Eql Pharma (Stockholm:EQL) — Final results for the year ended 31 December 2020

0:02 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the EQUALS GROUP PLC Final Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and will be in listen The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via your Investor Meet company dashboard, and we'll send you an e mail to notify you when they're ready for your review. I'd also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded.

0:40 Before we begin, we would like to submit to the following poll. And if you could give that your attention, we would be most grateful. And I'd now like to hand over to Richard Cooper, CFO and Ian Stratford Taylor, CEO from EQLS GROUP PLC. Good afternoon to you both. Hi, and welcome, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to to listen to our results.

1:03 If we could go thank you, Richard. So I'm aware that we'll have a range of people listening in from people that understand the business quite well to people that maybe this is the first time. So if we go over ground that some of you know well, then I apologize, but we need to make sure that everybody gets a good understanding of the company. So we're doing a little bit of history on this slide. The group was actually admitted to the AIM market in August 2014, so getting on for seven years ago. It was called Fair Effects at the time, and it was a retail consumer, if you want to think of it, b to c driven travel money business had you can put money onto prepaid cars to travel abroad with some FX dealing business on the side of it, and that's really how we grew strongly in those early years.

1:53 However, we made the strategic decision to pivot away from b to c to b to b in, 2017, and have have successfully done that. Part of the key reason for doing that, there were quite a lot of entrants into the b to c market, in, like, twenty sixteen, seventeen who were effectively giving the product away for free. It was becoming a very congested marketplace. That's really what drove the decision. And we could see that the big banks who ultimately were trying to win business off don't serve the b to b and SME, so the small and medium sized businesses, particularly well at all. So we saw a lot of opportunity there. So we are a challenger brand, and our our business model is to take business from the incumbent banks. You will hear a lot of these days about fintech unicorns, you know, whilst we compete with them to win business away from the banks, vast majority is still with the banks. We have to bear that in mind in terms of the opportunity, that we have in front of us and the ability to to challenge those people.

2:53 Our product suite is is broad. It encompasses payments, both UK domestic and international, cards in various forms, and banking or current account services. And as such, I mentioned the fintechs earlier, we have different competition in in each segment. For instance, payments, you can think of maybe TransferWise, now called Wise. In cards, could be Revolut or Monzo, and same with banking services. We have on our corporate so b to b roster now, we have some very well known names, and we can cater to them to cover all their FX needs. Corporate spend requirements, we'll talk about that a bit later. And we can get people up and running extremely quickly, and part of our USP is the speed at which we can move and banks cannot.

3:43 And we combine bank grade security. We used to say bank grade systems, but, actually, part of the problem the banks have is their systems are are very poor. And so whilst we have all the stuff they have in terms of connections and security protocols, We have way better tech, leading edge tech. So for a customer, you're getting all the access that you would get from a bank but on far better technology platforms. But that's underpinned also with a very strong compliance culture. We're regulated by the FCA. Mostly, it covers the vast majority of what we do. And the FCA are taking a very strong stance across this whole payment space, and we're very much at the forefront of that. Something I think maybe, not as well understood as it as it should be is that we're not just a product business, but also a platform business. And increasingly so, we have what we call b to b to b and b to b to c, whereby we're letting other financial institutions use our platforms to deal with their own customers.

4:49 And so we will, in effect, license out our our platforms to third parties. Moving along to the next slide. Just some highlights in terms of 2020. Transaction volumes, the focus, as I mentioned earlier, on b to b. Transaction volumes overall grew by 21% year on year. And let's remember, we're talking about the COVID year. B two b transactions within that were up 32%. And b two b is, in terms of revenue, is now 70% of the whole. International payments within all of that is is the real driver year on year. So the revenue increased by 46%, and the b two b component of that increased by 51%.

5:38 I think we proved last year that that we are very resilient, that we're not a travel money company. I think some people think that we are. But the nontravel money revenues increased by 18%, so there's significant growth there. B to b customers, we have 18,000 of them and growing, and this is really where the direction of travel for the company is. Against that background, last year, we reduced the cost base significantly, and total expense was reduced 18%, as you can see, from 30.6 to 25. We achieved cash flow breakeven, very important yardstick for for the group. EBITDA, Richard will take you through the EBITDA and the result after taxing this section shortly. But, essentially, the EBITDA was ahead of the market expectation.

6:27 We also did a a small piece of m and a during the year. We bought a dealing business called Effective FX in October of last year. We've become very good at doing these. We buy businesses that turn over, let's say, $1.01 or 100 or 200,000,000 of foreign exchange, maybe 1 or 2,000,000 of revenues. We can just absorb their book onto our platform, remove a lot of the overhead and back office. They can be up and running literally in in twenty minutes from from the moment. The ink is is dry on on on the contract. So we will do more if we see opportunity. Moving along, please.

7:12 So I think we can't talk about 2020 without covering two major headwinds the business faced. We could actually put three on here because, you know, we've all forgotten Brexit, but it was Brexit was a handbrake in terms of, you know, businesses having to think about, decisions and slowed down business confidence in general even if we had to have these other two. COVID, obviously, immediate impact to the business in terms of a hit to all the travel money related products. Corporate spend platform, which is an expenses based allows the corporate to give cards to employees who can do their expenses, control expenses very efficiently. So that sort of activity was also hit. It was down in April and May last year as much as 60 or 70%. I actually ended the year about 20% down year on year.

8:08 International payments, yeah, it was it was subdued but didn't completely stop. And the banking platform that we have was relatively stable. We took some immediate actions, as you can see, in terms of furloughing and then, permanently downsizing by about 70 heads. There was 1,600,000 of staff layoff costs involved in doing that, but the group has come out of that leaner, fitter, and in better financial position than before. We were very careful not to cut into muscle and bone when we did all of the, all the cost reductions. So, we're we're very happy with where where the business is now placed post COVID. We also had Wirecard. Wirecard, as as you know, big German financial institution that, went horribly wrong, during the course of last year. We used a subsidiary of Wirecard in The U UK to, technically issue our cards.

9:06 So with Wirecard, going pop in The UK also, we essentially had to move all our customers on the b to c side and some of them on the b to b onto a completely new platform, very rapidly in the space of four months. We did that, successfully. It was a massive project, and I think it shows how quickly we can move now that we could essentially create a brand new product. We moved took the opportunity to create a new b two c car product, which has 15 currencies on one piece of plastic and lots of new bells and whistles. Did all of that in four months, and I think that speaks volumes to how nimble we are now on a technological level. And so we end up with a b to c platform that we can now literally put into sort of more maintenance mode.

