Checkin.Com Group AB (publ)

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webcast with Checkin.com Group. Joining us today are CEO Kristian Karlsson and CFO Martin Boimer. After the presentation, we'll open up for a Q&A session where you can submit your questions using the form to the right. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Thank you, Martin. Welcome and good morning. Great to see many of you listening in. My name is Christian Karlsson. I'm the acting CEO of Check-in.com Group. I have with me today Martin Boimel, which is our CFO. And we will walk you through our report for the fourth quarter. I hope you had the chance to review the report this morning. The plan is that I will start by presenting the company's general development... Followed by Martin, who will go over the financial part. And after a brief summary, we will open up for Q&A. Quarter four, followed by the negative growth we have seen in the trend in 2024. But in addition to that, we have seen the trend break around the turn of the year end. Our revenue lands at 17.2 million Swedish kronor for a quarter, which is, of course, we've seen a negative development throughout the whole 2024. Net revenue for the full year fell by around 20%. Despite this, we have stopped the negative trend. And we see that the revenue is growing again, especially around the end of the quarter four. Beginning of the year now, we have signed two important agreements with our second airline, the Westage Group in Canada, and also with the multinational telecom group, Oredo. We're also doing some major restructuring on our sales and marketing activities. And we're already starting to see some bright spots with these changes. We have launched a new product or part of the software in the beginning of the year called FaceCheck, which is a new biometric login software that Verify uses in a quarter of a second. I will get back to that a little bit later on in the presentation. Around the agreement with this largest Swedish fintech company, it's still some uncertainty around the rollout. As I was just talking a little bit, the R&D area has been real, something crucial for check-in over the years. With investment in our software, That's why I happen to talk about our new product called FaceCheck, which is based on basically the technology that we acquired from the company DataCorp earlier on. And it's mainly used for login and verification via facial recognition. The main things with this type of product is really like the speed to recognize a face and the completely seamless experience for the end user. We've seen quite good interest already in this product, both from existing partners that went live with this in the beginning of the year, but also quite a good interest with current partners and discussions going on. It also opened up new revenue stream for us in areas where our revenue were not that large before. And now we're covering the whole user journey. The travel vertical, we have communicated quite a lot about the travel verticals the last year. We have invested a lot, especially in our marketing effort and in the software. And because of that, it was great to present. We have signed Vested Group, which has been a company we've been working on for quite a long time. And even if it was just a few weeks back, this sign, they have already gone live. So we have high hopes that this will grow over time. We continue to work actively with more companies in this vertical. We are in ongoing procurement processes and we're having many, several discussions with global airlines. Around our agreements with Ryanair, we continue to work closely with them to expand the software to more countries than today. In general, we see a strong interest and demand for our product and us as a company. However, this industry is a bit slower compared to other industries in the whole sales cycles. And that's something we have experienced over the year. But we are confident that this is the right way for us to continue to invest in this vertical because of this interest we see and be convinced that we will be able to sign more airlines going forward. I had a brief in the beginning about the restructuring of our sales and marketing. In the last part of 2024, we carried out a major review how we work with our sales and our marketing efforts. We have done some major adjustments. And we started to see a lot of positive signs of the development already, both like the amount of leads and customers that we getting in touch with us, but also in the whole sales cycle. So we feel that we are starting to get on a really good track with that restructuring we've been doing in these processes. And as we know, the more global companies that can find us, the more chances we have to grow the business with all our customer verticals. For those of you who have followed us since before, then you should know about our ambition to reach our financial ambition to reach 80% of this classic SOS metric, rule of 40. The rest of 2024 landed minus 3% for the whole year, which of course is a major disappointment for us. Even if the goals like remains, our ambition is still to reach 80% in 2025, but we need to have an accelerating growth in the coming quarters here to be able to reach that ambition. And with that, I leave over to Martin for going through the financials.

