Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining this Credit Clear FY24 results briefing. Joined today by Andrew Smith, CEO, Victor Peplow, the CFO, and Jason Serafino, the Chief Product and Technology Officer. We'll run through a few slides. This is a meeting, you can unmute yourself and pose questions at any point. I might just ask that we keep an eye on the mute buttons and if you wanna turn your video on, more than welcome to turn video on as well. We want this interactive, but if you could just keep an eye on those mute buttons, that'll be great. All the documents and disclosures have been released to the ASX this morning, including this deck, and it is being recorded, so we'll circulate a recording later this morning. So with that, over to Andrew Smith.
Yeah. Welcome everyone. It's lovely to see the registrations building. Hard to imagine, three or four years ago, we had to beg people to attend these conferences, so wonderful to see some momentum and support growing behind the business. So first of all, I just want to make a call-out in terms of the last 12 months' performance. FY 24 was, I think, a year where we started to gain confidence back in the market, where we considerably outperformed our guidance on four separate occasions.
To sit here in front of you, representing Credit Clear, having delivered a AUD 42 million revenue result, which is obviously a substantial record for us, up 20% on prior corresponding periods, and also a AUD 4.2 million underlying EBITDA result. Up again from what we thought was gonna be AUD 4 million at the end of the year as well. Wonderful effort across the team, something that we're very, very proud of, and absolutely, you know, I think sets the tone for a really strong future outlook as well.
Whilst I know that a lot of you in here aren't necessarily looking about what we've done in the past, you're looking at what we're looking to achieve in the future. Once again, we're gonna give our guidance this reporting presentation of AUD 48-50 million in revenue and an increase to above AUD 7 million in underlying EBITDA as well. Just to make the comment, that excludes any acquisitions that may be made. That's the title of the presentation. There's probably a few new followers to the Credit Clear story. Look, effectively, Credit Clear is a debt resolution business. It's important to note that we don't buy debt.
We assist our clients and their customers resolve overdue debt situations, and that's done through various stages of the business. The Credit Clear digital technology assists our customers through software as a service, where they use our technology to assist themselves resolve overdue debts with their customers. ARMA Group is effectively a hybrid debt collection business that ultimately uses our technology, supported by people, to resolve debt in the best possible way, delivering better outcomes to our clients through faster and higher recovery rates, and underpinned by better customer satisfaction, measured by Net Promoter Scores. Late stage recoveries is through our legal, which is Oakbridge Lawyers. They're involved in the late stage recovery of overdue debts, predominantly in the business-to-business space.
We're assisting organizations recover money through the court system. So an end-to-end solution. As you can imagine, this market, the need for a more sensitive, less friction approach to resolving the overdue debts with the obviously massive challenges associated with cost of living pressure and you know, high interest rates, the need for our services is very high. So without you know, letting Victor, our CFO, steal too much of the limelight in terms of numbers, I just wanted to sort of kick off that slide by you know, I guess, recalling some of the advice that I've had from, I'm gonna say, some of the most sophisticated investors I've ever come across, since taking the chair at Credit Clear as CEO about two and a half years ago.
And that was one, consistently under promise and over deliver. And the second one was that the market hates lumpy graphs. They love consistency. And what this graph or these graphs show is really consistent performance year- on -year. I think when Credit Clear first listed, there was a lot of noise around what we're gonna achieve, and unfortunately, I think we made a lot of promises and weren't able to deliver that. Now, what we've seen over the last, certainly four years, is consistent improvement in almost all areas.
Mainly revenue, having grown from 11 to 21, to 35, to 42 in the last four years, and certainly across the underlying EBIT numbers, going from - 5.2, - 3.6, almost break even with a 200k underlying EBIT number, and then this year to do AUD 4.2 million in underlying EBITDA, is something that I think that will give confidence to the investment community, and certainly is something that we're very proud of as a senior executive team to have achieved. So I'll throw to Victor, who can round out some of the numbers.
