Worldline Sa Ord

Good evening and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the Worldline Q1 2025 Revenue Conference call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Pierre-Antoine Vacheron, Worldline Group CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thanks a lot and good evening everybody and thanks a lot for joining this call. Since it's my first conversation with you before we enter into the presentation on Q1, let me start with a few personal comments. First comment, I must say that I'm extremely happy to have taken the leadership of Worldline. Over the last weeks, I've been in many locations already, and I can confirm that this company has great assets, extended breadth of skills, to serve customers in an industry which is really fascinating and where no position is granted. Having been in this industry for more than 15 years, I can say that nothing that I've been seeing so far has been a surprise to me. Issues are acknowledged and the teams are ready to move forward. So in a nutshell, I would say that nothing in what is wrong at Worldline can be fixed Third comment, I have been able, as expected, to leverage on my knowledge of the industry and of the company to hit the ground running. We've been in a position to take early decisions to fix some issues and to make early appointments that will increase our delivery capacity. Maybe if I can dive a bit into my initial findings, and you can follow on the slides which is on your screen. I have divided my views into four categories, market product, infrastructure, and organization. In each case, I see a solid base at Worldline, but the necessity to make several improvements. I will summarize each in turn. As far as our addressable market is concerned, we operate in what is still a mid to high single-digit growth payment market, faster than GDP, where we have significant scale, specifically in Europe. Regulation, the quest for sovereignty, and the remaining fragmentation of the European market gives Worldline a competitive advantage, as well as our strong relationship with banks. But clearly we need to be more selective given the investment required to address innovation and compliance requirements. This will mean exiting from segments or geographies inherited from our acquisitions and that we consider to adjacent. Regarding products, we have a large range of products which virtually covered the entire payment value chain. We have very strong segments with USPs such as digital, travel. We have a massive merchant acquiring value proposition and we have advanced expertise to face the evolution of client needs in payments processing. However, we clearly have opportunities to enhance further innovation customer experience, and differentiation. Regarding infrastructure, we have, as we outlined, a technology stack which is at scale considering the volumes we process. However, we need to converge our disparate platforms into a more focused number which have been identified. We should also save at scale the next generation technologies especially generative AI, to assist the convergence, streamline costs, and generate greater operational leverage. All this is already in progress and there are deliverables, but we need to secure and stabilize our priorities. Regarding the organization, this business has a wide talent pool and a track record in offshoring. which is pretty advanced for this industry. However, we need to increase ownership and accountability and to drive talent pool consolidation. Based on this, what are my focus in the coming months? All the approach is about putting the company back on track for robust growth and free cash flow generation. Logically, the first focus is to stabilize the priorities of the teams. Over the last weeks, I spent time, as I said, with the teams in the field, with customers, with partners. And there is an obvious basic need to clarify short-term priorities, but also to address some gaps in skills resulting from Power24, and to fix a few hot issues. The second focus is to deliver our product and project. A lot is happening, but by enhancing clarity and prioritizing what matters most, we increase the efficiency of the organization. All this with this objective to put the company back on track to robust growth and quick cash flow generation. But as I said from my observations so far, I'm confident that there isn't a single issue we can't resolve, but it will be progressive. And now when I look at Q1 that Gregory Lamberti will present in detail, two points are important to me looking at full year 2025. The first point regarding our revenue in Q1 is that they are in line with what one could expect. But the mix of volumes is unfavorable because it is less margin contributive. We have soft SME activity soft specialty retail, more FMCG, more airline. We are facing some issues in our terminal offering delivery, and that's one of the very key things that we need to fix. The same reversing trends in SME is among our core priorities to generate better margins. So the timing will depend on the velocity of the organization to deliver, which you will understand is difficult for me to assess right now after such a limited number of weeks. The second point regarding our costs, the good news is that costs are clearly under control and in line with the expectations. And on top of that, to preserve our cash flow generations, we have just decided together with the management team to implement an incremental 50 million euro cash cost saving initiatives by the end of the year. Now it is important for me to be reliable in what we do and in what we say. And given my limited capacity to assess at this stage the velocity of our teams, to which we should add to some extent the potential impact of global volatility and consumption patterns, we will take the time to reassess our outlook and we will come back to you when we published the first half year results on July 30th, sorry, 2025. But let me hand over to Gregory Lamberti to provide more detail on Q1 performance.