I know the impact my work is making is significant. The world has a growing population, and we need to feed that population. If we can use modern technology to help grow more food on less land, then I think we're doing the right thing. I'm working with an aerospace company to help consolidate their engineering data, so that way they can build better solutions for their hardware. We're helping Homepoint to design and build a next generation mortgage exchange platform. I'm currently working for Gordon Food Service, and we are building a new version of their e-commerce. We are now discovering, building, and iterating on systems that deliver invoices across Cazoo in a cost-effective way. Every client needs are different in some way, so the way that we design our e-commerce template, they can all change based on the client's business processes. Our clients come to us because we have the expertise, and we have proven that we can deliver. I build systems that are useful for our customers, but also the management of how to build such great things. I'm always questioning what is the best approach to solve a problem. Like a lot of technical people, one of the things that I really enjoy is the problem-solving side of things. It's always great to see people's eyes light up when they see the thing that you've built and then realize that the thing that you've built has a lot of value to them in their day-to-day lives. When you have this problem in front of you and you write code to solve it, you press play or run a compile command, and everything works. It's amazing. Probably the thing that I'm most proud of delivering for this client is an app that has been highly rated for its accessibility, getting incredible five-star reviews from blind users. For one client, we have a target to help them reduce carbon emissions by 30%. I architect and develop digital applications that help farmers grow more food. With building a pocket change mobile app that helps thousands of people that are in real debt due to student loans. It's literally helping to save $ thousands for people who really need it. My name's Andre, and I'm building a mobile banking app. I'm building e-commerce digital experiences. I'm building a mobile practice. I'm building customer experiences. I am building a world that works better for everyone. For everyone. For everyone. For everyone. For everyone. For everyone. For everyone. For everyone. My name is Melissa, and I'm building a world that works better for everyone. Everything starts with purpose. Kin + Carta exists to build a world that works better for everyone. Good afternoon to our friends in Europe, and good morning to our friends in America. Thank you for joining us. I'm Jay Schwan, CEO of Kin + Carta, and together with our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Kutsor, we're looking forward to sharing our very positive performance for the first half of fiscal year 2022 and our expectations for a strong second half. I want to share with you from the outset that we are carefully monitoring the implications of the war in Ukraine. We have no clients or employees in Ukraine, Russia or Belarus, so we see no near-term impact. Nonetheless, we are mindful of the macroeconomic effects still unfolding, and our thoughts are with those affected by this terrible conflict. Turning to our results, I'm very pleased to report that our momentum continues to gather pace. We achieved 59% organic net revenue growth over the first half of FY 2021, growing to almost GBP 86 million, and expect our second half to be even stronger. Demand remains strong, and we converted that demand into wins, driving a record backlog of GBP 106 million, up 29% from last year. Adjusted profit before tax improved to GBP 5 million while continuing to invest for scale, making strategic investments in high-quality, lower-cost nearshore delivery centers in Colombia and Greece, growing our public sector services practice, and continuing to scale our partnerships channel. This period marked the completion of our divestments with the disposal of three non-strategic ventures early in the first half for gross proceeds of GBP 33 million. We executed on our M&A strategy by redeploying those proceeds into 3 exciting pure-play DX businesses that we will discuss further later on today. We move forward with a strong balance sheet to support an accelerating M&A funnel and expect to increase the velocity of our inorganic expansion. Now, for our newer investors, I want to zoom out a moment and talk about the digital transformation or DX market for a second. The pandemic has accelerated investment in DX services, an already fast-growing market that's now projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 20% over the next 5 years. Another interesting point, the World Economic Forum predicts cloud-based digital transformation to be a $100 trillion business in the next 10 years. As businesses rethink their approach to technology, data, and experience, Kin + Carta serves this growing market alongside an emergent category of digital native transformation consultancies, the list of peers of which are outlined here on the right. Kin + Carta is a technology, data, and experience consultancy that operates at the center of this exciting market. Headquartered in London and Chicago, our 1,700 engineers, designers, and strategists deliver outcome-based digital transformation for the Global 2000. We exist to build a world that works better for everyone. This is our why. It is recognizing our role as architects of tomorrow's digitally driven society and the important choices that need to be made to build accessible, inclusive, and sustainable products and services. We go to market globally with five service lines, strategy and innovation, where we help companies define their digital transformation strategies. Products and experiences where we build digital products and services for companies, data and AI, where we combine data engineering and data science to help organizations make critical business decisions, cloud and platforms, where we help companies modernize legacy systems and re-engineer them to be cloud native, removing restrictive technical debt and unlocking innovation for new products and experiences, and managed services, where we use data-driven optimization to improve the experience and ROI of global digital estates. Expanding our services are one of four levels that fuel our organic growth. They sit alongside the industry sectors we specialize in, the technology partnerships that we