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

Welcome, everybody. I think we've got a few stragglers, but hopefully, that means they'll get in for the good part once I've finished. So yes, thank you for coming today. I know there's a few competitive events going on at the moment. So I do appreciate many of you coming. Some of those of you that are new to our story. Some of you have known me for what probably feels like a very long time, maybe too long, I don't know. But you're joining us at a very exciting time for PCI Pal. We are really at the next stage of our development, and I've talked to most of you about levels with this business as we've expanded along that path. And we're really on some new exciting things now. The real focus today is going to very much be on our market, how we see our market, what we think the size of that addressable market is because I think that's a really important topic for you. And we're going to focus heavily on technology and products as well. So I'll take you through the agenda now -- and we get the clicker. So we've got a great agenda. I've got some of my senior leadership team supporting me, other members of the business as well involved in that. So a quick overview from me at the beginning, setting out particularly that market overview as well, some things that you haven't seen before for those of you that do know us. We've got Darren here, who's traveled in from the U.S. Thank you, Darren, who's our Chief Revenue Officer. He's going to talk you through our go-to-market. We have a partner case study video with a number of our partners as well. We've got great relationships with our partners. So difficult to get lots of them in the room at the same time. So we've got them all on a video for you. We have a guest speaker from one of our customers as well, who's disappeared for the moment, but hopefully he'll come back. And then after the break, we have a product demonstration. And we're not just going to show you one thing. We're going to show you three. It's always a little bit tricky doing demonstrations of what we do because so much of it is integrated with partners. It involves telephony. It involves chat interactions. So we're doing our best to give you a real insight into what that looks like, working with a number of our partners as well, all of those very well known. We've got our CTO here, Mufti at the front here. Alongside him is Alessandro, our Head of Product -- our VP of Product, and they're going to talk you through our technology, our cloud platform and the road map and the vision for that. And we're going to bring that vision to life as well. So we're not just going to show you a road map up on screen. We're going to show you a prototype demo with that, which I think is probably the best resistance of this presentation and then some time for Q&A at the end. And you can give us a further grilling over drinks, too. I thought I'd start with my team. So you see me and Ryan quite a lot. Ryan is not here today. I'm afraid we did have to move the date of this event. So he's actually, I think, in South America somewhere on holiday. But you get to see myself and Ryan quite a bit. So today is more about you getting exposure to the rest of my team and hearing more depth about the business. I'm very passionate about hiring. It's a big part of my role. And if I get it right, it makes my job a lot easier. And I try to push that through the entire organization. Our Head of People is here. Rachel here has worked for me for over 7 years now. We only hire people if we're 110% about that person. That's one of our rules. So we rarely get it wrong. We do occasionally, but really. And across that team, we've got a good mixture of experience. So our business is steeped and experienced across CX, contact center and telco. We've got tons of that within the organization. Over the last sort of 3 or 4 years, we've been bringing in expertise around payments, broader security, fraud. And so we've got that mixture that we need to support the product road map that we've started to talk to investors about. We have a balance across the U.K. and the U.S. So it was a very purposeful move some time ago to centralize our sales leadership into the United States, which is such an important market for us, both in terms of new business, but also where majority of our partners are headquartered as well. And so Darren is in the U.S. And very recently, you would have seen that we hired a new CMO as well, which was long in the making, not the easiest hire, hiring a CMO in the U.S. as a small U.K. technology company, but very pleased with how that's going. So Kathy is not here today, but she's too busy to be here today, frankly. So hopefully, you'll start to see some of the benefits of that. Some of the other members of the team are here as well. Ady is here, our General Counsel. And Royston also we hired our new CISO as well and he came into the business about sort of 6 or 7 months ago now. In terms of background on the business, in terms of what we do. So PCI Pal enables secure payments, secure conversations, secure interactions across any customer engagement scenario. We kind of encapsulate that with business communications is the term, but predominantly, that's CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS, acronyms, wise, that's Contact Center as a Service, Unified Communications as a Service and Communications Platform as a Service. And it's really that CCaaS bit that you're going to hear quite a bit about today, and that's where the majority of our new business sales come from. And within that business communications mix, you've got engagements with customers going across contact center. That includes voice, so live voice calls, you've got chat, webchat, social media interactions, e-mail, all of this stuff goes into those business communications environments. But then you've also got conversational AI as well, which is starting to become a bit more prevalent today, both in terms of voice and chatbots. I just want to be really clear that when we talk about agents today, we mean human agent or AI agent. We don't care, okay? It's the same difference to us. And so we're going to talk about that or when we do mention