Eagle Eye Solutions Group PLC (EYE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 16, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Timothy John Mason
executiveGood morning, everybody, and welcome to our results presentation. Just as a reminder, you're at the Eagle Eye results presentation. The key thing that we do is we bridge online to offline, which is increasingly important in a connected world. We do that by promotions, by loyalty, apps, subscriptions and gift services. And the reason why we're doing it is because what we are enabling is what has always been the holy grail, but traditionally has been hard to do, which is one-to-one marketing. The market, I think, is accelerating. The pandemic, as has been frequently written up, has accelerated people's move towards e-commerce, the adoption of digital channels. So increasingly, the pressure on businesses is to be good in that space and as I've said, to be good in that space means being one-to-one in that space and having the ability to personalize every interaction, and that's where we come in. The world is always on. There's no such thing now. The consumer is always on because they always have their phone. So there is no such thing really as an online/offline world. It's just simply a connected world. And what we enable is you to benefit from that connection as a business in real time. Just as a reminder, you basically need 3 things in order to make this digital work in this digital world. The first is you need data management. So you need to understand who your customers are and what they're doing. You then need a way of working out what you think the next best message or the next best offer is to send to them. Increasingly with AI tools, you're able to do that more -- in a more and more granular and more and more personalized way. You then need a transactional capability to get that individual message to the consumer, and that is what Eagle Eye does. At the moment, people's data analytics capability outstrips their transactional capability. So they can personalize but then actually, when they want to get it through to the consumer, they have to resegment usually their point-of-sale system in the stores where the cash registers simply cannot support personalization. They can only support a segmentation. And then, of course, the third element that you need is a user experience. So if you're one of these big plants, you've got a big data analytics business on the one hand; you've got Eagle Eye as your transactional capability, bringing all your systems together; and then you've got your marketing and your marketing agencies creating the user experience. One of the things that they talk about in selling this sort of service is you need to work out what pain points you're addressing and to explain to people what pain points you address for them. So in order for us to improve our selling capability to major clients, we did some research with the major clients that we've won to understand the pain points that we addressed for them. Now the first one, as we always talk about, is this ability to personalize. But in their terms, what they're talking about is going from an ability today, pre-Eagle Eye, to do something around 500 million different personalized transactions or segmented transactions a year, moving to 10 billion. Now 10 billion sounds a hell of a lot, and it is all of a lot, and it's best-in-class and I'm not sure that anybody else can do it. The second thing that we enable is in most systems at the moment, are points based. So if you want to do something with your consumers, you do points. You put Eagle Eye in and it's unlimited. And particularly, the big difference that we make is we can do money. So you can make your rewards, do this and earn more points or you can do this and you own a discount and that discount is automatically adjusted at the checkout. The next issue is the problem of identity management that it's very difficult to group the fact that I've got a key fob, I've got a loyalty card, I've registered a credit card, I'm an e-commerce shopper, I've got an app, I follow you on Facebook, I follow you on Instagram and actually working out that those 7 different things than I could have kept going, obviously. Those 7 different things are actually the same consumer. And the risk is that you end up with more than one record for that consumer, particularly between e-commerce and the stores and so it's very difficult to work out what they're doing. With the advent of the Eagle Eye wallet, those 5 IDs very clearly get grouped in the wallet and become one customer. The next thing that happens is that, not only are the benefits that you are able to offer the segments points based, but actually, you tend to do them batch processed post the fact. And the more personalization that these businesses do, the longer that lag gets. So sometimes, it gets out to 3 to 5 days. If it gets out to 3 to 5 days, people call the call center and they say, I shop the other day, I earned 100 points. It hasn't been credited to my account. That is a car crash in terms of consumer experience, but also incredibly expensive to handle from a call center point of view. Now the benefit of Eagle Eye, it's real time. So literally, as you walk away with your till receipt and your app, it's all up-to-date the moment it happens. There's then some sort of internal things that just make life easier for the business. So at the moment, there's a lot of systems that make these promotional schemes operate. In one example, there's 14 systems in all involved, 5 of which were associated with offer management. We took that down to one, ours. So they saved the complexity, the license fee and everything else of 5 systems, they put in one new system, which holds everything together. That makes life significantly simpler and cheaper. And then finally, as you go to more and more personalization, you're using more and more brands to do that and you're raising more and more revenue, you need an administration system that holds all that together. Currently, the admin system is pretty clanky, Eagle Eye offers you an automated one. So using the mantra that we actually talk about of how we run our business in a way that is better, simpler, cheaper, you can see that now helped by this insight from our clients what we're doing is selling them a better system that's simpler to operate and cheaper to run. It's been a strong period and particularly for new wins, being our best period for new wins in our history. Now we have been impacted by COVID. So unfortunately, those new wins haven't quite been the icing on the cake they would have normally been but they've kept the business growing and growing strongly. We've continued to expand the capabilities of our platform that we'll talk more about the new business pipeline. It's been strong and is getting stronger and trading remains in line. I think I'm now handing over to Lucy to take you through the numbers.
