Good morning, and welcome to the Alfa Financial Software Holdings PLC half-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to set the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Andrew Denton, CEO. Good morning to you, sir.
Good morning, everybody. I'm Andrew Denton, the CEO of Alfa, and I'm joined by Duncan McGrath and Matthew White, Alfa CFO and COO. We will follow an agenda that will be fairly familiar to anybody who's seen any of our results presentations before. Essentially, you'll get some highlights from me before Duncan takes us through the financials. Matthew will then step through our delivery performance, leaving me with the business and sales update before we move into Q&A. To reinforce the request, please, please ask questions. We're really pleased to be able to answer them. Moving on to the overview. We've had an excellent first half with trading in line with our expectations as we made room to invest in our product and as major new projects began to ramp up strongly.
Major wins in U.S. Auto and multi-country European equipment finance have driven really strong TCV growth, up 40% from this time last year. This month saw another marquee win in U.S. Auto, and this win included our first sale of our new total originations product line, and this is a key first step in the significant expansion of our addressable market. We've continued our industry-leading delivery record. As Matt will outline, 13 deliveries overall in the half and one customer go live. This brings the number of customers on Alfa Systems V5 to 28, a number that has seen material acceleration in recent years, and we expect that acceleration to continue. We'll be talking a lot about acceleration during this presentation. We've also seen significant strategic progress during the half. SaaS is now business as usual at Alfa.
We no longer sell Alfa Systems any other way, and SaaS continues to be a key engine for revenue growth. Subscription is up 18%, with subscription total contract value up 26%. We've also continued with the launch of Alfa Systems 6. The fifth installment dropped in July, and Matthew will expand on how intelligent automation delivers embedded AI in the real world, and looking forward, Alfa Systems 6 delivers 10 new modules, which show great promise in accelerating incremental sales in 2025, and the demand for our services, driven by our sales success, means we are also accelerating recruitment. As well as the wins I just mentioned, our late-stage pipeline remains very strong. We are preferred supplier with 9 of the 11 prospects, and we are working under contractual cover with 8 of them, which means we are already working for them.
New opportunities have entered our pipeline, and we're seeing strong demand across all of our end markets. All of this gives us great confidence in our prospects, and we've therefore increased our full-year expectations by GBP 1 million, and we've declared GBP 0.042 special dividend. Moving on then to key highlights in the next slide. Duncan will explore the numbers in more detail, but the highlights are GBP 52.3 million turnover, in line with our expectations for H1. GBP 22 million of cash at 95% conversion. Again, this was in line with our expectations after unusually strong billing at the end of 2023. As I said, 18% growth in subscription revenues, laying down the foundations of future growth and resiliency, and a GBP 16.2 million operating profit, which gives an EBITDA margin of 33%.
Our closing and our average headcount were in line at 5% up, and retention was up from this time last year at 96%. Finally, TCV was up to GBP 193 million, an increase of 18% from this time last year. That's in line with our strategy and our focus, and subscription TCV, therefore, was up 26%. That provides the underpin for continued strong subscription growth. Over to Duncan.
Thanks, Andy. Financial performance was very much as expected in the first half of the year. Revenue was in line with last year on a constant currency basis, or down 1% at actual exchange rates. This was mainly due to the reduction in chargeable development work. However, the quality of the revenues continues to improve, which I will cover later. Costs were broadly in line with last year, and so operating profit fell by GBP 0.7 million, principally due to that revenue drop. The effective tax rate of 26% was higher than last year on the back of the increase in the U.K. corporation tax rate and the change to the R&D tax credit, resulting in diluted EPS being down 10% at GBP 0.04 per share.
We were pleased with the performance in the first half, and given our confidence in the outturn for the year, the board has declared a special dividend of GBP 0.042 per share. Turning now to TCV. The two wins in Q1 gave a very big boost to our TCV, which is up 40% on a year ago. I also wish to highlight the next 12 months TCV, which is up 20%, and it's this growth which supports our expectations of strong growth in H2. I've also noted on the slide that there were two prospects in the late stage pipeline, where we were conducting paid work that we expected to sign shortly. One actually signed in August, which has an initial TCV value of GBP 19 million, and we still expect the other, the second one, to sign shortly.
