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 the presentation, investors will be on listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. 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. We would like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. I would now like to hand over to Chief Executive, James Barham, and Chief Financial Officer, Ryan Murray.
Okay. Thank you, Nick. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this interims update from myself and Ryan. Really excellent progress in the first half. Really just proving execution against the plans that we laid out at the beginning of the year. We're gonna be talking in a bit more detail to those things. Broadly speaking, we're where we want to be. We will try to make sure we've got plenty of time at the end for questions as usual, which means we will spend a little bit less time on some of the background information. You can gain more insight through the IMC website if you want to look at historical presentations or YouTube or CMDs, et cetera. We've done plenty of content that's out there.
Edison, I should well call that out too. Let's start off with a bit of background in terms of what we're all about at PCI Pal. We're a software company, a fast-growing Software as a Service business, SaaS business. We have a secure payments platform that empowers customers to transact business securely, to do that cost effectively, and to do it in a compliant way. Our platform services customer interactions with businesses across every business communications environment, predominantly that's the call center or what we call today the contact center space, which also includes Conversational AI as well. Also the unified communication space as well, which is more of your back office type functions.
Everything today has been predominantly based on securing transactions and around payments and those things. Within those communications areas, we have various channels that we cover. In really basic sense, live voice, phone calls, web chat, social media, Conversational AI, as I mentioned, voice and web chat bots, these sort of solutions. We've got everything to cover the whole gambit there. In terms of PCI Pal strategy, three key pillars to that strategy, which have stood the thing instead since we started on this journey more than five years ago now. The first on the bottom left there you can see is cloud, to be the leaders in our market in public cloud services.
We were the first to market with a public cloud offering. We have the most extensive multi-tenanted public cloud platform, in our space today. I'll provide some more information on how well that's working for us, a bit later. The cloud platform, purposely would allow us to access the breadth of our market on a global basis. What we do is a little bit niche, operating the business communication space, but it's very much a global market actually. It's a, it's a large, addressable market opportunity. Being in the cloud allows us to cost effectively access the breadth of that on an international basis, and we've shown that through execution, across the last seven or eight years.
Also we leverage a go-to-market model, which heavily leans towards partner-led sales, so a channel sales model, predominantly selling to customers via contracted resellers that we have and resellers that we are integrated to. More on that to come. We've got a fantastic customer base. More than 750 customers across our platform. We've got some excellent brands that trust us. Lots of enterprise companies that work with PCI Pal. Not always enterprise size contracts depending on their communications footprint. We do have a number of very large enterprise contact center environments as well, where you're talking somewhat more than 5,000 seats each. Having said that though, we very much value the commercial to mid-market end of the space that we target.
This is your SMB space. It is the majority of the contact center market in most developed territories, generally taking up around 70%-75% of the market. Early on, we set out our stall to really be able to target that voluminous SMB space. Over the years, we've moved into the enterprise end of the market, really covering, as I said earlier, breadth of market in terms of size of customers that we can deal with. Really looking to try and maximize the addressable market opportunity that's in front of us. On the bottom right, you can see some of our partners. I said we're a channel business predominantly selling through the channel.
That's an example of some of our integrated partners that we work with. Now let's get on to an update on the period. Very good H1. Really pleased with where we've got to. I think, you know, we've in a really balanced way as well, but I think what really underpins what we've achieved in H1 is strong new business momentum, so great to see. We're a growth company. That's essential for us achieving our goals in the years ahead. Also operational efficiency as well, so really strong deployment velocity.
Those of you that know us will know that's important 'cause it allows us to get new sales that we make to revenue quicker, and longer term we want to become more efficient on that side of things too so that we can create more operational gearing in the business as we move into profitability again next year. ARR is up 21%, a key growth metric for us, 25% on a constant currency basis. It's a record real terms increase for us as well at GBP 3.6 million. Contracted ARR or CAR, as we call it, the difference between ARR and CAR is that CAR includes contracts that have not yet got to revenue recognition, but it's a really good indicator of future ARR.
We have really very little that drops out between CAR and ARR, it's really the CAR metric that is an important measure of whether we're gonna get to the growth objectives that we have in front of us. To be growing that at 18% or 21% on a constant currency basis is just where we need it to be. We, you know, what's making up that contracted ARR? Let's talk about new business for a moment. Some of the bullet points on the right and a bit more detail from the interim. Increased run rate. I mentioned about SMB and that area of the market that's important for us. I used the term run rate to describe the business that we do at that end of the market.
