Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PCI Pal results presentation. To start with, if we could cover a couple of housekeeping items before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, which you will see on your screens. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. However, questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen, or if anyone has dialed in via pcipal@walbrookpr.com. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives today. However, the company will review all questions submitted and publish responses where appropriate. These will be available via your Investor Meet Company dashboard. Finally, we would like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded.
I would now like to hand you over to Chief Executive Officer James Barham and Chief Financial Officer Ryan Murray.
Thank you, Tom. Welcome, everybody, to our half-year interim update. Solid half-year for the company. Good operational performance in the business. I'm always pleased to see record levels of new business sales as somebody with more of a commercial background. So pleased about that. I'm going to talk a bit more about that in a moment. Good progress across our product roadmap in the period as well. Features, enhancements, and some progress towards some product adjacency that we've been starting to talk about with investors. It's also our first period of trading since we got the patent case behind us, which was a distraction for management during that period. Been very much enjoying lifting our heads a little bit more, or certainly having a bit more time to do that.
Very engaged with our investors this week that we've seen one-to-one in terms of talking about the next three to five years for this company and taking it to the next level, given we've now hit this profitability point and entering a new phase for the business and where we can take the platform and the products that we've got that go with it. Yeah, we know what we need to do to execute for the rest of the year, but it's been a good start to the period. I'm going to start with a bit of background on the business for those new to the story. We have been using IMC for a long time. Please go back and look at some of the other presentations if you'd like a bit more background detail on that.
You can also always submit any questions to us that you have. A bit of an overview on PCI Pal. Fast-growing SaaS business, SaaS technology company. Effectively, what we do is enable companies to transact business through payments securely, to do it in a simple fashion, and to do that cost-effectively as well with their customers. We primarily operate in the business communications space, which is the terminology that we use, and particularly most of our customers use our solutions within contact centers. We do have more customers today using us in back offices as well, more of the unified communications space as well. For instance, finance teams using our technology. We can do that. We can support payments. We can secure payments across any channel going into those environments.
That's right from we can service legacy environments, hardware environments, right through to what the majority of businesses are using today, the very modern cloud technologies. Across those channels, there's all sorts of different ways that organizations communicate with their customers today. Across the contact center, you've got the traditional voice channel, which is predominantly still the main way that customers interact with contact centers over the phone, live voice interactions. You've got growing digital interaction methods such as web chat, social media, SMS, all these sorts of communications that you have with companies going to contact centers. What we're also starting to see is conversational AI coming to that as well. These are chatbots and voice bots as well, and so we're being really proactive in providing our services integrated to those environments too. We really do cover the full spectrum across business communications.
Now, we effectively integrate very tightly to those sort of conversations that are going on. The way that we do that typically is through partners of ours. Many of those are resellers. Many of them are technology partners as well, where we have the deep integrations to those environments. On the right-hand side of your screen there, you can see a selection of some of our partners. Our sales model is primarily driven by sales through our partner ecosystem. We typically sell about 70%-80% of our contracts go through resellers. We still do have a direct sales business and attempts to be more enterprise-sized operations that we're selling to through our direct business. Although we're seeing more and more of that going through our integrated partners too, which we like.
Those that have known us for a long time will know that channel was a key part of our strategy early on. We do have the strongest partner ecosystem in our fairly specialist markets. We live and breathe channel in this organization. People ask us, why do these organizations choose PCI Pal? It's because we've built a channel business from the ground up, right from the way our products interoperate with their cloud platforms, the way our commercial agreements work, the way we price our solutions, the people we hire, the relationships that we build, all very important in order for us to win the ground game with those important partnerships that we have. That's an important part of our future at PCI Pal. We have over 700 customers today. That's been growing quite rapidly over the last sort of three years or so.
We've got some fantastic brands that use PCI Pal. We're very proud for them to use our solutions, particularly across the U.K. and North America. You can see some very well-known logos there. We're not sort of really vertically focused as such. If the contact center is taking payments, we're interested in it. We happen to be very strong in retail, strong in insurance as well, and some well-known brands that you'll recognize on that slide. I would say obviously it's the logo slide, so you tend to choose your best logos for that. We've got some other good ones too across that 700 customers. We do also service a lot of sort of non-enterprise customers as well. Actually, one of the strengths to this business is that we can serve the breadth of the contact center market.
The small to mid-size end of the market as well is an area that we service very well, and I would consider that more to be our run rate. That's not to say that all the logos you can see on the slide here are enterprise-sized contracts. A mid-market contact center for us might be 500 seats. An organization with a 500-seat contact center is normally a pretty large company. Although for us, we don't consider it an enterprise sort of value contract as such, often we're dealing with enterprise organizations, even at the mid-market level. Moving on to the H1 highlights after that quick background on the company. Revenue up 26%. We really need to be looking at the underlying basis there though, because we had some revenue that was deferred from FY2024 that was well documented by us at the time.
