Good morning, everyone. I can see people are continuing to join the call, so we'll just give it another few seconds. Okay, great. I think we'll make a start then. Thank you to everyone joining us this morning. We're delighted to be joined for our first investor webinar by the management of CAB Payments Holdings PLC, who announced interim results yesterday. We're going to hear a presentation from CEO Neeraj Kapur and CFO James Hopkinson, which will last around 35 minutes, and then we will proceed to a live Q&A session. You can ask your questions using the Q&A box at the bottom of your screens, so please do submit those over the next few minutes. Just a quick reminder that Equity Development published a detailed note yesterday on CAB Payments Holdings PLC following the release of numbers. You can see that report from Paul Bryant on our website.
Finally, just to let viewers know, we'll be sending around a short feedback form after this presentation, so please do look out for that. Right, with that, I think we are now ready to start the presentation.
Good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to say we've made real progress in executing our strategy, and we've successfully transformed the business to better serve our clients. Most importantly, we've stayed true to our purpose of delivering prosperity in the emerging markets in which we operate. This means we remain true to our core FX and payments offering, enhanced by our banking license. My leadership team, which underwent significant changes during the second half of last year and the beginning of this year, is now fully formed, and we're united by a common purpose: to deliver prosperity in emerging markets. We optimize the use of our network, technology, and expertise to help governments, institutions, and organizations access hard-to-reach markets and move money where it is needed. Our focus throughout the year has been on executing and delivering what we committed to do.
We've made tangible progress, and we're starting to see solid financial momentum and growth in revenue. In September last year, and again at the 2024 full-year results, I laid out an 18-month roadmap to reshape the business into one delivering more predictable, attractive, long-term growth. We're now about nine months into that journey. The transformation phase is complete. The foundations have been laid, and from here, we move into the growth-through-execution phase. I'm particularly pleased by the new things we're achieving, constantly pushing the business to new heights. In the first half, we launched a number of firsts, such as processing our first client payments through our Visa partnership, conducting our first sale from our trade finance portfolio, initial test trades on derivatives with counterparties, as well as switching on new and exciting corridors. Our performance in H1 delivered our expected progress.
I want to make it clear: we know there's still work to be done, and we're still on a journey to get the performance to the level that we and our shareholders expect from this business. There are good and solid reasons we're confident about the future. Our client base continues to grow, adding 52 new clients in the half. Momentum is building fast. As I outlined at the full-year 2024 results, our business is becoming increasingly relationship-led. This means engaging with clients across the full spectrum of what we offer: FX, payments, trade finance, and deposits, all integrated through a more cohesive and coherent approach focused on providing solutions rather than just products. To serve our clients' ever-evolving needs, we're enhancing our products, from testing FX derivatives, building guaranteed deposits, to enhanced payment capabilities. We're building solutions matching their priorities.
In parallel, we're deepening our connectivity in both new and existing markets, such as Malawi, Mozambique, and Nigeria, giving clients more flexibility, reach, and choice. In a moment, I'll describe how our central bank strategy has opened up a new and exciting market. Our strengthened relationships with central banks have been pivotal to our success in leveraging our privileged position as an economic partner to them, and it's great to see we're being recognized through our win at the 2025 Global Markets Central Banking Awards. This award reflects not just the progress we're making, but the long-term commitment we're showing in supporting emerging markets globally. You can see we've done what we said we'd do in H1. Now that's translating into real momentum in terms of performance.
Going back to what I said earlier about our foundations being set, income has stabilized on a half-on-half basis and is now showing early signs of growth. In support of our strategy, our cost base has been successfully reshaped. We restructured our resources to align with our business model, making the business leaner and more client-focused. James will go through the details in a moment. Our revenue sources are becoming more diversified, with a good balance between our FX, payments, and banking offerings, as well as continuously reducing income concentration. With some strategic hires, we've restructured the sales force to be more specialized, focused on client growth and increasing share of wallet of existing clients. The focus is on selling solutions that combine our products. On the right, you can see the actions we've taken, which underpin our medium-term delivery. Our international footprint is expanding.
Our European office is already delivering revenue, New York is now operational, and our planned office in Abu Dhabi is set to open up access to new clients and new markets, perhaps as soon as H2 this year, subject to regulatory approval. Our active client base is growing, and crucially, we're building client relationships based on trust and value, not just price. This has helped us secure long-term, more sustainable, and more valuable revenue streams. We've also made strategic moves in key markets. We've secured an IMTO license in Nigeria, giving us greater participation in Naira flows. We've opened up our office in New York, allowing us to access more flows into and out of LATAM and Africa. Our renewed focus on building stronger central bank relationships is opening up more opportunities for us across the emerging markets.
