Temenos AG

SIX:TEMN

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Temenos Q3 2021 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Joel, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Max Chuard, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Thank you, operator. And good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. I hope you've been able to access our results presentation on our website. I will start with a review of our Q3 performance. Then I will hand over to Takis to run through the financials before giving some concluding remarks. Starting on Slide 7. We saw strong momentum in our business this quarter. The environment continues to improve, and more banks are pushing ahead with IT transformation. This is reflected in our license and SaaS, which both performed strongly in Q3. SaaS was accelerated to 30% growth in the quarter, and license were up 20%. We see demand increasing across all customer tiers and products. Total bookings grew at a healthy 19% in the quarter, which is adding to our backlog and increasing our recurring revenue visibility. This is a key metric for tracking the growth in the business overall as it combines the acceleration in the SaaS alongside the ongoing demand for our traditional license business. The growth in SaaS and maintenance is also driving our ARR, which was up 9% in the quarter. EBIT grew 7%, driving a strong operating and free cash flow performance. We are seeing a rapid evolution of SaaS and cloud, and we are doing -- and we are going through a very exciting phase in our growth. Competition for talent is intense, and we must ensure we can attract and retain the right skills and talent. This quarter, we've made some investments to achieve this, and Takis will talk more about this later in the call. Moving to Slide 8. We generated $10.7 million of SaaS ACV this quarter. In any 1 quarter, this number is driven by a combination of new bookings and volume growth in existing customers. In Q3, the vast majority of growth came from new bookings. And in fact, this was more than double the amount from last year with some very exciting names. And I hope that those new names will also drive increased consumption in the future, of course. The U.S. was the largest contributor to ACV, and Europe was the second largest. And we expect a very strong year with our SaaS ACV growing between 50% to 60% for the full year. Turning to Slide 9. Total bookings this quarter grew 19% with strong demand across all tiers and products. We generated $153 million of total bookings. And year-to-date, our total bookings are up 64% versus 2020 and also up very importantly on 2019 as we continue to take market share. The growth was across license and SaaS as well as an increase in the average tenure compared to 2020. On Slide 10, the sales environment improved through the quarter in all regions. We had 18 new clients wins, which was fairly evenly split across license and SaaS deals. The U.S. is still our largest contributor to total software licensing. This had a good mix also of license and size, this with some very exciting new names signed in the quarter. Europe had a sequential improvement in sales, and we expect the regions to accelerate further in the fourth quarter across both license and SaaS. We also had a good performance in Asia with 2 Tier 1 banks extending the relationship with us. And pipeline activity with Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks has clearly picked up across most regions, but in particular, in the U.S. where we are actively engaged in multiple large deals opportunities. This is very exciting times for us in the U.S. On Slide 11, I'd like to take a minute to discuss an interesting trend we've seen over the last few months. We've announced several exciting partnerships and deals with operators in the BaaS market. We announced 2 partnerships with BaaS providers in the quarter to enter the BaaS market in the U.S. and in Europe. And banks in the U.S. offer services to Credit Unions and which is an estimated market of $3.6 billion, and Vodeno is targeting Europe and BaaS market, an estimated around $3 billion market annually. We also signed a key deal with Green Dot in the U.S. to power its direct digital bank and banking platform services. Interestingly, we competed against some of the largest U.S. incumbent vendors and some -- and several new vendors on this deal. And the bank choose Temenos because of our hyper efficient, highly scalable and secure open cloud capabilities. And obviously, we've made significant investments over the last few years in that respect. I believe the demand for BaaS will only increase going forward as financial institutions look to access the digital transformation and fintechs and e-commerce platform look to embed banking services into the ecosystems. This is, as I said, a very exciting and an accelerating trend that is expanding our addressable market. It is great that our technology is at the forefront of this. And Temenos is extremely well positioned to capture this opportunity because of our market leadership, because of our credibility and the strength of our solution. Moving to Slide 12. We are making the good progress with the both partnerships -- strategic partnerships that we've announced at the start of the year. With Salesforce, we've completed the integration of our product for retail. We are working now on the business and the wealth versions of the integrated product, and we've seen already some strong interest in the U.S. and globally across all those 3 business lines. Then secondly, on the partnership with DXC, which continues to progress well, we are engaging with a number of DXC's customers on core banking replacement, and this is supporting the acceleration of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 pipeline in the U.S., as I mentioned before. Turning to Slide 13. I I'd like to spend a minute on our competitive positioning. Temenos is uniquely placed to meet the demands of our plans across all tiers and business