Alfa Financial Software Holdings PLC

Hello everyone and welcome to Alpha's 2025 half-year results. I'm Andrew Denton, Alpha's CEO, and I'm joined as always by our CFO, Duncan McGrath, and our COO, Matthew White. In overview, Alpha has had an outstanding first half. We've continued to focus on growing subscription revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong growth in subscription TCV at 12% versus the first half of last year. This year, for the first time, and in subsequent years, we will be publishing annual recurring revenue and net revenue retention. Duncan will outline the detail behind this, but in summary, we've seen annual recurring revenue of 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year, and net revenue retention of 112%. I'm delighted with the growth in annual recurring revenue, and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alpha's industry-leading customer retention is just as strong in a SaaS-only world as we grow our customer base with new subscription sales. Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues, and we have 23 Alpha Cloud customers, which is up from 20 this time last year. More generally, we've seen strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year. The late stage pipeline is strong with seven prospects. We're working under letters of engagement or equivalent with six of those seven customers in the late stage pipeline. And really importantly, we are seeing normal levels of activity in the early stages of the pipeline. From a delivery perspective, we've again seen a strong period and I'm delighted to say that we now have nine customers live on Alpha System 6, which underscores our messaging around this breakthrough new version of our software. Alpha System 6 is a frictionless upgrade opportunity for our existing customers. As always, we continue to invest in product, people and planet. Our average headcount is up 7% with continued high staff retention at 97%. We've invested a total of $19.4 million into our software in the first half with particular focus on expanding our target addressable market with commercial finance and expanding our serviceable addressable market through developments in the areas of originations and automotive fleet. From a financial perspective, our full year expectations remain unchanged. We continue to be confident in our future prospects, and as a result, the board has declared a special dividend of five pence. So onto the financial highlights. Revenue was 62.5 million, which is up 22% at constant currency on 2024, first half revenue of 52.3 million. We've maintained our excellent momentum in subscription revenue growth at 17%, being around the same level we saw last year. And as I've already said, net revenue retention was 112%, which demonstrates outstanding customer retention. Our excellent performance in contracting new business is demonstrated by a total contract value of $210.7 million. This is up from $193.3 million this time last year. That's 9% growth in our TCV versus last year, with subscription TCV growth of 12%, as I've mentioned, and software engineering TCV growth of 12%. At 21.6 million, operating profit was up 33% from this time last year. Our operating profit margin was higher than normal, at 35% in the half, which was up from 31% in the first half of last year. This was driven by increased chargeability in our software engineering teams. EBITDA margin at 37% showed significant growth from last year's 33%. And finally, cash was at 23.9 million, up from 22 million this time last year. And I'll hand over to Duncan.