invest in, the geographic territories that we exist in, and underpinning all of this is our material and sustained commitment to social responsibility. There are three important truths that we'd like you to walk away with today, how the growth of the business has accelerated in line with demand, how we built a modern scaling software delivery platform, and how social responsibility and pricing power and efficient nearshore delivery are successfully mitigating the macroeconomic volatility that we're all experiencing today. First, you'll have seen that in February we raised projected top-line net revenue growth from circa 30% to circa 35%-40%. Strong organic revenue growth has buoyed our momentum, and continued robust demand has given us the pipeline and the confidence to increase our position. In our last results presentation, I spoke to you about the record pipeline we were building as we accelerated out of the pandemic. That record pipeline has been converted to a record backlog of GBP 106 million of orders across our regions, 29% higher than the same period in FY 2021. In parallel, our growth teams have been driving exciting new client wins across regions, service lines, and industry verticals. Let me take a minute to share some of these new wins through the lens of our different service lines. In experience and products, we've been engaged by Wendy's to develop voice artificial intelligence to aid with ordering via mobile and ultimately drive-through. The BNP Paribas subsidiary L'Atelier awarded Kin + Carta a contract for product data and business strategy driven by our data and AI service line. Our UK public sector growth continues through strategy and innovation as we are appointed strategy partner to the new Trade Remedies Authority. In cloud and platforms, we're delivering the heavy modernization of core operational systems and cloud infrastructure for Wayfair. Finally, as we continue to grow our base, our resilient recurring revenue, we've been appointed by the packaging giant DS Smith to provide long-term managed services support and optimization of their digital estate. These wins are rarely limited to a single service line. An important factor of our growth is the ability to develop our partner channel while diversifying our client engagements across multiple service lines. We like to refer to this as building the value chain, solving the most important problems in digital transformation hand in hand with our clients, leveraging technology partners tasked with building the infrastructure of tomorrow across the most relevant combination of service lines in our market. Let's look at this through two recent engagements. To reimagine the way that L'Atelier uses data, our user experience design and product thinking is brought to life through the latest features of the Google Cloud Platform. This isn't in parallel. This is a completely integrated approach to marrying the best thinking, execution, and technology in the pursuit of the most valuable client outcome. For the U.K. Government Planning Inspectorate, we're designing and building and scaling an enterprise Microsoft Azure data platform that will transform the value of their data by enabling them with modern technologies and data services that they can rely on when making their most critical decisions. Our connected operating model allows us to deploy cloud data platform, data architecture, and data engineering practices together in lockstep with the best of Microsoft's cloud technology capabilities to build the best outcome for our client. Both of these examples were won and delivered by the successful deployment of our multilayered and scalable value chain. Staying with the scheme of scale, let's look at how our modern software delivery platform enables us to scale to the next level. The deliberate refocusing of the business into a DX pure-play is complete. A strengthened balance sheet with a net cash of GBP 5.44 million and a renewed GBP 85 million credit facility and productive investment in our expansion platform all signal the increased capacity to execute our M&A strategy. Critical to that journey is the purpose-driven approach that we take to acquire, integrate, and accelerate the value of the acquisition and the personal development of our people. Starting from the top of the flywheel, our expansion platform identifies and acquires businesses that either unlock new clients, new capabilities, new sectors, or new partnerships. Moving clockwise, we can track the journey of our newest pure-play DX acquisitions, more on them in a moment, as they carefully integrate into our Carta, which is a group of shared platforms that enable alignment and scale. These platforms are made up of a set of shared services, processes, and technologies and data across marketing, sales, delivery, people, and social responsibility. This is the playbook that connects an acquisition to our core systems, to our core processes, and our mission, thereby maintaining and growing enterprise value while ensuring that the employee experience is additive, nourishing, and true to the Kin + Carta promise. We are deliberate about the cyclical nature of this process. Returns from the acquisitions are then invested in further enhancing the Carta while providing new opportunities and pathways for our kin's career development and delivering incremental margin to the bottom line. Meanwhile, the wheel continues to turn with increased capacity for M&A and a pioneering commitment to new innovation. As our M&A velocity increases, I'm excited to introduce to you our three recent pure-play DX acquisitions, adding GBP 16 million of net revenue and growing over 20% year-on-year with 20% operating margins. As demand for software engineering continues to grow within a supply-constrained market, we have two frontiers to navigate. We must have an unquestionable focus on quality, maintaining the highest technical standards with the best engineering talent in the market, and we must also be able to diversify the location and margin opportunity with that talent. In fast-growing and award-winning software development company Melon Group, ranks number 1 in Bulgaria and number 23 globally by Clutch out of the 1,000 B2B companies worldwide, we have found both. Melon Group is an ISO-certified Microsoft Gold Partner serving blue-chip clients like Philips and Burger King. They deploy 305 high-caliber, lower-overhead software engineers across Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. The Sofia-headquartered business growing at over 20% will