Gambling.com Group Limited

Greetings and welcome to the Grandstand Limited second quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Peter McGough, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Grandstand's second quarter 2026 results call. I'm Peter McGough, Senior VP of Investor Relations and Capital Markets, and I'm joined by Kevin McCrystle, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Elias Mark, Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast live through the investor relations section of our website at grandstand.com forward slash investors and a downloadable version of this press release is available there as well. A webcast replay will be available on the website after the conclusion of this call. You may also contact investor relations support by emailing investors at grandstand.com. I would like to remind you that the information contained in this conference call including any financial and related guidance to be provided consists of forward-looking statements as defined by securities laws. These statements are based on information currently available to us and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual future results, performance, and business prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these statements. Some important factors that could cause such differences are discussed in the risk factors section of Grandstand's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date the statements are made, and the company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting forward-looking information, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. During the call, there will also be a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A description of these non-IFRS financial measures is included in the press release issued this afternoon. And reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to their most directly comparable IFRS measures are also in the press release, which is available in the Investors tab of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin.

good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining our 2026 second quarter conference call we have quite a bit to share with you today including our second quarter results and outlook for the full year as well as our recent corporate rebranding and the introduction earlier this week of our new roll card product Elias will follow with a review of the second quarter financial results in detail before we open it up for questions looking at our operating performance in the second quarter Revenue of $37.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $7.7 million were in line with our expectations. We also generated nearly $10 million in adjusted free cash flow, which is a positive indication on the health of our business and our ability to generate attractive levels of cash flow. The restructuring we announced in May is now substantially complete. The bulk of the associated costs incurred in the second quarter Cost savings from the restructure will benefit margins in the second half of the year, underpinning our full-year guidance, which we reiterated today. Looking a little further out, we will exit 2026 with a significantly higher adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow run rate and an expanded margin profile for the business. The second half margin profile will carry forward into 2027. Our business has grown and diversified significantly since our IPO, and our recent rebrand reflects these changes. Grandstand captures where the business is today, and importantly, where we will continue to invest and grow. We have established our position as the intelligence layer at the heart of the sports and gaming ecosystem. Our portfolio of data, technology, content, and audience solutions help power informed decisions across sports, gaming, and entertainment, serving both consumers and partners. Our consumer brands have built trust with each of their unique audiences developed over more than 20 years and will continue to reach millions of users under the grandstand umbrella. We started as a UK gaming comparison hub and over time added products targeting new global audiences around sports betting, fantasy sports, and Las Vegas. Now, in addition to recommending the best places for users to play online, we're developing more of our own products to directly service the problems users face in the market, thus deepening the relationship with each user. The data, technology, and advertising tools we developed initially for consumer audiences have significant application for partners in the wider sports, gaming, and entertainment ecosystem. Today, we have multiple partner solutions across five core areas. Sports data, which includes real-time odds data, line movement, injuries, and sports content, namely via optic odds. Advertising, with our ad tech and commercial solutions connecting operators to consumers. Partner Audience Monetization through Grandstand Partners, a technology and commercial support platform that provides media companies, apps, communities, and influencers with the infrastructure to monetize their audiences at scale. Entertainment and Ticketing Solutions through Spotlight Vegas. And now FinTech with a recent launch of RollCard, which I'll come back to soon. Clearly laying out our partner solutions helps us discover more B2B opportunities. We will continue to report based on sports data services and marketing. Sports data services revenue grew 12% year-over-year in Q2, with B2B continuing to be the accelerating growth