QuickFee Limited (QFE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. And on behalf of the Board of QuickFee, I'm pleased to welcome you all today to this Investor Day presentation. We've got a couple of hours jam-pack, full of goodness, introducing you to the QuickFee team, senior leadership team led by Jennifer Warawa, who I'll pass across to shortly. Today's focus is really all about unlocking transformational growth in the U.S. and sharing with you our plans and our progress, opening the covers a little bit more and sharing with you all the great things we're doing in the business, and giving you some insight into why we're so optimistic about the growth prospects of QuickFee moving forward. From my perspective, as Chair and as a substantial shareholder of the business, I've certainly never been more excited about the direction we're heading about the progress we're making. I believe we have a unique offering. Our product set is certainly one that differentiates from the competition in many ways, and the team will talk you through that today. We've certainly got a proven demand for our product. We've got an existing loyal customer set that continues to transact, and we continue to drive strong growth across all segments of the business, including recent group revenue growth of 35%, which is tremendous. We're very close to profitability. That's all what we're striving for. I can assure you that our executive team are working to their absolute potential to deliver results for every shareholder, and we are doing everything we can to drive ourselves towards profitability, and that marker is not that far away in the future. We have, talking of our executive team, the most experienced, high-caliber team that I've ever worked with, led by Jennifer and who I'll pass across to in a moment. And you'll get a flavor from that over the course of the next couple of hours. And I encourage you to hang on and listen to the insights that they share about the business, about the prospects and where we're heading because it is indeed a bright future, and I want to thank you for your participation and your attendance today and your support as a shareholder. Jennifer, over to you.

Great. Thank you very much, Dale. We're grateful that all of you could join us today as we share the latest progress we've made in the business as well as the growth ambition that we have our sights set on. Now if you've been following the QuickFee story for a while, there are a number of components of our strategy that are consistent with what you may have seen previously. What has changed is the clarity and planning around the execution of that strategy. We're laser-focused on activities that we believe will deliver the highest return on investment. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by a number of members of our executive management team, including Chris Smith, our Head of Growth and Customer Success; Kathleen Grant, our Head of Product Management; Dave Moore, our CTO; and Simon Yeandle, our CFO. This is an opportunity for you to not only hear about our strategy and execution plans right from various functional leaders in our business, but it's also an opportunity for you to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] And we'll get to all the questions at the conclusion of our presentation. I want to take a moment to set the stage for where we are today and why I believe that this is the right time for investors to take a real interest in QuickFee. Over the last 15 years, QuickFee has grown to be a reputable force in the markets that we serve. QuickFee is the leading business to business or B2B payments and automated bill-to-cash workflow solution that can help professional service firms increase revenue, decrease costs, all while improving their client and employee experience. We do business with over 1,250 firms worldwide. Globally, we funded over $0.5 billion plans through our QuickFee Finance product. In our last fiscal year, we drove over $1.2 billion in Pay Now transaction volume in the U.S. And we have a highly engaged and motivated team with an employee Net Promoter Score in the U.S. of 53. If you aren't familiar, a score of over 50 is considered excellent. I also think that it's worth calling out that just 1 year ago when we started tracking this score, our number was just 4. We're gaining traction in the U.S. with our Finance product with revenue growth over 50% year-over-year in FY '23, which is directly related to our revitalized finance strategy. I'm also impressed with the quality of firms that we're bringing on board. They have higher revenue than previous years, and a great demonstration of that is in H1 of FY '24, where the annual revenue of newly acquired firms was almost double our firm size from FY '22 or FY '23. While acquiring new firms is a critical component of our growth, it's also important to call out that without bringing on even 1 new firm, we can grow our total transaction volume by 8x just by capturing more of the revenue that's running through our existing customers. There's no doubt about it. A foundation for transformational growth has been laid. I'm proud to introduce you to our experienced management and leadership team, a number of whom you'll be hearing from today. I work with many executives over the course of my career, and this team is truly one of the best. What is it that makes them different and special? Every single person on our leadership team has owner mentality and an extremely high level of accountability. They treat this business as if it were their own. They hold themselves and each other to a very high level of accountability. And each and every one of them brings experience that is so important for the next phase of our growth journey. Our team represents diverse skill sets and backgrounds, but I tell them often that every single individual on our leadership team should think of themselves as a general manager of the business, first and foremost, and then think about their functional area as where they specialize. This keeps them looking at the big picture, being mindful of every other team in the business and always looking out for the best outcome for our customers and the company. In addition to our great management team, we have an extremely engaged and active Board of Directors that are aligned with our growth aspirations. Every single person on our Board has skin in the game and in total, own over 20% of QuickFee shares, so they're aligned with our shareholders' interest. This is a difference maker. I want to take a step back and provide an overview of the current market situation. Giving accountants -- given accountants are the #1 industry that we serve, let's focus on the market problems that they're facing on a day-to-day basis. In the FY -- in the 2024 accounting industry report, Wolters Kluwer asked firms what their greatest challenge was. And regardless of firm size, the answer was the same. Pricing and competitive fee pressure. One of the specific things that are making it hard to be price competitive. Well, here are a few. 56% of accounting firms say 50% or more of the clients are still paying by check, which is time-consuming and expensive to process. Accounting firms tell us that, on average, their clients take up to 50 days to pay, which represents significant working capital that's tied up in accounts receivable. In addition to these market challenges, imagine trying to navigate the AI revolution and a talent shortage that's been relentless since the pandemic. In wake of all these market problems, is there progress being made? Absolutely. There are some solid proof points that firms are moving forward with their digital transformations and are making progress in evolving how they work. In fact, 56% of firms have automated their client document collection, which is a huge leap forward. Every year, QuickFee conducts a survey within the accounting profession. And in 2023, there was a 22% drop in the number of CPA firms getting more than half of their payments by check. Progress is being made. Additionally, 61% of firms recognize that technology is helping improve their chargeable hours. They're seeing the link between technology adoption and increasing revenue. However, in spite of all of these positive advancements, only 9% of firms believe that they're maximizing the use and value of their current technology. In the U.S. market, we're in the early days of a seismic change. There is still much more work to do and more change to come. This is where QuickFee can play a pivotal role. I shared a few moments ago about the momentum we have in both of our markets, but what does the opportunity really look like in the U.S. market? In our most important and prominent vertical accounting, the total addressable market being firms over $1 million in revenue is $102 billion. When we scale that down to firms that serve businesses, it's an $84 billion market, of which QuickFee only has $10 billion of today. The really exciting part is that of that $10 billion in revenue flowing through our current QuickFee customers, we only capture about 12% of that, which means we have $8.8 billion in transaction volume that we can capture from our existing customers alone without ever acquiring a new customer. The potential is tremendous. To drill into these numbers a bit deeper, I wanted to share the breakdown of the number of firms in each revenue band. There's a lot of market to go after. Over 6,000 firms to be exact, and we currently work with only 757 of those. Now our primary verticals will remain Accounting and Legal or solution providers to those industries. I just shared with you the total addressable market for the Accounting vertical, but let's take a look at the Legal market on the right-hand side of this slide. The serviceable addressable market for Legal is $108 billion, and the legal customers we represent today only have $200 million of that revenue. Of course, Accounting and Legal will be our key focus verticals. However, as we work to unlock truly transformative growth, we will look to accelerate 1 or 2 additional secondary professional service verticals. Verticals that we're exploring include recruiting firms, management consultants, marketing agencies, training and development firms and even architectural and engineering firms. Our go-to-market strategy has us delivering sales and marketing tactics that go after these secondary verticals and where we see positive results, we will double down. Now we've talked about the market opportunity, but I also wanted to take a moment to share with you what the QuickFee portfolio includes and what our primary product offerings are. The QuickFee portfolio is split into 3 key offerings, which are Pay Now, Pay Over Time and QuickFee Connect. Let's start with Pay Now. Think of this as traditional digital payments. Our Pay Now solution allows the firm's clients to pay with ACH, EFT or credit or debit card. Then we also offer a lending solution that's proprietary to QuickFee called QuickFee Finance. This Pay Over Time option allows clients to pay their firm over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, while the firm gets paid in full within 3 business days at absolutely no cost to the firm. QuickFee Finance is our highest margin solution. Finally, our Connect product is a significant growth enabler in the U.S. market. Connect provides integration into leading practice management solutions, which are used by accounting firms helping turn a manual, often paper-based invoicing process into an automated digital process by sending out the invoices generated within the practice management solution via e-mail. We essentially bring the mature practice management systems into the modern age for our customers by automating processes. The reason that Connect is such a growth enabler is that when we put that payment link on an invoice and send it electronically, we see a considerable uplift in transaction volume from that customer year-over-year. In fact, some of our Connect customers have increased their transaction volumes by over 40%. Now let's dig into the benefits of each of these solutions. Our QuickFee Finance solution pays the firm in full within 3 business days which improves the firm's cash flow, clears aging receivables and allows the firm to sell more services on average, and the client can pay their invoices over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, which also helps improve their cash flow. QuickFee Finance has a very simple application process, and there are no credit checks required. It's also important to note that it costs a firm nothing to accept QuickFee Finance. The main benefit to the firm for our Pay Now solution is they can accept credit cards, debit cards or ACH and EFT online at competitive rates with credit card surcharging passed on to their clients. A firm we signed up earlier this month will save $150,000 a year on credit card surcharges alone simply by switching to QuickFee. This is a significant benefit. Their clients also appreciate having 24/7 access to an easy-to-use payment portal to settle their account. Our third key offering is QuickFee Connect. Connect integrates with leading practice management solutions, helping firms automate their bill-to-cash workflow, saving them hours of unbillable time and admin work while helping them get paid faster. You'll hear more about QuickFee Connect from our Head of Product Management, Kathleen Grant, in more detail later on. To connect the dots, firms are trying to shift from a manual costly process to an automated process and QuickFee helps them do that. Firms are trying to reduce the amount of working capital that they have tied up in accounts receivable. QuickFee helps them do that. Firms are battling pricing and competitive fee pressures and QuickFee provides flexible payment options to help them overcome those fee pressures and win more new business. Our current platform is well positioned to address the market problems. Now like any product in any industry, we naturally have competitors in our markets. We're also well positioned to win against those competitors. I'll talk you through the competitive landscape at a high level and then our Head of Sales and Customer Success, Chris Smith, will get into more detail in his section. In the Pay Now area of our business, the majority of traditional ACH and card processors do not have integration with practice management solutions. This means the processes remain manual, cumbersome, time consuming and expensive for firms. Additionally, many other processors do not have the option for the credit card surcharges to be passed on to their clients. When you think about the fact that QuickFee has shifted over $11 million in credit card surcharges from the firm to their clients, that is significant. There are 3 main attributes that differentiate our Pay Over Time offering from other financing providers in the market. They are consumer-focused and aren't designed for firm serving businesses. They have a very low invoice maximum, typically around $17,500, and they acquire a credit check for every customer. And most customers don't want to have a hit on their credit score simply because they paid an invoice. When you look at other A/R automation platforms in the market, we find that our key competitors are designed to serve top-tier very large firms and are often outpriced for midsized or smaller firms. QuickFee is designed for professional service firms. Our finance solution has no invoice maximum. The clients of firms don't need to get a credit check done. We integrate with leading practice management solutions and we have pricing that works for small, midsize and very large firms. We are the best fit for the largest portion of the market. Now what we've seen almost 40% growth globally year-over-year, that isn't why I came to QuickFee. And I don't think that's why you decided to invest in QuickFee. We're all here because we believe that the near 40% revenue growth year-on-year is just the tip of the iceberg. We believe that there's an opportunity for transformational and even exponential growth ahead. Where will that growth come from? And do we have a plan for it? Absolutely. Let's dive in. The U.S. is positioned to overtake Australia in lending volume. You can see on the slide shown where we're at today in terms of relative share as well as the growth trajectory that's possible in the U.S. Rapid Finance transaction volume is just getting started in the U.S. And with the size of the opportunity, the market is still untapped. In 4 years, despite not always being 100% focused on our core verticals in the U.S., group revenue has grown from $5.8 million to $14.8 million and the U.S. has gone from 1/4 to 2/3 of this. If you envision a flywheel that when turning at full force, compounds the efforts of every single component. That's what I'm trying to represent on the screen today. This flywheel showcases the 5 areas that we believe will unlock transformational growth in the U.S. market. Our #1 lever on our flywheel is QuickFee Finance. QuickFee Finance has revenue yields that are approximately 25x those of our Pay Now offerings. All while delivering the solutions to the market that is unmatched by any other company in the U.S. It's the reason that we brought QuickFee into the U.S., and it's absolutely instrumental in delivering transformational growth, Think of QuickFee Finance as our crown jewel of sorts. Secondly, QuickFee Connect is a key part of our growth strategy. Early results have shown that firms that adopt Connect have seen their transaction volume grow by over 40% in the same period over last year. In addition to that, by integrating QuickFee Connect with the most widely used practice management solutions in the U.S., firms are able to unlock automation capabilities that do not exist in practice management solutions themselves. To unlock that $8 billion plus in firm revenue that's not being captured by QuickFee today, Connect is the key. Third, we need to deliver differentiated technology. While the benefits we bring to firms are incredibly compelling, our ability to drive transformational growth won't be done by those alone, our ability to shift our product and development teams from being a cost center to a difference maker that delivers world-class solutions is a critical part of our flywheel. Fourth, strategic alliances and partnerships are incredibly important. If we want to grow this business at a faster rate than ever before, acquiring firms one by one simply won't be fast enough. By building strong partnerships with other industry leaders, we can grow our reach, drive increased awareness and acquire new customers at a scale that's much greater than 1:1. Think of it as a one-to-many approach. Finally, we're looking to leverage automation across all areas of our business. Given our goal is to drive cost-effective growth every single functional area needs to automate as much as possible, including sales, our operations team, customer success, finance and product and development. I am here because I believe in our ability to deliver transformational growth. I believe our value proposition supports that growth, and I believe that we have the team to make that growth a reality. I'm very proud of the performance of QuickFee Finance with our strategy, focus and execution being aligned with this key solution. As we called out in our first half results, our finance revenue was up 57% in Australia and 58% in the U.S. over the prior corresponding period, and we're just getting going. With that, I'm pleased to introduce you to Chris Smith, our Head of Growth and Customer Success. Last month, Chris celebrated his 1-year anniversary at QuickFee. And although 1 year is not that long, Chris has had a significant impact. I'm excited for you to hear what the progress Chris has made in the commercial area of our business and how he thinks about delivering transformational growth.

