Transcript

Oct 12, 2026

Summary

H1 revenue declined 3.9% nominally amid U.S. timing delays and lower professional services, but cash generation remained positive and debt-free. Management expects H2 normalization, sees recent order momentum, and is expanding toward subscription and enterprise credential management.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Intercede Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that is just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish our responses where it is appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you would give that your kind attention, I am sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Intercede Group PLC. Klaas, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Jake, and indeed, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Klaas van der Leest. I am the CEO for Intercede. At this session, I am joined by Nitil Patel, who is our CFO, and Alan Storey, who is our Chief Product Officer. I would like to welcome both existing investors, potentially new private investors, as well as analysts to this session, which will cover our H1 results, covering the period April through to September. We look forward to providing you with an update in the coming 45 minutes. Whilst this presentation is us presenting to you, we very much look forward to your questions, but also your feedback after the session. Without further ado, let us start with the presentation. If we start with company introduction, we then move on to progress report, financial review. Alan will then give an update on the product roadmap. We will do a quick summary, and then we will open up the floor to Q&A. For those who are new to us, what does Intercede do? We protect companies against data breach. How do we do that? We replace weak credentials, such as passwords, with much stronger authentication, and we do that simply, securely, and at scale. What do I mean with simply? We have standard off-the-shelf software, which is easy to implement. We do that securely. Our customer base is very recognizable. They tend to be very high-end government, U.S. federal agencies, defense and aerospace players. Before they put this type of software into production, it will be rigorously tested, so we know our software is extremely secure. The final point is we can do it at scale. Scale is quite important, particularly for these large agencies and large corporates. We tackle anything from thousands of licenses to millions of licenses at the very high end. The platform is simple to install, extremely secure, and it will scale. At 30,000 feet, how do we see our software and how is our software being perceived? It is very much seen as business critical software. What do I mean with that? This is not discretionary kind of spend. Even in financial downturns, economic downturns, this software will not be switched off because in effect, it is protecting the client's crown jewels. The second point of the headline banner is, we are in an interesting space. The cybersecurity market is very, very active. We hear and read about data breaches and company shutdowns very, very frequently. We can reference JLR, we can reference Marks & Spencer, but they are not the only ones. This is happening on a daily basis. If we then look at our business. We are a software company. It is scalable. We have proven that out over the last couple of years. Our operating model is very much proven. We have three streams of revenue. We have a very sticky recurring revenue base, very much based on our support and maintenance, but also now a growing amount of annual recurring revenue based on subs. We have our repeatable revenue, which is our professional services, and finally, we have our licensing column. We have a very recognizable client base. I always say Intercede is a small company based in Lutterworth, but with a client base to die for. While we can publish some of our client logos on our website, many of the logos we work with, we cannot or we are not allowed to publish. What is very, very common in that client base, they are extremely loyal. They tend to be quite happy. Every year we run our client satisfaction survey. We just completed our survey, and our Net Promoter Score this year, I am pleased to report, is 58. Over the last couple of years, that has significantly increased. It is not that long ago our NPS Net Promoter Score was hovering in the mid to low 20s. We have more than doubled it over the last three to four years, and 58 for a B2B software company is regarded as pretty good. If you are not familiar with Net Promoter Score, it is an absolutely brutal score. You only need to get a few detractors in your client base and you are very quickly back to zero. So 58 for a B2B software company is pretty good. Our management team is very established. Young kid on the block is Mr. Patel, who has been three and a half years with the company. Alan has been on just over 25. The rest of the team is pretty established, and I came in in 2018. Our growth pillars are very clearly defined. We are an organic growth play who will from time to time look at inorganic, i.e. M&A, but we are not a buy and build. So very, very clear. We take time when we look at our acquisitions. We have done one acquisition over the last seven years since I have joined. We are always in the market for more acquisitions, but we will only do so when we feel there is shareholder value to be created. If we then look at the market, it is extremely important to us. We are very much recognized as a market leader in the space we are operating in. We believe we have a strong competitive advantage, not just based on our client base, but also on the technology we have, the client base we have, and indeed, the people we have behind the organization who are regarded as specialists in their field. For those who followed us for a little while, you would have noticed that we have expanded from a single product company into a multi-product company. Four years ago, we were very much a single product play, playing at the top end of what we reference is the authentication pyramid, and both through our own development and through M&A, we are now covering the entire side of the authentication pyramid. Alan will talk about the pyramid in a bit more detail. What that has enabled us to do is basically grow our target account market, our TAM, not just from a product perspective, but also we are extending it from a geography perspective. We are opening up new countries through