Latest Results

Final Results

PCI-PAL PLC (AIM: PCIP), the global provider of secure payment solutions for business communications, is pleased to announce its full year results for the year ended 30 June 2024 (the "Period").

Financial Highlights:

Operating and Other Highlights:

• Positive adjusted EBITDA underpinned by revenue growth of 20% YoY.
• ARR increased 23% year on year to £15.5 million.
• Strong balance sheet, with positive cash generation facilitating further near term growth-investment in the business.
• Company’s key leading indicator of future recurring revenue, TACV, increased by 17% YoY to £19.2 million.
• Continued exceptional customer retention of 97% for the year, a 2bps increase over prior year (2023: 95%) with a net retention rate of over 100% at 102% (2023:103%).
• Strength of cloud platform evidenced by >99.999% uptime globally in year, including three straight quarters at 100%.
• Strong underlying volume of new business contracts signed, with new logos increased by 10% to 240 signed in the Period.
• 80% new business contracts sourced through the Company’s partner eco-system.
• Expansion of our market leading partner eco-system, including the highlight signing of a global reseller agreement with Zoom, with first customers already signed and live in the Period.
• Comprehensive U.K. court victory and subsequent settlement of all remaining litigation patent lawsuit matters with competitor

¹ Adjusted EBITDA is the loss on Operating Activities before depreciation and amortisation, exchange movements charged to the profit and loss, exceptional items and expenses relating to share option charges

² Adjusted PBT is the Loss before Tax before exchange movements charged to the profit and loss, exceptional items and expenses relating to share option charges

³ACV is the annual recurring revenue generated from a contract.

⁴ TACV is the total annual recurring revenue of all signed contracts, whether invoiced and included in deferred revenue or still to be deployed and/or not yet invoiced.

⁵ ARR is Annual Recurring Revenue of all the deployed contracts at the Period end expressed in GBP.

⁶ NRR is the net retention rate of the contracts that are live on the AWS platform rate and is calculated using the opening total value of deployed contracts 12 months ago less the ACV of lost deployed contracts in the last 12 months plus the ACV of upsold contracts signed in the last 12 months all divided by the opening total value of deployed contracts at the start of the 12 month period.

⁷Customer retention is calculated using the formula: 100% minus (the ACV of lost deployed contracts on the AWS platform in the last 12 months divided by the opening total value of deployed contracts 12 months ago expressed as a percentage).

Current Trading:

• Strong start to the new financial year with new business sales for Q1 in line with management expectations and ahead of the prior year.
• As announced in the Company’s update of 28 August 2024, the Group has signed a major new global reseller which has immediately resulted in the first customer being signed through this new partner in Q1. 
• Voice integration across this partner’s global UCaaS and CCaaS platform is expected to be complete in the coming weeks, with full product launch expected by end H1.
• New business sales highlights since the year end include:
• A new contract with a major US head-quartered BPO who will be using PCI Pal’s services initially across a number of its customers in the region.  The BPO has operations globally.
• A sizeable expansionary upsell to one of its largest customers to be utilised across various countries internationally. A testament to the Group’s strong customer relations.
•  An initial contract signed via the Company’s EMEA operation with a “Big Four” accounting and consulting firm.  The contract which is to initially provide in-house services regionally has been designed with future global and cross-department expansion in mind given the extensive operations of this new hybrid customer / partner. 

Commenting, James Barham, Chief Executive Officer, said:

“Overall we have made strong progress across FY24, continuing to deliver against our stated objectives to lead our market in true cloud solutions, and delivering to customers globally across our extensive partner eco-system. 

“The unfounded patent litigation brought against us, was a management distraction and cash drain for most of the last three fiscal years, and we are therefore clearly pleased that this litigation is now fully resolved following our success in the UK courts. What has been very encouraging is that throughout this Period, we have continued to grow revenues at market leading rates whilst also maintaining exceptional customer retention.  This, together with the improving operational performance of the underlying business, has created a strong platform for future profitable growth.

