NCR Voyix Corporation

Thank you for standing by and welcome to NCR Forex Corporation's Q4 2025 earnings conference call. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and that all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Sarah Jane Schneider, Vice President, Investor Relations. Your line is now open.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. This morning, we issued a copy of our earnings release, reporting financials for the quarter and year end of December 31st, 2025. A copy of the earnings release and the presentation that we will reference during this call will are available on the Investor Relations section of our website, which can be found at www.ncrvoice.com and have been filed with the SEC. With me on the call today are Jim Kelly, our Chief Executive Officer, Nick East, our Chief Product Officer, Darren Wilson, President Retail and Payments, Benny Tadele, President Restaurants, and Brian Walsh, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being recorded and the webcast is available on the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin, please be advised that remarks today will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For additional information on these factors, please refer to our earnings release and our other reports filed with the SEC. We caution you not to place undue reliance on these statements. Forward-looking statements on this call speak only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update them. In addition, we will be discussing or providing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, which we believe will provide additional clarity regarding our ongoing performance. For full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures discussed in this call to the most comparable GAAP measure in accordance with SEC regulations, Please see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8K file this morning and our supplemental materials available on the Investment Relations section of our website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Jim. Jim?

Thanks, SJ, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter and year-end earnings call. Our results for both the quarter and the full year reflect the positioning of the company now as a platform-led business supported by our leading service capabilities, and integrated payment solutions. Reflecting on 2025, my initial objective as CEO was to strengthen our executive leadership across retail and product. Retail represents 70% of our revenue, making this a critical leadership role as we work to achieve sustainable growth. Accordingly, I appointed Darren as President of Retail and Payments to strengthen our longstanding customer relationships reorganize and fortify our sales organization, and deliver our platform solutions to market. Since stepping into the role, Darren has appointed new leadership across three of our four regions, revamped the sales compensation plan, and played a key role in outlining expectations for our platform solutions. As we began our transition, it became clear that while we had a strong product team, we lacked centralized product leadership at the executive level. Nick was appointed our first chief product officer across both retail and restaurant. Nick originally joined the company through a prior acquisition and brought the right combination of technology, expertise, and deep company knowledge to step into this role. Nick has been instrumental in accelerating the launch of our new platform solutions and repositioning us as a platform-powered company. The most consequential achievement in 2025 was the completion of a five-year transformation that rebuilt the company's software foundation from the ground up. More than 50 legacy on-premise applications were modernized and unified into a single scalable platform built to power the mission critical operations customers rely on every day. In addition to these achievements, we continue to advance the company's financial initiatives which began in 2024 with the sale of the digital banking business and the announcement of the hardware ODM agreement. We executed a series of cost actions to address the termination of our transition services agreements with Condescent and NCR Atlios in the second half of the year to align our cost structure with the go-forward revenue. At the same time, we streamlined numerous internal operations and sourced key functions and began consolidating redundant systems. These actions not only reduced our reliance on third parties, but drive long-term efficiencies as we focus on our growth objectives. A clear illustration of the market's confidence in our go-forward strategy is reflected in the feedback received at the NRF show in New York this January. Our successful execution was on full display as we launched our modernized products providing a strong foundation from which to scale. We engage with nearly 400 companies, including more than 100 new prospects, and hosted investor events featuring live demonstrations of our VOIX portfolio. We are very encouraged by the response from both new and existing customers and the demand our new offering is already generating, as reflected in the more than 20 platform contracts we have signed, including three in the fourth quarter. This includes two new retail customers in the Philippines and Belgium, and our first enterprise restaurant platform customer, Chipotle. In parallel to our product initiatives, we continue to broaden our payments offering across geographies and industry verticals. We are enhancing our proprietary gateway, VoixConnect, to be able to scale our payments business together with the rollout of our platform solutions as we also expand our payment capabilities. Darren will discuss our recent progress in more detail later on the call. Next is services. With global scale and deep domain expertise, we operate inside some of the most complex retail restaurant and fuel environments in the world, providing hardware maintenance, installation services, 24 by 7 help desk, and platform management. Our services business represents over 50% of the total revenue today and remains a clear competitive differentiator for our enterprise business. We are leveraging our service organizations to expand our existing customer relationships and win new business, particularly as we deploy our new platform solutions. This will improve operational efficiency and deployment speed for both retailers and restaurants. Finally, as we recently announced, the phase transition of our hardware business to Enercom commenced in early January. We remain on track to complete the transition by the end of the first quarter. Brian will provide additional details on the financial impact later on the call. And with that, I will turn the call over to Nick.