This is our, you know, this is the typical turnover that we see on a quarterly basis of new business that's coming through the door. We've been very successful in incrementally growing that, and that is effectively our reliable base of business that's coming through. On top of that, we're layering on more enterprise business, and that's part of our tactics this year and a part of our longer term strategy is to sell more to large enterprise whilst growing our SMB business at the same time. We want both. We've been successful in the first half. I mean, not surprisingly, we're seeing more enterprise business coming from the U.S. business. The U.S. business appears to be taking, as expected, a big step up this year.
It's a substantially larger market than the U.K. We've signed a number of enterprise organizations. We've various different Fortune categorizations that we've referenced in the examples given in the interims. Say Fortune 50 insurance company, one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., really successful proof of concept with them, which has then led on to an initial sale that we made in the first half of the year, which is north of GBP 100,000 ACV value to us. We really think there's strong expansion opportunities as soon as H2 with that customer as well. Healthcare is a sector that those of you that follow us will know we're targeting. It's a key vertical for us in the U.S.
Great for me to see two healthcare technology companies that we signed, and these are substantial organizations. One of them is a Fortune 500, the other one's a Fortune Global 500. Also we signed our largest sort of healthcare, i.e. healthcare company deal, since we announced the Epic integration and we are using that integration to deploy to that customer right now. You know, we're putting those building blocks in place as we target these verticals, and we're seeing good traction in financial services or insurance particularly, plus the healthcare space. We're seeing that in our, reflected in our pipeline as well into H2 and beyond. Revenue on the third one down on the left there, revenue up 7% year-on-year.
It's actually 14% on a normalized basis. That's really what you need to be looking at is the 14%. Ryan will provide a bit more detail on that, but that's related to the big difference there in the percentages is mainly because of the revenue deferral that we had from FY24 into FY25. It makes the step up look smaller than it actually is. Ryan can talk to that a bit more. Underpinning the revenue growth is strong, continued strong customer retention metrics. GRR at 95% that's remained flat. We're very happy to keep it at that level given the scale we're now progressing to. We've continually proven ourselves to be able to keep our customers.
We have sticky technology, sticky products, we also have a great culture. We've got strong systems, processes to be able to maintain those relationships, not just with smaller customers, but also with the very largest as well. We've had some success in the year as we've mentioned in both the current trading and also prior to that in the first half of renewing some of our largest customers and extending some of those contracts. NRR is a metric that I've set some ambitions around at the beginning of the year where I stated that in the next sort of 2.5, three years, we wanna see NRR at 110%.
Now to be at 105% this year seems like we're well on the way to do that. It doesn't quite work like that in terms of how you incrementally build to it. Build to it. 105% is a really pleasing result for us so far this year. We'd be hopeful of maintaining there or thereabouts by year end compared to 102% last year. I will say that most of the expansion sales contributing to NRR are from upselling of our secure payment products. I'll talk a bit more about the strong demand we are seeing for those core secure payment products in a moment.
That is where the majority of that expansion's coming from that's driving up NRR. The health of the business, something I often talk about, you know, the business feels very healthy right now. Sort of key initiatives that we're working on through the year are progressing either as we expect them to or we're ahead of where we expect to be. I just talked about retention. You know, the quickest thing you can do if you wanna lose customers is to have a platform that's not reliable. We have 100% uptime of our global public cloud platform across H1. That is not uncommon for us to achieve actually. Whilst we contract to five nines, to our customers, we regularly achieve 100%. That's full credit to our engineering team.
That is excellent quality. It's also deeply critical for relationships with partners as well. When partners are putting faith and trust in you to resell your services, they need to know they're gonna work, and they need to know they're gonna be up. Again, that's even more in focus when you're selling through large technology partners as we did. Yeah, call out to my engineering team who are doing a fantastic job there. Just finally on the health of the business point, people. People are key to our success. They're also our biggest cost in the business. We need to make them count. Every hire we make in this business, we don't do that unless we're 110% about the individual.
We added some individuals to the leadership team, onboarding those in the first half of the year. CISO, new Chief Information Security Officer we added at the back end of FY25, and we added a new CMO, in Q1 this year. She's been with us about six months now, and both of those hires are going really well. I feel that we're taking a real step forward there. Underneath that, you know, the culture of the business, I think it's relevant to point out that, you know, in the early days of PCI Pal, it wasn't quite growth at all costs, but we were super aggressive around growth.
