Celebrus Technologies plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Cerebrus Technologies PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in the Sononi mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Bill Bruno, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon. And thank you, Lily. I appreciate it. And thank you, everybody, for taking the time today to walk through our financial results from this previous financial year that ended in March. With me, I've got Ash Mehta, our CFO, and my partner in crime. And we'll walk you through an overview of the business, but More importantly, we want to make sure that everyone gets any questions that you might have answered. So please feel free to utilize that Q&A tab. I'm monitoring it right here. So as we get through the content, we'll make sure that we try to get through as many of those questions as we possibly can. So please make use of those. And I think just a starter to kick things off. It was a fantastic year for our business. It marked the end of a lot of the restructuring and transition that we had as a business as we moved to being a pure place software sales business with a primary deployment model of what we call Selliverse Cloud or a single tenant private cloud instance for our customers. But I'd be remiss if I didn't just kick things off. And I hope some of them are listening. But the team that we've built and the team that's with us on this journey put an incredible amount of work into the business in this past year, continued to put work in such that we've started this current financial year with some good momentum. And I'm just very proud of the team and very humbled by how much effort people have put in and the passion that our team is showing for the business and also really appreciative of the support from our investor base as well as Ash and I are nearing three years on the roll now. And it's been a great journey and a very supportive one from the market as well. And we very much appreciate that. But with that, Ash, why don't we jump in, jump over to the operational highlights, if you don't mind. We've got the forward-looking statements, et cetera. I'm sure everybody's comfortable with those, but The main thing for us is the Celibris platform, and I'm not going to go too long-winded on this yet because there are actually a subset of slides in today's deck where I'll walk through what that looks like and what a typical deployment looks like, and we'll share a few stories as well. But we've invested significantly in the Celibris platform. We're very fortunate to have an unbelievable product and engineering team that continues to release two new major updates a year. I'll be very honest with you. A lot of our competitors barely get one update out a year and we get two updates and it's not just surface level updates. It's new features and functionality. In the past year and a half, we've rolled out a significant amount of innovation around what you'd broadly categorize as analytics. We've brought more artificial intelligence, machine learning to the product in the form of our bot detection models and a few others that we've worked on with customers. But it really has been a focus of ours. And a lot of that has been driven by the transformation we've been on as a business. As we decided to stand up a direct sales staff, build a formal global marketing team, and really start to bring Celebris into the spotlight, We knew that the platform was going to be asked to do more by our customers, that we were going to find areas of opportunity to to build not only new features and functionality, but also to grow and upsell our relationships with existing customers. And that really brings me to the key customer wins as we look at our verticals now, which are are much more dispersed. So financial services, insurance, health care in the U.S., travel and hospitality and retail. We now have bellwether clients in each one of those categories. So as an example, four of the top 10 global banks, one of the largest insurers in the US, one of the largest healthcare providers in the US, a top two airline to name a few. And these are really helping us sort of evolve and continue our investment into sales and marketing. We stood up a direct sales staff about a year and a half, almost two years ago. In this previous financial year that we're reporting on today, we stood up a customer success team to help really drive the relationships and the growth and partner with our professional services business to make sure that every customer is happy, feeling like they're getting the support they need from us. And also equally as important, understanding all the things they could be doing with Celebris as we transition to more of a land and expand sales approach. That investment in sales and marketing continues. We've now specialized our sales team by industry vertical. So across the verticals that I mentioned, finance, health care, insurance, etc., We've also brought on a new SVP of global marketing recently to the business as well to help us take that to the next level and really partner with sales on some of the initiatives that we have going. From a partner perspective, partners continue to be important to our business, but they're sell with partners. We have reseller arrangements, but even in those reseller arrangements, we're engaging directly with the partner and ultimately the end client or the prospect to make sure that our platform is being positioned appropriately, that clients are getting value. And just being customer first in our mentality, to be quite frank about it. But those partnerships have kind of taken multiple formats now. The first is the one that we've historically made use of, which are technology partnerships. Places where we land celebrous data to add even more value to the brands that we work with. Partnerships like PyGo. or Teradata or Salesforce or Snowflake or Databricks and several others. The other set of partners are to help us set up for scale, and it's our solution integrator partners. And so these are partners like a Merkle, like an Accenture, and some of our other niche partners in both the US and in Europe. Speaking of people, we also continue to invest heavily into our people and how there's been a significant investment from an HR perspective globally to make sure that we're ultimately building the right environments for our people, supporting them, helping them grow, putting training programs in place to help further develop people's roles within the business or develop them into higher tiers of management. We really want the culture to be empowered, and that's been a goal for Ash, myself, and our leadership team to make sure that everything that we do is one, customer first, and two, designed around creating opportunity for those customers and our people. And I'm happy to report that from a transition restructure perspective, With the name change, that was kind of the icing on the cake, if you will. That was the last step. And so as a business, we've moved into execution. That's not to say that we're not making changes. We're not making adjustments. But for those of you that are Formula One fans, the analogy that I've used is you don't put on a set of tires and they're not automatically in the zone, right? Now we're just making tweaks to the car at this point to make sure that we're maximizing performance globally and that we're taking advantage of the opportunity in front of us. So that's just a bit of a recap. operationally, but Ash, I'll throw it to you to talk through some of the financials.