Thank you, Jennifer, and thank you to everyone that is joined today to learn more about our transformational growth strategy. As Jennifer mentioned, I recently celebrated my 1-year anniversary at QuickFee. And I must say, I'm even more excited today than I was 1 year ago as I see the opportunity we have to 10x our business and be an outright leader in the markets we serve. Prior to QuickFee, I spent almost 17 years at Sage, a global player in the accounting, financials and ERP software space in a variety of commercial leadership roles, leading sales, operations and marketing functions. As you may have seen, Jennifer and I have actually worked together previously, and the reasons we have gravitated towards continuing to work together are because we both have extremely high drives, a strong sense of purpose and a high amount of trust and respect for one another. I'd like to highlight that having an executive team with the amount of trust, discipline, vision and execution capability that we have makes us a formidable force in the market. And now let's dive into delivering transformational growth through our commercial strategy. As you can see, commercial execution plays a significant role in our strategy to unlock transformational growth in the U.S. And you can clearly see each of these 4 highlighted areas represented in the coming slides. Our commercial strategy is centered around 3 main pillars: being the accountant segment market leader for automating the bill-to-cash workflow for firms that generate over $1 million in annual revenue. Second, expanding strategically and efficiently through partnerships and alliances so that we have a scalable revenue generated through disproportionately lower customer acquisition cost. And last, creating a scalable commercial foundation that can 10x our revenue while minimizing costs. Now let's take time to click further down into each one of these pillars. When you look at the market through our lens, the main players we see come off most frequently are Aiwyn, CPA Charge and Ignition. We see Aiwyn mostly inside public accounting top 300 firms. Also known as the IPA Top 300. These are the Top 300 largest accounting firms based on annual revenue. Aiwyn has e-invoicing automation and integration with multiple practice management systems and provides card and ACH payment options. The feedback we get from firms that we talk to outside of the IPA Top 300 is that Aiwyn is more expensive than QuickFee to implement and the recurring software fees are high. We believe this makes it hard for Aiwyn to move down market outside of the IPA Top 300 that they currently sit in. Moving on to CPA Charge. They are the competitor we see show up most frequently in opportunities, and they tend to be with accounting firms that have less than USD 5 million in annual revenue. CPA Charge is a high-volume, low-margin play that offers card, ACH and a white label B2C financing option that serves the lower end of the market for accountants and bookkeepers with basic needs and that are price sensitive at this stage of their firm. Lastly, Ignition is another provider we see show up in our opportunities. Like CPA Charge, feedback we get during the sales cycle is, Ignition is aimed at serving the lower end of the market and does not integrate with any leading practice management solutions. Their strategy focuses on accountants and bookkeepers that have very simple practice management needs and tend to be lower in annual revenue. As you can see on this graph, QuickFee has greater market reach due to our unique value proposition. And now I'd like to spend time talking about why this is. QuickFee is the leading B2B payments and automated bill-to-cash workflow solution that can help an accounting firm increase revenue, decrease costs, strengthen cash flow, all while improving the client and employee experience. Our financing product helps firms win new business and increase revenue per client by allowing their customers to spread out the cost over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months through an easy application process that does not affect their clients' credit score and only take seconds to complete. On the other end of the bill-to-cash workflow, our financing product helps clear out aging A/R for firms with slow-to-pay and late-paying clients. Next, we have our automated bill-to-cash workflow solution, QuickFee Connect, and that integrates with market-leading practice management solution providers, such as Wolters Kluwer, IRIS, and soon-to-be Thomson Reuters and delivers game-changing value at a competitive price point. When you combine QuickFee Finance with QuickFee Connect, and then layer in our ACH and card processing. There is nothing on the market at the price point of QuickFee that delivers as much value as QuickFee can in this arena. Now I'd like to take a moment and highlight how we are helping unlock new revenue opportunities for a firm that recently joined QuickFee. Nicholas Libock, the Managing Partner of Libock & Associates, an accounting firm that generates between $1 million and $5 million in annual revenue, joined QuickFee in September of 2023 right at the end of our first quarter. In less than 6 months, their firm has won over $200,000 in client work using QuickFee Finance. That is a significant and meaningful injection of cash for Libock & Associates that would not have been possible without QuickFee Finance. I love this example because Nicholas was able to reengage clients that had paused on larger projects due to cash flow constraints and create a win-win for his clients and his firm. This is the power of QuickFee Finance, and that's why it's so important, we are laser-focused on leveraging the value proposition of finance within our sales and customer onboarding cycle. In just 1 year, we've generated 17x the finance transaction volume from new firm sign-ups versus the prior comparison period. This is not by accident and is a great proof point of the value QuickFee Finance provides to the market. Now I'd like to talk about expanding strategically and efficiently through partnerships and alliances. Partnerships and alliances are a strategic growth tool that allows us to maximize market reach and overall value proposition in an efficient, effective and differentiated way. In short term, you should expect an intelligent selection of partnerships, alliances and strategic customers that will yield significant revenue results within the next 18 to 24 months. We have 3 strategies currently deployed that I'd like to highlight. The first strategy is elevating our strong collaborative relationships with industry players to shape an impactful and profitable referral engine. Accountants and other professional services firms rely on industry alliances and peers for their recommendations. It is important that QuickFee is visible within these industry events, and that's why we provide value as thought leaders in the verticals we serve. Jennifer Warawa and our Director of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, Rafael Casas, have led the charge here. In fiscal year-to-date, QuickFee has attended 8 conferences, 12 BDO local area meetings, delivered multiple speaking engagements at events and directly to accounting firms and their staff. While also being asked to speak at upcoming events such as BDO Evolve, BDO Alliance CAAS Roundtable, BDO Alliance AI Summit, CalCPA's Women Leadership Summit, Botkeeper's AI UNCHAINED and additional BDO area meetings. Today, we are members of BDO Alliance, Allinial Global and PrimeGlobal, and we're working to expand into more relationships with other alliances, societies and industry influencers that are seeking to advance digital transformation within the accounting profession. The second strategy is to strengthen QuickFee's value proposition and competitive differentiation through strategic partnerships and technology integration. Knowing when to build and when to partner is so important as a technology provider. As an example, in May, we will be launching our partnership with Knuula to provide QuickFee customers with best-in-class engagement letter functionality. QuickFee has decided to partner here instead of build organically so that our customers have the most robust and flexible engagement letter solution that complements QuickFee's best-in-class flexible payment options. Practice management integration partnerships are critical. And these partnerships allow us to deliver the best automated bill-to-cash workflow for our mutual customers. In Q1 of this fiscal year, we announced a partnership with IRIS to integrate QuickFee Connect with their practice management solution, IRIS Practice Engine. We are continuing to explore more partnerships like these to maximize reach and value. The third part of our strategy is to accelerate and extend QuickFee Finance's market reach through white label or co-branded embedded finance solutions. This part of our strategy allows us to convert other payment providers and invoicing solution providers, once seen as competition into a coopetition play by embedding our finance solutions into their current payments and invoicing process. We're actively in talks with and seeking to meet with other payment providers to target their professional services customer base with an embedded finance solution. As you can see, we are very focused on how to utilize partnerships and alliances to win in the market. Strategic partnerships take a significant investment of time and resources. Typically started by having to navigate through complex and matrix organizations to develop and complete commercial agreements. Partnerships that include product integration undergo further collaboration investment and go-to-market launches take time to ramp up education and awareness in the market. We believe forming these enduring relationships are completely worth the time and investment by creating synergies in the market that initiate growth opportunities we could never achieve without them. Now I'd like to take a deeper look into one of our strongest and longest partnerships in play, our partnership with BDO Alliance USA. BDO Alliance USA is among the industry's largest associations of accounting and professional services firms, containing more than 20,000 professionals in over 800 locations. 8 years ago, when QuickFee entered the U.S. market, we began our relationship with BDO and currently have 74 active firms that generated USD 5.5 million in QuickFee Finance volume in 2023. BDO Alliance USA has strong member engagement, their national and regional events have high attendee rates. We value these opportunities to get in front of BDO Alliance members, which is why we invest in attending their events and local area meetings. Equally, BDO Alliance continues to reward QuickFee with speaking engagements at these events because of the value we continue to deliver as thought leaders in the accounting space. As fruitful as our results have been from the BDO Alliance partnership, we're excited about the strong runway for growth to win more of the 150-plus firms that are currently not QuickFee customers today. Most of these firms use practice management systems we integrate with or will integrate with by the end of the fiscal year. Leveraging the value proposition of QuickFee Connect, along with QuickFee Finance, will be our key focus for winning more BDO Alliance firms on to QuickFee. Now I'd like to highlight one of our recent formed partnerships with IRIS. IRIS is a global provider of practice management, accounting and payroll solutions and is used by more than 600 firms in the U.S. with half of the top 100 CPA firms using an IRIS accounting solution. In September of 2023, QuickFee and IRIS announced a partnership that includes integration between IRIS Practice Management Systems and QuickFee Connect to enhance and automate the bill-to-cash workflow capabilities of IRIS. Like the partnership with BDO, we are maximizing the opportunity of engaging with their customer base by attending our first IRIS user conference as a gold sponsor in May of 2024. This puts us in touch with over 450 IRIS customers as an exhibitor and includes a speaking engagement to present the benefits of QuickFee Connect integration with IRIS Practice Engine. In addition to our QuickFee Connect and IRIS Practice Engine partnership, IRIS is also a customer of QuickFee Finance. IRIS customers can now use QuickFee Finance to pay their IRIS invoices that range from the thousands to over USD 1 million. We had a strong runway for growth with IRIS and look forward to delivering massive value to the market through this partnership. The last pillar of our commercial strategy that I'd like to highlight is creating a scalable commercial foundation. Two key components of this include our sales operating model and our commercial tech stack. For any company, evolving the operating model and underlying technology to fit the needs of the current strategy is key. At the heart of any high-performance team is the right balance of collaboration, communication, incentive, process, technology and enablement. One thing I noticed right away when joining QuickFee is the sales and customer success organization was ready for a faster, nimbler and more collaborative reporting structure. To achieve this, we flattened the sales and customer success organization and eliminated a sales leadership position and moved all account executives in the relationship managers reporting directly to me. Additionally, we created sales territories that paired each account executive with a relationship manager in their respective territories. This created a faster buying and onboarding experience for our customers that was enhanced by automation. We then introduced sales commission plans that jointly align the sales and customer success teams with company transaction volume growth objectives. We also brought in new technology to enhance our sales and marketing process, which I'll go into deeper on the next slide. And lastly, we redesigned the sales process and customer onboarding experience with the primary focus being speeding up the time to value for our customers. While making these adjustments, we introduced a standard