We've been proactive in reaching out to the central banks and ministries of finance of various markets, both new and existing, and this refreshed approach helps to establish a meaningful, longer-term, sustainable presence. Importantly, we continue to invest in our technologies, further improving our product capabilities and operational efficiencies. Our enhanced product offerings will improve our client value proposition, helping us to scale and increase the diversity of earnings. All in all, tangible progress. I can confidently say this shows our plan is working. The team is executing our four-pillar strategy well. We've taken action in each area, and while there's still work to be done, we're heading to the second half with increasing confidence in our ability to drive further growth. Let's look at how this is translating to tangible improvements in key metrics. Our client base continues to grow, with 573 active clients now on the platform.
We generated a strong H1 client cohort, and importantly, many of them are already transacting with us. This, combined with our growing diversity of markets, currencies, and products, has helped reduce revenue concentration. One measure of this, the top five currency corridors are now only 27% of the total income, down from 32% last year and 49% the year before. Improved efficiency and smoother onboarding processes mean we're transacting with clients faster. Our network of counterparties has also expanded, now 436 liquidity providers and Nostro relationships, enabling us to offer deeper liquidity and sharper pricing. The platform continues to deliver a holistic solution across FX, payments, and banking, and clients are increasingly treating us as their long-term transactional partner. This is reflected in our average deposit balance, which stood at GBP1.5 billion. Our platform is generating more and more volume.
We're now processing around 2,600 payments per day, showing a 20% growth over 2024, enabled by our investment in our technologies, including AI capabilities to drive efficient scaling. As previously guided, we're directing more of our technology investment toward commercially driven initiatives. In H1, 67% of CapEx was focused on product enhancements, ensuring our investment continues to support both innovation and revenue growth, versus the 29% allocated throughout last year. All in all, I'm pleased with our progress in H1. There's more to do, but I'm confident about what H2 will bring. Now, James will take you through our financial performance for H1.
Thank you, Neeraj. It's great to be here for my first set of results since joining the company.
As you can see from the charts, all of the key metrics shown are heading in the right direction, with half-on-half growth in volumes, income, EBITDA, and operating free cash flow. FX volumes of just below £20 billion have shown sequential growth, driven in particular by G10 currencies, as we've deepened our relationship with emerging market financial institutions. Emerging FX volumes were slightly lower in the half, reflecting both U.S. dollar strength against emerging market currencies and the impact of geopolitics on IDO budgets. Gross income of £51.8 million was up 3% half on half, although it was down 8% year on year, reflecting both take rate compression through 2024 and the impact of a short-lived dislocation in the first quarter of last year. We've controlled costs well, including executing the strategic restructuring exercise in the first quarter, and as a result, these same factors help shape the EBITDA performance.
Our disciplined management of costs and investment has resulted in the business remaining highly cash generative, with £9.5 million of free cash flow, with a cash conversion of almost 72% compared to 50% in both halves of 2024. As you can see, we've delivered half on half growth of 3% in income, 8% in adjusted EBITDA, and 9% in adjusted profit after tax, demonstrating that the strategic actions taken have started to generate positive performance momentum. For the eagle-eyed members of the audience, I wanted to highlight two changes to the presentation of the P&L. First, we've reallocated around GBP1.1 million of revenue from each of the halves of 2024, from wholesale FX to payments FX, as this category better reflects the activity generating that particular income.
Second, we've extracted IFRS 16 lease interest, which was previously netted from the income line, and we've separately disclosed this on the face of the P&L. Neither adjustment changes the statutory or adjusted profit numbers for any period, but we believe they better reflect our underlying business. Turning to the numbers themselves, an adjusted EBITDA of GBP13.1 million represents a margin of 25.3%, up 1.3 percentage points in the second half of last year. Depreciation and amortization increased by 37% compared to the first half of 2024 and 11% half on half, reflecting the step up in capital expenditure over the last few years and the timing of technology that came online. On the bottom line, we improved adjusted profit after tax by 9% half on half, as operational leverage started to come through, with costs growing slower than our income and activity levels.
This chart essentially shows that we remain a payments and FX business enhanced by our banking license, with around 60% of our income coming from our FX and payments product areas. We're enhanced by a banking license as it allows us to take deposits, which in turn feeds our payment services for those clients, funds their FX transactions, and in turn enables us to provide trade finance facilities. A key part of our strategic agenda has also been to focus our efforts on building client businesses that generate more annuity flows, which can grow in a more predictable and more repeatable way.
The red-dotted line on the chart highlights the product areas that are traditionally less volatile, as we have seen in developed FX, for example, where spreads are more predictable or where the business generates largely annuity-like income, as we can see in our deposits, trade finance, and our growing payments businesses. Together, these areas are 70% of our income and grew 8% half on half. Another focus of our strategy is to turn the topmost segment of the chart, representing emerging FX, into a more annuity and fee-based business as well. Emerging FX remains at the heart of who we are, but we're starting to do it in a way that drives more sustainable, recurring income streams. We're delivering this by, for example, working hard with our central bank relationships and others to resolve structural issues in markets.
