Gen Digital Aktienkurs
Vergleich mit Peer Group
📊 Peer Group
📈 Was ist das?
Die Peer Group sind die Unternehmen mit dem ähnlichsten Geschäftsmodell. Sie dienen als Vergleichsmaßstab, um eine Aktie einzuordnen.
🧮 Wie wird sie ausgewählt?
Nach Ähnlichkeit des Geschäftsmodells, also Unternehmen aus derselben Branche, mit vergleichbaren Produkten und einer ähnlichen Kundengruppe. Nur so vergleichst du Äpfel mit Äpfeln.
🏛️ Wofür ist sie wichtig?
Ob eine Aktie günstig oder teuer ist, lässt sich am ehesten im Vergleich beurteilen. Ein KGV von 18 oder ein EV/FCF von 20 wirkt je nach Maßstab günstig oder teuer. Die Peer Group liefert dabei den treffsichersten Maßstab: Unternehmen mit ähnlichem Geschäftsmodell, die denselben Bedingungen unterliegen.
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
Liegt eine Kennzahl unter dem Peer-Durchschnitt, ist die Aktie relativ günstiger bewertet, über dem Durchschnitt entsprechend teurer. Ein Abschlag zur Peer Group kann eine Chance sein, aber auch einen Grund haben (zum Beispiel geringeres Wachstum). Der Vergleich ist ein Startpunkt, kein Urteil.
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📘 Marktkapitalisierung
📈 Was ist das?
Die Marktkapitalisierung zeigt, wie viel ein Unternehmen laut Börse aktuell wert ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft Unternehmen in Größenklassen (Large, Mid, Small Cap) einzuordnen und gibt Hinweise auf Marktmacht und Stabilität.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Große Unternehmen gelten als stabiler, zahlen oft Dividenden, wachsen aber langsamer.
- Kleine Firmen können stärker wachsen, sind aber schwankungsanfälliger.
- Die Marktkapitalisierung ist ein guter Indikator für Unternehmensgröße, aber kein Maß für Unter- oder Überbewertung.
📘 Enterprise Value (Unternehmenswert)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Enterprise Value (EV) zeigt, was ein Unternehmen tatsächlich kostet, wenn man es komplett übernehmen würde – inklusive Schulden und abzüglich Cash.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
(= Marktkapitalisierung + Nettoverschuldung)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der EV ist eine realistischere Bewertungsbasis als die Marktkapitalisierung, da er die Kapitalstruktur berücksichtigt. Er ist Grundlage für Kennzahlen wie EV/FCF oder EV/Sales.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Der Enterprise Value zeigt, was ein Unternehmen tatsächlich wert ist – unabhängig davon, wie es finanziert ist.
- Er ist besonders wichtig für professionelle Investoren, da er eine objektivere Grundlage für Bewertungsvergleiche bietet als die Marktkapitalisierung allein.
- Ein Unternehmen mit hoher Verschuldung erscheint im EV teurer, eines mit viel Cash günstiger – auch wenn sie an der Börse gleich viel wert sind.
📘 Nettoverschuldung
📈 Was ist das?
Die Nettoverschuldung zeigt, wie viele Schulden nach Abzug des verfügbaren Cashs tatsächlich verbleiben.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen von Fremdkapital abhängig ist – und wie gut es in der Lage ist, seine Schulden kurzfristig zu bedienen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine niedrige oder negative Nettoverschuldung bedeutet hohe finanzielle Stabilität.
- Unternehmen mit viel Cash und geringer Verschuldung sind besser gerüstet für Krisen.
- Eine hohe Nettoverschuldung erhöht das Risiko – besonders bei steigenden Zinsen oder konjunkturellen Schwächen.
📘 Cash
📈 Was ist das?
Der Cashbestand zeigt, wie viele liquide Mittel einem Unternehmen sofort zur Verfügung stehen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Er gibt Auskunft über die finanzielle Flexibilität: Ein hoher Cashbestand ermöglicht Investitionen, Rückkäufe oder Krisenresistenz.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Cashbestand zeigt finanzielle Stärke und Handlungsspielraum.
- Cash kann für Investitionen, Schuldentilgung oder Aktienrückkäufe genutzt werden.
- Allerdings: Zu viel ungenutztes Kapital kann auch auf mangelnde Investitionsideen hinweisen.
📘 Anzahl ausstehender Aktien
📈 Was ist das?
Die Anzahl ausstehender Aktien gibt an, wie viele Aktien eines Unternehmens aktuell im Umlauf sind und von Investoren gehalten werden.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie ist die Grundlage für viele Kennzahlen wie Gewinn je Aktie (EPS), Marktkapitalisierung oder KGV.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Je weniger Aktien im Umlauf sind, desto höher fällt z. B. der Gewinn je Aktie aus – wichtig für Bewertung und Dividendenrendite.
- Aktienrückkäufe verringern die Anzahl ausstehender Aktien – und steigern den Wert je Aktie.
- Kapitalerhöhungen haben den gegenteiligen Effekt: mehr Aktien → Verwässerung der bestehenden Anteile.
📘 Kurs-Gewinn-Verhältnis (KGV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KGV zeigt, wie oft der Gewinn pro Aktie im aktuellen Aktienkurs enthalten ist – also wie „teuer“ eine Aktie im Verhältnis zum Gewinn ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KGV gehört zu den bekanntesten Bewertungskennzahlen. Es hilft Anlegern einzuschätzen, ob eine Aktie im Vergleich zu ihrem Gewinn eher günstig oder teuer erscheint.
🧮 Berechnung
📊 KGV (TTM) = bezogen auf den Gewinn der letzten 12 Monate (Trailing Twelve Months):🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges KGV kann auf eine günstige Bewertung hindeuten – oder auf Probleme im Geschäftsmodell.
- Ein hohes KGV kann Wachstumserwartungen widerspiegeln – oder eine überbewertete Aktie.
📘 Kurs-Umsatz-Verhältnis (KUV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KUV zeigt, wie viel Anleger für 1 € Umsatz eines Unternehmens zahlen – unabhängig vom Gewinn.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KUV ist besonders bei wachstumsstarken oder noch nicht profitablen Unternehmen hilfreich. Es zeigt, wie hoch der Umsatz an der Börse bewertet wird.
🧮 Berechnung
Marktkapitalisierung = 14,86 Mrd. $ | Umsatz (TTM) = 5,08 Mrd. $
Marktkapitalisierung = 14,86 Mrd. $ | Umsatz erwartet = 5,48 Mrd. $
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges KUV kann auf Unterbewertung hindeuten – oder auf schwache Margen.
- Ein hohes KUV kann hohe Erwartungen widerspiegeln – oder übermäßigen Optimismus.
- Besonders sinnvoll bei Wachstumsunternehmen, bei denen der Gewinn oder Free Cashflow (noch) keine Aussagekraft hat.
📘 Unternehmenswert zu Umsatz (EV/Sales)
📈 Was ist das?
EV/Sales zeigt, wie viel Anleger für 1 € Umsatz eines Unternehmens zahlen, wenn man auch Schulden und Cash berücksichtigt – es ist eine kapitalstrukturbereinigte Version des KUV.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Kennzahl eignet sich besonders für den Vergleich von Unternehmen mit unterschiedlicher Verschuldung – sie zeigt, wie teuer ein Unternehmen tatsächlich im Verhältnis zum Umsatz ist.
🧮 Berechnung
Enterprise Value = 22,48 Mrd. $ | Umsatz (TTM) = 5,08 Mrd. $
Enterprise Value = 22,48 Mrd. $ | Umsatz erwartet = 5,48 Mrd. $
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- EV/Sales ist neutral gegenüber der Kapitalstruktur und eignet sich gut für Unternehmensvergleiche.
- Ein niedriges Verhältnis kann auf eine günstig bewertete Aktie hindeuten – ein hohes Verhältnis auf hohe Erwartungen oder Überbewertung.
- Besonders nützlich bei wachstumsstarken, noch nicht profitablen Firmen.
📘 Unternehmenswert zu Free Cashflow (EV/FCF) | ex SBC
📈 Was ist das?
EV/FCF setzt den Unternehmenswert eines Unternehmens ins Verhältnis zu seinem Free Cashflow. Die Kennzahl zeigt damit, mit welchem Vielfachen des aktuellen Free Cashflows ein Unternehmen bewertet wird. EV/FCF ex SBC berücksichtigt zusätzlich aktienbasierte Vergütungen (Stock-Based Compensation, SBC). SBC verursacht zwar keinen direkten Cash-Abfluss, kann bestehende Aktionäre jedoch durch die Ausgabe zusätzlicher Aktien verwässern. Deshalb wird SBC bei dieser Variante vom Free Cashflow abgezogen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
EV/FCF ex SBC = Enterprise Value ÷ (Free Cashflow (TTM) − SBC)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EV/FCF ermöglicht eine Bewertung auf Basis des Free Cashflows und ergänzt damit gewinnbasierte Bewertungskennzahlen wie das KGV. Die Variante ex SBC berücksichtigt zusätzlich die wirtschaftliche Belastung durch aktienbasierte Vergütungen und ermöglicht dadurch eine konservativere Betrachtung aus Sicht der Aktionäre.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges EV/FCF bedeutet, dass der Unternehmenswert im Verhältnis zum aktuellen Free Cashflow niedrig ist. Die Ursachen dafür sollten jedoch immer im Unternehmens- und Branchenkontext betrachtet werden.
- Ein hohes EV/FCF bedeutet, dass der Unternehmenswert im Verhältnis zum aktuellen Free Cashflow hoch ist. Das kann beispielsweise auf hohe Wachstumserwartungen oder eine vorübergehend schwache Cash-Generierung zurückzuführen sein.
- Bei positiver SBC und positivem bereinigtem Free Cashflow fällt EV/FCF ex SBC in der Regel höher aus als das klassische EV/FCF.
- Besonders aussagekräftig ist die Kennzahl bei Unternehmen mit relativ stabilen und gut einschätzbaren Cashflows.
- Bei negativem oder sehr niedrigem Free Cashflow ist EV/FCF nur eingeschränkt aussagekräftig und sollte nicht wie ein gewöhnliches Bewertungsmultiple interpretiert werden.
📘 Kurs-Buchwert-Verhältnis (KBV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KBV zeigt, wie hoch der Marktwert eines Unternehmens im Verhältnis zu seinem bilanziellen Eigenkapital ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KBV ist besonders bei Substanzwerten (z. B. Banken, Industrie) relevant. Es hilft Anlegern zu erkennen, ob ein Unternehmen unter oder über seinem buchhalterischen Vermögen bewertet ist.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein KBV unter 1 kann auf Unterbewertung oder schwache Rentabilität hindeuten.
- Ein KBV über 1 zeigt, dass der Markt dem Unternehmen Mehrwert über den Buchwert hinaus zuschreibt (z. B. Marken, Patente, Wachstum).
- Das KBV eignet sich besonders gut für Unternehmen mit stabilen, materiellen Vermögenswerten.
📘 Dividende je Aktie
📈 Was ist das?
Die Dividende je Aktie zeigt, wie viel Geld ein Unternehmen pro Aktie an seine Aktionäre ausschüttet – typischerweise jährlich oder quartalsweise.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie ist die absolute Größe der Auszahlung je Aktie – wichtig für alle, die regelmäßige Erträge suchen oder Dividendenstrategien verfolgen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine stabile oder wachsende Dividende je Aktie ist oft ein Zeichen für ein solides Geschäftsmodell.
- Die Dividende je Aktie allein sagt aber nichts über die Rendite – dafür ist auch der Aktienkurs relevant (→ Dividendenrendite).
- Langfristig steigende Dividenden sind oft ein sehr gutes Merkmal (z. B. Dividenden-Aristokraten).
📘 Dividendenrendite
📈 Was ist das?
Die Dividendenrendite zeigt, wie hoch die Dividende eines Unternehmens im Verhältnis zum Aktienkurs ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft dabei, Dividendenaktien vergleichbar zu machen – unabhängig vom absoluten Auszahlungsbetrag.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine stabile Dividendenrendite kann auf verlässliche Ausschüttungen hinweisen.
- Ein Vergleich der 1J- und 5J-Rendite hilft zu erkennen, ob das Dividendenwachstum mit dem Kurswachstum Schritt hält.
- Eine niedrige Rendite ist nicht zwingend negativ – sie kann auf starkes Kurswachstum hindeuten.
📘 Dividendenwachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Dividendenwachstum zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen seine Dividende je Aktie über die Zeit gesteigert hat.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
5J: durchschnittliche jährliche Wachstumsrate (CAGR)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Stetig steigende Dividenden gelten als Zeichen für finanzielle Stärke und Aktionärsorientierung – besonders interessant für langfristige Investoren.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein stabiles Dividendenwachstum ist ein Zeichen nachhaltiger Ertragskraft.
- Ein hohes Dividendenwachstum kann ein erheblicher Hebel deiner Rendite sein:
- Wenn ein Unternehmen z. B. 1 € Dividende zahlt und diese über 5 Jahre jährlich um 15 % erhöht, bekommst du im 5. Jahr bereits 2 € je Aktie – doppelt so viel wie zu Beginn!
📘 Ausschüttungsquote (Payout)
📈 Was ist das?
Die Ausschüttungsquote zeigt, wie viel Prozent des Unternehmensgewinns (pro Aktie) als Dividende an die Aktionäre ausgeschüttet wird.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Quote hilft einzuschätzen, ob eine Dividende auf Dauer tragfähig ist – besonders im Verhältnis zum erzielten Gewinn.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine niedrige Ausschüttungsquote bedeutet: Das Unternehmen behält einen größeren Teil des Gewinns für Investitionen – typisch für Wachstumsunternehmen.
- Eine moderate Quote (z. B. 25–50 %) steht oft für ein gesundes Gleichgewicht zwischen Ausschüttung und Zukunftsinvestitionen.
- Hohe Ausschüttungsquoten können attraktiv wirken, sind aber riskanter, wenn die Gewinne schwanken oder sinken.
📘 Dividendensteigerungen in Folge (Erhöhungen)
📈 Was ist das?
Diese Kennzahl zeigt, wie viele Jahre in Folge ein Unternehmen seine Dividende pro Aktie erhöht hat – ohne Kürzung oder Aussetzung.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein langer Track Record kontinuierlicher Erhöhungen spricht für Verlässlichkeit, solide Finanzen und aktionärsfreundliche Unternehmenspolitik.
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein langer Zeitraum mit Dividendensteigerungen stärkt das Vertrauen – besonders in Krisenzeiten.
- Solche Unternehmen gelten als verlässlich und planbar für Einkommensinvestoren.
- Je länger die Serie, desto stärker das Commitment gegenüber den Aktionären.
📘 Umsatz
📈 Was ist das?
Der Umsatz zeigt, wie viel ein Unternehmen insgesamt mit seinen Produkten und Dienstleistungen verdient – also den Bruttoerlös vor Abzug von Kosten.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Umsatz ist eine der zentralen Kennzahlen zur Einschätzung der Unternehmensgröße, Marktstellung und Wachstumskraft.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein wachsender Umsatz zeigt eine steigende Nachfrage und kann ein guter Frühindikator für Gewinnsteigerungen sein.
- Vergleiche von aktuellem und erwartetem Umsatz geben Hinweise auf das Marktumfeld und Analystenerwartungen.
- Wichtig: Starker Umsatz allein genügt nicht – auch Margen und Profitabilität zählen.
📘 EBITDA
📈 Was ist das?
EBITDA steht für „Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization“ – also Gewinn vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen. Es zeigt das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens, bereinigt um bilanztechnische und finanzierungsbedingte Effekte.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EBITDA ist eine verbreitete Kennzahl zur Beurteilung der operativen Leistungsfähigkeit – insbesondere bei kapitalintensiven Unternehmen oder im internationalen Vergleich.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hohes oder wachsendes EBITDA spricht für starke operative Erträge – unabhängig von Bilanzierung oder Steuerlast.
- EBITDA ist besonders nützlich, um Unternehmen branchenübergreifend zu vergleichen.
- Wichtig: EBITDA ist keine offizielle Gewinnkennzahl – Abschreibungen und Finanzierungskosten werden ausgeklammert.
📘 EBIT
📈 Was ist das?
EBIT steht für „Earnings Before Interest and Taxes“ – also Gewinn vor Zinsen und Steuern. Es zeigt das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Finanzierungs- und Steueraufwand.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EBIT ist eine zentrale Kennzahl zur Beurteilung der Profitabilität aus dem Kerngeschäft – unabhängig von Kapitalstruktur oder Steuersystem.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hohes EBIT deutet auf ein profitables Kerngeschäft hin – vor Zinslasten oder steuerlichen Effekten.
- Es erlaubt objektivere Vergleiche zwischen Unternehmen mit unterschiedlicher Finanzierung.
- Im Vergleich mit EBITDA zeigt EBIT bereits den Einfluss von Abschreibungen auf das operative Ergebnis.
📘 Nettogewinn
📈 Was ist das?
Der Nettogewinn ist der verbleibende Jahresüberschuss (oder -fehlbetrag) eines Unternehmens – nach Abzug aller Kosten, Steuern, Zinsen und Abschreibungen
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Nettogewinn ist die zentrale Erfolgskennzahl – er zeigt, wie profitabel ein Unternehmen nach allen Kosten tatsächlich arbeitet.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein steigender Nettogewinn zeigt, dass das Unternehmen effizient wirtschaftet – trotz aller Kosten.
- Die Entwicklung des Gewinns beeinflusst z. B. direkt das KGV und weitere Kennzahlen.
- Im Zeitverlauf lässt sich ablesen, wie stabil und profitabel ein Geschäftsmodell wirklich ist.
📘 Free Cashflow (FCF) | ex SBC
📈 Was ist das?
Der Free Cashflow gibt an, wie viel Bargeld tatsächlich übrig bleibt, nachdem ein Unternehmen seine Betriebsausgaben und Investitionsausgaben gedeckt hat. Der FCF ex SBC zieht zusätzlich die aktienbasierte Vergütung ab, um den Cashflow um den Effekt der nicht zahlungswirksamen SBC zu bereinigen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Free Cashflow ex SBC = Operativer Cashflow − SBC − Investitionen in Sachanlagen (CAPEX)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der FCF spiegelt die tatsächliche Finanzkraft eines Unternehmens wider – unabhängig von den bilanziellen Gewinnen. Er zeigt, wie viel Spielraum ein Unternehmen für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe oder den Schuldenabbau hat. Der FCF ex SBC zieht zusätzlich die aktienbasierte Vergütung ab und zeigt, wie hoch die Cash-Generierung nach Abzug der SBC ausfällt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Free Cashflow bedeutet, dass ein Unternehmen echte Finanzkraft besitzt – unabhängig vom bilanzierten Gewinn.
- Er ist oft die solideste Grundlage für nachhaltige Dividenden und Aktienrückkäufe.
- Sinkender FCF kann ein Warnsignal sein – auch wenn der Gewinn stabil aussieht.
📘 Umsatzwachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Umsatzwachstum zeigt, wie stark sich die Erlöse eines Unternehmens im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verändert haben – tatsächlich (TTM) und auf Prognosebasis (erwartet).
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (Umsatz erwartet ÷ Umsatz Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein wachsender Umsatz ist ein zentrales Signal für steigende Nachfrage, Geschäftsausweitung und Marktanteilsgewinne – besonders bei Wachstumsunternehmen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Wachstum ist der Motor langfristiger Wertsteigerung – besonders bei Technologie- und Wachstumsaktien.
- Wichtig ist nicht nur das aktuelle Wachstum, sondern auch dessen Nachhaltigkeit.
- Prognosen zeigen, ob Analysten weiteres Potenzial erwarten – oder eine Verlangsamung.
📘 EBITDA-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das EBITDA-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen im Vergleich zum Vorjahr gestiegen oder gesunken ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwartetes EBITDA ÷ EBITDA Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein steigendes EBITDA ist ein Zeichen für verbesserte operative Ertragskraft – unabhängig von Finanzierungsstruktur oder Abschreibungen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Starkes EBITDA-Wachstum signalisiert operative Effizienz und Skalierung – besonders relevant in Wachstumsphasen.
- EBITDA-Wachstum ist ein Frühindikator für Margen- und Gewinnentwicklung – sollte aber stets im Zusammenhang mit Umsatz und EBIT betrachtet werden.
📘 EBIT Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das EBIT-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens (nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Zinsen und Steuern) im Vergleich zum Vorjahr gewachsen ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwartetes EBIT ÷ EBIT Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das EBIT-Wachstum ist ein direkter Indikator für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des operativen Geschäfts – unter Berücksichtigung der Kapitalintensität (Abschreibungen).
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Steigendes EBIT signalisiert wachsende operative Rentabilität – auch unter Berücksichtigung von Abschreibungen.
- Das EBIT-Wachstum ist ein wichtiges Maß zur Beurteilung von Geschäftsmodellen mit hohen Investitionskosten.
- Im Zusammenspiel mit Umsatz- und EBITDA-Wachstum ergibt sich ein umfassendes Bild zur operativen Entwicklung.
📘 Nettogewinn-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Nettogewinn-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark der Jahresüberschuss eines Unternehmens gegenüber dem Vorjahr gestiegen oder gesunken ist – sowohl tatsächlich (TTM) als auch auf Basis von Prognosen (erwartet).
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwarteter Nettogewinn ÷ Nettogewinn Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Der erwartete Wert basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Gewinn ist die entscheidende Ergebnisgröße für ein Unternehmen. Ein wachsender Nettogewinn deutet auf steigende Effizienz, stabile Kostenkontrolle und nachhaltige Ertragskraft hin.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Wachsender Nettogewinn stärkt die Bewertung, Dividendenfähigkeit und Kursfantasie.
- Stagnierender oder rückläufiger Gewinn trotz Umsatzwachstum kann auf Margendruck hinweisen.
📘 Free Cashflow-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Free-Cashflow-Wachstum zeigt, wie sich der freie Mittelzufluss eines Unternehmens im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verändert hat – also der Betrag, der nach allen operativen Ausgaben und Investitionen übrig bleibt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Free Cashflow ist der echte, verfügbare Geldzufluss. Wachstum in diesem Bereich ist ein Zeichen für finanzielle Stärke und steigende Flexibilität bei Dividenden, Rückkäufen oder Investitionen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Sinkender Free Cashflow kann auf steigende Investitionen, höhere Kosten oder stagnierende operative Erträge hindeuten.
- Besonders bei Dividendenwerten ist das FCF-Wachstum wichtig – denn Dividenden werden letztlich aus dem verfügbaren Cash gezahlt.
- Ein negativer Trend sollte genauer analysiert werden – er ist nicht zwangsläufig schlecht, aber potenziell ein Warnsignal.
📘 Bruttomarge
📈 Was ist das?
Die Bruttomarge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz nach Abzug der direkten Herstellungskosten (Material, Produktion) als Bruttogewinn übrig bleibt – also der „Rohgewinn“ eines Unternehmens.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Auch: Bruttomarge = Bruttogewinn ÷ Umsatz × 100
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Bruttomarge gibt Aufschluss über die Profitabilität eines Produkts oder Geschäftsmodells vor Fixkosten, Steuern und Zinsen. Sie zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen produzieren oder einkaufen kann.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Bruttomarge deutet auf starke Preissetzungsmacht und effiziente Herstellung hin.
- Sinkende Bruttomargen können auf Kostensteigerungen oder Preisdruck hindeuten.
- Besonders im Vergleich zu Wettbewerbern liefert die Bruttomarge wertvolle Einblicke in die Geschäftsqualität.
📘 EBITDA-Marge
📈 Was ist das?
Die EBITDA-Marge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz als operativer Gewinn vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen (EBITDA) übrig bleibt. Sie misst die operative Effizienz – ohne Verzerrungen durch Finanzierung oder Buchwerte.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die EBITDA-Marge hilft zu verstehen, wie viel operativer Gewinn ein Unternehmen aus jedem Euro Umsatz erzielt – unabhängig von Kapitalstruktur oder steuerlichem Umfeld.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe EBITDA-Marge zeigt starke operative Ertragskraft – unabhängig von Bilanzierungseffekten.
- Die Marge ermöglicht gute Vergleiche zwischen Unternehmen und Branchen.
- Ein stabiler oder wachsender Wert kann auf effiziente Kostenkontrolle und Skalierbarkeit hindeuten.
📘 EBIT-Marge
📈 Was ist das?
Die EBIT-Marge zeigt, wie viel Prozent des Umsatzes als operativer Gewinn nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Zinsen und Steuern übrig bleiben.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die EBIT-Marge misst die operative Ertragskraft eines Unternehmens unter Berücksichtigung der Kapitalintensität (z. B. Maschinen, Anlagen). Sie eignet sich gut zum Vergleich von Geschäftsmodellen mit unterschiedlich hohen Abschreibungen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe EBIT-Marge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen auch nach Abschreibungen effizient arbeitet.
- Sie ist besonders relevant in kapitalintensiven Branchen.
- Langfristig stabile oder steigende Margen sind ein Zeichen wirtschaftlicher Stärke und Preissetzungsmacht.
📘 Nettomarge
📈 Was ist das?
Die Nettomarge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz am Ende als „Reingewinn“ übrig bleibt – also nach Abzug aller Kosten, Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Nettomarge gibt an, wie effizient ein Unternehmen über alle Stufen hinweg wirtschaftet. Sie zeigt, wie viel Gewinn tatsächlich je Euro Umsatz übrig bleibt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Nettomarge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen nicht nur operativ stark ist, sondern auch seine Finanzierung und Steuerbelastung im Griff hat.
- Vergleiche mit Wettbewerbern geben Einblicke in die wirtschaftliche Qualität.
- Sinkende Nettomargen trotz Umsatzwachstum können ein Warnsignal sein – etwa für steigende Kosten oder sinkende Effizienz.
📘 Free-Cashflow-Marge | ex SBC
📈 Was ist das?
Die Free-Cashflow-Marge zeigt, wie viel Free Cashflow ein Unternehmen im Verhältnis zu seinem Umsatz erwirtschaftet. Der Free Cashflow entspricht vereinfacht dem operativen Cashflow abzüglich der Investitionsausgaben. Die Free-Cashflow-Marge ex SBC berücksichtigt zusätzlich aktienbasierte Vergütungen (Stock-Based Compensation, SBC). SBC verursacht zwar keinen direkten Cash-Abfluss, kann bestehende Aktionäre jedoch durch die Ausgabe zusätzlicher Aktien verwässern. Daher wird SBC bei dieser Kennzahl vom Free Cashflow abgezogen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Free-Cashflow-Marge ex SBC = (Free Cashflow − SBC) ÷ Umsatz × 100
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Free-Cashflow-Marge zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen seinen Umsatz in Free Cashflow umwandelt. Ein hoher Free Cashflow kann dem Unternehmen finanziellen Spielraum für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe, Schuldentilgung oder weitere Investitionen geben. Die Variante ex SBC berücksichtigt zusätzlich die wirtschaftliche Belastung durch aktienbasierte Vergütungen und ermöglicht dadurch eine konservativere Betrachtung der Cash-Generierung aus Sicht der Aktionäre.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Free-Cashflow-Marge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen einen hohen Anteil seines Umsatzes in Free Cashflow umwandelt.
- Das kann dem Unternehmen mehr finanziellen Spielraum für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe, Schuldentilgung oder Investitionen geben.
- Die Free-Cashflow-Marge ex SBC berücksichtigt zusätzlich die mögliche Verwässerung durch aktienbasierte Vergütungen.
- Besonders aussagekräftig ist die Entwicklung über mehrere Jahre. Sinkende Werte können beispielsweise auf höhere Investitionen, Veränderungen im Working Capital oder eine schwächere operative Entwicklung zurückzuführen sein.
📘 Eigenkapitalquote
📈 Was ist das?
Die Eigenkapitalquote zeigt, wie hoch der Anteil des Eigenkapitals an der Bilanzsumme eines Unternehmens ist – also wie stark es sich aus eigenen Mitteln finanziert.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Eine hohe Eigenkapitalquote steht für finanzielle Stabilität, Krisenfestigkeit und gute Bonität. Sie ist besonders relevant bei der Beurteilung der Verschuldung.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Eigenkapitalquote signalisiert finanzielle Stabilität – besonders in Krisenzeiten.
- Ein niedriger Wert kann auf ein höheres Risiko oder eine aggressive Verschuldung hinweisen.
- Wichtig: Die Eigenkapitalquote sollte immer gemeinsam mit der Eigenkapitalrendite betrachtet werden. Nur so lässt sich beurteilen, ob ein Unternehmen nicht nur solide, sondern auch effizient wirtschaftet.
📘 Eigenkapitalrendite (ROE)
📈 Was ist das?
Die Eigenkapitalrendite zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen mit dem Kapital seiner Aktionäre arbeitet – also wie viel Gewinn es pro Euro Eigenkapital erwirtschaftet.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Eigenkapitalrendite ist eine zentrale Rentabilitätskennzahl. Sie hilft Anlegern zu erkennen, ob das Unternehmen eine attraktive Verzinsung auf das eingesetzte Eigenkapital erwirtschaftet.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Eigenkapitalrendite spricht für ein starkes, effizientes Geschäftsmodell.
- Besonders interessant ist sie bei kapitalintensiven Firmen oder solchen mit hoher Eigenkapitalquote.
- Wichtig: Ein sehr hoher ROE kann auch auf hohe Schulden hinweisen – daher sollte sie immer im Kontext mit der Eigenkapitalquote betrachtet werden.
📘 Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)
📈 Was ist das?
ROCE misst die Gesamtrentabilität eines Unternehmens – also wie effizient es das eingesetzte Kapital (Eigen- und Fremdkapital) zur Gewinnerzielung nutzt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Das eingesetzte Kapital ist das gesamte betriebsnotwendige Kapital, unabhängig von der Finanzierungsquelle.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
ROCE eignet sich besonders gut für den Vergleich unterschiedlich finanzierter Unternehmen. Es zeigt, wie effektiv ein Unternehmen Kapital investiert – unabhängig von der Kapitalstruktur.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher ROCE zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen sein Kapital effizient einsetzt – unabhängig davon, ob es durch Eigen- oder Fremdkapital finanziert ist.