of accountability and a culture of continuous learning. This helped accelerate getting the right team members on board that thrive in this type of environment. A players want to work with A players. They thrive from challenge, and you can see this clearly in our eNPS results. We've continued raising the performance bar and our employees have continued responding with higher satisfaction scores. The next piece I want to touch on is the importance of integrating technology into our sales and marketing processes. Embedding technology and developing quality processes are table stakes for building a predictable, repeatable and scalable foundation. That's why we've adopted a technology-first strategy inside of QuickFee. Before hiring a person to do something, we evaluate whether there is technology that can solve the problem and provide better results. Instead of investing in more sales headcount, we've made investments into prospecting, sales automation, sales productivity and AI intelligence tools to improve results. When first joining QuickFee back in February of 2023, our commercial tech stack provided the basic technology needed to facilitate the sales and marketing process. We could have gone the route of hire more sales reps or buy more marketing lists to strengthen our sales funnel, but those tactics are not scalable and are not cost efficient. Over the last 12 months, we've invested in and introduced specific technologies to automate and elevate our sales and marketing effectiveness while improving the overall client experience. These tools allow us to intimately know our prospects before we ever meet them. It allows us to leverage AI to provide intelligence and insights we never capture on our own. We value data-driven decision-making, and these tools are continuously improving our go-to-market initiatives and tactics. What I love about this is we're building QuickFee the right way from the ground up. I've worked in larger environments where technology and process were out of alignment where it was very hard to break the cycle of slow and manual. This is not the case at QuickFee. We are building the commercial engine to scale. Lastly, I'd like to bring everything back to the so what? How do we know these are the right commercial strategies and if they're gaining traction? Well, a significant amount of transformation has taken place in a relatively short amount of time of less than 12 months. And the early indicators and green shoots are very exciting. We've gone from literally prospecting the hundreds to prospecting in the thousands, using high-quality tailored messaging that is delivered on time, all the time without drowning the sales team and administrative tasks. We've engaged with over 6,000 prospects and customers with an average of 5 e-mails delivered per recipient. Because we've made improvements in our messaging, including making it easier to meet with us by offering [indiscernible] scheduling links to our prospects and clients. We've been able to book over 602 meetings through e-mail engagements alone. Our finance strategies are delivering solid growth in finance volume. One metric that is near and dear to our hearts is measuring finance transaction volume over a trailing 12-month period. This eliminates any seasonal swings and is a good measurement of sustainable growth. When comparing February 2024, trailing 12 months to February 2023, we've grown 30%. Part of this growth is driven by the improved onboarding experience for finance customers. We are very excited to see a 17x improvement in transaction volumes for our new finance sign-ups when comparing to the first half of 2024 to the prior comparison period. And while we celebrate growth in our finance transaction volume, we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For the future growth, we will deliver. Lastly, QuickFee Connect is carving an amazing path for transformational growth to be delivered. In less than 12 months, we've onboarded 73 QuickFee customers on to Connect where annual revenues generated by these firms reached almost USD 1 billion. When factoring in our next QuickFee Connect integration to be released this year with Thomson Reuters Practice CS, plus the existing QuickFee customers not yet on Connect, our processing volume potential grows to USD 4 billion. Before I hand it over to the next presenter, I'd like to leave you with this. We have an intelligent and committed management team that is clear on where we're going, clear on how we'll get there, and we're all playing to win. And a 1,000% confidence in our team and our ability to deliver unmatched value to the markets we're in and the markets we choose to enter. Thank you so much for your time today. And now I'd like to hand it over to our Head of Product Management, Kathleen Grant.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. My name is Kathleen Grant, and I head up the Product Management team here at QuickFee. I've been with QuickFee for the past 3 years. However, I've been in the accounting industry in my whole career. After getting my degree in accounting and qualifying as a CPA, I spent close to 10 years working in public accounting as well as having my own accounting practice. The rest of my career has been spent in the industry working in product management with companies such as Wolters Kluwer and Aderant. So why join QuickFee? It's hard to build software for accounts if you've never been in that world. Part of being a good product manager is understanding what the customer wants, but also anticipating what they don't even know what they need. That's what I like about QuickFee. It's the perfect culmination of my career working in the industry and building software. I am passionate about the accounting industry, but equally passionate about building software that makes sense for our customers here at QuickFee. So let's look how product management fits into the flywheel. For QuickFee to achieve transformational growth, each group must be laser-focused on their piece of the flywheel while still working together in unison. Product is no exception. And as we go through the product strategy, you will notice our commitment and focus to deliver on these components. So let me just take a minute to go through them. Connect continues to be a key focus for the product team. This platform allows us to fully take advantage of the bill-to-cash workflow and extend not only automation and efficiencies but to drive additional transaction volume through our integrations. Secondly, being the voice of the customer is only part of the puzzle. It also includes working hand-in-hand with development teams using the right technology and the right tools to build world-class software to gain that competitive advantage. And lastly, on the flywheel for exponential growth to happen, we need to leverage strategic partners in order to quickly enter new markets and gain additional customers. Keeping those major components in mind, let's go one level deeper. Our three main initiatives for our product strategies are: modernizing our customer tech stack. We know firms are slow to implement new solutions. So let's not force them, but rather, let's meet them where they are by providing the latest innovations and products that can complement their existing solutions without completely replacing them. Secondly, optimizing the bill-to-cash workflow. This is where we excel, helping firms get paid faster through automation and innovation. And lastly, expand our ability to capture more share of our customers' payments. That means looking at alternative forms of payments and converting those to digital payments in a consolidated end user experience. Before I go into our initiative, let me just take a moment and give you guys a quick review of what Connect does technically. Jennifer and Chris spoke earlier about the benefits of a strong Connect product offering. Connect is what we call our integration platform. It allows us to expand our product offering through partnerships and integration, which results in higher transaction volume. When we look at the diagram, a few things to take away. First, we are very deliberate in which systems we integrate with. We currently integrate with the leading practice management systems in the accounting industry for our target market, which include Wolters Kluwer, IRIS and coming shortly, Thomson Reuters. These companies account for 90% of QuickFee's total addressable market. Second, the Connect platform covers the full loop of the bill-to-cash workflow using automation in places like invoice delivery, automating reminders on open invoices, settlements and payment reconciliation. This is a huge benefit for our customers by saving them time on mundane tasks. In fact, we have surveyed our current Connect customers and on average, they are saving 4 hours a week on just doing data entry of those payments. That adds up to over 5 weeks of time saved a year for one task in the workflow. Firms clients also see the benefit with Connect. E-mails with an easy pay now link and auto populating payment deals means clients can quickly and easily pay their invoice. As we mentioned, Connect customers noticed a 40% increase in transaction volume when they adopt Connect. Connect is a key focus for us in Q4, and we continue to explore additional integrations with practice management systems. In product management, when we're gathering requirements, we always keep the voice of the customer in mind. It's one thing to build cool software, but it's a game changer to build software that customers want. As I mentioned, most firms use one of the leading practice management systems. However, these practice management systems are old. They were developed over the past 15, 20 or even 30 years ago. There are pros and cons to software that have been around this long. They're very rich in feature and functionality, but they can't always provide the latest innovation and automation capabilities that newer software platforms can. We also know that accounting and legal firms replaced their practice management system once every 10 to 15 years. We also know firms are very slow to adopt new solutions due to the high cost of implementation and training. All this makes these solutions very sticky with firms. So what does this mean? It means QuickFee meets firms where they are, and we don't require them to switch large solutions or adopt new technologies. We allow them to use their current solution, but also leverage automation and efficiencies through our product offerings and our integrations. This is our value proposition, solving problems that others are not. Our second product strategy is optimizing the bill-to-cash workflow. The Connect platform fits into our workflow and it helps firms get paid faster and accelerate their accounts receivable. We feel so strongly that this is the right strategy, and we are doubling down into more integrations and more automations. For example, the bill-to-cash workflow starts with the firm invoicing their clients. As Chris shared earlier, we're currently developing an integration with Knuula, a third-party provider of automated engagement letters. This extends our reach to the beginning of the firm's workflow and incorporates additional payments such as retainers and on account fees by providing a payment link on the engagement letter. Firms want to get paid prior to starting their work. We can help facilitate that with this integration. Optimization also includes continuously reviewing our current offering. This includes updating our current user interfaces for all of our portals to our more modern, intuitive user experience and providing insights into their data so firms can make more informed decisions. And lastly, as we move towards capturing more of the firm payments, we are mindful of providing a consolidated experience. So that firms can manage all of their digital payments in one location while getting more insights. Looking at the graphic on the left, you can see QuickFee's current customer revenue is $10 billion, of which we currently capture 12% in total transaction volume. That leaves us a runway of $8.8 billion to go after without even adding one new customer. We have some features that are in the product right now that we can extend to our current customers to grab additional volume, such as Connect. Typically, we see a 40% increase in transaction volume. At the moment, we have 73 firms signed up on Connect. That is only a 10% penetration. As we round out our integration, we should see this number grow rapidly. Bank direct, right now, U.S. banks offer their account holders an online banking feature typically called Bill Pay, which generates a physical check to the payment recipient. Our Bank Direct functionality intercepts this physical check from the bank and converts it into a digital payment. During our early adopter phase of Bank Direct, we had 15 customers and we received over $2.6 million in additional volume. Recurring payments as more firms move towards advisory services using a fixed amount per month, the recurring payment plans are a natural fit. Currently, we have 16% of our firms who have implemented recurring payment plans with 80% being set up in the last fiscal year. So as you can see, we have a lot of opportunity to grow just within our current product offering. However, we want to be able to capture the other 88% of firm revenues that are not in digital payment form. So from a future consideration, we are researching different ways firms receive their payments. We know firms 50% of firms received 50% of payments still by physical check from their clients. That's about $2 billion in payments not currently being captured from our current customers. We're looking at technologies to intercept those checks that are available, and that's something we're going to -- we are currently exploring. Two other trends that have surfaced here in the U.S. are Real-time payments and Cryptocurrencies. The adoption for these two are slower than other payment types, but definitely trends that we're keeping an eye on. So now thank you for your time today. And I'd like to hand it over to Dave Moore, our CTO, to share a deeper dive into our technology strategy.

