GFT Technologies Aktie

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to GFT's First Half 2026 Results Conference Call. I'm Andreas Herzog, Head of Investor Relations at GFT. Thank you very much for joining us today. Joining me on the call are Marco Santos, our Global CEO; and Jochen Ruetz, CFO and Deputy CEO. Before we begin, please note that today's call is being recorded. The presentation accompanying today's discussion and the half year reporting materials are already available in the Investor Relations section on our website. A replay of this conference call will be available there also afterwards following today's event.

Marco will begin with an overview of the key developments and highlights during the first half of the year, followed by Jochen, who will discuss the financial performance and outlook. And we will then open the line for your questions. With that, let me hand over to you, Marco. Marco, please go ahead.

Thank you, Herzog. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me start with the highlights for the first half of 2026 and our full year guidance. We delivered solid revenue growth, significantly improved profitability, continued to scale our artificial intelligence capabilities and differentiation and confirmed our 2026 guidance. These results demonstrate disciplined execution of our AI-Centric 5-Year Strategy and continued progress in transforming GFT into a responsible AI-centric global digital transformation company.

In the first half of 2026, GFT generated EUR 463 million of revenue, representing 5% growth in euros and 5% growth in constant currencies. At the same time, profitability improved significantly. Adjusted EBT grew by 8% to EUR 33 million, corresponding to a margin of 7.1% compared with 6.8% in the first half of 2025. EBT increased by 26% to EUR 24 million with the EBT margin improving from 4.3% to 5.2%. This margin improvement confirms that our growth is progressing hand-in-hand with stronger earnings quality. It also reflects disciplined delivery, tire operational management and the increasing contribution of AI native services, our Wynxx Agentic AI platform and high value-added service offerings.

Our main growth markets in the first half of the year performed strongly. Revenue grew by 38% in Brazil, 27% in Colombia, 22% in Switzerland and 13% in Spain. We record growth across all sectors, including banking, insurance, with industry leading with a strong 14%. Overall, the first half confirms that we are progressing in line with our strategic and financial objectives, growing the business, expanding margins and scaling up our AI native assets, services and offering portfolio. Based on this performance, we confirm our full year guidance of EUR 930 million in revenue, EUR 71 million in adjusted EBT, corresponding to a margin of 7.6% and EUR 56 million in EBT corresponding to a margin of 6%. Let me now turn to the execution of our AI-Centric 5-Year Strategy and the tangible progress we are making with key clients and high value-added services and offerings. First, our AI modernization offering launched 9 months ago and supported by an integrated global marketing campaign is already achieving strong commercial traction. We won more than 20 projects across 9 countries, encompassing advisory services, application modernization, migration and application AI reimagined. This confirms that clients are moving beyond experimentation with GFT and committing budgets to production rate modernization programs, heavily driven by AI.

GFT combines strategic assessment, new targets, business and technical architecture design and program governance with the Wynxx Agentic AI platform across the full life cycle from legacy analysis and business rule extraction to code transformation, validation and deployment with human oversight and governance built in. Second, we won 6 next-generation core banking programs across Germany, Canada, Spain, Poland and Thailand, working with partners, including Thought Machine and Engine by Starling. These wins reinforce GFT's position as a lead implementation partner for cloud-native core banking. They also create multiyear opportunities across architecture, integration, AI native engineering and ongoing platform evolution. Third, GFT won the strategic development of COAFI, Financial Intelligence system. COAFI is the Brazil's financial intelligence unit linked to the Central Bank of Brazil.

The new solution will combine Wynxx with our specialized [ ImAA ] anti-money laundering capabilities to modernize a critical part of the country's financial intelligence system. The project brings together our Agentic AI platform, deep anti-money laundering expertise and advisory capabilities, positioning GFT at the center of the Brazilian anti-financial crime intelligence infrastructure.

Fourth, we completed the large-scale go-live of the [ AMLA ] anti-money laundering platform for a Tier 1 European bank. The platform went live and now supports 25 million customers and processes approximately 1 billion transactions per month. This is one of the largest AML implementations in the region and a mission-critical implementation at exceptional scale. It confirms the maturity of our anti-financial crime capabilities and the trust clients place in GIP to operate at the core of highly regulated banking environments.

Fifth, we successfully supported Commercial Bank of Dubai in launching UP by CBD, a mobile-first banking platform for micro and small businesses in the UAE. It combines digital onboarding, payments, payroll, savings and instant access to credit in a single application with direct integration into the Dubai unified license. This engagement reflects how our delivery excellence and cloud-native core banking expertise strength strategic client relationships and accelerate the launch of new digital banking propositions at scale. Taken together, these highlights demonstrate focused execution, delivering complex programs, scaling differentiated offerings and converting our AI-centric strategy into measurable clients and commercial impact. Let me now focus on the tangible results of our AI-centric strategy.

Our Wynxx Agentic AI platform for software engineering continued to scale. It's now active in 12 countries and supports 113 clients. The total influence contract value has reached more than EUR 144 million since the inception of the product, representing growth of 38% quarter-over-quarter. This continued expansion shows the growing adoption of Wynxx across our software engineering and AI modernization engagements and its increasing role in GFT's AI native delivery model. Beginning this quarter, we are introducing a new KPI for Wynxx Soft Engineering to improve the measurement of tangible results.

In the first half of 2026, Wynxx Soft Engineering generated EUR 24.1 million of actual influence revenue. We are also launching Wynxx Business Process as a new pillar of the Wynxx Agentic AI platform with dedicated assets, accelerators and offering portfolio. In the first half of 2026, Wynxx business processes alone generated EUR 14.8 million of actual influence revenue, supported by 6 clients reference, including a key Agentic AI credit risk platform for a Tier 1 European bank fully in production. This is important client case study is not an AI POC, AI pilot or MVP. It's a large-scale Agentic AI credit risk platform in full production for a major European bank. This AI native project involved a team of more than 30 forward deployed engineers with strong AI and data capabilities combined with banking and graduate domain knowledge. I will provide more detail on both areas in the next slides.

To accelerate our AI native transformation, we are investing strongly in our engineers to make them fully capable of working in a forward deployed engineering model. We recorded more than 3,500 training completions of third-party artificial intelligence coding tools, including Claude Codes, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini and other tools.

In parallel, we achieved more than 1,700 completions in advanced and specialist Wynxx models. These figures strengthen our ability to deploy forward deployed engineers and AI native teams, apply the right agentic AI tools for each client's environment and industrialize a new AI native delivery model globally. Let's talk about Wynxx. I presented this slide during our 2025 full year financial results call in March this year. This is the overarching view of the Wynxx ecosystem, which encompasses the current platform and its road map evolution. Wynxx is built on a common enterprise foundation that provides orchestration, governance access to market-leading proprietary and open source AI models and tools as well as strong token consumption management and AI cost control capability. This common foundation is essential for scaling artificial intelligence responsibly across complex enterprise environments.

On top of this foundation, Wynxx addresses 3 areas of client transformation. The first is Wynxx soft engineering, our Agentic AI platform for software development, life cycle, AI modernization and AI application management and support. The second, which we are very proud to launch today is Wynxx Business Process -- through which we apply Agentic AI automation to operational and industry-specific business processes and workflows. As part of our platform road map, we will launch the third pillar, Wynxx Data Intelligence over the coming quarters, which will combine AI orchestration with industry-specific data modules and business intelligence capabilities. These features, functionalities and capabilities are extended through Wynxx Agentic Studio and Wynxx Marcetplace, enabling GFP teams and clients to create, cover and reuse agents assets accelerators at scale.

In the next few slides, I will show how Wynxx soft engineering and Wynxx business process are developing as distinct commercial pillars within the Wynxx Agent AI. We have primarily communicated the adoption of Wynxx soft engineering through the number of clients, geographic reach and the total cumulative influence contract value since inception of the product. The progression shown on this slide demonstrates how rapidly and successfully the platform has scaled up and being deployed across our clients' engagements.

Over the past 12 months, Wynxx soft engineering has scaled from 42 to 113 clients, expanded from 4 to 12 countries and increased the total influencer contract value from EUR 26 million to EUR 144 million since its inception. This represents more than a fivefold increase in total influencer contract value, demonstrating accelerated adoption and strong commercial momentum.

We are now enhancing our current set of KPIs with a year-to-date revenue KPI to precisely measure the commercial delivery performance of Wynxx. In this regard, the actual influenced revenue of Wynxx soft engineering reached EUR 24.4 million in the first half of 2026.

Let me now turn to Wynxx business process. We use a GenAI designed to automate front, middle and back-office business process and workflows. Our solutions combine data perception, reasoning, orchestration and governance to deliver measurable operational outcomes across industries from anti-money laundering, know your customer and credit risk in financial service to visual inspection and condition monitoring in industrial manufacturing environments. The portfolio currently has several assets across industries and business areas, including 4 key accelerators: the Wynxx XL and Access Modernizer, the Wynxx process reengineering, the Wynxx governance operating system and the Wynxx Agentic architecture for business processes. Together, they cover the full journey from modernizing legacy business tools and redesigning process to embedding regulatory governance and implementing scalable multi-idented architectures across business process. A strong case is our agency credit risk platform for European Tier 1 bank. It supports several end-to-end business process and workflows, including credit memo generation, module validation reporting, natural language access to risk data and portfolio shot analysis. In one use case, report generation time was reduced from several hours to approximately 15 to 30 minutes, while improving standardization, auditability and the ability of analysis to focus on higher-value decisions.

In the first half of 2026, Wynxx business processes generated EUR 14.8 million of actual influence revenue. We are particularly pleased to launch this new pillar of Wynxx, which is fully focused on our clients' business domains and extends far beyond software engineering. These results demonstrated our AI-centric strategy is delivering through the strong execution across our AI native IPs, assets and services from Agentic AI software engineering to Agentic AI business process operations with governance, human oversight and measurable business value built in from the start. With that, I will now hand over to Jochen for a detailed review of the financials.

Thank you, Marco. And let's move on and directly go to Slide #11 and look at the H1 financials in one page. So the headline stated sustained growth momentum. We see revenue growth of 5% in the first half year of '26 to EUR 462.6 million. It's 5% growth in current currency and in constant currency. So FX did not play a role for the overall group numbers in the first half. It did play a role on a regional level. I'll come to that a bit later.

The second line, the order backlog is up 18%, strong development versus last year, roughly 5% for this year and a strong buildup for future years, especially our new SAP business in Brazil is now heavily contributing to the order backlog and the contracts are often multiyear contracts. EBIT adjusted is up 8%, reflecting an improved personnel efficiency, of which we mostly invested into AI and new services. We saw lower office expenses and managed corporate service costs and reduced FX losses. Here, the contribution is roughly EUR 700,000 of improvement. EBIT adjusted margin increased to 7.1% versus 6.8% in the last first half year.

On EBT level, we see a growth of 26%, significantly above previous year's numbers. Reasons are, of course, the same as for EBIT adjusted, plus lower capacity adjustments, which only stood at EUR 3.5 million versus EUR 7 million in the first half of 2025.

We had a minor effect from merchant shares. And overall, the EBT margin significantly increased to 5.2%, coming from 4.3% last year. Tax rate stood at 29%, which is also the number we foresee for the full year. Let's move to Slide #12. -- and start on the left side of the slide, looking at our sectors, all 3 sectors of GFT show growth. Let me start at the top. Industry and other clients grew by 14% in the first half year of 2026. Insurance clients, insurance business by 7% and the banking business grew by 3% in the first half of 2026.

Looking at the right side, our client portfolio, we see that the Tier 1 and Tier 2, the 2 biggest groups combined stand for 54% of all our revenue, a bit down versus last year, it was 56% in '25, but overall, well-balanced client portfolio.

Moving forward, Slide #13, take a look at the second quarter. The second quarter came in at EUR 233.04 million in revenues, which is a 6% increase versus previous year's second quarter. Main drivers coming from Brazil, Spain and Colombia. If we compare versus the last quarter versus Q1 of '26, we see a 2% increase in revenue.

Now going to the right side of the slide, profitability. EBIT adjusted came in at EUR 16.5 million in the first half of '26. This is a 10% increase versus Q2 of '25 -- sorry, this is only the quarter, Q2 '26 versus Q2 '25. And this is mainly due to improved personnel efficiency and cost management. When we compare to the previous quarter, we see a 3% increase and the reasoning is the same personnel efficiency and cost management. That said, let's move to Slide 14 and look at our business segments. revenue first. And let me start at the top with the European business segment.

Here, we show a mixed performance with a total decline of 3%. In Germany, we're still experiencing investment caution, while Spain shows strong growth. In this European business, we also include our U.K. organization and U.K. declined year-over-year, but with improving trajectory.

In Q3, we expect U.K. to exceed the revenue of Q3 last year. You probably remember U.K. was challenging us in '25, and we always said we would come back to profitability in January. We will come back to growth in July of '26. This is exactly what we see. The first half is still below the first half of '25. But from Q3 onwards, we will be back to growth. If we eliminate the U.K. from the European numbers, the rest of Europe is plus/minus 0 in revenue evolution in the first half year.

Now let's go to the bottom of the graph and look at Americas and APAC, where we see 14% growth versus previous first half year, mainly driven by Brazil and Colombia. Moving to Slide 15 and now focusing on profitability. On the left side, we see the EBIT adjusted evolution. And again, starting with Europe, Europe is up 29% in EBIT adjusted. Overall, strong improvement, mainly driven by the strong improvements we've seen in the U.K. and Software Solutions in the first half year of 2025, both were strongly negative in this first half year. U.K. is back to profits and Software Solutions is still in investing mode, but at smaller -- looking at Americas and APAC, we see that the EBIT adjusted improved by 15%, mainly driven by the strong demand in Brazil and Colombia. And when we move to the right side, the story doesn't change. It just gets a bit steeper, especially in Europe. EBT improved in Europe by 120%, mainly because now the restructuring costs are included, and they are far lower in '26 versus 2025.

And then on the Americas side, we see an improvement of 5%, so a bit less than on the EBIT adjusted. We have a more stable restructuring cost in that area. But overall, we still show improvement, which again is linked to Brazil and Colombia. Moving to Slide #16, the breakdown by our global regions. And let me start from the bottom with the smallest region, which is APAC and others. Here, we are down 3% after 6 months. small region, 3% is a small number. And we believe APAC and others will show growth for the full year of '26. So I expect them to come back to a positive green arrow for the full year numbers.

U.K. is still down 18% in the first half, as indicated, the trial happened in Q1 and Q2. And from now on, Q3 forward looking, we should see growth. North America is down 7%. But I have to explain the FX effects here. They are written on the right side in the text. We see Canada is down 12% on a euro basis. In local currency, it's 8%. Here, we do have a client with a quite pass-through low-margin business, which we're slowly reducing, which will go on until mid-2027. But at the same time, Canada is getting more profitable.

U.S.A. is stable in euro. It is growing by 7% in U.S. dollars, very important. So here, the FX was against us, but the U.S. growth trajectory is still intact. And now we go to Latin America, where we see 28% growth on a euro basis, Brazil contributing 38% Colombia, 27%. Both numbers would be a bit lower in local currencies. So we have a bit of tailwind in Latin America, and we had headwinds in North America. The of the 2 lead to no FX impact on the group level, but in the different regions, contributions are different.

Continental Europe, last but not least, now here, excluding U.K. at plus/minus 0. We have very strong growth in Spain at 13%, but we have a decline in Germany at minus 12%.

Now moving a bit faster on the next slide, Slide 17, the income statement. I would only want to mention the third line, which is cost of purchased services. They grew by 10%. Let's remember, we acquired Megawork in September last year. The Megawork business is a 95% freelancer business. They are not included in the '25 numbers in H1 '26, Megawork is included, and this fully explains the increase in cost of purchase services that we are now having the Megawork numbers inside GFT Group. At the same time, fourth line personnel expenses only grew by 3%, so it's more slowly than the revenue. If you combine the 2, which we always do in the fourth bullet point on the right as the personnel and purchased services cost ratio, this one is stable at 85% I think that's all I have to mention on this slide.

Let's directly move to the cash flows on Slide 18, cash flow statement. We started the year with EUR 55 million in net cash on the very left of the slide. And now the numbers for the first half. Operating cash flow was minus EUR 1 million, which is an improvement versus last year, as you see in the bullet points on the right. Last year, we stood at minus EUR 9 million. This is explained by the higher net income and working capital effects.

Why is operating cash flow negative after 6 months? Well, it's the same seasonality as we have every year. A lot of our revenue is wrapped up in contract assets in fixed price projects with our clients, which will get paid somewhere in the second half of the year. And then we will come back to a normal cash flow by the end of the year.

Looking at investing activities, small outflows of EUR 2.1 million and financing activities is dominated by our dividend payment of nearly EUR 13 million and our lease payments for our offices. Now if you add up the free cash flow, which is the last bullet point on the right, we see that the free cash flow adjusted improved to minus EUR 8.3 million after EUR 17.3 million a year ago.

In a nutshell, cash flow in first half year is absolutely in line with our plans. Slide #19, our balance sheet, not much to comment here. The balance sheet total reduced a bit to EUR 627.5 million. And maybe mention on the top right, we see the equity ratio, which improved by 5 points, driven by good net income and positive currency translation effects, which only materialized in the equity ratio. So good news from the equity side.

Now this brings me to Slide #20, our people slide, and let's start on the left of this slide, employee numbers at the end of June stood at 11,805. This is mostly flat versus the beginning of the year '26, and it's a 3% growth versus June last year. Growth happened in Colombia and Spain with some declines in Mexico, Canada and Germany. The number of external contractors reduced.

And here, we are comparing -- this is not the bullet point on the very left bottom of the slide. We're comparing to the end of last year '25, which was 1,445 and already included Megawork. And now we stand at 1,375, still including Megawork, which means the classic GFT business used less freelancers in the first half of '26.

Moving towards the middle of the slide, you see that utilization rate increased to 92.8%. This is an improvement of 0.6% versus last year's quarter and the previous quarter, mainly driven by Brazil and Colombia. The efficiencies we gained would usually show up in profitability, but we have invested our additional margins on additional business development initiatives to strengthen our overall positioning, especially on AI and banking transformation. Moving to the right side, attrition. Attrition stands at 10.4%. It reduced versus last quarter by 0.8% versus last year by nearly 2 percentage points, which is quite a big impact. We see this happening mostly in Europe, where there is not so much business dynamic and therefore, people don't change jobs easily. But we also saw a reduction in Latin America, driving down this number to 10.4% of attrition. And my last slide, additional performance indicators, the milestones we always name are all unchanged. Our free cash flow for the year is expected to be at roughly EUR 40 million. Our net debt versus EBITDA ratio is expected to be at 0.2x, and our utilization will continue to be in the area of 92% for the rest of the year.

Back to you, Marc. Thank you very much, Jochen. Let me summarize the key message for today. We delivered a solid first half of 2026 with 5% revenue growth and a strong increase in EBT while confirming our full year guidance. This reflects disciplined execution of our AI-centric strategy and continued progress in strengthening the quality of our earnings. Momentum remained strong in our key markets, particularly Brazil, Colombia, Switzerland and Spain, and we achieved growth across all business sectors.

Our AI native delivery excellence and strong industry domain expertise are also translating into major engagements across next-generation core banking, data and cloud transformation as well as anti-money laundering, credit risk, digital onboarding and know your customer. Our AI-centric strategy is increasingly visible in our commercial performance, -- the AI modernization offering is gaining strong traction, confirming that our clients are moving beyond experimentation and committing to AI-powered legacy and application modernization programs.

Wynxx has been successfully scaling up across our clients and expanding from software engineering to business process, creating measurable revenue impact for our AI-centric growth strategy. This demonstrates that our Identity AI platform is not only improving how AI native software is engineered and delivered for large-scale and regulated enterprise, but is also expanding to the transformation of mission-critical business and operational processes.

To conclude, we are executing our AI-Centric 5-Year Strategy with constancy and discipline. We are reinforcing GFT's position as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger, combining engineering excellence, deep industry and domain expertise and AI native assets and capabilities in the areas where clients need them most. Thank you very much. Now Jochen and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Well, thank you very much, Marco. Thank you very much, Jochen, for your remarks. And as Marco already stated, we are now happy to take your questions. [Operator Instructions] We have already some in queue. And the first question comes from Simon Keller Sauer, NuWays, sorry.

Questions. I'll start with the first 3 and then hop back into the queue. Firstly, where do you see the market cycle right now for bank-related IT services? Do you see there any improvement, generally speaking? And then on the order backlog, I noticed that it did develop strongly. So my question is, I mean, you mentioned the SAP projects, but beyond them, did these 6 next-gen core banking projects that you mentioned have any positive or significant contribution to this? And if so, how much? And thirdly, then also a technical question within the adjustments that you highlighted, M&A effects have increased from Q1 to Q2. And I was wondering what's the reason? Does that maybe mean that a transaction is pending right now?

I'll pick up the last question first. No, it does not mean an acquisition is pending. There is no main reason. I assume the main impact is FX because the majority of our M&A effects are in South America, especially with the Megawork acquisition, also including an earn-out, the Brazilian real strengthening and is now visible simply on a euro level. It looks a bit bigger than it would have a quarter or 2 quarters ago. Same for Colombia, Sophos acquisition. Maybe I don't know if you've seen it. They have elected a very conservative group President and the currency improved by nearly 10% over the last 2 months or 3 months. Therefore, these 2 effects are the main drivers for M&A, nothing else.

And on the order book, yes, you're right. Of course, the core banking projects take part in that. They support it. They are not the majority. As we said, we have invested into business development on the AI and banking transformation side. All these initiatives are now showing up also in order book for the coming years. So yes, those 6 core banking, but not alone is SAP core banking and other initiatives also around les supporting this strong order book.

And to complement the first question, what's the sentiment in the banking sector, if it's improving or not. So our understanding is, it is improving. So we see a better sentiment on our financial service clients, which is very good and especially based on our AI modernization offering. which is an area that we grew considerably, and we also see several opportunities in our pipeline. Did that answer your question?

Yes, it did. Okay.

And sorry for mixing up the company. So our next question, now we're coming to Kepler Cheuvreux and Mr. Sven should, you should now be on stage.

Can you hear me or no?

Now we hear you.

The first one is if you can still confirm that the U.K. business will see a revenue inflection in Q3? The second question would be if you think that it is possible or let's say, more likely than unlikely that the second half of the year, we will see a better cushion from FX than in the first half of the year? And my third question would be on attrition. Do you believe that the one reason why attrition is lower is similar to the reason why multiples in the IT and software sector have come down, which is due to the fears of AI disruption?

Let me pick up your FX question first. Yes, I think that assumption is correct. The first half still showed U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar challenges. But last year, the dollar and the Canadian dollar then settled more or less on the level we are at today. So from that, those 2 currencies, we should not see further impact in the second half and the Brazilian real or the break [Audio Gap] GFT.

And this was closer to nearly nothing a year ago. So that is, of course, included in all our guidance, but tokens are becoming part of the game, and it has to be part of the pricing as well, and we're working on that.

And we have a special team and a special initiative internally at GFT on a global perspective to work on the management and understanding of the evolution of the token consumption and the utilization of all the AI tools that we utilize. We also created an engine to manage the to consumption that we are making it available at Wynxx Foundation in order to even bring that to our clients.

And we have a special team on a global level. It's called AI native delivery champions, a team of 35 delivery leaders and technology leaders that are all of them working integrated on a global perspective in order to how we are going to manage, control and optimize the utilization of the tokens and the most important, how to measure and link the utilization of tokens with the benefits that we are bringing to our clients. which is for us very key. And our intention is also to bring that as KPIs to our clients because once we prove the utilization of tokens and the improvements on the throughput on the value creation of our clients and then we have a differentiation.

Perfect. Sounds good. And maybe a quick last one, again, on sentiment, similar to my colleague. Recently, there were discussions that IT budgets are shifting towards hardware with all the price increases. Do you see that coming at the expense of IT services or transformation projects?

As I mentioned on the other question, our reading is that we have a positive sentiment on the demand of our financial service clients, which is positive. And I think one key offering is AI modernization that is getting a lot of traction. And I see that's clear commodity business will be under pressure and keep going under pressure much commodity services. But high value-added services with a strong deployment of AI, we see a good sentiment at this point of time. And obviously, we are positioning on the segment.

We have another question from Simon Keller NuWays.

Perfect. Firstly, in what percent of projects do you utilize AI currently? And also in light of your win influence contract value KPI, why do you think this is the right measure to look at for monitoring AI utilization as well? The second question is then on the sales impact of Megaworks, either in Q2 or H1. And lastly, also with the growth outlook that you have, I recall that earlier this year, you said that H2 should see a pickup in growth. Do you still think that is the case? And if so, what's your visibility here in terms of discussions also with your clients? And how does that fit towards the current guidance that you have outstanding?

I'll start with the easy ones, right? So sales impact Megaworks, that's really easy. Contribution in the first half year was EUR 8.3 million to our total revenues. Growth outlook for the second half, I think we will see a quite strong Q3 as of today. So growth should pick up versus Q2 versus last year's second quarter, Q3 versus Q3 should look even better. And then the real question for the second half year will be Q4, which is a bit early to call.

Regarding your question about AI deployments across our projects and clients and also Wynxx KPIs, right? So let me start with the Wynxx KPIs. We've been in a quite, let's say, improving evolution with the adoption of Wynxx. And we created a set of KPIs, a detailed KPIs, drill down KPIs in order to measure the year-to-date revenue that we have with Wynxx, in order to measure the order book that we have in order to measure the weighted pipeline that we have - weighted pipeline, everything from the systems that we have in the company, okay? So that's a natural evolution of the products and the tail of KPIs. And this is simply to bring more control and that we can measure the results of that. Very happy with that development.

And regarding the overarch deployment, overall implementation of AI technology across the teams. This is quite interesting topic. We concluded a complete survey of all our projects that we have across the globe. We have more than 2,500 projects active right now. And we completed a survey of the utilization of all the AI tools that we are using from internally and the client tools. and Wynxx and the combination of that. So we have it 100% method, and we know today in details what's the percentage of our projects that we have that we are using digital Copilots, what's the percentage of the projects that we have using Anthropic Claude that we are using Gemini, Open AI that we are naturally using Wynxx. And we are now getting even deeper to understand the gross margin one of each of those group of projects and understand them and what is, let's say, the ones that are bring let's say, better contribution.

So we have that, say, understanding in full detail and our plan is to bring that over the next calls. And I would like to bring in details all that [indiscernible], which I think that can also be translated as a competitive advantage in front of our clients because to come to go in front of our clients and say and show that we have all that -- all those KPIs, that is definitely what our clients are looking for right now.

So Simon, be patient for Q3, please.

All right, I will be.

[Operator Instructions] This seems not to be the case. So thank you very much. As there are no further questions, we will bring today's call to a close. Thank you all for your time, your questions and your continued interest in GFT. Should you have any follow-up questions, please do not hesitate to contact the IR team as usual. We wish you a pleasant day and look forward to speaking with many of you again over the coming weeks and months. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's conference call following the publication of GFT's Financial Results for the First Quarter 2026. My name is Andreas Herzog, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations and CSR Compliance at GFT. Joining me on the call today are our Global CEO, Marco Santos; and our CFO and Deputy CEO, Dr. Jochen Ruetz. Marco will start with an overview of the key developments, highlights for the first 3 months, followed by Jochen, who will walk you through the financials in more detail. Marco then will conclude the presentation with some key strategic takeaways. Afterwards, we will be happy to answer your questions. Already a [ spoiler ], to do so, you simply need to raise your virtual hand that you should find at the bottom of the presentation and I will come back to that later. As always, the full presentation materials are available for download on our website and last housekeeping remark. Please be reminded that this conference is being recorded.

And with that, I would like to hand over to you, Marc.

