NCR at Oppenheimer Conference: Strategic Shift to Platforms

On Monday, 11 August 2025, NCR Corp (NYSE:VYX) presented its strategic vision at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. CEO Jim Kelly highlighted the company’s transition towards a platform-centric model, focusing on software and services, while acknowledging challenges such as margin compression due to hardware sales.

Key Takeaways

• NCR reported revenue slightly above expectations, driven by hardware sales, but faced margin compression.
• The company is transitioning to a platform model, emphasizing payments, software, and services.
• NCR Voyex is expanding its payment solutions, leveraging a $1.3 trillion transaction volume.
• AI integration is being explored to enhance efficiency in software development and customer service.
• The company plans to refine P&L reporting for clearer revenue stream insights.

Financial Results

• Revenue exceeded expectations, primarily due to strong hardware sales.
• Margins were compressed because of the higher proportion of hardware sales.
• Earnings met both consensus and internal expectations.
• Software maintenance revenue is approximately $2 billion annually, with $500 million from maintenance agreements.
• Tariffs have cost the company several million dollars, with plans to pass these costs onto customers.

Operational Updates

• A new leadership team, including Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Solares, was established in the restaurant segment.
• Renewal rates in the enterprise area reached 100%.
• The ODM agreement with Anicom is progressing, with successful pilots in Europe and Asia.
• NCR Voyex has 13-14 customers using its new microservices cloud-native application platform.
• An agreement with Worldpay for payment processing is in place, with conversion expected by September.

Future Outlook

• NCR aims to transition from a hardware-centric model to a platform company.
• Significant growth is anticipated from payments, software, and services.
• Expansion of payment solutions to enterprise customers is a priority.
• AI integration is expected to improve operational efficiency.
• The company will stop reporting gross hardware sales in 2025, focusing instead on commission.

Q&A Highlights

• Tariffs are impacting costs, and these will be passed on to customers.
• Capital allocation priorities include debt repayment, share buybacks, and AI investment.
• No major acquisitions are planned; focus remains on internal advancements.
• Free cash flow will primarily fund share buybacks.

For a more detailed discussion, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Alright. Thank you, everybody, and welcome to the Oppenheimer Technology Conference. I am Ian Zaffino. I am the equity research analyst that covers NCR Voyex. I have a outperform rating, $15 price target, and very honored to have with me today the company’s CEO, Jim Kelly.

Jim, thanks for joining us.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Sure, Thane. Thanks thanks for having me.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Alright. So, you know, we’re hot off of earnings, and maybe just help us, you you you know, help us understand the the quarter, may maybe recap that for us, and give us any highlights of of of the quarter that you Sure.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Well, I think as those who’ve been following the stock, I’m or for those who are new to it, I was formerly the chairman of the company. I stepped in in February as the new CEO. And as I said in my prepared comments and on the call, learned a lot about our customer base. I’ve been involved with the company for a year as the chairman before stepping into this role a little over a year. You know, I my expectations for this year was to to remain steady and perform against the expectations that we set at the beginning of the year.

And I think, for the quarter, irrespective of how the stock may have reacted on a couple of points, I thought the quarter was a good quarter for us. On the revenue side, we were slightly higher than expectations. That came with some margin compression, where largely that beat was around hardware. And on the earnings side, we met expectations, consensus expectations, and internal expectations in terms of what we wanted to achieve for the quarter. You know, deeper into the business, restaurant, I thought, is if you look at the comments that that Betty made, and I have the two presidents on the call, and I’ve just recently put chief product officer on just to give everybody a broader view of what’s going on here and different perspectives.

But restaurant, as the company went through its split in 2023, the leadership there actually left, and so it’s a new team that has come in. The team that’s joined us, and we mentioned the chief revenue officer within the restaurant segment. His name is Miguel Solares. Miguel has got twenty five years in the restaurant space. Our renewals this year have been at a 100% on the enterprise area.

Our opportunities that he’s opened up both with his reputation, but also the capabilities and reputation of the company, I think, are quite impressive, and I think you’ll continue to see that improve into next year later this year and into next year. A number of these larger enterprise organizations are constantly looking for new opportunities, in terms of capabilities, and I think the good news for us and for our investors and for our customers is that we have the capabilities that they’re looking for, in particular, around microservices. Likewise, on the retail side, I thought the performance, the number of new accounts that we have signed in all our four in each of the four major or four divisions of that segment, were also very strong. So, look, it’s a work in process. We were I stepped into this role to make some changes, and improve the overall performance top and bottom line.