We're still a growth business no doubt, you will have picked up, and if you attended the CMD or watched the videos, you know, we very much want that balanced growth and profitability story going forwards. So we're shifting our culture to a degree as well from this, you know, more of a growth at all costs approach to more of a Rule of 40 culture, if you like, and we're talking about that very much within the business. That's all happening. That maturing's happening. While we're doing that, we've got employee NPS scores in a very good place. Employee retention's very high.
For me doing my role, you know, I've loved building this team, but to see the strong execution that we've had in H1, but at the same time see the culture that we have here, that will support us as we drive to those ambitious targets we've set ourselves over the next 2.5 years is really quite pleasing and really good to see. Let's dig a little bit more into the kind of operational updates. On the partner ecosystem side, very briefly for those that are new to the story, the vast majority of our business comes through our partner ecosystem. We've got an extensive partner ecosystem, which is split between those three categories in the top left that you can see there.
Typically we say 75%-80% of our new business will come via resellers. Actually, in H1 this year it was higher than that. It's actually 83% of contracts came through resellers, and also an increase to the value contribution of those new deals to 71%. That's a trend that we have expected, and the reason that trend, that increase in value via partners is being seen is because CCaaS organizations are doing more and more enterprise business now. You know, not all enterprises have shifted their communications to the cloud yet. In fact, there's some pretty big numbers out there if you listen to some of our partners' earnings calls about what's, you know, what's remaining.
You've got that shift going on, but then you've got the fact that PCI Pal is working more deeply and more broadly with those partners. For those that sell to the enterprise, we've built up trust with those organizations for a number of years with many of them now, and so we're being offered into those, very large customers. Therefore the average value coming through, partners, has been increasing, which we referenced in the interims. It's worth adding that, you know, the channel business itself, we don't just play at it. It was a key part of the strategy from the very beginning.
You know, if I think back to when we were 10, 15 people, we've had a hiring strategy on the trajectory that we're at now that always looks at anyone that's involved with customers or partners must have experience of working through the channel. You know, we need that, so they understand how those relationships work, and hiring has been an important part of that. You know, we consider it a real strength of the business. In terms of highlights for the period to talk about, I've talked about incremental growth in SMB coming via partners and also increasing enterprise opportunities via partners. This goes back to the beginning of the year. I said one of the key strategies this year is to work more deeply and more broadly with the existing partners we've got.
You know, yes, we wanna sign new partners, but we must make the most of the ones that are, you know, right on, right in front of us as well. How do we do that? Some of that work is more commercial, relationship led, product enablement, marketing enablement, but also we're working on, you know, more deeper technical integrations with these partners. We've enhanced a number of the platform to platform integrations that we've got with key partners across this year. Some of those have completed, some of those are going through different phases. The sort of result of these, you know, these enhancements, the improvements that we're making could be that they aid increased deployment velocity, for instance.
Actually we can get their customers to using our services somewhat quicker because of the enhanced nature of the integration that we've got. It could be that we're giving them access to PCI Pal within products that we don't do, we haven't done historically. We have a partner, for instance, who has integrated their video capability to PCI Pal's secure payment suite. We are working with a number of partners at the moment to integrate our secure payments products into their Conversational AI products. Some of those are live, and some of them are going through deployment and through integration at the moment. A lot of this work, you know, it's deepening that competitive moat that we have with these partners, too. Just back to Conversational AI for a moment.
A trend that we are seeing with our partners is that there is a trend with the CCaaS vendors to either be building their own Conversational AI products or partnering or acquiring Conversational AI solutions. We've seen that with NICE acquiring Cognigy, for example, and we've seen several other partners of ours, such as Zoom, for instance, launching or planning to launch their own virtual assistant or chat and voice bots. You know, that supports the positioning that PCI Pal's got because we are the ones who have those relationships with those partners, and so we will work with those partners to incorporate and make available all the value that we give through the secure payment suite that we've got.
MCP is something we've announced through the trade that we plan to launch our MCP server capability in the second half of this financial year, fairly soon, actually. We announced that we were accelerating the development there. We're not seeing a lot of, you know, a lot of volume coming through Conversational AI situations or use cases as such. We're seeing a fair amount of interest, but we don't think the sophistication is there yet. A lot of what we're doing is positioning ourselves for readiness for the future, and to take advantage of what we believe will be significant increases in conversation volumes going through these business communication systems, and we think we're very well positioned to capitalize on that.
