CSG Systems International - Q2 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the CSG Systems Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and please be advised that this call is being recorded. After the speakers' prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you find your question has already been addressed, you can withdraw your question by pressing star one again. Now, at this time, I would like to turn things over to Mr. John Rea, Head of Investor Relations.

John Rea (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Like last quarter, we will be working from a slide deck, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. Please take a moment to locate these slides. Today's discussion will contain a number of forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our projected financial results, our ability to meet our clients' needs through our products, services, and performance, and our ability to successfully integrate and manage acquired businesses in order to achieve their expected strategic, operating, and financial goals. While these risks reflect our best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially.

Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new or future events. In addition to factors noted during this call, a more comprehensive discussion of our risk factors can be found in today's press release, as well as our most recently filed 10-K and 10-Q, which are all available in the Investor Relations section of our website. We will discuss certain financial information that is not prepared in accordance with GAAP. We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures, when reviewed in conjunction with our GAAP financial measures, provide investors with greater transparency to the information used by our management team in our financial and operational decision-making.

For more information regarding our use of non-GAAP financial measures, we refer you to today's earnings release and non-GAAP reconciliation tables on our website, which will also be furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K. With me today on the phone are Brian Shepherd, Chief Executive Officer, and Hai Tran, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Brian.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks, John. Hi, everyone. We appreciate you joining the call as we begin on slide 4. CSG had a fantastic start to 2023, with excellent results in both Q2 and the first half. We posted 9.2% year-over-year revenue growth in the second quarter and 11.1% double-digit revenue growth for the first half of 2023, both coming from 100% organic growth. Our performance over two quarters were the best first half results we have posted in nearly two decades. Our Q2 non-GAAP adjusted operating margin was 16.2%, a nice step up from the 15.1% we reported in Q2 2022.

Combining Q1 and Q2, it means Team CSG delivered 17.8% non-GAAP adjusted operating margin in the first half of 2023, which reinforces our commitment to maintain good operating discipline and expanding our operating leverage over time. CSG also grew bottom line non-GAAP EPS in the first half to $1.84 per share, which represents 7.6% year-over-year EPS growth, even as we had to offset much higher interest costs so far in 2023. Based on our strong first half, we are pleased to raise our full-year 2023 guidance. We are raising our revenue guidance to range from $1.15 billion-$1.175 billion, which means we raised the bottom end of our revenue guidance by $20 million and the top end by $5 million.

The midpoint of the new guidance now reflects a 6.7% year-over-year organic growth in revenue. We are raising our full-year 2023 non-GAAP adjusted operating margin percentage to range from 16.75%-17.1%, up from the prior 16.5%-17% range. Hai will share more details on all our revised guidance momentarily. In addition to reporting fantastic growth in raising our full-year 2023 guidance, we're also announcing a new $100 million share repurchase program, which will run through year-end 2024. At the end of the day, our faster revenue growth is fueled by strong ongoing market demand for CSG's industry-leading SaaS products and good sales performance. CSG's sales pipeline is large and healthy as we win and wow big new customers in a wide variety of faster growth industry verticals.

I will share more details on several exciting Q2 customer wins in a few minutes. One question I often get from investors is whether we see any softening in market demand globally, given higher interest rates and the risk of global economic slowdown in later 2023 or the first half of next year. While we continue to see good demand signals and customer buying behavior globally, I would share that almost all our customers are pre-preparing for possible rainy day scenarios over the next 4-6 quarters. Based on what we see today, we continue to believe that CSG can grow organic revenue consistent with our long-term 2%-6% range as we strive to be at the midpoint or higher of this range in most quarters and years....

As CSG continues to focus on delivering sustained mid-single-digit organic revenue growth or higher, like we posted in both Q1 and Q2 2023, we're also are continuing to take timely, disciplined steps to keep our operating margin healthy and growing faster than revenue, regardless of how global economic conditions unfold in the coming years. I would like to give a giant shout-out for our fantastic Q2 results to CSG's nearly 6,000 global employees, of which over 50% now live and work outside of the U.S. Having the majority of our employees residing outside the U.S. is not a coincidence.

When I was announced as CSG's next CEO in Q3 2020, one thing was crystal clear to our board of directors and to our executive leadership team: for us to elevate into a faster growth, more profitable, more relevant, and more diversified SaaS technology leader, CSG needed to become a more talent-rich, globally diverse company. A fantastic example of how our global team is executing on this is CSG India being named one of the top 100 India's Best Companies to Work For 2023, which we publicly announced in June. The success and momentum we are seeing in the first half results are 100% attributable to the dedication, talent, and innovation of CSGers all around the globe.

