IDEX Biometrics ASA (IDEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone and welcome to the fourth quarter presentation for IDEX Biometrics. Thank you all for joining. I'm Vince Graziani, CEO at IDEX. And with me today is Catharina Eklof, our Chief Commercial Officer at IDEX. Thank you again for joining.

Very nice to meet you all.

Before we jump in, it's always important to recognize the normal disclaimers that this presentation includes forward-looking information and statements. And as always, it's subject to change. And now, let's just dive right in. Here we are in the first quarter of 2024 with the biometric card market poised to take off. It's important to note that before now in the biometric card market space, there were really only 3 major players out in the industry that could deploy a biometric smart card. Those were the 3 major card manufacturers here in the West: IDEMIA, Talus and G&D. And IDEX set out on our strategy to enable broader deployment of biometric smart cards by doing complete total solutions for car manufacturers and banks. So now as we come back and look at our achievements for 2023, let's look at how we accomplish those -- that strategy. So we launched in 2023, our new biometric software platforms, both IDEX Pay and IDEX Access. These are complete platforms, including the card operating system and in the case of IDEX Access, we now allow API interfaces for our partners to deploy their own applets for access and access control. We implemented scalable enrollment solutions, including tap-to-phone, which is a much more scalable and deployable solution for enrolling the biometric smart card. We deployed a full end-to-end implementation program for banks and issuers, and Cat will probably talk about that a little bit more later. We enabled more than 20 car manufacturers and partners to come to market the IDEX biometrics fast track program. This includes all the software and solutions, as I've talked about earlier, but also includes manufacturing know-how, which capital equipment to purchase, et cetera, and what it takes to get through their LOA and get their final certifications. We now have launched as a result of all of this work, the world's first biometric metal card program with EBL and IDEX Pay in Asia. And we have our first customer to launch IDEX Access with AuthenTrend and opening up the markets in Japan for access control and authentication. Coming up in 2024, we anticipate to have many more bank launches with IDEX Pay in Asia and in Europe. We are working hard to get our certification done with Visa, which will open up even more banks and issuers, a big part of the world's banking industry is Visa. And of course, we need to get that out there into the market space as well. We will be launching as well a crypto cold wallet platform solution similar to IDEX Pay and IDEX Access but for the crypto cold wallet space. And we'll be launching a new biometric platform together with our partner, ST Microelectronics for card manufacturing partners and banks and issuers that want to have choice when it comes to the secure element chip. And we are continuing to work on our operational efficiencies. Those are coming into effect, and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we get into the financial section here. Okay. Let's go into the quarterly highlights for the fourth quarter. On the payment side, Eastern Bank Limited in Bangladesh launched their first biometric metal card globally based on IDEX Pay. This is a great deployment for both IDEX and Eastern Bank and demonstrates that our strategy to launch at the affluent segment first is a great strategy for execution. We now have 3 metal card manufacturers globally and anticipate that we'll have more design wins and more banks launching here, starting with the affluent programs, and then bringing in the mainstream customers as part of our overall strategy. We do have a partner in Asia who's piloting our first central bank digital currency card. And this is a pretty early deployment, but we do believe that we'll see future deployments of central bank digital currency cards with biometrics as other governments and central banks begin to deploy digital currency programs. We also have our first programs in development for entitlement programs. And this is an area where social security and other entitlement programs are dealing with lots of fraud. And so the biometric card here adds value with proof of identity and proof of life for those who are on these entitlement programs. And we anticipate we'll see more of these government programs globally as these biometric cards become more mainstream in the market. On the Access side, AuthenTrend, our partner, has launched a FIDO202 biometric card for digital access based on our IDEX Access total software platform. We also have additional contract customers for Access, taking advantage of the IDEX Access program. And the way that program works is we do the full card operating system and enable our partners through an API to add their own value to their access cards and authentication cards by doing their own applets in applications on the card in deploying their own unique solutions for their target markets and their geography. Our partner, Sentry, is now working on their next-generation access cards based on IDEX technology, and those are soon ready for launch into the market as well. And then regulatory enforcement in Europe and in the U.S. is creating more demand for cybersecurity. So we see more and more demand and more and more partners and customers coming to us for access control and digital authentication. On the card manufacturer side, we have card manufacturers and partners who are in certification with IDEX Pay. As we've talked about in the past, IDEX Pay is fully certified for software and security, all precertified today by Mastercard and soon to be precertified also by Visa. This means that our card manufacturing partners only need to go through the card structural integrity part of the certification in order to get their LOAs and we anticipate in the first half of the year, several more card manufacturers will soon be coming out and announcing their own LOAs. We have the first manufacturer in Europe already certified with