Thanks, Jim, and good morning. The launch of our platform solutions has generated exceptionally strong interest from customers, investors, and industry analysts. NRF serves as a global stage to formally introduce our microservices-based applications and represented the most modern, comprehensive software launch in the company's history. For the first time, we were able to showcase a fully integrated, modern cloud platform that leverages our extensive global software IP, including our extensive library of more than 30,000 unique features developed over the past three decades across geographies and vertical markets. Our sales discussions have since shifted away from individual products and toward adoption of a comprehensive set of capabilities spanning point of sale, self-checkout, supply chain and back office, as well as integrated payments and support services. Our end-to-end offering provides the flexibility, agility, security, and insights for retailers and restaurants to enhance the consumer experience and drive operational efficiencies. The capabilities we previewed at NRF will be lab-ready by the second quarter, with initial customer deployments scheduled for the back half of the year. This represents a meaningful step on our path toward broader commercialization and scaling of our platform. Based on the more than 20 customer contracts we have already signed, we have a backlog that we expect to deploy consistently over the next nine to 18 months, which aligns with the enterprise market segments and the technology roadmaps of our customers. In addition, we've developed and demonstrated a store-in-a-box offering for major fuel and will launch our restaurants and grocery offerings in the second half of the year. These offerings, priced to meet the expectations of small and mid-market customers, could be self-deployed in under 15 minutes. This again demonstrates the innovation and speed In 2026, our product team is focused on AI innovation for the platform. For example, we're now leveraging AI to examine the business logic of the live production stores to be able to accelerate new implementations, deliver seamless updates, and lower deployment costs for both the customer and the company. Further, our platform is designed for innovation at pace in the cloud and at the edge. allowing customers such as Chipotle to innovate their operations, utilizing the extensibility of our platform architecture and the game-changing acceleration of AI. Since NRF, we've continued to engage new and existing customers in our labs and at major trade shows globally. Darren recently returned to the Euroshop in Dusseldorf, where our demonstrations generated strong interest and reinforced demand for our platform solutions. Next month, Jim will attend Retail Tech Japan to showcase our localized applications And in May, Benny will be at the National Restaurants Association show in Chicago. We are building on this early momentum to meet the growing demand for our modern cloud-to-edge solutions.