“We have started FY25 well with new business sales both ahead of last year and in line with management expectations.  We are therefore now executing against our near-term plans to make additional and considered investments in the business that will underpin the longer term future growth prospects of the Group.  With adjusted EBITDA profit achieved in FY24, positive operating cashflow and a strengthened strong balance sheet, we are excited by the breadth of the opportunity ahead of the Group as we continue building deeper and wider channel partnerships, progress our product roadmap, and further scale the business into new territories.”

Analyst Briefing: 9.30am today, Tuesday 22 October 2024

An online briefing for Analysts will be hosted by James Barham, Chief Executive Officer, and Ryan Murray, Chief Financial Officer, at 9.30am on Tuesday 22 October 2024 to review the results and prospects. Analysts wishing to attend should contact Walbrook PR on [email protected] or 020 7933 8780.

Investor Presentation: 11.00am on Friday 25 October 2024 (UK time)

The Directors will hold an investor presentation to cover the results and prospects at 11.00am on Friday 25 October 2024 (UK time).

The presentation will be hosted through the digital platform Investor Meet Company. Investors can sign up to Investor Meet Company and add to meet PCI-PAL PLC via the following link https://www.investormeetcompany.com/pci-pal-plc/register-investor. For those investors who have already registered and added to meet the Company, they will automatically be invited. 

Questions can be submitted pre-event to [email protected] or in real time during the presentation via the "Ask a Question" function. 

Analyst Briefing: 9.30am today, Tuesday 27 February 2024

An online briefing for Analysts will be hosted by James Barham, Chief Executive, and William Good, Chief Financial Officer, at 9.30am today Tuesday 27 March 2024 to review the results and prospects. Analysts wishing to attend should contact Walbrook PR on [email protected] or 020 7933 8780.

Investor Presentation: 3.00pm on Thursday 29 February 2024 (UK time)

The Directors will hold an investor presentation to cover the results and prospects at 3.00pm on Thursday 29 February 2023 (UK time).

The presentation will be hosted through the digital platform Investor Meet Company. Investors can sign up to Investor Meet Company and add to meet PCI-PAL PLC via the following link https://www.investormeetcompany.com/pci-pal-plc/register-investor. For those investors who have already registered and added to meet the Company, they will automatically be invited. 

Questions can be submitted pre-event to [email protected] or in real time during the presentation via the "Ask a Question" function. 

FY24 has been a real turning point for the Company, and I am exceedingly proud of the leadership and staff for their determination to deliver positive results in the face of tightened corporate technology spending, general economic headwinds caused by inflation and high interest rates, and of course the significant distraction from the now resolved unfounded patent litigation brought by our competitor Sycurio.

Business Developments

Over five years ago, as an early-stage SaaS B2B company, we set out on a journey to prove our value as a Cloud company serving the global secure payments market through a cloud centric technology proposition with dedicated focus on targeting the market opportunity through partnership channels. Throughout that journey we have delivered consistent top line growth while being thoughtful and careful about the investment and funding required to grow the business.  While I am disappointed that the Company was not able to report our expected full year of pre-tax profitability, due to the timing of revenue recognition relating to a specific customer, this does not detract from the successful operating outcome that the team has achieved this year, and the consequent substantial swing from negative to positive adjusted free cash flow¹

FY24 was a real turning point for the Company as we delivered our first full year of adjusted² EBITDA profit as well as positive operating cash flow, and in so doing highlighted the long-term operational gearing opportunity of the Company’s high margin SaaS subscription revenue model. I would like to personally thank all our investors for their support to date on this journey.

Notable areas of positive progress include continued strong revenue growth; consistently top industry percentile customer retention rates, and expansion of our partner network with global names such as Zoom. Our employee retention remains high, and our culture stronger than ever. I would personally like to thank each and every one of our team members for their contributions towards reaching the milestone of profitability and for continuing to drive towards the Group’s mission.

