welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining our investor call.

Before we begin with the Q&A session, Geert and I would like to provide an overview regarding the company's financial performance, strategic progress, and outlook.

Thank you, Jeroen, and welcome, everyone. Let's start with our financial performance.

EBITDA reached €6 million in the second quarter, up 55% year on year, and €11.9 million in the first half of 2026, up 52% year on year, driven by revenue growth and improved operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA amounted to €6.3 million in the second quarter, up 61%, and €12.5 million for the first half, up 60%, lifting the half-year adjusted EBITDA margin to 9.6% from 6.5% a year earlier.

Revenue increased 14% year on year to €67 million in the second quarter and 9% year on year to €129.9 million in the first half. During the period, we identified specific messaging traffic that should not have been reported on a gross revenue basis under IFRS 15.

A correction has therefore been applied retrospectively from the start of the traffic in the second quarter of 2022. Revenue and cost of services for the prior periods were reduced with no effect on gross profit, EBITDA, or results.

The total impact over the four-year period is approximately €34 million in relation to roughly €1 billion in total revenue. Further, our annual recurring revenue grew 3% year on year to €35.5 million.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, ARR declined by 1.8%. This was primarily due to the loss of a 10-year contract that expired during the quarter and was not renewed upon retender.

Excluding this contract, ARR grew 8% year on year and 2.5% quarter on quarter. We achieved record messaging volumes in the second quarter, reaching 2.8 billion messages, up 30% year on year and 12% quarter on quarter, with strong growth across all channels.

HALO, our agentic AI platform, continued to gain ground as its contribution to ARR grew 187% year on year to €3.3 million, up from €1.2 million in the second quarter of 2025. Gross profit did not grow at the same pace as revenue as gross margin decreased to 30.6% in the second quarter and 31.2% for the first half year.

The margin decrease reflects shifts in product mix combined with messaging market pricing dynamics and currency effects. Operational efficiency improved further, supported by increased AI usage, with the number of FTEs down 11% year on year.

As a result, OPEX for the first half decreased by 12% year on year to €28.7 million. The net result for the first half was a loss of €2.3 million compared to a profit of €0.9 million in the prior year.

The prior year, however, first half included an €8.8 million gain on the extinguishment of our convertible bonds. Excluding this one-off, the underlying result improved significantly year on year.

In the second quarter, the net loss narrowed to €1.1 million from €4.6 million a year earlier. Turning to cash flow and financial leverage, this first half generated free cash flow of €5.1 million, up €2.9 million year on year.

This was driven by higher EBITDA and a €2.7 million cash receipt from our trade receivables factoring arrangement. Net debt stood at €59.8 million and our adjusted leverage ratio improved to 2.4 from 3.1 at year-end 2025 and 2.7 at the end of the first quarter of 2026.

With that, I would like to hand back to Jeroen for our strategic progress and outlook. Yes.

Let's reflect on the first half of 2026. The results confirm the direction we set out.

We delivered strong growth. AI creates when it can act on relevant customer context, and that belief is at the heart of our two key innovations we introduced this quarter.

At our customer event in June, we presented our new customer context platform. This platform is designed to bring together fragmented customer data and turns that into usable context for AI-enabled engagements.

Alongside this, we expanded HALO with Ask HALO. Ask HALO is a natural language assistant.

It makes it easier and faster to create AI agents. Other innovations we invested in during this quarter are agentic AI, voice AI, Voice for WhatsApp, and rich messaging.

These investments are aligned with structural market trends. The global AI market is growing.

Businesses are increasingly adopting AI to market, to sell, and to support their services to their clients. We updated our proposition accordingly.

We now position CM as the only AI platform that runs the whole conversation and everything it leads to. Our updated proposition brings four suites together around one single customer: Connect for every channel, Activate for marketing, Convert for payments and other transactions, and Support for AI-powered service.

This all runs on one shared customer context. Every interaction builds on the one before.

Further, we redesigned our website and launched a brand new campaign: Behind Every Moment. Together with Frank Timmermans, our new Chief Commercial Officer, we updated our go-to-market approach around key client segments.

