Credit Clear Limited (CCR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining this Credit Clear FY '24 results briefing. I'm joined today by Andrew Smith, CEO; Victor Peplow, the CFO; and Jason Serafino, the Chief Product and Technology Officer. We'll run through a few slides. This is a meeting. You can unmute yourself and pose questions at any point. I might just ask that we keep an eye on the mute button. And we -- if you want to turn your video on, more than welcome to turn video as well, we want this interactive. But so if you could just keep an eye on those mute button, that will be great. All the documents and disclosures have been released to the ASX this morning, including this deck, and it is being recorded. So we'll circulate a recording later this morning. So with that, over to Andrew Smith.

Yes. Welcome, everyone. So, obviously, see the registrations building. Hard to imagine 3 or 4 years ago, we had to beg people to attend these conferences. So we're wonderful to see some momentum and support growing behind the business. So first of all, I just want to make a call out in terms of the last 12 months' performance. FY '24 was, I think, a year where we started to gain confidence back in the market, where we considerably outperformed our guidance on 4 separate occasions. So seated here in front of you, representing Credit Clear having delivered $42 million revenue result, which is obviously a substantial record for us, up 20% on the prior corresponding period, and also up $4.2 million underlying EBITDA result, up again from what we thought was going to be $4 million at the end of the year as well. So wonderful effort across the team, something that we're very, very proud of and absolutely, I think, sets the tone for a really strong future outlook as well. So whilst I know that a lot of you here aren't necessarily looking about what we've done in the past, you're looking at what we're looking to achieve in the future. Once again, we're going to give our guidance this reporting presentation of a $48 million to $50 million in revenue and an increase to above $7 million in underlying EBITDA as well. And just to make the comment that, that excludes any acquisitions that may be made. So that's the title of the presentation. Yes. Look, there's probably a few new followers to the Credit Clear story. Look, effectively, Credit Clear is a debt resolution business. It's important to note that we don't buy debt. We assist our clients and their customers resolve overdue debt situations. And that's done through a various stages of the business. The Credit Clear digital technology assists our customers through software as a service, where they use our technology to assist themselves resolve overdue debts with their customers. ARMA Group is effectively a hybrid debt collection business that ultimately uses our technology, supported by people to resolve debt in the best possible way, delivering better outcomes to our clients through faster and higher recovery rates and underpinned by better customer satisfaction measured by Net Promoter Scores. And late stage recoveries is through our legal, which is Oakridge Lawyers. They're involved in the late-stage recovery of overdue debts predominantly in the business-to-business space. We're assisting organizations recover money through the court system. So an end-to-end solution, as you can imagine in this market, the need for a more sensitive, less friction approach to resolving overdue debts with the obviously massive challenges associated with cost of living pressure and high interest rates. The need for our services is very high. So without letting Victor, our CFO, steal too much of the limelight in terms of numbers, I just wanted to sort of kick off that slide by, I guess, recalling some of the advice that I've had from -- I'm going to say some of the most sophisticated investors I have ever come across since taking the chair at Credit Clear as CEO about 2.5 years ago. And that was one, consistently underpromise and overdeliver. And the second one was that the market hates lumpy graphs. They love consistency. And what this graph or these graphs show is really consistent performance year-on-year. I think when Credit Clear first listed. There was a lot of noise around what we're going to achieve. And unfortunately, I think we made a lot of promises and weren't able to deliver that. Now what we've seen over the last certainly 4 years is consistent improvement in almost all areas, mainly revenue, having grown from $11 million to $21 million to $35 million to $42 million in the last 4 years and certainly across the underlying EBITDA numbers going from minus $5.2 million, minus $3.6 million, almost breakeven with $200,000 underlying EBIT number. And then this year to do a $4.2 million in underlying EBITDA is something that I think that will give confidence to the investment community and certainly is something that we're very proud of as a senior executive team to achieve. So I'll throw to Victor, who can round out some of the numbers.

