Welcome to the First Derivatives results presentation for the year to February 2021. I'm Seamus Keating, I'm the Group CEO. I'm going to take you through the numbers and take you through some important points around our strategy and our plans for the business going forward. I'm joined today by Ryan Preston, our CFO. Ryan joined us just over a year ago, became our CFO at the end of 2020. As I said, we did a robust performance. We significantly strengthened the leadership team. We believe that our business is today well set to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. To take advantage of those opportunities, we're structuring the group as three individual business units. Each is going to have its own identity. To do that, we're changing the name of the group to FD Technologies plc. The other significant change in name is that our consulting business becomes First Derivatives, recognizing its significant role in change with our customers and also its connection with our roots. These three business units are how we go to market. Two of the business units, First Derivatives and MRP, are well set to increase growth and profitability. Good opportunities across what are significant growing markets. Our third business unit, KX, is an opportunity for significant investments to become a leader in an important growth area of enterprise technology. I'll take you through the details on those afterwards. First, Ryan's going to take us through the numbers. Thank you, Seamus. I will now take you through last year's key drivers of performance. We delivered a robust performance with growth in both total revenue and recurring software revenue, one of our key performance indicators, which grew 10%. As part of our ongoing strategy, we increased investment in the KX business in both R&D and sales and marketing, resulting in an EBITDA of GBP 40.5 million. We are also pleased with the significant reduction in our net debt, down to GBP 9.9 million, a reduction of 80%. We continued to see revenue momentum build as we moved into full year 2022. Gross profit remained broadly in line with an increase in KX margin, offset by decline in our MarTech business margin. We maintained our delivery headcount as customers indicated that a pause in marketing spend was only temporary. I have already mentioned the investment in R&D to increase ease of use and sales and marketing to realize future growth. Additionally, we strengthened both the board and leadership across the business, which increased admin costs. The robust performance and investments made in full year 2021 have laid the foundations for our future growth. At the start of the year, with the impact of COVID, we drew down on our loan facility, which has resulted in higher finance costs and an adjusted diluted earnings per share of GBP 0.59. Our robust performance meant the loan was repaid prior to year end. Whilst the taxation charge reduced, the effective rate of tax increase as profits in the U.K. increased. Going forward, I expect our effective tax rate to increase to circa 20% as profits grow in the U.S. and U.K. We had a significant reduction in net debt down to GBP 9.9 million, delivered by a strong operating cash conversion of 115% as we benefited from our focus on working capital. We realized an GBP 11 million gain from the partial share of our sale in Quantile Technologies. Operating cash conversion is expected at 80%-85% on an ongoing basis. Turning to the performance in each of our business units. Software and services are now reported as KX and MRP, previously referred to as MarTech. Consulting and managed services now reported as First Derivatives, which also includes elements of KX services. Revenues and costs relating to pre-sales, implementation, and support all remain under KX. I will now go through performance in each of the business units. KX revenue continues to grow, demonstrating the underlying demand for technology, even in difficult economic conditions. Fintech continued to grow well, where we have a strong brand and the investment decision is easier as KX is becoming the go-to market standard for data challenges. Industry was impacted as the KX brand is less well known and the sales cycles are longer. Businesses had a greater focus on day-to-day operations rather than investment programs where KX would be included. We are confident, however, that there's a significant market opportunity as these businesses look to monetize data post-COVID. We continued to invest to realize significant opportunity with increased spend in R&D and sales and marketing. As we invest in KX Insights, our cloud-native software, and promote our leading KX technology. In First Derivatives, our managed service and consultancy business, which now includes elements of KX services, we maintained our revenue despite the challenge from COVID, and our strong customer relationships facilitated the move to remote working. The business returned to growth in H2 and would have grown faster except for onboarding delays in January and February, primarily due to lockdown. There are continued positive signs that change programs are resuming, and we expect to see First Derivatives return to double-digit growth and improved margins in the current year. Full year 2021 was challenging for MRP as clients reduced their marketing spend due to COVID-19 and the U.S. was partly impacted by the election. We continue to grow platform-based revenue on the strength and demand for our Prelytix product. Gross margin declined as we maintained delivery headcount, as clients highlighted that the pause in marketing spend was only temporary. We have seen the spend start to return and expect to see double-digit growth in full year 2022. As we move into full year 2022, we are pleased with our growing momentum. Our strategy is to invest further to ensure we realize the opportunities that lie ahead. Seamus will provide more detail later in the presentation. We are therefore guiding as follows. Return to double-digit revenue growth in both First Derivatives and MRP. In KX, a 25% growth in exit annual recurring revenue offset by a reduction in perpetual license revenue, leaving overall revenue broadly flat. GBP 16 million of further investment in KX to accelerate growth consisting of GBP 5 million R&D spend, GBP 7 million in sales and marketing, and GBP 4 million in infrastructure cost to underpin our ability to scale quickly. I will now hand back to Seamus, who will