Celebrus Technologies (LSE:CLBS) — Capital Markets Day

0:01 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES PLC Capital Markets Day. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors online will be in listen in only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to ask every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, company should get your questions submitted today and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. We'll shortly submit a poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to CEO,

0:33 Bill Bruno. Good morning. Thank you, sir. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us both virtually and remotely. We've got a a fun agenda. Obviously, those of you in the room, you don't have to log in to the application to ask your questions. You can just raise your hand, and we'll just repeat them to the audio so that everybody that is virtual gets the benefit of hearing what it is that you're asking just to make sure the audio is working. Really appreciate everybody taking some time today. We've got a a fun agenda. As always, we'll start with a financial update from Ash. I'll give you a bit of a business update as this is our first capital market phase of CELEBRUS Technologies PLC. So we have finally now simplified the brand and aligned under CELEBRUS and behind CELEBRUS as the sphere of our business. I'll talk a little bit more about that and and how we're going to market. We brought Anne Phillips, who's the the smart person in the room, who will walk through some of our product updates.

1:23 And we have a video, and I'll just warn you now, we've got some technical difficulties with said video where it's only audio. So we all listen to podcasts. So we'll just pretend it's a podcast. The the video itself will be uploaded online so you can watch and see Lee from Merkel and the interview that we did with him if you so choose. But the audio is the most important thing anyways. And yeah, that's the agenda. So with that, I'll turn it over for the most exciting part, the financial update. Come on,

1:50 What a build up. You're welcome. Thanks, Bill. So I'm gonna run through quickly financial highlights, and then we'll go into a bit of detail around each of the financial statements and just talk about how they impact they're impacted by business. So the financial highlights, you'll see that the annual revenue recurring revenue increased to 17,400,000 during the period. That compares to this time last year of 15.8 and the year end figure of 16.7. And as you'll seen in the statement a few days ago, we anticipate the ARR growing on a periodic basis in period to period. Total revenue went up to 13,000,000, and I'll go into a little bit of detail on the dynamics behind that. That was in comparison with 8,100,000 at this time last year and 31,400,000 for the full year last year. And I'll talk a little bit about the first half and the second half weighting.

2:42 Software revenue, which is a key metric for us now, went up 18% to $77,300,000. We're using software revenues as a key metric to distinguish from total revenue, which includes hardware rep cost revenues. And there's a reason for that, and again, I'll explain that in a few moments. The gross profit margin was 37.4%. That was low in the first period as it often is, this time around due to a higher end hardware in our revenues. But we'll talk a little bit about the underlying software gross profit margin as well. Nothing that's a little bit more important in terms of understanding the scalability of the business. For the first time in quite a few years, we showed an adjusted PT profit, just 200,000, but that compares to 1,300,000 loss this time last year, and that equates to 0.56p of earnings per share.

3:36 Cash position at the period end is 14,700,000, and I'll talk about the kind of the dynamics of our cash balance and working capital and how that sort of fluctuates month to month. And then finally, we paid a dividend of 0.92p per share. That's up 4.5%, and I'll talk about the use of our cash over the medium term. So going to the income statement. For the first time, the final results last time, we split out the software revenues to highlight the underlying sort of growth in the business. As you know, we have quite a high degree of fluctuation in headline revenues from hardware sales. In some periods, hardware revenues can be 2,000,000, in some periods it can be 7,000,000. So that sort of distorts the headline revenue. So we're focusing on software revenues as being a key metric.

4:28 And in this period, they're up 17.7 to 7,300,000. The gross profit margin was lower, as I said, at 37.4%, but we are looking, as I said, at the software GP percentage being more representative of what's happening underlying in the business. So the software GP percentage was 56.4%, and we would expect that to go back for the full year as it was last year to the high 60%, and in due course to go to 70% and beyond. The OpEx increased to 4,900,000 compared to 4,500,000 this time last year. I spoke last time about how we spent last financial year, restructuring the business. We invested a lot into systems.

5:14 So a new finance system, a new CRM, a new HR system, license manager, a contract manager. From those, we were able to extract lots of efficiencies. And so the headcount we saved from those investments were then redirected to the front end into sales and marketing, setting up the customer success team. So last year, we held OpEx flat, also with a headcount of a 150. But now having done the restructuring, they've got a really solid base within the company. We now see investment increasing and OpEx increasing in the coming periods. So we've seen the start of that increase now in the second half. What we'll see is a full half impact, if you like, of headcount additions in the first half. And what we'll also be doing in the second half is looking forward to FY 2025 and the investments we need to make ahead of our year end now to be able to deliver increased revenues and numbers for FY 2025. So you will see that OpEx going up in coming periods.

6:12 The adjusted PT, 200,000. That was assisted by our finance income. So we have good cash balances and we invest those very wisely. We're very proactive around that. And so obviously during a period of volatility over the last six to nine months with interest rates quite increasing but also fluctuating between short term and long term investments, We've been very proactive in managing to generate £300,000 net from our cash balances. The annual recurring revenue, as I said, has gone up to 17,400,000, and the reported adjusted diluted EPS was a loss of 0.56 sorry, profit of 4.56, and the dividend, as I said, was 0.92p for the period.

7:01 Coming on to the balance sheet, consolidated statement of financial position. So the major changes in the period were really around the debtors and the creditors. So at the last year end, we talked about how a couple of deals have slipped through from the last year into the end part of this year.

7:19 And that was the reason for the shortfall in revenue last year. So what we've seen in this period is that those one of those deals, which had a very high component of hardware, was signed in early August. And so what you see in the balance sheet at half year end is a very high sort of trade data funds within the other receivables. But conversely, you also see a high trade in other payables funds relating to that hardware. So if you remember, the shortfall was around 6,000,000, and of that around 5,700,000 was hardware. So that's why you see the trade and other payrolls going up and the trade and other receivables also increasing. Those positions are in the process of reversing now, so we will be receiving cash shortly. As a side point, you may be aware that we don't generally have bad debtors.

8:07 Most of our customer base is large, profitable multinational businesses.

8:12 So we tend not to have bad debts, but payment terms are generally anywhere between forty five days and ninety days depending on whether we're doing it direct or we're doing it through a partner. And in this case, it was through a partner. The final point I'd make, really around the assets held for sale. So this is an item we introduced at the last year end moving out of property, plant and equipment and into assets held for sale. This is our London property of £3,000,000 valuation. So this has been on the market. We now have offers which we're negotiating, and these come from a wide range of types of buyer. And, of course, with any property sale, there are pros and cons to the structure of the deal. So we're working through that, and we'll be announcing further information in due course.

9:04 And finally, on the cash flow. So the main items in the cash flow, I think the first thing to draw to your attention was already the movements in working capital. And I should explain again really about how we recognize our revenue and how we do our billing. So a typical CELEBRUS contract will be a three year contract, and that will include a high proportion of license revenue, an element of support and maintenance, increasingly now an element of CELEBRUS Cloud, which we launched, a while ago, and then the very small elements of services. And how we recognize revenue on that is that the services will be recognized on a percentage complete basis as we implement the the CELEBRUS platform, and that's typically over around sort of two months or so. The support maintenance and the CELEBRUS count will be recognized evenly over those thirty six months of the contract.

9:54 The license is a bit unusual. We issue the license for a three year contract year by year. So at the time of signing, on the first anniversary, then for the second year, and then on the second anniversary for the third year. Now under IFRS 15, once we've delivered the license, our obligations are fulfilled. So we're required to recognize the whole of that license revenue in the month we deliver it. So that does lead to some distortions, if you like. This isn't really a SaaS kind of model. So that when that license revenue is recognized, it can have an impact on the period to results depending on whether we recognize in month one or month six or month seven. Equally, coming back to working capital, the significance of that is that when we sign a new customer or we do a renewal for a three year renewal, we will build a whole of the first year in one lump sum.

10:49 And then similarly, at the first anniversary and second anniversary. So the billings fluctuate quite markedly month to month. So there will be months where we don't have any renewals, for example, or a new contract. We might build perhaps less than $500,000, and there'll be other months where we do have significant billings, which could be $5,000,000 or more. So the position we're looking at and the fluctuations that appear then really come down to the number of renewals and the number of new logos or sometimes some upsell as well in a particular period. So you will continue to see that fluctuate kind of market. And, of course, for this half year, it's been affected also by this large contract win with the hard high degree of hardware revenues. On the cash generated from operating activities, nothing of any significance. We have accretion and amortization, of course. We have share based payments.

11:42 And then moving down to investing activities, we have a very low CapEx requirement in business like most software companies. We also tend to capitalize a very small amount of r and d. Now, we would rather not capitalize R and D. We'd rather have a go through the income statement. We believe that gives you a much cleaner income statement. It's easier to understand. And we're also aware that, there is a reputation among software companies of capitalizing R and D to flatter the p and l and take costs out and capitalize them. However, under IFRS, we are required to capitalize a certain amount of r and d, and that comes down to sort of the nature of the r and d. We have an r and d spend typically in the year of around $2.22400000 pounds. And off that, we're capitalizing somewhere around sort of two, three, four hundred thousand pounds depending on the type of R and D that it is.

12:34 And then finally, on financing activities, we pay dividend. So this £856,000 in this period is the final dividend from the last financial year. You'll see it in comparatives. About this time last year, we had paid 6,200,000, and that was in relation to the special dividend we paid, which was 12.5p per share, roughly £5,000,000, and our cash balances were quite healthy at that time. Purchase of own shares. So we continue to have a share buyback program, and the reason behind that is principally to negate the diluted effective share options in LTIPs. This isn't a particularly proactive share buyback program, so we're not going out seeking shares, but they will be mocked up by our broker, typically at the end of the day. And as I said, we'll take those up to a certain level to, net off the effects of dilution.

13:26 So that brings us down to the movement in the period of £2,500,000 and the returns of 14.7. And that balance, as I said, fluctuates period to period as we look forward to the rest of the financial year with the billings that we've got now outstanding at the year end at the half year. And also as we look forward to the second half and the kind of the the nature of our billings typically being second half. So you've seen from previous things that we do have first half, second half imbalance, if you like, in that second half revenues are generally higher than first half revenues. That will never be $50.50. We're trying to move it to typically around $40.60. But what that also means is because a lot of those revenues are related to license, that's what gives us that bias towards the second half. And then similarly, with that recognition of the license and the renewals, that also means we have a high amount of billions in the second half. So typically, you will see our cash balance at the year end being higher than it is at the half year.

14:31 And that's it. Thank you. Before you you step down, Ash, we have a question that I think might as well just answer right now around software gross margin and our improvements. And that perhaps you could speak to what's included in the cost cycle and how you're calculating the gross margin for software margin currently. And can you also explain sort of how we view the margins across the various things that that come into software revenues? Sure. Thanks. So yeah. No. Good point. Good question. And it is important to sort of know the margins on each of our revenue streams because as you look forward to what coming might look like in three years' time and how the income statement will be affected, it's important to understand that. Now, the margins we have are fairly typical for software companies. So on a license, typically, you'd be looking at around 85% gross margin.

