Eql Pharma (Stockholm:EQL) — Interim Results

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the EQUALS GROUP PLC Interim Results and Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so, and these will be available via your investor meet company dashboard.

0:33 I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from EQUALS GROUP PLC, Ian. Richard, good afternoon, gentlemen. Hi. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for for dialing in. Good evening. Perhaps we could move straight onto the agenda, Richard. So I'm gonna run you through today an overview of EQLS, some highlights of the first half. Richard will then do a very thorough CFO review. I'll then take you through a bit more detail in terms of, what's happened in q three to date and look forward and then summarize from there. So if we could flip the slide again, please. So, before I start on this, I was thinking a week or two ago, okay. We got, you know, one of these to do, invested, roadshow to do. I need to to think of something new to say.

1:29 And it suddenly dawned on me that, actually, I don't have to think of something new to say, that it's a good thing that we set out what we were intending to do back in March when we did the full year results roadshow. And we've executed against that plan. And so to some extent, it's as you should expect. We have talked the last couple of years about pivots from b to c to b to b, pivot more towards platform away from product, solutions, which is a brand new thing in, in May 2021. This has a a refreshing, sense of familiarity about it. So, equally, I don't need to spend twenty minutes at the beginning trying to explain everything that we do because, hopefully, by now, most of you, will understand it. So this slide is a a rehash of what I've gone through before in that we have the three major products, of accounts or current accounts, you wanna think of it like that, underpinned by the own name multicurrency I bands. We have the ability to do cards, both debit and prepaid, and we can do payments or account to account payments, be they FX or indeed same currency.

2:41 Take those products. We've got some differentiating factors to our competition. And by the way, no no one company really has everything that we have, so it's it's hard to identify a direct competitor. But we have the platform that combines both payment cards. We have, a lot of connectivity we've built up over the last few years and will continue to do. So we go direct where possible, removes people from the supply chain, makes things quicker, easier, more reliable. We invest a lot into compliance. We view that as a strategic asset, not as an overhead. And whilst we have a lot of the tech that fintechs have, they are generally self serve. You can't talk to a human.

3:27 We have great customer service capabilities as you can see from Trustpilot scores, and we will take our customers through the journey and explain stuff as we go rather than pure self serve. You take all of that, and you get the platform that you're all aware of, unified, highly configurable, highly flexible. We sell it to SMEs via the EQLS money brand and to larger corporates or enterprises. It's the EQUALS solutions brand. And, that's where we are. The next slide. Again, slight rehash, but I've put a lick of paint on it so I've got nice, new colors here. You can see where EQUALS was in 2007 when we started up as a card b to c card business on that bottom left through our journey to kind of where we are now where where some of the people we're citing as competitors, you know, are pure payments as a service or banking as a service providers like, Modular or Clearbank, for instance, or RailsR. RailsR shouldn't be on there because it kind of almost disappeared.

4:37 But that's that journey is well told and well understood, I think. Can flip the slide, Richard, please? And here, again, something we had last time that gives a a clear representation as what EQUALS can do in terms of the capabilities on the right hand side versus some of the competitors you might think of. And, without going through every tick and cross there, you can see that, what we're capable of compared to, others, stands out, and especially when you look at our market capitalization or enterprise value compared to some of the others on there. So what we have is something that we have built carefully and in a controlled manner over the last five years that has massive functionality, outstrips our peers.

5:29 But relative to them, we look undervalued. So I think that's a fair investment case right there. Flip the slide, please, Richard. So in terms of some factual things that we did in h one, we obviously did a lot. As you can see, transactions and revenues both grew at 43% clip, which means we maintained our overall margins. But EBITDA grew way, way quicker, as we all know, and that's through increased gross profit percentage and everything cascading down ultimately to profits, which is fantastic. Richard will take you through that in far more detail shortly. The platform itself, we now have, and it's a super important, sign in the road, full API functionality available to customers. What does that mean? It means that rather than having to log in to EQUALS money, if a large customer wants to connect their system directly to us, so called host to host, they can do so via what's called an API protocol.