models. We have a unique value proposition as banking is all we do, 100% focus. We have deep domain expertise, unmatched in our market. And overall R&D and innovation is customer-centric, using our domain expertise to meet the demands of our customers today and in the future. We combine our leading functionality with extensive localization capabilities for our clients in 150 countries. We have a game-changing technology. Our platforms are cloud-native, cloud-agnostic and that gives our clients efficiency, scalability and freedom to choose how and where they want to run our software. Our technology is APIs-first with AI embedded across the platform. And our packaged products with a single code base mean that all our clients are running on the same platform, and they can all benefit from our innovation in R&D, which is the highest in the industry. We can scale through our extensive ecosystem of technology and implementation partners. Now on Slide 14, I'll continue a little bit on our unique value proposition, which give us a winning combination of game-changing technology and rich, highly localized package functionality. What is important is that our investments are not diluted across overlapping products. We have one core banking platform and one digital banking platform and one code base. So when we invest a dollar in innovation, all our clients can take advantage of this. These are strengths our competitors cannot match. With a focus on technology toolkit and highly customer solution for each in diverse clients, the model is not scalable. When clients choose Temenos, our clients know they're working with a market leader and they know we can provide the business benefits they're looking forward in selecting a vendor. And let me give you some example of those business benefit we provide to our customers. Like [indiscernible]. [indiscernible] had its fastest product launch ever using our Temenos platform. In the U.S., the challenger bank Varo estimate that it is able to operate at a 25% cost of an incumbent bank using our technology. And now Green Dot, as I said before, selecting Temenos because of our hyper efficient, highly scalable and highly secure open cloud capabilities. So these business benefits are only possible because of our unique approach, package, upgradable software, one single code built using deep domain expertise and obviously, our passion and relentless focus on innovation. Having said that, I will now hand over to Takis to go through the numbers for the quarter.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Yes. Thank you, Max, and hello, everyone, from my side as well. Starting on Slide 16, I'll start with an overview of the quarterly financial performance. All figures are in constant currency unless otherwise stated. Our SaaS revenue accelerated to 30% growth in the quarter with now several quarters of strong ACV growth starting to be reflected in the P&L. We also had strong license growth with increased activity across all tiers, and these together drove total software licensing growth of 23%. Maintenance grew 3%, as expected, giving total revenue growth of 9%. EBIT grew 7%, and we achieved an EBIT margin of 37.2%, down 1 percentage point. You should bear in mind that the Q3 '20 cost base had the full run rate benefit of cost savings from our 2020 restructuring program. Our cash generation remains strong with operating cash flow up 7% to $68 million and free cash flow up 19% to $40 million. DSOs ended the quarter at 111 days, and we expect DSOs to be around 105 days by year-end. Our net debt moved below $1 billion, and our leverage stood at 2.2x, sequentially down from 2.3x. We now expect our leverage to be at around 2x by year-end. Moving to Slide 17. Our strong ACV growth of the last few quarters drove an acceleration of SaaS revenue growth to 30%. I expect SaaS revenue to increase by about $3 million in Q4. I was particularly pleased with the good license growth of 20% this quarter, driving total software licensing growth of 23%. The Maintenance continues to recover as expected, growing 3% in the quarter. We expect maintenance growth to accelerate into Q4 to give full year maintenance growth of around 4%, driven by the stronger license growth in the first half of the year. After 2021, we expect our maintenance growth to accelerate in 2022 and beyond, as licenses continue to grow. Service revenues were down 5% in a seasonally slow quarter. I expect growth to considerably accelerate in Q4 with service revenues growing around 3% for the full year. Looking at the cost base, our operating costs were up 10% year-on-year. As expected, the cost base in H2 is catching up with the continued hiring across the business, and we would expect our 2021 cost base to arrive as implied by the midpoint of our guidance. While travel costs are lower than forecast at the start of the year, those savings are offset by competition for talent in some areas of the business. Next, on Slide 18, we have like-for-like revenues and costs adjusting for the impact of M&A and FX. The Q3 figures are all organic and therefore, in line with our constant currency growth rates. In terms of FX, the euro weakened against the dollar and the sterling and the Swiss strengthened against the dollar, creating an EBIT headwind of around $2 million. We have also factored in this $2 million headwind on EBIT guidance for the full year. Turning to Slide 19. Net profit grew 1% in the quarter, largely due to the higher tax rate. EPS grew 3%. Our tax rate was 17.2% for the quarter, and we continue to guide for a 2021 tax rate at 16% to 18%. Now moving to Slide 20. Our DSOs reached 111 days at the end of the quarter, flat year-on-year, as Q3 is normally a back-end loaded quarter due to summer holidays. This usually results in a seasonal sequential uptick in DSOs, as also seen last year. We still expect DSOs to reduce to around 105 days by year-end. Beyond 2021, we expect DSOs to continue on their downward trend towards 85 days by 2025, driven by continued improvement in licenses