Yeah. Look, the only additional comment here is that, obviously trending in the right direction quite steeply, and that, you know, it's all good to achieve underlying EBITDA, but we're converting that into cash. But I'll delve into a little more detail over the next couple of slides, if we can move to the next one. Thanks, Warrick. So, Andrew and I have been continually asked by many, many fund managers, you know, "How effective is the operating leverage of this business?" I think this slide aims to show some of the indicators that proves the operating leverage that we can achieve. So firstly, we've got the gross profit margin improving year- on- year from 51% - 53%. So how have we done that?
First point there is, you know, the use of digital collections, particularly in the consumer space, where the receivables there tend to be high value, high volume, low value, which the technology is very conducive to. So that's the first point. Second is, you know, the Tier 1 clients that we've been reporting through the year. We're talking big brand clients here, large amounts of revenue, and with that comes economies of scale. The third point is process improvements. You know, the business has undertaken a couple of acquisitions in recent years, that led to duplication. So we've done a lot of work consolidating systems, processes, procedures, and that's helped improve our gross profit margins as well.
Going forward, you know, we also have, you know, our office in the Philippines now. That is very effective, but underutilized currently. Through FY25, you know, we'll expand the use of that office for tasks such as administration, client reporting, and compliance. We expect the gross profit margin to improve further through the use of Philippines, but also continuing to improve the other points I've just made there. That's gross profit margin. Look, I touched on cash from operations, but it's important to note that 3.7 cash from operations, compared to prior year figure of 2.7 deficit, is a massive improvement of AUD 6.4 million. Year- on- year, you know, that that's a huge turnaround.
Cash is king, as we all know, so management and the board are very, very pleased, as well as our large, you know, investors and shareholders with that cash from operations result. At the bottom there, we're reporting underlying EBITDA as a percentage of revenue for the first time. You know, it's more relevant now that we've gone past that breakeven point, if you like. You can see there, it's improved from 1% to 10%. If you're looking forward for a moment, if you take our guidance numbers for FY 2025, we expect that to improve further to 14%. A good set of numbers there, but I think the key message here, from this slide, is that the business model is working effectively, and we are achieving operational leverage.
We come to the next slide. Very important slide that I've presented over the last couple of years, and it reconciles underlying EBITDA to statutory EBITDA. I think we've always been very transparent with this one, and I'm, you know, trying to set out the two comparisons very clearly here. I'm also showing the last three years, just to get a better perspective on the progress that this business has made. 12 months ago, for those of you that were on this call, you will remember we referred to this business going through an inflection point, and I think we've followed through with those comments 12 months later, where you can see the improvements on revenue and underlying EBITDA. So the focus points for this slide is the green rows that we've got here, where we'll go through row by row.
We've already mentioned that revenue was up 20%, which is a great result. Employee benefits are up only 6%, and again, we've achieved that through the points that I went through in the previous slide, but particularly through digital collections, which Jason will talk about more later in this presentation, and that's why I've listed there the investment in tech development OpEx component. We've maintained that investment, 'cause we're getting benefits, and we consider that to be our point of difference relative to our competitors, so that's really showing through at the moment. Other expenses there, up 13%, we did invest a little bit there with onboarding new clients, particularly the larger clients, but that's a long-term view that we've taken and continue to go with in future. This is a long-term play.
We invested in onboarding clients, and that's coming through revenue, but there's more of that to come through in FY 2025. But you can see there, the underlying EBITDA result, you know, over three years, got from 3.5 loss to 200,000 +, to 4.2+ . And the key metric in all of these numbers is that 57% improvement for each dollar of incremental revenue has flowed through to underlying EBITDA. This has, in fact, exceeded our own expectations, where we were aiming for 54%-55%. So to achieve 57% whilst investing in new client onboarding and sales, et cetera, is an extremely pleasing result for management, and also compares very favorably to the prior year equivalent figure, which was 28%.
