Good afternoon and welcome to the Alfa Financial Software Holdings PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. You can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just click Q&A, type in your question, and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and now I'd like to hand you over to Duncan Magrath, CFO. Good afternoon, sir.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Alfa's 2023 full-year results. I'm Duncan Magrath, CFO of Alfa, and I'm joined by Matthew White, our COO. You were expecting Andrew Denton, the CEO, but unfortunately he's unable to make this presentation and send his apologies. So Matt and I will cover his sections between us. Perhaps before we get into the details, a few words on what we do at Alfa for those who are perhaps new to the story. There is, of course, a lot of information on our website, but I will try and give a brief flavor now. Alfa provides enterprise software for the asset finance market. Asset finance covers funding for the purchase or use of equipment or vehicles, whether by consumers or corporations. The asset finance market is huge. It spends approximately GBP 3.4 billion per annum on software.
The market ranges from small, high-volume assets, where the complexity is in the business process, to very large, high-value assets, where the complexity is in the transaction. Alfa Systems is able to support all of these forms of asset finance, and uniquely, it's able to do it across both equipment finance and automotive finance in all geographies. Alfa actually operates across 37 countries, and we have offices in EMEA, North America, and Asia Pacific. Matt will go into a bit more detail around this in his section. So onto the results for 2023. So, actually, one forward slide forward, actually. Great. So let's start with a review of 2023. 2023 gave us another Rule of 40 financial performance, again backed up by very strong cash conversion. The business became more resilient. Customer concentration was at 35%. No single customer contributed more than 10% of our revenue.
19 customers contributed more than GBP 2 million of revenue. That's up from 17 last year. As Matthew will outline, it's been yet another record year for deliveries, 35 deliveries in total, and that included 7 go-lives. Retention and engagement were at unprecedented levels, as you'll see. We did all of this continuing to deliver our strategy, and key to this is moving to subscription. Our financial results remain strong despite the headwinds from this transition, but we are seeing strong growth in subscription TCV and revenue, and these points for a very strong future. And if this was not enough, we've extended our competitive advantage and further secured our future with the release of Alfa Systems 6, a breakthrough release of our platform.
Added to that, a culture of continuous improvement has delivered progressive changes in our Alfa development module, and our positive impact as a business is underpinned by the validation of our SBTi targets. Looking forward, Alfa will deliver 10 new modules driving incremental sales, and our capability continues to expand through the growth in our teams, as again, Matthew will explain later. Our sales performance has been stellar, and a strong early-stage pipeline is backing up the clear strength of the late stage, as Matthew will touch on later. This confidence in our expectations and our prospects have led the board to increase our ordinary dividend by 8% to GBP 1.3 pence and to declare a special dividend of GBP 2p. Moving on to those key numbers. Our revenue for the year was up GBP 102 million, an increase of 9% from the prior year and our first-ever nine-digit year.
We ended the year with GBP 21.8 million in cash. That's underpinned by excellent cash conversion. Again, this time was at 115%. And as I've already mentioned, we made excellent progress in growing our subscription revenue, up 16%, and within that, Alfa Cloud up 31%. Operating profit, that's at 30% operating profit margin or 32% EBITDA. And during the year, we invested in growing our team as well as our software, and our closing headcount was up 8%. Keeping the team together and engaged is critical for our business, so I was delighted to see the year-end retention rate of 97% and with 82% engagement. And finally, we ended the year with a total contract value of GBP 165 million. That's up 16% from the previous year and growing all the time thanks to the strong late-stage pipeline.
I've already covered the main financial figures, but just to emphasize that we've had a strong financial performance. Revenue was up 9% over last year. Operating profit was up 2% at GBP 30 million, with an operating profit margin of 30%. The effective tax rate of 21% was higher than last year on the back of the increase in the U.K. corporation tax rate, resulting in diluted EPS being down 2% at GBP 0.079. Alfa historically was reliant on a small number of large customers, but over the last few years, we've made great progress in diversifying, as I mentioned earlier. But here is now a more visual representation of that. We cover many different end markets, which you can see on the left. Each of these squares is proportional to the revenue that we have in those markets.