Thanks, Andy. The figures really speak for themselves, and the first half of 2025 was a very strong financial performance. Revenue was up 20% at actual rates or 22% at constant currency, with growth across all revenue streams. There was particularly strong growth in software engineering, which was up 72% on the back of significantly higher chargeability than the first half last year. Improved chargeability improved the gross margin percentage up 130 basis points to 64.2%. Operating profit grew even more strongly than revenue up 33% to deliver an operating margin of 34.6%. It is worth noting that I estimate that the FX hedges that we put in place to protect ourselves from movements in sterling versus the US dollar added 240 basis points to the margin in the first half. The effective tax rate of 26.0% was in line with last year, and so basic EPS also grew by 33% in the half. Diluted EPS was up 34% at 5.35 pence per share. Overall, a really strong performance, and given our confidence in the future prospects for the business, the board has declared a special dividend of 5.0 pence per share. Turning now to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams, which was demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV in the calendar year. We said in March that we expected to work through the TCV during 2025, and we have seen a 5% reduction in total TCV since the year end, but it is still up 9% on this time last year. Next 12 months TCV is up even more strongly versus this time last year, particularly in delivery and software engineering, due to the new contracts we won in the second half of last year. We've calculated TCV on a consistent basis for many years now, but a number of people have noted that because we only include three years of subscription revenues, which is a much shorter time period than our average customer life, that it may understate the impact of subscription on our business. There is a benefit in consistent measures that you can view over time, but not if it misrepresents the growing importance of the subscription revenues to our business. So to help this and reflecting our transition to a SAS business model, we've decided to going forwards supplement the TCV disclosure with the more traditional SAS metrics of ARR and NRR, which you can see on the next slide. On the left you can see our annual recurring revenue or ARR figures for the last three reporting periods. We calculate this using the average subscription revenues over the last six months and then annualise them. We exclude any revenues that we do not expect to last 12 months at the start of the contract. This picture shows what you would expect a very strong growth in ARR, up 16% versus last year, very much in line with the overall growth in subscription revenues. The graph on the right shows our Net Revenue Retention Percentage, or NRR, and gives a financial metric which represents the net impact of churn and growth in the subscription revenues. This is calculated by taking the percentage of recurring revenues from 12 months ago that we have retained, including where we have sold additional services. Whilst we are often asked by those new to the alpha story about churn, in reality, closer watchers of our story know that it is in effect zero. and this is demonstrated by an NRR figure for the last three reporting periods that is considerably in excess of 100%. At 30 June 2025, the 112% NRR was particularly high as we had some new subscription customers at very low levels this time last year. Over the last 12 months, these contracts have started to ramp up through implementation, a typical pattern I explained in some detail at our last results presentation, and hence the 112% NRR. We would not necessarily expect to be at such a high level going forwards, with the figures from June and December last year perhaps being better representative of a more normal level. So looking now at overall subscription revenues. Subscription revenues continue to grow each quarter. For the first six months they were up 17% versus the same period last year. The growth in our Alpha Cloud customers has been a significant contributor to our recent growth in subscription revenues and you can see that we've increased Alpha Cloud customers from 20 last year to 23 this year. We now have 16 customers on v5 or Alpha System 6 who are live but not on Alpha Cloud. We don't expect to convert all 16 to Alpha Cloud but would expect to convert the majority and so this can continue to be a source of growth for the next few years. 12% growth in subscription TCV also underpins our confidence that this revenue stream will continue to show strong growth going forwards. Turning to software engineering revenues. Last year we had a relatively low first half and a much stronger second half. The strength from the second half has carried through into H1 2025 and comparing this with H1 2024 gives us 72% increase in revenues. This revenue is largely off the same headcount base and is simply due to changing the nature of the work being performed, resulting in much higher chargeability than last year. And this is a significant factor in the very strong operating margin percentage that we generated in H1. The biggest contributor to this increased chargeable work was to new customers we won in the second half of last year, with chargeable development from new customers increasing from 1.2 million to 4.5 million. At the moment, we are anticipating this to ease off slightly in H2, but it's also potentially an area that we could outperform our expectations if we get client approvals signed off more quickly than we expect. Perpetual license accounting, both one-off and customized license, totaled $1.3 million this year, slightly down on the $1.6 million last year, so a relatively small drag in this period from the move to a SaaS model. TCV is up 12% from last year on the back of these new projects, with good coverage for the next 12 months. Turning to our final revenue stream, delivery. As expected, with the ramp up of new projects, our delivery revenues increased 10% versus last year. We have 11 projects underway where the customer is not yet live, and only when these contracts are live will they drive up our subscription revenues. Of course, as these projects come to an end, we would expect them to be replaced by new projects. Overall delivery for TCV is showing as flat year on year. You can see that the coverage for the next 12 months has increased significantly, and this is driving our increased recruitment needs. The after 12 months element shows a drop, but this is mainly a function of taking quite a cautious view of our largest implementation project, where we have only counted up to the end of 2026, which is the first phase of a multi-phase project, and including nothing thereafter. We fully expect the project to continue beyond that date and generate further delivery revenues. Turning now to expenses. Cost of sales grew by 15% over last year, largely on the back of increases in costs from headcount and salary increases. Hosting costs increased with the growth in Alpha Cloud. Sales general and admin expenses were up 11%. There's growth in salary costs, but more significant was the increase in profit share and share-based payments. FX has been significant in the period. We had net transaction gains of 1.1 million in the period. Within this, the impact of realised and unrealised gains on the US dollar FX hedges was 1.7 million, offset by other transactional losses of 0.6 million. The exchange rate at 30 June 2025 was $1.37, so we could see some reversal of these gains in H2 if sterling weakens against this level. Other income was flat at 0.3 million, and this was the income from our R&D expenditure credit that is shown on this line. I will cover it under modelling guidance, but the impact of not expecting FX hedges to repeat and the impact of higher headcount and salary costs and depreciation and amortisation in the second half will result in a lower operating margin in H2 compared with H1. Turning now to cash flow. In March, I estimated that cash conversion for the year would be 80 to 90% for 2025 as a result of accelerated receipts in 2024 on two projects. Cash conversion of 88% for H1 was in line with this estimate. For 2026 and beyond, we would expect to be in the range of 90 to 100%. Dividends paid increased 1.5 million on last year to 11.2 million. Overall, there was a net cash inflow of 3.4 million for a cash balance of 23.9 million at the period end. Now some words on capital allocation. Alpha remains a highly cash-generative business. As we have transitioned to a SAS model, this has reduced the upfront licence payments we received under the perpetual licence model, but this is making the cash flow smoother. We have a strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends. Cumulative dividends paid in the last five years are now up to £153 million, and our overall dividend yield from ordinary and special dividends has been running between 3.5% to 5%. There are no immediate investment requirements for our current excess cash, and so we have declared a special dividend of 5.0 pence per share, up 19% on this time last year. Next, a brief update on modelling guidance. This slide is largely reiterating existing guidance, which remains unchanged as regards full-year out-earn, investment, cash flow and currency sensitivity. So I will just touch on two things now. Firstly, to reiterate what I mentioned earlier, that we expect to see a lower level of software engineering revenues in H2. And this, along with increases in salary costs and assuming no further gain on the FX hedges, means we expect lower operating margins in H2 than H1. So whilst we will see similar levels of revenue in H2 to H1, we will see lower operating profit. Secondly, a minor point, but due to starting up some projects in new overseas territories, we expect a small increase in our effective tax rate for the full year to 26%, 1% higher than the UK statutory rate. I will now hand over to Matt for an operational update.

