NCR Corp at D.A. Davidson Conference: Strategic Shift to Platform Model

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, NCR Corp (NYSE:VYX) presented its strategic vision at the D.A. Davidson 1st Annual Consumer & Technology Conference. The company is moving towards a platform-based model, emphasizing software and services over hardware. Despite facing integration delays, NCR is optimistic about future growth, highlighting its partnership with Worldpay and a focus on customer satisfaction.

Key Takeaways

• NCR is transitioning from hardware to a platform-based model, focusing on software and services.
• The sale of its Digital Banking unit to Veritas for $2.5 billion is helping reduce debt and repurchase shares.
• A partnership with Worldpay aims to streamline payment processing and capture more market share.
• NCR is restructuring operations and expanding into the mid-market and SME sectors.
• Despite integration delays, NCR is optimistic about completing its ODM model migration by year-end.

Financial Results

• Sale of Digital Banking Unit: Sold to Veritas for $2.5 billion, proceeds used for debt repayment and $125 million in share repurchases.
• Revenue Figures: Hardware revenue is approximately $1 billion, while software and services revenue is around $2 billion.
• Tariff Impact: Managed effectively with costs below $2 million.

Operational Updates

• Worldpay Partnership: Aims to capture a larger portion of the $1.3 trillion payment volume processed through NCR systems.
• Platform Development: Launching a next-generation platform early next year, with over $1 billion invested since 2017.
• ODM Model: Integration with Enicom (Foxcom) faced delays but is expected to complete by year-end.
• Organizational Restructuring: Nick East appointed as Head of Product; company reorganized into four regional quadrants.
• New Business Development Executives: 25 executives focused on acquiring new customers.

Future Outlook

• Growth Focus: Targeting enterprise and mid-market/SME sectors.
• Platform and Infrastructure Investments: Continued investment in platform capabilities and transitioning from on-prem Oracle to cloud Oracle.
• M&A Strategy: Not a primary focus, with emphasis on executing current plans.

Q&A Highlights

• Worldpay Partnership: Focused on accessing $1.3 trillion in payment volume.
• Go-to-Market Strategy: Shift towards acquiring new customers and expanding into the SME market.
• Next-Generation Platform: Aims to emulate platform companies like Netflix with new product launches.
• ODM Focus: Emphasizing platform capabilities as customers can source hardware elsewhere.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - D.A. Davidson 1st Annual Consumer & Technology Conference:

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Joining us today, I’m Matt Summerville with D. A. Davidson, the covering analyst for NCR Voyage. With me for a fireside chat today is Jim Kelly, the company’s President and CEO. I thought I’d kick it off with just asking Jim to tell us a little bit about your background, what drew you to Voyage as a Board member originally in October of twenty twenty three at the time of separation and now what’s led you into your role as CEO.

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Okay. Well, good morning. Thank you for joining as well. By way of background, most recently, I ran a public company, which I took public in 2018, started it in 2010 called EVO Payments and sold it in 2022. Before that, I was the President, at one point, the COO and CFO of a company called Global Payments, which went public in 2001 with a market cap of $400,000,000 When I left, it was $6,000,000,000 and then I think as people have followed Global Payments, at one point, it was a $60,000,000,000 company.

Before that, I spent ten years at a workout firm called Alvarez and Marseille. So I left there as a partner, started as its associate. There were six of us when I joined. And before that, I was an accountant. Over the course of that, I think the combination of all those experiences really helped inform how to successfully break down, understand the company and then also lead a company.

I think in the context of NCR in particular, I mean this is a company that was for sale in what 2020, 2021, Mike tried to sell the company to Veritas and I think Apollo that failed. COVID, they were in the midst of COVID, which obviously impacted a lot of companies or all companies. And then they went through a split. The Global Payments experience that I went through was actually a split as well. It was a company called National Data Corporation that was separated into two organizations and Global Payments was the one that I ended up joining.

And just the experience that was two years, very complicated. It’s kind of like getting a divorce because the organization is getting separated into two pieces. And I mentioned all that because for the last four years, NCR has gone through a lot of change. And last year, again, we went through a lot of change. But the change in the end is even though it was initiated by an activist, Glenn Welling with Engage, who had been on the Board, I don’t know, for a number of years, I think that was a pivotal moment for the organization.

