Good morning, and welcome to the ActiveOps PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so.
Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to the Executive Chairman, Richard Jeffery. Good morning to you.
Good morning, and thank you, and welcome everyone to this half-year results from ActiveOps. As usual, we try and make it as interesting and colorful for the business, we do welcome questions as well. Do either put them online and or pick them up at the end as appropriate. We've got a quite, a, strong message, I think, to convey today. The headlines are very good for the business, there's a lot to be excited about. In the course of the next sort of half an hour of actual delivery, that where Emma and I will talk through, effectively, the headlines of our positioning.
We'll talk about the actual financial results. I'll then finish up with our sort of fundamental strategy and this ambition in the coming time. Off we go. I think what I want to start with today is highlighting the fact that just recently, many people on the call may have actually attended, we did a Capital Markets Day. That was something about really unlocking the full sort of aspiration of ActiveOps. This is not something we've done before, but in that day, we put out our sense now of where we're heading as an organization. That's in financial terms, heading towards achieving GBP 100 million of ARR and a 25% EBITDA company.
The reasons I can go into, but there's much more available on the investor website on that day, we think that's a kind of logical progression of where we are. The whole underpinning of the sort of velocity of that is reflected in our half year results, which we'll spend more time on today. For those of you who are unfamiliar with ActiveOps, I'll spend a bit of time just explaining where we fit in the sort of ecosystem of SaaS software. Our customers are large banks, insurance companies, or other organizations with lots of administration, and by consequence, lots of different things their people are doing in different teams, different products, different functions, banks, insurance companies, with thousands of people, but thousands of people doing different things in different teams.
They have systems that, again, you may have heard of, like workflow tools such as Appian or Salesforce, systems of record of people like Workday or People and SuccessFactors. Those are kind of different universes where you have the work going on, and you have the people doing the doing. ActiveOps sits at the intersection of those two types of organization, two types of computer software, where organizations have needs to stitch it all together to say, how much time have people got? How much work can be done? Whether it's a team leader this week, next week, or a departmental or indeed, the strategic operation of the business in terms of how they configure the business, what the future looks like. Really, that's the sort of secret source of ActiveOps.
We give people control. We give them visibility of the data, but we process it, and we present it in a form that supports that Decision Intelligence that they so critically need. The interesting thing for ActiveOps right now is that's becoming more of a sort of companies are becoming more self-aware. The impact for us of AI, of robotic process automation, process mining, these are all labels that our customers are wrestling with and trying to implement value from, is making their world more complicated to run. That speaks directly to the tooling and the support ActiveOps provides. With our support, with our technologies, organizations are not only able to perform better, but they're also more able to exploit and be certain about those really expensive investments they're also making in their own transformation.
ActiveOps is that fundamental control tool to accelerate and augment their business transformation, which is, as you can imagine right now, with all the sort of a need for agility and customer expectation, a big issue for a lot of our customers. In terms of an organization, we think we have a number of sort of key strengths, and some of those are on the slide there. At a financial level, ActiveOps is a really simple business. We sell SaaS software. It's billed annually in advance based on our user base, and that gives, and Emma will come back to this, a really nice financial model where the business can grow out of its own cash. It's 90% gross margin, and fundamentally, it also rolls over.
As we go into any given year, typically about 90% of our forthcoming revenue is already essentially sold. In each year, we're just adding to that as we sell new customers, we're doing new implementations, and that rolls through. It's a very, very secure and sound business model. We sit in a very interesting space, as I've described, and it's an area which we're quite differentiated in, particularly with the new acquisition this year, which I'll come onto. We properly represent the leading authorities in this space. There is, to my, to our experience, no other organization has focused on that particular world of Workforce Optimization in the complex world of back office, anywhere on the planet.
We operate now globally, and that's seen in the, sort of, success of the-- The truth of that is seen in the fact that we have customers in Australia and South Africa and Canada and all over the world who use our stuff to leverage and solve this particular complicated problem. The very nature of our business means our customers are blue chip, all sorts of implications of that makes sales larger, probably more protracted, but also in our history, I think, Emma, technically, we've never actually had a bad debt. We operate to a very sort of secure audience in that respect. Coming to the sort of forward look of the business, and it comes in a key stat for us, which is net revenue retention, we have huge expansion potential in our existing customer base.
