PCI-PAL PLC (PCIP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PCI Pal results presentation. To begin with, if we could cover a couple of housekeeping items. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, which you will see on your screens. [Operator Instructions]. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate. These will be available via your Investor Meet Company dashboard. Finally, we would like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Now I'd like to hand you over to Chief Executive, James Barham; and Chief Financial Officer, William Good.

Thank you, Tom. Welcome, everyone, to our half year update for FY '22. It's been another really strong period of progress here at PCI Pal and certainly looking forward to taking you through these half year results today. Thanks for joining us as well on the IMC platform. For those who know us you know that we use this platform to make ourselves more accessible to a wider investor audience. We've built up a pretty good backlog of IMC presentations on here to help investors get a good grasp with our story, our messaging and our long-term plans for the business. So please, if you do want more background, do check out some of our earlier presentations as well. To kick this off today, I'll be giving an overview of our strategy. And then I'll move into the half year update and financial review from William. Before I do move on, I do want to say a few words on the patent dispute that we first reported to the market in September. I know that for many of you, this is going to be front of mind. So I wanted to deal with it at the front end of the presentation to allow us to spend more time focused on the financial and operational updates, which frankly very strong. So it might also be quite difficult for us to answer some questions at the end on this. But, so unless it's something fairly straightforward, we may not be able to answer the question because, obviously, we've got a legal case underway at the moment. So as a reminder, this case relates to alleged infringement of IP rights concerning one element of one of our products. The overriding feel from me really is one of the frustration, particularly as we were the first in our space to do what we do in the cloud with our own IP. We've been a disruptor in our market. And those of you that have followed us since the beginning, will know that story very well. And we've really transformed the way that companies could access secure payment systems in business communications environment. So the situation is fairly frustrating from a sort of business standpoint. But the bottom line right now is positive. So we're very confident in our position. We have been since day 1, and there's reasons for that. Our position is multifaceted in terms of the ways we're able to defend ourselves on non-infringement specifically. But additionally, the counterclaims we're making on validity as well are very strong. It's important to note, as we've stated before, we have always taken legal opinions as we evolved our product set to ensure we do not infringe any third parties IP right. So -- those things are up together. We have a very strong defense. We have high levels of confidence around this situation and frankly, with the strong performance of the business, we're very well resourced to see this process out if we need to. Now I think I should say, as an executive team, as a Board, as with anything we do at PCI Pal, we always consider all the options available to us, and we'll continue to do that as we proceed down this path. But certainly, whatever we do is working towards the best outcome for the company and therefore, our shareholders. Okay. Now I'd like to try and get on with the good stuff now, the business progress, which has been very strong. And William and I are really excited about what we're doing in the business today and what we've got coming down the track. So a little bit of background for those new to the story. PCI Pal is a fast-growing SaaS business. We facilitate secure payments for organizations that use our solutions, use our services. And we do this securing of payments across all business communications environment. So by business communications environments, we particularly mean contact centers and the omnichannel mix that goes into that steer. So voice or phone and the more common today, you're certainly growing digital channels such as chat, web chat, social media, e-mail, all of these to go into the contact center or call center mix. So basically, if a payment interaction is occurring anywhere outside of a website or in a store, we get involved. Now not only do we secure data, but we enable compliance with relevant data security standards as well. And particularly the global standard that governs the protection of card data, payment card data, which is known as PCI compliance, payment card industry compliance. And by using our services, our customers make their journey to compliance with that standard much, much easier, and it can also support their compliance to other guidelines that are out there or regulatory standards such as GDPR, for instance. We're cloud-only, true SaaS product set, and we can deliver as a result anywhere in the world. And our focus to date has been -- we talk about our EMEA region, but the focus within EMEA has very much been the U.K. and our North America region, which our focus has very much been the U.S., but we are very much expanding as well. So I'm going to talk to you a bit about that today. In terms of our products, we're very simple. So 3 core products: Agent Assist, Digital and IVR. Agent Assist is involved in securing payment data in live agent phone calls with customers. Digital is a live agent digital interaction with the customer, so that would be webchat