Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the EML Payments Limited FY 2022 Interim Results Presentation. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Tom Cregan, MD and Group CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the first half results for the financial year 2022. As you know, my name is Tom Cregan, MD and Chief Executive Officer, and I'm joined by Rob Shore, our Chief Financial Officer. We're also joined today in the room by David Curneen, our Chief Operating Officer, and Ryan Challingsworth, Head of Treasury. If there are any questions, you know, after this that we need to fire to Ryan or David. Jumping to slide 4. Our gross debit volume has grown significantly in the half to AUD 31.6 billion. Courtesy of our Sentenial Nuapay acquisition, we now operate in 32 countries around the world. Slide 6 of our headline numbers and key takeaways.
As I mentioned, our gross debit volumes were up 209% to AUD 31.6 billion, which drove a 20% increase in revenue to AUD 114.4 million. Our underlying EBITDA of AUD 26.9 million was 4% behind the prior comparative period. This is a reasonable result when considering an increase in overheads in our European business of approximately AUD 6 million, particularly in risk and compliance, the impact of Omicron on our European malls business in December, which drove lower foot traffic and sales than we would have liked, negative net interest revenue of AUD 2.7 million versus the prior comparative period associated with negative interest rates on our euro-denominated float, and establishment fees which were AUD 2.4 million lower than the prior comparative period.
We were implementing our remediation plan with the Central Bank of Ireland, which obviously required significant resources and management focus. To grow revenue of 20% in the midst of a regulatory investigation talks to the revenue diversity of the business and our ability to generate revenue growth from existing customers. Negative interest rates on our European float are outside of our control, but it's not taking a massive leap to say that if we hadn't seen the impact of Omicron in the malls segment, and we've been able to sign new contracts in Europe and generate a similar establishment fee, our revenue growth would have been closer to 25% and our EBITDA would have been north of 30%.
In the second half of the year, we would expect to see a recovery in revenue growth rates and gross margins as we sign and launch new programs in Europe. We were able to sign and launch 22 programs in December. From an establishment fee perspective, they were programs predominantly signed in the prior financial year, so the establishment fees were in the prior financial year and not in this first half. We'll talk about interest rates later in the presentation. The 2 recent target cash rate increases put through by the Bank of England is worth more than GBP 2.5 million per annum to us straight off the bat. You know, offsetting a large part of the negative net interest that we experienced in the first half.
With AUD 2.7 billion in float, you know, as at December 2021, you know, we're very well placed to benefit from an increasing, you know, rate environment globally. We start to migrate our two largest European customers across to the TRACE platform, which will commence in April. We expect to realize savings of AUD 3 million in FY 2023. That's starting to deliver against the synergy benefits that we originally outlined when we acquired PFS. In terms of overheads, it was the largest increase in a half that we have seen. This was driven largely by our remediation plan, increases in our risk and compliance costs, and 3 months of overheads from Sentenial post our acquisition on the first of October.
The remediation expenditure will cease once the project is completed by the end of June and won't be carried into FY 2023. We also said last year that we expected our compliance costs, you know, to increase by an annual AUD 5 million per annum due to more resources. We then expect future cost growth to be more in line with our historical trends, rather than looking at FY 2022 first half and predicting that overhead growth on a go-forward basis. I'd also make the point that our ability to launch programs in Europe in December and submit new contracts for approval has come about in part because of our commitment to the remediation plan.
The priority for us was not about expense management in the half, but making the investments needed, hiring senior executives to the team, and employing independent directors for the PCSIL board. Our cash at bank fell to AUD 86.2 million, and Rob will take you through this in his section. Twenty-eight million was injected back into our FCA safeguarded accounts in August last year, which we advised the market about at the time. Sixteen million of cash was used for the Sentenial acquisition. There's AUD 44 million of outflows on those two items alone. We remain very well capitalized with a strong balance sheet and cash position. On slide seven, we've got our mall volumes outlined.
Gross debit volume was up, you know, 26% on the prior comparative period, and was up 6% on the FY 2020, you know, kind of Christmas season, which was the last, you know, non-COVID impacted year. It was below our expectations. We thought, based on our growth rates leading into the key Christmas week, without the impact of Omicron, we would have generated another AUD 100 million or so in GDV, which would have corresponded to an approximate EBITDA lift of around, you know, AUD 3.6 million. Of course, it is difficult to be prescriptive about that because proving causality solely on Omicron is hard to do.
That's our view, you know, certainly looking at lower foot traffic and restrictions in the U.K. and Germany as two key markets. That is our view, and the timing of it was unfortunate, obviously for the second year in a row. On page 8, as shareholders would know, we closed our acquisition of Sentenial on October first, and have moved into the Open Banking and account-to-account payment industry in Europe, which was a fundamental part of Project Accelerator and becoming a digital payments business. We see this as a long-term driver of growth and value for the company.
If shareholders have followed recent capital raises in the industry, you know, particularly from TrueLayer and GoCardless, which raised AUD 312 million a week before last, they would see significant private equity investments into Open Banking in Europe because they also see the long-term growth and value opportunity, and that's the same opportunity that we need to now execute on. Since acquiring Sentenial, we've implemented our integration plan and agreed our 5 million growth investment that we previously outlined to shareholders. Our Open Banking gross debit volume is growing at 30% and will be supported by some of the new business wins outlined on this slide.
As investors should recall, given historically limited capital as a private business, Nuapay employs a sales model that works with larger enterprise distribution partners, hence customers such as Citigroup, Worldpay and Elavon. Visa Cybersource is another such partner. FedEx, The Economist, and Fiat Chrysler have come from that partnership. Cybersource alone have 450,000 active merchants. You know, they're the kind of scale partners that Nuapay has historically targeted. The upside of this distribution model is partnering with customers with significant customer bases and volumes like the ones above.
The downside is that we are reliant on those partners prioritizing Open Banking, so our growth investment is about increasing our business development team and internal resources to be able to target both direct and enterprise customers, and account manage our enterprise distribution partners, to identify the opportunities that will allow us to scale. We'll be announcing further wins in the coming months, and I look forward to sharing those with you. I think the team, you know, at Nuapay have been very active on the sales front and, you know, in the next couple of months, the market will see the fruits of that. On slide 9, we have the key highlights for the first half, some of which I've mentioned already.
Some others obviously include the approval from the CBI to allow us to launch programs in Europe under the Material Growth Framework. We launched 22 programs in December, and some of those were, as I've mentioned before, signed prior to May 2021 that were awaiting launch when we received the initial minded-to letter from the CBI. They were prioritized for launch, and from a revenue perspective, the establishment fees for those programs were charged in FY 2021. Again, we've made significant investment into our European risk and compliance function, including the hiring of several senior execs. In the next few months, we welcome a new head of compliance, a new general counsel, and recently welcomed a new company secretary and head of corporate governance for our regulated entities.
We've also entered into an outsourcing arrangement with HCL in India, who will be assisting us with various reviews which they can do at scale more effectively and efficiently than we can do internally, because they're providing those same services for a host of banks and financial institutions. Our remediation plan is continuing. We expect to fully complete it by June 30. While we are still under remediation and we still have months of work to do, ultimately, this will position us as a stronger business with more resources to support our future growth objectives in Europe. In the first half, we signed 33 new contracts and implemented 85 programs with six of those being Sentenial. Sentenial signed 34 contracts in the first half, both pre and post our ownership.
