Alfa Financial Software Holdings PLC (ALFA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Alfa's 2022 Half Year Results. I'm joined as always by Duncan Magrath, and Matthew White and our agenda for this presentation begins with this part with me introducing the session and giving some key highlights of the company's performance. Before Duncan takes us into a financial review, Matthew talks about our performance with respect to operational delivery, I will pick up business and a sales update before we summarize and go to an opportunity for Q&A. So beginning with the introduction and key highlights. In our review of 2022, overall, we've had very strong fundamentals, not only the financial performance, but I'm particularly pleased with the strategic progress and our progress with investment that we've made during this period. Matt will go into further detail on software delivery, but we have continued our impressive cadence in this area. We've had 2 new customers start to work with Alfa and we have had 2 go-lives. Particularly pleasing has been our performance around people. Our recruitment after a relatively slow start is now ahead, and we have increased our retention rates and our engagement is now at a record level since we have IPO-ed. And as Matt will go on to talk about, we're delighted to have been given the Gold Status investors in people. We continue to expand our products and our markets. Matt will talk more about a version of 5.7, Alfa Software. We're going into new geographies. We're expanding our wholesale footprint. We're increasing the capability within our cloud hosting offering, and we're increasing support for volume asset portfolios. 5.7 is a step change in functionality and technology, and we'll be delighted to take it to market later this year. We have again improved our revenue quality, further customer diversification with customer concentration now sitting at 35%. We've grown our subscription revenues, which have grown 18% since this time last year. And we've also grown our addressable market, not only in the different markets and verticals that we serve, but also our core addressable market as reported by Deloitte earlier this year. We've made significant strategic progress. Matt will go on to talk about subscription, but subscription revenue is now 31% of our total revenue mix. We've made progress with Alfa Start. Matt will talk about the new customer that we've onboarded, but we're also investing to improve our offering in the U.S. automotive market for smaller players with U.S. auto start. And we'll also talk quite a few times about our achievements in partnership with a 51% increase in partner utilization compared to this time last year. And without Alfa iQ, we've moved on with this offering significantly, and we're now into a phase where we're building product hoping to introduce our first product offerings under the Alfa iQ banner later in the year, and we paid GBP 12.2 million in dividends. Looking forward, we're continuing to recruit and retain talent. We are building out our smart engineering hub in Portugal and building on those first hires that we've made in that area, which increases our access to a global talent network. I've mentioned 5.7% in terms of innovating and investing in our product, we're very, very excited to bring this one to market. There are so many advances in this piece of software. We've made significant progress, and we will continue to make significant progress in building out our partner program as well as the growth in Europe that Matthew will report, we want to build on that European success with expansion into the U.S. for staff augmentation. The macroeconomic outlook does remain uncertain. But from Alfa's perspective, our pipeline remains strong. We are very confident in our expectations. We remain strongly cash generative, and we're actually confident in all aspects of our model. So on that basis, the Board has decided to declare a GBP 10.5 million special dividend, which will bring our total dividends and our total return to shareholders since November 2020 to GBP 100 million. Moving then to the key highlight slide. First half this year, we turned over GBP 43.9 million in revenue. That's a 5% revenue movement upwards at constant currency and 7% in absolute terms. We made GBP 14.2 million in operating profit, and that was up 25% since this time last year. And that's at a 32% operating profit margin. We will all talk about our total contract value and its importance as an underpin for our expectations. That's gone up again 10% since this time last year. And importantly, a significant driver of that has been the subscription revenue area for us with 16% contribution in the growth of our total contracted value. We now have 32 subscription customers, and as I said, that now accounts for 1/3 of our total revenues. Average headcount is up 6%, 23% growth since June 2020, and we're now through the 400 mark with 417 talented team members delivering Alfa's vision. And our retention rate is now at 85% and on an upward trend, which is hugely important in keeping the team together to deliver our promises. Strategic priorities will be the underpin of Matthew's presentation. But to remind you of them, because they underpin our vision, which is to grow our size naturally, but our impact more rapidly. The successes start with strengthened, growing our differentiation of our market-leading people, product and delivery. Using this differentiation in the strong markets that we serve, we sell, focusing on cloud-hosted subscription in our target markets. And we create the capability to deliver the things that we sell through recruitment, retention and overall capability growth, that's the scaling part of the successes. And then in terms of delivering that impact more rapidly, we are simplifying through continuous improvement to allow us to deliver more concurrent implementations. We're creating synergies through our partner ecosystem, improving our sales opportunities and again, enabling more Alfa systems implementation. And the final is being Alfa start, not only improving our offering for smaller asset finance providers and thereby expanding our target market, but also acting as a platform for innovation and increasing our reach. That's it for me for now, and I'll now hand over to Duncan for the financial review.

