Xero Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Xero's half-year results FY20 earnings call. I must advise that today's call is being recorded. There'll be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. I'll now hand you over to the first speaker today, Steve Bamos, Chief Executive Officer. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Well hello and thanks to all of you for joining us for Xero's financial and operating results for the half year to the 30th of September 2019. I'm Steve Vemos, Xero's CEO and I'm joined on our call by our CFO Kirsty Godfrey-Billy. This morning I'll share our latest performance highlights and the progress we've made against our strategic priorities during the period and then Kirsty will dive into the financial results in more detail before we move on to the outlook and Q&A. We're really pleased to update you today on Xero's performance in the first half. Our strong progress is evident across a number of areas including lifetime value, subscriber net ads and revenue. I thought we should start with subscriber growth on slide five. This first figure highlights the success we've had in the first half and underscores the cumulative progress we've made in recent years. A net 239,000 new subscribers joined Xero during the half. equaling our best ever result for a six-month period, which was the second half of fiscal year 19. Subscriber additions took the business through a significant milestone, 2 million. We ended the period with 2.06 million subscribers, up 30% on the same period last year. It's interesting it took more than a decade to add Xero's first million subscribers, but it's taken just two and a half years to add the next million, indicating the increasing momentum of our business. We've continued to drive the adoption of cloud accounting in New Zealand and Australia and we're expanding our presence in a number of international markets. Net subscriber ads of 130,000 during the half from Australia and New Zealand reflect a particularly strong performance from Australia. International net subscriber ads of 109,000 also increased markedly versus the same period last year. On slide six, we feature another highlight, AMRR, which is Xero's annualized monthly recurring revenue. AMRR increased by 175 million from the first half of fiscal year 19, and for the first time, exceeded three quarters of a billion dollars to reach $764 million. AMRR is an important forward-looking indicator of the value of our existing customer relationships and how our business is growing. Moving to slide seven, Here we have the main financial highlights for the period. We added more than $1.4 billion in lifetime value versus September 2018 to reach $5.4 billion in total lifetime value. Operating revenue for the half increased by 32% over the same period last year to $339 million. While subscriber numbers increased strongly, ARPU, or average revenue per user trends, were effectively flat. with a slight decrease of 0.4% to just under $31 and Kirsty is going to talk you through the underlying trends on ARPU later in this briefing. EBITDA excluding the impact of impairments increased by more than 90% or $31.4 million to $65.9 million. Moving to slide 8 and framing the remainder of my presentation are the three strategic priorities for Xero. These are to drive cloud accounting adoption, grow the Xero small business platform, and continue to build Xero for global scale and innovation. These haven't changed at the highest level we don't expect them to for some time. A tremendous amount of work has and continues to go on to further execute the initiatives supporting these priorities. Driving cloud accounting on slide nine is a core focus for us. And as our half-year results show, subscriber additions remain the single largest source of growth for Xero. We estimate global small business cloud accounting penetration is currently less than 20% in the countries in which we operate. So there remains significant headroom for growth, and we are incredibly excited about that. In Australia and New Zealand, we see aggregate cloud accounting adoption levels being over 50%. This is testament to our product innovation, the fact that Xero was born in this part of the world. The compliance needs of small business owners continue to play a big part in driving demand for cloud accounting. Government initiatives such as single touch payroll in Australia, payday filing in New Zealand and making tax digital in the UK all contributed to the 239,000 new subscribers added in the half. In addition to these growing digital connections between government and business, increasing adoption of cloud and innovation in financial services are significant trends that also support the growth of our business. Slide 10, and going around the regions, we see that Australia and New Zealand performed strongly in the period, with total subscribers now exceeding 1.2 million, an increase of 23%. AMRR within ANZ increased by 22% year on year. In Australia, subscribers increased by a net 114,000 and a half to 840,000. a 28% year-on-year increase. This was a new record for subscriber net additions for any region within a six-month period. Operating revenue performance in Australia was also strong, up 26% year-on-year. In New Zealand, where cloud accounting adoption is the highest in the world, our growth in subscribers remained strong at 13% year-on-year and in the period on 367,000. Subscriber net additions of 16,000 eased slightly versus the same period last year. The nine percentage point gap between operating revenue growth and subscriber growth in the first half of fiscal year 20 in New Zealand demonstrates progress we're making on upsell and adjacent product sales as we shift our emphasis to additional platform services such as payroll, expenses, projects and payments. Moving to the next slide. The results of our UK business in the half were strong. Our UK performance reflected the influence of HMRC's making tax digital initiative, which has sparked a shift in the way small businesses interact with