Celebrus Technologies (LSE:CLBS) — Interim Results and Capital Markets Day

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the D4 T4 Solutions PLC Interim Results and Capital Markets Day. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated on 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 it received in the meeting itself. However, 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. And I'd now like to hand you over to Bill Bruno, CEO. Good afternoon to you, sir.

0:30 Good afternoon. Alright. Thank you. And for those of in the room that don't have the tabs, you can choose to raise your hand. If you're so bold or you can wait till the end to ask a question, we can have a little bit of fun with it. Folks, remember to repeat the question just in case they can't hear on the audio if that does come through. You'll notice there are five names on the slide. We have Ann Phillips, our CTO. We have Ash Mehta, our CFO. Mark Krebs, our VP of global sales. Unfortunately, Tiffany came downhill. She is here in London, so we're sending her some well wishes. But she's unfortunately not here today, so you will hear me present about marketing, which will be a lot less exciting, but I will do it anyways. And we've got some some good content planned for you today. So from an agenda perspective, you know, we're we're happy to answer questions about the results. We're just gonna quickly go through the the the operational highlights, the financial highlights, and walk through just a little bit of a review of strategy.

1:22 Mark is gonna walk through our sales approach, both from a direct and indirect perspective and kind of what he's been doing now a year a year in with the transformation that we've made for our direct sales approach and some of the processes that we've put in place. And then what's been asked about quite a bit in our one on ones thus far. Sorry. I'm not too no. That's alright. I'm pleased. I'm right to the front. I'm trying to pick on you for being late. But Very punctual, Bill. Yeah. No. Absolutely. So a lot of questions have come up around our new partner launch of sales of the Salesforce CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES Salesforce applications. So we're gonna spend quite a bit of time on that. I'll walk through kind of the what's happened over the last thirteen, fourteen months with Salesforce that got us to this point, what started that partnership. And so it's going to do a demo.

2:08 And then that's where I'll jump in and play the marketing hat and walk you through kind of an example of how we're running our marketing approaches these days, how that interacts with sales, and how we're using that to drive new business as quickly and efficiently as we possibly can with partners. And then the treat at the end is, Berry Group is a customer of ours here in The UK, a retailer as as many of you are most likely aware. It's also a very busy time for retailers during the holiday season, so they were nice enough to set aside a bit of time. And their chief data officer, Steve, did an interview with us, and and he'll he'll talk through a variety of aspects of our relationship with them and how it's grown over the years and how they're using not only CELEBRUS TOP, but also the marketing and the fraud data platform today across their business. So we thought that'd a really good case study to to bring to life for all of you.

2:55 So with that, I suppose we'll jump into some of the highlights. So just, you know, briefly, it's been a very busy six months in the business. A lot of innovation. Obviously, a lot of innovation after the period as well with the Salesforce launch and some of the contract wins that came out yesterday in parallel to the interims. But we also had several enhancements to the product across version nine dot six and what we call CX vault. So a lot of we always get questions, and we always wanna call out innovation and and intellectual property. So these are patented and patent pending applications that we've added to the product. I'm sure many of you have read articles and follow companies that talk about a cookie this world or cookie deprecation and the death of third party cookies and all of the hoopla around that and all of the the doom and gloom that people write about.

3:45 There's no real solution or at least there wasn't to to a situation where someone opts out. To give you an example, I was on on with a German prospect of ours the other day, and they intimated that about 60% of their consumers opt out of of tracking. You know, they don't accept cookies, they use browsers that opt them out. In a traditional world of marketing technology, that means the room is dark. You don't know what people are doing. You don't know who they are. You're unable to help them. Alright? If you read any surveys from Forrester or Gartner, they talk about really two things that compete against each other and just don't make sense. Right? One is that consumers demand privacy, and the other is that consumers demand a personalized experience. They don't go hand in hand. In fact, they're fighting on a regular basis with that. So CX vault was our solution to that that that our engineering team phenomenal engineering team has brought to bear, which in essence allows brands to personalize in a without collecting data, without setting cookies, without storing data, and without sharing data. So it's a true cookie less solution that can be sold as a standalone to the product.

4:48 It does not require the larger sale, and that sort of fits with our simplified sales approach that that Mark's gonna talk to here briefly as well. We had several other innovations around digital identity. It all kinda goes hand in hand. That's the biggest and the most biggest driver of business for us these days in terms of the prospects and the conversations that are coming all have to do with digital identity because of those good challenges. And we we have several other patented applications in version nine dot six that enhance our ability to do that and continue to move us well out in front of our competition.

5:20 We'll talk about Salesforce, but that's not our only partner. We did become a foundational partner in TECHNOLOGIES always on insights program. How many of you know that we've been partnered with TECHNOLOGIES for quite some time, and we we have some integrations that we've used with them. This is a much more simplified streamlined integration. So it's just a further enhancement and innovation on what we've been doing. That again makes it easier to sell. It's a packaged offering. It's very it's the same thing every time for every customer, and it makes it a very streamlined thing to not only talk about and sell, but also demo and explain the value of. And and it it just fits with what we're trying to do as a business, which is take two technologies in the marketing and the and the fraud platform that can do a million things and try to make that digestible for specific pain points so that businesses truly understand what value we can provide instead of trying to educate them on the entire million things that we do. And you'll see that come through not only today, but if you are following us on LinkedIn and all the social channels. Hopefully, you've picked up on the fact that a lot of what we're writing and bringing to market is a lot easier to understand and kind of free of jargon and just gets right to the point.

6:24 We also had several contract wins in the period. The two that I'll call attention to are one with another US health group in The US. This one is important not just because it's a new logo, which is always important, but also because there's two elements to this that are that were key for us. One is this is a CELEBRUS cloud offering where we're hosting the environment for the client in a single tenant private cloud instance, which means it can be turned on seemingly immediately, and the client can start getting value much more quickly than they would if we were installing in their environment on premise. And also because we were hosting the environment for them, there's a a regulatory compliance in The US called HIPAA, and that resulted in our platform achieving HIPAA compliance in order to be able to provide this for for The US health care industry.

7:09 So it's yet another compliance element of our products and our delivery that that puts us head and shoulders above the competition. The second happens to be the group you're gonna hear from at the end of the day today, but it's the Berry Group and the fact that they added biometrics, the fraud capability to their to their websites for some for a couple of very specific purposes that I'll save for Steve to walk you through when we play that video. So with that, Ash, I'll throw the financial highlights over to you, sir. Okay. Thanks, Will. Hello, everyone. So I know you haven't come to hear the financial highlights, and that's fine by me. But I will go through them just very briefly. If you'd like more information, then there is an interim results presentation already on our website. So as for the financial highlights, let me just pull out some key points. So the revenue was up from 7.6 to 8,100,000.

7:58 Of course, during these times of volatile foreign currency exchange rates, there is some foreign currency impact on that. So around half of that growth was organic growth from customer wins and the other half was as a result of FX movements.

8:12 As you know, a large majority of our revenues are in US dollars. So as the dollar strengthened over that period, that has a positive impact on our revenues. Equally, on our annual recurring revenue, that's gone up from 14,000,000 at the start of the period to 15.8. And again, there's an FX impact within that. So of that 1,800,000 increase, 400,000 was from contract wins and 1,400,000 was from foreign currency movements. That component, of course, is very volatile. We we value our ARR every six months. So at the year end, we'll give an update on that, breaking down the increase in ARR between contract wins and FX movements as well to find more transparency into the actual underlying performance.

8:59 The gross margin for the period was 38.3%, down from 53.2 this time last year. The gross margin is very dependent upon some of our projects containing third party hardware and software. So where we do have periods as we did this time around of third party hardware going through the revenue line, That hardware is generally going through at a relatively low margin, typically of around 10% markup. Obviously, the rest of the business, the blended margin, which includes the licenses, the support and maintenance, and the delivery services, the blended margin of all of those is around 70%. And within that, if you were to break it down further, obviously, the licenses would be the highest margin, followed by support and maintenance, followed by the delivery services.

9:47 As I said, this was expected, and it arises from contracts we signed in the second half of last year, which were part of the reason for having a high trade debtor and trade creditor balance at the last year end. And of course, as these have then unwound, we we knew that there would be this hardware element, which would depress the margin for the first half. Looking forward to the full year, with the addition of new licenses and also very little hardware gains within the second half, we expect gross margin for the full year to revert to a typical 55% to 60% on a blended basis. Not mentioned on this slide, but let me just flag it up to you. The underlying operating expenses went up from 3,900,000 to 4,500,000.

10:32 Again, that's totally planned. That was as a result of previous communications relating to increased investment principally into sales and marketing, and that's an effect which will flow through into the second half as well. So that all in all gives us an adjusted diluted EPS of 4.49p for the period. And we are paying an interim dividend of 0.88p per share as an interim. Of course, since the half year end, we've also paid out a special dividend of 12.5p. But the underlying dividend will typically grow at a normal kind of few percentage points per annum, but we will review the cash balances with a view to perhaps making special difference in the future.

