Chapters Group AG - Capital Markets Day 2026 $CHG.DE

Welcome everybody. This is a very new format for us. We have twice as many people here in the room as last year and it's the first time we're doing a webcast. So this means that a few of the aspects here are a bit of a hybrid format. And the way the day will roll is we're going to do a few rounds of presentations and then we're going to host an event format that we've done internally a lot which we call the AI marketplace because one of the questions and one of the feedbacks we've gotten, we got a lot of questions around the impact of AI and software businesses and we felt the best way to explain to you and kind of align your thinking with our thinking is to just actually show you what we do. So this is going to happen after the event for the webcast participants so you can participate. We will do a brief kind of round of fire introductions to the projects that we are presenting right at the very end. So you will get a glimpse of it. A downside of that format or an upside if you're here is that it gives us a lot of room for Q&A with a lot of people from chapters here in person. So any question you have possibly have about our business you can ask here today. Now that's obviously not really possible if you are dialing in. So what we suggest to everybody who's dialing in, if you have any questions and you want any deep dive, get in touch with Andreas after the capital markets day and we will put you in touch with whoever you want to talk to in person and we can do one-on-one sessions again. You're probably wondering why do I have a orange dot? The reason is that I forgot the chapters lanyards. So a way and like an impromptu way to identify everybody who's working for chapters. Everybody who has a dot on their collar in different colors from the presentation kit next door is working for chapters group and you have all the liberty to approach these people and the two of you are getting dots as well. Sorry. And ask all the questions. This is going to be open-end. We will only leave if the last of you leaves and you can ask all the questions that you want.

So let's start with where we are. This is a really really interesting inflection point of the business. What you see on the left is the cut of the business in 2023. The business was about half software. We had a small investment in a business called Fintiva and a pretty big chunk of the group was still in what we call other today. So businesses that are not software or financial services. Now in 2023 as you know and as we talked about last couple of years we made some hard decisions on how we want to transform the business around how we want to look like and more importantly what we don't want to do and the result you see here. So our software groups of public sector and enterprise have grown substantially both in relative share and also in the absolute size of the business and also our financial technology segment which is not only the Fintiva business but two other businesses Expatrio that we acquired and now a very substantial part of the group and importantly because it seems so minor what we have left in other is actually one of the more exciting businesses that we have seen and one of the more AI forward businesses that we have in the group with Stefan here presenting today. So I think we've truly transformed the group. Now this is continuing and I want to point out one specific example in my presentation that will work as a proxy to explain how we think about building a business and that's our financial technology segment and I will use that as an explanation and you will derive a lot of conclusions for our software group from that. So this is our indicative split of revenues between financial technologies and the public sector and enterprise VMS. So you see the piece of the pie of the financial technology segment increasing in 26 over 25. But what might not be so intuitive or which might not be well understood that if we look at profitability, this is actually a very very big part of our profitability at this point and at least for us Malain and I and the board like this happened very quickly like it was clearly intended and this is why we did the moves that I will walk you through in a second but still it's important to reflect on how the group is changing and where the gravity of the group is today.

When I personally got started in building chapters, I'm an investor at heart, right? So the natural tendency is to get started with an investment holding mindset, very influenced by Warren Buffett, very decentralized, thinking like an investor only. And that's how we really got started at the beginning. I always say we want to build an operating system built on autonomy. Really at the beginning it was built on anarchy. Well functioning anarchy, well performing anarchy, but really no just a loose collection of businesses. And the real insight we had and that really started in 2023 with one of our largest shareholders who brought us that idea was to say there is actually something more you can do which is not to be just a capital allocator of businesses, but you can actually build a group that is worth more than the sum of the parts because you're actually improving the businesses that you are running. and if they join part of the group they become worth more and today we want to explain to you how that works. One phrase we use internally is we're trying to build industry standards. So historically we have acquired businesses in particular in the software space as long as the recurring revenue is good and the churn is low and it's a very well-defined niche in a vertical we would acquire that business. And I think over time we've both because we have built almost by accident in certain industry clusters but also because we've seen the benefits of building these little platforms in specific industries. We have some good traction of building industry standards and a high conviction that that's what we want to do in the future. And I want to walk you through one example where this played out particularly well.

So you see the split from us. It's a bit of a more sleek design now, but the numbers are the same from the annual report, the three segments. I want to touch on the financial technology which you know as the segment with three brands Fintiva, Coracle and Expatrio. That's how we presented this in the past. Now you also know me that in all of my slides and all of my presentation with the team or investors, I always talk about the three values that we have. I will spare you with that right now. But I would talk about one value which I have hold most dear in my heart which is we grow together. And I always talk about the story of you know like you see a pie on the table and there are two different types of people. One person sees it and says oh listen like how can I optimize my largest slice of the pie and how can I eat most of the pie and the other type of person that says okay listen how can I optimize for this? Now, at the beginning of the year, I thought about hiring a chief of staff. Now, we don't really have any office space left, so I decided not to hire a chief of staff. So, I trained Claude, the chief of staff agent, and uploaded all of my thinking and how I communicate in my presentations. And for this presentation, I asked Claude to the point I'm now going to make to put that into a graphic incorporating these values. I think the result is absolutely terrible, but I want to share it with you because that's what AI does. So this is what AI came up with. The situation we found in the blocked account space was a zero sum opportunity, right? You had three companies competing for one piece of pizza, three dogs, it's mine. No mine. Back off, it's mine. Both losing dogs leave hungry. I think what we achieved and now the magic of AI happens is this. So the dogs are now a lot more proactive. They're wearing chef hats. More pizza, more fun, more wins. Every dog leaves full and happy. What does it mean? It means if you essentially canalize the energy that you had on what is there, it very much limits your thinking. And when you canalize the idea of growing the pie, this is where the real magic starts.

Now, what's our business doing? This is chat GPT. If you type in chat GPT I need a blocked account in Germany. That's the product we are providing. So it's a special requirement for the visa process. You need a blocked account and you need insurance around that and the three businesses provide that. ChatGPT gives you this result. You can go to those four players, especially Fintiva and Coracle or you can go to Deutsche Bank. In 2025, we had enough capital to consolidate three of the four which we did. So brace for impact. And really what this created is that historically the entire market structure always focused on essentially two products. It was the blocked account and insurance. And there was a lot of competition. There was a lot of marketing spend. There was a lot of fighting and it was really fighting around that one pizza piece. And I think what got lost in that process is that misses the entire point because 50% of international students coming into Germany stay for longer than five years. 50% stay for longer than five years because they find love or work or both. Those are usually people that come to Germany to study and then find good jobs here and they have no prior relation in any financial services in Germany and the first entry point with financial services in Germany is us and it's kind of obvious that the big opportunity and the big price at the end of the rainbow is to change perspective and essentially become the partner for all financial products for internationals in Germany for the duration of their stay which in many cases is forever.

Now what we achieved with that market consolidation is that I mean you got to imagine they had developer teams that were building the same product to be competitive three times over. So everybody needed a certain product and you build it three times because everybody needs to offer the product. Now you can use the same development resources and you can build three different products that you can monetize which sounds very trivial but it's just how this works and we are now essentially resetting the focus of this business away from this is a blocked account insurance business to this can actually become a really end-to-end financial partner and in the future that business that you see at the top of the water to essentially become the funnel to something much much larger. Now, this probably as an investor sounds all super sensical and it makes a lot of sense, but I want to share some of the operational hiccups and decisions you got to make and also some of the opportunities that we found in doing it. So when we combined the businesses in about a year ago in May of 25, the thesis we had at the time was to essentially keep the three businesses separate, migrate one quicker than the two others and then over time figure out what the platform strategy should be. The idea was also to approach a mindset to kind of learn the best strength from all businesses and from all platforms and make a best of all worlds approach and kind of go slowly and with a measured approach and take our time to figure out what the target operating model is.

