Good morning. Welcome to Oppenheimer's Annual 5G Summit. I'm Ed Yang, cloud computing analyst, and I'm very pleased to host Brian Shepherd, CEO, and John Rea, IR of CSG. This is a fireside chat, so please send your questions into the dashboard. Brian, so glad to see you again, and thanks for spending some time with us. No, great to be here, Ed. Appreciate the invite. Well, let's start with, you know, your surprisingly strong year-to-date revenue growth- Sure ... up almost double digits. You know, what's driving this outperformance? Are your underlying markets growing this rapidly, or are you taking share? Yeah, it's a combination, and it's not unsurprising to us this year, 9% top line year-over-year, all organic, strong operating profit. We see every part of our business just kicking out better and better results, and it's a combination of winning giant new logo deals in all the verticals that we serve and taking more market share, and we think that will continue. Obviously, the 9% this year, we expect. We've been guiding overall longer term, 4%-6%, 2%-6% organic, midpoint or higher, even off the record-setting 2023. That's our expectation to continue that same trend into next year. If we explore that a little bit further, you know, maybe talk about what's unique about CSG. You know, what problems are you trying to solve for your customers? Yeah, for us, we really compete in three main spaces. We help great brands monetize their existing customer relationships through billing, provisioning, activation, everything from end-to-end mission-critical systems. That's number one. Number two, we really focus on AI, decisioning engines to help with transactional engagement. So think about the massive data they have. How do they make it easier for their consumers in any vertical, onboard, provision, activate, upgrade or downgrade service, and try to expand their share of wallet with their customers? And the third vertical is all around integrated payments. We have a cloud-based SaaS platform that helps over almost 110,000 merchants in the U.S. improve their, their payments, capability, and we try to stay pretty laser-focused on those three areas. So helping great brands both monetize and deliver an exceptional experience. You know, I definitely wanna get to the AI piece, and it's a big, important piece. But sticking with maybe just the 2024 growth outlook, and you mentioned the long-term growth targets as well. It's been stable around the 4% midpoint, but again, your 2023 growth could end up being double that. So as you think about planning for the new year, you know, what are the puts and takes that could lead you to land on either the plus or minus side of that long-term growth you'd normally expect to see? Yeah, this year, I mean, one, we're just hitting on all cylinders, new sales, bookings, land, and expand. Obviously, we got a big boost by displacing one of our largest competitors in the billing space at Charter Communications. We converted 14 million subscribers, and now we do all of their triple play billing. That contributed to that 9% through November year-to-date organic growth. What we see next year is a lot of investors ask, you know, "With the pressure that a lot of brands are feeling, do we see companies pulling back?" And the answer is, yeah, we have seen that, but where the value that we bring with our SaaS and software solutions are staying above the cut line because it's helping reduce operating expense, it's helping expand share of wallet and grow revenue, and so that's keeping us above the cut line. And often we see a lot of these big brands wanting to consolidate their spend with partners and vendors that just deliver better, and that's where we've been laser-focused and what's enabled us to drive. So we absolutely expect to be between 2%-6% next year. Organic, midpoint or higher is what we believe will be coming out. We always share our full year guidance in the February, early February earnings call once we close 2023 and the record-setting year. The thing we're pretty proud of is coming off this kind of growth in 2023, and then our ability to sustain that longer-term growth. And at this stage, that's absolutely what we see in the front windshield, but we don't take it for granted. You know, we gotta go out and prove the value every day to customers. We've gotta do a better job of closing sales, being easier to do business with, and if we do that, the organic growth continues, the expansion of our operating profit continues, and then we have the right to do better inorganic moves that are still highly disciplined. And you touched on this, but and in staying above the cut line, you know, one of your closest competitors has been facing some headwinds from, you know, customers pulling back on, quote unquote, “legacy systems.” Are you experiencing similar challenges, and is customer activity stable, accelerating, or contracting, both from an industry standpoint but from a CSG standpoint as well? And any sort of changes to the customer pipeline or sales motion that you think merits calling out? No, I mean, overall, I'd say it's that dichotomy, right? First, our sales bookings, our sales pipeline never been larger, never been healthier, and we see good performance as far as progress through our six steps in our sales process and