With that, I will turn the call over to Darren. Thanks, Nick. Good morning. I'd like to begin with an update on our payments strategy. We continue to scale our payments capabilities across industry verticals and geographic markets. VoixConnect, our proprietary gateway, serves as the conduit between our platform and third-party authorization processes. More broadly, the gateway becomes the single integration layer for our platform. Historically, third parties had the ability to connect directly into individual applications. Going forward, all third-party integrations, including payments, will route through the gateway, improving security, consistency, and scalability. In the US, we continued to progress on integrating Voice Connect with Corpay and WEX to be able to support commercial fuel payments. We achieved certification with Corpay in January and expect to be certified by WEX in the second quarter. We also migrated our remaining customers from the JetPay front end platform. Our US payment offering now includes both gateway and processing and we are registered as an acquirer. Internationally, we remain focused on expanding VoyexConnect to integrate with local acquirers and enable processing through in-market referral partners to scale our payment business more quickly. For example, we recently signed a referral agreement in Mexico to support payment acceptance for our customers in Latin America. We will look to form similar relationships for our customers in Canada and Europe with our enhanced gateway functionality later in the year. Lastly, we continue to implement pricing escalators where appropriate across certain retail and restaurant contracts. These escalators are being introduced upon renewal with most agreements structured on three to five year terms. As a result, the financial impact will build gradually over time. Our primary focus remains embedding our end-to-end payment solutions for both new and existing customers as they adopt our platform offerings. This deepens integration, removes intermediaries between POS and payments, lowers customer costs and complexity, expands recurring revenue, and increases long-term value for both our customers and the company. Turning to retail, in the fourth quarter, our retail business signed 40 new customers. Our platform and payment sites increased 6% and 12% respectively. Software ARR increased 8%, and total ARR increased 4% in the quarter. The launch of OXPOS and our fully integrated platform solutions continue to show early signs of success and attract new customers, as demonstrated by two new enterprise logos we secured in the fourth quarter. These customers chose to adopt the Voyex Commerce platform because of the flexibility, functionality, and operational efficiencies it provides. These solutions will allow them to integrate their entire technology estate, including third-party applications, improve both in-store and above-store functionality, and seamlessly adopt additional capabilities following the initial rollout. In Asia-Pacific, we signed a six-year contract with 7-Eleven Philippines, the number one convenience retailer in the Philippines, and will implement VoyexPos for CFR across more than 4,500 stores beginning later this year. Similarly, we secured a long-term agreement with Colroid Group, a leading Belgium-based grocery chain with stores across Belgium, Luxembourg, and France to implement VoyexPos for grocery across more than 850 stores. The rate at which we are attracting retailers to our platform solutions has further accelerated following our demonstrations at the trade shows we recently attended. I'm confident that this trend will continue as we also ramp our initial platform contracts following our upcoming deployments across our global footprint. With that, I will turn the call over to Benny.