Now the philosopher Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face because operations happened. So what we found out is the teams did not get along at all. It's not to blame like that's something that you see. What we saw is we had very different standards of compliance, IT processes, efficiency across the businesses, very very different. We found out that in one of the businesses which we ended up shutting the brand off, there were some really serious compliance issues of how they ran the business. And this is a product where you must absolutely not screw up. Right? So those are people from Pakistan borrowing money from their family to wire to Germany to us in the hope of a new future in Germany. And in that process, we got to make sure that we don't channel in any people into Germany that don't belong here, that we don't lose any money along the way. We don't lose any data along the way. All these things got to be not here. They got to be absolutely top-notch. And the zero mistake tolerance is zero. This regulated business mistake tolerance is absolutely zero. Now, some of the founders, some of the businesses saw this differently and we had to make changes. Now what we also saw and you saw that with the announcement, the idea was for Bastion who many of you know to become at chapters group and essentially run this group which he did at the beginning. Now Bastion also became a father at the time and his wife got really ill very quickly with a newborn at home and I made the decision. I said, 'Listen, you're out immediately. I take over. You do your thing. This is more important. They're fine now by the way but it looked differently at the time.'

So last September I was in a situation where I said okay I got various compliance problems. I got an incoherent IT strategy. I get teams that don't really work together and we got to find a way. So come in manuscript method and the way we run things. So what I did, I essentially everything starts with a strategic plan. So you come up with an idea of how should the business look like in three years. What are the big drivers, what are the really big value drivers or how the business can move to the next level? And we use a tool that is called policy deployment to track progress against that. But that's not something that gets adopted overnight like you need to teach policy deployment and you need to put the processes in place and you need to convince the team and you need to fight the right level of engagement. That needed to happen while at the same time figuring out how team structure is going to work. Now I got really really positively surprised because some of the talent that naturally I didn't know before in particular at Expatrio in particular Toby who some of you know Toby Fisher the now CEO of the group really impressed me not only by their personality but also with the approach they had because the mindset they had and which we now adopted and I grown a lot confidence that this is how you can run situations like this now and AI plays a role is to say listen let's get to target operating model just way quicker. We had a lot of maybe we were a little shy maybe we were a little cautious we haven't done it before but we were just giving this time and I think we were just delaying a decision and at that point a really big driver was the CTO of that business guy called Pablo who is amazing who came up with a strategy to say listen we're going to streamline the IT stack mainly through AI build development and this is going to happen within months not within years and that's what we ended up doing. So I appointed new leadership, we changed the plan, put new leadership in place, put new incentives in place, we have a strategic plan, we implemented policy deployment, and we started executing much much quicker than we initially thought and this is what we ended up doing.

So what used to be a three brand strategy is now a two brand strategy. What used to be two and a half platforms over time migrating became one platform quickly and this just creates so many efficiencies. I mean in theory nobody would disagree right? So in theory nobody would disagree that that's the right strategy but in practice this is really hard to execute because you have a lot of people care about the worlds that they have created in the businesses and they want to treasure that which is very human right but you got to change the mindset to this is what we have done and in the past it used to be Fintiva, Expatrio, Coracle but there's now a new way. It's not about whether you are better or worse but it's all about how's the target operating model and how can we get there and this did work out and I think it's an amazing inspiration for how we think about industry standards. A logical consequence of that is also that in future presentations we will not say this is a financial technology segment with three brands called Fintiva, Expatrio, Coracle but there's a group name which is Lumra which we implemented in December. So going forward you will have to get used to this graphic which is the financial technology segment with a big part is the Lumra group. Why do I tell you this story? I tell you the story because this is a big part of our chapters identity and the genesis is really really interesting. This started as a minority investment 20% stake made 2021 in a tiny business and this has now become an industry standard with the best compliance standard for students into Germany and a huge driver of organic growth and I think that's the inspiration we want to have.

So this business is going to do fine, right? It's going to grow. The efficiencies are not nearly like we will have another period of significant efficiencies in front of us. But this is really much more. This is an inspiration of what we can do in so many parts also in the software group and we've already started this. So there are already some of those early clusters simmering where we have already a couple of companies that are doing something similar and the idea is now for us to scale this and replicate what we've done here. And the big reason that's one of the big reasons why we quote unquote had to adjust our guidance is because the execution versus the initial plan is just happening a lot quicker than we originally thought. And this is also the reason why we're doing this because this is driving organic growth. And usually people think when they think about consolidation, they think about pricing and they think about the platform synergies and that's true. But also what's even more true and what's even more relevant is you can just serve the customer so much better. You can just use your development resources and you can use all the resources you have to really redefine an industry and become a true industry standard. And we've done this once. I think the financial results probably not super obvious last year are now becoming increasingly clear. And the vision I have or what gets me really really excited is that one day we stand here and we reflect on how the financial technology segment is in absolute numbers dramatically larger than it is today but hopefully in relative terms something else is much bigger and I think that's the story of chapters over the last couple of years. I want to give you another example. So it's usually very hard for people to make decisions around how something may look like in a year and people focus mainly on what is here today. And what we do to the team and what we do within our board communication is always reset focus on where are we going towards and not where are we coming from. Because what really matters last year is the decision that the pie chart that you saw around profitability is just a lot larger, a lot larger share in one segment. That's the messaging here. And what gets me really excited is to stand here next maybe next year is a bit ambitious but maybe in two years stand here and show you a much larger pie chart with larger actual numbers and financial technologies and hopefully a nice large who knows what's going to be software side. So thank you very much. Now you had all the good story and I'm handing over to Malain for the hard numbers.

Thank you. Thanks Jan. I'm going to try to keep it interesting. So what I want to talk through a little bit is what does creating an industry standard actually means in terms of numbers? Where do we see the impact? Where does it come from? What does it mean for our EPS growth? And I'm also going to talk a little bit about the early days of industry clusters in our VMS group. So starting with Lumra, obviously that is the industry cluster we have built. What we see for Lumra is organic revenue growth in 2025 was strong with 9%. We expect 20% plus for 2026 and some of that is volume growth with it which is great, people still love to come to Germany which is great. So that obviously adds to revenue growth but more importantly it's a review of a positioning of the three brands. It's a review of the pricing of the three brands. You are in a fundamentally stronger negotiation position towards all your key partners if you double the size. And we also see an increase in the conversion rates. As Jan pointed out, the key products still are blocked account and insurance. And the conversion rate of how many blocked accounts students actually also take an insurance product is increasing over time because we are applying the best of breed approach we see in one of the three brands for all of the companies. So that is kind of the key drivers between organic revenue growth for Lumra in 2026.

And more almost more importantly, this is what we expect in terms of growth. So as Jan pointed out we are putting this into one platform and that means that organic EBITDA growth for that segment we are expecting to jump from roughly 14% to 40%. A lot of this is reduced and focused marketing spend. Immediately, I think three days essentially after signing what the team did shut down is Google ads. All of them were spending a lot of money on winning market share from each other. We stopped that and that is like hundreds of thousands savings per year just by not spending that money anymore. Paying commissions to partners, all these kind of things where they just competed with each other. We can stop that now and that adds a lot of margin. Then also we had to streamline the organization. There were some positions that were just doubled across the group. This is not easy decisions. This is not fun decisions but it's necessary decisions. The team took them quickly, executed on them quickly and also that adds to margin. And then in terms of suppliers, what we realized after closing, other than the accounting system, every third-party supplier solution out there, if there were two options, Fintiva went for A, Expatrio went for B for every single thing they needed. So also there we are obviously consolidating. We can renegotiate contracts. So you just have typical merger synergies that add to an organic EBITDA growth in 2026 of more than 40%.

