Xref Limited (XF1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining Xref's investor update conference call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to your speaker, Mr. Lee-Martin Seymour, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir, and thank you.

Thanks, Eddie. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us. My name is Lee-Martin Seymour, I'm the Director, Co-Founder and CEO of Xref. We also have James Solomons, our CFO, on the line today. Thanks ever so much. Always good to have some familiar names joining us this morning, but also an awful lot of new people to the story. So I'll add some color to this morning's update that, hopefully, all of you have had a chance to read already. So I'll be doing that over the next sort of 10 or 15 minutes. If people are genuinely new to the story and haven't been involved in the recent Zoom roadshow that James and I conducted a couple of weeks ago, then please get in touch, and we're happy to provide you with a one-on-one. So if you -- we will also be opening the floor to questions at the end of this session, so please get ready for those. If you have been following us since listing in 2016, you'll understand that Q1, the first quarter of the year, tends to be our lowest quarter. And this is due to seasonality across the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. However, this year, we've seen the smallest impact. And our sales have grown in Q1, as you would have seen by this morning's release by 126%, up on last year, but also up 113% based on the prepandemic Q1 of 2020. So in a nutshell, we're experiencing high demand across all of our regions. Our incoming leads from digital and channel marketing are currently at record levels. Our initial deal size is 45% bigger than we've seen prior. And our conversion rates are higher. This has helped along -- this has been helped along by our self-service platform and other platform enhancements as well as our global credibility. The sector at the moment is seeking an all-time high automated employment verification as recruiters work from home and people start to -- companies start to rightsize across the globe as we come out of a pandemic. So they are finding us via channel partners such as Workday, Oracle, PageUp, SmartRecruiters. They're finding us via our online content to free tools or via our rating sites that we lead, such as G2, Capterra or our Google Ratings around the world. They're finding it easy to sign up and begin their journey with us. And these are all things that have built -- that we built over the last few years, and they are certainly paying dividends whilst the sector demand grows. Notable clients that we listed in the release this morning include Arnott's, Fortescue, Kiwibank, H&M Group, UEFA, that we're pretty proud of, and the University of Pittsburgh in the U.S. 78 new clients contributed 19% of our $5.4 million sales in Q1. But our cohorts were just as busy. So 17% came from clients that have been with us for more than 4 years. And a similar story for clients that joined us in 2018, '19 and '20. So the compound growth coming from the legacy clients are providing us with a very strong platform, a very strong foundation for growth leading into this financial year. So rather than look at our sales run rate, if you do the run rate, you're going to get to $20 million. However, consider that every year, for the last 5 years of us being around and/or us being listed, our Q4 sales tends to be higher than the preceding H1 result. So I'll let the analysts model that one out, but I'll reiterate that. Our Q4 results, if you had to look at our Q4 from FY '21, it is bigger than the preceding H1. So realistically, our sales are our crystal ball and they determine what our revenue will look like in the future. But having now seen what Q1 looks like, forecast Q2, add the 2 together, that would, in a traditional sense, give you what Q4 looks like and then all you're left with is Q3. So I'll let you -- get you to calculate that and work that one out for the year. In terms of revenue, we recognize revenue once the prepaid credits have been used on our platform. $3.9 million was up 77% on last year. Our sales, as I said, is our crystal ball. So we are expecting a nice step change in our revenue across the year, considering the sales results especially with a growing demand for additional checking, including services offered by RapidID. Following a strong Q4 in sales, our cash receipt hit $5.8 million, providing a nice cash surplus of $1.2 million in the quarter. This has pushed our cash at bank up to $9.4 million as at the end of September. Expenses will remain relatively flat throughout the year and only increase as a result of sales commissions from record results as they tend to push this forward. Next week, we're very excited. We released the new platform, the exit survey platform. We've been developing exit surveys for now just for the last year. I've had the joy of personally demoing the platform to some of our clients around the world over the last few weeks. Once we launch those clients, we'll be the first to use the platform. We've had an overwhelming response as a result of the demos. And I've enjoyed buddying up with some of our sales and account managers around our global offices to bring the news to the market. The platform extends our addressable market tenfold and allows us to offer more traditional subscription services to our extensive client base. We're already seeing strong demand from our North American market, especially enterprises that have enjoyed large global attrition during the pandemic. So more detail will follow in the coming weeks as to how that platform looks, how it works. And we're hoping to share with you some early wins as some of our largest clients start to use the platform. So a very exciting space for us right now. So please make sure you follow us via our Twitter handle or our website, xf1.com, for upcoming news over the next few weeks in terms of the platform and other things. And to round out a nice quick update for you all this morning, I'd like to spend some time opening the floor to some questions. So Eddie, I'll hand it over to you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from the line of [ Luke Tommy ].