Although we're now hitting around GBP 40 million of annual recurrent revenue, we can see at least GBP 130 million of accessible revenue from customers to whom we've already sold to. Think about that. We don't. There's no sales cost in terms of new customer acquisition. If we just keep that NRR, net revenue retention, so we're growing every year, there's GBP 130 million of accessible ARR for us to sell to. Of course, we're not just doing that because we are selling. We're selling to new customers who see the need for our stuff. We've had the best half, the best year ever last year, and the pace of that new customer acquisition is continuing to grow this year. This, the expanding opportunity is very large for the business.
The business has been on a path, in many ways, the half year results is just the start of what we think is a consequence of some sort of sequence of investments we've been making. About six years ago, we completely replatformed our technology, which has now been fully deployed on our customer base. We're now deploying better and better product at incremental revenue. Our Series are generating more revenue because we're offering more value to our customers. That is, if you like, creating this huge momentum to accelerate growth. Our next phase is really to sell more of what we've got.
We've made some strategic investments in our sales capacity in the course of the last year, which is genuinely, you know, leading some significant results as seen through the fees. From our point of view, an awful lot of very healthy momentum. Just to bring that to life a little bit, there's a slide here on the screen which just tells a story about one particular customer. This is CIBC Mellon, which is a joint venture in Canada that handles fund investment accounting for CIBC and BNY Mellon, two of the largest banks. Well, BNY Mellon is one of the biggest custodians on the planet. CIBC is a huge Canadian bank.
This is a classic example where a lot of people spending a lot of days trying to do that daily bank fund accounting, reflecting people's investment values, which was operates to a very tight cycle, and with an awful lot of data. An incoming manager found it was very hard to run. They had very little visibility over work requirements, skills, but also just productivity, performance. They knew they wanted to grow, they needed to expand their product set, but no real operational data on which to make that kind of decisions about where to put people and how to grow the business. ActiveOps has comprehensively solved that.
Catherine Thrasher , who was keynoted our conferences this year, at one of our conferences, was the COO there, and she will tell you all through the stats that appear, how it's enabled the business to accelerate in all sorts of ways. The sense of safety and control of the operational staff from being in a better managed environment where they knew what they had to do, and they could feel successful. But also from her perspective, her ability to flex the business and just as an example, open up another center in Vancouver to look after, to give advantage of a three-hour time shift between Toronto. It's just a brilliant example of how strategic, operationally and tactically, they are enhanced by having the value of ActiveOps systems in place.
Really great little story, and there's lots more on our website about equal stories like that. That's the type of experience customers have by introducing ActiveOps software and the methodology for managing operations that comes with it. Let's just move on to the actual results for the half year, which Emma will come on to the detail of, but from my point of view as the Executive Chairman, it really feels like a business which is humming. The core growth engine is delivering new sales. We've had five in the half year, and we've already had another three in subsequent to September. Compare that to last year, where we had nine in total over the full year, and nine itself was 3x the rate of the previous year.
The new customer acquisition is really going well, speaking to both the product set we have and the market demand. The other side of this business is that net revenue retention. You know, our software, if it does its job, actually reduces the number of people need. It improves the efficiency of the business. We're not doing our job if we don't enable that acceleration in productivity. If you like, naturally, the business is in its heads, which we would using our software. On top of that, with our product, our net revenue retention last year was 116%. Every single dollar of revenue last year, we're getting $1.16 for the current year. That's phenomenal.
It's phenomenal in any SaaS context. We're very excited about that because it's the manifestation of the product investments we've been making over the last few years. If you compound that going into each year, where you know, you'll get a 16% growth in the book each year, plus, of course, we're adding in our new customers each year, you begin to see why we think why we came out with the path to a GBP 100 million ARR business is pretty clear for us right now. The other facet of our confidence is coming from our expanding target addressable market. ActiveOps has been very focused on a certain type of work, the sort of complex administrative work. Of course, organizations have a lot of people doing a lot of things.