- Je höher der ROCE im Vergleich zu ähnlichen Unternehmen, desto mehr Wert schafft das Unternehmen mit seinem investierten Kapital.
- Besonders wichtig ist der ROCE bei Firmen mit hohen Investitionen – z. B. in Industrie, Energie oder Infrastruktur.
📘 Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
📈 Was ist das?
ROIC zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen das Kapital investiert, das langfristig im operativen Geschäft gebunden ist – unabhängig davon, ob es aus Eigen- oder Fremdkapital stammt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
- NOPAT = „Net Operating Profit After Taxes“
- Investiertes Kapital = operatives Vermögen abzüglich nicht-verzinster Schulden
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
ROIC ist eine der präzisesten Kennzahlen zur Bewertung der Kapitalrendite – besonders im Vergleich zur Eigenkapitalrendite, weil es Verzerrungen durch Schulden vermeidet. Er zeigt, ob ein Unternehmen Mehrwert für alle Kapitalgeber schafft.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher ROIC zeigt, wie gut ein Unternehmen mit dem tatsächlich investierten (betriebsnotwendigen) Kapital wirtschaftet.
- Im Unterschied zu ROCE wird nur Kapital betrachtet, das wirklich zur Finanzierung operativer Aktivitäten dient – und verzinst werden muss.
- Besonders hilfreich, um die Kapitalrendite von Unternehmen mit viel „überschüssigem“ Kapital oder zinsfreien Verbindlichkeiten realistisch zu vergleichen.
📘 Verschuldungsgrad (Leverage Ratio)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Verschuldungsgrad zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen durch verzinsliche Schulden (z. B. Kredite und Anleihen) im Verhältnis zum Eigenkapital finanziert ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Kennzahl hilft, das finanzielle Risiko und die Abhängigkeit von Fremdkapital zu beurteilen. Ein hoher Verschuldungsgrad kann die Eigenkapitalrendite steigern – birgt aber auch erhöhte Risiken bei Zinsanstiegen oder Liquiditätsengpässen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Verschuldungsgrad steht für finanzielle Stabilität und Unabhängigkeit.
- Ein hoher Wert kann auf erhöhte Risiken hinweisen – insbesondere bei schwankenden Zinsen oder konjunkturellen Schwächen.
- Wichtig: Immer im Kontext zur Branche und Kapitalintensität bewerten.
📘 SBC | in % Umsatz
📈 Was ist das?
SBC (Stock-Based Compensation) bezeichnet die aktienbasierte Vergütung, die ein Unternehmen seinen Mitarbeitern und Führungskräften gewährt. Der Prozentanteil zeigt, wie hoch die SBC im Verhältnis zum Umsatz ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
SBC in % Umsatz = (SBC ÷ Umsatz) × 100
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Aktienbasierte Vergütung ist für Aktionäre ein realer Kostenfaktor. Sie erhöht die Aktienanzahl und verwässert damit die bestehenden Anteile. Der Anteil am Umsatz zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen auf dieses Mittel setzt und wie viel der Wertschöpfung an Mitarbeiter statt an Aktionäre fließt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Wert ist grundsätzlich positiv: Die aktienbasierte Vergütung fällt im Verhältnis zum Umsatz gering aus.
- Ein hoher Wert kann dagegen auf eine stärkere Abhängigkeit von aktienbasierter Vergütung und ein höheres potenzielles Verwässerungsrisiko hindeuten. Entscheidend ist dabei auch, ob das Unternehmen die Verwässerung durch Aktienrückkäufe ausgleicht.
📘 SBC in % FCF
📈 Was ist das?
SBC (Stock-Based Compensation) bezeichnet die aktienbasierte Vergütung, die ein Unternehmen seinen Mitarbeitern und Führungskräften gewährt. Der Prozentanteil zeigt, wie hoch die SBC im Verhältnis zum Free Cashflow (FCF) ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
SBC in % FCF = (SBC ÷ Free Cashflow) × 100
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Aktienbasierte Vergütung ist für Aktionäre ein realer Kostenfaktor. Sie erhöht die Aktienanzahl und verwässert damit die bestehenden Anteile. Der Anteil am freien Cashflow zeigt, wie groß die SBC im Verhältnis zur vom Unternehmen erwirtschafteten Cash-Generierung ist. Da SBC nicht zahlungswirksam ist, wird sie bei der Berechnung des FCF typischerweise nicht als Cash-Abfluss berücksichtigt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Wert ist hier meist günstig. Die aktienbasierte Vergütung fällt im Verhältnis zur Cash-Erzeugung gering aus.
- Ein hoher Wert bedeutet, dass ein großer Teil des ausgewiesenen freien Cashflows durch nicht zahlungswirksame SBC gestützt wird.
- Je höher der Wert, desto stärker kann die SBC die tatsächliche wirtschaftliche Belastung für Aktionäre widerspiegeln.
📘 SBC-Wachstum 1J
📈 Was ist das?
Das SBC-Wachstum 1J zeigt, wie stark sich die aktienbasierte Vergütung (Stock-Based Compensation) eines Unternehmens im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verändert hat.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das SBC-Wachstum zeigt, ob die aktienbasierte Vergütung für Aktionäre zunehmend oder abnehmend relevant wird. Steigt die SBC deutlich, kann dadurch langfristig auch die Verwässerung der Aktionäre zunehmen. Gleichzeitig handelt es sich um einen nicht zahlungswirksamen Aufwand, der in der Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung das Ergebnis mindert, in der Kapitalflussrechnung jedoch wieder hinzugerechnet wird.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher positiver Wert ist meistens negativ, denn steigende SBC kann die Belastung für Aktionäre erhöhen, insbesondere durch mögliche Verwässerung.
- Entscheidend ist, ob die Entwicklung der SBC langfristig nachhaltig bleibt. Ein gewisses Maß an SBC ist bei vielen Wachstums- und Technologieunternehmen üblich.
📘 Aktienanzahl-Wachstum 1J
📈 Was ist das?
Das Wachstum der Aktienanzahl zeigt, wie stark sich die Zahl der ausstehenden Aktien innerhalb eines Jahres verändert hat.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Aktienanzahl bestimmt, auf wie viele Anteile sich Gewinn und Vermögen des Unternehmens verteilen. Sinkt die Anzahl der Aktien, steigt der relative Anteil bestehender Aktionäre. Steigt sie, werden bestehende Aktionäre verwässert. Die Kennzahl macht damit Verwässerung und Aktienrückkäufe direkt sichtbar.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein negativer Wert ist meist positiv, da die Zahl der ausstehenden Aktien zurückgeht.
- Ein positiver Wert deutet auf eine Verwässerung bestehender Aktionäre hin.
- Ein sinkender Wert ist nicht automatisch positiv: Entscheidend ist auch, zu welchem Preis und wie die Rückkäufe finanziert werden.
📘 Shareholder Yield
📈 Was ist das?
Der Shareholder Yield zeigt, wie viel Wert ein Unternehmen im Verhältnis zu seiner Marktkapitalisierung durch Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe und Schuldenabbau für seine Aktionäre schafft. Damit geht die Kennzahl über die klassische Dividendenrendite hinaus.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Dividendenrendite allein zeigt nur einen Teil davon, wie ein Unternehmen sein Kapital zugunsten der Aktionäre einsetzt. Neben Dividenden können auch Aktienrückkäufe den Anteil bestehender Aktionäre am Unternehmen erhöhen. Ein Abbau der Verschuldung stärkt zusätzlich die finanzielle Position des Unternehmens. Der Shareholder Yield fasst diese drei Komponenten in einer Kennzahl zusammen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein höherer Wert bedeutet mehr Kapitalrückgabe bzw. einen stärkeren Schuldenabbau zugunsten der Aktionäre.
- Die Zusammensetzung ist wichtig: Dividenden, Rückkäufe und Schuldenabbau haben unterschiedliche Auswirkungen.
- Rückkäufe schaffen nur dann Wert, wenn die Aktien zu attraktiven Preisen zurückgekauft werden.
- Entscheidend ist auch, ob die Kapitalrückgaben und der Schuldenabbau nachhaltig finanziert werden.
📘 Ergebnis je Aktie (EPS)
📈 Was ist das?
Das Ergebnis je Aktie (EPS) zeigt, wie viel Gewinn auf eine einzelne Aktie entfällt – und ist eine der wichtigsten Kennzahlen zur Bewertung von Unternehmen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Die verwässerte Aktienanzahl berücksichtigt auch potenzielle neue Aktien, etwa durch Optionen, Wandelanleihen oder andere Umtauschrechte.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EPS bildet die Basis für viele Bewertungskennzahlen wie KGV, PEG oder Payout Ratio. Es macht den Gewinn für Aktionäre vergleichbar – unabhängig von der Unternehmensgröße.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- EPS hilft, die Profitabilität pro Aktie zu erfassen – und ist besonders wichtig im Zeitvergleich oder im Vergleich mit Analystenschätzungen.
- Steigendes EPS kann ein Zeichen für stabiles Wachstum oder Aktienrückkäufe sein.
- Wichtig: Verwende verwässertes EPS für realistische Bewertungen – besonders bei stark aktienbasierten Vergütungssystemen.
📘 Free Cashflow je Aktie (FCF je Aktie)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Free Cashflow je Aktie zeigt, wie viel freier Mittelzufluss einem Unternehmen pro Aktie zur Verfügung steht – nach Investitionen, aber vor Dividenden oder Schuldentilgung.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der FCF je Aktie zeigt, wie viel liquide Mittel pro Aktie tatsächlich im Unternehmen verbleiben – wichtig für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe oder Schuldentilgung. Im Gegensatz zum Gewinn ist er schwerer manipulierbar und daher besonders aussagekräftig.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Free Cashflow je Aktie ist ein Zeichen für hohe finanzielle Flexibilität.
- Er zeigt, wie viel Kapital ein Unternehmen effektiv einsetzen oder ausschütten kann.
- Besonders relevant für dividendenstarke Unternehmen oder solche mit starker Kapitalrendite.
📘 Short Interest
📈 Was ist das?
Short Interest zeigt, wie viele Aktien eines Unternehmens aktuell leerverkauft wurden – also von Investoren geliehen und verkauft, in der Erwartung fallender Kurse.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Der Wert zeigt den Anteil der Aktien, der aktuell auf fallende Kurse spekuliert wird.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Short Interest dient als Stimmungsindikator: Ein hoher Wert deutet auf Skepsis oder negative Erwartungen gegenüber dem Unternehmen hin – kann aber auch zu einem „Short Squeeze“ führen, wenn der Kurs plötzlich steigt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Short Interest deutet auf Vertrauen in das Unternehmen hin.
- Ein hoher Wert kann ein Warnsignal sein – oder eine Chance, wenn sich die Stimmung dreht.
- Besonders spannend in volatilen Märkten oder vor wichtigen Quartalszahlen.
📘 Employees
📈 Was ist das?
Die Mitarbeiteranzahl zeigt, wie viele Personen ein Unternehmen weltweit beschäftigt – ein Indikator für Größe, Struktur und Geschäftsmodell.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft bei der Einschätzung von Skaleneffekten, Effizienz und Personalkosten. Zusammen mit Umsatz und Gewinn lassen sich Kennzahlen wie Produktivität je Mitarbeiter ableiten.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Viele Mitarbeiter bedeuten große operative Komplexität – aber auch hohes Umsatzpotenzial.
- Produktivität je Mitarbeiter ist ein wichtiger Indikator für Effizienz.
- Besonders spannend bei stark wachsenden Tech- oder Industrieunternehmen.
📘 Umsatz je Mitarbeiter
📈 Was ist das?
Der Umsatz je Mitarbeiter zeigt, wie viel Erlös ein Unternehmen durchschnittlich pro Beschäftigtem erwirtschaftet – eine Kennzahl für Effizienz und Produktivität.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Die Mitarbeiterzahl stammt in der Regel aus dem letzten verfügbaren Jahresbericht.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Kennzahl hilft, Geschäftsmodelle zu vergleichen – insbesondere zwischen arbeitsintensiven und technologiegetriebenen Unternehmen. Ein hoher Wert deutet auf Automatisierung, Effizienz oder hohen Wertschöpfungsanteil hin.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Umsatz je Mitarbeiter spricht für ein skalierbares und margenstarkes Geschäftsmodell.
- Ein niedriger Wert kann auf arbeitsintensive Prozesse oder geringere Wertschöpfung hinweisen.
- Besonders hilfreich beim Vergleich von Tech- vs. Industrieunternehmen.
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Gen Digital — Q1 2027 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Jen, and I will be your conference operator today. Today's call is being recorded, [Operator Instructions] At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Ben Lu, Head of Investor Relations.
Thank you, Jen, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Gen's First Quarter Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Vincent Pilette, CEO; and Natalie Derse, CFO. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the Investor Relations website, along with our slides and press release.
I'd like to remind everyone that during the call, all references to the financial metrics are non-GAAP and all growth rates are year-over-year and adjusted to exclude the extra fiscal week in Q1 fiscal 2026 and to include MoneyLion [ stub ] financials in the prior year comparison. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our press release and earnings presentation, both of which are available on our IR website at investor.gendigital.com. We encourage investors to monitor this website as we routinely post investor-oriented information such as news and events and financial filings.
Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance and operations including the impact on our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those expectations and statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions as of today's date, August 6, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.
For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.
And now I will turn the call over to Vincent.
Thank you, Ben, and good afternoon, everyone. 3 months ago, we guided fiscal 2027 with a structural step up, 8% to 10% revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth. Q1 shows why we had the conviction to do it. We delivered another better-than-expected quarter and entered the rest of fiscal '27 with strategy delivering double-digit growth.
Let's start with the headline. Bookings and revenue grew 11% and non-GAAP EPS grew 19%, both above guidance. Paid customers crossed $80 million, an 11th straight quarter of sequential growth. Two segments, one platform one mission, helping people live fearlessly in an increasingly complex and ever-expanding digital world. Our job is to be the trusted partner who reduces their risks and keep them safe, confident and empowered online and in an AI world.
Cyber Safety and Trust-Based Solution are both growing revenue with growth plus margin profile above 50 and are powered by a single platform of shared proprietary data and models, modular technology and AI-driven personalization that scale across our brands.
Our customer relationships are deepening. Membership is expanding. Cross-sell is at an all-time high, and we are begin to unlock the opportunities from embedded financial wellness and engine partnerships.
Cyber Safety, our foundation remains competitively strong. Bookings and revenue grew mid-single digits, sustaining last year's momentum.
Customers keep telling us about the AI anxiety, and for Gen that growing need for trust and safety represents a tailwind. AI is capable of taking actions on new behalf behind the scenes, which is amazing on one hand, but on the other hand, you relinquish control and transparency.
On top of that, AI is turbocharging the threat cycles. Threats are faster, more complex and increasingly personalized. Threat cycles once measured in months, are not compressed 2 minutes, and consumers feel it. We see it in external search, our own funnel and consumer research. AI adoption has passed 40% of U.S. consumers, yet nearly 2/3 are highly concerned about AI misusing their data, and that number is still rising. This is exactly the environment our portfolio was built for.
And we meet this growing need by staying ahead, leveraging the intelligence of Gen Threat Labs applying AI to detect and defeat emerging threats and putting AI native products directly in our customers' hands.
This quarter, our proprietary scam protection engine blocked over 0.5 billion scam attacks, more than 100 every second, including deep fake and voice clones. Demand is increasingly measurable to in our own consumer research over 60% of consumers to AI-driven scams make them more likely to pay for protection, our strongest measured purchase driver and concerns about AI scams are climbing double digits year-over-year in the U.S., rising even faster internationally. With nearly 500 million users across 150 countries, we are positioned to capture that demand globally.
We are not only seeing new demand but also very clearly that our existing customers are choosing more protection, not less. Norton 360's higher-tier memberships combining scam detection, identity restoration, financial protection and insurance has scaled to nearly $0.5 billion in annualized bookings.
Those deepening customer relationships are a strong reflection of this growing consumer needs. Norton cross-sell penetration rose another point to 27% with sales up double digits year-over-year, 8% to 10% higher than 2 years ago, and membership adoption across Norton, Avast, Avira past 60% with retention near record highs.
The conviction is clear, the future of Cyber Safety is all-in-one membership that matches the need of your digital and financial life, not [ per ] product. And we are doubling down by making the experience simpler, and more personal, so customers stay on top of a complex world with less effort.
As trends are also being validated externally, independent labs and leading reviewers continue to recognize Norton and Avast as category leaders best comprehensive protection, flexibility, ease of use and performance. Recognitions such as Tom Guides naming our Norton VPN, the best for streaming or PC MAC choosing AVAST One as the Editor's Choice, reinforce the competitiveness of our portfolio and the strength of our brands and offerings.
Let me highlight one product that makes our platform strategy tangible Norton's financial scan, build on MoneyLion AI is out of beta and now rolling out into Northern 360 across our largest markets. The concept is simple. It does for customers' financial accounts, what antivirus does for their devices, watching continuously and flagging the moment something is wrong.
Cyber Safety is no longer only about blocking threats. It has evolved to become the front door to a deeper, more trusted customer relationship and every financial account customer connects is one more opportunity to add value.
In Trust-Based Solution, the same strategy is driving growth. Bookings grew 25% with Identity, Personal Financial Management and our engine marketplace all contributing. LifeLock is in motion. We rebuilt the experience for a mobile-first scam-aware consumer, and the simpler tiered experience is moving customers to higher value plans and deeper engagement. Retention remains at record levels, touching 90% with NPS above 70%, thanks to the same playbook we have run before, deepen the customer relationship with expanding their production from basic credit monitoring to financial accounts to all the assets that matter in your life.
MoneyLion in its second year within Gen is now driving the same playbook as well. Personal Financial Management grew faster than we expected, led by InstaCash and Credit Builders plus, with direct origination and continued margin expansion. Its growth was discipline. 2/3 of our PFM revenue comes from repeat customers, underscoring the customer satisfaction, loyalty and durability and how we help manage and smooth consumers' ever-changing cash flow needs.
Our recently launched MoneyLion One premium membership now put Gen Scam and Identity Protection directly in members' hands because to financial wellness is not only about improving your access to money, it is also about protecting it.
More fundamentally, MoneyLion is evolving from managing today's financial moment to helping customers stay ahead of the next one, anticipating income and bills identifying potential shortfalls early and guiding them towards the right action.
Engine, the embedded marketplace connects consumers to the right financial offer and powers the next step in their journey. Engine had its strongest quarter yet, passing $0.5 billion in annual revenue run rate, led by a new insurance vertical built on [ Trellis ] infrastructure that we quickly integrated in just under 1 quarter, a core Gen capability. We added more than 30 new partnerships across multiple categories, drove total network inquiries to over $425 million annually and delivered record revenue. And we will continue to leverage that strength and add new verticals that address consumers' diverse financial needs.
Stepping back, two proof points tie the portfolio together. Connected financial accounts passed $110 million, up from $75 million when we acquired MoneyLion and 35% of our paid base now engages with financial wellness.
Every connection is a chance to deepen the relationship over time. And as we enrich our data and broaden the catalog, their engagement turns into monetization. We are already seeing it with Engine-enabled cross-sell into our installed base on track to double by the end of fiscal '27, giving us the confidence that the model is working and including it in our guidance raise.
Our AI trust [ level ] is moving from concept to product. A year ago, we said trust would be the bottleneck for Agentic AI as agents begin to act for consumers for making purchases to scheduling events. That thesis is now being validated in production. Norton Neo, the world's first secure and private AI native browser doubled its daily active users driven by its contextual Agentic VPN. Our open source agent security engine, [ Sage ], is now in Norton 360 and AVAST One, providing multilayer agent security to 25 million customers.
And we recently launched the beta of Norton family assistant, co-architected with xAI and supported by multiple models handling family and financial actions inside the Gen control trusted envelope built on [ ATH ], our agent trust hub.
This is a long game. Agentic revenue will be modest in fiscal year 2027, and but Gen holds what is hard to replicate, trusted brands, consumer reach, a unified data and identity platform and customer-focused technical capability to be the consumer's trust layer for AI. The moat widens with every new model partner, agent and connected accounts we deploy in our environment. And our goal is simple, make the AI economy safe and simple for our customers.
AI is also making us better operators. Following our restructuring, we move faster in smaller, more accountable teams and profit per employee already amongst the highest at our scale is up double digits. That leverage keeps our segments margins durable while we invest in growth. Cyber Safety operating margin remains above 60%, while trust-based solution remains at 30% even as our fastest-growing businesses scale.
Our blended margin reflects this mix, not pressure, we are reinvesting AI productivity into growth while delivering on our mid-teens EPS growth commitments, which brings me to our outlook that reaffirms a structurally high growth trajectory.
Q1 outperformance and continued momentum gives us the confidence to raise fiscal 2027 guidance to 9% to 11% revenue growth and 14% to 18% non-GAAP EPS growth. Beyond fiscal 2027, embedded financial wellness, partner expansion and engine monetization will sustain the synergy ramp and long-term growth. This is a multiyear compounding model, not a 1-year acceleration.
Let's step back and consider the transformation. A few years ago, many brought up Symantec consumer cybersecurity as structurally challenged. Today, Gen is a $5.4 billion revenue platform spanning security, privacy, identity and financial wellness, growing revenue and EPS double-digit returning capital while building the consumer trust layer for the AI era.
Along the way, we have more than quadrupled speed customers doubled revenue, nearly tripled EPS and returned $6 billion to shareholders while funding acquisitions along the way.
One truth drives the strategy. Digital threats ultimately target people and their money. Cybersecurity and financial wellness are two sides of the same mission. Our job is to end the customers' trust, unify the platform and help people move from protection to empowerment. That is the strategy, and it is working.
So to our teams. I want to thank you for strong Q1. And to our shareholders, 3 months ago, with fiscal 2027 would confirm a clear trajectory shift and Q1 confirms it.
And with that, let me turn it over to Natalie.
Thank you, Vincent, and hello, everyone. For today's call, I will walk through our Q1 fiscal 2027 results and our raised outlook for full year fiscal 2027. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and adjusted year-over-year growth rates, unless otherwise stated. I want to remind everyone that Q1 last year benefited from an extra week of revenue and earnings. Therefore, I will provide commentary on growth adjusted for the extra week as well as MoneyLion [ stub ] financials in the prior year so that the comparisons are on a like-for-like basis. Keep in mind that our original guidance, both for the top line measure and EPS already reflected these two adjustments.
Now on to our results. We delivered another exceptional quarter, exceeding the high end of our guidance driven by record bookings and revenue, high-teens EPS growth and robust free cash flow.
Q1 is our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit bookings growth up 11% year-on-year to $1.28 billion, while our revenues also increased 11% year-over-year to $1.34 billion, our fastest growth rate since Gen was created with broad-based growth across our two segments.
Not only was top line better than expected, investors count on us to be diligent in driving profitability while accelerating growth. Our operating profit grew 9% and with blended operating margin stable sequentially at 50% and consistent margins across both segments, even as we meaningfully grew MoneyLion and Engine. We have and will continue to invest in multiple business lines while managing a healthy balance of top line growth margins.
For the Cyber Safety segment, both bookings and revenue increased 4%, delivering another quarter of mid-single-digit growth. We saw growth across brands and memberships. However, our higher tier suites performance stood out in Q1.
Norton 360 is the market-leading all-in-one membership with our highest tier offerings seeing double-digit growth. This reinforces the value of premium offerings that bundle security, identity protection, VPN and many other safety features. And as we expand our new Avast One membership, we are applying the same customer-centric playbook to drive membership adoption, deepen engagement and increase customer lifetime value.
Cross-sells and upsells continue to exceed our expectations, up double digits in the Norton base, with the strongest growth we've delivered in the past 2 years as we improve targeting across new cohorts. And while we continue to refine our AI product recommender with an expanded product portfolio, enrich data and hyper personalization powered by the Gen platform, we believe we're just getting started and meaningful opportunities are ahead.
Cyber Safety margins remained stable at 61%, reflecting another quarter of disciplined execution as we continue to deliver on our mid-single-digit top line growth targets while sustaining best-in-class profitability. In Trust-Based Solution, Q1 bookings increased 25% year-over-year, while revenues grew 24% year-over-year. Identity continues to demonstrate strong momentum, and the early indicators of the impact of our reimagined LifeLock product are positive with higher sales conversion as customers engage with the improved experience.
Retention also remains healthy at nearly 90%, and particularly among more mature cohorts that have experienced the full breadth of the value proposition from monitoring their financial assets to full-service restoration, enforcing our ability to build highly trusted customer relationships.
LifeLock also delivers the strongest unit economics across our portfolio, supported by highly recurring revenue, durable retention and proven ability to drive ARPU gains through customer support and upsell.
Personal Financial Management growth was driven by record instant cash originations across both new and repeat customers. Our proprietary underwriting algorithm remains a critical component of the customer acquisition engine, while continued optimization of loss ratios is driving performance ahead of target.
The durability of this business continues to be underwritten by the fact that more than 2/3 of first-party revenue is generated by repeat customers. And while the performance continues to improve, as a reminder, our InstaCash receivables are sold to [ SoundPoint ] further limiting our balance sheet exposure as the business scales.
Looking forward, the recent launch of MoneyLion One membership also brings many of our core identity features to members and is designed to deepen customer relationships beyond individual financial transactions through a more integrated value proposition.
While it's still early innings, MoneyLion One is the first synergistic product that brings together identity and financial wellness as users build and scale their financial lives.
Engine Marketplace is quickly becoming one of our fastest-growing categories at roughly $0.5 billion revenue run rate as we drive growth across all vectors, partners, products, verticals and distribution.
In the quarter, we added more than 30 new partners, expanded our offering with additional premium products and scaled into additional verticals like the fast-growing insurance market.
We are also extending our reach through strategic relationships with leading platforms such as Equifax providing access to new audiences and additional high-intent customer demand. As the marketplace scales, the combination of broader supply, deeper partner integration and greater product relevance strengthens engagement and conversion while reinforcing the network effects that make Engine increasingly valuable to both consumers and partners.
Trust-Based Solution segment margin remained stable at 30%, even as we invested behind rapid growth across Identity, Personal Financial Management and Engine. We are increasingly excited about the many opportunities in this segment to come and will drive strong top line growth with a disciplined investment lens.
Direct revenue grew 6%, consistent with prior quarterly trends. Our partner business increased 31% and has surpassed $1 billion on an annualized run rate basis, with particular strength coming from employee benefits, which was up double digits and our engine marketplace, which benefited from expanded partners and verticals. As we deploy our capability to drive enhancements and personalization into our product offerings, we will leverage our omnichannel approach to quickly drive expansion and adoption.
Paid customers continued to increase, reaching $81 million this quarter, up from $79 million last quarter and up from $76 million a year ago. The growth in paid customers has driven was driven by both growth in our subscriber base, supported by continued product portfolio expansion across various consumer pain points, as well as accelerated marketplace performance from onboarding new partners and verticals.
Gross margin in the quarter was 82%, slightly down entirely due to product mix. Keep in mind that some of our fastest-growing marketplace categories have a unique business model, where it has slightly lower gross margin due to revenue share, but also carries a lower OpEx burden. And as we ramp up new partners and verticals in our engine marketplace, you should expect to see this mix dynamic continue to play out.
Our Q1 non-GAAP operating income was $668 million, up 9% year-over-year, with margins stable sequentially at 50%. You should continue to expect us to be disciplined and rigorous with balancing our investments and spending that supports scalable revenue growth.
Total OpEx was $425 million or 32% of sales, down 60 basis points year-over-year and down 150 basis points sequentially. Sales and marketing was $284 million or 21% of revenue which is roughly flat year-over-year but down seasonally 250 basis points versus the prior year -- excuse me, versus the prior quarter as the second half of each fiscal year typically has higher marketing spend around events, the holidays and tax season.
In marketing, one of the standout developments in Q1 was how quickly AI is becoming a real advantage in how we build and scale demand. For instance, AI is allowing us to produce AI-enabled creative and content workflows to improve efficiency and sharpen execution while continuing to invest behind the biggest growth opportunities across the portfolio.
Creative piloting in key media channels is showing 25% efficiency improvement with our ability to create twice the number of assets with AI. R&D spending increased to $105 million or 8% of sales as we continue to strengthen our platform and enhance our Cyber Safety and Identity Solutions in an environment where there is increasing consumer AI angst and where digital threat surfaces are ever evolving. We continue to manage our G&A in a very disciplined manner at less than 3% of revenue.
Q1 net income was $431 million, and diluted EPS was $0.71, beating the high end of our guided range of $0.68 to $0.70 and increasing 19% year-over-year versus our target of 13% to 17% growth. Interest expense was $119 million in Q1, and our non-GAAP tax rate remains steady at 22%. We reduced our weighted average ending share count to 603 million, down 21 million year-over-year, reflecting the impact of share repurchases.
Our philosophy of driving earnings growth faster than revenue growth continues to be our North Star. We believe this is the best way to deliver value to our shareholders, by pulling multiple levers to achieve both revenue growth combined with earnings leverage and disciplined capital allocation.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. Q1 ending cash balance was $564 million up from $411 million in Q4 and representing over $2 billion of liquidity when including our $1.5 billion revolver. We generated $434 million in operating cash flow and $430 million in free cash flow. We continue to delever below our 3x net leverage target, paying down our debt by $45 million with ending net leverage of 2.95x.
We also returned $181 million of capital to shareholders in the form of $100 million of share repurchases and $81 million of dividends.
For Q1 fiscal 2027, the Board of Directors approved a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 per common share to be paid on September 9, 2026, and for all shareholders of record as of the close of business on August 17, 2026. Going forward, there is no change in how we view our capital allocation strategy. We will continue to operate with balance and the flexibility to simultaneously invest in growth, both organic and inorganic, strengthen our balance sheet and return meaningful capital to shareholders.
Now let me discuss our Q2 and raised fiscal 2027 guidance and some of the assumptions that underpin it. We expect our strong Q1 momentum to carry into Q2 with revenue of $1.325 billion to $1.35 billion, up 9% to 11%. We are raising our fiscal 2027 revenue to $5.375 billion to $5.475 billion, reflecting growth of 9% to 11% versus prior guidance of 8% to 10% growth. We expect Q2 non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.71 to $0.73 and representing growth of 15% to 18%, and we are raising fiscal 2027 non-GAAP EPS to $2.87 to $2.97, up 14% to 18%.