Yes. Look, the only additional comment here is that obviously trending in the right direction, quite steeply and that it's all good to achieve underlying EBITDA, but we're converting that into cash. But I'll delve into a little more detail over the next couple of slides, if we can move to the next one. Thanks, Warrick. So Andrew and I have been continually asked by many, many fund managers, how effective is the operating leverage of this business. And I think this slide aims to show some of the indicators that proves the operating leverage that we can achieve. So firstly, we've got the gross profit margin improving year-on-year from 51% to 53%. So how have we done that? First point there is the use of digital collections, particularly in the consumer space, where the receivables there tend to be high volume, low value, which the technology is very conducive to. So that's the first point. Second is the Tier 1 clients that we've been reporting through the year. We're talking big brand clients here, large amounts of revenue and with that comes economies of scale. The third point is process improvements. We -- business has undertaken a couple of acquisitions in recent years. That led to duplication. So we've done a lot of work consolidating systems, processes, procedures and that's helped improve our gross profit margins as well. And going forward, we also have our office in the Philippines now that is very effective but underutilized currently. So through FY '25, we'll expand the use of that office for tasks such as administration, client reporting, and compliance. So we expect the gross profit margin to improve further through the use of Philippines, but also continuing to improve the other points I've just made there. So that's gross profit margin. Look, I touched on cash from operations, but it's important to note, $3.7 million cash from operations compared to prior year figure of $2.7 million deficit is a massive improvement of [ $6.4 million ]. So year-on-year, that's a huge turnaround. Cash is king, as we all know. So management and the Board are very, very pleased as well as our large investors and shareholders with that cash from operations results. And at the bottom there, we're reporting underlying EBITDA as a percentage of revenue for the first time. It's more relevant now that we've gone past that breakeven point, if you like. And you can see there, it's improved from 1% to 10%. And if you're looking forward for a moment, if you take our guidance numbers for FY '25, we expect that to improve further to 14%. So a good set of numbers there, but I think the key message here from this slide is that the business model is working effectively, and we are achieving operational leverage. We jump to the next slide. Very important slide that I presented over the last couple of years, and it reconciles underlying EBITDA to statutory EBITDA. I think we've always been very transparent with this one, and I'm trying to set out the 2 comparisons very clearly here. I'm also showing the last 3 years, just to get a better perspective on the progress that this business has made. 12 months ago, for those of you that were on this call, you will remember we referred to this business going through an inflection point. And I think we followed through with those comments 12 months later, where you can see the improvements on revenue and underlying EBITDA. So the focus points for this slide is the green rows that we've got here, where we'll go through row by row. We've already mentioned that revenue was up 20%, which is a great result. Employee benefits, though, up only 6%. And again, we've achieved that through the points that I went through in the previous slide, but particularly through digital collections, which Jason will talk about more later in this presentation. And that's why I've listed the investment in tech development OpEx component. We've maintained that investment as we're getting benefits and we consider that to be a point of difference relative to our competitors. So that's really showing through at the moment. Other expenses there, up 13%. We did invest a little bit there with onboarding new clients, particularly the larger clients, but that's a long-term view that we've taken and continue to go with in the future. This is a long-term play. We invested in onboarding clients, and that's coming through revenue, but there's more of that to come through in FY '25. But you can see there the underlying EBITDA result over 3 years, gone from $3.5 million loss to $200,000 positive to $4.2 million positive. And the key metric in all of these numbers is a 57% improvement for each dollar of incremental revenue has flowed through to underlying EBITDA. This has, in fact, exceeded our own expectations where we were aiming for 54% to 55%. So to achieve 57%, whilst investing in new client onboarding and sales, et cetera, is an extremely pleasing result for management and also compares very favorably to the prior year equivalent figure, which was 28%. But again, that is the key metric on this slide, 57% of incremental revenue flowing through to underlying EBITDA. Just to explain some of the other items as to why they're not part of underlying, we have received some government employee training grants, which have now phased out. We have not included them in underlying revenue. Similarly, we've had some nonrecurring expenses there relating to system consolidation, legal fees, post-acquisition redundancies, which you can see have decreased over the last 3 years. They will continue to decrease further in FY '25. And we've got shared expenses there, which can be volatile year-on-year depending on [ testing]. And then that ties back to the statutory EBITDA there of $1.9 million. But overall, a very pleasing result, turning in the right direction. Overall, financials are in a very strong position going through a very solid trajectory, and we expect that to continue going into FY '25. So they are the numbers. So with that, happy to take questions now. I'll hand over to Andrew.

