Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Equals Group PLC full year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand side of your screen. Just simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. Given the company review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and if you give that your attention, I'm sure the company will be most grateful. I'd now like to hand over to Ian Strafford-Taylor, CEO. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mark. Welcome, everybody. I'm Ian Strafford-Taylor, Chief Executive, as Mark just mentioned, and Richard, perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself too. Yes. Hello, everybody. Good evening. Richard Cooper, CFO here. Thank you all. I realize it's quite late, especially if you're dialing in from continental Europe, et cetera, thanks for attending. We'll crack straight into it. Starting at the beginning, you know, obviously this is the annual results roadshow. We'll talk a bit about 2022, and obviously there's a lot of focus in terms of what we're doing from here. I will go over where we sit macro-wise and a few highlights from 2022. Richard will then run you through a bit more detail, bringing to life the kind of bridge from 2021 to 2022 in a few areas. Some highlights of Q1 2023 so far. Suffice to say we've done a lot. Then some looking forward points, and then end with a summary. You may recall in the past when I've done these, if you've attended them before, I've talked a lot about own name IBANs and the products that we have and how we differentiate, and this is a kind of recap of that. The core original products of accounts underpinned by the IBANs, cards, we now have debit and prepaid, payments can be FX or can be same currency. Differentiators of the platform itself, the connectivity we've built up over the years, strategic focus on compliance, and we have people that people can speak to. That is a key differentiator between us and a lot of the fintechs. You end up with the platform itself, a unified platform. You can pay out by bank to bank or cards, and the own name multi-currency IBAN underpins all of this. You can have unlimited number of accounts or sub-accounts, however you want. You can configure it however you want for approvals, permissions, et cetera. We can onboard you rapidly. The manifestation of all of that is the Equals Money product that we sell to SMEs and the Equals Solutions product, which is designed for larger corporates. nice, you know, few little mottos here about what we're trying to do. The last little sentence there is the key part. Make money movement simple for our B2B customers is really what we're all about. Where does that put us? I think what we're trying to show here is that the incumbent banks still, I know trust may be a bit dwindled on some of them in light of recent events. Ultimately, people still default back to banks as a safe place to put their money, which is kind of bizarre when they re-lend it. Anyway, that's the way it is, and it's secure and it's safe. The neos, fintechs are all about innovating high tech. They tend to be self-serve only, tend to be B2C. We put ourselves firmly in the middle. You know, we've been around for 15 years. We're profitable, we're cash generative. We combine the best of both is really our mapping. This slide we've iterated since this time last year. You see, we've moved further towards the right-hand side there, the top right. We're very much a platform player. I'll bring that to a bit more life later. Very much B2B. Just a few highlights of 2022. I think the numbers speak for themselves. Transactions grew strongly, GBP 9.2 billion. Revenues grew even faster than that in percentage terms, and EBITDA grew even faster than that. Richard will highlight a few more aspects of that later on. We did a lot to the platform, not least, some of them are listed there, but a lot of additional development and more to come. Equals Solutions, key thing there that we're starting with there is the API integration. Now we can integrate to customers via API links rather than just logging into the platform, and that unleashes a lot of use cases for us as we go forwards. We re-upgraded the reporting suite during the course of the year. The card platform, we can self-issue now, removes another player from the equation. It used to be 21 currencies. One's dropped off, that was Croatia. We can do prepaid and debit, as I mentioned, physical and virtual cards, and they're all tokenized, so you can do Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. Full suite of services there. In connectivity, we integrated SEPA, you may recall at the beginning of the year. We have a unified processor for all the card platforms now. We started to integrate directly into accountancy platforms, which can be a barrier. You know, we compete at corporate. They love the products that we have. "Do you connect to Xero? No. Oh, I can't use you then." What all these things do is widen the addressable market for ourselves. In sales and marketing, we hired a Chief Commercial Officer in the middle of last year, and we followed that up with key hires across the piece. We've got a very strong overall management structure there, both in sales itself, marketing, sales enablement across the whole, the whole spectrum. Compliance, super important. Many of you on this call may be aware of FCA's increased focus on payments as a space in general, which we definitely welcome. We continue to invest in compliance, and we'll do so more this year as we move on. I think on people, the exec team's built out and the layer beneath is very strong also. We've had very high retention of key people. The SIP and