Board Changes

On behalf of the Board, I would like to welcome Ryan Murray who was appointed to the Board as Chief Financial Officer and Company Secretary on 14 October 2024. Ryan is a Chartered Accountant with extensive commercial, finance, tax and corporate finance experience, in the international technology sector. Ryan joins from AIM quoted FD Technologies plc where he was Group Financial Controller. 

As announced on 27 February 2024, William Good, the Company’s previous CFO, informed the Board of his intention to retire as CFO and Executive Director of the Company to pursue his other existing business interests. On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank William for his contribution to the growth of the Group and I would also like to welcome Ryan onto the Board.

Patent Infringement Claim

As previously announced the Company was not only successful in the High Court of England and Wales (“High Court”) in both defeating the claims of patent infringement made by our competitor, Sycurio, but we were also successful in our own counterclaims to invalidate Sycurio’s parent UK patent.  This outcome was notably reinforced by the Court of Appeal of England & Wales (“Court of Appeal”).  Subsequently, the Company entered into a confidential settlement with Sycurio that resolved all remaining aspects of the litigation in the UK and US as announced in June 2024.  The settlement enables management to move beyond the distraction created by this litigation over the last two and a half years, putting an end to what was viewed as an unwarranted and wasteful use of management time and cash resources.

Corporate Governance

The Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) recently announced an update to their corporate governance guidelines, and it is our intention to follow their expanded recommendations starting in FY25 when they become effective. I am mindful of the fact that as part of a fast-growing international organisation I must ensure that our organisational structure and corporate processes are both adaptive and robust so we can continue to deliver for all stakeholders, while not diminishing our entrepreneurial culture.  In that regard the Group is supported by an experienced Board of Directors, and led by a management team that has proven it can deliver. We take outside professional and business advice where needed and have access to an Advisory Committee consisting of executives and consultants with deep operational experience in select functional areas.

Our strategic aims are clear, our employee culture excellent, and our commitment to our partners and customers remains unshakeable.  I believe we have a balanced business and risk management structure that will allow us to continue to grow within acceptable levels of risk tolerance.

Stakeholder Communications

As a board, we remain focused on clear and regular communications with all investors, both retail and institutional, and expanding disclosures in line with the growth in complexity of the business.  We continue to utilise the Investor Meet Company portal, to reach shareholders of all types. During the year, the CEO and CFO held regular in-person meetings. As Chair, I am available as a direct line of communication to all shareholders in case other questions arise that need to be answered independently, as well as holding meetings with institutional shareholders around the time of the AGM. 

Forward Momentum

With the patent litigation now behind us, we can again fully focus on the growth opportunity in front of the Company; the further expansion of our global partner eco-system; and on our strategic product roadmap development aimed at expanding our addressable market over the longer term. Management is now 100 per cent focused on capitalising on the undoubted market opportunity before us as we look to deliver against our strategy of continued profitable growth, both organic and inorganic.

I continue to be excited and encouraged by the progress that has been made by the Group in FY24 and in the early part of FY25, and the Board is confident in the outlook and prospects in FY25 and beyond. I look forward to sharing further progress reports and news during the coming year, as we continue to execute against our ambitious plans.

Simon Wilson
Non-Executive Chair

¹ Net increase in cash before exceptional items and excluding the net proceeds from the issue of shares

² Adjusted EBITDA profit is the loss on operating activities before depreciation and amortisation, exchange movements charged to the profit and loss account, exceptional items and expenses related to share options

Overview

I am pleased to report another strong year of growth for PCI Pal as we continue to execute successfully against our stated objectives to lead our market in services delivered from the public cloud; whilst maintaining the most extensive and advanced partner eco-system in our market. 

