Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Temenos Q3 2025 results conference call and live webcast. I am Matilde, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Takis Spiliopoulos, Interim CEO and CFO. Please go ahead. Thank you, Matilde. Good evening, good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us for our Q3 2025 results call. I will talk you through our key performance and operational highlights for the quarter before updating you on our operational and financial performance. Starting with slide six, we delivered a strong performance in Q3 2025, benefiting from a stable sales environment throughout the quarter. There was no impact from the U.S. bank credit concerns in Q3, and we have not seen any impact so far in the current quarter. Demand in Q3 was broad-based, and we signed a number of deals across new logos and the installed base. I would note that there were no large deals in the quarter, though we do have several we expect to sign in Q4. We announced a number of AI-powered products this year, in particular our FCM AI Agent for financial crime mitigation and Money Movement and Management platform, and we have seen good traction on both of these. From an investment perspective, we have continued executing our strategic roadmap, investing across the business. Sales headcount, in particular, is on track to increase by around 50% by year-end. When we launched our new strategic plan in November last year, we indicated we expected around $20- $25 million of cost savings in 2025, and these efficiency gains are largely funding the investments we are making this year. The operating leverage in our business model is evident. Our profitability has therefore benefited from the sales momentum and the cost efficiency programs which are funding our investments. We remain prudent in our outlook given there are a number of large deals expected in Q4. However, based on our Q3 performance and the stable sales environment, we are raising our guidance for 2025 for subscription and SaaS, EBIT, and EPS, and are reconfirming our 2028 targets. Turning to slide seven, we signed a number of deals with new and existing clients this quarter, and we have highlighted four of these on this slide. A couple of the highlighted deals are in the Middle East, with clients either expanding into new geographies or launching new digital banks on our platform. We also have a client in the ASEAN region upgrading and moving to the cloud, and a client in LATAM moving on to Temenos core banking in the cloud. The key things across all of these clients are the reliability and scalability of our platform, the uniqueness of our country model banks that clients can leverage to rapidly expand into new geographies, and the flexibility to deploy in the cloud or on-premise. We will continue to expand our offering in all of these areas through our R&D roadmap. Moving to customer success on slide eight, this quarter, we went live on a major U.S. SaaS expansion with Frontbank, a global bank offering banking and custodial solutions to the asset management industry. Frontbank selected Temenos to support their U.S. expansion due to our comprehensive SaaS banking capabilities tailored specifically to the U.S. market. We deployed a full suite of services, including digital and core banking, payments, and data analytics on Temenos SaaS, allowing Frontbank to launch new products faster, elevate the digital experience, and scale efficiently. Notably, Frontbank can now offer a fully digitized corporate onboarding experience, allowing clients to complete the process quickly and securely. This go-live continued the extension of our leadership in best of suite in the U.S., in line with our 2028 strategy around three core levers. On slide nine, we have our latest payments innovation that we launched at Sibos in September. Money Movement and Management is a single pre-integrated AI-powered platform that enables our clients to replace fragmented, siloed legacy platforms or to rapidly launch new lines of business. It is deployable on-prem, in the cloud, or as SaaS, depending on the client's needs. We have already seen good traction on this and other AI-powered products such as FCM AI Agent, and we will continue investing in specific AI use cases to meet the needs of our customers. Moving to the next slide, I am proud of the industry recognition Temenos continues to receive. It is a great achievement, whether that is for the strength of our core banking platform, specific aspects of our offering such as deposits, or from our employees where we have been recognized as a great place to work in 15 countries. This last recognition is particularly important to me and a testimony to our values and culture. People are the key to our success. Finally, on slide 11, I would like to give an update on the execution of our strategic roadmap. We have been hiring talent across the R&D organization globally, in particular in India and the U.S. Our innovation hub in Orlando is having a visible impact on our U.S. expansion strategy, with the first prospective clients leveraging the hub to co-innovate with our teams in the quarter. We are on track to increase sales headcount across the regions by 50% by end of