Thank you, Kathleen, and welcome, everyone, to the call today. I joined QuickFee in October of last year as CTO. I've been in technology leadership for quite some time in a variety of industries, enterprise software, gaming, technology, consulting. I'm a career software engineer and architect and will always be a hands-on player/coach type of a leader. The reason I joined QuickFee is because as a consultant, I was advising companies and technology modernization. QuickFee was one of my customers. I saw this as an opportunity to leverage my skills and experience in ways that could have a direct and immediate impact. But that's not the only reason. QuickFee has tremendous potential and growth and I realize that the other one and probably most important was the leadership team I would be working with. So it was a combination of what I'd be doing, who I would be doing it with, are the main reasons why I'm here. Let's now dive into technology. When we look at development role in the growth flywheel, we start with automation. I want to clarify our stance on AI with regards to automation since virtually all AI requests coming from customers are really about automation. We are certainly automating the bill-to-cash workflow with Connect and continue to seek other opportunities where automation solves a problem. Regarding AI and generative AI, in particular, we have started using GAI tools internally in development. These tools help us write better code faster, resulting in more reliable features available in our products sooner. We approach with caution the embedding of AI in our products and we'll do that when the right opportunity and use case appears. We have strong AI skills on our team and look forward to applying those when it solves a very specific problem. Moving clockwise on the flywheel takes us to Connect. You've heard about Connect throughout this presentation and its importance to our future. Firms with Connect have nearly doubled transaction volume over pcp. When we build Connect integrations with practice management systems, it is extremely complicated to integrate our technology with things that, frankly, were not intended for integration. So our solutions are very compelling to our customers. when they see the entire life cycle automated. Finally, with differentiated technology, we are shifting the development team from a cost center to a difference maker. Doing big things that provide competitive advantage, gives the executive team confidence and our ability to deliver game-changing features. We have four main areas for development to deliver on growth. The first is strong customer focus embedded throughout the Dev team. The next is rapid delivery and scale, the sooner we can release features, the happier our customers. Next is security and as a fintech company, security needs to be at our core. And the last one is tech empowerment, taking on more within our own team. I'll dive into each one of these in a little bit more detail. Product development centered on customer needs. The customer has a voice and critical features at QuickFee, and we visit with them to collaborate on the user interface and overall experience. We have redesigned our user interface for our payment portal, and you can see a screenshot of that here on the right. This payment portal had more than 200 hours of testing, plus a lot of automation. And finally, we have robust monitoring in place that allows us to play back all client sessions. We use this for error detection and proactive resolutions. Accelerating delivery and building for scale. We just recently reduced our product delivery cadence by 25%, allowing us to get new features to our customers quicker. We also have early adopter programs for major new features like our ACH direct to bank that allow us to flesh out any challenges that were difficult to uncover in our own testing. Next, on the engineering processes front, we have core pillars that are key to how we build software. They are security, performance, resiliency, manageability and scalability. Each one of these pillars represent a checklist during our design process before the first line of code is written. These are referenced in our technical design documents, which are required for any major new feature. Just like with our customers, we want to automate anything that can be automated from unit test to automated regression test to regular code deployments. The team have adopted and automate everything mindset. Next is building with scale, software that is not designed to scale will hit the proverbial brick wall and be very difficult or impossible to fix. We are building things, software, processes and teams that has the capability to scale as the business demands it. Protecting systems and data. Security must be in our core fiber in everything we do, and I can tell you that it is. On the security front, we use some scanning tools that identify vulnerabilities. We've eliminated all critical vulnerabilities and significantly reduced the ones classified as high, and we'll keep reducing those. On the monitoring front, we've invested in market-leading tools, Datadog and PagerDuty that give us real-time dashboards and alerts. For disaster recovery, we've a solid plan, and we'll begin exercising it frequently just to make sure we're still good in the case of a disaster. For compliance, we've a technology bill of materials, which lists every version of any technology that we use in our stack. While this is something we would never make available to the public, it has been requested by a handful of customers. Strengthening our value through tech empowerment. We do this primarily in 3 ways: competitive advantage, less reliance on third parties and intelligent spend. For competitive advantage, we want to apply creative thinking to solve problems using our own technology, QuickFee intellectual property, when and where it makes sense in our products to help give us that advantage. That brings us to less reliance on third parties. We prefer the scenario of our tech, our problem. That gives us the performance monitoring and quick problem resolution times our customers' demand. We'll use third-party software, where it makes sense, but not in those areas that we need to control of the feature and the overall experience. Finally, regarding intelligent spend, people-wise, we've a good model of onshore versus offshore resources with 22% of the development team resources being based in the United States. We're also taking advantage of prepurchasing, compute resources in Amazon AWS for a sizable discount. Thank you, everyone. I'll now hand it back over to Jennifer to share highlights on our Australian business.

