Temenos AG

SIX:TEMN

Earnings Call Analysis

Company Sees Strong Growth and SaaS Expansion

The company's subscription business model transition is near completion and underpins an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $730 million, 84% of product revenue. Growth comes from both new subscriptions, up 40% to $67 million, predominantly from existing clientele, evidencing a solid net retention rate (NRR) of 112%. SaaS revenue is climbing, with a 19% increase in the quarter and 25% annually. Expectations are set for higher software-as-a-service (SaaS) annual contract value (ACV), despite its volatility. Operating cash flow reflects robust deal quality, jumping 26% in 2023; free cash flow reached $114 million in the quarter. With total software licensing rising 6%, the company is confident in its prospects, reflected in a 9% increased dividend proposal and an EBIT margin expansion to 31.3%.

Addressing Allegations and Reaffirming Operational Integrity

The chair opened the call by acknowledging the seriousness of a short seller’s allegations and affirming that a meticulous review with independent parties is underway. The company, 30 years in operation and serving nearly 3,000 clients worldwide, has consistently improved its products, risk management, and internal controls. An indication of Temenos' operational strength is its operating cash flow, which exceeds its EBITDA, and its resilience is further underscored by minimal overdue receivables and litigations. Despite the complexity of IT system implementations, the firm concluded 2023 with 391 successful software go-lives, and it maintains low customer turnover, with only a $19.1 million bad debt overdue for more than 90 days at the year's end. They also noted an increase in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in 2023, attributed to the transition to a subscription model rather than to operational inefficiency.

Strategic Partnerships and Substantial Model Shift

Temenos highlighted its partnership with Mbanq as a strategic gateway to the U.S. banking-as-a-service (BaaS) market. With a total investment of $59.9 million in Mbanq and revenue recognition amounting to 22% of the convertible instruments’ value since their investment inception, Temenos sees this as a key avenue for growth amidst the rise of nonbanks offering financial services. Moreover, the company has notably made a shift to a recurring revenue model over the last 18 months, further validated by strong 2023 cash flows and the successful delivery on KPIs. Their confidence in meeting 2024 guidance is based on solid year-end performance, provided external factors remain consistent.

Robust 2023 Performance and Positive Outlook for 2024

2023 saw a meaningful 16% growth in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), reaching $730 million, with a notable 84% of product revenue in the P&L represented by ARR. The subscription transition is nearly finished, with SaaS revenues growing by 19% for the quarter and 25% for the year. As a result of this strategic shift, the subscription mix for the licensing revenues was 67% in 2023, and it's projected to increase to at least 80% in 2024. Additional healthy metrics included a net retention rate of 112%, indicating robust client expansion and the high potential of its client base. The quarter was marked by important deals, especially in Europe and the Americas, with no observed impact from the Middle East conflict. In an assurance of continued investment in growth, new key sales leadership roles were announced.

Steady Financials Demonstrating Quality and Stability

Financially, the company exhibited disciplined growth, with a 40% increase in subscription revenue in the quarter and overall EBIT growing by 5% in Q4 and 12% for the entire year. This contributed to an EBIT margin expansion of 260 basis points to 31.3%. Temenos maintained robust cash flows, noteworthy for the quality of their contract signings and revenue recognition practices: $176 million of operating cash and $114 million of free cash flow were generated in Q4, marking a 26% increase in 2023. With a solid balance sheet showing a net debt of $623 million and decreased leverage to 1.6x, they proposed a dividend up 9% for the year, subject to shareholder approval. Notably, cash conversion for the last 12 months stands at 118%, exceeding the 100% target, which underscores efficient capital management.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Temenos Q4 2023 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] 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 Thibault de Tersant, Chairman of the Board. Please go ahead, sir.

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

Good afternoon. As the Chair of the Board of Directors and also former Chair of the Audit Committee, I consider it extremely important to be here today to demonstrate the Board's utmost support to the company and its management. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank the broad outreach and support we have received from investors and clients at this time.

The board will oversee a thorough examination with independent third parties of the allegations made by a short seller, and we will revert with a considered response when we have had the appropriate amount of time to ensure our examination has been robust. We have a responsibility to our investors, of course, to our clients also, and of course, also to our employees to be speedy, but also thorough, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Nonetheless, I think it's also important that I make some remarks in order to bring balance to the current circumstances.

