Right. Good afternoon, everyone, welcome. We didn't quite know how many people were gonna turn up when we sort of set up the capital markets. I think we thought about 30, and so it's like sort of 60 people registered. Apologies, a little bit more cramped than we were expecting. It's really great to see you all, and either it's a very dull day in the city, or let's hope there's something interesting to talk about, right? It is a absolute pleasure to welcome you, our shareholders, partners, and analysts, and to open today's Capital Markets Day. On that basis, off we go. There we go.
In terms of over the next 90 minutes, we'll take you through the story of ActiveOps, who we are, the scale of the opportunity, and how we're positioned to deliver sustained, profitable growth. I'll begin with a short introduction, the story of where we've come from and how we've built such a resilient and efficient business, and why the opportunity ahead of us is greater than ever. Bhavesh will expand on our market, our positioning, how ActiveOps fits into the world of accelerating digital transformation, and the customer opportunities that we are capturing already. After that, Phil and Dave will take you deeper into the product, showing you the depth and power of our offering, and really how our innovation and AI capabilities are unlocking new value for our customers and driving customer acquisition.
Emma will then take you through the financial story, how our operating model translates that innovation into consistent cash generation, reoccurring revenue, and scalable growth. Finally, I'll return to close the session by talking through our growth levers, the drivers that give us the confidence in reaching our medium-term ambitions, which we'll expand on today, and continuing to build shareholder value. Right, let's just talk a bit about the origins of ActiveOps. Back in the 1990s, my co-founder, Neil Bentley, and I were consulting with major banks and insurers. These organizations had invested heavily in process improvement, total quality management, reengineering Lean, but something was being missed. We'd watch the same teams doing the same work, same system, same process, produce very different results from one day to the next.
The variability wasn't the process, it was the actual management of the work itself. Teams were reacting to what had to be done, rather than planning what could be achieved with the capacity they had. That idea, to move management from reactive to active, became the foundation of our methodology, Active Operations Management. It was never about measuring people for the sake of it was about giving them numeracy and foresight, helping leaders and teams anticipate demand, plan with precision, and make confident decisions about how to use their time and their talents. Now, we embedded that approach into software in 1995, forming Workware Business Systems, and by 2005, we'd spun it out as Active Operations Management International. 2007, Neil and I bought out our consulting partners, leaving us free to drive the business forward.
From then on, we've been really disciplined builders. Across three decades, we've only raised GBP 5 million external investment from Calculus Capital back in 2014. Everything else has been self-funded through sales and success. That capital efficiency is not an accident. It's a reflection of our business model: recurring revenues, cash in advance, high margins, and quite importantly, blue-chip customers, where we're in the engine room. They rely on us every single day. Our software is not peripheral. It sits at the core of how major enterprises deliver their customer propositions. When our platform runs, the bank meets its service levels, the insurer settles its claims, the outsourcer delivers on time.
What that means is our revenues are sticky, and they're resilient, and increasingly, as you well may well know, geographically diversified, 'cause the problem's across the world. Europe, North America, Africa, India, and Asia Pacific, ActiveOps is active in all those regions. What's driving demand today is really an extraordinary level of investment our targets have already made in platforms like Appian, like Salesforce, like ServiceNow, in those human capital systems like Workday and SuccessFactors. These are powerful systems, but in practice, they often leave unrealized value on the table. The data is vast, but it's fragmented. The processes are automated but not orchestrated. Managers have more information than probably ever before, yet less clarity about where the work actually is and how to get it done. That's what ActiveOps is all about.
We sit at that intersection of the process and the people, bringing together their data and workflows into one view of reality. Thank you, my sound engineer back there. Our software methodology unlock that hidden value in those investments, surfacing capacity, stabilizing performance, and providing that, this is a key phrase, meter of value, that connects the technology investments customers have made to the business outcomes that they're looking for. That's a very scarce commodity, and we'll return to that theme, as you'll see through the day. We accelerate and de-risk transformation. We help leaders see what's really happening in their operations, plan with precision, and manage proactively. Whether their teams are using ServiceNow, Appian, Salesforce, Workday, or indeed, as the reality, combinations of all of the above. That's why our customers stay with us year- after- year.
They don't just buy software, they buy the confidence to transform, knowing their operations, on whom their customers rely every single day, will continue to perform flawlessly every day. What's in the box? At the heart of ActiveOps is a set of capabilities that we think are difficult to replicate and increasingly valuable in the context of automation and AI. The first is data. Like so many other domains, the value of data and the ability to synthesize it with other contexts is just becoming you know, such a lever on value. Over 15 years of anonymized operational data with some of the world's largest organizations, that provides a unique empirical view of how work really gets done across industries, geographies, and systems.
That data fuels our benchmarking, it powers our machine learning models, and most of all, positions ActiveOps as a trusted source of operational truth for our customers. The second is deep subject matter expertise, and we deal in some complex worlds. I'm the son of a farmer. How I ended up as a back-office expert, an expert in back-office systems is beyond me, but anyway. But it's built through decades of focus on the realities of managing complex, regulated operations. We understand the dynamics of performance, variability, and capacity at a level no one else in the world really does, and that expertise has only been expanded and deepened by our recent purchase, by our recent acquisition of Enlighten. Adding complementary analytics, capability, customer relationships, I'll go into more, and additional depth in the subject matter itself.
It's this domain understanding that ensures our technology solves real problems. The third is technical capability. We now have, within ActiveOps, I believe, a truly world-class development organization, combining that disciplined engineering with creativity in the latest toolsets in AI, data science, and product design. The three things together is what allows us to translate that operational insight into powerful, scalable technology, and you'll hear more about that. Fundamentally delivering measurable performance improvement to our customers, which is in scarce supply. Together, those three foundations, data, domain expertise, and technical excellence, form a virtuous circle. Our data deepens our insight, our insight guides our engineering, and our engineering develops more data. It's powerful. That cycle is the engine of innovation that I think will keep ActiveOps not just successful today, but for many years to come.
The challenges out there are only getting more complex. The tools may be getting more advanced, but the complexity or orchestration is only getting harder. We have a model that converts growth into cash. We've taken that foundation and built a highly efficient commercial model around it. SaaS revenue, build and advance, high growth margins. Importantly, a consulting enablement layer that ensures that adoption, evangelism, and renewal. I don't know how many here present went to our capacity event in Canary Wharf this year, the level of passion, almost verging on a cult, that our customers enjoy, you may hear a little bit more about that in a second, is fabulous because it reflects the value they personally receive, and more importantly, it sustains us.
That consulting enablement layer is part of the way that we can ensure when they pay that service fee, they get the outcome they deserve. Minimal capital requirements. You know, we generate cash to sufficient our growth. We've never had to come back to the market for more cash. On that topic, you know, in 2021, we chose to list on AIM. The purpose of the flotation was to provide an exit for Calculus Capital, our EIS investor in 2014, and for others who had supported the ActiveOps journey. Our balance sheet was strong. We didn't need to raise capital to fund growth. We chose public ownership because it aligned with, I think, who we are, transparent, accountable, and focused on that sustainable long-term value.
It provided a better fit for us than perhaps the private equity alternative. The IPO rewarded our early investors with an excellent return. Calculus, I think, really has a five and a half times return on their investment. It also marked a new chapter in the business, that was 2021. As I said, my co-founder, Neil, stepped back operationally. He remains a significant and supportive shareholder. As we became a public company, we strengthened our governance. ActiveOps has an excellent set of non-executive directors, some of whom are in the room. They're active, they're experienced and genuinely fully engaged in supporting myself and other members of the executive team. Mike McLaren and Hilary have been on the IPO since the IPO.
Bruce Lee, who's not here today, he's in the U.S., but he's recently joined the group board, bringing some real technical and data and technology expertise to the team. I think genuinely, they brought immense support to me personally, but they bring continuity and insight and challenge, to be fair, which is, I think, the hallmarks of the kind of governance maturity that ActiveOps is now achieving. A question often raised, we remain entirely satisfied being on a list of public markets. There's a perception maybe that valuations may be higher, but our experience, I think, is that strong public market performance and transparent governance are powerful drivers of value.
Our share price today now stands well above our flotation price, which is a matter of great satisfaction to me, and others in the room, I suspect. The more important, reinforcing our confidence that when the right opportunities arise, all the value of being on the public markets then come available. We have access to capital for M&A, we'll talk more about that, and strategic investments without compromising our independence. It's suiting us well, and we're excited about staying where we are. Since listing, we've invested steadily in innovation, as I mentioned, establishing a world-class data and AI team, expanding our development capacity, strengthening our regional leadership, and pursuing a selective M&A activity aligned with our strategy.
I think important for, as you look at the capability of the company, we've shown we can make those acquisitions work. Integrating new teams, we've done 4, integrating new teams and customers, whilst maintaining that critical focus on your customer base, capital discipline, and delivering the returns you expect. By example, was OpenConnect. We bought the company back in 2019, which brought valuable technology and clients into the group, but within 12 months, we sold its non-core assets for just under 3x the purchase price that we bought the whole company for. That was a very successful project. The customer base and the product set continue to with us today. Our innovation goes far beyond that.
In a world where I think automation and AI are simultaneously reducing the effort, multiplying complexity, this is really important. The need for visibility and control and coordination is just becoming exponentially greater than ever. Far from reducing our market, automation and AI have expanded it because the work is no longer confined to the back office. It's distributed across channels. You know, the enterprise, customer service, risk, finance, operations, they're all connected, they're all competing for shared and scarce capacity. Orchestration suddenly becomes hugely important. We're building those platforms of control that large enterprises now urgently need to manage that complexity because they're failing so badly in so many cases.
We're building that platform of control to manage that complexity, optimize working capacity across channels, geographies, and those Appian and Salesforce, and all the other kind of gizmos that people are sinking huge quantities of capital into to deliver those process improvements and those cost reductions. That's seen in the release of CaseworkiQ, for example, supporting the long duration, high-stakes, regulated work. Now, excitingly, our integration of WorkiQ into the core ControliQ, which automatically captures and interprets effort and outcomes without the need for hard-coded integrations. I'll say that again. Our Desktop Analytics can determine what's going on without the need for hard-coded integrations, which given the amount of money spent on integration, is potentially mind-blowing. That makes our solutions resilient.
