Celebrus Technologies plc

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Cerebus Technologies PLC Capital Markets Day. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors online will be in listening-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. We may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company your question submitted today and we published those responses where it's appropriate to do so. We'll shortly submit a poll and I'm sure the company be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to CEO Bill Bruno. Good morning.

Thank you, sir. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us both virtually and remotely. We've got a full agenda. Obviously, for those of you in the room, you don't have to log into the application to ask your questions. You can just raise your hand and we'll just repeat them to the audio. so that everybody that is virtual gets the benefit of hearing what it is that you're asking, just to make sure the audio is working. Really appreciate everybody taking some time today. We've got a fun agenda. As always, we'll start with a financial update from Ash. I'll give you a bit of a business update, as this is our first Capital Market Today of Celibris Technologies PLC. So we have finally now simplified the brand and aligned under Celibris and behind Celibris as the sphere of our business. I'll talk a little bit more about that and how we're going tomorrow. our product updates and we have a video and i'll just warn you now we've got some technical difficulties with said video where it's only audio so we all listen to podcasts we'll just pretend it's a podcast uh the the video itself will be uploaded online so you can watch and see lee from merkle and the interview that we did with him if you so choose but the audio is the most important thing anyways and uh yeah that's the agenda so with that Thanks, Bill. So I'm going to run through quickly financial highlights and then we'll go into a bit of detail around each of the financial statements and just talk about how they impact their impacted by business. So on the financial highlights, you'll see that the annual recurring revenue increased to 17.4 million during the period. That compares to this time last year of 15.8 and the year end figure of 16.7. The total revenue went up to $13 million, and I'll go into a little bit of detail on the dynamics behind that. That was in comparison with $8.1 million at this time last year and $31.4 million for the full year last year. And I'll talk a little bit about the first half and the second half waiting. Software revenue, which is a key metric for us now, went up 18% to $7.3 million. And again, I'll explain that in a few moments. The gross profit margin was 37.4%. That was low in the first period, as it often is this time around, due to high-end hardware in our revenues. 0.3 million lost this time last year, and that equates to 0.56 pence of earnings per share. Cash position at the period end was 14.7 million, and I'll talk about the dynamics of our cash balance and working capital and how that sort of fluctuates month to month. And then finally, we paid a dividend of 0.92 pence per share. That's up 4.5%, and I'll talk about the use of our cash over the medium term. So, going to the income statement. For the first time, the final The gross profit margin was lower, as I said, at 37.4%. But we are looking, as I said, at the software GP percentage being more representative of what's happening underlying in the business. So the software GP percentage was 36.4%. And we would expect that to go back for the full year, as it was last year, to the high 60%. We paid 4.5 million this time last year. I spoke last time about how we spent the last financial year restructuring the business. We invested a lot into systems, so a new finance system, a new CRM, a new HR system, a business manager, a contract manager. From those, we were able to extract lots of efficiencies, and so the headcount we saved from those investments were then redirected to the front end, into sales and marketing, and setting up in the first half. And what we'll also be doing in the second half is looking forward to FY25 and the investments we need to make ahead of our year end now to be able to deliver increased revenues and numbers for FY25. So you will see that opex going up in the coming periods. The adjusted PT, 0.2 million, that was assisted by our finance income. So we have good cash balances and we invest those very wisely. We're very proactive around that. And so obviously during a period of volatility over the last six to nine months with interest rates quite increasing, but also fluctuating through short-term and long-term investments, we've been very proactive and managed to generate 300,000 pounds net from our cash balances. The annual recurring revenue, as I said, has gone up to 17.4 million. and the reported adjusted diluted eps was a loss of 0.56 sorry profit of 4.5.56 and the dividend as i said 0.92 pence for the period coming on to the balance sheet uh concern stated statement of financial position so the major changes in the period were really around the debtors and the creditors so at the last And that was the reason for the shortfall in revenues last year. So what we've seen in this period is that one of those deals, which had a very high component of hardware, was signed in early August. And so what you see in the balance sheet at the half-year end is a very high sort of trade debtor balance within the trade and other receivables. But conversely, you also see a high trade and other payables balance relating to that hardware. So if you remember, the shortfall was around 6 million. you see the trade and other payoffs going up and the trade and other receivables also increasing those positions are in the process of reversing now so we will be receiving cash shortly as a side point you may be aware that we don't generally have bad debtors most of our customer base is large profitable multinational businesses so we tend not to have bad debts but payment terms are generally anywhere between 45 days and 90 days depending on whether we're doing it directly The final point I'd make really around the assets held for sale. So this is an item we introduced at the last year end, moving out of property, plant and equipment and into assets held for sale. This is our London property of £3 million valuation. So this has been on the market. We now have offers which we're negotiating and these come from a wide range of types of buyers. So we're working through that and we'll be announcing further information in due course. And finally, on the cash flow. So the main items in the cash flow, I think the first thing to draw to your attention is resorting to movements in working capital. And I should explain again really about how we recognise our revenue and how we do our billing. So a typical seller's contract will be a three-year contract and that will include a high proportion of licensed revenues, an element of support and maintenance, increasingly now an element of Celerbus Cloud, which we launched a while ago, and then a very small element of services. And how we recognize revenue on that is that the services will be recognized on a percentage-complete basis as we implement the Celerbus platform, and that's typically over around two months or so. The support and maintenance and the Celerbus Cloud will be recognized evenly over those 36 months of the contract. The license is a bit unusual. we issue the license for a three-year contract year by year. So at the time of signing, the first anniversary, then for the second year, and then the second anniversary for the third year. Now, under IFRS 15, once we've delivered the license, our obligations are fulfilled, so we're required results, depending on whether we recognise it in month one or month six or month seven. Equally, coming back to working capital, the significance of that is that when we sign a new customer or we do a three-year renewal, we will bill the whole of the first year in one month's sum. And then similarly at the first anniversary and the second anniversary. So the billings fluctuate quite markedly month to month, so there will be months where we don't have any renewals, for example, or a new contract, we might build perhaps less than half a million dollars. And there'll be other months where we do have significant billings, which could be $5 million or more. So the positional working capital and the fluctuations that appear then really come down to the number of renewals and the number of new logos, or sometimes some upsell as well in a particular period. also by this large contract with a high degree of firm hardware revenues. On the cash generated from operating activities, nothing of any significance. We have depreciation and amortization, of course. We have share-based payments. And then moving down to investing activities, we have a very low capex requirement in business, like most software companies. We also tend to capitalize a very small amount of R&D. Now, we would rather not capitalize R&D. We'd rather have a case of the income statement. We believe that gives you a much cleaner income statement. It's easier to understand. And we're also aware that there is a reputation amongst software companies of capitalizing R&D to flatter the P&L and take costs out and capitalize them. However, under IFRS, we are required to capitalize a certain amount of R&D, and that comes down to sort of the nature of the R&D. So we have an R&D spend typically in the we're capitalising somewhere around £200,000, £300,000, £400,000 depending on the type of R&D that it is. And then finally on financing activities, we pay a dividend. So this £856,000 in this period is the final dividend from the last financial year. You'll see in the comparatives, this time last year we had paid £6.2 million. were quite healthy at that time. Purchase of old shares. So we continue to have a share buyback program. And the reason behind that is principally to negate the dilutive effect of share options and LTIPs. This isn't a particularly proactive share buyback program. So we're not going out seeking shares, but they will be mopped up by our broker, typically at the end of the day. And as I said, we'll take those up to a certain level to net off the effects of dilutions. So that brings us down to the movement in the period of £2.5 million and the balance of £14.7 million. And that balance, as I said, fluctuates period to period as we look forward to the rest of the financial year with the billings that we've got now outstanding at the half year. And also as we look forward to the second half and the nature of our billings typically being second half. So you've seen from previous statements that we do have first half, second half in balance, if you like. in that second half revenues are generally higher than first half revenues. That will never be 50-50. We're trying to move it to typically around 40-60. But what that also means is because a lot of those revenues are related to license, that's what gives us that bias towards the second half. And then similarly, with that recognition of the license and the renewals, that also means we have a higher amount of billions in the second half. So typically, you will see our cash balance at the year end being higher than it is at the half year. And that's it. So before you step down, Ash, we have a question that I think we might as well just answer right now around software gross margin and our improvements in that. Perhaps you could speak to what's included in the costs that go into how you're calculating the gross margin for software margin currently. And can you also explain sort of how we view the margins across the various things that come into software revenues? Sure. Thanks. Yeah, good point. Good question. It is important to know the margins on each of our revenue streams because as you look forward to what the company might look like in three years' time and how the income statement would be affected, it's important to understand that. Now, the margins we have are fairly typical for a software company. So on a license, typically you'd be looking at around 85% gross margin. On support and maintenance, on that in due course. And the reason it'll go beyond 70% is as we sell more new logos, as we do more upsell, the largest component of a new contract is license. So on a typical contract, we might have, if I'm just taking numbers out of the air, for a million