Accesso Technology Group (LSE:ACSO) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Accesso Interim Results 2026. At this time all participants are in listen only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your zoom screen. If you have dialed in please select star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Instructions will also follow at the time of Q&A. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Lee Cowie CEO to start the presentation.

0:48 Thank you everybody for joining us today for the presentation of our half one 2026 results. I thought it'd be useful just to start introducing myself. My name is Lee Cowie and I am the Chief Executive Officer here at Accesso. I've been CEO since May and I'm very proud and privileged to have stepped into Steve Brown's shoes and this is my first opportunity to talk to you about our results. You may know that I was previously COO here at Accesso where I was for about 18 months but I have a long breadth and depth in the industry having served as Merlin's Chief Technology Officer and I have a total duration at Merlin of about seven years.

1:43 So we're going to talk you through our interim results today and then a little bit later on Matt our Chief Financial Officer will go through the numbers. First, I think just to reacquaint ourselves with who we are, and I thought it'd be useful to give you an overview of us as a business and the depth and breadth of capabilities that we are able to bring to market. We have for a long time been one of the largest providers of technology into a really exciting and interesting sector. and our technology such as location based entertainment across attraction. So those would be your theme parks, zoos, cultural exhibits. We also have a very strong presence in ski in North America in particular and in live entertainments, which is your seated venues, your rate, your arenas, your stadiums.

2:45 and of course now into hospitality with our products that do food and beverage and we operate at quite some considerable scale as you'll see from that our ecosystem our set of technologies exists to monetize every interaction between a guest visiting an attraction and the operator it removes friction from the purchase it enables the operator to better monetize the experience and it enables the visitors to have a friction-free better day at an attraction. And in the next slide, you'll see that we have some admirable customers scattered across the globe. And at this point, I thought it would be useful just to give you an overview of how we see the world around us developing and where we're seeing progress and upside and significant opportunity.

3:39 If we start with North America, we see very strong traction for our products, particularly in Ski, and particularly with the introduction of our new capabilities in payments. Ski has traditionally been underserved by technology providers, and we're able to bring sophistication and cost scale to a market that has been left largely alone, particularly in the payment space. And we're seeing a lot of traction and a lot of interest in both our payments capabilities and our new intelligence platforms. a very substantial install base across some very large clients there. In general terms, we're seeing broadly static volumes on ticketing.

4:28 We are seeing in some areas, interesting increases in per cap spend inside attractions. And we're also seeing a lot of interest with our new capabilities that we're bringing to market for net new logos. Over into Europe now, and again, similar story to the US. We're seeing broadly static attendance levels, but we are seeing some venues increase their revenue against a difficult economic backdrop. And again, we're seeing per caps increase. So a bit of a mixed picture in Europe, but still getting some interesting incoming new opportunities. Middle East, despite the tensions in the region and the geopolitical problems that they have, we are still seeing good traction.

5:21 We're seeing venues continue to talk to us about expansion and new openings. And we have some interesting conversations with large new logos over there that we don't yet have. So although it is a difficult and unpredictable market at the minute, we are not seeing that being particularly impactful on us, though it does remain a watch item for us as we play out the rest of the year. And then the story largely repeats across Asia Pacific and down into Australia, similar theme to what we're seeing in other geographies. So onto our summary of the H1 results so far. So you're probably not surprised that given the kind of market backdrop I've just given, we're largely trading as expected.

6:12 But what we are seeing underneath the detail of that is growth in ticketing and our distribution capabilities, which have been masked a little bit by some of the queueing contract changes that we previously communicated to the market at the end of last year. So whilst we're seeing growth in ticketing and that part of our business, it has been offset, which leaves us with broadly flat revenue in the half. Where we are seeing some benefit come through is the efficiency measures that we took earlier this year, where we substantially reduced cost and that has been flowing through into EBITDA. We're also starting now to see the payoff of some of the investment that we've made in AI capabilities.

6:59 That has been an expense item for us through the year, but it is starting to show benefit in the form of us materially accelerating the development of roadmap features and functions, and in some cases by up to six months. One of the early actions I've taken as new CEO is review our overall strategy and our leadership team. And I have put in place within the first month, first four months, a new direction, a new philosophy on who we are. And I have refreshed the and reappointed the senior leadership team. And so we're looking forward to H2, and the years ahead with a new revitalized approach to accessor. I want to give you a high level overview now of some of the key features of that strategy.

7:50 We are continuing to work on this through the course of the year and we'll be able to provide a lot more detail at our annual results. But I think it's useful for me to give you a flavor for how we're thinking about our world and how we're showing up in this market. Firstly, by way of a little bit of backdrop, a large number of our customers, both existing and prospective, are approaching us and talking to us about AI. And this is a theme running across pretty much all of the conversations that we're having. By and large, the attraction sector doesn't have access to large IT tech teams. And so they look for vendors like us to help them navigate technical change.