Now what we want to do is to achieve strong organic growth in the long run. Not only with merger synergies but really over time and that is where the not tip of the iceberg, the bottom of the iceberg comes into play. If you can focus all of your resources and all of your thinking on how do I build the next cool product for my client, what you can actually achieve is long-term volume growth. And you can actually achieve long-term revenue growth. And I think we've built a cluster now with Lumra and we've built a team at Lumra that can actually do this. So creating industry standards is the ambition and I think for Lumra we're absolutely there. For our vertical market software segments it's still really early days. I still want to give you a bit of an idea what are we doing there, how we're thinking about it, what is the effect on the numbers. So many roads lead to Rome obviously. First one is PSE and Hanscom and FA. Both of them in the mobility sector, software solutions for public transport, for bus, for trains, etc. What they also both had in common that they were a little bit of the ugly ducklings in their previous corporate setting, a little bit unloved maybe by the previous management. So we acquired both of them in 2025, merged them into what today is Peak Mobility, and Peak Mobility is becoming the shiny, beautiful thread. Are we there yet? No.

I think most of you have seen it in our numbers. Peak Mobility, the combined businesses, they didn't have a good year 2025. We found a lot of things in terms of processes, in terms of culture, in terms of cost efficiencies that needed to be fixed and the team on the ground did a fantastic job in doing this. And I want to point out a few examples and give some numbers in order to give you an idea of what the extent of this can actually be. So the first one is a super easy one. We did a corporate merger. They moved into one office. We save a lot of rent. This is a really easy decision. Everyone loves it. The new office is nicer. It's more modern. If you want to have a laugh, ask Jan about his first experience in the old PSE office. So that's the easy one. The not so easy one is the pricing review and the value-based pricing project we are currently executing on. This as an investor actually as headquarters this sounds so easy. They haven't raised prices for ages, you're adding value, and you just have these talks with the clients and you tell them how great they are and you go and then there are clients and they hate it if you raise prices and they have lawyers that actually say that the contract doesn't really allow for that and they push back and then they start complaining about what you didn't deliver in the last year and how the hell are you willing to raise prices? So this one is really really hard to execute for the team on the ground because they are having these uncomfortable conversations. I'm seeing the numbers. They are having the uncomfortable conversations and therefore 2026 alone and this is not the end of it we will probably see an impact on EBITDA of almost a million euro. And then the most difficult one obviously is the part on team size. So as said both companies came from a corporate setting and there's a certain way of working in these old corporate settings that I wouldn't call efficient necessarily. And that also means that you have a team that is bigger than needed and that also the people on the team are not always the ones that you actually need for the new era. So the team took the very tough decision on really downsizing the team. And again, this makes perfect sense but there are uncomfortable conversations not just with the people but with everyone, a lot of lawyers involved. So this is really hard to execute on and this is what the team did over the past 6 to 9 months and this is tangible EBITDA effect in 2026 alone of 3.5 million, 3.6 million with additional measures adding to that. So we are expecting Peak actually to become profitable in 2026.

No. Now you might ask, isn't that what's industry standard about this? Isn't that just your good old manuscript method playbook you should do with every company? Yes, it is. It is the groundwork that we need in order to actually build an industry standard. You can't start adding businesses or products to something that isn't running like a well-oiled machine. So this was needed in order to move to the next phase, which is strategic M&A in the mobility sector. This is four deals in the mobility segment. All of them are in due diligence. All of them with a closing date expected for 2026 and all of them have some link to Peak Mobility. They provide the same product but in a different geography. They provide an additional feature that would actually help. So all of this is really not just great deals on a standalone basis but it actually really adds to the value of the industry cluster in mobility. And then the second thing that we are going to do is become an innovative player in the sector. Again, your competition is they've all been around for a very long time. They all are doing things the way they used to do. And we now can do things differently and we now can actually think about what products are missing for our client. So what the team is currently working on and Leonard is here today and will give you a bit more detail on that as well is a software solution for essentially fleet AI powered fleet management which is particularly important when you have electric vehicles like actually Hamburg has driving around Hamburg. So this is something that can put us in a position where we become the product leader, the innovative leader in a very specific vertical.

Many roads are leading to Rome. The other example I want to give is our ecosystem in the emergency response solutions. So in 2023 we did two acquisitions in Austria. Both of them were providing or still are providing software solutions for fire departments. Cybos is an ERP solution for fire departments. And Blau list is an alarming solution. So essentially instead of having that good old thing on your belt, you can get an alarm on your iPhone. And that is an additional solution with Blau having a super strong position in the Austrian market. So we acquired both of them in 2023, did a corporate merger. They are now called Zolaris. Again, this is not that much of an industry standard. Now it becomes interesting with the acquisition of DVA in 2024. DVA is an alarming solution for fire departments and other emergency response providers that has a very strong position in Germany. So now we have a very strong position in Austria in the alarming solution. We have a very strong position in Germany with alarming solutions and we have an ERP software for firefighter departments. Three products all in the same industry. So, it's a little bit because we're in Hamburg, we figured we take a Hamburg example. Hamburg is now a client. This is a project that started by both companies in 2022. That's four years ago. What Hamburg wanted was essentially a combined product combining Cybos as their ERP solution with DVA as their alarming solution. Now you need an API and all the connections etc. You need a kind of real product. It's very difficult to work on something like that if you're still competing for alarming clients with the rest of your business. So it took ages. Now they are a client and that is what we really like. They have a prototype they presented at Intuitz 2026 as one team, one product. And can now we have something to sell to new clients. And the cherry on top, we saved probably 35k or so in expenses for the fair because we only paid it once.

Now what we are thinking here is building out an ecosystem, adding solutions for industrial alarming, adding solutions for dispatch centers. So anything that is emergency response related that could add to that industry cluster and we are looking for targets in that specific niche. So very short back to the jungle of numbers. I think and that has always been our complication. Two things are difficult for us. We know that M&A will happen. We don't know when M&A will happen. Just the other day we signed a deal. It's a fantastic deal actually. It's signed. We were ready for closing. And now the EU Commission has to approve the deal because it's so mission critical that the European Union has to confirm that we can be the buyer. That's three to four months until closing. I think it's great because not only the software is mission critical, but the end market is so mission critical that the European Union has to confirm. But it's three to four months adding to the timeline. So when M&A will happen is super difficult for us to predict and it's also and that leads to it being a bit difficult to predict what will happen in 2026, 27, 28. I think on the long-term effects we have a very good view on how the model can actually work. Now this is the M&A pipeline. These 11.4 million will stay on signing for a little bit longer than we expected. And we currently have 110 million in deal volume under due diligence that the teams are working on. Now, not only is that a lot, but we also really like the quality of these deals. We are looking at bigger deals than we used to look at. We are looking at deals that are adding to an existing industry cluster. We are doing very focused M&A in fantastic niches with really really nice companies that we are looking at that also meet our criteria on revenue, recurring revenue, that are ready for an AI featured world. So it's really really good quality of deal. So that makes us really exciting but makes this one a little bit harder.