We entered this fiscal year excited about the strong momentum we are seeing across our portfolio and are even more optimistic about what lies ahead. As you can tell from our raised growth forecast for both top line and earnings growth, this powerful combination of growth and earnings leverage gives us the confidence and capacity to invest across our integrated capabilities to further scale the business.
I want to thank our entire Gen employees around the world for their contribution to the success, and we look forward to delivering great value for our employees, customers and shareholders.
As always, thank you for your time today. And I will now turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays.
2. Question Answer
This is [ Ryan Tasly ] on for Saket tonight. Vincent, maybe to start with you. I think in the past, we've talked about Avast in the overall international business being a bit more device security weighted earlier on in their Identity journey. What have you seen from the international markets contributing to the growth in these improvements in retention rates that you're seeing at the overall company level, which has been really nice to see?
We actually, as you know, are very global, 150 countries from a Cyber Safety protection and in Cyber Safety, more security anchored. We've been driving growth across all countries by expanding from that core security into the privacy and the identity space. We continue to see good momentum adding privacy monitoring, adding other features, docket monitoring into the overall, and we see a balanced growth, I would say, a mid-single digit when you need to lie for currency, obviously, with currency momentum for now, Europe is growing higher and Asia is slower. But when you pro forma that out, it's about that mid-single digit. So a good expansion.
Financial wellness is really concentrated in the U.S. As you know, there's a lot of opportunity to transform that category and then make that category better embedded and combined with that security need. And as we get more proof point in the U.S., we will then extend internationally, but that's a long-term game. And -- that's why also in my remarks, I say this is not just a 1-year acceleration. We see a lot of opportunities to replicate the full portfolio success and momentum we currently see in the U.S. across all of our countries.
Awesome. That's super helpful. Natalie, maybe a follow-up for you. I want to just go back to the gross margin point, which I think was a helpful piece of information. given we expect the Engine business to be one of the primary growth engines for the company as a whole. How should we think about where gross margins might trend from here? Understanding that operating margin should be relatively stable about 50%. Just how should the gross margin mix kind of evolve as we get more growth in that engine business?
Yes, there's a lot of dynamics going on in the Engine business. I would say MoneyLion overall. I would -- there's a lot of different relationships, whether you're talking about the supply or the demand side of that marketplace and every relationship is different. .
What you can count on us to do is really optimize in terms of the quality of the inventory and making sure that we're providing the best customer experience with the best supply and the financials will come in terms of -- from a balance perspective, yes, your gross margin dynamics in the overall company are going to mix. But within each of the segments, we are very, very disciplined to drive margin, not only at the gross margin side, but also balancing OpEx so that we are able to really, really deliver strong operating margin in each of those segments.
Gross margin for us, whether you're talking about the [ CF side or the TBS side ], very, very strong. The team is committed to driving as much profitability as we possibly can. And even when you mix together with Gen, we're in a very, very strong position.
If I can add one dynamic within the marketplace, Ryan, it is that we have different margin profiles. And I would refer to our investor event last September when [ Rick ] presented the 30, 60 model. When a customer comes to Engine and when a customer is on an installed base, we have the opportunity to retarget it with the first or third party product, and there's different margin profiles.
So the longevity of the relationship and the ability to present offers at various moments of the digital and financial lives is critical. That's why thesis is really about building that trust relationship and over time, move that to a long-term value, which delivers a better margin.
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Poland with Wells Fargo.
I think first one, the fiscal '27 revenue midpoint, good to see that move higher. I think you used by $50 million, with half of it coming in Q1 and half coming with the remainder of the year. But EPS, it seems like it was mostly just flowing through the Q1 upside.
So I guess the question is, can you kind of bridge first where the incremental revenue is coming from for the rest of the year? Should we think about it as cybersafety or more on the Trust-Based side of things? And then the follow-up is just why for the remainder of the year, are we not seeing that convert to EPS? Are there any incremental investments or conservatism to just keep in mind?
Yes. So let me first take the momentum. You're right. We raised the top line guidance to a double-digit growth rate, 10% adjusted and by $50 million, as you mentioned. It's 40% coming from the flow through in Q1. And then we carried that momentum through the next quarter to a degree and then also embedded our increased confidence in the financial synergies coming from the embedded financial wellness, the $100 million I had called it in my last earnings script, if you recall, we're getting more and more confident that the levers we have in our control to make the platform concept of reality, if you want, is getting higher and higher. And so we folded that into the guidance.
Obviously, when it comes to investing for growth and transforming the company, we're very pleased to be able to transform Gen, as I mentioned in my earnings remarks strong, strong transformation while delivering on our commitment, and that commitment is to grow EPS mid-teens, on a now very -- many, many quarters, about 11 quarters in a row. And so we invest into transforming into a platform, bringing our capabilities, building AI capabilities, unifying our data, launching new products new verticals we integrated [ Trellis ] insurance capability into more than 10 partners here in the quarter, and we continue to go and expand those capabilities and investment goes towards that growth while we fund our commitment on EPS. And I guess the EPS flow through is just a result of that.
The growth drivers for the upside, as you imagine, with what I mentioned at the beginning of my answer, is coming more from that financial oneness and marketplace-oriented view, while we see very solid, sustainable momentum in Cyber Safety.
That's very helpful. And just a follow-up on the Cyber Safety side, it's good to see that growth rate holding relatively stable over kind of recent quarters.
When we think about deconstructing what's holding that stable, it sounds like a lot of just continued upselling to the Norton 360. Is there anything -- any context you could provide from just how maybe the new user side of things is going and just kind of how we can think conceptually about that?
Absolutely. So first of all, we have an entire set of strategic initiatives in Cyber Safety. You mentioned -- or I've mentioned and you repeated here, the move of moving to that full all-in-one membership. Cross-sell is improving as you've heard. And then moving from a cross-sell to a full membership is also that the higher-tier plans growing double digit is showing that effect.
But we're not stopping there because we know we need to meet the consumers where they are at the moment of need. So perfecting our entry doors is very, very important. We obviously already have the best anti [indiscernible], which is the old stable entry door moving into that privacy, both with best VPN, I think you've read online all of the improvement we brought to that product, integrating [ AntiTrack ], PMA, other version of protecting your privacy, understanding your personal data being exposed, giving you the opportunity to eliminate the lead you profile online to be more anonymous. I think it's all part of those new entry doors that bring consumers in.
And then from a channel perspective, consciously expanding the channel set, moving way into the AI chat. We now have more than 2/3 of our brands showing up into AI type of surge. We extend into and continue to reinforce new accounts with our employee benefit program. So the full channel diversification is also at play.
And so when you sum all of those seven, you cannot favor one versus the other, we're able to really see that long-term continued adoption of that full security posture.
Your next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.
A couple of questions. Just in terms of -- you noted upside from the higher-tier suites. And just -- I know you guys have done some testing, but how does that inform how you think about the targeting for the MoneyLion One memberships?
And then maybe as a second question, you noted kind of investments picking up on Trust-Based Solution, obviously, given kind of the traction that you're seeing we envision that most of those are kind of the engine marketplace and more on the gross margin line item? Or just kind of if you could lay out some of the investments there.
Yes. Very good. So definitely, in Cyber Safety, and you know we were the first one to come with Norton 360 full membership, all-in-one for cybersecurity and got very strong adoption from Norton in the first 18 months. And then as we brought more new lines of businesses into that full Cyber Safety portfolio, we also embedded into the suite and the movement from a first level plan to higher tiers, if you want, is along in the journey. So building the trust, building the right messaging, the right experience, proving the value of the products at all important moment, it's helping the consumer move towards that higher tier.
And so building that trust relationship it's what we've applied to almost every asset we've brought in. MoneyLion PFM, the financial management solution is no different. And initially, it was essentially a transactional business at the time of the need. And then we also know that of the 80% victims scam actually are people who don't have a lot of means and have financial needs and to bring all of that together protection and financial needs, rewarding the ongoing usage with better usage or better plan or better pricing of that discount is all part of that view, and then really building on that relationship over time.
We launched MoneyLion One, I got good feedback initially. It's still a little too early to project upside from that specifically, but the towards the membership across all of our assets is part of the playbook, and you'll see the same in PFM.
And then to your investment question, you've heard from Vincent a couple of times today even around investing in transformation, launching new products, scaling the synergistic wins across both segments driven by the marketplace and just operating the company completely integrated. And so those investments are going to come through mostly gross margin as well as we invest in the innovation, as we invest in AI, it's going to come through R&D as well.
And then, of course, as we launch these great new products and services, we're going to go to market. So you'll most likely see us increase our sales and marketing line as well.
And so it will be across I would say what I would leave you with is that we will always -- we always have and we always will have a disciplined approach as we evaluate those areas of investment. We are on a transformation and so quarter in, quarter out, it will be at different capacities and rates, but we'll always be disciplined and we will always be in pursuit of accelerating sustainable revenue growth.
Your next question comes from the line of Dan Bergstrom with RBC.
It's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. So you talked to adding new verticals and engine. Any sense of potential adjacent areas that could be of interest to customers? And then with insurance, it seems like you had really rapid success around integration. Is that something that could be repeatable with the engine infrastructure?
Definitely, so you referred to adding a new vertical last quarter or now 4 months ago, which is insurance. Currently, our engine marketplace was more specific around loans and credit cards and now adding insurance.
The technology is important, AI-driven matching process, understanding the workflow of each vertical between the partner and the consumers eliminate every friction. So our marketplace, which is not just a simple marketplace, it's an embedded marketplace an AI matching engine under is very important. It eliminate those friction points and making almost like a one-click process for a financial product, which, as you know, in this world is complicated to achieve is the long-term strategy.
We build that vehicle based on the capability we had acquired from [ Trellis ] quickly integrated them. The team did a fantastic job integrating into our current partner set 10 more partners active in selling and then [ coniously ] driving and expanding. It has a strong growth, and you'll see us continue and inorganically to build those verticals.
I don't want to give you any one in particular but I'm sure they're pretty easy to think about and almost to everything that's around that protecting your digitalized and financial life would be a valid candidate to look at.
That's helpful. And then I guess, realizing it's still early. Can you talk to the response around Avast One and maybe more generally, the concept of a more comprehensive free tier, is that something you've done historically or could look to do more broadly? And then maybe touch on the time line of running the 360 playbook at Avast One.
You touched on many things that I want to repeat, if you don't mind. So first of all, yes, we have a playbook that we've approached and developed at the thesis of the creation of Gen at the time called Norton LifeLock, which was merging 2-point product, Security and Identity Protection into Norton 360, a full membership and for a membership fee our customers have access not only on the product from a protection perspective, but all the way to the service at the highest tiers of restoration services and insurance, a full peace of mind, if you want.
That has been a very successful playbook. It's still at play. It's a long run. Even though the vast majority of loan customers are in membership, they're still at various level of the tiers. And as we evolve as the traffic partner along their journey, we keep moving them to that higher value. That playbook was the one to apply to Avast. And with Avast, we are quite a few capabilities.
The first one is the premium. We know that in the consumer world, starting with a premium, giving you a test for the product, understanding the basic value you can have. And from the are getting to higher value that you would be ready to pay for is the business model we've acquired. We digested it. We moved a few products already into premium since we acquired Avast. There are some we have not yet, full Identity Protection, we have not, and we definitely intend over time to move basic functionalities as they commoditize into an Identity freemium.
Avast One is the third dimension, which is we know the future of Cyber Safety is all-in-one. And so how do you move a freemium all-in-one? We decided to be a lot more a la carte. So you start with an all-in-one freemium. You have a basic taste of the various different functionality. And then with the same architecture, in the same product, you can decide to pay for the features that you use versus all of them. And that's the strategy behind our Avast One approach. We launched it in the last year, have good traction in France and Germany. We're not pushing it across all countries and we very methodically ramp and move it up, and you'll see us continue to talk about the success of Avast One it evolves and expands across all countries. SP-2 Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Robert Coolbrith with Evercore ISI.
Just wanted to ask on MoneyLion One, any sort of puts or takes from a monetization perspective versus the existing offerings? Or if you think about that as an at just expanding your service area with those customers and potentially expanding the monetization opportunity? Any opportunity do you think to bring more of the cybersecurity end of things put those products in front of the MoneyLion customer base.
And then finally, Cyber Safety, I just wanted to ask your view of the backdrop right now, it seems like every -- a couple of times a week now, we're hearing more about the [ Frontier Mall's ] accidentally hacking other services. And it was just new spark in the news today.
So just how are you preparing the products for what seems like it's going to be significantly worse trend environment? And then also, what type of opportunity as those threats emerge, do you think that presents for category sort of consumer interest in the category?
Let me take one by one. So MoneyLion One expansion and strategy. Again, I'll repeat what I said in my remarks, which is we're basically running the same playbook but tailored for that specific business model. And it's about building the trust relationship with the customers, dealing with their security or dealing with the financials require the same level of trust, security and privacy. And that's how we're expanding.
Moving a membership structure is the long-term goal. And behind the membership, you should view that as building the value into that long-term relationship and not focusing only on a onetime transaction monetization, but maximizing the value for the consumers and for us maximizing the [ CLV ] over time. And that's what MoneyLion is intending to do.
And for that, to show them that you offer more and more value at what they need. So MoneyLion One integrating obviously the basic cash flow needs. And inside the membership, you'll see us addressing various and different needs over time and then wrapping that up with an Identity and Anti-scam protection, basic features at the lower level. That gives you a sense of comfort at a minimum and alerts and a better -- have a number of basic protection and then moving that up to a higher level as you grow into your financial journey.
It is definitely as all of our business, a long-term view we take on growing that relationship. And I think if some investors love in enterprise because it's bounded by contracts, multiyear contracts and don't like consumer because it can change every day. Our view is that by building that trust relationship, it's equivalent to the value of a long-term contract in the enterprise world.
In terms of cybersecurity, definitely continue to expand. Now our goal long term, Robert, is to continue to move up our customers to the financial journey and move from sub prime to mid prime to prime customers introducing that financial wellness into our Cyber Safety customers, which we're in the process of doing. And then basically, the full production for both your digital life and financial life, basically two phases of the same coin, not even saying it separately in the overall.
So we right now are putting safety in front of the MoneyLion customers in the membership, which is an indirect way of monetization, but not in a direct sales process.
Although we do put LifeLock into our Engine marketplace because, as you know, the marketplace is embedded into also third-party distributors that use the marketplace for their own customers. And there, we sell security.
And then the last point on AI, you are right, continue to be a very volatile evolving environment. First, everybody embracing the curiousness and the power of AI. Now I would say, at least in our consumer base, in our consumer research, the anxiety is at an all-time high. Some of which is fed by what you read in the newspaper, including your AI model breaching into other enterprises. And even if it doesn't exactly concern the consumer directly, they read about it and increase their fear, that fear is supported by what we see the most relevant today, which is the veracity, the precision of the scams and the way to full consumers, driven by AI has increased significantly. And I think I mentioned it in my prepared remarks, it has moved as our #1 sales driver when we question our customers why they buy consumer Cyber Safety. What it means for long, long term, I cannot tell you, but I think we are right there. We use AI to protect against AI, and we'll always try to stay ahead of that environment.
Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Gallo with Jefferies.
This is [ Grant Darling ] on for Joe Gallo. Just stepping back when you evaluate the quarter, how much of the upside that you saw would you attribute to MoneyLion versus the rest of the business?
And then just any more color on money line growth and what we should be benchmarking to for the rest of the year. Has this changed from prior commentary?
So the growth was pretty broad-based. I would say you can see in each of the segments just in [ CF ] very consistent mid-single-digit rate with that change your margin rate combine that with the strength that we saw in overall [ TBS ]. Those segments both outperformed and delivering really, really strong margins, blending to a stable 50% operating margin.
On a go-forward basis, you can see what we assumed in the raised full year guidance, whether you're thinking of revenue or EPS, it's consistent and consistent acceleration on the trust solution side, mostly driven by the marketplace and engine. You heard from Vincent earlier that we are going to be continuously investing in the transformation and launching new products. That's -- a lot of that transformation and new product launches are coming through the MoneyLion and the [ TBS ] vertical, but I don't want to leave [ CF ] behind. We've reimagined LifeLock. We're reimagining Norton. We're focusing on customer service in terms of as we navigate those customers through an upwards motion in the membership tiers.
The cross-sell has been the quarter -- in Norton has been the best ever since we've done -- even since our last Analyst Day almost 3 years ago, and so things are really, really clicking in both of those segments. And therefore, the strength and the confidence that we have as we raise the full year outlook, I expect both of those segments to deliver.
Got it. That's very helpful. And then maybe just a follow-up. It was great to see some of that partner strength. I just wanted to ask on the channel expansion. You think about the CoPilot and Equifax into integration, certainly exposing your marketplace to large external audiences. How much is attributing to the increased confidence in the $100 million incremental annual revenue opportunity you called out? And maybe just like any guardrail for how much of that number could potentially materialize just this year?
So definitely, the marketplace is kind of a wrapper, if you want, around our strategy and the various offering a great way to reach to consumers at the right time in the digital journey for a financial need. We'll continue to expand on the vertical. We'll continue to expand on distribution. Equifax just went live this summer. We're working on all the integrations. That distribution expansion is more like a B2B before the B2B2C, if you want, right? So it takes a little bit of time to employ. But then it's a long-term relationship and a great upper funnel as we keep the capability retargeting those Engine customers. So very strategic, very long-term growth.
In terms of the $100 million revenue synergies is definitely contributes to 1/3 to about half of that revenue synergies. You'll see us at the next event, give a little more breakdown as we penetrated. I said second half of FY '27 will be we'll be deploying if you will mold the visibility on that, but a very strategic one and a long-term opportunity.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Vincent Pilette for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for listening. We have built a durable capital-light, high cash flow business at the intersection of AI, safety, financial wellness and trust. We have delivered 11 straight course of mid-teens EPS growth with a faster revenue growth model and a robust balance sheet.
Gen is transforming while performing, or I should say what Gen is performing while transforming and we are just getting started. So thank you for your interest and support.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
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Gen Digital — Q1 2027 Earnings Call
Gen Digital — Q4 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Ellen, and I will be your conference operator today. Today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]
At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Ben Lu, Head of Investor Relations.
Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Gen's Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me here today are Vincent Pilette, CEO; Natalie Derse, CFO. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the IR website, along with our slides and press release.
During this call, all references to the financial metrics are non-GAAP and all growth rates are year-over-year unless otherwise noted. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measure is included in our press release and earnings presentation, both of which are available on our IR website at investor.gendigital.com.
Today's call contains statements regarding our business and financial performance, including the impact on our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations as of today's date, May 7, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release and the risk sections and our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.
And now I will turn the call over to Vincent.
Thank you, Ben, and welcome to the Gen team. Today, I will cover fiscal year '26 results, how we are building for the Agentic AI era and our fiscal year '27 outlook. Natalie, will then talk you through the financials.
Fiscal year '26 was a defining year for Gen, our strongest result in a decade. Cyber safety and financial wellness are reinforcing each other, and that conversion is driving growth. We accelerated pro forma growth, plus 10% bookings plus 9% revenue and plus 15% EPS. Revenue crossed $5 billion for the first time and non-GAAP EPS reached $2.56, marking 10 consecutive quarters within our 12% to 15% growth commitment. We exited a 3x net leverage a year ahead of plan.
6 years ago, Gen was born as a $2 billion pure play consumer cybersecurity company. Today, we spend security, privacy, identity, reputation, financial protection and empowerment unified by a shared data platform and intelligence layer. We have more than doubled revenue, nearly tripled EPS and returned $6 billion to shareholders. Fiscal year '26 marks a structural acceleration from mid-single digits to double-digit revenue growth with mid-teens EPS growth. This is a step change in trajectory despite market concerns about AI disintermediation.
Our North Star remains helping people live fearlessly in a digital world. We secure devices and data, protect identities, safeguard financial health and champion privacy, while enabling people to unlock access, build reputation, make smarter decisions and use AI with confidence. That is our portfolio going beyond protection and into empowerment.
We operate in 2 complementary segments, a $3.3 billion cyber safety franchise, steadily growing mid-single digits with hundreds of millions of users and a high-growth trust-based solutions segment nearing $1.7 billion, growing 20% plus in key categories.
Connecting it all is 1 platform built on data, insight and Agentic AI. It enables safe and confident use of AI across both segments and gives us a unified view of each customer so we can personalize offerings, match the right features from across the portfolio to individual needs and deepen relationships over time. Let me now walk through each segment.
Cyber Safety is our foundation, stronger than at any point in our recent history. AI expands both the threat landscape and our opportunity. Every malicious agent, deep fake or scam ultimately targets 1 thing, money. That makes cybersecurity and financial protection inseparatable.
Attack cycles have compressed from months to minutes. Threats are more personalized, convincing and financially driven, drain accounts, stolen credentials, fraudulent transactions. Our platform integrates cyber safety and financial protection as one defense.
At scale, we block hundreds of millions of threats detect deep fakes and stop scams before impact. Our telemetry across devices, identities and financial signals powers a flywheel, more data improves detection, better detection builds trust, and trust drives growth.
Genie, our AI scan detection engine is now embedded across Norton 360, Avast and partners like ChatGPT. We continue leading in emerging areas like video-based deep fake detection, expanding coverage across major chip platforms while delivering top-tier performance in independent tests and global recognition from leading reviewers. Independent labs put security technology through the most rigorous test in the industry and earning 28 awards across our brands is a clear signal that Gen is setting the standard for consumer cyber safety.
As the platform scales, so does customer value. With our Gen stock integration, AI-driven recommendation and personalized messaging are improving engagement and outcomes. We exited fiscal '26 with record cross-sell performance in Norton and nearly doubled our Norton 360 NPS year-over-year at the same time. We are also seeing distribution advantages. Norton appears in 34% of tracked nonbranch ChatGPT prompt ahead of our nearest competitors with LLM driven traffic up 62% year-over-year as we constantly optimize value proposition and content.
This drives consistent financial performance. Cyber safety revenue grew mid-single digits in Q4 and for the year. Overall customer count reached 79 million for Gen with cyber safety subscribers growing sequentially for 10 consecutive quarters across channel and cohorts, ARPU and retention both improved, increasing lifetime value.
This momentum reflects the strength of our comprehensive cybersafety memberships integrating security, privacy, identity reputation and increasingly financial monitoring and wellness into a single trusted relationship. Membership adoption approaches 60% across Norton, Avast and Avira confirming that the future of cyber safety lies in all-in-one solutions and ultimately in a seamless secure trust layer.
To extend financial monitoring into our customer base, financial scan built on MoneyLion's fund money is now embedded in Norton 360 and Norton Money, providing visibility into financial health. Over time, connected accounts convert a protection relationship into a financial decisioning relationship, compounding lifetime value across the platform. And so cyber safety is really evolving into a proactive personalized safety company across devices, browsers and increasingly AI agents.
Turning to trust-based solutions. LifeLock protects identity and assets, MoneyLion helps customers manage and grow them delivering on our conversion strategy. We are deepening the customer relationship from protection to financial decision-making. 1/3 of our paid base now engages with financial wellness with connected financial accounts hitting all-time highs each quarter, 170 million in Q4, up 36% year-over-year. Each account unlocks monetization through engine personalized offers, credit cross-sell and richer data that improves our AI matching layer. Customers with connected accounts show higher ARPUs, try engagement and better retention.
LifeLock's mobile first AI-powered app is now rated 4.9 stars with strong engagement gains. We refreshed the lineup with differentiated features, including scam assistant and insurance centered on a simple idea, protection for the life you are building while creating a bridge to secure financial wellness. LifeLock's reimagined experience is live with approximately 3 million customers. NPS reached 73, up 4 points year-over-year with retention touching 90%. LifeLock Mobile revenue grew almost 50% and linked financial monitoring accounts rose nearly 25%. These operational results show that the redesigned experience is driving a deeper engagement and a higher lifetime value.
MoneyLion completed its first full fiscal year under Gen exceeding expectations with over 40% revenue growth. Its personal financial management portfolio delivered a record Q4 led by InstaCash and credit builder. We've also enhanced the membership with scam protection and identity services and early synergy between cyber safety and financial wellness that makes the trust core to the value proposition. Membership represents about 5% of our PFM utilization today with significant room to grow as we scale towards secure financial wellness and higher lifetime value.
Engine by Gen, our marketplace is the third category under trust-based solutions. Engine delivered record revenue, signing over 30 new partnerships in Q4 alone. It now processes nearly 400 million annual inquiries and has more than tripled revenue in 3 years.
Three developments this quarter illustrates Engines momentum. First, as announced in February, Equifax is embedding engine into myequifax.com, delivering personalized financial recommendations to consumers actively checking their credit.
Second, Engine is now the multi-category financial offer provider within Microsoft CoPilot Discovery feeds and MSN AI, live with credit cards and deposit and expanding to mortgages, loans and insurances. This positions us early in building the financial distribution layer inside large language models.
And third, we added a fully embedded insurance marketplace technology and expanded engine into a high-value vertical through the Trellis acquisition.
As integration deepens, engine technology becomes the AI layer powering personalized recommendations across Gen touch points. We have extended to cyber safety, giving all distribution partners access to solutions across all categories using Engine. And every Engine interaction feeds back into our data platform, sharpening the matching layer.
AI is a strategic lever for Gen. It is already transforming how we live as agents can now book flights, execute trades and move money. But the trust infrastructure is essentially nonexistent.
Summarizing content is 1 thing, wiring money on your behalf is quite another. Closing that gap between what AI can do and what consumers trust it to do for is exactly what we are building here at Gen. And while we built the trust layer for the AI economy, we are also launching AI native products and safe agents, leveraging Agent Trust hub technology. That is the mission of our newly created AI foundry team.
Norton Neo, our AI native secure browser is a good example. It is gaining traction and enables users to interact with AI agents in a trusted environment. Norton Neo is purpose built for a world where AI agents, browse, transact and act on your behalf. We have enhanced our security and privacy features and added an agentic VPN to the browser trust layer. We also announced a partnership with xAI whose models will power new AI native products we are co-architecting including a digital concierge for Norton subscribers launching this summer. And today, we joined OpenAI's trusted access for cyber and will start leveraging the advanced defense capabilities of the latest GPT 5.5. In fact, we are working with all Frontier model providers, including OpenAI, Antropic AI, Microsoft and Google to advance our mission of protecting and delivering the trust layer to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Since launching the agent Trust Hub, we've expanded through partners like Versal, strengthened privacy by masking agents IP addresses similar to a VPN and integrated agent protection directly into millions of Norton 360 users. Powered by Sage, our open source agent security engine, this integration into Norton 360 adds 3 layers of protection, detecting prompt injection, monitoring agent connections and scanning third-party agent skills before they load. These are early capabilities in a fast-moving space. We are the first to market with multilayer agent security for consumers, and this is part of a unified road map built on 1 conviction. Trust is a critical barrier to AI adoption, especially around personal data and identity and Gen is uniquely positioned to provide that trust layer at scale.
The consumer AI agent market is early. Agentic revenue in fiscal year '27 will be modest, but growing. Gen already has the critical assets required to win trusted brands, innovation and technical expertise, rich data, broad distribution and our unique consumer and financial insights. These assets combined are very difficult to replicate, thus creating a durable advantage as the category scales.
Finally, AI is also transforming how we operate. We have embedded it across engineering, marketing and support, streamlining workflows, reducing coordination layers and reinvesting capacity into products and sales.
Products can now move from ideation to launch with a very small squad and that's our Norton revamp launch in March. This efficiency is reflected in our economics. Profit per employee among the highest at or scale is up double digits. This leaner operating model lets us develop and test quickly, enter new categories faster and compound returns over time.
Cyber Safety, trust-based solutions and AI are converging into 1 platform. Each interaction increases the value and insight we deliver. One year after closing MoneyLion, we can link financial data to about 1/3 of our paying base, creating the foundation for synergies. We are now focused on turning those connections into insights driving engagement and improving recommendations meeting customers' needs.
With this momentum growing, we see over $100 million in incremental annual revenue from embedded financial wellness partner expansion and engine growth beginning in the second half of fiscal year '27 and scaling into '28 and '29.
What's emerging here is 1 connected trust relationship across protection, privacy, identity and financial decision-making, all powered by 1 unified platform. Safety, empowerment, leaving fearless in a digital world, that is our promise to our customers. For 10 consecutive quarters now, we have delivered on our Investor Day commitments. So for fiscal year '27, we are raising our outlook to 8% to 10% revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth, driven by the progress I've just outlined, including revenue synergies and AI-led efficiencies. This is a clear trajectory shift as our prior midterm targets were for mid-single-digit revenue growth and 12% to 15% earnings growth.
Gen sits at the intersection of trust, security AI and financial wellness. We are positioned to define how consumers live safely and confidently in the AI era, while delivering durable growth and strong returns.
And so with that, let me turn it over to Natalie, who will walk you through very exciting results.
Thank you, Vincent, and hello, everyone. For today's call, I will walk through our full year fiscal 2026 results followed by our Q4 results, then share our outlook for Q1 and fiscal year 2027. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and year-over-year growth rates, unless otherwise stated. I will also reference pro forma growth, which includes MoneyLion's results from the prior year for comparative purposes and excludes the extra week that occurred in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.
Now on to our results. Fiscal year 2026 was an outstanding year for Gen. Total bookings reached a record $5.1 billion, up 28% as reported and up 10% pro forma. Total revenue exceeded our guidance, reaching a record $5 billion, up 27% as reported and up 9% pro forma. Full year operating income was $2.5 billion, representing an operating margin of 51%. Full year EPS was $2.56, up 15% year-over-year and at the high end of our guidance. We generated $1.5 billion in free cash flow, representing over 30% of revenue and up 26% year-over-year. We lowered our share count by 15 million shares, and we have achieved 3x net leverage a year ahead of schedule. We have exceeded expectations on all vectors, and we are in a position of strength with great momentum heading into fiscal year 2027.