8:40 And a lot of the conversations we're having are about them saying, are we AI ready? Do we have the capabilities to help them navigate the uncertainty that AI is providing? Is our infrastructure able to support them through a period of change that is quite hard to predict? And that's going to weigh a little bit on decision making cycles. It's going to slow some decision making cycles down and people taking a little bit longer to evaluate technology. But the good news for us is that we can answer yes to every single one of those questions. And we can do that in a way that few of our competitors can, because we have a very broad and capable embedded ecosystem in the core of the venues that we have been proactively enabling to become ai ready and our ecosystem which is how we're talking about our capabilities which is on the next slide is really how we bring that to market so so we aren't talking about ourselves as a set of products we're talking about ourselves as a set of relevant capabilities that uh each and every one of our customers has uh nascent in their business and needs help with evolving and growing and navigating the AI future. We deploy capabilities in intelligence and we did that through

10:10 the execution of the exhibit transaction last year. We have capabilities in commerce. That's perhaps what we are most known for. Our ticketing platforms are known for being very high conversion, able to maximize basket value and convert customers on websites that are far greater than the majority. In fact, I would say all of our competitors. We have capabilities inside the venue where we can help curate experiences, where we can have targeted messaging to people in venue. where we can service their needs for queuing for food and beverage for retail and we can provide that over one unified operating infrastructure now each of those capabilities we can deploy independently but they become much more powerful when we deploy them in unison at a venue And the next slide talks how we're exploiting our capabilities to derive that much more powerful value.

11:19 So whereas previously, we've talked about products, we now talk about a software ecosystem. And there's a very clear reason why we do that. We have the ability to deploy our products at every point at which money changes hands inside a venue. Now, if they deploy a product, an element of the guest journey, runs on our capabilities but that also generates data and that generate that data generated into our excessive intelligence platform provides the venue with insight it gives them the ability to learn more about what customers are doing why they're doing it coupling that with external data allows venues to put that information in context and make assessments about what might be happening in the future such as predicting attendance or understanding what demographics may or may not be visiting a venue and then understanding why that is and what they might be able to do about it so it creates capabilities to allow venues to be much more targeted in their marketing now of course the more products a venue takes from us the more data is generated the more we feed into the intelligence platform which only serves to to improve the intelligence, it improves the accuracy of forecasting, it improves their understanding of what's going on in a venue, not just in the web journey, but also inside the journey and then perhaps in follow up through reach out and CRM.

12:51 And that sharper intelligence, of course, drives better outcomes for a venue, which allows them to improve their own revenue to attract more guests. to be more effective at yields to set better pricing, which would further encourage them to adopt more products from Excesso. And of course, with the way in which we price our products, the more a venue sells, the more we make. So we end up generating this really powerful revenue flywheel that genuinely creates a win-win capability for both venue and ourselves. And our ecosystem runs very deep, which we talk about in the next slide.

13:40 We have deep capabilities across those four pillars that I talked about in guest experience, mobile app, virtual queuing, which we are seeing continued interest in. We have got some very interesting conversations underway with very large operators to expand our virtual queuing offering. So despite having some difficult news last year, the picture this year is very different. And we're seeing continued interest in the virtual queuing offering. Commerce, of course, you'll notice for ticketing, but we also do point of sale, we now handle payments throughout the end, and we can distribute tickets to any OTA so we can allow a venue to be present in any sales channel. And one of the things we are seeing is a fragmentation of sales channels across online travel agents, across agentic commerce, across booking portals.

14:37 But we have the capabilities to ensure our venues remain relevant wherever somebody is buying. And then of course, we've got the intelligence and the capability platforms, the AI agentic powered platform that we have in the form of excessive intelligence. and all backed by our deep and global capabilities to provide a level of service that our competitors are unable to achieve. Let me talk a little bit now about what we've been doing within H1 off the back of that ecosystem strategy that we're now pursuing and I just want to dive in a little bit more detail on two signature components of that strategy that really brought it all together and enabled us to talk about ourselves in a different way.

15:27 The first being the intelligence platform. And I'm very proud of the capability we have here. But I'm even more proud of the way in which our organization has integrated this and brought them in. In the space of just a few months, we've completed a an acquisition, we have integrated the team into our organizational structure, Angie, who was leading that team as the exhibit now is our chief data and intelligence officer reporting into me. And we've also scaled the team. So we've recruited and improved their capabilities. We've embedded them in the commercial proposition, and we are actively selling it. And we're going out to market and generating an awful lot of interest with this capability.

16:12 Five we've already converted. But as you see there, our pipeline is substantial and long. And it is genuinely a conversation opener It is genuinely, as I showed you within that flywheel, a capability that allows the rest of our ecosystem to make sense. And because of that, we are very excited about the opportunity we have ahead of us for this. And we're very excited about it being the capstone on our strategy that gives us something very relevant to talk to venues about, particularly in the AI era. The next area that we've been focusing on. Again, this has been a rapid evolution and rapid deployment. We signed a contract with Adyen in about March this year.

