ActiveOps Plc (AOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the ActiveOps Plc results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself, however, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you to Richard Jeffery, CEO. Good morning to you sir.

Good morning, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for making the time to speak with us or listen to us this morning. We've got quite a bit to get through, and we're going to try and work through what I hope is a reasonable summary of what for ActiveOps has been a really great year, and the financial results have been strong as well. So I want to take us through a few things. And also conscious that many of you may not have heard Emma or I talk before, and we'll start with a bit of a context for the company and about what we do. And particularly, I'm focusing on that because I think it also will give you some idea about why we're so excited at the moment about some of the things that are going on in the world that makes our product particularly relevant. In summary, ActiveOps. So we are a software company. We're a SaaS software company, which means we get very strong recurrent revenues. We get good visibility of our -- of the money we're going to get in the course of any given year because our contracts are long term with very blue-chip companies. Alongside that SaaS revenue, we also have a certain amount of [indiscernible] what we call training and implementation revenues. And that can vary quite a bit, but that again is very revenue generative, it's highly profitable, but it depends a bit on the projects we do from one year to the next and how much our companies take on ourselves. So that revenue varies a bit, which means our total revenues, top line can vary from year-to-year, but the underlying strength of the business is very much to do with that SaaS revenue. So in this current year, as you'll see on the screen there, we're looking at about GBP 25 million of SaaS revenue and that's broadly spread across our regions. So we have an excellent customer base in Australia, which we've had for many years, where we are really the dominant player in most of the banks there. We have excellent penetration now in North America, particularly Canada, and Canada is one of the strengths of the year where we are now pretty much as predominant in use of our software by the Canadian banks as we are in Australia. And then EMEA, EMEA is the largest part of the group, where we are, again, used across a wide range of banks, insurers and, indeed, outsources. You can see some of the logos on the screen there. And then in terms of what we do, the industry has a challenge. It essentially is defined by one word, which is complexity. If you're a major financial institution, you have so many things your people are doing and they're doing them in so many different places. So if you think about it from the point of view of operating -- managing that cost quality triangle, you have a huge issue with the right number of people at the right places and you have teams. And within each of those teams, they have a different and very variable amount of work. And so from the point of view of optimization, managing the productivity and productivity is a very current word for a lot of organizations right now, that's really quite a challenge. Because as we all know, in any given stage of life, work expands to fill the available time. And ActiveOps provides the tooling that enables them to manage the sort of the complexity of that word. You can see on the screen here, some of the challenges the way that our customers describe their -- the problems, how many people do I need is the simplest way of doing it, but who can do what? Will I meet my service levels? My overtime bills are too great. These are the kind of world of managing ops that is such a challenging one. And the interesting piece, and this is why we are particularly mobilizing in a certain direction of the business is, those challenges are getting harder than ever. If you can imagine, we hear a lot about, for example, financial crime and the regulatory oversight, making sure banks are checking the right people being paid or the wrong people aren't being paid and so on. We hear a lot about operational risk. But the impact of COVID is still echoing through the industry in terms of big events that suddenly create the seismic changes. It means organizations don't have to just be better in control, they have to show people that they're in control. There's an awful lot of stakeholders. We all know as consumers, the consequences on a very practical level, if our credit cards don't work or the ATM don't work. All those things are creating a context where the world of work is becoming harder to manage. Working from home is the really interesting one because a lot of organizations through the challenges of moving back from COVID realizing they have to know things, they have to know things about how productive are their teams, not only just in the office, but when they're working from home. Can they allow people to work from home? Are they better? Or do we need to have the discussion about bringing people back in the office? These are very current issues that are probably more in people's minds than they've ever been. And so ActiveOps provides a structure around which is managing that and there's a picture on the screen here, which shows it. But in very simple terms, what we do is we enable our organizations, our customers to consolidate that single point of view, so that all those different types of