Instead of transacting on a particular deal on a particular day, we're now working to fill a monthly requirement for clients, turning a one-off transaction into regular daily activity, which can be recompensed by margin or fees. You'll hear more about this from Neeraj shortly. Our teams are also driving the business by adding more clients, bringing online more enhanced products and services, and opening up more new markets. You'll also hear from Neeraj that our business is becoming increasingly integrated, with more clients using multiple products across FX, deposits, trade finance, and payments. We're a client-led business, and this is increasingly apparent as we build out our solutions focus, which is largely agnostic to which product category we earn income in. Our volumes have shown sequential growth, despite U.S. dollar strength against emerging market currencies and the impact we've seen to IDO activity.
These headwinds have been offset by more significant growth in other transacting clients. As mentioned in the last few slides, take rates are broadly stable in developed FX, as they have been for the last few years, and emerging FX take rates have remained at around the same levels we exited 2024 with, as we expected. Our increasing focus on structured transactions will generate more fee income from our FX services, which in turn means that take rates should become less of a key driver of our FX business going forward. This shift in focus will not only help us build a more predictable income stream, but it is also the way we can build a more sustainable business with our central bank network and with our commercial clients. Turning to the next page.
Overall, our costs remain well controlled, and we've been repositioned to better deliver our strategic priorities and drive operational leverage as we grow. Staff costs were flat, half on half, and slightly lower than the same period of 2024, as we took action to restructure the business. As part of this process, we've taken out surplus roles and have now proportionately more resources in client-facing and revenue-generating teams. The one-off cost of the restructuring exercise was around GBP2.5 million, towards the lower end of the guidance we set out in the full-year results in March. As in previous years, these types of costs have been reflected as non-underlying in nature. Importantly, as we set out in the March results presentation, we're maintaining our guidance that staff costs, excluding potential variable pay, will be broadly flat year on year for 2025.
Moving to other operating expenses, in the first half of 2024, there was around GBP600,000 reduction to costs related to a one-off VAT refund. When adjusting for this to better reflect our underlying cost trajectory, non-staff costs or other operating expenses were up 5% year on year and broadly flat half on half. The increase in costs year on year largely reflects activity-linked costs such as software costs as we rolled out new products, and third-party processing costs like bank charges as we processed 20% more transactions year on year. Overall, we are positioned to deliver better operational leverage through time. We're developing lean principles and using AI technology and applying them to processes to drive greater efficiency. We'll continue to work hard to deliver further efficiencies as our platform scales, and we'll also continue to look to invest behind sustainable, profitable client activity where we see good opportunities.
As I mentioned before, we are a payments and FX business enhanced by a banking license. It is a real competitive advantage for our business, where we compete with non-bank businesses. The license also opens doors across our network, helping us to build a network of over 430 Nostro or liquidity provider banks around the world. Taken together with our emerging markets expertise, our business model is very hard to replicate. It's also important to remember that we're not a typical bank and have no intention of becoming one. Our revenues are largely capital light and non-balance sheet intensive. We remain highly capitalized with a CET1 ratio of 19.5%, higher than the market average. Our client assets to client deposits ratio was around 17%. This means that for every £1 of client deposits with us, we lend out approximately £0.17.
This is significantly lower than pretty much any other bank out there. To help benchmark how capital-light we are, the slide shows our stats against a selection of banks that are more international and transaction banking focused. Our uniqueness is further evidenced by our revenue to credit risk RWA ratio of around 30%. This is a significantly higher return than the same peer group that generates around 12%. Deploying credit and capital is not the key driver of our income. Where we do use our capital is largely in trade finance, which is diversified, short tenor, and generates significant activity in other products. Importantly, this also positions us for a massive opportunity. In Africa, around 40% of trade is intermediated by banks, compared to around 80% worldwide.
We can connect this demand with providers of capital in a capital-efficient way, and we can have a lasting positive impact on the markets we serve. Finally, on this slide, in terms of CapEx, we spent £3.5 million in the half, in line with our previous guidance, with around two-thirds of the spend focused on continued product development, which will generate further revenue streams. In the first half, we delivered good progress. We executed on our strategic priorities and the commitments we've made. We generated approximately £52 million in total income, £13 million in adjusted EBITDA, and £5.4 million in adjusted profit after tax, all showing growth in the second half of last year. We are pleased with the progress that we've made, as it is building a more diversified business with more clients transacting more products with us across more markets.
Whilst we have more to do, those evidence the steps we have taken have translated into building momentum for our financial performance. Cost efficiency and productivity remain a focus for us to deliver operational leverage as we grow. However, we will continue to invest behind activity that generates sustainable, profitable, client-driven revenues where we see the opportunities. I'll now hand back to Neeraj, who will describe in more detail the client progress we're making and why we're confident that this should translate into a better performance in the second half of the year. Neeraj.