We will continue investing in our people, our products, and our customers to grow revenue faster while we simultaneously expand our operating margins as we add meaningful size and scale in the years ahead with excellent operating discipline. Turning to slide 5, I will reiterate the four strategic objectives that will help CSG create more shareholder value and allow followers of our story to track our progress. As I just shared, CSG aspires to deliver long-term organic revenue growth in the 2%-6% range, striving to consistently be at or above the midpoint of this range. That is why we're so pleased to see the midpoint of our revised 2023 revenue guidance sitting above the top end of this range at approximately 6.7%.

We aim to add operating scale and expand our operating leverage by growing revenue to $1.5 billion by year-end 2025, with bottom line growing as faster than top-line growth. This scale will come from a combination of good organic revenue and sales growth, combined with disciplined inorganic moves. Further, we strive to be the number one SaaS provider of choice for global communication service providers by providing the most value-adding technology platforms and by being easier to do business with than our competitors. Finally, we plan to diversify revenue even more as we win big in faster-growth industry verticals like retail, government, financial services, healthcare, technology, and more. Moving to slide six, you can see we delivered against all four objectives with our excellent start in the first half of 2023.

On strategic revenue growth, we reported $585 million of revenue for the first half of 2023, resulting in 11.1% year-over-year growth, our best first half results in nearly 20 years. On the right-hand side of slide 6, we believe that CSG's high-recurring revenue SaaS business model and our strong, healthy balance sheet make us an attractive investment. By 2025, we aspire to gain scale in the markets where we compete and generate $1.5 billion in annual revenue, which implies that CSG will have added over $500 million in profitable recurring revenue from 2020 to 2025. Over the medium to long term, we aspire to expand CSG's operating leverage and use our strong balance sheet to deliver non-GAAP EPS growth that meets or exceeds revenue growth.

On this last point, I will continually reinforce a key principle for the CSG board of directors and management team. Investors can be assured that Team CSG is laser-focused on creating shareholder value and earning the right to grow profitable revenue faster, not adding empty revenue calories. We will maintain a disciplined, high return on invested capital mindset as we explore a wide range of strategic moves to create more shareholder value. Turning to slide 7, we had good successes in the first half of the year on our goal to be the number 1 technology provider of choice for communication service providers globally. Our continued success with both North American and global CSPs prove that we are executing well against this strategic priority.

It is great to see that CSG grew revenue at our two largest North American broadband cable customers by approximately 7% year-over-year in Q2 2023. This result was partially driven by the migration of subscribers at Charter from a competitor's billing system over the last 12 months. We also saw good growth coming from business expansion in other areas with our two largest customers as we help them solve many of their most important business objectives. With respect to new logo wins, we recently announced a great new deal with ATN International, a leading provider of digital infrastructure and communication services. Team CSG will modernize their networks with our mediation and roaming settlement products. This will enable ATN to automate mediation and wholesale settlement workflows and access real-time performance data to better align resources and to more quickly react to changing business needs.

We continue to win more business in the wireless telecom market. During the quarter, we announced a fantastic new deal with PLDT, the Philippines' largest fully integrated wireless operator. PLDT is expanding its two-decade partnership with CSG as it embraces the power of the cloud to bring its wireless business into the future and transform its customer experience, particularly for its PLDT Enterprise unit. This large-scale revenue management and BSS transformation empowers PLDT Enterprise with a cloud-based unified billing and revenue management solution that enables streamlined processes across its business segments, minimizes costs, and shortens time to market. This is the latest example of us serving our customers in an environment of their choice, this one in Amazon Web Services cloud-based solution.

A few weeks ago, we announced the completion of our digital BSS transformation project with Airtel Africa, a leading telecommunications and mobile money service provider with almost 140 million wireless subscribers across 14 countries in Africa. With CSG's unified revenue management solution, Airtel Africa is primed to streamline processes across its business, minimize cost, and shorten time to market, while delivering digital experiences that drive customer loyalty and sustainable business growth. Turning to slide 8, since 2017, we have diversified our revenue coming from exciting new industry verticals from 7% of total 2017 CSG revenue to 28% of our first half 2023 revenue. A fantastic accomplishment in a relatively short amount of time.