9:55 We don't need to do any significant spend on that for the next few years because it's state of the art. Move to the next slide. Against that background, governance, we'll we'll cover this in a bit more detail later, but governance is important. We're a listed business. And it's obviously one of our key priorities is to make sure that we have good governance. We have a new chairman, a new head of the audit committee who was a former partner at PLC specializing in forensic accounting. So he's fantastic. This side of things, I think we're, in a very good, space. We also have additional risk and compliance committees.

10:41 We have four regulated subsidiaries or probably consisted boards. We'll have, regular board meetings, minute to the roll up to the parents, as you might expect. We have additional training for staff internally. ESG absolutely embraced. If you go to our EQUALS investor relations website, you can see the report on there. We announced when we first did this deck, we had some additional NEEDs pending. We we've announced one already, and we so we now have an additional NEED pending. On that base basis, Richard, I'll pass over to you for your CFO report. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. I'm just going to dwell on this content slide for one moment just to set the scene because there are 10 slides I want to talk you guys through.

11:34 The first is a dashboard, and this is really a response to how investors have been asking us. Well, you know, how do you actually make your money? Give us an example. So we've done a a pro form a to take everyone through. And then from that, I lead into our revenues, gross profits, what comes out of that, the costs, leading to EBITDA, PBT, and then a couple of slides on cash. And then finally, some guidance, which is more along the lines of accounting guidance rather than commercial guidance. So without further ado, I'll move on to the dashboard. So if I can draw your eyes to the lines next to b to b annual revenue, which is about two thirds of the way up the page.

12:31 And above that, you've got the three core columns of payments, cards, and banking services. So what we're trying to do here is show how we make our b to b revenue, which is a focus that we've been really concentrating on in the last year. And I think it's fair to say that earlier years were more development and build, and now we're moving into rollout and sell. And so it was inevitable that, as Ian said, we we headed for and we achieved cash breakeven in 2020. So payments, for example, around four and a half thousand business customers.

13:18 Their average transaction size 32,000. It varies between spot and forward, and we'll come on to that. We make 70 basis points on that.

13:28 Cards, again, similar metrics, different numbers, you know, close to 9,000 business cardholders. The transaction size is much smaller, but the margin is higher. And then banking services, again, relatively straightforward, you know, close to 5,000 business customers contributing, you know, something like 2,600,000 revenue a year. Then there were other things that sit on top of that. This is about a million. So we get 20,300,000 of b to b revenue, and we add in the b to c revenue below that, which we're not turning off, but, naturally, it's got very affected by the travel embargoes.

14:20 And we own a contribution margin. Contribution is the combination of gross profits and below the line marketing, and it gives rise to this contribution of 17 and a bit million. And then on the cost side, what we've tried to show here is what we have been spending and what we have been accounting for. Because we remain in development mode and still get r and d credits, there's a reasonable amount, 4,500,000 in 2020, that is taken to our balance sheet. One of Ian's slides focused on Wirecard and COVID.

15:05 There were some exceptional costs in relation to this, which obviously go below the adjusted EBITDA. Moving on to revenue. So what we've shown here for trend is the first half, the second half, the full year, and the comparison to the previous year split by our sort of core markets. So international payments, there are some notes further on this below, you can see had a very, very strong year, not just growing over the first half, but significantly growing over the full year in 2019. The corporate expense platform actually performed remarkably robustly given that a number of sectors that we're quite dominant in were virtually shut down last year.

16:04 Banking held its own. Banking is split broadly between retail and b two b. And, naturally, the travel products were the one that everyone would expect to see a significant fall off, and the same is true for b to c in the line below it. So despite COVID and Wirecard, we we held up remarkably well in the year to to achieve 29,000,000 of revenue. And then just focusing on international payments, which is, in some ways, straightforward, but it's difficult to remain very competitive there, although we're doing extremely well, as you can see from our numbers.

16:50 We did over 94,000 orders last year. 91% of those were in spot. The order value was 72 and a half percent spot, but the revenue was 64% spot. And the reason for that is that the forward business is more profitable. It's more difficult to sell. We are getting lots and lots of traction for this. It's not something that some of the competitors can offer transfer wise, for example. And then the average order size, again, you can see that if somebody is giving us an order for 80,000, we're gonna make a lot more money on it than if we do a spot transaction at 20,000. So I'll then move on to gross profits by the second. This is really just a sort of snapshot to show, you know, where where the historical profits and and losses are are coming through. And it's probably no surprise that the corporate expense platform saw a lower gross profit last year. We've done quite a lot of restructuring around Wirecard, for example, and we expect those margins to significantly increase over the year.

18:09 Everything else, I think, will stay relatively as is. It's worth also pointing out that we have a very strong white label business, which means that smaller operators in the foreign exchange market who perhaps don't have their own robust trading platform could book their trades through our platform. We onboard them through KYC, and we we make a margin of about 25% of that. So it's another aspect of the quite quite widely distributed foreign exchange market that we're not walking away from. In fact, we're trying to offer it to be able to grab as large a slice of the pie as we possibly can.

19:00 Moving on to our costs and what this slide shows is a number of things. Firstly, how we've reduced our costs from, in the left hand column, 28,400,000 in 2019 to 24.8 in 2000 and sorry, 2019 to 2020. And then on the right hand side, you know, how we've accounted for those costs. So, you know, what are they? Marketing staff is the biggest cost, as you can see by a long shot. We we capitalized 4,000,000 out of the 17,000,000. That that's pretty standard, I think, for a techish company, you know, slightly less than 25%. Not very much we can do about our property costs. We have downsized professional fees, and they are what they are likely to go up with regulatory audits and similar as our IT costs.

19:57 But that's where it is. And, you know, the run rate accounting run rate was 17,000,000, you know, last year. So where does this leave us in EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA? Well, it takes us down to an adjusted EBITDA positive of 1.2. There is a bridge between that and the 2,019 on the next slide, because otherwise, it's a little bit difficult to understand the core components, but a lot of it is due to the fact that we'd be more conservative in our accounting for capitalized costs.

20:42 So sorry, it's actually the slide off next. So this is the result after taxation. So lots of noncash items below EBITDA, as you'd expect. In particular, the amortization on capitalized software is getting very, very close now to our actual spend on capitalized software, and we expect it to be broadly equal in 2021.

21:07 The business we acquired in November 2019 has performed very, very well. This is the white label business, and it turns out that our original estimates of contingent consideration were understated, and we've booked the the the rebook of that cost and paid it in the first quarter of two thousand and twenty one. We do, as we mentioned earlier, receive r and d credits. In 2019, we booked two years. We booked 2,018, and we booked 2019. And in 2020, just naturally, the year for 2020. It is very nice contribution from our majesty's government.