Can you hear me?

Yes, I can, Luke.

Okay. Lee, look, just a question on -- I noticed that -- and you and I sort of spoke about it, I think, in the past, I saw about a year ago that you -- the company borrowed $5 million. And it would appear that, that money is still sitting in the bank. And yet, it's sort of -- the interest on it is taking up about 10% of the net cash flow at the moment. Can you sort of explain to us, are there any plans for this money? And also, why was the lender provided an equity stake in the business ahead of the other shareholders in the company?

Sure. It's a great question, Luke, and thanks for asking it. Let's cast our mind back to -- our minds back to March 2020 when the world was starting to wind back head count and most of our clients were reporting that they were ceasing recruitment, et cetera. So at that time, we were pretty prudent with the share price down to $0.09. It wasn't a very good decision to perform a capital raise at that time as it would have been very dilutive to our shareholders. So we started to explore some equity debt. We knew what opportunity we had ahead. We knew where we had repositioned our costs. And so equity debt was something that we needed to explore. We'd actually spent some time with 3 or 4 vendors of debt in the market. And was -- and we're not happy with the way those businesses structure the debt. However, having chatted to -- having spent an awful lot of time with PURE and the team over at PURE, we were very happy to onboard at the end of that financial year in June FY '20 -- sorry, FY '21. We were very happy to onboard the debt at a premium to the market at $0.35, providing those $0.35 warrants to PURE. We provided -- we took on that debt premium. It was very -- it was highly serviceable by us. It formed no risk. And so we did it at a time where, in June 2020, when on one hand, we knew our opportunity coming out of the pandemic was fantastic, but our bank balance was just over $2 million. So it was one of the best insurance policies that we have ever performed. And with hindsight, we'd do exactly the same again. It was a very bleak period for any business globally. So it was a really good position. PURE have partnered us since then in a fantastic way, and they continue to be a really big supporter of the business. So much so that when we released our performance for FY '21, we actually worked with PURE to reset the interest rate back from 9.95% down to 8.5%. And that was really in lieu of their confidence around our business. And so our interest rate has been pulled back. Yes, our cash balance has gone up, and we have never actually used any of the funding that were raised by that debt. We have a full focus on -- some time in the future removing that debt. But I think this financial year is a year to be prudent, to focus on land grab and growth, to remain profitable and to exercise in the future a way of paying that debt down. But today, it's a lesser interest rate. It's highly serviceable and PURE continue to be a fantastic partner. Hopefully, that answered your question, [ Luke ].

You next question is from the line of [ Johnny San ].

Firstly, congratulations on an amazing result. I think if we've been sitting here a year ago, talking about this, the outcome, I think you would have been pretty happy. So congratulations, it really has been a terrific performance. I suppose what pleases me most is your growth in international business despite the inability to travel and the inability to actually get out in front of large corporates as a CEO and talk about the potential opportunity of Xref. So my view is not dissimilar to say, someone like Nearmap, who've done unbelievably well in Australia and continue to do so. And I think I see that happening with Xref over the next 2 or 3 years where you've kept building. But when do you see international business exceeding Australian business because that truly changes the whole ballgame for Xref?

