Zoom, maybe. Our Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Development Officer, Jason Margach.
Morning. Thank you very much, Craig. For us to really and truly reflect on the quarter that passed, I think it's pertinent that we pause and consider the contributing factors that have driven such immense turbulence in our market. We saw the peak of the SaaS couple of mid-quarter. We saw the commencement of the Iranian invasion late into the quarter. Against this backdrop, why are we different? Goldman , Bain's, and Gordon highlight that compliance is excluded. Kinatico operate within a regulatory-driven environment, which is deemed non-discretionary. Counter-cyclical, of course, is uncertainty will increase demand.
We have 12 months of deployed native AI in our solutions. We are not a roadmap status. Affirmation further emphasized by the Deutsche Bank in March that highlighted that vertical compliance software companies are structurally protected. So how did our results for the quarter validate this difference? Well, we grew to AUD 5.2 million SaaS revenue.
This is a 27% increase on prior corresponding period. We grew our existing SaaS customer base by 10%. We continue to demonstrate our operational leverage at our EBITDA level, and for the quarter being AUD 1.3 million or 30% up on the prior corresponding period. Next slide, please. Our delivery has been consistent across consecutive years. This is not a simple positive period result that we bring to you this morning. Our SaaS revenue at 61% is now contributing a material majority of our total revenue, which to emphasize, is now annualized at AUD 20.6 million, which is also a first time for us that we've exceeded this AUD 20 million mark. Operational leverage, again, highlighted in our EBITDA growth of 30%. This is against a backdrop of a 5% overall revenue growth. Let's unpack this 30% operational leverage for a second. How did we achieve this?
Well, it was achieved through the foundational strategy that we've deployed. We will continue, and have in the past, looked at both the front and back end of our business. We remain committed to ensure that every single dollar of sales that we generate equates to a dollar of margin we enjoy. I would like to now hand back to Michael, who's going to take us through momentum on our sales pipeline. Over to you, Michael.
Thanks, Jason. As we can see, despite the clear global effects and the macro conditions that we're seeing out there, the statement that Jason had in his slides about the counter-cyclical nature of demand has been reflected in the fact that the pipeline for KC has continued to grow. We have seen, and it's only been five, six weeks, relatively, since we did the half-year update, that the pipeline has now exceeded AUD 12 million. What we've also seen within that is that it has come from a number of new sectors not previously targeted by us amongst our four key ones of industrials, aged care, healthcare, disability care, higher education or government, and that these are organizations that have approached us with requests for proposals, direct inbound, and with an increasing size and quality of those opportunities.
These are from organizations that traditionally have not considered Kinatico in the realm of the initial nature of our products didn't potentially meet the complexity of their situation with a myriad of subsidiaries, supply chains, various constructs of contractors, volunteers, workforces, et cetera. What we've been able to do and now responding and in the process of that sales process with these larger opportunities, we're now playing an entirely different game that we haven't been able to access in the past. We believe this puts us in a very good position. Next slide, please. What are the things that are driving that? First of all is economic uncertainty and the workforce diversification.
Seeing the complexity that's going on, increasing contractors, casuals, outsourced roles, uncertainty within organizations, as it turns out, is actually an opportunity for us to highlight the need for getting one thing off the table of concerns and issues currently running for organizations in making sure that they are compliant. At the same time, we see a number of new regulations coming into force. From July 1, we have 80,000 new entities coming into our addressable marketplace with the requirements for anti-money laundering, monitoring, and management across a tranche of organizations. That includes things like real estate agents, accounting firms, lawyers' firms. All of these areas that traditionally may have considered their requirements simplistic, increasingly are falling into the same requirements overall as every other organization. For us, anti-money laundering is fully automated inside KC. It results within seconds.
It gives these organizations the ability to not only meet that requirement that they're now obliged to do, but also all of their other requirements become covered by that at the same time. The hybrid and distributed workforce, we're increasingly seeing as that plays out in the marketplace of what is required also. An organization's obligations do not cease or reduce just because a worker is not physically located in their office, et cetera. Working from home has exactly the same, if not increased, requirements. As mentioned previously, in terms of the pipeline growth, the interest across all enterprise sectors we're seeing, and sharing today, that the one that's actually started coming in at a statistically significant volume across the pipeline, is childcare centers. It's always been an awareness of target, but certainly we're now seeing a number of them that have come in.
