Trustpilot Group (LSE:TRST) — Introduction to Trustpilot Group PLC

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the introduction to TRUSTPILOT GROUP PLC investor presentation. Throughout the quarter presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the q and a tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself, but the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to head of investor relations, Louise Bryant. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you, Alessandro,

0:32 and hello, everybody. Thank you for joining me on this lovely sunny day, taking time out to hear a bit more about TRUSTPILOT. So I'm Louise Bryant, head of investor relations, and I will take you through a bit of an introduction to the business with a few slides towards the end around our performance last year, and then very happy to take any questions. So TRUSTPILOT was founded in 2007 with the vision to be the universal symbol of trust. It's a public platform where any consumer can go and review any business, and the business is able to reply to any review that's left on the platform. And the idea is that it's free to use. Point of use is open to all businesses and all consumers. We have over 300,000,000 reviews on the platform, and in 2024, had 230,000,000 of annual recurring revenue. We've got about a thousand people located around the world with big hubs in Copenhagen, London, and New York.

1:30 We listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, and we were part of that crowd of 2021 IPOs. And and clearly, some of us, it's been a bit of a rocky journey, but we definitely feel that we've turned a corner and and really starting to demonstrate what the business is capable of. So TRUSTPILOT is unique in five different ways. First of all, we are an open platform. So any consumer can go and leave a review of any business. If that business does not already have a review on the platform, you can create the page, the company profile page or CPP as we call it, and leave a review of that business. The business, any business is able to read and respond to those reviews as a free at the point of use. And by claiming your profile as a business, you get the ability, a, to respond to those reviews, but b, also to send automated invitations up to 50 a month on a kind of free per use basis. So it's a freemium software platform model, which we'll touch on in a bit more in a moment.

2:33 Businesses cannot hide genuine reviews, be they positive or negative. The whole point is that this is an open and transparent platform. The second point is that we are incredibly broad. So we are cross vertical, both online and offline and relevant both for small businesses all the way up to larger organizations. And we host reviews globally with subscribing businesses in more than a 100 countries. Our reach is phenomenal because we are so broad across so many different verticals and geographies. And because it's a consumer led platform, we have a huge consumer audience. And last year in 2024, we had a 140,000,000,000 annual TRUSTbox impressions. Now the TRUSTbox is effectively you seeing, you know, the star rating or the the TRUSTPILOT logo in some form of advertising.

3:21 Those TRUSTPILOT impressions only measure what we can measure ourselves, which is a is online impressions. So if you view a web page that has got that on it, that's deemed as a TRUSTPILOT impression. It doesn't include all the offline advertising that our customers do for us. Just as a point of note, we don't actually do any b to c advertising. So we're not advertising to consumers in any way. We actually are allowing our business customers to use the TRUSTPILOT logo, their star ratings in their advertising, and effectively, we're getting advertising for free as a result of that. As a result of that, we have hugely strong brand awareness and that influences purchasing decisions. And businesses are increasingly aware, particularly in key markets like Denmark and The UK and increasingly in The US, that that consumers purchasing decisions are influenced by their trust score. And therefore, they want to engage with the platform so that they can initially build the trust and the credibility and will come on to the the business value proposition and why businesses choose to engage with us.

4:27 Fourthly, we're a software platform. So we have a freemium SaaS business model. We're not monetizing as an advertising business. And what that means is that we don't need consumers to come to the TRUSTPILOT website to understand the trust score and for us to make money. The way we describe it is that our brand lives out in the wild. But what we are doing is we're providing tools to businesses to able to enable them to invite reviews at scale, but more importantly, analyze those review responses. So better understand what people are saying are positives, what are negatives and attributes, and how that might be changing over time. And as we grow as a business, we're investing more in product development, which enables us to improve those tools and add add things in, competitive analysis, for example.

5:20 The fifth and perhaps most important pillar is TRUST. It's in our name and clearly is our license to operate. We have to maintain the content integrity on the platform and make sure that the reviews that you are seeing and the trust scores are a genuine reflection of real life experiences. And to do that, we have a sort of three pronged approach. First of all, we use technology and data to detect fraud. We run through if you submit a review to the platform, there is typically a two hour delay between you submitting that review and it being posted to the platform. And in that time period, it's being run through a series of what we call engines internally, but effectively, they're models looking for patterns in data. Now we're not just looking at the content of the review, although we do have some models that are running through and checking for things like defamation or certain kind of words or phrases that we don't want pairing on the platform.