and services, cash collection and an increasing contribution from SaaS in the P&L, which typically has DSOs more in line with maintenance. On Slide 21, our Q3 '21 LTM cash conversion was 113%, well above our target of converting at least 100% of IFRS EBITDA into operating cash. We expect our cash conversion to be at least 100% for 2021, driven by strong growth in recurring revenue, which we have continued to deliver for at least a few quarters now. Next, on Slide 22, we show the key changes to the group liquidity since Q2 '21. We generated $68 million of operating cash. All the movements to highlight include the completion of our share buyback, which ended in August, and a net outflow of borrowings of $28 million. Our cash on balance sheet at the end of the quarter was $85 million, with our net leverage reaching 2.2x, down from 2.3x at the end of Q2. We expect our net leverage to be around 2x at year-end 2021, a slight improvement from previous commentary. Moving to Slide 23. Our ARR continues to accelerate on the back of strong SaaS growth and on the recovery of our maintenance revenue with ARR reaching 9% growth in this quarter. ARR growth will continue to accelerate in the fourth quarter as both SaaS growth and maintenance growth reached more normal levels. Our deferred revenue continues to grow nicely at 13% and with strong advanced collections and growth in SaaS being the key drivers. Free cash flow was up 19% year-on-year to reach $40 million, and our net cap debt was $5.8 million, down $1.4 million versus Q3 '20 and still expect it to be at 2020 levels for the full year, assuming no further M&A. On Slide 24, I have kept this slide in here to remind you of the new KPIs we introduced in February, total bookings and ARR. I won't go over it again now, but you can find tables in the appendix with SaaS, ACV, ARR, total bookings and free cash flow by quarter to help you track these numbers. Now on Slide 25, we have confirmed our non-IFRS guidance for 2021. The guidance is in constant currencies, and you can find the FX rate assumptions in the appendix. For ACV, we are guiding for 50% to 60% growth as we have seen strong growth in both new names and volume growth with a number of clients throughout 2021. For ARR, we guide for 10% to 15% growth, driven by committed SaaS revenue from the ACV we have booked and the reacceleration in our maintenance growth in Q4. We expect total software licensing growth of 14% to 18% with continued license growth as seen in the first 3 quarters and driven by the accelerating growth in SaaS. Total revenue growth is forecast at 8% to 10% with the impact of slower growth in maintenance and services on the back of lower license growth last year. We expect both of these to accelerate in Q4 ending 2022 and beyond. We are guiding for EBIT growth of 12% to 14% to $360 million to $367 million, including the $2 million FX headwind on EBIT for the full year. This implies an EBIT margin expansion of 130 basis points from 35.8% to 37.1%. Under our definition of non-IFRS, which we changed in January 2021 to bring us in line with our peers, we are now excluding IFRS 2 charges. There is a significant amount of volatility in these costs, including the share price and if and when individuals exercise their options. Our estimated IFRS 2 costs for the full year have increased from around $20 million to an estimated $50 million. While the normal IFRS 2 run rate cost is still estimated at around $20 million to $25 million, the incremental portion is driven by 2 one-off elments. Firstly, the introduction of a new one-off LTIP program extended across an increased number of employees to align a broader segment of the middle and upper management with the overall company performance. Our company is going through a rapid evolution with significant changes around SaaS and cloud across the organization, while the competition for talent in our sector has intensified. Our Board and Exco made the decision to give this one-off grant to a large number of senior and middle management below Exco level to ensure we can attract and retain the necessary skills and talent to drive the growth of our business going forward. The second element driving the increase of IFRS 2 costs is the alignment of outstanding years of existing LTIP programs with the new KPIs introduced in 2021, as voted on at the May 2021 AGM. And lastly, in terms of guidance, we have maintained our target of converting over 100% of EBITDA into operating cash and expect DSOs to reduce to around 105 days by year-end. We expect a tax rate of 16% to 18% for 2021, and our net leverage to be around 2x by the end of the year. On Slide 26, I'd like to reconfirm also our 2025 targets, which are presented -- which we presented at our Capital Markets Day in February. These targets are organic growth rates per annum. We expect total software licensing to grow 15% to 20%, and SaaS will clearly grow significantly faster at around 30% plus with licenses expected to grow at 10% plus per annum. This will drive total revenue growth of 10% to 15% per annum. We expect to expand the EBIT margin to around 41% by 2025, driven by strong growth in license and maintenance, improving our SaaS gross margin and leveraging R&D and G&A, while still growing R&D on an absolute basis by 7% to 8% per annum. We expect total bookings to grow 17% to 22% per annum with ARR to grow at least 15%. ARR, in particular, will drive free cash flow growth of at least 15% to reach more than $600 million by 2025. And then finally, on Slide 27. This is a slide we showed during the last couple of quarters, but I wanted to give a quick run-through of our non-IFRS EBIT and margin expansion in 2021. Our EBIT growth will be driven, in particular, by our growth in recurring revenues as well as licenses, while we continue to invest in R&D and sales and marketing and with greater variable cost accruals compared to 2020. As such, we expect to deliver an EBIT margin expansion of around 130 basis points in 2021. With that, I hand back to you, Max.

