XBP Global Q4 2025 Earnings Call - AI-led margin gains clash with a revenue air pocket after Exela BPA integration

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Hello, and welcome to the XBP Global Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Head of Investor Relations, David Shamis.

David Shamis, Head of Investor Relations, XBP Global: Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to XBP Global’s fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. Joining me are CEO Andrej Jonovic and CFO Dejan Avramovic. Before we begin, please note that today’s remarks may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our future performance, outlook, and strategy. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. For a detailed discussion on these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our proxy statement and other filings with the SEC, copies of which are available on our investor relations website at investors.xbpglobal.com. In addition, during this call, we will reference certain pro forma and non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release in the appendix to our investor presentation, which are available on our investor relations website. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Andrej.

Andrej Jonovic, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), XBP Global: Good afternoon, everyone. 2025 was a defining year for us at XBP Global. Following our transformative acquisition of Exela Technologies BPA at the end of July, we focused on three key areas. 1, integrating two platforms into one XBP Global and benefiting from resulting synergies. 2, voluntarily disrupting ourselves to become an AI-led company and benefiting from expanding margins. 3, making investments in growth, starting with the hiring of Mike Shufeldt, our new Chief Revenue Officer, and an expanded sales team. Let’s talk about these in a bit more detail. As I mentioned, in late July 2025, we completed the acquisition of Exela Technologies BPA, thereby combining a European business on one hand and an Americas and Asia business on the other into one platform, renamed XBP Global. Our initial focus has been to streamline and simplify the organization.

We’ve also hired new talent and promoted from within to ensure our culture is future-proofed. We feel good about the amount of progress we’ve made to date to operate as one unified organization. We’ve officially moved beyond the initial repositioning towards a focus on growth and building a sustainable long-term enterprise that is deeply embedded with our clients’ evolving needs. We’re focusing on mission-critical outcomes and incorporating AI responsibly. There are two key points I would like to make with respect to AI as we see it. One is human accountability, and the other is governance, and I will address this in more detail over the course of the call. We’re spending a considerable amount of time disrupting our legacy workflows. A lot of the disruption is impacting our technology teams and their way of operating as we move from traditional SDLC to AI-driven SDLC.

At the same time, I would like to say that disruption is ultimately function agnostic. Everyone in our company is expected to augment AI to deliver more of themselves. The simplest way to look at outcomes here is that we’re expecting to see meaningful margin uplift over the coming period. We’ve been laying the groundwork for a return to growth. We’ve onboarded a Chief Revenue Officer and invested in an expanded sales team. We’ve been reaching out to our trusted clients to reintroduce ourselves and to listen to their needs. The bottom line here is that we believe we have a suite of agentic AI-driven solutions which will enable more clients to transition from labor-intensive reactive workflows to fully orchestrated exception-driven workflows without compromising on their standards or our value of human accountability.

Another thing to note as it relates to our interaction with AI is that legacy metrics are changing rapidly. While they might tell the story of today, they might not tell the story of tomorrow. Take new sales, for example. Winning the trust of clients through large contract wins is exciting and tends to be viewed as indicative of momentum. I do think we need to take a more balanced approach and focus on ROI and the sustainability of contracts. We’re looking to offer our clients disruptive outcomes and deeper integration than before. Let me give you an example. With agentic AI, privacy is not afforded by using public models. We recently deployed a state-of-the-art large language model to a private cloud belonging to a major French insurance company in order to facilitate a plethora of high-value agentic AI use cases.

This approach ensures that agentic AI can scale securely on a private cloud while simultaneously protecting privacy to the maximum possible extent and avoiding escalating token costs or token maxing. We think this is an industry benchmark where our document processing custom neural networks can work in tandem with agentic AI to deliver best-in-class value to our clients. We think that longer term, this will result in structurally higher margins. Let’s start with the deck and slide 3 in particular, which essentially highlights our strategic positioning as a company. First, our presence in mission-critical mandates and in highly regulated environments creates significant natural barriers to entry. In sectors like healthcare, BFSI, and the public sector, there are complex and rigorous regulatory compliance governance and security standards that general AI simply cannot replace at the moment. These are more than just tasks.