Thanks, Andy. To start with headlines from the income statement. We've had a strong performance in both revenue and profits even after allowing for the benefit of favorable exchange rates. Revenue was up 7% in the period or 5% at constant currency. Operating profit grew more strongly at 25% or 21% at constant currency, benefiting from the revenue growth, along with costs remaining flat year-on-year. The operating margin of 32% was very strong but we will see some extra costs in the second half, and so I would expect the full year margin to be lower than this. The effective tax rate of 16% was lower than 20% for the first half last year, benefiting from the impact of some favorable prior year items. I expect the full year effective tax rate to be 17.5%, slightly improved on the 19% for last year. With the increased operating profit and reduced tax rate, basic EPS was up 32% at 3.0p and diluted EPS was up 31%. We are very pleased with the financial performance in the first half of 2022, showing the resilience of the business benefiting from growing subscription sales and reduced customer concentration, which I will cover on the next slide. We've continued to diversify our customer base with 35% of our revenues in H1 2022 accounted for by our top 5 customers, and this is down from 61% in 2019. The number of customers with annual revenues greater than GBP 2 million or the equivalent of GBP 1 million for the first 6 months of 2022 increased further to 15. As the business grows, we would expect to increase the number of customers with annual revenues in excess of GBP 2 million. On customer concentration, we would expect to remain around this level going forward. Turning now to the first of our 3 revenue streams, subscription revenues. The subscription revenue stream is the group's recurring revenue, and this increased 18% over last year with the revenues increasing from GBP 11.4 million to GBP 13.5 million. The cloud first approach to sales means that most of our late-stage pipeline are customers looking for a hosted subscription solution. Subscription revenues now account for 31% of our business, and the total customers of at least one element of subscription revenues has increased to 32%. This builds greater resilience into our revenue base. Moving on to our second revenue stream, software. The software revenue stream has perpetual license revenue and any revenue from development services, i.e., where the customer is paying us for changes to the software. Software revenues increased 5% in the period. As previously discussed, we are at a relatively low level of license revenues compared with the past. This is for 2 reasons: Firstly, the current v4 to v5 upgrades do not attract an additional license unless the customer takes additional modules. Secondly, as just mentioned, customers are increasingly looking for subscription services, which can include the license. Development days charged to the customer was slightly up on last year. One-off license revenues where our customer is already live and triggers an additional license payment were GBP 0.2 million in the period down from GBP 0.8 million in the first half last year. Turning to our final revenue stream, services. Services revenue includes all of our other sources of revenue, principally based on charging clients on a day rate basis for professional services, including implementation work. Total services revenue increased by 2% to GBP 23.7 million. There was a reduction in pre-implementation work and implementation work for new implementations but this was offset by an increase in work for existing customers, including the v4 to v5 upgrades. Total chargeable days were impacted by additional holidays taken in the first half and also due to some increased sickness days both of which we believe are impacts of COVID lockdown coming to an end. During lockdown, people did not take all of the holiday they were entitled to and the level of sickness dropped to very low levels, both of which have reversed. Offsetting these impacts, however, was a very strong increase in partner days, up 51% over the same period last year. This demonstrates encouraging progress. And as Matt will discuss later, we are confident of making further progress with our partner program in the second half. Turning now to expenses. Overall costs, including the benefit of FX gains have been held at the same level as last year. Salary costs are in line with last year despite the increased headcount and pay rises, and this was principally due to holiday pay accrual release due to the increased holiday taken in the period and also due to a reduction in bonus accrual for the year. We expect salary costs to increase in H2 with a full 6 months impact from the salary rises awarded in H1, along with the impact of the pickup in recruitment towards the end of H1. Partner costs were up from GBP 0.7 million to GBP 1.2 million with a 51% increase in the number of days I mentioned earlier. Hosting costs for customers increased in the period on the back of the growth in that business. We have a profit share scheme where employees share a pool of money being essentially 10% of the pretax profits. The cost of this increased in the