XBP Global Holdings, Inc. (XBP) Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you. Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the XBT Global Second Quarter of 2026 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. At the question and answer session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message if your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded online. To hand the conference over to your first speaker today, David Shamins, Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to XBP Global's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me are Chief Executive Officer Andrey Yonovich and Chief Financial Officer Dan Abramovich. Before we begin, please note that today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our future performance, outlook, and strategy. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. For a detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our proxy statement and other filings with the SEC, copies of which are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.xppglobal.com. During this call, we will also reference certain pro forma and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release and the appendix to our investor presentation, which are available on our investor relations website.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Andre. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. When we spoke last quarter, I highlighted our deliberate evolution, converting our legacy workflow platforms into high-margin, agentic AI pipelines, executing our self-disruption, and making targeted go-to-market investments. Today, I'm pleased to report that our second quarter performance represents a clear step up in profitability and operational momentum, with normalized EBITDA of 21.9 million and adjusted gross margin of 24.9%, our highest level to date. Our profitability trajectory and our pipeline quality give us reason for optimism. At XGP, we orchestrate essential mission-critical workflows in heavily regulated end markets, such as healthcare, public sector, and BFSI, where processing, precision, regulatory compliance, and auditability are non-negotiable. Our client base is rapidly moving past simple AI experimentation and aggressive ROI promises the clients naturally discount. Clients want production-grade partners who deliver real-world execution. Rather than falling into the common software trap or abandoning our operational DNA, we anchor our strategy in deep domain expertise. We leverage adaptive process orchestration in combining deterministic rules engines with intelligent AI models to guarantee precision and compliance in high consequence environments. When our AI pipeline encounters a complex exception, it doesn't fail. It routes the transaction to our subject matter experts. In mature deployments, this is the approximately 50 percent of edge cases, which our specialists adjudicate, resolve, and feed that judgment back into the model to continuously retrain it. We aren't replacing our people. We are elevating them into high-value adjudicators. By converting manual volume-heavy workflows into high margin intelligent AI pipelines under this model, we are building a more durable, repeatable, and profitable growth engine. Underpinning this operational shift is our ability to capture breakthroughs in the broader AI ecosystem. The era of open weight models is upon us. With multiple enterprise-grade open weight models launching recently, we're Our X-Train protocols allow us to rapidly integrate these models into our deployed agentic pipelines. This delivers significantly higher value to our clients while guaranteeing that data remains strictly within the enterprise boundary and compliant with advanced directives like the EU AI Act. Now, let's turn to slide four of our investor deck, where you can see how this operational transformation is translating into tangible financial results. We're raising our targeted annualized operational efficiency range to 65 to 75 million, up from 55 to 60 million, as a result of identifying additional opportunities for efficiencies throughout the organization. We have an expected 2026 in-year benefit of approximately $35 million. This transformation is correlated with our financial results this quarter. ADJUSTED GROSS MARGIN EXPANDED FOR THE FOURTH CONSECUTY QUARTER TO 24.9%, MARKING OUR HIGHEST LEVEL TO DATE. Normalized EBITDA stepped up to 21.9 million, and consequently the normalized EBITDA margin increased to 11.5%. The improvement reflects both a favorable revenue mix in the quarter and our AI-first automation efforts delivering structural margin expansion. The second part is what should compound over time. Skipping ahead to slide 7, I'd like to acknowledge that revenue remains down year-over-year and sequentially and that is expected. It reflects the legacy contract exits and volume reductions largely tied to last year's restructuring. Our forward-looking metrics are improving across multiple parameters, especially sales. During the second quarter, we achieved a meaningful growth in bookings and pipeline quality. We closed $121.3 million in total contract value, representing a 51.6% increase year-over-year and up 12.2% sequentially. OUR NEW ACV BOOKINGS REACHED 36 MILLION, UP 57% YEAR-OVER-YEAR AND 32.1% SEQUENTIALLY. OUR TOTAL PIPELINE STANDS AT 2.5 BILLION AS OF JUNE 30TH, A 17.2% INCREASE YEAR-OVER-YEAR. With respect to our pipeline, we're seeing significant AI interest in the healthcare and public sector practice groups, which centers around our healthcare payer and provider solutions. Demand from healthcare and public sector healthcare has been strengthening as clients are actively seeking secure, on-premise hyperautomation with strict data sovereignty guardrails and human-in-the-loop oversight. Despite strengthening public sector healthcare demand, the timing of overall public sector contracts is volatile, primarily as a result of geopolitical uncertainty. To highlight how AI interest translates to enterprise deals, we recently won a deal that will deploy a Gentic AI infrastructure to manage the maintenance lifecycle for global airline fleet. Every maintenance item will be vectorized and stored in a private vector database inside the client's private cloud. Our agentic solution will manage data access, allowing seamless reproduction of records when aircraft go off-lease or are sold. This is an example of turning data into a private, secure cloud with strict enterprise controls, which can be replicated across the airline industry. In short, we feel that our current trajectory strategy is working. We're building a high-quality, repeatable growth engine and applying automation into the way we operate, which should positively reflect in our results in the coming quarters. I WILL NOW TURN THE CALL OVER TO DAN, OUR CFO.

