Celebrus Technologies plc (CLBS.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to Celebrus Technologies plc post AGM update. That's a recorded meeting. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to set the following poll. I'd now like to hand you to Tom Skelton. Good afternoon, sir.

Thanks. Good afternoon. My name is Tom Skelton. I have the pleasure of serving as the Chair of Celebrus. I joined the Board as a non-executive late last year and assumed the Chair from Peter Simmonds in March of this year. My background includes serving as CEO on multiple technology -- technology-enabled services firm, both internationally and domestically here in the U.S. I've served on the Board of 2 FTSE listed companies. And in addition to that, served on the Board of one AIM-listed company named Blanco, where I chaired the Remuneration Committee. Very excited to be here today and excited to have with us the Board here of Celebrus. With me today are our CEO, Bill Bruno; and our CFO, Ash Mehta. In addition, we have our 3 non-execs, Peter Whiting, who chairs our Remuneration Committee; Helen Gilder, who chairs our Audit Committee; and Monika Biddulph, who's our Chair of Nominations. Also in attendance today is James Thorne, our Company Secretary. We're very excited about the progress we saw in 2024 as we continue the transformation of the business. To provide you with a few more details on that, I'm going to turn it over to Bill and let him give you a quick update. Over to you, Bill.

Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it, and welcome, everybody. Thanks for taking the time. It's always fun to do one of these things when it's so close to the results that we just published. So many of you have most likely heard from Ash and I in recent weeks or will soon as we've had a lot of a -- a lot of great conversations with our investors and interested parties as well. I think from a business perspective, we talked a bit during the results period about how we sort of took the next step in our sales structure and aligned individual sales team members by industry vertical. In the release, the RNS that went out today post our AGM, you've seen a couple of key wins in the airline vertical that were mentioned, one of which is a net new customer, a top 2 global airline and the other is an upsell to one of our existing airline customers as well, both of which signal sort of why we're simplifying and why we're aligning the sales teams into those individual verticals. We've talked a lot about the simplification of the business, about the restructure and also and how we sell in a land-and-expand model, that's still -- there's still a lot that Celebrus as a platform can do. And so having the sales team focus on individual industry verticals allows them to really closely align with our professional services team, our marketing teams, our customer success teams and our product teams to make sure that they fully -- they have sort of a full brief of use cases [ Lingo ], et cetera, that they can just use to become experts in their field. We've also trained the sales team in the art of social selling and bringing on some contractors who have made a career doing that for businesses like ours. And all of that is working quite nicely. It's great to see the progress. We were happy to be able to announce those wins. The pipeline itself does continue to grow, and we're moving deals through the pipeline much more quickly than we have in previous years, which is fantastic. We've also streamlined our approach to RFPs. I think you'll always see any software technology company talk about RFPs and their sort of love-hate relationship with those. But we've really streamlined those, and we've started to use artificial intelligence actually in-house to help us with those responses and to make sure that we're building some consistency, but also efficiency. During those processes as well, and we're seeing some great progress from that and also some nice wins from the outputs of that. So all things considered, we're quite happy with the progress of the business. We continue to focus on execution now that the massive sort of restructure the business from the front -- from the field teams to the back office has occurred. And again, we'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to use the Q&A tab, but that's probably good enough, I think, for the overview of the business. Tom, I'll throw it back to you to go through the Q&A.

Thanks, Bill. Appreciate that. Our first question today relates to the recent change in government. So I'll read the question out. The Labor Party has promised to kill business property relief and the IHT benefit this provides to AIM shares held for more than 2 years. To withdraw the relief may cause some share sales and price volatility, you have a plan to more actively market the company and its shares? Or do you think a strategic review is appropriate? Ash, I'm going to ask you to take that one for us, please?

Thanks, Tom. Okay. So let me just address the second part of that. Of course, I -- the government has changed, and there's nothing we can do about that. I think we'll have to wait and see what comes out in the budget like this year. But as far as what we can do and what we are doing, yes, there is a plan to more proactively market the shares in the company as a whole. And there's a reason for that. Obviously, as we disclosed in our final results announcement, we have really kind of completed the restructuring of the business. all the investment we've made into people, into systems, into restructuring each team, the creation of a direct sales team, the creation of a customer success team. That work is largely done. And I think we're now in a position to really kind of crank our power, Investor Relations and our messaging out. Now we will do that using our 2 brokers. So we have Canaccord and we have Cavendish, who are great supporters for us, and it will be supplemented by some of the activities we'll be doing in the coming months, effectively sort of weaving together some of the marketing communications we make add into the market with the investor communications that we make as well. And to help us do that. We've got a new SVP of Marketing, who joined us in the last few months. And we're already starting on that road. So for example, over the last couple of months, we have done a lot of presentations to potential new investors. And you'll have seen on the disclosures on the RNS that there have been a couple of new investors come on board. We're now getting a fair amount of interest from the United States as well. So investors over there looking at European companies. And so for that reason, Bill and I will be over in Boston next week at the Canaccord Tech Conference, and we'll be meeting around 15 or 20 investors there. So that's part and parcel of what we're doing. And also as part of the weaving together the story with our marketing communications. We'd like to kind of help investors get a better understanding of the kind of the dynamics of the business, the kind of circles we move in, what conferences we're going to, who we interact with. And I think that gives investors a better kind of more in-depth feel for who we are. Obviously, a lot of our investor communications in terms of the regulatory communications, whether it's results announcements or contract wins give you a bit of a sense, but we're hoping that this will give us kind of a next level of depth of understanding.