dollars a year, there might be perhaps sort of 700,000, 800,000 of that is license, and that's high margin. And then the our overall blended gross margin for software revenues. Does that answer it? Yep. Good. Thanks Ash. All right. Well, thank you, Ash. Appreciate the background there. I mean, I think hopefully what you're getting a sense of is where we're getting rid of, or retiring I suppose is the better word, the D4T4 name, and aligning all the troops behind Salvers, candidly makes sense. Obviously meeting with many of our Right. And so that that's the, it's a, it's a bellwether though. Cause when I joined the business, it was five years ago yesterday, nobody sent me a card by the way. Um, but five years ago yesterday, um, I joined the business. And one of the first things that I was asked was which team I'm on. Right. Are you D4, T4, or are you Salesforce? I told the company this and I'll tell you all I hate that. Right. Because if you're, if you're viewing yourselves as different teams, if you're, if you're viewing yourselves as different mentalities, all that does is take away from the momentum. a strategy, it needed kind of a northern star to guide towards. And for us, it's that we are a software business that sometimes sells services. And that is drastically different because everything that we do, everything that we invest in, all of our engagements with customers now, the sole focus is how do we sell more license to that customer and obviously make them happy with that and give them value and in turn give their consumers value as well. And our mission statement has also been with us over the last few rounds that Ash and I have been doing together in our one-on-ones, the brand is starting to get easier and easier to understand. But our mission is very simple. It's to improve the relationships between brands and consumers via better data. And so what does better data mean? Well, for us, and what you'll see when Ash comes up here and presents, it's about bringing our software, our people, and our processes, and in some cases, the environments that we're building and hosting, top retailers around the world, healthcare in the U.S., travel, hospitality, telco, you name it. They all have a very core problem, and that core problem is their digital data set is not up to par. They're not able to use digital data. And for us, that's the massive opportunity for the Celliverse platform. And we continue to innovate that platform, and you'll see some of that when Ant comes up here, because candidly, he's got all the fun stuff today. You'll see our launch of Celliverse Digital Analytics. You'll see some of our machine learning. You know, you can't do a meeting without mentioning artificial intelligence at least 37 times, right, in a room these days. And for us, it's about how do we build models that take the data we're capturing for customers about their consumer interactions and help them find the needles in the haystack faster, help them get value from the platform. And so everything that we've done, whether it's efficiency and process internally or externally in how we engage with customers is designed around making sellers easy to use, making sellers easy to derive value from and candidly make sellers easy to buy from. Because when all of you over the years didn't understand our premise or what our business was doing, now you can probably understand how confusing it was when we were trying to sell it as well. And now we have a very straightforward sales process. We know what pain points to listen for. And it's the benefit of our marketing investment and our sales investment over the last year that has helped us learn something you should do when you're trying to sell software so finding a pain point selling them just that pain point and then bringing in customer success to work with that customer to help them understand all of the things they could be doing with our platform and then ultimately upsell them and get them up and running on those things and get get to improving those relationships between brands and consumers even more so some of the new features and functionality itself fantastic. We've set up an international and a US-based team to work through our accounts. And in the pipeline today, it's probably about 80% of our existing customers have some opportunity in the pipeline already for expanding their usage of Sellvers. The two newest features, Sellvers Digital Analytics and Bot Detection, which you'll see here shortly, are both already in use in organizations. Those features went live in the summer. That is incredibly fast for the history of this business to get customers up and running on new features and functionality. And that's the MO. Historically, D4T4 was a company that tried to sell massive enterprise deals that could take a lot of time, 12, 18, 24 months in some cases. What we're trying to do now is sell software that serves a very specific pain point and worry about the rest later because it's a lot easier to sell to an existing customer than it is a new one. And so our goal is to shorten the sales cycles to, on average, eight months. So when we're looking at our sales team's pipelines, we're hoping salesperson, but ideally there's a significant number of pain point sales that we can move much more quickly through the pipeline. And that's ultimately the goal. And from a key win perspective, Gen is starting to work it. We've tested and we've been investing in those things. From the time they reached out to us till the time to close, because we now have systems that can track these things. It's amazing what you can do with data. It was under five months. It took about four and a half months to close. They purchased the Selliverse platform in Selliverse Cloud, where we're hosting and managing it for them. And they utilized several fraud and marketing use cases out of the gate. They're not even fully implemented yet. And they're already talking to customer success about adding the So for us, that's celebrants. That's what we want to be as an organization. That's what we're aspiring to be every day as we continue to make changes, as we continue to learn, as we continue to adapt. It's about listening to pain points, selling them those pain points, and driving that forward. I already covered some of these customer wins, but for us, it's sell responsibly. Ash talked about the hardware revenue, and we do have legacy customers where we're managing on-premise environments for it that we've been managing for quite some time. There's good money in it. The margins aren't quite as high, and we'll continue to support those customers. But from a sales perspective, we no longer even offer on-premise as an option. Now, that being said, I'm a salesman at heart. So if a customer wants to come in and say, we want to buy your software, but we have to put it on-prem and they've got a check to sign, we will do it. But in the sales docs and in the presentations and in the way that we're pitching the software, Seller's Cloud is primary option number one. And the secondary option would be the client's own cloud if they so choose. And that's it. And there's many reasons for that. And there's things that you wouldn't even maybe think about initially. But it goes all the way across the business by making this shift because it helps us better support our customers as well. It also helps us ensure that we've got our customers on the latest and greatest technology so that they can be early adopters of new features and functionality when we bring them live. There was a sort of undercurrent in the business of a lot of clients that had been on various versions of Sellables. It makes it very difficult to upsell them. recent version. By getting everyone on Sellerverse Cloud, by having a standard offering that's fully automated and scalable with some of the amazing IP and development that our team has done to date to bring that to life in a very short period of time, it enables us to turn these features on overnight for customers. The banking customer, the new logo, they have the ability to try all three features that they're interested in. We can just put them on like a switch for three months, let them Let them see the value of it, turn them off, and then ask them if they want to take it. So for us, there's a lot of value there. So if we truly want to improve the relationships between brands and consumers, that's what we have to do. We have to give brands the opportunity to see what this tech that we're bringing to the market can do for them. Give them the opportunity to see some of that value, and then turn that into a commercial discussion that benefits all of us. You'll hear a little bit later as well, you'll hear in this room, I think everybody that's virtual will actually see the video based on the testing when they're on their laptop, but we will make sure that video is posted online so you can see the video if you so choose. Lee has a phenomenal background dedicated to Dia de los Muertos, so you're not going to want to miss that. He and I, as Ash points out, have ridiculous backgrounds in our video, mine being wrestling action figures, which we're going to talk about later. But solution partners are a key element of our business. the rounds in July. But for us, we continue to invest in technology partners. We have some fantastic technology partners. We're building integrations with technologies we're not even partnered with because customers have asked us to. But where we see lead gen is through solution consulting partners, solution integrators. And that's my background, right? When I came out of university, I founded a consulting firm that built a business around helping technologies like Celibris. That was where I first came across Celibris. It was called Speedtrap back then. They're strategic advisors to customers, right? They're telling them what can solve their pain points. They're on the front lines. And so arming them with the Sellvers capabilities and forming partnerships like the one with Merkle that you'll hear about as the last agenda item today, we see as more and more opportunities to build sales channels without investing in sales channels. We can have solutions consulting partners out there who can build a service offering around Sellvers, deliver all of those services, and help us scale. and simply help us sell more software, then that's a great opportunity for us as a business, and that's why we're exploring. So the last thing I'll leave you with, and then obviously we'll address questions later on, but before I turn it over to Anne, you've heard me talk a lot about data. All of the systems that we've put in place have given us phenomenal ability to not only visualize what's going to close when and where the deals are and where the revenue is coming from and what's already committed, et cetera, et cetera, but we also have the ability to forecast that And with the current pipeline of visibility, with deals that we're already in legal negotiations with now, we feel very comfortable about the outlook for the year. And we're quite excited about it. And we're also extremely excited about where we're taking this business. So hopefully you're sensing some of that. But we are now a software company. We are all aligned behind one brand. We've completed several restructures to put the right people into the right places. And as a result, we've uncovered some phenomenal talent that needed an opportunity to shine. So we're really excited about where we're going. I'm thrilled about it. I always get asked, you know, what are you trying to do with Celeros? We're trying to take over the world. And in my opinion, our software is the best software backed by one of the most phenomenal engineering teams I've ever seen. The people that are on the front lines that are delivering these projects care about our customers to the point where we get feedback on a weekly basis from customers saying that we're the only vendor that delivers on promises. that's an anti-software company, right? Because we want to be honest, ethical. We want to deliver on our promises. But more importantly, we want to align and put our great people on the front lines with our customers, get them access to software that truly can be game-changing for them as businesses, and ultimately drive those better relationships with their consumers. So with that, Ant, I will tee you up, sir, if you don't mind. And Godspeed. Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name's Dan Phillips, I'm CTO. Maybe 20 minutes or so just to walk you through some of the new things which have come out in the last 12 months. A few slides, not too many, and then a couple of demos so you can see how it looks in action. You can ask questions as we go along. Well, where to start? So the best place to start is just that means is when we see an opportunity we go after it and that's really how to tee up the two things i'm going to show you this morning the last 12 months we've seen two clear opportunities one around digital analytics which i'll talk about in a bit more detail in a moment and also bot detection bot detection is one of those things that has lots of different names non-human traffic and why they are so interesting in the market at the moment. Before I dive into too much detail, let's just set the scene for what Celebris is. And it's actually these things. We don't talk so much now about CDP and FTP, some of those acronyms that become very confusing to people in industries. They've got bent out of shape, really, for what they actually mean. So we just talk about Celebris now and all these capabilities of what the product can do. do a lot of marketing. That's our heritage, of course, going back many years. Increasingly over the last three years, more and more in fraud. The banking customer that Bill mentioned a moment ago is right in there with a lot of fraud interest and use cases they want to deliver. Really good for us. But also some other things, CDI for Salesforce, And it's all built, of course, on the Sellebras platform, including the bot detection, and that really comes back to something which we've been signalling for the last year or two, really, which is we've always had the best technology for making it really simple to collect rich data from visitors to companies' websites, mobile applications and so on. We also want to start using that data more to add value to the business, and running machine learning models which detect bots is a valuable thing for the businesses we work being able to provide digital analytics is a valuable thing that uses that data and uses that platform. So it's about moving up the value chain, if you want to think of it that way. It's not just about getting the best data, it's about activating it as well. Okay, so when is CDA coming to all of this then? And actually, there's a whole bunch of reasons in the industry which have made is something that we originally got into as a company back in the days when we were called SpeedTrap, this is 20-odd years ago, before we became Celeros. That's where we started out live, actually. And in the intervening years, web analytics became really uninteresting as Google and Adobe kind of took over the world. But now, because of the changes in the privacy quote here around the HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services in the US. It was about a year ago they sent a letter to a whole bunch of healthcare companies saying you cannot track using Google Analytics what your customers are doing on your websites and mobile applications. It is a breach of healthcare information to do that. It's a breach of personal healthcare information, DHI. And that was such people fully realized how important it was that healthcare companies cannot use Google Analytics because they are disclosing healthcare information to Google. The same goes for Adobe Analytics. And what that created was a sudden surge of interest, which is now ongoing, to have an alternative, which has not happened in the last 20 years. It's a remarkable thing when these pivots happen in the industry. And that was it. And what's happened since then, of course, is a lot of in the industry and it was followed up in July this year by a follow-on piece of information guided issued by the HHS which is to inform 103 companies you can search this up on the web where they went after specific companies now saying you are still doing this you need to stop doing it so immediately there's all these companies who are panicking about how they're going to get themselves out of this situation And this net is widening now. So at the same time, they went after five tax advisory companies, Intuit being one of them, saying you're also disclosing confidential financial information by using Google Analytics on your website. So to cut a long story short, all of that creates a really fabulous opportunity for us to provide a better solution. So we have a solution. We've built it over the last 12 months. It's only available in Sellebris Cloud. We want to bring customers into Sellebris Cloud and our platform. And it provides a complete solution, a complete alternative to Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Companies who still want So whichever way the customer wants to tack, we can tack with them. Either they run it in Celibus Cloud, or we run it for them in Celibus Cloud, or they run it themselves in Celibus Workplace. And underneath it all, as I said a moment ago, is Celibus Platform. So it has all those good things that we talk about, identity graph, accurate identity resolution. It doesn't use third-party cookies. All those problems which are in the industry at the moment, we don't suffer from those. That's what it looks like then. Three different things a customer can pick and choose, whichever ones they so choose. So like two of them, the two on the left, Tableau and Power BI, they're running Cellebris in their own environment. They have their own reporting solution. They want to do more advanced reporting, perhaps a bit more data savvy. All the other customers, some big integration project, they just ask us for stand-up syllabus for them, data starts flowing, and they log in, and it starts working. So there's no tagging, no effort, it's really out of the box from day one. There's a bunch of sort of screenshots. Well, I'll show you these. This is what the workbooks looks like, actually, if you're running Power BI on Tableau. Lots of nice marketing-friendly data visualizations around cohorts you know people who arrive on your site today and buy something when do they come back and buy something in the future so the next people never come back lots of different sort of analytics that marketers want to know how people arrive on the site they're coming from social media do they're coming through affiliates are they just brand aware and search you up lots of different views of our data and all of this is just This is some of the newer stuff around cold analysis, which I was just talking about. I won't show you the screenshots of the CD8, because actually I can just show you the video, so you can see what the product looks like. So, see if I can get this working. Right, this is, This is CDA. So what you see here is kind of the opening page of the application. Essentially, our customer logs into this. It's running in Celibus Cloud. They just stream in here through their Celibus instance. They don't have to do anything to make that work. We just do it all. And the first page there by this dashboard just gives them an overview of what's happening on their websites and on their mobile applications. Very familiar for marketers. Nothing needed. So from a training point of view, it's all very straightforward. It's made to look like Google Analytics to give them a very easy transition. So when those healthcare companies come out of Google Analytics, they can just come into CDA and it's all very familiar for them. No great learning curve. So all sorts of things you might expect a marketer would be interested in. Things like visitor maps and so on. This particular demo takes us off to Texas Health, one of our customers. We're going to have a look at what it looks like on Texas Health. So I arrived on their website. We'll just switch CDA across to their domain. Want to have a look at their visitors. And once it refreshes, you'll see, you know, it's just one visitor. So it's not, this is just a test system. It's not a proper production traffic per se. You can start to see some things ticking up here. We've got some visits and so on. And then all these things down left-hand side here allow us to, or allow the marketer to go and have a poke around and see what's happening on their, website. We've got a real-time view of visitors. This is this visit here. It's called a visit log. It provides a kind of real-time view of what's going on on the website. What I'm doing here is actually I'm going to go and have a look at Cardiovascular, part of their website, and we're going to see how that interest starts to reflect in CDA. Now CDA is two things. It's both real-time and aggregated data. Who visited last year? Did more people visit last month than this month? That's what Here we see a real-time research down to an individual person. You can see some stuff here about how they arrived on the site, things that they're interested in, and what I'm going to do on the website here is just really engage with this bit of content. Perhaps I really want to know more about cardiovascular health. So I'm having a look through the page here. And Celibris, of course, is monitoring or tracking all of this information. It's looking at what I am looking at on the website, and that machine learning Allowing some of us to say right. Yes. So and and is showing an interest in my only in patient services but also in cardiovascular products and That's a really key point that machine learning is a real value add that the product can do we can Understand what people are engaging with and that becomes information that flows into CDA Now this point having found an interesting cardiovascular health. I'm going on to see what how am I going to pay for this? so heading up to the health insurance marketplace and And it's another part of the website. Of course, from a marketing point of view, marketers want to understand what parts of the site they're engaging with. So here I am on the site looking at the health insurance marketplace. We'll head back over to CDA. And when I refresh this page, you'll see that the list of signals, these machine learning signals, is not just that I'm interested in patient services and cardiovascular health, but also I'm now interested in health insurance. So we're building that picture of every visitor. What are they engaging with? And once that data is in CDA, it can be sliced and diced in just an extraordinary different way, number of ways. How many people from East Coast of the US are interested in cardiovascular products who are using iPhones? That's the kind of capability that you can just take that data and reform it in a hundred different ways, depending on what the marketer, what problem the marketer is trying to solve. Over on the left-hand side here, lots of different capabilities we can look to look at what the site is doing. One of my favorite bits of the application is right here where you can do transitions. So this particular page, it's at 55 page views and you can see that where people come into, it's probably a bit hard to read from the back there, so I'll just talk it through. You can see how people arrive on that page inbound and where they exit and it just goes on and on. There's absolutely wealth of capability down here. What people are searching for, people are downloading, also engagement, which is one of the areas that we really specialize in. So one of the disadvantages or one of the things that third party cookies really suffer from is returning visitors. People interact with websites from day to day or week to week. Third party cookies really impact we really understand if I visit a website and come back three weeks later we understand it's still me and that really shows through in some of that returning visitors and the engagement with the website the next few or next minute or so just walks through a few different parts of the website acquisition of course lots of marketers spend a lot of money on acquiring customers understanding how people are actually spending their money from an e-commerce point of view it covers all the things which So this is looking at some goals, conversion events is another way of putting that. This information down here allows the markets to drill down into as much detail as they need to. And then just to draw this to a close, media. Media is a really interesting one. So if you're a travel company, of course, you might really be interested in media, presenting videos of where someone might want to go on holiday. From a retail perspective, also really interesting. but actually healthcare