accesso Technology Group plc

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Accesso Interim Results 2026. At this time all participants are in listen only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your zoom screen. If you have dialed in please select star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Instructions will also follow at the time of Q&A. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Lee Cowie CEO to start the presentation.

Thank you everybody for joining us today for the presentation of our half one 2026 results. I thought it'd be useful just to start introducing myself. My name is Lee Cowie and I am the Chief Executive Officer here at Accesso. I've been CEO since May and I'm very proud and privileged to have stepped into Steve Brown's shoes and this is my first opportunity to talk to you about our results. You may know that I was previously COO here at Accesso where I was for about 18 months but I have a long breadth and depth in the industry having served as Merlin's Chief Technology Officer and I have a total duration at Merlin of about seven years. So we're going to talk you through our interim results today and then a little bit later on Matt our Chief Financial Officer will go through the numbers. First, I think just to reacquaint ourselves with who we are, and I thought it'd be useful to give you an overview of us as a business and the depth and breadth of capabilities that we are able to bring to market. We have for a long time been one of the largest providers of technology into a really exciting and interesting sector. and our technology such as location based entertainment across attraction. So those would be your theme parks, zoos, cultural exhibits. We also have a very strong presence in ski in North America in particular and in live entertainments, which is your seated venues, your rate, your arenas, your stadiums. and of course now into hospitality with our products that do food and beverage and we operate at quite some considerable scale as you'll see from that our ecosystem our set of technologies exists to monetize every interaction between a guest visiting an attraction and the operator it removes friction from the purchase it enables the operator to better monetize the experience and it enables the visitors to have a friction-free better day at an attraction. And in the next slide, you'll see that we have some admirable customers scattered across the globe. And at this point, I thought it would be useful just to give you an overview of how we see the world around us developing and where we're seeing progress and upside and significant opportunity. If we start with North America, we see very strong traction for our products, particularly in Ski, and particularly with the introduction of our new capabilities in payments. Ski has traditionally been underserved by technology providers, and we're able to bring sophistication and cost scale to a market that has been left largely alone, particularly in the payment space. And we're seeing a lot of traction and a lot of interest in both our payments capabilities and our new intelligence platforms. a very substantial install base across some very large clients there. In general terms, we're seeing broadly static volumes on ticketing. We are seeing in some areas, interesting increases in per cap spend inside attractions. And we're also seeing a lot of interest with our new capabilities that we're bringing to market for net new logos. Over into Europe now, and again, similar story to the US. We're seeing broadly static attendance levels, but we are seeing some venues increase their revenue against a difficult economic backdrop. And again, we're seeing per caps increase. So a bit of a mixed picture in Europe, but still getting some interesting incoming new opportunities. Middle East, despite the tensions in the region and the geopolitical problems that they have, we are still seeing good traction. We're seeing venues continue to talk to us about expansion and new openings. And we have some interesting conversations with large new logos over there that we don't yet have. So although it is a difficult and unpredictable market at the minute, we are not seeing that being particularly impactful on us, though it does remain a watch item for us as we play out the rest of the year. And then the story largely repeats across Asia Pacific and down into Australia, similar theme to what we're seeing in other geographies. So onto our summary of the H1 results so far. So you're probably not surprised that given the kind of market backdrop I've just given, we're largely trading as expected. But what we are seeing underneath the detail of that is growth in ticketing and our distribution capabilities, which have been masked a little bit by some of the queueing contract changes that we previously communicated to the market at the end of last year. So whilst we're seeing growth in ticketing and that part of our business, it has been offset, which leaves us with broadly flat revenue in the half. Where we are seeing some benefit come through is the efficiency measures that we took earlier this year, where we substantially reduced cost and that has been flowing through into EBITDA. We're also starting now to see the payoff of some of the investment that we've made in AI capabilities. That has been an expense item for us through the year, but it is starting to show benefit in the form of us materially accelerating the development of roadmap features and functions, and in some cases by up to six months. One of the early actions I've taken as new CEO is review our overall strategy and our leadership team. And I have put in place within the first month, first four months, a new direction, a new philosophy on who we are. And I have refreshed the and reappointed the senior leadership team. And so we're looking forward to H2, and the years ahead with a new revitalized approach to accessor. I want to give you a high level overview now of some of the key features of that strategy. We are continuing to work on this through the course of the year and we'll be able to provide a lot more detail at our annual results. But I think it's useful for me to give you a flavor for how we're thinking about our world and how we're showing up in this market. Firstly, by way of a little bit of backdrop, a large number of our customers, both existing and prospective, are approaching us and talking to us about AI. And this is a theme running across pretty much all of the conversations that we're having. By and large, the attraction sector doesn't have access