17:02 We have onboarded the capabilities. We've onboarded the technology. We've made it live. We've onboarded our first customer. And so we are up and running with that. And we have been prospecting well across our existing customer estate. We have three 13 customers already signed on board and we have many, many more in the pipeline that we have active conversations with. And this provides us with largely untapped revenue opportunity. We think about us being deployed across 1100 venues, 600 customers. We have an opportunity to have a conversation with the majority of them. and we will make money from that in the form of improved margin on payments but we will also simplify our pricing structure to our customers because we can now approach them with one single price that includes embedded margin from the payments capability we have it simplifies the number of vendors they need to manage but also simplifies our commercial offering so if We make money on every transaction.

18:14 It becomes a very simple conversation to say, well, we've already agreed a price with you. We just need to enable capabilities and we will further monetize those additional transactions that are flowing through things like F&B or retail or our queuing platform. And this really does simplify our whole proposition. So again, I'm very pleased with the progress we've made on bringing that on board, adopting it, making it live and onboarding existing customers, and there's much more to come there through the rest of the year. The other piece I'd like to talk about reference it a little bit at the beginning is our investment in AI. So not only are we investing in the platform to deliver AI capabilities to our customers, we're investing in our own agentic capability in engineering, in product, in operations, in finance, in HR, We have a belief that AI will impact every knowledge worker over the next 18 months, and we've leaned hard into that with investment to back it. And we are seeing material benefit.

19:25 Some of the capabilities that we had previously scheduled to deliver next year, we've actually been able to deliver this year. And as we continue to learn and grow and increase our ambition on agentic capabilities, We will progressively see that improve, and I'm very excited about the prospect for us becoming one of the first AI-first companies in our sector. So before I hand over to Matt to do the financial review, I just want to provide you with a recap of what I've been up to in my first 90 days here as CEO. We've worked hard to simplify our proposition so that we avoid the confusion of multiple product logos that we talk about where we enable an attraction through an ecosystem.

20:21 We've simplified that as well in pricing so that we don't talk about multi pages of pricing lists, we talk about one price. We've onboarded, we've enabled, we've grown our intelligence team, our capability. We've onboarded, we've launched and we've set live our first customer on payments and we continually increase our operational readiness through a new leadership structure, a new leadership team and new capabilities that we're building internally. In the months ahead, we'll continue to refine the strategy that I've outlined here. We'll provide you with more detail at the end of the year. but our focus is on pipeline conversion. We have a material improvement in our pipeline and we'll be focusing hard on converting that.

21:16 We have go lives on payments, on intelligence, on new logo wins that will be coming soon. And we'll be working to sell into our existing base the broader ecosystem which currently has less penetration than I think we deserve. And I think having a simple, more simple pricing, a clear view of how we better help an attraction will help us increase the amount of cross-sells into our existing customer base. And so you can see that from some of the stats at the bottom, the half one, 17 new venues, one, a material increase in the number of those venues taking multi product from us. And I think that's early proof point that the ecosystem strategy resonates that people are buying into it where we see customers taking more than one product from us.

22:18 And in some cases, the entire ecosystem from us, that's a proof point that how we're positioning and how we're talking about it is is starting to resonate and work. So I'm going to hand over to Matt now to talk you through the financials thank you Lee so Lee touched on these earlier in his first few slides I will reiterate them now and give a bit more colour so on the slide here you'll see that the key financial highlights so our cash EBITDA so our principal operating metric was 7.6 million for the period which was 50% almost 50% up on the prior period pleasingly so but our revenue remained flat and Lee touched on the reasons for why and I'll go into more detail on the next slide at 67.8 million the revenue actually excluding the virtual queuing product was actually up 7.1% so a good turnout for the period the underlying admin costs were down 6.1% following that cost reorganisation restructuring that Lee had mentioned and we ended the period on 7.3 million of net cash and that was after two significant capital allocation events being the the tender that we completed in in March mid-march and the subsequent acquisition of the exhibit product at the end of that same month and you can see that we returned 14.5 million sterling as part of that tender and I'll touch on that in a later slide on the right hand side of this slide you'll see the

23:49 composition of our revenue and those of you that have followed us for a while will be familiar with this at this point we're about 85% repeatable revenue and consistent period over period you'll see there and the major component of that repeatable revenue being transactionally led by a revenue share or a cents per ticket or per transaction in most cases and I'll take you through that breakdown of revenue in a bit more detail in the next slide So this slide here is showing you that the full composition of our revenue, the revenue by type at the top there that you can see that the breakdown of the transactional revenue being virtual queuing, ticketing and distribution. You can see there the virtual queuing revenue down 50% period over period. And that's due to those two major contracts changes that we had in that product that were announced earlier this year in January.