Fiscal year 2026 was our seventh consecutive year of growth and reflects consistent execution in our core cyber safety business, where we delivered on our mid-single-digit growth commitments laid out at our 2023 Investor Day, while also establishing trust-based solutions as a scaled double-digit growth engine with an expanded portfolio, including secure financial wellness.
In our Cyber Safety segment, bookings grew 5% and revenues grew 3% pro forma, while trust-based solutions delivered bookings growth of 24% and revenue growth of 23% pro forma. Segment margins were 61% for cyber safety and 30% for trust-based solutions, both in line with our targets. We delivered additional profit dollars while expanding our product portfolio, with additional investment in innovation, notable increase in marketing funds and disciplined investments in AI-related initiatives to support long-term growth, all while operating with a disciplined approach we are consistently recognized for as by running G&A at less than 3% of revenue.
Our robust revenue growth combined with continued operating discipline and strong capital allocation drove full year EPS of $2.56, up 15% year-over-year, which is the third consecutive year of double-digit growth. This underscores the strength and durability of our model and our cash generation, providing increased flexibility to return capital, delever the balance sheet and invest for strategic execution.
Now turning to our Q4 results. We delivered another exceptional quarter, exceeding the high end of our guidance, driven by record bookings and revenue, mid-teens EPS growth and robust free cash flow. On a reported basis, Q4 bookings was $1.36 billion, up 27% year-over-year and up 10% on a pro forma basis. Revenue was $1.28 billion, up 27% year-over-year and up 9% pro forma.
In our Cyber Safety segment, bookings grew 5% and revenue growth accelerated to 4%, driven by continued demand for our all-in-one subscriptions and the industry-leading retention rates of our highly loyal customer base.
As AI-driven threats intensify, our portfolio is becoming increasingly relevant to our targeted audiences. Demand for our Norton 360 memberships is supported by rising scam and fraud activity and the risks consumers are facing in their digital lives. As customers choose to upgrade to more comprehensive protection or higher-tier memberships that include scam detection, identity protection, restoration and insurance serve their needs and now have surpassed $0.5 billion in annualized bookings.
We continue to expand customer lifetime value through AI-driven cross-sell campaigns delivering increasingly personalized messaging at key moments of truth with enhanced customer segmentation powered by the Gen platform. As a result, we drove Norton cross-sell bookings this quarter with penetration now exceeding 26% of the base. Our cohort level ARPU exiting fiscal year '26 is now 7% to 10% higher than it was 2 years ago. Our go-to-market playbook is clearly working and is now further enhanced with the richness of the data and AI capabilities from our Gen platform.
Looking ahead, we plan to further scale our AI cross-sell and upsell playbook across additional customer cohorts in fiscal year '27 as our platform capabilities continue to advance. As we drive growth across cyber safety, we're operating this segment at a 61% margin rate, focusing on driving efficiencies through AI initiatives while continuing to invest in growth and marketing opportunities.
In our Trust-based Solutions segment, bookings and revenue more than doubled as reported with the additional -- with the addition of financial wellness to our portfolio. and grew 21% and 20%, respectively, on a pro forma basis.
LifeLock remains a core pillar of our identity business, and we have meaningfully strengthened the proposition this year.
Our reimagined lineup is simpler, more competitive and more clearly aligned to customer needs with a 3-tier portfolio that adds stronger credit and financial monitoring, differentiated scan protection, and clear price-to-value trade-offs. We have also rolled out a more modernized product experience across customers, while LifeLock NPS has reached a record high. Early performance gives us confidence that the strategy is working, with monetization up, upgrades are stronger and retention rates are improving across cohorts. With further upside in conversion and retention as the lineup reaches all channels, which we expect will drive sustainable, accelerated growth.
In MoneyLion, consumer demand for our personal financial management products remain strong, and we saw record origination volumes in Q4. PFM transactions per customer increased in the quarter and demonstrates the durability and stickiness of our financial wellness portfolio with over 2/3 of first-party MoneyLion revenue coming from repeat customers.
The Engine marketplace had another standout quarter, adding new partners across financial services and digital publishing while continuing to demonstrate the value of our scaled audience to premium distribution partners.
Additionally, we're expanding the depth of Engine with Gen's insurance category, adding more leading providers bringing a data richness that will enable better programmatic matching between consumers and leading insurance carriers. This simplifies decision-making and build greater trust and choice across the Engine marketplace while further expanding the value we bring to our customer base.
Combined, overall MoneyLion achieved nearly 40% growth in Q4 and is rapidly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue across these 2 categories.
Moving to direct revenue, which grew 19% as reported and 7% pro forma, reflecting the continued strength of our highly recurring subscription business, our scaling first-party portfolio and ongoing innovation efforts. As mentioned above, our unit economics remain sound with more customers, expanded ARPU, and strong retention when normalizing for mix. Our partner business grew 78% as reported and 20% pro forma surpassing our Investor Day target and also approaching $1 billion run rate through a combined acquisition growth in new partners and scaling with our existing partners. This remains our fastest-growing channel and a durable growth driver as we execute on our strategy. We continue to drive broad-based growth in our paid customer base now totaling 79 million customers, up from 78 million last quarter and 68 million a year ago.
Growth remains broad-based across segments and channels with consistent growth in subscribers and product users generating revenue, supported by diversified acquisition channels, and sustainable healthy returns as we deploy our customer-centric growth flywheel.
Turning to profitability. Q4 operating income was $641 million, up 9% year-over-year and representing a 50% operating margin in line with our expectations. Our focus is growing profit dollars while maintaining stable margins in each segment. We will continue to invest in our strategic AI initiatives and our long-term strategic growth initiatives while remaining steadfast in driving further efficiencies in our business.
Q4 net income was $408 million and diluted EPS was $0.67, above our guidance and up 14% year-over-year. This represents our tenth consecutive quarter of achieving or exceeding our 12% to 15% EPS growth target, reflecting our consistent execution and capital allocation.
During the quarter, we reduced our weighted average ending share count to 609 million, down 15 million year-over-year. Interest expense was $122 million in Q4, and our non-GAAP tax rate remained steady at 22%.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. Q4 ending cash balance was $411 million, representing nearly $2 billion of liquidity when including our $1.5 billion revolver. We successfully refinanced our Term Loan A at lower rates of SOFR plus 1.375% and extended maturities of our TLA and revolver to 2031. Please refer to Slide 21 for our latest capital structure.
We generated $452 million in operating cash flow and $449 million in free cash flow, and we deployed nearly $500 million of capital for shareholders in a very disciplined, balanced manner, including $200 million towards share repurchases of 9 million shares and $200 million of debt repayment. As I mentioned earlier, we exited the quarter with net leverage of 3x EBITDA, achieving our target a year ahead of schedule.
For Q1 fiscal 2027, the Board of Directors approved a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 per common share to be paid on June 10, 2026, for all shareholders of record as of the close of business on May 11 -- excuse me, May 18, 2026.
As we've consistently emphasized, our business generates substantial and durable free cash flow, providing us significant flexibility to simultaneously invest in growth, strengthen our balance sheet and return meaningful capital to shareholders. Over the past 3 years, we have deployed nearly $6 billion in capital to these priorities, representing 122% of our cumulative free cash flow in a highly disciplined and balanced manner. Approximately 40% was deployed towards debt paydown and delevering, 40% towards shareholder returns through opportunistic share repurchases and our quarterly dividend, and the remaining 20% towards targeted tuck-in acquisitions that expand our capabilities and further accelerate growth.
As our business continues to scale and free cash flow grows, so does our strategic flexibility and capacity for further capital deployment. We are entering fiscal 2027 with a stronger balance sheet, increased financial capacity and multiple levers to drive shareholder value creation. Importantly, we have $2.1 billion remaining under our share repurchase authorization and we will continue to drive a balanced approach.
Now let me share our Q1 and fiscal 2027 outlook and some of the assumptions that underpin it. We expect full year revenue in the range of $5.325 billion to $5.425 billion, translating to 8% to 10% pro forma growth. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $2.85 to $2.95, which reflects mid-teens pro forma growth of 13% to 17% with 15% at the midpoint. This guidance captures the momentum we have and represents our plan to accelerate growth through our transformed business.
Building on our commitment to drive mid-single digits in our Cyber Safety segment, combining a high-growth financial wellness business and continued diversification through an expanded portfolio, we have constructed a high confidence growth path. We will acquire more customers, continue to expand our product portfolio. We will scale cross-sell and upsell as customers' needs change. We will continue to optimize our subscription business model, bringing synergistic gains to market throughout fiscal year 2027. With the incremental net margin dollars from this accelerated growth and continued disciplined capital deployment to share buyback and debt paydown, we will accelerate EPS growth to mid-teens. This is our commitment to our shareholders.
For Q1, we expect revenue in the range of $1.3 billion to $1.325 billion, representing 8% to 10% pro forma growth. We expect Q1 non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.68 to $0.70, representing mid-teens pro forma growth of 13% to 17%. This guidance assumes current FX rates through significant fluctuations remaining possible due to current volatility in financial markets. We will continue to monitor our operating environment and stay focused on what we can control.
In summary, fiscal year 2026 was an exceptional year for Gen. We have accelerated our business growth with the same operating discipline you've come to expect from us over the years. Our high operating margin and outstanding free cash flow generation enabled disciplined investments in our innovation to further scale our business.
I want to thank the entire Gen team for staying focused and delivering great value to our customers and shareholders. We are proud of our performance, and we're excited to achieve even more in fiscal year 2027. As always, thank you for your time today, and I will now turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.
2. Question Answer
Great. And congrats on the quarter. You noted the paid base had a 1/3 -- or 1/3 of the paid base was engaging with the financial wellness portfolio. Just Kind of curious how you see that evolving? Or what you think that, that target could kind of get to?
And then just on the -- as a second question on the trusted access program or just kind of work with some of the other frontier models, is there any kind of gross margin impact that we should be kind of embedding as a part of working with those?
Okay. Excellent. Let me take those 2 an excellent question. So on the first one, it's really about the thesis that, if you are in cyber safety, 1 of your key needs is to protect against financial damage. And we see that as the overall threat landscape, if you want, is evolving from consumer becoming like 80% scams, it's all targeted at getting new money. Even if it's targeting your identity, it's ultimately it's your money. And now that we include financial protection and empowerment into our overall portfolio, we're connecting all of that together. We're offering our customers the ability to source scan for the financial environment and able to plug those accounts that they have, savings account, credit accounts, other financial tools to be able to be first monitored. And we monitor unexpected deviations, anomalies, et cetera. And then the next way is to provide recommendations, which is really building the trust. And only then, we intend to then monetize. We know that path. We've seen it. It started early on organically in our portfolio with LifeLock when we bought MoneyLion, they definitely understood that, that core cyber safety was providing the trust and the connection points. And we've seen that acceleration. It started when we bought MoneyLion. We had about overall something like 75 million connected accounts and then it range and is now 107 million and continue to increase. We do see -- to get a lot more cyber safety becoming the full foundations. We offered LifeLock into now a membership inside the MoneyLion. And so you're going to see this cross-pollination. We'll continue to report on that metric, which we believe is the first leading indicator of the future synergies. So you'll see us continue to develop that. I do expect to be a very, very large proportion of the installed base to accept this first step of financial monitoring and protection.
On the second question of the AI model, it's a great time. As you know, we launched our agent Trust Hub Technologies last quarter. It was about consumers, are customers, starting to use agents and wanted to be protected. We open our technologies to developers and others and making sure that, that could be embedded into their overall work. We then moved agent protection, that technology into our Norton 360. So if you are using your PC, have Norton 360, and agent are being used, you can also have protection and control. That need will only increase. We then moved into working with the and say, how can we also develop positive use case, the empowerment side, helping book your flight confidently, helping move your money confidently and securely and making sure that could be all automated in a good way. That's why we call it core architecting. They work on the model, obviously, optimize it for minimum usage, and we work on that trust security privacy layer. It does not have an impact on CapEx. We're not developing those models, if you want. They own the model. We own the product or a trust layer to the customer. And when we increase more value, our intention is to monetize that through membership. And so it's very similar business model than our normal cyber safety. Obviously, on a per usage basis, we're going to have a cost that will then be revenue for those LLMs. So we'll not have the same profit margin than cyber safety business, but does not have a CapEx investment for us.
Our next question comes from Robert Coolbrith with Evercore.
It sounds like the results in mobile remain very impressive. A couple of questions further to that. Just across the paid member base maybe across cybersecurity and trust-based solutions, to what extent are your members interacting via mobile touch point today. I don't know if you could maybe talk a little bit about the penetration with the mobile apps across the product base. I just wanted to ask if there remains a substantial opportunity to expand that footprint? And following on that, is there opportunities to sort of expand the touch points, expand cross-sell, deepen those relationships just via the mobile touch point?
And then secondarily...
Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to ask about the direct billing or the web shop opportunity. Yes, it looks like you're still transacting at least in my experience, via the App Store billing rails, but just wanted to ask about direct billing or web shops.
Excellent. I'll delegate the billing question to Natalie. Actually, I was going to give you a short and long answer on this very, very important strategic question. And the short answer is boy, we still have a lot of opportunities to move where the consumers are. As you know, in our core cyber safety and now moving to the more long strategic answer, our core cybersecurity was essentially device-based and PC-based and laptop based and then moved slowly but surely into mobile, as you know. Initially, we move more with point products, VPN and a few others. And then we integrated with Norton 360 and it became the membership on mobile. That was the fastest-growing segment. We still see that from there, in mobile for core security improving the engagement, moving to the higher value tier plans is still remaining to be.
And then I move to the second part of the portfolio when we bought MoneyLion, we knew the foundation was about protection and protection against fraud they were providing the empowerment side, hey, when I protect your financials, I can also help you make better decisions, manage it and then growing it.
And then you reverse back say the closest adjacency, was LifeLock. I'm protecting your identity, but you can unlock access. You can improve your reputation. You can get access to better financial products. That engagement, that is a core metric for the empowerment side of our portfolio continues to be developed.
I mentioned that as we launched the new LifeLock app, which is a great design, it's all around centering not only just being protected on new identity, but able to be able to manage to control and use it. We've seen the engagement growing, and that's what I mentioned, the new LifeLock mobile revenue is growing 50%, still needs to continue to penetrate into the full engagement. So if MoneyLion is fully mobile already, as you work back down to the core protection, we still very much PC devices and the need to continue to shift. So that the whole opportunity.
From being on mobile where the consumer is, we're also going to create the engagement. It is no different than moving also where traffic was, maybe just on search, moving into LLMs, moving into where consumers are into searching and we're doing exactly the same effort to meet the consumer where they are at the moment of the needs.
And with that, Natalie, I don't know if you want to share a little bit more on the payment for...
Yes. It's honestly a really special time with our targeted audiences and existing customers because it's been so much change. There's definitely change that you're referring to in terms of enabling the ability to then go more direct bill and on our own payment rules, which we love. Our BSR, our billing success rate on our own payment rails is extraordinarily high. I would argue best in class. And so now having that additional opportunity and ability to do that, we are very much looking forward to and moving very fast on.
But the other changes that I would call your attention to and are really driving some of our growth and our results are we've moved very quickly from, I would say, even a year ago, maybe 18 months ago with just a stand-alone Norton offering. Now we're able to sell and offer mostly because of our own internal tech functionality, we're able to offer customers the more choice in the membership offerings, and we really see a pickup there. And now on top of that, we've now enabled the cross-sell functionality that you referred to. And so just every single time that we're able to engage with these customers, either new or existing our product portfolio and offering just continues to expand. Their choice gets -- their areas of choice expand. And honestly, their choice of what they want to take advantage of, how they want to pay us and the frequency of their memberships is all real flexible. And so therefore, we're able to get very, very personalized and really meet the consumer where their demands are.
Congratulations on the great results.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Joseph Gallo with Jefferies.
Congrats on the really strong results. Your bookings grew an incredibly impressive double digits year-over-year organically in fiscal '26. How should we think about the trajectory in '27, especially just given the bullishness and financial wellness and AI?
Yes. From a guidance perspective, whether you look at Q1 or you look at the full year building on the momentum that we've seen and that we have honestly thought for all year in fiscal '26, we expect that momentum to continue.
Let's break it down a little bit. So let's start with the core cyber safety business. We talked to you guys a couple of years ago about driving that business to a consistent mid-single-digit rate of growth. We're there, and we plan to continue to be there. So we expect mid-single-digit rate of growth in our core cyber safety segment to continue. It's going to be driven from the things we've been consistently talking about acquiring new customers in a very healthy way, all shapes and sizes across the globe at the low, medium and high value levels and then taking those customers through a prideful customer journey and making sure that they are aware of the -- all of the product offerings that we've got at moment, especially in the moments of truth that they find themselves in. And that cross-sell upsell lever comes alive relatively early in your customer journey, and we see that through growing ARPU and stable to increased retention rate depending on the cohort we're looking at. And so those calisthenics, so to speak, of the KPIs driving the core cyber safety business are increasing and we continue to drive those.
And then blend that with all of the great things that we're doing in the Trust-based Solutions segment, we now have a reimagined LifeLock offering starting at the acquisition channels and then cascading through a stronger retention and customer journey playbook, making sure that those LifeLock customers have the best-in-class protection, have choice, not only from a product offering perspective. But again, the frequency at which they would like to be billed and really the flexibility of how they want to be billed is going to drive additional growth, higher rates of retention and higher NPS. And then, of course, we've got the financial wellness business, which is enormously healthy. MoneyLion on all dimensions is growing faster than the industry in a very, very, very healthy way.
And then in addition to that, as we look to fiscal year '27 and we continue that momentum throughout the year, we've got the opportunities to really drive and deliver on the synergistic benefits that you've heard from Vincent along the way.
And so we're just enormously excited. We have a very high confidence growth path. We've got the 8% to 10% in Q1 to continue the momentum we see in Q4. And then as we scale throughout the year and see those new growth initiatives come to fruition, we're really, really excited about it.
That's tremendously helpful. And then just maybe to double click on that last point, so MoneyLion. You have fantastic growth, 44% for the year. Is there a framework or guardrails for how we should think about growth in that business? Or any seasonality considerations we should have? And then you mentioned growing much faster than the market. I'm just curious what the market growth is from your perspective?
Yes. I think we had said expect approximately 30% growth. I think if you look across the different avenues or the different areas of competition, I would say that, that would be where we kind of peg it. And then in terms of the MoneyLion growth, we look -- I look at it specifically on 2 sides. We've got the first party, so the personal financial management tooling that we've got. It's an enormously strong business, very, very healthy. We saw a pickup in transactions per customer. As we navigate through closing the first fiscal year with MoneyLion, we've all been -- had the opportunity to learn that business and get very, very close to those customers. Those customers are incredibly loyal and very, very sticky. We love repeat customers. And therefore, we're highly confident in the health of the PFM business. And then on the Engine side, it's just massively exciting. We've got an enormously powerful Engine. We have a ton of data the functionality and the inventory that we bring together through that Engine functionality in a marketplace format on both the supply and the demand side just continues to expand, continues to become more competitive, and we see the growth in exchange for that.
Your next question comes from Hal Goetsch with B. Riley Securities.
This is a terrific result and outlook. Actually, the growth rate is -- pro forma going forward is a little faster than I would have thought. And maybe you could give a couple of points on why the range is in that 8% to 10% range? Is it just a sort of a weighted average of the 2 segments when it's growing mid-single and the other 1 is growing, trust is growing 20?
And then the second question would be our capital allocation goals. How you might break down your free cash flow uses this year?
Excellent. Good question. I'll take the first one. Yes, as we said, right, we're raising our model from a mid-single-digit growth rate to 8% to 10% next year, high single-digit growth. So it's structurally -- we feel really good about -- actually all of our businesses, you've observed that even in cyber safety, we've regained that momentum of mid-single-digit growth rate has been now for many, many, many quarters that we're adding customers quarter-over-quarter and deliver on that number.
Then you have MoneyLion, MoneyLion that continues to do well, better than its market, approaching also a platform and a membership view in the long-term strategy, and I think that will continue to drive the long-term growth aspect. And then inside that engine, which is really considering there's kind of a matching layers between what the customer needs and the offer they could consume. It continues to improve, it's scaling up inside Gen, and that leads you to the synergies we see which is this cross-pollination between being protected and being able to do something with your protected data, and we only see that accelerating, we'll report ongoingly with you guys, how we're going to progress along that line. But we see tremendous opportunity. So knock on wood that we'll continue on that very good guidance and maybe next year delivered another double-digit growth rate.
Yes. And then on capital allocation, I think it's helpful for the reflection, I would think with the numbers I shared in the prepared remarks, really reflects a balanced approach, which we've said very, very consistently, and we have been deploying it that way. Now that we're at approximately 3x net on the leverage perspective, it really allows us to a bit more flexibility as we navigate into fiscal year '27. Of course, we continue with that type of top line and mid-teens EPS growth that you should infer that we're going to continuously drive a ton of free cash flow. How that will be deployed is not going to be significantly different than what we've seen in the last year or 2. It's going to be a balanced approach across the opportunistic share repurchase. We will continue to delever the balance sheet and then, of course, opportunistic or tuck-in M&A opportunities to further diversify and grow our business. We also have the ability to use the dry powder to invest in our own innovation, which we will do in a very disciplined fashion.
2027 is going to be very, very exciting with the range on the top line, both bookings and revenue and us raising the expectation on EPS growth to mid-teens. You can trust that we're going to have a disciplined approach to the allocation and make the right trade-offs in the right moments.
Your next question comes from Saket Kalia with Barclays.
Great to see the better growth. Congrats.
Thank you.
Vincent, maybe I could just build off that last line of question a little bit on MoneyLion, just clearly a great contributor to growth and growing much faster than overall banking services. How do you sort of think about that overall market growing? And clearly, it seems like MoneyLion is taking share. How do you feel about the ability for that to continue?
Yes. Let me tell you about the growth driver in MoneyLion, but first and foremost, our principle. While I'll talk about growth driver, we have the best entry point for a specific consumer needs. If you want to be protected against the threat landscape, you are in Norton. If you want to use a premium, you're in Avast, but you have the best applications in the marketplace. If you want your identity or your reputation being monitored, being managed, you're going to LifeLock. And without question mark, we are the player in that market. What was MoneyLion is going to be the same. We have the best entry point to be able to manage your cash flow and improve your credit score. Full stop. We'll continue to see improve that door, and you'll see continued gaining share across the entire consumer base.
Underlying, though, to accelerate that growth, we have 3 growth levers. The first 1 is we offer financial protection. The trust element that is missing in so many of those smaller financial tech layers. The second 1 is we have a platform approach. Like we did in cyber safety, a great entry door, you and then you all in one, it will be the same in financials. And you're going to continue to expand. And with that being able to grow that ARPU inside the consumer. And the third 1 is all about the Engine. We are first and foremost a secure trust vehicle for consumer to make the best financial decision. And with that, engine will offer you the best offer in the marketplace where the first party products or third-party products to address those needs. So I don't know if there is any comparable, we obviously buy entry dose have competitors, but we're very focused on our mission of both protection and empowerment in an all-in-one membership.
Got it. Very helpful. Natalie, maybe for you, can you just give us a little bit of color on sort of how you're thinking about operating margins in the guide. I mean now that we're going to be lapping the MoneyLion acquisition, you've got some new member initiatives taking shape. Curious if you could just paint any broad brushes on how to think about margins for next year?
Yes. Thanks for the question, Saket. We're operating the entire Gen business at approximately 50%. you know these segments are CS at 61, TBS at 30. And from an overall construct perspective, we don't see or expect significant change. The way I look at it is at an 8% to 10%, whether you're talking about bookings or you're talking about revenue, this is the time to drive more, expand further, invest more, not constrict. And so that's what you're going to see us do. That's what our growth plan is constructed around its investments, it's innovation, it's driving healthier and healthier marketing, and it's going to drive accelerated top line across the different growth vectors.
Now we do have a mix component to the business, which we're very aware of, and we openly dialogue with you guys about, and that mix component has, of course, a growth component to it. But we believe that we can still operate those 2 segments in the margin architecture that I just shared. We will drive efficiencies where we can. And honestly, the TBS segment offering us enormous amounts and more and more touch points connected accounts is going to be what really, really fuels that synergistic flywheel that is going to, again, create opportunities across both segments, not just TBS. And so that's what we're going to be driving for. And then, of course, continuously count on us, we already run our back office functions G&A at less than 3% of revenue and will continue to drive more and more efficiencies and have a disciplined approach to how we run the company.
All in all, point you back to 13% to 17% EPS growth, whether you're looking at Q1 or the full year, taking us at a 15% growth midpoint on EPS, which we're enormously excited about.
Well done.
Thank you, Saket. .
Our final question comes from Richard Poland with Wells Fargo.
I think just to follow up on the margin side. I know you pointed to just kind of the mix shift towards membership and revenue synergies as potential drivers on the trust-based solutions side of things. Does that structurally change? Or is that just more, hey, we're going to continue to invest in this business in the immediate term for growth, and we still think we can move that number higher over time?
From an investment perspective, look, we've got a lot of areas to invest in innovation and developing new products as well as absolutely, we're focusing on the synergistic opportunities across all of the segments. Structurally, I don't believe in the immediate future that you'll see significant change in margin architecture in either segment and therefore, in the total Gen business. But...
Yes, I can add a little bit, Richard. I don't see that as an or, it is an and. We will continue to invest to grow and continue to gain share and be the best in each 1 of our entry doors. And as you know, different entry does grow at a different level. We're super disciplined in managing our marketing investment expect us to always be that. At the same time, and it's not a trade-off. We need to continue to cross-pollinate those needs and offer financial protection to do so did not come from a financial protection entry door or offer new empowerment services to those who came from protection. And that is an ongoing effort you will see us ramping and driving not only for next year but probably forever.
Great. That's very helpful. And I guess just to hit on the revenue synergy side between MoneyLion, Cyber Safety, LifeLock, I know you gave some good disclosures this quarter in terms of just kind of helping us understand how that is progressing. Are there any, I guess, metrics that you plan to more regularly disclose to help investors continue to track those revenue synergy progress as yet?
Yes. No, absolutely. We'll continue to develop how the different value propositions are coming together and offering that full financial protections and empowerment side of the equation. Today, we are doing the first one, which we call it almost like operational awareness customers that are coming in to be able to have that financial protection on the connected financial accounts. As we drive progress and start monetizing and doing things, we will add more disclosures and then as they become useful more metric, I don't want to talk about specifically. But the short answer is absolutely, we'll report progress on driving the full value of the portfolio value of the portfolio.
With that, I will turn the call back to Vincent Pilette, CEO, for closing remarks.
Thank you. I did want to add a few comments here at the end and maybe first, addressing investors and employees who work here 6 years ago when Rick Hill and I decided to sell the Symantec enterprise business to Broadcom supported obviously by the Board and returning $11 billion in special dividends. Today, we are just bigger than Symantec at the time, but growing 4x faster at 3x more profit. And so I did want to thank you for your loyalty and your support in believing in our vision of building that, protecting and empowering portfolio for consumers. Thank you.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
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Gen Digital — Q4 2026 Earnings Call
Gen Digital — Morgan Stanley Technology
1. Question Answer
I will read some very boring disclosures, and then we will get into more exciting conversation. For more important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.
I'm Meta Marshall. I cover cybersecurity here at Morgan Stanley. We're delighted to have Gen Digital here with us today. Vincent Pilette, CEO; Natalie Derse, CFO.
So great to have you guys back at the conference after a year. Before we get started, it's been almost a year since you announced the MoneyLion acquisition, it brings kind of meaningful transformation to the business. What was it about this kind of trust-based business that was attractive and complementary towards kind of that consumer security business you traditionally had?
Maybe I'll take that one. It has been a long journey for the last few years where we really have broadened our Cyber Safety platform from about 20 million users to now over 200 million active users, 500 million endpoints. And we continue to evolve the value we provide it to consumers for a membership fee, you come, you come to the Cyber Safety platform, you come from many different entry doors. Some come from a security perspective and they want to protect their device, their data, their network. Some comes from an identity perspective and they want to protect credit score, understand what's about their personal data that's sitting out there in the web, making sure that there is no identity theft. Other came from a desire of privacy, control of data, understanding how do I use my data more.
As the needs evolved, our consumers were asking more and more about, hey, what is it in the financial world that I need to protect it from. And one of the top 4 needs was about that financial health, if you want, protecting their financial health or improving their financial health. So we started to connect in our LifeLock app in our overall app, the ability to connect your bank accounts, your credit cards, other things, which we were monitoring, tracking and then restoring if there is any issues around anomalies, scams and others.
We then introduced Norton Genie, which is an AI assistant -- initially doing AI anti-scam but I moved quickly into the assistant as our user we're using with the agent saying, "Hey, is this a scam", it evolved into what else should I be protected from? And what do you see in the noise? When we were isolated subscription transactions or other transactions, hey, on other things, they were asking, what do I do with that? How can I unsubscribe here? What can I do in consolidate my credit card. And we felt we were not really equipped to do that. And so kind of limited in our view. That's where we started to really double down on financial health. As the next need when you have your basic digital environment protecting, helping you both manage and grow your financials.
We started organically, got many of our customers connecting their bank accounts and then quickly we're out of capabilities. That's when we acquired MoneyLion, which is a fully developed platform around this financial journey, if you want, from the initial needs of, hey, I need to understand my cash flow and need to bridge for cash needs all the way to an investment opportunity.
And so we felt the technology were really built around an embedded view that can be white label and say that's the best way for us to go and acquire.
Since we've acquired a year ago, we've been growing MoneyLion at 40% to 50% rate. We've been very focused on protecting the momentum they have in the financial wellness market, while we were driving the connection points with the rest of our users, 200 million of active users, 0 CAC, that can then be adopting the financial wellness view, and that's what we've been focusing on.
In the last quarter reported, we've mentioned that our installed base have increased the connections of the bank account, which is the first step towards financial wellness from Cyber Safety at about a 15% rate. And we continue to go and drive that metric as we embedded the full view.
Got it. I mean, we regularly get questions just kind of on that core security market. And just how are you seeing that kind of core security market evolve with AI adoption or just maybe more concerns about kind of your own kind of consumer security?