or social media like I mentioned just now or IVR, which is the sort of industry term for auto attendant or automated services, which can also be used with speech recognition, too. We're a primarily channel-led business. So the majority of our business comes through resellers, and as some of them shown on the slide there, and I'll take you through that later and give you an update on that. And then also just an example of some of our awards, which feel free to dig into afterwards the highlight on that being some of the people awards that we've been winning this year, which is kind of a testament to our focus on our people, which has been particularly important given the competitive hiring market right now. Getting into a snapshot of the year. So strong increase in revenue year-on-year, 72% up ahead of our management expectations, not significantly, but it was ahead of management expectations. I'll let William talk a bit more about revenue growth in detail. We're continuing to drive new business sales through our key sort of future indicator of recurring revenues, which is TACV, so that stands for total annual contract value, and that's the total annual contract value of all contracts that we have, whether they're live or not, i.e., whether they're revenue recognition or not. And that today is at GBP 11.4 million. So you can see that's not too far away from what we're anticipating [ during ] our market forecast for the full year. Another 2 key metrics for us that I look at, particularly that we introduced at the end of the last financial year, NRR, net revenue retention and churn and our management of churn and minimalizing that. So I think we're proving with that kind of performance at 120% NRR and our churn rate is less than 5%, that not only are we winning business, we're keeping it and we're growing it, too. And that's kind of the utopia that we want to get to. This has been something I've been particularly keen on as we brought further focus on this because we've got more opportunity here as we evolve our products-set, adding features and more opportunity to do more with the customers that we win. We work very hard to win those customers in the first place. Other highlights here for the half year. Partner ecosystem is critical to us. I have a bit more of a deep dive on that, but we do have the strongest partner ecosystem in our market by some margin. We've been completely committed to channel since the day 1 of this journey. We're very targeted about the businesses that we try to align ourselves with, and we've won a number of new really interesting regional and global partners in the first half. We've also got a very strong pipeline of new global partnerships as we look out into H2 as well. And just for a moment, I will talk about people, which is not new for us. We've always talked to our people. The majority of our cost base is people, and that's what drives this business forward. But that has been brought into sharp focus in the last 6 months with the war for talent that's been going on and sort of hit us 2 or 3 months into the financial year, but I'm pleased to say, whilst that's been a headwind and been a challenge, but I think we've kind of won that wrestling match. So we've adapted the way we're working with recruiters, adapted how we were hiring and not put too much pressure either on our budgeted pay scales. So we've been quite creative there, really worked on our employer brand and I'm also pleased to say with that, we've been able to maintain employee retention high, which is tracking pretty much today about 90% -- 90% plus. So yes, very happy with that, and that's a testament to the sort of culture that we've built here at PCI Pal. In terms of the strategy, very simply, 3 key pillars to our strategic growth. And now to be the leader for cloud solutions in our space through our solution to be available to customers anywhere in the world and to leverage a sales model that majority sells through channel partners, and we think we're being very successful in developing and progressing along those strategic avenues. A slight delay on the slide. In terms of our global presence, a split into 2 places, so cloud and the sort of global establishment strategy. So focusing on cloud for a moment. So a key competitive differentiator for us, as I say, first to launch cloud in our market by some margin, and we have the most mature cloud platform in that market as a result of that. It's also one of the key reasons we've been successful with other aspects of our strategy. So in particular, success in working with partners. Many of our resellers are cloud companies themselves -- global cloud companies, many of them, very large U.S. headquartered organizations. And so we sort of set out still to be the go-to cloud vendor for these cloud companies to want to work with. It's also a reason why we're able to serve the small to midsize end of the contact center market very efficiently. And coming into this space, that was always critical for us because the vast majority of the contact center market globally sort of 90% or more is less than 100 agency. So the vast majority is small to midsize and cloud gives us the ability to be able to do that. Now our cloud is hosted in Amazon Web Services. So AWS fully virtualized, and as you can see from the 6 padlocks on the slide there, we've got 6 regional instances of that platform that we can we can scale very quickly and at a significant pace. And in terms of the geographic point, in April last year, we went through a fundraise and that was to support an expanded development plan for us to grow our addressable market by up to 40% over the next 18 months. And we've made good progress against that. In the initial plans were that we would launch in Canada, and we have achieved that in