Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to meet with Paddy and I. As with all these things, some people will obviously will have know a little bit about ActiveOps, but I will kick off with a little bit of introduction to the company, for those of you who haven't met us before, and then we'll talk more about the results of the year and then the outlook. Quickly, a reminder of ActiveOps. We're a Global Operation. We have two revenue streams, SaaS and some services, primarily to support installation and establishment within our Client Organizations. We're global, spread across primarily an Anglo audience in South Africa, India, Australia, and North America, as well as EMEA, and we operate in out of seven offices.
Our customer base are Banks, Institutions, Insurance Companies, and effectively anywhere where there's large amounts of Administration related to sort of transactional work. That's been our heartland for many years. We solve a very simple problem, which is incredibly complicated to do in practice, which is, with all the complexity and variety in larger or large back Offices, there's a lot of Teams doing lots of different things, and while theoretically there's potential economies of scale, that's very hard for organizations to realize in practice, ActiveOps provides a solution. We provide the metrics, the management, such that essentially diverse teams, diverse managers, management operations, can integrate together, can ultimately make the best of their capacity. As such, it's an overlay to many of the other sources of automation and methods of improving productivity because it gives organizations control.
I'll come on to why that is turning out to be quite a strong theme for the moment a little bit later. The combination of our software and that embedded operational simple management rhythm provides very large corporations with the power to leverage their capacity in a much more consistent way, and the outcome of that is better productivity. Probably more importantly, it's the capability to then execute the other things they want to do. It's, it's very much a layer within the sort of elements of the things that they need to deliver their digital transformations. Turning to our year. I think clearly excited by the move to the public markets this time last year, it's been a transformational year for the business. Primarily, the underlying strength of the model has come through very well.
I think our SaaS, you know, continues to be the basis of a very secure business. Gross margins as strong as ever, very healthy revenue margins on the T&I. Sort of an Pperating level, cash, as we'll come on to, Paddy will talk about, remains very strong with generate. I think more importantly, and as I look at the year, we've laid down many of the elements of our strategy, which you'll see us well in the future. I mean, Logo growth has been strong. We've had significant expansion across, you know, across the regions, but we've also done many of the other things that essentially will see us through. In particular, regional development. We've talked a lot in the past, and our model is tends to establish within a customer.
They then see the value of that consistency of managing their operations, which leads to an expansion phase. That land and expand model, I think we've seen good success in a number of our customer bases and continue into this year, which is why our outlook is looking so confident. We've also got the depth with the WorkiQ product now being adopted by some of our existing ControliQ customers. Around a particular theme, that's proven to be a. We have the use case that we can use to grow that across different customers. It's that kind of core expansion of our customer base.
We've got the new products coming through in terms of our code base, so that we can build and expand software more effectively, we can respond to customer needs, more and more efficiently. In particular, our machine learning team has been established this year, which is unlocking a new key of revenue for us, or a new driver for growth, which is that, the machine learning. With using the data we have, applying the sort of machine learning, we're now able to do some very clever things around forecasting work. Forecasting is really the key, because essentially, the more an advanced organizations can be about what's going to happen, the more agile and more able they are to respond to their market need.
In a slightly different dimension on the sales front, we've also been developing our relationship with a number of partners, which is proving to be, I think, both deliver some results in a year, but more importantly, it will deliver a lot of growth. Highlighting here the Microsoft One, that has been tactically very useful in terms of sales, with sales support from Microsoft, but also now that the products are on the Azure Marketplace, it's also a channel. We've got a number of activities in the pipeline here, which are effectively driven through that. All in all, we're very excited about, and, you know, effectively where we've got to in the course of this year, notwithstanding the broader context.
I mean, we're a safe and secure business with the model. I think, Paddy, it would be good to, you know, if you pick up on some of the actual financial results.