Thank you, Andreas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me start with our highlights for the first quarter and our full year guidance. We delivered a solid start of the year with profitable growth and improved margins, in line with our full year guidance. Our focus remains clear, driving profitable growth by scaling our AI-centric 5-year strategy and transforming GFT operational model into a global AI native powerhouse.

In the first quarter, we achieved EUR 230 million in revenue, representing 5% of growth in constant currency. At the same time, we improved profitability with adjusted EBT margin increasing from 6.8% to 7% and a strong increase of EBT margin from 4.5% to 5.2%. Those results demonstrate that our AI-centric strategy is contributing into measurable financial results with improving earnings, quality driven by disciplined execution of our strategic initiatives and a shift towards high value-added services and offerings.

Our main growth market showed strong momentum, Brazil with 33%, Colombia with 20% and Spain with 9% revenue expansion. We recorded growth across all sectors with industry-leading with strong 15% of expansion. Overall, this first quarter shows that we have been successfully executing our AI 5-year strategy with discipline. The first 3 months confirm improving margins, stable growth and operational control. We, therefore, confirm our full year guidance of EUR 930 million in revenue, 7.6% EBT adjusted and 6% EBT margin.

Let me now turn to the strategy execution. Okay. Right slide. Let me turn to the strategy execution. Just a second, I think that we are moving the slides. Yes. Okay. So we are on Slide 8 -- Slide 5. We continue to make tangible progress on our AI-centric 5-year strategy, driving measurable impact across our key clients, our next-generation technology brand and positioning, our high value-added offering portfolio and artificial intelligence across the board. First, I would like to highlight that GFT U.K. increased its EBT margin significantly in the first quarter compared to the previous year. This is a direct proof that the measures we have implemented are taking effect, including new leadership governance model and closer integration with GFT's global and regional operations.

Second, we continue to win and expand strategic client engagements. Through our recent company acquisition, Megawork, we secured a new major SAP implementation contract with a Tier 1 banking group in Brazil with contract value of approximately EUR 18 million, further strengthening our position in high value-added and SAP transformation programs. This engagement highlights the synergies created through the Megawork acquisition, combining deep SAP expertise with GFT's proven track record in delivering large-scale transformation programs to highly regulated sectors.

Third, we continue to scale up Wynxx, our Agentic AI orchestration platform, which is now active in 11 countries and serves 105 clients. The total inflated contract value exceeded EUR 104 million, representing 48% growth compared to Q4 compared, powered and leveraged mainly by Anthropic Claude, Gemini and OpenAI large language models. This demonstrates that our AI-centric strategy is delivering financial results with sustained growth and increasing commercial traction driven by AI in large-scale enterprise software development and legacy modernization programs.

At the same time, we are expanding a strategic Agentic AI platform for credit risk operations for a Tier 1 bank in Europe. This contract expansion reflects client trust and GFT differentiation in Agentic AI business offerings. We have also committed to significantly scaling our AI capabilities with an accelerated and strong training program across GFT. In conjunction with the expansion of our AI native software development center of excellence, especially around Anthropic Claude and GitHub Copilot. This stems the foundation of our AI native operating model and enable us to industrialize AI native enterprise software engineering across clients and markets.

And finally, our next-generation technology brand and positioning strategic initiative continues to produce global recognition in the market. We are proud to have been awarded with 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year in Cloud modernization. This is an important recognition from one of the world's leading hyperscalers and confirms the strength of our cloud and AI modernization capabilities, offering differentiation leveraged by our Wynxx legacy transformer intellectual property. Moreover, we are not limited to one single cloud platform. GFT is a multi-cloud and cloud agnostic partner with a mission to help our clients select, design and implement the best cloud architecture for their needs, including sovereign cloud and data requirements in Germany and whole Europe.

As the sovereignty topic is becoming a strategic priority across the board, and especially in highly regulated industries, GFT is well positioned to help clients modernize mission-critical environments with leading cloud technologies, while guaranteeing security privacy and control over data modules and regulatory obligations. Taken together, these highlights show that our strategic initiatives are delivering, and we are transforming GFT into an AI-centric digital transformation company, reinforcing our next-generation technology brands, expanding through targeted M&A in high value-added SaaS and ICVs and improving our high value-added SaaS offerings and differentiation.

With that, I will now hand over to Jochen for a detailed review of the financials.

Thanks, Marco. And let's directly move forward all the way to Slide #7. Before we dig into the details, let me talk about our revised segment reporting. In our internal management, we have moved the responsibility for the GFT U.K. under our Group Executive Board member, Manuel Lavin. Manuel now oversees all European entities of GFT. Before moving to U.K., he was focused on Continental Europe. Now he focuses on all of Europe. This leads to a reclassification of our business segments. We're moving the U.K. out of the former Americas, U.K. and APAC segment and into the former Continental Europe segment, so that the new business segments are called Americas and APAC and the second is called Europe. Next slide a bit more.

Our prior year data has been restated. So however you see data for Q1 '25, we're showing U.K. under Europe now. Detailed disclosures are in the backup material. And that said, let's go to Slide #8 and look at the growth rate and the profitability margins in detail. Marco already mentioned solid revenue growth of 3% in euros and 5% in constant currencies to EUR 229.5 million. The order book has benefited from the SAP deal that Marco just mentioned, but overall order book was good at the end of Q1 '26. It's up 11% versus a year ago. EBIT adjusted is up 7%, reflecting improved personnel efficiencies, but at the same time, ongoing strong AI and sales investments, we saw lower office lease expenses, something we focus on in our profitability engineering. We saw reduced FX losses, and this overall led to an EBIT adjusted margin of 7.0%.

The EBT, the earnings before tax grew by 20% versus Q1 of last year. Main drivers on top of the EBIT adjusted reasoning is lower capacity adjustments, only EUR 2.5 million and positive share price effect. The EBT margin increased to 5.2%. Tax rate, let's mention it here, stood at 29%, pretty much the same as last year. And this is the tax rate we are expecting for all of 2026.

Let's move to Slide #9, driving scale growth across all sectors. On the left side, let me look at the sectors first. Marco mentioned already the 15% growth in our sector industry and others. We saw 6% growth in our insurance business, and we saw 1% growth in our banking business. The banking business is impacted by the U.K. reduction. I will come to that in a second again. If the U.K. would be eliminated, we would be growing banking by 4%.

On the right side, we see our client portfolio in our Tier 1s and the clients above EUR 25 million, we do see a reduction to 26%. We had 2 of our biggest clients have global CIO changes. And this usually leads to some cost containment mode for at least 2 quarters. So probably lasting until the end of Q2, and we saw that in our revenue numbers of Q1, and it is especially on the back of our Tier 1 clients. All other client groups increased by 1 percentage point.

This brings us to Slide #10, comparing over the quarters. And let's start on the left side with the revenue changes. Revenue growth already mentioned, 3% in euros, 5% in constant currencies, mainly driven by Brazil, Spain and Colombia. When we compare quarter-over-quarter with Q4 of last year, we do see a small reduction mainly due to seasonality effects. Let me explain the seasonality effects briefly. Two reasons. First, our clients usually have 12 months budgets following calendar years. And often Q1 is the budget that is not used by 1/4 of the year, especially if there is some macro challenges like the Iran war at the moment. So that is seasonality number one.

And number two, we do 1/3 of our total revenues in South America. January, February are the summer holiday months in South America as Europeans tend to forget. So our July, August in South America is January, February. Therefore, revenues and billable days in Brazil, Colombia are the lowest of the year in the first quarter. And that is the second seasonality effect I wanted to mention.

On the right side, EBIT adjusted comparing to last year, we were up 7%, mainly driven by personnel efficiencies and some cost management items. Margin increased to 7%. When we compare to Q4, well, that's kind of an unfair comparison, Q4 is always the best quarter of the GFT year with all fixed prices coming to an end. Q1 has the seasonality effects, therefore, hard to compare Q1 to Q4.

Let's move to Slide #11 and look at the segment analysis for revenue first. Let's start at the top. Europe shows a reduction of 4% when it comes to revenue to EUR 112 million and particularly noticeable in Germany, where we're down 10% versus last year. One of those CIO changes I referred to happened with a big German client. But at the same time, Spain is up 9%. U.K. still in decline, and we talked about this since 9 months that the U.K. business will go through the lowest revenues of its transition in Q1 and Q2 2026. So this is what's currently happening. The U.K. is EUR 5 million behind previous year's numbers. If we would exclude the U.K. from Europe, the rest of Europe is plus/minus 0.

Now let's look at Americas and APAC. We saw a strong development on the revenue side, 12% growth, 15% in constant currencies, mainly driven by our organizations in Brazil and Colombia. Again, for sure, seasonal effects, but they are the same seasonal effects in Q1 this year and last year. So, the growth is absolutely valid.

Let's move forward, Slide #12. This time, we are looking at the profitability, EBIT adjusted on the left, EBT on the right. Let's focus on Europe first. So the main improvements for Europe are in the U.K. and in Software Solutions. The 2 pain points we reported about last year, the U.K. is back to a mid-single-digit EBT, EBIT adjusted margin. So they come back as we had anticipated. Revenue will follow probably growth coming in the second half versus the previous year. On the profitability side, we are already ahead of 2025. So, the improvement in Europe is mostly EUR 3 million allocated to U.K. and Software Solutions, but we also saw better profits in Germany, Italy and Spain.

When looking at Americas, lower profitability in Q1 is burdened by the already mentioned seasonal effect of the summer holidays, which is the same in every Q1 '25 or '26, but it leads to the lowest EBIT adjusted contribution of the year from that region every year. Now when comparing these 2 years, explicitly, we see that the reduction in the segment relates to our Mexican organization, where one of those clients reduced due to a CIO change on a global level. And in Mexico, it hit us harder. Therefore, the reduction in Latin America or in the Americas, APAC region is mostly related to our Mexican organization. This is true for EBIT adjusted and EBT. We believe Mexico will normalize in the second half of 2026.

Now going forward, Slide #13, breakdown of growth by regions. And now we're still showing U.K. separately just to give you a bit more flavor of where revenue growth is coming from. So we keep Continental Europe, which is the biggest region we're showing on this slide, down 1%, mainly due to Germany, down 10%, Spain growing by 9%. It's kind of offsetting to only minus 1%. Latin America is up 25% with strong growth in Brazil, 33% and Colombia with a 20% growth. North America down 8% and most burdened by FX in this quarter. The Canadian business is down 12% on a euro basis or 5% in local currency. At the same time, the U.S. is down 1% on euro basis, which is an 8% growth in U.S. dollars.

Total of the combined is a minus 8% on euro basis. U.K. down 17%. I already mentioned, roughly EUR 5 million. The trial is in Q1 and Q2, and then we see growth again. But the pipeline is heavily changing from a more onshore business in 2025 to the already often mentioned more smart shore oriented business in 2026. And last but not least, APAC and others growing by 4% mainly in the Emirates and Thailand. Yes, we do have a client in the Emirates in Dubai, who has been working continuously throughout the whole board. There was never stopped with that project.

This leads to Slide #14, income statement. Let me do this quite briefly, mentioned cost of purchase services up 6%. Main reason here is that our newly acquired Megawork organization with GFT in September is mostly working with freelancers and therefore, the cost of purchase services have grown stronger than the overall revenue fully linked to Megawork. And at the same time, our personnel expenses are only growing by 2% and now let me be a bit precise because we're using rounded numbers here. Revenue growth is not 3.0, it's 3.4% and personnel expense growth is 1.7%. So revenue grew double the speed of our personnel cost expenses. And all this leads to, and we always commented on the right side, it's in the fourth bullet point, an improved personnel and purchase services cost ratio, which now improved to 84.6%. That said, I think the other part of the slide is already mentioned.

Let me move to Slide #15, cash flow statement. We started the year at EUR 55.2 million in net debt. In the first quarter, we have added operating cash flow of plus EUR 4.4 million comparing to minus EUR 4.3 million in Q1 last year. So a far better working capital position than 12 months ago as already expected. We have small cash outflow for investing activities. Then we have paid back debt in our cash flow from financing activities, leading to an overall net cash of EUR 53.7 million negative. The free cash flow adjusted stood at roughly EUR 1 million, which is again roughly EUR 9 million improved versus last year.

Slide #16, very shortly, the balance sheet, no major effects. We reduced the balance sheet total because we paid back some of our loans, which then led to an equity ratio increase by 5%, mostly because of the balance sheet reduction. But on top, currency helped us here as well. Translation effect improved equity by 2 percentage points.

Let's move to Slide #17, the people slide on the left, beginning with employees. We've reduced by roughly 130 FTEs in the first quarter versus the end of 2025. This reduction took place mostly in Mexico, where we indeed adjusted the team size. I already mentioned that was the most challenging market in the first quarter. Besides that, we had small reductions in Canada and Brazil, while at the same time growing in Spain, Poland and the U.S. The external contractor number went down a bit to 1,400. Overall, this number is up versus previous year 12 months ago because Megawork, as I stated, mostly uses freelancers for their SAP implementation business in Brazil.

Utilization, the middle block of the slide, at a quite high rate, 92.2% versus 91.6% a year ago. We're fine with this number, and we believe it will stay above the 92% for the rest of the year. On the right side, the attrition reduced by 1 point, which is quite a lot. We saw a major reduction in our European markets, Germany, Poland and Italy. And on top, we saw a reduction in Colombia, leading to this reduced attrition.

This brings me to my last slide, Slide 18, the additional performance indicators. We're expecting a free cash flow adjusted, we only adjust for M&A effects of EUR 40 million higher than last year and net debt of 0.2x EBITDA and utilization of 92%, all 3 KPIs unchanged to our guidance from March of this year.

And with that, back to you, Marc.

Thank you, Jochen. Let me conclude with a few key message. First, we delivered a solid start to 2026 with profitable growth, improved margins and increased EBT, confirming our full year guidance. Second, we are seeing growth across all sectors and strong momentum in key markets, particularly in Brazil, Colombia and Spain. The major SAP implementation contracts secured through the Megawork acquisition is a clear proof point of our M&A integration capabilities and our ability to scale high value-added transformation products.

Third, our AI-centric strategy is translating into tangible commercial traction, means continues to scale as a core enabler of large-scale software development and complex legacy modernization. AI modernization is gaining strategic relevance and our AI native software engineering services are becoming increasingly important for client transformation programs. Importantly, our disciplined execution is improving the quality of our revenue and profitability with strong EBT margin improvement in the U.K. and the continued focus on efficiency and delivery regards.

In short, we are delivering on our strategy and building momentum. The IT market is shifting quickly. Companies are moving beyond AI experimentation and are integrating AI systemically into large-scale modernization programs. This is exactly where GFT is positioned at the intersection of AI modernization and highly regulated industries, combining technological excellence, deep industry expertise and AI native delivery capabilities.

Thank you very much. Now Jochen and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Thank you very much, Marco and Jochen, for sharing the details of the first quarter and the further view into 2026. Ladies and gentlemen, Marco has already invited you to ask your questions. [Operator Instructions] I see we have already some in the queue. The first one -- first questions we will get from Simon Keller.

I have a couple. Starting with the CIO changes that you mentioned at Tier 1 clients. Do you think they could risk or these could risk that they move more into in-house delivery? Secondly, on Wynxx, you have mentioned that there is EUR 104 million in contract value that was influenced. How can we understand this number? Does it mean that EUR 104 million of revenues in Q1 were influenced by Wynxx? Or does it relate to order backlog? Can you elaborate a bit more please? And then on order backlog, it developed really strongly also when excluding the SAP contract. What you implement your view on this? Is it, for example, driven by the improving market? Or is it based because of longer-dated contracts that you have signed? And my last question is on attrition, which we saw is declining marginally. What's your read on this? Because to my understanding, historically, declining attrition was rather accompanied by a declining market sentiment, wasn't it? Yes, a couple of questions, but happy to follow up if there's anything that I need to repeat.

Thank you very much for the question. So, for the first question, if the CIOs on those global organizations change is going to accelerate in-house, right, internalization. We don't see that acceleration of internalization. I think internalization of resources are there in the industry. So it's been there for years. And we have been managing that process. We managed that last year and in previous years. And I think that I believe that now that a combination of AI, Agentic transformation and internalization and also really capability to deliver enterprise software with AI for highly regulated companies. I think that combination, that intersection, I think that is companies are exploring and designing their way to banks and financial services organizations. And again, as I concluded, I think that we are in the intersection of that, and we can produce value. We can do things that our clients cannot do. And that's the differentiation. That specification that we want to go forward. And that is going to, say, differentiate ourselves into the Agentic transformation and also internalization that I believe that we always have internalization.

So okay, in a nutshell answer your question, no, I do not see a acceleration in internalization process, sorry to be too much long on the answer. I mean it's a topic that we are on top. The second question is the EUR 104 million of contract revenue. So that's the contract -- the total contract revenue that we sold with project and services that we utilize Wynxx to the next that utilize Wynxx as AI agentic AI platform, and we brought competitive advantage. We won those deals because the competitive advantage of Wynxx, otherwise, we would have lost it. So that's the whole revenue that we closed with projects and services with Wynxx. And then specifically on the Q1 number, we grew in terms of contracts sold with Wynxx in Q1 as the number that I mentioned to you is EUR 104 million, the number to be precise, yes? What is it, sorry, which is, I'm going to have, sorry, struck on please. I found it, sorry, 48% in Q1. I just wanted to be precise on the number. So that was exactly the growth for Q1 this quarter of the first quarter 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025.

Picking up the other 2 questions, order backlog, yes, indeed, 11% is good. Even taking out the SAP deal. We are learning that the SAP projects we are gaining in Brazil are more longer term, but the volume is not driving the overall order book number of GFT. So most of the improvement is simply a good order book for 2026 for example. Nothing more than that. The one that is standing out is the Tier 1 SAP implementation at the Brazilian bank Marco mentioned, the rest is mostly 2026 is well balanced on the order book.

Attrition, yes, you're right. It's always laughing and a crying eye when attrition is moving down. Well, first of all, I need to hire less people, replace less people by hiring somebody new if attrition reduces. But at the same time, if people stop moving, move less between companies, it's mostly an indicator that the market is not moving very fast. In other words, probably not growing very fast in that moment in time. And that is especially true for the European attrition reduction. I believe in Colombia, it's more a normalization. We are now 2 years into our Colombian entity. We now have the team, the skills, the levels that we want, and that's why it has stabilized somewhat. So there's a mix of these 2 elements for the attrition. I hope we answered all your questions?

Yes, thanks you very much and well done and best of luck for the reminder of the year.

The next question we will have from Wolfgang Specht, Berenberg. Just a second.

And congrats from my end as well. I have a follow-up on the order book. Is there for sure an effect from Megawork included? So like-for-like, the Q1 last year did not have any -- let's say, Megawork was not consolidated yet. So we have a move from Megawork. Is that right?

Exactly right. Exactly right.

And then the duration of the order book, is this usual, let's say, 6 to 9 months? Or are there also parts moving definitely into 2027? That would be interesting. So the duration is somewhat longer than it used to be.

Let me take the answer directly. Yes, the duration is a bit longer because of the SAP deal. So, the whole Megawork business is a bit longer order book than classic GFT. But that we don't get too detailed about it because it is anyway a small entity. So basically, the good order book indicates we have a good pipeline and safe business for the year 2026.

Okay. And let's say, the AI angle of the order book has improved as we can calculate that, let's say, the EUR 104 million means that 45% of your current business has at least some parts of AI with the inclusion of Wynxx?

That is right. And the order book that is Wynxx related follows the same logic as GFT. It's mostly 6 to 9 months that we can look forward.

Okay. And then 2 other markets, U.K. and Canada. So U.K., you're more or less guiding us for -- with some caution to Q2, but saying that the turnaround will be visible in half year 2. So that means Q3 could still be, let's say, a rather weak development in the U.K.

Exactly. As I said, you're right. I think we've been saying this indeed all of last year, right, that we have to turn the pipeline from a very onshore to a smart shore pipeline. This is a change. And in this time period, we will see the trough of the revenue. And this will happen in Q1 and Q2. In Q3, we already see higher revenues in '26 than we were able to show in '25. So the changed pipeline will already improve revenues in the second half.

Okay. And then on Canada, minus 12%, looks somewhat harsh. I remember some important insurance businesses. Is it the fact that some of the important deals run out? Or why is the downturn in Canada also visible now?

No. Actually, we -- thanks for the question. So actually, we have one big client in Canada that we have -- that's, I would say, old clients. And it's government clients. It's an insurance, okay, related to insurance. And they -- and we have a contract there that is a contract that is quite related to resource allocation agency, okay? So in terms of profitability, very low, very low and volume very high. And this contract has been reducing. And we were able, by the way, last week, we had a quite successful win within that client on a different contract, smaller in terms of volume, but in terms of margin, much better because that is related to Guidewire, okay? So in terms of margin, much, much better, but in terms of revenue lower. So I think that -- and we were planning that. So it's part of our budget and planning for 2026. So that was not something that caught us out of the plan. And now we are in a journey to, let's say, to transform, right, very low margin agency staff all business into a more high value-added services that we expect to be much more profitable.

And I remember there were some initiatives to also bring banking solutions to Canada. Have you made progress into this direction?

Yes. We have also quite strategic information. We won a small services an implementation of a next-generation core bank into one of the digital banks of one of the largest banks. I cannot name it, right? We do not have the approval to name it, one of the large banks in Canada. They have a digital bank unit and we were able to start a, it's a small step, implementation of the business, core banking there. And we are now under discussions in order to expand it and then create MSA with this large bank in Canada. If you really make this one thing that can really drive a major growth for us on midterm.

Well, thank you very much for your question, Wolfgang. The next question we will have from Sven Sauer, Kepler Cheuvreux.

Also I have 2. The first one would be on Germany. I was wondering why revenues were down, but profits went up. What is the reason for this mix? And the second question would be, I was looking at an old presentation from a few years ago, and I remember that GFT used to provide a revenue split by the type of products like smart technologies, digital transformation and platform services. And I understand that you don't do that anymore today. But if we would extrapolate this mix to what the business looks like today, we know that smart technologies with AI is growing a lot. And I would appreciate it if we could get some color on what the other -- how the growth is in the other businesses like cloud and Guidewire and platform services. I assume SAP is also growing right now. Yes, it would be great if we could get some color on that.

Let me start with Germany. So yes, revenue down. As I said, it's one of those 2 CIO changes impacting it. Germany was not suffering so much on the profitability side from that revenue because it was heavily delivered March 1. And then the impact is shared between the smart flow country in this case, Spain and Germany. And at the same time, we've done a lot of homework on the efficiency and profitability side in 2025, also in Germany, Manuel Lavin is in charge of Germany since last year and [indiscernible] also taken over U.K. And in Germany, we saw the positive impact on the cost base already in Q1 this year, weaker revenue, but somewhat better profits. Therefore, good evolution. Now we want to have both revenue growth and tax. And now over to Marco with your history question from our GFT presentation.

Thank you for that one. We -- so first, why we are not bringing those numbers because information technology, let's say, has been changing, right, and has been moving very fast. And things are moving fast. And in the past, we had those, let's say, lines of items were related to offerings, which were very relevant and strategic for us all the time and offerings are something that, again, that is quite agile right now in terms of -- with all the transformation that we see. And then what we decided to rearchitect our services and our offerings with the key ones that we project over the next years. And that's why as we are reengineering, rearchitecturing these lines of offerings and business, then we decided obviously not to reinvest, okay? But I can give you some numbers. So we -- and also give some elements that are for sure are going to be -- are going to prevail or going to be part of our future report, which is naturally cloud. So that cloud is a major element for us still.

And that combined with cloud modernization with all the new offerings that we are bringing. And we have it break down by even the hyperscalers, AWS, Google and Azure, okay? And we also have a line item, which is the Wynxx line time, specifically the influence have offering AI. We also have the AI data. And we are going to bring some ISCVs. We're going to bring in future Guidewire and SAP -- naturally because of the acquisition of Megawork and most probably Salesforce that we want to highlight, okay?

So, we are architecting that information. And then we are going to communicate that accordingly on the right time when you have that definition.

Our next question will come from Knud Hinkel, Pareto Securities.

I have 3 questions. First of all, [indiscernible] compared to last year...

I'm sorry, Knud, a short notice, you are very hard to understand, your line is very [indiscernible]. Knud, can you hear us? No, no, we don't you. Are you still there? Maybe Sven has another question and we will have first. So, currently, we don't seem to have a connection to Knud Hinkel, right? He is not talking, which leads to the other question. If there are more questions, please raise your hand. So unfortunately, it seems we still cannot hear you. [Operator Instructions] We can ask Knud's questions. Absolutely. We will answer your question offline, just come back after the call. And with that, thank you very much for your time today and for all your questions, sorry for that. We will answer them separately. So, it seems that there are no more questions left at the moment. In case of further questions following that call, please don't hesitate to contact the IR team. We remain at your disposal, of course.

And with that, I would like to conclude today's conference call. Have a good day. Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Yes. Hello, and welcome to today's call for GFT Technologies 2025 Preliminary Results. My name is Philip, and I will be your host today. On the company side, we have presenting Mr. Santos, who is the Global CEO; and Mr. Ruetz, who is CFO and Deputy CEO at GFT. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And with that, I hand over the word to Head of Investor Relations, Andreas Herzog. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Philip. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's conference call and our preliminary results for 2025 financial year. My name is Andreas Herzog and I'm Head of Investor Relations and CSR Compliance at GFT. Joining me on the call today is our Global CEO, Marco Santos; and our CFO and Deputy CEO, Dr. Jochen Ruetz. Marco will begin with an overview of our key developments and highlights of the year, sharing also some light on our successful path in AI followed by Jochen, who will walk you through the 2025 financials in more detail. Marco will then conclude with our outlook for 2026 and some key strategic takeaways. The full presentation materials are available as usual on our website. And with that, I will hand over to you, Marco.

Thank you, Andreas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me start with a clear and simple statement. In 2025, we delivered and exceeded our current guidance. This performance is particularly significant when we consider the broader market environment. The technology industry is going through an accelerated and continuous process of funding shifts. Artificial intelligence is accelerating software development, change in productivity dynamics and reshaping how clients approach technology modernization. Given my academic background in computer science, I could not be more excited to say the resulting opportunities as Global CEO of GFT Technologies.

We anticipated the fundamental change early on and crafted our AI-centric 5-year strategy to be a driver of this transformation. Therefore, we are not changing direction. We are accelerating execution. Next slide, please. 2025 was defined by disciplined execution and tangible progress following the adjustment of our outlook earlier in the year. In an environment marked by currency volatility, accelerated technology change and structural shifts in our industry. Our priority was clear to stabilize performance, strengthen the quality of our earnings and close the year with improved momentum. We are proud to announce that we exceeded our guidance for 2025 with improved profitability in the second half.

Let's take a closer look at our 2025 results. Revenue reached EUR 888 million, representing 2% growth in euros and 5% growth in constant currencies. Our EBT adjusted reached EUR 67 million, corresponding to a 7.6% margin which demonstrated positive improvements compared to the first 9-month margin of 7%. The EBT also improved in Q4, reaching EUR 46 million with a 52% (sic) [ 5.2%] margin, reflecting both better operating performance and cost management compared to the first 9 months margin of 4.9%.

Excluding our portfolio optimization case of U.K. and software solutions, our core operations delivered 12% of growth in constant currencies with a 9% EBIT adjusted margin and a 7.5% EBT margin. Our main growth markets in 2025 showed strong momentum with Brazil growing 28%, Colombia, 19%; the USA 17% and APAC 17% year-over-year. Colombia delivered particularly strong performance, reflecting the successful integration and accelerated growth of our Software Solutions acquisition. In the United States, we achieved a solid 17% of growth, reinforcing our positioning in the most competitive and strategic technology environment worldwide.

In terms of sectors, insurance and industry recorded strong double-digit growth. Overall, the second half of the year demonstrated that our strategic decisions and operational focus are translating into improved margins and stronger quality of earnings. This performance reinforces that our transformation towards an AI-centric operating model is not only strategically sound, it is financially sustainable. Based on this performance and our solid financial position, we will propose a dividend of EUR 0.50 per share, unchanged from 2025. Let me reinforce what I said in the beginning.

