Good afternoon to those joining us from the U.K., and good morning to those joining from the U.S. I'm Kelly Manthey, the Global Chief Executive Officer of Kin + Carta. Seven months ago, I assumed this role, and since then, I've logged thousands of miles getting to know our Europe and U.K. businesses better, talking with our kin and clients, and spending time with the executive leadership team, setting our strategic priorities for FY23. Throughout my time, I've seen our culture in action, heard stories of what it feels like to be an employee and a client, and I've seen firsthand how well we adapt to change as a business. My conviction remains strong that our ambition to become a leading digital transformation partner at scale for the world's most recognizable brands is the right one, and that our foundation is right for getting us there. We've moved out of the building phase of Kin + Carta and into the scaling of the foundation for long-term, profitable growth. My CEO agenda has three key priorities: optimizing our foundation for scale, focusing our growth engine to organize around key industry verticals with our technology partners, and realigning the business around three delivery engines, domestic, nearshore, and offshore, with an emphasis on growing margin-enhancing nearshore and offshore. Today, I'm joined by our Global CFO and COO, Chris Kutsor, our Americas Region CEO, Adam Hasemeyer, our Europe Region CEO, David Tuck, and our Chief Strategy Officer, Richard Neish. We're going to talk about what happened in the first half of our year, how we responded, the dynamics of H2, and how those have shaped our outlook. Finally, we'll review the foundation in place for long-term growth. Since the Silicon Valley Bank news, we are watching this very carefully. We, as a company, don't do any banking with Silicon Valley Bank or affiliates. It's a fast-moving environment. We're watching this closely as it unfolds across our industry. Now, let's turn to our results. We are disappointed by our H1 financial results. Our H1 performance was a function of three factors driven by the challenging macro environment. The first is new business from new clients did not materialize as expected. Second, we saw more cautionary spend inside enterprise clients as they, too, evaluated what the macro environment meant for their business. An important note is that we define an enterprise client as those whose businesses have GBP 1 billion in revenue or greater. And finally, we saw the loss of some specific non-enterprise clients. A degree of client churn is expected in our business, but the all-at-once exit of these smaller, non-enterprise clients that were more susceptible in the environment and had more budget pressures had a compounding effect. The rapid convergence of these factors in Q2 put pressure on our first half revenue. We were responsive and ready through accelerating cost structure changes that were already part of my CEO agenda. These changes, coupled with continued stability inside our existing enterprise client base and key large wins in the public sector in the U.K. and a large data deal in the U.S., helped us protect margins and hold the outlook for the year, despite the negative macro effects. However, we made the decision at the end of Q2 to adjust for the reality of the risk we were seeing in the market. In particular, the H2 and Q4 revenue ramp were revised with the assumption that the pipeline velocity and macro environment conditions experienced in H1 could persist. These revised assumptions and Q4 risk adjustment drove our revised guidance for the year. Despite these challenges, we have seen that have put some short-term pressure on our business, also widely seen among our industry peers, the element of our strategy that are built for the long-term profitability continue to provide resilience. Demand for DX services remains a priority. We are focused on serving the right clients from the right locations with the right technical capabilities. We have a world-class client list. Our logo slide looks better than it did three weeks ago, three months ago, and certainly three years ago. Our blue-chip, enterprise-grade clients comprise 90% of total net revenue. Our clients have continued to invest in our partnership and have grown. Our client relationships are strategic and built on trust. They value our work and prove it with their long-term partnerships. Now, let's move to operational results. First, I'd like to explain the environment we saw in H1 and how it impacted our business. Like our nearest competitor, we saw more cautionary spend impacting our ability to convert the record pipeline we've talked about into backlog as quickly as we have seen in FY 2022. It took longer to close deals since enterprises were more likely to work with existing partners than seek new ones. But this incumbent market also worked in our favor, with the spend levels of our enterprise top 20 clients rising during the period as they put their ongoing trust in Kin + Carta. In the new clients we won in H1, adding 20+ new logos to our portfolio, these are new relationships. They start smaller, are focused on initial discovery or strategy engagements, and will require time to ramp into larger build engagements. We also saw some clients leave our portfolio. These were primarily non-enterprise tech scale-up clients that experienced more volatility and disproportionate budget pressures. This impacted our pipeline and slightly reduced our backlog. There was a broader market shift that contributed to the slowdown in buying behaviors. Enterprises took stock of what the macro environment meant for them and recalibrated their businesses to adjust to changing conditions. This added to the slowdown we saw in the speed at which buying decisions were made that ultimately impacted our ability to convert pipeline into backlog. In our Europe region, which is largely the U.K. market, we saw challenges emerge here first. We saw a greater concentration of smaller, non-enterprise clients impacted by the environment leave our client portfolio in the U.K. As we saw momentum return with data-led offerings and with continued success in the public sector, we prioritized accelerating nearshore delivery, which adds some revenue headwind in exchange for more margin efficiency and the ability to secure longer-term revenue. In our Americas region, we saw macro environment impacts late in Q2, with a shortfall in the ability to convert pipeline with new clients and a few non-enterprise clients leaving the portfolio. While spending continued in existing clients and we did win new business, it was not enough to offset the shortfall. Here, too, we prioritized the restructuring of delivery towards nearshore, which added a small revenue headwind, but provided higher margins and the ability to extend teams and budgets longer, giving us greater revenue predictability. This is what was happening in the environment and the impacts. Timeline is important, so next, I'll talk in more detail about the timing of these impacts and how actions we took offset them. Q1 was higher than Q4 last year and within our expectations. As we saw the environment begin to impact revenue in Q2 as a result of the new business shortfall and slower decision-making, it impacted pipeline velocity and hence backlog. We took swift