agents, it's a human agent or an AI bot effectively. Our historic value proposition has been very focused on compliance and security. And many of you have known us for that. And that's why we call PCI Pal, Payment Card Industry Pal. And it was -- a lot was about that. But we've evolved over time. And actually, our customers use us far more today to actually facilitate a payment even being possible to do it in a way that's integrated to that complex communications environment that they're dealing with that customer engagement on. And so we talk about our value proposition being broader today. So there's cost savings involved. There's revenue generation involved through the introduction of different payment methods and improved customer experience and agent experience as well. Three pillars of strategic growth. These have sort of stood by us since sort of 2017, 2018 when we first set these out, still underpin a lot of what we do today. So to be the leaders in cloud in our market. We are the out and out leader in our market for cloud solutions. We've got the most extensive public cloud environment. It's super reliable, super robust, highly scalable and within Amazon Web Services. It's global, as I say, the cloud platform allows us to access our market on an international basis. So what we do is a little bit niche, but being having the cloud platform is we can cost effectively access the entirety and the breadth of that market in a cost-effective way long term as we scale. And then linked to that is the channel model. So 80% -- 75% to 80% of our business goes through resellers. So we're going to do a deeper dive into our partner ecosystem in a moment. Some of the customers that we work with are some of the best-known brands in the world. We also work with a lot of smaller organizations as well. We cover the breadth of our market. The average sort of contact center size out there is less than 200 seats, so in size. So actually, most of them are small to mid-market. And our approach has always been we need to service that very large part of the market. It's not the sexiest part of the market. It's not the very large bit, but it's not the very largest contact centers, but it is the majority of the market. But then we've moved upmarket over the last 5 years, and we provide services to some of the largest contact centers in the U.K. and the U.S. And then we have a partner system, partner ecosystem, which is the envy of all of our competitors, I would say. So we are the chosen provider to the vast majority of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service providers. All those logos you can see on there. We do work with some other organizations as well outside of CCaaS, and Darren is going to cover those in a bit more detail when we get to that section. In terms of the financial highlights for FY '25, I'm not going to spend much time on this, but we're a growth business. But I would say that we're maturing, and we've certainly got both eyes on profitable growth, I would say. So we are going through an investment phase at the moment. We took that decision to push a bit harder this year. I must continue to believe it's the right decision. We've had a very strong start to this year. We've got great momentum in the business right now. So I expect to see the growth story continue. But we're at that level of ARR at kind of $20 million now. Contracted ARR is an important metric for us because actually that's ARR, including that, that's actually at revenue recognition. And then there's a bit -- and there as well that's not at revenue recognition yet, but it's contracted. So we will get to that point at some stage. So contracted ARR or CAR is a good indicator of future ARR and where we're going. High retention rates, consistently high retention rates. GRR at 95%. We have a real opportunity with NRR over time. So we want to sell more to our existing customers. So this points to the product road map that you're going to hear about today. We're very good at winning net new business. We consistently outperformed the market on that side of things. We want to sell more to our existing customers to allow us to do that more cost effectively as well and expand that wallet share that we have with those customers and with those partners. We moved into a loss this year purposefully because we decided to invest another GBP 1.5 million this year of the cash that we had available to us, we were profitable at the end of FY '25, and we will swing back into profitability, quite confident of that in FY '27, very much to invest some of that cash to continue to drive the growth momentum that we've got. Okay. So let's talk about products for a moment. So the three core products that we've been known for to date are covering any payment interaction that goes on within any CX environment. So they are Click to Pay, Key to Pay and Speak to Pay. Now Click to Pay is a digital payment mechanism where effectively we're sending out a secure payment link to the consumer. So they may be communicating with that agent, remember, human or bot, communicating with that agent across a web chat session or a chatbot session or they're interacting with them over social media or something like that. They could even be interacting with them on the phone. But the agent at that point decides to take a payment by sending a link through to that customer and the customer can fulfill their payment using that secure digital link. I'll stop there because you're going to see demos of this anyway. Key to Pay is what historically we were very well known for, and this is what we call DTMF masking. DTMF is the tone that's generated from the phone when you press the buttons. And each tone is a number effectively. It's a different tone for each one. And DTMF masking is something we've been doing for years. It's what a lot of our customers use still. And this is where customers actually use their phone keypad to enter their card details. But they can do that while they're in conversation with the agent at all times, but we strip the data from that live voice call that they've got going on. And then Speak to Pay. So Speak to Pay is speech recognition, AI-powered with one of our partners that we use. We've significantly