kicking out increased bookings that drives that ongoing, you know, year-over-year organic revenue growth. And at the same time, we do see customers saying, "We've gotta save money." And so what we're trying to do is a couple things: Sell the value, right? Sell the value on spend more with CSG, use more of our SaaS software solutions, and it'll actually help you cut your costs in other areas, deflect calls to the call center, less billing-related calls, improve monetization and speed of monetization, and stop doing some of the internal built-internally built IT development programs, move that to CSG software or move off of a vendor that's not serving you as well. So yes, there is pressure across the board, and we think as long as we continue to deliver that mission-critical value every day, we think we can, in a toughened market, we can continue to grow through that. But we don't take it for granted because we do have, you know, significant healthy competitors out there. We just have to, have to outperform them every month, every quarter, so to keep this thing going. ... So it sounds like your products have pretty high ROI for your customers? Yeah, they are. And, and we've, we've really shifted over the last two or three years to even more of an ROI-based selling. Customer success, not just good delivery, good ops performance, which has to be there, but how do we actually remind the customers of the value we bring every day? And how do we help them understand if they do a little bit more with us, don't treat this as a Sherman exercise, where you're just looking at the spend with CSG. Look at the value that you get from turning over more of your end-to-end solutions to us, therefore, we can actually help you cut costs and increase revenue. That's the focus of what our sales and our account teams and marketing teams are focused on, and at this stage, it's working, but, you know, we've just got to keep responding at the speed and pace of the market. We're not the biggest, so therefore, we've got to be that much more agile. We've got to be that quicker to speed to revenue, realization or cost reduction realization for our customers. What, what percentage of your business do you think is, defensive, like you describe, and, and non-cyclical, essential for your customers versus, discretionary? You know, we've never looked at it that way, but maybe a way to kind of give you a rough indication of that is, we enter every year with between high 80s and low 90s revenue visibility for the current year, high recurring revenue. And so therefore, that gives you an idea of how mission-critical and why we've had three-plus decade relationship. I know a lot of investors will ask about, you know, what's going on with some of your bigger customers, with renewals, including Comcast, that's coming up in December 2025. And what we say is, "You know, look, we're just mission-critical." We're effectively almost the ATM for some of these businesses in terms of onboarding, activation, provisioning, billing, monetization, and we don't take that responsibility lightly. So as long as we keep outperforming competitors and wowing our customers every day, then we've had a great renewal rate. On the discretionary side, it probably is in that single-digit percentages of overall, because the core is just mission-critical. When we look at that portion, that could be a little bit more discretionary, you know, what's a good leading indicator for you as a CEO to evaluate and look at the pipeline that would give you optimism or concern? Yeah, it's really around size of pipeline shape. Do we see the progression through the pipeline of late-stage deals? Do we see stage four, five, and six then having a good win rate in closing? Do we see the time from start of a sales through end of the sale kind of expanding at all? And at this stage, you know, we've seen a little bit of slowing, but that's been over the last three or four quarters because companies are just being very judicious and cautious, and yet we've been able to grow through that. Well, again, I think it just comes back to the testament of the value creation and how our teams are able to help customers understand it actually. We, CSG and our software, actually help them respond better to these tough economic conditions, and therefore, they should move forward with. And you see that with big wins in telecom, with M1 that we announced at Q3, a large cable operator. We've announced large wins in AI-driven CX with one of the largest technology companies in the world. Same thing on the payment, strong double-digit growth. And so, that, that's what we focus as kind of the early indicators for us, and we build that into our guidance. I think what investors have seen is we're not a company that overpromises our ability to deliver high accountability, pretty straight shooters with customers and any of the partners or investors we work with. We pretty much try to say what we mean and do what we say, and if we do, we think it'll keep turning out well for us. Let's talk about AI. Yeah. It's a huge platform shift. I think it's one that you as CEO has embraced wholeheartedly. And you've centered CSG around this technology. Could you just broadly walk us through, you know, your multi-pronged strategy around AI? Yeah, and investors can see from our earnings, Q3 earnings, deck one targeted page, and then can listen to the script where we talked about it more, but it's really in a couple areas. We do see it as a fundamental shift for every vendor, big brand out there in the world. So one, we look at it first and foremost from how do we just be more efficient and more effective in terms of how we operate? We're building AI community of practice across our 6,000 employees and our technologists. We're looking at every functional area from G&A around sales, sales enablement, marketing, human resource, and accounting and finance, even on the legal side. On our technology and engineering, we think there's a huge opportunity to actually drive higher quality code, whether that be into our products and R&D or into the services and deployment teams that we can drive. And so we really are focused on how do we use AI in a way that just enables us to run the business more effectively and efficiently, and contributes to that operating margin expansion that we constantly talk about. That's on the internal side. On the external side is we're working with customers. We've actually launched three products already. We've done machine learning and predictive analytics for a decade plus. We see this as the next natural step, where we can harness the data we have and our customers have, and we can turn that into actionable insights with our journey, orchestration, and analytics. So the three products we've deployed optimize sales. We can take the data that we have and our customers have, to then target a next best action and offer that improved upsell, cross-sell, that either a self-service can predictably give to a consumer, or that a call center, or a human assist, or a retail agent can give. We built that into our software. We've deployed it in three customers and have good early success. A second one that we're super excited about that we launched near the end of Q3 is what we call Bill Explainer AI. One of the biggest calls to a call center in lots of industry verticals are billing-related questions... Customers see something on their bill, whether it's electronic or a printed statement, they have a question, drives an expensive call to a call center. We have the data to be able to use both predictive analytics, but also generative AI, to actually predict what the questions might be and head those off with proactive outreach and notification to consumers. Or if a brand wants to go slower, to arm call center agents with that information to lower AHT, Average Handle Time, and to do it. So we're getting a lot of early interest in our Bill Explainer AI. And then we're also, on the market side, we're using it. Cyber and fraud are big issues when it comes to billing and payments, and so we have an AI-driven fraud alert notification that can help merchants or some of our larger brands actually know when there might be fraudulent activity, and we can use that to identify, predict it, and stop it sooner. Yeah, huge transformation, and I'd say we're like a lot of companies still in the early innings of the value creation that we think will come from it. It's a huge opportunity set- Yeah ... but, one everyone is pursuing. So, you know, what distinguishes CSG? What is your moat around AI? Do you think it's data- Yeah ... your apps, your customer relationships, network effects? You know, what, what makes CSG special in AI? Yeah, there, there's a lot of companies, and some of the bigger ones, that are talking about building their own large language models and doing a lot. We don't actually think that's our, our biggest secret sauce that can speed value creation, value realization for customers. We're partnering with companies like Microsoft. We're leveraging the bigger infrastructure, just like we did with cloud, where we led the billing and BSS industry with the first pure AWS cloud-adopted platform, cloud-native solution. We're doing the same thing. We're leveraging the infrastructure of the bigger companies. We're leveraging some of the capabilities and tool set, that. Then what we focus on is taking the data they have and we have, and putting that through our journey analytics, journey orchestration platform, that can speed both generative content development and new use cases that can predict easier onboard, frustrated customers, and get out in front of that, so you can resolve it before they churn, before you have to give them a price reduction. Predictive analytics insights and offers that can try to get a higher share of their wallet, and do all that using AI and our software in a way that's more efficient, that they can actually save money. Because we all know the three biggest drivers, four biggest drivers may be: Can you cut costs by using AI and drive more efficiency? Can you improve customer satisfaction and retention using AI? Can you identify, through AI combined with the software, how to upsell and drive revenue growth, and then do all that more effectively and efficiently for your employees? And so that is the focus of how do we drive faster value realization and value creation, and focus on what we do best. Let the Microsofts and the other big partners we have, do what they do best. And, and you mentioned Microsoft. We also cover Microsoft as well. And it sounds like most of your AI-infused products, will be hybrid, and you will leverage, some of the existing platform companies', solutions, in rolling out your products. When do, how do you, determine... You know, what's the calculus between, you know, how much you want to do DIY, do it yourself, versus, you know, partnering with, larger companies? Yeah. I have a follow-up question after that. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a combination, right? A lot of companies are trying to say, "We're gonna do it ourselves." They're gonna go out and buy a lot of AI companies. We think there's gonna be a huge shakeout, where people spend a lot of money and crazy multiples buying small AI or data scientist shops, and that, and there's a lot of value destruction in that. So what we try to focus on, whether it's partners on the Google side, the Microsoft side, we do a lot with AWS, on our cloud billing solutions. And we think leverage their larger strength, leverage smaller, innovative, shops around some of the AI. What we really do is we take data that customers have, we ingest it, we put it into our analytic engines, and then we can pop out in real time the insights that actually drive improvement around what we call transactional engagement on the customer experience journey. Everything from onboarding a customer all the way through, you know, how do you actually retain them if you're in a SaaS situation? And so, we just think rich ecosystems and each partner playing to their unique value and their strength is what actually speeds value creation for customers and for us internally. So yeah, we will take a partner-driven ecosystem approach, and we think that's the most efficient. It also improves our capital allocation and capital deployment strategy as well. You know, I think prior to perhaps some of the OpenAI board drama, you know, Microsoft and OpenAI had a lot of momentum. You know, as a partner to those companies, I was just curious, are there any thoughts you would share in terms of how those events might have, you know, shifted your thinking somewhat or, or not at all? You know, it's like you said, this is early innings of a highly, highly disruptive and new technology. There's gonna be a lot of shakeouts, and so that's kind of... I guess the only thing I would say is, I don't think that's the last by any stretch. You're gonna see a lot of bigger players doing different strategic moves. The more CSG can focus as an ecosystem-driven approach to partner with our customers to both speed, cost reduction, efficiency gains, make it easier for them to do business and speed revenue generation-... then that means we're bringing value. It becomes table stakes to our SaaS platforms, and we see it as table stakes at this stage in the next extension. And so as long as we are able to take advantage of as those shakeouts occur and continue to deliver our solutions, we think it's gonna contribute to our top line and bottom line growth. When you think about the opportunity for AI for CSG, you mentioned the cost savings but also the revenue opportunities. Can you talk about the cadence of how those two will develop? You know, like near term, is it more cost savings and then longer-term revenue opportunities? Or, you know, where's the lower-hanging fruit initially, and what's the bigger opportunity long term? Yeah. I think it's actually pretty similar. I mean, I think every customer is trying to figure out how they could deploy AI into the partner technology solutions that they purchase that brings them cost reduction, efficiency gains, or revenue expansion. And so that is part of what we see contributing and will continue to contribute to this 2%-6% organic growth, expect to be midpoint or higher in most years, and just continue to drive that. On the same thing, on the internal efficiency side, we think that there's huge ability. Now, what we haven't been able to do and can't yet, what how many basis points of improvement in our operating leverage will specifically come from AI versus productivity gains that we use to reinvest? And that part, we don't know. What we've committed to is you should see, investors should see our bottom line growing faster than our top line. And we see that as quarter turns of the wrench in every part of our business to take less productive spend, whether it's OpEx or CapEx, and apply it more to customer value, sales expansion, and that should drive operating leverage 10 basis points, 30 basis points like clockwork. And AI will be one of many things we're doing to deliver on that. You look at our results through nine months, we're at 17.5%. We're at 16.6% in, through, Q3 of 2022. That shows you this constant focus on driving operating leverage in our business, which AI should be a part of, but not the only driver. This is a tough question, but are there any existing products that you think will be disrupted by AI or that you're less keen on investing? You know, I think on our side, it's more about how do we complement and amplify. You know, if we were in parts of the business like call center or some of the other areas, I think is just gonna get disrupted, or we were vendors into G&A functions, then I think we might have. But what we see is if we focus on, you know, billing and monetization, we focus on payments, safe, secure, to keep the fraud and the bad actors out, then we focus on transactional engagement around CX. All of those have always had a strong data and insights-driven approach, started out with predictive analytics and machine learning, now just taking the next natural step, to generative AI. So we don't see specific parts of our offer, you know, specifically under threat because of that. But what we also know, if we don't keep up and keep ahead of competitors and where the market's going, then it could become a threat to us. And so that's why we're, you know, leading as much as we are. And what we don't... We tend not to lead on the giant press releases. We try to lead on product launches, value creation, and how it's actually deployed in the market. And on that, we like how we're performing, but we're not complacent by any stretch. It's gonna have to come with more and more wins that we talk about in future quarters. Since you've been in your CEO seat, Brian, I think one of the most successful initiatives has been to diversify your revenue stream. You know, obviously, the cable giants are still major clients. But maybe talk about parts of the business that are the fastest-growing within CSG. As your mix changes, you know, how does your margins evolve? Yeah. So, just as a reminder, for those that don't know our story, about today, right now, through three quarters, about 73% of our revenue comes from mission-critical SaaS platforms for cable and global telecom. About 27% come from other verticals: financial services, healthcare, retail, government, big tech, and a few others. Over the last four years, we've grown from 7% of our revenue and those other industry verticals that are faster-growing and larger, to 27% through three quarters. That's been a huge contributor both to our top-line growth, and to be honest, they're strong contributors to our profitability as well. We... There's no reason with wins like one of the largest technology companies, three largest pharmacy retailers in the U.S., large financial service providers, healthcare, and government, there's no reason you couldn't see. Those, those are digital CX, integrated SaaS payments. Those can continue to grow strong double-digit, top line and bottom line, and we can continue to see that 27% of total revenue get into the 30s and even mid-30s or higher with organic and potentially smart, disciplined acquisitions. So we love the bigger addressable market, we love the revenue diversification and what comes from those other verticals, but we've actually never grown faster in our core of North American cable, where the market share leader and global telecom were winning major shares. We, we absolutely believe both sides of that equation can actually grow faster and contribute more to the bottom line. ... So how do you grow, you know, grow revenues within cable? You know, what kind of long-term growth do you expect there? And related to your contracts, are there built-in escalators? You know, what are edge-out opportunities? And, you know, how sensitive are you to subs? Yeah, if you look at the, the North American cable, 75% of every subscriber that has a triple-play cable solution in the U.S. is being powered by a CSG platform. And that has grown significantly over the last four or five years as we won major share against two of our key competitors in that space. And so that has been a good growth area. There are escalators in the contracts, and obviously there's a renewal with one of our top two customers coming up at Comcast. But the way we do that and continue to grow, and we believe there's good growth in that, one, bring value and stay up and performing better than any competitor's platform in those bids. 2, bring them future-ready ideas like our Bill Explainer, like AI, like digital CX, like integrated payments, or some of the things we're doing as video gets unbundled and reaggregated in a new approach with our cloud-based Ascendon platform that was the first cloud-native in the industry. That can actually power a lot of the digital OTT platforms. We can win more market share. We can win new footprint. Number three, we can help them realize they don't have to build a lot of the edge systems themselves. They can actually move that to a SaaS partner that they've trusted for three plus decades. We can actually win more landmass, and we would love the opportunity. We're a leader in wireless. Right now, two of our biggest customers use a competitor for wireless. Over time, we think that there's an opportunity to drive a converged experience, but we respect. If they—our job is to just bring them solutions that can be easily deployed, easily integrated, fast value creation. If we do that, the renewals will continue to come like they have for 30+ years, and there'll be great value creation for our customer and for CSG. That's how we see growing in cable. Specifically, there's a lot of talk about fixed, you know, wireless. We see, you know, players like T-Mobile, Verizon winning more of the broadband subs, and there is that, just like Comcast and Charter are the fastest-growing wireless providers in the U.S., there's disruptive pricing going on on both sides. We do think that there's eventually technology benefits of a fixed fiber kind of plan that will continue to eventually enable our two biggest customers to grow through that. Our view is, over the last 30 years, I tend not to bet against Comcast, Charter, and Liberty Global. Players like that are gonna win big. They're gonna find a way to respond to the competitive environment. We see that with homes passed, the investment in network, what they're doing in wireless. And that said, we can also win big in wireless. So we're focused on both, and we like our ability to grow through that. Yeah, can we explore wireless, the wireless opportunity a bit more? Sure. You had a major win at a Singapore, Singaporean-based carrier. Are there more at bats like this? And, you know, what were the reasons for this customer to switch vendors to CSG? Yeah. I'll maybe talk... It's a great question, Ed, and I love this. We think we have massive market share gain potential in global telecom, and it started five or six years ago, where we saw major fundamental shifts that started outside the U.S. market. And that was extreme commoditization and price pressure on voice and data for most global telecom operators on the consumer side, and we saw, you know, big growth in one of their fastest-growing, smaller, but most profitable units in enterprise. And so what we realized is the complexity in the telecom industry, complex product offers, complex business process, therefore, complex and not agile tech stacks, weren't gonna be able to sustain. So we started to invest in out-of-the-box product solutions, and our starting point with the discussions with CEOs and C-level of every telecom operator is, the way you make money in this competitive environment is to take the complexity out, cut the customization, don't drive a services-based model, which has always been prevalent in global telecom, reinvent your business, lower your cost to serve with a product-based approach on your back office technology, on consumer, and on enterprise. That's why we won MTN, that's why we won Telstra, that's why we won PLDT in the Philippines, that we announced a couple quarters ago. Big win in the Pacific with Telstra, big win in the Caribbean, big win with the number two operator in Saudi Arabia. And specifically, M1 in Singapore chose to use our Ascendon Cloud platforms. We have both industry-leading on-prem and cloud of your choice. We also have the best cloud-native solution that's AWS-powered in the industry, and that's why we're winning more in global telecom. And to be honest, we think we're just getting started. A competitor's model that is more product-led services doesn't necessarily take out the complexity, and it manages the complexity. We think a product-based approach is what will win next year, three years from now, five to 10 years from now, as the world moves to more of a cloud, platform-based, more agile approach. And, the Singapore carrier, I mean, that's an international opportunity. Domestic, you know, with your core cable customer base, would they ever consider a more infrastructure-driven wireless approach versus an MVNO strategy? ... Yeah, I won't speak for them, but we think having two separate stacks, this is a CSG, two separate stacks, one running wireless, one running your triple play, and CSG's got 100% of this. Over time, what customers want is a converged experience, converged onboard, converged bill, simplified capability, so I could use that. So we think we understand why the decisions were made. We respect that sometimes customers will use 100% CSG for all their footprint, and over time, they might wanna have options. We give our customers flexibility and choice, and what we do is we just keep investing in our product-based platforms to then give them more future-ready solutions, so that when they're ready to break down those silos and bring back a truly converged experience, CSG's ready, and our products and platforms are ready to enable them. We would love, and we know we're ready to handle all the volume and then some, with we think lower cost and improved experience. We'll leave it to our customers. We respect their ability to make decisions when it's right for their business. We just try to give them great ideas, and we do think we could bring a ton of value to our big two on the wireless side and the converged experience side. If we think about your opportunities around digital transformation, and particularly in CX, you know, what kind of products do you offer there now, and how can they evolve? Yeah, the main thing we focus on with our CX SaaS platforms is, at the core, it's a predictive analytics and AI-driven decisioning engine that takes this massive amount of data that all of our customers have, and we can ingest that data and then draw insights to help them lower the cost to operate and grow revenue, cross-sell, upsell, all around transactional engagement. So what Adobe does for the marketing sales lead gen, we really focus in lots of verticals than on the transactional engagement. Lower cost, expand the overall share of wallet with the customer, and make it easier for them to do business. That's why... and our SaaS platform didn't start out winning in SMB, it started winning in the giants of the industry. Three largest pharmacy retailers deployed us for appointment scheduling back when we had vaccinations in COVID. Prescription readiness to avoid prescription abandon, improve, and