The commercial impact of these changes is still at an early stage, but we believe we are on the right path forward. In closing, the first half of 2026 demonstrates that our strategy is delivering measurable progress.

This supports our confidence that we are on the track to achieve our guidance of more than 30% adjusted EBITDA growth for the full year 2026. With that, we would like to start the Q&A.

Thank you, and thank you for taking my questions as well. First, on growth, over the past 12 to 18 months, even before that, you made clear progress on profitability and net debt leverage.

Gross profit, if I look at the growth, I feel it remains quite modest. What do you really see as the main bottleneck preventing stronger gross profit growth today?

What gives you the confidence that this is going to improve over the next 12 to 14 months? Then maybe another question.

You talked about that one contract that was lost at retender, and I appreciate you cannot discuss the names, et cetera, but should we think this is an isolated event or are there other sizable contracts within the ARR base that are due for renewal or retender over the next 12 to 24 months that could have maybe a similar impact on ARR growth, given that this is the first time that ARR declined quarter on quarter? Then also one on the balance sheet.

Clearly, the balance sheet is in a better place today. Leverage is down.

You also introduced factoring for the first time. Unrestricted cash, I think, is around €15 million, and from what I've read in your annual reports is that the RCF commitment reduces to €65 million in 2027 if I'm correct.

How should we think about the next phase of balance sheet management? Specifically on factoring, why did you decide to do it now, and is this a one-off or will this be a structural part of your balance sheet management?

Thank you.

All right, Thymen. Thank you very much for your three questions.

Let me answer the first two, and I'll then hand over Geert for the third one about RCF and balance sheets. Your first question was the gross profit.

The gross profit was modest compared to the revenue growth. Revenue growth was 14%, and that only translated in 5% gross profit growth if you look at constant currencies.

How do we look at that? I think what we did last quarter was basically a land grab in terms of rich messaging.

We always anticipated on the day that rich messaging would really take off, and I think that that just happened. Our volumes grew 30% over the last quarter compared to a year ago.

That increased, of course, our revenue and our messaging volumes. These new messaging volumes are new clients with WhatsApp, new clients with RCS, amongst others.

We believe that is the best strategy for CM.com now, at this moment, to grab as much as possible in this new flows of messages. We also believe that there will be a moment later in time, maybe not too far from now, that we can also optimize the margin we make on these new revenue streams.

We deliberately chosen for this strategy to first get the messages in, make the client successful, really demonstrate value of rich messaging for them. Later, when this value is more clear for all involved parties, there will be a time for us to optimize the margin on these new revenue streams.

Yes, new revenue will bring new gross profit, but there's a little bit timing issue that we see already the new revenue, and we really expect to see the growth in gross profit later. I hope that answers your first question.

Then about the lost contract. Yes, indeed.

We mentioned that deliberately. It was a contract we had 10 years, at least we didn't have it for 10 years.

We acquired a company 5 years ago, more or less, with had one individual, yeah, contract with a bit bespoke software development. It was a, yeah, made-to-measure software contract for one individual client with an annual fixed revenue of €1.5 million a year.

That contract had a duration of 10 years. We knew that when we acquired this company around 5 years ago, and that ended last month.

Yes, because this 10-year contract ended last month, our ARR was down, I think around €700,000 instead of €800,000 up what it has been if we didn't had this cancellation of this contract. We anticipated on this.

Because it was bespoke software, it was not our core business. We focus on messaging, AI, payments, tickets, that are our core business.

This was a bit separate contract. It was highly profitable, we regret that it was not renewed after 10 years.

On the other hand, it now helps us to focus more on our core business. It freed up also some people working on this bespoke project.

They're now reallocated to more our regular business development. That's the one positive thing about this.

It didn't came as a surprise. We knew it already 5 years ago when we took over this specific company, and we had to include it in the figures now.

We don't see any trend of this. It is really one-off accident, not related to any market circumstances or other developments within CM.com.

All right. This answers the second question.

Let's go now to Geert to answer your question about factoring and debt.

Yes, indeed, Thymen. On the balance sheet, we entered into a factoring agreement for one of our countries where we are operational.