24:38 But pleasingly, you can see the ticketing revenue being very robust and up 8.3% period over period. and that's related to again one of those customers with a contractual change and resilient per capita and resilient attendances throughout the portfolio that we have the distribution product had relatively flat revenues period over period and then the other component parts of our repeatable revenue so you see there that the maintenance and support the platform fees and the recurring license fees again positive positive momentum through the through the period the maintenance and support and recurring licenses licenses really driving that at 15.3 percent and 56 percent up respectively that is predominantly through go lives in the Middle East on the Horizon product that happened at the end of December 25th rolling into the current period and both through the current period as well and they progress through through to through to H2 at this point as well the other component part of our revenue is the non-repeatable piece that you see at the base there we've got one-time licenses and professional services the professional services it fluctuates period over period depending on what projects are in flight so you see some movement there but you do see a large uplift in the one-time licenses of 120 almost 123 percent and again that is due to those those middle eastern venues and being delivered and going live in the current period Next slide takes you through our income statement.

26:07 At the top there we've spoken to revenue and really the gross profit follows the revenue so flat gross profit period over period and the margin profile staying pretty consistent to 77.8% in the current period versus 78.3% in the prior period. really the key talking point on this slide is the the admin expenses that line there and at a reported level you can see pretty consistent period over period 51.7 versus 51.8 but the underlying admin expenses beneath that so stripping out the share based payments the amortization the exceptional costs we fell 6.1 percent really controlling and tightly tightly controlling our costs as Lee touched on earlier that was following adjustments that we made in January 26 this year we've been on a bit of a journey with our headcount so at the end of December 24 we were on about 680 heads December 25 we were about 655 heads and we ended June at the end of this period at about 617 heads so it's a progressively making change there and that is inclusive of acquiring 10 heads from the exhibit transaction who joined us in March Outside of that, in the in the reported admin expenses, we also have about 1.3 million of exceptional charges and one time charges primarily relating to that restructuring, but also inclusive of some acquisition and inspiration costs following that acquisition in March.

27:32 Lastly, on this slide, you can see that the finance income and expenses have changed somewhat. So in the prior period we had an FX gain on our finance income line. We have a US dollar facility and a GBP entity and then again didn't repeat in the current period. You see a drop off there in the finance income and we had a slight increase in the finance expense. So as a result of those two capital allocation events we were slightly more drawn on the facility throughout the period which resulted in a 34% increase in the finance expense for the current period. Next slide is taking you through our principal operating metric. This is cash EBITDA and the reconciliation between the operating profit and how we get to our cash EBITDA metric. So you can see they're taking you through these line by line.

28:21 We've spoken to the 1.3 million exceptional charges and the nature of those in the year. Share based payments are relatively flat period over period. and the other talking point here is the uplift in amortization and the uplift in amortization really is reflective of the fact that we made an acquisition of intellectual property back in May 2025 of one risk and it also takes a bit that was acquired in March of this year and as those intangibles and intellectual property and other items are amortized we get a slight uplift in an amortization expense running through the P&L period over period And then last slide for me is really talking through the cash flow. And so you can see running top to bottom, the key talking points are that our cash generated from operations was was 4.9 million for the current period slightly lower than the 7.7 that we had in the prior prior comparative period and really that's a working capital swing driving that and that's purely due to timing of collections we have a seasonal cut off in in June seasonal peak and it reverses in July and August so you see that that trend reversing by the end of the year and the other the other component parts of the cash flow that we've had in the period you see there the acquisition of Dexibit is a 5.4 million outflow so that's the upfront consideration of 7 million with the completion mechanic adjusted and a net of cash acquired and then lastly we have the 20.1 million of purchase of owned shares for cancellation so

29:51 that's reflective of the the tender offer 14.5 million sterling in March and also the tail end of the buyback that concluded in January 2026 and just to add more colour to that we've now cancelled just shy of 20% so 18.6 of our shares in issue since April 2025 so making a significant dent into that number and then finally just to conclude so we ended the period on 7.3 million of net cash that is reflected of gross cash of 33.2 million and 25.9 million of borrowings and you can see there we have an adjusted measure so excluding pass-through cash so we hold some level of cash relating to collection of cash from OTAs and distributors and passing that to venues but the adjusted cash was excluding that number was 0.5 million of net debt versus 20.3 million of net cash in the prior period so that swing of 20 ish million really being reflective of the outflows that we had in the current period And then just to finish on, pleasingly, we managed to refinance the HSBC revolving credit facility that we have for a further four year period.

31:05 So that concluded at the end of August. It originally expired in May 2027, now runs out to August 2030 on slightly more flexible terms and improved pricing, which was a great result. And with that, I will hand back to Lee to take you through the outlook for the remainder of the year.

31:23 Thank you, Matt. So we are holding guidance against what we have previously informed the market at 146 million revenue and approximately 20 million in EBITDA. What we've seen in the early parts of half to July and August has been broadly in line and we of course still have quite a tale of peak periods still to come, not least of which will be the Halloween period. around October and then the early scheme period at the end of the year. Within that, of course, there's still ongoing work in the in the Middle East with project delivery milestones still to come. And we'll maintain our discipline on costs throughout the rest of the year. Just touch a little bit on commercial momentum, we do have two very exciting opportunities that are close to closing we have verbal agreement and one of them is a substantial full ecosystem deployment as we talked about earlier with our new strategy this is again another piece of evidence that the ecosystem strategy is landing well and we've had some good and positive news with queuing it isn't retreating In fact, we have a major North American operator talking to us and extending

32:56 the rollout of their capability even further. And the good news on payments, we are gaining a lot of traction. We have customers live. We are saving them money. It is making us money. And so we're confident about that. And then just to emphasize the validation we're looking at on the strategy, our multi product pipeline has doubled. We have improved our focus on the cross-sell opportunity both into our existing estate and also new prospects and the sales team and sales structure is now well incentivized around bringing to life that ecosystem vision. So thank you for listening to us today.