Thanks, Richard. Good morning, everyone. Firstly, starting with the SaaS model that we have and the annual recurring revenue customer base. You can see the ARR there has grown by 10% over the same period, over March last year. The top 10 customers have grown by 15%, and eight out of those 10 have all expanded, and they're now accounting for just under 60% of our total ARR for the group, which is up one point from 59 at the end of last year. Net revenue retention remains positive at 102%, slightly below where we were last year, but as you'll remember, the productivity improvements that we deliver for our customers does, in some cases, result in a lower number of users. We're gonna see a natural small attrition through that.
We have lost a couple of customers, one of which was due to an outsource of a customer. We hope that that will lead to a positive engagement with that outsourcer in the future as we look to win back that account. Encouragingly, though, the top 40 accounts for the business at the end of March 2022 have expanded by 19% for ARR. There's 5 new entrants into that list, showing that the newer customers that we're getting this year are of significant size, and also 22 expansions across previous customers that we've had. Really reinforcing the land and expand model that we have there, and the strength of the SaaS model in the customer base. If I just move on to the P&L.
Here, you can see top line growth of 12% for total revenue, with T&I revenues increasing significantly at just over 30% as we move on from the impact of COVID in the first half of the year in 2021. Gross margins have remained stable at the top level, a one-point reduction, and that's primarily due to the relative increase of the lower margin Training and Implementation revenue stream that we have. If we break it down into the two product streams that we have, you've got the SaaS margins, a two-point reduction in SaaS margin, and that's as we've invested in the customer support area for our business, for our customers, to make sure that they're getting good levels of support.
That investment steps as we grow, so investment in 2022, you don't expect to see investment in 2023 in the margins coming back to where they were previously. Then very strong T&I margins in the year, at 58%. We were able to use our Indian delivery team on a remote basis, so low-cost delivery team on a remote basis, to complete deliveries in some of our higher cost jurisdictions in the U.K. and the likes. That gave very, very strong margins in that area, as well as the remote delivery model proving more effective and efficient in terms of getting the best use out of our resources there.
As we've previously talked about, the T&I revenues and margins can vary quite a lot, depending on the mix of customer, the implementations we have and where we put those, so we don't expect the 58% to be the same next this coming year. It will vary as we move forward. There has been additional investment in operating costs of GBP 2.6 million. I'll talk more about that on the next slide. That's given us an Adjusted EBITDA broadly breakeven for the year, which is a very strong result from our perspective. There've been exceptional costs of half a million GBP relating to a transaction that we were looking at back in March that didn't complete at that time. Obviously, funding from the markets was very, very challenging back in March, so we were unable to move that one forward.
You can see share-based payments coming into the P&L, those related to the long-term incentive plans that we put in place at the IPO, with depreciation and amortization remaining broadly flat. If I move on to the EBITDA bridge, you can see, obviously, as revenues increase, the margins from SaaS and T&I revenue streams goes up as well. We've put significant investment into the sales and marketing arena. We've got new sales heads in all of our regions, incremental investment in marketing as well, driving growth going forwards. Further expansion of the product and technology development team as well, enable us to deploy new features faster, as Richard mentioned, that new team of data scientists, providing further insight, and development for the product roadmap as well. We have capitalized GBP 0.4 million of R&D spend in the year.
As you'll be aware, the requirements from an IFRS perspective look to do that. We do expect that to increase as we move forward. Looking at our plans going forward, clearly wage inflation is out there. We're looking to balance the impact of inflation on our Employees as well as on the business. That will be partly offset by inflation clauses that we have in our existing customer base, that we will look to pass inflation on to customers as well. As I said, the T&I revenues and margins do remain variable and likely to return to year-end 2021 levels. Travel, as well, is picking up to pre-pandemic levels, was moving towards that at the end of last year. We expect that to continue in year-end 2023.
Clearly, the full year impact, as the headcount we've invested in year-end 2022 comes through in year-end 2023, and that'll, whilst we don't expect headcount to increase as fast in year-end 2023, that gives us the operational leverage in the business that we've previously discussed, such that by the end of year-end 2023, we expect to be moving to a positive EBITDA run rate as we exit in March next year. Then, if I just move on to the balance sheet, the balance sheet remains very strong. We're debt-free. We've got over GBP 30 million of cash in the bank, and we have very strong inflows of cash in the second half of the year, giving us a positive cash flow to EBITDA for the year.