15:18 On support and maintenance, typically, you'd be looking at around 65 to 70% gross margin. And then on services, typically, you'd be looking at around 40%. And then for CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES, which we've introduced recently, you're also looking at a similar kind of support and maintenance kind of margin of around 65%. So the blended margin on software revenues, as I said, is in the high 60%, 68% or so, and it's approaching 70%. We'll go beyond that in due course. And the reason you'll go beyond 70% is that is that we sell more new logos as we do more upsell. The largest component of a new contract is license. So on a typical contract, we might have I mean, just taking numbers out of the air. For a million dollars a year, there might be perhaps sort of $7,800,000 of that is licensed, and that's high margin.

16:08 And then the other 300,000 would be a combination of the support and maintenance or service cloud and services as part of that. So that blended margin will increase because as we sign new logos, as we do more upsell on existing customers, the largest proportion of that upsell in that new new logos will be licensed. And so that increased that high gross margin licenses will increase our overall blended gross margin for software revenues. Does that answer it? Yep. Good. That does. Good. Cool. Thank you. Alright. Thanks, Adam.

16:49 Alright. Well, thank you, Ash. Appreciate the the background there. I mean, I think, hopefully, what you're getting a sense of is is where we're focused now. And I think there's nothing more out of boat than the fact that we only have one brand to market. Getting rid of or retiring, I suppose, is the better word, the deportee for name and aligning all the truths behind CELEBRUS candidly makes sense. Obviously, meeting with many of our investors, you know, that was a constant question. There were just some things that took higher priority. All of the system changes, the people changes, the fact that we've completely restructured the business in about nineteen months, built an entire new leadership team, and stood up a direct sales business, a new marketing department, etcetera. And we finally got down to the name change. And, yeah, here we are. Right? And so that that's the it's a it's a bellwether though. Because when I joined the business, it was five years ago yesterday nobody sent me a card, by way. But five years ago yesterday, I joined the business. And one of the first things that I was asked was which team I'm on. Right? Are you d four, t four, or are you CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES? I told the company this and I'll tell you all I hate that. Right? Because if you're if you're viewing yourselves as different teams, if you're viewing yourselves as different mentalities, all that does is take away from the momentum and and, you know, the business, it needed a strategy. It needed kind of a northern star to guide towards.

18:07 And for us, it's that we are a software business that sometimes sells services. And that is drastically different because everything that we do, everything that we invest in, all of our engagements with customers now. The sole focus is how do we sell more license to that customer. And obviously make them very, you know, happy with that and give them value and and in turn give their their consumers value as well. And our mission statement has also been quite cleared up. And hopefully, as many of you have been meeting with us over the last few rounds that Ash and I have been doing together in our one on ones, the brand is starting to get easier and easier to understand. But our mission is very simple. It's to improve the relationships between brands and consumers via better data. And so what does better data mean? Well, for us, and what you'll see when AMP comes up here and presents, it's about bringing our software, our people, and our processes, and in some cases, the environments that we're building and hosting To the forefront for the brands that we're partnered with, whether they're some of the top financial institutions around the world, top retailers around the world, health care in The US, travel, hospitality, telco, you name it. They all have a very core problem, and that core problem is their digital dataset is not up to par. They're not able to use digital data.

19:20 And for us, that's the massive opportunity for the CELEBRUS platform. And we continue to innovate that platform and you'll see some of that when Ann comes up here because candidly, he's got all the fun stuff today. You'll see our launch of CELEBRUS digital analytics. You'll see some of our machine learning. You know, you can't do a meeting without talk mentioning artificial intelligence at least 37 times, right, in a in a room these days. And for us, it's about how do we build models that take the data we're capturing for customers about their consumer interactions and help them find the needles in the haystack faster. Help them get value from the platform. And so everything that we've done, whether it's efficiency and process internally or externally and how we engage with customers, is designed around making CELEBRUS easy to use, making CELEBRUS easy to derive value from, and candidly make CELEBRUS easy to buy from.

20:08 Because when all of you over the years didn't understand our our our premise or what our business was doing, Now you can probably understand how confusing it was when we're trying to sell it as well. And and now we have a very straightforward sales process. We know we we know what pain points to listen for. And it's the benefit of our marketing investment and our sales investment over the last year that has helped us learn that. And we've taken that further. So as we've talked about for the last year, we've talked about land and expand from a sales perspective. Right? Which again is not rocket science. It's just something you should do when you're trying to sell software. So finding a pain point, selling them just that pain point, and then bringing in customer success to to work with that customer to help them understand all of the things they could be doing with our platform, and then ultimately upsell them and get them up and running on those things and get get to improving those relationships between brands and consumers even more so with some of the new features and functionality of CELEBRUS.

21:04 So that customer success team is one that we put in place this year. I'm happy to report that that team is doing fantastic. We've set up an international and a US based team to to work through our our accounts. And in the pipeline today, it's probably about 80% of our existing customers have some opportunity in the pipeline already for expanding their usage of CELEBRUS. The two newest features, CELEBRUS digital analytics and bot detection, which you'll see here shortly, are both already in use in organizations. Those features went live in the summer. That is incredibly fast for the history of this business to get customers up and running on new features and functionality. And that's the that's the MO. Right? Where the historically, d four t four was a company that tried to sell massive enterprise deals that could take a lot of time. Twelve, eighteen, twenty four months in some cases. What we're trying to do now is sell software that's still serves a very specific pain point and worry about the rest later. Because you it's a lot easier to sell to an existing customer than it is a new one. And so our goal is to shorten sales cycles to, on average, eight months.

22:05 So when we're looking at our our sales team's pipelines, we're hoping and looking to build a sort of a range of opportunities in the pipeline. Yes. There will still be enterprise deals in those pipeline, one or two per salesperson. But ideally, there's a significant number of of pain point sales that we can move much more quickly through the pipeline, and and that's ultimately the goal. And from a key win perspective, we called out several. We called out some upsells, but what I wanna focus on today is what we're considering a bellwether for the business. Sort of proves the things that we've been talking about. Our newest logo is a bank in The US that purchased the CELBRUS platform. They came to us through the website. So that shows the marketing and lead gen is starting to work as we've tested and we've been investing in those things. From the time they reached out to us till the time to close, because we now have systems that can track these things. It's amazing what you can do with beta.

22:56 It was under five months. It take about four and a half months to close. They purchased the CELEBRUS platform in CELEBRUS Cloud where we're hosting and managing it for them. And they utilized several fraud and marketing use cases out of the gate. They're not even fully implemented yet. And they're already talking to customer success about adding new features. So for us, that's that's celebrates. That's what we wanna be as an organization. That's what we're aspiring to be every day as we continue to make changes, as we continue to learn, as we continue to adapt. It's about listening to pain points, selling them those pain points, and driving that forward. I already covered some of these customer wins, but for us, it's it's CELEBRUS TOP. You know, Ash talked about sort of the the hardware revenue. We do have legacy customers where we're managing on premise environments for it that we've been managing for quite some time. There's good money in it. The margins aren't quite as high, and we'll continue to support those customers. But from a sales perspective, we no longer see an offer on premise as an option.

23:54 Now that being said, I'm a salesman at heart. So if the customer was to come in and say, we wanna buy your software but you have to put it on prem and they've got a check design, we will do it. But in the sales decks and in the presentations and in the way that we're pitching the software, CELEBRUS Cloud is primary option number one, and the secondary option would be the client's own cloud if they so choose. And that's it. And there's many reasons for that. And there's there's things that you wouldn't even maybe think about initially. But it goes all the way across the business by making this shift because it helps us better support our customers as well. It also helps us ensure that we've got our customers on the latest and greatest technology so that they can be early adopters of new features and functionality when we bring them on. There was a sort of undercurrent in the business of a lot of clients that have been on various versions of CELEBRUS.

24:42 It makes it very difficult to upsell them if we also then have to get them upgraded to the most recent version. By getting everyone on CELEBRUS Cloud, by having a standard offering that's fully automated and scalable with some of the amazing IP and development that our team has done to date to to bring that to life in a very short period of time. It enables us to turn these features on overnight for customers. You know, the the banking customer that that the new logo, they they have the ability to trial three features that they're interested in. They can just book them book them on like a switch for for three months. Let them let them see the value of it, turn them off, and then ask them if they want a table. Right? So for us, it's it's, you know, there's a lot of value there. So if we truly wanna improve the relationships between brands and consumers, it's what we have to do. We have to give brands the opportunity to see what this tech that we're bringing to the market can do for them. Give them the opportunity to see some of that value and then turn that into a commercial discussion that benefits all of you, all of us, and allows us to further develop our people, continue to develop our product, and candidly grow the business at an exciting level that we can rally around and get excited about.

25:48 You'll hear a little bit later as well, you'll hear in this room. I think everybody that's virtual will actually see the video based on the testing when they're on their laptop, but we will make sure that video is posted online so you can see the video if you so choose. Lee has a phenomenal background dedicated to Dio de los Muertos, you're so not gonna wanna miss that. He and I, as Ash points out, have ridiculous backgrounds in our video. Mine being wrestling action figures, which we can talk about later. But solution partners are a key element of our business.

26:16 This is relatively new. We talked a bit about it in the summer as we made the rounds in July. But for us, we continue to invest in technology partners. We have some fantastic technology partners. We're building integrations with technologies we're not even partnered with because customers have asked us to. But where we see lead gen is through solution consulting partners, solution integrators. And that's my background. Right? When I came out of university, I founded a consulting firm that built a business around helping technologies like CELEBRUS. That was where I first came across CELEBRUS. It was called Speed Drap back then, twenty seven years ago. And those brands, the Merkels, the CX forwards of the world, and some of the other partners that we've built, they're strategic advisors to customers. Right? They're telling them what can solve their pain points.

27:01 They're on the front lines. And so arming them with the CELEBRUS capabilities and forming partnerships like the one with Merkel that you'll hear about as last agenda item today, we see as more and more opportunities to build sales channels without investing

27:16 in sales channels. We can have solutions consulting partners out there who can build a service offering around CELBRUS, deliver all of those services, and help us scale, and simply help us sell more software. Then that's a great opportunity for us as a business, and that's why we're exploring. So the last thing I'll leave you with and then obviously we'll address questions later on. But before I turn it over to Anne, you know, you've heard me talk a lot about data. All the systems that we've put in place have given us phenomenal ability to not only visualize what's gonna close when and where the deals are, where the revenue is coming from, and what's already committed, etcetera, etcetera. But we also have the ability to to forecast that out. And with the current pipeline of visibility with deals that we're already in legal negotiations with now, we feel very comfortable about the outlook for the year and we're quite excited about it.

28:04 And we're also extremely excited about where we're taking this business. So hopefully you're sensing some of that. We are now a software company. We are we are all aligned behind one brand. We've completed several restructures to put the right people into the right places. And as a result, we've uncovered some phenomenal talent that needed an opportunity to shine. So we're really excited about where we're going. I'm thrilled about it. I always get asked, you know, what what are you trying to do with CELEBRUS? We're trying to take over the world. And in my opinion, our software is the best software backed by one of the most phenomenal engineering teams I've ever seen.