I'd also make the point that we re-signed PCS, one of our largest customers in Europe, for a further three years, which is a great show of faith by them in our European business and the direction that it's heading. One of the reasons we are able to maintain our full year guidance today is the impact of multiple initiatives that we worked on in the last 6 to 12 months. In part, this was very much in recognition that our operating expenses in Europe would increase, and that we would need to overcome that on an ongoing basis. Some of the changes implemented or soon to be implemented include a change in our acquiring partner, saving us an estimated AUD 1.2 million per annum. Implementation of monthly inactivity fees on dormant accounts, generating an estimated AUD 5 million per annum.
Bond purchases in Europe, which we expect will have a net AUD 1 million uplift to the P&L in the second half. Improved COGS as a result of a new agreement with Mastercard in Australia and Europe. Contract renegotiations that will improve our margin outcomes and processing savings, as mentioned before, from April as our two largest European customers transition to the TRACE platform. On page 10, we have our sales pipeline, which now includes Centtrip. Despite our regulatory challenges in Europe, you know, I think our sales team have done a great job in continuing to build out the pipeline. Having looked at this recently, our win rate on the prepaid business is holding at 40%. In the prior comparative period, we signed 79 contracts, with 55 of those being GPR.
Our GPR new contracts in the first half was more than 50% down. That shouldn't be too surprising given Europe is our largest market by some margin, and we were unable to sign new contracts in the first half. We are focused on the second half on getting back to our historical cadence of contract wins, and the pipeline. From page 11, we talk about some of those new programs, which I won't belabor because it's probably more important that we get into some of the other slides. Slide 11, you'll see some new programs both in our mall space, which is probably the first digital gift card program for a malls customer that we've implemented with Cadillac Fairview.
You've got CoinJar in the UK, and you've got CrossPay, which is a cross-border payments company that entered into an agreement recently with Nuapay. Slide 12, we talk about Earned Wage Access, which we have talked about before, but it's one of the evolving opportunities we see, and we have some new partners there in that segment. I really believe that segment will be a significant growth driver for us because I think you're gonna see a lot of disruption in the way that payroll operates over the course of the next, you know, kind of, you know, 3-5 years. On slide 13, we signed Banco Sabadell, a Spanish bank that will be utilizing our payments technology.
We signed Flexischools, a leading Australian provider of payments for children, who have launched effectively a GPR card for children in helping them to understand the management of money. On slide 14, investors would know that we've partnered with MoneyMe for the last couple of years. That has seen GDV increase from AUD 6 million in year one to AUD 45 million in year two and is on track for AUD 100 million this year. This is a key part of our business plan that we've mentioned before, working closely with our customers so that their growth and success becomes ours. We're excited to announce that MoneyMe will be extending the Freestyle product into both their auto lending business and also into SocietyOne, which they recently acquired.
It's that balance of organic growth from existing customers and growth from new business that drives the revenue flywheel at EML. On slide 15, we outlined our partnership with AptPay in Canada, who we are working with to grow our GPR business in Canada. Again, on slide 16, as I mentioned earlier, we've re-signed PCS, one of our largest customers in Europe, for a further three years. Moving to slide 17, investors will be aware that Shine Lawyers filed a class action proceeding in the Supreme Court of Victoria. In the half, we have worked with our specialist counsel to determine what our likely legal expenses are over the expected duration window. We've taken a provision of AUD 10 and a half million.
We'll be asking the court to have Shine deposit this amount with the court so that they can cover our costs when we win. Given this is linked to the CBI issue, we've excluded the provision from underlying EBITDA. In general terms, we consider this to be both baseless and opportunistic, but it's in the commercial interest of Shine to drag this out and maximize their fees. We've taken the provision, and investors should expect this to play out over the next three years. I'm sure it's in the commercial interest of some to maximize, you know, media coverage of the action. But as it will be before the courts, and I'm not a class action lawyer, I don't expect to be providing a running update on this, and we'll leave it to our General Counsel to meet any continuous disclosure obligations.
On the next slide, we have a short Accelerator update. In summary, we're making very good progress. We can now support Visa programs in all regions. We launched Seamless in the USA, which is our payments portal in conjunction with Interchecks. We entered the Open Banking account-to-account industry in Europe. We've continued to invest in TRACE that we acquired as part of the PFS acquisition. TRACE has continued to scale up and obviously supported 1.4 million cards for the Northern Ireland stimulus package. In April, as mentioned before, we begin transitioning volume from our outsourced processor across to TRACE. The third leg of accelerator, our Finlabs investments have performed well.
Remember, when we make these investments, it is about mutual access to technology and distribution. Not acting as a private equity investor focused on an investment return. With Interchecks, as mentioned before, we have launched our payment portal, Seamless, which incorporates our card payment technology with their non-card payment technology such as direct debit, Visa Direct, Mastercard Send and PayPal. Interchecks recently closed a $16 million raise at a $115 million post-money, versus the $20 million valuation when we invested 18 months ago. Our second investment, Hydrogen, launched their platform in the second quarter and have over 200 customers using the platform. Hydrogen actually refers to them as tenants. So if you follow them in the media, that's the way they will refer it to.
We're steadily growing the number of users in GDV, and we're excited to see where this evolves to in the next six months. It's not material at the moment, but will grow and is showing some pretty promising signs. We continue to work on other Finlabs' investment opportunities, and we'll update shareholders, you know, at the appropriate time. With that, I'll hand to Rob to take us through the rest of the presentation.
Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I'm gonna take you through the financial results review starting on slide 24 of the pack. As Tom mentioned in the highlights, the results of the first half of the financial year delivered strong GDV growth. We're up 209%. We've seen organic growth in all segments, and the acquisition growth as we consolidated the Sentenial group from the first of October 2021. We've also seen revenue growth of 20% over the prior comparative period, with growth in all segments. Organic revenue growth offset low interest revenue. It's been a feature through the first half, and also delayed establishment fee revenue in our Irish regulated businesses, and a significant increase in our overheads, which we put on to address concerns raised by the Central Bank of Ireland late financial year, last financial year.
The consolidation of Sentenial contributed AUD 2.7 million of revenue and AUD 200,000 of EBITDA, so 86% of the first half revenue growth was organic in nature. It's been a challenging six months, and the results are kind of really further evidence of the resilience of the EML business model. I mean, gross debit volume was up to AUD 31.6 billion. It's a record result for the group, and it includes nineteen point five billion from Sentenial. As I say, it was only consolidated for three months of the year, from the first of October. Volumes translate to revenues at different rates depending on the segment, but the GDV volumes indicate demand for our payment services.
In the period, we saw both organic growth in all segments, which contributed AUD 1.9 billion of GDV growth, or it's 80% growth on the PCP alongside that acquisition growth. It's not all acquisition growth, there's a strong growth from organic sources too. GDV from our GPR segment demonstrated strong organic growth. We're up 29% in that segment, finished on AUD 6.3 billion. We particularly saw strong performance in the digital banking Salary as a Service and the government verticals which were driving that segment result. Our Gifts and Incentives segment saw a significant recovery from the impacts of COVID in the prior year. We saw record first half GDV.