be integrated into Kin + Carta Europe, providing near-shore delivery services for Kin + Carta clients immediately on completion. Melon will also be a continuing recruiting source for key talent moving forward. The acquisition complements Kin + Carta's existing investment in Greece to form a new Southern Europe territory in which to enhance margins and accelerate scale. When the pandemic closed brick-and-mortar stores, investment in the high-growth e-commerce sector rocketed as businesses struggled to deploy a lifeline to customer revenue. E-commerce sales are forecasted to grow by 50%, reaching $7.4 trillion by 2025, and a connected approach to e-commerce consultancy and engineering will win the largest and most resilient share of this market. The acquisition of the remaining 50% interest in Chicago-based e-commerce consultancy Loop further strengthens our digital commerce capabilities. As a joint venture, Loop has delivered end-to-end e-commerce consultancy, integration, and optimization since 2013, with increasing alignment to Kin + Carta's core technology, data, and experience services. This shared approach accelerates efficiency and speed to value for our enterprise clients, including Southwire and Royal Caribbean. Loop's growth prospects provide further opportunities post-acquisition for growth in Kin + Carta's e-commerce proposition. Finally, as businesses strive to automate insight and business intelligence, the increased focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning requires a step change in their application. The next generation is smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible, and more resilient AI. This advancement is found in our third acquisition, Octain, the Silicon Valley-founded responsible AI data platform. Octain provides clients advanced insight, predictions, and recommendations governed by socially responsible AI principles. Octain integrates into Kin + Carta's existing data and AI capabilities, which include the December 2020 acquisition of Portland-based data science company Cascade Data Labs. It gives Kin + Carta the ability to quickly and accurately predict supply chain shortages, detect fraud, measure customer retention, and accelerate data-driven decision-making. I hope you'll join me in recognizing the depth of opportunity in these acquisitions, and I look forward to sharing further M&A progress with you as we move forward with the execution of our strategy. Our final insight section shines a light on some of the operational and responsibility initiatives that are driving supply and demand while providing a valuable mitigation in a period of macroeconomic volatility. In a tight labor market, being clear what you stand for matters. Our employee value proposition has been reimagined for hybrid working with a systemic commitment to social responsibility that is resonating in the talent market and keeping attrition below market rates. It's a source of great personal pride that during this period, Kin + Carta was confirmed as the first certified B Corp trading on the London Stock Exchange, one of three goals that we set out ourselves at the outset of our transformation in 2019. We are the only publicly traded consulting organization in the world to be certified. The morning we opened the exchange was both a marker of our progress and a moment that will stay with many of us forever. In line with this commitment, we progressed our leadership and IDEA during the first half with the development of a global allyship plan, the tracking of diversity data and job applications to remove bias, new IDEA philanthropy partnerships, and rolling out of new anti-discrimination policies. We're focused on living our employee value proposition and are committing to building a best place to work across the globe. It's been great to see external validation of our progress with Best Place to Work awards in our regions and territories, alongside recognition for diversity in tech, corporate equality, and LGBTQ equality. We've achieved so much in this area, and there will always be another step, another chapter to navigate, another opportunity to show leadership. The learning and development of our kin is paramount to their personal fulfillment, and our operating model supports this through accelerated learning and diverse career paths that hero both craft and growth mindsets. These measures and more are allowing us to mitigate tech sector supply constraints. Lastly, I wanna share with you three initiatives that are good practice regardless of climate, but are key to countering today's current inflationary pressures. The first is the pricing power that we've been able to enact with our clients. Rate increases averaging more than 5% have applied to over 75% of our revenue base, and new client business rates are well above legacy client average rates, in some cases, higher by double digits year-over-year. The second is the continued scaling of margin efficient nearshore delivery capabilities to more client projects. In South America, we deliver high-quality software engineering from Argentina and Colombia with a strategy to further diversify across the continent through a build, buy, and build operate transfer approach. Our European nearshore delivery capabilities were built on foundations in Greece, and as we've discussed, further growing through acquisitions in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. This gives us the opportunity to consolidate European nearshore operations alongside efficient shared services within our central office into one Southern European territory, further improving margin efficiency in that region. Finally, we're investing in a homegrown talent pipeline for diverse junior talent and others that wanna pivot into the technology sector. We call it the Kin Accelerator Program. We hire, train, and deploy diverse junior analysts through cohorts, boosting the personal connections that build retention while lowering our overall employee cost basis. To date, we've completed 4 CAP cohorts in the Americas with CAP graduates now accounting for 5% of the total America's workforce. As a fast follower, we've now launched CAP in Europe and expect similar results as the program gathers momentum. Now let's link progress to performance as I hand it over to my colleague, Chris Kutsor, Kin + Carta's Chief Financial Officer, to talk you through the half year 2022 financial results and our future outlook. Over to you, Chris. Thanks, Jay. I'm gonna start with an overview of H1 before going into further