We are a partner of choice for big brands and higher growth industry verticals, where we will help our customers digitize and modernize their customer experience and provide them with cutting-edge integrated payment solutions. During the first half of 2023, both solutions delivered good double-digit organic revenue growth and continue to be game changers for CSG and our customers. During the second quarter, we expanded our customer experience business with NRC Health, one of the nation's largest healthcare performance improvement firms, supporting more than 7,000 organizations. We are enabling NRC to execute a digital multi-channel communication strategy in a streamlined, effective, and scalable manner. Another nice Q2 win was a contract expansion with one of the world's leading technology firms. We are deploying our AI-powered digital CX solutions to provide their customers self-service capabilities in the voice channel.

These solutions will help reduce the number of contact center calls, lower the number of agent-to-agent phone transfers, and limit the number of repeat customer call center contacts. This is an excellent example of how CSG's AI-driven digital CX platforms help big, exciting brands improve customer experience and save operating costs. Also in Q2, we landed a good contract with a bundled utility service provider for municipal and private utilities to support various customer engagement initiatives. This deal expands our footprint in the utility industry and is another example of how our customer experience suite of products is finding use cases across multiple industry verticals. In the payments market, our continued double-digit revenue growth is a testament to our industry-leading SaaS integrated payments platform.

We now provide award-winning payment solutions to approximately 106,000 active merchants and ISV partners who need ACH, credit card, payment gateway, and payment processing capabilities, serving a wide range of recurring revenue industry verticals. In July, we were recognized by The Strawhecker Group as having the best payment API set in their annual Best of Breed Award showcase. As a leader in ACH processing, we continue to add scale by signing ISV partners in faster-growing industry verticals like property management. I will wrap up on slide nine before turning it over to Hai. Fiscal year 2023 is off to a fantastic start. We grew first half organic revenue double digits on a year-over-year basis. We continued to win fantastic new customer logos quarter in, quarter out, in addition to growing revenue nicely at our two largest customers.

We continue to diversify our business with over 28% of revenue coming from big, faster-growing industry verticals like healthcare, financial services, retail, tech, and government. We continue to demonstrate our commitment to run our business more efficiently with first half non-GAAP adjusted operating margins in the high 17% range. Our message to our three key stakeholders are clear: To our employees, CSG's best days and biggest breakthroughs are still ahead of us. We will keep dreaming big and demanding even more from our collective global talent as we do whatever it takes to turn our giant dreams into reality. To our customers, CSG is here for you. We are dedicated to being easier to do business with than any of our competitors, while solving your toughest business and technology-related challenges. We thank you for your continued trust in CSG.

To our shareholders, CSG's transformation is just getting started. Faster recurring revenue growth, improved operating leverage, and exciting industry vertical diversification are what this management team and our board of directors will hold ourselves accountable to, and we will do it with the high integrity, focused execution, and good governance that you've always come to expect from CSG. With that, I will turn it over to Hai to provide more detail on our Q2 and first half results, as well as our revised guidance targets for 2023.

Hai Tran (CFO)

Thank you, Brian. Let's walk through our Q2 and first half 2023 financial results, then I'll wrap up with some conclusions. Starting on slide 11, we generated $585 million of revenue in the first half of the year, which represents 11.1% year-over-year growth, all of which was organic. This strong first half revenue increase was primarily attributed to the continued growth of CSG's revenue management solutions, including the conversion of customer accounts onto CSG solutions, other ancillary services, and increased payment volume. As we mentioned on our Q1 earnings call, some of the revenue uplift we recognized in Q1 was related to the timing of certain license-oriented deals moving from Q4 of 2022 into Q1 of 2023, and the growth we get in 2023 from converting millions of subscribers off of a competitor at Charter over the last 12 months.

Even when excluding both of these items, our first half revenue growth rate would still have been higher than the top end of our long-term organic revenue growth range of 2%-6%. Our first half 2023 non-GAAP operating income was $96 million, or a non-GAAP adjusted operating margin of 17.8%, as compared to $77 million or 15.7% in the prior year. The increases in non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP adjusted operating income margin percentage can be mainly attributed to the higher revenue and improved operating leverage we get as we grow faster.