work across all their products, they have a single point of view that says this is how much work we've got. This is the time we have, which then immediately unlocks the potential to better manage their capacity between teams and ultimately reduce their costs or also improve the service levels because they can move people between teams more easily. And again, without over -- sort of over dwelling on it right now, the challenge to do that is just getting harder. And so the ActiveOps intelligent software to support people making those decisions, the need for that is just getting better. So ActiveOps is a standard across many, many banks, and that makes a huge value to them because we can provide benchmarking context and the like. We can show them how good their supply is. If you have an outsourcer providing services, how good is that outsourcer at managing your work relative to how good you are internally, so how much work do you want to do internally or outsource. Can you prove to an external customer -- regulator, how good you are in control and so on and so on. This is what ActiveOps brings to our customers. And probably with a potency and sharpness, those kind of issues are probably more in their mind at a C-suite level than they've probably ever been before. Our products really go down to software, as I said, in terms of 3 areas. We have the desktop analytics program, which essentially has visibility of the use of applications, what people are doing on their desktops, which is particularly valuable. For example, when you're rolling out new technologies they're putting in place robots and new means of processing. And they need to be able to see if the staff are taking up or what applications they're using, which bits of the functionality they're not using very well, which is hugely impactful. Well-being, being able to show that they are -- people are not working extended hours back to the working from home. It just provides that decision intelligence to make better visibility, better use of time and work. The other products there, which we've expanded the scope of ActiveOps is reach in terms of bringing that level of visibility and control. CaseworkiQ is the latest addition. It massively extends the application of ActiveOps do more complex work with the automation agenda taking away a lot of the simple work, more and more staff or employees to resolve inconsistencies or exceptions. That's where that takes time. It may even dip length of time. And our CaseworkiQ, one of our customers, and I got it across 3,000 people doing financial crime remediation work, that's a huge addition to their control over the work that's doing. And then the core product of ControliQ, which is really the engine room of ActiveOps. It's the one that provides the actual real detail of how to manage and support our customers optimize the use of their capacity. Now what's really sort of building now has been the application of machine learning, in particular. Our software has always provided structure. It helps you and I as operational leaders make better decisions. What's so extraordinary now is with the power of machine learning, and we make big use of Azure and some of the Microsoft environments, you can now bring the fact that we have our own proprietary data, and we've been at the [ same now ] for over 15 years on the cloud. And we've got that data. We have the standard ActiveOps methodology, which shows structure around how things work, which means now the application of that machine learning is now able to not only predict but be prescriptive about what we can do. So for example, things that I might have had to do manually, like do a plan for next week, our software does that for you. It does it for everybody. And we all, therefore, can trust the numbers better. And guess what, we make better decisions because I'm, therefore, less likely to sandbagging my plan and all the other kind of things that goes on. So our technology is both automating what managers need to do, but also predictively and prescriptively helping them make the right decision. And just to give you a little anecdote, our customer has recently introduced the Smart Planning, and they haven't picked up in operations a change to the environment and the work they were processing. The Smart Planning tool identified the fact that work was no longer coming in, flagged it up, produced the plan. And ultimately, it gave the business a huge and greater visibility over the benefits other projects we're bringing in, which for them was a really great example of how ActiveOps decision intelligence not only helped them manage that result better but gave them confidence about other things they were doing. Another little example, we did a proof of -- we're doing a proof of value down in South Africa for a customer. They recently -- because they didn't have the data required to cut their staff to come back into the office. Not popular, lots of many buses, lots of work in Johannesburg, not the greatest environment, consequence, low morale. They introduced ActiveOps' data. And within 4 weeks, not only did they have the visibility over how people are working but they also were then able to say, actually, people are better at home. They gave the control, they can make choices about what and when. And more important -- and as a consequence, then the productivity of the unit went up. The customer experience went up. The manager's blood pressure properly dropped and overall morale has been through the roof. And that was just 4 weeks, but it beautifully illustrated the