Morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today's Institutional Analyst Call with FD Technologies, following its announcements this morning. We will have time for the analysts online to ask questions, but I'd like to start today's call by handing over to CEO Seamus Keating. Seamus. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call at short notice. I'm joined today by our CFO, Ryan Preston, and Ashok Reddy, the CEO of KX Business. I'd like to start by providing some color on today's two separate announcements, and then we'll go to your questions a little bit later. The announcements are, firstly, that the Board has concluded the structure review that we announced in October last year. The Board has been thinking through this for over a year, evaluating the options for FD Technologies to optimize shareholder value. Our conclusion is to simplify the group through the separation of our three different businesses. The second announcement is on trading for the year ended 29th of February. While the group revenue and Adjusted EBITDA numbers are broadly in line with our guidance, the ARR performance of KX in FY 2024 was well below our guidance in October last. I will go through the reasons for this shortfall in our execution and what we are doing to fix it, but let me first cover the strategic decision on our group structure. We held many discussions with shareholders and the Board considered all of the alternatives carefully, supported with the work of our advisors through the last year. It was clear to us that we have three different businesses with different business models and different capital requirements. Their different growth opportunities would be better served under separate ownership, with more efficient access to capital, a clearer employee proposition, and focus on a single mission. The first step in the separation announced today is the merger of our MRP business with CONTENTgine. This is a private business that's highly complementary to MRP. The merger creates a strong player in the demand generation services market that owns its entire supply chain. With the planned cost synergies, we expect the combined business to generate a cash EBITDA run rate of GBP 5 million by the end of this year, and that it will grow and increase profitability from there. This would be an attractive asset in a consolidating sector, and our 49% holding gives us material option value going forward. The final step in the structure review is the separation and investment of First Derivative, with the timing taking account of market conditions to reflect its value. We are not rushing this, and we believe that First Derivative is an attractive, differentiated business with significant platform opportunity as a premium capital markets consulting firm. We expect the proceeds to both fund the medium-term growth of KX to get to cash break-even and to return capital to shareholders. This will leave KX as a fully funded pure-play software business operating in one of the most exciting growth markets in technology listed in the U.K. While there are some short-term execution challenges in KX that we are addressing, we are convinced that operating as a standalone business would better highlight the value in KX, both from a customer and investor perspective. It will also make it easier to recruit and retain high-caliber staff in what is a very competitive market. I'd like to turn now to our update on trading this morning. At the group level, our performance in FY 2024 is broadly in line with consensus estimates with revenue of at least GBP 247 million and Adjusted EBITDA of at least GBP 22.5 million. However, the KX ARR is significantly off our guidance, so let me explain what happened and how we are dealing with the issues that caused this. I want to begin by acknowledging that we got some things wrong in our guidance and assure you that we take those lessons on Board. To recap, in our H1 results, we delivered 15% ARR growth and reiterated our guidance of 35% for the full year. That was in the back of an encouraging pipeline build with a cloud service provider after we'd gone live on Azure in Q1 and AWS in Q2. Gross ARR added in the year in total now of GBP 14 million was just over 20% gross growth, giving 12% net growth after churn, which was within our estimate. This is that churn was a minor factor in our miss and came predominantly from the cryptocurrency and the solutions part portfolio. The two key reasons for the ARR miss were, firstly, the pace of the pipeline build and a number of early wins during H1 caused us to be overly optimistic about what we could deliver in H2. A lot of that was due to the makeup of the cloud pipeline, which was much more heavily weighted to the newer sectors than our direct pipeline. Our conversion rates were lower with a higher loss ratio. We attribute this to us not yet having enough repeatable references where our customers could get to value very quickly. Going forward, combining these cloud partnerships with our systems integration partners, we believe, will help to improve penetration in these sectors as these relationships mature. The second significant reason was that our direct pipeline suffered some slippage linked to the weaker macroeconomic conditions significantly. This was caused by a general lengthening of the