Celebrus Technologies plc (CLBS.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
November 30, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
operatorGood morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Celebrus Technologies Plc Capital Markets Day. [Operator Instructions]. We may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, [indiscernible] your questions submitted today and we'll published those responses where it's appropriate to do so. We'll shortly submit a poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to CEO, Bill Bruno.
Guerino Bruno
executiveGood morning. Thank you, sir. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us, both virtually and remotely. We've got a fun agenda -- obviously, for those of you who are in the room, you don't have to log into the application to ask your questions. You can just raise your hand, and we'll just repeat them to the audio so that everybody [indiscernible] gets the benefit of hearing what it is that you're asking, just to make sure the audio is working. Really appreciate everybody taking some time today. We've got a fun agenda. As always, we'll start with the financial update from Ash. I give you a bit of a business update, as this is our first Capital Market Day at Celebrus Technologies plc. So we have finally now simplified the brand and aligned under Celebrus and behind Celebrus as the sphere of our business. I'll talk a little bit more about that and kind of how we're going to market. We've got Ant Phillips, who's the smart person in the room, who will walk through some of our product updates. And we have a video, and I'll just warn you now. We've got some technical difficulties with said video, where it's only audio. So we all listen to podcast. So we'll just pretend it's a podcast. The video itself will be uploaded online. So you can watch and see [indiscernible] if you so choose, but the audio is the most important thing anyway and yes, that's the agenda. So with that, I'll turn it over for the most exciting part of the financial updates. Come on, Ash.
Ashoni Mehta
executiveThanks, Bill. So I'm going to run through quickly financial highlights, and then we'll go into a bit of detail around each of the financial statements and just talk about how they impact the business. So financial highlights, you will see that the annual recurring revenue increased to GBP 17.4 million during the period. That compared to this time last year of GBP 15.8 million and a year-end figure of GBP 16.7 million. And as you see in the statement in a few days ago, we anticipate the ARR growing on a period-over basis. Total revenue went up to GBP 13 million. I'll go into a little bit of detail [indiscernible] comparison to GBP 8.1 million at this time last year and GBP 21.4 million for the full year last year. And I'll talk a little bit about first half and second half waiting. Software revenue, which is a key metric for us now, went up 18% to GBP 7.3 million. We're using software revenue metric to distinguish from total revenue, which includes hardware cost revenues. And as we call that, and again, I'll say that in a few moments. The gross profit margin was 37.4%. That was low in the first period as it often is, this time around due to higher hardware in our revenues. But I'd like to talk a little bit about the underlying software and gross profit margin as well. I think that's a little bit more important in terms of understanding the scalability of the business. For the first time in 20 years, we showed an adjusted PBT profit just GBP 0.2 million, but that compares to GBP 1.3 million loss this time last year, and that equates to 0.56p of earnings per share. Cash position at the period end was GBP 14.7 million, and I'll talk about kind of the dynamics of that cash balance and working capital and how that sort of fluctuates month to month. And then finally, we've had a dividend of 0.92p per share. That's up 4.5%, and I'll talk about the use of our cash over the medium term. So turning to the income statement. For the first time, the final results last time, we split out the software revenues to highlight the underlying sort of growth in the business. As you know, we have quite a high degree of fluctuation in headline revenues from hardware sales in some periods. Hardware revenues can be GBP 2 million and some periods [ GBP 7 million ]. So that sort of distorts the headline revenue. So we're focusing on software revenues as being the key metric. And in this period, they're up 17.7% to GBP 7.3 million. The gross profit margin was lower, as I said, at 37.4%. So we are looking, as I said, the software GP percentage being more representative of what's happening underlying in divestments. So the software GP percentage is 56.4%, and we would expect that to go back for the full year as it was last year to [ the high 60% ] and in due course, to go to 70% and beyond. The OpEx increased to GBP 4.9 million compared to GBP 4.5 million this time last year. I said last time about how we spent last financial year, restructuring the business. We invested a lot into systems. So new finance system and new CRM, a new HR system, [indiscernible] manager, a contract manager. From those, we were able to extract lots of efficiencies and set headcount we see from those investments to then be directed to the front end into sales and marketing and setting up a customer success team. So last year, we held OpEx flat also with a headcount of 150. But now having done the restructuring, we've got a really solid base within company. We now see investment increasing in OpEx increasing in the coming periods. So we've seen the start of that increase down in the second half what we've seen the full half impact, if you like, as additions in the first half. And what we'll also be doing the second is looking forward to FY '25 and the investments we need to make ahead of our year-end now to be able to deliver increased revenues and numbers for FY '25. So you will see that OpEx going up in the coming periods. Adjusted PBT GBP 0.2 million, that was assisted by our finance income. So we have good cash balances, and we invest this very wisely. We're very proactive around that. And so obviously, during a period of volatility over the last 6 to 9 months with interest rates quite increasing, but also fluctuating through short-term and long-term investments. We've been very proactive and managed to generate GBP 300,000 net from our cash balances. Annual recurring revenue, as I said, has gone up to GBP 17.4 million. And the reported adjusted diluted EPS was a loss of 0.56 -- sorry, [ profit ] at 0.56p. And the dividend, as I said, 0.92p for the period. Coming on to the balance sheet. Consolidated statement of financial position. So the major changes in the period were really around the debtors and the creditors. So at the last year-end, we talked about how a couple of deals have slipped through from the last year into the end part of this year, and that was the reason for the shortfall in revenue last year. So what we've seen in this period is that those -- 1 of those deals, which had a very high component, as hardware, was signed in early August. And so what you see in the balance sheet at half year-end is a very high sort of trade debt balance within another receivables. But conversely, you also see a high trade and other payables relating to that hardware. So if you remember, the shortfall was around GBP 6 million, and of that, around GBP 5.7 million was hardware. So that's why you see the trade and other payables going up and the trade and other receivables also increasing. And those transitions are in the process that we're working now. So we will be receiving cash shortly. As a side point, you may be aware that we don't generally have bad debtors. Most of my customer base is large, profitable multinational businesses. So we cannot have bad debts, but payment terms are generally anywhere between 45 days and 90 days depending on whether we're doing direct or we're doing through a partner. And in this case, it was through a partner. The final point I'd make really around the assets held for sale. So this is an item we introduced at the last year-end moving out of the property, plant and equipment and into asset sale. This is our London property of GBP 3 million valuation. So this is still on the market. We now have offers, which we are negotiating and these come from a wide range of types of buyer and of course with any property sale, there are pros and cons to structure the deal to work, and we'll be announcing further information in due course. And finally, on the cash flow. So the main items in the cash flow, I think the first thing to draw your attention is we saw the movements in working capital. And actually the same, again, really about how we recognize our revenue and how we do our volumes. So a typical service contract will be a 3-year contract, and that include a high proportion of license revenue, an element of support and maintenance, increasingly now an element of Celebrus Cloud, which we launched a while ago and a very small element of services. And how we recognize revenue on that is that the services will be recognized on a percentage complete basis as we implement the service platform, and that's typically around sort of 2 months or so. This full maintenance and service count will be recognized evenly over those [ 36 ] months of the contract. The license is a bit unusual. We issued a license for a 3-year contract year by year. So at the time to time on the first anniversary then for the second year and second anniversary for the third year. Now under IFRS 15, once we've delivered the license, our obligations are fulfilled. So we're required to recognize the whole of that license revenue in the month we deliver it. So that does lead to some distortion, if you like. This isn't really a SaaS kind of model. So when that license revenue was recognized, can have an impact on the period of results to be what we recognize in month 1 or month 6 or month 7. Equally, coming back to working capital. The significance of that is that when we sign a new customer or we do review -- a 3-year review, we will build a whole of the first year in [indiscernible]. And then similarly, at the first anniversary and second anniversary. So the billing's saturate by marketing month-to-month. So there will be months where we don't have any renewals, for example renewal of contract and we might build perhaps less than $0.5 million and there will be other months where we do have significant billings, which could be GBP 5 million or more. So the position [indiscernible] really come down to the level of renewals and the number of new logos or sometimes some upsell as well in a particular period. So you will continue to see that fluctuate higher market. And of course, for this half year, it's been affected also by this large contract with high degree of hardware revenues. On the cash generated from operating activities, nothing of any significance. We have accretion and amortization of course. We have share-based payments. And then moving now to investing activities, we have a very low CapEx requirement in the business like most software companies. We also tend to capitalize a very small amount of R&D now. We would rather not capitalize R&D. We would rather have a gaze to the income statement. We believe that gives you a much cleaner income statement. It's easier to understand. And we're also aware that there is a reputation among software and use of capitalizing R&D to flatter the P&L and take profit out and capitalize them. However, our under IFRS, we are required to capitalize a certain amount of R&D and that comes down to sort of the nature of the R&D. So we have an R&D spend typically in the year of around GBP 2.2 million to GBP 2.4 million. And of that, we are capitalizing somewhere around sort of GBP 200,000, GBP 300,000, GBP 400,000 depending on the type of R&D businesses. And then finally, our financing activities. We paid dividend. So this GBP 856,000 in this period is the final dividend from the last financial year. You've seen the comparatives. This time last year, we had paid GBP 6.2 million. And that was in relation to the special dividend we paid, which was 12.5p per share, roughly GBP 5 million and our cash balances were quite healthy at that time. Purchase of shares, so we continue to have a share buyback program. And the reason behind that is principally to negate the dilutive effect of the share options and LTIP. This isn't a particularly proactive share buyback program. So we're not going out seeking share, but they will be mocked up by our broker and activity at the end of the day. And as I said, we'll take those up to a certain level to net off the effect of dilution. So that brings us down to the movement of GBP 2.5 million [indiscernible] as I said, fluctuates period to period, as we look forward to the rest of the financial year with the billings that we've got now outstanding at the year-end at the half year. And also as we look forward to the second half and the kind of the nature of our billing typically be second half. So you've seen from previous statements we do have first half, second half in balance, if you like. In that second half revenues are generally higher than first half revenues. That will never be 50-50. We're trying to move it to typically around 40-60. But what that also means is it's because of a lot of those revenues are related to license. That's what gives us [ outline towards ] the second half and then certainly, with that recognition of the license and the renewals, that also means we have a high amount of billings in the second half. So typically you will see our cash balance at the year-end being higher than it is at the half year. And that's it.
Guerino Bruno
executiveBefore you sit down, Ash, we had a question that I think we have to obviously answer right now around software gross margin and our improvements. And that perhaps you could speak to what's included in the costs that go into you're calculating the gross margin for software market currently and you also how we view the margins across the various things that come into software revenues?
