All right. Well, thank you everybody for coming. I think we'll kick off. We're pleased to be excited to be announcing our results for the year to the end of August, and we'll press on straight through with that. Firstly to remind, we are all about becoming the world's most trusted service, and we do that by providing our service through large corporate clients, specifically banks, private banks, and wealth managers. Next slide, please. We see that as a huge market opportunity. Firstly, we get paid from premium brands driving the loyalty of their most profitable customers. We're becoming the best way for those wealthier mass-affluent individuals to organize their lifestyle and travel needs, which is an absolutely huge market.
We've become the best way for people earning more than GBP 100,000 a year, all up to the ultra-high net worth. That is a colossal part of the market. Within our market of providing concierge and travel services, we're now the established market leader. We've got 100% corporate client retention. We win almost all of the tenders that come up, albeit there are quite a few more still out there. We're looking forward to continuing to grow our competitive advantage. There's also, in our model, a growth engine. What I mean by that is that as we get bigger, we get better, both in terms of efficiency and service quality. As we get more efficient and improve our service quality, we get bigger, which drives efficiency and service quality. More about that later.
Essentially, where we're at today is we are winning new clients. We are improving the service engine. We can show that with the data that we go through today. The market opportunity remains huge, both the immediate market opportunity of working with wealth managers, private banks, premium credit card businesses that look after their top customers, and then as we get better and better and better, other market opportunities as well. The growth engine is something which I think everybody on this call has seen the video of before. It is worth reminding. As we get bigger, we increase member engagement, so more end users use us. That delivers a better and stronger ROI for our corporate clients who give us more money, and that allows us to invest into tech, improving our proposition.
That then allows us to increase more cash, more margin because we get more efficient. But the improvement in service proposition actually leads to more members activating the service and using it. That growth engine continues. This year, we're particularly pleased because we are at record levels of net revenue. We're at record levels of EBITDA. That GBP 4.9 million EBITDA really masks the fact that four of that came in the second half. The first half of this year was poorly damaged by Omicron. If you remember, we hired a load of people because we saw good growth in September, October, November last year. The wind very much got taken out of our sails in terms of revenue in December and January, albeit we hung on to that cost.
In the first half of this year that we're reporting, we only had GBP 0.9 million EBITDA. The second half, GBP 4 million, and that increased across the second half. Cash levels are pretty much at the same level as last year. We won new contracts. We retained all of our existing contracts. We've got active members up as well, the number of end users using our service in the past 12 months growing to 275,000. That also grew a lot more in the second half than the first half. Our profitability was notwithstanding the fact that we invested actually more than ever into our technology, our content and telecoms.
Because of the trading to date so far this year, albeit we've only had two months, because of we've got very strong client retention, growing demand, because we're, our proposition is getting better all the time, we're very optimistic about meeting the expectations in the market for the full year going through. Our platform is very well positioned for growth. This is quite important. We mentioned this at the half year. We've got a large member base, and we're scaling that, but we don't need to be scaling in new markets.
We don't need to be scaling into new categories. We don't need to be scaling even outside of financial services to meet the expectations or exceed the expectations that are out there in the market. What's good for us is we want to, over the next 18 months, really be doing more of the same in existing markets or existing categories that will help us achieve decent cash generation, and then some of that cash we'll invest back into future growth. That's why we're feeling good in the business today. Over to Arnold.
Thank you, Alex. As Alex said, record net revenue growth this year of 35%. Just to give you the up 11% despite the impact of Omicron, as Alex indicated earlier. With that growth, all three regions grew, and particularly Americas was up 67% year-on-year, EMEA 21%, and APAC 25%. Strong across all three regions. Within our corporate revenue, and that's the revenue we get from our corporate clients who pay us to look after their high-value members, that's up 29% to GBP 21.1 million. Supplier revenue has recovered well as travel has, global travel started again. That's more than doubled to GBP 5.7 compared to last year. Just give up 1% to GBP 4.9.