our resellers and distributions, and that is very much driven by our go-to-market model. Again, for those who are new to us, we love regulation. In the U.S., there is an awful lot of regulation, so we play there very well. We see now increased regulation coming up within the EU. We see other countries who may not have necessarily the regulation as we know it in the U.S., but they want to follow the regulation or the standards in the U.S. Particularly in Asia Pac, a lot of the governments out there, they look at U.S. regulations. Again, that will give us a few tailwinds. Financially, Nitzan will talk very much about the first six months. From a medium to longer term perspective, we have shown really good growth in all KPIs. We have a good amount of cash in the bank. We are debt-free. Our balance sheet is incredibly clean. We are extremely profitable. Our attrition remains incredibly low. Our attrition in terms of revenue is significantly below 2%. I always describe it as the funnel. We want as many clients in the top of the funnel, but we also want to squeeze the bottom of that funnel so we are not leaking. We are in a position where we are currently transitioning from perpetual to subscription. We need to do that very carefully. In the public markets, there is very little room to switch on a hard pivot. We are trying to manage that in the coming years to move to a subscription basis, and we are making good progress on that. If we then look at our strategic growth plans, I have already highlighted that objective number one is organic growth. We want to drive double-digit organic growth over a prolonged period of time. If you look at our CAGR over the last four years, we are very sensibly driving 20% plus growth. How do we do that? We clearly invest in our people, we invest in our products, but we also invest in our partners, and that is very much driven on the pipeline. Our approach to the second leg of our growth strategy, the inorganic side, is cautious. We have very strict assessment criteria. I know there are questions in the chat already about M&A. We will provide a bit more color on that. We are actively managing a long list. We have a short list. We are talking to potential targets on a weekly basis. Capital structure, again, through our finance team and Nitzan, we have a very low risk attitude. We are managing our working capital very carefully. We are generating good cash, we are extremely profitable, and we will continue to do that going forward. The final point is, as I already alluded to, our focus is on recurring revenue. We try and get operational efficiencies where we can. We are starting to use AI a little bit in order to get a little bit more efficiency. That is not to replace our staff. It is very much to enhance the work they do. Our growth strategy and plan is very clear, and it is all about execution as we have been focusing on that for the last seven years. Just a quick update on the markets we operate in, particularly after Trump announced his tariffs. We thought in June it would be good to provide a quick update on this. Still pleased to report there are no impacts on tariffs for us. We have seen little or no impact on Doge. There are some conflicting news feeds out there at the moment. I think on Monday there was a news feed out that Doge has been disbanded, but that the principals were still very much alive. I saw a note last night that allegedly it is still alive. Conclusion from our side is we see little or no impact from Doge. So whether it is there or it is not there, I do not think makes any real difference. Yes, we have seen some federal delays, which is why the arrow is pointing downwards. Interesting to note, and this is already one of the questions which I can kind of pre-answer now. It was not actually the shutdown that caused the delays. During the shutdown, we as Intercede and our partners were all fully funded, so there was no real impact. The impact we did see was the change to the new administration, and particularly in the period July, August, so the summer period, there were recognizable delays and one of the larger programs we actually worked on was faced with no further funding, which is an interesting point when you are talking about one of the largest agencies in the U.S. But it is what it is. That process has fully normalized. You would have seen we issued a second RNS earlier this week showing new deal flow also in the U.S., and we fully expect that we see fewer delays, if not no delays going forward, but that is based on the information we have today. The move from GOTS to COTS, government off-the-shelf to commercially off-the-shelf software, we see as a positive. Again, lots of public domain information on this. The new administration is really focusing on defense and border security. Good news for us is these are very much the areas we operate well in, and we have recognized client base. The purchasing review potential move more to direct relationship with vendors. What we have seen so far is it has been very much focused on Microsoft and Oracle and Salesforce. Whether or not Intercede will be included in this group, we don't know, but I can reassure you we're very much prepared for this. We're visible in all the procurement frameworks in the U.S. as in when they decide to have a direct relationship, we can, and we're ready for it. The last one is an interesting one. There's definitely a lot more focus on the state of the cybersecurity in state and local. I think it's in the press here as of last night that there are certain councils in central London that have been affected by a cyber attack. There is more spending at state and local. Alan was in the U.S. last week during our client advisory board, but was also recording marketing literature on video with one of our partners, Guidehouse, who now want to branch out of pure federal but into state and local and into commercial or enterprise. Market update from the U.S., still very, very strong. Still a lot of our revenue is driven by the U.S. Yes, we've seen some delays, but, we believe that's very much normalizing. Then finally, what we call rest of world. Europe increased regulation is due DORA. We see that as positive drivers for our business, but we also see some more focus on data sovereignty. Data sovereignty has already been an issue in the Middle East, where they don't necessarily want to be on U.S. cloud. We also see that very much coming through within the E.U. Why is that of interest to us? Because the software we use