So everything I'm going to tell you now is before M&A because frankly I just don't know what is going to happen. But a few effects of building an industry cluster on our numbers. So what you probably have noticed is that our entry multiple or the multiple of capital invested compared to EBITDA jumped quite a bit from 2023 to 2025 from 6 to 11 and a half. That is a lot of that is driven by Lumra. That is a transaction where we paid more than our average 6 and a half to seven and a half. But what we do see looking at the long-term plan is that we will very quickly go back to a multiple below six because we essentially operate it down. What you've also probably noted is that the share of adjustments in our EBITDA was fundamentally higher than it used to be this year. Again, a lot of this is driven by transactions like Peak, by transactions like Lumra. They have been dear to the people working at Lumra because this is a huge change for them. You need to make sure that the team on the ground is actually satisfied. There have been a lot of adjustments in relation to Peak because we need to turn that ugly duckling into a swan. So it has been a lot. It has been unusually high this year. We do expect this to normalize back to normal levels in 2026 again. And I'm going to make the big disclaimer of and whatever happens in terms of M&A because that might change things. Now, we also had negative earnings per share in 2025. This is essentially down to the fact that while we adjust for all these one-off effects in EBITDA, they are in the operating results. We don't adjust for that. This is really a number where we adjust for all the accounting stuff like goodwill depreciation etc. But this is really a number that is net income of all the companies belonging to the group multiplied with our share in it and then we add it up. So 2025 has been an exceptional year. What I presented last year that for 2027 we expect a range of 80 cents to 1.10 per share in 2027 and that expectation has not changed. Now what has changed is our view on organic growth. You saw we updated our guidance and last year I presented this.

Sensitivity table and I've put 10% organic growth in there, and I felt really bold. I felt really daring. It's like okay. And we saw then that obviously organic growth is the oxygen for our earnings per share. And that hasn't changed. What has changed is that I actually dare to do a sensitivity analysis with organic EBITDA growth above 10%. And what you can see here, and this is a five-year period 2027 to 2032, what you can see here is the organic growth we can achieve is so fundamentally important to our growth of earnings per share. Much more important than the entry multiple we pay. Much more important than the entry multiple we pay. If we can find great businesses with fantastic growth profiles, we can pay a higher multiple because that operates down very quickly. Now, you don't have to get worried that we'll get crazy and start buying at 13 times all the time. Mark will never allow that. But I think it goes to show how important organic growth and hence how important building industry standards is to the entire model. Now, Jan gets the fun part of telling the story. I get the hard part of telling the numbers, I always say. Now, the really hard part is to get to the 20%, because all of this makes sense in Excel and it's a complex Excel model, but it's Excel. Someone actually has to get organic growth on the street, and that is not us. That is our platform teams, and that is in particular Mark and the COO team and the CTO team that are supporting our platform teams where they can to actually get to those numbers. So over to Mark who's hopefully going to tell us how we get to 20% per year.

Thanks a lot Marlene. I have three topics. One topic is transformability. One topic we already mentioned is industry standards and of course no VMS presentation without the topic of AI. So we heard from Marlene and that's the top part of this slide that obviously the manuscript method seems to deliver with the improved guidance. We also heard that we have also in the VMS space first indications that building industry standard does make sense. Now how can we actually do that in practice with a little bit more detail around a French example? I know they now also out of the World Cup but I still miss them and so we will still have them on the slide. And obviously what is playing the role of AI in that regard. So before I introduce a concrete example, I like to take a step back and look at why we all in this room like vertical market software from a first principles perspective. You can see on the left hand side why we like investing in vertical market software. Obviously the well-known notion of high switching costs. So customers are locked in these B2B software solutions. It's a lot of effort for them to move from one vendor to the next vendor. You have to train your people. You have to buy new software. You have to do a lot of customization. It takes a lot of time and you're operationally depending on that software. So people typically don't do that. Even if I tell people to hike the prices and move the prices up, they still remain clients. Another thing that we really like is although those vertical market software markets are sometimes really really small, remember we still have the market leader of orchestra management software doing revenues of €1.5 million and we are the market leader. So sometimes these niches are really really small but what makes it attractive is that in those very small niches you only have a few players and you don't have a lot of competitive intensity and all the big guys like Oracle and SAP they don't find it economically useful to develop software for such a small niche so the supply scarcity is protecting our companies from a lot of competition. And lastly but not least, most of the clients of our software business have what I would call a good enough inertia. They don't need the best UI. They don't need crazy additional functionality year-over-year. And frankly speaking, they sometimes are pretty happy with okay service. And all of that creates a low churn profile, very predictable revenue streams and we end up buying those assets at pretty okay multiples. So it's a good business to be in. And if we combine what we can offer to these companies, we can offer much cheaper capital compared to those sellers of those businesses or buy and hold forever approach of being a public company, not a private equity, not being required to exit those businesses is a very good fit to what those owners of those software businesses actually want. That is stability for the legacy they built over decades. Now the special thing that we bring in, and I think we even more bring this in since the last two years, is we collected a lot of best practices how to improve those businesses. So it's the improvability that we bring to the table. We call it the manuscript method. It is policy deployment. It is pricing. It is a lot of additional things that we collect and share in the group to improve the businesses and that eventually makes up the 22 plus percent guidance. So the classic power move is buy a durable asset, improve it, and everybody is happy. The key thing here on the slide is the defensibility of those assets is not something that we add. The defensibility of these assets comes when we acquire the businesses. I think we will see later in the presentation why this is maybe changing with AI.

Now a concrete example I always appear here trying to come back to last year's session. Last year's session I already talked about the French business that had some problems. It was this business somewhere in southern France that we acquired. It's a public sector VMS business, small business, 3 million revenues, bit more than 1 million in EI. So imagine your parents in France, you have to work and you want to have your kids being taken care of. Our software is managing this from a customer's perspective. We acquired the business and then after the acquisition, we realized oh the business is not collecting any new professional services bookings. What's going on? We used policy deployment. We did come up with some counter measure plans. We assigned some additional people to the sales side of the house. Nothing worked. And we used what we call the diagnostic manuscript ratios to figure out where is the issue of this situation. Issue was sales and marketing ratio was off, professional services ratio was off. The long story is either we bring in new professional services bookings or we need to conclude that this business is overstuffed in terms of professional services and we have to let people go. Right? So that was where I was at the same time last year. And after this workshop, I was like traveling to France to sit together with the team somewhere in France middle of nowhere like 50 kilometers outside of Marseilles. And that was like a very cozy meeting room with a lot of people with a very small window and it was really really hot but we had a lot of coffee. So what we did is we discussed what is the situation of the professional services. Is this business really not having enough professional services? Do we need to cut the team? And what we figured out is that it's not a problem of the business not delivering professional services. The problem was that there was no charging of this professional services delivery in an appropriate way. What they did quite often is they had some health checks. So customers wanted to improve the usage of the software and then they charged like €5,000 for a workshop for a one or two day workshop which is kind of okay. But the problem was all the change requests that came out of this workshop were actually included in this 5,000 euro and sometimes they spent like work for like €20,000 and didn't charge a dime for that which is suboptimal. And the other thing is they had a couple of larger cities as customers. And these larger cities, they were just having kind of dedicated support people. They called them like all the time. And we figured that some individual employees worked like three days out of the week for a particular client and they didn't charge anything for that person. So what we decided we concluded we wanted to introduce two manuscript modules. One was a tool called Redtrace, another was a value based pricing normalization. And the Redtrace tool is a really nice tool. It basically gives you an Excel sheet, just visualize it a little bit. You have a column with the days of the week and then you have columns for each employee that should deliver professional services. And at the beginning of the week, everything is like red, hence the name Redtrace. And the people, the individual contributors then have to fill each day with professional services work. If they achieve a day full of work, they can turn it green. If they have no clear confirmation from the customer, but maybe they can do some work for a customer, it's yellow. If they have some vacation, it's gray. And if they cannot bring in enough work, it remains red. And the team is meeting every week and everybody in the team is looking at that sheet and everybody is obviously kind of a little bit embarrassed if all is red, right? So people are really calling customers, can I do this work? Can I do that work? And after a couple of weeks, the situation typically looks like that. So some people have it all green, some people have some red and some people have still a lot of red. And what then the team does is to understand what is actually this person doing all the day, although it's not billable work but then they figure out situations like I just mentioned that a customer is constantly calling that poor employee and the poor employee cannot defend themselves not to deliver services. So then the leader needs to step in and change that customer relationship that we either stop this or have the customer pay for that. And the business also did come up with a functionality in the software they call it the green button. So whenever a customer called they could press the green button and the green button was recording the time they spent for that particular customer. As a flanking strategy they also did a pricing normalization. So they introduced a new service level with the customer and as you can see there's a gold level that's plus 60% maintenance revenue charged if a customer was on gold level. And of course those nasty cities always overusing those professional services didn't have a choice not to take gold right. And we did also some communication for the team because the team needed to understand why we are now treating the customers in a different way. The team first time ever realized how much revenue and how much profitability the business actually is making because the former owner never told that to the team and all those initiatives led to a lot of individual accountability taking and you can see here these are the monthly professional services bookings that we did achieve when we started introducing this somewhere here and we increased that by 160% and all of those things is probably a combination of certain tools we share within the teams and the people on the ground that take those tools and execute those tools and these are people that are different than me and I'm very grateful that we have a lot of such people nowadays in not only in France but also in Germany. And that's how this whole manuscript method, call it 1.0, actually is working.

