Ten Lifestyle Group Plc (TENG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Very good to see you all today. We're going to run through the highlights of the results to date. But then the operational update where we've actually achieved operationally in the business, a reminder of the business model and how that works and how that is working in practice. And then finish off with looking forward at what are we expecting? And then we'll have plenty of time for Q&A. So we're delighted with the results. Revenue is up. Profitability had a step change. We've got an inflection, not just in EBITDA, which is -- more than doubled but we've also got an inflection with PBT to have positive profit before tax, profit after tax as well. And that's really been led by retaining all of our corporate clients and growing the number of Active Members whilst we invest into tech. And it's worth, just having a look at this in graph. So this is something I look at to make myself happy. It's great to see that the revenue has gone up driven by Active Members largely. That's led to an improvement in EBITDA, and really pleased that we are profitable before tax and actually in the year generated more cash than we spend. So that was something that we're very happy about. Behind the numbers, though, we're still all about becoming the world's most trusted service platform, working behind global brands. And as a reminder, the global brands that we work behind tend to be the world's top wealth managers, private banks, credit card -- premium credit card businesses and some other luxury brands as well. And they use our services because when they use our services, they grow customer retention, customer acquisition and the profitability of their customers. Things like spend on card. Assets under management improve when people are engaged with our service. As well as some soft measures that boards in markets like the U.K., the U.S., Canada are measured on such as Net Promoter Score. When people use our service, the Net Promoter Score of the total banking experience improves. How we do that? Again, everyone on this call pretty much knows this, but we deliver in 4 pillars: travel, dining, tickets and retail. And we deliver value-add services, expertise and then also events and editorial in each of those 4 pillars. A reminder that we are, in our market, the market leader and we remain the market leader and are growing that competitive advantage. So we're winning most of the contracts that come up for tender, and we're retaining all of our existing contracts and growing within those existing contracts as well. And that's because of the quality of our service, the technology that we've got and the whole ecosystem that makes us a kind of plug-and-play loyalty solution for the brands that we work with. Now what makes that a huge market opportunity is that as we become the best way for people to organize travel, dining, tickets, retail, that -- for the world's high net worth most affluent. That is clearly a vast market. But in the short term, over the next few years, you could argue that the market we're in, in a very visible way today, is customer loyalty for financial services. And today, we are less than 0.2% of the global financial services, advertising and sponsorship budgets. And that doesn't include client entertainment in private banks and some of the other factors that would go into looking after clients. So we've got a huge opportunity even in our immediate market, let alone future markets. And then the growth engine at the heart of our business model, I would encourage all of you to watch the latest update. So although you've seen -- previously many of you have seen the principles and how we've delivered to those principles in recent years. That's been updated with the latest set of results that really make the growth engine, and the fact that it's working so well, very, very visible and credible. So where from today? Well, we're scaling our large member base with corporate clients that we already understand, and we are doing that in markets where we already are. We don't need to grow outside travel, dining, entertainment and retail. We can just continue to get better and to iterate and to put more digital assets into those pillars with stronger financial services. And now we are increasingly profitable, generating cash for the first time. And that allows us over time to invest more back into the growth engine or to improve our balance sheet. It gives us that optionality and that position of strength. One other thing I just want to touch on before Alan talks numbers. We have changed our Board a little. So Bruce Weatherill, who's been an excellent Chair for us since IPO, has step down for reasons of ill health. Jules Pancholi, who's one of our treasured non-execs has stepped up to be Non-Exec Chairman. We've got Edward and Carolyn have joined us, and Victoria has joined us from our executive team as well. Jules brings experience of high-growth businesses. Specifically, in some of the markets where we're strong, like travel. He's also a technology geek at heart as well. That really helps us. Edward also very much into tech and growth, but he's got a strong background in financial services, which is our core market. Carolyn listed market experience. Again, got experience in the travel sector and growth customer market fit and change management. And Victoria, many of you may have met already at the Capital Markets Day. It's certainly our last Capital Markets Day, Jules was a key speaker. Alan, over to you to talk the numbers.