Ashoni Mehta
executiveSure. Yes, good point -- good question. And it's important to sort of know the margins on these direct streams because as you look forward to what [indiscernible] like in 3 years' time and how the income statement will be affected, it's important to understand that. Now the margins we have are very typical for a software company. So when a license, typically we're looking at around 85% gross margin. On support maintenance, typically, you'll be looking at around 65% to 70% gross margin. And then on services, typically, you'd be looking around 40%. And then for Celebrus Cloud which we've introduced recently, you're also looking at -- and support maintenance kind of margin of around 65%. So the blended margin on software revenues, as I said, is in the high 60% or so and this approaching 70% and will go beyond the due course. And the reason it will go beyond 70% is we sell more new logos as we do more upsell. The largest component of new contract is license. So on a typical contract, we might have -- I mean, just taking numbers out of the air for $1 million a year, there might be perhaps sort of 700,000, 800,000 of that is license and that's high margin. And then the other 300,000 will be a combination of the support and maintenance or [indiscernible] services as part of that. So that blended margin will increase because as we sign new logos, as we do more upsell on existing customers, the large proportion of that upsell and that new logos will be licensed. And so that -- increased that high gross margin licenses will increase our overall blended gross margin for software revenues. Does that answer it?
Guerino Bruno
executiveYes. All right. Well. Thank you, Ash. I appreciate the background there. I mean I think ultimately getting a sense of is where we're focused now. And I think there's nothing more outpaced than the fact that we only have 1 branch market getting rid of retiring, I suppose is the better word, the [indiscernible] name and aligning all the [indiscernible] makes sense, obviously, meeting with many of our investors that was a constant question. There were just some things that took a higher priority, all of the system changes, the people changes, the fact that we've completely restructured the business in about 19 months, built an entire new leadership team and stood up a direct sales business, a new marketing department, et cetera. And we finally got down to the name change. And here we are, right? And so that's the -- it's a bellwether though, because when I joined the business, there's 5 years ago yesterday [indiscernible] by the way. But 5 years ago yesterday, I joined the business. And 1 of the first things that I was asked was which team [indiscernible]. I told the company that tell you all my detail right, because if you're viewing yourselves as different teams, if you're viewing yourselves as different mentalities, all that does is take away from the momentum and the business. It needed a strategy, it needed kind of a northern star to guide towards. And for us, it's that we are a software business that sometimes sells services. And that's drastically different because everything that we do, everything that we invest in, all of our engagements with customers now. The sole focus is how do we sell more license to that customer and obviously make them very happy with that and get them value and in turn, give their consumers value as well. And our mission statement has also been quite cleared up. And hopefully, as many of you have been meeting with us over the last few rounds that Ash and I have been doing together in our one-on-ones, the brand is starting to get easier and easier to understand. But our mission is very simple. It's to improve the relationships between brands and consumers by a better data. And so what is better data means? Well for us and what you'll see when that comes up here and present, it's about bringing our software, our people and our processes and in some cases, the environments that we're building and hosting to the forefront for the brands that we're partnered with, whether they're some of the top financial institutions around the world, top retailers around the world, health care in the U.S., travel, hospitality, telco, you name it. They all have a very core problem and that core problem is their digital data set, is not up to par. They're not able to use digital data. And for us, that's the massive opportunity for the Celebrus platform. And we continue to innovate that platform, and you'll see some of that when that comes up here because [indiscernible] today. You'll see our launch of Celebrus Digital Analytics. You'll see some of our machine learning. You can't do a meeting without talking -- mentioning artificial intelligence at least 37 types, right, in a room these days. And for us, it's about how do we build models that take the data we're capturing for customers, about their consumer interactions and help them find the needles in the haystack faster, help them get value from the platform. And so everything that we've done, whether it's efficiency and process internally or externally and how we engage with customers is designed around making Celebrus easy to use, making Celebrus easy to drive value from and candidly make Celebrus easy to buy from. Because when all of you over the years didn't understand our premise of what our business is doing, now you can probably understand how competing it was when we're trying to sell it as well. And now we have a very straightforward sales process. We know what pain points to listen for. And it's the benefit of our marketing investment and our sales investment over the last year that has helped us learn that. And we've taken that further. So as we've talked about for the last year, we talked about that and expand from a sales perspective, right, which again, it's not rocket science. It's just something we should do when you're trying to sell software. So finding your pain point, selling them just that pain point and then bringing in customer success to work with that customer to help them understand all of the things they could be doing with our platform and then ultimately upsell them and get them up and running on those things and get to improving those relationships between brands and consumers even more so with some of the new features and functionality of Celebrus. And so customer success team is 1 that we put in place this year. I'm happy to report that, that team is doing fantastic. We've set up in international and a U.S.-based team to work through our accounts. And in the pipeline today, it's probably about 80% of our existing customers have some opportunity in the pipeline already for expanding their usage of Celebrus. The 2 newest features, Celebrus Digital Analytics and Bot Detection, which you see here shortly, are both already in use in organizations. These features went live in the summer. That is incredibly fast for the history of this business to give customers up and running our new features and functionality. And that's the [indiscernible] historically D4t4 was a company that tried to sell massive enterprise deals that could take a lot of time, 12, 18, 24 months in some cases. What we're trying to do now to sell software that serves a very specific pain point and worry about the rest later because it's a lot easier to sell to an existing customer than it is a new. And so our goal is to shorten sales cycles to on average 8 months. So when we're looking at our sales team's pipelines, we're hoping and looking to build a sort of a range of opportunities in the pipeline. Yes, there will still be enterprise deals in those pipeline, 1 or 2 per salesperson. But ideally, there's a significant number of pain point sales that we can move much more quickly through the pipeline. And that's ultimately the goal. And from a key win perspective, we called out several. We called out some upsells, but what I want to focus on today is what we're considering a bellwether for the business, sort of proves the things that we've been talking about. Our newest logo is a bank in the U.S. that purchased the Celebrus platform. They came to us through the website. So that shows the marketing and lead gen is starting to work that we've tested and we've been investing in those things. From the time they reached out to us till the time to close -- because we now have systems that can track these things. It's amazing what you can do with data. It was under 5 months. I think about 4.5 months to close. They purchased Celebrus platform, in Celebrus platform, where we're hosting and managing it for them, and they utilize several broad end marketing use cases out of the gate. They're not even fully implemented yet, and they're already talking to customer success about adding new features. So for us, that's Celebrus. That's what we want to be as an organization. That's what we're aspiring to be every day as we continue to make changes, as we continue to learn, as we continue to adapt. It's about listening to pain points, selling them those pain points and driving that forward. I already covered some of these customer wins. But for us, it's Celebrus platform. Ash talked about sort of the hardware revenue, and we do have legacy customers where we're managing on-premise environments or -- that we've been managing for quite some time, put good money in. The margins aren't quite as high, and we'll continue to support those customers. But from a sales perspective, we no longer even offer on-premise as an option. Now that being said, our sales been a part. So if the customer wants to come in and say, we want to buy your software, we have to put it on prem and they've got a check to sign and we will do it. But in the sales decks and in the presentations and in the way that we're pitching the software, Celebrus platform is primary option number one and secondary option would be the clients on cloud if they associate, and that's it. And there's many reasons for that. And there's things that we didn't even maybe think about initially. But it goes all the way across the business by making the shift because it helps us better support our customers as well. It also helps us ensure that we've got our customers on the latest and greatest technology so that they can be early adopters of new features and functionality when we bring them live. There was a sort of undercurrent in the business of a lot of clients that have been on various versions of Celebrus. It makes very difficult to upsell them if we also then have to get them upgraded to the most recent version. By getting everyone on Celebrus Cloud, by having a standard offering that's fully automated and scalable with some of the amazing IP and development that our team has done to date to bring that to life in a very short period of time. It enables us to turn these features on overnight for customers. The banking customer that the new logo, they have the ability to trial 3 features that they're interested in. We can just put them on like a switch for 3 months. Let them see the value of it, turn them off and then ask them if they want to pay for, right? So for us, is -- there's a lot of value there. So if we truly want to improve the relationships between brands and consumers, what we have to do. We have to give brands the opportunity to see with this tech that we're bringing to the market and do for them, give them the opportunity to see some of that value and then turn that into a commercial discussion that benefits all of you, all of us and allows us to further develop our people, continue to develop our product and candidly grow the business at an exciting level that we can rally around and get excited. Here -- a little bit later as well -- here in this room, I think everybody that's virtual will actually see the video based on the testing when they're on the laptop, but we will make sure that video is posted online so you can see the video [indiscernible] phenomenal background dedicated [indiscernible] so you're not going to want to miss that. [indiscernible] ridiculous backgrounds in our video [indiscernible] we can talk about later. But solution partners are a key element of our business. This is relatively -- we talked a bit about it in the summer as we made the rounds in July. But for us, we continue to invest in technology partners. We have some fantastic technology partners. We're building integrations with new technologies. We're not even part of it because just customers have asked us. But where we see lead gen, it's through solution consulting partners, solution integrated. And that's my background, right? When I came out of University, I founded a consulting firm that built a business around helping technologies like Celebrus. That's where I first came across Celebrus. It's called Speed-Trap back then, 27 years ago. And those brands, the Merkle, the CX forwards of the world and some of the other partners that we've built, they're strategic advisers to customers, right? They're telling them what can solve their pain points. They're on the front line. And so arming them with the Celebrus capabilities and forming partnerships like the 1 with Merkle that you'll hear about as the last agenda item today. We see as more and more opportunities to build sales channels without investing in the sales channels. We can have solutions consulting partners out there who can build a service offering around Celebrus, deliver all of those services and help us scale and simply help us sell more software, then that's a great opportunity for us as a business, and that's why we're exploring. So the last thing I'll leave you with, and then obviously, we'll address questions later on, but before I turn it over to Ant. You've heard me talk a lot about data. All the systems that we put in place have given us phenomenal ability to not only visualize what's going to close when and where the deals are and where the revenue is coming from and what's already committed, et cetera, et cetera. But we also have the ability to forecast that out. And with the current pipeline and visibility with deals that were already in legal negotiations with now, we feel very comfortable about the outlook for the year, and we're quite excited about it. And we're also extremely excited about where we're taking this business. So hopefully you're sensing some of that. But we are now a software company. We are all aligned buying 1 brand. We've completed several restructures to put the right people into the right places. And as a result, we've uncovered some phenomenal talent that needed an opportunity to shop. So we're really excited about where we're going. I'm thrilled about it. I always get asked, what are you trying to do with Celebrus? We're trying to take over the work. And in my opinion, our software is the best software backed by 1 of the most phenomenal engineering team that I've ever seen. The people that are on the front lines that are delivering these projects care about our customers, to the point where we get feedback on a weekly basis for customers, saying that we're the only vendor that delivers on promises. And that's the type of vendor we want to be. In many ways, we're being a software company that's an anti-software company, right? Because we want to be honest, ethical. We want to deliver on our promises, but more importantly, we run and align and put our great people on the front lines with our customers, get them access to software that truly can be game changing for them as businesses and ultimately drive those better relationships with their consumers. So with that, Ant, I will [indiscernible].