Enterprise sales can be uneven, and we had a relatively quiet patch in H1 2023, but you can see from the graphs we've made very significant progress since then. As you know, the TCV is calculated using an arbitrary three years for subscription revenues, but our customer relationships are a lot longer than this, and so arguably, this understates the position. We are often asked what customer churn looks like, and so the next slide demonstrates how sticky our customer base is. This slide shows all of the customers that are either on V5 or in the process of discussions to move on to V5. The key takeaways are stickiness and acceleration. Firstly, stickiness. There have only been two customers who did not continue with Alfa V5. One was due to the customer selling their portfolio.
This was, in fact, sold to another Alfa customer, so the contract stayed on Alfa. The other was the loss due to an OEM making a strategic change and withdrawing from the financing market shortly after having gone live. There have been no other losses, so we've never lost a V5 client through a tender process. The second thing to point out is acceleration. It took seven years, from 2010 to 2017, to start the first 10 V5 customers. The last 10 have started in just the last eighteen months. As discussed in previous presentations, we've made great progress in diversifying our customer base over the last five years, and we're now at the point where we are much less reliant on any one customer and any one market.
More details of this are in the appendix on page 33 of the presentation, which is on our website. Turning to subscription revenues. Firstly, looking at subscription TCV, where you can see we've had 26% growth over the last 12 months as we've added the new customers we saw on the last slide. This has made our subscription our fastest growing revenue stream, and of course, it adds important visibility to our revenue projections. This visibility, allied to our great customer longevity that you saw in the last slide, highlights how important a revenue stream this is for us. Subscription revenues grew 18% in the first half and now account for 35% of our revenues. 66% of these revenues come from live V5 customers, with 19% from customers upgrading from V4, with a balance of 15% from new customers.
However, the new customer figure does not tell the whole story, so I think it's worth having a look at an illustrative subscription life cycle, which I've shown on the next slide. Before starting, a quick reminder that our pricing is based on contract volumes and not user accounts. The more contracts on Alfa, the greater our revenues. Also, the more modules a customer uses, the greater our revenues. So the three key areas of growth for subscription revenues are, firstly, growth with existing customers, either as contract volumes going up, new modules, or increased pricing. Secondly, customers upgrading from V4 onto the SaaS model. And thirdly, new customers implementing Alfa. Regarding new customers, it's worth understanding how the revenues grow over time, which is what this slide is about.
A typical subscription customer will pay for some services during implementation, but our revenues will only start to ramp up once they go live and start putting significant contract volumes onto Alfa. So it is only once past go live that revenues from new customers really start to reach a steady run, state run rate. As mentioned earlier, the way we calculate subscription TCV is take an arbitrary three-year period and include the estimated revenues for that period, which are highlighted inside the purple box on the left. As you know, each customer contract often has some different or unique characteristics, but we've tried to show an illustrative contract on this slide. You can see from this that the subscription TCV at the start of the initial three-year period will be relatively low, but increases significantly up to go live.
This growth will, of course, vary from contract to contract, depending on the length of time between signing the contract and go live, and therefore, how much of the post-go live subscription fees are captured in that initial TCV. This is not something we've highlighted before, but the key thing to take away is that subscription TCV will grow quite strongly over the first few years. The growth in our subscription revenues is very much driven by the successful move to SaaS, but this has had an impact on our software revenues that you can see on the next slide. Software revenues have decreased 33% in the period, continuing that successful transition to SaaS, along with a reduction in chargeable software development, and this was against a very strong period last year.
I've illustrated this with the bridge diagram, which reconciles GBP 8.9 million of revenue from the first half last year on the left, to GBP 6 million of revenue the first half this year on the right. The two significant movements are the GBP 1.3 million reduction from customized perpetual license recognition, along with a GBP 2.4 million reduction in revenue from chargeable development work. The reduction in the customized perpetual license income is the headwind that we've been running into as we transition to a SaaS model and increase the quality of our revenue. As previously discussed, the reduction in chargeable development work is a function of two things: firstly, our development teams have been focused on internally funded development into Alfa Systems 6.