Before addressing some of the main allegations, I would like to restate the obvious, which is that Temenos is a 30-year old business, serving close to 3,000 clients around the world, a very regulated industry. Its products, organization, processes, risk management and internal controls never stopped improving year after year, and its indicator of strength is the fact that its operating cash flow is consistently higher than EBITDA. And an answer to questions on its products pertinence and quality resides in the very small amount of its overdue receivables and very few litigations of threatened litigations.

With this in mind, let's now review the main categories of allegations. First of all, the client implementations. Of course, these are complex IT system implementations. And yes, occasionally, they can go wrong for a myriad of complex reasons, which are very far from being all of them attributable to Temenos and more often due to change requests.

It is never as simple as it may appear. As a company, while we hate to lose any customer ever, regrettably on occasion, this can happen. And if it does, we do our utmost to learn from the loss and ensure that these learnings are absorbed into our future success.

We statistically have very little litigation with clients. In 2023, we have 391 go-lives of our software, which is a very clear evidence to demonstrate our successful product and implementations. Furthermore, we have an average churn of about 3% in dollar terms in our installed base, which is far better than the average churn of enterprise software and in spite of being a very competitive market, unhappy customers generally used 2 levers. The litigation or threat of litigation is one of them, and we have had a very small number of them in past years and only one open at the present and refusal to pay or lengthening of payments, which is not at all our case since we only have a bad debt overdue for more than 90 days of $19.1 million at the end of 2023.

And yes, DSOs increased in 2023, but this is as a result of our success in transitioning to a subscription model.

Mbanq. Mbanq is a partnership that is strategic in nature as a potential pathway to enter the [indiscernible] market in the U.S. They are not a reseller who would resell licenses to end customers. In June 2021, we entered into an agreement to purchase a series of defined convertible instruments. In our interim report, we disclosed our initial investment for $19.9 million. In total, we have made a total investment of $59.9 million in Mbanq and what we booked in total revenues did represent 22% of the value of these convertibles since the date of investment.

All the relevant statutory information is available in our interim and annual report since June 2021. We believe that banking as a service, where nonbanks will seek to offer banking services will be a major contributor to the financial services sector in the future. For that to happen, service providers like Mbanq are going to be required.

[Audio Gap]

As well also as software vendors like Temenos. We invested in Mbanq, as we believe they will be a great [indiscernible] provider to nonbanks. We also confirm, we have not made any other investments in businesses that would subsequently buy software from Temenos.

Allegation about pulling forward. Yes, our customers run mission-critical software, and the negotiations can be time-consuming and sometimes quite complex, following lengthy engagement and workshops. Purchases are not, of course, made off the back of [indiscernible]. Implementing a new system could take potentially a year, so it's normal that discussions and renewals are engaged early. This makes good business sense for Temenos, but also for our clients.

Sometimes, it is just a compliance requirement for our clients that they conclude renewals with their existing core vendor well before the expiration of the current license agreement, so that they would have the option if they wanted to change providers, which we need to respect. Our ARR growth indicates the fact that at the point of renewal, we generate significant value from existing customers.

Regarding the allegation of backdating contracts, we have very strong governance over contract signatures. For almost 4 years now, we use DocuSign as our contract signing software as standard. We have a well-controlled approval process for contract execution governed by signature policies, internal audit review and board oversight. In addition, in order to recognize license revenue in accordance with IFRS, all performance obligation must be fulfilled. And this includes the provision and delivery of software in the respective quarter.

Infinity. We have integrated the Kony acquisition, whose R&D was mostly based in India, as a great addition to our India development factory. The market segment and the enhanced value proposition are now much better aligned. We did see client attrition following the Kony acquisition, but these were residual issues, not of our making, and we successfully managed the transition. We integrated the product organization into the Temenos product organization, as would have been expected of us to allow us to integrate capabilities on our platform and achieve synergies.

Our Infinity offering today is winning accolades and other large and prominent bank customers. We have hundreds of customers using it, and we continue to sell it.

R&D. We are capitalizing R&D as required by IFRS, and have always maintained full transparency on capitalized R&D costs and amortization impact. In our Q4 results presentation, you will see the full impact of net capitalization to our profit.