We are leading the IT industry transformation. We do so because we didn't simply echo the hike of the markets. But because we identified the underlying potential of generative AI and its profound relevance for our industry as early as 2023. To be precise, in June 2023, we kicked off the strategic initiative to bring generative AI into the core business of GFT, our engineering services. We knew that we must have an IP to orchestrate AI and launched the development of the GFT AI impact products. Only 6 months after the launch of ChatGPT, well before I became the dominant topic across the enterprise markets and the IT industry.

Throughout 2024, we moved from experimentation to deployments strongly integrating GenAI into our engineering services, software development life cycle and delivering first client and project implementations. While other people were building chatbots, we teach the hard work, validated use case in real and mission-critical environments and build up internal know-how and capabilities. As a result, we published our AI-centric 5-year strategy to the market in March 2025. We doubled down on the profound positive impact of artificial intelligence, and we positioned GFT to become a true responsible AI-centric technology powerhouse.

From there, we accelerated execution. We rebranded Wynxx based on an architectural evolution of GFT impact towards an agentic AI platform. We expanded globally across clients, countries and users and in our Capital Markets Day of October 2025, we launched our AI modernization offering powered by Wynxx legacy transformer and continued expanding the platform into new domains. We've built AI native capabilities early formalized the AI-centric strategy, and we are now scaling it.

The GFT AI-centric 5-year strategy is more relevant than ever. It is perfectly aligned with all the major market shifts we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months. When we defined our strategy, we positioned GFT to become the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world. Our mission is to bring the best responsible AI-centric digital solutions, software development and technology service to every company in the world, not as a marketing message but as an operating model. We embedded AI into our DNA, our delivery platforms in the core process of our software development life cycle in the implementation of our partner platforms into modernization methodology and into the way we scale globally.

Again, I could not be more excited to say that our strategy is more relevant and validated today than ever. The major AI market shifts we are witnessing are not challenging our direction. They are reinforcing it. We developed a comprehensive transformation road map builds around clear strategic goals, defined objectives and measurable KPIs. Our execution is structured across 4 core dimensions, brand, client service and talent, supported by strong group-wide governance organization leadership and performance management. All strategic initiatives are fully in motion. Today, I will touch on some of the key ones, our AI-centric transformation, our rebranding positioning, the expansion of global accounts, Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, and high value-added services and offerings. And what I will show you today is how this strategy is being executed constantly and with measurable impact. Thank you. Let me now turn to our execution of the 5-year strategy.

Our strategic initiatives and the tangible impacts we are creating with key clients and through our brand positioning. Firstly, and driven by our proven AI capabilities, we continue to expand and deepen relationships with large strategic accounts. During the fourth quarter, we expanded 2 additional group Tier 1 clients, each now exceeding EUR 25 million annual revenue. This reflects both client trust and our ability to scale long-term partnerships. In Colombia, our largest clients accelerated strongly with 35% revenue growth and has now become a top group Tier 2 clients. This demonstrated our ability of successful integrated company acquisitions and to unlock growth through offering cross-selling.

In the United States, we achieved a 10% revenue growth with a key major retail banking clients, which moved into our top Tier 2 client category. This is particularly important in a highly competitive and mature markets, where expansion is driven by differentiation and delivery quality. Beyond client growth, we also strengthened our global position. In 2025, we completed our global rebranding across 20 countries, built around unified responsible AI centric positioning. This is not just a visual update. It reflects our strategic evolution and how we want to be perceived in the market.

And finally, I am proud to highlight that GFT has been named as the #1 global leader in the IDC market space for worldwide cloud-native core banking implementation services. This recognition, one of the most important in our history confirms our engineering depth, our domain expertise in financial service and our ability to deliver complex transformation programs at scale.

Let me now turn to the execution of our AI-centric transformation strategic initiative and the tangible progress and impacts we are creating with AI. First, we significantly scaled our Wynxx AI agentic platform focused on software development life cycle and legacy modernization in 2025. It is active in 8 countries serving 92 clients representing more than 250% of growth in clients year-over-year with a total influence direct contract value of EUR 70 million representing more than 700% revenue growth year-over-year. This reflects not only AI adoption but real commercial impact. A key enabler of this strong acceleration has been Wynxx multi-model architecture, which allows our platform to leverage over OpenAI GPT, Gemini and especially Anthropic Claude Sonnet and Anthropic Claude Opus models, which are delivering the highest efficiency and code quality results across our legacy modernization, software development use case. These models are now at the core of our most advanced enterprise AI deployments.

A strong proof of this impact is Bradesco Seguros, the largest insurance company in Latin America. There, the adoption of Wynxx has expanded in 22% quarter-over-quarter, increasing our AI native team from 180 to 220 engineers while delivering a 40% productivity improvements across software development legacy modernization. This clearly demonstrates that AI is not reducing demands. It is driving revenue growth and value creation. Beyond software development, we are also developing an agentic AI platform for credit risk management as a top Tier 1 bank in Europe. In the large-scale agentic platform for orchestration of manufacturing, engineering and field services for the major automotive clients in the United States.

These initiatives show how GFT leveraging agentic AI expertise into mission-critical business process at our clients. We also strengthened OUR ecosystem, we are leading the deployment of Anthropic Claude codes and GitHub Copilots across large teams of 50 and 130 engineers, respectively, had 2 Tier 1 clients in the U.S. These are also concrete examples of the implementation of AI native engineering teams whose objective is not hand coding software anymore, Rather, they develop software orchestrating AI code assistance, agents and large language models. We also launched GFT's Global AI native software development Center of Excellence to scale multi-model and agentic engineering across our organization and client engagements.

It's designed to be tool and module agnostic, allowing us to integrate and orchestrate leading solutions focusing currently on the AI coding tools, Anthropic Claude codes and GitHub Copilots as well as OpenAI Codex and Gemini code assist based on client requirements. This structured approach ensures focus on the most capable tools on the market as well as governance best practice and scalable adoption while maintaining flexibility and independence in an evolving AI ecosystem.

At the same time, we launched our AI modernization offering powered by Wynxx legacy transformer. This formalized our approach to accelerating legacy modernization through AI and established a clear commercial framework for capturing this massive growing market opportunity. I will come back to this topic later. Finally, we expanded our Wynxx agentic AI platform into some fronts, its foundation, business process, data intelligence, studio and marketplace, position it as a comprehensive platform rather than a single-product solution. I will give you more details in the following slides. Taken together, this milestone show consistent execution in scaling the platform proving impacted clients, expanding into mission-critical domains building ecosystem capabilities and productizing AI modernization.

This is how we are operationalizing our AI-centric strategy not as a concept, but as measurable progress across markets and clients. As I mentioned, we significantly scaled our Wynxx agentic AI platform in 2025. This reflects real commercial impacts, not experimentation. Wynxx covers the full software development life cycle from store creation and estimation to testing code-fixing, architecture support and legacy transformation. It's deeply embedded into delivery. Importantly, the platform leverage leading foundation models from Anthropic Claude, OpenAI and Google, combining the strongest capabilities of each in a true multi-model architecture. This ensures performance, flexibility, cost efficient, consumption of tokens and independence in a rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.

But scaling the software development life cycle, legacy modernization was only the first step. Let me now show you how we are expanding beyond soft engineering into the broad enterprise landscape. Through our foundation layer builds on this MCP service governance, orchestration, FinOps and integration across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, we can deploy agentic capabilities into complex enterprise environments. At the same time, our architecture remains multi-module and cloud agnostic, including sovereign clouds and open source model capabilities when and where they are required. The next layer of evolution and expansion of Wynxx is into business processes. We are moving beyond software development into functional, operational and business domains, such as HR operations, resource staffing, project portfolio management, financial risk assessment, compliance, financial transaction monitoring, manufacturing maintenance among others in pipeline.

Earlier, I shared examples of our agentic credit risk solution and our large-scale automotive orchestration program in the United States. They are all becoming new elements on Wynxx business processes. But these are not isolated use case. We have developed 3 agents for our own global HR function at GFT automating workflows and decision support for talent acquisition, which we are bringing into Wynxx to offer to clients as a scalable AI value proposition. In addition, we feel our Smaragd platform, we are developing Agentic AI anti-money laundering capabilities, bringing AI-driven orchestration into financial transaction monitoring and compliance environment.

This is a natural extension of our deep regulated sector expertise and reflects the fundamental shift. AI is no longer limited to software code productivity. It's an orchestrator and decision-maker of business workflows. This position Wynxx not just as a software engineering tool but as an enterprise enabling platform. And we did not stop there. The third layer of expansion focused on data and intelligence. We are combining data intelligence product and assets and extending Wynxx into industry-specific data domains from banking, insurance, to manufacturing, robotics, oil and gas and retail. This is where domain expertise becomes critical. Agentic systems must operate within regulated frameworks, industry data models and mission critical architectures.

Our approach combines AI orchestration with deep knowledge and sector-specific intelligence, enabling intelligent advisory systems, all built on a scalable foundation. So what we are seeing is a strategic progression from software development to business process to data intelligence. And now the final step, the next layer of evolution is the democratization of Wynxx. At its core, Wynxx integrates software development life cycle capabilities with business process orchestration and data intelligence from software development, operational workflows to industry-specific data and intelligence. This platform sits on a strong foundation of governance orchestration and multi-model flexibility supporting Anthropic Claude models, including Sonnet and Opus as well as other leading foundation models in sovereign and enterprise-grade architecture.

Now Wynxx is no longer a single-layer tool with the launch of the Wynxx Agentic Studio and marketplace. We are opening the platform for structured extensibility and ecosystem participation. The Wynxx Agentic Studio allows all GFT teams more than 12,000 engineers, employees and our clients should build, customize and integrate agentic capabilities into their own environment in a governance way. The Wynxx marketplace enables reusable agents, assets and accelerators to be available, shared and consumed at scale across all GFT. We are not building isolated AI features. We are building an AI-native operating layer, this progression reflects our strategic ambition to move from AI adoption to AI orchestration and from isolated use cases to enterprise-scale AI-centric transformation.

Let me now connect our AI-centric platform evolution to a concrete commercial opportunity, AI legacy modernization. First, independent industry researchers forecast that the modernization market is expected to grow through approximately USD 25 billion in 2025 to around USD 57 billion by 2030 representing around 18% of CAGR, growing multiple times faster than traditional IT services. At the same time, 62% of U.S. organizations still rely heavily on legacy systems and 75% of banks globally run on legacy core platforms. These systems struggle with regulatory change, product time to market and increasing total cost of ownership. And the most striking number, an estimated 250 billion lines of COBOL remain active use globally. AI modernization is not a short-term IT initiative. It's a multi-decade structural cycle. The magnitude of accumulated technical debts is unprecedented.

Forbes Global 2,000 companies are estimated to hold between $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in technical debt. This is not a technological constraint, structural bottleneck that hampers innovation, agility and growth across enterprise. AI can compress legacy modernization time lines from years to quarters that's what Anthropic recently announced to the market. This is fully in line with what we presented during our Capital Markets Day in October last year. AI is making large-scale modernization more feasible, more affordable and less risky, unlocking productivity and cost advantage that were previously out of reach. This combination massive technical debt, structural demand in AI-enabled acceleration defines a significant brand new growth opportunity for GFT today and in the years to come, something that simply did not exist about 2 years ago.

We have already delivered more than 8 AI-native modernization project case studies using our Wynxx legacy transformer. achieving productivity improvements between 42% and 70% and up to 95% accuracy in business rule handling among many other efficiency KPIs. These are not pilots, POCs and experiments, they are large production grade modernization programs, delivering manageable outcomes. We began with the modernization strategy itself using generative AI combined with more than 35 years of GFT's domain expertise. We defined a structural transformational road map aligned with business objectives, regulatory constraints and long-term architectural goals. From there, we designed the cloud-native target model, it's not simply about linking systems to the cloud. It's about rearchitecturing them using the best market practices, resilient, scalable and ready for continuous innovation.

But the strategy on target design alone are not enough, execution must be embedded into the full life cycle. That's why we integrate AI across development, security and testing to continuous integration and deployment, ensuring modernization delivers not just change, but performance and operational control. Now what makes large-scale modernization particularly complex is that business logic often exists in 2 places. First, in documented process and operating models and second and more critically, feed them deep within decades of legacy lines of code. That's why our approach combines 2 perspectives: a top-down AI approach where we preserve and modernize these rules within the new architecture, reimagining process while maintaining regulatory and operational integrity and a bottom-up AI approach where we extract hidden logic and documented dependences and deeply layered functionality directly from legacy systems.

Many of these rules exist nowhere else but in the code itself. That is where our Wynxx legacy transformer becomes crucial. Wynxx suites understand and structures legacy codes, enabling us to restructure complete applications in a modern architecture while preserving and evolving core business rules. This combination, strategic redesign, cloud native architecture, life cycle embedded AI and agentic core transformation allows us to move from manual migration to industrialize AI modernization. And that's the key difference. We are not just migrating systems. We are transforming business platforms in a governed, secured, responsible, scalable and repeatable way. Now to conclude this part of the presentation, let's take some steps back and gain strategic perspective. All the examples and tangible results presented here underscore our leadership in driving our industry transformation.

This is not only because we apply Wynxx to become an AI centric but because we genuinely believe and understand the major shift of AI. We started our AI-centric journey way back in early 2023 ahead of the competition, and we are leveraging on more than 35 years of domain knowledge, engineering experience, a clear asset in these transformative times and a claim that not many can take. Jochen, over to you.

Thank you, Marco. After this really important deep dive on our technological changes in the GFT business landscape. Let's move to the 2025 financials and directly jump to Slide 17 where we see the overall KPIs at a glance. Revenue, Marco already pointed it out, grew by 2 percentage points in constant currencies, that's 5%. Now allow me to be very precise, 5.3% is the exact number in constant currencies. The order backlog is down by 2% in constant currencies, up by 1 percentage point and this is a bit weaker than a year ago. When we moved into 2025, maybe you remember, a year ago, we talked about a couple of long-term contracts in the U.S. which was supporting the order book, but they are still there, but they are one year younger now.

Therefore, we are still okay with the order backlog as we see it today. And looking at the profitability, EBIT adjusted is down 14%, mostly due to the strategic realignment in U.K. and software solutions that we talked about in the quarters before. I mean the bullet points on the right, you see that U.K. and Software Solutions burdened the EBIT adjusted with EUR 14.8 million, while all other units improved the EBIT adjusted by EUR 4.2 million, and this even includes the EUR 1 million negative FX effect. When we look at the EBT, the earnings before tax, we, of course, see the development impacted by the already mentioned operational challenges. But on top, on the EBT level, we had a one-off in 2024 in line with the fiscal court proceedings in Brazil, a one-off of EUR 9.8 million positive, which could, of course, not be repeated in 2025.

We saw higher capacity adjustments than in the year before. They stood at minus EUR 13 million in 2025. It was EUR 10 million a year ago. But the other way around, M&A effects smaller. We had less costs from M&A effects, EUR 8.6 million negative in '25 that was nearly EUR 14 million the year before. And then there were some minor virtual share effects. We had a stable tax rate of roughly 29%. Moving forward, Slide #18. Let's look at the growth by sector and changes in our client portfolio. And I start on the left, and here, we see that in the sector, industry and others, we saw a growth of 14% in the year 2025. This client group now representing 12% of GFT's overall revenue. Insurance clients grew by 15% of the revenue in 2025. Now this category represents 17% of the GFT revenue.

And last but not least, the big block of our banking business decreased by 2 points to 71% on the overall revenue. Main driver here was the U.K. business, which was shrinking in '25 and exclusively with banking clients. On the right side of the slide, we see our client portfolio. We categorize the clients in bigger than EUR 10 million to EUR 25 million. Marco used the terms Tier 1 and Tier 2 which is the same meaning. So our clients above EUR 25 million or Tier 1 clients grew by 2 new clients. It's now representing 29% of the overall GFT business. So we were able to expand 2 Latin American clients into this group. At the same time, the clients between EUR 10 million and EUR 25 million are internally called Tier 2 clients, went down slightly to 28% because we lost 2 big ones to the Tier 1s.

And then between the smaller clients above EUR 2.5 million, below EUR 2.5 million, it's quite stable compared to previous years. Moving forward, Slide #19, let's look at the fourth quarter in detail. On the left side, we see the revenue, and first, comparing it year-over-year Q4 '25 versus Q4 '24. We had a solid revenue growth 3% or 7% in constant FX, mainly driven by our business in Brazil, Spain and Colombia. And we saw a pickup versus the last quarter, Q4 of last year versus Q3 of last year of 9%, mainly due to positive business development, again, in Brazil, Spain, Poland and Italy.

Megawork contributed roughly EUR 4 million in the fourth quarter. On the right side, the EBIT adjusted, again, comparing to last year's fourth quarter shows a 9% reduction, which is mainly due to the U.K. realignment that we have been working on. Margin reached 9.4% in the fourth quarter. Comparing to quarter-over-quarter, Q3 versus Q4 2025, we saw a significant improvement of 40%, primarily driven by high margins, good business profitability in Brazil, Spain and U.S. margin stood at 7.2% in Q3 and 9.4% in Q4.

Moving forward, Slide #20. Here, we look at our performance per business segment. On the left side, the revenue evolution, let's start with Continental Europe, where we are down 3%, mostly due to macro headwinds particularly in Germany, Italy and Spain. And of course, software solutions is in these numbers, too. Minus 3% this year '25 compares to plus 9% in the year '24. So we had a good growth in Europe in '24, but the minus 3% was a bit disappointing from our European market in the year 2025. Looking at Americas, U.K. and APAC, we see revenue grew by 6% which was 12% in constant currencies as this is obviously all non-euro countries. And by that, offsetting the reduction in the U.K. So we showed 6% growth despite the decline on the revenue side in the U.K. On the right, the EBIT adjusted by business segment, I usually mentioned at this moment in time, the end of the year that this is probably not the best KPI for GFT as our 2 business segments are very interwoven with internal delivery nearshore, offshore.

But still, let's look at the numbers. Europe is stable on EBIT adjusted, more or less the same number, no change to previous year. Americas, U.K. and APAC is 12% down primarily to the business decline in the U.K. The U.K. was minus EUR 12 million versus last year. So that was heavily impacting this part of our business. Moving forward, Slide #21, showing the revenue growth rates of our different markets. And as usual, I start at the bottom, APAC and others, our smallest region grew by 17% in 2025, but it only stands for 3% of the GFT business, but 17% growth is a good result, mainly coming from Singapore, the Emirates, Dubai, Vietnam and Thailand. U.K. often talked about this year already, minus 29% versus previous year.

Of course, most of this coming from U.K. Now you might ask yourself, what's the others in U.K. Yes, we separate Gibraltar from U.K., and that's the only additional effect that we have. So U.K. and our clients in Gibraltar are both down. But our transformation process is strongly progressing. And our new and very experienced managing director in the U.K. started February 1 and is already with clients today. North America, growth 2025 is 8%, fueled by our U.S. evolution, 17% there, Canada growth was 3%, leading to an average 8% growth from North America. Latin America growth, 22%, strongest contribution coming from Brazil and Colombia. In Colombia, we have a month of M&A. Inside, we acquired Sophos in February '24. Organic growth in Colombia was 10%. And so overall, good growth on the Latin American side. And last but not least, Europe, minus 4%, driven by a more or less flat Spanish evolution, but a decline in Germany, Italy, and let me mention again, although we don't put it on the slide is software solutions.

Bringing me to Slide #22, our income statement. I think we can do this quite fast. Revenue is, of course, unchanged 2 percentage points. Second bullet point is highlighting the one-off we booked in '24 from the Brazilian fiscal proceedings worth EUR 10.58 million, and when looking at personnel costs, this is the challenge to be improved, which then will improve the margin side of the personnel cost versus overall revenue ratio we're showing in bullet point #4, we have to be back to 83% for what we want to achieve in our guidance.

And last but not least, let me mention the tax rate. It is exactly 28.5% as in the year before. And that's what we foresee it for '26. The tax rate will be between 28.5% and 29%. This brings me to Slide 23. Cash flow statement. We started the year with a net cash of minus EUR 42 million, we saw operating cash flow at plus EUR 43 million, which is significantly lower than in the year '24 for 2 main reasons.

First, we had a lower profitability in '25 Q4. And second, we already mentioned that a year ago, we had very, very positive favorable working capital effect at the end of 2024 which immediately means it burdens the year after. And a lot of our big clients either pay before new year or after the year. And in '24, that was very positive. In '25 working capital was okay to slightly unfavorable. And that was, in the end, pushing the operating cash flow to EUR 43 million. We had hoped for getting closer to EUR 50 million in the end. But believe me, the money came in, in January. Cash flow from investing activities was mostly Megawork acquisition, which burdened us with EUR 6.8 million. Cash flow from financing activities, we had the acquisition of treasury shares worth EUR 15 million and the shareholder dividend.

And then we mentioned the free cash flow adjusted, which is at roughly EUR 28 million. The main drivers why it is below '24 is the lower profitability. The already mentioned favorable working capital at the end of '24, burdening '25 and the not so favorable working capital at the end of '25, which could benefit '26, which we will talk about in the coming quarters. So let's move forward to Slide #24. Very quick on balance sheet, really nothing to write home about. The overall total of the balance sheet is down by 2 percentage points. Equity is mostly stable. Equity ratio is down a bit to 41.1%.

Conscious of time, let's move forward to Slide 25. Let's look at the left first, employee number was up 2% throughout the year, comparing year-end to year-end, 11,772 full-time equivalents. On the external contractor side, we see an increase to 1,445. But please be reminded that the company we acquired in Brazil in September of last year, Megawork works in the SAP field of Brazil, which is a pure freelancer market. The whole SAP market in Brazil is freelancers only, and we added 300 freelancers via Megawork.

So obviously, the rest of GFT slightly reduced the usage of freelancers in 2025. Utilization in the middle came in at 92.6%. And let me mention on top that inside this utilization, we had less nonbillable hours than in the previous quarters which we immediately saw on the profitability side. And to the very right, attrition, slightly down to 12.2%, of course, overall up compared to a year ago. This little decline, I look back at '23 and '24 reporting. We always have that in the last quarter. It seems like in Latin America, once spring is coming, summer is coming attrition is reducing somewhat. That's why this explains the reduction to 12.2% from 12.7% at the end of Q3. It's mostly linked to our Latin American markets.

And my last 2 slides, we always have an additional milestone slide and on our achievements. And this is Slide #26, when we look at how did we do in our free cash flow milestone, we wanted to achieve EUR 35 million of free cash flow. We achieved EUR 28 million. I already mentioned on the cash flow side that working capital was not favorable. That was a missing EUR 7 million at the end of the year. Money came in, in January, and that will help the 2026 free cash flow. Net debt was spot on 0.8x EBITDA at the end of the year, and utilization was also in line with the milestone we gave, 93% -- 92.2% to be precise.

Now let's look at '26 for these milestones. I look at free cash flow. First, we believe free cash flow, reflecting higher profitability and more or less stable working capital should be at EUR 40 million, maybe with everything I've said on the slides before, that's even a bit conservative, could exceed those EUR 40 million in free cash flow in 2026. Net debt is expected to be at 0.2x EBITDA, if we do not spend on potential further acquisitions. This is assumed in this number right now. And utilization is expected to be on a similar level as in 2025. With that, Marco, over to you.

Thank you, Jochen. Let me now turn to our outlook for 2026. For 2026, we are guiding revenue growth of more than 5%, representing approximately EUR 930 million, an adjusted EBT margin of 7.6% corresponding to around EUR 71 million and a strong improvement in the EBT margin to 6%, representing approximately EUR 56 million, all figures in constant currencies. In summary, we expect a strong improvement in EBT margin alongside continued revenue growth driven by a deliberate substitution from traditional labor-based delivery towards an AI-native engineering service combined with assets, IPs and the Wynxx agentic AI platform. Our commercial focus remains clear on expanding global accounts, Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients as financial service institutions are increasingly moving towards AI-powered legacy modernization creating structural long-term demand.

We see this translating into sustainable opportunity across our core markets. We will continue the disciplined execution of our AI-centric 5-year strategy and its global strategic initiatives with Wynxx serving as a key differentiator in our offering delivery, client engagements and modernization progress. This includes investments in the modernization of Smaragd into an AI cloud-based anti-money laundering solution to capture new opportunities, which will be generated by upcoming regulatory requirements in the DACH region, Europe and globally. In parallel, we will continue investments in AI-native assets and IP built on the Wynxx agentic AI platform, expand our AI native centers of excellence, continue workforce AI risk scaling and strengthen the AI infrastructure and platform capabilities across our globe delivery model.

2026 is a year of accelerating execution advancing our transformational AI tool and AI-centric business model while expanding margin, invest in our strategy and sustaining revenue growth. Let me briefly reaffirm our midterm ambitions for 2029. Our targets remain unchanged. We continue to aim for revenue of approximately EUR 1.5 billion, and adjusted EBT margin of around 9.5% and a service mix based on at least 50% in high value-added sets in AI-native delivery. At the same time, we plan to further expand our Smart Shop delivery model towards 40% ratio including AI. These ambitions are fully aligned with the strategic direction we have outlined today.

Continued revenue growth will be driven by key Tier 1 Tier 2 clients and global accounts. Cross-selling of our high value-added services and offerings supported by organic growth through our AI modernization and AI native engineering service, combined with IP assets bundled into our Wynxx agentic AI platform. Our M&A ambitions are focused on selective acquisitions on high-value added service companies in existing GFT markets. Profitability improvements will benefit from a continued shift towards high value-added services and native engineering service, which bring higher margins by design. Further expansion of smartshore incorporating AI centric module and a disciplined focus on scale within our existing geographies, especially our key Tier 1 growth markets. At the same time, profitability engineering measures and the normalization of Smaragd and GFT U.K. performance are expected to contribute to continuous operational margin improvement across 2027 through 2029.

In short, our midterm trajectory remains intact and the progress we made in 2025 reinforce our confidence in achieving these ambitions. Ladies and gentlemen, to conclude, let me emphasize a few key messages. First, we have demonstrated our strategy delivers, we slightly exceeded our current 2025 guidance. We strengthened the quality of our earnings and improving profitability in the second half, demonstrating operational discipline and focus on execution. Second, we continue to make tangible progress on our AI-centric 5-year strategy, expanding 2 additional group Tier 1 clients beyond the EUR 25 million annual revenue mark. This is a strong proof point of our offering and service differentiation and our ability to scale long-term client partnerships.

Based on our successful scale-up of Wynxx in the global markets, it's moving beyond software development life cycle towards a broader agentic AI platform, expanding into modernization, business process, data intelligence, agentic studio, marketplace becoming a responsible and secure enterprise AI orchestration platform. With our AI modernization offering powered by the Wynxx legacy transformer, we are translating the strategic direction into a structured commercial framework to capture a multiyear modernization opportunity at scale. This is a sign that artificial intelligence is expanding opportunities, not reducing them. AI is lowering technical barriers and software development in legacy transformation, making modernization faster, more feasible and less risky.

However, large-scale transformation has never been simple, it requires more than technology. It requires deep engineering strength and domain expertise, which requires an understanding of regulatory environments, legacy architectures, industry-specific processes, transmission critical systems and the ability to stay in control to govern and to orchestrate change across complex systems. This is where we see our role. We entered 2026 with clarity, confidence and positive momentum grounded in our AI-centric strategy, differentiated platform and IP and a strong engineering foundation and our ambition to lead the AI native era. Thank you very much, and let's go beyond together. Now Jochen and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Yes. Thank you very much, guys, for the presentation. [Operator Instructions] And we see the first question comes from Wolfgang Specht.