It needed to separate. The idea of being a conglomerate, maybe that was exciting years ago. But for people like Matt and others that follow companies, what were we? Were we a hardware company? Were we a software company?

Were we a service company? It was hard to get coverage. Therefore, it’s hard to get investments in the organization. So I think the separation was a very good decision. But at the same time, it was those four or five years were and I wasn’t part of it, but just watching it plus my experience was a huge distraction.

And I think, to some extent, adversely impacted our customers. While our revenue attrition is 1%, as I said last quarter, it’s not that the customers are leaving. I think it’s the level of satisfaction, which we’re heavily focused on today since I’ve joined in the CEO role, and I’ll cover the history of getting from Chairman to this in a But I’ve met with over 50 CEOs and CIOs, all separate, either a CIO or I’ve met the CIO and the CEO, but over 50 companies in the last, say, one hundred and twenty days to send that exact message that the customer matters and foremost to me and to the rest of the organization. And some of the distractions that they unfortunately were a byproduct of the things that I just described, those are in the past. Last year, we restructured the balance sheet.

We sold one of the remaining divisions, which was called Digital Banking, which is now called Condescent. We sold it to Veritas for $2,500,000,000 paid off a substantial amount of the debt. Last year, I think we ended the year at $1.5 or $1,600,000,000 We bought back some shares last year as well. We spent $125,000,000 a little into this year as somewhat of a return back to shareholders because most of that cash went to debt holders. But I wanted to also recognize those who’ve been long term holders of the company.

But the strategy going forward is more investment in the company, get return the company to growth, bring out our new products, which I think you’re going to ask about. How I ended up on the Board? As I said, my last company was sold in 2022. I had knee replacement surgery, so I wasn’t planning to work for a while. That’s not a lot of fun.

Those who haven’t gone through it, keep your knees healthy. And then an investor who knew the people at ENGAGE had suggested that they talk to me about initially about being the CEO, but I was still closing my transaction and then asked if I would join the Board, which I agreed to do in October. And then the Board asked if I would step in as the Executive Chair. In May because we were doing two big transactions, that one. And then we were also outsourcing our hardware manufacturing under an ODM model to Anacom, which is owned by Foxcom.

So I stepped into that role. And then I think by the end of the year, the CEO that the Board previous Board had appointed was the time he had been a CEO. That was one of the reasons they asked for me to get more hands on. But I think the board, not me per se, but the board more broadly, made the decision that a lot needed to get done at the company in a very compressed period of time and felt that a change was better for the future of the company. So I maybe my wife wasn’t as happy about it, but I stepped into the role of CEO.

I personally believe this is a great company. I haven’t seen many companies in my years of workout or the two companies that I ran that had the position with the marquee list of customers that we support. We’re very support very fortunate to have this group of customers. And I think the investments that go back several CEOs ago to turn the company into what we now refer to as a platform company. They thought of it as a cloud company, But the evolution of being cloud processing has germinated to the point that we are on the cusp of launching one new product, our cloud solution, to essentially support all our existing customer base and be able to access other segments of the market.

Very helpful. Thanks, Jim. I want to dive right into

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: the payments side of the business. Can you compare and contrast NCR’s historical payment strategy and perhaps how your success with EVO informed your desire to pivot towards partnering with Worldpay almost immediately after taking the CEO role?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Okay. So those twenty five years between Global Payments, EVO, that was a payments experience, payments processing. So the credit card put in the machine and validating it’s not lost or stolen, you have credit. And then the transaction of taking that electronic transaction and turning it into cash, the consumer gets charged on their bank statement or their credit card statement, the merchant gets paid and the guy in the middle, which is called the merchant acquirer, makes their fees. That was the business that I’ve been in for the last twenty five years on a global basis, effectively every continent that’s got any decent GDP that I’ve worked on.

The time I came to NCR as the Chairman, I there’s a little store in our building. It’s where we demo some products and employees can go in. This is Marche, the food court, where they can buy things. It’s all honor system, checkout. So we were doing a demo of the products for the new board members.