Ant Phillips
executiveGood morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Ant Phillips. I'm CTO. Maybe 20 minutes or so, just to walk you through some of the new things, which come out to the last 12 months. A few slides, not too many and then a couple of demos. You can see how it looks in action. And you can ask questions as we go along. Where to start, so best place to start is just to reiterate what Bill said a moment ago that at the start, we have a software product business or software business. We have a sales-led software business. And what that means is when we see an opportunity, we go after it, and that's really how to tee up the 2 things. I'm going to show you this morning. In the last 12 months, we've seen 2 clear opportunities, 1 around digital analytics, which I'll talk about in a bit more detail in a moment and also Bot Detection. Bot Detection is 1 of those things that have lots of different names, nonhuman traffic, invalid traffic. That's the term that Google uses bots to everyone else. I'm just going to walk you through those things and why they are so interested in the market demand. Before I dive into too much detail, let's just set the scene for what Celebrus is, and it's actually these things. We don't talk so much now about CEP and FDP, some of those acronyms that become very confusing to -- in the industry as they go, then have to shape really for what they actually need. So we just talk about Celebrus now and all these capabilities and what the product can do. We can do a lot in marketing. That's our heritage of course, going back many years, increasingly over the last 3 years more and going forward. The banking customer that Bill mentioned a moment ago, it's right in there with a lot of forward interest and use cases they ought to deliver really good for us. But also some other things, CDI for salesforce is how we work with the salesforce marketing cloud, really strong partnership there and CX vault and unique patented technology, which allows our customers to work with their customers who have opted out. We have all those privacy concerns, but they still need a relevant customer experience even though they have opted out with data collection. And then the really new thing over on the right-hand side is the digital analytics, Celebrus Digital Analytics, CDA. And it's all built, of course, on the Celebrus platform including the Bot Detection. And that really comes back to something which we've been signaling for the last year or 2, really, which is we've always had the best technology for making it really simple to collect rich data visitors to company's websites, mobile applications and so on. We also want to start using that data model to add value to the business. And running machine learning models, which detect bots is a valuable thing for the businesses we work with. Being able to provide digital analytics is a valuable thing that uses our data -- use that platform. So it's about moving up the value chain, if you want to think with that, right? It's not just about getting the best data, so they're activating it as well. Okay. So where does CDA coming to all of this then? And actually, there's a whole bunch of reasons in the industry, which have made digital analytics a really interesting space to be in. And it's not lost on us to be irony here, which is web analytics or digital analytics is something that was -- we originally got into as a company back in the day, we moved from Speed-Trap, 20-odd years ago before we became Celebrus. That's where we started out life actually. And in the intervening years, where analytics became really uninteresting to Google and Adobe kind of took over the world. But now because of the changes in the privacy world, it's become an interesting space again, especially for a set of different industries like health care and insurance. So actually, we've kind of gone full circle and has become a really big opportunity for us. This quote here around the HHS, health -- Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S. was very a year ago, they sent a letter to a whole batch of health care companies saying, you cannot track you using Google Analytics, what your customers are doing on your websites and mobile applications. It is a bridge of health care information to do that. It's a breach of personal health care information, PHI. And that was such a moment in the industry that I don't think people fully realize how important it was that company's -- health care companies cannot use Google analytics because they are disclosing health care information to Google, same goes for Adobe Analytics. And what that created was a sudden surge of interest, which is now ongoing to have an alternative, which has not happened in the last 20 years. It's a remarkable thing when these things happen in the industry. And that was it. And what's happened since then, of course, is a lot of interest and a lot of movement in the industry. And it was followed up in July this year by a follow-on piece of information guided issued by the HHS, which is to inform 103 companies, you can search, it's up on the web, where they went after specific companies now saying you are still doing this, you need to stop doing it. So immediately, there's -- all these companies who are panicking about how they're going to get themselves out this situation. And this net is widening. So at the same time, there were after 5 tax advisory companies, Intuit has been one, saying you're also disclosing confidential financial information by using or using Google Analytics on your website. So if you cut a long story short, all of that creates a really fabulous opportunity for us to provide a better solution for these sorts of companies. And that [ next line ] which is going to widen over time and insurance could be next and it's really tough for them. So we have a solution. We built over the last 12 months. It's only available at Celebrus Cloud, we want to bring customers into Celebrus Cloud platform. and it provides a complete solution, a complete alternative to Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Companies who still want to run things in their own provider solution [indiscernible]. So whichever way the customer wants to tack, we can tack with them, either they run it in Celebrus Cloud or we might call them in Celebrus Cloud or they run themselves in Celebrus Cloud. And I believe at all, as I said a moment ago, is Celebrus platform. So it has all those good things that we talk about, identity graph, accurate, identity resolution. It doesn't use third-party cookies all those problems, which are in the industry at the moment. We don't suffer from those. And the benefit of that is the company [indiscernible] for example. That's what it looks like then, 3 different things. A customer can pick and choose whichever one they so choose. So like -- 2 of them, the 2 on the left, Tableau, PowerBI running Celebrus in their own environment. They have their own reporting solution. They want to do more advanced reporting, Tableau Workbooks for data savvy. For the other customers, they can use Celebrus Digital Analytics, and we will reform them right out of the box. And the absolute benefit of all of this is that it takes no work from the customer. It's not some big integration project. They just ask us to stand up Celebrus for them. They just start their own and they log in and it starts working. So there's no tagging, no effort. It's really out of the box in day 1. There's a bunch of sort of screenshots. Well, I say this is what the workbooks looks like actually, if you're running PowerBI or Tableau, lots of nice marketing-friendly data visualizations around cohorts, people who arrive on your site today and buy something, when do they come back and buy something in the future to the next people never come back. Lots of different sort of analytics that market is want to know how people arrive on the site, they're coming from social media, are they coming through affiliates or just brand aware and set you up. Lots of different views of that data. And all of this is just out of the box. That's the real beauty of it. It takes no efforts. It's up and running. This is some of the newer stuff around cohort analysis, I was just talking about. I want to share the screenshots of the CDA because actually, I can just show you the video so you can see what the product looks like. So see if can get this working. Right. This is CDA. So what you see here is kind of the only page of the application essentially, our customer logs into this. It's running Celebrus Cloud. Data is streaming through the Celebrus instance. They don't have to do anything to make that work. We just do it all. And the first page thereby, this dashboard just gives them an overview of what's happening on their websites and on their mobile applications, very familiar for marketers, nothing needed. So from a training point of view, it's all very straightforward, is made to look like Google Analytics to give them a very easy transition. So when those health care companies come out of Google Analytics, they can just come in to CDA, and it's all very familiar for them. No great learning curve. So all sorts of things you might expect a marketer would be interested in, things like visitor maps and so on. This particular demo takes us off to Texas Health, 1 of our customers. We're going to have a look at what it looks like on Texas Health so I arrive on their website. We just switched CDA across their domain, to have a look at their visitors. And once it refreshes, you'll see just 1 visitor. So it's not -- this is just a test system. It's not a proper production traffic. You can start to see some things kicking up here. We've got some visits and so on. And then all these things down the left-hand cycle that allow us to -- allow the marketer go and have a look around and see what's happening on their website. We got a real-time view of visitors in this visit here. It's called a visit log. It provides a kind of real-time view of what's going on the website. What I'm doing here is actually, I'm going to go and have a look at cardiovascular part of their websites. And we're going to see how that interest starts to reflect in CDA. Now CDA is 2 things. It's both real-time and aggregated data, who visited last year, did more people visit last month than this month. That's what digital analytics all about, understanding your audience. And here, we see a real time and individual person. You can see some stuff here about how they're arrived in the site, things that they're interested in and what they do on the website here is just really engaged with this bit of content. Perhaps I really want to know more about cardiovascular health. So I'm having to look through the page here. And Celebrus, of course, is monitoring or tracking all of this information. It's looking at what I'm looking at on the website. Now machine learning is allowing servers to say right, yes, so -- and showing an interest in not only in the patient services but also in cardiovascular products. And that's a really key point. That machine learning is a real value add that the product can do. We can understand what people are engaging with, and that becomes information that flows into CDA. Now at this way, having found an interesting cardiovascular health, I'm going on to see -- well, how am I going to pay for this. So I'm heading up to the health insurance marketplace. And it's another part of the website. Of course, from a marketing point of view, people -- markets want to understand parts of the subject. So here I am on the site, looking at the health instruction marketplace. And we will hit that over to CDA. And when I refresh this page, you'll see that the list of signals. These machine learning signals is not just I'm interested in patient services and cardiovascular health but also are now interested in health insurance. So we're building that picture of every visitor, what are they engaging with. And once that data is in CDA, it can be sliced and diced in just an extraordinary different ways, any people from East coast to U.S. are interested in cardiovascular products, who are using iPhones. That's the kind of capability that you can just take that data and reform it in a 100 different ways that anyone on the monitor what problem the market is trying to solve. Over on the left-hand side here, lots of different capabilities that we can look both the visitors and that real-time visitor log where they're coming from in the world. We can start to look at what the site is doing. And 1 of my favorite bits of the application is right here, where you can do transitions. So this particular page at 55 page views. And you can see that where people come into. It's probably hard to read from the back there. So I'll just talk you through, you can see how people arrive on that page inbound and where they exit. You can see all the way through the websites or mobile application and you can really understand how visitors are engaging in the websites. And if it goes on and on, there's absolutely wealth of capabilities down there, what people are searching for, people are downloading, also engagement, which is 1 of the areas that we really specialize in. So 1 of the disadvantages or 1 of the things that third party cookies really start up on is returning visitors, people interact with websites next day or week to week. Third party cookies really impact the efficiency or efficacy advantage. We don't suffer any of that. We really understand. If I visit the website and come back 3 weeks later, we understand it's still me. And that really shows through in some of that returning visitors and the engagement with the website. The next few -- or next minutes or so just walk through a few different parts of the website, acquisition, of course, or market spend a lot of money on acquiring customers, understanding how people are actually spending their money from an e-commerce point of view. It covers all the things which you see in Google Analytics and a lot more where the value add of what we do sign through. So this is looking at some goals, some conversion events in the way of putting that. And this information down here allows them up to drill down into as much detail as they need to and then just to draw this to a close media. Media is a really interesting one. So if you're a travel company, of course, you might really be interested in media, presenting videos of where someone might want to go on holiday, from a retail perspective, also really interesting, but actually health care companies use media a lot. And the reason they do that is to provide videos or presurgery videos for people to understand what they're about to go through. So that media section of CDA -- actually is going to see a lot of use from all different industries for very different regions of course, but still it's really applicable part of the application for different regions. Okay. That's CDA. So in interest of time, I'm going to quickly move on. Before I change that completely, any questions on CDA, anything not clear?