improved the sort of quality scores that we get around our speech recognition capabilities. We're more frequently seeing customers looking to switch between speech recognition and keypad entry as well. But we cover every interaction type that goes into those business communications and contact center environments. So let's talk about the market opportunity for a moment. So our addressable market, as we have stated it kind of to date has been based primarily on -- we have to base it on data that's available to us. And when you're a fairly niche player in the contact center space, that can be a little bit tricky sometimes. So historically, we have based our addressable market based on the amount of contact centers out there, the amount of seats that those contact centers had. So if for a moment, we base our thinking on that, that market on an international basis to us looks like GBP 660 million in ARR. So that's -- what that effectively takes is the amount of agents that there are on a global basis, how many of those we think take payments and what our average ARR is per license that we earn, which is slightly under GBP 100. We then look at -- well, what of that can we actually access today. So if you then look at what we can access today, we then look at Europe, North America and ANZ because that's really where we're set up to serve. So that reduces it by about 1/3. So really our sort of TAM or SAM, I suppose, our serviceable addressable market is really that GBP 450 million today. I just wanted to put this into perspective. So we think this is around the size based on ARR, so revenues, annual recurring revenues of the companies in our space today is in the region of GBP 70 million. PCI Pal's -- well, we've exceeded 19.3% because that was in June '25, and we're having a good start to the year. So we are the fastest growing in our space. We believe that our ARR is either #1 or #2. And if it is #2, it's soon to be #1. So we're in a really strong position in our market. But it's a relatively small market that we're in, but we've got a good addressable market to go after. Now what I'm going to talk to you about now is the contact center solutions market, which is a bit broader than just thinking about agents and seats. And this is really where we see ourselves in the future. And I think it's a better way for investors to think about the opportunity that this technology company has. The market is growing. And the reason the CCaaS and the CX market is growing is because of the evolution of the CCaaS players. So this is the transition of communications to the cloud. There's a much more broader CX mix now. When I started in this industry, call centers were very different to contact centers as they are today. They do all sorts of things. They're super modern. They're the front line of customer experience. And then you've got the emergence of conversational AI and agentic AI as well. So when we think about it in terms of contact center solutions market, it's a somewhat different picture. And we think it's a really exciting picture for us to see, and we think we've got a really good positioning in this. So today, the global contact center solutions market, depending on where you look, feel free to put in ChatGPT, comes out in the region of $25 billion to $30 billion today. Now I have listed at the top of this slide here, many of the different contact center solutions that make up parts of that. So you've got everything baked in. These are the sorts of budgets that are out there in total being spent on contact center solutions. That market is expected to grow by more than 6x over the next 8 years to $180 billion, which, again, as I say, that's exciting for us. So why is that happening? It's happening because of that digital transformation from on-premise to cloud. They might think, well, hasn't that already happened? Well, it's happened to a degree in the U.K. It's happened to a degree in the U.S. but has it happened everywhere? No, it hasn't. And this is a global market that we're talking about here. There are still also a lot of enterprise-sized organizations that still have on-premise or privately hosted environments. We see it all the time with our very largest partners who are supporting those environments. So you've still got that digital transformation going on to the cloud. And when they move to the cloud, more solutions become available to them because they can go into these big CCaaS, UCaaS marketplaces. They can say, I want this workforce optimization solution. I want this PCI compliance solution. I want this payment solution, all integrated into the same environment. Full omnichannel mix, as I say, you've got more and more people working from home or hybrid environments than ever before in contact centers. It's more cost effective doing that. You've got all of these services available to the breadth of the market as well, not just enterprise, -- any size organization with any type of contact center operation can access these services through these cloud providers because they scale just like we do. They have pricing to suit the very smallest contact center and pricing to suit the very largest. And you can take what's going to suit your business. And then another big factor here, clearly, these bottom two bullet points here, conversational and agentic AI automation. That is going to be part of that. It is our belief that conversational AI will drive more conversations into what was known as the contact center environment than ever before. And the reason that will happen is we'll start talking to these things, like people like speaking. When you think conversational AI today, you think of webchat a lot of the time. But actually, you need to think about voice AI. And actually, when voice AI becomes sophisticated enough and it's not yet, then we think that it will be one of the easiest mechanisms by which us as consumers choose to engage with companies, with organizations, with merchants that we're buying products and services from. And so that does come into play as well, the conversational AI and the Agentic AI side of things as well. And just to put it into perspective a bit, when we think about our positioning here, we believe we're very well