Although to a lesser extent than in prior periods, we did still see the segment impacted by social distancing restrictions which were introduced in Canada, Germany and the U.K. in late November and December, which was in response to the Omicron variant. GDV was up 21% on the prior year, with mall volumes up 26%. Reward and incentive programs grew 4% on the PCP because we had some tougher comparatives with the prior period that was benefiting from some non-recurring COVID programs, such as the Diageo program we saw in Ireland, in the prior year. In the early part of half two, we've seen continuing challenging trading conditions, particularly in Germany, where a key customer's service desks remain closed. We've seen incentive programs perform well with employers offering digital incentives to try to get employees back into offices.
In the digital payment segment, this was our VANS segment in previous years. Following the Sentenial acquisition, we've renamed the segment to sort of better reflect what the segment does. GDV increased by 431% to AUD 24.4 billion with the acquisition of Sentenial driving 98% of that growth. It's pleasing to see the new European Open Banking volumes have grown by 30% year-on-year. This is prior to EML's investments being made to drive additional growth, which is happening now and will be a feature through the FY 2023 year. They were somewhat bootstrapped in terms of their spend on growth initiatives. Prior to EML acquisitions, as Tom said, the money that we're investing will help drive that forward into future periods. Moving on to revenue now on slide 27.
We grew 20% over the PCP to record first half revenues of AUD 114.4 million. The group revenue yield is driven by segment mix, and so that moved to 36 basis points through the consolidation of the Sentenial group. Group revenues exclude nine hundred thousand dollars of non-cash amortization, which is AASB 3 fair value uplift on the bond portfolio. That's an acquisition related accounting. The majority of our revenues are generated from recurring revenue streams in the GPR segment. So GPR represented 61% of group revenues in the first half, so we are still a majority GPR business.
The GPR segment grew wholly organically, with 28% revenue growth up to AUD 69.6 million in the period, with the segment revenue yield flat at 111 basis points on interest revenue and the loss of establishment fee revenue in the half in our Irish regulated businesses. We had a couple of headwinds it had to overcome in the last 6 months. It grew 6% over the prior comparative period. We saw increased volume, improved volumes in the period offsetting the higher breakage rates due to COVID we saw last year. The restrictions in Germany, Canada, and the U.K. on our expectations for that 6-month period. Revenue yield of 408 basis points is impacted by the timing of revenue recognition.
We're carrying over AUD 4.2 million, which will be recognized in half two as opposed to 15, compared to AUD 3.8 million last year. Digital payments segment consolidated AUD 2.7 million of revenue through the acquisition of Sentenial and generated 7% group revenues. The segment's strategically important to the group's growth prospects, with the Open Banking product Nuapay is expected to period. Moving to slide 28, looking at gross profit margins. Saw margin compression of 5% over the PCP to 66% on interest revenue in the first half. We dropped AUD 2.7 million versus the same period last year to just AUD 600,000 this period. That's approximately half the margin compression you've seen. We've guided to this previously.
We've been challenged by historically low central bank rates in all of our key markets for some time. More pleasingly though, in December 2021, and more recently, just a week or so ago in February, we've seen the Bank of England raise the cash rate by 40 basis points in the U.K. on the GBP. That's gonna have an immediate benefit to group earnings in the second half. These moves by the Bank of England are worth more than AUD 2.5 million in annualized interest rates. They're one of the first central banks to start moving rates, and it's gonna have an immediate impact on future interest revenue streams. The headwinds we've been facing for several years now are already starting to turn. We expect to see further interest rate rises in many of our...
We'll talk about this more in revenue guidance, but on page 36, we've outlined the breakdown of our AUD 2.7 billion float into the currencies in which they're held, and given an estimate of how we'll certainly be a direct beneficiary of interest rate rises. We've got a small amount of debt denominated in euros, and we've got a large liquid float balance that earns us interest. We'll be a net beneficiary from interest rate rises. Group gross profit margins were also impacted by a reduction in setup fee revenue due to spend fee revenue in the second half as new programs gradually launch through this next six-month period. Restrictions only impacted the European operations of Prepaid Financial Services' business unit that translated into a reduction in the overall GPR segment margins. It's significant because the setup fees convert to gross profit at 100% margin.
It's better both through interest, immediate interest rate rises impacting interest revenue, but also better in establishment fee income, but then also through a number of initiatives that we've been working on to some in the second half. During our acquisition of PFS, we'd predicted synergies from the insourcing of payment processing. It's currently a cost of more than AUD 5 million per annum, and we've been working hard to develop that internal processing platform since we acquired the business. We've now, in the last six months, had successful launches in Northern Ireland Stimulus, which is more than 1.4 million cards, and the Aspen program with the U.K. Home Office, which has proven the capability of that processing platform. Now we'll see, starting in the next few weeks, volumes from our two major-
Two of our major European customers will already start to transition through the second half, and that will generate at least AUD 3 million of total savings in FY 2023. We've also agreed price discounts with our key payment schemes in both Australia and Europe. These take effect from 1 January and improve margins through lower transactional costs from our scheme partners. We've commenced reactivation campaigns to encourage customers with dormant accounts to recommence using their accounts. We've also introduced account maintenance fees to offset the increasing costs of compliance and the negative interest rates on our euro float. We'll talk more about that in just a moment. Moving on to slide 29 now on overhead. We're slightly ahead of our guidance range for costs. We had overheads in the first half, AUD 48.5 million. So 45% of the midpoint of our overheads guidance.
We're up 24% on the PCP, and we still expect costs to increase in the second half as new roles recruited in the first half and starting in the second half will impact this future six-month period. It's worth reflecting on the context of the overhead increases, though, in the achievement of the remediation project in the period. While the increase in overheads is significant, the rapid actions taken and the new roles recruited have been essential in regaining the confidence of our regulator. We've demonstrated our commitment to meeting their expectations, and that's led to the path forwards that we announced in November. Without the commitments to these spends and a significant increase in the spend on people, controls, technology overheads, we could have been stuck in a challenging regulatory dialogue with this regulator for a much longer period.
The majority of the increase in costs related to PFS, and to a lesser extent, the consolidation of Sentenial to three months. The increase in the PFS cost base will support growth in future periods. While we're at the forefront of some evolving regulatory requirements, we're expecting all industry participants, all of our customers, to face these same challenges in the future periods. Looking at slide 30, underlying EBITDA at AUD 26.9 million was down AUD 1.2 million, down slightly on the PCP, as we were unable to entirely offset the impact of the cost increases from lower interest and less setup fee revenue in the first half despite strong revenue growth. The slowdown in late November for the gift volumes due to Omicron was really the gap.
We're expecting to close it in the second half with the initiatives I outlined earlier. These aren't new initiatives. These have been worked on for over six months, and they were started because it was clear that our cost base in Europe would increase markedly, and we can't sit by and not respond to that. We've been working on all the levers, on customer pricing, contract renegotiation, and new fees on dormant accounts. We were impacted, as Tom mentioned, by non-recurring fees associated with the CBI remediation project. It's about AUD 2.2 million, and by class action litigation initiated by Shine in late December 2021, so we've taken up a provision. As Tom outlined, Shine Lawyers filed group proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria in December, and EML vigorously defend them.
We've recognized an AUD 10.5 million provision for the likely legal costs that will be expected to be incurred in defense of these claims. We intend to seek an order for security for such costs from the class action plaintiffs, and we also hold an insurance policy, but it has not yet reached the necessary accounting criteria for recognition at this time. Including these non-recurring costs, group EBITDA was AUD 14.2 million. Moving to slide 31, we bridge the movements between EBITDA, NPAT, and NPATA, but we still consider 9 million to better represent the trading performance of the group in the period. Looking at the balance sheet on slide 32, we remain in a very strong balance sheet position.