Yes, look, to reinforce Victor's comments. One of the things that we're really pleased about is that we've maintained our investment in our technology, which we see very much is our competitive advantage. So maintain that development costs. It's certainly very easy to just look at ways to save money and cut expenses in areas that are going to give us an immediate hit to our bottom line, but we'll hurt in the future. We've maintained that investment in technology. We've also ramped up our investment in terms of sales and marketing. We recognize that we've got a really unique competitive advantage in our AI-driven technology and we are experiencing rapid growth in terms of new customer acquisition. So -- and obviously, the third thing is to ensure that we invest in the overall business for growth. So to have achieved that in terms of sales and marketing, technology, whilst still seeing the numbers increase and improve the way they have is something that should once again give a lot of confidence to the fact that -- it's not just about 2024 performance, it's about 2025, 2026 and beyond. So let's talk about the new customers that we've won over the last 12 months. Look, one of the things that used to keep me awake at night when we had a private business was that if we lost 1 or 2 of our major clients, it would be almost catastrophic to the overall profitability of the business, and it requires some immediate redundancies. Seeing the business continue to increase the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers to a level of 20 tier customers -- Tier 1 customers and over 44 Tier 2 customers actually shows the robustness of this business that there's no one -- dependence on any 1 key client. The fact that we're now at 20 Tier 1 clients that average over $1 million per client is actually a testament to not only the legitimacy of Credit Clear as a market leader within their credit collection space, but it also gives stability to the future maintainable earnings that obviously contribute so greatly to the value of the business. So to have seen major clients like ANZ, Origin Energy and other major banking finance utility companies choose Credit Clear as a Tier 1 provider to assist them either with Software-as-a-Service solutions or third-party digital -- third-party hybrid collection services or, in fact, late-stage collection services, I think just shows the confidence that the market has to partner with an organization like Credit Clear, which has a strong reputation of delivering great results, incredible service and very compliant processes. So it's over to Jason to give us a bit of an update of what we've achieved in 2024.

Thanks, Andrew. So you can see the highlights on this screen here in terms of what we've achieved in FY '24 with our strategy. So underlying these results, as has been covered there is our strategy to bring together the best in class in digital, with the best people. And having digital and then the people who have got the long credibility in the industry experience. Those 2 things together are really resonating with the clients, and we're able to provide services right from a due payment all the way through early-stage collections -- late-stage collections all the way through legal services, and that is really appealing. And as a result, we're winning clients at record levels. As you can see, the tender win rate maintaining 70%. If you compare that to ARMA's premerger, the win rate was about 30%, which was a great result. So getting 70% is really, really pleasing to see. And the clients that are coming on board, we continue to see them growing and meeting our sales targets. So you can see the clients signed in FY '23, have now achieved 81% of our sales projection, that's up from 32% for that group the prior year. And similarly, clients signed in FY '24 at 33%. So we can expect to see a lot more upside coming from those already signed clients, 67% still to come from FY '24 and 19% from FY '23 even without signing new clients. Gross profit, as Victor covered there, really pleasing to see our strategy coming together with the profit increasing from 51% to 53%. That is a result of our strategy of consolidation across the group, removing duplicated roles. But significant consolidations of systems and processes. I think we had 6 different collections platforms across the various companies, and we're consolidating those into 1 -- 2 into different outsourced managed service providers. So all of that is coming together into 1 cohesive group, as well as that continued growth in customer self-service using our digital platform, and we'll continue to see that operational uplift continuing. So in summary, continued strong sales growth, significant upside from already signed clients, increasing operational leverage along with favorable market conditions gives us confidence in that FY '25 guidance of $48 million to $50 million revenue and $7 million of EBITDA -- underlying EBITDA. To the next screen -- so a key indicator that we've been tracking is payments on the digital platform. So these are self-service payments where a customer received a digital message from us, clicks on them, comes on to the portal on their phone, makes a payment or sets up a payment plan that we then automatically process. So in other words, they don't require human touch from our team. And we've continued to show really strong progress. Payments growing 63% to $116 million on the platform this year. So when you consider that growth rate, 63% against the group revenue growing by 20%, you can see that there's been a strong shift to digital, as Victor said, particularly in the consumer portfolio where we've seen a doubling of the proportion of payments made digitally over the last 12 months. So why don't we focus on digital payments. We do that for 2 reasons. The first is sales. As Andrew said, clients are increasingly wanting digital in the service to improve customer experience. And they want to deal with the market leader in this space who demonstrated results. And clearly, we have digital at very, very high scale. And the second reason is profit margin. So purely digital collections at 80% to 90% gross profit compared to collections with operators on the phones that will be closer to that 50% to 60% mark. So our high proportion of digital is one of the key leading indicators to increasing profitability. It's one of the reasons why we continue to bring on new clients without growing our head count proportionately. To the next screen. All right, so something very close to my heart, AI. If you've been following us and you know this is one of the areas we've been very bullish about over the years, and we see the potential for AI to really transform the debt collection industry particularly as we see more and more activities being digitized. Yes, we're in a bit of a hype cycle on AI. That's for sure. People are talking about AI solving anything. But we've always taken a really pragmatic scientific approach to what we do, and we measure the results. And it's easy for us to do that because we know whether it collects more money or not, it's money in the bank. And we verify our approach through champion/challenger testing. Here is a recent example. We do a lot of these, but here's a recent example from a major utility where we take the customers, we separate them randomly between 2 cohorts. One group of customers get our digital platform. And they get all of the aspects of our digital platform without the AI. So they get messages in a predetermined sequence. The second cohort then gets that, but with our AI making the decisions. So every day, the AI is looking at every customer and making a decision for that customer that day, what's the best channel to communicate on, what's the best time, what's the best message to send, et cetera. And you can see the results here, they're material. So the AI cohort collected 22% higher than the non-AI cohort. And it's this kind of result that is really causing clients in the industry to sit up and take notice. You can see all the awards that we've been awarded, which is very exciting, but also it really helps in the sales process. The sales team really loves to talk about this because it's a new exciting thing to open doors. And the results are very strong. And it's also a great competitive advantage because it's a very, very difficult competitive advantage to replicate. To train these AI takes tens of millions of prior interactions, and we've been accumulating that data over 8-plus years. So a new entrant coming into the market simply can't replicate that in any reasonable period of time. So we will be continuing to invest in this space and seeking to maintain our market leadership as we go forward, really excited about what we'll be doing in this space. So stay tuned. Thank you. Andrew?