Yeah, thanks, Bill. So let me go through some of the financial highlights, and then in subsequent slides, I'll go through some of these points in a little bit more detail. But the key highlights, obviously, ARR is a very important metric for us, and that's one that we drive through all of what we do through the organization, whether it's our sales team or our customer success team or our professional services team. That's gone up just under 21% to 20.2 million. In terms of the path that that is on, then three years ago, that number was 10.6 million. So quite significant growth over the last three years. And another submetric we use is what percentage of software revenues is ARR. And that's now gone up to 92% from 89% last year. And the balance of that is the services revenues that we have in terms of service implementations and upgrades. Revenue was up very significantly, up to 32.6 million, and I'll talk about that in a bit more detail later. But within that, a key component is the software revenues. So whilst the revenues as a whole, as a headline revenues, will fluctuate period to period because of hardware sales and revenues, the thing to look at is really the software revenues, and those also were up by a healthy 14.7%. Gross profit was slightly lower than last year, 52.7%, but that's due to the higher level this year of low margin hardware revenues. And so within our revenues, you'll see that there is this hardware. It relates principally to some on-premise installation customers that we have. We have made a lot of effort over the last three years in moving our customers away from on-premise into the cloud. And part of that also has been moving them away from perpetual licenses to term licenses. So this is all part of that change. Now, within that, what we have started disclosing a year ago is the software revenue gross profit. which, again, we think is a more consistent indicator of what's happening in the business. And so that was up from 68.8% last year to 72.2%. And that's a blend, if you like, of a number of different margins across licensed, which is typically 85% margin to 90%. Below that is also support and maintenance and our seller is cloud. And the margin there may be somewhere in the region of 65% to 70% typically, And then the third component of that is services. And typically for a services project, you'll be looking at a 35% to 40% margin. Now, of course, as the business grows, that margin will increase because a large component of our new logos and our upsells is licensed revenues. Point four, the profit before tax was up to 6 million. This is the adjusted profit before tax. The statutory profit before tax was 5.6. The reason we focus on adjusted profit before tax is that this is a better representation of cash generation. So the balancing items between adjusted and the statutory are generally non-cash items like share-based payments, for example. So we find that adjusted profit before tax is a much more useful metric for investors. EPS and dividend. So our adjusted diluted EPS was 10.71%. That's up from 7.74 pence last year. And off that, we're paying a final dividend of 2.23 pence, making a total dividend for the year of 3.15 pence. And that's up 4%. And I'll talk more about that later in the presentation. And finally, we had a very healthy cash balance at the year end of 30.7 million. But within that, there was an element of hardware creditors that we need to pay in our Q1, i.e. that's the April to June quarter. Those were paid off to the tune of about 6 million. So the underlying cash balance was 24.7 million. Hey, Phil.