In fiscal year '22, we had a $23 million positive impact to the profit, whereas this reduces to $18 million in 2023, which means that we are, in fact, on a decreasing trend of capitalization in 2023 and had less expense relief year-to-year. We capitalize efforts that result in functionality and technology that goes into our products and certainly not customization efforts.

Partners. Partners are key to our business across the full ecosystem, including delivery, sales and distribution and also Temenos exchange partners, and you will see more about how strategic partners are to our business in the presentation today and tomorrow.

The large majority of our 2023 go-lives were managed by our partners. The vast majority of our sales, however, are direct sales. And as an example, in 2023, only 4% of our total software licensing revenue was derived from sales to partners.

Well now I will not use more of your patience with the allegations today, and I will let you draw your conclusions based on my comments and also on the results of the examination we will write.

One of the strengths of Temenos is to be in a leading position in a growing market. And this is what we are going to review with you now, and I will hand it over to Andreas now.

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

Thank you, Thibault. Good afternoon, and welcome to our Q4 results call. I will first talk through our performance, the market environment and some of the highlights from the quarter, before handing over to Takis to run through the financials.

But before I do that, let me summarize the substance of what I'm going to say today. I'll say 3 things. In the last 18 months, we successfully changed the model to a recurring revenue model. We delivered a successful 2023 with increasing cash flows and, of course, all other KPIs. And thirdly, we are confident that we will deliver on our 2024 guidance based on where we ended 2023 and, of course, subject to extraneous factors.

Now let's talk about Q4. Our Q4 results are in line with the pre-announcement we made in January, with annual recurring revenues, total software licensing, EBIT and EPS all well above guidance. We have now also given our EPS growth, which was 4% for the quarter and 13% for the full year, again, well above the guidance we gave.

I was particularly pleased with the growth in annual recurring revenue, which is our key KPI. Our ARR grew 16% in 2023, with a significant portion of the growth coming from upsell and cross-sell of the installed base. There is a slide in the presentation that in my view, summarizes the year very well. I believe it is Slide 15.

If you do the math, our retention rate from the existing customer base or what the industry tracks us -- net retention rate, NRR, is a very strong 12%. So 112%, if you like.

The downturn within that number is very small indeed. The new logos bring the overall growth to 16%. This means a couple of things to me. Firstly, that the customer base is buying our products in earnest, i.e., cross-selling works. So a core customer buys Digital or Infinity, as we used to call it, or Payments or a Retail or Corporate Customer Extending in Wealth, for example. It also means that clients are successfully renewing their agreements with us, and when they do, there is a strong value uplift at the point of renewal.

We reached $730 million of ARR by year-end, which represents 84% of our product revenue in the P&L. We are seeing strong value creation in both subscription and sales deals, and we have maintained a consistently low rate of share across the entire client base of around 3% per annum on a dollar basis.

Our subscription transition is now substantially complete and our SaaS business has continued to grow. SaaS ACV this quarter was driven clearly by some incremental signings with new clients, in particular in Europe and some additional volume consumption from existing clients. Whilst the absolute ACV number can be volatile between quarters, we have seen resilient growth in SaaS revenue, up 19% in the quarter and 25% for the full year, and we expect stronger SaaS ACV over the coming quarters.

The sales environment remained stable through the quarter, and we had a strong performance in Europe and the Americas in particular. We continue to see positive development in our pipeline and closed a number of important deals in the quarter. This included a deal with a Tier 1 U.S. bank for their international corporate banking [indiscernible], after they already signed with us in 2022 to renovate their international private bank.

We had a number of other clients renew and extend their relationship with us, including a global Swiss-based private bank and a leading European bank, which renewed their use of Infinity or front office digital platform.

We also had a good level of contribution from Tier 1 and 2 clients at 46% in the quarter and 43% of total software licensing over the last 12 months, which is back at prepandemic levels. I'd also note, we have not seen any impact from the conflict in the Middle East and we'll continue to monitor, of course, this closely.

We continue to invest in our sales force. We announced at the start of the year, the appointment of Will Moroni to President International. Phil Barnett continues to run our Americas business, and both have now joined our Executive Committee. We've also made other external hires and internal promotions in several regions.