Guerino Bruno
executiveI think while you're switching the topic, Ant, the 1 thing I will say is this was an idea that we had 8 months ago. And it was in clients' hands 4 or 5 months later, something like that. So the speed of this is impressive. But it's also -- had touched on it, but I think it's worth really calling out. [indiscernible] of money of the complexity of the tools that we now compete. In 1 day, we could have a sign up and running on reports that we historically have taken them 6 to 9 months to create, and we do it on the flip of the switch. And what's been really difficult for marketers brands that run into this third-party cookie challenge because we've had a few brands that are taking this on, who came to us because they were in the dark. They had to turn off alter tech. They didn't know who was using their websites. They didn't know where the marketing investments and where that money is going. And they were candidly freaking out about it because it's not small amounts of money. When you look at advertising budgets and the brands that we're working with in most cases, it's the largest budget in their business, even larger than R&D. So to not have visibility into how those investments are performing is it's a massive business for us. So we think this is a great opportunity for us to solve that, and it was expected because as we started the Celebrus platform as a direct business, right? Still obviously selling through partners. But going direct, we knew we would get more questions. We knew people who want to test the limits of Celebrus and perhaps have Celebrus do other things that maybe we weren't allowed to talk about because we were sitting behind the partner who wanted to sell their stuff instead. And so these types of opportunities never would have happened, if we didn't start going direct and start having those conversations with brands.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeYes. Does it take a long time to set the stuff to the customer to train them to use it and train?
Ant Phillips
executiveYes, good question. So just for benefits on the people on the webinar, the question is, does it take a long time to get set up from a customer perspective and also to train to use it, yes. The answer is no to both questions. So the only thing the customer has to do is to put Celebrus onto their website or mobile application, which is a very straightforward thing to do. Data then start slowing because we don't need any integration, we just capture everything that their visits or uses of mobile application to do it. That flows into Celebrus and Celebrus Cloud. And then we package it up and presented in dashboard. And it's intended to be really simple to use. So it's entirely designed on the perspective of a marketer. So all the things, which I was showing you there, there's a lot of things there. Market is just understand that stuff. That's the world they live and using downloads and site search and these things. That's just what they do and breathe every day. So the idea is that this is entirely self-served. We don't have to run a training program, Celebrus is kind of irrelevant. The actual platform, it's kind of irrelevant if you want to be really good about it because what matters is what I showed you in the demo, which is their in website, their mobile applications and in CDA where they see what's happening. the fact that there's a whole bunch of clever tech in the middle which is doing stuff is neither here and all that. Their marketers get what they need and their website and mobile application is providing that kind of insight using Celebrus. So that helped?
Unknown Attendee
attendeeYes, it does help. I know you, yes, at the point of being able to turn on more marketing perspective, see increase in your clients demand for Celebrus?
Ant Phillips
executiveYes. And it's a really interesting areas because obviously, this is pretty new 4, 5 months. We're not yet sure how many customers will only want CDA, how many customers will want the full Celebrus Data Model and CDA or how many customers will just want the Celebrus Data without the marketing application on top. And actually, the way we built this is that we can start anywhere in that spectrum. And then the customer can add on to it. So they might be an existing Celebrus customer and then they add on CDA. We might tip them in over in through the door with CDA and then they realize the value of the data, and they start to get more capabilities added on license after that. So it gives us such a range of different ways to navigate a particular customer, wherever they want to start doing start small and relatively less expensive from a CDA and then we grow them out over time. If it's an existing customer, we can add on CDA. So really, really interesting possibility.
Guerino Bruno
executiveAnd it's the benefit of Celebrus because we have full control over this. And this is a reminder, too, because we've said that a lot. It's a single-tenant private cloud incidents for each client. There's no shared architecture. So it's dedicated to them, they own it, they control it, even though we manage it. So it passes all the security, you can buy its test in a way that other vendors. And it's turned out to be really interesting in the sales side. Going back to your question about the marketing spend. There's a couple of CDA marketing campaigns that just went live, I think, 1.5 months ago under some of the most interactive content we've ever had in market campaigning. So there's interest for sure, right, that we're looking to harness. It's really difficult to market these days. There is compliance challenges. So that was a nice win for the marketers to get them excited and gets the team sort of driving that forward. But from a sales perspective, it's been a quite fun is we'll have someone come in wanting to talk about this. And then will tell us about the rest of your platform. No, we're not going to do that. We're going to tell you this because this is what you need right now, worry about the rest later. Like we'll show you the rest later because the reality is somebody that buys CDA today, like 5% of the platform. So from a customer success perspective, it's just a natural revenue growth for us. And when we've got a customer success team incentivized on 20% year-on-year growth by selling deals like this, we're giving them the opportunity to achieve that, right? Because they can literally go in and just sell them Bot Detection and that or sell them something from Celebrus. It doesn't matter on the broad use case. The way that the team has architected this in such a short period of time, this fully enabled sales to just pick from a menu and say this is what we're selling this customer, and we have it all automated behind the scenes to get it up and running to the point where we're going through this with a new customer where they were deciding between [indiscernible] then they sell the time for us. And we determine the system on in 4 days from contract signature, fully light screen, ready to rock. Their internal IT team said it would be 8 months. So some of these things are no-brainers, right? It was a natural move for us to move to the cloud like this because nobody knows our tack better than us. And people are going to look at tack [indiscernible] was on the call yesterday, we were in final stages with another client where they were claiming it was going to take 30 days to deploy Celebrus on their website, which is an absolute job, right? But unfortunately, that's the only thing they have to do and we're doing the rest, right? So it does really help us move much more quickly to the value story. And it means that we can get potentially 2 or 3 bites of the apple for new customers in the same year that they've signed. If we're seeing that value more quickly, they're trusting us as a vendor more quickly and then we can go in and start talking to them about other features and functionality that we have across the platform.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeSorry, maybe as a question to be possibly what level of ARR [indiscernible]?
Guerino Bruno
executiveYes, from an ARR perspective, our starting point now as a like a pain point land and expand pain point deal, whether it's CDA or something else, start in around the 200,000 to 300,000 U.S. range on average starting. We've got customers that have been with us for 6, 7, 8 years, where that number has grown to 7 digits a year. So for us, we've proven that we can grow the customers. We know we can deliver value. So it's really just getting these things where we can bring more new logos to make it more exciting as a software business and do it quickly.
Ant Phillips
executiveI'm going to rewind because I want to just come back to this before I talk so that I can talk about bot detection, non-human traffic, very different world, much more data science, data focused, machine learning focus. bot detection is something that lives in the core platform. And the reason they live in there is because it's applicable to all of those things you may think, well, how does bot detection make any difference to the marketing portal, how the bot detection make any difference to the fraud world. And I'll talk about that. And the reason it's so interesting is because one of the points or proof points efficacy as analysts like to call it, around bot detection for retailers in the market space is that typically somewhere in the order of 20% to 30% of traffic coming to retail websites are bots. And then you think about, well, the impact that has on the way that market measure what's happening on their website, it's really impactful. So 30% of what those visits to their websites are not actually human traffic. They might be paying for it still. It's a great deal of pay per click sort of there, as fraud, which is a different thing, we'll talk about in a moment. But nonetheless, the marketers bots are just as much of a problem as the fraud bot. And in the fraud bot, bots are forced to break into websites. This is as a whole subindustry in the dark web buying stolen credentials or breach credentials and then using bots to try and get into people's bank accounts. So for a criminal, I like to spy 1 million breached accounts on dark web. And when I use those, use the names and passwords to try and get into their bank accounts and different websites, how that kind of cycle us for it happens. And the way they operationalize it at scale because you couldn't really have people going through cycling through 1 million different breached credentials to use bots and that's a bit of software basically cycles through the breached credentials just trying to one after another until they find someone who's used the same password on their bank account as they use on their retail website or whichever website have the data breach. So if you want to think of that as a warning not to use the same password on your banking websites and you do elsewhere, please do take it that way. That is really a bad thing to do because as soon as data breach happens, then your bank account is at risk. So let's scan forward and just 1 slide and then video. So why bots become an interesting thing? So it's a good question to us. Certainly, the reason why we got into CDA is because of those industry changes. So why is bots is interesting thing now. And actually, it's for a very different set of reasons, and most of it is technology-driven rather than market driven like the CDA changes around privacy. It's actually really simple to create bots. If you go to ChatGPT and ask it, create some software, which can be a bot, it will [indiscernible] on the right-hand side. It will write you some of the most fantastic codes, which just act as the bot, which ties up the browser, visit a website, but to use the name and password as was the money out and just do that all day, every day hundreds of thousands of times a day, you scale out to a server or you've got millions happening every day. I can just scale these things up so quickly but the barrier to entry -- of course it's getting so low now because this technology is out there. You can buy software packages, which are like for GPT. If you search out for GPT, it's a fraud package based around generative AI. It's all becoming so easy, which means that the websites and customers are the target. So therefore, the defense is need to be up accordingly to backlog this nonhuman traffic. There are actually some other interesting things happening around the world around bots. What used to be very much based around service. I'll stand up to serve a fortune just faster way trying to break into different websites. Some of these malware that you may have seen in the industry like genesis marketplace. They are running on people's computers with malware. So it's the computer -- the end user computer [indiscernible], which are actually trying to break into the website, not as a central server so much. That's still there that is distributed bots running on end-user devices. It makes them much harder to spot because it's not just 1 or 2 of these servers. it's anywhere. They want end user devices, which are where