As Alex said, it was a game of two halves, the first half, impacted by Omicron with GBP 0.9 million EBITDA, the second half of the year, a strong return to profitability, GBP 4 million in the second half, that's around about 15% margin in the second half. That means our loss before tax improved by 31%, to GBP 3.8 million against GBP 5.5 million last year. As Alex said, cash is at GBP 6.6 million, which is similar to gross cash last year, although we did take on debt during the year, that's to support future growth in the business and manage our working capital.
In relation to the income statement, our operating expenses did go up year-on-year, partly due to the removal of payroll assistance where we took salary sacrifice last year, as a COVID project. Government support came away as well, and that was GBP 2.8 million. We did put additional FTE on to support the increased activity as it came back strongly, especially in the second half. Depreciation is down by GBP 0.5, and that's really driven by reducing right-of-use assets as we reduced our office space year-on-year. Share-based payments are down by GBP 1.1 million. Again, that's due to the salary sacrifice option schemes that we had during COVID, and they ended in March 2021. We do have exceptional items this year.
The majority of that relates to the closure of our Russian office, where we sold that in full and it was cost of closures, and that was in March 2022. Our net expense is slightly better, That's primarily due to FX. It's difference in our intercompany balances, That, as I said, loss before tax improved by GBP 1.7 million. This is a normal chart that we show in terms of net revenue growth and splitting it. As Alex said, we retained all material contracts for the third year running. Our base corporate revenue has grown by GBP 6.9 million. We've included a new measure here, we call it the Net Corporate Revenue Retention Rate. That's basically looking at our recurring revenues year- on- year from the same customer base.
In 2022, that rose by 120%. The prior year it was 75%, that was the impact of COVID. This is the measure that we're gonna use going forward to track how good in terms of the money we get from our base business going forward. I think that range will be between 110%-120% going forward. New contract wins in the year contributed GBP 2.2 million. That's the four contracts we launched during the year. As I said, supplier revenue up more than double year-on-year. On that point, the next slide is to look at the recovery of supplier revenue, and I've shared this before. The two graphs here, the left-hand side shows the year-on-year improvement.
Actually we're above pre-COVID levels. In 2019, we had GBP 5.5 million supplier revenue. This year just gone, we did GBP 5.7 million. If you look at it on the half year to half year, you'll see, you know, how COVID impacted us strongly through 2020 and 2021. We've seen steady, strong recovery through each half of the year to up to, you know, at the end, the second half of the year, it's our supplier released GBP 12.8 of our net revenue. Moving on to, as I said, all three regions grew strongly. EMEA up 21%, and that was the recovery of base business plus supplier revenue recovering despite the impact of Omicron, which impacted the business for three or four months. As I said, we won and launched two region contracts in the region.
Americas has sort of been the star of the regions, up 67%, that's through increased member activity. One of the big increases has been, if you remember, we launched a extra-large contract in February 2020 just as COVID hit. That contract has never really reinflated to the size it was, and it's now starting to do that, especially in the second half of the year. We've seen strong growth coming in the Americas region. APAC is up 25% year-on-year, that's primarily due to Credit Suisse on the new large contract we won which launched at the start of the financial year.
We have seen that APAC is the sort of last region to come out of COVID as we saw various lockdowns throughout the year, and it's just starting to come out even towards the end of the year. Thanks, everyone. Adjusted EBITDA point of view, EMEA is down slightly year-on-year by 0.6. As Alex explained, that's where we increased our FTE at the beginning of last year. We kept that FTE because we knew that we'd need it when we came out of Omicron, and that's proved right in terms of the growth that came through in H2.
Americas, adjusted EBITDA loss improved by GBP 1.5 million, that's the strong uplift in net revenue offset by increased FTE, the increased activity in net revenue moved the region to profitable in H2. I've got a slide on the next slide to explain that. As I said, APAC slightly down year-on-year as we've got the new contract progress is on, base business was down. We are seeing some signs of recovery towards the end of the year. This is the new slide we've put in just to show the improved profitability in Americas. This slide looks at net revenue over the four years against adjusted EBITDA.
