accesso Technology Group plc ($ACSO)

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. I hope everyone is doing well and looking forward to a fantastic presentation today. I'm joined here by our esteemed CFO, Matt Boyle and we're going to walk you through our full year results. We do have a longer presentation than we've had in the past. And so we won't have time obviously to cover every slide. So you're going to find -- I'm going to kind of do an abbreviated presentation today, and the full presentation is available -- will be available on our website. But just for the sake of hitting the key points, I'm going to move around a bit for the sake of speed. So I'm going to start off actually on Page 8 because I think you all know who we are, what we do, what markets we serve. You all have heard that plenty of times and are very familiar with the business overall. But I want to point out that we have a history of sort of evolution. That's really what the whole company is about. And as we'll talk about more later, we're in that same position today. And we're kind of built for that. We're geared for change, all the way back from the very beginning when [ Leonardo ] have the idea to start a virtual queuing product because he got tired of waiting in line at Universal Studios in Florida from the fact that we started out with accesso Passport is a SaaS product when people thought we were crazy, that no one would rely on the Internet for their ticketing. Then we pioneered online ticketing. We were the first to market with mobile ticketing for theme parks and attractions. And so we're always evolving, always in venting. And while we're doing that with the products that we have, we've also been expanding our verticals and our capabilities with a whole range of acquisitions in what has been built, I would call it the global powerhouse across the attractions industry in terms of technology. So we're very familiar with change. And as we all know, the market is quite disruptive right now. [indiscernible], if you will. And we'll talk more about that as we go through in terms of where our -- where we think our position is in that space. So I'm going to -- obviously, Matt will talk about the numbers. You can see the headlines here on Slide 10. Top line revenue, $155 million; cash EBITDA, $23 million. We have lots of cash, a great balance sheet at the end of the year and some great progress on our EPS and Matt will get into all this in more detail. But overall, a solid year. Obviously, we'd like to have more growth. But in a year that was a bit challenging for a variety of factors, we held our own quite well. And I am pleased to be in with the result given all the overall circumstances. So one of the things you've seen in our -- I guess, our market updates is just environment and how we responded to that. And we're pretty nimble company. If you were around during COVID, you saw that in full play. And we adjust in not only in our technology but also how we operate our business. So we had some uneven demand across the geographies. There were some travel disruptions, people not wanting to travel to certain regions or social or political reasons. We had some summer softness with operators. And I think the operators are always struggling to respond. Is it risk happening for a week? Or is it a trend? Should we change our pricing? Should we change our promotions? And then also, we were dealing with the overall backdrop. In terms of our trading, I guess, you could say, our share price with the sort of indiscriminate, as someone called it indiscriminate software sell-off despite the fact that we feel our position related to AI is actually very strong. So what we've done is our commercial team has done very well. You can see our wins. We've had a great focus on cost discipline. We've lowered our head count from just to about 600, down [ 605 ] or so where we stand today and focusing a lot on productivity and efficiency, some of that powered by AI, some of that powered by just rethinking how we're structured. Our margin -- our transaction revenue was flat. It's important to note here. We can go backwards. And I think in hindsight, some of the conversations or updates we had about transactional revenue softness could have implied that we were going backwards. And really what I meant was that we weren't seeing the growth that we had hoped for. So I just wanted to point that out because I think some translated to the fact that the market was soft and transactional revenue went backwards for excess but that's not the case, actually, it helped flat even in a difficult market backdrop. And importantly, as we announced today, we laid out and have facilitated a structured transition plan between myself and [ Lee ] having hired him at the beginning of last year. He is now ready to take the helm on May 1. So a lot of information here on this slide on Slide 12, a fantastic new Chief Commercial Officer in place. We've really refreshed our go-to-market approach. We've thought about our look and feel. You may notice today our presentation looks a little different than it has in the past. We've gone to a sort of crisper look, more modern look. We have a fully a brand-new website, which actually is quite a project with all the products and markets that we serve. And as a result, our pipeline looks really good. It's continuing to strengthen. Strengthen as the year has progressed. And the quality of our wins has improved. We're seeing more customers from our legacy product moving into SaaS solutions or new customers coming in looking for SaaS product and also continuing to expand our relationships with existing clients. So overall, our win rate has dramatically improved. The new business that we signed compared to 2024 was roughly double in terms of annual value. So we're really happy with the traction we're seeing on the commercial side and with the new focus that our team has. 13 and 14 really are a bit of just an update on how things are going with both accesso [ Freedom ] and accesso Paradox, 2 acquisitions that we've made in recent years. And just highlighting the fact that we've thought about these acquisitions and these different products very carefully. And sometimes it takes a little patience. But our strategy is intact, and it's really paying off. We're seeing great momentum with [ Freedom ]. We now have 63 venues that are contracted and continuing to grow. That's more than double than we had in the prior year. And it's proving to be a really important part as prospects consider their overall operation and the benefit accesso can bring to them by having that integrated platform between ticketing, food, retail and all kinds of things. Same thing with [ ski ], accesso paradox, which is really an acquisition we made is to give us a path forward for our clients that are on Siriusware, which is an installed application. Customers looking to move to SaaS needed an alternative, particularly in the ski market. And accesso Paradox is doing exactly that. So we're seeing great move to -- from the clients in that Siriusware product moving over to our transactional model or SaaS model. And overall, just in terms of ski, remember, we have 160-plus resorts as clients that's double the nearest competitor in this sector. So we are very strong in ski and continue to grow. And I believe it's a very important vertical for us. to continue to stay focused on and to continue to innovate with. So I want to take a moment on this one because if you're on Slide 15, about virtual queuing. And I think this is really important because context does matter. And as the headline says, one decision is not a verdict on the product. And we sort of had a lot of focus around this, a lot of a lot of chatter around what's going on with accesso and queuing. And I think it's important to point out that we have 25 years of fine-tuning a really robust application that works at scale and handle a wide range of scenarios. And as I called out in the slide, there's not something you can [ buy code ] over the weekend. And it's not just about the base idea, okay, who is next in the queue? What's happening? It's all the multitude of scenarios that go on in an environment when you have 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people in the park in 15 and 20 attractions, all the different variables that are going on, helping guests with accessibility. Accessibility needs, the whole range. And importantly, we do still have IP. I know that our core patent expired some years ago, but we've continued to file patents for specific functionality that is very critical to how the application works when you're running at scale. Again, someone can make a very simple [ deli ] type product. But our application and queuing is much more robust and much more significant than that, and we had a successful defense of one of those patents in 2025 that we're very happy about. So I just want folks to think about this product as something that's obviously the foundation of the business, but it's not a legacy product. It's not a tired product. It is a fantastic product that not only proves itself functionally, but also from a revenue perspective. And as we noted midyear last year, one of the major customers indicated they were not going to continue using the product. And near the end of the year, they changed their mind on that. They've extended through this year and actually have a pilot going at 2 additional locations and very, very pleased with those initial results from those pilots. So I just want to sort of put a pin in this because I think it's super important that we realized that [indiscernible] is a very great product, and it will still be a centerpiece for us from our product strategy. Couple of pages here, sort of 16 and 17. I won't go through those in detail. I think it goes without saying that every organization is looking at AI enablement in terms of how they work. We certainly do that and certainly doing that across every single area, including myself. Much of this presentation has been designed by AI as a matter of fact, and we were looking at everything from engineering, product design, sales and marketing, operations, so many tasks that can be expedited with the use of AI tooling, all the different scenarios. And we are seeing some great efficiencies coming from that, improved work product, improve time to market. with everything across the board, whether it's an application, whether it's meeting notes, whether it's marketing content, we are -- we have embraced AI across the organization. And it's also allowing us to find some efficiencies, but also to be a better business to operate more efficiently and more effectively and be faster at bringing things to market. So we're going to talk more about AI in a minute as a product and how that is a strategy. But I think it kind of goes without saying that we're embracing AI in the organization. We're a technology company for goodness sake. And it's at the core of what we do. I have multiple AI applications on my own desktop. And I can only imagine how many of our developers and our operations teams are using in their work every day. And so it's important just to call that out. I don't think it's something that you need to hear about every presentation because it's sort of, as I said, goes without saying that this would be a fundamental part of how we operate. So with that in mind, I want to save as much time as possible for the strategic inflections that is coming up later in the presentation. But I'm going to turn it over now to Matt to cover the financial highlights for you all.