6:14 But in the background, we're collecting hundreds of what we call metadata points. Things like the IP address, your email address that it's being submitted from, and whether or not that's correlated to any other reviews that have been submitted to platform. The operating system, the language, the time of day, all these sorts of things. So hundreds of data points. And then we're looking for patterns in that data to understand whether or not we feel that it's a genuine experience based on all the 300,000,000 reviews we have on the platform and the data points we've got associated with those, the probability of it being a genuine review. Clearly, we will not catch everything. About 90% of the reviews that we remove from the platform are done by the technology. But if if something does get through and and clearly there are instances where that does happen, we then have what we call the people and community pillars to help us with that. So on the people side of things, we have content integrity and fraud and investigation teams in place.

7:12 And if a consumer or a business flags something, you have the ability to do that. That is then investigated by those teams. And they will look for a lot more detail and things. Of the reviews that are removed automatically, if you submit a review and our systems deem that it might not be genuine, you will be contacted and asked to see if you can provide any evidence that it was a genuine review or or to give more insight into it. And that is another way in which we're trying to keep more genuine reviews on the platform. Where we discover misuse by a business or by a a consumer user, we will take enforcement action. And that can include things like cease and desist letters, warning notifications posted on the company profile page.

7:58 We've taken legal actions. So in The UK, in November last year, we won a high court ruling against us a series of review sellers. And then finally, we also engage with regulators and with our peers to promote trust in reviews online. And so that can include things like sort of advocating on the behalf of consumers with regulators to make sure that platforms remain open, for example, rather than always in some cases, there's a desire to make them closed platforms, for example, which would obviously not be overly helpful if you as a consumer just want to go and leave a review about a business you've experienced. In terms of our business model then and how we actually make money, so we operate a high margin SaaS platform. So that's software as a service.

8:48 And and as I said earlier, it's a platform that as you go from the freemium model up into the different paid plans, you can get different tools and insights from the reviews that we are collecting on the platform. The consumer ultimately owns their review, and they're the only one that has the ability to take that review down if they ever chose to beyond having been through the kind of checks that we've just talked about. Excuse me.

9:19 But in in submitting a review to the platform, as a consumer, you're agreeing to our terms, which allows us to use the data in the background for this use as a as a software platform and for businesses to gain insight into how they can, a, build trust if they're a small business and wanting credibility, then use that their trust score and reviews to grow their business. And we've got a demonstrable proof. There are a number of reports and, independent pieces of research that we've commissioned that are available publicly available that you can go and look for, but which will demonstrate, the return on investment. For example, last year, we did a piece of research that demonstrated a 401% return on investment to businesses using it because it improves things like the conversion rate of checkout, the basket size, and and just generally helps to grow revenue.

10:11 And finally, at the kind of top end of the business value proposition for for businesses, how you can improve your business, and then I'll touch on that a bit more in in the following slides. As I said earlier, it is a freemium model. So it is free for businesses to claim their profile, respond to reviews, and send up to 50 review invitations per month. If you're a small business, that should give you enough reviews on the platform without needing necessarily to move up into to the higher plans. But clearly, if you want to really engage with your customers and understand what they're thinking on a a much larger scale, then having the ability to send much higher levels of automated invitations is beneficial and one of the reasons why businesses choose to invest in using the platform.

11:00 Our gross margins are over 80%, so we're a typical SaaS business in that regard. And then the kind of major costs below that are our sales and marketing expense. As you would expect, majority of our costs are people. Then we've got technology and content spend, which is around the development of the platforms, the product and engineering side of things, as well as those content integrity and trust teams. And then finally, and a costs, and that effectively gets you down to an adjusted EBITDA line. So our platform is dual sided, and it's underpinned by network effects. And we refer to this as the flywheel. So the more reviews that consumers leave on the platform, the more businesses become interested in how consumers are reviewing them and their score and how they're showing up online.

11:49 And therefore, businesses then adopt the platform. They send more reviews and you you have this great flywheel effect. I touched on a moment ago the business value proposition, which is on the left hand side. So build trust. So for your smaller businesses, that's around initially collecting and responding to reviews. And really, that's where the business started. Our founder, Peter Moorman, who founded the business in Copenhagen, wanted a way to demonstrate that his, what I would call, kind of basement business of importing cables that connected your Nokia phone to your laptop and and then selling those demonstrate that he was a trustworthy individual using reviews from previous customers to do that. Originally, he was selling his products on eBay, but he found as you as you would expect with a classic arbitrage business that others were coming in and effectively undercutting him. And so he wanted a way to demonstrate that he was a trustworthy business, but without sending people to look at the reviews that he'd already collected on eBay. And that was kind of the essence of of how TRUSTPILOT was founded.