And up on the screen, there were numbers telling like The U. S. National debt, which is going really, really fast. And I asked David, who was the CEO at the time, what is that? And he said, that’s the volume.

That’s the estimated volume of what goes through the systems, all our point of sales globally. So volume is the value of what you buy at a store. That’s the terminology used in the payment space. So the company has $1,300,000,000,000 of volume that goes through a point of sale. My last company, EVO, in total had $150,000,000,000 in annual volume.

So 150,000,000,000 versus $1,300,000,000,000 We were a $700,000,000 revenue company making $450,000,000 when we sold the organization. So immediately, I thought, why are we not accessing at that level because today the company only accesses $400,000,000 of the $1,300,000,000,000 The reason is when the company purchased, Mike purchased a payments company called JetPay in 2020, I believe it was, small, small company. It wasn’t geared to deal with the behemoths that we support, fuel, grocery, Whole Foods, Circle K. These are giant global organizations in some respect. And this little engine just was incapable of providing that service.

So very quickly, right after that, and this was well before I was even the CEO, we divested the component of JetPay that is that authorization piece, putting your card in the machine, the box at the point of sale. And the expectation was we will go find somebody else to rent as opposed to own. It’s much better to own, but owning and building was just not in the cards. It would have been way complicated. It would have taken it would have been a huge distraction.

And as I just said a minute ago, last year was a big year of restructuring the company. We just didn’t have the bandwidth to do it. But I guess by the time I became the Executive Chair, I started down the path of talking to all the major players, people that the CEOs that I’ve known in each of those companies, one of which is not running the Social Security Administration, Frank, from Fiserv. And Charles and I have known each other a long time. I talked to him.

Charles is that company was owned 51% by or they owned 51 they were owned 49% by FIS. And so it was a private company thinking about going public. They were just recently announced to be sold to Global Payments. And what I offered him is have $1,300,000,000,000 of volume that we can put through your platform. And from their standpoint, they saw that as a good commercial deal.

It’s a business that they’re in, which is they don’t sell directly all the time. They sell through relationships. You can call them partnerships. They’re not legal partnerships, but commercial relationships. They have all the capacity and capability that our customer base needs.

And in some instances, probably 15%, 20% of our customers are using them as an acquirer. So it seemed to be a good marriage between the two. Now that company is going to become part of Global Payments, which obviously was the company I was the President of for ten years. So it is the right direction because now we can access the $1,300,000,000,000 And this is what we’re doing. We started it two months ago, right after this got announced.

We have a team of people who came from EVO, so people with experience in payments, and they are actively sitting with our customers through our sales organization or directly, teaching them about the capabilities that we have, not just the relationship with Worldpay, but we have embedded capabilities that the company has not taken advantage of. In some instances, given it away for free when it’s actual value that we’re providing to the customers that competitors are charging for. We just haven’t done that to date. So just like we’re moving out of one time software licenses like the old Microsoft then move to three sixty five. We’re doing the exact same thing.

We’re moving from a one time license model to a subscription model because we’re providing a different type of value to the customers. So why would a customer want to do business with us, one of our customers, who’s already with us for a point of sale? Why would they want to do business with us for payments? And it’s very simple, and I’ve already seen many of these examples. I saw it in my past life, but I’ve seen it already since I’ve joined.

You have three components to getting a transaction done. You have the point of sale, which is ours. You generally have something in the middle, a switch. And there’s parties that do this. We have one of those as well.

In The U. S. Alone, it does $800,000,000,000 of volume. And then you have the point of sale. I mean you have the processor.

So if you put multiple parties in the middle and there’s an issue, and we’ve seen this as well with one of our big customers, somebody at the processor makes a change, firmware is updated. If I don’t know that at the point of sale, the next transaction they try to run it fails. And these aren’t little companies, these are giant companies. So it is this is the only way they make their income is through their point of sale. So our view is it is you put your entire trust in us to run your point of sale, which runs effectively your entire company for the grocery, fuel, convenience and restaurants that we support predominantly.