Earlier this month, we announced that we had achieved a Net Promoter Score of plus 54, following a survey of over 900 customer contracts. NPS, an industry standard KPI, measures the propensity of customers to promote Temenos to prospective customers. According to the NPS survey, one of the key factors driving customers to recommend Temenos to others is our product capabilities. Our clients are putting their trust in Temenos to run their mission-critical business, as our banking platform has proven robustness and resilience over the last 30 years.

We've also made several exciting announcements at the start of this year, including the launch of Temenos Enterprise Services. These are end-to-end self-services for retail business and corporate banking. They come with over 120 prepackaged banking products and 700 pre-configured APIs, enabling banks to rapidly deploy software solutions and significantly reduce modernization costs, complexity and risk, while accelerating time to value.

We also recently announced program LEAP. It's a new AI-powered offering that helps customers to modernize faster, and to quickly move to the latest cloud-native Temenos technology. We'll be talking more about this initiative in our approach to AI at our Capital Markets Day tomorrow.

I'll now hand it over to Takis to talk through the numbers for the quarter.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Thank you, Andreas. Starting with Slide 13, I'll give an overview of the quarter. All figures are non-IFRS and in constant currency, unless otherwise stated.

Having substantially completed our subscription transition, we have seen strong growth in ARR, which reached 730 million by year-end, up 16%, also helped by the growth in sales and maintenance.

Subscription revenue was up 40% to $67 million in the quarter. And as Andreas said, subscriptions were 67% of the license mix for the full year. We have very little term license remaining in the pipeline for 2024. Therefore, subscription will be an even higher percentage of the mix this year, I think, at least 80%.

SaaS revenue grew 19% in the quarter and 25% for the full year, with ACV of nearly $9 million. I appreciate this is low compared to other quarters, but ACV can and will remain volatile between quarters. However, please note that SaaS revenue also benefits from overages, where we charge clients a premium for volume consumption over their contractually committed amounts. I also expect ACV to increase in the coming quarters based on our visible pipeline of deals, so I'm confident to deliver very good SaaS revenue growth in 2024 and beyond.

Total software licensing was up 6% and maintenance was up 7%, driven by similar trends that we saw in Q3, namely strong subscription growth, which contributes to maintenance in the P&L, value uplift on renewals and CPI linkage.

Services also continued its growth trajectory, up 6% in the quarter and continue to be profitable as it has been throughout 2023.

EBIT grew 5% in the quarter and 12% for the full year, with a full year EBIT margin of 31.3%, a 260 basis point expansion.

Our cash flow continues to be very strong, and this is something we are particularly focused on, as it underpins the quality of our contracts we sign and the appropriateness of a revenue recognition policy. We generated 176 million of operating cash and 114 million of free cash flow in the quarter, and our free cash flow grew 26% in 2023.

We continue to have a strong balance sheet, with net debt of $623 million and leverage at 1.6x by the end of the year, down from 1.8x in Q3.

We have announced a proposed dividend of CHF 1.23 for the year, up 9%, to be voted on at our AGM in May.

Moving to Slide 14. It's worth remembering that in 2022, we had around $10 million or so of deals, slipping from Q3 to Q4 when we were impacted by the slowdown in our end market. So a somewhat tougher comparison base for Q4 this year.

In this context, total software licensing was up 6% for the quarter and 10% for the full year, driven by growth in subscription and sales. Operating costs were up 7% in the quarter as we expected, with the usual seasonal trend of investments, greater cost of sales linked to higher revenues in Q4 and greater variable cost accrual in the last quarter. Operating costs were up 2% for the full year.

Lastly, we delivered $101 million of EBIT in the quarter and $313 million for the full year, and our EBIT margin roughly flat in the quarter and up 260 basis points for the full year.

Next on Slide 15, the ARR bridge, which we have shown for 2023. As you can see, a significant portion of the ARR was generated to upsell, cross-sell an incremental volume from existing clients. We had a minimal number of clients reducing the amount of software and services they use and similarly, only around $20 million of absolute churn where clients stopped using our platform. Overall, the negative impact amounted to only 3%.

Our net retention rate, as Andreas mentioned, amounted to 112%, which clearly demonstrates the growth potential in our client base, and also underpins our midterm ARR projection.

Next, on Slide 16, we have like-for-like revenues and costs, adjusting for the impact of M&A and FX. The figures are all organic and therefore, in line with our constant currency growth rate.