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Thank you, Takis. And so on Slide 29, in conclusion, we continued our strong momentum in the third quarter. License and SaaS, both performed strongly, with SaaS revenue accelerating to 30% and licenses up 20%. Our total bookings continues to grow strongly, driving backlog and visibility, as does our ARR. Our EBIT growth is driving our strong operating and free cash flow generation. And finally, we are going through a very exciting phase of growth. And I am confident to deliver our 2021 guidance as well as the midterm ones. I look forward to updating you on our Q4 results in February. So with that, operator, I'd like to open the call for Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Laurent Daure from Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Laurent Daure, Head of IT Software and Services Research]

I have 3 questions on my side. The first point is on the Green Dot deal, seems quite an attractive deal. Could you elaborate a bit further with more details on this deal, the ramp-up phase? I suppose the SEB will be impacted by this deal like in Q4. And any granularity on the size this deal could reach maybe 1 or 2 years from now? The second question, Takis more for you, you reconfirmed all your guidance. I was thinking about the licensing was 14% to 18%. Why have you kept the low end of this guidance unchanged because it seems to imply more or less flattish license in the fourth quarter? And final question is on the stock option. You just described at the CMD, on the long run, you were expecting the charge to be 3 -- I think 3% to 3.5% of revenues, with more fight for talent, is there a risk that this number may be adjusted [indiscernible] not only for 2021, but for the coming years?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Laurent, thanks for the question. I'll take the first one. Yes, listen, Green Dot is a very exciting deal. It's the Temenos banking cloud. So it is an ACV deal. It is a large deal. We signed it in Q3. So it will really start impacting on the P&L more towards 2022. But it's an exciting deal. What we are seeing in the market with embedded finance and the ability to expand our market into different ecosystems and the ability for Temenos to be the technology to power this, I think that's very exciting. And the path of traction and the speed at which we saw -- we are seeing this happening is very, very exciting. And I think we're extremely well positioned. We do want to be the de facto player and technology provider to those BaaS providers. You've seen we have also Mbanq, in the U.S., we've now got Vodeno. We are selected. We are choose by Green Dot. We have got around 33 million customers. It's a very, very exciting company. So very pleased with the deal. And as I said, it's also a deal that we were able again to show our value proposition to show the business benefit we can bring to them, again, some very established U.S. incumbent vendors and also the traditional neo vendor. So very pleased with this deal.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Laurent, let me take the other 2 questions. License growth, clearly, we're pleased that we have shown 20% again in Q3. We had Q1 and Q2 also good. Keep in mind the comparison base gets tougher in Q4. So that's maybe one reason why we feel confident with the guidance as it stands now. And second is, we still have the largest -- traditionally, the largest quarter ahead of us. As we mentioned in the past, we expect closure rates to be back at the pre-COVID levels by the end of the year. So at this point in time, I think we feel confident with our guidance as it is out there. On your IFRS 2 costs, clearly, we need to highlight that this is a one-off, okay? Now we have been investing across the organization in our talent pool in terms of salary increases. So this is all reflected in our cost base. From today's point of view, I think it's too early to come up with an IFRS 2 number for the next year and will inform in February. Maybe it's going to be slightly higher, a couple of basis points, we don't know at this point in time. But clearly, it will be not driven by this one-off, or only partially. So I think, yes, even if we end up at 3% to 4% next year, but I think we'll need to see where we stand in February. I mean one of the reasons, as we have mentioned, is exactly what has happened this year. The share price recovered first, then it came back again. You really don't know what is happening. So we were constantly wrong even when we're estimating for ourselves the cost. But the run rate, I think that's the important one. The $20 million to $25 million still stands. So another $5 million, $6 million for Q4.