The normalized, if you like, the underlying basis of revenue growth for the period was 13%. That is where we expected it to be. Probably the more important growth metric for us as a true SaaS company is ARR. Our ARR grew 21%, not impacted by that revenue deferral as such, grew over 20%, 21% to GBP 16.8 million. That is really encouraging growth for us. New business sales, as I mentioned, which is ultimately contributing to that growth momentum in ARR. A record first half for us, selling GBP 1.9 million in ACV. ACV being annual contract value. That tends to be how we report our new business sales. It is very easy for investors to kind of figure out is the annual value of the licensing that we are selling. Our contracts are not always 12-month contracts. Our average sort of contract length is more than two years, actually.
It's very common that we're signing three-year-plus contracts. We report to investors on the annual contract value so that it's easier to comprehend within the metrics. TACV at GBP 20.3 million, up 16% year on year. We are profitable, group profitability level. We intend to stay that way now as we've pivoted into profitability and look to invest further in growth, but to do that from a profitable base. A bit more detail on some of those key stats. In terms of the new business, good run rate business. I've talked about this a number of times in our sort of recent reporting. It's a strength of this business. Quarter to quarter, we've got very good visibility of the new business coming through. A lot of that's being driven by the small to mid-market end.
That is the vast majority of the contact center market that is out there. If we cannot service that, I do not know what we are doing. It is important to be able to service that end of the market. We layer on top of that the enterprise deals, which might be 1,000-seat contact centers plus. We signed a number of those in the period, including a FTSE 250 that was a competitive displacement, obviously in the U.K. We are actually live with that customer now as well. That is always good to see. Of the new business value for new logos that we signed, 77% of the value came through our partners. The ecosystem is continuing to perform very well for us. Average contract values across that are pretty much in line with what we have reported historically. We are around the GBP 20,000 ACV mark across the business.
The US is typically higher, and the U.K. is a bit lower than that. Our US average contract size is north of $30,000, whereas U.K. is more around the $15,000 mark. You get a bit of variance there just because of the different size and the organizations that you're dealing with. In terms of retention, thinking about the sort of commercial health of the business, and I think we've proven that we're good at signing new business. We've got a good sales operation here. We're also very good at keeping customers too. We've had high retention for, well, for a long time, since pretty much forever. 95% GRR, gross revenue retention at 95%. It's down slightly from 96% last year. It will move around a bit. We did have it up at 98-97%, but it's going to move around.
We don't expect it to go below 95% retention. I wouldn't be surprised if it tracks up a little bit before the end of the year. I mean, you're talking very few logos here when these changes are happening. I think for us, one of the things we really need to get a hold of is how we cross-sell more to our existing customers. We have the strong retention. How do we drive that NRR, that net revenue retention up, which today is 102%, which is in line with management's plans for the half year. That's where we expected it to be. That's probably where we expect it to be for the full year as well, probably.
I have an initiative within the business right now to look to try to increase that in FY2026, because I think NRR, along with ARR, supporting ARR can be a key valuation metric for this SaaS company as it is for many others. There is an opportunity there that I need to work on grasping. Probably the highlight in terms of retention in the period was that we were successful in winning the retender of one of our largest customers, the Department for Work and Pensions. We did put an announcement out about this before pre-Christmas. That is an initial three-year term worth more than GBP 5 million over that period. There is a second three-year period that we would expect the customer to flow into.
Providing we do a good job for them in that first three years, which we expect to do, then the sort of total value of that contract over six years I think would be north of GBP 10 million. Yeah, very pleased to retain that. We're super strong in U.K. government, and we intend that to stay that way. That's both central government. We've got HMRC as well. We've also got more than 100 local authorities and councils. We've got a bunch of housing associations as well. The government space is very good for us in the U.K., and it's an area we continue to focus on. In terms of partners, there's more granular detail on this later. We referenced the new partnership with RingCentral.
Whilst I talk a lot about the primary focus of our teams from a business development perspective is building deeper, stronger relationships with our existing partners, because we've got quite a few of them, and they are very big, most of them, we are still very targeted and quite selective about what new strategic integrated partners we bring on board. RingCentral is one of those we've been sort of chasing for a while. If you look at the resellers that we've had over the last three, four years, we've pretty much ticked off most of the vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. RingCentral was missing from that. We've done a bit with RingCentral in the past.