Focusing on the cost base, our services costs continued to decline, down 4% in the quarter and 13% for the full year, while product costs were up 9% in the quarter and 6% for the full year, reflecting the ongoing investments we are making in our platform.

Looking at FX, we had a weaker Indian rupee as the main driver on our cost base. Overall, there was a $2 million to $3 million positive impact from FX on EBIT.

On Slide 17, net profit was up 5% in the quarter, slightly lower than EBIT growth, with higher tax charges offsetting lower financing costs and FX. EPS for the quarter was up 4%, and it was up 13% for the full year.

On slide 18, our 2023 last 12-month cash conversion was 118%, above our target of converting at least 100% of IFRS EBITDA into operating cash. We also expect our cash conversion to be at least at 100% for 2024.

Slide 19 shows the group liquidity. We have the key changes over the year. We generated operating cash of $392 million, at the end of the year was $107 million of cash on balance sheet and net borrowings of $658 million. Our leverage was 1.6x, and I expect it to decline further through 2024, excluding the impact of potential M&A.

On Slide 20, we have our 2024 guidance, which is non-IFRS and in constant currency. We are guiding for ARR of about 15%, as we continue to benefit from growth in subscription and sales revenue. We expect total software licensing to grow 7% to 10% and EBIT to grow 7% to 9%, reflecting the investments, we plan to make this year, in particular in R&D and sales. We are guiding for EPS to grow 6% to 8%, with our tax rate expected to move up to between 20% to 22%. And lastly, we expect our free cash flow to grow at least 16%. We have put the EBIT and free cash flow bridges into the appendix for your reference.

With that, I hand back to Andreas to conclude.

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

Thank you, Takis. And so to conclude, we are successfully moving forward with a recurring revenue business model, with ARR of $730 million at the beginning of this year, up 16%, representing 84% of our product revenue and with very low churn, but even more importantly, a significant contribution to growth from the existing base.

Our subscription transition is substantially complete, and we see growing demand for SaaS and cloud across client tiers. We're expecting to see the first of our Tier 3 to 5 customers migrating to SaaS and cloud on renewal.

Our strong growth in ARR is also driving our free cash flow, which grew 26% in the year, and we are forecasting free cash flow to grow at least another 16% in 2024.

We've had a good 2023, with strong cash generation, and we are confident in '24 subject to, of course, extraneous factors.

With that, operator, I'd like to open the call to Q&A.

[Operator]

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Frederic Boulan from Bank of America.

[Frederic Boulan, analyst]

So if I can come back on 2 points in the initial commentary from Thibault. So firstly, on Infinity, if you can share with us an update on the number of go-lives you've seen on Infinity in 2023, maybe from a gross basis also net number of customers win? And if you can give us any perspective on how that's been trending versus 2022?

And then coming back on Mbanq, so you gave some useful background on that. But can you share with us, again, the kind of revenue that you've done with them and with specific timing of the investments you've done in the business? So I think you mentioned the initial $19.9 million convertible in total of $59.9 million. So if you can explain a little bit -- the phasing of the investments and revenue from it?

[Adam Snyder, executive]

Fred, it's Adam here. So Infinity, we haven't broken out the go-live, so that's not disclosed. But as Thibault said, there were multiple deals signed in Q4, and we have hundreds of clients live on that software.

I'm going to hand over to Takis to talk about Mbanq.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Fred. So on Mbanq, to be a bit more specific, the investments were done as reported in the -- and the interim and full year report, so there were $20 million done in 2021 and $40 million done in 2022. That's on the investment.

The revenue recognized was about $11 million in 2021 and $2 million in 2022. Mostly it was licensed, and clearly, they bought software for their platform to scale their platform and to enable their growth, which they have been delivering. So no revenues taken in 2023, minimal in 2022 and known, obviously, going forward.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Chandra Sriraman from Stifel.

[Chandramouli Sriraman, analyst]

Can you hear me?

[Unknown Executive]

Yes, we can hear you fine.

