GB Group plc (GBG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And it's great to see so many people in person as actually someone just said to me, if you think about the last 3 years, this is probably one of the largest in-person gatherings for quite some time, and it's great to see so many familiar faces. Actually, also very worth -- well, should note, we've also got over a 100 people who are joining us virtually from around the world. Hence, actually, one of the reasons we put it on in U.K. afternoon to make sure our U.S. Cousins going to all join. So a very warm welcome. As I said, I know a number of you in this room And for those who don't know me, I'm Chris Clark, Chief Executive of GBG. And again those of you who know us well might well remember that we ran a series of Capital Markets events around our 3 core capability areas of location, identity and fraud. Actually, location we did in July 2018; identity we did in December '19 and fraud was scheduled for early 2020. And as we all know, for obvious reasons, that was canceled, I won't say, postponed. But when I thought about that, it actually made me think how far we actually, as a company, has evolved in the last 3 years or just over 3 years. And in fact, what today is all about is demonstrating the progress we've made to create what we believe is a unique integrated capability set. And on that note, we're very much today hoping to demonstrate to you why we believe we are in a unique position through the work that we've undergone over the last number of years, and we will not be focusing on the short term. And the agenda following me takes 4 key parts. Firstly, we're absolutely delighted that we have Julie who's come over from Michigan, who is from an external industry analyst to give you real insight from not GBG about what's going on in terms of structural growth drivers, what customers are saying and how the industry ecosystem is developing. We're then going to hear from 4 of our products, data and technology experts, hoping to describe what makes GBG special or our secret source. We'll then take a short break -- and we'll hear from 2 of our 4 managing directors who will very much focus on why we win today in the market. And then we'll be wrapped up by David, our CFO, who will talk about our medium-term guidance. And then David and I will host Q&A. And for those in person, and you have the time after the event, there will be drinks but also 4 product demonstrations to allow -- to give you all a chance to see our products in action. GBG differentiates around 3 core areas, and we hope that it becomes very clear to you during the course of today, our data, our technology and our team. And personally, actually, one of the things that I'm most excited about today is the fact that you have the opportunity to hear from and meet a number of the GBG team. We've got people that are presenting or here in the audience that have grown their careers in GBG, Gus being an example. We also have David Green, who's been at GBG for over 25 years. I can't see, David. He's at the back there, over 25 years, who is Managing Director of our Loqate business. We've got people that joined GBG more recently through acquisition. We've got Chris, who is our CEO of GBG Americas, who joined us from IDology and we've got Jose, who joined us more recently with Acuant. And we've got people who've joined us over the last 2 years as we've helped to scale the business. Whether that's Dave who runs our Asia region, or Borris, who runs our European region, who is at the back as well. And hopefully, you'll get a sense of why we are so proud of the team and why we believe that adds significant competitive differentiation. Before handing to Julie, let me try and set the scene. We have a very clear purpose, building trust in a digital world, and we have a very clear vision for a world where everyone can transact online with confidence. Those are very easy things to say and words to put on a slide and there are certainly, words that inspire all 1,300 of us around the world that work for GBG in our work day in, day out. But as I think you'll get some sense of today, particularly actually from Gus and Julie, it's a very, very difficult thing to do. That creates a long-term opportunity for GBG. But I think more importantly for us, as employees at GBG is what drives us day in to day out, thank you on making a real difference. We are at the forefront of a large growing deeply fragmented market that has strong structural growth drivers through all sorts of economic cycles. Now Julie and us are both going to talk a lot more about this. But very simply, it is about continued digitalization, particularly with a focus on customer experience, continued ever-increasing amounts of fraud and ever increasing amounts of regulation that our customers have to face. Those 3 fundamental points continue and will continue for multiple years ahead. We have thousands of people that have worked incredibly hard over years, both organically and inorganically that have helped us create what is a unique position. And that's demonstrated by the significant capability we have in data as Gust will describe. It's also evidenced by the thousands of customers we serve every day. Customers across a variety of end market sectors of a variety of scale from household names right through to the most innovative startups and customers that like working with GBG, -- we are very proud of our customer relationships and our Net Promoter Scores. And actually, we're delighted today that you will hear from 5 customers via video of a variety of sizes and scales from all of our key geographies that hopefully gives you that flavor. And I've already talked about the 1,300 GBG team members that make us special. And as I think those of you know us well, know we're deeply proud of our very high engagement scores. And we have a very attractive financial model, as David will come back to. Our growth strategy is based around 3 core dimensions: geographic expansion, sector diversification and extending our product capabilities. Let me touch on each 3 of those in a little bit more detail, starting with geography. The bad actors, the people that we are trying to stop don't see national borders. They don't understand local regulation. In fact, all of those differences creates opportunity for them. And I think Julie will touch a bit more about that. So when we think about geographic expansion, the first thing we do is think about having broad global coverage of data so we can satisfy our customers' demands wherever they are in the world. The second thing we then think about is how do we get more customers in key geographies because that, as Gus will explain, give more power to our overall data capabilities. And we have, over the last number of years, and we will continue to expand geographically and Gus -- sorry, Dave and Chris will both talk about this in more detail through both organic and inorganic activity over time. From a sector perspective, Financial Services has and will continue to be for multiple years ahead, the biggest part of what we do. And I think that's for fairly obvious reasons in terms of the size of the price for the bad actors, but also the significant regulation around financial services. And with the continued evolution or disruption of the financial services market, we act believe the long-term growth opportunity in Financial Services. Having said all of that, when one thinks about the secular growth drivers, we have seen over the last number of years and expect to see continued further opportunity in different customer end markets. And we believe there's significant opportunity for us over time across public sector, including things like national border controls. -- and utilities and telco as well as things like health care and continued expansion in sectors like gaming as sports betting gets liberalized further around the world. And again, both Dave and Chris will talk more about how that's playing out and how we think about it. And then last but not least, product extension. It wasn't many years ago when our location type services were bought by marketers to help them win more customers. Identity services were bought by compliance departments to fundamentally meet compliance regulatory needs. And our stand-alone fraud services were bought by risk divisions of, say, Tier 1 banks. However, we've absolutely seen a significant shift over the last 3 years, and we expect that to continue and accelerate. We're actually to protect yourself as a business and to protect your consumers and keep them safe, you need to have an end-to-end capability to minimize the risk. And again, I hope that comes through further as a team explain what makes us special. And we will continue to drive through organic development a true end-to-end capability that is second to none. So that's what today is all about. That's a headline. It now gives me huge pleasure to introduce Julie to talk more about the market from an external perspective. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Chris. So I'm with Aite-Novarica. I'm the Head of Risk Insights. We are a global advisory firm, and I'm fortunate to manage a team of people that all of us have come out of Industry. So all of us have been on the front lines, fighting fraud, fighting financial crime, in some cases building products that help do this. And now we bring this kind of background to bear with a bird's eye view that help us educate our clients about the challenges and the types of technologies that can be used to essentially fight the bad guys. While ensuring a delightful customer experience because that is really the goal for the customers of firms like GBG is how can you stop the bad guys while not putting too much friction in front of the customer that leads to lost revenue. So for the next 15 minutes, I'm going to talk about some of the key trends that we see driving investments in solutions like GBG. I'll talk about, to Chris' point, why Identity is easy to say, but it's really hard to master. And then we'll spend a little bit of time with the future view. So as we look at the key trends for those that are sitting in the buyer seat at financial institutions, at gaming firms at e-commerce merchants, digital acceleration is certainly one of them. We were already progressing pretty rapidly towards this digital-first environment even before for the pandemic and that pandemic put the pedal to the metal on some of these aspects. And so we've done some subsequent consumer surveys across multiple geographic markets to say, okay, so Mr. Consumer, you tried mobile banking for the first time during the pandemic because your branch was locked down. You tried sending a push payment for the first time because nobody wanted to touch cash. To what extent are you going to stick with these new behavior patterns? And what we have seen very clearly, both in the survey data as well as the actual transactional data is that this digital-first behavior is going to stick for the majority of consumers. And that kind of leapfrogging we saw during the pandemic is something that is here to stay. We also, over the past decade, have seen the rapid industrialization of fraud and financial crime. And it's not a fraud presentation if you don't have your obligatory picture of that guy in the hoodie, but it very much is this -- it's fraud ink at this point. And they've brought all of the data breaches over the past decade to bear with very sophisticated automated tools that enable them to heavily target financial institutions with very sophisticated attacks. I was actually on a Zoom call just last week with one of our bank clients that for the past 6 weeks, they have been enduring an attack that in their words, the identities are close to pristine and the monetization of those new accounts that are opened with these identities happens within 48 hours. This is the kind of threat environment that GBG's customers are trying to face. And this is why kind of that end-to-end fabric of risk assessment technologies is now so essential to stopping the dollars from going out the door while at the same time ensuring a great customer experience. And at the same time that you're trying to stop the bad guys, you have this competitive impetus of a delightful customer experience. And kind of this bar of expectation that has been set for minimal friction by folks like Apple and Amazon and Uber. And so as you're looking at this competitive ecosystem, having the ability to do effective risk assessment of either a new identity as it's coming to the fore or a return identity even figuring out, is this Chris Clark? Or is this somebody that just bought Chris Clark's details off of the dark web 10 minutes ago? And then regulation drives really interesting differences across geos that drive differential investment patterns. So you have markets like South Korea that for more than a decade, has mandated that for any online banking transaction, you have strong multifactor authentication in place. Contrast that with the U.S. market that has had no such requirement for quite some time. You don't have to enter a onetime password every time you get into your online banking account. And so the investment patterns in those markets will be very different. Europe moved to the SCA over the last few years. That has driven some very interesting investments in things like online banking as well as card-not-present e-commerce transactions. And then you have different KYC regulations that drive different gaps in the identity construct across different markets. Australia has a very rigorous KYC requirement. And so doing things like perpetrating synthetic identity fraud where you create a fake identity out of the ether is really hard to do in Australia. In contrast with the U.S. market, which has an incredibly porous identity construct and synthetic identity is a massive problem in that market. So this just underscores how complex the ecosystem is and how for a merchant or a bank that is operating an identity construct across borders, is really hard to do. And this is why as we look at sizing this identity market or fraud and financial crime market. If anybody tells you that they have one big sizing for the entire globe, you're going to want to take a very close look at that methodology because as you look at how people invest in identity and fraud and AML solutions, it's going to vary market by market, and in many cases, it's going to vary use case by use case. So when we do a sizing, we look at a specific technology, such as global document identity verification where you take a picture of that driver's license or passport verify that against the facial and then we'll size that technology, which we believe is growing at a very rapid clip. It's double digits over the next few years because there are so many use cases that, that is applicable to. And identity really is essential and at the heart of those trusted transactions. So the identity fabric as you look at this, is complex. And it consists both of deterministic types of checks. So when somebody comes in to open up a new current account at NatWest, you're going to do some checks to see that name, that tax ID number, that address matches the data on file at a source of record. But then there's also many probabilistic checks that you're going to want to combine with those. Things like does this device have a good reputation. Has it been used before? Is the e-mail address associated with this identity something that we've seen in the ecosystem for the 15 years that we see consumer history for them? Or is it something that was a Gmail account that was set up 10 days ago? All of these can factor into kind of a holistic risk assessment of is this identity something that we can trust and put minimal friction in front of? Or is it something that we need to do some additional checks? Because the reality is, all of our data is readily available on the dark web. Our personally identifiable information, our credentials, all of it's for sale out there. And you can see the bargain price of $120 to get a brand-new identity that belongs to somebody else. These are 2 examples. There are thousands of sites like this all over the dark web. I mean it really does, this is the underpinning of this industrialized fraud economy that we're up against. And unfortunately, consumers still make it really easy for the bad guys to perpetrate a lot of these attacks. We just pulled some research out of the market. at the end of last year, where we surveyed consumers across Singapore, across the U.S. and in the U.K., about the extent to which they have good password hygiene and the extent to which, as you are interacting with multiple online properties, be it your bank or an e-commerce firm or a travel firm? Do you use different sets of user name passwords so that when Twitter gets breached and the bad guys all of a sudden have 35 million user name passwords at their disposal and they immediately put those into bots to see how many different properties, those users and passwords will work at. If you're not using different user name passwords, they have the keys to the kingdom. Unfortunately, as you can see from this graphic, the majority of consumers across all countries are using that same handful of user name passwords across all of their online relationships and 1 in 4 consumers across all these geos aren't even using a unique user name password for their bank. Again, this makes it very easy for the bad guys to perpetrate their fraud and underscores why firms like GBG that can help guard against this are so essential to the ecosystem. Because the failure to adequately risk-assess identity has so many consequences for the firms that are on the receiving end of all of these attacks, rising fraud losses. So application fraud, account takeover scams. I was talking to one of our other financial services clients a couple of weeks ago, and they were saying, right now for every 10 -- for every one good account login that they see into their online banking site. There are 10 fraudulent attempts that just kind of underscores the velocity that's coming at us right now from a financial services and e-commerce ecosystem. There's reputational risk. So if you are not adequately verifying that you know this customer on the other end of the transaction, it's not just a fraud risk. It's also you're in violation of your KYC obligations. And that leads to fines, that leads to unpleasant headlines for your brand. And then there's also customer retention. So if a fraud happens on an account with a wealth management company with a financial services firm that customer is not going to feel protected. And the consumer surveys that we've done across a variety of different use cases show that the vast majority of consumers, if that trust is breached, they're going to take their business elsewhere. So as you look at kind of the ecosystem of managing fraud, unfortunately, security innovation all too often precede security. So you have this kind of virtuous cycle where a new product or service is introduced and will take banking, for example. You introduced faster payments or you introduce push payments. You haven't necessarily as a firm thought through all of the risks. And so the bad guys typically find the gaps before those gaps can be plugged. They will use their automation. They will get as much money as they can in a shorter period of time until that financial services firm is able to bring technology to bear to plug the gaps. Unfortunately, that is not often a fast process. The bad guys don't have to make business cases to justify investment. Usually, the good guys do. And so as you, over time, do you justify the investments, you upgrade, then the bad guys will find a new hole. And so this is why fraud really is always going to be a journey. It doesn't have a destination for any of us because it is this lopsided game of chess, where for every one move we, as the good guys have, the bad guys get 2 or 3. And this is why, as you look at the various technologies that are needed to protect the ecosystem, be it in financial services or in gaming or in health care. You need to have that ability to -- as somebody comes in the door, identity-proof them determine is this a good customer? Is this a good prospect or is this indicative of patterns of a bad guy? And that requires both those deterministic identity checks that I talked about at the outset as well as some of those probabilistic that brings our digital identity into the equation. And those same elements are essential across the life cycle of the consumer to make sure that as we have established a relationship with the consumer, that somebody hasn't compromised it and that this still is our good customer coming time and time again. And as we put various controls in front of consumers to do this. consumers have a very strong opinion about the ability to have some control over that customer journey. We have a number of consumer surveys that we've done across geos and we've cut them by age groups that show that, in some cases, consumers are very comfortable with things like fingerprints and facial biometrics. In other cases, as we look at different age groups, as you get older, your fingerprint starts wearing off. And it doesn't work so well for seniors. So having the ability to put various forms of authentication and risk assessment in the consumers' hands to choose is something that we're seeing more and more firms trying to do to facilitate that great customer journey. And this is where the orchestration hub has emerged as a key area of focus. And the concept behind this is you can have one API call to your trusted vendor that then can facilitate a number of different detection and authentication solutions behind the scenes. Not only does this help to facilitate a more effective customer journey, more efficient IT resources, but it can also help firms to be much more nimble in the face of this rapidly rising threat environment. I spoke at a conference a few years ago, where I spoke after a famous hacker. And at the end, he was supposedly reformed, although it kind of sounded like he was bragging up there. But at the end of the presentation, there is a financial service from the audience to raise their hand and said, what could we do to make it harder for guys like you And he didn't hesitate. He said, You've got to be more nimble. You were so slow and makes it easy for us. And that's where we're seeing increasing investment in this orchestration hub capability set. Because you're not waiting in line in the IT queue of some slow financial institution that takes 18 months to get through that queue. You're partnering with the vendor that can help you to be much quicker and much more nimble. And at the end of the day, a holistic understanding of identity, both the static data elements as well as all of the digital metadata that we leave behind as we're engaging in the digital environment is critical to being successful both in terms of fighting the bad guys as well as ensuring that great customer journey. So I'm going to turn it over to Gus Tomlinson, who's going to tell us a little bit more about that.