the bots are running. So that means where they used to live in data centers, now these bots are everywhere. They're on our end-user devices. They look just like real users. They log into the website. They have cookies. It looks just like you and I do when we use in our banking website. They behave just like regular users do. They don't just go stick to the login page and try logging with the stolen credentials. They kind of browse around showing interest in some special offer and then they try and break in. So they hide in sites by looking just like regular users. And of course, what really is driving on this is that this isn't small money bot. These systems are scaling up to millions of dollars every year. So it's become organized crime. It's not just a little bit of money here and there. We are talking very big money that's driven the whole business around bot detection. And it's just as relevant for marketers, as I said, as to the fraud credentials. So with that backdrop, I'm just going to show you how it works. So this video starts -- just forward a little bit. You probably know our background in [indiscernible] use cases. They are all relevant. They haven't actually changed over the last couple of years. What has changed very much in what we're doing for is how we talk about the product we really refined, especially this year, how we talked to people about what we do moving forward. It's very different in marketing and marketing, it's all about revenue, acquisition, can we drive more traffic to our website. Before, it's all about cost. It's about managing the operational cost to fraud, can't get rid of it all to just managing it to a certain level. And that's something which tops very much plays into because once people find a way into your site using bots, they scale up very quickly. So they need the right tools and the right data, of course, where we come into this to be able to kind of block it and [indiscernible] just as relevant as they always have been. So what I'm doing here, just to give you a bit of an idea of what behavioral biometrics, which is one of our core technologies looks like in our forward world, is going to first direct, and we are logging in. So this is a regular [indiscernible] website. Sitting behind this is Celebrus and our Bot Detection. Now I just need to pause here because there's a bunch to explain here. So this application is a case management tool. This is the sort of software that's used to world over by the [indiscernible] securities as a place to just work cases, suspicious activity, hacked accounts, other things which needs investigating, they use these kind of workforce management tools, case management tool all the time. This is one -- which is just actually an open-source product called the [indiscernible]. We've integrated with Celebrus. And what happened here is when we were tracking that visit to First Direct, we were able to use behavioral biometrics to verify that visitor is who they say they are. And that's what's happening here. This identity verified is just saying, we know who this person is and they are behaving exactly like they normally do. We wouldn't normally create a case to say everything good, a case is normally something bad, but for the purpose of demonstration what the product does, it just helps to kind of walk that through. And all these little blue things here, these are all risk indicators in the [indiscernible] for investigators. They talk about risk indicators. What are the risky things about this visitor? Are they coming from a different part of the world? Have they bought a new device that's a bit suspicious? All of those things are patched under this term risk indicators. So I think is good about that particular site was looking into First Direct. What happens now in the video is that we changed [indiscernible] and we visit First Direct again, but this time, we changed a few risk indicators so that it is a suspicious visit. So back on the website. New visitor is kind of tricky to identify because it's exactly the same computer, which is actually doing the [indiscernible] behavior has a bit of a difficulty factor to it. But nonetheless, we're kind of logging in. We've set behind the scenes, a few things about this visitor that looks suspicious to Celebrus. So we go ahead and try and log in. Meanwhile, back over Celebrus, we have detected that this is a suspicious activity and the account has potentially been hacked. And that's all done through behavioral biometrics, that's the technology underpins as well as providing a bunch of information about the countless impact, various other interesting things. We provide [indiscernible] a whole lot of other things as well. So now let's having figured out how to break into an account. Let's scale it up. And this bit of software that you see on the right here is conceding and it's a very typical kind of software that's forced to use to operationalize [indiscernible]. It is a piece of software that simply acts as a real person. And that's sequence of things, which is probably far too small to read there. Our set of actions is going to do. So what [indiscernible] does, it piles up a browser and then it starts doing a repeated set of actions say, let's go to the homepage of [indiscernible] and then we'll kind of pretend to be a normal user for a while, and then we'll go to the login page. We'll take some of those stolen credentials and put them in username and password. If we break in then we'll try and add a pay and transfer the money to new account. And I'll just keep doing that minute after minute, hour after hour, all day long. So what you're going to see when I click go is exactly that. That's [indiscernible], kicks up a browser. Now this is not the First Direct website [indiscernible], of course, [indiscernible] First Direct just for the purposes of the demo, we were going to mean things do. So this is our own website. So that's why it looks a little bit different. But basically, it's doing exactly, as I said, it's doing a series of things, which are just hiding in plain sight and showing a bit of interest in car insurance, messing around the mortgage [indiscernible]. Sooner or later, it gets to a login page. And now on the left here, this is typically a real-time log of what Celebrus is seeing that visitor do. That data has been catched in realtime. It's been evaluated in realtime using behavioral biometrics. So in a month all these detailed events are things that the visitors click on and where they navigate to all these little biometric risk indicators saying that Celebrus is evaluating this visitor and seeing if the machine learns as there's really something sketchy about this visitor that we need to raise the case, in that case management tool. what [indiscernible] is doing now is trying to pretend like a regular user, not progressing too fast. Computer bots tend to progress through certain parts of the site too quickly, which makes them very easy to spot. So it's kind of taken a sort of slightly [indiscernible] attitude working its way through the website. popping around a bit like users generally do, and actually, it hit jackpot. So in this particular example, it's guessed, the user name and password and it's got into account. And now what it's doing is going to have a pay and try and transfer some money. So at this point, of course, it is really having a good time. They found an account that they can compromise and they can start to figure out how to get money out of that account. The actual break in though was the hard bit of those 1 million different credentials, probably only 0.1% of them are actually valid for getting into any given bank that they found them just through that automated process. Meanwhile, back over in the hype is our management tool it's correctly spotted that an account has been [indiscernible]. And rather like I was saying with CEA, we often don't talk about Celebrus or show Celebrus much. We talked about is the website, First Direct and case management tool because those are the things that the customer really care about. The fact there's a bunch of [indiscernible] up in the middle that we're figuring all our [indiscernible] or there, what actually matters is what tool investigators are going to see and that's the case management tool. They're going to see this an account as been comprised. And in many of the banks that we deal with are quite small teams. You take the kind of 100 or 150 people dealing with fraud. That's really not the case. Often it's just 2 or 3 people. So [indiscernible] of like 50 bots positive today, they're just never going to be able to spot the legals on that. So it has to be accurate. And it has to be really [indiscernible] of which accounts have been compromised, those are small teams of people and actually kind of follow up in the right places. And that's why you absolutely need the best data. So that's it. CDI, Bot Detection. Any questions? Anything else [indiscernible].
Unknown Attendee
attendeeJust to broad question around when you announced when used to be the FTP, I think you talked about finding partners in fraud management software. It looks like you've booked into case management. I just wondering kind of like that ecosystem because of the signals that you have [indiscernible] the sort of much useless, but they usually without sort of decisioning or actually get types of threat [indiscernible]. So I'm just wondering kind of how is that sort of ecosystem build out and perhaps that new customer, you've won, like [indiscernible]? Just curious.
Guerino Bruno
executiveYes, those virtually just the question was more around like the vendor partner network with fraud and what that's shaping up like in organizations. It's going to sound a bit cruel, I suppose, that we don't care so much because what we found is it as we've evolved and I kind of alluded to, we've really evolved our pitch, even more stuff going into this year as we circle who presented a couple of years ago, our Capital Markets Day has kind of really engaged with customers. It varies so much from customer to customer, what they're using internally that it more matters about what we do and showing them things like this, bringing it to life in a more end-to-end scenario. They're able to paint the picture for. So we do have some other partners. We have folks that we continue to work with, like [indiscernible]. We have some others in the background that we're building, and we're exploring selling together with, and that will always continue to turn on. But we're not waiting on that. For us, the platform and the data that we can provide is working. Even in the Bot Detection, which is live, I think, is 4 clients right now, which for us is a lot in a short period of time since launch, right? So those of you that have followed us for a long time. They're seeing some pretty alarming results, upwards of 30% of their traffic being non-human that, for marketers, where they're potentially paying Google advertising, paying their agencies millions of dollars for some of their traffic. That's a significant return on investment just on turning our platform on because it gives them all the data they need to prove that the traffic is invalid and get various refunds or rebates or whatever the case may be for them. So for us, it's really interesting. We were with a head of fraud recently in one of our banks. And when he came into the room, he did not ask who we integrate with or anything like that. He goes, I have 2 questions for you that I care about. One, can you do this in real time in the moment, which that just exhibited. So we showed them that. He's like, great. Then, can I actually get the data? Because a lot of the platforms out there is black box. And when the environment is moving so quickly, when things are changing so quickly, a black box isn't helpful if what's inside that box is not looking in the right places, right? Because it may not pick up that, that was just the same exact product like browse on the same exact machine suddenly taken over by process. There are so many nuances to those things, the top quick that moves in the minute something gets published, [indiscernible] move on to doing something else. So you're in a constant game of catch-up, if you try to focus on that. So it's a bit more long winded, but I don't want to cover a few of those points because we are expanding partnerships. We're exploring that. We have consulting partners as well that we're working with in the fraud space, and we'll continue to do that. But for us, partnerships now -- it's about [indiscernible]. It's about having something that we can sell and bring to market together. It's not just a handshake to throw over those next to each other, right? So when we announce formal partnerships, it will be because there's formal business value use cases that we're selling in the market. The rest will just show up as low as on our website or in some of the collateral or in some of the videos or some of the demonstrations that we published that if that helps to make sense.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeBut you're agnostic to which sort of case of fraud management...