We have the rest of the chain now that we can support what you need. And on the restaurant side for the last, I don’t three or four years since JetPay has been there, our attach rate of new customers we sign up on the restaurant. Now these are more mid market or SME. They’re not the large enterprise for the reasons I mentioned. But our attach rate is like 95%.

I think it’s been as high as 99%. The only difference is we have some dealers in there that sometimes have their own payment solution. So I think it’s the best for the customers. We’re not charging more. We’re just displacing a competitor who would be in the middle.

And it enables the customer to have one relationship to provide the entire spectrum because they’re already relying on us to manage the most important piece, which is the point of sale.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Very helpful. Just as a couple of follow ups. How rapidly do you think you can scale this business for Voyage? And how should we think about the TAM? I know you referenced $1,300,000,000,000 in volume.

But ultimately, what does that translate into as far as TAM? And how do you convince customers that are using TAM for us, you’re saying? Yes, TAM

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: for And then how do

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: you convince customers that are using a different payment product to come over to this platform?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Okay. I think some of that I just addressed. They’re coming to us because they’re frustrated with the middle. And I can’t say the names of the customers, but I know one who’s a very big customer right now, super frustrated because each one of the organizations in the middle, they have their own kind of cycles. And so their cycle versus the customer cycle versus our cycle, you got to line it all up.

It’s kind of a pain in the rear to make all that stuff happen. So with us, we now offer the entire spectrum, where in the past we haven’t. And on the restaurant side, as I just mentioned, our attach rate has been effectively 100%. So customers want ease of implementation. They don’t want to have to call and coordinate because otherwise it puts them in the middle.

They have to get us on the phone, they have to get the other party on the phone and we have to work together. The reason we connected, we created what used to be called Connected Payments, it’s now called Voix Connect, is to take some of that aggravation out of the mix. They did this in 2014. They created this platform. This platform process, as I said, 800,000,000,000 today.

It’s most of our U. S. Customers. We have similar platforms in other markets. And it enabled the customer in the past to say, Oh, I want to be with Global or I want to be with First Data or I want to be with Elavon.

And this could just switch to them directly. It was designed to make it easy for the customer because in 2014, the NCR didn’t think about being in the payment space. They were happy to downstream that to somebody else. They were kind of late to the party. So now we’re 2025.

We have the capability like most software companies domestically and now internationally that control payments as one throat to choke for the customer to rely on us to be able to offer that solution. So again, I mean some of it’s economic. We have to be competitive on price. But regardless, we’re not actually activate we’re not collecting any of that value today. And just to give you an order of magnitude, what does $1,300,000,000,000 mean or $800,000,000,000 In The U.

S. Alone, that’s over 12,000,000,000 transactions a day a year, excuse me. So that means 12,000,000,000 people are running a transaction through one of our point of sales in The United States each year. You could just add a penny or 2 pennies to that. That’s like real money, isn’t it?

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: For sure. I appreciate that. Maybe let’s pivot a and talk about

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Well, can I just one other comment? We’re not trying to become a payments company. Just because I’m twenty five years in this, that has nothing to do with it. I also have a software background. The company’s greatness is around supporting our customers for software.

Because I’ve heard this now in the market, Jim’s there, so we’re going to become a payments company. We will not sell payments to anybody other than our customers. We’re not knocking on doors. We’re not creating a sales organization to compete for payments. We’re just trying to provide the best quality service to our customers and make it as easy as possible for them.

That’s simply all we’re doing.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: One of the other sort of at least I consider to be somewhat meaningful strategic shifts you’ve made, I think when David kind of launched Voyage as a stand alone CEO at the time, his main sort of strategy revolved around mining the existing customer base incremental wallet. And you’ve said, well, that’s important, we need to go get new customers. We haven’t been going to get new customers. So talk a little bit about how you’ve pivoted the sales organization, how you’re running the business today to kind of go down both of those paths at the same time.

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Yes. Before I I might even heard that from David when I met David at a lunch. But I did hear that from one of our Board members as that was the company’s philosophy over the last five years, we have enough customers. We have these big customers. There’s lots that you can sell to them.

