Celebrus Technologies (LSE:CLBS) — Post AGM-Q&A

0:02 Good afternoon, and welcome to the d four t four Solutions PLC post AGM q and a investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be switched at any time by the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Peter Simmons, Chairman. Good afternoon, sir.

0:35 Thanks, Ali, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining this question and answer session for D4 Solutions on the day of our AGM. We held the full AGM this morning, and I'm pleased to say that all the resolutions were passed with a very high majority. I think they were above 99%, and and I think the RNS has been published to put that out into the public domain. So the purpose of today is for those of you that are new to the business, to give you a bit of a taste of what we do. And for those of you that are familiar, it's a chance to refresh your memories on on the sort of underlying business that we do, but also to ask questions. And the whole point of this is it's a Q and A, so please feel free to use the platform to submit questions.

1:24 We're going to start off by getting Bill Bruno, who became CEO in October last year to present about 10 slides, I think it is about ten minutes on what the business does today. And hopefully, that will give people a chop an opportunity to sort of think of questions that that are fresh in their mind. So once Bill's done that presentation, I think Ali from Investor Lead Company will come back on and remind you how to submit questions if you need help in that respect. And then we'll run the Q and A and we've obviously got a hard stop of exactly an hour. So if we're still going at 04:00, we'll we'll we'll bring proceedings to a close. But on that note, Bill, can I hand over to you and let you do your 10 slides in ten minutes? And the rest of us are gonna turn our cameras off while Bill's presenting.

2:18 Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Please start the clock. Hi, everybody. Thanks for for taking some time today. I'll I'll point you to the d four t four investor website as well where we have a variety of materials from the financial results that posted a a few weeks back, including a presentation that we did. This one's gonna be a little bit different. As Peter mentioned, it's gonna be focused more on sort of reacquainting, some of you with the business and refreshing things for for those of you that are interested in that as well. And you'll see a lot of taglines. A lot of marketing has changed. Our our websites have have revamped both for the d four t four websites, which was recreated based on investor feedback to make that a better experience for for all of you. But then the marketing website as well, the celebrus.com domain was also redone to really focus on on helping organizations understand how we how we go to market, how we focus on better capturing and connecting data that they already have and that we create for them in some of our intellectual property and software to power better customer experiences and and customer analytics for for brands.

3:21 Now, ultimately, what that looks like when we go to market are three core products. All named CELEBRUS, but I'll walk you through sort of which which each one of these are. Starting from left to right, the CELEBRUS customer data platform that was acquired by d four t four solutions in 2015, this is our marketing, data capture and contextualization engine, that we bring to market with partners like Pega, like Teradata, like and many others, where we capture and and and merge digital identity with all of the behaviors that you have with the brand across all your different devices and channels. So if you think of the fact of whether or not you've opted in to cap to capture, whether or not you've opted in to cookies, Once you've done all of those as the the sort of foundation for our CDP is based on your willingness to share that data with brands, we then capture all of your interactions and behaviors, and we do that to give brands the opportunity to give you a better experience.

4:17 If you're struggling in certain, processes, if you're trying to research, a new, mortgage as an example, given that about 70% of our business is in financial services inclusive of insurance, you know, so on and so forth. And we package all of that up. And instead of handing clients the haystack, we hand them the needles in those haystacks and say, are the things that you might, that you might care about. These are opportunities to create a better experience for consumers. And if you do that, everybody wins. Now there's another element to consumers as well, and that's protecting them. Digital fraud, as an example, around the globe is increasing at at alarming levels, anywhere from 30 to 40% increases year on year for specific fraud use cases. And for those of you that have been following our story, we launched a new product that in June of last year, called the fraud data platform.