6:31 Takes time to integrate as you might expect, but those customers tend to be bigger, and, obviously, they're very sticky. They're gonna go through that process. I'll talk a bit more about that later on. We've also increased the automation of the payments out journey. We automated payments in first, payments out. Like, a massive percentage of our payments out now are automated, and that will be completed during the balance of this year. European expansion, we acquired EQUALS Money Europe, which used to be called Unix, and we got regulatory clearance actually just outside of h one. It was on July 4. Again, we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. On cards, we've now replatformed Fairfax. So it's on new tech, not old.

7:19 We can decommission the old. Partly the timing of that, for those of you long memories, Wirecard fell over three years ago. And so the cards we issued at that time because we had to are all expiring. So it's the perfect time to do that shift over to new tech. So that's really the last major thing that we have that's running on on old platforms. The, API, integration of cards also, means we can now start off this as a white label. We integrated Rocket that we bought, earlier this year or completed earlier this year. So if you load your Fairfax cards, you'll be presented with an option to load it via Rocket. It's very funky. And if you have a card, please use it, and you'll see what I mean.

8:06 And we've integrated into Xero as an accounting package, and we'll be doing more of those as the year progresses. On sales and marketing, we've deployed far more of a regional sales model. We're a great believer here, especially when you're selling to corporates and especially larger corporates. Get out on the road, see people face to face. Don't expect everybody to come to London or or, you know, just because you're in London. That doesn't work as well as actually being out where they congregate. So we have more people traveling, going to trade shows, conferences, that type of thing. We've also radically improved our digital real estate. So our pay per click, SEO, websites themselves, all way better and converting way better.

8:51 And we're actually marketing the whole concept of multi currency iBAN properly now. We have web pages that support it rather than just outbound sales. And compliance, constant theme, con continued investment into personnel. It's largely rather than being an increase in headcount there. It's a sort of scale up of quality. So we've been improving who we hire in, especially to the enhanced due diligence teams, more experienced sorry, experienced compliance professionals there. We're also now using feature space, which I've mentioned before, which is AI enabled transaction monitoring system. If we're onboarding quicker, you can't just onboard and then forget. You have to monitor.

9:37 It's a vital part of the compliance puzzle. So it's great that that's live. Next slide, please, Richard. Just a little bit on EQUALS GROUP, who NexSaz was. I'm sure there's interest in knowing what's going on there. As I mentioned, we completed the acquisition on the July 4. We renamed it on the August 9. We have a properly incorporated local board there with, nonexec directors who are local. I am actually on the board as is Richard. So we have representation there, but it's important for the regulator that it's run as a as a proper subsidiary standalone entity. And we submitted a plan to the MBB, National Bank of Belgium, that is. That's the regulator.

10:23 This was always part of the plan with them. Change of control comes first. We submit the the strategic plan to them second. That's not holding us up in any way. The feedback from them on that plan so far has been extremely positive. It's actually a document I'd love to share with everybody at some stage. It's a really good piece of work. Sometimes these plans can actually help you, you know, distill your own thoughts. So it's been a great exercise to do for them. Recruitment, we've made some key hires, Head of finance is in in place, head of risk. Interesting there. The head of risk won't just do risk in, EQLS money Europe, but will service the group as well. And another thing the regulator likes and I like is that, you know, this entity is part of EQUALS GROUP. It's not a complete stand alone.

11:14 So if we find a great person there, they can contribute into activity in the group elsewhere, and that's to be encouraged. So we're we're continuing to hire. We've taken much better offices there, put the staff in the offices, the atmosphere amongst the staff. We've kind of equalified it, if that's if that's a word even. So the offices feel like this one does that I'm sat in right now. They attend the, every two weeks. We do an all hands. They've, actually, we've had them all over recently to meet everyone that works here. So I'm very pleased with the pace at which we managed to do that. Products integration, whilst we could pretty much go very, very quickly in terms of putting solutions through that entity, We can only go at the pace of the banks.