driver. Sports data revenue is on track for growth in the teams this year with significantly higher growth coming from our B2B OpticOdd solution. B2B now makes up the majority of revenue for the sports data services business and is pacing to grow well in excess of 50% this year compared to last year. OpticOdd is the intelligence layer, hiring informed decisions in sports, processing more than 1 million requests per second. New B2B data deals in Q2 were led by quant and market making partners who value the speed of our data. 40% of our new deals were international partners and we continue to see success upselling existing clients. OpticOz is also rapidly becoming a sports data layer for consumer AI. Perplexity went fully live into production in early July. Optic Odds is the 11th most invoked connector in perplexity, ahead of massive enterprises like Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, Notion, and Snowflake. API daily volume requests are still climbing by the day, all before the national catalyst of the NFL season. Q2 total marketing revenue is down 10% year-over-year to $26.5 million, driven from declines in SEO revenue, but we saw strong growth in North America and from our partner audience monetization platform, Brandstand Partners. Our marketing business has dramatically diversified from a year ago, with non-SEO marketing revenue now accounting for 67% of our marketing business. While gross margins for non-SEO channels are lower, the OPEX requirements tied to these revenues are also much lower than for organic SEO. The restructure heavily targeted fixed costs in the marketing business, which will result in improved margins going forward. As we move into the second half of the year, we see a clear path to returning the marketing business to growth for the 2027 full year. I also want to highlight that even at the lower marketing revenue run rates, our marketing operations continue to generate attractive levels of cash flow. Now we can finally talk about RollCard, our new fintech solution. It's a purpose-built, FDIC-insured, high-limit debit card for sports betting, casino, and prediction markets. Payments and money movement remain a high friction point in gaming for both consumers and operators. RollCard has been designed as a high-limit, low-friction debit card built with a betting consumer in mind. The revenue model is based on interchange generated from dollars deposited into sportsbooks, casinos, and prediction markets. Gold card customers earn cash back on qualifying deposits. The underlying deposits that drive handle and trading volume are in the tens of billions of dollars. A low single-digit market share for gaming, betting, and trading deposits forecast a 50 to 100 million revenue opportunity in the next five years. The majority of handle and trading is concentrated into a smaller cohort of players that actively bet across multiple platforms. Bullcard was designed to serve that cohort of players. The value proposition for the cardholder is simple, safe, private, high limit, low friction debit card to manage the funding of their betting and trading strategies. The cardholders will be incentivized with cash back program and other premium benefits that we'll introduce to enhance cardholder experience and loyalty. RollCard is backed by Grandstand's sports, gaming, and entertainment audience. That existing audience relationship provides RollCard direct reach to high-end customers from the start. In addition, our existing relationships with prediction markets, online operators, and land-based operators will expedite the go-to-market motion. The RollCard payments platform is a clear example of Grandstand developing value-added solutions as a fintech intelligence layer for payments in sports, gaming, and entertainment. creating a deeper connection between both consumers and partners. Looking forward, the balance of 2026 is setting up for a typical seasonal pickup as we move into the North American sports season, which will drive revenue growth. We will also benefit in the second half of this year from a restructure related to fixed cost savings, which will drive margin improvement. Restructure wasn't just about resetting our cost structure. It was an intentional shift to layer AI at the core of how we operate, then build teams around it. The AI-enabled restructure has allowed us to reduce management layers and empower more nimble teams. Repetitive processes have been and continue to be automated, while work velocity is increasing. We are continuing to innovate in how we utilize the AI tools available. We are now rolling out Memento, our context layer that sits underneath our tools and gives them the company's memory. The benefit compounds the more we use it by remembering relevant knowledge across the business. We're also moving to Multi-Agent Harness to provide access to the best models while keeping token costs in check. Randstand is now positioned to sell more of our own product suite directly to our audience, including RollCard, OzJam, Rotowire, and Spotlight, in addition to our performance-based advertising. Deepening our audience within our own ecosystem allows us to deepen engagement while increasing revenue opportunities. Enterprise Data Growth and a Diversified Marketing Business are positioning GrantStand for a return to revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth as we move through 2026 and into 2027. With that, I will turn the call over to Elias for a review of our second quarter financial results and further detail on our guidance for the year.