or the software we manufacture is typically used on-prem or in hybrid cloud. So it gives the entity or the end client the opportunity to choose where their data is being hosted. Finally, Asia Pac. Asia Pac has been growing very, very nicely for us. Again, in the second RNS we issued this week, we're highlighting a deal in Asia Pac, particularly in Singapore, where we now very much have a growing footprint. Singapore is interesting. Whilst they don't necessarily have their own regulation, they very much follow FIPS 201 from North America, and they want to be compliant and following that standard very, very clearly. So their security requirements are extremely high, and we fit well into that category. What's happened over the last couple of years is we've been building out partnerships, reseller relationships in that region. A lot of the partnerships we have, they actually branch out of Singapore. So we're now starting to have initial dialogue around countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and others will follow. As and when we have more information, we'll provide a broader update on that one. I think that's the update on this side. I'm going to go on mute and pass over to Nitil. Thanks, Klaas. Just to reiterate what Klaas has been saying, the company's clear strategy is to innovate. We'll show you that, what we're doing with that. Also to diversify with the geo-diversified pipeline and to execute on our plans. We have highlighted, assuming that everyone's read the RNS, that the revenue was slightly down on a comparative basis at 3.9% in nominal terms and then obviously 4.2% against constant currency. Again, I'll come to later on what the impact the strong pound has had on the dollar as a lot of our revenues, significant amounts of our revenues come out are denominated in U.S. dollar. We continue to invest in our product. It's critical for us. Again, Alan will explain later on the product vision we've got for the next 3 to 5 years. We are expensing most of it. In fact, all of it at this, it's just a structure of GBP 2.1 million into the income statement. We'll continue to do that unless of course we've got a separable identifiable product like we had last year for SecureVault, which we will then capitalize according to the standards. Then you'll see the correlation of adjusted EBITDA to PBT and why they're quite similar to each other. As we mentioned, there's a focus on subscription revenue. There's a pivot to it as best we can with a gradual process on how we're doing that. The good news for us is that new products such as SecureVault are only available as subscription pricing. We're incentivizing our sales team to do more 3 or 5-year deals, again, to give the group more predictability and more future revenue for stability. As we mentioned before, I think everyone knows that when we see the graphs in a minute that professional services were down, and I'll explain why that has occurred. Graphically, just to show you the numbers, if you look at the top left, GBP 8.2 million has that split. The good news is that S&M continues to go in the right direction for us. It's a key KPI for us. Why is that? Because it's recurring, and it's a very sticky revenue for us. If it can in the year cover over 90% to 95% of our operating expenses, then anything else that we add on the top line will be very, very accretive to the bottom line. PS has been off, and it's close to comparative 2.7 to 1.4, and there are two main reasons for that. One is Klaas has said there were some delays in July, August, which had an impact on us for PS revenue for recognition. Also last year, we successfully deployed a big deployment from that large order we had in December 2024. That successful deployment meant a lot of our staff were used to make sure that we were helping the client to get up and running. The good news is they are, but obviously that doesn't repeat itself and hence why you're seeing that the numbers are slightly off. There's a question in the chat about is our normal run rate. We expect our run rate to pick up in H2 now that the delays are not occurring. We'll look to get to normalized run rates between GBP 3.5 million-GBP 4 million in the year. Revenue-wise, as Klaas has said, the U.S. still represents a large, nonetheless, a large percentage of revenues, 80%. We are seeing movement in the rest of the world. As Klaas has alluded, there is movement in APAC, there is movement in Europe, and we will continue to focus on developing that geo-diversified pipeline for us. As I mentioned, why are we showing adjusted EBITDA to profit before tax? It is a strong correlation between the two because we have limited exceptionals. Our normal exceptionals are amortization, depreciation, right of use asset, and share-based payments. Then of course, net cash and equity all going in the right direction. We generated cash from operating activities. We outflowed an element of share award. I will explain that later. But as Klaas has mentioned, got good cash generation in the year, and we are forecasting that for the year-end. Income statement. Again, a very clean income statement. We will continue to use this. I think most companies are going to have to adopt this anyway for IFRS 18 when it comes into play. Two things of note for us, obviously, margins are down. That is a reflection of, A, the product mix at the moment that I just mentioned, but also that if we miss revenue at the top line, the fixed elements of our operating expenses does mean that the flex is limited, payroll being the biggest expense in our operating expenses. So it does have a larger impact on profit, which we will expect to pick it up as we are holding our numbers into H2. The one thing of note is that tax expense at the moment is nil, and will be nil. We forecast it to be nil for FY26. But as you noted in the last bullet point, our losses are going to be utilized. As of FY27, we are now forecasting to pay tax going forward. Again, just an illustration of what our exceptionals look like. Mainly to do with amortization and depreciation. Just wanted to show you the movements in operating expenses, why they have not moved so far. Obviously, the two reds, the targeted investments that we have mentioned, the innovation is really critical for us. This is built into the budget. The run rate we replicated starting to H2. Did mention about the foreign FX. We had net adverse impact with pound strengthening. We do not hedge. We have taken the view that that is too risky for us, especially the