Yes. So the AI topic is a fascinating one. And I think every investor asking me is AI going to eat software companies. And we're not really defining ourselves as a software company, even though we are a software company. And we see really ourselves addressing a pain point from a consumer standpoint. You want to have that at a high level peace of mind when you use your digital world. And maybe you guys are techies and have easy peace of mind controlling it. But many of our customers, they just don't want to be techies. They want someone that's going to be the digital companion, the digital concierge that's going to take that complexity, that fear away from them. That's our mission.
And we see AI as a fantastic tailwind for us. On one side, as the Agentic world becomes more and more prevalent and consumers started touching it, the angst of what it does for you or what you don't know it does for you is actually increasing. And the need for simplicity and peace of mind is actually increasing.
Over the last 2 months, we've seen in our installed base, the number of consumers or machines on which AI tools or OpenClaw platform was downloaded increasing, which surprised us because we didn't think our customers are the early adopters of these new things. Immediately triggered in us that they actually don't know what it does. They're playing with it. Some are stopping because actually, if you try OpenClaw after 20 minutes, you get like a headache. But if you are able to move further, some of our customers calling me and say, "How do I install? How do I know it doesn't do that? How do I do my machine?" That's when we came up quickly and say, well, there is a play here that we didn't even think about. We had moved from device to user. We need to move from user to agents, which as a TAM is exponential.
And how do we use then our capability, consumer-facing software capabilities to make this Agentic world safe, reliant and easy to use for consumers is actually a fantastic opportunity for us. It's one that's moving fast. We are readjusting the company to be all in on that opportunity, and we're going there.
The second tailwind for us on AI is it actually will change the way software is developed. That investor are not wrong. Today, I can come with a prototype in 72 hours when in the past, it was taking 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, a lot of testing. And that can change on the fly based on real-time feedback from consumers. What an opportunity for us.
Now you're worried that my engineers will be without a job. And inside the company, we said, wow, as we equip our engineers with all of those AI tools, now have, rather than having 1,000 engineers developing software, I have 1,000 engineers thinking about the upstream problem statement and can churn a super fast pace, quality software that will be then used by consumers and adjusted in real time. And now suddenly, you see, oh, my moat is changing. What is my moat. It's the understanding of the customer problem. The agility to be able to define that requirement upstream, be first, be agile, adjust it and real-time go and address that need. And I think that, for me, is a super, super opportunity.
So we're rewiring Gen as an AI-first company, which is not easy. I'm not starting with one person building it AI first. I'm starting with 5,000 people and 2 years of legacy to change it on its head, and we are real time now thinking about how do we collapse functions, how do we enable a product manager that in the past had to go to the engineering to develop to the Q&A to go and test it, to the legal to check legal, to marketing to build the marketing. As a stand-alone man or equipped with AI tools to go and put that prototype in the hand of the users in 72 hours.
And so those two things creating a super need and it's enabling us, we see AI as a fantastic opportunity.
Okay. All right. Well, we're definitely going to dive more into that because that sounded good.
So maybe circling back to kind of MoneyLion for a second. You've talked about kind of the first-party and third-party solutions. Just how do we think of kind of that marketplace developing on the MoneyLion side?
The MoneyLion business is incredibly healthy and very, very diverse. There's -- I would say, two main segments of that business, the PFM business, which would be the early wage access, and that's growing 40% in the past quarter, even faster earlier in the year. And then we've got the engine in the marketplace side of the business, which really brings to life the Gen -- the strength of the Gen brands and really brings together the supply and demand for the increasing expansion of the financial tooling, whether it's credit cards, whether it's mortgages, whether it's tax services, et cetera. And they're both growing approximately 40% as of our last reported quarter.
And so just how do we think of kind of what clearly has been a really great success so far. What drives that kind of continued growth going forward as you kind of expand out the portfolio set there?
Yes. On the PFM side, definitely, it's the economy. In terms of the demand is there. We have -- we see great healthy acquisition through PFM, but we also see retention and the recurring customers that come from the PFM side of the business, which is 60% of the MoneyLion business today is really, really robust, and we just see that -- I guess, that continuous business momentum there.
And then on the marketplace side, I think it's endless in terms of the diversification. That engine that the MoneyLion team has built is just based on really sharp technology and very, very robust. It powers not only our on asset or our in-house app. It's also white labeled with many of the brands that you would think about when you think about financial tooling and instruments. And now with the strength of the brand, bringing the supply and demand together in a very easy marketplace is just really, really powerful.
Okay. One of the things you guys kind of talked about early on was introducing the subscription-based model that you guys have had on the consumer security side into the MoneyLion business, which has traditionally been more transaction-based. Can you just walk through kind of what approach you're taking to this and just what that feedback has been so far?
Yes. So I can take that one. Before I answer the membership question, I want to add on the marketplace because I don't know if everybody fully understand the power of that business model. And many times when I talk about marketplace to invest in the marketplace, I don't really fully understand why you have a marketplace. For us, it's a fantastic expansion of the possibility to addressing needs from the consumers. We're already protecting from a customer perspective, your devices, your data, your financial lives. Now I know, for example, in an Agentic world, I could know automatically, but I know that you have an insurance coming for renewal, you may have forgotten because insurance is you buy it and you forget about it.
The agent can not only alert you of this coming for renewal. But You can go to the marketplace and search the better rate and say, "Hey, I propose a better rate". If you don't trust fully your platform, you want to be alerted and have the opportunity to [ try switch ] insurance. Or it can be fully automated. And every year when your car insurance come for renewal, you can have your agent search, it has access to marketplace and it can go and renew that for you.
So it's an enabler, if you want to. I'll never be an insurer. So I don't know what insurance exist. The marketplace suddenly becomes the opportunity for me to provide to my customers this full end-to-end experience without having to develop the product myself.
And now suddenly, you can think about many other products that are related to that financial health that I'm not going to provide. And so for us, the growth of engine, we're also about building different pillars of partners coming in and say, you fit at the right time in my customer journeys financial journey, I'm going to be able to offer this.
And we've seen Equifax change from a discussion on buy data and credit from you that I then use into my alert and overall modeling, to let's partner together. With the marketplace and you provide the data, we can really develop and expand the set of opportunities we can offer to our consumers.
And as I mentioned, in this new world, the moat is what is about the ability to really understand new consumers and be at the right time in a personalized way in their journey. That is critical. And a bank, a mortgage company will not spend the time to try to get to understand every customer. It's difficult if it's just related to a onetime transactional review.
So I brought that up because I think it's very important to understand that. I mean it's super powerful. It moves from a product or a membership sold to a customer to a full ecosystem, providing an end-to-end value to the customer.
Back to the membership now I'm going to relate it. Of course, we don't want to be just purely transactional -- transactional fees. But we know some customers will always like that will want that. And so we will move towards membership at the pace the customer will adopt but it is our mission. Why is it? Because we want to move into that full Agentic world, where you pay a membership, you forget about it, you set your agents, you forget about them, and you have the trust that, that will deliver that value for you in this world.
So MoneyLion was all about transactions, which I say, okay, they had developed the system to be with the ability to move to membership. So we have the technology and the capability. Cyber Safety is 95% membership. And now we want to extend that membership into financial wellness.
And it's really about testing and creating the right value for the consumers. Finding those payments and say, you know what, at this point in time, it is more benefit for me to pay a membership $20 a month and be able to use the agent we just developed to be able to use the unsubscribed in an automatic way. And then benefit from those criteria that if I wasn't a transactional model, I would have to each time select. Now would pay as you go, which is also a model you could have. But the ease, the peace of mind if you want to bring. That is why the membership is so critical.
We won't force a back-end force or go suddenly say, by next quarter, we'll be 50%. We will continue to develop our membership to more and more provide that value to the consumer then they will adopt at their own pace.
Okay. Not only one of the interesting conversations that we had on the last earnings call was just about kind of your guys' positioning in a K-shaped economy. And I thought it was a particularly interesting conversation about how you kind of see yourselves benefiting from both trajectories of that. Just wanted to kind of get a sense of maybe rehashing that conversation a little bit.
Yes. I mean, from a K-shaped economy, we have solutions, and we have protection. We have services for all ends of that. And so really, when you think about the people that are really struggling as inflation continues to scale as things just cost more on a daily basis, people are really struggling. There are stats out there that would tell you 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
And so then we're right then and there, helping them put food on their table, so to speak, with the PFM solutions that we've got. They're incredibly easy to use. It is honestly just you set up an account with us. We validate your -- the sources of wages coming from your employer. You're on direct deposit, and then we're able to allow you to scale with us. And as you continuously repay or reimburse those funds, you're able to get more and more funds are more frequent. And so that's a really, really a helpful set and a healthy alternative for folks that don't necessarily either qualify for those credit cards or qualify for the actual short-term or long-term loans that they need to be able to live their life and feed their family.
And then on the other side, I would say, swing the pendulum really, really far and you think about people that are on our broadest LifeLock identity protection and 360 Suite probably have a lot of assets to protect, probably have a lot of money that -- people that typically have assets to protect want those assets to grow and that money to grow. And so that's where the marketplace and engine comes really into play in terms of -- there are some interesting stats, how many people pull credit card -- new credit cards every single year, even over $100,000 of annual income. They're pretty alarm -- in a good way, alarming stat for us in terms of the demand is out there. And so now we take it upon ourselves to really make sure that we've got the most dynamic supply out there to really to feed that demand and to fill that demand.
And the engine is just incredibly powerful and the marketplace is incredibly powerful. And economically for our business, it's powerful. Of course, as we do any kind of marketplace model on the supply side, demand side, there's affiliate or referral fees on both sides of that, that we can benefit from. But imagine when we take a LifeLock customer and we put them into that engine, first of all, the supply goes through the roof because who doesn't want that type of 800-plus credit score with a lot of assets to protect just a lot of financial health there. So on the supply side, we get increase there. We'd love to bring a buyer that way. But then from our company economics, it's 0 CAC. And because we've already got that user or that customer in our ecosystem.
I think you were kind of pointing out like you thought that it was kind of giving you the share advantage in the marketplace with you kind of outgrowing your peers.
Yes, absolutely. And I would say just from an overall financial wellness and I would zoom maybe even further out and say Trust-Based Solutions, we love how competitive advantage we are. There's not a lot of customers that you -- or competitors out there that you can point to that have our entire solution set. And so we're really trying to take that and use that to our advantage and really cut through from a customer demand perspective.
Okay. The cross-sell opportunity between Cyber Safety and the Trust-Based Solutions is kind of the key area of focus you guys have talked about. Can you guys just talk a little bit more about the strategies that you're taking? And what are the -- like what innings are we in from the monetization standpoint?
Yes. And monetization is a big word. I would start with adoption. The most important for us is for Cyber Safety customers to understand that a full protection of their risk include the financials. Now they know it because one of the top 4 needs is protecting against financials. And so the adoption, the #1 metric is about Cyber Safety customers that get monitoring, alerts on deviations and other incremental services on that protection of financials.
And we've seen growing that at double digit. We have over 100 million bank account connected from Cyber Safety side. That doesn't move yet to, of course, monetization.
The second step is about making the engagement on the financial wellness side, call it not just the protection, but the manage and grow, I manage your financials, important.
So we are working on three initiatives. The first one is to put the marketplace in a creative way into the LifeLock applications. LifeLock becoming more and more of your protector, if you want, of every asset you have. And trying to move that application into a more engaging company -- engaging application, sorry. That then really having that discussion on the journey. So we have that embedded now into LifeLock.
We're coming up with a new redesigned app that also provides content, educational content on that full aspect.
The second initiative is about launching Norton Money into our employee benefit solutions. The EB channels. That is the channel that, at this point in time, is the most hungry to always consume the entire set of the portfolio. In which, of course, one element they really interested into the early wage access, that can be connected to payroll. So I won't call it risk-free, but very low risk. And having the employer promoted that into the environment.
We have the product. We started to launch it into the broker environment that then moved to our customers subscription in the fall during the onboarding period.
And then the third one is the Norton Money really providing the first incremental step in Norton, which is different than LifeLock around your credit score and your capability to track and have visibility on your financial features, which we have only launched into our installed base as a free tool of free feature adoption with installed base or they pay a subscription, but free one to kind of familiarize with the financial ones.
Monetization will follow as people start to really understand that between Cyber Safety, having a peace of mind in digital world and using new money digitally, if you want, will become more seamless.
Yes. Okay. Perfect. The cyber margins obviously remain very robust at over 60%. Trust-Based Solutions remains kind of solid at 30%. Can you just give some additional details around kind of the margin trajectory of the business and reinvesting for kind of all of these initiatives that you guys have laid out.
Yes. We've had just a real strong thread in our DNA to just run our company very efficiently and really focused on how can we do more with less, just as an always on. And that really, really helps. It just sets the expectation and we've got the alignment at [ ELT ] so that it doesn't really make it a specific phase of our company or a specific exercise.
And so the team knows that we're going to ask them to do give us double-digit efficiencies in our over $1 billion marketing spend, and we're going to really leverage the tools and technology, whether it's AI, whether it's just a modernization of how we allocate marketing and look at those ROIs. We're going to do -- we're going to continuously focus on that.
And so then it allows in both segments, both the Cyber Safety grown 61 -- margin rate of 61% in the last quarter. We're really proud of that, but we believe the team can run even more efficiently and create the capacity for investment. That's what we want. We want to never operate status quo, always focus and earn those efficiencies, and so then we can deploy that back into fueling sustainable growth. That's the Cyber Safety, even 2.5 years ago when we did our AID, that's what it was all about.
And then in Trust-Based Solutions, even at 30%, look, there's a mix factor there. When you think about where Gen is and overall versus Trust-Based Solutions. But I'll tell you, when you get into that sector, we're industry-leading margins, and we're very proud of that.
We've already moved the MoneyLion side up from 15% to over 20%, and we'll continuously earn even more efficiencies in that business as we continue to operate together, but we have every intention to deploy that right back into the innovation, the ideation and really bringing some of these test use cases to full scale so that we can really win in Trust-Based Solutions.
Got it. You guys are obviously very cash generative. Just how should we think to your approach with M&A. MoneyLion has obviously been a great success. Software valuations as we kind of started with are slightly more depressed. Just how are you thinking about M&A as kind of an overall part of the strategy?
Maybe I'll take it first. You didn't want to quote the number, but the ROIC on MoneyLion acquisition is through the roof. And frankly, we could say this because we were a great operator, it was a great asset, but timing is everything as you guys know. We are not focusing on that. I'm not going to try to time things. It's great that software valuation is depressed. It's not great for me, to be honest. It was great for my investors. But from an opportunity, maybe it's great, maybe it's not.
We start M&A way upstream around innovation and customer need. I'll come back on the same topic. Our moat is the trust from the customers the understanding of our consumers, with consumer and consumer only focus on that and the agility to go and continue to develop and evolve our portfolio to address that need, broadly defined around protection and empowerment of that digital world. Starts there always.
It always starts with organic and consumer research and organic testing. Now AI has even shortened that -- or increased the ability or shortened time frame to go and do a lot of that testing. Financial wellness started with financial wellness features into LifeLock. And we saw some adoptions and different behavior than we expected. It was like, oh, there's something bigger than we can play here. And that's where we did.
Are we constantly looking at once we have that consumer and we have invested a bit organically? How long it would take for us to develop the best product? Or is there something in the market that exists and that could maybe be easily brought in and accelerate the growth. Of course, we are.
And when we do that, we look at many parameters. And as you know, may sound good on its face. Valuation may be great. Technology is not great. Culture is not great. Maybe it's not the time that they want to buy it. I'm wondering if today, I get a proposal to have Gen bought at $21, I'm going to turn it down for sure. And so he actually valuation may actually may not be a helper in M&A. And then we're going to look and we're going to look at balancing it, "Hey, shared my M&A today used as cash to do buyback" and what's that return. And I want to make sure when we do investment on cash, we have the highest return proposed.
And so that makes the M&A topic if you want something that's always ongoing and never really a focus, if you want. In today's environment, with the cash we generate, it's great. We have plenty of growth to deliver. We're very focused, as Natalie has told you many, many times around delevering below [ 3x ] by FY '27, and we are here today.
We will continue to do that. But when we do that, we balance it with also the opportunity to buy back at $21, which is super accretive. The organic investment is built into our P&L. And if we see from time to time, some tuck-in opportunities, say, hey, this is a better return, will go and do that.
I would just build on that it's definitely diverse and it's disciplined. And Vincent makes my job really easy. Of course, when you think about capital allocation, when we generate over $2 billion of free cash -- unlevered free cash flow, we've got a lot to deploy. But as it pertains to M&A, it's massively disciplined.
I mean although he's using with innovation, diversification and it's not even game-changing. It's creating the game in many capacities. He does it with a disciplined approach, and we're very, very clear and aligned on the criteria of when we're going to do a deal, we're massively disciplined about it. And I think if you look at history, every one of our acquisitions has made enormous economic and financial sense.
Okay. So we've talked a lot about the portfolio. We've talked a lot about kind of optimizing that. Just -- and we've talked about cross-sell. But just in terms of kind of additional go-to-market strategies, can you just walk us through kind of the partnership channel and who you're primarily working with and that process of getting towards this $500 million target in annual partner revenue.
Yes, we've already achieved it. So thankfully. So if you don't mind, I'll just use a second to go back to our last Analyst Day, we said we wanted to build our business non-money line, nonfinancial wellness to a sustainable mid-single digit, and we've done it ever since we said it. And it's through the levers of growth, we said 5 points -- 5 levers for 5 points of growth. .
Cross-sell has been huge for us. It's been a revenue driver. It's been a retention driver. Upsell has been a broadening out in terms of as we learn and grow through these stand-alone products.
Now how do we optimize and blend them with the membership to drive into what you heard earlier from Vincent, just an enormous engagement and expansion opportunities when you've got them in a membership.
Partner has been a diversification channel for us as well as an acquisition channel for us. It's only circa 10% of our business, pre-MoneyLion. And -- but very, very diverse. It allows us to go global quickly. It allows us to go through partnership that allows us to go through affiliation.
Two of them that we love because of the customers that we're able to engage with through these channels are employee benefits we already touched on. It's our highest ARPU solution that we're able to go into those channels and really expand our reach and really get highly retaining, highly engaged customers through. We love it. It's been growing double digits and we'll continue to do so.
And then telco. Telco has been a way for us to get into global expansion, especially lower-penetrated countries that have high hurdles of entry. And so we've really been able to figure out first with the telco in Canada, and then now have really expanded into Latin American countries, some of the other Eastern countries. And it's really been one that has low acquisition cost in terms of entering the market. But then we're able to expand through our membership offerings and really understand the local solutions that really resonates with the customers.
Okay. I mean, Vincent, I think you mentioned Equifax kind of in one of your answers earlier, but just kind of we talked about just further on go-to-market. Some of these expanded partnerships, you have one with Equifax, just are there other opportunities we should be kind of thinking of?
Yes, and we're constantly working on trying to expand the pie, as you imagine. This is where engine is another one, right, that really brings another benefit. It goes to partner and say, "Hey, I can not only bring all of those customers but I have really a modular offering and you can bring into it from the marketplace to those customers". That opens up a lot of doors. And so you should continue to look for more ways of distributions from partnering with AI companies to partnering with telcos and financials that go and touch directly to customers.
And we've taken an approach where we want to make sure it fits into the overall ecosystem. Does it enrich the product? Does it enrich our [ anti-scam ], for example, is the customer being able to either see the brand or not or being retargeted for the value that we provide. And so the game and the discussion with those partners has really changed from in the past, I buy your security solution, I embedded into mind and I resell it to my customer to how can we be part of that ecosystem. So just stay tuned as that continues to evolve.
And then maybe just last question. You gave kind of a great way of all of the ways that you're transforming the business. Like what do you think are the best ways that we should be kind of monitoring the progress on some of these initiatives?
The multiple is a little bit like our customers. We still have our investors that came from many, many different doors. Some come from, hey, I know you from being the security subscribers and having a very stable cash flow through a membership, the deviation is like it's like 2% and no more. And I would say, for those investors, that business is healthy and you can continue to look at the continued increase in customers we have, and we're publishing that number, and we'll give you that core business, how is it doing anything is doing well.
Then we have some investors that come to say, hey, that's pretty cool, you come from a fintech angle or you provide financial wellness and they really see, okay, what's the advantage when you compare to other of those fintech companies where you bring trust, you bring scale, you bring multiple things, how are you doing? Well, we're growing at about 40% to 50%, and we're delivering best-in-class margin of that market above 20%. And so those are two set of investors, and you can continue to monitor, we monitor those.
And then we have those who are a little bit more in between and don't fit one of the category and say, how does it fit together? And is there something special coming here? And there, the monitoring is really, as I mentioned, really understanding how the Trust-Based Solution is adopted by the Cyber Safety and that converge. And that's critical because if that is successful, and we continue to report on progress, you're going to see certainly the opportunity to expand that TAM in an accelerated way. That's pretty significant, which is very different than those security-oriented investors or the fintech-oriented investors. It would be kind of an Internet platform where moat is this protection and empowerment, the brand, the data, the ecosystem, not specifically one specific features of our product. It's more difficult to comprehend, as you know. And it is what it is. We're going to go.
And then I still have the investors that are really interested by AI. They come to me more to get some intelligence, not really to look at our business yet. So I cannot say we are yet really approach from that perspective. I do feel, though, we have a critical role to play in how the economy is becoming Agentic.
And that we're not the sexy player today, it's fine by me. That gives us plenty of time to really try to capture that opportunity.
All right. Perfect. Well, Vincent and Natalie, thanks so much for being here today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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Gen Digital — Q3 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Tamia, and I will be your conference operator today. Today's call is being recorded [Operator Instructions] At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Jason Starr, Head of Investor Relations.
Thank you, Tamia, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Gen's Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Vincent Pilette, CEO; and Natalie Derse, CFO.
As a reminder, there will be a reminder of this call posted on the Investor Relations website along with our slides and press release. I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, all references to the financial measures are non-GAAP, and all growth rates are year-over-year unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our press release and earnings presentation. both of which are available on our IR website at investor.gendigital.com. We encourage investors to monitor this website as we routinely post investor-oriented information such as news and events and financial filings.
Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance and operations, including the impact on our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those statements are based on our current beliefs, assumptions and expectations as of today's date, February 5, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statements in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.
And now I'll turn the call over to Vincent.
Thanks, Jason, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. We continue to make steady progress toward our long-term vision building a trusted AI-powered platform that keeps people safe online and helps them manage their financial lives. Our results show the strategy is working. We delivered another quarter of double-digit bookings growth, grew our paid customer base to more than 78 million and increased non-GAAP EPS 14% year-over-year.
What matters most is what these results represent, growing trust. Millions of people choose Gen to stay safe online, protect their identity and manage their financial lives. Everything we build is designed to earn that trust every day. Today, I'll focus on 3 things: how AI is reshaping the threat landscape, how cyber safety and financial wellness needs are converging, and how our unified AI-driven platform underpins durable long-term growth. And after that, Natalie will review our financials.
So let's start with the threat landscape. The most dangerous attacks today no longer look like traditional hacking. They are embedded into everyday digital experiences: shopping, social feeds, search or payments. Consumers are not being breached through technical exploits. They're being redirected from trusted behaviors into outcomes that look legitimate and feel safe. Sponsored ad, a realistic video endorsement, a QR code at checkout, a device pairing prompt, any one of these can trigger a scam that compromises both digital identity and financial health.
We see this shift clearly in our data. Across Gen, we block tens of millions of scam attempts every quarter, most tied to financial fraud. Last quarter alone, we blocked more than 45 million fake online shop attacks, up over 60% year-over-year. These scams mirror exactly how people shop today and scammers are following consumers in those same channels. As a result, fake ads now represent more than 40% of all consumer cyber threats that are visually indistinguishable from legitimate brands, and the fraud often is not revealed until credentials are stolen and payments are made.
Speed is the second major shift. AI has compressed the life cycle of attacks from months to days, sometimes hours. It has lowered the cost and effort required to launch personalized scams at scale. The implications are clear: more attacks, faster execution and higher success rates.
And Gen is built for this reality. Because of our scale and the depth of our telemetry, Gen has a unique view into how threats emerge, spread and intersect with real consumer behavior. We analyze real-time signals across security, identity, devices, platforms and financial activities. This lets us go beyond blocking threats to understanding risk as it evolves and adapting protection dynamically.
Cyber safety today is no longer about blocking malware or bad website after the fact. It is about understanding behavior, intent, context in the moment across identity devices, platforms and money. And Gen's platform is built for exactly that. This approach is resonating. Cyber safety bookings grew 5% year-over-year with double-digit growth in our most comprehensive Norton 360 with LifeLock offerings. Customers are choosing broader protection because of the risks they face are broader.
Looking ahead, AI agents represent the next major shift and the next major consumer risk. Millions of people already use AI agents to browse, shop, manage accounts and make decisions on their behalf, and adoption is accelerating. These systems act like humans online but at far greater speed and scale, creating new vulnerabilities. AI agents can be received the same way people can through fake ads, impersonation sites or misleading messages, but the speed and impact are amplified. We're already seeing agents click on fraudulent ads and the credentials into impersonation sites and authorized transaction based on manipulated information.
Take Openflow as an example. It runs locally and performs tasks on your behalf, like managing e-mails and automating daily activities. To work, these agents access your files, your messages and credentials. And if something goes wrong, the consequences can be severe. A single malicious e-mail could prompt an AI agent to scan a device, extract sensitive data and send them out without exploiting any traditional software bug.
The AI is doing exactly what it was designed to do, just without enough safeguards. Autonomous agents redefine what consumer cyber safety means. Protection is no longer just about protecting users. It's about protecting the autonomous systems people rely on. Security cannot be optional, but the providers of these innovations are not focused on making it foundational. That is a gap Gen is uniquely positioned to fill.
Earlier this week, Gen Threat Labs introduced a beta version of the world's first agent, Trust Hub. It allows users both humans and AI bots to scan skills for risk before execution, control what agents access and verify safety before it's used. It also includes a curated marketplace of skills maintained by Gen security researchers, effectively the world's first trusted app store for agent skills.
Also in December, we launched Norton Neo, the world's first safe AI browser. Adoption has been strong in our installed base, reinforcing demand for AI experiences that are secured by design.
AI agents will go through hype cycles, of course, but the trend is permanent. As AI have becomes embedded in daily life, people need a trusted partner to protect them. The AI economy cannot scale without safety and confidence, and that's where Gen comes in.
Our competitive advantage is based on AI combined with and powered by the unmatched breadth of signals that we bring together across security, identity and financial risks. At our skills, those signals allow us to retrain our defenses continuously, detect scams earlier, adapt faster and stop attacks in real time. That allows us to deploy enhanced anti-scam protection across our portfolio, including on-device deepfake detection that can stop an attack during a video playback. These are practical defenses designed to protect consumers against real-world threats.
We also recognize that identity threats and financial risks are no longer separate. They are deeply interconnected. That is where Gen delivers true peace of mind, and our customers recognize this shift, trusting us more every day. Across our portfolio, we're approaching 100 million active financial accounts monitored and over 500 million protected endpoints.
Each month, customers take millions of financial actions, allowing us to strengthen protection, personalization and recommendations. Within LifeLock, we continue to expand beyond traditional identity protection. Financial accounts monitored grew double digits year-over-year to nearly 50 million. We are redesigning the LifeLock experience to deliver clear and expanded alerts, personalized insights and more actionable recommendations reinforcing its position as the most trusted financial protection partner.
MoneyLion also continues to perform strongly, with nearly 40% revenue growth in Q3. More importantly, it is evolving into an always-on financial hub. Beyond short-term liquidity solutions, we're helping consumers manage cash flow, build confidence and protect financial progress they're working hard to achieve. Later this year, we will launch Money One, a new subscription, combining the best of MoneyLion with scam and identity protection currently in close beta and moving towards early access.
This quarter, we introduced a new feature like Found Money, our savings optimization assistant. Early engagement has been strong. 60% of user engaging with Found Money interacted with an offer and 30% linked at least 1 additional account, strengthening the data foundation that powers personalized guidance.
Leveraging the strength of Gen, we also embedded scam security and risk detection directly into MoneyLion's transaction insights. And as adoption grows, this reinforces the flywheel between engagement, insight and value. And as a result, we delivered record highs in Instacash usage, RoarMoney deposits and card activity, prove that trust, safety and growth scale together.
Our marketplace, Engine, continues to scale under the Gen brand. This quarter, Engine processed a record number of inquiries as we expanded into new credit cards and mortgage categories and integrated Engine more deeply into our consumer brands, helping insights turn into action more often. Yesterday, we announced an expanded partnership with Equifax using Equifax' differentiated data to enable enhanced alerts and insights for our customers across our entire portfolio. It also enables Equifax to offer more personalized financial offer on myequifax.com powered by Engine.
Stepping back. Our platform strategy is a real differentiator. Across Norton, Avast, LifeLock and MoneyLion, we operate leading consumer brands that generate high-value signals on behavior, risk and intent that are amplified by our marketplace. Engine alone now processed over 360 million inquiries annually with expanding financial product verticals and improving conversion.
What sets Gen apart is how we connect these inputs to create value for our customers and the business. Unifying AI and our data-driven platform to bring together security telemetry, identity events, financial behavior and marketplace interactions is at the core of our strategy. This shared foundation allows us to move beyond static protection and deliver personalized contextual guidance when it matters the most. After building our modular cyber safety tech stack, we're now focused on expanding our unified data platform and automation trust layer, turning vast amounts of data into actionable intelligence that helps consumers make better digital and financial decisions.
In an AI-driven world, where outputs can be biased or manipulated, Gen's ability to anchor guidance in verified identity and trusted data is a durable competitive advantage. And our strategy is simple: turn proprietary signals into trusted recommendation and scale them across our products and partners.
We are already seeing early benefits. Our AI life cycle agent is orchestrating customer life cycle communication, engagement and personalization across the portfolio. Our real-time data platform powers customer-facing features like protection score, giving consumers a clear actionable view of their protection. And shared LLM frameworks are accelerating innovation across products with new agent capabilities deployed in MoneyLion and Norton Money app.
