Crunchfish AB (publ)

Hi everyone and welcome to this webcast. My name is Axel and I'm an analyst here at Vestahamnen. Today we'll talk to Crunchfish and discuss their Q1 report where I will begin asking some questions but I also will take some questions from the audience so I encourage you to send in questions. I will also say that this interview will be around 45 minutes and it will be uploaded on our YouTube channel. With me today, I have CEO Joakim Solmundsson. Welcome. Thank you, Axel. In the interest of time, let's jump right into the questions. Let's begin with the financials. Revenue wise, you're off to a great start with 1.7 million in sales in the first quarter. What's behind the numbers?

Well, that was the news of yesterday, wasn't it? We did announce that we had a sort of a final agreement with oppo uh we we've we've done that business that started already back in 2014 actually uh but then this is their use of our gesture software in q1 so we invoice that and then they they said that they they want to sort of now close this uh part of the business we can do other things with oppo but we recognized that and took that into the q1 number so that's essentially is what's behind sort of the tenfold increase that we had compared to last year.

Yeah. And you mentioned the gesture of business. What is the latest update on that?

We are progressing, we EY. We're having meetings with potential candidates. There are a couple that are looking quite strong. I've just prepared this morning actually a bit of an additional deck based on questions that we've had. My opinion that The candidates looking at our gesture business, they are in the situation of thinking, should we buy or should we make? Should we build it ourselves? And what we've done now is to really help them understand that what we have spent 12 years doing, we've spent, I think, Yeah, in excess of $20 million, actually. That's how much we've spent in this area. This is not something that they shouldn't be taking lightly. So we are breaking down all the challenges that they have to look at and also categorize them in terms of what is the development complexity? How hard is it to do it? And how technical challenging is it? But also looking at the impact on performance. How important is it that you actually have that aspect? Because if you're new to an area, you don't really know even what you're getting into. So we have broken it down into sort of small pieces and we are categorizing it development complexity versus performance impact. And that will help, I think, people to understand that if we're really gonna perform in this area with our hardware and do it ourselves, It's a major effort. Why don't we seriously consider buying instead? And then we are a good unit to purchase. So I'm looking forward to this. It's a good process. EY is doing a good job. And I think Jens Henrik, who is now taking over after Fredrik, who's left us, our engineering... our engineering director, R&D director, is doing a really good job in these discussions. I'm there as well, but it's basically me and just Henrik to get with you why in these discussions.

And it's going well. So back to the sales numbers. So one part was the OPPO payment and another part, I guess, was revenues from IDFC project that is ramping up. How is that project progressing? Is it progressing according to plan or?

Yes, certainly it's out, as we have said. That's what happened this quarter, which is sort of big news. In the Q1 report that we just have published, this is sort of that we are finally in production. We're out there. one thing that is one technical part of our solution which is the pki this is the public key infrastructure part where which we deliver as part of our solution to get that into their system has proven a bit more challenging than we thought. So right now they are, we have now a way forward with them, but their internal security group, ISG within the bank, have been having views on how that has to be done. But we've found now the way and we are in agreement and now I think we are can go for ramping it up. And that is also, I believe, a reason why RBI, because we are doing this for RBI, this is for the digital rupee. This is why they are, I think, delaying sort of their public announcement. That's just what we're waiting for. But it is running. RBI is aware what's going on and it's happening. But I don't think they will announce something until this security setup with PKI, as it's called, has been fully sorted out. So I think that's one reason why RBI is a bit late, in my opinion, with their public announcement that this is actually running. But it is running.