Thank you, Steve. So key financial highlights on this page to call out. So you see at the top there is cash EBITDA was $23 million, so plus 0.8% up on the prior year. a margin of 14.8%, again, consistent with the close to 15% that we had in the prior year. So cash EBITDA for those that aren't familiar with it, is our principal operating metric. It is an adjusted EBITDA number less capitalized development spend. So our revenue was $155.1 million. That was plus 1.8% up on the prior year on a reported basis. On a like-for-like basis, it was up just under 4%. So there were a few like-for-like adjustments to strip out there being the disposal of a Brazilian subsidiary that we made in January 2025 and a couple of -- well, a B2C business that we disposed off in 2024 and a onetime hardware sale that we also had in 2024. So stripping those out, we were just shy of 4% growth on a like-for-like basis. You'll see gross margin there, up slightly on the prior year up to 78.5%, up from 78.1% in prior year. That really is just due to the margin mix or the revenue mix. So the hardware is typically a lower margin and we didn't have it in 2025, so up slightly. You'll see there a notable increase in statutory profit before tax, which is very strong as well as the notable increase in adjusted earnings per share and again, a very strong Steve mentioned a strong balance sheet, so $30.5 million of cash at the year-end and that is after a significant share repurchase activity that we've had over the 15 months -- past 15 months, I'll cover in a later slide. On the right-hand side, you'll see a mix of our revenue on a by type basis. So 84.6% is repeatable. And just as a reminder, the majority of our revenues are about just shy of 3 quarters is coming from transactional arrangements, whether that's on a revenue share basis or $0.0 per transaction basis. that's the major component of repeatable revenue. And then we also have some support maintenance agreements as well over term periods. Next slide, please, Steve. And on this side, again, for those of you that have followed us for a while now, this is our breakdown of that revenue by type into the more granular buckets that we have. So at the top there, you'll see repeat the breakdown of repeatable revenue. So within transactional revenue itself, you've got virtual queuing. So we highlighted that had quite a choppy peak seasonal period in that summer so we were down 6% compared to the prior year, but relatively flat taking in e-commerce. So factor tendencies equates to flat ticketing revenue but resilient despite that. And then offsetting that, you've got growth in distribution of 4.5%. So we mentioned this at the half year. where there are flatter attendances, operators will tend to lean on those distribution channels for promotions and discounting to fill the gaps that they have, and you see that reflected in the numbers there, the 4.5% increase. So there are other components contributing to the repeatable bucket of recurring license fees that were up 30.8% and maintenance and support agreements are both up 16.8%, and they're being driven really by the new horizon venues that we've had going live throughout the back end of '24 and throughout 25 and predominantly in the Middle East, which operates breaks and license and support model on and less so the transaction model. And beneath that, you'll see the contributors to our nonrepeatable bucket. Again, I think this is really highlighting the resilience of our business model so where whether it's flatness or less lower growth in transactional. We do have this service based on repeatable business that we can turn to. So we see increases there in implementation, change your question in billable services and the professional services line that we've broken out on a more granular level this year to make it easier to follow. So the increases in implementation and change requests really customers wanting advanced change request or advanced road map items to align with their own projects. or desires that they may have. And then we have a very willing and able professional services team that perform ad hoc customer requests and typically fluctuates year-over-year, but really is another boosting to our [indiscernible]. And then the final item to up to call out there is the hardware line. So I can touch on it earlier, as you see a drop of about $1 million and that's really because of the onetime accesso [ Prism ] sale that we had in 2024 that we wouldn't expect to repeat in '25 or going forward. Next slide, please, Steve. And then this is the income statement. So a couple of call-outs on this slide. Really, we've covered revenue and cost of goods sold is the admin expenses. So flat there, which really goes to show the robust cost control we've had throughout the period. So reported admin expenses up 0.2%, and the underlying admin expenses up to $99.5 million, which is up 2.5%. The underlying expenses we have majority payer being a SaaS-based business that mostly payroll and head count related. And you'll see on Steve's earlier slide that we ended 2024 on 682 heads we ended 2025 on 655 days, and we're now down at 600 -- roughly around 605 heads, really having a robust cost discipline and making sure that we're rightsizing the cost base to reflect the revenues that we have. And then the final piece to call out here is the net finance expense, I will call it. So that is a net number of $0.1 million expense for the current year, which is significantly lower than the prior year. And then that's reflective really of the fact that we have lower drawing throughout the year. So we will draw roughly about $10 million average on the facility throughout the period compared to double that in 2024 as well as having some positive FX revaluations. We have a the USD facility siting a GBP entity. So we benefit from the positive gains in that facility, and that's reflected in the finance income line. The next slide is a cash EBITDA. So this is bridging from the previous slide where you saw operating profits on how we get to our cash EBITDA numbers and the adjustments that we're making. You see then pretty limited exceptional expenditure during the year. Really, that's only related to our acquisition -- or the disposal, sorry, at the Brazilian subsidiary. And then you'll see the amortization line dropping down quite dramatically during the year. That's really assets becoming fully amortized. So it's a 20% drop in the number there year-over-year, assets becoming fully amortized than the cost dropping off. You'll see the share-based payments there dropped to at 14.9%. So we run equity programs for all of our staff, but the vesting assumptions changed slightly during the year, which is reflected in the cost decrease that we have. And then the last one is called out on this slide is the capitalized development spend. Again, we're very prudent on this number. So you'll see a slight increase from 2.6% to 3.1%, but that's still only representing about 2% of revenue year-over-year. That's all really to call out on that slide. And then this slide is showing cash flow. So I think the thing to call out here really is the strong, stable, sticky nature of our cash flow. So you can see year-over-year, very, very consistent free cash flow generation. So you can see the top there, $1.8 million up on cash flow before working capital movements. And just to touch on the working capital movements, you'll see a large swing from negative 11% almost in the prior year to plus 6% in the current year. So that really reflects the seasonality, particularly of our distribution business, depending as a seasonal peak in December and depending on whether it's collected, it [indiscernible] off of December or whether it hasn't, it makes a significant difference on a December basis throughout a 3- to 5-year average, you'll see it normalizes quite dramatically. And so that's driving that movement -- back to the previous slide, Steve. Yes, sorry. And then the other thing to call out on the cash flow are, you'll see there the $4 million acquisition, just over $4 million acquisition of intangible assets. So that's the one [indiscernible] intellectual property that we purchased in the midyear. And then you've got $15.9 million on share buybacks and a further $4.1 million on shares for our employee benefit trust. So we ended the year on $30.5 million, which is gross cash of $41.4 million and borrowings of $10.9 million. So again, very, very strong healthy balance sheet that we've got. Just touching on the outlook before we move on. So we have made movements, I think, it's fair to say since the year-end, so we've had the tender offer of $20 million as well as the acquisition. We expect to end the half year, so H1 and a relatively very modest net debt position, which is consistent with our normal seasonal cash profile and then we can collect cash significantly through H2, and we'll end the year and 2026 back in a very strong net cash position. And then final slide for me, really touching on capital allocation that we mentioned at our interim but bring it to the [ fore ] again. So we've operated quite a number of schemes over the past 12 months through at this point. So first, buyback started in April 2025. So we purchased 1.7 million shares for just shy at million a further program extended that for another 1.2 million shares for $5.3 million back in October through January '26. And then on the 18th of March, we completed a tender offer that you will all have seen for $20 million returning or purchasing and canceling 4.8 million shares and just shy, a total of 20% of the shares in issue being canceled over that period and a total of $36 million return to shareholders. So we still hold a very strong balance sheet post all of the movement post year-end, which gives us leverage to continue to providing shareholders -- share returns through meaningful capital allocation in the period going forward. And that is interesting for me. Back over to you, Steve.