Hi, everybody. I'm Gus Tomlinson. I'm Chief Product Officer in EMEA. And as Chris [indiscernible] 32.36 upon, I've been at GBG for 10 years now and have actually got to see how GBG has grown its product data on tech, both organically and inorganically. I'm also joined today by Kartik, Mark and Jose, who will also bring to life a little bit more of the technologies that we're using and some of the innovation that we have coming up. Location identity and fraud, you all should be very, very familiar with those. Independently, they are all market-leading solutions. But hopefully. And what comes through today is that when combined, we add more value to our customers, and we differentiate more from our competitors. And that's really the message I want you to take away. Every single day, each of you in the room and millions of customers globally will interact with our technology we just might not know it.And that's actually a really good thing because if we listen to what Julie just said, it's that excellent customer experience that actually is a testament to the tech and the data and how we use it. Location. Capturing addresses and validating them, along with mobile and e-mail to make sure that very first step of the customer journey is outstanding. For those of you who get a bit of flat-pack furniture delivered from IKEA or a pair of Nike trainers globally, it's GBG that makes sure that gets to your door in the quickest best way. identity, making sure that you can trust that a person who is presenting themselves is who they say they are and also importantly, linked to compliance that you are allowed to do business with them. If it's at bet365 customer globally who wants to place a bet, it's GBG's technology that underpins that. And lastly, for, certainly not least, throughout the customer journey knowing that you can do business and that you can trust that transaction, that's GBG, and if it is HSBC across Asia, or Barclays mortgages in the U.K., it's GBG's technology that underpins those fast and accurate decisions. So when combined, these solutions are truly differentiated. If we look next at what our customers expect and Julie has already touched on quite a lot of this, and our customers operate in a fiercely competitive landscape and a tricky one, don't be too depressed by all for that's out there, don't worry. We're here. They want to onboard more customers. Why? So they can drive growth. They want to stop fraud as early as possible. And if you can do that at the front door even better, and they need to comply with regulations. Onboarding more customers, it takes a lot in a competitive environment to get that customer to your front door. So it's our job to make sure that we give them the best experience that we match as many as possible experience. And that's what our tech does. And by combining and layering things like location, identity and fraud. That is exactly what we do. We take focus starts who are part of the FlexiGroup. We help them combine both data and document checks so that actually, if you get somebody from a hard-to-reach market that you can't match on data, you can step them up to documents and you can still give them a digital experience, and they can place their bet. We also take other customers where actually, if you put an address in, we make sure it is in the best possible format because some of the people that we pass our data to, they don't have the best possible format. So we do the hard work of making sure you get the best mate. Stopping fraud as early as possible. It's a huge problem for our customers You hear that fosters are getting more and more sophisticated. If we take loan application fraud, 14% of it is due to synthetic due to all of those breaches, bonus abuse fraud, cost the gambling industry, about 15% annually of its turnover. -- huge, huge numbers. So stopping that is a big, big headache solver for our customers. And we layer technology, and we've been doing this for a number of years that make sure you know an identity is who they say they are, and you can trust them. A really great example and you'll hear it a few times today is how we reacted very, very quickly to the Optus and Medicare breaches in Australia by adding alerts in when we do an identity check to make sure that you can trust them. And that actually came from the great learning of velocity checks when we acquired Audiology in America. And lastly, complying with regulations, whether that be anti-money laundering, age, vulnerability or actually data privacy regulations, it's hard and it's really, really complicated. And it's GBG's expertise and investment in learning about that, that makes us valuable to our customers. If we take gaming, Ontario has recently regulated in the state of Canada, and we've helped most of the top operators globally to enter that market. The data that the regulations went live. Another great thing is if you've got the U.K. Gambling Commission using your technology is a good rubber stamp. So how do we do it? There's lots of different ways. I've picked for that hopefully sum it up. And over the past 30 years, we have organically and/or inorganically grown our data, our technology and our experience to actually make the best of those. We have global reach, which when you hear about how important identity is locally means that we can serve customers like matter identity solutions that are best fit for their markets. We layer our technologies, and I mentioned ideology and the fact that in the Americas, we combine identity checks with velocity for check seeing how many times some things coming through. We do that now globally with a piece of technology called eDNA that we acquired via Acuant and customers like Grenda, OPay or , who you'll hear from later, benefit from that to make sure that they're stopping fraud as early as possible. The customer life cycle, I won't touch on too much because Jose will dig into GBG go later, but we facilitate our customers at every single part of that journey, adding that value and doing exactly what Julie just mentioned is really, really important, allowing them to flex and react quickly to changes in the market. And lastly, customer choice. We're all as individuals pretty picky. We want to do things exactly how we want to, whether that is going into a High Street store, whether it is on your mobile on your web and GBG make sure we have a truly omnichannel approach creation, who power Currys finance. They are a big customer of ours, and you can use our technology from them either in-store or online to make sure that you should get that loan approved and you can take your TV home or your Apple device or whatever it is. And that's because they have our fraud tech, our data, our document tech and also recently, our mobile tech to make sure that they can do that. So why is it complex? And I've learned this over the 10 years that I've been at GBG. Nobody is simple and no data set is simple. It's incredibly complex, and that's why GBG's strengthened data is so incredibly important. Take personal data. We think first name one Middle name, adding a second middle name, a third middle name, a fourth, fifth, sixth seventh in some cultures middle name are out of [indiscernible] . Adam Mother's maiden name. It all makes things very, very complex. I could probably ask most of you in this room, your birthday, and you'd all give me a day a month and a year. If I ask the same room in the Middle East, I'd get the first of the first in the year that they were born because culturally, they don't celebrate birthdays. So it's GBG's understanding of this that actually means we can source data, we can understand it and we can build the technology in the rules so that you get the most value from it. It is one of our core strengths. We have hundreds of suppliers globally that actually continue to work with us and actually approaches because they want to work with us. We've got a document library of over 8,000 documents and why is that important because there's this 8,000 documents out there, each of us have probably got 2, a driver's license and a passport. Half of the room may have a European passport and half might have already got their U.K. passports. documents change and they're complex. And in every country, when you multiply that 8000 is what you need to win. We have customer data, and we have customer data uniquely from multiple different countries over 70 as Dave will talk about. We have it from location, from identity and from fraud. And the power of all of that when you bring it together is really, really unique. And that's what gives us the insight. Breadth and depth of data really is one of our differentiators. And owning data, it's not what creates the value. Accessing, linking and deriving those fast and accurate decisions is exactly why our customers come to us. So what is our kind of strategy with data and why am I so excited? As I touched on, we've got 3 types of data. The stuff that we buy from suppliers, and we are continuously accessing more data from suppliers, whether it be 3 bureaus in the U.K., adding mobile data or enriching the data that some of our suppliers give us. We have the data that we get from customers. And we've got the data that we create from our products. And each of those is continually getting richer. When you hear Dave and Chris talk about our cross-sell and our upsell capabilities. When customers take more products from us, our data gets richer. And we are only just scratching the surface. I'm personally very, very excited about continuing to work with those suppliers continuing to leverage technology like ED&A that we've acquired from Acuant to really build up that differentiation. As Julie said, you cannot make a probabilistic or a deterministic decision. You have got to get a holistic picture of an identity throughout its entire life cycle, and that is exactly what GBG does with its solutions. I'm now going to hand over to Kartik, who will also touch on how AI is helping us get even more value from that data.