Now what happens with AI and what happens if you would just continue with implementing the manuscript method. I think what happens with AI is that AI is not attacking directly the different modes I mentioned on the first principle sides but it basically attacks the underlying factors that lead to those modes. So why are there high switching costs? So one big answer to this question is that it's just bloody painful from a migration effort perspective to move from solution A to solution B. Now with all the automation that AI is offering that migration effort ladies and gentlemen is decreasing. So that will erode. Will high switching costs ever go down to zero? Probably not. But they will erode the supply scarcity. So having a small niche and nobody coming into this niche because it costs so much to develop for that small market. The orchestra example, I think that will break because with every frontier model we'll see the build costs just go down and down and down. And we can see that and you'll see that later with some examples that Toby is sharing. It's actually amazing how quickly you can come up with a fully fledged ERP solution and we did that internally as well. Now the good enough inertia so the satisfaction with the status quo that will also depending on the particular businesses hold back for a while. But when you have a situation where the AI startups or the existing providers of competitive solutions are providing more and more value using AI in their products at some point the delta between our solutions if we don't do anything and the competitive solution will be so high that this delta makes sense if you combine it with the low migration effort. And what we also should not forget is that often times our solution has been introduced to the customer organizations maybe 10, 15 years ago. The guy that has been introducing this software from a customer side is getting older and older and at some point that guy will retire. And then a new guy comes in without all that history with all that relationship and the new guy will maybe say oh I want to have a cloud solution. Exactly. So these are kind of breaking points and if we are not the one delivering top AI enabled services and solutions at that point then we're losing out and if you become like a lazy incumbent there is another option: we have the same possibilities as the AI startups using the different tool sets the agentic tools that are at our disposal. So if we can bring our existing companies to now move quickly because we have several advantages, we do have the distribution to the customers. We have these customer relationships. We are basically create from a procurement perspective. It's much easier for us to deploy new software versus a new player. So we have a lot of advantages but we really need to move quickly and that's why we did come up with this RAV that you might have heard of. This stands for red alert for opportunities kind of our AI strategy that should help our existing companies to move quicker and to AI transform those businesses. Now if I go back to my first principal sites, you might say, 'Oh, this is red. Switching costs go down. The niche is no longer unattackable and you have a yellow on the good enough inertia.' Am I in the wrong movie here? And my answer is no, you're not. And why is that? Because these red situations also create something that I told Greg, one of our investors from Sedor just before the session started. Often times in these little niches, you do have just a couple of players as I mentioned. It's like the four tiles here on the carpet and that market structure is very hardly ever changing because of this low customer churn profiles. Now AI is changing that and those players that don't move will basically be washed away and there's also a possibility and opportunity for our companies to actually expand their market share not only against these AI startups but also against the existing players. So there's a great opportunity for us if we can bring our existing companies to move quicker than the existing players. I think what we also should take away from this slide is that AI through these red areas is actually breaking the division of labor by these companies no longer can protect themselves because those things break. So there's actually a responsibility and opportunity for the holdco or the platform in our situation that we help those companies to transform and that implies that the manuscript method needs to transform itself to just improve businesses like as I just have explained by the example of this French business but to actually transform the companies. Now, what does that mean? If we're talking about transformation, I think it's good to remember that most of our companies actually have quite some time until this red situations come in. And why is that? Because they're mission critical. Now, mission critical is a very high level term. So if you go down one level and you ask yourself what actually makes mission criticality of these software businesses, I would like to introduce a concept that I call operational anchors. What are operational anchors? Operational anchors are data and functionality in the software that if you remove that the customer really has operational problems to deliver. So often times they are critical parts in the main workflow of the customer. They accumulate a lot of valuable data. Often times these operational anchors are also connected with each other. By the example of this French business, all of them are example of that French business. So for instance, our software is collecting the attendance data of the children in these nurseries and this information gets sent to the city and then these nurseries they get subsidies. They don't get paid if this software doesn't send this information. They use it for the canteen forecasting to know which child has which dietary preference. I mean this is an operational issue for those customers and the mayor of that particular city has a legal obligation that every child is enrolled in school. Guess who is actually managing that source of truth? It's the software of our business. And if they don't provide that regularly, the mayor of this business will violate the law. So these are basically networks of operational anchors and that's one of the reasons why customers shy away to replace those businesses. Now what happens if we acquire and collect businesses in the similar industry and in this situation we actually have that I already was talking about this business for early childhood caring. We do have when we are taking the vertical as citizen in France in social need being it parents that need to take care of their kids while they're working or a little bit older children that might be disabled or they might unfortunately have lost their parents. There's software to manage that. We have two businesses. We call them Heart One and Heart Two. And we do have two businesses that take care for elderly people. So some elderly people in France they cannot pay their taxes because they have a little bit dementia and they are guardians that take care for these type of people. They use software and that's King One and King Two. All of these businesses have operational anchors. Hence they have low churn profiles. But all of these businesses will at some point be disrupted if we don't move and AI transform those businesses. And we're doing that with the RA strategy. Toby will talk about this in a second or in a minute.