Thank you, Kevin. Second quarter revenue of $37.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $7.7 million were in line with expectations. The operating dynamics for the first quarter were carried forward into the second quarter and total revenue was down 5% year-over-year with lower marketing revenue offsetting continued strong growth in data sets. Data revenue of 11.2 million grew 12% year-over-year entirely driven by strong growth in enterprise sets. Data revenue was 30% of total revenue in the quarter Enterprise Revenue. Marketing revenue of 26.5 million declined by 10%. Strong growth in partner audience monetization in North America, including from prediction markets, was offset by declining revenue from organic search and from markets outside of North America. Adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was 7.7 million. I guess the dividend margin was 20% and gross margin was 84% in the quarter, compared to 35% and 93% in the year ago period. The lower margin reflects the higher cost of sales and marketing expenses associated with a diversified marketing business, partly upset by lower people costs. We have executed on the previously announced restructure plan. As a result, we entered a third quarter with a reduced health count of approximately 25%, and we'll see $13 million of lowered fixed costs on an annualized basis, driving margin expansion moving forward. We incurred $3.2 million of restructuring costs, of which $1.1 million was settled during the first quarter or the second quarter, and $2.1 million will be settled during the third quarter. Adjusting net income. was 2.5 million and adjusted net income per share was 5 cents compared to 13.4 million and 37 cents in the year-ago period. The decline reflects the lower adjusted EBITDA and higher interest expense in the quarter and unrealized foreign exchange gains positively affecting the year-ago period. Adjusted free cash flow was 9.6 million compared to 8.2 million in the year-ago period. Cash conversion in a quarter was unusually high because of working capital timing differences following the first quarter, where it was unusually low. Over the first six months of the year, 81% of adjusted EBITDA was converted to adjusted free cash flow. Whereas timing differences can affect a single quarter, allowing us to both de-lever and continue investing in product information. At the end of the second quarter, we have total cash of $8.8 million and total liquidity of $33.3 million, including our ongoing credit resources of $24.5 million. During the second quarter, we continue to de-lever by prepaying $10.4 million while solving the third consideration, Gillespie, Peter McCrystle, We are reiterating our outlook for the full year to be in the range of 165 to 170 million and adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of 45 to 50 million. The implied margin reflects the mixed shift in marketing revenue, roll card launch expenses and modest revenue, and fixed cost savings from the restructure benefiting the second half of the year. We expect positive seasonality in the second half of the year to drive strong sequential revenue growth. Paired with 6.5 million of fixed cost savings from the restructure, this will drive margin expansion and significantly higher adjusted EBITDA and adjusted free cash flow in the second half of the year. We expect that trajectory to carry forward into 2027 and drive strong year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth. with expanded margins in the low 30s.

And with that, we will turn it over for questions.

Thank you, Sal. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one now. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. Again, to ask a question, please press star and then one now. The first question we have comes from Jeff Statenel of Stifle. Please go ahead.

Oh, great. Good afternoon. Thanks, everyone. Why don't we start with the new product launches? That's where we've been getting the most questions since you announced it and including tonight. Kevin, can you just maybe talk to the decision internally to expand sort of a bit further outside what I would call your kind of historical swim lane with payments and maybe how you think about Your right to win in the competitive environment in that space?

Yeah, sure, Jeff. I mean, first off, payments are the biggest friction in U.S. gaming. And it's a space we've been eyeing since PASPA. We've been doing this in this space for 20 years and have a deep understanding of the issues users and operators face. And as we continue to build out our audience, want to find more ways to provide value to them directly rather than just referring to operators. It's a large space. As I mentioned, there are 50 to 100 million upside margins in the mid-30s. We have the audience that we can sell into, which is really helpful to give us a launchpad for the business. We have partnerships in the ecosystem with operators. and everybody else we need to work with. We have all the pieces we need to run this business already as we've been developing our under-operated audience, our partner audience, our ad tech and various pieces. We can use that to sell into roll cards. So we think that's going to give us a great advantage.

