I'm the head of corporate development at Huddlestock and also responsible for the investor relations. Meaning that if you have any questions about the company, you're always welcome to contact John Skajem, of course, the CEO, but also me, and all the contact information is available on the website. As you understand, this event is done in English, and the reason for that is quite simple. we have a lot of shareholders-
Shareholders.
-that are not, Norwegian, and to have it in English makes it possible for everybody to gain and get all the same information at the same time. That's the reason for that, and I hope that is okay for everybody, both here in the room in Stavanger, welcome to you, and to the participants on the web. This is an event where we have physical, shareholders in this room. We have shareholders online, we have a few presenters here in this room, and we have a few presenters online.
What we try to do today is to mix this together in a good way so that it will be a good presentation and where all listeners, if they are here online or are, they're looking at this presentation, when it's put as a record on the, on the web, to make it a good impression, we need to have some driving rules. What will happen is the following: this is an event which will start with the Q1 presentation. That will be done by the CEO John E. Skajem, followed by a short Q&A session. For questions from the audience here in Stavanger, you will be given a microphone so that you can say the question in the microphone.
For the audience that are online, there is a button on the bottom of the screen that says Q&A. Please use that button to type in your questions. When the Q1 presentation is finished, we will read through the questions, and those questions will be answered. When the Q1 presentation is finished, we go straight over to the more the Capital Markets Day part, and that consists of a couple of presentations for a some of the teams from the management group. For questions for that last part, please type that also into the Q&A button, and we will make sure that these questions are answered after the presentation. Either it will be done written, or we'll make a small video recording. The Q&A that will be answered today is connected to the Q1.
That's the plan and the setup for this session, and I will try to keep it together as good as I can, and I hope, and I guess, I've been told that this will go very good. With that said, I'll give the floor to John Skajem, the Group CEO of Huddlestock.
Thank you, Leif Arnold. good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 earnings release. It's been an exciting period, but one of the things that we thought also would be beneficial for everybody is to also have a Capital Markets Day, where we can go through some of our products, showcase what we have, and maybe everybody can start getting a better understanding for where we are. We thought it would be very beneficial to put these things together in today's session. Now, if you can only participate for part of it or whatever, it's gonna be taking roughly about half an hour for the Q1 earnings release, and then about an hour and a half with going through the products and the items we're gonna show afterwards.
I hope everybody can hear me well and see me well, and we'll get right to it. I use this machine to flip the switches, and we'll get right to it. The first quarter of 2023 has been very hectic. It's been a quarter where we have achieved many of the things that we said we were gonna do, and it has also been a quarter where we are continuing to progress and grow the business, and we do so by some of these highlights here. We'll get to the numbers, and we say that for the first three months of this year, we've had NOK 16.6 million in earnings, top line, and that's compared to NOK 9.1 million of similar quarter in 2022. It's a growth of about 183%.
We also use the term pro forma. This is because we have acquired some companies, and we then take all the revenues and the costs and everything in all of the companies we have acquired and put it into a pro forma number. On this pro forma number, we are now reaching NOK 25.3 million in turnover. For the clever people, you see that we're now just about NOK 100 million in revenues. We are making good progress, and this is compared to NOK 9.1 million in first quarter 2022. Now, obviously, the growth here is significant, and we can attribute most of it to growth in our products, growth in our clients and sales, but also, of course, massive amount of it comes from the acquisitions that we have made.
If you look at one of the key numbers for software as a service companies, it's what we call recurring revenue. That means the revenues that keep growing as we go along. More clients, more business, they grow steadily. We're now up to NOK 9.5 million in this first quarter, that's roughly NOK 38 million on an annualized basis. In the fourth quarter, just for comparison, we were at NOK 3.5 million. We've made a good progress in increasing our recurring revenues. Okay, that's the financial numbers. We'll get more into some of the others later on. As a business, our highlights for the first quarter was that we finally received the Finanstilsynet, the Norwegian FSA approval to acquire TRAC Services.
It's a regulated business under the Finanstilsynet umbrella, as a more than 10% owner, we are 100% owner, you need to have a approval of being fit and proper, we finally received that in end of February. We are now officially the owners of TRAC Services and Tracs Technology, we closed that deal in March. As a part of that deal, the Njord Group also invested another NOK 5 million into our shareholder base. We're very thankful for the support they are giving us, what we are doing is to continue to grow our business and make Trac Services the great company it deserves to be. We also acquired a company called Dtech.