Moving on, our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $124 million for the first half 2023, or 22.9% of revenue, excluding transaction fees, as compared to $106 million, or 21.7% in the first half 2022. Lastly, our first half 2023 non-GAAP EPS was $1.84, as compared to $1.71 in the first half of the prior year, which represents 7.6% year-over-year growth. The increase in non-GAAP EPS is mainly due to the higher operating income in the quarter, offset by higher interest expense and foreign currency headwinds. Turning to slide 12, I'll go through the balance sheet, our cash flow generation, and shareholder returns.

Our first half 2023 cash flow from operations was $28 million, as compared to a negative $13 million in the first half of the prior year. We had non-GAAP free cash flow of $11 million in the first half of 2023, as compared to a negative $33 million in the first half of 2022. The primary driver of this increased cash flow performance was favorable working capital changes, driven by accrued employee compensation and deferred revenue. We continue to anticipate our full year 2023 free cash flow to range from $80 million-$120 million, as we anticipate strong operating performance and working capital benefits in the second half of the year. We ended the second quarter with $146 million of cash and short-term investments.

That, along with our outstanding debt at June 30, 2023, results in $281 million of net debt, and our net debt leverage ratio sits at 1.2x adjusted EBITDA. As a reminder, our capital structure is currently 100% floating rate, but we continue to explore potential ways to balance and optimize our exposure to interest rate volatility. Moving to the bottom right of the slide, we declared $18 million in dividends during the first half of 2023. During the first half of 2023, we did not repurchase any stock under a repurchase program. As Brian mentioned in his comments, we're excited to announce a new $100 million share repurchase program that will run through year-end 2024. Turning the page, I'll provide my insights on the raise we are making to our 2023 financial guidance targets.

The key highlights are, one, we are raising revenue guidance from $1.15 billion-$1.175 billion, which means we raised the bottom end of our revenue guidance by $20 million and the top end by $5 million. The midpoint of the new guidance now reflects a 6.7% year-over-year organic growth in revenue. Secondly, we are raising full-year 2023 non-GAAP adjusted operating margin percentage to 16.75%-17.1%, up from the prior 16.5%-17% range. We are also tightening our non-GAAP EPS range to $3.42-$3.58, which still results in the midpoint of our non-GAAP EPS guidance staying at $3.50, the same as before.

Wrapping up, CSG will continue to relentlessly prioritize every investment we make and stay disciplined in the allocation of resources and the use of capital. Innovation and an adherence to a risk/reward framework with continuous learning are key cornerstones of how we manage the business. Our business is well positioned with a strong sales pipeline and a high-quality customer base. We are also heavily focused on cross-sell opportunities within our existing customer base. Today, approximately half of our top 20 revenue customers take either digital customer experience or payment solutions from us. We remain committed to accelerating and diversifying our revenue growth, which may include closing and integrating disciplined value-added acquisitions.... We believe this approach, combined with our consistent capital distribution, will serve our shareholders well. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator to facilitate the question and answer session.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Mr. Tran. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you do have any questions, simply press star one. Again, if you do find that your question has already been addressed, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing star one again. We'll take our first question this afternoon from Maggie Nolan of William Blair.

Maggie Nolan (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, thank you. Congrats on the great results. I wanted to ask about the payments offering. Last quarter, you talked about potentially accelerating payments growth, and that was from a very strong performance last quarter. Can you give us an update on the momentum?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah. Hi, Maggie. Thanks for joining, and hope you're doing well. I would say we continue to see the, the same similar strong double-digit organic growth in terms of the business. It's really coming from a combination of increased volume from existing customers continuing to win more new merchants onto our platform. So we just continue to execute. Hai, you're, you have, kind of direct oversight of that business unit as well. You wanna give some additional color, to answer Maggie's question?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah. Hi, Maggie. Thanks for joining and thanks for the question. Yeah, the, yep, as Brian building upon what Brian said, a little additional color is that, you know, I think we've, we've invested a lot of, of, of time and energy in terms of, enhancing the collaboration on the go-to-market side within the payments organization. Much more focused in terms of our approach, in terms of the, the target, customers that, that we are pursuing. It's yielding, some early, and, and positive results. That is kind of a, a playbook that we're looking to effectively rinse and repeat as we move forward, and then build upon, with, the additional investments on the go-to-market side.