That's great. Thanks, Kevin. And then for our follow-up, maybe switching gears over to the guidance, it looks like the midpoint implies about 5% revenue growth in the back half versus flat in Q1 and down 5% in the second quarter. Elias, you called out a few tailwinds in the prepared remarks, but maybe can you just rank order for us? You know, some of the growth drivers as you see it that bridge you back into the mid single digit range. And I think I caught this, but is it fair to assume, you know, sort of growth can improve sequentially through Q3 into Q4 and continue into 2027?

Yes, as we enter the third and in particular the fourth quarter, we have some positive seasonality coming into play that will help us reverse the trend in our marketing business. What we've seen every time we make the marketing business over the second half of the year will be roughly flat and we see the

And just to be clear, did anything change with your assumptions on roll card in the back end for the revenue guidance?

No, the roll card was included in our original guidance. We do assume a modest start to the ramp of this year. It's a bit of trial and error in the beginning. So it has

That's right. Thank you both.

Thank you. The next question we have comes from Barry Jonas of Trust Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to dig further into roll card. Kevin, is there a way to help thinking about the long-term market opportunity for the card and I guess the payment platform in general as a whole? Thank you.

yeah so the primary way we make money is on interchange on deposits into operators and that is a very large market of deposits into operators so you know taking a reasonably small say one you know two percent um interchange fee on that and taking a reasonably small market share is you know alone a pretty big opportunity there we are not going to scale this immediately into that $5,100 million. That's going to take years to do. But we think on a five-year timeline, it could get quite large. Expect something like 80% to 85% gross margins prior to marketing on that business. There are additional ways we can monetize besides interchange, but that's kind of more medium term. Right now, we're focused on that piece of the business.

Great. And then, you know, just want to dig in a little into Odds Jam. I think we've seen a proliferation of competitive tools, potentially AI driven. Maybe just talk about how you plan to keep Odds Jam's current positioning and, you know, where you sort of sit in terms of the product development and how you'll sort of compete with up and coming competitors. Thank you.

Yeah, there are certainly plenty of startups whipping up kind of worse versions of odds jam with AI and pricing it lower. You know, we are, you know, still competitive with that. We're building new core features to increase more of a mode for startups. The most important thing we've been focused on this year is rebuilding our social distribution engine since the end of the earn out. And I think we're in a much better place I'm now for NFL and expect that to stabilize. But an important piece of Odds Jam, and I think the same for Roto-Wire, is to understand how we report. We report by revenue type, not by brand. And so there's a lot of additional value coming from Roto-Wire and Odds Jam. We're seeing very strong growth in North American marketing and a decent piece of that is supported by Roto-Wire and Odds Jam, which goes under the marketing revenue. Additionally, Odds Jam is a key support driver for roll cards. So there's multiple ways for us to win with Odds Jam, not only with the data, which also flows into Optic Odds, but there's a marketing opportunity on top of that. There's roll card support, and we don't want to get into the features themselves, but developing a much deeper feature set, which would be very challenging for new products to compete with.

That's very helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you. The next question we have comes from David Bain of B Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you. And we're with Texas Capital, but that's fine. Thank you for all the colors today. It's been helpful. But, you know, maybe first, could you take a step back and share longer term margin expectations for the marketing business and the levers within that number, including, you know, maybe some bifurcation of SEO versus non-SEO? Any kind of detail would be helpful.

Yeah, I think it's helpful to start in H2. We expect from Q2 through to the rest of H2 to roughly double the contribution from the marketing business. A significant portion of our restructure was tied to fixed costs related to the marketing and SEO business, which will help the margins of that business. into the end of the year and then a run rate going into next year. So the margins will expand this year. We don't have a year or two for that to happen.

If we look at the midship within the marketing business, about two-thirds of the business at one rate is from sources other than most of the businesses is very diversified as it is. and the expectation is to have contribution margins moving forward in the 40s from the front end business, which requires the contribution margins on the data side in the mid 60s.

