Bango PLC

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bango PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Paul Larby. Paul, good morning, sir.

Good morning, and thank you, everybody, for joining. We appreciate your time this morning as we talk through the results of the first half of 26 and give you a bit more context and colour around the business. I'll start with a quick overview and reminder of the business and the highlights for the half before turning over to Matt to review the financial sections in a lot more detail. And then I want to end by sort of giving some real world examples of how the DVM is being used in all sorts of different applications before talking a little bit about the outlook and we'll then turn it over for Q&A and Suki will guide us through the Q&A. Thanks for everybody who submitted questions in advance and as we just heard you can submit them using the panel at the side of the screen. So throughout the presentation today, we'll talk about the two business segments that we operate within Bangor, that's payments and subscriptions. And as a reminder, payments basically is a way of allowing users to purchase both digital and physical goods and to charge it to their mobile phone. And they can purchase those goods from people like Amazon or Google or a whole host of other merchants. They pay for using their mobile phone in one of two ways. It can be charged directly to their bill, and we call that direct carrier billing or DCB as we go through the deck, or also potentially for the balance held in a mobile wallet. It's a simple, robust, trusted payment mechanism that's very popular in developing markets, especially where there's a large unbanked population, but also in developed markets such as Japan, where there's really a customer preference to pay for things with their telco, whether that be things they're buying online or purchasing a sandwich or a coffee from the 7-Eleven store on their way to work in the morning. We're one of only two global DCB players and the largest integrator for the Google Play Store. And we first launched with Google back in 2012, so a long history with Google. We're the leading provider in Japan, and in Japan we started with Amazon back in 2017, adding carrier billing for the Amazon.co.jp store, initially with the largest operators, MTC and KDDI. In 2020, we added SoftBank to that, so covering the three largest operators. And then when we acquired Docomo Digital in 2022, we signed a long-term agreement with NTT Docomo to provide their remaining DCB services from app stores through to Shopify shops through to airlines, in addition to the Amazon business that we were already supporting for NTT Docomo. We look at subscriptions, the role of the telco shifts from being a purely a payment instrument, so a way of accessing the funds, to the actual reseller of the service in subscriptions. So it's the telco's way of attracting, retaining new users by bundling a third-party service with their first-party telco services. Our product for that is the digital vending machine, which supports over 130 different subscription services, allowing those providers to distribute their product not only to telcos, but to new verticals such as banks, retailers, and connected TV providers. Subscriptions is a great business because everyone in the ecosystem benefits. The telcos, as we said, use that to attract, retain customers and generate more revenue. For the content partners, it's their way of reaching new customers and new consumers and having somebody else market their content. And as consumers, we get a better deal and more control over our subscriptions. We look at the DVM in more detail and the platform that we operate within Bangor. Across both payments and subscriptions, this platform approach allows everybody in the ecosystem to connect once and access many, and access a broad ecosystem of partners. So if you're at telcos such as Verizon, one connection gets you access to over 130 different subscription services. If you're a subscription service like Disney, one connection will allow you to resell your service through a growing network of over 150 telcos, banks, and retailers. What makes the DVM really unique is that end-to-end lifecycle management. This is not just about the connection, it's about that end-to-end lifecycle of a subscription. from test environments and tools that allow people to connect into the DVM and validate their connection, to tools that allow you to migrate existing subscriptions over onto the DVM, to partner discovery, which allows content partners and resellers to find each other, to discover each other. And if you are one of our pre-stock partners where we have existing commercial terms, that's the fastest way to find and resell and launch a new bundled service. The offer capability, and we'll see some great examples of that at the back end of the presentation, allow these bundles to be defined and managed. And the complex rules to be applied. Is there a free period? How long does a free period last? Can you upgrade the subscription to a premium tier? What happens if you don't upgrade? All of those rules are addressed within the offer management capability that we provide within the digital vending machine. And that's functionality that historically may have been done in the telcos, OSS, or VSS system. The CX, or user interface, provides a white label capability for any brand to take what they have and embed it within their existing app or website, giving a really fast way to launch new services and launch the DVM to their customers. Once the app is live and the consumer is activated, the DVM really shifts into performance and taking actions to drive success. And this is where AI really helps us differentiate, both in looking at the data within the platform to understand how we can drive improved subscription success, but also embedding that into agentic workflows, which automatically will start to take action to drive increased subscription. And remember, the revenue model we have for this business means that as our customers grow, so does Bangor revenue. And that really is the benefit of the platform approach, and that's where the R&D that we're investing in the platform and have invested over a number of years is really helping to drive the growth. If we take that end-to-end solution, which really is unique in the market, it itself creates a very significant barrier to entry for competition. But that's actually compounded by when you consider that we're connected into identity systems and billing systems of organizations such as telcos and retailers. So very sensitive systems that they trust us to connect into. And it's that trust that we build with the world's largest media companies and telcos and banks that's really, really important and sort of adds to the differentiation because they're relying on Bangor to support their growth. And actually that trust they place in us and their reliance on us to support their growth only increases as adoption of the platform grows. And this growth itself gives us unique insights into how all these subscriptions are performing and how we can drive more success, which further goes to accelerate the growth of the platform. So this defensible position we have, the competitive differentiation, only grows as more people join the platform and as people use the platform more. And its foundation is that platform and the trust that some of the world's largest companies place within Bangor.

We look at the first half results.