government. Subscriber numbers in the UK increased by 51% year on year, and we added 73,000 subscribers in the half to reach 536,000 subs. Revenue in the UK also increased by 51% to 80 million. while AMRR grew by 56%. We're also heavily invested and we have also heavily invested to ready our customers for open banking and this has positioned us well in the UK and for similar initiatives in other markets. We see the open banking movement as positive for business and consumers alike. It will drive competition, innovation and create better value in financial services that drive or that small businesses rely on day to day. The pace of innovation within the FinTech space is exciting and we're pursuing potential opportunities to partner with others to deliver new financial services products. FinTech is going to feature in the announcements we're making next week at Xeracon in London where thousands of our partner community will be in attendance. We also opened a new office in Manchester earlier this week which complements our existing London and Milton Keynes locations. There's plenty of headroom for growth within the UK and it remains a top priority for Xero. Moving on to North America and slide 12. Our go-to-market team in North America continues to develop and execute our community-focused Partner Playbook that's proven successful in other markets. Subscriber numbers in North America increased by 21% versus the prior year to 215,000 subs, driven by steady progress in the US and our newer Canadian business. Overall North American operating revenues increased by 34% or 29% on a constant currency basis. In terms of forward looking indicators, year on year we have seen an uplift of more than 40% in partner channel capacity, that is being the number of small businesses we can reach through our partner community. We expect to see our strategy translate into revenue growth across North America as we gain further traction with new partners and drive increasing adoption. We're also encouraged by the level of engagement at our Xerocon San Diego event, which was held in June. We were joined at the event by more than 1,000 attendees, which is a positive indicator for the appetite and interest in Xero within the North America region. This under-penetrated market remains an attractive opportunity for us, with a huge TAM on offer. A key priority continues to be the enhancements of our local product fit and to build improved compliance functionality such as the work we've done on GST returns for Canada and tax mapping for the US. Now onto slide 13, the rest of world includes our businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa. These markets remain a great opportunity for us and while still relatively new to the group, delivered impressive momentum during the half. Revenue for rest of world region grew 43% year on year and subscriber numbers grew 52% year on year to 99,000. Net subscriber ads more than doubled over the same period last year as we continue to benefit from our positioning and grow brand awareness in these growth markets. During the half, we launched a bank-free partnership with Hang Seng Bank, a leading provider for small to medium businesses in Hong Kong. In South Africa, the roadshows we hosted in Johannesburg and Cape Town during the half attracted over 1,200 attendees, which again is a great indicator of early stage interest and demand for Xerox. We also announced a number of alternative lending integrations in South Africa including with Bridgement, Retail Capital and Alula Lend, leveraging our global bank feed API. So that's a good segue to the next part of my presentation where I want to talk about our second strategic priority, the Xero Small Business Platform. The diagram on slide 14 is an illustration of the Xero platform and the surrounding ecosystem which is central to our strategy and future. I'll just take a moment to revisit the key elements of the diagram. Xero's birth in the cloud established us as a platform for collaboration between advisors and their small business clients. From these origins, we extended the platform beyond bank feed connections, which acted as the foundation stones to Xero's initial push into cloud accounting. By giving small business customers access to even better and more useful data and information regarding the financial performance and health of their business, The platform allows us to offer a much wider range of complementary services and applications. Growth of the Xero platform to date means we support more than 200 connections to banks and financial services partners around the world. We have more than 800 application solutions in our ecosystem and we support more than 50,000 users of Xero's API developer tools. This diverse and vibrant community gives our customers better access to data and insights to make their lives easier. We've also worked hard to develop a range of new partnerships that ensure even more opportunities for small business customers to benefit from being on the platform. For example, our app partner Figured in the agricultural space is working with us in a number of geographies beyond their Kiwi roots. Xero and Figured work together to support farmers and other agricultural business owners to manage their business and gain better access to capital. On slide 15 we show the progress and growth in the revenue performance of Xero's small business platform in the first half of fiscal year 20. The left-hand chart on this slide shows Xero's operating revenue composition and you can see from that slide that from there the platform and other non-core accounting revenues accounted for 11% of total operating revenue in the first half of the year, increasing from 9% of total revenue in the first half of fiscal year 19. The bar chart on the right-hand side shows the platform revenues in the form of add-ons like expenses, payroll, projects, Hubdoc, as well as FinWeb transaction revenues grew collectively by 116%. This growth reflects our focus on the small business platform and the work we're doing in areas such as payments. We're excited