Okay. What about costs? You have some potential new products that will be coming out. What about costs? Will those new products bear more costs? Or how can we see the costs going forward?

i don't think so actually i i don't think we have to scale up cost that significantly we the within digital cash um we have developed offline payments for was it four years now it's quite a stable and ready product um what the the thing we announced at the end of March, end of Q1, was a new scheme which wasn't related to offline payments, but it was still in payments. It was mobile card payments, what we called ACE, App Integrated Card Emulation. That we can use sort of the same team that we have been working on offline work with them to deliver that scheme as well within the same platform but then the new thing that we announced just at the end early i think early may was that not only is our technology applicable for offline payments it's not just applicable for mobile car payments it's actually generally applicable for anything where you want trusting clients and you want that to be device agnostic as we have it and particularly if you want to operate without server access any mobile application is that you have a client this is what you have in your hand and you access the server but if you want to detach yourself in some areas it's called computing on the edge you are computing all the way out in the ed at the edge in your devices as well if you do that and you have something which needs to be protected, some assets that needs to be protected, then you sort of have to use the technology that we have patented and developed for offline payments. And now what we're going to do, and I'm actually heading there today, we're going to have a full one-day workshop to decide on, we have a choice. We could stay with offline payments only. We have that. And we're going to definitely focus on that. and we can forget about mobile card payments and we can forget about all the opportunities with other mobile applications that is open to us. That is in a way playing it safe. Or we can maybe introduce some more risks by looking into some of these other things. And exactly where the balance is, I don't really know. This is what the board will have a deliberation on today. We have a full half day after this annual meeting that I'm heading for after this, but we also having the whole team coming on wednesday morning we have a half day with them where we tactically will really think about okay what is generic in our platform that can be used for not only offline payments not only for mobile card payments but also for other areas and how can we split the generic stuff from the specific stuff offline payments is a specific implementation on a general platform Same thing with ACE. Same thing with other things. And we're pretty determined. That's what we want to do, to split up the platform that can do device-agnostic trusted client application from the actual implementation. That's something that's going to happen. That's going to be wise to do anyway. But how far we will go in that direction, I don't know. How much extra cost? I don't think it will be that much extra cost. I think we already have... Because what we've done for offline payments is just that right now offline payments is a monolith. It's one code, which is both the platform and implementation. What we want to do now is what's called a refactoring, where you split it up. specific which is offline payments from the platform's strength in itself that could be used for other things but but that's just normal housekeeping of doing software development that you do refactoring once in a while and and that is something i think we are pretty clear on that we want to do that's that's just good maintenance of our our code base

So as I understand it, your technology could be applicable to all apps, but what is it that it would be protecting? Is it user data or how is it making it more secure?

Anything that you want to manage offline. There is sort of offline what you want to manage is both you are able to operate offline if you have sensitive data like everybody knows how for digital cash it's quite sensitive because when you work on data in the client in the mobile phone itself then you need to decrypt the data so you have it in a way naked raw here is the data otherwise you can't work on it so at that point The data is very vulnerable. It's very sensitive. That's why it needs to be run in what's called a secure element. You cannot run it in what's called rich world, the normal apps operating system, because that is completely unsafe. So it needs to be in a secure element. That needs to be protected. So if you want to take logic and run it on the client, that needs to be protected. Client-server application, otherwise, they have the logic in the server, in the backend. But now we're talking about bringing the logic down to the client. That's one. The other thing is that you work on data without access to the server. You need to be able to save data. And then you encrypt it. But you have to make sure that when you bring that data back in to work on it, you must be sure that you haven't manipulated that file. You can't change any individual parameter because it's all encrypted data. But what you can do, you can replace the file. And if you replace the file, you create a new state. That is what we call the rollback process. problem, that you download data, so you save it, encrypt it on your phone. You make a copy of that file, spend your money, and then you copy back that instance when you just have downloaded money. And all of a sudden, you have your money back. That can't happen because then you create money on your own. That is the same problem that you have to solve also in other areas. So you need to solve the rollback problem and you need to solve the problem of running safely. The third thing you have to saw is when you export data, when you send data, and that's what we have in our TAP protocol, this trusted application protocol that we patented, was it two years ago? Extremely important. And I talk about that in my CEO work, that these three aspects, protecting your operation when you work with the data, protecting when you have data at rest, can't be manipulated, and also when data is in transit, when you send data, all these three things. And we have patented all three aspects, plus quite a few other things as well. So we're very strong for device agnostic, trusted client applications, and that's what we want to exploit.