Thanks, Duncan. We've had a great start to the year in every team across the business, and the result is fantastic performance now, and really good progress with our strategic objectives as we build for the future. We're strengthening our three differentiators, our team, our product, and our delivery. We're selling, as Andrew will describe later on. We're scaling our capacity to deliver for the future, and we're simplifying so that we can deliver even more alphas even more efficiently. Everything starts with our fantastic team, so our people are always the first differentiator that I mention. Our team is growing with an average headcount up 7% on H1 last year. In fact, we've recruited around 40 people this year so far to enable the delivery of that strong pipeline that Andrew will cover. And this headcount growth will feed into our H2 costs as set out by Duncan. And we put a lot of effort into making sure that we recruit very, very talented people. And because we recruit high quality people and because we have a growth mindset culture and because we're always striving to achieve more as a company, developing talent within our team will always be a focus for us. Ensuring world-class leadership at all levels is a particular focus at the moment, and that's why our Continuous Conversations initiative is really important. We're giving our people the tools to make one-to-one conversations across the business even more impactful for performance in current tasks, but also for development, for career goals and for well-being. And it's initiatives like this that have resulted in us retaining our gold accreditation from investors and people. And we've seen improvements in our ratings in every area. We avoid complacency, but we're really pleased with our engagement score and with our stellar retention rate. People sometimes ask whether retention at Alpha is too high. The answer for us is no. Retaining our talented team is hugely important because we're building something special here. And the higher our retention rate, the faster we can build on the experience within the business. Our Lisbon Smart Hub has shown that we can access talent beyond our long-standing office locations in the US, London, Sydney, and Auckland. And we've now started recruiting in the Gdańsk area in Poland. We're finding some great talent. In Lisbon, we recruited software engineers only, and we did find great talent. In Gdańsk, we're recruiting more engineers, but also for our cloud hosting operations teams. Our delivery track record is perhaps our most important differentiator. We delivered 11 upgrades in H1 and another five since then. More frequent customer upgrades is really important to simplifying and to ensuring quality delivery for our customers. And when we've spoken to you in the past, we've described Alpha System 6 as a low-friction upgrade, and we contrasted that, contrasted the move from V5 to AS6 with the upgrade from V4 to V5. We already have nine customers live on Alpha System 6, which clearly demonstrates the success of this strategy. Progress on all of our projects remains excellent. Our software maintenance remains first class and our cloud hosting operation remains both gold standard quality and super efficient. Maintaining the quality of our product and our delivery is hugely important in ensuring that we maintain our position as the premium provider in our industry. Partner-led delivery will enable us to access new markets and enable us to do more in some of our existing markets than we can achieve by growing the Alpha team alone. A key next step in making partner-led delivery a reality will be to deliver a minimum viable product of a partner-led delivery project for a UK equipment start project. Now, we're still waiting for the right project to come along here. Our pipeline as a whole is strong, but the right project in the right region and the right industry is required for this particular next step. But we haven't just been waiting. We're working on our US auto start product. We're making sure that we use our existing US auto projects to build our product for the future. And we're learning more about the lower tier US auto finance market, which we believe will be key for partner-led delivery in the future. While we expect partner-led delivery to contribute a relatively small proportion of our revenue, we do expect revenue for these customers to be weighted towards higher margin subscription. Our headline strategy for delivery is simplification. Our market opportunity is huge and simplification will allow us to deliver more alpha systems implementations more efficiently. So we're investing. in our Alpha Start accelerators for larger customers and our Alpha Start products for smaller customers. And we're investing in migration tooling to enable legacy portfolios to be converted to Alpha systems more easily. We're investing in automated testing to simplify the upgrade process for our customers. We're investing in our Alpha Cloud hosting operation to make it even more efficient as it scales. And we're investing in AskThea, our large language model chatbot for system documentation. All of this means that projects today require considerably less effort from our highly skilled delivery team than in the past. And that allows us to layer on subscription revenue from more and more customers more efficiently. And finally, we are extending our product differentiation. We're delivering new functionalities for our customers now with some really important product enhancements being carried out directly for customers for deliveries now. Our alpha development model is bedding in and we're seeing the results in some great KPIs. And we're also investing for the future. Our focus here is on US auto originations, fleet and commercial finance, all of which will increase the market that we can access. We're there with demonstrable products in all three areas, and we're making good progress towards our goals of sellable products by the end of the year. Really importantly, we're also working closely with customers in all three of these areas, and this is always our preferred way of working. We're confident that this will result in a product that's a great fit for the market as a whole. US auto originations and fleet functionality allow us immediately to service an additional part of our existing target addressable market in asset finance. So they increase our serviceable addressable market. The commercial finance market is something we've been working on for a while and investment in this area will continue into next year and beyond. At the moment, we're working with customers in the asset finance market who have commercial finance offerings. The longer-term goal, which may be a number of years away, is to open up a brand-new addressable market and to sell to standalone commercial finance customers. The potential for the long-term prospects here are really exciting. In the short term, the late-stage pipeline is also really exciting, and I'll hand over to Andrew for an update on that.

