Hello, everybody. Welcome to this PCI Pal update. We're using IMC today to provide a relatively short update to our investors, and those that are following us with regards to the trading and business update that we issued this morning. And that will also include an update on the company's strategy, going forward for the next three years plus. I'll also cover the new product announcement as well that we announced prior to the trading updates. So, starting with that trading update, really happy with the year overall. Good performance from the business. We've signed more customers than we've ever signed before. We've expanded our partner ecosystem still with some major enterprise new partnerships. And we've maintained very high customer retention during that time as well. So, good health to the business under the surface.
We are continuing to execute against our key strategic objectives, and those kind of foundational pillars to the growth that have been consistent for PCI Pal for a number of years, leading our market as the go-to cloud platform in our space. We have the strongest partner ecosystem in our space and leveraging that ecosystem and those tight-knit integrations that we have with many of the world's leading business communication providers to enable us to be able to access the breadth of the contact center market globally. You know, those three pillars of that strategy have stood us well, and they continue to do so, so just to walk through the trading update for FY 2025. First of all, we finished the year with expected top-line revenue and bottom-line profit before tax in line with market expectations.
I'm pleased to be able to sit here and say that today. We've taken another big step forward in ARR. We've 25% growth in ARR to GBP 19.3 million, our key growth metric and sort of key long-term valuation metric. That's very pleasing to see. And then, in terms of contracted ARR, so CARR, there's a branding change there for those that know us. We did used to refer to this as TACV. The definition is the same. The naming is different, contracted ARR. That's up 17% in the year to GBP 22.2 million. The brand change effectively reflecting the fact that CARR is that long-term indicator of future ARR and future recurring revenues. We're aligning it much more closely with ARR, particularly given we expect over time to see some shortening of our time to revenue as well. Closing the gap on those two metrics.
Revenue performance that I've just referenced, supported by strong customer retention still. So, our churn remains less than 5%. Probably one of the highlights for me so far is the increase in NRR that we've seen. So, that's your net revenue retention. And we've seen an increase year on year from 102% - 104%. You know, we don't have a huge amount of additional cross-sell opportunity to our very sticky customer base today, but we are starting to see more of that occur. And we plan to expand NRR in the years to come. And that ties in well to the refresh strategy for FY 2026 and beyond. And then finally, on cash, just south of GBP 4 million in cash at the end of the year. Some impact from non-operational costs during the year, but from an operating perspective, cash flow positive.
Actually, it's that healthy cash balance and the position of the business in terms of our cash flow profile that's enabled us to look more closely at the next steps from an investment perspective with the business. But more on that to come shortly once I've finished the trading update piece. Operationally, some sales highlights in the year. As many of you know, we were super pleased to re-secure our largest customer in the U.K., which is the Department for Work and Pensions. We won that three plus three year renewal with the customer through a competitive process back in October, November time. And that's got a total contract value across both of those terms of over GBP 11 million.
And any changes we've had to make as a result of that, that renewal have all gone through, and we're continuing to have a very positive relationship with the department, as well as the numerous other U.K. government contracts that we have. We had a number of competitor displacements in the year. We continue to go after those aggressively. This included another FTSE 250, who is now live as well during that time. So, signed and live during the year. And we're tracking other displacement opportunities as well, which we think are, you know, they're coming to us being proactive, but also because of some challenges that we're seeing out there with other products, which in contrast, we have very strong uptime, excellent support capabilities, strong CSAT scores, et cetera, that we can evidence through, you know, real customer referencing.
And then, of course, we've got the strong technical integrations to the CCaaS platforms that many of these organizations are using today or they are starting to use or plan to use in the future. So, that continues to be an initiative for us going into FY 2026. We expanded our partner ecosystem in the year as well. So, the first win, which we'd already announced with RingCentral, but during the year we did onboard that key strategic partner, and we launched it in the second half of the year across Europe and North America. And we're seeing some really good momentum with that partner. You know, that is a sizable organization, and they seem very committed to making this a mutually beneficial relationship. So, looking forward to that one having a material contribution in FY 2026.
We also announced in the trading update that in the back end of the year, we signed another one of these large business communications providers as a reseller. And again, we are in that case the sole solution provider for what we do. This is an organization with around $1 billion in revenues, who has a mature UCaaS and meetings portfolio globally. And, as we've seen with other vendors such as Zoom, is moving into the CCaaS space to cover the full business communication suite. So, excellent to get in early with that with that partner. And we're now going through an onboarding process with them. Now, following the trading update, we've given an update on our thinking on FY 2026, so we've provided that update to investors around our revenue expectations for the year based on the FY 2025 results.
It's also considering the nature and mix of the business that we've signed in the year, how we expect FY 2026 to play out and the timing of the sales pipeline, et cetera. And then, crucially, we've factored in the FX movements, which are quite impactful on us given the fairly sizable amount of revenue that we now have coming through the U.S., so the weakening of the U.S. dollar. So, we've considered those things, and we've adjusted our thinking for top-line revenue for next year to between GBP 23.5 million to GBP 24 million. In terms of momentum, once the FX movement is factored in, we do expect to broadly be where we anticipated to be for ARR and CARR. So, that's really quite encouraging for me. And it will be reflected in the revenue recognized over time. And we're maintaining those strong growth rates for those top-line key SaaS metrics.