We don’t need new customers. So I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard That we always need new customers. Customers go out of business, they get they merge, they don’t like you, they leave. So we have, I don’t know, 25 new BDEs, I think they’re called, outselling to new customers. One of the challenges, we haven’t launched the new products.

So as the new products come out, I think it will make it more effective for them to sell. But we’re already having wins, not specifically on the software side, but in the hardware side and the services side. We just signed a fairly sizable very sizable account that I think will grow and eventually, we’re believing into a software relationship as well. So yes, my mandate is go get new business. And one of the things we haven’t done, we’ve been very complacent in just being in the enterprise space, which is terrific.

We don’t have a ton of competition at enterprise. We all have competition, but it’s much different in the SME market. But the new products that are coming out, the platform products have the capability of being downshifted into the middle market. And I think there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity. You see some of that on the restaurant side.

We signed, somebody called Ziggy’s Coffee and Yogurtland and with our new Aloha Cloud solution. So there is a mid market that is there’s 7,000,000 merchants to just pick on The U. S, 7,000,000 merchants in The United States. We’ve been focused on the very top quadrant. I mean it’s a quadrant.

It’s an eyedropper of customers relative to 7,000,000. While we cover the spectrum on the restaurant side, we really focus predominantly on the enterprise space, but we’re moving much more aggressively into the bid market. And you’ll see that as we launch the new products into next year. So take care of existing customers and roll out the new products to them. Existing customers are super important to us.

We don’t want to lose anybody. But at the same time, we need to grow and growth is not going to just come through enterprise customers. It’s going to come through new relationships in the mid market as well and the SME.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Just to take that a step further, can you give maybe a little more granular detail around kind of the next generation platform that I believe you said is launching early next year, if I’m not mistaken, and how you feel that will differentiate yourself competitively at both the enterprise level and the SME side of the business side of the market?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: So the best I can tell, the company has acquired 50 software applications over, I don’t know, thirty years or so. You would know better. You’ve covered it for a longer time. There’s 25 that are really active today. On the restaurant side, there’s the one you everybody knows called Aloha.

And then the left on the retail side, the three major categories I just mentioned, under an acquisition called Retalix. And there’s a variety of flavors inside that structure. And I think this was a buy market share already in the hardware business, buy out the software component of the hardware business. I’m guessing that was the strategy. But the challenge is we have 20 a lot of tech debt.

We have 25 legacy applications that are running today around the world. So I live in the Southeast. I shop at a supermarket called Publix. They’re running an application that’s over twenty years old. It works, but it doesn’t have what ultimately people want, which is what we described in our last on our first quarter call, the idea of a platform company.

So what is a platform company? I don’t know if you’ve heard that terminology before. It was somewhat new to me, but we are all living it today. So think of Netflix. I’m sure everybody’s heard of or seen Netflix before.

So let’s say you watch a movie last night. Let’s say it’s a drama. Then tomorrow you’re going to get proposed other dramas to watch because it knows what you like. Well, that’s what our customers, not we’re B2B, so we’re not B2C, but that’s what our B2B customers want. They want that information to know how you shop at a supermarket or how you go to a gas station because they have competition for your dollars every single day.

Today, we can’t provide that information easily because we have legacy on prem applications like your PCs have an operating system sitting inside them. So if you go to Publix, the 17,200 of sales at Publix have an operating system sitting inside that PC. More recently, David and others have been able to we refer to it as attached to our cloud to be able to extract data. But it’s not the same as actually being on the application. These are DOS or Microsoft or might even be DOS based old applications.

This is a Linux based cloud running in Google here and in Europe that allows real time reporting, a variety of capabilities, all those ones that I just described as an example of Netflix that the customers are really demanding. They’re just I think they’re very disappointed it’s taken us as long as it has to get here. I think they’ve been working on this project, best I can tell, maybe 2017, 2018. We spent over $1,000,000,000 building these capabilities. And this has been maybe I initiated a push earlier than I don’t know what David would have otherwise done.

But we’re framing to the marketplace what we’re building, what kind of company we are. There’s 16,000 companies that would qualify themselves as a platform company. We retained a firm called Prophet and a guy by the name of Ted Mosier, who wrote a book called Winning Through Platforms. And Ted has been working with us for the last, I don’t know, five months in helping us learn how to effectively launch the product. One of the things I did was promote someone who we bought a company from in 2019.

