nCino's cash flow was $115.6m. Its buybacks were $175.7m.

On 25 August 2026, nCino reported a quarter that fixed the thing investors had complained about for two years. The banking-software company turned a $15.3 million quarterly loss into $5.1 million of profit. Operating cash flow for the half came in at $115.6 million, up 60%. In the same press release, the board authorised another $100 million of share repurchases.

The number that explains the half is in neither the headline nor the release. In those six months nCino spent $175.7 million buying its own shares — half again what the business produced.

Where the cash came from

Net cash from operating activities        115,604
Repurchases of common stock             (175,659)
Proceeds from term loan, net              199,294
Net borrowings on revolving facility     (135,000)
Net cash used in financing activities    (119,305)

The gap is filled by a line that did not exist a year ago. On the debt note, nCino discloses a senior secured incremental term loan of $200.0 million, maturing 28 October 2029, amortising $2.5 million a quarter. Part of the proceeds went to paying down the revolver, which fell from $213.5 million to $78.5 million. The rest is the buyback.

Add it up and the balance sheet moved in one direction while the income statement moved in the other:

Net debt rose by $67.0 million across a half in which the company earned $18.7 million and generated $115.6 million of operating cash. Nothing here is hidden — every figure is in the same 10-Q, three notes apart.

The business underneath

It is worth being precise about what is and is not improving, because the two halves of this story point in different directions.

Subscription revenue grew 10.9% in the half and professional services fell 1.6%. Gross profit grew 15.5%, faster than either, because the loss-making services line got smaller and cheaper to run — its cost of revenue fell from $44.3 million to $39.5 million while the revenue it supports barely moved.

That is a real improvement and it is what produced the cash. It is also why the shape of the company changed: this is no longer a business whose story is growth. Software companies that grow 9% are valued on what they return, which is the context for everything below.

Four authorisations in seventeen months

The August announcement is not new policy. It is the fourth $100 million programme since March 2025.

• March 2025 — $100 million, completed in the third quarter of fiscal 2026.
• December 2025 — $100 million. As of 31 July 2026, $0.02 million remained available.
• March 2026 — a $100 million accelerated share repurchase with Wells Fargo. The initial delivery covered about 80% of the purchase price at an initial price of $14.98 a share. On 2 June 2026 the ASR settled and nCino received 487,675 additional shares, based on a daily volume-weighted average price of $16.57 over the term.
• August 2026 — a further $100 million, announced with these results.

Six months to 31 Jul 2025    2,572,782 shares at $23.53   =  $60,546k
Six months to 31 Jul 2026   10,828,574 shares at $16.16   = $174,979k

nCino bought 4.2 times as many shares this half as last, at an average price 31% lower. The buying worked on the count: the basic weighted average fell from 114,657,339 to 104,350,762, a decline of about 9%, and the shares retired in the half were 9.4% of the prior-year count.

It did not, however, manufacture the earnings turn. Net income attributable to nCino went from a $9.7 million loss to $18.7 million of profit — a swing of $28.4 million that no share count can produce. The smaller denominator amplifies the per-share figure; the numerator is the reason it turned positive at all.

The $200 million is floating

One line in Item 3 connects this filing to the question the market is asking about September.

nCino’s term loan and revolver bear interest at the borrower’s option off Term SOFR plus a margin, with the margin stepping up on leverage ratios. That is floating-rate debt, taken on three weeks before a Federal Reserve meeting at which a rise is a live possibility. Asked the standard question, the company answers:

“A hypothetical 100 basis point change in interest rates would not have had a material impact on our financial results included in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q.”

The arithmetic is defensible. A hundred basis points on $200 million is roughly $2 million a year, against $18.7 million of first-half net income — about 11% of a half-year’s profit, spread over a full year. Reasonable people can call that immaterial.

It is also the answer that puts nCino in a specific group. When we read every June-quarter filing that uses the phrase “100 basis point”, 393 companies used it and 93 attached a dollar figure to their own interest expense. nCino is in the other group: it names the exposure and declines to size it. With $275.4 million of debt and a $100 million authorisation outstanding, its readers have to do that sum themselves.

What would change the picture

• The next authorisation is not funded yet. At 31 July nCino held $83.3 million of cash against a $100 million programme announced three weeks later. Either the $115.6 million half-year run-rate pays for it, or the balance sheet does again. The October filing will say which.
• Growth is the variable, not the buyback. At 9.4% revenue growth the repurchase arithmetic works because the multiple is low. If subscription growth slips below the high single digits, the same policy funded by the same debt looks different.
• Services is shrinking on purpose or by accident. The filing does not say which. Professional services revenue fell 1.6% while its cost of revenue fell 10.7%, which reads like deliberate mix management, but a smaller implementation business is also a leading indicator of fewer new deployments. The next two quarters separate those.
• The term loan amortises. $2.5 million a quarter is small against this cash flow, but the loan matures in October 2029 and its margin steps up with leverage. Buying back stock with borrowed money raises the ratio that sets the margin.

What this article does not say

No share price appears here, and no view is offered on whether the shares are cheap. The prices in this article are the ones nCino itself paid, disclosed in its own filing: $23.53 a year ago, $16.16 this half, $14.98 and $16.57 on the two legs of the ASR. Whether repurchasing at those levels was a good use of $175.7 million is a judgement the filing cannot settle — but the filing does tell you that the money was borrowed, and at what maturity.

Check it yourself

Every figure above sits in one document, the 10-Q linked in the sources. The cash flow statement is in Item 1; the repurchase table and ASR terms are in Note 8; the term loan and the outstanding debt table are in Note 10; the interest rate sentence is in Item 3. The $100 million authorisation is in Item 8.01 of the 8-K filed the same day.

We have written before about the gap between a software company’s reported growth and its cash — the same reading that found monday.com’s revenue rising 22% while its cash flow fell 17%, in that case with the signs reversed. For buybacks measured against what a company spends on itself instead, see the five companies whose capex overtook their repurchases.

Every calculation above is written out in this article’s front matter and re-checked when the site builds.

For the same measurement at a larger company — repurchases of $624.0m against free cash flow of $585.2m in a half — see Docusign.

If a figure here does not match a filing, tell us and it will be corrected on the article and on the corrections log, with the date.