companies use media a lot. And the reason they do that is to provide videos, kind of pre-surgery videos for people to understand what they're about to go through. So that media section of CEA actually is gonna see a lot of use from all different industries for very different reasons, of course, but still it's a really applicable part of the application for different reasons. Okay, that's CEA. So in the interest of time, I'm gonna swiftly Move on. Before I change tack completely, any questions on CDA? Anything not clear? Stunned silence. Cool. I think while you're switching tack, the one thing I will say is this was an idea that we had eight months ago, and it was in clients' hands four or five months later, something like that. And Ant touched on it, but I think it's worth really calling out. My original consulting business, we made a lot of money off the complexity of the tools that we now compete with. In one day, we could have a client up and running on reports that would historically have taken them six to nine months to create. And we do it on the flip of a switch. And what's been really difficult for marketers and brands that have run into this third-party cookie challenge is we've had a few brands that are taking this on. who came to us because they were in the dark. They had to turn off all their tech. They didn't know who was using their websites. They didn't know where their marketing investments and where that money was going. And they were candidly freaking out about it because it's not small amounts of money. When you look at advertising budgets in the brands that we're working with, in most cases, it's the largest budget in their business, even larger than R&D. So to not have visibility into how those investments are performed to solve that. And it was expected because as we started to sell sellers platform as a direct business, right. You know, still obviously selling through partners, but going direct, we knew we would get more questions. We knew people would want to, question is does it take a long time to a get set up from a customer perspective and also to train to use it to capture that yeah the answer is no to both questions so the only thing the customer has to do is to put celebrus onto their website or mobile application which is a really very straightforward thing to do data then starts flowing because we don't need any integration we just capture everything that their visitors or users of mobile applications are doing and package it up and present it in the dashboard. And it's intended to be really simple to use. So it's entirely designed on the perspective of a marketer. So all the things which I was showing you there, there's a lot of things there. Marketers just understand that stuff. That's the world they live. They understand page views and downloads and site search and these things. That's just what they live and breathe every day. So the idea is that this is entirely self-serve. We don't have to run a training program Sellebris is kind of irrelevant if you want to, the actual platform is kind of irrelevant if you want to be really brutal about it. Because what matters is what I showed you in the demo today, which is their websites, their mobile applications, and then CEA, where they see what's happening. The fact that there's a whole bunch of clever tech in the middle which is doing stuff is neither here nor there. Their marketers get what they need, and their website and mobile application is providing that kind of insight using Sellebris. So does that help? Yes, it does, yeah. see an increase in your clients' demand for Sellebris. Yeah and it's a really interesting area this because obviously this is pretty new, four or five months, we're not yet sure how many customers will only want CBA, how many customers will want the full Sellebris data model and be an existing seller as a customer and then they add on CDA you might tempt them in over into through the door with CDA and then they realize the value of the data and they start to get more capabilities added on license after that so it gives us such a range of different ways to navigate a particular customer wherever they want to start they can start small and relatively less expensive with CDA and then we grow them out over time it's an existing customer we can add on CDA so really really interesting possibilities. And it's the benefit of Sellevus Cloud because we have full control over this. And just as a reminder too, because we've said that a lot, it's a single tenant private cloud instance for each client. There's no shared architecture. So it's dedicated to them. They own it. They control it, even though we manage it for them. So it passes all the security compliance tests in a way that other vendors can't. half ago and they're some of the most interactive content we've ever had in marketing campaign so there's interest for sure right that we're looking looking to harness it's really difficult to market these days with compliance challenges so that was a nice win for the marketers gets them excited and gets the team sort of driving that forward but from a sales perspective it's been quite fun because we'll have someone come in wanting to talk about this and then we'll tell us about the rest of your platform no we're not going to do that architected this in such a short period of time, this fully enabled sales to just pick from a menu and say, this is what we're selling this customer and we have it all automated behind the scenes to get it up and running to the point where we're going through this with a new customer where they were deciding between us hosting and them hosting. Then they saw the time lapse and we could turn the system on in four days from contract signature, fully light screen, ready to run. Their internal IT team said it would be eight months. So some of these things are no brainers, right? It was a natural move for us to move to the cloud like this because nobody knows our tech better than us. And people are going to look at tech and think, oh, it's going to take a long time. I was on a call yesterday where we're in final stages with another client where they were claiming it was going to take 30 days to deploy sell this on their website, which is an absolute joke, right? But fortunately, that's the only thing they have to do. And we're doing the rest, right? So it does really help us move much more quickly to the value story. And it means that we can get potentially two or three bytes of the Apple from new customers in the same year that they've signed. If they're seeing that value more quickly, they're trusting us as a vendor more quickly, and then we can go in and start talking to them about other features and functionality that we have across the platform. Sorry. Maybe it's a question for you, possibly. What level of ARR would you expect to generate from that product? You know, from an ARR perspective, our starting points now in the pain, like a pain point, land and expand pain point, The number has grown to seven figures a year. So for us, we've proven that we can grow the customers. We know we can deliver value. So it's really just getting these things where we can bring in more new logos, make it more exciting as a software business and do it quickly. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Okay, I'm just going to rewind because I want to just come back to this before I talk so that I can talk about bot detection, non-human traffic. Very different world, much more data science. think well how does bot detection make any difference to the marketing world or how does bot detection make any difference to the forward world and I'll talk about that and the reason it's so interesting is because one of the points or proof points efficacy as analysts to retail websites are bots. And then you think about, well, the impact that has on the way that marketers measure what's happening on their websites. It's really impactful. So 30% of those visits to their websites are not actually human traffic. They might be paying for it still. There's a great deal of pay-per-click fraud out there, ad fraud, which is a different thing we'll talk about in a moment. But nonetheless, So for a criminal, I might buy a million breached accounts on dark web. And then I use those usernames and passwords to try and get into their bank accounts on a different website. That's how that kind of cycle of fraud typically happens. And the way they operationalize it at scale one after another until they find someone who's used the same password on their bank account as they used on their retail website or whichever website had their data breached. So if you want to think of that as a warning not to use the same password on your banking websites as you do elsewhere, please do take it that way. That is really a bad thing to do because as soon as a data breach happens, then your bank account is at risk. So let's scan forwards. And just one slide and then a video. Why have bots become an interesting thing? It's always a good question to ask. Certainly the reason why we got into CDA is because of those industry changes. So why is bots an interesting thing now? And actually, it's for a very different set of reasons. And most of it is technology-driven rather than market-driven, like the CDA changes around privacy. It's actually really simple to create bots. It's far too small to read, but essentially that's what's happening in that prompt over on the right-hand side. It will write you some of the most fantastic code, which just acts as a bot, which fires up the browser, visits the website, puts a username and password in, transfers some money out, and it can just do that all day, every day, hundreds of thousands of times a day. You scale it out to a server farm and you've got millions happening every day. You can just scale these things up so quickly that the barrier to entry buy software packages which are like fraud GPT. If you search up fraud GPT, it's a fraud package based around generative AI. It's all becoming so easy, which means that the websites our customers are the target. So therefore, the defenses need to be upped accordingly to battle off this non-human traffic. There are actually some other interesting things happening around the world around bots. Some of these malwares that you may have seen in the industry, like the Genesis marketplace, they are running on people's computers with malware. So it's the computers, the end user computers, your computers and mine, which are actually trying to break into the websites. running on end user devices. It makes them much harder to spot because it's not just one or two of these servers. It's everywhere. It's everyone's end user devices which are where the bots are running. So that means where they used to live in data centers, now these bots are everywhere. They're on our end user devices. They look just like real users. They are a browser. They log into a website. They have cookies. It looks just like you and I do when we visit our banking website. They behave just like those stolen credentials. They kind of browse around, show an interest in some special offer, and then they try and break it. So they hide in plain sight by looking just like regular users. And of course, what really is driving this is that this isn't small money anymore. These systems are scaling up to millions of dollars every year. So it's become organized crime. It's not just a little bit of money here and there. We are talking very big money. as to the fraud prevention folks. So with that backdrop, I'm just gonna show you how it works. So this video starts, actually I'll just fast forward a little bit. Yeah, actually that'll do. You probably know our background in fraud now is these use cases. They are all relevant. They haven't actually changed over the last couple of years. What has changed very much in what we're doing in fraud is how we talk about the product. We've really refined, especially this year, how we talk to people about what we do in fraud. It's very different in marketing fraud. In marketing, it's all about revenue, acquisition, how do we drive more traffic to our website. In fraud, it's all about cost. It's about managing that operational cost of fraud. Can't get rid of it all, so just managing it to it and deflect it. So these use cases, just as relevant as they always have been. So what I'm doing here, just to give you a bit of an idea of what behavioral biometrics, which is one of our core technologies, looks like in our