12:08 We have to integrate with them. That takes a while. We have ING and KBC that already had relationships with that entity when when we bought it. And we're also adding Citigroup and Barclays into the mix into the entity. So we plan to do that in the balance of this year. We're still on plan for that if anything's slightly ahead. So and the same with EQLS money. So hence why I said earlier that submitting the strategic plan hasn't slowed anything up, because, by the time we get hopeful to the approval from the MBB on all of that, is when we'll be, ready to to push more volume through the entity anyway.

12:50 At that point, I'll hand over to Richard to take you through some numbers in more detail. Thank you, Ian. And the slides that I'm gonna take you through really augment quite considerable disclosures in both the front and back end of the r and s. But before I do so, I think it's just quite useful to remind some people who may be new to the stock that we are a tech led financial services business regulated by the FCA, the Bank of England, and now additionally by the National Bank of Belgium. And that recent acquisition has given us two additional banking links with ING, ING, and KBC, which augment what we have with Citibank, Barclays, and that West RBS Group.

13:41 And just as a source of elevated pitch on our numbers before I take you through the slides, you know, we are unusual in that as a financial services company, we are are fast growing, and we've got more than double digit growth in revenue, considerably more in in the year on year comparison. We have had a gross margin improvement. We've had an even better drop through to our p and l, an even better drop through to our earnings per share,

14:12 and an equally good drop through into cash, which has allowed us to have plenty of bandwidth for m and a, market shocks, and, hopefully, hopefully, the announcement formally of a dividend in due course. So I will now take you through those slides in turn. So just a snapshot of our p and l account,

14:37 And you can see the growth in the right hand margins, revenue up 33 year on year, 17% up on the second half last year. There's not very much seasonality in our business apart from a bit in the retail. Our gross profit margin our gross profits have increased, but our margin has also increased, and that is just as important. It has always been our aim to punch through the 20% EBITDA margin, and, you know, we we've done so in this first half. We don't have very much noncash going through the p and l these days. We are or we do have a tax charge now, but there is a tax there is a difference between the tax charge, the reported tax charge, and what we will be paying in tax because we have 13,400,000 of losses carry forward. We do have some tax payments to make in relation to one small but very, very important subsidiary, our white label business.

15:41 That has all led to a real turnaround in our reported earnings per share. I would stress that these are reported earnings per share figures, not adjusted earnings per share figures. And for those who are very technically minded, we've got a paragraph or so in our RNS just reminding people how earnings per share is calculated, which is not, as you may think, earnings just divided by shares. There are all sorts of fancy fair value calculations for the diluted.

16:13 I'm gonna lead completely onto cash flow, not least because I've mentioned the word dividend. And, you know, cash seldom lies, and we wanted to illustrate this again. And this follows on from many of our disclosures that we've done before. So, you know, what do we have that isn't through the p and l account? Well, we will continue to invest, and we will continue to capitalize a portion of our staff costs. There's not much working capital movement. It can be it it can move weekly, our working capital, depending on the the day of the week that is at month end. It can depend on when some of our customers have forward contracts that mature, etcetera, etcetera. We don't have any debt. That's all being completely repaid well well over six months ago.

17:08 We have some acquisition cash flow outflows, and there's a slide on that later on, and we're quite proud to make the acquisitions that we have made in the period. So we've ended the period with almost CHF 18,000,000 of cash. Two slides on revenue, one in pictures, which shows very clearly that the SME business in international payments and cards is growing very, very well. But the star of the show is solutions. You know, it is 30% of of revenue. We believe that that may well get to 50% within a year or so, probably 2025.

17:58 But the white label businesses continue to grow. The consumer business, which is really the only well, it it represents less than 5% of our business now. A massive turnaround from, you know, when we started this journey.

18:13 And, you know, that has grown certainly year on year, a slight dip on the second half of last year, but nothing to worry about. And this excludes our bureau business that we sold in the first quarter of this year.

18:31 This next slide is a simple bridge. How have our revenues moved? So you you can see the the best part of 14,000,000 of increase in revenues in a single a single half. And 53% of that revenue increase has come through solutions. And if you do the math and you look at h 02/2022 comparison, again, some 59% of the increase over the last half last second half of last year, again, comes from solutions. But, again, both the graph and this numerical slide shows that we have increased the revenue from SMEs against a tough economic background and ditto from white label too.