We've seen a trend in the year, which is really very interesting around UCaaS, so this is unified communications as a service. So this is your back office phone systems. We have a number of key partners who have large UC businesses as well. Zoom do, RingCentral, 8x8, for example. So we're seeing increased opportunity levels for UCaaS use cases, and we've made a number of sales in that regard in the period. We actually think, as we move more towards a self-service capability, which I'm gonna talk about more in a moment, and I've talked about in the past, we think that will create a more cost-efficient way that our services can be deployed into UCaaS scenarios as well.
Probably finally to wrap up is our business development effort around new partners. We are very targeted about identifying potential new strategic partners and then how we go about trying to win partnerships with those organizations. Sometimes it takes a very long time, particularly if you know, we're convincing that partner for the first time that this is a good thing to do, and we can add value. We may have to displace a competitor. That's not something we come across commonly, but when we do, it's something that we can go after quite aggressively. In the period, we've been successful in moving a number of these opportunities along.
So much so that, a week or so ago, we announced that we'd signed a major new strategic partner, and that partner will be completely standardizing with PCI Pal. We'll be doing a trade, a trade PR announcement with them in the next month or so, maybe two months, and at which point we'll be able to name them publicly. This is all part of our plan. I mentioned earlier about working more deeply with existing partners. It's also about adding incrementally more partners, those that suit our model, working really closely with them, adding value, providing a great service, and helping us to drive that growth momentum going forward. All in all, good health of the partner ecosystem at the moment and the continued progress we're making there.
I'm gonna pause for a second, and I'm gonna hand over to Ryan, for the financial update. You can control the slides, Ryan, if you like. I think you can.
Sure. Thank you, James. We'll start by having a look at the core metrics that define really the health and the trajectory of the business. We exited the first half at GBP 20.3 million ARR, as I said, up 21%. It really demonstrates the continued demand for our offering. Along with that, the contracted ARR was up 18% to GBP 24 million, really that provides strong visibility into ARR conversion over the coming periods, which really supports the confidence in our continued revenue progression. Importantly, actually, underlying all of that is this growth has been experienced across all of our regions, EMEA, North America, ANZ, reinforcing the global reach of the business as well.
Retention remains, again, a structural strength with the GRR at 95% and the net revenue retention at 105%, reflecting the stickiness of the platform and our ability to expand with existing customer relationships, really validating the land and expand strategy. You know, we're winning the customers, retaining them at high levels, and gaining a greater share of their wallet. Looking at the revenue, we delivered GBP 11.3 million in the first half, and as James referred to, there was just under GBP 700,000 deferred from FY24 into the first half of FY25. When we normalize for that gives Underlying growth of 14%.
It's really important to look at that to understand the trajectory of the business, and it reflects the steady execution that we had planned. Importantly, the revenue is made up 93% of recurring revenues, up from 91%, highlighting the continued quality of our revenue, and also provides strong visibility and durability of revenues into the future. ARR converts into revenue through contracted revenue. Contracted ARR converts into revenue. We focus on the time to revenue and the duration that that's taking. That's down to about five months at the moment, and we continue to focus that and refine that area. This really is financially important because the faster implementation the contracted ARR moves to revenue, the quicker EBITDA contribution will accelerate, and we'll start to see more operational leverage.
Every time we get these improvements, we'll roll them out across our partner ecosystem and get them embedded into the systemized. If you look back over the years, our compounded growth has been over 30% on both ARR and revenue. That combined with the ARR growth, improved NRR, and predominantly recurring revenues really reflects a quality business model. Turning to profitability and margins, as I referred to, our revenue is up to GBP 11.3 million. That delivered a gross margin period of 87% compared to 93% in the prior period. Now, this movement is really due to a revenue mix and is timing-related. The recognition of our license revenue, which has a higher margin, is dependent on deployment timing and ultimately, which is dependent on end customers.
The timing effect weighed modestly on our H1 margin in the period. We expect that to start to unwind in H2 as the full effect of the H1 deployments are felt or delivered through revenue and also with the furthering deployment of contracted ARR, which has been secured in H1. In the period, our administration expenses increased to GBP 9.6 million, and reflecting the deliberate investment in engineering platform capability, our product marketing, and our broader go-to-market capacity. This is really targeted investment to support ARR scaling and long-term operational leverage. All of that delivered an adjusted EBITDA of GBP 0.2 million versus just under GBP one million in the prior period. I think it's really important to contextualize the comparison. The prior period EBITDA has benefited from that deferred revenue from FY24.
