CAB Payments Holdings Limited (CABP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the CAB Payments Holding plc 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's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to Gaurav Patel, Head of Investor Relations. Good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our first half 2024 results presentation. I'm Gaurav Patel, Head of IR here at CAB Payments. This is our first presentation via the Investor Meet Company platform, and we're really glad to be here. I'm joined here today by our new CEO, Neeraj Kapur; and CFO, Richard Hallett. Neeraj will start off by giving a strategic update on the business as the new CEO, and Richard will summarize the financial performance in the first half of this year. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity for Q&A, as explained, via the chat box and to those that have asked questions in advance. With that said, I'll hand it over to Neeraj.

Thanks, Gaurav, and good afternoon, everybody. This is my first results presentation as CEO of CAB Payments and Crown Agents Bank. I've met some of you maybe before, but probably not many of you. So hopefully, at some stage, we'll see each other face to face. So before we start, let me just say on a personal level that I'm very excited to be here. This is truly a unique business with a differentiated business model sitting within truly vast markets. I would add that this is a perfect opportunity for me. I have been given the responsibility and leadership of a U.K. regulated bank that primarily operates in challenging international markets with ambitious growth plans. CAB has some unique strengths such as its prominence in the sub-Saharan African market and the ability to unlock liquidity for its clients in hard-to-reach markets. We are broadening the opportunities for business in the European market through our Dutch DNB regulated subsidiary, and we will soon enter the U.S. market. CAB has valuable operational leverage and is therefore able to scale up with limited additional investment. All this is great, but what truly attracted me to work here is our purpose. And that is of moving money where and when it is needed into geographies that have some real challenges and for clients that are internationally renowned for providing significant aid. We are a purpose-driven organization, and we always have been. This was a really important attribute of the culture for me, and we will continue to make sure we fulfill and embed our purpose in everything we do. Finally, but also very uniquely, our status as a B Corp is only achieved by a handful of U.K. banks, which shows our serious commitment to sustainability to serve both ourselves and our clients. All this lays the ground for a truly world-class international business that is delivering good in the world. Turning to Page 3. I wanted to summarize our position at the end of the first half. This was a solid performance in comparison with the exceptional prior year performance, which saw a significant tailwind from our trading activities in Nigerian naira. Tempered significantly in the second half of last year, we saw central bank interventions in the Central African franc and West African franc. These were our top 3 currencies previously, and impacts have been felt well into the first half of this year, where we generated GBP 56 million of gross income, a decline of 22% versus prior year. Encouragingly, excluding these currencies, our core business has continued to grow double digits, showing that the CAB business model is robust, and we are growing in other geographies without the noise of dislocations. The result of this is that our corridor concentration is reduced from 49% a year ago to 32%, a significant improvement, but this is not by design, and there is more to do in terms of reducing our concentration. We made good commercial progress in the half, having grown our network by 13% to just under 360 partners giving us differentiated access to hard-to-reach markets. Furthermore, we onboarded 35 new clients, and our active client book now number, 526. The key here is that we are building increasingly good relationships with central banks in new jurisdictions such as the Caribbean, but there is more to do. As mentioned in our update in July, we saw the global cross-border payments market declined by 10% in the first half of this year. Despite this, we've managed to grow our volumes by 4%, which is very encouraging as we continue to gain market share. I've spent some time with the senior leadership team considering our overall strategy and have concluded that it is largely fit for purpose. I'm going to provide an update on our strategy by simplifying it into 4 pillars that will drive the business into the next phase of its growth, which, of course, builds on the very strong foundations already laid with a laser focus on execution. Part of the outcome of that strategic review process has been some strong and significant additions to my leadership team and throughout the organization to enhance our execution capabilities. Let me provide you with my view of our corporate strategy, which builds on the business' strong foundations. As the new CEO, I'm keen to give you my initial impressions of the business. The box on the left shows how I perceive CAB now. Nothing has changed. It is still a leading B2B cross-border FX transactions provider with a differentiated network. It is