Okay. Okay, great. Yep.

Sorry, Elias. Just on the data side, if we look at the that's where we see the business performing coming into 2027 as well. The data side of the business will continue to scale in 2027 with very high incremental margins. The marketing business we expect to have a very modest growth but positive growth in 2027 and that should have a neutral margin effect and the balance Thank you for your time today.

Yeah, spam is getting better. Google has seemingly done a better job of dealing with that. That said, the overall SEO positioning is roughly unchanged. There's a slight decline from Q1 to Q2. That's just normal seasonal trends. Obviously, a larger decline year over year. The regulatory environment and a handful of the countries where we have predominantly SEO-focused businesses have not been helpful. UK is an example of that, where we're seeing CPAs down about 15%. But we are seeing some positives there. In the North American business, the marketing is up pretty substantially, and that also includes SEO. So it's not down everywhere, that's for sure. But in terms of the future, SEO is certainly not going away. We are really focused on diversifying away from SEO, so we're less impacted by whatever the future of Google is. This includes many channels, but ultimately building direct user relationships that allow us to sell subscriptions, fintech tickets, et cetera, to those audiences and also cross-sell into affiliate platforms. Thanks, guys. Go ahead. I mentioned the subscription business that we have revenue associated with those as well. Rotowire in particular has been doing very well with SEO and that goes under the marketing business, but it's from Rotowire.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. The next question we have comes from David Katz of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I think I wanted to keep going down that same vein, Kevin, where you just left off and talk about the non-SEO portion of the business and the marketing piece of the business. You said doing very well. Can you Maybe take us just a little bit farther and give us a long-term aspirational, any qualitative sizing or sense of where you think that can go since it seems to still be growing pretty well.

Yeah, as we referenced, the non-SEO is now about two-thirds of the marketing business. It's the same channels we've talked about before. Some mix of CRM, paid, and social, but Grandstand Partners is also a big piece of this. That's our partner audience monetization platform, which provides technology, commercial tools, and whatnot to external media companies and help them monetize their audience at scale. That's up over 100% year-over-year and is roughly the same proportion of SEO to non-STOs or overall marketing business. We're also doing more advertising deals, so think brand exposure rather than just performance deals. we are diversifying globally but a lot of that impact we're seeing now is in North America and with that the North American business is North American marketing business is going strong North American marketing is up 63% year over year and marketing is about 57% of our total North American business and this is partly grants and partners which I mentioned prediction markets are starting to ramp acquisition so we have a new New partner in the market to work with. And, you know, in the US, it's a lot of it's sports. So World Cup was helpful in Q2. But that was roughly as expected. We'll see, you know, some larger NDCs at a slightly lower value per NDC with that. But RevShare will also pick up long term with that. You know, SEO is still holding up there in North America. But there is a very significant run rate for the marketing business. Everybody asks us, when is sports data going to be larger than marketing? And the answer is probably not for a little while. On a contribution basis, in a few years, that seems possible or likely. But until revenue, the marketing business is going to keep growing. We've talked for a long time about diversifying, but we have a diversified marketing business now with two-thirds of it being non-SEO. It can grow very substantially from where it's at today.

Understood. Appreciate all of that. With respect to prediction markets, it's obviously possible to have a call and not spend some reasonable amount of time on that. Can you just help us think about the size level and the proportion that that can bring, given how quickly that's growing and what your avenues of engagement are there?