So it sounds like there's a large potential within trusting clients, within mobile payments or just apps in general, but I think it will be difficult to kind of take market share. How will your strategy be around that?

Well, we are coming with, again, we're not going to, just like in offline payments, we always talked about enabling offline payments in an online world. We never plan to be our own payment service. We always come with a component that would help Payment services, which are inherently online only, like Swish here in Sweden, only online. You have to be online with your bank ID. You have to be online with Swish, otherwise you can't pay. We could help Swish to actually make it that it can actually work, even if you don't have access to backend services. Same thing we're doing in India as well. We are working on having that. But Now I missed my point. What was your question again?

The strategy around gaining market share in these new markets with large potential.

So we are going here to these payment services in order to tell them that with our technology you can open up new novel use cases like offline payments that you didn't have before. Now If we skip, say, ACE for one minute, we talked about that a lot in our last meeting. So let's skip ACE. Let's go to a wider sense. And one area which is super hot at the moment is AI. And one thing you want to do is this idea of computing on the edge. You want to run your AI model in the clients. You want to bring your logic that runs on the server that it actually can run offline in the clients. One reason is that you want to get rid of lag delays but but also that this could be that you can be a bit more private because if everything up in the server everything is logged if all your questions is logged and people would like to be more private just like we want to be more private with payments but these companies which are this is extremely hot look at microsoft who's now the most valuable company in the world look at nvidia they're the number three in the world right now they were not there just a few years ago but they are they're just sailing up there Their technology, what they want to do is, OK, how are we going to deliver our licensing, which is based on server licensing? And now it's going to be on clients instead. How are we going to protect and make sure that our logic is protected when we run it on the client, and also that we consume, basically, credits when you run it? Because otherwise, they won't be paid. They won't let it free if they have it unsafe. we could deliver to those companies that technology because essentially it's the same problem you bring down digital cash you can operate offline here we are bringing down basically their commercial licensing model so and and also you can we can have then logic that can run then on the client side so we can approach and we that's what we are doing now with ey We are actually widening this process with EY, looking for potential investors for the digital cash area to go to Nvidia, to go to Microsoft, to go to Apple, and to have an even more reasons to talk to Google, to talk to some of those companies which are super hot and super interested in the AI area, because we have a component which they don't have. We have device agnostic, meaning that is extremely scalable to all devices. trusted client applications and that's computing on the edge so this means that we won't compete but we will deliver a component which enables a direction which they want to take

What about some cybersecurity firms like Polo Alto or some other big firms? Could they also be potential partners?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we are certainly widening the scope. We were in a niche. We were very proud. Two months ago, we felt, look at the world of payments. It's so big. And we had this niche, offline payments. We actually found ourselves a niche in such a great area of payments. And we're still proud of that. that we can do that. But what we've realized, and that is sort of, I think it's huge. We've realized that what we've built and what we have patented is technology that is not just applicable for offline payments, which I am sad to say, still is just in its early days in India. Nowhere else. We don't see it in Sweden. We don't see it in Europe. We're hoping for ECB maybe. But offline payment, that's why our revenue is so low. Now, all of a sudden, we have technology that applies to essentially all types of mobile applications. All mobile applications client server. And any of those applications which benefit from running things offline, logic, as well as keeping data and managing that, that whole field is open, which is a much, much bigger market to address. And we're not going to compete in this area, but we're going to come with a ready technology component and say, look, we have the patents, we have the know-how, we can help you. And that... is an interesting one certainly in an area i think most tech investments today is straight into ai that's where it's going and we could help them use that money wisely by using our technology so we'll give that a go i hope as i said we're gonna go to an off-site meeting now for uh 24 hours with the board as well as the team to really try to figure it out. What should we do? We could stay at offline payments. I don't think that's the ideal scenario, but you could always argue, so how much should we start to venture out? But we won't increase costs necessarily. Our team is fully capable of doing it sort of where we are today.

You mentioned the ECB and also in your Q1 report, you had some interesting updates around CBDC projects.