11:18 As for the cash balance at the year end, if you remember, as I mentioned, we had a high trade debtor balance that has unwound, and that's what gets rise to us holding 26,200,000,000 at the end of the half year. And as I said, since then, we have paid a special dividend, 12.5p per share, which equates to around 5,000,000. So the underlying cash balance is effectively $2,021,000,000 pounds, I say. Okay. Good. Thank you. Thank you. So tying into that, just to talk just a little bit about our our themes and our strategy as a business, the main the main theme that we've been bringing throughout the business is focus, focusing our resources in the right area, focusing our sales in the right areas, and and doing the right things. And that's been carrying through everything that we've done that we've done in the in the past year as as a leadership team in CELEBRUS as well as what we continue to do. And and the three things behind me on the screen are the three things that we are focused on by way of what we're bringing to the market. It's to sell software. It's our marketing platform and our fraud platform, and it's to underpin that with the offering of CELBRUS TOP.

12:31 The CELBRUS TOP offering, the nice thing about that is over time, it will move our reliance on third party hardware away. That will start to diminish. We'll focus more on operationalizing our customers quickly in cloud based environments. And the nice thing about those contracts is they become ARR driving contracts where we're delivering services on an annualized basis with multiyear commits without cancellation, which is our standard contracting period these days as as we go to market. Within the CDP, you'll you've probably noticed this. We've been quite loud in both products as of late. I'll cover some of the marketing from tipping Tiffany's perspective towards the end of the presentation. But we've really been simplifying our messaging, simplifying our approach, both direct and indirect, because there's improvements needed in in both areas. For direct, we've never done it before.

13:20 So that was new in in and of itself. But for indirect, it's about taking some of those principles, and Mark will walk through those shortly. On FTP, you know, we just announced another contract win of of another client going on live with FDP that now brings five existing customers paying for the FDP, which we're quite thrilled about given the short period of time that that's been in the market. Through that period, we've learned quite a bit. So we've learned a lot about the structure of organizations and how they align on specific fraud use cases and how a group, for example, in a business may only focus on one of those fraud use cases, and there's an entirely different team focusing on another. It's quite interesting, actually, from somebody who's been in the marketing world now for over twenty years. A lot of those silos and lack of communication amongst departments seems to also exist in fraud. It's not just on the marketing side of the house.

14:11 And that's brought forth a lot of interesting learnings in terms of how we position the product, how we sell the product. At this point, we feel like we've, one, validated that what our perception was, which is that we were bringing a product to the market that fills gaps. We've now validated that. Every customer that has gotten access to the data does not wanna shut it off. We now understand and have validated our differentiators against many of the major players that we come up against. And what that's allowed us to do is to start working on what what I'm what we're collectively calling an early adopter campaign now for new business, new logos. So now that we have vetted this, we've proven it with our existing account base. We continue to build pipeline with this existing accounts. There's more in the pipeline than the ones that we've already announced. We're now going to go on the front foot with a a early adopter campaign for fraud, partnering with some of our consulting partners that we've that we've brought on board around the globe to put together offerings that package up our data with with significant fraud use cases and use that as a benefit to to gain market share a bit more aggressively. So that that's something that you'll see some noise about here in the coming months and something we're excited to do now that we've, you know, sort of vetted and and learned things as we went. And CELEBRUS Cloud, just as a reminder, is is an innovation of our customer data management division.

15:26 We have been building massive analytic environments for customers, helping them better utilize data not only from our software, but from anything that that creates data within their environments. That knowledge and that know how and the innovation and some of the software and and intellectual property has enabled us to build, you know, this approach to CELEBRUS Cloud, which is quite interesting. Because when I talk about it, a lot of people just assume it's only us hosting. But we actually have the ability to deliver the construct of CELEBRUS Cloud into a client's cloud environment as well. So if they wanna host it in their environment, we can make that easier for them. We can help them manage it. We can spin up the software more quickly. And a lot of that discourse has really sort of forced innovation for us to think about how we streamline things, which frankly was the backdrop for how the CELEBRUS CDI for Salesforce came about, which will be, I think, an interesting story when we come on to that. But let's start first on the sales side and throw things over to Mark here to walk you through kind of what we've been doing in the business and how we've been simplifying things. So you can just tell me when to change slides, but I see you won't get started there. Perfect. Nailed it. Hi, everybody.

16:32 As Will said, so I'm I'm Mark Krebs, head of sales for CELEBRUS, all of our products underneath CELEBRUS line. This is a I've been here for a little over a year. Just a little bit of a brief background. So I've run sales and business development and partnerships for several companies across a couple different industries. Most notably, I worked for or set help start up a software company that was one of the first SaaS companies that business model in the software world. And that's actually where I crossed paths with Bill. I'd say that we've been on probably hundreds of sales calls together. He's closed lots and lots of deals. We're very comfortable in understanding how each other work and figuring out what works when pitching to folks.

17:19 When I joined any new company I've ever joined, I take for the first couple months, I take the approach of observing and learning learning the product, the industry, the competition, observing everything that's we're currently doing, why we're doing it, and what we could possibly be doing different. As far as the learning was concerned, the majority of my time for that are pretty much most of the first year was learning about our partners. Because, historically, our go to market strategy was to sell through partners. So we did we started off the year as we have in the past on the same blueprint. We did global sales plays, global sales kickoffs with our two main technology partners, Pega and Teradata.

18:07 As Bill said, partnered with system integrators and consulting firms around the world. Basically, we did over 50 industry team presentations globally, educating partners about who we are, how our technology makes their system better, why they should feel compelled to make introductions to their clients. As a result of those industry presentations, we had hundreds of individual calls with teams to talk about their clients through strategy meetings, ultimately resulting in introductions to their clients.

18:45 It was as I was observing, I realized it took a lot of time. This education and enablement of partners took a lot of time because you had to get them up to speed on an industry and a product that they weren't necessarily familiar with, even though they understand the overall industry and kinda where we fit into it. Excuse me. So I noticed the the amount of time that it took, but it it worked. You know, the great great majority of opportunities active opportunities in our sales pipeline came from clients from partner introductions. Our I would have to say, I think everything I've been told from previous years, our engagement with with partners is probably better than it has been ever in the past. We attended events, stood in their booth, co presented with them.

19:34 We flew around and met with individual teams for their regional team meetings. We sponsored events. We did all the whining and dining we're supposed to do for partners and salespeople to get them excited to try to try and pitch our product. The main observation I had was while that works and will always be a big part of what we do, Our approach didn't strike me as being very efficient. It took a lot of time and lots and lots of calls, and frankly, took up the majority of the sales folks' time spending talking to partners. In my mind, I think they'd be more way more effective talking to prospects and clients. So we have if you hit the gotcha. Go ahead. Excellent. So we have hit the proverbial reset button with our partners.

20:26 We were pleasantly surprised at how well received it was because they tended to agree as we started making these observations of, hey. We're doing a lot of talking, but we're not doing a lot of as much sales as we probably should considering the opportunity. So we've taken a much more targeted approach. Accomplished, we think, will accomplish way more with way less time invested, and our partners seem to agree. So what we've done is we've identified named accounts. So rather than doing a global sales play, talking to people all over the world about clients that may be in industries that aren't necessarily in our sweet spot or markets that may not make as much sense for us. We've identified in various markets specific partner clients that we want an introduction and working with them to come to an agreement on which ones those should be.

21:22 I tend to find the specific industries we wanna target. So, you know, finance, insurance, telco, travel and hospitality, retail, health care in The US, because we have our whole own situation with health care in The US. And then doing in in specific markets. So I initially, our big push is going to be in The US and in Europe and India. Of course, I'm a sales guy, so I will talk to anyone anytime about anything. So any opportunity that pops up anywhere in the world, of course, we're gonna talk to them and sell to them. But we're gonna be hyper focused on identifying specific accounts that we wanna go at. And, again, our partners agreed rather than spending all of our time educating their teams about who we are, what we do, how CELEBRUS works, All we're gonna do is have strategy calls with them and say, this is a a named account. This is why we believe they are in dire need of our solution. This is why our solution is going to make your existing footprint better.

22:25 You're gonna make more money. Spend our time on strategizing and selling as opposed to education. We had our a call last week, a named account in The US, one of the largest on improvement retailers, and it followed this blueprint perfectly. Got on a call with a solution consultant and the account executive, walked them through exactly the problems that their client is having that they didn't even know because, again, we play in a different world than they do. Walk them through how we could solve that problem, walk them through how it will make them look like heroes and make them more money. The account executive said, that sounds great. My main contact is the chief data officer. I'll make it outside of the call for next week. So, again, rather than to Bill's point about focus, rather than spending so much time on education and enablement, we're basically having our partners get us in front of our their clients as fast as possible because we can sell way better than they can.

23:22 So it seems to work. Along these lines, we have changed around the internal structures and created incentives to try and elicit the behavior that we want even internally. So rather than the sales folks spending the majority of their time working with partners, our partnership team is basically taking that back over and doing a lot of the lead gen. I would not call them business development reps, but they, to some extent, are. Their job is to work with partners at these strategy calls, identify clients that that fit our ideal customer profile, ask the hard questions of, is this really a good client? Are they in a good position? Is this the real time, the right time to be talking to them?

24:08 Identify these key metrics that we would expect for a lead to be flipped over to sales. So partnerships have taken that over. They're gonna do basically all of the bird dogging to identify these opportunities. As soon as they have the trigger will be as soon as they have qualified and they have a client ready for a first call, they're gonna flip it to sales. And I think I think the one thing I just wanna put out there is the nature of people is if you want them to do something, you incentivize them to do it. Right? So as Mark built this strategy, we then changed the construct of how the partner teams and everyone's incentivized. If you're incentivized to feed sales with leads, miraculously, you start to see people do those things. And that's been a theme that I know I've covered with many of you over the over the last year of just as we've restructured the business and aligned people in these in these categories.