Ford world, is going to First Direct and we are logging in. So this is a regular First Direct website. Sitting behind this is Celibris and our Ford detection. Now, I just need to pause here because there's a bunch to explain here. So this application is a case management tool. This is the sort of software that's used the world over by fraud investigators as a place to just work cases, suspicious activity, hacked accounts, other things which need investigating. They use these kind of workforce management tools, case management tools all the time. This is one which is just actually an open source product called The Hive. We've integrated it with Celebrus. And what's happened here is when we were tracking that visit to First Direct who this person is and they are behaving exactly like they normally do. We wouldn't normally create a case to say everything's good. A case is normally something bad, but for the purposes of demonstrating what the product does, it just helps to kind of walk that through. And all these little blue things here, these are all risk indicators in the parlance of risk indicators. So everything's good about that particular visit, it really was me logging into First Direct. What happens now in the video is that we change tap and we visit First Direct again but this time we change a few risk indicators so that it is a suspicious visit. So back on the website, new visitor, it's kind of tricky to identify it because it's exactly the same computer which is difficulty factor to it but nonetheless we're kind of logging in we've set behind the scenes a few things about this visitor that look really suspicious to Celerbus so we'll go ahead and try and log in meanwhile back over in Celerbus we have detected that this is a suspicious activity and the account has potentially been hacked and that's all done through behavioral biometrics that's the technology that underpins it as well as providing a bunch of information about the account that's been hacked and various other interesting things we provide to the forward analysis tool, a whole load of other things as well. So now let's, having figured out how to break into home page of First Direct first, and then we'll kind of pretend to be a normal user for a while, and then we'll go to the login page. We'll take some of those stolen credentials and put them in, username and password. If we break in, then we'll try and add a payee and transfer some money out to a new account. And it'll just keep doing that minute after minute, hour after hour, all day long. So what you're going to see when I click go is exactly that. That Selenium kicks up a browser. Now, But basically, it's doing exactly as I said, it's doing a series of things which are just hiding in plain sight. It's showing a bit of interest in car insurance, messing around with the mortgage calculator. Sooner or later, it gets to the login page. And over on the left here, this is simply a real-time log of what Celebris is seeing that visitor do. That data is being captured in real time. It's being evaluated in real time using behavioural biometrics. So in amongst all these detailed events of things that the visitors clicked on and where they navigated to, there's all these little biometric risk indicators saying that Celgus is evaluating this visitor and seeing if the machine learning says, you know, there's really something sketchy about this visitor. We need to raise a case in that case management tool. What the bot is doing now is trying to pretend like a regular user, you know, not So it's kind of taking a slightly laissez-faire attitude, working its way through the website, flapping around a bit like users generally do, and actually it's hit jackpot. So in this particular example, it's guessed the username and password, and it's got into the account, and now what it's doing is gonna add a payee and try and transfer some money. So at this point, the Forrester's really having a good time. They've found an account that they can compromise, out of that account. The actual break-in, though, was the hard bit. Those million different credentials, probably only 0.1% of them are actually valid for getting into any given bank, but they found them just through that automated process. Meanwhile, back over in the Hive, in our case management tool, it's correctly spotted that an account has been hacked. And rather like I was saying with CEA, we often don't talk about celebrants or show celebrants much. What we talk about is the website, first direct, Those are the things that the customer really cares about. The fact that there's a bunch of clever stuff in the middle, we're figuring it all out, is neither here nor there. What actually matters is what fraud investigators are going to see, and that's the case management tool. They're going to see that an account has been compromised. And in many of the banks that we deal with, they're quite small teams. You'd think there's kind of 100 or 150 people dealing with fraud. That's really not the case. Often it's just two or three people. So if you bury them, That's it. CDI bot detection. Any questions? Anything else you'd like me to move through here? Just a broader question around when you announced what used to be the FTP. I think you talked about finding partners in fraud management software. It looks like you've hooked into... obviously the signals that your software generates, you know, they're sort of not useless, but they use it without, you know, sort of decisioning or actioning type software attached to it. So I'm just wondering kind of how is that sort of ecosystem build out and perhaps that new customer you've won, like, you know, how does it work? Just curious. Yeah, so for those of you virtually, just to hear the question was more around like the vendor partner network with fraud and what that's shaping up like in organizations. It's going to sound a bit cruel, I suppose, but we don't care so much. Because what we found is it, as we've evolved, and Ant kind of alluded to, we've really evolved our pitch even more so going into this year as Circle, who presented a couple of years ago at our Capital Markets Day, has gotten really engaged with customers. It varies so much from customer to customer, what they're using internally, that it more matters about what we do and showing them things like this, bringing it to life in a more end-to-end scenario. They're able to paint the picture for us. So we do have some vendor partners. We have folks that we continue to work with, like Quantexa. We have some others in the background that we're building and we're exploring selling together with, and that will always continue to turn up. But we're not waiting on that. For us, the platform and the data that we can provide, it's working. Even in the spot detection, which is live, I think, in four clients right now, which for us is a lot in a short period of time since launch, for those of you that have followed us for a long time. They're seeing some pretty alarming results. upwards of 30% of their traffic being non-human. For marketers, where they're potentially paying Google advertising or paying their agencies millions of dollars for some of that traffic, that's a significant return on investment just from turning our platform on because it gives them all the data they need to prove that the traffic's invalid and get various refunds or rebates or whatever the case may be from that. So for us, it's really interesting. We were with a head of fraud recently in one of our banks. Um, and when, when he came into the room, he did not ask who we integrate with or anything like that. And he goes, I'm gonna have two questions for you that I care about. One, can you do this in the, in real time in the moment, which that just exhibited. So we showed him that he goes, great. He's like, and can I actually get the data? Because a lot of the platforms out there are black boxes. And when the environment's moving so quickly, when things are changing so quickly, a black box isn't helpful. if what's inside that box isn't looking in the right places, right? Because it may not pick up that that was just the same exact browser on the same exact machine suddenly taken over by a fraudster. There are so many nuances to those things with how quick that moves. And the minute something gets published, fraudsters move on to doing something else. So you're in a constant game of catch up if you try to focus on that. It's a bit more long-winded, but I wanted to cover a few of those points because we are expanding partnerships. We're exploring that. We have consulting partners as well that we're working with in the fraud space, and we'll continue to do that. But for us, partnerships now, it's about lead gen. It's about having something that we can sell and bring to market together. It's not just a handshake to throw those next to each other, right? So when we announce formal partnerships, it'll be because there's formal business value use cases that we're selling in the market. The rest will just show up as logos on our website or in some of the collateral or in some of the videos or in some of the demonstrations that we publish with that, if that helps to make sense. But you're agnostic to which sort of case of fraud management?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

What you're seeing here with Hive, it kind of goes back to the selling. It's a really good example of what Ant and team have done to support sales. Because again, as we're selling direct, customers want to see end to end more. They don't just want to see the data. Because sometimes, unless you're really data savvy and you live and breathe it all day, you might wonder how you're going to use it. Or it might feel overwhelming. So we've started to build these very specific demos that can be repeated by the sales team. And the sales team can play this video and can explain it today to you. And the point being is it shows end-to-end value. It shows the data coming to life. It helps people understand what that great tech that Selvers has does. But to Anne's point, We don't sell the tech. We're now selling the value and the pain point, right? And we're showing how it can be done. We're not going in and tooting our own horn to talk about how great all the tech is that does it, right? Because then all we're doing is pontificating what we need to be selling, right? So it's a fundamental difference. But I love this example because it shows you some of the things that Anthem team have innovated on, thinking outside the box on how we sell a value story of what we do in product. Because the minute we show that to anybody in the product department, they get it. We don't need to worry about their lingo because they will talk. The minute they see this, they just start talking. Our sales decks, we don't have them. We have like three slides that we keep just in case. We go straight into the product showing things like this just to get them up and running. Because candidly, when we talk to people, if I was to sit you down for a 40-minute sales call and I start to tell you all the things we do, you're going to think I'm lying. Because you're going to think it's black magic or it's smoke and mirrors. You're not going to believe that it can do that. But the fact that we can demo it on the customer's website, show them what it would look like if they deployed it tomorrow, using all the fancy things that Ant and team have built over the years. It's a really powerful statement. So we don't have sales decks anymore. We don't use them. We just go straight into conversation. We listen. We show them the tech. We see what resonates. stage would presumably be two-factor authentication. Does that mean they then focus less on this because that removes that security risk? So two-factor authentication introduces friction into the customer journey and that applies just as much to retail websites as a good example. So in Europe we have 3DS which is where you see the kind of in-screen pop up saying kind of prove this on your phone. As an example, 3DS is not used in the US at all because it introduces too much friction in the customer journey. Customers drop out. Revenue is more important than fraud. You don't have to think of it as that trade-off. And the consequence of that is that actually there's a middle ground which Celibus enables, which is which accounts have been compromised, or even do something more selective. So where there is clearly an account in jeopardy, then use 3DS for that point in