His name is Nick East. He’s based in Bath, England. He was the founder of the company. And the product is called Edge. It’s an integral portion of how the platform actually works effectively.

And I promoted him to be the head of a product. Because in the past, the company did not have a product lead. It was very siloed organization. In an ATM business, a digital banking business, a little payments business and the software business. And inside software, it’s not just software, it’s software, hardware, services and different flavor of services.

So not a lot of great coordination. Now with all the other noise gone, we’re just a software company with effectively one product because the product itself are the applications that are going to sit on the cloud. So think of your iPhone. I think everybody here, most people it doesn’t matter if it’s iPhone or Android. Each of our phones have a different set of apps that are sitting on it based on our personal needs, what we like to see, what we need to access.

So think of that as a corollary to what we’re doing. We’re going to have a platform like your iPhone. We’re going to build apps on there to meet the needs of a grocer and all the features that a grocer needs or to meet the needs of fuel and all the needs of fuel. Instead of having to go out to one of the locations and actually work physically on them or do it in our lab and send it to them and then having to have it tested, it’s all going to be just like on our phone, it’s all going to be remote. And so that’s where we’re heading as an organization.

I’m just not saying we’re doing it now because I’m here and we’re going to start it. It started before I got here. We’re now all I’m saying, we’re now coming to market. NRF is in January on the retail side, on the restaurant side. It’s not as dramatic of a shift because we’ve already launched Aloha Cloud a while ago.

We have other aspects of Aloha Cloud that are on the platform that will get launched this year. But that’s where we’re heading and that’s what’s the thrust of the conversation that we had during the first quarter call.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Very helpful. Let’s maybe spend a minute talking about the ODM. Some people may not be familiar with what an outsourced design manufacturing business model is. So maybe talk about the way Boyix had historically approached hardware, what the go forward approach is and what could go wrong in this type of pivot for the company?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Nothing. How many people here are accountants? Not a lot of them. So one of the challenges of being in the hardware business is that it’s not recurring. So unless you’re a store a company that opens a store every single day that has to buy hardware every single day, you tend to buy it when you need it.

You try to hold on to it as long as possible and then you replace it when you have to. And as we Matt mentioned earlier, we kind of have finite number of customers of size. It’s not like we’re adding hundreds of thousands of new customers on the enterprise side, it would be impossible. So the enterprise customers are going to buy when they need to buy. And I wasn’t here during COVID, but I can tell you from my experience at EVO, there were a lot of hardware buys.

As businesses slowed down during 2020, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, people looked for something to do and they upgraded their estate. And I think that’s one of the reasons, it’s not an excuse, but I think that’s one of the reasons that Voyage has seen the last two years of very episodic and mostly down purchases on hardware because I think if we went back and looked at 2021, 2022, 2023, because we’re not losing customers. So they bought a bunch of stuff. They just didn’t need to replace it. And unfortunately, because there are a lot of machines that drive the market from day to day, if not every day, that as we go up and down based on purchases, because the revenue associated with hardware is close to $1,000,000,000 and we’re close to a $3,000,000,000 company all in.

Dollars 2,000,000,000 is software and services, the rest of it is hardware. And we have some big customers. And when those big customers buy, we show a lot of revenue. When customers don’t buy or if we have a lap over year over year, there’s a lot of explanation we have to do in the scripts as to what happened and why did that happen. But I can’t project and customers are just not going to buy hardware every single day.

So there is an accounting structure, it’s similar to six zero six, where you kind of you’re able to net down something that you are six zero six is actually different, but it’s the idea of netting down something that previously was grossed up. So ODM, as Matt just said, outsourced design manufacturing, We made a decision. Myself, David, the Board at the time made a decision that the direction of the company is what I just described as a platform company. And do I really care if they buy our hardware, they can buy other hardware as well, if that’s in their best interest because our focus is all around the platform that I just described to you. It doesn’t diminish the value of hardware.