Secondly, there's been a gap in chargeable development between existing projects having gone live, but not yet being replaced by new projects where development is later in the period. Looking forward, though, you can see that the next twelve months TCV has increased from GBP 6 million last year to GBP 10 million this year, as we start to see the planned development work become agreed with new clients. We are therefore expecting a stronger H2 from this. One final point, with the transition to SaaS, our software license revenue is increasingly shown in subscription. There is therefore only software license from historic contracts shown in software, and this is now at a relatively low level. With the majority of the revenue in software now from chargeable development, I'm now wondering whether this revenue stream would be better described using the name product development instead of software.
One to think about. So turning now to the final revenue stream, services. Total services revenue reduced by 1% versus a very strong H1 2023. As previously discussed, we had a number of projects going live in H2 2023, with the new projects not yet at full run rate in the first half of this year. You can see from the very significant boost in, and growth in TCV, that the new projects are starting to be contracted, driving more than doubling of TCV since this time last year. This was boosted by one customer signing a statement of work for the whole of the implementation project through to twenty twenty-seven, which is quite unusual, but obviously good news for us. I've had a number of questions about what activities sit within services.
It is essentially activities carried out by our delivery teams and comprises delivering implementations, delivering upgrades, delivering migrations, and other deliveries to clients. Perhaps this too could be doing with renaming, and perhaps we will call that delivery going forwards. Turning now to expenses. Overall costs were very similar to last year, up only GBP 0.1 million, so I won't dwell too long on this slide. Biggest movement here is the increased salary costs from additional employees and pay rises, largely offset by more people being involved in internal development work, with a consequent increase in capitalized development. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion of 95% was as expected, with accelerated collections at the end of twenty twenty-three impacting 2024 cash conversion, along with the higher capital expenditure from the intangible asset capitalization I referred to on the previous slide.
We noted at the time that 140% cash conversion for H1 2023 was unusually high. As previously flagged, we expect to operate around 100% cash conversion going forwards, but this can vary between the years, and that given the very strong finish to 2023, we'd expect overall 2024 cash conversion to be circa 90%-100%. We had GBP 0.8 million of share purchases in the period, solely for the purchases for the employee benefit trust to satisfy share options. We also paid GBP 9.7 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 unusually strong cash collection at the end of 2023, and so receivables were unusually low. At June 2024, these have returned to a more normal level.
Prepayments and accrued income has increased by GBP 1.5 million, largely as a result of awaiting a PO with one customer before we could invoice them, and this has now happened. Maintenance contract liabilities increased due to the annual billing in May, although this is reducing in importance as more of our business moves on to a monthly SaaS payment cycle. Now, some words on capital allocation. There's no change to our policy, which is to ensure that we have sufficient funds to run the business, but to retain some optionality for further investment into our product or possibly bolt-on M&A. We create that optionality through our progressive ordinary dividend being set at a sustainable level and supplementing this using a special dividend to return any excess capital. There are no immediate investment requirements, and so we've declared a special dividend of GBP 0.042 per share.
Next, modeling guidance. We very much expect our growth in 2024 to be second half weighted, returning to a more typical pattern. We will continue to see sequential subscription growth, and this will be boosted by services and software growing in H2 as those new projects ramp up. For the full year, we expect cash conversion to be below the long-term trend of 100%, as a result of the very strong conversion in 2023. We expect the full year effective tax rate to be 26%, due to the full year impact of the 25% U.K. corporation tax rate, along with no longer receiving any benefit from R&D on the tax line, but instead receiving a benefit through the RDEC scheme, which is now shown in operating income.
Currency sensitivity is updated slightly with an increase in our underlying sensitivity to the U.S. dollar, due to the change in the balance of our business, although this is more of a 2025 issue than a current year issue, as we are largely hedged for the U.S. dollar this year. I will now hand over to Matt.
Thanks, Duncan, and good morning, everybody. A brief update from me today with some highlights on our progress in strengthening our product, our team, and our delivery track record, in scaling our organization, and in simplifying our delivery to enable that ongoing subscription revenue growth that Duncan has just described. We're strengthening our product differentiation with the launch of Alfa Systems 6, which includes 10 new modules released in six installments. Alfa 6 will be sold as a SaaS-only product, providing the clearest possible strategic direction. We're continuing to invest in our product with an enhanced new business originations product line and commercial finance support as the key items expanding our target addressable market, and following the movement of Alfa iQ in-house, AI innovation is now fully embedded into our product and our organization. Our product includes intelligent workflow process automation and predictive analytics for credit.
