Celebrus Technologies (LSE:CLBS) — Post AGM Investor Presentation

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES PLC post AGM update. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time by the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you to Tom Skelton. Good afternoon,

0:31 Thanks. Good afternoon. My name is Tom Skelton. I have the pleasure, excuse me, of serving as the chair of CELEBRUS. I joined the board as a nonexecutive late last year and assumed the chair from Peter Simmons in March of this year. My background includes serving, as CEO on multiple technology technology enabled services firm, both internationally and domestically here in The US. I've served on the board of two FTSE listed companies, and in addition to that, served on the board of one AIM listed company named Blanco, where I chair chaired the remuneration committee. Very excited to be here today and excited to have with us, the the board here of CELEBRUS. With me today are our CEO, Bill Bruno, our CFO, Ash Mehta.

1:21 In addition, we have our three nonexecs, Peter Whiting, who chairs our remuneration committee, Helen Gilder, who chairs our audit committee, and Monica Biddulph, who's our chair of nominations. Also in attendance today is James Thorne, our company secretary. We're very excited about the progress we saw in 2024 as we continue the transformation of the business. To provide you with a few more details on that, I'm gonna turn it over to Bill and let him give you a quick update. Over to you, Bill. Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it, and, and welcome, everybody. Thanks for taking the time. It's always fun to do one of these things when when it's so short so close to to the results that we just published. So many of you have most likely heard from Ash and I in in in recent weeks or or will soon as we've had a lot of, lot of great conversations with our investors and and interested parties as well. I think from a business perspective, we talked a bit during the results period about how we sort of took the next step in our in our sales structure and and aligned individual sales team members by industry vertical.

2:27 In the release, the r and s that went out today, post our AGM, you'll have seen a couple of key wins in the airline vertical that were mentioned. One of which is a net new customer, top two global airline, and the other is an upsell to one of our existing airline customers as well, both of which signal sort of why we're simplifying and why we're aligning the sales teams into those individual verticals. You know, we've talked a lot about the simplification of the business, about the restructure, and also in how we and how we sell in a land and expand model. That's still there's still a lot that CELEBRUS as a platform can do. And so having the sales team focus on individual industry verticals allows them to really closely align with our professional services team, our marketing teams, our customer success teams, and our product teams to make sure that they fully they have sort of a full brief of use cases, lingo, etcetera, that they can just use to become experts in their field. We've also trained the sales team in the arts of social selling and bringing on some contractors who have made a career doing that for businesses like ours. And all of that is is working quite nicely. It's it's great to see the progress. We were happy to be able to announce announce those wins. The pipeline itself does continue does continue to grow, and and we're moving deals through the pipeline much more quickly than we have in previous years, which is fantastic.

3:52 We've also streamlined our approach to RFPs. I think you'll always see any software or technology company talk about RFPs and their sort of love hate relationship with those, but we've really streamlined those, and we've started to use artificial intelligence actually in house to help us with those responses and to make sure that we're building some consistency, but also, efficiency during those processes as well. And we're seeing some great progress from that and also some some nice, some nice wins from from the outputs of that. So all things considered, we're quite happy with the progress of the business. We continue to focus on execution now that the massive sort of restructure of the business from the front from the field teams to the back office has has occurred. And, again, we'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to, to use the q and a tab, but that's probably good enough, I think, for the overview of the business. Tom, I'll I'll throw it back to you to to go through the q and a.

4:49 Thanks, Bill. Appreciate that. Our first question today relates to the the recent change in government. I'll I'll read the question out. The the Labor Party has promised to kill business property relief and the IHT benefit this provides to AIM shares held for more than two years. The withdrawal of the relief may cause some share sales and price volatility. Do you have a plan to more actively market the company and its shares, or do

5:19 you think a strategic review is appropriate? Ash, I I'm going to ask you to take that one for us, please. Thanks, Tom. Okay. So let me address the second part of that. Of course, I, the government has changed, and there's nothing we can do about that. I think we'll have to wait and see what comes out in the budget later this year. But as far as what we can do and what we are doing, yes, there is a plan to more proactively market the shares in the company as a