Sorry, Matt, I'll practice your slide turning better the next time. All right. So on to some very exciting things. And there's a lot to unpack here. And we've tried to make sure we have plenty of time for this. And then obviously, we have a lot of time for questions at the end as well for those of you that have questions. We spent a lot of time thinking about AI, obviously, not only internally, but also what it means from a product perspective. And importantly, what are our customers looking for. But I want to start with just kind of highlighting what the overall AI space looks like. And as I said before, there's been a sort of indiscriminate sell-off of software companies. And it feels like everyone sort of said, run from software, and we'll figure it out later in terms of which ones are viable, which ones are at risk. And we obviously have an opinion about where we sit in that based upon the facts of this AI and the different categories of businesses that are at risk. And obviously, on the left-hand side, you see companies mainly that have per seat pricing, and that's the big underlying issue. Think about all the applications we use in our daily lives are e-mail, things like our work editing tools, all those applications that we use every day are seat licenses. And so companies that are running on C licenses are looking at is obviously at a declining workforce, lower seats. And not only that as a onetime effect, but a continued drip of lower seed licenses being needed. And so those sort of are the big core types of products that are in the highest risk category. In the middle, you've got some companies that are -- that are systems of record. They have a lot of integrations. But the data is sticky, but AI really just going to become an interface layer sort of translation layer. And then on the right-hand side, you see categories 4 and 5, and I think we sort of sit in the range of those depending upon the product that we're talking about. But vertical systems of record deep domain expertise, which is certainly accesso proprietary data, [indiscernible], obviously, there's a lot of that in our business, transactional pricing, not seat license pricing. And AI -- the businesses in these categories really AI enhances them versus replaces them. And we clearly believe that AI enhances everything we do. As one headline we have, it says it makes us more valuable, not more vulnerable. And I believe that is absolutely true. And you can sort of digest this and think about, okay, where does accesso sit? But I do believe we've been caught in a wave of sort of everyone running from software and when folks start peeling back and really categorizing the companies in the space, they're going to realize that, well, accesso was in a really strong position and not only in a strong position today, but also where we're going is going to further secure that position. And so I just kind of thought this slide was really helpful in terms of putting some context around that because we get a lot of questions about, oh, what's going to happen to accesso with AI. And I think it's going to make us a lot better. So as I said before, we have embedded customer data. Our systems are mission-critical. They're not a nice-to-have system. There's not an easy alternative to maybe work processing like you may have today or e-mail systems. We have 20 plus, probably almost 30 years of accumulated tech logic, and that's hard to come by in our space and not just across ticketing, but across a range of solutions that our operators are using. We have a whole ecosystem. We're not just one -- sort of a one-trick pony. You can come to us whether you need 1 solution, 2 solutions or 9 solutions. And we can help you out with that in an integrated and coordinated manner, and that's something that absolutely no one else has. And importantly, just our structure of our transaction-based revenue. And we certainly had the jobs about that over the years about all being transaction based. But I think it puts us in a really great position, and we are thankful we are in that situation versus having sold our products on a seed license basis, for example, we are well positioned and not under threat from a revenue perspective than a lot of the other companies are going to be facing in a pretty strong way. So as I said, we have a strong position in what is an otherwise noisy market. And from an optics perspective, there's nobody else that has everything we have to offer to operators of these venues. And what we've stepped back and looked at is clearly we're going to innovate within our products. Passport will get AI, [ paradox ] will get AI, Horizon will get AI. [ Freedom ] will get AI, all of our products will get AI, where it benefits the product where it benefits the user. But importantly, that overall view is really where AI is going to be at strongest. The ability to take different components, different silos of data and make sense out of that and turn it into insights is invaluable. And it's not just about our systems, it's about all the systems the operators use. That is the opportunity. So I'll talk more about that in a minute, but we sort of have 4 things we've been working on in the past year and they are accelerants our growth going forward and at the core of our innovation history. Number one, as we extended our view on payments. This is something that's been well considered because when you embark upon a journey on payments, it's rather permanent. You're installing hardware with the venue, the terminals you check out with, you're doing lots of internal plumbing. And importantly, you're relying on this partner for service, which is an important part of our customers' business. And so when you're going to connect yourself to a partner, you need to make sure you're attacking to the right partner because you don't want to sort of get -- have issues with your payment process that then sort of backlashes on your overall relationship. And so we spent quite a bit of time the majority of last year and even part of the year before, evaluating all the different providers that are out there and we're very happy to say we've secured a partnership with [ Adient], and I'll talk more about what that looks like in a moment. [ Composable ] commerce, we've mentioned that before. At the core, as I reflect on accesso overall, e-commerce is at the core, it is our absolute powerhouse. And not just for ticketing across everything we do, leveraging that expertise for transaction optimization is absolutely foundational to this business and we have to always evolve. And so right now, we are well underway with what we call [ composable ] commerce, and it's our next evolution of e-commerce and how customers will buy when they go to their computer when they go to their phone. Alongside that is conversational commerce, which is there will obviously be people going to the computer will do to our phones for a very long time, but there's a big wave coming, and that is conversational commerce. That is going to ChatGPT, that is going to Meta AI and saying, "Hey, I would like take us to Legoland this weekend. What are the options? I'm looking for a Six Flags annual pass. Can you give me my choices?" and have all that on a chat, never typing a thing on your keyboard or on your phone. And we've really made great progress on this. And in fact, we're ready for our first customer pilot here coming up in the next coming weeks, actually, allowing guests to browse, order and pay everything via conversation. And that is an example of gain another level of innovation, just like mobile ticketing, just like being a SaaS company, this level of innovation and getting in there early when you can be an early adopter, you can learn from those smaller sample sizes and perfect your process. So it becomes larger, you're the leader. And last but not least, is our AI evolution from a product perspective. And as we see today, we have acquired [ Dexagot]. We identified that as a target. Rightly so, idn brought this to our attention early on after joining accesso. And after getting to know them and realizing what they've built, it was clearly an opportunity for us to leapfrog to use the term to accelerate our capabilities. And we certainly looked at alternatives and hands down determined that acquiring detain and bringing that into our ecosystem was going to be a game changer for us. So I'll unpack means a bit more as we go through. Payments are at our core. We start with payments. we move billions of dollars a year. Passport alone moves something like $4 billion of revenue. That's just Passport. Think about all of our other products in total. We are moving a tremendous amount of