Alfa Financial Software Holdings (LSE:ALFA) — Final Results

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ALFA FINANCIAL SOFTWARE HOLDINGS PLC Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet company platform. And before we begin, we would just like

0:33 to submit the following poll. And if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Andrew Denton. Andrew, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, and thank you, Jake. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to ALFA FINANCIAL SOFTWARE's 2024 full year results. As is usual for these kind of presentations, I'm joined by Duncan McGrath, ALFA's CFO, and Matthew White, our COO. So if we could, move past the disclaimer and go on to the, the agenda page. If you've been to one of these before, it'll be a very familiar running order for you. I'm gonna start off with some highlights from the year, then Duncan will step through a financial review before Matthew talks about our operational delivery.

1:21 I'll then close this off with a business and sales update. And as Jake said, there'll be an opportunity for q and a afterwards. So here's the year end review. One thing that we've been getting used to, at ALFA is sequential growth in subscription revenue, and 2024 was no different. At 18%, it means it remains our fastest growing revenue stream. We also saw strong growth in subscription TCV, total contract value, up 14%. And subscription is now more than a third of our total revenue base at 34%. We have 21 ALFA Cloud customers. That's up from 16 in 2023, and 50% of our live customers are now on ALFA cloud.

2:12 All of which we believe shows that we successfully transitioned to a SaaS model, and we will accelerate from here.

2:20 We've also seen a record sales year. Eight new customer wins within the year is a record and has driven record total contract value. Our late stage pipelines remain strong with eight prospects, five of whom we're working with under letter of engagement. We've continued to diversify our customer base, continuing our progress and making the business more resilient with every passing year. And customer concentration has now reduced to 32%. We have 21 customers with more than £2,000,000 sterling of revenue, and our largest customer accounted for only 7% of our total revenues. I'm pleased to say that we've achieved all of this performance while maintaining our investment in product, people, and the planet.

3:07 So 2024 saw 37,100,000 sterling of investment in our product. And you might have seen that we launched ALFA System six. ALFA System six is a breakthrough iteration of our platform, which extends our market lead and includes 10 new software modules, which drive incremental sales and bring value for our customers. In People News, our average headcount was up 5%, and we continued our strong staff retention. It was 96 for the year. And we joined the United Nations Global Compact. So all of this progress makes us confident as we have ever been about our future prospects. It's led the board to propose a 1.4 p ordinary dividend and to declare a 2.4 p special dividend.

3:54 And I know that Duncan will dive into our track record in returning capital to shareholders in his section.

4:02 So moving on to the highlights. Revenue was £109,900,000 sterling, up from £102,000,000 last year. This means that revenue has progressed 9% at constant currency. Operating profit was 34,300,000 sterling, which was up 14% on twenty twenty three's 30,200,000 sterling. Our operating profit margin was 31%. That means we delivered a rule of 40 performance. That's the addition of revenue growth with operating margin percentage. And if we were to base that on EBITDA margin, we achieved rule of 43 at constant currency. And I think it's worth revisiting that progress in subscription revenue because it pops up here again.

4:50 18% growth outstripping twenty twenty three's 16%. Same with that record TCV, particularized here at 221,300,000 sterling. That's up 34% from twenty twenty three's 165,300,000, and is driven by an exceptional sales performance. And finally, we ended the year with 20,500,000 sterling in cash and a closing headcount of $50.02. So based on all of these achievements, we believe that 2024 was a breakthrough year. We think we'll look back on 2024 as an inflection in our performance and a culmination of our strategic plans, and it provides a really strong platform for our future success.

5:42 So to repeat some of those points, we achieved landmark contract wins in all our markets with a record eight customer wins. These wins boosted our total contract value to a record level of 221,000,000. Subscription revenues are now a third of our revenue base, and we've now expanded our cloud footprint to cover 50% of our customers, growing subscription revenues to be more than a third of our revenue mix and moving to a SaaS only sales strategy. We launched ALFA System six, a breakthrough iteration of our platform, 10 new modules. We grew our US operation to over 100 colleagues. And we grew overall ALFA headcount headcount to over 500 colleagues, increasing our total dividend by 10% as we went.