So in closing, success for Gen is defined by trust, earning it, scaling it and delivering it in the moments that matter the most, helping people make safer, smarter digital financial decisions. Cyber safety remains foundational, and it's not just a category. It's a promise. And as awareness of Gen portfolio grows, we are increasingly recognized not only as a cybersecurity leader but is a trusted partner across consumers' digital and financial lives. We are executing well in a rapidly changing environment. Our platform is scaling. Our strategy is working, and we are focused on long-term value creation by earning our customers' trust every single day.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Natalie.
Thank you, Vincent, and hello, everyone. For today's call, I will walk through our Q3 results and also provide some additional color on our performance metrics. I'll then conclude by providing an outlook for Q4 and fiscal year 2026. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and year-over-year growth rates, unless otherwise stated. I will also include commentary on our pro forma growth, which includes MoneyLion's results from the prior year for comparative purposes.
Now on to our results. Q3 was another strong quarter for Gen, with results coming in at the high end of our guidance, driven by record revenue and bookings, double-digit EPS growth and exceptional free cash flow generation. On a reported basis, Q3 bookings was $1.3 billion, up 27% year-over-year and up 10% on a pro forma basis, with revenue of $1.2 billion, up 26% year-over-year and up 8% on a pro forma basis.
In our Cyber Safety segment, bookings grew 5% and revenue grew 3%. Our strong bookings reflects ongoing demand for our cyber safety subscriptions and is a leading indicator for future revenue. Operating margins remained strong at 61%, as we drive increased leverage in this segment. Growth continues to be supported by secular tailwinds from rising scam activity, driving strong adoption of our Norton 360 memberships across both desktop and mobile. Our higher tier memberships continue to grow double digits, where customers choose the most comprehensive security, privacy and identity protection and our newest capability Genie Pro Scam Protection.
Through our expanded features, we are strengthening our product relevancy and driving increased membership conversion now nearing 45%. We will continue to strengthen life cycle messaging and upsell pathways, improving the customer lifetime value across all cohorts.
In our customer success organization, our product recommender continues to scale with select customer cohorts. This is an internally developed AI model that analyzes customer product ownership, feature usage and behavioral signals to deliver more relevant and timely offers. This approach allows us to better match customers with the services that they are most likely to need, improving conversion rates and increasing product penetration across our installed base.
Early results are encouraging, particularly across our privacy add-on products, with Norton cross-sell penetration now exceeding 26%, which reflects our continued progress towards the targets we set out at our last Analyst Day. Based on this performance, we plan to expand this capability to additional cohorts in Q4 and continue to drive more commercial benefits from our Gen platform.
In our Trust-Based Solutions segment, on a pro forma basis, bookings and revenue grew 23% and 22%, respectively, and more than doubled on a reported basis. Operating margins remained stable at 30%, in line with expectations, as we make targeted investments in MoneyLion and other AI-related initiatives. Performance this quarter was led by nearly 40% revenue growth in MoneyLion, well balanced across strong customer demand for personal financial products like Instacash and further scaling of our Engine marketplace, which enriches the Gen platform through tens of millions of inquiries taking place every quarter.
Double clicking a bit more, Instacash delivered record originations during the quarter, supported by targeted marketing investments to capture elevated demand during the holiday season. At the same time, Engine continued to gain traction as we added new partners across leading financial brands and top online publishers.
The strength of the Gen brand and our scaled audience is increasingly elevating Engine as a premium marketplace partner. Growing adoption of third-party financial products on Engine reinforces our mission to help consumers make better financial decisions through embedded experiences across both financial and nonfinancial platforms. And we continue to deliver a steady growth in our Identity offerings. We remain our -- which remain our highest value customer cohort with the highest retention.
We are also advancing our secure financial wellness strategy with the initial rollout of a LifeLock-branded marketplace that now includes offers from leading credit card issuers and high-yield savings accounts. While still early, initial test results are encouraging, particularly in driving offer engagement with our LifeLock cohorts.
And across the segments, our direct channels continue to reflect the strength of our first-party portfolio and innovation efforts with revenue growing 18% as reported and 6% pro forma. Our partner business continues to scale impressively, growing revenue 88% as reported and 23% pro forma, supported by diversified growth across the portfolio, led by Engine marketplace, retail channels, particularly in Japan, and employee benefits, which delivered another strong double-digit quarter of growth driven by continued new logo acquisition during open enrollment season.
We continue to drive broad-based growth in our paid customer base, now totaling over 78 million customers and up 1 million sequentially. Cyber Safety direct customers were up 0.5 million as we continue to expand across the regions and channels, consistent with prior quarters. And we are acquiring new customers through MoneyLion and Engine marketplace as we add new verticals, all with sustainable, healthy returns.
Now turning to profitability. Q3 operating income was $629 million, translating to a 51% operating margin, in line with our expectation. Our margins remain robust across our segments as we scale and diversify. We remain committed to operating in a disciplined fashion as our results demonstrate, scrutinizing our cost envelope proactively. We have and will continue to invest in our strategic AI opportunities. We will invest in our long-term strategic growth initiatives while remaining steadfast in driving efficiencies.
Q3 net income was $394 million, and diluted EPS was $0.64, up 14% year-over-year as reported and at the high end of our guidance. This represents our ninth consecutive quarter of achieving or exceeding our 12% to 15% EPS growth target, reflecting consistent execution and capital allocation. During the quarter, we reduced our weighted average ending share count to 618 million, down 5 million shares year-over-year. Interest expense was $131 million in Q3, and our non-GAAP tax rate remained steady at 22%.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. Q3 ending cash balance was $619 million, representing over $2.1 billion of liquidity, including our $1.5 billion revolver. During the quarter, we generated $541 million in operating cash flow and $535 million in free cash flow. This robust free cash flow enabled us to deploy nearly $700 million of capital for shareholders, including $300 million towards share repurchases, which is 11 million shares as well as $300 million of debt repayment and $77 million of regular quarterly dividend.
We exited the quarter with net leverage at 3.1x EBITDA, which puts us ahead of schedule for our goal to drive net leverage below 3x in fiscal year 2027 while maintaining flexibility to continue investing in growth and additional capital returns. Please note, we are currently exploring refinancing options for our TLA, our Term Loan A, which matures in September of fiscal 2028. Early market discussions have been encouraging, and we expect to complete this before it becomes current.
For Q4 fiscal 2026, the Board of Directors approved a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 per common share to be paid on March 11, 2026, for all shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 16, 2026. These strong quarterly results underscore our commitment to driving profitable growth with disciplined execution, generating strong free cash flow and returning capital to shareholders that have become hallmarks for Gen.
Now let me share our Q4 and fiscal year 2026 outlook. We are raising our revenue and EPS guidance again for fiscal 2026 based on our strong results and the momentum we're seeing. Our business remains resilient, bolstered by a highly recurring revenue base further supported by solid customer retention and substantial free cash flow generation.
For fiscal year 2026, we are raising our annual guidance and now expect full year revenue in the range of $4.955 billion to $4.975 billion, up from our prior expectation of $4.92 billion to $4.97 billion. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $2.54 to $2.56, representing our continued commitment to achieving a 12% to 15% annual EPS growth. This implies an expected Q4 non-GAAP revenue in the range of $1.24 billion to $1.26 billion and EPS in the range of $0.64 to $0.66.
Our Q4 and full year guidance assumes high single-digit pro forma growth and disciplined cost management while funding targeted longer-term growth initiatives and investments in the Gen platform and additional AI capabilities. This guidance range also assumes current FX rates for Q3.
We're now well into our final quarter of a very strong fiscal year. We've successfully integrated MoneyLion and continue to accelerate our growth profile while maintaining the same operating discipline that has long defined our strategy. With many opportunities ahead, we are driving healthy growth across both our operating segments and focused on unlocking top line synergies through our secure financial wellness strategy.
Operating margins remain strong, and we're continuing to invest in scalable innovation without compromising returns. Our free cash flow generation is robust, creating capacity for growth investments, ongoing opportunistic share repurchases and further delivering -- delevering to drive strong returns for our shareholders. We continue to hit the mile markers we've laid out as we navigate towards our long-term growth objectives. I want to thank the entire team for staying focused and delivering great value to our customers and to our shareholders.
As always, thank you for your time today, and I will now turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Roger Boyd with UBS.
2. Question Answer
I wanted to come back to consumer AI and what we saw with OpenClaw, Moltbot. I know you touched upon this a little bit, but I think we're becoming more aware of how much trust individuals are going to need to place in the hands of AI that's going to touch all accesses of their digital lives. And I'm just curious how you're thinking about the role Gen can play there in helping consumers. I know you mentioned the agent Trust Hub, AI web cycle, the Neo browser. But do you feel like this could be a material kind of tailwind to demand for cyber safety moving forward? And are you seeing any sort of uptick in pipeline around that so far?
Very good question, and I confirm, Roger, that the trend is happening. The revolution of AI is happening, and everybody saw it with the virality of OpenClaw in the last 2 weeks or even last weekend. I would say I see it in a sequential way suddenly exponential growth. We initially -- as you know, we're protecting in the initial days of the Internet the device and protecting against weakness in the operating systems and then later on protecting against the flurry of website that existed in the early days of uncategorized search tools. All of that create opportunity, as you know, and that's the root of Avast and Norton brands.
If you take today this revolution of AI, it is happening in front of us. We're agents in the case of OpenClaw and do your task. As you know, you can send a WhatsApp text to your machine at home and ask them to go and book a restaurant or do other activities, and they will do it. And the agency, if they don't know how to do it or cannot do it via e-mail, may go and download other agents or skills if you want and do it that way. And so then you have an explosion of players around you that are going to try to complete the task you've asked them.
Today, like any new innovations, a super fund is an early adopter. Security is not the mindset. It's really about how cool it is to be more efficient to be delegating your tasks to those agents. And similarly that, at the beginning, the operating system were not fully secured and Norton created the antivirus, we feel there's a huge gap here to singly focus on bringing that trust and security and verification inside this environment.
As you mentioned, we launched the agent Trust Hub at Gen from our lab. It actually comes from the fact that, over the last 2 weeks, we saw many of our Norton users starting to use some agents, cascading those activities to other agents and so exposed to risk. There's over 18,000 skills that have exposure to the Internet that can be pulled by your agents. Some of them could be malicious. Some of them could leak some of your information like password or other things if you give them access to your machine. And people don't always know what they will do.
This Trust Hub will enable to really validate whether an agent or skills will have a set of risks and decide whether it's an acceptable risk or not. And actually, very uniquely, we built it for bots and agents. So website normally designed for humans and you can if you want to program it yourself. But it's also for the agent to go and look at it. You see what's verified or risky, and then where the marketplace is to see which other skills can be used.
Similarly that when the Internet and the different websites were not fully categorized and search organized, we can play that role of helping what is safe and secure to give confidence for you or your agents to go and delegate those tasks. So now it's not only anymore about protecting a machine, then we were moving to protecting a user with multiple surface exposure. Now it's about protecting a user plus an infinite amount of agents that can represent that users. And so we definitely see this as a renewed need for our mission to play right in that center and that revolution.
Awesome. I appreciate all the color there. And just a quick follow-up on the MoneyLion business. Again, very solid growth there, 40%. I just want to confirm, where are you kind of in that shift over to kind of more subscriptions in that business? I think you noted that some of those are trending towards early access. But it seems like still very early days. But how at all is that impacting the growth in that business and then your outlook for trust-based services for the rest of the year?
Yes. 100%, and we said the mark for a very, how could I say, cautious pace, it doesn't mean a slow pace, but a cautious pace to make sure that we follow the consumer needs where they are, and we do not compromise the customer experience. MoneyLion itself in the financial wellness sector is growing ahead of market, continue to be very strong on both leg, the personal consumer offering led within Instacash but also membership savings account. And then with Engine, that's really outgrowing the rest. And today, the ratio is roughly 60% on the consumer side or the personal financial side and then 40% on the Engine side.
We continue to see steady growth. You mentioned 40%. We do have a good business responsible management where we set the long-term business growth at around 30% as we scale for a margin that is above 20%. And then when we see pocket of acceleration, we'll, of course, capture them as we saw this quarter.
As we continue to scale this business, the biggest opportunity for us is really to drive the revenue synergies across the portfolio. As we see our customers, already when they come to cyber safety, their #1 concern is to protect against a financial damage, to protect their financial health. And now with MoneyLion, as we embedded white label and created into our Norton and Avast, LifeLock applications, we enable the consumers to not only be protected but improve that position. We have a few activities put in. We started -- created Engine version into LifeLock, where we're redesigning the experience here. We've seen an increase -- a double-digit growth in LifeLock customer connecting their bank account into the LifeLock app to be able to detect anomalies and give advice on that. And that will continue as we said.
We launched last quarter Norton Money both in the employee benefit channel, which will only, as you know, show up materially at time of benefit inscription at the end of the calendar year. And then we also launched it into our own installed base to really refine and connect between cyber safety and financial wellness. And we see early adoption of -- and convergence of the need between the cybersecurity and the financial health position.
Those are really good fact patterns. We said that we'll start sizing revenue synergies and then overall long-term growth after this fiscal year, so probably in the May time frame for the next fiscal year.
The next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.
Great. Maybe I just wanted to spend a second on -- if you could kind of go more into the Equifax partnership and just how that can help drive incremental MoneyLion product adoption, if there's any kind of economics of the partnership that we should be mindful of.
Yes, very good. So you referred to our partnership we just announced 2 days ago with Equifax. Up to now and before we penetrated financial wellness, our relationship with the credit bureaus was essentially a vendor to customer relationship. We were consuming some of their data, some of their information to embed that into our proprietary algorithm and modules to give alerts to our customers, help them restore and serve them that peace of mind that their financial profile in the digital world was fully protected.
With MoneyLion, especially the Engine now, we're able to match financial institution offers with consumer traffic. And then, as you know, we already embedded in that some of the LifeLock benefits, some of the identity protection, and we have very strong momentum. That enabled us to have a very strong strategic discussion with Equifax, a 2-way discussion, and their strategy is essentially positioned on the financial institution, the SMB, the enterprise side if you want. And as we are very strongly and uniquely focused on the consumer side, coming together, if you want, we can bring more value to the customer.
So on one way, we now have deep access to their differentiated data set, not just credit monitoring but the credit block and some utilities and really expand the alerts and visibility for the consumers on their risk profile out there. And then they're going to use Engine on myequifax.com to bring all of their traffic a more personalized, both safety and financial solutions offering, which will increase, over time, obviously, monetization.
And then that strategic partnership will also enable to enrich the offers on the Engine as the financial partners that Equifax has relationship with will also then use that Engine platform. So feel pretty excited about that. We obviously look with -- to partner with many others in the industry to really provide this unique value proposition, this matchmaker, if you want, between financial solutions, safety at the core and then consumer with their needs.
Got it. And maybe just as a follow-up. I know you touched on it but kind of expanding on that last answer. Just any trends between first-party products and third-party products on the MoneyLion marketplace? Any material shifts in any direction?
So the short answer is all of the trends you've seen for the last 2, 3 quarters [ for Money ] have continued and continued. And that's what we embedded in our guidance, and January was no different either. We have grown, as I mentioned, our first-party product, which essentially was not from the Engine only but some of -- from the engine at the somewhat same growth rate at the Engine. And we cite Engine is pretty balanced on the first party and third party.
Obviously, where we're strong, like short-term lending and some of the credit builder, we lead in that subcategory. And in others where we don't have, of course, an offering, it could be a credit card or an insurance, we are obviously all third party.
The following question comes from Matt Hedberg with RBC.
Congrats on the results, really, really impressive. Natalie, you didn't talk about fiscal '27 and obviously, you're not guiding to it yet. But when we think about anniversarying MoneyLion, you talked a lot on this call about cross-sell and AI, additives. Are there any sort of high-level kind of early guardrails or kind of building blocks that we should think [ in reference to ] profitability?
Yes. In the overall business, I would point you to, outside of MoneyLion, we had said we wanted to drive a sustainable mid-single-digit rate of growth over the long term, and we have now done that for several quarters in a row. And so as we go into fiscal year '27 in that same type of period of long-term Analyst Day targets, I would point you to that.
Now parts of our business are growing faster than others, especially as you see the MoneyLion results and some of the areas of partner. But all of that's embedded in the guide. All of that is embedded in the mile markers that we put out there.
Specific guardrails as it pertains to fiscal year '27, I would point you back to that overarching growth and profitability architecture. Don't forget that we had the extra week in this fiscal year, so you definitely want to keep that in mind. Don't forget that the special tax is now behind us, and so that will give us a couple of hundred million dollars of additional capital allocation to go after and to deploy in a productive fashion. And then other than that, it's going to be balancing, making sure that we're investing for the long term while capturing the current demand and continuously driving a very efficient business.
That's great. That's super helpful. And then, Vincent, I wanted to double click back on MoneyLion synergies. It sounds like you're doing a lot right now. You talked about Money One, and it sounds like synergies maybe later in the year -- fiscal year here. I guess, when we start to think a little bit more broadly about some of these synergies, how do you think about bridging the gap between kind of the historical MoneyLion cohort and kind of your premium base? It feels like there could be a lot of synergies there. But could you see not only cross-selling synergies but also sort of benefiting your premium base?
Yes. Actually, we see synergies across the entire cohort as we see the convergence between cyber safety and financial wellness needs from a customer perspective. I mentioned the customer come to our portfolio for about 4 key reasons, and the #1 is always protect me against financial damage. That space, of course, has to run its course. And part of it is us educating, but of course, they have to realize our offering and experiences, et cetera. That's why sometimes you may feel it's slow, but we want to make sure we follow that customer experience.
Obviously, LifeLock customers, a little bit more -- or further away in that convergence because they already had organically in our portfolio moved from basic credit monitoring to monitoring your key assets like your home for home title, your bank account for anomalies, and we continue to expand that pool. And so that awareness, if you want, is strong. And now we can bring other additional value.
I think I had mentioned to you that one of the first realization that financial wellness was coming closer and closer is as we were monitoring those anomalies and we introduced our AI assistant into the environment, most of the question was not too much please spot the anomaly, was what can I do with it. Can I consolidate this? Can I save money here? And we didn't have at the time the value to deliver it.
Today with MoneyLion, which, of course, we're creating for a LifeLock customer journey experience, we'll be able to address all of that. So it's expanding that view. We're not approaching it as a cross-sell the same way that maybe a traditional cross-sell has been, and so it's much more customer-driven from a customer adoption using our assistants into the platform.
The next question comes from Saket Kalia with Barclays.
Okay. Great. And great to see the consistency. Vincent, maybe we'll start with you. There's clearly a lot of success on driving the top of the funnel, right, with various offerings, right? And of course, MoneyLion is the newest one. I'm curious how the addition of all these businesses and the growing membership mix is contributing to retention. I know that's not maybe the perfect metric to look at right now, but I'm just curious how you think about that just as you kind of build this flywheel.
Yes, absolutely. So before I talk about retention, I would say the customer experience is the most important. That's why very early on in our strategy, we took a modular white label approach in our stack. The second view is it's good to have your modular white label, so you can curate the user interface and experience to your brands. So it's part of your own journey as a special LifeLock customer or a Norton customer or an Avast customer, which is different in adoption of innovations and other things.
And then you really drive that. Now our second step is to drive that with intelligence. And so unifying our data set across all of our applications to drive intelligence and leverage those intelligence pools, of those LLMs across the different apps is adding more value, personalized, contextualized, finding that right moment of your needs, and that also is a big impact, a big driver in this multi-application or multi-brand portfolio.
And then to answer your question, if you do really well in customer experience and you find the right moment and the right intelligence, if you want to do it, you're going to have improved retention. Today, we have our cohort by cohort that continue to improve in retention. Of course, MoneyLion doesn't have subscriptions, so we do know about MoneyLion yet in terms of material retention pool. As we'll grow subscription, we'll be able to tell you more at that time. And overall, Gen retention has been stable.
Got it. Got it. Very helpful. Natalie, for my follow-up, maybe for you. It was great to see the strong capital return, I think, in $300 million in the quarter in both delevering and in buybacks. I was just wondering if there are any guardrails that you would have us think about for kind of how you'll deploy kind of going forward beyond Q3.
Yes, we were happy about this quarter. It's -- we generate such a substantial amount of free cash flow, and we really challenge ourselves to deploy that in a balanced fashion as fast and as efficiently as we can. And I think Q3 was reflective of that.
And Q3 is going to continue in terms of as we look into Q4 and we look into the fiscal year. The tenants are the same. We'll continue the dividend. We'll have a balanced approach across accelerated debt paydown and opportunistic share buyback. We have lots of room left in our buyback program. And as we look to the future, it's going to be a balance across the 2.
Keep in mind what I mentioned earlier. We will have a couple of hundred million more than we even did in fiscal year 2026 because we're through the transition tax that kind of hits us and has hit us for the last 6 years in Q2. So even though we already, on an annualized basis, generate enormous amount of free cash flow to deploy, we'll have even more next year to deploy. We'll do it in a balanced fashion.
We stay very committed to -- yes. And we stay very committed to -- like we put that under 3x net target out there for ourselves. We're really, really close. I mean, even if I look at -- in the next quarter or 2, we're going to organically be there through mandatory debt pay down and a little bit of accelerated debt. And so we'll continue the balanced approach. It's working for us.
The next question comes from Rob Coolbrith with Evercore.
Congratulations to the team on the strong results and outlook. Just wanted to ask on some of the investments you're making operationally in the business. Sales and marketing seem to be accelerated a bit in the quarter. I was just wondering if that's something that's reflective of inflation in the media cost environment or if that's in response to anything you're seeing in the business, maybe faster payback periods, stronger LTVs maybe on the Norton 360 mix shift, which sounds quite positive.
And then on R&D, it looks like you're seeing even stronger efficiency and productivity growth there. Just wanted to ask, anything new you could add on the use of AI within the organization, if that makes a strong contribution, just maybe better synergy realization. Anything more you might be able to add on that?
Yes. Thanks for the questions. We appreciate it. On sales and marketing, let me take that one. We have increased our sales and marketing. We continue to deploy in the market where we see the highest and the most efficient return. There's a few. We're definitely investing in capturing more on an acquisition front the bigger higher ROAS on the membership adoption, so the 360 memberships, to your point. We see that really taking off in the mobile, the customers that are being acquired through the App Store. That's driven by a lot of the new functionality that our team has built and expanded into the mobile channels. But it doesn't stop there. We're seeing the demand for the 360 memberships across the board. That's fantastic.
We continue to invest in MoneyLion, both on the first and the third party. We see well-balanced growth, even higher than we had indicated to you guys, higher than our expectations, higher than the average industry growth. So we saw both first party and third party growing at approximately 40% in the quarter and so continuously investing in healthy returns to shore that up.
And then just generally across the board, we're very, very diversified across the channels. We really just operate in a disciplined fashion to create the capacity to invest more and more in sales and marketing because we want those healthy returns. We want to make sure that we're acquiring the right cohorts at the right high so that we continue to sustainably grow at that mid-single-digit rate of growth.
And so yes, for Q3, I'm proud of the team. And then every quarter, we just get smarter and smarter through the analytic and the tools that we're using on those returns on that CLV over CAC, and that continues to be a horse that we'll ride to drive our revenue growth.
Cool. And then maybe I'll take the R&D. And then, Roger (sic) [ Rob ], as you analyze it, also keep in mind that the MoneyLion business and you have the public data from prior acquisition versus a core security business have different profiles. Obviously, the MoneyLion is more -- a little bit more in cost of goods sold, a little bit more in S&M, a little bit less in R&D. And I would say our security business is exactly the reverse. So you do have a little bit of a mix impact.
On R&D, though, we're doing pretty cool things. I mentioned, I think a few times, that we have 2 big buckets of AI initiatives. One, we call them AI-native portfolio, and it's really about rebuilding many of our new applications or features with, first, an AI lens as opposed to introducing AI feature into it, redesigning it from an AI native view.
And then the second one is changing our functions to be AI first. And there are 3 buckets that are making really progress. One is in our support area. The second one is in our marketing area, and the third is in R&D. And there is no order of priorities on those.
We're making really good progress on redesigning how we approach software development and product from ideation to product launch. We have a set of seeds, I would call that we say -- we call [ Gen acorn ], and it's basically a squad of 3, a PM, an R&D developer and a design person, and they have to drive everything from ideation to product using only AI tools. And we're running experiment. We're still in the learning phase, but super exciting by how the capacity, if you want, to test, learn and put to market new products at the speed of -- never equaled before.
That will continue to lower your cost of overall R&D. We're trying to bring that approach into our more infrastructure, so into the licensing system, into the billing system, which takes a little bit more time versus the ideation. But I think the world is here to change, and we've got to be at the forefront of it and leverage the full benefit of it.
Our final question comes from Joseph Gallo with Jefferies.
I really appreciate it. Earlier in the call, you talked about protecting the user and the incident amount of agents that represent that user. How should we think about the ASP uplift or monetization opportunity there? Just can you share a little bit more details on that opportunity?
Yes. We are absolutely not yet the level of discussing an ARPU, an ASP. This is really a fast evolving -- I was going to say evolution. I should say, revolution happening. Even people who are not technically savvy, like some of my dear Board members, are calling and say, "Oh my God, I use OpenClaw and now I've connected my e-mail and my calendars, and I don't know what's working. Can we please undo it? I'm worried." And so we see that real time, real life with people adopting it.
Right now, there is a gap to fill, which is providing that safety the same way that antivirus suddenly provided safety into the operating system at the beginning of its life that was not focusing on security, more on all the features. We believe there's a similar need here into the AI economy, and we were going to move super-fast on that. There is no doubt in our mind that as we continue to expand that and able to protect not only the users but now the exponential amount of agents they may use, they would be willing to pay for that pain point because we see it real life that it is a pain point and a worry for those who are using it.
That's really helpful. Maybe just as a follow-up, I mean, you guys have done a tremendous job of beating the expectations you've laid out. As we think about 4Q guidance, is there anything we should consider in terms of macro or as we're getting used to MoneyLion, just anything to call out in terms of seasonality there?
I think just from a current consideration standpoint, everything is baked into either our actuals or we're just -- we're responding to what we know of right now. I don't really look at macro factors and try and fold in or weave in anything specific with the unknown. And I would include FX in that. So the currencies that we assume are what we already know and what's already in the Q3 actuals. Anything else that you...
Well, if I can add, obviously, you've seen the consumer sentiment being at a multiyear low. But I would say the last months, maybe the last few months have been stable at that level. And obviously, the need we address, whether it's security or, frankly, financial health to be able to survive in that are all super relevant in that environment. So notwithstanding a onetime special, crazy environment that could happen in the world, we do feel that even though it's low, it's stable.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.
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Gen Digital — Q3 2026 Earnings Call
Gen Digital — Barclays 23rd Annual Global Technology Conference
1. Question Answer
Well, hey, good morning, everyone. Welcome to day 1 of the Barclays Tech Conference. My name is Saket Kalia. I cover software here. And I'm honored to have with us the team from Gen Digital. Of course, we have Vincent Pilette, Chief Executive Officer; as well as Natalie Derse, Chief Financial Officer. And also, we've got Jason Starr in IR somewhere back there. I thought he was here. He was just here, Jason Starr.
He's there.
So just to frame today, we've got about 30 minutes together. Let's take the first 20 or 25 minutes to go through some fireside chat. There's Jason. Hey, man. We've got about -- let's take the first 20 or 25 minutes to kind of go through some fireside chat with Vincent and Natalie, which I know is going to be fun. And then we'd love to make this interactive. So if you've got any questions, just pop up your hand, we'll get a mic over to you to make sure we get it out. So with that, Vincent, Natalie, thank you so much for being with here today.
Thank you.
Thanks for the invitation, and good morning. Thanks for paying attention to Gen.
It wouldn't be a Barclays Tech Conference without you.
Thank you.
So I mean, no. So maybe a good starting point for those in the room that might be less familiar with Gen Digital because it's changed so much over the years. Vincent, can you just give us a brief overview of the business and your brands that some of us may not have heard of. Natalie, related for you, maybe you can just give us an overview of some of the main financial highlights that you were most proud of coming out of last quarter. There's a lot to be proud of, right? So I'm sure that will be a fun thing but maybe Vincent, you can start us off.
Yes, absolutely. So again, thanks for coming. I used to say that Gen is probably the least known tech company on S&P 500. Yet, we are the leader in cyber safety dedicated to the individuals or consumers. So we're helping people be safe online and be protected from a very dynamic threat landscape that's evolving at rapid pace, especially now with the use of AI and data to personalize that threat. We have about 77 million paid customers, 200 million active users on our cyber safety platform, 500 million endpoints. And we acquired those customers through products that are sold to 4 key brands: Norton, Avast, LifeLock as the cyber safety brand and now the MoneyLion as a financial wellness brand.
As we acquired that leadership position in cyber safety for consumers, we decided to move to the next part of our strategy, which really is tackling the next pain point for our customers. And most of our customers are coming to cyber safety because they want to protect their financial position, their financial wellness or want to improve it. And the second part of that strategy is about that. It's about fixing their financial wellness, helping them both manage and grow their financial position. We recognize that about 2/3 of people in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck, that about half of the financial products sold in the marketplace to consumers is actually done outside of the primary bank of that consumer.
And when they shop, they shop in trusted platform at moment of their journey, financial [ journey ], where they have the need. And it's that trust and that moment of truth that they look for as they shop for financial product. And so we felt that tackling that new category that I would call embedded financial wellness, we call it secure financial wellness is really mixing that security, that trust with the next pain point for you, which is managing the financial wellness. We acquired MoneyLion about 6 -- sorry, 2 quarters ago, about 6 months to really accelerate our transformation and bringing it all together. And then Natalie will tell you everything we're proud about and we've delivered over the last 6 months.
Yes.
Funny side. Sorry, I have to interrupt you for a second. I think MoneyLion was announced near to the day today. Very good, so it's been year.
Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
I'm so sorry to interrupt, Natalie, please.
No problem. So Q2 was a really strong quarter for us. And I would say the summary is it was really strong growth in a very, very profitable manner with strong free cash flow. And the details around that in the quarter, we grew 25%, 27%, whether you're talking about bookings or revenue. We delivered from a profitability perspective, very strong margins. And it's our eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit EPS growth alongside very strong KPI performance, whether it's the customers, whether it's the core calisthenic metrics that we've got in the core business. And we did that all through closing now the second quarter with MoneyLion in the family.