We have AUD 86.2 million in cash on hand, and we have AUD 30 million of breakage accruals, which is the contract asset, of which 64% of this will convert to cash within 12 months. As gift and incentive volumes have improved in FY 2022 year to date, this has led to a working capital outflow into the contract asset as compared to the inflows we saw in FY 2021 when our volumes were impacted by COVID. We've split out cardholder assets of AUD 2.06 billion and a liability owed to our cardholders of the same amount. These are the amounts held on behalf of our customers and cardholders, and the amounts we self-issue for these products under our own licenses.
It's less than our total float of AUD 2.7 billion, which includes the North American business where it's issued by our partner banks. When we look at the interest rate potential upside, it's the AUD 2.6 billion that's the more important immediate number that we'll benefit from. Of the AUD 2 billion, that's significantly weighted to GBP, where we're already starting to see interest rates move upwards. Trade receivables grew in the period. We had some delayed receipts of approximately AUD 8.6 million from two customers. We've already received 75% in the half, in the second half. It's already in our bank. The remaining is just a timing difference owed from the Northern Ireland stimulus package, so there's zero risk of non-collection. We don't have an issue with receivables.
We typically sit on client funds, so these are just timing issues in the first half that have already corrected themselves in the second half, as we speak today. Intangibles increased with the acquisition of Sentenial and the valuation of their software and goodwill being brought onto our books. Associated with this acquisition was also the drawdown of AUD 48.2 million of interest-bearing borrowings from our banking syndicate in the period. Mentioned the provisions we've taken up, and we've got AUD 19.7 million there as at 31 December, and that will fund the expected future costs of the PFS regulatory matter and the legal fees associated with the class action. Trying to draw a line under the class action by fully providing for it in this period.
On slide 33, we show underlying operating cash flow of AUD 14.7 million, and which is impacted by the delayed receipt of those two large customer balances totaling AUD 8.6 million. As I say, 75% of this has already been received in the second half, so we'll see this come through the cash flow in the second half. Slides 34 and 35, now thinking about guidance. Underlying guidance for FY 2022 is as follows. We're talking revenue of AUD 230 million-AUD250 million. That's up between 18%-29% on FY 2021. Still expecting gross profit margins of around 69% for the year. Overheads between AUD 103 million-AUD 112 million, which is up 34%-46% on FY 2021. Net result of that is underlying EBITDA forecast, which we're maintaining.
We're reaffirming our guidance range of AUD 58 million-AUD 65 million for the full year, FY 2022. There's obviously some assumptions that underpin that guidance range. We're assuming the gift and incentive segment will perform in line with seasonally adjusted trends. We're not expecting to see a significant impact from COVID-19, a new variant or some other issue cropping up with COVID-19. We're implementing opportunities to reduce dormant state balances, including reactivation programs or which will drive interchange revenue or a dormancy fee if the money's not reactivated. Subject to finalization of this initiative, we expect a new recurring revenue stream, and we expect a non-recurring catch-up in the second half. These are new fees on dormant accounts, so we're not seeing any pushback on these. There's no competitive pressures there, you know, 'cause they're dormant accounts.
They have been so for some time. We expect to be able to continue to launch new European programs under our CBI license, and we don't expect a material impact from the growth directions which have been imposed. Overheads are tracking in line with expectations announced at our AGM in November, with higher overheads driven by new roles in Europe to address the CBI matters, higher insurance costs and higher internal external audit fees. Detail on the potential interest rate benefit. I don't have a crystal ball, but there is a strong rhetoric around interest rate rises at present. We've provided a breakdown of the cash balances by currency, so investors can really do your own modeling and your own expectations of where you think interest rates are gonna go. We obviously have our own views on that.
Bear in mind, always forecast to the right for the medium term. Say, in 3 years you could see multiples of this. We've seen several years of headwinds from interest rates and FX rates, which follow the interest rates primarily. It's pleasing to see this start to turn into a tailwind in future periods. If you look back on our results from several years ago, interest was a much more significant core revenue stream. I can't predict the timing, but if we saw a 50 basis points rise across the board, AUD 7 million-AUD 8 million, if we achieved a sort of consensus economic forecast, and we see the interest rate rises that the smart economists are predicting. Then you could be looking at a AUD 30 million revenue stream in 3-5 years' time based on current volumes that we're doing.
With that, I'll hand it back to the operator to open up for any questions.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question.
Had a couple come through from the webcast. The first one was, if interest rates were to rise tomorrow by 1% globally, how quickly will the earnings benefit the group? It'll happen immediately. It's on the liquid float. We've broken out our float into liquid as well as the sort of bond investments. Obviously, the bonds are very fixed. Majority of our portfolio is held in liquid, and you see that start to rise immediately.
The first question comes from Steven Kwok from KBW. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, just the first one I have was just around the CBI investigation. Did you mention that, you know, in June you'll have more? I guess, like, what are the steps going forward in June if everything is remediated? Is that the end of the investigation, and there's, you know, that you can continue to grow and sign up new clients? Just wanted to get a clarification on the CBI side. Thanks.
Yeah. That's Tom Cregan speaking. Yeah, that's correct. The plan has always been for us to implement the full steps in the remediation plan by June 30. Included within that is customer notification. If you're changing limits to certain customer programs or changing terms and conditions, that requires a 60-day notification to comply with consumer law in most countries. That is included within that timeframe. The process is really that the remediation plan is completed internally and then gets independently reviewed in what's just called an independent assurance process. The first step is the board of PCSIL sign the remediation plan off as having been fully implemented.
It then goes through a kind of independent assurance, you know, process, which just validates that all of the steps and changes have been made. Effectively the program is over because by that point, the CBI's expectation is that it's then what they would call internalized. All of that, all of those changes to policies and procedures and so forth are then part of the BAU, not part of an ongoing, you know, remediation plan.
We are able to, I mean, obviously, you know, Banco Sabadell and others, so we are signing other customers in Europe as we speak, and we're able to put those forward to the CBI for approval, as well as the ones that were launched late last year. I mean, I think the good news is kind of competitively, you know, we're not kind of stuck in the concrete there. We're able to talk to customers and actively prospect and sign. I don't think. I'll just make one point that I made before, and part of this is luck and good fortune.
The nature of this industry in terms of the sales cycles mean that, you know, when we received notification in May, the original notification from the CBI, there were these, obviously, these programs that had already been signed that were waiting kind of implementation. For those customers, you know, it's obviously not ideal that they had to wait to launch them. In their shoes, they would've had a couple of options. One of those options was to wait and to, you know, trust us to get the issues resolved and get their programs live or to go and find an alternative provider. In doing so, you're then starting the process again.
You're then having to find a different provider, redo all of your technical integration work, which might take 6-12 months. We didn't see any real defection of signed customers because they were in that, I guess, in that between stage where it was just easier for them to work with us and expect us to get their program live. Similarly, for new business that you're signing, the CBI have, and most regulators have to approve new customers. If we were signing customers today and putting that forward, there's no expectation really of that customer that it would be any less than 90 days, right, to get regulatory approval. Obviously, that customer then has development work on their side.
On average, that's a kind of a 6- to 7-month process for the customer to do the development work on their end. Again, I think our prospects and the customers are in the pipeline, you know, just expected us to have this done and have the remediation plan done such that it wouldn't impact the timings of their launch. You know, that's where it sits.
Yeah.