5:47 whole. And there's a reason for that. Obviously, as we disclosed in our final results announcement, we have really kind of completed the restructuring of the business. All the investment we've made into people, into systems, into restructuring each team, the creation of a direct sales team, the creation of a customer success team, that work is largely done. And I think, we're now in a position to really kinda crank up our investor relations and our messaging out. Now we will do that using our two brokers. So we have Canaccord, and we have Cavendish, who are great supporters for us. And it'll be supplemented by some of the activities we'll be doing in the coming months, effectively sort of weaving together some of the marketing communications we make, out into the market, with the investor communications, that we make as well. And to help us do that, we've got a new SVP of marketing who joined us in the last few months, and we're already starting on that road.

6:45 So for example, over the last couple of months, we have done a lot of presentations to potential new investors, and you'll have seen on the disclosures on the r and s that there have been a couple of new investors come on board. We're now getting a fair amount of interest PLC from The United States as well. So investors over there looking at European companies. And so for that reason, Bill and I will be over in Boston, next week at the, Canaccord and we'll be meeting around 15 or 20 investors there. So that's part and parcel of what we're doing. And also as part of the weaving together of the story with our marketing communications, we'd like to kinda help investors get a better understanding of the kind of the dynamics of the business, the kind of circles we move in, what conferences we're going to, who we interact with. And I think that gives investors a better kind of more in-depth feel for who we are. Obviously, lot of our investor communications in terms of the regulatory communications,

7:45 whether it's results announcements or contract wins, give you a bit of a sense. But we're hoping that this will give us kind of a next level, of depth of understanding. Terrific. Thanks very much, Ash. We appreciate that. We appreciate the question as well. Our next question, Bill, this will be coming to you. What trends in customer behavior do you see driving demand for your solutions over the next two to three years?

8:14 Yeah. It's a it's a a a great great question. I mean, I think, man, if I had a dollar for everybody that's emailed me about Google's lack of a decision, that that, I'd I'd be able to retire today, I think. But the, yeah, the the I think going away from the the nonaction from from Google and where that may go, think customer behavior, has largely transitioned for most for most businesses that we're working with to where mobile devices, and I'm including tablets and phones in that, are the most predominantly used channels. They're also the most difficult to capture data in. And I'm not talking about compliance. I just mean the tech of it, like the design of of mobile applications without getting too in the weeds are generally pretty restrictive to to how you capture data and and and build customer journeys and establish a a profile. It just so happens to be an area that we excel in.

9:12 And so that trend is is one that that we're set up quite well for that we continue to innovate on, and and we believe we're we're well ahead of our competition on, not just in terms of our own thinking, but what we're hearing in the field as we're winning deals as well. I think the the other element here that that is playing in quite a bit is, you could call it compliance, but I'm I'm just gonna call it being a good steward of consumer data. There I just did a podcast, yesterday, actually, that'll come out later this month that,

9:41 where the main topic was kind of around some of the trends in how brands approach data. And I've been in this industry my entire career. Right? But the main premise is, you need to be very careful as a brand these days on where you're sending your customer data even if they've consented to it, and how you own and control that. And CELEBRUS is really uniquely positioned here because, again, we build single tenant private cloud instances that brands own and control. And we've started to build out a variety of platforms, including our analytics capabilities, where customers and and brands are able to get all of the value they used to get from other technologies, but they're able to do it within their four walls.

10:21 And that, I think, will continue to be a differentiator for us. I think given the consumer concerns and privacy, given the the data challenges around digital identity and then particularly in mobile, those are trends that that we're seeing sort of come to fruition. And and the the airline win, just as a final point on that, the new win that we brought in, that was because our competition couldn't deliver on mobile devices, and we showed them our ability to do that in three days. And I think that is something that we you will see us get louder and louder about. And to Ash's point, something that we'll continue to bring our investors along in that conversation as we roll our digital presence all under one umbrella as well and bring all of that together for you and give you the opportunity to subscribe to to more than just investor communications.

11:09 Thanks, Bill. That's really helpful. The the next question, you kind of touched on it, but see if there's anything you'd like to add. The recent wins in travel and leisure promising. What key features of the CELEBRUS platform attract companies to in this sector, and how do you plan to sustain this momentum in acquiring new customers?