money. And what that does is it allows us to get scale pricing. Our individual operators, maybe they sell $20 million a year across their whole resort or $200 million. They can't access the pricing that we can access when we look at the billions of dollars that we process. So what we're doing now is we move from being a payment gateway, which is what we've had forever, which is where we hand off the transaction to the processor, we're now going into actually being a processor with a partnership with Adient. And what that does is it allows us to, a, bring much better pricing to operators that can't negotiate anywhere near that level of rate. And it allows us to integrate our system in a more comprehensive way to become less disjointed, if you will. Because we can then end-to-end offer the package that is plug and play more so than please still hear for your payments, go here for this to you for that. We can bring you the whole package. And so within that, on the payment gateway, yes, you get a fee for every transaction that goes through. But on the processor side, you get a portion of the margin as well. So in addition to giving the clients a much better rate, access to much better rates, we also are rewarded with that for bringing those clients into the [ Adient ] platform. And so it expands a new revenue line for us in a way that is scalable, not just across ski or theme parks or live entertainment, but across our whole business. And so that is a very scalable opportunity that over the sort of midterm, long term is going to be a very valuable line item for accesso in terms of margin. And if you think about other operators that are out there in different areas like Shopify or [ Toast ] point of sales here in the U.S. They actually make most of their money on the processing side, and they don't make a whole lot from software if you look at their financials. And so this is an area that we have not really explored until now. And we've made a big move with the partnership with [ Adient], which was by far our top choice. Their global footprint is phenomenal. And they're going to give us that end-to-end relationship that we're looking for, for our customers. So our clients will get a better rate, it's less complicated. And by the way, doesn't take much capital for us to do this. So we're off and running. We'll start bringing customers on here mid-2026. Obviously, it will take time to scale, but we'll be moving on this very promptly to make it a core part of our offering. So I talked about [ composable ] and conversational there's more details on this page. If you think about e-commerce and maybe true to my heart, if you think about excessive Passport, e-commerce is -- was the lifeblood -- is the lifeblood of that product. And we've taken that learning across our whole product set in increments. And products all have their own e-commerce, I guess, you could say, module, right? But what we're doing with [ composable ] commerce is we're separating that from Passport and we're making a commerce layer, an e-commerce player that can work across any of our products. It's adaptable and scalable across our product set. So taking that transactional revenue and that incredible optimization we bring to our clients for optimizing their revenue and opening that up to work for Paradox, to work for Horizon to work across our whole product set. It's a very big move, and it's an effort we've been working on for about 2 years. We completed our first pilot over last summer. And now this year, we'll start the rollout to test out paradox. It will be the first of our products to adapt composable commerce. And then clearly, we'll work across the portfolio to bring that to life. But if you look at the revenue profile this brings in, if you look at Horizon, for example, Horizon doesn't have a transactional-based e-commerce product. And why would we rebuild something only for Horizon, where we should build something that works across all of our products. And that's what we're doing. So you might imagine Horizon will be next. And then clearly, Passport will get a major upgrade with composable. So it's not just separate, it's also a different architecture. So if you think about e-commerce as a flow A, B, C, D, then you check out, that's kind of what we have today. But composable is what it says, is composable. Think about being able to drag and drop and design your own screens. Think about being able to go in as a user and change our colors, change the shape of the squares and rounding the corners and changing the thoughts and changing the pictures and the images, that's what's composable. So we end up with a much more adaptable platform. And it's one of the things that our clients often ask for is the ability to customize the flow in the site to work for their branding, but it has all the optimization within that. So they can't mess up essentially. We've determined which modules work the best, and we make those modules available to them to drive and drop on their screen. So this is a fundamental part of transactional revenue growth for accesso going forward. Sub to that, I guess, you could say, is conversational commerce. And that is, like I said, you just talk to it, right? And it helps you out with your order, it helps you out with your choices and this is where everything is going. And going to a venue's owned website will certainly happen for many years to come. But there's going to be a convergence of shopping within things like ChatGPT, where everything we do will be -- we'll go to [ cloud], we'll go to ChatGPT for everything, and it will shift from being a Google search. Google is already doing that today. It will shift from going to a venue prime website to just using ChatGPT for everything we use or whatever your platform of choice is at the time. So conversational commerce allows us to plug in to those chat-based channels. very smart and have a dialogue with our product set, have a dialogue with our customers' information and get the user back exactly what they're looking for in a way that we are managing the messaging, we're giving them those options, and we're still controlling the transaction. And again, something operators can't bring to the table themselves. And we're making sure where our planning is there. We're making sure that this is available. And like I said, it will be rolling out in a few weeks as a trial at a very significant theme park. So we're looking forward to that. Stay tuned. So shifting now to the fourth box, which is how we think about AI. So my favorite headline here is data everywhere, inside nowhere. I'm going to say it in my sleep. But that's really what we were looking at. And on the left-hand side, you can see an operator all the things she's thinking about, right? Oh my gosh, I have all this information. Everything is in a different holder, right? It's all on a different data silo, gas survey, social media ticket sales, weather, accidents incidents, you should say, their loyalty program, their point-of-sale data from the restaurants from the retail stores. What do you do with all this data when it's not connected? And that is the problem. And the opportunity is to help them leverage that. So if you want to know how to optimize your labor, you have your labor scheduling system and you have your food sales, 2 different buckets. How do you leverage those 2 together to help the operators create optimized labor schedules, for example. how do you leverage weather prebookings, social media feedback, marketing calendar, all those to drive dynamic pricing? Connecting all that is something that human brain simply cannot do that AI now opens as a new opportunity. And so we are absolutely the best prepared in the market to bring this to our customers and to the end markets that we serve. We can see everything across the guest journey. We're embedded in their core systems. We have the foundation for AI insights. And we obviously had a huge customer base. We know how to execute at scale. And importantly, we know the business really well. That's something that's lacking. When you go to ChatGPT or to [ cloud ] or to whatever your choice of AI tooling is, it doesn't understand the attractions sector. It doesn't know what a per cap means. It doesn't know what seasonality means in terms of that context. And that's what we bring to the table, right? And that's what the tooling we need to do because that's different than just loading all the data into a random AI tool and hoping it can give you the proper answer, it needs context. So with [ exabit], we acquired that context. We acquired that intelligence. And what we're looking at is embedding the intelligence of the core. And like I