28:39 The people that are on the front lines that are delivering these projects care about our customers to the point where we get feedback on a weekly basis from customers saying that we're the only the only vendor that delivers on promises. And that's the type of vendor we wanna be. In many ways, we're being a software company that's anti software company. Right? Because we wanna be honest, ethical. We wanna deliver on our promises. But more importantly, we wanna align and put our great people on the front lines with our customers, get them access to software that truly can be game changing for them as businesses, and ultimately drive those better relationships with their consumers. So with that, Ant Yeah. I will tee you up, sir, if you don't mind. Yeah. And Godspeed. Good morning everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Ann Phillips, I'm CTO.

29:26 Maybe twenty minutes or so just to walk you through some of the new things which have come out in the last twelve months. A few slides, not too many, and then a couple of demos so you can see how it looks in action. Please ask questions as we go along.

29:42 Well where to start? So the best place to start is just to reiterate what Bill said a moment ago and at the start which we have a software product business, we're a software business, We are a sales led software business. And what that means is when we see an opportunity, we go after it. And that's really how to tee up the two things I'm gonna show you this morning. In the last twelve months, we've seen two clear opportunities.

30:06 One around digital analytics, which I'll talk about in a bit more detail in a moment, and also bot detection. Bot detection is one of those things that has lots of different names, nonhuman traffic, invalid traffic, that's the term that Google uses, bots for everyone else. I'm just going to walk you through those things and and why they are so interesting in the market at the moment.

30:31 Before I dive into too much detail, let's just set the scene for what CELEBRUS is. And it's actually these things. We don't talk so much now about CDP and FTP, some of those acronyms that become very confusing to people in industries. They've got, bent out of shape really for what they actually need. So we just talk about CELEBRUS now and all these capabilities and what the product can do. We can do a lot in marketing. That's our our heritage, of course, going back many years. Increasingly over the last three years, more and more in fraud. Banking customer that Bill mentioned a moment ago is right in there with a lot of fraud, interests and use cases they want to deliver really good for us. But also some other things, CDI for Salesforce is how we work with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, really strong partnership there. And CX Vault, our unique patented technology which allows our customers to work with their customers who have opted out. We've had all those privacy concerns, but they still need a relevant customer experience even though they've opted out to the data collection.

31:31 And then the really new thing over on the right hand side is digital analytics, CELEBRUS digital analytics CDN. And it's all built of course on the CELEBRUS platform, including the bot detection and that really comes back to something which we've been signaling for the last year or two really which is we've always had the best technology for making it really simple to collect rich data from visitors to companies, websites, mobile applications, and so on. We also want to start using that data more to add value to the business. And running machine learning models which detect bots is a valuable thing for the businesses we work with. Being able to provide digital analytics is a valuable thing that uses that data, use that platform. So it's about moving up the value chain if you want to think of it that way. It's not just about getting the best data. It's about activating it as well.

32:21 Okay. So where does CEA come into all of this then? And actually, there's a whole bunch of reasons in the industry which have made digital analytics a really interesting space to be in. And it's not lost on us the irony here, which is web analytics or digital analytics. It's something that was we originally got into as a company back in the days when we were called speech habits. Is twenty odd years ago before we back became CELEBRUS. That's where we started Outline, actually. And in the intervening years, web analytics became really uninteresting as Google and Adobe kinda took over the world. But now because of the changes in the privacy world, it's become an interesting space again, especially for a set of different industries like health care and insurance.

33:06 So actually, we've kind of gone full circle and it's become a a really big opportunity for us. This, quote here around the HHS, the health department of health and human services in The US, it was about a year ago they sent a letter to a whole bunch of health care companies saying, you cannot track using Google Analytics what your customers are doing on your websites and mobile applications. It is a breach of healthcare information to do that. It's a breach of personal healthcare information PHI. And that was such a moment in the industry that I don't think people fully realized how important it was that companies health care companies cannot use Google Analytics because they are disclosing health care information to Google.

33:52 Same goes for Adobe Analytics. And what that created was a sudden surge of interest which is now ongoing to have an alternative which has not happened in the last twenty years. It's a remarkable thing when these pivots happen in the industry. And that was it. And what's happened since then of course is a lot of interest and a lot of movement in the industry and it was followed up in July this year by a follow on piece of information guided, issued by the HHS which is to inform 103 companies you can search us up on the web where they went after specific companies now saying you are still doing this you need to stop doing it. So immediately there's all these companies who are panicking about how they're gonna get themselves out of this situation and this net is widening now. So at the same time they went after five tax advisory companies, Intuit being one of them, saying you're also disclosing confidential financial information by using or using Google Analytics on your website.

34:55 So to cut a long story short, all of that creates a really fabulous opportunity for us to provide a better solution for these sorts of companies. And that net, as I mentioned, is going to widen over time. Insurance could be next as a really good example. So we have a solution. We built it over the last twelve months. It's only available in CELEBRUS Cloud. We want to bring customers into CELEBRUS Cloud on our platform. And it provides a complete solution, a complete alternative to Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Companies who still want to run things in their own environment, we provide a solution then as well based around things in CELEBRUS Workbooks, which is how BI does. So whichever way the customer wants to attack, we can attack with them. Either they run it in CELEBRUS Cloud or we run it for them in CELEBRUS Cloud or they run it themselves in CELEBRUS Workplace.

35:49 And underneath it all, as I said a moment ago, it's CELEBRUS platform. So it has all those good things that we talk about, identity graph, accurate identity resolution, it doesn't use third party cookies, all those problems which are in the industry at the moment we don't suffer from those and the benefits of that is the company can use our solutions like CBA for example.

36:15 That's what it looks like then. Three different things a customer can pick and choose whichever ones they so choose. So like two of them the two on the left Tableau and Power BI and if they're running CELEBRUS in their own environment and they have their own reporting solution they want to do more advanced reporting, perhaps a bit more data savvy. For the other customers, they can use CELEBRUS digital analytics and we will run it for them and it's right out of the box. And the absolute benefit

36:40 of all of this is that it takes no work from the customer. It's not some big integration project. They just ask us for stand ups out of the swollen data starts flowing and they log in and it starts working. So there's no tagging, no effort. It's really out of the box from day one.

36:58 There's a bunch of sort of, screenshots. Well, I'll show you these. This is what the workbooks looks like actually if you're running Power BI or Tableau. Lots of nice, marketing friendly data visualizations around cohorts. You know, people who arrive on your site today and buy something when do they come back and buy something in the future. So the next cohort actually people never come back. Lots of different sort of analytics that marketers want to know how people arrive on the site. Do they come in from social media? Do they come in through affiliates? Are they just brand aware and search you up? Lots of different views

37:32 of our data and all this is just out of the box that's the real beauty of it it takes no effort to be up and running.

37:41 This is some of the newer stuff around cohort analysis I was just talking about. I won't show you the screenshots of CEH because actually I can just show you the video so you can see what the product looks like. So see if I can get this working. Right. This is this is CDA. So what you see here is kind of the opening page of the application. Essentially, our customer logs into this. It's running in CELEBRUS Cloud. They just streaming in here through their CELEBRUS instance. They don't have to do anything to make that work. They just do it all.

38:31 And the first page they arrive at this dashboard just gives them an overview of what's happening on their websites and on their mobile applications. Very familiar for marketers, nothing needed. So from a training point of view, it's all very straightforward. It's made to look like Google Analytics to give them a very easy transition. So when those healthcare companies come out of Google Analytics, they can just come into CDA and it's all very familiar for them. No great learning curve. So all sorts of things you might expect a marketer would be interested in, things like visitor maps and so on. This particular demo takes us off to Texas Health, one of our customers. We're gonna have a look at what it looks like on Texas Health. So I've arrived on their website and we'll just switch CDI across to their domain. I want to have a look at their visitors and once it refreshes you'll see you know, it's just one visitor. So it stops, this is just a test system. It's not, proper production traffic. So say you can start to see some things ticking up here. We've got some visits and so on. And then all these things down left hand side here allow us to allow the market to go and have a poke around and see what's happening on their website. We've got a real time view of visitors. This is this visit here. It's called a visit log. It provides a kind of real time view of what's going on on the website.

39:49 What I'm doing here is actually I'm gonna go and have a look at cardiovascular parts of their website and we're gonna see how that interest starts to reflect in CEA. Now CEA is two things it's both real time and aggregated data. Who visited last year? Did more people visit last month than this month? That's that's what digital analytics is all about understanding your audience. And here we see a real time usage down to an individual person. You can see some stuff here about how they arrived on the site, things that they're interested in and what I'm going to do on the website here is just really engage with this bit of content. Perhaps I really want to know more about cardiovascular health. So I'm having a look through the page here. CELEBRUS of course is monitoring or tracking all of this information. It's looking at what I am looking at on the website and that machine learning is allowing CELEBRUS to say right yes so ANTS is showing an interest in not only in patient services but also in cardiovascular products.

40:50 And that's a really key point. That machine learning is a real value add that the product can do. We can understand what people are engaging with and that becomes information that flows into CDA. Now at this point having found an interest in cardiovascular health I'm going off to see what am I going to pay for this so heading off to the health insurance marketplace and it's another part of the website. Of course from a marketing point of view people marketers want to understand the parts of the site they're engaging with. So here I am on the site looking at the health insurance marketplace and then we'll head back over to CDA and when I refresh this page you'll see that the list of signals these machine learning signals is not just that I'm interested in patient services and cardiovascular health but also I'm now interested in health insurance. So we're building that picture of every visitor what are they engaging with. Once that data is in CA it can be sliced and diced in just an extraordinary different way number of ways. How many people from East Coast Of The US are interested in cardiovascular products who are using iPhones?

41:54 That's the kind of capability that you can just take that data and reform it in a 100 different ways depending on what the marketer or problem marketer is trying to solve. Over on the left hand side here lots of different capabilities we can look both at the visitors in that real time visitor log where they're coming from in the world to start to look at what the site is doing. One of my favorite bits of the application is right here where you can do transitions. So this particular page, it's had 55 page views and you can see that where people come into it, it's probably a bit hard to read from the back there. So I'll just talk you through. You can see how people arrive on that page inbound and where they exit to. So all the way through the, website or mobile application, You can really understand how visitors are engaging with the website.

42:43 And it just goes on and on. There's absolutely wealth of capability down here. What people are searching for, people are downloading, also engagement, which is one of the areas that we really specialize in. So one of the disadvantages or one of the things that third party cookies really suffer from is returning visitors. People interact with websites from day to day or week to week. Third party cookies really impact the efficiency or efficacy of that. We don't suffer any of that. We really understand if I visit a website and come back three weeks later we understand it's still me and that really shows through in some of that returning visitors and the engagement with the website. The next few or next minutes or so just walks through a few different parts of the website. Acquisition, of course lots of marketers spend a lot of money on acquiring customers, understanding how people are actually spending their money from an ecommerce point of view. It covers all the things which you see in Google Analytics and a lot more where the value add of what we do shines through.

