Thank you, everybody, for joining this call, this Q1 presentation for the 2024 results. The plan is to keep this presentation in approximately 30 minutes, including any Q&A session at the last part. I am Leif Arnold Thomas. I'm the Group CEO of Huddlestock, and I will go through a slide deck that has also been announced earlier today through the exchange system. So, let's just start. Let me see. Here it is. Make it a little bit bigger. Here it is. Good.
Okay, Q1 2024, after 3 acquisitions during 2023, it's a quite different group this quarter than last year, but for shareholders that has been in the company for several years, it still is the Huddlestock group that is developing. Today in Q1 2024, Huddlestock is a company with a profitable and growing consultancy business within the financial services area, and also a tech business in what we call Investment- as- a-S ervice, with a great potential. I'll come back to both of these parts.
To sum up a little bit about Q1, if we start with the top line and the revenues, the revenues in this quarter, Q1 2024, ended up on NOK 20.6 million, and that's an increase of 24% from the Q1 in 2023. So that's a good increase, of course, and much of it is driven by acquisitions, as everybody knows. If we would like to compare, as I would like to compare a little bit about apples and apples, we could look on the Q4 2023 compared to Q1 2024, because except from some revenues from Huddlestock Solutions in Q4, it's very much the same. And there we can see that the revenues are quite steady from these two quarters.
When it comes to profitability, EBITDA is something that we are measuring, and the EBITDA this quarter ended up in -NOK 3.8 million, compared to NOK 2.4 million last year. But again, back to apples and apples, I would like and emphasize the development from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024. And if you look at the EBITDA on those two quarters, it has been an improvement with approximately 50%. That is, of course, very satisfying to see and is very much driven by substantial lower operating costs that I will also come back to. As I said in my start of the presentation, we are very happy to see that we have a profitable consultancy business.
The consultancy revenues are going a little bit up and down from quarter to quarter, dependent on season, summer, vacation, holidays, and so on. This quarter, we have had much to do with from all the consultants and no holidays, and that has ended up with a very, very good quarter for us within the consulting business. Also, if you look at the margins, which in this quarter was 26%, that is very satisfying to see. In parallel, we're working with the Investment-as-a-Service business area, and that's our technology. We are investing in the system. We are doing tweaks, we are doing adjustments so that it can be used in other markets.
Which, for one example, is the launch of the fund trading based on Bricknode technology in the Norwegian market in the end of the quarter. That is a big milestone for Huddlestock, because then we are starting to demonstrate that the technology that was acquired in April last year from Bricknode is now being rolled out in the Norwegian market, and fund trading is the first thing. So even though it has taken some months to come there and be able to launch fund trading to the first Norwegian client, then now it's easy to roll it out to other similar clients.
Except from different deliveries on the financial sides and customer side, the Q1 has been a quarter with a lot of changes within at least the management group. I took the position as the Group CEO, February the first, this quarter. We have a new CFO, Morten Bernhardsen, that came in in Q1, and we have also done some adjustments within the management group. So that Daniel Risberg is now appointed as the Chief Commercial Officer with special focus on the Nordic region. And Robert Fuchsgruber, which has been and still is the country manager for Germany, now is fully focusing on the German and the Central European market. So this is very much focus, focus, focus.
Stefan Willebrand, which many of you already knows, is appointed as Chief Information Officer, and that includes the technical side, but also a more responsibility on how to make sure that the technology is being adjusted to the business needs and the client needs. So a little bit broader role than he had before, so I'm very happy about that he accepted that position as well. When it comes to the financial sides, after the quarter, I think it is important to mention that we yesterday announced that we closed a convertible loan of NOK 2.5 million.
And that is exactly what we need on our roadmap going forward, developing this business, first of all, to get it EBITDA positive, of course, but even more important, to build a foundation for a growing, an attractive company for the years to come. On the right side of the slide here, you can see the development of what we call LTM, the last twelve months, revenue, looking twelve months backwards and where we are. Going out of Q1, we see that we have a LTM of approximately NOK 90 million, which is demonstrating that the growth is still valid.
But even more important perhaps is to look at the recurring revenues, where we definitely have a target of having that as much as possible of the revenues, because the recurring revenues are really valuable to us and the investors, I would expect. In the end of Q1, that target figure reached almost 50% of the total revenues, and that is also very satisfying and in line with the plan that has been built and made some time ago, and that is still very valid. Huddlestock, the group, we have two main legs.