What we're doing in our, in our Decision Intelligence suite with the product is extending that. In a typical bank, now we can offer a suite of software, which is not just in the administration, but it's in the branches, it's in the relationship directors, in relationship managers. It's even more customer facing. We're actually significantly enhancing the addressable community within that customer community and of course, to our other potential customers. The final component of our success this year, I think, is the acquisition of Enlighten. Enlighten was a very similar company in a sense. It was very ox-centric, probably more consulting-led, but a consulting with a tool-attached organization. We've worked, you know, again, them and in Australia, and particularly over many years.
We were delighted to have the opportunity to acquire them this year, because with that comes, firstly, a body of knowledge and experience, which incredibly augments our own. Secondly, it extends our regional strength. We are by now the completely dominant player in Australia. Also it's introduced us and brought with it some really new 22 new customers, of which six or seven are very large enterprise organizations, which we will enhance our presence in the U.S. Probably more significantly, it gives us a huge amount of additional sort of a target addressable that we can go at. That revenue, which of course, we can leverage the infrastructure because we don't need two management teams, we don't need new. You know, our development centers.
There's a whole load of associated cost efficiencies, which we can bring on top of what was GBP 8.5 million of additional annual recurrent revenue coming into the books. A very, very good and we'll come to some details, but fundamentally, we're just as excited about having made the deal in here we sit in November, as we were when we did it back at the end of July, which, you know, is not always the case. I think a final word from me is then about that line along the bottom. This isn't a kind of regional, sort of regional pulse. What you can see there is all the different regions of business in various ways, have had a very good half year.
South Africa is a very high percentage. It all depends on the base, of course, but SA is a great strength, but then other regions are much larger, so a percentage increase is in that sense, slightly harder to achieve. The key thing, this is a very global group with a lot of global success. That's the sort of headlines.
Emma, perhaps I'll hand over to you to pick up some of the actual numbers.
Well, super. Thanks very much, Richard. We've had a very strong start to FY 2026. Even without the value add acquisition of Enlighten, our underlying metrics are solid for the first half of the year. It is worth just highlighting that the numbers that we're presenting for H1 only include three months of the financial performance of Enlighten, as opposed to six months. We acquired the business on the 27th of June, for H2, you'll see a full six months of trade included in the H2 numbers.
In terms of the financial highlights, to share with you, our organic SaaS revenue growth, apologies about the light, our SaaS revenue growth increased by 22% year-on-year, which is supported by the acquisition of new logos that we've had in the year and also the underlying NRR rates, which I'll come onto shortly. We've reported just under GBP 41 million of ARR at the end of H1, of which includes GBP 8.1 million coming directly from the recent acquisition of Enlighten. Even if you strip out the impact of the acquisition of Enlighten, we are still reporting an organic ARR year-on-year growth rate of 27%.
From an adjusted EBITDA margin point of view, we've reported 9%. For the same period last year, we reported 7%, that's despite the investment that we've done in our sales and marketing in the first half of this year. Finally, the cash position. We've reported a cash position of GBP 13.3 million versus the previous year, it was GBP 13.4 million. It's broadly in line. However, that is despite the fact that during the first half of this year, we paid out GBP 5.8 million of cash for the initial acquisition, the initial consideration payments for Enlighten. One of the other things to highlight on here is the T&I revenue recognition. Consistently over the last few halves, we've reported GBP 1.2 million versus the first half of this year, where we reported GBP 3.4 million.
That is 145% increase on a consequences basis, on an organic basis. One of the main drivers behind this is the new logo acquisition that Richard has already spoken to. Last year we onboarded nine new customers, and so far this financially, in the first half of the year, we've onboarded five. You're really starting to see that momentum fall through, which ultimately drives the professional services revenue for us. What we're typically going to see is return to normal levels. If you look at the pre-COVID professional services revenue levels, we are currently on track to return to those previous historic levels compared to what we've seen in the last few years.
In terms of some of the other P&L performance metrics, From a gross margin, we've maintained a 84% gross margin. We've delivered that rate consistently for the last few years. You do see a little bit of mix on the gross margin. You do have a mix between a SaaS margin and a T&I margin. Our SaaS margin for the first half of the year was 90%, which was a slight improvement that we saw in the first half of the previous year, which is driven by some restructuring within the server hosting environment to make that even more commercially additive to us. From a T&I margin perspective, these do fluctuate depending on whether we're installing for an existing customer or a new logo.