action to accelerate the cost structure changes we were planning to do in order to hold the profit expectations for the year, despite the new revenue challenges. We then considered the new client caution and slowing sales cycles into our next forecast, and as such, reduced our growth expectations for Q4 and revised our FY 2023 expectations and outlook accordingly. We adapted and responded to conditions through focus and controlling the controllables and the acceleration of key areas of my CEO agenda. The actions we took gave profit protection while maintaining our focus on our longer-term growth ambition. We accelerated GBP 3 million of annualized savings in OpEx. This wasn't cutting into the muscle of the business, but rather, cost structure changes were accelerated, refocusing key leaders in our business from internally building Kin + Carta to serving clients and market. OpEx structure improvements were executed through executive changes, role consolidation, and the launch of a global shared services center in Southeast Europe and Melon, leveraging our recent acquisition and allowing the transition of business operations roles from the UK market. We prioritized nearshore for staffing engagements, increasing our nearshore delivery from 9%-34%. This provides more margin-efficient growth and more opportunity to maintain and expand revenue with clients. Through focus on developing in-demand capabilities like data, we have retained pricing power and secured an average rate increase of 5% in half of our client portfolio. We've shifted how we go to market, bringing together the focus on the sectors we already have strength in, with the relevant tech capabilities, and selling in market with our technology partners like Google and Microsoft. This sector-focused approach has driven a record public sector deal and created new sales momentum in both regions, including a $9 million multiyear data deal in the automotive sector in the U.S. Our client portfolio remains strong, with 90% of revenue from enterprise clients. Data is what's next on the enterprise tech agendas, and we are ready. Bolstered by our acquisition of Cascade Data Labs, we are scaling their capabilities across our organization and in market to drive new deals. Now, turning to H2. We expect sequential net revenue growth in H2 over H1, which is typical for our business. As the H2 environment unfolds, there are three dynamics at play that have been considered in our guidance. First, the assumption that macro conditions will still put some pressure on sales cycles and the speed to turn pipeline into backlog and backlog into revenue. Next, we've sold new deals, but part of this is building relationships with new clients, and that takes time. We have to convert these smaller initial engagements into larger build deals. We expect some to convert immediately, but some will take longer. And finally, we also signed larger multiyear deals, and this gives us more predictability in H2 and beyond. Combined, these factors underpin our revised outlook for the year. Importantly, I'll leave you with this: nowhere is there an indication that the long-term DX strategies of our clients have changed. We saw the spend levels of our enterprise top 20 clients rising during the period as they put their ongoing trust in Kin + Carta. Technology investments remain a top strategic priority inside of enterprise clients, and demand for key technical skills like data is strong, and we have a proven ability to keep and grow resilient enterprise blue-chip client relationships. Kin + Carta remains a critical component to our clients' success. Now I'll turn it over to Chris Kutzer, our Global CFO and COO, for a detailed look at our financial results, starting with a walkthrough look at our pipeline and backlog visibility in H2. Chris? Thanks, Kelly. I'm gonna unpack both backlog and pipeline a bit, as these drive our visibility into our revenue and forecast. So zooming out, first, our sales pipeline is a measure of the qualified demand that our sales team is pursuing, and this pipeline converts into backlog, and backlog converts into net revenue, and these two combined drive our net revenue forecast. So first, a reminder that backlog is signed and committed contracts not yet delivered. It's our order book of revenue, and it's very durable. Cancellations to backlog are rare, and in H1, the total backlog reversals from client cancellations and reductions was less than 2% of the total backlog value. However, we did see the velocity slow for some backlog converting into net revenue, as some clients reduced the initial team size or slowed the pace of how quickly they wished to start projects. Pipeline, the blue part of the top left-hand chart, is our qualified sales funnel with various levels of advancement, which then converts into backlog and then revenue. And that chart on the left is our usual snapshot of both pipeline and backlog compared to last year, and both are up compared to last year. But as noted, there are slowing cycles, and those slower sales cycles means that the conversion into revenue is taking longer than usual. And this is the reason for the revised outlook of lower net revenue, not just from H1, but also lower revenue expected in H2 for the same level of pipeline and backlog in prior years. The middle chart reflects the more difficult macroeconomic conditions that we've recently seen. Our level of backlog coverage of our H2 forecast is higher this year versus what was actually delivered in revenue last year. So we are contemplating that it takes more revenue and pipeline to deliver the same level of revenue. And finally, the last chart on the right gives us a view of the backlog duration, and this duration is a reflection that many of our contracts extend beyond the next couple of months. And this is good. This is a long-term trend that our enterprise clients are signing larger, longer deal contracts as we expand our services with them over time. As backlog feeds net revenue, I'm gonna move to revenue highlights and growth trends. I'm gonna start with an obvious statement and a disappointment in our H1 results. But I also want to remind us that last year's first half posted organic growth of 59% as we came out of the COVID decline. A zoomed out two-year view reflects this is a strong business, and beyond that, we have a proven track record of double-digit CAGR going back to 2017 when Kin + Carta acquired the businesses that make up Kin + Carta today. The revenue chart in the top right shows our near-term sequential half-year performance, and after a slight dip sequentially from H2 last year, we expect sequential growth to return in H2 of this year. Looking at net revenue by region, net revenue growth grew 15% and was driven by an Americas growth of 22%, and Americas now represents 72% of total net revenue. Like-for-like growth was flat in the Americas after strictly stripping out currency in the Loop acquisition. The significantly higher mix of nearshore delivery by our Latin America teams was good for gross margins and good for client satisfaction, but comes with a drag on organic net revenue of approximately 3%. Europe posted growth of 2%, which, excluding the nearshore acquisition of Melon in 2022, was a 16% decline on a like-for-like basis. Again, it's important to note that our successful execution of growing nearshore delivery for our U.K. clients by our Melon teams in Southeast Europe drives higher gross margins and stickier client relationships. But this does come at a lower price point, and thus was a drag on organic revenue growth of approximately 3%. On a sector basis, we highlighted the progress in the U.K. public sector last year, and it's up a further two points to about 6% of net revenue. This is likely to grow further on more wins, like the recent GBP 14 million two-year contract previously highlighted. Encouragingly, notwithstanding the volatile macro backdrop, we continue to secure price increases, with about an, a 5% price increase average over half the portfolio, while the other half of the portfolio is still under review. New client rates continue to trend higher as well for new business. This next slide shows our underlying client relationships are long-term, durable, and resilient. As Kelly mentioned earlier, our portfolio is predominantly blue-chip, enterprise-grade clients who stay with us for many years. 