Guerino Bruno
executiveAbsolutely, absolutely. What you're seeing here with [indiscernible] It kind of goes back to the selling. It's a really good example of what [indiscernible] team have done to support sales because, again, as we're selling direct, customers want to see end-to-end more. They don't just want to see the data because sometimes, unless you're really data savvy and you live and breathe it all day, like you might wonder how you're going to use, where it might feel overwhelm. So we've started to build these very specific demos that can be repeated by the sales team and the sales team can play this video, can explain it today to you, right? And the point being is it shows end-to-end value. It shows the data coming to life that helps people understand what that great tech that Celebrus adds to us. But to [indiscernible] point, we don't sell the tech. We're now selling the value in the pain point, right? And we're showing how it can be done. I'm not really -- we're not going in and tooting our own horn to talk about how great all the tech is that does it, right? Because then all we're doing is pontificating when we need to be selling, right? So it's a fundamental difference. So I love this example because it shows you some of the things that [indiscernible] team have innovated thinking outside the box on how we sell a value story of what we do in products because the minute we show that to anybody in the fraud department, they get -- we don't need to worry about their lingo because they will talk. The minute they see this, they just start talking. Our sales tax, we don't have them. We have like 3 slides that we keep just in case. We go straight into the product, showing things like this just to get them up and running. Because candidly, when we talk to people, if I was to sitting down for a 40-minute sales call, and I start to tell you all the things we do, you're going to think I am lying. Because it's -- you're going to think it's black magic or it's smoking [indiscernible]. You're not going to believe that it can do that. But the fact that we can demo it on the customer's website, show them what it will look like if they deploy this tomorrow using all fancy things that [indiscernible] team have built over the years. It's a really powerful statement. So we don't have sales tax anymore. We don't use it. We just go straight into conversations. We listen, we show them the tech. We see what [indiscernible]
Unknown Attendee
attendeeNext using first direct to the example, the next security stage would presume the 2-factor authentication. Does that mean they then focus less on this because that removes that [indiscernible]
Ashoni Mehta
executiveSo 2-factor authentication introduced subscription into the customer journey. And that applies just as much to retail websites is a good example. So in Europe, we have [indiscernible], which is where you see the kind of industry pop-up saying kind of approved this on your phone. As an example, [indiscernible] are not used in the U.S. at all because it introduces too much friction in the customer journey and customers drop out. Revenue is more important than fraud [indiscernible] is that trade-off. And the consequence of that is that actually, there's a middle ground service enables, which is I'm sure don't use [indiscernible]. We don't use 2FA whatever the business policy is. But at least now, which accounts having almost or even do something more selective. So where there is clearly an account in jeopardy, they use 3DS for that point in time. So rather than pushing everyone through that restriction, just take those very high risk situations and put them through it. It provides a much more tailored approach to that kind of risk. And that means you can actually adjust that threshold depending on the business's appetite for risk at any given point in time if they're trying to drive down [indiscernible], that will cost revenue. It will push the way for example, their phones at hand and they're checking out whatever that kind of situation is, but they can still push down forward but taking that kind of consequence of lowering revenues, the push from the business is to get more revenue and to kind of aside for any forward consequences, then that threshold can go up and they can make that decision. So it creates a really agile business that have managed for in a very dynamic way. It also highlights [indiscernible] into the platform that we didn't really start to promote a ton because we were buying partners solely until we launch [indiscernible] as an experienced changing capability in the platform. So sellers can it be -- so if we see something like this happening. I'll give you an example. If a customer that -- if that was happening, we may determine through Celebrus that perhaps you're [indiscernible]. It is removed the [indiscernible], right? It seems simple, right? But doing that and pushing a pop-up that gives phone number to call, is enough to stop the processor and move them on to the next one, right? So there's several things you can do that Celebrus does, but you'll see us talking a lot more about, but it's that intervention capability in [indiscernible] quite interesting as we can go end to end. We can report it. We can provide the data to verify why it was happening. And as the customer gets comfortable with the results and the accuracy [indiscernible] as they deploy, they can then start to do things with it right within Celebrus so that it doesn't even have to get to the case management team right away. You can just block the transfer right out of the gate. And actually, there was a LinkedIn[indiscernible] if you follow us on LinkedIn if you have. We shared the hack out of it because it was someone's mother that ran into a situation where her account got intervened with the buying, if I remember it is buying a home and it locked the money transfer that had been hijacked and saved the hard earned money that she would not have seen ever again, right? Because there's -- once it's going on a wire transfer, it's gone. So with the use of Celebrus data and some of our vendor partners, back to your question, [indiscernible], it enabled the ability to stop that transfer.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeYes, give us except some of the signals that were being put -- picked up. If I go back a couple of years, I think you were talking about things like the location, the device, but I'm just interested how that's moved on in the last couple of years?
Ashoni Mehta
executiveSo the question is both risk indicators and the data behind it, how has that changed over the last few -- and the answer is we carry on growing that out. So what we originally started with it's a pretty rich set of indicators, the sorts of things which you might think of are things like with someone's coming from in the world, the geo location, things like the kind of device they're using. And of course, these things do evolve by the time we buy phones to [indiscernible] and so on. So the risk of the do change. And actually, the data we collect has changed as well. So we have support for kind of pencils like on tablets and really granular biometric data. But these things are all indicative of how someone uses a device. So for example, piece of data. One data appointment and incredibly predictive stats is, is the person on a call when they're doing a money transfer because in almost all scams that being coached through subsequent of action, which they wouldn't really want to be doing. So they have a easy person saying, yes, yes, I'm from the bank, just kind of go here, and you're going to get a code sent to your phone in a moment coming back to 2-FA. Just to take that code and put it into the website, they've been touched through it. So actually, they're on a call. That's a really predictive data point whether a scam is in flight at a moment in time. So we had a [indiscernible] information the kind of network that mobile phone connects to and it's pretty stable by home network, as I'm sure you do, too. That network has a name, and that's a pretty stable piece of information, courses quite high where they're coming on by changing these [indiscernible]. So all of these lots of data points gradually evolve over time to learn more about how [indiscernible] work and how we can collect the right data kind of severe deflect what they're trying to do. So a lot of [indiscernible] the short answer on a quite low level granular data we helps us understand the device and how it's being used and what the business is doing or what the user is doing it. The [indiscernible] that happens in my household, which my [indiscernible] saying is point products is that [indiscernible] had Celebrus, fans would have gotten more Taylor Swift tickets. So that's the reality of it because we would have identified that to more people, and we would have stopped that from that. The post that, I can't get to one of the particular ticket [indiscernible]. Well, you're probably using bad to [indiscernible] right. All right. So will we try to tee up the half work in J Lo. I'll just give you a bit of a backdrop. This is the last part of our agenda, and then we'll just open the floor for questions and obviously hand out from imbuing room afterwards as well. So this is John [indiscernible] and Mark [indiscernible]. They'll introduce themselves here in a moment on the black screen. For those of you in the room, those of you on the device at home, you'll see the video just fine. And with [indiscernible] we've launched and they came to us actually. And I've got a long history with [indiscernible]. Years and years and years ago. I trained [indiscernible] team18 years ago. They've gone a long way. We've got thousands of customers around the globe. They were acquired by [indiscernible], one of the largest total agencies in the world. And they're out on the forefront of trying to help clients better manage and measure and optimize their ad spend and their marketing investments in a world where all of these cookies are falling apart and going away. So they were quite intrigued by the Celebrus software, and they were with us [indiscernible] join built a program they see a lot of marketing about coming. So this is the first time we're talking about it publicly. But it's called [ CXM ] signals. I don't need things they do. But this signals, we will walk through to give you a bit of an interim background on him. He's going to talk a bit about their 5 challenges and sort of what led them to celebrate going to talk a little bit about what intrigued them about Celebrus, still talk a bit about the offering and then he'll wrap up and talk a little bit about [indiscernible] as well that we're going after and which ones are drawn. But we're excited about this because we think this is kind of the bedrock of what we want to do with solution integration partners, right? We want to find something that they're quite good at, where they're the strategic adviser for brands, bring our software in as part of that story and let them go sell it, with us there at the table to help explain the tech demonstrated like you've seen today, but ultimately, let them build an entire service program around it. So for us, it's great exposure. It's obviously a great opportunity for us to sell software, which at this point, I hope you understand it's all we're trying to do. I think I said it like 30 times today. And ultimately, it gives them the ability to be profitable while allowing us to expand without having to scale up a massive services business because they can be the ones putting the wrapper around everything get helping clients get value from Celebrus and all we have to do is just keep the lights -- so that kind of the benchmark of where we're going. We mentioned some other ones in the update on Monday to online like CX Forward. And they're a great example of a regional partner that specializes in a very specific area, and they do a decision. So like the Pagus, the Adobes and the Salesforces of the world, helping with the across-channel decisioning to pick what you see and where you see it based on the devices that you're using and what they know about, right? And so for them, they're packaging up Celebrus as the gap, the part that's missing, which is the database. So you'll see a lot of coming from as we form these. We'll have regional versions.
Guerino Bruno
executiveWe've had some regional partners [indiscernible] Europe and APAC for many years that we're getting up and running on some of the way is the greatest in revamping some of their offerings. And then you'll see some of the large mobile players like Merkle. and turning the mix as well with very specific offers. And again, kind of like having another sales team without having to invest in other sales. So it's -- so when we're really excited. I love the way Merkle things of the world. And so I think I probably said enough and we'll just let Lee tell you.