LTIP awards that we made definitely play a part in that. Also, some fintechs, or in fact most fintechs, have been laying off staff, so we're able to be a, an employer of choice. We're definitely seeing very good quality candidates wanting to come and work here rather than having to go and prize them out. Moving then over to Richard. I'll pass you to Richard, who'll give you a bit more insight into 2022 numbers. Thank you, Ian. There are a few slides here and a few appendices on cost mix, liquidity, and revenue split. Before we go into that, I would just like to try and iterate three messages. The first is that not only has our revenue been growing, but we've increased the margin on that revenue too, which has led to higher gross profits. We continue to exercise very strong cost control, yet at the same time ensure that we do make product investments, to drive our product forward. Thirdly, the combination of all that has led to our increasing cash balances, and therefore our ability to pick up some small businesses and invest in the due diligence that we need to investigate acquisitions. Without further ado, I'll move to The shape and size of our business. This is just really to set the scene for those who are not so familiar with us. We put GBP 9.2 billion of transactions through our pipe last year. Also, we do have a legacy and very important foreign exchange business. We've got two points here on this slide showing that 80% of our book is represented by spot foreign exchange, and the average transaction size remains around GBP 30,000. That's very reassuring because what it actually tells you as investors and readers is that there are no hiccups in this business at all. We have grown the international payments business line, which means that if the percentage of spot and transaction size have remained static, what's happening is that we've got more transactions and more clients. In a similar vein, for our card product, we did 1.2 million loads per day. If you do the math on that's one sort of 10 every minute in relation to the card transactions. That's grown from 4.2 million to 8 million, which is the equivalent of 75 every minute. Incredibly robust platform. All of this is really part of our solutions sale. You may ask, why am I showing the number of bank accounts? Well, again, this underpins what we are saying on solutions, which is that to run the solutions product, we need a lot of infrastructure beneath the surface. The 600 bank accounts that we have serve that for our customers. Lastly, on this slide, you know, have we been productive? Yes, we have. We've risen the revenue per employee from GBP 173, 000 to GBP 260, 000, despite raising the headcount in the year by actually slightly more than 10%. Just to repeat some of these key messages. You know, revenue growth, 58%. EBITDA growth, even higher, 81%. EBITDA margin, higher still, increasing to 17.4%. And you know, we're very anxious to get that number closer to 20%, and we believe it will be in 2024. We do make continuing investments. We're not shy about this. The investments that we're making from capitalized software are now lower than the expense for capitalized software in terms of amortization. After all of that, and after repaying the CBILS loan, we have increased our cash balance by the year-end. By last week, that number was, you know, GBP 0.10 per share, GBP 18.3 million. All of that has led to a very, very substantial increase in adjusted diluted EPS. There is a slide on how we come to those numbers. It's quite a complicated calculation, and we're trying to harmonize what the analysts say on this. This is my Damien Hirst picture with all the blobs. Some of you may have seen it before. This shows the huge variety of methods by which within each product set we can make money. I mean, cards, you can see there, pretty much touches all the sides there. Solutions is more interesting because we are moving much more towards a fee-based model in that business line. As you will have seen from the underlying P&L, which we'll come to in a moment, you know, it is the Solutions business that we are very, very keen on and developing. This is a bridge now between the GBP 44 million of revenue in 2021, and the almost GBP 70 million of revenue in 2022. For those sharp-eyed amongst you'll see one red blob in the middle, and in 2021 we made a material trade, contributed GBP 1.5 million of revenue, GBP 800,000 in gross profit. That was a one-off. We announced it as a one-off. It wasn't repeated this year, and it is the only downer in this bridge here. The bulk, again, as you can see, is from Equals Solutions. White Label, a tremendous purchase that we made in 2019, and we bought out the minority share in 2022 as well. That's, it used to be called Casco, it's now called Equals Connect, and I again will talk more about that White Label capability when we return to him in a moment. Just a simple reminder of our P&L, walking down from revenue to gross profits, contribution, staff costs, other costs. There is an appendix where we lay out these costs in a little bit more detail, and there's a bridge on EBITDA in a second as well. What's happened to our EBITDA? Well, I've mentioned it's gone up. It's gone up a lot. It's almost doubled, you can see what's really driving this. Yes, we have increased the staff costs. We've increased the staff numbers. We've had both aggressive and defensive pay rises, around 8% last year in a very tight labor market. Inevitably, with increased volume, we've increased our IT costs, Amazon Web Services hosting and similar. We are very proud of our compliance capabilities, and we have both upskilled, upgraded, and built our compliance team