Got it. I have a follow-up question around just the guidance. As we look at the first half results, I was just wondering, like, how much was, like, the Omicron impact? You kept the guidance the same, so I was thinking relative to your prior guidance, like, what are some of the new things you've implemented? I think you've called out, like, the acquiring fees, the dormancy. Were those factored into your previous guidance? I was just wondering to see, like, you know, how much of a headwind did you have, and then, you know, where were the areas offset to get you back to your guidance for the full year? Thanks.
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the Omicron impact, it's always very hard to say what volumes you didn't see come through. I mean, based on the run rate that we were seeing through November, which you've got Black Friday going in there for the sales there, so you've got a decent amount of lift of volume going through. We'd estimate it's around about AUD 100 million of volume. That's about AUD 6 million of revenue, just under AUD 5 million of GP. That was the headwinds we'd think from Omicron through last week in November, through first 3 weeks, you know, through to Christmas in December. That's the headwind.
How we offset that, I mean, I think we'd factored in an element of dormancy fees, but I think the project's progressing well. It's a complicated project. You're working on multiple countries to work through consumer law on. That's progressing better than, faster than expected. We've seen interest rate rises are going faster than expected. I mean, the Bank of England probably moved faster than most economic forecasters who are typically quite conservative. That will immediately benefit earnings. We had factored in the Mastercard agreements in Australia. I mean, partially built into guidance previously, we'd obviously left ourselves some wiggle room for things not happening exactly to plan. You know, you sort of
I think most investors have heard me talk about don't bank on 365 days of sunshine. I think that's really what you're seeing there. Yeah, we definitely are a little bit disappointed in terms of the GDV in Q3 for malls, but the actions that we can control have been going better than expected, and that's what we can focus on, what we can do.
Great. Thanks for taking my question.
No problems. There's been a couple of questions as well on interest through the chat, which we can probably roll into a little bit more dialogue. Well, part of it is we've got a AUD 2.7 billion dollar float. A 1% rise doesn't seem to correlate directly to AUD 27 million dollars either. It doesn't because of the US dollar float, which we don't earn interest until the US Central Bank rate goes above 2%. That's the big gap. There's Canadian. I think it's 65%-70% of the interest we get to keep. There's some nuances in that.
Broadly, you know, if you took $2 billion of the amount that's on our balance sheet, we get the interest rate benefit on that immediately washing through. We're already starting to see improved interest on our GDV balances, which is a significant part of that float that's already coming through now.
Thank you. The next question comes from Elijah Mayr from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the question. Just firstly, could we just go sort of into a bit more detail on the overheads, I guess going into sort of the full year guidance that's implying, I guess, around AUD 60 million for second half 2022. Can you sort of maybe give us a bit of color on how do you expect that to progress in third quarter and fourth quarter? Just trying to get a sense of what that exit rate for overheads will be towards the end of financial year 2022.
Yeah. I think your exit rate's gonna be your second half run rate. I mean, you've got, you're consolidating up Sentenial's overheads for a full six-month period, not three-month period. That's part of your lift. We're also investing heavily in the Nuapay product and building our Open Banking position in that market as well. So that's part of the lift. Then finally, you've got the roles Tom's called out. You know, a new head of compliance is a significantly, you know, they're reasonably expensive roles that we're putting in place. That's really your run rate through. If you took your second half OpEx run rate, that's your run rate through into FY 2023.
I think, Elijah, when we're hiring the people that we've hired in Europe in that space. Just for the benefit of most on the call. Regulated businesses over there have what they call PCF functions, so control functions. The CFO will be a designated PCF. Your head of compliance will be a designated PCF. Any of those PCF roles have to be approved by the regulator. What we've done is hire some really seasoned people who have been in industry for a long time, but have held multiple PCF roles, you know, across different companies in the industry, so that they're basically already known to the regulator, right? 'Cause they would've worked with them in various roles.
Some of these people we've hired have got, you know, 20-year track records. You know, they're not cheap, right? At the end of the day, that's not really the point. You know, we're hiring people there for the now. The other thing I would say is we historically, whenever we've looked at adding, you know, senior execs into the business or growing expense in some part of the business, we've always looked at, you know, how do you self-fund that, right? This first half is not a period to think about self-funding. We could have been really, really cute and said, "How do we minimize, you know, overhead, you know, additions," but that wouldn't have got us back in business with new programs in December.
That's really the crux, right? I mean, I'm not gonna worry too much about overheads in a half versus our long-term competitive position, which would be impacted if you were unable to launch programs and unable to sign, you know, new customers. You know, the run rate as at June will include those individuals. That will be the starting point. You're not gonna see, you know, the same kind of growth in. Well, Sentenial will be net new, which you'll have to model. After that, you know, I think the kind of expense growth will just return to what the historical levels were previously.
I think that's key because you're gonna see, you know, we've managed to maintain strong revenue growth. We're up 29% in the GPR business. You can outgrow a step change in this overhead base from the FY 2022 year. You can outgrow that. This is unusual. We've had a strong track record of, you know, holding the line on in terms of leverage on our cost base. This is the first year that we've had to put in place a pretty significant increase, we've managed to maintain the revenue growth, so the overheads will correct themselves over time.
Yep. Appreciate the color. Maybe a second one, just on the sales pipeline, increased to, in terms of the projected 3-4-year GDV, to AUD 13.6 billion from, I think previously it was AUD 10.5 billion. This period seems to be including Sentenial. Can you give us a sense of that 13.6, how much of that is sort of from underlying, the underlying pipeline, and how much Sentenial, I guess, contributes to that projected GDV?
Yes. The prepaid section is probably in the 10 range, and Sentenial will be 3.5 in that kind of magnitude. If you look at the pipeline, you know, if you went back a year ago, we would've had, you know, call it AUD 10 billion in the pipeline. You've got a 40% win rate. You know, our GDV this year is up 20%-40%. You've always got conversion of what you said a year ago kinda coming through. And then you've got your future conversion, you know, coming through as well. Yeah, the prepaid side would be around the 10 mark, and Sentenial would be in the 3 and a bit mark, I think.
No problem. I'll pause it there and let some other questions come through. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question comes from Tim Plumbe from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Just a couple of questions from me, if that's all right, and largely follow-ups from Elijah. We spoke about the uplift in costs, Tom. How do we think about the operating leverage opportunity for this business in FY 2023 and beyond now that you've had an extremely material uplift in FY 2022? You know, is there significant further investment that's required, or should you get pretty strong operating leverage with top-line growth thereafter?
Yeah. Look, I just think our expenses will just come back to their normal cadence. I mean, you're not gonna have the cost of remediation, which, from a cash flow, I mean, we obviously provisioned them last year, but from a cash flow point of view, are still pretty significant. I think by the end of June, you've really got your business rebased, I would think, with the increased costs around that. The rest of our business is on budget for OpEx and just in line with normal historical standards. I think you look.
When you look at leverage, you look at things like, you know, processing savings being banked next year, which we're pretty confident of because, you know, when your 2 largest customers are migrating in April, then it becomes, you know, more definitive that you're gonna obtain those savings in the next couple of years. When we bought PFS, you know, we said there was about AUD 6 million of third-party processing savings, but, you know, it's still GBP 3.2 million a year as we sit here, right? There's, you know, given exchange rates, AUD 6.7 million, you know, something of that magnitude. You start to get that, you know, leverage come through.