Pleasing progress indeed. It's all about delivering what we said we'd deliver. It's been a period of intense effort and strategic enhancement, which has transformed the business and continues to allow us to deliver on our commitments and to position ourselves for continued sustainable growth.
At the last full-year results, I laid out an 18-month roadmap to reshape the business and put it on a predictable growth trajectory. We're now nine months into our journey, and I can confidently say we've laid strong foundations. The team have been focused on execution and delivered. We've established the business, improved our operating model, and created the platform we need to grow on. We're driving new client solutions and operational efficiencies through enhancing our technology stack as we offer more digital solutions. Whilst growth in H1 was modest, it's turning a corner, and we've done well against the exogenous factors out of our control, and solid foundations are in place. We expect our progress to accelerate in H2. Turning now to our client activity in H1, activity levels have remained resilient despite ongoing global macroeconomic pressures.
Our strategic focus is starting to show meaningful results, although there's clearly been an impact to our International Development Organization activity levels, which has made about 10% of our revenues historically and now. Starting with banks, which represent around two-thirds of H1 income, this segment is showing early positive signs of our relationship-led model clearly delivering. The bank segment includes both commercial and central banks. This grew 5% half on half, driven by higher FX volumes, core deposits, and an uplift in trade finance activity, together with successful onboarding of new correspondent banking relationships. In the NBFIN FinTech segment, representing just under a quarter of income, we also showed good sequential progress on income, up 5% half on half. We grew our client base in H1 with a number of significant new clients all about to go live with us.
The IDO sector has been challenged in the period as they felt the impacts of well-publicized geopolitical headwinds. These pressures contributed to a 13% decline in income to £5.9 million. As we mentioned at the full-year results, we're expanding our reach beyond financial institutions to include large national and international corporates, such as airlines, key resource firms, and asset managers who can benefit from our integrated FX, payments, and banking solutions. Our specialism is that we're able to move money to where it's needed, and there are requirements where we can add real value to the markets we serve and the corporates that also do business there. Our all-important purpose of bringing prosperity to emerging markets for sustainable growth is grounded in the strength of our platform and technology designed to drive client loyalty and deliver holistic solutions across FX, payments, deposits, and trade finance.
Our client-led solutions focus aims to harmonize the power of all of our products together to work through our client relationships to solve real problems rather than just purely execute a trade. This is why we've created a structured solutions business. It's also powerful in being able to build a more fee-based business model at the same time as increasing share of annuity flows in the FX product set. I'll go into the power of this solution in a case study shortly. This includes helping clients unlock trapped liquidity and convert to hard currency, source liquidity for outbound payments, or hedge against volatile currency movements. All of these are critical pain points which our solutions aim to solve. Spot FX remains our core business. However, we're rapidly expanding our offering to meet a broader range of client needs. I'll go through the progress of each of these now.
First, enhanced payments. Three clients are now live on our automated clearinghouse, or ACH rails, with 52 currencies available. This proposition is now being marketed and is gaining traction in particular with our IDO and NBFI clients. Next, FX derivatives. We've completed successful test trades, operational readiness is in place, and we're talking to a number of clients to get started in the second half of the year. Our approach here is not to carry significant risk on our balance sheet, and we'll be hedging our positions in real time. Deposits. We continue to build our deposit booth, strengthening our transactional banking relationships, particularly with banks clients. We've also been working on a guaranteed deposit product through a global banking partner. Finally, trade finance. We have the ability to bring together providers of capital and unsatisfied demand in Africa, LATAM, and beyond for trade finance.
This is a capital-light business, demonstrating our origination capability, and is an important first step in helping our markets access international trade finance capital providers. These product enhancements and structures are driven by real client demand, demand which gives us strong confidence in the acceleration of momentum into the second half. With a client-centric model, we're starting to look at total client wallet rather than just individual product revenues. I want to add some flavor on the work that we're doing and the results we're delivering. This is a standout example of our relationship-led central bank model driving tangible results. In one key African market where foreign banks trading local currency FX had been largely prohibited from operating by the Reserve Bank for several years, we very recently successfully reestablished ourselves as a trusted economic partner to that central bank.
With their full support, we're the only foreign bank currently operating in this way, helping the central bank source material levels of valuable U.S. dollar reserve capital on a medium-term programmed basis, while also enabling us to provide local currency to our clients. This isn't just about access; it's about impact. By managing the solution for the central bank, we're generating a stable fee-based income. That's a core part of our model. We're providing a valuable service, improving prosperity in that country, and not relying purely on spreads. Crucially, this approach has effectively reopened another market for our business. Foreign flows have resumed. We're helping the market increase its liquidity in both local and foreign currency, as well as supporting the central bank in building up their reserves of U.S. dollar and other G10 currencies, and in line with their own monetary policy goals.
