A warm welcome to today's investors call. I'm Achim Weick, Founder and CEO of EQS Group, and with me is André Marques, our CFO. Good morning, André. Good morning also from my side. An exciting hour lies ahead of us. We can look back on a successful first half year, 2023, and look forward to an even stronger second half of this year. First things first, let's start with our purpose. We at EQS Group strongly believe that transparency and integrity create the most important corporate capital, and that's trust. Everything we do at EQS contributes to this purpose, and we are on a strong mission, creating trusted companies. Let's start with our financials. Let's look into the details of the first half year, 2023, André. P leasure to guide you through our first half financial development and our highlights. As usual, we start with the main highlights. We have three big highlights in the first half. The first and foremost highlight really is that finally, the Whistleblower Protection Law, the national ones, came into force in several core markets. One of those, Germany, obviously in July, in the beginning of July, but also such markets like Italy and Spain or Austria. We could see the first effects in the first half. We doubled the number of whistleblowing customers, basically also including July, so to date, year to date, which is great and more to expect for the second half. Absolutely. The law was postponed for a year and a half in many countries, and yet it still came as a surprise to many companies. Now we have a law, starting in July in Germany, but there are still many companies who take their time and I think we will see a strong increase until the end of this year when the penalties kick in. I think that makes, makes a lot of sense because all the time it took so long, and all of a sudden everything went very fast, also in Germany, surprisingly fast, and I think it hit the companies a bit surprisingly. Another important highlight for us, although everything as expected, is the EBITDA improvement, which is a strong one, and it shows the scalability of the business. Once we have more customers on the platform, the incremental profitability is significantly higher. All right, let's have a look on the key KPIs we are guiding throughout the year. Also on the customer numbers, the total customer, customer number, including the whistleblowing, but not only, we saw a strong increase in the first six months, 730 new SaaS customers we acquired in the first six months. Now we have already, nearly 5,700 SaaS customers. Really huge amounts that we have acquired over the last years, significant amount of new customers. Yesterday, we hit the 1,000 number, for this year. Yes. Wow! It's we see really a dynamic development at the moment. That's cool. What else to say here on the KPI slide? I mean, important that you see here on the lower left tile, that the driver is compliance, as always said. On the one side, the whistleblowing, on the other side, also the filing business with the ESEF has shown nice growth, and on the other side, the investor relations. Our business is stable in the first six months. However, we have a basis effect. As you know, we have stopped doing business in Russia. We basically canceled all our contracts with the customers from the beginning of this year, and that's why we basically have no revenue there. We had revenue last year, when you clean out for Russia, we had a certain growth. Not big, but some growth, and, we expect it's going to improve over the course of the year. Also important here on that slide in the right upper end, the quality of our revenue. Nearly 90% of the revenue is still increasing Revenue is recurring It's continues to increase because the growth is coming from subscription contracts, so the additional revenue we add on top is mostly or nearly 100% recurring. This comes together with a high gross margin. It's a platform business, scalability on EBITDA, and that comes from the gross margin. 78% has also increased in Q2 versus Q1. We started to report this in Q1. Just again, as a reminder, we are currently looking to set up everything to provide also some information on the cost of sales method of P&L accounting. Looking into the financials, P&L, and balance sheet, seeing really great development. We cleaned up here for the discontinued business, that's what you see with the little star on the positions like revenue, operating expenses. Across the two business units, we had a 16% growth in the first half, operating expenses increased only by 6%. That's, that's why EBITDA scaled up. On the group earnings side, we still had a negative one in the first half, but we believe in the second half, we're gonna see a positive group earnings. That's also- Gonna be a great milestone for us after 5 or 6 years of investment. Strong investment. Since we started the corporate compliance segment. Despite the IFRS, earnings is not positive yet, our free cash flow is even higher than what we generate as EBITDA. We have very strong cash-generating business from prepayments of customers. Most of the business is coming from the subscription, and that's always a one-year upfront payment from the customers that leads to a strong free cash flow. Also on the balance sheet side, you see that balance sheet has improved further. Really, I think a solid balance sheet now with a equity ratio of nearly 60%. Net debt, now at EUR 25 million, so we decreased that