said earlier, not just putting AI into our products, of course, we're going to do that. But thinking about it more broadly in terms of what will really make a difference to the industry, which is what matters, and that's what will drive our business. So on Saturday, Matt, maybe a little tired still. On Saturday, we completed the acquisition of [ Debit ] and we're bringing that into accesso and into the market as accesso intelligence, which happens to stand for AI, by the way. And it's an AI analytics demand forecast and capacity planning, it's a big data management platform. And what's interesting is it gives you a single view across everything, not just the accesso systems. Clearly, we're important to that equation. But it gives you systems from other vendors, maybe you're using a different food system, maybe you're using a different scheduling system, you need weather data. You need a vet data, you need local event data. You need school calendar access -- you need all of that. And what it does is it unifies all that into one layer of intelligence. And the -- what [indiscernible] has done over several years now has accumulated the context, if you will. So the models are trained. The AI models are trained on specific context, like what does seasonality mean? What does an event do? What is an event -- what it in count has an impact on my attendance this coming weekend? When it rains what happens to my attendance? And when the sun is out what happens to my attendance? All of that off-the-shelf AI absolutely does not bring to the table. So for us, this is clearly a leapfrog move. I did enjoy the frog -- I kind of have to admit. And we certainly evaluated whether it's a build versus buy. And we determined that buying this was going to catapult us ahead of the industry and give us something that would take us years to build on our own. So there are already 75 venues using [ dexabit]. They include things like this Smithsonian. So a very good, strong blue-chip customer base. They have 1,000 prebuilt visualizations, so dashboards, if you will, and they're already integrated to 100 systems. That alone would have taken years for us to do just the integrations. So what it does, it brings all these things together on the left, right, food sales, wait times, whatever it may be that the he has in their different data folders and data silos. First of all, gives you reporting, okay. Reporting is really important. And we struggle ourselves to bring all of our different applications of someone's using more than one of them into a single view. We get that immediately, just add water and you're going to have dashboards across all the excessive applications that you're using. And that will give you -- will give us a significant advantage in the marketplace and a big advantage for our clients to have a single view across the business. There's also an important part, which is called Voice of the visitor, which is looking out across the Internet and all the things customers are saying about your venue and bringing that all into a consolidated perspective and also providing you insights around things you can do to improve any concerns that visitors might be expressing. So what we do in Phase 2 is we move into predictive operations. So things like demand forecasting, what should I expect for attendance to Saturday? What should I expect for attendance across next year? Dynamic pricing, things like staffing, as I mentioned before, as well as capacity planning. That's sort of Phase 2. And in fact, I think exabits already pretty far into this, what we'll be doing is looking at bringing that into our product set us capabilities. So imagine accesso intelligence, taking all these different variables and creating dynamic pricing and then feeding it back into Passport, feeding it back into a rise and feeding it back into Paradox. So it becomes a loop of not just putting data out about what happened but helping you predict the future and operationalize that into something that maximizes revenue. And then Phase 3, that is sort of, okay, [ start track ] here, but this is not far away, by the way, which is allowing things to automatically happen, right? Self-healing operation. So when you see something happening, you have the system respond to take care of it versus opening a trouble ticket, for example. So that is the next level. I think where we're going to see success out of the [ chute ] is going to be Phase 1. We're going to be larger there probably in a matter of weeks, honestly. Phase 2 would then be a process that will happen over -- starting this year, over the next couple of years and getting better and better every single day. So just the intelligent reporting alone is a significant advantage to the industry and the elements of the predictive operations that will come to market very soon and the ones that are already there are something that no one else is offering. So what you end up is a little bit of a complicated graphic, that shows, I think, in one view, access in the middle our applications, whichever ones are using, wraps around the payments platform. And then the internal systems, other systems you're using, your CRM system, your financial reporting system, Google Analytics is looking at your website traffic, your hotel management system, which we don't offer today, your visitor survey data and then external data like weather, school calendars, social sentiment, industry data, economic data, all of that can be combined to give you through excessive intelligence applying sector context, all the data, all the dashboards that are there, being able to interact with the conversational engagement to do this and give you all the things you see across the bottom, forecasting revenue optimization, dynamic pricing, ops planning. And I think an important part here I want to highlight because I didn't cover it before is that third green box conversational. So having grown up in the theme park industry, my early days was deepened spreadsheets and a lot of manual data work. And what would happen is everybody comes to you asking you, can you run this query for you? Can you build the spreadsheet for me? Can you give me this report? The operators don't have the ability or the access to that kind of data or the skills to mine the data. And what [ Debit ] accesso intelligence brings to the table is conversational insight. So anyone with any skill level could ask a question, what was my #1 guest satisfier yesterday? What food items sold the most on Saturday? Which food items didn't sell on Saturday. What should I expect next week because there's a big concert in town? Will it affect my attendance? You can ask those questions and it can take all this information and come back to you with an intelligent answer, insight and predictions. And that's really what unlocks the power here is not that you've got to be a master in database queries you can beat anyone, you can be the CEO, you can be the head of marketing. You can be the store manager, and you can use this by simply asking the question and getting back the data you need, whether it's an answer, whether it gets you back to spreadsheet, whether it gives you back to report that is conversational insight that absolutely does not exist today. And it's across all of these squares on the page, not just one system. This is an absolute game changer for Access and importantly, for our customers. So Matt, you're going to cover the outlook, I believe? Or am I going to cover the outlook. I'm going to cover the outlook. So the outlook is coming up. I think the slide is actually out of order. So number one, we're unrivaled our opposition, covered all that at [ nauseam]. We're engineered to evolve. One of the things that we've gotten on the right side, you'll see, we've gotten beat up a little bit in the past about the amount of money we spend on R&D. Well, what that has done is kept us current, kept us flexible, kept us adaptable and we are ready for AI. And if you scrimp on the R&D, you find yourself in a position when something changes you're not able to respond because you now have to go and spend the next couple of years on significant deficit of technology. accesso is not in that position. And if I've ever been thankful for our commitment and our continued investment in our products, it's never been stronger than today and the fact that we are literally AI-ready and I can say that our competitors, by and large, are not in that same position. This is an absolute string for us, and it will -- and the ability to layer AI onto what we have immediately is going to have a significant impact on this business going forward. So I think Matt now you've got the outlook part.