21:53 So this next slide is the bridge, and this is the one that drives to show everybody, well, what really happened to our EBITDA. Yes. It it, it went down, but why did it go down? Well, we've got a lower contribution due to COVID and Wirecard, absolute inevitable. But in the accounting terms, we reduced the the amount that we capitalized. So whilst the money or, in fact, the I mean, the money we did spend less, but we we accounted for less through the the income statement

22:27 as well. Everything else there is is pretty straightforward. In 2019, there was an impairment charge for CardOne Money, our banking services business based up in Chester. Ian will talk more about the value of that business as we get on to, you know, the commercial part of the deck. I've talked about r and d and making the two to one year comparison.

22:57 So moving on to cash flow and where we are with that. So, again, walking through from adjusted EBITDA all the way down. And, you know, we've we've we've dealt with a lot of these items already. Exceptional items lower than the previous year, capitalized software lower than the previous year, acquisitions lower than the previous year, positive working capital on this slide, R and D credit, we received everything that we were due from HMRC, and we also took the opportunity to avail ourselves of the government CBILLS scheme and drew down 2,000,000 on the December 23

23:41 this year. So that left us at the balance sheet date with 10,000,000 of cash, and that falls into a different type of categorization on the next slide, which is we start with our 10,000,000, but we do have float float in and float out on customer margins with with payment processes sorry, liquidity providers, I should say, and customer deposit margins. And this slide shows the CBILLS liability. So net net, at the balance sheet date, we had 4.9p and gross 5.6p per share. So I think this is coming up to my last slide on forward guidance.

24:29 And on the left hand side of the deck is those items of an accounting nature, and the right hand side sorry. Wrong way around. Left hand side is cash, and right hand side is is accounting. So what are the highlights of this one? Well, the first is that our q one twenty twenty one revenue was 8,000,000, so almost exactly the same as it was last year before COVID hit. Our cash position was 9,000,000 on the March 31. And just as a sort of teaser as to how we've driven our costs down, our basic payroll reduced from 1,250,000 in March 2019 to 930,000 in 2000 and sorry.

25:17 2020 versus 2021. Confusing the years.

25:22 And, you know, capitalized software, this is the sort of range that we are expecting to spend this year. We will continue to make r and d credits, but they will drop off as we head into profitability. It's quite a complicated calculation, but nevertheless, quite healthy. And the earn outs, as we indicated earlier, the significant part is already being paid this year. There are bits and pieces for the other legacies in the in the balance of the year. And on the right hand side, it's really there for accounting guidance, it's for analysts and similar as to, you know, what is expected to go through, you know, below the line. And at that point, I'm going to hand back to Ian.

26:09 Thank you, Richard.

26:10 So I'm gonna briefly cover some slides on transaction volumes and revenues and some, verbal highlights of what we did in 2020, and then trundle through in terms of how how we're gonna go forward from here. So on transaction volume, so this is the big number, if you will, of the amount of activity through the fixed plant, if you will, that we've created. And if you look at the kind of middle column there, FY 2020, so full year 2020, at the bottom, the grand total there, that's £3,500,000,000 worth of activity through this platform. Bearing in mind we did that with, you know, reducing our workforce by 25% or so.

26:57 So we're processing more and more efficiently, and that is a definite priority for the company. We are going very, very rapidly towards more straight through processing, exception based processing, if you will. So you're only having to intervene on nonstandard transactions, and the vast majority can go through automatically. So here, we've got the b two b and b two c split, again, as as we've had before. And you can see there on b two b international payments, strongly up year on year. Corporate expense platform, only down 20% year on year.

27:36 The banking platform, pretty steady on B 2 b and also on, B 2 c. And as Richard said, I'll come to whilst it's interesting to look at these products separately, it's far more, correct to look at them as a whole because, for instance, we have a way better international payments platform because we have the banking platform that underpins it, which I'll draw out later. You can see pretty clearly in terms of volume, on the b to c products, both b to b and b to c on the travel products. You can see they were down, like, 75% year on year, so that was the real hit. I saw out of the corner of my eye that one of the questions was, you know, how much revenue do I think was taken away from us by COVID, and will it come back?

28:28 You know, one hesitates to to draw straight line conclusions. But for instance, b two c was down 5,000,000 year on year, you know, one compared to the other. And, clearly, there was some reduction in activity on on b two b. So a 5 to £7,000,000 spread sounds reasonable, and you would hope if things normalize that we'd get that back at some point. Go to the next slide, Richard, please. So revenue per quarter thought was be quite useful for everyone to see just how the revenues evolve. The the nature of FX on the particularly on the international payment side, though, is you could have a really bad quarter just because nothing's going on, and then you could have a very strong quarter after it. So I'm I'm quite loathed to compare quarter by quarter, but it's a sort of illustrative side. It's it's quite useful for this basis. But, for instance, you know, with the whole run up to the general election towards the end of twenty nineteen, you know, you had some very quiet months and then a very busy one in in December. And so, I'd always caution that. Nevertheless, you know, given q one twenty twenty one was in the full teeth of a lockdown in The UK, whereas q one twenty twenty, we're sort of being a bit blase about it till the middle of March.

29:48 To do the the result that we did for q one of this year, I think, is fantastic. And interestingly, if you look at the breakup of it in terms of cross payments, banking, corporate card, the travel money products, other. It's it's not far off, actually, the mapping in the first quarter of of last year. It does set us confidently looking forwards, but I think if 2020 has taught us anything, if all of us on this call and basically everybody is, you know, anything could change relatively rapidly. So we're not counting our chickens. You know? We we have refined

30:29 the forecast that are in the market slightly upwards, but let's see how the year progresses so we can have more certainty as we go. Next slide, please, Richard. So just, in terms of some key things that we did last year, we've covered COVID, I think, enough. Wirecard, similarly, you know, as mentioned, we're now replatforming the entire b to c offering. We made some significant cost reductions, but we did it whilst keeping the resources we need for growth.

31:00 B to b to b and b to b to c, you know, we have this direct connection to faster payments, which I'm immensely proud of. When we announced it a couple of years ago, the market was sort of underwhelmed. You're now seeing the benefits of having that, you know, that ability to process sterling outbound payments in bulk, you know, tens of thousands automated, very cost efficiently, very cheaply. It's $24,736.05 instant movement of money. Powerful thing to have that not many people do have. We acquired effective FX. The the deal structure was was clever in that essentially self funds, and it's cash flow positive.