Thank you, Christian. As we always have, the report is filled with a lot of details, so I'm going to go through just the high-level points, and then we can leave some time for questions in the end. So net revenue fell by 37% compared to the same quarter last year, and we landed on 17.2 million kroner. The gross margin was 68% in the quarter. That's lower than compared to what we've been at previously. And I'll get back to that a little bit later. EBTA amounted to 1.9 million kroner with the margin of 11%. A bright spot in the report is the cash flow from operating activities and that's plus just over 5 million kroner. And after investments, cash flow is basically at break-even in the quarter. And we ended the quarter with a cash position of 29 million kroner and an equity ratio of 88%. And if we go into the net revenue, Christian has already mentioned we are down compared to the same quarter last year, but also sequentially compared to the previous quarters of 2024. And revenues landed at 17.2 million kroner for the quarter, down 37% compared to last year. And for the full year of 2024, we had revenues of 77.5 million kroner, and that's down 20% compared to the full year of 2023. And the main driver behind this drop is the drop that we've seen in the travel segment, where we had really strong quarters in Q3 and Q4 of 2023. But as Christian mentioned, we are seeing some brightening in this area, and we believe we have bottomed out now in Q4. Going into gross profit. gross profit decreased to 11.6 million kroner in the quarter. It's basically driven by the drop in revenues and the margin of 68% in Q4 and 74% as you see in the charts to the right for the full year of 2024 is lower than where we previously have been, around 80-85%. And We mentioned it in previous reports. This is due to the investment in capacity in the systems to be able to handle higher volumes, especially server capacity and similar things. And then the rollouts that we have planned with some of our larger customers have been postponed or haven't rolled out in the same extent that we've hoped and planned for. And that's why the margins are a little bit lower than expected. And it's due to that many of these direct costs that we have, they're not completely variable with the underlying volume and they are rather driven by kind of incremental capacity steps. And so this is what happens when revenue, when we see a drop in revenue, but when turning things around, we will see an uptick in gross margin when we start growing again. Going into the sales and marketing costs, we have spent around 4 million kroner per quarter over the last few quarters, and Q4 was in line with that. 3.7 million kroner, to be more exact. That corresponds to 22% of the net revenues in the quarter. And for the full year, we also spent 22% of net revenues on sales and marketing activities. Going to EBITDA, EBITDA amounted to 1.9 million kroner in the quarter, corresponding to a margin of 11%. And the margin for the full year was 18%, as you can see in the chart to the right. And the drop in EBITDA is driven mostly by the drop in revenues and gross margins, of course, but also partially offset by lower operational costs. And then finally, if we go to the cash and equity ratio, we ended the quarter with a cash position of 29 million kroner. And if we adjust for our bank loans of around 8 million, the net cash was 21 million kroner. And that is completely unchanged since the end of Q3, where we also had a net cash of 21 million. And that ties into what I mentioned in the beginning, that the cash flow after investment was basically break-even during quarter. And the equity ratio at the end of the year was 88%. So with that, I'll hand it back to Christian for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Martin. So just if you summarize what the fall and the full year and our net revenue fell for the full year by around 20%. We do feel we have stopped the downward trend we experienced in 2024. At the beginning of this year, we went live with a new biometric login service called FaceCheck. We have adjusted our models around sales and marketing. Despite the downtrend we experienced over the year, we have a good cost control and we can adjust the cost as needed. It's still some uncertainty around the rollout, which is a large Swedish fintech company. And in the beginning of the year, we have signed two major agreements with Vested Group and Oredo. And with that, I will hand over to Finwire Martin for Q&A.

Thank you for that presentation. And yes, let's open up the Q&A section here. What is the status of the Swedish FinTech customer and why did they choose to pause?

Yeah, what I just said in the report, but it's an unchanged situation. Contract is still active, but I can't comment on the expected rollout plans.

Can you tell us more about FaceCheck and how the product differs from the other facial recognition solutions that are on the market?

Yeah, it's based on the technology we acquired from Datacorp. So it's now fully integrated. And of course, we've been doing a lot of adjustments, so we should fit our customers. But two major things compared to other solutions out there is first, it's like super fast. Secondly, it's like fully passive. So the customer doesn't really feel that they need to do anything. So it's basically a complete seamless experience for end users. This means it's easy to sign up for something. It's like to open up your phone, basically. It's very well positioned for new regulations where they ask for this type of solutions in many several industries. So it's really interesting and the feedback has been great so far.

Stake.com seems to be doing well. How is your collaboration developing?

Yeah, it's really going in the right direction. It's been working out with a while. They really like what we do in our products, software. So we hope over the year now that this will be scaled up further. But the collaboration is going definitely in the right direction and we have high hopes for this.

Current financial targets are quite high considering the numbers. Are there plans to adjust them?