It makes them adaptive to the realities and complex, fast-changing enterprises, allowing our customers to evolve their processes and systems without losing that visibility or control. ActiveOps today is led by an experienced team. Over that time, we've grown, we bring together sort of domain expertise, as I said, but also proven operational leadership and a shared commitment to our mission. Over time, I think we've built some exceptional strength across technology delivery. Sorry, this thing really is giving me streak today. Gives ActiveOps, I think ActiveOps, me personally, the confidence and the continuity to scale, 'cause that's really what we're here today to talk about, the ability to scale faster than ever before. Whilst we're proud of our track record, I think the capacity to grow is only growing.
In terms of today, ActiveOps is a profitable, cash-generative SaaS company, delivering Decision Intelligence to the world's largest service organizations. We're helping them manage complexity, meet regulation, and get more value from those investments they've already made, and those still to come. The long-term prospects are, I think, enormous. As automation and AI continue to reshape how work is done, the need for ActiveOps' platforms of control will only grow. There's such a growing sense of disappointment in execution, and the focus is turning towards delivery and ops execution, and ActiveOps is right there. We've built the IP, the data, the leadership, and the credibility to meet that demand, and we've done that with discipline, creating jobs, paying taxes, and building shareholder value whilst maintaining our independence and purpose. Thank you for today.
In terms of what we're gonna take you, as I said, our next step is Bhavesh, who's gonna talk about the market in more detail and the opportunity. We are fiercely proud of where we've got to, but personally, I am just as excited really about the doors that are unlocking in front of us. Thank you. You're gonna give me a clap on that, is that right?
There you go. Thank you, Richard. I've gone for the old school paper today, as opposed to the AI. Good afternoon, everybody. As Richard said, my name is Bhavesh. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at ActiveOps. Some of you probably don't know me. I've been at ActiveOps now for just over three years. My background is B2B technology marketing. I've been lucky enough to market technologies, services all over the world, from start-ups through to the mega vendors like Oracle. Richard mentioned the word cult. I must admit, when I first joined ActiveOps, I was a little baffled by this idea that our customers are advocates. 'Cause I come from a technology marketing background, it's very rare to have a volume of customers that are hugely passionate about the technology that you provide.
I can tell you now, three years in, it's incredibly true. The customers are what I would call true raving fans. As a marketeer, it's a great foundation to start on. It's a great foundation to build a strategy on. Talking about customers... Let's see if this thing will work today. There we go. You all know this, ActiveOps, our sweet spot is enterprise brands across financial services, insurance, healthcare. You also know that we have customers in over 40 countries with a very strong history of brand advocacy. You know, you'll hear a bit later on from Emma, when we talk about the TAM, we're only just scratching the surface. The question is, How are we going to accelerate the growth from an ActiveOps perspective?
In order to do that, we have to first understand what our customers are gonna go through over the next three to five years. What are they faced with? What we do know, there's gonna be a lot of disruption ahead. We know that our customers face fierce competition, ever more demanding customer expectations, and increasing regulatory burden. The change that they have to go through is not just critical for growth, but for many, it's survival. As the market conditions require rapid change over the next three to five years, how are organizations gonna keep up? What are they gonna do to transform? They're gonna ask themselves a number of questions. Strategically, what are they gonna do?
Many will talk about the need to digitalize products and services, streamline their customer journeys, All of them will drive operational efficiency or want to drive operational efficiency. The truth is, though, it's the AI, that's the key technology driver of change over the next three to five years. Organizations aren't very good at transforming. They don't have a great track record. According to McKinsey, in their State of Organizations report, only 14% of organizations truly achieve an agile operating model. 90% of the leaders say they need capability building, Only 5% believe their organizations are capable of doing it. I guess the most damning stat is despite all the huge investment in technology and capability, 72% of change projects or transformation projects fail.
That's really because they haven't been able to take it from strategy to delivery and the delivery of impact from an execution point of view. I really like this statement from McKinsey, this idea that what companies in short are good at is defining what they want to achieve, but they struggle with the how and make that happen. That's really interesting and really exciting for us as ActiveOps, because we put the how into the what and how. The market conditions are right, so we know we can help our customers. This was doing this earlier on in our dry run, down quicker. One area where AI is predicted to make a huge impact in the how in the coming three-five years, is in the automation of processes, something that Richard had talked about a little bit earlier.
In this Gartner chart, you will see that hyperautomation is gonna be one of the largest spend from a technology perspective. Hyperautomation, as the name would suggest, it's using AI as well as a bunch of other technologies in order to further automate processes. In the next three-five years, the fight behind AI and human resources is gonna play out. How much can be automated? How much staff do I really need? What type of resources and skills am I gonna need in the future? Those are just some of the questions our customers will be asking over the next three-five years. Again, this is fantastic news for ActiveOps. That's because hyperautomation focuses on operations. That's where it starts, enabling processes to be transformed and automated. AI agents do more work, and traditional silos that we know today will collapse.
Again, great for ActiveOps, operations will be the heart of this new order. Richard spoke about the intersection between process and people, and that's a really important point to make today. Market conditions are good for us, as I've outlined. Customers are gonna be spending money on operations, which again, is our sweet spot. We have a solution to bring these two worlds together. In essence, we are in the middle of this change. We are, I genuinely believe, in the eye of the storm over the next three-five years. The opportunity for us to bring together the worlds of process and people, bringing together workflows, processes, and technology with time, skills, and complexity of people. That's really the key to turning strategy into measurable, sustained outcomes.
According to McKinsey, it's how you build that institutional capability to drive sustained business impact. We call this Decision Intelligence. Of course, you will see today, there's a hell of a lot of AI in it. How are we gonna translate all of this into our conditions for growth? What are we gonna be doing to capitalize on this Hyperautomation wave? You're gonna hear pretty soon from the product team. They're gonna show you how we're rapidly expanding our platform, which is already built to support some of these key business initiatives, and how we're gonna drive more of that process agenda. We're also expanding our messaging, our positioning in the marketplace, 'cause we have to appeal to a wider audience, not just operations. We have to appeal to technologists.
We have to appeal to the individuals and organizations that are driving the transformational agenda, along with the other C-suite. We have to be positioning ourselves and evolving our positioning from where we are today. You're also gonna hear from Richard a little bit later on, talking about our push towards a co- partner strategy, looking at appealing to consultancies, systems integrators and technology ISVs that are really driving that agenda of change within our enterprise customers. I thought I'd bring this to life a little bit 'cause I think the key point that I really wanna make here is that we're already doing this. ActiveOps customers are already on this path and have been doing this for many years. I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a story about Nedbank.
Nedbank is one of the largest top five banks in South Africa. actually, Nedbank is probably one of our most innovative customers in EMEA. Around five years ago, Nedbank had a bit of a problem. They needed a point of difference in their market. Their cost income ratio was taking a bit of a hit. Their customer service was the same, if not probably worse than everybody else. In fact, everybody's customer service in the South African market of banks was rubbish. I guess all of us who have banks as our own personal customers, we know they're not great at customer service anyway. This is not a new problem. It's a problem that a lot of organizations are trying to solve, Nedbank decided they're gonna do something about it. They embarked on a transformation journey.
They called it Project Phoenix, the key essence to that was to delight customers. It was to put the customer at the center of their business. You know, we all know that's not an easy thing to do. How have we been supporting Nedbank through this journey over the last three to five years? In three ways. First of all, taking a data-driven approach, giving them the insights so they can understand what areas of the process they should be automating. They have a mantra at the bank, which is: digital when you want it, human when you need it. It's really critical that we're enabling them to identify what's the right areas to tackle to drive the biggest impact. The second thing is, how do we help that bank and Nedbank release their potential?
Yes, we can release capacity, but how do we make them or support them use that capacity wisely as quickly as possible? Of course, it can't be a one-off. It's got to be a long-term, sustained impact, and again, supporting the bank over the last three-five years to drive continual impact. Looking fast, fast-forward into today, how are they doing? We think about the choosing bit, the choosing of the processes and the steps in the process. They found through the ActiveOps data set that 20% of the tasks accounted for 80% of time, and they just figured out they could probably automate about 44% or reduce work by 44%. That's what they originally started with. The stats on the screen there is where they are today.
They've in the retail and business bank in particular, they've eliminated 25% of work through automation, 10% through Lean, and 9% through Gen AI. That Gen AI number is going to increase over the next three-five years. None of this would have been possible without the ActiveOps data set, without the effort lens that we provide, 'cause we enable them to pinpoint the areas they're going to drive the biggest outcomes and change. What about the other percentages of people, the people doing work? The parts that human does, you know. Well, through the visibility, we enable them, and they've been able to unlock capacity.
Within three months, we've seen double-digit improvements in productivity across multiple areas of the bank, which has been proved significant in terms of the outcomes they've been able to achieve. I guess the first question you're probably thinking in your mind is, what? What did they really achieve as a result of all of this? Let's have a look. If you remember what their initial premise was, right? They wanted to delight their customers. They wanted to put the customer at the center of their business. Three examples here of what they've achieved. On the insurance side of the bank, they've seen turnaround times for things like funeral and death claims, half, in some cases, more than half. Now, just think about that for a second.
If you're a distressed customer who's got a parent or somebody that you've just lost, you want your bank or your insurance company to pay you out as quickly as possible. That has a material impact on your brand, on your brand credibility. The retail and banking side, they're now one of the market leaders in the South African market for things like home loans. They process home loans faster than any other competitor in the local market. If you're buying a home, which I'm trying to do right now, you want that done as quickly as possible. They've been able to win market share as a result of that. Finally, on the debt recovery side, which is a little bit more nuanced, right?
You want to collect the money, you want to do it in a way that the customers are well treated. This has been transformative for the bank. Their cost to collect is reduced by 54%. Last year alone, they collected ZAR 17 billion, which is about GBP 700 million in their financial year, which was a significant number for their bottom line. They've got to balance that with the customer experience. They managed to service something like 1.6 million customers, and importantly, 110,000+ of those were able to retain their vehicles, and over 8,000 were able to retain their homes. That shows a good balance between managing their customers versus driving the revenues.