Yes. Thanks for the presentation. Three questions to start with from my end. At first, influenced contract value, can you give us some more information why you placed influenced in front of that? So it's only a part of these contracts, let's say, Wynxx related and then on restructuring, can you give us, let's say, some insight where you are currently standing regarding timing for both U.K. and for systems solutions and what we should expect in further structuring steps during 2026.

And finally, on your order backlog, which is slightly down year-on-year while you're guiding revenues up mid-single digits. Does this mean you're looking at a very rich pipeline and expect more short-term deals to come on the table? That's it from my end.

Okay. So thank you very much for the question. So what does it mean? Influenced total revenue, it's a quite simple KPI for us. It is the total value of the project of the service that we sold that we brought that we embedded Wynxx as an AI agentic platform. And so that's the whole services, the whole value of the activity.

And it's never just 1 thing that wins a contract, right? It's usually many factors. Restructuring costs, U.K. software solutions, both done, finished. We believe we have the right size since the end of year 2025 in the U.K. and in Software Solutions so the EUR 13 million we spent last year on restructuring, we believe, will be far lower in 2026, roughly half of that EUR 6 million to EUR 6.5 million. Order backlog, yes, we do believe the pipeline is rich enough exactly, as you said, to cover for the revenues that we've foreseen. The 1% downturn, honestly, this is more statistical and delta that it really is a drive force. Therefore, order backlog is okay for this guidance. More questions.

Hello, everyone. Awesome. No, we're not in Q4. First on Wynxx. Firstly, how easy is it to implement Wynxx and what type of projects do not utilize Wynxx, is there any category that's clearly not able to utilize Wynxx, for example, or the type of customer. Then I have a question on the market. Clearly, your business ex U.K. is doing good. What's driving the normalization in your view also in the discussions that you have with your customers? Is it a normalization or is the pickup really driven by AI technology, for example, due to the lower project costs or pressure to stay competitive or something similar. And then lastly, can you specify the sales outlook for GFT U.K. in '26. I'm asking to get a better understanding of the different dynamics within the group.

Thank you for the question. So regarding the implementation of Wynxx and how easy it is, it's a super interesting question. As we started the journey way back, as I mentioned, 2023, started GFT Impact. It was the seat of Wynxx. In 2024, we were able to deploy it, We faced lots of challenge of implementation of GFT Impact. It was later on Wynxx into the clients in order to customize it for their environment, okay, for the clients. And in the last year, we invested strongly on the infrastructure of Wynxx in order to make it straightforward. So that was a very good decision and a very strategic decision that we did. So we invested on the foundation of Wynxx that I mentioned here.

And then we made it much more straightforward. So the implementation now for clients is really fast deployment. So we evolved a lot on that front. So that's your first question. The second question, which is the U.K. normalization, what is the driver, right, of the U.K. normalization. We are very, very happy with the new MD that we hired for GFT U.K. So he is already on board. He's already with clients, already with the teams now. We understand that we are now in the second phase so the first phase was the major change of the organization last year. But now we are in the second phase of this transformation. We are now on the, let's say, stabilization and preparing the ground in order to accelerate. And I must say that we are very happy with the results of U.K. in January actually that also came possibly as we were planning, which is very good news for us.

And let me attach the numbers to it because you asked for it on Slide 36, we anyway show our turnaround situations in a dedicated way in the deck. And for '26 -- while in '25, we had revenues of roughly EUR 80 million in the U.K., we believe we will see the turnaround happen somewhere mid '26. But overall, for '26, we expect revenues to be at EUR 70 million. That would be another EUR 10 million reduction coming from the U.K., and that is baked into this guidance. Hope we covered your questions.

That's clear. One follow-up question, if I may. And that's regarding the projects that do not utilize Wynxx. Is there any type? Or should we assume that long term or midterm, yes, all your projects will utilize Wynxx to some degree, at least.

Thank you for reminding for that. We are pushing Wynxx as our core differentiation of GFT and we have a very strong and good adoption, as you saw in the numbers. However, we have clients, and we have global clients that they say, "I have my Wynxx." I have already made a global agreement with Microsoft with GitHub Copilot. I developed my X layer here of governance, and I have my Wynxx. And that's fine, and that's fine for us. And we want to be the best AI native engineering partner of that client and be the best using the GitHub Copilot. And then we are bringing our center of excellence and knowledge of that in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition and leverage over this new AI adoption.

And as a second step, we want to bring Wynxx later on as an add-on because Wynxx is connected -- is already connected with Anthropic Claude, with GitHub Copilot, Gemini so we can bring that as a second step. So that's our strategy. But if the clients at the very end does not get Wynxx, we are -- we want to be the best AI native engineering service for them.

Thank you very much for your question, Simon. Next up is Felix Ellmann.

Okay. Thank you. Nice to hear these results from you. Congratulations to these. I have 1 question. With regards to the software segment, many clients in some sectors are awaiting the development of AI and they are waiting for signing new orders looking at the AI field, and some of them even stopped their new orders because they said, "Hey, let look, how far the AI development will go." And do you see any difference in the behavior of clients? Do they sign shorter projects? Do they sign later? Do they even sign earlier? Or how do they behave within the fast development we see in the sector?

We see today clients moving forward. We saw last year that several clients for some projects or initiatives, they were kind of in the waiting time, right, in order to understand how technology will evolve and move in direction. But we sense now that clients are already, let's say, agreed that AI is part of a future, and they are moving forward with implementation of projects with development of projects, bringing AI and even with the implementation of ISPs and definite software vendors and software as a service. And naturally, we see also more discussions towards build instead of buying. So there are several clients that are moving to us and say, let's review these and maybe build leveraging over AI, which, by the way, is music to our ears, it's very good because we are positioning be that AI native leader to build, but also implement core banking, thought machines, sales force and implement other technology, SAP and bring the best to the clients.

Well, on the long term, you could even cut some software revenues from the software vendors of the field by building new software.

Look, I know that is one of the key discussions on the IT market this year. What I can tell you is as the barriers of creating builds reducing and if you deploy AI and you can create more so there is a natural discussion about, let's build, right? Let's build and let's evaluate these functionality ABCD, instead of I pay recurrent license for a platform, right, vendor. I can build that. So that's clear. However, I think that course, that's my perspective, okay? That's my perspective. I think that the core services, they are going to be heavily based on SAPs or sales force.

And by the way, if you look at the site of one of the largest AI in the market, one of the ones that I mentioned today. If you look at their sites, they are hiring people for sales force, for example, right? So they are really moving towards the core. They are implementing SaaS, but the satellite functions from SaaS, those ones are under discussion in terms of to be built. Again, I think at GFT, we are very well positioned because it can build AI and again implement that with my SEV partners, and not naturally accelerate AI for the ISV partners that I have, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, and others.

Thank you for your questions, Felix, and we have 1 more question, which comes from Lukas Spang.

Yes. I would like to start with the cash flow topic. I thought you already mentioned that, that could be kind of conservative. If I take a progressive calculation and take the EUR 35 million you initially planned for last year, take the EUR 10 million EBT on top and then the EUR 7 million, which slipped from Q4 to Q1, I would even come up at EUR 52 million. So just from understanding in the EUR 40 million that I used behind this EUR 40 million why just from EUR 40 million for 2026.

We were indeed torn between EUR 40 million and EUR 45 million. There's still 1 challenge. We still have to pay taxes. So the EBT has 1 cost position, not mentioned. And on the working capital, we simply took a more cautious stance than you have now done in your calculation.

Okay. And then on the adjusted margin level if I compare 2025 to your guidance, 2026. It's both 7.6%. So regarding -- or looking forward, you have this 9.5% for 2029. So why is there no progression in terms of margin in this year versus last year?

Yes. Two main reasons. The software solutions, part of GFT is still an investment mode as we have described. So we will have kind of the same result in software solutions as we had in 2025 on EBIT adjusted level. Again, I'm referring to Slide 36 to see the details. And the U.K. is back to black in terms of positive EBIT adjusted contribution, but still far off the 9%, 9.5%, even the 7.6% that we guide for the year 2026. So these are the 2 challenges we have. And last but not least, we have added roughly EUR 5 million of additional costs for the transformation of the whole company to move ourselves into AI centric. It's now the time to do this. And there, we have added investments internally. And when we say investments, it's cost, it's people cost, it's training costs, it's business development costs, salespeople to drive GFT exactly towards that evolution to generate higher margins in the years after. This is the goal of the year 2026, built the foundation.

And these costs are rather onetime? Or will these costs stay in 2027 and beyond?

They will stay, but relative to revenue reduce.

Thank you very much, Mr. Spang for your question. So far, we don't have any further questions in the queue. And with that, I am handing over back the word to you, Andreas, for some final remarks.

Well, thank you, Philip. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your time and all your questions. It seems that there are no questions left at the moment. If there are any further questions following this call, please do not hesitate to contact the IR team. We remain for your disposal. And with that, we conclude today's conference call. Have a good day. Goodbye.

Hello, and ladies and gentlemen, welcome to GFT's Capital Markets Day 2025. It's great to have you with us here in Frankfurt or online. Great to see you today. Today, we want to give you an inside look on how we are working with our clients on some of the most forward-leaning projects in the industry from AI-driven modernization to next-generation core systems and large-scale digital transformation. Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are becoming central to how financial institutions operate and innovate. And GFT is playing a meaningful role in shaping that evolution. Let me start by introduce the leaders who will set the tone for today. Sorry, I need to go there. From our Board, we have Marco Santos, our Global CEO; and Dr. Jochen Ruetz, CFO and Deputy CEO. Both will begin with our 5-year strategy update, sharing where GFT stands today, what we have set in motion and where we see the next stage of growth coming from and why GFT is the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger.

So you'll also hear throughout the afternoon from several of our senior experts, including Ignaci Barry Willadel, our Global Head of AR and Data and Regional Head of Business Development for Western and Continental Europe. We will have Dean Clark, our Head of Technology Office and Chief Technology Officer of GFT U.K. We have Floris van Hist, our -- since January this year, our Senior Vice President for GFT Software Solutions; and Sacha Beck, Executive Director and Financial Service Lead at GFT Germany.

Before we move on, I want to extend a warm thank you to my Investor Relations colleagues, [indiscernible] Nicole Schutford and Maren Dellis as well as the event colleagues, MarAllens Sabrina, for their tremendous work in preparing today's event would have been impossible without that. Thank you.

We are also delighted to welcome outstanding speakers and partners who bring valuable perspectives from leading institutions across the industry -- and I will introduce them by order of appearance. We have Glaioanico, IT Superintendent from Bradesco Seguros from Brazil. We will have Mike Laws, Managing Director at Deutsche Bank coming from U.K. We have Alexander Graff, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of FICO from the U.S. We have Alexander Listen, General Manager at DKB Code Factory coming from Germany; and Eric Nercu, Vice President, IT, Property and Casualty Insurance and Corporate Services at Geneva from Canada. We truly appreciate your participation, your insights and your partnership.

Before we dive deeper into the agenda, let me briefly connect today's insights with our last Q3 performance and the progress of our 5-year strategy. GFT delivered solid results in the first 9 months with double-digit growth in key regions like Brazil, APAC, Colombia and the U.S.A. At the same time, we continue to scale the strategic pillars of our plan, driving AI deployment across markets, expanding Rings as a core modernization engine and strengthening our position as the AI-centric digital transformation challenger. These achievements give us strong momentum for the midterm as we move in the next phase of our strategic execution. And much of that you will hear today reflects exactly that.

So let's take a look at our agenda. We start with our 5 years strategy update from Marco and Jochen. We will then move into agentic AI modernization with Wings with Ignasi and Dean. We will move into a coffee break then. Maybe you have -- need to have some break and some coffee after that AI deep dive. Next, and this connects very well with the technical insights from Ignaci. We shift to the client's perspective with the impact of AI on productivity from Bradesco Zegurs, lafio Iuanico and Ignaci. We continue with the crucial topic of AI and anti-financial crime, featuring Michael Laws from Deutsche Bank and Floris from [indiscernible]. We stay with that topic of anti-financial crime with Alexander Graf from FICO, who brings deep expertise on decision intelligence, analytics and risk technology across financial institutions, and we'll talk about FICOs and GFT's global partnership, what we will announce shortly. So this is kind of a small spoiler.

We then explored the joint success with DKB and GFT for efficiency, agility and digitization presented by Alexander [indiscernible] and [indiscernible]. And this will follow by future core systems and tech leadership with Eric McCu from Veneva and Marco Santos again on stage. And Marco will then also return for a brief closing message. So this is the agenda. I think we put very interesting things together. And with that, thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your engagement, your partnership and your trust in GFT. We're excited to show you how we are shaping the next chapter of AI-centric digital transformation together with our clients, partners and all of you.

And having said that, Marco, I would hand over to you. The stage is yours.

So good afternoon. Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us here in person, and thank you very much for those who are joining virtually. So let's get started. We have a pretty full agenda. And I would like to start with a video, a video that our marketing team created that is helping us on bringing the positioning of GFT. Let's take a look on this video.

[Presentation]

So that's GFT. Let's go beyond the hype. What do you see out there? Too much noise, too much hype. We create impact with artificial intelligence. We believe on that, and we are doing that. We are the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. That's our positioning. And I'd like to also share with all of you some personal insights and learnings that I had. So I met 2 brilliant minds on the artificial intelligence industry. One of them is Denis Hasabis, the Google DeepMind CEO and Founder of DeepMind, who takes care of all artificial intelligence projects at Google on a global level. He has 6,000 data science, AI, artificial intelligence engineers at Google. Everything is under him. And I met him in person in the United States, in California this year in the second semester. And it was amazing to see the way that the artificial intelligence is evolving with building blocks of modules like Gemini and other models, large language models, small language models and elements and agents that they are building on top of each other. That is exactly the vision that we have for Wings, and we're going to talk later on about it. I also met in person in Berlin in Germany, actually 2 months ago, Sam Altman, which is the 1 mind and person, individual in the road in artificial intelligence. I met him in the [indiscernible] Springer event awards for a dinner and then for a workshop in the day after. I met -- I talked to him in person. And I could talk hours here about my learnings, right? It was an amazing opportunity for me, for GFT.

And one thing that stands out, the artificial intelligence, the progress and evolution of artificial intelligence has been material this year in 2025. Things are moving and evolving so rapidly. And he, he believes that in 3 years from now, there will be so many change, so many things that are difficult to predict. And obviously, he's working 24/7 to be leading on that. And on the same way, I am working 24/7 to also lead there with artificial intelligence for our industry. But that's the good learning. Things are changing so fast and we're going to see the strategy of GFT that is to tackle these transformations. So this is -- for me, it was an incredible learning.

And now taking you to what's going on, trying to bring a real understanding about the transformational impact of artificial intelligence into our industry, information technology, IT because there are a lot of people talking. When you talk to investors and you talk to analysts, when you talk to clients, lots of questions and lots of inputs, feedbacks. I'm going to bring you not the hype, tangible results. So let's try to understand this. And to do that, I usually utilize a quite known analogy, the good and bad printing revolution. Before this, before the good and bad printing revolution, we had -- we were writing books with hands for thousands of years, [indiscernible] were writing books by hands. And with the good and bad printing revolution, we created a complete change in the way that we think, that we learn, that we create, that we share ideas, that we scale in mass production, mass product books. And we created an infinite number of jobs.

So we scaled it up complete massively. We were able to create universities because of that. We changed the way that education works. We created the renaissance and the modern age arrives from middle age to the modern age. That was the change, and we created lots of jobs. We even created companies to create the machines for that. We created inventory companies, inventory. We created logistics. We created even companies to sell books. And we created the commerce companies to sell books and then we created Amazon.com to sell books. That was the beginning of Amazon. So it's a massive, massive, massive scale up and changing. And on the same way, the same analogy, that's what's going on now. We understand that at GFT. So what we are doing today, we are writing software with hands, hand writing, hand coding. And with artificial intelligence, we are unlocking completely new set of opportunities to obviously produce things faster, be more efficient, time to market, to reimagine the way that we think, learn and create technology, software and naturally laying down the foundation of a new era with artificial intelligence.

This is beautiful. And I could -- we have today with Wink and artificial intelligence around 50, 53 case studies of real impact. I'm going to just go to talk about simple things. One, major financial service, car manufacturing company, our clients, We put -- they started a journey to modernize their core banking loans. We put 2 proposals. We are doing that project with AWS. We put 2 proposals, 1 proposal doing the first piece of the project of the core banking modernization, which is the documentation, just the first phase documentation, 1 proposal, 6 people, 1.5 years. 1.5 years, EUR 1 million, 6 people to work on that. We put a proposal. We put a second proposal using Wink, artificial intelligence, generative AI to do the documentation of the same system, 6 people, 6 weeks, EUR 100,000. The clients chosen the artificial intelligence one. We already delivered. It's not hype. This is a reality. We already delivered that client is happy. And by the way, the deliverable that we generated with 6 weeks using artificial intelligence for the documentation of this has a better quality than if I had 6 people working for 1.5 years trying to document millions of lines of codes. This is groundbreaking. This is artificial intelligence creating impact in a simple case. I could go on and on with more complex case like a regulatory change in Brazil that they changed their social security from numbers to numbers and letters, which is a huge transformation in the whole industry, multi-industry in Brazil, and we deployed artificial intelligence to solve that problem. And we simply wiped out all the competition.

We put proposals over the last 3 months, and we won all of them in financial services, in banking insurance, in telco, everywhere because they are using artificial intelligence to do something different. And we are doing something new. It was a regulatory request. And I could go on and on and on. So pragmatic, simple, tangible results.

We have -- now let's talk about our strategy. I talked to [indiscernible]. [indiscernible] Altman said, I wish that all companies would move to become an AI-centric organization regardless of the industry. So we are more than ever confident and happy to have designed and have communicated that strategy. We want to be the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world. So that's our vision. And we have the mission to bring AI centricity, digital transformation for software development for technology services for all the industry. And we are positioning ourselves as the challenger. I won a challenge, and I am challenging the IT -- the traditional IT service industry. I am a challenger inside my clients. I want to challenge and help the clients challenge the status quo, the legacy systems that they are there. The coherent ecosystem of partners that are doing those legacy maintenance for 20, 30 years, doing the same thing, super hard to change, complex tool to be -- to deliver new functionalities, costly. We want and we are the challenger on this. And that's why we are positioning as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger.

Our 5-year strategy. So it's -- we talk about the vision mission position. We have strategic goals. And the strategic goals are: number one, fast learning, adaptive and an innovative organization. As some Aman told us, as Denis, if you are not this, if a company in the IT industry are not a fast learning and adaptive organization, it's challenging because we need GFT, we need to be prepared for the next change that happened in 1 year from now, 2 years from now, 3 years from now, whatever, something new come that replaces OpenAI ChatGPT or replace completely Google, whatever, we want to be positioned on the forefront of that shift of that change. That's our position.

So that's our strategic goals. And naturally, an agile company that orchestrates our job -- our work with agentic work naturally global AI-centric market leader and democratized AI as well. And we want -- so that's my commitment. We want to create a company to last on these super changing environments that we are information technology. I want to believe -- to have a company in 3 years from now, 5 years from now that is ready for the next shift, the next leapfrog, the next wave of opportunities.

And so vision and mission, strategic goals that are long-term goals to last, and we have our ambitions. We have ambitions, and we have ambitions and bold goals. I want to almost double the company. on our long term. That's our ambitions, and we have that ambition to make our revenues EUR 1.5 billion to improve considerably our margin to 9.5% EBITDA adjusted. And to do so, we need to increase the high value-added service that we have, transform everything that we do in AI with AI, high value-added services and also improve our cost structure with more nearshore and offshore.

We have several strategic initiatives. I'm going to -- we are going to -- myself and Jochen are going to touch. We're going to cover the great majority of them, but we are not going to cover today, but just want to mention, I want to, and I strongly believe on that and the team also strongly believe on that, to globalize more the company coming from a federated silos company to a more global organization. So that's a strategic issue that we have that is changing many dimensions of the company. It's moving.

Naturally, we're going to transform ourselves as an AI-centric organization on the software development with Winks as our spearhead and also all the other services around it. We are also focused on positioning ourselves into the market, positioning as the AI, artificial intelligence, digital transformation challenger with the next-generation brand design. We launched our new brand and so on and so forth. We also won the generative AI AWS award. We also won many other elements of Gartner positioning of generative AI and so forth.

We -- and we naturally want to keep innovating, investing in asset creation as we did with Winks. We want to grow Winks. We want to create more Wings and the other strategic initiatives that we're going to cover right now. So let's talk about strategic initiatives for sustainable revenue growth, areas that can bring large-scale opportunities for us. First, implement our global delivery platform focused on smart shore and startup in India. So that is one important fundamental elements of our strategic for the 5-year strategic plan. And it is simple. Before GFT, we had some delivery centers and the delivery centers were federated, also connected with one market and another one with 1 or 2 markets. Now we are harmonizing everything, bringing that into a big platform of delivery. We have one central demand leader for that, one center supply of all the delivery centers in a global platform. And every proposal that comes across the globe for a project that is large-scale project that needs efficiency, brings differentiation skills, we use that to deliver the proposal and win the deal. And that's what we did successfully this year with [ MAPFRE ], one of the largest insurance companies in the world that we started -- that participate in a strategic process with them, RFP. And we won because we were able to articulate our delivery capability from Colombia, from [indiscernible] solutions, the acquisition that we did from Colombia, and it was a requirement on the RFP, and we were able to deliver that combined with other -- with Brazil and other centers of excellence, and we're able to win a strategic project at [ MAPFRE ] this year. Fantastic result of this strategic initiative. the result of strategic initiative, we also won this year a strategic project in robotics here in Germany. And it was a project that required a large-scale team of data AI and cloud, impossible to do that with the 1 or 2 centers. We had to bring all this platform together, Poland, Spain, Brazil and India to put a proposal to bring such a large-scale [indiscernible], we won it and you deliver that. We have the same -- on the same message, India. We started up India for -- I'd say -- I cannot say the name, but I'm going to tell you one of the top 2 largest retail banks in the United States of America, top 2, one of them, we were able to stay on the game on the core banking implementation that they are doing. And it's their requirements. You need to have a footprint in India, a delivery center in India. And because we had India, we were able to be part of the game, participate and we won, and now we are growing on that client with a next-generation core banking project. Without India, last year, 1 year ago, 0, not possible to compete, 0. Reality, our 5-year strategy. And I tell you more, 2 weeks ago, we signed a new master agreement, service agreement, MSA, with one of our top 4 clients in the world, GFT with India rate cards. So we've been operating with this client for several years. And we have been -- this client look at GFT as the European shop, and European partner.

We unlocked India now. We unlocked a new world of possibilities because there are a new set of programs and services that are done with an India platform. And now when we are 2 weeks ago, we signed the master agreement for the first time becoming a European regional company, service provider to a global one. And not to mention about our AI strategy, 12,000 engineers, 1,200-ish are already working with [indiscernible] projects. Most of the team, 96% trained with AI tools and so on and so forth.

A second strategic initiative from our 5 years plan is to first move everything that I do, this is soft application development, software engineering to soft engineering AI, the AI-centric thing, number one. And we also have some other, let's say, core elements of our high value-added service offering that we are putting focus. One of them is the next-generation core banking, which stands out for us. We are the #1 in the world, delivering thought machine projects, delivering 10x, delivering [indiscernible], delivering Oracle Flex Cube and now a new partner, which is Visa [indiscernible] that I'm going to mention a little earlier -- later. So that's next-generation core banking. GFT, #1 in the world, very well positioned and moving forward.

Also on the front of the ISVs like Salesforce, like Guidewire that we're going to talk later on with a client, [indiscernible] and SAP, a new element of ISV specialization that we brought on our system, on our ecosystem. And by the way, we already sold, and we announced that last week on our Q3 announcement, already a new project with SAP in one of our clients. Hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google, Clouds and our products, SmartAC, Ingen, and Winks. And I'm going to put highlights on AI data intelligence and artificial intelligence modernization in a second.

Just to complete, we have our products in Smart Act is our anti-money laundering compliance solutions, and I'm going to announce that now. We are going to have Deutsche Bank here formally coming into picture and talk about their decision to move with Smart Act at Deutsche Bank Germany. This was a competition that we participated, and we won that, and Deutsche Bank is going to come and talk in a few minutes about that. This is very good. Last week on the Q3 announcement, I did not mention any of the clients because we still do not have the approval, but now we have the approval to do that. This is fantastic news for our software solutions practice -- unit, sorry. We also have Ingenia and that we also communicated last week that we announced that we closed a 3-year deal with Audi, Volkswagen Germany and Wink that is -- I'm going to -- that is a chapter that we're going to talk soon. And among all those partners, 2 new ones, which is Visa [indiscernible] with the most advanced core payment systems that are coming to play. GFT is already doing some projects with them, and we are creating a global partnership with Visa Pismo and also with FICO that we're going to have Alex Graphi soon talking about FICO and why FICO chose GFT as a strategic partner. So for us, it -- I could not be more proud to have FICO, the largest rating scoring consumer company in the United States of America and U.S.A. and one of the largest anti-money -- anti-fraud company in the world, the whole world that are choosing GFT to be a strategic partner.

Moving from the strategic initiative of focus on high value-added service and offerings, let's talk about our global accounts, the strategic initiative that is focused on what is going to move the needle, Tier 1, Tier 2 clients, global accounts. That's -- we have a strategic initiative that is moving all GFT because I want to -- that's our current footprint. That's our current, I would say, wallet share of clients. We have 4 clients today, more than EUR 25 million, 20 clients more than EUR 10 million, and then I have almost 40 here, Tier 3 clients, more than 500 clients Tier 4 that generates less than EUR 2.5 million. And I tell you that in several areas, in several units and markets, we are putting more efforts here than I'm putting on here. So moving the company, moving GFT to focus on what matters. Let's focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts.

Let's focus on those guys here in order to bring my offering, industrialize my offering, my capabilities, by differentiations to move those guys, have more Tier 1, have more Tier 2, move Tier 3 to Tier 2 and be smart to focus on the Tier 4s that can become a Tier 1, but the laggers, those clients that are requiring more energy than other accounts with low profitability. This is definitely -- there's no space with GFT, right? We are going to simply put the right focus.

And so that's -- this is simply a glimpse about some of our clients -- and you see the clients that we have, HSBC, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Itaú, the largest bank in Brazil, Latin America, BBVA, we are the one of the key partner on modernization of BBVA, one of the benchmarks of technology in Europe. We need to grow here and many others, right? You see -- and many others that you cannot mention this one of the top 2 largest retail banks in the United States of America and many others here that are non-open logos for us, yes, yet.

And what we want to do, I want to focus prioritization, industrialize the process of taking my offerings, my differentiations, my capabilities and bring to them to grow the -- bring up my -- also my capability, my strategic initiative of Smart Shore and my offering of India, bring to them and bring and then create spending a virtuous cycle, engineering growth, engineer growth accelerate growth into my business. And naturally, not only bringing growth to the current Tier 1, Tier 2 clients that I have, take the Tier 3 to become Tier 2, bringing all the capabilities, differentiations that I have into the clients that I have, industrialized process and obviously, engineer profitability because on that process, I'm going to engineer in profitability because I want to get rid of a Tier 4 clients that are clients that cannot take us to more than EUR 1 million, never. And we have low profitability or we have not a nice profitability. So we need to put the right energy on the right things, on the things that are going to scale.

And I do believe that this combination of strategic initiatives creates and can create and will create a large-scale growth. You just -- if we get -- if we bring and we make new Tier 1 clients paid year over the next 4 years, you can get 8 clients, you can double it. And so on and so forth, right? So we can really -- so that's our goal to have those -- obviously, those percentages are approximately percentages, but our expectation is to have more of the company around 70%-ish on the Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients on the long run and have less energy, less dissipation of energy and heat here, right, on Tier 4, be smart, be smart here, right? So that's what we are now industrializing, pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward, and that's a combination of strategic initiatives.