That has had one or two of our competitors, but they are now very much standardizing with PCI Pal, and we're looking forward to announcing the full launch of that across North America and Europe imminently. Yeah, big company, $2 billion-plus in revenues, great momentum. Product highlight for us is getting them fully integrated, really tightly, desktop, repeatable telephony integration as well within four months. We've sold our first customer before Christmas, and we've sold a couple in H2 already as well. Great peer-to-peer engagement. One I'm very excited about with a very mature business already that we can go after and talk to their customers. All of this is kind of rounded off with the point I wanted to make at the end around the culture within this business. I think PCI Pal has got an excellent culture. We're very proud of it.
We continue to work on it. We're maturing. It is less of that sort of startup and scale-up culture now. I think we're handling that well. You'll have noticed that we added somebody to our advisory committee in the period, and that reflects our sort of focus on that strategically around people. We added a very experienced Chief People Officer to the advisory committee as well. She is helping us with that and will give a strategic viewpoint on future considerations we make around investment and investing in people as we go further. We haven't really grown our headcount substantially very recently. This year, we're looking to add about 10 heads. People in our space are expensive, so we have to do that quite cautiously. We're 130 people today. That is the summary of H1.
I'm going to canter through this bit because I'm conscious of time and leaving enough time for questions. Background on our products. Two kind of main product areas that we have here. You've got Assisted Secure Payments, and then you've got Automated Secure Payments. On the left there, Assisted Secure Payments is really where you've got a live customer and a live agent or employee in some kind of communication. Typically, that would be over the phone. More commonly today, it might be over a web chat session or whatever, but you've got two humans interacting with each other. On the automated side, traditionally, that would have been auto- attendant or IVR, as we call them in the sort of telephony industry. You've effectively got a human communicating with a computer.
What we're starting to see a bit more of, be it that it's moving fairly gently towards this, is that we are seeing chatbots and voice bots coming in. I'm sure chatbots have been out there for some time now. We're also starting to see voice bots as well using speech recognition capabilities too. We cover both of those sort of touchpoints from within contact centers and business communications environments. Underneath that, you've got our three core products. We're fairly simplistic in terms of the products that we have. We've been building out lots of features and enhancements around these. From a very base level, if you look at it from high up, it's fairly straightforward in terms of the three core products that we have. You've got the Click to Pay solution, the Key to Pay solution, and the Speak to Pay solution.
They are all delivering the same value proposition effectively, which is what I talked about earlier with secure payments. We are enabling payments that are completely integrated to this communications environment in the contact center, the desktop, the communications platform, the payment service provider. We are also providing a mechanism by which our customers, the merchant, can take payments without the sensitive personal data, the payment data going into their environment. We actually help them from a compliance perspective too. The way that these work is that they are really covering the various channels going into the contact center environment. Click to Pay is effectively where we are sending out a secure digital link to the customer.
At the point that there's a payment, let's say you've got an agent and a customer in live conversation or through a web chat session, they can post a URL or a hyperlink through the web chat, which the customer can select, and they'll be diverted to a PCI Pal payment page. On that payment page, in a very basic sense, they could process a credit or debit card payment. They could also use, if they're using their mobile, we've got all the e-wallets enabled, so Apple Pay, Google Pay. They could use open banking, which is something becoming much more common in sort of the government space as well. They could use buy now, pay later if they're used to using a Klarna account. They can have all those options available to them through the Click to Pay offering.
That's one of the advantages to Click to Pay is that because it's web-based, you can enable all those different payment features, those digital payment features. Now, Key to Pay tends to be what historically we've been sort of more well-known for. The sort of industry and what we do has evolved to a degree since then. Key to Pay is where, again, you've got a live communication going on, and at the point of payment, the customer is asked to type their card details in using their telephone keypad. Rather than speaking their credit or debit card data, they type them in on their keypad. The reason we do that is because it means that they don't have to read their very sensitive card data, which would go down the phone line, be heard by the agent, be recorded by the call recorder, then key it into their desktop.
It would get all over their network. From a data security perspective and compliance perspective, it becomes a real mess very quickly. We provide them with a solution where they can key in their card details. They stay in communication at all times if they want to speak. PCI Pal, through the integrations that we have with the communications platforms supporting that interaction, is able to pick out those tones as they come through, and we wrap it up and send it off to be paid when the payment is ready to be made. The payment can be taken without the card data going into that contact center environment. From a security perspective, you've got kind of a descope going on there so it doesn't touch the environment. That's a big part of the value proposition with that product.
