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

Hello, and welcome to Alfa's Full Year Results for 2022. I'm joined today by Duncan Magrath and Matthew White, and I'm Andrew Denton and the Chief Executive Officer of Alfa. We'll start with an introduction and key highlights before moving on to a financial review, which Duncan will lead. Operational delivery will be presented by Matthew before coming back to me for a business and sales update before moving into a summary and then with some time for questions and answers. So I'm delighted to present another strong set of results, strong fundamentals, another great financial performance, which I'll unpackage on the next page, another record year for software delivery. 28 deliveries in total, and Matthew will take us through those. We've grown our team size. Retention is back up to 90%, and staff engagement is now at a record level of 84%. And the strength of our culture and people strategy has been recognized by both investors and people and by Newsweek. We've also continued to expand our product and the market that it can serve. We've invested GBP 29 million in our product compared to GBP 26 million last year, and we've launched a new version of the software to greater claim Alfa 5.7. We've again improved our revenue quality. There'll be more over the page, but customer diversification is down again at 35% and subscription revenues are up 17%, underpinning total recurring revenues of 75% overall. Subscription itself is a major strategic objective as we seek to increase the operational gearing in our business. The expansion of our partnership network is designed to do the same, and we've seen a 58% increase in partner chargeable days compared to the same period last year. Matthew will talk more about this. He will also talk about our partnership with Tomorrow's Journey, which is an example of an ecosystem partner, augmenting Alfa's own capabilities and leveraging Alfa's open API capability, the first of many, we hope and believe. And Alfa iQ has product ready to go for decisioning, training, explainability and analysis. Looking forward, we go into 2023, a confident and progressive business. In 2023, we will continue to grow our team. We'll continue to grow our product, and we will continue to expand our partner program, and our strong pipeline, which I'll come on to in more detail later on, underpins that confidence. As well as confident we remain cash generative. So the Board has proposed an ordinary dividend increase of 9% and a GBP 4.4 million special dividend, returning an additional GBP 8 million to shareholders. Moving over the page then to key highlights. And this slide puts those strong results into sharp focus through our KPIs. GBP 93.3 million of revenue was an increase of 12%. 17 customers contributed more than GBP 2 million to that total, another great example of customer diversification. As I said, subscription revenues were up 17%, great progress for an important strategic goal. Together with repeat business with existing customers, this takes the overall total recurring revenue level to 75%. This gives us excellent earnings visibility, which is further underpinned by the length of our customer relationships, creating a layering effect of recurring revenue to support our growth ambitions. Operating profit moved up to GBP 29.6 million, representing a 32% operating profit margin, and we grew and retained our team, as I said. Our year-end headcount was up 15%, and our retention level was 90%. Finally, our strong recurring revenues and pipeline combined in our total contract value, which is also up on this time last year. I'll now hand over to Duncan.