90% of all revenue comes from enterprise-grade clients, which are typically a billion-plus in size. The 10% of revenue that is not derived from enterprise clients, those clients are not venture-backed startups, but they're businesses that are less than a billion in size, typically privately owned or PE-backed. Think well-funded scale-ups or family-owned long-term businesses, not venture-backed startup businesses. This 10% of revenue from non-enterprise clients will never be zero. We often take projects that we know will be less strategic in nature with smaller-sized companies, as they may come from our partners, our partners such as Microsoft and Google, to do new cutting-edge work. This is good for the business and typical of digital consultancies. The graph on the left reflects the number of clients with net revenue over GBP 1 million, and we now have 37 clients, which is a reduction of just 3 versus last year and reflects the macro trends in the first half already covered. We expect the upward growth to resume in H2 and beyond, including boosts from the recent large wins announced with the $9 million deal in the U.S. and the GBP 14 million deal in the U.K. The middle chart reflects client longevity. 60% of our top 50 clients have been with us four years or more, and over a third have been with us for more than six years. This demonstrates our client relationships are multifaceted, strategic, and long-term. The chart on the right reflects revenue predictability, and this shows 78% of our H1 revenue was derived from clients that have been with us three years or more, up from 76% at the end of FY 2022. The longevity or stickiness of our clients provides a strong base of continued growth for the recurring nature of our revenue. Looking at the income statement, my commentary is going to focus on the results from continuing operations, and I'm going to cover just a few key points. Adjusted operating margin was 7.6%, down from 8.5% delivered last year, and reflects slightly lower gross margins on lower utilization in the volatile trading conditions, which was partially offset by the higher gross margin resulting from the additional nearshore mix. We also accelerated targeted OpEx reductions, and we now have a more efficient cost structure. In addition, H1 operating margin is always lower than H2, as it carries the seasonal headwinds of the significant holiday months of August, the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., and the Christmas holidays around. We expect a much higher margin in H2. Adjusting items, which total GBP 22.2 million in the period, include acquisition-related costs of GBP 12 million, as well as GBP 4.9 million for the legal fees and settlement of two very unusual client disputes. One was a small legacy client that came via a prior acquisition, and it was highlighted in last year's report, and the other was another non-enterprise client this year. These are now fully closed, with cash to be disbursed in H2, and the company is investigating partial recovery through our insurance. These are the only two client disputes to have ever escalated in this way, and we believe reflects unique circumstances, at least partially escalated due to the economic challenges faced by these specific non-enterprise clients. Note, this GBP 4.9 million is not related to trading or client satisfaction. These are legal fees and settlement costs to avoid the time and cost of litigation. This GBP 4.9 million is neither revenue nor delivery costs. The revenue and margin impact for actual trading is part of our underlying PNL results, and the trading costs were approximately GBP 2 million in H1. Also note for adjusting items, we will have a credit in H2 of approximately GBP 7-GBP 8 million related to savings of a renegotiated office lease in Chicago, and this will be included in adjusting items at the full year. Also, the acquisition-related costs were reduced significantly in H2, as we now have amortized the bulk of our prior acquisition obligations. So the adjusting items net charge, absent further acquisitions, will be much lower in H2, likely in the low single-digit millions. Moving to the balance sheet. Net assets reduced in the half year by GBP 40.7 million. 18.6 of this was a result of the decrease in the legacy pension surplus. And as a reminder, the scheme is fully hedged for interest and inflation rate risk and has a strong liquidity that helped it cope with the volatile U.K. gilt markets in 2022. Our net debt remains low at GBP 11.9 million, and a net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of just 0.5x. As a reminder, the group has a committed bank facility of GBP 85 million through September 2026 and has ample capacity to continue investing in the business and pursue further targeted accretive acquisitions, likely to come with a focus on nearshoring and data science, should our funnel produce a good candidate. Finally, the maximum amount of deferred consideration outstanding is GBP 27 million. The majority of this relates to the acquisitions of Spire and Cascade. For H2, we expect cash payments of about GBP 12 million and a final vesting of GBP 3.2 million of deferred shares previously issued in 2021. Of the remaining GBP 12.1 million, up to 6.8 may be settled in shares at our option. Full details are included in the appendix. Looking at cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 9.7 million in H1, and the net cash outflow was GBP 11.8 million. The material bridging items were GBP 5.4 million for acquisition-related expenses, share repurchases of GBP 8.4 million by the Employee Benefit Trust to satisfy employee equity awards, and GBP 4.3 million of outflows in respect to adjusting items, covered earlier. CapEx was GBP 1.4 million in the first half and is expected to be about GBP 2 million for the full year. So let me close with a few thoughts on our overall financial picture. It's clearly been a challenging H1, and macroeconomic markets are continuing to be volatile. But we are optimistic about H2 and beyond, and here's why. Foundation of our business in the coming years is the strength of our long-term relationships with our enterprise clients, who form the overwhelming majority of our revenues and who increasingly spend more with us over time. The balance