Maggie Nolan (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you. Then as we think about some of the growth drivers for 2023, there's obviously going to be some, some changing dynamics in 2024 with your largest customers. Can you give us an idea of what you think some of the opportunities are for growth or expansion with your two largest customer accounts in the following year?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Sure. Happy to do that, Maggie. You know, the way, the way we think about it in this environment, 'cause we get asked a lot about both, what about, you know, rainy day scenarios and others. First, what we see going on in all of our customers, including our top two, anything that can help them drive revenue growth faster or be easier to do business with for their customers, actually drives improved results. You know, it gets funding. With CSG, we tend to be mission-critical, and we help drive revenue growth, and we help drive good, improved customer experience, and in some cases, can drive operating leverage on their side. That's true of our big two.

That's true of almost every customer we serve, that's part of what's driving just good, sustained revenue growth kind of across all of our business. Specifically, in our big two, I mean, we were proud of Q2 showing 7%, you know, quarter year-over-year in, in our top two customers. We see increased homes passed. We see them kind of weathering the storm on some of their decline in broadband or the competition they face from fixed wireless in the U.S. market. We see them continuing to kind of work through that. As they pick up more broadband subscribers, have more homes passed, that obviously drives more business for CSG.

Then we constantly are trying to work with them, having, you know, multi-decade relationships to just help them figure out how they could grow faster on the consumer or the enterprise side of their businesses, and how we could help them just perform better all around our core applications. It's a combination of both their growth, and we like what we see from both the big two, and the additional value we can bring to them. Obviously, that's a big focus for us.

Maggie Nolan (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for the update.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks so much, Maggie.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We go next now to Nehal Chokshi at Northland Capital Markets.

Nehal Chokshi (Managing Director)

Yeah. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi. Was the results that you saw in the second quarter above your own expectations, i.e., above what the sell-side consensus view was, and therefore, does the full-year guidance revenue range really represent the outperformance achieved in the second quarter?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah. Hi, Nehal. Thanks so much for joining us. we, we, we liked what we saw a lot in Q2. We had high expectations for ourselves, and we overachieved against what we thought had the potential to shape up and be a really nice Q2. I, I would say at this stage, you know, we've tried to reflect full-year guidance in terms of what we think the most likely that we can deliver based on what we see at this point in time in the business, which both reflects the strong Q2, it, it reflects the sales momentum we've continued to have in the business and what we see in the outlook for Q3 and Q4.

I would say it takes into account a combination of both the strong performance in Q2 and what we think we can deliver, kinda going forward. With that said, that's really our focus at this stage. We celebrated for about 15 minutes, and we're now one month and two days into Q3. It's all about the execution in Q3 and Q4 for us.

Nehal Chokshi (Managing Director)

Great, then shifting gears a little bit, slide six, you cite that you expect to drive operating leverage. Could you talk about what is the driver of your operating leverage, perhaps in the context of thinking about your business in terms of the, you know, cash cow versus your, you know, growth portions of the business, high-growth portions of the business?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah, yeah. I'll start, and then I'll have Hai kind of add some more color from his vantage point. First, we see operating leverage in a couple different dimensions. First, what we've tried to do over the last 12 months and do even more in the coming several years, is redirect every dollar we spend into what can deliver faster revenue growth or deliver better on a customer, the value we bring big customers all around the world. If we can continually do that and get more efficient inside our four walls and put towards investments that will actually deliver a faster return, that should drive ongoing acceleration of both top-line revenue growth and bottom.

Secondly, we, we have a commitment where we wanna grow bottom line, whether that's non-GAAP operating margin or and EBITDA and EPS faster than revenue growth, which means we've got to create operating leverage across both the investments we make in R&D and SG&A. Third, you know, this whole point we talk a lot about of getting to 1.5 billion is to drive scale, that then we can also drive operating leverage as we just add more size and helps us do that kind of across the board. There is a strong focus across all those dimensions on both the organic and the inorganic side to make sure that we're delivering. Hai, do you want to provide any more color on that?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, Brian. I think our, our internal mantra is a commitment to growing our expenses more slowly than our revenue, right? That is something that, that we think about, you know, every day, every week, every month here, at CSG. In order to do that and yet fuel the, the growth in the business, we also spend a lot of time thinking about prioritization through the lens of impact. Where are we gonna allocate resources? You know, where are we gonna spend those, or make those investments that's gonna yield the largest impact on the business itself, as Brian said. That's, that, that is something that we do think about quite a bit and we talk about quite a bit internally.

Nehal Chokshi (Managing Director)

Okay. Thank you.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks, Nehal.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We go next now to Shlomo Rosenbaum at Stifel.