Thanks, Andy. We've had a really strong overall financial performance. Revenue was up 12% in the period or 8% at constant currency. Operating profit grew more strongly, up 20%. The operating profit margin of 32% was very strong, which benefited from some gains, which I'll referred to later. The effective tax rate of 15% was lower than both the U.K. statutory rate and last year's effective tax rate due to some favorable prior year items, including R&D tax credits. With the increased operating profit and reduced tax rate, both basic and diluted EPS were up 27% at 8.2p and 8.1p, respectively. We are really pleased with the financial performance in 2022, benefiting from a strong revenue base from existing customers, with growing subscription sales and improved customer diversification. This is a new slide that I have not shown before. The slide splits each revenue stream between existing customers and new customers. The top table shows the split by revenue stream, how much of each revenue stream is existing customers and how much is from new customers. The bottom table shows what percentage of our overall revenue sits in each category. We have defined new customers as a customer that is going through an implementation of Alfa for the first time. Existing customers are customers who already implemented Alfa before, and includes those customers upgrading from earlier versions of Alfa onto v5. The purpose of the slide is to show that a lot of our revenue each year comes from existing customers. And whilst only subscription revenues can be considered true annual recurring revenues, or ARR, we do believe that in both our software and services, we have revenue from existing customers, which is of a recurring nature. Taking the 29% of our revenues, which are subscription revenues, and adding the 10% of revenue in software from existing customers, and the 36% of revenue in services from existing customers, you can see that 75% of our revenues were of a recurring nature. The proportion of revenue from existing customers will fluctuate. At the moment it is high due to the ongoing v5 upgrades. As the v5 upgrades work their way through, we would expect the proportion of new customers to increase. These new customers will bring incremental revenues to our subscription revenues, but also post go-live additional revenues for software and services as they continue to upgrade and look for more development. This is particularly true of minimum viable product projects, which have shorter implementation phases, but with more post go-live development. This may be the last time I included this slide at least in this format as we believe we have reduced our customer concentration to the point that it is no longer a key risk for us. Our top 5 customers now only account for 35% of our revenues and the number of customers with annual revenues greater than GBP 2 million is up to 17, and we expect the latter to grow as we grow the business. Turning now to the first of our 3 revenue streams, subscription revenues. Subscription revenues, which account for 29% of our business, increased 17% over last year, with revenues increasing from GBP 23.5 million to GBP 27.4 million. This growth was driven on the back of 15% growth in maintenance and 28% growth in hosting. The subscription-first approach to sales means that most of our late-stage pipeline are customers looking for a hosted solution so we expect this to continue to grow. 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 20% over last year, driven by a 51% increase in the number of development days worked for clients, with a particularly strong performance in the second half of 2022. This more than offsets a drop in one-off license revenue, which dropped from GBP 2.1 million last year to GBP 0.4 million this year. 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 upgrades to v5 do not attract an additional license unless the customer takes additional modules. Secondly, as I just mentioned, most of our late-stage pipeline is for subscription services so new licenses will be shown within subscription. Turning to our final revenue stream, services. Services revenue includes all 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 8% to GBP 49.6 million. There was a reduction in implementation work for new customers, but this was offset by an increase in work for existing customers, including the upgrades to v5. As you saw on an earlier slide, approximately 2/3 of the services was for existing customers, and 1/3 for new customers. Within these figures, there was a very strong increase in partner days, up 58% over the same period last year, and now represents 11% of our total services days. Turning now to expenses. Overall costs increased 9% in the year. Salary costs, the biggest component, increased 11% over last year, with average headcount up 10%. Partner costs were up from GBP 1.5 million to GBP 2.5 million, with the strong growth I mentioned on the previous slide. Computer costs were up GBP 0.9 million, partly on the back of growth, but also with increasing costs of cybersecurity, which we expect to continue to grow further in 2023. Travel, marketing and conference costs nearly doubled from the very low level in 2021, which was suppressed by the impact of COVID. 