6:32 I'll now hand over to Duncan. Thanks, Andy. 2024 was an excellent year of financial performance. Revenue was up 8% at actual rates or 9% at constant currency. The quality of the revenue continues to improve, which I will cover later. Cost of sales increased slower than revenue, up 2%, with a greater level of investment in 2024. Operating profit was up 14% at an improved margin of 31%. Effective tax rate of 24.9% was higher than last year, and this was on the back of the increase in The UK corporation tax rate and the change to the r and d tax credit. Diluted EPS was up 8% at 8.56p per share.

7:20 Overall, really pleasing performance. And given our confidence in the future prospects for the business, the board has proposed an ordinary dividend of 1.4p per share and declared a special dividend of 2.4p per share. This is a total dividend of 3.8p, which is up 15% on the dividends declared and proposed this time last year. So along with a special dividend of 4.2p we paid earlier in the year, total dividends are 8 point naught pence for the year, up 10% on last year. In our q four trading update, we announced that we will be renaming our revenue streams. There is no change to how we recognize or allocate revenues. This is simply renaming the underlying nature of the revenues, which have changed as we have transitioned to a SaaS model.

8:11 We develop software and deliver that software to our customers, and these two activities then drive the increase in our subscription revenues. Our strategy is to deliver more alphas to customers that will then grow our subscription revenues. We've renamed software to software engineering. Historically, this revenue stream generated a lot of revenues from perpetual license sales, but this is now a small proportion of these revenues. Now the vast majority of this revenue is from chargeable development work performed by our software engineering team. Hence, we are calling this software engineering from now on.

8:48 Note that software engineering teams not only generate revenues in their own right, but sometimes they develop software which increases our addressable market as well, which gives us a double benefit. We've renamed services to delivery to make it clearer that this is all about delivery of software and projects to customers. The name subscription revenue remains unchanged, and these are revenues that we bill on a recurring basis either monthly or annually. And as just noted, our strategy is to drive up these recurring revenues, and I will talk about this on the next slide. This graphic is to illustrate how the individual revenue streams from a typical medium to large project evolve over time. Smaller projects would have a similar profile, but over a much shorter period of time.

9:33 An ALFA start project is the shortest implementation we do, and in that case, there would be no software engineering revenues as they are out of the box projects with no software development. One key thing to note when looking at this graph is that our pricing for subscription is not based on the number of users using the system, but it's based on the volume of contracts, I. The number of assets in a customer's portfolio. The higher the volume of assets that they are financing, the higher our subscription revenues. As customers grow, our revenues grow. And the quicker they can get live, the quicker we can see an increase in their subscription revenues. And so we are really keen to get our customers live on ALFA systems as quickly as possible. So let me take you through the life of a contract, and the x axis here represents time starting on the left, working to the right, and with the y axis representing the size of the revenues generated.

10:26 As you know, we often start working with customers before a contract is signed, and this will be recognized in delivery revenues. We may have some sandbox environments, and so we may generate some small subscription revenues. Once contracts are signed, then we scale up our delivery teams, hence the increase in delivery revenues. Once the initial planning and design phases have been completed, we will then have approved designs from the customers for enhancements to the software that they wish us to develop. We charge for these developments on a time and materials basis, and hence, as we develop the enhancements, we start generating software engineering revenues. These revenues will normally drop off sometime before go live to allow for testing. Post go live subscription revenues ramp up as the customer adds more of those assets onto the system to be financed.

11:14 Initial loads may be a small portfolios with further portfolios of assets loaded onto the system later. Some customers may put new business only onto the system and run off their old portfolios on the old system. And in this case, the ramp up can be similar to the life of the underlying assets, say, three to four years. It's also important to remember this when considering our TCV. This, you'll remember, is a calculation based on the three year subscription revenues. So at the point of signing, this can be a relatively low number, but we'll build up over time as we get closer to the full run rate. I covered this growth in the TCV at the half year presentation and, there's a slide in the appendix on our website which shows this. This diagram here is a very much simplified diagram as as different customers will take different approaches to adding assets onto the system.