This is, yeah, I would say normal factoring of our accounts receivable going through a process also with, of course, a bank, a financial institution taking over these receivables. A very solid process that we underwent, was approved by the bank internally, and this is something we want to continue for this specific country in the coming quarters, indeed.

The impact as you also have read in the interim financial statements has been that we derecognized around €2.9 million receivables at the end of the quarter. I think this is a kind of trend we expect also for the coming quarters for this specific country.

Then indeed, on the more general view on our financing structure, I think you're fully right. I'm very happy on the trend that we are seeing.

Our adjusted leverage decreased significantly over the past one year and a half. That's a trend that we want to continue.

Not maybe that's steep as was occurred, but we further want to decrease. You see also that we are generating cash.

Of course, cash generation comes with black numbers also, with profit. You also see that we are closing the gap towards profitability.

That's the road we continue on to become profitable and generate cash. That will also, I think, make it easier towards banks and financial institutions, looking forward, and also to our situation in general.

Very happy on the trend and the progress.

Thank you both for answering my questions. If I can just quickly have a question on the first one, I asked about growth.

You touched on messaging indeed, that now you have all these high volume of rich messaging volume. What about the other divisions?

If you look at Engage, at Pay, at Live, if you look at growth there, where do you see that coming from in let's say the coming quarters, that incremental growth?

All right, let me answer that. Indeed, I focused a bit more on the messaging business in my first initial answer, but I can also dive a bit deeper to the other units, like Engage.

If I reflect a bit on what happened with Engage over the last years, of course, yeah, when we listed the company in 2020, we did a few acquisitions, also in this SaaS AI type of business. One of the acquisitions we did was CX Company.

They had a, yeah, conversational AI products with many clients. We acquired that, we integrated that into our business, we integrated the platform, we accommodated the people.

We stabilized the business, to say. Then we started investing.

With the team we acquired, we started investing in new developments, new insights to really build the product for the future. That was HALO.

We launched it 1 year and a half, and that really helped us not only, yeah, to stabilize the clients with AI Cloud, because we saw some churn a few years ago there, but with the launch of HALO, we managed to stabilize the churn and also, yeah, generate a lot of growth, of course, in HALO. If you see that we almost tripled the revenue with HALO last year, that's a really good growth.

Next to that, we had also did other acquisitions within this Engage software business, for example, Building Blocks with the Inspire product. Here's actually with the same history, but it started a few years later.

We acquired Building Blocks for consumer AI, AI that really gives insights in consumer behavior for a lot of clients. Was a very advanced product at that time.

It was with a lot of machine learning, a lot of data scientists. The market evolved.

We evolved, we learned, we integrated, yeah, the companies, we integrated the platforms, we accommodated the people, and we also here, we started investing in new products. That new product was CXP, the customer context platform, which we just launched last June.

Also here, we expect that CXP will generate a lot of revenue in the upcoming years like HALO did in the past years. Together, HALO and CXP will be our two flagship products.

If you look at the revenue for the last year, we saw an impact of, yeah, the former Building Blocks, Inspire business that a bit stalled and also declined due to some churn. Clients who were there for years, yeah, were looking maybe for newer solutions, like we just launched with CXP.

I think we are, yeah, ahead of time with this product. Context is really important.

I'm very happy that we have this product now. Also like HALO was a bit the future for CX Company after we acquired it, we really believe that the CXP, the context platform, will be the solution or the future for the clients and the business we acquired with Building Blocks.

Going forward, we see a lot of potential there. Just looking back for the last year, we saw a little bit stagnation in revenue.

It didn't grow as fast as we maybe had wished for. If you dive a little bit deeper, you see that Mobile Marketing Cloud is growing good, Service Cloud is growing good, HALO is really going well, and for Inspire, you now have the solution with CXP.

That's a bit diving into Engage. I think Pay is according to plan.

We had a good half year according to our internal budgets. Volumes are growing.

Product is really evolving. The investments we did in direct connectivity with Mastercard and Visa is really paying off.

We are also investing in upcoming payment methods like Wero, the new standard in Europe, successor of iDEAL. We introduced a really nice terminal lately.