December. We have also been making investments in our sales training and governance process to maximize the quality of our pipeline. Lastly, we are looking to improve the efficiency of our operating model, rolling out AI initiatives across the business, including in software, legal, marketing, and finance, in addition to R&D where the focus is on leveraging AI for development, testing, and support. Moving to slide 13, we delivered 11% total revenue growth this quarter, driven by broad-based wins with both new and existing customers. We had another strong quarter for subscription and SaaS, which grew 10% in Q3, as well as maintenance, which was largely driven by premium maintenance signings. Services revenue also grew for the second quarter in a row. Moving to slide 14, our EBIT grew 36% in the quarter, driven by the strong revenue growth and operating leverage. Our ongoing investments in product and tech and go-to-market were largely offset by our cost savings program, in line with our self-funded investment strategy that we announced at last year's CMD, with an expected $20- $25 million of cost savings in 2025, funding the majority of our investments. There is also some impact from cost phasing, with some catch-up expected in Q4 2025. EPS grew 41% in Q3, largely driven by EBIT growth and benefiting from the lower share count. Moving to ARR, it has once again benefited from the growth in subscription and SaaS and maintenance. As a percentage of last 12 months' revenue, ARR equaled 88%, up from 87% in Q3 2024. This gives us excellent visibility on future recurring revenue, as well as our future cash flows, helping underpin our 2028 targets as well. On slide 16, I would like to highlight a few items. Maintenance grew nicely in Q3, up 14%, and we now expect maintenance to grow around 11%, constant currency for the full year. I would also flag that subscription and SaaS has grown 12% year to date, total revenue 10%, and EBIT 24%, which supports the increase in full-year guidance we announced today. Given the continued strength in EBIT growth in Q3, we now expect our EBIT margin to be up at least 170 basis points for the full year. On slide 17, net profit was up 35% in the quarter, in line with EBIT, with higher tax charges offset by lower financing costs. The tax rate in Q3 was around 21%, and we maintain guidance of a 2025 reported tax rate of 15%-1 7%, benefiting from a one-off tax benefit from prior years, which will materialize in Q4 2025. The normalized underlying tax rate excluding this one-off benefit remains at 19%- 21%. EPS grew by 42% ahead of net profit growth, as it did last quarter, once again supported by the lower share count. Moving to free cash flow, we delivered significant growth of 30% in Q3 2025. As expected, we are showing an acceleration in H2 2025, driven by the growth in deferred revenue and lower restructuring costs than in H1 2025. We have now absorbed $30 million of restructuring headwind in the first nine months of the year. Free cash flow has now grown 13% year to date, so we are confident that we will deliver on our full-year guidance of at least 12%. Next, on slide 19, we show the changes to group liquidity in the quarter on a reported basis. We generated $61 million of operating cash and bought back $148 million worth of shares, completing our CHF 250 million buyback program in August. We ended Q3 2025 with $184 million of cash on the balance sheet. Our leverage stood at 1.4 times at the end of the quarter, and we also expect to end 2025 within our target leverage range, retaining flexibility for either further share buybacks or bolt-on M&A. Now, moving to slide 19, a couple of items to highlight on our balance sheet. We completed our CHF 250 million share buyback program in August at an average price of CHF 63.25 per share, representing 5.5% of registered share capital. These shares will be proposed for cancellation at the 2026 AGM. In July, we closed the CHF 500 million revolving credit facility signed in Q2. As previously mentioned, we have no further refinancing requirements until 2028. The bond maturing in November of this year has already been refinanced by the bond issued in March of this year. Our reported net debt stood at $702 million at quarter end. Turning to slide 21, I would first like to note that we remain prudent in our 2025 outlook, given there are several large deals in the Q4 pipeline. However, given the good performance in the first nine months of the year, we are increasing our subscription and SaaS guidance to at least 7% to reflect the sales momentum. As a result of our operating leverage, premium maintenance signings uplift to Q3 EBIT, and the self-funding of our investments, we are raising our EBIT growth guidance from at least 9% to at least 14%. Correspondingly, we are also upgrading our EPS growth guidance from 10%- 12%- 15%- 17%. We are keeping ARR guidance of at least 12%, given the delayed benefit to ARR from stronger subscription and SaaS growth, and we're also keeping free cash flow guidance of at least 12% growth unchanged. As a reminder, our guidance is non-IFRS in constant currency, except for EPS and free cash flow, which are on a reported basis. Both the 2025 guidance and the 2024 pro forma numbers exclude any contribution from multi-funds. Free cash flow is, of course, under our standard definition, including IFRS 16 leases and interest costs. Lastly, we have reconfirmed our 2028 target. Before we head to Q&A, I'm sure you will have seen the statement from our Chairman in the press release that the CEO search conducted by the Board is currently ongoing. As you can appreciate, this is not something I can comment on any further. With that, operator, can we please open the call for questions? We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast while asking a question. Please limit yourself to one question per person. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Sven Merkt from Barclays. Please go ahead. Great. Good evening. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe one on the pipeline. Can you just comment on the quality of the pipeline and the visibility you have into Q4? You called out that there are a number of large deals in the pipeline. I guess this is the case usually in the fourth quarter. Is there anything unusual here to point out? What sort of pipeline conversion do you assume for these large deals compared to prior years? Thank you. Thanks, Wen. On the pipeline, there is nothing that has changed from the previous three months. Clearly, we have the large deals in the pipeline, as we commented back in July. We also do not assume any changing conversion rates. The way we look at this is always as a weighted average at the start of the year when we provide guidance. Clearly, we take an assumption on the conversion rate of large deals, which is lower than we use for, let's say, the average deal. Nothing has changed in terms of the pipeline. What we have clearly seen is no impact from any macro uncertainty. I think that's good to highlight, given we're three months more into the year. We have seen in Q3 good execution and good conversion rates across the regions. Also, nothing to highlight. We want to remain prudent on how we assess the pipeline. Clearly, the pipeline is growing quite nicely, as you would expect, with a substantial increase in the number of salespeople working to build the pipeline. Again, let's remain prudent. There is still some macro uncertainty out there, but we have seen no change in banks' behavior in terms of spending plans. Clearly, they still want to invest. They prioritize digital transformation. This is, I would say, what we call a stable sales environment, and we expect this to remain for the remainder of the year. Perfect. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Laurent Daure from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes. Thank you. Good evening, Takis. I have one and a follow-up. First is on the support revenue. You had another great quarter. Where do you stand in terms of the mix between the premium maintenance and the classic maintenance in order to help us to see what could be the growth rate in maintenance a bit normalized one or two years out? My follow-up is on the U.S. If you could give us an update on the penetration of some tier two, tier three banks that were part of your long-term plan. Thank you. Hi, Laurent. Let me address the maintenance question first. Clearly, 14% was a good number. This continued the trend from what we have seen last year and also the first half, clearly benefiting from premium maintenance, but it's not just premium maintenance. Also keep in mind we get uplift from renewals, and we also have the CPI indexation, which over the years obviously falls into the number. We have seen clients taking up our premium maintenance offering on the one hand, but on the other hand, we have also seen clients not churning on this. They maintain those premium maintenance offerings for a much longer period than in the past. Clearly, that helps. If you don't have churn, that helps a lot. This is what we also see in terms of visibility going forward. Now, we said 11% for the full year, so that's about the number in Q4 as well. For the next years, I think it's too early to provide specific guidance, and we're not disclosing the split other than we're growing on all the maintenance streams. For the next years, I think what we had implied in our original CMD plan was somewhere 5%, 6% as a base rate because clearly we have seen some catch-up. Some normalization is probably what we would model in that case. On the U.S., as you would expect, clearly we're seeing a very nice build-up in our pipeline for the U.S. I think in terms of the signed deals, we will see even more of the impact materializing in 2026 in line with our strategy. The sales team is now fully in place, and I think this is clearly shown in the pipeline generation. We see we get with more people and a better understanding of our offering. Clearly, we get into more RFPs, and also our win rate is improving from the data we have. You need to keep in mind we're tackling a huge market with a real need and a long runway for banks to modernize. I think we have a much better value proposition in terms also of strategic roadmap versus where we were one year ago. The investments we have done, both on the product side, but also on the go-to-market side. Some of that roadmap, some of the products