Ten Lifestyle Group Plc ($TENG)

I'm delighted to be presenting the results for Ten Group to the end of February this year. And the reason I'm delighted is that we're going to have to -- next slide, please. We're going to -- I'm going to be taking you through the details of those results, then Alan reminding everybody about our business model. There'll be an operational update and an outlook. And before we go into the actual details, let's just remind ourselves what we're all about. So really, we've got a main mission and then a secondary mission. The main mission is that we need to be the best place in the world for wealthy and affluent people to organize their lives. So we deliver better results than people can get on their own using the best resources of the Internet or large language models across dining, entertainment, travel, luxury retail. We get them access pricing and other benefits that they couldn't organize for themselves. And as we do that, we become the most trusted service in their lives for organizing across travel, entertainment, dining and retail. Now because we get very good at that, that then allows us to become the most trusted customer loyalty platform for our corporate clients. And what that means is that most of our members don't need to pay to use our wonderful services. Their bank, their credit card company or their wealth manager pays for them to have access to our services. So that's what we're all about as a business. We need to be a brilliant service for the end users of our service. And then because we are, we can become the customer loyalty platform for anybody really, but primarily financial services today that wants to look after high net worth and mass affluent customers. And the highlights are really, really a good set of results. So revenue is up, 9% increase in net revenue at constant currency, 6% otherwise. EBITDA is up, PBT is up. We have no long-term debt in the business. And importantly, the digital transformation in the business is coming through in the numbers. So net revenue per FTE is up 11% to making more money per full-time employee in the business. And our operating expenses per request managed is down by 9%. And that's largely because of how we operate, led by our investment in technology, which we've got running at a run rate level of around GBP 6.5 million every 6 months. Probably the best number overall in terms of percentage increase, although actually PBT to be fair, is up by even more than that, is the number of active members in the business. So we've got 436,000 people who've used our service in the past 12 months. And we've won more contracts both before the period and since. But the best slide, my favorite slide in the whole deck is the next one, which really does show all of that visually. So continued growth on all of the important metrics in our business. Moving on, short reminder that we are all about delivering to the end user of our service, but those people do not need to pay to get access to our service. These wonderful clients, our corporate clients here pay for people to be able to use our service. So they are a global group of companies who have got one thing in common, which is that they want to look after and grow the customer value of their affluent and high net worth customers, and we help them do that. And on the next side, we've got some good evidence, not least, probably the best evidence is the fact that we've got very high client retention. But when we ask as part of our corporate service, we collect data on Net Promoter Score and also we ask customers in a representative market research auditable way, what impact our service has on their decision to stay with their bank or wealth manager. And 62% say that our service plays a strong or decisive role in people staying with their wealth manager bank or credit card business. And that's a really strong result. It's actually up from 54% in the last reporting period. And saying that we play some kind of strong or some kind of role has gone up to 90% from 88%, really reflecting the improvement in our service. And there's more about that on the case studies part of our website. This slide is worth kind of looking at for people that are new to our business. And so people watching this largely on video should spend a little bit of time having a look at this. But for all of you on the call, I'll skip this slide. And just remind us that the investment case is that we're growing revenue and margin, which you see in the numbers today because of our investment in tech and our operational improvements as well. We are still less than 0.25% of the customer loyalty market in financial services, let alone the other customer loyalty markets we can move into. And as we become the leading customer experience and loyalty platform, we should be -- we've got a huge addressable market that we're playing in. And that growth engine, next slide, which really does sit at the heart of our business model is happening. Our service gets better -- more members use us because the proposition is stronger. More members use us for the first time because the service they deliver is better, they use us more and more. That drives a better ROI, return on investment from our corporate partners who invest more with us. They invest more with us and we get more members, we can build a stronger member proposition. And then behind all of that, the secondary flywheel, we invest more into making our service more efficient, more personalized and higher quality because of the technology in our business. And all of that continues to develop our service, our business, our revenues, our profitability and the future strength of the business as well. Alan, over to you to talk to the business model.