period on the back of higher profits. We benefited in the period from the weakening of sterling versus the U.S. dollar and saw GBP 0.6 million of FX gains compared with a loss of GBP 0.3 million last year. Within other costs, we continue to see a low level of travel and conference costs and we'll see an increase in these costs in H2 as they normalize. Turning to cash flow. Another strong cash performance with operating free cash flow conversion of 112%. We saw the usual increase in contract liabilities and also working capital as a result of the annual maintenance billing cycle. Trade receivables continue to remain well controlled. And although some of the maintenance payments were not received until July, making the performance slightly worse than the first half last year. As expected, capital expenditure was slightly up with GBP 0.3 million from increased capitalized development. Tax payments increased versus last year to GBP 4.0 million with last year being a net receipt of GBP 0.3 million. This was due to last year benefiting from receipt of 2 years' worth of R&D tax credits and also some additional tax payments in 2022 related to the higher-than-expected profit delivered in 2021. We announced a share buyback program in January, and we've [ crossed ] GBP 2.2 million of shares in the period or GBP 2.0 million net of some shares issued to satisfy share plans. The biggest item on the cash flow, however, was the payment of GBP 12.2 million of regular and special dividends in the period. So now on to the balance sheet. The balance sheet remains pretty straightforward. Debtors are well controlled, contract liabilities increased largely due to the annual maintenance cycle. Corporation tax payable at the end of last year was as noted on the previous slide, paid in H1 this year. GBP 3.7 million of owned shares with a cost of GBP 5.4 million are now held across the EBT and in Treasury. Looking now to future revenues and TCV. As you know, we've consistently reported what we call TCV, or total contract value. On the left-hand side of the graph, I have shown the figures for the last 4, 6 month periods. Total TCV is up 10% over the last 12 months, partly benefiting from exchange but also benefiting good conversion of the late-stage pipeline, which more than offset the unusual loss of one implementation customer who lack the internal capability to complete the project. Strongest growth in that period was the subscription TCV, which was up 16%. Next 12 months TCV is up 8% compared with 12 months ago, with again strongest growth being in subscription TCV up 19%. The TCV for the next 12 months is in line with last year end, but this is driven by the services figure being down, which is a seasonal issue with a lot of statements of work awarded at the end of the year and then progressively work through during the year. Overall, the TCV figures give us confidence in the outlook for the business. I will now cover capital allocation and dividends. As you've seen, the business continues to be very cash generative, and we had cash of GBP 21 million at the end of the period, having paid GBP 12.2 million of dividends in the first half and GBP 89 million of dividends since November 2020. Our stated dividend policy is progressive, i.e., to increase the regular dividend as the business grows. Our cash generation from operations has been GBP 79 million over the last 2.5 years, and this level of cash generation has led us to generating significant excess cash over that period. We have previously stated that we intend to return excess cash to shareholders. And following the strong performance in the first half, we are declaring a special dividend of 3.5p, amounting to GBP 10.5 million, which will be paid to shareholders in October. This will take total dividends since November 2020 to GBP 100 million. Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. We saw an effective tax rate of 16% in the first half, benefiting from some prior year items. And as mentioned earlier, I expect the 2022 effective tax rate will be 17.5% but I'll remind you of the planned increase in corporate U.K. corporate tax rate from 2023 onwards. We will see increased costs in H2 due to increased headcount towards the end of H1, along with the impact of pay rises and normalization of costs. We saw a slight increase in CapEx in the first half with capitalized development at GBP 0.3 million over last year, along with some small office fit-out costs. I expect roughly the same impact in H2. So CapEx for the year as a whole will be up GBP 1 million higher than last year. As announced to the market in July, we've assigned the lease on the ninth floor of our London office to CHP, which means that we will reduce lease liabilities by GBP 6.3 million, lease assets by GBP 5.8 million and therefore record a one-off gain in H2 of GBP 0.5 million. We have benefited from weakness in sterling versus the dollar in the first half partially offset by the impact of strength against the euro. I have shown updated currency guidance here with the key one being the U.S. dollar, where a $0.01 movement will impact revenue by GBP 225,000 and operating profit by half of that. I will now hand over to Matt.