Awesome. Thanks, Ash. I've seen a couple of questions in the chat asking what it is we actually do. So we're going to cover that right now. So that's a good tee up. So if this doesn't answer those questions, please provide a follow up to that question as well, if you don't mind. But what do we do for our customers? So let's start with the basics. Our mission statement is quite simple, although how you do that is quite difficult in today's marketplace, but it's all about improving relationships between brands and consumers. And what does that really mean, right? In the marketing side, it means knowing enough about your customers, even when they're not logged in, across any digital touchpoint, your websites, your mobile apps, your tablets, et cetera, To be able to know enough about me as a consumer to show me things that I might like, to present me with messaging that matters, to build loyalty with me because you understand what I care about and you're making sure that I'm having a good experience every single time I interact with your brand. On the fraud side it's about protecting consumers and it's the integrity and the trust that implicitly comes with that and it's about instead. Knowing enough about you as an individual to make sure that we're stopping the fraud before it happens that we're able to identify that someone got access to your credentials. And it's trying to perform a bank transfer or that you're about to fall victim to a scam. and to be able to identify that and stop it before it happens. And there's a variety of use cases we can get into. I've got a few case studies here and a few slides that we'll cover as well. But that's the ethos of what we do. So how do we do it? Let's go to the next slide, Ash, if you don't mind. You know, let's talk a bit about the platform. The easiest way to think about the Celebris platform is I think of it as your mobile device. You know, think of it as your Apple or Android device. It has an operating system on it, right, that supports a lot of functionality, just like the Celibris platform supports a lot of functionality. And there are some core tenants of that platform that give us a differentiator in the marketplace. And I'll talk on the next slide through a deployment and what that looks like to give you a sense of how it looks in action. But when we're selling to a client, yes, they're buying the operating system on the phone, but what they're really buying are apps, right? They have a pain point or a need, and we're selling them a solution or an application, just like you'd install on your phone, to solve for that particular pain point. Those use cases run the gamut of marketing, fraud, as I mentioned on the previous slide. It's partner activations, so people that are using Salesforce or Pega, or Adobe, or Teradata, or Databricks, or you name it, where they want to land better data into those platforms for their business users. It's personalization. It's our ability to intervene in the fraud world and stop it before it happens. A simple example of that might be one that was quite public, where someone's mother was about to fall victim to scam. And because Celebrist Data was able to identify that, we changed the button from transfer for the The wire transfer she was about to perform to request and thus saving her from sending money to a bad actor. And then analytics, which has been a big, big investment for us around bringing business focused applications to market that bring the data to life. and allow data scientists and business analysts and power users to really understand the journeys, the interactions, the behaviors, the segments and the personas of their customer base that matter to them so that they can build those better experiences, make those decisions, and ultimately drive more value to the business. But when we deploy for a customer, what does this look like? It's, we talk about tagging free. So let's take a customer on day one. You know, our primary deployment model is what we call Celebrus Cloud. This is a single tenant private cloud instance dedicated to that organization. So what that means is we stand it up, we manage it for them, but they own and control it. It's part of their environment. Now, when it comes to deploying Celebrus on websites or mobile websites, it's a single line of code. That line of code, once it's deployed, allows us to capture an unbelievable amount of granular data, what you're clicking on, what you're typing, what you're viewing, provided you've opted into that from a marketing perspective. And there's an element of compliance inherently in what we do. In mobile apps, it's a library file for iOS and Android. And once deployed, gives us the same ability to capture that data. You could deploy us in anything digital. So we have clients that deploy us in their call center applications. We've got insurance customers that deploy us in their agent applications. We have airlines that deploy us on the kiosks in the airports or banks that deploy us on the iPads that their banking reps in the banks themselves might be using to engage with people when they come into the bank. But once you've deployed Celebris in all of these channels, we start building a digital profile about you as a consumer, which starts with you as an anonymous individual. And as we build that over time, we process this data, provide it in a structured format, and make that data available for organizations to take action on. And so that action in the marketing world comes to the personalization elements that I was talking about before. In the fraud world, it's about intervention and stopping someone from stealing your money or pretending to be you, et cetera. But what sits behind that is the syllabus architecture where we are collecting and contextualizing every journey and every interaction that a consumer is having with a brand, building a digital identity solution that solves for some of the most complex challenges today, powered by an identity graph that we provide the customers out of the box. and a data model that makes sense of that information so that it's easy to use. If you read any Forrester or Gartner study that interviews any CMO or any chief data officer, you're going to see two complaints that are always at the top. One is how difficult it is to capture and make sense of digital data, and the other is how difficult it is to use digital data in any other application. Celebris makes capturing digital data easy and straightforward. We eliminate all of the custom coding and tagging. We provide a digital identity verification solution that allows you to better understand your customers in the moment, whether they're logged in or not. And we provide a data model that gives structure to data that historically lacks it so that it's very easy to use in any system of your choosing, which is what powers a lot of our integrations with Pega, with Salesforce and others. And then on top of that are all the machine learning and context that we provide along the way. Jump to the next slide if you don't mind. Sure. So just when we're selling in the market, there's two types of personas that we look for. The first is kind of the immediate win for us. So organizations that have hit some sort of roadblock, they're frustrated with their existing tech stack. They're struggling with a lot of the common gaps that I have up here on the slide. You know, they don't understand who their consumers are. They don't have good complete or accurate digital data. They're not able to use it or they're struggling with compliance. And they know there's got to be a better way. And Celebris is that better way. And so when they hit that level of frustration and that level of maturity, these are the conversations that turn into very quick wins for us. Average sales cycle now is about eight months. A couple of the wins we had in the last financial year were four months. And that's because they had a pain, they were frustrated, and we had a very specific solution that showed them that we could get rid of that frustration and add immediate value. The second group is maybe a little bit of a longer sell, and it's people that haven't necessarily hit that point of frustration or failure, but they know that there's probably a better way to do things and they're willing to be educated. And this is a great opportunity for both our sales and marketing organizations and customer success folks to work together on how to best educate those prospects to turn them into a new customer for our business. And so speaking of some new customers, I'm just going to run through three quick stories here. First, as a retail customer, I love telling this story because it speaks to the power of Celibris Cloud, and it speaks to how quickly we can deliver value to our customers. Prior to being at Celibris, I worked with a lot of our competitors. On the marketing side, solutions like Adobe, Telium, and others. And I've seen very long deployment cycles. For an enterprise organization rolling out a new technology, it's not uncommon for that implementation process to be 10, 12 months, sometimes a year and a half. You'd be surprised how often that happens. In this particular retail customer, they signed a deal with us because they wanted a digital identity solution to better understand their anonymous and known consumers so that they could build better marketing automation. They could target you with better emails, target you with better advertising, show you products that you actually care about or that you've purchased in the past that you might be interested in, etc., Because they use Celibris Cloud, we have the environment stood up within 48 hours. They were collecting data within three days of signature, and they were able to get this live in our identity solution up and running before the launch of their biggest annual campaign that they run. which means that at the conclusion of that campaign with Celebris running, they covered about 80 to 90 percent of their customer base with Celebris' digital identity solution and built meaningful profiles about the interests of those individuals, the journeys, and the interactions so that they could use that throughout the year to build better interactions, to build better experiences, and ultimately get more value out of those consumers as well. The next one is a health care customer. And this speaks to our land and expand model and why we made the investment in customer success. But this is one of the largest health care organizations in the United States that's using our platform. They wanted to use our platform to build what they call the digital patient data model. And I'll be honest with you, a lot of that is because the health care environment in the U.S., runs a lot like retail. It's very competitive. We don't have a great system when it comes to that. And so it's very competitive. It's very much for profit. And so a lot of the use cases look like retail or like a bank, depending on the nature of the organization. This customer brought us on to be their digital patient data model. They care very much about compliance. In the US, it's called HIPAA. It's the compliance for how you manage health information and what organizations have to do to protect that, which Celebris is completely compliant with and offers a very unique solution because, again, a brand that deploys Celebris fully owns and controls Celebris and the data. They don't send it to us. And so for this customer, they signed on with a view of growing over time. And they got so much value initially from the initial subset of websites that they actually deployed us across their entire digital presence in a few short months. To do that in other technologies would have been 12 to 15 months of effort. This was three months of partnership between our professional services team and the client-side team running their digital channels. And really speaks to our ability not only to win in the market, but also to very quickly get customers seeing value so that they move more quickly into new features, new functionality, or higher levels of consumption. the final story that I'll jump through today and then we'll move on over to Ash here from a financial perspective. is around real-time analytics and decisioning for one of our insurers. So this has been a really interesting opportunity for us because it speaks to some of the upsell capabilities for the investment that we've made in our analytics capabilities, namely for this customer, our Celibus Digital Analytics. So this insurance customer in the U.S. went with a Celibus cloud deployment that we fully manage and maintain for them on their behalf. uh as they started it started as a integration with pega for this customer so it was powering their digital decisioning cross-channel not just online but offline as well even some of the direct mailing and as they got used to celebrist and they started seeing the value from celebrates one of the natural questions that they asked was well we have all of this data you give us it in this lovely structured format Can we also replace some of our other technologies? We use Google Analytics. We use some of these other applications. Can you be our analytics platform? We just so happen to have an offering for that. And because they were Celibris Cloud, we were able to ultimately get them up and running on Celibris Digital Analytics very quickly and effectively so that they can start to transition to Celibris as their single source of truth for all digital analysis actions. And that speaks to what we've started to build by being a direct sales organization focused on driving our software revenues and focused on bringing a team of people from sales to customer success to professional services and managed services to the table so that it's all one joined up team that is focused on delivering value to our customers listening to them and and finding ways to to continually drive that ball forward and help them and make sure that they're getting as much value from celebris as possible so those those are just a few stories uh from the field over the over the past year that hopefully hopefully all that gives some insight into how we deploy what it looks like with customers, and then on the value side, what that looks like as we get engaged with those brands.