Thank you, Alex. This slide, you'll recognize it is just to remind you of our revenue model. As Alex said, we get paid by the bank's credit to look after our high-value members. So that's 87% of our revenue. And we do make about 13% of supplier. That's ticked up a bit, and I'll go into that a bit more detail. And that supplier revenue is mostly from travel hotel commissions. And then on the corporate revenue, our contracts are long term in nature with guaranteed minimums. And we get paid by activity, be it through a high-touch request through our lifestyle manager, which might be phone, e-mail chat or more so to our digital platform where that would be a lower fee per request, but higher margin for the business. Next slide. And how we differentiate by value segment, we do have value segment between very high, high, medium, very high being clients who might have assets under management, high, you might have a premium bank account or a premium credit card and the medium clients are the card networks, that would be Visa or Mastercard. The reason we differentiate that is in terms of how we -- the proposition is put to them. And so where it's a medium client where they can't afford to spend as much money per member, it's more digital first, and that's the mass affluent area. So that could be up to 70% to 100% digital. To remind you, we signed our first digital-only contract in January of this year, and that launches in H2 of this year. And then it goes up to -- on the high net worth side, it's a channel choice. And then we have some high-touch service, hyper-personalized marketing and it's more of an optimal hybrid service. And then looking at that in terms of the eligible members in the high and very high-value segments, we've got 2.1 million eligible members who couldn't get access to our service. In the medium segment, tens of millions in there you can graph that. But then on the right-hand side, that is our active members by value segment. And as Alex said earlier, the great number is we've grown 23% to 436,000 year-on-year, actually growing well, about 16% from the year-end as well from 375,000 to 436,000. A lot of that has been driven by the digitization of the business as we grow out. As a reminder, active members are anybody who used our service at least once in the last year. I come to this point about affordability, the very high -- the Average Concierge Revenue per Active Member, the very high segment can afford to spend more with their clients because they make more money from the clients. And that's why it could be more of a hybrid service, whereas in the medium, it's less and it will be a digital-led service going forward. And then this is a really good example of how digitization impacts the business. And this is a case study where we did a full digital relaunch to a subset of an existing bank that we have. We launched this back in October, and this is a sort of 6-month results. So we went into 40,000 eligible members. And the impact of that 6 months after launch is we've reached 11,500 members, of which over 75% were new to concierge. And in that time, we've grown our active members by over 90%. We've increased our penetration to over 25%. So 1/4 of the portfolio uses the service at some point. And also, we've increased the digital mix as we've relaunched digital. So that's up 75%. So that's really strong numbers, and it's a lot better than we anticipated when we launched it back in October. And the outcomes is when members are aware of concierge, they want to engage with it. And then engagement for the bank becomes more affordable with digital transformation that allow the service to scale. And also what allows us to do is as people register, they register their interest, their follow interest preferences. And that's really powerful for us because that means we can go an ongoing hyper-personalization. We can market to them what they like and want. And that's powerful in terms of going forward. And we're looking to roll out the rest of the portfolio, which is a bigger part of the portfolio later in the year, which will materially grow our active members with this client at a lower cost per active member. And we've got some verbatims coming back from members who have used the service for the first time. So it's a really good example of what happens as we launch digital into our clients. Then moving on to the numbers. Income statement, as Alex said, net revenue up 6%, 9% constant currency and then net revenue per FTE up 11%. Operating expenses only up 3% to 26.7 million with the cost per request down 9% as more digital requests come into the business. And actually driven a really good margin uplift. That's a 10% uplift, GBP 1 million up year-on-year. And that would be even more if we had some constant currency impact, it would have been up 28% like-for-like. And that margin has driven up by over 10%. So a good growth and margin coming through in the business. And I'll go into a couple of things explaining that later. We did have exceptional items as we restructured the business. Sorry, just go back a little bit. And then net finance expense was well up, but that was driven by FX losses. So if we exclude FX losses and exceptional items, our adjusted PBT was actually up at GBP 1.6 million versus GBP 1 million last year, which is good growth. Moving on to the next slide. This is our net revenue. And as you can see, as I said, net revenue has gone up to GBP 33.7 million, GBP 34.6 million at constant currency. Base corporate revenue grew by GBP 1.2 million. That would have been higher, although we did make an investment in a contract we renegotiated at the start of the year, where the revenue is lower in H1, but the renegotiation allows us to market to more members. So we're looking for growth in H2 and actually, it will really impact FY '27 in terms of the exit rate. That was a conscious decision we made on that, and that probably cost us about GBP 700,000 of revenue on this bridge. So the base corporate revenue would have been higher without that. And then we have some new contract wins, which offset the medium loss that we announced at the full year. And then as I said, supply revenue, good growth in supply revenue. So if you go to the next slide, -- this shows our supplier revenue, the actual percentage of our total revenues popped