IDEX Pay. And as previously announced, they were able to get that certification in LOA in record time, thanks to the precertification of our IDEX solution. And then our Visa certification is in progress. We're working closely with Visa on this and anticipate to have that certification complete sometime in the first half of 2024. Now let's go into the fourth quarter financial summary. Fourth quarter revenues were down from the prior quarter as we're in the process of transitioning our business from our legacy component customers, to selling the full solutions for IDEX Pay and IDEX Access. This transition is happening, and we're seeing an impact of that also in our margins. Let's talk about first on the quarter itself. We had negative gross margins total, but that was the result of onetime inventory write-offs of some of our old legacy products that we still had in inventory. So we're getting those products in that inventory off the books. Excluding these onetime write-offs, our margins actually grew to 44% for the fourth quarter. This is an improvement that demonstrates that our approach of selling the complete solution is also going to improve our margins over time. Our operating expenses decreased by 33% compared to the prior quarter and this is in line with previously announced actions that we had taken to rightsize the business and lower the operating expenses. We continue to focus on this and look for operating efficiencies, and you'll see these numbers continue to come down over the coming quarters. During the quarter, we did complete a capital raise of NOK 35 million and a convertible debt offering of NOK 100 million. Our goal here was to minimize dilution for our shareholders and get access to the capital we needed to continue to run the business. Both of those were successfully completed by the end of the fourth quarter and met all of our expectations there. So now we're going to move over to the fourth quarter commercial update, and I will turn it over to Catharina to walk you through the commercial update portion of the presentation. Cat?

Thank you, Vince. So just as a reminder to everyone, our business model is still based on 3 different solutions that we take to market. So as you heard Vince say, we do have our biometric sensor that we have our legacy customers taking. We are also commercializing the biometric system solution, which contains both the sensor and the algorithm, and this second product is mostly sold out to our Asian customers. And then we have our biometric card platform, the IDEX Pay focused on the payment and the banking sector and IDEX Access platform, which is focused on the authentication space. The way we take these solutions to market, we have 4 different channels that we work with. So the first one and the most important one is our manufacturer. The second one is our ecosystem partners. So these are processors, mainly integrators and then we have resellers in specific dedicated markets. We focus on -- geographically, just to remind everyone, we focus on Asia as our prime set and key markets in Europe for the payments. And for our access market, we have a global focus. The 3 sectors that we are concentrating on: banking and payment, public and private services and government and enterprise security. As been said, IDEX is currently in commercialization with 20-plus manufacturers and partners and we have a healthy growth of new customers. So as you can see, looking at the map of our customers, we are expanding heavily in Asia, but we have also added key geographies, such as the Middle East and also India during the fourth quarter. So we have added players like KL HI-TECH, which is one of the largest manufacturers in India. We have added Toppan Gravity which is a well renowned manufacturer in Middle East, which is also linked to the Japanese mother company, Toppan in Japan. And if we look at the growth, so over the year-on-year growth, we've moved from 15% to almost 28 customers during '23. And all of these manufacturers together today represents a TAM, total addressable market, which represents 1.2 billion cards. The other thing that is very important that has happened during the fourth quarter is that the regulatory environment and the industry standardization has both increased pressure and accelerated. The payment service directive has come into effect. So there are strong pressure on banks to bring out accessible payment vehicles further to be enhanced during 2025. And the NIS 2 Directive, it's a security directive coming out for enterprises, how to protect their assets and their employees, and I will cover that a little bit later. And the other act that's come into operation is the DORA. So the Digital Operational Resilience Act also exercising and demanding of enterprises to level up their security services. When we look at the industry standardization, the main thing that happened during Q4 is that EMV code, the standardization body for payments, which is global, have put biometrics on the agenda and the first initiatives to standardize biometrics globally above Mastercard and Visa because as you know, there are several more payment schemes that are interested in deploying biometrics and EMV [corseting] the framework enables both certification to be faster, more economical and streamlined, but foremost also the consumer experience to be streamlined across all schemes. And the other thing that we're seeing is that FIDO is becoming deployed in 2 countries that are frontrunners here for national deployment is Japan and Taiwan. If we look at what have we done in IDEX to actually drive the market? Well, as Vince said, the key thing is to actually ensure that the banks has a full suite of enrollment solutions so that the activation of biometric cards follows the bank processes that they deploy today. So IDEX has put to market iOS mobile application. We have also introduced an Android solution that we call Activation Pad. We have also worked significantly on cost optimization, both for manufacturers streamlining the card manufacturing processes and ensuring together that we come out with a card product that is as cost efficient as possible. The other key thing that we have spent a significant amount of time on is launching our metal cards