Could you talk a bit about that? Well, ECB, I think I'm annoyed that ECB is not... They did have a time plan. Mid-March, they would announce the ones that will be allowed to bid. Now we are looking at, what are we? We're past mid-May. No update, nothing from ECB. I think they can at least give us a new time plan. Not even that. So I think that's sad. But we are working with partners. And there has been for other countries, there has been some wins with partners of Crunchfish that where offline payments is also a prioritized thing. I think there's two particular, we have NDAs with them and I'm not obliged to say that's why we are just saying it's two CBDC wins, but it is one part of ours that have won. The project for two countries and offline payments is a part of it, not just something which will come later, so it's quite interesting that's what we were doing that area.

And can you explain maybe Crunchfish position in those projects? Maybe it said in your report that you would act as a maybe sub-supplier or that you will not be the prime.

I think it's been quite crystallized that if you want to do a CBDC system, you have an online system that works basically. Yes, in a way, think of Swish. It is an online system, but who guarantees the money on that account is the central bank rather than the commercial bank. But they believe as an add-on component, they want offline as well. Not many companies can do it. And certainly only one who can do it device agnostic. That's us. I think what I understood from mobile card payments, looking at the whole industry have done mobile card payments, they have all shunned away from a solution which is with hardware-based security. They're going for... another type of security, which is sort of host-based, and then they are limiting it rather than the use case. I think we had that already in our annual report, and we are continuing with that diagram, which is that diamond diagram, where we are that happy solution that we have no limitations on use case. We can do online, we can do offline, doesn't matter. We have no limitation of what devices can use it. We are good to go for anything. We are the only one that could do that. All the others would have severe limitations based on that it's only for specific devices. That's our strength. And that's what we also then can exploit in other areas as well, like mobile card payments or any other mobile application area.

I was thinking to take some of your questions as well, so we don't run out of time. There's a question. What's the status as to India and any new release sales efforts into Africa and South America through SaaS expand?

Well, India is sort of... We are... In India, as people are aware, that MPCI, they launched UPI LiteX. This is the payment in proximity, very similar to what we did with HDFC and IDFC Bank as a pilot. We believe that their implementation has challenges because they have implemented in rich world and then it is possible to hack an implementation like that. I don't think it's protected enough. It's not in a secure element. This is where we, I believe, can help. We are in that dialogue. It's progressing. And if we crack MPCI, we crack the whole Indian market. And I'm still optimistic. I don't think they want us to... prove them right, but I think we can.

How are discussions going with HDFC?

That's going well. And I think we are adding a board member now who used to run the whole card business at HDFC. And he saw immediately the potential in Ace, for instance. So Ace is, HDFC is by far the biggest issuer of cards in India. There's no even close to what HDFC, this is the biggest bank, commercial bank, but for card business, they are the biggest one. And we also have dialogues with them operationally, not just through our new board member that we presented here. He used to run the card business. And it's sort of, yeah, his people that he recruited one day, they are the ones running it. They are... We are talking to them. And right now, I think one aspect, that's not the only aspect, but we are talking about ACE. Because they understand that if we can give them a plug and play with what is host card emulation SDK, a mobile SDK in their phone, which already have superior pre-built security, that is of huge interest. And so that's great for the bank. And this is something that they like to see because that helps them doing tokenized payments. But this is also what's good for, you know, I believe companies like any card network, MasterCard, Visa, Discover. JCB, UnionPay, anyone. The technology we have there is really good because that helps these card networks to more quickly roll out their products and get it helping the banks more quickly to get it certified. And then on top of that, we can enable new things, which they don't even have, like offline payments. with a secure balance. But that's even going beyond. So I think what we're doing here for the card networks is really quite interesting to get them, I think, back on track, that they're not just a legacy rail, they can actually exploit it more.

So the new proposed board member, Mr. Sahoo, was it a strategic initiative to propose him as a new board member or...?