5:05 And the fraud data platform is is focused on building an evidentiary profile about each and every one of you as you interact with brands that have chosen to deploy that platform. And that profile then operates in real time in the moment so that every time you come back to a website or you interact with a mobile app, it's able to determine whether or not we actually think it's you. And there's two pieces in in fraud detection and management. Obviously, the first is to catch the fraudster before the fraud, which is our tagline. And to do that, you need to have a rich dataset in real time that allows you to do that. But there's a competing objective as well that that brands struggle with, and it's limiting the number of false positives. And so what's a false positive? Well, this would be a situation where you're perhaps in a store making a purchase, and you've been to that store before, and you've used that card before, and you or you've been on that mobile app before on that same device.

5:57 And for some reason, they think it's fraudulent even though it's you. And that creates friction. It upsets consumers, and that's called a false positive. And so the fraud data platform is a unique value proposition that actually helps clients solve for both. We bring the right data at the right time in the right format to not only catch the fraudster before the fraud, but to also allow customers to more accurately be able to assess whether or not that's actually you. And last but not least is our customer data management division. Now the first two platforms I've talked about create a lot of data. You need some place for that data to go. You need to build environments as a brand, that for brands that we partner with to actually, you know, be able to activate that, to provide data to your analysts, to your data scientists, to build reporting, to build models, etcetera, etcetera. And our CDM business has a variety of d four, t four intellectual property and software as well as third party software and hardware and the people power behind it to build these environments in a hybrid cloud nature, whether that's fully on prem, whether that's in the cloud like Azure or AWS as examples, or some hybrid of that. And those environments then include not only our data that we may be capturing for customers based on the CDP and FDP deployments, but also five, ten, 15 different datasets that already exist within those organizations.

7:14 Just to give you kind of a sense of what some of our customers say, why do they pick us? You've got you've got two two brands here. The one on the top left was a is a global bank that works with us in 19 different markets. And for them, it all started around customer. They recognized that they did not have a platform that could do customer. They had a a platform that could do behaviors, but they couldn't manage identity in today's world given the challenges with what Apple has done around, intelligent tracking prevention or ITP, the browser restrictions, the deprecation of third party cookies, and all the things that you'll see in our blogs and all of our press releases and all of our, marketing that's coming from the CELEBRUS brand these days. And they found CELEBRUS and said that's the first technology we found that can truly do customer for us, and we're now deployed across 19 different

8:01 markets. The customer on the bottom, this is a very common story as well. A lot of our competitive solutions require tagging. What is that? That's putting code on pages and customizing and writing code on individual pages or within mobile apps. And every time you put more code in something, it's a chance for something to break. And it takes a lot of time not only to deploy it, but it also takes a lot of time to maintain it. And most of the time, brands that are doing that find themselves in this vicious cycle of just constantly trying to fix things to create accurate data.

8:31 This client intimated to us that before they brought us on board, where we have a tag tagless solution that requires no custom code that allows you to capture the minute you deploy us and makes it much easier to maintain in both web and mobile environments. This client basically went from spending 90% of their time just fighting with the data to, to spending 90% of their time actually using it.

8:54 Now from a partner perspective, it's just as strong for us. And on the fraud side, you know, some of the partners, include the likes of of Teradata, but also Quantexa as a new partner. And we even have a quote on the on the lower left or lower right here with, E and Y as well. On the top left is Teradata, who we've done a ton of global global work with for many, many years around the globe. We have over 60 deployments together around the globe. And as you can see in the quote from Yasmeen here, we've we've created over billions of dollars of value together around the globe.

9:25 E and Y, we've had the pleasure of presenting on stage at in in a couple of recent UK fraud conferences, and they've had some phenomenal things to say as they've evaluated our fraud data platform as well. We very much appreciate the the commentary that they've provided and the recommendations that they provided along the way as we continue to refine our go to market there as we're actively selling that in the in the market today.

9:47 We've also done a lot of our own talking. So I don't know how many of you follow us closely. If you don't, I'd I'd urge you to create a Google alert for for CELEBRUS as an example and and start to get some some elements here. We've brought PR in house. We've we've restructured the marketing team. We brought on new leadership for for that team based in The US, and we're starting to get a lot of recognition and creating a lot of noise.