Speak to pay to a degree is quite similar from a value perspective. The difference is we're using speech recognition here. Rather than the customer type their card details in, they will speak them out loud. Through enhanced speech recognition capabilities that we actually launched a V2 of about two years ago now, and it's really capable through Microsoft Nuance capabilities. We can pick up through the language that's being spoken when the customer is speaking card details over the phone. We'll capture that voice traffic as it goes through. It works in the same way. We package up the card data and pair it up with information from the agent's desktop CRM and send it off to the payment processor to process the payment. All three of those products are available through the PCI Pal platform.
We've got a single public cloud platform globally. We've introduced for this time, it's a bit of a busy slide, but a slide that's kind of covering off what that, from a very basic perspective, my engineering department did not produce this diagram. I might add that this is showing you really what, from a basic sense, what the platform looks like. Single public cloud platform, as I said, we touch over 500 million interactions a year through that, through the channels that I talked about earlier across 700 customers, across many thousands, tens of thousands of call center agents that have access to our products. In the center of that image that you have there, you can see the three core products: Click to Pay, Key to Pay, and Speak to Pay.
Those solutions cover both that pink section and the green section, which is the contact center environment and the unified communications environment as well. You have the three sort of integration touchpoints that we have. On the left-hand side there, you can see Salesforce. You can see Epic, Civica, etc. These are the CRM desktop web applications that our customers are using. PCI Pal is deeply integrated to those environments. We have repeatable integrations to those as well. It is easy for us to support deployments into those environments. We also have integrations to a lot of payment service providers. We are integrated to more than 120 payment service providers, many of the main ones certainly on a European and North American basis. You can see names on there. Some of those organizations are resellers of ours. Worldpay is not only an integration that we have.
They're also a bit of top reseller of PCI Pal for a number of years now as well. Then underneath that, you've got some of the digital payment capabilities, which is some of the stuff we've added over the last sort of 12-18 months. That's just really providing contact centers with payment options that have traditionally only been available on websites. Now they can benefit from having, if they use Klarna on their website and their retail website, they can use Klarna through their web chat sessions with their customers as well. That's great from a customer experience perspective because they're able to offer the same service whether it goes to a contact center or on their website.
On the right-hand side is kind of the really key part in terms of where we are today, which is the communications integrations that we have. We are resold or certainly partnered with the majority of the logos that you can see there. These guys are all really supporting those interactions across that contact center and unified communications environment. Our longer-term ambition from a product perspective is that we're going to be not just adding features and enhancements to our core, but our intent is to add adjacent products into that SaaS platform offering. We think that that could really add value to the organization longer term as we do that. We are planning to be able to talk to investors about those sorts of things in the periods to come. Conscious of time, not too much longer left for me.
Strategy-wise, cloud, global channel. Very simply, we wanted to be the leaders in cloud in our space. We are the leaders in cloud in our space. We were the first mover into the market. We have very little competition with any kind of mature cloud environment that comes close to where we are with things in the cloud. That has been one of the reasons we have been so successful with our partners. Super reliable platform as well. Regularly get 100% uptime month to month. H1, we were north of five nines uptime across the platform, which is very important for customer retention. The cloud platform allows us to access our market cost-effectively on a global basis. The majority of our customers today are in Europe and North America.
If we needed to, we can spin up an instance of our platform through Amazon Web Services within less than a day. We can do that super quickly, really cost-effectively. We can just do it based on commercial demand, effectively paying for itself. We do not need any sort of big initial outlay to set up data centers, etc. We use the channel model to cost-effectively access that global market. If I give you an example, we are expanding into mainland Europe at the moment. It sounds quite a big deal, but we are not planning to open a big office presence in mainland Europe necessarily. We may have a WeWork office that has two or three desks in it, but currently, we are hiring for our first hire in mainland Europe, and then we are going to hire a second probably three months after that.
We hire for people that will then go out and speak to our partners' teams that are already in that region. It is quite cost-effective launch activity that we can go through with a region like mainland Europe. I'm conscious of time. I've covered most of this, but please do come back to this. Our global cloud platform in terms of where the availability zones are. The green rosettes that you can see on there are where we have patents approved. We have a number of patents. Probably the most valuable patent that we have protects the way that we integrate in a very light touch way to voice platforms in the cloud. What that means is that our partners can access PCI Pal services in a very light touch way.
Rather than having to route and trombone lots of calls through our platform, they can literally ping us at the point that there's a payment, and we can get involved in the interaction only at the point when we're actually needed. Whereas we've found that with some of our competitors, they actually need to carry all of that customer's call traffic when really we're just solving a problem that affects maybe less than 20% or less than 10% of calls. That light touch approach has been really valuable to us, and we were quite sort of pioneering in the cloud space to be able to do that. We've patented that. Whilst we're not particularly sort of aggressive with our patents, we do use it as a protection method with our partners.