Year on year revenue is up 20% to £17.96 million (2023: £14.95 million) with an exit ARR run rate for FY24 of £15.45 million, a 23% year on year increase (2023: £12.58 million).  TACV, the key leading indicator of the Company’s future recurring revenue, increased 17% to £19.21 million (2023: £16.43 million). Revenue numbers have been supported by top percentile industry customer retention with GRR at 97% for the year (2023: 95%) which reflects the value of our products, the high quality of services we provide, our focus on customer service and our global cloud platform.  I am especially pleased that underlying these healthy growth numbers is a stable core to the business manifested by exceptionally high service levels and cloud platform uptime exceeding five nines including three straight quarters at 100%. 

Gross margins have increased further to 89% (2023: 88%) which reflects the margin-rich nature of our subscription based licence model with services provided from PCI Pal’s mature, global, public cloud platform hosted in AWS.  The continued increase is a result of the high proportion of revenue achieved through licence sales and the proportionately reducing amount of sales from lower margin services such as professional services and charges from connection minutes.  This trend was expected and is a result of PCI Pal’s own innovation and patented IP that allows us to provide professional services more efficiently, and our ability to provide connectivity to contact centres without carrying call traffic.

The foundations of this business are its culture and people. We have bred a culture within PCI Pal that not only drives employee satisfaction, with high people retention¹ of 93% (2023: 96%), but also encourages high performance, entrepreneurialism, and ambition from all those that work within this growth business.  PCI Pal’s culture and our focus on our people is what has driven our success to date and will continue to do so as we scale the business further.

New business sales

Year on year new business sales were 10% lower than the record level achieved in FY23 at £3.8 million (2023: £4.1 million).  In FY23, we reported the signing of a large new customer in the US with over 10,000 agents, which was a strong contributor to the Group’s exceptional new business sales number in that year.  In FY24, the Company had more success in winning a volume of run rate contracts with small to mid-market contact centres, which makes up the majority of the contact centre markets in the UK and US. Within FY24, achieved the Company’s second, third, and fourth highest sales quarters in its history.  This was illustrated in the record number of new contracts signed, increasing 12% year on year to 271 (2023: 241).  This consistency of volume is encouraging for me as ultimately it is the foundation of our sustainable success from our channel and cloud model.

As well as the strong run rate, the Company signed a number of enterprise size customers.  Highlights of these included:

• A sizeable initial contract through a key reseller with a Fortune 500 US healthcare insurer.  The customer has numerous businesses across the US and so we have the opportunity to expand with this customer.
• A competitive displacement sold directly to a FTSE-250 financial services company in the UK.  PCI Pal is delivering its secure payment solutions across all communication channels in the customer’s contact centre covering phone (keypad entry), voice (speech recognition), and digital (payment link).
• Further adding to PCI Pal’s strength with US pharmaceutical firms, we added another Fortune 50 customer from this sector, resold through one of our top performing partners in the year.

Partner eco-system

With typically between 75-85% of new business contracts sourced from the Company’s partner eco-system, the continued success of these relationships, as well as the addition of carefully chosen new partners, are key contributors to PCI Pal’s continued growth momentum, high retention rates, and sustainable profitability. 

We continue to develop and expand the relationships we have with our existing resellers, the vast majority of whom are large, multi-national organisations with US headquarters including Genesys, Amazon, Talkdesk, Vonage and 8x8.  With the majority of our integrated partners PCI Pal is either the preferred or sole secure payments vendor that the partner works with in a resell capacity and we have achieved this by putting our partners first.  Evidencing the close relationships we build with partners we were pleased to be awarded global technology partner of the year with 8x8, a longstanding partner of the Company.

In the year, we continued to invest in our partner programme and channel team resources to continue to drive further deepened relationships with these mostly large international organisations. Reflecting this, 80% of new business contracts for the Company were sourced from partners (2023: 83%), and contributed 70% of the new business value signed (2023: 77%).  On an underlying trend basis, the value of contracts signed through partners is substantially more than any prior year except for FY23 where the Company signed a large one-off deal through one of its resellers.  This trend shows the increasing run-rate we are generating through partners, by volume and value, with many of whom we now have multi-year relationships with.