a PRA-regulated bank with a flexible balance sheet that can provide some real differentiation and leverage with and through our clients. A point of detail that has been missed by many. Moving over to the key differentiators. Again, these have not changed, and these are well understood. So what do we need to do? The main focus areas are: we need to improve our capabilities and further professionalize the business; we need to focus on improving the depth and breadth of our network, both quantitatively and qualitatively; we can then expand the customer base, expand the geographies we operate in and improve our share of wallet. None of this is revolutionary, but it needs a highly focused execution mindset throughout our business to deliver this. Page 6 shows the 4 strategic pillars that we will be focusing on to drive our strategy. Put simply, delivering these pillars will create a better performing and more sustainable business. Through delivering the strategy, this business will become more diversified in terms of network, clients, corridors and geographies. It will also deliver a more sustainable growth business that is able to grow consistently year-on-year with reduced volatility and will not rely on market dislocations to drive revenue. Once all the building blocks are in place, it will also deliver significant operational leverage with the ability to grow EBITDA margins as we generate more revenue. The 4 pillars focus on: network, not just the size but also the quality and the ability for it to deliver what our clients need at competitive prices; clients, again, this is not just the number of clients, it's about getting the most out of existing ones and adding new ones in the right geographies so our revenues are more balanced; platform, utilizing a significant untapped resource at our disposal, the banking license, to drive incremental FX and payments flow, generating both transactions income and net interest income; invest and innovate, allocating our nonregulatory capital correctly to deliver the best value for shareholders, including continue to grow our technology and balance sheet. I'd now like to take you through each of these 4 pillars one by one. Pillar 1 focuses on our network, which is a key differentiator and strength of our business. The slide shows you where we are focusing to improve our network of providers as well as the actions we are already taking. The key here is to broaden, diversify and localize the network. Our new Head of Network has already devised a regional strategy and is building teams in each of our target jurisdictions. The importance here is that we are building local in-country presence to build the relationships with local banks and more importantly, central banks. Previously, our network effort was being run centrally and exclusively from London. By hiring local expertise, we are also figuring out the best way to expand our network in newer jurisdictions such as LatAm and the MENA regions. We have developed a framework to assess the quality of all of our partners, including pricing capabilities, capacity and reach. And we will focus on spending time with those that meet most or all of our criteria in order to facilitate best execution for our clients. We are also building relationships with local remittance players who can help us serve the large payment volumes that our local banking partners cannot do as well as integrating with last-mile payment networks. And on this subject, I'm very proud to inform you that we recently signed a global partnership with Visa to help us achieve this. Visa were very keen to partner with us after gaining a strong appreciation of our business and the value of our business model. So the ultimate aims are as follows: grow the network quality in Africa, especially in those regions where we have suffered as a result of central bank interventions, Nigeria, XAF and XOF, which will allow us to foresee the next emerging macro theme; we will grow the number of liquidity providers with the view of getting differentiated and priority access to liquidity at good pricing for our clients; partner with local fintech and remittance companies that are able to provide the high-volume payment solutions that we need, this has been addressed in large part through our Visa partnership; and importantly, grow our network in wider geographies so we can enhance the sales effort in those regions. So speaking of sales, that brings me on to Pillar 2. So Pillar 2 focuses on our client relationships, both in terms of our existing client base and onboarding new ones. We have over 500 clients across 4 main customer segments of IDO, emerging market financial institutions, nonbank financial institutions and major market banks. However, we are undermonetizing our existing client book. With only 12% of our customers generating more than GBP 500,000 per annum of revenue and that 66% of our customers generate less than GBP 100,000, which we consider to be the tail, we either need to monetize those clients in the tail of our book or exit them entirely. The first major priority is to improve sales leadership. We have appointed a new Global Head of Sales and a Head of Payments. These new leaders will take on the charge of optimizing the sales organization and integrating it deeper into our trading and network operations to facilitate closer cooperation. We are also finalizing a new sales incentivization scheme, which closely aligns