limitations and the data they had before and then the value of the ActiveOps data. And that's before they start bringing in all the value of being able to use that data to better planning. Just a really simple example. So all of which couples with lots of outcomes for customers. You use that time to reduce cost maybe, but it's more often used for better use of that time. And it's on the screen there, again, you've got some good examples of what the outcomes of that is. So as I sort of look forward to the sort of the competitive environment, ActiveOps has always had a very clear position about giving control. And whilst there's lots of other things people can do in the contact centers or in sort of spreadsheets [ equivalent to ] this, but more and more, we have that sort of compelling differentiation of, if you like, we put the work into the time, we can really match and align that work to give our customers the decision intelligence to make better choices. So what does that mean then in terms of our year? Well, really, as I sort of -- you can tell from my tone really, I think there's just so much to talk about and so much specific progress. First, you've got that market context, which I talked about. But in response to that, the R&D team part of ActiveOps has been pushing examples, I've given you a couple there, of this machine learning and AI into our technology to reduce the effort, improve the efficacy and ultimately make our products much, much more effective, easier to assimilate and scalable. We do -- our software addresses more types of work. It's easy to use, the UI is better. The aggregation across the cloud is a hugely better and then with our sort of benchmarking, there's a huge amount of opportunity to consolidate ourselves with, for example, one of the various resource planning tools at their like Workday or SAP or perhaps Pega as a processing engine. It's our ability to synthesize that data, which is just going off the scale. One of the things for the company, because we've been going since 2005 on the cloud, has been also taking our customers with us as a -- on the technologies. And we've been migrating our customers from the old sort of work we used to call the work we put on to ControliQ. And again, as a [ seminal ] year, we've done that. We've now got a situation where all our big customers -- in fact, pretty much all our customers now are on this new technology. And as Emma will show you in a minute, the impact of that is to unlock a huge amount of revenue growth opportunity. We've been working hard on our marketing. If any of you are really interested in what we do, please do go to our website. What you'll find hopefully there is some really great videos by customers talking at different -- in the different levels of their organization about the impact ActiveOps has had on their work, their ability to deliver their strategy, but also at the operational level, feel good about the organization they work with, which matches a great deal to us. Now on behind that, firstly, the product revolution, the marketing investment, my next agenda is moving to sales. Because this organization wants -- we had an amazing track record of incremental growth because people use us and expand. The land of expand is our signature. The truth is we need now to really accelerate our new logos. Logo acquisition is always a challenging one for us because essentially, you're selling to very big organizations with all the protocols and associated complexities. But with the combination of the [ curve up here, ] the really clever stuff, we do some things that, frankly, are pretty unique. And secondly, the market context where people are more sensitive to some of the problems we fix, we really have a golden opportunity. So you will have seen maybe in the press, we've appointed a new Group Managing Director, James Bawa. He's the tip of the spear in terms of this new sales effort. But all regions are showing a lot of opportunity, so we'll be placing in the coming year sales resources in a variety of places. So an awful lot of both potential platform market and capability really coming to bear. And all of that obviously has to translate into some numbers. So I think -- and in fairness, I think, I'll hand over to Emma to talk a little bit about the finances of the year.

Perfect. Thank you, Richard. So I'm pleased to share as far as better numbers to year-end '24, with total revenues of GBP 26.8 million given the year-on-year growth rate of 9% on a constant currency basis. We have achieved a really exciting milestone this year with profit before tax of GBP 1 million, which is a robust performance against the prior year, which was a GBP 200,000 loss. We expect this to continue as the group benefits from the operational leverage within the business model. The group remains well capitalized with GBP 17.6 million in the bank. As earlier -- as mentioned earlier, the operational cash generation of GBP 4.2 million is supported by the annual in advanced cash cycle, which typically means we've received cash up front. The adjusted EBITDA of GBP 2.4 million gives us an EBITDA margin of 9%, which at the half year point was 6%, and, in March '23, was 3%. So we can really start to see that momentum fill within the operational leverage of the business. Looking at the detail -- and looking at the P&L in a little bit more detail. There are a couple of numbers which are well pointed out. So as Richard mentioned at the start, we have seen a slight change in the revenue mix this year. It is worth pointing out that the T&I revenue