IDEX Biometrics ASA

Hello, good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the IDEX Biometrics second quarter and first half of 2024 presentation. I'm Vince Graziani, the IDEX CEO, and Katerina Eklof, our chief commercial officer, was unable to join this quarter due to travel, but she will be joining again in future presentations on future quarters. And before we jump into the presentation, it's important to take a moment to acknowledge the normal disclaimers that go along with any of these financial presentations for publicly listed companies. So let's just take a moment on this slide. And then we can jump in. And I think before we start, it's probably good to do a brief overview about IDEXX business again, for some it's a reminder, but some, there may be some new people tuning in here and talk briefly about what we do and the problems we solve and the benefits to the IDEXX approach. So IDEXX is a technology company providing biometric smart card solutions for banks, issuers, enterprises, and governments. We're focused on our two main markets, which are both very large as payments and access. Each of these markets will turn into multi-billion dollar market opportunities. And what is the problem we're trying to solve? Well, for consumers and enterprises and governments, we're all facing rapidly increasing security threats. We hear this in our lives and in the news every day. Passwords and pins are no longer sufficient against these security threats. And multi-factor authentication is definitely an improvement, but it comes along with its own issues and problems of inconvenience. In fact, I just had a recent issue myself where I accidentally dropped my smartphone into a lake and was informed that, oh, it's very easy to replace. You had insurance. Just log into the account of your phone provider and put in a claim and you'll have a phone within 24 hours. When I went to log in from my wife's phone into my account, it said, yes, we've sent you a temporary pin code to the phone number listed here, which is the phone at the bottom of the link. So you can see, and I'm sure we've all had issues where multi-factor authentication causes problems. In that sort of scenario, if you'd had a biometric smart card, I could simply tap that card to my wife's phone. and then authenticate so that the provider would have known, yes, that's Vince Graziani's fingerprint, and he has the card even though he's coming into our account from a new device. So there's a lot of friction in the system, and that friction can be resolved by biometric smart cards. And then further, IDEX Biometrics is uniquely positioned as a technology platform provider in this space. Our solution provides a decentralized card-based fingerprint biometric authentication system. We'll talk more about that later. But because the fingerprint data, your personal biological data, never leaves the card, it's actually transformed into a digital template. It's encrypted and stored only on the card. This method for authentication is GDPR compliant by design. and has the ultimate data privacy protection. None of your personal data ever goes off into the cloud. And then we're a multi-factor authentication system by design because the card itself is something you have, and it has your biometrics built into the card, which is something you are. So in one motion, you have multi-factor authentication that's completely frictionless and eliminates the need for pins and passwords. Now let's turn to the second quarter results. And if we look at the financial summary for the second quarter, we had revenues of 0.4 million, which was similar to the prior quarter and a gross margin of about 40%. Our operating expenses were 5 million. This was down. We've announced in prior quarters that we were doing some major restructuring and cost cutting measures. We're at the very beginning of those in the second quarter and seeing some of the results already. We were down from 6.1 million in the prior quarter down to 5 million this quarter. We had a total of 1.1 million in restructuring charges. And I'm going to talk a little bit more on the next slide about what we've done in the restructuring, but we've consolidated our engineering functions back into Europe and the UK, and we've closed our two main facilities in the U.S., And that's what's really what resulted in the major restructuring charges. On the gross margins, it's worth commenting there that our margins continue to increase as a general trend. They will fluctuate quarter to quarter depending on the mix of product between the payment and access. But in general, we have a much bigger software component to our solution sale and our margins are improving as a result. The other thing I wanted to comment on was the revenues for this quarter. Those revenues now are coming completely from our new products and solutions. IDEXX Pay and IDEXX Access, so our full solutions, we're no longer getting any of our revenues from our older components business that was our business model when I started with the company over four years ago. I think this, even though the revenues are modest, it's important to note that it's all coming from the new products. We have been impacted. a bit by some of the geopolitical activities in the world. As we've announced in the past, we were launching with banks in Bangladesh. And those of you that follow the news will have seen there's significant social unrest happening right now in Bangladesh. And all those bank launching activities have been put on pause. We expect that as a result, Our revenue in the third quarter will be below our internal