On the right, we show how we've now got a broad base of customers who provide more than GBP 2 million of revenues every year, and this is a dramatic improvement compared with 2019. Finally, another way of looking at this is the top five customers account for 35% of our revenues, whereas five years ago, this was 61%. We measure what we call TCV or total contract value, and the methodology remains unchanged. But before I go into that, again, for those perhaps not familiar with, with Alfa, I'll explain our three revenue streams. Subscription revenues cover Alfa Cloud and also where we charge license and maintenance for non-Alfa Cloud clients. This is where we bill on a regular basis, be it monthly or annually. Software revenues are where we charge customers for software development work or where we charge a one-off perpetual license.
Note that the perpetual licenses are largely a historic issue, and this is declining as we move into subscription. Then finally, services are any services other than development where we charge the customer on a day-rate basis, primarily for implementing the software. For TCV, we make a few assumptions in calculating the figure. We assume that all subscription contracts will stay with us for three years. In practice, it is many more years than this, but we've assumed a very conservative three years. For software revenues, we include anything that is contracted. For services revenue, we take what is contracted, but we do, on occasion, assume that where we've started a new implementation with a customer, that this will be completed, even if not fully covered by what we call a Statement of Work.
The most important thing is that we calculate this consistently, and so it is the movements in TCV that are most important rather than necessarily the absolute figures. So total TCV of GBP 165 million is up 16% over last year, with strong growth in subscription TCV as we signed up customers in the late-stage pipeline. We also show how much of that TCV will be recognized in the next 12 months, and at GBP 67 million, this was up 3%. Again, strong growth in subscription TCV, but somewhat offset by reductions in software and services in advance of converting some big customers that are in the late-stage pipeline. So now looking at this revenue breakdown. So talking now about the subscription revenues. These increased 16% over last year with revenues of GBP 32 million.
We have only had an Alfa Cloud-first approach to sales for the last few years, but we are now seeing the benefits of this in the growth in revenues and TCV, which was up 28%. We are now live with 13 Alfa Cloud customers, with another three in implementation. Moving on to our second revenue stream, software revenues. These decreased by 4% in the year, with TCV down 11% as a result of the reduced revenues from those customized licenses as we transitioned to subscription. We also performed less chargeable development work for customers as we looked to focus more on investment into Alfa Systems 6, which you'll hear more about from Matt in a minute. So turning to our final revenue stream, services. Total services revenue increased by 10% to GBP 54.6 million, with growth in both existing and new customers.
TCV is down 5% versus the same time last year, and this is due to existing projects getting towards the end of their implementation. We expect the TCV to increase in 2024 as new projects contract. Turning now to expenses. I won't go into too much detail on the costs, but we'll pick out a few items. Overall, costs increased 13% on last year. As you would expect, salary costs are the biggest component of our cost base, and these increased 12% over last year, with average headcount up 10%. Hosting costs grew on the back of the strong growth in Alfa Cloud. We have a profit share scheme, which takes approximately 10% of our profits and, apart from senior managers, is shared amongst all employees, and this increased in the year. Turning now to that strong cash flow that I talked about earlier.
We focus a lot on cash conversion, a measure of how much profit is converted into cash. We had a very strong year in 2023 with 115% cash conversion. As we move to a subscription model, we generally expect to operate around 100% cash conversion, but this can fluctuate from year- to- year. We had GBP 4.8 million of share purchases in the period. GBP 3.1 million arose from share purchases under a share buyback scheme, which completed in June 2023, and GBP 1.7 million from purchases of shares for the Employee Benefit Trust, which we used to satisfy any share option vesting and avoid diluting shareholders. We also paid GBP 19.7 million of dividends in the period. So onto the balance sheet. Picking out some key items and firstly, trade receivables.