The main headline, though, is their Net Promoter Score over the last few years has gone from 7.8 to 80. They are now the number one in the market for customer experience, and it's now a significant differentiator for Nedbank in the African market. It's not an isolated story. We hope, depending on the courier, we hoped to give you some packs when you leave today, and in those packs, you will see a booklet, which has a number of customers from around the world with different transformation stories, solving different problems, similar to what I've just described with Nedbank. I mentioned earlier when I joined ActiveOps three years ago, I didn't believe Richard, in terms of, you know, the customers.
I did scratch my head a little bit until I spoke to some customers, you know, they truly are raving fans. Our customers are absolutely passionate about ActiveOps and the impact that we generate. I've been lucky enough to interview customers all over the world and see that. I always say to Richard, every time I do an interview, "I'd love to have the whole company on my shoulder, so you can hear what a customer says." It is amazing. I don't want you to take my word for it, I'm going to show you some actual customers talking about what they think of ActiveOps.
We have currently six top strategic priorities. They are built around customer, profitable growth, ESG, and ActiveOps. Our use of ActiveOps product are mainly tied to the customer satisfaction, because we are a customer-centric organization, and also the profitable growth, because operational-wise, that's a great cost inductor.
Reached some really good goals, improving by around 20% our productivity and also 20% our efficiency. I mean, it's been three years that we've been performing and meeting the SLAs and all of the expectations constantly.
regardless of the context and the situation we are in, regardless of the variability, in terms of volume.
Almost 200 processes on the team, where I sit on the team, it can be difficult to be across all of those at once. ActiveOps with the dashboard allows me, at the push of a couple of buttons, real-time information to see where people have capacity on one side and need on the other, and match that. We've invested in our people. We've improved the consistency of our customer service, using the methodology, we've been agile enough to improve and manage our operational risk. We've been able to take in significantly more services into the business. We've doubled the workload that's come in, we've only needed to increase our capacity by 50%. ActiveOps information has changed the way we do business. I believe it's a positive and a legacy on our culture going forward and would like to be on board.
ActiveOps has given me the data that I need to be able to really understand our capacity, our capabilities. We just didn't have the clarity that we needed. We didn't have the capacity. It's generated that capacity for us, and it's given us the confidence to know that the decisions that we're making are the right decisions because we're seeing that translated into the data.
The other big thing is the target operating model. My job is to continually build that operating model and plug in new capabilities so that we are able to acquire more businesses, attach them into the group infrastructure, ActiveOps plays a big role in that. With ActiveOps, we gained the visibility, we could see whether we were being efficient or not. We could see where there's surplus resources, that was a huge step forward from our perspective. We've seen double-digit % improvements in productivity, enabling us to do more with less and allow the business to expand.
ActiveOps enabled us to create constantly improving organization that keeps pace with our business, but at the same time, it's coherent, it's unified, and it's managed in the same way across the board.
It has empowered me as a leader because it has given me really great insights on, you know, where do we have areas where we can still actually unlock even more value. I can sit boldly next to my frontline colleagues and be able to present back on the value that we are bringing to the bank. I'm actually able to bring in some science and data that says, "By the way, as much as you are chasing non-interest revenue from this perspective, selling this product, this is the value that I've also brought in indirectly to influence the same NIR KPI." It has been such an incredible journey. I cannot imagine managing a large portfolio like this without ActiveOps.
Great. I think the key for why this is so important is really just going through branding in general and why this matters. As consumers, all of us in this room, by the way, it's human nature, we will buy on emotion and we'll justify on logic. Happens every day, right? You may not think so, but that's what we do. That's what our brains do. The same thing applies in B2B, right? One of my challenges as a marketeer is how do I build the emotional connection for our customers and our prospects? We've been working really, really hard over the last three years to build a framework to put our customers at the heart of our marketing strategy, and you've seen some evidence of that just here. We want them to tell the story.
We want them to build that emotional connection or use them to build our emotional connection with our prospects and our customers. It's the foundation of what we do, and it's why we're gonna accelerate in the next three-five years. I didn't want to just leave it as a video. I've got a real-life raving fan in the room. May I introduce Nicole to join me on stage, as in just walk a couple of steps forward. Nicole has been a, I guess, a supporter of ActiveOps or a customer of ActiveOps, 16 years, I think, Nicole?
2009.
2009. Oh, my word! You just saw the video, Nicole.
Mm-hmm.
You know, does that resonate with you in terms of what those customers are saying?
Absolutely, I think if I go back to kind of my journey with ActiveOps, as I said, it started in 2009, was trained by Alex, he did all of our training. I've been on a really long journey with the organization and started with Workware, as Richard was talking about earlier, and seeing how the evolution of the product and how everything kind of works. Listening to some of those things, absolutely. I'm in the insurance market, it is transforming at the moment massively. Some of the things that the guys are talking about, I think are really pertinent now, but the value that we've seen since we actually started, or I started using ActiveOps way back is. It's just been phenomenal.
Have you got some examples over the last 16 years of the sorts of things?
I've got one or two.
that stick out? Have you got one or two that you could share?
I think the biggest one is when you're thinking about strategy. We had a location strategy where we were looking at the locations across the whole of the UK, and we had real estate that were like, "This is amazing. We're gonna close this location down. We've saved the business GBP 10 million." Operationally, it was a nightmare, and it was only because I had the data that I was actually able then to go back to the board and say, "Actually, as a business, you think we've saved GBP 10 million, but operationally, it actually cost us X million because we had attrition, we had to look at how we were training people, the engagement for staff went down, so productivity dipped.
It actually gave a much better focus and understanding of what was happening to the business, not just in silos. That was kind of really, really effective. Also, I know COVID was quite a long time ago, but it shows how long ago because we had operations not only in the UK, but also offshore as well, when our offshore operation had to work from home, very, very quickly, we were able to see the productivity had dipped. We were able to understand why that was, and what it turned out was when, obviously, our teams were in the office, they had brilliant internet connectivity, so therefore, their productivity was a bit higher. When they were all working from home, they were using their own home internet.
Within days, we got dongles out to everybody, and then very quickly, we could monitor and see how the productivity then improved. Even from a, like a BCP disaster recovery perspective, we were able to use the data and leverage that. We made decisions really, really quickly that then was able to then turn the business back around as well very quickly, so therefore, we didn't then miss service levels, et cetera.
You kind of alluded to it just a second ago in terms of, obviously, your history with ActiveOps, but, you know, today we're talking about the future.
Yep.
What's happening with, you know, markets and customers and the challenges over the next three-five years. With your experience in insurance.
Mm-hmm.
You talked about it being a transformative period over the next three to five years. What part do you think ActiveOps could play in that journey for insurance companies?
If we look at it, currently, like in the here and now, for those that know, the insurance market, particularly in London, is a soft market. To enable organizations to ensure they've got the profit margins where they need to be, they're gonna start looking at efficiencies and operational efficiency, and that's exactly, you know, what we can use this data for. I think from a shorter term, that will really help, but also. Again, I've done this myself, I've used the data to look at automation and processes that could be put through the robotics process. We had hundreds and hundreds of claims that used to come in. There was nothing that my guys could do on it because it had been queried by an underwriter.
They were adding absolutely no value on it. Very, very quickly, we were able to understand what those volumes were.
Mm.
How long that piece of work was taking a technician, and then if we put that through the robotics process, how many FTE that would free up to then look at the value add work that they could then do. It worked out it was about seven FTE that we were able to release, and then what that then also had a knock-on effect on was then we were putting those people onto the work that was really adding value, and that drove down the service levels. Again, all coming back to that customer-centric piece. Moving forward, I think that there's those kind of opportunities to really start to identify those processes, but more importantly, to actually understand every time a lever is pulled, to track that.
I think a lot of organizations are great at saying, "Oh, we need to do that," so everyone rushes over, and it's all, "This is amazing. They're on this project." Then people walk away because then they're on to the next...
Mm-hmm
kind of best shiny thing. Whereas the data allows you to carry on tracking that through to make sure that the return on investment is exactly where you were expecting it to be. If it's not, then you can challenge it and then go back around and understand why it's not. I think it's gonna be really, really important moving forward, especially in that kind of transformation space.
Mm-hmm
to understand where we should be pointing our guns and also which processes or things should we look at first. Sometimes things aren't really. You know, we think we're doing the right thing, but we don't know that actually does that have a knock-on effect to something else? Whereas when you've got the data, you can make better informed decisions that then give you the biggest impact.
I know Nicole's gonna hang around and be here for the rest of the afternoon, but we give perhaps two questions from the audience, if there's any questions for Nicole, just raise your hand. If not, we'll carry on with the Q&A later on. Any immediate questions for Nicole? You've told them everything they need to know, Nicole.
Oh, it's a super fan badge.
It's a, it's a raving fan badge.
Raving fan, yeah.
Nicole, thank you very much for now.
You're welcome.
I know you'll be around for the rest of the day.
Yeah, if anyone wants to ask me anything, please just give me a shout, and I'll, yeah, wait around.
Great
as well.
Thank you, Nicole.
Thank you.
That's all. Okay, to summarize, we are truly a transformative technology for our customers. Actually, we've evidenced some of that today. Our Decision Intelligence platform is becoming even more critical for where our customers are going to next in the next three-five years. AI is gonna transform work, we know that. The blending of AI with human and hyperautomation is gonna become the norm over the next three-five years. As I said earlier, we are in the eye of the storm. The opportunity is for us to execute. Now, our customers know, like Nicole, like Nedbank, and all the customers on the video, that if they have ActiveOps, they're gonna be able to sleep easy at night.
They can navigate the next three-five years knowing that we're gonna help them transform with confidence. From a marketing perspective, we will continue to build on this. That's the path for the next three-five years. Build on our strength. I've said it multiple times already, our raving fans, customers, they are awesome in terms of the stories that they have. Our strategy is to build on the progress we've already made over the last three years. I mean, just think, the last three years, capacity program has grown from strength to strength. The amount of customers, the, you know, the community that we're building all over the world is having a material impact on our ability to cross-sell and upsell our technology, as well as, you know, drive new business. We've seen our brand transform.
I mean, just the sort of things that we're seeing here is very different to what we would have done three years ago. Who would have thought three years ago we would have been sponsoring the British & Irish Lions on their tour of Australia? That's what we will continue to do. My job is to move us from being the best-kept secret in operations into being the credible brand in transformations. We are well on the way to do that. Thank you. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the product team, so Phil Moody and Dave Wands, part of the product team, I should say.