10:10 Why are we doing that? Well, one, it helps our partner relationships. So for partners that are out selling CELEBRUS, if we're being loud and customers can can look up CELEBRUS and see things validated that they're hearing in the sales cycle from partners, that's great. Rising tide lifts all boats. But it also helps our direct sales and marketing initiatives that that we've invested in and that we've spoken about in in previous meetings and during our results presentations as well a few weeks back. And so not only are we coming in, in the news for a variety of features and enhancements such as our most recent cross domain continuance launch that happened two weeks ago, but we're also winning awards both as a company and as our technology products for the CDP and the FDP as well. And we'll continue to create that noise and and create that exposure for the brand to to continue to help us guide on this growth path that we've put ourselves on.

10:59 And so that brings me to to to just the key strengths. I think simply put, all of our platforms are true first party. They're embedded within clients' infrastructures. Our competitors are not. We don't have any data gaps. We don't have that issue with wrangling data like I mentioned before, and we provide that data in milliseconds, not minutes, not hours, not days like our competition. But we're not just dumping a bunch of data in someone's lap and saying, figure it out. We're providing context. We've we've embedded machine learning in our products through a variety of innovation that we've done over the over the recent years, and we're able to stitch the entire journey together. So as you traverse a brand where CELEBRUS may be deployed, we're not only able to to identify and and work with you provided you've consented to it across your your websites,

11:41 but also the mobile apps and all the different devices that you use with those brands. And first and most importantly, despite being listed last, it gives brands full control over the the data they own it, and it gives consumers control over whether or not they share that data in the first place. And from our perspective, that is just as important as what the technology does, and that is a stance that we take in the space that a lot of a lot of our competition refuses to even go near. From an innovation perspective, this is a bit of a busy slide. These slides will be available, up on up on the investor meet website as well as on our own investor website on on the d four t four solution site as well. But this just gives you a sense of our innovation. When we think of product innovation, which comes from three areas, our own internal meetings and discussions with a lot of the fantastic people we have across the company, our conversations with partners on a quarterly basis to see what they're running into in the field, and from our customers,

12:38 through our advisory councils that we have with several customers, through the customers that have signed on to be beta testers of new features, etcetera, etcetera. And the four areas we focus on is usability. This is a big one for us, making it easier and easier and easier to utilize CELEBRUS in many ways. We've got clients that have data coming from our platforms platforms connecting in some cases to 15 to 20 different solutions within their environment. It's focused around insight. You know, people don't have a lot of time. So how can we shorten the runway to value? How can we provide that insight through machine learning and all of the various, features that we've launched in recent years to make that easier and easier for clients to move more quickly? For us, it's how much value can we show in that first ninety days of deployment?

13:18 It's around activation. You know, CELEBRUS as a system, we're we're data as a service in many ways. Our systems are more valuable the more systems we connect to and the more utilized our our data becomes. And so making that very easy, not being a closed off marketing cloud like some of our competitors where they just try to hoard all the data in one place, but actually saying, we'll create it. We'll format it. We'll structure it. We'll save you 60 to 70% in year one on what you've typically called digital data management, and we'll connect all these other systems that are starved for data. And finally, security. You can't be in the

13:50 data business without focusing on security. We've made significant investments, and we've also made significant innovations in our products to continue to stay on the forefront and and to control all of that for customers and make this as as strong of a platform as we can. It starts with our ISO 27 double o one certification. It goes all the way through the processes, the training, and the people that we brought on board to manage this as we go through the engineering cycles.

14:14 Our differentiators, I've touched on some of them, but as a business, and this is a slide that came right from the annual resort results presentation as well, is to focus on growing our software revenues and be a software business, driven by the great people that we bring into market that work with our customers to to drive client success. It's to drive annual recurring revenue, which for us are multiyear commits, to the tune of three years with no cancellation. It's to continue to innovate like everything that I've shown you on that last slide. That is the innovation that we've driven just in the last two years.