12:55 Once you started collecting and responding to reviews as a business and and you can sort of see your trust score steadily moving up to the level perhaps that you've targeted, As I mentioned, you can use that then in your marketing, your advertising to help acquire new customers. And and as I said, we've demonstrated the the the ability to do that both in online, offline advertising, TV advertising. And finally, and much more applicable to larger businesses, which is more where we're moving as a business ourselves is the insights piece. So how can you better serve your customers and fuel growth that way? And we have customers on the platform such as Vodafone, for example, who have linked their review invitations to particular store locations.

13:43 And in doing so, they're getting a much better understanding of how those different stores are are performing. For consumers, it's about discovering a business, choosing an often custom a consumer, sorry, will come to to be aware of TRUSTPILOT or to choose a business because they have been looking at purchasing something. They've got near to the checkout, and then they've gone, actually, I just wanna check that this is a real business. And the other people have had, you know, positive reviews with it. And once they've done that, then it's about sharing that and helping other people to do so. Our market opportunity, which we sized prior to the IPO back in 2021 is enormous. So it's almost so big that it it kind of is a bit pointless talking about these numbers because they are so large. But the service addressable market that we talk about of about 19,000,000,000 is really around the kind of key markets of The UK, North America, and Europe.

14:40 We do have a presence in Australia. And that business is a large part of that business is actually selling into China because of Chinese businesses that want to have credibility in in the Western world. So back in Australia or in Europe or in The US. And more importantly, the market is is supported by structural drivers. So first of all, the growing trust imperative. Historically, you know, in times gone by, you would get recommendations of perhaps where to shop or particular services by talking to your friends, your family, your neighbors, and and your local community. Now that's still there to some extent, but most of us are so busy in our day to day lives that actually we need to kind of answer almost immediately when we're sort of halfway through doing something.

15:30 And you want to be confident about the purchase that you're about to make. And on the other side, businesses want to to kind of trust that that they will be paid. So trust is an increasing import increasingly important part of doing business. Secondly, the growth of the influence of of reviews. Online research demonstrates that actually 89% of consumers in The UK will look at star ratings before before they make a purchase. And actually, when you look at our star ratings, you find that that there's a very strong correlation between improved conversion rate and return for a business all the way up until the score is about 4.7, and then it tends to plateau because at that point, you know, consumers are convinced that you're a trustworthy business.

16:18 Regulation is increasingly playing a part. So governments want to ensure that consumers can trust reviews. And so you've seen things like the FTC rule on fake reviews in The US. You've seen recent legislation in The UK to similar effect, banning the use of fake reviews, preventing you from hiding genuine positive or negative reviews in the platform, preventing you from or preventing businesses, I should say, from incentivizing reviews. So effectively saying, you know, if you pay me x amount, you know, I can go and leave a series of reviews for you and all those sorts of things. And and so that is increasingly an area of focus. And we have a policy team that's constantly looking at this, understanding how things are changing and making sure that we're always on the right side of that. And you can see that in the FTC ruling, which was published in the summer last year, the TRUSTPILOT was cited 27 times as how to do things from a review perspective.

17:15 And finally, the growing importance of data. And I'm well aware that kind of data is sort of can be seen as a bit of a buzzword. But fundamentally, companies seek insights, actionable insights from data sources. So the companies that are collecting reviews on a platform then want to understand what what does that actually mean? What are the insights from that? So it moves from being a kind of marketing tool to being a customer experience tool. And then more broadly, there are businesses that are interested in understanding trends in data kind of cross sector or cross geography or just more broadly. And we released a product called TRUSTLAIR or we announced, I should say, a product called TRUSTLAIR in March this year, which will eventually when it's properly launched towards the end of this year, enable those businesses seeking to understand the the kind of data the full data set of 300,000,000 reviews and and and use that for for their insights.