Great. Thanks a lot, Dave. QuickFee was founded in Australia 15 years ago and is a profitable business performing exceptionally well right now. QuickFee Founder and Executive Director, Bruce Coombes, continues to lead our Australian business. While the markets now mature, there are still opportunities to sign up new firms, and our sales team is continually meeting new prospects and driving organic growth through existing firms. The total accounting and legal market in Australia is valued at approximately $57 billion. This includes firms both larger and smaller than QuickFee's current target market. Simon will talk more about the credit underwriting process later, but we generally only deal with firms with over $1 million in annual revenue. We estimate that our total obtainable potential Finance and Pay Now market has a natural ceiling of $400 million, split equally between finance and P&L. Now we don't expect to grow that size any time soon, but it gives you an indication of the total market potential. Over time, QuickFee has solidified our position as a market leader, operating alongside 2 main competitors. QuickFee commands approximately 40% of the Australian market for fee funding, and QuickFee's legal disbursement funding business is also proving to be a valuable contributor in our overall lending growth. Economic conditions are in our favor, driving increasing demand for our solutions. Our revenue and yields continue to grow, reflecting this improvement in borrowing demand. Now, I'll hand it over to Simon Yeandle, our CFO, to drill into more detail on the financials.

Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning, everyone. As most [ of you who don't know, I've been ] in QuickFee for about 3.5 years now and still enjoying it. We've got probably the best -- the most talented team we've ever had. So before I start, just by going through our products and the revenue streams and the money we made from each of them. Firstly, interest income from loans we originate on the finance product. This interest is paid by the clients of accounting and law firms when they take out the payment plan to pay the fee invoices they receive. Secondly, fees from our Pay Now product, split between EFT, ACH in the U.S. and credit and debit cards. EFT fees are paid monthly by the firms. QuickFee's card revenue is a share of the card surcharge supplied on payments after cards scheme and other fees are deducted. So each of these has their own economic characteristics. Interest income on loans is recognized over the life of the loan. Pay Now revenue is recognized immediately upon Pay Now full transaction is being completed. In terms of pricing and revenue yield, moving across the top row of the table, our finance product is priced up to 12.95% of the invoice value on loans that range from 3 to 18 months. The average length of loans is approximately 10 months with monthly installments made by clients on those loans. If we go down, Australian disbursement funding product listed here. The interest on that compound is through the principal of compounded interest for Pay in Full of the earlier of successful settlement of each personal injury matter or 24 months, and this product generates approximately 20% APR. In H1 FY '24, the revenue yield on our financial product was 8.9% in the U.S. and 14.2% in Australia. We calculate revenue yield simply by the interest income we've recognized over the lending we totally made in that period. In the U.S., Pay Now ACH generates approximately 38 basis points or 0.38% of volume and card approximately 15 to 20 basis points. In Australia, we make only negligible yield on the online payments in full. EFT is basically free in Australia and card surcharges are only and really supposed to cover processing costs. The Q Pay plan product is different from the fee funding product. This product provides finance to the homeowner services market and includes the Jim's Group franchise agreement. It operates similarly to most BNPL products. The merchants themselves pay a fee of up to 8.75% at point of sale when the purchase is made. And in Australia, we also earn fees from a monthly subscription to allow firms to host the one label to pay on portal on their website. On the next slide, I talk more about what is the revenue and the earnings growth we've seen recently. Now, this is a simple chart showing revenue in blue, gross profit in green and EBITDA in purple on the bottom. And the message is simply that we've been growing revenue and gross profit, and that's translating into EBITDA growth. We show EBITDA after interest. So it's actually EBTDA. We deduct interest on borrowings because those borrowings reflect the cost of funding the loan book growth, and that's a direct cost of doing business. So it's included in this measure. The EBTDA was flat in the first half of FY '24 versus the prior half year. But it's important to remember that H2 in any particular fiscal year is stronger than H1, which really just due to seasonality that we see in most years. In addition, we incurred about $0.5 million of one-off product development expenses in H1 related to consulting work and costs associated with the transitioning to a lower cost product development strategy going forward in H2, as Dave mentioned, offshoring a lot more of the development work. So we expect revenue to continue to trend upwards and costs to stay relatively flat, which gives us confidence that H2 FY '24 will deliver improved EBTDA over H1 this year, reducing the $3.4 million loss in H1 substantially. Very importantly, we've a predictable and stable cost base. Our total operating expenses increased from $7.7 million in H2 FY '23 to $8.4 million in H1 FY '24. This $0.7 million increase was due to those one-off costs we spoke about. And on an underlying basis, OpEx is broadly flat. The 4 charts at the bottom, we presented these in our 0.5 year results. These show the 4 OpEx categories that we report on across the past 3 0.5 years. So these are consecutive 0.5 years, and all show either underlying reductions or remain approximately flat. We expect our cost base to remain broadly stable for the remainder of this fiscal year. And we're doing not only growing revenue, but we're maintaining costs without increasing our credit loss ratio. We continue to incur minimal bad debt. I'll dig in a bit more detail about how we think about credit risk and our loan credit loss business model shortly. So when we put that all together, what we can see here is a chart showing split between fixed and variable costs. And importantly, why we're so confident that we can get to a sustainable profit. The 3 material categories of variable costs in the business are: firstly, interest on borrowings and those borrowings to fund the loan book growth that's directly tied to the finance volume with the loan originations, and that's interest revenue. Secondly, is a component of our U.S. ACH processing costs, they're tied directly to transaction numbers and volumes. And thirdly, card processing costs in Australia, so we show the revenue and the costs separately and the Australian card processing business. So that's about 60% to 70% of costs are fixed, i.e., independent of revenue. The chart on the right shows the effect of revenue on earnings. So the dotted line is a hypothetical revenue growth currently growing at the same growth rates that we saw in H1. And then those 3 rightmost columns of the radical 0.5 years of costs split between fixed and variable. The purple is fixed and the green is variable. So you can see that the purple fixed costs drove very slowly compared to the revenue growth, and you can see the scalability of our model once we hit profitability. So if you look at the indication of the revenue growth we need to -- for revenue to basically outstrip costs not to hit profitability, then we'll continue to grow earnings. I did see one of the Q&A questions that's already come up. It's about how we think about and manage credit risk. So I did want to talk a little bit about why we've such low bad debts in our business. You can see on the top left table here, they run at approximately 0.15% of lending other than that being consistent over probably the last 5 or 6 years. And really, when QuickFee is started, our founder, Bruce Coombes, like most small business owners, has almost pathological hatred of losing money. And those strict credit policies we put in place have stayed in place for many, many years. So we're very proud of the fact that we look after every dollar and that owner mentality is to be heard earlier, very prevalent throughout the business. I've split this presentation on credit risk into 2 parts. On this slide, we talk about our business model and how we contract with firms and initial onboarding. On the next slide, we'll talk about how we operate day-to-day and ongoing credit collections. But firstly, every new firm signs a contract that includes the guarantee that they'll pay QuickFee back any unpaid amounts, if one of the client loans is defaulted or the client defaults on those loan repayments. So in a nutshell, we need both the client, who's paying the installments, and the firm, who's guaranteeing it, both to default for any loan to go into arrears even before any risk to become delinquent. Secondly, for all clients and most of our firms, we've a direct debit authority that allows us to take money directly from their bank account for installment payments. Thirdly, each firm undergoes strict initial qualification criteria around their size, their revenue, their profits, a number of partners or directors. We conduct financial health checks on their accounts, the external bureau checks with Equifax and other bureaus. We conduct KYC, Know Your Client, and AML, Anti-Money Laundering checks and a credit limit for each firm is set accordingly. Lastly, as Jennifer mentioned earlier, all accounting firms must have an annual revenue of at least $1 million. And in Australia, we receive a personal guarantee from one of the directors or partners if the firm has less than 2 partners. So how do we ensure day-to-day that individual loans do not go bad. There are 3 main levels of credit protection. The first is a client. Every client is checked, an AML checks are performed before each and every loan is approved. We sign every professional fee invoice that's being funded over a certain threshold. We've strict approval metrics internally based on the size of the loan, the clients and the firm's total exposure to us, requiring up to approval by directors for certain loans and credit loans. And as mentioned, we've that direct debit authority on clients. So, we take money out of their accounts. We're not relying on them to pay us. We process those debit runs twice a day in every single business day. Before that sounds a little bit like overkill, on top of that, management, including myself, Jennifer and Bruce Coombes, Executive Director and MD, Australia, we meet on a weekly basis and review every single loan that's fallen into arrears even by a few days and if they need any required action. We're truly across that granular level of detail in our business. Any defaulted loans from our client is followed up the same day it fails. Payments are rescheduled on the same day. And after 2 unsuccessful attempts, the firm is contacted and the firm makes the installment or in some cases, entire loan usually within about 7 days. That's the first. Secondly, we've the backup of all firms. Ultimately, our credit risk is with the firms themselves because they're the ones guaranteeing those loans. Professional services are among the more robust industries and are relatively well insulated from economic downturns. Accountants always got business to do even when there's uncertainty in the economy. We do run our annual financial health checks on each firm's financials. They're thoroughly reviewed and assessed according to detailed internal models and parameters. And finally, in Australia, we've trade credit insurance. It's underwritten with QBE, and that insures the firm for every loan that's been taken out to pay our fees. So if a firm balance is not enough, they guarantee or goes insolvent, QuickFee is covered for any loss. Now, that's an extra level of protection and it's worth noting that we've never actually needed to claim on that policy. We've experienced credit managers in each region. All our policies and anti-money laundering requirements are monitored and reviewed and all approved by the Board annually. And so it really is no accident that our losses are so low. It's a real highlight of our business model, and it's a highlight, particularly for our lenders, who lends specifically against these receivables. And it's worth noting that we do reject some loans. Most firms are approved. Some firms do get rejected. Some loans do get rejected, but they're pretty rare. The important thing to remember is we do all the work upfront to make sure the firms are sound, and we continually monitoring -- monitor them so that when loans are coming in they can quickly get approved. And that's experience is good and best for the client and the firm. So it has been pretty rare that loans get rejected, but at times we occasionally do and they'll be because of the policies we've in place. I'll wrap up now with just a quick recap on the progress and growth we've made this fiscal year and an update on this current quarter. For H1 this year, we reported revenue growth of 35% of the group with revenue from the finance product up 57% and 58% in Australia and the U.S., respectively, and loan book growth of 32%. In Q3 this year, so January and February in aggregate, just gone, we've seen similar volume growth to H1. U.S. finance volume was up 39%, and Australian finance volume is up 14%. So all the signs are there for H2 to deliver increased revenue and EBTDA over H1. With that, I'll pass back to Jennifer to explore what our longer-term ambitions are and some closing remarks.