Thanks, Darren. In the fourth quarter, our restaurant business signed more than 150 new customers. Platform and payment size increased 11% and 3% respectively. Software ARR increased 3% and total ARR increased 6% when excluding our SMB business. Our enterprise and mid-market segments maintained steady growth this quarter, while SMB performance was impacted by headwinds related to market dynamics and the legacy nature of our current SMB offerings. In the fourth quarter, we renewed and expanded our long-standing relationship with Red Robin, a fast casual chain with nearly 500 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Our new five-year agreement includes managing their service desk operations and delivering wall-to-wall technology support. Additionally, as an existing user of Aloha Point of Sale, Red Robin will now be the first enterprise table service brand to adopt Aloha OrderPay, our next-generation handheld solution, to improve ordering speed and guest satisfaction. As shared in November, the launch of Aloha Next enabled us to renew and expand our partnership with Chipotle through an exclusive six-year global agreement. The rollout remains on schedule with Aloha Next now in their lap, and both teams remain aligned on readiness milestones. In addition to Chipotle, we are now in two additional enterprise restaurant laps, underscoring the confidence global brands are placing in our latest technology. We are advancing the deployment of additional platform capabilities, including Menu and Smart Manager. Menu is being rolled out to multiple enterprise customers next month, enabling real-time unified menu management across channels. Smart Manager is already in pilot with multiple customers. These early implementations are providing valuable insight into sequencing and workflows, which we expect will accelerate the launch of additional capabilities throughout the year and further strengthen our value proposition for restaurant operators. As Nick mentioned, Aloha Next for SMB, our modern and cloud-native store-in-the-box solution, will launch in the second half of the year. Designed for the SMB space, it streamlines workflows, reduces costs, supports quick self-installation, and allows restaurants to easily scale features as they grow. As we enter 2026, we are encouraged by the momentum in our enterprise pipeline and the depth of customer engagement. Our strategy is resonating in the market and we are well positioned to accelerate growth in the year ahead. In our SMB business, we are re-engaging with customers in preparation for the launch of Aloha Next. We will look to sell our latest solution into our existing base and to new prospects to address the recent performance of this business and enhance the growth profile of our restaurant segment. I will now turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Benny, and good morning. Our results for the quarter and for the year were in line with our expectations and reflect the progress we have made to streamline our organization and reposition the company as a platform-led business supported by our leading services offerings and integrated payments capabilities. For the quarter, total revenue increased 6% to $720 million due to higher hardware sales in the period. Reported recurring revenue increased 1% to $422 million and 3% when excluding a certain divestiture and other non-core items. Software ARR and total ARR both increased 3% when excluding the divestiture. Platform sites increased 8% to $80,000, and payment sites increased 4% to $8,600. Adjusted EBITDA increased 17% to $130 million, as margin expanded 170 basis points to 18.1%, driven primarily by our cost containment actions, partially offset by lower fees earned from the transitional service agreements with NCR Atlios and contestants. Non-GAAP EPS increased 48% to $0.31, while GAAP EPS was $0.49 in the fourth quarter. The GAAP EPS included a $65 million tax benefit related to a legal entity restructuring we completed in Q4. The cash on this will likely be received in the first half of 2027. Turning to our segment results, retail segment revenue increased 9% to $501 million, primarily due to higher hardware sales. Recurring revenue increased 3% to $279 million, driven by an improvement in software revenue. Segment-adjusted EBITDA increased 12% to $114 million, as margin increased 70 basis points year-over-year to 22.8%, driven by revenue growth coupled with our cost initiatives. Turning to restaurants, total segment revenue of $212 million was flat, which reflects hardware growth offset by a decline in one-time software and services revenue and weaker performance in the SMB business, as Benny outlines. Recurring revenue increased 6% within our enterprise and mid-market businesses. Segment-adjusted EBITDA decreased 3% to 66 million, as margin decreased 110 basis points to 31.1% due to lower one-time software and services revenue compared to the prior year period. Lastly, net corporate and other expenses decreased 9 million, or 15% to 50 million. Turning to our cash flow, our cash flow is across the company's operating, investing, and financing activities, reflect the restructuring actions we took during the year to support the Go Forward organization. Adjusted free cash flow excluding restructuring for the full year was $136 million, about $40 million below expectations due to timing, including a $13 million delayed tax refund and higher working capital use primarily from increased hardware sales in Q4. Restructuring cash outflows of $109 million were related to severance, stranded costs from the spinoff, and the sale of digital banking, infrastructure investments, and to a lesser extent, ODM transition costs. We invested 46 million in capital expenditures during the quarter and 165 million for the year, inclusive of accelerated product investments. These investments directly enabled the launch of our new platform solutions, unveiled at the NAC show last October and the NRF show this January. In December, we also sold a non-core warehouse and training facility, which generated an additional 16 million in cash for the quarter, as we continue to streamline our footprint. Finally, we repurchased approximately 69,000 shares or 25% of the Series A convertible preferred stock for 74 million in addition to 4 million of common shares. We ended the quarter with net leverage position of 2.1 times based on our net debt as of December 31st in the full year adjusted EBITDA. Turning to our 2026 outlook, we expect reported revenue of 2.21 billion to 2.325 billion down 13% to 18% due to the ODM implementation. We expect to complete the ODM transition by March 31st. Thereafter, hardware will be sourced through Enecon, and we will earn a commission rather than carry inventory. On a pro forma basis, adjusting for the change in hardware revenue recognition for Q2 through Q4 in the prior year, revenue is expected to be down 2% to up 3%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $440 million to $445 million, or 4% to 7% growth. Non-gap adjusted EPS is expected to be between 93 and 96 cents, or 3 to 6% growth. Seasonality remains consistent with 2025, with Q1 expected to be the lowest quarter. For both retail and restaurants, we expect recurring revenue to improve throughout the year. We expect margins for both segments to step up in Q2 upon implementing the hardware ODM model. Restaurant margin will improve modestly through the year, and retail margin should show additional expansion as we ramp the deployment of our platform solutions beginning in the third quarter. Adjusted free cash flow is expected to be between $190 to $220 million, reflecting the partial year working capital benefit from the ODM transition effective April 1st, offset by approximately $120 million of anticipated cash outlays related to the following. Severance actions taken in 2025 and 2026, stranded costs associated with the completion of the spinoff of the ATM business and the sale of the digital banking business, costs related to the ODM transition, internal infrastructure investments, and an accrued litigation matter. We anticipate the elevated restructuring will step down in 2027. I will now turn the call over to Jim for closing remarks.