Shlomo Rosenbaum (Managing Director)

Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. Brian, the, the, the revenue in EBITDA was, was very strong operationally, and you guys are, seem to be starting to hit really a stride over here. Is, is the tightening of the EPS range as opposed to raising it, is that just due to higher interest expense versus last quarter? If that really is it, can you just tell us what you have embedded this quarter for interest expense for the year versus what you had last quarter?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah, thanks for joining, Shlomo. Really appreciate it and the question. Hai will provide a couple, a little more of the details, EPS is the area, even though we saw good growth in the first half over last year, we'd like to do better on, that's, you know, we constantly look at how we could improve. EPS, the drag is really coming from two things in full-year 2023. One is the 100% floating debt with the higher interest rate, north of $32 million in interest costs for the year. Hai will provide the specifics on that. The second one is the foreign exchange as the U.S. dollar, you know, kind of also created a hit.

Overall, from an EPS, we're seeing that we could, between interest expense and Forex combined, we could take a hit of about $0.14-$0.15 per share on EPS. That does create some headwinds. What we've got to do is we've got to grow faster on the top line. We've got to continue to put out strong operating profitability, and then obviously, you know, work on getting the interest cost down, which Hai, I think would be what? It's actually almost approaching just shy of $35 million now. You want to provide a little more color.

Hai Tran (CFO)

No, I mean, that, that's right. The, the, specifically, our current expectations is that interest expense for the year is about $34.8 million. You can see that on page 17 of the earnings release, Shlomo.

Shlomo Rosenbaum (Managing Director)

Okay. Could you talk about the seasonality of the cash flow of the business? Like, if you, if I look back historically, a lot of times there is a back-end-weighted free cash flow year. You certainly saw that last year, but it seems to move around. You know, sometimes you have it more even. Could you talk about what's gonna change in the second half of the year in terms of working capital? Are there specific, like, milestones and projects? Are there certain clients that tend to pay more in the second half of the year? Just give us a little bit of a bridge from, you know, what, from basically $11 million of free cash flow to, let's say, the $80 million-$100 million. Like, where, what's, where's that gonna... You know, what's gonna change right now?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah, I think, Shlomo, you hit the nail on the head. It is a couple of those things. We do have, as we've announced in the last couple of quarters, some large global telco projects that we're in the midst of. Those projects are fantastic strategic opportunities for us to garner very robust and healthy long-term customers that provide a tailwind to our business for many years to come. In the interim, as we are getting those projects off the ground, there are milestones that are tied to the cash flow, and those milestones will begin to hit in the second half of this year.

Then on top of that, just some timing around CapEx and some timing associated with working capital. This year, we see obviously, our, our cash position is much better than it was last year, but we see a similar dynamic in terms of a back half weighting on, on our free cash flow.

Nehal Chokshi (Managing Director)

Okay, great. Thank you.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks, Shlomo

Operator (participant)

We're next now to Matthew Harrigan at Benchmark Company.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. Can you talk about, you know, the adaptability of the Xponent product across so many industry verticals? It, it feels like you're nicely accelerating, activity, you know, really outside the financial services space as well as within. Are you getting better at really kind of assessing, you know, the attribution of, of consumer behavior and purchasing decisions and retention decisions to, as you go, as you go through the process? Including the incorporation of AI, which you talked about, in a, in a white paper earlier this year, I think, in concert with some consultancies?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks, Matt. Appreciate you joining us today. Hope you're doing great. Yeah, the, the core of our CSG Xponent, which really has a lot of applicability across industry verticals, is, is at, at its core, a decisioning engine that really takes the data that our customers has and helps them harness that in real time to give next best action capability for onboarding new customers, cross-sell, upsell, deflecting customer engagement calls. It can both drive revenue and offset operating costs, and just improve their overall customer NPS scores. That's the core of what it does. Wrapped around that then, is just targeted use cases, vertical by vertical, that makes it easier to implement and get a faster ROI.

Even in a, I'd say, a more bumpy economic environment, it has such a good return that it kind of pays for itself quickly. What, what we're trying to do more of is constantly improve that decisioning engine and the analytics capability that we provide to our customers, wrapped with targeted use cases. In financial services, we see that with, digitizing, different types of loans and payments and notifications. In retail, we see that improved, kind of experience that we're driving on, on pharmacy retailers around prescription notifications, prescription abandonment, or improving how they notify the customer. In some of the areas like big tech, You always talk about the win, where we're really helping on contact center routing, that can really take a lot of cost out of their business and get the customer's issue solved more quickly.