up to 13%. It's normally been around 12%. And what's really happened there is whilst Europe has been a mature region where we make good supply revenue there, other regions, Americas and AMEA are coming through as well, and that's up in the percentage of net revenue and the absolute number went up to GBP 4.5 million this year compared to GBP 3.8 million last year. Next slide. And then just breaking down that revenue and EBITDA by region. As you know, Europe is our most mature region. Our net revenues are up at 8% at actual and constant currency with growth both in corporate and supplier revenue. Adjusted EBITDA wasn't up that much because we had invested in our proposition to really grow engagement and that was a cost as well, although the margin is still over 30% in our most mature region. Americas, we did have some impact on currency with the U.S. dollar mainly. So whilst revenue is down, we've been down 1% in constant currency. We did have the contract loss I mentioned, and that contract renegotiation mentioned impacted our short-term growth. And then on that, our adjusted EBITDA was up by 0.3%, and that was partly offset by the contract investment, but also some adverse effect on our LATAM currencies that held back the growth in EBITDA. Our star region still is AMEA, net revenue up 21%, 26% in constant currency. And that's continued base business growth and demand in Japan, that region is doing really well for us just now. And that's we've driven the adjusted EBITDA up by GBP 0.6 million to GBP 2.4 million. So that's up to a margin of 27.6%, so getting close to Europe now as a region. Next slide. This is one we always show, continued technology and AI investment. So our technology investment as a percentage of revenue has go down from 21% to 19% year-on-year. And as I said, we're maintaining the spend. And why do we do that? We spend it to grow competitive advantage, efficiency, service levels and revenues, and that's what's coming through the numbers now. And that Tech investment, the trend will continue as we go out, will remain fairly flat and will be a reducing percentage of net revenue as we go forward. On our cash flow, operating cash is up 2.8 million year-on-year. The investment in intangibles continue, as I talked about. Then more importantly, we are now debt free. So we paid off the remaining loan notes that we took out during COVID. That has now gone, and that's been replaced by a finance arrangement, which is a GBP 5 million revolving credit facility. That's with NatWest, our bank. And I'm pleased that they've supported us and looked at where this business is going, and that gives us just a buffer for our short-term working capital needs. And it's a more flexible arrangement and less expensive than the loan notes we have had in the past. And then that's led to net cash being at GBP 9.3 million, up GBP 2.5 million year-on-year. On that, I'll hand back to Alex now, I think.

Super. Thank you very much. So Ted, let's go straight into a very short 2-minute video. [Presentation]

This is a real vindicating slide here. So every single one of the contracts that we won recently of any size has been partly because of our investment in technology. Now 2 of these are digital-only launches. And that's the first time in the history of TEN that we have launched that we've been able to offer a digital-only proposition. So the one in the top right, March '26, and the fully digital contract won in January '26. Both of those, by the way, will be launched in the second half of this year. So they really affect next year's numbers, not this year's numbers. But both of those are -- allow us to deliver at large scale to many more customers digital only. And that really allows us to have a larger addressable market, but still talking to the mass affluent consumer group. We're not going to the mass-mass market. This is still mass affluent. The other 4 contracts around Japan, Asia, U.S. and Europe are hybrid. So they're partly digital and partly high-touch. And that's where people want a stronger proposition to give their top customers, typically wealthier customers, channel choice. They can either talk to our wonderful expert lifestyle managers or they can use the digital platform. And sometimes they'll prefer to use the digital platform even when they're given the choice because if you're just buying 4 tickets for an Ed Sheeran concert, doing it digitally, being able to choose where about you want to sit in the stadium makes more sense than doing it high-touch. If you just want to book a table for 2 in a restaurant that you know, but using the access and the benefits you get through 10, you probably want to do that digitally rather than high-touch. You want to talk to an expert lifestyle manager when you want a roundtable for a big family event or when you want to choose between 3 or 4 different restaurants in a city that you don't know or between restaurants that you don't know. So at the top end, we give channel choice, and that allows us to win against people that only have high-touch concierge, many of our competitors. In the mass affluent space, we can offer hybrid or we can offer digital only. And that has been the success of our recent wins there. Next slide. So what is that tech? Well, on the right-hand side, you have how members use us. We've improved how people can access entertainment, dining, how people can use AI to access our services. On the left-hand side, inside the business, Ten MAID and Ten Co-Pilot is what people, particularly lifestyle managers inside our business use to organize requests quicker, more effectively to access knowledge and integrations with our suppliers to serve faster, better. Using Ten PX, it's also a lot more personalized. Ten PX is our personalization engine, really important part of our service today and a hugely important part of our future. We know that when we tell our members about assets and services and products that we've got that are uniquely suited to that individual, -- we delight our members, the customers of our corporate clients. And the AI Guardian tool means that AI QAs and checks requests as they're being worked on, which helps reduce errors, helps improve service quality and productivity as well. Next slide shows what we are now building. So focusing on the right-hand side, we will be working