Our delivery tooling includes Thea, which uses large language model technology to provide chat-based interaction with system documentation. And AI innovation sponsors within our teams enable AI use to improve our operational efficiency, while ensuring that everyone is clear on the guardrails, keeping us all safe. As you can see here, and as Duncan has already described, we're building our customer base and our journey towards having all customers on the modern technology stack of Alfa Systems V5 and Alfa Systems 6 is progressing well, with nearly all V4 customers now actively working on an upgrade. We're investing further in simplifying our delivery methodology and tooling to enable faster and more efficient delivery. And we're also investing in preparation for partner-led delivery to enable us to reach more customers.
I mentioned Thea earlier, and that will be a very important tool for partners as well as for customers and our own team. We're growing our headcount with increased targets for recruitment in H2 to support the exciting pipeline that Andrew will describe in more detail next. We're rolling out an improved induction program to enable us to onboard those new people more quickly. The team remains very engaged, and people are sticking around. Retention remains very high at 96%. We have very few leavers, but we stay in touch with those who do leave, and we see many people return to Alfa. As a different lens on our engagement, we've quoted our Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS score, here in the slides. eNPS scores between 10 and 30 are considered good.
Those between fifty and seventy are considered excellent, and our score, exceeding even that excellent level, reflects commitment to shared goals within the team as together we build our company for the future. And as always, we're really grateful to everyone in that team for enabling the excellent progress that we're reporting to you today. That's all from me, and I hand back to Andrew.
Thanks, Matthew. A brief look at our pipeline and a sales update from me. As I noted in my opening remarks, our new business pipeline remains strong and continues to provide the fuel for our growth. We've also got to have a really good half for converting prospects into fully contracted wins, particularly if we add August's win. A massive milestone and real reinforcement of our leadership position in U.S. Auto Finance. We started the year with 11 prospects in our late-stage pipeline. The two wins exit the pipeline, but new additions have kept the pipeline at 11 at the half year point. If we then fast-forward to today, another prospect and another win keep the scoreboard ticking and show the health of our sales channel.
Particularly, when we overlay the position of these prospects, preferred supplier with nine of the eleven, and as I said before, we're working under contractual cover with eight of them. The late-stage pipeline right now is very much alive across all geographies and sectors, with a really good mix of customer size. A new analysis for subscription revenue, rather than just project revenue, shows the power of our strategy. A point-in-time view shows that the projects are weighted towards lower effort levels, but future subscription revenues are weighted towards much higher revenue levels. In a nutshell, we're switching on higher subscription levels with much lower implementation friction. We are delivering our strategy and accelerating our future growth. So in summary, the outlook. Our business is in fantastic shape. A strong pipeline with high levels of conversion, bringing internationally recognizable logos onto our customer roster.
This reflects the continuing high demand across the industry we serve. We've executed on our investment plan for 2024. We mend the roof, and we extend our house while the sun shines to ensure continued success and provide the foundations for a strong future. New sales coming on stream in H2 and planned lower investment levels will see financial performance weighted towards the second half of this year, and you'll continue to see sequential growth in subscription revenues, a key part of our strategy for accelerated growth in the future. Thanks very much for your attention. That concludes the formal part of the presentation. We'll now switch to Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab, which is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to read the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received questions throughout today's presentation, and Andrew, if I could hand over to you to share the Q&A, that'd be great, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.
Fantastic. Thank you. And thank you for those who have already submitted questions. We'll do our best to answer them. The first one comes from Christopher T: "The company has seen strong growth in subscription revenues as part of its SaaS transition... How sustainable is this growth in the long term, and what steps are being taken to ensure continued competitive advantage in this market?" It's a question, actually, that segues a little bit into the second question, which we'll move on to in a second, and I hope that Duncan will pick up. But in terms of the strong growth in subscription revenues as part of the SaaS transition, I'm gonna try and repurpose your question a little bit, Christopher, but please do come back into the chat if I haven't answered it properly.
It's really about strong growth in general, because as I said before, SaaS for us is business as usual now, so when we make a sale, we make a SaaS sale, and accordingly, you'll see our subscription revenue growing as part of that transition. Interestingly, what we're doing, as well as turning on a more robust revenue stream, we're also building further revenues into the future. One thing I often comment on in investor presentations is the financial performance that we are achieving today is in the face of reasonable and material headwinds that come from that transition, so repurposing the question then, is how sustainable is our ability, essentially, to continue winning these new customers, winning these new SaaS revenue streams going into the future? You won't be surprised that I'm gonna say very. Why is that?