time. So rather than pushing everyone through that friction, just take those very high risk situations and put them through it. It provides a much more tailored approach to that kind of risk. And that means you can actually adjust that threshold depending on they're trying to drive down forward, that will cost revenue. It will push people away because they haven't got their phone to hand when they're checking out, whatever that kind of situation is. But they can still push down forward, but taking that kind of consequence of lowering revenue. If the push from the business is to get more revenue and to kind of decipher many fraud consequences, then that threshold can go up and they can make that decision. dynamic way. It also highlights some elements of the platform that we didn't really start to promote a ton because we were behind partners solely until we launched CX Vault as an experience changing capability in the platform. So sellers can intervene. So if we see something like this the next one right so there's there's several things you can do with sellers that you'll see us talking a lot more about but it's it's that intervention capability and fraud that's quite interesting because we can go end to end we can report it we can provide the data to verify why it was happening and as the customer gets comfortable with the results and the accuracy of that as they deploy it they can then start to do things with it right within There was a LinkedIn post not too long ago that if you follow us on LinkedIn, if you haven't, we shared the heck out of it because it was someone's mother that ran into a situation where her account got intervened with as she was buying a home. And it blocked the money transfer that had been hijacked and saved her hard-earned money that she would not have seen ever again. Because once it's gone on a wire transfer, It's gone. So, you know, the use of Selliver's data and some of our vendor partners, back to your question, Kai, enabled the ability to stop that transit. Yes. Can you give a sense of some of the signals that were being picked up? How has that changed over the last year or two? And the answer is it will carry on growing that out. So what we originally started with is a pretty rich set of indicators. The sorts of things which you might think of are things like where someone's coming from in the world, their geolocation, things like the kind of device they're using. And of course, these things do evolve over time. We buy new phones, we buy new laptops, we get new laptops and so on. So the risk indicators do change, and actually the data we collect does change as well. So we have support for kind of pencils, like on tablets, and really granular biometric data. But these things are all indicative of how someone uses a device. So, for example, a piece of data, one data point which is incredibly predictive, scams, is the person on a call when they're doing a money transfer. Because in almost all scams, very persuasive person saying, yeah, I'm with your bank. Just kind of go here and you're going to get a code sent to your phone in a moment, coming back to the FAA. Just take that code and put it into the website. They've been coached through it. So actually, if they're on a call, that's a really predictive data point of whether a scam is in flight at the moment in time. So we added a call status information, the kind of network that a mobile phone connects information. Fraudsters try to hide where they're coming from by changing these things. So all of these sorts of data points gradually evolve over time as we learn more about how fraudsters work and how we can collect the right data to kind of subvert or deflect what they're trying to do. So a lot of biometric data is the short answer and quite low level granular data which helps us understand the device and how it's being used and what the visitor is doing The joke that happens in my household, which my wife will love it, I'm saying this publicly in half the market today, is that had Ticketmaster, had Celebrist, fans would have gotten more Taylor Swift tickets. So that's the reality of it because we would have identified that those weren't people and we would have stopped that from happening. The opposite to that is I can't get to one of the particular ticket sites called AXS because it's convinced I'm a bot. So while we try to tee up the half-working video, I'll just give you a bit of a backdrop. This is the last part of our agenda, and then we'll just open the floor for questions and obviously to hang out in the building room afterwards as well. So this is a gentleman named Lee Pitu at Merck. They'll introduce themselves here in a moment on the black screen for those of you in the room. Those of you on the devices at home, you'll see the video just fine. And with Merkle, we've launched, and they came to us actually. And I've got a long history with Merkle. Years and years and years ago, I trained the web analytics team like 15, 18 years ago. They've gone a long way. Got thousands of customers around the globe. They were acquired by Dentsu, one of the largest global agencies in the world. And they're out on the forefront trying to help clients better manage and measure and optimize their ad spend and their marketing investments in a world where all of these cookies are falling apart and going away. So they were quite intrigued by the Selliverse software and they, with us, have jointly built a program that you'll see a lot of marketing about coming. This is the first time we're talking about it publicly. this signals, Leo walked through, he's going to give you a bit of an intro and background on him. He's going to talk a bit about their client challenges and sort of what led them to Celebris. He's going to talk a little bit about what intrigued them about Celebris. He'll talk a little bit about the offering and then he'll wrap up and talk a little bit about the vehicles as well that we're going after and which ones are drawn. But we're excited about this because we think this is kind of the bedrock of what we want to do with solution integration partners. We want to find Something that they're quite good at, where they're the strategic advisor for brands. Bring our software in as part of that story and let them go sell it with us there at the table to help explain the tech, demonstrate it like you've seen it do today. But ultimately let them build an entire service program around it. So for us, it's great exposure. It's obviously a great opportunity for us to sell software, which at this point, I hope you understand is all we're trying to do. I think I said it like 30 times today. Um, and ultimately it gives them the ability to be profitable while allowing us to expand without having to scale up a massive services business. Um, because they can be the ones putting the wrapper around everything, get helping clients get value from Sellebris. And all we have to do is just keep the lights on. So that it's kind of the benchmark of where we're going. And we mentioned some other ones in the, in the update, um, on Monday that went live like CX forward. they're a great example of a regional partner that specializes in a very specific area they do decision so like the pegas the adobes and the sales forces of the world helping with this cross-channel decisioning to pick what you see and where you see it based on the devices that you're using what they know about right and so for them they're packaging up sellers as the gap uh that's myth the part that's missing which is the data piece throughout Europe and APAC for many years that were getting up and running on some of the latest and greatest and revamping some of their offerings. And then you'll see some of the large global players like Merkle entering the mix as well with very specific offers. And again, it's kind of like having another sales team without having to invest in another sales team. So it's a win-win. We're really excited. I love the way Merkle thinks about the world. And so I think I've probably said enough and we'll just let Lee tell you.

Hello, everyone. My name's Lee Fitzhugh. I'm from Merkle. I've been with Merkle now for 12 years. I've worked in the industry for 27 years. My role at Merkle is to head up a capability which we call Data-O-Matic. It's quite nice. So what we do is we work with brands to help them collect, create, consolidate their customer data. We then expose that data to various different marketing technologies. And then ultimately then our clients then use that marketing technology to then deliver compelling experiences for their customers. In terms of Merkle, we are part of the Dentsu group. Dentsu are one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. We're the largest agency in Japan and we're the fifth largest advertising agency network worldwide. From a Merkle perspective, there's a singular sentence that describes what we do. It's a little bit of a tongue twister, but we connect, create and curate intelligent experiences that empower individuals, build brands and transform businesses. So if you want a single sentence to describe what we do, that's it. What we do at a umbrella level is we help brands go through their data and digital transformations. And ultimately that's around delivering a customer experience transformation. Now that's a really interesting topic because that's obviously brands evolving and changing to deliver what's best for their customers. And that's in an environment where today in 2023, The pace of change is greater than ever before. Business stuff always had to change, but at the moment, the pace of that change is accelerating. If we think about some of the things that have been going on in the world recently, we had the COVID pandemic, we had the Ukraine-Russia war, and then recently we had the explosion around generative AI, which everybody's talking about. So these things that happen at a macro level, meaning that organizations, brands are having to change all the time with that. And what we do is we work with those brands to try and adapt through that and ultimately make sure they stay very relevant with their customers. As I mentioned, one of the key things here is around customer experience. I think this is really critical. So some really interesting stats that really perhaps amplify why customer experience is so important. There was a recent study that suggests that 73% of consumers agree that if they have a great customer experience, it helps their buying decisions. And actually, they'll be willing to pay more, as much as 7% to 16% more as a premium on the price, because the fact they feel so connected and engaged with that brand. So I think that's huge. However, here's the other thing that I think is really interesting there. 