details. As always, my comments are focused on results from continuing operations, and as you will have already heard, this is a very strong set of results. Starting at the top, we've generated revenue growth of 59% on a like for like basis, driven by growth from current clients plus additional new wins within the half. We also have confidence looking ahead, considering our current backlog of orders is further improved to a record GBP 106 million. Adjusted PBT was improved at GBP 5 million along with adjusted EPS at 2.3p. You've heard a lot already about M&A, so I won't go into further detail here except to highlight that we expect the Melon acquisition to complete sometime in H2. Finally, I'm pleased to report that following the three disposals of our non-core businesses, we finished the half with a net cash position of GBP 5.4 million, which, coupled with our renewed credit facility of GBP 85 million, provides ample scope to pursue our stated M&A strategy going forward. Moving to revenue highlights. The key takeaways from this slide are at the top right. You'll see the sequential revenue growth. Also a reminder that the seasonality of our first half drives revenue lower than H2 because the majority of our holidays for August and December are within H1, and this reduces our billable days. It's encouraging to see that our H1 2022 revenue is sequentially higher than that of H2 2021. In the middle, you can see the strong growth in both regions led by the Americas at 76%. The Americas region now makes up 68% of our net revenue, which is in line with our strategy to have higher exposure to the U.S., which is the largest DX market in the world. The higher backlog is matched by an increase in our pipeline, which has grown from GBP 101 million at year-end July to GBP 115 million at the end of H1 in January. We're starting H2 with good visibility to revenue and visibility to continued strong demand. Finally, on this slide, a critical point. There's ever-increasing demand for our talent in our industry, and the entire market is experiencing wage inflation. Our clients are keenly aware of this reality, and as a result, as Jay already mentioned, we've been able to increase our pricing by over 5% to our existing portfolio while new clients are starting at even higher rates. The following slide demonstrates the value of our work and the long-term client relationships that help drive predictable revenue. The graph on the left reflects the growing number of clients with net revenue of more than GBP 1 million. This is driven by larger contracts and the increasing engagements of clients across multiple service lines we offer, and that helps drive the higher revenue per client. The chart in the middle is client longevity. We've previously shown this graphic for our top 100 clients, but following the divestments, our top 50 clients represent over 80% of our net revenue. You can see that more than half of those clients have been with us for more than four years, and nearly a third of our clients have been with us more than six years. The chart on the right reflects revenue predictability and continues to show that 72% of our net revenue is derived from clients that have been with us three years or more. Longevity or the stickiness of our clients provides a durable baseline for growth as we look ahead. Moving to the income statement. I'm not gonna cover all the numbers in detail, but if we go straight to adjusted operating profit, it's important to note that the significant improvement from GBP 1.8 million to GBP 6 million was after an increase of nearly GBP 700,000 of share-based compensation expense. This higher share-based comp reflects the larger pool of employees combined with aligning to global technology company pay practices. Our operating margin increased to 7% in H1, which was in line with our expectations. We've reiterated our margin guidance of 10%-11% for the full year, and this is despite the technology wage inflation pressures mentioned earlier, which of course we're mitigating through a combination of price increases, additional nearshore delivery, and a focused hiring of more junior talent. Adjusting items were little changed and include only acquisition related expenses and pension related expenses. Further detail is available in the appendix. Adjusted PBT also increased materially, and the table at the bottom adjusts the prior periods for the net effects of COVID business disruption and the related government assistance programs for easier comparison. Looking at the balance sheet, as mentioned, we're now in a cash position of GBP 5.4 million at the end of the half, which follows the non-core disposals. I'll cover cash flow elements behind this shortly. Net assets increased by GBP 29 million since year-end as a result of these divestments, and a further increase in the accounting surplus of the St Ives pension scheme also contributed. If we take into account the effect of the acquisitions completed or signed after the balance sheet date, our pro forma net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio is expected to be less than 0.5 times for the rest of the financial year. Alongside the committed bank facility of GBP 85 million, we are in good shape to pursue further accretive transactions going forward. Looking at cash flow, our adjusted EBITDA was GBP 9.7 million in the period, and this includes total operating profit from both continuing and discontinued operations of GBP 7.4 million. It also includes the GBP 2.3 million of adjusted depreciation and amortization charges. Next, working capital outflow of GBP 10.5 million was the result of the strong revenue growth compared to the year-end, as well as the timing of incentive payments in respect to last year. The incentive payment effects will reverse in H2, and I expect that net working capital will be much lower as well, and this is gonna result in a positive H2 and expected full year operating cash inflow. Of course, there's the material inflow of the GBP 33 million from the completion of the non-core divestments. It's also worth mentioning the GBP 2.8 million outflow related to the closed St Ives. Ives pension scheme includes GBP 2 million of deficit repair contributions. We are committed to GBP 1 million of repair contributions in H2, and contingent contributions related to potential stronger cash inflows could drive that higher to GBP 2.2 million. We've commenced the 2022 triennial valuation for the pension scheme, and we're expecting that to be close to fully funded on a statutory funding