[Operator]

The next question comes from James Goodman from Barclays.

[James Arthur Goodman, Research Analyst]

You talked about being engaged, I think, in multiple large deal opportunities in the U.S. I mean we saw obviously a particularly big cloud vendor win in the U.S. recently for, I guess, the complex domestic operation. When I think about the customers that you target with your SaaS offering, typically, it's sort of well outside of that kind of Tier 1 category. So I was just wondering if you could help us there with, I guess, the evolution of the competitive situation with the native cloud vendors as we think about larger tiered clients? And the second question, just I think there was, in Q2, some discussion of a modest amount of slippage out of that quarter. And I was curious as to whether you close those deals this quarter, if not, if that's been anticipated for the year? And did you experience any further [ slippage ] on the license side?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

James, let me take the first one. Yes, we do see a large amount of exciting opportunities in the U.S. Some of those are during with -- from our partnership with DXC, some are just driven by our own operation that we have there. And also, as I mentioned, we've got a particular focus on global accounts and big banks and we've got a team that is looking specifically after those accounts. Those are, I would say, Tier 1 to Tier 2 institutions. It's mainly, I will say, at the back end that they want to renovate. Is it through microservices or line of business, but it is significant type of activities. Now to your question about the competitive landscape. I tried to explain during the -- during my presentation, how we differentiate ourselves and why we win. We clearly don't win all the deals because there are some deals that are -- our model doesn't fit for those deals. We -- our goal is to provide a highly scalable model which we can repeat, we invest massively, and we can show a very clear business benefits to our banks, to our customers. And I tried to give some of that. We are not in a business of building a tailored platform for a single bank. That's not our business, and that will never be our business. So the big cases where a bank will want to invest in something very specific for them that they'll be able to tailor it made, to evolve it in the very specific requirements, that's not Temenos. Temenos is about heavy investing in innovation, lead innovation, bring value. And that's why also you see Temenos running at high margins, we are able to sell that value to the customer, they see the benefit of what we bring to them. When Varo is able to operate at 25% of the cost of an incumbent vendors they see the benefit of what we can bring to them. And that's our model. So we will not win all the deals because some of the deals will not be for us.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

James, let me take the second one. The one example given at the time of Q2 results was just to show the impact one deal can have on growth rates. So I can't really comment on this specific deal other than not much happened with the legal team. So it's expected to close now shortly. So let's say, October or November. But clearly, as you see from our Tier 1 total software license share, we had some very good other deals closed in Q3. So yes, so still the one ahead and clearly part of our full year forecast.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Chandramouli Sriraman from Stifel.