even higher in the last year. We're doing more prospecting and T&E. Last, actually last foreign item, I went to Malta to do a bit of prospecting with some old contacts that I had from previous companies and very promising they look too. The bulk of the EBITDA raise is the increase in contribution. Again, if you're not familiar with that's gross profit less marketing. There's a big interaction between what we spend in affiliate costs, which come to gross profit, and what we spend below the line in marketing and branding. However, we continue to invest, and this slide here shows, you know, the very substantial investment that we have made since 2019. Boy, has it paid off in 2022 with, you know, GBP 15.6 million from Solutions. The Solutions revenue just would not have happened if we hadn't made these investments. As mentioned earlier, you know, the capitalized software is now lower than the amortization cost. However, we've also made external business acquisitions. IGA, Hermex, Effective, and now Hamer and Hamer, I do beg your pardon, are, you know, lovely entrepreneurial FX businesses that we can pick up on an accretive basis. They contribute not just to our revenue, but our talent pool, and we've very successfully grown all of those. I've already mentioned the Casco White Label business where we bought out the minority share in the last quarter of the year. In the last part of 2022 and on the 6th of January this year, we concluded the acquisition of Roqqett, the open banking platform. Again, more arrows to our quiver, if that's the expression. We're not shy about making investments. Investments lead to growth and I believe that Canaccord, who are our house broker, have issued a note suggesting that we will do something like GBP 88 million of revenue this year. That's twice what we did in 2021. After all of that, we are still generating cash. Yes, we're making investments. Yes, we're making acquisitions. Yes, we repaid our loan, the CBILS loan. Underlying all of that is our fantastically strong trading capability. And I think at that point I will close my presentation just with the earnings per share figures. What we're trying to do here is really, I won't say educate, but help people understand what other brokers are using to give rise to the adjusted earnings. These are not atypical. They are the share option charges and the amortization of acquired intangibles. Should we have made any exceptional items in the year, which we did not, they would go in there as well as the acquisition costs and any tax impact on any of those above items. The denominator of earnings per share is not as straightforward as the number of shares we have in issue. It is a weighted average number, and when you dilute it for the share options, you don't take the total number of share options. You effectively take the in-money proportion of share options and use that as the denominator. What we have at the bottom of the slide are all four different variables, and you will see that basic and diluted compared to the previous year do not have a bracket behind them. We're very proud to say that, you know, after a really fantastic year. Our P&L account is positive all the way down to profit after tax. At that point, I'd like to pass back to Ian to talk about our progress in the Q1 of this year. Thank you, Richard. Q1. First of all, let's have a brief look at the numbers. Numbers are obviously, we're delighted with them. As of Friday, we were at GBP 20.2 million of revenues, up 54% year-on-year to the same period. We can extrapolate out in terms of where we may end up for the whole of Q1. Very pleased with that. If you look at the revenues per working day, that's a massive increase. Similar to the story for the last year or so, the underlying products themselves are doing well and growing nicely, but it's solutions when you layer it on top where the sort of super normal growth is. Same theme, very delighted with that set of numbers. I think more of the Q1 story is about the other stuff that we've been doing, a lot of which was announced today. Oonex, if I could have had a template for the type of licenses and capabilities of a European business that would enable us to expand into Europe, it would be what Oonex has. It's absolutely the perfect fit for us. Why does this matter? Because right now, as you know, the solutions revenue is the big piece that's growing the fastest. Underlying that is powered by the IBAN. The IBANs that we issue now are issued out of the U.K., and they're prefixed with a GB for Great Britain. We are turning away business literally every single day because we can't also offer an EU-domiciled IBAN. If this deal, and it obviously is conditional upon approval by the National Bank of Belgium, if this deal goes through, then we will be able to offer BE-prefixed IBANs, and that opens up the whole of the Eurozone. That's just for the solutions piece itself. That's massive. The addressable market is, you know, multiples of what we already do, and you look at the revenues that we've done in the U.K. from U.K. customers and extrapolate out. You can, you can do your own math. We can also sell our other products, be it, you know, traditional international payments, card-based products, through that same licensing across the whole of Europe. Massive opportunity there. We also, as part of the transaction, should it get approved, get two new banking partners, ING and KBC. The reason all of this matters is, let's say today we decided to go for a license in Belgium. That would probably take at least a year, maybe longer, just to get the license. You also need banking partners. You also then need them to start issuing IBANs, and then