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

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PCI-PAL results presentation. To start 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 today. However, the company will review all questions submitted 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. I would now like to hand over to Chief Executive, James Barham; and Chief Financial Officer, Ryan Murray.

Okay. Thank you, Nick. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this interims update from myself and Ryan. Really excellent progress in the first half and really just proving execution against the plans that we laid out at the beginning of the year. So we're going to be talking in a bit more detail to those things. But broadly speaking, where we want to be. We will try to make sure we've got plenty of time at the end for questions as usual, which means we will spend a little bit less time on some of the background information. You can gain more insight through the IMC website if you want to look at historical presentations or YouTube or CMDs, et cetera. We've done plenty of content that's out there. And [ Edison ], I should -- we should call that out, too. So let's start off with a bit of background in terms of what we're all about at PCI Power. So we're a software company, fast-growing Software-as-a-Service business, SaaS business. We have a secure payments platform that empowers customers to transact business securely, to do that cost effectively and to do it in a compliant way. Our platform services, customer interactions with businesses across every business communications environment; predominantly, that's the call center or what we call today the contact center space, which also includes conversational AI as well, but also the unified communications space as well, which is more of your back-office type functions. But everything to date has been predominantly based on securing transactions and around payments and those things. So -- and within those communications areas, we have various channels that we cover. So in really basic sense, live voice, so phone calls; web chat, social media, conversational AI, as I mentioned, so voice and web chat bots, these sort of solutions. We've got everything to cover the whole gambit there. Now in terms of PCI Cloud strategy, three key pillars to that strategy, which have stood us in good stead since we started on this journey more than 5 years ago now. The first on the bottom left there is cloud, to be the leaders in our market in public cloud services. We were the first to market with a public cloud offering, and we have the most extensive multi-tenanted public cloud platform in our space today, and I'll provide some more information on how well that's working for us a bit later. The cloud platform purposely would allow us to access the breadth of our market on a global basis. So what we do is a little bit niche, operating in the business communications space, but it's very much a global market actually. So it's a large addressable market opportunity. And being in the cloud allows us to cost effectively access the breadth of that on an international basis. And we've shown that through execution across the last 7 or 8 years. And then also, we leverage a go-to-market model, which heavily leans towards partner-led sales. So a channel sales model, predominantly selling to customers via contracted resellers that we have and resellers that we are integrated to. More on that to come. We've got fantastic customer base, more than 750 customers across our platform. We've got some excellent brands that trust us, lots of enterprise companies that work with PCI Power. Not always enterprise-size contracts, depending on their communications footprint. But we do have a number of very large enterprise contact center environments as well. We are talking somewhat more than 5,000 seats each. Having said that though, we very much value the commercial to mid-market end of the space that we target. So this is your SMB space. It is the majority of the contact center market in most developed territories, generally taking up around 70% to 75% of the market. And so early on, we set out our store to really be able to target that voluminous SMB space. And then over the years, we've moved into the enterprise end of the market, really covering, as I said earlier, breadth of market in terms of size of customers that we can deal with. So really looking to try and maximize the addressable market opportunity that's in front of us. And then on the bottom right, you can see some of our partners. So I said we have channel business, predominantly selling through the channel, and that's an example of some of our integrated partners that we work with. Now let's go on to an update on the period. So very good H1. really pleased with where we've got to. I think we've -- in a really balanced way as well. But I think what really underpins what we've achieved in H1 is strong new business momentum. So great to see we're a growth company. That's essential for us achieving our goals in the years ahead, but also operational efficiency as well. So really strong deployment velocity. Those of you that know us will know that's important because it allows us to get new sales that we make to revenue quicker. And longer term, we want to become more efficient on that side of things, too, so that