Brilliant question. Slightly loaded as normal, but brilliant question. Okay. So our new platform has been built for the North American market. Obviously, it takes into account all of our other regions, but it has a level of self-service and self-branding and things like SMS built in because North American market works slightly different to the rest of the world. So we have built it for the North American market. Why have we done that? Because we want to leverage the opportunities that exist with huge businesses, and we don't get in front of businesses as large as some in North America down here in APAC. So we have seen growth -- strong growth and strong demand for the new platform from clients we're speaking to. In terms of getting in front of those clients, the world has just given us the gift of remote meetings. So funnily enough, I'm actually spending more time with clients around the world now than I ever have because we were always restricted with face-to-face meetings and the cost of travel. So in fact, all of the demos that myself and the team have conducted over the last few weeks on the new platform have been on Zoom and we'll continue to work that way. The 2 goals that would probably showcase where we are as a business today are exactly as you detailed. We -- I think everybody would agree once the North American revenue eclipses that of the rest of the business, we're in a very good space. And I think the second goal is a complement to that. As soon as our subscription revenue eclipses our traditional credit model revenue, we are also in a good space. So these are the things that we're focused on. How we're going to do it? Well, our step change comes from not just our pre-existing client cohort, it comes from our digital marketing and the demand that we're seeing through leads for client acquisition. So client development and client acquisition are our 2 key secret weapons in our business today, but also the ability to move our platform to a wider addressable market. The current addressable market within the regions we're working in is about 19 million permanent employment job moves per year. Our platform extends now across the hire-to-retire spectrum. So it doesn't just include preemployment, it includes pulse checks for employers -- sorry, employees and exit surveys for exiting staff. So our addressable market goes up from $90 million to $900 million across the regions we're in. We now can speak not only to the recruitment side of HR, but HR itself and including payroll. Wouldn't it be nice to integrate our exit survey platform into ADP or Kronos, some of the biggest payroll vendors across the world. So this is a big step change for us. It's an inception point. What we're seeing today is a mix of the hard work that the team have performed over the last 11 years to position us as the best platform on the planet in terms of automated referencing. But also, mix that in with the demand in the market for automated remote referencing for preemployment and exit surveys. So I've got a really lovely message from one of our investors this morning. And my response was, we are enjoying every minute because we've worked very hard for 11 years to see the market. Finally, Google us, find us, set up an account and get their credit card out of their back pocket because what they're getting in return is huge return on investment. Hopefully, that answers your question.

It does. And thanks for the detailed response. Just one little, short question. A very impressive range of new accounts that you signed, which is always critical and also critical that you've retained customers from as far back as 2017, which tells me about your annuity capability. Can you possibly tell me how you signed someone like -- how did you bring UEFA in Switzerland on as an account? If it's possible to talk about an experience like that. That's a pretty impressive achievement. And that's not because it's a football thing.

Well, I'm really glad you spotted that because if you look at our releases across the last 5 years, irrelevant of all the news that we've shared with the industry, with the market, the biggest rise in share price as a result of a release was when we signed Chelsea Football Club. So I'm not sure what it is about football clubs or football-related clients, but UEFA was sold out of our European business and as a result of just the network between clubs because we do have an array of soccer clubs around the world. And so that network talks, and that's how we brought UEFA in. It was a really nice deal to do. And they're using us on a global basis. So for them, our language capability was very important and so was our ability to integrate as well as those additional checks like RapidID. So it was a really nice deal because it used the full suite of our services and it came from a network of pre-existing clients within that space.

Well then, as long as it wasn't Arsenal you had signed, congratulations.

Your next question is from the line of [ Yuri Saltz ].

[ Yuri Saltz ] from [ JFL ]. Strong congratulations, of course, as well. I have 2 questions. The first one is on your cash flow report. It seems that you have spent something like $0.5 million on the website, at least it reads like that. Can you comment a bit more on what you have been doing? Where the cash -- for what did you spend that? And in particular, what's the nature of that cash out? Was that fixed? Was it a one-off or is that ongoing? Maybe you can start with that question.