sales performance and client value to individual monetary compensation and our sales goals, something that has not been in place before. We will also work towards a decentralized sales model, which focuses on on-the-ground presence and allows us to build closer client relationships that are more culturally aligned rather than over the phone thousands of miles away in London. The opening of the European and U.S. offices will add to this effort. However, independent of those offices, we will also have salespeople on the ground in Africa and LatAm. Our ambition is to double the sales force over the next 3 years, but the key is to grow them in the right areas with specific targets. While we expect an increase in cost to build this, we do not expect it to be significant, and it will also be aligned with higher revenue. We are also doing a thorough review of the client base. This involves assessing clients that have signed with us but choose not to use us potentially because they see us as a backup provider. We will see if there are ways of getting them to transact with us. Otherwise, we will exit these relationships if we do not see any meaningful revenue in the near future. If there is any support we can offer these clients to support their FX and payments activity such as liquidity or trade finance lines within our risk parameters, then we will do so, which brings us on to Pillar 3, our platform, which is all about leveraging the banking license to accelerate FX and payments growth. I see our banking operation as a key differentiator versus our peers, one which has been historically underleveraged and I believe can drive significant FX and payments volume through our platform. The banking license provides us with a real advantage. It allows us to deploy our balance sheet where we are able to use our own capital and deposits together. It also gives us access to more sophisticated treasury investment options such as the Bank of England and the Fed, which allows us to generate higher returns for our balances and hedge where we can. We need to do better things with our banking license, however, including making better use of lending facilities to our clients as well as better allocation of assets to earn better return for a similar risk profile. We have already started taking action in May. We increased limits in our liquidity as a service or LaaS lines from GBP 40 million to GBP 75 million and our trade finance lines from GBP 100 million to GBP 200 million. We have done this in a controlled manner to only our top customers where we can keep the risk level low. We have seen good take-up of these facilities, and it works well for us as the credit risk is only incurred over a short duration of typically less than 5 days for liquidity as a service and 6 months for trade finance. The major point here is that these liquidity and trade finance lines are only to facilitate trading through us so that we drive FX and payments income as well. In our experience, these facilities tend to turn over at least 4 times a year, meaning that GBP 1 drawn on our balance sheet drives GBP 4 of FX or payments volume in a given year. This is a great use of our balance sheet to facilitate more volume. By being able to do this, we are able to act as a one-stop shop for those customers, allowing us to drive both net interest income and transaction income. Another thing we are doing with our balance sheet is improving our asset side allocation framework. This is to move us outside of just Bank of England and the U.S. Fed asset allocation and into higher returning assets that are able to offer similar risk profiles. In June, we completed our first trade, acquiring a high-yielding corporate bond from a listed bank, which has instantly increased the yield on our portfolio. We are professionalizing our treasury management function, and we have made the appropriate hires to get this started. Going forward, we should see our net interest income continuing to be a meaningfully -- a meaningful contributor to our revenue but at the same time, driving increased FX and transaction income. The important thing to stress here is that we will continue to be a transaction-led bank. Underpinning all our initiatives will be a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Capital allocation is extremely important in order to deliver sustainable growth in the future. Today, I want to provide some important insights as to how our capital allocation works, especially since the understanding of us as a P&L-driven banking institution places a different type of regulatory capital requirement on us compared to a typical lending bank. Our capital waterfall is simple. We need to prioritize our regulatory capital requirements, make sure we can firstly run the bank. Next, we want to make sure we have sufficient capital to invest in the organic growth opportunities in front of us such as extending liquidity as a service and trade finance lines as well as our tech stack. We have an ambitious pipeline of projects to make sure that we can keep the business growing and competitive in our chosen markets. Finally, after that, we will consider whether there is sufficient capital to sustainably return capital to shareholders. We have GBP 113 million of capital today, of which GBP 89 million is allocated to satisfying our regulatory requirements. The calculation of this requirement is largely based on the average of our last 3 