further, and the cash position is also quite good. We like to give you a deeper look into the EBITDA development year-on-year. What you basically can see here is that the two major effects on the significant increase of EBITDA, so nearly tripling EBITDA, was the decrease in consultancy spends versus last year. As you remember, we had a capital increase. We had some tax and some financial consultants and legal consultants for that process. On the other side, the increase in the operating business of around EUR 4 million on the top line, that too, or a bit more than EUR 4 million, led to around 50% additional EBITDA. Incremental EBITDA growth has been great and, and the profitability piece of this. We came out at EUR 3.2 million reported. As you know, taking out the discontinued operations, the continued operations number is around EUR 3.5 million. W e're fully on track with EBITDA. That was what we expected for Q2 or the half year. Now it's going to improve further in the next two quarters. It's great to see that we now can show what we promised over the last years. We said when the law will kick in, when we will see this strong increase of new customers, then you will see the scalability of the business model. We had investments since 2017 when we started this new business field. We first started with our own solution, and then acquired three companies in this field, and now we are in the pole position in Europe. We are the market-leading provider. This finally shows also on the EBITDA development. T hat's a simple fact. I mean, it's the nature of the business, and we are far from a steady state here, right? I mean, this is just starting to ramp up. All right, then now let's come to the major reason for that, and I think that's the whistleblowing, the most important initiative for 2023. 2023, the year of whistleblowing. Exactly. We're really proud of this slide. Since 2021, we acquired over 2,400 new whistleblowing customers. You see, especially in the last months, the number is increasing strongly. July was a very strong month for us, and this gives us a lot of confidence that the second half of this year will be very strong. Keep in mind, this is 2,500 new customers since 2021, although until now, the law hasn't been in place in several core markets. We already now have acquired 2,500 new customers and are very nicely on our track to achieve our 5,000 customer goal. That's the goal, 5,000 new whistleblowing customers. When you compare the 2 quarters, 2Q of 2023 comparing to 2Q of 2022, you see that the new customer number is increasing strongly. We have a 91% higher new customer number than 2022 in the 2Q. On the new ARR, you see the positive development. It's not increasing as fast, but that was clear when we decided to go into the broader market, that the ARR per customer is lower. T his is important to establish us as the market-leading company in the whistleblowing field in Europe, but also a great basis for further growth to expand our relationship within the corporate compliance segment. W hen we look into the core markets, Spain, Italy, and Germany, we see a lot of activity, a lot of dynamic developments, and this will move on and continue in the upcoming quarters. Also a good news, the partner business is finally picking up. We knew that the partners will only be active when the law is in place. T his is a confirmation. The first few months of the year were slow, but now it's really picking up, and it shows that partner business can be really a strong contributor to our targets and to achieving our goals and also wonderful to see that the right part of the slide, that we see a lot of activity in the market and, a lot of, participants in our webinars. Inbound interest is really high. Let's remember our growth journey. We always said, "Let's start with whistleblowing. Let's grab the market, then expand the relationship with our customers. Let's up and cross-sell our Compliance COCKPIT." Then that third step would be expanding into the broader field of sustainability. A s an example, so that you can see how interesting then the up- and cross-selling for us is, that is an example from Switzerland, a customer that signed up for the Cockpit. In Switzerland, we started to sell the Cockpit, and you see it's factor of five or six ARR in comparison to the just the simple solution. W hat's also worth mentioning here is that, while our sales force is acquiring customers, intensively in the whistleblowing field, new customers, our operations team is working on the existing customers in order to migrate them to the platform, to enhance us then, and also the sales teams afterwards to, roll out the whole platform. Great! Thank you, Achim. Let me give a quick outlook also. The future looks really bright these days, right? Definitely. W e confirm our 2023 outlook that we gave, with the full year results, so all the same. Even more important in our perspective, always the midterm view of the growth. Here you see, over the next years, we expect the compliance field to grow on average, 20%-25% per year, with the investor relations area growing at a single-digit rate. With this growth and the additional customers coming onto the platform, paying, we will see EBITDA and scalability, building up step by step, to a very nice margin of at least 30%. It's a huge window of opportunity for us. The corporate compliance market in Europe is untapped. There are many, many companies out