Every one of our customers needs hardware to be able to run the software. We’re just not mandating it. It has to come from us. In the years past, that was the mandate and it wouldn’t run on anybody else’s hardware. So you had to use their hardware.

It was kind of because their history was hardware company. It was hardware software Now we’re inverting that. So last year, while I was very busy getting the sale of digital banking done, there was another group that was working on ODM. And the plan and we communicated an expectation last year, we would be done by December. And I think that’s what the market expected.

We even in the third quarter went out with numbers of pro form a what we would look like without it. The challenge was and actually there’s something positive that this isn’t a spin, but I think it’s positive that the partner, which is Foxcom through it’s a Taiwanese company, Enicom, which has been a great partner, has been with us for a long time. So it’s not as though we’re picking somebody new. They already have the infrastructure. But we’re an Oracle company.

They’re an SAP company. And the ability for their SAP company or infrastructure to be able to manage the complexities of our warehouses and warehouse distribution just in time, all that stuff. They tried to build it in house. It just didn’t work in time. And so what we said publicly is absolutely true.

We pulled I pulled the plug at the Vein Air end of last year. We could have maybe moved a piece of the business, but I thought that was a bad decision to separate because we have some customers that are global. And so we weren’t going to have one coming from them and one coming from us. So we just pulled back because in the end, what’s most important to us is our customers and the ability to be able to meet their needs. And we just weren’t ready.

And so we called a time out. They went off and bought a party application that’s specifically designed to do what our manufacturing facility required in terms of picking and putting new items back onto the shelf. So that’s in UAT as we speak. It should be done testing by the July, and then we’ll start piloting. And I’m still now I’m probably a little bit more optimistic that we’re going to hit the end of the year.

I want to hit the end of the year. So the spin on this was, thank God it didn’t happen because this year has been very complicated. Everybody is familiar with tariffs. The way we manage tariffs, it’s cost us, which means our customers cost nothing, it’s cost us less than $2,000,000 of an expense hit because we were able to effectively manage either suppliers where we bought, moving a lot of our stuff is assembled in Mexico, and we would have some protection relative to tariffs there. So if that had been if we had accomplished this last year and that had happened, I’m not sure how they would have managed through the process.

So in the end, I think we’ll come to a happy ending at the end of this year. I think we’ll be able to finish off the migration and have them successfully get started by the end of the year. There was some thought about doing in the fourth quarter. I don’t know. We haven’t really made a decision yet whether we would kind of pollute the fourth quarter with kind of half in and half out.

We’ll try to do it as of January 1. We’ll let you know as we get through the testing.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Appreciate that. We just have about five or six minutes left, but I want to talk about change and pivoting has been a bit of a theme of this conversation. But below maybe the C level ranks, there’s been some changes that have taken place, some folks you’ve elevated into different roles. Maybe talk about some of the other change that’s been afoot within the executive leadership team at Voyage and maybe even a rung below that. And then how has the organization been responding to yet another wave of change afoot at the company?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Have you been talking to people at the company? Yes. I think anybody who takes on a responsibility like mine, you try to do what I do what I think is best for the company. I have a long experience running companies back to my early 30s. So there were some members of the team.

I think it was just time to make a change. David was one of them. That was the Board’s decision. At the executive level, we didn’t have a product person. We’re a product company.

We didn’t have somebody leading the product organization. We had two different people within who are sales leaders who are running product. It made zero sense to me. So that’s why we moved Nick into that position. That has been a game changer across the board.

I think that is has been extremely well received, not just from employees, but every customer that I’ve interact he’s interacted with, with me has been very positive. We had a Head of Marketing, and she did a very good job. But at the same time, we’re not a B2C company, so I didn’t need a Head of Marketing. So that person exited. And the person who previously ran the retail side, I just thought it was time to make a change there.

And we brought in somebody new from my background, who is now running the retail organization, and we reorganized the structure of the reorganization to be into four quadrants. The company tried to run everything from Atlanta. And having run global companies for twenty five years, that’s a stupid idea. You need to decentralize as much as you can. We can’t decentralize the entire company because they’ve already consolidated a bunch of the back office costs in Serbia.