They’re mission-critical mandates where the cost of error for our clients is significant. Our entrenchment means that we aren’t just a service provider, but a part of the client’s overall compliance infrastructure. This is one of the key reasons why our top 25 clients have been with us for over 15 years on average. Furthermore, our competitive mode is defined by human accountability and domain expertise. While AI is great at automating tasks, it cannot independently manage the last mile of complex decision-making. Our clients depend on the institutional knowledge we possess to provide oversight and protection. With decades of experience, and by anchoring our hyper-automation solutions with human in the loop or human on top processes, we ensure that human accountability and judgment is paramount to everything we do. Domain expertise is what makes our business model resilient in today’s shifting landscape.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that we often sit at the crossroads of analog data and digital outcomes. For many of our clients, digital transformation is more than just software. It requires a partner capable of processing large, unstructured, and often physical datasets into fully digital, actionable workflows. This physical element of our business makes us an essential partner in enabling the very digital transformations that AI models rely upon. I’d like to skip to slide five. As I mentioned earlier, XBP Global is deeply embedded in the operations that underpin our economy and government, especially in the United States. Our data management and automation solutions are vital for sectors like healthcare, banking, and finance. We handle vast amounts of sensitive data and decisioning here. One example is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has for years been one of our largest clients.

We’ve delivered essential AI-enabled services for many years to the VA, and it ultimately helps our veterans obtain better and more timely care. I’m gonna skip ahead to slide 9, which talks about our diversified base of 2,500+ clients, with no single client accounting for more than 7.5% of our revenue. If we break this down a little further, over 140 of these clients have ACV of $1 million or more. We’re in a position now to increase our penetration with these clients and win back some of the business that BPA has lost over the last couple of years. From a new sales perspective, we think we’re starting to see good momentum in the few months since becoming XBP Global.

We created approximately $1.4 billion of new pipeline in 2025, up 8% over 2024, and in the full year, we closed nearly $300 million of TCV, with approximately $100 million of that coming in just the fourth quarter. That said, the sales cycles do remain long. Headwinds from the broader macroeconomic environment are not making things easier for anyone. To summarize, 2026 will be a pivotal year for us. We expect to see further improvement in our margin and substantial progression towards being an AI-led provider of mission-critical workflows, and we’ll do our best to ensure we remain relevant for our clients and prospects. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dejan Avramovic, our CFO.

Dejan Avramovic, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), XBP Global: Thank you, Andrej, and good afternoon, everyone. I will now walk you through our financial and operating results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025. My comments will primarily focus on pro forma results to reflect the combined operations of BPA and XBP Europe on an apples-to-apples basis, given continued complexity in the GAAP results, especially for full year numbers and any comparisons versus prior periods. Starting on slide 11. For the full year 2025, we had pro forma revenue of $879.6 million, which was down 13.6% year-over-year. The decline was primarily due to project completions and client exits, partially offset by new client additions.

Like I talked about on our last quarterly call, the restructuring of BPA resulted in expected restructuring related exits as customers were effectively forced to diversify some of their business away from us. Additionally, it means that for a large portion of the year, the company did not have a functioning sales funnel, which further impacted our ability to retain and win new clients. Post-acquisition, however, we have turned our sales engines back on and have been very focused on ROI in everything we do, which ultimately we think will be beneficial for us. Our pro forma gross margin was 21.9% for the year, which was an increase of 30 basis points year-over-year. This was primarily driven by a favorable sales mix with our higher margin technology segment driving the overall gross margin lift.

Our pro forma normalized EBITDA was $90.2 million, a decrease of 13.7% year-over-year, and our normalized EBITDA margin was flat versus last year at 10.3%. With regards to the operating cash flows, the post-transaction period was negatively impacted by the expected cash outflows related to the transaction and pre-petition liabilities, which were in excess of $21 million. Turning to slide 12. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we had total revenue of $207 million, a decline of 15.1% year-over-year, and our gross margin increased by 110 basis points year-over-year to 22.7%, driven by margin expansion in our Applied Workflow Automation segment. Our normalized EBITDA was $19.2 million, a decline of 35% year-over-year.

Again, the fourth quarter revenue and EBITDA declines can largely be attributed to the expected restructuring-related exits I just talked about and were especially challenging on tougher comps from a year ago. Like Andrej talked about in his opening remarks, we’re starting to see some green shoots from a sales perspective, and this was evident in our bookings numbers in the fourth quarter. Let’s start with our new TCV bookings. In the fourth quarter, this metric was up 53.2% year-over-year, more than double our new TCV bookings in the third quarter and 68% above our new TCV bookings from the previous four-quarter average. With respect to our new ACV bookings, these were up 37.7% year-over-year, up 89% from the third quarter, and 47% above the previous four-quarter average.