on localizing our product in that really important market of Japan, Brazil, Middle East. There are some other localization as well, but it's those 3 areas in particular. We are integrating more APIs. We're continuing to improve how we operate in terms of CMS, that's for content management system, improving that just makes us more efficient and allows us to reduce the cost per request, increase the amount of content on our platform in terms of offers, benefits and so on because we can manage it more efficiently. And then further on in the year, we'll be continue -- we'll be growing earn and burn points that will probably be towards the end of this calendar year. And we're always keen to get better than bank data security upgrades so that we can claim and prove that we've got better data security than the banks that we work with. So next slide. Apart from tech, we are -- we're also interested in becoming the -- sorry, I should say, alongside those tech improvements, we are positioning ourselves more as becoming The Customer Platform for corporates that have got customers they want to serve. Now one of the important points there is that if you are a big blue-chip company, whether that's in financial services or in other vertical markets, you want to be serving clients with benefits. You want those benefits to be personalized, which is very expensive to set up, but we've already got that personalization engine. You want to make sure that anybody you trust with your customers' data is as close to bulletproof as anybody can be. And we've got the credibility of working with 50 financial service clients around the world and having a system which has been built to be secure and compliant. Very often at the top end, you want to make sure that if you've got a digital platform that it's backed up with high-touch service for your most valuable customers, and we uniquely have got that mixture of the very best digital and the very best high-touch service as well. And increasingly, we also say to our corporate clients, we used to say, buy Ten, we'll then deliver concierge services under your brand. What we now say is we will come with assets and services which are unique -- which we've got, which we can offer you. But also often, you'll have your own assets -- so in the U.S., for instance, if we're working with a regional bank, they probably sponsor a few stadiums where they can get tickets for shows, for instance. And they normally find managing those ticket allocations really difficult. They typically haven't invested in the technology to manage those assets, but we have, so we can do that for them. And very often, we can build -- again, if we take a regional bank, we can build a dining program for them where they're regionally strong and host that on our platform for them, again, something that they couldn't usually afford to do. And all the way through the customer journey, our assets, services, personalization and that channel choice mean that we are a candidate to run all of their customer loyalty programs for their top customers. And in doing so, have huge competitive advantage, but also the security and the compliance that comes with a partner with our level of strength and tech and our level of security as well. Next slide. Because our services have got better and our propositions got better, we are already increasing -- and this isn't a huge investment. This is many hundreds of thousands, but not even 1 million of additional spend into sales, where we can sell as to the senior people in banks, wealth managers and new verticals. What we can do for them, engage with them on what their challenges are, what their particular commercial objectives are and solve for that using all of our assets and assets that we can create for them and host on our platform. So whilst you won't see a huge increase in sales cost because it actually isn't hugely expensive, the focus that we've got on growing that top line behind better tech, behind this customer loyalty proposition is higher than ever. And that is working. So in Japan, we've won new clients with signed contracts in new verticals. We've started to win contracts in the employee market, and we've got some very good prospecting in media, property, auto and other new verticals. We've got stronger pipeline than we've ever had. And then with existing clients, we've increased the number of active members, as Alan said, on contracts in Europe, multiple contracts in Europe actually, and in Japan and other parts of Asia as well. We've won new clients. We've won growth with current clients as well because as we launch digital, that tends to involve more marketing because they get a better ROI per request, which grows the number of active members. And again, you've seen that in the 23% increase. So we are increasing active members. So the pathways here, which is important, are continuing to grow. So where from here? Well, in the mid term, we want to get to a net revenue of GBP 100 million and a 35% EBITDA margin. Now remember, we're already at 30% in Europe. and Asia is getting up close to 30%. So with increasing tech, increasing digitization, that 35% looks very achievable to us, and that's what we're aiming for. One thing that we're very pleased about is that because of the new wins and the underlying business improvements, today, we've seen the analysts upgrade their expectations for us in the market as well, which makes that GBP 100 million more achievable versus the previous expectations as well. And final slide, please. So we are happy that we have won new contracts, but we're also delighted that the underlying business is improving because of our investment into tech and improving what our expert lifestyle managers can deliver as well. Most of the recent wins will have a marginal impact on H2, but will have a full year impact on the next financial year, which is where the upgrade has come from. And so we are happy with these set of results. I think they put us into a positive position for future growth. And that growth engine, again, the image of it there, any of you that haven't watched that video recently, definitely worth having a look at on the Investors section of the website because that really does explain why we get out of bed in the morning and why we're confident about the future for the business.