Thank you very much, sir. Good afternoon. I'm Phil Moody, Group Product Director for ActiveOps. I've been at ActiveOps now for nine years. In that time, I've had a really unique vantage point. I started in delivery, so with the implementation of the software, very much on the ground, and then set up relationship management globally and ran it, where I worked directly with customers on their operational challenges. Now I'm leading our product development to solve those challenges at scale. Before ActiveOps, I spent 12 years at RBS in various operational leadership and change management roles. Like Dave, who'll be speaking shortly, I've seen transformation from both sides: as a customer struggling with the complexity of operational change, and now as a technology partner, helping organizations navigate more effectively. I've walked in our customers' shoes.
I've helped them deliver significant and sustained value. I know firsthand what works and what doesn't when it comes to operational transformation. What I've learned from those years in the trenches is this: successful transformation isn't about having the latest technology or the biggest budget. It's about making the right choices, knowing where to transform, when to transform, and where your investment will have the greatest impact. That requires something fundamental, deep, accurate knowledge of the work that's being done, who's doing it, how they're doing it, and the effort it actually requires. Over the next 10 minutes, I'm going to be talking to you about how we're using AI and data intelligence to make the choosing wisely phase faster, more accurate, and more impactful than before. Dave?
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dave Wands, Product Director for Adoption Solutions. My role at ActiveOps is to ensure customers don't just buy our technology, they realize its full potential and sustain that value over time. Here's the reality we see: the best technology in the world is only creating value when people use it every single day to make better decisions. That's what adoption is all about. I've been at ActiveOps for over seven years. In that time, before the role I'm doing now, I was leading our European delivery teams, so working with our banking, BPO, and insurance clients across Europe. Prior to that, like Phil, was at RBS for over 10 years, implementing major change and transformation programs.
I've seen both sides of the coin, the difficulty of running an operation while trying to transform it, and I've also been on the other side of the coin, being a partner to help people change successfully. My key takeaway from all of that is really adoption isn't about cool training materials or nice-looking slide decks. What it's really about is making the technologies easy and simple for people to use, so they use it every single day. In a moment, Phil's going to talk you through the choose wisely section, before he hands back to me to take you through how we realize benefits with our clients.
Thank you, Dave. As Richard mentioned earlier, successful transformation starts with making good choices about where to transform and when. This requires detailed knowledge of the work being done and the effort required. Now, that sounds really, really simple, but it's extraordinarily hard. Work is everywhere, in workflow systems, in email accounts, in core banking applications. One of our customers tried to map out all of the systems where work is stored. They gave up when they reached 150. We have banks with over 50 different workflow solutions alone. ActiveOps is at the point where all of this data comes together. Historically, gathering it in one place required huge integration efforts, and now the very outcome today is this method is so often brittle. Change or update some system, and you need to adapt your integrations. It's still so expensive, time-consuming, ultimately really fragile.
We're making this simpler. Our Desktop Analytics technology is able to identify and categorize non-core work, meetings, one-to-ones, trainings, and so on. We can see what people are doing even when it's not captured in a core workflow system. Our next step is start to apply the same technology to automate the capture of work volumes and effort. Imagine this, a technology that within weeks gives you a consolidated view of output, what you've produced, input, the effort used, and the process, and then turns this data into insight that generates real business outcomes. That's where we're headed. Fast deployment to actionable intelligence. No massive integration projects, no brittle connections, just insight that drives much better decisions. That's what we mean when we talk about the unique data set. When I talk about our product suite, you'll hear me reference WorkiQ.
WorkiQ is ultimately the application-level intelligence software. It's automatically deployed onto desktops, giving you a view of exactly what individuals are doing during the working day. It's a zero input solution and ultimately is just running in the background, used by numerous customers globally. You'll also hear me reference ControliQ. ControliQ, and previously known as Workware, is a system that's been very much our core, kind of our core offering throughout the years. Brings operational control, planning intelligence, very much focused around processes that are more one and done. Finally, you'll hear me reference CaseworkiQ. CaseworkiQ is very much focused at the more complex environments. When Richard talked earlier about some of the regulated processing areas, it's very much focused around...
or big users are in KYC, AML, banking, et cetera, to really help ensure that we protect our customers on the longer term processes that might take days, weeks, months, even years to complete, and ultimately give you meaningful insights to help you move, kind of help you move forward. What I wanna touch on first is to really talk about One Best Way. One Best Way will be coming into ControliQ, and ultimately will be giving you the ability to understand automatically processes that are being completed by individuals. I appreciate this isn't the biggest visual, but I will briefly talk you through it. What you can see on screen is ultimately an automatically understood customer notification journey. Essentially, our WorkiQ gatherers have understood what an individual is completing on a given working day.
It's understood the distinct process steps within that particular process, and also then the application flows that make up the movement through, kind of through that individual process. What we're also able to do is use Large Language Models, ultimately, to describe the process that is being completed. You see, here, the description of the process that is being completed. It's not just Bhavesh, it is clearly me as well. I can't click a clicker. Well done, Moody. You've got to do a really good job. You can see a brief description, used, kind of, created by a Large Language Model. Why is this important, and what does this give us?
Ultimately, using this technology, the insight, gives us the opportunity to understand individual's performance and ultimately understand how the best performers in the team are completing a route through a particular process. One Best Way compares how a team member is completing the process, and you'll see here, against, kind of against the norm. Our software is able to understand what the One Best Way of that particular process is. You can see the top line at the top. The different colors represent the different applications that are being moved through as an individual is processing an item. It will automatically understand the amount of time taken to complete that process and also the volume of items processed. You can see here, Jim is actually taking a little bit longer, and we can immediately understand what some of the causes of that are.
He spent a bit more time in the CRM system and a bit more time in Word. Why does that matter? It moves the conversation on from what you really need to do as an individual is get better, which is somewhat demoralizing and a little bit vague. Here's specifically what some of the best performers in the team are doing, and here's what you can learn from them. It's concrete, it's actionable, and it's based on real data from real high performers in your own organization. This isn't theoretical best practice from a consultant's playbook. This is your best people, your actual processes, and your proven results. We're taking that knowledge, making it visible, and ultimately transferring it across your teams. That's an example of how we do it in a more simple environment.
We talked about ControliQ, aimed at more one-and-done processes. What about when it's a much more regulated process and something that takes a much more significantly degree of time? We talked about CaseworkiQ. We talked about it being our highest growth kind of product, which is absolutely fantastic. What CaseworkiQ does is understand the overall effort to perform a longer term process. It allows our clients to understand the SLA adherence of that and the overall amount of time that it took from the receipt of a particular case through to case completion. What are we able to do? We are, this week, with our, with four banks globally, launching a beta program for this particular feature.
Process analysis will be providing an automatic view of closed cases, so you can understand the specific flow of how a particular pathway has been, kind of has been taken. What's the most common and likely path flows that you're able to, kind of achieve as a particular process, and also visualize where the potential bottlenecks are within that particular journey. What we're also able to do is provide high-level metrics on the average handling time, average duration, and SLA adherence. For those process improvers within the room, of course, we're able to provide a significant level of detail just in terms of how activities are performed, down to the individual task step level. We're not just showing you what happened, we're showing you where the inefficiencies are, where the bottlenecks are, and ultimately, where there are opportunities to improve.
As I said, this isn't focused on simple, repetitive tasks. This is in the world of complexity. As I said, our four major banks around the world are starting using this, kind of using this particular feature as of this week, we're really excited about the value that this ultimately will bring. We don't want to stop there, right? We know that there's a real opportunity to go further and deeper into process analysis and process analytics. This is gonna be where we start to supplement the process data with AI and that process analytics layer. What we're able to do is start to really understand what the overall opportunity is that sits within your departments, within your operations, within your teams.
Essentially, rather than manually assessing and understanding what potential there might be within your process, we're using data and AI, joining together production and application insights to give you a real-time view about opportunities and where they sit within your business. What essentially Process Insights does is automatically map the process for you. It brings out the high level, the high-level metrics. For example, like quality, how much work in progress is being carried through each of the steps. More than that, it will then start to give you automatic opportunities of where you could potentially improve.
Those of you who'd be familiar with Lean and Six Sigma, will be familiar with the Eight Wastes, so motion over processing, transport over production, waiting, inventory, intellect, and also how you might improve the process through eliminating steps, combining steps, rearranging steps, simplifying steps, and standardizing steps. Ultimately, we will be doing that for you automatically. You can see here, OPI, which Dave will speak to a bit later on, is calling out opportunities in regards to the WIP levels that are currently being seen between process steps. It's calling out overproduction, where actually the underwriting team are currently ahead of SLA, which ultimately is introducing more cost than is necessary within your business.
Also, there's a credit check at step 3, when actually our software is suggesting it could be performed at step 2, so you don't have that additional waste coming down the line. We're not just giving you the data, we're giving you specific actions to take. This frees capacity within your transformation spend and leads to better choices. As Bhavesh described, organizations are investing heavily in hyperautomation and AI. What we're doing is helping them choose where to invest the transformation effort for maximum impact. This is Decision Intelligence for transformation planning. Let me bring this together. Better choices are great, but we need to convert these into business outcomes by realizing the benefit. Here's a key thing to understand. Capacity is not just something that can be created. You can't just walk into an operation, there's a bucket of capacity in the corner.
Capacity can be, however, released by getting the same people to do more work or fewer people doing the same work. This sounds incredibly easy, Dave is just about to show you its extraordinarily complex optimization challenge. We've shown you how we can help organizations choose wisely using data and AI. Now, Dave is gonna show you how we can help them realize the potential and protect the impact. Thank you, Dave.
Thanks, Phil. Yeah, Phil said, should be easy, right? Same people doing more work or fewer people doing the same amount of work. Let me just paint a little picture about what it's really like in an operation. Thousands of different types of work coming in in different patterns and different peaks and troughs, which could be daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The criticality of those processes varies hugely. Some needs to be done within an hour, some can wait five days, some will need to wait much longer. I need to understand what skills are available in my team in order to get that work done. I don't just need it at a high level, I need to know at a granular level what people can actually do and can they do it effectively.