Thanks for that, Matthew. As I said at the top of the presentation, our late stage pipeline is strong. With eight new customer wins in 2024, our delivery teams have been fully utilised in the first half of this year and this has kept TCV high. Today, we have seven prospects in our late stage pipeline and we are preferred supplier with all seven. With six of these prospects, we are doing paid work and a letter of engagement or equivalent. Returning to the theme of subscription growth, it's worth noting that three of the seven have an annual subscription revenue of over two million once they get to full run rate. And that strong late stage pipeline is backed up by an equally strong and dynamic early stage. And I'll discuss market demand on the next slide. Our strong pipeline demonstrates that there is strong demand in our end markets and our exceptional sales performance in 2024 has driven growth across all our revenue categories. This is building our future performance in subscription. We continue to invest in our product to widen and deepen our competitive moat and to expand our target addressable market and our serviceable addressable market. Subscription will see growth in the mid-teens as new customers ramp up. And our expectations for this year, as I said, are unchanged with an expectation of double digit revenue growth. So in summary, we've had an outstanding first half and we are set fair to deliver in line with our expectations. We continued our focus on growing subscription revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong sales growth in subscription, with TCV growing 12% versus the first half of last year. We've seen annual recurring revenue of 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year, and net revenue retention of 112%. As I said, I'm delighted with the growth in annually recurring revenue and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alpha's industry-leading customer retention is just as strong in today's SaaS-only world. Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues and we have 23 Alpha Cloud customers, up from 20 this time last year. we've seen really strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year the late stage pipeline is strong with seven prospects and we are working under letters of engagement or equivalent with six of those from a delivery perspective we've again seen a strong period and i'm delighted to say that we have nine customers live on alpha system six That reinforces what we've been saying about this breakthrough new version of our software. Alpha System 6 is a frictionless upgrade. And we've continued to invest in product, people, and planet. Average headcount up 7%, with continued high staff retention at 97%, investing a total of $19.4 million into our software in the first half, with particular focus on expanding the target addressable market, and expanding our serviceable, addressable market. And finally, from a financial perspective, as I've been saying, our full-year expectations remain unchanged, and we continue to be confident in our future prospects. So, as a result, the Board has declared a special dividend of five pence. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you to the Alpha team for the presentation. We've had a number of questions that have been pre-submitted and submitted live. Now, just as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please type them into the Q&A box situated on the right-hand side of your screen. Now, moving on to the first question that has been submitted. How is demand for software from banks and finance companies right now? Maybe that's one for you, Andy.

Thanks very much. And first and foremost, from all of us at Alpha, thank you very much for taking the time to attend this afternoon's presentation. We appreciate it and we appreciate all the excellent questions. I tried to cover this off in my part of the presentation and we looked at the late stage pipeline where we have seven good customers at that well-developed state. Six of them are doing paid work with us. That's something that we try to do at Alpha to start that level of engagement as early as we possibly can in the sales cycle. I also touched on the early stage pipeline or the earlier stages in the pipeline that are backing up that late stage pipeline and we're seeing an awful lot of dynamism a lot of activity in the early stage pipeline and perhaps the question within the question is is what are the things that are driving that it's as everybody on the call knows a very interesting world at the moment um and in interesting worlds tend to bring a couple of things along with them uh one of them is regulatory and governance change And in general, we deal with large, regulated, highly governed entities. That means that as those things change, they need systems to support that change. And the heart and lung systems like Alpha are very much fundamental in that. If your existing systems don't support that, you need to change them. Systems like Alpha are also a platform for innovation, and particularly with Alpha, with the level of configurability, techniques like business rules and workflow, and so on. If you don't have systems that have those kind of capabilities in an increasingly competitive market, then you need to replace your system in order to give yourself a platform for new product development and innovation within the market. So those are a couple of factors that are driving that early stage pipeline. But the summary answer to the question is that we're seeing really strong demand and we're very, very happy with the sales pipeline at the moment.

Thank you. Next question. What sectors, in brackets, auto finance, equipment, leasing, fleet, et cetera, are showing the strongest growth?

I suppose the obvious answer to that is that we are seeing growth across all of the sectors that we work in. We're fortunate in terms of the resiliency of the business that we operate in a lot of countries, a lot of end markets, and that gives the business a natural resilience as we progress forward. It might be useful in thinking about why is growth coming from all of those markets, perhaps to develop a little bit my answer to the first question. We tend to see the reason for buying systems, we categorize them as push factors and pull factors. Push factors are things like regulatory change, as I discussed, cyber security, the fact that somebody might be sunsetting, decommissioning your old system that you're currently running on. Those are things that you've got no choice in. Pull factors are that kind of innovation stuff that I talked about, automation, innovation, being more competitive in general. If we look at the push factors, again developing the answer to the first question, there's just a lot of push factors around at the moment. I touched on regulation and the governance environment. There is an awful lot of old systems around which are being sunset or frankly are just no longer fit for purpose. Probably about two-thirds of the total addressable market, one way or another, could be described as legacy. So as long as there are those good push factors, and I'm in my 30th year this year, and for that full 30 years, there always seem to be push factors one way or another, then that means that we'll see strong demand across all aspects of our target markets.