Lucy Sharman-Munday
executiveThese are the key KPIs, and I think we continue to develop SaaS-based KPIs that really demonstrate that we're becoming a really good SaaS business. Just quickly whizzing through some of these, and then I'll come back and talk in detail in the slides that follow. The revenue growth of 8% to GBP 10.8 million. We continue to have a high level of recurring revenue at 73%. We've made huge strides forward in our adjusted EBITDA going from GBP 1.3 million in half 1 '20 to GBP 2.1 million for this frist half. We have achieved, again, a very low level of churn, so 0.2% of value of churn, similar level to half 1 '20. The cash position is in a good place. We were at net cash of GBP 0.1 million at the end of December. Half 1 '20 ended in a net debt position of GBP 2.2 million. And we did our maiden operating first half profit of GBP 0.2 million. And for half 1 '20, we were at a loss of GBP 0.5 million. So hopefully, you'll agree that they're sort of pretty strong KPIs for the first half of the year. I wanted just to remind you and show you and highlight some of the things around the business model. The business model hasn't changed. We built the implementation fees as sort of what we classify as one-off, which is time and materials for people. And then our recurring revenue is made up of license fees, transaction fees, and we split out SMS fees because they've got a slightly different margin profile. And I think if we take a step back, the business has been growing half-on-half year-on-year, and you can see that on the graph on the right-hand side. In terms of the revenue mix in the period, you see a slight hiccup in terms of implementation fees. I think it's worth noting, and Tim alluded to different significant wins in the period, which we did. So we won Woolworths in November, and we announced our second U.S. client. There is very little revenue for those significant guidance in half 1. So a couple of months of Woolworths and nothing of the U.S. client. So that revenue is to come in half 2. In terms of license fees and transaction fees, we've clearly been COVID impacted, and I'll talk you through sort of a bit more detail on that in the next slide and sort of there's overs and unders going on in those 2 lines. It's worth highlighting the SMS fees, which have grown by quite a lot. So they represent 11% of the revenue in this first half, where we've seen it traditionally be more around 5%. The reason for that is sort of twofold. For those of you that remembered, we implemented a quick solution for SMB outlets to be able to use our system as an identity management catchment tool when COVID first hit and they were using SMS as the mechanic to do that. So that has now been replaced by the government scheme, but we knew that, that was going to be the case, but it generate us some revenue at the beginning of the pandemic. And secondly, which is the majority of this growth that we've seen. One of our customers particularly uses SMS' channel to communicate to its customers when they buy something online. So as a result of the growth in e-commerce, what we've seen is that line grow as a result. So when the goods support, you get a text that says new order is in place. When your goods are about to leave the warehouse, you get to text saying, expect your delivery on this date. So that growth in e-commerce driving the SMS fees growth. This is a little bit more color to sort of match sort of what's going on in volumes compared to what's going on, on the revenue front. So we have seen a bit of a dip in volumes during the period. So 5% drop compared to half 1 '20, but still huge volumes, just under GBP 0.5 billion of transactions. And the graph on the right-hand side is sort of showing you sort of what's going on. So loyalty continues to grow, driven by both the annualization of sales but also SEG is live and now generating volumes through the platform, which is just going to ramp up and it wasn't a Big Bang approach, so more to come on that in future periods. In terms of promotions, promotions has been the area we've been most impacted due to COVID. So first of all, the F&B business has reduced quite dramatically, which represents about 10% of the business. Secondly, the brand activity that goes through our F&B in network has been switched off entirely as a result of network being closed. And then the other area, which is worth highlighting, for one of our supermarkets, we bridge the coupon issuance between in-store and online. So it creates an omnichannel coupon. So if you get a coupon when you buy something online, you can use that coupon in store. And I think what we've seen in terms of shopping habits has been sort of twofold. One, consumers aren't coming into store as much. Maybe a consumer used to go in every night for their supper. Now we're saying consumers may be coming in once a week instead. And secondly, what we are seeing is people are choosing their channel and sticking with it. So people definitely shifted to shopping online, but I think people are making a channel choice. So that particular service I talked about isn't being as used as frequently as we've seen pre-COVID. And then last but not least, gift continues to be a pretty small proportion of transactions and revenue. It's about 5% of revenue, but we did see a pickup in those volumes during Black Friday, where people were clearly in lockdown, so doing significant amount of shopping online, but also that drive, promotional activity, as well was very important. So just a little bit of more detail on the half 1 '21 income statement. Talked about the growth overall compared to half 1 '20. But when we look back compared to that growth of revenue versus the last half, half 2 '20, we still had half-on-half growth of 5%. And you can sort of extrapolate that out to look at compared to what the market's got in terms of the growth, and therefore, you feel that the trajectory is definitely achievable. Gross profit and gross margin. Gross profit has grown. Gross margin is at 91%, down slightly as a result of SMS. So I touched on before, that growth in SMS does carry a significantly lower gross profit because cost of sales are predominantly driven by the cost of the carrying costs for those SMS. So change in mix at the top is impacting the gross profit margin for the period. In terms of net operating expenses, like everybody, there's been a lot of focus on managing their cost base, and we're no exception to that. Net staff cost remains the significant amount of our cost base. Over 60% of cost fall in this category and we've held those costs compared to half 1 '20. So same number of people, 140, and we're managing that and have actually been able to optimize the use of our people in the pandemic because of our operational working and doing that very efficiently. We have had a little bit of benefit still from the move to Google Cloud, which I spoke to a lot of you about in the last set of results. The last year, we had a couple of months where we were parallel running in the last geography. So we do have a little bit of benefit from that coming in from this period, about 0.1 decrease in infrastructure costs. And then the obvious ones in terms of office spend, where we've got offices that have got flexible working space, we've been able to pull back on during this period. And travel clearly has been switched off. And last year, we think we spent about GBP 0.5 million on travel. So that discretionary administrative costs and a couple of people on furlough as well has allowed us to reduce those costs by about 28%. But importantly, we still continue to invest in product. We invested about GBP 2.2 million in the half, in line with what we did in half 1 '20. So we're not compromising on investing in those important areas during the period, too. I've talked about the EBITDA profit and I think it's worth sort of moving then down to the sort of the profit before tax line, where we've made this first half operating profit of GBP 200,000. And I expect we continue to sort of follow that trend going into the second half as well. So overall, feel that the first half is in a pretty good place. Just a little bit of a moment on cash. We burned GBP 1.4 million of cash in the first half. But when I saw you last at the end of the full year, we said that we benefited from deferring about GBP 2 million worth of COVID deferrals, which included like PAYE VAT suppliers, et cetera, et cetera. And from that GBP 1.4 million, GBP 1.1 million of that relates to those COVID repayments. So there's still a little bit more to come in the second half and maybe a little bit beyond because we've deferred the VAT in terms of the latest government scheme as well. But we will, again, in the second half, prepare a chunk of that as well. So if you strip that out, we basically round about GBP 0.5 million of normalized cash outflow compared to GBP 0.9 million in half 1 '20. If we just sort of break down that GBP 1.4 million, what it's made up of, it's GBP 0.2 million of operating cash inflow, split by the breakdown there of GBP 2.1 million EBITDA, working capital outflow of GBP 1.6 million and then we've got an overseas corporation tax payment of GBP 0.3 million going through. So those things netting up to GBP 0.2 million. And then CapEx represents GBP 1.4 million. The majority of which is our capitalized development costs, which is GBP 1.1 million of that. So we're left with headroom for a second half of GBP 5.1 million. GBP 0.1 million of net cash and then Barclays facility of GBP 5 million. And we're comfortable that we've got sufficient headroom to prosecute our existing plan. Just highlighting that we have the facility with Barclays in place till September '21. I'm currently looking at what that means and the different options for us. Clearly, Barclays have key interest to renew the facility with us, but we've also got a lot of interest from other banks as well. So we continue to make progress on that, and I'm pretty confident about what that brings in the future around better terms, et cetera. I am going to hand back to Tim of the strategic update.
Timothy John Mason
executiveThank you very much, Lucy. So just to remind you, our core strategy is to win new customers, get them transacting on the platform, and as a result of the success that they then enjoy with digital marketing, to deepen their products with the services that we offer. And we've talked to you in the past about how GBP 1 of win in year 1 from a client is GBP 3 in year 3 and GBP 4 in year 4. Part of the way that we do that is we develop new products, and we normally talk to you about new things that we've got coming to the market in the year and then, of course, particularly that we take that to new geographies. And then finally, and I've already mentioned it today, that we run our business in a way that we try and run it as better, simpler and cheap. So just stepping through that, this has been our best period for win in the company's history. We have won new enterprise wins, Woolworths, in particular, who are the market leader in Australia, and I'll come back and talk a little bit more about them in a while. Pret a Manger, where they have launched this very popular subscription program, which is being run on our system. We announced last week that we've been working for a while with Virgin Red. There's several interesting features about the Virgin Red opportunity. One is it's an airline. It's our first move into the airline vertical, where they have a lot of loyalty programs. The second is that it's an affiliate network. So there's a lot of different businesses where you can earn the points, all coming together to one account, to one individual. And then the final element is actually that there's a burn network as well. So you can flight in New York and then exchange your reward for Greggs sausage rolls, if you fancy it. These are all examples that I've talked to you in the past of the Eagle Eye technology stitching all of that together and making that operable. So I think that's interesting. And then great to have signed that lovely brand, Liberty. And good collaboration Salesforce where we're working with our e-commerce operation and Oracle tools. Transaction volumes have been impacted. They're sort of flattish. But -- and I think the situation there is they've been impacted by COVID on the one hand, but -- and the new clients are in the run-up stage, not at the transaction stage. So it's absolutely nothing to worry about, completely explicable and our transactions will be growing again once we emerge from COVID. And then in terms of deepening, we continue to have a staggeringly low level of churn, 0.2%. Good contract renewals during the year. And doing some nice new work for the Loblaw program in the period. I've talked a bit about the Virgin thing already, but you can see it here. So at the center, you have Eagle Eye, which sets all the opportunities for both the earning and the burning, as I've shown you there. So different places to earn, different places to spend. This is a great showcase of the breadth of the Eagle Eye technology and our ability to stitch different things together and also the -- as I said, the fact that it takes us into airlines, which is an interesting space. Our position in North America is moving forward nicely. So we won a new client in the office and home products space, big American retailer, over 1,000 stores and we are just ramping that up to go to a pilot before the end of our financial year. Southeastern Grocers keeps progressing. Coupon at till is now live, plus that -- plus the clip to card. So that's going well. It is live, but it's a phased-implementation approach. So there's a lot more transactions to come from the Southeastern Grocer account over the next 6 months to a year. And as I mentioned, Loblaw has done some interesting stuff around health and also around subscriptions, both of which we are helping them to deliver, and they're 2 very sort of relevant of the moment topics. We were absolutely delighted to win Woolworths. Woolworths are the market leader in Australia. They are a digital leader. In fact, we work with a business called [ Willis X ], which is the digital arm of the Woolworths Group. And the reason that they created [ Willis X ] was because they wanted to be able to move at a faster pace to address the market opportunity that digital offered, and they felt that the core business just wasn't going to be able to move that fast. They are, for me, absolutely the market leader in Australia. So we joined the market leader in Australia to the market leader in Canada. The Sainsbury's in the U.K., and these are all leading digital businesses. We continue to support the warehouse group, which is the big nonfood retailer in New Zealand. And I think this gives us a strong base for expansion within Australia and New Zealand, but also particularly moving out into Asia. In terms of innovation, so I've mentioned that Message at Till is now live. Not only does that come out printed on a till receipt, as you may have experienced sometimes if you've shopped at, say, a Marks & Spencer or a Waitrose, but it also now clips to card and becomes present on your app at the same time. One of the big things that we've done for Southeastern Grocers is point-of-sale connect, which is just upweighting and upskilling our ability to analyze baskets and the speed at which we can analyze baskets and our ability to apply discounts against more complicated rules and more complicated promotional sets. This is the guts, the engine room of digital promotion. We've made a big step forward to achieve everything that Southeastern Grocers want to do here, and this technology will be applied with other new clients that we have won in the period, and we're still continuing to benefit from being hosted on Google platform. Because of the lockdown and not being able to go to the office and everything else, we had to focus even more closely, I think, on our people in the year. We wanted to try and get through COVID without missing a beat. Our people are the crucial thing in what we do. As we went into lockdown, we did a stress survey to understand how our people were feeling and how we could support them through the disrupted and lockdown working. We discovered that although our teams felt that they were working very hard and that they were under pressure to deliver, they weren't under unreasonable pressure, that they understood what they were doing and why they were doing it and that they had support from their teams and their managers to deliver. As ever, when you research these things, what you discover is the biggest course of stress to any employee is the behavior of their boss. And so what we set up was some extra management training to try and improve the quality and capability of our managers and how they look after their people. I think in the old world, we'd have probably got that senior management team together for some sort of residential offsite. What we've done because of lockdown and everything else is we actually have a weekly seminar, which the whole of the executive committee and the whole of the senior management team attend, where we discuss different books, there's a book called The Chimp Paradox, which is about how you manage yourself in order to make sure that you don't allow your own frailties to impact the life of people working for you; a book called The Loyalty Effect, how you create value for customers, how you engage staff. We've done a big piece of work on agile and how to deploy agile across the whole business. As I say, we get together on a weekly basis. We also started measuring Employee Promoter Score during this period, and 54% of people would recommend Eagle Eye's products and services and 60% would recommend it as a place to work. For those of you not familiar with Net Promoter Score, it's a 10-point scale and you only count the top 2 boxes, and you subtract from the top 2 boxes, any scores in the bottom 6 boxes, the other 2 being neutral. So it's a very, very aggressive score and actually, it's quite common. You can have negative. You can quite easily have negative Net Promoter Scores. And certainly, to get to the levels of 60 as a Net Promoter Score is very high. We're very pleased with it, we're working very hard to keep it going because we believe that, ultimately, it's our people that make the difference and enable us to deliver for our customers and for shareholders. In terms of outlook, our trading remains in line with Board expectations. We have been impacted by COVID, there is no doubt. If our underlying trade was not COVID impacted and we were able to lay out the wins that we're enjoying on top of it, we would be enjoying record trading. Our pipeline is strong, particularly in the U.S., but starting to materialize in Asia. Our funding position, as Lucy has explained for the current strategy is solid. And I think that, as I tend to say every time I see you, the market is coming towards us, and I think COVID has accelerated businesses' need to adopt and implement things digital. So the ode remains confident that there is a significant opportunity for us going forward as the world comes out of lockdown. Thank you very much indeed for your attention. We'd be delighted to take any questions you may have.
Operator
operatorWe have a question from Kevin Ashton from Nplus1.
Kevin Ashton
analystI'd like to ask you a little bit about the product, I guess, acceptance through momentum. I mean, Tim, you already mentioned something that we see all the time, which is, I think you described as staggeringly low churn. So acceptance is kind of answered in a way. But is this win rate that is interesting that you talk about, that you say it's the best ever win rate you have, and we've seen one of the names that you've talked about, big enterprise names coming in, you just talked us through a few of them. I guess from our point of view, was looking for trends or inflection points and so it's kind of hard to see the trigger on that, I suppose. But it does feel like you're somehow crossed a rubicon to some extent. And you also talk about a very strong pipeline. And if you're winning more deals, you're going in. I mean, I guess the slides you showed at the beginning shows where you are adding the value, but I'm just kind of thinking, how does it look from yourselves. Does it feel like you've, I'm not sure it's an evolution rather than a sudden change in terms of your offering, but it does feel like, as you say, a higher win rate is a big deal.
Timothy John Mason
executiveI mean -- yes, no, it is a very big deal, Kevin. I think it's a shade irritating that -- I think the history of Eagle Eye to date would have been some amazing wins with the likes of the Loblaws and the Sainsbury's and -- but that underlying ability to turn GBP 1 of win in year 1 into GBP 4 by year 4, has actually been the driver of the historical performance of the business. Yes, the first bloody year that we get the winds going, stone me, if we don't have a pandemic, and actually, the underlying is a bit softened by the pandemic. But there's nothing -- so I would say that the reason that we're able to grow the business is -- a lot of it has to do with what we've won and the annualization of what we've won. It's fair to say that a lot of what we've won is not transacting yet. So there's a lot to come from those wins, but -- and I think we're confident -- well, we are confident that the underlying will return, that brands will want to be doing more digital marketing, that food and beverage industry will want to be winning customers when we come out of lockdown and get their industry back going again. So I think that the layers will come back into place as we move into the fourth quarter of this year and then into the start of next year.
Operator
operatorAnd we'll go to Ross Broadfoot from Investec.
Ross Broadfoot
analystAnd 2 questions, if I may. The first, as you get more boots on the ground in the regions where you've recently won bigger clients, how will that change the setup of your teams from a sort of sales perspective? Lucy, I know you're heavily involved in Loblaws, but are there sort of regional heads of sales that are now empowered at that kind of level? So that's question one. The second, and the method, obviously so far has been invest as you win. But obviously, you're flagging -- COVID having driven structure at your clients in terms of omnichannel. And as more and more enterprise-level clients join the platform and you continue to build that roster of client, is there a potential to ship to investing slightly ahead of new client wins? And is there anything on the platform that you would love to have that you think would really help get you into clients' x, y and z that is currently you're waiting to sort of invest more in?
Timothy John Mason
executiveSo international management, we've actually -- we now run the business with regional Vice Presidents. So we have Jonathan Reeve down in Australia and Asia. We have Al Henderson, who is also our CSO but is the Regional Vice President for U.K. and EMEA. And we have, at the moment, we're covering the U.S. and North America by -- with Anthony Stevenson, who actually is Head of Sales rather than the Regional Vice President. So I think the short answer, Ross, is absolutely yes. And the reason that we've done that and the structural emphasis of that is that these regional VPs articulate the needs and wants of the clients on their geography. If Eagle Eye is successful by being a very customer-focused business by creating a lot of value for the people that we serve as I think that pain points slide illustrates in the deck and so what we want to make sure is that even if you're the other side of the world, we are getting very clear feedback about what clients need, what clients expect, where we're overperforming, where we're underperforming, et cetera. So yes, is the short answer to that. In terms of -- I wouldn't say we -- no, no, the short answer is we are not being -- we are not limited to do something that we want to do by shortage of funds. We are okay with the pay-as-we-go model. And of course, the better we do, the more funds we generate to get a little bit ahead of ourselves. So I think we're okay, but you have my absolute assurance that if I do think we are slowing ourselves down, then clearly, we will come to shareholders and explain the benefit that we can deliver by accelerating. But at the moment, we -- this is a very profitable business. You've seen us start to turn to full PBT, profitability. But it's -- we are managing the profitability that we make, so that we can drive the growth. We're not just letting the full profitability that the business could achieve rip through the organization because we've got lots of growth to deliver for as far ahead as we can see. So we have our own ability to fuel our growth, I think.
Lucy Sharman-Munday
executiveAnd the question Tim specifically around investing in the platform or the products, I think the answer for that is also no in terms of, is there anything a huge gap in our product portfolio. I think the last 12 months, we've been investing in the Message at Till capability, which I think is very important for the U.S. market. So if we didn't have that, maybe we'll be saying now, yes, that will be a gap with our strategy of growing in the U.S. But I think, as we said to you before, we invest into the products very much linked into what our customers are telling us rather than speculative investment. And I think we feel that actually, that strategy is sort of keeping us, again, on the curve rather than behind on that strategy. Would you agree?
Timothy John Mason
executiveI would. And I think we've talked to you before about the development of the affiliate network and actually, we didn't tell you it was Virgin, yes? So we -- I think Lucy is right, I think it's the way we've got amazing clients who have a view about how they want to do personalization and how they want to do their marketing. And because of the geographic spread, we can help them develop that and then deploy it elsewhere. So quite a lot of the work that we will do -- we're doing at the moment and is going live at the moment in North America is needed for work that we will be doing in the near future in APAC.
Operator
operatorAnd we'll go to Robin Speakman from Shore Cap.
Robin Speakman
analystJust following on from Ross' question just on cost within the business. Cost management over the last year throughout the pandemic has been a very positive surprise to all of us, I think, and clearly very welcomed. Just looking at costs moving forward, do I sort of take it from your answer to Ross' question that from this point, really, cost inflation in the business is going to be concentrated around the future sales effort. Clearly, the platform is pretty well developed. Implementations, you've talked in the past about them being on a shortening time scale. So what I'm getting at here is the ability for cost leverage focusing on sales?
Lucy Sharman-Munday
executiveYes. Yes. I think -- yes, the immediate requirement in the business at the moment is around the delivery of the new wins. So I think we spoke to you before. We have a team that sort of comes in initially with the expertise and then we fill in behind it. We're at the stage now for our international new wins in terms of Woolworths and the North American win that we're currently recruiting for the local team to support that. So the initial team can drop back and then will be deployed on the next new opportunity that comes in. So we're currently recruiting for 6 heads specifically for that requirement. In terms of further investment, I think we continue to be flexible. And we will continue -- I think as you point out, Robin, I think we had -- before the pandemic, we were beginning to get a bit of a reputation of not investing too far ahead of where we needed to be and I think we'll continue to do that. We've got a clear line of sight in terms of what we want to be doing in terms of bond movement of our margin. And there's a skill for that in terms of not releasing it too quickly because we're still sort of putting new and new geographies. But I think definitely, sales is an area we would want to invest into the future, especially if we start seeing that America has really got the potential that we believe it has. And I think probably the product is the other area that we will continue to invest in because it's important as we grow on the top line, but it won't grow at the same rate as the top line itself.
Robin Speakman
analystOkay. Understood. Just moving to the actual mix of the client base. And what we've seen as you identified there, Tim, about the kind of success of online. I was just wondering how you saw a potential role for Eagle Eye in servicing the growing number of online-only potential retailers? And also, third question is just about the significant data flow that you are generating, and clearly, the platform is now pretty embedded across sectors. You must be generating some really interesting data and I just wondered about whether there are any plans to sort of monetize that, whether it's possible to monetize that? Or whether you see the data capability as you're sort of strengthening your own proposition with the client base?
Timothy John Mason
executiveOur sweet spot is omnichannel. Our sweet spot is online to offline, which is about 80% of economic activities. So at the moment, we don't -- and where we're particularly helpful is where an online -- sorry, an omnichannel business has an online offering, which struggles to speak to its stores, its shops, and we can reconnect them back together so that they can have a better single customer view. So our strength is not pure place, I would say, at the moment. In terms of data, we -- the 3-layer cake, the 3-part bit that we show you at the beginning, at the moment, we have no -- we're not a data business. We're a transaction business. We hold -- we tend to hold very little data, and we hold it for as little time as possible, and we pass it back to the client. So we keep our GDPR compliance levels light, and we just do our transaction, do what needs to be done and then hand it back to the client. That doesn't have to be forever. If we decided that, that was the best way to grow Eagle Eye, then we could change that. We could equally, easily plug into Eagle Eye data analytics, Inc. as we plug into dunnhumby. But at the moment, as yet, we haven't chosen to do it. So I think both things that you allude to are ways in which Eagle Eye could grow in the future going forward. The thing that we will have to do as the management team on behalf of the shareholders, is to pick the ones that we think will give us the best bang for buck.
Robin Speakman
analystOkay. Very helpful.
Timothy John Mason
executiveAt the moment, frankly, the best thing that we can do is to get more and more enterprise businesses on the platform that we've got. We haven't even started yet in terms of just the U.S. itself, as you know, Robin, is such a massive opportunity for this. And one of the great things about our entry in the U.S. is the incumbents are not very popular. So that the people that have got -- have current contracts for services that we offer are always looking, is there a way I can change the system? Is there a way I can replace it? And we're a different sort of business. I just talked earlier on about the way we create value for businesses. That is different. That is attractive. And I think it will do well in the U.S.
Operator
operatorAnd very quickly, we'll go to Katie Cousins from Shore Cap.
Katie Cousins
analystJust a quick question from me. ESG is in the forefront of a lot of investors' minds right now. I just wanted to ask what is Eagle Eye doing to address this? Or how do the company values positively contribute towards ESG qualities?
Lucy Sharman-Munday
executiveIt's a good question, Katie. We've actually got -- we set up sort of an Executive Committee to look at it. I think there's sort of 3 areas that we're sort of addressing and looking at the moment. One is around people and diversity and equality. And Tim started to talk about the real focus around people and it sort of extends beyond that. For example, we've started an ERG program as well, run by a group of employees, set up by them. And each month, we talk about a different important topic, whatever that is. This month, we've talked about International Women's Group, Women's Day. The month before, we talked about Chinese New Year, for example. We talked about Black Lives Matter. So there's always been a topic where we're trying to drive really the topics from what's important to our people. So we're doing a big piece of work around people. Clearly, around being carbon-neutral and the environment, et cetera, et cetera, that's been run by our COO. We are sort of fortunate clearly that our solution is about trying to eliminate paper. But also our big suppliers really are the people, which obviously doesn't have that sort of impact is around Google and Rackspace, another big technology supplier. So we're fortunate that they've got their own initiatives as well. So that helps in terms of flow through to our business. And then I think there is the sort of general compliance side as well, which sort of I'm sort of running and looking at in tandem with the speed to frameworks that are in the market. So it's something that we'll be able to report on more fully at the full year, but it's sort of underway, and we're looking at it pretty seriously.
Operator
operatorDan Ridsdale from Edison.
Daniel Ridsdale
analystYes. I was just trying to get a picture of the sort of later revenue value within your current customer base. And you talked about it going from GBP 1 to GBP 4 in 4 years. I mean, of the sort of GBP 10.8 million revenue of the period, are you able to give a picture on how much of that is coming from, I guess, the people are still early on that journey and then you talked about customers who are not yet generating revenues. And obviously, you've got the effect of COVID, I guess, complicating that. Is there any -- are there any metrics you can give to steer us in that regard?
Timothy John Mason
executiveThe overall point is, the better we do at winning, the more we have coming in at the one level with the opportunity to develop 2, 3, 4 in the years going forward. So that's great for the outlook. I think the second thing is that I don't see any reason why most clients won't return to the sorts of behaviors that they had prior to lockdown. So I think that, that will also contribute. Lucy, I don't know if you want to add anything else?
Lucy Sharman-Munday
executiveNo, I was just going to say this year is a bit of a funny year, clearly, because of the pandemic impacting the growth of existing clients that maybe are on year 2 or 3 of their journey. So we're probably going to get a bit of a flattening. So I think we haven't done the specific analysis because we do it on an annual basis. But the important thing for us is actually, we've got quite a few wins coming in, in the pipe this year that is going to really drive that growth and that shape going forward so -- which is important and at a higher rate than we've seen before.
Operator
operatorAnd that's the end of questions. Tim, have you got any closing remarks?
Timothy John Mason
executiveThank you very much for joining us. I think, as we say, I think the outlook is, for the rest of the year, is sort of as we've indicated. And I think the moving into next year, I think there really is quite an opportunity for these wins and the strength of the pipeline to start layering up in the way that we've sort of indicated that the business will perform. So I'm pretty bullish, to be honest, about what the next year will hold.
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