If I could move on to the next slide and pass back to Jason.
Thanks, Michael. We acknowledge the macro environment, which is showing signs that the hiring market is softening. Our lead indicators point to a potential near-term downturn in the pre-employment screening volumes. These volumes have a real and direct bearing on our transactional revenue stream. To this end, we do see that we foresee a short-term downturn in the revenue. In addition to a potential downturn in transactional revenue, we also expect to see continued and expanding delays in closing those enterprise compliance solution sales. This is not specific to us at Kinatico. Taking a look at some macro factors, current consumer confidence has fallen from 84.5% to 58.8% by the end of March, which, for context, is at an all-time low. 95% of businesses surveyed by the ACCI in April are reporting fuel prices do and are affecting their operations. 43% are fearing a lower consumer spending.
Enterprise CFOs are now required to sign off 79% of purchasing decisions. This is up from 45%. Enterprise sales cycles have increased by 25% to 134 days. This is the environment in which we now operate. Despite this, as we have highlighted, our qualified pipeline and opportunities continue to grow quarter -on -quarter. We now exceed AUD 12 million. Allow me to hand back to Michael, who will take us through the really important bit of how we are going to navigate through these challenging times. Mike, back to you.
Thanks, Jason. Why we're confident? Not only do we see the opportunities in continuing to grow, as I've outlined, of the regulatory tsunami of additional things that are coming through. Payday Super's another one. The operational systems overhaul required across all compliance requirements with organizations is only exacerbated by yet another example of that regulatory wave being Payday Super. Whether it's the penalties and modern slavery laws and WHS enforcement regulations that we're also seeing on the horizon, and this counter-cyclical logic, the uncertainty, more contractors, casuals, more compliance complexity. Excuse me. Why are we confident around that? Well, because we're seeing the feedback from the market and where we're at. To address some of the questions that I see coming in already, do I see any back, any barrier remain to convert some of these larger deals in the pipeline? No.
In fact, we have gone through and, in addressing the RFPs and in the discussion of that selection process of going through it. We have seen that, and the feedback is very strong, that we've met every requirement. What we're seeing and what Jason's touched on there is that potentially there is an increasing in the time lag to actually get that final decision on the board. No, we do not see any barriers. In fact, we're quite bullish and confident about it. What is the current gain that is just outside of our control is potentially a delay in actually getting that signature and that signing across the board. Where we've seen, to answer another question there about the pipeline, the conversions, we've been saying all along since launch, we'll provide details around that at the end of the fin year.
What I will share today is that a number of the large opportunities have continued to progress through that sales cycle to increase and get to that decision point. The other thing that we're seeing in the market and the results in KC that I can share is the ongoing proof point of entry and sign-ups of SMBs into KC and the proof point of the self-service and the config. We've been able to prove even to the large enterprises going in there to the demonstrations, et cetera, a platform configured to their exact requirements, to their exact infrastructure for their first demo. That was something that was unheard of for us before.
In terms of our corporate position, we've always demonstrated disciplinary OpEx, discretionary OpEx discipline, and we've seen that in the way that year-on-year the management of costs and stabilizing of costs while revenue has continued to grow. That is the thing that is driving that situation, that we see a 30% increase in EBIT, while on a 5% increase in revenue. The AI automation that I'll talk about further and the things that we've already been doing and have already talked about. Are already having an effect there. For us, AI is not, as I've discussed before, is not a, yes, we're doing it also. It's been foundational. It's fundamental to the way we've approached KC. It's fundamental to the way we manage the organization. The ROI for us is twofold.
Not only the velocity, quality, and type of customer features, but leveraging AI in our operations to actually further increase our operating leverage. We do all of these things starting from a base where we are a cash accretive, profitable company with AUD 10 million in the bank. What does that mean? Fundamentally, what we're going to do for this quarter now that we're into it, and actually what's going to happen is we're not doing anything to reduce speed around KC development. We're not going to reduce any of our marketing spend or push, and in fact, we're going to double down. We have the ability to do that. We have the ability to go after it.