14:46 It's building for scalability as a business. For those of you that attended the final results, you will have heard us talk a lot about the systems and the processes we've put in place to scale to really take this business to the next level and and capitalize on the opportunity that we all believe across the board this business has. It's diversifying our route to market, so it's that investment in direct sales in addition to building out our existing partner relationships and adding new partners for both the CDP and the FDP. And last but not least, and and honestly, most importantly, it's about building a culture of empowerment and accountability across the business. It's giving

15:17 our employees the opportunity to contribute to the success of this business to understand what we're trying to do as a business and then ultimately let them. Because businesses don't always hire us just because we have great technology. They hire us because they love the people as well. And that's why we've been able to maintain our people and our customers to the high degree that we have.

15:37 And so finally, from an outlook perspective, before I I throw things back for for questions to Peter here, you know, for us, it's, again, delivering ARR growth and focusing on continuing to build the strong pipeline. We think we have a massive opportunity in the market. We understand that that opportunity is not a long window. We want to run through that door before it closes, and we think that the market conditions are in our favor to do that. We'll continue to invest in sales and marketing to, again, diversify that route to market, as I mentioned before, and we have complete confidence in our strategy and ability to deliver through this year and into

16:08 the future. And so, hopefully, for those of you that that needed a refresher or wanted a refresher, hopefully, you found that valuable. I've seen some questions flowing in as well. Also, I think now's a now's a good time to throw that back to Peter, and we'll we'll go through the questions. Bill, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. I'd just like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via investor dashboard. As you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all the investors for submitting those.

16:42 Peter, could I just ask you to read out these questions and give response to it?

16:45 It's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Okay. Thanks, Ali. Before we do the questions, actually, one one other thing I thought we ought to do is just introduce ourselves because there there may be people here here who aren't familiar with the the the board. So, obviously, I'm Peter Simmons, Nordic tech chairman. You've already heard from Bill Bruno, who's recently appointed CEO, but perhaps the the others would like to do introductions as well. Starting, Monica, with you. Hello. Yeah. I'm Monica Bedolz, and I'm a nonexecutive director joining a deeper deeper solutions in

17:18 2019. And, Ash? And, Ash, your microphone's off, so you might need to turn it on.

17:27 Oh, is it on now? It's on now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. So I'm Ash Mehta. I'm the CFO. Okay. Thank you. And, Peter? Hi, everybody. My name is Peter Whiting. I am a nonexec director and chair of the remuneration committee. Thanks very much. Okay. So we've had a number of questions been coming in while while Bill's been presenting, but please do keep them coming as well because as I said at the beginning, the whole point of this is to be interactive and to use it as an opportunity to get as many questions out as possible.

18:00 So I'm gonna try and sort of group these together so we've got a bit of a theme, but I think probably the there's several questions coming, Bill, around the sales cycle of how long it takes to make a sale, Why is it so long?

18:16 And why is it that we've only been able to communicate to FTP sales so far? Thank you, Peter. Yes. I will I will address both of those. So so sales cycle I mean, for those of you that that are perhaps unfamiliar, I joined the business a little almost four years ago now. And when I started, the sales cycle was quite long. It was around probably fourteen to sixteen months. The goal there was to try to cut that down to twelve and and then cut that down further from there. Our sales cycles now run on average nine to twelve months, and the main reason for that is we're selling to large enterprise organizations. It's a disruptor

18:54 sale. So in many cases, we're finding our place to fit. We're pushing other technologies aside. We're working either with partners or directly to identify the right decision makers. And in large enterprises, particularly banks, given we're 70% of our businesses roughly, they don't exactly move quick. So there are there are always going to be some some time lines there that that drag on. Now that being said, we've also changed the way that we sell, and and we're selling on a use case basis. So instead of selling the whole platform, which has been historically an approach in d four t four, we're now selling use cases. And use cases are great because you can say you can hear a client say, I have this pain, and we can say, I solve for this pain. We can keep it very focused, and we can use that to try to drive the sales cycle down. Now we we announced two wins just ahead of our financial results, one additional FDP win and one CDP win. And both of those were closed in about six months, and they were both direct deals.