[Chandramouli Sriraman, Managing Director]

Maybe a couple of questions from my side. So when I look at Europe, it still seems to be very Q4 loaded like 2020. Can you give some color on what's driving this? You have been quite positive in terms of the demand bouncing back in Europe for a while now. What are the key hurdles you see here for things not to have improved already? And maybe a very quick question in terms of the sales and marketing costs. You have mentioned that you are seeing some increased competition there. How should we see this evolving as licenses continue to progress as you expect?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Chandra, let me take the first one. So listen, Europe, we saw a sequential improvement compared to Q2 to Q3. Clearly, the largest quarter is Q4. Europe is pretty much closed for most of the Q3, the summer is long in Europe and especially after COVID times, people are taking time off and that was the case, clearly. But I think as well what probably you don't fully appreciate is that we do also see quite some traction in our SaaS business in Europe. And when you look at our performance in Europe from a bookings point of view, where you take into account if you on the total contract value from our SaaS is, then the picture is totally different. And then you would see Europe in Q3 being strongly on last year. So I think this is a little bit probably what is not -- but what you cannot see and is the fact that we see more and more traction in our SaaS business coming from Europe. Clearly, U.S. continues to lead the way. But second is Europe, and we see increased activity from our SaaS business in Europe. And hence, when you look at the total contract value of both the license and the SaaS, then Europe has clearly strongly rebounded in Q3 in that respect.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Maybe on, Chandra, the sales and marketing costs, I think as we explained at the start of the year, at the CMD, sales and marketing will grow faster than the revenue this year, but also the future years. And clearly, this is something we not only started this year, but if you remember, we were already making selective investments in both R&D and in sales and marketing on the back end of 2020. So this is, I think, something which is going to increase. Now as we mentioned, this loyalty program clearly had also some salespeople benefiting from this. But this is just one element. We do regular salary benchmarking reviews. But this is something we saw what we predicted in our forecast. So I would say no change expected from what we said at the start of the year.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Knut Woller from Baader Bank.

[Knut Woller, Analyst]

Also a couple of questions from my side. First, on the SaaS ACV, which was basically down year-over-year, admittedly against the back of tough comps. Still, it was, I think, the weakest SaaS ACV now that you delivered in the last 5 quarters. So I'm trying to get a better feeling for the momentum that you're seeing on the SaaS side, which I don't see reflected in the SaaS ACV and would appreciate here some more color. And then secondly, on the cash flow, it looks like the cash flow in Q3 has been particularly driven by trade payables, while receivables were a headwind and here particularly looking at receivables, they have been up sequentially. Can you give you some ideas on what drove the receivables up in the third quarter?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Knut, let me take the first one. Listen, our SaaS ACV business is very, very strong. And there is a lot of activity, very strong pipeline. Now when you look at the ACV for this quarter, the element I tried to highlight is that, within every quarter, you will have an amount of consumption. And this is difficult to predict when a certain customer will require increased consumption. And clearly, this year -- this quarter, sorry, we had minimal from that. So if you look at -- and that's why for me, ultimately, this is very positive KPIs. When you look at the incremental or the ACV this quarter almost all of it is new business activity, which we generate in the future, increased consumption. So yes, it is below, a year ago, that's for sure. But this is just new business activity, new logos, that will hopefully be successful customers that will increase consumption and so on. So for me, I'm very pleased with the delivery of what we signed on the ACV side in Q3. It's lots of new logos, very exciting new logos, exciting names that hopefully will generate much more consumption in the future.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Let me take the cash flow question. So yes, we had an outflow of around $26 million on the receivables. But clearly, we had, as I mentioned, a very back-end-loaded quarter. So quite a number of deals signed very late and basically, the cash will come in, in Q4. This is also visible with the DSO number moving sequentially up. On the payables, I think if you go back into the quarters, and clearly, we had some positive impact there of payments we had also suppliers or basically prepayments. And therefore, this was a positive impact. But clearly, over the full year, we always expected more quarterly specific variations to normalize. So other than the receivable with the DSO increase with a traditionally back-end loaded-quarter, nothing specific to mention here.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Stacy Pollard from JPMorgan.