25:00 It's about coming up with the right objectives, the right goals, and then incentivizing them, bonusing them, offering share options, whatever the case may be, depending on what motivates those individuals to do those things in exchange for those types of of incentives. It's the same thing as salesperson. If they're not gonna make money, they're not gonna do it. Right? The same thing happens throughout the organization. You just have to figure out what that that option is or what that benefit is that we need to offer in exchange for that. People are creatures of habit. So good. No. That's entirely true. Excellent. Next slide. Thank you. So we're very excited. We're already seeing this start to work. We were really encouraged that our partners senior management and our partners entirely agreed to lots of motion, lots of activities with not nearly as many results as we should have. So they're basically as excited as we are. We're already starting to see engagement.

25:51 We're already seeing our partner team, to your point, to listing the right behavior. They're already starting to call us and say, hey. I've got a call scheduled for you with so and so. We'll get the exact kind of calls I wanna get from the partnership team. I've got a new lead. So freeing us, not spending nearly as much time being way more efficient, and I think will result in way better results. We've been hyper focused on the partnership side of things. But as a result, that also frees up the salespeople to do what the salespeople should be doing rather than educating they should be selling. So we have spent a considerable amount of time basically building out a direct sales approach. It's not something that CELEBRUS, I don't think, has done historically, but it's what I'm most familiar with.

26:39 And it's funny when I I said that I observed when I first started at a company. One of the first things I noticed was if and when we were to get in front of a new client or I'm sorry, a new prospect, we would run through the presentation, show them what we do, do a a technical demo. Without fail, at the end of every single call, the person that we were presenting to was pissed off. They were angry because they're like, why don't I know about you guys? Why why do I not know that this technology exists? Because it solves the problems that I've been having to deal with the last ten to fifteen years. This is a pain point that I have that you guys solve immediately. I tried four or five other solutions. They can't do it. I I mean, it is it was shockingly consistent of people pissed off that they didn't know that we exist.

27:32 That to me screams we need to do a lot more talking. So from a direct so the first bullet point on here on marketing, and we'll talk a little bit more on the marketing side of things, but we're going you've probably seen it in social media. We've been going very loud. We've been way more active than we ever have. The name just getting name recognition. I was shocked in the beginning of how many people we would present, and they just said we've never even heard of CELEBRUS. You have some of the biggest clients in the world. We have technology I've never seen before, but I've never heard of you. Like, they just didn't understand. So to me, this is a massive opportunity for us to just go really loud. So we built out a direct sales program, and you have to build the infrastructure for that. So we have sales enablement tools. We've implemented the CRM. We're using HubSpot.

28:21 We have subscribed to sales enablement tools like like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo. We each salesperson has identified a 100 target accounts in each one of the industry verticals that we're we're targeting, and we're doing direct prospecting out of something that we haven't, as a company, done. Of all of our sales guys have done it before. We just haven't done it here. So they're very excited to build out sales funnels. This graphic is just an automation that we built in HubSpot where you identify a key title within an organization that we're targeting. You can put them into, basically, a funnel. They get emails. They get LinkedIn messages. Marketing is kind of blazing the path ahead of us so that they'll see mess they'll see advertising on LinkedIn before they hear from us, create enable brand awareness.

29:14 Doing this on the CDP and the FDP side of things because this is new to CELEBRUS. Obviously, it's a lot of refinements and optimization required because we test things, see what works. CRMs are incredibly sophisticated now where you can send out a series of, let's say, five emails. You can see open rates, and you can tell the fifth email seems to resonate way better than the third one. I wanna change and optimize and figure out what messaging You can you can get very efficient very quickly. And so we're constantly doing that. The other going direct, there's several positives that come out of it. One is visibility. The when you're talking direct when when somebody when we reach out and we get somebody to talk to us or they see marketing and they reach out to us, which is now happening, which is fantastic, they're raising their hand and saying, I'm interested.

30:07 Tell me more. There is no education. You don't have to tell them what their problem is. They have the problem. They know what their pain point is. So it gives us the ability to be a lot more prescriptive in our conversations, understand exactly the pain point, what is it they're trying to solve, what's the directive from their their boss, What is the pain point? How much is this costing us? Or how much what is the increase in revenue that you're looking for? So it's the the calls that we've been on when we're talking direct, it is amazing how how much quicker the conversation proceeds. It it there isn't this back and forth, like, again, going how we had historically been doing it with partners going back and forth and trying to find the right person and lots and lots of prep prep work. You don't call with somebody. You show them what we do. We ask them a ton of questions of what is it that you're trying to accomplish.

31:00 You'll we'll get into this as far as the simplification rather than us. In the past, I think we were so excited as this solution does so much. We show all these amazing cool things, and people get excited, but that confuses people. You have to be hyper focused and just say, okay. This is your problem. Here's our solution. Let's have the next conversation. And we've already seen the sales cycle start to accelerate significantly faster, taking that approach, being way more prescriptive. The other opportunity that gives us, and we think this is gonna be key, especially going into the the economic environment we're going into now. Historically, we focused on trying to sell the entire platform and all of the incredibly cool things that it does, which is great, but it tends to pull in a lot more people because the division we're talking to, they'll see something in the demo, and they'll say, oh, I've got 10 of my friends that would wanna see this too. Extends the sales cycle, pulls in a whole bunch of decision makers. It it just it can't complicates the the conversation.

32:01 This gives us the ability to be a lot more prescriptive to say, this is your problem. This is our solution. We can sell parts of what we do and take more of a when appropriate. Of course, if someone wants to buy our entire platform, I'm happy to sell it to them. But if somebody wants to be just a portion of it, trying to solve something specifically, we can sell portions of our solution and take more of a land and expand approach. Going into a down economy, I think the key focus I've I've been communicating with the sales team is from a cost perspective. A lot of clients that we talk to or prospects that we talk to, when they see our solution, they realize that can probably get rid of some of the stuff that I do that doesn't do as much as your system does. So we can eliminate costs, which is a fantastic sales approach during a down economy, but it also gives us flexibility in our pricing. So we don't have to sell necessarily something really big right out of the box. We can land, sell something that gets us in the door.

32:57 As Bill said, anytime anybody starts using our solution, they start seeing value, and it's incredibly easy for us to start saying, okay. That this is one solution, one use case that you just bought us for. Here's a whole bunch of other use cases and expand very quickly through our conversation. So we think there's lots and lots aside from not only relying on the partners to generate leads going and digging up our own leads, which will massively increase our sales pipeline. There's other benefits and opportunities from taking a direct sales approach. The rest, I'll I'll go through quick setting. I've been talking too long. Sorry. The I guess, I'm getting excited about this. The so, clearly, to to roll out a a a new strategy on both from a partner side and the direct sales side, we've been working with both teams on the partner side to make them super efficient and not get sucked into the education enablement side of things, stay hyper focused on just introduce us to your client on the direct sales side of things. As I mentioned, we've done a whole bunch of sales automation and enablement tools.

34:09 And Bill touched on this earlier, refining the messaging. You know, we have in the past, I think, got super excited and talked about everything we can do. Having, you know, thirty, forty, 50 slide pages in a sales presentation is not necessarily great. We've got down some presentations. We'll have four or five slides show a technical demo and then just start asking questions, and it's just as if not more effective. Just stay hyper focused and simplify the message. So and it even goes to the technical demo side of things. On the presales, you know, again, we get excited and show all of the things that these that this solution can do. We've taken the approach of let's ask some questions in the beginning and understand what it is that they wanna accomplish, and we're just gonna show them that part of the job. We can show them the rest at any other time.

34:57 This makes it significantly more repeatable, and and it ties in with the whole marketing side of things. Once we identify or have have been identifying the messaging that seems to resonate based on industry, based on job title, it makes it very easy to replicate. And then marketing can basically pave the way for us as we're doing our direct sales outreach. They're gonna blast the marketplace to educate folks, and they'll understand when we send an email that they've heard of CELFERS. And then the last one, I'm I'm I'm more I'll have always been, you know, words are only worth what they're worth. I'm more of a shiny kind of guy, so I recognize none of this matters till I start bringing you guys a ton of new logos.

35:44 But I'm confident that we're gonna be able to do that. And in preparation, there is nothing but opportunity for this company to grow. We have a very small sales team. We have unlimited market to go after. We in preparation of that, that we're starting the process now of putting systems and processes in place. I am my previous life, I used to be a a CPA. So I like systems and procedures, and I like structure in my brain. So putting together, basically, training program certification standardization, people have to be certified before they're allowed to talk to a client or present a technical demo. Creating alignment of the teams. You know, right now, everybody kinda does everything, create more roles and responsibilities, create teams and pods where a salesperson is working with the business development rep that's working with the solution consultant.

36:39 This is a standard template I've done tons and tons of times. I didn't invent it. I'm not gonna start. Other people have done it. It's repeatable. It's very easy to do, but we're putting together a template for growth because we're entirely confident that this is already working and it's going to work very well. Sorry. No. You're good. Too long. No. Thank you. No. It's just less marketing speak other than the end. There you go. Fine. So from us so obviously, that sales approach, it's good that we have these building blocks in place because we have a opportunity in front of in front of us to test it in a completely new opportunity, and that's with the launch of Salesforce partnership. So just a little bit of background very quickly, and then I'll throw it over to to Anne here to show you the good stuff.