we can create more operational gearing in the business as we move into profitability again next year. ARR is up 21%, a key growth metric for us, 25% on a constant currency basis. And it's a record real terms increase for us as well at GBP 3.6 million. Contracted ARR or CARR, as we call it, the difference between ARR and CARR is that CARR includes contracts that have not yet got revenue recognition, but it's a really good indicator of future ARR. And we have really very little that drops out between CARR and ARR. And it's really the CARR metric that is an important measure of whether we're going to get to the growth objectives that we have in front of us. So to be growing that at 18% or 21% on a constant currency basis is just where we need it to be. We -- what's making up that contracted ARR? So let's talk about new business for a moment, some of the bullet points on the right in a bit more detail from the interim. So increased run rate, so I mentioned about SMB and that area of the market that's important for us. I've used the term run rate to describe the business that we do at that end of the market. This is our -- this is the typical turnover that we see on a quarterly basis of new business that's coming through the door. And we've been very successful in incrementally growing that. And that is effectively our reliable base of business that's coming through. And then on top of that, we're layering on more enterprise business, and that's part of our tactics this year and a part of our longer-term strategy is to sell more to large enterprise whilst growing our SMB business at the same time. We want both. And we've been successful in the first half. I mean, not surprisingly, we're seeing more enterprise business coming from the U.S. business. The U.S. business appears to be taking, as expected, a big step up. This year, it's a substantially larger market than the U.K. We've signed a number of enterprise organizations with various different fortune categorizations that we've referenced in the examples given in the interims. But say Fortune 50 insurance company, one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., really successful proof of concept with them, which has then led on to an initial sale that we made in the first half of the year, which is north of GBP 100,000 ACV value to us. We really think there's strong expansion opportunities as soon as H2 with that customer as well. And then health care is a sector that those of you that follow us will know, we're targeting. It's a key vertical for us in the U.S. So great for me to see 2 health care technology companies that we signed, and these are substantial organizations. One of them is a Fortune 500, the other one is the global Fortune 500. And also, we signed our largest sort of health care, i.e., health care company deal since we announced the Epic integration, and we are using that integration to deploy to that customer right now. So we're putting those building blocks in place as we target these verticals, and we're seeing good traction in financial services or insurance, particularly plus the health care space, and we're seeing that reflected in our pipeline as well into H2 and beyond. Revenue on the third one down on the left there, revenue up 7% year-on-year. It's actually 14% on a normalized basis. That's really what you need to be looking at is the 14%. Ryan will provide a bit more detail on that, but that's related to the big difference there in the percentages is mainly because of the revenue deferral that we had from FY '24 into FY '25. So it makes the step-up. Looks smaller than it actually is. Ryan can talk to that a bit more. Underpinning the revenue growth is a strong -- continued strong customer retention metrics. So GRR at 95%, that's remained flat, and we're very happy to keep it at that level, given the scale we're now progressing to. We've continually proven ourselves to be able to keep our customers. We have sticky technology, sticky products, but we also have a great culture. We've got strong systems, processes to be able to maintain those relationships, not just with smaller customers, but also with the very largest as well. And we've had some success in the year, as we've mentioned in both the current trading and also prior to that in the first half of renewing some of our largest customers and extending some of those contracts. NRR is a metric that I've set some ambitions around at the beginning of the year, where I stated that in the next 2.5, 3 years, we want to see NRR at 110%. Now to be at 105% this year, it seems like we're well on the way to do that. It doesn't quite work like that in terms of how you incrementally build to it. But 105% is a really pleasing result for us so far this year, and we'd be hopeful of maintaining there or thereabouts by year-end compared to 102% last year. I will say that most of the expansion sales contributing to NRR are from upselling of our secure payment products. I'll talk a bit more about the strong demand we are seeing for those core secure payment products in a moment. But that is where the majority of that expansion is coming from that's driving up NRR. The health of the business, something I often talk about. I think the business is very healthy right now, sort of key initiatives that we're working on through the year are progressing either as we expect them to or we're ahead