Lee Fitzhugh
attendeeHello, everyone. My name is Lee Fitzhugh. I'm from Merkle. I've been with Merkle now for 12 years, I've worked in the industry for [indiscernible]. My role at Merkle is to head a capability, which we call Datamatic, it's quite nice. So what we do is we work with brands to help them collect, create, consolidate their customer data. We then expose that data to various different marketing technologies and then ultimately, then our clients, they use that make technology to then deliver compelling experiences with our customers. In terms of Merkle, we are part of the [indiscernible] Group. That's still one of the largest [indiscernible] agencies in the world. We're the largest agency in Japan, and we're the fifth largest advertising agency network in worldwide. From a Merkle perspective, there's a single sentence that describes what we do. It's a little bit of a tongue twister, but we connect, correct and curate intelligent experiences that empower individuals, build brands and transform businesses. So if you wanted a single sentence and describe what we do, that's it. What we do at an umbrella level is we have brands go through their data and digital transformations. And ultimately, that's around delivering a customer experience transformation. Now that's a really interesting topic because that's obviously brands evolving and changing to deliver what's best for their customers. And that's in an environment where today in 2023, the pace of change is great to deliver before. Business always have to change. But at the moment, the pace of that change is accelerating. If you think about some of the things that have been going on in the world recently, we had the COVID pandemic. We had the Ukraine-Russia war. And then recently, we've had the explosion around generative AI, which everybody is talking about. So these things that might go live that meant the organizationa and brand having to change or the time of that. And what we do is we work with those brands to try and adapt to that and ultimately make sure they stay the development with our customers. As I mentioned, one of the key things here is around customer experience, I think this is really critical. So some really interesting stats that really perhaps amplify what customer experience is so important. There was a recent study that suggests that 73% of consumers they agree that if they have a great customer experience, it helps their buying decisions. And actually, they'll be willing to pay more as much as 6% to 7% to 16% more as a premium price because of the fact they feel so connected and engaged with that brand. So I think that's huge. However, here's the other thing that I think is really interesting that, 32%, so almost 1/3 of consumers will walk away from a brand they love if they have one bad experience. So that's why this is so important that organizations go -- get this right. They go through the right data and digital transformations, and they're constantly evolving to deliver those great customer experiences. The last thing I would say on this, just to build on that point around speed of change and going to respond to change [indiscernible], I think the most significant challenge right now is understanding the difference between temporary and permanent chips and consumer behavior. And a really keen important way that brands can then make sure it mitigate against that is understanding, knowing the customer will understand change in behavior. Well, I think that then goes back to what is it we're trying to solve for our customers and brands. So what we're trying to do there. So this is going a little bit deeper on that theme I mentioned a moment ago around data transformation and the [indiscernible] service digital transformation. We speak to lots of brands and the situation where they perhaps have limited first-party data. The data is perhaps not connected well enough, it's not the quality. And ultimately, what that's driving is that customer knowledge. So we can see that a particular customer [indiscernible] Celebrus can help us to collect that data at scale and actually start to build up that customer knowledge and also build that first-party data asset either because there's a huge step needs to be built up from a ground up or to make sure that, that first-party data asset is constantly being refreshed maintained and scaled. I think the next area is around knowledge of customers from a recognition perspective. So I guess these are the two sort of key foundations of identity if you like. It's how much you know about your customers and then your ability to recognize customers, we should obviously then lead into addressability. So we see lots of challenges where there's a process where visitors will come to brands and their digital assets. At the beginning, they may be unknown. There's a path to then driving to a situation where they are known, but it's about optimizing that journey, is about make sure that we can get to that known state as quickly as possible and break down all the barriers along the way. And there's some key factors that I'll come onto shortly within Celebrus technology that certainly help that. The next thing that we're seeing is the fact that to actually create a great customer experience, there's a little bit of what's old is new here. So if you think back -- going back quite a long time now, there used to be a situation where consumers would go and buy perhaps at a much smaller shop. In those days, it would be a shop because websites and online was not -- an option wasn't available. And when you go to buy in that shop, you would have a real one-to-one relationship with that shopkeeper. That shopkeeper would know you by name, they perhaps notice your buying habits and mostly your buying traits. And that would actually feel like a really great personal experience with the human [indiscernible]. Fast forward to 2023, we would like to now mimic that type of customer experience, the debt at customer experience when you're speaking to a brand feeling like you've got that one-to-one experience, but we now need to do that at scale and obviously, in a digital environment. So that's where by using the data that we're collecting using technology like Celebrus, we can actually feed that into activation tools and decision tools that can look at all the different permutations of products, offers, content and just serve that up in a way that it feels really personal, really connected to you as an individual. So that's really key. And I guess the last asset really here is a measurement, which is super important. So as we drive brands forward to creating better customer experiences, driving outcomes, it's meaningful we can measure that accurately. And we've really well connect data and identity that we can collect through these type of tools and solutions. We can get to more direct attribution and more accurate measurement. So I think this is kind of really an extension really of how we can start to hit some of the gaps that we have in the market today. Some of the customers [indiscernible] using technology [indiscernible]. As I've mentioned, ultimately, what we're trying to do is drive outcomes for the brands that we're working with. So we want to drive outcomes like greater understanding of our brands customers. We want to drive outcomes around orchestrating timely relevant experiences. And we want to help our [indiscernible] drive greater engagement with their customers. So we've come up with this offering that we're calling [ CXM ] signals. So foundationally, customer experience management. So that term and that theme that I've mentioned a few times now. We've honed in on signals. It's not the only facet of this solution, but those signals are really key because it's those signals customers' behavior and how they interact brands that allow us to then trigger and create those [indiscernible] independent experiences. So really, what's the CXM signals is bringing together is the Celebrus technology and the Merkle Services. And really where we see those two things intersecting is the Merkle Services trying to then very quickly and rapidly deliver those priority use cases that ultimately drive the outcomes that I already mentioned. If we take that down a level already spoke about the fact that one of the key facets of CXM signals these focal brands collect first-party data identity. And that's all about informing and driving these personalized experiences. It's also about maximizing customer identity. So that's going to be a key facet of CXM signals, allowing brands to really recognize customers from loan to unloan as I already mentioned, a optimized [indiscernible] that process. and maximizing customer knowledge and customer memory. I think that's a term that you and I have used before, and I think that's really important. It's our brands. remember their customers in an intelligent way so that they can then talk to them and really make sure that they do that affinity with the brand. So that's very important. So ultimately, that's coming together to drive the experiences. The other thing that's important is most of the brands we're working with nowadays are not working with a blank sheet of paper. So they've already invested in some level of technology to support what they're doing in the space. The challenge there is that those being able to maximize the value from those and those reduced you need to be feeding them with the right level of quality curated data. So I think that's another way that CXM signals can help [indiscernible] really feeding system, whether it's paid to platforms or marketing technology or ad tech serving the right data to those in a really timely manner. The other thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet, but I think is super important. It's all about outcomes. [indiscernible]. It's delivering tangible business outcomes. It's delivering priority KPIs as fast as possible. And I think there's some assets of this solution. So again, what Celebrus can do out the box and then the power the Merkle services and our expertise to really help brands get to that speed to value fast. Some of the things that I think are super important in terms of the services technology, they are protecting 3 capabilities. So that really allows us to deploy the technology in a brand's digital environment across their websites and acts really quickly. There's out-of-the-box functionality that allows us today to get the closer that outcomes in those use cases is the true real-time capability to ensure the fact that the customer data is available in the moment -- in the moment, super important because if you're trying to create those compelling experiences the data needs to be available to create those experiences right here right now while I'm in great [indiscernible] brand. And then I've already touched on how important decision is at the moment. So the fact that you've got that marketing brands so that you can mimic that one-to-one interaction, even though in reality, it's something that you're doing at scale to many, many customers. We see that the Celebrus out-of-the-box functionality around decisioning and those decisions is a real kind of [indiscernible] to get into that particular objective. And then the other thing that I think is super important is the fact that within this solution we can work with brands or we can surface personalized content for both consented and non-consented customers. This is huge because obviously, for consented customers, much easier to do. But actually, there's some really neat technology within Celebrus tool that allows us to also in a very compliant way actually serve content that's relevant to the consumer, and it's noninvasive. doesn't breach any compliance that actually means that even those customers feel like they're getting a personalized experience which I think is super important. So I'll talk about verticals, but we've really started to think about how we [indiscernible] segment brands into genres, if you like. So I think the most important, genre, I think, where we can perhaps get the most traction and where we focus our priority is a genre that we call visit-based. So these are brands where their consumers will visit them to make a purchase. So I'm thinking retail, hospitality, travel, automotive. I think within that genre, retail is obviously an area that we're super adjusted in and we might focus. But I think that whole visit-based genre is interesting. This is a genre where these brands, consumers will potentially buy a mix of products. And I think this is a genre where these customers will purchase when they need something. So we need to speak upon those behaviors. I think this is a genre where customers may be anonymous or known, and it's really important, as I already mentioned, that we can take those consumers on [indiscernible] from anonymous to known in the most effective and optimal way. And I think there's a big drive here to continuously drive loyalty and provide opportunities for these customers [indiscernible] purchase cross-sell, upsell. So I think there's lots of scope for us within CXM signals to really drive some great outcomes, and we drive some business value here, not only for the brand, but obviously, by definition, if we're making the customer experience more compelling for the brand's consumers, there's a value exchange there, and they get in [indiscernible] experience. I think thereafter, I think we're really excited about where we can take the journey. So Next, I don't know how quickly we will really track that visit-based genre initially focusing on retail. Thereafter, I think we can start to think about what we call term-based customers. So this is where brands consumers are buying products on terms and this is your classic financial services, telco, media, where this renewals, again, it's all about making sure that we can drive lifetime value. And I know this is an area where some of rest have had some great success in the past. And from a Merkle, Celebrus, CXM signals perspective, we look to actually make sure we give [indiscernible].
Guerino Bruno
executiveSo we was going to wrap up, and we'll show the video how with everybody. For some reason, the TV did not let the video play but on the laptop, it's fine. And what he was going to wrap up with was just talking through some of the verticals that we've gone after initially? From a vertical perspective, they're very strong in region. So that was very intriguing for us as we've got some fantastic retail customers, some that have been public. But last year, we had very good -- do a presentation on our [indiscernible] as well about the great [indiscernible] data. And that's a vertical we want to grow very quickly. So that's the first step is retail then finance and then [indiscernible] in that order are the ones that we're going after with Merkle to start with in terms of customer concentration. The nice thing is that we actually came to find out, as we explored, we had several direct customers orders whether that was through Merkle or whether it's through [indiscernible] agency and who's doing the media line for several of our customers. So it's been -- it's been a fast moving target. It started a few months back, and we started getting in front of clients within a couple of weeks of meeting each other. So again, very critical value in terms of let's go sell this thing and start delivering value instead of just sitting in the room talking about it. And then from there, you'll see some formal launches and things like that after Christmas because we start to get kind of a slow time right now. So we'll launch it sometime in early January. So with that, we do have some questions. So Ash, maybe just start with you since [indiscernible] there. So the first 1 was that there's been a significant shift in product and most notably geographic mix revenue. Could you expand on U.S. revenue?
Ashoni Mehta
executive[indiscernible] Point that billion will be online in due course, will be here as well. So you back around [indiscernible] which we paid as well. So yes, on the revenue and the breakdown, so the question, it's really around the note in the results where we break down our revenue by type -- revenue stream to license or store maintenance. But we also break it down by geography as well. And the question here is about the increase in the U.S. And so the [ GBP 6 million ] to do, which is the deal [indiscernible] from March 31 of this financial year that was end customer through a partner the end customers in the U.S. And so when you look at the notes and you compare year-to-year in terms of revenue by geography, that's the reason for the increase in the U.S. revenue. So it's at [ GBP 6 million], the large part of it is the hardware.
Guerino Bruno
executiveExcellent, Thankyou. Ash, it's another one here for you. This one as well, considering the projected by cash balance at year-end, including the property sale, are you looking at any acquisition work? And if not, are you considering another special dividend?