12:07 In some cases, there are multi country rollouts with their own delivery teams and with their own software development requirements. For instance, adapting to local legislative requirements. In reality, therefore, the actual picture is often more complicated than this. Despite this, the key points I would like to take away from this slide are, firstly, our revenue streams have different profiles during an implementation and post go live. Secondly, our subscription revenues will build up over time as assets are added onto the system, and it can be a number of years before full run rate subscription revenues for big projects are achieved. Thirdly, initial subscription TCV when we win a contract will be relatively low, but will subsequently grow as the projects get closer to go live. This slide shows all the customers that are either on v five or ALFA system six or in the process or discussions to move on to ALFA system six.

13:03 I showed this slide at the half year and have updated for the recent wins. The key takeaways are stickiness and acceleration. Firstly, stickiness, there have only been two customers who did not continue with ALFA v five, and these were not lost to the competition. In both cases, they exited the asset finance market. Secondly, acceleration. The last 15 customers have been added in the last two years. The previous 15 took four years. I would also point out that you can see 11 customers in the pink that are not yet live. And as mentioned on the previous slide, the full impact of these customers on our subscription revenues will, in some cases, be a few years away yet. So turning to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams, which is demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV.

13:56 We have continued to see steady growth in the subscription TCV, but the signing of full contract packs in the second half of last year has secured a lot of work for our software engineering and delivery teams, which as you can see is a huge underpin for our 2025 revenues shown in the next twelve months TCV. We expect to work through the TCV during 2025. However, we are still confident that we will convert the late stage pipeline and the timing of these contract wins will determine the actual level of TCV at any point in time. So to subscription revenues. We continue the sequential growth in subscription revenues in 2024 with each quarter growing on the previous quarter. For the year as a whole, that delivered 18% growth in revenues, and this is now up to 34% of all of our revenues.

14:45 We've seen a 14% growth in subscription TCV, and this was driven both by new customers and from the existing customer base. As noted earlier, the subscription TCV will grow for new customers up to and post go live as assets are added onto the system. We expect growth in subscription revenues in the future from new customers as they ramp up as well as growth from existing customers, including incremental sales of new modules and ALFA cloud. Now to software engineering revenues.

15:17 As predicted, we had a much stronger second half for software development, so finished the year up 12% on last year. You'll see we had a drag of 1,100,000 from the drop in the customized license as we transition to SaaS, and now this accounts for less than 20% of software engineering revenues. Customized license revenues from perpetual license sales will decline over time with our SaaS only sales strategy. Given the start up of new projects, our charge for development work was directed towards new customers starting up, particularly in the second half. Those new projects have committed to new development work, and you can see this in the increase in TCV, which is up 38% overall, but with particularly strong growth in the next twelve months figures, up over 50%.

16:03 Turning to our final revenue stream delivery. We've been through a transition of completing some existing projects and with new projects starting to ramp up. As you know, we increased recruitment in the second half of twenty twenty four to cope with the increased demand. Overall revenues were up 1% on the previous year, but you can see a significant increase in TCV, which has more than doubled overall and nearly doubled for the next twelve months. So we are expecting a busy 2025 for our delivery teams. Turning now to expenses. With an overall increase of 5% in operating expenses, a 7% increase in total salary cost was partly offset by an increase in the amount of time spent on investment which was capitalized. The other key movement to note is the reduction in other income, which is due to a reduction in the recognition of r and d expense claims.

16:56 Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion of 89% was as expected, and with the accelerated collections at the end of twenty twenty three impacting 2024 cash conversion along with a higher capital expenditure from the intangible asset capitalization I referred to on the previous slide. Dividends increased 2,400,000 in the year to 22,100,000, and there was a net cash outflow of 1,300,000 for a cash balance of 20,500,000 at the year end. Now some words on capital allocation. ALFA remains a highly cash generative business. As we have transitioned to a SaaS model, this has reduced the upfront license payments we received under the perpetual license model, but is making the cash flow smoother.

17:44 We have a strong track record of returning excess excess cash to shareholders through dividends, although I'm not sure that we always get the credit we deserve for this.

17:54 You can see from the left hand graph that we have paid a cumulative of 141,000,000 in dividends since 2020 and that we pay a relatively low ordinary dividend, but top this up with special dividends to distribute the excess cash. We like the optionality this gives us, and this continues to be our policy.