That ensures that if we need it, we can use it with those partnerships that we have. Talking about our partners, just to summarize, we've talked about this a lot in the past and other presentations, but the top two categories on the left there, integrated partners and solution providers, are really the main resellers that we have. You can see some very well-known names there. In terms of updates from the period, I've talked about RingCentral. The onboarding was very fast there. Update on Zoom. We signed Zoom in FY2024. It went live at the back end of FY2024. We've sort of had six months of that this year. Pipeline is building. Signed numerous new customers with Zoom. What we've always said about Zoom is that they are newer to the contact center market.
They've got a big unified communications and video business, obviously, that most people know them for. If you listen to their earnings calls, they're investing a lot of money into contact centers. Zoom had a less well-established contact center customer base, but it is growing quickly. We've got a fantastic relationship with them, really deep integration, and they are certainly one for the future for us. I would say that's the sort of difference with RingCentral is that RingCentral have that very mature customer base already. The momentum is slightly different in terms of what we'd expect. We're excited about both of them. They're just a slightly different kettle of fish between the two. New partners pipeline is looking pretty good. We've got some interesting new partners coming through as well. As I said, we don't have masses of them.
That's not our strategy. We try and align ourselves with partners that are going to really make a difference for us. Hopefully, we can talk to investors about some of the new stuff coming through in the next 12 months. Standardization, that's something that we've been talking about this week. Standardization is really one of the building blocks towards us ultimately getting to a point of our customers being able to completely self-serve our products and services. We have been working with key partners for some time now to work this standardization rollout with them. It's one of the building blocks towards us reducing our time to revenue. For those that know us, you'll know that we have a period of time from when we sign a customer to when we get to revenue recognition, which is typically around five months.
Part of that is because there are some custom elements to the deployment, or we have to wait for partners to do certain things. We are longer term. We're really planning to move to more of a true SaaS-type situation whereby everything is completely self-served and easily accessible through APIs for every aspect of the product that we provide, not just parts of it. Standardization is part of that. That's particularly aimed at small to mid-market customers through our partners where they're going to be using standardized versions of our products that you've seen, which should allow us to reduce our time to revenue and to get these customers also operationally live quicker as well. There are efficiencies to be had there because we don't want to grow our PS costs with our revenue over the next three to five years.
We want the product to do the work for us. There are some near-term gains to be made, but there are certainly some longer-term gains over the next 18 months or so around that as well as we focus on this time to revenue project that we are running within the business. Finally, conversational AI vendors. We have a number of resellers in the conversational AI space. These are chat and voice bots that are reselling our solution. They are selling our solution because we provide that value proposition to the end customer. They are also selling us for the same reasons that many of our integrated CCaaS and UCaaS partners sell us because we actually take their own platforms out of scope.
The way we integrate with these conversational AI vendors is that we do it in such a way that if their customers use our products, then card data, so that sensitive personal data, does not actually touch the conversational AI platform. They get that gain as a result of doing that. It is an interesting space. It is moving quickly. There are lots of small new vendors out there as well, which is why we are building at the moment this voice and chatbot API that we expect to launch later this calendar year. That is so that we can really deal with more of these conversational AI vendors than if we were just doing it all manually, one by one, and we were having to do it through custom integration. That is why we are building the API. That is something that is on the horizon for us.
Rattled through of the background and strategy. I'm going to hand over to you now, Ryan, for the financial update.
Thank you, James. Good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased with our first-half financial performance with growth in both top-line revenue and also down to adjusted profit levels as the momentum of the business continues. Revenue growth covers 26%, the normalized, sorry, being 13%, demonstrates the trend and growth in top-line revenue continues in the business. From this revenue, we saw growth in both our gross profit and gross profit margin to GBP 9.6 million and 89.6%, respectively. That's pleasing as we work towards our target of a 90% gross margin level. From that gross profit, we reinvested some of that back into the business and didn't flow it all the way through to adjusted profit.
Some of that was absorbed as the business grew, but also with three key strategic initiatives in the business. The first one being around partner management and development. As 70%-80% of our new business comes from our partner network, we invest in a partner management team. We've hired that in North America, and we are expanding that. That is to drive deeper relationships with existing partners and the embedment of PCI Pal within their ecosystems, but also to evaluate and add new partners to the group. Secondly, around new business and retention, that is sales, marketing, and customer success. Around, yes, winning new ACV, but also expanding with existing customers who are with the group. Thirdly, around the deployments. As James mentioned, our deployments, there is a professional services element, making sure that is as efficient as possible.