And I think that's great. We can create additional AI modes if we AI transform these businesses. But what we also can do and this is something that we actually did today. So I learned from Torson who is heading up the group in France that we acquired and closed and signed a deal today. No joke we call it the Full House. Now the Full House is a so-called Cass software which is managing the registration process of when there's a citizen in France in social need they have to register themselves that hello I have a problem and the hello I have a problem software is Full House has about 20% market share across France and the beautiful thing apart of yes they also have some operational anchors they are in the process of replatforming their solution and why is this relevant? It's a great opportunity for us not only to help them to replatform their solution with what we learned over the last 12 months around agentic coding and also thanks to Toby and team but we can actually now coordinate similar replatformings in some of the other businesses and while doing that we can synchronize the data model and we basically can allow that a person coming in via the Full House is then basically assigned to an appropriate order of our businesses and we can do that in an automated way. We can also when we synchronize the data model basically have a platform that always knows where the individual citizen are stuck in the process and that allows us to provide a lot of automations that allows us to provide a lot of analytics and that allows us to provide a lot of cross-selling into this space and essentially will allow us to create an industry standard in this particular niche and therefore the acquisition of this Full House will make the whole system much more stickier and therefore essentially make the whole companies more valuable and I think we acquired this business for like five times ITA. I would argue we could have paid probably a bit of a higher multiple for that and it would have still make sense. The key ingredient that we need here is that we can actually only do that if we can replatform some of those businesses. That requires that we opt up or level up our R&D departments to really apply agentic coding and to become much more quicker in developing software and that's something that Toby will speak to in a minute.

The probably last slide here is finishing off where I say where we should on the right going forward. On the left hand side I think we should continue to underwrite to acquire networks of operational anchors. We should do that in the verticals we're already present in to become a more dominant player in those verticals. This will obviously give us much more pricing power as you can see from that house for me. I mean this is like pricing like paradise pricing and I think that should be something that we really should do. And on the other hand when we're doing M&A we should have open eyes for transformability. Now transformability transcends to we need to understand for each acquisition what is the headroom meaning what is the current situation and how can we move this business into a transformed version of themselves. What does it mean in terms of team size? What does it mean in terms of processes? What does it mean in terms of pricing? And we're currently developing checklists to better assess that. It also is important to understand what's the tractability. So tractability means how easy we can do this transformation or how hard is this transformation. For instance, we found that in some of the businesses where we have leaders that really leaning in into the AI transformation, everything is much more easier done as opposed to you have someone that just doesn't believe that AI is meaningfully impacting his business and that will also instruct what we're doing with this business respectively with the leadership team. But also the tractability is concerned when it comes to customers. So we have some customers that basically tell us go away with AI. We don't want to do anything with AI. And such a business is for me less attractive as opposed to you have a sector that is really appreciating AI. So tractability goes kind of both ways. I think going forward we really need to invest in the repeatability of all those transformations because the more often we're doing that the more proficient we are becoming and I think if we develop muscles in that regard that will become a key differentiator in the future and we already seeing it right now that some of the companies we're talking to in the M&A process when we're talking about with what we're currently doing in our companies in terms of AI, it already becomes an attractive feature of us because they can see that we can help them to manage the AI transformation. So the new power is keeping the focus on making this transformation happen quickly more quickly than the potential decay. And by compounding this across eight platforms we're basically leveling up the manuscript method from just improve stuff to transform stuff. And the key ingredient that I currently see is that we need to double down on making our R&D teams into agentic coding factories. That's the groundwork we already started doing and Toby will show a couple of examples. And the next area that we tackle will actually in parallel is to do the AI transformation in other departments as well. Okay, that's it.

Thank you. Before we start, I want to tell you a story. So, my family, we spent January and February in Cape Town most of the time and I go back for business if I have to. It's the same this year. So, I had something to do in Europe. I did what I had to do and then flew back and landed in Cape Town. So I always have my phone shut on long distance flights. So I open my phone this February, you know, the SAS calypsa. And there was an investor. They're not here today. They remain unnamed. They wrote me an email. I said, 'Yeah, we got to talk to you.' So I wrote them back. I said, 'Well, sure, but I'm like on vacation and we're in close period and you know Andreas.' So, those are three really good reasons why we should not talk today, but does it maybe have time? They're like, 'No, no, no. Like, we have to talk as soon as we can.' Okay. Small investor. As soon as we can immediately, please. Okay. So, I go to a hotel, kids come up. Daddy, daddy, my wife, it's like, 'No, no, no. No pool. I have this important investor call.' So, I dialed in three partners. They look at me. I say, 'Well, how can I possibly help you? What's on your mind? Something's wrong?' And the lead guy looks at me and said, 'Yan, what about AI?' And it's funny, right? Because this man was just he was scared. You just hear all the news and you hear what's happening and you see the rumors and you see everybody talks about some vision what might potentially happen and the learning we took away is that when we communicate both with clients internally, some of the people in the organization that are also skeptical, you have people who are not 100% convinced, who get objections or investors like you, we made the choice to be super specific and tell people very specifically what we do, what the limits are, what the resources are to get there and also what's easy and also how the future could look like. But we want to make that very, very specific. So what we're doing now is a bit of an experiment which is going to be a bit wild. So the idea of this is that I'm going to call on people from the team who will make a brief roll of thunder, two-minute pitch on who they are and what they want to present. I'm going to say something that will make them uncomfortable and hopefully funny to set the stage. Then we'll rush through them. Everybody on the webcast, if you find someone particularly interesting, write Andreas. We're going to set up a one-on-one, possibly group them into one-on-ones, but one-on-ones. Everybody who's here, both here in the room and also at the end of the hall, there are several rooms where we have screens and we have time and later a beer. And if I was you, I would spend a lot of time with these operating folks and just quiz them, ask them about the business, ask them about the projects, ask them about the limits of implementation. I still have to identify a few more dots because of course although I'm not presenting a product, obviously everybody else from the Chapters team is hanging out as well and we are here for all your questions and make use of that. Again, we will only leave if the last one of you leaves and usually we have some good staying power but until the last question is answered we will be here. So, let's start this little experiment. And I'm going to start with my safe bet. Andreas, I think you're first and you're going to give us an exciting example about AI in the public sector space.