positioned. And the reason for that is that a lot of this is going to play out across the CCaaS networks. Some of it will go across UCaaS, but a lot of it will be CCaaS. So its big cloud contact center vendors. And this is what we've built our business on. So PCI Pal, we work with 70% of the CCaaS market today by revenue works with PCI Pal. If you look at our partners and you add up their revenue, 70% of that $6 billion, those organizations are working with PCI Pal. We think we're scratching the surface on those organizations, and that's why we're trying to work more deeply with them. That CCaaS market is expected to grow by a similar-ish amount in that time frame as well. And we intend to be part of this wave, both through what we do today, but also what you're going to see from our product road map. Not on the slide, but the other thing to consider within contact centers is the labor market. The biggest cost to contact centers is the labor that they pay for, it's people. And that's where we're going to save the most money over the next 8, 10, 20 years as a result of AI is the labor cost. And the labor cost today in 2025 is estimated to be GBP 300 billion. Now when they make savings on that labor cost, that means budget is going to come available for technology, and we think that will help drive the growth in the software solutions market within contact centers as well. So talk about the drivers. Darren is going to dig into a bit more detail on why customers and partners choose us. But if I talk more about the drivers for why people come to PCI Pal, I'm trying to repeat myself too much on the last slide, but it's that emergence of cloud communications and the positioning that PCI Pal has with the repeatable integrations that we've got to all those big CCaaS and UCaaS players out in the space. We think there's going to be an increase in the need for regulation, governance, security. Fraud is a very interesting topic at the moment because along with the conversation around conversational AI, you've got the mirror side of that, you got the flip side of that, which is, well, how can a fraudster use conversational AI? How can they use deep fake voice, for instance? So I actually think the fraud market is going to become quite interesting around conversational AI. And technology will evolve both for fraudsters as it does for merchants using the technology in-house. The evolving digital payments landscape. So as a consumer, when you interact with a company, whether you're in their store, whether you talk to on webchat, whether you phone them, whether you do anything with them, you want to be able to choose how you pay them, whether that's I want to use Klarna because I'm that person who wants to use a Klarna account or you want to use Apple Pay, Google Pay, you want to use open banking, you want to push the money to them. Being able to make all those payment methods available has value. We do that. We orchestrate all those payment methods to our customers in their CX environments. And this final one on the bottom right there, I mentioned platforms. There is a big trend towards platforms. Now this helps our partners a lot. And our partners, it's no surprise that most of our partners all now have marketplaces. And it's because they are the platform to facilitate these conversations. They use the marketplace to give access to application software providers like us. And then their existing customers can procure anything they need, whether it's that partner's own call recording product or whether it's somebody else's call recording product, but they do it all through their platform. There's real value in the platform. And we believe with our platform, we're providing that kind of value to our partners as well within our own niche. So just moving on to our platform. We're going through a transformation at the moment. This is not new. We are partway through this. We felt for many years that we have a platform. But in the eyes of investors, I think there's a few things we need to do, a few additional things we need to do to make it clear and obvious that we have a platform. We have a globally distributed AWS platform, super reliable, 700-plus customers on it, et cetera, integrated to all those CCaaS vendors, et cetera. We have a platform. But we're going through a transformation more from a branding perspective, I suppose, a branding and product perspective to take us from being what we see as the leader in secure payments to this market to being a secure engagement platform and the leader for doing that. Some of you would have seen this slide or a similar version of this slide, but that's sort of in a semi circle there -- sorry, the outer one at this point, the orange one, secure payment suite is really where we are today. It's those three products that I talked to you about earlier. It's Key to Pay, it's Click to Pay, Speak to Pay. We've got some data analytics starting to go on now. We're going to get much deeper into that reliable. We've got some patented methods for what we do, which do actually act as a protection as well for some of our partner model. But importantly, we've got all these repeatable integrations to more than 100, 130 plus. You may hear a few different numbers, but it's around that region, right, roughly. 130-plus payment service providers that we maintain all the CRM applications, desktop applications that you can think of and every business communications platform going really. And we want to make the most of that. And so this is why we are investing in product development, and we're building up towards this. And so some of this we have already launched, so proactive fraud management. You would have seen in the announcement we made in July that we've actually already launched the first sort of iteration within that fraud management suite that you can see here on the slide. We're going to show you particularly around identity and customer authentication later today, and we'll show you how that fits into the call flow and the conversation flow that we have today, so you can see what we see and why that is a straightforward sideway step, we think, for our customers to allow us to cross-sell our solutions to them and becoming that platform. So