sheet is strong, with low leverage and ample committed liquidity that provides the ability to continue to invest in the business, and our cost structure is the best it's ever been. We've got more capacity for more margin-efficient nearshoring, and our reduced OpEx baseline is going to help us drive even more profitability with future growth. So thank you. And with that, I'll hand it back to Kelly. Thanks, Chris. Our long-term strategy and foundation for scale remains strong. We have been and will continue to be a strong growth business, building world-class software solutions. We are truly global, with teams in nine countries, and have the right foundation for scale. Our ambition has not changed, and we've strengthened the foundation that is required for long-term, profitable growth. We're focused on the right clients, the resilient enterprise blue-chip client profiles, and we're ready to serve them with the in-demand technology capabilities they need, like data and AI, and we'll continue to acquire the capability tuck-ins that will help us serve their future needs.... We are driving margin-efficient growth through delivering from the right locations, and we'll continue to look to expand nearshore through M&A. Most importantly, we are fostering the right culture to attract and retain the right people through our commitment to operate as a more responsible business and certified B Corp. We enter H2 with a record order book, but we are mindful of the macroeconomic challenges that continue to evolve, as recently as this past weekend with Silicon Valley Bank. While we have no direct impact, the implications to the wider industry are still unfolding. We'll continue to monitor and be mindful. H1 was challenging, but we expect H2 to perform better and FY 2024 to improve on FY 2023 growth. We expect FY 2023 to be driven primarily by organic growth. Our medium-term guidance remains unchanged, scaling profitable growth with EBITDA margins, reaching the mid to high teens. While our first half performance was disappointing, this will not distract us from pursuing the longer-term ambition that we have for Kin + Carta. The demand for DX capabilities remains strong and a strategic priority for enterprise clients. We have used the environment to accelerate the changes needed for the long-term profitable growth of the business. We will continue to lean on our proven ability to adapt to changing market conditions, to bring the right technical capabilities to the right clients, and deliver with the right talent in the right locations. Kin + Carta is a B Corp, a higher standard consultancy, and built to last. Now, we'll turn it over for Q&A. Thank you, everybody, for listening to the presentation. If you do have any questions for management, I'll just remind you, please do submit via the Q&A text feature at the bottom of the screen, and I'll unmute you and invite you to ask your question directly. So the first question that we have is from Steve Liechti. Just give me one second, Steve. You just should be able to speak now. Right. Hi there, guys. Just to double-check, can you hear me? Yes. We hear you, Steve. Hi, Steve. Okay, good. That's a success. Thank you. My first question, I think you've answered it to some extent a couple of times, but, obviously, the new news, post your updated guidance was SVB. You've chosen not to change your guidance now, on the back of that, but just anything that you can give us in terms of what clients are thinking, saying, you know, where you're sort of more confident and less confident, overall? So that's the first question. Second question, it goes back to your helpful chart in terms of conversion of backlog into revenues. And what I'm taking is, in the second half, you've got about 70% of your revenue in the bag, and you've got about 30% of pipeline still to convert. I guess, given macros, given all the stuff that's going on- Mm-hmm ... just help us in terms of how you're thinking that 30% can be converted from the pipeline. There must be sort of some sort of maths behind that number. So that's the second question. And then the third question is probably more strategic in that, you know, if you look at the performance of your peer group, you know, there's quite a lot of differences between the different players. What can make your business more sticky and more resilient beyond just scale? Now, you sort of mentioned, I guess, nearshoring, offshoring. I don't know whether managed services or anything like that would be relevant. Just anything you can give us there in terms of potentially shifting the business. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. I'll start and unpack it a little bit, and then I'll ask the other guys to jump in to add some color to unpack some of your questions. So first of all, I want to reiterate, we remain confident in our outlook. I know the environment continues to unfold. We're very mindful of it. As we mentioned, we are not directly impacted by Silicon Valley Bank. We don't believe any of our client base is having any kind of significant direct impact, but obviously, the environment's unfolding and will dictate their behaviors. We're watching it very closely. But we remain confident in our outlook. Our outlook contemplated slower sales. You know, some of the behaviors that we saw unfold late in H1, we contemplated that as we adjusted our guidance for FY23. So we are mindful of that. As you look at our backlog, you know, our backlog is in a better position than it was last year at this time, so we're in a slightly better position. So is our pipeline, and that's an important part of the equation. And our pipeline's weighted, so we, you know, we have things that are, you know, in the 90% stage that need to simply convert. And again, these are with enterprise clients. That's the important thing. The enterprise client base that continues to invest in us, that's continuing to invest in strategic areas of their business, particularly in this kind of environment, they're continuing to lean on the strength of our partnership, to continue to help them execute on those priorities. And so those are the things that are in our pipeline that give us confidence in being able to close the gap. And those are the things that we're gonna continue to work. In terms of more resilience, you know, it goes back to the main foundations of the business that are really gonna underpin our continued scale and growth, focusing on these enterprise clients, the long-term relationships with them, being ready with the right capabilities when they need it, having multiple locations from which we can deliver from. So our shift to nearshore, moving from, you know, 9%-34%, just this year, gives us more margin efficiency, gives us more flexibility in how we can be more responsive and adapt to any challenges that our clients have while maintaining revenue with them. And obviously, you know, having more optionality with that will be helpful in the future. We've talked about offshore. That's something that's still on our strategic agenda to evaluate, to continue to give us more options for pricing, but also to help us with managed services, which is on our strategic agenda. We have the beginnings of managed services in Europe, which is going very well. We're looking to replicate that in the U.S. client base. We're