Great. Thank you so much, Simon. So I actually want to start back where we started the presentation, unlocking transformational growth in the U.S. market. In our time together today, I hope that you foresee enough information to be confident that we've the right people, we've the right strategy, we're executing swiftly, and that QuickFee truly is capable of transformational growth. What this transformational growth look like? Well, we talk about it in terms of setting our sights on $100 million in revenue. Please don't mistake this for guidance or forecast, but think about it like a mission or ambition, a very tangible, very realistic mission and ambition. As we think about this kind of growth, there are a number of factors and levers that we take into consideration, including a subscription pricing model or recurring revenue, expansion of QuickFee Finance into secondary verticals, potential market expansion into Canada and potentially other markets, sufficient growth capital to execute. Every one of these is on our radar, business cases are in development and work is being done. We're moving ahead with our foot on the gas. Well, $100 million seems like a significant jump from where we're at today, let's click down on the potential pathway that you see on this slide to make it real. We have 1,250 active firms today, and the current annualized revenue per firm is about $16,000. With Connect accelerating volume uplift and focus on our higher-margin product, taking that annualized revenue to $30,000 is well within our reach. If we 3x the number of active firms, there's $100 million in revenue, and that's just one potential pathway to get there. You'll see on the chart on the right that our variable costs grow in line with revenue. But to get to the $100 million of revenue, our fixed costs only double. Why do I believe that I'm in the right place at the right time? Why do I believe that the people that you've heard from today are in the right place at the right time. And why do I believe that you, as an investor, are investing in the right company at the right time? Our top-tier management team, a number of whom you've heard from today, are leading the areas of their business with owner mentality, high accountability and a sharp focus on outcomes, the same outcomes that you, as an investor, are seeking. We've a proven track record of delivering over 35% year-over-year revenue growth despite challenging market conditions like COVID and a strategy that was not narrowly focused on the true difference makers. Just one of our verticals, accounting has a serviceable addressable market of $84 billion in the U.S. alone, add in legal with a serviceable addressable market of $108 million and then add in over 50,000 companies in our secondary verticals. The market opportunity is tremendous. Given we've just 12% of our existing firm's revenue flowing through QuickFee, we've the opportunity to 8x our transaction volume without getting even one new customer. Our proposition is different. The combination of our unique finance product, Connect's ability to modernize the firm's existing tech stack and our unique pricing sets us apart from anyone else in the market. Finally, we've a customer base of over 1,250 firms that continues to grow. We're very appreciative for your time today and hope you can feel the energy from our management team around our strategy and our execution plans. It's an incredibly exciting time to be at QuickFee, and I believe that our best days lie ahead. I'm now going to hand it over to Katie MacKenzie, who handles our Investor Relations, to moderate the Q&A portion of our meeting. Please make sure that you put any questions that you may have in the Q&A box.