18:14 On the right hand graph, I've shown what this dividend stream means in terms of a dividend yield in each of those years using the dividends paid in the year and the average share price for that year. You can see that for the last three years, we've delivered a good dividend yield alongside the share price growth. There are no immediate investment requirements for our current excess cash, and so we have declared a special dividend of 2.4p per share and proposed an ordinary dividend of 1.4p per share to give a total dividend of 3.8p per share, up 15 on this time last year.

18:49 A few words on modeling guidance. The growing subscription revenues and the high levels of next twelve month TCV means we expect to continue to see mid teens growth in subscription revenues and overall double digit revenue growth for the business as a whole. We believe in continuing to invest in our product to maintain our market leadership and so expect capitalized investment at similar levels as 2024. Note, this will feed through into increased amortization over the next few years.

19:19 As noted before, we remain a highly cash generative business and expect cash conversion to average around 90% to 100%. For 2025, we expect to be between 8090% cash conversion, principally due to the unwind of advanced cash on two projects. We expect the 2025 effective tax rate to be circa 25% in line with UK corporation tax rates. I've shown the gross currency sensitivities, but note that we have circa 80% of our US dollars cash flows hedged. Also note that whilst this means our profit is largely protected, the revenue will vary depending on exchange rates as we don't hedge accounts. We just mark to market the hedges through the p and l. I will now hand over to Matt, who will outline the significant strategic progress we made in 2024.

20:09 Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you, Duncan, and, hello, everybody. We thought it would be helpful for this audience if I just start with a few words after clearing my throat on who we are, what we're doing, and why. ALFA is a software and delivery company. We exist to deliver our leading edge technology. Now specifically, that means ALFA Systems, our single tenant SaaS software for the asset finance industry. With our smart, diverse team, we are making our customers future ready. Now the market for asset finance software is huge with an annual spend of $3,400,000,000 in 2022.

20:54 We are the leading player in that market, and yet with that a £110,000,000 of revenue that we're discussing today, you can see that our market share is small. So our focus is on growing into that enormous market opportunity. Our vision is to grow our company and to grow our impact faster than our headcount whilst retaining our culture. And key to this is key to achieving this is delivering more concurrent implementations of our world class product more efficiently. We're retaining our small company field, but increasingly, we have a big company impact. Our strategy for this long term sustainable growth is built on our four s's.

21:43 Strengthening, that's maintaining and improving the best things about our company, selling to new customers, scaling our organization, and simplifying each of those deliveries so that we can deliver more. In 2024, we strengthened our key differentiators. That's our product, our people, and our delivery. And our product is our first differentiator. Investment in our class leading ALFA Systems product increased again in 2024 to £37,000,000, up from 35,000,000 in 2023. The investment is both functional and technical. Functional investment work increases our product capability and our addressable market and more on that later.

22:34 Technical investment has included making use of the latest technology, including, of course, AI. Highlights of that technical investment in 2024 included Thea that's our large language model chatbot, a system for implementation. We also launched proof of concept intelligent document processing integration, and we've enhanced our data pipeline technology for external integration and reporting. The launch of ALFA System six or AS six has provided a showcase for fifteen years of development in ALFA Systems v five. And this has given us a fantastic platform for reaching future customers and for infusing existing customers. And new ALFA System six modules also open up incremental sales opportunities.

23:25 It's really important that we're very clear that functional and technical investment at ALFA is ongoing, and the level of investment will be maintained in 2025. Investment in our product is key in maintaining that differentiation. We're building for the long term here.

23:44 Our refreshed development model, which I talked about last year, has brought improved product ownership, which has enabled smaller, more targeted investment as well as those larger strategic items. And finally, on the product, we've refreshed our module set to simplify and to provide more clarity with a view to those incremental sales. Our awesome team is our second differentiator. We attract fantastic people to join our team, they stay with us for the long term as they gain skills and experience and as they can add more and more to this special company that we're building together. Our engagement score remains really high at 82%, and our retention remains really high as well at 96%.

24:32 In 2024, we've delivered a full refresh of our induction approach, adding flexibility for our different recruitment routes and for different regions, as well as reducing the time required to get new people into their first roles. And we've continued to invest in our learning and development with hundreds of new pieces of learning content available in available for delivery, in short, on demand courses. For 2025, we're planning a refresh of our talent management and development, which will be led by our new talent manager, fantastic new hire. And our delivery track record is our third and perhaps most important differentiator. Safeguarding this as we continue to grow and deliver for our customers is another key part of our culture.