As just noted, we had very strong cash collection at the start and end of 2023, and you can see this with receivables of GBP 5.6 million being GBP 3.3 million lower than last year-end. Cash increased to GBP 21.8 million on the back of the strong cash generation, even after funding those dividends and share purchases. Corporation tax recoverable is up on 2022 as a result of receivables for R&D claims. Now moving on to cash allocation. Our basic principle is if we have excess cash, we will return it to shareholders. We like to retain some optionality, so we have a relatively low ordinary dividend but use a higher special dividend to return excess capital.
There are no immediate investment requirements, and so alongside declaring an ordinary dividend of GBP 0.013 per share, which is 8% up on last year, we have also declared a special dividend of GBP 0.012 per share. Next, a little bit around modeling. 2023 was weighted towards the first half, and we expect 2024 to be weighted towards the second half due to the timing of customer-funded development and the startup of new projects. Within this, however, we expect subscription revenues to continue to show strong sequential growth quarter by quarter.
We expect the full-year effective tax rate to be around 26% due to the full-year impact of the UK corporation tax rate of 25%, along with having to now show R&D benefits in other income as we are now classified as a large corporate under HMRC terms, and so we've moved into a new regime called the RDEC or Research and Development Expenditure Credit. So that moves the benefit from the tax line into other income. We generate more U.S. dollars in euro revenues than we have costs, and so we are sensitive to currency movements, and I've shown these sensitivities on these slides, and they've increased slightly from last year simply due to the growth in the business. So I'll now hand over to Matt to cover the operational and business highlights.
Thanks, Duncan.
Whenever we meet investors and potential investors, we emphasize the size of our market opportunity because the size of that opportunity is key to understanding Alfa and to understanding our strategy. As Duncan said, the annual spend on software in the asset finance industry is around $3.4 billion. We are one of the biggest players in our market, and we have annual revenue of around GBP 100 million, so we have a huge market to grow into. Our strategy - that's our four S's that you can see on the screen now - are all about enabling growth into that opportunity. The first element of our strategy is strengthening, strengthening our key differentiators. That's our product, our delivery track record, and our people. Those three differentiators give us our competitive advantage in our market. We are a recognized market leader, and we're also recognized to be the premium player.
My role at Alfa is to ensure that we continue to strengthen those differentiators, and I'll talk about each of them in turn over the next few slides. The second element of our strategy is selling, selling our single-tenant SaaS product into our target markets. Scaling our capacity for delivering includes the obvious, such as growing our headcount, but it also includes other elements such as increasing the amount that partner companies can take on in implementing our software. And the final element of our strategy is simplification. Simplifying our product, our implementations, and everything that we do enables us to achieve more. Our product is our first differentiator. That's Alfa Systems. That's our software. We have a single product with a single code set covering all customers and all of those markets in which we work. And 2023 saw continued investment in Alfa Systems extending our advantage.
We release a new version of our product every four weeks. Every new release is available to every customer as a frictionless upgrade, and every release includes many product improvements. Some of those product enhancements are internally funded by Alfa, and some of those product enhancements are funded directly by our customers. Now, the opportunity to do so is valuable for our customers where they want us to prioritize their particular agenda, and we do so where there is alignment with our overall product direction. So customers are able to pay for prioritization of features. When complete, some enhancements are freely available to all customers, demonstrating to them the benefit of investing in packaged software. But some enhancements to Alfa Systems are included only in additional saleable modules.
Now, one of those four-weekly releases in 2024 will see us change our major version number, and Alfa v5 will become Alfa Systems 6. While it'll only be one time box away from the final release of v5, Alfa Systems 6 is far beyond anything we could have imagined in v5's early days. It will include 10 new functional modules, providing further revenue generation opportunities for Alfa, as they can be sold as incremental modules to existing customers. As well as functional enhancement, we've continued to invest to maintain our technology advantage. Ongoing technology investment in our product is important as part of our commitment to avoid technical debt, which would have to be paid down at some point in the future, and also to continue to attract and to retain the best technology talent in our industries.