2022 was not a full normal year for these costs, and so we expect a further increase in 2023. We have a profit share scheme where employees share a pool of money, essentially 10% of the pretax profits, and the cost of this increased in the year on the back of higher profits. Netting off these costs are significant gains in 2022. We had GBP 1.1 million of FX transaction gains during the year. This was largely due to the retranslation of financial assets, which started the year being converted at $1.35 and finished the year at $1.21. In addition, we also managed to convert some dollar balances at particularly low rates in the year, which also generated some gains. We also had a one-off gain of GBP 0.6 million from assigning the lease for one of the floors in our London office. We also benefit from some business rebates as well. So in total, there are GBP 2 million of gains reducing our costs in 2022, which we are not expecting to repeat in 2023. Turning to cash flow. Another strong cash performance, with operating free cash flow of 102%. We expect to operate around 100% going forwards. In 2022, Alfa became a large company in U.K. HMRC terms. And so we now pay all tax related to the current year in the current year rather than on a deferred basis. And so we had unusually high tax payments of GBP 6.2 million in the year as we caught up, but this will normalize again in 2023. We had GBP 5.6 million of share purchases in the year. GBP 4.7 million arose from purchases under the share buyback scheme we launched in January 2022. There was GBP 0.9 million also from the purchase of shares for the Employee Benefit Trust, which helped offset any dilution of vesting of [indiscernible] share schemes. The biggest item on the cash flow, however, was the payment of GBP 22.5 million of dividends in the year. So now on to the balance sheet. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this as it remains very straightforward. The growth of the business has led, as expected, to growth in the balance sheet. Receivables are up on the back of a strong finish to 2022, but they remain well controlled, with only GBP 0.1 million overdue by more than 30 days. The other big change is the approximately GBP 7 million reduction in noncurrent assets and liabilities from the assignment of the lease. Looking now to future revenues and TCV. TCV is up 7%, with subscription TCV up 9% and software TCV up 35% on the back of deferred license recognition and committed development work for existing projects. Services TCV is down 9% as we work through the existing work and the timing of some contract signatures. We expect this to improve once we contract some of our late-stage pipeline. Next 12 months TCV is up 9%. So overall, the TCV figures and the strength of the late-stage pipeline that Andy will talk about in a minute, give us confidence in the outlook for the business. Whilst we have consistently calculated TCV on the same basis, I wanted to show you an alternative view on the next slide. The TCV I showed on the previous slide assumes that we retain our subscription customers for 3 years. This is clearly a conservative assumption as in reality, our customer relationships last much longer than this. This slide shows what our TCV would look like if we assume subscription customers continued for 5 years from now. Whilst I still think the important issue is to calculate the value consistently and look at the trends, this better shows the importance of subscription to our future business. As you've seen, the business continues to be very cash generative, and we constantly review the best mechanism for our capital allocation. Even after allowing for investing in the business, and ensuring that we retain a strong balance sheet with net cash we continue to generate excess cash. We have 3 mechanisms for returning this excess cash to shareholders. Firstly, we have a regular progressive dividend policy, i.e., to increase the regular dividend as the business grows. We are proposing a 1.2p per share dividend, up 9% on last year. Secondly, we initiated a share buyback program in January '22, and during 2022, purchased 2.8 million shares. This program continues. Thirdly, we use special dividends. We have declared a special dividend of 1.5p per share. Following payment of these dividends, total shareholder returns over the last 3 years would have been over GBP 110 million. Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. Full year models, when looking at the cost base, you need to remove the GBP 2 million of gains that we had in 2022, which netted down our underlying costs. You will also note that with the year-end headcount up 15%, but the average only up 10% for the year, that a lot of our recruitment was second half weighted, and that we have some annualization of 2022 increased headcount to come through. We are obviously also continuing to recruit and we have our annual pay round coming up. We have some further normalization of costs in 2023 post COVID of about GBP 1 million, along with the impact of general inflation and cybersecurity costs. We will obviously be doing what we can to minimize the overall impact of these cost pressures. We expect CapEx to increase by circa GBP 1 million for increased software development and some IT investment. We saw an effective tax rate of 15% in 2022, which benefited from prior items, in particular, R&D tax credits, which reduced the effective tax rate by 3 percentage points. Like our tax payments, we now find ourselves in a large company bracket for R&D credits, which reduces the benefit to us, added to which the rules are changing from April '23, which reduces the benefit further. The impact of these 2 changes is to in effect half the benefit we get from R&D, reducing it from about GBP 1 million per annum to GBP 0.5 million per annum. This, combined with the increase of the U.K. corporate tax rate from 19% to 25% from April '23, means that we expect our effective tax rate for 2023 to be about 22%, and for '24 onwards to be about 25%. I've also updated the currency sensitivities, with the key one being the U.S. dollar where every $0.01 movement, we expect to impact revenue by GBP 300,000, and impact profit by GBP 160,000. I will now hand over to Matt.