As you can see, from a net revenue perspective, we are actually higher than pre-COVID levels at GBP 16.5 million against GBP 15.8 in 2019. We've improved profitability year-on-year. We've gone from about GBP 4 million loss in 2019 to 2020 to just under a GBP 1 million loss at GBP 0.7 in 2022. We just went into profitability in the second half of that year. That's where we are. We're plugging that hole at Americas, was the sort of drag on our profitability, and that's improving. We're looking to see it to go move into profit for this year, financial year coming up. We show this slide every year.
This shows that we continue to invest in our technology, that's really across our digital platform, tech, like our CRM system, content, and our infrastructure and communications. Why do we do that? 'Cause it creates competitive advantage that drives efficiency, service levels, and revenues. We'll sort of maintain that level of investment. It will probably also go up, not as fast as our net revenue growth. We will still maintain that going forward. As for our cash flow, operating cash flow came in at GBP 4.8 million, slightly better than last year.
That was due to the reduced loss before tax of GBP 1.7 million have gone through. A bit of a drag on working capital as the business grows. We've got some reduction in non-cash items, principally due to the share-based payments. As I said, continued investment in tangibles, GBP 6.4 million. During the year, we did receive some receipts where employees did exercise some of their sorry, sacrificed options at the start of the year, GBP 1.4 million. We raised loans of GBP 3.4, as I said before. Lastly, you know, that means that our decrease in cash was only GBP 0.1 in the year, GBP 6.6 against GBP 6.7. Back to you.
Great. Brief reminder again, I think everybody on this call knows about our growth engines. I'm not gonna play that video today. I'm gonna skip through that, but it is worth having a look. There's a new updated version of that on our website, and really worth having a look at that, and certainly very useful for sharing with any colleagues, friends, family you might wanna share that with to explain our business model. A brief reminder, we make our money mostly from blue chip corporates, particularly in financial services, paying us to look after their top customers. We also make some money from supplier revenue, mostly in travel. We get paid for delivering high touch service where human beings get involved and also for digital service, which is self-serve.
Mostly on multi, almost all, on multi-year, either three or five-year contracts with guaranteed minimums on the larger contracts or contracts in new markets. This year, one of the things that underneath our business that drives it is the number of active members using our service and the number of active members that we've got that are either very high value, high value or medium value. Very high value are very high value to the company that's paying us to look after them. That would be a private bank and their high net worth customers. It would be the top end of the retail bank, where some of their customers have got assets under management with them as well. It also includes a couple of the very, very, very top credit cards.
For instance, credit cards where people are paying thousands and thousands of pounds a year for the benefits of that product. High value are customers who are worth a little bit less. Maybe they are wealthy people, but they've got a bank account but no assets under management with that, associated with that product, for instance. Then the medium value customers tend to be people that we get members that we get through Visa, Mastercard through the payment networks. You can see that in every different type of member, we've seen a growth in active members, and we've seen them in each geography, and we've seen them in each segment as well.
Now because those people then use us, once you're active you tend to use us and use us more, that grows our revenues very directly. Operational update. Contracts are up. Four new contracts, retained contracts. We talked about active members going up. Member satisfaction levels have continued to be high. One final thing to mention here is that we have applied for B Corp certification, I'll talk about that a little bit more later on, and rolled out our digital platform as well. We're now live on 80% of our material contracts have got our digital platform. That's up from 67%, 64% previously. Around the world, the new growth is spread geographically. We've also had not only growth but good contract expansions, renewals.
When we are renewing contracts, we are typically pricing up as well now, as you would expect. We're also launching more engagement really by having more digitalization, more of our platform as part of our service, more onboarding, more re-engagement when people haven't used the service for a while, and so on. Generally very happy with our corporate client growth this year. When we look at the client list, it's pretty awesome. We've got some really rock solid corporate clients who, some of whom, by the way, don't necessarily use their logos, so it would be even better if we hadn't had to not only use logos that we've got permission to use.