of where we expect to be. The -- I just talked about retention. The quickest thing you can do if you want to lose customers is to have a platform that's not reliable. We have 100% uptime of our global public cloud platform across H1. We -- that is not uncommon for us to achieve actually. So whilst we contracted [ 5 9s ] to our customers, we regularly achieve 100%. So that's full credit to our engineering team. That is excellent quality. It's also deeply critical for relationships with partners as well. When partners are putting faith and trust in you to resell your services, they need to know they're going to work and they need to know they're going to be up. And so again, that's even more in focus when you're selling through large technology partners as we did. So yes, call out to my engineering team who are doing a fantastic job there. And then just finally, on the health of the business point, people. People are key to our success. They're also our biggest cost in the business. We need to make them count. And every hire we make in this business, we don't do that unless we're 110% about the individual. We added some individuals to the leadership team, onboarding those in the first half of the year. CISO, new Chief Information Security Officer, we added at the back end of FY '25. And we added a new CMO in Q1 this year. So she's been with us about 6 months now. Both of those hires are going really well, and I feel that we're taking a real step forward there. And then underneath that, the culture of the business, I think it's relevant to point out that in the early days of PCI Power, it wasn't quite growth at all costs, but we were super aggressive around growth. We're still a growth business, no doubt, but you would have picked up and if you attended the CMD or watch the videos, we very much want that balanced growth and profitability story going forward. And so we're shifting our culture to a degree as well from this more of a growth-at-all-cost approach to more of a Rule of 40 culture, if you like, and we're talking about that very much within the business. So that's all happening. That maturing is happening. But while we're doing that, we've got employee NPS scores in a very good place. Employee retention is very high. So for me, doing my role, I'd love building this team but see the strong execution that we've had in H1, but at the same time, see the culture that we have here that will support us as we drive to those ambitious targets we've set ourselves over the next 2.5 years is really quite pleasing and really good to see. Let's dig a little bit more into the kind of operational updates. So on the partner ecosystem side, very briefly for those that are new to the story. So the vast majority of our business comes through our partner ecosystem. We've got an extensive partner ecosystem, which is split between those 3 categories in the top left that you can see there. Typically, we say 75% to 80% of our new business will come via resellers. Actually, in H1 this year, it was higher than that. So it was actually 83% of contracts came through resellers and also an increase to the value contribution of those new deals to 71%. Now that's a trend that we have expected. And the reason that trend, that increase in value via partners is being seen is because CCaaS organizations are doing more and more enterprise business now. Not all enterprises have shifted their communications to the cloud yet. In fact, there's some pretty big numbers out there, if you listen to some of our partners' earnings calls about what's remaining. So you've got that shift going on. But then you've got the fact that PCI Power is working more deeply and more broadly with those partners. And for those that sell to the enterprise, we've built up trust with those organizations for a number of years with many of them now. And so we're being offered into those very large customers. So therefore, the average value coming through partners has been increasing, which we referenced in the interims. It's worth adding that the channel business itself, we don't just play at it, it was a key part of the strategy from the very beginning. If I think back to when we were 10, 15 people, we've had a hiring strategy on the trajectory that we're at now that always looks at anyone that's involved with customers or partners must have experience of working through the channel. We need that. So they understand how those relationships work and hiring has been an important part of that. And we consider a real strength of the business. In terms of highlights for the period to talk about, so I talked about incremental growth in SMB coming via partners and also increasing enterprise opportunities by partners. This goes back at the beginning of the year, I said one of the key strategies this year is to work more deeply and more broadly with the existing partners we've got. Yes, we want to sign new partners, but we must make the most of the ones that are right in front of us as well. How do we do that? Some of that work is more commercial, relationship-led product enablement, marketing enablement. But also, we're working on more deeper technical integrations with these partners. So we've enhanced a number of the platform-to-platform integrations that we've got with key partners across this year. Some of those have completed, some of those are going through different