Thanks, Duncan. As usual, I'm going to be talking about our software, our excellent team and our delivery. And that excellent team is highly engaged in our strategy, and we can see that from our pulse survey stores in this area. That's vitally important as we continue to leverage the talents of everyone in the organization in making strategic programs. Our strategy is increasingly embedded in our organization and provides a framework for everything that we do. Our software, which is built on leading-edge technology, is ahead of anything else in the asset finance market. The complexity of our market provides an ongoing challenge or would be new entrants. We're delivering line of business software, bringing competitive advantage to our customers and providing the backbone for our customers' operations. And we are the only proven modern solution for high volume. Our product continues to move forward, increasing the size of that competitive mode. We have now launched Alfa version 5.7, which includes about 2 years of functional and technical improvements in the software and provides an opportunity to showcase that functionality in our marketing. Our product -- our partnership with Tomorrow's Journey is important in ensuring that we have a solution for vehicle subscription and for usage-based mobility products, which represents an important opportunity for our industry. And the trend towards enterprise software as an ecosystem plays very well to Alfa's strength in its open API. Containerized deployment of our software increases standardization between our customers, including between on-premise and hosted installations. This simplifies implementation and support activities, reducing our costs, and our updated high-volume performance listing consolidates that advantage in the high-volume market as well as proving our ability to work with Amazon's Aurora Serverless technology, which enables dynamic database scaling. Outstanding performance and stability are key to providing a gold standard service within our Cloud Hosting operation. This service enables our customers to focus on running their business and not on running systems. And our Hosting revenue is growing fast, with 28% growth in 2022. Again, we're improving the product. Our Hosting team has worked closely with our strengthened cybersecurity and internal technology teams to add SOC1 auditing to our product supplementing SOC2 ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 accreditation. So we're consolidating our advantage by increasing our regulatory compliance offering. As Duncan said, uptake of our Hosting product remains strong, with most of our ongoing implementations and the late-stage pipeline taking advantage of our cloud-hosted product. In addition, we have opportunities to sell Hosting as an add-on service to existing on-premise customers. We are extremely pleased to have increased our engagement score again to 84%, which is our record level. This follows from the ongoing implementation of our clear and comprehensive people strategy. Despite a tough recruitment market, which resulted in a slightly slow start to the year, and maintained very high standards for new joiners to our talented team, we had a fantastic year for recruitment in 2022. We also had another really good year for retention, which was 90% for the year. Our strong culture and our people strategy means that we have a compelling offering for new recruits and that people want to stay having joined. And this means that we were able to exceed our target for year-end client-facing headcount, with the size of the team as a whole, moving past 400 during the year and now around 450. As Andy said, headcount was up 15% at year-end. After rapid growth in 2022, we expect slightly slower headcount growth in 2023 as we consolidate the experience level in the team. Our engineering smart hub increases our access to talent, although Lisbon is lower cost than London, and we're recruiting hybrid workers and planning to use flexible collocation space, all reducing overheads. The team is up and running, enhancing Alfa systems. We're finding that Lisbon is a good source of talent, and we're learning how to position ourselves in their recruitment market. For example, contribution to the core product is a key differentiator for Alfa as a recruiter in Lisbon. And the smart hub model is designed to be repeatable so that it can be rolled out to further locations in the future. We received Gold status in the U.K.'s widely adopted investors and people accreditation, and we were shortlisted for Employer of the Year in our size category. We were also shortlisted for the Investors in People Award for diversity, inclusion. As you know, that's nearing out really close to our heart, so particularly pleasing for us. And in November, we were ranked 4 in Newsweek's list of the U.K.'s most loved workplaces. We are proud to say that we have a top ranked tech firm and the top-ranked listed plan. We are a software and delivery company, and we never forget that our efforts all come together with successful delivery of our software for our customers. We succeed with complex projects where our competitors struggle. Our delivery cadence has continued. In fact, 2022 saw a record number of deliveries that's either upgrades for existing customers or new customer go-lives. The start of 2023 has seen that cadence continue, with 2 new customers going live already. And increased upgrade cadence is another important part of our strategy. By simplifying the upgrade process, we can deliver new functionality to our customers more rapidly, and we also simplify our maintenance landscape by reducing the number of supported versions of our software. More information on our delivery progress can be found in the appendix to this presentation. And you'll see that we have recurring services work with most of our customers, underpinning our services revenue. We've also continued to invest in our delivery methodology and tooling, with the highlight for 2022 being a new tool to enable portfolio migration of Alfa via simplified approach. This will enable our customers to purchase and integrate finance portfolios, which brings incremental revenue for Alfa because of volume license bounds. Partnering is a key element of our strategy for delivery, and 2022 was a fantastic year for our partner program. As Andy said, we delivered a 58% increase in partner days. We added a second staff augmentation partner in EMEA, adding resilience to our program. And, for the first time, we started work with a staff augmentation partner in the U.S. That was a key strategic goal for the year, and we're thrilled to have achieved it. We also spent some of 2022 considering a move towards a partner-led delivery initially for our simpler projects. We've concluded that it's both possible and a good idea, and our partners are very onboard and very excited. It will be a multiyear journey, but that journey will enable us to increase our capacity for delivering our software as well as increasing subscription as a proportion of our revenue. Importantly, everything that we do to enable partner-led delivery is also aligned with our strategy for simplification. So we will see incremental improvements to our existing delivery model along the way. And that's all for me. I'll hand back to Andy.