The only thing to note in the cash flow is, you might remember at IPO, the previous share options were exercised and sold by members of the team. That had a cash inflow prior to the year end, including taxes that were due to the tax authorities of GBP three and a half million. Those taxes were paid out to the authorities in the month of April last year, giving that one unusual, exceptional item, if you like. Apart from that, a very clean cash flow and balance sheet, and we're, you know, from a financial perspective, we're in a very strong position, and very optimistic about the future. With that, I'll pass back to Richard to take you through where we are on strategy.
Thanks, Paddy. I wanted to highlight two or three things I think, which are the reasons why we're sort of motoring at the moment. Firstly, if you think about the context of the world of work, we've always been effectively about how people orchestrate, manage their resources. The effect of COVID was to break so many of the existing systems organizations had for doing just that, because they effectively had been established for years based on people's presence. We've all been hearing so much about hybrid working and the like. We've heard about wellness and so on. All those things now are absolutely demanding of both data, but also capability. It's one thing to have information, but what do you do with it? How do team leaders, operational leaders, actually look after people and manage their work activities when they are at home?
It's a combination of data, but also the mechanics: How? When do we meet? What do we talk about? How do we plan ahead? That, of course, is absolutely speaks to ActiveOps' fundamental offer, and that in itself, if nothing else, for our existing customers, it's had a hugely positive confirmatory effect on how valuable our data and our process is for them. More importantly, it's created a pain point for people who don't have ActiveOps. There's a second effect we can see coming up as well, which is the dreaded R-word or recession. ActiveOps is all about effectively sweating the assets. It's making sure you're capitalizing on the investments you already have, to do the best you can within the constraints, as it were, of your organization.
In prior periods of pressure, let's say, we've always found a very healthy demand for ActiveOps, because it plays to the theme of let's simply circle the horses and wagons, as it were, and do what we can within the constraints of our operational businesses. ActiveOps is got a hugely compelling sort of offer in that respect.
I think that conjunction of two things is part of the contribution to the outlook that we're feeling in both in terms of pipeline, but also it's the internal dynamics within our customers, which is turning this kind of operational efficiency of control agenda to the higher levels of the board table, and it suddenly becomes more accessible, and it's more exciting, perhaps, or perhaps just more pragmatic than some of the other issues. Some of that is coming through, I think, in things like the Gartner table you can see on the right there, where there's concern about how to manage people, the well-being, and so on agenda, it is very much playing to that.
That's part of the reason we're pushing our products outwards in our customer range around things like the CaseworkiQ, which I'll talk about. The context for the problem we solve, the pain is increasing, and that has a corresponding improvement to the, kind of, the accessibility of our solution or the demand for our solution. Picking up a little bit more then. Take on the market. This is a picture some of you will have seen before. We're very clear on where we focus, not because there isn't a lot more out there, but at the end of the day, we're not constrained by target addressable market. There are Plenty of organizations, with large numbers of people, where productivity needs to be managed carefully.
We've focused on the banks and the related ecosystem around them, of business process outsourcers, insurance and healthcare and so on. What we're now doing is looking at particular types of issues. The big one of the moment in for a lot of banks, is financial crime. You've probably all seen reports in the papers about the consequences of getting it right or wrong. Just highlighting at the moment, you imagine the sensitivity in sanctions processing, if completely sort of untoward. You know, things that should have got trapped, don't get trapped, the political and financial consequences is very high. There's an extremely high level of oversight and effort and resource expenditure going into financial crime prevention and administration in the clearing, in the banks. That's true across the world.
It's not a, it's not a region issue. CaseworkiQ, in this particular case, is suitable. We've developed this product, which extends the use of this kind of method and system we have, to the knowledge worker, the case managers, and in particular, around financial crime. That's proving, firstly, in a very effective solution. We've had some cracking sales, in that respect, to our existing customer base, but it's a very clearly articulated value proposition to our existing customers to sell on. That kind of niche marketing to our existing customer base, where we have an existing relationship, is, I think, something that we can see a lot happening in the course of this year.