43:47 So this is looking at terms and goals, conversion events is another way of putting that. And this information down here allows the marks to drill down into as much detail as they need to and then just to draw this to a close. Media media is a really interesting one. So if you're a travel company of course you might really be interested in media presenting videos of where someone might want to go on holiday. From a retail perspective also really interesting but actually healthcare companies use media a lot. The reason they do that is to provide videos, kind of pre surgery videos for people to understand what they're about to go through. So that media section of CEA actually is going to see a lot of use from all different industries for very different reasons of course but still it's a really applicable part of the application for different reasons.

44:41 Okay that's CEA so in the interest of time I'm going to swiftly move on. Before I change tack completely, any questions on CDN? Anything not clear? Stunned silence. Okay, Cool. Think I think while you're switching tack Yeah. The the one thing I will say is this was an idea that we had eight months ago. Yeah. And it was in client's hands four or five months later. Something like that. So the the the speed of this is impressive. But it it's also and I touched on it, but I think it's worth really calling out.

45:26 I I built my my original consulting business, we made a lot of money off the complexity of the tools that we now compete against. In one day, we can have a client up and running on reports that would historically have taken them six to nine months to create. And we do it on the flip of a switch. And what's been really difficult for marketers and brands that have run into this third party cookie challenge is we we've had a few brands that that are are taking this on who came to us because they were in the dark. They had to turn off all their tech. They didn't know who was using their websites. They didn't know where the marketing investments and where that money was going. And they were, you know, candidly freaking out about it because it's not small amounts of money. You know, when you look at advertising budgets in the brands that we're that we're working with, in most cases, it's the largest budget in their business, even larger than R and D. So to to have to not have visibility into how those how those investments are performing is it's a massive business risk.

46:24 So so, you know, we we think this is a a great opportunity for us to to solve that. And it was expected because as we started to sell CELEBRUS platform as a direct business, right, you know, still obviously selling through partners, but going direct, we knew we would get more questions. We knew people would want to test the limits of CELEBRUS and perhaps have CELEBRUS do other things that maybe we weren't allowed to talk about because we were sitting behind a partner who wanted to sell their stuff instead. And so these types of opportunities never would have happened if we didn't start going direct and and start having those conversations with brands. Excuse me. Yeah. Does it take a lot of time to set this up in a customer and to train them to use it and to train the trainers? Yeah good question so just for the benefits on the people on the webinar the question is does it take a long time to a get set up from a customer perspective and also to train to use it. So capture the yeah. The answer is no to to both both questions. So, the only thing the customer has to do is to put CELEBRUS onto their website or mobile application, which is a really very straightforward thing to do. Data then starts flowing because we we don't need any integration. We just capture everything that their visitors or users of mobile applications are doing.

47:40 That flows into CELEBRUS and CELEBRUS cloud and then we package it up and present it in the dashboard. And it's intended to be really simple to use. So it's entirely, designed from the perspective of a marketer. So all the things which I was showing you there, there's a lot of things there. Marketers just understand that stuff. That's the world they live. They understand page views and downloads and search site search and these things. That's just what they they live and breathe every day. So the idea is that this is entirely self serve. We don't have to run a training program. CELEBRUS is kind of irrelevant if you want to the actual platform is kind of irrelevant if you want to be really brute about it because what matters is what I showed you in the demo there, which is their websites, their mobile applications, and then CEA where they see what's happening.

48:26 The fact that there's a whole bunch of clever tech in the middle which is doing stuff is neither here nor there. Their marketers get what they need and their website and mobile application is providing that kind of insight using CELEBRUS. So does that help? Yes it does, yeah. I know you're yes at the point of being able to just turn on your marketing spend and see increasing your clients demand for subresults. Yeah and it's a really interesting area of this because obviously this is pretty new, four or five months. We're not yet sure how many customers will only want c CDA, how many customers will want the full CELEBRUS data model and CDA, or how many customers will just want the the the CELEBRUS data without the marketing application on top. And actually, way we built this is that we can start at anywhere in that sort of spectrum, and then the customer can add on to it. So they might be an existing CELEBRUS customer, and then they add on CDA.

49:26 We might tempt them in over into through the door with CDA, and then they realize the value of the data, and they start getting more capabilities added on license after that. So it gives us such a range of different ways to navigate a particular customer wherever they want to start. They can start small and relatively, less expensive with CDA, then we grow them out over time. If it's an existing customer, we can add on CDA. So really really interesting possibilities. And it's the benefit of CELEBRUS Cloud because we have full control over this. And just as a reminder too, because we've said that a lot, It's a single tenant private cloud instance for each client. There's no shared architecture. So it's dedicated to them. They own it. They control it even though we manage it for them. So it passes all the security compliance tests in a way that other vendors can. And it's turned out to be really interesting in the sales side. Going back to your question about the marketing spend, there was a couple of CEA marketing campaigns that just went live, I think, a month and a half ago. And they're some of the most interactive content we've ever had in marketing campaign.

50:24 So there's interest for sure, right, that we're looking looking to harness. It's really difficult to market these days with compliance challenges. So that was a nice win for the marketers to get some excited and get the team sort of driving that forward. But from a sales perspective, it's been quite fun. Because we'll have someone come in wanting to talk about this and then, well, tell us about the rest of your platform. No. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna sell you this because this is what you need right now. Worry about the rest later. Like, we'll show you the rest later because the reality is somebody that buys CDA today, like 5% of the platform. So from a customer success perspective, it's just a natural revenue growth for us. And when we've got a customer success team incentivized on 20% year on year growth by selling deals like this, we're giving them the opportunity to achieve that. Right? Because they can literally go in and just sell them bot detection at that end or sell them, you know, something from full CELEBRUS. You know, it doesn't doesn't matter. Some of fraud use case. You know, the way that the team has architected this in such a short period of time, this fully enabled sales to just pick from a menu and say this is what we're selling this customer and we have it all automated behind the scenes to get it up and running to the point where, you we're we're going through this with a with a new customer where they were they were deciding between us hosting and them hosting.

51:39 Then they saw the time lapse. And we could turn the system on in four days from contract signature. Fully light screen, ready to run. Their internal IT team said it would be eight months. So some of these things are no brainers. Right? And it you know, it's it's it was a natural move for us to to move to the ground like this because nobody knows our tech better than us. And and, you know, people are going to look at tech and think, oh, it's gonna take a long time. I was on a call yesterday where we're in final stages with another client where they were claiming it was gonna take thirty days to deploy CELEBRUS on their website, which is an absolute joke. Right? But fortunately, that's the only thing they have to do and we're doing the rest. Right? So it does really help us move much more quickly to the value story. And it means that we can get potentially two or three bites of the apple from new customers in the same year that they've signed.

52:26 If they're seeing that value more quickly, they're trusting us as a vendor more quickly, then we can go in and start talking to them about other features and functionality that we have across the platform. Right? Sorry. Maybe it's a question for you possibly. What level of ARR would you expect to generate from that product? You know, from an ARR perspective, our starting points now in the pain like a pain point plan and expand pain point deal, whether it's CDA or something else, start in around the 2 to 300,000 US range on average starting. We've got customers that have been with us for six, seven, eight years where that number has grown to 7 figures a year. So, you know, for us, we've proven that we can grow the customers. We know we can deliver value. So it's really just getting these these things where we can, you know, bring in more new logos, make it more exciting as a software business and do it quickly.

53:16 Cool. Cool. Cool. Okay. I'm just gonna rewind because I want to, just come back to this before I talk so that I can talk about bot detection, nonhuman traffic. Very different world, much more data science, data focused, machine learning focused. Bot detection is something that lives in the core platform and the reason it lives in there is because it's applicable to all of those things on top of it. You may think well how does bot detection make any difference to the marketing world or how does bot detection make any difference to the forward world and I'll talk about that. And the reason it's so interesting is because one of the points or proof points efficacy as analysts like to call it around bot detection for retailers in the marketing space is that typically somewhere in the order of 20 to 30% of traffic coming to retail websites are POPs.

54:07 And then you think about all the impact that has on the way that marketers measure what's happening on their websites. It's really impactful. So 30% of those visits to their websites are not actually human traffic. They might be paying for it still, there's a great deal of pay per click fraud out there, ad fraud which is a different thing we'll talk about in a moment, but nonetheless for marketers bots are just as much of a problem as the fraud world. And in the fraud world bots are how forced us break into websites. This is a whole sub industry in the dark web of buying stolen credentials or breached credentials and then using bots to try and get into people's bank accounts. So for a criminal I might buy a million breached accounts on dark web and then I use those usernames and passwords to try and get into their bank accounts a different website. That's how that kind of cycle of fraud typically happens and the way they operationalize it at scale because you couldn't really have people going through cycling through a million different breach credentials is to use bots and that's a bit of software that basically cycles through the breached credentials just trying them one after another until they find someone who's used the same password on their bank account as they used on their retail website or whichever website had their data breached.

55:28 So if you want to think of that as a warning not to use the same password on your banking websites that you do elsewhere, please do take it that way. That is really a bad thing to do because as soon as soon as data breach happens then your bank account is at risk. So let's, scan forwards and, just one slide and then a video. So why have BOTS become an interesting thing? It's always a good question to ask. Certainly the reason why we got into CBA is because of those industry changes. So why why is BOTS an interesting thing now? And actually it's for very different set of reasons and most of it is technology driven rather than market driven like the CBA changes around privacy. It's actually really simple to create bots.

56:13 If you go to chat GPT and ask it create me some software which can be a bot it will quite happily there's far too soon to read but essentially that's what's happening in that prompt over on the right hand side. It will write you some of the most fantastic code which just acts as a bot which fires up the browser, visits the website, puts username and password in, transfers some money out and just do that all day every day hundreds of thousands of times a day. You scale out to a server farm and you've got millions happening every day. You can just scale these things up so quickly that the barrier to entry for fraudsters is getting so low now because this technology is out there. You can buy software packages which are, like four GPT. If you search up four GPT, it's a fraud package based around generative AI.

57:03 It's all becoming so easy which means that the websites our customers are the targets. So therefore, the defenses need to be upped accordingly to to battle off this nonhuman traffic. There are actually some other interesting things happening around the world around bots. Bots used to be very much based around servers. I'd stand up the servers of fraudster and they would just bat away trying to break into different websites. Some of these, malwares that you may have seen in the industry like the Genesis marketplace, They are running on people's computers with malware. So it's the computers, the end user computers, your computers and mine, which are actually trying to break into websites, not a sort of central server farm so much. That's still there, but it's distributed, bots running on end user devices.

57:52 It makes them much harder to spot because it's not just one or two of these servers, it's everywhere. It's everyone's end user devices which are where the bots are running. So that means, where they used to live in data centers now these bots are everywhere. They're on their end user devices. They look just like real users. They are a browser. They log into a website. They have cookies. Looks just like you and I do when we visit our banking website. They behave just like regular users do. They don't just go straight to the login page and try and log in those stolen credentials. They kind of browse around, show an interest in some special offer and then they try and break it. So they hide in plain sight by looking just like regular users. And of course what really is driving this is that this isn't small money anymore.