expectations, but we hope to see improvement again starting in the fourth quarter. Let me focus a little bit on the details about some of the restructuring we've done in the last several months here. And as we said, during the last two quarters, we started to focus on a major restructuring in targeting to reduce operating expenses down to 2.5 million per quarter. We've now taken action there to close two of our U.S. facilities, our engineering facility in Rochester and our engineering facility in Wilmington, Massachusetts, have now been both shut down. We're very focused. We continue to focus on execution and expense optimization. We certainly have been able to retain enough talent in the team to continue to expand the business through software and also address all the commercial opportunities before us. So we're We're taking this action, but we're also being very mindful that we need to retain enough talent and critical mass to execute on the business. So the further restructuring that we've done will now be in effect during the fourth quarter. And that's Q4 is when you'll see the full effect of us heading towards that 2.5 million per quarter target. During the quarter, we also did a $5 million private placement to raise working capital. And that placement also included warrants with the potential for another second $5 million within 12 months. So those warrants will expire in May of 2025. Now let's move on to talk about the second quarter commercial update. And before I go into specifics, I do want to say we've noted a market shift, a significant shift in the market sentiment where In the past, IDEX was always pushing and evangelizing our solutions and our technology for biometric smart cards. In this quarter, we started to realize we were getting RFPs from customers who want us to respond to proposals. This would be banking customers and card manufacturers, so we're seeing much more pull in the market. I think that's a very good sign in general. We're also seeing an increase in repeat orders from the customer base, another good sign that the market is starting to happen. In terms of our overall marketing strategy, we've talked about this in the past, but we see that the emerging markets and emerging economies are growing faster. So we're focusing there in Asia and other emerging markets. We continue, and that's for payment. We continue to focus on IDEXX access because this is a less regulated market. And while it's more fragmented, there is an opportunity there to get faster time to market and therefore faster time to revenue with some of these access customers and partners. And we continue to evolve the business and develop new software to address all these new markets and use cases. So let's go on and talk about some of the specific achievements and milestones. So during the first half, we had bank launch announcements with IDEX Pay in Asia and Europe. Mutual Trust Bank in Bangladesh was one of the big announcements that we had. We did anticipate that Mutual Trust Bank would have launched their product by now, but due to the unrest in Bangladesh, that is temporarily put on pause. We do have a new market that we opened up during the quarter with Challenger Bank in South Asia. Our car manufacturing partner, Beautiful Card Corp from Taiwan is one of the largest card manufacturers in the region, was granted their LOA from MasterCard and subsequently placed an order for their first production orders on IDEX as well. We continue to expand our enrollment solutions and we launched our mobile SDK solution into the market, allowing banks and issuers to integrate our enrollment right into their banking apps. And we now also launched, previously we had been only on Apple platforms on iOS, but now we've also launched the Android version of that as well. We continue to expand our market for IDEXX Axis with Authentrend, our customer out of Taiwan, and with our partner Sentry out of the US. So we announced both of those. And Authentrend was one of the customers I mentioned earlier that sold product and came back and ordered more. So a very good sign for the market there and their market opportunity. Large South Asia manufacturing partner for IDEX Pay and IDEX Access was also announced. And then yesterday morning, we had an announcement regarding the TALU card, which is really our first card for accessibility for the visually impaired. We'll talk more about that use case in just a minute. In terms of upcoming milestones. IDEX will continue to have more bank launches in Asia and Europe, and we expect launches also in Turkey from our partners there. We have commercialization with our access partners. And again, the way that we go to market with access is we've got our full software solution that presents a very clean defined API for our access partners to come up with their own use cases and their own applets to plug in and launch new products and use cases. And we'll see more and more of those coming during the next quarter. Our visa certification, we anticipate to get that certification finally done with visa very soon. I think it's important for us to acknowledge that we have talked about Visa certification for many months now, and it continues to be delayed. I just think it's also important to remind people that IDEX is working very closely with Visa on this. We are using Visa's own biometric applet for payment, and we will be the first, potentially the very first customer to get certified with Visa's biometric card applet for payments. And as I mentioned, we're working very closely with them to make sure that we get through this certification process seamlessly