[Stacy Elizabeth Pollard, Head of Software and IT Equity Research]

Just a couple of catch-up questions. First of all, what happened in services again? Can you maybe speak about that a bit more? And what we should expect in services going forward? How much is being taken by third parties now? And does that shift continue? And second question, just kind of a follow-up around the ARR, and the 9% looks a little bit below the 10% to 15% target for the full year. Is that catch-up mainly coming from the higher signings in Q4? Is that the way we should think of it?

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Stacy, let me take those. Maybe first on the ARR. And clearly, ARR, which is driven by maintenance and SaaS growth, will see an acceleration, pretty considerable acceleration in both maintenance and SaaS growth in Q4, which will basically going to drive the ARR growth into the 10% to 15% range, as we have guided. So I think nothing specific to read into that. And given the visibility we have, this is something -- yes, we're pretty happy to forecast. So yes, ARR growth will materially accelerate in Q4 as well maintenance and SaaS. On the services, I think there are 2 elements to consider. One is what we have seen in terms of the revenue impact. Clearly, we had a particularly high number of partner implementation in Q3, which is something that's always difficult to time. From the current point of view, we would see Q4, let's say, with a normal share of partner implementation, so material growth acceleration in service revenues in Q4 to arrive around the 3% mark for the full year. And then the other element is clearly having -- has an impact on profitability was more than we have been making some selective investments into our partner model, especially around governance, customer success, which is also, I mean, is still small, having a small impact on the margin, but this clearly should help us drive license growth in 2022 and beyond and also become more efficient in terms of the implementation time frame for future projects.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Michael Foeth from Vontobel.

[Michael Foeth, Head of Swiss Industrial Research]

Two questions also from me. The first one is regarding the additional Board members that you announced, the 2 additions, which look very good. The question is, whether they are going to replace other Board members? Or that whether you're expanding the Board, and if you're expanding, why does Temenos feel it needs to expand the Board? Second question is regarding your view on your overall pipeline, how is that developing? How would you qualify your pipeline of business now versus a quarter ago and a year ago?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Michael, the -- so the -- yes, we are bringing 2 Board members, which have, I would say, quite -- probably a different profile, which will very nicely complement, I would say, the -- our current board. It is about expanding it. It is about, as I said, bringing new type of ideas, new interest into that Board. And I think it's going to be very, very interesting to have them as part of the Board. We are also obviously nicely moving into a more diversified, with now 3 female at the Board, so around 30% will be represented by female at the Board, which I think is great. So it is about expanding the Board with new and very interesting backgrounds. On the question about the pipeline, listen, clearly, the -- I would say, the U.S. is where we see the -- probably the most active because of, I would say, some very large deals that are progressing well and in which as I said, is a very, very exciting. And so the U.S. is clearly -- we are making now significant inroads in the U.S. And as you've seen now, it's now quite a few quarters that the U.S. is the largest contributor to our total software licensing. And we see both, I would say, from license and SaaS. I would say the rest of the regions are clearly coming back from the COVID crises. And we see both, I would say, Asia starting as well. I mentioned we had 2 very interesting Tier 1 deals that expanded the footprint with Temenos this quarter. But there is more activity happening and across Asia, also in Australia, which has been a very important market for us in the past. And then during COVID it slowed down, and now we see increased activity again. So clearly, Asia as well is coming back. I mentioned Europe. Obviously, Europe where that has been the regions which has been the most impacted, and that has been the slowest to come back compared to, some extent, the U.S. But there as well, we are starting to see increased activities. There's a need of digitalization across the globe, and we see both traction on the license side, but as well on the on the ACV. So clearly, a picture which is clearly improving compared to last year, a picture that is improving compared to a month ago. So we see continuous improvement in the environment, which is obviously then giving us ultimately the confidence for the medium term.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Gianmarco Conti from Deutsche Bank AG.