31:43 We did plenty of engineering releases, you know, maybe a little bit under the radar in some respects. But in international payments banking and cards and perhaps most importantly, on customer onboarding, On b to b side, we've made it you think about our product suite. You know, we're trying to take business from banks without people having to move their bank account. And, therefore, the product has to be easy to get at, intuitive, easy to understand, and easy to onboard. And so if you can automate as much of that onboarding as possible to make it easy for a potential customer to become a customer, then that's, obviously, a key thing to do, which we put in place during the course of last year. CRM. We had a CRM system, but it was not to the quality that we needed it to be. We invested and, you know, whilst we're cutting costs last year, we we found

32:40 the funds to invest in a system called HubSpot, which we've implemented during the course of last year and is strongly being rolled out further during the course of this. I'll get onto that a little bit more in a slide or two. And all the while, investing in compliance and regulatory, we view this if you do it well, we view this as a competitive advantage because there are lots of you know, I refer to those smaller players maybe turning up a couple 100,000,000. So, you know, less than 10% size of us, who just can't cope with these burdens. You know? They can't cope with the tech burden of the platform that you need to have, and they certainly can't cope with the increased scrutiny from the FCA and all the various stuff that we have to do. So we we believe our prowess here puts us in a good position in terms of shaking loose some smaller competitors that we could acquire.

33:36 Page, Richard. So how, how do we now go from we built a lot of stuff last year and, actually, the year before. We invested a lot, and we now need to go to selling it. And the key thing here is this concept of equals money. So this is the b two b side of of the equation. Equals money, a tagline of an account to bank on. What is it? EQUALS MONEY is is the unified suite that pulls all the various product streams that we have together in one place. And then the key to it and I apologize for getting technical here, but it's worth a couple of minutes just to explain it. A key to it is an own name iBand multicurrency account, which is a a mouthful, I realize.

34:24 But if you if you are a a business and you decide to use an FX broker instead of your bank to save some money on your FX, typically, that FX broker will not be able to give you an account in their in your name. They will use what's called a pooled account. So you'll send money to them into a pooled account. They'll change it to something and send it somewhere. And what that means is whoever's receiving that money from you will receive it from ABC, FX company, on a in effect, a third party basis. It's it's messy. It also means that FX company will receive your money to pull funds, won't know it's yours unless it's got the right indicator on it, and then has to move it from there and put it into a portal so that you can see it. Clunky, messy.

35:11 What we now have is is the capability to give the corporate effectively a bank account or a current account in their own name, because we have the banking platform. That sort of goes to what I was I was talking about earlier. We have we we have this ability to give each corporate an account in their own name. But more than that, each account and, know, we're all aware of sort codes and account numbers. If you put a sort code, account number, and some other numbers together, get what's called an IBAM, which if any of you brought money to Europe, you'll you'll know. So each customer gets their own unique account, so their own IBAM. But that account is multicurrency enabled, so they don't need to have an account for dollars, account for euros, and all this messy stuff that's that you used to have.

35:57 We can just give them one account, and they can give that I band, if you think of it, to any customers, suppliers, anybody. So it becomes very, very simple to use. Yeah. Here's my banking details for everything. Money comes in. Money we instantly know it's theirs because it's in their account. So you can see how this starts to make the whole prospect of a of a corporate using us so much simpler, so much easier than their bank because they're dealing with everything all in one place. They can make payments by account to account transfers, so bank transfer, or by cards, which increasingly you have to use cards to pay ecommerce retailers or, you know, for instance, Google. You can't pay by bank transfer. You have to pay by card. So a corporate can access all of this in one place. Hopefully, that conveys the importance of this own name IBAM multicounting account.

36:48 Add on top of that, some other advantages we have, you know, our heritage background, we've, you know, we listed. We've assembled these licenses and permissions religiously over the years. They take time. The connectivity that we've invested in, we've got clever people who know their stuff internally. And I put customer services there also because, you know, this is our own team. It's not outsourced. Expertise that you can speak to a human being that knows what they're talking about on the product is a is a key USP. I think one of the questions later is about, you know, how do we differ from some of the other fintechs? Well, that's a key part of it. There's people you can speak to here, and I think Trustpilot bears that out.

37:35 I mentioned earlier, you know, during 2020, it was very much the last bit of the build, and now it's sell. But keep building, build more, but selling is the key thing now, and the EQUALS money proposition is is the central plank of that. I think I covered already that this equals money solves numerous problems for the target SME customer. Our build target so who we're designing and building this stuff for is corporates of between fifty and five hundred employees, that sort of order of magnitude. But, clearly, the product suite works well for one to 50 employees or 500 and more. CRM, absolutely vital to all of this. So HubSpot and, actually, beneath HubSpot sits a a a middleware system called Segment that allows all our various databases to accumulate right to HubSpot.

38:29 So this system is, is is amazing. All in one place now, we have all of the front and off back office interfaces. Anytime you speak to a customer, be it via email, telephony, everything, goes into there, the recordings. There, you can transact within the HubSpot system. So it's really gonna really is making a difference in terms of our our growth. We also did a sort of soup to nuts review of our sales and marketing plans, so we have a revised b to b sales and marketing plan. Internally, we also hired a b to b marketing specialist into the team. So we're gonna be picking up a lot of traction as this year goes on on the b to b side.

39:18 And the onboarding platform I mentioned earlier, I think, called TrueNarrative, is key to reducing new customer friction. And if you think of the funnel of, you know, believe it or not, from b to b, it's still very much sales first and marketing sort of augments the process. So you have to have, the more salespeople you have making, the more calls to the more targeted leads, the better you'll do. And then if you can onboard them efficient efficient all the better. The CRM, HubSpot, also, not only once they become a customer, don't just forget them. How can you make sure that, you know, you're maximizing share of wallet? We call it the back book, optimize the revenue out of the customers we already have. HubSpot is also gonna help us with that.

40:06 The b to b and b to b to c capabilities, I think we mentioned earlier. So, I I like that business because you think of it, we can access customers three ways now. We can either go to them directly, which is the optimum, you know, by our own sales teams, and we might retain, you know, after commissions and everything about 85% of the net revenue of those transactions. Or we can go by our affiliates, and affiliates are are clearly a very important way to get customers and but you are ending up having to pay a third party to get at those customers, and that might might net 70% of of the revenue. Via the b to b and b to b to c platforms, you might end up with only 30 or 40% of the revenues, but it's additional scale, and you're getting to customers that someone else has got. So we can, you know, get a reducing share of wallet, but nevertheless gain that scale and volume by having these sort of three ways of acquiring customer.

41:04 You could flip the spreadsheet as as covered. B to c, as as I think we said earlier, it's not like it's going away. Clearly, it's been ravaged by, COVID. But, you know, we have a product there and a heritage and, you know, a brand name in Fairfax that we built up over the years. So we've retained that brand, but now sits at top a brand new offering, as we covered earlier, our post wildcard. The multicurrency card, brand new desktop and brand new app. A key little thing here, where we're building thing in things in b to b technologically that we think would have a b to c application, we'll drop it in there. And that's part of the the benefit of a unified platform is that you can just do that. So the linked cards we announced, as an RNS reach, early March, I think, is an example of that. You know, we can a b to c card user can now give cards to their children, friends, family, whoever they want. And either those cards draw on a shared balance, or they can have a separate balance. It's quite a powerful way. And it means we can actually widen the use case of the b to c platform that we've got such that it's can compete with GoHenry and Osprey for pocket money type stuff.