37:26 They they came to us, so he's a good friend of mine, was pretty high up at Salesforce and lots of introductions for us thirteen, fourteen months ago, something like that. I'm bad at the time. There was some somewhere in that window. And they came to us with two things. One, they were missing digital identity and key elements of the digital journey to power their journey builder application that they call, but basically all their orchestration that they do for marketing. Right? How they how brands trigger campaigns. You know, you you look at that pair of shoes and then somehow it follows you everywhere. You know, those types of things, they they were lacking the data that they needed to do that. That was one. And then the other comment they made to us is they said, and because we're lacking that, we're losing deals. So so we knew we knew it was a massive opportunity for us to innovate with them because if they're losing deals, then there's an there's an immediate way for us to both win. There's there's we assumed and we have now found out their sales teams would be incentive incentivized and aligned against it. And that's where this customer data integration came from. Now to be quite honest, Salesforce has a couple of CDPs, I think, they've acquired now at this point in time. So bringing in another partner that that had CDP tied to it could really confuse things when it comes to sales. Right? We don't care what you call us if you buy it, if I'm being quite honest. Right? So so Salesforce has this CDI concept.

38:42 We ran with it. Customer data, that's what we do really well with our digital identity services, and we integrate with Salesforce. So it seems pretty straightforward at the end of the day. And so, ultimately, what it is is we have a direct integration now. It's prebuilt. There's T shirt sizes as we call them, small, medium, large, extra large. It start and there's a basic and premium version. It's all based on the size of of digital sessions or digital visitors that they that a brand may have across their site. And for the basic small T shirt, starts at 12,000 a month.

39:15 You sign up for it. It's a very streamlined version of our application, and you start to get all the things that you see in pink on the slide to varying degrees depending on whether or not you purchase the basic or the premium version. It's very prescriptive. It's very simple. As a result, it fits in line with everything that Mark is outlining in terms of how we sell, and it it's kind of the perfect marriage of what we're trying to do. You'll see some background here in the differences between basic and premium. But in essence, basic, you get the basics. In premium, you get a few extra data points around identity and some of the interactions and things like foreign field interactions. And the beauty is regardless of the level, you you you have this data land right within Salesforce, it's and part of the Salesforce data model. So a a brand will go in, and you'll see this in the demo, but they can pivot and make decisions and triggers right off of the data. They don't even need to know it's coming from CELEBRUS.

40:06 It's just right there within the platform. And we power the digital identity side, which is something at Salesforce. I've worked with them for many years. I've had a lot of friends that have worked there over the years, and that's always been a struggle. New CR when when you're logged in, they do really well. But when you're not logged in then you're that anonymous user even if they should know who you are. It's difficult. And that's something that we've mastered with the patents in our application around digital identity that I've spoken to all of you about numerous times now. And, you know, we we thought this just as a final point before I throw things over over there. There. This was a direct quote that came during the integration work that we were doing. Salesforce calls it live time. They've always called it real time, and everybody's got different things. But, basically, they saw the magic being that in live time, in the moment, a marketer can be in the marketing cloud and can be using CELEBRUS data that's inputting literally in milliseconds, updating in the moment. So you could be on a website right now powered by Salesforce and CELEBRUS, and they're making a decision about what you're doing because that's how fast it is, and that's how great this integration works.

41:06 And so with that, I believe our friends on the god mic are going to power up Ant's demo, and Ant's gonna walk you through a voice over of that demo with our first video. Cool. Thank you, Bill. Oh, look at that. Right on queue. Afternoon, everyone. Right. So give me ten or fifteen minutes, walk you all through what this actually looks like and get under the hood a bit of the tech. The way we've structured this is it's actually a video. There's quite a lot of different things going on, and it's a lot of clicking around, which I want to avoid in a demo. So I've kind of pulled this all together into a demo, which I'm gonna pause and start and just talk you through what the different things are doing as we move along. CELEBRUS Cloud, CELEBRUS CDI, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, of course. So, hopefully, it all kind of join up in one story.

41:56 I have just one slide at the start just to explain a bit of context for what CELEBRUS CDI is, and then the rest of it will be either our CELEBRUS CDI app or indeed Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Right. So the one slide is this slide. Four things then just to explain a little bit more about what this is. First of all, this CELEBRUS CDI for Salesforce is a data as a service, meaning that I got you. Yep. It just kept playing. Oh, thank you. Yep. You're good. Go ahead. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. It's a it's a data as a service, meaning that you instrument your website or your mobile applications with CELEBRUS. We collect the data. We enrich it. We deliver it into Marketing Cloud, into the customer's Marketing Cloud, which they can then use all of those tools in Marketing Cloud in near real time, in live time.

42:49 So it's a very convenient way for Salesforce Marketing Cloud users to get the right data in the right way. Second thing to say is it's all about visitor profiles. So there's different kinds of data. If you ever get an under the hood of data, there's all different kinds of data. The kind of data which we care about in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is actionable data. I want a piece of data or some data about each of my visitors who are using my applications, my web applications, my mobile applications. I want to know where they come from in the world, what they're interacting with, what their interests are, all of those things. And those are things those things we call visitor profiles. So the way you'll see this presented in Marketing Cloud is essentially as a table of visitor profiles. So I can see all my audience. I can segment them. I can put marketing campaigns around them. All of that good stuff that Marketing Cloud does in a very easy to consume way.

43:43 The third thing, which kinda joins up with something that Dylan and Mark was talking about earlier, is around identity. This all sits on top of our identity graph. It all sits on top of CELEBRUS core foundation, which means that all those nasty things that are happening in the world for marketers around the death of third party cookies and many other things, ITP, Apple's ITP, all of that is sold for. They get that as part of the package, and that's a really compelling part of the story. And then last but not least, compliance and secure. That's not not the most glamorous part of the whole offering, but necessary nonetheless. This is all hosted within CELEBRUS Cloud, fully automated environment from the point to which someone signs on the dotted line. They'll be up and running in twenty minutes. They'll be able to log in and start getting data fit into market cloud. So very low latency, getting them up and running. And from our point of view, from the from the costs we invoke from having customers within CELEBRUS cloud, very low maintenance. We wanted to build the technology so that we can scale very effectively. We can't have an army of people looking after all these customers in CELEBRUS Cloud. We need to automate around this, and that's really the key point.

44:50 Alright. So that's enough of that's enough of the slides. Just one last thing to say in passing, which is really just to reiterate that point that's put under synthesis all the good stuff in CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES. So now we're gonna take a look at CELEBRUS CDI. This is a new application. When we stand up a new customer in the CELEBRUS cloud, they get essentially emailed a link, which they can then use to log in and start adding their users, start getting data delivered into Marketing Cloud, and start setting things up. For the most part, everything that we do in CELEBR automatic. You just add our libraries to your web or mobile applications, and data starts flowing. It's really for getting up and running. There's very little required of the end customer. But nonetheless, there are some things about web and mobile applications which are specific.

45:40 So how do users log in, for example? What sort of things as a marketer are you really interested in tracking? Those kind of goals and what sort of marketing campaigns to use? Want that data in Marketing Cloud as actionable data. So you have to tell us a few of those things so we can deliver the right kind of data. And that's really the focus for the CDI app is just to get up and running quickly and then give us those hints, those clues to to deliver the right data into market cloud. And that's what you see me clicking through a few of these things here. You can tell us, for example, what your website domains are unless you've got very good eyesight. You'll see that that's very .co.ukand.com, which we'll come back to in a moment. You tell us how people log in to your website or where they register, for example, what kind of identity you use. You can download things around consent and the service tag.

46:28 Just pause it there. And importantly, some of those things are absolutely central to how marketers work, marketing campaigns, goals, how how people search on the site, how people set up signals to show what they're interested in. Those are the things where you can fine tune what CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES So as an example of that, I've got two in here. The first is a very straightforward goal. So this goal, again, unless you've got sniper like eyesight, not gonna read that, but what it actually says is that you were interested in creating a goal, essentially a signal when someone lands on the checkout page. So a really simple piece of information to say that Ant has checked out or completed the checkout. And, actually, when you look at how marketers work, they set goals all over the place.

47:14 Perhaps they set up a goal that says they want to drive people to a particular page which has some special offers on it, or they want to see if you can drive people to a particular part of the site or use more of an application which isn't being used very much. And these goals are used for all sorts of analytical purposes and to see what kind of results they're getting. And being able to give us those clues so that we can keep an eye out for them give that data to the marketer is really important. So that's that's one part of where customization happens. Another part of the customization is where they quite simply just tell us just pause this at the right moment. So there we go. So on this part of the CGI app, they tell us what their domains are, what are their website domains. And this they've got two in this example.

47:59 One is very.co.uk. One is littlegoods.com, And then they tell us how they would like the signals generated. This is deploying our machine learning actually on their website so that they can attach, say, say, very.co.uk, or that's a retail primarily a retail website. But we'd also like to generate financial services signals because Berry actually does a lot around financial services. They do loans and various other products as well. Whereas if you looked on this for a health care customer, you deploy our health care machine learning so that we can look for what the customers are showing an interest in and generate the right signals accordingly. Is someone interested in credit card offers or is someone interested in buying PS two, for example, for a retail kind of use case? We have six industries, which range from the ones on screen there, retail, financial services, health care, insurance, telecom, travel, and hospitality, and we'll grow those out over time. I suspect the financial services will be probably the most popular and also retail. Salesforce is very strong in retail. So I think that's gonna be a really good one as well.