19:20 But our gross profits have also moved up, not just in margin, but in quantum. And so what this slide attempts to demonstrate is the areas where the margin has increased. I'll pick a simple extract, total international payments. We've got a 41% gross profit margin that is diluted really by the white label business. But the gross profit increased by 2,200,000. And where did that increase come from? So we're saying here that in the aggregate, something like 75% of the gross profit increase came from the increase in revenue, but 25% came from improved efficiencies in lower cost ratio.

20:12 And the bullets along the side of the the slide give a more of a story in that. You know, our cost of sales are threefold. They are transaction cost, affiliate commissions, and staff commissions, and they're very, variable with revenue. And the dial that we can move most is actually affiliate costs. And so and, you know, Ian's done an amazing job in renegotiating with some affiliates lower terms because some of those affiliates are generating a lot of business for us, and they're doing very, very well and good luck to them. And affiliates are often the key to getting into new market segments too.

20:59 So when where do we spend our money? Well, there are no great surprises in this slide. But, again, for transparency, we're just putting it up on on one page. If you look at the bottom of the slide, you'll see that our headcount year on year has increased by 21%. But actually, our staff costs have only increased by 18%. So we have hired very, very wisely,

21:23 and it's a testament to the success of our share option flow or share incentive plan and our LTIPS that no one really that we have wanted to keep has left. It's been a fantastic retention tool. I'm still here.

21:44 So and and that really puts pay to that. And those staff costs include, you know, recruitment training. Training is a really big budget now for us to to stay ahead of all the compliance rules, the consumer duty, etcetera, etcetera. And for those who have managed to read through our r and s, you will see that there's a little bit of negative information there relating to how much performance related pay is as a percentage of our total staff cost. And the answer now is 25%. So we have really derisked a lot of the the staff costs as well. Moving on to the EPS increase. And, really, the point of this slide is just to show that, you know, the denominator in EPS has moved a bit, but it's moved such a small amount that it's it's had had the only the tiniest impact on our EPS calculation. The rest is pretty straightforward.

22:44 You know, it's the revenue, the the gross profit dropping through to to everything else.

22:55 So investments and acquisitions. There are two slides here. One is based upon what we did in the period, and the second slide is what we've done after the period. So those who have followed us for a while will recognize that we continue to make investments through our fantastic tech team. And most of that investment has gone into EQUALS money, the platform,

23:20 And boxes is a sort of subset of that platform for, you know, the launch of further products, particularly for solutions. And then the second part is, you know, what have we bought externally? We've announced that we bought Rocket, an open banking platform at the beginning of the year. We announced that we did a a small FX brokerage business called Haimer and Haimer. And, you know, both of them are really adding adding to to our our products and and revenue set now.

23:55 And after the period, UNEX now renamed EQLS Money Europe, acquired on the July 4 an equity deal with some working capital components that will over time get repaid, injecting that by way of loans. So it doesn't pose a dividend trap for for the business, and it means that they can be repaid as Equal Money Europe gets into profitability. We will continue with product development in the same sort of quantum as we've been doing in the first half of the year. And in the second half of the year, we do have some outflows in relation to our very successful acquisition of Casco. And Hamer and Hamer, this FX business that amazingly had an incredible day to day, can get a further 1,700,000 over three years if the targets are met.

24:51 And there's also some money to go out in relation to Rocket. I thought we'd sort of end with this slide, which is, you know, we're quite often asked how much working capital do you need, what happens with it, etcetera, etcetera. So we have the money at the banks, primarily, you know, Citibank, Barclays, and NatWest. And of that, just under 10% is probably sort of trapped. There is a regulatory deposit of just under 400,000, but the rest is, you know, float that we need. We have a card provider where we prefund. And if you look further down the page, you'll see that there's another card balance there. So our our card business consumes about 1,400,000 of of working capital.

25:41 We margin our clients as best we can, and we are margined by our liquidity providers all for forwards. And so there's 2,100,000 of margin at the balance sheet date that was consumed there. The rest is as you'd expect for any other trading business. And out out of that 14.2 that we're showing here, you know, $55,000,000 is my rainy day money. I I think a 5,000,000 is the amount of money I would never want to go below. And so I think that is quite important in thinking about, you know, how we can reserve money for future acquisitions and how we can, should the board decide, you know, formally declare a dividend when the court process has concluded.