32%, so almost a third of consumers, will walk away from a brand they love if they have one bad experience. So that's why this is so important that organizations get this right. They go through the right data and digital transformations, and they're constantly evolving to deliver those great customer experiences. The last thing I'll just say on this, just to build on that point around speed of change and having to respond to change, 40% of CMOs think the most significant challenge right now is understanding the difference between temporary and permanent shifts in consumer behaviour. And a really key and important way that brands can then make sure they're mitigating against that is understanding, knowing their customers and understand their change in behaviour. Well, I think that then goes back to what is it we're trying to solve for our customers and brands. So what we're trying to do there, so this is going a little bit deeper on that theme I mentioned a moment ago around data transformation and digital transformation. We speak to lots of brands and they're in a situation where They perhaps have limited first party data. Their first party data is perhaps not connected well enough. It's not of the right quality. And ultimately what that's driving is that customer knowledge. So we can see that for that particular customer struggle, Celibus can help us to collect that data at scale. and actually start to build up that customer knowledge and also build that first party data asset, either because there's a huge gap and it needs to be built up from the ground up or to make sure that that first party data asset is constantly being refreshed, maintained and scaled. I think the next area is around knowledge of customers from a recognition perspective. So I guess these are the two sort of key foundations of identity, if you like. It's how much you know about your customers and then your ability to recognize customers, we should obviously then lead into addressability. So we see lots of challenges where there's a process where visitors will come to brands and their digital assets. At the beginning, they may be unknown. There's a path to then drive them to a situation where they are known, but it's about optimizing that journey. It's about making sure that we can get to that known state as quickly as possible. and break down all the barriers along the way. And there's some key facets that I'll come on to shortly within the syllabus technology that certainly help that. The next thing that we're seeing is the fact that to actually create a great customer experience, there's a little bit of what's old is new here. So if you think about going back quite a long time now, there used to be a situation where consumers would go and buy perhaps a much smaller shop. In those days, it would be a shop because the websites and online was not an option, wasn't available. And when you go to buy in that shop, you would have a real one-to-one relationship with that shopkeeper. That shopkeeper would know you by name. They'd perhaps know some of your buying habits. They'd know some of your buying traits. And that would actually feel like a really great personal experience with a human being. Fast forward to 2023, we would like to now mimic that type of customer experience, the depth of that customer experience. When you're speaking to a brand and feeling like you've got that one-to-one experience, But we now need to do that at scale and obviously in a digital environment. So that's where by using the data that we're collecting, using technology like Celebrus, we can actually feed that into activation tools and decision tools that can look at all the different permutations of products, offers, content, and just serve that up in a way that it feels really personal, really connected to you as an individual. So that's really key. And I guess the last facet really here is measurement, which is super important. So as we drive brands forward to creating better customer experiences, driving outcomes, it's really important we can measure that accurately. And with really well-connected data and identity that we can collect through these type of tools and solutions, we can get more direct attribution and more accurate measurement. So I think this is kind of really an extension really of how we can start to hit some of the gaps that we have in the market today and some of the customer struggles, but using technology such as others. As I've mentioned, ultimately what we're trying to do is drive outcomes for the brands that we're working with. So we want to drive outcomes like greater understanding of our brand's customers. We want to drive outcomes around orchestrating timely, relevant experiences. And we want to help our brands drive greater engagement with their customers. So we've come up with this offering that we're calling CXM Signals. So foundationally, customer experience management. So that term and that theme that I've mentioned a few times now. We've honed in on signals. It's not the only facet of this solution, but those signals are really key because it's those signals in customers' behavior and how they interact with brands that allow us to then trigger and curate those really great and compelling experiences. So really what CXM Signals is bringing together is the Sellevus technology and the Merkle services. And really where we see those two things intersecting is the Merkle services trying to then very quickly and rapidly deliver those priority use cases that ultimately drive the outcomes that I already mentioned. If we take that down a level, Already spoke about the fact that one of the key facets of CXM Signals is how can brands collect first party data and identity and that's all about informing and driving these personalized experiences. It's also about maximizing customer identity so that's going to be a key facet of CXM Signals, allowing brands to really recognize customers from known to unknown, as I already mentioned, and optimize and accelerate that process. and maximizing customer knowledge and customer memory. I think that's a term that you and I have used before, and I think that's really important. It's allowing brands to remember their customers in an intelligent way so that they can then talk to them and really make sure that they feel that affinity with the brand. So that's super important. So ultimately, you know, that's coming together to drive the experiences. The other thing that's super important is most of the brands we're working with nowadays are not working with a blank sheet of paper. So they've already invested in some level of technology to support what they're doing in this space. The challenge there is that in order to maximize the value from those tools and those technologies, you need to be feeding them with the right level of quality curated data. So I think that's another way that CXM Signals can help ground the series, really feeding, assisting, whether it's data platforms or marketing technology or ad tech, serving up the right data to those in a really timely manner. The other thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet, but I think it's super important is it's all about outcomes. It's speed to value. It's delivering tangible business outcomes, priority KPIs as fast as possible. And I think there's some facets of this solution. So again, what Celerbus can do out of the box and then the power of the Merkle services and our expertise to really help brands to get to that speed to value fast. Some of the things that I think are super important in terms of the syllabus technology there are the tagging-free capability. So that really allows us to deploy the technology in a brand's digital environment across their websites and apps really quickly. There's out-of-the-box functionality that allows us to then get really close to those outcomes and those use cases. There's the true real-time capability to ensure the fact that the customer data is available in the moment. In the moment is super important because if you're trying to create those compelling experiences, the data needs to be available to create those experiences right here, right now, while I'm in great gauging with the brand. And then I've already touched on how important decision is at the moment. So the fact that you've got that marketing brain so that you can mimic that one-to-one interaction, even though in reality, It's something that you're doing at scale to many, many customers. We see that the Celerbus out-of-the-box functionality around decisioning and those rules-based decisions is a real kind of exciting way to get into that particular objective. And then the other thing that's, I think, super important is the fact that within this solution, we can work with brands or we can surface personalized content for both consented and non-consented customers. This is huge because obviously for consented customers, much easier to do, but actually there's some really neat technology within Celeris tool that allows us to also in a very compliant way, actually serve content that's relevant to the consumer and it's non-invasive, doesn't breach any compliance, but actually means that even those customers feel like they're getting a personalized experience, which I think is super important. Sure, so I'll talk about verticals, but we've really started to think about how we could segment brands into genres, if you like. So I think the most important genre, I think where we can perhaps get the most traction, where we'd focus our priority is a genre that we call visit-based. So these are brands where their consumers will visit them to make a purchase. So I'm thinking retail, hospitality, travel, automotive. I think within that genre, retail is obviously an area that we're super interested in. We might focus, but I think that whole visit-based genre is interesting. This is a genre where these brands, consumers will potentially buy a mix of products. I think this is a genre where these customers will purchase when they need something. So we need to pick up on those behaviours. I think this is a genre where customers may be anonymous or known, and it's really important, as I've already mentioned, that we can take those consumers on that journey from anonymous to known in the most effective and optimal way. And I think there's a big drive here to continuously drive loyalty and provide opportunities for these customers, these brands, to repurchase, cross-sell, up-sell. So I think there's lots of scope for us within CXM Signals to really drive some great outcomes and really drive some business value here, not only for the brands, but obviously by definition, if we're making the customer experience more compelling for the brand's consumers, you know, there's a value exchange there and they get a greater experience. I think thereafter, I think, you know, we're really excited about where we can take the journey next. So I don't know, you know, how quickly we will really track that visit-based genre initially focusing on retail. Thereafter, I think we can start to think about what we call term-based customers. So this is where brands, consumers are buying products on terms. And this is your classic financial services, telcos, media, where there's renewals. Again, it's all about making sure that we can drive lifetime value. And I know this is an area where Celebrus have had some great success in the past. And from a Merkle, Celebrus and CXM Signals perspective,

know we'd look we'd love to actually um make sure we're giving that to your attention as well so lee was going to wrap up and we'll share the video out with everybody for some reason the tv did not like the video that it plays on the laptop just fine um and what he was going to wrap up with was just talking through some of the verticals that we've gone after initially From a Merkle perspective, they're very strong in retail. So that was very intriguing for us because we've got some fantastic retail customers, some that have been public. Like last year, we had Barry do a presentation on our behalf as well about the great things they've been doing with data. And that's a vertical we want to grow very quickly. So that's the first step is retail. Then finance. concentration. The nice thing is that we actually came to find out, as we explored, that we had several joint customers, whether that was through Merkle or whether it was through Density Agency, who's doing the media buying for several of our customers. So it's been a fast-moving target. It started a few months back, and we started getting in front of clients within a couple weeks of meeting each other. So it was, again, very quick to value in terms of, let's go sell this and and start delivering value instead of just sitting in a room talking about it. And then from there, you'll see some formal launches and things like that after Christmas because we start to get into kind of a slow time right now. So we'll launch it sometime in January. But with that, we do have some questions. And so, Ash, maybe we just start with you since we're probably tired of hearing. So the first one was that there's been a significant shift in product and, most notably, to as well let's see um so yeah on the revenue and the breakdown so the question is really around the notes in the um results where we break down our revenue by type of revenue stream to license or support maintenance but we also break it down by geography as well and the question here is about the increase in the us and so the six million i was referring to which is the deal that's set from march 31st into this financial year and that was an income year to year in terms of revenue by geography, that's the reason for the increase in the U.S. revenues. It's that $6 million or so, the larger part of which was hardware. Excellent. Thank you, Ash. I believe there was another one here for you. I can help you with this one as well, but considering the projected high cash balance at year end, including the property sale, are you looking at any acquisition However, what we will do is continue to build up the cash balance for a number of reasons. So just to talk about how the cash is used, as I said, probably around 10 million or so is effectively working capital. The