phases. And the sort of result of these enhancements and improvements that we're making could be that they aid increased deployment velocity, for instance. So actually, we can get their customers to using our services somewhat quicker because of the enhanced nature of the integration that we've got. It could be that we're giving them access to PCI Power within products that we don't do -- we haven't done historically. So we have a partner, for instance, who has integrated their video capabilities, PCI Power Secure Payment suite. We are working with a number of partners at the moment to integrate our secure payments products into their conversational AI products. Some of those are live, and some of them are going through deployment and through integration at the moment. And a lot of this work, it's deepening that competitive moat that we have with these partners too. Just back to conversational AI for a moment. A trend that we are seeing with our partners is that there is a trend with the CCaaS vendors to either be building their own conversational AI products or partnering or acquiring conversational AI solutions. We've seen that with NiCE acquiring Cognigy, for example. And we've seen several other partners of ours such as Zoom, for instance, launching or planning to launch their own virtual assistant or chat and voice bots. So actually that supports the positioning that PCI Power has got because we are the ones who have those relationships with those partners. And so we will work with those partners to incorporate and make available all the value that we give through the secure payment suite that we've got. MCP is something we've announced through the trade that we plan to launch our MCP server capability in the second half of this financial year, fairly soon, actually. And we announced that we were accelerating the development there. Now we're not seeing a lot of volume coming through conversational AI situations or use cases as such. We're seeing a fair amount of interest, but we don't think the sophistication is there yet. So a lot of what we're doing is positioning ourselves for readiness for the future and to take advantage of what we believe will be significant increases in conversation volumes going through these business communication systems, and we think we're very well positioned to capitalize on that. We've seen a trend in the year, which is really very interesting around UCaaS. So this is Unified Communications as a Service. So this is your back-office phone systems. We have a number of key partners who have large UC businesses as well, Zoom, RingCentral, 8x8, for example. And so we're seeing increased opportunity levels for UCaaS use cases, and we've made a number of sales in that regard in the period. And we actually think as we move more towards a self-service capability, which I'm going to talk about more in a moment and I've talked about in the past, we think that will create a more cost-efficient way that our services can be deployed into UCaaS scenarios as well. And then probably finally, to wrap up is our business development effort around new partners, we are very targeted about identifying potential new strategic partners and then how we go about trying to win partnerships with those organizations. Sometimes it takes a very long time, particularly if we're convincing that partner for the first time that this is a good thing to do and we can add value. We may have to displace a competitor. That's not something we come across commonly. But when we do, it's something that we can go after quite aggressively. And in the period, we've been successful in moving a number of these opportunities along, so much so that a week or so ago, we announced that we've signed a major new strategic partner, and that partner will be completely standardizing with PCI Power and we'll be doing a trade PR announcement with them in the next month or so, maybe 2 months, at which point we'll be able to name them publicly. But this is all part of our plan. I mentioned earlier about working more deeply with existing partners. It's also about adding incrementally more partners, those that suit our model, working really closely with them, adding value, providing a great service and helping us to drive that growth momentum going forward. So all in all, good health of the partner ecosystem at the moment and the continued progress we're making there. I'm going to pause for a second, and I'm going to hand over to Ryan for the financial update. And I'll -- you can control the slides, Ryan, if you like.

Thank you, James. I think we'll start with having a look at the core metrics that define really the health and the trajectory of the business. We exited the first half at 20.3 million ARR and say up 21%, and it really demonstrates the continued demand for our offering. Along with that, the contracted ARR is up 18% to GBP 24 million. And really, that provides strong visibility into ARR conversion over the coming periods, which really supports the confidence in our continued revenue progression. I think importantly, actually underlying all of that is this growth has been experienced across all of our regions, EMEA, North America, ANZ, reinforcing the global reach of the business as well. Retention remains, again, a structural strength with the GRR at 95% and the net revenue retention of 105%, reflecting the stickiness of the