Great. Thanks, Bill. So let's go through the financial results. go into a bit more detail on the points I raised in the financial highlights. I hear we've got six charts, and these are basically the key metrics that we focus on and the key metrics that we think most closely align with creating shareholder value. So I already talked about the importance of software revenues, and we see that on an upward trend over the last few years. FY21 was a little bit unusual because at that time, We were still doing perpetual licenses, but we no longer do. And that conversion is really important in terms of contributing to our ARR growth, because once you've sold a perpetual license, it's kind of gone and you've only got to support maintenance. So all of our customers, all of our offers and proposals are now done on a term license basis and typically a three year contract. Annual recurring revenue I already mentioned, and that's very apparent in terms of why that relates to shareholder value, because many companies are valued on a multiple of ARR. And that growth, as I mentioned, is up to 20.2 million now. The adjusted diluted EPS, 10.7 pence. Again, this was distorted back in FY21 by the perpetual license. But since we moved to term licenses, we see a steady growth over the last three years. The dividend is going up. We balance our cash needs in terms of our willingness and ability to invest in organic growth and growth by acquisition, along with making some sort of dividend payment. We have a number of investors for whom it is of some importance. So this isn't going to grow dramatically, but we tend to grow around sort of four to five percent per annum. So that's gone up to three point one five pence. And of course, that's a very direct sort of return in terms of shareholder value. Adjusted PBT I've already talked about. And again, just to remind you, the reason we use adjusted PBT is that it's essentially a proxy for cash. So that 6 million that we've got in adjusted PBT for this year converts into cash or has already converted into cash through the course of the year. And then finally, cash itself is a very important key metric for a number of reasons. Firstly, it feeds our ability to invest and pay dividends. And this balance has gone up to 30.7 at the year end. But within that, the actual underlying balance is 24.7 million. And I'll go on to talk about that in a subsequent slide. So let's go through the income statement. Sorry, let's go to ARR first. Yeah, let's do ARR first. So this chart basically shows how our ARR has moved during the last 12 months. So at the start of the year, we had 16.7 million. At the end of the year, we had 20.2 million. And this basically breaks down what all those changes are. So the first of those bars is the new logos bar. So as I said, when we sell a new logo, it's typically for a three year contract. And within that, we've changed the way we sell. So our sales cycles used to be 12, 15, 18 months because we were trying to sell the whole range of what Celebris and the Celebris platform could do. We've moved that to being a use case basis. So when we're in dialogue with a customer, we'll try and find their two or three key pain points. And in doing that, we tend to start off typically with a customer with a relatively low contract value. This could be perhaps 0.3, 0.4 million ARR per annum. we grow that over a period of time and so this is literally capturing the initial contract now the next bar is the upsell and that's a combination of two things firstly pre-existing customers to whom we've made an upsell this could be additional functionality increased volumes of sessions but this also then covers new logos we've made in the year to whom we've already made an upsell so As part of the restructuring we've done of the customer-facing teams, not only have we reduced the sales cycle by selling on a use case basis, we've also set up a customer success team. And that customer success team is engaged with the customer even pre-signing. It might well be that they sign up to two or three particular use cases, which we solve in the first few months. And then we already know the next sort of five or 10 use cases that they'd like to address. And our CSM team is already engaging them on that. So those new logos are 0.9. There is already some upsell in that 4.9 million that you see in the next bar. Celebrist losses, typically historically we've had a churn of around three to 4%. This year it's lower than that. So it's about 0.1 million on the 16.7 starting. This is a single customer which decided to move away for whatever reason. The next chart is about partner losses. So we have had other customer losses, but partner losses were essentially losses where we had an end customer through one of our partners, These were generally customers that we had had prior to sort of three years ago. These are customers from a time when we didn't sometimes have very good interaction with partners and then customers. And that's the whole reason for setting up a direct sales team. So in future periods, we will see partner losses being much lower. These are some legacy customers that we had from sort of three or more years ago. The next bar chart is unprofitable customers. So all of the investment we've made into systems over the last few years into a new finance system, a new license manager system, for example, a time tracking system, all of these have allowed us to see better granularity on profitability of customers. And so what we've done is we've addressed that by going back to those customers and try to get them to become profitable, increase their sort of usage and increase their pricing. There have been some instances where we haven't been able to do that. And so we've moved away from those customers and that's led to a reduction of 0.4 million in our ARR. It's never good to lose a customer. But having said that, we now have a portfolio of customers, all of whom are profitable. And then challenge now is to get them to target profitability and to get them sort of growing in ARR in their own right. And the final small chart there, the 0.3 million is revaluation. So a lot of our revenues, as you know, are in US dollars and our ARR obviously is in US dollars as well for the large part. And so this really represents a revaluation at the year end into GBP. So all of these numbers are in GBP. And as we've converted some of the USD contracts, there's been a slight loss. So we end the year at 20.2 million. So now moving on to the income statement. I mentioned already that the headline revenues are distorted from period to period by a third-party products revenue line, which fluctuates. In some years, it could be 2 million, as it was last year. In some years, it could be 5 million. And immediately, the prior year, it was just over 10 million. So we don't have any control over that. It really comes down to our on-premise customers and when they want to do an upgrade on their hardware and their installations. And what's much more useful for our investors and for us as we manage the business is to see a trend line on our software revenues. And as you saw in the previous key metrics slide, there is an upward trend line on software revenues and that's what we target as a key metric. The gross profit, the third-party products generally have a gross margin of around 15%. So they kind of drag down, if you like, the headline gross profit percentage. So again, much more useful for us and also for investors is to look at the software gross profit percentage. And what we've seen that do over the last year is go up by 3.4 percentage points to 72.2. And what we should see in future years As we grow software revenues, both new logos and upsells will have a high proportion of licensed revenues. And licensed revenues being the highest gross margin will then drive the blended margin of software gross profit percentage to be beyond 72 in future years. Operating expenses. These have gone up during the year. We continue to invest. As Bill said, we've largely finished the work of the last two and a half years of restructuring