19:45 So we're we're learning. We're innovating. We're learning. We're we're seeing what's working and what isn't, and then we're quickly adapting in the sales cycle. But we see a path where we can shorten the sales cycles. And I think it's about having a pipeline that has a mix of different deal sizes and different deal shapes because some will always take longer than others. Now on the FTP side, we only you're right. We only did have two two wins, but I think it's I think people sometimes forget. You know, we launched the platform into the market from scratch. We we have done, obviously, the investment, to bring that platform to market, But we're not really afforded as a public company. We're not afforded the opportunity to go stealth mode, so to speak, like some organizations would if they were privately held. And so instead of trying to hide it and not being able to fully explain where we were investing and and why we were making investments, we brought it to market, and we ran from the start to learn as we go in front of all of you.

20:38 And, you know, from that perspective, having two wins, having two new partners, and having the pipeline that we have now in in just over a year, I think, is quite fantastic. Some we have, about six customers, seven, I think, now, actually, in different various stages of trialing the FDP. We've got a pipeline that's growing. We've got awards that the platform has won in its first year, two to be exact, in the info security and cyber cybersecurity world. We've got endorsements, like the one that I showed on the previous slide from from folks like ENY who live and breathe in the fraud world. And so from my perspective, I'd always love to sell more, but I think what the team has done in in a in a short year's time is actually quite fantastic given where we started from being starting from scratch.

21:22 Thanks, Will. I actually could add a bit of extra color. Some of you may know, I also chair another software business that sells primarily into the banking space. And we regularly ask ourselves the same question, why does it take so long? And I think the answer is that the the number of hoops you have to sell through to sell into a banking customer in particular is just unbelievable. And the

21:50 and even when you've got everybody on-site, you've then got to do things like get project scheduled in amongst all the other things that they're working on and then then people sort of move jobs, and then you sort of feel like you've gone back to square one sometimes. So I think actually what the guys have done with the fraud product has been incredible. Yes. We'd all like to see it quicker, but the reality is when you're dealing with large financial institutions, quick is a relative thing, I think, and I think that we are moving quickly. I think there's another question around FTP pipeline bill here, but I think you've probably answered it. But, I mean, you you wanna say anything about sort of where you see that pipeline going over the next few years? Because clearly, that's what people are interested in. We've we've got a great product. We've obviously got some early good customers on board. What what do you think the the real sort of size of the prize is here?

22:43 You know, we think we have something special. And, obviously, the the pressure on us is to execute, which the team understands and and feels across the board, and and is working on a daily basis. The the platform itself has been validated to do exactly what we thought it would, which is solve for a large data gap in the industry, that exists today. Ours the solutions we compete against are black box. They don't provide a full set of data. They focus just on the point where fraud can happen. They are third party solutions, and they don't capture or maintain identity in any meaningful way, which makes it really difficult to build an evidentiary profile, etcetera, etcetera. It is a competitive market. Everyone, when you walk through a a conference like we've done now that we're getting back out in the field now that those things are are happening again, puts all the same things on their on their booths. And so for us, it's it's about having the pointed messaging, adapting that messaging for customers, responding to the various rebuttals or roadblocks you run into when they say, well, x y z does what you do, and we have that solution, etcetera, etcetera. It is very much a competitive sale. We're doing a good job of displacing technology.

23:47 And every time that we've, that we've started to go down the proof path, we've not been told no or been told it doesn't do what we say it does. So for us, it's just about the energy and the sales teams to get out there and to continue to hunt and to continue to create opportunities and continue to build that pipeline. But for us, I see this as a major driver of business for us going forward. Thanks, Will. That actually leads very deeply into another question about the sort of direct sales versus partner sales. And the question that's coming specifically about direct sales is, is this primarily enterprise slash c level top down sales or is it a product led bottom up typical SaaS sale? Yeah. So so it's it's a little bit of both. So we've we've put several things in place now across the business to support direct sales. So you have from a marketing perspective, we've got campaigns and nurture campaigns that are going out to lead list that that we've created, from various events and contacts and organizations, etcetera, that are keeping people warm and trying to convert them to qualified leads and doing all the things that you would expect in account based marketing.

