Good morning. This is the conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Worldline first quarter 2022 revenue conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Gilles Grapinet, CEO of Worldline. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. This is Gilles Grapinet speaking. Thank you for attending today's Worldline conf call on our first quarter 2022 revenue. I will start this presentation providing you the key highlights of the quarter and some details on our commercial dynamics regarding our merchant services activities as committed. Eric will present you in detail our Q1 results before a wrap-up from myself for the conclusion. With Marc-Henri, our Deputy CEO, we will take your questions. Let me start by saying that we are very satisfied with a very strong start of the year. After our solid full year of 2021, this Q1 2022 is showing again our strong growth momentum to deliver on our 2022 guidance. This very good growth performance could be achieved despite some non-anticipated headwinds over the quarter related to the current geopolitical crisis in Ukraine and the immediate enforcement by our company of the international sanctions framework on Russia. As you could see, from an organic standpoint, all our divisions did contribute to these Q1 results, with a steady double-digit growth in our merchant services activities, up 15.8%, a strong quarter for MTS, and FS starting the year in line with the anticipated full year trajectory for this division. From a more strategic perspective, during the quarter, we have as well closed the acquisitions of Axepta Italy and ANZ commercial acquiring activities in Australia. These two operations bring a meaningful contribution to the merchant services activities with circa EUR 230 million added revenue from now on a full year basis, growing double digits, and a strong add-on to our merchant base with circa 110,000 new merchants in the portfolio. Last, the closing of the announced TSS disposal to Apollo is well on track. We have already received the formal opinions from the Works Council, allowing us to fully confirm our closing roadmap expected in H2 2022. All these achievements are paving solidly the way to a successful execution of the full year 2022 guidance and our midterm trajectory that we, of course, will both confirm today. Now, as committed to do regularly since our full year 2021 release, I want to give you more colors on our commercial dynamics in merchant services. Let's start with the commercial wins and upsells and renewals, and also the business partnership we have signed during the quarter. Regarding our scope extension with existing customers, we signed, for example, with the large French retail group, BUT, based on McGEN POS, where we will provide a fast checkout and click and collect solution with strong benefit for the merchant and their consumers, allowing accelerating checkout, improved sales conversions, and enriching the customer experience in a more digitized experience in the shops. With Valora, focused on the small scale retail stores under the k kiosk brand, we have introduced new payment acquiring capabilities such as DCC, Interchange++ model, and the full access to some alternative payment methods, leveraging the positioning of Worldline as a single entry point to manage the ever-growing complexity of our payment ecosystem. Now coming to new wins, such as North or Pearson on the online or VinFast and Monoprix on the in-store. I won't comment in detail each and every of them, but I want nonetheless to draw your attention on the most recent one, the Monoprix contract, won against some of the most well-known global name of our industry. This important win was made possible by our new omni-channel payment acceptance platform, part of our target platform environment. Through this contract, Worldline will support all the 700 Monoprix superstores in 250 towns in France with the Worldline omni-channel target solution, combining in-store and mobile payment acceptance, really able to respond to new omni-channel consumer behaviors. Regarding the new partnership, Q1 has been also very fruitful, in line with the trajectory that we have presented end of February 2022, and represents another way to bring value to our merchant community through our orchestration strategy. It also highlights, I believe, the attractiveness of Worldline for many ISVs, as we can provide a privileged access to circa 15% of the European retail ecosystem. This partnership approach represents one of our new growth accelerators for the medium term. On one hand, we can enrich our own catalog of services with the offers of our partners. On the other hand, we can benefit from their own reach to their own merchants. During the quarter, in terms of partnerships, I would like to highlight the following among others. We signed, for example, with Microsoft based on their Dynamics 365 fraud protection new system. It will enable Worldline enterprise level customers to deal with increasing challenges caused by online payment fraud through a next generation hybrid fraud solution that can help increase accuracy and efficiency far beyond that of traditional rules or advanced machine learning alone. Powered by adaptive AI technology, the solution is actually able to learn and adapt to the ever-changing fraud patterns, enabling global merchants to optimize fraud detection and to protect revenue. With Alipay, we have integrated Alipay+ to enhance in-store and e-commerce payments for global merchants, allowing them to accept payment with a wide range of e-wallets and bank apps from across Asia. Last, with VeriTrans, which is a new growth opportunity as it opens to online the Japanese country, our new partnership unlocks Japanese acceptance landscape, both in-store coupled with online offering to boost preference for card payments at large scale in a country where only 35% of transactions are expected to be card-based by 2025. As presented during our CMD last year, we will actively pursue the development of these new growth levers in the coming years. To conclude this introduction regarding some business KPIs, let us come back to some of these new data