expand further on the exciting opportunities for each of these business units. Thank you, Ryan. Let's look from here at the detailed plans for each of the business units. We're going to start with KX, given that that is the most significant opportunity, we believe, and clearly the area of greatest investment. The opportunity is to create a leader in one of the fastest-growing segments of enterprise technology. That fast-growing segment is streaming analytics. This space is actually about the bottom left-hand piece of this chart. Using real-time insights, using real-time data to create advantage, to create competitive advantage by using that data to make decisions, not about what's happened in the past or even in the past hour, but actually what's happening in the moment. To take action based on that and to create efficiency, to create competitive advantage. There are literally thousands of use cases where large organizations today can take advantage of this ability to make those decisions and take those actions. They vary from areas like manufacturing efficiency, where being able to literally reduce faults, increase yield, increase uptime in plants. They vary from areas like trading technologies, which we've been at for a very long time now. The heritage of KX, again, is making decisions in the moment, pricing decisions, trading decisions, buy, sell, hedge, whatever. Decisions in the area of telco on automating networks, making networks more efficient, optimizing them for where the customer traffic is and where the service levels are at in the customer organizations. Of course, artificial intelligence platforms become a really critical part of how organizations make decisions. Using real-time data for those critical AI decisions has become an important component of many of the well-established AI platforms that are out there today. This sector has become a significant sector in its own right, such that many of the analysts today recognize it as a separate segment in their analysis. A separate segment because their customers, large organizations, are coming and asking literally, "What should we be doing in this area? What are the key technologies and who are the key suppliers that you as an analyst see out there?" Forrester, one of the well-known analysts, has identified what they call the seven must-haves of a streaming analytics platform. In our view, the two most challenging areas here are what we call number two and number four. That is the ability to cope with real-time data, to literally ingest data in motion. In number four, to do the analytics on that data in the moment, combining it with all relevant historical data so that it's making a decision about what to do now. It's a decision not just based on rules, but actually a decision based on intelligence. Why do we believe that at KX that we are uniquely positioned, and we get a particular advantage in this area? Very simply, in one platform, we combine those two most challenging areas of streaming analytics. We combine that streaming data in the moment with historical data as the fastest way to make the best decisions. We can ingest data from any source, whether it's a sensor, a file, a log, a market, a machine, a device, pull in extra data from either any of the cloud platforms, all the relevant historical data, do the analysis, and make the decision. Importantly, get that intelligence coming out of the platform, making a decision, getting on, and taking action. That's why KX is uniquely positioned, and that's our particular advantage in the streaming analytics space. We're delighted that through the year, our customers have continued to expand their use of KX. They've expanded the use in the world of capital markets, looking at increased trading, greater volatility, spikes, and increased demand. They've also expanded to use us for additional applications across the same organization, and we won five new surveillance customers during the year. Very significant implementations in major global financial institutions using the power of KX to give them that decision in the moment around their surveillance. We've also won a number of significant customers outside of the capital markets world, continuing to add new customers in areas like automotive, utilities, and telco. I think it's worth pausing here for a moment on some of the detail of what are we actually doing for these customers. We've spoken a number of times about our work in the world of Formula One. A very typical use case in Formula One is to support the customer from the wind tunnel, where they do some of their most dynamic modeling of the aerodynamics on the car, to the car on the track in the race, and right back to their headquarters, wherever they're doing the bulk of their R&D and their detailed planning. Literally in one platform, they're able to see the data from the wind tunnel to the car to the track, and back to headquarters. That literally enables them in the race to get the most efficient setup on the car using all the current data to do that. For us, a typical contract around this area is worth probably around GBP 250,000 per annum, to give them that coverage, and is increasingly delivered in one of the cloud platforms, so that they can access that data wherever they want at any time. Another example that I think is useful to talk about is in the world of utilities. Again, here we're seeing some repeat performance in that world of utilities. A very typical example is the increasing rollout and use of smart meters across networks. Those smart meters are creating many times more data than the utilities have ever coped with before. They're using that data to help them with production planning, with demand management, managing issues across the network. Again, they need to be able to pull that data right from the devices, the smart meters, through to their central management platforms so that they can, again, make those decisions in the moment and plan ahead. Quite often in these areas, the issue with the existing technologies that they've deployed are that they're simply not able to cope with the combination of volume and speed. That's absolutely where KX comes to play and is uniquely positioned to deliver on the performance demands of those new networks. I think it's also useful to talk a little bit about what we're doing on KX Insights. We'll go through the R&D program shortly. Insights is our cloud-first platform, launched