When looking at adjusting for that timing benefit, looking at the underlying year-on-year movement, it's really the growth that we have experienced that we've reinvested back into the business. Overall, we're sustaining the ARR growth at over 20% and by being EBITDA positive. Turning to cash, and cash remains a focus, a real central focus for us, especially during our growth investment period. You'll see that underlying operating cash remains positive before working capital movements. The net cash in operations in the period just on was just under GBP 600,000, reflecting the time-related utilization of working capital rather than a structural cash burn. We did invest GBP 900,000 in our capitalized development expenditure, this was targeted, focused in on our platform and deeper partner integrations.
This is strategic R&D designed to really maintain and strengthen our competitive advantage and support future ARR growth. At the end of the period, we had cash of GBP 2.6 million on the balance sheet. In addition to that, we still retain full access to our undrawn GBP three million RCF facility. I think it we're utilizing our cash in a controlled manner to drive value-accretive investments. As ARR scales and margins expand, we expect operating cash conversion to strengthen progressively. Turning to the balance sheet, intangible assets increased to GBP 4.6 million, consistent with our continued investment in the product and aligns with our strategy to reinforce long-term competitive positioning.
Our deferred income stands at GBP 14.5 million at the end of the period, which again, provides clear visibility into revenue recognition over the coming periods. Importantly, our liquidity remains controlled, and overall, the balance sheet really supports organic investment and execution of our growth strategy without near-term capital requirements. Looking ahead to H2 and beyond, the focus really is around execution against a defined profitability trajectory. In the, in the second half, we expect strong revenue delivery supported by license revenue recognition and continued deployment of those contracted customers that I referred to earlier. As the revenue mix is normalized, we expect gross margin to improve, and it's a timing issue rather than a structural issue.
Operationally, we have strengthened the model by focusing on different aspects such as standardization and other improvements to drive our time to revenue, and we remain focused on reducing this further. For FY26 andWe are the revenue and the adjusted EBITDA remain in line with expectations. I think more importantly, the significant value inflection really sits beyond FY26, at which point is expected to be driven by ARR reaching the scale, operating expense growth normalizing relative to revenue growth and the standardization and future investment and automation of the platform flowing through.
As long as we stick with our priorities of growing organic growth, which we've targeted ourselves 18%-20% range, and driving operational leverage, this should ultimately translate into increased margin expansion, further operating cash generation, and really strong group profitability throughout 2027 and beyond. With that, James, I'll hand back to yourself. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Ryan. Product and platform overview now. Really this is about the importance of our platform going forwards, and how we intend to capitalize on what we've built today, the positioning that we have through our partner ecosystem, the technology integrations that we have, whether they're with resellers or whether with third parties that we work with, and leveraging that go-to-market motion to continue on the current growth trajectory, but also create new opportunities for PCI Pal as well as we go forwards. To start that off, though, I think it's really important to emphasize the demand we are seeing for our core secure payment products. That is driving all the momentum in the business today. And that is as we had expected it to.
Whilst we do have an eye on some new product developments, I'm gonna talk about those more in a moment. We're not developing those products because we feel that our core of secure payments needs to be replaced. If anything, it is growing in terms of demand that we're seeing. And that's really exciting because these are mature products. They're products we've added to, and they're just as relevant today and will be in the future as they were a number of years ago. In fact, if anything, we're seeing an uptick in demand in perhaps some of the regions where it had taken a bit more time to connect, so particularly in, you know, the US, for example.
For those more new to our story, those three key products that we have underneath the banner of secure payments are Key to Pay, Click to Pay, and Speak to Pay. Effectively what these things are doing is PCI Pal acts as a payment facilitator. First and foremost, we're making a payment possible across any communications channel by using Key to Pay, Click to Pay or Speak to Pay. That's any of those channels that I talked about earlier. It's whether it's within a contact center, a UC environment, or whether it's in Conversational AI, we are making the payment possible in a way that's completely embedded and integrated to that conversation. That carries value in itself. We also act as a secure data transmitter as well, and so this actually is where the original value proposition came from.
It's why we're called PCI Pal , because that related to PCI compliance around credit and debit card data. You do get that too with what you do with PCI Pal . Today it's more like table stakes. If you use our solutions, it's gonna allow you to be secure and allow you to be compliant. The three different methods really cover different channels. Key to Pay is effectively typing in card data using telephone keypad. You can do that whether you're in conversation with an agent or a bot, or whether you're using a fully automated system via a bot or an IVR system, which are very quickly becoming bot systems themselves. This is where the technology known as DTMF masking comes into play.