Thank you, Gus. I'm Kartik , the CTO for GBG's location capabilities, and I'm pleased to be talking to you today about our use of AI and ML. At GBG, we are inspired by data and the value that it drives for customers. From the beginning, we have delivered rich data insights across location, identity and fraud, utilizing advanced techniques from unique algorithms to multilevel rules engines. Hence, we believe in the strategic layering of AI on top of our current approaches to keep ahead of the ever-evolving digital world. AI and machine learning have been a core investment area at GBG over the past few years. It has enabled us to drive even greater value for our customers in terms of increased match rates, complex fraud detection and advanced identity verification. We do all of this while having customer privacy at the forefront. Let me highlight a few great applications of AI that we're working on. Throughout the eDNA identity network that Gus just touched on, we are now able to use AI to underpin the threat analysis across our entire identity fraud ecosystem. AI enhances our identity graph compliance and monitoring capabilities, which is crucial to our ability to continue creating trust in a digital world. As we expand our documents and biometrics capabilities, AI is used extensively in Tax temper detection to ensure that the key elements of identity are valid and not altered, including photo substitution, physical presence and Tax tamper detection. On to fraud, AI is enabled in our financial crime studio to enhance fraud detection, where rules-based approaches stop scaling. In fact, with some of our customers, we're seeing significant uplifts on fraud detection and reduction of up to 50% on false positives. Across these 3 examples, AI allows our products to find patterns in identity and fraud that are imperceptible to humans than rules engines and other traditional approaches by learning from data to detect very complex and sell nuances. In fact, our application of AI and threat analysis in the identity fraud ecosystem demonstrates our expertise, which led us to being recognized recently with an Asia Risk innovation award, which we're very proud of. Finally, in Loqate, due to the complexity of global addresses and the lack of a single addressing standard, we've developed VerifAI AI to help understand the intent of end user inputs alongside AI-based address parsing to manage complexity, and we're seeing an uplift in match rates of up to 25%. As we roll out this great technology across all regions, we're already seeing the commercial impact at us on accelerating customer acquisition. We're delighted in recent months in welcoming Klarna to Loqate services. It's a great example of a high-value cross-sell with identity. Our ability to outperform our leading competitor by 23% on match rates in a head-to-head was a clear differentiator. I've used my section to share a few great examples of the progress we made with AI and data science and GBG, which demonstrates our ongoing commitment to innovation and drives our competitive advantage. All this is not possible at scale or replicable without a solid data platform, providing strong governance, lineage and privacy audit capabilities. These are core elements of our data mesh, which Mark will soon touch on as he dives deeper into our technology. Before we do that, let's hear from IBM, a strategic partner of GBG utilizing Loqate services. [Presentation]