Richard talked about it earlier, as did Phil, hundreds of different systems where all of this work and time is being managed, all of them being done independently and not talking to each other. As a leader, I need to balance that. I need to balance running the operation today, as well as transforming it for the future. That, as you can imagine, is not an easy thing to do. You try imagining trying to optimize all of those parameters in your head to maximize performance. It just is not possible, and that's where we're starting to change that. I'm gonna talk to you about some of our Series 5 and Casework features today, and how they help our clients release potential, release benefit that they can actually use.
Let me take you through the first one, Productivity Boost, based in our ControliQ platform. Productivity Boost is our first Series 5 feature, and is going into beta testing like the process analysis feature that Phil talked about earlier. What does Productivity Boost do? Well, quite simply, all it's doing is optimizing and prioritizing the work that should be done to get the best output. Think of it simply as putting your best players in their best positions to get your best possible outcome as a team. What you're seeing on the screen at the moment is a screen that all of our leaders use. It's a live status dashboard that has been around since ControliQ started.
In this example, look on this screen, and I can see as this team leader, I am 14 hours short of what I need to get done today. If I don't make a change, I'm gonna miss what I need to hit. I'm gonna miss my SLAs by 14 hours. This is exactly where we see Productivity Boost coming into play and our customers using this feature. Let's have a look at what happens if I hit the Productivity Boost button. Straight away, I'm getting some insights on how I can improve my performance. What is the opportunity that is available to me? In this example, I have the opportunity to improve productivity by 15%. Fifteen percent, what does that mean? Well, it's actually 12 hours of capacity that is sitting on the table waiting to be unlocked.
It's helping me realize where I can do, where I can prioritize to get better output. We see Productivity Boost as being the first of a number of buttons. If I want to improve productivity, I'm gonna hit that. I might have a development boost button where I want to cross-skill my team. I'm gonna hit the development boost button. Then there might be a service button where I've got a service challenge, and I wanna focus on my resource on those most important tasks. This is the first step on that journey. How does it do that? What the algorithms and the AI is doing in the background is it's looking at all of our work patterns. It's looking at the individual skills of who can do what, who is the most skilled at doing every task.
What is the work availability? What is the task priority? Basically, what it's doing is getting your best people, your most skilled people, working on the things that they're most skilled at. It's bringing all of that together for you and then communicating it back to the team. That's all interesting, the screens are all great, but what's really exciting is our data scientists are showing us that the Productivity Boost by hitting that button is between 20% and 40% improvement. By getting your right people doing the right things at the right time, we're getting immediate capacity released over and above what's available at the moment.
Some of you, I'm noticing a couple of faces, some of you at the Capacity Conference recently. This was one of the items that went down an absolute storm, and we've already got three of our biggest clients come and start beta testing this this week. It's out there in the wild, being used as our very first Series five feature. Bhavesh talked about Hyperautomation, but this is really about all of those tasks that can't yet be automated. How do we get the best value and optimize our people to get the best outcome as we can? That's what Productivity Boost is there to do. That's the first feature I wanted to talk to you about. That's the sort of simple ControliQ world, boosting performance.
What about those other worlds, our Casework worlds, which are far more complex, far more difficult to understand and interpret? These are our most complicated regulated worlds. Think of like corporate onboarding, think of KYC remediation-type worlds. All those cases that come into those teams follow hugely different paths, dependent on a number of different factors. They sit on hold for periods of time while we're waiting for input from regulators or other people, and it's difficult for a team leader or an operation to understand what should happen and when it should happen. This is where Casework adds a real value. What Casework is able to do is map the feature out and set a flight path. It can tell you what's gonna happen and when it's gonna happen, based on what's happened previously.
Combine that with an early warning system, so it knows the flight path that's happening, and it's telling you when you need to do something because you're deviating from the flight path. Combine that with automated skills, right? You're getting to a place where we're about to build the CaseworkiQ brain, the planning functionality of CaseworkiQ. We know flight paths, we know people's skills, and we know how the work is arriving, and we're warning people if they're going off track. What that then does is create an automatic capacity plan that tells people how they should deploy their people and how they should prioritize work. The really cool thing that we're looking to do is then feed all of that knowledge back in to your Pega, your workflow systems. We're helping those investments get real value.
We're adding more value to what they've already paid for. We're not replacing them, we're just enhancing them. That's two quick features I've talked about on releasing benefits. If you've released benefits in an organization, the next most important thing is you've got to protect it. It can't be a quick win. What we know is that one fundamental principle is true, that anything that is complex to do is not sticky. It makes it hard for people. They will not do it. That's why we're looking to change that. We're looking to reinvent what our interface looks like, and we're using Large Language Models to inform our operation. We're basically turning it into a sat nav for ops. Let me show you what a little bit about what that means.
This is a ControliQ Series 3 feature. It's a buzz board. It's a communications tool to talk to my team. I'm not gonna talk you through the detail, think of a team leader at the moment is looking at all of this information before meeting the team to tell. Think about: What do I need to tell the team? What are the priorities today? How am I gonna do that? Think of it like an atlas or a map that you'd have in a car, and I'd be reading that. Where we're changing now is we wanna change from an atlas to a sat nav, and that's where OPI, our virtual coach, comes into play. What OPI will do is remove that need for you to interpret that data. It will tell you where you need to be and how you're gonna get there.
In this example, it's helping me prepare for my meeting with my team. Who do I need to shout out? What are the opportunities that I can do better in, and what else needs to happen across the team? As a team leader, I can potentially take on bigger teams. I'm not investing my time in preparing for meetings. I'm being told what I need to do and when I need to do it. This is the sort of stuff our team leaders are super excited about. We'll get them better results and better outcomes. That's a team leader, but let's go up a level. Imagine you're a senior leader, or an executive. This is our Exec Insights dashboard. Again, Series 4 feature, out in the wild at the moment.
Gives great detail on where the opportunities are and how I'm performing. It's over a longer term than what I was just talking about on the buzz board. It's trends, it's opportunities, it's capacity, but the principle is the same. We wanna bring the Large Language Model, OPI, our virtual coach, front and center. Again, in this example, OPI's gonna say, "What are the actions I need to do as a senior leader, as a department leader, to drive real benefits?
Where am I going off track, and where do I need to quickly intervene or pat someone on the back for a good job done. We're trying to make it simple for our leaders and make it easy for them to use the tool, so our tool becomes ever more sticky and ever more valuable to our users. I guess, in summary, what we're looking to do is help people choose the right transformations that are gonna add value. We're gonna help them release benefits by simple features that identify where benefits are, and we're gonna make it easy for them to do. I'm gonna hand you over to Emma, who is now gonna talk you through the financials and the opportunity ahead of us.
Perfect. Thank you very much to Phil and Dave. It's a real pleasure to be here today to see so many attendees. Many of you are longstanding supporters of ActiveOps, some of you are new faces as well. Most of you know me, but for those of you that don't, I had an interesting journey with ActiveOps. I joined the organization back in 2018, I supported the business for the IPO in 2021. However, I left the business in 2023 after five years. I appreciate that's possibly an unusual way to start a Capital Markets Day session. However, I did return a year later as the Group CFO. A question I'm asked a lot is why? Why would you return to an organization that you have left?
For me, the answer is quite simple: ActiveOps is a CFO's dream. What do I mean by that? 90% of our revenues is recurring, which gives me great visibility of the revenue to come in the year ahead. Our annual in-advanced billing mechanism gives me strong cash generation, which gives me great flexibility on choices that we have around capital deployment. Our international presence gives me some protections against FX volatility. Finally, the business has a strong balance sheet with no debt, so we are really operating from a position of strength. Also, the very nature of what we do provides strong ROI to the CFOs of our customer organizations. It's not just me.
My aim here today is to show you how our financial performance reflects a business that is scaling successfully, and how this brings us closer to our milestone of becoming a GBP 100 million ARR business, delivering EBITDA margins of 25%. Maybe it's just me. FY25 for ActiveOps was an excellent year. Our recurring revenue grew by 15%, a clear indicator of our customers' confidence in the value that we are delivering. We achieved SaaS revenue growth of 15%, driven by continued expansion of our SaaS platform and sustained customer demand. Our gross margins remained world-class at around 84%, highlighting the scalability within our model. The adjusted EBITDA margin of 8% shown healthy profitability, even as we invest in the future growth of the organization.
We also closed the year with just under GBP 21 million of cash in the bank and no debt, which gives us great financial flexibility. On the 15th of October this year, we released the interim trading update, which reports organic ARR growth on a constant currency basis of 27% and organic total revenue growth of 34%. These results show a business that's not only growing, but it's growing well, combining expansion with deliberate investment. What's really encouraging is how broad and sustainable our growth has become. In FY 2025, we added nine new enterprise customers, which is 3x that we did in FY 2024. At the same time, our existing customers are continuing to expand their usage of our platform through increased user usage and also adopting new modules.
In FY25, we saw double-digit ARR growth across all three products, and what was particularly encouraging was the strong growth in CaseworkiQ, where we saw growth at 38%. We have the continued adoption of ControliQ Series 3, delivering average ARR uplift of 23%, and the launch of ControliQ Series 4, incorporating advanced AI and ML capabilities. Whilst still in the early days, we have seen an average uplift of 15% in ARR. A key strength of ActiveOps is also our geo, easy for me to say, is how diverse we are globally. We are seeing momentum across the globe. North America had a standout year with revenue year-on-year growth of 22%.
EMEA, our largest region, continued to expand steadily, and in particular, a sub-region of South Africa, which had revenue uplift year-on-year of 46%. APAC is also making a meaning contribution to the group with an ARR increase of 25%, driven by four of our largest customers moving across to ControliQ Series 3. A clear stat for the SaaS business is the NRR. At the end of FY25, the NRR rate of 108% on a constant currency basis highlights that our customers are staying and they are growing. In the recent H1 trading update that we recently did, we reported an NRR of 116%, further demonstrating our capability to expand and capitalize on the TAM within our existing customer base.
In short, we've got momentum everywhere, within our products, geographies, and also customers. Let's take a step back and look at the size of the opportunity that we are pursuing. ActiveOps operates predominantly in two rapidly growing markets, those being Digital Operations Management and Decision Intelligence, both central to how large organizations run and optimize their workforce. Across our core verticals of the financial services, insurance, BPO, and healthcare sectors, we estimate our available TAM to be just over GBP 900 million. What do we mean by available TAM? As per the recent interims that we have just released, our total group ARR was just below GBP 41 million. Within our existing customer portfolio, we have the ability to expand up to GBP 130 million through the ability to cross-sell and upsell. Also, if you look at the...