to large IT tech teams. And so they look for vendors like us to help them navigate technical change. And a lot of the conversations we're having are about them saying, are we AI ready? Do we have the capabilities to help them navigate the uncertainty that AI is providing? Is our infrastructure able to support them through a period of change that is quite hard to predict? And that's going to weigh a little bit on decision making cycles. It's going to slow some decision making cycles down and people taking a little bit longer to evaluate technology. But the good news for us is that we can answer yes to every single one of those questions. And we can do that in a way that few of our competitors can, because we have a very broad and capable embedded ecosystem in the core of the venues that we have been proactively enabling to become ai ready and our ecosystem which is how we're talking about our capabilities which is on the next slide is really how we bring that to market so so we aren't talking about ourselves as a set of products we're talking about ourselves as a set of relevant capabilities that uh each and every one of our customers has uh nascent in their business and needs help with evolving and growing and navigating the AI future. We deploy capabilities in intelligence and we did that through the execution of the exhibit transaction last year. We have capabilities in commerce. That's perhaps what we are most known for. Our ticketing platforms are known for being very high conversion, able to maximize basket value and convert customers on websites that are far greater than the majority. In fact, I would say all of our competitors. We have capabilities inside the venue where we can help curate experiences, where we can have targeted messaging to people in venue. where we can service their needs for queuing for food and beverage for retail and we can provide that over one unified operating infrastructure now each of those capabilities we can deploy independently but they become much more powerful when we deploy them in unison at a venue And the next slide talks how we're exploiting our capabilities to derive that much more powerful value. So whereas previously, we've talked about products, we now talk about a software ecosystem. And there's a very clear reason why we do that. We have the ability to deploy our products at every point at which money changes hands inside a venue. Now, if they deploy a product, an element of the guest journey, runs on our capabilities but that also generates data and that generate that data generated into our excessive intelligence platform provides the venue with insight it gives them the ability to learn more about what customers are doing why they're doing it coupling that with external data allows venues to put that information in context and make assessments about what might be happening in the future such as predicting attendance or understanding what demographics may or may not be visiting a venue and then understanding why that is and what they might be able to do about it so it creates capabilities to allow venues to be much more targeted in their marketing now of course the more products a venue takes from us the more data is generated the more we feed into the intelligence platform which only serves to to improve the intelligence, it improves the accuracy of forecasting, it improves their understanding of what's going on in a venue, not just in the web journey, but also inside the journey and then perhaps in follow up through reach out and CRM. And that sharper intelligence, of course, drives better outcomes for a venue, which allows them to improve their own revenue to attract more guests. to be more effective at yields to set better pricing, which would further encourage them to adopt more products from Excesso. And of course, with the way in which we price our products, the more a venue sells, the more we make. So we end up generating this really powerful revenue flywheel that genuinely creates a win-win capability for both venue and ourselves. And our ecosystem runs very deep, which we talk about in the next slide. We have deep capabilities across those four pillars that I talked about in guest experience, mobile app, virtual queuing, which we are seeing continued interest in. We have got some very interesting conversations underway with very large operators to expand our virtual queuing offering. So despite having some difficult news last year, the picture this year is very different. And we're seeing continued interest in the virtual queuing offering. Commerce, of course, you'll notice for ticketing, but we also do point of sale, we now handle payments throughout the end, and we can distribute tickets to any OTA so we can allow a venue to be present in any sales channel. And one of the things we are seeing is a fragmentation of sales channels across online travel agents, across agentic commerce, across booking portals. But we have the capabilities to ensure our venues remain relevant wherever somebody is buying. And then of course, we've got the intelligence and the capability platforms, the AI agentic powered platform that we have in the form of excessive intelligence. and all backed by our deep and global capabilities to provide a level of service that our competitors are unable to achieve. Let me talk a little bit now about what we've been doing within H1 off the back of that ecosystem strategy that we're now pursuing and I just want to dive in a little bit more detail on two signature components of that strategy that really brought it all together and enabled us to talk about ourselves in a different way. The first being the intelligence platform. And I'm very proud of the capability we have here. But I'm even more proud of the way in which our organization has integrated this and brought them in. In the space of just a few months, we've completed a an acquisition, we have integrated the team into our organizational structure, Angie, who was leading that team as the exhibit now is our chief data and intelligence officer reporting into me. And we've also scaled the team. So we've recruited and improved their capabilities. We've embedded them in the commercial proposition, and we are actively selling it. And we're going out to market and generating an awful lot of interest with this capability. Five we've already converted. But as you see there, our pipeline is substantial and long. And it is genuinely a conversation opener It is genuinely, as I showed you within that flywheel, a capability that allows the rest of our ecosystem to make sense. And because of