33:44 We will look forward to providing more detail at the end of the year we will now begin the question and answer session if you wish to ask a question please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your zoom screen as a reminder participants can also submit written questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button The first question is from Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

34:23 Morning guys, I hope you can hear me okay. Hi, morning. I have three questions if I'm allowed. Just never know when it will come back to me. So the first one is on the Outlook statement, particularly the one you talked about in terms of the two opportunities, one of which being a full ecosystem deployment. Could you give us a bit more color in terms of geography, how long the sales cycle was, what they're currently using in terms of sort of are they using multiple products etc etc that would be great the second one is on AccessoPay I know it's early days but can you give us a sense of what a successful take up of AccessoPay looks like in 2027 maybe in terms of gross profit and then finally if you could give us any updates on the Merlin ticketing renewal that would be great

35:21 All right, so first question on the multi-ecosystem customers. That's North America, the geography of that one. We've been talking to them for six to 12 months. They are currently using a range of systems across their estate. Some we have been providing majority we haven't been providing for but we've been talked to them about how we materially elevate and improve their business through the capabilities and the strategy that I articulated and it's a very very exciting prospect for us these are a it's a large player substantial presence in the US market and really excited about that one that's imminently due for signature so we can't name them yet but we will when we have signed it be able to make some more PR statements and then focus will be on onboarding them and getting them up and running as quickly as we can.

36:36 Your second question I think was on payments and what success looks like so with those Just in terms of scale with those 13 customers that we have signed and contracted and are onboarding, one of them is live, the rest will onboard shortly. That is total processing volume of about 50 million in terms of the amount of payments that are going through the platform. And we take a margin on that the margin varies, depending on the size and shape of the deal. I think it's between 40 and 100 basis points, I think on across that. We see line of sight to that 50 million becoming about 300 million in relatively short order into next year.

37:30 And we believe that our total TAM, if you like for payments is in the billions, you know, low low 1 billion in terms of total processing volume that I think we can push through that so we see quite a long runway on that the amount of margin we're able to take will depend on the scale and size of the deal and also what they are currently processing but as you might imagine that that looks material for us and we're certainly going to be pressing that very hard and then your your last question was on Merlin we continue to enjoy a very healthy and positive relationship with Merlin we are actively talking to them at a very regular interval we have teams embedded with them and actively working alongside them we are continuing to talk to them and you know at this at this stage that's the all I can really comment on but the relationship is strong and we are a very important part of their business and the conversations are constructive and healthy sorry very greedy but this very quick follow-up just on that new the one that's been verbally agreed could I assume that that also includes payments

39:02 we are discussing payments with them yes that is one of the key components of our ecosystem and it's the thing that kind of unifies the ecosystem and yes we are payments is very much on the table with that great thank you so much thank you Tintin the next question is from Katie Cousins at Shaw Capital please unmute yourself and begin with your question thanks one of both just a couple from me please thinking about

39:37 You mentioned in the statement about how AI has actually lengthened some of the customer decision cycles and just kind of any thoughts around that is it actually now because some of the discussions are becoming bigger and and now you've got this proposition of of the ecosystem to to discuss with them than previously and and then also like tied into that just customer health obviously it's tough macro backdrop and some of these venues are suffering from high cost pressures and they can be quite capital heavy so actually is that favourable to you guys because they are more open for a perhaps a more price savvy contract or is actually that also working into some of the sales decisions and perhaps discussions and that they're trying to navigate between and then I'll ask another one on SSOP after that if that's all right yeah okay so let's start with AI first um

40:41 I mean, I think I think the kind of the kind of press coverage of AI is just kind of giving everybody pause for thought and swings between AI is going to change everything and everything we've assumed to be true is now no longer true to a more recent guy is going to take over the world and we're all we're all doomed. I think I think that kind of commentary is just giving venues pause for thought by thinking are the are the assumptions I've made around what tech means for my attraction still valid into the into the future and I think they're just taking a little bit more time the other thing to bear in mind as I said in the presentation is that for the majority of our customer base they don't have access to a deep technology capability so they don't have the skills in-house to be able to make an adequate assessment of what AI means for their business and so they turn to us and they engage us in conversations and those conversations at a really strategic level it isn't just about do I purchase software it's about help me understand how AI is going to materially change my business and those conversations naturally need to take more time um the benefit of course that we do have is that we we we have been thinking about this for a long time um and in the form of the intelligence platform we have very easy demonstrable capabilities that articulate to them and actually we can demonstrate to them how ai can you know

42:12 materially improve their business and we're embedding ai capabilities into into all of our products as well so we um we're well positioned for those conversations uh it just means that they take a little bit longer it is it's not we're not in your traditional we need a new ticketing system and we are now talking to them about you actually need a new strategy and we are the answer to that strategy because of the capabilities uh that we can bring to bear um so they're all they're all really good conversations and the the the interesting thing about them is that it elevates us in the organization so whereas previously ticketing decisions may have been an operational decision when having conversations at boardroom level, which, of course, is where we have most opportunity to shine. So net, it's positive for us. All these conversations are positive.