Sure. So during COVID, we spoke to many of our clients that we're letting people go or seeing a huge attrition rates within their business, companies like Qantas and Crown Casino and lots of nonessential clients within the market. So I actually crawled around on all fours with big A3 sheets of paper and a marker and started to design our exit survey platform. And so for the last year, we have been in full development. And it's not developing a feature, it's developing a whole platform. In fact, our new platform is released with the exit survey tool. However, in January, February, we'll be releasing our automated references on that new platform as well. So brand new look and feel, and a lot more features as well as our pulse surveys will be released as well. So we've not only built a new platform for exit surveys, we've built a new platform to house all of our products and features. So that's been a year-long build. We've only capitalized the build of that platform. There's no other dev business as usual or integration development that is being included. It's pretty much put brackets around that new platform development. And we can see that extending throughout this year. We go into building our new billing engine in the new year, which will house our self-service subscription pricing table. So you'll see development run through most part of this year, but certainly waning as we get to the end of the development. We're aiming, by the start of Q4, to be fully ready with a fully new platform, including all of our products and services and the new billing engine because, as you know, Q4 is a huge quarter for us. But I can tell you this, where we are today, where the platform is, will easily get us to $100 million revenue without any further development. We have what we need and now is just about growth and scale. And any capitalization has just been purely based around that new platform. Hopefully, that answers your question.

Okay. That's fair enough. Second and last question is on your cash surplus reported at $1.2 million. I mean given the type of business you're in with quite a lot of cash coming in upfront and also the clear growth trajectory you are now in, would it be a reasonable assumption that in the next 2 or 3 quarters, you will also produce some kind of cash surplus? Or are there -- for the near term, again, the next 2 or 3 quarters, are you aware of some costs, maybe some necessities, some one-offs that will occur that will still lead to a cash loss somehow?

A few comments on this one. Great question. I think when you first land profitability, it's a bit like landing a big jumbo. You might bounce around the runway until you get comfortable. So there might be the odd quarter this year that we are not, in fact, cash flow breakeven, but the year will be. We will be bringing the year in cash flow breakeven. Now let me make this comment. We are on a global landgrab. We're doing everything we can to grow as fast as we can to find the scale and make a considerable step change in our business. So our focus is not necessarily profit. Our focus is to not -- to have cash reserves and to not [ burn ] cash at the same time as growing as fast as we can. And this is a balancing act that we've performed quite nicely over the last few years. So I think what's important for us is to make sure that any additional cash, we make decisions on that. And those decisions will probably be around pushing it more into the digital marketing space. We're in a position right now where if we spent additional money within our digital marketing, we know that, that has a huge knock-on effect to the pipeline that's coming in for the following quarter. So we're playing that balancing act at the moment. We're focused on bringing the year in profitable. But any extra resources will be focused on marketing that brings in more leads, therefore, more pipeline. This quarter, we actually saw more than $3.6 million worth of pipeline get created out of the converted leads that came in, a huge record and a massive signpost to a successful Q2.

Your next question is from the line of [ Angie Ellis ].

Congratulations on a great result. I probably have too many questions, you might have lost the time to catch up. I was just wondering in terms of the demo for sign-up timing, are you finding from when you do these demos, is the sign-up time getting shorter or longer these days?