18:10 And examples of how that can be used are Advent International, our partner, has been using a lot of the TRUSTPILOT data. A, as part of its due diligence, it's a a PE fund. So trying to figure out whether or not it's right to invest in certain companies. And then secondly, actually, as part of looking at the operational performance, I should say, of their operating companies and trying to track that over time and and seeing that actually if you can improve the the customer service, the customer satisfaction, that actually helps improve the performance of the business. We have five street strategic pillars that are very clearly laid out, which is how we are going to deliver growth as a business. The first is trust. As I touched on at the beginning, trust is the most important pillar here. Without trust, we lose our license to operate. It's also our biggest opportunity in that we are unique investing in the kind of content integrity and the transparency of the platform.

19:07 The consumer value and business value are the two sides of the flywheel. So you need both sides of those flywheel growing in order for the entire flywheel to turn. They don't have to be growing at the same rate, but they do both need to be growing. And so we're looking at metrics around the number of reviews on the platform, the trust box impressions from a consumer perspective. And then from a business growth perspective, we're looking at bookings growth and the net dollar retention rate. And you can see some of the areas we're focusing on in terms of sort of strategic priorities over the last year and and this year coming. So it's about the usability of the platform, the brand perception for consumers, and then for businesses, really trying to focus on the enterprise segment of our customers, which is an area that we've kind of moved into as the business has grown up and evolved.

19:58 We've got four focus markets, so The UK, US, Germany, and Italy. Our CEO, Adrian, joined in September 2023. So he's been in post for eighteen months. And one of the things that he brought when he joined us was a bit more strategic clarity. So I think previously, we were trying to kind of grow everywhere. And actually, he said, look. We can't we can't do all things all the time. So let's start with a number of focus markets, really demonstrate that the flywheel is working, learn what we need to learn about how we can get that working most efficiently, and then we can start looking at adding, subsequent markets. I mean, as I mentioned at the beginning, we've got paying customers in in over a 100 countries. So there's plenty to go for, over time, but we want to do it in the most efficient manner and make sure that we're delivering a return when we go and invest in in new markets and sales teams there.

20:51 Underpinning all of that is what we would want to achieve in terms of financial performance, so efficient growth. We've talked historically for a number of years. We're comfortable delivering mid teens revenue growth on an annual basis for many years to come. We would hope that on a on any given year, and certainly this was true last year with the bookings that came through, that we could deliver higher than that, but we are confident that we can deliver mid teens revenue growth on an annual basis. And from a margin perspective, we believe that we can deliver incremental margin improvements every year with the ability for us to reach an adjusted EBITDA margin of over 30 and effectively become a rule of 40 business. Now we haven't put a time frame on that. I see there was a a pre submitted question around that.

21:41 We haven't deliberately haven't put a time frame on that because there's a kind of constant tension between how much do you invest for growth when you've got such a huge market opportunity versus how much do you let fall through to the bottom line. And so we want to maintain some flexibility there whilst we continue to grow and commit to kinda growing the margin over time. And finally, underpinning everything as you'd expect, people and culture. And our peak on score, which is effectively our internal measure of employee engagement, has been consistently improving since this time last year as we've put in place things like new new values for the business and and focusing more on what we would kind of colloquially call getting stuff done, you know, delivering all the time. I think where the business came from was very mission driven and quite idealistic in some ways, which was wonderful and it got the business to a certain point.

22:39 But now we're in that kind of professionalization growing upstage, and so we needed to have a bit more of a kind of customer focus and delivery focus through our values. We've retained the values that we had to start with, like being positively human, for example, is a really important one for us. But we've sort of added this additional layer of of delivery. So content integrity. I did briefly talk about this earlier on, but it's it's it's really important to us and and to the future of the platform. And so we look at it in a number of ways. We have guidelines on the platform which are freely available for everybody to look at both for businesses and consumers. And they and we state very clearly on every company profile page, you can click through and it it'll have a link that says how this company uses TRUSTPILOT.

23:26 You can go through there. You can determine it tells you whether or not they pay for extra features. It tells you how much they engage with the platform. It can give you the review changes over time. So how many five star, four star, three star, two star, one star, how that's changed over time, how many reviews they flagged to our content integrity team, whether they're not happy, how often they're responding to negative reviews, for example. And so we're trying to be fully transparent to consumers, but without overloading them with information as soon as you look at that company profile page. And on an annual basis, we publish what historically has been called the transparency report and is gonna be called, I think, trust report going forward so that you can see all the metrics around how many fake reviews we've removed from the platform, how that's spread across different star ratings, for example.