Apologies. There is more TAM coming, I promise. If you then also add in the TAM related to our Target 250 accounts, the overall TAM that is achievable to us is GBP 900 million. This TAM continues to expand for a few reasons. Operations are accelerating digital transformation, and the demand for data-driven workforce optimization increases. Even with our ARR, currently at just under GBP 41 million, we are addressing only 4% of the immediately addressable TAM to us within our existing and Target 250 accounts. If you look across the wider TAM, outside of the Target 250 accounts, we're barely addressing 1%, which as Bhavesh says, we're only just scratching the surface. That's the really exciting part. The runway of ahead of us is vast.
Our GBP 100 million ARR milestone is not aspirational, it is realistic and reflects both our execution capabilities and also the size of the opportunity ahead of us. Whilst M&A forms part of our growth strategy, it's not a dominant player, unless we find the right business to accelerate scale, capability, and geography. This year, we found an opportunity. At the end of June 2025, we completed the acquisition of Enlighten, a global software and professional services business focused on operational excellence, concentrated in North America and APAC. This deal is strategic for a number of reasons. It adds approximately GBP 8 million of ARR. It doubles our North America revenues, which is a strategic growth market for us. It increases and adds an additional 22 new logos to the family, including U.S., U.S. brands, which have significant expansion potential.
It enhances our product roadmap, particularly in the area of operational transformation, a logical next step in our Decision Intelligence capability. The structure includes synergies, both from a revenue perspective, now with our ability to cross-sell WorkiQ, CaseworkiQ, and ControliQ within the existing Enlighten customer base, and also the cost synergies related to combining the two businesses. Importantly, this acquisition was funded out of existing cash resources. We haven't compromised the strength of our balance sheet. Integration is going well, and we are currently on track to deliver EPS accretion from FY27 and onwards. This acquisition fully aligns to our strategy of high-quality recurring revenues, geographic expansion, and margin potential upside. This is a value-creating transaction, one that accelerates growth and deepens our competitive moat.
One of the most exciting aspects of ActiveOps to date is our ability to invest in growth while remaining profitable. We have made some deliberate investments over the last few years and will continue to do so, in particular within our sales capacity, product innovation, and customer experience, and also more recently, the partner channel, which Richard will come onto shortly, all of which is driving long-term value. Despite these investments, the organization remains very cash generative, and the operating cash conversion was over 200% at the end of FY25, showing the strength of our SaaS model. As our ARR base expands, we will start to see increased operational leverage, meaning that for every pound of new recurring revenue, you'll see more of the contribution down to the profit line.
Over time, this gives us a powerful margin expansion opportunity with a clear path to scale whilst enhancing profitability. Our balance sheet is one of our greatest assets. At the end of FY25, we had just under GBP 21 million of cash with no borrowings. We have both resilience and financial flexibility, and we are disciplined on how we use that strength. Our capital allocation priorities are clear. First and foremost, we invest in organic growth through product scale, sales capability, and partner channel. Secondly, selective M&As, with the Enlighten deal being an example of how we execute. Finally, return of capital to shareholders when appropriate. Once all growth opportunities have been well funded, this balanced approach allows us to build value whilst maintaining a strong balance sheet. Looking forward, we see a huge opportunity for ActiveOps.
The market of Digital Operations Management and Decision Intelligence is expanding rapidly. Organizations globally are putting the pressure to become more and more agile whilst maintaining high quality levels of services, which puts us in the perfect spot. We expect double-digit ARR growth to continue into FY26 and beyond, underpinned by further expansion within our existing customer base and further, continued product innovation. Growth margins should remain resilient as EBITDA margins are set to rise. The combination of strong growth, a robust balance sheet, signals a company that's not just growing, but it's scaling. Just to close out, just a few final points from me. First, ActiveOps is in a great shape. We are financially robust, and we are strategically focused. Second, our growth is sustainable, and it is accelerating.
Finally, our vision is clear and achievable: to become a GBP 100 million ARR business, delivering value to all stakeholders. I would just like to finish by thanking you all for your continued support with ActiveOps. We are incredibly excited about the journey that we've got ahead of us. Now I'll hand it back to Richard.
Thanks, Emma, thanks, team. We've really labored a bit on the relevance to the market today. I hope because that concept of disappointment in transformation is so predominant in so many of the enterprises we do. Coming in with something that's demonstrable, it's real, and it's delivered value is just such an uplifting. You got some customer stories there. There's many others behind, but I think that's really underpinning the relevance as we've moved from a kind of solution which is relevant to a specific audience pertaining to operations management, suddenly an enterprise-wide issue. That really, it's changing the tenor of how we're speaking to customers.
It's changing the approach to who's taking an interest in this, that just supports, I think, the all the other reasons why the business is so strong. You've seen that sort of story today, and I think that strength does underpin our ambition, our medium-term goal of reaching that GBP 100 million. It's not aspirational for me. I think it's just simply a logical next step for a business with the deep customer credibility, the proven market fit and levers to scale. I just want to touch on some of those levers. I think as I hope you're seeing, first and foremost, it's the ActiveOps is today a resilient, high-integrity growth engine. We can feed more petrol in the tank of sales and capabilities.
As you've heard, we have a material addressable market within our existing customers, but also, and this is the critical accelerator, we're achieving record 300% increase in our new logo acquisitions last year. If you can compound the increase in customer expansion, you add in new product capabilities and value derived from that, and then you're chucking in new customers at the rate we are in the front of the top of the tank. That in itself is the engine of growth. Lever number one remains growing and accelerating our direct sales capability. It's accessible, it's controllable, and more importantly, it's underway. Over the past year, we've strengthened our commercial team. Just to give you some more content, we've seen accelerated momentum as you've heard from Emma, in every major market.
North America, we've added senior leadership in sales and increased capacity, particularly in Canada. That's an interesting market amongst many interesting markets. We're now present in six of the Canadian major banks and a fantastic platform to exploit, much like we did in Australia 10 years ago. We appointed a Chief Revenue Officer, and his role, Stephen's role, is to take this kind of global challenge and opportunity, which is, at the end of the day, delivered locally, but bring ourselves and scale, create the capacity to bring on new sales staff. Our sales quota carriers has already increased from April 2024, when we had eight- 16 today. That's progress we're already making.
That kind of momentum is already, is there, and that increased capacity is variously along the ramp to competence and will yield in the coming months. Capacity25, as we mentioned a few times, our annual customer event in Toronto, London, and Melbourne. It enjoyed record attendance, the people coming to the conference is also shifting. We've got our core raving fans of our operations people, but increasingly it's the transformation agendas, and it's the technology leaders and HR interesting. I hope many of you will look to those charts that Phil and Dave were talking about and said, "But this is walking all over the process mining, you know, issues at the moment." We're actually providing the type of technology people are buying separate tools for, embedded in our solutions.
Their process mining and discovery is just a by-product of using ActiveOps. You don't have to go out and do those special projects because it'll just generate as part of using us to control your day-to-day. We're actually creating some space in a very interesting area. Some of that actually came through in the Capacity25. Enlighten. Bringing Enlighten customers to Capacity25 again, has completely lit the torch of their transition to taking advantages of ActiveOps. I came this morning, it's funny how these things sort of cluster together, but there's a, you know, one of our big American customers in Canary Wharf this morning.
We spent the whole morning walking him through how his organization can now exploit the new ActiveOps toolset on an existing Enlighten product set. The energy and the motivation, I think, is powerful. We're seeing incredibly strong engagement, lots of active opportunities already coming from that 22 additional customers. Again, huge opportunity there. As we look at that positioning that Bhavesh was talking about, what that then creates is a different sort of demand. We can create that new agenda, but we also now need to look at how we can leverage that, how we can actually increase our sort of scale. And the key point here, selective with partnerships and selective acquisitions.
I want to talk about a second, our second lever on growth, which is through our partner channel. Up till now, our growth has come through direct enterprise sales, pretty much. We've cooperated with other organizations, but fundamentally, ActiveOps has done the selling, engaging, proving, and expanding with the major accounts. That will remain central, as I said. To accelerate, we do need leverage, more routes to customers to discover ActiveOps without us, you know, effectively not being in the room, and not being in every conversation. Around those Appian and Salesforce, they have huge marketplaces and resellers.
Rather than, if you like, competing for attention directly with those providers, what we're doing, our approach, is to work through the specialist implementation firms that coexist in that ecosystem, because they have a shared interest in extending and expanding their own presence in those organizations. The trusted partners whose success depends on, if you like, proving some of the things Dave was so eloquent about in terms of that delivered value. They sit in those, that critical intersection between technology adoption and operational performance, which of course, is ActiveOps's strength. We're already well down the path on this. We've got a great partnership with SS&C, who own and bought Blue Prism, a technology platform, and are huge consumers of ActiveOps themselves.
They don't, you know, they can practice what they preach, and they can advocate what they practice, where we're at, we're embedded alongside their Chorus platform. Rulesware, for those of you who may not know the name, is a major Pega implementer in the US particularly. We're working with them extensively now to take a version of solution to a rule, a context of Pega, where ActiveOps is a huge offering. The key thing for me is not just them as a partner, but them developing with us solutions I can then take to other Pega intermediaries. Effectively, we can scale that way. In Australia, there's NAC Consulting.
They're a specialist consultancy whom we've relationships with. The interesting thing about their offer is they absolutely build their capability around a technology platform. Whereas we'd have a relationship today with PwC or KPMG, ultimately, they want to sell time and materials. Actually, if they can not avoid the complexity of enterprise software, they'd love that. You know, give them a spreadsheet, they'd love it, because they can go back and sell it again next year. Whereas NAC Consulting, they're building an offering around performance improvement, central around embedding a tool. They won't implement without a tool. They're already a customer of ours, in effect, because they manage a relationship we inherited through the Enlighten purchase. They're a great proxy for developing our go-to-market strategy with these kind of intermediary partners.
Critically, you see, what we're doing is enhancing their value proposition. We're not asking them to sell something else. We're bringing something to augment and amplify their own individual reach. That, for me, is the secret. As I look at the sort of 25 years and imagine the number of companies we've talked with and engaged with over the years successfully, invariably, the issue is demand creation. There has to be something that they need, not something I want to sell to them. I think that's what we're seeing, a shift. That shift in the market, looking for transformation and solutions, we're looking to provide services, there's suddenly a real meeting and alignment of values. That integrator-first model, we think, is going to be pretty efficient and importantly, repeatable and scalable.