24:55 Then we have the sales teams doing a lot of one to one messaging, and that that messaging is happening both from top down and bottom up. And then you have folks like myself and other leaders in the business that are starting at the top and and and reaching out to them directly as well. So it is kind of a three pronged approach that we're taking, and and it's different messaging. We're trying different messages. We're seeing what works, and we're sharing that across the team. And we're we're meeting at least twice a week as a sales team to workshop these ideas and then go back out into the field and try new things. So, you know, this is a new approach for d four t four. We've brought on and restructured sales and marketing. And and to support this, we've built out our partner set to also support this differently. And we've put systems in place under to underpin that so that we can measure all of this as well and understand what's working so we know where to make the investments.

25:40 Okay. Thanks, Bill. A question about, sort of the the wider macroeconomic environment. The question is, has, the sales sort of pipeline or sales activity been impacted by either sort of the global sort of impact of of sort of inflation or or sort of threat of a of a sort of a downturn? Yeah. No. I think, you know, obviously, we're keeping our eye on on the market conditions. It's it's a very interesting slash challenging market at the moment for a lot of people, and we're conscious of that and and keeping an eye on that. From our perspective, there's sort of two approaches. It's one, securing the existing client renewals, which are all moving along as intended, and and in a very positive manner, and it's obviously focusing on building pipeline.

26:25 I'll be honest with everyone. There's one deal that was supposed to close towards the end of this previous fiscal year that got moved out, but it actually wasn't the economy. It was due to some of the the the Russia elements, and some stock the the business had a bit of a a stock downturn on their side that that sort of put a freeze on their investments, but they're just waiting for budget to to secure so that they can sign the contract. That's the only one that we've had impact to. The the sales pipeline, the conversations we're having, there's a lot of eagerness. You know, the the the death of third party cookies, the the fact that fraud is costing businesses millions and millions of dollars a month, and is becoming regulatory in nature in places like The UK and and in The US with a lot of the government discussions does set up for our in in our favor. And it does help even in times of a tough economy to have solutions that are regulatory in nature, particularly the FDP and and our CDM business where a lot of regulatory analytics for banks is run within.

27:20 So we think we're in a good position. And that being said, we're constantly monitoring it and trying to stay two or steps ahead of it so that as a business, we're prepared to manage with whatever surprises come in the second half of the year. What about supply chain, though? I think, obviously, there's a there's a sort of a well known chip shortage. Is is that affecting any of our customers and their ability to move projects forward? It it abs it absolutely has, Peter. I think, you know, the the hardware side, so the third party hardware that does go into to our CDM environments, there are shortages that vary wildly week to week, to be quite honest. You know, even things like graphics cards to things like networking switches, etcetera. So you you may have 90% of what needs to go into a server before it gets delivered to an environment. You're just waiting on a cable, which has happened previously to us as well.

28:08 And that that supply chain shortage has existed now for a couple of years. It's had varying degrees of impact, but we we stay out in front of it with our partners, partners like Dell and WWT that we work with exclusively to to bring that environment, those environments to life, and and we'll just continue to monitor that. But it is absolutely an issue. I mean, it's impacting everyone, right, from automobiles all the way through to to laptop computers. Okay. Next question is around, I guess, sales mix. It says d four t four earned 25% of its revenue from its own IP last year. Given own IP is d four t four strategic focus, how do you see that changing? And what are the biggest hurdles? Yeah. Absolutely. So I I can give kind of the strategic answer. And and, Ash, if if you wanna maybe speak to just the product mix and sort of where we see that going, that'd be beneficial. So I'll I'll start with the strategy side. I mean, from our perspective, you're a 100% correct, focusing on driving our own IP, not just because that's where most of the margin is, but also because it just makes sense. That's that's what we've invested in, and we need to sell it to more people.