The margins typically that you'd expect to see for the T&I margins for us is anywhere between 50% to 60%. The operating costs, you'll see that it's gone from GBP 11.1 to 15.6 million, which is a huge increase, actually that is mainly driven by the consolidation of the Enlighten OpEx, also the sales investment that we've previously mentioned. We're talking a lot on here about adjusted PBT and adjusted EPS. The reason why we've put the numbers on here as adjusted is we've removed the impact of the deal fees relating to the acquisition of Enlighten. We did incur GBP 1.4 million of deal fees in the first half of the year, the EPS and the PBT numbers shown on the screen have excluded that.
We've seen an increase in adjusted EBITDA. We went from GBP 1 million for the first half last year to GBP 2 million. We've doubled the adjusted EBITDA performance in the first half of the year. One of the things that we've talked about for a number of years is around starting to see the operational leverage come through from our business model. We are really starting to see that. If you look at what the incremental revenue is half year on half year, then compare that to the margin against the increase in the EBITDA that we've performed in the first half of the year, every pound of new revenue coming through is worth more to us than what we previously had.
The EBIT, the adjusted EBITDA margin on new revenue coming through is 16% versus the combined average group, which is 9%. You're really starting to see that leverage come through in the business model. In terms of the strength of the SaaS model, one of the things we've done here is that chart in the middle, what we've done is we've split out where the growth of the ARR is coming from. We're talking about we're seeing a 27% increase in ARR year-on-year on an organic constant currency basis. What we're seeing here is the impact of the new logo momentum really pulling through.
While that 27%, 11% has come from new logo ARR growth, which comes from the new logos that we won in the back half of last year, plus the five that we secured already this financial year. Also the other number on here, which is impressive, is the NRR rate. On a constant currency basis, we're reporting 116% NRR, which very much talks to the expansion that we've done within the existing accounts, but also the upsell of the series, which I'll come on to shortly in a second. One of the things that we talked about, if I just continue on the theme of the NRR, what really supported by the NRR rate is the customer expansion that we see within our existing portfolio.
For some of you that have followed us for a while, you will have seen a similar chart to this before. We shared a U.K. Tier 1 bank last year. This year, we're sharing a African Tier 1 bank. This particular customer has been with us for over 10 years. However, just for presentation purposes, we've just included the last seven years on here. This is quite typical for what we see. Quite often we will go into a new logo, and we'll go into a particular division to try and solve a particular problem. What we then often will do is, from the return on investment that that particular division receives, is very quickly we will scale through the organization, that is exactly what's happened here.
In FY 2023, we went into a new area, which was the Central Ops service within this particular bank. In FY 2024, they continued to expand their user base, but also they moved up their unit of cost to Series 3. Just to give you a bit of flavor on that, ControliQ, our core product, our cornerstone product, it's split into series. Every time that we do a bundle of new releases of new features, we will basically call that series, and we will commercialize that. At this particular bank, they moved to Series 3, which actually does increase their ARR by 150%. The following year, we actually then upsold them to Series 4, which increased their ARR by a further 50%.
More recently, we've been able to cross-sell WorkiQ, which then has increased their ARR by a further 67%. One of the really interesting things is within the series that we have, is we have a number of customers that are still on Series 2.5. We've got 35 customers still on Series 2.5, which gives us a great opportunity to continue that acceleration on that ARR growth. We've also got 26 customers on Series 3, and just more recently, we released Series 4 at the start of this calendar year, and we've got 11 customers on that series at the moment. There's this huge expansion potential within our existing customer base, even just within the ControliQ series releases.
That's not to mention the cross-sell opportunity with CaseworkiQ, and then also the expansion of WorkiQ. In terms of the TAM and the achievable total addressable markets that we have ahead of us, what we've got on here is the achievable TAM, and what do we mean by that? As an organization at the end of September, our ARR was just under GBP 41 million. If you look at the existing customer base that we have today, and we look at the series uplift, the cross-sell opportunities that we have, we believe that we could grow the ARR within the existing customer base by GBP 130 million. If you also look into our target top 250 accounts, we can increase that ARR again by GBP 900 million.