42:29 So b to c still represents the growth sector for international payments. That was actually up year on year if you if you hark back to an earlier slide. And there is clearly a revenue opportunity. You know, it's like COVID owes us some revenue sort of thing that will come back at some point, and we're well placed to pick it up when we do. What we won't do is, you know, big above the line marketing like we used to do, you know, two or three years ago, three or 4,000,000 of TV ads and stuff like that. We don't need to do that. We can do our marketing quite efficiently via social referrals, affiliates, price comparison sites, that sort of thing. We've actually performed better than we expected in terms of new customer acquisition in b two c during the first quarter. So we're comfortable that as and when things pick up, they were well placed.

43:22 And we've also refined our customer services offering there such that customer services team support the entire product suite, including b to b. Because every time you speak to or interact with a customer, is actually an opportunity to sell. And, you know, we're gonna make sure that the customer services teams are incentivized also in terms of bringing new business in, which they haven't necessarily been before. And then just a sidebar there, we have three physical unit charge outlets in Central London. We've reduced that to one. We need to keep one to need the vault in terms of doing the cash through the post, offering, which we anticipate will rebound strongly once people start traveling. Flip side. Just in terms of q one, we covered some of the numbers earlier, but revenues of 8,000,000 and revenue per head of 120 k, that revenue per head was 90 k going back a year, I think, is a fantastic q one performance.

44:21 We are very enthused by it. B to b led, international payments led. Against that, still very strong cost control. And I, Richard and I religiously, pin our every exec member down on the head count, go through it name by name. Richard literally literally checks every payslip in the payroll every month. So we're not gonna let that, get out of out of control. And the performance is ahead of our internal expectations for the for the first quarter, and hence why there has been some upward revision of the numbers, with with the broker. The balance sheet's in good in in a good place. We have a a growth strategy that you're increasingly gonna see more of and will be more over with.

45:08 But, you know, we're we're working on that. We're deciding what we what we can and can't say without, you know, disclosing what we consider to be sensitive against our competition. A lot of product upgrades happened in q one. Listed a couple of them there, but there's way more to come during the rest of the year, which we'll get to in a second. And we did this tie up that we are in est with TAP Global on crypto, just to clarify where where we and I stand on cryptocurrency. You know, we obviously in normal fiat currency, we deal in all the major currencies. And there are many so called exotic currencies where you're trying to find ways to get liquidity either into them or out of them. For instance, Brazilian real out of Brazil is pretty hard to do.

45:58 We view crypto as no different. It's another exotic, if you will, that increasingly is mainstream that we need to have an understanding of and provide an ability for our customers to transact in and out of it should they so want to do. All the while, we have to make sure that we stay in lockstep with the regulator and also with our liquidity providing banks, because, you know, we can't can't bet the farm on crypto. Equally, we want to be able to do as much as we can in providing our customers the liquidity in and out. So that's the path we're going. I think we'll have, more to say on the subject as the year goes on, but we're not, gonna become a crypto house in case any of you were worried about that.

46:45 If we could flip the slide, please. So as the sorry. Back one. The rest of the year goes on, the growth strategy will become more apparent. Within that, we're hiring more salespeople. It's quite a low tech answer to getting more sales, but that's a key part of it. More people making more phone calls means means, means more sales. We've actually already hired about 10 whilst keeping the headcount constant, during this year. And, generally, I think we're looking to keep the headcount about where it is in absolute terms. We'll be getting more efficiency gains as the year goes on in more back office roles, but we'll fill those in terms of, more people on the revenue generating side.

47:34 The CRM, I think I've covered. It's it's vital to all of this. Training. We've got a a good group of salespeople already, but they tended to be one trick ponies, and we need to train them better such that they can sell the entire suite rather than just one piece of it. Sales enablement is is a fancy way of saying I've got a couple of people whose sole job is to make sure that everybody does what they're supposed to do in terms of using HubSpot, tracked people rigorously against KPIs, the the enforcing side, if you will, into of sales. Investment in compliance such that we can onboard people quickly. If they don't go straight through, that we can turn them around very rapidly, so there's the minimum friction involved. And a self serve push, I think, is interesting in that a key part of our businesses as we covered with the international payment side. International payments up until now is almost a 100% of our customers will be speaking to one of our dealers.

48:35 And the dealers, you know, really, that's you know, customer asked to buy some currency, and they process it for them. That's fine if a customer's paying you £10,000 a year of of net revenue, but not so fine if they're paying you a £100. And what we're doing is pushing the people that pay you not much and not only don't pay not much, but probably can't pay you that much, in terms of their overall possible wallet size to self serve, I e, use the automated platform and do the transactions. That will free up more of the dealers' time to push the bigger paying accounts. So that's a key part of and the investment in the tech over the last couple of years has allowed us to have a platform that's that's, is better suited to that.

49:24 We'll carry on enhancing the b to b product suite, and so the EQUALS money functionality will will skyrocket forward as as as the year goes on. Customer tiering, we were definitely guilty of that in terms of not doing it, before now. HubSpot makes this much easier to do. But as I was just alluding to, you know, there's customers who are clearly gold and then, you know, gold, silver, bronze, that type of thing, and you make sure that you serve them up the product that you want to serve them up. And if you look to the box to the right there in terms of pricing models, we've absolutely priced our products kind of the same way since the year dot. So for instance, on a card, you you get charged something where, in effect, on the foreign currency spread and certain fees. It would be good to have the flexibility to actually say, well, we can provide you an all you can eat for a standard monthly charge, and then everything else is for free type stuff. And just the ability to put the right customer against self serve or or customer human interaction on the right pricing model, these are I think you can see how that will enable us to earn more per customer as we move on.

50:40 We'll still be pushing for more efficiency gains, straight through processing, as I mentioned earlier, automated reconciliations. All this stuff, you know, just makes the concept of more scale. We're definitely in a place now where we could put a lot more business through the business that we have without having to hire a ton of people. The car platform will have more toys to play with there, virtual cars as well as physical. Right now, we do prepaid cards. We'll add debits. That's important because right now, to move money, particularly on the corporate platform, you have to consciously move the money from the balance onto the card. Many corporates would like the reverse, I. That the card can pull the money automatically from a shared pool of funds, and having that debit functionality is is a key part of that. Tokenization means we'll be adding Apple Pay and Google Pay in effect and self issuing the cards, you know, we'll be doing all our own issuance rather than having third parties involved in it once bitten, three times shy post wildcard.