26:34 So I'll now pass back to Ian to talk about our current trading and the future. Thank you, Richard. Could you flip the slide? Thank you. I won't go through this in exhaustive detail, but far right column there is 2023 year to date. If you look at the revenues per working day, how they've continued to go up. When you look at q three to date, we're running at about 30% higher than than q three last year, which is a is a very healthy increase. It was quite bizarre. Those of you who followed us for a while will know that last year, I was really wanting to do 70,000,000 for the full year. We did 69.7, and we were very close to being 40% for that bottom right hand, number, and it came out 39.45 or something like that. So I keep missing my big figures.

27:32 But, the period we picked for this year was pretty much the same as for last year, so September 8. And the first few days of September last year, we had quite sort of, supernormal days. So we picked a really tough period to compare ourselves to. The message is, you know, we continue to trade well and strongly, and growth is robust. And as I alluded to in the r and s, when I look at the the future in terms of pipeline, this is it's strong, so we are encouraged. As we integrate more and more into larger enterprises via API, there is a lead time with that. It can take months rather than weeks.

28:18 But, obviously, there are chunkier revenues when they do come on stream. So I have good line of sight, as to where we, ought to be going in terms of our revenues just for the rest of the year. I'll flip the slide, please, Richard. This somewhat ugly slide, but nevertheless gets the message across. Think of it now that we have one tech stack equals core. It's the platform, all the settlement rails, the direct connectivity, the licenses, compliance, the operations, the factory, if you wanna think of it that way. We have one API layer, and that API layer supports our own product. So EQLS money, cardboard money, Fairfax now, all consumed from that central core via that API.

29:05 And it's the same API that we will serve up to third parties. So when, you know, we'd had this chat a year ago, we only had those top three boxes there, EQLS, BUNNY, CODD, or MONEY, and Fairfax. We didn't have the ability to integrate with third parties via our APIs or white label them. Now we do. And what this is trying to get across, therefore, is the addressable market for us just got a lot bigger. Just in that, we're having the API capabilities that we are really reaping benefits of now. And we'll see more white labels being done by us during the rest of the year. On top of that, we've got geographic expansion. We already have The UK, obviously. That's where we, basically, all our revenues have come from up to now. Europe, will be coming on stream, as we know, and you heard earlier.

29:59 We have a route into The US. We've not pushed our, accelerator hard on that yet and neither will do so until you know, you don't wanna be stretched, going Europe and US both at the same time or committing a load of resource. Our US headcount is the grand total of two, and we'll stay that way for the foreseeable future. But we have the route into there when we when we choose. And, obviously, there's other geographic places we could go to. What's be the beauty of this model now is it could be that other countries, whilst we could go there, we'd rather not let somebody who is already there, you know, utilize our tech via the API links and consume it that way. So we don't necessarily have to sell it through our own brands. I think that's the message. So it's far more platform driven, far more fee based driven as we move forwards over time.

30:58 Slide for you, Richard. So we'll continue to grow, and we'll grow with control. That's the the overall message. So as we look forward on payments, we'll fully automate all outbound payments, basically by the end of this year. Bulk payments is a is a pet thing of mine that is allowing a customer to send, you know, thousands of payments by one click of a button. They can do dozens or maybe a 100 or so now relatively easily, but it's, we can't industrialize it. And, so that will open up global payroll and all all sorts of other types of solutions. And they'll be able to do that either via API or by logging to the platform doing it that way.

31:43 And we will continue to go direct where we can. One piece of this is to out third party interfaces into Swift and do it all ourselves directly. But there's other direct payment network integrations I'd like to be doing over the course of the coming months and years. On cards and acquiring, we can now decommission the old platform. Thank you thank you very much. B to b cards in Europe and The US, as we've mentioned, white label cards are coming via API links. We've got a couple of large ones in play currently, and enhance the ROCCAT platform to process, euros. Right now, it's sterling only. EQLS money Europe, we've submitted the plan to the MBB. We'll launch multicurrency I bands.