Okay, I'll cover this [indiscernible]. So at the top there, you've seen the 2 black boxes, the guidance we're giving is in line with the current consensus. So revenue of $146 million approximate million and approximately $20 million of cash EBITDA as a trading update, January and February traded in line with our expectations, particularly on transactional volume, that's pleasing given the choppy end that we'd had from June through December of '25, being mindful though that it is still early in the year. We are a seasonal base business and our peaks are in a late June through early September, and then again in Halloween at the end of October. So I'm mindful that there's still a lot of the year left to play out. Just really highlighting the Middle East piece in there that's in our numbers. So we expect this year, somewhere between $4.5 million and $5 million of milestone-related revenue from that Middle East region. Half of that, so approximately $2.5 million. We've delivered already is just pending customer acceptance, which is great. The remaining $2.5 million is to be delivered from April through the year-end. So some level of risk there. We -- so far, it has been business as usual for us as best it can be given the circumstances, but it could change in a moment's notice. We did have a positive signal that Aqua Arabia, a large park there in the [indiscernible] attraction opened on the 20th of March despite the conflict. So -- but we are happening, but we are mindful of it. The last piece on this slide is just to highlight really the strength in the balance sheet, which I mentioned on my earlier slides with regard to capital allocation. So we have purchased 20% of shares back over the last 15 -- 12, 15 months and completed [indiscernible], so as a game changer of an acquisition and we have predictable steady state free cash flows, and we expect to continue supporting future shareholder capital returns.