One of them is the size of the addressable market. We've seen research out there that says the asset finance market that we serve spends about $3.5 billion on software and related services every year, and given that we've only just given our reports, consensus is something that doesn't trip off the tongue as well as it normally does, but at about GBP 109 million sterling, that's definitely headroom. The question for us is how do we make sure that we keep making advances into that headroom? Two things. One of them was something that Matthew set out very eloquently in terms of our delivery track record. We focus on the deliverability of what we do and continuing to be a trusted partner for our customers in fulfilling our promises.
The second one was the comment that I made, and actually, again, Matthew set out the results of that good work. If I were investing in a software company, I would be very careful to make sure that that company invests in its software, mending the roof while the sun shines, rather than sweating the asset and sacrificing its growth for short-term financial gain. In twenty twenty-three, at this time, we had invested GBP 18.1 million in the software. Twenty twenty-four sees GBP 18.8 million of investment in our software in total. That is growing. You see the fruits of that in Alfa Systems 6. That is our competitive advantage over our customers as well as our track record. We will continue to invest in our software going forward, and you'll continue to see that. Hopefully, that gives you what you want, Christopher.
Duncan will answer the question from Tom M. Thank you to Tom, but I'll tee that up for you, Duncan. "Given your strong cash generation and return of excess capital through dividends, how do you balance investing in growth initiatives with shareholder returns?
Yeah, so, it's probably worth just taking a step back and looking at our business model. I mean, we're very, very cash generative as a company. Actually, our investment is not really CapEx heavy other than effectively taking our people's time. We've grown as a company completely organically from nineteen ninety. We've never acquired any other company. So our investment into our product, and which then drives future growth, is all around our people's time. There is therefore what we sacrifice potentially, if we do a lot of development, is potentially a bit of chargeable income, because we may be focusing our own people on internal development that might not be funded by customers.
That's a little bit of what you've seen happen over the last 12 months, where we've made a big push and done a lot of development into Alfa Systems 6, and that's had a positive impact, clearly on our products and on our long-term growth prospects. But it's had a short-term impact on that chargeable development revenue that I talked about on the software slide. So I think it's very much we think about the long term. As Andy said, we absolutely mend the roof while the sun is shining. We look at the longer term, but we also balance that with also short-term customer needs as well. So it is a bit of a balancing act.
Generally, though, even within that balancing act, we're gonna throw off excess cash that we can distribute through dividends. So, hopefully, that's answered that question, and I will go on to the next one, also from Tom: "Regarding your sustainability goals, how do you plan to scale this effort, and what specific challenges do you foresee in achieving your net zero targets through the supply chain?" One of our challenges, I guess, is to a certain extent, we've done an awful lot already. We have. I think, again, if you think of the business model of Alfa, we 70% of our costs are actually salary costs, they're people costs.
Our supply chain is largely around, I guess, our major costs are around offices, professional services, with firms, and some of the cloud computing costs that we have. So we start from a relatively low base, and obviously, making the 90% reductions that we're committed to doing from a low base is potentially somewhat more difficult than if you started in it from an inefficient place. But we've definitely started engaging with the supply chain. We've now, in terms of supplier onboarding, sustainability and ESG are part of the evaluation criteria that we do.
I think the other angle that we're starting to think much more about is the efficiency of our own Alfa system as well, and there's work going into try and make our system as efficient as possible in terms of its consumption of power. So, lots of activity going on that we can do a lot of engagement with the supply chain. That, the supply chain, you're right, and implied from the question is the bulk of our emissions, because a lot of our building emissions are relatively low now. I will hand the next question, I think, to Matt.
Yes, before Matt, I've been working with my colleagues a long time-
Yeah.
So none of them will be surprised when I chip in a little bit, so apologies to everybody for that. Just an extra point on our sustainability goals, Duncan. One of the other ways that we can drive and help overall sustainability is through our software. So a brief note that some of the work that we've done in the functionality of our software is to allow our customers to be better at their own environmental accounting and reporting. Because we actually have an awful lot of data on assets and asset utilization, this allows us to make it very, very easy for our own customers to provide much more sustainable product lines within their own businesses. So there's an extra string to our bow in that respect. Sorry, Matt, over to you.