It's a powerful validation of our purpose and strategic approach, and a playbook we're replicating in other markets. We're steadily building a business with an increased global reach, one that's closer to our clients, closer to liquidity and capital flows, and better positioned to capture growth in key corridors. A sustainable emerging markets business that makes its money by delivering prosperity in those markets. Last year, we opened Amsterdam as our European hub. I'm pleased to say it's now starting to deliver revenue through new clients. We've expanded the sales force and now have four sales professionals on the ground, with a strong pipeline continuing to build.
At the same time, we're delivering on our plans to have more boots on the ground sales operations in Africa, and then expanding that model into LATAM, giving deeper access to local financial institutions and large corporates, and ensuring we're better aligned with the needs of each market. We recently secured a representative sales office license in New York, and just this week, we officially opened its doors. It's a significant milestone, which validates our business model, opens up a large new market, and brings us closer to key clients and our U.S. clearing banks who provide access to U.S. dollar liquidity. In H2 this year, subject to regulatory approval, we'll be looking to have a sales operation in the ADGM in Abu Dhabi, a strategically important location.
We've applied for a Category 2 license to operate there, recognizing the region's role as a critical source of capital flows into Africa and Asia. The capital of capital. Together, these moves are giving our platform a truly global reach. We're investing to become more scalable, connected, and built for long-term revenue growth and profitability. We'll continue to update you on our progress. Our business growth is being powered by the advances we're making in our technology and how we're driving efficiency in our processes. Our efforts in this area have underpinned a significant 20% increase in transaction processing, now handling 550,000 transactions in the first six months of this year, with little to no increase in operating costs. As it stands, our platform can handle multiples of this figure as we continue to grow. To date, approximately 94% of processes and transactions are streamlined via straight-through processing.
We're also really focused on our customer experience journey, including significantly speeding up how long it takes a client to onboard with us and start transacting. Our platform is also flexible. This flexibility has allowed us to offer new products and functionality to our clients more rapidly. For example, in this period, we configured our system to quote all currency crosses in Chinese Renminbi. We've remained truly customer-focused, ensuring our systems are up and available, maintaining over a 99.7% uptime. We'll continue to invest in our technologies and processes, increasing the use of AI. This will make us more efficient as an organization and significantly increase the speed of business, which our clients always value. We're now working very hard to deliver the impact of the efforts in H1 to our clients in H2 and beyond. We closed the first half with strong client-driven momentum.
This gives us real confidence in our ability to deliver an even stronger performance in the second half of the year. Client growth continues to be a key driver. We added 36 new active clients in H1, and we're seeing strong engagement from across our expanding base. Our European office is starting to deliver with a growing pipeline of both major and emerging market banks. We're also seeing a real uptake of our new enhanced product suite. Clients are now actively transacting on our improved payment rails with our ACH capability coming online and volumes steadily increasing. Our structured solutions, I refer you to the example I shared earlier, represent more than isolated wins. They reflect the type of purpose-driven, high-impact conversations I'm now having with emerging market central banks around the world. We continue to increase the reach of our business. New markets are opening up.
Europe is scaling well, and with our U.S. representative office license now in place, we're able to begin business development in a major global corridor, the Americas. It's an exciting time, and we're well positioned to make the most of it. I want you to know how good we should all feel about the future of our business. We've laid strong foundations through our drive for growth, and from here, it's all about building, scaling, and growing, with our purpose being our North Star, delivering prosperity into emerging markets. Despite it being a difficult period for the markets, alongside internal complexity and uncertainty, we've still delivered our growth objectives, and everyone in the business has navigated this with professionalism and determination. Well done to the team. We're passionate about driving prosperity in our chosen markets.
As we build a more scalable, profitable business, we'll be able to increase our reach and the positive impact on the emerging markets we serve. Technology is key to this as we enhance our product set, as well as drive further operational efficiencies in our business. We're halfway through an 18-month journey to drive sustainable growth, and already we're seeing solid and tangible progress. Progress is starting to come through in our financial performance, and it's setting the tone for what's ahead. My team and I are wholly focused on execution and delivering on our commitments. We have real momentum heading into the second half and strong confidence in our ability to deliver further growth in H2 and beyond. Looking ahead, we remain focused on full-year delivery, and we'll update you on our 2026 plans at the time of our full-year results. Right, let's take questions.
Hello, good morning everybody.
Morning, thank you very much for that detailed presentation. Pleased to see that Neeraj and James have joined us now live to answer investor questions, and I can see a number have already come in. If you're ready, I think we will make a start.
Perfect, thank you.
The first one I can see here is about Abu Dhabi. The questioner says I'd have sort of assumed that the market would be mostly moving money between Abu Dhabi and large mature markets, which are probably well served by major banks. Could you explain what you see as the opportunity for you in the region?
Yeah, sure. The real opportunity is more about the emerging markets, and the questioner is right in thinking that there are large flows into developed markets out of UAE and the Middle East more generally, but there are also much larger flows that are starting to come through with the emerging markets. Specifically, there's a demand for North African currency from the UAE and the Middle East more generally. The Abu Dhabi hub will consider all of the Middle East, not just UAE, as the source of that funding.