32:33 We know we have demand for this product both with existing customers and customers that would like to use us but can't and have said so. Integrate with the new banking partners and also plumbing as I mentioned, and grow the current merchant acquiring offering, which is actually performing ahead of plan currently. Sales and marketing, we will focus we won't defocus on SMEs, but we'll do more focus on the larger corporates, because now we have the API capabilities, we can do so. We will continue to upgrade our salespeople as we do in the compliance area. You know, we need smarter people. We're not selling on price. We're selling on functionality.

33:18 We're solving problems. So you need salespeople that are capable of doing that. We'll continue to expand and improve the digital reach, including some social. A big fan of face to face sales, so a chain in commerce, fairs, limited sponsorship, also, will will come into that. So get people to congregate where you can sell to them or go where they congregate. Compliance and risk, obviously, we'll keep continue to invest there. Experienced professionals quite often with particular industry expertise, which so we you know, different industries have different nuances, and it's good to have people that understand how they work. Increased use of the transaction monitoring, utilizing AI.

34:04 And we know that regulators, not just the FCA, but the world over, it's more and more about protecting the consumer. We have consumer duty regs coming in here any minute. That's a theme just as well with b two b then, isn't it? But even on b two b, you do still have to watch what you're doing. And I think it's worth emphasizing the strength in-depth that we have. Five years ago or even less, it was a bit lopsided. There was a lot of reliance on me personally. We've got a good quality exec team that's fully populated, and the layer beneath them is also very good. And overall, our workforce is our strength. The SIP and LTIP regimes that were put in place and supported by shareholders. So thank you for that. Have been instrumental, I think, in in staff retention.

35:01 Think about it. You know, we have people on, you know, in customer services, maybe on 25,000 a year now own, you know, 8 to £10,000 worth of stock. It's it's a material amount, which they'd lose if they leave. So they're engaged. We've got a great culture here, motivated workforce. You can flip the slide, please, Richard. So in summary, EQUALS, as I say, it's, it's very much delivering on the message that we said we would do six months ago. And if anything, we've outperformed it, continued growth in all the key metrics, turnover, revenue, profits, distributable reserves, which I could never say properly. And we're trading ahead of expectations, which is great. Throwing off a lot of cash, active in m and a, as you've heard, 10 p a share just in the cash that sits on on the balance sheet.

35:57 The core functionality, the product functionality that we have, the EQLS core powering everything, and now we have the API layer. And that one platform doing cards and own name iBands, as we all know, it's not unique, but it's still quite hard to find. The tech is scalable. We commissioned, because we've been talking about our tech for some time. We commissioned an external company to do a an audit, if you will, of our tech and, make sure that what we were saying is is correct. It's a very positive audit that I've got back from them. That 10 x capacity, is from that report, not me, pulling a number out the sky. So, we're proud of our tech, and ISO two 27,001 is in flight. Should land this year.

36:47 Basically, that's a sort of best practice, badge of cybersecurity and security in general. So, we're very proud, as and when we get that. Compliance culture has been a theme throughout the deck and throughout the last couple of years. We'll continue to increase the headcount there and skills. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has to do compulsory training, which lands at least one new model module every month, actually, normally two or three. We have independent audits to make sure we're on track. And as we know, the FCA are hot on the sector. And last but by no means least, you know, the company is now grown up enough to pay this maiden oh, sorry. Has an intention to pay the maiden dividend subject to, all the various stuff that we have to do to do that.

37:40 And I think that is a key statement. You know, what we're not saying is, okay. Our growth has peaked. Let's start paying dividends. We're saying we're confident very confident in in the business such that we can pay a dividend, and still have enough cash to do what we need to do, to drive the business going forwards. So on that note, we'll hand over to do the q and a. Ian, Richard, that's great. And thank you very much indeed for your presentation today. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard.