We have the technology leg, which we call Investment-as-a-Service. An Investment-as-a-Service platform is a way for us to give our customers access to both investment tools and services, so that they can fully concentrate on building their business within the investment area. And the main revenue model of that service is the recurring model with licenses and transaction fees and of course also dependent on assets under management or administration. The other important leg for us is the consulting services. The revenues is approximately 50% or even more of our total top line. That is a business that is steadily growing. It's profitable, it's very much project-based and of course dependent on consultants.
So it's a business that are steady and good, but not that scalable in the same way as the technology business. We do have clients within the consulting business, which have been there for many years, with strong brand names, and we have long contracts with these clients. So I think that we have two very interesting legs of this company: the steady, profitable consulting business, and the technology business with a big potential as we see it. On the customer side, we of course have different types of customers, but to try to put them in two categories, we have the incumbent clients, that is, clients and organizations which have an existing business.
They typically earn money. They typically have a good brand name, and everything is good, but they also need to renew themselves and provide new products and services to their network. And many of these customers do have also a strong network, which is a big opportunity for us for distribution of our services. Typical for that type of customers, it takes longer time to get them, because they typically have some solutions from before and using more time and energy, they are more expensive also to get. But when you have them, they are a very attractive customer group. In the other end, we have the startups, new ideas, energized people with a lot of exciting visions and plans for the future.
Typically, it's shorter lead time, easier to attract them, and definitely they have a big potential. So that is also for Huddlestock, very, very important, and we experience that to deliver Investment- as- a- Service, that will say access to products and services and license, without them needing to invest a lot of money, is also very attractive. So these are the two main directions of type of clients, both with some exciting opportunities for us and also with their different ways of setting up their business. But we can have experience that we are able to serve both those client types in a very, very good way and with a very attractive service offering. We are in a market that we call reinforced growth market.
And what is that? Well, let me shortly explain. It's a mega trend that you see in most countries, that more and more individuals are coming to the market to place their money somewhere. It's driven by individual need and wish for taking care of some future situation. It could be after finished with work and being pensioners, it could be to save to some goals. It could be a home, a boat, or a car. And it's not only driven by the individuals themselves. Even as important is the government's interference in this process, because they are more and more also giving incentives for individuals to take care of their elderhood.
Meaning with more and more individuals in the investment market, more and more preferences are entering the market, and with more preferences, we see that it is making the space for more and more platforms, platforms that are directing their value proposition into specific groups. And with more platforms, then there is even more easy for new individuals to enter the market, and so it goes. And if you look at the statistics, also, and we have now looked at a Norwegian and Swedish statistics and compared 2018 with 2023, we see the same picture there. Number of private individuals are growing with 30%, during these five years, and if you look at the value of their holdings, it has grown with 100%.
We see that both the number of individuals that needs to be served and the assets and value of their holdings are increasing, which is a perfect match to where we want to be and provide our services to our B2B clients. On the right side, you see a number, 7,000 and 11,000 approximately, and that is a figure we would like to show because that is also important for us. We do have customers with a lot of clients on their own books, and we are serving these clients with our technology, and it scales well. But we also do have a licensed business within the group, meaning that we're able to have end clients served directly on our books.
Through our Investment- as- a-S ervice offering, Huddlestock Investor Services, we do now have approximately 7,000 end clients on our books, and since all these clients, or most of them, have more than one account, we have approximately 11,000 end client accounts in our systems. So that is another part of delivering services to the investors. So it is not only to deliver software as a service, it's also about to deliver the services directly into and using our license as well. After three... No, it's more six acquisitions, but the three last years, we are now present quite strong in the northern part of Europe, especially in the Scandinavian countries, but also with a big potential in the German market.
In Norway and Sweden, it's very much about to roll out and to attract the clients on our Investment- as- a-S ervice offering. From the Bricknode side and their history, we definitely have a strong position in the Swedish market, and now we are rolling out the same services into the Norwegian market with fund trading as the first one. What is important for us now is to continue to do the integration and the tweaks so that the standardized service platform from the Bricknode side also can be used in other markets. As mentioned before, we do have an important consultancy business with a strong position and foothold in Denmark and in Sweden.