measure, which will likely lead to materially lower contributions for fiscal 2023 and beyond. We're also discussing a secondary funding objective with the trustees and the related funding plan that will take us to self-sufficiency in the coming years. Overall, the business generated a net cash inflow of GBP 25 million in H1, which has left us in a net cash position, and those proceeds have already been partially reallocated into the three new DX acquisitions. Finally, I'd like to point out that a significant portion of the commitments on past acquisitions and on Melon may be settled in Kin + Carta shares at our option. A full schedule of these contingent considerations is available in the RNS and in the appendix of the slides. Turning to outlook. Trading remains strong with robust demand and a record backlog entering H2. We recently raised guidance in February from 35%-40% organic net revenue growth while also holding margins, and our medium-term guidance remains unchanged. Let me summarize before we move to Q&A. The first half has been one of strong progress for Kin + Carta, both in terms of financial performance and strategic development. Financially, we've driven strong net revenue growth. We've improved H1 margins, and we've exited the half year with record backlog of orders, and we're mitigating the wage inflation through pricing, managing attrition, and targeting junior talent while also expanding our nearshore delivery. Strategically, we've concluded our divestments and are now purely DX-focused. Our balance sheet and cash flow generation is strong, which provides substantial capacity to pursue further accretive acquisitions. We recently raised net revenue growth guidance for the full year and remain confident in the road ahead. Thank you, and now we'll move to questions. For the first question, we'll go to Paul Richards at Dowgate. Hi there. It's a question on sort of talent retention. You know, really like obviously what you're doing in terms of its purpose-driven bringing on junior talent. The only thing that I'd note is that this is a similar approach to other people in the industry. Kind of Globant, S4, TPX, Mplex, all these sort of similar things. Is there a risk that this becomes a bit of a zero-sum game, or is it that it's just that the companies I'm familiar with, like yourself, are much more advanced in these areas than say the major consultants? Thanks. I can start with that, Paul. Good. Great question. I think there's two aspects to our approach that are kind of worth considering. So, You know, the investment in junior talent and bringing more people into the tech sector, that's a market movement. You know, being in the industry for 25 years, you know, this isn't the first time I've seen a supply-constrained environment, and it's very common that, of course, when there's a supply-constrained environment, there's a big investment in increasing the supply. We're doing that, and of course our competitors are gonna be doing that as well, and that's just a natural balancing that happens in the market. I think what's important to note is that we're doing it, and we're doing it successfully, so we're able to attract top junior talent. We've got funnels of talent coming in from now, like the new coding schools and people that are pivoting into the tech sector, which is an extremely valuable section of the workforce, so experienced talents that now it's pivoting into the tech sector. We've established those funnels, and that gives us a lot of confidence. The other aspect from a social responsibility standpoint, I do think there's a lot of people talking about it. I think there are very few that are actually enacting and delivering on the promises like we are. You know, I think there's a difference between narrative and action. With our certification by B Lab, you know, the prospective talent out in the market is acknowledging that as a huge differentiator 'cause it's not just us saying something. It's a third party coming in and certifying that we are socially responsible and being very transparent with the areas in which we're excelling and the areas where we need to improve. I do believe that is a significant differentiator for us at this point, in comparison to some others in the industry. More broadly, you know, in 25 years, you know, we've seen supply-constrained environments. We've seen salary inflation. We've seen bill rates rise in line with that salary inflation, and that's happened over many cycles. This is the next one. The question is, you know, how quickly can you reach that balancing point in terms of client bill rates and managing salary inflation? I think what Chris is pointing out is we're doing a good job of balancing that through the three-pronged approach that we mentioned. That's great. Thank you. Anything else that you would add there, Chris, or? No, I think you nailed it. Thanks, Jay. Thanks, Paul. For the next question, we'll go to Steve Liechti from Numis. Okay. Hi, guys. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Double-check. Yes, Steve. Yeah, cool. Just a few quick ones, please. First of all, on headcount, can you just give us a group number in terms of headcount now post the recent deals that you've done in total and then within that the number of engineers there are, and then perhaps split that between nearshore and onshore numbers? So that's the first question. Do you want me to ask them all, and then you answer them? I think that's a quick one. Let me jump in. Yeah. Our headcount, including the Melon acquisition and Loop, is gonna put us just over about 2000. Think of it as about 1700 plus, you know, 300 and change puts us a little bit above 2000 headcount as of now. We're growing week-over-week, month-over-month, of hiring more people to fulfill the demand and deliver on the H2. We're gonna grow from there in the second half, Steve. I think you also asked about nearshore versus onshore. Today we've got about 10% of our existing employees are nearshore, and that's primarily Argentina, some in Colombia. You've heard us talk about Greece as well. Melon will add again about 300, so that's certainly gonna raise that, once Melon is completed here within hopefully a month or two. Does that answer all the headcount questions, Steve? Yeah. Just to double-check, within that 2,000 number, how many of those are engineers, sort of revenue-generating engineers? Half about right. Jay, does that sound about right? Most of nearshore is gonna be engineering, by the way, so it depends on what you're looking