Ashoni Mehta
executiveOkay. Well, let me take the last point first, please. We are not considering that special dividend. These are kind of rare occurrences, but we felt it was appropriate this time last year. However, what we will do is to continue to build that cash balance for a number of reasons. So just talk about how the cash is used for, as I said, probably around [ GBP 10 million ] or so effectively working capital. The balance at the period end consisted just some [ GBP 15 million ]. Obviously, we have high great trade debts and creditors related to the transaction that I referred to [indiscernible] say effectively normalized cash balance, if you like, in normal these days is around [ GBP 20 million ]. So that balance will increase as we make more profit and generate more cash. And that will be retained by the company. Obviously, we have a dividend [indiscernible]. However, as we've put in our statement and [indiscernible] go into a bit more detail about this, we are going to be a little bit more proactive on our M&A. So over the last couple of years, we have added a number of incoming opportunities. We have very precise criteria divided by [indiscernible], and that is what we measure against and nothing we've seen up to now fit those criteria as well as we like. But now we will be a little bit proactive and that's with that this tight criteria could take 12, 18, 24 months or so. And just to provide some color on sort of the profile. We have in mind what we would be looking for. And for us, it's an intellectual property acquisition to add more features to the platform. There are several discussions that we've had the 3 of us as well as our [indiscernible] sort of where to change the product you're starting to see a lot of more modular elements of the product that someone can take on and get quite a bit of value and then consider the rest of the platform. You can expect to see that as a consistent driver of where we're going. And there are some things -- it won't halt our innovation. We will continue to build. We'll continue to innovate. So we're not going to wait to find something. But as we're searching, we know what we're looking for. It will be a bolt-on technology capability to the platform we're buying. It made more sense than building candidly. And a lot of it you might suspect and what Ant share today will be on the data activation side of things. How you use the data, how you bring the data to life. So as despite will be technology led. So this is not going to be an acquisition for sort of financial engineering purposes. There will be technology that may have a customer and we anticipate them having integrated that into the service platform, and that's an opportunity for upsell to existing customers, and it's also an opportunity to give a broader offering to new customers as well. So in terms of feedback, if we were getting [indiscernible] thoughts around that, it's not going to be a [indiscernible] from day 1, but payback probably somewhere between 18 to 24 months' time. Are you sort of valuation multiples that you'd be looking at? And what [indiscernible]
Guerino Bruno
executiveWe have a profile that we've agreed to at Board level in one of our board meetings recently that we're utilizing as we go out and continue to search as [indiscernible] became across some, but that we explored even in this last financial year. But when we uncovered it, it was more people than it was actual tech, which doesn't fit the profile that we're looking for. So we have some ideas and what we think. But to be honest, a lot of that won't get fine-tuned until we find some potential [indiscernible] sort that obviously, you know that as a business, cash from the bank, generating cash, we think that there's plenty of ways we can explore an acquisition if it makes [indiscernible]
Unknown Analyst
analyst[indiscernible] Just a quick one around the employee incentivization and ARR growth. I think you mentioned that your direct sales people are sort of [indiscernible] rates maybe up 20% growth. And I think your outlook is sort of 15% to 20% -- high 20s [indiscernible] Just curious, I think in the last 6, 12 months, you've been tracking slightly below that sort of what would you say were the main reasons? And then secondly, what's missing maybe from a headcount perspective [indiscernible] to kind of get back to these sort of levels? And then as a follow-on, I think you -- and I'm not sure the share base comp part is relatively small. I think in the share dilution [indiscernible], which I guess some people use a good thing, but in terms of would it not [indiscernible] maybe to incentivize more people sort of maybe at a sort of lower down the level to take part in the share price.
Guerino Bruno
executiveSo I'll cover some of that high level you filling the as [indiscernible], I think it's going to be one [indiscernible], Ash, if you don't mind. So yes, our [indiscernible] are driven all the way up to, as we call it, a range from 15% to 27.5% ARR growth year-on-year. We've had some big jumps in ARR since turning it started at 10.6%. So we've got a good jump in that revenue and that is the focus of the business. I think more importantly, at the start of this year, we realigned everyone's incentives across the business. And this is a conversation that we've had at the [indiscernible] level and at the Board level, but it goes well beyond just [indiscernible]. So the management team, which is 10 people -- 10 new people and for that team have bonus structures based upon the same goals and metrics. The sales team are incentivized to sell licenses. That's where the commission comes from. So [indiscernible] sell services, et cetera. And their escalators are based on the number of new logos that are given here. So we kind of force them to think differently about how they're selling. Our partner teams are incentivized to generate [indiscernible] that turn into yields for the sales team. Our marketing team is incentivized on lease. So that could go on and on and on. But we've gone through the business to make sure that everything is focused on driving sales from whatever they can control and then tying that to the overall company's success as well and our inherently in our ability to hit the expected results and market expectations. Now one of the things that we did a couple of years ago as well from a board level [indiscernible] we reinstituted more clearer framework per share occupancies. So we actually have somebody before you've asked, which is incentivize the people and getting them access to share options throughout the business, and we now evaluate that at the end of each year for awards once the results published each year. So we have a much more formal plan. And we've also brought on new people who have been incentivized right out of the [indiscernible]. So we're utilizing that as best we can, obviously, within the parameters of what we are allowed to do from a dilution perspective. And that's why the share buyback program is so important to try to offset some of that. And as we're able to continue [indiscernible] Anything I missed?
Ashoni Mehta
executive[indiscernible] I'll just point it out because when you're talking about high sort of performance of the individuals and teams within the group. So everything that Bill described is also supported by the changes we've made over the last couple of years in terms of new systems, efficiencies [indiscernible] have talked about today, but we have a that part is a cultural change, we'll be putting in place as well in terms of making this a much more empowered account organization about the clarity of role definition and people's roles across the organization. Of course, right now, the focus is very much on the front end, and that's where we're investing in terms of sales and marketing and customer success. However, behind that, we also need to ensure that there's good scalability around delivery as well. So the reorganizations we've done, we've strategy have been across all departments of the group. And in terms of performance and delivery, yes, share options are part of bonuses across the organization are part of it. [indiscernible] sort of more sort of less tangible thing, which were really important as far as we sort of lockdown over the last couple of years. Flexibility of working is really important. That's something we put in place on hybrid working. And also the benefits package we've taken a fresh look at all that and we've [indiscernible] around that as well. So this is really all important aspects in terms of recruitment, retention and ultimately performance as well.
Guerino Bruno
executiveExcellent. A couple of questions from here. Are your clients ready or reluctant to commit 100% to cloud. There's always going to be some of options from certain brands. But to be honest, a lot of marketing technology has been cloud first for a really long time. So like the brands that we compete with like a [indiscernible] or Adobe on the marketing side, as an example, or a biotech on the behavior side, on the fraud side. They're all third-party cloud-based applications. So it's not new. And ultimately, even though we're offering cloud as the primary, it's a single-tenant private cloud, which is also something that these other vendors are not offering. So it's basically just like outsourcing the IT element so that you have functional software that stays up to date and then having the data flow into your internal environment so that you can use it. So we think it's a strong offering, but we also from what we've seen in the market with the new business we close and the existing customers who have made that jump is, there's a high level of comfort from their security and compliance teams when they look under the hood and they audit everything will do it because candidly, we also want everything we're doing with advisers. So we have all of the certifications. We have all of the penetration test results, et cetera, et cetera. And we have a security operations [indiscernible] center monitoring all of our operations on a data basis, which it's been a strong investment. We brought on a Chief Security Officer last year into the business and built out that team. So we'll continue to do what it takes to keep a level of comfort in our customers. And that is talked about on a monthly basis, if not weekly, internally at the management team to ensure that we're constantly ahead of the curve in that capability. Another question. Because visitor data is anonymous, can you aggregate data and statistics from your multiple customers and industry verticals and resell it? The simple answer to that is no. Because doing so would infringe upon our first-party nature and the story we tell. Now that being said, we have customers that have chosen to opt in to subscribing to our machine learning models. Why is that important? Because as they're using those, they get the benefits of updates to those models that may be as a result of other things that customers have done with those models. So it has nothing to do with any data sharing. None of the data over mixes, but the enhancements we're making along the way as a result of other customers using some of these new subscription-based offerings like CEA or light bot detection or our marketing signals model that's been on for a few years now, and it's a lot that almost every account these days. Those types of enhancements, we are utilizing kind of shared knowledge. And we're also exploring [indiscernible] clients app. They want to join kind of committees with each other to knowledge share. And that's obviously something we're happy to bridge and allow them to do whatever they buy because their data is their system, right? But we -- you won't see us doing any kind of data sharing or anything like that because that's just -- it just risks the [indiscernible] of what we put out in the market.
Unknown Executive
executiveAdd something in [indiscernible] so one direction, I think, which is being explored at the moment a split government regulation level particularly around some of the forward financial crime institution in the U.K., [indiscernible] Association is how they share and could be a future weapon against financial client on the basis that [indiscernible] when they go to one base and find that they're being effective, they go somewhere else. So that's not there today and obviously [indiscernible] are concerned from a privacy perspective. But I think over the next year, we see that good welcome to fruition. And it's exactly what that would look like remains to be seen clearly were forced to break into accounts, they can clear those funds out. They that money kind of the exfiltrate the system through new accounts. So if financial institution is able to share those new accounts that make it get insights, which they didn't have access to before. It's a very sensitive area of this. So I don't expect it to happen quickly and it's certainly not happening today. But I think in the financial plan world, data sharing is almost inevitable that will be kind of thing [indiscernible] practical way to kind of help scale.
Guerino Bruno
executiveSo we have time for one more question. We'll do it from the room because we just run through several here.
Unknown Analyst
analystWith your [indiscernible] company in the world is obstacle companies already have something they think can do this already and don't intend to or just getting in front of those companies?
Guerino Bruno
executiveGetting in front of those companies? It's a great question. Just in case those that are remote that the comment was around our mission of taking over the world and what's inhibiting our ability to do that. And it is -- I've said this before, but I think it's not an excuse. It's just a fact. We are starting. We had to start sprinting very quickly because there's things that we're missing. We didn't have marketing and brand that we didn't have PR, right? We didn't have kind of a brand identity sorted, we didn't have a direct sales team, right? So there's a lot of things that had to be done. We didn't have systems, the things that Ash was talking about earlier that help us actually manage the business that is moving that quickly, right, to ensure everything can be -- is visible, everything is measured and accountable. So a lot of those building blocks had to be put in place, and we had to play catch up on a lot of the branding. Simplifying the name helps masses with. People are starting to know Celebrus. We're finding people reaching out to us the marketing, PR. We've got the subject matter expert sort of panel, which includes Ant and others. Obviously, we're getting published every other retail in various journals and [indiscernible] and various articles, people like Circle, et cetera, and it all seems to be building a groundswell, is what we're finding is once we get introduced to a company one way or another, we have a very powerful conversation with them. And then from there, where it might go [indiscernible] as we do find someone who doesn't who thinks they have it all for, right? And there's always going to be that. A lot of the conversations where we've been successful are the ones where they failed trying to do it and have accepted that the current way of working isn't going to get data. And it's finding those organizations, but it's not easy. It's just go to market in today's marketplace with all the compliance challenges around the globe. It's a little looser in the U.S. So we've put a lot of emphasis in that, and it's working. It's building a robust pipeline. I'm really thrilled with where the sales team has gotten and how they message and how they sell. So we really just need to get them in more rooms. And that's ultimately the goal. And that's where we continue to make investments, and we have some hires planned in the second half that Ash alluded to, to set up for next year's growth so that we can continue to drive that forward. All right. Well, I think that brings us to time. Obviously, for those in the room are going to stick around, so feel free to stick around if you've got any other questions. Otherwise, for those of you remote, thank you for taking the time. Apologies for the video issue. Like I said, that will get published online anyway you see that in all of the story, the marketing [indiscernible] so I appreciate you watching it. And with that, I think I'd throw it back for final words coming back to you.
Operator
operatorThat's great. Thank you very much indeed to the team from Celebrus Technologies plc. I will shortly now redirect investors online to provide you with their feedback. If I could ask you please not to close the session. And if you could please provide the company your feedback, I'm sure that will be mostly [indiscernible]. The management from a Celebrus Technologies plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's Capital Markets Day and a good afternoon to you all.
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