Now let's getting back to the high value-added service offerings and differentiation. I mentioned about -- I touched a little bit on the next-generation core banking on the ICVs, hyperscalers and our products. Let's talk about artificial intelligence modernization. This is immense. This is huge. This is huge. Artificial intelligence modernization. AI is breaking down, steering down the barriers of changing legacy systems across the board. These unlocking opportunities that were not there before. There were no opportunities before to change legacy for some legacy core banks. The barriers of change were super high. They were there for 25, 30, 35 years to change that programs, endless programs, risky, risky, enormous cost.

Now with AI, we are making modernization projects feasible, affordable, less risky, impactful and transformative. 62% of the U.S. companies, they rely on legacy modernizations. 75% of the banks on a global level run on legacy, and they are failing to deliver what they need in order to deliver their goals. HSBC estimates 5,000 applications need to go to modernize. 86% of the banks executives say modernization is critical. This is huge. And we are the best company positioned to do the artificial intelligence modernization, this artificial intelligence accelerated journey, artificial intelligence accelerated modernization. We have a complete set of offering capability units with since the strategy to the top-down approach, bottom up and important to highlight Winks, with an agent, a functionality that is our legacy transformer that is moving forward in the market, bringing 40% of efficiency at minimum with the example -- one simple example that I mentioned before. Artificial intelligence modernization, we need to deploy AI. We have our technology, our differentiation. Winks, important to highlight, we're going to talk more about Winks, clients improving this year from 25 to 58. We expanded from 1 country to 8. Bradesco Insurance, we're going to talk here, 40% improvement in terms of productivity with a large-scale team. It's not a toy POC. It's a real 180 team working, large scale, delivering development and modernization and question, does or did Bradesco Insurance ask GFT to reduce the team in 40%? No. We are growing the team now I have more than 200 because capital is smart. Capital flows to where return is higher. Capital flows it.

So if I deliver with more productivity, I am going to get projects from the competition. That's what the effect that's happening at Bradesco Insurance, and you can have the clients talking in a little while to all of you. And staggering figures, right, in terms of documentation, of code fixing and et cetera. I could not be more proud of the Winks team, what we have done with the creation of that technology, what we are doing on a global level. I could not be more proud of that positioning.

Finally, AI and data. AI, data and intelligence, that's a major practice that we have. We have 224 clients, more than 1,000 projects that we have already delivered, more than 2,200 AI data specialists, 6 global centers of excellence and leader at Gartner 2025. We have a complete unit with enablers offering, cases, accelerators, services, differentiators, including the ADA marketplace. [indiscernible] is going to talk later on. And naturally, what are some logical steps for GFT with this? Some logical new industries where our experience capabilities offering differentiation and even our roots as a German company is in high demand today. So we got it. Robotics. We -- GFT has been selected as a strategic partner for Neo Robotics to develop their software platform powering the next generation of physical AI for [indiscernible], publicly referenced. We did that large-scale team for GFT and Nora. And that's the quote of David Zager, the Founder and CEO at Neo Robotics. With GFT, we have found a strategic partner that shares our vision of bringing cognitive robots into a real-world application with a deep knowledge in AI software engineering, that's our differentiation, and complex and highly regulated industries. And we made it.

And obviously, Again, that's a capability that we have, it's in high demand. Warfare is movingfrom hardware to data, to software. So since 1987, we've been delivering complex projects, mission-critical projects, high volumetrics, security sensitive and for highly regulated industries. That's GFT since more than 30 years. And we've been pulling into several discussions right now with defense companies to help them what? To discuss about how to modernize. We need to modernize. We all need to modernize, and we need to help us to accelerate the digital transformation with AI, data software. And GFT plays as -- clearly as a German champion for that, German champion in AI data and modernization. This is -- in this transformation. This is something that, it's coming. We are discussing now a major projects in defense in Poland. It's a pitch. I'm discussing right now 350 deal size, 350 FTE size in a defense company in Germany right now. It means that we're going to win that? No. It means that we're going to win 100%? No. But this is wonderful to have that opportunity. This is wonderful because we have a strong capability, a global capability, international data, AI, cloud, and this is in high demand for Europe and for especially Germany and all Europe, right? And I think that we come into play with a good [indiscernible] all that.

So Jochen, I would like to invite you on stage. Otherwise, I keep talking the whole afternoon.

Thank you, Marco. Warm welcome from my side, everybody in the room, all virtual participants. I will talk about 2 more work streams of our 5-year strategy. I will talk about the gravity program and our M&A strategy. It takes about 10 minutes. Gravity program is a self-chosen title. And what does it mean that's the headline, focus on simplifying and optimizing countries, offices and shared services inside the GFT Group. We have some KPIs here. They are going to repeat on the next slide. Let me highlight them there. And let's look at what we have done in the year '25, '26. I'm looking at the bullet points on the left side right now. And so we are doing one thing in all countries, which is we are reviewing the clients, especially the subscale revenue and margin clients and their contribution.

Do we want to work with them in future? That's the Tier 4, Marco was already mentioning. We're looking for major accounts, and we have to be critical on all the Tier 4 clients, which are the very, very small clients. Second bullet point, review subscale countries. We're currently in our budgeting process for the next year. We're going to have our reviews end of this week. And there we're going to discuss also our small countries, the subscale countries, the countries which are not generating economies of scale as of now, but we need economies of scale across the GFT Group in future. Third bullet point, optimize G&A cost, cost base and location. Well, of course, we do what everybody does. We simplify, we automize and if it can't be simplified or automize, we move it to cost-optimized locations. And the fourth point, reduce office space without -- with low utilization. GFT is following a very strong work from anywhere, work-from-home approach. But you see this office, it's pretty full when you walk the aisles right now. This is where projects are happening, where senior sales is happening. But a lot of the coding our people are doing must not be done in a GFT office. Therefore, office space, we're critical about and we reduce where we can.

And now what are the proof points of the year '25, '26? And you see that on the right side, the U.K., we had to reduce by 50% in workforce in 2025. Well, there's nothing to really be proud about because we were not able to staff our people in projects locally anymore. After COVID, there was a high demand for local resources and the demand diminished again when the work bench from Eastern Europe and India was working well again, demand reduced for local resources, and we had to rightsize our U.K. organization. This year, 50% down, productive people, but also in the back-office teams, we had to rightsize the team. I'll come back to U.K. on the next slide.

Software Solutions, our second turnaround topic of the year 2025. We went into the year with a too strong workforce. We brought on board a strong manager. Floris is here with us today. We reduced the workforce by 15%, and now it better fits the revenue structure of the business. So we are set to go into 2026 on a better cost base. We will still invest in that business, but the cost base is now far improved.

Third bullet point, we have reduced our global G&A workforce by 6% in 2025, something that is still ongoing today. So this is work in progress, but it's our target to get the right size. And people we can't simplify or automize, we have to move to low-cost locations. That's happening right now. Strict cost control, the fourth bullet point, I will not go deep, but office space, we reduced in Germany, Italy, Poland, Brazil over the last 12 months by 7,500 square meters. This office here is roughly 1/4 of the size of the former office, which was around the corner, while we didn't manage it down. In this case, we had to wait. Sometimes you have to wait. There was a long lease contract, but we had taken the office on board before COVID, and we learned we need less space. So we have reduced globally office space by 7,500 square meters.

Now at the bottom, the 5-year strategy about this, the mentioned cost effects on the right side, they will all materialize next year. This year, many of them have been more a cost than a benefit. The benefits will come in years after. And until '29, we believe we can improve our EBIT adjusted with gravity program work by at least 1 percentage point.

And let me highlight again the U.K. story. In the U.K., the gravity approaches, we leverage what works best. And again, on the left side of the slide, we are replicating in the U.K. our blueprint from the GFT U.S. And the smaller bullet points say it, we have a very efficient local team in the U.S. today. It's roughly 40 productive people, plus sales, plus administration in the U.S., and they are mostly managing the 95% offshore delivery that we have. This generates a mid-teen margin today, which is comparable to what peers generate. Simply, our U.S. business is only 9% of total GFT.

This blueprint, we're bringing to the U.K. right now. We're revising the go-to-market strategy, the leadership and the organization. We're implementing a new country manager. He will be on board somewhere in the first quarter, and the new governance for sales, operations and delivery are underway. So outlook for next year, this year, '25, but also '26 are transition years. '26, we will already see the margin improvement. So we should see a black breakeven for the U.K., and we will return to revenue growth in '27.

I promised my team, I will only bring one financial slide today, right, only one because this is all about the business side of GFT. This is the financial slide, and I'm trying to highlight the isolated GFT Group performance of the non-turnaround countries, which is by far the majority of the GFT Group. First, the 2 turnarounds, GFT U.K. and Software Solutions, including the numbers and the decline on revenue and profitability basis. We have a third enemy this year, which is FX. The euro is so strong that we have a lot of headwinds, especially on the revenue side. It's also burdening the profit. But if you take out these 3 effects, GFT in constant currency is growing by 11% this year. This is happening on the back of a very strong Latin American market, of a strong North American market and a somewhat weaker and not growing European market. It's already the blended growth rate of these 3 markets, but excluding U.K. and Software Solutions, 11% growth, and we are at a 9% EBIT adjusted margin. So this is where we can take this. Turnaround programs happening under management will take 1 or 2 years to get closer to the group numbers in those turnaround markets, but we are on track for that.

Now M&A strategy. Come on in. Take a seat, please. M&A strategy, we have also refined with the 5-year strategy. And again, the headline is highlighting it. We focus on bolt-on acquisitions of high-value-added services company in existing GFT markets. On the bottom, you do see the history of our M&As. We've done 13 M&As over the last 14 years. So we are quite experienced. We've done them in Europe, North America, South America. But now the strategic focus is a bit changed. It's on the top right. Country-wise, we stay in our existing markets. We don't go for M&A outside of GFT existing markets. Gravity program, focus on markets, maybe even reduce the markets, and we focus M&A on the existing markets.

Second, technology, unlock new ISV solutions and business to strengthen the core. Marco was talking about ISV a lot. M&A strategy has to follow that. I get to the example on the following page. And clients, of course, we want access to future Tier 1 and to Tier 2 clients via M&A.

Current priority list on the right side, on the top, it is North America. Again, as I said, we have good margins in the U.S., but it's only 9% of the GFT business. It should be 30% of our business if it would be like the market share that the markets globally have from the U.S. North America, high focus for clients, more clients access. We all know Americas is not cheap. So that's a challenge. The second, Latin America. Here, our strategic approach is to buy ISV companies and by that, also get their clients. And number three, a bit more opportunistic in Europe, also looking for ISV clients, so software implementation product companies with their client base. That's the fundamental M&A strategy. And now the one example that we implemented in the year 2025 is the company Megawork in Brazil, an implementation partner for SAP software products.

Megawork, now more on the left side, is a EUR 15 million, EUR 16 million a year company right now. We are consolidating since September. That's why we only will show EUR 5 million of revenue this year from Megawork. They do a 20% EBIT adjusted margin. So ISV business is highly attractive margin-wise. And it's roughly a 300 people team. And how does it fit into the strategy? We focus on existing GFT countries. Well, the client -- sorry, the M&A target is in Brazil. So obviously, we're following the strategy. We will later roll it out into other existing GFT Latin American markets, potentially Colombia, Mexico, and maybe even beyond into Europe, but currently focuses on Brazil.

The second M&A strategy, expanding client base, cross-selling potential. Well, in this case, we have acquired a company that has a diversified client structure in health, pharma, public sector, utilities, manufacturing, and we want to cross-sell GFT services into them. But also the other way around, we want to cross-sell the SAP expertise into GFT client base. And this has already succeeded in 1 case after roughly 4 weeks after buying. That's, I think, a record for GFT.

Number three, focus on high value-adding services. While it is an SAP product implementation business, we're showing the margin over here. So that fits. And last but not least, the GFT AI portfolio that Marco talked about a lot, should support the M&As. While in case of SAP, we still have a bit of work in front of ourselves, but we want our Wings suite to also support SAP services in future, something to work on for the next years. So implementation of the M&A strategy at work. That said, Marco, conclusion is for you.

Thank you, Jochen. So conclusion to go direct to the point, we are executing our 5-year strategy with a mission focus and to be the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger as I presented, as I mentioned to you. We are engineering growth and profitability while also focused on initiatives such as the acquisition of high value-added service companies in current markets that we have.

There is a clear path for large-scale growth opportunities in several fields, as I mentioned to all of you, the artificial intelligence modernization, the AI data and intelligence, the robotics, the defense, our core banking part and ICVs and clouds, but especially on the artificial intelligence modernization with an immense huge opportunity in terms of legacy architectures modernization. And the path ahead is bold, is ambitious and full of opportunities. GFT is ready for this -- to lead on the AI-centric digital transformation, right? So that's what we are positioning for. I think that we've been moving strongly as I presented before.

And I would like to thank you for the time and open for some questions. I don't know how we are with time, but go ahead, Andreas.

Okay. That one. Well, thank you very much for your update and almost staying in time, almost. I think before we proceed with our tech expertise, I would allow one question to keep the dialogue a little bit flowing, but then maybe move the other questions to the coffee break. So if there is a question in the room, we have one, maybe 2.

Yes. One question to the recent acquisition and the SAP topic you mentioned. Is there any risk that you get in conflict with SAP's own AI strategy?

On the contrary, one of the reasons of the acquisition is that SAP has a strong AI and AI strategy for their products. And we want to -- we do not want to do the traditional, the vanilla SAP. We want to definitely be the leading on this AI-centric transformation of SAP with the Agent platform that they are doing, number one. And number two, to also use AI to accelerate their migrations from the ECC to SAP/4HANA. So that's for us, we believe that is a strong opportunity. And we already started cross-selling, right.

Are you talking to SAP on that topic?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I met to -- with some -- in the event of Sam Altman, I met one of the Board members of SAP here in Germany at a global level. And we are talking in many countries, not only in Brazil, but in Spain, the Global Head of Partnership, which sits in Spain globally for SAP. So we've been, let's say, active discussing with them. Very happy, very happy with SAP. And by the way, for me, this is gold. We simply brought SAP an ISV. It's a global SAV brought into our ecosystem. And then we created a cross-selling immediately. In less than 1 month, we already sold SAP into one of our clients that we have. So for me, this is -- can really -- our expectation is to do more than the business case that we bought put on top.

Thank you. We have another question in the second row.

Yes. I have got one question with regard to the focus on the Tier 1 clients. I remember that you pursued very successfully this land and expand strategy. So the question for me would be, is that now that? Have you changed the strategy with regard to that? Or how should we think about that?

Yes. I think -- may I, if you want to take it, I believe that the land and expand strategy was a strategy that took GFT from EUR 100 million-ish, right, several years ago to the size that we are today, EUR 885 million. That's our guidance for this year. And I think that was quite, I would say, important and relevant strategy for us. But what's the situation now? The situation now is that I have a quite interesting and strategic client list of Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, as you saw. I also have a lot of more than 500 clients on Tier 4.

And now I need to rebalance the focus of the company because I'm clearly investing the same time and effort of our sales team, marketing, presales, technologies, architects into these long tail Tier 4 clients. I'm investing the same amount of effort in clients that you look at the clients and say, wow, these clients will never give me more than EUR 1 million never because there is no size for that. And by the way, my margin is not that good. So it's no-brainer. Let's invest the time on the ones that matter that can move the needle, Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients.

And obviously, let's be smart to keep doing the land and expansion, but smartly land in specific clients that can be a Tier 1 and then have a right plan and measure that every quarter, every 6 months, every year and see the plan evolution to take it from Tier 4 to Tier 3 to Tier 2 to Tier 1. That's the mission, but focus on what matters because if I double my Tier 1 and Tier 2, I can double the company. And they have scalable right and capabilities. Obviously, it's not simple, it's not trivial on that journey, we're going to lose some. We need to win others. But that's our mission.

Perfect. Thank you. I think there will be more questions in the coffee break, and we will have also the opportunity to talk about other questions later on. So thank you very much for that update on our 5-year strategy and showing us how our 5-year strategy is taking shake and for demonstrating how AI is breaking down the barriers of change in legacy systems and unlocking new major opportunities.

And we exactly take it from here where we now move from strategy to execution to the technology that is already transforming client projects. Today, please welcome Ignasi Vilardell and later on, Dean Clark, who will take us deeper into the world of agentic AI modernization with Wynxx. Ignasi, it's yours to have.

Thank you. Thank you, Andreas. The first statement that I want to say is that GFT was founded in the '87, right? And more than 10 years, we started doing AI projects. So we haven't jumped into the AI wagon last year so we have more than 10 years working around data and AI projects. One thing that I want to share with you is a set of examples, some of them being spoiled by Marco at the beginning. So I'm going to try to speed up a little bit that part. But I also -- I want to share with you that whenever a company is adopting AI, the impact of that adoption, it is different. We've seen different flavors and colors.

And the reason being is because it is impact, it is not uniform. That is the reason why at GST, we have a very, I would say, concrete offer when we are going into the market to help our customers to do this AI adoption in a very measurable and impactful manner. How are we starting this type of projects? The first thing that we need to understand and that we love to demonstrate the value with measurable impact. It comes for individual productivity right there. This is automating individual tasks that you have to do in your daily routine. And as we do that and we are accumulating experience, then we are ready to jump into the next step, which is precisely improving the process-based productivity, which is automating entire workflows across different business units.

The importance of having this stage, let's say, approach is because companies require time to get confidence on what is the possibility of AI to also change and adapt the cultural impact that represents the AI adoption and at the same time, to start realizing that this exponential ROI that AI will bring as long as they move into an AI-centric enterprise, it requires this step-by-step approach. So this is what we are currently doing.

But of course, at GFT, we are determined to go to the next growth phase, which is this AI-centric enterprise. Every lessons learned, every project, every success that we do, we make sure that we capitalize those and we make it tangible in our set of products, Engenion, Wynxx and Smaragd to continuously helping our customers. If we have to think about AI adoption, the most, I would say, immediate area where we should adopt AI is a very, I would say, mature arena. It is precisely the software development, right? This is the area where AI has been largely adopted over the past years.

Quoting Gartner, by 2028, 90% of AI software engineers will be using AI. That is a tremendous jump from 2024 -- sorry, here you go, only 14%. There is a massive jump of AI adoption in that field. And GFT, we are not just, let's say, being watching what's going on. But on the contrary, we are [ actionating ] this trend by helping our customers with Wynxx to generate better documentation, to generate better code, to generate better test and also helping them to maintain their systems. This is clearly a trend that GFT is capitalizing and that we are helping our customers across the board.

Now as I know that you would like to see some examples, I'm going to be covering some of them. The first one is in Mexico. It's a Tier 1 multinational bank that you see more or less here the rationale of these cards is we see in blue, let's say, the motto of the project. In that case, it's testing automation at scale. And then we have the pre-AI baseline, so the customer not using GFT services, not using Wynxx, which is our AI-based product to accelerate SDLC.

And then on the right-hand side, we have the results after adopting Wynxx, after engaging with GFT. And here, what we can see is that we have decreased the amount of time required to do test execution from 5 days to 2 hours. This is a 98% reduction in the times. Similarly, if we look at the human-based intervention, we see that we decreased from the 75% human intervention in the test execution to only 5% of manual execution. Going to another customer. We're still in LatAm, one of the largest customers and banks that are operating in Colombia. We are seeing more or less the same behavior, right? But in that case, not only in testing, but also in different steps of the software development life cycle.

Generating code, we reduced 72% of the time required to do so. Identifying code vulnerabilities, we reduced 88% of the time required to do this check and to fix them, which is the next step. And the same for code review, generating user stories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is changing completely the landscape for our customers whenever they have to produce code at scale.

And the last example in this slide is in North America, another Tier 1 institution, and again, we have a baseline of lack of documentation, very slow process to have coverage on the code, testing, et cetera, et cetera. And using Wynxx, we are able to improve dramatically the entire situation. So in a nutshell, in just these 3 examples, we are seeing how Wynxx and how GFT is improving significantly the times, the quality and the coverage that we are providing to our customers between 70% and 95%.

But the most important thing that we need to highlight as well, that's a message that I want to share with you is that the more that the customers are engaging with GFT, the more that Wynxx is used, the better results that we are obtaining, the better efficiencies that we are generating. And if you don't trust me, because we never met, right, later on in the process, Bradesco Seguros themselves are going to be sharing that story with us.

I'm going to spoil myself a little bit, but the story is in early 2024, the customer launched the challenge to all their IT providers saying, guys, we need you to deliver more business value with the same budget. And the result of that challenge, the GFT was the winner party, achieving the result of 40% efficiency and productivity and 80% of faster code correction. Again, later, we are going to be -- we are honored to have Bradesco Seguros themselves, one of the largest Latin American insurance companies to share with us this project and these initiatives.

So as I said, we started in the software development life cycle. But if we have to think about what's the next step, immediately, we think about business processes. And this is precisely what we've done. So back-office processes, middle office processes, front-office processes. This is where AI could help all these financial institutions and industrial companies, insurance companies, et cetera, et cetera, to automate many of their functions. Some examples could be document management, where we can apply AI and actually, we've done it, credit risk assessment, customer service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I know that you like to see some examples. So let's go for it. The first one, let's think about a mainframe system. This is a very critical infrastructure. And every single minute of downtime, it is actually affecting that the customer is not able to transact, right? It's not able to buy, it's not able to pay, you name it. So definitely, reducing the times required to fix incidents, it's critical. It's key. And this is what we've done at GFT. We take an existing service. We download all the data from the customer, of course, with their permission, how these tickets -- how this incident has been solved over time.

And we generated this engine being able to help the operator that whenever new ticket, a new incident is coming to the system, he or she can expedite the resolution of such kind of an incidents. And after just 3 months that we put this system in production, we reduced the average ticket resolution time by 30%. And this is precisely what you can see here, the SLA times going down and down and down and down. And I know that you like also to see some proof -- graphical proof of that because another thing that we do at GFT is not only training and putting together all these AI engines, but also bridging the gap between the technology and those people that are not technology, but they need to use that technology.

And here, you have some screenshot of this solution that is already in production, bringing that value for different customers across GFT. This is not just operational efficiency. This is strategic leverage because of that, now whenever we are pricing a new application maintenance for our customers, we can be more competitive. And those existing engagements where we are doing maintenance, we can also open the door for potential margin improvement. So this is what AI is unleashing for us. Time is very sensitive, and I know that I'm actually running out of time already perhaps.

But it is even more important when you are submitting and creating credit risk analysis. A credit risk analyst, whenever they have to create this report, what they have to do is some of the -- all the tasks that you see here and beyond that. But this is just, let's say, a summary of some of the tasks that they have to do. And as you can see, they have to do documentation, they have to gather information, they have to fill out some sections. They have to answer some qualitative and quantitative KPIs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Together with Oliver Wyman, we create a pilot with one of our customers where what we said and what we did is creating an agentic approach that some of these steps could be enhanced with the use of AI and therefore, reducing the time required to do this task. On average, we said that we can save between 30% and 40% of the times required by the analysts in conducting these credit risk reports. And for that particular customer that you see here some key figures, how many analysts, how many customers, how many new customers, et cetera, et cetera, because that, of course, influence the business case.

It means that in a single year, they can save between EUR 4 million and EUR 5 million. That is in a scenario where the customer is not growing. If the customer is willing to grow, which, of course, they want, that savings go much beyond that number. And since I know that you like an image better than me talking, this is actually the solution that we have implemented that we are pitching and that we are using as an accelerator to help our customer to achieve these goals. So this is not only about being able to deploy AI, but doing it at scale for enterprises.

Last but not least, we talk about SDLC, right, AI for SDLC, software development life cycle. We talk about the incursion of AI into business processes, back office, middle office, front office, but we are not going to be stopping here. For us, the next frontier, the next jump, as Marco has said also at the beginning, is the capacity to go towards this new arena, which is a tremendous volumes of opportunities for GFT, which is the large-scale modernization. We've seen over the last, I don't know, 10, 20 years, many of these initiatives repeatedly stalled not because of lack of vision, but because of the prohibitive cost of delivering such kind of a project, very long projects, a lot of risk, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm talking about projects such as mainframe modernization, reengineering of machine control systems, you name it. Nowadays, GFT with the use of Wynxx, we transform the forbidden type of projects into something that we are actioning, we are delivering. And again, following the same structure that I've been following across the presentation, some examples. The first one, Tier 1 multinational bank in Spain, mainframe, core banking, more than 40 years of a legacy system. And the important thing, I know it's a little bit tiny here, but more than 428 million lines of code, more than 347,000 programs, more than 4,000 functional groups. All this entangled altogether.

Now imagine that you're an engineer and you have to serve in to understand all this complexity and to determine what is the best strategy to migrate this into a new banking architecture. And I'm going to tell you, you cannot use AI at all. Not possible, right, unless you have a very deep pocket and a lot of patience because that will take ages. GFT with the use of wings, we are transforming this opportunity into a reality and not only for one country, but as you can see here, we're doing this for 2 countries at the same time.

This example was already shared by Marco. Tier 1 multinational car automaker happen to be German, but in that case, operating in Brazil. similar complexity, right? We're talking about core banking, 2,000 programs, more than 200 databases, more than 3 million lines of code. And again, you have to understand everything with no documentation whatsoever to then establish what is the migration strategy, the modernization strategy. Marco said before some numbers, right? You will see a variance of the Wynxx.

And the reason here is because we needed for them to deploy the LLM. This is a more technical aspect of it. But even though this is a 69x reduction of the original project without using GFT and AI for less than 10% of the cost. And you may say, yes, Ignasi, but before you were getting that and now you're getting this, don't get confused. Before we will never get that. That was prohibited. That was not even a possibility for the customer. They didn't start this type of project. Now they do, and they are doing it with GFT.

And last but not least, I'm not bringing KPIs because we have started quite recently. But you think about industry, think about German champion in the machinery space. And imagine the amount of lines of legacy code that is running inside these machines. And now I don't know if any of you have quite recently went to China, but the competition being created there around machinery robotics is fierce. So definitely, they have now a motivation to accelerate the innovation to shorten the time to market.

And to do so, they have to create new type of software to be run embedded into these machinery systems. This project -- this challenge, even though it's not a core banking system, is very similar to this. Legacy systems bear entangled. You need to understand the business logic behind, you need to determine the migration strategy, and you need to do that in a cost-efficient manner. And this is precisely what we are doing. And this is precisely what we are going to deliver out of this immediate project to them, help them to achieve these objectives over there.

Now everything that I've said share the same common goal, right, which is helping our customers to run this enterprise AI adoption while we can measure the value that we are bringing to them, which, for sure, I've been sharing with you. But we are not stopping here. For us, as we said at the beginning, agentic is the next frontier. And for us, as part of our strategy is that AI, it is not something that we see as our customers shoot it up, but something that internally we are adopting.

What you see here on the left-hand side is our agentic marketplace. So every single process that we have inside GFT at the moment is being analyzed to see what can we do to improve the process and to bring agents to help us to be more efficient internally. And that is something -- let me see if that works now. Yes, there we go. And that is something that we are creating internally to help our employees to get access to those agents to find a way that we can build agents in a standard manner, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But this is not everything. On the right-hand side, you have our agentic governance framework, which we have created to ensure that internally and to our customers, whenever we are creating an AI system, whether it's an agent or not, and in that case, it is, these agents are aligned to the business goals. So we want to generate return on the investment. Second, we want to do it in an ethical and responsible manner. We want to make sure that it's compliant. We want to make sure that it's secure. And of course, we are building all the technical underlying architecture to make that a reality.

I know that you are thrilled to know a little bit more about what's behind the scenes in terms of the technical ins and outs. And for that reason, I will welcome my colleague, Dean Clark on stage to tell us about it.

Hi, everyone. So welcome to this presentation. So the idea that I'm going to talk about now really focuses on a few of the key messages that Marco was pitching to you in the beginning introduction. So firstly, before I move forward into what GFT are doing in terms of its future road map and where we're moving Wins, where we're moving our AI adoption, what I want to do a little bit is just rewind for a second, just understand where the market is, what we're seeing in the market and how we're going to react to that.