We work with our partners and our customers' technical resources to enable that, but also the integrations into our partners' ecosystems. That requires a technical element and also some R&D for future products. Overall, this delivered a profit before tax of GBP 175,000. Profitability of the group continues as we continue to grow, and it was achieved through the fiscal discipline during the period. Taking a closer look at the revenue mix and how it is built, I said the top-line revenue continues to grow, underlying 13%, but actually really pleasing with that is 91% made up of recurring revenues, which really underpins the high quality of the revenue that we're delivering and the stability of the business. The non-recurring is primarily made up of professional services, which is around the deployment and configurations for our customers.
The majority of our revenue, as the revenue top whole revenue grows, actually most of that is recurring, and that continues at that percentage, which is really pleasing. You'll see on the right-hand side the regional revenues. We are cloud-based, so therefore our offering is global. We have seen growth in all of our regions during the period. EMEA, being our most mature market, is still seeing strong double-digit growth. As we continue to expand across Europe, we expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. North America, again, really strong growth. It did see the benefit of the deferred revenue coming in. The normalized growth there is still about 13%-14%, which is still really pleasing. In the Australia-New Zealand region, yes, a much smaller base, but yet again, we are still growing our revenues in that region.
Overall, globally, we are contributing to our top-line revenue. The main indicator for our revenue overall will be the TACV converting into ARR. TACV is the annual recurring revenue that we have contracted and signed, with the majority of this actually paid for upfront. Yes, it has grown to GBP 20.3 million, up 16%. Within this mix, we have what we term as on hold, and that is really the initial staging area. A contract is signed, and a contract has been signed with technical resources from our customers or our partners being assigned to allow the delivery of that. What you'll see is, as the revenues and the TACV has increased, the proportion of on hold and in deployments hasn't increased accordingly.
We maintain those at a low level as we continue to drive efficiencies in the converting of signed contracts into our revenue. I say that deployments are below our target of 15%. That is very pleasing. I said, really, it is the conversion of our deployments that drives our revenue. That is we work closely with our customers and our partners ultimately to deliver that. James has covered off their revenue retention, but I suppose the bit that I would like to add to that is it continues to be at 95-96%. We generally trend around 96%, really strong, which demonstrates the quality and the stickiness of our revenue. On my previous slide, I talked about how the recurring revenue is 91%, and this demonstrates how sticky that is, and that continues going forward.
Now, if we turn to the balance sheet of the group, a few of the things I would like to just draw our attention to is we continue to invest in our product with capitalization running at the same similar levels as the prior year. As a percentage of our revenues, our investment, and our R&D is beginning to drop off, it was running at over 10%, and now it is dropping to sub 10%. We are investing in our product at the right level to keep it relevant, to keep it up to date, but actually allowing the top-line revenue to grow and not be putting that all necessarily back into the R&D aspect of it. The other receivables is driven by deferred commissions. We sell, you sell ACVs.
We pay our sales team their commissions, and that gets released to the profit and loss in line with the recognition of the revenue. Probably most pleasing, we still have a good cash balance. We have GBP 4 million of cash on hand at the period end, driven by good working capital management, which means the business is funded for the future growth. Alongside that, we still have access to our HSBC facility of GBP 3 million. While it fluctuates, our availability to that is there, and we have availability to most of that as of today. It is undrawn and remains undrawn, and it is not planned to draw on that at any time in the near future. Deferred income remains stable.
It's added to with new ACV, but it's offset by the unwinding of previous prepaid multi-year contracts, which is something the business isn't offering on a prepaid basis anymore. We do have multi-year contracts, but we allow the customer to pay annually. That offsets by that, and also if there's terms or cancellations of contracts, a small number of contracts might cancel before they go live. Overall, the group is generating a positive operating cash of just under GBP 1 million on an adjusted basis, which overall leaves us with a strong balance sheet and a really solid position to push ahead with the business. Okay.
Okay with me. Thank you, Ryan. Just to wrap up before we get some time for some questions. Just on the platform and product update, I've touched on some of this as we've been going through.
We do include uptime in this. It's absolutely critical. I mentioned some competitor displacements, and I do know that some of the reasons for that are to do with uptime and performance. It is the first step towards good customer retention. It's critical that the solution works. If it doesn't work, then it's going to receive some heat quickly because it involves payments. Our uptime has been consistently very strong for a number of years now, and very pleased with that across the platform. The RingCentral integration, certainly a highlight on the product side, just so you can get some kind of understanding.