29:09 So for us, you know, it really is about focusing on driving that and the support that comes around those the the IP that we bring to market, whether that's the CDP, the FTP, or the software and intellectual property that we've built and automated within the CDM business as well. Okay. Ash? Yeah. And to add on to that, just to echo what Bill was saying, we do see that being an increasing part of the overall revenue mix. As you've seen from the final results, we do have third party hardware software sales. They are intermittent. We are growing the maintenance support and maintenance line. And, also, we're moving some of our customers into the CELEBRUS cloud, and that's just like a managed service function as well. So all of those revenue streams are generally higher margin. They will form a larger percentage of our overall revenue mix. And so just touching on another question that was asked prior to the meeting, that will over time have a positive impact on our gross margin as well as we see the license element forming a larger part of our revenue mix.

30:12 That is obviously a higher margin component. And so that's what will drive the revenue gross profit improving over time. Okay. Thanks, Ash. Another question for you, Bill, about partners. The question is, can you talk a bit more about what's happening with the relationship with SSAS given that they have historically been a a large generator of revenue, but they don't seem to be mentioned as much in the marketing materials. Sure. Yeah. So there's there's a couple of areas that that we do a lot of work with, and I and I would, I guess, course correct that a little bit. I mean, our two biggest partners are SaaS and Teradata. Teradata is a certified reseller of our CDP and FTP platforms, and SaaS is a reseller of our CDM business line services and the managed services and and the environments that we're building. And we've done a lot of work with SaaS. We continue to do a lot of work with SaaS, and we're evolving that. They're very SaaS has a very burgeoning, and they've won some awards on the fraud side for their data modeling and their fraud and their risk models.

31:15 And so they're building up to be a strong partner for us on the FDP as well. Partners continue to be a focus, but we're evolving our relationships with all of our partners. One, to try to simplify what they're selling. That benefits them as well. It's becomes easier to enable and onboard their own teams to to get them in the market saying the right things, to to identify the right opportunities that we can then sell together with them when they bring us into the room. But the other is just to to honestly dig through the confusion. In in both the marketing and the fraud worlds, there is a ton of confusion over who does what and what solutions actually do and what it looks like, etcetera, etcetera. And we've invested a lot of time with our partners to build sort of go to market demos to simplify that, to show it working in their environments, to show them what what the art of the possible is, and we'll continue to do that.

32:00 So you can expect to see more from from the likes of SAS, Teradata, Pega, and and several others that we're working on as well behind the scenes that we hope to talk to you about throughout the year. Okay. Next question is about Prickly Cactus. And I guess maybe you could give a bit of color, Bill, as to what Prickly Cactus was, what we acquired, and and what benefits have have come from that transaction. Yeah. So above and beyond acquiring a business was a very interesting name. What it really came what it really came down to for us was, we saw an opportunity. It was a business that we had been working with, and and an individual within that business that had known us for many, many years. And it it's rare as an opportunity to bring in, basically three individuals that have an incredible amount of expertise in the markets that we sell into.

32:50 And so for us, it was about standing up direct sales, but also building up better customer success and account management. And so the earn out that they're on is structured around their ability to drive more revenue from both existing and new accounts. The pipeline that they have, in place and the influence they've already had in the business gives us full confidence that they're going to achieve that earn out, which ends in September of of twenty twenty three. And for us, it was to to start to build out the direct sales capacity to bring in our ability to better position our products to to help educate and teach the teams and then also use, you know, their expertise for over the many years in their career to help us in the market in sales opportunities to move those things forward. So they're fully integrated into the business. They've had a massive impact across both new and existing accounts. They've had a phenomenal impact on some of the innovation that we've done with products and even even a lot of our product marketing messaging as well and how we bring it to market for both the the CDP and FTP.

33:44 Okay. Thanks, Will. There's a question about board changes, and and the question was you've made significant board changes. Do you expect any more? Perhaps perhaps I'll answer that one. Obviously, the appointment with of Bill was as a result of a a a very professionally managed hiring process run by Monica as chair of of the nominations committee. Bill, I'm pleased to say, came out head and shoulders above the other candidates, including external candidates with a a real demonstrable passion for the business and a very clear strategy for how to grow it and take it forward. So I think we were very pleased with the way that process ran. And I think I mean, Bill, you can answer, but I I also think it was a a sensible, well structured handover from peak year that took place throughout last year. So, hopefully, you you didn't feel that you were just dropped in the deep end and that there was a a proper process there.