It's early days, we only launched the product formally last month, but we've been prepping the market with our customers in the lead into that, and I said I look forward to being able to report more in the course of the half year, in October or November, when we talk next. Looking a little bit more regionally, EMEA has been our very strong region. There's a significant expansion across a number of accounts, particularly our, I say, our existing accounts. We don't disclose actual customer numbers, but some of our, the well-known brands that we've talked about are using ActiveOps very thoroughly and expanding in a number of areas. Into some interesting different areas.
I've touched on financial crime. We've also got pilots running in branch-related activity, in some of our banking customers, where there's a real issue around how do we start to present You know, we need to have staffing in branches sufficient to manage the customer demand of walk-ins, but we can't just put phone calls in to soak up the capacity, 'cause that's an immediate task. Whereas back office work, it can be blended into the, into that kind of customer-facing activity, can be put to one side if a customer walks up. Sounds easy, in practice, really complicated to do when you've got thousands of branches. That's exactly, again, the sort of problem that ActiveOps can solve. We've got a lot of activity in Europe. That's a real area of growth for us.
If you look across at North America, as you will have seen from Paddy's area, it was our highest growing region last year, and we are continuing to be developing that market strongly. We're seeing a lot of demand for the, for the WorkiQ product, which is this more of a sort of data collection device. Of course, the exciting piece then is against the, we've talked about Anthem and Humana, and a number of other, the big healthcare environments, is cross-selling that to ControliQ. We've been on this particular agenda for a while, but I think that has been one of the impacts of COVID with the noise and fragmentation, we haven't been able to progress with our ControliQ deployments in the last two years.
Perhaps as, as, you know, they haven't made as much progress. As I speak, you know, today, we've got three major pilots being commissioned, and it's always been the intention. There's never been any dispute about the value. Again, I'm looking forward to that, the cross-sell of the ControliQ product to our WorkiQ product in the course of this year. On the other side of the fence, WorkiQ into existing ControliQ products is, has made more progress. On the right there, you can see one example of a very strong North American customer of ours, which is now using WorkiQ, and there's some fantastic results. There's a, there's a webinar by the TD Bank organizer or owner of the product on.
Available on LinkedIn now, which you can see. She talks very, very clearly about the value to them of having this visibility, both of the sort of what people are doing, when they are, but also how it contributes to them. Let's be clear, they introduced it on a well-being agenda, making sure their staff working from home weren't being overloaded. I think that kind of example is proving extremely valuable when we go to other parts of the region, South Africa or Australia, with that sort of case study, to make it clear about that those kind of benefits. North America remains a key area of growth for us. The scale, even in the last quarter, again, we've seen significant new logo sales coming through.
Again, the intrinsic scale of the U.S., I think, makes it a very attractive market for us. Just finally, on the strategy piece, just a quick touch on the machine learning. ActiveOps has got extraordinary amounts of high amounts of data, but it's essentially transactional. What we're now doing, using some of the power of frankly, Azure, the Microsoft Azure and the machine learning environments, is to convert that back into greater and more powerful insights. The one example I'll cite is, we've introduced this to some of the forecasting. At the moment, a team leader will develop a plan using our software, and that will enable the, you know, the different managers to integrate their activities for next week much more effectively.
It does rely on the quality of the planning by that team leader, with all the value of. With ActiveOps' new machine learning, essentially all that's taken away. The system will generate the forecast and plans, which can be moderated by the team leaders. Our pilot in South Africa seems to suggest that that actually increased the bandwidth. It gave them plans and solutions that were done better to the level of a, sort of, you know, about 20%-65% improvement in their confidence, which translated into one and a half persons extra capacity per team per week. If you extrapolate that across a NatWest or a Barclays, that's a phenomenal increase in capacity through that machine learning. We are very excited about that.