Thanks, Duncan. We've made some great progress in the 3 areas that I cover in these presentations, which are our market-leading software built on leading-edge technology, our fantastic team and our outstanding delivery track record, which is arguably our most important differentiator. Our strategy is now embedded within our organization. We're making great progress with our strategic initiatives and all of our people are empowered to take initiatives themselves towards our vision of delivering more Alfa Systems implementations more efficiently. Examples coming out of our bottom-up innovation process include tooling to simplifying software configuration and to simplify the production of system documentation. It's worth repeating the context in which we deliver our software. The functional requirements within our market are very complex. Alfa's functionality is ahead of anything else in the market, and this is delivered on a leading-edge technology stack. Competitors either operates on a legacy technology platform or lack the functionality to compete at scale or both. We maintain a strategic road map for our product taking input from clients, prospects and partners as well as from legislation, market trends and new technologies, and we're investing in strengthening our markets and products team in H2. We released a new version of our software every 4 weeks, and each release includes meaningful improvements to Alfa Systems, both customer-funded and through internal investments. But periodically, about every 2 years, we draw a line in the sand, and we announced the release of a new version of Alfa Systems. We're working on plans for the release of Alfa Systems version 5.7 later this year. Version 5.7 will include many exciting functional enhancements to Alfa Systems including an updated UI with improved user experience, extensively enhanced credit decisioning capability and improved support for associating revenue streams with individual assets on financial schedules. This will improve our offering for, for example, IT equipment vessels, which deal with high volumes of assets. Also, moving in the opposite direction, Alfa 5.7 improved support for ongoing billing arrangements, which were entirely unrelated to an asset finance schedule. These might include billing schedules for dealers or for brokers or for other introducers. Enhanced configuration segregation enables multiple operating jurisdictions to be managed in a single instance, and this consolidates our market-leading position for multi-country and multi-brand implementations. Alfa Systems operates in a highly regulated environment. And as we've said in the past, Alfa functionality remaining compatible with regulation introduces an ongoing barrier to entry. But technology also moves on. And Alfa 5.7 support for new messaging frameworks is an example of investment in remaining leading edge. We're very pleased to have announced a partnership with Tomorrow's Journey to deliver a new proposition for vehicle subscription and usage-based mobility products. Tomorrow's Journey provides a market-leading front end in this area and Alfa's flexible architecture and extensive support for all forms of asset finance mean that very little development is required to move from working prototype to production ready. Another ongoing technology initiative sees us moving to containerized deployment for all customers. We're making good progress with this starting by moving to Docker deployment for all hosted clients so that we can roll out containerization to on-premise customers. This initiative increases standardization and simplify support. We've also carried out new high-volume performance testing. This consolidates our advantage in the high-volume market as well as proving our ability to work with Amazon's Aurora Serverless technology. Aurora Serverless provides on-demand database scaling, which is particularly helpful as part of our hosting offering where it dramatically improves efficiency and reduces Alfa's costs through dynamic database scaling. Also in the hosting space, we're adding SOC1 to our existing SOC2, ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 auditing for our product. SOC1 verifies the controls around financial reporting. SOC2 and ISO 27001 verified security and