Now as to why this sales velocity is not being reflected in our revenue performance, the direct answer is that we’re currently in an air pocket. We’re burning off legacy projects while new higher value signings are still in the implementation lag, which can last anywhere from a few weeks to several months until that revenue and margin are recognized. That being said, we’ve seen a small uptick in our gross margins, which is a direct result of AI-enabled outcomes, but there is more work to do. Moving to slide 13, which reviews our segment breakdown. As a reminder, Applied Workflow Automation is our largest segment and contributes approximately 90% of our revenues.

This segment includes the company’s bills and payments, healthcare industry solutions, on-site enterprise solutions, integrated communications, and enterprise legal management business units, which serve leading banks, payers and providers, utilities as well as federal, regional, and local government entities. The technology segment focuses on the sale of recurring and perpetual software licenses, software maintenance and professional services, as well as hardware solutions and maintenance. While this segment only makes up about 10% of our revenues, it contributes approximately 30% of our gross profits since the gross margin of this segment tends to be in the range of 55%-65%. In the fourth quarter, the Applied Workflow Automation segment had a year-over-year revenue decline of 15.1% on a pro forma basis.

Gross margins, however, increased by 140 basis points year-over-year, and 110 basis points sequentially to 18.4%. Our technology revenue declined by 14.6% year-over-year, but increased 1% sequentially to $21.7 million. This decrease was primarily driven by the expected completion of several one-time projects and, to a lesser extent, the exit of certain clients. For the full year, our European region saw revenue growth of 4.7% year-over-year, driven by many of the initiatives and sales wins we experienced earlier in the year, offset somewhat by the completion of some projects and client exits. Our gross margins in Europe increased 130 basis points year-over-year to 28.1%, which is well above our consolidated gross margins of 21.9%.

This gross margin expansion was driven by execution of large-scale deals with high levels of automation, something we’re working on executing across the combined company. This should serve as a blueprint for the direction we plan to take gross margins for XBP Global. With respect to margins on slide 14, I’d like to point out the expansion of our gross margin despite the decline in revenue over the last few quarters. Our gross margins are up 200 basis points in the last two quarters as a result of a deliberate application of automation and focus on cost efficiency. Now I’ll turn it back to Andrej, who will give you some additional color on some of our automation and sales efforts.

Andrej Jonovic, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), XBP Global: Thanks, Dan. I’d like to cover a few more slides, and I would like to ask that we turn to slide 15, where we’re seeing a natural evolution of our workforce composition driven by the dual impact of the AI disruption that we are embracing. On one hand, it changes the way we operate internally, and on the other, how we operate in serving our clients. Among our tech teams, the shift towards AI-based SDLC creates an uplift primarily in product development, change requests, and increasingly in tech support. We see approximately 70% uplift in speed in output, meaning new features, and we think this has further room for improvement. I want to draw your attention to a metric that separates us from the legacy BPA model, which is revenue per FTE.

When contextualized, as shown on the right-hand side of the slide, our revenue per FTE is approximately $80,000 and exceeds the peer group average of approximately $60,000. We still see this as a relevant indicator for how we’re decoupling growth from headcount, something that distinguishes us from legacy BPA models, including many companies that are significantly larger than us. Next, I’d like to talk about some of our client metrics on slide 16. As you can see, we have a broadly diversified industry vertical and client size, which provides a natural hedge. Our top three clients contribute approximately 17% of our annual revenue, with the top ten making up just 32%, which goes to show we aren’t overly concentrated. Moving to slide 17, with respect to sales.

Overall, we’ve seen an expansion of our pipeline and a healthy rebound in bookings in Q4. We’re investing in sales efforts, and we’re watching this space closely. The chart on the left shows our quarterly TCV signings, and while it’s true that we’re still far off from the pre-merger levels, we have seen in Q4 the highest results in all of 2025. On the right-hand side, we show our new ACV signings by industry, and the key takeaway here is that our bookings are diversified and not overly focused in any one industry. In total, the fourth quarter, we closed around $34.8 million of new ACV from over 560 separate deals.

We’ve had some success this quarter, particularly from BFSI manufacturing, which included a win-back with a large property and casualty insurance company, which is the result of our win-back campaign, and a large contract with a well-known aerospace and defense contractor and several banking-related deals. Additionally, we closed several federal and local government-related contracts across the Americas and Europe. I’d like to close by thanking our dedicated team for their continued efforts in growing our sales and moving us in the right direction. With that, I’ll turn it over to the operator to open up for Q&A. Operator, please.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. One moment, please. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.