platform and our ability to expand with existing customer relationships, really validating the land-and-expand strategy. We're winning the customers, retaining them at high levels and gaining a greater share of their wallet as they -- a greater share of their wallet. Looking at the revenue, we delivered GBP 11.3 million in the first half. And as James referred to, there was just under GBP 700,000 deferred from FY '24 into the first half of FY '25. So when we normalize for that, that gives an underlying growth of 14%. It's really important to look at that to understand the trajectory of the business, and it reflects the steady execution that we had planned. Importantly, the revenue is made up 93% of recurring revenues, up from 91%, highlighting the continued quality of our revenue and also provides strong visibility and durability of revenues into the future. And ARR converts into revenue through -- or sorry, contracted revenue -- contracted ARR converts into revenue. We focus on the time to revenue and the duration of that's taking. That's down to about 5 months at the moment, and we continue to focus that and refine that area. And this really is financially important because the faster implementation, the contracted ARR moves to revenue, the quicker EBITDA contribution will accelerate, and we'll start to see more operational leverage. And every time we get these improvements, we'll rule them out across our partner ecosystem and get them embedded into the system. But if you look back over the years, our compounded growth has been over 30% on both ARR and revenue. And that combined with the ARR growth, improved NRR and predominantly recurring revenues really reflects a quality business model. Turning to profitability and margins. As I referred to, our revenue was up to GBP 11.3 million, but that delivered a gross margin in the period of 87% compared to 90% in the prior period. And this movement is really due to a revenue mix and is timing related. The recognition of our license revenue, which has a higher margin, is dependent on deployment timing. And ultimately, we're just dependent on end customers. And the timing effect weighed modestly on our H1 margin in the period. We expect that to start to unwind in H2 as the full effect of the H1 deployments are felt -- are delivered through revenue and also with the furthering deployment of contracted ARR, which has been secured in H1. In the period, our administration expenses increased to GBP 9.6 million and reflecting the deliberate investment in engineering platform capability, our product marketing and our broader go-to-market capacity. And this is really targeted investment to support ARR scaling and long-term operational leverage. All of that delivered an adjusted EBITDA of GBP 0.2 million versus just under GBP 1 million in the prior period. But I think it's really important to contextualize the comparison. The prior period EBITDA has benefited from that deferred revenue from FY '24. So when looking at adjusting for that timing benefit, looking at the underlying year-on-year movement, it's really the growth that we have experienced that we've reinvested back into the business. So overall, we're sustaining the ARR growth at over 20% while being EBITDA positive. Turning to cash, and cash remains a focus -- a real central focus for us, especially during our growth investment period. And you'll see that underlying operating cash remains positive before working capital movements. And the net cash in operations in the period was just under GBP 600,000, reflecting the time-related utilization of working capital rather than a structural cash burn. We did invest GBP 900,000 in our capitalized development expenditure, and this was targeted focused on our platform and deeper partner integrations. And this is strategic R&D designed to really maintain and strengthen our competitive advantage and support future ARR growth. At the end of the period, we had cash of GBP 2.6 million on the balance sheet. But in addition to that, we still retain full access to our undrawn GBP 3 million RCF facility. So I think we're utilizing our cash in a controlled manner to drive value-accretive investments. And as ARR scales and margins expand, we expect operating cash conversion to strengthen progressively. Turning to the balance sheet, intangible assets increased to GBP 4.6 million, consistent with our continued investment in the product and aligns with our strategy to reinforce long-term competitive positioning. Our deferred income stands at GBP 14.5 million at the end of the period, which again provides clear visibility into revenue recognition over the coming periods. Importantly, our liquidity remains controlled. And overall, the balance sheet really supports organic investment and execution of our growth strategy without near-term capital requirements. Looking ahead to H2 and beyond, the focus really is around execution against the defined profitability trajectory. In the second half, we expect strong revenue delivery supported by license revenue recognition and continued deployment of those contracted customers that I referred to earlier. And as the revenue mix normalizes, we expect gross margins to improve, and it's a timing issue rather than a structural issue. Operationally, we have strengthened the model by focusing on different aspects such as standardization and other improvements