does vary year-on-year. It is very much driven behind the mix between new logo and existing logo rollout. In terms of the margin, we've seen an increase in the margin from 82% to 84%. It is worth pointing out that underlying we've seen an improvement in the SaaS margin from 85% to 87%, which was supported by the restructuring of the host environment, which delivered an underlying cost savings for the group. The other number, which is worthfully in announcement here as well, is the operational expense, which you'll see year-on-year has remained the same at GBP 20 million. In year-end '23, we benefited from an FX favorable movement of GBP 700,000, which is a comparison to year-end '24 with less than GBP 50,000. We've also capitalized more in FY '24 with capitalizing GBP 1.3 million versus the prior year at GBP 900,000. So what does that mean? If we split both of those adjustments out of that number, underlying year-on-year, we see a reduction in the operating expense by about 1.5%. Breaking that down into a little more detail. The main thing really to pull out here is year-on-year, that cost savings has come from a change in the sales and marketing spend. Towards the back end of year-end '23, we rightsized the North America sales and marketing capacity. Shortly, we are going to talk around planned investment in year-end '25 in sales, which is more focused on global and enterprise and sales resources as opposed to a concentration in the North American market. One of the things that we talk a lot about is our land and expand success. So what we're trying to do here is to show what does that mean to us is the business. So our annual recurring revenue has increased year-on-year by 14% on a constant currency basis. This is supported by net revenue retention of 110%, which we have consistently maintained for the last few years. What I'd like to do here is draw your attention to the chart in the middle. So of the customers that we retained last year, 82% of those customers either increased or maintained ARR. And what's more impressive is also the customers we retained, 27% actually increased their ARR by 20% or more. And as you can see from the chart, we are building momentum in that land and expand. On the right-hand side, you'll see a breakdown of our customers and the makeup with our ARR. You'll notice that our biggest customer is 14% of our ARR with the top 2 customers both being over 10%. It is worth pointing out that both of these customers have been with us for over 8 years, and both continued to deliver strong growth year-on-year. The other thing I'd like to pull out here is the customer number. We have consistently reported for the last few years a customer count number of 81. This year, that has dropped down to 74. And as Richard mentioned, we have introduced 3 new logos during the year, which gives an underlying loss logo number of 10, which may seem high. However, when you look at what that equates to in terms of ARR, those 10 customers were equated to less than 3% of our roll-forward ARR. So while the customer number may seem high in terms of the loss, actually, the impact was [indiscernible] is fairly immaterial. One particular statistic is one of those customers who've been with us for quite some time, their annual contract was worth GBP 6,000. So actually, this was an opportunity to trim up some of those smaller accounts, so we can ensure that we're focused on the larger enterprise accounts where there's a lot of opportunity for land and expand. Just keep the numbers seen around the land and expand. And so here, what we have is an example of one of our U.K.'s tier 1 banking customers. And what this chart has shown you is the growth in ARR over the last 8 years. So we originally onboarded this customer back in FY '17, where we went into one particular department in one particular country, and very quickly, we grew the ARR 5x over the first 3 years as we expanded across geographies and departments. Now what's really impressive is what we've been able to do as well in the last few years. So between FY '22 and FY '23, we were able to successfully cross-sell CaseworkiQ, which grew the ARR again by over 50%. And then more recently, we've actually been able to upsell Series 3, and we've seen a 25% increase in ARR. Now this story doesn't stop here. With the rollout of Series 4, which is expected by the end of this financial year, that will give us another opportunity to continue further upselling within this account. Also, we are not at full penetration with this particular customer, but there is still the opportunity to continue to expand in terms of licenses. Now what really exciting here is this model can be easily replicated across a number of our existing 70-plus customers. The majority of our customers are more to the left-hand side of this chart. So this gives us a huge opportunity to really exploit the total addressable market within our existing customers, which we currently value to around GBP 90 million in terms of ARR growth. Just to finish up on the financials, just to summarize, we -- as a business, we've got a healthy balance sheet. We've got net assets of just below GBP 9 million, in the prior year that was just below GBP 8 million. We've got no debt in the business. We've got high levels of cash. Our total revenue, and 89% of that is recurring revenue. We're strongly cash generative, and we are also now delivering sustainable profits which puts us in a really good position to help support and invest back into the business to support growth in the coming years. Thank you.