sales cycles as customers took longer to make decisions in a more uncertain environment. The fact also that we are targeting larger deals meant that customers required more and quite often higher levels of approval within their organizations before they could commit to the deals. Some of these deals will actually be larger as we go forward, as customers plan to deploy us more widely across the organization, taking advantage of the work that we've done on the product over the last couple of years. These decisions then to deploy us strategically across the organization become CIO-level decisions and consequently take longer. The macro environment is what it is, and we are neither alone nor immune from its effects. However, we have taken steps to fix the issues that we can control around our pipeline qualification and the deal execution process. So what have we done? Firstly, we've upgraded our sales and marketing leadership through the appointment of Clint Maddox as CRO last month and Peter Finter as Chief Marketing Officer a few months ago. Clint, who has worked previously with Ashok, has hit the ground running, bringing his experience in both enterprise technology and channel distribution to scale our sales process and increase the efficiency and the productivity. Secondly, we're increasing our sales capacity on those sectors where we see the highest near-term results, namely in capital markets, aerospace, and defense. Combined, these two sectors have accounted for the bulk of our new ACV in FY 2024. In these sectors, we have multiple proven use cases giving customers value in quick time. We will target the newer markets through our channel partners, which include the OEMs, the systems integrators, and the cloud providers. Again here, we're targeting a focused set of use cases: research in healthcare, fault detection in the wafer fabrication world, meter data management in utilities, network analytics in telco. Across all of these use cases, we have increasing referenceability with customers in those sectors. The CSPs remain important channels for us, and we believe that better targeted execution will bring stronger and much more consistent results in this area. Despite the pressure in the current macro environment and the execution issues that we've seen, we have many reasons to continue to be optimistic about the prospects for KX. Firstly, the opportunity remains large as ever. We have an increasing number of established repeatable use cases in capital markets, aerospace, and defense. We're taking these use cases to new customers in those sectors. In capital markets alone, there are hundreds more customers of all sizes who can benefit from our technology. In the other sectors, we have a significant opportunity around equally differentiated use cases. With laser focus on these with our partners, they will add to our growth. We added 19 new logos in FY 2024, giving us significant opportunity for upsell going forward. Secondly, the recent release of our time series database, the foundational product kdb+ 4.1, that extends our technology lead both in performance and functionality. Likewise, the work we've done around our PyKX product, which enables Python users to work seamlessly with our technology, is bringing us new customers and new workloads to our table. Finally, we remain excited by the response to the KDB.AI product, which we launched at the end of last year. This positions us to benefit from the growth in generative AI. Two of our largest customers are already licensed users, and we have a further two technical wins with some of the large capital market institutions. In summary here, we're doubling down on the areas of highest near-term return. With the initiatives that we've taken to improve execution, we can deliver sustainably high growth rates. In the short term, we're working through these changes and reviewing our cost base and looking forward to providing the detailed update on the FY 2025 guidance when we deliver our full year results in May. At that point, we will also give an update on our progress through the first half. Turning to First Derivative. In common with its peers, this was a tougher year as customers remained cautious on spending from the first quarter onwards. We ended the year with revenue down 7%, although we managed to maintain our EBITDA margin by managing the cost base effectively. We are, as we've come into calendar 2024, starting to see a return to stability in revenue at First Derivative. In addition to a more positive tone to our customer conversations, we're becoming more confident about the prospects for a return to growth as we progress through the year. In the meantime, we continue to manage the cost base as we did right through last year to support our drive for a higher margin in this business. In summary, I appreciate that we've released a lot of information today. So let me summarize the main points. We've completed our structure review, with the merger of MRP being the first step, followed by the planned investment of First Derivative. As we said, we are not rushing this. This will create a pure-play, high-growth software business in KX with sufficient capital to execute on its market opportunity and become profitable, and also to return some capital to shareholders. The KX opportunity, despite the short-term