Thank you, Alex. I'm delighted indeed, very proud to share that on behalf of everyone at Ten, an excellent set of financial results with you today. So we look at our income statement. As Alex indicated already, our net revenues grew by 35% to GBP 63 million and he has engaged more Active Members to use our service. To enable us to service the activity, our operating expenses increased by GBP 9.1 million, which is 22% increase, with average headcount growing by 13%. Now this really shows the growth engine really at work as we've delivered operational efficiency in the business, and their operating costs have grew by 13% less than our net revenues. This run results in an adjusted EBITDA improvement of GBP 7.1 million to GBP 12 million year-on-year, which equates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19.1%, an increase of 9% over prior year, a significant step change. We continue to invest in our digital capabilities, and this comes through in our increasing amortization of GBP 0.7 million up to GBP 5.3 million in the year. We also incurred some exceptional costs in the year at GBP 1.1 million, which relates primarily to a one-off restructuring program we put in place in the second half of the year, which is driving further operational efficiencies across the group. From a PBT perspective, Alex said, there's been an inflection point. First, is our maiden PBT since IPO. As our PBT of GBP 0.9 million is a swing of GBP 4.7 million compared to a loss of GBP 3.8 million last year. Again, another significant step change. And lastly, there is a tax credit in the year as we recognized the deferred tax this year of GBP 5.3 million relating to historical losses. We move on to the next slide. This is just a slide that shows the bridge between our prior year revenue of GBP 46.8 million to this year's revenue of GBP 63 million. I'll just walk you through the bridge. We did have some FX benefit in the year of GBP 2.7 million, which means our underlying growth was 29% at constant currency. Our base business grew by 11.1%, and our net revenue retention rate of 131% was ahead of 120% last year. New contract wins in the year increased GBP 0.7 million, and our supplier revenue increased by GBP 1.7 million year-on-year. So if we go into the next slide, this will show you the breakdown of our supplier revenue. And this, to remind you, supplier revenue is predominantly travel related mostly hotel commissions. And the graph shows by half year, our supplier revenues recovered strongly post-COVID. And for the full year '23 was GBP 7.4 million, up 30% on the prior year. This equates to circa 12% of our net revenues. There is some seasonality in that as H2 stronger due to the travel-related bookings, which in turns drives a higher margin in H2. Moving on to our net revenue by region. This shows -- just to remind you, we did actually changed operational structure in the year. So we moved Middle East, Africa to APAC. And so that meant that EMEA became Europe and Asia became AMEA. So this is all like-for-like comparisons year-on-year. So in Europe, growth was 26%, and that was really just due to continuing strong member proposition and driving activity across the region as well as increased supplier revenue. In Americas, we saw the highest rate of growth at 56%, again, due to continued growth in base business through higher member engagement. AMEA, slightly lower growth at 16% as there were still some pandemic restrictions at the start of the financial year. Moving on to the profitability by region. As you can see, Europe, which is our most mature region, profitability grew by GBP 4.3 million to GBP 9.2 million. And the EBITDA margin in Europe is 36% in our most mature region. Importantly, in the Americas region, which traditionally has been a profit drag on the group is now profitable in a full year for the first time since IPO. Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 1.9 million versus a loss of GBP 0.7 million, which is an improvement of GBP 2.6 million. Then AMEA, adjusted EBITDA grew, improved by GBP 0.2 million. Again, lower growth in other regions, but has benefited from the lifting of travel restrictions during the year. And Europe does give us an indication of the sort of maturity of what the group could do in terms of long-term margin of the group. And that will depend on how much we're going to reinvest back in the business to fully grow it. Moving on to the next slide. This is a slide we show, which is a continued technology investment. We've invested over GBP 49 million in the development of our technology to date. Why do we do that? Why do we invest in our Ten Digital Platform; and into Ten MAID, our internal CRM system; content; and the IT infrastructure; and comms that comes around with it? Well -- and then most importantly, artificial intelligence and automation in the past year? We do it because it creates competitive advantage. It drives efficiencies into the business, improve service levels and gross revenues. The graph shows the combined cash spend of both development spend and P&L costs just prior to IPO through the current year. As you can see, in terms of absolute spend, it's leveled off year-on-year. And actually, this -- as a percentage of net revenue, our spend this year has reduced from 29% last year to 22% this year. And we anticipate similar absolute levels of spend going forward. And then the last slide on the finance is our cash flow, and this shows that our operating cash flow came in at GBP 11.5 million, an improvement of GBP 6.7 million year-on-year. Another significant step change as we generate cash. The principal driver of that was the improvement in PBT, some improvement in working capital and increasing noncash items. As I said in the previous slide, we continue to invest in technology. We spent GBP 7.3 million in intangible assets. And during the year, we did receive additional loan notes of GBP 1.2 million. And also, we introduced an invoice financing facility with NatWest, our principal bank. And that was just to support our group working capital requirements going forward. So as a result, our net -- our cash and cash equivalents increased by GBP 1.6 million to GBP 8.2 million, and our net cash increased by GBP 0.5 million. And as you'll see in the [ premium ] , we did actually -- post balance sheet, we have raised a further GBP 950,000 in loan notes, and that's to further support our working capital requirements as we come into the new year. I'll hand you back to Alex now.