These sorts of processes that we go through with these large organizations, if we're going to embed ourselves properly so that we're fully productized by them, there's a lot of work that goes into that on the engineering side, and our small product team has to product manage that through. You have the integrations on the desktop. You have the integrations on the voice side of things as well. You then have working through the commercial aspects of the SKUs, so the pricing on the other side. There are all sorts of things that go into it. After that, only after that, you then have the enablement of the partner, which is something we're very methodical about, but takes time when these are organizations with thousands of employees across various territories. Getting out and communicating, even marketing to those employees takes time to do that.
We're pretty good at that, though we are nowhere near the size of those organizations to be able to do that, but we do a good job with that. Some of those partners also have their own partners. They have their own resellers, whether that be telcos or whoever else might be reselling them. We want to work with our partners to speak to their own partners as well. It is an ongoing thing, and there is a lot of effort that goes into that. We are making it easier for us to onboard these very large integrated partners. Four months for that one is really quite encouraging. Standardization, we've talked about, good momentum there, and I'm hopeful of seeing some gains in the second half of the year.
We're sort of deploying more customers than we ever had before in a shorter time span than we ever have before. I expect to see that continue in H2. The data project, that's something that Ryan's actually been very involved in. The finance team are heavily involved in that. This is engineering work going on in the background that doesn't necessarily come out as a sort of product highlight that investors are going to pick up on that readily. This is about single source of truth of data within PCI Pal, and we've come a long way in the last few years, but we want to be completely interconnected across every department within the group, and we've made good progress towards that.
The smarter we can be with our data, no matter what that data is, then the easier it will be to run the business, and we'll be able to do it more intelligently as well. Data, of course, is very key to AI. It's key to, are we able to use AI effectively within the business? Can we use AI within our own products as AI product features of PCI Pal platform products? Data is really critical to all that. It sort of spreads throughout the organization. Now, as part of that, we do expect to have our first own AI features of the payment products I talked about earlier, so Click to Pay, Key to Pay, Speak to Pay.
We have some features coming out which are AI-enabled, which will add AI capabilities to those offerings, which effectively work to intelligently recommend the most effective payment methods to customers, to agents, to merchants, to make those decisions themselves. We are fairly careful with information that we share on these things. We are now officially the only publicly listed company in our space. That is one of the reasons we do not always readily share as much detail as some of you may want us to. We also have to trade that off with what is commercially sensitive and moving the business forward. Yeah, that is coming. Voice and chatbot API we talked about as well. We have got some good stuff going on with adjacent products too. Hopefully later this calendar year, we will be talking to you about an adjacent product.
What do I mean by adjacent product? The difference there with features and enhancements of our existing products is these are products that can really create either new revenue streams or materially move the needle on the existing revenue streams that we've got. That for us is quite key. It's key for my ambition for the platform to be really seen as a strong SaaS platform longer term as well. All of this I'm talking about is being generated organically by our team. I think it's worth pointing out that whilst we have mentioned M&A a bit recently, that's because it is the right time for us to start thinking about that in the considerations we make strategically with the business. However, we're not going to make stupid decisions given where the share price is. That doesn't help us in that regard.
We look at that and take that very, very cautiously. Everything we're doing at the moment is being produced by our own in-house development teams. Sometimes that's not always optimal to move as quickly as you want to, but we have to work with what's in front of us, and we have to take on responsibility to move that price forward as well. That may then give us more options available to us. That's a bit of outlook that I'm touching on there. In terms of that outlook, we've started the second half well. We've got good new business sales momentum going through. We've got a good continued increase of the 12-month rolling pipeline. Pleased about that.
We've got the business there to sign to get to where we want to for the incremental uplift on new business signed year on year by the time we get to the end of the year. We do need deployments. We need to get customers to revenue recognition to drive towards the revenue numbers, the targets that we've set ourselves, ARR and top-line revenue as well, maintaining that profitability level. During that time, yeah, it's been great this year to be able to think more long-term about the business. It's not like we stopped doing that during the patent case, but it was quite a distraction. We do a three-year plan refresh every year that many investors know we do that.
I'd say we're doing more of a refresh than ever before this year, or certainly than we've done for a number of years because we're kind of at an inflection point with the business. We got to profitability, and we're in a good position to push on from here. Some good work going on on that side. Myself and the board look forward to updating you all on where we're ending up with that. We've started to drop in some of that messaging and give you some sort of directional guidance with the interims that we've released this week as well. Okay. That's the end of the presentation. Thank you for listening. We've got some time for some questions, which I can manage from here.
Taking the first one that I can see here, I'd like to know when your company is paying a dividend. I know that this is important to many, or it's certainly something that you'd be thinking about in your investment thesis. Today, PCI Pal is a growth company. Where we are today in terms of profitability means we're in a position where we want to invest those profits over and above what we expect to show in the market in the business for growth. The levels we're expecting to grow our ARR at this year are very strong, and we want to try to continue that growth going forward because we think that that is what will deliver value to our shareholders longer term. We think we've got strong support from our investor base on that basis. Hopefully that clears up the position on dividend.