you need the other banks around the world to recognize those IBANs and populate their BIC tables and SWIFT and everything else. That can take 18-24 months. You have to think ahead. This gets us there way quicker. I think when you look at the total addressable market for the company as a consequence of this transaction, you can start to get excited. We certainly are extremely excited about the capabilities that this opens up for us. I think it's fair to say that we probably couldn't have done this a year ago, not in terms of finances, but more in terms of bandwidth of management. This will be, you know, a big exercise for not just the exec team, but everyone in the company to get this business where we want it to be as quickly as we want it to happen. We're perfectly placed to do it now in terms of resources we can allocate to it. The other acquisition we mentioned today is Hamer and Hamer. It's a B2B-dominated international payments business. There's two principals that founded it. They're coming across together with five sales people that they also have working on it. Very entrepreneurial pair of guys. Done this from scratch without all of the advantages that a company like ours has. This is all self-genned, no affiliates. They'll be a real boost to our capabilities in terms of sales and also dealing, fresh blood talent. In pure economic terms, you know, we're paying 2x revenue, 3x EBITDA. It's a very, very good transaction for us, quite apart from those subjective, measures. Roqqett, we actually completed the deal, you know, early Q1, and I'm delighted to say that, you know, the first milestone we had was putting Roqqett into the, into the payout or the checkout process on, FairFX. You can load your FairFX card now by clicking a button that says Instant Bank Transfer. It'll ask you who you bank with, take you straight into that app on your phone. You press the button, it's prepopulated everything, you can release the money. We've done that to FairFX first because we want a real live example we can show to prospective customers. Say, "Look, we use it. This is how it works. It's simple. You'll get paid quicker, cheaper, easier via this route than accepting debit and credit card." Still do debit and credit card. Please do, because you know, a lot of people are comfortable with using that, but this gives you an alternative. Actually, I should have mentioned earlier, what OONEX also has is a merchant acquiring capability, which is the ability to take debit and credit cards on behalf of our customers and push those through. All of a sudden now, if Oonex goes through, we'll have the ability to say to our customers. Not only do we have everything we had before, that once you get paid, we've got a global collection account for you. You can move the money around, you can do what you need. We can actually help you get paid in the first place from your customers. The full suite, if you will, from first transaction, to whatever you choose to do with your profits. We also sold the cash business. Why? Because it's clearly non-core for us, it's largely B2C, it's, you know, banknotes is not exactly the, our direction of travel, so it should speak to focus. In those four boxes you've got. We've bought a geographic expansion with more capability. We've bolted on another dealing business. We've shown we can do them before. We pick it up. It's literally a lift and shift, if you wanna think of it like that. Keep the revenue generators, move on. We've bought a business that has technology that we showed that we can plumb it in very quickly and efficiently. We've improved focus by dispersing of a business that's non-core to ultimately what we're doing. We've also done more product development. A few things are listed there. The, you know, hidden there is the fact that we actually do have our corporate card now live in the U.S. It is the single currency version. The multicurrency version will come very soon, will be integrated into Xero, as I mentioned earlier. Also in the quarter, quite apart from the numbers which we've already seen, sales cadence, overall sales discipline since we hired Tom Kiddle as our Chief Commercial Officer, we've got far better visibility now in terms of pipeline and where the business is going, so we can sort of forecast out with more certainty. We've got agreement to open the Dubai rep office, so that'll be coming very, very shortly during the year, but we've done all the hard work to do it. If we're moving on to the next slide, let's have a look a bit further forwards. What I want to introduce the concept now, and we very much are, I've been saying we're more of a platform business than a product business for some time. Imagine at the center of Equals is what we call Equals Core, which is the platform itself, all the settlement rails, the direct connectivity, that stuff, all the licenses, the regulatory licenses, et cetera, the tech itself, compliance, operations, settlement. What we have now is the ability to sell what that core produces in four different ways. Top left is what we've always done, we can sell it ourselves. We can sell it ourselves through our products, Equals Money, Equals Solutions, FairFX, and CardOneMoney, the latter two being the currency card and the current account product of Card One. On top of that now, we can sell those capabilities via API. That's the sort of bottom right. That means rather than someone having to log into our platform to do all this stuff, they can integrate their platform direct to ours on a technological level. Much easier for us in many ways because the whole chewing and throwing is done, you know, over systems, and so we have lighter touch. We can also White