Of the total contracts sold in the Period, more than three quarters were contracted through Integrated Partners.  Integrated Partners are typically CCaaS (“Contact Centre as a Service”) or UCaaS (“Unified Communications as a Service”) providers where PCI Pal has a single repeatable integration to their own public cloud platforms which is then leveraged by the partner to deliver all sales they make to their customers.  It is common that these integrations leverage PCI Pal’s patented integration methods, which we have developed over a number of years having been the first to market with a true public cloud offering.  PCI Pal products are then available to those Integrated Partners’ customers across their entire platform, which commonly would be on a global basis.

In the year, we expanded our partner eco-system with numerous additional partners.  The highlight in terms of global coverage and scale has been the addition of Zoom which we announced in November 2023.  PCI Pal was selected following an extensive evaluation process by Zoom, to be a launch partner for their new ISV exchange programme integrated to both their Zoom Contact Centre and Zoom Phone services.  I’m pleased to report the successful integration was completed by the year end with both products live and at general availability.  We were also successful in signing a number of initial customers which are currently going through the new fast-track deployment process with Zoom.  We’re very excited by the truly global coverage and scale of Zoom and in their momentum into the contact centre space.

Since the year end, as announced in our trading update of 28 August 2024, we have signed a further global strategic integrated partner who despite historic relationships with our competitors is taking PCI Pal forward as its preferred vendor for secure payments.  We are now going through our enhanced partner integration and deployment process where the partner will have access to all new version and features of our product suite.  The new partnership has also immediately resulted in the signing of our first customer from the relationship.

In summary, the growth of our channel partner ecosystem, and its importance to our end customers, represents a valuable competitive moat.

Operations

PCI Pal has consistently achieved exceptional customer and partner retention.  The reliability of our platform from which we deliver our services is a foundation of this key metric performance.  As the first to launch a true public cloud platform in our market we have the most mature cloud platform offering in the space and as a result we have continued to deliver top percentile service uptime statistics.  Across FY24 we achieved in excess of 99.999% availability across our global cloud platform, with three straight quarters at 100% uptime.  This sort of exceptional performance is testament to PCI Pal’s product and engineering teams that we increased investment in from FY22 onwards.

In the year we rolled out a new support portal for customers to interact with us through a single, easy-to-use support environment that is optimised to minimise response times.  The results of the launch were that we have reduced response times by nearly a third, and in the year, we have consistently achieved better than our own SLA targets.  Reflecting these improvements customer satisfaction has increased further to 90% (FY23: 85%).

Further operational gains were delivered in the Company’s new customer deployment capabilities which we have historically measured using a time to go live (“TTGL”) metric.  Across FY24 whilst TTGL was relatively flat year on year overall, we in fact improved TTGL for higher value (projects those in excess of £25k ACV in value) by more than 10%⁶. 

To see these improvements coming from the same level of professional services resource year on year speaks to our improving efficiency. In FY24 we delivered 20% more projects than FY23, with the revenue value of those projects also increasing by the same amount (20%) year on year.  These statistics support our confidence levels that the operating core we have built for this business is suited to further scale and to do so cost effectively.  We expect to see further improvements in TTGL across the coming 12 months as our product enhancements empower reduced deployment times across all customer types and sizes, with professional services and custom work being allowed to focus more on larger customer projects.

Market Overview

Overview

Today PCI Pal sells its products primarily into the contact centre markets in its regional focus areas which are North America, UK, and ANZ.  Outside of these focus regions, the Company leverages its global cloud platform and partner eco-system to reach into other territories including mainland Europe, APAC, and LATAM.  These three regions represent further growth opportunities for PCI Pal as the business continues to scale.

The US and UK are the two largest contact centre markets in the world.  In both countries, workforces in contact centres are substantial with between 2-4% of national working populations estimated to be working in those environments².  This scale is similar across ANZ and Europe as well.  We estimate that between 60-70% of these environments handle sensitive payment data, which has been our key addressable market today.