49:02 And that actually is all there is to the CDI app. It sounds really trivial, and, hopefully, it is that simple for marketers to use. This is just about giving marketers the tools so that we can shape the right data that we deliver into Marketing Cloud. And, actually, pretty much everything else I'm gonna talk about is all in Marketing Cloud because that's where the actual action happens and and quite rightly. So I think the amazing thing too is that I've been working with this technology now for over twenty years. And the fact that someone can log in to this simple app, make a few changes, and that just automates the configuration of CELEBRUS without any manual intervention at all. It is quite groundbreaking. That is the it's it's an incredible thing that the team has come up. Yep. Yep. Yep. So just before I switch across to Marketing Cloud, I'm gonna just show you a very simple use case, which seems that today is very and if you missed it, Black Friday was last weekend. I'm just gonna simply show you someone logging into their account on very, which is a handy way of showing that someone actually identifies who they are by giving us their email address.

50:09 And then I'm gonna do a site search, that little text box up to the top there. When you click in that, kind of site goes a bit gray and type in what you're interested in, and it gives you search results. So that's a few different things there from a sort of observation point of view. Someone arriving on the site, showing an interest in a particular topic, logging in, and all of those different pieces of data, as I'll show you in a minute, arrive in Marketing Cloud, and then you can build journeys around that, which I'll show you as well. So first and foremost, let's go to the account page. No great rocket science here. I'll just log in using my work email address in this example. Nothing more than that. We're keeping an eye on this, obviously, and we can see us log in. I go and do a site search. I'm just typing in the word loan there, and lo and behold, I arrive on a page which Ferry's website has where you can get loans. If you're buying some high value products, then you can get a loan for it and spread the payments out. Simple as that. Now, of course, from the market's point of view, that's very interesting because we now know my email address.

51:06 We probably know how I arrived on the site. They're coming through a referral referral from another website. We show know that I have an interest in loans. In fact, I'm starting to show those some of those behaviors on the website here. So all of that information is very interesting, very useful. So the point of the CELEBRUS CDI is to make that actionable in Marketing Cloud. So let's switch across into Marketing Cloud. Anyone familiar with Marketing Cloud or anyone used Marketing Cloud? No. Not many marketers in the audience today. Alright. Okay. So this is Salesforce Marketing Cloud. That's a hard to read banner at the top there. It's just a whole bunch of different tools. Marketing Cloud has lots and lots of different rich tools that you can use to create customer journeys and do paid media advertising on Facebook and all sorts of other good things, personalization, analytics.

51:57 The one tool that we are super interested in well, there's there's two, really. One is called contact builder because that's where we, in marketing cloud, do all our data stuff, or people in marketing cloud do all their data stuff. And then the really interesting tool is journey builder where you build customer journeys. So I'm gonna show you the data part first, and I'm gonna just move across into contact builder, which is this tool which is coming up now. And it might be probably easier to see this on replay when when you put this in front of your computer screen rather than on big screen in front here. What I'm doing here is just going in and having a look at these things called data extensions. And the data extension in Salesforce is nothing more than just a table. If you use Marketing Cloud, you have lots of data extensions, and we'll provide a data extension full of lots of visitor profiles and all the data that we know about visitors to your website or your mobile application. We all have other other data extensions as well. You might have a data extension, which includes customer information or products you've sold them. You might have account information on their balances. All these different piece of data roll up into data extensions.

53:02 And one of the really most compelling things around this solution is to join our data to other datasets within marketing cloud. Because it's all very well known that AMP's interested in taking out a loan and that AMP's interested in buying a big screen TV. But if I've already bought those things very recently, then that really changes the kind of customer journey that you put me through. Because if you keep marketing the same thing and you've already bought a product, that's really irritating for consumers. So, therefore, the digital data is crucial, but it's only part of the picture. You need those other data extensions. You need that other data to complete the whole customer journey. I think it's also goes back to the comment Mark made. Obviously, we're in a an economy that you're all dealing with on a daily basis and monitoring.

53:51 Brands are gonna wanna optimize their costs. One great way to optimize cost is to stop spending on things you shouldn't be spending on because it's wasteful. So our integration, to Anne's point, becomes a way to avoid waste. And and a lot of conversations are around paid media optimization. I mean, it's the largest advertising is the largest budget in an organization. It's larger than r and d in most businesses. So a three percentage swing is massive in savings as an example. You know, if you're just able to shut stuff off and suppress things, you're literally saving millions a year by doing that. Yep. Okay. This is our data extension. When you sign up and when you log in to our application, we'll create this data extension for you in your marketing cloud. So it'll sit alongside all those other tables over those other data extensions that contain your customer data, your account data, transaction data, all that good stuff.

54:46 It's quite a white table. It has about seven to eight different data points. So for one individual, you have one row in that table but have about up to 80 different data points. And those are across about 12 different topics. So things like what forms you've been you've interacted with, perhaps you applied for a loan, that would be a form on a website, things like your geolocation, where in the world you come from, all these different topic areas boil down into a set of fields in that table, and there's about 70 or 80 of them. And within the tooling here, within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can drill down and start to look at these customers. I was thinking I was gonna show you some of these data points, but there's probably not much chance you can read them from back there. So I'm gonna just sort of talk and show at the same time. So as I scroll across here, there's just one customer in this system, which is the the row there, which you can see.

55:40 The row shows a few different things which are worth highlighting. It shows what kind of device I'm using. That's quite interesting. Am I an iPhone user? Am I an Android user? Am I using PC? It shows where in the world I'm coming from. That's really super valuable from any marketer's perspective. It also shows us things I'm interested in, my signals. So when I was working my way through that very website, you show me so you saw me showing an interest in getting a loan, and that data shows up in this row as well. Any identity information, like my email address or my account number or my username, that's in here as well. And that's very important because if I want to join this data to other datasets, then I need to know that this email address matches with that email address in this other piece of data, this other dataset. And that's how we join things together. Usernames, email addresses, account numbers, all of that good stuff is how this data actually gets joined up in practice.

56:32 So in the course of this demo here, I'm just kind of scrolling across showing some of these different pieces of data. The the other thing to just highlight, you do watch this on loop, though, is that there's different ways of looking at data. You can look at data for what's just happened, what's happened in the last twenty four hours, what signals, what interest is Anthony and showing right now. And that's really interesting depending on what kind of question you want to ask for the data and what kind of customer journey. But sometimes you need a broader view. So what has Anthony shown an interest in over the last month or the last week? So these data points also have variations columns, which are the last latest value, the last day, last seven days, last month. So a market, depending on what kind of customer journey they're creating or what kind of use case they're building, can go for the right kind of time frame accordingly.

57:23 Also important to to note that time difference, none of our competitors can go beyond seven days because of the the cookie blocking and browser restrictions and the things that Apple has done. So they're blind. Right? But what we bring to Salesforce in this very simple integration that has a lot of complexity within it in terms of the data is a full picture for as long as you'd like of a user profile. And that was the value Salesforce saw when they first saw our platform back in that initial introduction, and that's why they wanted us to build this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's the data part. Let's get into journey builder now. Oh, there is one more thing, which I just dimension in passing. This this particular screen here just shows the digital data that we are providing, our business profiles being joined to other data. And that's another part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

58:14 It's a part of data designer. We do that kind of functionality where you join datasets together to enrich the whole picture. But the next piece of this is to go to real star of the show, which is called journey builder. And journey builder is where, as its name suggests, your customer journeys. I've got just one in here, which is focused around targeting people who are interested in taking a look, just continuing the example from the very website. So we're gonna click into that, and now we're into journey builder. And this is called the stage. This is where you build your customer journeys. And a typical Salesforce Marketing Cloud user would have lots of different customer journeys for all different kinds of segments, all different kinds of customer journeys.

59:00 I'm just showing one here just to just bring an example to life of what we can do with the CELEBRUS data. And there's really two parts to any given customer journey. There's the part on the left hand side there, which is called a filter, which is you take all your audience and say, well, if these million different customers do rock up on our website, which ones are we actually interested in? So that won't be everyone, typically. It'll be a much smaller set. So in this case, that filter is setting up for people whose we captured their email address, and we need that because momentarily, we're gonna send them an email. And, also, they need to be living in The UK. So we're using bit of identity. We're using a bit of geolocation. We can build arbitrarily complex kind of criteria filter to get really targeted if we wanted to. And the second thing we do as well as the filter, which is what's coming up on screen right now, it's a pretty straightforward filter, and it's super easy with the CELEBRUS data, which is kind of the whole point of this.

59:55 Once we get through the filter, then we get into the stage itself, and we can see there's this sort of branch where we branch down from the the top left, and that is called a decision split. And that's where we decide how to treat different customers according to their signals and different data points. So this this decision split is using several different part points of CELEBRUS data. You can see that when I just pop this thing up. So I'll just read it out just to help. So what we're saying is that any customers who have interacted with the loan calculator in the last twenty four hours on the very website or that they have downloaded some information about interest rates guide or that they have shown that they've clicked on a particular interest rate offer to pass on the website or they're showing a very clear signal that they are interested in loans. Someone shows any of those sort of broad set of signals, then they are eligible for receiving an email.