Added together, the functional and technical investment in our product in 2023 comes to GBP 35 million, a further increase on the GBP 29 million invested in 2022. Alfa Cloud represents the additional revenue from providing a subscription-hosted version of our product, and this is our fastest-growing revenue stream, with nearly all new customers and more than half of our customer base as a whole now taking advantage of our single-tenant SaaS offering rather than using our software on-premise. Finally, on our product, Alfa iQ, our AI joint venture, has moved in-house at Alfa. We were ahead of the game on AI, and incorporating these exciting technologies into our product and into our operational efficiency is now BAU for us. Our delivery track record is perhaps our key differentiator. Alfa Systems provides the heart and lungs for our customers' businesses. It's not enabling software for an internal business function.
So by that, I mean that it's not software for a finance or HR team within a customer's organization. Rather, Alfa Systems is line-of-business software supporting asset finance providers in selling and then credit checking and underwriting and funding and then administering asset finance agreements. So that means that any Alfa Systems implementation is necessarily a huge and complex business change process, and we succeed with those risky business change projects where our competitors fail. That makes us the low-risk choice, and it makes our delivery a key differentiator. As a company, we never forget that our efforts all come together when we successfully deliver our software for a customer. And we had another record year in delivery with seven new customer go-lives. We also had a record number of deliveries overall, with 35 in total, including those new customer go-lives as well as customer upgrades.
Our strategy, as I mentioned, is to simplify the implementation of Alfa Systems so that we can take advantage of that huge opportunity that we've got with more concurrent implementations of our software. We're progressing that strategy every year with incremental investment in delivery improvements. Those improvements are enabling us to implement Alfa Systems with reduced effort. That reduces costs for our customers. It allows us to implement more software and to increase our margin. Finally, I'll turn to our people. For anyone new to Alfa, it's really important to understand our culture and some of the things that make Alfa a really special place to work. Hopefully, you'll get a bit of a feeling for that today from me and Duncan. Lots of us have been around for a long time. I joined as a graduate in 1999.
Andrew Denton, our CEO, he'd been around for a while before I arrived. Duncan's the relative newcomer. He joined on the first day of lockdown, but then we didn't need an experienced listed CFO back in 1999. We work really hard to attract fantastic talent in our industries and in our geography, in the various geographies in which we work. We recruit a lot of graduates and also some experienced technology talent. And then we get that team engaged, sharing a purpose, and building something special together. And people stick around, partly because we continue to bring in fantastic new talent, so there's a nice virtuous circle there. 2023 saw us continue to grow our excellent team. Average headcount grew by 10% to 463.
Importantly, our really strong retention rate has allowed us to consolidate experience levels within the team as a whole while we continue to recruit. We've also continued to improve our learning and development. The culture as a whole at Alfa has a huge bias towards personal and organizational growth as we build Alfa together. This investment in increasing our headcount, in retaining our talented team, and improving learning and development will enable us to take advantage of the very strong pipeline. So 2023 was a year of fantastic delivery for our customers, but also of continued investment in our product, in our delivery capability, and in our team. We're set to push on with exciting new customers in 2024. Speaking of those exciting new customers, I'll turn to the late-stage pipeline.
We continue our strong sales momentum with no late-stage losses and three wins during the year. We've also more than replenished those wins with the late-stage pipeline ending the year up at 11. Over the year, we've added six new prospects to the late stage, and you can see a bit more detail on that late-stage pipeline in the appendix to this presentation. To give you a bit of context on that pipeline, we're very strict with the way that we report. We count a prospect as part of the pipeline until we have a fully signed contract pack, including the license and the hosting that we need for go-live. And that's why we're doing paid work with 5 of the 11 prospects in the late-stage pipeline.
To give you a bit of historical context, this is about as strong as the late-stage pipeline has ever been, taking into account the number of prospects listed here, the quality of those prospects, and the fact that we're working with so many of them. That's why we're so excited about the pipeline. Turning to the outlook, demand for asset finance software remains robust, and our projects continue with new opportunities adding to our pipeline. Revenue growth is expected to be mid to high single digit. As Duncan has outlined, we expect greater weighting in H2 as new sales come on stream. Subscription revenues are growing strongly in line with our strategy, and we're continuing to invest in the business, both our people and our software ahead of growth. To recap, another Rule of 40 financial performance backed up again by strong cash conversion.