So but the piece that touches the customer, we can decentralize. So we have a Latin American head, so I promoted somebody to run Hell Latin America, whose legacy, Diego, he’s done a fantastic job. It’s actually one of our best operating units. Unfortunately, it’s the smallest unit, but it runs extremely well. The U.

S. Is the largest, roughly 60%. So I removed the person that was running that division and promoted our Head of Product for that. Previously Head of Product into running that group. He’s done a fantastic job.

His name is Tom Perrault. We’ve just hired a new person for Europe and Asia who starts like any day now, came out of Cisco, actually had a relationship with Tom previously. We’re excited about him joining. And then we moved somebody from The U. S.

To run the Japanese based business, which is our largest market. His ancestry is Japan. He speaks Japanese. And we needed to infuse this is when a company is 145 years old, there’s a lot of longevity in our employee base. And so sometimes we have to make changes to have different ideas of how we’re going to operate as an organization.

How is the company the company is moving at a faster pace. You can probably tell by what you’ve heard from me today, but I’ve heard it from customers who say to me that we’ve not seen this pace in the past. I don’t think it’s just me. I think it’s the focus that we have as an organization because we’re no longer a big conglomerate. We know what our mission is.

We’ve been very clear. I have a town hall at the end of every earnings call, so for a year. And we’re very clear with the organization, very transparent. My sense is I I don’t think you’d expect me to say anything else, but my sense is that we’re making progress on a rapid basis.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Very good. Then maybe just one more to kind of close out here, Jim. Can you talk about balance sheet priorities? You mentioned post the digital banking transaction, the balance sheet is in probably the best shape realistically, probably is the best shape it’s been in the last twenty years or so. So what are your priorities?

Know you mentioned a little bit around repurchases. What are you thinking from an M and A standpoint? And as you’ve kind of cleaned up the company to a degree, you have what looks like a pretty cohesive retail and restaurant platform. You’re building out a payment business. Is there potential strategic optionality for the company at some point down the road?

Jim Kelly, President and CEO, NCR Voyage: Okay. I’m not sure I know the last question, but I’ll get the other ones real quick. So the buybacks, it’s not my nature to do buybacks. I think at some point they make sense. But like I said, we sold something for a lot of money, and I think it was appropriate to do some of that.

We just did an authorization for another 200,000,000 We have got a preferred out there that at some point, I’d like to either retire or convert. So I just wanted to have the authorization. We basically had used all the prior authorization. So we will do it as it makes sense. I think in this year and into next year, it’s all about investing in the product, getting it to market.

We do have some infrastructure issues. We run on four accounting systems because in the company split, it never finished the job of converting from an on prem Oracle to a cloud Oracle. So there’s going to be some money that you’re going hear about. I think we’ve talked about it publicly about investing in the company, not a lot of investments. I didn’t want to do it last year because I wanted to see how we finished up the year.

But I’m only more optimistic being in this job now one hundred and ten days about the future and what’s available, the people at the company who are desperately looking to return this company to a growth strategy. While we’re number one, we’re number one because we bought a lot of software companies. We need to start acting like number one. In terms of strategic, the last two companies I worked at, EVO, we bought 46 companies around the world and global is probably 25. So M and A is not something I’m afraid of.

But that’s not really the right answer for this company. The right answer for this for NCR, Voyage, is execution on its plan, the things that I’ve just described to you today. Could there be M and A? Yes. But I think that’s super low on the list of things that we’re going to spend time and money on.

Strategic options. I sold my last company. So I think if somebody is willing to pay the value for the company, I’m happy to listen to anybody. But that’s not why I joined the company. I joined the company to try to put it back on the right track, work with the team.

A lot of those were my former employees at EVO that have come over on the payment side. But NCR has a great deep bench of experience, culture, etcetera. And my feeling, especially as a Board member and at the time I was the Chairman, that’s part of our job. We could have run a search and tried to find somebody to replace it. I already had been there for a year.

I’m not going to be there for ten years, but I wanted to see this company achieve what I believe it can, which is substantially better than what you see today from a performance standpoint with our customers and definitely on the financial side.

Matt Summerville, Analyst, D. A. Davidson: Very good. We’ll leave it there. Thanks, Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.