I think this will be an area you'll hear me talk more about in the future, but it's essentially building on that resource base we have of now 15 years worth of real transactional data that's embedded in the ActiveOps data set. Again, lots more to talk about in the future on that one. Just to turn to the other side of the equation, Paddy, perhaps you'd like to talk a bit about our ESG?
Yes, certainly. Thanks, Richard. Fundamentally, the purpose of simplifying the run of operations, that supports the ESG and agenda, not only in how customers manage their operations, but also the positive impact it has on the well-being of their teams. Richard gave you the TD Bank example in the U.S., where they specifically put in place WorkiQ to help manage the working patterns of their teams and make sure they're doing the right thing for their employees. More specifically within the business, we've developed a more formal structure to the work that we were doing before in this area. We've adopted the GRI framework, where it's appropriate for the business. Within the environmental section, the single most impactful area, if you like, is our hosting footprint.
We host our customer base and our software on the Microsoft Azure platform. I'm sure you know that is a carbon neutral platform from the point of view of emissions. We have also established our baseline for the other key area of travel for a carbon footprint where we're baselining that, so we can understand what we're using in that area to enable us to take positive action as we move forward. In the social area, we've maintained a very solid employee engagement score of four, and that's despite an increased participant participation rate, which sometimes can lead to a drop-off. We'll also be publishing the diversity data of the business in the annual report, which you'll see come out shortly.
From a charity perspective, for example, in the U.S., we've supporting a charity called Brighter Tomorrow, and they're focused on providing a safe shelter for victims of domestic violence and assault. In EMEA, as well as the charitable work that the team has been doing, we've also been directly supporting employees and their families in India and Africa, where COVID had a particularly difficult impact. For example, in India, as you may recall from the news, it was difficult to get hold of oxygen. You know, we're directly supporting our team members over there, with that, through financial support and the same in Africa.
From the governance perspective, we've continued to develop and enhance the policies and procedures that we have, and we've embedded the formal audits, remuneration, and nominations subcommittees into the governance structure that we have for the business. Good progress. Clearly, plenty more to do, but the ESG agenda forms one of the cornerstones of the business.
Thanks, Paddy. It's worth a note on one of the other infrastructure things that have cropped up is SOC 2. Some of you who probably never enjoyed the benefit of this. As a SaaS company, clearly data security is critical. In the U.S., we are working for a lot of healthcare providers, and where HIPAA rules are very, very stringent around the protection of personal data. I'm really pleased with this year, we, you know, we've got our SOC 2 process nailed, and that is something which frankly, not a lot of companies do. You know, it's a lot of things, a lot of work to get that. A bit like ISMS and the like.
That, I think, is a testament to the integrity of ActiveOps, because the customers we deal with demand that. Again, when I talk about the sort of layers, the platform of different elements that we've got in place, I think succeeding with that is just one other example of some of those foundational elements that's perhaps not that visible, but makes a massive difference when it comes to the trading activities and the ability to sell. Looking at the outlook, I hope you're picking up from the tone of this conversation, we're very, very bullish. I think combination of market context is creating more pain to the issue we've solved. The context for the outcomes we deliver, again, is very, very strong, and we're seeing that in the Q1.
Q1 trading has been very strong. It's been against our expectations. There's a sort of nuance to that. Our revenues are multicurrency. Our costs are also in currency. Essentially, it's the margin that we make in regions that comes back to the U.K. PNL, and with the weakness of the pound, that's contributed in a positive way to, you know, when we've got lots of dollar earnings, that helps the PNL. At an underlying level, trading has been very strong. The teams are busy, the revenues are strong, and you know, we've had a healthy first quarter against our expectations. Paddy's talked a bit about our expectations for the year. We're certainly on track in terms of our EBIT target.
As I alluded to, the launch of CaseworkiQ, I think we've got a cracking pipeline of customers coming through that way. On a running basis, the effects of the last year and as for market context, I would say ActiveOps as a trading company, has never been stronger, and it's looking really good for where we're at, despite, if you like, the broader ups and downs of the share price market and the reflection of tech stocks. You know, it's for others to make their choice, but we certainly internally are very excited. We're just feeling confident about where we're at at the moment.