So again, that is the key metric on this slide, 57% of incremental revenue flowing through to underlying EBITDA. Just to explain some of the other items as to why they're not part of underlying: We've received some government employee training grants, which have now phased out. We have not included them in underlying revenue. Similarly, we've had some non-recurring expenses there relating to system consolidation, legal fees, post-acquisition redundancies, which you can see have decreased over the last three years. They will continue to decrease further in FY 2025, and we've got shared expenses there, which can be volatile year- on- year, depending on testing. And then that all ties back to the statutory EBITDA there of AUD 1.9 million. But overall, a very pleasing result, trending in the right direction.
Overall financials are in a very strong position, going through a very solid trajectory, and we expect that to continue, going into FY25. So there are the numbers. So with that, happy to take questions now, or hand over to Andrew.
Yeah, look, just to reinforce Victor's comments, one of the things that we're really pleased about is that we've maintained our investment in our technology, which we see very much as our competitive advantage. So maintaining that development cost certainly very easy to just look at ways to save money and cut expenses in areas that are going to give us an immediate hit to our bottom line, but will hurt us in the future. We've maintained that investment in technology. We've also ramped up our investment in terms of sales and marketing. We recognize that we've got a really unique competitive advantage in our AI-driven technology, and we are experiencing rapid growth in terms of new customer acquisition. So, and obviously a third thing is to ensure that we invest in the overall business to grow.
To have achieved that in terms of sales and marketing technology, while still seeing the numbers increase and improve the way they have, is something that should once again give a lot of confidence to the fact that it's not just about 2024 performance, it's about 2025, 2026, and beyond. Let's talk about, you know, the new customers that we've won over the last 12 months. Look, one of the things that used to keep me awake at night, when we had a private business, was that if we lost one or two of our major clients, it would be, you know, almost catastrophic to the overall profitability of the business, and it would require some immediate redundancies.
Seeing the business continue to increase the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers to a level of 23 customers, Tier 1 customers, and over 44 Tier 2 customers, actually shows the robustness of this, business. That, you know, there's no one dependence on any one key client. The fact that we're now at 20, Tier 1 clients, that average over AUD 1 million per client, is actually a testament to not only the legitimacy of Credit Clear as a market leader within the credit collection space, but it also gives stability to the future maintainable earnings that obviously, contribute so greatly to the value of the business.
So, to have seen major clients like, you know, ANZ, you know, Origin Energy, and other major banking, finance, utility companies choose Credit Clear as a Tier 1 provider to assist them, either with software as a service solutions or third party hybrid collection services, or in fact, late stage collection services, I think just shows the confidence that the market has to partner with an organization like Credit Clear, which has a strong reputation of delivering great results, incredible service, and very compliant processes. So that's over to Jason to give us a bit of an update of what we've achieved in 2024.
Thanks, Andrew. You can see the highlights on this screen here, in terms of what we've achieved in FY 2024 with our strategy. Underlying these results, as has been covered there, is our strategy to bring together the best in class in digital with the best people. Having digital and then the people who've got the long credibility in the industry experience, those two things together are really resonating with the clients. We're able to provide services right from a due payment, all the way through early stage collections, late stage collections, all the way through legal services, and that is really appealing. As a result, we're winning clients at record levels. As you can see, their tender win rate maintaining 70%.
If you compare that to ARMA's pre-merger, the win rate was about 30%, which was a great result. So getting 70% is really, really pleasing to see. And the clients that are coming on board, we continue to see them growing and meeting our sales targets. So you can see their clients signed in FY 2023 have now achieved 81% of our sales projection. That's up from 32% for that group the prior year, and similarly, clients signed in FY 2024 at 33%. So we can expect to see a lot more upside coming from those already signed clients, 67% still to come from FY 2024, 19% from FY 2023, even without signing new clients...
Gross profit, as per Victor covered there, really pleasing to see our strategy coming together, with the profit increasing from 50 to 53%. That is a result of our strategy of consolidation across the group, removing duplicated roles, but significant consolidations of systems and processes. I think we had 6 different collections platforms across the various companies, and we're consolidating those into one. Two different outsourced managed service providers. So all of that's coming together into one cohesive group, as well as that continued growth in customer self-service using our digital platform, and we'll continue to see that operational uplift continuing.