Thanks, Matthew. I'll pick the ball up again with the business and sales update, and we'll start with creating a positive impact. At Alfa, we've been creating a positive impact since before the term ESG was even coined, as it's very dear to our hearts, as Matt touched upon. We continue to work very hard to create that positive impact for our people, the communities in which we work and within wider society. From an environmental perspective, we've refreshed our sustainable development goals, and we continue to see this as a great way to focus our efforts in sustainability. We've calculated our Scope 3 emissions, and we are on our site-based targets journey through our SBTi process. To support our culture, we've launched new training capabilities with our new learning management system, providing over 150 modules of co-curated content already. We continue to come together to innovate and connect company events and to support our hybrid smart working model. We have shared through increased communication, videos, stories, newsletters and podcasts, both internally and externally. And smart working continues to work well. And along with all of the above, it's contributing to that record engagement score of 84% that we're very proud of. We call employee resource groups communities. It better reflects our approach and the fact that they're employee-led, and our communities have already been responsible for countless high points in the year, some of which are set out on this slide. Moving on then to an overview of the market. The macro outlook remains somewhat dynamic. As we said before, and seen before, asset finance tends to increase its share of overall lending during trickier times. And end market technology changes, such as electrification, as well as social behavioral trends, such as mobility, increase the need for digital innovation. Technology needs to evolve to support all of this. An older cloud imposter, less functional systems are even less able to cope. There are plenty of factors driving this need for software change. The need for software is driven by scale of business and ambition as well as new business volumes, regulatory change, digitalization and flexibility are still driving requirements for systems change. And there are security issues with legacy software, which is a very current issue as well as increased cost of ownership, particularly in dealing with a changing landscape. Automation and operational efficiency are always key, but particularly key right now as businesses respond to the need to be competitive. So as well as these market drivers leading people to choose new software, Alfa is serving a deep, growing and resilient addressable market. And Alfa itself has in-built resilience. We have a diversified customer base across 37 countries in 5 continents across equipment, auto and wholesale finance and commercial loans, across OEMs, banks and independents. And we've seen our growing subscription revenues as part of a wider, repeatable revenue component, and we have modern cloud native, scalable, functional, flexible systems, as Matt touched upon. And finally, we have strong revenue visibility that can be seen in our TCV, all, together, bringing resilience into our business. I said I'd touch upon the pipeline, and in particular, the late-stage pipeline and the movement in the year. As I said earlier, we are very happy with the composition of that late-stage pipeline. With the one Alfa Start prospect added to the late stage since the beginning of this year, and 2 wins during 2022, we are now at 10 late-stage prospects. Importantly, though, I'd like to draw your attention towards the shape. The shape has changed with 5 of what Alfa classes large prospects now comprising more than half of the late-stage pipeline. We are confident in our ability to convert these prospects, and as I said in the quote, this is one of the things that gives us great confidence in our future. Moving on then to the investment case. And as it says on the slide, Alfa has a very compelling investment case and it's worth revisiting it to bring everything together. We serve a massive market. Asset and auto alone is an annual target addressable market of over USD 3 billion spend per annum. If you add in wholesale and commercial loans, where Alfa also has a compelling proposition, you end up with a huge amount of runway. Push and pull drivers are leading people to invest in new technology driven by macro changes, regulation, digitalization, cyber concerns and their own competitors. There are massive barriers to entry for new entrants. There is a wide and deep moat for Alfa. Three decades of investment and execution in our software, as Matt said, has proven, and has proven in all aspects of our target market, and we invest continually to maintain that position. Alfa Systems is a market-leading software. Whether you're looking at technology, performance, usability, configurability, composability or functionality, nothing touches Alfa. Our business is diversified, making it highly resilient. And we touched on that strong recurring revenue base. Total recurring revenues of 75% of the whole and 17% growth in subscription during the period. That market-leading software doesn't just make us competitive. It forms a backbone to our business through exceptional IP that creates sustainability and opportunities for growth. And finally, our growth is cash generative, consistently high cash conversion and a strong balance sheet. So in summary, strong fundamentals, another great financial performance, another record year for software delivery with 28 deliveries in total. We grew our team size. Retention is back up to 90% and staff engagement at a record level of 84%. The strength of our culture and our people were recognized, we received accolades from investors in people and from Newsweek. And we've continued to expand our product and the market it can serve. We've again improved our revenue quality and again made tangible strategic progress. So looking forward, we're confident. We will continue to grow our team, we will continue to grow our product, and we will continue to expand our partner program, and our strong pipeline underpins that confidence. We remain cash generative so the Board has again proposed to return some of that cash to shareholders. I'm very proud indeed of what we've achieved in 2022, and we are in a great position to push on in 2023. Thank you for listening, and we'll take question now.