size of the finance team. We have the capability of doing forward rates. We will look at that in the future. But at the moment, we tend to convert quickly into sterling because our payroll is the biggest expense, which is in sterling, and we tend to keep three to four months of USD cash just to meet our U.S. obligations. The greens, just to flex on revenue. If there is less revenue, there is less commission, there is less bonus accruals. Because I mentioned with the contractor PS that we did not pick up in July, August had an impact, obviously a positive impact on the other side. Balance sheet, again, a very clean balance sheet. We do not anticipate anything major moving in this in the future. We will probably bring deferred tax assets and deferred tax liabilities into FY26. Now, knowing that we know that the tax losses have been utilized and we can forecast our R&D movements and capital allowance movements. The big movement on the top end is right of use assets. We have renewed leases on most of our properties in the U.K. and the U.S. And then three metrics that we focus on are the key working capital metrics, which is trade and other receivables, cash, and deferred revenue. These we focus on purely because these are good metrics to hold a company to generate cash, to be able to do what it wants to do with its clear strategy of investing, not just in its people and products, but also doing an M&A play as and when we get the right acquisition into play. Just showing the cash flow. Again, we generated cash compared to last year. I suppose the main movement of note is the cash in financing activities. That is mainly to do with the VCP. I will explain that in a minute. But as you can see, good cash flow, good generation, and no debt in the group. Just passing to show you the illustration of where the cash moved. Obviously, you have to take the comparative from the 1st of April rather than 30th September 2024. So as we mentioned, GBP 1.165 for cash generation. The VCP cash award. So this was the VCP that we announced in October 2022, and had a trigger price of 121 and a full realization price of 133. That did occur when the share option was exercised. And when the board met, the decision was made at that point in time to then look at the way we could protect dilution and EPS going forward and looking at the cash flows and the cash generation we were going to forecast in the next two to three years. And the view was taken that we were better to award a cash element to that award rather than a share element. Although we did issue 700,000 shares to the awardee, it was better to give a cash element because we could protect EPS and dilution going forward. At that point, I am going to pass you over to Alan, who is going to describe the product and vision for you. Thank you, Nitil. So let us take a look as to where we have come from as a company, where we are today, and where we are heading over the next three to five years. So we started off as a single product company. Those of you who have seen our authentication pyramid, we have very high security at the top, lower security at the bottom. We started off playing in that very high security space, governments, intelligence agencies, aerospace defense, for example, just working on PKI, public key infrastructure. We added FIDO passkeys in there, a standard that comes in from the consumer space but is still very high assurance. We then added in via acquisition a multi-factor authentication and password security management solutions. Those have now been completely integrated into the organization. So we take those to market as MyID product family. And that in effect covers the first part of the pyramid, the first face of the pyramid from the top to the bottom. That allows us to move down into the mid-market. It also importantly allows us to provide solutions for customers who are on the journey towards better security and help them on that journey. So important to note, we believe there is still growth in that space. Personal identity is still a good place to be, but we're ambitious and we're looking ahead to the next three to five years. Where can we take the product to drive that growth and increase revenue? We believe the best place is broadening out our credential management capabilities to support not just people, but people and non-human entities, including devices and agentic AI. And I'll explain what we mean by that. So our intention is to become a leading software provider of enterprise credential management. Sometimes, Gartner call this secrets management, but it's basically looking after the secrets, the keys, the credentials within an organization that allow people and things to identify themselves and access your environment. Again, integrated software product family here, as we've done with the existing acquisition, brought that into the company, focusing on employee ID, machine ID, and agentic AI. What I mean by machines is fairly straightforward, printers, routers, servers. These tend to have identities. They need to identify themselves before they can connect into your environment. What we're seeing now is the appearance of agentic AI. So that's when AI is acting in an autonomous way on behalf of a person or a thing, making decisions. For example, moving money between one account and another based on a set of rules. And if that's happening, you need to know that that agentic AI is what it claims to be and not somebody trying to break into your system. This solution, we believe, builds on what we already have. So we're not completely starting from greenfield. We have the credential management system that works for people identities today. We can extend that to machine identities. We also, about a year ago, introduced a SecureVault product. This protects keys and secrets within an organization. So for example, if you have a private key on your phone to read an email, you lose that phone, you replace it, or you need to read the same emails on your iPad, you need to securely get that key and put it onto your new device. So this is one of the major features of credentials management in a broader context within the organization. So we already have some of the building blocks there. What we're looking at at the moment is identifying what capabilities we need to add into our existing product set to cover that whole solution across enterprise credential management, some of which we'll build, some of which we'll acquire, and I'll talk about those in the next few slides. So why do we