Thanks, Andy. Another question for you. How exposed are you to the health of the car finance market, given the high interest rates?

It's a great question. I'm going to assume that the questioner is coming a little bit from the recent headlines around commissions that were made in the UK markets. Certain other markets actually have already been through that journey and come out the other side. I guess the first thing to talk about in answering that question is the fact that um cost of borrowing which i think is what we're meaning here by high interest rates is not as much of a factor in asset finance as it is within plain vanilla finance asset finance and auto finance one way or another will take the future value of the vehicle of the asset into account um which means you're you're essentially funding the gap And secondly, because the asset is very, very much at the center of things, nobody's ignoring APR or equivalent, but most people will go to a dealer thinking, I've got this amount to spend on a car, how much car can I have for my money? Cost of borrowing is less important in terms of influencing the headline rate. The other point to make is a lot of car finance, probably the majority of car finance, is supplied by the manufacturers. And the manufacturers really, really need to do finance in order to sell cars. People don't tend to walk into dealerships with enough money in their wallet to just drive out with the car. That funding then is being provided from the balance sheet of the manufacturer itself. So cost of funds is at best an internal measure for them. And secondly, it's a thing that they just have to do, which is another thing that makes our end market very resilient. No asset finance. If you're in what we call vendor finance, then no asset sale is pretty much the mantra. From Alpha's perspective, yes, probably just slightly over half of our total revenue will come from automotive finance. But it's important to break that down. Knocking on the door of about 40% of that is in the US, just over 15% is in EMEA, and then a fraction of that is in the UK. So we are doing business in the UK. Our customers in the UK, along with our other customers, are continuing to provide high demand for our software and services. But auto finance, we actually think as an end market, it is also a very resilient market.

Thank you. Are you able to scale into new markets? And if yes, which ones are you looking at and why?

Yes, there are two kinds of market that I guess we would be looking at and let's pick them off in turn. Countries, different countries and different competitive arenas from a geographical perspective. Asia-Pac, North America, and Europe, EMEA, tend to be the big markets. Alpha is very applicable to all of those markets, and the vast majority of the work that we do is across EMEA and North America. We are moving into other target geographical markets. We're doing that now. There are a number that we're looking at. Germany, for instance, is a really successful market for us within Europe. And there's a chance that that might become in due course what we would call a target geographical market. Why am I bothering to explain the fact that a particular country or a particular geography may or may not make the grade as a target alpha market? It's because we believe that strategic focus is super important. We can't be running off in every single direction at the same time. So it's super important for us to understand the geographies that we're targeting and to make sure that we do the best possible job in doing that rather than trying to what my father would call boil the ocean all the time that we're doing business. So that's geography. Great opportunity for Alpha because it's so good at doing international business. And then the other one is actually Matthew touched upon in the presentation. Functional target markets. We've talked about expanding our serviceable addressable market through originations and fleets. which is sort of one of them is a different flavor of asset finance, handling large fleets of assets. The other one is moving what we do a little bit further down the value chain of finance so that we're covering the start point of our customer's customer's journey, as well as the servicing part of it. So both of those are great opportunities for us. And the next one that we talk about is commercial finance, which is a little bit longer range for us. Matt described very eloquently that we're able to sort of shuffle our way into there at minimum risk for the company because an awful lot of our existing customers do commercial finance. But the flip side of that, as that medium-term opportunity, is that we believe it is a multiple of the size of Alpha's existing target addressable market, which will give us excellent headroom in our medium to long-term future.

Great. Thanks, Andy. So, one for you, Matt. How easy is it for a customer to switch from Alpha to another system or vice versa?

Thank you Scott and thank you as well from me to everybody who's joined us today and for the really good questions as well, of which this is one. So we describe Alpha as heart and lungs software. What we do is we manage the revenue-generating products for highly complex, highly regulated organizations. This is line-of-business software, and our customers are banks or finance companies or the finance arms of manufacturing companies, OEMs. So we shouldn't be looking at this as back-end or accounting software. It's not the likes of Sage or SAP or Workday, although, of course, implementation of those systems is complex in its own right. And the result of that is that any implementation project in this space is necessarily a major business change program. So the simple answer is that it's resource intensive to implement alpha systems, but it's very, very time consuming, very, very expensive, and even more importantly, very, very risky to implement software that isn't alpha systems. I was talking about our delivery track record as one of our differentiators and perhaps our most important differentiator. Our projects succeed. uh and it would be very very difficult therefore and very very risky as well as resulting in less functional software if you were thinking about taking out alpha systems and implementing perhaps a competitor product instead or perhaps something internally written and so the result of that is that uh is the customer retention that we have today. And if you have the slide deck from today available, you can download it from our website. If you don't, you can see an illustration of that on slide 31. Broadly speaking, people don't leave alpha systems having implemented unless they're leaving our market.