Thank you, Andre, and good afternoon, everyone. As in previous quarters, my comments will primarily focus on pro forma results to evaluate our operational performance on a comparable apples-to-apples basis. Starting with slide 9, total revenue for the quarter was $191.3 million, down 14% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. This decline remains consistent with expected client exits and volume reductions associated with legacy contract restructuring. On a consolidated basis, our reported gross margin was 21.5%, which was up 80 basis points from a year ago. We introduced a new metric this quarter, adjusted gross margin, which normalizes for one-time charges such as severance and non-recurring restructuring related costs, which can materially impact our cost of revenue. We believe that using adjusted gross margin provides a clean apples-to-apples comparison of our profitability across the reported periods. In Q2, our adjusted gross margin expanded to 24.9%, up 290 basis points from a year ago, and 140 basis points from the first quarter, reflecting our highest gross margin to date. Normalized EBITDA reached $21.9 million, reflecting an 8.4% increase year-over-year and 40.6% increase sequentially, with normalized EBITDA margins expanding to 11.5%. Turning to our segment breakdown on slide 10. In the applied workflow automation segment, revenue was 166.8 million, down 16.7 percent year-over-year, driven by lower volumes and completion of certain one-time projects along with expected exits. Adjusted gross margin for this segment reached 19.2%, up 120 basis points year-over-year. Our technology segment revenue was $24.5 million, an increase of 9.8% year-over-year, driven primarily by higher one-time projects in the quarter. Our adjusted gross margin expanded to 64.2%, growth of 690 basis points year-over-year. Turning to the next slide, where we illustrate our recent quarterly performance. Our margins have increased for four consecutive quarters, and this is driven by our shift to higher margin, higher automation business, combined with expanded utilization of automation tools, along with some favorable mix in the quarter. Our normalized EBITDA growth this quarter is a validation of this shift, showing a material step up from Q1, both in terms of dollar amount and as a percent of revenue. We expect an inflection in our revenue in the second half of the year. Combined with continued expansion of our gross margins along with SG&A savings, this positions us to further grow normalized EBITDA into the second half of 2026 and into 2027. Moving to slide 12, we continue to project an approximate 20% workforce reduction by the end of the year relative to the year-end 2025, and our updated efficiency target currently stands at $65 million to $75 million in annualized run rate efficiencies. The increase versus last quarter was primarily driven by non-payroll initiatives, including third-party vendor savings. I will now hand the call back to Andre for closing remarks. Thanks, Dan.

Turning to slide 13, I want to emphasize the long-term impact of our AI operating model on labor productivity. As I talked about it last quarter, legacy business process services operated under a headcount dependent framework. TODAY, XDP GLOBAL IS LEADING THE PEER GROUP IN LABOR EFFICIENCY. DRIVEN BY OUR AI FIRST TRANSFORMATION, OUR REVENUE PER EMPLOYEE GREW TO APPROXIMATELY 89,000, UP FROM 82,000 LAST QUARTER. We continue to project that our revenue per employee will approach $100,000 by year end, which meaningfully exceeds our peer group average of roughly $60,000 per employee, proving that our transition to high margin automated execution is taking firm hold. On slide 14, one thing I really want to emphasize is a low client concentration. Our top 10 clients represent only 34% of our revenues. Additionally, we're diversified across client verticals, which is a natural hedge for us. And our average client tenure among the top 25 clients is around 15 years. Skipping ahead to slides 15 and 16, as I mentioned earlier, we've seen positive momentum in our bookings and the overall pipeline health. new and total bookings continue to tick higher and the breadth of our opportunities remains diversified across industries. In closing, our profitability trajectory has inflected positively, driven by expanded use of AI and automation tools, which have led to our highest adjusted gross margins to date. Our commercial momentum is solidifying, backed by a stable $2.5 billion pipeline and strengthening in the late-stage pipeline. Our focus remains firmly on value over volume, building upon relationships with our clients to deliver the outcomes they need while ensuring we deliver the expected margin profile to our shareholders. Finally, with respect to our strategic alternatives process, which we announced last quarter, we have engaged a financial advisor. We will provide updates on this as appropriate. I'd like to thank our dedicated team for their continued efforts, and with that, I'll turn it over to the operator to open up Q&A. Operator?.

Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder to ask a question, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you have a question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And I'm showing no questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review. [Call has ended.]