the first half at the back end of the first half. And we've also, since the end of H1, launched in Australia, too. So we actually have people on the ground in those territories now, being able to work with our existing partners who have offices there. So really looking forward to seeing the pipeline starting come together in those territories as well. Now we've also been investing as part of that fundraise in products, so product development, product marketing and that's been progressing well, too, but we're going to see the majority of those benefits starting to come through in the second half. In terms of the ecosystem and giving you a bit of an update. So I said we channeled -- 81% of our contracts come through partners. We're a channel-first business. That means we still do business direct as well. Majority of our direct customers tend to be more enterprise in nature. And we do have some of the largest contact centers in the U.K., for example, who use us through direct agreements with us that tends to typically be where we sell direct. We are a pure-play organization. So that means we're only focused on secure payments and that makes us much more attractive to many of these partners. So there's no perception that we might compete with them trying to cross-sell products that might potentially trade on their toes, which we know has been a challenge for other competitors of ours. We're completely committed to channel with the people we have, the processes we have, the technology that we've built and all of those things underpin how [indiscernible] successful in building a strong ecosystem. On the left-hand side of that slide, you'll see that we split our partners into 4 groups. I'm not going to spend a long time talking through those because I have done it on some of our much earlier presentations. So please feel free to go back to those, if you'd like to listen through. But the short point is we have a very joined up and focused and tactical approach to how we treat partners once they're onboard, enabled and then we're getting them into business as usual and producing for us. In terms of partner highlights in the period, Amazon -- probably want to choose from that, the Amazon deal that we announced in H1, so Amazon customers can now procure PCI Pal services through AWS Marketplace, which is the Amazon technology marketplace. We're the first vendor in our space to achieve this globally and we have a fully approved integration there. So we're going through partner enablement with Amazon at the moment, and that's Amazon Connect customers, which is Amazon's cloud contact center platform. In particular that we're focused on there. But as you imagine, Amazon is a very large organization. So enablement, onboarding and getting that moving will take a little bit of time. Now we've signed other various global companies in the period, all of them on our target list at the start of the year, and I'll talk a little more about those at the regional breakdown. And then finally, I would say that we've really upped our game in terms of our relationships with existing partners coming into the year. We've seen the emergence of marketplaces, for instance, which may make it a bit easier for competitors to get into those environments. We've actually been taking it up and not many of these organizations where we've built up a lot of trust. We built up strong customer bases. So actually we're becoming a solution of choice for many of these resellers, and I'll highlight a company like Genesys, for instance, where we're an AppFoundry premium partner, which is a fairly, fairly exclusive group, but we got that off the back of our hard work and focus getting to that point. So it's not on the background. I'm going to hand over to you now, William for the financial update.

Thanks, James. So as James indicated, we're very happy with the numbers that are flying through into the business. The continuing the trend, the strong growth that we've set out over the last 5 years and have reset out in April to drive the business further forward. And I'm pleased to say that from my point of view, all the key metrics we have are in the green, if you use a traffic light system, which we do, and some of them are right at the top end of the performance criteria we're looking for. So you'll recognize the format of the presentation. I try and keep things consistent for you. So you can see the comparisons and the performance going forward. So these are just some of the key financial highlights. As I said, we're making significant progress against all the key metrics. So the top left-hand box there is the revenue. So it's up 72%, as James said, year-on-year for a period of period. So we did GBP 5.47 million in the first half of the year. And you can see that I've kind of outlined the forecast that's in the city at 10.9% actually has just been increased by our brokers to GBP 11.1 million, and we're well on track for achieving that. And if you take that into context, we're on target for doing GBP 11 million. You go back 4 years, we did GBP 2 million revenue. So we've increased revenue 5.5x in that 4-year period. And as we set out in April 2021, we're looking at driving that from 10x in 6-year period. So we're achieving that. More importantly, on the right-hand side, the gross margin continues to improve. So not only are we driving revenue, we're keeping more of it to pay our bills. So revenue improved by 8.4% half-on-half. And that has allowed us to increase our adjusted EBITDA. Now the adjustments I take out are exchange movements. I take out the cost of the patent, which I'll talk about later, and also share options. So the adjusted EBITDA for the half year was just a shade under GBP 600,000 and the statutory loss on the basis was GBP 1.1 million when you put