It's something we will clearly review on a regular basis. We're happy to answer that question on a regular basis and give you an update in terms of where we are at with it. There's a question here about why didn't we announce the RingCentral partnership when it was signed if it was the one announced in August? Wouldn't that have been a positive for investors? I think there's a general point to make here around this because I've been asked similar questions before. There are two things to consider here, particularly. There are non-disclosure requirements within contracts. That's not a price-sensitive announcement. When we sign a reseller, there's no guarantee there's going to be any business coming with it.
It is not like we have signed a contract that is worth 10% of our revenue or something, and we need to put an announcement out because it is price-sensitive. There is no regulatory requirement to make that announcement. If we are under non-disclosure requirements in our contract, then we cannot make that announcement, even if we might want to. The other consideration, which is what I am always sensitive to, is that we are not in the biggest market in the world from a competitor perspective, but I am also always conscious of protecting the business and protecting our knowledge and our strength and our strategy from competitors who are watching. We will pick and choose when we make announcements. There is often a trade-off between do we want that out in the public domain before we have gone live with that partner? In this case, no.
We want to make that announcement when that's all done, dusted, and we can move on. That was the decision we took around RingCentral. There's a lot of thought that goes into these things. It's not that we just sort of forget about making an announcement. We do think about it tactically. Trying to find one for you, Ryan. There's one around sales seasonality. I can take that, and then we'll try to get a financial one for you. Is there seasonality to our new business sales? I was actually asked this earlier in the week on the analyst call that we did. Yes, there is. I mean, there's not really seasonality because more people buy licenses from us because of certain times of year. It's more because the way our financial year falls, which is something I inherited.
The financial year runs from July to June. That means in H1, you've got July and August, which are two of probably the most dead months of the year for any technology company because everybody's on holiday. You've then also got Thanksgiving, which is the big holiday in the U.S. It's bigger than Christmas for them. You've obviously got Christmas here in the U.K. We don't have any of that in the second half, really. You kind of have an Easter break in the U.K., and that's it. We have typically sold more in the second half of the year than the first. That's probably the main reason. We've got a few partners whose year-ends are in January. You often get the overflow from their year-end into sort of February, March. That also contributes to H2 typically being slightly stronger.
As you can see, we've had a relatively strong start to our Q3. There are a number of questions here from the same person that are relatively technical. I don't think they're really appropriate for me and Ryan to try and answer them now. If you can guess who you are and you want to send those through to Walbrook, please do so. We're happy to answer those in more detail or we can in the portal to pci-pal@walbrookpr.com. Let's see if we can pick out some of those. Okay. This one's complete. There's a question here about Ryan, if you could try and answer this one or clarify this one. On which period are you recognizing deferred revenues?
I think that relates to the deferred revenue bullet.
Yeah. Our deferred revenues are released or our contracts are annually.
When we release our revenue, it's released monthly as it comes through. When contracts are deployed, there might be some catch-up revenue, which we refer to that is recognized. If a contract is signed in month one and doesn't get deployed to month six, there would be a catch-up revenue released to bring that through. The rest of it will flow out on a monthly basis.
Okay. Thank you. One more in here. Could you update us with regards to the lawsuit in the U.S.? Are they still going on? Just to be really clear on the patent case. It is gone. There are no future concerns that we have around that. It was fully settled after we successfully defended ourselves and also invalidated our competitor's patent in the U.K. courts in the summer.
We settled the whole thing, what was remaining quite quickly after that in June, I think it was.
Yeah, no, we have very much moved on from that, just to be clear.
Okay. I think unless there's any more—oh, hang on. There's one more. Okay. I think I've already answered this to a degree. Does Q3 or Q4 tend to be stronger for new contract—oh, Q3 or Q4 tend to be stronger for new contract signings. It doesn't really work like that. That's kind of potluck, really. I couldn't tell you whether Q3 is usually stronger than Q4. It varies. It just depends where it falls. I can give you the commentary around whether I think H1 will be stronger than H2 because typically H2 is stronger than H1 for the reasons I said.
I would not want to comment on Q3 or Q4. There are too many variables there.
Okay. Tom, I think that is good. Great. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, James. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate your time. Could I ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback? If anyone has further questions or would like additional information on PCI Pal, please do get in contact via pci-pal@walbrookpr.com. James has just mentioned a number of those technical questions. Please do send those through. Many thanks for attending today's presentation.