in January this year. We've been working extensively with our existing customers on Insights, talking to them about what we were going to do and what it was going to do for them. Fundamentally, with our existing capital markets customers, it's the opportunity for them to move their existing data to any one of the cloud platforms, get the advantage of significantly reduced storage cost, but also things like increased productivity, absolutely guaranteed security, and guaranteed resilience. In our business today, we have approximately $20 million of annual maintenance contracts with those existing customers. Our opportunity with KX Insights is that we're moving those customers onto a subscription model of our platform, and with an opportunity for them to get significantly greater value from that platform, and for us to be able to increase the annual subscription compared to the maintenance charge. These are some of the work opportunities that we have today with customers, the work we've been doing with those customers, and we can continue to add customers both in capital markets, and also in the sectors outside of capital markets. Yes, this is a large global growth opportunity. It's large and it's growing because the data coming either from markets, machines, devices, is growing exponentially. Everything is becoming smarter, creating more data, and the opportunity is there to use that data to make organizations more productive, more efficient, more competitive. You can see here that this is spread across multiple sectors. We today have customers across all of these sectors. We were particularly pleased to see in the Forrester recent Now Tech report, they recognized the progress that we've been making, and they characterized us in the large supplier segment. These are the conversations that they're having with their customers. That KX is in the company here of the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, as you can see from the chart. This is already a large category and is the fastest-growing category of enterprise technology. How are we unlocking the opportunity? Firstly, on the product side, it's been a busy year for our R&D team and a very exciting year for our customers. We've delivered, as I said, the KX Insights platform, as a cloud-native technology, deployable from the markets across either AWS, Google, and Azure Microsoft. In addition to being cloud, also deployable, of course, on-premise and at the edge, where increasingly large volumes of data are being created on those edge devices. Part of our development during the year has also been to enable our technology for that subscription and consumption model, which is the way of the future for enterprise technology. Coming up as we look to this year, we continue to work on areas like interoperability, ease of use, getting to that hybrid cloud platform. SQL support is really important because it actually helps us to abstract our proprietary language away from the developer and allow developers whose experience today may be in something like Python, to actually use the benefits of KX without having to learn and work in a proprietary language. Equally important, coming up later this year, is our ability to deliver as a service. In addition to subscription, that delivery as a service allows us to use that consumption capability to broaden our footprint and allow customers to get more value, but allow us to get value also as they expand their use of KX. Having done that work on the product, having the product in a really strong place, we're also investing significantly in the go-to-market, in our marketing and our sales capability. Taking the work we've done on the product, taking the work that we've done with the industry analysts, continuing to build that brand awareness through advertising, through events. We are effectively doubling our field marketing sales capability as we go through this year. We have to have that footprint on the ground to be able to follow on the opportunities and close the deals. That shift to subscription is very important as we do this. It is the way of modern enterprise technology. It does mean as we go through this year, that the increase in subscription means that our perpetual licensing will reduce as we go through the year. Meaning that overall, our revenue on licensing in KX will be broadly flat, and therefore our gross margin will be broadly flat. That shift is an important part of us building the capability to grow faster in the future, and to build on that subscription model each year and deliver the sort of growth target that we're expecting to do. In addition to that, we're investing in the systems to support this growth, and we're investing in partners. We've spent significant time with the cloud partners as we've come through the year, and we've got a number of significant channels with those partners. The first important one is around that KX Insights work, moving our existing customers to that subscription model as they move to the cloud. Our cloud partners are very excited about the opportunity that they have working with us to move those workloads into one of their platforms. That benefits both them because they get the consumption and the data processing, and clearly benefits us and benefits our customers because of the advantages that it brings to them. That's an important opportunity with the cloud partners. We're also available on demand across any of the cloud markets. Again, that is because of the work we've done on the Insights platform. Really exciting is the opportunity to become embedded within some of these data management, data warehouse players where they need the high-performance capability of KX as part of their data management service that they're offering to their customers. You may have seen a recent announcement with Databricks, where we are integrating into their data management service as a high-performance component. We continue to work with our partners in the other areas, particularly on the systems integration front. A number of those opportunities that I spoke about in the sectors outside of capital markets that we won last year were with the systems integrators. Again, as our technology becomes more easily deployable, more interoperable, we see that we're getting greater attention from those systems integrators looking to include it in the solutions that they take to the customers in the different sectors. If we bring all