that, we are very excited about the opportunity we have ahead of us for this. And we're very excited about it being the capstone on our strategy that gives us something very relevant to talk to venues about, particularly in the AI era. The next area that we've been focusing on. Again, this has been a rapid evolution and rapid deployment. We signed a contract with Adyen in about March this year. We have onboarded the capabilities. We've onboarded the technology. We've made it live. We've onboarded our first customer. And so we are up and running with that. And we have been prospecting well across our existing customer estate. We have three 13 customers already signed on board and we have many, many more in the pipeline that we have active conversations with. And this provides us with largely untapped revenue opportunity. We think about us being deployed across 1100 venues, 600 customers. We have an opportunity to have a conversation with the majority of them. and we will make money from that in the form of improved margin on payments but we will also simplify our pricing structure to our customers because we can now approach them with one single price that includes embedded margin from the payments capability we have it simplifies the number of vendors they need to manage but also simplifies our commercial offering so if We make money on every transaction. It becomes a very simple conversation to say, well, we've already agreed a price with you. We just need to enable capabilities and we will further monetize those additional transactions that are flowing through things like F&B or retail or our queuing platform. And this really does simplify our whole proposition. So again, I'm very pleased with the progress we've made on bringing that on board, adopting it, making it live and onboarding existing customers, and there's much more to come there through the rest of the year. The other piece I'd like to talk about reference it a little bit at the beginning is our investment in AI. So not only are we investing in the platform to deliver AI capabilities to our customers, we're investing in our own agentic capability in engineering, in product, in operations, in finance, in HR, We have a belief that AI will impact every knowledge worker over the next 18 months, and we've leaned hard into that with investment to back it. And we are seeing material benefit. Some of the capabilities that we had previously scheduled to deliver next year, we've actually been able to deliver this year. And as we continue to learn and grow and increase our ambition on agentic capabilities, We will progressively see that improve, and I'm very excited about the prospect for us becoming one of the first AI-first companies in our sector. So before I hand over to Matt to do the financial review, I just want to provide you with a recap of what I've been up to in my first 90 days here as CEO. We've worked hard to simplify our proposition so that we avoid the confusion of multiple product logos that we talk about where we enable an attraction through an ecosystem. We've simplified that as well in pricing so that we don't talk about multi pages of pricing lists, we talk about one price. We've onboarded, we've enabled, we've grown our intelligence team, our capability. We've onboarded, we've launched and we've set live our first customer on payments and we continually increase our operational readiness through a new leadership structure, a new leadership team and new capabilities that we're building internally. In the months ahead, we'll continue to refine the strategy that I've outlined here. We'll provide you with more detail at the end of the year. but our focus is on pipeline conversion. We have a material improvement in our pipeline and we'll be focusing hard on converting that. We have go lives on payments, on intelligence, on new logo wins that will be coming soon. And we'll be working to sell into our existing base the broader ecosystem which currently has less penetration than I think we deserve. And I think having a simple, more simple pricing, a clear view of how we better help an attraction will help us increase the amount of cross-sells into our existing customer base. And so you can see that from some of the stats at the bottom, the half one, 17 new venues, one, a material increase in the number of those venues taking multi product from us. And I think that's early proof point that the ecosystem strategy resonates that people are buying into it where we see customers taking more than one product from us. And in some cases, the entire ecosystem from us, that's a proof point that how we're positioning and how we're talking about it is is starting to resonate and work. So I'm going to hand over to Matt now to

talk you through the financials thank you Lee so Lee touched on these earlier in his first few slides I will reiterate them now and give a bit more colour so on the slide here you'll see that the key financial highlights so our cash EBITDA so our principal operating metric was 7.6 million for the period which was 50% almost 50% up on the prior period pleasingly so but our revenue remained flat and Lee touched on the reasons for why and I'll go into more detail on the next slide at 67.8 million the revenue actually excluding the virtual queuing product was actually up 7.1% so a good turnout for the period the underlying admin costs were down 6.1% following that cost reorganisation restructuring that Lee had mentioned and we ended the period on 7.3 million of net cash and that was after two significant capital allocation events being the the tender that we completed in in March mid-march and the subsequent acquisition of the exhibit product at the end of that same month and you can see that we returned 14.5 million sterling as part of that tender and I'll touch on that in a later slide on the right hand side of this slide you'll see the composition of our revenue and those of you that have followed us for a while will be familiar with this at this point we're about 85% repeatable revenue and consistent period over period you'll see there and the major component of that repeatable revenue being transactionally led by a revenue share or a cents per ticket or per transaction in most cases and I'll take you through that breakdown of revenue in a bit more detail in the next slide So this slide here is showing you that the full composition of our revenue, the revenue by type at the top there that you can see that the breakdown of the transactional revenue being virtual queuing, ticketing and distribution. You can see there the virtual queuing