at. Yeah, about half. I would say a little over half are engineers. There's I mean, obviously a much larger number than that are other skill sets that we deploy on our projects, like project managers and designers and strategists, et cetera. The engineering workforce has traditionally made up over a bit over half of our total headcount. Okay. Thank you. Just on the like-for-like in the first half, the +59%, you mentioned that it's new and existing. Can you give us any sort of carve-out between the new and existing number there? Just while we're doing that, is it fair to say that within that 59%, the price increase is about 5% given what you said? I know there's lots of different moving parts, but is there any number you can just help us with there? Steve, 5%'s probably about the right number you wanna think of in terms of an uplift from price. I would say, it's not that unlike the past. We always have a price increase. When you think about the services we deliver and sort of the more cutting-edge tech that we focus on, we've always been able to carry out some pricing power. We've flexed that a little bit more with the market here recently. If you think about the price increases, it tends to be when you start the new work. It's when you start the new statement of work, it's when you deploy the next team to deliver it that it kicks in. It has a little bit of a lag effect. Now, maybe more importantly, every new client that we bring on tends to be at the higher end of the rate card because they're not on a legacy contract. That sort of balances it out. It gets it to, you know, 5%+, which is where we are. You asked the split of the revenue. I would point you back to one of the charts I presented that I talk about 70% of our revenue comes from clients that have been with us three years or more. That's probably a good split. 70%-75% of our revenue is existing clients, and I don't know, 20%-30% would be coming from new or novel clients within the period. Great. Thanks. Just a quick one on the balance sheet. Well, two things really I guess. One is, obviously, your credit facility is GBP 85 million. Can you give us a corridor in terms of where you'd be happy in terms of net debt EBITDA for the business on a sort of pro forma or long-term view? That's the first question. Or first part. The second part is just going back to the triennial review. My assumption is that the ongoing cash payment under the old review was about GBP 3 million, and I know there was a different formula there, but let's call it GBP 3 million. Realistically, what do you think the number could go to from fiscal 2023 with what you see now? Can you give us any help there? Thanks. Yeah, you bet, Steve. Boy, this is like the finance show here. Apologies. Kelly, David, I welcome you to jump in, and especially on if there's anything else on pricing you wanna add in a moment. Steve, let me answer your question on the other part. First, I'll take the pension question. Yeah, we expect next year the contributions to go down probably in the neighborhood of GBP 1 million of repair contributions per year going forward, because we expect, as we said, the triennial valuation to continue to show improvement in the plan to an additional or continued surplus. Obviously, there's a lot of actuarial assumptions that will go in there into that, but it will come down. I would say if you're looking for something to model, you could use GBP 1 million or so, but we will update you later in the year when that becomes a more studied number with the trustees. Your other question was on net debt to EBITDA. It's gonna move a little bit based off of the timing of acquisitions. We're in a net cash position, but as we said, we intend to continue to acquire. I think it will vary between 1 and 1.5 times for most of the periods. I would be comfortable going up a little bit above 1.5 to potentially 2, but that would be for a short period of time, 'cause as we bring on that acquisition, it's going to naturally de-lever, in particular as we grow the rest of the business. I would say between 1.5 times is probably where we'll be cruising, but it will come below that depending on the timing, and it could go above it for a short period, depending on the timing of deals. Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Next, we'll go to Jonathan Barrett from Panmure Gordon, who has a couple of questions. Over to you, Jonathan. Hi, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah? Yeah. Hi, Jonathan. Hi. Yeah, just a couple of questions. Just first of all, on the pipeline and the backlog. Obviously, you've given us an update today at the half year. Can you just talk us through how you expect that to develop excluding Melon coming in? I'm just keen to understand the movement, particularly in the pipeline element and how that backlog may build as well. Perhaps talk about the effects of Melon on those two items, the pipeline and backlog as well. Just trying to understand what sort of shape that could get into. Sure. Yeah. Do you wanna do that one first? Yeah. Great. Yeah. Let me do that, and then I'm gonna invite Kelly and David to add some color that they're seeing from their regions 'cause they're the ones that drive the pipeline and the backlog. Pipeline as a reminder is a weighted view of the sales pipeline we're pursuing. So they're qualified deals that the team is pursuing, whereas backlog is one deal. It's a contract that's just waiting to be delivered in the future. Pipeline converts into backlog, and backlog converts into revenue. So with the continued demand we're seeing in the market, we're expecting the pipeline to continue to be healthy, and we expect backlog to grow, not just because Kin + Carta is growing, but the deals you've heard us talk about, the deals that we're landing are larger in nature. We have multiple service lines combining to deliver more complex and more complete solutions for our clients. That should drive a larger backlog, which gives us a little bit more confidence and visibility going forward. David, Kelly, I'd invite you to add what you might be seeing in the regions. Happy to, Chris. Apologies, I can't turn my video on, but hopefully everybody can hear me. The first thing is to pick up on the growth and I guess the pricing power that we see. In H1 across Europe, we won 10 new logos. That's more new clients than we've won in any previous six-month period. The first thing to state is that the organic growth has the momentum. The areas that we're seeing significant pricing power, and Jay highlighted