Contact centres have long since evolved from lower service level cost centres to, today, where they represent the front line for many customer experience touchpoints for organisations across the globe.  Recent research³ shows that customer experience within contact centres in B2C environments is perceived to be on par with quality of product or service being provided as the most important success factor for customer interactions. These being ahead of, for example, the price of those services. Customer experience is therefore key.

The need for secure customer interactions

Security requirements for contact centres became more challenging with the on-set of the pandemic which accelerated the work-from-home trend that many businesses operate in today’s post-pandemic world.  Today, more than 75% of agents working in contact centres in the US and UK either work from home or have hybrid working locations between home and office.  Home-working of any kind presents an increased challenge for data security, particularly around payments which is the most sensitive personal data from a data theft perspective.  PCI Pal’s solutions remove sensitive data from the agent’s environment entirely, so whether the agent is in an office or contact centre, or working from home, they are not exposed to sensitive customer data.

Digital transformation in contact centres

Digital transformation has positively impacted a contact centre’s ability to provide a broader set of options to facilitate customer interactions and a positive customer experience.  Contact centres today handle any contact touch-points with customers outside of in-store interactions including telephone (live voice interactions), email, web chat, telephone (automated IVR), and any number of other digital interactions such as SMS and social media.  We are seeing companies embrace the choice to suit each individual customer’s contact preference, however, the shift to digital is happening relatively slowly still today. For example, over 70% of customer interactions are still carried out by telephone (voice) in the United States.  Of the growing digital channels, email and web chat make up over 25% of interactions⁴.  PCI Pal has solutions that cover the breadth of this omnichannel customer engagement mix.

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is growing in the contact centre market⁵.  To date its main use across customer interactions has been within web chat where “chatbots” are used to interact on basic tasks with customers rather than live agents.  These chatbots have historically used rule-based configurations, however, with the advancement of technology in the space we are beginning to see conversational AI vendors providing both chatbot and voicebot solutions to the market which are driven by natural language processing, which in essence is more what we would typically expect of AI-capability. 

PCI Pal has partnered with a number of conversational AI vendors, including Converse360 and Poly AI where we have integrated our secure payment solutions to their products to remove sensitive cardholder data from their environments and also support their own customers to achieve de-risking goals and compliance objectives.  Whether we are securing a bot or an agent, PCI Pal’s solutions are very similar and delivered in a relatively similar fashion.

AI is here to stay and will evolve within the contact centre market.  At PCI Pal we see opportunity from AI in our market, opening up new partner potential for the Group whilst making customer interactions more sophisticated which is consistent with our product roadmap direction.  That said we do not expect to see a pivot from live agents to AI voice or chatbots, rather we expect to see an evolutionary shift, similar to the digital transformation contact centres have gone through in the last 10 years.  More complex and high value interactions are going to be funnelled to highly skilled agents, with more basic and mid-level tasks carried out optionally by AI solutions as they advance in capability. 

Product Update

In FY22, the Company increased investment into its engineering and product functions in order to enhance the core product suite and grow its addressable market. We did this by introducing new products and features driving on-going strong customer retention, as well as creating additional upsell and cross-sell opportunities to drive future NRR. 

I’m pleased to say that FY24 has been another year of real progress in these plans.  Across the year we have delivered a number of key roadmap objectives including:

• The introduction and full launch of a new user interface that drives an enhanced user experience, both for the agent / business user and consumer across all voice and digital channels.  The new interface incorporates all of the additional payment methods available in PCI Pal today, such as digital wallets, open banking, and buy now pay later services.
• Improved data analytics capabilities that are providing insights and data to our customer success team around adoption and usage of our products and services.  This is the first of a number of enhancements expected as a result of continued strengthening of the Company’s data backbone.