The demand is there, and I want to continue to build that to ensure that as we get through these short-term timing issues, et cetera, we really take advantage of the opportunity that is in front of us and the foundation that we have. We're also not going to pull back from any kind of distribution development across third parties actually distributing KC, whether via white label or other type of agreements. The net reality is that the macro pressure makes compliance more critical. The requirements don't pause for any kind of geopolitics. If anything, I'd further point that the position of Kinatico in going after compliance and with our USP being the fact that we save companies time, we give them visibility.
We remove the complexity from managing compliance resonates very strongly and is further reinforced by the fact that we see the growth in SaaS despite the challenges on the global macroeconomic situation in terms of what it may affect short-term transactional revenue moderately. It really is a reinforcement of the reason why we have the company heading in the strategy that we have been. For us, it's further reinforced it's exactly the right thing to do. Next slide, please. Getting on to the AI. Very excited to share detail on this development. We've talked previously about some of our custom AI engines or large language models that we've developed, not reliant on any one of the major players. This isn't a licensed thing. This is something Kinatico owns.
This is something Kinatico developed based on our knowledge in the industry, based on the proprietary data access we get, and we have developed this from scratch. We own it. It's ours. This is an LLM that is able to recognize and process any document. It is not just OCR. It is intelligent. Here we have the example on screen where we have a birth certificate from somebody born in the 1800s, and the creases across the paper, et cetera. The LLM is able to actually recognize what it is and extract the data for automated processing. The key to this is that this solution does not require training. Traditional methodology around this would be to provide hundreds or thousands of samples of these type of documents to train the LLM on what it was actually doing and how it worked, and then over time, its accuracy would increase.
We have put the logic in here that it is able to read and recognize any document from scratch. Not only that, it supports multiple languages. Circa 15 day one, including Chinese, including all of the languages of target markets where we have aspirations to expand into. The idea that not only for us internally, we can actually have the processes that automates and expands the ecosystem of credentials and documents that can be processed. We also, though, have the customer benefit where all of your proprietary internal things that you may use, and it's astonishing how many legacy type cards and credentials are used across organizations today, all of a sudden can be tracked and monitored for expiry dates, renewal requests, requirements, updates, et cetera.
Not only do we have a customer impact of manual entry going from hours to seconds, things that literally couldn't be supported in the past, finally automated. For us means there is effectively infinite scale without admin overhead or people overhead. This is a material development. It is the example of not something that's been thrown together and is a concrete evidence of the point of how long ago we started our AI development. Next slide, please. The next one is, and the previous example really customer facing and now the operational leverage example. We now have on our org chart virtual verification officers.
These AI agents effectively appear on the org chart managed by department managers, can be allocated as resources to process verifications and targets of where you have repeated tasks of going and extracting information from our restricted sources, et cetera, processing it, positioning it, assessing it, et cetera. It all fits within our AI mantra internally in Kinatico of human-led AI. We are dealing with people's sensitive information every day, all day, and ensuring 100% accuracy, ensuring security, et cetera, always remains our highest priority. While we leverage AI wherever we can, we have a very strict mantra of it is always people-led AI. What this means for us, though, is that this is the next stage of our efficiency gains and our EBIT expansion. We've already achieved very strong growth in that area.
This is the thing that drives the next stage, and we believe, or we know that we'll see the effects of this in the coming financial year. Not only does this improve our operating leverage, you get a faster turnaround time for customers. This operates on 24/7, on weekends, no toilet breaks. It's a material move. Again, this is something that we have developed with our domain expertise because we have access to data and then utilizing AI. AI is not the differentiator. It's the way we use it and what we do with it. To sum up before we get into questions. Next slide, please, Dom. For us, this is about disciplined growth through global uncertainty.