The first question comes from the line of James Goodman from Barclays.

I'll go for 2 questions, please. Maybe just first in terms of the outlook geographically. I mean the growth is coming largely outside of the U.K. I appreciate it all depends on which customers you sign and when. But just more in general, I was curious as to whether you see that trend continuing more sort of international diversification? And the second question is also related to the growth, but from the headcount perspective, clearly up very strongly in the second half, 15% year-on-year as you say. I think we haven't seen that sort of level of hiring for a while now. I think it speaks to your confidence, but, at the same time, it's clearly below the rate of revenue growth that we're looking for at the moment. And at the same time, you're also leaving more partner assistance into that outlook as well. So I guess the question is, is there something that's increasing the intensity of the headcount? I mean, are you needing to hire more people to fulfill the work in any way? Or should we really see this headcount more as representative of the potential demand that you see out there with these larger prospects in the late-stage pipeline.

Thanks, James. Start with the first question, sensibly, about the outlook. I guess I would point to in both the growth that we've seen in 2022 being across all of our territories. We've seen very, very good progress in EMEA, the U.S. and indeed Asia-Pac. Your point about the U.K. I'm certainly not going to argue with it, but being our home market, it's an area where we are exceptionally strong. So probably in terms of headroom for growth, EMEA is much more European and there's North America as well. From a prospect perspective in that late-stage pipeline, we see it balanced across all territories. And I think, importantly, all verticals, particularly strong demand right now from automotive with all 6 new entrants to that late-stage pipeline being from the auto sector. Looking at headcount, it's a bit of everything, I suppose, but one point that I think we've made before a few times and seasoned Alfa watchers will know is that, from our perspective, we have a huge amount of faith and belief in our strategic hypothesis, in our approach to fulfilling market demand. So with respect to recruitment, our approach is that we recruit into the business in a way that the business feels comfortable with, whilst we retain supervisory ratios, quality and that all-important deliverability that Matthew touched upon. We have built a -- we've built a capability that is capable of delivering. We never recruit for particular opportunities because it takes a little while to grow an Alfa expert. But we're recruiting as fast as we can, frankly, because we're very confident in the prospects of the business. One sidebar to that is that -- one of the things that is very important, I'm sure, with a lot of people that those on this phone call are looking at is cyber. And we have seen particularly strong growth, if that's the right turn of phrase, in our cyber capability to make sure that we keep the business safe, and that's something we'll continue to do.

And just looking at the headcount additions in terms of regions, I'm looking at the average headcount, but it looks like bulk of additions are still coming in the U.K., I mean understandable given the tech-led nature of the business and the investment that you're putting in there. But when I look at areas like the U.S., which are driving a lot of growth, do you need to continue to staff up there from a go-to-market perspective, from a deployment perspective? Or can you reasonably fulfill that demand with U.K. and sort of the hub sort of prospects that you've got?

Yes. So it's a good question, James, and it gives me opportunity to remind listeners that our development center is still very much U.K. based. So development that's driven from customers and prospects in all of our regions is still very much going on in the U.K. Matthew touched upon the opportunity and the growth that we're seeing in our Lisbon smart hub. We're excited about that because that gives us a wider talent pool to recruit from -- for our technical staff, and we see that as being something that is repeatable. So as we prove Lisbon, we can do new Lisbons in other territory, and that spreads the load. But if you subtract our development and engineering capability in London, and then look at the way that we're recruiting, it's going to be pretty balanced across North America and Europe from a delivery capability.

We currently have no questions in the queue. [Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from the line of Gautam Pillai from Peel Hunt.

Congratulations on a good set of results today. I have 2 questions. First, on the v5 upgrade cycle itself. Can you comment on how that is playing out currently? And how are the conversations with new and existing customers developing? And are the customers kind of understanding the functionality differences? And is there any price increase when existing customers move to v5? And again, are you only selling v5 to new customers? And the second question is on the partner ecosystem. And there was an encouraging commentary on the services business you had with partner that's increasing. Can you comment on who do you typically work with? And have the partners fully invested in your ecosystem? Are they in a stage where new sales references come via the partner channel?