24:17 And it gives you all sorts of insight around that. Technology. As I mentioned at the beginning of this, we invest heavily in technology to maintain So we're using we are using AI, predictive AI. We're also using we've been using since about 2016 large language models and data analysis, looking at all these data points and trying to spot and remove reviews before they even hit the platform. Now this is continuously evolving. We're never going to be perfect at it. Things will always creep through. And so we're constantly having to kind of up the game. And our teams in the fraud and investigations team are constantly testing our systems ourselves. And as they learn things from that, they're then using that to train our models so that they can catch thing further things in the future.

25:08 We take action when a business or a consumer violates any of the guidelines we issue, including legal action as I mentioned earlier. And I've I've touched on the regulation piece, I think, as well. So we have a proven track record of growth and improving profitability. And and clearly that second part is is key for many investors. Investors. You'll see that in 2021 when we listed, we were profitable at the adjusted EBITDA level. But the following feedback that we received as part of that IPO process and and through 2021 when, you know, the market is quite a different place and very focused on growth, there was a strong desire for invest from investors for us to invest very heavily in growth. And as a result, we saw the margin dip down in 2022.

25:56 Subsequently, as you'd expect, received feedback that that that was not perhaps how investors have thought about it given that the market changed with interest rate increases and so on and so forth. And since then, we have been very focused on making sure that we are delivering what we're operating efficiently and delivering operating leverage on an annual basis. And you can see the massive jump that went from '22 to '23 and and and again, a further improvement this year. And if you look at the analyst consensus and forecast and our guidance that we published in March, we said we expect to deliver a further two percentage point improvement in that margin in 2024. So as I said, 2024, we delivered an excellent performance. We invested heavily in product innovation, and that enabled us to drive what we call the SaaS upgrade cycle. So by investing in product, you demonstrate more value to your customers, and, therefore, you're able to charge them a higher price. And that's what underpinned an improvement in our net dollar retention rate to a 103%.

26:56 We saw strong bookings growth, so 21% constant currency across all our markets, but particularly in The US, which grew 26% across the year, and I think it was 29% in the second half. The US post IPO had, I think, underperformed our expectations and to some extent the market. And at the back end of kind of 2022 coming into 2023, we completely changed the strategy of how we go to went to market in The US. As a result, we focused on what we call high customer lifetime value services. So things where you as a consumer really care about how you spend your money and making sure that you're actually gonna kinda get value and what you want from it. So things like financial services products, education, health care are kind of good sector examples.

27:47 And what we what we felt and and has subsequently proved to to to be true is that if you can get the flywheel moving in a particular vertical, it's much easier

27:57 than trying to do it across the entire market. And and you can see that coming through in in the performance. And what's been really encouraging is if you go and talk to the sales teams in The US, they'll they kind of have such a buzz about things and they'll say things like I never dreamed two years ago that we could land such and such client, which is really nice to see. It's also spilling over into other sectors because clearly as the awareness of TRUSTPILOT grows in in one particular vertical, a consumer might then go, well, I'm gonna review this this other business over here. And so that's also helping awareness and kind of growth on the platform. Growing consumer adoption globally, 23% increase in reviews, and obviously, 55% increase in adjusted EBITDA to 24,100,000. We delivered continued operating leverage, so taking that margin from 8.8% to 11.4%.

28:49 And this bridge very nicely splits out where we've managed to achieve that. So we invested more in cost of sales, and the reason for that is that it's really around commission that we've paid to our people, particularly in North America, but because they beat the targets that we had set them. And so we saw a little bit of negative leverage coming through that as a result of higher commission levels. But actually through the the kind of new sales and marketing, tech and content, and particularly through g and a, we've actually seen good operating leverage last year. What we've said in terms of where we expect operating leverage to kinda come over time is the first line we would anticipate to to grow more slowly than revenue is is the g and a line because you should be able to leverage a smaller cost base as the revenue grows in that regard.

29:40 Tech and content is likely to be the next line that that starts to come down as a percentage, but that won't be immediate because we are continuing to invest in product and technology behind that. And clearly, as I've I've said all the way through, the trust piece is very important to us. What I would say and why we saw a particular jump up in in 2024 for that that line or or leverage on that line, I should say, is that we implemented a number of new models on our trust and content integrity. And that meant that we actually saw a reduction in the number of kind of issues and queries that were coming through to our content integrity and fraud investigations team. So the number of reviews, fake reviews that were removed from the platform automatically went from 79% to 90%, and that's obviously helps from a kind of cost and leverage perspective.