We'll continue to expand KC and the marketing at pace, very much protecting our margins and our end of year results and our leverage in our targeted NPAT, our targeted cash accretion, our targeted EBIT. We have plans in place should there be short-term revenue effect, that we will maintain our targeted outcomes, and we're confident around doing that. Having said that, we also believe with the strength of the SaaS, et cetera, we're somewhat insulated from effects that for many other companies, I think, where they're materially affected. The questions there to move on. I've answered some of them already as we go, but one is: Has the transactional revenue already been impacted? I would say yes, a little bit. We as an organization, with where we're positioned in pre-employment particularly, have very strong lead indicators to the economy overall.
What we're seeing across the board, I would say, is a decline of economic activity and hiring and/or companies pulling back and pausing activity. There was an effect of that in the Q3 numbers for the transactional revenue. We expect more of one in Q4, as I say, as a function of that economic activity. Another question, can I provide examples of white label opportunities? We've been in discussions with, and they continue, whether it is industry organizations, whether it is other large distributors in the RegTech space of adding our compliance solution to their overall offering. It is the type of, I hesitate to use the word consultancy firm, but that sort of encompasses it up overall.
That all of those pieces are where we get that added value chain of all of the business systems required within an organization without necessarily having to offer all of them. Partnerships with HRIS and payroll companies, they're all of the type examples of white label themes. "There's a focus on defining margins is laudable, but does that imply the business is struggling to actually grow NPAT margins?" No. We, in fact, target very much both of them and actually looking to grow both across the board. When we look at how we measure the indicators of performance, we often talk about EBIT, but there is no question that ultimately NPAT margins is a key target. The general question of are we confident of our trajectory? Absolutely.
On both historical reference of the achievement and the growth of taking the company to be where it is in terms of its growing, having a product in market that is in demand, that we've developed, that is already developed for the AI age. We're already cash accretive, and we're in a position to grow from there. I would simply say the confidence internally is the highest it's ever been. The question of, are we seeing a runoff in CVCheck? Do you expect this to stabilize or continue to decline? Look, it's a question we obviously get a lot, and I wouldn't confuse any short-term macro effect with the overall view.
We've said for some time, and that is our position, transactional revenue is going to stabilize at AUD 15 million-AUD 16 million per annum. Some of that ends up being converted as we take customers into the SaaS chain, and it'll get replaced by new customers coming in. That's about the level and size of that business. We may see a short-term effect, but that is not structural. That is not indicative of that business space. It is a direct effect of the almost daily change we're seeing to the macroeconomic condition in the short term. Do we still plan to grow internationally? Absolutely. Again, whether the timing is affected in the short term because of everything that's going on, and whether in this climate is the right time to expand or push the button on that expansion is a question.
Our plans and development around our international expansion are actually accelerating. You'll notice, some of you who are more attentive may have noticed at the beginning of this call that Jason's title had changed. Now, Jason, traditionally being CFO and COO, has given up the COO functionality, with Odelia Sarre taking over as COO because Jason is focused on corporate development, which includes international. That in itself is the indication of the seriousness with which we take it and how we look at it. Another one is when we talk about longer sales cycles for enterprises, is it a budgetary issue or is it product functionality? I'd say neither. It is a focus issue internally in those organizations.
When they have plans afoot to make decisions and start rollout plans, we are being told things like, "We're going to speak to you in a couple of weeks because the CFO wants us all to redo our forecast budgets internally to see what costs we can save for the next couple of months." It's the fact that they're engaging in a transparent way around those things about the timing effects is very significant. It is universal, and from the data that Jason shared, that organizations right now are moving into a phase of risk planning in the event that global situations actually decline further. One of the other questions, the last one that I think I've answered is, have we converted some of the larger deals in the pipeline that are pending to go live yet to show up in the ARR?
Yes, there have been some of the historical deals that we've signed previously that have now gone live and driving the start of that uptake in the SaaS, is the short answer to that. Mentioned in terms of KC wins, been consistent, and I'll continue to say we'll share more detail about that at the full year results. I think that answers all of the questions. Craig, back to you.
Indeed. Thank you all for attending. As previously advised, a copy of this will be published online on our website in due course. Thank you all for attending. Have a very good day.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody.