NCR Voyix at Financial Technology Conference: Platform Transformation Insights

On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, NCR Voyix (NYSE:VYX) participated in the Financial Technology Conference, where CEO Jim Kelly outlined the company’s strategic direction and financial health. The company is undergoing a transformation into a platform company, focusing on enterprise clients in retail and restaurants. While past challenges such as infrastructure issues were acknowledged, the future appears optimistic with plans to leverage data and integrate solutions for enhanced customer experiences.

Key Takeaways

- NCR Voyix is transforming into a platform company, targeting enterprise and mid-market clients.

- The company reported a low attrition rate of 1% of revenue this past quarter.

- A $200 million share buyback program is in place to return value to shareholders.

- Partnership with Worldpay is set to enhance payment capabilities in the fuel and grocery sectors.

- Future growth is expected with new cloud-based solutions and software development initiatives.

Financial Results

- Leverage: Reduced from over 4x to between 1.5x and 1.8x after selling Condescent to Veritas.

- Tariffs: Impact of less than $2 million absorbed within financials.

- Revenue: Stable through the first quarter, with the payments business currently at $400 million and projected to grow.

- Attrition: 1% of revenue this quarter, improving from 2% the previous quarter.

- Share Buyback: Authorized $200 million, with $125 million already spent from previous authorization.

Operational Updates

- Divestiture: Digital banking business Condescent sold to Veritas for $2.5 billion.

- ODM Deal: Agreement with Enicom, owned by Foxconn (SS:601138), expected to conclude by year-end.

- Platform Transition: Over 16,000 platforms in the US as part of the transition.

- Software and Services: New cloud-based solutions piloted in grocery, fuel, and restaurant segments.

- Product Development: Launching cloud-based products like menu manager and smart manager for Aloha products.

- Regional Expansion: Expanding gateway to Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

Future Outlook

- Partnership with Worldpay: Completion expected by summer’s end, with financial impact anticipated by late this year or early 2026.

- New Customer Acquisition: Increased focus on acquiring new customers.

- Software Launch: Emphasis on launching new software products.

- Expansion of Switch: Plans to extend the switch to additional regions.

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

Full transcript - Financial Technology Conference:

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: My banter for the past fifteen minutes. My name is Dan Perlin. I head up the fintech practice here at RBC. And I’m delighted to have Jim Kelly, who is the CEO of NCR Voyix. Jim is a long tenured payments guy.

Been in the business for, I don’t know, thirty years?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Not

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: quite that long?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Yeah.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: A little while.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: I’d have to be a little older. Yeah. Twenty five.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Twenty five years. Yeah. Okay. So this is a fantastic time for you to be taking over the company. So what I wanted to start with at a very high level is you’ve been in the CEO role, I think, for a little over four months now.

And so as you’ve been in that position and you’re reflecting on things that are amazing maybe at Voyagex or really good at Voyagex versus things that maybe need some attention. So if you could just start with that balancing act and then we’ll just continue from there.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Sure. Just by the way me, by the way of context, I was the Chairman when the company split in October 23. I was asked by the board to step in as the Executive Chairman. We had a new CEO, David Wilkinson, had been with the company, I think twelve years, not previously been a CEO and was appointed by the previous board to take on that responsibility. We have a lot going on last year in ’24.

Beyond the spin, we had a couple of infrastructure issues to deal with. We had a fraud Yep. Beginning of the year, sadly. But most importantly, we had two big components of the business to focus on. One, which was kind of a remnants of our ATM business.

It was a digital banking business, which is now called Condescent. And it was the Board’s decision to divest that asset, which we did to Veritas. It was signed in June of last year. We closed in October of last year. The significance of that event was that we paid down the sale proceeds were 2 and a half billion.

So we paid down a significant part of the bonds that were outstanding. I think we took us north of four times leverage down to under two times leveraged, somewhere between one and a half to, say, one eight, leverage today. The was to not exit the hardware business. We’re still gonna be in four primary businesses, hardware, software, services, and payments. But the volatility of hardware sales, you know, I could see this when I was at EVO, a lot of people stocked up on hardware during the slow time of twenty twenty one, twenty two.

And I think the same thing happened at NCR. But from an investor standpoint, you see these rises and falls of revenue. We wanted to normalize that, and there’s an accounting structure called ODM, which we signed a deal with a company called Enicom, which is owned by Foxcom, with the expectation of that, completing by the end of last year. That did not occur as of last year. It was a techno technology challenge, nothing more.

You In retrospect, given the tariffs this year, I think we were better positioned to manage that instead of managing it through a party. But we still have the same expectations that’ll get done by the end of the year, which is what we said on the second quarter call. Now, what I’ve learned, I’ve now met with over 50 CEOs or CIOs across our core customer base. And while we have thousands of customers that we support, the largest group of them is roughly about 400 customers. That represents north of 70%, 80% of the customers of the company’s revenue.

And, you know, the positive to answer your specific question is we have a very long standing close relationship, supportive relationship with some of the biggest retail and restaurant customers across the globe. And that was reaffirmed by the meetings that I had with them. Now the flip side, I think, if you look at the last four years of the company’s history, five years, There were I’m the CEO, I guess, the last three years. Yeah. Mike Hayford was there for, I think, five years or so.

Yep. But there was a sale process that went on in the 2020, 2021, which which never occurred, obviously. We had COVID to deal with like everybody else, and then the company went through a spin. So I think there’s a number of customers whose commitments that we made were probably not met timely and still have not been met timely. I think that’s on the negative side.

We have some work to do on the legacy applications. The positive is that the company is now a platform company, which we talked about on the second quarter call. So it’s a platform company. There’s over 16,000 of them in The US today. So if you think of a company like Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), you watch a movie tonight, it’s an action movie.

Tomorrow, it’s going to propose other action movies for you. It’s the same concept, our ability to understand what our customers want. Now we’re busy, but they ultimately are servicing their customers whether it’s restaurant or retail. Retail for us is grocery fuel and convenience predominantly. So Whole Foods as an example.

So if you if you if we can provide the data of the customer set, when they shop, what they like to buy, when they like to buy, it makes a better experience not just for their end user customer, but obviously for our customer in terms of providing real time data, which today they don’t get to see because most of the applications, if not all the applications are using, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years old. So on the negative side, yeah, we have some work to do on infrastructure, some investments in infrastructure, and I think we’ve said that on the calls. On the positive side, our attrition is 1% of revenue. I can say that again. Last quarter, 1% of revenue.

I’ve never heard of that before. We have a long standing, very important customers. And when you think about what we do, all the revenue that these customers collect come through our point of sale. So we’re a critical factor in how these companies operate, and we’re getting closer and closer with them relative technology. So investments that Mike’s made and people before Mike and David in platform, which is something we’ve been talking about regularly, and I think we were more transparent this last call.

We now have a chief product officer, Nick East, who’s been with the company for a number of years, that our focus on delivering next generation solutions will continue to bind up those relationships, I think, for the foreseeable future.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Before I want to delve into a lot

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: of those topics. I try to cover everything.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I was going say that was great.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: We we just got minutes on this.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: So what I but before we do that, one of the things we’re trying to run through the vein of this conference, given the timing of it in the quarter, is just what are you seeing in terms of May trends? How did that compare? Are there any hesitation on spending from clients given some of the uncertainties that have been in the backdrop? But more importantly, just what do you see in terms of the May trend on the consumer?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Well, would start with tariffs because that’s one thing that, you know, we, I think, went into the penalty box undeservingly in the very early stages. Our stock dropped Yeah. Pretty significantly. Cause I think the expectation were tariffs were gonna be a problem to us. We’ve seen less than $2,000,000 of total tariff impact, which we’ve absorbed within our financials.

There’s no this can change any day as we well know, but right now tariff does not represent an issue to us. I didn’t actually see a slowdown even with tariffs as in the height of that, you know, six weeks or so ago Mhmm. In terms of customer spends. I think the opposite. I’ve what I have seen is the customers are very excited about what we have to bring to market.

So I’m not seeing I have not seen any slowdown in the customer’s demand for service product, newer solutions than what we’re offering today. We are pushing really hard to get the product to market as on plan by the beginning of next year.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: And then in terms of what you see from the volume trends, maybe more specific in restaurants, but even in retail for that matter, nothing noticeable?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Yeah. Most substantially, you know, most of our our revenue is on a subscription type basis. It’s not affected like in the payment space. Yep. When o nine hit, you know, our volumes dropped materially.

It’s the time I’ve ever seen volumes start to go negative. Yeah. We’re not seeing that. I have I mean, our today, our payments volume is relatively small. So I can’t tell exactly how much payments have moved over the last, you know, six months or so.

Yeah. But in terms of the core spend or revenue for the company, it’s been it’s positive and negative. It’s been steady. It’s Yep. It needs to be growing in in one direction instead of declining in the other.

But it has not declined. As I said, revenue has been stable, consistent through the first quarter, and I haven’t seen anything change since then. Great.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: So I wanna step back here and and go back to the messaging that you had in in kind of your opening remarks. Enterprise is like your sweet spot, right? I mean, you talk about

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: It is the company.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: It is the company. And I think there’s a view that that is maybe not the case.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Yeah. Don’t know why.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I don’t either, but we get it all the time as well. And so there’s a lot of competition. But the question that I have is, because enterprise has been so strong for you guys or as a big part of the company, what wasn’t going right under the prior administration, so to speak, relative to kind of the changes that you’re making now?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Well, when you’re talking about prior

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I mean, I’m not talking about governmental. I’m talking about David and the team prior. Because I feel like they were going down a path of SMB a little more than maybe what I’m hearing from you.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: I don’t I mean, David was there for twelve years, and he ran the retail side of it. I mean, retail has mid market. On the restaurant side, we do have the SME. We acquired Aloha product Yep. Many years ago.

They had a dealer network. Many of those dealers, companies like Mercury and Shift4 and others that acquired those dealers Yep. Or at least worked with those dealers over this time period. So we do have an SME market. I met with our dealer network our dealer, executive team, a couple of months ago.

And, you know, yes, the the the SME market is very competitive. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of of point of sale software companies that, are in that space. And I’ve, you know, I’ve heard the terminology that we’re a donor space for some of our competition. I’m sure you’ve heard the same thing.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I have.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Yes. But I think you have to also understand how the competition prices. It’s a very ISO priced low on lower giveaway, the point of sale in software to get payments. That’s not a strategy that we’ve adopted at the company. Now I believe that the the products that and services that we sell have value, and payments has value.

And if you price payments at an to offset giving other stuff away for free, in the end that comes back to bite you. When the contract renews or over time as the statements increase, then I think customers, like any consumer, customers get frustrated with it and look for options. And we’ve heard that from some of our from feedback at conferences, etcetera. But you you should think of this as an enterprise mid market. And mid market are hundreds of locations.

Like, we signed Ziggy’s Coffee and Yogurtland on Aloha Cloud. Yeah. I mean, those are two and three hundred, 400 location establishments. But, yes, we’ll sign individual steak houses, etcetera. Those generally are at Aloha 19, which is not a cloud based application.

It has cloud application connectivity, but it’s not a cloud based one. Connect. And then Voyage Connect is integrated to all the payment processors in The US. Yep. And it also offers functionality, point to point encryption, tokenization, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Pay, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) Pay.

There’s a host of capabilities. So it’s not just a conduit. It’s a conduit that’s adding value. For whatever reason, in the past, we either didn’t charge for it or didn’t charge appropriately for it when you look at parties that do this as a living, that they charge for that capabilities. So some of it is, look, we’re offering the service.

We’re not recouping value for it. But the the is if you’re a customer, and I have this going on right now, I will not say the names, where there are three there’s two intermediaries between us, the point of sale, intermediary one, two, and then the payment processor. So when something breaks or somebody’s behind, trying to coordinate three disparate companies is it’s very difficult. It’s frustrating to the customer. And who do you think the customer calls at the end?

Mhmm. He calls us. So my view is we’ll just make it easier for you. So that’s why I actually reached out to Chuck originally and said, look, you’re Worldpay. You have not only domestic, but you have international capabilities.

We’re interested in in those capabilities. I mean, I talked to the other guys as well. Now it’s gonna be Cameron’s business. So Cameron and I have talked about this as well. We’re not looking to be in the acquiring business.

That’s not our focus. Our focus right now is the software piece. Yep. But we want to be able to offer the capabilities that our customers demand because as I said, all the revenue that comes from these customers comes through our point of sale. But that revenue only has value to the extent that they can process a credit card.

And if there’s ever disruption in that cycle, then it’s, you know, it’s painful for them.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yep. What kind of time frame are we thinking in terms of We mean or you? The universal we outside. Let’s say it this way. What should investors expect from these potential opportunities over the course of the next couple of years?

Will it be in 25 numbers? Should we be thinking more of a 26 story?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Well, I think you already said so, again, the reason we’re using Worldpay is they already are in fuel and grocery in a big And we’re not competing against them, whatever customers they have, they have. Yep. So I’m not trying to take them. But I know what percentage of our business they have because I can see it Yeah. On our system.

That transaction is supposed to be done by the end of the summer.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yep. Okay.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: So then we can start selling. Now recognize those are no payments. Grocery and fuel are very, very thin margins. So I’m not expecting some overnight success. But I think you’ll start to see it in the numbers probably by the very end of this year or going into ’26.

And once we do, we already have had wins, but they’re not big enough to talk about. We do 400,000,000 today. The statistics on new customers, which is actually back to one of your questions, one of the negatives I’ve seen is we’ve not pursued new customers at the rate we are pursuing now. We’ve been somewhat complacent, big company, conglomerate, lots of big customers, plenty to do. Don’t push to go do something else.

That’s not my philosophy. My philosophy is always grow because customers are gonna leave you or they’re gonna get merged into somebody else. Mhmm. But but I would my sense is going into next year, we’ll be able to see it. And the moment I see it in a material way, it’ll continue to snowball.

But the bigger play, I’m not minimizing payments, is the software launch. Launching as a platform company. We’re not we have no interest to be a payments company holistically. It’s one of the commitments I made to to Worldpay is we’re not out just selling payments. We’re not looking to become a competitor to theirs.

We’re only a competitor to the extent that these are our customers at the point of sale, whether it’s hardware, software, or services. If we’re supporting a customer and they want payments, and we have some customers like that today, then we’re going to support them as a branch of the organization.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yeah. And timing on the switch, as you call it? I’m not going to use gateway anymore.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: The switch is up and going. What we’re doing is moving that to all the rest of the regions. So we effectively have four regions. We have Latin America, US and Canada, Europe, and then Japan, and Europe Asia, and then Japan. So each of those have earlier versions of what we have in The US.

Mhmm. So I expect to launch I’m actually talking to Diego I don’t know, tomorrow or the next day. He runs Latin America. So I think he’s in in the earliest shape to get it up and running. Darren is talking to Worldpay about getting Europe set up.

So we’re gonna do this in parallel. But our number one focus is to drive the software and services business.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Okay. Well, let’s talk about that because the big part of the strategy for the past several years has been to pivot the business to more of a SaaS based model, right? Away from license upfront and hardware, and that’s just continuing today. So maybe just bring us up to this point in time. Where does the where does the organization stand in terms of that transition?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: This is what we what I outlined in the comments on our second quarter first quarter call. So the we are in pilot not at pilot, but we’re in pilot with both grocery and fuel domestically and internationally. I mean, convenience kinda just goes with grocery Mhmm. On the restaurant side. The retail side, there’s less of a change.

You know, we’re we’re continuing to roll out the point of sale aspect of Aloha Cloud. Nineteen is in market. There’s gonna continue to be upgrades and enhances enhancements to both of them. What will be coming out this year is menu manager, smart manager, and kitchen for Aloha products, which are bespoke different than others. These will work with they’re cloud based Yep.

Linux based, platform based. So these will these are enabled to run with anybody’s application. It doesn’t just have to run with our point of sale. It can run with parties as well. So I would say these pilots go well.

We’ll continue to pilot more and more customers. We’ll start rolling out across their base. I was with one of our customers out in the Northwest West last month, and I think he’s halfway through a deployment

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Okay.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Of one of the earlier versions of our cloud solution. So look, there’s always software is tough, so there’s always challenges. We’re trying to create different than the past, we sold 20% of an application. We built out the other 80%. We customized the heck out of everything.

So we’re we now know what people want. We’re trying to normalize that so that when we come out with a product, it’s 80 to 90% complete, and the customization is more on the margin than the core. And actually, that’s what the team is working on right now is to make it easier for them to stand it up, easier for us to roll it out, less friction than in the past, and we’re optimistic of the future.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: That’s awesome. Thanks. So a one percent attrition rate is pretty astounding Yeah. Across a lot of industries.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: It was 2% last quarter.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Oh, is that okay?

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: It’s going to I thought

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: it was actually maybe 2%, but I was going to run with the 1%.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: So No. No. It was 2% for, year end. I think I said 2% last year. Yes.

This quarter, you’re right.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: It’s Okay. It was 1%. 1%. All right. So the question is, you know, you have this level of attrition that is incredibly low, but the level of investments may be in the product previously were not at par.

We have So, like, I’m trying to make sense of how

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: How many applications do you think we have on the retail side? You know, I was gonna answer quick question. 2,500? No. I have no idea.

We have 25 software applications.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I thought you were gonna throw out a crazy No. No.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: But 25. So we’re keeping 25 of sales running

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Oh, my.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: For the retail side. Well, actually, 50 overall, but 25 are the core ones. And then for Aloha, there’s 19 versions of Aloha. There’s probably four or five that are still so Yeah. We have a we have a lot of, you know, tech deck as they would describe it.

Yep. The platform is single. So we’re moving from a lot to one. And one will do the same better than all the others did individually. But those are 25 years old.

Yep. They were bought over a series of years that transformed the company from a hardware to a software organization. And now we’re transitioning from there to being a platform company. And a platform company is a Google and Azure

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yeah.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Cloud that provides the real time data that they’re all looking for. It’s just I think the company maybe should have started a lot earlier because the market has moved in this direction faster. But I think at the level of enterprise, I’m not seeing a lot of companies that have the capabilities that we are launching to the market. And this isn’t, as they call it, slideware. These are live with real very large international organizations running them today in pilot in their stores.

Got it. All right, we’ve about a minute left.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I wanted to ask just on capital allocation. Always an important topic, but like what’s interesting about this one, so you announced a $200,000,000 buyback. That and of itself is significant. Yeah. But there’s a nuance to it, which allows you to buy back your preferreds.

Yes. So is there some something we should be aware of, like, makes it unique? I mean, I thought it was a bit a We spent

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: a 125,000,000 after we sold Veritas for 2 and a half billion. I thought it was appropriate that we return something to shareholders. Yeah. But we did I don’t I forget the exact number of shares we bought, but we spent a 100,000,000 initially and then 25,000,000 in the first quarter ish. The I I don’t think the original one I don’t can’t remember whether this was an authorization that preceded me, whether it included the preferred or not.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: I think it did.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: Yeah. I I don’t recall if it did or not. But we wanted to make sure it was clear this time, so we effectively canceled that one and put in a new one. There isn’t we aren’t laser focused on the preferred versus the common. Okay.

And right now, most of the investment’s going into the company. Yep. But I wanted that to be out there since we didn’t since we kind of retired the past one.

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: Yeah. The preferred has been around for a while. So Yes. Okay.

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: It has been a while for

Dan Perlin, Head of Fintech Practice, RBC: a Great. Well, we’re out of time. Jim, thank you so much for being I really appreciate it. And always a pleasure.

Great to

Jim Kelly, CEO, NCR Voyix: see you. Too.

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