I’ve had a chance now to meet over 50 of our largest customers both on the retail and restaurant side. And I would say, as I said in my prepared comments, the relationship is is good. It’s been strained at times, maybe in particular during the somewhat during the COVID period, but also during the split in terms of focus, a spin off of an organization. I’ve seen one once before firsthand. I mean, it’s very disruptive to the company.

And I would say, you know, last year as well was a year of trans transformation. In in addition to just getting through the split, we were also selling off a significant asset. So this year has been all focused on delivering product, delivering on commitments to product, better execution relative to setting expectation and then achieving it. So on those measures, I think think the company did very well for the

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Good. You know, I guess before we get more into the business, maybe walk us through the ODM agreement with Anacon and, you know, any updates there.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Sure. Just as a reminder, so last year, in addition to divesting our digital banking business, which is now called Condescent owned by a private equity firm, Veritas, the second focus in in restructuring, the way the company went to market as a platform company as opposed to what was historically a hardware company. We signed an agreement with the manufacturer of our products, a company called Anicom, which is a minority owned by Foxcom, the same company that makes the iPhone. The expectations I mean, internally, I I was the chairman at the time, but the expectations last year were that, we would be able to get through, sign it over the summer and then get through it in ’24. The reality was not that, and that’s why we’re continuing to work on it was, as we’ve said on several of the calls, it was technology.

We’re a Oracle shop. They’re an SAP shop. They have to build some technology because now they’re in the distribution business where they wouldn’t have previously been in the distribution business. That was a distraction for a number of months. They’ve acquired a piece of software from a company called Manhattan.

So as I said on the call, our expectation is still that we’ll finish it up by the end of the year. We’ve already gone to pilot successfully for Europe and Asia, and the piece that remains is The Americas, which is out of, Nashville. We go to pilot, I believe, on the eighteenth of this month, so I think we’ll be able to have a view internally by, mid September. And then once the pilot is meeting expectations, then we’ll commence a migration of our business to their business. They’ll be picking up a number of our employees, and we still think we’re on track to have that completed by the end of the year.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Good. That that

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Just to clarify too. So that will mean next year, provided that happens, once it’s switched over fully, we’ll no longer report, in our gross revenue hardware sales. We’ll earn a commission, which will be reported in there, but not the absolute numbers. It’ll be software services payments and a commission on hardware. The expectation as well, we’re working on re repositioning the p and l.

So today, we mix software and services together because if you look at the company years ago, large conglomerate in a bunch of different businesses. So likely, the decision of, I’m sure, years ago was to squeeze down certain lines together. We’re trying to give more clarity on payments, software, services, and then hardware commission. So it’ll be a cleaner view in addition to the segments in the business, but a cleaner look on the p and l, and we’re working to try to get that done by the end of the year.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And then may maybe talk about, like, retail hardware, software, know, some of the growth that you’re seeing there versus expectations of of what you have previously.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yeah. I think on the we’ll start with the restaurants again. So I think the what we’re seeing today in restaurants is not like what we will see as the team digs in. As I described, we have a new leader in that group, and he’s brought in a new team. We’ve also, on the SME side, replaced our, previous leaders in that area.

So that’s been largely a turnover of the entire sales leadership starting at the executive level and then one level down. So my expectation is you’ll see us you know, historically, we have focused very much on just taking care of our existing customers, not to minimize it, but as I said on the last call and before this and where we stand today, we have roughly 1%, attrition, revenue attrition from our customers. So customers stay with us, not just because of the software and its capabilities, but also the service organization that, that supports them. So I think you’ll see us as a result of my joining, pursuing new relationships because it’s enterprise. They’re almost exclusively RFPs, but you’ll see us much more prevalent in the r s the the RFP space than maybe in the past where I think they seem somewhat content to stay where they were, not to minimize the importance of retaining our relationships, but to get the company ultimately to the growth rate we’re looking for, it’s gonna need the same.

On the rest on the retail side, as Nick East, the chief product officer, commented on the last couple of calls, the movement is to bring our microservices cloud native applications, our platform, to market. We’ve I think we have 13 customers already signed on it. We have one that is working through a rollout, so they’re through pilot. Actually, two customers. One customer is in pilot.