51:45 I put b two b affiliates there because a key thing to do there is to have our, EQUALS GROUP PLC integrated into account platforms like Xero, for instance. So in effect, you're getting those platforms that's selling your product for you. You're an accredited supplier to them, and everything fits. It's just one less thing for a corporate that's buying their package to to have to worry about. All the while we're talking about this growth proposition, though, I want to emphasize key for us is that it's controlled growth. So continued emphasis on operational excellence, clients, control. And more longer term than 2021, Richard, if you could flip the slide.

52:32 We have a Capital Markets Day hurtling towards us that I'm trying to plan to be on the May 6 at 11:00. You're all very welcome. I I think that will be useful because of these things you tend to hear from Rich and myself, and this will give people that attend the ability to meet, the wider executive team and some key transactional individuals, if you will. We'll showcase what we currently do and the in a bit more detail, the road map for the rest of the year and beyond in terms of what we're we're building. Then the growth strategy, how we're gonna sell it. And, you know, last but by no means least, the the investment in operations compliance regulations. So growth, but not at any cost.

53:19 There's a link there. You can also find it on our investor relations website. On that note, I think we're open for q and a. Ian, Richard, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit the Q and A using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review the questions submitted already, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A, can be accessed via your Investor Meet company dashboard. We will send you a notification when that's ready for you to review. I'd also like to remind you that your feedback is important to the company. And immediately after the presentation has ended, you will be redirected for the opportunity to provide feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations.

54:08 Ian, Richard, before attending to the questions that have come in the live Q and A, I wanted to start off with a pre submitted question we received, which reads as follows: There are a number of relatively new payment groups operating in a similar space. What makes EQUALS different, and what intellectual property protects its position? Let me deal with the the intellectual property bit first, and then I'll pass back to to Ian. So all our software is in a a code bank. All our URLs are in our own name. Our fixed asset register and our r and d claims to HMRC sets out what is ours. We take trademarks out where we can. We take patents out where we can too.

55:00 We like many other fintechs, we have in the past used, you know, multiple contractors to help in some of the IT build. And those contractor contracts, which have largely disappeared now, have a very robust, you know, we own the code type clauses. So that's the IP protection in competitive landscape. Yeah. I mean, it's very hard to give a succinct answer to that. You're absolutely right. I mean, payments is there's a lot of fintechs appearing that are well capitalized. Partly, I think the first thing to, you know, hark back to is whilst that's important, so is the amount of business that still sits with the incumbent banks. You know, that is that's where we can all take, a ton of of revenue and opportunity from.

55:54 And the fact that there's so much money pouring into it is indicative of the size of the prize. I mean, it's an enormous marketplace. Now most of the the new in new people that are coming in tend to be b to c focused, not b to b. That's part of the reason that we shifted our our our gaze over to the b to b side. So we're we're fishing in an area that's less glamorous in that respect. So it's not about millions and billions of customers in that headline. You know, we got 10,000,000 customers or not. It's it's more subtle than that. Also, we cover, as we mentioned earlier, more than one product place. So in within payments, you can say, well, it's transfer wise. It's it's is competitor there. But even there, TransferWise is solely a self serve platform. What we have across our chart top product suite is the ability to speak to a human being and to have more products, Brett. So you can't do a full contract on TransferWise.

57:00 You can with us. So it's it's hard to answer simply, but I think the in simple terms, if if we if we look at the connectivity that we've put together, the payments networks we put together, we've got comparable tech with with with these, fintechs but overlaid with human interaction, then I think that's that's really the USP. That's very kind. Thank you very much indeed, Ian and Richard. Could I ask you guys, please, just to click on the q and a tab on the right hand side? Richard, I did promise to tell you if you are pixelating, but I didn't wanna stop you mid flow. But there is occasional pixelation, so please feel free to keep your camera on or or just turn it off for the q and a.

57:48 But just to say, if I could ask you guys to be so kind, if I could ask you to read the question, who it's from, and give a response where it's appropriate to do so. And what I'll do is I'll pick you up at the end, if that's okay with you. Yeah. I'll Why don't I read a new answer? And then Okay. Focus on it. So the first question is from AIMS. Can you give us a flavor of your b to b customer acquisition strategy? Yeah. I'm I think I alluded to a bit a bit of this. It's as simple as a ton of people on phones making phone calls towards your target customer, not just to any any business, and all the way through the funnel using the HubSpot system. The key is, you know, bums on seats literally is as crude as that to have more more salespeople making more calls. But you augment that with a tone of voice. We've got an economist. We have good social presence.

58:45 You have good marketing collateral. You have a b to b marketing strategy that augments it. But, really, it's that combined with a a powerful affiliates team, and we're gearing up the affiliates team even further such you're getting to the customer more than just directly. But you'll see more of this on Capital Markets Day. So the next question is from Ryan N. Well done on the swift action rewirecard. Do you think that this had any reputational damage to EQUALS? I think on the weekend that the FCA decided to shut Wirecard down and everyone's money was frozen, it certainly wasn't helpful. And, however, I think you can also see that it's how you respond to stuff like that. I mean, we had almost the entire company volunteer to do customer service calls during the middle of this, and we handled it very well and had massive retention in terms of the customers that used us.

59:42 And then we recorded them all onto a new platform, and, the retention level was way higher than we expected. So, I think it it was painful while it happened that week, but we handled it well. So if anything, we came out with our reputation enhanced. And a question from Simon c. What do you feel is the greatest risk to EQUALS as you transition through the second half of two thousand and twenty one? Well, ignoring COVID, I'll try to split that to one side. I mean, that's clearly a risk. But, really, it's execution of of of the sales and growth strategy is is the key one. I mean, you know, we know there's gonna be more regulation from the FCA and all these type of things we kind of expect, But that's where we've really got to make sure that we execute.

1:00:34 So there are another couple of questions that I'm gonna read out and answer myself. So there's one from Alex s. Why do you have two names for the segmentation of b to b revenues on slide seven and eight when you're talking about the same numbers. So slide seven is really a at a glance view of the business by segment, and schedule eight or slide eight is trying to show the history, you know, h one, h two, and a comparison to the prior year. And then there's another question from Alan c on slide eight. It shows that full year 20 b to c, 5,000,000 lower than last year and also travel within B2B was 2,000,000 lower. Is it reasonable to think sales could have been 7,000,000 higher if COVID did not occur or might come back if things normalize?