revenue down 50% period over period. And that's due to those two major contracts changes that we had in that product that were announced earlier this year in January. But pleasingly, you can see the ticketing revenue being very robust and up 8.3% period over period. and that's related to again one of those customers with a contractual change and resilient per capita and resilient attendances throughout the portfolio that we have the distribution product had relatively flat revenues period over period and then the other component parts of our repeatable revenue so you see there that the maintenance and support the platform fees and the recurring license fees again positive positive momentum through the through the period the maintenance and support and recurring licenses licenses really driving that at 15.3 percent and 56 percent up respectively that is predominantly through go lives in the Middle East on the Horizon product that happened at the end of December 25th rolling into the current period and both through the current period as well and they progress through through to through to H2 at this point as well the other component part of our revenue is the non-repeatable piece that you see at the base there we've got one-time licenses and professional services the professional services it fluctuates period over period depending on what projects are in flight so you see some movement there but you do see a large uplift in the one-time licenses of 120 almost 123 percent and again that is due to those those middle eastern venues and being delivered and going live in the current period Next slide takes you through our income statement. At the top there we've spoken to revenue and really the gross profit follows the revenue so flat gross profit period over period and the margin profile staying pretty consistent to 77.8% in the current period versus 78.3% in the prior period. really the key talking point on this slide is the the admin expenses that line there and at a reported level you can see pretty consistent period over period 51.7 versus 51.8 but the underlying admin expenses beneath that so stripping out the share based payments the amortization the exceptional costs we fell 6.1 percent really controlling and tightly tightly controlling our costs as Lee touched on earlier that was following adjustments that we made in January 26 this year we've been on a bit of a journey with our headcount so at the end of December 24 we were on about 680 heads December 25 we were about 655 heads and we ended June at the end of this period at about 617 heads so it's a progressively making change there and that is inclusive of acquiring 10 heads from the exhibit transaction who joined us in March Outside of that, in the in the reported admin expenses, we also have about 1.3 million of exceptional charges and one time charges primarily relating to that restructuring, but also inclusive of some acquisition and inspiration costs following that acquisition in March. Lastly, on this slide, you can see that the finance income and expenses have changed somewhat. So in the prior period we had an FX gain on our finance income line. We have a US dollar facility and a GBP entity and then again didn't repeat in the current period. You see a drop off there in the finance income and we had a slight increase in the finance expense. So as a result of those two capital allocation events we were slightly more drawn on the facility throughout the period which resulted in a 34% increase in the finance expense for the current period. Next slide is taking you through our principal operating metric. This is cash EBITDA and the reconciliation between the operating profit and how we get to our cash EBITDA metric. So you can see they're taking you through these line by line. We've spoken to the 1.3 million exceptional charges and the nature of those in the year. Share based payments are relatively flat period over period. and the other talking point here is the uplift in amortization and the uplift in amortization really is reflective of the fact that we made an acquisition of intellectual property back in May 2025 of one risk and it also takes a bit that was acquired in March of this year and as those intangibles and intellectual property and other items are amortized we get a slight uplift in an amortization expense running through the P&L period over period And then last slide for me is really talking through the cash flow. And so you can see running top to bottom, the key talking points are that our cash generated from operations was was 4.9 million for the current period slightly lower than the 7.7 that we had in the prior prior comparative period and really that's a working capital swing driving that and that's purely due to timing of collections we have a seasonal cut off in in June seasonal peak and it reverses in July and August so you see that that trend reversing by the end of the year and the other the other component parts of the cash flow that we've had in the period you see there the acquisition of Dexibit is a 5.4 million outflow so that's the upfront consideration of 7 million with the completion mechanic adjusted and a net of cash acquired and then lastly we have the 20.1 million of purchase of owned shares for cancellation so that's reflective of the the tender offer 14.5 million sterling in March and also the tail end of the buyback that concluded in January 2026 and just to add more colour to that we've now cancelled just shy of 20% so 18.6 of our shares in issue since April 2025 so making a significant dent into that number and then finally just to conclude so we ended the period on 7.3 million of net cash that is reflected of gross cash of 33.2 million and 25.9 million of borrowings and you can see there we have an adjusted measure so excluding pass-through cash so we hold some level of cash relating to collection of cash from OTAs and distributors and passing that to venues but the adjusted cash was excluding that number was 0.5 million of net debt versus 20.3 million of net cash in the prior period so that swing of 20 ish million really being reflective of the outflows that we had in the current period And then just to finish on, pleasingly, we managed to refinance the HSBC revolving credit facility that we have for a further four year period. So that concluded at the end of August. It originally expired in May 2027, now runs out to August 2030 on slightly more flexible terms and improved pricing, which was a great result. And with that, I will hand back to Lee to take you through the outlook for the remainder of the year.