think this is the right space for us? The first one is demand. We've had existing customers approach us saying, "Intercede, you're very good at managing personal identity. We have machines that need identity, in our environment as well. If a server certificate expires, nobody can log on. We need to manage and track that." There are solutions that do this. We've looked at some of the solutions, but they're expensive, they're complex. They don't give us the control we need. Could you add that into your product? We've seen existing customer demand on this. We've seen similar feedback from partners as well, and also working with analysts such as Gartner and KuppingerCole. We're seeing a growing need for a single pane of glass to manage multiple credentials within the enterprise. Today, people tend to deploy point solutions, something to do personal ID, such as us, something to do machine ID. They're starting to look at how do we manage agentic AI. That's relatively new. There are a few standards in that space at the area, but it's identified as a growing area that can help businesses via a converged management solution. I saw there was one question in the chat, so I'll address this now on identity and access management vendors and the Microsofts, the Okta's of this world. We've been successful where we work with them. We work alongside them as opposed to try and compete with them. For example, with Microsoft, we were one of the early adopters working with their FIDO passkey APIs, so we could issue and manage passkeys that work with Entra ID. We're now seeing customers starting to adopt that. That's been a very good place to us to add value around those major identity and access management vendors. This plays very much into that space. For example, Microsoft Entra ID predominant in a lot of our customers controls. Once you've connected as a person or a device, what can you do within the environment? But they don't issue and manage those credentials in the first place. We believe this is an area that carries on our work with strategy. As I mentioned, it builds on what we've already got. We have the credential management capability. We have connections into the environment. We have policy control. We have the SecureVault. Moving down to the bottom section here. Anybody who's going to buy a solution in this space absolutely needs to work with a credible vendor. How you get that credibility is by delivering high security solutions to customers such as we have, and also the scalability and process control. A lot of our solutions work with existing networks, identity and access management systems, certificate authorities to automate processes, what's called identity orchestration. We've done that at scale. We've done that with millions of people, millions of credentials. So we believe we have the credibility to move into this space. Looking at how modern enterprises are today, this is focused on the space we play in today. So this is the personal identity management. The two MyID logos there represent our product family. The top one is the integrated suite that has password management, one-time password management, FIDO passkey management, and PKI credential management. We connect into infrastructure, certificate authorities, identity and access management systems, sources of user data, et cetera. The MyID logo below that is the SecureVault that can protect some of those secrets and securely recover them when they're needed to. We can also onboard people, so we can capture fingerprints, photos, scan passports, do background checks. We do this at the highest levels of assurance, and we issue those credentials onto a wide range of form factors, USB tokens, smart cards, virtual cards, mobile. So that's very much where we play today. As we build the slide, we start to see more entities within the enterprise exist that need a credential. The first one is machines. Printers, routers, firewalls, servers, these connect into the network, and typically they would need a certificate to do that, to identify themselves. That is good for us because certificate space is where we play very strongly. As I mentioned, there are vendors that do that today. There are vendors who provide machine identity. There are vendors who provide personal identity, such as ourselves. But there is nobody doing it across both areas and nobody doing it well. The next level up is where we have systems talking to each other. This is really an extension of machine identity. Most applications we access today are not a single monolithic application where we just log on and use an interface. What is happening in the background is there are multiple cloud services, microservices, where data packets are being sent between API endpoints, how systems communicate with each other. Those endpoints, if you are going to talk to that endpoint to send it some data or request a process, you need an identity to do that. So you need a credential to authenticate, and the data that is sent between those endpoints needs to be protected. Again, this is an extension of machine identity. What we are starting to see now is a greater use of agentic AI within organizations. Still relatively new, but that is an autonomous AI agent acting on behalf of a person or a thing that is performing operations based on a set of rules. Again, the standards in that area are quite new. People like the FIDO Alliance are trying to be a standard in that area. Certificates potentially a standard in that area. Good news again for us, we work with both of those standards bodies very closely already. But there is basically a broader set of objects within an enterprise that need credential management, and it is very difficult for enterprises to get a view across the entire enterprise. So where we play today is down the bottom left. Where we are moving is to provide this across the entire enterprise. So converged credential management, regardless of that credential we are managing, is for a person, a machine, or an agentic AI object. We will build this via a combination of buy and acquisition where appropriate. So we have identified, in effect, the Lego blocks we need to click together to build this overall solution. Some of those we already have. Some of those we can build. Where appropriate, if we find the right vendor that can accelerate us in direction, we will make an acquisition. We are actually managing that process at the moment. Looking at what we have been doing with the product to put us in a good position to move