In 2025, we completed a heavy lift. Using AI and our application library, we modernized more than 50 legacy solutions into a unified cloud-to-edge platform. That five-year effort leaves us with a modern architecture, full feature capability and the ability to serve all segments of the market domestically and internationally on one integrated platform. I view this as a three-year term with year one complete. Now we move from transformation to scaling. In 2026, the focus is building backlog across all markets, accelerating deployments and driving adoption across retailers and restaurants. We are no longer building the platform We are selling it and delivering it. I am confident in our competitive positioning and in the strength of our platform. What gives me the strongest belief in our ability to deliver is our seasoned sales leadership and the team behind them. They know our markets, maintain deep, trusted enterprise relationships, and understand how to position the comprehensive value of our platform and are executing with discipline and focus. A critical component of that conviction is building meaningful sales backlog this year. Enterprise implementation takes time, making backlog a key metric. The backlog we build in 2026 begins to accelerate revenue in the second half of the year and into 27 and beyond. As a reminder, we support approximately 400 of the world's leading enterprise retail and restaurant customers across the 35 markets in which we operate. As they modernize infrastructure, we are well-positioned to continue delivering the full functionality they rely on today through a modern platform that provides materially greater capability. This is complemented by new customer logos. We are winning in the market, accelerating recurring revenue and overall revenue growth this year into next.

I will now turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session.

If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star 1 in your telephone keypad, raise your hand, and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star 1 again. Thank you. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Your first question comes from the line of Matt.

Somerville, DA Davidson, your line is now open.

Yes, thank you.

Backlog was mentioned a couple of times by both Jim and Nick in the prepared remarks. Is there any sort of framing up you can provide around that metric that you're seemingly emphasizing in terms of comparison versus the prior year, the prior couple year period, and how that informs the sort of inflection you're pointing to in the back half of the year when it comes to organic revenue, and then that'll follow up. Thank you.

Thanks, Matt. I think as I described in the call, Our customer base, while we cover the full spectrum, from SME to enterprise, the enterprise side is our most significant segment. And that group, as I mentioned in the comments, that takes time for them to modernize. So I said nine to 18 months. That's what I've seen here. Sometimes it's taken even longer. Because to some extent, we move at the pace that they're willing to take the upgrades. We're on the beginning of this, the modernization of the applications that some of you saw when we were displaying it at NRF in January. Those are the products that are now the 25 demos that we've done since NRF. Those are the products that we will expect the customers to start signing contracts, some of which, as we said, we've got 20 already signed. So those are in process to be deployed this year into next year. I had a customer here yesterday. We have two tomorrow. I'm heading to Japan for the show in Japan. Darren just came back from Dusseldorf. Booth was packed just like it was at NRF. And the sales organization, as I mentioned in my prepared comments, one of the things Darren, Benny, myself, Brian, there's a big team, worked on a revamp of the compensation plan. Because when you look at the organization of the last 20 years, really have not had a new product other than the acquisition of Edge. There's nothing of scale that was new to the market. It was largely a regurgitation of applications that have been around for a long period of time. So this is the first time that the companies come to market with something material, all cloud-powered or platform-powered. You know, specifically to the question, this new sales structure rewards our sales organization, which I'm hopeful is listening, for signing accounts. And I was with the North American group with Darren and their leader, Scott, The other day, they're here in Atlanta. As I shared with them, it's my job and the operational side of the organization, the combination of people from our CIO and George who runs operations to deliver the product. And that's where Backlog comes in. It's not something new to the company. We've always looked at it. But today, it's a more important feature for us to focus on, or KPI, And I think at some point we'll start sharing that more broadly with the market. But for right now, that's a bellwether to us, and we see it starting to build because we have 20 customers that have already purchased the products on contracts. And we're going to do better to try to accelerate those deployments this year than maybe we have in the past. There's a greater, keener focus on it as we've addressed other issues. components of it. I think Nick would like to add a comment to that too.