So in summary, continued strong sales growth, significant upside from already signed clients, increasing operational leverage, along with favorable market conditions, gives us confidence in that FY25 guidance of AUD 48-50 million revenue and AUD 7 million of EBITDA, underlying EBITDA. To the next screen. So a key indicator that we've been tracking is payments on the digital platform. So these are self-service payments, where a customer receives the digital message from us, clicks on them, comes onto the portal on their phone, makes a payment, or sets up a payment plan that we then automatically process. So in other words, they don't require human touch from our team. And we've continued to show really strong progress, payments growing 63% to AUD 116 million on the platform this year.
So when you consider that, growth rate, 63%, against the group revenue growing by 20%, you can see that there's been a strong shift to digital, as Victor said, but chiefly in the consumer portfolio, where we've seen a doubling of the proportion of payments made digitally over the last 12 months. So why do we focus on digital payments? We do that for two reasons. The first is sales. As Andrew said, clients are increasingly wanting digital in the service, to improve customer experience, and they want to deal with a market leader in this space, who demonstrates results, and clearly we have digital at very, very high scale. And the second reason is profit margin.
Purely digital collections are 80%-90% gross profit, compared to collections with operators on the phones, that will be closer to that 50%-60% mark. A high proportion of digital is one of the key leading indicators to increasing profitability. It's one of the reasons why we continue to bring on new clients without growing our headcount proportionately. To the next screen. All right, so something very close to my heart, AI. If you've been following us, then you know, this is one of the areas we've been very bullish about over the years, and we see the potential for AI to really transform the debt collection industry, particularly as we see more and more activities being digitized.
Yeah, we're in a bit of a hype cycle on AI, that's for sure, but you know, people are talking about AI solving anything, but we've always taken a really pragmatic, scientific approach to what we do, and we measure the results, and it's easy for us to do that because you know, we know whether it collects more money or not, it's money in the bank, and we verify our approach through champion-challenger testing. Here is a recent example. We do a lot of these, but here's a recent example from a major utility, where we take the customers, we separate them randomly between two cohorts. One group of customers get our digital platform, and they get all of the aspects of our digital platform without the AI, so they get messages in a predetermined sequence.
The second cohort then gets that, but with our AI making the decisions. So every day, the AI is looking at every customer and making a decision for that customer, that day. What's the best channel to communicate on? What's the best time? What's the best message to send? Et cetera. And you can see the results here, they're material. So the AI cohort collected 22% higher than the non-AI cohort. And it's this kind of result that is really causing clients in the industry to sit up and take notice. You can see all the awards that we've been awarded, which is very exciting, but also it really helps in the sales process. The sales team really loves to talk about this, because it's a new, exciting thing to open doors, and the results are very strong.
And it's also a great competitive advantage because it's a very, very difficult competitive advantage to replicate. To train these AIs takes tens of millions of prior interactions, and we've been accumulating that data over 8+ years. So a new entrant coming into the market simply can't replicate that in any reasonable period of time. So we will be continuing to invest in this space, and seeking to maintain our market leadership as we go forward. Really excited about what we'll be doing in this space, so stay tuned.
Thank you, Andrew.
Yeah, and I'd just add to what Jason's saying, you know, I was only listening recently to a professor on AI, that was the head of AI at SAP, obviously a very large global software provider, and they talked about the fact that 80% of all AI projects internally fail. One of the things that we know we can guarantee is if you implement a third-party collection service or even a first-party software-as-a-service digital offering, we can sort of guarantee the success. And the reason why we can guarantee it is 'cause it's been proven and built out for many, many years. I'm not sure whether it was just luck or very good judgment, Jason, but the fact that we've been winning awards in AI since 2001...
Talks to the fact that we're well ahead of the market in terms of preparing for that AI transformation change, and certainly within the credit collection space, it's put us well and truly ahead of the market as well. So well done to those who, you know, we're ahead of the market within that tech team.
Thank you. Next question.