34:44 Ash obviously joined us in in 2021 as well, and I think this found his feet very quickly and is now a very effective part of the exec team and a and a and a key support to Bill. So I think we we don't expect any more imminent board changes. But for those of you that are familiar with corporate governance rules, you'll you'll all be aware that nine years is the sort of time period for which a non exec director can serve before they're considered non independent. So I'm in seven and a half years. So I guess that the next planned piece of board change will probably come at some point in eighteen months time or thereabouts when when I need to find my successor. I think probably the last question we've got here is around the special dividend.

35:33 Shouldn't the company be using the cash rather than returning it to shareholders? Well, let me just give you a one piece of information. I think from memory, the the votes at the AGM resolutions this morning were 25,800,000 in favor of the special dividend and 1,250 again. So it seems to be quite overwhelmingly decided by most shareholders that it was a good thing. But but in all seriousness, why did we decide to do this? Well, we we do want to invest in the business. We're not afraid of doing acquisitions. CELEBRUS, in fact, was an acquisition that we made about eight years ago. And I think it was a very successful, very well managed acquisition that's proven that you can actually bring a piece of product into a business and transform the business as a result. So I think there is definitely a proven capability here to to make good acquisitions.

36:35 I mean, I I might ask Ash to talk about value creation at the moment because one of the challenges for companies of our scale is finding other acquisitions that are value creating at a at a price that is sensible. But we're always on the lookout for acquisitions, but we certainly at the moment don't have anything imminent on the radar. The question about investing in the business, I think Bill has already alluded to the fact that we are investing in business development, new sales, into marketing. The challenge as a public company is if we overdid that, all of that sales and marketing is a is a an operating cost on day one and it generates revenue that comes in anything from six to eighteen months after we've been investing in it. So probably if we were a private company, we might be spending more of that cash on sales and marketing as a public company. Hard to do because there will always be a pushback from some shareholders who would rather that we didn't push the operating profits down by too much.

37:40 So I think it's a balance. We believe we've got the balance right. I think certainly as we see successes coming from the investment into the full platform, we'll continue to review the extent to which we want to, as Bill would say, push the loud pedal harder to grow faster. But at the moment, we believe we've got sufficient cash to easily achieve all of the investment we need in the business, and we felt that it was the right thing to do to return some of the surplus cash back to shareholders. So, Ash, I don't know if you wanna comment a bit more about that. Peter, I think you covered it wonderfully. I'll add a couple of nuances there. Obviously, the cash balance that we have. We this is an ongoing debate that we have at the board level. The cash balances have been healthy.

38:28 We need cash, obviously, for working capital purposes, for any investment opportunities, either inherently into organic growth or for potential acquisitions. But there's another aspect as well that the cash plays, and that's really around kind of vendor risk perception. A lot of our customers and end customers are large multinationals, and they're relying on some pretty in in integral sort of software for their business from a company which is, you know, relatively small by comparison. So that always plays a role as well. But having taken all of those into account, the conclusion that the board came to over the last few months was that there was surplus cash, and we thought it was right to hand it back to investors. And that's that's what we're doing. We didn't feel at this point in time it was right to raise the ordinary dividend by more than we have in previous years, but that's something we'll monitor.

39:20 But certainly for this time around, as you saw in the final results, we had a very healthy cash balance, free cash of around 25,000,000. And so at this point in time, that was the right thing to do. Okay. Thanks, sir. So I think unless anything popped up in the last few seconds, I think that's covered all the questions that have come in. So, Ali, can I hand back to you to sort of wrap up and ask people to fill in their post session questionnaires, etcetera? Yes. Of course. And first of all, I'd just like to thank you all for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of d four t four Solutions PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.

40:13 Thanks, everyone.