Okay. Last slide. I'd have to leave it up there. Our new time line power in the business is fun. I'm going to close with that, and then I'm going to stop. The share so we can -- we can take questions from the group. I know we moved through a lot quickly. We have a lot to unpack. It's also been a very busy week or 2 here between finishing up results, finishing an acquisition of a company based in New Zealand, nonetheless. And so we're obviously very excited about all the things that are to come. I'm very excited about [ Lee], having, I guess, you could say, handpick my successor and having him here for -- since the beginning of last year, he's fully embedded in the business. And having such a plan transition smoothly with such a qualified person. It was not only intelligent and great at what he does. He's a great person as well. So I'm super excited. And to have a running start on the next wave of accesso with all the things that are to come. I think the [indiscernible] acquisition is just is going to really make a huge difference in this business on top of everything we already have that's working great. So I'm super excited, and Matt and I are happy to take your questions. So let's go.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Katie Cousins with Shore Capital.

Two, please. On [ Dexus ], struggling with the name of it, [indiscernible]. Have you got any examples of their existing customers who are already using it? And any tangible you can kind of point of how it's improved trade in? That's the first one.

Yes. I mean, [ Sony ] is one that is a notable customer. I mean, Matt, you probably can name it to others on the list you have in front of you. I think it's the customers often request that they're not be quoted as a customer just for confidentiality reasons, so we can't provide the whole customer list, but there are a few notable ones that I think are important to highlight. And what we see is a very high retention rate for the customers. They see -- there was even one customer example where they said, "Oh, maybe we don't need this." And then they quickly came back realizing they didn't need it. The power of what it brings to them in terms of being able to operationalize the amount of savings just in report generation alone assigned from the revenue and business optimization is very significant. And what I can tell you that on the accesso side, we've been working with [ Dexia ] now for, I guess, a year as a partner, while this was happening on an underlying basis. And we're 2 for 2. We showed the product to 2 customers and both bought it. So in the first meeting, by the way, they bought it quickly. They bought it without question, and they're loving -- that's on its way. So I think it speaks for itself. And as I told someone yesterday, it's almost hard to explain it until you see the demo and see how it works because it's really mind boggling. But the operators are getting a lot of value from it. And I don't have exact numbers on what they're -- what the improvement to them is. I think some of the capabilities we're going to bring into our product like dynamic pricing, for example, will have a material impact on their top line revenue.

It's good to hear the 100% succession rate so far. Yes. The second question is just on -- in terms of new wins and it was encouraging to see that actually, I think it was 11 out of 43 new wins took multiple products with you guys. So could you provide a bit more color on what products that they're taking? And is there a bit of a pattern between a combination of products?

We're basically seeing any product plus free. That's kind of what the equation would be. Obviously, a lot of Paradox plus freedom, some Passport plus freedom. Freedom is gaining traction as there are more customers using it, our referral base increases and it sort of starts to snowball, but it's generally plus freedom.

Our next question comes from James Lockyer with Peel Hunt LLP.

Firstly, just on the guidance for the year. I think within the $146 million, you've got some milestone payments from the Middle East within that. And obviously, you had some of that in 2025. Am I right in thinking that on the current guidance, it sort of implies a decline year-over-year. And if that is the case, what's the major driver for that? And if not, how should we see some upside from current guidance from that perspective?

I'm not sure where you're getting the decline from James. But the last year, we did roughly about $3.5 million to $4 million of milestone-related revenue from Saudi Arabia and --

I meant the group revenue or the group revenue. So I think it was 15% last year. [indiscernible].

One customer. I mean we do have the loss of a major queuing customer in the current year. So transactional revenue would be below where it was in buy for 2026. So that is reflected in that guidance. But the Middle East alone, if you're looking at it will be slightly up where it was for 2026 compared to '25.

And what's the implied underlying organic growth then from the core business? In the guidance?

For transactional revenue?

Yes.

Yes. Well, it's -- so it's reflected in our commercial wins really. So if you look at the commercial outperformance that we had. So we had moved from 30 wins in 2024 to 43% in the current year in 2025, and that will be reflected in the growth rate that we have underlying outside of the major milestones and nonrepeatable revenue and ignoring the major customer curing loss. So there will be growth in the [indiscernible].

And on the AI point, I think you flagged some operational efficiencies, the productivity gains throughout that. And obviously, we're early days with where that technology is coming through. Where do you see the benefits over the next few years in terms of time saved product releases quicker in terms of sort of you able to quantify that in terms of where you think margin might get to because of the AIs you're implementing?

Yes. So we've had enough time now with the tooling and understanding kind of where we see the most efficiencies, the quickest. Clearly, any kind of operational or product area, operational area and are seeing the most gains. We are not seeing the gains in engineering, which is not unusual, especially when there's so much context required. The tooling doesn't quite understand the context in order to just write an e-commerce application for a theme park, for example. It doesn't have experience with that. And so we're seeing -- not seeing the gains in engineering, which I think is not unusual for a lot of companies. It is helping us move faster in certain areas. And certainly, refactoring code is quicker. Things where we need to update something, we're seeing some gains there, but not large gains. The bigger gains are coming in sort of our -- like I said, our operations product and marketing areas. Think about even just sales proposals, the speed with which and the quality with which we can create sales proposals. Those are the areas that I think are going to make the biggest the biggest underlying difference in terms of efficiency, both in being able to operate over time with fewer people, but also, importantly, being able to move faster, getting quotes out faster, getting product design faster handling customer queries, either automatically through automated processes or more quickly with AI tooling. So I think we're going to see the biggest benefit in the areas outside of engineering, which is more than half of our group and engineering will be a little bit slower on the uptake and we'll see those -- that there'll be a decent amount still, but it's not going to be the same level we're seeing those other areas.

Okay. Maybe just a final one. I think historically, you've talked about a 20% margin. Do you think as the medium-term, longer-term guidance, do you think that this could see the AI investments, the acquisitions you've made recently, the pricing -- the weight because your consumption versus per seat, do you think your -- the margin could be higher than 20% over the mid- to longer term?

Yes. I think where we get there is we need to increase our revenue growth rate. And one of the sort of 2 sides to that one is attrition. So making sure we stick our customers, right. We stick the landing with our customers for the long term, right? There -- they're not seeing some better things across the street, so to speak. And this progress with AI will differentiate us in a way that competitors can't get to for years. And so I think on an attrition basis, this will really help a lot. Although we don't have much, if we allow the competition to continue to grow and our attrition could start to grow. On the new wins, this is something that no one else can bring to the table. And sometimes we find ourselves competing on price maybe or customers sort of past [indiscernible] with an application they're considering. This is something that is going to be a differentiator for us that again is unmatchable. And I think our competitors are going to be showing a feature within their own system. They're not looking at the overall client ecosystem the way we can come in into the room already ready to do with the integrations that are in hand. And the conversational AI is really going to be unprecedented. So I think that will help the revenue growth rate. And if the revenue growth rate picks up, 7%, 8%, 9%, which is probably about where this company can be given our scale. And at the same time, the cost base is not growing. It's continuing to shrink even by the amounts that we did this year. You get there pretty quickly. And so it's really about not solving. We can't cost our way at 20%. That is certainly not the goal. And I think a lot of our savings, we will reinvest in things like accelerating AI capabilities even further. But at the same time, continuing to lower that cost base and propelling the growth rate is obviously the combination of higher margin.