So right now, today, you can already see a number of organizations are adopting AI. It's now part of business as usual. Everyone is trying to embed it in their processes. We've seen a large number of use cases where it's being embedded in coding assistance like our Copilot, for example. We want to make sure that we are not competing with those, but we are contributing additional savings. And what you've already seen from some of the existing case studies and success stories with our clients is that we are achieving those things alongside the other coding assistant. And that's a key part that I want to talk about at length later.

But in order to try and progress a little bit, right now, we need to focus on how AI is already transforming both the world and how it's transforming the possibilities that large organizes and enterprises have in terms of modernizing their estates, moving forward with their productivity, bringing AI into their products, into their services, into the offerings for their clients. And the way that people are already doing that is that they are already seeing AI doing what is traditionally seen as automation really of the low-hanging fruit.

So the manual repetitive tasks, the research, the data processing. These are activities that everybody has already been looking at using AI for years. Generative AI, of course, is making that a lot more easy. Generative AI, of course, focuses on that content creation, content summarization. Now in addition to that, we've also got use cases where people are starting to enhance their products, where they're able to personalize customer journeys. They're able to personalize or hyper-personalize user interfaces, customer journeys, be able to target specific products and processes around people's thoughts, wishes, demands.

And finally, the third point around how AI is already embedded in our world today is purely and simply amplifying human potential. And really, for me, this is the fundamental concept of why AI is really being adopted wide scale by some of these larger enterprises. And this isn't about how tools are there to replace humans. This is about how tools are there to amplify their potential. It's about lifting that up to the next level so that we can do more with less or ideally more with the same.

Now if it will change, there we go. So in the market today, we've already seen that we are moving on as GFT. Marco mentioned already that we have our legacy Modernizer agent. That is GFT's first agent built within Wynxx. Wynxx as a platform is an exceptionally mature product already that sits alongside the software development life cycle, pointing at successfully improving a number of the processes along that route. Now in order for GFT to grow, we need to take into account all of the market trends. We need to make sure that we aren't following everybody else, but we are leading other people.

We understand that today's ecosystem, we have a number of our clients already looking at and indeed implementing agents. But there is a challenge today. Marco mentioned at the beginning, there is a lot of noise around AI. How do we rise above that noise? How do we create that level of impact? Gartner coined about a year or so ago, the term agent washing. This is something where existing large organizations created their new branding around their existing platform. They didn't take into account the true agentic need. It needs to be autonomous. It needs to make decisions and it needs to execute something. So what we have seen in the industry are a lot of applications, a lot of software products be labeled as agentic when they aren't. They just purely use AI.

Now one of the things that we are doing, and you've just seen it from our agentic architecture that Ignasi has displayed on the screen or at least the governance model anyway. we are ensuring that every product that we build that is labeled agentic will be truly agentic. It will make decisions. It will be autonomous. And we've created a governance framework. We've created a model. We've created architectures and blueprints that not only are we using internally on Wynxx, but we're also starting to embed on our client projects.

Now one of the interesting aspects of this is how can you identify what is truly agentic. Without sifting through it, without using it yourself, it's very difficult to do that. What we want to do is build the trust in the level of execution that we perform with our clients with the products that we build. So GFT's name is synonymous with being that challenger in the industry all around AI and agentic AI. Now in order to move forward, we can't just make our platform agentic, okay? Other people are creating agentic platforms.

Why does that make GFT special? It doesn't. We need to focus on moving that forward. We need to look at the evolution of those agentic platforms. To date, GFT has obviously focused its Win product on the software development life cycle. Now Win in itself, as you can see from the slide, has focused on design and planning, development, testing validation, deployment operations holistically, okay? The features that we have sit within the software development life cycle, and they are there to enhance what you can get by buying something like GitHub Copilot or CursA or using Anthropic CludAI.

Now those specific tools are aimed at code generation, code completion. They will create a read me file. And I'm sure if you've done any reading on Wynxx or you've heard some of the presentations today, you understand that our product doesn't focus in those areas specifically. It can touch on that. It does some of the fringes. There are a number of articles that you can probably find on the Internet right now by Gartner, by McKinsey, by Bain, and they all state the same thing. A developer spends approximately 20% to 30% of his time engaged in writing code. If you're looking at these coding assistants, which have come a very long line and are very useful, I use them myself, you are going to be focusing those savings on that 20% to 30% of your day.

GFT's Wynxx product focuses on the holistic software development life cycle. So we try to get as much of the savings as we can from that other 70% to 80%, which is a far greater share. For that reason alone, without adding in the additional savings from using one of these coding assistants, that's why you're seeing some of these larger numbers in terms of our savings compared to the numbers that you're seeing from those traditional coding assistants.

Now I mentioned that we need to move forward. I mentioned that we need to enhance our product beyond agentic. One of the ways that we're going to do that is that we are going to start to focus our product on becoming more of a general intelligence model. We are going to get our platform to think how can I do this? What is my reaction to that? So the way that I or hopefully, many of you in the room cognitively process things based on our surroundings, by our situations, by the things that we have at our disposal like tools or a glass or a piece of paper, we are able to solve complex scenarios.

We are able to understand the context of each of these things. We're going to create a central orchestration process within Wynxx as a platform. And that orchestration, you can think of it as a brain. It is there to understand its context. That context might be architecture. It might be code, it might be documentation. It could even be an organization's IT security policy. But we're going to be able to ingest all of these components into that central orchestrator or brain. It is going to then understand contextually the meaning behind all of these things.

It is then going to create a plan, okay? Very important thing in agentic AI is to create that plan. The orchestrator is then going to be able to provide that sequence and that communication out to other agents or APIs or micro services to execute on that sequence, giving you an end-to-end transformative process.

Now both Marco and Ignasi have talked today about the importance of being able to transform organizations. This transformation is very expensive. It's very time consuming. It's very complex. What we're doing here is we are going to provide a platform that is going to break down some of those barriers. It's going to reduce that time. It's going to simplify to the point where the risk of doing those migrations is reduced.

Now how are we going to do this is probably the question you're going to ask. What I've described right now is probably the holy grail of products, the holy grail of platforms. How do I minimize my cost? How do I make it go faster? How do I reduce the risk and complexity? So to date, I'm hoping that you've all heard of a large language model. The term has been thrown around a few times today. A large language model ultimately is therefore creation, okay? I'm going to ask it to provide something it will based on its understanding or neural network within its large data set, it's going to provide some contextual output.

A large action model goes beyond that. So whilst a large language model can create, for example, a plan, the construct that is now a large action model can actually take that plan and execute and communicate. So this is going to be one of the central components of our brain. Large action models are available today. You can find them in open source. So they are starting to become a little bit -- I don't want to say widespread because that would be exaggerating slightly, but we are starting to see bleeding edge technologies that are starting to make use of this technology.

GFT also want to be a bleeding edge organization taking advantage of this. This large action model adoption will essentially move the dial of where we are, where typically we would have to write a huge amount of code, a huge amount of logic, we'd have to build learning cycles. We'd have to build a memory. The large action model actually takes care of a huge amount of that. And we can leverage all of GFT's existing learnings, coupled with that simplified technology stack, enabling us to go to market quicker, more effectively to a much better output for our customers.

Now what we've heard from Ignasi earlier today, and we've heard from Marco already, these legacy transformations are highly complex. We've heard that they can take several years. They can cost millions and millions of pounds. One of the larger cost components of these types of transformation projects is the validation. If I write a piece of code, someone's got to check it. If I release a piece of code, it needs a review. If I write a document, it needs a 4 eyes check. All of these stages across that process require somebody to put a second pair of eyes on it and effectively sign it off.

Now with agile release processes, we've obviously seen DevOps tool chains. We've seen better workflows that have enhanced it. But ultimately, it still comes down to someone needing to check. One of the benefits of, again, the large action model and some of the technology understanding of our architecture around putting inspectors or auditors into the loop is our AI platform is going to validate at each stage a lot of that output. The winner of the race for transformation is going to be the organization that manages to build in as much of the solution validation to their product as possible.

If we can reduce that amount of validation that typically can be 60%, 70% of a project's time line and cost, this will be groundbreaking for our clients. This is where GFC can essentially pick up the baton as a leader in the field. So what we're hoping is that we can compress those 18- to 24-month projects by using our new platform to under 6 to 9 months. We've seen some of the savings that Marco has talked about. We've seen some of the savings that Ignasi has talked about. We are looking to go beyond that.

Now I've spoken a little bit about how we're going to evolve Wynxx as a platform. What I haven't said is what the future for that platform involves. Now it's going to become an agentic platform. It's going to be able to communicate externally with other agents. So not only are we going to turn all of our features into separate agents. Not only are we going to add them to our agentic marketplace, both our internal client-facing agents and our internal ones that are actually going to be added. All of these agents will essentially be able to be accessed by our central orchestration or our brain. The brain will also be able to use anybody else's agents.

There was a great question around the SAP. Are we going to be aligned with SAP's AI strategy? Or do we conflict with it? This is a great example of how we're going to work with it. Our brain will be able to reach out to SAP's agents. We will be able to embed those within our workflows. Our brain will understand the complexities of what the SAP agents are doing. We can teach it how to embed those in its sequencing to solve even more complex problems. So that's a great example. thank you for that question, by the way, teed that part up nicely.

Now the next stage of the vision is not just to use this as a platform or a suite of products. It's actually to start to become a de facto member of a human AI partnership. We are going to embed Wynxx not as a tool for engineers to use, but actually as a worker as part of a holistic team unit. We're going to be able to offload a number of specific tasks. It will go and autonomously complete those end-to-end. That is the vision for Wynxx.

Did I do on time? Almost.

Well, thank you very much, Dean. Thank you very much, Ignasi, for that insight and fascinating look into enterprise software and where AI systems learn that and collaborate intelligently and specifically.

You have perfectly been in time. I think there are tons of questions in the audience. I suggest to have a coffee and address these questions directly to our speakers. And we will again meet in, well, roughly 20 minutes at 4:00 p.m., we continue with the next session. Thank you very much.

[Break]

Okay. Welcome back, everybody. I hope you had enough time to grab a coffee and to interact with our tech experts and also have a chat with the management. We now shift to the real-world client perspective. What does AI-driven productivity look like inside the major financial institution. I'm very pleased to welcome [indiscernible] from Bradesco Seguros together with Ignacio to share how AI is making a measurable impact on delivery and efficiency. Please, Ignacio. The stage is yours.

Again. Again. One second. Thank you, Andreas. I was a little bit jealous when Marco used the video. And that's why as a nice breaking, I'm going to also add this video to start with and presenting officially what is wings, and then we will go into this conversation with [indiscernible].

[Presentation]

All right. Thank you. So as I said before, of course, we are 100% certain of what we are saying and what we are sharing with you in terms of KPIs, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that if we have the capability to bring a customer talking on our behalf around experience that they have had with GT using wings, that's the best story that we can share.

And for that very reason, I'm honored to welcome our guests, [indiscernible], welcome.

Thanks, [indiscernible]. Thanks for having me here.

Now I see you, [indiscernible]. So [indiscernible], before we jump into a set of questions, please, for the benefit of the audience, can you introduce yourself, your role inside Bradesco Seguros and tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Yes, sure. First of all, thank you, [indiscernible] and GFT, for the opportunity to be here with you. I'm running the IT shop here in Bradesco Seguros, mainly the development team, so responsible to make sure that we have the most of our IT investment, the investment in technology that the company has. I can also introduce Bradesco Seguros now if you think it's a good definitely to do that, [indiscernible]

Go ahead.

Yes. We have -- we are an insurance company, the largest in Latin America. We are based in Brazil, very focused on the local market. Last year, we had a revenue of EUR 20 billion, which was quite good. And it left us a net profit of EUR 1.5 billion. And fortunately, this year is -- the numbers are looking even stronger than that. So we are presenting good results. And of course, the challenge that we have is to keep going with this level of outcomes.

Thank you, [indiscernible]. And again, thanks for coming here today. We've been talking a lot around AI today, but also over the last 2 years, a lot of companies, everybody talking about AI. So when you decided back then early in 2024 to start adopting AI for SDLC, what was the main motivation that spark this change in your strategy and decided then to adopt artificial intelligence for your development processes?

Well, I'm pretty sure that all of you know that the investment in technology is one of the biggest constraints every company has. So the good side of our company is that we have an amazing sales team that is able to bring home a revenue of EUR 20 billion every year. But on the other hand, we are obsessed by efficiency. So we need to provide the most with the budget that we have for our annual investment. And that was the main motivation for us to look at AI. So this obsession to make more with the investment that we have. It's not little, but it's always a constraint, right? In every company, the investment in technology is something that you need to take the most of it.

And the other side of this equation is that we have very nice and very good strategic partners like GFT and a few others that are connected with technology. So using these connections, we saw that AI was gaining momentum, mainly in code development, but we asked ourselves together with GFT, what else can we do instead of just using for accelerating coding, but can we use in the overall system development life cycle in other arenas as well. So that was the main trigger that sparked the whole thing and got us where we are today.

During today's session and usually when we are reading the market around the impact of artificial intelligence, we are very keen to explore what are the, let's say, the quantitative KPIs that are supporting this strategy. But I'm interested also to know a little bit more about the qualitative KPIs. Did you experience any change between before, in our case, using Wings and after using Wings in your operations, in your teams?

Well, yes, absolutely. And I think I can highlight 3 main things here. One of them is the shift left. So we are able to anticipate our gates of quality, security, so all of that. So it put us in a very good position to understand earlier where the showstoppers would be and get ahead of time in terms of being faster in anticipating what would be happening with the code when the code gets to a quality or security gate. So we have less code being holding these gates, which means that we are more productive. The other thing is the shift right. We are also being able to give the product owner more visibility about the outcomes when certain topic or story will be ready, how much it will cost. So it's more predictable now for the project owner to understand the whole thing.

But probably the most interesting is probably what we are seeing in the screen now. We got a very simple word cloud from our tool is the tool that we're using to store all the data we have about our agile development, and that's the nice thing about having data, right? So before using AI, we got this word cloud and what was screaming in the cloud, the words that are screaming on the cloud were mainly about the process. So we could see things like daily alignment, so the ceremony of the agile methodology. After using AI, we start seeing these words changing to the actual objective of the squad. So in a very insightful way, we noticed that the mindset of the team was changing from the process to the final outcome from the objective of the squad, and it was very interesting.

And [indiscernible], that question we cannot miss, right? So qualitative KPIs is for sure an improvement in the attitude of the team towards the adoption of AI, but we should touch as well the quantitative one. So what can you share around those metrics that you are taking into consideration to say, yes, Wings was providing value to our operation.

Well, and that's all that matters, right? So the bottom line, so the results itself. And what we noticed is once we are in regime, so after implementing AI, we could see gains from 30% to 40% in productivity. What it means in the real world? It means that this year, 2025, we are delivering with the same technology investment that we had last year, 30% to 40% more to the business. So -- and we opted to do that, right? The other option that we could have is just save this money. And actually, we are doing that in certain areas, for example, in maintenance. We are able to maintain the systems this year, costing 30% less than we paid exactly for the same maintenance last year.

So it's a cost reduction for Rio. But for investments to develop new things, we opted to protect the investment. But this year, we are delivering 30% to 40% more to the business in terms of -- the main metric that we use here is function points. So we are able to deliver more function points to the business, 40% more function points to the business this year than we delivered last year. And one good thing is that we are using these metrics for 5 to 6 years.

So we are quite mature in understanding how our productivity behaves in the overall development cycle. How many function points we are -- each squad each agile squad is able to deliver month after month. So we are quite mature in these metrics, which helped a lot us to understand and to measure these gains in an effective way.

I think that it is instrumental to have a good methodology to measure performance of different providers, of course, including GFT. But clearly, that was the baseline for you to then determine that GFT was, let's say, one of the winners, right, in this AI race. I know that you also have some KPIs from Bradesco that you want to share with the wider audience today. Please, [indiscernible], tell us about what we see on the screen at the moment.

Well, yes, the gains that we had in productivity, there are many different flavors. So we saw these gains in application modernization, in code conversion and everything. The one that I like the most is probably what you can see in the left bottom of this screen. We are calling vulnerability for the lack of a better word, but it's prevention against cyber attacks. We have many tools in the market that are able to identify a potential threat that happens somewhere in the world. then we check our code against that threat and we start fixing to eliminate to prevent to be interested by similar attack.

When we look at that 2023, we acted in roughly 60,000 preventions, and we spent BRL 13 million our local currency. Then the following year, which was last year, we did 3x more with half of the budget. So it's an impressive gain. And this year, we kept the same budget for this kind of activity. And very likely, we'll be delivering 50% more than we did last year. That's the kind of repetitive work where AI is very strong, where we can see the results in a very strong and very positive way. So this is for highlight one of the pieces that we have in the overall development cycle.

So more value with the same budget, I guess your Chief Financial Officer is super happy, I guess, with the outcomes.

Thinking about know very well that they are always asking for more. So and our mission is to challenge you guys to deliver more. So we are together on this.

And we are fully committed to deliver that as well. So thinking about and sharing more, let's say, details around the main features that the developers use the most. What can you share around this topic with the audience today?

Well, we are using for the entire development life cycle. So one thing that we actually, the analysts, they like quite a lot is to use agents to help in the story creation. And we measure the quality of the store by points. So we can see that the story that was Level 5, for example, last year, is functuating something like 7 this year. So we have better quality story is being produced and a better quality story affects the whole cycle, right? It goes smoother through the whole development cycle.

But for the developer itself, what they did -- what they do like us in this prevention to cyberattacks is a very good example because the work that developer used to do was to get dozens, hundreds of codes, very similar pieces of code and do very similar changes in those pieces of code. So it was quite repetitive for them. They did almost the same change in hundreds of different codes.

Now what they do is working a prompt that will be doing the work for them. So they love it. It changes completely the mindset of the developer. And then after the prompt is done, they see the end result and then they refine the prompt to get even better, and that's where the productivity is coming.

Part of it is cultural change. But if we talk about challenges, right, more than 180 professionals across more than 20 squads. What can you share around the challenges that we have had during this period?

Yes, if we look at this number of 20 squads is what we have with. If we look at the broader team, we have almost 200 squads running. And I think there are 2 things that we noticed. One of them is the time. So the productivity does not come fast. We noticed that we spend 3 months in a setup and ramping up the team. So if we have a squad that's not using AI for the same -- very same squad to get ready, we need to train the professionals. We need to get the tooling ready. They need to get used to that. And what we noticed is that it typically takes 3 months for the whole thing is ready. And in these 3 months, we didn't see any gains. Actually, sometimes we see even some worsening on the productivity. But after that, the magic starts happening.

In the following 3 months, we can see this number stabilizing. So then the productivity starts to show up and the teams get their gears really going, and we see the numbers showing up. That was one thing. So you need to persevere in doing the work and get confident that results will come. The other thing that we noticed is that the results mainly at the beginning over these first 6 months, they are very heterogeneous across the different squads. -- mainly because what is very typical is that we start with the quads with the worst productivity. So we see the major gains in them because they had a bad productivity at the beginning. So if we look throughout the different line of businesses, we saw that the gains were as high as 70% in one side and as low as 20% in the other.

But when all of this come together and stabilize after these 6 months, what we can see after all this turbulence is gone is that we end up with 30% to 40% gains overall. So you need to pass through that to see a stable result at the end. So -- and sometimes people are impatient wait for that and anxious to see the results and the results are showing something and they think they can take that for granted. So you need to give some time to get a stable number out of it.

I think that some part of the KPIs that -- or the aspects have already been shared in here in the following plot. But just for the sake of time, Gay, I'm going to jump to the next one, which is part of the story that you were sharing in the latest question is related to having this perseverance, having this strategic vision that needs to be implemented and wait for the results to come, right? From that angle, are you redefining the concept of your workforce in this new AI era?

Yes, we are doing that. So of course, we need to change the way that the team is working, and it's very important. They need to change. We need to change -- you mentioned before, right, it's a culture of change. So we need to change the mindset of the team to take advantages of the new tools that they have available. And being a developer, I know it's quite hard for the developer to believe that AI will be doing better than the developers. It's a very artisanal kind of work, and they love to do this stuff. But once they are challenged to do prompts that help them to do the work, it starts getting interesting. So that's a very important thing.

But I think we are now moving to a different stage, right? We -- until now, we have been using AI to accelerate the work of the team. I think we are now moving to a point where agents will be doing -- AI agents will be doing a complete piece of work by themselves. And I think that's the next challenge we have together. How can we have mixed squats where we have some humans, but also some autonomous agents that we just ask them to produce a piece of code and test it and we get it done and join with the rest of the work to have the whole thing ready.

Very aligned to our view as well. Now for closing [indiscernible], what tips would you like to share with the wider audience that we have here today face-to-face and also virtually connected to this session of all the journey that you have started more than 1 year ago.

Well, there are 4 things that I usually like to share with the people. First of them is that security is a must. So if you have any doubt that your code will be protected, don't go there. So you need to make sure that everything is secure from the beginning. Your code will not be shared with anyone else, your data is protected. That's the very first thing. The second one is that you need to have the people train it. So investment in enhancing people ability is very important. You need to get the tools to train, to understand how the technology is evolving. So keep this space is very, very important.

And then the other 2, I got this from Charles Darwin on his theory of evolution, right? He noticed that who survives in the nature is not the strongest or the fastest, is the most adaptable to change. And I think it's so true in our corporate world as well. So being able to change constantly is what differentiates us as a company. And we need to understand that and keep this space as well.

And the last thing also comes from Darwin. He noticed that for IPC to evolve, competition is very important, but collaboration is even more. So that's why we love to share with other companies to learn from them as well to evolve together. And I read leaving here the invite for everyone for us to collaborate and go beyond.

And let me add, point #5 is working alongside GFT into that journey, but it's going to be me saying that, [indiscernible], not you. Thank you very much, [indiscernible], for being our trusted partner in that journey for being here today to share everything that you shared with us, your experiences, the challenges that, of course, it is not an easy task to do. But definitely, Bradesco Seguros is determined to go into that direction, and we are honored and proud that Shift is part of that journey together with you. Thank you, [indiscernible].

My pleasure. Again, thanks for having us.

Well, thanks also from my side, [indiscernible]. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ignacio, for hosting that session and for the insights and sharing these impressive results, real tangible results from real project that connects very well to the theory we had before.

So we now turn into a topic that is absolutely crucial for the global financial stability, the role of AI in combating financial crime. And please welcome my colleague, Floris from [indiscernible] and Michael Laws from Deutsche Bank for our next slot. The stage is yours.

Thank you very much. Warm welcome from me as well. We'll be switching gears now. We heard a lot about Wings as one of our proud products in my team, Software Solutions. We actually also are very proud to have the products of Smart where we have been serving many banks, especially in Germany and in Switzerland, Austria, to stay compliant, a key capability of keeping the license and keeping the trust of your brand is actually being able to detect what kind of money flows through the bank and also adhere to all the regulations that keep on changing and keep on being added across the world to fight terrorist funding, to fight anti-financial crime, to fight money laundering.

And we're very proud to have been serving Deutsche Bank for many, many years in this space. And I have a great pleasure of welcoming Mike Laws into the call. If we can switch to the screen. Perfect. Hi, Mike. Good afternoon.

Hi everyone. How are you doing.

So Mike is actually in London, and Mike Laws is responsible for all of the technology stack that Deutsche Bank uses globally to fight financial crime, which, as you can imagine, is a growing piece of technology because technology works both ways, right? You can use it for the good side, you can also use it for the bad side. And Mike is the one that tries to keep up or even be in front of the bad guys by having the right technology stack in the bank.

So Mike, welcome to the audience. If you would like to briefly introduce yourself and your role in Deutsche Bank.

Thanks, Floris. Yes, Michael Laws, I've been at Deutsche Bank for over 15 years now. I've worked in many parts of the organization, started off in their markets business, but within technology. And then in about 2017, I was asked to take a professional risk and move into infrastructure, potentially to infuse part of the organization with a bit more of a commercial mindset.

And I've been kind of in compliance and AFE ever since 2017, predominantly based in London. I've done some time in -- I did 3 years in New York as well. And more and more so, I'm doing regular trips to Germany. But I would say that's a nice brief introduction for me, Floris.

Very good. So 50 years in the bank, the last 7 years only in fighting financial crime. Let's first do a quick look back, right? So what would you say is the biggest trend in technology in specifically your area of the bank? What have you seen changing much in the past years?

Yes. Well, it's what's changed or almost -- I think what hasn't changed is often that's almost more relevant pointing out. So I think one thing that's different to many other sort of commercial parts of an organization is that I find that in regulation compliance and AFC, we're sort of never finished. So I'd like to keep with me a few examples of what was acceptable in terms of transaction monitoring or screening at the beginning of this journey. And I'll pick on one, which is client screening. So obviously, every bank has to regularly screen not just its clients, but associated parties for sanctions risks, internal watch list, a variety of things.

And if I go back to that first day in AFC and compliance back in sort of 2017, we could probably screen about 500,000 parties a day, and that was probably okay. And if I look to what our plans are next year, we're going to probably be doing 30 million parties multiple times a day, and that's probably okay. So right? So the expectation kind of moves rapidly in this space, and it's always just okay. I've had a few instances where we've been called out for some particularly good work. But generally, it's trying to keep pace with the regulation. And of course, the next one is, which I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit more detail later is the utilization of AI and machine learning.

And I don't think anybody involved in this space has not noticed that more recently, there's been far more willingness and increasing engagement from regulators around the potential for AI, which wasn't always the case. You could argue that you could interpret the new EU AML regulation that, that kind of level of engagement has moved to support, which very quickly becomes expectations. So clearly, I would be surprised if there's many top-tier banks that don't have some AI detection next year.

Just to round out this thing that we're never finished, there is this -- we must not only keep pace with regulation, but we always -- we also have to keep pace with business and market growth. So like if you pick transaction monitoring, the U.K. digital payment market, I think it's going to be about USD 450 billion this year. That's going to double by 2029. And real-time payment transactions for the last 2, 3 years have gone up approaching 50% and your monitoring environment is just expected to handle that.

If I take some very real examples where we've introduced clients into Deutsche Bank that are merchant solutions, money service bureaus, payment service bureaus, we're talking about going from a system that probably has to handle 100,000 transactions a day or a month to tens of millions. And we need to be -- we need notice to do that. So I think the first big kind of challenge in the past few years is that sort of expectation like we're never finished. More recently is absolutely this expectation versus actual progress that can be achieved with AI.

I think those commercial products out there like ChatGPT, Gemini, they are so gratifying, right? They are designed for the consumer market. They make you feel good. And then you start thinking about how I could apply that to a regulatory environment. And the margin for error is so low in what we do, all the requirement to explain an error if it happens. I would just use an example from last weekend where I was trying to understand the internal temperature that I had to remove a joint of beef from the oven. I didn't want to know what temperature it had to be. I wanted it to account for the resting period, the temperature increase. And it told me that I should remove it from the oven when it was 5,658 degrees Celsius. Now if I had somehow applied that to a threshold or something in my transduction monitoring system, I wouldn't be able to say, well, you win some, you lose some with AI.

So I still think there's that barrier that we kind of have this expectation that's been put on us in tech and we haven't quite achieved. And I would say the last one I will talk about in terms of the challenges where I really think the value comes from is really understanding the bank's role in fighting financial crime, yes. So we don't arrest people. We don't go and find criminals. We are a part of a very, very regimented structure that informs kind of governing bodies and law enforcement regionally and in specific countries. We play a part. And sometimes, if you don't truly understand the laws, regs and guidance, you can actually sort of get a little bit ahead of yourself in trying to think, oh, surely, we need to do this. And actually, that's not our part in the overall picture.