11:32 Yeah. It's a great question as well. And you're right. I I did kind of touch on this a little bit, Tom, but I'll I'll, I'll sort of address it very head on. You know, travel and leisure, just like finance, retail, you know, they're we can spot a good opportunity for us very quickly. Right? If a if a company relies heavily on digital and they care very much about one to one relationships with their customers, then that is a a very key opportunity for us. In the airline industry, as an example, the booking process is quite complicated. Right? If you go to book a flight today, yes, you start by picking your two cities and your date. But think about all the results you're presented, all the ways you can filter those results, the things you can interact with to look at seat availability on those various flights.

12:20 These are all things that an airline who's data driven will want to have a view into, but they're very difficult to to collect in a meaningful way in a lot of our competitor systems that are sort of custom JavaScript based. You end up writing a bunch of custom code, and what those brands were finding out is that they never really ever trusted the data because it was so fragile.

12:42 You know, CELEBRUS bringing a data model in that allows these brands to very quickly capture these complex interactions without a lot of custom code and put a structure to it to where teams like revenue management or data science teams can use that to better understand what you care about as a consumer or how they might adjust what you're seeing when you're searching for flights is really, really powerful because of the amount of options that come into

13:06 that. So any process that's complicated like that in digital is is a great opportunity for us. In terms of how we sustain that momentum, well, when you when you have a key win, you use that, you market the heck out of it, and you put it into the hands of marketing and sales, and you let them run with that. And then conversely, you take our customer success team, and you take the wins that we have over here, and you think about how to apply that across our entire customer base so that we can start to upsell customers as well. So it it really is it needs to be a bit of an assembly line, right, when it can't happen in a silo and everything needs to be sort of amplified, not only externally to bring in new wins, but also internally to our existing customers as well. Thanks, Bill. Really helpful.

13:52 The the next question is actually a a similar vein. It's really an innovation question. Given the ongoing technological advancements and changing customer needs, how do we ensure that our product road maps align with future market demands? So another another great question. I I you know, our product road map is based on basically three factors. You know, the first factor is things that we see in the industry. So an example of things that that like that is our entire identity solution was something that came up between our CTO and I over a beer years ago just talking about some of the industry challenges.

14:33 Another source of that is our customers. A prime example of that is when we launched CELEBRUS digital analytics last year. You know, we had customers coming to us saying how great our data was and how structured it was and how they couldn't use some of these third party, analytics vendors, like Google Analytics or an Adobe, and they needed they needed a better option, and they asked us if we could help them.

14:54 And then the third is partners. You know, partners come to us with ideas either integrate with portions of their platform or to bring new use cases to life. And that's kind of the three things that that that we that we review. Now the road map is something that we discuss every other month or so internally, and we continue to do two new releases a year. So it does give us ample opportunity to bring new features to the market quite rapidly, you know, to be on basically a six month clip where we're putting out new features, new capabilities, and enhancing the platform is significantly faster than any of our competitors, and we've gotten that down to a science now. So we'll just continue to do that. We'll continue to take feedback, and there's even been some interesting investor feedback from these last rounds that factored into some of our marketing messaging as well. So I think the biggest thing is to have have big ears that listen and to try to stay on top of what's going on in the industry and try to predict what's gonna happen before it does.

15:51 Terrific. Thanks, Bill. Ash, this next one is for you. I think the investor is basically curious about our h two weighting versus h one, and I think it would be good to to provide some commentary there if you might. Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Tom. So, let me just tell you the history of why we have that waiting. So

16:16 if you remember, historically, we used to sell through partners, and a lot of those partners had a December year end. And because we used to sell principally into financial services, banks, insurance, those organizations also have a December year end. So with that client base and over that period of time, there was always that h two waiting. Now having set up a direct sales team and selling pretty much sort of throughout the year, that will balance up the first half and second half to some extent. However, there will always be an h two weighting. Part of the reason for that, as you saw in the final results, is where we have some fabulous sort of upsell to existing customers. Even if we upsell in, let's say, May or June in our first half, generally, that upsell will then be cotermed into the annual license, you know, in December or November, whenever it might be. So there will always be that sort of bias, if you like, towards the second half, but we are trying to balance it up. And if we can get it to $60.40, that's probably as good as we'll get.