there that don't even have a compliance function in place yet. They all need software. They all are looking for a platform to really run a whole compliance program. Even with the enterprise and multinational companies, we see huge opportunities for us in selling best of breed, but also selling the whole Compliance COCKPIT. Yes, that's from our side. We are very, very happy now to get your questions and then to have a discussion on those questions. As always, a little reminder, you can see on your screen on the upper left, a question mark button. If you press that, it will open up the field, and you can submit your questions. We'll get them, and I will have a first look on the Q&A that came in so far, and we already have a couple of questions in the pipeline, so quite a lot. That's really good. Let me quickly check. Let me quickly check. I mean, we see on the one side that we have had an issue a bit with the sound, so we're sorry for that. The mics are not really working. We will just speak a bit louder and just give us also a Q&A note here in case it's improving or not. That would be helpful, so we can speak even more louder, right? All right, let's dive into the questions. Very shortly, we start with Martin Amrein, with a question on the cooperation or the partnership with the BBG. I think it's in Austria, Achim, right? Yes He's basically asking if we are the only company that has this seal of partner, this partner seal, and then there is a question on profitability. I will get to that, but maybe you can say something on the BBG. T his was an RFP, and we won that RFP, and now we are the only partner at this point, which makes us very proud and which gives us access to governmental bodies in Austria. That's a great success, and I think it will support our, our strong growth and our market position in small market, Austria. Maybe just as a follow-up here from Paula on that topic, from Baader Bank, is do we have any revenue volumes that we can already relate to that? I think it's too early, right? N ow governmental parties in Austria can buy our software without doing a separate RFP each time. This is a great potential for us, but we don't have any specific numbers on that at the moment. All right. Good. Let's get to a question from Marius Fuhrberg from Warburg Research. You expect stronger customer growth by the end of the year. Have you received an increased number of contact requests by potential customers that make you feel confident on that wave? W hat we see is a number, a huge number of new participants in webinars and inbound leads and so on. If you go through the whole funnel, the marketing and sales funnel on all the different stages, you see that the funnel is getting stronger and stronger every week and every month. Yes, there are strong signs that the second half year will be stronger than the first half year, and the number of new customers will increase. Specifically for Germany, there was a question from Alexander on the whistleblower systems for Germany since the law came into force. That was just one month ago, Mr. Hilzekron, that's too early. We said at the beginning that we believe it is still a bit of a surprise for 2 companies, but we also see demand picking up, right? W hen 2 years ago, we thought when there's a law, we will see a wave three months before and three months afterwards, and the law, coming out. That's not the case. We see that the, interest is increasing now after the law is published. What we now will see is a steady increase of, new customers in this field, especially in Germany. I mentioned it before, there will be penalties, but the penalties will start only in December of this year. Many companies then thought, "Well, then I still have some time to sign these contracts." We believe that many, companies will sign the contracts in the fourth quarter. Great. Maybe a question on the pricing here. Do you see price pressure in the area of whistleblower systems, or can you keep your prices stable, or is there a special discount for the first year or something like that? W hen we talk about different cohorts, we have to look into different pricing. On the lower end, you have to be very competitive on pricing. On the upper end, I think it's more our quality, the data protection, data security topics, trusting us, us with their most sensitive data. Therefore, we knew from the beginning on that on the lower end, there will be competitive pricing, and on the upper end, there will be more high-margin business. We think it's business as usual. All right, then let's go a bit on the profitability side of things. T he price is also related to that, but here is another question from Martin Amrein on the overall earnings. That's one I can take. From 2024 onwards, according to plan, EQS should show profits. Are there any thoughts from the management when there will be dividend payments? Yes, we believe so. 2024, there should be again, earnings, positive earnings. We said in the first half of 2023, that should be likely the case. Dividend payments, no, no comments on that. I think it's too early. We move a bit further. Let me quickly have a look. There are a lot of questions coming in currently, which is really great. I think it's a good discussion. I'm trying to structure that a bit to not have double replies on things. Maybe just shortly back on the BBG. There are more than 2,500 institutions that have to implement, and is there some customer