a couple of them in the intro. L'Atelier, which is a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, where we're doing some work in the data space. The pricing power for us is that we were able to differentiate very well an area that was of high value to them that they couldn't see anybody else meeting their needs in the way that we could. That enables high pricing power. The pipeline is strong, particularly with the number of new wins that I mentioned in H1, and continuing to see very strong demand from longstanding existing clients. The pipeline is definitely at a very strong and robust level for us right now in Europe. Hi, everyone. I also can turn on my camera. This is Kelly. Across Americas, we're seeing kind of two things. One is our clients are spending more with us, so, you know, we had about 12 new logos come into the pipeline, you know, over the last 12 months or so, and, you know, we're seeing $1 million annual run rates with those clients. And then we're also able to push through, as Chris mentioned, we got an average of about 5% rate increases on, you know, with existing clients, and then with our new clients, we're able to just kind of go out of the gate with the improved rates based on market. And then the second thing is we're selling more inside of the client. We're able to start something with strategy and innovation that's then turning into building a product, or doing, you know, something in the cloud for them. It's adding additional work streams, which adds to longevity. We're seeing modernization work turn into also new product work, so that's helping with our, you know, with our longevity with those clients. Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you for that. Perhaps so if we could just stay on Europe and the U.S. My second question is about the growth rates. Obviously, they're both growing very well. The U.S. is growing faster at the moment. Will the growth rate in Europe sort of get closer to the U.S. once you've got the additional capacity of Melon? Is that gonna help boost that, or, you know, or should we expect the U.S. to be growing faster, you know, in the next years ahead? David, do you wanna touch on your expectations in Europe? Yeah, absolutely. I just thought you might have started. Yeah, Jonathan, absolutely. I'm just making sure you can hear me, yeah. The expectation of growth in Europe is to catch up on what the Americas have been doing. We're seeing that now in terms of the growth rate over the last six months. And as you say, the acquisition of the Melon Group is a game changer. That's gonna increase the scale which our large, long-standing clients have been looking for some time. With the addition of the Melon Group, as Jay and Chris have mentioned in the intro, that adds over 300 people to the European business, taking us to over 800 across six countries, and importantly, with a third of the headcount now in a nearshore location. Pre-COVID, our clients were looking for it. That's only accelerated the demand. We have longstanding existing clients who are already scaling with us in nearshore locations. That, for us, in addition to going to market with some of the new propositions that we've touched on and a significant acceleration of the partnership channel, gives us all a lot of confidence that we will match the organic growth rate that we see in the Americas region. Thank you. That's really helpful. Thanks, Jonathan. Next, we'll go to Fiona Orford-Williams, who has a question about new business wins. Yes, it's Fiona. I wanted to ask about whether the new business wins had been broadly spread across those five activity segments that you outlined, whether there were particular hot areas at the moment, and what implications that has for capacity and utilization. Yeah, I can jump in first. This is Kelly. You know, from the Americas, there's really two ways to think about this. The first one is we definitely see the continued demand across cloud modernization. There's definitely still kind of a pent-up demand around, you know, modernizing legacy systems and then further building new applications on top of that. We're definitely seeing that. Then we're also seeing, you know, businesses begin to adopt and begin to go on their data journeys. You know, with our acquisition of Cascade Data Labs last year, we've been able to go to market much more strongly with a really strong data proposition, and it's early days inside of many businesses being really mature on what their data strategy is. It kind of goes hand in hand with modernizing. Help us modernize. Part of that modernization journey is modernizing our data, and the next piece of that is to help us get use out of that data. Our data as a product proposition has been something that we're seeing increasing interest in inside of our clients. David, can you talk about some of the trends in the hot areas in Europe you're seeing? Yeah, absolutely. Similar in Europe, we're seeing data and AI growth significantly. There was a spotlight on two of those wins at L'Atelier and Planning Inspectorate, where the data and AI service line has been the compelling reason for the client to come and work with us. We're also seeing significant growth in our managed services, which has been a well-established service line for us in Europe through the work that we've done with the English Football League and other clients. What we're seeing now is a real demand to build multiyear managed service contracts, and Jay in the intro talked about DS Smith being one of them. We've also had wins with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which when we put all of that together, it's the managed services service line is expanding significantly for us. The entry point for us varies by sector. What we are seeing is an opportunity to, at the start of it, with the strategy work and the longer tail of managed services, really expanding and growing the overall contract value. With a quick sort of spotlight onto public sector in the U.K., I think in the last session that we had six months ago, we talked about it being a high growth area for us. Since then, we've won 3 new logos in U.K. public sector. We've brought in a dedicated public sector team with combined experience of probably somewhere in the region of 20-30 years. That has given us a significant foothold, both with the credentials that we already had and with the expertise of that team. We're winning more contracts through the U.K. public sector portals of G-Cloud and DOS. Again, that's giving us a great