Interest rates will give us leverage that we haven't had before. In fact, if you just take a half on half, we had to eat AUD 2.7 million of negative net interest, which we didn't have to eat in the prior comparative period because we weren't European regulated, right? It was Brexit, so we'd only moved there in December. You didn't have AUD 2.7 million of both revenue and margin to outrun in this first half. But obviously you can't outrun it 'cause it is what it is. You've got to find ways of addressing that.
Part of that is interest rate recovery, part of that is bond purchases that we talked about earlier, which had about AUD 1 million in the second half. You start to get that coming through. That's where some of that leverage comes. If you're growing revenue at 20%-25% and you're starting to just get back to a more normal cost OpEx cadence, then I think and you get margin improvement from those items. I think you start to see the EBITDA margin's gonna move up accordingly.
Got it. Then just the second one to follow up in terms of the sales pipeline. Maybe are you able to give any color in terms of potential new vertical opportunities that sit within that bucket? Or how we should think about the timing around that potential sales pipeline? Is there a significant portion of that should come up for decision-making over the next six months?
I don't know about significant portion, but I mean, we're kind of. I know it'll sound a bit cheesy, but we're, you know, if we were doing this call in a month's time, we might have a few more to announce. But you know, we certainly think material opportunities that you know were in the pipeline last year. 'Cause we often get asked, you know, out of a AUD 10 billion pipeline, you know, what are the bigger opportunities within that? There's always ones that are small, and there's always ones that are larger. That's a bell curve.
You know, on the Nuapay side, you know, I think in the next kind of couple of months, six weeks, you know, they've got some, you know, pretty sizable deals that I think would be ASX worthy of announcement in terms of materiality. On the prepaid side, I'd expect a couple as well, you know, in the next, I'll say in the next month that are ASX worthy. Obviously, the more deals, the more customers we have, you know, you can't use the ASX as a marketing platform. You can't go and put every new deal on there 'cause they'll just knock you back.
I'd be surprised if we don't have you know probably 4 announcements in the next month. I'd say you know in a month's time we would have a few others. The key that they are they're more sizable. You know if you can get them in then obviously you're getting you know they're the kind of how would I call it? The not foundational but they're you know but they're the ones that scale you quicker right? I mean you can add you can add a lot of programs that you know in year two you know might be AUD 10 million, AUD 20 million or you can add some that could be AUD 200 million, AUD 300 million, AUD 400 million.
Obviously, they're the ones that we're aiming for. I think it's a bit of a watch this space, but in the next month, I'd expect we have 3 or 4. Yeah.
Right. I'm sorry, just in terms of any color you can give us in terms of new vertical opportunities that sit within that pipeline, or should we be thinking similar verticals that you're already servicing, such as neobanks, online gaming, etc. ?
Online gaming. Yeah, I think. Well, I mean, I'll go to Nuapay first, then I'll do the GPR piece. Certainly on Nuapay, you know, it covers acquirers, it covers aggregators, it covers payment gateways who wanna use Open Banking services because their merchants are asking them to have Open Banking services available. They're expecting that at a lower cost, right? You've got a competitive tension there. There was a company yesterday called Banked, which we'd looked at as a Finlabs investment before deciding to acquire Sentenial. I mean, they raised $20 million. Their key customer is Bank of America.
You've got Bank of America, you know, looking at adding Open Banking into their kind of merchant services, the same way that Nuapay has done with Elavon, Citi, Worldpay, and a bunch of others. They're making SafeCharge, etc . They're making good progress on getting through there. That will be the kind of decent ones on the Nuapay side. On the prepaid side, honestly, it's still pretty varied. Like, there's one that I can't go into, but I will go into when we announce it, which is a new. It'll be the first time we've gone into that vertical in Europe. But it will probably be our largest vertical by opportunity size.
There's a lot of data on it. Therefore, you know, we can provide some more color on that when that gets announced. Yeah, you know, Earned Wage Access, you know, several customers in that space. You know, digital lending. I mean, you know, as we sat here, you know, we signed a contract as we sat here with a digital lender in Australia. You know, I would say lending, Earned Wage Access, disbursements. I don't think there's any particular skew in the pipeline. I think it's pretty balanced, pretty varied.
Got it. That's great. I'll jump back into the queue. Thanks.
Thanks, Tim.
Thank you. The next question comes from Garry Sherriff from RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi, Tom and Rob. A couple of quick questions on reloadables and also supply chain and wage costs. Reloadables. Some of those three verticals you called out, gaming, salary packaging, and government, any tailwinds or headwinds that you see for those verticals in the next 12 months?
No, not really. I mean, I think you know gaming is always a pretty resilient right to most cycles. We didn't call it out in the deck, but we already had you know bet365 as a customer in the U.K., and we've launched it into Italy and Spain. You know, you've got customers that are kind of increasing or launching it in different countries. But I don't really see any good times bad times. I think gaming is a pretty resilient you know business. You know, Earned Wage Access is brand new. I think I said last year that I think in years to come it'll change the way all of us get paid.
I mean, this concept of you get paid once a month because that's just convenient for your payroll team is gone, right? Now, you're seeing lots of companies attack that vertical in different ways. You're seeing companies that are attacking it as a quasi-lender, you know, kind of lending you money against your future payroll. Or they're more of a platform provider. You know, an HR ERP system that has payroll functionality that's added in, Earned Wage Access and won't charge for your salary to be drawn down because they'll make their money on the SaaS fee on the platform itself, right?
You know, one of our larger opportunities in the next month will be in that space. Early days, but my gut feel is that platforms will win out in that space. I just think that charging people to access their salary, I think won't stand the long-term test of regulators and what have you. Certainly in the U.S., in different states, you can't do that because labor laws would preclude you doing that. You know, I think the platforms are the way to go, and we're certainly pretty active in that space. Excited about that.
Government, I don't see any real change in that position going forward. Northern Ireland was obviously one of our larger stimulus programs, but we're talking to other governments about similar programs. The Northern Ireland government was pretty excellent actually in terms of promoting the success of that program. There was just a ton of media in Europe on that which has driven, you know, inquiries from other governments in different countries. You know, that's positive for us. No, I don't really see any segments that are kind of subject to any economic headwinds. I mean, ask Rob if he sees any, but I-
No, I think what I'd add is that, you know, we've reiterated for a while that we've got incredibly low customer churn. I mean, it's fractions of one percent over a 3-year cycle. It's a very low customer churn. When you've got GDV and revenue growth in the GPR segment of just under 30%, you will always see a larger second half to a first half. That's the normal trend of our results, is a bigger second half to first half. I don't see any particular headwinds, but I also see that you're building off a bigger base. All the programs that we've been adding in the first half will contribute more to the second half than the first and so on. You know, salary packaging vertical in Australia is incredibly resilient. It's doctors and nurses payroll, isn't it?
No, I don't really see any macroeconomic headwinds. I see a lot of benefits. I see a lot of benefit from interest rates, and I see a benefit from FX rates on the back of the interest rates too. I mean, if you look at the GBP, the Bank of England announced a 25 basis point increase, and the exchange rate's moved from a 1.8 to a 1.9, on the back of that, and we've got a significant amount of offshore earnings. We faced headwinds for a number of years, which has sort of been, you know, we've outgrown largely in previous years. Now we're gonna get some tailwinds, which is gonna be helpful.
Thank you. Last two questions on supply chain. Any shortage issues for plastics or physical cards or any increased costs that we should factor into for the second half 2022 into 2023? I guess a similar question in relation to wage costs. Thank you.