Very good. Thank you, Emma. So the next phase, what I thought we'd do is just look at sort of more of the outlook around where we're heading and in terms of the strategy and opportunity. And as I've touched on already, I think the key thing here is really putting the reality into the need for AI to support this. This is one of those areas where we hear a lot in the press about the impact of artificial intelligence and the like. And working just straight down that slide on the left that you can see how AI will actually automate an awful lot of activities, but if you like, processes, people and a very good technology in the service industries we operate. What that does then mean is, as a consequence of that, the precision and data that leaders need to have to support their own control of that is going up by that order of magnitude. So they're going to need that smart, accurate and highly prescriptive and predictive information to control it. And ActiveOps has put itself in a great place for that. We are established as a provider of systems of control. And now our technology, as Emma showed you in that kind of uplift on the right-hand side there, is really translating into value. So for example, anybody using our planning, if we implement planning -- introduce Smart Planning, it is worth about 7% improvement in productivity, directly quantifiable benefit. So for our sales teams, our relationship managers, that's a very clear articulation of value based on something where we're already a trusted provider. And that's just one example of the type of activity we're doing. In terms of the different elements of that, just again, to give you a flavor of it, one of the big challenges of organizations is being reliable. We all know the impact of unreliability in our suppliers. So service level prediction, knowing that your teams are going to deliver what they promised in some areas, which are highly variable like we don't know when this is going to reply on some of the inquiries of that mortgage. So in a portfolio of 10,000 or 20,000 activities at any one time, having confidence in what level of outcomes you're going to achieve as an organization has a huge effect, not only on the customer experience but also how your teams feel about it. So service indicators. Using AI and our transaction flows to predict that has just transformed the visibility of some organizations about what they're going to do, not just how bad was last week or whatever. Moving from retrospective to predictive thought has a huge effect on their confidence and their capability. Skills. This again is a huge issue for so many organizations. One of the reasons you have to have local management who really know the team, know the work is because they are the ones who carry that information in their heads about what the capabilities and skills of those team members are. And that's fine and useful, but it's very difficult to aggregate that. ActiveOps' latest generation of smart skilling means that across the activities that you are doing, which are in the ActiveOps already, our AI will now effectively determine and be able to work out the normal learning curves. And therefore, where I or Emma or anybody else is actually on that curve on that journey. Also interestingly, if I don't do a certain task for a length of time, how quickly are my skills in that will degrade, which means, again, that information can be pushed to a leader or to other -- the HR department to really actively manage that skills base. So we've gone from a kind of very inherent skills capability in people's heads to a systemic source of data on which to base that decision intelligence. It really will be transformational to the world of sort of orchestration and management because the unstructured data turns into a readily accessible and relatable data. The next stage, which we're now releasing in the first turn of the wheel here is essentially this copilot, the copilot for this activity, where through teams rather than through the software, senior leaders, middle management, different roles will get notified of things that matter or even though we're able to inquire. We're using equivalent of a large language model like ChatGPT. Literally, you might say what do I need to worry about today? Or what's the areas of greater stress on the business? And our copilot will return the fact that team X has had 3 people off sick and team Y can help, and they may not necessarily have done that. So that also, again, pushing the decision-making into the technology and helping leaders make right choices, the impact on their efficient use of time and the outcomes they achieve is really quite exciting. Now these are features which are not just sort of theory. Our Series 3 is already released, and that's generating that uplift you saw in terms of the smart planning and other features, new features we're going to be releasing in the course of this year includes the Virtual Coach. So a massive step-forward in our product proposition across the range. I've touched earlier, but importantly as well is our marketing. So again, if any of you have been tracking our website, you will see a change in top note around the whole Decision Intelligence. But behind that a much clearer way through to what does this actually do and the voice of the customer. And what that does mean and what we're seeing now is a real change of gear in terms of [ borrowing the land ]. So the inbound needs have increased. So you can see on the screen there, 19% increase year-on-year. But what's really interesting is the quality of them. We all know how much research we do now in any context, before we contacted the half potential sort of customer or supplier. So the people who do an awful lot more research on the website, customer -- which means that when they actually contact us, they've got a much clearer sense of what they want from us. So rather than our sales cycle being elongated by education, there's much more focus on you have a solution, I think I might need, show me. And that has a huge effect on the velocity of the sales pipeline. Still talking about big enterprises, but entering with the sense of need is really important. Translating that into an overall improvement in our lead generation as it shows there through our all sources gone up by 27%. And then, of course, that then filters through to that one important pipeline of real opportunities as we look ahead. Let's say, one of the key measures for me is taking that new logo acquisition. And as I mentioned, our net revenue retention of 110% just to be completely clear about that. What that tells you is for every pound of revenue