Yeah, look, I don't think I need to talk too much about this, but it's pretty clear trading conditions are favorable for, you know, a business that's assisting, you know, deal with overdue accounts or even late stage accounts. Cost of living crisis is certainly here, and it will be here to stay, certainly for the next few years. There's been a real shift in terms of sale of debt. You know, the big debt providers, like a Credit Corp, have really struggled to deploy capital within the market, because a lot of the large credit providers aren't selling debt, like the Westpac of the world. It's certainly opened up our market, expanded our total addressable market to assist clients deal with overdue debts internally through a partnership with Credit Clear.
So that's certainly favorable for us. And we've seen some consolidation across the industry. So a lot of the large providers, like, you know, a Collection House, or like the Illion, Milton Graham, Recoveriesc orp, mergers that have happened recently, have actually taken away some competitors within this space. And whilst we're sort of bringing a new innovative approach to the industry, I think that's also contributed greatly to our outlook in terms of, you know, 2025 and beyond. So certainly favorable market conditions. So let's wrap things up. Try to summarize some of the good things that were talked about. You know, trading conditions are certainly supportive. Australian companies are very much focused on strengthening their internal and partnerships to resolve overdue debts.
There's consistent organic growth, where clients that we've already signed, perhaps we've already onboarded them, they're gonna contribute the greatest part of our 2025 growth. In terms of budgeting for growth in 2025, to hit that guidance number of 48-50, most of that's already baked into the client that we've signed, in terms of existing customer growth, so we're very, very positive about that outlook. We still are winning at a tender rate of over 70%. We have a very strong sales pipeline. We've only won one major bank. We're still consistently taking on new clients in that sort of insurance space, or in fact, that banking and finance space, utility space.
There's huge, exciting opportunities, not just in domestic territories, but international, through organizations that we trade with in Australia that have foreign sister businesses, like in the UK. This competitive advantage around artificial intelligence, I think is really key to providing that X factor or unique selling point when pitching for new business. I think that's still very much in our favor. And lastly, just to sort of talk about the guidance, in FY 2025, our revenue, we're expecting to be in excess of AUD 48 million and within AUD 50 million, and underlying EBITDA of approximately +AUD 7 million. So, this isn't including acquisitions. We're still very focused on, you know, new markets, and how an acquisition can be a beachhead into a new territory and expand the total addressable market.
I have spoken about the U.K. as something that's very much a focus for us, because of those synergies between clients that operate in Australia and also in the U.K. So, watch this space, which will hopefully see an increase, not just in terms of our overall revenue, but certainly our underlying EBITDA as well. So thanks for everyone who tuned in. Thanks to those who supported the company through this, you know, last 12 months, and we're very positive about what 2025 and beyond can bring us.
Thanks very much, everyone. Let's get into some questions. Perhaps if you just wanna unmute yourself, I can see who's unmuted, and then I can, in an orderly way, ask you to go through the questions that you have. So anyone who would like to come online-
If you are online, yeah, you message us.
And we've got some in the chats as well. So, from Michael Chang-
I've got one.
Oh, there we go.
Oh, I recognize that voice.
G'day, Andrew. How are you, mate? Outstanding results. Well done to you.
Thank you
... and the whole team. I noticed in the guidance, which is very impressive as well, that there's reference to the exclusion of any acquisition this financial year. If there was to be an acquisition, would there be a requirement for the business to raise capital for that, or do the cash reserves presently held allow for any acquisition to avoid the capital being required?
Very good question, Lewis, and one that I am very happy to answer. On the basis that the acquisition, or any acquisitions that we're sort of down the track with, at this current stage, will be funded with cash on hand. So, as presented earlier, in FY24, we've actually increased our cash reserve by AUD 3.7 million. So, we're generating cash monthly and annually. So, if we can fund it with cash reserves, we'll fund it with cash reserves. If there's another acquisition that could be, let's just say, substantially larger, represent a better value, you know, I'm not ruling out 100% that we won't go to the market and raise money, but certainly not anything that we're looking at right now.
... Outstanding! Keep, keep up the great work, mate. Thanks.
Right. Bye-bye, looks, you know, sunny.