Yes. And I'll just add to what Jason is saying, I was listening recently to a professor on AI that was sort of head of AI at SAP, obviously, a very large global software provider. And they talked about the fact that 80% of all AI projects internally fail. One of the things that we know we can guarantee is if you implement a third-party collection service or even our first-party software-as-a-service digital offering, we can sort of guarantee the success. And the reason why we can guarantee is because it's been proven and built out for many, many years. I'm not sure that was just luck or very good judgment, Jason, but the fact that we've been winning awards in AI since 2001, talks to the fact that we're well ahead of the market in terms of preparing for that AI transformation change. And certainly, within the credit collection space, it's put us well and truly ahead of the market as well. So well done to those who are ahead of the market within that tech team. Yes, look, I don't think I need to talk too much about this, but it's pretty clear trading conditions are favorable for a business that's assisting deal with overdue accounts or even late-stage accounts. Cost of living price is certainly here and it will be here to stay certainly for the next few years. There's been a real shift in terms of sale of debt. The big debt providers like Credit Corp have really struggled to deploy capital within the market because a lot of the large credit providers aren't selling debt like the Westpacs of the world. It certainly opened up our market, expanded our total addressable market to assist clients deal with overdue debts internally through a partnership with Credit Clear. So that's certainly favorable for us. And we've seen some consolidation across the industry. So a lot of the large providers like a collection house or like the Illion's Milton Graham Recoveries Corp. mergers that have happened recently have actually taken away some competitors within this space. And whilst we're sort of bringing a new innovative approach to the industry, I think that's also contributed greatly to our outlook in terms of 2025 and beyond. So certainly, favorable market conditions. So let's wrap things up, try to summarize some of the good things that we've talked about. Trading conditions are certainly supportive. Australian companies are very much focused on strengthening their internal and partnerships to resolve overdue debts. There's consistent organic growth where clients that we've already signed, perhaps we've already onboarded them. They're going to contribute the greatest part of our 2025 growth in terms of budgeting for growth in 2025 to hit that guidance number of $48 million to $50 million. Most of that's already baked into the clients that we signed in terms of existing customer growth. So we're very, very positive about that outlook. We still are winning a tender rate of over 70%. We have a very strong sales pipeline. We've only 1 major bank. We're still consistently taking on new clients in that sort of insurance space or in fact, that banking and finance space, utility space. There's huge exciting opportunities, not just in domestic territories, but international through organizations that we trade within Australia that have foreign sister businesses like in the U.K. This competitive advantage around artificial intelligence, I think, is really key to providing that X factor or unique selling point when pitching for new business. I think that's still very much in our favor. And lastly, just to sort of talk about the guidance, in FY 2025, our revenue, we're expecting to be in excess of $48 million and within $50 million and underlying EBITDA of approximately plus $7 million. So this isn't including acquisitions. We're still very focused on new markets and how an acquisition can be a beachhead into a new territory and expand the total addressable market. I have spoken about the U.K. as something that's very much a focus for us because of those synergies between clients that operate in Australia and also in the U.K. So watch this space, which will hopefully see an increase, not just in terms of our overall revenue, but certainly our underlying EBITDA as well. So thanks for everyone to have tuned in. Thanks for those who have supported the company through this last 12 months, and we're very positive about what 2025 and beyond can bring us.

Thanks very much, everyone. Let's get into some questions. Perhaps if you just want to unmute yourself, I can see who's unmuted, and then I can in an orderly way, ask you to go through the questions that you have. So anyone who would like to new messages. And we've got some in the chats as well. So from [ Michael Chan ]. There we go.

I recognize that voice.

Andrew, outstanding results. Well done to you and the whole team. I noticed in the guidance, which is very impressive as well that there's reference to the exclusion of any acquisition this financial year. If there was to be an acquisition, would there be a requirement for the business to raise capital for that? Or do the cash reserves presently held allow for any acquisition to avoid capital being required?

Very good question, [ Louis ] and one that I'm very happy to answer on the basis that the acquisition or any acquisitions that were sort of down the track with at this current stage will be funded with cash on hand. So as presented earlier, in FY '24, we've actually increased our cash reserves by $3.7 million. So we're generating cash monthly and annually. So if we can fund it with cash reserves, we'll find it with cash reserves. If there's another acquisition that could be, let's just say, substantially larger, represent a better value. I'm not ruling out 100% that we won't go to the market and raise money, but certainly not anything that we're looking at right now.

Outstanding. Keep up the great work, man.

Larry Gandler from Shaws. I can see you unmuted.

Guys, great result and sunny skies, Andrew. So I want to kind of explore those blue skies. It's hard to kind of gauge what -- how much of a leader Credit Clear is in the industry. I'm not sure if you have a feel for maybe your market share or your total collections in the context of the size of the industry, but how much scope is there for you guys to continue to gain share. If you could help us give a feel for that?

Yes. Look, I still think that we're really emerging as a Tier 1 provider in this sort of credit inflection space, certainly in Australia, not to mention the rest of the world. There's been some very large players dominating this market for a very long time. So we have very much a new kid on the block at that Tier 1 level. Rest assured that all the other big banks are looking at how we're performing on the ANZ portfolio, which as an update, has been very, very well. We've performed first in almost every metric measured in terms of our performance servicing compliance in the first sort of 4 or 5 months working with ANZ. So if you think about that, we're only 1 step into that sort of top end of [indiscernible] banking and finance space, lots and lots of runway to go there. If we think about sort of state, federal government penetration, we are only really just making steps into that sort of sector as well. So I would say they're the biggest providers of debt when they outsource them. You think about the ATO having over $50 billion worth of debt. Those contracts are worth tens of millions of dollars to 4 or 5 collections businesses. So the fact that a lot of those businesses have now consolidated. When that market really opens up again, we'll start to use third parties. I see that as a huge runway for us to start to continue growth in Australia. And there's lots and lots of other markets, obviously, insurance space where we have really good, deep penetration lots -- across lots of the really key names, whether it be AAMI or the Suncorp businesses or IAG would be in the ARMA businesses. I think we're still only scratching the surface in terms of work that we're doing with those organizations. So answer your question, I think that FY '24, FY '26, FY '27 should have really consistent growth domestically, but we absolutely want to grow that ability to cross-sell and upsell to say organizations in Australia like Origin Energy that have a very strong presence in the U.K. through their ownership within a business called Octopus Energy, who I've met before. They're very interested in bringing an organization that can provide AI-driven digital solutions supported by traditional offerings as well, say, people on the fine. So -- once again, I think that when things start to slow down in Australia, we want to make sure that we have very much got either new services diversify or new markets to grow in.

Okay. Can I just -- maybe again, just to kind of scope out the size of the business. So you had $116 million of collections in digital. Is that right? And that's doubled -- you doubled the proportion. Did I understand that correctly, Victor?

Yes, over the -- in one of the portfolios in the consumer portfolio.

Okay. Great. And what do you think the prospects for digital next year? I can't imagine doubling again as a proportion. That would probably put them over 100%.