An operational update for some of the highlights from the year. Firstly, we are very proud of having retained all of our Material Contracts for the fourth year running, and we've won some new contracts as well. As Alan just said, growing in all 3 regions is really healthy sign. I'm particularly pleased that the Americas, which was our profit pool, if you like, the most loss-making part of our business has reversed and is now profitable on an EBITDA basis. And we've also won plaudits in terms of winning the Aspire Awards for Concierge Agency. And although the best plaudits we can possibly win is retaining and winning more contracts that grow the business. So very happy about that. We've continued around the world to benefit from being able to explain to banks and wealth managers and card companies why -- sure they do banking, lending, investments, insurance but lifestyle is an important aspect for them to offer as well. We sell that into more than 50 banks, wealth managers and card companies around the world very successfully. We're helped in some markets by the States because JPMorgan Chase and American Express and Capital One have all been investing more into lifestyle. And they do that because they can prove, just as our clients can prove with the data they get from us and on our programs, that it helps them make more money. When you organize aspects of your lifestyle and travel through your bank, your assets under management increases, your retention rate goes up, people are more likely to join that bank because the buzz about -- the attraction of it is higher. And the fact that JPMorgan Chase have invested more than $1 billion into growing out their lifestyle and travel program is good because it stimulates other banks to say, what can we be doing? Capital One bought a competitor of ours for $296 million, a competitor called Velocity Black. That is also good. It takes Velocity Black out of the market, which is helpful, although we haven't lost any material business to them. And it also means that other people who want to compete with Chase, the biggest credit card issuer in the States; Capital One, I think the fifth biggest credit card issuer in the States, know that they've got to work with somebody and that somebody should be and is often us. Our tech is something that we have built and that worked very well for us. So as you know, we've built the travel -- online travel agency with flights and car hire and hotels. Now we've also got Viator integrated, which allows us to book a lot of activities like going up the Eiffel Tower or taking a boat trip down the [ tents ] . We also have got all sorts of personalization built into that. People can buy with installments in markets like Latin America. We've got content chatbots in there and some programs. You can buy hotels through us using loyalty points. All of those things make the platform very, very attractive. But we're continuing to make it more attractive. So we're improving how we position travel. We are building more self-serve dining so that people can book restaurant tables that are not available on the Internet through us in top restaurants. And people can book tickets again, that are sold out on the Internet through us for things like Ed Sheeran concerts, Beyoncé concerts, for theater, for sports as well. We're also building all the time now. It's a nonstop stream. We're building AI into how we work. So we are a partner of Microsoft with this. We're invited to things like their Hackathons, their accelerator program. So they select partners who they believe are going to be at the cutting edge of AI and work more closely with those partners, and we are one of those. We're integrating AI both with our lifestyle managers and also into chatbots so that our members can self-serve, and it has an immediate impact elsewhere in the business with things like translation, coding, actually even how some of our financial integrations work have been influenced by AI. I'm about to play a video just to bring that alive for you. It's a short video. [Presentation]

Great. So we can talk more about AI maybe in the questions, but it's very, very fundamental for the future of our business. So it's a really very exciting opportunity. Preferences are a part of that. We've improved the preferences on the platform this year. And that allows us to accelerate demand through personalization. When you get offered something that's entirely focused on you, where you live, what you like, what your interests are, the benefit you get from that is enhanced. And then you enjoy the service more, that makes more money for our corporate clients and adds to the growth engine. Aside from direct service quality, we've also been improving our ESG credentials. Now this is important because it's important for many of our members. It's important for many of our corporate clients, and it's important for the people inside our business as well. So we have become a B Corp certified. We were ringing the bell at the London Stock Exchange not long ago, just a few months ago as we became the first AIM-listed company to be B Corp certified. That helps us retain and attract talent, and it also helps us develop our corporate clients. We offer greener, very often, choices for our members built into our platforms. And we're beginning to experiment with how we can help our members think more about philanthropy and connect with that as well. All of these things help make sure that we're offering things that are relevant to our members, relevant to our corporate clients, but good for people and planet as well. I'm particularly proud of being the first AIM-listed B Corp certified business. So Alan, back to you to talk about our business model.