It's becoming a blueprint for how we're going to expand globally into, okay, we have our traditional markets, but obviously, that does open the door to further strategic markets, whether it's localizations in geographies or indeed, specialist areas in terms of, you know, industries. We have our focus today, but we need to find doorways through without over-consuming our own sales resource into new markets and new opportunities. So each new partner multiplies our reach and impact, bringing their own relationships and domain knowledge, which we think is going to be pretty potent. And over time, we think that will become the growth engine.
The next, you know, the short-term when it comes to timescale, is essentially about our current direct sales, but we've hired a new group head of partnerships, and his role is to evolve the delivery model building on this platform we're doing, so that by three years' time, we're starting to see a material amount of work coming through on that indirect channel. Where we're co-selling, but it'll be part of a scale of opportunity. It's disciplined, data-driven, and I think it's going to be quite powerful. The third lever is back to M&A. Whilst our core engine is organic, M&A will be an important contributor to our medium-term growth strategy. It's not the central pillar, but as Emma, I think, talked about, and evidentially, we've had some good results for, it is a targeted accelerator.
It's going to be part of the story to build the scale. We've demonstrable track record of efficient purchase, careful integration, and successful execution. One of the things that's made the Enlighten, I think, acquisition going as well as it has and is ActiveOps' core strength. It was never about, Oh, gosh, you know, we're not getting the growth, we've got to buy something, or anything, yeah. It was the engine of growth ActiveOps is really, really pumping. The ability of ourselves to take what was quite a large organization and fill it into the operation and deliver some of the savings we will do in the course of the coming 18 months.
More importantly, take a product set to a customer base that is there, but needs to be reenergized and excited, I think is just a great model. The strength of our business is giving us the capacity, quite apart from the economic access to capital through the public markets, which is also really good. You know, it's because our platforms and our culture, I think, is really strong. Enlighten customers coming to the Capacity25 events genuinely were blown away by the level of passion for the product sets and their own relevance to it. It wasn't like, well, who are these aliens? You know, it was more a case of, I recognize people like this, and I want to be part of that club.
You can't really I mean, like Bhavesh was talking about earlier, you can't understate the value of that emotional connection. It's really powerful. The strategic logic for further acquisitions is clear, Emma's touched on it, but access to customer bases. If that gives us new customers in target areas, the geography is spot on, accelerating our presence and strategically important. Also access to specialist knowledge like that, a specialist around the leveraging of value from Pega or Salesforce. That's another driver for acquisitions. It could be a services-heavy business, which ActiveOps is not.
As a way of getting into some of that specialist skill sets, so we can build some product, like Kainos did very successfully with Workday, where they've developed a, I think it's they've themselves now got a revenue stream, ARR, approaching GBP 100 million, on the back of identifying spots and opportunities that complement the Workday product that they themselves could offer. There's lots about that relationship. I think we can do a lot with ActiveOps in terms of leveraging. So access to specialist knowledge is one option. Finally, just new markets.
Areas that we wouldn't necessarily want to, we wouldn't necessarily have the capacity to build ourselves. Inevitably, you know, sort of if we can buy a business that contributes to that story in much the way that OpenConnect did, and most recently, Enlighten did, then, of course, we would do that. Anything that brings ourselves closer to customers, partners, or platforms. I'm conscious of time. I won't have time for a lot of few questions. M&A, you know, I think, I think we have the capability and the strength in a measured way to expand our aperture, so to do that in the coming, medium term. Against that context, where that 100 million, I think, is perfectly achievable by just doing the math on the compounding rate.
If you work on the NRR of 117%-118%, you chuck in 10-12 to 20 new customers a year, and the numbers start to get quite exciting. Our pathway is clear: deepen and expand current momentum. Years one and two, build leverage, formalize frameworks, enable partners, complete technical integrations, and selectively, potentially deploy capital for strategic acquisitions. On behind that, the year three-five, acceleration, essentially, partner networks, new channels, and acquired companies delivering that compounding ARR. Again, I'm not looking so much about the target itself, it's the velocity through which we travel through the target that I think is particularly exciting. That's the story.
It's, we think it's quite a well-tuned engine at the moment, enhanced through the Series 3- 5 evolution. We're adding some, we think, pretty high torque accelerators, both organic and inorganic, that multiply our reach. You can probably tell the sort of confidence in the team. We tried to put a few people in front of you so to see that it's more than, you know, more than skin deep, as it were. This is a financially strong cash generative business, you know, 115% net NRR, accelerating client logo. There's a lot of spring in the step at the moment. Personally, as both founder but also Executive Chair, what's wonderful is, I think, you know, the best is yet to come. That's not a cliché.
That's genuinely a market opportunity because of the complexities of hyper-operation, which ActiveOps is incredibly well positioned to exploit. Thank you. Thanks for coming and hearing our story a bit. We do want some Q&A. I think on that basis, I'll pause and ask the team to come on stage, and we'll take questions from the floor. Thank you again.
Unfortunately, it's going to be a very a dull, financial question only. Emma, just on the, I guess, timing, roadmap for the GBP 100 million ARR, is it three years, five years, 10 years? Just wondering, without sort of, wanting to be too specific.
Yeah.
Just wondering roughly what those... I have a follow-up. Thank you.
We're not committing to a timeframe. We are saying medium term, so we'd be looking sort of three to five years.
Okay. The 25% EBITDA margins, could you just let us know roughly where the operating leverage is going to come from?
Mm-hmm.
Which cost buckets are going to scale with revenues and which aren't? Thank you.
Typically, the way that our business model works, in terms of sales and marketing and new customer success, that will obviously scale as revenue also scales. However, sort of the back office infrastructure, in terms of your finance functions, HR, and everything else, we are definitely at a scale today where we could definitely take on more ARR. I'm not sure that directly sort of answers your question, but really, in terms of typically the costs we will see that will scale with revenues is customer-focused and facing cost buckets. As the infrastructure is, we're probably at a scale now where we can definitely sort of maintain the levels we are for at least the next few years.
Thank you.
James? Oh, sorry. Sorry.
Maybe a bit of a dumb question to ask, given your, you know, stellar growth, but I was just thinking about your MO in that you've got a certain, you know, very blue chip customer base, but they're all of a certain sort of cohort in terms of being around, trying to drive efficiencies. Is that where you very much see your focus, or do you want to tap into the sort of Revolut, Klarna of this world, which have, I guess, from day one, driven a lot greater automation? That's just interesting as to whether you see opportunities there, and indeed, if you pursued that would maybe be a North Star for certain customers in terms of if they wanted to go that far, well, this is where we could take you.
I was just wondering, look, there seems to be a large addressable market in terms of if you just continue doing what you're doing, but just thinking in terms of different types of customers and more digitally native, do they feature at all? Are they relevant, attractive, et cetera?
We've got a specific example, but perhaps, Bhavesh, do you want to pick it up from a market positioning perspective?
Yeah, I think I was going to cover the same example, really. I think the short answer is yes. About six to nine months ago, we won Starling Bank, which is obviously one of those organizations that you're talking about. Interestingly enough, for them, it's about becoming more professionalized from an operations perspective, since they want to scale. They got bitten a little bit in terms of some regulations. There are some drivers to support those types of businesses as well. To be fair, before Starling came to us, it probably wasn't on our radar, and those type of organizations are now becoming more on our radar.
What's interesting is, and I was in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, and I was having dinner with somebody involved in the Revolut environment. You know, whilst the app itself and the front end is all very shiny and nice, they can't ultimately get away without the regulatory mechanics and the usual suspects around AML processing and the like. In a sense, it's they can easily become victims of their own success. The relevance of our stuff to their factory, it may not be as big as other people's factories, but one thing is, what is fascinating is the same. There is no company that we ever deal with, which has got a kind of singularity of system.
That problem of, that Dave mentioned about complexity of systems, you know, it's out there, and it doesn't go away. Yes, is the short answer, but it's fascinating. James?
Thanks. Question on product, if that's all right. Pre-Enlighten acquisition, I think you had a really clear three-product suite: Work, Control, Case, Casework. Post-Enlighten, how should we think about the product suite from a sort of staring at the shelf? First question. Second question is, what's the sort of capacity for applying things like OPI into Enlighten last week?
Really great question. This year, for us, is very much about joining together and converging our existing product suite. Essentially, it talks about WorkiQ coming within the ControliQ environment. Casework is already there. Ultimately, this financial year, we'll be completing that move. Over the last four or so months since obviously taking on Enlighten, we've been reviewing the similarities with the features. Obviously, there's some that they do better than us, others that we do quite a bit better than them. Essentially, we're going to be moving next year to bring ultimately Enlighten into ControliQ as well.
Essentially, we are working at prioritizing the features that add the greatest value to their broader customer suite, and ultimately, as an outcome, ActiveOps customers will essentially get more value. We're making that assessment really carefully because ultimately, there's some things that they've built that didn't necessarily have the same commercial case behind it, that we might put behind some of the things that we invest in doing. Also, there are interesting features that we've reviewed. Obviously, they came in as an AWS house, whereas we're very much a kind of a Microsoft house. There are real opportunities and synergies from an efficiencies point of view. Also, they've got some really great people, too.
From our point of view, this coming kind of year is about bringing us all together as a broader family and really respecting the insights that their tenured staff also bring into where we might go in future. Absolutely, that is a greater focus around transformation. I think what, and apologies, it's a very long answer.
Yes, it's long.
I think one of the things that wowed me at the conferences, where I got the opportunity to meet Enlighten customers, was they were really impressed by a lot of the intraday insights, which ultimately, Enlighten don't necessarily have. Actually being able to make those in-day decisions are still real problems for some of their largest customers. Actually, on the right-hand side of things, when they're driving the continuous improvement element, they've got real power and real value that ultimately has been delivered for their largest customers on the longer term. When we talk about active advocacy that we see in ActiveOps, we absolutely see the same thing in Enlighten.
For us, we just see a real opportunity because we're so good at the intraday stuff and a lot of the things on the left-hand side, by combining together with their knowledge on the right-hand side around transformation insights, I really think it's just a real opportunity for much more significant growth.