Label it, as Richard mentioned earlier. Traditionally, over the last year or so, we've had the White Label capability just for international payments, which was Equals Connect. We're just offering the international payment capability via our White Label. We can offer the full suite, and hence why we bought out the minority, 'cause we're gonna iterate that White Label product to focus more on higher margin type businesses than just FX to other brokers. The last top right, bring your own license, is basically to drop in the notion that we can allow customers to use some of the Core but not all of it. They might have their own license, so we'll do everything else for them. They might have their own settlement rails and licenses, in which case they just want the tech. Platform as a service or payments as a service, if you want to think of it that way. Where we used to have just the top left, we now have four routes to market. The bring your own license will come during the year. The other three are live and increasing. If we overlay on top of that, the notion that we can expand geographically, and Oonex is the first instance of that, I hope you can see that from where we were to what's in front of us, the addressable market and our opportunities for growth are significant and hence our confidence as we look forward from here. I think this is an interesting slide. We tried to outline here our capabilities on the right-hand side with capabilities of some of our competitors. I never have a bad word to say about Alpha. I think they're a very well-run business. They're different to us, though. As you can see, we have more capabilities than they do. What they do, they do extremely well. If you look at, let's say the middle one, ClearBank there. ClearBank did a fundraise a year or so ago where they raised more money than our market cap, yet you look at their capabilities compared to ours, night and day. I think it illustrates here when you look at the valuations ascribed to each of these businesses that, you know, for sure we're being valued fairly traditionally based on EBITDA, PBT, EPS, those sorts of things. The, the value of the platform that we've assembled and the capabilities that we've assembled whilst, you know, we are listed and of course there's many benefits to that. In the non-public arena, you know, the value of that platform would be more ingrained into the valuation of the business as a whole. Ultimately, what matters is the revenues and profits we can generate out of building that platform. As I think Richard showed you earlier, in terms of what we've invested, you know, that's, whilst a decent sum of money, you know, we can do that in solutions in one year, which wouldn't have been possible without this investment. We move on from there. We want to grow fast. I won't labor on all the boxes here, you can read those at your leisure. Scaling sales through tech, HubSpot is a key thing I've been talking about for a year and a half. We're utilizing that way better now. Part of what we've done since Tom arrived was not just hire more salespeople, but this whole concept of sales operations, which is optimizing the CRM plus QA-ing, if you will, so quality assurance, such that we're only pushing leads from sales into compliance, et cetera, that weed out the stuff that we just don't want to do. We do turn away a lot of business. The more you can triage or refine the funnel at the sales end and have your salespeople doing the kind of almost, you know, we talk a lot in compliance and risk about three lines of defense. You can almost use sales team as the pre first line, if you will. We are doing more and more of that. Digital marketing, we had an okay capability, now we have a great one. We've made some really good hires, I'm much proud of that. However, I would caution that with saying that, whilst that's obviously really important, for Solutions in particular and a lot of B2B sales, it is sales, it's people on phones, it's people going to meet people. You clearly need digital assets that work, so if you know, you're selling to a customer and then they go and look at your website, it needs to work, it needs to sell, but it's an augmentation to the sales process rather than the driver, if you will. We won't acquire a Solutions customer typically by a random person clicking on a link from social media onto our website. Just doesn't happen that way. It's very important to optimize that whole digital suite, which we now have. That cascades also into the organic growth slide there, better SEO, better website capabilities, more testing, ABC split testing. To the extent we have more mature products, for instance, FairFX, more automated communication, more data as well, far more analytics in terms of working, you know, working out customer behaviors and when to target them with what type of communication. Hiring excellent talent. We've got more and more specialist teams. In solutions in particular, we're hiring salespeople. We tend to look at it vertical by vertical. We'll try and hire people who have worked in that vertical to sell to that vertical 'cause they'll understand better the types of problem that businesses in that vertical will have and can therefore say, "We understand you've got this, that, and the other issue. Here is a platform that will fix it for you." Whilst growing fast, you wanna grow sustainably. Clearly compliance and operations, very important here. Investment in tech, it's fair to say that when we build new products and roll them out to customers, we always, I repeat, always involve all areas of the company when we build this stuff, such that it's not just a front end with no back end. It'll