leveraging it where it makes sense, but we have to continue to grow it. That's on our strategic agenda, to continue to grow and acquire managed services capabilities. In terms of sentiment inside of our client base, that helps to give us some confidence. I'm actually gonna maybe turn it over to David, if you could give a little bit of sentiment that you're hearing inside the enterprise right now? Yeah, sure. I'd love to. Hi, Steve. So just in the last two days, we've had two significant updates from our existing clients. So one in our public sector vertical, we've added GBP 800,000 of pipeline to our backlog for the remaining four months of this financial year. Also, with one of our large existing financial services clients, they've approached us about taking on a large, new distributed project for them. And that would be across UK and Southeast Europe on a significant scale. So that will sit in our pipeline until we convert it and move it into backlog. But both of those are very positive indicators. One, a new work stream that we hadn't been talking to them about in financial services, that we feel good about. And based on the very strong track record that we have been delivering for them from Southeast Europe, since we brought that on board, we feel good. And the second is, an existing client that we're doing great work with, that we've increased the spend and had commitment of that just yesterday. So two very recent data points in the core verticals that we're doing well in, all since the news of Silicon Valley Bank, over the weekend. Adam, anything you can add to give some color to what the U.S. market's looking like? Yeah, absolutely. I've actually spent the last few days here in San Francisco with a couple of our most strategic accounts, specifically in the agriculture industry. And a common theme from both of these strategic partners is that investments are now starting to unlock, and there is no change in plans from them. In fact, they've asked for additional capacity on existing programs that are primarily being driven from LatAm, in terms of the growth numbers, and they're also unlocking new investments in innovation. And so the common theme in many of these conversations is, "Kin + Carta is our partner. We love what you have to offer. We love the quality that we're getting from LatAm, and we're ready to start investing again." And so, again, just a couple of data points from this week. We just happened to be in San Francisco as well, but it is encouraging for us as we look to convert pipeline into backlog for H2 commitments. Steve, there's one last thing I want to add. You asked specifically about our backlog position, with I think 70% covered was. You pulled it right off the chart there. That's there for a purpose, so we could demonstrate how our backlog position is today versus the forecast that's in front of us, compared to where it was a year ago. And as you can see, it's 70%. We have 70% of our H2 forecast sitting in backlog, compared to 65% a year ago. That's a good thing, and that contemplates the slower cycles we're seeing. But one other point, the backlog that's on there, and it says it on the chart, excludes Melon. So Melon is included in the forecast, but it's not included in the backlog, which means it's an even better covered position for the same level of revenue. So that 70% gap is smaller when you include the Melon backlog, and they certainly have backlog. And then I think the last thing I'd point out there is, of course, we have pipeline, and Kelly mentioned it, behind it. It's not just backlog that converts to revenue. Pipeline converts to revenue and can quickly turn to net revenue, and we have pipeline at various stages, as Kelly said. So there's plenty of math and consideration in how we will convert to the forecast we've given within H2. Great, thanks. Okay, so the next question that we have is from Jonathan Barrett at Panmure. Jon, I think you should be able to talk now if you want to ask your question. Good afternoon, guys. I've got three questions for you. First of all, can you explain the difference between North American and European client behavior at the moment, just so we can understand that a bit more clearly? Obviously, you'll want to probably comment on the public sector separately with regards to Europe, but if you can just give us a bit of a feel for the sort of the how the HQs in these locations are looking at things. Second question is around the backlog. Have there been any further losses since the end of January? Obviously, I note that you have lost only a very small amount, but just want to understand if there's been some variance since then. And then thirdly, can you comment on your types of services, and just give us a feel for if any of them are particularly stronger or weaker, relative to the average that you're reporting, please. Thanks very much. Thanks, Jonathan. Let me unpack that a little bit. And I'm gonna start with the services. I think it's important to know, we talked about, we've communicated, we've got kind of five core service lines that we go to market with, but really, where the magic is, is in our ability to combine those service lines inside of the enterprise strategic accounts. It helps us with expanding the relationship, and it helps us with serving more areas of the business. So our real superpower is building products and experiences, custom-built strategic products and experiences on cloud platforms powered by data. So, you know, the combination of those things is really our sweet spot and really differentiates us. Our clients can often find point providers that maybe have strength in one or two things, but it's the fact that we can combine those things really well, on their most business-critical technology projects that really gives us the longevity inside of those accounts. It's the managed services aspect of that. So we're doing. Again, as I mentioned, Europe has done a really great job of creating a managed services capability, which helps them take advantage of the long tail of more support, and run and maintain, and enhancements of the things we're building. We need to scale that engine. We need to scale that more. So that's, I don't know if I'd call it a weakness, but it's more it's an area that we're looking to continue to grow. That's been on our strategic agenda and on our M&A strategy as well. Managed services is something that we need to continue to bolster. In terms of the buying behaviors that we're seeing across North America and Europe, in the U.K., you know, we saw the downturn hit first and hit hard in the U.K., and it was much more severe there. We're also seeing things, you know, momentum, kind of return a little bit there. We're seeing more strategy and discovery initial engagements. These are smaller engagements that start with, you know, discovery, smaller teams. They need to ramp. All of that ramp is in our pipeline to be able to convert to backlog. You know, we're seeing the U.K. market kind of turn around in terms of starting some of these engagements that we will eventually need to ramp into larger build deals. In the U.S. market, you know, we're seeing maybe less so on the strategy and discovery, the small deals, but we're seeing the big deals come through. You know, we mentioned the $9 million data deal that happened in the auto