everything back in. That's our adjusted EBITDA with a 57% improvement. The other key metrics or some of the key metrics we look at are our annual contract value, the value of contracts that we signed as new contracts in the year, we ACV. That's performing well. That's up 6% period-to-period at GBP 1.76 million. Please bear in mind that the comparison was quite strong as we had -- as we were coming out of the first impact of the pandemic coming through in the comparator. But also bear in mind that this delivery is on roughly the same level of salespeople we had the previous year. Now we have taken on new headcount. We have expanded it, as James said, into Canada, into Australia. We've added people in the United States. But typically, it takes 4 to 6 months before those people actually sign their first deals. And then it takes another time before it actually starts filtering through to revenue. So we're looking forward to that growth continuing. And we're targeting GBP 3.7 million there or thereabouts in the full year. The new ACV is one of the key drivers that drives our TACV number that James mentioned, and that's up 37% half half-on-half at GBP 11.34 million. And for those that have been following us for a little while when we did the presentation in September, I outlined that we are looking for -- to achieve TACV in FY '22 of about GBP 13.1 million by the time we get to June 2022. So we're well on track for doing that. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. More importantly, recurring revenues continue to grow. 90% of our revenue is now recurring. That's on the basis of our deliberate plan to make sure that we don't charge upfront. We work with our clients, and so we have recurring revenues. And finally, the other highlight is cash balances. We finished the period with GBP 5.5 million that is substantially ahead of where we were expecting today coming into the year because of the strong performance of the business. And again, I'll talk a bit more about that in the next few slides. So looking at TACV in a bit more detail. Some of you will recognize this graph. I keep it going. You can see the half-on-half growth coming through. So it's grown 19% since June 2021. And the little white box at the top, the 1.8 box at the top is the amount we've got to do to take it up to the 13.1% forecast I put in the market in September. So why is it growing? Well, it's growing because we're signing new customers. But also, we're not losing that many customers. James talked about churn. It's a focus for us. It always has been. There's no point signing customers and then have them switch off after 12, 24 or 36 months. And so we measure that and we started publishing those stats to you in September. As of December, based -- our churn is down at 3.5%, which is right at the top end, the lower end of our target. So anywhere between 3% and 8% is seem good for a SaaS company, and we're at 3.5%. But clearly, we're focusing on that. Net retention, as James mentioned, is another key metric. So not only are we successfully signing in new logos and bring them in, but a good proportion of our sales are now coming from upsells to existing clients, be that new licenses or be that being introduced to other parts of these global business we've signed. And we've been very successful in rolling that out over the period and expect to continue that into the second half of the business. Just looking at TACV a bit more. This is the split by region. The charcoal bar in the graph on the left-hand side represents EMEA, which again is growing strongly and continue to grow strongly. The orange bar is North America. And as I remind people, eventually, the North American bar will overtake the EMEA because it's a bigger market, but it just takes time to get our momentum building. The table on the right-hand side is very important to us as a business. That's the split of the TACV. So TACV is the measure of all the contracts we have signed and still valid -- I'm sorry if canceled -- if a contract is canceled, it's taken out of TACV. But the split is important because, obviously, we can only recognize revenue under the accounting rules once they go live. So our ARR, which is the deployed contract has grown from GBP 5.89 million to GBP 8.96 million, so a GBP 3 million jump in the last 12 months. And that leads to the regular monthly recurring income dropping through. At the end of December, we had a further GBP 1.89 million in active deployment. So our TTGL, which some of you will remember is our metric we use to how quickly we get a business -- a contract from signature through to revenue recognition. In the period, we achieved 22 weeks. Typically, it's 22, 24 or 26, somewhere in that region. So we are on track for that just at the top end of it. And so that GBP 1.89 million, all things being equal, will get deployed, and we'll get -- we'll drop into the ARR boosting the ARR up towards at the GBP 11 million as we come into FY '23. You'll also see there's an element of on hold contracts. These contracts we declare because they relate to either where customers need to put extra resources in to get going and they're part of -- or they're part of a bigger expansion and rollout of changes in that customer or they've come to a channel partner, and that channel partner is selling new to the end customer. And so they have to put their business -- their processes in first before we can get switched on. So those contracts, they do roll over. Eventually, they're coming to deployment and then go through, but they typically take a longer time to go live. Just looking at the revenue. Again, revenue is growing strongly. So the graph on the left-hand side, the 5.0, that represents our recurring revenue. And the little orange bar on the top represents our professional