cascade all the way through to finance, operations, et cetera. We don't put stuff live and then create problems for ourselves. Featurespace, which I mentioned there, is a state-of-the-art transaction monitoring system used by some very large banks and financial institutions, has machine learning capability. As we automate more stuff and get bigger, having the investment in that type of capability, we think is more than worth it. In operations and settlements themselves, we're integrating into more and more direct settlement routes directly, mostly via Citibank. We'll have more instant transfer currencies. We automated the process of payments in to start with because the key initial product was this concept of a global collection account. The next thing we're doing during the course of this year is to automate more of the payments out. We do next, we get additional banking partners, but we're always on the lookout for more 'cause we're big enough to support many now. Scalability. We've built a platform for scale. As Richard says, you know, we've doubled in a couple of years in terms of volumes through the platform. We can do a lot more. The tech is, you know, we've basically removed the vast majority of technical debt now. We have an evergreen, so-called evergreen technology stack, and the vast majority is in AWS, and we can scale that up and down as we need. Compliance and risk. We've got 32 heads in risk and compliance. It's over 10% of the workforce. Of course, you'll never, ever catch everything, and it's a constant battle. We do train our people religiously. Everyone has to do monthly compliance courses. People do not qualify for an annual pay review unless they're up to date. It's a never-ending task, and fraudsters are extremely sophisticated, so unfortunately can never catch all of it. We are investing all the time to make sure we are best in class, if you will. You know, okay, 32 heads is great, 10% of the workforce is great. I'm constantly trying to upgrade the people we have in there, so it's not just head count, but also experience to spot the type of patterns. If we can automate, which we are doing, more of the kind of easy to automate checks, then we can have more experience in terms of people looking for patterns. Regulatory compliance is a focus. We've increased the head count of that within the 32 during 2022. Consumer Duty is coming in in the U.K., supposedly in July from the FCA, which again ups the ante in terms of the protection of consumers as we go forwards. Also we have to comply with operational resilience. ISO 27,001 is in flight to land this year. It's basically the highest level of digital security badge you can get. So we expect to get that, and that will be another to the badge of honor, if you will. All the while, we have to keep an eye on what's coming. The FCA are obviously more and more focused on payments overall, which we welcome. There's Authorized Push Payment fraud, regulatory changing coming. Again, you know, it's a very painful area for many people to the extent they've been fallen victim of it. Senior Managers and Certification Regime may come in for payments firms, may not, so there's a lot of debate about it. We have to keep across all of that type of stuff and do so. That leads us to the focus areas for this year. Obviously, Equals Money and Equals Solutions will be pushing as hard as we can while looking for more and more efficiency and expanding overseas. This concept of embedded finance is broadly the ability to offer the non-financial institutions financial products. You know, recently, Uber now has an Uber card that it gives to their drivers. We could do that type of thing for people and allow them to consume our capabilities, payments as a service. We're moving, as I say, more and more towards being a platform business with annuity revenues. To wrap that up, what is Equals now? It's a strong growth company. I think we've shown that consistently with 50% type growth numbers, turnover, revenues, profits, all moving, and distributor reserves in the right direction. We're generating cash whilst investing, as Richard mentioned. As we sit here now, it's GBP 18.3 million in cash, which is GBP 0.10 per share, which one could say isn't necessarily reflected in the share price. This is all built on the platform. The platform is the key. Equals Core that powers everything that we do. We'll continue to invest in it. We're growing with control because we take care of that. We know that you could grow and leave things behind. We don't do that. We do have a strong compliance culture, and we will continue with that. We have numerous e-external audits, which we don't have to have. We choose to have and have good dialogue with the regulators. We have a proven track record delivered by a stable team, you know, strong, consistent market beating. Although we're only not even at the end of March, we're ahead of expectations, which we've told the market for this year already. Hopefully, you can all see the direction of travel. On that note, I'll. That's great. I'll hand over to Mark. Thanks, Ian, Richard. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors, this afternoon. Ladies, gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions. Just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while Richard and Ian take just a few moments to review your 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&A, can be accessed via your Investor Meet Company dashboard. Mindful of time, but of course, Richard, Ian, you can see we've had a number of questions from investors. Firstly, thank you to everybody for engagement, this afternoon. If I may, just hand back to you both. If I could ask you just to read out the questions and give a response where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thanks, Mark. Richard, I'll read them out if you like. The first one is: Do you anticipate ever paying a dividend? I think the honest answer is yes. As we sit here now, hopefully you can see that, whilst we're generating cash, we've found good uses for it. That won't always be the case, if we carry on growing like we are, we'll be throwing off even more cash. We won't just sit on it for the sake of it. If it's so, I would like to be paying a dividend, if I'm honest. Richard, I don't know if you want to add anything to that. Yeah, I think a medium-term objective is to pay a dividend, but we are conscious that we can use our cash very wisely, the type of acquisitions we've done so far. These low-level acquisitions do really require cash. They are more accretive than I think for us, more accretive to our share price, these acquisitions, than simply paying a dividend. Thanks. There's a couple of questions which I'll paraphrase, noting that Alpha forecasts they might earn GBP 45 million of interest on customer balances for the next 12 months. Where are we on this? I'll let Richard talk about it in a second, as both questioners have pointed out, we are a different animal to Alpha. Where they've gained large customer balances tends to be in the fund administration space, most of all. When the euro was negative, we absorbed that cost, and Alpha passed it on to their customers, and so I get their stance. Ours is somewhat different in that we categorize interest as part of our revenue stream because we took it as a cost. When we're negotiating with people, we bear it in mind. Our number is nowhere near theirs. Richard will give you a little bit more flavor. We allocate it to the business line that's generated the balance, if that makes sense. If it's a Solutions customer that's holding XYZ with us, then it'll be part of the Solutions revenue. Do you wanna give it more, a bit more color, Richard? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the same vein that we choose not to publicly analyze either the industry sectors or the revenue components, I would echo Ian. To the extent that we do get interest, and we do. We got a seven-figure sum last year. It follows the revenue line, and it's quite often a negotiating point with our customers as to how we bill them. It's, it's definitely good for us, and it's definitely helped a bit. It's not anywhere near as material as it is for those guys. That may change over time. Would we go out and try and win business for the sake of acquiring bigger balances? Maybe. It depends on your view on the interest rate cycle and where we are. I wouldn't want to be saddled with customers that deposit a load of money with us where we earn nothing, and we're not charging them anything else. It's, it's a moving feast. I think the other interesting thing about what Alpha has said in the week, is that they plan to move up to the premium segment of the main market. You may know that there are two segments of the main market, the standard and this premium. By doing so, they will void their inheritance tax benefit by being on AIM, which, some people have remarked that this possibly represents a good arbitrage to sell Alpha and buy Equals. I couldn't possibly comment. You couldn't possibly comment any further. No. That would be our take on the Alpha statement. Similar question, slightly different. What are you as a board together with Canaccord doing to promote the profile of the company, given that your results, performance are all excellent. Is there a prospect of a dividend? At what stage would you think of implementing one? I'd give the same sort of answer. I mean, promoting the business, we don't need to be a household name in terms of how we go about acquiring customers, we are well-known in the payments industry and getting more well-known, we'll continue to attend trade shows and do that kind of promotion. As I said, I'd like to be in a position to pay a dividend if we grow like we think we can, the cash generation carries on as it is. If we could find a good acquisition to do, we'll always do that first, if that makes sense. A question, why was the deal done today in shares rather than cash? The honest answer is, I wanted to tie the principles of Oonex into, so skin in the game, if you will. It suited us better, rather than just acquiring the license and they all run off to the hills. Especially in light that we need National Bank of Belgium approval for the deal, it made sense to lock them in in that way. It's very small amount of dilution, as you can see, if we get approval, less than 3%. In that instance, it made sense. Obviously, I'm very, very careful with the equity of my shareholders. Hamer and Hamer at 3x EBITDA looks like great deal. How deep is the market for similar? It is, but you need a few things before we'd acquire a business. First of all, it has to be B2B more than B2C. We're not really interested in acquiring businesses that are B2C-focused, which second part of that question says, you know, people on the White Label platform, they tend to be a bit more B2C for our taste. Second of all, you want the people that you're acquiring to be people that you'd want to have working for you. Cultural fit, attitude, general way they go about things, and they definitely tick that box. Third of all, they've gotta be sensible in terms of what they're worth. You know, some of them are just a little bit bonkers about what they think their businesses are worth. This is a very sensible pair of principals who recognize that on our platform, they could make a lot more