Thank you. And thank you, thank you, Guy, for a great clarificatory question around our use of delivery partners. We work with delivery partners in, I'll split it into three different ways. Firstly, delivery partners provide staff augmentation. Secondly, we work with system integration partners, and then we're moving towards partner-led delivery. Your question, Guy, is about whether working with partners will compress our margins because of competition. I think you're asking whether when we have a fully fledged partner-led delivery offering, partners will be able to compete with us for software implementation services. And the short answer to that is no, they won't be able to compete with us for those services, because that in order to implement, they'll need to be accredited, they'll need access to our collateral.
They won't have the wherewithal to implement unless they're working in partnership with us. And we would expect to work in a very controlled way with our partners in all cases. So back to those three different ways of working. Working on staff augmentation, we are contracting with the customer. We are running the implementation, and partners are assisting us. On system integration work, in most cases, the partners are working very much on the customer side, and they're doing work that we wouldn't expect to do as part of an implementation.
Just to be really clear on that, the reason for that, that huge strategic opportunity that Andrew was just outlining means that our strategy is all about enabling us to take advantage of that opportunity with as few days from Alfa as possible as part of the implementation. So we're not competing for. We don't want system integration work. That's not part of our growth strategy. And then on the third, on partner-led delivery, as I said, in order for partners to take on that partner-led delivery work, then they'll need access to our accreditation, our collateral, et cetera. So that's something that remains under our control. We have fantastic relationships with all of our delivery partners, and control isn't an issue for us, but we're also confident that it can't become an issue for us.
Thanks, Matthew. Question that I'll pick up, a couple of questions that I'll pick up. The first one is from Vishal: "Very pleasing to see the four large subscription wins you've highlighted. Current subscription revenue is circa GBP 40 million. What's the hurdle for being classified as large, given the rate at which you're going?" It's a great thematic question. So, a quick clarification, Vishal, and again, tell me if I've got this wrong. I think you're probably referring to the four in the late-stage pipeline that we've picked up on the slide that you're now seeing. So those are not wins yet, but we, as I said, are working with eight of those from a contractual perspective, so they're already doing paid-for work with us, so we're pretty confident.
There's a degree to which actually we could find ourselves moving this constantly, so this is the first time that we've talked about size of future subscription revenues when these things come on tap, and at the moment, we're saying that large equals an annual subscription of greater than two million. What we don't want to do is we don't want to be confusing everybody by making that a moving feast. Hopefully, you can always pick up in the narrative my general excitability and our excitability when there's a really, really big one. The point we were trying to convey is that when you compare the size of that short-term project, which is great revenue, it's revenue we like very much, but it's not the accretive subscription revenue we're looking for in our long term.
Compared to the size of those subscription revenue streams we're switching on, you can see that we are doing that with increasingly lower friction, which is exactly our pipeline, and very much chimes in with the answer that Matthew's just given around our partners. I'll also pick up the one from Sean. "Please confirm the impact on revenue if an existing client moves from version five to version six?" Again, a great question. I'll start by talking about perhaps what Alfa six is not. Alfa six is not a big technical upgrade in the way that four to five was. We have some tremendous functionality and architectural advances in Alfa System six, but it's not a completely new technology stack.
Actually, we are expecting the move from 5 to 6 for our existing and new customers to be pretty seamless, which is good news, because we don't destabilize our customer base by doing that, and that's very much the aim. Where's the upside? Well, the upside is two things. First of all, the question I answered earlier about competitive advantage, but the second one is in the form of modules. One of the ways that we license our software from now, a SaaS or subscription basis, is on a functional module basis, and Alfa Systems 6 brings 10 new modules into play. We will be trying to see the fruits of those modules in terms of incremental subscription sales, that hopefully you'll start to see in 2025.
Increased competitive advantage, and incremental sales opportunity. Duncan, are you happy to take the question from Vishal?
Sure. So, the question was, "Given your TCV, there should be further material top line growth, but the mixture would be skewed towards services, or delivery," well picked up. "Should we expect for more margin contraction in the near term to sub 30%, but starting to grind higher? What do you think is a long-term sustainable margin for the group, given the correct focus to keep investing and innovating the product?" So, in terms of the TCV growth question, I think we will still expect to see subscription being the fastest growing revenue stream that we have. You're right to point out that there is a very large jump in the services TCV, but that's total TCV.