Very much related to that is how scalable is Alpha's platform and can you handle much bigger clients without heavy extra costs?

I'll attempt to be a bit briefer and there's loads of engagement, we could run out of time. The very simple answer is it's extremely scalable. And yes, we are able to scale without significant additional costs. The largest portfolios live on Alpha Systems have millions of asset finance contracts. The smallest have hundreds of asset finance contracts being administered, although they would tend to be the very, very high value. portfolios but to be to be a really important point on that in which we should be really clear on is there is one version of the software everyone is running the same software and that's important for that simplification agenda and we can change the size of our single tenant SAS cloud hosted environments with the push of a button through our automated cloud management platform It's a good question because the scalability of our systems is one of the key selling points for our customers.

Thanks, Matt. Not wanting to leave Duncan out, but so how much revenue is recurring versus one-off project work, Duncan?

Yeah, so Matt referred to the appendices of the slides. And again, if people have got them available, it's slide 33 is how we try and answer this question. So in terms of the pure numbers, 72% of our revenue in the first half this year came from existing customers with 28% from new customers. I think what we're trying to do with that is also talk about that as revenue of a recurring nature. So even when a customer goes live online, you might think that might be the end of our relationship and that for instance delivery revenues may come to a stop but but for most customers there's an ongoing relationship um where we continue to get revenues going forward so um actual even if you looked at the definition of actual one-off which might be just you know a one-off license receipt that we get very, very, very small in our numbers. If you're talking about the split between sort of existing and new business, then as I said, 72% came from existing clients and 28% from new clients in the first half.

Duncan, do you earn extra fees for system upgrades or is it included in that recurring contract?

Yes, Matt just referred now just to actually the fact that we've only got one system and we have one system with an upgrade that's released every four weeks without fail. Clients and customers can take that upgrade at no cost. There is normally some support for that. So when they do take an upgrade, generally we're helping with them. So we get some delivery revenues for that. They may just be taking an upgrade to sort of keep up with the latest version, but they may be taking an upgrade to take available some new functionality that we've released. Sometimes that new functionality is bundled into a module and that new functionality in the module, they would have to pay for the module. So it's sort of a mix. We do get extra fees, extra delivery fees for helping people do upgrades. Some of the functionality and upgrades they get for free. If it's a big piece of functionality sitting in a module, then there'd be an extra subscription cost for that.

Another question around the subscriptions and fees. How much of growth in subscription revenue is from price increases versus new clients?

Yeah, we don't specifically disclose this, but I think if you look at something like the NRR figures that we disclosed for the first time at these results, you can see that the NRR is 112%. So that basically means we've got 12% growth from the clients that we had 12 months ago. And that's obviously a subset of the business. I think we had 17% growth in subscription revenue in the first half. And broadly, I think you could say that about half, just under half of that came from new customers and about half of that came from growth with existing customers.

Thanks, Duncan. Andy, I know recruitment and retention is an important part with Alpha. We've got a question saying, are staff retention and recruitment in tech a challenge and how are you addressing it?

I might perhaps repurpose the question a little bit and replace challenge with important. Right now, in both of those areas, we're going really, really well. But we don't take our success in talent acquisition and retention for granted in any way. So Matt talked about our 97% retention. Super, super important to us. We celebrate retention. We certainly don't want retention to go down because it's the best recruitment that we do, keeping the incredible talent that we already have here. In terms of talent acquisition, again, we do really well at it, but noting that in general, we are picking the best of the best in terms of talent. We want to make sure that we keep that high performance culture in Alpha going. So again, we don't take it for granted. We bring experienced hires. We bring in graduates and we do that from diverse talent sources to make sure that we continue the culture and the sense of innovation that you get from diversity of background, heritage and thought. And we're also expanding our talent pools. I can't say Gdansk anywhere near as well as MASS, but having opened up in Gdansk, having already set up an office in Lisbon, those two offices are as much as anything else about increasing our access to technical talent. in all aspects of things whether we're talking about innovation and product investment investing in our talent our company we will always try to mend the roof while the sun shines retention is good talent acquisition is going really well and we can get the people in the door that we need to fuel our growth but we won't take it for granted thanks for that andy um i think that um the what additional question you i think you maybe covered it but whether you want to add any element to it is how does your approach differ from other tech companies um with regards to the staff retention and um people um yes it's a it's a great um and related question i mean both of those questions are driving at things that are very much the well genuinely actually the the beating heart of alpha our culture And that's something that really does differentiate us. I think a lot of the things that we talk about, we're very much doing them. They're very much embedded in an organization. Whenever anybody asks you a question about what you do different, it sort of opens the door a little bit to saying mean things about other people. But what I will say is that none of the stuff you hear or read about our culture is performative. It's very important to us and it's what we are. To the extent that actually with institutional investors, with new prospects, The thing that we're really keen to do is to get them out of a meeting room where they're getting a nice PowerPoint and access to myself, Matt and Duncan and our revenue team and get them to come into the office where you can meet the Alpha people and understand how it really works and what's going on and just the feel to this place. And I'm talking all aspects of our culture. I touched on inclusion and belonging, but social impact. innovation isn't just high days and holidays it it's continuous communication um early and imperfect open communication and community and in my mind you can tell i'm passionate about it it's really hard to separate those things and then you layer on that high performance culture uh i talked about the fact that quality and delivery those are also culturally embedded so we're walking the walk in all of these areas and that makes alpha i think very different I'll use the phrase purpose-driven organization, which is very often reserved for the not-for-profit sector. But that's us. That's how we feel. It makes us proud about what we do. And then that has a really great business outcome as well as making it a more pleasurable place to work because it makes us more committed, more effective, and, yeah, it just makes it a fun place to be. Hopefully that gives a flavour of why we're different. The three of us have to come to work as well. So we wanted to make it an enjoyable place and we want to be proud of what we do.