At the core, it's a decisioning and AI-driven platform that is providing value on a very targeted use case. What we're trying to do, expand out the use cases and be more, even more specific in those verticals and sell direct, but also get our channel sales, because there's a lot of great partners we have that could actually sell with the relationships they have, pull us in. Because what we do is the decisioning and the SaaS platform. Often, they can wrap it with a bunch of additional capabilities and services. That, that is a big focus, and we've just got to continually turbocharge that part of our business.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

Given that, and given the resilience predictability of the billing business, where would you expect to get dented if we did have a mild recession in the U.S. and maybe a little worse in Europe?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah, it's hard to predict, I mean, exactly kind of where it is. I mean, that's that balance we try to talk about in the earnings call. One, we do see every customer looking and asking questions about how they can take costs, no different than CSG is, out of their business. So far, what has held up well in terms of our accelerated revenue growth, if the spend they make with CSG helps them accelerate revenue or cut their operating costs or wow their customers better, then those costs aren't what get left on the cutting floor as they try to squeeze OpEx improvements out of their own business, because we become part of the solution.

You know, I think it could create risks in any one of these verticals, where we see some pullback, but so far, we've been on the side of the ledger that actually says, we, we help solve those challenges and improve their business results, so therefore, we stay and continue to win those programs. I actually don't think that there's one industry vertical or one region of the world. I think it's something that we've just got to continue to sell the value and the ROI, the proven ROI business case that we can drive. If we do, I think you'll continue to see good, good organic growth.

That said, we're also trying to make sure that we're disciplined, and we don't get our forecasting wrong, so that we constantly grow our OpEx slower than what our revenue's growing, as Hai talked about earlier.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

Congratulations.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Hai, anything else you?

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

November.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

No.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Appreciate it, Matt. Hai, anything else you would share on just how we think about kind of that balance of the growth part of the business, and then if we, if we did see a slowdown in coming quarters, how else we would respond?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah, I mean, I, I think you covered it, Brian. I, I think, you know, for us, it's, it's we're always trying to do two things. One, develop tools and capabilities that are very data-driven, that enables us to peer around the corner, looking at both financial and non-financial trends in the data. So that we have a bit of a canary in the coal mine that helps us rapidly respond to where we identify those risks, and then rapidly flex our cost base where possible, right? But, you know, that is an ongoing battle, as Brian mentioned, you know, to be able to have more visibility in the business.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

So you get a decent economic view just off the data that you have in-house, as well as just what your clients are telling you?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah. I mean,

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

That's correct.

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah, we do. You know, if you can imagine, particularly in, like in the CX business, we have a lot of access to data. The payments business, we have lots of access to data, right? You know, that, that large data set enables us to perform some interesting analyses. Now, it's the question around getting more sophisticated, you know, trying to figure out which one of those metrics are more predictive in nature.

Matthew Harrigan (Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. Thanks, Hai.

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yep.

Operator (participant)

We'll take our next question now from Brett Knobloch at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Brett Knoblauch (Managing Director)

Hi, guys. Thanks for, for taking my question. I guess the first, on the, on the new share repurchase program, how does this change maybe your near-term acquisition strategy as we are approaching call it 2025 soon, and your goal to reach $1.5 billion? Should we think of this as you guys being more favorable to share buybacks over the near term over M&A, or is there another way to think about it?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

No. Hey, Brett, hope you're doing well. Thanks for joining the call. Great question. No, it doesn't change at all. Our three main priorities that we try to be pretty consistent on every call and in interaction, one, hands-off glass on dividend. We've pretty much historically raised 6% like clockwork for over a decade now as an aristocrat, dividend provider. We're gonna continue that. Secondly, scale with great value-adding acquisitions to create scale and operating leverage in our business. Third, at a minimum, offset executive-based comp dilution on the share buyback side. If we see an opportunity where we think our stock is undervalued, and we can deploy capital that way, we will, just like we had a big bunch of share buyback in 2022.

So that doesn't change any of that, and we see opportunities kinda continue to execute that across the board.

Brett Knoblauch (Managing Director)

Got it, understood. Then maybe just on the EPS guidance. You guys raised, call it, you know, revenue guidance, margin guidance across the board, kinda left the midpoint of EPS and free cash flow unchanged. Should we just think about that as maybe any EPS improvement where is being offset by maybe higher interest costs, or is there anything else going on that would have led to maybe, you know, not raising the midpoint there?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Good question. Hai, you want to add?