25:23 2023 saw more new customer go lives than any year in ALFA's history, and 2024 saw us start significant project work with six new major customer projects. This level of transition to new work, which followed that huge year of delivery in 2023, is unprecedented. Andrew will say more about our pipeline and the fantastic pipeline conversion that we achieved in 2024 later. Accelerated conversion of that pipeline is enabled by those three key differentiators that I've just talked about. And as we continue to develop our product and to deliver for new customers, our people gain an experience. So all three of those differentiators are further strengthen strengthened.

26:11 That virtuous cycle underpins our ongoing success, and the result is the fast growth in subscription revenue that we are achieving. In order to deliver the projects that we've sold, we scaled our headcount. Average headcount grew by 5% in 2024, and the team is now more than 500 people strong. We're continuing our review of our global footprint with a view to creating a further smart hub alongside our Lisbon development team. 2024 has also seen us scale our addressable market with product innovation in two key areas, commercial finance and US auto originations. Last year, I said that we were planning internal development in both of these areas. And over the last twelve months, we've sold our revolving credit module for commercial finance to an existing customer. We're now working towards capability for standalone commercial finance sales. And we've also sold our first US auto originations project with a major implementation project in progress with a large US captive.

27:21 For 2025, the market expansion focus continues with US auto originations and commercial finance, but we're also adding fleet functionality for the auto market to ALFA System six. Fleet functionality will allow us to do more for existing customers and will also add new prospects to the market that we can address. Simplifying the implementation of our products so that we can deliver more alphas more efficiently is a hugely important part of our strategy. This will open up sales opportunities, and it will allow us to lean in to those subscription fees. We've enhanced our migration suite to ease the transition to ALFA systems for new customers and also for additional portfolios within existing customers.

28:10 One of our customers used the tool to migrate a portfolio of 850 trucks in two months without our assistance. This demonstrates capability for customers to increase their usage of the system and thereby increase volume based subscription fees. We've invested further in our automated testing to simplify upgrades, and we're increasingly encouraging customers to share long term support code branches, which simplifies our maintenance efforts. We've made progress towards partner led delivery in two key areas. Firstly, we've completed the program of enabling investment for partner led delivery of our UK equipment start product. So our next UK equipment start project will be an MVP for partner led delivery.

29:01 Secondly, 2024 saw a complete implementation including a data migration, which was completed in less than nine months by our people following our US auto start methodology. This has allowed us to do much of the work required to develop a US auto start product for partner led delivery. Again, we're now looking for the right customer to implement this. And the next step after that will be to train partners so as to enable partner led delivery here. So we're way off our first US auto start partner led delivery project, but we're also making real progress. And our analysis suggests that there's a significant market here, so we're starting to get out and to talk to potential customers.

29:49 We we are now implementing ALFA Systems six. As we've said, for our existing ALFA v five customers and for the day to day as a whole across our world, a s six is just one four week time box of development away from ALFA Systems v five. There's no replatforming required. There's no major upgrade needed. But our software and delivery in 2025 is a world away from 2010 when we launched v five. Because our strategy is based around the aggregation of games, it can be hard to appreciate the scale of progress within that strategy. So we thought it would be helpful to provide a high level overview of some of the key progress. The transition that's illustrated on this slide is outlined really well in a discussion with our CTO, Andrew Flagg, a video and a transcript of which you can find on the investor relations section of our website. And the outcome of this is strategic progress.

30:48 We're able to deliver business values for our customers more quickly. As Duncan said, we've doubled our speed of customer acquisition. We've added 15 customers in the last two years, and the previous 15 took four years. So the set of results we're presenting today is not only a reflection of sales success, but the output from fundamental strategic change achieved incrementally, allowing us to grow into our market opportunity. And we're not stopping here. The investment in maximizing our opportunity will continue, and Andrew is going to outline our fantastic sales progress within that opportunity next. Before was a record sales year.