No on the plastics. We did hear of some companies that were struggling to source cards in, you know, in the U.S. in particular, but we haven't had the issue. I think just given the amount we buy, you know, our suppliers that are global suppliers like G+D, you know, really prioritize our business and pay a lot of attention to it. No issues on that front. On the wages front now, look, it's not really disruption, I would say. I mean, I think most companies are seeing, you know, more turnover from, you know, from staff, you know, this kind of so-called, you know, Great Resignation thing.
You know, pay is under pressure. I mean, I think I was talking to someone well recently, in the last week, who you know didn't work for us, but was in an HR role on AUD 135 and got recruited for AUD 250, right? You're seeing that happen, but we just don't pay those salaries so we wouldn't be hiring that person. I mean, our REM structures are pretty fixed. We've just gotta work within them. You know, in some cases, that might mean you see a bit more turnover because you're hiring people and a year later they're getting poached for more money.
That's okay, but we can't really compromise the REM framework or we'll just be chasing tail, you know, nonstop. I think it's a reality out there, but it's not really influencing the way we're paying people.
Mr. Sherriff, does that answer your question?
Yeah, it does. Thank you.
Thanks. Before we go to the next one on the call, maybe we'll just quickly do one from the chat that's come through, Tom, on the question about, are the CBI approving any new programs and what are the impacts of the Material Growth restrictions?
Yep. The Material Growth is in place until October, which is actually December, I beg your pardon. Early December. We haven't gone into detail with the market around what that restriction is and how it would, you know, kind of impact our business. What we said last year and what we have done is, if you think about it like a professional sports team, create salary cap space by exiting certain programs that had significant volume but very low yield in order to replace that volume with higher yielding, you know, programs. We have done that and created, you know, significant enough space, put it that way, that you know, we don't see any likelihood of exceeding.
For this calendar year. We think we'll be able to operate under that Material Growth Framework, but obviously continue to grow our business organically with the customers we have, as well as add new business. I think the second question was, you know, are we submitting new contracts? We are. As we're signing new contracts and they're going through a kind of revised risk review process, you know, we will be submitting them. As I said before, there's 90 days that the regulator has to, you know, to approve those programs. That's pretty standard with different regulators in Europe. You wouldn't see new business having been approved because we wouldn't have even submitted it until January.
I think you'll be looking for that in kind of the March, April, you know, timeframe. You know, in order not to be kind of, you know, tone deaf, if I can call it that, you know, to the regulator, we you know our agreement is that we will only put in or only submit programs that you know that kind of meet a certain risk threshold. When I say that, it's more, it's not financial risk or anything like that. It's just the kind of the framework of how programs are assessed in Europe.
Most of the programs that we'll be submitting are gonna be pretty vanilla, if I can say that, in terms of the countries in which they're in, which removes, you know, kind of geopolitical risk as a, you know, as a consideration. So there's a bunch of stuff we're doing there, but long and short of it is we don't see that, you know, based on programs that we expect to sign and the pipeline we're in, that we would have. That Material Growth Restriction would be an impediment to us.
Thanks, Tom. I mean, the operator, do you wanna go back to a question from the phone?
Thank you. The next question comes from William Cunning from Carter Bar Securities . Please go ahead.
Hi, Tom, Rob. Thanks for
Hi, William.
That's all you've provided so far. I've got a couple of quick questions. Just firstly, just, could you maybe provide a bit of color just on your outlook for the multicurrency business? Just as we look at sort of travel resuming, especially around Europe, I think that business used to do maybe AUD 120 million volumes, if I'm remembering correctly. How much of that is sort of baked into the second half, and maybe how can we think about that going into FY 2023?
Yeah. Not much is baked into the second half. It's really a kind of a very heavily skewed. I mean, last part of June, but far more skewed in July and August with. Because in our multicurrency programs, I mean, we signed you know a large customer that used to be a Wirecard you know a customer called Volopay, which we signed last year. But obviously the volumes of that won't you know just haven't come through.
A lot of the programs, if you look at Centtrip and Volopay and these type of programs, a lot of them are having expense management solutions for people. So for example, both Centtrip and Volopay, you're talking about corporate expense cards, for want of a better word, that are multicurrency for shipping operators and people that run yacht fleets and yacht rentals and things like that all throughout Europe in those kind of summer months. You got Avios, which is obviously a more of a B2C model, which I think will do far better. I mean, really last year it didn't do anything because of restrictions, but I think you're gonna expect to see that better.
Travel cards really since we've bought PFS, it was about 10% of their earnings and that disappeared with the advent of COVID. I think that we'd be looking forward to that coming back in FY 2023. We just haven't had that in the last two years. Again, probably back to one of the previous questions. I mean, we see that as a bit of upside and a bit of leverage too, given the margins are higher in that product segment.
Yeah. Thanks for that. I guess that sort of feeds in perfectly to my next question. Just on the GPR business, just the whole combined business. Should we see some degree of revenue margin uplift? You know, if we think about the maybe faster growing programs of U.S. gaming, obviously multicurrency. My understanding was, is that they transact at a higher margin than maybe some of the other programs that you've got. Should we see that maybe progressively build year on year from 2023 to 2024?
Look, I think it'll build, but I wouldn't be putting any real aggressive forecasts into the yield because the yield is just a mix of different programs, right? So if you looked at... You know, I mean, you—Gaming in the US is higher than gaming elsewhere for us because of interchange rates. So you've got, you know, benefits in certain markets. You know, programs in Australia, and we might do some of these overseas that are salary packaging programs that are more fixed price models, if you like. So you're charging a fee per month for the card, irrespective of volume. Obviously changes the yield.
You've got government programs, you know, in certain in the U.K., for example, where the program might be 40 basis points. But part of our earnings stream is more funds are pre-deposited with us by the government, which we then invest in government bonds. The collective gets you to the same number of yield.
Right.
Where the yield is, I would kind of keep it steady or I would slightly increase it. I wouldn't be going too crazy. 'Cause even with multicurrency that's you know north of 200 basis points you know it's 10% at PFS when we bought it. PFS is obviously a much bigger business now. It might be 5. It might now be 5%. It's kind of it'd move the needle a little bit, but not hugely.
Yep. That's fair. Thanks for that. I guess my final question is just on the new Pay business. I mean, you've had that for a couple of months now. Just off the back of COVID and what you've seen in sort of uptake in Open Banking, do you have any more sort of learnings from that over the last couple of months or any sort of improved view on the Open Banking market going forward?
Yeah. Look, we were all pretty bullish anyway because it was our first acquisition, I think, that was done, obviously tied into our Project Accelerator strategy. You know, you're buying a business without any earnings, right? Which isn't kind of historically, you know, what we had done. Buying a business that was undercapitalized, it required two things. It required just funds for growth, and it required someone like us with bigger scale to leverage. You know, instead of them building out their business and having to hire people in finance, they can leverage you know people that are already in the EML finance team or the IT area or so on.
Look, I just think in a simplistic way, 'cause I'll be a salesman for it because you know I'm a believer and I led that acquisition. I just reckon you gotta look at where I call it the smart money is going into that place, right? I mean, when TrueLayer raised you know $100 million, you know GoCardless raised $312 million. I think they raised $190 million the last time. You look at the PE investors that are in there, I mean, they're no fools, right? They're seeing this as a 10-year transformational way in the way people pay. It's not there today, but that's why they get in early, right? They can reap the value of that.