And with that as a base, we have now started to explore how we can grow that business even more, still within financial services, but to explore if it could be developed geographically in other markets or within new business areas. So that is an ongoing work that has started and that we are really eager to see what we can get out of it, because we do have a very good consultancy business in our group already. When it comes to Germany, that is definitely one of the most important markets for us when it comes to potential. It is giant, and it is a much opportunities for sure. That said, it goes slow in that market, of course, I would guess many reasons.
We therefore are, of course, always investigating potential M&A opportunities in the German market to see if there are some opportunities that could get us even faster to the market. We did also announce an LOI with AVL in January. That is a very interesting and very exciting potential client. January is some months now from now, and it goes slow. So, we are having dialogue and talk and process with them, but the process is going a little bit slower than we had hoped for and expected when the LOI was signed.
This quarter, we have not announced any new customers of Huddlestock, but that does not mean that we are just sitting on our chairs and done nothing. We have done a lot of work internally to make sure that our products and services are working well for existing clients and new clients. And here are some examples of what we have done. Most of you have probably heard about the App Store, where you can go in and then and buy or get access to different apps.
Huddlestock is now added in Microsoft AppSource, which is a type of app store for developers, meaning that they can get access to our products and services and develop further the systems on ours. We have done the preparation to integrate for Norwegian bank payments, and that's an important part of the journey to Norway for the Bricknode system. We have integrated with the AvtaleGiro here in Norway, which is very much used and important part of the recurring saving plans, which is growing and popular. In Sweden, there's been a big change in the BankID system. If you want to be in the business, you need to upgrade. Nothing more exciting than that.
But if you do not do that job, then you are having a problem. So that is also something we have done to make sure that we are in line with market requests in the Swedish market. And we're also working a lot with automation of fund trading and ETF trading. So this is a little bit top of the iceberg of product and integration deliveries done in the Q1. All of it to support, to take care and grow the business in Sweden, and of course, also to grow the business in Norway, where the fund trading in Stack by.me is one example that was delivered in the end of the quarter.
Even though we do not have signed up any new customers this quarter, we did get a new client in 2023 called Nowo. It's a Swedish savings platform. They have been using now our technological solution for some time, and they are very happy with the deliveries from Huddlestock. My main message with why I take this example now in the presentation is because of their size. They do serve more than 100,000 saving customers, and that creates a lot of need for scalable solutions and technology that works with a lot of customers. In the Nowo example, with our Nowo client, we are demonstrating that our technology are...
is working perfectly in my eyes. So I think that this is a very example, and I'm happy to present that example in this quarterly presentation. So a little bit about the financials. We have been through some of it. The revenues are a combination of consulting revenues and recurring revenues, Investment- as- a- Service. For this quarter, isolated, we have a mix of 39% from the recurring revenue business and 61% from the consulting business. And all of it, also the consulting business, is about to implement and deliver a project within the financial service area. Then a little bit about the quarterly results.
Normally, it's about to, and we are doing it here as well, to do a comparison between Q1 this year with Q1 last year. And, that is why that is the main comparison. But since Huddlestock one year ago was a very different company than today, after several acquisitions and one divestment, we also would like to then show the development from the Q4 2023 and Q1 2024. Revenues, I have commented already, from Q1 last year to year, it's a nice growth of 24%, much driven by acquisitions.
If you look at the revenues from the last quarter until this quarter, it's quite flat, a little bit down, but then please remember that included in Q4 2023, also we had revenues, some of that quarter from Huddlestock Solutions, which are not included in the Q1 figures. The personnel costs are quite similar, a little bit down from last quarter, up from the quarter last year, and that's again, driven by more companies and people in the group. But what is important to, and I'm very happy to, to see that, is to, to report the development of the EBITDA. It has developed from -2.4 quarter last the quarter last year, until -3.8 this year.
But if you look at the comparison with Q4 last year until this, that will say this quarter compared to the previous quarter, it has been an improvement of around a little bit more than 50%. And that is mainly driven by the operational expenses that has gone down. Cash flow going into the quarter approximately NOK 10 million going into the first quarter. And costs on the operational side, that's personnel and development and not development, but maintenance. And we, as a technology company, has, of course, also done investment during the quarter. Financed through a loan primarily, and then going out of the quarter with approximately NOK 10 million also in cash.