31:37 We had eight new customer wins, and six of these came in h two. And this included some significant wins which allowed us to access more of our addressable market. Which increased our ability to grow. Apologies to the watchy audience. I had a microphone problem for a second. So this sales success has boosted our TCV to a record level of 221,000,000 sterling. And our pipeline is also looking healthy. We now have eight pro prospects in our late stage pipeline, and we are preferred supplier with five working under letter of engagement with six of them. And six of these late stage pipeline additions are projected to have annual subscription revenues of over 2,000,000 when they get to full run rate, further underpinning our SaaS transition.

32:34 And our successful transition to SaaS has been a real theme of this presentation, and the slide you're looking at shows just how our SaaS footprint continues to grow. More than half of all our customers are on ALFA Cloud, and exactly 50% of live v five a s six customers are on our cloud with a live total contract volume of 1,500,000. Duncan has already explained how revenues for SaaS customers ramp up over time, so we're yet to see the full positive revenue impact of those newer customers. So the outlook for ALFA continues to be extremely positive. Our pipeline is showing continued strong demand. New customer wins are driving growth in delivery and software engineering revenue streams, and we're seeing continued ramp up in that subscription revenue sector.

33:27 We continue to invest in our product to maintain our competitive advantage and to drive future growth. And we will continue to see mid teens growth in subscription revenue, and we expect double digit growth for 2025 overall. So to summarize again, sequential growth in subscription revenue, which was again our fastest growing revenue stream. We also saw strong growth in subscription TCV, up 14%. And subscription is now more than a third of our revenue base at 34%. We have 21 ALFA Cloud customers, up from 16 in 2023, and 50% of our live customers are now on ALFA Cloud. All of that shows that we've successfully transitioned to a SaaS model and will accelerate from there.

34:15 We've also seen a record sales year, as I've just outlined. Eight new customer wins in year is a record and has driven record TCV in turn. Our late stage pipelines remain strong with eight prospects, five of whom we are working with under letters of engagement. And as I said, we've continued to diversify our customer base, continuing our progress in making the business more resilient with customer concentration now reduced to 32%, and we have 21 customers contributing more than £2,000,000 revenue. Our largest customer accounts for only 7% of our revenues. And we've achieved all this while maintaining our investment in product, people, and planet. 37,100,000 sterling of investment in our product and launching ALFA System six, a breakthrough iteration of our platform, which extends our market lead and includes 10 new modules.

35:10 Average headcount up 5% as we continued our strong staff retention at 96% for the year overall, and we joined the United Nations Global Compact. So this progress makes us confident, confident as we've ever been about our future prospects and has led the board to propose a 1.4 p ordinary dividend and declare a 2.4 p special dividend. Thank you for listening. That concludes the formal part of the presentation, and I'll hand back to Jake. Perfect. Andrew, Duncan, Matthew, that's great. And thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q and A tab that's situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard.

36:05 Guys, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But, guys, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks again, Jake. Well, let's try and pick up the first question, which is from Richard, Al. That is, has got CFO written all over it. Duncan, the the question is, with subscription revenue now accounting for 34% of total revenue, what's our long term target for subscription revenue as a percentage of total revenue? Even though I'm frozen, I am here. Sorry. We'll answer. Yeah. Good question. I I think we we can we will see progress as our subscription revenue as a proportion of the business going forward. We will see the 34% climb.

37:02 It will climb relatively slowly. I think 2025 is a good example. You know, we will see mid teens growth in subscription revenues, but we're gonna see strong growth in the rest of our revenue streams as well. So as a proportion of our business, it's not going to suddenly dramatically jump up. What's a long term target? I think we we feel it's still really important that we have a strong delivery capability. That's one of our differentiating factors. So we will always have a strong part of our business being our delivery capability. And also, of course, we will continue to develop our software. So we see it as a balance. We might be in the 40%, but we're not going to suddenly become a a dramatically, you know, mainly focused subscription revenue business anytime soon. So 30% to 40% is sensible to to think about in in the medium to long term.

37:52 Brilliant. Thank you, Duncan. Second question is from a couple actually from Gary B. So we'll, we'll answer the first one first. It feels like, one for Matthew, but what I might do is a bit of a clarification, which I hope will, will help the, answer the the answer before inviting Matt to talk about, how we, spend our investment money. Gary, the the there's there's almost an issue in the question in as much as you talk about how much we improve our existing products versus developing new capabilities. And I'll just give a note on how we see our product to everybody listening. And as much as we're very passionate about the fact that there is only a single product, that gives us huge, huge advantages.