to have extended our existing partnership with global payments platform, Stripe. On slide 16, I want to reinforce how our platform strategy is core to everything we do, including and beyond cloud accounting needs. Our customers' data is at the heart of Xero. Small business customers interact on a day-to-day basis with the data in Xero by the actions they or their advisors take. Our ambition is to help and encourage small business owners to manage as many of their workflows on our platform as possible. This will enhance the quality and quantity of customer data. Leveraging our machine learning capabilities, we can further optimize and improve the applications we build and the workflows managed on the Xero platform, which in turn further enhance the quality of data in a virtuous circle. We can also use artificial intelligence to generate applications which surface insights for our small business customers based on the underlying data that has been generated, also bringing the wisdom of the crowd to the individual. These insights might inform our customers as to what they should worry about, could do better or should do next. Going beyond what they're doing each day to consider the so what and the now what is very important to delivering the ultimate value of Xero as a small business platform that provides our customers with trusted human insights. Having talked to the opportunity, it's great to be able to provide you with a couple of examples of actions we've taken in the half to drive our platform agenda on slide 17. Since we acquired HubDoc just over a year ago, we've been working on how we can bring HubDoc smarts closer to more zero customers. HubDoc can make a big difference for small business owners and their advisors, saving them a significant amount of time. Over the past year, we've already seen a marked improvement in speed and accuracy of both data ingestion and coding functions within HubDoc. In April, we extended and expanded our partnership with Stripe to continue helping people in small business spend less time chasing payments. Small business customers can now open a new Stripe account within Xero, and existing Stripe customers can also log into their Stripe accounts as they create an invoice. The typical benefit of using a PayNow option such as Stripe is that an invoice can be paid up to two weeks faster. Additionally, Xero's auto-pay feature works with Stripe to allow you to set up and receive recurring card payments for repeat billing customers. The new Stripe feed means every Stripe transaction can now be accounted for and reconciled with one click in Xero. These are and have been among the top requested features from customers and will address key moments in their day-to-day activities where things can be done simpler and smarter so they can get back to focusing on running their business. On slide 18, Our third strategic priority is really critical for us as Xero continues to grow and evolve and reflects the need for us to build today the capabilities that will support a business in three or four years will be significantly larger than we are today. We're focused on growing our talent and tuning all our business processes for operational excellence. During the first half of fiscal year 20, we continue to invest significantly in developing capabilities across technology, data, product management, strategy, and M&A, to mention a few. We've hired several senior and experienced people to enhance our talent pool in all these areas. At the leadership team level, during the period, Damian Tampling joined Xero as Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer from Deloitte, bringing significant technology and digital experience. Tony Ward joined as President of the Americas, bringing deep technology industry sales, marketing, and product management skills, having held senior positions at Microsoft and LinkedIn, And as Xero continues to evolve, our Chief People Officer role has been re-established as a standalone role reporting directly to me. Rachel Powell, who was previously Chief Customer People and Marketing Officer, has been appointed Chief Customer Officer, now responsible for our global sales and marketing functions and leading and developing them. Nicole Reed is now Acting Chief People Officer until a formal recruitment process is completed. Nicole recently joined Xero with human resource and organisational development experience across both the financial services and technology sectors, and I feel very fortunate to be working with a talented group of executives who have the skills and passion required to help Xero grow and continue to evolve. Coming to the next and final slide I'm presenting before I hand over to Kirsty, I wanted to touch on social and environmental impacts. As we've said previously, at Xero we believe that beautiful business also means being a good corporate citizen. So we're pleased to announce we've made some meaningful early strides towards our social and environmental ambitions in the first half of fiscal year 20. We've been actively working with ESG rating houses to improve our ratings such as those you can see on the slide. We're also announcing today that we're taking action to reduce Xero's emissions footprint and we'll offset 100% of Xero's carbon emissions across all areas of the business covering last fiscal year, 19, and on a go-forward basis from this year onwards. We're calling this program Net Zero at Zero, and we'll share more details about our carbon offset provider and projects as they're finalised. We're also looking forward to providing future updates on our investment in our social and environmental impact programs as we explore a range of initiatives such as employee volunteering and support for non-profit and for-purpose organisations. Xero's purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors and communities around the world. This is a purpose we believe in and we are committed to. So with that, I conclude my business update and I'll pass over to Kirsty who will take you through the details on the financials.

Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Hello, everyone. I'm Kirsty Godfrey-Billy, Xero's CFO, and I'll now cover our financial performance for a half year in more detail. Turning to slide 21. Results for the first six months of FY20 are a great indicator of the business's continued top-line momentum, alongside an increasing number of strong financial performance indicators. Two of the most important financial metrics to us in terms of managing the day-to-day business are our annual monthly recurring revenue, or AMRR, when talking to the top line, and free cash flow when it comes to returns and efficient capital allocation. As Steve has mentioned, AMRR was a key performance highlight growing by 30% over the same period last year. Of this growth, more than half came from our international segment. This is further evidence of Xero's progress as a global business. Looking at the chart on the right, we recorded a positive free cash flow performance for the period. This was the first in Xero's history for an interim result. Free cash flow of $4.8 million was equivalent to 1.4% of Xero's first half operating revenues and an increase in dollar terms of $14.6 million on the same period last year. This positive evolution in our free cash flow profile is a strong indicator of the underlying trends as we scale the business. Positive free cash flows provides us with the flexibility to deploy capital towards investments and initiatives that support further growth and value creation. As we'll get into in the outlook, we continue to anticipate a positive free cash flow profile for the current year. Our priority will remain to reinvest or invest in growing the business in order to address the significant opportunities that lie ahead. Turning to slide 22. Positive contribution margins in both Australia and New Zealand and the international segments for the year signal that we're another step closer to really uncovering the long-term economics of our business model. In Australia and New Zealand, segment contribution grew 33 million, or 34% year on year. Contribution growth for ANZ continues to exceed revenue trends, and this highlights our ongoing operating discipline and scale benefits. What's exciting about our international segment is that we achieved a positive contribution margin in the half for the first time. This improved by $12 million over the year to reach $11 million, while supporting an increase in revenue of $40 million, or 46%. This outcome was due to the realization of scale and customer acquisition cost efficiencies, despite growth investment and a focus on subscriber additions. On slide 23, we show how lifetime value per subscriber and the total lifetime value of zero subscriber base has increased over the past 12 months. Lifetime value, or LTV, is a key metric used across the business to guide decision making on where and how to invest. It shows the value created that is not captured elsewhere in a financial statement. Overall, LTV per subscriber climbed 5% over the year to $2,619. This was driven by a lift in gross margin, while churn and ARPU trends were consistent at a group level with the same period last year. There were a couple of opposing trends that contributed to the APU outcome that are worth looking at in more detail. In Australia, the onset of single-touch payroll afforded us an opportunity to serve a fast-growing area of the market with a payroll-only product at a competitive price point. STP was extended to businesses of all sizes from the 1st of July this year, and we moved quickly to support the changes that many Australian employers were required to implement. The success of our payroll-only product in Australia resulted in a small shift in product mix and some downward movement on ARPU. The new connections were established with these Australian customers give us the potential to offer further value-add services in the future. The ARPU trend in Australia was offset by the positive progress on ARPU made in the period through upsell and cross-sell within New Zealand. Pleasingly, ARPU trends internationally were consistent with the same period last year. With the increase in LTV per subscriber and a 30% increase in subscriber numbers, total LTV added in the past 12 months was over $1.4 billion. I'm pleased to highlight that over $1 billion of that $1.4 billion was added in the last six months. This took our total LTV to $5.4 billion, up 37% from the previous 12 months, which is a great result. On slide 24, I'd like to give some more color on the compelling SAS metrics that the business is currently delivering. In the first half of FY20, CAC months of 12.3 indicate the time it takes for us to recover the cost of acquiring a new subscriber through subscription payments. An LCV to CAC ratio of 6.9 remains a very strong indicator of the significant value created by adding a customer to the platform. It means we have added almost $7 of lifetime value for every dollar we spend on CAC. This measure has improved over the last six months from 6.0 and from 6.2 this time last year. Moving to slide 25. Here we summarize our financial performance measures for the year, showing year-on-year changes from the first half of FY19. Operating revenue increased 32% to $339 million. This was driven primarily by subscriber growth in all markets. Gross margin lifted by a further two percentage points to 85%. EBITDA on a reported basis was $65 million, which is a $48 million improvement on the same period last year and a major and almost three-fold increase. This reflects the continuing benefits of scale and efficiency improvements, as well as the significantly lower impairment charges incurred, which at $1 million was $17 million lower than the same period last year. We've also reported a great bottom line accounting result with a first time interim net profit of $1.3 million. This is the second consecutive net profit we've had for a six month period after we achieved a positive net profit for the second half of FY19. I'll now break down some of the key trends within our financial performance, moving to the next slide. Here you'll see we've continued our gross margin improvement to 85.2%, an increase of 2.4 percentage points over the same period last year. It's pleasing to see this upward trend continue across the ANZ and international segments. Gross margin continues to reflect the efficiency improvements we've gained. This includes economies of scale realized in hosting costs and the use of machine learning for our customer experience portal, Zero Central, to deliver better service outcomes at a lower cost. In the next slide, you'll see we have maintained a focus on efficiency benefits in CAC and product spend over the half year. CAC is a percentage of revenue reduced to 43%, down from 45% in the same period in FY19. This result was achieved despite the continued significant investment in both new and existing markets. In addition, CAC spend over the past six months has included additional technical spending to help address single touch payroll in Australia and making tax digital in the UK. Looking to product spend, as a percentage of revenue, product costs, including OPEX and CAPEX, increased slightly to 31% over the same period last year. Product investment in the first half of FY20 targeted a range of initiatives that will support near-term products and customer objectives, as well as longer-term strategic and technological needs. We recently launched some exciting new product features including single sign-on, advisor app recommendations, in-app account provisioning, and Stripe transaction feeds. Moving to slide 28 on our cash generation and our capital position. As already mentioned, we delivered a positive free cash flow result in the first half of FY20 of $4.8 million, which is equivalent to 1.4% of Xero's first half operating revenues and an increase in dollar terms of $14.6 million. Operating cash flows improved significantly, coming close to doubling to $71.5 million, which, given a monetisation ratio in excess of 100%, shows the underlying quality of our EBITDA result. Investing cash flows for the period were $66.7 million, an increase of $21 million or 46% year-on-year, excluding M&A. In terms of our capital structure, total cash and short-term deposits at 30 September 2019 were $496 million. Our net cash position at the end of the first half was $101.4 million. The $300 million USD of capital raised last year from the convertible notes provides provides us with considerable flexibility to assess future investment opportunities. At the end of the period, we recognised a term debt liability of $395 million New Zealand dollars. We also renewed our standby debt facility during the half. The new facility has a three-year term and we increased its size from $100 to $150 million. We added two new global banks to the syndicate, HSBC and Citibank, and continue to be supported by the BNZ and ANZ. Despite the 50% increase in size, we were able to secure more flexible terms while maintaining broadly the same annual cost to zero. Although there are no immediate plans to draw in the facility, the scope has been expanded to include short-term liquidity requirements should they arise. The capital we have on hand, combined with the ongoing capital generated by the business, enables us to pursue acquisitions and investments that extend and enhance our small business platform and ecosystem. We're carefully reviewing future opportunities to do this through both organic and inorganic avenues as we continue to develop our strategy and apply our capital allocation framework. In summary, we've put together a really exciting strategic launchpad for growth. So with that, I'll hand back to Steve to comment on our outlook before the Q&A. Thank you.