to drive our time to revenue, and we remain focused on reducing this further. So for FY '26, we are -- the revenue and adjusted EBITDA remain in line with expectations. But I think more importantly, the significant value inflection really sits beyond FY '26, at which point it is expected to be driven by ARR reaching the scale, operating expense growth normalizing relative to revenue growth and the standardization and future investment and automation of the platform flowing through. So as long as we stick with our priorities of growing organic growth, which we've target ourselves 18% to 20% range and driving operational leverage, this should ultimately translate into increased margin expansion, further operating cash generation and really strong profitability throughout '27 and beyond. With that, James, I'll hand back to yourself. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Ryan. So product and platform overview now. So really, this is about the importance of our platform going forward and how we intend to capitalize on what we've built today, the positioning that we have through our partner ecosystem, the technology integrations that we have, whether they're with resellers or whether with third parties that we work with and leveraging that go-to-market motion to continue on the current growth trajectory, but also create new opportunities for PCI-PAL as well as we go forward. So to start that off, though, I think it's really important to emphasize the demand we are seeing for our core secure payment products. That is driving all the momentum in the business today, and that is as we had expected it to. So whilst we do have an eye on some new product developments, I'm going to talk about those more in a moment, we're not developing those products because we feel that our core of secure payments needs to be replaced. If anything, it is growing in terms of demand that we're seeing. And that's really exciting because these are mature products, the products we've added to and they're just as relevant today and will be in the future as they were a number of years ago. In fact, if anything, we're seeing an uptick in demand in perhaps some of the regions where it had taken a bit more time to connect, so -- particularly in the U.S., for example. Now for those more new to our story, those 3 key products that we have underneath the banner of secure payments are Key to Pay, Click to Pay and Speak to Pay. And effectively, what these things are doing is PCI Pal acts as a payment facilitator. So first and foremost, we're making a payment possible across any communications channel by using Key to Pay, Click to Pay or Speak to Pay. And that's any of those channels that I talked about earlier. It's whether it's within a contact center, a UC environment or whether it's in conversational AI. We are making the payment possible in a way that's completely embedded and integrated to that conversation. That carries value in itself. But we also act as a secure data transmitter as well. And so this actually is where the original value proposition came from. It's why we call PCI-PAL because that related to PCI compliance around credit and debit card data. But you do get that, too, with what you do with PCI Power. But today, it's more like table stakes. So if you use our solutions, it's going to allow you to be secure and allow you to be compliant. And the three different methods really cover different channels. So Key to Pay is effectively typing in card data using telephone keypad. And you can do that whether you're in conversation with an agent or a bot or whether you're using a fully automated system via a bot or an IVR system, which are very quickly becoming bot systems themselves. And this is where the technology known as DTMF masking comes into play. And we have some patents related to the way that we deploy our voice solutions as well. It also acts as a protection in some of the technology integrations that we have with our partners in a very light touch platform-to-platform way. We then have Click to Pay and Speak to Pay. So Click to pay is where we're really opening up the opportunity for digital payment methods. Click to Pay uses a secure web link, which is sent to a customer. I mean that's in very basic terms. It could be fully embedded into our customers' own systems that they're using. It could be a notification in an app. There's all sorts of different ways that you can facilitate this web payment form effectively. And in that form, it works in a similar way in that PCI Power is capturing all the sensitive data, but also we can facilitate lots of different payment methods there as well. So it's not just credit and debit cards, we can make any kind of e-commerce type payment methods available to customers or to consumers at that point. And so our own customers, for example, it's very common to include digital wallets in that. So Apple Pay, Google Pay, et cetera. Buy now, pay later is relatively common as well. So if they use Klarna on their website, they can use Klarna with PCI Power in their contact center or on their web chat environment or a firm and things like that. And we have open banking to and a variety of other different digital payment methods that are available. And then Speak to Pay is speech recognition. So this is AI-powered speech recognition. We're on our second iteration really of the Speak to