Thank you for the questions and for the kind comments. Let's start with v5 and the upgrade cycle. We're obviously delighted, and I think we've said so in all the commentary around it that when somebody upgrades to v5 from v4, and these are people who we've been very often with on a multi-decade journey. And it's great when somebody knows you inside out and back to front and still elects to carry on that journey with you, it says an awful lot about our product, our people and our delivery capability. From a V5 perspective, these are people who already are licensed to use the software. But in terms of incremental financial developments of those existing customers, we have seen 100% penetration with our Cloud Hosting service with those people upgrading from 4 to 5. So that's been a really great source of growth within our subscription line actually and has been a big driver of the healthy CAGR within subscription in recent reporting periods. We are only selling v5 to new customers. And with v5 being very much a true product, as we've spoken about before, that is a very, very clear incentive for people to carry on upgrading and being able to avail themselves of new capabilities and new possibilities within Alfa version 5. And that's exemplified of course, by 5.7, which Matt talked about some of the great features in that, and that's proving a pretty compelling offering to both new and existing customers to stay with us on the upgrade journey with Alfa. Absolutely, you're right to point to the headway that we've made with partnership. Again, a 58% increase in partner days, which continues the good progress there. We talk about ecosystem partners this time around. In particular, we see Alfa's open API capability as being a great way, not only to deliver Alfa, but to deliver through Alfa the kind of services that fintech players and other progressive and exponential technology is able to deliver with Alfa as the backbone for our customers for all of these. From an implementation partner perspective, Matthew talked about the journey towards a partner-led implementation, which we're excited about, starting with Alfa Start customers. And from an augmentation perspective, we're seeing good growth over the year. We've seen partner resource on every single EMEA project, which is fantastic. We're expecting partner resource right across the late-stage pipeline, which, again, is fantastic. And we've made good way -- headway in the U.S. with using partner resource and announcing some new partner capabilities in that market. I'll stop short of particularizing every partner that we work with, but all of those partners are highly committed to the journey with Alfa. We've been absolutely delighted with that level of commitment and dedication to building centers of excellence around us. It's a great sign of partner confidence. And, to some extent, all of our partners will have some bearing on new sales because all of them are asset finance and also finance specialists, and therefore, they're influential in our target market.

Very helpful. If I can squeeze in one more, probably one for Duncan. If I can have a small clarification on Slide 9. It seems like subscription revenues from new customers are lagging software revenues. Can you elaborate on this dynamic? Do you expect the mix to reverse over time as you're probably pushing subscription to new customers?

Yes, sure. Absolutely. The lower level of new customers and subscription is partly driven by the v4, v5 upgrade, where -- and they're already customers. So whilst we're selling effectively things like new Hosting services to them, that goes into the subscription base. That appears as an existing customer sale. So we're sort of getting growth from the existing customer base in terms of actually brand new customers. I think we've said at the moment, the mix at the moment in terms of the brand new sort of customers coming on to Alfa is a little less than it might be once the v5, v4 upgrade cycle slows and therefore, we'd expect that new, new customer element and subscription to go up. But it's -- I think the important thing is we're getting growth even from the existing base in subscription revenues.

Next question comes from the line of Harvey Robinson from Panmure Gordon.

A couple of questions from me. Just [Indiscernible] unpacking the recurring revenue comments. You talked to a very high number there, and you've discussed how much of the services is recurring in nature. Could you just give us a bit color on how that -- what the trends are in those numbers, and where they might go to on the recurring nature? I think, James with Barclays [Indiscernible] that growth as the U.K. being very strong. It's a bit technical problem in the call. And I have a couple of sort of [ stumping ] questions on the balance sheet [ reminiscing ] trade receivables and contract liabilities [Indiscernible] what's going on there? So that's the only question from me.