It was the Sunmi P3 RE. It's a bit technical name maybe, but it's this terminal, payment terminal, really has it all.

It's waterproof, it's really handy, it's a good battery, and we're now introducing that in our Live part. Then you see that it's also really, yeah, integrating.

Where we maybe looked back last 2 years on three or four different business units, we see that every step we take, it's becoming more and more one platform with one consolidated solution around the four different use cases we now present on our website. Live, I think Live has actually, it was a good year this year.

Last year was a bit better. Why?

There were a lot of one-off events last year, like, for example, the Amsterdam 750. That only happens once in the 750 in 750 years that you have that.

There were also some other really big events last year. For example, the sales last year of the last Grand Prix this year, a lot of the tickets for the last Grand Prix this year were sold already last year.

We are not selling this year tickets for the Grand Prix of next year because there won't be any in Zandvoort. If you look at purely the volume of tickets in the Live business, it's a bit less than it used to be last year.

We added so much extra value for these clients that in total we are very happy about this experience business. It also leads to extra business in payments, it leads to extra business in Engage.

Also especially in Live, you see that this vertical, festivals, events, museums, attraction parks, yeah, that we have a really solid proposition there and that we're winning a lot of deals. That, yeah, this makes us very positive looking forward for this part of the business.

With all the artificial intelligence, live experience are, yeah, really something that set out for consumers in the future. That's our belief.

Great. Thanks a lot, Jeroen.

Sorry. Johan van der Veen, ABN AMRO here.

A lot of answers were already given on the questions raised before. I would like to go into depth in the Pay segment, looking upon TPV volumes.

They are slowing down somewhat when you look upon the Siemens contract you mentioned before. Where are you exactly with the ramp-up?

What's, for instance, the impact of this Wero introduction, and how would the take rates develop from this? When you look upon the growth, we don't see it really getting converted into gross profit already.

A little bit more color on Pay.

All right, Johan. Thank you very much, and also for standing in for Wim Gille.

You do a good job as our new standby analyst. Thank you very much.

Still engaged, of course, with the company and the investment case, but Sure you are,

sure you are. Great you're here.

About payments. Volumes are growing, and of course we need

Slowing down.

They're not growing as fast as you

The growth is slowing down somewhat,

yeah. They're still up.

Then about going forward, you have Wero, the new payment method, and some comments about take rate. The way how people pay at the moment is really changing.

It used to be a lot of iDEAL, especially in the Netherlands. iDEAL is a very convenient way to pay.

It is also for our merchants very convenient. They have guaranteed funds.

If you pay with iDEAL, they know they will receive it. That's contradiction with all the other payment methods, like the buy now, pay later products, but also credit card payments.

People can ask their money back, to say. That's always a bit more complicated.

What we see now is due to new technologies that consumers have more choice how to pay, for example, Apple Pay, Google Pay. This type of wallet payments are really easy to do, and that changed a bit the behavior of payments.

I think that's good because included in Apple Pay, you can include all your card payments, not only debit card, but also credit cards. What we see now in the volume shift is that we see a shift from the more traditional iDEAL payments and the debit card payments, which were a bit more low-margin, very efficient payment method, and it shifts now more to credit card payments.

Credit card payments are, for clients, a little bit more expensive. The good thing for CM.com is that on more expensive payment methods like credit cards, we can earn a bit more money.

The investment we did over the last decade, actually, to build our own in-house processing platform is more and more paying off, where we see the shift towards the more expensive payment methods like credit cards. It's really easy.

If you do like Apple Pay, you select your credit cards, you just click and you pay automatically. We see the rise of more payments there.

How that all evolves, we have to see. Also, Wero at the moment, it has the same price point as iDEAL, which is good for our merchants.

The company behind Wero, they didn't promise that it will keep that price. I expect actually that the price of a payment will go up.

That's not positive for our merchants and for other merchants, but it is positive for payment service providers like CM.com. Volumes are growing, and the take rate is going up.

We really believe that we will see that for the foreseeable future as a trend. Then on top of that, we will have new people who will pay.

Now, only people can make payments, and we have a lot of technology to block bots for payments. That's really reverting, of course.