Thank you, Scott, and it was great working with IBM. So I'm Mark Mamone. I'm Chief Information Officer at GBG, and I'm going to spend some time talking about the significant progress that we've made in technology and really help demonstrate why it's a real enabler for growth. So let's start with the team. We've built a global leadership team with decades of experience. We have over 500 technology professionals globally. They are organized in a modern way, and they are using best practice tools and technologies. This year, we will invest GBP 50 million in technology supporting our product development, our product operations and GBG. And there's a big number there, 22 billion transactions that traverse the platforms that underpin our products. And I just want to dwell on that a little bit because it really does bring to life the performance and flexibility enhancements that we've made and have within our products. So if we focus on performance, we have events that drive unpredictable surges of demand such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, where this year, in the Loqate platform alone, we saw 2 billion transactions across our platforms, and we coped admirably. It also talks to the fact that we could scale our infrastructure, scale our operations up to cope with that demand, but also and importantly, we can scale down that demand to more economically cope with the small to medium [indiscernible] 51.34 as well. And it also depends the flexibility that we now have around deployment and consumption for our customers, some of which you heard through Scott and coping with the variety and different needs of our customers. I also want to draw your attention to the trusted and secure piece. So in the world of compliance clients over the last few years, we have invested significantly in enhancing our products to cope with the needs of compliance, and that includes things like data controllership, audit trails and reporting. And if we look at security as well, we have invested in a global secure operations center. We have enhanced our cyber defenses and we have embedded best practice security engineering within our product both of those, not an end game, of course. What they have done is significantly improved our risk position. A lot of what I've talked about there can be explained, at least in part by the capability-led architecture against which our products aligned. So let me spend a bit of time on that. So it's a journey, as I've described. And if we look back 4 or so years ago, certainly when we did the last capital markets, we had strong regional products. And of course, we still have those. But we were constrained somewhat around agility and around operational cost. If we roll forward to where we are today, we have a far more integrated set of products and technologies some of which are sharing capabilities that realize some of the value that I've described. We are able to release faster through that capability. We are able to deploy more easily, and our customers are able to consume easily. But it's not an end game, as I said. If we roll forward to a position where all of our products will align to this architecture, then what we have is a set of reusable composable capabilities, where our products, whether new or enhancements made up from those capabilities, which talks to the agility that we need that Julie mentioned. And that will mean that we will release for even faster will be even more innovative. So let me bring out 2 proof points just to bring that to life. And I'm only going to do 2 in the interest of time. We've mentioned document and biometric technology and Gus talked about the 8,000 document types that we now have in our combined library, which is important, obviously. But what we also have is an automatic document recognition capability that recognizes you can't always know the type ahead of time. We also augment that capability in areas where we know it's perhaps better to ingest capability from a strategic partnership, and we do that in the case of facial recognition, for example. And that talks to the flexibility of the platform being able to ingest partner services as well. And then if we flip to the right, you've heard from everybody actually, certainly Kartik and Gus about the importance of data. So let me just dig into the data point. So for our artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have built a data platform of data mesh that allows us to decentralize data management that allows us to ingest data faster to allow us to create data to allow us to manage our own data and present that data compliantly and responsibly to our products and the machine learning models that drive the differentiation that you've heard from Kartik And they are just 2 examples. So in conclusion, where we find ourselves today is a strong foundation on which to build our products. The net result is that we are able to release products, incremental and new faster than we've ever done before. We're able to deliver that value to customers regardless of their need of geography of consumption, example. And I hope you share my excitement in what that enables and what that might unlock for GBG, our customers, et cetera. So I'm going to stop there, and I'm going to hand over to Jose, who's going to describe what that depth and capability really means for our customers and the consumption of the services. Over to you, Jose.

Thank you, Mark. That is indeed a fantastic foundation to deliver value to our customers in the marketplace, but also a foundation that makes my life a lot easier by building and releasing products faster to the market. Everyone, my name is Jose Caldera , I'm the Chief Product Officer for Global Products at GBG. -- I am the former GBG and the former Chief Product Officer for Acuant, and I'm thrilled to have now technology and data and leverage the data intelligence from GBG to create better products to the market. I'm going to close the session of technology and products and focusing on how we deliver customer value and how to do our products to the customers. Before we do that, I want to introduce our second customer testimonial Onto is a European digital first electric car subscription services that uses several products from GBG to help onboard their customers. Let's hear from them... [Presentation]

Audience can leverage our services to gain competitive advantage and to perform better in the marketplace. So let's get into how we deliver these values to the marketplace. So GBG is the only platform that can deliver identity, fraud and location services in an integrated manner. But also, we deliver this in different capabilities and different integration and adoption methodologies. So we can build on-premise. We can go hosted solutions or we can go fully on the cloud through our SaaS solutions. That SaaS can be degraded through a robust set of APIs or through low code or no code. We can always have, for example, clients that in the financial industry, like Bank Paribas, that is a Tier 1 financial institution that rather integrates on-premise solution or we can have digital first, disruptors in the real estate market like NOC that rather integrates through a no-code solution. But the majority of our clients take advantage of our SaaS platform, and that implies that they integrate because they want to perform well in the marketplace and the SaaS Solution allows them to scale and to perform at whatever -- whichever capacity they need in the market. Also, by having SaaS models, we are able to leverage the data and to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies as Kartik and Mark described before and the value that delivers to the customers. All of this through a robust set of APIs. However, things are changing. It's more difficult nowadays to find technical resources that can actually go through the process of implementing applications that take advantage of those robust API's, and some of our clients are requiring to go to market much faster. So GBG is at the forefront of solutions of by enable in the adoption of location services through low-code APIs and the identity and fraud services through no code. So all of this gives the chance and the ability to our clients to integrate however they want and it's important and the key is enabling them to get those services to their client as fast as they can. One of the things that Julie mentioned throughout the presentation is that identity is a fabric is a trusted fabric of commerce. That is correct. And in order to achieve that, you have to have an understanding of an identity throughout its life cycle. So it's very normal for us today that if we're going to do a transfer say, from our bank account into, say, a different bank account or investment account or so ever, that we get challenged for our authentication. So that implies that there is a methodology in which the bank, the financial institutions or whoever has a view of that identity and what are the challenges that require to that identity in their life cycle. GBG already provide services that provide value in the lifetime of those identity. However, in order to do so in a manner that is consistent, we have to build the capability that allows us to describe that journey in a consistent manner. And we have to bring the capability of orchestrating the different types of services that GBG offers so that they can be introduced at the proper time in that customer journey. This is, in essence, the GBG Go platform. We launched the GBG Go platform in the United States in October. And in this platform, we are building on top of the Acuant technology that allows us then to deliver the services and more GBG services to the market in a faster way. With GBG GO, we are bringing orchestration, we're bringing customer journey, and we're bringing a statistics to give our customers and our clients the value that they require so that they can create more value to their end users. The GBG Go platform also is a Libre XML code, and that allows us to, with orchestration, with the journey and with no code, it allows us to retrieve new services and make the services available to our clients, which implies that we can have a capability now to go to different markets, different sectors with much faster than we could before. I know all of this may sound a little bit to abstract in one of the sessions that we'll do in the demo is going to be demonstrated the capabilities of the GBG Go platform. So with that, I want to close down the technology and product session. And I suggest that we take a short 10-minute break, and we'll come back. We're going to hear from Chris Luttrell and Dev Dhiman, who are going to walk us through our go-to-market capabilities in the world. Thank you very much, and we see you in ten. [Break]

I'm delighted to be with you here today to share more about our opportunity. Asia Pacific is GBG's fastest-growing region today. We are very well established in our core markets of Australia and New Zealand, where we have market leadership with our identity proposition, and we are very well established in our Asia region where we have market leadership in terms of fraud and financial crime propositions. However, across both markets, we still have considerable room for growth. In the coming slides, I'll be providing you with a summary of the way in which we organize our go-to-market teams around the world and how that's evolved to better serve a changing marketplace. I'll be sharing more on the tools that we have at our disposal to help us unlock growth in our markets, both in the places we play today and the spaces we can tomorrow And then finally, I'll share more about our plans in APAC and how we plan to make that an even more significant contributor to group revenues in the coming years. I'll then hand over to Chris Luttrell, CEO for GBG Americas, who will talk to you about the great work that's happening in our biggest market and how we bring things together for our customers. So let me start by sharing more on how we take our products and services to market across all of our 3 major regions. Today, that takes the shape of 3 channels: direct sales, indirect sales or partner sales and digital or self-serve. Today, our most established and largest channel is direct sales. We have over 300 colleagues around the world in our key markets, located on the ground with our customers and empowered to make the decisions that provide our customers with the best possible outcomes. The direct sales teams of GBG are typically focused on Tier 1, Tier 2 or mid-market customers where our customers typically have the best understanding and the most mature understanding of their requirements for identity, fraud or location, products and services. Our customers in financial services, e-commerce, gaming, telco and health care, just to name a few sectors, rely on our experts to help them keep pace with rapid market developments. The direct sales team is typically broken into 2 personas. Firstly, those who target new logo acquisition, and it's thanks to the great work of this team that we're proud to be able to say we have over 70 countries around the world where we have large-scale installations. And secondly, we have account managers who deliver best-in-class customer retention rates, which David Ward will talk about in his section, who help our customers get the best from the solutions that they've already invested in and who help make our clients aware of other products and service that we've either developed or we've acquired and Chris Luttrell will talk about how we're doing that with Acuant and IDology , for example. So let's move to our second sales channel, indirect sales. As the testimonial from IBM showed, collaborating on our ecosystem, we can reach a much broader market, and we can get them much, much more quickly. At GBG, we have built the capability required to enable, manage and motivate the channel. And this is an area we've seen really good recent success around the world. Our willingness to cooperate has enabled us to really differentiate ourselves from others in our marketplace. The expertise that we've built in that team has meant that we've been able to develop a range of partnership models, and we use the best option to best fit the opportunity we are evaluating. A few of the partnership types that we use today include resellers where we allow local partner to resell our products in a market where we either don't yet have a presence or don't wish to have a presence, capability or technology partners, where we include point solutions in our end-to-end offerings. Data partners, Gus talked about this at length, but this would include how we consume data from credit reporting agencies and provide our own intelligence over it. And a final example of many is OEM relationships, and that's where GBG solutions can be embedded in an off-the-shelf product sold to an end customer by another entity, and that is exactly how IBM are taking our locate product to market to their huge potential marketplace. And then thirdly and finally, our most recently developed route-to-market self-serve or digital, and this has become a key tenet of our go-to-market model. This channel enables us to firstly reach profitably smaller customers. given the higher cost of going direct, it allows us to nurture, capture and convert new customer interest through a much lower touch model. Secondly, it enables us to scale quicker for less complex solutions. And that includes the low- and no-code solutions that Jose just covered in his section. And thirdly, it's been a great way to prove demand in new markets before we put down further infrastructure there. In recent years, we've made significant improvements to our lead generation process in this space. We've greatly improved our conversion rates by better qualifying leads. And we've also invested in a much better digital experience ourselves, just like our customers have and that includes a much slicker integration through APIs . So simply put, why is this important While having 3 channels allows us to capture more customers, access more prospects and deliver greater revenue growth. So you've heard now about the scale and the breadth of our go-to-market teams, which are pretty much unparalleled in our space. Now how do we leverage that organization to address our opportunity? Earlier, Chris Clark showed this graphic to show how we think about our growth across 3 dimensions: geographies, sectors and customer life cycle. Let me now build on this by sharing more about the tools that we have at our disposal to access those opportunities. And it won't surprise you, we have more than one given us size and scale. Before the break, you heard from the product and tech teams on the capabilities that we've recently released and have in development Therefore, product innovation and product development is a core growth engine for us. Once we've developed new solutions, we put it in the hands of the go-to-market teams that I've just shared more context on to help them power progress, that progress is obviously greatly helped by the customer relationships we enjoy. It gives us the ability to cross and upsell we have with thousands of customers around the world, an unparalleled database of leads who value GBG solutions who come to us for advice on solving age old and new challenges. Thirdly, we can enter new sectors. And we've seen already how our solutions have been deployed into both existing vertical market markets where perhaps we didn't play before, but also into newly emerged marketplaces such as Buy Now Pay Later or the Neo banks across Southeast Asia. Next, and a tool we've seen central to our plans in Asia, in Latin America and in Europe, we can extend our geographic footprint, both in terms of laying down infrastructure in a market or being able to serve customers from afar. Two really good examples of this. Southeast Asia, in the last 18 months, we've expanded our business into Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, taking advantage of some very favorable market conditions. And secondly, in locate where the team started their German operation just purely through digital and self-serve before putting down more routes there once we've proven the demand for our solutions. And we've built a material-sized business there, thanks to the great work that, that team has done. And the final tool, which David Ward, again, will touch more on in his section is how we acquire businesses. We have a strong track record of doing this, and this is a lever that will always enable us to increase the pace at which we can grow and also increase the pace at which the businesses we acquire can grow. The important takeaway on this slide is really that we have different instruments at our disposal to capture the market potential. So now let me touch on our opportunity in APAC before I hand over to Chris. APAC is a region that is home to 60% of the world's population. It enjoys the highest digital adoption rates of any region in the world. It's home to some of the biggest consumer marketplaces. And presently, it has regulatory tailwinds that help increase demand for GBG's products and services. I said at the outset, our APAC business is well established. In ANZ, we have market leadership in identity. We enjoy strong customer relationships with some of the leading financial services, gaming, telco players to name a few. In Asia, today, we only go to market with our fraud proposition. We don't really take our identity or location services to market. However, we've not done badly in fraud. We deploy our solution to 8 of the top 10 banks in Singapore, all 10 of the top 10 banks in Malaysia, 6 of the top 10 in Indonesia, 3 of the top 5 in Hong Kong, and we also manage 2 of our biggest customer relationships from the region with HSBC and Citibank. But we are not done yet. Now Chris might disagree. But having lived in Singapore for 7 years, I truly believe this is the biggest opportunity for GBG and its future growth. And I'm going to use 2 instruments of the toolkit that I talked about earlier to represent how I see that playing out, and that's product innovation, and geographic expansion. As I said earlier, ANZ is the biggest part of our APAC business today, and our strategy here is really clear. We're going to double down on the size of that business and take it to the next level. We're going to innovate at pace, and we're going to deliver new capabilities to market, including taking capabilities we have in other markets like Chris to our customers in Australia and New Zealand. Two really good examples of this. Firstly, GBG Alerts. GB Alerts is a market-first proposition in Australia, which will help our customers their share information on highly suspicious identity verifications to prevent perpetration of further identity theft and further fraud. We've actually accelerated the deployment of the solution in the wake of the recent Optus breach that Gus talked about, Optus is one of the largest telcos in Australia and suffered a breach that impacted almost half of the Australian population. We've made that product available in beta already to help our customers maintain the trust of their consumers. And it's the latest example of a consortium model, which duly featured in hers slide and closely mirror is actually the service that Chris and her team have won with in Americas for many years. And secondly, we're going to be deploying some of the newly acquired Acuant solutions into Australia. We're going to make it relevant for the local context, and we're going to cross and upsell our existing customers. In particular, we're really excited to be launching our ongoing PEP and Sanctions screening solution next month and that has been based on a really pressing need we've heard from our customers, which we can now solve. In comparison to ANZ, our Asia business today is smaller, but our opportunity in Asia is much broader and much larger, albeit with inherently greater execution risk. Today, as I said, our business in Asia is fully focused on our fraud solutions, but clearly, we have much greater possibilities ahead of us in the broader market. And prioritization will therefore be really important. In the midterm, we're going to focus on 3 things. The first is geographic expansion. So whilst last year, we expanded our Australia and New Zealand business into New Zealand with the acquisition of Cloudcheck. We've clearly got much more scope to expand in Asia, where really we -- today, we focusing heavily on Southeast Asia. This will also include bedding down in markets we've recently expanded into, such as Thailand, where we're seeing really strong interest, and we've already delivered new customer wins. Secondly, we're going to deliver a next-generation cloud-enabled financial crime studio. This is going to enable us to take our fraud business to the next level. We'll be able to deliver fraud propositions at a pace that can keep up with the fraudsters in this lopsided game of chess. We'll be capable of scaling up to handle the enormous volumes of transactions that we see in the populous markets of Asia that our financial institution customers have to deal with. And finally, as Mark said, we'll also be able to scale down to fit the commercial context of the number of fast emerging fintechs that we see day in, day out in Southeast Asia. And last but by no means least, we see a huge opportunity to deliver a market-leading identity solution for Asia, taking the heritage that we have around the rest of the world and putting it to bear in a market that has 60% of the world's population. We'll do this by bringing together components that we have in the group. We'll do it in a way that meets local market needs, and we will do this by outperforming homegrown offerings that exist today in the market, but at subscale. This is a market that offers huge possibilities to GBG and huge growth paths for the future of our business. Our in-market presence, our 250 talented colleagues our knowledge of the market and our long-standing relationship with some of the marquee brands in the region, give us a lot of confidence that we can deliver on this opportunity. To close out this section, I now want to introduce another of our very strategically important customers, AMP Bank. We've been partnering with AMP for over 8 years. They trust us on staying on the right side of AML and other regulations in a market like Australia, which I'm sure you all know, has hugely significant fines and penalties for noncompliance. Over that time, our relationship with them has grown manyfold. And the latest example of that is that they were one of the first customers to take the GBG Alerts product, not only taking it to market, but also contributing their data to help us make it an even better proposition. [Presentation]

I love customer testimonials, and that's one of my favorite ones. I love hearing them when customers mention safety and trust and just using the word safe over and over again, it's really, really good. It's nice to hear customers reference us using these words because we really are -- it's what we're doing. We're building trust in a digital world. Thank you, Dev. I appreciate you speaking here as well. So hello, everyone. I'm Chris Luttrell, and it's a pleasure to be with you all here today. I lead the GBG team in Americas. I came from the audiology acquisition, and I'm located out of Atlanta, Georgia. So I'm really excited to be here with you all today. The U.S. Dev is the largest and most strategically important market for identity verification and for identity fraud. It represents about 41% of the total market, and it's projected to grow substantially over the next few years. So let me set the stage for you. Julie mentioned, she talked about this, the pandemic. We all know what happened in 2020. And we saw that rapid shift to digital during the pandemic. This meant that there was an instant and growing demand for the services that we offer at GBG. Identity is critical to onboarding. It's critical to onboarding and legitimate customers and companies really began to think about identity and fraud together, not so much separate anymore. When you can handle the -- when you can sort of take care of the fraud at the beginning of the process, it actually costs much less down the line to have to handle it after you've already let a fraudster into the front door. So one thing that I know that will always -- if you have a job in fraud or a job related to fraud, not being a fraudster, but if you have a job in fraud. Well, I guess it could go either way, but you will never go hungry a day in your life. There is always going to be a need for the services that we offer when we're doing identity verification and fraud prevention. So that's pretty exciting. We want you to stay on the good side of fraud, not the bad side of fraud. So every year, we actually published a research paper that measures consumer sentiment on identity fraud in the digital environment.76% of the customers told us of consumers that we surveyed, they told us that if they knew that an online company was using advanced identity verification solutions, they would be more likely to do business with that company. And so on the other side of that, we also surveyed businesses. And it was interesting because the business has told us that having strong identity verification in place is a strategic competitive differentiator for them. So understanding that there's always going to be a need for what we do and businesses are now seeing this as a competitive differentiator. You can see really how the opportunities are really endless here at GBG, and we're well positioned for that growth. The diversity and the breadth of U.S. businesses creates a tremendous opportunity for GBG for that continued growth. And now when we combine IDology and Acuant, this means we have the best capabilities to serve this market, and it gives us access to new sectors as well as those best-of-breed products. New sectors, Chris and Dev both have mentioned, those include things like border control, health care, automotive services, travel and leisure One of my favorites is gaming. I think I'm actually approved to open a casino. We can talk about this over a beer at some point, but all the licensing requirements that you have to go to in the U.S. to be approved for gaming. So that's one of my favorite markets. But some of these markets are markets that would have taken us quite some time to penetrate, but now we're already there because of the Acuant acquisition. So a really good benefit there. Gus and team gave an incredible overview of our products and how our customers are using them. I'm really passionate about this. We truly have the most innovative and best-of-breed products in the industry. We're serving some of the largest businesses in the world when you hear these names that we're working with. Having that great product means that we can maximize our opportunities in the markets that we serve. For example, in the Americas, from the Acuant acquisition, we can now offer the compliance platform, document verification and biometrics. And our wide range of options that Jose and Mark talked about. Jose talked about GBG Go, right? Like that gives us a much quicker way to go to market than we've ever had before. Also having these capabilities and having the expertise that we have in set, within our portfolio, it really provides more leverage and flexibility when it comes to pricing. We were challenged by a customer to reduce price due to competitive pressures in the U.S., we were able to extend and offer with more attractive commercials and retain that customer relationship. And we're able to do that because of the capabilities in the portfolio that we have. Consumers report fraud losses north of $5 billion in 2021, big number. That was almost a 70% growth from the prior year. So that's why we're really excited to bring in the Acuant AML risk prevention offering. And when you combine that to the IDology fraud consortium capabilities, the joining of these solutions and verticals positions GBG to have the largest risk prevention solution in the U.S. It also opens up opportunities for us to create more innovative product and do more within our solutions. When we talk a lot about fraud, it's kind of -- it's fun to talk about. But really, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do building that digital trust, but we are trying to make sure that we are giving our customers the ability to onboard their consumers in a user-friendly way so that they can drive revenue for their company, right? Their company grows, their company generate rates revenue that equates to generated revenue for us as well. So I want to take a moment, and we're going to hear from Michelle Prince-Glenn. She is from Central AMS. Central AMS is a specialist digital platform provide fit for gaming in the U.S., and they've taken on more services from us over time. So let's hear from Michelle. [Presentation]

Another great testimonial. And that testimonial I really like because it shows you how when we take great care of our customers, our customers are going to take us into new opportunities and new growth, and they'll take on more solutions. So that's a great example. So following the growth toolkit that Deb described, -- we have clear plans for growth in the Americas. We're addressing sales reach and productivity by combining the Acuant and the IDology sales teams and aligning them against the market opportunities and the verticals. Our direct sales teams are now combined and they are focused on winning quality and sustainable customer sales in the mid to enterprise sector. And this is a huge market with proven appetite to buy our solutions and respond to the unique data and fraud assets that we have. We've had some near immediate success through cross-selling between IDology and the Acuant client base. For example, we had IDology clients who are in instantly interested in document verification and transaction monitoring when we announced the acquisition. And on the Acuant side, we had clients immediately interested in things like fraud consortium and deeper KYC checks. One of the reasons I was personally excited about this acquisition is because of the relationship that Acuant and IDology already had prior to the acquisition, we were partnered on certain products, and this just made it so much easier for our go-to-market teams to jump-start any conversations on these upsells and cross-sells. It wasn't much of a learning curve because we already knew one another solutions and products. So we were able to hit the ground running, and I was pretty excited and proud of the team for that. So let's focus on channel for a moment, channel partners because this is where it gets really, really exciting for us. We have a tremendous opportunity with our partner programs, and this enables us to have broader reach, bringing Acuant Into the GBG family created even more opportunities for us. Acuant had and still has a mature and robust partner ecosystem. That means we all now have mature and robust partner ecosystem. So GBG now has thousands of indirect relationships across the world gaining OEMs, resellers, system integrators, distributors and more. For example, we're helping CETA implement the new check-in and security and boarding process at Newark, New Jersey International Airport. We're delivering biometric services to the SIA that our government approved for deployment into the Italian and Spanish airports, and we're enabling Thales to reach new markets in Latin America. We have a great new route to a further diversified market for our services, which drives further global expansion. We see the opportunity for consistent double-digit growth, delivering not only new business, cross-selling and product innovation but also by our own geographic expansion. We already have some customers in Mexico, which is an emerging market, but it's also a good springboard into Latin America via our partner network, Thales mentioned earlier, through selective customer acquisition and in time, as Dev mentioned, as part of the growth toolkit and M&A strategy there as well. This all really sits in that toolkit, and we see the midterm growth potential with these initiatives. You should see a theme coming together here. We have the best and most innovative products, a seller network of partners and customers and a market appetite that will only continue to grow. The opportunities there really are for the taking. So let's bring this all together. I love this slide. It really tells a great story. We have growing momentum leaning in with our market-leading capabilities. It starts with making sure we've got a range of innovative products that can be consumed to meet real-world customer needs, combined with making sure we're easy to do business with, along with taking great care of our people and our customers. We have strong relationships with our customers. You've heard from them -- some of them already today like IBM. And a team of -- we really have a team in place to build long-term revenue by upsell, cross-selling, gaining more market share and delivering the best products in our results than any other company out there. We understand the local market requirements and regulations, we understand the needs, and we look to expand into adjacent geographies using these same go-to-market strategies. We really have the complete package. We're enabling commerce. We're facilitating payments. We're stopping the bad guys. We're making the world safer, and that's something that I know I am immensely proud of, and I hope you all are as well because it's really good what we're doing in the world. No one else in the world is doing what we're doing today with how we're doing it. If I can leave you with anything, it's that. We have the best-in-class products. We have incredible customer base. We have tremendously smart people working with this. We've got a deep expertise in our markets and a passion for our product suite and our company. We know that we can win in this market consistently. So before I hand it over to Mr. David Ward, who will discuss how this all translates to results. I'm going to leave you with one final customer testimonial. And this one is from Payfare. Payfare was -- Payfare came to us for document while they were using IDology for KYC. They needed to also add in document verification, so came as a cross-sell and really, really good example of how we can work together to bring those -- bring multiple products together across the organization. So let's hear from Su. [Presentation]