1:00:54 That's that top decision split on the stage. Now if they don't fall into that category of people, then we can take different routes. We might just choose to retarget them, for example, on Facebook just to kinda keep that relationship warm before we start spamming them or hitting them with emails. So we have different ways of treating people driven off the CELEBRUS data. Now in reality, we might use more customer data as well. We might say, well, these are the people who are eligible, but they they mustn't have already bought or taken out the load because we don't want to keep irritating people coming back to that source. So this is where you start to use those different datasets which we're going together. But for the purpose of this demo, we're gonna use those different data points that CELEBRUS is providing, and that's what drives the stage. That's what drives the customer journey, and it takes literally just a few minutes.

1:01:41 The demo part here is just simply showing that nothing has been activated yet. It's really simple in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You set up these criteria, and then you activate it. And then every minute, thirty five minutes, or every hour, it actually goes ahead and processes all your audience. So, really, in near real time, you can have someone showing a set of behaviors on the website, various websites or in their mobile app that will be delivered into Marketing Cloud, and Marketing Cloud will then actually activate that data. And in this particular example, what it actually means in practical terms is that we send an email. And that email, as you can see on screen, is just a marketing email from us. But, of course, in practice, that will be about the loan which Berry would offer that person.

1:02:26 So that is an end to end solution driven from the point at which they contract with us. We'll scan them up in CELEBRUS Cloud. Twenty minutes later, they can log in. They can set up how their website works, give us some of those clues around goals and signals and good things, and the data starts to flow into Marketing Cloud straight away. And all the goodness that is in Marketing Cloud, all those great tools become actionable with our data really immediately. Okay. That's it. Awesome. Thank you, sir. I'm sure there'll be some questions at the end. As a reminder, for those of you listening at home or in your offices, you can use the q and a panel as we have a few more minutes here, and then we'll open up the floor for questions. So get all your typical questions ready to rock and roll. So this is where I'm gonna play the role of Tiffany. To be honest, I'll we'll probably get her when she's feeling better to to record this section, and we'll just put it up on the investor site so you can actually hear it with the passion and the enthusiasm that it deserves of someone with their background. And but I will I will do my best.

1:03:28 And, fortunately, I've been in many conversations with her about this because, obviously, when we think about the marketing opportunity, when you partner with someone like Salesforce, there's a lot of opportunity. But they're also a massive brand and a massive organization. So the the goal is obviously to come up with the right message, to come up with the right alignment between our sales teams and theirs to fully understand how their sales teams are inside of us. Going back to my comment earlier, people are creatures of habit. So we wanna know exactly what they're trying to do, what their bonuses are aligned to for that year, how they're going to get paid, and make sure that everything we do with them in the field is aligned around making them happy. Right? For us, it's very simple. We just wanna sell the app. Right? And and the the beauty of it is it's such a streamlined version of CELEBRUS that then once this has landed and we've closed the CDI opportunity, there's massive opportunity for us to upsell them into everything else. So for this, the whole point was to build something digestible.

1:04:22 I mean, $12 a month is an extremely low entry point. It does widen, we think, potentially, the funnel of the types of organizations that are gonna start using CELEBRUS as well and bring us into markets that, you you know, know, ultimately, we might not be targeting with our with our exact sales staff, but we don't need it. Right? The goal over time is to turn this into a credit card swipe. That's more of the running. We're we're just starting to crawl, obviously. But that's sort of the running phases where somebody can just go sign up and be done with it, you know, and and have you know, as we're building out our partners and our solution integrators and consulting partners, we may for certain t shirt sizes, we may not even ever interact with those customers. We may just have, like Salesforce does, when we built the app, we had to partner with one of their preferred vendors to help us build the app within the app exchange. It's the process they follow. Similarly, just thinking in the future, we may do the same and have a list of partners that they can select and the brand can work with to help them manage this implementation without them ever even having to come through our door.

1:05:27 The machine that Tiffany and her team have built is quite phenomenal from a lead generation perspective. You you heard Mark talk a little bit about this at the beginning, but I'll pretend to understand all the nuances of this. But in essence, every piece of content that we put out now is measured. Every interaction you have with that content is measured. And there's a scoring system that sits behind that that HubSpot puts in place. So as you interact with our content, you may eventually become a marketing qualified lead, and that means you've shown interest in what we do. When that happens, it lands in these guys' inbox for Mark to assign to someone and then qualify it from a sales perspective. If it's not an an opportunity at this time, the person goes back into the marketing bucket and the the process continues. But as the as they fall out the machine, you know, sales then takes them, runs with them, qualifies them similar to the partner approach we mentioned before. And the way we're scoring and the amount of content we're putting out is by design is a lot. So we got really two things at the heart of it.

1:06:26 We have our marketing team in house, but if you recall, we also brought our marketing PR in house as well. Not only was it more cost efficient to bring that in house, but it also is just more productivity efficient. Because if you have somebody that actually works for you, they're gonna work harder for you. Right? They only have one client, and it's us. And they only have one team to answer to, and it's our sales team. So it it makes it a lot easier. It's just a lot more pragmatic. So there's a ton of messaging and planning that goes into these campaigns. And marketing has I think there's five or six different campaigns running in parallel at any given point in time, where based on what you show interest in, you're going to get different messages. You're going to get different ads. You're going to get access to different content. We're practicing what we preach. We're using our own technology, and we're using the systems that Ash and I have spoken about quite a bit that we put in place, you know, from a HubSpot perspective, our operational systems, our finance systems. All of this is linked together and being linked together to to provide full visibility. So if we see something working, we can pull that lever harder and and and generate more positive results.

1:07:29 The press, we're we're extremely loud. We wanna our platforms have been fortunate, and our people have been fortunate to win lots of awards. ANS is an award winning technician on our team. At this point, he contributes to cybersecurity blogs. We've got Circle, our fraud expert who's won several several awards who many of you met last year at this time when we did the capital markets that the platforms themselves are winning awards. And, it it's about getting the message out, creating brand awareness so that we get entered into and and introed into more conversations and so that there's a better chance when one of our reps picks up the phone and makes a call that that person has heard of us to go back to to Mark's point earlier. We're even as we get into social advertising and email, we're even considering some fun things like putting a billboard outside some of the prospects offices or RFPs that we're responding to. People are gonna see CELEBRUS.

1:08:18 They're gonna hear from us. And frankly, now nobody's paying for billboards anymore, so they're quite cheap. And we just thought it'd be something fun and and a bit cheeky to do. If we're in an RFP for a business, they walk out the office and they see our logo that says you should hire So we're we're testing these things. We're measuring these things. We're having fun with these things because at the end of the day, this is supposed to be fun. Right? And winning is fun, and winning is contagious as you always say. Right? As we start to win, people will wanna do it. And we'll use that as an opportunity to to drive more results from our partners, from our teams, etcetera. And that's where the alignment really does come in. The nice thing about our simplification as a in message is that we don't have to build a million things for sales to to get these guys what they need in the field. Going back to Mark's point earlier, when he's talking about us having you know, selling the entire platform, well, then you gotta have the material that literally covers everything you're talking about because, well, if you ask a question about it, we have to have something that explains that later. Right? Because you'll really only listen to a sales guy to a certain extent, then you wanna see the proof. You wanna see the the product. You wanna see it documented somewhere, etcetera, etcetera. So we're as we're simplifying on these use cases, there's a ton of content being created. And then that means that we can focus on these specific think of them as just swim lanes.

1:09:30 Right? Great. You have this gap. You have this need. Here's the swim lane. Here's the content. Here's the campaign we're using, and here's the messaging that we're going to put in front of them. And and that is being carried into our partner marketing initiatives that Tiffany brought on a partner marketing manager, and she now manages all of our communication and education with partners so that it doesn't have to be manual. Right? Because the goal really with partners is to ultimately find the reps that get it, that wanna make money, that have a client that we can sell to. It's really all we care about. It's very simple. All the other ones, put them in the fishbowl and throw bait out there into local mines. So so getting them in an automated nurture campaign just like we're doing for potential clients, just like we're doing to educate our own teams, you know, sort of practicing what we preach and constantly getting feedback from sales on what's working and what isn't. Because Tiffany and the team know that if it's not working from a sales perspective, doesn't matter how cool it looks, doesn't matter how fun the messaging is, doesn't matter how much fun we had doing it. If it's not generating business, it's not getting done again.

1:10:29 And that's that's the iteration. You know, you have to be willing it's a terrible analogy that I use all time. Have to be willing to admit the baby might be ugly. Right? And and so so it's it's about just being able to walk away from something and say, let's try something else. You know, let's let's throw a bunch of things out there. Let's see what works, and and let's see where we get to on that and not be afraid to to fail because, honestly, you're you should just learn from that and then do something different. It's okay, and we're creating a culture where we want people to try things. So we want people to feel empowered to innovate. You know, we don't want them to come to one of us and ask what they should be doing. We want them to be coming up with ideas on their own, testing them, and have them know that they can do that within the culture of the business and that we expect that of them. And for at the end of the day, it's all about measurement. I mean, there's obviously a quality side of it.

1:11:18 We have it's it's it's a ton of stuff. But honestly, when we brought Tiffany in, I I can't speak highly enough about her, but her background in marketing and how long she's been doing this for various companies of different sizes and backgrounds. The minute she came in and and sort of changed everything about how we think about things, we started building ideal customer profiles. We never really had those before. You think we should. Right? And so having ideal customer profiles, who are we going after? What do they care about? What message do they wanna hear? You know, having all of those initial conversations aligned with what Mark and and his team wanna do in the field to make sure that they have that collateral, but then ultimately measuring every conversion, every lead download, and moving quickly. So just like the integration with Salesforce, if you go download something from our site tomorrow, the minute you download it, we're getting notified.