• A significant enhancement to our payment services architecture which includes a new standardised integration method for all payment services with which PCI Pal integrates.  This enhancement is expected to substantially reduce the work-effort for PCI Pal when integrating to third parties which is in-turn expected to drive down time to revenue across customer deployments.  This functionality is a key stepping stone towards true self-provisioning for small to mid-market customers.
• A fast start payment processing option for small to mid-market customers leveraging partnerships with well-known international payment providers, including Stripe, that is creating the opportunity for PCI Pal to act as the payment provider.  This functionality will open up the opportunity for a new revenue stream for the business, as well as also presenting a further opportunity for the Company to drive down its time to revenue.
• A new partner on-boarding integration process which will culminate in new integrated partners going live faster, with tighter integrations, and higher levels of integrated productisation with the partner’s own product suite.  This methodology has been utilised on the new Zoom integrations, and we are expecting to see long term deployment efficiencies as a result.

Having focused our earlier stage engineering efforts on the innovation around third party (partner) integrations and the reliability of our global cloud platform, we are now enhancing the core cloud platform. Long term this will add to the Company’s addressable market opportunity by broadening PCI Pal’s value proposition, as well as enhancing the core business model today.

Settlement and full resolution to unfounded patent law suit

In the year we were very pleased to announce a full resolution to the unfounded patent lawsuits that were brought against us by a competitor, Sycurio.  Sycurio filed the litigations in 2021, not long after it was acquired by the US arm of the private equity firm Livingbridge.  For almost three years the Directors defended the Company from the unfounded claims being made which culminated in a resounding victory for the Company in the High Court of England and Wales which also included successfully invalidating Sycurio’s UK parent patent.

The Company was pleased to announce that following its resounding victory in both the High Court and Court of Appeal, it had reached a confidential settlement with Sycurio that resolved both the UK and US litigation in full. 

In defending against these lawsuits, the last two and a half years have been a distraction to management as well as a substantial drain on cash resources, with over £4.3 million gross (£3.3 million net of a High Court award) in legal fees and associated costs being incurred.  This has inevitably had some impact on the capital available to the Company to accelerate its growth momentum but, the Company is now very well positioned with a strong balance sheet to re-accelerate momentum and push forward with its stated objectives having now settled the case.

PCI Pal Intellectual Property

Invalidating our competitor’s parent patent in the UK, further demonstrates PCI Pal’s leading position as the company that disrupted a primarily hardware-based market, bringing the first true cloud solutions to the space.  We have continued to evolve our cloud environment at pace, which has included true innovation that has now been patented by the Company.  In particular, the Company’s patents cover unique technology that better enables it to integrate with our partners and other third parties. Such integration naturally carries material real value to the business given our model and the importance of working with partners to contact centre technology markets.  Our patents also protect our partners and the investment they make of their own to work in close partnership with PCI Pal.  We are proactively monitoring the marketplace and will defend our IP if required.

Outlook

Following our success in the patent litigation that has constrained our investment into the business for the last three years, I am immensely proud of the position we have put ourselves in today in what promises to be another exciting year for the business.  Having achieved continued revenue growth momentum and for the first time positive operating cash flow, we look ahead to delivering further growth in FY25 during which we will return to our plans to invest further in the business to maintain the long term growth opportunity and further build recurring revenues.

FY25 is also expected to be a progressive year for the evolution of our product-set that will see us enhance our relationships with partners and customers; generate increased operational efficiencies; and create new longer term addressable market enhancement opportunities. At the same time we are now able to fully consider all the strategic growth options available to this healthy and innovative growth business.

James Barham
Chief Executive Officer

¹Percentage of employees at start of year still employed at end of the year (excluding planned leavers)

² Source: OMDIA -Global Contact CenterMarket Forecast:

 ³Source: Contact Babel the US CX Decision makers guide 2023-24 page 19

⁴ Source: Contact Babel the US CX Decision makers guide 2023-24 Page 24

⁵Source: Contact Babel - The Inner Circle Guide to Chatbots etc 2024 - various points

⁶ The reduction in time between a customer signing a contract and the contract going live