... Yes. sorry, I don't know you.
Hi, Stephen Wood from Trinity Bridge. Emma, just on those margins, for a digitally led business, there seems to be an awful lot of people cost in the group. I appreciate a good chunk of that's investment for growth, and, you know, that's well understood. In an 85% gross margin business getting to 25% EBITDA, that feels like a hell of a lot of people costs for an efficiency business. If you could talk me through the investments there.
That's a fair challenge. We do invest heavily into our product. In the last few years, we've sort of ramped up the investment in product and the tech team. We are at a scale now in the amount of new features that we are pumping out every year. I'm sure that's not a technical term, Phil. The amount that we're delivering at the moment, the level that we can develop at this stage will remain static. We don't imagine that we'll have to invest too much more in the development and product team going forward. We've sort of got to that right level in terms of being able to release a new feature every year, broadly. That's where you'll start to see the acceleration in the margin come through.
Stephen's still sort of querying that there's more to it than that, yes. I mean, I think. Sorry, down a bit. ActiveOps is because we're quite a global company, it's quite a small company in one level. The gearing to exploit, be present in, and exploit different regions, there's quite a lot of managerial overhead, and that's a fact that's been with us all the way through. I think, again, part of the reason that this is exciting, of course, just purely scale starts to give you. You don't need two managing directors in a region. You don't need. There's lots of aspects to this, that you have to have it to be present and execute, which become much more scalable.
That is part of the leverage that I think we'll go through. And again, another reason why the Enlighten acquisition, I think, will serve us very well, because it sort of jumpstarts that.
Yeah, I was curious to learn a little bit more about the partnership model, the new arrangements. How long would it take to onboard one of these partners, and how much of the heavy lifting will they have to do to make an implementation on our behalf? Or is it just a referral kind of partner?
No, it's more than that. I mean, but equally, I think this is part of the development cycle we're going through, because I'm not saying it is, this is a, as a revenue stream, you know. It's. This is part of the reason I want to get a bit more control over it, to shape that. To answer the question a slightly different way, unlike. We don't have to build anything new much because ActiveOps is always deployed through its customers. You know, when typically a land and expand would involve a signature delivery, properly involving ActiveOps resources, and then the customer then builds some internal capability.
We have the accreditation frameworks, we have the training modules, we have the kind of instruments of the scaling, which we've deployed for years with NatWest and Barclays and National Australia Bank and so on. That's very nicely, that's easily configured to a delivery model. I think some of the areas that will come in terms of stuff, is more the expertise the other way, in the context of a certain problem with a certain system, bit like my Kainos example, Workday. I think there will be things that we need to have development capacity within Phil and Dave's team to take that knowledge and that experience and convert it into product. The mechanics of actually working through with a partner, well, current experience is pretty easy in the context of that.
Thank you. How would you expect the new arrangements to affect the unit economics or the aspirational targets that you've set for the medium term? Are they going to be assisting or neutral?
Are you talking about pricing models in the context of that?
Yeah, yeah, in terms of the economics.
Generally, as a principle, ActiveOps over the years has not sought. We tend to be a follower of market trend. In that context, like SaaS and all the other kind of elements to it, we've In that space, I mean, There's a lot of models out there for the kind of service delivery, co-sell type partners, and I don't expect us to be so very different for that. Whether that's a. If you take the relationship with, I mentioned with NAC Consulting, they manage the relationship with one of the customers of Enlighten. We, Enlighten now, contract directly, and we pay a leverage there.
It's like of the order of 10%, and that covers a customer success function that we would otherwise have to pay for anyway. There's a few models out there. At the moment, you know, that trade-off between you providing the service and the delivery model, you know, there's plenty of room in the model.
Sure. That's clear. Thank you.
The gentleman with the glasses. Yeah.
Thank you very much for a very interesting presentation. Can you give me some idea, and it's very, obviously very confident, what keeps you awake at night? Where do you see the major problems arising, possibly, in achieving those targets? You know, what are the major competitive threats?
The thing that we have, which is a strength, is confidence in our results. I think of all the things that I worry about, the things are more to do with this.
Yeah.
in a given context, a given implementation. We have a very, very powerful track record on delivery. We sometimes do in the early relationship-forming stages, performance-related payments, and we have never not been paid, ever. For us, and personally for me, the success of the company is something to be cherished. I worry every single implementation is gonna deliver what our customers expect. That translates through into, I think, the approach our team have. If you, like, step away from the product offering, and it's being authentic, it's things like the cybersecurity.
We are a big cloud platform, so terrible. We are interacting with some of the largest financial services institutions in the world, so I do not want my software to be a pathway through to something bad happening in that world. Those sort of risks. That said, appropriately, you know, I'm, we do the best for that sort of, that sort of sleep at night stuff. We don't have to sell next month to keep the business turning over. Again, I'm not sort of trying to flip it around, but. I'm not saying I sleep easy at night all the time. As Emma said, there's a lot about the dynamics of this business model, which gives us certain.
I mean, there are stresses and pressures, but there's, it's a, it makes it, so it's cyber risk, it's consequences, if you like. I mean, we're not an instrument, fortunately, of actual execution. If our software goes down, like, if a workflow goes down, work stops. ActiveOps would is the measurement and the control over, but it isn't the actual instrument of progression. I know our customers feel pain when, if and when our software doesn't work, but it doesn't stop their execution, which would bring another hope. It's a sort of indirect answer, but it's, you know, I can't speak for others, but ActiveOps is, in that sense, quite a low-risk business. Is that a good answer?
Your pricing model is to pay per seat, but with AI-
Mm-hmm.
It's considered that there'll be less seats. Would you change the pricing model?
An interesting question. Fascinating question, because it is an issue for the industry. I'm evidentially at the moment because we're reaching more addressable work, we are not seeing any sense of that. I mean, a couple of big renewals of one of our Australian customers recently announced a major reduction in their headcount, purportedly. Maybe they're just in hope of delivering the benefits from AI, but our address, our contract increased despite that reduction. I think I took that as sort of, you know, that is some evidence to support the fact that we can increase our demand. I think there's a different angle on it, though, in terms of that, because ActiveOps is a point at which the outcome becomes consolidated.
I think there's an interesting opportunity for us to actually be the meter of value, as I talked about, which in itself could be charging. We can charge our software potentially as we could charge by the outcome of our software, it works. Others could piggyback on that as well. We could potentially offer a solution to that particular problem so that whether you're, you know, Blue Prism, ServiceNow, all those kind of components are actually linked to an output value, which, guess what, with things like Blockchain, you can unitize, so you can't print your own money, and actually then derive a charging system, whether it's for a product set like ActiveOps or ServiceNow, or it could be a relationship between an outsourcer and a third party or the bank as a medium of exchange.
Suddenly, the Holy Grail is: I don't want to charge you for inputs, I want to charge for outcomes. One of the interesting areas that these guys are working on at the moment is assurance around using the ActiveOps measure of outcome as a unit of value. Sorry, long answer, but that's, there's some really interesting opportunities for ActiveOps in that area.
Great. Thank you. The pricing, well, the payment model's always been great because you're paid up front, so you're developing it on somebody else's cost of capital. Do you think that that will change? Do you get more pushback these days from people who are trying to be leaner in their own capital efficiency?
No, we don't typically, because we're dealing with such large organizations. That's never a challenge. This is something that we transitioned about five-seven years ago to annual in advance billing. No, we don't get a lot of pushback. The size of our invoices typically do like to pay one invoice instead of 12. No, we don't. We're lucky we don't have any type of pushback from that perspective.
Thank you.
The only question I guess we would want, not at the risk of putting pressure on Alex, but so you haven't heard about the integration of Enlighten much, particularly, whether there's a. Perhaps I'll put it the other way. Alex, is there any aspect of the integration with Enlighten that you think has come through from what you've been in the audience, but highlighting? Alex is our head of corporate development and as such, has got the dubious challenge of controlling and executing the integration.
I think we've covered the high points. Emma talked about the ARR ad, and I think perhaps one piece to add there is probably the, you know, a lot of that ARR comes from some really very strong brands, and some really sizable accounts. Two of our top 10, now Enlighten, heritage and five out of the top 20. Not only are they sizable and great brands, but also I think one thing that ActiveOps has always been great at, and perhaps Enlighten is not as strong at, is the sort of the land and expand motion. Whilst those are big and established accounts, there's plenty more opportunity for us to take those further and to, you know, greater heights.
I think maybe the people aspect, Phil talked about people there briefly, but as of the landing, we've got more than 20 Enlighten colleagues at the moment supporting an ActiveOps deployment in North America. Enormous deployment to a Canadian customer. That team has seamlessly dropped into an ActiveOps deployment with a, you know, required very little retraining and enablement to do that. That's also been a huge enabler for the business of, you know, what otherwise could have been quite a tricky program for us to resolve. Just to put you on the spot.
Any more for anymore?
Richard, I'm kind of insider because I'm on the executive direction.
Oh, yeah.
The question I get from shareholders in ActiveOps is: Is there an exit strategy? What is the exit strategy? You know, what's the end game? GBP 100 million of ARR, it will be a lovely figure, but I don't think that's the end game. How do you see that?
It's a hell of a ride, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly, Mike, as you know. To that extent, I mean, I personally think this has got a long way to go. You know, you can't predict necessarily the ebbs and flows of opportunities and, you know, absolutely maximizing shareholder returns might do that. Genuinely, I think the public market is treating us well. It's giving us the flexibility and the, and the, and the means to do what we want to do. The relevance of what we do, I think, is global and applicable, and if we can build a billion-dollar company in valuation terms on the public markets, which is listed on the UK Stock Exchange, that would personally give me intense profit satisfaction. I don't... That's my basic position.
I'm certainly personally not done yet.
I really believe I've given you that answer.
Yeah. You know, that's it, but it's driven by the opportunity. Again, we have labored under that, you know, sort of famous phrase of being a well-kept secret. I just think the context of the market looking for solutions to a problem, that they're seeing the problem, but they don't know the, you know, is very, very strong. Thank you, Mr. Market Director, for landing that one. Good. Look, let's time up, but I think we're hosting a few drinks downstairs. Is that the plan, sir?
Just next door, yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Who doesn't like a free drink, right? Thank you all very much indeed. Thanks to the team.