58:38 These systems are scaling up to millions of dollars every year. So it's become organised crime. It's not just a little bit of money here and there. We are talking very big money and that's driving a whole business around bot detection and it's just as relevant for marketers as I said as to the fraud prevention folks. So with that backdrop I'm just going show you how it works. So this video starts actually I'll just fast forward a little bit. That should that'll do. You probably know our background in Fortnite is these use cases.

59:26 They are all relevant. They haven't actually changed over the last couple of years. What has changed very much in what we're doing in Ford is how we talk about the product. We've really refined especially this year how we talk to people about what we do in Ford. It's very different in marketing. Marketing, it's all about revenue, acquisition, how do we drive more traffic to our website. In fraud, it's all about cost. It's about managing that operational cost of fraud. Can't get rid of it all, so just managing it to a certain level. And that's something which bots very much plays into because once people find a way into your site using bots, they scale it up very quickly. So they need the right tools and the right data, of course, which is where we come into this to be able to kind of block it and deflect it. So these use cases just as relevant as they always have been. So what I'm doing here just to give you a bit of an idea of what behavioral biometrics which is one of our core technologies looks like in the in that forward world is going to First Direct and we are logging in. So this is, regular First Direct website, sitting behind this is CELEBRUS and our fraud detection.

1:00:33 Now I just need to, pause here because there's a bunch to explain here. So this application is a case management tool. This is the sort of software that's used the world over by SWORD investigators as a place to just work cases, suspicious activity, hacked accounts, other things which need investigating. They use these kind of workforce management tools, case management tools all the time. This is one which is just actually an open source product called the Hive. We've integrated it with CELEBRUS. And what's happened here is when we were tracking that visit to First Direct, we were able to use behavioral biometrics to verify that visitor is who they say they are. And that's what's happening here. This identity verify is just saying we know who this person is and they are behaving exactly like they normally do.

1:01:21 We wouldn't normally create a case to say everything's good. A case is normally something bad, but for the purposes of demonstrating what the product does, it just helps to kind of walk that through. And all these little blue things here, these are all risk indicators. In the parlance of fraud investigators, they talk about risk indicators. What are the risky things about this visitor? Are they coming from a different part of the world? Have they bought a new device that looks a bit suspicious? All of those things get captured under this term risk indicators. So everything's good about that particular visit. It really was me logging into First Direct. What happens now in the video is that we change tap and we visit first direct again, but this time we change a few risk indicators so that it is a suspicious visit.

1:02:07 So back on the website, new visitor. It's kind of tricky to identify it because it's exactly the same computer which is actually doing the fraudulent behavior, adds a bit of a difficulty factor to it. But nonetheless, we're kind of logging in. We've set behind the scenes a few things about this visitor that look really suspicious to CELEBRUS. So we'll go ahead and try and log in. Meanwhile back over in CELEBRUS we have detected that this is a suspicious activity and the account has potentially been hacked. And that's all done through behavioural biometrics. That's the technology that underpins it. As well as providing a bunch of information about the account that's been hacked, various other interesting things we provide to the fraud analysis tool, a whole load of other things as well.

1:02:52 So now let's having figured out how to break into an account, let's scale it up. This bit of software that you see on the right here is called CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES And it's a very typical kind of software that forced us to use to operationalize bots. It is a piece of software that simply acts as a real person. And that sequence of things which is probably far too small to read there are a set of actions it's going to do. So what CELEBRUS is it fires up a browser and then it starts doing a repeated set of actions to say, alright. Let's go to the home page of first and then we'll kind of pretend to be a normal user for a while. And then we'll go to the login page. We'll take some of those stolen credentials and put them in username and password. If we break in, then we'll try and add a payee and transfer some money out to a Google account.

1:03:40 And it'll just keep doing that minute after minute, hour after hour, all day long. TECHNOLOGIES So what you're gonna see when I click go is exactly that. That's Kicks up a browser. Now this is not the first direct direct website. I'm running a bot against first direct just for the purposes of the demo. It would've been a mean thing to do. So this is our own website, so that's why it looks a little bit different. But, basically, it's doing exactly as I said. It's doing a series of things, which are just hiding in plain sight and showing a bit of interest in car insurance, messing around with the mortgage calculator. Sooner or later, it gets to the login page. And over on the left here, this is simply a real time log of what CELEBRUS is seeing that visitor do. That data is being captured in real time. It's being evaluated in real time using behavioral biometrics.

1:04:31 So in amongst all these detailed events of things that the visitors clicked on and where they've navigated to, all these little biometric risk indicators saying that CELEBRUS is evaluating this visitor and seeing if the machine learning says, you know, there's really something sketchy about this visitor. We need to raise a case in that case management tool. What the, bot is doing now is trying to pretend like a regular user, you know, not not progressing too fast. Computer bots tend to progress through certain parts of the site too quickly which makes them very easy to spot. So it's kind of taking a sort of slightly laissez faire attitude, working its way through the website, flapping around a bit like, users generally do. And actually, it's hit jackpot. So in this particular example, it's guessed the username and password and it's got into the account. And now what it's doing is gonna add a payee and try and transfer some money.

1:05:24 So at this point, the Forrester's really having a good time. They found an account that they can compromise and they can start to figure out how to get money out of that account. The actual break in mode was the hard bit. Those million different credentials probably only 0.1% of them are actually valid for getting into any given bank that they found them just through that automated process. Meanwhile, back over in the hive, in our case management tool, it's correctly spotted that an account has been hacked. And rather like I was saying with CDA, we often don't talk about CELEBRUS or show CELEBRUS much. What we talk about is the website First Direct and the case management tool because those are the things that the customer really cares about. The fact that there's a bunch of clever stuff in the middle, we're figuring it all out, it's neither here nor there. What actually matters is what fraud investigators are gonna see, and that's the case management tool. They're gonna see that an account has been compromised.

1:06:21 And in many of the banks that we deal with, are quite small teams. You you think there's kind of 100 or a 150 people dealing with fraud. That's that's really not the case. Often, it's just two or three people. So if you bury them in false positives of, like, 50 false positives a day, they're just never gonna be able to spot the needles in amongst all the all the haystack. So it has to be accurate and it has to be really sure of which accounts are being compromised so that those small teams of people can actually kind of follow-up on the right cases. And that's why you absolutely need the best data to kind of figure this out. So that's it. CDA bot detection. Any questions? Anything else you'd like me to walk through here? Just a broader question around when you announced what used to be the FTP.

1:07:13 I think you talked about finding partners in fraud management software. It looks like you've booked into case management. I'm just wondering that ecosystem of because obviously, the signals that your software generates, they are not useless, but they use it without decisioning or actioning type software attached to it. I'm just wondering how is that sort of ecosystem build out and perhaps that new customer you've won, how does it work? Just curious. Yes. For those of you virtually, just to hear, the question was more around the vendor partner network with fraud and what that's shaping up like in in organizations. It's gonna sound a bit cruel, I suppose, but we don't care so much. Because what we found is it as we've evolved and that kind of alluded to, we've really evolved our pitch even more so going into this year as we've as we circled who who presented a couple years ago at Capital Markets Day.

1:08:10 It's gotten really engaged with customers. It varies so much from customer to customer what they're using internally that it more matters about what we do and showing them things like this, bringing it to life in a more end to end scenario, they're able to pick paint the picture for us. So we do have some vendor partners. We have folks that we continue to work with like Quantexa. We have some others in the background that we're building and we're exploring selling together with and that will always continue to turn on. But we're not waiting on that. You know, for us, the platform and the data that we can provide, it's working. You know, even in the spot detection, which is live, I think, in four clients right now, you know, which for us is a lot in a short period of time since launch. Right? For those of you that have followed us for a long time. They're seeing some pretty alarming results, upwards of 30% of their traffic being non human.

1:09:00 You know, that for marketers, where they're potentially paying, you know, Google advertising or paying their agencies millions of dollars for some of that traffic, that's a significant return on investment just from turning our platform on because it gives them all the data they need to prove that the traffic's invalid and and get various refunds or rebates or whatever the case may be from that. So for us, it's really interesting. We're with the head of prod recently in one of our banks. And when when he came into the room, he did not ask who we integrate with or anything like that. He goes, I have two questions for you that I care about. One, can you do this in the in real time in the moment? Which that just exhibited. So we showed him that. He goes, great. He's like, can can I actually get the data?

1:09:46 Because a lot of the platforms out there are black boxes. And when the environment's moving so quickly, when things are changing so quickly, a black box isn't helpful if what's inside that box isn't looking in the right places. Right? Because it may not pick up that that was just the same exact brow like, browser on the same exact machine suddenly taken over by a fraudster. There are so many nuances to those things with how quick that moves. And the minute something get gets published, fraudsters move on to doing something else. So you're you're in a constant game of catch up if you try to focus on that. So it's a bit more long winded, I I wanted to cover a few of those points because they we are expanding partnerships. We're exploring that. We have consulting partners as well that we're working with in the broad space and we'll continue to do that. And but for us, partnerships now, it's about lead gen. It's about having something that we can sell and bring to market together. It's not just a handshake to throw all of those next to each other. Right?

1:10:43 So it you know, when we announce formal partnerships, it'll be because there's formal business value use cases that we're selling in the market. The rest will just show up as logos on our website or in some of the collateral or in some of the videos or in some of the demonstrations that we publish with that, if that helps and makes sense. But you're agnostic to which sort of case of fraud management Absolutely. What you're seeing here with with Hive, it it kinda goes back to the selling. It's a really good example of what Ant and team have done to support sales. Because again, as we're selling direct, customers wanna see end to end more. Know, they don't just wanna see the data. Because sometimes, unless you're really data savvy and you live and breathe it all day, like, you might wonder how you're going to use it or it might feel overwhelming.

1:11:28 So we've started to build these these very specific demos that can be repeated by the sales team and the sales team can play this video and can explain it today to you. Right? And and the point being is it shows end to end value. It shows the data coming to life. It helps people understand what that great tech that CELEBRUS has does. But to Anne's point, we don't sell the tech. We're now selling the the value and the pain point. Right? And we're showing how it can be done. We're not really we're not going in and tooting our own horn to talk about how great all the tech is that does it. Right? Because then all we're doing is is pontificating what we need to be selling. Right? So it's it's a it's a fundamental difference. But I love this example because it shows you some of the things that that AMP and team have innovated out, thinking outside the box on how we how we sell value story of what we do in fraud. Because the minute we show that to anybody in the fraud department, they get it. You know, we don't need to worry about their lingo because they will talk. The minute they see this, they just start talking.

1:12:23 Our sales decks, we don't have them. They have like three slides that we keep just in case. We go straight into the product showing things like this just to get them up and running. Because candidly, when we talk to people, you know, if I was to sit you down for a forty minute sales call and I start to tell you all the things we do, you're gonna think I'm lying. Because it's it's you're gonna think it's black magic or it's smoke and mirrors. You're not gonna think you're not gonna believe that it can do that. But the fact that we can demo it on us on the customer's website, show them what it would look like if they deployed it tomorrow using all the fancy things that Ant and team have built over the years. It's a really powerful statement. So ours we don't have sales text anymore. We don't use them. We just go straight into conversation. We listen. We show them the text. We see what we see what resonates.