Our next question comes from Jon Byrne with Berenberg.

Two questions from me, if I can. We'll take the turn. So firstly, on [indiscernible]. I guess from a commercial perspective in terms of monetizing what should we expect in terms of contribution from accesso intelligence going forward? And do you think about it as a stand-alone kind of product to monetize? Or is it kind of primarily a good foot in the door for cross-sell opportunities and sort of surround existing solutions? How should we be thinking about it?

Yes. I think it's strategic for us, number one, around our product set and increasing our win rate. which is more powerful than just selling accesso intelligence on its own because of the value of selling intelligence along with Passport, along with Paradox along with Freedom, that's a much bigger opportunity than [ Dex ] would have had on their own. And that really is going to amplify both the value that there their product rates, but also the overall results. And so I expect that the commercial model there's still a bit of a discussion around that, and we will obviously be managing that going forward, but there will obviously be customers that are out there that can benefit from a technology they don't necessarily even maybe work in our space or they don't use our -- one of our applications. We see that as a lead opportunity. Let's bring them in, even if they're using a competitor system, let's enable them with some elements of the product and that brings them closer to accesso and allows us to talk to them more about our actual solutions and maybe switching over. So we see it as a conversion tool. We see it as a strategy to improve our overall portfolio. But I can say we've not sort of said, "Oh, this is -- this line item today is going to grow in a trackable manner for its own revenue category," it's going to become more of an overall benefit to the business.

Great. And then just secondly, on outlook, you mentioned seasonality. Can you just remind me or give us a steer in terms of concentration in those summer months, say, June to August, particularly given the growth of the ski product what should we expect for this year?

Yes. It's so the majority of our revenue, John, comes from that June through September period. So -- and October a little bit in December, but -- you think of it as pivotal really for our year. And we had that last year, right, when there was softer and weaker transactional volumes through the back end of June and early July. We revised guidance accordingly at that point in time. So it reflects the importance of it to our business, and that will continue going forward. I mean, ski has seen some level of growth. It was certainly our strongest performer in terms of commercial new wins last year. but it will take some going there some way to offset the size and the impact of the interaction space that we have.

Our final question comes from [ Jason Rand ] with Deutsche Bank.

[indiscernible] in today, the [ adjustment ] from [indiscernible]. On the -- to the customer base. I appreciate you mentioned or can be named. But can you talk at all about any drink customers you may have? And then again, I think you just touched on it slightly, but what do you expect kind of pricing to solution to be looking ahead? And then secondly, on capital allocation. At this level, how are you thinking looking ahead in terms of share buybacks compared to kind of further bolt-on acquisitions.

So the interesting thing is -- sorry, a little bit of an echo there. Yes, there we go. So interestingly in [indiscernible] and her team's focus has primarily been around cultural attractions, museums, if you will. And so our overlap, that's not one of our bigger markets. similar operations, similar concept to a theme park, but it's just a different space. We certainly have museums in our portfolio, but it's in a primary sector for us. And so our overlap or sort of bumping into each other had been fairly limited. We obviously had gotten to know them before joining accesso. We got to know them as a group much more closely over the last year plus. In terms of customer overlap, I think that's what we're going to build going forward. And we see their customer list is additive as new commercial opportunities for us. Some of them are certainly customers we would like to move over to an access platform. And so it's really about taking what they've built where they've learned the context of a venue operator, primarily in the cultural space and now enabling that across the broader leisure and attraction sector. That's really our goal. It's a bit -- obviously, they have a great customer base. but it's really focused on what the potential is for the product within our ecosystem. In terms of capital, Matt, you have the --

Yes, I'll just touch on the capital allocation piece. So thanks [indiscernible]. I think the key point to highlight there really is the nature and the stable, sticky nature of our cash flows, which I hope has been reflected in the last couple of years when you looked at the cash flow slide to general consistent free cash flow, which we've used accordingly to provide shareholder returns over that same period. There's no reason that, that shouldn't continue. So whilst spending on a tender and making an acquisition over the weekend, we still hold a strong balance sheet, which we would continue to leverage to provide shareholder returns in whichever form that may take, we'll make the best use of our available options at the time that, that comes, but there's certainly no reason it should continue.

I'll add on to that, Matt. They wouldn't let me write in the annual report that our share price is frustrating. And so I'll say it now, they thought it was a little too direct, but it is very frustrating obviously. If you look at our underlying business, it is strong. It's strong. We've got a very good position related to -- and we have a really great customer set. And we've sort of been calling a wave of either disproportionate focus on one client, one product. some of the AI pressure, maybe some main market pressure as well, a whole variety of factors. And our view, I think, along with many probably a view is that our share price is tremendously under value. Our company valuation is much lower than it should be. And I'm confident that this too shall pass, we just got to keep our head down. We continue to build great products, provide great service and the share price obviously buy back shares to the extent that it is reasonable for us from a balance sheet perspective.

That's the end of our Q&A session. I will now hand over to Steve Brown, CEO, for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. And it seems like this may be my last investor presentation. So I thank you all for sticking with us and staying so tuned into our business over time. It's clearly an exciting business. And I've been through many waves of change in this business since 2007 which turned into accesso in 2012 and then what it is today. I had 12 employees in the very beginning, there's 605 now. We've worked on, I think, 3 countries. We work in 31 countries now. And this business is built on changing and innovating and not just sort of building something and letting it run, but it's always being ready for whatever is next. And I think the move we've made here is our big step into what's next and not just adding features and calling it a strategy, as we say in our report. But thinking about it more comprehensively. And importantly, if we always put the operators first, the clients first in terms of what will help their business then we will win in the end. And I think that's exactly what [indiscernible] and accesso intelligence will do for the business is put the client first, help them run their business much better than they can without it. And in turn, we'll continue to be the trusted partner and the market leader for many, many years to come. So thank you all very much, and I'm sure Lee will do a fantastic job. I have all the confidence in the world and he's obviously supported by Matt, who probably could use a good rest about now. So thank you all very much, and we'll talk to you later.

Thank you for joining today's call. We are no longer live. Have a nice day.