So thanks, Kirsty, and now touching on the outlook which remains unchanged from the statement we made at the end of fiscal year 2019. Xero will continue to focus on growing its global small business platform, maintaining a preference for reinvesting cash generated subject to investment criteria and market conditions to drive long-term shareholder value. Free cash flow in the financial year to 31 March 2020 is expected to be a similar portion or proportion of total operating revenue to that reported in the financial year to 31 March 2019. Finally, before I conclude, I'd just like to acknowledge and thank our entire team of zero people for all their hard work which has delivered these results. And on that note, I'd like to thank all of you for listening and attending today and hand back to the moderator now for your questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you need to cancel that request, please press the pound or hash key. Our first question comes from Paul Mason from Evans & Partners. Please go ahead.

Hey guys, just a couple from me. The first one, Just wondering if you could talk a bit about your US subscriber numbers, whether there was any Hubdoc in there or whether that was all core zero subscribers. I'll ask the others in sequence.

So our US or America subscriber numbers did include Hubdoc only when there was no zero core subscriber included. So we only count one subscriber for the core zero in any adjacent attached to that subscriber.

So in terms of the 20,000 outage, we should look at that as basically all being people that subscribe to the zero accounting suite?

They are unique subscribers. So there will be a portion of those that will have only Hubdoc subscriptions, but most will be core zero

Okay, cool. Just on the Australian business quickly as well, it looks like your subscriber numbers have gone really, really hard because of single-touch payroll. Just in terms of the ARPU dynamic that we can expect, say going forward as a result of that, should we read that as a lot of subscribers that were really backloaded or should we read that as having an element of lower ARPU subscribers and and sort of treat the current ARPU as sort of a baseline for our own forecasting purposes.

Yeah, Matt, as I said in the script, there has been a slight downwind trend in ARPU in Australia due to the single-touch payroll product at a rack rate that has a price point of $10, which is, you know, obviously substantially less than our ANZ ARPU, which currently sits at $31.64. So ongoing, I think, you know, we are certainly ensuring that we are driving attachment of adjacent products and services through our core subscriptions. And so within those numbers where we have achieved a payroll-only subscription, we see that then as a benefit to being able to then be able to upsell the course of Xero subscription and also additional adjacent products.

Yeah, great. And just the last one from me. In terms of, if we wind back to the second half of 2019, you guys had a bit of a surge in your CAC months in ANZ because you guys were running a marketing program to existing subscribers to upsell them payroll and things like that, if my memory is correct. And it looks like the CAC months have sort of dropped back again. Assuming my recollection of history is accurate, can you maybe talk us through sort of what's going on there, whether those programs are going to come back again or... or the numbers being disguised by the surge in subscribers from single touch payroll? Yeah, just any color there.