1:13:12 The next using First Direct as an example, the next security stage would presumably be two factor authentication. Does that mean they then focus less on this because that that removes that security risk? So two factor authentication introduced description into the customer journey and that applies just as much to retail websites as a good example. So in Europe we have 3DS which is where you see the kind of in the screen pop up saying approve this on your phone. As an example 3DS is not used in The US at all because it introduces too much friction in the customer journey, customers drop out. Revenue is more important than fraud.

1:13:58 You also have to think of it as that trade off. And the consequence of that is that actually there's a middle ground which CELEBRUS enables which is, sure don't use 3DS or don't use 2FA whatever the business policy is, but at least know which accounts have been compromised or even do something more selective. So where there is clearly an account in jeopardy then use 3DS for that point in time. So rather than pushing everyone through that friction just take those very high risk situations and put them through it. It provides a much more tailored approach to that kind of risk and that means you can actually adjust that threshold depending on the businesses appetite for risk at any given point in time. If they're trying to drive down forward that will cost revenue. It will push people away because they haven't got their phones at hand when they're checking out whatever that kind of situation is.

1:14:55 But they can still push down forward but taking that kind of consequence of lowering revenue. If the push from the business is to get more revenue and to kind of aside from any forward consequences, then that threshold can go up and they can make that decision. So it creates a really agile business that can manage forward in a very dynamic way. It also highlights some elements of the platform that we didn't really start to promote a ton because we were behind partners solely until we launched CX vault as an experience changing capability in the platform. So CELBRUS can intervene. So if we see something like this happening, I'll give you an example. We have a customer that, you know, if that was happening and they've determined through CELBRUS that perhaps your account's been compromised, they just remove the transfer buttons from the screen.

1:15:48 Right? It seems simple. Right? But, you know, doing that and pushing a pop up that gives a phone number to call is enough to stop the fraudster and move them on to the next one. Right? So there's there's several things you can do that sell this. And you'll see us talking a lot more about, but it's it's that intervention capability in front that's quite interesting because we can go end to end. We can report it. We can provide the data to verify why it was happening. And as the customer gets comfortable with the results and the accuracy of that as they deploy it, they can then start to do things with it right within CELEBRUS so that it doesn't even have to get to the case management team right away. It can just block the transfer right out of the gate. And actually, there was a there was a LinkedIn post not too long ago that if you follow us on on LinkedIn, I urge you to do it if you haven't.

1:16:34 We share the heck out of it because it was someone's mother that ran into a situation where her account got got intervened with as she was buying a I remember correctly buying a home And it blocked the money transfer that had been hijacked and saved her hard earned money that she would not have seen, you know, ever again. Right? Because there's there's once it's gone on a wire transfer, it's gone. So, you know, the the use of CELEBRUS data and some of our vendor partners, back to your question, Kai, enable the ability to stop that transfer. Yes. Can you just give us a sense of some of the signals that were being picked up? If I go back a couple of years, I think you were talking about things like, you know, the location of the device, but I'm just interested to how that's moved on in the last couple of years. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So the question is both risk indicators and the data behind it how has that changed over the last year or two And the answer is we carry on growing the house. So what we originally started with is a pretty rich set of indicators, the sorts of things which you might, think of are things like where someone's coming from in the world, their geolocation, things like the kind of device they're using.

1:18:00 And of course these things do evolve over time. You know, we find new phones, we find new laptops, we get new laptops and so on. So the risk of the hedge do do change and actually the data we collect does change as well. So we have support for kind of pencils, like on tablets, really granular biometric data. But these things are all indicative of how someone uses a device. So for example, a piece of data. One data point which is incredibly predictive scams is is the person on a call when they're doing a money transfer. Because in in almost all scams they're being coached through some sequence of action which they wouldn't really want to be doing. So they have a very persuasive person saying, yeah, I'm with your bank.

1:18:45 Just kind of go here and you're gonna get a phone a code sent to your phone in a moment coming back to the to if they just take that code and put it into the website. They've been coached through it. Actually, if they're on a call, that's a really predictive data point whether a scam is in flight at the moment in time. So we added a call status information, the kind of network that a mobile phone connects to. It's pretty stable. Like, I have a home network, as I'm sure lots of you do too. That network has a name, and that's a pretty stable piece of information. Fraudsters try to hide where they're coming from by changing these things. So all of these sorts of data points gradually evolve over time as we learn more about how fosters work and how we can collect the right data to kind of subvert or deflect what they're trying to do.

1:19:35 So a lot of a lot of biometric data is the short answer and quite low level granular data which helps us understand the device and how it's being used and what the visitor is doing or what the user is doing with it. The joke that that happens in my household, which my wife will love that I'm saying this publicly at Capital Markets Day, is that had Ticketmaster had CELEBRUS, fans would have gotten more Taylor Swift tickets. So so that that's the the reality of it because we would have identified that those weren't people and we would have stopped that from happening. The opposite to that is I can't get to one particular ticket cycle access because it's convinced I'm a bot. Well, they're probably using bad time then, so send them our way as well. We'll get the good time. How many children's just you?

1:20:26 Excellent. Yeah. Cool. Alright. So so while we try to tee up the the half working video, I'll just give you a bit of a backdrop. This is the last part of our agenda, and then we'll just open the floor for questions and obviously to hang out in the room afterwards as well. So this is a gentleman named Lee Kitsu in Merkel. He'll he'll introduce himself here in a moment on the black screen for those of you in the room. Those of you on the devices at home, you'll you'll see the video just fine. And with Merkle, we've launched and they they came to us actually. And I've I've got a a long history with Merkle. Years and years and years ago, I trained the web analytics team like like fifteen, eighteen years ago. They've gone a long way. They've got thousands of customers around the globe. They're they're required by Dentsu, one of the largest global agencies in the world.

1:21:12 And they're out on the forefront trying to help clients better manage and measure and optimize their their ad spend and their marketing investments in a world where all of these cookies are falling apart and going away. So they were quite intrigued by the CELEBRUS software and they, with us, have jointly built a program that you'll see a lot of marketing about coming. This is the first time we're talking about it publicly, but it's called CXM signals. I don't name things. They do. But this signals, Leo walked through. He's gonna give you a bit of an intro and background on him. He's gonna talk a bit about their five challenges and sort of what led them to CELEBRUS. He's gonna talk a little bit about what intrigued them about CELEBRUS. He'll talk a little bit about the offering. And then he'll he'll wrap up and talk a little bit about the verticals as well that we're going after and which ones are grounded. But we're excited about this because we think this is kind of the bedrock of what we wanna do with solution integration partners.

1:22:07 Right? We we wanna find something that they're quite good at, where they're the strategic advisor for brands, bring our software in as part of that story and let them go sell it with us there at the table to help explain the tech demonstrated like you've seen Anthony do today. But ultimately, let them build an entire service program around it. So for us, it's great exposure. It's obviously a great opportunity for us to sell software, which at this point, hope you understand is all we're trying to do. I think I said it like 30 times today. And ultimately, it gives them the ability to be profitable while allowing us to expand without having to scale up a massive services business. Because they can be the ones putting the wrapper around everything, get helping clients get value from CELEBRUS and all we have to do is just keep the lights on. So that's kind of the benchmark of where we're going. As we mentioned some other ones in the in the update on Monday that went live, like CX Forward.

1:23:01 And they're a great example of a regional partner that specializes in a very specific area. They they do decision. So like the TEGAs, the Adobe's, and the Salesforce's of the world, helping with the same cross channel decisioning to pick what you see and where you see it based on the devices that you're using and what they know about you. Right? And so for them, they're packaging up CELEBRUS as the gap that's missed the part that's missing which is the data piece. Right? So you'll see a lot of these coming from us as we as we form these. We'll have regional versions. We've had some regional partners throughout Europe and APAC for for many years that were getting up and running on some of the latest and greatest and revamping some of their offerings. Then you'll see some of the large global players like Merkle entering the mix as well with very specific offers. And again, it's kinda like having another sales team without having to invest in another sales team. So it's a win win. We're really excited.

1:23:53 I love the way Miracle thinks about the world, and so I think I've probably set enough, and we'll just let Lee tell you. Hello everyone, my name is Lee Fitzhugh, I'm from Merkel. I've been with Merkel now for twelve years. I've worked in the industry for twenty seven years. My role at Merkle is to head up a capability, which we call Datamartech. It's quite nice. So what we do is we work with brands to help them collect, create, consolidate their customer data. We then expose that data to various different marketing technologies and then ultimately then our clients then use that marketing technology to then deliver compelling experiences for their customers.

1:24:47 In terms of Merkle, we are part of the Dentsu Group. Dentsu are one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. We're the largest agency in Japan and we're the fifth largest advertising agency network worldwide. From a Merkle perspective, there's a singular sentence that describes what we do. It's a little bit of a tongue twister, but we connect, create and curate intelligent experiences that empower individuals, build brands and transform businesses. So if you wanted a single sentence to describe what we do and that's it. What we do at an umbrella level is we help brands go through their data and digital transformations Ultimately, that's around delivering a customer experience transformation.

1:25:45 Now that's a really interesting topic because that's obviously brands evolving and changing to deliver what's best for their customers, And that's in an environment where today in 2023, pace of change is greater than ever before. Business average always had to change, but at the moment the pace of that change is accelerating. If we think about some of the things that have been going on in the world recently, had the Covid pandemic, we had the Ukraine Russia war, and then recently we've had the explosion around generative AI which everybody's talking about. So these things that happen at the micro level, meaning that organizations brands are having to change all the time with that, and what we do is we work with those brands to try and adapt through that and ultimately make sure they stay very relevant with their customers.

1:26:42 As I mentioned, one of the key things here is around customer experience. I think this is really critical so some really interesting stats that really perhaps amplify why customer experience is so important. There was a recent study that suggests that 73 of consumers agree that if they have a great customer experience it helps their buying decisions and actually they'll be willing to pay more as many as much as 67% to 16% more as a premium on the price because the fact they feel so connected and engaged with that brand. So I think that's huge. However, here's the other thing that I think is really interesting there 32%, so almost a third of consumers will walk away from a brand they love if they have one bad experience.

1:27:31 So that's why this is so important that organisations go get this right, they go through the right data and digital transformations and they're constantly evolving to deliver those great customer experiences. The last thing I'll just say on this, to build on that point around speed of change and having to respond to change. 40% of CMOs think the most significant challenge right now is understanding the difference between temporary and permanent shifts in consumer behaviour. And a really key and important way that brands can then make sure they're mitigating against that is understanding, knowing their customers and understanding their change in behaviour. Well, I think that then goes back to what is it we're trying to solve for our customers and brands.