[Gianmarco Paolo Conti, Research Analyst]

I have about 3 or 4. So the first one is just a quick one around whether the one-off LTIP is truly a one-off and not just recurring cost that might come back next year? The second question is with regards to the lower SaaS ACV, I know you've explained this previously, but my question is, is there a risk that to continue to grow ACV SaaS, you would always need to basically increase new winnings? And given that the banking environment is quite conservative with regards to cloud, it will be tricky to have this basically grow sustainably from only fintechs and challenger banks and the likes, especially as consumption is unpredictable. I'm just trying to understand what's the strategy and how you guys think of guiding for SaaS ACV? The third question is, roughly, I know you've given some metrics around the exchange rates, but could you perhaps quantify what in percentage terms what is the FX impact you expect, both on TSR and revenues for the full year. And the fourth question is just around DXC. I was wondering if you could give any update and a bit more granular detail, and for example, if you've been invited to any RFPs? Or is this just still proof of concept at this time? Or if there have been any significant developments.

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Let me take the second question and the last one. So on the SaaS ACV, listen, we clearly don't see a slowdown, and we don't expect a slowdown of our SaaS ACV. What we expect is a continuous strong, very strong growth of our ACV business. And again, as I said before, Q3 the full ACV has been done just on new logos. And remember, last year, the same period was the year where we have seen PayPal. We had seen some deals moving into ACV. So I think that's -- for me, the quarter has been a very strong quarter on the ACV side because it's all incremental. And there is so much activity happening. If you look at what's happening on the BaaS side, and the market is bubbling, and this is not going to stop and we are extremely well positioned to capture it. Now on the DXC side, DXC, yes, we are involved in some RFP processes. Some are more advanced than others. But as I said, there is some very interesting activity going on. As I said, some of the large pipeline deal activity, some of them are with DXC and some are advanced, some are less advanced, but it is going well. It is progressing well. And clearly, those are large deals so it takes time. And as we had mentioned when we signed the partnerships at the start of the year, this would be a 2022 story and not having really an impact on 2021. But listen, it is progressing well. So it follows the flow. So we are confident that with DXC being the owner, ultimately of the IP, knowing the customer extremely well, we are extremely well positioned to win those deals.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Let me take the other 2 questions. The first one on the one-off for the LTIP. This was clearly also communicated that way and also internally. We have clearly the regular, as I mentioned, the regular salary increases. People have a variable component in their total compensation. So this is always reflecting the changes in environment. I think these people which we have now awarded with this loyalty share program, this is also maybe the team or the key people to drive this current transformation over the next 3, 4 years because you need continuity, you need stability and I guess also some of the future leaders. So clearly, it's also something we will not be able to afford every year. Let's be clear here. So no, it's definitely a one-off. On the FX, we always post the FX rates. Currently, we basically take last quarter and then the spot rate going forward. On the top line, as most of our revenues are dollar-denominated and a bit of euro. Yes, you have some impact there, but not much. So clearly, this is why we give you usually the currency mix where we're short, the British pound, short the Swiss, also short a lot of other currencies, the Romanian and the Indian rupee being the most important one. So this is the way we currently see it. So this year, yes, we had an overall negative impact on our cost base. Let's see where we end up. We are reporting transparently, and this is why we also have adjusted the guidance to reflect this. So if we stay where we are, I think there's probably not going to be a lot, maybe a bit of additional headwind. But I think this is in the bulk of as we have guided.

[Gianmarco Paolo Conti, Research Analyst]

Okay. Fair enough. Just a follow-up on DXC. Just to clarify, there have been no invites to RFPs, right? It's still just discussions, something more advanced than the asset bonds, but no specific RFPs in [indiscernible]?

[Max Chuard, CEO & Member of the Executive Committee]

No, no, what I say is, some of them are more advanced, which means that there have been an RFP process and that we -- as I said, we are extremely well positioned because of the relationship from DXC and because of what Temenos can bring also to the table. So I think this partnership really strengthening our value proposition, strengthening our ability to win the deal. Thank you, operator. That was the last question. Thank you very much for attending the call, and we'll speak very soon. Thank you.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, CFO & Member of the Executive Committee]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.