Pay solution, and it's super reliable. It still typically gets used more in accessibility situations where you might have callers who may have a disability and for one reason or another can't use the keypad or prefer to speak details, in which case, we can use enhanced speech recognition to do that. And also, this will come -- this comes into play with voice bots through conversational AI as well, which are effectively using AI speech recognition as well. So we can seamlessly integrate into those conversation flows as well. And we're seeing excellent momentum across this area of secure payments. However, we are adding to what we do from a product perspective. And I want to give you our sort of balanced view on what that looks like. So today, I will add to this, this was a graph that we -- a chart, if you like, that we shared at the CMD or certainly something very similar to this. You've got the current product suite, which by vast majority, revenue-wise is the secure payment suite and then also secure data collection as well because we can use the secure payment suite to capture data rather than payments. So we have customers that use it for social security numbers that use it for setting up direct debits and bank account details. Any sort of sensitive information, we can actually use those solutions to collect that. So there's less so what is used for, but it is available in terms of data collection. And then we have the fraud management piece as well. And with that, we launched a fraud screening solution, which we launched in July at the beginning of this year. It's fair to say we launched that very early. So we've been going through a process to roll that out to our partners, and we've got a number of those that are being onboarded right now with the fraud risk screen capability. We've got a number of new customers, direct customers coming through contract process for that. So I'd expect by the full year to have some customer base there that we'll be talking more about. But effectively, what's happening here with the fraud risk screen is that we're doing a check, a fraudulent check prior to taking a payment. And then we use the intelligence that we get back to drive the payment method that we offer to the customer. And so rather -- if it looks like it might have some fraud risk associated to it, then we may not offer a credit or debit card payment. We may offer a payment type, which has additional authentication such as a digital wallet payment because when you make a digital wallet payment, the consumer has to have face recognition to authenticate themselves, which therefore means the merchant taking the payment is more protected. And so therefore, if it is a fraudulent payment it's highly unlikely that they're going to get a chargeback in that situation. That's what we're trying to avoid. Now longer term with the fraud management piece, we will use it outside of the context of just the payment point in the call. You can actually also use it earlier on to assess whether there's any fraud going on, but that's very much in our plans longer term with that. And then in the center there, you've got analytics and data. So this is really around the reporting capabilities. We launched a new version effectively of our data analytics capability and reporting suite earlier this financial year. We're continuing to improve what we do there. We have a company-wide sort of data consolidation project going on at the moment, which isn't just about reporting externally. It's about all sorts of things, efficiencies, use of AI within the business. But that will contribute to our ability to provide better insights to customers and partners around improving customer experience, increasing revenue, reducing chargebacks and all these sorts of things. So these three or l things are all available today. And then the direction of travel we're taking with products in the sort of adjacent areas, we've talked to you about customer authentication before, and we expect this is coming soon. And so we plan in H2 to be announcing a new product capability around customer authentication. So effectively, we're helping our customers be confident that who they are talking to is who they say they are. So we've got several features planned to how we achieve that, and we'll launch an initial iteration and then we'll add to that in the months following that as well. And the customer authentication tool can be used at any point during a conversation. So we're not just engaging here at the point of payment. We're engaging at other points in the call wherever our customer wants to use that solution. But the important thing is -- because customer authentication is not new, the important thing is we're leveraging that, and we're doing that from the integration point that we have in that conversation. So we're doing it from our USP of being integrated to that conversation, that communications platform. And that's the uniqueness to it. We're not trying to do this for the first time, but we are trying to do it from that perspective for the first time. Now we've also got identity verification on the list as well, which is planned for the future. But particularly, I want to draw investors' attention to self-service onboarding, which in itself might sound a little unimportant. But actually, I think to investors that know us well, they're starting to realize