1:12:08 Alright? We're provided you opted in. So we're all of these things are happening in real time. The scoring is being adjusted. I saw emails today where they were adjusting some of the scoring to take into account different behaviors. So it's a constant flow, but then ultimately, that ties to opportunities. Those opportunities, we're monitoring on a daily basis. The opportunities as they are, one, port into NetSuite as we start to to interact and and integrate those platforms. Azure's team brought NetSuite live back on October 1. Right? And so every area of the business benefits from the measurability and and the ability for us to not only predict the business, but it also has other impacts. It has effects of you know, we know when things are going to close. We know the size of the deals. It allows us to better plan for that depending on the currency those deals are being done in as well.

1:12:53 So everyone benefits from this measurement, and we're all data nerds at heart. And so we're going to drive this business analytically. We're going to look at it from that perspective and make decisions based on on the data. And so with that, we'll bring forth the very group interview here as the final thing before questions. But the main comment here is they're a seller's spot user. They're using the marketing platform. In this previous period, they opt to upgraded to the fraud platform. And you're gonna hear from Steve, the chief data officer, exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it. It's an eight minute video in total including all the marketing effects, so it's not a long one. But we'll go ahead and play that video. Mister God Mike Alessandro, please. Hi. My name Steve Pimlitz. I'm chief data officer of The Very Group.

1:13:44 For those that don't know, The Very Group is one of the largest pure play digital on online retailers in The UK, you know, offering multi range category retail purely online. And I head up all data analytics and platform capability for the very group. Well, CELEBRUS sits right at the heart of the organization. And so as a Chief Data Officer, I've got the pleasure of really supporting the business with platform capabilities that span across all our business units and CELEBRUS is one of those platforms. So it helps really as a pure play digital online retailer. One of the most important things is understanding your customer through that digital experience.

1:14:37 And CELEBRUS is the platform, the technology and the capability that we use to understand the customer and, you know, unlock value by creating great experiences for the customer that delight them and hopefully convert more of them through our funnel. I think as more and more companies think about, you know, cloud scalability, the reality starts to dawn that you've got all these clouds that you have to manage yourself, unless you can partner with somebody that offers, you know, managed service type capability. So for us, having the benefit of staying on a great platform like CELEBRUS, but the added benefit from a people perspective, a cost perspective, an upgrade perspective of that being a managed service has really supported our data strategy.

1:15:34 Why has it benefited us? Just things like upgrades, patching, resilience, thinking about scalability, disaster recovery, all the things that come with, you know, a platform, you know, CELEBRUS manages that for us, so we can concentrate on the value creation element, you know, understanding customers, thinking about attribution, thinking about fraud, and not necessarily maintaining and running the platform, which is really important. But we can pass that to our partners at CELEBRUS. I'll probably frame it in our data strategy actually because we forgot four pillars to our data strategy, which is data insight action, which is this flow of value creation and trust, which is all about things like compliance risks, etcetera. So when it comes to value creation from CELEBRUS, it's very much through that data insight action flow.

1:16:36 So let's give you a few examples. So marketing triggered campaigns is a great example. So somebody's been onto the website, has added something to the basket and has then dropped out. So we can send a real time personalized message through multichannel comms to really be relevant and convert that customer in a future visit. That'd be one example. Another example would be just attribution, understanding end to end attribution across lots of different sources of traffic and lots of different channels that that's complex. But CELEBRUS powers an attribution model where we can, you know, run advanced analytics over the top, think about, you know, weighted attribution and CELEBRUS powers that. So those are just two examples of how we use CELEBRUS data and there are many, many more.

1:17:41 Well, think, you know, with the deprivation of third party cookie data, I think, you know, first party cookie understanding of your customers is vital. And I think identity becomes in vital. And if you think about again, various business model, we have millions of customers who use our digital propositions across many devices, across many domains now as we've got more and more brands, we've got Littlewoods, we've got Ferry Group and we're about to launch a loans business. So, you know, understanding the identity of a customer across multiple channels, multiple domains, to be able to, you know, support them, look for fraud and risk type dynamics and also to offer personalization across channel and across domain is a big part of our strategy.

1:18:39 And again, CELEBRUS does a fantastic job of that with its implementation that allows us to really support the customer, drive relevant personalized experience and protect the business. Well, it took bot detection first and I think the bane of my life at the moment is definitely building visitor count for everybody across the business, especially our marketing colleagues that are looking to understand, you know, how their marketing dials are impacting volume of traffic to the business. And bots are getting more and more sophisticated. So, you know, working with CELEBRUS using their data, looking at some machine learning techniques and anomaly techniques, we're able to either real time do bot detection or post visit do bot detection to remove that from our visits accounts.

1:19:39 Why is that important? Obviously, we're to optimize our business in terms of volume and conversion, So it's massively important to us as a digital retailer to have a trusted visitor and conversion number. So CELEBRUS really sits at the heart of that and powering that to make sure our digital customer experience and our marketing experience can be built upon, you know, a trusted foundation. So that's it from a bot detection, from fraud detection. You can imagine again being an online retailer, offering everything from Apple products, Sony products, right through to just fashion, beauty, sports, home furnishings. We get a lot of frauds just trying to, you know, just leverage what technology they might have.

1:20:32 So, what are we doing? Well, we're constantly looking to optimize our fraud detection and get ever more sophisticated. So, some of the great facilities that CELEBRUS offer in the fraud space are very much, you know, things like as we get onto the fingerprint type technology where we can understand, you know, how quickly somebody types, some of the swipe speed to really build, let's call it a digital fingerprint for that individual user on that individual device and if we see a pattern that isn't the same, then that can flag an alert and we can start to think differently about that particular visit in the context of our business model.

1:21:32 No. What we do, I'm sure you're gonna ask. We can't get Steve to say the brand name correctly. We've we've tried. We've tried, but I I don't mind the way you pronounce it. I actually think it's kinda fun that way. But but hopefully, that at least gives you gives you a sense of of kind of how we can upsell and cross sell across the platforms and how much easier it is when we host support, to be quite honest. Because we can turn things on quickly if they wanna see what something looks like. We can turn it on and give them access to it for a period of time and then say, oh, it's off now, now you've gotta pay for it. Right? And so there's a lot more fun that we can have with that. But heard enough from us. Let's hear from all of you. I do have some questions coming in on the panel. Anyone in the room have any questions you'd like to ask? We do have a few minutes left. Yes, Kai. There's no mic or anything? Oh, no. There's no mic or anything. Yeah. They'll hear you. Okay. They'll hear you. Yeah. That one's gonna Still look at you. Readably right to your mouth. Yeah. There's you. Cool.

1:22:24 So a couple, if it's alright. The first one was around the CDI app for Salesforce, and I think the sort of starting AR is a 150 k. So it doesn't take many customers to move the needle for you at this point. So if we sat here again in twelve months time, you know, how would you measure sort of success in terms of how many customers you you might think you you might be able to to sign up? That was the first one. Maybe we take them on my own. Sure. That's a question that that you know I'm not gonna answer. Right? The the so the whole point we're gonna celebrate the first one because then we will figure out where the price points fit and how the messaging works so that we can learn. Right?

1:23:11 The the whole point is to try to find a price point that people can't say no. Maybe it's the Italian in me, right, but make them offer they can't refuse. We wanna find what that level is. And so we're gonna play around with the pricing. But it does start at 12,000 a month. The premium starts at 15,000 a month. That may change. It may go lower. It may go higher. It may stay lower for the first 10, and then it might go up from there because that's what this guy likes to do. Mhmm. Right? So so, you know, that that's all to be to be determined. Right now, we're gonna celebrate it more and learn from that. They're they're actively I think in two hours, we've got a mapping call. So we're pretty active right now with Salesforce team on the ground running. We've got the accounts listed. We're gonna pick pick some existing accounts that we both mutually share and and Salesforce customers that aren't using CELEBRUS as the as the starting point. So we hope to have a lot of updates in in this regard, but the whole point is to make this something that is easy to consume, that adds value at a price point where we don't have to spend a lot of time on it. Right? We wanna simplify this quite a bit. And so, hopefully, in when we're sitting here a year from now, we're having a lot of really fun conversations about about the new logos. But, you know, it's it's very early to tell.

1:24:25 Great. Then two for Mark, if that's alright. The first one was around the so I guess the messaging and getting through to potential customers. Right? And as these clusters forming MarTech companies buying their own CDPs, there's these sort of digital experience companies like Bloomreach and Episerver, and they're also sort of trying you know, selling something that sounds very similar to to CELEBRUS and then CPaaS, Twilio, for example. Right? So my question is sort of how in all this noise and all these large companies, I I think your position is to kind of improve or feed feed the best data into these sort of systems. So how do you make sure you you get that message across and and I was sort of overwhelmed by by by by the noise? Yeah. It's a great question. That's I'd say the biggest challenge.