years' revenue growth. In other words, as our revenue grows, our regulatory capital requirement grows in a straight line. Currently, that leaves us with GBP 25 million of capital, which is available for use. This amount remaining, we allocate spending towards CapEx for growth and extending our balance sheet. That results in a small amount remaining. We could distribute this to shareholders, but we would prefer to build the surplus for future opportunities given the relatively small quantums involved. Returning capital to shareholders is something we want to do responsibly and consistently. We also want to make sure it's not at the cost of growth opportunities. So where are the opportunities for deploying capital to drive growth? Now turning to Page 11. I want to highlight some of the exciting technology projects we are working on. This goes towards building a bigger and better business with the ability to serve client needs in today's and tomorrow's markets. This includes new products such as FX derivatives. This requires an overhaul to our systems in terms of treasury and capital management as well as dynamic hedging and regulatory reporting. We want to make sure we are fully ready from a technology, regulatory and operational perspective before we launch this at scale to our customers -- to our clients. We are also working on expanding our global payments reach, specifically utilizing the ACH network through Visa in our payment flow, which will allow us to perform a higher volume of payments in a more cost-efficient manner. This will lower the cost of transaction and allow us to work with lower ticket payments as well. We are also looking to adopt a more efficient FX settlement system, notably payment versus payment or PvP, which mitigates settlement risk and reduces friction in the payment value chain for wholesale FX. Central banks in particular are strong proponents of this. On the processing side, we are looking at enhancing our straight-through processing or STP as well, which should improve our ability to interact with our clients, network and payment rails without manual intervention; robotic process automation or RPA, which will help us deal with a much higher volume of payments. On the protection side, we are prioritizing AI-driven processes to enhance our operations. We've been working on this for some time, which should improve speed, reliability, especially with transaction monitoring, AML and client screening as well as transaction processing. We are very much in a test-and-learn phase, but this promises some real benefits. And finally, on the platform side, we will continue to upgrade our FX payments and banking platforms to ensure they are scalable and can meet the increasingly complex needs of our clients as well as being fit for purpose as we begin to [ be ] more global organization. We expect to spend about GBP 15 million this year on technology development. So now that I've explained my 4 strategic pillars, what will they deliver? A more resilient business, something that can grow sustainably and predictably. I want to be clear that we are still very much a growth business. A business that is diversified, both in terms of clients, geographies and corridors. A more professionalized business both in the front office and in operations. We are also going to be tracking process through a number of strategic KPIs to show that our strategy is being executed as planned and driving the output KPIs beneficially. These KPIs focus on certain growth metrics such as network clients and geographies but also the quality of that growth, which will drive revenue growth. We will report against these periodically. And finally, a core component to delivering the strategy is the quality and capability of the people executing it. I've already started strengthening the leadership team when it comes to that with some key hires made both in the front office and operationally. Our front office hires all have had significant experience in emerging markets at major financial institutions as well as at our competitors. The fact that I've been able to attract such high-quality talent to our organization shows that they believe in our business model and the opportunity for growth that it offers. Kirsty and Claire joined us last month. Kostas joined us last year and has done a fantastic job building the European office and setting up the local sales effort. Thomas has just joined him from StoneX yesterday. Operationally, we welcomed our new COO, Stuart Houlston, from our competitor, FleetCor. Stuart will further professionalize our operations and review our technology stack. Darren, our new Head of Network, has been with the organization for a while, but I'm very excited about his new role, which is a key to our future success. We also welcome Matt Talty, who I've worked with extensively in the past. He has a proven track record of enhancing treasury operations and balance sheet management. We also have a new CRO to join us shortly, and we are actively recruiting for a Head of Sales in the U.S. and a Head of the Middle East and North Africa. In conclusion, the past few months have been about honing the strategy into the 4 pillars, ensure that we have the capital allocation to support our revised strategy and with the right people in place to drive execution and growth. So thank you for listening, and I'll pass you over to Richard to talk about the financials in some detail.