One of the things that's worth highlighting is that with the GBP 41 million that we have today, we're actually only addressing 4% of the immediately achievable TAM that we have ahead of us. If you actually look across the sectors in which we operate in, beyond the target 250 accounts, we're actually addressing less than 1% of the available market that we have. There's a huge opportunity to continue, number one, pushing that NRR. The rates that we've seen recently have continued to deliver similar rates that we've seen in the last year. Also there's a huge opportunity to onboard new logos, which is what we're really seeing that momentum come through at the moment. Just to quickly touch on the Enlighten integration.
When we initially acquired Enlighten, we shared with the market our plan of an 18-month integration plan, which we are well into. We're five months into that 18-month integration plan. One thing I can say is we're currently on track to deliver that 18-month integration plan. The cost synergies that we've identified at the point of the acquisition, we are in the process of executing, and we are realizing them as we work through that process at the moment. We have combined the operational activity of the Enlighten organization within our own op structure already. The other thing really to highlight is we talked around the acquisition, the EPS accretive from FY 2027, which we're very much on track to still deliver.
It is worth pointing at this point, the initial consideration for Enlighten, we funded through our own cash reserves, so we didn't bring on any debt as part of the acquisition, and the balance sheet still remains strong, despite the acquisition. Just from a capital allocation perspective, in terms of our order prioritization. As an organization, we remain an organic growth business as our first priority. We will continue to invest in our sales and marketing. We will continue to invest in the partner channel, which we've just started on that journey very recently, and we'll continue to invest in our products as well. We will continue to look for M&A opportunities, provided it's the right opportunity for the organization.
Finally, the third in order of prioritization, we would look to return any additional funds available back to shareholders as and when appropriate. Finally, just a few takeaways from me. Firstly, we do expect to remain a double-digit ARR growth business for FY 2026 and beyond. We do have a clear strategy to drive growth within the organization. There's huge opportunity ahead of us, and then also to continue driving that operational leverage within the business. We still have a very strong balance sheet. We have no debt, we are highly cash generative.
Finally, as Richard's already mentioned, our ambition to become a GBP 100 million ARR business in the medium term is absolutely achievable. We believe it is achievable, and is what we are currently working towards.
Very good. Thanks, Emma. Just moving on then, in terms of some more substance about that, how the growth sort of strategy. I think if there's one anchoring point I wanted to make, is that this is essentially about continuing to improve on things we're already doing. This isn't about a sort of magic left turn or a big pivot. We have a powerful product, which people are buying quite well. As such, the agenda's moving from, if you like, product development and effectively marketing, to much more about the selling. Then to that extent, what we have is a proven engine. We're just gonna scale it. I say it's just, but there's so much about that. It's resilient. What do I mean by resilient?
We're global, so we're not subject to the vagaries of individual, if you like, regional prior... You know, regional economies go up and down. We've seen over the years, the value of currency con spread. In other words, because we have Australian dollars, we have New Zealand currency, we have U.S., we have Canadian, all coming back to the U.K., that makes the business also very, very resilient. There's lots of aspects of our business model, which means we can tactically deploy sales in particular regions to, if you like, capture opportunities. The NRR, I know we've mentioned that a lot, but you really can't underestimate the value of that core growth engine where your existing customers are buying more from you in, at the level they currently are.
That's a huge growth lever for us. What we've done in this year, we've increased our sales capacity. As of September this year, we had 16 quota carriers, and that would have compared with eight, or the prior year, just 8. Imagine that working through the system, becoming ramped, different, the vagaries of different sales in different areas, as you can imagine, fundamentally, the sales capacity of this organization is very, very different from what it would have been a year ago. Also, to augment that and to focus it, I've just appointed Steven Teasdale as our new Chief Revenue Officer, his role, because we operate quite a globally diverse model, is to pull that sales structure into a coherent proposition and give us the platform from which to scale.