Yeah, we've historically primarily talked about prediction market in terms of our data business, and that is still going strong. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of these market makers and quant funds are now entering the space and utilizing our data. We are, though, doing more on the marketing side than we were previously. It's really useful to have another player in the market that needs traffic and users, and we're happy to supply that. BrandSan is not cannibalized by these prediction markets. It's really the opposite. You know, they're providing an additional participant in the market looking for users. And it seems like it's going to push the rest of the market to be a little more aggressive in the NFL season in terms of acquisition. So I think it'll be helpful all around. Hard to say right now in terms of the size of the prediction market as, you know, I think when we talk Q3, we'll have a better frame on that. This is the first NFL season with a full push there.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question today, please press star and then one now. The next question we have comes from Chad Baynon of Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Just with respect to the guide and holding that in relation to the inline second quarter, I think you've said Marketing should be roughly flat for the year. Sports up in the teens. But can you kind of help us think about what would get you to the low or high end, particularly of that revenue guide, given that we have about five months left in the year? Thank you.

Yeah, so to clarify, we expect the marketing business to be roughly flat in H2 as it was down in H1. It will be marginally bound for the full year. If we look at the range of guidance, what would really push us towards the top of the range would be a recovery in SEO that would go through very quickly.

The primary growth drivers right now are the sports data, B2B, the enterprise sales, and North American marketing. So those are the two pieces. They're both growing at a pretty good pace right now. So if they grow a little bit faster, that's what would get us to the top of the range.

Great. Thank you. And then on North American, maybe a two-parter here. There has been another player that's kind of climbing the ranks in terms of market share, some slight shifts there on the podium. So wondering how your diversification looks amongst customers. And then secondly, with respect to Alberta, any comments in terms of if it's been a successful customer acquisition period up there? Thanks.

I'll take your Alberta question first. I launched in Q3, so not in these Q2 figures. It has been a reasonably successful launch. I think our market share is about what it normally is in these things. It is not the biggest province, and it's not a really spiky launch. It's going to be a flatter, more prolonged launch, but we are doing reasonably well in Alberta, so feel good about that. In terms of your first question, I guess you're a little vague in terms of the new market participant. What are you referring to exactly?

Just with respect to Fanatic's recent move in iGaming share.

In iGaming, yeah. Look, iGaming for us is pretty stable.

Or sports betting, actually, for both, actually. It's probably better to phrase it that way.

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I think having... Additional players beyond the traditional OSB partners in the market is pushing everybody to be more aggressive in terms of their acquisition, and we benefit from that. We are working closely with them, with Fanatics, and I expect that to go well. In terms of the iGaming side, that's pretty consistent. Not too much moving sharply there in terms of sports betting. I think we're lined up. Nicely for the fall, you know, with our North America marketing business being the key driver within our marketing business that is primarily sports-based or very heavily sports-based. And so we, you know, do see more seasonal trends on the U.S. calendar rather than the historical. You know, when we were more international casino, it was a slightly different trend line there. So we expect a strong September in moving to NFL.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question today, please press star and then one now. The next question we have comes from Mike Hickey of Stonex. Please go ahead.

Hey, Kevin, Elias P. Thanks for taking our questions. Maybe just the first one, Kevin, on your data business continues to be a real window of strength for here for you guys. Can you talk about your product pipeline for the sports data business and what new products or capabilities you're most excited about?

Yeah, excited about all of the sports data, B2B, to be frank. But we, you know, as noted, you know, with the traditional markets, the market makers, there's a new buyer of data. International is still going strong. You know, a year ago, that was zero. of the business, and now it's 40% of new sales. And we're increasingly selling a lot of existing clients as we slowly build out. New Feature Set within Optic. We did talk in Q1 about non-sports data entering. That went live pretty recently, so we'll need to take a couple months to kind of see what comes there. But we plan to continue building more products on top of Optic to power more of what operators need from us. We started as this kind of trading risk management and can move on to power more of what they need to power their entire sports book.

You guys, it's nice to see you hit consensus, beat numbers this quarter. Obviously, you've gone through a challenging environment to give guidance and you've restructured your business. Looks like SEO is stable somewhat here. Data is growing nicely. Do you feel like, Elias, you've sort of reached a point now where your business is stable enough that you have greater confidence in your forward guidance or your ability to forecast growth?

Yeah, our internal feeling is that we have Gillespie, Peter McGough, Kevin McCrystle, William Hanson