Many thanks, Neeraj, and good afternoon, everyone. It's great to have the opportunity to present to the retail investor community, I think, I believe, for the first time. So turning to Page 15. I will take you through some of the key highlights of the performance in the first half of this year. Importantly -- it's important to say that the narrative has not changed since our trading update given -- that we gave at the end of July. Some of the numbers I'm going to quote show strong declines. However, this masks some good underlying performance in what we would consider to be a reset year. So gross income fell 22%, which is explained by the elevated income we earned in the prior year period from naira trading as well as the continuing tailwinds from XAF and XOF currencies prior to the fourth quarter 2023 central bank interventions. If we adjust for these 3 corridors, our underlying gross income went up by 11%. And actually, our FX and payments FX business was up by 14%. It's important to stress here that we will continue to trade in these markets where we can. So we still consider them to be core to our income. Adjusted EBITDA fell 53% to GBP 18.7 million. On the face of it, this is a material reduction, but this simply reflects the lower revenue, largely naira but also XOF and XAF, and higher costs versus the previous year, much of which is the effect of the annualization effects of talent acquisitions that we made in 2023. I'll go into this in a little bit more detail in subsequent slides. Operating free cash flow fell 75% to GBP 9.4 million. Again, this is a combination of lower EBITDA but also higher CapEx than prior year where in the prior year, we underspent in the first half of 2023. And so taking all this together, our adjusted EBITDA -- sorry, our adjusted PAT fell 62%. Now sifting through the noise of the comparability of last year, we do consider 2024 as a reset year. There have been no meaningful dislocations that we have benefited from for the first time in many, many reporting periods. And as such, the business can now sustainably grow from this level, reinforced by the strategic update that Neeraj has just laid out. If we move to Slide 16. So on Slide 16, we provide a bridge between gross income in H1 '23 and that reported in H1 '24. This helps better define the good underlying performance of the business ex naira, XAF and XOF. Firstly, we can see that the combined gross income of naira, XAF and XOF was GBP 29 million in our prior year numbers and only GBP 8 million this year. This equated to a fall of around about 73% in those currency corridors. The underlying 11% gross income growth excluding these 3 currencies was a combination of good progress in Emerging Markets and G10 currencies. In Emerging Markets, we have managed to make further progression in a broader range of currencies with Emerging Market volumes up 9% excluding the 3 currencies. For Developed Markets, we've been building strong relationships with central banks, notably in the Caribbean, which are increasingly channeling flow through us. With regard to NII, this hasn't fallen off as much as we had anticipated given rate curve resilience. You will recall from our March presentation, we were anticipating a 10% to 15% reduction through 2024. Having said that, the balance sheet initiatives that Neeraj highlighted earlier will further help us to mitigate the effects in a falling rate environment. Other growth includes that of same currency payments, which grew by 8%; and other banking services, which includes trade finance fees, which grew by more than 100%. So if we now move on to Page 17. I'll touch on some corridor performance. Volumes were robust, having increased 4% year-on-year, especially in a market that contracted both on a global level, some 10%, and in our traditional sub-Saharan African market, some 5%. In our Emerging Markets segment, volumes were down approximately 2%, and the headline take rates have contracted meaningfully from 61 basis points to 33 basis points. This really does show the impact of the dislocated take rates we were generating from naira trades in the prior year period. However, on an underlying basis, stripping out the effects of naira, XOF and XAF shows a much more encouraging picture. That is that the take rate remains broadly stable at 33 basis points in our emerging corridors and volumes actually went up by 9%. On the major market side, our take rates were marginally up at 7 basis points, but our volumes were up a healthy 8%. Concentration and concentration risk is a big positive coming out of this. You will recall that when we sat here in March that our top 5 currencies for 2023 accounted for 45% of our gross income. In H1 last year, this was even higher at 49%. This has now come down to 32% for the first half in 2024, which is helpful with respect to concentration risk. As Neeraj mentioned earlier, this is not by design, but given the fall away from naira, XAF and XOF, we would expect further improvement from here as we expand. What does this mean for adjusted EBITDA performance? If we turn to Page 18. Thank you. We can see the results of our decreased revenue and increased cost has resulted in a decrease in our adjusted EBITDA margin from 56% this time last year to 34% for the first half of this year. Costs in the half increased approximately GBP 5.5 million versus the prior period. The largest component of this increase was people costs. We made some significant hires in 2023, which have now begun to annualize in 2024. These hires were largely in technology, risk, and of course, our sales department as we were gearing up for geographic expansion. We've also made some new hires this year, as outlined by Neeraj as a part of the strengthening of the leadership team. We also had an increase in technology costs, which accounts for new software to streamline business processes, increased operational resilience, increased numbers of software licenses due to higher headcount as well as inflationary increases embedded in our relevant software contracts. We also incurred higher property expenses resulting from our new London headquarters and the 2 new offices in Amsterdam and the U.S., which were not present this time last year. We're expecting the revenue to cost jaws to widen next half through revenue growth, which will outpace a marginal increase in cost through the remainder of this year. We're generally expecting a higher margin in the second half of this year, and I'll come on to this later. So turning to Page 19. We mentioned at our trading update that we were anticipating gross income for 2024 to be marginally below last year. We expected this to be a combination of BAU performance combined with strategic initiatives. Let's firstly look at BAU performance. In H1, we generated GBP 56 million of gross income, and that was without any tailwinds from naira and still suffering from the headwinds of our XAF and XOF corridors. As is well known, we tend to transact more in the second half of the year. It is therefore worth noting that in 2023, if you strip out the 3 West African currencies, H2 revenues were higher than H1 by 22%. Going back to 2022, H2 revenues were higher than H1 by 57%. This implies that both seasonality and underlying business grows half-on-half. This happens -- this has happened consistently, and we expect this to happen in H2 of this year. The seasonality component of our business is hopefully well understood. But as a reminder, a number of remittance customers tend to be back-end weighted to account for cultural holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Thanksgiving, et cetera. Furthermore, for IDOs, spend has a strong track record of picking up in the second half as organizations tend to try and spend their budgets in a use-it-or-lose-it model. The second component of this growth will come from strategic initiatives that were put into place towards the end of H1 but have not yet had a chance to make a financial impact in H1 2024. This includes the extension of increased trade finance and liquidity facilities to certain clients where we've seen a strong take-up and perhaps some -- and only a small contribution thus far, but also we're expecting a small contribution to the new European office in the second half. And finally, our newly structured sales force and sales initiatives are expected to make some impact in Q4. By way of current trading, we've had a healthy start to H2, which gives us confidence in the outlook 2024. And increased revenue in the second half, together with a marginal increase in costs, we expect adjusted EBITDA to expand in the second half bring the blended full year margin in the high 30s by the end of this year. Thank you for listening. And let me quickly pass you back to Neeraj for some closing remarks. Neeraj?