1:01:29 So I'm sure Ian will have a commercial view of that, but I'll just kick off with a num numeric answer, which is that the shops themselves produced 2,400,000 of revenue in, you know, 2000 and, you know, '80 sorry, '19 and and similar in 2018. So a lot of that was lost. Then there was a retail card offering as well, and a lot of the retail card revenue in 2019 can also be attributable to some chunky rebates that we got that were accruing over a moment in time. I think the me speaking as a CFO, I think that the the challenge in relation to getting more b to c or travel revenue is making sure that we're not forgotten about by those people who did travel or spend money with us.

1:02:27 Have they lost their cards? You know, are they just not traveling? We've obviously got our robust database with the enhanced CRM, But it's you know, are we going to drop out of the firmament would be the challenge, I think, that we need to to rise up to. Ian, would you like to take that on? Yeah. And it's good that the CFO is more conservative than the CEO, isn't it? My view is because because we went through that whole wildcard experience, basically, everyone that we want to have a car has got a new one. And, the engagement that we've had with that customer group and now with HubSpot, we can talk to them more dynamically is good. So I'm I'm confident that we'll get a a definitely significant revenue increase when things if things normalize normalize.

1:03:28 But absolutely correct, Richard. You know, the longer it goes on, then we wanna make sure we're not forgotten. But we do you know, when sterling goes up, we send out rate alerts. We're dialoguing with customers. We have the link cards, dialoguing with them as often as we can without without knowing too much. So, definitely, we'll get something back. Whether we get all of it or 80% of it is, I guess, the debate. Okay. There are a couple of questions that have some similarities. I'll read them both. There's one from Andy M, which is what is your view of future growth and market share? Do you see this organically or through potential acquisitions? There's a question from Stephen H. How is the M and A environment buy and sell side? And there's another question about the first quarter revenue being strong and what growth levels do you expect because we're coming out of lockdown and vaccination opening up.

1:04:26 Yes. As I alluded to earlier, we did have a good q one. It was significantly better than you and I had planned, Rich, or expected. But we don't wanna go crazy and extrapolate that and and increase our estimates in the market by over much because we're just cautious given what happened last year. So there were some revisions in terms of can CANACOL's guidance that hopefully you've seen, and I think that's appropriate. So we're we're more confident than than we were. And those numbers exclude any potential m and a. We could have done more m and a last year, for sure. We were unwilling to do most of the deals tend to be, as I mentioned, these sort of international payments dealing businesses where you're paying about one times revenue, three times EBIT sort of thing.

1:05:27 And, normally, they they have an upfront payment as part of the deal, and we weren't willing to do anything like that during the course of 2020. We might do that now. And as I alluded to in terms of the compliance burden, I think that could shape loose even more people that just can't cope. You know, lot of these businesses tended to be not lifestyle y, but, you know, two or three founders that have built it up, it pays them a decent amount, but they're seeing it get eroded by competition, tech, and reg burdens. So I I'd be quite hopeful on that. There's also part of the question was not just m and a in terms of us buying things, but I think in terms of being bought ourselves, you know, if there was anything like that, I couldn't tell you anyway. But I think, you know, what we have assembled here, you know, which maybe was unglamorous while we were doing it, is is not an easy thing to assemble.

1:06:25 And we're starting to see the fruits of that labor come through in terms of what the the market is seeing in terms of financial numbers. So, yeah, we've built something to be proud of, and our current thinking is just to keep growing and growing as fast as we can. And anything else, m and a work wise, you'd think would just take care of itself somewhat. You can do that. And the second question from Steven h is how is The US initiative developing? Good question. I wonder if that's the Steven h. I think it is. It's it's a good question. We were would have pushed quite hard on The US in 2020 were it not for COVID. So what do we have in The US? We effectively think of it like the EU. We're passported across The US by the relationship we have with Metropolitan Commercial Bank.

1:07:18 We've kept all of that open. The push was gonna be using our corporate spend platform given the high usage of our platform across the film production industry. You know, the the logical place was to land and expand in film production in the sort of LA region and and build up the corporate car platform through that. Clearly, it was not the best use of scarce resource to push hard on The US in 2020. We haven't shut anything down. We've kept it ticking over. It's there to push when we're ready to push, and the time to push on that is getting nearer, but we're not quite at the moment yet that we want to do it. So everything's still up and running, but we're not gonna push hard yet.

1:08:06 Okay. So there's a question from John f. When level of revenue profits do you expect in the longer term for faster payments for HomeSend and over what time scales? This is a HomeSend revenue question. Yeah. I mean, not keen to give an exact number on a on a revenue for a particular customer. So but, you know, Home Send is up and running and is adding significant p and l, and that will grow. So, you know, they are when we were doing the r and s for them and the whole negotiation and everything is a, you know, business that's largely owned by Mastercard, they're very, very protective.

1:08:51 So they wouldn't thank me for giving out. I think we have to classify that as confidential. So there's a question from Alex s about headcount, which I'll address in the first instance, and I'll allow Ian to continue it. Will you need to add cost headcount this year in order to drive higher sales? There are two parts to this to the answer to this question. The the first is that we drove our headcount very, very aggressively down. I mean, we've rounded the numbers up to 250, but actually the March payroll was 248. We've taken out about another seven people since then. And I think that we would expect the numbers to trade between two forty and two sixty five for the year depending on where we are with the sales recruitment cycle and various, you know, junior boards who we will recruit in. We have certainly seen salary pressure.

1:09:58 We lost a couple of good people. We've hired a couple of very, very good people, though. So we're still in an attractive place. You know, we have we have a good package for for very salesy people, And it's ebbs and flows. I think with salespeople, you you try them out. If they perform, fantastic. If if you don't, you get rid of them very, very quickly. Ian, do you wanna add much? Yeah. I I mean, it's the way the question's actually written, you know, will you need to add cost and headcount this year in order to drive higher sales? The the short answer is no. We don't need to add. We will have higher revenues without adding bodies, but we will. So it's it won't be that you need to. It's that we will do. We'll add additional heads to drive it if we see the opportunity, and we are seeing the opportunities. So, you know, I think I'm minded that, in some ways, the opportunity we have now is similar to the opportunity we had on IPO in that then it was in b to c. We had something that most people didn't have or would take a while to replicate.

1:11:08 They replicated two years later. We didn't manage to go fast enough. Same opportunity now on b to b. We've we've assembled something that's hard to do in time terms, not necessarily in monetary terms. So we need to go as fast as we can. So to the extent possible, that's what we will be doing. And there's this GROUP question, but from Neil b at the end. Employees working remotely. Good or bad question. Cost savings question. Well, the fact of the matter is, here we are all on, you know, enabled via a platform that we can speak to you and take questions, and it's all very clever, isn't it? And, you know, Zoom throughout the pandemic has been amazing for keeping the business going. And the and the point I have to make actually is whilst Zoom to speak to your colleagues is okay. You know, we're a a business that has to have the highest level of encryption, security. We're connected to the Bank of England, stuff like that. So for us to go to full remote working as we did a year ago was also a testament to the quality of the platform that we've built up over the years. As we sit here now, both our office locations in London and Chester, we have full lateral flow testing, all the stuff you might expect, testing at home to make people feel as comfortable as possible to come in.