The other one is is started the rollout feedback, on the application. The platform itself has been extremely positive. So as we look into ’26 and beyond, there’s gonna be a full court press recognizing that both in the retail and the restaurant side, we have very aged, applications that are running in, you know, some of the stores that I’m sure are restaurants that you shop in or eat in today. So the exciting piece for me and I think for the entire 14,000 people here is we’re launching, a next generation solution that, I think is unmatched, in particular on the retail side and, you know, not as well on the restaurant side. So next year, the balance of this year, is get those products to market and, continue to pursue payments.

You didn’t mention that per se, but payments will continue to well, we’ll start and continue to be a bigger part of the story here. We touch over $1,300,000,000,000 of point of sale, transactions across our entire enterprise and mid market and SME space. The company has only accessed a very small piece, and it’s on the restaurant side. And there, you’re talking about single to maybe two or three location establishments. If you look at on the enterprise space, both on the fuel side as well as grocery and DSR, we have we have a lot of very large customers that are paying somebody else to provide that service, and we now have the capabilities through a new relationship that we announced in February to take advantage of of offering to our customers one relationship to provide everything from the point of sale all the way through payments.

We have all the internal capabilities other than the authorization system at this time by virtue of an acquisition the company made several years ago. So I think great new products coming to market and payment capabilities that the company has not had previously. I think we’re set up very struck for very good for the back half of this year and then clearly into next year.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Yeah. And where did it stay on retail for for for a little bit longer? How would

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: you environment,

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: you know, as far as customers, you know, will willingness to to transact? Like, has there been changes in scope or size or, you know, where where are their heads as as it relates to to to the products that you deliver to them?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yeah. So the the the majority, obviously, the vast, vast majority are still on legacy applications, and these legacy applications are very dated. They work. They’re not overly costly, I would say, relative to these organizations. But the the challenge that they have, I like to analogize it to an iPhone where you have real time feedback of whatever you’re looking for sitting there on your phone.

That’s what our platform offers. Similar to a company like Netflix, you know, you watch a movie one night, and the next night, it’s gonna show you something similar because it knows your buying patterns. That’s what our customers are looking for. So I don’t I haven’t seen any real reluctance thus far. Now we haven’t pressed the the product in a material way, but very large, whether fuel or grocery, the ability to have that capability, the redundancy, our edge product, which is a component of the application, the microservices capabilities, which is the gonna become a mainstay for the retail environment.

I think they’re excited about the journey to the next step. I haven’t seen the cost is always gonna be groceries business or in fuel is gonna be a big driver, but it’s a balance between them managing costs, but also getting the benefit of having this type of application. It’ll be easier to make changes, easier to do updates. It has the ability to extend to allow them to do updates directly to the system for those who are larger. I think the the value enhancement is such that that is overwhelming, you know, the the general may be concerned that cost is becoming more of a of a of an impediment to completing a sale.

We’ve as I said, we’re at probably 13 or 14 customers today who have either purchased it and were starting to install, yeah, or have purchased it and are pending install. And that, you know, price is always gonna be negotiated, but that’s not an impediment from where I sit today.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Good. If we were to maybe toggle over to restaurants, maybe talk about new wins, know, where renewal trends look like. Maybe you wanna give us an example of that, as well as any maybe platform expansions with, you know, existing customers customers and the customer base.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yeah. I would say probably the strongest piece is on the renewals piece relative to the new wins while we have a number that we’re working on today. Our focus is enterprise predominantly. We support the mid market as well, and we announced a couple last quarter, the quarter before. And we support SME.

That’s largely the smaller side, which is largely by virtue of the acquisition many, many years ago of Aloha. We have a dealer network, and we, you know, compete against the smaller players or those who who go after single site locations. That that is not the predominance either of the revenue or the profit of the organization. Although I will say the payments on that side, we get a 100% of all our new SME customers are taking our payments end to end or gateway together with the acquiring piece. For Dom, both on the retail side as well as the restaurant side, our focus is enterprise and upper mid market.

And there, I would the the setup for the balance of the year is a number of RFPs that were new customers as well as existing customers who are checking the marketplace to see what other options are out there. And the feedback I’ve gotten from these from the leadership of these companies would suggest that we’re in very good shape, and, you know, we’ll see how the second half, plays out in terms of announcements. One of the challenges we have being focused on enterprise is announcing names. I know some people otherwise like to talk about names, but, generally, these larger customers prefer you not name them. So if you look at our scripts, they’re almost exclusively, referencing the type of business that that we’re extending the relationship with or getting into as opposed to calling out the specific names.