into this area. We have enhanced what the product can do in terms of the types of credentials it can manage. So we manage smart cards, PKI tokens, FIDO passkeys, identity wallets on mobile. We brought the SecureVault in. Again, we have built a number of these building blocks already. In terms of the way we deploy and integrate the product, we put investment into APIs and SDKs, toolkit around the product. We are cloud capable. So we can run this product at scale and integrate it into the environment it will need to be as it is managing machine identities. There are more machines than people out there, so we need to have those scalable automated processes, which we have. Within the organization, Klaas touched on some of this earlier about our use of AI. We have moved to a much more modern development process. We have DevOps. The product builds every night automatically in the cloud and auto test runs, which means we can have our human testers focused on user experience as opposed to the use of the API. Basically, we built efficient and modern processes there. We do not get AI to code for us. We do not find it is quite at that level yet, but we do find it can help our developers write test plans, help with automated testing, for example. Basically, we are using AI to make our existing team more efficient, but we are not using it to replace people. Summarizing on this, we believe there is a need for this. We are seeing a demand for converged enterprise credential management from our customer base, from the analysts, believe there is a space for this, and we believe we can play very strongly in that space. There are a wider range of credential types out there that need managing. We manage some of those already. Some of the technologies involved fit very well into our product stack. Again, we are looking to evolve our product capabilities in this area to manage non-human identities, agentic AI, and people in a single credential product. Important point here is like our existing business, this is mission-critical for people. As Klaas was mentioning, our product does not tend to get switched off. People keep the power on, people keep their security up and running. Just like they need the security for people, they need the same level of security for machines. We believe this is an excellent business space for us to move into. With that, I am going to hand back to Klaas. Thank you, Alan. In summary, market-wise, yes, we have seen some delays in H1, particularly relating to the new administration in the U.S. But as you would have seen from the second RNS that we have issued this week, there is some good momentum now from both net new business as well as renewals. We fully expect that that is going to normalize throughout the second half of the year. We have talked about our move from perpetual to subscription and annual recurring revenue. Yes, it is tricky in the public markets, but we are trying to manage that. Really encouraging with the uptake on our subscription revenues at the moment, but at the same time, we need to balance that against the market expectations and market forecasts that are out there. Pipeline wise, we have been signposting this for a little while now that we are not just a single-trick pony for the U.S. We are very much developing new regions. Asia-Pac is a good example. We are seeing good traction within continental Europe, EU at the moment. We are also continuing to see interest within the U.K. Nick will talk about revenue margin profitability focus. We are trending very nicely, and although we are 4% off in terms of revenue against a high comparable from last year, we believe we are making up some good ground. The final two, very much on balance sheet. We are pretty clean. We have no debt. We have significant amounts of cash in the bank. We are generating every quarter, every half, every year, good cash. There is no bad debt in the business. We are pretty well supported. If we then try and wrap up, we believe we can meet the full year forecast. I know there are, again, awesome questions in the chat out there. At the end of the day, there are many things that we cannot control, but the things that we can control is how we run this business and how we convert that pipeline into orders and from orders into revenue in period, or if it is not in period, into deferred revenue for periods to come. If we then move on to final slide. If we now look output wise, I talked about the move from perpetual to subscription, which will be a longer term program and project. I referenced already the pipeline, but the pipeline is developing very nicely, both in the U.S. and what we call our rest of world. We are continuing to invest strategically into our product for medium and longer term. R&D wise, we are north of GBP 4 million at the moment, so those who have been following us for a while know that number has been growing. That is also reflecting in the headcount. Our headcount at the moment is 115, 100 plus in the U.K. and the rest in North America. We talked about our approach to M&A. Again, reiterating, we are not a buy and build, but we very much continue to evaluate the opportunities ahead of us. Alan has given some good hints as to where our interest lies at the moment, and we have active dialogue as we speak. Client wise, referenced earlier on, again, we see very little attrition and we have an extremely loyal client base. Once our clients are on platform, they tend to be on platform for longer periods. Longer serving clients is now 22 or 23 years. That is a pretty good driver for lifetime value of the clients. We believe we are well positioned for growth in revenue, growth in margin, growth in profits, and driven by a wider expansion model, both from U.S. and non-U.S. perspective. As Alan has indicated, we very much see a play for us to become a leading provider of enterprise and unified credential management, where we take on more than just person entity or person identity. We see a real opportunity moving into machine and potentially agentic AI. That concludes our presentation for today. There are quite a few questions in the chat now. I quite enjoy this part because if I read the questions, I can pretty much handle them out. First, well, it's not the first question because there were a few pre-submitted questions, but it's the first question in the chat that was on our side. It's a question from Ted. Can you give us a bit more color how you will drive market uptake? What's your marketing strategy, basically? Alan, you