[Chandramouli Sriraman, analyst]

Perfect. So yes, just a few questions. In terms of the building blocks of the guidance, Takis, can you just give us how fast maintenance will be going? We have seen a step up in terms of maintenance growth in '23. Should that be sustained as we look into '24. And services, should we now look at a sustained recovery in terms of services, given that now the overall business in terms of new deals is moving in the right direction? Any comments on that will be helpful. And I have a follow-up.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Chandra, maybe first on maintenance. Clearly, we have seen a very good trajectory starting from 3% in Q1 '23 and then 7% in Q4 '23. Now clearly, there is more to come. We would expect maintenance to grow on the full year, also given a bit the tougher comparison base around 5% to 6%, 5% to 6%, adjusting for some hedging gains we had in 2023, but I think that's about what we expect. You still got the same trends, the uplift on the renewals, the CPI having a good impact.

On services, the business model on services, i.e., implementation with partners as the preferred route, which Andreas and Thibault have mentioned stays. Clearly, we have seen all the -- what we had called red projects, almost all having moved out of a backlog. So the backlog obviously contains now a much healthier mix in terms of the margin projects. We would expect services revenue to grow this year again, as we have seen crossing the trajectory in the last quarter. And clearly, profitability also to improve for the full year.

[Chandramouli Sriraman, analyst]

Great. And maybe a quick comment on Europe. It's seen some sustained recovery over the last 3 quarters. Is this the first sign of a sustained improvement now post-COVID? Or is this some of the slip deals getting signed? Are you seeing the momentum build up here in terms of the pipeline within Europe?

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

It's true. We saw good market momentum in Europe and progressively through the year, it became better and better. And I'd say 2023 is probably the most successful year we've had in Europe for quite some time now. We think it's sustainable. We haven't had much in terms of slip deals into 2023. If you recall, we also had a good European quarter in Q4 2022. So -- and we see traction both on-prem and SaaS.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Charlie Brennan from Jefferies.

[Charles Brennan, analyst]

Perfect. I'm hoping Thibault still around actually, because I wanted to ask 2 questions on process. Firstly, I think everyone will welcome the decision to bring some externals in to do a thorough independent review. Can you just give us some sense of time lines here? I think when Darktrace did something similar last year, it took them around 5 months to come back with the conclusion of a report. Is that the type of time line that we should be thinking about here?

And then secondly, I understand the CEO search is still underway. Do you think you've got to get to a conclusion of that independent report to be able to get a new chief executive over the line? Or do you think we can get that before then?

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

Yes. Charlie. So yes, for sure, the process will be run by -- first of all, it's going to be overviewed by the Board, and we will get help from independent third parties on the legal and the accounting side. At this point, we want to go as quickly as possible, but we want to be very thorough as well, in order to eliminate any doubt and get absolutely to the bottom of all the topics.

Five months seems very long to me because, I mean, we are in a very well controlled organization, with terminals, with the processes that were implemented. So my expectation is that it's going to be significantly shorter than 5 months.

And yes, you mentioned the impact -- potential impact on the CEO search. This is a little early to say. But we want to find a very competent CEO, but also a brave CEO, able to go through difficulties. So it's going to be an additional test, if you want.

[Charles Brennan, analyst]

Perfect. Hopefully see you tomorrow, if you're going to be there.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Toby Ogg from JPMorgan.

[Toby Ogg, analyst]

Just one more on the -- just on the examination. Could you perhaps just give us a bit of a sense for the depth of the examination, and just a bit more detail on sort of what exactly it will look like? And then you talked about third parties. Again, which third parties do you think are going to be involved in the examination?

And then just one for Takis, just on the guide for 2024. TSL guidance, 7% to 10%. Could you give us a feel for how we should be thinking about the respective growth rates for the on-prem licensing piece and then the SaaS component within that? And how we should think about the visibility you have around that 7% to 10% at this point in the year?

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

So the examination will go to all the depth that is necessary in order to get clarity on every single allegation in the short seller report.

The third parties, we are in the process of hiring them. There will be top third parties, we are planning to hire both a top low firm in Switzerland and a top low firm in the U.S. as well as a top accounting firm in order to run this.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Okay. Toby, let me take the other one. Our guidance, when we put this together, clearly was based on a number of elements. One is how the pipeline has evolved last year and what visibility we have today, and the pipeline has clearly developed well and is supporting that kind of total software licensing growth.

In terms of -- we have given a slightly wider range. Usually, we give 2%. We have given now 3%, showing an element of prudence. That's one point.

Now on the individual elements, when I talk about very good growth on SaaS, this would mean at least 20%. And then -- if you want the -- the remainder will come from largely subscription.