so we have the best user experience in the market. And we do anticipate to have that certification coming out very soon now. We do anticipate then, as a result, car manufacturers to be obtaining more letters of authorization, including with MasterCard and Visa in the coming months. We have our crypto cold wallet platform should be launching in the market with some of our partners in the last half of the year. And then our biometric platform with STMicroelectronics continues to make progress. And you'll probably see some announcements about that during the second half of the year. And again, we'll continue to focus on always focusing on operational efficiencies and getting our costs down while we're ramping up our revenues. So globally, the overall market for biometric smart cards is starting to expand. Between IDEX and our competitors and partners, we're seeing that there's more and more interest, and as I mentioned earlier, more and more pull, more people understanding the benefits of biometric smart cards. If you look across the entire globe, Biometric smart card activity is expanding in countries like Bangladesh, India, and Japan. So APAC, as we talked about, obviously in the Americas, in EMEA. On the payment side, there's many banks already in the pipeline. As you can see, many of those banks are already using IDEX solutions. And on the access side as well, it's becoming more and more of a global footprint. either with IDEX or with our partners or even with our competitors. It's just becoming a more and more global solution for the biometric smart card. And we see this as very positive for IDEX and the industry in general. And for our part at IDEX, we just continue to knock down the barriers for the market entry and When we talk about IDEX as a solutions company, we really mean total solutions. So instead of providing just fingerprint sensor, we provide all the related software and card operating system. We go further and provide the software and APIs to be able to integrate with mobile phones. So either for enrollment or tap-to-phone applications, etc., We're constantly working on cost optimizations to get the overall cost of the card and cost of the total solution lower to simplify deployment. And then we work with industry standard bodies to make sure that all those certifications and industry standards are in place to simplify things for people to deploy biometric smart cards. And then constantly we're working on new use cases and new models. And we'll talk about that actually on the very next slide in terms of use cases. And again, this is another area where we can add value or our partners can add value through software and open up totally new markets. So of course we have in-store payments, which is the standard contactless biometric card, but now we have a software and use cases for tap to phone applications. This could be used, for e-commerce payments or other transactions as well. Closed-loop payment systems, for example, if student ID is also used as a payment card for on-campus payments at the campus bookstore or at the canteen, these closed-loop payment systems are becoming more and more popular. And this is a big use case with a lot of potential customers out in the market. And then as we talked about earlier, strong digital authentication, the need for multi-factor authentication without the hassle of passwords and pins, this is becoming a bigger and bigger application and use case for our product. And then social applications like social disbursements and access and IDs are also growing use cases. And let's move on to the next slide, and we can focus a little bit more on one particular use case that was just announced yesterday. And we've talked about this for many years, that the biometric smart card could be a big factor in accessibility, particularly for the blind. We now have our first real card out in the market where the biometric card is used to help enable the blind people across the globe, really, starting off in the UK where there's more than 2 million blind persons out trying to make payments on a regular basis, but globally more than 2 billion blind people in the world who have to make payments with traditional payment cards. And many have said that they've been forced into situations in the past where with a PIN, they would need to actually tell the clerk at a store what their PIN number is or if they weren't comfortable with that, they would have to just forego the transaction altogether. The biometric smart card, this is a great application to eliminate that need and enable people with inhibited sight to be able to make a transaction just the same way the rest of us do. This is, I think, just the beginning of great use cases for biometric smart cards. So to summarize, We continue to be laser focused on execution and profitable growth. The company is well positioned. We have our complete solutions in the market, and we're starting to drive market adoption. We're opening markets, as we've said in the past, region by region and segment by segment, and we continue to execute on that strategy. And we're expanding into new markets and new use cases. And with our new leaner operating business model as well, we see there's a very big future for IDEX. We're very excited that we have a path to get to profitability with a much more efficient company. And right at the time when the market is really starting to see the value of biometric smart cards. So thank you all for tuning in. Appreciate it. And we'll be sure to have Katarina Ekloff join us with a more detailed commercial update next quarter for you. Thanks very much.