Africa itself is becoming much more important to the Middle East as they move away from carbon fuels as their main income driver and start looking at other businesses that they would like to both own and invest in all over Africa that are dealing with rare earth metals or lithium, cobalt, copper, and other materials that are becoming more and more important in the world that we live in. I would say that with my sort of more in-depth knowledge of the region that I've gained over the last year or so, this is why the opportunity is so strong for us specifically, and they themselves identify us as an expert in African currencies in which they would like to invest. That's the reason, but the questioner is right in thinking there are other flows that are probably even bigger, but those are not of interest to us.
Very clear, thank you. A couple of questions here about cost and the restructuring exercise, so I might try and sort of group them together, perhaps maybe one for you, James. Firstly, is it fully done? Were additional savings identified along the way? Is there a sort of an ongoing process of cost control, and have some cost controls now become more embedded, whether it's around processes or whatever it might be, and therefore perhaps more permanent in nature?
Thank you, excellent question. I think the way that we approached the exercise, whilst it did take out around 100 roles, the objective of it was not just to save costs. I mean, that is one of the outputs of it, but it was also to reorganize our staff group so that we're much more client-oriented, client-facing, and we have a greater proportion of our business in revenue-generating roles. It was really getting the organization fit in the right shape with our resources in the right places, pointed at things that make a difference. Will that ever be over? No, I think you know we really want the organization to continue to be a customer-oriented, customer-focused organization. I don't expect there to be another reorganization charge, if that was the question. I think that the vast majority of that would have been captured in the first half.
There may well be a tiny amount in the second half, as we had a number of people who were involved in that transaction that actually remained on with us over the half-year period. To be honest, I don't think it's going to be noticeable in the accounts at all. Ongoing cost control, are they embedded? I think the discipline of cost control is something, as you'd expect from a CFO, the whole of the team, we'll be really focused on making sure that we are deploying that money as if it's our own. I mean, that's really what I want to get that across in the culture, so we get the most return out of whatever investment we make.
Thank you. A question here about the dollar, and in the last few results, you've stated that dollar strength has impacted the business negatively. The dollar's been a bit weaker in 2025, so inversely, has that been good for business or not necessarily?
I mean, from my perspective, it has been good for business. However, I think the other point that we are very keen to deliver is the demand for dollar because it's the reserve currency of many of the countries, pretty much all of the countries we deal with. Getting under the skin of getting involved in that demand is a key driver of our business over and above the movement in that currency. I'll let James talk about the effect of the currency because it does have an effect. Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question, and it's quite a complicated picture because I think the U.S. dollar was strong against a basket of emerging market currencies, but has had a period of relative weakness against people in cable, for example, against the pound. That is an effect. Why is that an effect?
If I am buying something in an emerging market currency that costs 10 units, and if my currency, my home currency, the dollar, strengthens, then I don't have to buy 10. I can buy, I can use my dollars. I don't need as many dollars to buy that property. That's basically the impact on that currency. We obviously run our financials on a constant currency basis as well, so we see what the impact is, and actually, it was relatively minor in this period.
Very clear, thank you. You probably won't be surprised to see this question. Can you give us any examples of how you are using AI in the business, if at all?
Yes, I think AI is a growing area for us, and we sort of spent a little bit of time on it in the presentation. What we see is that the areas in which we can use it more will be this kind of agentic AI where it actually tries to understand more about the things that we get our people to do. There are areas that we deal in, specifically in the risk area, where judgment is needed, and that judgment cannot be replaced by AI from our perspective.
However, there are many things, many parts of our processes that require much more mechanical type decisioning that can be taken over by AI, and our COO and CTO are both working very hard, and we have resources in place that are very specific and very specialized to get better use of AI over the next 12 months from our business. I've always said this since I've arrived, that the key success factor for us will be the operational leverage that we deliver whilst we grow our revenue line. What we've seen this half is very pleasing because we've got revenue growth with zero growth in costs, and we want that to continue, and AI will be a very strong driver of that. Do you want to add anything to?
No, I think we've got a lot of use cases that are being tested at the moment across the organization. We've got a group of, I think it's around 100 people who are actually piloting in their day-to-day jobs in the organization, the use of AI. I'm actually one of them as well, so I'm one of the guinea pigs internally. We've got actually quite a lot of activity going on to try and work out what are the best use cases for us across risk, finance, the front office, understanding our data. There are so many exciting areas that we can get involved in, but yeah, no, it's a core part of what we will become. Thank you. You touched on this in the presentation as well with regards to the New York office opening up LATAM opportunities. We have a question here.
Which would you say are the most attractive markets in that region for you, do you think?