Customer concentration at 35%. No single customer greater than 10% of our total revenue and 19 customers with more than GBP 2 million of revenues. Another record year for delivery, 35 in total, including seven new customer go-lives. Retention and engagement at unprecedented levels. All of this while continuing to deliver on our strategy. Key to this is our move to subscription with strong growth in subscription TCV and revenue. All of this points to a very strong future and extending our competitive advantage further, securing our future with the release of Alfa Systems 6, delivering progressive change in our Alfa development model, and our positive impact being ratified and underpinned by the validation of our SBTi targets. 10 new modules driving incremental sales looking forward, and that stellar sales performance backing up our confidence in the business.
Thanks to that confidence, we've increased our ordinary dividend by 8% to GBP 0.013, and we're declaring a special dividend of GBP 0.02. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll move on to questions.
Fantastic. Thank you very much, indeed, Duncan and Matthew. Ladies and gentlemen, do please continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just want the team to take a few moments to review those questions submitted today. I'd like to remind you that recording the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Duncan, Matthew, as you can see, we've had several questions that have come through from investors throughout today's presentation.
Can I just please ask you just to click on that Q&A tab, and where appropriate to do so, just read out the question and give your response, and I'll pick up from you at the end, please.
Yeah. So I'll take the first question, and then, Matt, you might want to take the second and third one, and we'll see where we go from there. So the first question was around, how has the transition towards a subscription-based model impacted revenue growth and retention? I'm taking the retention here to be the retention of customers. It's probably worth starting there, to be honest. I think some software companies, when they move from a historical on-premise-based system to a new digital cloud-based system, they potentially lose a lot of customers in the process of the transition. The transition we've gone through at Alfa is, in fact, very different to that. The transition we've gone through is that we've been operating on a digital cloud-native piece of software called version 5 from 2010. So actually, we're continuing to sell the same piece of software.
It's just now that people can effectively have the software based with all the services that we provide through Alfa Cloud within it. So actually, unlike some other software companies, we've not had to force anybody to move off an old version of the system. So we've not gone through a loss of customers. And indeed, every v5 customer we've never lost a v5 customer. There have been two exceptions to that. One where one of our customers was bought by another one of our customers. So actually, the portfolio stayed on Alfa, and the other one was a customer that actually exited the asset finance market and sold their portfolio. But we've never lost a v5 customer to a competitive tender. And it's been v5 that we've been selling since 2010.
We do have some legacy customers on v3 and v4, and the process of transitioning them is getting towards the end now. And all of those people have taken sort of Alfa Cloud. So our subscription basis has been effectively selling the same piece of software but enabling people to effectively buy the Alfa Cloud services and pay for it through a subscription model rather than paying for a large upfront perpetual license. So the second part of the question, then, is how has it impacted the revenue? So no losing customers from what I've just said. So the impact has really been largely driven by accounting impacts, to be honest. And there's a danger of me switching the whole audience off when I start talking about accounting at this point. But essentially, the old perpetual license model basically recognized revenue slightly quicker than a subscription-based model.
So what we've had is a bit of a headwind from effectively, if you the new contracts we're selling now, we're effectively recognizing revenue slower on a subscription basis than if we had been selling a perpetual license. So we've seen a transition from sort of, we're still recognizing some existing contracts that were sold on a perpetual license basis, and the revenue for that is declining. The new revenue for the subscription contracts is picking up, but it's picking up more slowly than it would have done if we'd been selling a perpetual license. Offsetting all of that, we've obviously got a new service Alfa Cloud, which we're selling for. So it's difficult to be precise as to what the net impact is. If it was completely like for like, we would have seen slower revenue growth.
But obviously, we've got some very good growth that we talked about. The underlying growth in Alfa Cloud of 31% has obviously helped offset some of that as well. So Matt, I don't know if you'd like to pick up.