into production with 3 manufacturers. And this is really the wedge into biometrics, starting with the affluent and high network customer segments of banks. As you've seen, we have deployed this first out in Asia. The other thing that's coming into market with IDEX is actually using the combination of a mobile phone. So the communication is steered through the banking and mobile app. So when one uses the mobile phone, you get communication and affirmation confirmation that the transaction has happened, where and when, which is a natural linking and we see banks appreciating to have the strong linkage between mobile and the biometric card. Lastly, just for everyone to understand what do IDEX have in market today? So as I said, we're rolling out the metal cards. On our plastic cards, they are based on recycled PVC. IDEX issued cards together with banks and manufacturers across debit, credit, prepaid and corporate cards, all segments to enable banks to enforce biometrics and put it where their segments see best fit. And lastly, in Bangladesh with EBL, which is the leading innovator bank in Bangladesh, very happy to announce that EBL is taking the charge of bringing biometrics to Bangladesh, and it has caused a lot of excitement and many customers awaiting this card. The core reasons for EBL to launch this is it brings them differentiation and very focused on their high-end customers. So as they travel, look for less declines, customers are demanding secure cross-border payments. The ambition is to drive top of wallet and of course, by that, that it renders customer loyalty. So exciting news as this gets into market. Now as it comes to our access and authentication products, today, globally, cyber security represents over $10 trillion with McKinsey forecasting a double-digit growth over to 2025. Therefore, today, we see 90% of the enterprises implementing a zero-trust strategy as frameworks to combat these threats. So access management is becoming a top priority for these enterprises, and few will buy some key trends. So first of all, you all know, cybercrimes are -- methods are becoming more sophisticated. It is pressuring the enterprises to raise the bar. The increasing dependency on online collaboration, so all enterprises are dealing with collaboration between employees, contractors, suppliers and customers. And this requires enterprises to be extremely diligent in who can access what. And the lost key thing that has happened since COVID is, of course, hybrid work model. So right people can access the right system no matter where they are outside or within the firewall. So this is driving the global market to multifactor authentication, and it is becoming a standard, a de facto standard. And with that, as IDEX operates globally, when we meet our market partners, we see that biometric authentication is the only way to secure that user credentials are not shared and biometric access should be decentralized. And in conclusion, physical access is as important as online access to enterprises. And our partners, Sentry, eSignus and partners out in Asia are all enabling the Microsoft, Apple, Google compatibility. For crypto, we are now enabling Ethereum and Bitcoin. And as Vince said, we've launched in one of the most proponent markets for FIDO Japan with AuthenTrend with strong interest from corporate clients in Japan. Market outlook. Well, in short, the payment market for metal cards is growing at plus 24%, and the PVC market is growing at a steady 5%. We still see financial and digital inclusion as a key global priority. And you will hear this being pronounced by governments around the ESG agenda, and there is still today 1.4 billion unbanked. The forecast that we have is that there will be around 40 million cards by 2028. So that's the growth figures we have and that's fueled then by these different initiatives. So both banks rolling out stronger regulatory enforcement and standardization. And the other key driver as we talked about just before is that the digital ID market is also forecasted to grow for different applications at a very strong pace. Finally, an important part of 2024's agenda is really of looking at ESG and both across companies like Mastercard and BBC News, all over the world, the notion of digital exclusion is becoming top of the agenda foremost by European Union means to actually ensure that people who have disabilities needs to be able to pay with other means than mobile or in combination with mobile. So driving accessible payments for elderly, visually and memory impaired and digital excluded is becoming something that's now regulated on agendas for governments. And IDEX is very much at the forefront and we'll be driving -- you will hear more on our initiatives on this. And as a conclusion, IDEX today is actually deploying across a range of different markets. So as you all know, we do payments. We have just introduced cyber and digital access. We do digital currency Central Bank in Asia Pacific. We do public transportation, and we're just in the cusp of rolling out health care program and government security has just been implemented. And each market represents its own very large opportunity for both the partners and IDEX. Vince, over to you.

Thank you, Cat. And great job, great summary there. And let's sum it all up here as well. So at IDEX, we see ourselves as enabling the future of payments and authentication. As Cat just pointed out on the last slide, it's a multibillion dollar market opportunity. It's just huge across many applications. And we're executing on our strategy, which includes complete solutions for both banks and card manufacturers to drive market adoption. And our second part of our strategy is to open up markets region by region and segment by segment. So this focused marketing approach is really working for us and really paying off. Further, we now see ourselves, as Cat just showed in the last slide as well, expanding the use cases for biometric smart cards into other markets and other market opportunities. So the market opportunity just continues to grow. So with that, we'll summarize and thank you all for joining our fourth quarter presentation and look forward to talking to you again in the next quarter. Thank you very much.