services release under the rules of IFRS 15. So we didn't charge upfront fees. They're worth GBP 1.2 million, GBP 1.5 million to us every year. Those then get held and start getting amortized once the contract goes live in line with the normal IFRS 15 accounting process. Now within our revenue, we have had some strong tailwinds boosting us, which is why we have achieved 72% year-on-year, which is ahead of our own expectations. So firstly, where we upsell and where we upsell with new licenses, the time to go live on those are a lot shorter than obviously a new contract coming through so we can switch them on and start recognizing revenue. That's probably added GBP 100,000, GBP 150,000 to my -- to the revenue this year and then will flow through into the second half and onwards. In addition, we do, in some -- use telephony minutes to help connect our services to contact centers. And those minutes are related to calls coming in. And if we're receiving more calls, we get more revenue. So one of our customers has been substantially busier than we expected and has generated an extra GBP 250,000 worth of minutes in the period. Now those are not as high margin as licenses as you would expect, but it's still an important revenue earner and gross margin earner for us. That strength in growth of revenue has allowed us to increase our forecast revenue in the period. So if you remember, we came into the year with a forecast of GBP 10.4 million, we raised it when we did the trading update to GBP 10.9 million, and we just raised it again to GBP 11.1 million, driven by those factors. And again, the gross margin is 81%. So more and more of that is dropping to the bottom line. I do expect the gross margin to continue to improve because the AWS platform, which we sell on primarily is our own. And so that will head up, as I've said in previous presentations to north of 85%, maybe 90%. Just looking at the income statement in more detail. Clearly, I've talked about the revenues and the cost of sales and the gross margin. So I'm not going to talk any more about that. But I will highlight the staff cost there, which has grown by 36%. Now that's because we're taking on more staff because of the April '21 fundraise, which we set out our store to continue to expand this business and grab additional TAM, addressable market. So our headcount in the period has gone from 71 as at the end of June '21 to 86 as at the end of December, and we're now just in the low 90s as we speak at the end of February. That's all part of the plan. We haven't held back on the plan because we have been funded for it, even though the patent has come into the equation as well. You'll see the loss from -- the operating loss for the business has improved from GBP 2.1 million to GBP 1.1 million. Now that's a statutory operating loss. So it includes all the exchange gains losses and other sort of adjustable items. So below that, you'll see I've taken it out. So the biggest movement is the exchange gains and losses. So in the prior period to December '20, we actually had an exchange loss of GBP 366,000 because the U.S. dollar went from GBP 1.35 up to GBP 1.4. Conversely, in this period, it's dropped back from GBP 1.5 back down -- to GBP 1.4 back to GBP 1.35. So it's reversed itself again. That's why I strip it out. All that exchange loss relates to the revaluation of the sterling loans that the plc has made to the U.S. It's no cash implication at all. You'll see the exceptional cost line in there. So at the patent case that James mentioned in the beginning, we have spent GBP 285,000 to the end of December with legal fees. I've treated that as an exceptional cost. And clearly, those costs are expected to continue. So if you look at the finnCap forecast, we're expecting a loss of a cost of up to GBP 650,000 in the full year to June '22. And then there's the expenses from share options. So taking those out, the adjusted operating loss is only -- has improved by 39%. So it's GBP 1,037 against GBP 1.7 million, a very strong performance and above our expectations. Just looking at cash. Cash, we've used GBP 2 million worth of cash in the business, which is actually slightly -- which is actually less than we were expecting to when we went into the year because of the expansions we've been pressing in headcount. You'll see that's up markedly from the prior period. Why is that? Well, just as a reminder, in the prior period, we did receive from our largest U.S. customer, an advanced payment for year 2 and year 3 licenses, which totaled $1.13 million. So that takes recognized in the deferred income line. Deferred income actually grows because of advanced billing and the other side is cash. So that's the primary difference between the 2 businesses. So we finished the period with GBP 5.5 million in cash, having started with GBP 7.5 million, but we also have no borrowing facilities, which were repaid in June 2021. So we're in good shape in cash-wise and ahead of our expectations. Finally, balance sheet. I'm not going to talk much about this. The only thing that's probably highlighted the trade debtors is in line 2, which has jumped GBP 1 million. That's not because we're not collecting our debt. That's because that's a mixture of strong contract sales where we're advancing -- billing in advance. Plus the growth in the business. We're up 72% in revenue terms. And just to -- our debtor days, our collection periods, we actually collect on a 65 to 70-day period, our debt. That's not bad considering a number of our channel partners take 60 days credit from us. And we have minimal debt over 90 days, the same as we reported in the full year to June '21. And again, no bank borrowing in there. So that's it from me on the finance side. I will now hand back to James to take you through the rest.