opportunity to get in with new service lines in the U.K. public sector alongside the private sector wins that we've talked about. Any pinch points on capacity? I think, Chris has mentioned or Jay have mentioned that, you know, we are at a period where the demand is often outstripping supply. With the introduction of not only the Melon Group, but also through our Kin Accelerator Program, we are, you know, building the capacity that's needed. We've hired in Europe more people in February than we've ever hired in any month before. We're certainly one step ahead of the curve because of having the strong employee value proposition that we touched on earlier. For us in Europe, B Corp is very much an advantage. It's giving us that benefit of a reason for the talent to come and choose to work at Kin + Carta because many of them have lots of options of where to go, and they're choosing to come and join us because of our purpose-driven stance. Yeah. I can echo that on the talent. You know, our purpose-driven, you know, as evidenced by B Corp help, certainly helps us with attracting and retaining talent. Having interesting work with well-known brands, working in emerging technology absolutely helps us retain folks, providing career growth opportunities and mobility opportunities. We're a growing business, which means there's a lot of opportunity for leadership roles, which helps us retain talent, and then benefits. The table stakes benefits that are there, but you know, I'm in South America right now actually visiting with our Latin American team, and a lot of the benefits that we're offering in Latin America, you would find only offered at the executive level in some of our competitor firms here in Latin America. It's really differentiated the way that we think about taking care of our Kin. Thanks, Fiona. Apologies, I couldn't see your full name, but that was Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. Lastly, I can see that we have one hand up from George O. Apologies, I can't see your full name, but please feel free to ask a question. Oh, hey there. Thanks for taking my questions. Two quickies, if you wouldn't mind. Jay, in your opening narrative, you talked about outcomes. Now, clearly outcomes is also a nod to pricing in terms of a pricing methodology. Just wondered how much of it is outcomes and how much of it is vanilla T&M. Then sort of, if you wouldn't mind, any comment on the use of subcontractors. Chris, onto you for something far more interesting, a quick fire round. In terms of your H2 assumptions, any color at all on sort of utilization, higher, lower, the same? Pricing, higher, lower, the same? Unplanned staff attrition and wage inflation. Although we can't see Kelly and David, any comments you could make would be great as well. Thank you all. Thanks, George. Yeah, I can start. In terms of the question of outcome-based pricing, these are just for context, contractual structures that are common in the kind of consulting sector. Outcome-based pricing structures would, you know, be a share of an upside of a potential outcome versus T&M, where we're getting paid by the hour. Our a large majority, I mean, significant majority is all T&M-based contracts, which is low risk. You know, for us, as we run most of our projects and programs using agile methodologies, that allows us to, you know, continually refine the backlogs that we're working on as it relates to, you know, the features and functions of the systems and the software platforms and products we create. It kind of lessens the risk level. Outcome-based pricing offers potential higher reward, higher margins, but it comes with increased risk. We will entertain outcome-based contracts in the future as we get to a bit larger scale where we could kinda take on some of that risk. As we're kind of getting the platform in place and you know, and the network scaled, we're staying relatively conservative as it relates to our contract structures. The market growth is giving us more than enough tailwinds to be able to give us the momentum that we're looking for in terms of continued growth. That's a little bit there. In terms of a contractor mix, you know, generally, we work towards an 80/20 kind of model, so 80% perm, 20% contractor mix. That just gives us a little bit of flexibility in terms of, you know, as projects and programs kind of ramp up and down. We've got that contractor mix in order to kinda scale the staff as needed. Maintain a target utilization rate. That's been strategic for us. It's working well. We'll continue with that strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. Anything else, Kelly or David, you would add to either of those answers? No. The only add is what I mentioned with our managed services being a strategic growth area for us and that's typically not on time and materials, but isn't necessarily outcome-based, George. It is multi-year retained revenue, which is great for us. Yeah. Good differentiation, David. Chris, I guess we'll go to you for the second part of George's question. Sure. Yeah, thanks, George. You were asking about utilization and I think hiring and attrition and assumptions. I'll start with we do measure all of the above, of course. Our employee retention, the flip side of attrition, is better than market benchmarks in both regions. We watch it. We are better than market, and we expect that to continue. Utilization has improved. If you think about where we've come from with the restructuring we've done, the divestments, and just growing 60% year-on-year is a whole bunch of volatility. There's room for continued improvement of utilization, and that's what we're assuming will continue. There's nothing heroic assumed in my outlook, but all of the above is assumed in the outlook that we've given for the year, which includes the H2 trends continuing. We'll certainly push to exceed that, as you would expect. That's all factored in, into our outlook, George. Chris, do not go into the engineering team saying nothing heroic expected. They'll throw you out. All, thank you very much for your help on this. You bet. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. If you have any further questions, please contact Jay, Chris or us at Powerscourt. Now I'll hand back to Jay to conclude. Thank you all for joining us. Obviously we're excited about the momentum that we're experiencing, and we appreciate the interest and the support. As always, Chris and I are available for any follow-up questions you might have. Thanks for joining us today. Take care, everyone.