So as you say, there are two components to that. So CAC is broken down into three different components. The first is driving growth in subscriber numbers. And so we will have seen, we have definitely ensured that we have invested enough to be able to capture the opportunity within single touch payroll. There is the second component which is ensuring that we are driving the increase in platform revenues across our existing customer base and so that will definitely continue within the future and then the third is around loving the customer base that we've currently got. So as we grow subscriber numbers there are obviously more subscribers that we do need to be able to love. So as far as your recollection you are correct. So if we look back at March we had CAC months in ANZ of 9.4 because there was a bit of a surge up. As we've said before, LTV to CAC, which really looks at the efficiency across ANZ, is now sitting at 12.3%, and I think that has shown that there has been absolute efficiency during this half, due to the real increase in subscriber numbers, helped by STP. Longer term, I would feel that we'd be making the wrong decision if we were to continue to have those levels of efficiency within ANZ and have said that it would be probably right for those longer term to slightly come down as our base becomes larger and we do have more customers that we need to show that love to.

Okay, great. Thanks. Great result.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Rowan Sundram from MST Marquis. Please go ahead.

Hi guys, just had a question around the cash position. I'm not sure if you flagged this in the past and sorry if I've missed it, but is there any preference internally to maintain a net cash position or have you said anything in the past around a willingness to move to net debt for the right opportunities? I'm just looking for a bit of an update on that. Thanks.

So we have, within our outlook, we do state that we are reinvesting our cash back into the business. So the expectation is that we will keep our net cash position to be at similar levels to what we had at the end of last financial year. So we certainly, in that statement, we are saying that it will be positive, but it will be a similar percentage of where we are you know, looking at doing where we hit March last year.

Okay, no problem. Actually, Kirsty, while I've got you, around your ANZ ARPU commentary, do you have an estimate of what the ARPU growth could have been if not for the STP payroll product?

Yeah, no, we don't disclose that. We don't disclose that. But I think, you know, if you look back in time, the ARPU that we sit at within ANZ at 31.64, you know, that is that is up from March. So we certainly have maximised the opportunity of STP, but in a number of cases, also with being able to move our subscribers through the product stack and also ensuring that they're maximising the use of the platform revenue, with platform revenue growing at 116% year-on-year, there are a number of different contributors to our APU mix at the moment within Australia and across the business.

Thanks, Kirsty.

Our next question comes from Roger Samuel from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi Monique. I've got three questions please. First one is obviously there was some benefit from single touch payroll and making tax digital in this result. Do you expect to get more benefits from this in the future periods? And the second thing is on North America, you mentioned that the capacity went up by 40% year on year. Is there any more color you can give us on the region, especially how you convert these businesses into customers with the new leader in place right now? And then thirdly, just on your lifetime value, which went up pretty well by 6%, you've got some best-in-class churn rate there and also gross margin of 85%. Is there any more lever you can pull, perhaps the ARPU lever for price increases and perhaps growth in platform?

Okay, thanks, Roger. It's Stephen. I'll touch on the answers to those. Firstly, on the benefit of STP and making tax digital, I think in the bigger picture context, you have to believe that the trends are for governments to continue to increase the extent to which they encourage, expect digital connections with business. That is, in my view, one of the significant trends that defines more than this year, but potentially the next 10, 20 years. So, you know, we see that as a core part of, in addition, let's say, to the adoption of technology and cloud, the change that's going on and the innovation of financial services, those three big things all make Xero's business very relevant and gives us supports of potential that we have. Each of those by the way is worth sort of drilling into at the right time but single touch payroll is not over. There is still the next wave which will be addressing the businesses that have one to five employees and those that also deferred from the initial burst. So it's not over yet. And also when you look more broadly at, say, making tax digital, whilst the burst around that is certainly something that has been an influence in recent periods, there's other potential initiatives by the UK government that they've mentioned, they've talked about, and that will emerge over time. So I see these things as definitely encouraging our business growth, but also being a continuing trend for a long time yet to come. On North America, the important thing about the TAM metric is that it is an insight to the progress we're making in building the community, the partners, the accountants and bookkeepers that really do underpin the foundation of our business model and how it's evolved over the years. What we do once we connect and we engage those partners is a range of activities that enable them to go on the journey of practice transformation. that's really key to them building the capabilities in-house and then helping their customers come on board with Xero. So it is a process and it's one where within a practice, the journey accelerates over time. And that's why we keep stressing the need to stick to the course and be patient about the growth of our business in the Americas. It's a phenomenal opportunity for us and we remain very strongly committed to that course. The final one, which was, let's see, the LTV. Yeah, look, I think, Roger, on LTV metrics in churn and gross margin, probably the only appropriate thing to say right now would be that we continue to really focus on operational excellence across our business and we look for the opportunity to do things smarter and better. Very fortunate in our customer service organisation to have leadership that has been very strategic over the years and leverage technology very, very well to enable the efficiencies and we've got a great tech team that also work closely with Amazon to make sure we're getting the best we can from our hosting service. So rather than put sort of commentary on what I think is possible, all I would say is continuous improvement is fundamental.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Just a few questions. Firstly, in the UK, Stephen, can you just talk to the impact of the price increase you had in the UK recently? How should we think about our pull-up list going forward? And are you seeing – I mean, your subscriber growth is very strong, but are you seeing an increase in churn in recent months?