MoneyLion growing almost 50% in the first half, the first 2 quarters that we have had them in the family, so to speak. And the core business just continues to be consistently growing in line with what we set as our expectation a couple of years ago at our last Analyst Day. We've now had 4 consecutive quarters of 4% to 5% growth in the core business, MoneyLion aside. So we're really, really proud of that. And the EPS growing faster than revenue, in line with our expectation is just a sign and the commitment that we are committed to returning free cash flow -- all the free cash flow back to shareholders.
Yes, absolutely. Great EPS compounding story for sure. Vincent, maybe on MoneyLion. Again, about a year since we announced the deal. If I remember correctly, about 2/3 of that business was consumer-related, right, where customers were buying personal financial management tools or PFM tools, while about 1/3 of it was kind of enterprise marketplace. And the key there with that latter point was this matching engine for financial products on that engine. So maybe for you, Vincent, can we just dig one level deeper into each of those segments? And most importantly, why was that a strategic fit with Gen's consumer cyber safety business?
All right. Let me start by -- and then do a little bit of working back to how we got into financial wellness. We moved historically from a device security-based environment where the threat landscape was mainly malware attacking device to really being user-centric, protecting your digital footprint from all various sorts of attacks that exist out there, and that's an evolving framework. We moved from being protecting your digital form to protecting your digital identity, protecting your entire digital footprint. As we were doing that, more and more customers started to say it's not just, okay, to just protect my passwords, my identity in the web. It's also can you protect my financials. And so we introduced in LifeLock have the opportunity to plug your bank account and for us to monitor all of the transaction, unusual transaction, or potential financial fraud, merged with our anti-scam and all of the scamming threats that exist out there.
As more and more of our customers were moving into that direction, they were asking more and more financial insights. Hey, what can I do? What are the memberships that I could eliminate? How do I rationalize my credit cards? What do I do? Different things. And as we move into that insight, we're feeling like we are limiting our capacity. And so we said we're going to move to extend to the next product features or product set, which was a personal financial management app or set of features that naturally you can move into. So that's the first anchor coming from a very strong consumer-centric product set, extending that into what is a set of PFM tools. And that range from managing just visibility, managing cash flow, managing savings all the way to managing investments. And then we still had the comments about the insight. I mentioned that half of the financial products are consumed outside of the primary bank into trusted platforms.
And so we're also looking at bringing some of those offers and opportunities to the consumers inside the experience. So as we were building that, naturally, our first organic set towards adding the feature in LifeLock, then coming up with Norton Money, we're looking what is the best architecture out there. That's when we met MoneyLion team. First for a partnership. They're the first team in financial technology or in financial wellness that started about 12, 15 years ago with a platform ID in mind. Now everybody today says, I come from a specific feature, it could be a very great savings anchor or different things, and then they'll expand into platform. MoneyLion started with a full set of features. Even though they may have concentrated on a customer segment that is earlier in their financial journey and needs cash flow management, they really had a set of features.
And then they had bought a small asset that they developed called Engine, which is an embedded marketplace. So it's technology driven. It's not just traffic web marketing, it's technology-oriented, but you can embed it into many different experiences to then bring a catalog to consumers that are shopping for different options to improve their financial wellness position. So we like that a lot. The partnership discussions led into an acquisition because we felt bringing the 2 assets together was the best for us. And since then, we've had the opportunity to bring all of our consumers, prime consumers.
I mentioned over 70 million paid customers, 200 million free users to improve the richness of that catalog with more and more financial institutions coming in and looking at that opportunity to go and serve more consumers. So since then, since we acquired them, we've had very strong organic growth in that category. The marketplace itself, the Engine has been growing over 50% now for 3 quarters in a row. And we see tremendous opportunity in that not only to embed it into our own applications and user experience in Norton or in LifeLock or in Avast, but also to offer to third party like a CNBC or a Forbes to embed it into their own offering with their own brand to match their consumers with other financial products enriched and then we have the full visibility on the entire committee.
That gives us tremendous visibility from a data perspective on consumer behaviors, what they want and through AI and machine learning environment, really matching the consumer needs at the moment of truth through LifeLock and other applications. You know we have an asset. We know you're protecting your home, you have an insurance on that, you need to renew it. We can also bring the marketplace and offer you the best rate. And so since then, the marketplace has outgrown a little bit, our PFM tool both have grown. So it's a ratio more of 60-40 versus 1/3, 2/3, but they stay in that position. Our next big thing, of course, is to bring that financial wellness to all of our 77 million paid customers and then expanding that to our 200 million active free users, which we've barely scratched the surface on.
That was super helpful. And I think I see the strategy behind sort of marrying cyber safety with financial wellness. Maybe just for those investors that aren't as familiar with the space in which MoneyLion competes in, maybe the follow-up question for you, Vincent, is why was this the leading asset in the space, right? And presumably, there were other options. The Engine seems very differentiated, right? But maybe on the PFM side, why was this the leading asset when certainly speaking for myself, I probably use, I think, my bank app. I imagine a lot of people are similar. Why was this the best asset as you thought about the space?
Yes. So I first want to start with your initial comment, which is scaling, it's interesting, people may not fully understand. When we bought MoneyLion, people were surprised how does cyber safety fit with financial wellness. And for those who were following our company for a long time, I want to bring you back to 2018. The Norton division that was still very much device-centric from a security perspective at the time, bought LifeLock, which was initially credit monitoring. And every investor said like, "Oh, I don't understand this purchase. What is this about?" And as you remember.
I remember, yes.
We got plenty of pushback that did not fully understood. 2019, we merged the 2 assets and came up with the cyber safety platform, which was, hey, I'm going to protect your digital footprint, you as users forget your devices. You have your devices protected, but there's a lot more to it. And then we're going to evolve credit monitoring as one of the dimension of your identity, and we're going to provide you both identity and privacy services and solutions in that membership. When we launched Norton 360, which was the full spectrum of our portfolio, within a few months or a couple of quarters, we got like a 60% adoption rate and very strong. And then, of course, competition followed. And today, if you look at assets that are focused on consumer cyber safety, nobody is thinking just device. They're all thinking about the broad view in cyber safety, including identity, including credit monitoring. I think even Microsoft including their credit monitoring in the application, which I don't think it really fits there.
And because they understand that's how consumers look at it today. I predict that within the next 5 years, financial wellness will be symbiotic with cyber safety. It will be about protecting your digital footprint and giving you as a consumer, the ability to use that privacy, that protection to get to services or solutions that require you to use that PI environment to get a better service or a better value. And so while today, to some investors and maybe even to some of our customers, they don't totally understand yet how it fits together as we continue to merge the platform, as we continue to communicate the value, you're going to see a very fast adoption rate. And I can tell you, within the next couple of years, maybe 5 years, everybody that's looking at cyber safety will have some element of financial wellness into their offering. Now why was MoneyLion a great asset? I think we like a lot of things.
But the #1 thing we like is that they were a tech company that really, as I mentioned, developed that platform view. And as you know, at Gen, we have a white label modular architecture strategy that we rewrote when we acquired Avast to be able to serve all of the customers and the brand being mainly around the user experience and the user journey, not around the tech stack. That's solely standardized and then we have the data platform supporting it. And MoneyLion had a similar approach, if you want, not the best from a technology perspective. We love the marketplace. Many of the fintech assets are more on the PFM side with single product view than extending to a platform, but don't have a marketplace. That is a richness for us. And so a tech company that has a platform idea with the marketplace felt was the right view. And then just you know we got it to a very good price, too.
Yes, absolutely. It's a great reminder that LifeLock was a very forward-thinking acquisition. I can certainly tag to that.
At the time.
Yes, for sure. Natalie, I want to stay on MoneyLion with you as well because I think what we said on the last quarter is that this would be exiting this year at 30% growth, which I think was another raise in the guidance for that business. I think one question that I get to be completely honest is, Saket, I don't know anything about MoneyLion's market with PFM or Engine. Is this 30% growth sustainable? And so maybe the question for you, Natalie, is how do you think about market growth, maybe MoneyLion's ability to take share and ultimately, what that normalized growth rate is? Does that make sense?
Yes. So before we acquired them, MoneyLion was growing on average 30%. And when we look at, albeit MoneyLion is a beautiful unicorn business for all the reasons that Vincent just walked you through. But in summary, it would be they not only have great first-party products, but they have the marketplace, they have the Engine. They have a fantastic app experience. Their customer experience and engagement is really, really high and very, very fresh. And so we believe that they are going to outpace the market, but there's many, many ways that they can do that.
And so yes, the last couple of quarters, we've been in the 45% to 50% mark. That didn't come for free. They had launches. They had programs. They had -- they really drove that growth. But as we look at the overall market and we look at how fast competition is coming in and the competitive landscape as well as we integrate the business and really come up with those use cases of where we can really leverage the 77 million paid customers on the Gen side, how that's all coming together. That's where the 30% exit rate is coming from. Is there opportunity to go faster, stronger? Absolutely. But in terms of where the market is, it's around 30%.
Well, that's really impressive.
And I think, Saket, if I can add, I don't think investors have fully understood how to move with financial wellness, MoneyLion, both PFM and the marketplace has opened up the door for opportunities. We moved from originally 10 years ago, that's very product-centric. I have an antivirus, I downloaded on the machine. Since then, of course, it moved to a membership. I have a very strong platform on protecting all of your digital platform. We're extending that now to protect and empower you in the digital life. And not only we get the best PFM for financial wellness, which is the MoneyLion features, but we get this marketplace. That marketplace today is offering consumers the best visibility of everything they can do from a financial wellness perspective, best credit card, best loan, best insurance, et cetera. And it's really targeted inside the app through an AI-powered, call it, a matching view, so match.com inside our marketplace and taking your data that you already want to protect, you want to protect your home, you have this, you have a mortgage.
We can say it's time to renew your insurance and you have the best insurance. And it's all of that as an experience, including the card and exit inside the app without getting out. That is a fantastic experience. We are extending that marketplace to nonfinancial products. And so suddenly, I'll give you a small example, like a lot of our customers inside LifeLock that have a certain number of assets are asking about, hey, what about will and trust? What do I do with that asset? Yes. And so in the past, we were thinking about we don't have the expertise. How do we go and develop that? Do we want to do an acquisition? How do we want to approach it?
Today, the marketplace offer us the opportunity to have the consumer in the app to go and consume the next need, the logical need in this digital journey without having us to go and build it first and sell it to a third party. Based on that consumption, we have even more data to understand the need and can pick and choose where we invest and what we develop as first-party product versus leave as third-party product. And now it's a full ecosystem with the underlying data across our brand, across our app that enables to give you personalized, contextualized digital experience based on your needs, you're going to have different features into the app and the Engine creates this full ecosystem of first-party and third-party offering. That is entirely changing the game the way we think about innovation and what we can do versus just selling one product to a customer.
So that's a great segue into one of the follow-ups Natalie that I had for you just on the engine piece. When we were together at NASDAQ a couple of months ago, we were kind of talking about sort of this 30, 60, 90 framework, right, for that business. Can you just walk through an example of each and why it's important now that Gen has so many more customers under the umbrella?
Yes, sure. The easiest one is the first-party product, and it's just a very high-margin business. It's -- we are going direct to the customers either in the app or the Engine. but it's just a normal sale, so to speak. That's the easiest one. And then the other one would be the Engine where we bring -- it's almost like the marketplace where you bring the buyers and sellers together. So we've got inventory there. We have to pay a rev share to the seller and then we obviously have the buyer transaction. And you just share the margin in terms of that transaction.
And then the other one would be -- the 90% would be when you think about the 77 million paid customers, they're in our ecosystem already. There is no CAC, right? So there is -- all you've got is just mostly the revenue. And so you're going to have very, very little cost of goods sold on that transaction, and that's where that 90% comes from. And that's where all of the synergistic opportunity that we're talking about in terms of bringing the existing highly valued, highly tenured customers in the Gen portfolio over to the MoneyLion side and vice versa, that's where that 90% ecosystem comes from.
Yes, absolutely. So basically, you've got this kind of captive customer base that through the engine, you can kind of cross-sell them financial products as they mature in their sort of own financial journey, if that makes sense, right?
Absolutely. And then on the other side, someone like probably 3 of us sitting on the stage, right, in terms of you want to make more money on your money, right? And so now we're also going to be in that ecosystem and in that marketplace with high-quality inventory. We believe that the MoneyLion inventory in that third-party marketplace is already high valued. And imagine now with the brand recognition that we've got with LifeLock and Norton and the conversations that we can have, now you're in the JPMorgan Chase, you're in the Chase Sapphire, that type of inventory increase in quality more targeted to a highly valued LifeLock customer is going to appear in the marketplace as well.
Understood. Understood.
There was a simple flywheel of, as you know, in the past, ARPU retention times the number of customers equal your revenue becomes suddenly a multidimensional set of flywheels. And we still are playing with all those dimensions to really follow the customer in their journeys, but the number of opportunities is exploding. With that, of course, you have different margin profiles, but we really manage the business on the total growth of total profit dollars or EPS dollars. And then we manage each business segment or each flywheel within its own ecosystem.
Absolutely. There's -- we spent so much time on MoneyLion. I want to zoom out a little bit and try to put all this together. And Natalie, when we think about this from the revenue side, definitely when it comes to the profitability and EPS side. But I think what we said in the last call was that total revenue grew 10% year-over-year this quarter pro forma for MoneyLion. So assuming MoneyLion were part of the business last year. We can all take estimates for how to think about growth next year, right? But what are some of the puts and takes that we should think about as we think about revenue growth in fiscal '27 when you lap MoneyLion, we've got some timing stuff with like an extra week. Maybe some of those puts and takes. I understand you can't guide yet, but what are some of the puts and takes that we should be thinking about?
Sure, let's start with where we are now. We've delivered the first half really, really strong, $200 million of additional revenue, a couple of beaten raises. So we're in a great position as we enter into the second half. We believe that we will continue to drive and achieve the revenue synergistic opportunities that Vincent has laid out here. The core business, like I said, has been now 4 quarters in a row at a 4% to 5% growth. We expect that to continue as we really have the majority of the team still focused on driving the core fundamentals of our Norton and LifeLock and Avast businesses. The metrics are strong and trending in the right direction.
And let's not forget that we just continuously drive a high amount of free cash flow, EPS growing double digit now for 8 consecutive quarters, and we stay committed to that guide point that we laid out even 2 years ago, we said 12% to 15% growth in EPS over the long term. And now we've done that for 8 quarters in a row that will continue. And then just from a capital allocation perspective, we have a lot of free cash flow generation, whether you talk about levered or unlevered. And so now that we are fully through the MoneyLion close and integration and as we enter into the second half, we've got a lot of opportunistic share buyback opportunity as well as accelerated debt paydown opportunity, and we're going to do a balanced approach for that.
Yes, absolutely. I want to move to margins here in a second. But any questions here from the audience before I move there?
And maybe if I can add on.
Sure, Vincent.
When I became CEO, they told me to get out of the guidance and let Natalie speak. And she did a fabulous job. We never missed a quarter since we've been together. But the way I'm visualizing our overall environment and supported by the view is we have different entry doors to our portfolio. You can come from a need for security. You can come for a need for privacy. You can come for a need for identity management or you can come from financial wellness. Each one of our doors are growing and are outgrowing their respective market, whether it's MoneyLion, the highest growth, identity and privacy or security, all are growing in the current category, all of our competitors and we're going to grow. They have different growth profile, but all customers are good. And then our role, as we continue to use the personalized -- or we continue to personalize the environment for them to contextualize our offering is to move more and more customers to that full membership.
A security customers will quickly come into security and privacy. We barely scratch the surface to move to financial wellness. Somebody comes on financial wellness is already begging for an anti-scam to SKUs that we have from our overall portfolio or SKUs around credit monitoring, which we had into LifeLock. And so quickly, we're going to come into those bundles of those memberships. That surface of cross revenue synergies expanding is at the early journey in an overall journey we see. And that, for me, is the biggest opportunity we have. Now I don't know about next year guidance, but every day, in each category, we beat the market, and then we try to bring more value to our customers. That's how we're thinking about our portfolio.
Yes, absolutely. Now I want to touch on margins a little bit. I think we're at about 51% operating margins currently, which digested even a little bit of the MoneyLion dilution, which makes sense given the faster growth that, that business brings. Vincent, you touched on revenue synergies and maybe there's a membership opportunity there. By the way, I'm a very happy member of LifeLock and Norton for what it's worth.
Thank you for that.
Yes, absolutely. But from -- where are we sort of on the journey around expense synergies around MoneyLion, understanding that wasn't really the main purpose of the acquisition, but where are we on that journey?
I'm good. It's been a long time since you asked me about cost synergies, which in MoneyLion, we have a very strong record. We acquire assets. We immediately integrate it into our overall architecture strategy and then all operations are integrated. We move Avast to a very, very strong margin very first. I think we generated over $300 million of cost synergies every one of the assets. We are a serial acquirer, but we've only done 5 acquisitions, many of small size in 5 years. So it's not like we're doing all the time. But we have a good strong operating cadence. So MoneyLion got integrated immediately. We put into the business, functionalized the back end and then enabled that financial wellness entry door to operate and be in its own market. When we bought it, operating margin was at around 14%, 15%. In the last 2 quarters, it went between 20% and 22%, and we'll continue to improve that.
So from a cost synergy, if you want, that is a done deal. At this point in time, it's about really driving the mix. And as Natalie mentioned, cross-selling, coming to membership because today, MoneyLion is mainly transaction fee-based revenue or lead-gen revenue, moving to membership. If you come to us to monitor your credit, you also have a kit that needs to be building up their credit, which is a feature for MoneyLion and you want to have a full credit journey. So we'll have a membership credit journey view. You may want to have a fully embedded view between a LifeLock and a financial wellness that will be another offering. And so we're testing at this point in time all of that, which will continue to improve both the reliability, reliance, predictability of our overall revenue model and as you know, improve the margin as we continue to create that...
Yes, absolutely. Natalie, I want to go back to a mechanical question of it. I just want to make sure we touch on it. Remind me, this fiscal year, we had like an extra week. It was something weird, right, with an extra week. Can you remind us what -- how much revenue that added just as we think about what adjustments we need to be thinking about for next year around forecasting revenue?
Yes. I think it happens every 7 years is what I believe, and it was about $85 million. And so that won't obviously repeat. So yes, please definitely take that into account as you look at next year. But the exciting part of next year, and we can't wait to talk to you about it, just we're really working through all of the great stuff, all the great ideas, all the green shoots as we get into the back half. And then we really look to next year, kicking it off in May when we do earnings. We'll have the privilege to give you the full year guidance for next year, and then we'll be in a much better position to really, really give you meat on the bone, so to speak, as it pertains to how we're going to drive all of the revenue synergies and the growth expansion that Vincent has out laid here.
Boy, excited about giving guidance for next year. I can't think of a better way to end. Vincent and Natalie, thank you so much for the time. A lot of exciting things to talk about here.
Thank you very much.
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Gen Digital — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Lauren, and I will be your conference operator today. Today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]
At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Jason Starr, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Lauren, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Gen's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Vincent Pilette, CEO; and Natalie Derse, CFO. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the Investor Relations website, along with our slides and press release.
I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, all references to the financial metrics are non-GAAP, and all growth rates are year-over-year unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our press release and earnings presentation, both of which are available on our IR website at investor.gendigital.com. We encourage investors to monitor this website as we routinely post investor-oriented information such as news and events and financial filings.
Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance and operations, including the impact of our business -- on our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties and that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations as of today's date, November 6, 2025. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.
For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.
And now I'll turn the call over to Vincent.
Thanks, Jason. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Gen's results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026. This was another quarter of outstanding execution, exceeding our expectations as we capitalize on our global user base and compounding data advantage. We delivered record revenue and earnings, continued to drive strong customer and bookings growth and are making clear progress with our portfolio transformation. This performance demonstrates the strength and resilience of our business, underpinned by a high-margin subscription model now expanding into faster-growing adjacencies in secure financial awareness. It also reflects our strategic position as the most trusted partner in protecting digital lives, bringing confidence in a complex and increasingly AI-driven world.
Before diving into the numbers, it is important to recognize the environment in which we operate. Consumers today face a rapidly evolving threat landscape. They face a new generation of cyber threats like AI-powered pishing, deepfakes, inner circle in presentation and identity tests driven by large-scale data breaches. These threats are increasingly personalized, sophisticated and harder to detect.
The financial impact is real and rising. Cyber crimes against consumers are projected to exceed $15 billion annually in the U.S. alone, growing at double-digit rates. Meanwhile, Financial wellness is a very real and prevalent consumers' need. 2/3 of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, often stitching together their financial lives across multiple digital platforms beyond traditional banks. In this environment, risk and financial wellness are deeply interconnected. When people live with little financial buffer, an incident of identity test, a fortune charge or even a scam can quickly upend their finances. The stake go beyond security and protection, they are also about trust and well-being.
People aren't just searching for another financial product, they're seeking for a trusted and reliable partner, one that can secure their identity, protect their data, safeguard their privacy and empower their financial well-being through trusted decisioning along their journey. And that is exactly the role Gen is built to play, and we are uniquely positioned to be the global consumer cyber safety and fintech leader now and in the future agented that is emerging around us.
Let me review some of the highlights of the current quarter. We generated just over $1.2 billion in revenue, up 25% year-over-year. Our consumer FinTech business, MoneyLion, delivered another exceptional quarter, growing 50%. And when including MoneyLion's results in the prior year, Gen grew revenue 10%, matching our strong Q1 performance. We continue to operate with financial discipline maintaining a non-GAAP operating margin above 50% and driving a non-GAAP EPS result of $0.62, up 15% year-over-year even as we continue to make disciplined growth investments throughout our technology stack in AI, data and platform architecture.
These disciplined investments will continue to fortify our global leadership and over time, further compound allowing us to offer even more offers, services and value to our customers to help them lead secure and safe financial and digital lives.
Similar to Q1, our performance was broad-based. We generated growth across our Norton, Avast, LifeLock and MoneyLion brands. Our bookings for the Cyber Safety segment grew 5% year-over-year coupled with a robust operating margin of 61% and healthy and stable customer retention. During the quarter, we expanded our scam and deepfake protection powered by Norton Genie Pro and Gardin to help users combat the rapid rise in AI-based camps.
Early adoption is strong and accelerating. We support in over 40 languages and more countries coming on later this year. We are driving rapid development with our cyber safety assistant, delivering actionable insights to Norton 360 users. As more innovation is integrated into our cyber safety suite, we are seeing higher engagement, which we believe is helping drive strong Norton 360 and Avast One membership growth.
Our refreshed privacy portfolio is also gaining momentum. Following the Norton VPN improvements, which we released earlier this year and several positive reviews in leading tech publications that have boosted market awareness, using privacy have accelerated to double-digit growth. We also -- on small business solution, combining security and financial protection features for entrepreneurs and teams. These efforts align with Gen's strategic direction to penetrate new customer cohorts combining technology leadership and improved user experience.
Independent testing continues to validate our leadership as Norton and Avast to remain the top 2 brands in consumer protection and will continue to drive additional innovation in the portfolio through new features such as our AI-driven customer renewal model. Overall, cyber safety provides an important needed value proposition to consumers as we continue to operate this business with discipline, driving stable and profitable growth.
Our Trust-based Solutions segment delivered another standout quarter with revenue up over 25% on a pro forma basis, while operating margin came in at our 30% target. Our trusted brand lifelog remains the leader in identity protection, allowing consumers to support their financial journey with the best credit reputation, consuming financial products at those moments of truth when identity, reputation and financial well-being intersect.
MoneyLion exceptional results across our first-party personal finance products, and our engine marketplace demonstrate our disciplined execution unrivaled portfolio and the strong signal demand for our secure financial wellness services. The integration of MoneyLion has been one of our smoothest yet. With cost synergies delivered ahead of plan, we are now unlocking revenue synergies by unifying best-in-class data systems and solutions across our cyber safety and trust-based solutions. We have embraced Money Line's experimentation and innovation DNA and are focused on building new features in a category that is still transforming, incorporating best practices from all of our businesses will ensure cutting-edge product performance, but also multiple opportunities to cross-promote our features to consumers across channels such as the planned launch of EWA feature in our employee benefit channel.
We have begun rolling out early access financial wellness features across selected Gen brands, including LifeLock and Norton, marking a key step in expanding our ecosystem. This includes the early launch of Northern Money, a unified platform that combines credit monitoring, identity protection, financial insight and a created marketplace. We have also embedded a robust credit card marketplace for LifeLock customers a natural extension of the credit monitoring features that are increasingly engaging with.
Continued excellence in embedding AI-powered financial recommendations and insight is a natural use of our data advantage to help consumers make even better financial decisions. The LifeLock and Norton consumers will no longer need to leave the ecosystem for customized precise recommendations that can improve their financial lives. These initiatives reflect our broader ambition to build the leading decisioning platform for consumers secure financial empowerment.
Gen now serves hundreds of millions of active and premium customers across our ecosystem, creating a substantial base for future financial product and subscription cross-sell monetization. This strategy drives lifetime value expansion and sets up a strong growth trajectory. This is exactly what we outlined in our strategic vision for secure financial wellness to enrich Gen's ecosystem by leveraging our trusted data platform where every decision and transaction feels secure, permitted and contextual and embedding financial wellness like digital banking insights, precision marketplace payments into our cyber safety and identity protection and
AI is now the connective tissue of everything we do across innovation, products, marketing and customer experience. In cyber safety, AI powers behavioral-based that detection and real-time scam identification, protecting users from phishing, deepfakes and other emerging forms of attacks.
In financial wellness, the MoneyLion engine leverages AI through Spark, our proprietary underwriting platform that matches customers with the best and most relevant financial products, personalizing and accelerating their decision-making. Our AI Norton Neobrowser personalized browsing by introducing safe and private memory support, transforming each browser instance into a unique personal assistant that user can trust. Within our customer success organization, we improved retention through tailored offers and enhanced user satisfaction and drove sustainable long-term revenue growth. As we unify our customer data securely, we are developing personalized and permissioned AI-powered outcomes, redefining the trusted value we bring to consumers. Operationally, AI is already delivering tangible productivity gains. Our customer support automation and agentic framework continues to mature, now handling 55% of text-based chat and 40% of voice-based interactions driving over 20% cost efficiencies in this function to reallocate towards our platform investment.
In R&D, we have applied agentic AI across the entire product development large cycle enabling us to shift over time, resources for maintenance towards innovation and ultimately boost product velocity. And finally, in marketing, we have built an AI-enabled ecosystem that accelerates creative production and enhance productivity across every team from upper to lower funnel. This shift is creating a more agile data informed marketing organization that is operating at the pace of our ambitious innovation. We're very excited about the scale and growth we can deliver through this strategy through our global data advantage and the consumer trust.
With a strong first half results and increased visibility in the second half of the year, we are raising our annual guidance at $95 million at the midpoint of our prior revenue range representing over [ 25% ] growth on a reported basis. This underscores the momentum we see in our business as we transform into a customer-centric platform, leveraging our skilled customer base and using our data mode to do our personalization and trust at the core of our business.
In summary, we delivered another very strong quarter and are raising our annual guidance again demonstrating our strategy is working. We are ahead of plan with MoneyLion and setting our sights on capturing further growth synergies and leading with innovation and grounded in trust. We are building the first AI-powered platform with a trust layer that unites security, privacy, identity and financial wellness solutions into a market advantage that no one else holds at scale.
Our ecosystem brings together a portfolio of competitive first-party products in cyber safety and trust-based solutions and an expanding partner network that underpins our engine marketplace to also provide leading third-party products and solutions for our customers. And all of it is supported by a customer-driven platform that deliver personalization and contextualization at key moments of truth.
To our investors and partners, I want to thank you for your confidence. To our employees I want to thank you for your relentless commitment to our customers and to fulfilling our mission of powering digital freedom. Gen is executing with momentum, discipline and purpose, and our opportunity has never been greater.
And now I will turn it over to Natalie to discuss our financial results and financial guidance in more detail.
Thank you, Vincent, and hello, everyone. For today's call, I will walk through our Q2 results and also provide some additional color on our performance metrics. I'll then conclude by providing our outlook for Q3 and fiscal year 2026. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and year-over-year growth rates, unless otherwise stated. I will also include commentary on our pro forma growth, which include MoneyLion's results from the prior year for comparative purposes.
Now on to our results. Q2 was another strong quarter for Gen with better-than-expected results. On a reported basis, Q2 bookings and revenue were over $1.2 billion, up 27% and 25% year-over-year, respectively. On a pro forma basis, Q2 revenue grew 10%, consistent with last quarter. And excluding MoneyLion, Q2 revenue grew 5%, which is consistent quarter-over-quarter performance and in line with our commitments.
In our Cyber Safety segment, bookings was up 5% and revenue was up over 3% with broad-based growth across channels. With our expanded scan protection features and cyber safety AI assistant, helping consumers outpace emerging threats. This has translated into strong sales of our leading Norton 360 comprehensive membership offerings, and reflected in our accelerated bookings growth this quarter. More partners are also adopting our highest tier all-in-one cyber safety memberships and promoting our bundled solutions to their channels.
As just one example, our employee benefits partners already see the expanded value we provide through Norton 360, and this channel continues to grow double digits with a robust pipeline ahead of the annual enrollment period. More and more consumers understand the need to have full suite with identity protection, and we see it in our results.
Additionally, across our go-to-market channels, we are leveraging our data and AI capabilities to drive more effective targeted campaigns through our in-product messaging platform, upselling more customers to higher-tier memberships with additional identity and privacy protection or cross-selling them additional add-on products that fit their immediate needs based on select moments of exposure.
These post-sale levers continue to drive more growth, higher engagement and, in turn, higher retention. Our cyber safety platform remains our foundational bedrock and the growth playbook we deploy continues to provide an accelerating flywheel rooted in innovation and serving customer needs. In our Trust-based Solutions segment, on a pro forma basis, bookings and revenue grew 26% and 27%, respectively, and more than doubled on a reported basis.