Okay. Thank you, Sue, and thank you to all of our customers actually for their -- for taking time to give their contributions to the session this afternoon. Hopefully, that's been very helpful to bring the story to life for everyone. I particularly like Su's video because I think it summarizes our differentiation really well. So she talks about speed, resilience and standing customer relationships. And I think that's a really good summary. I think of what you've heard throughout the session today. And I hope you -- so the comment towards the end there that originally Payfare were an IDology customer using data verification and KYC and they have now taken since the Acuant acquisition, they have now taken the document solution for us as well. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first Capital Markets event in a while now. I'm David Ward, CFO of GBG. I'll first of all, like to thank my colleagues for their presentations today. I thought they did a cracking job. Lots and lots of content in here. But I guess we don't apologize for that because I think that is just a sign of how much we've got going on at the minute and the opportunities that we are all excited about. So GBG is a group that has always been evolving. But in many ways, some of the changes of the last 2 to 3 years have been some of the most significant of our history . And it was for that reason that Chris and I felt that it was high time for a capital markets event so that we could take this as an opportunity to showcase to you some of the exciting opportunities we've got that make us feel optimistic about the future and therefore, underpin our ability to be able to execute on our medium-term financial plan. As Chris said earlier, this session today isn't about the short term, where, as you know, we have faced some post pandemic headwinds. But it is about our strategy and our medium-term prospects. So using the next few slides, my objective is to bring together for you the key themes that you have heard from the team today and explain why we see these as the pillars that underpin the financial outcomes that we expect. And of course, there will be a reminder of our medium-term financial guidance that we are today reiterating. So those of you that are familiar with GBG, will know that we have consistently said that our competitive differentiation comes from 3 things. It comes from our data, our technology and our people. And I think we've demonstrated to you today that it's those 3 things working in concert that is really our differentiation. And as you've heard from the team today, we have been busy bringing to market some exciting developments by way of broader and stronger data sets and state-of-the-art resilient technology. And this is why we are trusted by thousands of customers globally with some of their most critical business workflows. You also heard from Chris Clark and Julie about why the structural growth drivers of the markets we serve remain strong and have a very long runway of growth opportunity for us. We can all do 8 TAMs and market growth rates, and I think Julie did a great job earlier explaining the complexity there. But I think it's best if we just keep it simple. Firstly, it is unanimous amongst the industry analysts that there are significant structural growth drivers that will face our business through the economic cycle. And second, as of today, our markets are still highly fragmented. And while GBG is a leader in terms of scale and technology, we still only hold a very small market share, and that gives us an opportunity for us to be able to expand the wallet share that we get from our customers. And so it's the combination of these things, us addressing a large market with exciting opportunities for growth and being confident that we are differentiated from the competition and with a strategy that will ensure we stay ahead. And therefore, overall, we expect gains in customer wallet share. These give us the confidence in our long-term growth potential. Our next pillar of confidence is our track record. Over the last 5 years, GBG has delivered mid-teens revenue growth and high teens growth in adjusted operating profit. We have delivered that through a combination of strong organic execution and selective M&A that has not only delivered an enlarged GBG, but as you have heard today, has also significantly differentiated us from the competition. And our growth has also been delivered with one eye on resilience and sustainability. And therefore, we have focused on expanding our diversification. As you've heard from the technical development team today, Gus, Mark, Kartik and Jose, our solution set has been substantially broadened. We have moved from being a UK-based U.K.-centric business to a much more global business, and we now drive 70% of our revenues internationally, and I particularly enjoyed the healthy competition between Dev and Chris as to whose region is going to grow fast this next year. And we are proud of our sector diversification where we have seized opportunities in many new markets, where our solutions are increasingly becoming relevant and necessary. It's true that in 2022, we did suffer from some pain from our exposure to the crypto currency markets and to some Internet economy customers. But in the context of cryptocurrency, it's worth remembering that crypto was only approximately 7% of our pro forma group revenue last year. And actually, therefore, we feel that we seize that opportunity while it was strong pretty well and also at the same time, managed our exposure far better than some of our competitors, both in terms of how deep we were involved in that market, but also some of the parties we we're involved in working with. Overall, our track record and our diversification give us substantial belief that we can continue to deliver excellent financial returns. Our business model is not so dissimilar to many other technology subscription businesses. We see significant value and take confidence in our future from the fact that more than 90% of our revenues are repeatable. We have strong growth margins are over 70% and we have natural operating leverage. We generate strong cash flows and over the last 5 years, we have averaged a cash conversion rate of over 100%. And that is the rate at which we convert adjusted operating in profits to cash flows. That gives us an excellent business framework for continued investment. And within our financial plan, we expect to reinvest the potential operating leverage that we could create to fuel further growth. The emphasis for our investments will continue to be product and technology advancement and go-to-market resources. Since I joined GBG just over 18 months ago now, I have increased our focus and disclosure of our revenue types. And I actually see our mix of commercial models as a differentiator from an investment case perspective. Both of our 2 main commercial models, subscriptions and transactions or consumption are repeatable or recurring in nature as both involve continuing revenue streams for GBG if customers want to continue to use our solutions. And combine I find that with now many years of experience that we have of customer and revenue retention. And this becomes a very important pillar behind our midterm guidance. Both models have benefits we feel that the optimum for GBG is to have a mix of the 2. Different customers prefer different models, as you'd expect, some like the low entry point of the transactional model where others prefer the certainty of availability and pricing that the subscription model gives them. And from a GBG perspective, we like the forward visibility that subscriptions provide. And of course, the proportion of our subscription revenue did increase after the Acuant acquisition. But we also like the more immediate correlation between volumes and revenue that the consumption model provides. In a market where customers' usage is expanding, it means that there is an immediate and directly correlated revenue impact for GBG. And over the years, this has served us very well, and we feel that certain commercial situations is the best way for us to maximize customer value. And the final pillar that underpins our confidence is our fantastic customer base, and you've heard a bit about that from some of the other presenters today. We have many thousands of customers globally, and we have relatively little customer concentration. In FY '22, we had around 40 customers with revenue in excess of GBP 1 million each. And in total, these contributed 30% of group revenue. That's after normalizing for the crypto revenues and U.S. stimulus revenues we saw that year. And retention in this group of customers has tended to be very high. You will see that we have a very long tail of customers where revenue is less than GBP 100,000 each per year. And these customers also contribute approximately 30%. Overall, our customer retention has been a strength of GBG. And if we exclude the real end of the tail of small customers, say, for example, all customers under GBP 10,000 per year. Even in the last 12 months, our retention has been comfortably above 90%, and net retention, which we define in is the rate at which we grow our existing customer relationships over a rolling 12-month period has been in the range of 105% to 108% for the last 3 years. Clearly in the current year, that has dip given the substantial declines we've seen from just a few crypto customers and Internet economy customers, but we do expect for this level of NRR to return given our business model that has a number of different levers for expanding the revenue opportunity within each customer, including, of course, now cross-selling the Acuant solutions. At the bottom of this chart, I've laid out 4 real examples of where we have successfully grown our presence with the drivers of growth ranging from upsell and pricing, as we did with a top U.K. supermarket, volume growth from the expansion and penetration of our customers' products as we -- when we are built into their workflows from day 1; expanding the use of our solutions into additional business units or geographies as we do with the Buy Now Pay Later company; and finally, from us successfully cross-selling through our identity, location and fraud solutions. Hopefully, those examples are helpful illustrations of how we enable strong growth from within our customer portfolio and why we have confidence that there remains significant runway ahead. Within our medium-term guidance, we continue to expect that approximately 2/3 of that growth will be generated from existing customers with the remainder from us winning new logos. So bringing that together, the pillars of confidence that you have heard from me today and from the team and are shown on the bottom of this slide, that is why we are today reiterating our medium-term organic financial guidance. We expect revenue growth of 12% to 14%; adjusted operating profit margins of 23% to 24%; and an average cash conversion of around 95%. Clearly, in the current financial year, as I've said, our growth has been below this level as we have faced into the headwinds caused by crypto and some of the volume declines from Internet economy customers and it is a bit more growth than most analysts are expecting for FY '24, our next financial year, but we are talking here about the medium-term guidance or GBG's growth potential through the economic cycle. And we certainly believe these growth rates will be deliverable when we are past some of these short-term turbulence items. Moving on to Capital allocation next. Our short-term focus is on repaying the debt that we took on to fund the 2 acquisitions that we made in our last financial year. At that point, we took our debt leverage to 2x EBITDA, and that still feels like a comfortable level of debt for our group. As I've said already, we plan to continue the operating cost investments that we have been making into technology and go-to-market resources in the hope that, that will fuel future growth. And these investments are within our margin guidance that I just provided. And just a reminder that we expense all of our R&D and technology spend, we not capitalize any of those costs. In the last 3 years, in fact, we have invested more than GBP 100 million into technology all through the P&L. We plan to maintain our progressive dividend. That provides a consistent and reliable cash return for our shareholders. But given our growth plans and high cash generation, We do expect to generate surplus cash over and above that, which we would pay as a dividend. And just as we have been doing successfully now for over 10 years, we would first look to deploy surplus cash to accelerate the strategy through acquisitions. My next slide has more detail on how we think about M&A, but the key message here is that we continue to see a strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, and it is the Board's view that utilizing surplus cash for acquisitions is better strategically than making additional returns to shareholders. So of course, those do remain an option that we continue to keep under review. So to M&A. This has been such a critical component of the strategic development of GBG over the last 10 years, and the Board does expect that to continue. We are very fortunate that in our markets, there are many potential acquisition targets, and we believe that careful selection of those targets will allow us to further accelerate our strategic development. There are 2 main characteristics that we look for in potential acquisitions. Firstly, a target might be able to enhance our access to new markets, new customers or new data. or a target may bring differentiated IP that can help us bring additional value to our existing customers faster than we may be able to do organically. And often targets we contemplate will have a mixture of both components, just in varying degrees. If we look at our 2 most recent examples of acquisitions, Acuant and CloudCheck, Acuant offered very strong elements of both of those characteristics where CloudCheck was primarily offering access to a new market for us. And following the Acuant acquisition, we actually feel that right now, we have filled out our technology portfolio nicely, and there are no immediate or obvious gaps that we feel we need to plug via an acquisition. Hopefully, you got a sense from the team today that we have plenty of exciting organic opportunities ahead for us. And in all of our contemplated acquisitions, we focus on repeatable commercial models that support profitable growth with attractive financial returns. And most critically, we look for complementary cultural alignment. That all said, our short-term focus is on repaying debt and continuing the good progress we have made so far with the integration of Acuant. So we do not expect any acquisitions in the very near term, say, the next 6 months. But following that, we do expect our focus for M&A that would best accelerate our strategy is likely to be an acquisition that would open up new markets or customers for us. And that would almost certainly be a bolt-on acquisition that we could do either from cash or from our existing debt facility. And so in summary, my key aim for this session was to give you a good sense of the pillars underpinning the confidence we have in reiterating the medium-term financial targets that we first set out just over a year ago. I do have to acknowledge that in 2022, we have been disrupted with some growth headwinds wins that few of us predicted. But those will be behind us, we expect at some point during this new calendar year. And none of those short-term challenges take away from the longer-term and potential that we see for growth. And as you've heard from all of the team today, there is a lot of excitement about what GBG is going to be able to achieve. As I reflect on this slide, which frames the fantastic journey of growth that GBG has had since 2018. Chris, myself and the whole leadership team are relentlessly focused on the opportunity between now and 2026 to be able to push beyond GBP 400 million of revenue and GBP 100 million of adjusted operating profit. And so at that point, I'd like to close today's formal presentations, and we can prepare for some Q&A.