Thank you, Alex. This is just a slide to remind you of our revenue model. We're essentially a B2B player. The majority of our net revenues come from our corporate clients. As Alex said, predominantly financial service companies. So you saw -- who'll pay us to look after our high-value customers we call our members. And we essentially have customer loyalty program for our clients. These contracts for these clients are long term in nature with some have been agreed minimums within them. We essentially get paid based on activity. So that's why we're engaging with one of our lifestyle managers, either through a call or e-mail or self-serving through our Ten Platform, the digital requests. These activities, which drive our total corporate revenue. As the pie chart shows you, 88% of our revenues come from these corporate clients paying us to look after their members; and 12% is the supplier revenue, as I described earlier, which is mostly travel. This next slide just looks at how we break down our clients in terms of value. And we look at it through the lens of the bank in terms of whether it's a very high value. High value means your value -- let me just explain that briefly. At very high value, as typically members attached to programs with private bank and corporate clients, which have assets under management or hold premium high fee products. Our corporate clients can afford to spend more per member in this segment through member interaction. We can market more to them and more personalized. And we see a higher Active Member penetration as the slide shows there to eligible, and the digital mix will lower as we offer channel choice to this member. So that graph shows that there's a higher Active Member penetration in that segment. The high value segment includes members attached to programs with mass affluent retail banking clients or credit cardholders of an issuing bank program. And this segment, Active to Eligible is slightly lower than very high, and this mix is slightly higher as they can afford to spend less with these clients. And lastly, in the medium value segment, these are members attached to programs that corporate cloud may hold or management were at a lower per capita value per annum. And we acquired these Eligible Members via contracts with the payment network providers. And this segment, the member interaction will be less, will be more digitally-led because it will lower the cost productivity to align to the clients per capita budget. And then in terms of what we earn from these clients, this slide looks the concierge revenue per Active Member by value. And as you can see, we do get paid more per Active Member in the very high segment compared to the high and medium. So whilst we have a lower number of Active Members, we get paid higher in the very high segment. And that will show in the next slide, which is just a breakdown. We showed this last year and this is updated this year. And this will look at the Eligible Member base on the left-hand graph looking at our very high, high segments, and our total Active Members by all 3 segments. And as you can see, our Eligible Member base has grown over 1 million from 2020 from 1.1 million up to 2.1 million. We've grown our Active Members, and that's up to 353,000 this year. That's a 28% growth year-on-year.

So in terms of outlook, clearly, the easiest way to think about how we grow our business is by winning new contracts. That then leads to more Eligible Members, which leads to more Active Members that drives revenue. So we start by wanting to retain all of our current clients. And then we want to grow the number of Active Members, grow the usage for Active Member and grow new contracts with current clients. So that's where a bank that might have us engage with their high net worth clients might launch us their mass affluent or a bank that might have us in one geography might launch us into another geography where they also have a presence. And then we win new clients, and they're always at different stages. They're either just about to be signed, which is when we typically announce them or in negotiation or their somewhere in our pipeline. Now in the future, today, almost all of our revenue is financial services or derived from financial services. But in the future, there will be new verticals where we'll also be winning new clients and engaging customers in different ways, and that's already nascent in some parts of Ten. Where from here? Well, this is taken almost word-for-word, just point into bullet points from our prelims issued today. So we're all about continuing to drive revenue and profitability by growing the number of members that are engaged with us, making sure that we convert our strong pipeline so that we win new contracts as well. We're helped both in retaining and winning clients by the fact that the higher interest rate environment, let's say, 5%-ish around the world where it used to be 0.5% means that banks make more money from their cash-rich customers. And so you've seen that in banking results all over the world. And that then means that the ROI, the return on investment calculation when they look at what they should be investing with us, favors us very much. We don't need interest rates to go up anymore. But being in decent single figures as far as the bank is concerned is much better than being at 0.5%, which was a much more hostile environment for us. Never mind the fact we've grown our business very well from 2008 through to when interest rates started to go up in 2022. We've raised a little bit more debt into the business. And the reason for that is really just to make sure that there was -- we have a strong balance sheet moving forward to help reassure investors, corporate clients and just to basically derisk anything there. Trading to date is good, and we are expecting to meet the expectations that are out in the marketplace today with improving profitability and improving revenues. And clearly, we're also aiming to continue to improve the service levels that we deliver in our proposition, which all drives that growth engine. So that is the results for the year to the end of August 2023. Thank you very much.