points we released. All our past actions to expand our merchant base have contributed to a remarkable MSV growth during the first quarter of 2022. In Q1 2022, indeed, Worldline's own acquiring MSV has increased by 36% versus Q1 2021 to reach EUR 66.5 billion, which represents a strong performance in our addressable European acquiring market, as you can see. It illustrates our capacity to continue to gain market shares in both in-store and online, with respective MSV growing at circa 37% and circa 32% versus 2021 respectively. For your information, our MSV was up 27% versus Q1 2019. Then, as you can see on the slide, we continue as we speak to see a strong dynamic at the beginning of Q2 2022 with the solid trend in our MSV expansion. Last, on the merchant counts that we will report more in detail on a semester basis, I would just like to mention the positive ongoing trend. At the end of Q1 2022, our net merchant count, i.e., new merchant minus attrition, was up circa double digit versus Q1 2021, pursuing on the solid 2021 trend presented in February 2022, and perfectly in line with our midterm objective to onboard circa 190,000 new merchants since 2021. To conclude this section, I hope you can perceive through these new disclosures of KPIs and information, the strong business momentum of our merchant services activity as it enjoys visibly more and more the growth benefit of our combination with Ingenico, while continuously improving its market shares and competitive positioning. It's my pleasure now to give the floor to Eric to present you our financial performance more in detail. Thank you, Gilles, and good morning to all of you. Let me start with an overview of our revenue performance in Q1 2022. During the first quarter of 2022, Worldline's revenue reached EUR 939 million, posting a solid 11.6% organic growth fueled by our merchant services. In Q1 2022, the main highlights per GBL are the following: First, a steady 15.8% organic growth in merchant services, weighing now at 67% of Worldline revenue, reflecting the strong growth in payment volume throughout the quarter on both in-store and online activities, and the benefit of our commercial dynamic with new merchants onboarded on our platform. Second, financial services showed a 2.5% organic growth as expected, with good commercial development allowing us to offset the effect of historical equipment contract renewals, as already mentioned end of February during our full year 2021 publication. Third, mobility and transactional services were up 8.4% organically, and benefited from a strong project activity with new and existing customers on top of a solid transactional revenue dynamic in the transportation vertical. The strong performance confirms the trends seen during the fourth quarter 2021, and is fully in the trajectory of the 2022 guidance. Let me now detail this number by business line. First, our merchant services activity. Revenue reached EUR 627 million, representing a steady 15.8% organic growth, despite the effect of the Russian situation, as we have stopped our online corridor immediately after sanctions were imposed, costing us circa 1% in our MS division in Q1. Regarding the commercial acquiring side, we experienced a strong double-digit growth driven by all customer segments and geographies, with notably an all-time high reached in the German market in terms of transaction volumes. This performance has been particularly led by our mass market activities as well as by the large retailer, and is reflected in our in-store acquiring MSV growth presented by Gilles a few minutes ago. Last, we have started to see a strong rebound in our DCC products related to the start of recovery in the travel vertical. Moving to the payment acceptance, our activity reached close to double-digit rate. The main growth components here are a steady performance of our global sales and vertical go-to-market, fueled by new merchant wins and upsell with existing merchants based on the extension of our line of offering and solution, as well as a solid performance with our digital customers benefiting from the bounce backs of the travel vertical. To be noted that this dynamic has more than compensated the stop of our Russian activities related to our online corridor in March. Excluding the Russian effect, payment acceptance organic growth was solidly double digits. Last, on the digital services, we have experienced a mid-single digit organic growth with a strong growth in Germany and Belgium, driven by all customer segments, while we have suffered as factors in our guidance from some anticipated and limited delays in the POS supply that could last a few more quarters. As already communicated by Gilles, the commercial activity over the quarter remained strong, with numerous wins for both commercial acquiring and payment acceptance in store and online. Overall, this performance is a solid start of the year and fully in the trajectory we foresee for 2022, which remained unchanged despite the Russian situation. Now moving to financial services. Financial services revenue reached EUR 223 million, representing an organic growth of 2.5%. The activity showed good volumes and commercial development, allowing the GBL to offset the temporary effects of large historical contract renewals, impacting both issuing and acquiring activities as expected. As a reminder, this contract has been successfully extended for several years at the end of 2021. Regarding card-based payment processing and acquiring, we have experienced a stable performance due to the mentioned Equens contract renewals, offset during the quarter by improved transaction volumes, mainly in Germany and Belgium. Digital banking remained strong as in 2021, benefiting from high authentication volumes still driven by e-com transactions. To end with account payments activity, the performance has been steady, with a high level of activity in both volume and projects related to large contracts in Germany, while the UniCredit contract ramp-up has now reached its run mode. Regarding the commercial activity, the quarter has been successful with several wins and partnerships based on innovative solutions for our