But renewals are great. They’re a 100%. Payments are starting to roll out to this to the enterprise base, which we don’t have today. And we have, I think, a strong pipeline for wins on the enterprise and mid market space into the back half of the year.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Thanks. And then just more to that point, how do you think about the competitive landscape? And and maybe just compare the enterprise competitive landscape to the the nonenterprise. I don’t know if you wanna call it SMB or mid market, but, you know, because that there there’s some perception issues, I I I think. So

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yes. I would say, Andy, you’re you’re absolutely right. There’s definitely perception issues. And I think as it relates to that, you know, I I I would align this to a lot of us eat out. You know, you go to certain establishments.

You see brands that are pretty prevalent in a lot of restaurants whether across The US, and the company won’t say by name, but I think people know who I’m referring to. While we do compete in that space, that has been largely because of legacy. We have a fraction of the size of an organization that some of the bigger players have in the SME space. But if you flip that to the enterprise, again, comments that I made it when I first joined in February, we have roughly 8,000 people that support services here. When you get to larger mid market and enterprise, your product in and of itself is not what drives a decision by the by these companies.

They don’t have typically, they don’t have a very deep IT organization. There are exam there are exceptions, but they rely heavily on our organization. We have a professional services group that is, you know, roughly 2,000 people of the 8,000 that support these large enterprises, both on the retail and the restaurant side. And without that, I think it’s difficult for those who are in the SME market to be able to reach into the enterprise space because you need that infrastructure. That’s they they come to rely on it, and we have, I think, a very strong dedicated team.

And, again, this is a company that’s been around for a hundred and forty five years. It’s been in the software space for over thirty years. It’s built, a very, you know, a very efficient large machine that knows how to take care of customers in both arenas. And so from an enterprise competition space, I mean, there’s maybe one or two names, but most of them do not have, and including those, not have the same services capability that we do. I think where we need to continue to invest and bring forward products that are in the queue are on the restaurant side.

I think there, we’ve been probably late to bringing cloud solutions and microservices solutions to our customers, but we are moving aggressively in that way and meeting the needs of enterprise, and it’ll cover mid market, maybe one day as well the the small market.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Thanks. You know, I want I want to maybe switch gears here. But if anyone has a question, please put it in the chat or send me an email at Ian.Zaffino@OPCR.com. I’ll get your question asked and hopefully answered.

So, again, the chat or email me. But, Jim, if we were to go on to payments a little bit, talk to me about the opportunities there and just, like, a strategy overview.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Sure. So the best example is I referenced earlier is our SME space. An company did an acquisition in 2019 of a company called JetPay. It was a small public company. In 2023, we sold the authorization, the front end piece, the piece where that drives the, when you put your card in the terminal and it’s validated for not being lost or stolen and within credit limits.

That piece, because it was not that system was not capable nor did it have the integrations necessary to be able to support large enterprise restaurant or retail organizations. So that’s why it was divested. In February, we signed an agreement with Worldpay, which is now gonna become Global Payments. I think for those who know me, I was the president of Global and the CEO and founder of, Evo Payments. So we have we have a new relationship with Global that will cover a lot of the markets in which we or all the markets that we operate in other than Japan.

That was not a company that either of them focused on. So, again, back on the restaurant side, we sign up all new restaurant small merchants and most mid market merchants. Today, we pick up payments. At the same time, we’re picking up the point of sale relationship. Historically, though, for enterprise restaurant and retail, we didn’t have a payment solution.

Even with JetPay, JetPay was not capable, did not have the the products that were necessary to support benefits or fuel, and, therefore, that was never pursued five years ago. So that’s what we’re doing now. We’re pursuing that in a meaningful way. The size of the total spend that goes through our point of sale around the world is $1,300,000,000,000. My last company, which had 700,000,000 of revenue, we had 150,000,000,000 going through our terminals at the point of sale.

We were at a software company. We’re a credit card processing company. But here as a software company, it’s our point of sale, our software point of sale, now connected to Worldpay that we can offer an end to end solution that, the company couldn’t offer until this year. And, actually, the conversion of our existing portfolio onto Worldpay should be completed by the September. So the opportunity is 1,300,000,000,000.0 of spend.