In terms of term, we had $78 million last year. I think you should expect this to half maximum, and the rest would then come from subscription.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Josh Levin from Autonomous.

[Josh Levin, analyst]

I have 2 questions. The first is what is the current state of Temenos relationship with DXC? Is there currently an active partnership?

And the second question. You talked about contract signing procedures and using DocuSign. Just for the absolute sake of clarity, can you -- are you saying that there was no backdating?

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

I'll take the question on DXC. Of course, there is an active partnership, and we are working together with DXC. They participated in our partner program and we're working well together.

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

And DocuSign, why did I refer to DocuSign? Well, simply because it's an additional proof point. You know that there is no backdating because -- or at least there is a proof point of the date at which the contract is signed, because it's recorded in the system.

So am I saying that there is no -- absolutely no backdating. I think it's extremely unlikely that there would be, based on the process that was implemented. Now, it's the thorough examination that is going to tell us if there is or not.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Knut Woller from Baader Bank.

[Knut Woller, analyst]

Looking on the DSOs, you highlighted that the rise of DSOs has been due to the transition of the business model to subscription. With the transition now almost complete, how should we think about DSOs going forward? Are there any targets you can share with us?

And then on the operating cash flow, when I look at the operating cash flow, we have seen that other noncash and nonoperating items have been a more pronounced contributor to the cash flow in Q4. Can you give us some color here, as well as regard to the income taxes paid, which have been up noticeably in the fourth quarter? And then I have a follow-up.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Okay. On DSOs, we ended up doing better than what we had internally budgeted and we said 2024 would be the peak as we conclude the transition to subscription, and we can confirm that. So we would expect DSOs to go down in '24 and beyond. How much they will be down? I don't think we should provide even more guidance KPIs, other than that they should be going down going forward.

Now on the operating cash flow and maybe I missed it, clearly, there were a number of moving parts, but there was nothing specific. We had good collection. We had all clients paying on time, so there was nothing specific on the income cash flow strength.

Now on taxes, well spotted. We had said in the past that tax payments would be volatile and were volatile in the past, and you see this also on the movement on the tax liabilities. This comes down to when the ultimate -- when ultimately, the individual countries or authorities or tax authorities in the countries make final assessments and basically send us the bill to pay. And then given the still high interest rate environment, you don't want to push out.

So yes, we had in various countries, U.K., Luxembourg some other, we had this done quite a bit in the last year. We had very good cash performance, which enabled us to pay taxes as they come due and to get the tax liabilities down. From today's point of view, clearly, tax outflows in this year will be quite a bit lower. So if you want, despite the substantial tax payments, we still delivered a good free cash flow performance.

[Knut Woller, analyst]

Thank you, Takis. Just getting back on the other noncash and nonoperating items. They have been going up from $12.7 million in Q4 '22 to $36.7 million in Q4 '23. If you don't have the number on hand, I'm also happy to get some more color on that, but I would like to understand this movement because it was quite a substantial contributor to the cash flow, given the adverse net working capital momentum, particularly from trade receivables.

And then on services, if I understood you correctly, you said that services have been profitable. If I look at the P&L, I get to roughly $34.6 million service revenues and $36.4 million services costs. So I'm trying to square the profitability argument here. Can you help me understand, whether I understood you correctly or not?

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

We'll come back on the other noncash items.

Now on the services, clearly, when we talk about profitability, this is on a non-IFRS basis. And the IFRS cost, you see reported clearly include some of the restructuring, they include some of the bonuses accruals. So I think that's the delta to the reported number -- between the reported and nonreported number. So on a non-IFRS basis, it was a 2% margin we say.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

[Mohammed Moawalla, analyst]

I had 2. First one for Thibault, just to follow up on the [indiscernible] third-party review. Would this entail kind of a forensic accounting review as well in terms of its scope?

And then secondly, just on the outlook for 2022 on license plus SaaS, kind of the midpoint implies some deceleration relative to '23. I just be curious to understand, is this sort of being more prudent from the macro? I know you've been a bit reluctant to kind of put in some outsized deals in the outlook, but also curious to get your perspective on any kind of initial kind of customer conversations you may have had since the short seller report came out? And to what extent we should think of this guidance as being perhaps a bit more back-end loaded until at least the review is completed?