Thanks, Andy. I can certainly say I've been to a few of your hackathons and there's no doubt about it. They're slightly different from the standard ones. Next question is for Matt. How does AI impact on revenues, staffing levels and R&D developments?

Okay, and there's a few questions on AI as an opportunity and also a little bit on AI as a threat coming up that I can see as well, Scott. So hopefully you keep me honest, but I'll attempt to answer them all in one, partly in the interest of time. But if you feel I've missed anything, then please feel free to come back to it. So we at Alpha, we love technology, we love all aspects of technology and new and evolving technology and we love AI. Just to define our terms here, I'm talking about AI as a generic term for a number of really exciting technologies of which Large language models are a part, and perhaps the most exciting part, the most fast moving part at the moment, but by no means all. And we're really excited here at Alpha about both the reality and the possibilities of AI technology, and we have been for a long time now. We don't see AI as an end in itself, except in so far, of course, as we need to show customers and perhaps investors and potential investors as well that we are ahead of the game with AI. But what we do see as an end in itself is developing fantastic new functionality to deliver more and more for existing customers and to sell to new customers at Alpha. So that is an end in itself. We're ahead of that. We've been ahead of that for a while with automated decisioning, machine learning, prediction. We're ahead of that with AskThea, which is our large language chatbot that I was talking about in the presentation there. We're also ahead of that in some more innovative areas. We've got some really exciting proof of concepts for use of agentic AI with alpha systems. I'll perhaps come back to that a little bit later. And we stay ahead a bit. Both Andrew and actually you, Scott, you've talked about our commitment to innovation. And as you might expect, our innovation program is dominated by AI at the moment. Innovation is really important to all of us. And, Alpha, you mentioned the hackathons. We have quarterly innovation days. We've got also, really importantly, a well-established process for turning innovation into production reality. And that well-established process includes very experienced and senior mentors for each initiative, and we have dedicated AI innovation mentors. Improving operational efficiency. You talked about, I think you talked in the question a little bit about the costs and how we can improve efficiency. So operational efficiency is another end in itself in which AI can help. RCE is a part of that. Tools for improving coding efficiency is a part of that and all of that's in the innovation agenda as well. AI is also a sales opportunity because there is a risk presented to our customers, particularly perhaps in cybersecurity, and Alpha's cloud hosting is built for security and monitoring, and perhaps we'll talk a bit about that later on in this session as well if we have time. Just a little bit on AI as a threat. So perhaps people will be able to build software from nowhere using AI and overtake alpha. We don't see that as a clear and present danger at this time. AI is very good for writing code from scratch for very simple or well understood use cases, but it's got a long way to go at the moment before it can write or maintain complex code for use cases at the scale of alpha. And to the extent that it can help us in the future, we will start very far ahead. Actually, writing code is a relatively small part of the software development lifecycle. Understanding what a customer wants to achieve, why, making that happen, and then delivering it is a huge part of that as well, of course. And another way in which we see AI as an opportunity for us is that I talked a little bit about Gentic AI earlier. To stay ahead of operational efficiency for our customers, there's a need to use the latest tools available. In order to do that, you need software that provides an open AI for that line of business processing. And that's Alpha Systems. So in order to get on that journey, implementation of modern software is extremely important. So again, it provides an opportunity for us. Perhaps I've covered everything.

Yeah, that's good. Thank you, Matt. Very good covering of AI that's there. And in the interest of time, I will move on. But Andy, for you, how do you ensure client data security when more customers are moving to cloud deployments? Just if you need to, just unmute yourself, Andy, if you don't mind.

Well, somebody had to be that guy, didn't they, Scott? Sorry, it's always me. It's a huge and important question. I'm trying to answer it. fairly quickly. Where you see systems making headlines for cyber problems, one thing that they have in common is they're very often multi-tenant systems. So there's no logical or physical separation between the compute and data environments across these organisations. And that means contagion is going to be a problem if there is a cyber threat. Within Alpha's cloud, from the get-go, we figured actually you can have all of the advantages, the operational, the economies of scale of multi-tenancy through some of the things actually Matt touched upon, like configurations code, like using automation techniques, and have single tenant environments. So you might ask what happens if there is some kind of hack on a customer environment. We simply delete it and we spin up a new one. They're not even... properly connected to our environments. They can operate on their own even if we have an issue. And that's at the heart of our approach there. Single tenant SaaS is something that we think ultimately everybody will come around to because it's the right answer for heart and lung systems as Matt described. If you've seen our recent publicity, then you also might have seen Data Guardian, which is then talking about how we take that a level further. Single tenant with dedicated compute power and resources. And then you've got A primary backup, you've then got a backup in another region in case AWS goes down in your region. You've then got a backup in a different cloud provider in case AWS just isn't there at all. We call that a triple shield. We're very, very aware of who we're serving and what they're concerned about, and we think we do something different there, and it's very much part of our sales proposition and our differentiation.