I think it's a very good initiative. It shows our commitment to the Indian market, for sure. But Vijay Raghunathan, our head of India, who has been working with us since 2019, they are basically university friends from back in the days. They are alumni from the same sort of university, and they are close friends. Vijay has talked about Birren, which is his short name for Birendra, Birendra Sahu. He's talked about him. many times to me and said that, let's talk to Biren and see what he says. Because these people, Vijay followed a path of working, you know, he was head of prepaid cars at Amex for many, many years, for instance, Vijay. Biren took the route of working with the banks. You know, he was vice president at GE Money, General Electric Money, or General Electric Bank. He was at HDFC, senior executive vice president, basically being at the very top level. And he was responsible for the card business there. But then he also founded IDFC First Bank, the other bank we work with. He was the founding person, one of the founding persons there. And for many years, he was head of all what's called retail product, meaning all the consumer products that the banks offers. So this guy has extraordinary, I think, insight and experience with working with banks. And also direct contacts with some of the key people that we want to talk to at very senior levels. So I'm extremely happy with the addition of, and he's not here in Sweden today, but he will be by link to our workshop that we do this afternoon.

Great. There's a question revolving gesture. So how is the process regarding EY in terms of costs? Do you pay EY a monthly cost or is it kind of a success?

Yeah, there is a retainer to EY monthly. And that is for their work in both, because there is one process running for gesture and one for little cash. And they sort of have two separate teams under the same head, really. So we pay a retainer for that. And then there is a success fee. And basically there, I think EY wouldn't engage unless they saw the opportunity of a success fee. That's what they live on. The other thing is sort of, it pays their, their costs in a way, but it is the success fee that they are interested in. So they're very motivated and trying to make basically a transaction out of this.

So worst case scenario, if EY doesn't find the right partner to sell Gesture to, what happens with that?

We actually have a Malmö company who has offered us that we can take your team tomorrow. Just take it. We take the whole team. But they've said that we don't want to pay for your team, but we can take the cost of it. So we can immediately just... provide them with a whole team and then we are not capitalizing on what has been over the years now I think it's accumulated 20 million dollars so it's huge cost we don't see that as plan a or not even plan b but it's there so we can we could we can basically shut off or shed off a cost of almost a million krona per month now if we wanted to. But we think that there are inherent values, which is significant that we want to realize. So that's why we're not just jumping on that proposal.

I also wanted to ask you about Viki and how Viki will fit your new strategy and maybe your new potential products with mobile payments, etc. How do they fit in there?

They fit very well. You know, they are still are. We really like Vicky. They provide the shell. I think that's sometimes hard to understand that they they provide in a way the security arrangement, but they don't write the application. The application is what we provide. That is this device agnostic device. trusted client application the actual logic for what it does within that secure element that is all us and that's what we have patented left right and center that's what we have done but we we we really like viki and and uh we um yeah we we it's particularly patrick he talks to them very regularly um And yeah, I think part of the strategy going forward, because Viki, I think they look at, they have six business verticals. Banking is one, and there are five others as well. We could talk to them that what we have done and we have actually applied patents for, we could actually work together, not just in payments, With Digital Cash, let us discuss your other areas as well, because we believe what we have now is device agnostic, trusted client applications for any area. So that could be one of the outcome of the workshop we're going to do now over 24 hours. Let's see what Wiki can bring in terms of market reach for us.

Interesting. Would you say that there is a dependency risk on Eviki? What would happen if they would not want to partner anymore? Is there someone else you could turn to?

Well, we have identified potential We are looking at this area, but we're quite happy with the relationship. So we haven't actively been thinking of it because we really think that what they have is the way they've done it is quite a unique sort of setup, the way that they can protect a third party like ours. sdk running within their protected environment we we think that is very unique and they were very early with that i think they are the world's first virtual secure element but there are others as well but we haven't actively started engaging in any way with them but but we are we are looking at it because there is a dependency which is there but if a company work with us with the agreement we have with Viki, they get both parts. They get the application that we provide and the arrangement with sort of Viki as well. I think Viki on the other hand, they provide that shell, but they don't provide the trusted client applications that can operate particularly in offline mode. This is what we are unique in. Viki developed their technology originally for being securing the client, but accessing the server so it's it's a classical client server but the logic is in the server the data is sort of on the server side it's not running they don't have rollback protection they don't have offline running that's not what they did this is all us and that's where we have our patents and this is where we really complement the the technology of wiki understood i also want to encourage you to keep sending in questions i only have a few questions left

So with maybe a broadening of your products, how will you prioritize your resources? How will you go about?

