PBI
#No, we've not.
We were pretty purposeful about what we said at Analyst Day, and I'll repeat it.
First of all, if you start with available free cash flow, as you get into 2016 through 2018, we see a pretty big opportunity to drive real cash flow.
That will become very congruent with earnings.
The second thing we said is that our view of capital allocation is we'll be balanced between share repurchases and acquisitions.
And the third thing we said is we'll have a bias towards share repurchases in the short term.
And I think all those comments still stand.
I'm not prepared to say a lot more than that, however.
Yes, so I would say that's a business that over the last couple of years has performed quite well.
As you look at the pipeline that they had in the third quarter, they had an opportunity to do much better than they did, and I would say our sales execution was not what I would have expected.
So as I remarked, there's positives and negatives about the quarter.
Software, I thought the optics were less good than the actual execution.
In shipping, I just didn't like how we executed.
So I think we'll be back on the horse in the fourth quarter, but they certainly didn't perform the way I wanted to in the third quarter.
I would say the answer to the first question is what.
And the answer to the second question is we continue to look at other outbound markets.
So not to be flip, <UNK>, if you look at where we are in the UK, we are very early, so I think there's a lot that can be done there in terms of driving that even further.
There's opportunities in terms of more listings.
There are opportunities in terms better conversion rates.
So we're early innings there.
We're going to continue to do better, and we are focused with our partners to do that.
As it relates to other countries, that's clearly part of the plan.
Right now I'd say that we'll go wherever we can find the next anchor client that would really provide the foundation for our business.
As you look at the markets that you'd likely find that, I'd say Germany, India, China, and Japan are the ones that we're pushing the hardest on, but we have to do it in a way that makes economic sense.
At this point, the biggest thing that will drive productivity, or two biggest things, are one is the removal of the duplicative expense.
So that by itself has a positive benefit.
And the second is as that channel becomes more experienced, so there's nothing structural at this point that's in the way, so now it's just a matter of time.
We have all of the people in the seats, and that's really what was transpiring over the third quarter.
Now it's moving up the productivity curve.
Yes, so again, I think if you look at that business over the last couple of years, they've done that high single digits and actually low double digit performance, so it's not even quarter to quarter.
Software businesses are never quarter to quarter, particularly ones starting with the level of scale that we have.
The next move for them is to think where we started.
We went from general (technical difficulty) to product specialists.
The next turn of the crank is to go from product specialist to solution sales.
So let me give you an example of what that means.
So we have our customer information management businesses.
That's a line of business that's a product specialty, if you will.
As they mature their channel, they will move from product specialists that know those products inside and out to people that know about money laundering and know your customer and other types of application areas that become important to the client.
So I can get the predicate of your question looking at the third-quarter results.
I would say that they've hit the ball fairly consistent with what we think our long-term expectations are over the last couple of years.
And they got more opportunities for productivity.
The other thing that will help, and we haven't talked about it a lot, is we've not done as well this year on our services business in Software as we had planned.
As you move more into the solutions aspect, it will drag your services business along with it.
Thanks.
So let me recap.
As I mentioned, from a quarterly perspective, there were some positive and negatives.
That's not to be unexpected.
That's generally the way.
As we pointed to at Analyst Day, we expected the third quarter to be better than the first half, and the fourth quarter to be further improvement from there, and I think that's the way it's going to turn out.
In terms of our strategic road map, and I think this is the headline of the third quarter, we made little progress over the last 90 days.
And I would just recap, too, because I think their economic consequence is so substantial, the fact that we got Canada out the door from a systems perspective is significant.
As we've talked about, that's the next important step to realizing that $125 million of benefit.
I would say we've seen productivity improvements beyond what I would have expected where we are in deployment already.
And the second really important strategic item that we're able to make progress on and the third quarter, to <UNK>'s question, was the integration of Borderfree.
We've talked about $25 million to $30 million of synergies over the next 18 months.
Collectively, those two items represent $150 million benefit.
So as I said, you'll get fluctuations and a little bit noise quarter to quarter, but our focus and our perspective is squarely on the long-term creation of shareholder value.
That will conclude our remarks for today.
We'll talk to you in 90 days.