Thank you, Jennifer, and thank you to the whole team, such an interesting and comprehensive overview of the business and certainly a very exciting time for QuickFee. So, we do have quite a few questions in the Q&A tab. So I would just direct these to the appropriate management team, and perhaps there might be occasions where a few different people might like to chime in. The first one, Jennifer, I think would be for you. How do you see your competitive position and how this has changed in recent years? And perhaps, Chris, you might have a few comments on that as well.

Yes. Thank you, Katie. I think that -- I mean, obviously, the competitive landscape has changed since we entered the U.S. market in 2016. I think that Chris did a really thorough job of digging into the competitive landscape and who we typically see in our sales cycle. We believe and we know from conversations with firms that we've the greatest coverage of the greatest portion of the market with our product offerings. We've a very differentiated strategy. We've offerings like our finance product and Connect that are different than what other people are offering in the market. And so we're well positioned. I think the competition is healthy, and I think it helps make technology better for the customer overall. So I think that it's good when we've a healthy, competitive landscape. It raises the bar for everybody.

Okay. Chris, did you want to add anything to Jennifer's comments?

I'd just say, when I think about payments -- the payments offering and what has come in newer over the past few years, obviously, everybody is looking for automation. And so our ability to come in and to take our flexible breadth of payment options and then layer in automation and the more that we build around that. We've it at a price point that literally nobody else can touch, and we've practice management systems that we're integrating with that are the right ones to go and do. So, I just think we're in a really strong place. As Jennifer said, competition is good, and it's helped us just go to what's the next place that we need to help deliver in the market. And I'd say we're just in a really strong place competitively.

Yes. Okay. Thank you. We've a question here on product development and what that encompasses. So that could be Simon, perhaps Kathleen and Dave, each of you might sort of chime in a little bit there on the product development expenses and what that encompasses?

Yes. Thanks, Katie. It's a good question. It's really the -- from an expense point of view, that captures Dave's entire team and Kathleen's entire team, and entire product management strategy. All the Dave work that goes into not only developing new product, but also maintaining existing product, keeping it up and running. And it's largely staffed, either employees or contractors, what's in that number. Importantly, we do expense all of it and software development that's capitalized. So from a P&L point of view, it's easy to understand it's a great sort of cash expense. At some point in the future, there may be an argument to capitalize some. But at the moment, it's all expensed, and we can expect to continue to do that.

Okay. I think that some captured in terms of Kathleen's and Dave's whole team. And we got a question here. I think this one is for you, Jennifer, the plans for global expansion. What are the plans for further global expansion at the end? Talked a little bit about Canada. Is there -- do you want to expand on that a little bit?

Yes, absolutely. I mean I think as you saw here, we've tremendous market potential in the U.S. I mean sometimes you can look at another country and you realize that the opportunity in California is greater than another country. So I mean, we've -- we just have so much runway in the U.S. That said, the immediate opportunity that we're looking at is the Canadian market. It is largely a lot of the accounting profession and legal profession in Canada come down to the U.S. for conferences. There's a lot of cross-border activity and thought leadership and product sharing. And so we definitely get inquiries about whether Canadian firms can use our solution, and that's not the case right now. So Canada is our immediate area of focus. And then after that, we'll -- we can explore other markets. But we'll have our hands full with the U.S. and Canada for the time being.

Yes. Okay. We've a question on credit risk. But I think Simon, you called that out through the presentation. I think we had lots of slides on that in the presentation. So I'm pretty sure that we've covered off that one talking about the credit risk. We've got some questions here on Knuula. What does Knuula do and what is an engagement letter? That came up a few times in the presentation. I think Chris and also Kathleen talked about Knuula. I'm happy to hand it over to either one of you to answer that one.

Sure. I can go ahead and take that. So Knuula is a company that has designed a solution for engagement letters. Engagement letters are contracts between a firm and a client, and it defines the service that the firm is going to perform for the client. And this engagement letter is set at the very beginning before the firm starts any work for the client, and it typically includes like an estimate of fees, and the clients usually will pay prior to the work being started. So that's why we feel it's a really good integration for us since it extends our payment workflow to the beginning of the clients onboarding with the firm.

Okay. We got a question on product integration of Thomson Reuters and IRIS. How is the UI enhancement project progressing? How would you prioritize this work? Kathleen, I can see you nodding. Yes, would you take that one, yes?

Yes, sure. I can take that one as well. So yes, we've been working on refreshing the user interface for the payment portal. So that is complete, and it's being used by several of our customers right now. Now we've paused on the migration of any customers until after tax season. We're very mindful here in the U.S. that it is tax season, and the firms are all very, very busy. So we're going to migrate some more after April 15. We're also focusing on additional functionality to the payment portal, which is expected to be released in the coming months.

Okay. Thank you. We got a question here on staff numbers. Jennifer, I think that one is for you. How many staff at the moment does QuickFee have? And what are your hiring plans for the second half?

I mean, quickly, Katie, we've got about 16 staff in Australia and 32 in U.S., so that's 48. We've no plans really to expand the Australian team at the moment. And I don't think if Jennifer has planned for significant growth in the U.S., either.

No, we feel like we've the right number of people to achieve the growth ambitions that we've set out for the second half.

Okay. We've got a few questions here. I think for Dale. Does QuickFee offer employee share ownership plans for its employees?

Yes, we do. Simon can elaborate a bit more in detail. But of course, part of executive compensation is a fairly well structured and robust share plan, a part of [ rim of old ] employees is to offer that as an incentive for performance and outperformance. Simon, do you want to add anything on that front?

Yes, a couple of points. Every single employee is granted share options on annual basis. The senior management are on performance rights, and those rights only vest at certain share price hurdles. And those hurdles are detailed in the annual report. So I'm not sharing any secrets when I say the best share price conditions for those are $0.15 and $0.20. That's for the senior management team that includes Jennifer and myself, and most of the people on this call.

Okay. We've got a question here on M&A activity. It's a question that comes up quite often in investor forums. I think, Dale, that's probably one for you.

Yes. Thanks, Katie. Look, I think as everyone has seen today through the presentation, the opportunity is immense that this business has. We're not considering acquisition. We've got our work to do. We've got our heads down, and we're focused on growing our top line and getting to profitability and accessing the enormous opportunity in front of us to grow shareholder value. Right now, clearly, the market is not reflecting the potential of the business. We certainly feel we're -- on a share price basis alone, we're undervalued. We think there's tremendous growth still to come. So quite frankly, any talk of that is a distraction for Jennifer and the rest of the team. When it comes to assessing M&A opportunities, look, the market constantly is looking for rationalization across fintechs and different industry types. We've always got our eyes open towards ways to improve and increase scale. But having said that, you've seen from the concluding slides that Jennifer shared, with just 1,250 customers, we've got a tremendous opportunity to organically grow this business before we even contemplate additional scale from any inorganic growth. So from that, you can probably read into it. Right now, we are laser-focused on executing against our strategy.

Okay. Thank you, Dale. We've got a question here. What is QuickFee doing to engage more retail investors? Has the number of retail investors increased in the past 12 months? I think I'm happy to sort of take that one. So working with QuickFee now for almost a year, I think in Investor Relations, we're very -- we do regular webinars after every quarterly, after every half year, those webinars are lodged on the website. We do direct shareholder e-mails for all of our investors participating in conferences. We've Jennifer currently in Australia at the moment, meeting with some investors face to face. We've got this investor webinar. So I'd say that we've a pretty active Investor Relations program that is targeted at both retail investors and also institutional investors. We've seen an increase in trading liquidity this year. I'm not sure of the exact percentages of changes on the register. Simon, you might be across that a little bit. But I think given the engagement that we've got with this webinar and I think the trajectory of the business, we'd expect to see an increased level of engagement of retail and institutional investors moving forward. I'm not sure if Dale or Simon, Jennifer, if you wanted to add anything to that.