availability controls and ISO 27018 focuses on cloud data security. So again, we're consolidating our advantage by increasing our regulatory compliance offering. We're also investing in our cybersecurity team as well as our wider capability in this increasingly important area. Uptake of our hosting product remains strong with 9 of 13 new implementations expected to be hosted in production and nearly all customers benefiting from hosting of environments during the implementation project. We're really pleased with our engagement score, which is at 83%, a record high since IPO. This follows from the ongoing implementation of our people strategy, which is clearer and better targeted than ever before in our history. Although we're seeing signs of competition for talent easing, recruitment markets in all of our locations have been competitive during the first half. We will not reduce our standards for prospective retreats to our highly talented team. But we have a fantastic offering from the new joiners and a fantastic recruitment team. And so despite the market and a slightly slow out of the year, we're now broadly on budget for recruitment. And at the same time, we're ahead of our budgeted retention, which means that we expect to be ahead of our planned client-facing headcount by the end of the year. Our engineering smart hub will increase our access to talent. Also Lisbon is lower cost than London, and we are recruiting hybrid workers and planning to use flexible co-location space, all reducing overheads. We've selected the seats from our London-based team, which finalized our approach to the Lisbon market, and we've started recruiting in Lisbon. We're finding lots of talent. And we now have 3 accepted offers of recruitment with our first new starter already on board. The team as a whole is very excited about it. And the Smart Hub model is designed to be repeatable so that it can be rolled out to further locations in the future. Our team challenges developed collaboratively by individual teams have been successfully implemented and new smart working patterns have been established. And the background of new working practices makes our engagement score particularly pleasing. In London, hybrid working has enabled us to consolidate from 3 floors into 2, which will give us an annual cost saving of around GBP 1 million. And we're thrilled to have achieved Gold Status within the U.K.'s widely adopted investors in people accreditation standards. And we've recently been told that Alfa is in the top 20 of all organizations that received this award. We are a software and delivery company, and we never forget that our efforts all come together with successful delivery of our software for customers. We succeed with complex projects where our competitors struggle. And as Andy mentioned, our delivery cadence has continued. We started work with 2 brand new customers in H1, one of which is a third implementation for Alfa's U.K. equipment start product. The other is not yet contracted, so it remains in the late-stage pipeline. We've had 2 new customers go-live in H1, both were initial implementations for minimum viable products and both projects leverage Alfa Start configuration. We've also completed one of our major U.K. v5 upgrades and started work on a first Mexico implementation of Alfa with an existing customer. More detail on our delivery programs can be found in the appendix to this presentation. We also continued to invest in our delivery methodology and tooling. And a particular highlight in this area is a new tool to enable portfolio migration to Alfa via simplified upland. Partnering is a key element of our strategy. And as both Andy and Duncan have said, H1 included a 51% increase in partner days. We're keen to operationalize staff augmentation partnering in the U.S. And to that end, we signed a partnering agreement with a new U.S. staff augmentation partner and training is scheduled to start in early October. We're also supporting one of our EMEA staff augmentation partners, which is working towards setting up in the U.S. And finally, we started work -- we started the work required to plan a multiyear project for our journey towards enabling partner-led delivery of Alfa Systems. That's all for me, and I'll hand back to Andy.