Yeah, Matt, maybe give you kind of a couple of concrete examples because it does vary by customer and also by the product that they're adopting. Right now, over the next two weeks, we have a customer who's rolling out our AI pick list assist functionality and that's a simple add-on. So the deployment's automated, it rolls to all the stores and it will go live. They have a couple of months of pre-testing and then it will just roll. So in terms of the actual deployment of technology, You know end-to-end that's probably a you know, three to four months across the largest stage But then you look in some other customers where it's kind of it's much more kind of much more like heart surgery You know a major point of sale change and equally in the retail space It's in particular. There are periods that are seasonal where you just can't make change so that period you have you haven't you know adopted the new tech by around about the beginning of November and then there's a freeze because that's such an important, critical time for retailers to make their revenue and margin targets for the year. And that flows again in January. So any period, any rollout that's quite complex, that spans more than a year, is always, in retail space in particular, going to have to bridge one of those lockdown periods, sort of blackout periods with technology change. So it does depend very much on the extent to which we're needing to make change in that tech environment integrated with other components, whether it's a simple add-on like the piglet assist or whether it's a more complex transformation.

Yeah, there's components to it. So this product, as we've already deployed it, deploys within an hour into a store environment. But then there's a training component of it. And it's completely new for our customers. It's Nick doesn't like this analogy, but I analogize it to the iPhone. So we don't manage our iPhones or Android, if you're Nick. Somebody else does, but we have the benefit of it. And that's the same model. That's the primary model. It's not exclusive, but that's the primary model that we're offering to our customers. So there is a training component, even though we're able to provide exactly what they've seen the day before the migration because we're able to emulate the screens modernize but emulate everything, the features, et cetera, there still is a learning curve that the stores have to go through. And, you know, Darren mentioned 7-Eleven Philippines, which we just signed. That was, what, 4,000 or 5,000 stores. So that's going to take some time. And that's what I'm just sensitizing you all to, is that backlog is an indication of the health of the product. And as that builds, that's revenue that's accumulating and will get deployed across, as we've said several times, nine to 18 months. We'll try to do it as fast as possible. But, you know, the end, as Nick Hartley said, this is heart surgery for these guys. This is the most this is the way they make money. This is the way their companies operate. So it has to go smoothly because it's dependent. They're depending on us, and they want to make sure there's no disruption to their stores so when they open up that they can transact.

So anyway, hopefully that clarifies what you were thinking. Appreciate the color.

And then as a follow-up, I'm just hoping you guys can expand a little bit on Benny's SMB comments and the headwinds you saw in the quarter. Is this something more acute or something more chronic? And kind of frame up what that means, you know, as far as the guide for 26. Thank you.