Well, that's the million dollar question that we're going to go to Mölle over 24 hours to discuss. As I said, one extreme is to don't do anything. Just wait for the market to happen in offline payments and that's all we do. That's where we were two months ago. That was our universe. Now our universe is potentially much bigger. And the question is, how do we do that? And as I said, we can go gung-ho on all areas. I don't think that is very wise. We need to understand where we are particularly strong. We need to understand what segments are actually the most open to innovation and want to actually take new steps. So that's what we're going to try to figure out over the next 24 hours. I think we just opened the... possibilities. Mobile card payments is a good example, but just like offline payments, it's one area. The latest press release, which was I don't think understood at all of the market, this is the platform idea that we can actually go in any direction. It's open for it. And That's where we need to deliberate. I think the fact that we want to spend some time on ACE, mobile card payments, I think that's probably a given. But what else outside of that? That is what we need to figure out. Because that would be most likely outside of the area of payments. That could be generative AI or AI in general. It could be identification. It could be gaming. It could be Yeah, basically protecting media resources that you want to run offline so you're not dependent on basically server access. But there are subtle differences in those areas, and we're going to discuss that in some details to understand what potential areas is most ripe to benefit from our unique technology where we run things offline with a trusted client that is device agnostic.

For example, with ACE, how would a potential timeline look like? When could you have a finished product? Or it depends if you partner with certain players in the industry.

Yeah. I think we have started to take... We are discussing with both... Parties that deliver host card emulation. And thus the whole package, both the backend part as well as the client part. And we're seeing if we could complement them. And we have a couple of those discussions going. We're talking to banks like HDFC, the biggest issuer in... the big land of India to see, and there is interest, how can we help and how can we actually exploit this? But we're still in early days. This idea was conceived quickly. We filed a patent. We wrote a white paper that was mid-April. So I think we are in early preliminary stages discussing about where it is. But it serves us very well, certainly in the EY process, talking to these card networks, because they see... more than offline payments they see potential in in ace because that is affecting potentially their core business of basically making money out of yeah card card payments i think in in 2024 there has been a lot of great news for crunchfish but what does a shareholder have to look forward to next Well, I think we will elaborate and come out with more explaining how we actually will exploit this new opportunity. As I said, we're going to have quite an important workshop coming up. we will elaborate more what's going to happen there and we will explain. I'm sure the Q2 report due out in August will have more detail on that and we may announce some news before that. Within the offline payments area, which is the most concrete, we certainly cannot lose focus on that. I'm still waiting for ECB. We are progressing with the Big Fish in India, which is MPCI, basically handling all the payments, both on the card side. They have their own card scheme there, but they also have UPI, which is the dominating payment scheme. And they want to do offline. I already said it. And MPCI also does the digital rupee, which we are complementing with the telecom solution. I'm hoping to get the proximity part as well, because RBI have said we want offline payments. Well, then I'm saying, well, then you have to do it securely. Otherwise, people will sit in India and make their own money. And that's why we will try to convince everybody that there is no choice than to go for our solution. So I think looking out for what's happening there. And then obviously, we have the UI process. Anything that will happen there, there could be some investments coming, or it could be a divestiture of the gesture business. That will certainly, you know, be a shake the market. That will certainly help the cash business. Yes, it will.

Okay, that was all of my questions. I also checked the audience questions. I think we touched upon all of them. So without further ado, I will end this webcast with saying thank you to you Joakim and to all of you who listened in. And you can find this recording on our YouTube. And at ours as well. That's great. And I wish you and Crunchfish good luck in 2024. Thanks Axel.