last year we got from our customer base consistently, we get for GBP 1, GBP 10 next year. So there's an underlying growth driver. Now if we can then add in the opportunities to expand from that graph because most of our customers at the left-hand side of Emma's picture earlier on about the need to take control of the more advanced, they just -- that's a revenue kick. And then you overlay that with moving from 3 to 5 to 12 to bigger numbers of new logos, which, of course, doesn't kick in the current year, but will accumulate as we go through next year, you start to see the opportunity for that compounding revenue increase. So really good stuff. In terms of the change of our sort of capital allocation this year. So there's a question in relation that I'll come to this. But essentially, what we are doing is within the general fiscal rules of keeping our EBITDA and our PBT comfortable with the right side of the wire, which we were pleased about this year, we're now going to be expanding that sales team. It's not -- it's every order of 5 enterprise sales across the regions, South Africa, Australia, North America, particularly U.S. now and in the U.K. and all of whom are gearing towards that kind of the type of enterprise customers we're talking about there. So that in the current terms of the timeliness, the way it works will mean that that won't necessarily affect the revenues this year, but we're confident about the impact as we go into the next year, full year starting 2025-'26 of that increased capacity to service the pipeline, which has been building. Now that is something which, based on the evidence, obviously, if we really get the paid take up, we have the cash to actually expand that more rapidly. So that's a very -- that's the nice situation we're in. Similarly, around product, we have the capacity, the cash in the bank to focus around certain aspects of our product road map if we get a certain traction with either certain integrations with 1 or 2 platforms or other areas. Now this is a very -- this is a business which is just well capitalized to the level of trading we're doing. So lots of interesting stuff going on there. And overall, what that means is we're confident that we can continue to both farm out and develop our relationships with our existing customer base, but really get into that bigger and wider GBP 900 million ARR that's out there. And again, the crucial bit for me as much as our capability is the market sensitivity. I mean we all know because we read the papers, the sort of headlines around CEOs demanding their people back in the office and all that. That's when the sharpness of the -- rather the lack of precision about their data on things like capacity and work really come to focus, which is a great place for us to play off. So looking forward, as we look at the sort of the current trading, we're obviously a quarter into our year. Essentially, in the way of these things, I can confirm we are comfortably -- we are in line with Board expectations. So whilst all the figures will come out at the half year, the current update is we've had good levels of expansion, including one new client, a particular one this -- earlier this quarter. The road map releases are on track, I've alluded to. And I think that just gives a level of confidence in not just around the Board table, but actually in the business, actually, that's the key thing about how people feel around the world. ActiveOps is a very diversified business with people around in Australia, the U.S., India and the U.K. and the [ move music ], because of the type of stuff we were talking about, is really very positive. So lots of reasons to be cheerful. But I think at that point, I'll stop talking and perhaps take a few questions.

[Operator Instructions] As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I could just hand back to you just to read out the questions and give response to what's appropriate to do so, I'll pick up from you both at the end.

Thank you. So from James, with the substantial cash position, how do you see the utilization of capital between organic growth through the expanding sales team and acquisitions? Good question. The context really -- coming out at the other end, I think you've heard me say about sales, and that's a good lever to be pressing and we do have the means. I think the interesting one is acquisitions. Now one of the benefit of being on public markets is obviously the ability to raise capital for acquisitions. But with the recent state of the market, that hasn't effectively been possible. Public market valuations versus private seem to have the sort of -- have had a big delta. I think that's changing and ActiveOps' general position, we have done 3 acquisitions over our history into good success, particularly notable to the last one. And I think that is something which we continue to look at. We are primarily an organic growth company. We have the means of growth, however, in our own -- within our own hands, as I've already spoken to. But I think having that sort of that capability will become increasingly important. And we might make -- we might be looking for acquisitions for regions of product enhancements, something adjacent, but it also -- and then as in the past, it's a way of accessing new markets. When you look at our acquisition of OpenConnect back in 2016-'17, that really gave us hugely enhanced position with the US health care market and that's been a fantastic source of growth and opportunity for us. So I think the balance is there, but I think we should again stick to our primary [indiscernible] source of growth, which is through our own means and organic growth. Which geographies are you most excited about? Interesting question. You saw -- we made a management appointment of a new regional general manager in Australia. Australia has been a huge strength of this business, but it's actually been quite static for perhaps the last 4 or 5 years. I think there's been a total change of gear there. They're an important part of that technology refresh. All the big Australian banks are now on our latest platform. And through that process have really engaged with the new functionality. So I'm very excited about the growth in Australia, both in terms of expansion and new logo. Canada, I touched on that at the beginning. Canada has been the real success story of '23-'24 with now a fairly strong position, if not dominant, in the Canadian banking market. We have -- that's, however, at the early stage of the growth cycle. So in other words, we are placed in there with lots of opportunity for expansion. So I'm very excited about the Canadian market. In