So just a few points of guidance for the Q&A. We have just under 25 minutes because I think we said we would run until 5, and I think we want to be respectful of everyone's time if people need to leave at 5. We will lose sharply and give you all an opportunity to go and see the demonstrations that we have set up for you. So if you don't need to rush off, please don't, please come and see the demonstrations. The team would love to see you. We've got the whole team available for questions. Everyone who you've seen presenting today is available. And if you'd like to ask any of the many questions, please do so. I should just say -- as you know, we're not talking about the short term today. We only announced our half year on the 29th of November. And so there is no new news. So we are not talking about that. And therefore, any questions on the short term, I'm afraid we are going to keep out of bounds as well at this point. So if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand, and we will sort you out with a microphone. When you get the microphone, if you could first please state your name and the institution that you're representing that would be great. And I think Tintin's hands shot up. So we'll go to Tintin first.

Tintin Stormont of Numis. Obviously, lots of talks about market leadership and winning customers, et cetera. Maybe phrasing the question differently. When they don't choose you, what is the reason? And maybe there are reasons when they don't choose you, you're happy because maybe it's price-led, et cetera. But when they don't choose you and you really wanted to win it, where do you think the shortcoming has -- where is the shortcoming?

Thank you, Tintin. Actually, I'm going to pass that straight on to the 2 of the team that actually day in, day out and winning customers because I'm interested in their answer as well because they tell me they never lose. So Chris, why don't you start up and then Dev, why don't you start and then Chris want full.

Yes, sure. I can take that. So just a reminder, Dev Dhiman for APAC. So where we have not capitalized on opportunity, typically, I think it's because we haven't positioned our solution in a way that we should. And I think actually, what you've heard from the team is actually we have everything we need. And sometimes, we've not positioned the completeness of that solution. And obviously, some of that's recently been acquired in the best possible way to customers. And when that's happened of late, what we've almost always done is gone back and had a second conversation and had a very different outcome. So that's one occasion that I can think of very clearly in Australia recently. Another has been price. So we do obviously operate in a very, very competitive market, and we are definitely not the cheapest player in any of the markets we operate. We are convinced that we offer the best match rates, for example, in certain solutions over and above what our competitors can do. And obviously, we also have an infrastructure in market that most of them don't invest in. And so we do see price as another challenge. And again, in those occasions, sometimes there's things we can do. Chris talked about that in Americas of how we won that customer back, but there's other occasions that we have to walk away from opportunities because they're not profitable for us to pursue.

Tintin, so I'm going to go a good bit of what Dev just said. For us, in the Americas, Historically, if we did not win, it might be because we didn't have a specific offering, right? We might not kind have had AML, transaction monitoring or document verification. But now we're seeing businesses come to us because they know we have a full suite now of identity fraud, the document verification, the transaction monitoring, really that true in life from onboarding to in life that Chris talked about initially. I would also echo what Dev says about pricing. The U.S. is very, very price -- there's a lot of pricing competition and a lot of pricing pressure going on there. And we -- but we're able to address that now. We can address that in some more creative ways by having this whole toolkit in this -- all these capabilities that we have at our fingertips now.

Okay. Next question. Julian in the middle of that, please?

Two, if I may. Firstly, in terms of the fraud business and the fraud capabilities, a lot of chat about that. alongside verification. Would there be any plans or a stage where you can integrate fraud and the ID verification businesses over the medium term, that seems like a something that maybe -- may happen. Interesting view there. And the second one, financials. 12% to 14% revenue growth is looking sort of beyond the near-term headwinds, as you say, 23%, 24% margins, where is the operational gearing. If it's a 12% to 14% revenue growth business, at 23%, 24% margin would suggest quite a lot of investment going in each year. Is that the case in terms of technology requirements? Is it -- it's a battle against pricing? Or is it just a view taken now and then we'll see how we go when we kind of get there. I noted your '26 ambition is a slightly higher margin than that by maybe a bit M&A. I don't know, just interested in that long-term aspiration for the business once we get past these headwinds we're seeing now.

Thank you, Julian. David, who want to take the first and then you can get the second. So firstly, in terms of identity and fraud coming together. I think one of the key points we've -- you've heard all of us from Julie actually right through to all the team talking about fraud. When we talk about fraud, we aren't talking about the fraud solution that we describe investors in terms of ex growth rate, we're talking about all of our solutions help prevent fraud whether that's from a plane I'll address right through to deeply sophisticated AI technology. So actually, fraud is the biggest driver of all of our solutions, point one. Point 2 is actually in reality today, our business is combined. So we run identity and fraud as combined capabilities today in the markets. We report them -- I've said this -- been asked this question a number of times -- Been asked this by number of analysis . We report them separately, candidly, because it's a moment of history. And actually, there I said it, especially with my Audit Chair sitting in front of me. Our auditors didn't want us to change reporting too often. So actually, how we're managing on the ground, how we're managing it in front of customers, which matters most is integrated today.

Yes. On margins, it's a good question, Julian. And I think the short answer, I'll give the longer answer. The short answer is for the window, of which we're covering by the presentation today. So the medium term, we do expect that level of investment to be going back into the business. So the longer version of the answer is that actually we see, as you've heard today, it's so many opportunities for growth. and it is still a highly fragmented market that I think we will our best place strategically at the minute to continue to invest technology, bringing the products together, better solutions for customers, new go-to-market resources in new geographies, as Dev talked about let's chase the extra growth.

I think there's one other point that I think is just worth noting and possibly, you've all kind of reflected a bit on this and perhaps we don't talk enough about a point that actually I've articulated a bit in the past, but I think Julie articulated it incredibly well today, which is one of the reasons we thought I think someone external talk about the market. What we have to all remember is fraud is a fact of life, and it's only, only getting worse, which I think is awful for all of us as individuals, but it is a fact of life through the digital society that we're moving towards. The bad actors are unbelievably good at what they do. The reality is to remain relevant and currently continue to grow for multiyears. As a supplier in that industry, you have to keep investing hard because otherwise, your technology and products become legacy very quickly and don't serve today's problem.

Okay. Next question, so go next -- while we're in the middle. Can you pass it along to Andrew for me.

It's Andrew Ripper from Liberum. I've got 2, if you'll indulge me. So first one, GBG Go, Jose sort of talked about it at the end of his section. Just wondered if you could take a couple of minutes and just go back over what that product is and what you feel the opportunity for it is maybe referencing also the digital and self-service opportunity.

Sure. So GBG Go is a no-code platform that allows to basically do 3 fundamental things. First off, it allows us to describe the journey of an identity. What it means to take an identity from one form to another form throughout of the life cycle of that end user. The second thing allows us to do is to orchestrate services such that within that journey, we can bring the services and the value of those services at the moment most important part of that journey. The third thing that allows is to give statistics and give data back to our clients as to how that process works and how they can optimize the process for applying that value in those services into the into the user experience. The second part of your question as to what that enables to do, there are 2 things that I think are fundamental. One is the -- there is a side of the market that is struggling with 2 things. One is finding the technical resources to deliver their solutions and their applications to market. A no-code solution in the future of low-code also API towards go is going to allow them to be able to bring those services to market with less use of technical resources. The second thing is that many clients are -- have a requirement to go to market much faster. What that means is that they need to reduce the time upon which they take to develop applications. And Go allows them to do that because of the capabilities of the low code and our code. So I think those are kind of the 2 things. So what we're doing is expanding our capabilities of reach into markets that now are having those efficiencies. That doesn't mean that it's going to replace APIs or it's going to replace all the other things that we do is going to go and enhance our capabilities so we can add more clients into our portfolio.

Is it possible -- I'm not asking for a sort of a target revenue number, but just in terms of trying to understand sort of roughly quantitatively what the sort of the opportunity is and also that sort of digital self-serve opportunity. I've got no idea how significant that could be if we look out to 2026, could it be a meaningful contributor to growth over the next 4 years?

No. It's a very great question. We're absolutely not going to give lesser detail on that, partly because I think a key point that Jose mentioned is what -- in this whole presentation actually is what we're really striving to do is offer customers today and customers tomorrow different ways of accessing our services because the reality is not only by size of customer, so from a small business to a very large global enterprise. But actually depending on sector and a number of other sectors, we absolutely believe that there isn't a one-size-fits-all model. So exactly one of the reasons that we can never be that definitive on go is how many larger enterprises will use it as their orchestration there. That's a really simple example. You heard Julie talk about the battle ground being around orchestration. It's still -- I think it's still early to say whether large enterprises will continue to enter or the stuff themselves or we'll look to third parties. So it's very difficult to be very precise about it. The other different reason that's quite difficult to be precise about it is Jose mentioned in his presentation that it offers one of the things that we're really excited about is it offers a low-risk, low-cost, easy deployment model into new geographies. Now how successful that is, will be dependent less on the technology and lots of other factors. So we're not going to give specific numbers around it because, candidly, we don't know. What is really important is we think strategically is a critical part of the jigsaw puzzle.

I think the final comment I would make on Go is as Jose advertise nicely. He will be doing a demonstration shortly. So it's honestly the best way to understand. And I think the instruction Jose had was keep it to 5 minutes. So even if you in a hurry, go and catch that before you go. Did you say you had a second question?

If you'll allow me, I mean, I don't want to take somebody else's questions, but I do have another one.

Then 2 more hands flying around over there.