Okay. I couldn't quite hear the end of the last question, but I think I answered the question. In terms of recurring revenues, we're at a quite high level. So -- and again, just to sort of emphasize recurring of a recurring nature, I guess, is the important point here. 75% is higher because of, at the moment, doing a certain amount of those upgrade works with our existing customers. I think it's probably important not to massively overplay that, but 14% of our services revenue is coming from to v4 to v5 upgrades. So that's about -- truly about 7% of our overall revenues. But we would, therefore, see the 75% as a bit of a high. If we've done no upgrades then it would be like 68%. So that's why we sort of see somewhere around 65% to 75% is the range of those sort of recurring revenues. I think obviously, the other thing that's worth saying is as soon as somebody is upgraded, and the point I made earlier is that development doesn't stop, services doesn't stop, and so we built on top of that. But yes, in terms of the overall number, we would see that properly coming down, but we see that as a good thing because more new customers, to pick up the earlier point, would actually generate more new subscription sales.

And perhaps a supplementary comment over that if I may [Indiscernible], I mean that's the detail of it, Harvey, but I think the key thing we would like the investment community to take away is -- the question is why do investors rightly like recurring revenues is because it builds a base, which layers up to the overall revenue mix for an organization. So we're obviously delighted with the progress that we've made in subscription, but we want to make sure that people are clear on the embedded nature of Alfa Systems, and therefore, the reliability of a huge proportion of our services revenue that you wouldn't necessarily see in other kind of services revenue. There's a non-optionality of doing this work that we can rely on year in, year out, which gives us great revenue visibility.

And I think your second question was around balance sheet. So there was a big jump in the receivables from GBP 6 million last year to GBP 8.9 million at the end of this year. That's very much driven by, as we talked about, a very strong finish to 2022, with revenues in October and November up to the 22%, 23%. And we build normally within the month of the following month. So November is the critical month for year-end receivables. And we're also slightly quicker at billing this year than we were last year. You might have expected our accrued income to go up a bit more for December's revenues, which were so strong, but we're slightly quicker. I think the important thing around receivables is, as I said earlier, this GBP 0.1 million of receivables over 30 -- more than 30 days old. So it's a very clean ledger. And in terms of the other big balance sheet movements, I touched on the assignment of the lease that has that basically GBP 7 million comes off the right of use assets and GBP 7 million comes off the lease assets or slightly more of the liabilities rather, sorry, which generates the gain. So that was the other big movement. The rest is generally straightforward, but if I missed -- if you had another question within there, which I missed [indiscernible], Harvey?

Just the contract liabilities jumped a bit as well, isn't it?

Yes. So in terms of contract liabilities, the maintenance is pretty in line with last year, which is what you. Expect the contract liabilities jumped up a bit. That's the way that the accounting works and you can see a little bit of that in the TCV number where the software TCV has gone up as well. So there's a bit more effectively revenue sitting there that will unwind.

Can I ask a supplementary question just more about the macro environment. And I think a lot of people, obviously see you as an auto finance company, not asset finance company. Could you just give us more color, obviously the pool of vehicles out there of various types? I mean just give us a color on your contract structure. So I think some people would simply think there is value-related element that [Indiscernible] confidence of volume-related number. Could you just give us a bit of feel for that, Andy?

Absolutely. I'm pleased that you opened the door to that because it's an important clarification. I think -- I think it's very wrong to see Alfa's opportunity actually as being related to new business volumes. Clearly, business competencies might be one reason why people would want to invest in software. But in fact, the major reason that people need to kind of heart and lung software that we're selling. It's not only for portfolio growth, but is for the exam portfolio, which, with some of these organizations, does run into millions of wheeled assets. We see asset finance and auto finance, roughly half of our market for each of them, as faring very well in tricky conditions. And sometimes people ask about high interest rates, but there is no connection -- to your specific point, there's no connection with automotive value and Alfa's operations. We're always looking at volume with respect to all of the asset classes that we serve, but again, to reiterate, and hopefully, people took it away from both the RNS and the markets part of the presentation, there are myriad drivers for people investing in enterprise software and Alfa is in a particularly good position because of the multilayered operational diversity of what we do.

[Operator Instructions] We have no further questions in the queue. I will now hand the call back to Andrew Denton for some closing remarks.

Thank you very much. A couple of closing points from me. Firstly, thank you to everybody who took the time to listen to our results this morning. And I'd say a very busy day in the public market so we appreciate you prioritizing Alfa's results. And just to close, we've said a few times actually already, and I'm sure we'll say it again. As we are in March, our day-to-day is all about 2023 right now, but the results and having these kind of dialogues gives us a good opportunity to reflect back and be proud of what we achieved in 2022, and we're looking forward to more of the same going forward. So thank you again. Thank you for your questions.