in the roadmap are very specific to the U.S. market. We need to be, as we said, we wanted to be closer to the customers, and clearly they see our investment in go-to-market in the product as well. The innovation hub clearly has helped a lot. Also, for awareness building, as you know, pipeline is 12- 18 months to develop. This gives us a good level of confidence that the conversion of this pipeline into signed deals will clearly accelerate next year. Thank you, Takis. We now have a question from the line of Frederic Boulan from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Hey, good evening, Takis. If I may, a question around Q4. If I look at your guidance, upgraded guidance, it still implies much less growth in Q4 versus what you've done year to date. Same on EBIT, you're gaining for 170 bps margin expansion since you've done four points in the first nine months. Are there any specific moving parts you want to call out for Q4? Is there anything you can share on your free cash flow conversion? You've grown EBIT $22 million year on year in Q3. Net profit $16 million, but the cash flow growth is about $6 million. If you can talk about some of the drivers for free cash flow conversion, anything specific you want to call out for the rest of the year, DSOs or else, and any specific elements you want to call out into next year. Thank you very much. Okay, a lot of questions, Fred. Let me take them one by one. I think if we start with, you know, subscription and SaaS and keep in mind that we want to remain prudent as we started the year, there is, you know, still macroeconomic uncertainty. What we did, given we have not changed the outlook for, you know, the sales environment, you know, if you want the upside, we were going for around 6% in Q3, delivered 10%. The upside of, let's say, $5 million, you know, we let it flow through into the guidance. This is where, you know, the upside for subscription and SaaS is coming from. We are, you know, not flagging any explicit risks other than we have large deals in there. No change to visibility. Again, it's, you know, at least 7%, and we want to remain prudent for this time. Also, keep in mind, you know, we have, and this shows maybe the underlying, you know, very robust growth that we still have the impact from this BNPL customer in every quarter. If you exclude the impact from that, you know, we would show this really shows the underlying growth, which is very healthy. Nothing specific to flag here other than large deals, and we want to remain prudent. On EBIT, yes, you know, the guidance implies some deceleration. We have seen, you know, year to date EBIT growth of 24% clearly has benefited from a strong growth in subscription and SaaS of 12%, strong maintenance growth. Clearly, there also been, you know, the full impact of the cost savings initiatives, but clearly not yet, you know, the visibility on the investments, which are tracking somewhat slower. If I look at the Q3 exit cost in September and October trend, you know, that clearly is the right number to target. Also, keep in mind we have the majority of our variable costs, bonus accruals, commissions always in H2 versus H1, even more loaded towards Q4. That is driving, you know, some of the cost increase. It's very similar to last year. If I look at the cost we added H2 versus H1 last year, H2 versus H1 this year, this is very similar, maybe even some higher cost there. Ultimately, it's at least 14% is the guidance. That's what we would. Finally, on free cash flow, yes, 30% in Q3 was, you know, clearly materially ahead of our full-year guidance. Keep in mind, you know, we had, you know, the bulk of restructuring costs of $30 million out of the $35 million in the year-to-date number and, you know, substantial outflows linked to that. It was really in line with our expectations, the 30%, which gives us 13% for year-to-date growth, so well on track. There is clearly nothing special to there. If you were to exclude, if you take the EBIT to a free cash conversion, if you were to exclude restructuring costs, we would be at a very high conversion. Even with that, we say EBIT of 14% and or at least 14% and free cash flow at least 12%, so there is not such a big delta. We have a bit of catch-up to do on investments in Q4, so we feel comfortable with the at least 12% free cash flow guidance. Nothing special to flag on cash. Okay. Thank you, Takis. The next question comes from the line of Josh Levin from Autonomous Research. Please go ahead. Thank you and good evening. Two questions for me. Just to be clear on the new guidance, you've talked about large deals. To what extent does the new guidance bake in the new deals? Are they fully baked in or partially baked in? My second question, I read how Morgan Stanley is using AI to rewrite old outdated code, you know, written in COBOL to more modern programming languages. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for Temenos? Thank you. Hi, Josh. I think there has not been much change in terms of how we assess large deals. Clearly, number one, we want to remain prudent. What I said before is, at the start of the year, we have a view on large deals evolution. For any specific quarter and the full year, we always take a risk-weighted approach to large deals, i.e., we assume for the same dollar value of large deals, we assume a lower conversion rate than for a standard deal size. This is how it's reflected in Q4 and the full-year guidance. There is no excessive dependency on large deals. We had this in Q2. Given Q2 was a much smaller quarter than Q4, this is why we had flagged this in Q2. AI, we are using AI ourselves quite a lot, and clearly, AI is a big opportunity. I think on both sides, we're investing in AI use cases on the client side. We showed some of the AI-enabled products. We have rolled out a substantial double-digit number of AI initiatives internally as well. We are a large product and tech organization. We are having some pilots with some clients. It is not that straightforward to take COBOL code and just use AI and make it modern. It sounds nice, but there is a lot of challenge given there is no documentation or anything. What AI can help with is in the documentation of old code and then trying to map this into new functionality. A tier one bank like Morgan Stanley, they will always have the capacity of internal development. They have done it before, so it's unlikely they would change that. What we see is helping banks reduce the implementation effort, help them move faster to a newer release, move faster on upgrades. This is where we see the AI opportunity, and I think this is tracking well with the pilots we're doing. Thank you. We now have a question from the line of Charles Brennan from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi. Great. Thanks for taking my question. It sounds like 2025 is in good shape. I was wondering if we can just lift horizons to 2026 and specifically think about the subscription revenues. You started to shift to subscription in anger in 2022. If those deals run to their natural five-year duration, I guess that's a 2027 renewal cycle. Do you think that's how it will play out, or do you think it's inevitable that those deals renew slightly earlier than the contract termination date? Do we start to get a renewal cycle start in 2026? Is that going to start to help the visibility and the predictability of the business? Thank you. Hi, Charlie. It's an interesting point you raise. We had the start, and if you go back and look at the numbers in 2022, clearly we started with the subscription transition, but we still had quite a considerable term license business there as well. Not all the license business in 2022 was subscription. It's correct that those will come up for renewal in 2027. It's also correct that you're going to see the 10-year renewals from 2017, which was a strong year for Temenos renewing in 2027. Let's not get into the debate about when these contracts will renew. In general, as you know, clients never wait until the last minute to renew because that's not a good starting point from their side. Do we have the visibility on 2026 subscription? I think we have good visibility stemming especially from the pipeline build we have seen over the last 12 and 18 months. The renewal cycle is something you take as it is planned. We don't have a specific renewal strategy. Let's see, we have good visibility on 2026. Let's not speculate on the renewals. Perfect. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Justin Forsythe from UBS. Please go ahead. Mr. Forsythe, your line is now open. You may go ahead with your question. Apologies. I was on mute there. Thank you so much for letting me on. I've got my one question here and follow-up. Takis, I guess from the outside looking in, it would seem like the year has gone quite well to start under the guidance and shepherding of Jean-Pierre. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your initial conversations with the board, you know, what they expect you to do. Are you continuing to execute on the strategy that he laid out? I would imagine that, and I caught this from the commentary on the management call, there are some things that the board would expect to change going forward. Are you then therefore beginning to implement some of those changes? Maybe you could just outline a little bit on the strategy going forward. I just wanted to hone in a little bit on the big contract loss. Maybe you could just remind us when you expect to lap the impact of that and the magnitude of it and just circle back on what exactly happened there if the provider, I think it was PayPal, decided to go with just a different provider or if that was something that they decided to insource. Thank you. Hi, Justin. First, on strategy, I keep in mind, you know, a strategy is not created by one person. The strategy, which was presented last year at the CMD and validated before by the board, was created by the entire management team and actually the leadership team. This is how we came up with a bottom-up strategy, looking at what we need to do on product, or what we want to do on product, and go to market and aligning this with the market perception. It was not Jean-Pierre creating a strategy. It was really the leadership, which was then validated by the board. The strategy, as you know, our Chairman mentioned early September, remains unchanged. This is also why my primary focus is on executing