It's a pretty fantastic client list, so we're really proud of it, and we're proud about how familiar that looks to people that have been looking at our client list for the last few years. We tend to add to it, very few come away, and none have come away in the last three years. As I said earlier on, we're not looking to add new categories. We're not looking to get good and serve our clients, our members in new areas. These are the areas, particularly dining, entertainment, travel, retail and events. The Book Club really I would categorize as a type of event. Editorial really spans across dining, entertainment, travel and retail. In each of these areas, we're just getting better all the time. As our buying power improves, we demand more from our, from our suppliers.
As we, our technology improves, we've got more things integrated in with our tech stack. As our knowledge about our members and their preferences improves, we can target the right thing to the right member at the right time. As we get more known in the market, we also just have a lot more things coming to us. Hotels that years ago didn't want to do business with us will be desperate to come and visit our offices and give us good deals. Same for airlines, same for entertainment and so on. We had a nice breakthrough the other day. It's a little bit cheesy, but because we not only want to work with venues and with ticket companies to get tickets, we also want to work with producers.
I was delighted that we got Michael Bublé availability all over the world on his latest tour without having to deal with either a ticket company or a venue by then. We did that just straight directly with his global producers of that tour. These kind of things, the kind of things that turbocharge each individual part of the business, both in terms of efficiency and service quality, as we grow the business. The platform is getting better all the time. More languages, more currencies, more functionality, and more ability to customize it to the corporate, which is really important to them as well, whilst maintaining it as a single platform. What we don't want to do is build different technology stacks for different clients, and we haven't needed to do that.
That really counts against scalability, and in the end, counts against having a really high-quality tech stack with the right features and benefits for members. It would also make us far less efficient. The fact that we're delivering to all of those brands that you saw on that slide earlier on with the same tech stack, but that that tech stack allows things to look, feel, and be different, but without adding complexity for us in terms of coding and content and features and so on. We got better at engaging our members with better content. All of you who've got access to the Ten platform, please do go on and have a look at the newest inspiration section there because it really is just a huge improvement on last year.
We've got much better use of video. Our content is much easier to search, much easier to find what you're looking for, and that's already driving a lot of repeat use because it just works better than it ever did before. What improvements we've made in inspiration are matched by improvements in travel and improvements in some of the other areas as well, offers and experiences for sure. Our content's also got better looking and is used more broadly by different corporate clients as well around the world. We've had content that we've actually sold as additional things to corporate clients in seven or eight languages in the past year, more than we've ever done before.
When they use our content, that not only makes us more money 'cause they pay for it also drives more usage of our service, which also drives our stickiness and revenues as well. Other things. Payments is important, so making sure that people can store their cards and then can with one click buy, is a small but very important improvement. We also increasingly, our corporate clients want to have only their cards that are able to be used on a platform, sometimes only their cards to use. If they want to use another card, they might be charged for that or it might be made possible. Preferences are something that we're good at now, and we're gonna carry on getting better at.
Enhancing member preferences, so people can tell us what they like, and then we can tell them more about those things at the right time, when they're in the right place and so on. Channel choice. For years, our service was email and phone, and then we had email, phone and the platform. Now we've got email, phone and chat, both through WhatsApp, and also through our own chat functionality on the platform as well. WhatsApp and our own chat functionality is just going up and up and up in terms of use and that's really helping us engage with our members as well. Some of those conversations can be automated or semi-automated.
In terms of improving how we operate today rather than changing what it is we do, is a bit of a theme for the last year and the next 18 months. A big part of that is that we've got automated journeys. Where somebody has stopped using our service, where the corporate client agrees to this, which is a majority of them, we would then say, "Look, you've not used us for three months. Here are some ways you might think to use us from here on in," based on their profile. That is really growing the number of members that stay engaged with the service and will continue to grow active members.
When we get a new member base, and we go out to them and we tell them about our service, where previously, a long time ago, we would just send them one email and see who responded. Now we're doing a lot more in terms of video. Often our communications are targeted to people based on their age, their location and so on. We do more than one. We do a series that are really, really well-received and that are growing the number of people that actually activate our service right at that very early stage, by an additional 50%. These small changes, 50% improvement there, 10% improvement somewhere else, 5% somewhere else, 20% somewhere else, add up to a much, much better member experience and far more engaged members.