Thanks, Yan. So, I'm Andreas Philippe of Altamount, and we actually started Altamount two years ago in this room. We introduced it. I think some of you folks have been here at that point. Two years ago in July '24 and I think today our ambition of Altamount is really to become the leading public sector software company in Europe. That's what we work for every day and I think AI is a big part of that. In the last year we acquired six companies. This year in '26 we expect 20, 45 to 50 million revenues plus five, six, seven more acquisitions this year which will obviously increase the revenue number for this year. When we started we had some hypothesis to be honest AI back in '24 was not one of them. Yeah to be very honest. But we believe AI is super important and we're all super in awe of the power of AI and I want to show you that in a second. So as I said in the last two years we built a platform, we built a great team, we had a lot of hypotheses that we mostly have been validating, added some of them like AI and we're really ready to accelerate the growth. And I think one important part to just show you how important AI is for Altamount, we set up a dedicated entity we called it Altamount Ignite with the objective to ignite AI in our portfolio companies and this unit Altamount Ignite is run by Leonard. Leonard, where are you? And Leonard will be showcasing next door one of the use cases that he deployed together with Peak Mobility. So we had it a couple of times here before. Peak Mobility, public transport provider in Germany. It's the market leader, I don't want to say the world market leader but one of the global market leaders for depot management. And it's a mysterious word, depot management. You go out on the street, you see all the buses, the red buses driving passengers from here to anywhere else in Hamburg. In Hamburg, there are 1,200 buses driving around during the day. And at night, all these buses have to park somewhere. They come to depot. And in these depots, they are being maintained, cleaned, the wheels are changed, and everything that needs to be done. And this is a pretty traditional process. In Hamburg it is software based but globally we're below 15% digitization in these steps and this is a global phenomenon. So this is something where peak is really really strong and now you know if you have a diesel bus it's pretty easy, you fuel the bus within 7 minutes and it's ready for the next day. With the e-buses that are coming more and more into the cities it's much more difficult, it takes 6 hours, 7 hours to fully charge a bus. And sometimes this is happening during the day. So if it's doing a ride, it cannot just easily get recharged. So it needs to go to a depot. And this needs to be integrated in the schedule and the planning of the buses. And this is what peak is offering. And we're the first on the global market who are currently developing a solution where we have a dynamic route planning for the next day where this whole charging maintenance of these buses is fully integrated for the depot. So it really becomes a dynamic depot and Leonard will be showcasing that in the room next door. Pretty exciting case. A second use case that we have, it's a company also a portfolio company of Altamount called Ecomdias run by Christian. Christian is here. Very nice company. It's a secure workflow automation for critical infrastructure but it's mainly for the police in Germany. So what Ecomdias is doing, they provide the so-called online portal in Germany, this is where the 80 million adult citizens in Germany can file a police report. My handbag got stolen, my car has been crashed, or somebody killed somebody or whatever. Just the filing of a police report. You have two options: You go to the police station or you do it online. That's the two options you have in Germany and we are providing the online channel. So there are a lot of police reports coming into the system 24/7 and somebody at the police station has to read all the reports and prioritize what to do first. And this is a very manual process and then at night if there's a police report coming in at night there must also be somebody at the police station who reads that report which is quite expensive to have people sitting there 24/7. And what Christian and the team of Ecomdias have now developed and are just about to deploy is a fully automated prioritization engine. So it reads all the different police reports and if there's a murder or a bomb threat or whatever, it's getting fully prioritized and some of the others are just held back until 7 a.m. in the morning so that the night shift doesn't have to deal with that. So it's a very powerful solution that's also decreasing the cost for the police which the police is very happy about and Christian will also showcase on the live portal later on. Thank you.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Next next up is Yasha. Long story. So the very first software company ever bought by the entity then called Medicon was a business called Parity. And it was amazing because it was the first deal and everything that could potentially ever go wrong in acquiring a software company went wrong within the first couple of weeks. Now it was amazing. Like everything you could potentially creatively imagine would happen happened. Now, not only did that business recover in remarkable ways, but that experience also brought us you and you're not only running par, but you're running one of our largest platforms now and it has grown tremendously over the years and you've been with us since 2019 and it's an amazing journey and I'm handing over to you to present what you're doing in the bicycle and motorcycle market.

Yeah, thank you very much Jan and indeed par was a great school for me to learn everything that could might happen in a software company but this is not the topic today. What I'm going to show you today is an example of an ongoing chapters momentum initiative at our opco CSB. So CSB offers an ERP or often called dealer management system specifically for motorcycle dealers and we are market leader in this market. We have about 900 dealers online which means that about 1 million service appointments are going through our system each year while the booking process is still quite manual like most likely the dealer has a customer on the phone and types everything manually into the system. So there's quite a huge amount of digitalization potential and this is why we decided to set up with the chapter's momentum initiative a project and we are now building an AI based digital service assistant for CSB and the idea is that the service assistant can be implemented into the customer's website and then end customers, our customer is a dealer, and then the end customer books an appointment directly into the system by using natural language. And what did momentum specifically enable about it? I will keep it short just from a top level perspective. First of all, we of course gained a lot of speed as the idea of momentum is that we take external capacities into the projects. Those were recommended by Tobias and financed by chapters and those external guys were able to ship the feature very fast. So there was no disruption of our existing road map. And secondly, we have a way more capable product now through the use of AI which from a high level perspective means that we found a solution that the AI is directly connected to the on-premise ERP system so it can talk in real time to the dealer and is always up to date and this makes it possible to set up an appointment whenever a service assistant and mechanic is available and the customer wants to have it. Finally about the timeline and some economics. We started with that in May 2026 and it took us only 3 months and about 20 days of internal capacity to build the first MVP that is fully tested running internally at CSB now and we are planning to deploy this to the first batch of customers. We have about five customers that have committed already to pay for the solution. They are waiting for it and once they are satisfied with the solution, we of course plan to further push it into the overall customer base and based on some estimates we made before, we assume that we are able to create an additional revenue stream for CSB of 350,000 euros per year for subscription fees for only that small add-on. That's it so far and if you are interested in more details feel free to stop by later. I'm somewhere over there in the back in one of the rooms and I'm glad to be there for your questions.

Now I'm handing over to U Matias of Vatakant, our literal neighbors because the Vatakant office in Hamburg is very close to the headquarters of Chapters Group. And when I talk to some of you, you know, I'm on the phone walking outside and usually that means that they are watching me what might be going on in front of their screen. You're presenting something that is kind of interesting, not operationally related, but around how we source companies.

Thank you very much. I'm going to talk about the scorecard for M&A purposes and before AI, we used to have to dig through all sorts of information which you see on the left side. Just from the website, finding out whether a target can be interesting for us was not that easy. And basically we wouldn't have the idea whether that target would be a good fit to our guard rails which you see on the right hand side and whether it would really pass or sustain in a shark tank. So we came up with an AI solution with an AI lens, as we call it, which will find out whether a target is really interesting to us. But just using AI isn't always the kind of goal you want to use because it would give you randomized output. So we had to train the AI. But we did it for a specific sector. So we need to train the AI what is a key definition to us in that sector. Whether it's a core platform, whether we could treat it as an add-on, and most importantly, the AI also needs to understand how software is bought in that segment and what our customers really need in that segment and of course, the AI also needs to know what are the current market trends to actually score the companies in an initial setup. So that's how one scorecard could look like. So basically telling us what's the owner structure, can we actually buy it? Does it check out all the quality gates which we have in place and gives us a lot of context of that company in a matter of seconds instead of just digging through it and having first meetings with targets who are not really interesting to us. So if we do it on a bigger scale for example, for logistics software we did it before actually entering the market. So we can actually see upfront whether we could want to go into that market. So we see on the top right hand side that we have lots of core platforms available and which of those can be really addressed and actually highlighted up here are the ones where we were actually in talks with them and as you already see there are also some optimization layers which we could add on in a later stage. And finally, what that score gives us is fast analysis and a good personalized dedicated outreach with high response rates and a high conversion rate and of course it gives us the market overview which I've just shown you and how we can complement those targets in the long run and maybe for some cases actually build an industry standard in the long run. I'm happy to talk to you later on and looking forward to your questions. Thank you.

So, I was opening LinkedIn one night and I got messages from Julian, former professional athlete now turned SaaS founder. And I kept on writing with Julian, or what I thought was Julian, and we were agreeing on a call because you were doing a capital round. And then when we first had our first meeting where we met in Berlin on the roof terrace, it was funny because I said, 'It was so nice writing with you,' and he's like, 'Yeah, that was my bot.' So I was like, 'Okay, well, so I'm not entirely sure you're human. You might still be a robot. I don't know. But certainly your outreach was professional and very much to our liking and you've been as an investment part of the Chapters family for some time now and you're doing many exciting things in AI.'

Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. I'm very glad that I'm a human in you too. So maybe first of all, I was a professional athlete. Now I have a company Fuksum. Where does Fuksum come from? Fuksum comes from the future of XM. That was our initial idea because five years ago I was based in Berlin, I was there in a university and I thought, why are we still writing exams with pen and paper? This was my initial idea and now we built a much larger solution. We built a full solution for universities, the complete operating system. And you will think now, why does this guy do that? Because I recognized, because we did market research, because that was the only thing I as a student could do, market research and do something like that, and we saw that 120 universities use 1,800 different software solutions. And when I recognized that, that was the moment where I saw that we need an all-in-one solution and that is exactly what we're doing now. We have now 30 customers all over Europe, we have six modules, we are now building 90% with AI. So we were very glad that we were, I would say, born in the age of AI because it helped us very well to build an all-in-one solution and now we have six main products: Folks Apply for application management, campus management, learning management system, we have a mobile version, we have the examination tool which was our initial idea, and our alumni management. And we are doing a lot of other very cool things. I'm glad to see you and talk to you maybe later and we see us there in the back corner. Thank you so much.