banking partners and clients. Among others, I would like to mention the two following. First, a partnership signed with UniCredit on the open banking side. The solution will allow UniCredit customers to connect their accounts in other banks throughout Europe with one single API. This enables UniCredit to effectively offer account information services and payment initiation services. This removes the complexity and friction of many diverse integrations and allows UniCredit to provide its customers with the ability to get a consolidated view of all their bank accounts held with one or more banks. It also enables them to initiate an online payment at an account from another bank in Europe. Second, we partnered with MS to implement an innovative Visa Debit Bancomat, Bancontact solution. The card benefits from a large acceptance due to a combination of Bancontact and Visa networks. This combination makes it possible to pay for purchases in Belgium and abroad, online and in store, with or without tax, with a single card while taking advantage of the added value of applications such as P2P payments. All transactions are debited immediately from the account and can be viewed in real time via MS web and mobile banking apps. The immediate updating of the data gives the bank customers total control over their expenses. The aim of this partnership is to support neobanks, fintechs, and other new smaller banking players in order to rapidly launch a turnkey end-to-end account and payment card solutions on the market. Last, I would like to mention that our pipeline of new projects remains significant across Europe with a sales cycle that implies closing a large deal, hopefully by year-end. Let me conclude this part with MTS. Revenue reached EUR 90 million, up 8.4% organically, and represented a strong quarter led by high project activity with existing and new customers, coming in parallel with solid transactional revenue from the transportation vertical. Starting with trusted digitization, growing double digits during the quarter, the performance has been driven by new projects signed and increased volume on tax collection and digital healthcare. On top, we benefited from the ongoing dynamic as in 2021 of our cash to invoice solution related to importation rules from Europe to U.K. in the Brexit context. E-ticketing activities have steadily performed as well, fueled by increased volume in transportation vertical and a higher level of fare collection in Latin America. Lastly, on the e-consumer and mobility, we have experienced a good performance with a solid momentum in our contact solutions and in connected living and mobility. To end with MeTS, commercial activity over the quarter has been dynamic. We have signed among other Département du Nord, a local authority in the north of France, actually the biggest local authority in France. That has chosen Worldline to use a SaaS solution, Worldline Parcours RSA, in order to equip their circa 3,000 social agents. It will enable the department to streamline the process of supporting social assistance beneficiaries with hundreds of counterparts involved in order to bring them back quicker to employment. Worldline has also secured a three-year service contract with a European train operator for its Integrale solution. Integrale will bring cloud-based, on-the-day control system, providing better IT integration and data flows into the national railways to control trains. Now to end my section, let me just remind you an important message we have already provided regarding our group exposure to Russia. As already communicated on March 18th, 2022, we would like to remind you the group limited exposure to the Russian market. As said, the group has immediately enforced all the international sanction applicable to Russia in compliance with Worldline corporate policies, and suspended its Russian online activity so long as applicable. As a reminder, Worldline does not have any payment processing operation based in or operated from Russia. Last, we do not have any significant exposure to Russia software solution or subcontractor impacted by the ongoing sanctions. In a nutshell, our exposure to Russia is rather limited, with circa 1.5% of estimated pro forma annual group revenue and circa 3% of merchant services revenue. As mentioned earlier in Q1, the situation has cost 1% growth to merchant services performance, and we have embedded this impact for the following quarters of 2022 while confirming our guidance, as Gilles will tell you in a minute. Last, we do not have any business exposure in Ukraine. Now let me hand over to Gilles to conclude. Many thanks, Eric. Now moving to the key takeaways of the first quarter 2022. Let's say we are pleased. After a year 2021 of very solid execution on all fronts of the group strategy and operations, we actually start 2022 in a very good position. I would like to highlight three key takeaways. First, from the pure financial standpoint, a very solid start of the year, fully comforting our 2022 growth trajectory. Second, from a commercial standpoint, ongoing strong mass market merchant base increase, numerous commercial successes with large merchants materializing with a 36% growth in our acquiring MSV in particular. Last, I want to mention from a more strategic standpoint, thanks to the progress on the TSS and the closing of Axepta and ANZ, we are really more than ready to pursue developing our market consolidation strategy as we actually see many new opportunities ahead of us for the coming quarters. All these make 2022, with the full confirmation of our guidance, a very solid cornerstone to project with confidence our group for the next three years. Now to end this presentation, I'm happy to confirm our 2022 guidance, with 8%-10% revenue organic growth and OMDM margin improvement between 100 basis points and 150 basis points compared to the 2021 estimated pro forma margin of 24.8%. Finally, an OMDM conversion rate into free cash flow of circa 45%. Looking to the guidance more in detail, the bottom range factors, as mentioned during our full-year release, localized and temporary potential COVID constraints impacting merchant