B Corp is something which is also something that we've applied for B Corp. We are moderately confident of getting it. I would say we are confident of getting it, but we haven't got it yet. This year, why do we apply for B Corp? B Corp is a certification that you are a business that's serious about doing the right thing by the world and how it operates. Now for us, this is a good thing in itself. It also helps us attract and retain talent. There's a lot of people who find this a very attractive thing in an employer, and it gives us a competitive advantage and it enables conversations with the corporates to pay our bills. For instance, Mastercard are extremely keen to grow their environmental credentials.
They're also very keen on DE&I, diversity, and inclusion and equity. Coutts are themselves a B Corp. Lombard Odier, the Swiss private bank, who we don't yet work with, but they are a B Corp. Coutts, we certainly do work with. This allows us to have conversations at very senior levels about how we can help them with their agenda around ESG or indeed being B Corp. The B Corp certification gives us a kind of table stakes to have those conversations at senior levels, grows our revenue, helps us attract and retain talent, and makes us even proud of the business that we run. In terms of outlook. Now, as you know, we want to be growing the size of our current contracts and then we want to win new contracts with current clients.
We want to win new contracts with new clients, we also want to win new clients in new sectors. This is the most boring slide in the deck and the most exciting one at the same time. Apologies. This is really a cut and paste, which is what our corporate governance guys tell us to do from our [prelims] that were published today. Let me talk you through. We do expect to grow revenues because of growing demand as we continue to increase active members and first time users from a growing eligible member base. Our corporate clients, particularly the banks who are benefiting from higher interest rates, are enthused about paying us to deliver more service to more of their wealthier customers.
To put that into some context, amongst our very high valued members, we have around 10%, actually 11% penetration of the eligible very high members today. We've got about 11% penetration. On some programs, we're up at 30%, 40%, 60% penetration. We've got a long way to go. We have very few of our corporate clients that have very high valued customers that ask us to look after, ask us to, you know, hold engagement. They want us to grow engagement. They're happy to pay more. We can do that through the tools that we've got. Similarly, amongst our high valued clients, we've only got 3% of the eligible members using our service today.
We think it's very credible that we should get that to 10%, 12%. We could, we could do very well only by growing in existing clients, albeit we do expect to win new corporate clients as well. We have done that. Last year, four new material contracts, and we want to see ourselves continuing at that kind of order of magnitude of growth. Supplier revenue is important as well because although this is, our smaller revenue stream, only 12%, it doesn't cost us much more to, if anything, to actually grow that line because, you know, booking travel successfully with more people, we get paid for in terms of corporate revenue, and then we make the revenue on the supplier side as well, on many contracts.
I'm very pleased that we've got record levels of that so far this year and we're expecting to have a good year on supplier revenue, for sure, a record year. Beyond that, we want to continue to grow profitability. Now, how do we grow profitability? Firstly, whilst we expect to maintain our investment in our kind of central costs, if you like, people like sweet our technology, communications and content, we do not expect to grow that investment at the same level as we grow our net revenues. That will drop to the bottom line and improve our profitability.
On top of that, we will continue to grow efficiencies as the growth engine kicks in more and more, and we have more things that are digitized or semi-automated and more experienced staff in the markets, particularly in Americas, where we've had very high growth in the past, six months in particular. That will grow our margins, and we are very focused on improving our profitability, probably even more focused on that than growing our net revenue, albeit we're very happy that we will be growing our net revenue at very healthy levels.
We did take some loans into the business, and that's really just to give us a very prudent level of working capital and a buffer there. We then expect to achieve cash generation in the second half of the current financial year. Overall, looking forward, trading to date has been strong. We've got very good metrics in the business that mean that we are very optimistic about another year of good progress and meeting the expectations that are out there in the market. At half an hour, that is everything from me.