So, this is particularly exciting because Celten is one of the longest additions to the Chapters Group and it's the 3% bar in other that you saw at the very beginning. Now you could wonder, it's the only non-software financial technology business we have left. So what's going on there and it's kind of amazing. So you built an HVAC business here in Hamburg from scratch with our help since 2020 which is now one of the largest HVAC businesses here in northern Germany and I don't know what happened but recently you caught the AI bug and what has happened in this very blue collar business is unlike anything I've seen before and it's absolutely amazing to watch. It has a very clear lever on profitability because there's just a lot of variable and people cost involved and the savings are incredibly real and you've adopted a very playful and very experimental mindset to improvement and implementation and it's incredibly exciting to have you.

Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Yan. A little bit disappointed that you did not introduce us as the Kahen, the coolest cooling company in town as you used to, but yeah, I'm fine with it. We can talk later by a beer. So we're the Calder Helden. We are 23 people in Hamburg, Germany. And I think AI is one of the biggest opportunities in our industry that maybe ever happened. And that's why we started to look at our problems and search for solutions. And one of our biggest problems is that our technicians need to write a service report after every service call after a long day on a rainy rooftop, they need to type it on a small tablet keyboard and to be honest, a lot of those reports are incomplete and a lot of information is missing and that's a heavy problem for us because on that information we build our invoice. So we probably lose money when our technicians don't write the report properly. So we started with the AI hub to create our service report buddy. It's a GPT that works along with the technicians and they don't have to type in everything now. They just talk about the problem they had. It can be completely chaotic. AI structures this and the most important thing, it asks. If AI sees something is missing, it will follow up and we did something that the GPT also has technical knowledge. So it's not a master craftsman, but it's kind of an experienced journeyman. And if a young technician just says, 'OK, problem is solved,' the GPT will ask, 'OK, what was the problem? What was the root cause?' If the technician doesn't know what the root cause was, the bot will give him hints where to look, where to search for the problem. And afterwards, we will get a clean report and just put it into the ERP system and afterwards we build our invoice on it. So more complete reports, that's pretty important for us. And to be honest, it's just the beginning. We have a lot of problems, a lot of themes in our company, in our industry that can be solved and can be more efficient by AI. And so all people can focus on keeping the future cool. Thank you.

So, our last example and presenter is you. You're usually the one who knows the few examples I bring around what we do and what we do in the group. I usually bring up the gun and fishing license registry business that you might have heard from me from time to time. So, here it is, John.

Yeah, thank you very much. And last but hopefully not least, I've got something very operational for you today. So basically, what is it we do? I asked AI to do a picture as well and I think it's telling you exactly what we're trying to achieve in Germany and that's public safety. So our software solution helps the authorities to keep criminals and other bad people away from guns and as well we do that in terms of nature. So we help Germany to look green. In terms of numbers, this means we have around 30 employees, around 450 customers, and that's around 90% of the relevant market in Germany for gun and fishing and hunting licensing control. So this means around 5 million firearms in the hands of 1 million people and that's basically our business. We like to talk to our customers and we have something which most customers and most companies have, customer success managers, and those people need to prepare for their customer calls. And we found out that this is roughly 1,200 cycles a year at least and at least 18,000 minutes spent in our small company just gathering information from different systems. So you know what's up with the customer, what tickets did they raise in the last couple of weeks, what opportunities do we have? What do they talk about with our support teams? So is there an opportunity for an upsell or something like that? And what we did, we needed something which reduced those 18,000 minutes because it was around six systems you need to look into. You need to do a manual research and if you're not that seasoned it may take a while. We used the AI hub for that. So we have a compliant opportunity now to link all of our internal systems to the AI hub and create a very easy report within seconds about everything which is happening at a customer for the last couple of weeks, months, a year, whatever you want to see. So this enables us on the one hand to have very good conversations with our customers. So it makes sure we think about the right people and the right things and it makes sure we have a very clear logic applied to that. So it knows our products, it knows the questions the customers raised in the last couple of months. We know what is happening in sales, which conversations there have been and so it gives the customer support manager a good idea of what is happening at the customer at the moment. And this takes less than a minute. So it gives us as a very small company a lot of hours. So 300 hours or more just on time back in terms of better conversations with customers because we don't need the time to research. We have the time to talk to the customer. And it's a very small operational example, but it's in the AI hub. So it means it can be shared across the community of companies we have. And we have a couple of other things coming out of that because we don't just use it for this specific use case. I actually use it before every conversation I have with a customer because it takes me less than a minute and then I don't need to log in to different systems. Nothing like that. I just have one prompt, looks like ChatGPT. We all know that. And I get a report with very easy to read traffic lights: green, yellow, red, for different categories like sales, support, all the other stuff. And if there's something I like to know a bit more in detail, I get into the report and have all the data ready at hand in just a couple of seconds. So this for us is the biggest opportunity apart from AI, agentic coding and all the other things we've seen today, in an operational area between customer support and sales.

Amazing. Brilliant. Thank you.

And I'm back there.

So, you very soon you're allowed to stand up and grab a drink and thank you for your patience. I hope it was directionally interesting. If there's one thing you want to take away from this presentation, there's one thing. Remember the slide that Tobias showed with the founders and the operators. Most of the businesses were started by founders who saw a market opportunity and a software tool at the time, like Microsoft Access, some early Java solution and they said, 'Listen, I know, nobody understands the gun license market better than I do and I'm going to solve this problem.' And then 80% of the businesses that did that who never scaled, we don't see them, they never scaled. But the ones that found product-market fit, they grew very capital efficiently with no external investors and they became the businesses that now become part of Chapters Group or other acquirers. Now for the longest time when we acquired these businesses we ran them with an operator mindset, right? Efficiency improvement, get the succession right, get pricing right, get things stable. I think that's changing. So when I look at 2030 and how we want the group to look like, it's all about reigniting that entrepreneurial fire and appreciating the distribution and the great reputation and the great market position we have in all of those markets, but make clear to the operating leaders that they now have a new super weapon, which is AI. And if you're close to the customer, customer intimacy, that's a word we use a lot, you can actually reinvent your business. And you can, because we also know a thing or two about M&A, you can also use M&A to really build an industry standard, a really magical business in a certain vertical in a pretty short time. And our focus is to kind of reignite that fire. And we can really reinvent the businesses, rather than just run them, we can reinvent and recreate these businesses because of the powerful tools of AI. And the best way to figure it out and get a sense for it is if you, now first you're allowed to clap and thank the team. Thank you very much. And then you can stand up and get a drink and go after everyone at Chapters. Malina wants to say something that's important, some directions.

So there are fridges with drinks.

The bathrooms are at ground floor and a bit hard to find. Don't get lost. We have who's in here?

Folks and Kit in here. I'm going to be in here. You're going to be in here. Mark's going to be in here. Toby's going to be in here. Andreas, where are you?

Down the hall.

Down the hall. Yasha, where are you? Also down the hall. Okay, but mingle around, ask all the questions you want. Whoever has a dot has something to say. So, thank you.