of this together, yes, this is a very significant investment that we're making in the growth and development of KX. We believe the returns are very significant. Why are we making this investment now? We're making this investment now because, as I said, the product is now in a really strong place. We are getting the affirmation of that product from the work we're doing with both our customers today, where on that Insights program, we have probably 10 customers today who are in what we call our early access program, where they're testing the technology, they're doing the trials. The feedback on that is exceptionally strong. As I said, we expect to be able to move those customers from their original maintenance contracts to working with us on subscription. In addition to that, we see new customers looking to deploy Insights to solve their streaming analytics problems and give them the power of KX so that they can increase their efficiency and their productivity. Well, we're making these investments from a position of considerable strength. The cash flows of KX alone are more than sufficient to fund these investments. This is a very strong investment to deliver on this growth opportunity. The guidance that we're giving is that based on the work that we're doing, we expect the exit rate of annual recurring revenue to increase by 25%. That's in this year. We see mid-term targets here where that net revenue retention, the signal of our ability to broaden out within customers and do more with existing customers to get from today in the order of 100% to be at least 120% and to strengthen the gross margin. Really encouragingly, the work that we've done, our pipeline today is stronger than it's been. Probably 90% of the opportunities in our pipeline are subscription opportunities, whereas 12 months ago, that percentage was probably down at 30%. Those are the early signs that our program is already making progress and starting to work, and we'll continue to pursue that. That's a significant opportunity. Let's talk about the other two business units where we see the near-term opportunity into both increased growth and increased profitability. First Derivatives, our consulting business is already benefiting from the work that we've done through the year, strengthening the leadership with David Collins coming in and adding more people to the leadership team who are able to have the conversations at more senior levels with customers. We already see that we are winning more programs where we're taking responsibility, and we're advising the customer on what the right solution is and how to implement it, rather than providing them with the skills to implement their program. That work means that we've got greater visibility of the revenue streams, and we can make higher margins on that revenue. These are some of the examples that we've worked with during the year on these customers. These examples are typically where we've won a program of work and continue to deliver that. Those programs have been won because we are able to engage at that more senior level. Actually, also we are able to demonstrate to those customers that we have both deep domain and understand the world of capital markets, and that we also have the technical skills to automate, to digitize, to improve, to make it more efficient. A significant opportunity here to maintain that increased growth rate and to improve the margins in First Derivatives as we go from here. The returns we expect here, again, are that we can see growth of 10% this year, but we can maintain that growth because we are getting better visibility of the revenue stream. More of the work here is being done as managed service. Importantly, being able to increase the gross margin as we get greater value from that work. From First Derivatives, let's then move to our third business unit MRP, which originally stood for Market Resource Partners. We're in the world here of account-based marketing in the world of digital marketing. We've seen this business had a challenging 2020, but actually come back very strongly as we come into 2021, as customers, particularly in the U.S., want to be able to dial up quickly their investment in marketing and lead generation, and our platform allows them to do that. This is a platform which we'll see from the next chart, is actually significantly differentiated in what is a very fragmented market. In that fragmented market, we have global scale. We can operate across countries and across languages. It's powered by the real-time capability of KX, and it is driving results that are significantly better than other platforms that customers might use. Again, here, the industry analysts have picked us as an important player in this space, showing us as one of the leaders in what is a fragmented industry. It is that global capability and the depth of our proposition that gets us into this leadership position. That means that we can continue to grow this business and improve margins. Here again, are some of the customer updates and the work we're doing with customers here. It's across a breadth of both sectors and a breadth of geographies. Quite often we're working with the same global organization in multiple geographies, one of the benefits of our scale. This platform is already a cloud-first platform delivered in the cloud to customers. The targets here, again, I think are important. The platform part of that revenue, we believe can grow in excess of 20% per annum. With that growing at that rate and the services component of this business being largely stable, we're very comfortable that we can achieve double-digit growth overall. It is actually also about getting greater visibility in that platform revenue. That also leads us to being able to improve gross margin and improve returns overall in the business. Moving from there to summarize and bring it all together. For last year, a robust performance, a clear strategic direction for the group with each business having its plan, its metrics, and its targets. Overall, a significant investment in KX going forward, growth in revenue and profitability in the shorter term in the other two business units. An important investment opportunity where we can see that KX has that opportunity to be a leader in that streaming analytics segment and to deliver very strong returns off the back of that leadership position. Thank you.
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