the business, restructuring departments, investing into systems, getting efficiencies. So we now have an operating expense line which has gone up in the year. But this is kind of. kind of value added sort of OPEX, if you like. So we've eliminated a lot of roles around kind of admin and routine functions through the investment into systems. But the OPEX line will continue to grow as we continue to invest in the business and principally on front end facing roles. And then the final line is the interest income line. So we have had a good cash balance over the last 12 months. We manage our cash very tightly. We collect monies pretty quickly. We don't have any bad debts. And we've then utilized that cash very effectively. And over the last 12 months, We've had investments ranging from overnight to a week to a month or three months or six months. We've also been very careful in terms of utilising the rate interest rate inversion that happened and putting the right amounts in right terms of deposit. So that's been a good return for the year. And that obviously helps our adjusted PVT as well. So moving down from the adjusted PBT, we have a number of non-cash items, and that's why we focus on adjusted PBT. These are things like amortization, the share-based payment charge, restructuring costs, which are one-off costs. And then moving down below the profit before tax line, a key change this year has been the tax line. That tax line has gone up quite dramatically for a number of reasons. Firstly, we've made more profit, of course, but the rate has gone up to 27.5% and that's driven by the UK tax rate. going up last year from 19% to this year to 25%. Obviously, nothing we can do about that. That's just what the rate is. But we're also impacted by the R&D tax credit we claim. So the rules around the tax credit have tightened. Less cost is eligible to be included within that. And also within that eligibility, Whereas we used to have an additional deduction of 130%, that's now gone down to 86%. So quite a dramatic change in terms of what that means for our UK tax charge. And on top of that, we also had some losses in the US, which will then be offset in future years. And of course, that increases our tax charge for the year. But we also see that tax charge coming down below 25% in future years. And then finally moving down, as I already mentioned, the adjusted diluted earnings per share of 10.71 pence. So moving on to the cashflow and the key items here, I suppose the first one is really the working capital movement. So we manage our working capital very tightly. We collect cash very quickly. We build quickly. Our customers, when they're on a three-year contract, tend to pay us for the whole of the first year as soon as we sign up. And then at every anniversary, they'll pay us for the subsequent year. So we always tend to have a sort of a positive cash flow. And that's kind of reflected if when I come and talk about a balance sheet, you'll see that reflected in the deferred income line in our balance sheet. And that gives you an indication of how our cash kind of moves. But moving down the cash flow statement, obviously, we've got the interest income I mentioned already. Our purchase of assets, we don't have a lot of capex. Typically, in a year, it'll be 0.2, 0.3 million. This year, it's been a little bit higher because we moved off this both in India and in the UK. So there's been a bit of capex around that. And then capitalized development costs, we tend not to capitalize capital. Development costs, we can avoid it. However, there are certain circumstances under IFRS where we have to capitalise. And that's, again, typically around 0.2, 0.3 million a year. And that's out of the R&D investment typically in a year of around 2.3 million. So the large part of that goes through the income statement. Of course, what we want to do is keep the income statement as clean as we can have it. Moving down, the dividend in a typical year is about £1.2 million. Last year it was higher because we had declared a special dividend of £5 million, but a typical dividend outflow will be around £1.2 million. Share buyback was around a million this year. So we do a share buyback not to enhance EPS, but really to offset the dilution impact of our share options. So as an investor, you'll obviously be very interested in what your diluted sort of interest is in the company. So although we disclose an adjusted diluted EPS, we don't envisage that dilution happening because we buy enough shares back to satisfy what we think will vest out of our share option scheme. so um cash movement in the year of 13.5 million taking our balance up from 17.1 at the start to 30.7 at the end of the year and then the balance sheet so Again, comparing the two columns, where are the major changes? Let's look at the PPE. So this is property, plant and equipment. As I said, we don't have a lot of capex. We did invest around 0.3 million into some of the fixtures and fittings in our new offices. The reason why this balance has gone up so much is due to IFRS 16. So when we enter into a lease, we have to recognize the whole value of that lease on our balance sheet. And that effectively gets written down month by month over the course of the five-year or three-year lease. So this is kind of a non-cash asset because we've got the asset on this side, but we've also then got the liability further down in the balance sheet. It doesn't really affect the net assets. At the year end, we had inventories of 3.7 million. This is hardware relating to some of the on-premise customers I talked about. And this also is part of the reason why, although I talked about having 30.7 million of cash, the kind of the normalized cash balance is around 24.7 million because we know we had to pay 6 million out after the year end for hardware. And that 3.7 million is part of that 6 million of the hardware that we need to pay out And that's also reflected in the trade and other payables, which have gone up from 2.3 to 8.7 million. And then finally, just to point out to you the deferred income line. This is a creditor, but people tend to think that this is money going out of the company. But actually, it's not that kind of creditor. This is actually a good thing because this is customers paying us in advance of us recognising revenue. And that ties in with what I was telling you about customers paying at the start of a contract for the coming year and then every year after that. So. This is customers paying us ahead of us recognising the revenue. So this balance, having gone up from £9.3 million to £17.6 million, is a good thing. It's a creditor, but it's a good thing because people have paid us cash up front, if you like. So that's how that sort of line works. And that leaves us with net assets at the year end of £29.5 million. So that's the bulk of the financials. There is one other point I'll raise, and you may have seen it in our announcement. We are changing our reporting currency to US dollars from FY25. And there are two main reasons for doing that. Firstly, we think it better reflects the company and who we are for the fact that we have a large proportion of our revenues, either in the US or even in Europe, but in US dollars, because they're large multinational companies. So it'll give people a better flavor of who we are and what we're about and where our focus is. But secondly, with all of those USD contracts, we spend a fair bit of time on treasury and managing our FX. So for every contract we have, let's say we sign up a three-year deal, we'll at that point put in place a hedging contract for one year forward and then two years forward. And that's manageable up to a certain point, but there still is some risk in terms of the time delays in doing that. But also as the business becomes bigger, that becomes a bigger burden and challenge to manage. So In converting to US dollars, we'll effectively eliminate that FX risk. And that's obviously good in terms of the business. And it sort of eliminates a resource that we'll no longer need once we've made that conversion. Okay, cool. Yep.