30:29 I wouldn't anticipate seeing that kind of jump on an annual basis, but it might come through in quite a lumpy way over time. And CAC, we anticipate that that will remain a fairly constant percentage of revenue for the time being because we want to invest in this business for growth given the opportunity that that you can see.

30:50 So we have very high retention of the existing customer base. So 85% gross retention rate is based on the dollar value rather than logos, which is is sort of more relevant and ties more neatly into the kind of bookings numbers. So last year, 85% and then we have what we call the kind of expansion. So the upsell of renewals, cross selling, adding domains, those sorts of things will come through in this expansion. So And what you're trying to do on an annual basis is expand your existing customer base through that SaaS upgrade cycle with product improvements and demonstrating more value and then add new business on top. And the chart at the bottom shows this very nicely that you can see the continual growing of the base of business, probably not in the first year because that tends to be when the churn is highest.

31:40 So that peach color that's the sort of second bar down on the f y twenty four, you can see is very slightly smaller than it was in 2023 reflecting that gross retention rate. But actually, all the bars below it tend to kinda keep growing. You tend to see the highest churn in in that first year. We have a very strong balance sheet, and we're generating cash. So we raised a huge amount of cash as part of the IPO. Now that we are now profitable in generating cash, so we had adjusted free cash flow last year of of 17,000,000 driven by that improved profitability. We announced at the beginning of twenty twenty four our first share buyback, And that was really because what now that we were generating or at that point, we've begun generating cash, but we were sitting on a huge cash pile that we'd raised as part of the IPO, and it didn't feel efficient to be sitting on that much cash. And so we started the buyback with the intention that we would return the kind of IPO cash that we didn't need so much anymore, but with a view that continues to hold that as we begin generating cash in this business, it should be very cash generative because of its nature as it grows. That unless we can see alternative uses for that that capital that will generate a better return, we would return that that capital, that cash to shareholders.

32:55 So in March, we continued last year, we returned 43,000,000 of cash to shareholders, and we announced a further 20,000,000 buyback in March. Our capital allocation framework is quite clear in this regard. First of all, we want to invest organically to grow. But what we're very conscious of is that operationally, whilst it might look nice on a spreadsheet to put all the investment into growth, operationally, because we're a people business, if you try and add too many people in one go, it can actually dilute the performance of the underlying business. And so we've kind of got ourselves into quite a nice cadence where we're adding a certain number every year and growing at a very nice clip. But experience has shown us that if we try to go too much faster than that, you end up taking managers off the sales floor to interview people, then the new on new hires coming in have to go through a training process, gotta be onboarded, they get a six month ramp up period. And actually, as I said, it tends to dilute the performance of the existing team if you've got too many new people coming in at once.

33:52 And so we do want to scale efficiently, but we are mindful that we can't necessarily grow, you know, kind of thirty, forty percent a year from a people perspective. That probably wouldn't deliver the value for our shareholders that that we would be hoping it would do so. And so then we need to look at what are the other options. M and a, we've included purely to have the flexibility in future. For clarity, we are not currently looking at m and a options. There's nothing on the table. If we were to look at m and a, the working hypothesis is that it would be to accelerate the product strategy. So can we acquire some technology that we can then bolt into the platform and enable us to grow faster? It's much less likely to be acquiring another review business. I realized actually we haven't particularly touched on the competition, but but maybe I can do that here.

34:41 The way that we think about it is is there is nobody doing exactly what we are doing, and it comes back to those five pillars that I talked about at the very beginning of the presentation. But there are other businesses kind of around the fringes.

34:53 So, on a vertical specific basis, you've got the likes of Yelp or TripAdvisor, which are very much map based products. They're advertising businesses, so you as a consumer need to go to their website so that they can generate revenue from advertising. They're very much vertical specific, as I said, and they're kind of map based. So you go to them to find a hotel in a particular location. You've already narrowed down that that location. Then you've got what I would term the kind of marketing review platform. So in The UK, that might be something like FIFO or reviews.io. They're a closed platform. So as a consumer, you can't go and leave a review easily on that platform without having been invited by the business. And they don't have a consumer brand. So their their awareness from a consumer perspective is much, much lower, and therefore, they don't have the same flywheel effect that we do.