prescription abandonment rates that can drive revenue and improve notification or treatment protocols. Large tech is using it to reduce the calls to their call centers in various areas, and we're starting, it sounds counterintuitive, but we actually made all this progress outside of cable and telecom because they, a lot of our customers saw us as, quote, "the billing company." It took us a while to show the value we were creating to large banks and financial institutions and tech and retail. Now we're starting to walk in and help our customers in cable and telecom understand we can do the same thing for them, and we're not just the billing company, if you will. It is around that decisioning engine, predictive analytics, onboarding, and inbound and outbound customer notification that breaks down the silos and just makes it easier for big brands to be easier to do business with in a lower cost way or to drive revenue. That's why it's a strong double-digit growth, business, organically, and why we think we can sustain that. Are customers more willing to take your call with regards to the CX business with the AI implementations and the changes there in the technology? We've now done a nice job with our marketing and sales teams just to educate the market more on what we have, and so yes, much more receptive to that. But let's be honest, CSG is still a small-cap company. So we've got great direct sales, but what we're also doing is investing a lot in our channel-driven approach because we know that there's big, big and mid-sized companies, both technology, SI, and consulting partners, that can actually pull in our software and wrap it with their value-added services or their consulting and their integration implementation, and we can get the recurring platform fees. So we're also investing more to leverage other people's brand recognition and just bigger size, scope, and scale. We think that both a combination of direct sales with a channel-driven can also even further accelerate the organic revenue growth in digital CX and CSG across the board. Can you remind us on your capital allocation priorities? And one thing I think that has been very strong on your end is, you've taken almost like a physician's approach to the balance sheet in terms of, you know, first, do no harm, in terms of chasing M&A, et cetera. But at the same time, you know, you see the market has kind of run as well. So do you wait or chase for valuations, and how does that factor in to dividend and buybacks? Yeah, I mean, we, we've got an enviable balance sheet, right? 1.8 times net debt leverage. We kick off a lot of cash, high recurring, we've got a lot of flexibility. So first, we're over a decade long as a consistent dividend contributor. We've raised it every year, about 6%. We use the phrase, "Hands-off glass." Investors should expect that to continue like clockwork. But we're not waiting on capital allocation and doing inorganic moves. We're just staying highly disciplined. In the first 18 months when I took over, we did announce 4 or 5 good acquisitions of strategic assets and product platforms that help us accelerate growth rate and have winning end-to-end portfolios all around SaaS and cloud, and we're gonna continue to do that. The reason we haven't done a deal in the last 18 months is not because we haven't looked at a lot, we just have a very disciplined strike zone: strategic value, product value, the ability to have great financial return, and good cultural integration with the right risk-return profile. We think if we stay disciplined on those key principles that we use for our inorganic strategic growth, then we'll more often than not create significant value like we have when we deploy capital. So we're constantly looking at 10-20 types of companies, but our strike zone never moves, and we think as long as we continue to do that, then we'll continue to generate great value with the inorganic moves that we have. We only have about a minute left, Brian, but, you know, any, any closing thoughts or anything that you think is underappreciated about CSG by, by investors that you'd like to address? Yeah. No, first, appreciate the time that everybody has. Hopefully, people see high-integrity company commits to what it's gonna do, very clear on our strategic, what we think is gonna unlock value, and then we try to hold ourselves accountable with a lot of authenticity, and so you can expect us to continue that. When we perform well, we'll share it, we'll share why and what we're gonna do to keep it going. When we... If we have a misstep like we did back in Q2 of 2022, we own it, and we fix it quickly. Love the management team and the global employee base. Love the passion that we're seeing. I think the biggest, maybe underappreciated story is the market does not yet believe that we can consistently grow just 4%-5% a year and have bottom line grow faster. If so, it'd be reflected in a quite different stock price. So we believe our job is, no problem, if the market's not believing that, put up better and better results, and it'll take care of itself. That's the CSG we are. That's the CSG we're gonna try to continue to be, and appreciate the time and interest, Ed, on this fireside chat. Thank you, Brian. That's all the time we have. Thanks. Enjoyed the conversation, Ed.