Always. Good to see you guys.
Thanks to us. Larry Gandler, from Shaw and Partners. I can see you're unmuted.
Yeah, thanks, guys. Great result, and sunny skies, Andrew, so I want to kind of explore those blue skies.
Uh-huh.
You know, it's hard to kind of gauge, you know, what, how much of a leader Credit Clear is in the industry. I'm not sure if you have a feel for maybe your market share or your total collections in the context of the size of the industry, but how much scope is there for you guys to continue to gain share? You know, if you give help us get a feel for that.
Yeah, look, I still think that we're really emerging as a Tier 1 provider in this sort of credit collection space, certainly in Australia. You know, not to mention the rest of the world. You know, there's been some very large players dominating this market for a very long time. So we're very much a newcomer at that Tier 1 level. Rest assured that all the other big banks are looking at you know how we're performing on the ANZ portfolio, which, as an update, has been very, very well. We've performed first in almost every metric measured in terms of our performance, service, and compliance in the first sort of four or five months working with ANZ.
So if you think about that, we're only one step into that sort of top end of town banking and finance space. Lots and lots of runway to go there. If we think about sort of state, federal, government penetration, we are making steps into that sort of sector as well. So I would say they're the biggest providers of debt when they outsource them. You think about the ATO having over AUD 50 billion worth of debt. Those contracts are worth tens of millions of dollars to, you know, four or five collections businesses. So, the fact that a lot of those businesses have now consolidated, when that market really opens up again, they'll start to use third parties.
I see that as a huge runway for us to start to continue growth in Australia. And there's lots and lots of other markets, obviously insurance space, where we have really good, deep penetration lots, across lots of the really key names, whether it be AAMI or the Suncorp businesses or IAG within the NRMA businesses. I think we're still only scratching the surface in terms of work that we're doing with those organizations. So, to answer your question, I think that FY 2024, FY 2026, FY 2027 should have really consistent growth domestically. But we absolutely want to, you know, grow that ability to cross-sell and upsell to, say, organizations in Australia, like Origin Energy, that have a very strong presence in the UK through their ownership within a business called Octopus Energy, who I've met before.
They're very interested in bringing an organization that can provide AI-driven digital solutions supported by, traditional offerings as well, say, people on the phone, so once again, I think that when things start to slow down in Australia, we wanna make sure that we've very much got either new services, diversify, or new markets to grow in.
Okay. Can I just, maybe again, just to kind of scope out the size of the business. So you had AUD 116 million of collections in digital, is that right?
Yeah.
And that's doubled. You doubled the proportion? Did I understand that correctly, in terms of-
In one of the portfolios, in the consumer portfolio.
Oh, okay, great. And what do you think the prospects for digital next year are? I can't imagine doubling again as a proportion. That would probably put them over 100%.
Yeah, I think we'll see... what we're seeing is, as the new clients are coming on board, they're quickly adopting digital into those new clients. So I think as we see new clients coming on board, they will come in at that higher proportion. I don't have a number for you in terms of where I think we might end up at for the group, but I'd imagine the consumer will at least maintain, probably improve a little bit further from where it is, in terms of the proportion that we're already doing there. And then we'll see deeper uses of digital across other portfolios as well, I believe, over time, so commercial and insurance as well are very good for digital.
So we're not using digital much as in the larger debts, like big commercial debts, for example, but I don't see we're going to get much penetration of digital into those-
Yeah.
- traditional spaces. Now, I will say that, lots of our clients, are recognizing the value of holding, correct digital contact information on their clients. So I'm talking about email addresses, mobile phone numbers. In fact, we've just been asked to sort of join a large utility company, or the largest utility company in Queensland, on a joint presentation to share with the market just how strong engagement you can get with a high contact strategy on digital. So focusing on gathering digital information on your new clients or existing clients, or updating them, and just what that does in terms of engagement rates, cure rates, rehabilitation rates, when it comes to managing, you know, all portfolios, whether it be, you know, short, you know, late stage, you know, financial hardship, early stage collections.