Happy. Yep. So perhaps worth probably first giving a little bit of background on Alfa iQ, our AI joint venture with our partner Bitfount. It was a fantastic experience for us. We benefited hugely from bringing in some fantastic talent and also from Bitfount, our partner. We've proven out two use cases for predictive AI in credit decisioning and in analyzing business processes and understanding how to improve those processes. When we say that AI is part of business as usual, what we mean is that we've brought that joint venture and the talent in-house at Alfa. And the next step for us in terms of gaining in terms of enhancing our competitive position in this space, which is what the question is about, is in developing some products, like product within Alfa Systems directly, probably for targeted use cases such as receipt allocation.
Those targeted use cases enable our customers to gain benefit quickly and without complex legal analysis that's required around personally identifiable information and some of the other ethical concerns around the use of customer data in predictive AI. The other thing that we've done as part of bringing Alfa iQ in-house is that we've provided mentoring and training to each of our product area owners so that in every product area, we have awareness of AI and its potential. We're also providing sponsorship to all of our innovation areas. We've got a fantastic innovation agenda at Alfa, and we have a number of innovation items in the AI space, each of which is mentored and assisted by AI experts that we've recruited and we've grown as part of that joint venture with Alfa iQ. It's a really exciting space for us.
Yes, to directly answer the question, it does enhance our competitive position in this space. The next question was about the competitive landscape and what needs to be achieved to gain a larger slice of the market opportunity. As I said, we're the premium player within the industries in which we work. Generally speaking, the transition from legacy technologies onto Alfa Systems is driven by a number of factors. Some push, some pull. We see our customers being forced to invest in their systems for a number of reasons. Often, they're working on very old technologies, sometimes based on a mainframe with systems that have been in place for decades. That introduces risk, and it introduces cost. That's one of the key drivers for investing in that software and moving to Alfa Systems.
Regulatory change will also push our customers into investing in their software or moving on to modernized platforms. There are also pull factors, so the need to keep up with changing technology. For example, we were talking this morning about the move to electric vehicles. That can be a push factor because the need to provide financing alongside vehicles for charging infrastructure adds a level of complexity that either legacy systems or, in some cases, our competitors can't handle. And the need to continually innovate within the asset finance space also introduces complexity that legacy software and our competitors can't handle. So to answer the question, we need to keep being the best. We will continue to see those push factors and those pull factors prompting prospects to invest in their systems and prompting prospects to move on to Alfa.
Matt, I might take the next one and then ask you to chip in at the end because you're the expert on this. The other thing I would just add to the point you made about competitive landscape, I think our delivery record is second to none, and continuing to have a really, really strong delivery record is the best sales pitch that we can gather. That builds momentum, and that helps with getting a share of the market. That's a really important point, which sort of leads neatly onto the next question, which was the question is, you talked about focus on software simplification to accelerate implementations with a focus on partners. Can you indicate how many of your projects are delivered by partners and where you expect this to go? Do they specialize in certain verticals or customer sizes?
So, perhaps just as a, again, for those who are not completely familiar with Alfa at the moment, when we're talking about partners in this context, we're talking about augmentation partners. So these are partners that provide people to go on projects and work alongside our people. So at the moment, we still effectively run the projects, but when we're shorter resource, we can ask our partners to provide some people onto those projects. And this is a program that's been underway for a number of years now. Ultimately, as Matt talked about earlier, there is ultimately a price of trying to get to partner-led delivery. But Matt may wish to comment on that in a minute. But if we stick to augmentation partners, then actually, every project in EMEA last year had at least one partner on them.
We've had a broad spread across EMEA. We've also had two projects in America where we've had augmentation partners on. In terms of specializing in certain verticals or customer sizes, no. Effectively, they are working on our projects in our space. So as we help to train them and they get to understand our business, then they can do more with us. But no, it can operate across equipment and automotive, and it can operate in EMEA and the U.S. And they can operate across company sizes. Sometimes, actually, a smaller project may be more difficult because obviously, you need a wider range of skills and a smaller number of people. But they've operated in small projects and large projects as well. But Matt, you may wish to add something onto that.