activities, limited recovery of international travel, and some limited delays on POS supply related to the still ongoing component shortage. As you can see, the bottom range now factors also an additional parameter related to the complete stop of our e-commerce activities with Russian consumers. We are confident that we can still deliver our guidance while absorbing this negative impact of these sanctions on our e-commerce business, even if they were to be enforced all along the year 2022. Frequently as said, despite adding this parameter, we fully confirm our guidance for the year. Now before we open the usual Q&A session, I would like to announce the nomination of Grégory Lambertie as Group Chief Financial Officer, following the decision of Eric Heurtaux to leave the company for a new challenge in a few weeks. First, I warmly thank Eric for his instrumental contribution over the past six years to the remarkable development of Worldline, and I really very sincerely wish him every success in his future endeavors. I am also delighted to welcome Grégory in this key leadership position in the company. We've been working together for the last two years in the executive committee of Worldline. His large experience in the payment industry, in-depth financial skills, and direct personal involvement over the past seven years in all transformative acquisitions made both by Ingenico and more recently by Worldline, will be key assets in supporting from now on Worldline growth trajectory, M&A and integration ambitions, and operational efficiency execution. I will give the floor maybe for a few words to Eric and then to Grégory. Many thanks, Gilles. As you all know, I have spent nearly six years leading finance in Worldline, bringing my own contribution to make it today a very successful large listed company. It has been a fantastic ride working closely with Gilles, Marc-Henri, and this great management team. As you can guess, it was not an easy decision to leave this company, but life presented to me an exciting new challenge at the right moment in my career. I will join the executive management team of a large tech scale-up company operating in a different sector, still privately owned, at a different stage of maturity. Still smaller today, but doomed to become an undisputed leader in its field, and most likely one day also, like Worldline, a successful listed company. After having worked with Grégory over the past two years, and given the strong momentum of Worldline, I am fully convinced he will continue the successful journey of our group in his new position as CFO. It was a pleasure to work with all of you along those years, and maybe our road will cross again in the future. In between, I of course look forward to our next interaction during the Q&A roadshows. Thank you, Eric, and good morning to you all. I'm delighted and honored of this great opportunity. After 20 years in the financial industry, and a few of those dedicated to actively participating in the payment sector consolidation, I am very much looking forward to shaping the future of our company in this leadership position alongside Gilles and Marc-Henri and the great team at Worldline. I'd like to thank Eric for the fantastic handover we made together until today. Of course, I'll be part in the coming roadshow alongside Gilles and Eric, and I look forward to meeting you in your, in our future interactions. Many thanks, Greg and Eric, and I am now ready with the management team to take your questions, guys. Thank you. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question is from Josh Levin with Autonomous Research. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Eric, best of luck. Two questions. Public market valuations, including Worldline stock price, have come down quite a bit. When you talk to potential M&A targets or sellers of payment assets, to what extent have their valuation expectations also come down and relative to public equity market valuations? The second question, historically, you've been reluctant to consider share buybacks. Given where the stock price is and the performance of the company, if you compare that to M&A opportunities available, how do you weigh the value created from a share buyback versus, additional M&A? How would you measure that? Thank you. Hello, Josh. I think I will take these two first ones. Well, as a matter of fact, I must say that, maybe I will start by background comments. Over my last more than 10 years of tenure in Worldline, I never saw so many European banks, including the largest one, actually engaged in strategic reviews of their payment business or initiating concrete processes to find partners, set up alliances, sell sometimes their payment businesses. It is really, for me a very interesting moment in the dynamic of the consolidation, because even the largest European banks actually are realizing that they need partners if they want to stay really involved and relevant for their own banking consumers in distributing better product services, better payment services. This is driving me to a first observation to answer your question. Most of the discussion we are currently undertaking or having with banks are primarily meant to help these banks to solve a business issue. The business issue they feel is that the technology is going too fast. They don't have the global or pan-European reach. They lack relevance for omnichannel, and fundamentally, they need technology for a partner. Value is not, at this moment in time, the primary triggering element of most of these discussions. It is really finding a technical and business solution to a business issue they feel is more and more heavy for them. It is why for me, at this moment in time, the intensity of discussion we have with banks has no correlation with the evolution of the payment sector valuation. This discussion actually to a certain extent could even be eased by the fact that they all feel that the market is actually going through a very strong momentum, and that there may be opportunities to strike strategic deals today and expect and maybe surf in the future on the rewriting of the payment sector when it will happen, because it should happen given the study of our results all together of the sector. Long answer to your question, we don't believe and we don't observe, most importantly, that this moment in time, that the evolution of the price of the stock in the sector is slowing down in any form or shape the intensity of M&A opportunities. Regarding share buybacks, I must say that given what I just said, M&A remains clearly our key focus at this point in time regarding capital allocation on top of CapEx and R&D. For the time being, our board still consider M&A offers a better value creation for shareholders than share buyback in the current context and given what I just said regarding the M&A perspective ahead of us. Thank you. The next question is from Hannes Leitner with UBS. Please go ahead. Yes, thanks for letting me on. Also all the best, Eric, for your next steps. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the merchant service trends. Clearly it was another strong quarter in growth. Maybe you can drill down a little bit on the dynamics, maybe how much is the support from travel. Then also you referenced a couple of international contract wins, so maybe you can talk also about them. Then just coming back on the M&A, maybe you can give us a little bit of timing phasing, and putting this in context of size. You mentioned quite a lot of banks are doing strategic reviews, but are those significant deals which could move the needle for Worldline or just to get a better feeling for it? Thank you. Okay, Hannes, Eric speaking. Thank you for your kind words. I will take your first question. On the MSV trend, I think it's a combination, and I think all the signals are green currently. As we told you, the MSV growth has been quite strong, above 30%. It's through both online and in-store, as we could say. It's fueled by the recovery from last year, by the good volumes also with the existing merchant and by the number of new merchants. We said a few minutes ago that we enjoyed versus Q1 2021, a net increase in merchants, which is double-digit versus what it was one year ago. It gives you an idea of the robustness of our commercial activity, in particular for what fuels most of the recovery, which is the small and medium sized customer. I think the travel has also been quite good, recovering as expected. We know that with travel comes some value-added service, some goodies like DCC, that also contributed to the MSV growth. I can add to that, in particular, if we want to give additional color, Germany has been extremely strong. PAYONE is doing really well. You may have in mind that in our business, given our particular in-store exposure, the biggest moment in payment is usually Christmas. In fact, we experienced over the last period, the highest peak in payment ever in this business in Germany, meaning that the coming back of the business in Germany, the switch to electronic payments on this market and our commercial wins is really fulfilling a very strong and a very solid momentum, giving us good confidence for the future. Indeed, as Eric said, travel, and in particular airline travel is continuously moving up, not yet fully at 2019 level, but getting very close to it. Given the momentum we already see, this crossing the lines in the coming months. Just regarding M&A, Hannes, I believe that, well, this is actually as always, as we talk here about the large, some of the largest European banks, they have their internal governance complexities and many layers of potential approval and discussion. It is hard to really just commit on a given timeline for some of these discussions. I mean, given the number of things we see, let me phrase it this way. Most certainly things will happen for the bank side of this discussion, because we have also other M&A opportunities that are not bank related of smaller magnitude, sometimes for technology assets or some value-added services that we could inject in our portfolio. If I just focus on the banks, I mean, I would be disappointed personally by next summer, we would have not been in a position to convert some of these discussions. Some of these are actually starting processes that are included in tentative timeline from the sellers, so that could last between two, nine, 10 months, let's say. Normally when it is a competitive process, it has a type preset timeline that hopefully can be respected with all the uncertainties of M&A, of course. We have also some more exclusive discussions that can develop different ways that allow more creativity in the way we can structure transactions. Talking about magnitude, some of these discussions are with banks that are controlling between, let's say, 20%-30% of their domestic market. We talk of some of the largest European countries. We talk here about sizable opportunities, of course, in the relative size that our MS division is already quite big. Nonetheless, this could represent, let's say, during the course of our next few years, sizable addition in core geographies in Europe, where we see an unprecedented momentum to open doors to a discussion that were not taking place previously. Thank you. The next question is from Alastair Nolan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Morning. Thanks for taking my question. Gilles, with volumes running well ahead, I think, of expectations and in + 30-something percent in the first quarter, can you just comment on what's happening with regard to take rates and kind of what the dynamic is there? Is it mix effect or any more detail you could provide would be really helpful. Just on the travel volumes, I think the last time you updated us, travel volumes were still running 50% below kind of pre-pandemic levels. Is there an updated level at which you've exited Q1? Yeah, those would be my two questions. Thank you. Thank you, Alastair. I will give you some color, Eric speaking, on those questions. On the take rate, I think the trend we observed previously have not changed drastically during this first quarter. It's very much continuity. As you understood, we are not so much impacted by the mix, because all the type of customer and type of services are growing nicely. There is