sector. That just happened. That's a testament to these are strategic things that need to get done, and clients are investing, continuing to invest in those strategic areas that are important for them. You know, we're seeing those big deals. So, you know, where the macro effects hit the US later, I think we're gonna see the kind of momentum hit full speed a little bit later than we're seeing in maybe the UK. So I don't know, Adam or David, any other color on the market conditions that you would wanna add? Yeah, happy to. Just to expand on the new wins. I mean, 15 new wins, new logos in the U.K. in the first seven months of this year, is more than any full year in the prior seven years that I've been in this business. I don't know if there's many businesses right now that are winning as many new logos as we are right now. And why is that? We've got a winning combination. Kelly touched on the combination of bringing, in the case of Intelligent Experiences, bringing consumer, Google, and search data together. That's winning. Five of the new logos that we've won so far this year have been exactly that. So we, we've got a winning proposition. We've got very good partnerships with Google and Microsoft. So we're seeing the start of that recovery. We were impacted when we saw those three digital scale-ups leave the portfolio. But we've replaced those digital scale-ups with large enterprise-grade clients. These absolutely fit our ideal client profile. They're in the verticals that we've been focusing on, and we've talked in previous updates about those verticals. So for us in the U.K., that's financial services, public sector, and retail, and that they are at least GBP 1 billion in revenue. So we feel very good about the wins. There is work to do to turn them into larger delivery engagements, but that work and that focus is underway right now. The fact that clients recognize that what we have is highly differentiated, they trust us, our partners want to work with us to make those introductions, and we're converting those new wins, definitely in the U.K., gives the team lots of confidence. You know, and we are seeing signals here in the Americas that things are starting to loosen up. What... You know, how I would classify the elongated sales cycles, many of the larger programs didn't renew at the same rate that we were anticipating and starting H1, meaning they really moved into kind of maintain and operate rather than investment and building new things. But what we are seeing, and back to data, it's not just at the large automotive manufacturer, but we're looking at a forecasted amount of greater than 100% growth in FY 2023 over FY 2022, which really helps to show that our clients are continuing to invest in the more critical systems, the data foundations, the visualizations, and analytics that are helping to drive many of product development and internal business decisions. That's where they're using us most at the moment. We're also seeing some pockets of growth, specifically within content and commerce. Again, really focusing on these revenue-generating activities. The industries that we're seeing most growth currently right now, financial services, with the anchor client here in the Americas, which is forecasted this year to beat our initial budget numbers by about 40%, and then agriculture, as I mentioned earlier, and retail, seems to be returning back to a growth phase for us. Mm-hmm. Jonathan, you asked one other question about backlog, and has any gone away recently? No, absolutely not. And in fact, the stats that we gave, less than 2%, about GBP 3 million of total backlog contracted in the first half. There's always some ebb and flow within backlog, because something might finish early, there could be a rounding off of a project sooner than anybody expected. So there's always some ebbing and flowing within backlog. Even within the half, it was quite small, and we wanted to make sure we could demonstrate that and ensure everybody understood the confidence and durability that backlog is. So no, there's been no further contraction beyond, again, what would be very typical in any given year. Thank you. Hi, Jonathan. I just wanna give a market perspective on the data point that the team have been talking about. If you look at what's happening in Microsoft, you look at what's happening at Google, Microsoft are shifting their focus very squarely towards data and AI. That's really significant for us. Google is shifting to AI solutions. Again, that falls right into our area. If we look at the demand we're seeing in data, 48% increase in data and AI net revenue from our top 20 clients year-on-year. We've got a GBP 25 million pipeline, up from GBP 14 million year-on-year. Data is the highest growing sector in the digital transformation market. It's the highest spending growth area. If you think back, and Jonathan, you've been with us on the journey, think about the data journey that we've been on, the acquisition of Cascade Data Labs, the acquisition of Octane Responsible AI, really building out the foundations of a fantastic, really strong, and end-to-end data proposition, and that's really important at this moment in time. Why? Because there's a shortage of end-to-end data supply within the marketplace. Plenty of boutique, plenty of niche domains, but the end-to-end proposition is gonna be increasingly important for us moving forward. Thank you very much. So the next question we have is from Gautam Pillai. You should be able to speak now. Great. Hello, everyone. I have three questions, if I may. Firstly, on the revenue shortfall, can you unpack it a bit? You did mention, Mm-hmm. ...circa 3% of the, you know, those had been driven by lower pricing, given higher nearshoring. Of the remaining, how much was driven by enterprises slowing project ramp-ups, and how much from the, the scale-up issues? You might not be able to give quantitative numbers, but any color would be very helpful. Second, question on the cost structure changes. Can you comment on the attrition, both voluntary and involuntary? How do you make sure that there is enough capacity in the business to drive growth as and when the opportunity arises? Thirdly, if I may come back to Richard on the, on the partner ecosystem, specifically Microsoft and Google, what has the... what is the commentary from these partners more recently? Has the pipeline coming from the partner channel changed much in 2023? Thank you. Hey, Gautam. I'll start. Thanks for your questions. In terms of unpacking where the shortfall was, as we mentioned, there were really kind of three main contributors, and across those, they each contributed roughly a third. So it was kind of equally split across those contributors. So the new business shortfall is really kind of our ability to open up new logos and start new logos. Again, as it was more of an incumbents market, the ability for a brand-new player to come in and start with a brand-new client, we saw a little bit more hesitancy there, and so we did not, you know, meet our new business expectation. You know, inside of our enterprise clients, while they remained stable, and continued to grow, you know, there was much more caution inside of the large enterprise. And so that, again, added some slowdown to our pipeline velocity, i.e., our ability to convert that