We can now start to market to those customers, and that’s exactly what the Salesforce is incentivized as a SPIFF to do. That’s exactly what we’re, intending to accomplish is to get as many, if not all those customers over time, onto us for an end to end solution, end to end encryption, end to end service. That way, if we make a change at the point of sale or if there’s a change at the processor, we have a piece of software that sits in the middle, which we call Voyage Connect, that, will normalize to to avoid any disruption of processing capabilities or processing at the point of sale for our customers. So it’s a a better solution than where they have been in the past. I was just on a phone with one of our large petroleum con or, gas companies, fuel companies, and we’re dealing with two intermediaries who have to integrate to our point of sale.

This is legacy. And by taking those out of the mix, it gives us the opportunity to make it easier, save some money for the customer, but mostly ensure the continuity of service at the point of sale. These are on premise data centers. One sits in Ohio, one sits in Virginia. Today in The US, they process, you know, what runs through them is 800,000,000,000 of the 1,300,000,000,000.0 of volume.

The rest of it is spread across, the other regions. So for us to be able to move you know, today, we have probably a half a billion on of credit card in our numbers. So you’re looking at an opportunity to go from a half a billion to 800,000,000,000 just in The United States. Outside The United States, we don’t touch credit cards at all. So payments is a huge opportunity.

My my background has been 25 in payments, as I say, Global Payments and EVO, and there’s probably 40 people here today plus the people who are here as a result of the JetPay acquisition that are payment experts. 40 people from EVO. Some of them actually used to be with me at Global Payments as well. So I think we’re very we’re well situated. You know, what are the impediments?

We have to explain this to our enterprise customers. The enterprise customers already have a relationship. We have to work through that transition. But this is the first time the company’s truly been able to offer end to end, payment capabilities for any customer that we do business with, today. And so opportunity is really big, and we’ll start to show more of that in the coming year as we refactor the the the income statement.

So you’ll be able to see our growth in payments right now. Right now, that payments growth is a a significant driver. I expect software is gonna move in the same way. Services to continue to move, faster than where we’ve been in the past. Those three points are where we’re relying on to, to drive growth for the future.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Right. You know, and and I know we kinda touched upon this, but but but but, you know, when when I think about your vision or when you think about your vision over the next several years, you know, what are gonna be, like, the big sources of upside, you know, international growth? And then how do we think about margins and and levers to to increase margins?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yeah. So I I just on the back of what I was describing, I think the the the near term benefit opportunity is in payments. That’s gonna move faster, the complexity of it. They’re already using some our customer is using somebody for payments today, somebody for gateway. That’s just not a surface that NCR seem to wanna play in, so they were much more of a open market to some extent.

As that moves inside the company, that’s not dependent on anything but some time and connectivity. It’s not launching a software, a new software. The company’s already paying for this to somebody else, And this same story I’ve seen in the payments world where we were the payment processor, we’re the payment we were the merchant acquirer, then the customer picked up a new point of sale. The point of sale had end to end capabilities, and we would generally lose that opportunity. So I think there’s that’s the primary driver.

On the software side, software takes time to change a point of sale for a supermarket. It’s not as though they’re gonna shut down the point of sales. It can’t all be done at night. So there is across the fleet of stores, and, you know, some of our locations has over, the enterprise has over 20,000 lanes within the organization. So that’s more of a transition.

It’s launching our new products into those establishments. We’re moving away from selling our legacy applications for a host of reasons, but mainly our new VoIP pause, the capabilities that far exceed what the customers are are currently currently seeing. So I think that’s the second piece in terms of big move. You know, the the increase of software maintenance. Software maintenance now, if you look at the p and l, if you take out hardware, it’s roughly $2,000,000,000.

So a quarter of that is, software may software maintenance agreements under perpetual license agreements. So while we have some perpetual licenses in that number, most of that is software maintenance. That number is going to grow significantly, as we move them from an on prem application to a cloud application with all the capabilities of a platform company as I described. So that together with payments, and I don’t wanna minimize services. I think services has been somewhat undersold here.

I was in Serbia, last month. Now that’s where our operations center, 4,000 people are located. And you walk around the building and you see, all the different desks, some of which are encased in a closed glass office of over a 100 people that are servicing leading organizations of which I won’t mention the names, but they’re household names in the restaurant space or in the retail space. We have roughly, I think, 35 out of upwards to 500 large customers that are using services today. So big opportunity, and this is something we’re talking as a management team.