So one thing I think in more recent news is really understanding what excellence looks like in terms of our piece of the puzzle. So Floris, I think those 3 challenges of the last year, of the last few years for me have been that expectation. We're never finished, that AI is supposed to make everything we do super easy, but we still seem to be doing loads of work. And then this evolution around really understanding what excellence looks like for a bank and the role they play in financial crime.

Okay. So okay, okay is never good enough or is just good enough, right? That's your emotional state in most days. Is that a fair statement?

Yes. Look, as I said, I think we've had -- I've had a couple of examples in my career. One example when we really moved to some cutting-edge technology around voice surveillance and how we're able to demonstrate Lexicon hits on specific and have it graphically represented across the wave file, the Lexicon hit. And we were actually presenting that to the SEC 6 years ago or something, and they couldn't help themselves. They said, we've never seen something that's good. So it can happen.

But I think the general consensus is that -- remember, they are -- the regulators are not there to motivate us, right? They're not there to tell us that we're doing a great job. They're there to ensure that we are actually complying with the laws reg guidance that we've provided with. So we're probably looking in the wrong direction if we're expecting them to pat us on the back for a job well done.

Okay. Over the summer, we presented our road map for Smart, where very fitting to what you just described, we actually will leave 20 years of rule-based growth, right, where we kept on adding rule after rule after rule after rule, depending on what the regulator could see and could foresee what was happening to actually say, no, we need AI in the core, and then we will add as many rules as that we need for Germany, for Switzerland, for Austria and for other countries. And as one of the results from the end of that discussion, also the dialogue with you guys where we have a very intense dialogue on where we need to take the product also for a bank at your scale.

You were actually -- came back to us and said, we have now made the strategic decision that you will be the leading platform for today and tomorrow in this space. And I'm sure that part of that is this trust that our vision on the AI and the AI capabilities and the journey, but keep it regulated, transparent and trustworthy was a big part of that decision. So can you elaborate a bit on the reasoning and why you were able to extend that trust for the coming years as well?

Yes, sure. Look, I mean, I think our experience -- one thing that's quite interesting when you look back at our history with Smaragd, as you said, I think you will know better than I like the first deployment of Smaragd. But quite interestingly, it's been there for so long. And despite like attempted changes in strategy. So we have looked at other products. But actually, in the background, the product has been maturing, we saw a quite a significant uplift from version 4 to version 5, which almost sort of incidentally, part of Deutsche Bank's technology strategy is that you must keep software within x number of versions. So we've sort of, as a result, sort of forced to do the upgrade to version 5 and actually we're pleasantly surprised by a lot of the upgrades that we saw in that product.

I think from a usage platform, I think it offers like the sort of versatility of your kind of indicator setup. So you can be a low tech savvy individual and be able to construct indicators pretty readily because of the nature of the organization, GFT and your exposure at Deutsche Bank as a [ CTP ] partner as well, very recently, I mean, I've been very appreciative of what we've achieved -- well, what we did -- what you guys delivered for us on Monday this week, which was some resource augmentation to actually get a number of those indicators set up in short order.

So certainly, for us as an organization, that's something that's quite helpful for me as a CIO when I've got the product -- the product development partner is also a strategic [ CTP ] partner. Sometimes there's complexities from a procurement perspective if I'm picking up specialist professional services that are tied to a product, right? But actually, as an organization and the parent company, I think you were quite uniquely positioned the last -- particularly this -- what we had to do this month.

I think also we've had some very open dialogue recently in terms of trying to -- how we could maybe introduce risk scoring, very open around, obviously, what we need to do from a cloud migration perspective. I mean that's kind of key for us, right? We are 100% cloud first. That's probably like as we discussed only this week, that's probably the next big thing to fit into our joint road map is when do we think we can have a version of this stood up on GCP.

I still think one of the things that if I was a vendor in transaction monitoring, I would find it very, very challenging to deal with the diversity of clients that you have, right? So -- you've got on one side of the fence, you've got all these organizations that want to buy a solution. They want it out of the box. So what they think they're doing is that they're buying a product and then the expectation is that, that gets them a score -- that gets them a B minus. If they implement it, they get a B minus. It's good enough to move on. But then you've got other organizations at the other scale that are like, I know what I need to do. I know what the models are. I want to write my own models.

And so I think what we've got with Smaragd today is we've sort of been able to do a bit of both. I don't personally understand exactly how the transition to AI-based detection will work. I've seen how we do the recall. I know it exposes -- opens up a whole new quadrant of risk that we can capture, but all these AI-based systems struggle to get a recall of above 80%, but then the message is that you're finding another 40%, and that's the business case. But yes, look, I think the product has worked well in our environment, very important for us at least to have that kind of German centricity and the penetration of Smaragd into the German market. And for Deutsche Bank, particularly, it's been helpful to have that partnership of a strategic CTB partner that GFT is plus the software provider.

All right. Fantastic. And I think -- so one of the things that Mike called out was the work we delivered on Monday. And why is that? Well, in the world of regulations, Q4 is always very, very busy because that's basically when you have to prepare for the rules of 2026, right? So we have to always make sure that our system and then our clients are ready to actually adhere to whatever 2026 is added on to the system. So that's why we are working very intensely now in literally adding those rules into the system as they fit into the work that Deutsche Bank wants us to do.

And then secondly, what you called out and which actually is also in the end, the reason why I recently joined GFT, that is the power of the combination of having software but also having this long-term capability of actually being able to help large banks in the core of their business, connecting the right data, connecting the right software and then adding our own intelligent IP to actually make sure that then their process not only works, but to keep them compliant, secure and trustworthy.

And so Mike, with that, thank you very, very much for being able to dial in. I know you were supposed to be in another meeting. So thanks for taking the time to join us here. And with that, greetings to London. See you next time. Thank you for today. Thank, Lars.

Thank you very much. Mike already managed. Thank you very much, Floris, for that essential deep dive into how AI is transforming and financial crime, fascinating views into a very crucial topic. So now we broadened the perspective even further to decision intelligence, analytics and risk innovation at scale. And I'm very pleased to, in a few minutes, welcome Alexander Graffy, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at FICO, who will share how advanced analytics and AI are shaping smarter, more predictive decision-making across the financial industry and how the global partnership between FICO and GFT, what we will announce very shortly, will help banks act in real time, stop fraud early and simplify risk decision using AI.

And I welcome back Marco on stage for hosting that session with Alex, right? Good.

Thank you, Andres.

Hi, Alex. How are you doing.

Hello, Marco. I'm good. And you?

Very good to have you here on the stage, on a virtual stage, and welcome, right? And thank you very much for the opportunity. And I would like to ask you -- I know that was quite short notice, right, this organization, and thanks for you to make it. I know that you are in a global event, right, from FICO in the United States, USA right now. And -- but if you can introduce yourself and you can introduce FICO, I think that obviously, all the -- sorry, all the American audience that is connected here, obviously knows FICO.

I lived in the U.S.A., and I know how FICO is important for our lives, right, to buy a car, to buy insurance and a house. But if you can introduce FICO and also introduce the and also talk about what we've been talking for a while. This is global partnership and so far.

No, it will be my pleasure. As you said, actually, this week, I'm in Atlanta. We are running here our global kickoff. We just started our fiscal year now early in October. So it's a pleasure to be here with you talking a little bit about FICO, about our partnership. I run our B2B and marketplace business. It involves all our partners around the world. I'm based out of Miami. I joined FICO 12 years ago. And actually, during this time, FICO has grown a lot.

FICO is a global leader in AI-powered decisioning and our platform brings together data analytics, decisioning and optimization into a single environment. It enables financial institutions to move from manual decision processes to automated, explainable, real-time decision intelligence with government and compliance built in. As you said, FICO is very well known in the U.S. We have 2 businesses. We have the scores business and the software business. We operate as a single company, but with these 2 line of businesses. And talking a little bit about our partnership with GFT.

Sorry to interrupt you, but what's the volume sorry to interrupt you, but if you can give a glimpse here, what's the total -- the market cap of FICO right now? What's the size in terms of revenue and KPIs? Can you give the number of transactions and the fraud positioning, the positioning anti-fraud in the world?

Yes, for sure. In terms of market cap, our market cap is currently around $40 billion. We have around 4,000 employees around the world. FICO was launched in 1956. It means that next year, it's an important milestone for us, 70 years operating in the market. And we operate basically globally, Marco. So we have a global operation. And of course, our presence in the U.S. is quite strong also because, as you said, everyone know FICO as well due to the scores and the importance of the scores in the credit market.

Fantastic. And what -- can you talk about our partnership, what we envision together and what.

Absolutely. And it excites me a lot. When we talk about partnership, as I said, FICO will turn is 70 years. And until 4 years ago, FICO was basically driven by direct sales, direct sales motion. 4 years ago, FICO decided to invest on another distribution channel, creating a new go-to-market motion, opening the opportunity to work with partners. And it means that we are still in our, let's say, initial phase, but we defined a very small number, selective partners to work with us. partners that we understand that can move the needle for FICO and FICO can move the needle for partners.

So why GFT? Exactly because we understand that we can complement really well one each other. FICO brings to the market our technology, our platform, as I said before, we moved from sealer solutions to a platform. We landed this new technology already in around 200 global financial institutions. It means everywhere in the world, we are talking about Latin America, U.S., Asia, Europe. And with GFT, we can bring a very important IP that will allow our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey, and it will allow our journeys, our customers to bring more innovation to their processes.

What will translate into a better customer experience for their customers. And at the end of the day, it's what the market is looking for. So as an example, we have discussed a lot about bringing an integration between Smaragd and our platform, how we can bring an AML use case to FICO platform allowing customers that are already using our platform around the world to automatically connect with an AML solution and also allowing your installed base to have an easier connection with FICO platform and also exploring other use cases that GFT can help us to implement it faster with the workforce that you have across multiple countries and in multiple institutions. So it's a win-win partnership and a partnership that we have big aspirations.

And it's a partnership that's already generating revenues, right, dollars, right, in euros for all of us, right, because we are working in 2 projects, right, in Latin America and in Asia, right, right now, right, which is very good, right? I love to talk about partnerships when you have results, right?

No, absolutely. I mean before having results, I used to say that we are daily. Now we married. So we got married already. We have our first really real clients operating together with FICO and GFT. And this is the beauty of it because we know that when we have this step going to real customers, it tends to scale really fast. And this is our goal. It's to bring it to the market at scale and see a lot of financial services institution working together with FICO and GFT.

Fantastic, Alex. And any other thing that you'd like to bring to -- for the audience here?

I mean just highlighting once again my excitement about this partnership. And one thing that is crucial for the success of the partnership is when the teams work in a very collaborative way and in a very integrated way. And this is the kind of synergy that we have seen since the beginning between FICO and GFT. So both teams, they really operate as one group and the customers, they feel it. This is why we could have success really quick, as you said, in 2 different regions, Latin America and Asia. And now we look for the success that we will definitely have also in Europe and in U.S.

Fantastic. And for us, I would say that it's really proud, and I'm very honored to have the opportunity to create -- to be part of the global list of partners of FICO and create this global partnership with such a company with that size with your magnitude, right, $40-ish billion market cap, the #1 company in rating score in the United States of America, right? So basically, all the citizens in the U.S. deal with FICO every week.

And also, you guys were recognized the #1 in the world last year, right, in anti-fraud, right, in the whole world. So it's for us, it's very important and proud to get closer. And let's move forward with our projects on core banking with the FICO elements of platform. also bring Wink to accelerate the AI transformation of the projects that FICO are doing. And number three, to bring Smart Act, right, into the FICO store, right, and then bring that to Smart Act and also think on even new features, for example, crypto, anti-money laundering for crypto, right, which is something that is definitely a next-generation wave, and we together can work on that. Very good. Alex, thank you very much for the time. Really appreciate it and wish you and wish all of us all the best. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Marco. Thank you very much, [ Graffi ], for that insightful view into how decision intelligence and smart analytics power better risk decisions across the industry. Thank you very much for the very spontaneous willingness to frame that global partnership between GFT and [ FICO ] in a few words. More to come in the next days.

We now move from analytics to operational transformation with a strong joint success story. Please welcome Alexander Lessen from Deutsche Bank and from dry -- sorry, my fault. Alexander [ Lessen ] from [ DCB ] Code Factory and [ Sasha Beck ] from GFT to share how [ DCB ] is driving efficiency, agility and digital delivery with GFT. Please, Sasha.

Thank you, Andreas. A very warm welcome. Today. It's a pleasure to meet you all, and it's a pleasure, especially to welcome Alexander [ Lessen ] here remotely, Managing Director of [ DCB ], Deutsche Credit Bank. So very similar to Deutsche Credit Bank, another business model. A pleasure to have you here, Alexander, remotely. Maybe do you want to start with a short introduction of yourself and maybe give us a brief overview about Deutsche Credit Bank, [ DCB ], what is the business model behind?

For sure. Very well, nice having me. Yes, some words about myself. I'm Alexander [indiscernible], General Manager of [ DCB ]Code Factory. DCB Code Factory is a subsidiary of DCB. And we are doing together with DCB some digital products for our clients. We are doing this since 2018. So -- and we have currently something about 200 people here working at DCB Code Factory and normally all the kind of people you need to build digital products.

Some works of DCB. As you might know, DCB is one of the largest online banking in Germany. So we have roughly around 6 million customers, mostly private customers, but also we are very strong in business customers. We are growing during the last years, and we want to grow in different kind of areas. When you're reading the newspapers, some of you might realize that we are going also to more interaction of brokerage and also in this cooperation with GFT, we are building some nice products in this area.

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So thank you. Great to hear that, and it's a really success story when you see the growth of DCB over the last few years. Over the last 2 years, DCB and GFT have developed a really success story. We've built up and build operate transfer model. So an own development delivery center in Valencia. This is the project we want to share with you all today. So that's the story behind our success.

Today, about 55 specialists are working in Valencia working for DKB, developing software, cool stuff, innovative stuff, and it's really good to have a look behind the scenes today. So talking about results and behind the scenes, we should mention that -- we were able to reduce the cost in comparison, Berlin to Valencia about more than 30%. So it's a really huge effort we made together with DKB to reach these goals. And also for GFT, it was a milestone because it was a crucial project for us. It was really important to get the right people on board to get the business model running to show that 30% of cost reduction is possible with a nearshore development center, and it was really important for us to show our global delivery competence we mentioned also earlier today.

So we are really happy and proud that we have this trust of DCB and the management team of DCB, the Board members visited us in Valencia over the past weeks and months. So it's really a good story to share with you all. And now we want to keep a look behind the scenes and maybe Alexander, let's start with a look back at the beginning. What was the reason that you've decided to build up an own delivery development center in Valencia?

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Yes. The starting point is what we see in digital is not done. So [indiscernible] B has a clear strategy. We want to further strengthen our position as German leading digital banks and to achieve this software development is or have to become a core competence. And what I mentioned before, we have here also a hub in Berlin with more than 200 people from all over the world. And we are standing in front of the question how to grow, grow in Berlin or grow in another place around Europe. And therefore, we are looking for location to make sure to have a hub where we are able to build stable quality and long-term teams.

And Valencia so far was a perfect choice with us. We took the choice together with GFT and it offers a growing taxes, strong universities and a high quality of life, and we were able to get talent, attractive talent that is the main aspect. And together with you, so we prepared this decision. And now we are here some years -- 1 year later.

Exactly. So we get in contact 3 years ago, and we started with some small nearshop project, and then we delivered and we created and gained this trust. So maybe, Alexander, can you give us an insight why did you choose GFT for such a special project?

To put it in one word, trust. you mentioned a couple of times that is the highest level of relationship to doing such a trustful and very delicious project, to be honest. So we know each other very well for certain times. We did a lot of projects together, and we have created a good relationship and we are had whatever good feeling that GFT is a good partner, have good technology experience, a good banking know-how as well, not only in Spain, very, very, very good, good connection and locales. So -- and yes, and that was the starting point.

And I can also share with you that we are -- or I was traveling around Europe to find a good partner and a good place because I was always saying when I go somewhere from Berlin and as you know, we are a German credit bank, we are mostly located or we are only in German where we are going abroad. So you need a good partner. You get a reliable partner, a stable partner to start such a business. And to GFT, this allowed us to start quickly to reduce the risk and to make and sure that we will become that all everything become success story. And so what I can say so far, I have all this feeling that GFT was transparent or is transparent and trustful from day 1. And so -- and now we are here 1 year later.

Yes, I remember the first conversation we had. And then we discovered several locations of the GFT universe. And then it was clear, okay, Valencia could be a great attractive sunny place to hire with our GFT network to universities, recruitment areas and so on. Now 55 people, specialists in core technologies to provide online banking services and so on in Valencia, in our office. So we share our spaces, we share our expertise, we share our network with the local government and so on. And now we are in the phase working together. The 55 people are working exclusively for DCB, developing new code, new topics together with AI. And at the end of next year, it will be an own subsidiary of DCB. So the people will move over to a legal entity of DCB. That's our understanding of trust and partnership, and we are able to release people we've hired to a client because we are convinced that this trust will evolve, and we will participate together from this trust. And now we've mentioned 30% cost advantages and so on. Maybe can you give us some insights how you achieved that?

I guess it's a question of efficiency and structure. We both together and we are try to rethought the processes, the GFT process, also our process and to build new teams from scratch. I guess that is one of the key aspects to find good talent, which have a lot of knowledge about building digital products. DCB is, I would say, in a situation where we are changing from a traditional banking to more tech company. And for that, that can be a long, long path.

And these kind of teams, these new teams, these fresh blood, new ideas is helping us to do this. And the teams in Valencia are following the normal -- the modern principles about DevOps and continuous delivery and the development and stuff like that. And that is helping us. And it's also helpful that we have a good mix of seniority. So we agreed that we will have a good setup from 30% of senior, 30% of midlevel, 40% of juniors. So to build, yes, a good attractive environment for everybody and for stable teams. And so the cost reduction is a result of more also the efficiency of the organization.

And besides the cost, you've also managed to increase the quality and the output of codes of line of codes of story points and so on. How?

Yes, what I mentioned before, I guess a major point was to building these teams up from scratch. So it was really impressive, really impressive how fast it not only was to find the talent, it was also impressive how fast it was that the talent were into the topics. After whatever, 3 or 4 months, you were able to see how they were using the typical DCB language to understand the technology to understand the problem and the motivation to drive things forward. That was really impressive for everybody.

And also working together with the teams closely with the colleagues in Berlin, you can imagine from the beginning on, we had some questions, how can it work, different culture, different languages. Different kind of backgrounds. It really doable, yes. So is it only a dream, but it was really nice also from the GB part that everybody was open to share to collaborate.

We have a lot of people coming from Berlin to Valencia and other region, everybody was really excited to be part of this journey, and that was good. So we pay for that. We hope that, but it was at the end of the day, very, very nice to have that. And with all the setup, the modern tools and metals and it was able to deliver fast and very, very short, and we are more than happy.

So AI was the dominant topic today. So looking ahead, also with you, I would like to ask you what -- which role does AI take in your strategy, in your technical topics you have to solve? Maybe you can give us some insights.

I guess if you can bring to the point, AI is a core element of our digital transformation. So no doubt about that. So -- and the pace of change in the market and increasing regulatory demand and rising customer expectations, all make it clear banking for the future will rely on intelligent use of data and automation. And with the new development center we created exactly the structure we need to scalable development process, modern technology and platform and to have interdisciplinary teams and have the talent to go quickly into the technology to get quickly and these data and these automation things and to be successful in AI.

at the end of the day, you need people, you need talent, you need to knowledge to drive these things forward. And what we want to be also to be more independent and to own this kind of knowledge by ourselves to learn it and to make it for ours. And the setup enables us to develop these things fast to roll out AI-driven to build innovation. And so far, the project was for more than an efficient initiative. It led us the technical and organizational foundation for DCB to adapt AI in practice. So from my perspective, a win-win-win situation.

Alexander, thank you for these great insights. And from my perspective, I think it's really measurable when -- what happens when a trust and the common goal and technological excellence come together and we build up something new from scratch. And I think we can use this trust and the knowledge of the DCB to strengthen our partnership, and we are happy to have you here as a client. Thanks for your insights, and we are looking forward for the collaboration. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alexander. Thank you very much, Sacha. Let's have a very short break of 10 minutes until we have our next client success case on stage. We will be Eric [ Marco ] from Beneva out of Canada. So we meet again in 10 minutes. Maybe you have a bio break or coffee or maybe something to drink.

[Break]

Thank you. We have to do just a short break, bring the people back into our room and then we will immediately.

[Break]

Thank you very much for your patience. We needed to have a short break to set up the technic again. But next, we look ahead at the future of core systems and technology leadership, and we'll talk about Beneva's modernization journey. Beneva has gained a reputation for being among the most innovative insurers in Canada, especially by adopting new Guidewire cloud features early. Please welcome Eric [ Marco ] from Beneva together with [ Marco ]. [ Marco ], the stage is yours.

Hi, Eric. Thanks for joining. I can see you. How you're doing? Good. Thanks very much. We really appreciate your time and your dedication here. And if you can start and I give some glimpse about Beneva, right, and what's the company and the business and also the strategic movements that you guys did with the merge that happened. And then you can again also ask some other questions about the GFT, the project, et cetera. But let's start with Geneva, right, and also introduce yourself as well, really appreciate it.

So hello, everyone. My name is Eric [Marco ] I'm IT Vice President at Beneva Insurance in charge of Property and Casualty IT systems and also corporate IT systems. a Insurance is an insurance company in Canada. We're located in the province of Quebec, but we also have operations in the Ontario province. Beneva is the largest mutual insurance company in Canada. And eventually, we will operate in the other provinces of Canada as well.

So Beneva is more than 6,000 employees, $17 billion company. We have a broad range of insurance products to our customers and some of them for P&C for personal lines and commercial lines. Beneva is the result of a merge of two equal sized carriers in province of Quebec called La Capital Insurance and SS Insurance. We did merge together to forge Beneva Insurance in order to have more capital in order to be able to do acquisitions to grow a lot more in the Canada country in our market and also to survive to the competition that is now worldwide because since COVID, as you may see, a lot of transactions are being done on the web. So that brought not kind of competitors in the insurance and financial services industry. So we wanted to do this merger in order to grow. And if everything goes as we expect in January of next year, we will do the merge with [ GOR ]Insurance located in province of Ontario, and there's other mergers and acquisitions to come in the other provinces of Canada. So I think it gives you a good walk-through of who is Beneva Insurance.

Fantastic, Eric. And what about in the midst of all those changes and all those merge and all those challenges. So how comes into play the technology, right, the technology challenge that you guys faced that Geneva faced and you in your role and run those strategic projects to move the company forward.

Yes. Good question. So when you merge 2 insurance companies of equal size that each have their own IT ecosystem, what we have done is we have taken the best of both worlds on both companies. And then we have done choices in each of the areas, P&C insurance, group insurance, life and insurance, financial services, BI, the office platform and all of that you can imagine. And then we did plan all of that. It was more than 200 projects that we have done at the same time during the first 3 years of the merge, so between 2020 and 2023. And we've been delivering all of that.

Meanwhile, still continue to attain our objectives of the company and also to be there for our customers. So we have chosen to be a SaaS first company in order for us to not develop and build everything by ourselves. And we are working very closely with our partners. And we have also decided to ask help from our system integrators, our SIs that we consider our partners like GFT, that been very helpful for me and for us for P&C, but also for group insurance and other areas where we've been working with GFT for many years now, but especially during the merge.

And can you give also more glimpse and more inputs about this strategic technology program and how GFT working on that, the technology Guidewire, cloud and the partnership of GFT on that, say, major program?

Yes, of course. So for P&C, property [indiscernible], on one side, we had the legacy systems before the merge. And on the other company, the other side, we had the Guidewire on-premise suite that was deployed. So we have decided to go forward with the Guidewire suite.

First, we did migrate the on-prem version to the cloud version. And then we did the merge for claims, for policy, for billing, and we have just got live last weekend for commercial lines. And it's been major projects for the last 5 years, but was most focus on the first 3 years on claims and policy and billing. And we've been working with GFT because GFT is local, they have a very strong expert for Guidewire. They speak French because I speak French, most of us. But as you can see, we speak English also. And for me, GFT was a key partner for helping us to be successful in that merger for Guidewire and also for one of my colleagues, Julie, that is in charge of group insurance, where GFT is providing the same kind of help for another product that we call in group insurance. So GFT definitely is a key partner for us and for me. That being said, we are now investing a lot more especially is my main partner in order to help us be successful and achieve very, very success and results together.

I think that's our approach to have our global capabilities, GFT, but also play locally, right? So this global local approach to have agility and to talk and support our clients locally, right, with the agility that is needed, right, on the edge, right? So if you in Canada, in Quebec, right? And I would have a question here, but you already started responding. Why GFT, right? So that's the competitive advantage, the differentiation of the GFT that Beneva perceives.

Yes. So first, GFT is local. That is very important for us, especially for the French language. As I said earlier, our natural language is French. and GFT local here in Quebec, they all speak French, but this is very important for us. Then your partnership with Gador because you have a lot of Gador experts, more than 10, a lot of them are with us, and I hope it will continue to.

But again, also for you to have your market shares, I understand. But this expertise is recognized here in the local market for the carriers local here, now more and more in Canada, but especially for Beneva. So you are my main partner for Gador -- so -- and it's been recognized for many years now. We've been working for more than 10 years, GFT and Beneva around the expertise of Guidewire. -- and you've been always there. What I like also with GFT is we work as partners, not only customer provider. We have regular follow-up meetings, exec level every 2 weeks, every, I think, 6 weeks with my CIO and levels over me. And we've been always addressing challenges, maybe sometimes issues and always found solution. And that's why I call partnership.

And on my side, I try to give back, but that's why we do press release. We do customer testimonies, anything that you want us to do to talk to maybe new customers, potential customers. That's the kind of thing we're doing in order to give back because you have us to be successful. You are part of the success of Beneva merge, but also our current investments. So those are the many reasons why GFT is important for us here in Quebec.

Very good. And I also got to know that Geneva has gained a reputation of -- for being among the most innovative insurers in Canada, insurance companies in Canada. And can you talk about that? So your appetite, the appetite for innovation to move forward to implement things new to be -- implement Guidewire, right, new technologies, clouds, et cetera. Can you also elaborate on that?

Yes. So great pleasure. So the first one you want to innovate. I think one of the base foundation is to have an IT ecosystem that is up to date. So as I said earlier, we have chosen a Software as a Service first approach and the merge did bring that kind of amazing opportunity to invest in IT in all of the areas you can imagine in a company like us. So we did modernize everything. So today, we are to the latest SaaS software we're using for P&C as Guidewire for group insurance, for Life, for BI and all of that.

So that brings a lot of opportunities because we perform our updates regularly. So we are always up to date with our providers. We have access to the latest features, their latest AI features, GenAI, Agentic Ag AI. One example of that is 1 month before Guidewire has done their annual event in Las Vegas called Guidewire Connections, and they'll announced a bunch of new features around AI and Gen AI that we now have access Beneva. And we -- I think we're the career in Canada, the most advanced in terms of IT because we have modernized everything. The merge gave us this incredible opportunity. And now we're more in the innovation phase. So we are investing a lot in digital, in automation, AI, Gen AI because we have the technology that allows us to do that and also the partner ecosystem like GFT that allows us to do this.

And also, we're -- I think for Guidewire, we're one of the top 2 most advanced worldwide customers of Guidewire. We're using all of their latest products in the suite and features. And because of GFT, we are now doing our 3 updates per year like they are asking all of their carriers to do. We're using things like the Advanced Product Designer because we have done the conversion with GFT. We're using [ Jutro ] as digital because we've been working with GFT for going to the cloud and having access to these latest features. So those are many examples of the things we are now doing and we can now do, sorry, in order to innovate on our side. And I think because we hear that quite a lot, we are now recognized for that here in Canada. And not, but I've been traveling quite a few times in many places in the world in the last 2 years. we hear a lot more and more about Geneva worldwide, not only in Canada.