The growth in the next twelve months TCV for services is lower than that. And I did point out within that services TCV, we've actually got a statement of work with a customer that goes all the way through to twenty twenty-seven, which drives a big part of that growth. So it's really good news to get that contracted. It shows the strength that we have in the longer term, but I wouldn't read into that services will grow faster than subscription. Subscription will keep growing faster than services. In terms of the...
What the impact on the margin is, we're still going through. We've talked about the headwind that we have from revenue terms of moving from perpetual to subscription license, but we perhaps haven't been as explicit with people that that actually has a sort of margin impact slightly as well, because obviously subscription revenue takes longer to build up, and therefore it will take longer for that to have a margin benefit over perhaps a, if you were amortizing a perpetual license over a short period of time, you'd get a much bigger margin boost. So I think we've got a little bit of a margin headwind that we're doing through the transition. We still think of ourselves as a Rule of 40 company.
So, and, perhaps referring back to the earlier question, you know, that's one of the things that we judge how we do our investment plans. But, you know, something like a 30% margin business and somewhere between an 8% and 12% revenue growth business overall is, is certainly what we're continuing to aim for, and we think is achievable.
Thanks, Duncan. I'll pick up the question from Sean on market share, which I talked about in terms of runway earlier. "So on the basis that Alfa only has a circa 3% market share, please provide further detail on the size of the largest operators." So I guess the first thing is to think about what that market looks like, and I talked about the three point five billion annual spend on software and related services. That's global, and that is not all available at exactly the same time. It's definitely not the case that absolutely everybody in the market is coming to tender all at the same time every year.
Which is actually kind of good news, because you don't want them all to come to tender, because I don't think we'd be able to recruit fast enough for what I hope would be our success. So there are still plenty of people who are moving along with their existing software. What does that GBP 3.5 billion spend look like? Might be a helpful way of seeing how the market works. So you could probably split it down into two thirds, and let's use round numbers and say it's about GBP 1 billion each. There's about GBP 1 billion that's being spent on in-house software. Back in the day, and still a little bit, people do and did build their own software. Lots of reasons why we feel pretty strongly that that's a bad plan.
But that still amounts to about a billion of the global spend. There's also about a billion on ERP systems. People who are taking the likes of SAP and Oracle, and sort of trying to shoehorn them into being effective within our market. And with apologies to these people who do a great overall job of being ERP systems, the weaknesses do tend to be found out, because it's a specialized market doing specialized things. And then there's about a billion that's spent with specialist providers, people a bit like us. But even that is a bit nuanced, because very often it's a mixture of all of these.
I'm not gonna list out all the competitors for a couple of reasons: one, it'll take time, and two, we try to stay classy on these kind of calls, but I guess the thing to think about with Alfa is that we have more competitors than lots of other people, because we are across all of the markets. We have some competitors that only operate in North American automotive finance, and some competitors that only operate in European equipment, but there are some big competitors out there that we respect. What I am pleased to say is that, as a general rule, we're doing pretty well.
Those tenders are coming out, and we're winning those tenders for all the reasons we've set out, and we will do our very best to make sure that that continues. So, a slightly nuanced answer, Vishal, but hope that gives you what you were looking for. Please say if not. I think that is all the questions that we have.
Perfect. Andrew, thank you very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review the questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Andrew, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Of course, and my first closing comment is to thank everybody who took the time out of their day to listen and interact with us today. This is a great platform and a great opportunity to be able to interact with a larger group of investors and potential investors. So, we'll continue to do this, and please, if you're able to, continue to do it with us. As you've seen, and as we've been talking about, the company's in a terrific place. We're really, really happy with where we are. We continue to accelerate into our target market. We continue to accelerate our technology. We continue to accelerate our recruitment. And, thank you for asking, important to us are sustainability and social impact initiatives.
We see that very much as part of our overall business growth. We'll continue to invest and to make sure that we do that, and of course, the financial results that we'll focus on very hard that will follow. Thanks very much, all of you, again, for attending, and we look forward to doing something very similar, next time we report.
Andrew, Duncan, Matthew, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected, to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will 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, and good morning to you all.