Definitely shorter. So to sort of put that into context, when we listed in '16, our sales cycle was 95 days long on average because we had to meet the client. They wanted a free trial, then they wanted a pack of credits to last them the first 30 days, and then they were on 30-day payment terms. So we'd spend 95 days turning them around to a proper client. In 2018, I made the promise that we were going to find or acquire clients within 1 day, and it was called at the time the 1-day promise. And we did it by launching Xref Lite, sort of self-service sign-up tool. And we've seen the growth of that since the end of '19. So today, we don't actually sign up clients in a day. We see clients sign up in an hour or within minutes. So when we report our client numbers, we don't actually report the Xref Lite clients because we do have a lot of clients that find us through content, check us out on G2, figure out that we are actually market leading, open up an account, spin the wheels without talking to us, get their credit card out and buy a few credits. And then they work out, hang on a minute, we need to use this across the enterprise, let's contact one of their enterprise salespeople. So to be honest with you, not only do we sign up clients an awful lot faster than we used to, Xref Lite helps with that. Our digital marketing helps with that. Our credibility globally helps with that. But also when we see them sign up, they sign up with vigor. And their initial sale is much larger than it's ever been. So Ramsay Health Care was a great example. They had to look at Xref Lite because of the size of the business. They spoke to one of our account execs here in Australia. And their first purchase was $120,000. So a really big move forward in the strength of conviction that we are seeing from clients around the world. So hopefully, that puts into perspective where we are with our digital marketing.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from the line of [ Stella Wong ].

Just 2 follow-on questions from previous really good questions. The first one is with the strong expectation, the new platform to be released, what should we expect in terms of financial? Should we expect strong SaaS-type subscription to become a more noticeable part of the pie, for example, in your next quarterly reporting? Or is it initially still reflected in credit sales?

All of the above, [ Stella ], as normal. If you're a client of Xref today, you would be paying us for your next year's hires. So if you were going to make 1,000 hires next year, you would prepay your credits for those hires and then we would recognize those -- that revenue when you take those checks over the next 12 months. So we have a big client base across the globe. However, we have now the ability to revisit all of those clients. And our conversation would be, for years that you've used us, you paid us prepaid credits for references that you're going to collect. However, if you move to the new platform, you're going to be able to, not only have the new UI, you're going to have more features like SMS or a brand -- a full branding, advanced security. But you're going to have unlimited pulse checks for your internal staff, and you're going to have unlimited exit surveys that you can perform on, not only the person that leaves today, but everybody that's left the last few years. So there is a huge amount of value that you, as a customer, can garner by moving to the new platform. But what we're able to do is revisit our whole client base, bring a new platform to the fray to those people that love using Xref today, offer more value and obviously move them from a prepaid credit situation into a subscription model. In doing that, we can then charge -- effectively charge more for providing more to a client that's been with us for a long time. So it's a way that we can revisit our whole client set, bring them on to the new platform and effectively up the amount of money that, that business is paying for extra services across their business, not just employment. The other thing is, obviously, with a subscription, we're able to recognize revenue faster. There are clients that pay us prepaid credits and then they go on to a recruitment freeze or they don't use those credits for 18 months because for some reason, there's been a change in their business. No longer do we want to, as a business, be tied to someone's recruitment so that we can recognize our revenue. We want to recognize revenue faster. So with the subscription, irrelevant if you are hiring, if you are checking up on your current employees, or if you are surveying your exits, irrelevant of what you're doing on our platform, we will recognize 1/12 of your subscription every month. And therefore, have a far more consistent revenue recognition model. We haven't -- we don't then have any credits hanging over, and we're not tied as we were within COVID to companies not hiring. So a larger sales to our cohorts, a bigger addressable market to, not only the recruiters, but to the HR and payroll contacts within that organization at a much faster revenue recognition model. So those 3 components sort of lead to your question to yes to all of those things.

Great. That all makes sense. The second one is really appreciate you balancing the growth and keeping a strong cash balance. And in light of the debt facility that's still in place, I'm just wondering, in addition to the digital marketing expenditure that growth might require in land grabbing, would you also consider acquiring in order to grab more client base that would be, otherwise, hard to grab even if the acquiree could be loss-making? If that makes sense in terms of customer acquisition cost, would you contemplate doing that?