35:42 Google reviews is the one people ask us about a lot. We have a partnership with Google whereby we are providing them with our review data. And as a result, that means that we surface very well from an SEO perspective with Google. So they know that the review feed they're getting from us is verified genuine reviews because they only take the feed of the invited reviews. They also know that it's constantly refreshed because we're getting about 200,000 new reviews every day. And as a result, it helps surfacing for our businesses which they very much like because they want to surface well on Google search. And then finally, with the kind of new sort of TRUSTLET product that we've talked about and the insights that we can give businesses around kind of how consumers are thinking about them and that kind of bigger feedback piece, what positives are, what the negatives are, what you can learn from that.

36:37 There is a little bit of overlap. Although we see it as complementary with the likes of the kind of Qualtrics from Medallia who are doing offering a very different sort of product. Ours is very much a kind of real time completely unstructured, unfocused feedback, whereas those tend to be asking kind of more specific questions to a specific set of consumers. And as I said, I kind of I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent here from a a capital allocation perspective. But finally, you know, where we're not able to find somewhere to use the capital well internally, we would look to return that to shareholders. And given that we're a growth business and early in our development, we feel that the the way to do that is very much through share buyback rather than through a dividend. So in summary, we feel we're very well positioned for sustainable growth. We have a unique value proposition being purpose driven and really focused on the content integrity of the platform.

37:35 We are a high margin SaaS business with network effects with a clear strategy behind that in order to deliver improving product capability, which will help build customer stickiness and growth for the business. The market opportunity is huge because really we can play cross sector, cross geography through small businesses all the way up to large businesses. And and so the opportunity for us is incredible. And finally, we've got this proven track record of execution where we have continually delivered what we've said we've gone we're going to deliver and beaten it both in terms of growth and margin, clear capital discipline, and this long term goal, as I mentioned, of being a rule of 40 business with adjusted EBITDA margins of over 30%. And so with that, I will hand back to Alessandro.

38:23 Thank you, Louise. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions, and you can do so just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while Louise takes a few moments to review the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via investor dashboards. As you can see we have received a number of questions both pre submitted and throughout today's live presentation. And Louise, I'll just hand back to you now to run through the questions, and I'll pick up from you at the end if that's okay. Yep. Of course. Thank you. So there's a question here. Do you see any impact from the tariffs and macroeconomic uncertainty? I imagine a question every business is getting at the moment. We're not directly impacted by the tariffs being a software business. We're not obviously moving physical goods around, but we are very aware that this can have a knock on impact in terms of the broader economy and therefore our customers.

39:17 As things stand, we are not seeing any impact on the business, but we're not naive. And clearly, that could change over time. So it's something we're keeping a very close eye on. What I would say is that, technically, Germany has been in a recession for the last couple of years, and that business has been growing kind of above the group average over that time. So it is possible for us to continue growing well through difficult periods, but it just somewhat depends on how big the the kind of macroeconomic impact and uncertainty is. But as I said, at this time, we're not seeing anything in particular, but obviously keeping a very close eye on things. So what's this second question? Who do you see as your competitors? Hopefully, I've touched on that. We don't see anybody directly competing against us on all those kind of five areas I outlined at the beginning, but there are sort of different businesses around at fringes.

40:11 If if there's something specific that, you know, you want to ask, then then please do put it in the chat or or by any means, follow-up with us afterwards. What is the incremental margin for new businesses that you win? And does this margin differ across markets, particularly in The US? So if you look at our 2024 results, you can see the drop through of incremental revenue to incremental EBITDA adjusted EBITDA last year was 25%. We don't kinda give guidance specifically by by markets, but what I would say is what we have talked about more broadly at the contribution margin level, which is your revenue, less cost of sales, less sales and marketing, that The UK business, we gave them a contribution margin. We reported a contribution margin in 2023 of about 63%.

41:06 And we said at that time that Europe's contribution margin was in line with the group average, which is sort of in the fifties. And therefore, by default, The US has to be materially lower. That pattern kind of remains the same. But, obviously, as the business overall continues to become more profitable, those start moving up. And particularly in The US where we saw a 10 percentage point improvement in the net dollar retention rate last year, that obviously will have a a more marked impact on The US. But it is still a a kind of lower margin contribution margin market at the moment. I've lost lost track of where I was. How worried are you as AI agents grow and more customer analytics reviews become available?