We have some patents related to the way that we deploy our voice solutions as well, which also acts as a protection in some of the technology integrations that we have with our partners in a very light touch platform to platform way. We then have Click to Pay and Speak to Pay. Click to Pay is where we're really opening up the opportunity for digital payment methods. Click to Pay uses a secure web link, which is sent to a customer. I mean, that's in very basic terms. It could be fully embedded into our customer's own systems that they're using. It could be a notification in an app. There's all sorts of different ways that you can facilitate this web payment form effectively.
In that form, it works in a similar way in that PCI Pal is capturing all the sensitive data, but also we can facilitate lots of different payment methods there as well. It's not just credit and debit cards. We can make any kind of e-commerce type payment methods available to customers or to consumers at that point. Our own customers, for example, it's very common to include digital wallets in that, so Apple Pay, Google Pay, et cetera. Buy now, pay later is relatively common as well. If they use Klarna on their website, they can use Klarna with PCI Pal in their contact center or on their web chat environment. Or Affirm, things like that.
We have open banking too, and a variety of other different digital payment methods that are available. Speak to Pay is speech recognition. This is AI powered speech recognition. We're on our second iteration really of the Speak to Pay solution. It's super reliable. It still typically gets used more in accessibility situations, where you might have callers who may have a disability and for one reason or another can't use the keypad or prefer to speak details, in which case we can use enhanced speech recognition to do that. Also this comes into play with voice bots through Conversational AI as well, which are effectively using AI speech recognition as well. We can seamlessly inter-integrate into those conversation flows as well.
We're seeing excellent momentum across across this area of secure payments. However, you know, we are adding to what we do from a product perspective. I want to give you our sort of balanced view on what that looks like. Today, I will add to this was a graph, a chart if you like, that we shared at the CMD, or certainly something very similar to this. You've got the current product suite, which by vast majority revenue-wise is the secure payment suite. Then also secure data collection as well, because we can use the secure payment suite to capture data rather than payments. We have customers that use it for Social Security numbers, that use it for setting up direct debits and bank account details.
Any sort of sensitive information, we can actually use those solutions to collect that. That there's less so what it's used for, but it is available in terms of secure data collection. We have the fraud management piece as well. With that, we launched a fraud screening solution which we launched in July, at the beginning of this year. It's fair to say we launched that very early. We've been going through a process to roll that out to our partners, and we've got a number of those that are being onboarded right now with the fraud risk screen capability. We've got a number of new customers, direct customers coming through contract process for that.
I'd expect by the full year to have, you know, some customer base there that we'll be talking more about. But effectively what's happening here with the Fraud Risk Scoring is that we're doing a check, a fraudulent check prior to taking a payment, and then we use the intelligence that we get back to drive the payment method that we offer to the customer. Rather, if it looks like it might have some fraud risk associated to it, then we may not offer a credit or debit card payment. We may offer a payment type which has additional authentication, such as a digital wallet payment, 'cause when you make a digital wallet payment, the consumer has to have, you know, face recognition to authenticate themselves, which therefore means the merchant taking the payment is more protected.
If it is a fraudulent payment, it's highly unlikely that they're gonna get a chargeback in that situation. That's what we're trying to avoid. Longer term with the fraud management piece, we'll use it outside of the context of just the payment point in the call. You can actually also use it earlier on to assess whether there's any fraud going on. That's very much in our plans longer term with that. In the center there, you've got analytics and data. This is really around the reporting capabilities. We launched a new version effectively of our data analytics capability and reporting suite earlier this financial year. We're continuing to improve what we do there.
We have a company-wide sort of data consolidation project going on at the moment, which isn't just about reporting externally, it's about all sorts of things, efficiencies, use of AI within the business. That will contribute to our ability to provide better insights to customers and partners around, you know, improving customer experience, increasing revenue, reducing chargebacks, and all these sorts of things. These three or four things are all available today. The direction of travel we're taking with products in these sort of adjacent areas, we've talked to you about customer authentication before, and we expect this is coming soon. We plan in H2 to be announcing a new product capability around customer authentication.