not one which is overstating the overall, and that's the very good news of this first quarter. It does not influence so much the take rate which remain pretty stable. As you know, in our activity it varies quite significantly from one type of business to the other. That's why we never like to give numbers and average. That doesn't mean so much in such an environment. What is critical is the evolution and the evolution of the take rate is rather stable. On your second question related to travel volume, I think we probably moved up from the 50% you kept in mind from last year, probably close to two-thirds. That's a nice recovery, a nice acceleration. This is indeed very much aligned with our plan, in particular strong in airlines, as Marc-Henri said, and online business. It's fair to say that we still miss a significant part of the intercontinental travel. We see coming back some U.S. citizens definitely in Europe. Chinese travelers are absolutely not there yet, and a part of the Asia and Middle East travelers not fully yet there. I think there's still an upside down the road of 2022 for sure, if things were to normalize this year. As you know, we kept that as a type of progressive ramp-up on intercontinental travel every year during the next three years of the three-year plan. If it happens sooner, that would be good news. Right. Thanks, both. The next question is from James Goodman with Barclays. Please go ahead. Morning. Thank you very much. Encouraging to see the reiterated guidance despite the Russia exposure that you've called out. Gilles made some comments around adding that new parameter at the end of your opening remarks. You know, the question is really for nuance between the guidance ranges. Are you saying that if all of that Russia revenue goes away, you're towards the lower end? Or are you also implying that there are some offsets perhaps? I'm thinking about potential benefit of inflation through the transactional revenues as you head through the rest of this year. I'm also mindful that there might be some further supply chain issues around terminals. Really just looking for you to provide some context as to how you see the guidance range. Switching over to maybe the last time we speak about it, but the European Payments Initiative, the majority of banks have now left that project. I thought just worth getting a comment from you on sort of observations around that and, you know, what's sort of left there and any remaining opportunity. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Hi, James. On your first question, I mean, let me phrase it to try to answer your question. For the timing, what we say is exactly what we see. We confirm the guidance while absorbing this very unanticipated negative impact of the full stop of the e-comm activities with the Russian consumers, which represent an absorption of roughly one point of the top line growth of the entire group, and as you see, between 2% and 3% of the MSV activity. Able today to absorb within the guidance. Okay. Which means that most probably, should this geopolitical situation have not developed at the end of H1, we would probably have felt quite comfortable to, at minimum, narrow the guidance given the very strong underlying momentum we see on the domestic activities and the development of the group, our commercial wins, and so on. Unfortunately, life being what it is, we are not in a position to say today that we can narrow the guidance. This said, as you flagged yourself, we have, for the bottom of the guidance range, what could drag us at the low end of the guidance, which are if we face more severe supply chain impact on the POS delivery or if the international travel does not pick up fully as anticipated or is even lower than that. For the time being, this risk has been controlled in Q1. In all fairness, the situation is still quite fluid, and it is probably too soon to be more accurate on where we could land in the guidance as we speak. Today, the good news is we absorbed Russia, and we are very confident that we can stay within our guidance. I would give you a clearly around it later this year, depending on the evolution of these non-controllable parameters like the supply chain, the health situation development. For the time being, we feel quite good. You know that the stats are still somehow relatively high in Europe, but hopefully thanks to the vaccination progress, it does not seem to develop into too deadly situation in too many countries. When you look at China, you see a very different picture at the same. Sorry for that. There is a bit of uncertainties. My main message is the underlying business is damn good. The competitive positioning of the company post the Ingenico transaction is also super solid. This is really the main message of today. For the rest, we navigate in front of some uncertainties and too soon to answer more precisely to your question. Regarding EPI, I mean, EPI indeed, I mean, EPI is today the second attempt of a large number of large banks and some pure players like ourselves and Nexi/ Nets to try to create something new on the pan-European basis. Clearly the project is facing unexpected hurdles, and for the time being there are discussions of narrowing the scope of EPI more on the digital side of things with actually dropping the card component of the scheme, trying to push potentially a wallet for internet and mobile-based payment, relying primarily on the contactless payment and instant payment. Honestly, there are still a lot of discussions to take place. Too soon to say if this revised format can fly or not and how many supporters it can gather. One thing is for sure, there is a real strategic ambition of the participants to find a way to bring a new payment solution into the ecosystem. Maybe the second attempt will not be the good one right away, but most probably there will be discussion ongoing in the coming quarters and semesters to shape something anyway. That is my main takeaway of this one year of effort, or one year and a half of effort with so many banks. There is the ambition to do something to bring this missing link in the European payment architecture. I believe