41:56 I e, businesses may not be interested in paying for insights, and also consumers may rely on AI agents' recommendations rather than doing their own research. Have you seen any changes in customer consumer behavior following the launch of AI agents? So this is a really interesting question and something we're keeping a really close eye on because how we show up in search is really important. What we've actually seen over the last year or so is that we've seen a big jump up in how we're showing up as a result of some of these AI agents. So I don't know if you've, searched in Google recently. You get the Google AI summaries at the top. TRUSTPILOT will surface very well in those, and we have seen it coming up in in some of the other, AI models. But we are very conscious that these things are evolving and moving all the time and we need to make sure that we're moving moving with them. We hired a chief strategy officer last summer, a lady called Carrie Ryan, who came from process and in particular Stack Overflow where she negotiated the deal between Stack Overflow and the likes of OpenAI, etcetera, in terms of using the data. So it is something that we're thinking about. Can we provide the data in some form of partnership agreement similar to do with Google or can we sell it to them as part of TRUSTLAIR?

43:07 It's all sort of an area that we're exploring at the moment and trying to work out, you know, what's the best way forward for us to make sure that we're well positioned in the future. Which geographies or sectors present the most untapped potential for TRUSTPILOT over the next few years? So as I said, we're in fourth focused on four key markets, but in in many more than that. And the way that we sit, we're still actually relatively early stage even in The UK. If you take our, bookings number in The UK as a percentage of what we think the total addressable or the serviceable addressable market, I should say, of The UK is, we're still only kind of single digit percentage penetrated in that market. So we feel we've got much more runway to go here and in those other three focus markets at at the present time. Now there will come a point at which we've kind of really proved internally how the best way is to get the flywheel moving and we want to move on to the next market and so on and so forth.

44:04 And the way that we went about choosing Germany and Italy was thinking, okay, well, which are the big economies? And clearly, Germany is the biggest economy in Europe. And then looking at where there was high brand awareness in those markets. And so other markets that could be of interest to us and where we've already got well established businesses in places like Spain and France, decent business in Australia as I've mentioned earlier. So there's lots of opportunity open to us. We don't don't feel like we're running out of runway in any way, shape, or form even in The UK. What trends are you seeing in customer acquisition costs and how do they compare to customer lifetime value? It's a good question. So what we have seen with Adrian coming in and with our new chief revenue officer coming in last summer is a much greater focus on the cost of acquiring. So looking at the metric that we look at internally is LTV to CAC. So lifetime value divided by the cost of of acquiring that customer. And that has been improving over time and it and and continues to do so. It is very much an area of focus for us.

45:06 And so I would say that we're seeing an improvement in efficiency there whether or not that translate necessarily into reduced total cost where you can see that our sales and marketing absolute spend is likely to continue to improve as we've talked about investing for growth. And as we shift the business more to enterprise, the lifetime value, the average lifetime value should increase because clearly enterprise customers come in at much higher price point average contract value. Can you please comment how revenue mix has changed over time between SMEs and enterprise customers? Do you have more large customers as a percentage of sales now? So this is a really good question. I would say it hasn't shifted materially over the last kind of four, five years.

45:52 But, before you get very worried, we have got this focus since Adrian came in on trying to grow the enterprise segment and developing the products to do that. But we're very early in our journey. We are definitely not a high class enterprise sales organization at the moment. And so with the arrival of Brian Green, our chief revenue officer who came in, last summer from Adobe, we are trying to build that muscle. And actually, if you take a step back and think, well, we've already got some amazing enterprise level customers without having kind of that full infrastructure in place, that sort of enterprise sales and product development, that should give comfort that there is a lot more to go after. So at the moment, enterprise is around 40% of bookings.

46:37 And obviously, over time, we would want to see that increase. And the reason for focusing on enterprise is a, they have a higher customer contract value, forgive me. B, the retention rate is much higher, so they tend to stick around for longer and are hugely helpful from that perspective. And then thirdly, being a larger customer, they have much larger marketing budgets and therefore using TRUSTPILOT in their advertising is is is hugely valuable to us in terms of the kind of brand awareness and brand reach. So that's the rationale for for very much focusing on enterprise customers and and, you know, we'll continue to be a a focus kind of going forward. I think that's all the questions I can see in the chat. If anybody's got anything else, please feel free to to ask and reach out.

47:25 That's great, Louise. Thanks very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, come with your questions, miss, today, we will publish a response now on the Investor Me company platform. Just before redirecting investors, Friday, their feedback is particularly important to the company. Louise, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Yes. Of course. So thank you all for joining. I hope you found that useful and a good introduction to TRUSTPILOT. Please feel free to reach out through the investor relations contact on our website if you've got any further questions. And in the meantime, thank you for engagement and your questions. That's great, Lou. Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team for TRUSTPILOT GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all. Thank you.