I think it's, I mean, there are a number of countries within that region of Central and Southern America that we can't deal with due to sanctions and other things. There is a number that we can deal with, and there are some exciting ones that we are dealing with currently, places like Guatemala, Bolivia, and to some degree, we're sort of dealing with places like Mexico as well that we have connection with. Now, we will go deeper into other countries. I visited Argentina beginning part of the year. I also visited Chile, and both of those countries, Argentina specifically, is coming out of a very strong period of economic rebalancing, and it's coming to a place in around October where its midterm elections will determine the opening up of that currency more globally, which is where we are positioned to take advantage.
Chile is another one where it's different. It's a much stronger economy than Argentina has been in the past, and there's a lot of growth there as well. We have some business that we're doing in that region already. We believe the U.S. office will allow us to be more present because of geography and time difference as well, obviously. It also allows us to be more connected because the main flows are between the U.S. and the LATAM region. That flow isn't just out of the U.S. into LATAM. It is the other way around too. There's a lot of flows of currencies that go straight into New York, for example, which also make that location quite valuable to us.
Thank you very much. We've got a question here, I suppose, about sort of capital allocation. The questioner basically says, "If you were to find an extra pound or dollar down the back of the sofa, where would you most like to invest it?" I think the meaning perhaps is, what is the best return on investment of that extra additional incremental capital? Where would it get most bang for its buck?
I think that we've kind of set that out already. We've already set out things like our AI strategy. We've set out the fact that we're growing in Abu Dhabi, in the U.S. Europe is starting to build out very, very well now. I think, look, obviously there are programs in place in terms of platforms and other IT-type investment that we are already doing. Therefore, having more money down the back of the sofa hopefully will allow us to accelerate some of those plans and deliver the revenue that comes from that. Also, as I said, the operational leverage that we get from the investments that we're making means we're not adding costs where we can keep the costs flat and ideally see the costs come down as we deploy some of these investments we're making as our revenue increases.
I think I wouldn't say there's something new that we need to do right now if we found an extra pound, James.
No, and that's exactly right. I will look for that extra pound down the back of the sofa though because that would always be a nice surprise. No, I think hopefully we're trying to do the right things already. Thank you. No, that's very clear. We have a question here about management incentives. Are incentive structures designed whereby there is alignment with shareholder interest and/or management are able to have a good level of, quote unquote, "skin in the game"?
Yeah, I think there's two parts to that. I think there's the regulatory side which says what we're allowed to do and how that works. There's also the fact that there's a regulatory requirement for certainly myself and James as Executive Directors of the company to hold a certain amount of shares. All these things are in place and they are pretty standard. There's no non-standard part to it. We also incentivize our staff obviously below the board level quite extensively. Certainly, the Executive Committee is very aligned to pretty much the same performance criteria as James and I are. One below that is also something that we are introducing, specific incentives that build on our profitability and revenue generation over the next period of time.
I think that we feel that we have over and above our normal reward mechanism of bonuses and pay, that we have additional elements that align well with what the shareholders are looking for and align with our plans. Over-delivery is what we are trying to incentivize. We're not incentivizing standard delivery. That's already taken care of. For us, you know we would like to see an acceleration of profitability come through that incentivization. If that happens, people get rewarded for that.
Thank you. I'm conscious of time, but there's a lot of questions coming in, so I think we've still hopefully got time for another two or three. One question says, "Which competitors do you come up against most often?
It's a really interesting question because in my travels, certainly over the last year or so, I've not actually come across any. I think downstairs in our trading floor, we see more of that, and there'll be a number of people out there that will be quoting various currencies. Some of them do some currency, some of them do other currencies. I think we are one of the broadest out there. Stonex is one of our sort of known competitors, but from what I understand from my trading floor, they don't come across them that often. It isn't that they don't, they do come across them, but not as often as I would have thought either. In some of the currencies that we're dealing, we can be sometimes the only people that are doing it.
That's why, as we've said in the past, the UNHCR, for example, and other UN bodies use us quite extensively in some of the currencies that really people are not dealing in at all. I think that specialism is very important to us, and the question is a good one in saying, actually, the lower the number of competitors that we see up against us, the more we should, the more that validates that we're doing the right business because we are very much a specialist in emerging market currencies. If we're up against people quoting euros and dollars and yen for another developed currency, then we're probably in the wrong space.
I can just add a little bit to that as well because I mean, I spent 20 years of my career building emerging market banks in Asia, Africa, the Middle East. I think what's true is that over time, a number of providers into emerging markets have reduced their focus on the markets that we've served consistently throughout. I think that there's a real opportunity for us to step into that space, which is pretty exciting. I think the other thing as well, and Neeraj and I spent a fair amount of time on the presentation talking about how we are not just a pure transactional business. We are looking for building long-term relationships and providing solutions. I think when you go from transactional to solutions, transactional, yeah, there's a market price and there's competitiveness. When you're looking at a solution, I think that's when you really differentiate yourself.
Thank you very much. Indirectly related to competition, there's a question here saying, "Does the Visa last mile product risk cannibalizing some of your fintech business? Are you competing with them?