Yep. Staff augmentation partners are really important to us. They give us experience. They give us bench. So when I say they give us experience, they might have worked in a particular geography that we haven't worked in the past. And that's a really important part of our strategy. As Duncan said, we are moving towards partner-led delivery. We haven't talked about Alfa Start, which is our product for smaller asset finance players. This year, we've had a partner for the first time working on an Alfa Start project. And that's really important because Alfa Start projects are small, short projects. In the past, we've always needed people with lots of Alfa experience and access to all of Alfa's internal knowledge base in order to be involved in those implementations.
And so the fact that this year, we've made the improvements to our methodology, to our tooling, and also to our infrastructure to enable a staff augmentation partner to work on one of those projects is really important to us in the move towards partner-led delivery. Partner-led delivery is important to us for the obvious reason. It increases our capacity for delivering Alfa Systems and for making the most of that strategic opportunity that that strategy is all about. Shall we move on to the next question, Duncan?
Yep.
It's about Alfa's outperformance of competitors and whether we're referring to generic ERP operators such as SAP or whether there are other lease finance specialists that we compete with. The answer is yes. There's a bit of a cycle to the competitors that we see in the market. 10 years ago, we used to see SAP, and we used to see Oracle a little bit more than we do now competing for new work in our industry. Nowadays, we don't see those guys so much. We tend to see other specialists, providers of asset finance software, of whom there are a number. We also see occasionally, although it's reducing, we'll actually see competition from in-house software development. We're dealing with major organizations, banks, finance companies, manufacturers. They'll often have a team of software developers in-house.
And sometimes, they kind of act as sort of a pseudo competition offering to develop software. Because of the complexity of the industry in which we work, that's a very difficult ask for an in-house IT team. And so that's falling away a little bit. Similarly to the ERP operators, even the might of Oracle and SAP tried to get into our industry, found it very difficult, and we were able to beat them. Actually, worth mentioning, when we are implementing for a customer, we're converting off one of the ERP providers or a general banking software provider because it's for a growing portfolio. A more generalist finance platform was able to deal with the early growth of the product within our customer. But when it comes to looking to specialize in asset finance, that's a lot harder for something more general to handle.
Onto those specialist providers, tends to vary by geography. What we don't see is any individual specialist provider other than us that is equally strong in all of the areas in which we work. So we'll see different competitors in different parts of our market, different competitors in auto finance and equipment finance, different competitors in the U.S. to Europe to U.K. or to our Asia-Pacific markets. It's a real strength of ours that we're able to play in all of those markets, and we're able to win in all of those markets and be seen as the premium provider.
I think it's worth adding, Matt, that anybody wants to do a bit more homework, there is a freely available report by Deloitte on the asset finance software market. So if you wanted to find out more, you can just google that. You can get it off the Deloitte website, and that does give a flavor for the market and the competitive landscape.
Fantastic. Thank you, Duncan Matthew, indeed, for answering all those questions you can from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company. Matthew, can I ask you for a few closing comments, please?
Of course. Firstly, I guess we'd like to thank everybody for joining us and thank the team at Investor Meet Company for making this possible. It's a bit disconcerting standing in our offices speaking into our computers. So it's been really great to see the interaction. Thank you very, very much for that. But a really special thanks to our team here at Alfa. Hopefully, you've got a flavor. It's a great place to work, and we're really enjoying building Alfa together.
And we're really proud of the strategic progress that we're making together, building the team, investing in our product, and seeing the sales come through as a result, and being able to tell all of you about another year of growth on all fronts, another year of Rule of 40 financial performance with a growing TCV, falling customer concentration, and really fast-growing subscription revenue pointing to an exciting future. So thank you, Paul. Thank you, everybody.
Fantastic. Duncan, Matthew, thanks indeed for updating investors today. Please ask investors not to close this session. You'll be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Alfa Financial Software Holdings PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.