So if I just take that on behalf of Steve. So we did put the price increase up on the 1st of August in the UK and so that has had a positive impact on APU. I suppose just let's be mindful of the fact that we hadn't had a price increase for three years prior to that and we haven't seen any real churn impact based on that price increase. There was... a sense in the market that we absolutely have been increasing the value of our product set by the £2 or £2.50 or well in excess of that over the last three years.

I think just to add to that, we also made the announcements of the product roadmap resulting from our Instafile acquisition and as we make more announcements next week at Xerocon, supporting the statement Kirsty just made about additional value in the subscription, We're going to have some very strong features around compliance that we know that our council and bookkeepers in particular are going to really enjoy.

Great, thanks. Secondly, just because here's following on the output question in Australia, should we expect that output to increase going forward given, I mean, you had that single-dutch payroll benefit in the first half, but should the expectation be that output increases going forward or should it remain flat near term?

So, I mean, as Steve was saying before, single-touch payroll has only become required for employers that have five or more employees. We still have next year to come the smaller businesses. So there's certainly still opportunity we see to further the benefit out of STP. So you have two moving forces within the Australian ARPU. You have the ability for us to be able to sell single-touch payroll, payroll-only product to market, which would have a downward trend on ARPU, but then we also have the ability to be able to ensure that our small businesses are maximising the benefit out of the adjacent products and services that we can offer through platforms. So it will be a mix of both of those that will impact the ARPU going forward.

Got it. Last one, can you also just give an update on the Stripe partnership? I know it's recent, but just data, attach rates and stuff like that?

I think we're more than happy to talk more offline about the details, but essentially we've built a good relationship with Stripe and we've just added the functionality that I mentioned in my remarks that continue to offer our customers a great opportunity to get paid faster and also to to process payments much more efficiently for those recurring customer billing events that they have. So I think at this point I'm not sure what more I can add to that.

Thanks Steve. Thanks Kirsty.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tom Beedle from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi guys, thanks for the question and great result. Just the first one, just around the platform opportunity, obviously strong revenue growth there, but still a relatively small contributor. So I guess firstly, would you be able to go into more detail about the specific drivers of that growth? Was payroll a big driver in the last half? And also, are there any initiatives on top of the Stripe partnership that might drive platforms contribution materially higher? Second question is related to this, just around product development. Could you talk about the types of things that you're investing in? Is there anything worth singling out, like either at the platform level or capabilities within specific markets? And then just finally around M&A, you obviously issued that convertible last year with the intention to do M&A. And just given you haven't done anything material yet, has your strategy around M&A changed since then? Thanks.

Okay, Tom, why don't I answer those. Firstly, on platform growth, it is absolutely across the board. So everything that we mentioned that is part of that growth in revenue applies quite evenly actually across all elements of the business that we're doing in adjacent products as well as transactional services. So it is across the board. And by the way, in terms of are there other opportunities, yes, there are. There's plenty of very interesting opportunities. I think the important thing to remember is that this is an emerging part of our business where we are adding resources and building capabilities. So Xero got where we are today by really being focused on subscriber growth. And over the last 12 months, and you see it in the New Zealand numbers, we are getting much, much more efficient in the way that we go to market for those adjacent products, but also much more experienced in terms of the potential that we have around financial services and partnerships in financial services. So plenty more opportunity there, but it is a process where we are developing and growing those capabilities in the business. In terms of product development, it's really interesting because we look very regularly at where we're investing our product development capital and it is actually across the board. So everything from the areas of practice management for accounts and bookkeepers through to the mobile customer experience, through to some new initiatives in the reporting area and also in the short-term cash flow management area, we've got a lot of work going on. There really isn't any part of our product suite that is, let's say, not being enhanced or isn't being led by people who see real opportunity to add more to the customer experience. So we really don't see our product as it is today and product range is static. There's plenty of opportunity to do more. On M&A, nothing's changed on strategy. The strategy is the three areas that I talked about around driving adoption, building a platform and building capability and when we assess M&A opportunities and partnering, we look at those three as the foundations to why would we do this. We've built our M&A team and our strategy capability over the last six months and we are actively evaluating opportunities and as those progress towards any outcomes, you will know.