43:00 Katie, sorry, I've forgotten what your second question was.

43:03 yeah I mean it kind of ties in it's just about how actually venues are perhaps suffering from increased cost pressures given how capital intensive they can be and so just if that actually is hindering any of the decisions or really is there an opportunity because you're able to offer the new ecosystem at perhaps more competitive pricing

43:33 Absolutely, because we can offer a comprehensive set of solutions that now under one vendor we can offer the end-to-end capabilities whereas previously they would have had to strike up conversations with multiple vendors. We of course can provide scale economies into that but I think the most interesting story we have for venues there is the payments capability. um and the wholesale pricing that we are able to bring to venues that would have had no way of accessing that that pricing and some of the conversations we're having with moderately scaled venues when we talk about you know the pricing and the the compelling price that we can put in front of them it saves them substantial amounts of money because we're able to provide wholesale pricing on on payments whereas previously they would have had to negotiate on their own and in some cases cases that is a very very substantial number so we are able to show up wherever they've got price pressure and of course the more they take from us the better our price can become so we're very well positioned for that

44:48 Got it thank you and then just on assessor pay in order to reach you talked about the 300 million and perhaps larger going forward on payments do you need any additional infrastructure or investments in order so that or could that be quite unhealthy drop through?

45:08 We do not need any additional infrastructure for that. The platform is stood up. We have scaled the team a little bit, but we see that that team been able to cover the certainly the near term growth that we can see. We'll review that as we continue our success there. But I'm not anticipating that that will be a substantial cost item for us.

45:33 Got it. Thank you.

45:36 Thank you, Katie. The next question is from John Byrne at Berenberg. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

45:46 Hi, good morning. Three questions from me, if I may. Maybe take them in turn. firstly I just wanted to break down that ticketing growth number a little bit more so obviously you've seen some good momentum from new wins over recent years and then you mentioned that growth this half is attributable to better pricing terms just trying to think about what contribution you expect from new wins to be this year or going forward how should we think about that sort of like contributing to the growth number Matt can I give that one to you yeah sure so john hey john the uh you're right so the ticketing uplift number that we've got in there 8.3 percent on the single line and 8.6 on the on the segment a lot of that is being driven certainly in the first half for by revised pricing a major customer alongside both relatively flat or robust attendances and then growth at new venues being the other component part. So I would expect with the current period, majority is coming from revised pricing, but on a go-forward basis, would expect growth to be coming from new logos and cross-sell that Leah has spoken to.

47:01 um we it will really be um what we've seen traction certainly in the last few months on that as we've indicated on the commercial momentum so i expect a positive trajectory on on growth on that ticketing line for sure over the next next few years certainly in 2027.

47:19 Okay, great. And then that kind of relates to my second question, which is, I guess, assumptions for growth going forward. I mean, are you factoring or basing sort of your growth expectations on more footfall and spend per customer? Or is most of that top line growth expected to come from new logos and cross sell with, you know, footfall, you know, growth being a sort of upside? a bit of a mix to be honest so most of our businesses you see in the composition transactionally led so the inflation comes through as ticket prices increase we get a natural increase in revenue even while tend to stay relatively flat so there is yield management in that so we would get some level of uplift there either inflationary or just beneath and then growth there above that comes from new wins new logos both cross selling existing they would expect a growth rate of that plus an extra inflation plus.

48:16 Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. And then just final one is, you talk about the multi products and cross sell. I mean, I guess, can you give us an indication of where your cross sell conversion is relative to the opportunity? I mean, just how much is expected to contribute to that growth? Is it kind of a couple of percent or how material is the cross sell conversion at the moment? So to be it's not huge actually to be honest John at the moment, which is where we see the opportunity So we haven't necessarily had leaders and they touch on it to be able to really point to be cross so into our base Whilst we've had the products of themselves They are really big or typically have been sold as somewhat standalone solutions to a customer with with separate operation teams separate price point separate contracts separate UI interfaces to some extent and so we are solving for those problems but the problem solved in part by having a unified payments layer that sits across all products and the same thing for a unified intelligence layer so being able to offer those is really helping our cross-sell in terms of where we see growth coming from which is probably a 50-50 split if not slightly higher weight in terms of cross-sell opportunity but think of it 50-50 in terms of cross-selling growth and new logo growth going forward.