want to take that one? The marketing report up to me, so I was expecting that one to come in my direction. There's probably two main themes here. One is thought leadership. On areas where we believe we are ahead of the competition, we want to be in our customers' faces that we're leading the charge in this area. A couple of examples. I did a presentation at the FIDO Authenticate conference on use of FIDO passkeys in high assurance environments. That was with a partner, Yubico. Recently did a presentation with Microsoft on how you could issue and manage passkeys that work with Entra ID, because we were an early adopter for that. Again, there's elements of thought leadership. The second one really carries through from that. Our marketing is very much working with partners. We're 115 people. Some of our partners are much larger than that, both technology and reseller partners. As another example, last week I was in the U.S. with our customers doing a customer advisory board. One of our partners, Guidehouse, there. They're around 18,000 people globally, currently take us into federal government. I was recording some marketing with them where they're positioning it into regulated industries outside of federal government. Energy, healthcare on a global basis. The marketing is very much focused on thought leadership, where we believe the most appropriate to differentiate, and also primarily supporting our partners to help go and drive those leads. Thank you, Alan. Next question, I think was from Ian. Hi, re: M&A, have you looked at Device Authority as a potential acquisition? Tern PLC hold approximately 25% of Device Authority and their entire market cap is around GBP 3 million. This includes other investments that could be sold off as they are not a strategic fit for Intercede. Ian, it's a company policy and market policy that we cannot comment on any specific targets. I'm afraid I'm going to answer this question more in the round. Kind of picking up on earlier comments on M&A, we're very much in the market. We have a long list, north of 300 companies of potential targets. At any point in time, we have a shortlist of 15-25, and within that shortlist, we're typically in dialogue with multiple parties at any point in time. No comments on specific targets here, but if we broaden the question a little bit to, are you still looking in the market for potential acquisitions? Absolutely, yes, and I think we've given a good indication as to what we're potentially looking at. There's another question, again, pre-submitted, I think it was from Max. Did the U.S. shutdown affect the timing of the flow of orders? I think we've answered that question during the process that it wasn't actually the shutdown. During the shutdown, all our programs were fully funded. Next question is from William. Thank you for the more comprehensive revenue breakdown in the interims. We are always listening, William. It's very helpful. Professional services at GBP 1.4 million were below your previously stated normalized full year run rate of GBP 3 million-GBP 4 million. Is this likely to improve in H2? Nitil, you kind of touched upon it, but maybe you want to repeat yourself earlier on. Yeah, thanks, Klaas. Yes, William, just to reaffirm that, as we mentioned, there was a slight delay for us in July, August. We're forecasting to pick that up to the normalized run rate into H2, so yes. Next question is again from William. In the finals you mentioned potential upside from increased DoD spending. Is this still the case or has it been delayed by U.S. government shutdown? As per earlier remark, we have seen no real impact from government shutdown. We do see defense spending as an interesting point. Again, lots of public domain information on this, but if you look at the comments that, again, Trump has made around defense spending within the E.U., defense spending from NATO, we actually see some opportunity popping up in continental Europe. As and when we have updates, we will provide more color on that. Question from Andrew. Regarding your plans of converged enterprise credential management, can you say a bit more about competition, including large identity and access management players if relevant? Is positioning of the IAM players important when Intercede is evaluating its best opportunities? I think, Alan, you again touched upon this, so I am just going to bring this one back to you. Yeah. As mentioned, we very much follow a work with strategy. We do not want to fight with the Microsofts and the Oktas of this world. They do not do this. There are other vendors out there who focus on either machine identity management or sometimes they are called certificate lifecycle management, but they do not tend to be the huge identity and access management players, which is important for us. We very much want to follow that work with strategy. Next question from Mike. Three years in, how would you rate the success of Authlogics acquisition against your original expectations and why? I think, Mike, there are different angles to this. We have acquired some very strong IP. We have acquired a very strong client base and distribution network. We actually got our new CTO out of Authlogics, so that is all very positive. Revenue-wise, no, not there yet. Expecting more from it. I fully expect it will come, but against the original case, we are behind on revenue, but there is no reason that we cannot make that up. Next question, William. Is the large project you mentioned still defunded? No, William, the lack of funding was only during July and August. That project has now been fully funded. I can also declare because the client is not in the public domain anyway, but the USD 1.5 million in RNS too was actually from the same project, which gives you a good indication that there is definitely funding on this program. Next question, Andrew. I noticed that support and maintenance revenue in the period was a decent amount higher than a year ago, but deferred revenue at period end is roughly the same as a year ago. I would have expected it to be higher. Are you able to comment on this, please? Mr. Patel. Yeah. Thanks, Klaas. Andrew, yes. We are slightly disappointed with deferred revenue. As we have mentioned, some of the FFPs that we had last year as a comparative had long-term capabilities and deliverables. They have all unwound because we have delivered them, hence why the numbers are not growing as we thought it will. We expect that to change in H2, and as we focus more on three to five-year