1:25:11 I've worked in a a lot of startups where your biggest challenge was you don't really have a product that works that great yet, so you have to sell kinda we were to pretend Mhmm. Fake it till you make it kind of thing. We have the absolute opposite, which is we have an unbelievable product that nobody knows about it. I'd say that's the biggest challenge on the sales side of things is getting through the noise. Kind of like we're doing with this CDI, Just even positioning ourselves as necessarily a CDP, you do tend to bump up against other people that just creates confusion. So we're playing around with a lot of messaging right now of rather than selling the whole platform, go after specific use cases. Like, if if this is your problem, if you're trying to optimize paid media, here's how we solve for it. So it's not necessarily the entire platform. It's kinda like, here's your ROI for this specific use case. But we're actually playing around with a lot of this messaging we do. As I mentioned, lots of testing, seeing what lands. We quickly see if something is if no one is if there's a a zero open rate, but, like, that's a bad subject line. Let's go fix it.

1:26:10 Getting people to initially respond is a challenge, but we're working through that. We're getting really good at once we get on a call with somebody positioning where we fit in the ecosystem. And it's really easy, to be honest, as we find it to be pretty easy and a nice thing to be able to say that you have a CDP. Well, that's great. We're gonna make your CDP better. You already have a decisioning system. Great. Because this is how our data feeds into this. So we kinda say we're the Switzerland of technology because we plug into everything, and we make everything significantly better. So it's a pretty compelling sales statement. Brie, sorry. Third one, if that's alright. And it has some financial issues. The next one's $10. Yeah. Okay. It's the last one. Your enthusiasm for sort of the direct sales model and the product is very obvious. And so I guess sort of other than our forecast in the market, what is standing in your way of sort of going to Bill and asking him for another 10 or 20 salespeople to to really sort of accelerate the growth of the company. How do you think about I'll answer that one directly. Perhaps Bill Bill and Ashley, how do you think about that trade off? Yep. Everything everything changes when as we start with.

1:27:18 So success breeds success. So as we start to see investments paying off, those investments will get our backing. We are not going to treat every channel and every relationship and every partner equally. We are gonna provide them all with the same opportunity to work with our fantastic technology, but the ones that are doing the labor work and the ones that are generating the results are going to get the benefit of our marketing dollars, our time, our effort, etcetera. And and that's how we have to think about it, which means year to year, our pipeline can look very different in terms of who the sources of that pipeline are. And that's fine because all we care about is meeting market expectations. Great. Yeah. Thanks. Lauren? Well, yeah, you mentioned Salesforce came to you a little while ago. Yeah. It was through a friend of mine at the Going back through I I love the T shirt syllabus, by the way. Great. They fit the size too. Yeah.

1:28:08 They obviously have a couple of CVPs, as you know. Mhmm. They weren't happy with what they got or they wanted to broaden the experience. Great question. Can you give us a background to that and how other platforms like Salesforce might fall on on the back of that? No. It's a great question. So you know what the funny thing about customer data platforms are? Most of them don't capture customer data. Right. The majority of them are traffic cops. They bring a bunch of information together, but they're only as good as the systems they're pulling data from. So even when you look at Datorama and some of the acquisitions that Salesforce has made, they're really great when they have the data. But they're largely sitting there with their handout waiting for someone to hand them the data that they can use to unlock the potential to Mark's point earlier. So So for Salesforce, we're not trampling on their CDP at all. And, actually, one of the things that we're exploring, if any of you follow Salesforce, is they have this Genie integration.

1:29:01 It's really a partnership with Snowflake. We already have an integration with Snowflake. It's a natural addition to the partnership. But, again, focus. We're gonna stick with what we've got, gain some success, and then look at some of these other areas where we can where we can play a role. Because the Genie integration is what feeds their CEPs, So we can fix a lot of issues potentially. And the always on to back to your other question, the always on insights program with five gs is very similar. Right? The only difference is it's an install of CELEBRUS. There's not a predefined streamlined app. Yeah. That takes some time from a technology partner to tell us what they want and to actually engineer that with us. Right? So the CELEBRUS CDI app was a very concerted effort with Salesforce where we took exactly the blueprint they were looking for, and we worked that across our teams to engineer that so we could make it a simple app with a simple front end to use as you as you saw. That's basically the difference, but you will never find a technology we can't connect to. That's a promise I've made many customers, and they will never call us a liar on that.

1:29:59 Do we have a question? Yeah. No. How how rich is your is your dataset you can collect from your existing customers in your sales pitch to to the point about your performance versus comparison? So well, a lot of it, I'll be honest with you. A lot of the competitors we come up against, I've worked with for over twenty years. I was on their advisory boards and was on their product committees and their innovations. So I know how they work, and we also we know how they work. We also get feedback from the field, from partners, from clients, from prospects. The number of prospects that come to us because something else wasn't delivering on a promise is is one of the biggest reasons they come to us these days. In terms of the data that we capture and the granularity of it, I've I've worked with a lot of applications. I've never seen anything like CELEBRUS. Before they paid me to sit here with all of you, I was calling it the best data collection and contextualization engine in the planet, and that was back in 2004.

1:30:49 It hasn't changed. It's just what we do now is so much more expansive. And if you were to quantify that versus your competition in terms of improved conversion or reduced fall fall Yeah. What numbers would you use in the sales? So so we have a client. We did a I think we showed a case study in during the final results back in July. It was one fraud case study where the client, just by using our data, eliminated 20% more fraud than they had previously been able to recognize, which if you think about the millions of dollars at risk, that's significant. They also decreased the number of false positives by about 5%, if I remember the number correctly. And what that means is and I always use this example because it really upsets me. But I go to the same coffee shop when I'm at the office. I'm here every other month. Right? And without fail, eventually, and Ash makes fun of me when it happens, my credit card gets blocked.

1:31:37 They should hire us because that's a false positive. Right? That's me using my credit card. It's a common behavior. I'm here a lot. You should know that I go to the same coffee shop, and I'm a creature of habit. My wife knows it. She talks about it all the time. I don't like being out of my routine. They're trying to tell you something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. But so that that's just an example. And on the marketing side, we've got hundreds of use cases, but one just on the paid media side. We have a client that just recently saved about 30% on their paid media spend by optimizing that spend. That was a client's up and not paid back. So the value is there. In that case, it's more granular targeting of of For that one, it's it's suppression. You know, it's it's not inundating you to to Anne's point. It's not inundating you with ads that aren't relevant to you. There's just so much inaccuracy in advert in the advertising world that we can bring by you know, you read a lot of journals on Forbes and other channels about, you know, the power of first party data.

1:32:35 First party data is all we do. And if we can make that available in real time to connect to Facebook or Google audiences or to their advertising platforms to suppress things because you just bought that pair of shoes as an example. So instead of showing you that pair of shoes, they show you something else. There's massive value in that. There's also value in what Steve was talking about with bot detection. Right? If you're if it's not a human, don't waste some time on the page with ads because as a retailer, you're spent people are spending money to show ads on your own sites. Right? You you get sponsored ads all over the place. Even our financial institutions, their credit cards, their partnerships, you're gonna see ads that are paid spots from those brands, from those credit card companies, etcetera. Suppressing those saves money for those brands. It also offers an opportunity for the bank or the retailer to say exactly why investing to advertise on their platform is safer and a better use of money as well. So everybody everybody wins when that's done. Right?

1:33:32 You have I know we're we're out of time, but we have two questions in in here, and I think we should answer answer both of those. So the first was the length of the sales cycle for CELEBRUS. I mean, we kinda touched on this. We're trying to shorten it. The last few deals that came through were six to eight months in duration of the the new business that we closed. When I joined, it was about twelve to sixteen months. So, ideally, we're looking to get it under six. Ideally, for Salesforce, I'd love it to be weeks. Right? We'll see where we get to. But we're learning, we're optimizing, we're improving. The other question is we got a lot of money on that balance sheet. Don't know what we're what we're gonna do with it and and acquisition. I mean, Ash touched on this in the financials. Obviously, we we did a special dividend just recently.

1:34:18 But we are actively there's nothing imminent, but we are actively exploring m and a. So keeping cash on hand is important while we explore that as we look for build or spy opportunities that make sense to expand our platform given some of the features that we brought to the market, particularly in the fraud world and also CX Vault that I talked about earlier. I don't know if there's anything else you wanna touch on. Yeah. I'll say one additional thing. So as you know, we've got a share buyback program in place that's controlled by FinCap, but we underarm the parameters that we've set as a board. The purpose of that really is to mitigate the effects of dilution from the share option scheme, the optip scheme. So we're not being overly aggressive in buying in the market. Of course, not our decision. It's FinCap's decision on a day to day basis. But we will use that to get up to the level of the share options and LTIPs outstanding to where you can then mitigate any dilution for your for shareholders.

1:35:11 And it's important to note. We're we're using that to tie key people to the business. You know? So I was talking about incentives for people there. There's a lot of our employees like being tied to the success of the business, and we like them to feel that way. So so putting that plan plan in place and having that now revisited annually is really beneficial for our employees and also hopefully becomes a way that we can offset some of the inflation challenges as well around incentivizing employees. So I wanna be respectful of everybody's time. I know we've gone five minutes over, I appreciate your patience. We've answered all the questions for the virtual audience. We're obviously staying here. So if you have any questions, we'll we'll we're happy to answer them, but we'll set everybody online free, and then we'll just hang out here for anybody that's got questions. I think we're gonna do a quick closing. Bill, Ash, and Mark, thank you very much 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?

1:36:04 This will only take a few moments to complete, so I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of 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.