Thanks, William. Should we get to my slide? Yes. Okay. So yes, sales and revenue growth is okay. So just focusing on the split of ACV. So our new sales bookings in the period. EMEA at GBP 1 million was ahead of our expectations within the business for the half year. So very pleased with that. That's partly due to strong sales in EMEA as well. So this is the direct result of the strong performance of NRR. So the EMEA business is more mature. So we have more opportunities to upsell to those customers. So the North America number, which is all U.S.-based business was in line with management expectations at just under GBP 0.8 million. Now the vast majority of that is net new logo business, so that's all new business. So we'll expect to see upsells coming in the U.S. as the sort of years progress in those relationships get a little bit more mature. And we are on track moving into H2 with the U.S. to expect that to uptick in the second half. We're starting to talk more about our ARR now as well. Now that we've previously talked about TACV being what ARR is likely to look like. But now that we're getting a slightly larger organization, we'll start to focus a little more on ARR, which is up 52% to GBP 9 million. I'm very pleased with that result. There are some underlying operational metrics, which are performing very well and help really drive that. So those that know us well will know that we've talked about one of our delivery metrics, TTGL, Time-To-Go-Live, which is a period of time it takes us to get from signing a contract to when it goes live and is, therefore, revenue recognition. Well, we're inside of our management expectations for the half year against that metric at 22 weeks. And we've got very strong or high NPS scores across both implementations and our Service Desk areas as well. So these are Net Promoter Scores. So this is a very strong indicator of customer satisfaction with us. So critical that those 2 metrics are working well for us if we're going to be able to keep customers and we can be able to do more with customers, which ultimately is what's driving those NRR and minimal churn rates. In terms of average deal sizes, so slightly higher than the year-on-year average, but still, we're very much within the sort of 20,000 to 30,000 ACV mark, which that's perfectly good for us because it's targeting that small to midsize end of the market. But we do have numerous enterprise deals that we are still doing. We haven't had necessarily any of the one-off really big ones that we had a handful of in the previous 2 years, but we've got a steady flow of 100,000, 150,000 ACV value individual deals being done. And in fact, I'll highlight one of those on the next slide in the U.S., which has great expansion opportunities. So in the top right of the slide there, it's an enterprise deal that we won with a very well-known U.S. headquartered pharmaceutical firm with truly global operations. So we're going through a delivery process with them at the moment, but that is not across the entire business. So the EMEA business has been successful in expanding into existing accounts, and we would now expect to start seeing that happen in the U.S. as well. ACV sales in North America were up 14% year-on-year. As I said, slightly ahead of management expectations. So we're happy with that. That's the back of the same resources we had in the prior year. It's only since the further investment that we've started to escalate that growth. And you may remember that those of you that I spoke to before, I explained there's a timing intricacy with the U.S. We cannot just pile money into the U.S. and expect to return because their maturity around payment security and payment technology is a little behind some of the other markets that we're operating in. So there's a timed increase being built up there, but we do anticipate an uplift in the second half as part of that. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, we did launch our Canadian operation, too. So the North American business won't just be U.S., it will be Canada as well. And actually, that team here has already started building our pipeline, which is great to see. In terms of EMEA, I don't want to repeat things we've already been through. But naturally, is the more mature part of the business, we'll see revenue being able to increased more significantly. We'll see that starting to come through in North America across the remainder of this year. But it was great to see the EMEA business EBITDA profitable. When we did the fundraise in April last year, we pushed back our cash generation points in our breakeven points by 12 to 18 months, we told investors and really, this is the first line in the sand of that new time line that we have hit. So we're looking 12 months out now to get to those first months of cash generative and breakeven. And it doesn't actually feel that long ago that I was talking about that previously. So I'm very pleased that we're on track and in line to get to those breakeven points as well. As I said, upsell opportunities have been very strong in EMEA, some great new partners that we've won too. And I said I'd highlight 1 or 2 of those. We've won 2 new major BPO partners in Europe. These are big global organizations. One of them has actually got more than 200,000 call center agents across its whole group, that's one of the largest in the world. And we've sold customers to both these BPOs that we signed in the same period. So it shows how quickly actually the BPOs get working. So -- and the BPOs are big outsources, big outsourced contact centers. But because that's Mainland Europe, that's a really good indicator of our capability longer term to be able to use the U.K. to expand into Mainland Europe to grow that addressable market opportunity for the for the EMEA business. And then just finally, the majority of our engineering and product [ choice ] based in the U.K., and some of you will be aware that I hired a new CTO in May last year. He's also our CPO as the Chief Product Officer as well. And he's been -- I've been working with him, hiring new product -- professionals into the business. I could not be more pleased with how that's going, and I know that the management team feel exactly the same about that. So I often say this, we're obsessed about hiring, and we don't let people in unless we're 110% about them. And I think we've got that one right. So we're very pleased with the direction that that's taking. Which in terms of an outlook, we do have real confidence looking out, not just for the second half, but we've got -- we're very excited about the rolling 5-year plan that we're constantly evolving. H2 has started very well. We're 2 months in now, totally in line with management expectations as we expect it to be. New business tracking very well. We've had a strong couple of months there. New hiring as well the new hires that we've been making as a result of the additional investment, they don't have an impact immediately. It takes people time to be onboarded some more than others, some longer than others, depending on their role. So in H2, we'll start seeing some of the benefits of those hires, whether that be sales, whether that be product, whether that be operational. So there's going to be great to report on that progress with you. As I mentioned earlier, Australia is now active and open. So we've got a team of 3 out in Australia headed up by a VP of Sales with some very specific experience of our industry. So we're hopeful that it's in the ground running. And then as I said, I'm very positive about the product situation at PCI Pal. And we've got some great product initiatives that we're working on. We're driving more pace through our development teams, and I should be in a position to provide updates on how those initiatives are going through our H2. So that's the end of the presentation, but very happy to take some questions.

Okay. Well, thank you, James. Thank you, William. Now if we could turn to the questions, and we have a number of questions that were submitted ahead of the presentation. However, please continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by your investor dashboard on the Investor Company platform. Additionally, your feedback is important to the company. So immediately after the presentation has ended, you will be redirected for the opportunity to provide feedback. While you're submitting questions, those first look at those submitted ahead of the event, and you'll be unsurprised to hear there have been a couple in relation to the intellectual property issue, which I know James may touch on again in a second. We have a couple that were covered in the presentation itself, but one very relevant that I might put you, James, if I might. Do you have any... [Technical Difficulty]

I think we've all lost Tom. So there were 2 questions that I know were going to come. One of them was related -- and actually, we've had a number of questions through the chat as well on these topics. So I will cover it which relates to the timeline with the patent dispute that we're dealing with and what does that pattern actually timeline look like if we're not to achieve the question was if we're not to achieve any kind of settlement or finish any sooner, what would the timeline look like? Well, the timeline in the U.K. will be -- trial date is set for June next year, so 2023. And the U.S. is unknown at this point, but we're being told [indiscernible] probably a year after that. So we're talking mid-2024. And either of those states include appeal processes by the way, which could add another 12 months plus to that. So yes, it's not a fast process, but it's one that we're in and we're going through right now. In terms of the second question that was submitted before on the assumption that Thomas does not manage to reconnect. And I've had 1 or 2 questions like this, so we'll cover it, which is a question about whether we have any major customers either in Russia or Belarus or any of our customers or do we think the conflict in the Ukraine causes us any issues? Bottom line is we don't believe that the conflict in Ukraine would cause PCI Pal any issues. It's pretty early days for us looking at customers that we may have that are Russian by nature, but obviously, that's any considerations around that we need to take very carefully. But it's something that we're looking at. And we're very mindful of what our people think of this situation, working in the business. That's not just U.K. but that's U.S. too. So that's probably almost the main focus point we will have is making sure that our people are feeling okay about it because there's a lot of anxiety flowing around this situation right now. But from a business standpoint, I don't have any major concerns. Jumping to the questions. There's a number of questions on here, which probably requires slightly more complex answer. So we're going to take some of those afterwards, and we'll respond to them in the portal. So we have a question here from Morgan, which is how do you plan to manage your bottom line loss going forward? Top line growth is good, but bottom line growth with a path to profitability is even better. Okay. So I would say that we do have the latter. So we have top line growth, and we do have a path to profitability. We moved that profitability point out limited to fundraise in April. Why did we do that? We did that because we were expanding our addressable market, so we need to invest more to keep the growth rates going. So for us, what we said to investors at the time was that, that was to enable us to keep the 30% to 40% minimum revenue growth going not just for the next 2 years, but 3 years onwards is what we're looking at. So that's why we did that. And as I said in the presentation, we're tracking very well to get to our first month of cash generation, followed by profit in the business in the second half of FY '23. I'm just quickly assessing any other questions. I think that's it for the questions now.