No, not really. I think the reason that we have specifically partnered with Visa is that we have a choice, and the choice was, do we invest in creating what Visa has and going into all of those different currencies and jurisdictions and all the rest of it, way beyond where we have been in the past, or do we partner with them? That question had to be answered before we entered into that partnership. What we found was that that Visa partnership would enter us into more currencies more quickly than if we tried to do all of that heavy lifting ourselves. Not only that, it was a much cheaper route to getting there than trying to develop a load of IT systems change that would then get us to that level of complexity and delivery.
We have demand for it, this B2B2C type business, especially from our international development organizations, and therefore being able to do it more quickly meant we have a quicker route to revenue generation. All of those things taken together make the decision to use Visa rather than do it ourselves a clear one, really. James?
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I think the other, dare I say, cool thing that we're doing at the moment is we have a technology in the organization that allows for smart routing. In other words, our technology is able to deploy the most cost-effective route to market for our clients. That actually is proprietary. That is really interesting. The ACH rails are part of that. Thank you very much. A question here on Helios, still owning a large stake. Could you describe their involvement in the business and any color on your view on their potential intention longer term?
Yeah, so Helios have two board members on our board. Obviously, they're not independent, so they are non-independent board members. We have a very close relationship through them, and we don't know what their intentions are regarding their shares. I mean, that's for them, like any other shareholder. They are treated like any other shareholder. You know, we are a listed company, and you know there is a very clear Chinese wall between those that are on the board and the rest of Helios and its investment business. From our perspective, we have a very strong and good relationship with Helios. They will have to decide at what stage they wish to divest from their shares and who they wish to sell to and all the rest of it.
The point is that we deal with them very much like any other shareholder, and all shareholders are just as important as they are. Clearly, they have had that holding and stayed stationary since IPO. That isn't abnormal, but you know let's see what happens in the future. Ultimately, what has happened post-IPO that all the shareholders know about is the change in both in the share price, but also in the market itself doesn't really lead to many people wanting to sell immediately if you look at their in-prices. That's their decision. I mean, for every shareholder, it's up to them to decide when and how they would like to sell or buy shares, and we're very happy with our relationship with all our shareholders.
Thank you. Maybe one final question here with a question that says, "I'm certainly not an expert in all things crypto, but we do read a lot around transfers using crypto and increasing use of stablecoins and others. Is this something you have on your radar and are looking at? Could it be an opportunity? Could it be a threat or maybe a bit of both?
Yeah, I think it's a really great question because it is both. It is a threat and it is an opportunity. We've been working on how we might involve ourselves in specifically stablecoin because when we look at the markets we're in, we support an awful lot of commodity trading. That commodity trading can be done much more efficiently from what I've seen through, what do you call it?
Blockchain.
Blockchain. That blockchain would use the stablecoin as the point in which it transfers value from one party to another. That happens instantly, and it also happens extremely cheaply. That is something that I think is a very attractive thing for the markets that we're in and is something that I know that those markets, when I go and speak to them, especially their central banks, are very interested in. We see that as something that is an opportunity for us. I say we are working on that. As we see that becoming more regulated, I think that we will definitely be looking to see how we can get involved. The other side of it is that we're not involved and will not be involved in what is termed crypto, which is a very different offering.
What we need to be much clearer about is the market understands the difference between a stablecoin and a cryptocurrency and the fact that, you know, where our bread is buttered is on the stablecoin side and how that works with a blockchain with commodity trading and all of the things that surround it. At the end of the day, yes, these things are, these are digital currencies, but they do start and end with normal currencies. Those currencies have to be loaded up or they have to be brought onto those platforms, and then they have to be brought out of those platforms. Those are areas in which we can take part too.
Interestingly, we have, and we made this point in the presentation, that normally all the crosses of currencies we have are with other, you know, well-known currencies like US dollar, sterling, and all those kinds of things. We have introduced that every one of our currencies can be crossed with RMB, which is obviously a very important currency, especially when you look at Africa. That's one thing. It isn't difficult for our system to also create crosses with stablecoins.
Right? So.
are things that we are looking at that could be very interesting in the shorter term as we develop our views on stablecoin as something that we involve ourselves in with our customers in the more medium term. That is kind of, these are all the kind of things that our technology and operations people are heavily involved in right now.
Great question. I think that's a very interesting place to leave things. I think we've covered a lot of ground as well today in the presentation and in the Q&A. If we didn't get around to your question, please reach out to us at Equity Development. We're happy to pass your query on or to contact the IR team at CAB Payments Holdings PLC directly. As I mentioned earlier, please look out for a feedback form hitting your inboxes shortly. It just leaves me to thank our viewers for listening and to thank Neeraj and James for the presentation and the time you've taken to answer investor queries directly in this forum. We look forward to hearing from you again hopefully in a few months' time.
Thank you very much.
Thanks all.
Take care.