Thanks Matthew, and I will conclude with the business and sales update, starting with ESG. We continue to do all of the things that we've always done around our drive to create a positive impact. But this half, in particular, we've seen more outcomes and more community focus. I'm picking up a few of the highlights. Our health and well-being focused launching Peppy men with a focus on men's health. More innovation, more events and more real-world 3D connections as well as the online ones, we've had excellent feedback on those, and they are really important aspects as we continue to stoke and look after our culture. And we've all talked about that Best Pulse Survey Engagement score since 2015 of 83%. From an inclusion, diversity and belonging perspective, our global community groups that are run bottom up by employees continue to thrive. And a real highlight there is Alfa for Racial Equities initiative to reboot Alfa's work experience in conjunction with upreach, which promotes the needs of less advantaged graduates, and we've had a great initial work experience session with some people there. From a communities and environment perspective, we continue to raise funds with new corporate charities in coming. And I'm delighted that we've been able to work with Change Please, who are dedicated to empowering homeless people and training them up as baristas, getting those people involved in our coffee shop and looking after our people has been a real highlight. And finally, moving towards science-based targets in terms of our environmental impact strategy and starting our move towards climate positive status. All of these together, in my opinion, are part of walking the walk in terms of the impact that we have on the communities that we're involved in. Turning now to the market overview. The headline is that the auto and equipment finance markets remain remarkably resilient. From a macro perspective, we're seeing rising inflation and most people agree that there is a risk of recession going forward. However, asset finance markets remain robust in these kind of conditions. And in fact, they tend to thrive. One of the reasons for that is that asset finance is a more secure form of lending. So it tends to gain lending share during these kind of conditions. And whilst our market is not completely immune to these pressures, we have other characteristics of our business and the sector that we serve that makes us feel very confident going forward. The first of those is software drivers, and it's important to understand that the requirement for a software change is not just driven by new business. Major players within our market and within our customer base have large extent portfolios that require management and drive software change. These drivers continue to be regulatory change, which will only increase in troubled macro conditions, the continued march towards digitalization which becomes more acute in post-COVID hybrid working conditions. And that requirement for flexibility. The ability to handle the requirements that you don't yet know exist. All of these are driving people to update their software and invest. And there's still a great deal of legacy software out there. Legacy software comes at a higher cost and it comes with security issues all of these force people, drive people into investing in new, more modern software like Alfa. Alfa itself as a business is highly resilient. We've already talked about our continually reducing customer concentration now standing at 35%. But Alfa has a highly diverse customer base. We are not exposed in any way to any sector of our target market. We operate across 37 countries in 5 continents. We operate across equipment, auto and wholesale finance. We serve OEMs, banks and independents. And layering on top of that our increasing quality of revenue mix. Our growing subscription revenue accounting for about 1/3 of that mix and growing 18% from this time last year. Our system, it's modern, it's cloud native. Adding capital letters, there is no technical debt within Alfa. We are very well placed to serve our industry going forward. And that strong TCV, which is growing and driven very heavily by the growth in subscription revenues. Alfa is extremely well placed to continue growing in a resilient market. Moving on to Alfa iQ. We now have a change in mode with Alfa iQ and that we are creating product. We've proved the applicability of AI and machine learning techniques to the asset finance market. We've onboarded our first revenue-generating customers and we're on course for producing that product this year. The first product will be scorecard as a service, and we believe it will have a profound impact on the allocation of capital in asset finance. And we're looking forward to saying more about it next time we update the market. From a pipeline perspective, we continue to convert opportunities in our late-stage pipelines into active customers. And we're seeing strength throughout the pipeline with a particularly strong showing from automotive finance accounting for all 3 late-stage additions this quarter. And we're seeing a lot of activity in the early stages of the pipeline, which is an important indicator for support of our growth not just this year but into 2023 and well beyond. Our pipeline is looking robust, and it is growing. Our drivers for growth and our investment case remain as before. From the perspective of our base case, we are strongly positioned, as I've described, in a large, resilient addressable market with clear structural growth drivers with more layering on top of them. Our differentiated business model is difficult to replicate. We have a broad and wide moat. Constant innovation delivering leading-edge technology, embedding strong long-term customer relationships increases the breadth and the depth of that moat and generic stickiness. And we have strong cash generation and a strong balance sheet to support our efforts. Over and above that, we have the accelerators that we talk about. We've talked about the gains that we've made in subscription, and we continue to make those gains. We've talked about Alfa Start. Alfa Start's effect on innovation within our business, our ability to serve our customers and implement Alfa Systems quickly and its ability to serve smaller and growing asset finance companies. Partnerships to allow us to do more Alfa implementations concurrently in more places and more technology, technologies like Alfa iQ, which expands our market and our differentiation. And there are other markets that are airing on top of our home asset finance market. We've talked a lot about wholesale, and that's a growing part of our business. We're also starting to think about the wider corporate lending market, which Alfa is very well placed to serve. So in summary, I'll repeat those strong fundamentals, a great financial performance and strategic progress and continued investment in our products. As Matt has outlined, continued delivery cadence, more customers, more go-lives and will continue to emphasize delivery as a key differentiator, recruitment, engage and retention to make sure that we have the best supply of the best people to do what we do. And the icing on the cake of investors in people Gold Status. We continue to expand our product and our markets, new geographies, new offerings, new features and technology capabilities within the upcoming Alfa 5.7. We improve our revenue quality, further customer diversification, reducing customer concentration, our growth in subscription revenues and our growth in addressable markets. And all of these strategic accelerators continuing to progress subscription, start, partnership and Alfa iQ, and we will continue to allocate excess capital in the form of dividends to our investors. We'll build on this looking forward, we continue to recruit and retain talent. We'll continue to innovate and invest in our product, and we'll make progress in building that partner program in the coming months. So there is that backdrop of the macroeconomic outlook remaining uncertain. But from Alfa's perspective, our pipeline, our business, our confidence remains strong. So we are growing in a resilient market and this underpins our expectations for 2022 and beyond. Thank you for listening.