Having really strong digital contact details is almost one of the key leading indicators to, you know, better recovery rates, better engagement rates. And it's probably, you know, common sense if you think about how, you know, the whole of, you know, society is really moving away from, you know, traditional methods of collections, being phone or letters, and being very much tied to their smart devices, whether it be their Apple phone or their Android phone. So I think, coming back to your question, that having, you know, between somewhere 80 and 90% of all collections having some type of digital treatment, I think that's where we should be aiming.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks very much, Larry. Andrew, maybe just to address Michael's question regarding where we are winning business. Are we winning them against smaller players or the major players in the sort of competitive environment?
Yeah, look, if we look at that slide around Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, absolutely, we're winning them against, you know, large competitors. So, you think about the big providers that, you know, have been operating in the industry for a long time, I think that we still have that real strong innovation. We're still small enough and nimble enough to make changes and adopt to certainly the systems and processes that our clients have, whether it be with around compliance or data transfer. I think we're a really sort of technology-led business as well, so our ability to integrate and exchange data between their system and our system in real time has been a real success for us.
And let's just say, more recently, having gone through the due diligence process, improving our policies, processes, controls, and procedures, has set us up to onboard and win those Tier 1 clients at a quicker rate.
Thanks. Picking up on the Tier 1 clients, Mark Yolward asks about how mature we are in the growth phase of those Tier 1 clients. Do we expect sort of additional growth from those that already won and onboarded? And then, a second part of the question is, what are the expectations two to three years from now for digital collections? I think we've already dealt with that one.
Probably answer that one.
Yep.
Look, in terms of existing Tier 1 clients, there's some of those clients that are at a mature stage. So if I think about one of our largest clients, or in fact, our largest client being, you know, that large utility company in Queensland that we're doing this joint paper with, I think that we're sort of mature to a level where, we're providing lots of services around accounts receivable, and they're probably mature. But that's probably the only one that I can think of, where it's at maturity.
Lots of our other large clients that we've either recently won or have had for a while, like, you know, the ANZs of the world, we're only taking a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the workflow that they could refer out to us, and I think that they represent the majority of what we're trying to budget for growth in FY 25. So if you think about how this business operates, you need to start engaging with the client, you know, years ago, right?
To win a tender, you know, a year and a half ago, then we need to onboard them for sort of eight or nine months in a bank's instance, or ANZ's example, and then it might take two or three years before you build it up to a level which is, you know, at 80%-99% of what we'd expect. So there's huge amounts of runway with existing clients that we've got on board.
Okay, question from Scott: Will Credit Clear be investing in the Remitter IPO in the U.S.?
I think the short answer is no. You know, we certainly wish them all the success in the U.S. For those who aren't aware, Remitter and Credit Clear had a partnership where Remitter used our code from about five years ago. That partnership came to an end in FY24, where I think we agreed to go our separate ways, which effectively means that we can compete with them in the U.S., they can compete with us in Australia. But look, the more companies out there that are, you know, I think, pioneering the digital transformation and innovation within the credit collection space, the better.
What we've found over the last couple of years, because of that tech correction, a lot of those digital fintech businesses that were trying to digitize this collections process have fallen out of the market. And those who are able to, I think, continue to get funding or start to generate cash themselves, are less. So, I wish them all the best.
You maybe want to just, in case some people missed the announcement regarding Mark Casey's stock, Andrew, give an update there?
Yeah. Look, obviously, Mark Casey is the primary founder and, I think, majority shareholder in Remitter. He recently sold his entire share base in Credit Clear. So I think that clearly, first of all, recognized his contribution to the business, having been a founder, having invested money, having been on the board. It sort of marks an end to that sort of, you know, involvement with Credit Clear. So it was wonderful to see some really blue chip, you know, investments or shareholders buy Mark's 33 odd million shares. Some of those were on the register, some of them were new. I won't name them apart from maybe a couple.
Thorney being our largest shareholder, bought some of the shares, and a bunch of others that, quite frankly, really have strengthened the register.