Yes. I think we'll see -- what we're seeing is as the new clients are coming on board, they're getting -- they're quickly adopting -- we're quickly adopting digital into those new clients. So I think as we see new clients coming on board, they will come in at that higher proportion. I don't have a number for you in terms of where I think we might end up for the group. But I'd imagine the consumer will at least maintain -- probably improve a little bit further from where it is in terms of the proportion that we're already doing there. And then we'll see deeper usage of digital across other portfolios as well, I believe, over time. So commercial insurance as well are very good for digital. So where we're not using digital much is in the larger debts, like big commercial debts, for example. I don't see we're going to get much penetration to digital into those traditional spaces.

I will say that lots of our clients are recognizing the value of holding correct digital contact information on their clients. So I'm talking about e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers. In fact, we've just been asked to sort of join a large utility company or the largest utility company in Queensland on a joint presentation to share with the market, just how strong engagement you can get with a high contact strategy on digital. So focusing on gathering digital information on your new clients or existing clients are updating them. And just what that does in terms of engagement rates, cure rates, rehabilitation rates when it comes to managing all portfolios, whether it be short, late-stage financial hardship, early-stage collections, having really strong digital contact details is almost one of the key leading indicators to better recovery rates, better engagement rates. And it's probably common sense if you think about how the whole of society is really moving away from traditional methods of collections being phone or letters and being very much tied to their smart devices, whether it be their Apple phone or their Android phone. So I think coming back to your question that having between somewhere 80% to 90% of all collections, having some type of digital treatment. I think that's where we should be aiming.

Thanks very much, Larry. Andrew, maybe just to address Michael's question regarding where we are winning business, are we winning them against smaller players or the major players in the sort of competitive environment?

Yes. Look, if we look at that slide around Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, absolutely, we're winning them against large competitors. So you think about the big providers that have been operating in the industry for a long time. I think that we still have that real strong innovation. We're still small enough and nimble to make changes and adopt to certainly, the systems and processes that our clients have, whether it be with -- around compliance or data transfer. I think we're a really sort of technology-led business as well. So our ability to integrate and exchange data between their system and our system in real time has been a real success for us. And let's just say, more recently, having gone through the due diligence process, improving our policies, processes, controls and procedures has set us up to onboard and win those Tier 1 clients at a quicker rate.

Thanks. Picking up on the Tier 1 clients. Mark [ Yarwood ] asks about how mature we are in the growth phase of those Tier 1 clients. Do we expect sort of additional growth from those already won and onboarded? And then a second part of the question is what are the expectations 2 to 3 years from now for digital collections. I think we've really doubled that one.

I'll probably answer that one. Look, in terms of existing Tier 1 clients, there's some of those clients that are at a mature stage. So if I think about one of our largest clients or, in fact, our largest client being that large utility company in Queensland that we're doing this joint paper with. I think that we've sort of matured to a level where we're providing lots of services around accounts receivable and they're probably mature. But that's probably the only one that I can think of where it's at maturity. Lots of our other large clients are that we've either recently won or have had for a while like the ANZs of the world, we're only taking a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the workflow that they could refer out to us. And I think that they represent the majority of what we're trying to budget for growth in FY '25. So if you think about how this business operates, you need to start engaging with the client years ago, right? To win a tender 1.5 years ago, then we need to onboard them for sort of 8 or 9 months in a bank's instance or ANZ's example. And then it might take 2 or 3 years before you build it up to a level, which is at 80% or 90% of what we'd expect. So there's huge amounts of run rate with existing clients that we've got on board.

Okay. Question from Scott. Will Credit Clear be investing in the Remitter IPO in the U.S.

I think short answer is no. We certainly wish them all the success in the U.S. For those who aren't aware, Remitter and Credit Clear had a partnership where Remitter used our code from about 5 years ago. That punch came to an end in FY '24, where I think we agreed to go separate ways, which effectively means that we can compete with them in the U.S., they can compete with us in Australia. But look, the more companies out there that are, I think, pioneering the digital transformation and innovation within the credit collection space, the better. But what we found over the last couple of years because of that tech correction, a lot of those digital fintech businesses that we're trying to digitize this collections process have fallen out of the market and those who are able to, I think, continue to get funding or start to generate cash themselves are left. So I wish them all the best.

You maybe want to just stay in case some people missed the announcement regarding Mark Casey's stock, Andrew can you give an update there.