execution issues which we are solving, is as exciting and as big as ever. The market is enormous, and our technology is uniquely differentiated. I'm confident that we can deliver strong, sustainable growth and value for shareholders. With that, I'd like to hand over for your questions. Thank you, Seamus. We will now open the floor for institute analysts to ask questions. Please use the raise your hand function on Zoom. Wait for your name to be called, and I'll open your line. I'll now pause for a moment to allow the questions to be queued. Okay. The first question is from Joseph George. I'll just be opening your line now. Bear with a second, please, Joseph. Just to turn on your line. Yes. Hi. Morning, guys. And thank you for taking my questions. I have probably three, if you don't mind. The first one would just be on net retention rates within KX. I'm just hoping you can bridge the sort of start of the year to the end of the year ARR for me. Net retention rate was close to 120% at the start of the year. It was 117% at H1 in constant currency. So can you just bridge that to how we get to the 12% ARR growth, please, in constant currency? And ideally, sort of split out where retention growth is coming from and where new business growth is coming from, please. You want to give us your other questions, Joseph, and then we'll. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Second question would just be on the midterm growth. Obviously, we have the sort of 45% CAGR for ARR growth. How should we think about that target given today? Is this something that you guys are still reiterating? And can you give us anything to sort of underpin confidence in that, please? And then the third question would just be on the potential transaction involving First Derivative. Yeah. Any color you could give on sort of likely options here, outcomes, and anything on timing would be great, please. Thank you. Okay. So let me start with the midterm growth. As we set out this morning, we're looking forward to giving a full update with our results on the 21st of May. I think it's right that given that our new CRO joined just a month ago, that we give him the opportunity to work through the pipeline, work through meeting all of the team, and that when we come to that point, that Clint will absolutely own that pipeline and what we believe we will deliver from it. So I'd refrain from giving more guidance until we get to that point. As I said, we're also working through the cost base to be able to give a very fulsome update at that stage. So that's how we sort of think about getting you that guidance going forward. On the net retention rate, Ryan, our CFO, is with me here. In reality, we closed the books last night. I'm not expecting that we'll have the full degree of detail on that. We obviously closed the books on ARR, not on revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as I say, we'll be able to provide more color of that in May. So we're just going through all the deals now, and we will be able to provide the detail on that, as I say, in May. But a significant number of the new deals would have been expansion deals with existing customers. Given the significant number of them that closed during the end of the fourth quarter, they won't have much impact on revenue for the year that we'll be reporting. But we'll give a full update and that bridge when we've worked through all of that detail for the results. And in terms of the potential FD transaction, as I've said, we're not rushing this. We're setting out the strategic intent. We believe FD is a valuable business with an exceptionally strong brand right across capital markets. We'll work through that in a very disciplined and measured way and give you an update as we think it's appropriate going through that. Understood. Thank you both very much. Once again, obviously, for those wishing to ask questions from the analyst call, please use the raise your hand function. I'll now be opening the line for Damindu at Peel Hunt for a second. Damindu, you should be online now. Yeah. Thank you very much. So I got three questions as well, so I'll just rattle them through. The first one relates to existing customers on KX who are not on any new pricing models or any new licenses. Let's call it consumption-based pricing, for example. I know through channel checks, you guys do try to reach out to those existing, some existing legacy customers to try and kind of move them forward to what would be a better pricing plan for you guys. And the success rates are probably not where they can be. So the first question is, will the CRO look at also better monetizing existing customers alongside looking at the pipeline? The second one, again, relates to KX. Seamus, you made the reference that part of the lack of progress on KX is there are not enough repeatable reference customers around because in those particular domains, the customers didn't get to value or not enough customers got to value. Could you tell us, could you give a little bit more color on domains where our customers did get to value and you have very good referenceability, and the areas where you think referenceability can be better and therefore will be a focus? The last one is on First Derivative. Obviously, you kind of alluded to some green shoots or stabilization. Could you remind us again on the First Derivative what the end markets are, like what sort of capital markets clients and use cases you are talking about? Because from where I am sitting, looking around, the end markets for First Derivative still do not look very healthy given the kind of the market outlook for this calendar year. I just want to get a sense that we are not going to end up in the same scenario where we are being a bit too optimistic about how First Derivative will pan out. Those are my three questions. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks, Damindu. I'm going to ask Ashok to just give a bit of color on the work we've already done with existing customers in KX to basically get more money from them each year. And we had some good examples of that in our sort of first-half results presentation. And I think also, Ashok, to talk about the repeatable references and how we're getting those out into the newer sectors. Yeah. I think the first one from existing customers, I think Clint, our focus is going to be making sure that they are getting to value. And we will have very much a focus on NPS. So getting customer adoption and being able to get them to use more of our offering. So there is both upsell and cross-sell, but making sure the customers are getting value. And that allows us to monetize it. We also had implemented some price increases in this past year. So as the renewals come up, we expect that to help get more value, but also make sure the customers are getting the value. And we'll also have a specific technical account management going forward to help existing customers to use more of our portfolio. The second part, in terms of where we have repeatability today, we are very strong in the capital markets, primarily around how people develop models and to simulate and deploy models, whether it's pre-trade or post-trade. So we expect that whether they're doing any cloud platform or with partners, that we have a very high repeatability. But also, we are trying to now go after new logos, which is where I think the second tier and the tier two and tier three customers, we are starting to see uptick where they would like to get the same value proposition and the use cases like the tier one investment banks and hedge funds. But now we are seeing that in the second half of the year, we see several new logos in that context. And the other one is where we find is defense and aerospace. 25% of our new bookings, as Seamus mentioned, is coming from defense and aerospace. That, again, we find that we have built off products. Also, we have made things technology to meet the requirements of defense and aerospace from a security perspective. That should help us to get more defense and aerospace customers. The third part, areas of where we are going to refine, is to basically working with newer segments. Semiconductors is where we feel like we are very strong. We are starting to look at some areas like telco and others where we want to make sure that we develop those use cases and further validate before we go after new customers. Thanks, Ashok. Damindu, if I maybe cover your point then on stabilization in First Derivative. So the end markets that we're operating there are the largest investment banks going across the U.S. and the U.K. And they've clearly been going through a tough time with very little in the way of transactions or IPOs. But what we're starting to see is that in the areas around the risk and reg and areas that are going to help them to continue to drive down their cost-to-income ratios, there is more activity around those and more intent to let new projects as we go through this year. And in terms of the business, what we're starting to see is that the weekly and the monthly numbers on charge are starting to go in the right direction again. In a consulting business where you, in each six-month period, have come down in the last two, I think we're getting increasing confidence that it is flattening and that while our first-half comparison will be quite difficult, we're looking at the sequential half and feeling that on that basis, we're starting to see stability. Then we look to the second half after that and see how the end markets are panning out. So overall, for the year, we're probably looking quite flat from the half that we've just ended. So we're not over-optimistic, continuing to work hard on the pipeline and manage the cost base very closely so that we can see some margin improvement as we go through the year. Thank you. We have Roger Phillips. I'll just unmute you now, Roger. Roger should be online now. Hi, guys. Yeah. Could you talk about churn levels in the second half in particular and essentially what the gross ARR growth looked like in the second half? And maybe sort of segue on to talking about how any pivot in the sales pipeline away from solution more towards pure product may have affected the ARR growth performance for the year. Maybe just to sort of talk around that would be useful. And then the second question was, in terms of are there any particularly large deals that slip to the right that make an impact? A sort of commentary on the sort of the volumetric makeup of the pipeline and how it's a load of small deals or a couple of large ones that can affect the ARR performance. Any color on that would be