Yes. Katie, I was just going to add. Thanks for that. I mean Katie is being very modest, of course, given we brought her on board to help engage and she's doing a terrific job together with the rest of the team. Look, I think running sessions like this today is evidence of our commitment towards sharing information and informing and engaging with all shareholders. Look, it is challenging when you're a small cap -- micro-cap company to get the attention of retail investors in the broader market. I think we're seeing perhaps somewhat of a change in the level of engagement and of interest in micro-cap companies on the ASX. And part of our strategy deliberately is to overshare here and to be able to keep our shareholder base informed of not only strategy and plans, but some detailed information about where we're heading with. In an effort to be more transparent, we do feel there's a hell of a lot of good news that's going on. And often times, shareholders feel like they're the last to know. And so we certainly are making a concerted effort to ensure that you're not, and we'll continue to do so going forward. And we always make ourselves available. I know Simon in particular is constantly responding to individual shareholders request for more information. And personally from a chair perspective and a Board, we're happy to do so.

Okay. Thanks, Dale.

If anyone have any specific questions, they did want to ask outside this forum, always happy to receive them via e-mail or phone. So please just feel free to send them in whenever you have them.

Yes. We've got a question here, and this might be one for you, Simon, about Q3 to date, January and February. We did have information in the deck a little bit of Q3 to date. Simon, did you want to expand on that?

Yes. I think the revenue expense, I mean, yields will be similar than to what we've seen in the past in terms of volume. There were some -- we've shared a few numbers earlier in the presentation. Important to remember, though, that from a pure dollar point of view, this is probably the weakest quarter in the financial year, given January is long school holidays in Australia and the beginning of tax season in the U.S. So from a pure comparing Q3 to Q2, I tend to see, actually volumes will be going down. But on a prior year basis, we'll continue to see similar growth to the rest of this year.

Okay. Thank you. Dale, this might be one for you. We've got a question here on the role of Bruce in the business and how that has changed over time.

Yes, sure. I'd love to answer this one. As we speak, Bruce is at an accountant's conference, doing what Bruce does best, and that's engaging with our customers and growing our business. It's fair to say that Bruce has done a phenomenal job. The numbers reflect that. Since his role has been refocused back to leading our Australian business, we've seen phenomenal growth, I think it was a 58% revenue growth on finance in Australia. And Bruce is a tremendous advocate for our business within Australia, but also plays an important role supporting Jennifer and the U.S. executive team in relation to strategy. His understanding the profession is second to none. And so he's a resource that gets utilized across our business as and when we feel we need to call on him. So certainly his role, whilst it's changed, it certainly hasn't diminished in any way, shape or form. And I'd suggest the only reason he's not on this call is because he's probably on the showroom -- on the show floor at the exhibition center in Melbourne, engaging with our customers over the course of today.

Yes. Okay. Thanks, Dale. We've got a question here on if -- whether the company needs to raise any capital or can the future be self-funded? I mean, we do get this question quite often. Simon, are you able to take that one?

Yes. It's a good question. And I think it's getting that balance right for us between -- you've seen that the revenue growth, we expect it to continue. And the business, we expect to be positive from an operating cash flow perspective very, very soon. We do have to fund 10% to 15% of loan book growth ourselves out of our own funds. So if loan book growth exceeds the cash that the business generates, then that 10% to 15%, we've to fund ourselves. There could be a requirement for growth capital, absolutely. And I think anyone who looks at our balance sheet knows there's cash there that can get us to profit. But how quickly the loan book grows and how much of that 10% to 15%, we've to fund ourselves. If the book grows extremely fast, then there maybe requirement for growth capital, and that could be debt or equity.

Okay. Thank you. We've got a few questions here going back into the integration. So the -- this might be one for you, Kathleen or perhaps Dave. What is the road map for Connect integrations? And how do you prioritize the integrations? And would it be sort of one integration per quarter?

I'll go ahead and take that one, Dave. And if you have -- I'll share my perspective and if you have something else, so share it after that. But as far as the road map for Connect, we -- I think most of us has said that Connect is a huge priority for us. It's our main initiative, and we see a lot of growth with the Connect integrations. So that's going to continue. As far as integrations go, we're rounding out our major integrations with Wolters Kluwer, Thomson and IRIS, which is going to take up about 90% of all of our firms using those practice management systems. After that, we're looking into, what I'd say, like the smaller practice management systems, whether it's QBO or Karbon. We're looking at that and we'll continue to add additional integrations. As far as how we prioritize them, we go through a process. What does the market, what do our firms, our customers, what are they using? What is the percentage of usage in the U.S.? So that we go through an algorithm to really determine the prioritization of those integrations. Would we do one integration per quarter? It just -- it depends on the integration and depends on if that practice management system is on-premise or if it has APIs. So it's -- we want to develop integrations as fastly -- fast as possible.

Okay. Thank you. Jennifer, this could be one for you in terms of the broader U.S. economy and the impacts that, that has on QuickFee.

Certainly. So I'd say in the U.S. economy, it's -- there's a great deal of uncertainty, especially as we're approaching elections. The people are trying to get an idea of what that economic landscape looks like. When there is uncertainty, people tend to want to hold on to cash. And so what we're seeing is people taking out quickly finance loans to pay their bills. And we get questions from firms saying, "I think it's very strange that people are paying with financing, when I know that they've the cash." So they'll go back to their clients and say, "I thought that was interesting, you utilize financing when I know you've the money, and they'll say, I just want to hold on to my cash right now." In a time of uncertainty, this is really easy money for me to get. It's a short application process, and it means that I can deploy my cash somewhere else. So I'd say in a challenging economy or in uncertain economy, I think it adds fuel to our demand.

Thank you. We've a question here, Simon. It's sort of related, I know you answered it a little bit in terms of the funding capacity on the balance sheet. But can you just elaborate on the current funding facilities? Just to tie off this question with the other one, what's sort of about the capital raises.....

I hope you're well mate. Thank you for your continued support. The current funding facilities we've, there's a USD 40 million facility with Northleaf, that's about AUD 60 million. And at December 31, that was drawn to about AUD 40 million, and that has an advance rate of 90%. So that will fund 90% bubble, we'll file the other 10%. There's also a facility we signed in December with Wingate, specifically for our loan disbursement funding business, another AUD 10 million facility that was drawn to AUD 5 million at December. There is a slide in our half year results deck that sets out all that detail and more. So I'd encourage you to go and then dig it out or let me know then I can send it to you.

Thank you. We've a question that has just come in, Simon. I think this is one for you about what sort of steady-state margins do you expect the business can earn in the medium and longer term? And in this presentation deck right at the end, it's sort of for the first time, we did put those margins in there. So Simon, are you happy to sort of talk through that steady-state, longer-term business margin?

I think if we -- on that slide, let me have that in front of me. It's about a 30% to 35% EBTDA margin once the business reaches the sort of level of scale, we believe it can. Our gross profit margin has been running at about 65%, and that is really dependent on the variable variation in the interest cost because that comes off the growth profit number. A couple of years ago, our margin was a lot higher because we had cash surplus and didn't need to borrow as much. You see with increased borrowing, the interest cost goes up and therefore gross profit margin comes down. But importantly, the net interest margin we make on every loan stayed pretty consistent. So cash rates have gone up when we managed to increase rates on our loan products as well. So that net interest margin is staying reasonably consistent and should stay consistent too. If Central cash bank rates come down, we may reduce it at some point. But again, our -- the demand for that finance product is really being an aspect because clients are paying the interest, but they welcome the speed, efficiency, and loan credit check kind of presses to take that alone. So they're reasonably insulated or more indifferent to any sort of change in rate, which is why we've been able to increase them with cash rates.

Okay. Thanks, Simon. I can't see any more questions that have come through. But if people do have questions, certainly, feel free to e-mail Simon or myself or Jennifer. We're always happy to answer further questions from investors. And so, Jennifer, I might just hand it back to you just sort of to wrap up.

Great. Thank you so much, Katie. We really appreciate the time that everyone took to spend with us today. We know it is a long presentation, and we covered a lot of material. I thought it was particularly important that you heard from various members of the management team. I know that in our quarterly results calls or our half year results, it's Simon and I sharing updates on the business. But I thought it was important that you've heard from other functional leaders in the business about where they're focused in our strategy. I -- as I said at the end of the presentation, I think that we're in a very unique position. I think that we're well positioned for exponential and transformational growth. And I think that you're in the right place at the right time with us as an investor. So we're very excited. I hope that, that energy and that excitement and some of our passion came through today. And we thank you so much for your continued support. And I'm in Australia, and in Sydney this week and Melbourne next week. If you haven't already set up time with us and you'd like to, please reach out to Katie or Simon, and we'll get some time on the calendar. Happy to grab a coffee or meet in person. So thank you so much for your time today, and we'll be in touch soon.