Sure. I don't know that I off the top of my head have the exact percentage of the business. The SME is the smallest piece. by far, really in both segments, but in restaurants, since that's the question. If you look at the history here, NCR, long before I was here, but used to compete against it when I was at payments companies, when they started acquiring their dealer network, at least components of their dealer network, they ended up with a large population of customers. So unless you have a large population of Salesforce to continue to replenish, we all know that the SME market is one that contracts. So I think since the acquisition, I'm guessing that we've seen some level of contraction in that space. I think what's happening more recently has a lot to do with the announcement around Aloha Next. The application that we're selling into the marketplace, unlike the enterprise space where you don't have this massive number of ISVs selling software against, you know, that's not the competition profile for an enterprise market, retail or restaurant. But in the SME space, having done it for 25 years, there's a massive amount of software competition. It's not hard to get into the point of sale space for SME. Whether you're successful or not doesn't necessarily matter. So there's a lot more competition. And frankly, our product set, which has been our Aloha called Essentials, or more recently, and not that much more recently, it's been around for a while, which was the Aloha Cloud, which was the mainstay, kind of the next mainstay here for the SME market. I don't think that ultimately hit the bid for what our customer base was looking for. Plus, it was not leveraging all the benefits that are embedded in the retail side of the house. And so that's why I made the decision over the summer that we were going to pivot. It's one of the reasons we were able to announce Chipotle, because it's the architecture that they are ultimately looking for on the enterprise space. But as we said in the comments, I think Nick mentioned in his comments, we have what we refer to as a store in the box, a restaurant or retail, grocer, major oil, or I guess that's the group. We're now in a position by the second half of the year to be able to, because we have all the infrastructure, it's just basically building the applications, which with the benefit of our team and AI and the library of technology we have embedded in Aloha today, we'll be able to give the SMA team a very competitive product in the marketplace. So it's As I think Benny said in his comments, the market dynamics, yes, we have competition. There's really good competition within that space. But at the same time, I don't think we've had the right product to meet the competition and to address what the customers are leaving. So I don't think this is bad necessarily. I think it's just the reality of the company didn't get on the next gen fast enough and we're there now. And so... I'm expecting that we'll start to see this number improve over time. But I'll let Benny, who runs it, see what he'd like to add to it.

I think Jim summarized it very well. So maybe if I articulate the three things that we see is one, as Jim stated, there's a historical how did we manage this business, the acquisition process, et cetera. But the second one is if you look at the market, the key difference between enterprise and the SMB is is A, the buying journey itself is very much focused on what's the lowest pricing, it's fast to convert and change. When we talk about the competition, it's not necessarily just a product competition, highly fragmented, the number of people who participate, easy to enter, et cetera. So when you add on top of that the third component, which is the product that we had in that, I termed it maybe legacy, uh is it has a compounding effect so i i would say a you look at as a component of our business not the largest segment it is actually the smallest both in restaurant but for the company as a whole but the second is when we have aloha next now launched in the second half as next aid as a store in a box which is easy to implement very cost effective that would that would start to impress it

Your next question comes from the line of Kartik Mehta with North Coast Research.

Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning. Jim, you've made a lot of changes at the company. It seems like things are moving in the right direction. You're on this ODM hardware transition. Once that's complete, what do you think is the organic revenue growth rate of this business?

I think it's going to change. Well, thank you, Karthik. I think it's going to change, obviously, as I said in my comments. I mean, 26, I think, will improve over what we've seen in the software services and payments line, taking out hardware. And that's the range that we gave. One of the headwinds we're going to see that the market is seeing is the impact of AI and the consumption of chips around the world. We're now... moving away from being the supplier of that. But it is a reality that the marketplace is seeing price increases. So there could be an impact to that. But going back to that first question with the build backlog and our ability to accelerate deployment, I'm very confident that we're going to see ARR grow, total revenue grow, well, into 26 and then definitely into 27. as we deploy these applications on the retail side in particular, as customers have added locations over the years, it's largely been at the same price. I've said this numerous times in earlier calls that there wasn't a culture here of increasing price in particular on the retail side. I think the restaurant side saw some of that on annual renewals. So there'll be a step up for the software. It's in our view, leading the market on both the retail and restaurant side, given its configuration. And then we have the payments piece. And one of the changes I've made on payments is instead of trying to retrofit legacy applications, that since there is seemingly a very strong desire to move into the modern architecture, we're going to put payments together with the new sales as opposed to trying to retrofit what's been there in the past. So My expectations, as I summarized in the end, is that this is going to be a good year, and I think next year is going to be even better.