As we hire the next tranche of five, six, who knows, sales teams, they're stepping into a well-structured, well-disciplined environment. Ditto, expansion about existing customers, the importance of account management, as you can imagine, and identifying what part of the organizations would value from ActiveOps' software is a critical part of expansion selling. Steven's come in to augment our capabilities in that area. Of course, underneath all that, the value of our IP, the value of our intellectual property. We have 15 years of underpinning our AI tools now, and that's our kind of uniqueness. We can bring some specific capabilities at the desktop that others just can't do. That's part of our moat, if you like. Of course, we're simplifying how we make our products work in terms of for our customers.
Instead of a team leader or operational leader looking at a set of numbers, however well structured, they can now tap a query into this ActiveOps software and say, "What should I worry about?" It'll come up with a considered view of all the different things that they might want to give their attention to. Lots and lots of really interesting capabilities on which to sell that platform. That is the anchor of our growth, is doing what we do better and at larger scale, but is what we already do.
Just by way of example, some of the tooling that's now in beta for our customers, I won't go into much, and again, much more on the website if you want to hear more information, but it's a combination of really practical stuff at the coalface to help organizations simply exploit and do better what today. That would be a productivity boost, which is being tested by our customers. We're also going into different domains, like case analysis and process mining. It's a huge issue for our customers, and we're providing tools to do that just as a by-product of using our software, rather than having to get extra software or additional experts or consultants in to do it.
Right through to one of the most troublesome issue for organizations is benefit measurement as they deploy technology, and we're giving them a transformation tracker as a tool, so they can essentially scorekeep themselves, not just within operations, but across the whole enterprise as they deploy and they manage different tools. That makes ActiveOps a kind of meter of value of those projects and processes they're looking to change, which in a world of so much moving parts, is data beyond the, it's worth a lot, let's put it that way. Lots of exciting things to talk about. The other thing that I think is really notable in terms of the last half, is just the level of interest.
We've always taken a pride in networking our customers and building this community around pro-professionalizing operations management. There's some stats on the screen there. We have our customer events, one in Toronto, one in Melbourne, and in London. This year we were exceptionally pleased with the turnout. Huge number of customers, and also a huge number of potential customers who, frankly, coming to our events gives them a sort of a very much an experience they realize they want to be part of. Very powerful as a business accelerator tool.
Also this particular year, I think, almost all the Enlighten customers came to Capacity events, and that's really had its impact in terms of them seeing that becoming part of the ActiveOps community is gonna augment and, you know, add a huge amount of value. We're already seeing cross-selling opportunities and accelerated demand to move on to the ActiveOps platform from the Enlighten customers, which again, will help to improve the pace at which we can achieve operational gearing. It'll help expand the target addressable market because some of those customers are really quite large as well. An awful lot from our sort of infrastructure, again, which is just driving extra value, but at very little incremental cost.
The second pillar, though, beyond the sort of doing what we do better and larger, is now starting to focus around different ways of going to market through channels. ActiveOps has a relationship with many, many organizations because of the nature of who we work with. But we've recruited a head of group partnering because we see there's a huge opportunity to take our product to work with some of those other big institutional systems like Workday, like ServiceNow. Rather than going direct to those core system owners and their own ecosystem, we're working with the partners, the people who have responsibility to-- A business model requires selling more software to those infrastructures.
The example at the moment is a healthy relationship building with a company called Rulesware in the U.S., which is a very big Pega partner, Pega being a workflow tool, where we are working with them to deploy ActiveOps in the environments that they have for their customers, but also develop a kind of niche product fit to that specific environment, which we can only do with their help. 'Cause we see that opportunity for us is in terms of business development, where those environments, those software platforms, have particular features which we can sell to. I think, see, our partner strategy is something that we'll be working on in the course of this year. I think by the end of this year, we'll have a very clear view and some prototypes working, like the Rulesware relationship.
I hope within three years, we'll be looking at the introductions and the co-sales from our partner network being incredibly accretive and additive to what's really fundamentally an organic direct sales growth engine. It all adds together to really a hugely positive outlook for this business. It does feel like a number of threads are coming together. In terms of the outlook, the second half is continued in the same vein. You know, lots of things to talk about in due course. At next results show, I'm pretty confident to be reporting positive things. Fundamentally, we've already had three new customers after the half year, so that's eight cumulatively for the year.