1:28:26 So what we're trying to do there, so this is going a little bit deeper on that theme I mentioned a moment ago around data transformation and to a certain extent digital transformation. We speak to lots of brands and they're in a situation where they perhaps have limited first party data and their first party data is perhaps not connected well enough, it's not of the right quality and ultimately what that's driving is that customer knowledge. So we can see that for that particular customer, CELEBRUS can help us to collect that data at scale and actually start to build up that customer knowledge and also build that first party data asset, either because there's a huge gap and it needs to be built up from the ground up or to make sure that first party data asset is constantly being refreshed, maintained and scaled.

1:29:19 I think the next area is around knowledge of customers from a recognition perspective. So I guess these are the two sort of key foundations of identity, if you like. It's how much you know about your customers and then your ability to recognise customers, which should obviously then lead into addressability. So we see lots of challenges where there's a process where visitors will come to brands and their digital assets at the beginning and they may be unknown. There's a path to then drive them to a situation where they are known, but it's about optimizing that journey. It's about making sure that we can get to that known state as quickly as possible and break down all the barriers along the way. There's some key facets that I'll come on to shortly within CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES that certainly help that.

1:30:06 The next thing that we're seeing is the fact that to actually create a great customer experience there's a little bit of what's old is new here. So if you think about going back quite a long time now, there used to be a situation where consumers would go and buy perhaps a much smaller shop. In those days it would be a shop because the websites and online was not an option that wasn't available. And when you go to buy in that shop you would have a real one to one relationship with that shopkeeper. That shopkeeper would know you by name, they'd perhaps know some of your buying habits, they'd know some of your buying traits and that would actually feel like a really great personal experience with a human being.

1:30:52 Fast forward to 2023, we would like to now mimic that type of customer experience, the depth of that customer experience when you're speaking to a brand feeling like you've got that one to one experience, but we now need to do that at scale and obviously in a digital environment. So that's where by using the data that we're collecting using tech manager like CELEBRUS, we can actually feed that into activation tools and decision tools that can look at all the different permutations of products, offers, content and just serve that up in a way that it feels really personal, really connected to you as an individual. So that's really key. And I guess the last facet really here measurement, which is super important. So as we drive brands forward to creating better customer experiences, driving outcomes, it's really important we can measure that accurately and with really well connected data and identity that we can collect through these type of tools and solutions, can get to more direct attribution and more accurate measurement.

1:31:58 So I think this is kind of really an extension really of how we can start to hit some of the gaps that we have in the market today and some of the customer struggles but using technology such as others. As I've mentioned, ultimately what we're trying to do is drive outcomes for the brands that we're working with. So we want to drive outcomes like greater understanding of our brand's customers. We want to drive outcomes around orchestrating timely relevant experiences and we want to help our brands drive greater engagement with their customers. So we've come up with this offering that we're calling CXM signals.

1:32:46 So foundationally customer experience management so that term and that theme that I've mentioned a few times now. We've honed in on signals. It's not the only facet of this solution, but those signals are really key because it's those signals in customers' behavior and how they interact with brands that allow us to then trigger and curate those really great and compelling experiences. So really what CXM signals is bringing together is the CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES and the Merkel services. And really where we see those two things intersecting is the Merkel services trying to then very quickly and rapidly deliver those priority use cases that ultimately drive the outcomes that I already mentioned. If we take that down a level, already spoke about the fact that one of the key facets of CXM signals is helping brands collect first party data and identity and that's all about informing and driving these personalised experiences.

1:33:44 It's also about maximising customer identity, so that's going to be a key facet of CXM signals, allowing brands to really recognise customers from loan to unknown, as already mentioned, optimising and accelerating that process, and maximising customer knowledge and customer memory. I think that's a term that you and I have used before and I think that's really important. It's allowing brands remember their customers in an intelligent way so that they can then talk to them and really make sure that they feel that affinity with the brand. So that's super important. So ultimately, you know, that's coming together to then drive the experiences. The other thing that's super important is most of the brands we're working with nowadays are not working with a blank sheet of paper, so they've already invested in some level of technology to support what they're doing in this space.

1:34:34 The challenge there is that those in order to maximize the value from those tools and those technologies you need to be feeding them with the right level of quality curated data. So I think that's another way that CXM signals can help ground zero. It's really feeding existing whether it's data platforms or marketing technology or ad tech, serving up the right data to those in really timely manner. The other thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet, but I think is super important is it's all about outcomes. It's data value, it's delivering tangible business outcomes, priority KPIs as fast as possible and I think there's some facets of this solution. So again, what CELEBRUS can do out the box and then the power of the Merkle services and our expertise to really help brands to get to that speed to value fast.

1:35:25 Some of the things that I think are super important in terms of the CELEBRUS technology there are the tagging free capabilities. So that really allows us to deploy the technology in a brand's digital environment across their websites and apps really quickly. There's out of the box functionality that allows us to then get really, really close to those outcomes and those use cases. It's the true real time capability to ensure the fact that the customer data is available in the moment? In the moment is super important because if you're trying to create those compelling experiences, the data needs to be available to create those experiences right here, right now when I'm engaging with the brand. And then I've already touched on how important decision is at the moment so the fact that you've got that marketing brain so that you can mimic that one to one interaction even though in reality it's something that you're doing at scale to many many customers.

1:36:19 We see that the CELEBRUS out of the box functionality around decisioning and those rules based decisions is a real kind of accelerator to get into that particular objective. And then the other thing that's I think super important is the fact that within this solution we can work with brands or we can surface personalised content for both consented and non consented customers. This is huge because obviously for consented customers much easier to do, but actually there's some really neat technology within CELEBRUS TULL that allows us to also in a very compliant way actually serve content that's relevant to the consumer and it's non invasive, doesn't breach any compliance, but actually means that even those customers feel like they're getting a personalised experience which I think is super important.

1:37:14 Sure, so I'll talk about verticals but we've really started to think about how we could segment brands into genres, if you like. So I think the most important genre I think where we can perhaps get the traction, where we'd focus our priority is a genre that we call 'visit based'. So these are brands where their consumers will visit them to make a purchase. So I'm thinking retail, hospitality, travel, automotive. I think within that genre, retail is obviously an area that we're super interested in, we might focus, but I think that whole visit based genre is interesting. This is a genre where these brands, consumers will potentially buy a mix of products, and I think this is a genre where these customers will purchase when they need something, so we need to pick up on those behaviors.

1:38:11 I think this is a genre where customers may be anonymous or known, and it's really important, as Olivier mentioned, that we can take those consumers on that journey from anonymous to known in the most effective and optimal way. And I think there's a big drive here to continuously drive loyalty and provide opportunities for these customers, these brands to repurchase, cross sell, upsell. So I think there's lots of scope for us within the CXM signals to really drive some great outcomes and really drive some business value here, not only for the brands, but obviously by definition, if we're making the customer experience more compelling for the brands consumers, you know, a value exchange there and they get a greater experience. I think thereafter, I think you know we're really excited about where we can take the journey yet so next, so I don't know you know how quickly we will really crack that visit based genre initially focusing on retail.

1:39:08 Thereafter I think we can start to think about what we call term based customers. So this is where brands consumers are buying products on terms and this is your classic financial services, telcos, media where there's renewals again it's all about making sure that we can drive lifetime value and I know this is an area where CELEBRUS have had some great success in the past and from a Merkel CELEBRUS and CXN signals perspective you know, we'd love to actually make sure we're giving that due attention as well. Lee So was gonna wrap up and we'll share the video out with everybody. For some reason, the TV did not like the video, but it plays on the laptop just fine.

1:40:00 And what he was gonna wrap up with was just talking through some of the verticals that we've gone after initially. From a vertical perspective, they're very strong in retail. So that was very intriguing for us because we've got some some fantastic retail customers, some that have been public. Like last year, we had Barry Group do a presentation on our map as well about the great things that we're with data. And that's a vertical we wanna grow very quickly. So that's the the first step is is retail, then finance, and then travel in that order are the ones that we're going after with Merkel to start with in terms of customer concentration. The nice thing is that we actually came to find out as we explored that we had several joint customers on it. Whether that was through Merkel or whether it was through Density Agency and who's doing the media buying for for several of our customers.

1:40:48 So it's been it's a it's been a fast moving target. It started a few months back, and we started getting in front of clients within a couple weeks of meeting each other. So it was again very quick to value in terms of let's go sell this and and start delivering value instead of just sitting in a room talking about it. And then from there, yeah, the the you'll see some formal launches and things like that after after Christmas because, you know, we start to get into kind of slow time right now. So we'll launch it sometime later in January. But with that, we do have some questions. And so, Ash, maybe we just start with you since Sure. We're probably tired of hearing. So the first one was that there's been a significant shift in product and most notably geographic mix of revenue. Could you expand on US revenue? Sure. Yeah. I'll do that. And let me just point out that video will be online in due course with the video as well. So you will get to see the background that Teddy was referring to as well, let's see.

1:41:47 So, yeah, on on the revenue and the breakdown, so the question is really around the notes in the results where we break down our revenue by type of revenue streams of license or support maintenance, but we also break it down by geography as well. And the question here is about the increase in The US. And so the 6,000,000 I was referring to, which is the deal that's set from March 31 into this financial year, that was an end customer through a partner, but the end customer is in The US. And so when you look at the notes and you compare them year to year in terms of revenue by geography, that's the reason for the increase in The US revenues. It's that $6,000,000 or so, the large part which we can't win. Excellent. Thank you, Ash. I believe there's another one here for you. I can help you with this one as well. But considering the projected high cash balance at year end, including the property sale, are you looking at any acquisition work? And if not, are you considering another special dividend?

1:42:43 Okay. Well, let me take the last point first. Please do. We are not considering another special dividend. These are kind of rare occurrences, but we felt it was appropriate this time last year. However, what we will do is continue to build up the cash balance for a number of reasons. So just to talk about how the cash is used, because as I said, probably around 10,000,000 or so is effectively working capital. The balance at the period end was just over it's just under 15,000,000. Obviously, we have high degree of trade debtors and creditors related to the transaction that I referred to. So you could say effectively a normalized cash balance, if you like, if anything normal these days is around 20,000,000. So that balance will increase as we make more profits and generate more cash, that will be retained by the company. Obviously, we have a dividend that is aggressive, and we will continue with that. However, as we put in our statement and we can go into bit more detail about this, we are going to be a little bit more proactive around our M and A efforts.

1:43:42 Over the last couple of years, we have added a number of incoming opportunities We have very precise criteria list of criteria devised by the three of us and that is what we measure against. And nothing we've seen up to now fits those criteria as well as we'd like. But now we will be a little bit proactive. And that's the process clearly with that type with those type criteria, it could take twelve, eighteen, twenty four months or so. And just to provide some color on on sort of the profile, we we have in mind what we would be looking for. And for us, it's an intellectual property acquisition to add more features to the platform. There are several discussions that we've had with the three of us as well as our head of engineering. That's sort of where to take the product. You're starting to see a lot of more modular elements of the product that someone can take on, get quite a bit of value, and then consider the rest of the platform. You can expect to see that as a consistent driver of where we're going. And there's some things it it won't alter innovation. We will continue to build, we'll continue to innovate.