Thanks, Richard. So in summary, we are focusing on executing our strategic plan outlined in my 4 strategic pillars of network, clients, platform and innovation and investment. The fundamental business model is sound and intact with a huge target addressable market. My approach is to get the basics right and having the execution discipline and management talent to get things done efficiently. So we're going to strengthen the network, focus on our client base, taking advantage of being a bank and continue to invest and innovate. We have made high-quality hires with significant capabilities and experience to drive this forward. I'm very excited by the next phase of growth and look forward to updating you on our progress. Thanks for listening, and we can now go to the Q&A.

Perfect, Neeraj, Richard and Gaurav. Thank you very much for the presentation. What I'll do at this point is I'll just bring the cameras back up. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And Gaurav, if I could just hand over to you to chair the Q&A, that would be great. And then I'll pick up from you at the end.

Absolutely. Thank you, everyone, for submitting your questions via the Q&A online facility. So let me go through the first question, which is presubmitted a couple of days ago. What are you doing to enhance the shareholder value considering a lot of shareholders are deeply underwater, particularly around excess capital return, strategic partnerships? And what are your revenue projections in recent additions in the EU? When do you expect the U.S. banking license to come through? There's probably a few questions in there, so happy to break that down. So let's start with the first one about enhancing shareholder value and about shareholders that are underwater and the capital return.

I think what we've set out today is a strategy that is both transparent, builds on what we've already got here and is totally aligned to the markets that we operate in. And that is what we need to do. We need to grow our business and we need to grow our profitability. And that is how I can enhance shareholder value. There's no other secret trick to, I'm afraid, and there are some hard yards to do. And that's where I'm starting, and that's where the new team members will play their part.

And what are your revenue projections for the recent additions in the EU? And when do you expect the U.S. banking license to come through?

So we haven't actually talked about projections by that kind of split. We will talk more about any kind of guidance probably next year when we've done our full year. So right now, that's not really something that I can provide any information on. In terms of the U.S. license, we are in the -- we're in the part of the process where we're just waiting. There are no further parts for us to complete. There are no questions from the U.S. regulators. We are purely waiting. And therefore, we hope that we receive that license sometime in the second half of this year.

Okay. Thank you, Neeraj. Second question is around scale potential, incremental revenue opportunity. Three parts here: the Visa collaboration, having a U.S. representative office and the Dutch license by giving a potential revenue expectation and the time frame in which to achieve it.