Thanks, Ash. So I'll cover off a couple of things on the next slide here, just from an outlook perspective. I think some of these questions are coming through here, so we're going to answer a few of these here as I talk a bit about this. I think first and foremost, thanks to the team, the systems, the processes that we've put in place, as Ash mentioned, even as we've been able to evaluate at a pretty granular level, every single client engagement across the board in an automated way. It's also allowed us to advance how we measure and analyze the pipeline. We've brought some artificial intelligence in the sales as well, in addition to solutions like HubSpot to help us better manage this. And as a result of all that, we're quite happy with the growth in the pipeline, the success that we're having in the market at events, which has been a big driver of leads for us over the last 12 to 18 months. And we're quite happy with where we are starting this new financial year, knowing the gap that we have to close and and pipeline that we have in front of us that we feel quite comfortable in our ability to meet market expectations the the second element that i'll mention um is has quite a few questions coming through on the platform here is around sort of our continued investment and and you know where we're where we're going as a business and we've talked a bit about this in the r s um we've talked a bit about this going all the way back to the capital markets day back at the end of November of 2024. But we are exploring M&A opportunities. Obviously, we will continue to invest in our sales and our marketing. We're continuing to analyze what works. And at a board level, we're looking for opportunities for further investment that can drive some real value for our business, for our customers, and obviously for all of you as investors. But we also have had a plan from day one. When Ash and I sat down and started sort of mapping out where we wanted to take the business as we were thinking about building a leadership team, building a business and restructuring the business and turning it into the software company that it is today. Naturally, one of the conversations that we had and that I've been having with our tech and product teams has been, the build versus buy scenario. We knew standing up a direct sales staff, marketing ourselves directly, engaging with customers directly, that there would be things that would come up that customers would perhaps want Celebris to do. And we would have to make decisions on whether or not we build it or we buy it. Our investments in innovation and analytics are a great example of when we chose to build it, to roll out Celebris Digital Analytics and some features that are coming in the platform here over the next few weeks. But In an area, and we've talked about this at a board level and we've agreed a profile, there's an area of the product and by way of thinking about other applications that you can bolt on, that's more in the realm of personalization, marketing automation, intervention, if you will. where we have some features in the product that do some of this, but we've historically deferred to partners to manage a lot of this. And from our perspective, as we've thought about this and worked through a profile, and given the fact that we've brought the organization through this transition, we're now in the execution phase, we've got cash in the bank, and we've got an aligned view internally and at the board level with what a good acquisition might look like. We've brought on a financial partner to help us with Discover and we've started that process. There's no commitment to timelines. There's no commitment to actually making an acquisition. But we are quite interested. We think now is a good time, not just for us, but based on market conditions as well, to potentially find something in that marketing automation space that would make sense to bolt on to the Selliverse platform. But Ash, if you don't mind, I'd like to throw it to you because we've also got a few questions coming through here around what we're thinking in terms of size and the impact on the business.