17:22 We're mindful, though, of the fact that sometimes it appears as if there's a kind of a big cliff, if you like, or a lot to do in the second half. What I would say to that is that, we monitor very closely our backlog and how much coverage we have for the market expectations on revenue and profit before tax. And that's a figure that we track it from the start of the year. As we go through the year, we see that number coming down as we approach the final quarter. So that's the kind of information at some point we'd like to share with investors. It's information which, yeah, we need to be comfortable, has veracity behind it, and we can share it on a consistent basis. But certainly, in terms of gauging, the gap, if you like, the starting point, of course, is to look at the ARR.

18:08 And so with ARR of just over 20,000,000 at the start of this year and with market expectations of revenue of 34, we're in a strong position of around 60% coverage for for the full year anyway. So we're trying to bounce it up. But as I said, it will probably never be more than forty, sixty first half, second half. Thanks, Ash. Very helpful. We appreciate that. Bill, a quick, question here on m and a. Obviously, we we've signaled that we we have some interest there. I think it would be good to provide a little bit of background, to the folks. Sure. Yeah. So so this was always kind of a part of the strategy as we sort of completed the transformation, if you will, and moved into the execution phase. We we thought it was prudent as a next step to to explore kind of build first buy.

19:05 There had been a lot of conversations happening with myself and the product teams for about the last two years looking at sort of where we wanted to take the platform, where there was perhaps areas of opportunity in the platform. And we chose to build some of that, namely a lot of the analytics elements that we've launched, whether that's the digital analytics capabilities or the self-service analytics powered by Metabase. But there was an area of the platform, and we knew this would happen as we were selling direct, that clients would start to engage with us differently. They'd ask new questions. They'd want our platform to do more for them. And it's kind of in that realm of, I'll call it, like, marketing automation, personalization, or in fraud, the intervention, kind of the ability to trigger experiences, to trigger campaigns, etcetera. There's some capabilities in CELEBRUS, and some of our our power users of the platform are using that capability.

19:51 But that's one that we saw as an opportunity as a potential, buy instead of build scenario. The market conditions the way they are, the the current company position, the cash we have in the bank, etcetera, were all reasons why we thought it was prudent to to look at this. And so we're we're in that process. We've brought a partner in to help us guide that discovery. We've we've identified some interesting companies, and we've started this sort of discovery process, if you will, to see if anybody's interested to have a chat. Nothing is imminent, obviously. We're very early in the process, and it's also not, necessary for the strategy. We had a few questions on that throughout the last several weeks as well. And just to clarify, like, this isn't something that has to happen this year, and it's not something we're gonna do unless it makes sense, and that we, as a board, all agree that it that it makes logical and fiscal sense for us to do, you know, for the for the growth of the company. But we do we do have a really, I think, well defined sort of, profile of what we're looking for. It's been a really interesting process. And like I said, there's been about 15 or 20 companies that were were interesting to us. So we'll see where we'll see where we get to. If if there's updates down the line, obviously, you'll all be the first to know. But but, it's been a fun process so far, and the partner that we brought on has been fantastic in helping helping to guide that as well.

21:11 Terrific. Thanks a lot, Bill. I think that brings us to the end of the the q and a. So Perfect. Anything I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Go ahead, Albert. Thanks very much for answering those questions you can for investors. I just wanna say, of course, the company can review all the questions for today, and we'll publish those responses on the investor meet company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Bill, was just wondering if I could ask you for a few closing comments. Yeah. I'll just say thank you for the time and and the questions, and and thank you for the continued support in in the business as we've been on a been on a journey. I I think, you know, Ash and I and the board are very appreciative, you know, when you bring in a new management team to see the ongoing support for sort of the vision that we've built for the business. And, it's really nice to see, the the questions coming in, and and it it gives me an indicator that everybody seems well aligned with where we're going and and is understanding the business more and more too because the tougher questions are starting to be asked, and and I like see to that. So so thank you all, and, have a great rest of your day.

22:17 Perfect. Thank you all for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will then take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at CELEBRUS TECHNOLOGIES PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.