49:34 Great, that's really helpful. Thanks all. The next question is from Oliver Tipping at Pill Hunt. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

49:47 Hey guys, yeah, I just want to check on, I know you mentioned earlier that the Middle East was sort of relatively unaffected by the war and they're seeing good attendances there. In terms of the milestones for key contracts, are you guys comfortable with how those timelines are playing out or is there any risk at all of slippage of milestones from this year and say into next year? Yeah, I can cover that. So to take you on the journey of that. So we had, I think, when we came back out with the market update in July, we had about 1.8 million expected of revenue from Saudi from there through the end of the year. And we're now expecting 1.3. The majority of that, so two venues, the Middle East and Saudi Arabia have decided to push into 2027, so there has been slippage on it already.

50:36 We don't expect a huge amount of slippage on a go forward basis. We've got 1.3 million to recognise for the rest of the year, so that's baked into that 146 million of guidance across the Middle East in general, so Saudi plus wider Middle Eastern customers. That is pretty evenly proportioned through the rest of the months that remain, so September through December. so we we could get slippage it's not unexpected with with Saudi Arabia with the way things play out but at present moment we're comfortable that 1.3 million will come in great thank you as the months as the months progress obviously the risk risk the next question is from James Locker at Pillhunt LLP please unmute yourself and begin with your question

51:25 Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. So actually, I've got one, but it's on one topic. So it's actually in three parts, awesome, being three questions. So you talked about AI across a number of angles in the presentation, but how are you thinking specifically about plugins? There's a there's a bare thesis at the moment today, I could disintermediate platforms aggregators, which we strongly disagree with. But plugins are available for trainlinebooking.com and the fork and things like that. So part A of the question was, How do you feel about the aggregated disinmitiation bear case? B, how do you see the opportunity within plugins? And Matt, could you comment on how economics work for plugins within that nature? And then C, given that a customer who's planning a trip on chat GPT might want a train to Thorpe Park and then a dinner and a hotel in the evening, would any plugin from Accessor be more likely to be B2C?

52:22 And could an AI plugin make it easier to work with other leisure providers such as Trainline and Booking.com? Thank you.

52:29 Those are great questions, James. Let me talk about how we're thinking about that. Plugin is not really a term that we use, but I get the essence of where you're going with that. We have a strong thesis that what we are going to see is a fragmentation in purchasing channels. we've lived through various cycles of changing consumer behaviour from back in the dawn of ticketing it was box office then it became online through desktop then it became online through mobile devices and then there was the birth of online travel agencies and now we're going to see fragmentation into agentic commerce and purchasing through LLMs we're well positioned for that in fact we have a beta AI apps running in the likes of ChatGPT already.

53:37 We've been demoing agentic capabilities actually embedded in ChatGPT. We of course have very strong distribution capabilities through ingresso so we're all we're already very well plugged into a lot of this kind of fragmentation and we have the ability to reach consumers wherever they they they may be and we are working on a very interesting and currently confidential partnership with a division of a large payments provider to be one of the first ticketing providers in the attraction space to kind of support full breadth agentic commerce across any AI platform and been able to kind of plug agentic commerce capabilities directly into ingresso which is our distribution capabilities of course gives us exceptional reach and I think you know it's still a little bit early to call what model is going to win every LLM provider has a slightly different take on how commerce will play out our philosophy at the minute is we just need to be there and we need to be present and through this partnership we're talking about that gives us the ability to to reach all all LLMs so we are actively engaged in the experimentation of

55:07 that and we have already bought to market you know capabilities to purchase via AI and they're up and running in terms of economics I don't think we have a strong thesis on how those economics are going to play out I mean at the minute a purchase through our system wherever that purchase happens is is the same price. So we're kind of largely agnostic to channel it's still running through our infrastructure. So purchase through our infrastructure. I do think you raise an interesting point around curation of experience. And you see not too far in the distant future where personal AI agents operate for you. And book an experience including travel including hotel including airlines including airport parking including attraction tickets and we certainly have the capabilities to be a very meaningful part of that booking trip but it's still too early to call on

56:14 is there going to be a dominant way of doing it but we're present wherever those conversations are happening so may i just ask a quick follow-up actually on the on the i don't i don't expect you to talk more about the confidentiality one you mentioned around the payments then but can you describe is that effectively would that allow someone to not even leave the ai app to make the purchase because at the moment if i wanted to buy a ticket it would load the com you know the loads of the company's website within within the uh within the chapter environment if you're doing a payment style deal with someone could that be when you talk about the end-to-end do I'm not I'm not even leaving the app is that what you're suggesting so if you're able to sort of say I want these tickets and I can purchase them within the AI experience completely

56:59 Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's certainly something that with the with the test app that we have in the beta apps that we have up and running, that's something we're already seeing as a as as an option. So, yes, there is that that journey, I think could be possible in the not too distant future, whether venues want to do it that way or not. That's, that's for them to decide. But we, we will enable that.