We're really anticipating on agentic payments, agentic commerce. Like we have agentic messaging already, we will also have agentic commerce.

Agents, AI agents on behalf of consumers, will make payments towards our merchants. Personally, I think that will really elevate the number of payments in the future.

I think more people will pay, but also more agents will pay. There will be more payments in the future.

That's really a trend we're anticipating on with our agentic AI solutions combined with our payment solutions. You used to have conversational commerce, the symbiosis between messages and AI, and there will be also an agentic commerce where payments and agentic AI comes together.

I think a lot of positive signs for growth in the future. Step-by-step, we're getting there.

Okay.

Clear, and thank you for that color. Regarding the ticketing, when you look upon eventing, you could argue that you are underperforming them and underperforming the market.

Would there not have been much more growth to be expected after your independent promotion acquiring in Germany?

That's right. We're starting up in Germany.

We have the first sales people on the ground now in Germany. We have our first deals in.

We have a few big festivals we're working now on with ticketing. This will translate in new revenue in the future, not far from now.

We're also selling more apps with Appmiral, the consumer apps in Germany. We see a lot of opportunities there on the home market of Eventim, indeed.

You see there are two different players in the market. On the one hand, you have us providing software for all the experience around festivals aiming at the independent organizers.

Then there are a lot of dependent organizers like Ticketmaster with Live Nation. They organize their own festivals, and they have to work with Ticketmaster, the same as with Eventim, where they sometimes invest in venues or they invest in organizers or promoters.

Then they also push a bit the ticketing. Next to that, Ticketmaster, Eventim also play a more active role in marketing the tickets on their own, for their own risk and reward, I think they promote the tickets.

We are a bit more enabling our clients to be successful with our software so they can do their promotion themselves. They keep the records, the data for themselves, and they can truly stay independent.

It's a bit of different vision. It pays off.

It's a different part of the market. It's successful in the Netherlands.

We see also some success now in other countries like in Spain, primarily Ibiza, but also mainland Spain, and in Germany we are investing in further growth. It goes with seasons.

We started last year, we have the first season now. We have I think three to five big events.

Then we made our name there in Germany. We have a lot of positive reactions, and then let's see over the winter what we can win in new deals for the next season next summer in Germany.

It's a good market, and I think it's a healthy competition we're bringing there to the incumbents there. Let's see how it goes.

Okay. Then

I would have a last general question. I can understand that you would not like to say too much already after your CCO did start already.

On growth in general, because that's I think one of the most important points within the investment case. You are, from an outside perspective, very disciplined in costs, and it looks like you are not really expanding your sales organization.

You touched upon your steps taken in ticketing in Germany, but in general, when would there be, I would say, an acceleration in acquiring sales people and to get the growth to a higher pace? Could you say already something on that when you are coming with, I would say, a kind of plan or with reacceleration of growth?

Yes.

Growth is our number one topic. Every meeting, every day, every hour, we talk about one thing only, and that is growth coming from sales.

Indeed, we focused on profitability as well over the last couple of years to manage our debt, to manage the things we just discussed. I think we're happy where we are now.

We see the costs under control. Maybe because we focus on that, but also partly just because AI is also doing its job.

We have a lot of things just automated with AI. We are our own client ourselves.

We use HALO all the time. It works very very well.

Cost is under control. Growth have to accelerate, and we're working on that every day.

Together with Frank Timmermans, the CCO, the commercial officer we just hired, he's now 2 months on board now. He already spoke to a lot of clients.

He got a good view of the sales force we have already, the interaction we have with marketing, the play we have internationally. Over the couple of last weeks, we made a lot of decisions together how to optimize our team for the future.

We will focus a bit more on the sub-industries we are very successful in, like we did always in the past as well. We know we are very good in specific client cases, and where we can replicate success, that's always an easy win.

That is one thing is top of mind. Also a few other things are top of mind: partnerships.

We evolved a lot of partnerships recently towards much more success. We will focus much more on partnerships because we can sell and deliver everything ourselves like we always did, but when we work together with great partners, and we have a couple of announcements coming up, I think, in the upcoming days or weeks, where great partners will do part of our sales, will do part of our implementation, will do part of our service.