money, and theirs kinda capped out. We're absolutely delighted with them and, yeah, we could do more. We will do more if we find them, but it's, you've gotta have those three things. The next question is about Roqqett. When do you expect it to be fully integrated in the Equals offering? Well, the stage one was getting it into FairFX, which it now is, which is great. Now we can say to our B2B customers. Here's the thing, you take your payments by debit and credit cards, fine, but we've got an alternative which is quicker, cheaper, and easier for you. Why not try that? That'll happen during the course of this year. The other thing we want to do with it, right now it's sterling, open banking sterling. We're gonna add euro functionality into it, so it will definitely marry up together. Question, next one is cross-selling opportunities synergies from Hamer and Hamer acquisition, are there cross-selling opportunities? Definitely. The short answer, they're selling vanilla FX products to a B2B client base. Yes, for sure we'll be able to sell more stuff to their current customers, and they'll be able to acquire more customers by having more stuff to sell. Next question is why can't big banks replicate what you do? I mean, we're a big customer of big banks, and each one of them will give us one account per currency, and it takes forever to open them up. You know, they're constrained by their systems, and they're constrained by the rails upon which they operate. We're not. They just can't. Actually, the most enlightened of them is probably Citigroup that we're dealing with currently, who aren't trying to do what we do. They're happy for us to do what we do and for them to help us. Actually, all the banks have a similar sort of attitude. They're not trying to do it. Does that mean that a large bank would never buy us? No, I don't think we should ever exclude that, but that's really why they can't do it. An FT article last week. Yes, this is about the FCA letter. There was a letter written by the FCA recently to the CEOs. It was, you know, instead of Dear John, it was Dear CEO. It was to all payments companies basically saying that the FCA, you know, is looking at the space. The intention of the letter really was to allow the FCA, should it so choose, to go into any company, should it so choose, and have a deeper look. We're in regular dialogue with them. They're broadly, I won't put words in their mouth, but, you know, broadly happy with what we're doing. I welcome this attention from them in terms of increased focus on the space because particularly in terms of e-money licenses, there are a lot of e-money licenses handed out by regulators around the globe or particularly, sorry, in Europe because it's very much a European construction. Having increased observation of that and a little bit increased focus, I think can only be a good thing. We welcome it. Yeah, we welcome it. What area of your current business now would benefit most from a small bolt-on acquisition? Yeah, the international payments business. The easiest way to buy more scale and more turnover and profits is to buy smaller FX businesses. Last question is, do you think the value of customer is recognized in the share price? No. I don't think it's got anything to do with share options, which is another part of the question. I think, you know, if you think back not too long ago, we were at GBP 0.20. I think people have made look at the chart and think that's gone a long way. You know, let's sell into some into some good news, take some profits, realized profits, especially if they got losses elsewhere. I think there's an element of that and a certain resistance levels at GBP 0.90, maybe GBP 1.00. We have to get through those layers. Let's not forget also, we had to place during the course of 2022, the entire position of Crystal Amber, which was, you know, basically 25% of the issued equity of the company, which got placed over the course of the year to various institutions. I think there was a kind of a pause for breath and maybe, you know, the market wanted to see how we would do for Q1, had our growth stalled. You know, if you look on the chat rooms, we try not to do, but people tell me anyway, you know, Q3 and Q4 were sort of flattish but albeit at big numbers. The line of sight to growth in Q1 of this year, I think, has removed some of the doubts. Hopefully we can push on from here. I think that's all the questions. You've been very generous, Ian and Richard, in taking those questions from investors and thank you very much indeed once again for everybody's engagement this evening and bang on time as we come up to 7:00 P.M. Ian, I know, and Richard, I know investor feedback is particularly important to you both, and I'll shortly redirect investors on the call to give you their thoughts and expectations. I wonder, before doing so, if I may, Ian, just hand back to you for a few closing comments. Yeah. Well, firstly, I would like to thank everybody for taking the time to listen to us. It's been an exciting day for us, not just the results for last year, this quarter and the, as you can see, we've been very busy and the outlook as we look forwards. For those of you who are shareholders, thank you for investing, and I hope we're justifying your faith. For those of you who are thinking about it, hopefully, we've demonstrated that we're a growing company with enhanced growth potential now, with everything that we're opening up. Thank you again for your time. That's great. Ian and Richard, thank you once again for updating investors. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Equals Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good evening to you all.