Yes. Look, obviously, Mark Casey is the primary founder and I think majority shareholder in Remitter. He recently sold his entire share base in Credit Clear. So I think that, that clearly, first of all, recognized his contribution to the business, having been a founder, having invested money, having been on the Board. It sort of marks an end to that sort of involvement with Credit Clear. So it was wonderful to see some really blue chip investments or shareholders buy Mark's 33-odd million shares. Some of those were on the register. Some of them were new. I won't name them apart from maybe a couple. Thorney, being our largest shareholder, bought some of the shares and a bunch of others that quite frankly really have strengthened the registrar.

Thanks very much. Tim has asked 2 questions. The first one is any information around shortening the life cycle for onboarding Tier 1 clients, maybe one for you, Jason.

Yes. We -- I think, as Andrew said, we get better and better actually at the technology side of onboarding. And so we've got a very strong process there and some very well-developed technology to do that. So we'll continue to -- I think, be able to shorten that from an onboarding point of view. The actual time frame to get those Tier 1s to scale -- and by the way, so having been through ANZ and other top 20 kind of organizations in the country, one of the biggest challenges to get through an onboarding is due diligence, making sure you've got all the security and processes in place. And once you've passed a few of those, it's a bit of a rinse and repeat for the others. And we've now done quite a few of them. So we've got great answers to get through that process as quickly as possible those clients. And if we take them, then we integrate with platforms. Some of those platforms are used by other clients. And so that then really dramatically shortened the integration with other clients on that same platform. So all of that goes a long way to helping shortening the onboarding process.

Yes. I think Jason really hit the point at the end. Once you've integrated with a third-party CRM system, a lot of those CRM systems are commonly used by other providers in that space. In fact, there's 1 aggregator or [ TDX ] as part of the Equifax business. They operate in the U.K., in Australia and other markets around the world. The fact that we integrated with them for ANZ has set us on a really good trajectory to be able to sort of basically plug into providers, not just in Australia but in international markets. So in answer to that question, it should dramatically speed up from lots of reasons.

The second question from Tim just relates to how we're thinking about JVs or white labeling our technology with competitors or potentially other partners.

Yes. Look, I think that we've probably highlighted the fact that our artificial intelligence and our digital workflows and technology is our advantage. I'd be pretty loath to provide it to direct competitors as effectively giving them the same advantage that we might have. However, in all -- in sectors of the market, which could be around debt purchase, we'd be very happy to sort of utilize our technology and partner through JVs or white label agreements. So it probably clearly defines it. We actually don't compete with debt buying organizations. They're operating in a different part of the market. And in fact, we provide services to lots of those providers. So in short, I think that direct competitors, we wouldn't provide technology to, but those that are in our sector, we'd certainly consider it.

One question I skipped over going back here is what are the opportunities in government and sort of after the Robodebt scandal and what's the approach at the moment?

Yes. Look, when you think about the ATO and [ Centrelink ] and those type of organizations at a federal level, they're really huge contracts. When you think about the revenue offices, whether it be revenue in New South Wales that are looking to sort of bring in collections around fines. Naturally, there needs to be some sensitivity around that Robodebt debacle that happened. But having a technology platform that actually measures Net Promoter Score. And I'm talking about asking someone to provide their rating post engagement with Credit Clear's digital white label solution or, in fact, a third-party solution actually allows government to provide data back to the community and stakeholders around some positive experiences or in fact, a really positive outlook to say that this technology not only helps us resolve and deal with what is a growing problem, but also doing it a way that actually constituents or customers would prefer to use.

George, I think we answered the question regarding the potential acquisitions and need for a capital raise. It's not envisaged at this point, which I think and I hope that means we've run through all the questions. Are there any other questions coming from the floor? If you would like to unmute yourself, you can do that now. Otherwise, the -- it ticked over 10:00 and Andrew, I can ask you just for a few closing words.

Yes. I think we're obviously, a little bit concerned, having an open meeting like this with everyone able to ask questions or unmute themselves. So I want to thank you for just how well everyone's behaved on this call. Once again, I'm very proud of the team and I want to thank the team for their efforts. And I just want to make a quick call out to some of those individuals who will be leaving the business in the next couple of months following some consolidation of roles. They've certainly helped contribute a massive amount for the success of this group. It's just when you bring 7 companies together, there's not necessarily room for everyone. And whilst that will have some good financial impacts on the outlook of the business. It's certainly worthwhile recognizing thanking those individuals for their commitment and performance.

Very good. Thanks very much, everyone. Have a good day.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.