It's fantastic to be partnered with you and such a company that is leading, especially on the Guidewire platform in the world. So it's very, very good for us, and we are very proud for that. Thanks for the partnership. And to conclude in terms of artificial intelligence specifically, we discussed a lot about this topic.

How can we differentiate ourselves on the hype outside, the hype, lot of noise outside, but there are really potential interesting elements of AI that can be brought to the business or to the IT. So how are you guys thinking on that possibility of AI for Geneva in terms of claims, underwriting, you name it, right? So how do you see that?

Yes. So at Geneva, we are trying to see how we can augment our efficiency, how we can also lower our operational costs. And hiring new talent is not that easy. I don't know how it is in the other countries, but in Canada, it's still a challenge. So we're trying to do more with the persons that we have.

So that's where Gen AI comes into play in order to automate some business processes that we have for our employees, for our customers, how can we bring more and more self-service online with digital on the mobile app, how can we improve the way we work as in IT to automate some testing tools like the unit testing, functional testing, user acceptance testing without having to perform all of that manually. How can the machine can generate code for our developers in [indiscernible]. So those are the many areas where we are having action items right now, early accesses with some of our partners like Workday and also Guidewire and other things that we are looking to improve like one have been asking GFT to do 3 updates per year in Guidewire, and they are now automating that more and more with AI in order to lower the time we take for each update. So that's the kind of example of things we are in action and we are looking at [ Baer ] to improve our processes the way we -- and also maybe for the agents and claims adjuster, can we take more calls on the where the machines generate more information and it takes them less time to analyze specific claims or on the other side to provide a code or a policy change more faster. So those are other areas where we are looking to improve, and we're working that with our SI partners and GFT, you're one of our major SI partner right now.

Fantastic, Eric, look, you could not be more proud and happy to have you with us. Any final message, anything that you would like to bring to the team here?

But I would like to thank you, everyone, because you are a great partner. You have been with us for many years, and I hope that we will be together for many years to come. We have so much to achieve together. You guys are great. You are always there. We can do the real things together. You are always helpful for us, and I really appreciate that. And I really look forward to all the many things we will achieve together and we'll be proud to having achieved together as well. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Eric. Thank you. Thank you very much. Eric -- thank you for your participation.

Thank you. very much, Eric and Marco, for this inspiring insight into Geneva's journey and into the long and trustful partnership between Geneva and GFT. And again, framing the important role of AI shaping tomorrow's financial industry. So well, all things need to come to an end, and we are approaching there very fast now. So Marco, the last slot is reserved for you for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Andreas. So I'd like just to reinforce some key message that we have conveyed right across the whole event. So first, we believe on our strategy. We truly believe on the creation of competitive advantage, differentiation using AI. for the benefit of information technology. We believe on that. The team believes on that. We have a strategy that is centered on that to be the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world, positioning ourselves as a challenger, as a company that I want to challenge the status quo.

I want to really bring tangible results with artificial intelligence to our clients to challenge the legacy, the traditional ecosystems, the incumbents and bring really competitive advantage for the benefit of our clients, for the benefit of GFT, for the benefit of our shareholders. So that's number one.

Number two, we truly believe on large-scale opportunities that we have in front of us. We've been -- we discussed that a lot. So the modernization per se is something huge, immense that is going to happen. It is going to happen. The companies must modernize, especially those major organizations, Tier 1, Tier 2, banks, payments, credit cards, insurance, manufacturing, defense, especially defense industry, all of them need to modernize to take the technology to the next level.

And those opportunities were never there before. They are unfolded now -- they are unlocked, sorry, with artificial intelligence. And I think that we are leading that journey with a technology that brings a clear differentiation for us, which is Wings. We can really be a strong player on that field. And also on top of that, we have our data AI business units, intelligence business units that is moving very strong with several case that is moving forward and then all our differentiation in our offerings and services with the ISVs, our own products like Smart Act. We are investing in Smart Act. We are going to make it really, really, really powerful and successful. It's a competitive advantage, a leading product in [ DACH ]. And now we need to keep moving, right, with the recent announcements. And by the way, the recent announcement today and also DCB, et cetera. So we truly see some areas of large-scale opportunities and more than happy to -- obviously, to move the company. We focus with prioritization. We need to focus on what matters. We need to focus on what has moved the needle with the key clients, the Tier 1, Tier 2 land and expand on clients that can become a Tier 1 push for the right profitability and do what we are calling engineering growth for the company and engineering profitability and create a virtuous cycle. And obviously, we have -- I'm not going to repeat all the strategic initiatives, and we are executing that with an mission focus and more than happy to be with all of you and look forward to see the next announcements, the things that we are bringing to the market, clients, partnerships and results. Thank you very much.

Well, thank you very much, Marco. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we officially conclude today's Capital Markets Day. A sincere thank you to all our speakers and all of you for joining us and contributing to such an engaging afternoon. We now invite you to stay with us for some dreams, at least the ones who are here in person. Sorry for them participating online. Outside in the hall, we prepared some small things, and please take the opportunity to network to continue the conversations and to enjoy the early evening in a relaxed atmosphere. Thank you very much again. See you soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 9 Months Q3 Results 2025 of GFT Technologies SE Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Shari, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Andreas Herzog, Head of IR. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's conference call with our CEO, Marco Santos; and our CFO and Deputy CEO, Jochen Ruetz.

This morning, GFT published the results for the first 9 months and confirmed the outlook for the full financial year '25. Marco and Jochen will guide you through our numbers and will then be available to answer your questions, of course. Corresponding slides for today's session are available on our website in the Investor Relations section.

Allow me to remind you that registration is still open for our Capital Markets Day next week in Frankfurt. Join us in person or virtually to gain deeper insights into our 5-year strategy and explore, together with our experts and key clients, how Agentic AI is redefining enterprise transformation. If you have not registered yet, you still have the opportunity to do so or simply contact the IR team. We will be happy to assist.

But now without further ado, I would like to hand over to Marco. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andreas. Warm welcome to everyone and thank you for joining today's call. Before we move into the figures, let me share a brief reflection from my recent investor roadshow in the United States and Canada where I had the opportunity to meet with investors in those key markets. The discussions were highly engaging and they confirm that our AI-centric strategy is resonating with credibility in the market.

Investors clearly recognize GFT's differentiation, our AI-centric mission Wynxx, our generative AI product for software development life cycle and legacy modernization, our deep engineering expertise, industry focus and ability to deliver globally at scale.

GFT is not simply part of the IT services market. We are challenging it. That feedback reflects our positioning as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. We are proud of who we are, ambitious in our goals and bold in how we compete, leading with innovation, speed, and measurable impact with artificial intelligence. It's not about creating hype. It's about making impact.

Now let's look at our year-to-date performance on the next slide, please. I'm pleased to share an overview of solid GFT's results appeared marked by constant delivery of our 5-year strategy. We delivered solid results for the first 9 months of 2025, and we are confirming our full year guidance with confidence and positiveness.

Let's take a closer look at our 9-month 2025 results. We achieved EUR 655 million in revenue, representing 2% of growth in euros and 5% of growth in constant currencies. This is a strong performance and reflects continued client demand, the resilience of our smartshore global delivery platform and differentiation of our offerings and our AI-centric strategy. Our EBIT adjusted came in at EUR 46 million, corresponding to a 7% margin.

Moving to our guidance for the full year 2025. We are confirming our expectations of EUR 885 million in revenue with 2% of growth in euros and 5% of growth in constant currencies. We also confirm with confidence and positiveness our target to reach an EBIT adjusted of EUR 65 million at 7.3% margin.

Now regarding our financial highlights. In constant currencies and excluding the U.K. and Software Solutions, we delivered a quite solid, strong and profitable operating performance with 11% of revenue growth and an EBIT adjusted margin of 9%.

Our main growth markets continue to perform very strong with Brazil leading the way with outstanding 27% of growth; APAC with 22%; Colombia, our Software Solutions acquisition, with 19% of growth; and the USA delivering an outstanding 18% of growth.

These 9-month results confirm that our 5-year strategic initiatives are on track. Our profitability remains solid, and we are entering the final quarter of the year with strong confidence, focus and discipline.

Let's move on to the next page to look closer at the highlights of the last quarter. Building on our solid financial performance, I am pleased to share that we are executing our 5-year strategy with strong momentum with a particular focus on the accelerated deployment and expansion of artificial intelligence across our client installed base.

Let me lead you through some of these impressive achievements in the third quarter. Firstly, I could not be more proud to present that we have achieved a highly successful artificial intelligence deployment and expansion led by our GenAI product Wynxx. We successfully rolled out Wynxx to 8 countries. The number of active clients increased by 38% quarter-over-quarter from 42 in Q2 to 58 in Q3, reaching a total contract value of EUR 42 million.

Wynxx is now evolving towards an Agentic AI platform, which can improve its capability of learning, adaptability, collaboration and decision-making, evolving with our clients' business needs to drive measurable outcomes such as a faster time to market, lower cost and higher productivity and customer satisfaction.

Secondly, an outstanding large-scale AI client success case study at Bradesco Seguros, Latin America's largest insurance company, which implemented Wynxx and achieved an impressive proven 40% productivity improvement across 180 FTE development team focused on AI modernization and software development.

The fundamental important news is that GFT is now delivering 40% more to the client, and the client is not asking GFT to reduce the team by 40%. On the contrary, our teams keep growing. We are right now more than 200 professionals working at Bradesco insurance with Wynxx. This is our AI-centric vision getting materialized with tangible results for our clients and for GFT.

Moving on to the next bullet point. We also secured a new AI data and software platform contract with a leading German cognitive robotics company, further expanding our footprint into the high-growth and promising robotics and physical AI industry.

Our global brands relaunch was completed successfully, positioning GFT firmly as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. This marks a key milestone in implementing our next-generation technology brand and positioning.

In the Software Solutions business, our Smaragd platform was selected by a tier-1 German bank as its core AML transaction monitoring system. Additionally, we also closed a strategic 3-year contract with Audi AG for the extension of the central platform for digitalized project planning and management based on GFT's Engenion technology.

In Brazil, we signed a new 3-year master service agreement with a tier-1, the top 3 large -- one of the top 3 largest retail bank in the country, in a process of vendor consolidation from 20 down to 8 IT partners. This was a clear sign of client trust and confidence in GFT's delivery capabilities and differentiation.

Another milestone this quarter was the successful completion of the Megawork acquisition on September 2 and the signature of our first cross-selling contracts with a Tier 1 GFT clients, showing immediate synergies of SAP into our core business. This is aligned with our strategic focus on ISVs and high value-added services.

Finally, I am proud to share that GFT has been ranked #1 globally in Digital Banking Services in the 2025 SPARK Matrix and also recognized as an Emerging Specialist in Generative AI Service in the Gartner Innovation Guide 2025. We have been executing our strategy, scaling AI at the core of our services, turning our vision into measurable outcomes.

All our 5-year strategic initiatives, naming a few such as our AI-centric transformation, smartshore global delivery platform, expanding Tier 1 and Tier 2 client relationships, among others, have been building the foundation for sustainable growth and an innovative, efficient and resilient GFT organization.

Now I will hand over to Jochen for a detailed presentation of the figures.

Thanks, Marco. And let's directly move to the 9-month financial results, going to Slide #7. Marco already mentioned the solid growth to EUR 645 million in revenues with a 2% growth in constant -- in current currencies, sorry, and a 5% growth in constant currencies. So the strong euro continues to weaken our current currency growth rates.

It's a bit the same on the order backlog. We're down 1% versus previous year end of September. But in constant currencies, this is an increase of 3%.

Focusing on profitability, the EBIT adjusted is down by 16% mainly to the already mentioned turnarounds in U.K. and Software Solutions. The margin stands at 7.0%. You see in the smaller bullet points, the deviations to last year. U.K. Software Solutions are EUR 9 million behind last year. All other GFT entities are slightly up versus last year, including a EUR 2 million hit coming from FX.

When we go to EBT, we have additional topics besides the ones already mentioned. First of all, last year, we had a one-off -- strong one-off gain in Brazil of EUR 9.9 million. It was the release of a provision for a court case. And therefore, the comparison to last year lacks this EUR 10 million in 2025. The capacity adjustments are at EUR 8.1 million. Last year it was EUR 6.9 million, so slightly up in 2025.

Interest, M&A is down. The Sophos integration and acquisition last year led to strong costs, especially for order book. Other longer term amortizations are coming to an end. That's why this cost effect is reducing. And last but not least, virtual share effects, EUR 500,000 profit coming from this one last year, EUR 1 million.

The tax rate is at 31%. This is a notch above what we used to expect for the year, but we do have a nonoptimal mix of entities. We have entities in GFT with a loss, often talking about GFT U.K. and Software Solutions, and we have other entities overcompensating with profit. This is always a bad time for tax rates. Therefore, we are slightly behind 2024 tax rate, and we believe this will improve again in future years.

Going to Slide #8 and focusing on the sector growth, which is the left side of the slide. We do see strong growth, and let's start from the top in Industry & Others, 13% of growth in current currencies versus last year. The Insurance business is growing by 15%, 1-5 percent, versus last year. And the Banking business is down by 3 percentage points. But let me point out our U.K. organization, which is heavily behind 2024 revenue figures, is nearly all in Banking. So this is playing in the banking sector numbers.

Going to the right side, the client portfolio, not much has changed. I'll do this quite fast. The largest client is 12% of the group revenue. All ratios in the 4 groups we're showing are pretty much unchanged. So the portfolio is more or less like previous year.

Let's move forward, Slide #9, and look at the quarters. I'll start with the revenue side on the left. The revenue year-over-year is down by 1%, a slight decrease year-over-year, primarily driven by the weaker development in U.K. and Europe. And on top, we do have FX impacts when we compare.

When we compare quarter-over-quarter versus Q2, we see a 3% decline. The decrease is mainly due to the weaker performance in U.K. and then to a far lesser extent, Canada, Germany, and Poland.

Now let's move to EBIT adjusted on the right side, comparing again year-over-year, the EBIT adjusted is heavily down 37%. Last year, it was EUR 24 million. This year, we didn't have the spike in the Q3 EBIT adjusted as has been expected due to our turnaround challenges that we're currently working on. That's why EBIT in the third quarter came in at EUR 15.4 million.

Let we now compare quarter-over-quarter, Q3 versus Q2, this is a slight improvement, but it's not the step we used to see in the last 2 years between Q2 and Q3, which is fully due to the 2 turnarounds and some FX challenges.

Moving forward, Slide #10, looking at our business segments. And again, starting on the revenue side left, Continental Europe is down 5% due to macro headwinds with noticeable reductions in Spain and Italy. At the same time, Americas, U.K., and APAC is up 6%, which means a 13% increase in constant currency, 6% in current currencies, 13% in constant currencies. And these growth rates, as Marco mentioned, are mainly coming from Brazil, Colombia, USA, and Canada. The U.K. is challenging these growth rates as it declined by 26% versus last year.

On the EBIT on the right, let's again look at Continental Europe first. Here, we're down 19% in EBIT adjusted mainly due to the lower revenues and corresponding gross margins and the Software Solutions transformation.

On Americas, U.K., and APAC, we have differing effects. We have got strong business in U.S. and Brazil with strong profitability, but the turnaround in the U.K. is burdening these numbers mostly. And on top FX, negative EBIT adjusted effects are also only happening in the Americas, U.K., and APAC segment.

Moving forward to Slide #11, growth rates by the regions we have defined. And let me start from the bottom from small to big. APAC and others is 3% of the GFT revenue, and this region is now growing by 22%, and we have named the countries which grow fastest. And you do see the Emirates named in here, which is also part of Others.

U.K., #2, 9% of the overall revenue, down 25%. I think you have a rounding thing to the slide before, minus 25% due to the local market. I think we have discussed it in all quarterly calls. This is currently our turnaround country. North America, 17% of the overall business, is growing by 11% in current euro currencies.

The U.S., keeping the pace, growing 18% by half year, growing 18% after 9 months. So it's keeping the pace and it is stronger growing in local currencies. And Canada, a bit weaker, growing by 4% now after 9 months.

Latin America stands for nearly 30% of the overall business, growing by 20% versus last year, driven by Brazil and Colombia.

And then our biggest region, Europe, standing for roughly more than 40% of the overall GFT business. Here, we are down 6 percentage points. The slowdown is not major, but it is in all of our major countries: Spain, minus 4; Germany, minus 3; Italy, minus 3%; and then a bit bigger hit on the Software Solutions side, our other turnaround entity.

Let's move forward, Slide #12, P&L. I'll do this fast, not really much to talk about. Maybe just a brief comment on other operating income, the second line and the second bullet point on the right. Here, we are down. Here, we have booked last year the Brazilian court case release of the accrual. Therefore, the EUR 10 million or EUR 10.8 million are not happening again in 2025.

Cost of purchase services is mostly stable, 2% up, just like the revenue. And then personnel costs, up 4%, which is driving our current nonoptimal profitability. And this is the number we are working on to improve for 2026. Other operating expenses did not grow, showing that we are managing our cost base.

Let's move forward to Slide #13 and look at the cash flow. We started the year with a net cash of minus EUR 42 million. The cash flow in the first 9 months is plus EUR 2 million. This is EUR 20 million less than the last year. And the effect is 50-50 on 2 topics.

First of all, lower profitability than last year, roughly 50%, EUR 10 million less cash flow from that, and EUR 10 million higher working capital effects. We see a strong cash inflow, as always, in the fourth quarter. And in the end, we will hit the free cash flow target we will talk about on the last slide.

On investing, we have besides our normal fixed asset investments, the Megawork acquisition, which here is highlighted with EUR 6.88 million cash out for investing. And for financing activities, we included the acquisition of treasury shares, for which we spent EUR 14.14 million by the end of September and the shareholders' dividend of EUR 13 million. This all leads to a free cash flow adjusted after 9 months of minus EUR 10 million. It's the same EUR 20 million gap I was already commenting in the operating cash flow.

A very short look at the balance sheet on Slide 14 shows no major changes. What we do see is that the balance sheet has contracted a bit, which is mainly due to the cash outflows for the dividend and for the purchased shares. That's it. I would keep it there. If you have questions, please highlight.

And I move directly to Slide #15, utilization and the people slide. First of all, employees is up to slightly above 11,600 FTEs, not a big growth. The big growth is coming from Brazil, Colombia, France, India, USA. But at the same time, we have minor reductions in Canada, Germany, Italy, Mexico, but all these effects are not major.

The external contractors are more or less stable, 11,600 -- 1,163 by the end of September, slightly down versus last year. And looking at utilization rate at 92.5% on a high rate, we're happy with this. So far, we have talked about the increased base after the Sophos acquisition. So when you compare to previous years, you have to take into account roughly 1%, 1.5% Sophos lift-up effect when comparing.

And last but not least on this slide, attrition. Attrition is up to 12.7%. This is mainly happening in our growth markets. When we looked at the regional development, we saw Latin America. North America is where the growth is and that's where also the attrition is picking up, not so much yet on the European side. So it is differing by regions.

With that, let me move to the Slide 16 and have just a couple of sentences on our share buyback program. The very first arrow program results. We have spent our EUR 15 million by the 10th of October. We have repurchased worth 761,000 shares, which is roughly 2.89% of our share capital at an average price of EUR 19.70. So all of this share buyback happened from April 24 to October 14. I will not repeat the resolution details and the capital authorization.

Let me focus on the purpose. For this, we have agreed with our administrative Board that we will decide on the exact further use of the treasury shares in due course, somewhere in Q1 first half of next year. And of course, all the effects and costs are included in our guidance.

Now my last Slide #17, the additional milestones we're always giving. They are mostly unchanged. Free cash flow expected at EUR 35 million this year. The gap to previous year explained by the lower profitability and the very high cash inflows we saw at the end of especially 2024. We expect a net debt-to-EBIT ratio of 0.8, and we have upped the utilization target slightly to 92%. Last milestone guidance here was 91%.

And with that, Marco, back to you.

Thank you, Jochen. To conclude, I would like to emphasize a few key messages. First, we have demonstrated resilience, achieving solid growth in the first 9 months of 2025 with some markets delivering outstanding performance such as Brazil, APAC, Colombia, and the United States of America, all of them generating double-digit growth.

We are successfully deploying and expanding artificial intelligence across our markets, client, services and offerings with Wynxx continuing to stand out as a key differentiator for GFT. We foresee a large-scale long-term growth opportunity in legacy modernization, where AI is breaking down traditional barriers of change and unlocking new horizons for our clients.

At the same time, our transformational initiatives in the U.K. and Software Solutions units are progressing well showing tangible early improvements, thanks to the disciplined management and focused execution.

Above all, we are executing our 5-year strategy determination and diligency, positioning GFT as the artificial intelligence digital transformation challenger. Thank you very much, and let's go beyond together.

Now Jochen and I will be happy to answer your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Wolfgang from Berenberg.

Three questions from my end to start with. First, on the Wynxx contract value you gave at EUR 42 million. Can you give us some idea over which horizon this should transfer into sales? Second question would be on the largest clients, which I suppose is still a German bank. Do you expect, let's say, stable revenues going forward? Or could there be some declines in 2026? And then on restructuring of the U.K. operations and Software Solutions, where are we standing in the reorganization process at both topics?

Thanks, Wolfgang. Thanks for the questions. I'll pick up the one on the largest client, Deutsche Bank. Sorry, yes, I mentioned it now, right? So no surprise. It's the long-standing biggest client of GFT.

Revenues are slightly going down '25 versus '24 as the client overall is spending less on external services. For next year, we see a small further decline happening, but nothing major, right? We're around EUR 100 million, and I think we will be slightly below in 2026.

On the Wynxx transforming into sales, Marco, I'll leave that to you.

Yes. So regarding the number of the EUR 42 million that we mentioned here, they are all the projects and services that we sold -- that we have sold with Wynxx as a generative AI tool for our clients. So that's the total -- what we call total contract value of service and projects with Wynxx as artificial intelligence, and that will be delivered.

Some of that already delivered and some other parts, it's going to be delivered over the next few quarters. It depends upon the specific project and specific service. There are projects that are short-term projects that are going to deliver in 1 month, 2, 3 months and others that are going to be more -- that will take more time.

And regarding the restructuring of U.K. and Software Solutions, where do we stand? So we are doing very well on those turnarounds and the restructuring. So Software Solutions, we have evolved and optimized the team and the organization with our gravity program. We also put, let's say, strong focus on the strategic clients of Software Solutions, and I'm very proud to say that we were able to accomplish 2 major goals with Software Solutions.

One, to close a strategic contract with Smaragd as the anti-money laundering solution for one of the largest banks in Europe, one of the top banks in Germany. And that client position Smaragd as the future of AML technology. So for us, this was a really, really good news and a major accomplishment. And the other one is the extension of the contract at Audi that also was a remarkable achievement that we did with the team from Software Solutions. So moving very well on the restructuring process and also in the business evolution.

In terms of U.K., we've been moving on the restructuring as well. And we are now in the, I would say, the conclusion of bringing the new country manager of U.K., which is a process that we took that in a very -- with very diligency and also doing some specific restructuring that we planned. So U.K. is also moving. We also got some signs of some good small wins here and there in U.K., small projects yet, but good signs as well.

Okay. To come back on the anti-money laundering deal, is this really a new customer? Or is it, let's say, a renewal of an existing customer that had been using the Smaragd tool before?

This is very good question. So actually, is, as I mentioned, one of the largest banks in the region in Europe and in Germany. And these clients, they already used Smaragd, okay? And we were able to sell it to a new entity. So it was a new sale. It was not an extension of the current contract. It was a new sale. And I must even state that the client was planning to do the project with another technology with a competitor Smaragd. And the team in a very, very focused approach, were able to show our capabilities, our differentiation and change the game and made that a big win for us. We're very, very proud and very happy with that development.

The next question comes from the line of Knud Hinkel, Pareto Securities.

One question from my side. Looking at your utilization rate, which is above 92%, which is good, which is almost too good, if I got that correctly because I think 91% is considered optimal. It seems -- or my reading is that you don't have a capacity problem, but my reading is that the lower profitability compared to the usual run rate in the last couple of years comes from unprofitable projects. Is that reading correct? Or am I wrong here?

So let's start with the very good utilization, 92% has now with the Sophos acquisition moved to 93%, right? This is now all leveled up by roughly 1 percentage point. So we're satisfied with the Q3 utilization, but it could be even better. And let's not forget, utilization is people. At the same time, utilization can be in euro, so in money. And they are small countries like U.K. have a major impact. And the underutilization we had this year still in Q3 in the U.K. costs money. So that's part of the challenges we have.

And we do have project issues in the U.K., which we are repairing this year. So it's not broad-based across the GFT. It's a very U.K.-specific challenge or turnaround that we are managing, including bad projects which caused overruns, and they are included in the numbers as well. You don't see that in the utilization. You see that in the profitability.

So in other words, no, there is no broad GFT pricing challenge, right? As Marco has pointed out, all other units, except U.K. Software Solutions and if you take out FX, are growing by 11%, and they show an EBIT adjusted margin of roughly 9%. So their work is intact. We have to manage the turnaround in the U.K., which will take 1.5 years, right? We have said the P&L will look better in '26. Growth will return hopefully mid-'26, and we will really see it in '27. That's the model we're working.

[Operator Instructions]

We know it's a busy day out there today. Therefore, not so many questions as usual. But if you have one, feel free.

We have a follow-up question from Wolfgang.

Yes. One element that's a little bit concerning is definitely the order book, which is not up to allow for, let's say, mid- or high single-digit growth next year, at least not from today's perspective. Can you give us some idea how the current pipeline is looking, how the leads are developing? Are you negotiating a lot currently? Are there a lots of interesting projects out? Any taste on that would be helpful.

I would repeat what I said on the U.K. There, the order book is a challenge, and it is a burden on the overall order book. Second comment in constant currencies, it's up 3%. This is not euphoria, but it means there is growth, and that's what we're seeing in the market.

Yes, I would love to have an order book up 10%. That's not exactly what the market currently puts us. And this is mainly driven by Europe, right, where we currently still see those minus 6% for the year, and it's also reflected in the order book. We hope it will turn around beginning somewhere first, maybe second quarter of 2026.

Just to give more color on that. We see some strategic markets with, I would say, with a very strong pipeline. So Brazil has -- which is our largest unit, we have such a really huge and strong and resilient pipeline. This is very good for us. And this is also with Colombia as well with the acquisition that we did in Sophos and Latin America. So very, very positive.

U.S., we are also working on some strategic deals right now, quite positive, quite positive, very positive in the U.S. And in terms of Europe and specifically Germany, lots of activities in terms of business development and the pipeline is getting very, very solid and very strong in Germany, even though we have obviously the challenge in the German market, automotive, et cetera, but we've been -- by the way, with this year, we've been growing outside of financial service in Germany. And we see, say, a very good pipeline, okay, in Germany. It's very good. It's very good, shows a lot about the differentiations of our offering.

APAC is also showing positively. So I'd say that we see -- I see a very good year for next year, a good year for next year. We are now going to invite you and we're going to have a Capital Markets Day next week. And we are also going to talk about natural areas that we are under that the market is asking and pushing GFT in a quite positive way, which is defense, bringing our capabilities in data AI and intelligence into the defense industry.

So it's something that we are being naturally requested to work on, and we are pitching right now. And also, I think this is quite -- this can be very big. And we're also going to talk next week. That's the modernization, legacy modernization area, especially with AI right now. And we have several pitches in Europe in regards on modernization of core banks, okay? So that's -- so I see a good timing and a good momentum. And so that's my positioning, okay? More than happy to have you next week on the Capital Markets Day.

Yes, we couldn't advertise more. Are there more questions?

There are no more questions at this time.

Okay. So if that's the case, thank you for your attendance. Hope to see you next week at our Capital Markets Day, just to mention that we'll be there. Take care, and goodbye. Bye-bye.

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