Yeah, sure. So if you're going to make an acquisition, it's got to be sizable enough to make a difference to the company and the group as a whole. So uh we're looking at something which would have a few million of arr at least um that's important for a number of reasons firstly it makes an impact on our arr and it's a good addition but secondly it's a vindication of the technology um that we're buying that there are customers who are using it who are tied in for a period of time um so that's one sort of hurdle if you like um that's going to be really important for us obviously as we go through the process and we find targets we'll be modeling the kind of the pro forma income statement, the pro forma EPS as well, that that will have. We are looking for something which will be earnings accretive in a relatively short space of time, 12 to 18 months perhaps. And we are looking for something which Once it might be cost savings, it's not important to us. I mean, the key thing is that we can have quick integration onto our platform, and then we can immediately start cross selling. That's where the value in an acquisition is going to be by adding some of the functionality that Bill was describing. The earnings accretion comes not from the cost savings, but really from the upsell to existing customers, both ours and the targets.

Thanks, Ash. And I think we're moving into the questions, obviously. At this point, you can put up the question slides so everybody feels like we're there. But I've got another one for you, Ash, if you don't mind. Because obviously, this kind of ties into some of what we were just discussing. But from a partner perspective, I talked a bit about our growth in partners. And we have our technology partners. We have our services partners to help us with scale. and delivering. But we also have a couple of reseller partners that have had relationships with us for quite some time, which makes the top customer reporting a bit confusing at times, Ash. So one of the questions was just around the customer one, customer two under IFRS. Can you explain some of what that really is?

Yeah, absolutely. So a customer as defined under IFRS is someone to whom we raise invoices and we bill. So obviously where we have a reseller partner, and we're invoicing them. That's what we disclose in terms of aggregate sort of sales to that customer. Well, behind that, there are dozens of end customers with different sort of ARRs and whatever. So it isn't very helpful. And we are looking into how we can sort of better share some of that. But I think it's suffice to say that if the concern is sort of concentration of customers, we don't have a high concentration on any one particular Celebris customer. So this is misleading and perhaps we ought to explain it. But yeah, it's a single partner with a lot of dozens of end customers behind it. Thank you, Ash.

I've got a question here that I'll take, but Ash, feel free to chime in if you'd like. What percentage of sales are direct versus via partners, and how has this changed versus the last year? So in the financial year that we're reporting on now, FY24, every single new logo in that year was direct. We had some partner upsells. You know, we have a good book of business with those two resellers, as you see them in customer one, customer two, for the reasons that Ash just mentioned. And those customers have grown in their usage of Celebris. But in terms of new business, every logo was direct. Starting this year, it's a little bit of a mix because we did have a partner win in this current financial year that kicked us off this year. But the pipeline itself, because there's been a few questions about pipeline as well, It's still about 75%, 80% of what's in the pipeline are direct engagements. Now, that's not to say that partners aren't involved, right? But we only have two reseller partners. We're not really actively exploring adding more at this time. That could change at some point if something opportune presents itself. But we are at the table controlling our own destiny. And about 75%, 80% of the current pipeline opportunities that that we have at this point in time. And I suspect that will be the trajectory. Now, one of the things we are moving towards is engaging solution consulting partners as part of those deals. But that's really to be the front line delivering services for these customers as we bring them over the line. And just to touch on, because there was a question that kind of went in with that. There was some discussion around kind of upsell success that we're having. Is it in a particular vertical? Are there any particular standout performers? I think the standout performer, candidly, has been our team working really well together. I've been really happy with how customer success has quickly integrated and worked together. closely with sales and with professional services as we bring logos into the business to really make sure that we're doing the most we can for those customers. And that's not just revenue generating. I'll give you just an anecdote. It's also in how we think about how we train our customers. So because of feedback that we were getting in the field from customer success and from customers, it actually kicked off an initiative driven by professional services to evaluate a new training and learning platform for our customers that we make available online. and how we designed that and how we went through that thought process. So it's not only impacting and showing success in our ability to upsell customers very quickly because of this land and expand approach and because we have so many apps or solutions we can sell to a customer once we've landed, but it's also helping every avenue of how we serve as a customer. And obviously, you know, on the forefront, yes, that's great. You want happy customers, you want to eliminate churn. As Ash mentioned, our churn averages out to about three or 4% a year. But it also helps us with the upsell because a client in a good mood is going to be a heck of a lot easier to sell to than a client that's in a bad mood. So all of these pieces are working well together is what's driving a lot of that value.