balance at the period end was just under 15 million. Obviously, we have a high degree of trade debtors and creditors related to the transaction that I referred to. So you could say effectively a normalised cash balance, if you like, if anything is normal these days. make more profits and generate more cash. And that will be retained by the company. Obviously, we have a dividend that is aggressive and we will continue with that. However, as we put in our statement and thought we'd go into a bit more detail about this, we are going to be a little bit more proactive around our M&A efforts. So over the last couple of years, we have added a number of incoming opportunities. We have very precise criteria. These are criteria tight criteria could take 12, 18, 24 months or so. And just to provide some color on sort of the profile, we have in mind what we would be looking for. And for us, it's an intellectual property acquisition to add more features to the platform. There are several discussions that we've had, the three of us, as well as our head of engineering, about sort of where to take the product. You're starting to see a lot of more modular elements of the product that someone can take on consider the rest of the platform you can expect to see that as a consistent driver of where we're going and there's some things it won't halt our innovation we will continue to build we'll continue to innovate um so we're not going to wait to find something but as we're searching we know what we're looking for it would be a bolt-on technology capability to the platform where buying it made more sense than building it candidly and a lot of it as you might suspect given what ant has shared today will be on the data activation side of things um you know how you use sort of financial engineering purposes. It will be technology. It may have a customer list. And we anticipate then having integrated that into the service platform, that that's an opportunity for upsell to existing customers. And it's also an opportunity to give a broader offering to new customers as well. So in terms of payback, if we were going to sum the thoughts around that, it's not going to be only decreed from day one, but payback probably somewhere between 18 to 24 months time. Are you sort of valuation multiples that you'd be looking at? We have a profile that we've agreed to at board level in one of our board meetings recently that we're utilizing as acquisition if it makes it makes good sense for the business yes sorry did you want to come no no no just a quick one around sort of employee incentivization and ar growth and i think um you mentioned that your direct sales people are i think sort of furlough rates maybe of 20 percent growth and i think your your own altitude is sort of 15 to 20 high 20s yeah um Just curious, I think in the last six, 12 months, you know, you've been tracking slightly below that sort of, you know, what would you say were the main reasons? And secondly, what's missing maybe from a headcount perspective or other to kind of get back to these sort of levels? And then as a follow on, I think you're And I'm not sure the share based comp part is relatively small. I think in the share dilution is relatively small, which I guess some people, it's a good thing, but in terms of would it not make sense maybe to incentivize more people sort of maybe at sort of lower down levels to take part in the share price. So I'll cover some of that. on here. We've had some big jumps in our arms since joining and started at 10.6. So we've got a good jump in that revenue and that is the focus for the business. I think more importantly, at the start of this year, we realized mission comes from. So they're not incentivized to sell services, etc. And their escalators are based on a number of new logos in a given year. So we kind of force them to think differently about how they're selling. Our partner teams are incentivized to generate leads that turn into deals for the sales team. Our marketing team is incentivized on leads. So that could go on and on and on. But we've gone through the business to make sure that everything is focused on driving sales from whatever they can control. and then tying that to the overall company's success as well inherently in our ability to hit the expected results and market expectations. Now, one of the things that we did a couple of years ago as well from a board level with Hashnize, we reinstituted a clearer framework for share options. So we actually have done what you've asked, which is incentive So we have a much more formal plan. And we've also brought on new people who have been incentivized right out of the gate with share options as well. So we're utilizing that as best we can, obviously, within the parameters of what we are allowed to do from a dilution perspective. And that's why the share buyback program is so important to try to offset some of that. And as we're able to, we will continue to do that. No, but I'll just broaden it out a little bit, because what you're talking about, Kai, is sort of performance of the individuals and the team within the group. So everything that Bill described is also supported by the changes we've made over the last couple of years in terms of new systems and efficiencies. What we haven't talked about today, but we have talked about in the past, is a cultural change we'll be putting in place as well in terms of making this a much more empowered, accountable organisation, about the clarity of role definition in people's roles across the organisation, of course, Right now, the focus is very much on the front end, and that's where we're investing in terms of sales and marketing and customer success. However, behind that, we also need to ensure that there's good scalability around delivery as well. So the reorganizations we've done and structured have been across all departments of the group. And in terms of performance and delivery, yes, share options are part of it, bonuses across the organization. Flexibility of working is really important. That's something we've put in place through hybrid working and also the benefits package. We've taken a fresh look at all of that and we've revamped everything around that as well. So these are really all important aspects in terms of recruitment, retention and ultimately performance as well. Excellent. So a couple of questions from here. Are your clients ready or reluctant to commit 100% to cloud? There's always going to be some reluctance from certain brands, but to be honest, a lot of marketing technology has been thought first for a really long time. So like the brands that we compete with, like Atelium or Adobe on the, on the marketing side, as an example, or BioCatch on the, or BehaviorSec on the fraud side, they're all third-party cloud-based applications. So it's not new. And ultimately, even though we're offering cloud as the primary, it's flow into your internal environment so that you can use it. So, you know, we think it's a strong offering, but we also, from what we've seen in the market with the new business, we've posed an existing customer into the business and built out that team. So we'll continue to do what it takes to keep a level of comfort in our customers. And that is talked about on a monthly basis, if not weekly, internally at the management team to ensure that we're constantly ahead of the curve in that capability. Another question, because visitor data is anonymous, can you aggregate data and statistics from your multiple customers and industry verticals and resell it? The simple answer to that is no. Because Doing so would infringe upon our first party nature and the story we tell. Now, that being said, we have customers that have chosen to opt in to subscribing to our machine learning models. Why is that important? Because as they're using those, they get the benefits of updates to those models that may be as a result of other things that customers have done with those models. So it has nothing to do with any data sharing. None of the data ever mixes. for a few years now and is live at almost every account these days. Those types of enhancements we are utilizing, kind of shared knowledge. And we're also exploring. We've had clients ask. They want to join kind of committees with each other to knowledge share. And that's obviously something we're happy to bridge and allow them to do whatever they'd like. It's their data. It's their system. But you won't see us doing any kind of data sharing or anything like that because it's just rich. So one direction I think which is being explored at the moment as the government regulation level, particularly around some of the fraud, financial crime institutions in the UK, SIPAS and the Payments Association, is how data sharing could be a future weapon So that's not there today, and there's obviously all sorts of concerns from a privacy perspective, but I think over the next year or two that could well come to fruition, and exactly what that would look like remains to be seen. from your accounts then they could get insights which they didn't have access to before it's a very sensitive area this so i don't expect it to happen quickly and it's certainly not happening today but i think in the financial time world data sharing is almost inevitable and that will become a thing as the only real practical way to kind of help scale out so we got time for one more question we'll do it from the room because we just read through several here

With your modest aim of conquering the world, is the biggest obstacle that companies already have something they think can do this already and don't think they need you or just getting in front of those companies?

have PR, right? We didn't have kind of the brand identity sorted. We didn't have a direct sales team, right? So there's a lot of things that had to be done. We didn't have systems, you know, the things that Ash was talking about earlier to help us actually manage the business that is moving that quickly, right? To ensure everything can be, is visible, everything's measured and accountable. So a lot of those building blocks had to be put in place and we had to play catch up on a lot of the branding, simplifying the name, helps massively. People are starting to notice all of this. You know, we're finding people reaching out to us, the marketing, the PR. We've got a subject matter expert sort of panel, which includes Ant and others who are getting published every other week now in various journals and Forbes and various articles, people like Circle, etc. And it all seems to be building a groundswell. Because what we're finding is once we get introduced to a company one way or another, we have a very powerful conversation with them. And then from there, Where it might go awry is we do find someone who thinks they have it solved for. And there's always going to be that. A lot of the conversations where we've been successful are the ones where they failed trying to do it and have accepted that the current way of working isn't going to get it done. And it's finding those organizations. But it's not easy. It's difficult to market in today's marketplace with all the compliance challenges around the globe. It's a little looser in the US. So we've put a lot of emphasis in that and it's working. It's building a robust pipeline. I'm really thrilled with where the sales team's gotten and how they message and how they sell. So we really just need to get them in more rooms. And that's ultimately the goal. And that's where we continue to make investments. And we have some hires planned in the second half, as Ash alluded to, to set up for next year's growth so that we can continue to drive that forward. All right. Well, I think that brings us to time. remote thank you for taking the time apologies for the video issue but like i said that will get published online anyways and you can see that in all of its glory the marketing team just so they appreciate watching it and with that i think i throw it back for the final words coming up for me

That's great. Thank you very much indeed to the team from Solaris Technologies PLC. I will shortly now redirect investors online to provide you with their feedback. So if I could ask you please not to close this session. If you could please provide the companies your feedback, I'm sure that'd be mostly received. I'm part of the management team of Solaris Technologies PLC. I'd like to thank you for attending today's Capital Markets Day and good afternoon to you all.