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

Yes, no. Of course, the examination will include forensic accounting review. We are in the process of hiring an accounting firm in order to do precisely that on all the allegations having an accounting consequence.

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Yes, on the guidance, the midpoint is 8.5%. Now in 2023, we started with at least 6%, we ended up with 10%. We always said there is still more uncertainty out there. We were coming out of difficult environment since Q3 '22, which has then stabilized. The market environment has remained stable so far in Q4 and what we have seen so far, and this is also our prediction for 2024.

So if you want, the midpoint is actually slightly higher than what we started last year, given the good pipeline development and visibility, is there some element of additional prudence in there? Maybe yes, yes.

In terms of back-end loaded or Q1, clearly, it's too early to assess any, as Andreas and Thibault mentioned, any potential negative impact of the most recent events.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Gianmarco Conti from Deutsche Bank.

[Gianmarco Conti, analyst]

Yes. So firstly, could you provide some more clarity on the Infinity claims and perhaps give some more color on how Infinity is progressing and whether you're seeing stronger traction among larger banks in U.S. And if you could quantify how much is in data contributing to your revenues into 2023?

Secondly, if you could provide some details on the enterprise services announcement, and the breakdown, perhaps the LEAP program and how much you expect this to help your TSR growth into next year.

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

It's Andreas. I'll take the questions. I'll start with Temenos' LEAP. It's a significant program. We launched it at the beginning of the year. It's addressing the needs of those clients that have, for whatever reason, remained on all the releases, all the architects, all the technology platform. And we are putting process tooling AI together with a commercial value proposition to bring them forward to the latest cloud-native solutions releases so that they can take advantage of what the platform can offer today, but also be SaaS ready.

So it's an important program. It's a multiyear program. It will inevitably -- we've already launched it with the sales organization. It will be formally communicated to the community at Temenos client forum. So we expect to start ramping up revenues, if you like, from the second quarter of this year onwards.

The opportunity, I may say, the multiyear opportunity is significant. I'm not going to enumerate it. But as we progress the quarters, we should be able to be providing commentary around how that is developing.

Infinity, we are not breaking out either geographies or tier of banks, other than to say that progressively since the acquisition, we are actually working with larger and larger organizations. And in fact, at Capital Market Day tomorrow, I will give a couple of case studies with Infinity. And I will also provide very important value benchmark information that we can now share with the public on how Infinity improves the bank's operations.

[Operator]

The last question for today's call comes from Justin Forsythe from UBS.

[Justin Forsythe, analyst]

So I got a couple of questions from me. First, Thibault, in your prepared remarks, I just wanted to make sure that I caught one of your points correctly, which it sounded like in some of these instances with delays and integrations that -- or maybe all of them or most of them, it should be attributable to change requests from the clients and not rather issues relating to the Temenos side of the integration. I just wanted to make sure that I caught that one correctly.

Also, just wanted to do a double check on the guidance. We talked a little bit I think about earlier, the TSL guidance for 7% to 9% and you unpacked it a little bit. Clearly, you've got ARR growing faster than that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the delta there and what the key drivers of that ARR expansion or bio materiality?

[Thibault de Tersant, executive]

The delays in implementation, no, of course, there is a vast array of reasons why there might be delayed. I was simply trying to show that it's not necessarily because of the product. It can -- and it happens frequently that we receive change request because when you have a program that spans over a couple of years, the customer, the client can change his mind on a few points. And this is very common in enterprise software.

But there are also other reasons, management changes, you name them. And of course, from time to time, glitches in the Temenos software. I'm not saying this never happens or also an implementation that is not successfully in the way it is done, right?

[Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, executive]

Okay. Let me take the delta between ARR and total software licensing. Clearly, on SaaS, they both fully contribute to that. Now if you look at subscription, we have the license part and the maintenance part. But clearly, on the remaining term license and what we call customized development part of around, let's say, 40 million for this year, you only have the term license part, which carries maintenance and which contributes to ARR. So that's clearly a number around 5% to 10%. So clearly, that's the biggest contributor. Once we have all on subscription, or almost all on subscription, you will probably see a smaller delta going forward.

[Operator]

Gentlemen, that was the last question. Back over to you for closing comments.

[Andreas Andreades, executive]

I'd like to thank you very much for attending today's call. And I hope that we'll see each other tomorrow. Thank you very much.

[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.