deals, we are targeting that number to go up, especially long-term. So slightly disappointing, agreed, but we expect to unwind that and increase it at year end. Andrew is back again. Can you talk a little please about the pipeline for Europe and do you see any scope for Intercede to be part of EU's digital wallet plans? Let me split this up in two parts. So let me take the first part and Alan can talk about the second part. Pipeline for Europe. Whilst we do not split out Europe in these conversations, we talk about the rest of world. Rest of world is our non-American business. That pipeline is developing very nicely. More specifically, we also see net new opportunity within the EU at the moment, so we are continuing to pursue that business. Next question is from Nicholas. Can you explain the disappointing decline in share price since September 24? Interesting question, Nicholas. I think the initial decline very much driven by our half one results announcements. We can all take our views on that. We are 4% off. It is a timing issue as we have highlighted in our updates over the last couple of weeks. If one order had come in, it would have looked very different, but not a lot we can do about that. We cannot control when governments are in go slow mode. The second part I think of that explanation is just general market sentiment. We are not the only share price that is down. We tend to follow a basket of other AIM listed shares, I cannot think of one, at least not in our basket, that has performed well over the period. So, I am afraid it is what it is. Internally, as a management team, we very much take the view we cannot control what is happening on the share price. The only thing we can work on is how we run the business and how we run the business successfully and profitably, and then hopefully the share price will follow. Klaas, I think you were going to address on EU wallets. Oh, I'm so sorry, Ian. Sorry, Alan. Can you comment on EU wallets, please? Absolutely. Yeah. We're well aware of the EU wallet scheme, and we support wallet technology within the product already. We are unlikely to be the system that will be issuing the wallets. That's likely to be government to citizen. We're very much focused on enterprise ID. However, we believe there's a really interesting opportunity to make use of those EU wallets, those verifiable credentials to help organizations either onboard people. There's been a lot in the press about remote workers being onboarded and there's been a fake identity, not genuine. A verifiable credential can help that. By verifiable credential, I mean you can cryptographically prove who you are with this credential online, which is very interesting. Also, a lot of our customers struggle with unlocking credentials, so account recovery. We're finding that hackers don't tend to go after a phishing-resistant credential. It's too difficult. They will target onboarding, or they will target account recovery. More likely for us is use of these verifiable credentials, these wallets in processes we support and helping organizations issue credentials is where we see we fit in this space. Thank you. Alan, next is from William again. After the recent orders, what is your level of confidence in achieving full year expectations given the weak H1? I am not convinced that or I am not completely agreeing with a weak H1. I think H1 was solid as per our update, 4%. We have already indicated during the presentation that we have a pipeline we believe we can convert. The second RNS that was issued also should give you some confidence that there is good net new business order flow and also strong support and maintenance renewals. We believe we can meet full year forecast that is currently out in the market. Then I think we have the final questions. Again, from William. Are there any conversations with the U.K. government about digital ID scheme or are they determined to have a bespoke CMS? Alan, you want to comment on this? We cannot comment on specific engagements, but we can Yeah. Conversations, yes. Again, we do not believe our system will be the one that is actually issuing this because it is likely to be a wallet-based credential. So very similar answer to the EU. However, there are some really interesting opportunities to help customers onboard with that credential or in account recovery or even use that to derive an enterprise credential, which is our focus. So we believe there are opportunities to ease costs for our customers using these credentials. So yes, we are engaged. That concludes, I think all questions have been answered. I am going to hand back to Jake. Perfect guys. That's great. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time addressing all of those questions that came in for investors this afternoon. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we will make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Klaas, perhaps before, really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great. Thank you, Jake. A couple of final words in closing. We believe we have delivered a very solid H1 set of results against the backdrop of some U.S. delays. We are pleased to report strong momentum in the second half with the announcement of new wins earlier this week. In the presentation today, we have also provided an update on our three to five-year vision with the aim of extending our offering from person ID into machine ID and potentially even agentic IDs. As discussed, we have very good market drivers as well as dynamics, which put Intercede's offering right in the heart of strong identity and our aim is to deliver solid double-digit growth, sustainable revenue growth and profitability. Clearly, this is not possible without a committed team of colleagues who I believe deliver the best code in our part of the industry. We look forward to keeping you updated on progress, and I hope you found this session informative. Thank you again for attending. Please do provide us with your feedback at the end of this session. This will help us to improve our presentation for future sessions, and we look forward to providing you with our next update in June. That concludes the update from Intercede PLC. Thank you. Perfect, Klaas. That's great. Thank you. Thank you all once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order for management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I am sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Intercede Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.