Perfect. And just to follow up, Darren, in your prepared remarks, you talked about the third-party integration and maybe change there. What's the benefit? You know, is there a revenue benefit, cost benefit, cross-sales benefit? What's the benefit to Voya from the changes you're making?

Thanks, Carlton. I mean, the key benefit that we're seeing from a customer service proposition is one throat to choke. What we're seeing from the backlog of 21 deployments that we're working on now is where we're working with numerous third parties, we're trying to orchestrate the multiple stakeholders supplying or supporting a customer can result in problems with implementations. where we've got our integration, and it's just us. It is one solution. We're controlling truly the end-to-end proposition and deployment and service model. So there's one number to call that can help across the full range of hardware, software, and services solutions that we provide to the customer. And then, of course, the real benefit, the ultimate benefit is that we've got the pricing upside, because essentially, car tickets, You know, it's additional upside revenue for us because essentially we are just switching that revenue from the third-party payments provider to ourselves, often at similar costs, or we can often incentivize in terms of the whole package that we're providing to the customer. So the step up in revenue upside follows as well. But ultimately, in all the conversations we've been having with clients about their appetite for payments, has actually been the customer service proposition, one provider, one seamless joined-up proposition. Because ultimately, whilst the AI debate is here and thriving, data and loyalty and personalization are the critical kind of pain points or differentiators for retailers. So them having the full end-to-end payments data in the platform, in our platform, that's really tracking from supply chain through SKU, through checkout, through reconciliation and settlement, is truly joining up that end-to-end and then feeding into their loyalty proposition. So it covers many facets in terms of the real benefit of the full holistic proposition.

Thanks, Aaron. I really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 in your telephone keypad. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Perline with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Yes, good morning. It's Matt Roswell filling in for Dan this morning. Two questions. more of a guidance modeling question, and that's, can you walk through some of the puts and takes around the adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin? I'm thinking things like accelerated investments, the ODM transition, et cetera.

Hey, yeah, so thank you, Matt. So the range of 440 to 455, it's about a three and a half to four point margin improvement over last year, and some of that about 250 to 300 basis points of that is from the shift to the ODM model April 1st. And then the rest of it is margin improvement as we deliver cost actions that we've already taken and new actions as we go through the year. And accelerated investments, those were last year. That was more of a CapEx item. So that's not really impacting the EBITDA. So the EBITDA is growing 4% to 7%. It's growing a little bit faster than revenue. We do have some things that we're overcoming from the prior year, like TSA fees that were helping us last year that are gone this year as we've exited those TSAs. So that's a little bit of the reason why the EBITDA growth isn't quite as strong as it was last year.

Okay, excellent. And then a bigger picture question. Where do we stand with the World Pay Agreement in terms of payments?

The agreement was signed a year ago. I'm 25. So that is complete. The implementation, the migration off of JetPay, I think Darren mentioned that, that's fully complete. So now it's selling new customers. So I think we had 100% of the SME market sold again, many of the bid market. On the enterprise side, as I mentioned, the pivot that we've done is moved away from trying to retrofit a legacy application because as we talk to customers, And as I said, we had customers here yesterday. We have customers here today. It's a lot easier if we're selling something new than to try to ask them to go back and retrofit the way they work payments today is do it holistically as a new install. So I'm less focused on pushing what I had said earlier in the year. I'm more interested now that we've been able to modernize the applications at light speed, frankly, over the last five months. Some of that was the accelerated investments in IT spend, and the rest of it was our experience and AI. So I think the plan is completely the same as it was before. It's just it's less of a retrofit. It's more of a new sale opportunity.

Okay. Thank you very much.

That concludes our question and answer session.

I will now turn the call back to Mr. Gene Cayley, CEO, for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for your continued interest in NCR Wigs.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.