So we've kind of -- we've answered the last part of that question in terms of European license and the time it will take. We will come back to that when we have further detail next year. What was the other thing?

The Visa collaboration.

The Visa collaboration is valuable to us in that when we look at B2B2C activities, so where some of our clients want us to actually distribute the funds that they've asked us to move further into their organization, generally to their staff for paying expenses and other things. The Visa collaboration allows us to do that in a much more cost-effective way in a very large number of currencies that otherwise would be quite difficult for us to develop on our own in that kind of cost-effective way. So that is very valuable to us, and we can use that in many other opportunities that we can have with our clients.

Thank you. Your strategy to diversify revenue seems key. So what are the steps you're actioning? And what can we [ produce ] success by?

So one of the things we talked about was the way that we are spreading our network. That network will spread both in terms of geography and liquidity providers, both in the regions that we're already operating as well as new regions such as Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, et cetera. So the measure will be how many more relationships have we built and how -- in which regions have we built them. That should be a good measure of that.

Thank you. With technology developing at pace, how are you advancing against competition and continuing to grow the client base?

I think that's quite interesting. I mean technology is always moving forwards. And part of our strategy going forward, as we've set out, is to continue to innovate from our technology perspective. We've brought in a new COO, Stuart Houlston, from our competitor, Corpay. So we have some insights in terms of what our competitors are doing in this space also. We have a very specific business model, which is B2B, and we need to optimize our offering technology-wise to make sure that we can operate both most effectively and most efficiently as we grow our business and create as much operational leverage through technology as we can. We have talked about the use of AI and robotics to help us, especially in the AML space and those kind of compliance-type activities to improve our straight-through processing. So all of those things will be enabled through a better use and investment in technology.

Thank you. Another question here I have in the thread. Good to see increasing sales staff, but will there be a reduction in back-office staff to control costs?

I think ultimately, what I'd like to see is increased volumes driving increased revenues with no increase in back-office staff. As we drive our technological solutions, clearly, we are trying to drive a better and more efficient back-office operation. So that is absolutely key in terms of what we do going forwards. But the key really is to improve revenue.

Okay. And there's another subsequent question on this, is about senior management share purchases to bolster up confidence in the company. If you can make a comment on that.

Yes, sure. I mean I think that's important. I think we, as a senior management team, are quite well committed to the company. We will have various LTIP schemes, et cetera, in place. And obviously, those that have been here longer have more investment in the company than those of us that are newer, but that will continue to be a theme of driving that kind of alignment between us and the shareholders.

Okay. Thank you. And there's a last question about the shares being down 70% without any clear explanation. Why -- could there be another massive fall in the future? What is the company doing to manage this and other risks?

So obviously, from what I've said already, my job -- the job of the management team here is to drive business growth and business profitability. That is what we're focused on. We have very limited influence over what the share price actually does. And from my perspective, it's very important for us to focus on executing our plans and delivering profitability and the improvement in the growth and the diversity of the business as we've set out in our strategy. My belief is that if we can deliver those quite stretching targets that we're setting ourselves and those strategic aims, then the share price will follow.

Okay. Thank you. So I don't see any more questions in the queue. So I'll hand it back to the operator to close things off.

Perfect, Neeraj, Richard and Gaurav. Thank you for answering those questions you can from investors. Of course, the company can review the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before we redirect investors to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Neeraj, can I just ask you for a few closing comments?

Yes. Thank you. That was a very useful session, and I'm glad that we're able to engage with retail investment community, which is very important to us. Hopefully, you'll get a very clear message of the clarity of our strategy going forward and the fact that we have invested in the capability to be able to deliver that in the best way we can. And the job now for us is to deliver, and we will be providing appropriate KPIs going forwards both in terms of the success of the strategic side of the equation and not just the financial outcomes that are normally provided by listed companies. So hopefully, the input KPIs will provide more value in terms of what is actually that we have been doing to drive our business growth and therefore its value. And thanks very much, everybody, for taking the time to listen to us. And hopefully, at some stage, we'll meet face to face.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the management team to better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few minutes to complete. I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of CAB Payments Holdings plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.

Thank you very much.