1:12:31 Speaking personally, there is no substitute for physical meetings with people on premise, in terms of you know, we've all invested heavily in diversity over the years. And to get that spark and interaction, you need to be in the same room. We're encouraging teams to come in. We're encouraging but not five days a week on specific days. And so it's a there's no yay or nay answer to this. We will keep the office. We don't use much office space as we had before, but we need people to be interacting with each other. Actually, apart from anything else, for their for their mental health, you know, you get in, see other people just to get back in that kind of interaction group.

1:13:19 So, there's a question a couple of questions from Bruce and a couple of questions from, AMS. I'll deal with Bruce to start with. So who does the company see as being the most relevant competitors to their b to b unified suite for account and card payments? What is their USP against them? Transfer wise, or now call wise, would be the most obvious. Their b to c focus win will b to b. They can't do four contracts. We can. You can't speak to a human being. You can, I think, is is really you know, people particularly, if you're a business, you know, if you're a larger business, you might have a treasury function?

1:14:07 You know, if you're a very small business, you might be happy to self serve. But if if you're if you're on that kind of small or medium size, having the ability to speak to a dealer, who's bespoke to you that's got some market color can tell you what they're seeing is is invaluable, and that's a service they don't have. Okay. There's a question from AMS. NatWest have announced they will will refuse to serve business customers who accept payments in cryptocurrency. What is your position? What's our position? Our position is we have to respect the position of NatWest. NatWest is just one of our liquidity providers. I get where they're coming from because, you know, at the end of the day, you don't get line of sight easily to the original source of funds. And, you know, it's it's a dangerous area. That's why when I was talking about crypto earlier, I said that we will only go at the pace that is okay with our regulator and also with our main liquidity providing partners.

1:15:12 And each has a different stance, not just on crypto, on other areas of business, be it gambling or whatever. So there's a question from Bruce Lee, which I will read and then answer. If you look at the company's results in 2018, revenue was £26,100,000 and adjusted adjusted PBT, 6,800,000. Can the company outline what is the fundamental change in their business that means that while SENCOTS are forecasting that revenues will grow to 37,600,000 in 2022, adjusted PBT is forecast to be only 1,500,000. How long will it take for adjusted PBT to grow back to twenty eighteen levels? So the first part of the answer to this question is it's due to accounting conservatism.

1:16:01 In 2018, 8,500,000 of cost went below adjusted PBT. And then the second is really what is the position going forward. Well, we've been very, very focused on cash breakeven as, you know, you'll you'll see. I'm not familiar with the same cost forecast. Canaccord are forecasting 4,000,000 plus of adjusted PBT for the year. And we have no reason to contra against that at the moment. So we've had a very, very good first quarter.

1:16:49 The, you know, the mood in the company is very, very buoyant. We have, you know, gone through the really the really big, you know, foundations and and walls of of of the build. We and we are now in rollout and and and sell mode. I think there's clearly an appetite for this product. I mean, I'm myself, Annie, in a in in the office today, the streets are very, very much busier. You know, there are now queues at the sandwich bars, and there are more sandwich bars open. Tubes, know, I'm I shleppered in on the tube from West London. And, you know, for the last two days, I haven't had seats. Oh, woe is me, you may say, but, you know, that's that's an indicator of economic enthusiasm, I think, is probably the the word.

1:17:47 And it's yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's great to see the energy in the company. People are really, really fired up, wanna make things happen, and I think you'll see that all when you come in and dial into the Capital Markets Day. There's finally a question from Ames. Given the business advantage you have developed with a platform offering, how do you assess the threat from perhaps an unwelcome takeover approach at the stage of growth? I noted the broker commented you were a prime potential target. That's always that's always something that could happen. I mean, there's different types of potential suitors for a business like ours, and, you know, if it was someone that was gonna buy us that would help us grow faster, then it wouldn't necessarily be unwelcome. But I I can't assess it any more than you've just done in the question, really.

1:18:46 It's no. It's clearly a possibility. I think, you know, we're still for some reason, there's still some investors that look at it as a travel money related business, but the share prices would go up if there's better vaccine news and go down if there's worse pandemic news, which makes no sense. So there is an element to which what we've assembled is not reflected in the stock price. So I think that would that would drive that threat. Yeah. And, Ian, I would I would just add and repeat that, you know, last year, we did almost 3,500,000,000 worth of transactions. We have, at the balance sheet date, close to 100,000,000 of money from customers that's not on our balance sheet.

1:19:39 And we're we're not a bank, so, you know, why are they putting it us with us? Because they intend to spend it on our product. So, you know, those are those sort of KPIs, I think, all go very, very well for, you know, for for the growth. I think some of the products that that we've looked at are are very, very interesting, and it may well be that we can do more joint ventures with with other companies because of them. I think that may well be, you know, the future in this in this sector. And, prosaically, you know, there's a two way price in our stock. One says buy, one says sell, As as Lord Hanson would say.

1:20:27 Richard back to the Yeah. Richard, thank you very much, Andy, and for being so generous with your time and actually taking on every single question. We're well through the hour. So thank you to the investors who who took the time to submit and obviously to both Richard and Ian for being so diligent in giving their responses. Perhaps, Ian, before we just wrap up, and I know investor feedback is important to both Ian and yourself, that perhaps we can ask you for a few closing remarks, and then I'll redirect investors to give feedback. Yeah. Well, thanking everybody for for their time, and hopefully, you found that useful and informative. I think the macro message for me is we did more than survive in 2020. You know, we rightsized the business from a headcount standpoint. We we carried on developing and building good stuff such that we're now primed in 2021.

1:21:19 You know, we've got a great product we can sell that we're gonna improve even further as during the course of the year, renewed vigor in behind our sales strategy. So as Richard alluded to a minute ago, the feeling within the company is very positive. We're excited about what we've built and what we're gonna build and how we're gonna move forwards from here. And I hope, you know, that investors can get some sense of that enthusiasm and excitement and and follow the stock. Ian, thank you very much. And to both Ian and Richard for updating investors so comprehensively today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? It shall now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback.

1:22:06 If you access this meeting via our website, then the feedback page will appear. If you access this meeting via the link sent to you via by email, you'll simply be asked to log back in to submit your feedback, and I'm sure the company will be very appreciative of your your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team of EQLS GROUP PLC, I'd like to thank you very much for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all, and thank you for your time.