Okay, great. Thanks.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Gary Sheriff from Royal Bank of Canada. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi, Stephen. Kirsty, just a couple of quick questions. One on the US. Tony Ward's been at zero now for about five months. I'm wondering if you could provide some colour on any changes Tony has made or elaborate on what he's done since arriving, whether there's been any change to, I guess, the sales strategy, whether you're accelerating your US sales staff hiring process or if sales tactics or targets have changed.

Yeah, I'd say a couple of things. Tony certainly has very quickly... brought into the strategy we have had, which is to move from where we were to focusing on executing the playbook through accounts and bookkeepers that has worked elsewhere. He has moved to separate the US business from the Canadian business and has appointed country managers in each. And he is also advocating very strongly, as a good region executive does, for more investment in more local compliance and other features of the product that will support our business in the Americas. So Tony's off to a great start and has only added to our belief in the path we're taking and conviction to continue to invest in the Americas.

Thank you. Second question just in terms of the UK. So Intuit appear to be also doing a good job of posting strong subscriber growth and spending pretty aggressively in the UK market. You guys obviously also doing very well. I'd be interested to hear as to where that share is coming from. Do you believe that's mainly coming from Sage or can you provide a little more colour as to where do you think your share is being acquired from?

I think that the UK as a cloud accounting marketplace is still still has a lot of runway. So our best estimates say that it's penetrated around 20%. So still a lot of headroom. Our focus and our business is very much oriented towards accountants and bookkeepers and businesses that employ people, although we do have a lot of customers who are not employing businesses. So we're very much focused on continuing to execute the playbook and growth rates starting with five and both subscriber numbers and revenue are very, very healthy and we're really pleased also with the progress we've made around making tax digital and our presence in that very important change that's going on in the UK.

And final question on the regulatory environment. You've talked about ANZ in the UK with regulatory tailwinds in terms of cloud adoption. Is there anything in the US or North America broadly that you can point to that's on the horizon which may also provide some tailwinds?

I think potentially in Canada the move to open banking could help a lot because interestingly cloud adoption in Canada is I think around the 10% mark, if not lower. And one of the things that's interesting as you observe that is whilst the Canadian environment is very, very similar to Australia and New Zealand from a, let's say a reporting and accountant bookkeeper engagement with small business. What isn't as evident there is the banks being as oriented towards technology and connecting in more progressive ways, the way that we've been very fortunate to be supported by the banks in Australia and New Zealand and in the UK. So I think that open banking is going to accelerate innovation in the Canadian banking system and then in the US we'll just have to wait and see.

That's great. Thank you very much for the colour.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Gareth James from Morningstar. Please go ahead.

Oh, hi, guys. Yeah, firstly, I didn't quite catch if you gave constant currency ARPU growth. And also, can you clarify what the price growth was in New Zealand versus the prior comparable period, please?

So constant currency ARPU heads Minimal change. And sorry, what was the second question around pricing strategy? We did a price rise in New Zealand, but that was back in September last calendar year.

There was no change in the half.

No.

So what's the change versus the PCP?

Okay, you're talking about the increase in APU in New Zealand. Yes, so I'll let Kirsty answer that.

Okay, so yeah, I mean, there was an increase in APU in New Zealand, and that was due to The team doing a great job at being able to upsell current small businesses through the product stack, but also the attachment of our platform products and services.

Okay, and just on the gross margin, there was a comment about it being driven by economies of scale. How much of it is just kind of one-off and how much is likely to continue?

So, yeah, I mean, you will have watched us over the years as we have strived towards 85% of gross margin, so it's really exciting today to have been able to hit that milestone. And that has been driven by a couple of factors. The first was that we moved from Rackspace to AWS a couple of years ago and continue to drive efficiency through our hosting costs with negotiating with AWS. The second was the way in which we are looking at providing services to our through our customer experience team and the use of Zero Central and machine learning in that area with no degradation of service whatsoever. So we have strived hard to get to the deadline of 85%, which we've made today. We will continue to look at how we can drive further efficiencies in the future, but today we're really pleased with hitting 85.2%.

Okay, and just one final one from me. Just with regards to the H&R Block acquisition of Wave, I think Wave claim about 400,000 subscribers or thereabouts in the US. Just wondering if you expect that to impact your business very much going forward?

We are partners with H&R Block and I have checked in on that with our team in the Americas and it's very much business as usual. We still collaborate, work very well with them and look forward to doing so in the future.

Okay, thanks guys.

Thank you. Just in the interest of time, I believe we'll take one final question from Mark Bryan from Wilson's. Please go ahead.

That's okay. The question's just been covered on gross margins. Thank you. Thank you.

With that, I'll pass back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Well, look, thank you. Thanks again for your interest and for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Obviously, very pleased to be able to announce results and to discuss them today that demonstrate continued growth and continuing improvement in our key financial metrics. So thanks again and I'm sure we'll be talking.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining the call today. You may now disconnect.