A comparable payments company, Payoneer, was acquired in June for 8.3x EBITDA. This recent transaction serves as powerful ammunition for the special committee, creating a clear valuation benchmark that makes the CEO's initial lowball offer difficult to justify and strengthens their negotiating leverage for a significantly higher price.

A high-priced, high-margin service provides a competitive advantage beyond just profit. It allows you to pay your own vendors and partners more than your rivals can. This premium payment secures priority service for your customers, enabling you to deliver a faster, superior experience that competitors with lower margins cannot match.

Unlike pure SaaS investors, a HoldCo can view technology services revenue not as a low-multiple distraction but as a strategic advantage that provides deep customer intimacy, market intelligence, and a pathway to developing higher-margin IP.

AI allows service-based businesses to operate with software-like efficiency and high gross margins (e.g., 75%). This has created a new category, "Service as a Software," causing a major shift where private equity firms now value these service companies similarly to traditional SaaS businesses.

Despite investor focus on its well-known distribution business, Amadeus's Air IT division (inventory, reservation management) now generates 50% of group profits. This less visible, mission-critical software segment is the company's most profitable and formidable moat.

SaaS pricing has always been determined by the value it delivers to customers, not its cost to build. While AI makes development cheaper and faster, it doesn't fundamentally change the value a product provides. Therefore, companies that solve important problems will maintain their pricing power and high margins.

A powerful software value-creation lever is "engineering out" partners. By acquiring or building technology that replaces a licensed third-party service, a company eliminates a variable cost. In SaaS, this cost reduction applies retroactively to the entire customer base, dramatically boosting gross margin.

The payments segment is Kaspi's profit engine, contributing 40% of net income from only 16% of revenue. Its net income margin surpasses 65%—higher than Visa's—because it operates on its own closed-loop rails, eliminating intermediary fees.

The Treasury segment's CFTPay platform has highly attractive unit economics because its distribution model is B2B2C. Instead of costly direct-to-consumer acquisition, Priority integrates with large enterprise partners (like debt settlement firms) who bring tens of thousands of their own customers onto the platform, creating scalable, high-margin growth.