What should we go next? Shall we go on to... Let's pick off a few quick questions. So, Andrew D., the hardware, is it a hangover from long-standing customers? Yeah, we don't offer hardware anymore. We don't offer on-premise. All of our proposals go out as cloud proposals, and that could be the customer's cloud or it could be our own Celerbus cloud. We're kind of indifferent to that. Obviously, we'd rather it's Celerbus cloud because it's another ARR revenue stream. But we're not offering any hardware or even perpetual licenses or on-premise or anything like that.

So there's been several questions around the acquisition.

Let me just take that one. Do you want to take the balance sheet one? Go for it. So Andrew D is asking, what's your attitude to balance sheet gearing? have a good cash balance and we will utilize that for an acquisition um as far as we can you know leaving some working capital for our month-to-month purposes we expect that depending on the pro former income statement of a post-acquisition model that we would be able to raise new equity for it especially if it's an earnings accretive in the short term and certainly in the longer term so i think they've been element of new equity in terms of debt I trade carefully, to be honest. I was CFO of a company back in 2008, which had a fair amount of debt and it was a very tough time. So I'm wary about it, not just in general, but specifically in terms of the agility we need to have as a company, in terms of finding opportunities where we need to increase investment for organic growth. I'd like to be able to do that without having to go back to a bank every quarter and negotiate covenants and all those sorts of things. So I don't rule out an element of debt for an acquisition, but I think we're a very small proportion of our balance sheet and our consideration for an acquisition.

We had another question from Peter asking, would we look at a security or fraud platform acquisition? The discovery process that we're in thus far has been quite interesting. We've looked at a lot of options. And I think the best part about a process like that, which I've done in other companies as well, is sometimes you see things that you didn't even think about. And that being said, we've evaluated some fraud platforms, some security platforms. We're more thinking about intervention for fraud. which means that if we get something in that automation personalization space, if you will, it also can power fraud intervention rules and better ways for us to stop the fraud before it happens, which is really more in line with how we position the platform now, as I talked about earlier on in the presentation. Thinking about the platform as an operating system and our marketing applications, our fraud applications, et cetera, but it all being part of the same platform. The intervention personalization would be a cornerstone of that, which would ideally give us revenue options for both marketing use cases and fraud use cases and have a bigger impact on the overall customer base instead of a segment of that. We've got some questions on third-party products. Why has it grown despite we're changing our model to cloud? Well, it's because not every client, unfortunately, is making the move to cloud. A key element to keep in mind, though, with regards to the hardware revenue in this past financial year, FY24, is part of that was a deal that slid from FY23 into FY24. And so from that perspective, it's not the standard to have the hardware number as high as it was in FY24. But that's why we've broken out the software revenues. That's why we've broken out the GP for software revenue, because that's our core focus. These customers that we're delivering hardware for, it's to build and expand the environments where they're running our services and our software within them. And they're profitable customers, and it behooves us to continue to support that. But if at some point we can convert those customers to cloud, we will do that because it's a much more palatable model for us. It's much easier to maintain and scale. And it shifts the revenue to an ARR driven managed service as well as we look down that direction. But for now, we'll continue to monitor, manage this. We'll continue to provide it as needed, but we're not. We're not doing that going forward. Even if a customer chooses to buy our software and wants to deploy it on-premises, which is the third and last option in terms of how we sell, we would not provide the hardware to support that. We'd focus purely on the software and supporting that software. I think we're probably out of time. Yeah, I'm just taking a look to see if there's anything. Yeah, maybe we'll do... Maybe we'll do one more question just to end on. And thank you, everybody. And we'll go through anything that we might have missed and provide these later. But one more was, will the company now start to market its shares more actively following the move to being a software company? I mean, I think from our perspective and with our brokers, Cavendish and Canaccord, It's been a lot of effort to market the company a bit more loudly to the investor base both existing and and prospective investors. We have had folks enter the register some phenomenal organizations that believe in the vision that we're building on and we couldn't be more than we're very appreciative of that and of that support we are. looking at as we're up leveling marketing a bit here this year we're looking at how we extend that for investors as well and and provide you with a bit more marketing material around what we're doing versus just the performance and rns elements that that we have to do from a regulatory perspective so watch the space uh yeah we are We are doing quite a bit. I mean, Ash and I will be at the Canaccord Conference in August in Boston as well. And we spent quite a bit of time with a bunch of folks over the last month and a half as well, thanks to our brokers. So I think you'll see a lot more here. Similar to how we were building better experiences for our customers, we've really prided ourselves and hopefully you've seen a difference in how we're marketing customers. to the investors as well, and how we're simplifying our messaging and trying to make things easier to understand, trying to be straightforward in sort of where we're going and helping bring you along on that journey so that there's no surprises. But obviously, any feedback that you might have on that or things you want to see us improve on, we're more than happy to take that feedback. But with that, I'll throw it back over to the team here for InvestorMe to wrap things up.

Thank you, Bill. Ash, thank you for answering those questions you can for investors. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the Invest to Meet company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, Bill, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?

Yeah, just thank you. Thank you for your continued interest in the company. Thank you for following us on this journey. And thank you to my team. around the globe, you know, 155 plus strong, working really hard every day on our mission statement of improving the relationships between brands and consumers via better data. I honestly could not be more excited to be leading this business with the team that we have in place. And hopefully you're starting to see some of the fruits of that labor and the unbelievable effort that's happening around the globe to make Celebrus a household name and bring Celebrus into the hands of every organization that's struggling with any digital data or digital identity challenge.

Bill, Ash, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Celebris Technologies PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.