EMEA terms, which includes -- because we organize around Time Zone, South Africa. South Africa is also a real point of growth. We were last week in SA presenting in the context of a very large enterprise, about a much more all expansive use of our software across their enterprise, including not just the sort of service operations, but the contact center and the branches to provide that kind of clean consistent data across the whole of their enterprise. And that as a solution is a broadly applicable to a lot of our organizations. So there's a lot -- in a sense, there's a thing about the geographic split, it gives us currency hedging, but it also gives us a lot of different response to different markets, but reflecting where we are at the moment, I think the consequence and the applicability of our technology is actually pretty universal. Can you expand on the Microsoft Azure partnership? I was under the impression some level of employee productivity monitoring came as standard with Microsoft Teams? That's interesting. I mean -- so we enjoy a really strong relationship with Microsoft. They have been the sort of point of endorsement on a number of big pursuits. We had some success with RFPs this year where our product was -- unusually companies -- 3 companies came out with substantial request for proposals in our space very clearly. And we won all 3, and we won all 3 because of our road map and our technology. Obviously, as part of that, you need the endorsement of, let's say, other people to say, yes, they're a big player. This is the right software in the context of an organization like ourselves and Microsoft provided that role. So that's hugely helpful. But addressing specifically the question around Teams. The Teams have -- the sort of Microsoft environment are provided in this Veeva. They specifically and deliberately avoid, if you like, anything associated with managing output. So they will give visibility over meetings and your screen time and the like. But there's a very conscious and deliberate policy that supports that. So in other words, ActiveOps is a very natural enhancement to where they are going strategically. And that's quite a clear policy. So although sometimes -- and this makes the point, productivity can be misused as a label, the intent that people really want the sort of information that we provide, they won't get that from the Veeva product anytime soon. But equally, it's very complementary to that. How does your platform sit against enterprise owned ERP systems, Microsoft Dynamics or other data? How often does it refresh yourself in those disparate data sources, how work-intensive is it to keep the platform updated from those other sources of truth? Again, great question. Really, if you think about the -- what we call the ERP systems, there are systems of record for your staff. A good example and it's a bit of a tight line is again Workday or SAP, but sticking with Workday. Workday, however, or rather [indiscernible], we put the work into Workday because Workday doesn't measure work, it measures time. So there's a really nice fit with ERP systems. The value we have now, if you take one of our big customers, they take their skills, they take their information on staffing from Workday, they feed it up into ActiveOps as part of our planning. And our planning process, which is much more about run, is used then to plan and manage the team. But importantly, our data goes back into Workday better and cleaner because it's more precise and accurate pertaining to what's actually happening. So there's a really nice piece of symbiosis there around sort of using that data. So to the specific questions, what our new technology is, is ultimately in the [indiscernible] and wholly API driven. So what that means in practice is if there's a source of architectural technology inside a company, [ ready ] to staffing, for example, then that we can draw that in. But just as much importantly, our data source, our consolidation of information from lots of sources, which then becomes valuable, is pushed out to Tableau or QlikView or whatever the reporting engine might be. So again, it's all about finding a place in the ecosystem of a large enterprise's technology stack. And our secret sauce is that combination of work into something that can be consolidated in time, and that is pretty special. Are you seeing any customers pool spending as they're unsure or confused about the overlap and future for technologies such as GenAI or RPA? The short answer is no, because making the point, there's so much talk about the impact of that stuff, but what actually companies need to see is the reality of how it can help. And I hope as I brought to life some very practical example are the skilling and the planning. ActiveOps' technology is beautifully based to show that. It's not about the concept of AI, it's about the reality of AI. So just like the manager interaction, these tools are interfaces. But behind that, you have to have something that does something useful, and then you can apply the power of technology. So specifically to us, no, not that. Generally, and particularly in the U.S., enterprises are becoming more careful about that and this was why you need to establish a real need. The procurement process are not getting shorter. One of the reasons we had the logo acquisition last year was lower than we historically, just because the procurement process are being longer. But systemically, the problems of complexity are beginning to overwhelm with other companies, which means, therefore, technologies like ours become a bit of a life vest in stormy seas. Just taking a pause to see if there are any more questions. Do you think are Emma?

No. I think nothing at the moment.

Perfect. Rich and Emma, thank you for jumping in and thank you for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company. Richard, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?

Well, I'd be at risk of repeating myself. I mean what we've got here is a business that's really well positioned. We've got a really exciting product set. The actual sort of customer base we support, we clearly have the credibility, because we do work for the largest companies in the world. And so therefore, really the opportunity for us is to capitalize on that with new tech, better marketing and a real sales focus. So an awful lot of good stuff in there.

Perfect. Rich and Emma, thank you once again for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback and the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management of ActiveOps Plc, I would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.