38:32 Richard, Ian, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation. And, Ian, if I may just ask you just to make your way through the questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Thanks. And, you know, as we know, due to time constraint, we might not be able to answer all of them, but I'll do my best. Some we've answered during the course of the presentation. So the first question is solutions has gone to nought percent of revenues to 30. What percentage of revenues do you expect it to represent over the mid mid to long term? Well, the most immediate I think, Richard, you covered this. So we expect it to get to 50% of revenues probably by it might happen next year, but more like sometime during 2025.

39:19 And I think that's a reasonable expectation. The next question is, is there seasonality in the business with some months consistently stronger, weaker than others? And if so, why? The answer is yes in that because we're so much of a b to b business now. I mean, obviously, on the b to c side, we still have that seasonality for travel, but it's, you know, it's a very small amount of our total revenues now. But b to b customers tend to be quieter during holiday months. So July, August are typically quieter than other months. This month is typically strong. The last ten days of December are typically a graveyard. So but it should all come out in the wash.

40:08 The next question, at what point would you consider a main market listing? I think the honest answer is we always consider a main market listing. I think we're too small to do that. Of course, we could buy other businesses and get our market cap up that way or, you know, hopefully, the share price will do what it ought to do. You know, I think it becomes more of a thing when you're at $250,000,000 market cap or more that it's something you can consider. Equally, AIM does have its advantages, not least inheritance tax funds. Alpha have stated intention to move to main market. So there's some arguments to say you should stay on AIM, but I something we'll constantly review, and I think it's a very fair question. The next question is how likely are you to do share buybacks assuming required votes to allow these? Personally, I'd like to see this.

41:03 It's another really good question. I think the dividend announcement and moving distributable reserves up to Topco so that we can pay the dividend also frees us up to do that. I I think it'd be easy to say we would definitely do that if the stock was very liquid and had a a big free float. My concern will be taking out shares from a liquidity standpoint, but I'll take advice on that. Part of me would like to do it. Some shareholders would like us to buy back shares that match any LTIP or SIP awards, and I get the logic of that. So I can't give a definitive answer, but I I take the input. Next question.

41:50 Q three revenues per day, slightly higher than those in q two. Delighted to see that as I would expect to guess. They are stronger than in q two, and we maintain you know, as you can see, the the revenues per day number continues to tick up for the whole year. So, clearly, revenues per day in q three to date are higher than they were in q two and, obviously, in q one. So do I expect a stronger finish in the year now the business is ramping up for q four? Yes. But always that caveat of December. So I think the numbers that analysts have put out today are sensible. Most of them are predicting around 20,000,000 of EBITDA. And if you think, who next is probably dragging about a million, so that would be 21,000,000 of EBITDA if we hadn't done who next this year and start to contribute next year.

42:41 So I'm confident with the numbers we have out there. Of course, it's possible to beat them, but I think that would be premature to say so. The next question is, do I have any thoughts on Alpha's acquisition of Cobalt, r alpha, replicating equals here, I e r alpha group, direct competitor equals in Europe with acquisition of Cobalt. No. Actually, we looked at Cobalt ourselves. It's a very good business. What it is is a treasury management system, really. So it's not like an Unix. It's a platform that you know, if you're a corporate with 700 bank accounts across 10 banks, you can look it all in one place and manage it from there. It's pretty cool, pretty funky.

43:30 I was talking to an investor earlier, and I said, well, if if that if we were speaking to that corporate, we'd say, well, get rid of those 10 banks and just have one account with us. We do everything for you. That would simplify it rather than using that platform. We will butt heads with Alpha a bit more than we have in the past, but I think the big difference between us and them is is we have invested in prior years way more into the plumbing end of it, if you want to think of it that way. We don't normally take wallet off each other. Certainly not happening yet. We're normally taking wallet share off banks. So we're not in a in a direct head on competition yet. And even if we were, the market scale and the addressable market is so big that there's definitely room for the both of us.