This new go-to-market with partnerships, personally, I expect a lot of that. I think we're ready for that now.

We postponed that a bit in the past because dealing with partners in a successful way is quite complicated, actually, because you have to manage a partner on two levels. You have to manage a partner and their end customers, it's twice as complicated as doing direct sales.

I think we're ready for that now. Our support systems are also ready for that.

That will be a new go-to-market. Then there's a third go-to-market we're investing in at the moment.

It's not live yet, but that's the self-service. We see that a lot of innovative companies are growing so fast that they don't want to go direct to a partner or direct sales, but they would just want to manage themselves online.

We had been very successful with that like a decade ago when we were more in the SMS gateway business. We lost that skill a bit, I think, over the last 5 years, but we are re-getting that so that clients can come to our website, see what we're doing, and onboard themselves, basically.

That will drive a lot of business. It will help us with the messages.

It will help us with the software, with the AI, with the tickets, but also with payments. If clients can onboard themselves, they can experience the platform, they can educate themselves, that will I think really be an extra go-to-market.

That is more for the next quarter. We haven't done that in the last quarter.

We made a lot of plans about this. We're working very hard in the background to make this possible.

I think that's the three steps we're doing: direct sales, focusing more on the success cases and replicating that success, that's one. Second, partnerships: managing partners, attracting partners, making them more successful, that's second priority.

Third priority is onboarding self-service and then making those clients successful on the platform. That's on our mind right now, and we will now come out with solutions in that phase, I expect, in this current quarter.

It's all about growth. Does that mean that we will also hire many more sales people?

Actually, we don't know yet. We think that for the amount of clients we have, for the ambition we have, that we have the right number of sales people at the moment.

Otherwise, we would have changed that number. I think we're good as we are.

Maybe we have to combine skills and clients and products in different way. Frank is on top of that together with us.

Let's see how that evolves. Sales is our top priority in every conversation.

We have with the management board, we have it with our clients, we have it with the supervisory board, and with our investors. The only way is up.

Because, and one last short follow-up is talking about operational efficiency, you said that you were able to improve your cost base by AI-driven processes with the number of FTEs down 11%. That's, I would assume, more at the development side of business.

Commercial, you did not lower the amount of FTEs in the same pace like you overall did. Could you give a little bit of color on that?

Is it more that you did grow the sales organization or did you rationalize that as well, but at a lower level than the 11% mentioned?

I think, Johan, there are several elements. I think for everybody in the company, using AI, it's kind of a superpower.

You get extra resources by AI. You could say, and that's definitely true looking to our sales organization over the past weeks and months, we are optimizing and automating, for instance, demos.

In the past, preparing a demo was a significant amount of time and significant amount of study. Now it is using our skills and using our agents.

We have built for that. It's done in real time.

You can do a demo. Asking the customer, what is the thing you want to improve, and you do it immediately with all the material available on the internet about this customer making an HALO agent as we speak real time during the demo.

We've seen this being presented to us. It's really amazing.

I would say that sales organization using AI has received superpowers to better serve our customers and better explain what our products and our four suites can do, because what we can do is bringing the full customer interaction in one place to our customers. A lot of our competitors only can do a part of it, and then you need to connect with other parts.

We can bring one integrated platform and solution to our customers. Then, indeed, we didn't reduce our sales force, I would say we added it by bringing AI.

Where you see the decreases in FTE, it's mainly, I think, the support in general functions, for instance, finance, but also HR, legal. There you see that also using that superpowers, as we call them internally, with AI, we can do the same job at higher quality, even, I would say, more efficient than before with less people.

Okay.

Clear. Thank you, and very helpful example and good on the direction given.

Thank you for your answers.

Thank you, too, Johan.

You're welcome.

thank you all. Thank you all for joining our call.

It was great to share all these thoughts together with you. We are pleased with the progress we made in the first half of this year, and we remain focused on executing our strategy and delivering long-term value.

Thank you for your continued interest and support, and we appreciate your time today. Look forward to speaking to all of you again very soon.

Thank you.