Treasury Intelligence Solutions

Mr. Vucetic, this publication recently reported on the massive goodwill that the financial investor Marlin Equity Partners has on its balance sheet for TIS. However, your company has missed the self-imposed growth and profitability targets. In the past six months, we have carried out a re-calibration of our growth fields. It was about sharpening our story. Some customers were not clear enough about what we actually offer. That is why we have tried to limit our offer in an easier way to understand.

And with that you want to catch up on growth? We want to double our turnover in the next three to five years and remain profitable. Half of this growth is to come organically, 30 percent through partnerships and the rest through M&A. With the Ebitda margin, we plan towards 20 percent, at the moment we are at 10 percent here.

"We aim to double our revenue over the next five years."

Where do you expect a lot of growth? We see growth in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and in the Nordic countries. However, the largest increase clearly comes from North America. There we have invested heavily and built up a powerful team that is competitive. The share of sales today is still comparatively small, but already double-digit. In the future, the region should account for half of our turnover. A second growth lever is the partnerships already mentioned, which we are pursuing much more aggressively today. These can range from financial institutions to ERP providers to other treasury management system providers. If, for example, an ERP system provider wants to improve its capabilities in payment transactions, it can work with us. This is similar to a white label approach.

That all sounds good. However, the PE investor Marlin is likely to exert pressure. Since Marlin is involved in many companies, the colleagues bring a valuable perspective. Marlin has a value creation team with experts from various disciplines. We use these resources intensively. It is a close relationship, I would say. I feel like Marlin is more like a venture capital investor and not a classic PE investor. They are close to where they need to be close.

What is your focus in the product world at TIS? If you look at our products, the central topics are real-time transparency, fraud and artificial intelligence. We have a clear idea of where AI creates real added value. In our view, it is most valuable when integrated directly into workflows. We aim to be "best-of-breed."

Can't companies quickly build such solutions themselves with Vibe Coding? Do you see your business threatened? There is always a trade-off between what companies develop internally and what they buy externally. In my opinion, customers will not build up the payment infrastructure themselves, which we have already developed over the past decade. We want to be the center of this infrastructure. Can you build an AI agent who communicates with the house bank? Yes, you can. But when you think about regulation and maintenance, I'm not sure if companies really want to do that themselves.

I view Marlin as a venture capital investor rather than a private equity investor.

How does TIS deal with AI in concrete terms? Like any other company, we are working hard to integrate AI. We see particularly big advantages on the development side, i.e. where we build new products. Today, we can develop new products much faster. We are modeling and testing what works best. The biggest benefit is that we can create and show products for customers much faster than we would have thought at the beginning of this year. However, it is also crucial for us how we best embed AI into the workflow of our customers. We rely on partial automation rather than complete automation. Someone must ensure that the necessary responsibility is present. That's why the "Human in the Loop" is important.