So not all acquisitions are the same, obviously. We've courted 11 businesses over our 11 years and explored acquiring them and have said no to 10. One that we did acquire, RapidID, we've grown 2,200% since the acquisition mid-'19. If we were to make any acquisitions, it would -- to pure -- to be focused on our growth, so could we make a step change in technology or our client set. Unfortunately, a lot of acquisitions that we look at, possible acquisitions, their technology is simply not as good as what we could develop or what we have at the moment. The people aren't as good as our people because the Xref team is just exemplary or their client set, most of which we already have. So the possible acquisition has to look very much like RapidID, easily integratable, strong early signs of an additional market that we can leverage and technology that provides us a time hack. Let's not spend 18 months developing something if we can get it off the shelf and get it into our client's set immediately, which is what we've done with RapidID. So the word is prudent. We would be very prudent. But we are very well connected to the market that we work within, and we tend to explore any opportunity.

Sounds very sensible. If I could just squeeze in a general question only because you've got your fingers on the [ towers ] of the world's employment trends. Is there -- during the last quarter, out of the ups and down of COVID, is there anything interesting you noticed in terms of what segments are doing better among your customers and segments are not recovering as fast as you would expect? Any interesting trends you see there? That will be the last of my questions.

Sure. During COVID, we split our client set into essential and nonessential businesses. We wanted to do that or we did do that because we saw growth within our essential businesses such as aged care, not-for-profit education, government. And I think internally, it was good for -- at the time, it was good for our team to see that despite the pandemic, an area of our business was performing really, really well. And we were adding value to essential services in the regions that we're in. So it's a very good space to polarize. Our nonessential clients are starting to rightsize. This lockdown in Australia hasn't been like the last one. What we have seen is clients start to mobilize their recruitment because they know that we are going to have our Freedom Day, and we are going to get back to business. So there's a big strength of conviction from nonessential clients rightsizing. However, finding talent is really, really difficult at the moment and on a global scale. So if you have to think about talent that's on the move right now, we have candidates that are calling time on their employers. So they're wanting to move. They've been there for 18 months, and they want pastures new. So we have a big migration of talent that has been in work. People trying to get back to work, people trying to move sector. So there's an awful lot of people that have worked within the airline industry that are now moving into health because they can offer customer service within triage in hospitals instead of pushing a trolley in the middle of a plane. So big sector moves. But also there's a huge amount of salary pressure that's emanating from borders being closed and no migratory talent coming in. So we have many businesses that hire nurses within Australia and health workers. 30% of all health workers tend to arrive in Australia every year, but we're not seeing that. The government are consuming an awful lot of health workers to put jabs in people's arms. So our aged care centers and hospitals can't find the talent they're looking for. Search or talent search, candidate search is an all-time high in terms of HR agenda point. So for us to bring exit surveys to the fray, that -- where an employer is able to upload 5,000 people that have left your business over the last 3 or 4 years and ask them whether what they thought about the business, whether they would ever like to return to your business and what kind of role and skills and competencies would they like to be remembered for, we are very -- we are, in the next couple of weeks, going to be able to create immediate groups of alumni candidates that are willing to get back to those companies. Thousands of Qantas' staff are going to be asked the question, would you like to come back? We're helping our clients find a new way to source talent that they've never thought of or acted for before. So it's an exciting space, and we're responding well to the market trends. And I think many of our clients are suggesting that they're going to continue to be remote. Therefore, their recruitment is remote. And therefore, automated checks are very much in demand. So as I said before, I think we've worked very hard to position ourselves for the market as we climb out of the pandemic. And we're just about to enter one of the biggest migrations of talent we've ever seen. And internally in Xref, we're certainly very excited about the Roaring Twenties we'll hear again.

There are no further questions at this point. Mr. Seymour, please continue. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, some absolutely fantastic questions this morning. Please reach out if you'd like a discussion with myself, Sharon or James. And please follow us. We have got some news flow due out as we launch the platform and a few other things. So thanks ever so much for your time this morning. It's been excellent and look forward to catching up soon.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our teleconference for today. You may all disconnect, and thank you.