helpful. Thank you. Sure. So, Roger, on the churn for the year, it was within the estimate that we had back in October at the higher end of it, but within that estimate. Ashok, maybe you can talk a little bit about what we're doing around the solutions portfolio and then very much the pivot towards the infrastructure products going forward. Yeah. I think in the second half, what we saw is the majority of the churn was coming from the solutions portfolio. I think one of the things what we have found is that while we anticipated that given the shift of products, we need to give enough roadmap direction for existing customers who had the solutions portfolio. So that's part of the investments we are making is to make sure that there's a migration path as well as giving them better support. So that's something which is helping us as we look into the next year. The second part of the question around volumetric, the pipeline, our majority, almost 90% of our pipeline is products and maybe about 10% of solutions mainly around existing customers wanting to need more of it. In terms of the shift and some of the slips, we did have a couple of large deals. Primarily, these things are where customers started off with one part of the division, and then they're trying to standardize. The good thing is we are starting to see that more and more where companies we just had a Canadian bank, for example. They started off in Canada. They wanted us to standardize across U.S. and Canada. So the deal became bigger. You know that while that one closed, but there are a couple of other deals like that which are where it's kind of getting bigger. They want to standardize, and there are more stakeholders and economic buyers we'll have to get approvals from. Those are a couple of examples which I could think of in terms of where the deal volume. We do have a lot of those deals which we had was CSPs. Some of it was also the cloud. Sometimes in the recently, the customers may want to do some things on-prem. We are also working with customers around hybrid solutions so where they can leverage some storage on-prem and cloud for compute. Thank you, Roger. So at the top of the hour, we have time for one last set of questions, and they will come from Martin O'Sullivan. Martin, I'll just open your line. Go ahead. Yes. Morning. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I noticed that it's been two years to the day since you announced the KX strategic partnership with Microsoft on the 1st of March, 2022. Could you just speak specifically to that in terms of provide some perspective on what is working well with Microsoft, what is not working as well as you might have expected, and the general progress with Microsoft on developing applications and services and collaborating with the sales and marketing initiatives with enterprise clients? Thanks. Ashok, do you want to cover? Yeah. I think we find that Microsoft partnership is going very well in multiple angles. One of the areas where the assumptions we've made, which is around we can use the marketplace to lower the sales cycle. But what we found is even though we had a good pipeline, customers still want us to do the POCs and have the technical win, especially for some of the newer use cases, the product Microsoft. We have this Insights Enterprise. Given it's a brand new product, they still want us to make sure that we work with the customers, solve the problem, and they want to also see who else has done it. So that's the part where we have had a good pipeline, but we haven't been able to close some of the deals because people want the proof points, and it's actually integrated. In terms of additional areas where I'm very excited about is, obviously, Microsoft is building out the Copilot, which we are now trying to find customers for the beta. The second part of that is we are very excited about some of the opportunities we are seeing in the defense and aerospace with Microsoft. Some of the pipeline that we have when we look at the next year, the next fiscal year is again on defense. So it's not just in the financial services. Okay. So you're pretty happy with the way the Microsoft, the pipeline, etc.? Yeah. No, I think compared to how you were thinking about it two years ago, you're pretty happy with the progress. I think so. I think we also are seeing that they are quite a bit focused on AI and our new focus on KDB.AI, where we are seeing quite a few joint customers who want to operate at scale. We already won two deals. One of them was with Microsoft. And then we have a significant pipeline building, 39 opportunities right now in the AI space, which Microsoft is also focused on. Thank you. If you can guess, we are now at the top of the hour. Thank you for joining the call today at short notice. We will now be concluding the call, and we're passing over to Seamus Keating for his final remarks. Thank you, Dwight. Thank you again, everyone, for joining us at short notice this morning. We've set out the strategic direction, the group, which we believe is right to split the businesses and have KX as an independent, standalone business listed in the U.K. We look forward to giving you a much fuller update when we get to the results herle in May. Again, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you. That concludes today's call.