before I wrap up, growth ambitions. So I just want to be clear about this. We think we can grow this business within the next 5 years to GBP 50 million in revenues and to do that organically. Now to do that, we've got to incrementally add to our new business year-on-year. And so there's ways that we plan to do that. We aim to be Rule of 40 within the next 3 years. Profitability is really important for PCI Pal, and we don't make decisions around further investment lightly at all. But the decision we made at the beginning of this year, I think, is proving to be the right one based on the momentum that we're building across this year. But we are aiming for profitability, and we're aiming for that rule of 40 point within 3 years. So how are we going to get there? More of the same, which is the dullest statement ever, but it is more of the same. We're good at what we do. So it's expanding that partner ecosystem that we've got. It's working deeper and broader with those big partner organizations. Some of those organizations have got 10,000-plus employees distributed across the world. And most of the business we're doing with them is in the U.K. and the U.S. So it's expanding those relationships. It's increasing the number of enterprise customers that we've got. That should not be a new message to you. It's something we plan to do more of this year, next year and the year after. And we've got a lot of credibility here in terms of some of the organizations that use us. Our largest contact centers using PCI Pal have more than 10,000 agent seats. That's a big environment. Customer retention. We're going to maintain it. So we can't take our eye off the ball of retention. We need to keep that high. And then we use that as our way in to expand existing accounts that we have. So we drive our NRR up. I'd like to see our NRR at 110% plus within the next sort of 2 years or so. That's where I'd like to get it to. We are good at selling net new business, but I'd like some of that new business to be coming -- more of that new business to be coming from existing customers, get it to revenue quicker, stickier, et cetera. Cost of acquisition are lower as well. So driving the NRR up. Operational gearing as well. So we need that profitability to be flowing through. We're going to talk a bit today about partner and customer self-provisioning, that sort of automation upfront so they can get live quicker so they can get access to the services quicker in a more sort of true SaaS way, which will get us to time to revenue down to that TTR that we've talked to you about, we want to bring that down. We want it to be super short over the next couple of years. And we also need to keep growing our addressable market, too. So we need to grow the opportunity that we're chasing after, and I'll explain some of that. But the main two ways we can do that are further geographic expansion. And by that, the first thing we always think about is what more can we do in the U.S. That's always the first thing that we interrogate ourselves on before we go putting somebody in Spain, which we did, one person. And -- but then it's product, right? So -- and then the other aspect of growing the addressable market is through products and product development. And so it's balancing off those two things. So that's the overview a little bit over time. I'm going to hand over to Darren now. He's going to tell you a bit more detail about how he's going to do these things.

Before we get into too much detail, I do want to introduce you to the team. We've worked hard to build the dream team. And I think the key point here is that we have over a century of relevant industry experience across this team. You'll see some of the organizations that these team members have worked for. Previously, many of them come from contact center background. A number of these companies, interestingly, these individuals were very helpful in building and those organizations were sold. [Transversal] was sold to Verint, ShoreTel to Mitel, and then Interactive Intelligence, who I originally came from, we sold the business to Genesys for $1.3 billion. So we have a very seasoned experienced team. And the newest team member is Ritch Caudill. He's our head partners in the U.S., but he is global. And this is very important because we want to keep our sellers focused on selling. And we have to, at the same time, invest in our partners, ensuring that we're doing ongoing regular partner enablement. It's a full-time job to be out there on the front line, garnering their mind share, meeting with those teams in the various regions, and ultimately generating that demand to feed sales to feed the sellers. So Ritch is now building out a team. We just hired a new partner manager in the U.S. And as James suggested, we actually hired one in Spain, not just for Spain, but for Mainland Europe. So we're covering the entire region. Rest of the team, Dom, has actually been with PCI-PAL now for almost 10 years. He had sales for us in EMEA based here in the U.K. Mark had a similar role, head sales in North America. He's based out of Ohio. He's been here for 4 years. Ritch, again, I mentioned, he's the newest. He's been here 2 years. Sadie is a long time. I think. Sadie, I won't even actually quote a number of years because you've been here since inception of PCI PAL, that's fair to say. Tom Nicholls, who heads Global Presales for us. Tom has been with the organization for 7 years, and I've been here for 7 years as well. So really solid leadership team, and these are the folks that get the job done every day. So moving on to that, James asked me to provide a little bit of insight into our go-to-market strategy and our sales motion. As James has already highlighted, our primary go-to-market model is partner. We generate 80% of our new opportunities through our partner ecosystem. I'll talk about that a little bit more in just a minute. But we also do sell direct, to be clear. Interestingly, though, when we do sell direct, in some cases, we end up fulfilling through a partner because we have marketplaces out there, for example, like Amazon Marketplace. And we may sell a customer direct, go through all those steps. But then they -- in the end, they would prefer to actually procure through Amazon, they get their credits with Amazon, right, which makes sense. They kind of compound their purchases and they're buying through a marketplace like Amazon. So even though we do sell direct in some cases, we may well fulfill through partner. We had a fairly logical view of segmentation. I don't think there should be any surprises there. We are smart about it. We primarily leverage partners to service the commercial and the mid-market segments, which is more downmarket. And then clearly, Enterprise is where we're going to reserve our precious resources, our internal resources to spend time on those chunkier enterprise opportunities. So that's where we where we tend to focus and spend more time. Working with Kathy and the marketing team, we are now utilizing ABM to target more same. So we're really going after -- we're marketing, particularly in the U.S. to those enterprise type organizations. And there is a vertical industry segment focus there as well. So there are certain vertical industry segments that we're targeting. With that, we'll go to the Partner Ecosystem. We have 2 major types of partner. We have resellers and we have introducers. The focus really is on our reseller partner community. And we have subcategories. We actually have what we call integrated partners, and we have solution providers. The key difference there is that with integrated partners, that's typically the CCaaS partner that James referenced earlier, could be UCaaS, CPaaS. But the point is, we are highly integrated, near embedded. And many of these partnerships that we have, they're almost -- they're OEM in some respects. There is a white label option A number of the partners, for example, 8x8, they called our product Secure Pay. They make it their own. It's on their price list, their sellers sell it as if it were their own product. You can't get any better relationship or partnership than that. So these are our best -- this is our best category of partnership or the integrated partners, and this is where we generate a lot of revenue today. The other key category of partner is solution provider. And these are more like your traditional VARs. It could be a Business Process Outsourcer, BPO. But the point here is that we could end up encountering any variety of platforms when we're selling with one of these partners. So we don't quite have the repeatability that we do in the case of an integrated partner where, again, they're making it their own in effect, right? And that's sort of the difference. Still solution providers can be up to 40%, 50% of our partner business today. So it's a very important source of revenue. So that's our -- this our key focus partners. But we do have Introducers. And the reason this is important is because in some cases, a partner may not necessarily want to resell PCI PAL, put us on their paper, but they do want to introduce opportunities to us. In many cases, we'll pay a referral fee for that. So there's some compensation associated with that, but obviously, significantly less than what we would pay a reseller for actually being involved more commercially in the deal. And again, many of these we end up selling direct. But the point is these are more kind of one-off opportunities or occasional opportunities. What we try to do, though, the more we can make this repeatable then we can build the case to the business partner as to why they would potentially become a reseller. So a number of these actually end up becoming resellers over time by virtue of our ability to demonstrate that repeatability. So it feeds, in this case, it feeds the rest of our reseller community. In terms of overall regional coverage, James already mentioned the more English-speaking regions, obviously, where we tend to base North America is our largest addressable market and our best opportunity. The contact center market is 5x that of the U.K. Sometimes you will say 6X -- we might -- it depends on who the audience may be, but yes, 5x to 6x, I think, depending on the analyst report, but it's sizable. The other thing, in general, it's amazing because when we have leads and opportunities come in, the size of a contact center opportunity or lead that we get in the U.S. is often 2x to 3x the size of what we see in the U.K. These are much larger opportunities, larger contact centers. You have -- I mean the number of 10,000-plus [C] contact centers in the U.S. is significantly greater than what you see in some of the other markets. So very important, and that's where we're really focused on that ABM program, which is account-based marketing. It's where we're really focused on that ABM target list of partners is to generate more of those enterprise opportunities in North America. Our U.K. business is -- we've been doing business in the U.K. longer, more mature, consistent. Many of you are aware that we have a lot of local and central government customers, obviously, in the U.K., solid business and continues to grow. But we're now expanding into the EU. And the reason for this is, in part, we go where our partners go and many of our partners are global. They have sellers all over in almost every major region, major country, major market. So for example, the reason we hired a resource or 2, in fact, in Spain, this is actually 2, James, reason we hired 2 in Spain, a presales engineer and a partner manager, is because actually, we've seen a little bit of a groundswell of opportunity in Spain from our partners. Our partners are bringing us into deals there. But we're also seeing that in other markets. We're seeing that in Italy. We're seeing that in France. We're seeing that in Nordics. And so now in terms of the ground game, we are really focused on identifying who those partners are that are active in the region. We map their sales team and organization. We connect the dots, we do enablement. We do training for them so that they're aware of who we are. And then ultimately, that will help us drive more business from that region. [Audio Gap]

Okay. So you've just seen our products in action. And what I'm going to do now is talk to you a little bit about what powers that platform and why partners standardize on us. Okay. So as you've heard, we are a cloud native platform, born in the cloud. That secures payments and sensitive data across all the channels, voice, chat, e-mails, Conversational AI embedded in the contact center and broader communication stack. And as you've heard, we are agnostic to the technologies that the customer uses, whether it's the payment gateways, whether it's their carriers, whether it's CCaaS systems, we can support them all. We deployed globally on AWS across regional instances with EMEA and North America and ANZ giving customers assurance on compliance and availability from day one. And when needed, we can spin up AWS regions very quickly. We minimize risk by removing sensitive data from customer environments using a combination of DTMF masking, data storage minimization, Tokenisation and encryption everywhere. So compliance, scope and operational burdens dropped materially. Our partner ecosystem, as you heard earlier from Darren means of our co-developed integrations, we can unlock the full platform for our customers with a single integration and reduce their efforts to go live. So let me talk a little bit about the scale and reliability behind that proposition. So this is something that's behind the scenes an awful lot of hardware that goes on across engineering to achieve. Right now, that growth run rate that you've heard earlier today requires reliability at scale. So here the operating numbers and those capabilities that make it happen. The platform is engineered for that addressable market expansion. So partners can take us into more geographies, segments and workloads without re-architecture. We have over 700 customers globally live on our platform. We process millions of transactions and calls every day, and we do that at a reliability of 99.999% annually, and we've done that 2 years in a row. Operationally, we hold ourselves to a very high standard, and we design our platform for 100% uptime. And as Darren mentioned earlier, we have achieved that 3 quarters almost in succession, if I remember correctly. PCI Pal so our integrated contact center solution, as you've just seen in the demos, that Chris just did, embed secure payments directly into those leading CCaaS platforms. One of the key things is to drive faster, repeatable deployments, reduce the operational efforts and improve that customer experience. A critical part of that reliability story is a continuous assurance, 24/7 Threat Modeling, we have IPS/IDS, [last] SOC I'm going to explaining all of those things. But all of those things, a long way of supply attestation reviews, independent insurance test means that, that ongoing vigilance is what sustains that platform's integrity and trust at scale. So customers and partners can rely on PCI PAL for secure payments every hour of every day. And that's why we have a customer satisfaction rating score of 91%. In the SaaS industry, 90% plus this top-tier performance. And underpinning all of this is our security by design. So as you can see, if I start from left to right, an awful lot of work goes into those compliance and certification standards. We have everything from it, obviously PCI DSS, but multiple ISO certifications in terms of disaster recovery, business continuity, security standards. We also have SOC2 recently achieved. All of those things means our customers can buy with confidence globally. On our integrations, as Chris has highlighted and Darren's mentioned earlier, we only join in when a payment is needed to be taken, which is very key that Darren very clearly highlighted that patented design minimizes the costs increases resilience for our customers because we are not involved in the whole journey other than when that payment needs to be taken. And we've heard direct feedback from our partners as well as enterprise customers that really value that type of integration. Our multi-tenanted platform lets us serve many customers on one secure system. So obviously enables efficient, cost-effective growth without sacrificing reliability. Our higher-value customers can be segregated when needed to allow for that customer to support customer reliability and performance requirements. Finally, as you've heard, we are ready. We have a Conversational AI API available today, and we have a number of partners already live using that. 8x8 is probably an example with their intelligent customer assistant who they take payments through their voice bot as well as their chatbot using PCI PAL in the background. We are also aligning to the newly introduced MCP framework for AI. So that bot can integrate with one another more efficiently and effectively to unlock new products, new use cases without [bespoke] bills even to be done. So I've covered some of the architectural advantages. So what we'll do now is I'll hand over to Alessandro and he'll explore a little bit how PCI PAL is our leverage platform to transform beyond point of payment and compliance solutions.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alessandro Dalla Volta. I head up product development globally at PCI PAL. And today, I'm here to tell you a little bit about what we are doing to transform PCI PAL and become an effectively not just point of payment type of solution, but ultimately expanding beyond the point of payment and becoming a wider technology provider to contact center. So the -- if you think about the -- what's changing, what's changing now is not our core strength. We are going to build upon our core strengths, which is compliance and security, solidly. And the way and what's going to change is actually the scope of the problem that we are solving for our customers. So historically, we've entered the customer journey at the point of payment by our customers and partners face additional challenges. They face additional challenges across the entire customer engagement. And that means from authentication to identity and verification, fraud prevention all the way to completing other nonpayment related tasks. Okay. So what you see on the screen. You can see effectively a typical workflow. So this typical workflow starts with customer authentication. You can see then an agent understanding a customer request. You can see collecting a secure payments, fraud screening, completing nonpayment tasks, wrap-up work et cetera, et cetera. So the -- for us, it's really how do we move from that point, which is point #4 there to becoming a wider provider to the contact center and therefore, capturing additional value within the overall engagement. So this evolution builds upon our compliance and security expertise. And really extends into this broader area of customer authentication and broader area of fraud screening and also data, wider data security. Okay. So how are we going to do this? And our transformation is supported by a new product suite. It's a product suite that connects our proven secure payments capabilities with adjacent high-value use cases. So they include Fraud Management, that include identity and verification, customer authentication, secure data collection and importantly, self-service onboarding. So for example, with Fraud Management, customer service agents can understand right at the start of an interaction what's the risk level connected to that interruption. With identity and verification, customer service agents can very quickly, seamlessly identify a customer and verify their identity. How, for example, a customer could upload a passport, a driving license. Those documents get verified fast, quickly, securely in real time. And the agent, importantly, gets to see what the outcome of the verification process is immediately seamlessly. And so other examples, customer authentication. Customer authentication is all about building trust in the engagement. It's all about authenticating in a secure way customers right at the start of an engagement. How, for example, passkey authentication are things like voice biometrics and a number of other technologies. Self service onboarding. Self service onboarding is really interesting because it will enable our customers to get to the time to value quick. We want customers to get to that aha moment where they get material value out to the product quickly. And equally, from a self-service perspective, we want PCI PAL to get to revenue recognition quickly. And therefore, accelerating that time to revenue. So right at the center of all this, we have analytics and data science. So there is absolutely no point to build a new product unless we can actually measure quantitatively, a, the performance of the products, b, the value that these products are actually delivering to our customers. And as more products become available, data actually has exponentially more value. Why? Because suddenly, you can connect the dots across the entire product portfolio. So imagine being able to connect the dots across all the way from the moment that someone authenticates into the entity and verification, collecting a payment, potentially collecting security additional data points, whether they are PHI, PII, et cetera, et cetera. So everything that we are building, we are building with analytics, built in. And analytics are part of an investment team to a new data platform that we have. Okay. So what does it all mean for investors? So a couple of things. So primarily, and firstly, we are expanding into adjacent high-growth segment. We are doing that whilst strengthening our core product. For example, digital wallets that we've been talking about today the Apple Pay, the Google Pay, PayPal, all payment methods that enable customers to securely and quickly complete a payment. Secondly, from an investor perspective, we are improving scalability and we are improving profitability. The self-service onboarding is key. It's key to -- once we are in a place with multiple products available to customers to getting those customers to the aha moment quickly, getting them to use the products quickly. Minimize the time it takes for customers to go live with the product. And equally, minimize the times that it takes for PCI PAL to get to revenue recognition. Okay. So let's move on. So once the product portfolio is in play, the new products are built and the product portfolio is in place, then I want you to relook at the agent flow that you see there on the screen. So now suddenly, you can see that we are part of the whole engagement all the way from the very beginning, so immediate fraud screening, new customer identity verification, returning customer authentication and collecting a payment and potentially collecting additional data points. They could be PHI, PII things like a social security number, things like a patient ID, whatever they may be. The point is we are adding value across the entire customer engagement. Okay. So what I'd like to do is to play a short video that will bring all this to life. And what we are going to be seeing is a fictitious contact center based in the United States, it's a health care contact center, and you'll see how agents are able to very quickly look at a customer's profile they are able to very quickly identify the customer, verify their identity, they are able to very quickly build trust by authenticating them and so on and so forth. And so let me just play this video. [Presentation]

What's really exciting about what we just showed you, though, is that this stuff is coming very soon. As I said, we are going through this transformation right now. So by the end of this financial year, we'll be in a very different place. We're nearly halfway through it already. So we're making really good progress this year. So customer authentication, identity, I expect we'll be launching products related to those in calendar year '26 and we will drop the news out as we go, gradually showing that execution against the road map that we told you we're working towards. And it will be a transformation. And I've said to some of our investors at some point, we may need a new name. Because PCI is very much about the payment card history part that we had. But like many technology companies, we're evolving, and we're making the most of the positioning that we've built to date, the platform and technology that we've got and the fantastic team that we have. So I'm going to use that to wrap up now, and we have plenty of time for some questions. And then we've got some time at the end as well. And if you want to talk a bit more with us, or any of my other team here, then please feel free to stay with us a bit longer.