Onto the strategic update. So, let's talk about FY 2026 and beyond and this refreshed plan. I told many of our investors, including, I believe, on IMC, that we would be reviewing our rolling three-year plan. Setting the context, you know, at the back end of January last year, we settled the ongoing patent litigation that we've been, you know, we'd had on our shoulders for three years, nearly three years. Big cash drain, big distraction, and going into FY 2025, we didn't have that there anymore. So, that opened up more options for us in terms of what we wanted to do going forwards. We then went through a transition of CFO, and my new CFO, Ryan Murray, joined me in October of this financial year, so October 2024.
And then, very purposefully following that point, and certainly particularly ramped up in the early part of H2, the board and myself have carried out a full review of the business's strategy in light of our sort of changing position without the patent case being around and with the new CFO in place. And, and we told investors we were gonna do this. So, so we've done that, and we've made some considerations, and, we've made some decisions around that. So, we're communicating that for the first time or certainly high level today, which is one of the reasons I'm doing this trading update video for you. So, first and foremost, PCI Pal is a growth business. And I believe, and the board believe, that one of the biggest risks to this business is if we stand still.
You know, if we do not capitalize on what we've built today, that position, that market position that we have at this intersection fully integrated to the communications environment, the payments environment, the desktop CRM, is hugely valuable to the business going forwards, and we are the out-and-out leader there in our space, and it's taken a lot of time and effort and investment to get to that point, but we think we need to use that to drive the business on further, and that creates more opportunity for us. We looked at what we think is gonna happen with the contact center solutions market globally over the next five to 10 years. You can see in the update some of the data there. It's fairly consistent across the board, substantial growth in that sector.
It's expected to grow between six and seven times over the next sort of five to ten years. And given how well we are positioned, we can really capitalize on that and be part of that growth, we believe, which will help sustain strong organic growth for this business. The other factor that comes into play here is around conversational AI, which is starting to become more prevalent in the contact center space. We're not seeing it heavily across payments yet, but it's playing out across the CCaaS market. You know, these communications platforms that are handling those conversations, facilitating those conversations. That is where a lot of these things are playing out. And that is where PCI Pal is extremely well positioned. We think there's a growth opportunity from a product perspective as well. And so, we're looking very closely.
We're doing a lot more than that. We're moving our roadmap along as fast as we can, to produce adjacent products that can create new revenue lines for us that we can sell through our existing go-to-market motion. That also longer term in the future, we can also sell fully digitally as well, because we have aspirations to get very much to a self-serve direct selling capability through our website as well. We think that these things will open up more opportunity for PCI Pal, both in terms of products driving addressable market increases. We think that it will protect the business that we do today. We also think that internationally through our technology capabilities, it will open up more of the sort of international markets for us in a more cost-effective way.
So, in short, we think there's an opportunity to push more. And we are gonna push, push harder. And the commitment we're making to that is that, you know, we believe that we can grow ARR at between 18% and 20%, not just for the next couple of years, but for FY 2027 and beyond where we're looking at that. And that's what we're gonna try and do. We think that will deliver real sort of longer-term stakeholder value. To do that, we need to make an investment in the short term, and that investment in cash terms in the near term is in the region of GBP 1.5 million , with around two-thirds of that hitting the P&L in FY 2026.
The majority of the use of that, that investment is gonna be spent in marketing and product marketing, and an element of it being spent on engineering as well to support those growth efforts. Marketing is something that we reined in and held back as a result of the patent case, to conserve cash, and we've kept marketing relatively flat for some time, and we think it's time that we push on and we move forward. We are the only publicly listed company in our space, and we do not want to sit still. As part of that, since the end of the financial year, we have very recently hired a new Chief Marketing Officer. Some of our investors were aware that that was a search that we were, we were gonna be starting.
And that Chief Marketing Officer is U.S.-based, and she joins us in just under two weeks' time. So, we're very excited to have her joining us, and she's got some very relevant experience as well. So, just finally to wrap up on the new product announcement that went out first this morning, and it's very much linked to that strategic plan. You know, when we're talking about ambitions to grow that net revenue retention number, we need to do that by having more products available to us in our kit bag effectively. You know, we think we've got good relationships with customers, with partners, we've got good salespeople, but we need more product to sell. And so, you know, we're targeting our business with moving the needle on that and actually producing some of these adjacent products this year.
This product announcement is the first in a number of these that we have planned across the year. Really it's about, you know, opening up our platform as well with more product capabilities. We want to broaden what we do. We want to sell more to our existing customers. This first product that we've launched is gonna be part of a range of fraud management products that bolt onto our existing solutions, and that we can then sell to existing customers and new customers, whether direct or via partners. We think that it will strongly complement the current payment offering that we have, and will create that new revenue opportunity for us.
You know, doing this fraud risk screen instantly, really very quickly, just immediately prior to the payment could prove very valuable to our customers, many of whom suffer from fraudulent payment activity, particularly over contact center environments. And this should help them to reduce the costs of that fraudulent activity, the operational costs, the costs if they're sending out goods, for example, and also the costs of chargebacks themselves, which from payment service providers like Stripe have been announced very publicly that they are going up. And so, we think this is a very compelling, bolt-on product for us, that can give us an opportunity to create sort of adjacent product revenues, as we move through the next three years.
So in short, yeah, exciting times for us. So, yeah, we're moving very quickly. I'm really excited about FY 2026. I'm looking forward to seeing investors in a couple of months' time when the full year results are out, and we really plan to be on the front foot, so thank you for joining me today, and I'll speak to you soon.