how important this is for PCI-PAL and for a number of different reasons. And just to be clear, it is a product initiative. So adding a self-serve capability to what we do is a product initiative for us and an engineering workload that we have to resource. Some of my biggest challenges in the business today are which opportunity do we go at the hardest. These are mostly good problems for us to have, but that tends to be the sorts of discussions we're having to have within the business right now. But in terms of self-serve and self-serve onboarding, what this means for PCI Power, we are working towards this. So it's not a light switch moment. It's building blocks towards this. And we expect that by the end of FY '27, we will be able to sign up customers through our website who can sign up, contract, pay, gain access to and use our services entirely via our website. And we're aiming for MVP stage within 18 months unless we decide to try to move that faster potentially. Now the building blocks towards it mean that we actually get some operational gains, too. So I've talked a bit about standardization in our interims. I've talked about that at the full year. And so actually, when we're onboarding some of these SMB customers, we're able to leverage some of the standardization more out of the box for our products. And so that means there's less professional services involvement on our side, less custom development work. So that means increased operational gearing longer term, which clearly is something we want to see more of. Now we think we're going to start seeing that anyway just by nature of what we're doing and our ambitions around Rule of 40 within the next 2.5 years. But this could be a real catalyst for that longer term as well. And the sort of bigger strategic point around self-serve is that it opens up another go-to-market motion for PCI Power. And this is something we're very much targeting right now, is it creates a product-led growth stream, which is more of a true SaaS type growth stream where we can sell our services entirely digitally. We can market and sell them entirely digitally anywhere in the world. And that will change the -- or add an additional go-to-market model for the business in that time as well. So when we think about the growth trajectory of the business out to FY '30 and beyond, we very much want this to be part of that. And so the self-serve piece is really quite important. So I just know sometimes when you talk about product, people's eyes do tend to light up about some bright new shiny new product. Actually, we've got some excellent products that already exist and we can make them better. We can make them more available and we can access more of our market and self-serve is one of the key ways that we're able to do that. So it's for Ryan and I to make sure that we move that along at the right pace. Just before we wrap up, underpinning all of this is a public cloud platform. I'm not going to spend much time talking about this slide at all. Please feel free to look at it separately. But yes, excellent platform, as I've said already. But that secure engagement platform that we have today, we have the platform. We have this ecosystem of partners underneath it. Some of those are resellers, some of those are integrations. We've got more than 130, 140 payment service provider integrations, some of whom we aggregate across, and then we have all the CRM integrations that you could need, et cetera. So -- and then effectively, our platform is sitting on top of that. And so that's the direction of travel that we're taking in terms of anything new that we do, we are then able to take via our current go-to-market model. And then with the emergence of self-serve capabilities and that full sort of PLG approach to things, that will create a new track for PCI Power, more of a true SaaS sales play in the longer term, which we think is really quite exciting for us. So just before we go to questions to wrap up on the outlook, we have made an excellent start to H2. Q3 is often our strongest quarter at PCI Power just because of where partners year-ends tend to fall. But yes, as expected, we've had a strong start to this third quarter, continued sales momentum, particularly in the U.S. and continued seeing strong traction across insurance and health care. We announced a major new partner that I mentioned earlier. And also, we've referenced that we did extend one of our largest customer contracts in that time as well. So that's also been secured during -- since the end of H1. And really, our focus right now is the same as it has been this year as any investor that's spoken to be one-to-one. We're focused on execution of the plan this year. We want to beat our numbers this year. That's where we want to get to. I don't want to set new expectations but the ones that are there. We've got to meet the numbers, but really where I want to be is beating those key numbers that are out there, building that trust with our investors and proving that this pathway that we're on and the adjustment we made at the beginning of the year was the right decision and plotting that long-term path to not just keeping the scaling going, but making that profitable as well and on time with what we're expecting that to look like over the next year or so. So we've set ourselves very well up for a strong H2 and to achieve those things.