that already uses something? I don't know. I don't know either. W e can check that. That's a question from Lucas and there was another investor asking the same. We need to check that with our colleagues, and then we get back. Quantification of the current potential customer pipeline. We did that in the past. There is no significant change, so we are getting the pipeline is filling in a very similar dynamic, and it's emptying. To say, we are adding customers on the one side, on the other side, we get customers, potential customers in the pipe again. There is no significant change here, because we are also closing now quicker and then the pipe empties on the one side, but it fills up with new demand that comes through inbound or through our sales activities or partners. The sales cycle should be shorter now. Maybe a question from Fidun Bank from Ralf Marinelli on the international business. You have won 525 new SaaS customers of 730 in total. What does it mean for revenue development in absolute figures over the next years and in percentage of group sales and group sales? It translates significantly higher customer growth number in foreign markets versus Germany, as of the first half, translates to a higher growth of revenue, as you also can see in the report, in international markets, that's for sure. T here are also a lot of smaller companies within there. There are smaller tickets, the sizes, so that's, that's not translating one to one, as we already mentioned. It's not translating 1 to 1 in the growth rate, but we see a strong growth in international markets. On the other side now, Germany is going to pick up now with the largest coming into force, and we will see for sure a good number of nice business in Germany, so too. The question is then what it means for really for volumes of these deals? We don't believe that there will be over the next years, a significant change in this 70% Germany, 30% foreign market split. It might change a bit to maybe 65-35, but not the overall picture won't change completely. We might be advancing in Germany with the cross-sell a bit faster, and in foreign markets, maybe still picking up on new customers. Fiona from Edison asks again on partnerships: Are there other framework agreements that are similar to the Austrian ones? I mean, we are working on that. W e have over 100 partners. Over 200. You're right. One of our most important partner in Germany is the Federal Gazette Bundesanzeiger. We believe that business will pick up also strongly in the second half of this year, and we have similar agreements in other countries. M ore framework agreements to come. All right. Good, let's move on. A question from Fortino Capital, from Wouter van de. Who do you see as your biggest competitors right now? We have competitors in every market. In Germany, I think we have around 60, 70 competitors. 60 or 70, not six or seven. That's a huge number. A lot of small startups or law firms who offer a service, so there is not the one strong competitor. There are, let's say, five companies we see from time to time in some pitches, but also there it changes. We are by far the biggest provider, in our core market and the competitive landscape looks really different in each European market. There's no pan-European provider out there, except EQS. Right. One more question on the whistleblowing. Okay, actually now we're getting more into the topic of the conversion and the compliance corporate strategy. There are a couple of questions here. We're trying also to aggregate them. The first one would be on the conversion rate. Fiona from Edison asked what conversion rate are you looking at for cross-selling whistleblowing customers, and at what time scale? W e always say 20% of our whistleblowing customers should translate into corporate customers, and we said within the next few years, so we didn't give a clear deadline there, but I think it's according to the midterm outlook that's 2026, 2027. Great. Many questions today. It's r eally good discussion, and it makes a lot of sense. A ctually, I think, I don't know another one on the cross-sell, but we have one here from Lucas Spang from TIGAS Capital, on the personal expense side, and on the number of employees, and I think Alex ander Jeschonek had a similar question. Number of employees for in half year 1 was down to 567. T here was a slight increase, not really a huge one, and on the other side, we saw still an increase on the personal expense side of things, which was around 6%. Where does the gap come from? Typically, it's the IT inflation costs. So whenever it comes to a replacement of an employee, you typically hire at a higher rate. We're trying to work on that and diversify with different locations where we're hiring. But this is a typical trend you have, and when you have to replace 50-80 employees, then the new ones could come at a higher rate. That's one effect. The other effect is salary increases for the existing staff. That's something we have done continuously over the last years, and as you know, with the higher inflation rate in several countries, there was more higher salary increase related to that. However, we split that partly. I think we talked about this before we made a split into different periods for different teams or different so to say, management levels. By that we could manage, manage a bit. Y ou have an incremental increase, although the headcount stays more or less stable, and