1:44:46 So we're not gonna wait to find something. But as we're searching, we know what we're looking for. We have both on technology capability to the platform where buying it made more sense than building it, candidly. And a lot of it would be as you might suspect, given what Ant has shared today, will be on the data activation side of things. You know, how you use the data, how you bring the data to life, etcetera. Can I have moment for us? Please do. Yeah. So as Bill described, it will be technology led. So this is not gonna be an acquisition for sort of financial engineering purposes. It will be technology. It may have a customer list, and we anticipate then having integrated that into the CELFUS platform, that that's an opportunity for upsell to existing customers, and it's also an opportunity to give a broader offering to new customers as well.

1:45:32 So in terms of payback, if we were getting some thoughts around that, it's not gonna be only decretive from day one, but payback probably somewhere between eighteen to twenty four months time. Are you the sort of valuation multiples that you'd be looking at in in that We have a we have a profile that we've agreed to at board level in one of our board meetings recently that we're utilizing as we as we go out and and continue the search. As Ash mentioned, we came across some, but that we that we explored even in this last financial year. But when we uncovered it, it was more people than it was actual tech, which doesn't fit the profile of what we're looking for. So we we have some ideas and what we think, but to be honest, a lot of that won't get fine tuned until till we find something tangible and sort that out from there. But obviously, you know, debt as a business, cash in the bank, generating cash. We think that there's plenty of ways we can explore an acquisition if it makes good sense for this.

1:46:27 Yes, Kai. Sorry. Did you wanna No. No. Go Go ahead. We'll do something we want to post. Yeah. Go back to the chat and go after you. Just a quick one around employee incentivization and ARR growth. And I think you mentioned that your direct salespeople are, I think, of hurdle rates maybe of 20% growth. And I think your own LTIP is sort of 15% to 20% high 20s. 27. AR growth, yeah. Just curious, I think in the last six, twelve months, you've been tracking slightly below that. What would you say were the main reasons? And secondly, what's missing maybe from a headcount perspective for other to get back to these levels? And then as a follow on, I think you're and I'm not sure the share based comp part is relatively small. Think in the share dilution is relatively small, which I guess some people use a good thing. But in terms of would it not make sense maybe to incentivize more people sort of maybe at a sort of lower down the levels to take part in the share price. So I'll I'll cover some of the high level and then you fill in the gaps here. Think it's gonna be a one two punch to ask if you don't mind. So, yeah, our LTIPs are driven all the way up to, as you call them, a range from 15 to 27 and a half percent ARR growth year on year. We've had some big jumps ARR since joining. It started at 10.6.

1:47:48 So so we've we've got a good jump in that revenue and that is the focus for the business. I think more importantly, we've at the start of this year, we realigned everyone's incentives across the business. And this is a conversation that we've had at the runco level and at the board level, but it goes well beyond just astronaut. So the management team, which is 10 people 10 new people and and and that have formed that team have bonus structures based upon the same goal goals and metrics. The sales team are incentivized to sell licenses. That's where their commission comes from. So they're not incentivized to sell services, etcetera. And their escalators are based on number of new logos in a given year. So we kind of force them to think differently about how they're selling. Our partner teams are incentivized to generate leads that turn into deals for the sales team.

1:48:39 Our marketing team is incentivized on leads. So we then I could go on and on and on. But we've we've gone through the business to make sure that everything is focused on driving sales from whatever they can control and then tying that to the overall company's success as well, inherently, and and our ability to to hit the the expected results and market expectations. Now, one of the things that we did a couple of years ago as well from a board level on with that time, we reinstituted a more a a a clearer framework for share options. So we actually have done with you before you've asked, which is, you know, incentivizing people and getting them access to share options throughout the business. So we now evaluate that at the end of each year for awards once the results publish each year. So we have a much more formal plan. And we've also brought on new people who have been incentivized right out of the gate with share options as well. So we're utilizing that as best we can, obviously, within the parameters of what we are allowed to do from a dilution perspective.

1:49:34 And that's why the share buyback program is so important, you know, to to try to offset some of that. And, you know, as we're able to, we we will continue to do that. Anything I missed on that? No. But I'll just broaden it out a little bit because what you're talking about, Kai, is sort of, performance of the individuals and the team within the group. So everything that Bill described is also supported by the changes we've made over the last couple of years in terms of new systems and efficiencies. What we haven't talked about today, but we have talked about in the past is a cultural change we'll be putting in place as well in terms of making this a much more empowered, accountable organization, about the clarity of role definition in people's roles across the organization. Of course, right now, the focus is very much on the front end, and that's where we're investing in terms of sales and marketing and customer success. However, behind that, we also need to ensure that there's good scalability around delivery as well. So the real reorganizations we've done, we've structured it across all departments of the group.

1:50:31 And in terms of performance and delivery, yes, share options are a part of it. Bonuses across the organization are part of it. But, you know, we're sort of sort of more sort of less tangible things, which were really important as well as we've come out of sort of lockdown over the last couple of years. Flexibility of working is really important. That's something we've put in place through hybrid working. And also the benefits package, we've taken a fresh look at all of that, and we've revamped everything around that as well. So these are really all all important aspects in terms of recruitment, retention, and ultimately performance as well. Excellent. So a couple of questions from here. Are your clients ready or reluctant to commit 100% to cloud? There's always gonna be some reluctance from certain brands. But to be honest, a lot of marketing technology has been cloud first for a really long time. So, like, the brands that we compete with, like a CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES on the or BehaviorSec on the fraud side, they're all third party cloud based applications.

1:51:32 So it's not new. You know, and ultimately, even though we're offering cloud as the primary, it's a single tenant private cloud, which is also something that these other vendors are not offering. So it's basically just like outsourcing the IT element so that you have functional software that stays up to date and then having the data flow into your internal environment so that you can use it. So, you know, we think it's a strong offering but we also from what we've seen in the market with the new business we've closed and existing customers who have made that jump is there's a high level of comfort on their security and compliance teams when they look under the hood and they audit everything we're doing. Because candidly, we also audit everything we're doing with independent advisors. So we have all of the certifications, we have all of the penetration test results, etcetera, etcetera. And we have a security operation center center monitoring all of our operations on a daily basis, which has been a strong investment. We brought on a chief security officer last year into the business and built out that team. So we'll continue to do what it takes to keep a level of comfort in our customers.

1:52:34 And that is a that is talked about on a monthly basis, if not weekly, internally at the management team to ensure that we're constantly ahead of the curve in in that capability. Another question. Because visitor data is anonymized, can you aggregate data and statistics from your multiple customers and industry verticals and resell it? The simple answer to that is no. Because doing so would infringe upon our first party nature in the story we tell. Now, that being said, we have customers that have chosen to opt in to subscribing to our machine learning models. Why is that important? Because as they're using those, they get the benefits of updates to those models that may be as a result of other things that customers have done with those models. So it has nothing to do with any data sharing. None of the data ever mixes.

1:53:22 But the enhancements we're making along the way as a result of other customers using some of these new subscription based offerings like CEA or like bot detection or our marketing signals model that's been live for a few years now and is live in almost every account these days. You know, those types of enhancements we are utilizing, you know, kind of shared knowledge. And we're also exploring. We've had clients ask. They wanna join kind of committees with each other to knowledge share. And that's obviously something we're happy to bridge and allow them to do whatever they like. It's their data. It's their system. Right? But we you won't see us doing any kind of data sharing or anything like that because that's just it just risks the ethics of what we put out in the market. Can I add something in there? Please do. So one direction I think which is being explored at the moment as the government regulation level particularly around some of the fraud financial crime institutions in The UK, CYPAS and the Payments Association, is how data sharing could be a future weapon against financial crime.

1:54:26 On the basis that fraudsters when they go to one place and find that they're being deflected they go somewhere else. So that's not there today and there's obviously all sorts of concerns from a privacy perspective. But I think over the next year or two that could well come to fruition and it's exactly what that would look like remains to be seen. Clearly when forced to break into accounts and they need to clear those funds out they money kind of exfiltrates the system through mule accounts. So if financial institutions were able to share those mule accounts then they could get insights which they didn't have access to before. It's a very sensitive area this so I don't expect it to happen quickly It's certainly not happening today but I think in the financial crime world data sharing is almost inevitable and that will become a thing as the only real practical way to kind of help scale up.

1:55:24 So we got time for one more question. We'll do it from the room because we just read through several here. Go ahead. With your modest saying of conquering the world, is the biggest obstacle that companies already have this something they think can do this already and don't think they need you or just getting in front of those companies? It's getting in front of those companies. That's a great question. Just in case those that are remote didn't hear that, the the the the comment was around our our mission of taking over the world and and what's inhibiting our ability to do that. And it is yeah. I've said this before, but I think it's not an excuse, it's just a fact. We are starting we we had to start sprinting very quickly because there's things that were missing. We didn't have marketing and branding. We didn't have PR. Right? We didn't have kind of the brand identity sorted.

1:56:11 We didn't have a direct sales team. Right? So there's a lot of things that had to be done. We didn't have systems. You know, the things that Ash was talking about earlier to help us actually manage the business that is moving that quickly. Right? To ensure everything can be is visible, everything's measured and and accountable. So a lot of those building blocks had to be put in place and we had to play catch up on a lot of the branding. Simplifying the name helps massively. People are starting to know CELEBRUS. We're we're finding people reaching out to us, the marketing, the PR. We got a subject matter experts or panel which includes ants and others who are getting published every other week now in various journals and Forbes and various articles, people like Circle, etcetera. It all seems to be building a groundswell. Because what we're finding is once we get introduced to a company, one way or another, we have a very powerful conversation with them.

1:57:01 And then from there, where it might go awry is we do find someone who doesn't who thinks they have it solved for. Right? And there's always going to be that. A lot of the conversations where we've been successful are the ones where they failed trying to do it and and have accepted that the current way of working isn't gonna get it done. And it's finding those organizations. But it's not easy. It's difficult to market in today's marketplace with all the compliance challenges around the globe. It's a little looser in The US. So we put a lot of emphasis in that and and it's and it's working. It's building a robust pipeline. I'm really thrilled with where the sales team's got and how they message and and how they sell. So we really just need to get them in more rooms. And that's ultimately the goal. And and that's where we continue to make investments and and we have some hires planned in the second half that is actually to to set up for next use growth. So that we can continue to drive that forward.

1:57:56 Alright. Well, I think that brings us to time. Obviously, for those of in the room, we're gonna stick around. So feel free to stick around if you've got any other questions. Otherwise, for those of you remote, thank you for taking the time. Apologies for the video issue. But like I said, that will get published online anyways, and you can see that in all of its glory. The marketing team just got rid of that. So they'd appreciate you watching it. And with that, I think I'd throw it back for the final word coming up to you. That's great. Thank you very much indeed to the team from CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES PLC. I will shortly now redirect investors online to provide you with their feedback. So if I could ask you please not to close this session. If you could please provide the company your feedback, I'm sure that'd be mostly received. On behalf of the management team of CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's Capital Markets Day, and good afternoon to you all.