the strategy. We've done this in Q3. We'll continue to do this, also in Q4 and beyond. We have the people in place, and it's actually great to see that everyone is delivering. The team is very motivated in standing behind the strategy. It's really a focus we all have. If you look at the progress we have seen across the different elements, we said we're going to substantially expand our salesforce across the regions. We'll have done that. We will increase the headcount 50% by year end. On the product side, Barb has brought in some great talent, and we're also hiring both in the U.S. and in India and complementing our roadmap. It's really executing this. On top of all the operating model changes, on the BNPL, I think there is no new information to give on BNPL on the reasons we can't comment on individual customers. Whether the name you mentioned is correct or not, clearly there is a headwind this year, which we communicated already at the start of the year. It's equal numbers in every quarter, and the guidance is fully reflecting this. Okay. Got it. No, that's fair. Maybe I'll just ask then, since you can't answer that, one quick follow-up, which is on the salesforce that you expect to increase quite drastically. Could you give us a little bit of a lean on what types of customers you expect them to serve? Is that tier one, tier two, tier three, or down in the credit union space? What geographies do you expect them to come in, or is that more balanced? Thank you. Again, back to the strategy where growing in all regions, yeah. The salesforce is expanding in all regions, really across the world. It was a scale-up, which we needed and wanted to do also to support our 2028 targets. We emphasized the US where we started first, but Will and his MDs have expanded the salesforce across the world. Nothing has changed in terms of the strategy. In the US, we go tier two, tier three. The three growth levers we have defined, best of suite, the modular approach, and adjacent solutions. The growth levers are valid and still applied globally. No change to tiering or regional focus or anything. It's just really adding capacity and capabilities to deliver the 2028 targets. As we said, it's an investment year. The good thing is we do a lot of self-funding for those investments, but no change to that. Got it. Thanks so much. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. We now have a question from the line of Toby Ogg from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Good evening, Takis. Maybe just one quick one and then a follow-up. First one, just on the guidance, EBIT and EPS upgraded, but no change to the free cash flow guidance. What are the factors driving that? Just on AI, you mentioned in the release a number of AI product launches gaining traction. So FCM AI Agent and the Money Movement and Management platform. Can you just give us a sense for how you're monetizing this? Is this through higher pricing, or is there incremental modules being cross-sold? Can you just give us a sense for the size of these AI product revenue streams today and when you'd expect them to start becoming a more meaningful revenue driver for you? Thank you. Hi, Toby. Let me get back to the free cash flow question first. Clearly, as we said, if you look at the pure numbers, there is not that much change in terms of the EBIT growth and the free cash flow growth expected for this year if you want to go back to the conversion question. Ultimately, there is always a lag. It's similar to ARR. We can't translate a positive subscription and sales impact to free cash flow immediately given there is a time difference. As we said, there is still some catch-up in terms of investments to do. Finally, we still have a large Q4 ahead of us. This is always the most important quarter for us in terms of free cash flow. We're quite happy with our 12% free cash flow guidance. Now on the AI products. Clearly, we had some product launches at the flagship event TCF, the FCM AI Agent, and also the other products. We're not going to go into that level of detail, although we have seen a number of deals signed for, especially the FCM AI Agent already in the last few months. Usually, this comes as an add-on to existing core installations. There is a good market demand there. We have also seen a very large tier one bank using this. That's a testimony to the real use case we're providing here. It's a very interesting product, substantially reducing the number of false positives in screening, which is driving a lot of manual work at banks. There is clearly a business need for that. The numbers are still small, especially in the context of our overall business. This is what we are seeing together with banks developing use cases. Referring to our development partner program, we're not just going out there and inventing something in the lab and then see whether this sticks. We're really co-developing use cases, which we know banks are interested in and are willing to pay for this. No further financial details we can provide on AI products. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. The conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Temenos and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.