44:23 The next question is, are you able to give any further guidance on dividend policy? Short answer is not yet. What we wanted to make sure we did now is state the intent to pay and the, you know, strong dividend cover that we have there. One and a half p, Richard will quote a statistic that we're basically adding six p a year at current rates in cash, you know, to the balance sheet. So it's only a quarter going out in dividend that we've announced an intention to pay. It'll take a little bit of time to get this through, EGM and the court process. And so when we hopefully, formally announce the dividend, we'll clarify policy a bit more then. I think it'd be a little bit premature now, but, we certainly aren't expecting, to pay less in future years. Let's let's put it that way. Yeah. And for those who are shareholders, you will be getting a circular tomorrow, and it'll be going up with the various proxy forms on our website too.

45:30 Great. Next question. Have you started earning revenue in The US? If not, when do you think this will start going forward? What do you see the revenue split in UK, Europe, US? Great question. Not really. I mean, we we have customers in The US that we do international payments for, but I'd really ascribe them to to The UK business. We have soft pedal launching the card in The US. The banks there have been slow, but it's kinda suited us because we're, you know, we're, got our hands full with the European expansion. I would say, you know, next year with the following win on. I'm not sure what numbers the the market consensus around a 115,000,000, isn't it? Something like that or 113.

46:17 We might do 10 to 15 in Europe. US, maybe only one, but that will change over time. If if we get the traction we expect in The US, I can see The US picking up quite quickly. But I I don't really wanna predict, more than a year out. So the key now is nail Europe and expand there because we know that will work. We've got a a pent up demand there that's gonna move the needle quicker than committing a lot of resource into The United States. The next question, are you aspiring to ramp the European solutions business far from The UK equivalent given there's existing demand for Europe for Europe from the current customer base.

47:04 Yes and no. I mean, the devil's in the detail and the and the, you know, execution. It's possible. I just don't know until we're in it. You know, even if we just replicated what we did in in The UK, I think, we'd be happy with that. I think investors would be happy with that when you look back at the numbers of what we managed to do. There's a fair argument to say we could and should do it quicker than that, given what we know and and, given that, the systems are all embedded in, but, I'm not gonna commit to it. Richard, here's one for you. Could you explain a little bit about the r and s with it regarding the share premium account? I agree. It is very legally his wording. So any deciphering, Richard, you can give would be helpful.

47:57 Yeah. Yes. If you look at the balance sheet of a company or a group like ours, there'll be the group, and then there'll be the company in its own right. It is a company in its own right that has to have distributable reserves to to be be able to pay a dividend, not the group. And we have very substantial share premium. We have 53,000,000 in our share premium account. And all we're doing, if if you follow a little bit of accounting theory, is we're gonna go share premium, credit distributable reserves, 25,000,000. The the bottom half of the balance sheet doesn't move. The top half of the balance sheet doesn't move. It's just an inter account transfer. It does allow us through the court, so it's court approved to, you know, pay a dividend, buy back shares, whatever.

48:51 Very clear. I mean, unfortunately, that's the legal wording, and I agree. When you read something that says capital reduction, you go, oh, what the hell is that? But it's it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And the last question slash comment, it's a very kind one. Great business update. Thank you for spending time talking to small investors. Please keep please keep doing so when you are much bigger. Yes. We will. I've I actually quite enjoy this, or I wouldn't be doing it at 06:00 on the first day of the roadshow. That's the end of the questions. Ian, Richard, absolutely. And thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. And, of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately afterwards just for you to review and to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. And we'll publish all those responses out on the investor meet company platform.

49:45 But, Ian, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that'd be great. Thank you. Yes. Well, I think I think as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, what's what's good about this set of numbers is we've delivered what we said we would do, and it's a consistent story. Now it's about adding more distribution channels for the business. We're not doing anything radical or, oh, by the way, we've now thought of this new thing to do. It's executing on a plan, and it's clear that the plan is working. Add into that continued growth in q three, add into that the maiden intention to pay the maiden dividend.

50:35 And I think you can see that the company has evolved and grown up, continues to be a growth story that we can all be proud of. You've got a workforce here that's absolutely committed to it. It's loving doing what they're doing. So, I think it's a great investment case, and I would like to thank those of you who who are holders for being holders. And those of you who are not, I would encourage you to become one. And thank you all for your time this evening. Thank you very much. Ian, that's great. And, Rich, well, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations.

51:22 This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team with EQUALS GROUP PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good evening to you all.