I think we're, you know, I take a lot of comfort out of that, because they see, you know, huge growth prospects for those, you know, companies that are in the market, you know, and so do we. You know, I think some of the things that they're working on are really gonna come to fruition, right? I mean, when you're one of these ones we hope to announce kind of early April, all things being equal. But you can see. You know, you've got different competitors there with different strategies. You've got some that focus more on the data side of the equation. A company like Trustly, for example, which they I'll describe their business.
They would describe it differently, but you know, they make a lot of money out of account verification. You know, Spotify, Netflix, Disney. When you go for a subscription, you know, payment, they're kind of validating you, and they're validating that you've got money in your bank and money in your card and so forth, and for which they get a fee. You've got other companies like Nuapay that make more money out of the actual physical, you know, transference of funds. There's so many opportunities in that space that to me just have a perfect fit and things that aren't competitive to us. I'll give you an example. You know, crypto payments, for example.
Regulators are more and more interested in money going into a crypto exchange from a bank account, so they know where the money came from.
Mm-hmm.
They're more interested in when the individual withdraws money from that crypto account, that it goes back to their bank account. You know, that program, our card doesn't really fit the use case for that because our card kinda sits to the side. It's not a core bank account. I just see use cases evolving over time for that business. Things they're not even doing now, subscription payments and other things like that. I'm as bullish as I was when we bought it. The biggest thing I'm bullish about, I mean, we've only been 3 months or 4 months, so it's kind of early days, but you always know whether these acquisitions are gonna work within the first 90 days.
'Cause if you buy them and everyone's nice to you when they're selling the business, right? Because they want the check, and that's just the way it goes. Once you own it, you get a sense of just how the people will integrate, and the culture and so forth. The team there have been fantastic. I mean, you just don't see fiefdoms. You see them really wanting to be part of a growth driver for EML. You've got, you know, by the end of June, I think we will have kind of integrated their IT teams and finance teams and HR teams into the broader, you know, European business. You don't see any politics or any rubbish. They just wanna get on with it.
To me, that's what gives me hope. Like, if we'd spent the first 90 days haggling on, you know, roles and what my job title is and all that stuff, you go, "Oh my god, you know, this is not, this doesn't augur well." It's totally the opposite. You know, they're action-oriented. They're really good. They've got some great people, and they're just hungry, and that's exactly the kind of business we need.
Yeah. Great. Well, thanks for that.
Thanks, Will.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question comes from Brendan Carrig from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Look, I'll just make a quick follow-up, really. My question was just on the CBI. Around the independent sign-off that you were looking to potentially get, is that still a prospect? Or Tom, your comments about the Material Growth limitations being in place until December, does that effectively negate the potential for that independent sign-off for the CBI remediation plan?
No, we'll still do that. It's the sign-off is just part and parcel of the program. That'll go in. You know, that's not gonna be huge cost. I mean, if we spent millions, you know in round terms, it might be AUD 150,000 or something like that for that. A couple hundred grand for that independent assurance. It's not a crazy number.
Does that not then, if and when you get that, say, I don't know, next couple of months, why then would the Material Growth limitations need to be in place until December of this year?
Yeah. It's possible that they're not, but you know, the CBI have said that they're willing to, you know, review that, right? If when we get to June 30 and when that program is complete and has been signed off, then we're fully able to go back to the CBI at that point and try to have it removed. That option's there and has been acknowledged by the regulator that we're entitled to try and do that at the time. It's probably the best way of answering that. I think we probably would do that. You know, as it stands, the kind of that restriction is there until early December.
Okay. Just a quick follow-up on Sentenial. The EBITDA contribution for the first three months was effectively zero.
Mm-hmm.
The guidance to 0 to -3 loss.
Yeah.
Is it fair to assume that, yeah, then now the spend, I guess, steps up, given the guidance range for the remainder of the guidance period? I mean, just following on from the comments earlier, is it reasonable to assume that we should start to see a bit of a tick up in FY 2023? Because the counterargument to your sort of optimistic comments about money flowing into the sector is actually that it's becoming more competitive and actually, you know, might be more difficult to continue to win new clients and to gain momentum in the space.
That way, mate. This thing's the start of a 10-year play, and it's just miles and miles ahead of any competitive saturation coming apart. I mean, you're talking about. If you think about, this is the way I look at our businesses of, you know, prepaid is inherently a niche business. I mean, you've got different niche applications and use cases in gaming and salary packaging and so forth, right? And this wouldn't be just us, but it's our competitors as well. Because it's niche, you know, you see yields in the realm that we make because companies have got to have a business model. When you start looking at Open Banking, you're just talking about the total size of banking payments in a region. This is just astronomical.
I think it'll be years before we're worried about, you know, kind of competitive tension or saturation. You've got different companies targeting it in a different way. As I said, you've got Trustly who have a go-to-market strategy. TrueLayer who are really good, look like a pretty good business, who, you know, who have, you know, built a reasonable volume. I think GoCardless have done well. GoCardless typically look after small merchants, so they have an integration with Xero, for example, right? They're providing Open Banking services for small businesses that are attached to those platforms. It's just miles too early to worry about consolidation and competitive tension or that kind of thing.
Well, can I ask then just about how the rollout at Worldpay is going from their perspective? 'Cause if they then push it out to all of their merchants, obviously that's volume uplift from the Nuapay perspective. How's that progressing?
Yeah. Well, I think we'll probably update that in a month or so, I think. Along with all of them, right? With Elavon and Citi and others. What we are doing and what they are doing is obviously looking for their merchants that have sizable volume, because that's the way to get benefit for both parties, right? You know, with Worldpay, we're not out there, you know, kind of incentivizing their reps to go and target the corner store who might be using Worldpay. It's kind of working with Worldpay to look at their kind of enterprise clients within their own portfolio.
The same for Citi and the same for Elavon and the same for what's now Nuvei, which is the Canadian business that bought SafeCharge. I think that's what we'll start to see. I think the programs that'll come through will be names that people recognize. The volume is gonna be sizable. It's just early on and it's open slather as far as I'm concerned. The key to success over that long term is not going to be. Well, first of all, it's how many banks are you integrated to?
If you look at, I think TrueLayer, don't quote me on this number, it's just one that's in my memory, but I think they were quoting that they're integrated to 3,500 banks. I can't recall the numbers for the competitors. Just use that. Nuapay is connected to about 2,100-2,200, and you know, expanding rapidly and will work with other companies that already have connectivity to banks to try to get to that same number by June. You've gotta have the table stakes, which is bank integrations. I think their tech and their solutions are really good.
Now that when we bought it, I think I've said this at the time, you know, one of our institutional investors in Australia, you know, rang Worldpay and said, "Why did you know, work with Nuapay?" They said, "Really great at engineering, really shit at sales and marketing." That was exactly what we wanted to hear, because when you're doing the volumes they're doing, you know, you want world-class payments infrastructure and engineering. Hopefully we add the kind of icing on the cake on the sales and marketing piece. Yeah, early days. I think we've got, it's just upside as far as I'm concerned.
Okay. That's clear. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
I think we'll have to wrap it up. I think we're running out of time. We definitely appreciate everyone taking the time to talk to us today and so we look forward to talking to many of the people on the call later through the week.
Yep.
Thanks, everybody. Much appreciated.
Thank you. Should we conclude? Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.