Thanks very much. Tim's asked two questions. The first one is: Any information around shortening the last cycle for onboarding Tier 1 clients? Maybe one for you, Jason.
Yeah, we, I think as Andrew said, we get better and better actually at the technology side of onboarding, and so we've got a very strong process there, and some very well developed technology to do that. So, we'll continue to, I think, be able to shorten that from an onboarding point of view. The actual timeframe to get those Tier 1s to scale. And by the way, so having been through ANZ, and other, you know, top 20 kind of organizations in the country, one of the biggest challenges to get through an onboarding is due diligence, making sure you've got all the security and processes in place.
Once you've passed a few of those, it's a bit of a rinse and repeat for the others, and we've now done quite a few of them, so we've got great answers to get through that process as quickly as possible with those clients. You know, if we take them, then we integrate with platforms. Some of those platforms are used by other clients, and so that then really dramatically shortens the integration with other clients on that same platform. So all of that goes a long way to helping shortening the onboarding process.
Yeah. And I think, Jason really hit the point at the end. Once you've integrated with a third party CRM system, a lot of those CRM systems are commonly used, by other providers in that space. In fact, there's one aggregator of debt, called TDX, it's part of the, Equifax business. They operate in the U.K., in Australia, and other markets around the world. The fact that we integrated with them for ANZ, has set us on a really good, trajectory to be able to sort of, basically plug into providers, not just in Australia, but in international markets. So, in answer to that question, it should dramatically speed up for lots of reasons.
The second question from Tim just relates to how we're thinking about JVs or white labeling our technology with competitors or potentially other partners.
Yeah, look, I think that, we've probably highlighted the fact that our artificial intelligence and our digital workflows and technology is our advantage. I'd be pretty loath to provide it to direct competitors, as effectively giving them the same advantage that we might have. However, in sectors of the market, which could be around debt purchase, we'd be very happy to sort of utilize our technology and partner through JVs or white label agreements. So, you know, it probably clearly defines the fact that we actually don't compete with debt buying organizations. They're operating a different part of the market, and in fact, we provide services to lots of those providers.
So, in short, I think that direct competitors, we wouldn't provide technology to, but those that are in our sector, we'd certainly, you know, consider it.
One question I skipped over going back here is: What are the opportunities in government, and sort of after the Robodebt scandal, and so what's their approach at the moment?
Yeah, look, when you think about the ATO and Centrelink and those type of organizations at a federal level, they're really huge contracts. Then you think about the revenue officers, whether it be Revenue New South Wales, that are looking to sort of bring in, you know, collections around fines. Naturally, there needs to be some sensitivity around that Robodebt, you know, debacle that happened.
But, you know, having a technology platform that actually measures Net Promoter Score, and I'm talking about asking someone to provide their rating, post-engagement with, say, a Credit Clear digital white label solution, or in fact a third party solution, actually allows government to provide data back to the community and stakeholders around some positive experiences, or in fact, a really positive outlook to say that, this technology not only helps us resolve and deal with what is a growing problem, but also doing it in a way that actually, you know, constituents or customers would prefer to use.
Thanks. George, I think we answered the question regarding the potential acquisitions and need for a capital raise. That's not envisaged at this point. Which I think and I hope that means we've run through all the questions. Are there any other questions coming from the floor? If you'd like to unmute yourself, you can do that now. Otherwise... It's ticked over 10 o'clock, and Andrew, I can ask you just for a few closing words.
Yeah, no, well, I think we're obviously a little bit concerned, having an open meeting like this, with everyone able to ask questions or unmute themselves, so I wanna thank you for just how well everyone's, you know, behaved on this call. Once again, I'm very proud of the team, and I want to thank the team for their efforts. And I just wanna make a quick call-out to, you know, some of those individuals who will be leaving the business in the next couple of months, following some consolidation of roles. They've certainly helped contribute a massive amount to the success of this group. It's just, when you bring, you know, seven companies together, there's not necessarily room for everyone.
While that will have some good financial impacts on the outlook of the business, it's certainly worthwhile recognizing and thanking those individuals for their commitment and performance.