57:26 Great, thanks so much. That's great. Thank you. The next question is from Harold Evans at Singer CM. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

57:41 Hi, gents. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple to start off with and then one follow up, if that's OK. First one on the product side. making headwear in terms of simplifying your pricing. I just wanted to follow up on Matthew's question about sort of standalone products and then you sort of see AccessoPay and Intelligent sitting across that. I was wondering to what extent to sort of enhance that cross-selling, simplify from a customer experience perspective, to what extent you know pre-integration of products and sort of increasing that usability is really on your sort of roadmap and sort of how how important is that in terms of then driving the cross-sell that seems to be a direction of travel for the business maybe why don't we leave it there and then I'll go on to a financials question okay so on the product I mean the reason that anybody would do an integration between systems is to ensure that

58:43 data flows appropriately from system a to system b at the right time now the majority of the data in our kind of ecosystem model flows up into the intelligence platform so the integration is largely taken care of from a strategic perspective from an analysis perspective from um you know kind of stitching it all together by us already being pre integrated into the intelligence platform. One of the unique things about the way that the exhibit was grown is they didn't have a ticketing platform, they were vendor agnostic. So they had to um build their own integrations to any platform and so we we bought that company knowing that they had a really easy way of integrating with any ticketing provider and they come to us with over 100 integrations so we've largely integrated already all of our products directly into the intelligent platform for that um presentation of that data The only other stitch that we need to do is in the kind of operational transaction layer so that somebody can scan their annual pass that they've purchased in something like Passport with the food and beverage endeavour and those entitlements and discounts be recognised.

1:00:01 And that's largely been a feature of how we've been operating for a while anyway. So that integration is largely done. And on the payment side, we took a decision several years ago to pull out payments as a group wide function. And because it's a group wide function that's integrated into all of our products, it was just a matter of plugging in our new payments capabilities into something that's already centralized and standardized. So the lift on integration is not particularly high. There is some work that we do need to do to normalize UI and normalize kind of the administrative experience. And we're focused on that now, but it doesn't get in the way of us being able to sell the ecosystem.

1:00:53 Alright, that's really useful. And then just Matthew, what just went on guidance, just helping me or us out on H1, H2 split, obviously, H1 sales flat, but guidance implies negative 9% H2 sales. And then on the cash EBITDA, you went from seven to 11% on a cash EBITDA margin. you delivered so improving cash EBITDA margin but the implication for H2 is that we go from a 21% into H25 down to a 16% cash EBITDA margin to hit your 20 mil can you just help me out on the top line and then also on the cash EBITDA margin H1 H2 please yeah sure so the H2 I mean the reason we are down year over year or full year guidance versus 2025 is due to the shortfalls that we've got in H2 and all of those shortfalls are across the queuing contracts so they were H2 weighted and so the major contract change at one of them and the loss of another all impact the period July through through October predominantly so as you as you say H2 revenue will be a lot shorter a lot a lot lower than H2 in 2025 and then in terms of what is that what's the knock-on impact the cash ebits are through we reduced overheads in January 2026 so that's relatively flat-lying reduction throughout the whole 12 months but the shortfall in revenue in

1:02:24 H2 is more significant than the cost that's being offset

1:02:32 okay thank you and then just finally IP theft how worried how reassured are you what have you found what to the extent you can or wish to share to the market on that thank you so yeah let me take that Matt we've largely concluded on the analysis on that I mean we took the step to kind of

1:02:58 proactively communicate to the market at the point at which we became aware of that. We're not overly concerned by that. You know, something, something for us to learn from, I think, in terms of where we did have that exposure and what we need to put in place to correct it, but The good news is it didn't impact any of our production systems. It didn't impact any of the data that we were particularly concerned about. The value of what was taken is negligible in our eyes. But it does, you know, and I think every technology provider in this space, it just reinforces that vendors of scale and sophistication like ourselves are going to become increasingly important because of the amount of danger that exists from cyber security and that is only going to increase so we have very robust security in our production systems it's apparent and obvious that we need to take that same robustness and move it into some of the adjacent systems that didn't benefit from some of that investment we made but the corrective path for us is clear and is well underway the incidents contained we've moved on from that

1:04:29 it's a it's a lesson to be learned but I think it's the same lesson that an awful lot of companies are learning we're certainly we're certainly not unique and immune from the threats and the challenges that the whole of the technology space is facing into super thank you very much The next question is from Richard Jeans at Hardman and Co. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question. Please unmute yourself by pressing star six and begin with your question. We will move on. Unfortunately, we have run out of time for further questions.

1:05:26 I will now hand over to Lee Cowie, CEO for closing remarks.

1:05:30 So thank you everyone for joining us today. I hope the kind of takeaways that you get from this is that we are confident about the future strategy. We have some really compelling and interesting early proof points from that. I am excited about the prospect for us bringing something unique to the market in the form of excessive intelligence. and I'm encouraged that the early conversations we've had about payments are cutting through and really demonstrating the value that we bring. That coupled with a refreshed and reinvigorated management team and an absolute focus on selling the ecosystem vision, I'm really happy to be stepping into CEO at this point and have every faith in the future for Xesso. We'll talk to you again at the end of the year for our annual results until then thank you very much thank you for joining today's call have a nice day