We talked that in the presentation as well. Yes, they are high, especially from where we're coming from now in 2024. we know that we need to have an accelerated growth now in the coming quarters here to be able to reach this. Obviously, the goals or the ambition is a high ambition. But we have not changed anything. We have not adjusted it, but we're working against it.

And have you noticed any positive effects of the software now being available on Creatio's marketplace?

They have just started to do marketing and sales activities together with us. The plan is that we will continue the coming weeks here. So right now we have not seen any major changes. revenue from this. We do believe it's a super exciting opportunity. Now, once we are up and running for a while, but we've not been really pushing it. So that's one of the most exciting things, I believe, this coming year. And we've been working long to get this type of platform agreements together and that we can reach almost 7,000 customers like in one integration should be able to give us a lot of opportunities.

And in the report, you talk about an improvement in terms of revenue. How big is the improvement? Can you share some numbers, perhaps?

It's a little bit too early to share some numbers, but as we said, we saw a turning point in the end of Q4. So we feel that the negative trend we have seen, I would say the whole 2024, has changed a bit. So I will not go into any numbers, but it feels like we are on an upwards trend now.

You have now signed with another large airline group. Congrats. How do you see the financial effects of that agreement in the longer term?

But looking at all this type of deals, of course, they come in with massive opportunities. Unfortunately, you don't get everything out from day one. On the upside with this, we know that Over time, the similar type of companies, they're growing with us. But also right now, we are in a position where our software is much better than it was for a few years back. Once these customers came in, similar customers came in first. So now we're having like a more tailored solution for this type of customers. And that's why we hope they should be able to scale up even quicker. But obviously we have been taking investments in the travel verticals and that should be a growth driver going forward.

Have you seen any developments in the US markets beyond the agreement with WestJet?

Yes, we have seen some development. We see some development, especially in the travel industry. We communicated before the agreement with FlightHub, which is one of the major online travel agencies in North America. We're having a lot of new ongoing discussions with companies in US, North America, especially around the travel vertical. So yeah, every type of deal we're doing, we're getting some more interest. So yeah, we see positive on the development here.

You have invested quite heavily into the travel segment. What should the market expect from this financially in 2025?

I was just talking about that a little before here, but But our ambition is to grow the travel segment. We've been investing a lot there. So we will not go out and say any numbers, but we're working to grow the business with our biggest customers and also with new ones we've been signing. So as I said before, we hope that the growth should come basically from the travel industry this year.

And what new industries do you see that you think you could benefit from using your software?

We're working with, I think, what we call over 20 industries today. We had the three main ones, which is travel, financial service, and iGaming. Now with this new agreement we signed with Oredo, in Qatar, and that will cover the Middle East. We know it's a strong demand for services like ours in the telecom sector, which is based on these regulations, especially around SIM cards and identification of users. So I would say the telecom industry is super interesting for us as maybe the fourth industry to grow.

And you previously mentioned having high expectations for the regulations of the iGaming market in Brazil. How has that progressed, given that no new agreement seems to be assigned since Q3?

It has progressed well. We have signed new agreements. We have more customers live. We're not always doing press releases about all agreements we do. So we have a couple of operators live in Brazil since January. So yeah, the expectations, we had high expectations. And it's been going quite well, I would say.

How do you expect to reverse your growth when you're signing agreements with limited financial impact?

We know by our histories that normally our customers are growing also with time. If we're taking, for example, our biggest customer today, they... started to work with us and then it took almost 18 to two months to two years before they really started to grow um so normally when when you're signing these big deals or these major enterprise companies they normally starting with one one user case and or one market or one type of device type and so on and then if they're happy to scaling that up um We, of course, hope that it will scale up quick and then it will have a major financial impact on our business. But as I said, we have just guided that we see a limited financial impact the first quarters, just so people are aware of that.

Can you elaborate on the difference in your offering when assisting with the check-in of first-time users versus checking out many recurring instances?

Yes, it's a little bit... The question is if it's about the travel or not. But if we take in this example, for example, then we can mention that, especially with the new paycheck product we've been doing, that's a typical like... product that you can use for the second time you're checking in, for example. So the first time you may be using your ID verification or your ID and the face and so on. And the next time this customer is coming back, then the face will be recognized and so on. So I would say that could be, and that's one of the reasons with this new type of technology that we developed with FaceCheck.

Okay, thank you very much for that presentation and also answering all our questions. And thank you to everyone who followed this presentation with the checkin.com group. And have a great rest of the day. Thank you.