Thanks, Andy. Matt, how is adoption of Alpha 6 progressing amongst existing customers?

So it's another really good question. It's very important to us that the move from Alpha Systems V5 to Alpha Systems 6 is a very, very low friction upgrade. The move from V4 to V5 included re-platforming and a brand new user interface. Although really importantly, we maintained 20 years of function investment in the product that we'd accrued to that point in 2010. And actually the conversion of our existing co-set remains one of the reasons that we're ahead of the competition now. But the progression from alpha systems B5 to B6 is incremental. And for our customers, the process of taking an alpha system 6 upgrade is the same as taking an upgrade within B5. And that's why we're really pleased that at the half year we already had nine customers live on Alpha System 6. But Alpha System 6 is really important to us in that it gave us an opportunity for a fantastic marketing event for the system as a whole and to launch some really exciting new modules that can help us sell to new customers and also give us a platform for incremental sales to existing customers.

And Matt, will Alpha System 6 reduce the implementation time compared to previous versions?

Yeah, OK. So simplification is a really key part of our strategy and I talked about it a little bit in the presentation. We've got an absolutely huge opportunity to grow into and that's the reason that simplifying the implementation of Alpha Systems, I said earlier that it was necessarily a major business change program, but both simpler and less risky than implementing capacitor systems. Simplifying, however, is really important to us so that we can layer on more and more implementations of alpha systems software, layer on more subscription revenue. And again, that's one of the reasons for the acceleration and wins that you can see in the appendices to our presentation. Alpha System 6, though, isn't specifically a part of that, although all product innovation has simplification of the implementation process as part of the considerations for that product innovation. The key things that simplify the implementation of the product are those that I talked about in the presentation. our Alpha Start accelerators and products, that automated testing and the system documentation, including through Ask Thea, as well as migration tooling, really importantly enabling customers to move new portfolios to Alpha Systems and to move their existing portfolios to Alpha Systems, and Alpha Cloud itself, which is one of the major advances in simplifying the implementation of alpha systems that we've seen since Alpha Systems V5 was launched. And again, just to refer to that appendix, slide 39 I think gives a really good overview of the strategic change that we've achieved incrementally since the launch of Alpha Systems V5 in 2010.

Thanks Matt. Duncan, is the dividend safe and will it grow?

In the interest of time, I'm winning the shortest answer prize, yes and yes. On a slightly more expansive note, we have a relatively low ordinary dividend, which will grow. We pay out all the excess cash in special dividends. That could go up and down depending on particular cash flows in that year. We'll just make sure that we maintain

a minimum level of cash in the business but yeah as the business grows we expect to grow the overall cash returns to shareholders thanks thank you um final question is for andy share price has fallen over nine percent in the last six months would uh be interested to know how the management team's thoughts on this do you think the business is fairly valued by the market at current levels

It's fun timing for that question because the ticker I'm looking at, which is not real time, is saying that we nearly got that back today. Look, I live and breathe this business. We love this business. We rate it very highly. We're very confident in the business and its prospects. And it's almost impossible for me to think that it's fairly valued. so so what's the answer to that well i think we all here think that it's important um not to run the business with constant reference to the share price we we need to make sure that the investment community is aware of our equity story and and what is different about this business which we we work hard to do particularly at times like um like this in the in the cycle um But ultimately, the thing for us is to understand the fundamentals of the business. In our minds, you get great financial fundamentals, good growth, great profitability, great cash conversion, as Duncan's outlined, all of those basics, whilst also having an exceptional growth opportunity. So we keep focused on that. We keep focused on strategic execution. And the assumption is that the share price will catch up. But the most important thing I think you should hear from the leadership is that they're focused on the success of the business, not constantly looking at a ticker.

Thank you, Andy. So that's all we've got time for at the moment with regards to questions. Andy, maybe if I could just hand back to you for any closing remarks.

Yeah, thanks very much, Scott. Look, this has been great for us. We really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. personal investors. It's not something that we get a chance to do all that often. So your support is really important. We appreciate the level of engagement that we've had this afternoon. And as I said, you're taking some time out of your afternoon to listen to us. Hopefully you'll continue to monitor the company, maybe by a shower or two, and we'll see you hopefully next time we report.

Thank you to Andy, Duncan and Matthew for joining us today. That concludes the Alpha Financial Software Investor presentation. Please take a moment to complete the short survey following this event. The record of this presentation will be made available in Engage Investor and I hope you enjoyed the presentation today. Thank you.