As I almost said, the Enlighten acquisition is bedding in nicely, with absolutely confidence around the cost savings, but also the capability enhancement I think that we're looking for. The impact of the investments in the sales structures and the like, really starting to kick through. Overall, that adds up with a management team that's bringing a confident about the outlook, but also returning to that GBP 100 million ARR thing. You know, that's, of course, it's not gonna be easy, and it feels like a logical progression of the rate and the velocity of this business right now, rather than a sort of a moonshot, big hairy goal activity.
A lot that we are kinda have to work on, but as ever, it's it is an interesting space and we're as excited about it as we ever are. That's the presentation deck, but I see a few questions have popped up on the Q&A here.
Do you want me to jump in with the, with one on deferred income?
Yeah, go for it.
Okay, perfect. There's a question around deferred income sales from GBP 16.7 million to GBP 13.9 million . The main driver behind this is the timing of invoices. The first half, most of our renewals take place in the second half of the year. Actually the highest was on deferred income is in H2. If you look over history, you will see that at the end of H1, there is a natural dip into deferred income. It is not a signal of slowing billing momentum.
From James: How much of the CaseworkiQ ARR came from cross-selling rather than new logos, and can this pace continue? I think to answer the last bit first, yes, definitely. Interestingly, most of the CaseworkiQ is a expansion, so it's customers who absolutely know the value of ActiveOps, but the value of the CaseworkiQ product to extend it to a more complex type of work. Interestingly, though, almost all the new logos took a blend. From the get-go, there was both the ControliQ and the CaseworkiQ. I don't think we've had a single pure play, new CaseworkiQ sale. I might check myself on that one, but to the point, it's certainly complementing the portfolio, and it's a very big expansion lever.
Should we expect further mergers and acquisitions to drive the next phase of growth, or has the strategy shifted to purely organic? I think what we saying there is whether with. I mean, ActiveOps has the capacity to achieve its targets through organic growth. As the Enlighten acquisition, I think, is demonstrating it's a very useful accelerator, both in terms of client prospects and also just fundamental revenues. It absolutely is part of our activity.
In fact, with the return of our share price to what you might certainly in excess of where we floated, of course, that gives us greater access to capital and the potential of doing M&As through that, through that raise, which some of you may know the history, but shortly after we floated, we had an opportunity, but with the market context, it, we weren't able to do the deal, which is frustrating at the time, but I think that's in a much better place today. No, we will absolutely do selective acquisitions if the opportunity is there. We have a very clear set of criteria against which we would be doing that.
In terms of the time frame attached to the GBP 100 million ARR, we haven't gone out with a deadline or a time frame as such. What we have said on that is in the medium term, which sort of what do we mean by that? It's anywhere between three to five years, and it's probably the goal.
Market speak for that sort of time frame?
Yeah.
Yeah. As for the share buyback, any thoughts on potential timing or financial achievements to trigger a shareholder dividend? Yeah, I mean, it is third on the list of capital allocation. This is primarily a growth stock, and I think for most of the people who invest in the stock, it's a growth, you know, it's a growth agenda. However, there is an element of sort of financial maturity around dividend, and as a significant, you know, as a founder and as a shareholder myself, you know, that would, that is a factor to consider. Fundamentally, with the level of opportunity we see in front of us, I think it's a growth investment. You know, we would invest for growth.
We'll take that under advisement. I mean, at the moment, I think, you know, the answer is not. We just recognize that there is a potential for that, should the cash pile grow, we haven't got the other obvious opportunities in terms of M&A, for EBITDA reasons, we want to maintain our profitability, and so on. You get to that place, the share buybacks or possibly dividends, you know, will become the logical next step.
That's great, Richard, Emma. If I may just jump back in there and thank you for addressing all those questions from investors today. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Richard, before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Thank you. ActiveOps is on a really strong roll. We've got a fantastic NRR, we've got a growing client base that's a, you know, new customer client base, and so as I hope has come through today, I think it's a business which has got a long way to run. The only other point, I think, is we are, I think, enjoying being on the public markets, and I think the ActiveOps sort of part of participation and AIM is certainly a very good place for us to be right now. For that reason, I'm grateful for anybody on this call who's taken the interest in the stock. Thank you all.
Fantastic, Richard, Emma. Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback and know that the board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ActiveOps PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.