Effectively we're helping our customers be confident that who they are talking to is who they say they are. We've got several features planned to how we achieve that. We'll launch an initial iteration, and then we'll add to that in the months following that as well. The customer authentication tool can be used at any point during a conversation. We're not just engaging here at the point of payment, we're engaging at other points in the call wherever our customer wants to use that solution. The important thing is, because customer authentication is not new, the important thing is we're leveraging that and we're doing that from the integration point that we have in that conversation.
We're doing it from our USP of being integrated to that conversation, so that communications platform, and that's the uniqueness to it. You know, we're not trying to do this for the first time, but we are trying to do it from that perspective for the first time. We've also got identity verification on the list as well, which is planned for the future. Particularly I wanna draw investors' attention to self-service onboarding, which in itself might sound a little unimportant, but actually I think to investors that know us well, they're starting to realize how important this is for PCI Pal and for a number of different reasons. Just to be clear, it is a product initiative.
Adding a self-serve capability to what we do is a product initiative for us and an engineering workload that we have to resource. You know, some of my biggest challenges in the business today are which opportunity do we go at the hardest? These are mostly good problems for us to have. That tends to be the sorts of discussions we're having to have within the business right now. In terms of self-serve and self-serve onboarding, what this means for PCI Pal , we are working towards this, it's not a light switch moment, it's building blocks towards this. We expect that by the end of FY27, we will be able to sign up customers through our website who can sign up, contract, pay, gain access to, and use our services entirely via our website.
We're aiming for MVP stage within 18 months, unless we decide to try to move that faster potentially. The building blocks towards it mean that we actually get some operational gains too. I've talked a bit about standardization in our interims. I've talked about that in the full year. Actually when we're onboarding some of these SMB customers, we're able to leverage some of this standardization more out of the box for our products. That means there's less professional services involvement on our side, less custom development work. That means, you know, increased operational gearing longer term, which clearly is something we wanna see more of.
Now we think we're gonna start seeing that anyway, just by nature of what we're doing and our ambitions around Rule of 40 within the next two and a half years. This could be, you know, a real catalyst for that, longer term as well. The sort of bigger strategic point around self-serve is that it opens up another go-to-market motion for PCI Pal , and this is something we're very much targeting right now, is it creates a product-led growth stream, which is more of a true SaaS type growth stream, where we can sell our services entirely digitally. We can market and sell them entirely digitally anywhere in the world.
That will change the or add an additional go-to-market model for the business in that time as well. You know, when we think about the growth trajectory of the business out to FY30 and beyond, we very much want this to be part of that. The self-serve piece is really quite important. I just know sometimes when you talk about product, people's eyes do tend to light up about some bright, new shiny new product. Actually, we've got some excellent products that already exist, and we can make them better. We can make them more available, we can access more of our market, and self-serve is one of the key ways that we're able to do that.
It's for Ryan and I to make sure that we move that along at the right pace. Just before we wrap up, underpinning all of this is a public cloud platform. I'm not gonna spend much time talking about this slide at all. Please, please feel free to look at it separately, but excellent platform as I've said already. That secure payment solutions that we have today, you know, we have the platform. We have this ecosystem of partners underneath it. Some of those are resellers, some of those are integrations. You know, we've got more than 130, 140 payment service provider integrations, some of whom we aggregate across. Then we have all the CRM integrations that you could need, et cetera.
And then effectively our platform is sitting on top of that. That's the direction of travel that we're taking in terms of anything new that we do, we are then able to take via our current go-to-market model. With the emergence of self-serve capabilities and that full sort of PLG approach to things, that will create a new track for PCI Pal . More of a true, you know, more of a true SaaS sales play in the longer term, which we think is really quite exciting for us. Just before we go to questions, to wrap up on the outlook, we have made an excellent start to H2.
Q3 is often our strongest quarter at PCI Pal , just because of where partners' year ends tend to fall. Yeah, as expected, we've had a strong start to this third quarter. Continued sales momentum, particularly in the U.S. and continued seeing strong traction across insurance and healthcare. We announced the major new partner that I mentioned earlier, and also we've referenced that we did extend one of our largest customer contracts in that time as well. That's been, that's also been secured during. Since the end of H1. Really our focus right now is the same as it has been this year. As any investor that's spoken to one-to-one, you know, we're focused on execution of the plan this year.