that at a point in time, something should happen. There also Q2 will be quite intense in terms of discussion between the participants. Let's see where we are at the end of Q2. I see. Thank you, Gilles. Appreciate it. The next question is from Alexandre Faure with BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead. Good morning. Thanks for letting me on. I have a couple of questions. First one is very much a clarification. I'm sorry I was a little late in joining the call. I'm sure you touched on it in the prepared remarks, so apologies for asking you to repeat. Could you please explain to me exactly what the decision is in Russia? Are you just simply stopping activities there, or are you still running them and applying sanctions? The reason I'm asking is from memory sanctions don't have much of an impact on your activities with domestic cards in Russia. That would be my first question. I think, Eric, you called out a bit of a headwind, perhaps about a point in Q1 in merchant services. I wanna make sure I got that one right. My second question, just to follow up on what you said earlier, Gilles, when commenting on Chinese travelers in Europe, could you give us a sense perhaps on how big Chinese payment methods were for you in revenue terms in MS in 2019, if you have that in mind? Thank you very much. No, I will start by the second one, and definitely the first one would be a repetition, Alexandre Faure, but for you we are happy to do it. I give the floor to Eric. I mean, we were, and I think we still probably are, the largest acquirer of UnionPay, Alipay, which had payback, as per my recollection, before that was 2019. We were clearly market leader now it confirms. For the time being, this business is not really there, at least for in-store payment in Europe. Of course, we do some e-com acceptance of Alipay, which help pay our UnionPay payments for our gateways. But for the time being, we are still missing the local part of the Chinese spending in Europe, and which was quite significant, particularly in travel-related activities, luxury environments and so on. The day it will come back, it will be a very nice upside. Regarding the repetition regarding Russia, I mean, Eric, I give you the floor. Russia, I will be short. We issued a communication mid-March, Alexandre, on this. To make a long story short, we suspended all our activity as per the sanction. The bulk of our activities were related to our online corridor, allowing the Russian consumer to pay on foreign websites. And this, as an order of magnitude, represented in 2021 around 1.5% of our total revenue or 3% of merchant services. As we have suspended our activity immediately after the sanction has been imposed on Russia, it means that in Q1 the month of March fully suffered from this impact. As a matter of fact, indeed in Q1, we had a headwind corresponding to 1% of merchant services. That will move now to 2.5%-3% on a run rate period from Q2 onward. We did confirm fully our guidance while absorbing this unanticipated negative impact at the time of the budgeting. Perfect. To clarify. Thank you very much for the clarification. Thank you. The next question is from Sandeep Deshpande with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for letting me on. I haven't heard all the questions, so I might have to repeat something here, but I just want to understand, you know, you've had a very strong quarter in merchant services. I mean, clearly, I mean, there is some impact of returning trade. I mean, can you talk about it regionally as well? I mean, where the strength is coming from in terms of merchant services? I mean, you've talked a little bit in the call on travel and some travel has returned, but not all travel. Maybe you can also talk a little bit about the segments in which you're seeing the improvement and whether you can expect that this kind of improvement can continue in merchant services through the whole year. I think we can do it together with Eric. In terms of geographies or in-store activity, which is the biggest part of information services is clearly European. I would say from that point of view, it was good all across Europe and particularly good in Germany, as I said, very strong momentum in the German market, in the Swiss market as well. Overall, I would say on DACH what we call the DACH region, very strong momentum with a combination of people being back in business and compared to last year restrictions, and of course, the good momentum and the commercial wins. All this was very supportive and will play a role throughout the year, as the overall momentum of this activity is strong and the move from cash to electronic money is confirmed, sustained, and continue to develop in this region. It's a very pretty momentum. The online payment developed as well as Eric said, in double digits. From that point of view, we don't have a geographically specific sector or consumer all across the world, except for China, as we explained, and it was only that impacting our Russian situation. Here we see an acceleration to continue in the coming quarter because it is boosted by travel, and travel as it was said during this call, is not yet a 2019 trends, but we see a very strong difference between the beginning and the end of Q1. This domain is really accelerating, and it's as you can probably all of you witness, tourists are starting to come back to European location in significant quantities. This is this momentum give us a visibility on an acceleration and which should be very still very much supporting our business in the coming quarter. Eric, I don't know if you want to. No, I think you said it all, in terms of geographies. I would add Switzerland that performed extremely well as well. I think that's noticeable, and including for travel and DCC, but I think I fully concur with everything you said, Gilles. Yeah, well, in fact everywhere. We have maybe time for one last question. We're getting to the end of this hour. The last question is from Tammy Qiu with Berenberg. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. You indeed delivered very impressive work for merchant services in Q1. Given all the inflation, supply chain challenge, and probably that can impact some kind of, you know, consumer confidence at some point, can you talk us through a little bit the trend into second half of the year for both merchant services and of course, financial processing as well, please? Thank you. Hi, Tammy. Good to hear you. Well, I will start maybe by two comments which are more on the macro side of things. We've been looking at this past issue. It's true inflation is a new phenomenon in general in the world, and of course, over the last recent years of economic development. It has some merits for a merchant acquirer, of course, when street prices are increased, as you know, as we are getting commissions that are based on the ticket value, of course, we are naturally hedged, and somehow this is of course, a type of mechanical hedging against inflation, both on the margin side, but also it helps the top line somehow, at least on the comparison effect. More importantly, my comment is that when you look backwards, and we did that in the past, let's say macro, big macro changes that have impacted the European economies, whether it was a sovereign debt crisis or whether it was in the past the things related to subprime or more recently to some slowdown we've been facing. It is interesting to observe that never, ever the transaction volume on cashless payments, nor the dynamics we could observe in terms of the course of domestic consumption plus the accelerated cashless momentum have deviated from the historical growth trajectory that we were measuring. Meaning that there is a real disconnection between the evolution of the GDP on one hand and the behaviors of consumers. It's sure that the reason for that when you become a very large scale acquirer, somehow on our platform, is that ultimately the way consumers are actually spending their money, whether it is on the fuel, on energy, on leisure activities or things like that, are ultimately relatively secondary, as long as the overall size of their domestic consumption basket does not really decrease because we are so big that somehow we capture their payments wherever they take place. This has been demonstrated over a long series of data point. It's why we look forward at the current dynamic that we see in the European domestic consumption with a lot of confidence because what we see in our platform is exactly what I just described. We are actually observing a very strong dynamic of the domestic consumption patterns, as Marc-Henri and Eric said, all across the European geography. It's why we look at that with actually a lot of confidence for us, the business model of the company, and it's extremely diverse positioning in the European market. In terms of what to expect for your modeling of the year, based on what Gilles said, we have not changed our view. We still expect a trend stronger, thanks to a strong start of Q1 and a favorable effect in Q1. Starting Q2, we expect the situation to normalize with H2 2021, as you remember, having been much less impacted by health restriction. In MS, you should still expect a double-digit growth. In FS, progressive fade away of the negative impact associated with price discount on the historical Equens contract. On ETS, we should be in the usual mid to high single digits. Okay, thank you. That's great. From the perspective, your positioning, you definitely do have a very good position in the European market from recovery perspective and offline market perspective. Do you see any weakness from e-commerce because of customers moving to things like omni-channel or completing their merge and acquire at all? Not a weakness per se, but what we can say is in-store is much more dynamic in terms of coming back than e-commerce. What we observe, it's not. There is a change of habit that remains after COVID, that people are using electronic money in store. That has changed. They move really from cash to non-cash, and that's not ambiguous, and that's lasting. We could have thought that some people would have maintained a habit of buying online rather than going in-store, and that we do not observe. We observe that there is a will and a desire for social life, for shopping together, for moving out. Some online business did develop, but coming back to in-store activity is very strong, very robust and proving as something on which we can bet in the long run. In-store momentum much stronger than online. It's not that much that online is significantly weakened. No, fundamentally, a part of the wins that we did report are also very interesting in the way we actually, with our innovation and R&D, are developing new ways to do the physical shopping. If you look at some of the announcements we made this quarter, I mentioned Bit, which is quite an interesting one based on Android POS, allowing click and collect in the shops, or some that we did not report with Saint-Gobain, for example, allowing to actually order significant things. You pay half of the amount in store, and then when the goods are delivered, you pay the other half through an online payment. We mentioned Carrefour, in which we do a very nice Amazon Go type of experience, in which you do your shopping by yourself and basically without having to go to the cashier. I mean, we are also reinventing the way we do shopping in store, allowing also to be part of this attractiveness that Marc -Henri mentioned, which is just to make it faster, more convenient, actually omni-channel, if you want, and enjoying the best of both worlds. This is a big focus on our innovation roadmap. Of course, from that standpoint, we should not keep in mind that in-store is a traditional, dull way of doing shopping. Actually, we also reinvent the way we do in-store shopping to make it faster, more convenient, frictionless, as much as we can, if it is the choice of the merchants. It is part, of course, of what will ultimately make this convergence take place, and I think we are just ideally positioned for that. Okay, thank you. Gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session today. The floor is back to you for any closing remarks. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your devices.