In our LifeLock business, growth remained stable with highly retaining customers and strong customer NPS. Additionally, MoneyLion personal financial management solutions are scaling significantly with strong gains in new active users and increasing product consumption. And our engine financial marketplace delivered another strong quarter, the fourth consecutive quarter of growth over 50%.
The accelerating adoption of third-party financial products available on Engine reinforces our marketplace strategy and our mission to help consumers make better financial decisions through embedded experiences across financial and nonfinancial platforms and apps. This momentous business is powerful in and of itself. And as we innovate across our trust-based Solutions segment, we believe it provides us with such a unique opportunity to cross pollinate.
Although we're just getting started, we are very excited about the green shoots in our early test results driving offers and in turn demand with our LifeLock cohorts. And we expect this momentum to continue as we expand the marketplace catalog to include new third-party product categories, such as prime credit cards that are personalized for our diverse customer base.
Overall, our direct channels continue to demonstrate strong fundamentals, growing revenue 17% as reported and 6% pro forma. And partners scaling considerably, growing revenue 88% as reported and 24% pro forma, demonstrating healthy diversification, underpinned by strong innovation across our product portfolio. Turning to customers. We continue to expand our customer base, now reaching over 77 million customers, up approximately 1 million sequentially with expansion across our segments and net adds across our key channels. As we navigate forward with a more integrated business model, we will take a customer-centric approach and that requires us to refine how we target personalized offerings to best serve their needs.
We will continue to focus on subscribers, which are customers who pay for our products on a recurring monthly or annual basis, such as our vast Norton 360 membership customers or MoneyLion subscriptions, which are refining. In addition to subscribers, we will also focus on product users generating revenue, which are customers whom we monetize through transactions and complementary engagement models such as our MoneyLion personal financial wellness and marketplace customers.
And while we are at the early stages of development, we wanted to introduce our expanded approach designed to capture the growing demand in a more focused manner as we continue to innovate and scale. We are no longer just a direct-to-consumer business, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach with such a diverse customer base. More to come on this as we drive further expansion across these vectors.
Now turning to profitability. Q2 operating income was $623 million, translating to 51% operating margin in line with our expectations. Operating margin for cyber safety platform was 61% and trust-based Solutions was 30%, each in line with our plan. Our margins remain robust as we continue to drive growth with a disciplined approach to resource allocation, scaling efficiency with AI and measured investment in our long-term strategic initiatives.
Q2 net income was $387 million, and diluted EPS was $0.62, up 15% year-over-year as reported. This represents our eighth consecutive quarter of achieving or exceeding our 12% to 15% EPS growth target. Interest expense was $139 million in Q2, our non-GAAP tax rate remains steady at 22%, and our ending share count was $624 million, up $2 million year-over-year.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. Q2 ending cash balance was $701 million, representing over $2.2 billion of liquidity when including our $1.5 billion revolver. Year-to-date operating cash flow was $525 million and free cash flow was $512 million, demonstrating the capital efficiency of our business model.
As we shared, Q2 is seasonally high our highest use of cash given the concentration of tax payments that are due within the quarter, including $139 million transition tax payment our last payment related to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Also worth noting, due to how specific calendar dates fall in this fiscal year, we have both of our semiannual interest payments in our first half of fiscal 2026 whereas typically, we have the first payment in the first half and the second payment in the second half of the fiscal year.
Given this higher use of cash in Q2, we did not have any additional capacity or share buyback during the open period. We paid down $160 million of debt and ended the quarter with our net leverage at 3.2x EBITDA. We paid $77 million to shareholders in the form of a regular quarterly dividend of $0.125 per common share. For Q3 fiscal 2026, the Board of Directors approved a regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 per common share to be paid on December 10, 2025, for all shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 17, 2025. Our free cash flow generation remains very strong, and we stay committed to a balanced capital allocation as we enter into the second half of our fiscal year.
Now let me share our Q3 and fiscal 2026 outlook. We are raising our revenue and EPS guidance again for fiscal 2026 based on our strong results and the momentum we're seeing. Our business remains resilient, bolstered by a highly recurring revenue base, further supported by solid customer retention and substantial free cash flow generation.
For fiscal year 2026, we now expect full year revenue in the range of $4.92 billion to $4.97 billion, up from our prior expectation of $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion. And reflects reported revenue growth of 25% to 26% year-over-year. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $2.51 to $2.56 and representing our continued commitment to achieving our 12% to 15% annual EPS growth.
For Q3, we expect non-GAAP revenue in the range of $1.22 billion to $1.24 billion. We expect Q3 non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.62 to $0.64 or 12% to 15% growth year-over-year.
Our Q3 and full year guidance assumes high single-digit pro forma growth. combined with disciplined cost management, while funding targeted long-term growth investments in the Gen platform and additional AI capabilities. This guidance range also assumes current FX rates to Q2 and although significant fluctuations remain possible given the volatility in currency markets that has taken place over the past few years.
In summary, we are well positioned after a strong first half. We're accelerating growth while maintaining the same operating discipline that has long defined our strategy. We are driving healthy growth in both of our segments, and we've made tremendous progress with the integration of MoneyLion.
Operating margins remained strong, and we're continuing to invest in scalable innovation without compromising returns. Our free cash flow generation is robust. -- creating capacity for ongoing opportunistic share repurchases and further delevering to drive strong returns for our shareholders. We continue to hit the mile markers we've laid out as we navigate towards our long-term growth objectives.
I want to thank the entire team for staying focused and delivering great value to our customers and shareholders. We look forward to sharing more progress in the coming quarters.
As always, thank you for your time today, and I will now turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Rob Coolbrith from Evercore ISI.
2. Question Answer
Congratulations on the strong results. Just wondering, first of all, if you could maybe give us your view of the macro environment and the health of the consumer right now. And if we were to see a more significant downturn, how you'd expect that to play across the 2 segments of the business. And then also -- ask on the transition -- Sure. Please go ahead.
Okay. you ask a question of that. Sorry, but that to jump. But -- thanks for the congratulations. This is Vincent. Thanks for the congratulation. We definitely had an outstanding quarter, and I would add another one. So let's talk about the macro environment. We have two segments, right, security and privacy and then trust-based solution really anchored around the secure financial wellness. I'll start with the security and privacy. Obviously, you've seen in our Q2 threat report that we just published last week continued increase in complexity of the threat landscape, targeting consumers in various forms increased use of AI just last quarter, blocked 140,000 website, all designed by AI but with a very high level of credibility and precision. So all of that, if you want, will continue. We believe the consumers for a very small membership fee, I would say, can protect against thousands of dollars lost through cyber criminals. When you look back at historical during downturns or upturns, we have not seen too much correlation to our subscription or security revenue streams.
On the Secured Financial wellness, we now have millions of our customers connecting their bank account, for monitoring, alerts. We do offer, as you know, first-party financial products from liquidity offering to credit building, to high-yield savings accounts. We've seen a very strong growth again this quarter under personal financial management offerings here under 50%, but very strong. We have not seen a change in patterns in consumption over the last few months, and we do not see it here as we speak so far.
Generally speaking, when interest rates continue to trend down, normally, there's actually renewed activities and refinancing and other activities that support that demand. On the second aspect of our secure financial wellness, it's our marketplace. Here, we've really seen the benefit of coming together with Gen, millions of consumer board onto the marketplace. We're just at Money 2020 conference and a lot of very strong interest from financial partners to join the engine marketplace by Gen. And I think we'll continue to have that opportunity to offer for consumer, whether the economy goes up or down, I think the need for the best financial decisions will remain and be strong.
Great. And thank you for all the detail on the LifeLock integration from the experiences you bringing to bear between LifeLock and the secure -- sorry, financial wellness. But just if you could maybe talk a little bit as you go down this cross-sell journey, maybe about the frequency of member interaction with the LifeLock products, particularly around they do identity unlock as they're shopping for financial products. Maybe can you just talk a little bit about the mechanics of the cross-sell and some of the unique opportunities there.
Absolutely. So obviously, revenue synergies is a long process, MoneyLion fully integrated from a back-end integrated from an R&D perspective. We're finalizing the integration of the data to offer an enriched experience. And now we're really unlocking the revenue synergies. There are 2 immediate components we're focusing on. One is not in money with EWA features going into employee benefits, but also on money as a PFM tool for our Norton installed base. That's one. And the second one is the embedded, I would call it, core marketplaces, focusing at the needs of the consumer. LifeLock is the first immediate case. Since we brought the money line on, we've really enriched the marketplace with credit card catalogs or offerings, if you want for prime customers, and we're embedding that into LifeLock. And as you know, LifeLock, it's not only monitoring your credit, it's really monitoring and managing your financial moments of touch, you check your credit, you check your financials, when you're going to go for a purchase and/or if you want to improve your credit level in order to do approaches that you intend to do today.
And so at that point in time, if you want in an embedded experience, we now have that marketplace and made into the LifeLock applications. It's actually a very positive results, although on a small base. And we have a long transformation to drive, as we've already discussed in prior quarter and making progress on it is really moving an application that was essentially passively giving you peace of mind to a more engaged applications in which you come and validate and try to improve your journey, and we see good progress overall in that trend as we bring new tools such as the credit builder tool or now this credit marketplace.
Our next question comes from Roger Boyd from UBS.
Great. And congrats also on the strong results. I wanted to touch on partner revenue, which was, again, very strong and I think maybe accelerated organically, but you did note 50% growth in MoneyLion Engine and double-digit growth in employee benefits. Just any thoughts on how we should think about the trajectory of partner revenue over the back half of the year, anything to be mindful of from a seasonality perspective, particularly with MoneyLion Engine and then the employee benefits channel into open enrollment? And I have a follow-up.
Yes. I'll take that one. It's nothing less financial and more structural. So 2 years ago, when we did the Analyst Day, we said, "Hey, we have a big opportunity in our partner organizations." At the time, it was 90% direct, 10% partner. As we're expanding the portfolio. We said it in the long run, we think it will be more of an 80-20 and you're going to see partner growing faster than direct. And it makes sense because many of our services are embedded into partner views and then we had the view -- this long-term view of bringing this marketplace adding more value to our consumer.
And what you see now 2 years later, 8 quarters later, since we laid out that strategy, it's finally taking routes. Quarter in, quarter out, you may have a little bit bigger gap or a smaller gap. But I think you'll continue to see partner revenue outgrow the direct revenue, as we continue to contemplate bringing to our consumers adjacent values that we may not even manufacture ourselves because we neither bank or we may not be a legal firm, but that all fits together around supporting that financial wellness overall.
And -- no, I would not predict specific seasonality quarter-in and quarter-out that you see every year. Now obviously, you can always the growth rate change quarter-in quarter-out, but similar trends will continue moving forward.
Awesome. That's helpful, Vincent. And then Natalie, just on free cash flow. It looked like it was actually pretty robust after backing out the tax payment. I know you don't guide to it, but any color you can give just on how you think about free cash flow trajectory and -- as that continues to improve? I know you touched upon it in the remarks, but any update on how you think about capital allocation between debt paydown and share repurchase?
Yes. Thanks, Roger. Our free cash flow generation will continue to stay strong. It's -- yes, seasonally high in Q2. And then, of course, we have that timing element that hurt a little bit more in Q2 than norm as well. Yes, as we accelerate rates of growth as we integrate and we continue to scale we're going to continue to operate in a disciplined fashion. We've laid out our margin expectations for each of the segments over the long term. And we'll continue to deploy our capital in a disciplined and balanced way across accelerated debt paydown but also share repurchases. And then we just haven't -- with the timing of the MoneyLion deal over the last, I would say, 3 to 4 quarters and when we were able to get out in the open period, we just didn't have the opportunity to do much share repurchase. But as we look to the back half, we'll get back to being much, much more balanced across accelerated debt pay down and share repurchase.
Our next question comes from Dan Bergstrom from RBC.
It's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. So you highlighted higher engagement on Norton 360 in your prepared remarks, you also talked to some scans is providing some tailwind there. Beyond that, maybe what are some keys to the momentum in upselling customers into those higher-tier Norton 360 memberships?
Very good, Dan. Thanks for joining. So to remind people, Norton 360 is our all-in-one suite set of plants, if you want, from the Norton brand. We have the same on Avast One from the Avast View. And our goal has been to move more and more people to membership, you pay a fee with that, you'll get our new features and the piece of mind in this environment where cyber threat is pretty dynamic. And then depending on the plan, all the way to all in one, including the LifeLock identity protection, then you fully protected. We still have the majority of our customers on the Norton 360 lower and mid-level tier, not including the identity. We have, at the beginning of the year, moved Norton Genie, our anti-scam into that known 360 platform and have evolved Norton Genie from a pure AI-driven anti-scam to becoming really the AI cyber safety assistant. And we've now just launched into 40 new countries in 40 languages, that feature. That feature is at the core of getting our applications to our platform more engaging where you can ask your questions and can automatically also become ultimately become your agent connecting different privacy and security features at the moment it's needed. We have seen some traction on the upper level of the plan, -- no with Norton 360 with Norton Genie Pro, which is an upgraded feature that provides not only the security side, the AI assistant but also the insurance, the voice block, the tax block and so a much more enriched experience full private and full protection. And we've seen traction with that. And then we're now just launching Northern money, which will be the alternative to go and move to a higher plan with credit monitoring financial insights and create marketplace as an alternative path to the upper plant. So as I mentioned in my remarks, continue to see very good progress towards, a, the membership; and b, the engagement with the platform.
That's great. And then I know paid customers is the new metric, but the old KPI around direct cyber safety customers was in the slides, up $400,000 quarter-over-quarter. Understanding there's some rounding there, but that's impressive, but at the upper end of what we'd expect historically. And again, I know it's a seasonally strong quarter here, but maybe what was some -- what was you had some of the strength on the customer addition number?
Yes. I would say now it has been many, many, many quarters. I don't remember how many maybe 7 or 8 that we've been in the range of, I would call it like 250 to 400. So you're right, it's in the upper of the range, but we basically see it on the high side of the range in line to our expectations as we've been driving increased engagement, more channel to acquire customers and improvement on the retention. And I think it's more progress across all of the dimensions that reviewed. Now as you know, our customer base is evolving. We see it in two categories. One is a subscriber generated revenue, as Natalie mentioned, and the other one is a product usage generated revenue. We see a very strong increase across all dimensions, and our goal will be to continue to increase the subscription. We did provide the whole metric just for people to understand and assess the health of our core Gen the way we looked at it before we split into 2 segments, which I think will be useful for investors.
Our next question comes from Saket Kalia from Barclays.
Congrats on another rate guide. Vincent, may be for you, absolutely. But maybe if you just kind of picking up off that thread. You've talked about sort of the potential for new business models in the MoneyLion. I mean it seems to be doing very well, right, just as it is. But I think that there's such a subscription DNA at Gen and you've kind of talked about that as a possibility. Without preannouncing anything, how do you sort of envision something like that looking, if that makes sense?
Yes, totally. So just to put in context, maybe some investors don't have the full history that we've had since You know us very well and covers for a long time. When we acquired MoneyLion, most of the revenue, if not all of the revenue was driven by what we call product usage revenue, our product usage derived revenue, which is essentially transaction-based. And many customers like that. They use the product for free. And when they transact a very small portion of the transaction gets booked as a fee, and that's how they make the money.
You know what they say, Saket, don't break what's working. So we're trying to make sure we manage very carefully because it's really working for the money line installed base and is working for the MoneyLion customer and the team knows how to bring innovation into that environment. We will maintain that. in addition, and that's why it's complementary. We say that when you come to a little bit more premium customers, they like to have a subscription, they pay and then they have access to many different features Ala Cardo or as much as they want, and we're building those subscription views, which may include, not only the ability to use the PFM tool or to consume some liquidity product or to do credit builder for their kids or having access to actually the investment features on the platform. And we know that's more prone to our type of customer base. And so features are there, and it's a question of balance on how we're going to drive from a marketing perspective and where we're going to have membership versus transaction-based revenue.
And over time, you're going to see that progression. As you know, just to complete my answer, we always said that a shift, a full shift from transaction to subscription will lead to a shorter gap in the -- or a gap in the short term and the longer value over time. And we hopeful to be able to manage that transition towards more subscription without too much impact on our overall knowing that it's all about driving long-term customer value here for maximizing that
Yes. Absolutely. Natalie, maybe for my follow-up for you. I'd love to maybe just touch on the profitability of the MoneyLion business I think in the presentation, it showed about a 20% operating margin. That, of course, is fantastic if it's supporting 50% top line growth. But maybe the question is, how do you think about the margin journey that we could see in MoneyLion? And maybe remind us how that sort of 30-60 dynamic that we talked about at our session a couple of months ago, sort of plays into that journey.
Yes. Thanks, Saket. Good to hear from you. Yes, MoneyLion margin, that's where we started, approximately 20%. Keep in mind, as we blend MoneyLion with trust-based solutions and even just integrated with Gen overall we have achieved the cost synergies that we have laid out for ourselves as we integrate them as an acquisition, just high level, especially the back office and some of the other -- the fixed costs that we could strip out of the business. So that's done. We also have revenue synergies that we're going after. You heard them peppered through the messaging today and our slide where and our day that we did around MoneyLion back in September, there's so many revenue synergies to go after. It requires investment to drive that growth. And so we'll continue to stay committed to that. So that points to the current margin rate today driving that 50% growth rate.
And then as we look forward, of course, yes, the mix is definitely there and is an opportunity for us to balance. But keep in mind, we want all parts of the 30, 60, 90. They provide us different layers and levels and types of value and access to different customers.
So if you think about the 30% margin on the marketplace that's going to fuel customer acquisition and really give us just a ton of access to different sites, lots of data that we can do deep data analysis and customization personalization.
And then the first-party products at 60% and then all the way up to the retargeting of the 90%, it's a very, very healthy model. It's a flywheel effect. But the quarter-in quarter-out, what percentage of the business is going to come from different segments is going to be mixed. And as we move forward, we're going to find that right balance for the business all with the appetite of healthy, sustainable accelerating rates of growth as we integrate across trust-based solutions with all of the different services that we're innovating on.
Our next question comes from Tomer Zilberman from Bank of America.
Maybe going along the same track of the MoneyLion, right? You had 2 solid quarters MoneyLion growth, 45% to 50%. You previously guided it to grow 30%. I think your guidance now calls for an exit rate of 30%. And -- just wanted to get more color why we wouldn't see these elevated growth levels sustain into the back half? And apologies if I missed in your prepared remarks, but can you pair that with commentary around the business model transition you're expecting in the second half? And I have a follow-up afterwards.
Absolutely, yes. So I'll take that 1 first. So MoneyLion, when we acquired and closed the deal April of this year, it's not too long ago. It feels like a long time goes only 6 months ago. They were growing at 25% to 30% at about 15% operating margin. Since the beginning of this year and as we integrated and started to work on various different aspects, including marketing and leveraging our customer base, et cetera. We've seen that elevated performance level, as you mentioned, 45% the quarter before and 50% this quarter. While we improved the operating margin over 5 points, now over 20%. We are not forecasting moving forward 50%. We do believe there may be a little bit of a boost of coming together and we feel it's more prudent to base maybe linking back to Saket's question at around a 30% growth rate, 20% margin redefine another new rule and call you the rule of 50, that's what it would be and managing the business along those lines.
As we see room and acceleration, we'll definitely capture it in the marketplace. So be assured of that. And there are different ways of capturing it, including moving more transactional customer, maybe customer we can identify as not having a strong recurring pattern and moving them to a membership having a chance to offer different values in a bundle membership structure, which is really most of what we are planning to do over time, while we maintain that Rule of 50 growing at 30% to 20% margin.
And then along the line, every quarter, we learn more, we'll understand better the trends and that's where we'll be. What it is not implied into our current exit 30% growth rate is any significant macro level effect because, as I mentioned, in a prior answer, we do not see a change today of patterns or behaviors from the millions of customers that are plugging into our platform.
Got it. And maybe as a follow-up, if I move towards the core cyber safety business. I know someone addressed earlier that you grew your customer's $400,000 sequentially. But if we look at the growth trends they diverged a little bit from last quarter. Last quarter, if I have it right, revenue and bookings grew 4%. This quarter, revenue was 3%. Bookings was 5%. What drove that slight delta? And do you think that the 400,000 adds this quarter and the better bookings growth can translate into better revenue growth over the next few quarters?
Yes. Tomer, it's Natalie. So keep in mind, revenue is going to reflect the trailing 12-month bookings. So if you go back and look at the bookings as reported, that's where you would see the 3%. Also keep in mind, we're only rounded at the whole numbers. When you get into the decimals, it's sub 2 points. So it's really not that different between bookings rate of growth and revenue like you see 2 points on the surface.
And yes, as we look forward, it's not just the customer acquisition, it's the balance across the segments, it's the innovation, it's the scale, it's AI coming through. It's more personalization. It's more customization through IPM, Cross-sell, upsell are still alive and well partner mixing in, there's just so many factors even in when you look at both on a pro forma basis but even excluding MoneyLion, the core business has so much opportunity. And we are just driving all of the growth levers that we possibly can with all of the innovation that's coming to market.
So I would say, as you look forward, we're focused and just look at the full year guide pointing to on a pro forma basis, it's a high single-digit rate of growth, and that's what I would -- that's what I would point you back to.
Our next question comes from Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley.
Great. Maybe as a first question, you noted the AI impact kind of bringing 20% efficiency on the customer support. Just wanted to get a sense of other ways in what you guys are utilizing AI and what you're finding traction within the business? And then just as a follow-up question, just any OB OBA impact on tax rate that we should be expecting?
Okay. Let me take the one on the use of AI. So all of our AI initiatives are split into 2 buckets. One is to use our, call it, data platform to build AI native features of product from Norton Genie to Spark to others, Norton Browser that you see there. I leave that on the side because that's not your question, but it's our main effort in trying to bring a truly AI-native portfolio, even all the way of thinking in our lab of not only how we protect against AI-generated scams or threat, but how will security look like in the world of agent to agent interaction where you as a consumer may ask your automated agent to do financial wellness transaction on your behalf and then interact in the world of agent, how does privacy and security work in that environment. So super, super important topic. .
And then we have the second bucket, which we call transforming Gen into an AI-first company, which is really changing our not immediately jumping into AI platform of tools, but changing our workflows to then being able to automate and where it's needed using AI to generate things. Obviously, in support and services, we further along the tools and the processes in the market are more mature, which today have roughly half -- a little bit less than half of all of our contacts fully contained into an AI environment, whether it's 1 or multiple bought. And that has generated significantly which we have reused to really build our data approach or data platform to our business.
I mentioned marketing. Marketing is probably the second 2 R&D, I'll talk about it in a minute, function that we're transforming. Marketing, really, we combine everything from upper funnel or branding all the way down to performance marketing under one leader combined organizations, and we've realigned around value creations around their brands, and they are using the tools, AI first to really develop the framework to our vision later on will be to enable our product leaders to do everything from ideation to first level performance materials assisted by AI bots without human intervention.
That's not the case today, but within the marketing function, they started to get really good traction on developing materials and even creatives all through AI. And that has enabled also to redirect the savings towards more performance marketing to then accelerate the growth -- and then the last piece is around R&D. We've been at it for a little bit longer, which is starting with more automation. We're running some pallets. I'll give you the name, we call it inside an the Jenny corn and to see if we have from ideation to product development everything managed by 1 person assisted by bot. We have some level of success, but we are running a lot of those experiences and bring them back into our development environment to improve the way we develop products.
There, the savings have really redirected since we had a large portfolio with years of experience but also skewed to maintain. We're trying to lower our maintenance costs to redirect into more innovation and most importantly, higher velocity in a different prototype and testing. I would say I see really great potential. They're slower to materialize and capture, but we are on a great path. That's how we are becoming an AI-first company.
And then I think you had a follow-up question on the one beautiful tax bill? .
Yes. Just any impact of tax rate that we should be thinking of?
So our tax rate is long-term focused. And so the 22% that you see in our non-GAAP results and -- is assumed in the guide as well. So the beautiful build just helps with cash flows in terms of cash taxes in the short term. In the long term, it's -- there's no material change. So we don't really influence that or we don't include that change in the long-term tax rate expectations.
Our final question today comes from Joseph Gallo from Jefferies.
As you think through the cross-sell opportunities between the MoneyLion and the Gen Digital basis and vice versa, which ones seem to be gaining the most traction early on? And then are there any more go-to-market effort left to implement, to accelerate?
Yes, very good. So we are at the early stage. So I definitely would say, yes, we have a lot of room to accelerate the current results you see here is on the merit of the core business on the own each one of them and then maybe a core platform of data and operations. But we haven't really delivered yet the value of bringing everything together. The most natural one and more immediate one is really the amendment, if you want, of financial insight and financial options into the LifeLock app. That's where originally, maybe we had discussed that in September, we had the initial ask for financial ones well necessary insights and advice were coming from. That's how we started that project organically and then led to the acquisition of MoneyLion. We now embedding that and I think it's going to take traction. We're very careful. We're very created, if I can say. We're not doing blasting marketing. We know that our customer in LifeLock will benefit from that insight and those new options, but we're following the demand. We're not trying to do a forceful marketing campaign or inside app that could be very annoying. So preserving the piece of money is key and will drive at that space.
The second one, obviously, is bringing Norton Money -- sorry, money into Norton as an alternative to identity into Norton or in full combine, of course. And the most immediate one is money line features into our employee benefit channel that represent probably the best channel on the entire portfolio and having traction on all dimensions. We are about to launch that. Of course, in employee benefit channel, you're going to have to have the time to onboard the new employers, then go for the onboarding a view and then only you'll see the results. So the result will be delayed, but the traction in the early discussions are extremely positive. So it's only the beginning of the journey, I would say, on the revenue synergy side.
Great to hear. There is more to come. And then just -- I know you called out a consistent macro, but Americas has been pretty consistently strong. Is there anything to call out on the other geos?
Actually, you're right. We haven't talked too much about the other geo. I was just discussing that with Natalie and my head of corporate FP&A yesterday reviewing the results in Europe. They've been very strong, positively surprised by how broad-based our growth rates have been. U.S. first, then you know for a while, we had Latin America leading the way. Right now, for the last 2 quarters, we've seen a lot of strength coming out of Europe, and we haven't introduced financial wellness yet in Europe. So that's talk about more to come over the next few quarters and years, we really feel excited about all of the levers we have at our disposal, if I can say, to drive that long-term value for our customers.
thank you. That is the end of the Q&A session, and this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining, everyone. You may now disconnect your lines.
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Gen Digital — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
Finanzdaten von Gen Digital
Umsatz
Der Umsatz stellt die Summe aller Einnahmen eines Unternehmens z. B. für dessen Produkte oder Dienstleistungen dar.
Umsatz (TTM) einfach erklärtDirekte Kosten
Direkte Kosten sind die Kosten, die direkt im Zusammenhang mit der Herstellung des Produkts oder der Dienstleistung entstehen.
Bruttoertrag
Der Bruttoertrag gibt an, wie viel vom Umsatz nach Abzug der direkten Herstellkosten im Unternehmen verbleibt. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von der Bruttomarge (engl. Gross Margin).
Brutto Marge einfach erklärtVertriebs- und Verwaltungskosten
Die Vertriebs- & Verwaltungskosten (engl. Selling, General & Administrative expenses, kurz SG&A) beinhalten alle Aufwände für Marketing und den Verkauf sowie die allgemeine Verwaltung des Unternehmens.
Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten
Die Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten (engl. research & development costs, kurz R&D) geben Auskunft darüber, wie viel das Unternehmen in die Forschung und die Entwicklung seiner Produkte investiert. Vor allem prozentual vom Umsatz und im Vergleich zu direkten Wettbewerbern sind die Kosten interessant.
EBITDA
Das EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) ist der Gewinn des Unternehmens vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von der EBITDA-Marge.
Abschreibungen
Abschreibungen stellen Wertminderungen von Vermögensgegenständen des Unternehmens dar (z.B. durch Abnutzung von Maschinen).
EBIT (Operatives Ergebnis)
Das EBIT (engl. Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) ist der Gewinn des Unternehmens vor Zinsen und Steuern, das auch als operatives Ergebnis bezeichnet wird. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von
der EBIT-Marge.
Nettogewinn
Der Nettogewinn stellt den Gewinn oder Verlust nach Abzug aller Kosten dar.
Nettogewinn einfach erklärtaktien.guide Premium
| Jul '26 |
+/-
%
|
||
| Umsatz | 5.079 5.079 |
20 %
20 %
100 %
|
|
| - Direkte Kosten | 1.117 1.117 |
31 %
31 %
22 %
|
|
| Bruttoertrag | 3.962 3.962 |
17 %
17 %
78 %
|
|
| - Vertriebs- und Verwaltungskosten | 1.150 1.150 |
2 %
2 %
23 %
|
|
| - Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten | 418 418 |
17 %
17 %
8 %
|
|
| EBITDA | 2.394 2.394 |
30 %
30 %
47 %
|
|
| - Abschreibungen | 220 220 |
19 %
19 %
4 %
|
|
| EBIT (Operatives Ergebnis) EBIT | 2.174 2.174 |
31 %
31 %
43 %
|
|
| Nettogewinn | 1.053 1.053 |
76 %
76 %
21 %
|
|
Angaben in Millionen USD.
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Firmenprofil
NortonLifeLock, Inc. beschäftigt sich mit der Bereitstellung von Sicherheits-, Speicher- und Systemverwaltungslösungen. Das Unternehmen ist in den Segmenten Enterprise Security und Consumer Digital Safety tätig. Das Segment Enterprise Security konzentriert sich auf die Bereitstellung von Lösungen zum Schutz von Organisationen, damit diese ihre Geschäfte sicher abwickeln und gleichzeitig neue Plattformen und Daten nutzen können. Das Segment Consumer Digital Safety bietet Lösungen zum Schutz von Informationen, Geräten, Netzwerken und der Identität von Konsumenten. Das Unternehmen wurde im April 1982 von Gary Hendrix gegründet und hat seinen Hauptsitz in Mountain View, Kalifornien.
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| Hauptsitz | USA |
| CEO | Mr. Pilette |
| Mitarbeiter | 3.900 |
| Gegründet | 1982 |
| Webseite | www.gendigital.com |