Going forward, and since we do have a negative EBITDA, we need to have some more cash into the company to support the path we are on. Yesterday, it was announced that we have been able to raise NOK 12.5 million from existing shareholders in a convertible loan structure. That is very good, not unexpected. We have done capital increases before, we have done it now. We might do it in the future, I don't know. But then we have the finance and financing needed for what we need in the short and the mid-term period. So that is a very good way to continue the path where we are using brakes and the speed pedal at the same time.
We take decisions and take actions on initiatives and activities that have potential of increased profitable revenues and invest in the solution to secure that path. But at the same time, we have a strong focus on cost as the development in the operational costs showed in the previous slide. So it's in my opinion a controlled situation we are in with both ambitious and growth initiatives within the consulting business, within the Investment- as-S ervice business. We are focusing on marketing and sales but at the same time, in a way that is not jeopardizing this good foundation for a very promising and exciting business going forward.
The last funding is definitely also helping us on that path. To sum up, Huddlestock today, it's a company with two main legs. It's profitable consultancy business. It is another leg with what we call Investment- as- a- Service offering. That's technology and platform opportunities, where we can scale up with our products to a strong growing market. We see a big potential in Germany, even though the AVL LOI goes slower than we had hoped for. We have a very focused management in the group now, where our focus is, of course, to sell more of the services within both professional services and Investment- as- a- Service, the technology side.
With a focus on being even more efficient on the sales side, and also to see how we can continue, because we have started, but how we can continue to increase efficiency and enhance every structure we must have. And in combination with that, good cost control and cost reduction, I see that we are doing a lot of important activities that should end up in what we expect to be the EBITDA positive situation. So, that was the last slide. So then I can open up for questions, if you have any.
Excellent, Leif Arnold, that's a strong presentation, so, so thank you for that. We do have a, a question from, I believe it's David, and it goes like this: "Could you please tell us a bit more about your view on the company's pipeline of potential customers and product offering within Investment- as- a-S ervice, in the short and the long term? And where do you see the greatest potential in the full year of 2024?
Yeah. Let me start with pipeline. As I mentioned in the presentation, we have done also some adjustments now on the management side, and that is one activity also to make sure that we have an even more and stronger focus on building the pipeline. The pipeline is, in my opinion, strong and it is growing. The biggest challenge for us, that's also always irritating not to comment on more than I can, but we cannot comment, and we do not announce anything before it's signed. So the processes are sometimes things taking a long time and something it goes fast. So a general comment is that it's strong and it's growing, even though it's not visible. And then it was a question about...
Product offering-
Next
... within the Investment- as- a- Service. What, what are the products? Are there a growth in the product range? We are working on the Norwegianization of the product. Denmark-
Yeah
... needs tweaking.
Yeah, it's a very good question. Because if you're only looking for new opportunities, it's very easy to start to develop new stuff all the time. Because then you seem to be able to meet demands in the market in more places. At the same time, I'm quite clear that we need to be profitable, and the answer to be profitable is to focus on the most profitable products. Meaning that what we have done already in the Swedish market is to focus on the products that are most profitable and most well-used, and spend our resources on making them, these products, adjusted so that they can work in other markets, for example, the Norwegian market. That's the answer.
So focus on the products, not many more new, exciting products, and, and make sure that these products are sold and used and gives profit.
Excellent. Excellent, thank you. And then, a follow-up question would be how do you assess the outlook and the utilization rate for the consultancy business for the full year of 2024?
We do not guide. We do not guide. That's the answer, the most important answer. What we see and expect is probably the same as we have seen so far, that from quarter to quarter, it goes a little bit up and down. The direction so far is that it's had been growing steadily. And as you also probably saw or heard from me, we have now initiated also some work on how we can grow that business. So we have definitely ambitions, but I will not say anything about our expectations for the full year.
Thank you. As we are now 2 minutes over our allotted time, if there are no immediate questions, I think we should close the call. Are there any questions anybody would like to bring forward? I guess not.
No.
So-
Oh, yeah. No, okay, then, then I will say thank you very much for participating, you that are here now or the ones that are, are listening to this presentation, you know, on the recording afterwards. And thank you very much, and thank you for being shareholders in Huddlestock, and please do not hesitate to contact me or investorrelations@huddlestock.com or any other people in Huddlestock if you have questions. We are so happy to receive questions. It can be positive or negative. Everything is appreciated because it's important signals for us in the management to see and how we are perceived out there and what we should focus on. It could be more information, less information, yeah, anything. So please contact us. Thank you very much, everybody, for participating.
Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you.