38:44 We're not trying to take lots of bits of different products and sort of paste them together in a coherent way. It increases the cost of ownership. It makes them less coherent. It makes them more difficult to use. And we don't get cross cutting advantages and economics from all of the things we do from an investment perspective. So we only have one product, but the the the the terror of the question is quite right. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we use that in twenty twenty four's case, 37,100,000 of total investment. And I'll ask Matt to talk about how we go about that. Yeah. But thank you for making a single product point. It's a it's a really important point for us. We know that lots of people are saying that they deliver the same code set for every customer, but it's it's really important to us that we we really, really do.

39:40 I'll take your question to be asking really about the creation of new modules of the software versus the improvement in additional modules. So what proportion of our development would require new license and maintenance fees for existing customers if they wanted to start using it? That's how I'll take the question. Please clarify, we'll happily come back if I'm misunderstood. I'd say, obviously, it varies. We spend a lot of time, as Andrew suggested, every year deciding exactly what we're going to focus on. There's always an awful lot that we want to get through. There's a lot of opportunity for us. And the best way to answer it probably is to say neither dominates.

40:28 It's really important that we balance improving existing functionality for our existing customers with creating new modules that we can that that add license and maintenance that we can sell to existing customers. It's really important that our existing customer base is happy with the level of improvement that it's seeing and understands when we create new modules, and we think we get that balance. We think we do well with that, but certainly our existing customers are happy. The the best way to best way to describe it is to say that neither dominates. So we do create a lot of modules. We've created a a lot of modules with the launch of ALFA systems, ALFA system six, but we also spend a lot of time improving existing functionality. So it'll vary year on year.

41:15 I won't say it's half because that would be that would be overly precise, but neither dominates on a year on year basis. Yep. Thanks, Matt. Absolutely. And the the the major thing that we we talk about a lot is that we we man the roof while the sun shines. It's important to us that we keep moving the product forward. As Matt says, there's no huge pattern to it. Sometimes what we do do is is very visible externally and very monetizable, which we're seeing with AS6. Sometimes it's important to really be doing exactly that, mending the roof and making sure the product is is the best it can be. But the the major thing for us is that we're not we're not going to sweat the asset and, leave it alone and, and have to do some quite evasive work in a few years' time. It's important that we keep on looking after it.

42:07 Gary, I've got your second question, but, hopefully, you'll forgive us for moving to John's question because it flows really nicely from this part of the conversation. John S, you've asked, with growth in The US and a broader customer base, are there plans for expansion into new geographic markets or industry verticals. And the reason I take this next is it speaks quite nicely to some of the investment that we have made and are are currently making. One thing that we have a real focus on is what exactly that actually, strategic focus. So we're very keen that we we have well defined addressable markets, and we don't allow ourselves to sort of drift into whimsy and just try and do everything at the same time. So we're really focused that our our key markets are US equipment, US automotive, European equipment, European automotive.

43:02 A word about Asia Pac, which for us is, very much dominated by Australia and New Zealand. We have a fantastic operation there, and it's very important to us in terms of global footprint as well as making sure we can do a a follow the Sun, support model, and we have some superb customers in in that end market as well. Those are markets that we're penetrated, in varying degrees. I'm kind of teeing up Gary's question a little bit by saying that. Now if we look at, if we look at US Automotive, I I I would say without fear of logical contradiction that we are the dominant player in that market now. We still got a lot of headroom in US equipment, which is everything but but passenger cars essentially.

43:55 European equipment and European auto, again, we're well penetrated in those markets, but there's good headroom. Never say never, but, I think it's reasonable to say that, there's no huge rush to expand our geographical footprint because that leads to a bit of strategic dissonance, and we've got all the big markets covered. But you also asked about industry verticals, and it's a really great question. That's where an awful lot of our investment effort is going. We are, as Matthew said, creating new functionality and new modules. But, hopefully, two of the things that you picked up in our 2024 release, which will go through into 2025 very much, is that we're, we're putting a lot of effort and time, and, of course, money into originations, which is the, the bit of our addressable market that happens before a finance contract goes live. So the bit where we're doing the credit check, the funding, that kind of stuff. It's a huge market.