pipeline into backlog, which converts into revenue. And then the third component was that non-enterprise client churn. Again, in our industry, some element of client churn is normal, but the non-enterprise, kind of smaller scale, type businesses that all kind of exited at once, you know, compounded with slowing decision-making in the enterprise, compounded with it's a little bit harder to open up brand-new doors, as new clients are a little bit more cautious. Again, about a third across each one of those categories, that really contributed to it. One thing I would add, when you think about our revised outlook for the full year, those three contributed to the, you know, to the H1 shortfall that you saw in the numbers, but it also contributed to our expectations for H2 and Q4. So when we called down the year with our trading update, February 24th, it wasn't just about the miss in H1. In fact, it was more about the H2 ramp-up in the new reality we were facing when we did that. So to Kelly's point, that third to third explains both what happened in H1, but really explains how we look at the year in its entirety, and that is fully considered in our revised outlook. Then, Gautam, you asked a question about attrition and ability to, I think, scale talent, acquire talent. So attrition, obviously, we've seen attrition, you know, dip a little bit right now. You know, it's in the high teens. I'd say, you know, across our businesses, of course, every location has a bit of a different attrition profile, but I'd say we're at one of the more, the most stable places that we've been, as folks are kind of holding onto their jobs a little bit longer now in this environment. And in terms of, you know, supply in general and our ability to kind of attract talent, I guess I want to make sure that one thing is really clear: Managing the bench, which is, you know, the excess capacity that we have or capacity that's getting ready to roll onto a project, is part of business as usual for us. And so, walking that very fine line of matching supply with demand and the timing, that is the art of our business. That is where we live in the business. And so, our COOs in each of our regions manage with the demand team, the timing of pipeline conversion. When will pipeline convert into revenue or into backlog, and when is the start date for that? Matching that with who's rolling off which projects when, and then where do we actually need to do hiring to fill those gaps? That is the business. That is where we live and breathe in the business. Our ability to continue to scale nearshore gives us the ability to actually carry a slightly larger bench at a lower price point, so we can be ready faster. And so that's why you're kind of hearing our push to, you know, create these global distributed teams, make sure that the makeup of them is skewed more towards nearshore, so that we can be ready and be hiring in advance, you know, to kind of be ready and carry the right amount of folks to be ready to start projects. And then I think you asked a third question about partners, but it's escaped me now. Do you wanna re-ask it and- Sure. I- No, sorry, Richard, go ahead. I think the nuance of the question, it was about partnerships, and in particular, whether there's a change in dynamic with the leads. Now, there is a sense of a tech reset. I talked about it a second ago. Microsoft really shifting to data and Google, playing in a very similar space. We're seeing all the conversation at the moment about OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the implications that that have. So whilst that movement is happening, the velocity of new business leads remains the same, but mirroring what we've heard in the rest of the presentation this morning, new bigger opportunities are fewer at this moment in time. And actually, we're seeing real traction in retail search, in data-led Intelligent Experiences, hand-in-hand with Google. Kelly's talked about that, that marriage of the right service lines with the right industry verticals, and the right tech partner. Now, the technology partners themselves are increasingly organizing around industry verticals so that they can talk the language of the client, get closer to the client in that way, and we're making sure that our growth engines are doing the same. We remain Microsoft's Sustainability Change Partner of the Year within this period, Specialist Solutions Partner in Data and AI, Digital App Innovation, and Infrastructure with Google, Premier Partner with Google Cloud, Specialist Solutions Partner in Data and Analytics, App Development, and an authorized reseller. So we have a diversification across the way that we interact with our partners, and it remains a critical channel for us. Great. Thank you so much. Well, last bit, just to add on to the talent. You know, as we're all Zoomed in right now on the return to growth story and where the growth opportunity is, and watching the market very closely, you know, in a not-too-distant future, we're all gonna be looking at supply and staffing all of the growth. And so one of the things that's very important is our continued focus on talent, on culture, our ability to attract talent, and we're not taking our foot off the gas on that. In fact, we've recently just won some awards, some Great Places to Work awards, Best for Wellbeing, being recognized as a Best in the World, for governance and B Corp accreditation. Our employer branding team, we have a whole team focused on the employee value proposition, which means what it feels like to be an employee at Kin + Carta. Perks and benefits, culture, all of that, they've just been nominated for an award through Gartner. So again, it's very important. We're managing the growth equation right now. The supply equation's always very important as well, for us to continue managing. So I just wanted to make sure that we pointed that out. Yeah, thanks, Gautam. To Kelly's point, when we grew 59% organically last H1... Again, I don't want that just to be a forgotten number. We grew 59% just a year ago in the same H1 organically, which meant we had to hire those people and staff them, and then deliver, and we did it. So this engine is built to be able to grow like that. That's why culture is so important. That's why talent acquisition, that's why we talk about it. That is our business. It's always been our business, and will be. So managing that bench that Kelly mentioned before is the core operations of the firm. So thanks for the question, Gautam. Great. Thank you so much, guys. As it's getting close to one o'clock, I'd say we've probably got time for one more question. I think we've got a raised hand here from Kai Korschelt at Canaccord. I'll unmute you now. You should be able to speak if you want to ask your question. Yeah, great. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yep. Yes. Perfect. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. I just wanted to drill down a bit into the data and AI business. Obviously, ChatGPT has become available as an API- Mm-hmm. Very recently, and so that obviously makes it much easier for companies to, you know, integrate into their own workflows or technology stacks. Just wondering, is that something that your business benefits from, or are you doing more proprietary or bespoke works? I'm just wondering how that... you know, whether that could be a demand catalyst for you guys or not. That was the first question. The second one was around future M&A, and just really, if the demand environment is a bit more volatile, how do you think about, you know, scope, scale, maybe, of M&A? You have a bit of leverage. What would be sort of the maximum leverage you'd be prepared to take on? Thank you. Yeah, great questions, Kai. I'll start with data. I think it's important to acknowledge every enterprise is in a different place as it relates to where they are with their data journey, but every enterprise's antenna is up. And certainly all of the press around ChatGPT has only made, you know, the question that enterprises are asking is, you know, "What should we be doing with data? How does this relate to us?" So it's certainly spurring a lot of conversations to accelerate how enterprises are thinking about data. Most businesses are looking at from a data governance perspective: Where do I get it? Where do I get my data from? It's all over the enterprise. It's not simple to take the data and use it, and that's probably one of the number one conversations we're having right now, is: Where is it? Can you help me get it? And then once you help me get it, help me glean some insights from it. And that's where the kind of the data science and data analytics aspects come into it. And then also help me build a product that can leverage it to make it a more meaningful experience. Either help drive revenue, save cost, create a better end user experience. So we're finding enterprises, they're all at a different place in their journey. Their antenna is all up on, "Hey, data, this thing's next. We should be probably doing something about it. What should we do about it? Kin + Carta, here's what we're thinking. Here's where we are. Can you help us navigate what we should do about it? That's a little bit of the color of kind of what the conversation looks like, inside of enterprises right now. Our data strategists and our data scientists are having a lot of fun with ChatGPT, exploring it, and showing our clients a little bit of a window into how they should be thinking about it, but I think everybody's kind of exploratory with it right now. I don't know, David or Adam, do you want to add any—would you add any additional color to maybe some of the recent data deals? Sure. So as Kelly mentioned, you know, a core part of our current data service offering really is around the data foundations, the analytics, the visualization, and building data products on top of it. It is really the tip of the spear in terms of what ChatGPT gives us the opportunity to do, and really the art of the possible of thinking about how do we eliminate interfaces and UIs and traditional ways of interacting with systems and information? Now, to have this tool that brings that last mile, that is so accessible to the business, to individual users, there's a lot there. There's a lot there to unpack, and there's a lot of opportunity, and clearly, there's a lot of momentum. And so we're poised to capitalize on that momentum and having those conversations with our existing customers and our partners. I would say there's definitely an energy and enthusiasm about how we use generative AI in context of business to help solve problems. The only thing I would add is it remains one of the fastest-growing service lines that we have across Europe. To the question around how do each organization approach it? It's actually very different by vertical. So within the commerce and the retail space, a lot of it is about search, personalization, and optimization. And then in financial services and public sector, we're building platforms that enable our clients to make better decisions. So that's all about enterprise data. That's building the data products and platforms that their staff need to use in order to make the right decisions within their businesses. But we've got some incredible data strategists and data leaders in the U.K. and Southeast Europe working very, very closely with all of our top clients, and we're committed to the growth of that area, and it's going very well. Then, Kai, I know we're running short on time, but you did ask a question about M&A, so I wanna make sure that we get to it. M&A is still something that we're exploring. We are still looking for capability tuck-ins, both in the data space, but also continuing to be opportunistic, looking for capabilities that we don't yet have, like managed services, you know, things like that. So we're continuing to look for capability tuck-ins. We're continuing to look for nearshore expansion, so we're continuing to look in the Latin America market to continue to accelerate our ability to add those delivery capabilities. So it is still strategic. It is still something that we're looking at. Chris, is there anything you add there in terms of size or or anything? Yeah. Kai, thanks for the question. You asked, too, about leverage. So, first, remember, as Kelly said, we're looking at bolt-ons or tuck-ins at the smaller end, as we have mostly done, not entirely, mostly done. We have a significant proud track record of successful integration and successful onboarding of acquisitions. Adam Hasemeyer, on the call, came from the Spire acquisition in 2019. He's now leading the Americas, and there are many more people like Adam that are key roles now from acquisitions. So that's the first part. Remember, we've always looked at the smaller end of the scale, so they're more value deals by definition. These are not 12x, 14x, 16x multiples that we're paying. We're paying mid-single digits, sometimes lower single digits, in terms of multiples. So as we look to acquire, I will remain comfortably under 2x. I think we can probably do this between 1x and 1.5x, and any deal that we do is gonna be immediately accretive- Mm-hmm. ... and will be margin-enhancing from the beginning. So it's gonna naturally de-lever from the time we acquire it anyway, so the businesses we're buying, the profitability profile that they have. So I am conscious of our debt level in this environment, and that is part of the consideration as we do acquisitions, but they're not big to begin with, so I think they're gonna be well within our a low leverage environment that we're targeting. Thanks for the question. Thank you. It's great color. Cheers. I'm conscious now we're now slightly past 1:00 P.M., so I'd just like to thank everybody for joining and for those who asked questions. If you do have any other further questions, please submit them to Kin + Carta at powerscourt-group.com, and I'll now pass over to Kelly for some closing remarks. Yeah. Thanks, everyone. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for your continued support. I know we're all navigating, you know, some of the short-term macroeconomic environment. We remain confident in our outlook. Our formula for the long-term success is gonna be continued focus on the right clients, serving them, and being ready with the right capabilities, serving them from the right delivery locations, and continuing to attract and retain the best talent. This is the formula and the foundation for success for the long term, and we're laser-focused on it. So I thank you for your continued support, and I thank you for going on this journey with us.