Hai Tran (CFO)

Yeah. That, that's correct. it, you know, we, we are seeing improved performance in the underlying business, but the, you know, those improvements are facing the headwinds of both, higher interest costs as well as currency fluctuations. you know, taking away some of those benefits. As Brian mentioned earlier, it's about a $0.14 headwind this year for us.

Brett Knoblauch (Managing Director)

Perfect. Understood. Then maybe if I could squeeze kind of one last one in there. I guess on, on the, the, the payment side, it seems like that's, you know, still growing, quite robust. I guess as we break out, you know, first half revenue growth is, you know, 11% and, you know, second half implied, you know, closer to 3%-3.5%. Could you maybe just help parse the, the differences between what's driving such a dispersion growth between the first half of this year and the second half, and what maybe the payments is contributing to that?

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah, we don't, we don't break out the specifics, but maybe I can help a little bit, Brett. If you look at our first half, you know, just a little bit over 11% year-over-year organic growth, there's two, you know, contributors that kind of really took it to that double-digit level. If you take our conversions we did at Charter and converting 14 million subs off of one of our bigger competitors, and then we talked about the kind of the big one-time license, those two things combined, even if you neutralize those out, are about 4%. It says the core business is still growing above the 6%, you know, range around that.

That gives you a kinda maybe, you take those two out, it kind of just says, we're still in that 2-6, but slightly above. What we've seen in the business is all of our units are contributing to that good growth. We fully expect our payments in digital CX to consistently be strong, double-digit organic growth businesses, and we see really good growth potential in both North American cable and definitely the global telecom space on the consumer and enterprise side as we win more big wireless deals.

Obviously, what we try to do then in digital CX and payments is both through organic growth and, you know, smart acquisitions that can add value, you know, get the size and scale of those faster-growing units even bigger as we continue to also grow nicely in the core cable and telecom.

Brett Knoblauch (Managing Director)

Understood. All right. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Thanks, Brett.

Operator (participant)

We'll go next now to Dan McDermott at Oppenheimer.

Dan McDermott (Equity Research Associate)

Hi, everyone, Dan on for Tim Horan. Thank you for taking my question. I don't believe you currently support Comcast and Charter's mobile business. Their mobile business is obviously growing extremely fast, adding around 1 million subs this quarter combined. Wouldn't it make sense for Comcast and Charter to consolidate onto 1 platform? Are customers currently getting 2 bills, 1 for their broadband and video services and the other for mobile? Thank you.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

Yeah. Hey, Dan. Thanks for the question. Thanks for joining. Hope you're doing great. We love the question. Yes, that is something that we try to raise to our good, our good customers at and the execs at both Comcast and Charter. We do not serve on, with the BSS platforms, the wireless today. We respect that our, you know, our customers often will use different vendors for different parts of their business. We respect that, at the same time, we don't love it, and we try to give them a lot of business cases and reasons why it could make sense to consolidate. Today, it is separate platforms. There's not a 100% converged bill, although we work with Comcast and Charter, as does one of our competitors, to try to deliver still a great experience for their customers.

I, for one, am a quad-play customer of one of those, given where I live in Denver, and we think it could make sense over time. So far, we, we respect that that's not the decision that they've felt makes sense today, and we just try to serve them well with what they give us and give them reasons to consider how they could expand with us if they wanted to at some point in time. Completely their choice.

Dan McDermott (Equity Research Associate)

Got it. Thank you so much.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

No, thanks. Thanks, Dan.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. I currently don't see anyone else in queue. I'd like to turn it back to Mr. Shepherd for closing comments.

Brian Shepherd (CEO)

No, thank, thanks, everyone, for joining the call. We're, we're extremely proud of Q2, but for us, like we talked about earlier, we're now a month and two days into Q3. As good as Q2 was, we think we can still do better. We can do better on EPS, we can do better on our interest expense, we can deploy more capital in a way that adds shareholder value with good acquisitions. So we're proud of what we're doing, but we've got a lot of work to do to keep elevating the results. Thanks for the time, and look forward to talking to you next quarter.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the CSG Systems Q2 2023 earnings conference call. I'd like to thank you all so much for joining us and wish you all a great remainder of your day.