Big opportunity to sell into services as well. So I think on all three play planes, we have opportunity, payments first, probably services second in terms of speed, and, software just because it takes time. But as I said, we’ve already started to sell the Voyage Pause and Voyage Self Checkout, and we probably have thirteen, fourteen, as I said earlier, in the market today.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. You know, as far as tariffs, just give us the rundown on on the exposure there and what you’re doing to mitigate it.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Yeah. So I guess my initial impression I don’t really remember his first term on tariffs exactly. We didn’t we were not in the payment space, we really weren’t exposed to tariffs. So, I mean, I knew the I knew the narrative, but I don’t know that I knew the implications. You know, here, we do have suppliers that we we purchased product from that are now subject to higher tariffs or tariffs that they didn’t have previously.

Our agreements generally provide that, we can pass on that cost. When we when this first hit, I just started, and the view my view was this could be transitory. It was not gonna stay forever, and I didn’t wanna, like, go through the process of communicating to customers that we were going to pass on the tariffs. So initially, I don’t think they really got started until the second quarter. So yes, we’ve absorbed cost to date, a few million dollars more because we didn’t really start till the second quarter, so we’re starting to see it in the third quarter.

You know, my feeling on this has changed. I said this in the prepared comments that, you know, presumably Trump will be in office for four years, and, you know, this may extend beyond four years. So at some point, this is not, you know, this is not going away anytime soon. So they’re still in the range that I just that we described on both of the last two calls. But my expectation is that we’re gonna go back to the customers, where appropriate and and say, look.

You know, this is we’ve absorbed a a couple million dollars or so already, but my expectation is now we’re not gonna do this in perpetuity. So, I think we’re gonna move in the in the direction of letting them know this is kind of a cost of doing business these days. K.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: And then maybe the final question. Just just touch upon capital allocation priorities, you know, free cash flow use. Yeah. Any m and a out there that you’d like to to pursue?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Sure. Look. We took a big step towards fixing the balance sheet last year. We we sold a business that couldn’t sell during the prior four years. We sold it for a very good price, 2 and a half billion dollars, and we paid off about a billion 3 of of term debt, and we paid off another $300,000,000 of a receivable a revolving receivable line of credit.

So I think the balance sheet’s in much, much better shape. I mean, it’s in excellent shape compared to where it was. The area that we need to focus on currently is billing and collection timely. That has more to do with infrastructure changes that we need to do to improve the billing systems that a lot of it still is legacy, and, you know, we have a big project underway to, to address that. Last year, we also and into this year, we we spent about, I think, 125,000,000 in buybacks.

And part of that was because we sold a company for 2 and a half billion dollars. A lot of the proceeds went to pay off debt, so some of it was a return to shareholders. I think we bought back close to 10,000,000 shares, during that time period. I think that’s still part of something that, we have another authorization out there. That’s something that we’ll continue to look at depending on where the stock is trading.

But most of this is going to be generated free cash flow that it will show up in that direction. I don’t think you’re gonna see us in in the m and a space in any material way. You know, we have some stuff that we have to clean up that we’re still dealing with from the Atlios NCR split that are some of the businesses that we got were really businesses that they were involved with. So there’s there’s some of that that we’ll still have to resolve. It’s not an acquisition.

It would be more of a divestiture. But on the m and a side, you know, the thing that’s most interesting to us internally is is is the advancement of AI. Not that we would be buying an AI company, but we’re definitely seeing AI as a benefit to our development cycle. It’s it’s rapidly improving the turn. It’s consistent with what other companies are seeing.

Now the nice thing is we build out our new applications. We already have the playbook. It’s already we have these applications. Grocery stores are not changing the way they do business, or restaurants are not changing the way they do business. Fuel, the same.

They’re they’re just looking for modern capabilities. And I think an area that we’re investing in in terms of spend, it’s not necessarily capital, but it’s spend, some of it may be capital, is around how we can bring AI in to be more efficient as a company. I would say that’s consistent with what the board has talked about with us over a year ago, and we’re starting to see it in our services group and how to handle phone calls, etcetera. We’re doing it in document retention, but most importantly, we’re starting to use it in a material way in software development, in rewriting applications to meet the needs, of our customers.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Alright, Jim. This was great. This was really helpful. Thanks for taking the time, and I’ll let you get back to your, your one on one.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyex: Alright. Thank you. It’s nice to see you.

Ian Zaffino, Equity Research Analyst, Oppenheimer: Yep. Take care now. Thank you.

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