Terrific. Thanks very much, Ash. We appreciate that. We appreciate the question as well. Our next question, Bill, this will be coming to you. What trends in customer behavior, do you see driving demand for your solutions over the next 2 to 3 years?

Yes, it's a -- it's a great question. I mean, I think man, if I had a $1 for everybody that's e-mailed me about Google's lack of a decision that I'd be able to retire today, I think. But the -- yes. I think going away from the non-action from Google and where that may go, I think customer behavior has largely transitioned for most businesses that we're working with to where mobile devices, and I'm including tablets and phones in that are the most predominantly used channels. They're also the most difficult to capture data in. And I'm not talking about compliance. I just mean the tech of it, like the design of mobile applications without getting to in the weeds are generally pretty restrictive to how you capture data and build customer journeys and establish a profile. It just so happens to be an area that we excel in. And so that trend is one that we're set up quite well for that we continue to innovate on. And we believe we're well ahead of our competition on not just in terms of our own thinking, but what we're hearing in the field as we're winning deals as well. I think the other element here that is playing in quite a bit is you could call it compliance, but I'm just going to call it being a good steward of consumer data. There -- I just did a podcast yesterday, actually that will come out later this month that where the main topic was kind of around some of the trends in how brands approach data. And I've been in this industry my entire career, right? But the main premise is, you need to be very careful as a brand these days on where you're sending your customer data, even if they've consented to it, and how you own and control that. And Celebrus is really uniquely positioned here because again, we build single-tenant private cloud instances that brand's own and control. And we've started to build out a variety of platforms, including our analytics capabilities where customers and brands are able to get all of the value they used to get from other technologies, but they're able to do it within their 4 walls. And that, I think, will continue to be a differentiator for us. I think given the consumer concerns and privacy, given the data challenges around digital identity and then particularly in mobile, those are trends that we're seeing sort of come to fruition. And the airline win, just as a final point on that, the new win that we brought in, that was because our competition couldn't deliver on mobile devices, and we showed them our ability to do that in 3-days. And I think that is something that we -- you will see us get louder and louder about. And to Ash's point, something that we'll continue to bring our investors along in that conversation as we roll our digital presence all under one umbrella as well and bring all of that together for you and give you the opportunity to subscribe to more than just investor communications.

Thanks, Bill. That's really helpful. The next question, you kind of touched on it, but see if there's anything you'd like to add. The recent wins in travel and leisure promising, what key features of the Celebrus platform attract companies in this sector? And how do you plan to sustain this momentum in acquiring new customers?

Yes, it's a great question as well. And you're right. I did kind of touch on this a little bit, Tom, but I'll sort of address it very head on. Travel and leisure, just like finance, retail and the other, we can spot a good opportunity for us very quickly, right? If a company relies heavily on digital, and they care very much about one-to-one relationships with their customers, then that is a very key opportunity for us. In the airline industry, as an example, the booking process is quite complicated, right? If you go to book a flight today, yes, you start by picking your 2 cities in your date. But think about all the results you've presented, all the ways you can filter those results. The things you can interact with to look at the availability on those various flights. These are all things that an airline whose data-driven will want to have a view into but they're very difficult to collect in a meaningful way in a lot of our competitor systems that are sort of custom JavaScript-based. You end up writing a bunch of custom code. And with those brands we're finding out is that they never really ever trusted the data because it was so fragile. Celebrus is bringing a data model in that allows these brands to very quickly capture these complex interactions without a lot of custom code and put a structure to it to where teams like revenue management or data science teams can use that to better understand what you care about as a consumer or how they might adjust what you're seeing when you're searching for flights is really, really powerful because of the amount of options that come into that. So any process that's complicated like that in digital is a great opportunity for us. In terms of how we sustain that momentum, Well, when you have a key win, you use that, you market the heck out of it and you put it into the hands of marketing and sales and you let them run with that. And then conversely, you take our customer success team and you take the wins that we have over here and you think about how to apply that across our entire customer base so that we can start to upsell customers as well. So it -- it really is -- it needs to be a bit of an assembly line, right? When it can't happen in a silo and everything needs to be sort of amplified, not only externally to bring in new wins, but also internally to our existing customers as well.

Thanks, Bill. Really helpful. The next question is actually a similar vein and [indiscernible]. It's really an innovation question. Given the ongoing technological advancements and changing customer needs, how do we ensure that our product road maps align with future market demands.