We wanna beat our numbers this year. That's where we wanna get to. I don't wanna set new expectations above the ones that are there. We've gotta meet the numbers, but really where I wanna be is beating those key numbers that are out there, building that trust with our investors and proving that this pathway that we're on and the adjustment we made at the beginning of the year was the right decision. And plotting that long-term path to not just keeping the scale, the scaling going, but making that profitable as well and on time with what we're expecting that to look like over the next over the next year or so. We've set ourselves very up, very well up for a strong H2 and to achieve those things. Thank you for listening.
Let's take some questions, which I was gonna manage. I did pick up some when I wasn't talking, so we'll see if there are any more. No, we've not actually. Just a few questions in here. Bear with me. We've got, with large percentage of new contracts secured via partners, how concentrated are the top partners, and what visibility do you have on a forward basis? Taking partner concentration first, we actually have a good spread of business that comes via our partners, both in terms of new business and in terms of revenue within the business. I would say that there's a top seven or eight, and then it starts to tail off somewhat where from there. You know, it's typically that top seven or eight.
We do have some who will have a particularly strong quarter, but then, you know, may be quieter for the remainder of the year. Yeah, in general there is not significant partner concentration risk as such. We're very careful in how we forecast business as well. It's almost impossible to forecast the very largest deals. We have to be careful with that, and we try and just to forecast based on run rate if we can. The other question was about forward visibility, which I assume relates to pipeline. We work very closely with partners. You know, it's all about building that mutually beneficial relationship with them, and we put a lot of effort into that. We invest heavily in it as well, both in terms of time, engineering resources. We also give.
We try to make it interesting for them from a commercial perspective. If we do all of those things really well, and we look after their customers well, we've got good uptime, et cetera, then the relationships on the ground are easier to manage. We will potentially get more insight into pipeline and get a bit closer on that. Actually, from a sales perspective, we've been very successful for the last, at least last six quarters in forecasting opening quarter, expected sales delivery for the three months ahead, if that makes sense. Yeah, we've got good insight. Sometimes you're one step removed, but generally we've got good insight. Another question.
There's a question about the Visa, the, the U.K. banks initiative with Mastercard and Visa, which relates to setting up new card rails in the U.K., which was in the news recently about a risk that if Visa and Mastercard's networks were turned off, would that be a major issue for U.K. companies, which the U.K. government think it would be a major issue not just for companies, but for the whole country. think it's very unlikely, but we're very aware of that. I don't think, you know, there's no immediate opportunity that we can accurately identify with that. The question is, do we see it as an opportunity?
One point I will make is that we do know from operating in mainland Europe that mainland Europe, to a degree, are ahead on some of these things. There are a number of new alternative payment methods, which are used in countries like France, Netherlands, Spain. These are alternatives to using the Mastercard and Visa payment card rails. These are quite prevalent, and some of them have been around for a number of years, so they're some way ahead of what we're doing in the U.K. The U.K., I believe, is setting up new card rails, which is somewhat different to an alternative payment method.
I would add that we do support most of those, certainly the top two alternative payment methods in France and Spain, and that's been part of our mainland Europe push that we've got. Certainly don't expect that to have a negative impact on PCI Pal . Finally, a question on Model Context Protocol for Conversational AI services. How would we describe it for PCI Pal , I think it means. In very simple terms, we'd describe it as an open source standard to connect AI platforms to third parties, whether they be other AI platforms or platforms like PCI Pal's platform.
For us, I think long-term MCP will make it easier for us to for other platforms to consume our services, I would say, particularly after we've integrated introducing new products and services to those organizations that we're that we're partnered with. I think we're quite some way off where we will have, you know, bot platforms just coming to us to consume our services. We're making sure we're ahead of the game so that when that does come, we are ready for it, we've got a mature model to deal with it, and we can take part in the volume of transactions going on rather than be a victim of it. We had one other question, which is about amount of business that's come from one particular partner.
I'll make the point here, we're very careful about specifics that we reference, both in terms of what goes into the results, but also on these presentations. We are the only publicly listed company in our space. We think we're moving faster than anybody else, we think there's a lot of eyes on us right now, so we're super careful about what we share that could be competitively sensitive. I'm not gonna be able to answer that question, I'm afraid, but we think that's best interest the shareholders. Okay. Don't think there's any more questions, so.
Yes. Sorry. Thank you both. Can I ask investors not to close the session, as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. If there are any further questions, or you would like additional information on PCI Pal , then please get in contact via pcipal@walbrookpr.com. Thank you everyone once again, and, hopefully you'll see the team present again shortly.
Yep. Thank you everybody.
Thank you.