that's a fact we have to work with. That's not nothing new for this year, and that's why we don't guide a increase in personnel expense or no increase, zero or something, because we know that's something we have to factor in. We have a question from Alexander Hobart, from Alpha Star. "Currently, there are rumors you're looking for a PE investor. Could you comment on that, please? Do you think it would make sense to take such a step at the moment, and if so, why?" Do you wanna comment on that? No, I think it doesn't make sense to comment this. It's a rumor, and we don't comment on rumors. All right, next one is coming from Fiona, from Edison, on the ESG topic. What progress has been on the ESG side of things? For us, an interesting topic is the supply chain management topic and the supply chain due diligence topic. In Germany, we have a law that will be in force for all the companies from 1,000 employees to 3,000 employees in the beginning of next year. What we did is we developed a great tool, a risk management tool to comply with the LkSG, this German law, and we will start selling this product in the second half of this year. It is strategically very interesting because it's a bridge from corporate compliance to ESG. It's a law, that's why it's regulated, right? We could see this as a compliance workflow, but we could also see this as an ESG workflow. I think we developed a really great product there, and we're looking very much forward to selling this in the second half of this year, and also implementing this into our Compliance COCKPIT offering. Great. Maybe another one on the Compliance COCKPIT, and that we didn't take before, so just to be here, complete. Marius Fuhrberg from Warburg Research asks how your experience is so far in upselling a Compliance COCKPIT to whistleblowing customers. We touched it, but we didn't, I mean. W e waited for the Whistleblowing Law for so long. We started developing our first product in 2017. Now, finally, the law is there. You can imagine that we put all of our sales colleagues, also marketing budget, on this whistleblowing topic, to grab the market. That is our first goal. Then we said, after grabbing the market, landing then we want to expand. We are not focusing at all on selling the Cockpit yet, but there are markets like Switzerland, for example, or we also started in U.K., markets that are not really affected by the EU laws. There it makes sense to start selling the Cockpit, and there we have really great first successes in up- and cross-selling. I t's too early to now give you the full picture, and we don't have the full picture yet. I think we will have more clear view on this when the whistleblowing wave is going down, and we can move our resources from whistleblowing to selling the Cockpit. I think the first customers we won give us a lot of confidence that the next step will also be very successful. As mentioned during the call, our operations team is working significantly strongly with migrating the existing customers that we acquired singly or acquired through acquisition in the past, to bring them onto the platform, so that they basically are, with the whistleblowing, already on the platform, and the barrier to use additional services is super low for them. We're preparing for that. Can wait. Last questions here coming from Yannik Ziron from Stifel. I think we've touched on the whistleblowing. The second one is again, on the cost side. What's your view on the operating expenses in light of accelerating revenue growth? Yes, as said before, basically what we saw as, cost development versus revenue development is opening up, so under proportionate or disproportionate, expense development, mainly driven by certain IT inflation or certain personal cost inflation, maybe certain hirings to a certain extent. That is, at a single-digit level, between 5%-10% will be expected. On the other side, the growth coming on a double-digit, high double-digit rate, around 20-ish, in the midterm. That's, what we see, and that drives the scalability and should, and should allow us to show great EBITDA together with this nice, growth on the top line. Also, Yannick had the question on the press coverage, on the potential entry of a PE investor. EQS, what are your general thoughts on this? In which area would you need expertise, financial support? I think as Achim said, we don't comment on the press. I n general, all companies in the market, especially in the dynamic, tech market, are always looking into different financing options and, are also always approached by PE, but this is really nothing new, and this is going on for years. It's usual business for us. We are really focusing on the whistleblowing wave and then on up- and cross-selling onto the cockpit and also, the LkSG is a really interesting topic, the supply chain due diligence law, because we expect a law on the European level also, which will give us a great opportunity to up- and cross-sell into the ESG space. These are the things that are really important to us and we focus on that. Definitely. We'll keep you posted on that. Thank you very much today for this great discussion and lots of questions we received, a great interest. W e're looking now for a great whistleblowing second half of 2023. It's gonna be an exciting second half year. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the summer here in Germany. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.