[Operator Instructions] We will take our first question from James Goodman from Barclays.

A couple from me, please. So just firstly, just in terms of headcount expectations, for the rest of the year, I think you were up 7% at the period end, but already up, I think, 9% versus the full year. I think, Matthew, you said that you were likely now to be ahead of target for the full year. So I'm just wondering where your expectations now are. I think you look for about 10% previously. And I'm thinking about that in the context of all else being equal, that potentially driving a higher revenue performance? And then the second question, just around the customer that you called out that is stock project due to an internal inability to complete the resources, I think you said. What are the chances that, that could restart at some point further down the line? And can you speak to your comfort really in that just being isolated to a very customer-specific situation?

Thanks very much, James. I'll take the second question first and probably ask Duncan to pick up on your first question if that's okay. There's always a chance, of course, that they're going to restart. We've shared probably some separate conversations that they are in an unusual position because there wasn't a burning systems platform, and this was all about technical progression. It was about the capability to manage the change. But certainly, as we look across our pipeline of current work, and the sales pipeline, I'll be confident that we're not going to see this again. Duncan, you okay to pick up the headcount question?

Yes, sure. So James, we had -- at the end of the period, we were at 417 people at the end of June. As we talked about, we had a lot of recruitment towards the end of that period. We would expect that number to nudge up a little bit by the year-end, but not probably hugely dramatically. But in terms of average headcount, yes, we should -- we will see a step up, although a lot of those new recruits will obviously need to go through induction and training. But yes, we will see an increase in the average headcount in the second half.

Great. That's clear. Perhaps just one quick additional follow-up. Just on the pricing environment and what you're doing with your day rate given the backdrop that we're seeing at the moment. Can you make any comment on that?

Absolutely. From the perspective of our pricing across all aspects of our revenue, we have built into our contract a relationship with CPI. So certainly, as costs increase and as the inflation that people are expecting into the future comes to pass, then we will be able to put our prices up. And indeed, we have done already this year.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question from Harvey Robinson from Panmure.

Just a couple of questions on margins and then maybe a question on service revenue. You obviously had a nice movement in gross margin in the period year-on-year. Could you just give us a feel for what that is? Is that the subscription revenue coming through? And should we expect gross margins to edge up over time, the subscription could become a bigger part of the business? And I think Duncan obviously alluded to some extra costs in H2, but obviously, there's a 5-point -- almost 5-point growth in operating margins in the half. Could you just give us a bit more color in terms of modeling SG&A in H2? Is it appropriate to that head count in there to get a better feel for that, if possible? And the final question really is just on services. I mean, clearly, that looks like there's a very heavy recurring element of services, how much of services do you actually think is in effect recurring?

Great. Thanks, Harvey, and to have some great questions. I'll pick up margins dramatically. Ask Duncan, if that's okay to do the -- essentially the cost bridge that you've asked for and will pick up that recurring aspect as well. So if I look at margins a bit more in a wider context and link it back to our strategy. being able to do more with the same number of people effectively operational gearing is running through everything that we're doing. And you're correct to point out that the growth in subscription now accounting for about 1/3 of our overall revenue base means that we are able to grow independently of growth in headcount. And we would expect that to have a positive effect on margin going forward. From a recurring perspective, absolutely. It's again a good pickup, something that we continue to tell the market about that one of the advantages of having this diverse customer base with ongoing needs actually, particularly in the current environment where we are anticipating regulatory change and a requirement for agility, flexibility and reactivity. We have a good deal of recurring revenue within our services aspect of our revenue mix. We wouldn't guide on the exact percentages in respect to that, but you're right to assume that a good deal of that is going to come back year-on-year. Duncan, you okay with to provide some color on costs?

Yes. So on the cost front, actually sort of linking with the question with James earlier, we saw a big pickup in the number of people recruited towards the end of the first half. And that, combined with the impact of pay rises that we made in the first half, we're expecting our -- effectively our salary costs to go up somewhere between GBP 2 million and GBP 3 million in the second half compared to the first half. That's sort of an ongoing effect because of the growth of the business. And there's a slight seasonality effect also in the cost base, which means that the first half operating margin is higher than it will be for the full year, and that's to do with -- we are quite seasonal in relation to things like conferences and travel, a seasonal because conference season is in the second half, but also -- we're starting to see increasingly customers asking us to visit in relation to contract wins, et cetera. So we're seeing travel costs increasing as well. So we are expecting those sorts of costs to go up by about GBP 1 million in the second half versus the first half. And then finally, we -- because of that pickup in people, we are expecting some of our training and recruitment costs to be higher in the second half versus the first half as well. So very much not expecting to hit a 32% operating margin for the full year because of that. But yes, some seasonality and some growth in the business accounts for that.

It appears there are no further questions at this time. Andrew Denton, I'd like to turn the conference back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you very much, and thank you for looking out for us today. I would just like to close by thanking everybody who attended the call for their continued interest in Alfa. And of course, my heartfelt thanks to the entire Alfa team for a terrific half, and we look forward to speaking to you again with our full year results and hopefully, to some of you on the road show. Thanks for coming today.