44:59 We're very excited about it. We have pulled that trick off, if you like, before when we released wholesale, and we describe that as allowing us to access more of our addressable market. So that is, very much within the planning. We've already launched it. It's already there. We're gonna be making a big deal of that in 2025, and we're hoping to pick up more sales, both net new and incremental. The other one, which is a really big market opportunity, is commercial lending. More generic commercial lending, ALFA is extremely well suited to, and we have put in some work to increase our ability to to service that market. We'll continue to do so. I'll note that 2025 also sees, functional investment, which is kind of a subvertical, into fleet management, which also brings with it a lot of value added product capability, the ability to do a lot of what in our world is called servitization, where you add bolt on services to that that core finance product.

46:08 So I hope that gives you a good flavor, John. Gary, back to you. Well, I tried to comment a little bit on the competitive environment, previously. We often say in these kind of calls that we we don't allow ourselves to slip into hubris. We genuinely do think we have all of those competitive advantages and differentiators that Matthew talked about, but, clearly, we have to make sure that we absolutely maintain those. We've gone from a standing start, as I said, to a dominant position in US auto. There's plenty of runway for us in that market, but the competitive positioning from our perspective is good. We we've already proven ourselves in a a very, very high volume market, and, a lot of the players there are on slightly older or sometimes unproven technology.

46:57 So we feel we have a good good advantage there. European equipment, where we've got a couple of very big customers, but there's definitely plenty of runway. Different competitors within, that market, but, again, we feel pretty strong. This term, we've said a little bit less than we have in the past about ALFA Start. But ALFA Start and generally everything that we're doing around, streamlining implementation of our software is making us, far more competitive in some of those markets that have got a a very broad price point. Europe, plenty of competition, probably more players in both, equipment, and automotive. And I'll say across those four main sectors, plenty of secular variety in terms of, what is competitive and what people are looking for.

47:53 And, again, we feel very strong, but there's probably the most competition that we see in any of our markets, I suppose, within Europe. The overlay to that is that we're kind of unusual. And if you'd have asked us who our competitors are, we probably wouldn't have named the names still. But I would say we've got different competitors in each of those markets. So our capability to be just as good across all of those subverticals means that we see different competitors. And, therefore, the corollary of that, which you're probably reading ahead of us, is if there are organizations looking for a system that works equally well in The Americas as in Europe, and many of our customers are looking for automotive as well as equipment to some extent, then I really do think that gives us an unassailable lease. So that's the, the one point I'll move into thinking.

48:47 Yeah. Pretty confident there. Generally, we're confident across the piece. But as I said, we're careful not to not to slip into hubris because we've always got to be focused, and we've always got to be aware. Andrew, Duncan, Matthew, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. And, of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. But, Andrew, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great. Yeah. Brilliant. And thank you for your your efforts in in hosting us today, Jake.

49:35 I think the the people asking the questions kind of nailed it, really, talking about our progress in subscription, talking about our, ability to sell in a competitive environment, pivoting off a fantastic year of sales performance, in 2024. And I'll I'll take a slight leap on the investment one, but it it's only a slight one. Everything that we've done in terms of continuing to stretch the lead that we believe with we've had with our product. So 2024 really is that breakthrough year. We're an organization that feels very strongly that we can deliver really good performance that any company would be proud of in terms of our financial performance and everything we do around, around our culture, and in particular that light that Duncan shone on, what we might call predictable special dividends.

50:37 So we're trying to do all of the basics really well, and that includes cash conversion. Hopefully, you find our accounts and our disclosures, readable. We take great pride in that. But, hopefully, you can also see that this is a company that is incredibly progressive at the same time. We've made that step into subscription revenue and into SaaS that generally, is a headwind that sets companies back a little bit. We've carried on with that rule of 40 performance through that transition. We've made that transition, and we're excited to see what subscription revenue, the changes we've made to our our software, and frankly, all of the breakthroughs that you saw in 2024, we're excited to push off from there. So, appreciate you taking some time out of your day to listen to us, and, please keep an eye on the the website and all of our various channels to, keep apprised of, of the things that we're doing. But thank you again for your time today.

51:36 Andrew, that's great. And thank you, once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of management team of ALFA FINANCIAL SOFTWARE HOLDINGS PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.