Leif Arnold, which you just saw here, he comes as the CEO of Dtech is a software-as-a-service company, which are serving the pension market. This is a new, call it vertical for us, where we're now entering a new, set of financial companies that we can serve. It's not that we are entering the pension market. The pension technology, Dtech, is taking care of themselves, and the clients, Duvi, for example, is taking care of it. We provide the technology and the custody services, the wealth management parts. It's just adding another vertical of potential clients that we can have to our system. Therefore, Dtech is a very, very exciting business to be in. We get a little bit further into that later on. Huddlestock Solutions, that's our technical programmers here in Stavanger.
They have managed to get some very large mandates in the first quarter, basically, they're sold out of business for the rest of the year and well into 2024. We're very proud and pleased to see that they continue to grow, they are definitely delivering great products. Our consultancy division continues to be sold out as well. There's big demand, even though the economy is slowing down a little bit. We have long-term contracts, these contracts, they usually ,ast six months, 12 months, they're rolling over as we go along. We are now serving clients like Nordea, SEB, Handelsbanken, Swedbank, Danish Central Bank, to mention a few. We're very pleased to see that they continue to generate significant revenue for us, also good profits, they're serving clients very well.
The German market has been somewhat more affected than the Nordic space when it comes to the economic side of the business. For those that watch the news, we saw that they released their GDP numbers the other day, and this is the second quarter running that they are showing negative GDP, which means Germany is basically in recession. We continue to grow our business in Germany, and we see that the demand is starting to pick up again after a six-month period of somewhat slower pace. Right after the quarter was finished, we also acquired a company called Bricknode in Sweden. We will get back to that a little bit later on. With all these things, we have gained great colleagues and employees around the Nordic and the German space. We've gained lots of new, exciting clients and products.
Later today, we'll have Daniel speak about the product mix we have, that will be very interesting to see how the bag of products we now have is becoming more and more filled with the things that we really need to have with us. With all these technology people, the staff and everything, we're also capable of reducing our dependency of external consultants, for example, or external programmers and so forth. Now we're moving more and more of the activity in-house. That's beneficial for two reasons. one is that we have better control. Secondly, we also have lower cost. These are positive developments for the group. After the close, which means starting in April, I mentioned Bricknode. We focused on acquiring Bricknode, and we closed that deal on April the 4th.
I would say that we have signed some new clients. The first family office in Norway has now signed up, and this is also a new space for us. Now, we're able to serve even more and greater client base, so this is a milestone for us. A Swedish management firm, which do not want to be named, they want to stay anonymous, they have signed up and is going to be onboarded now in May. No, not in May, in June. We hope that they should start delivering revenues for us by mid-summer. Garantum Wealth Management, many of you have heard of them. They have also signed a contract with us, and we're working on onboarding them as well as we speak. Mentioned Bricknode a couple of times.
Focusing on M&A, we have done a lot of M&A lately. We're not gonna focus on M&A, other than making sure that all the M&A transactions and all the new companies we have gathered together is being incorporating the organization and that we continue to develop the organization so that we take advantage of all the situations that are out there. This is one of the things that we're working on very hard, is that we have developed a strong management structure. We have already had two management seminars where we have been together. We have learned the strength and the weaknesses for all of us. We have learned what are the key targets for us going forward. We have started to work very closely together.
I think this is maybe one of the most important things, is that we need to have a strong management team that can work together, play each other good and help each other out, and also challenge each other so that we do have progress going forward. We have come a long way with that, and on the next slide, we'll show a few of those little things that we have focused on. That is some of our key priorities for this year. We have tried to be simple in our list here, but key for us now is that we need to execute. We need to start continuing to make more revenues, serve more clients, get our products out there, and this is very, very important for us. What is the key things we need to do?
Well, we need to pick up the low-hanging fruit, the products that are available, ready to go in the marketplace. Here we are identified many new clients. We have just signed thre of them. There's more to come, and we're gonna focus all our effort on getting the low-hanging fruits on board and start using our products. We're gonna go to the medium-hanging fruits, and then by the end of the year, we're gonna go to the more, the greater, strategy. As we know, these sales processes do take time. People don't decide overnight that, "Oh, I want to switch technology system for my platform." It can take anything from three months-18 months to have somebody switch the systems. It's long processes, and therefore, we need to be quick and start the process as soon as possible. It's also, I mentioned streamlining the organization.
This is a key topic for us. We are working hard on creating a Nordic white label solution. We have a few technical development tasks ahead of us, and that is, one thing is that we do need to sort out a Norwegian tax reporting system. We need to connect our system to the VPS, for example, and BankID. We do have parts of our organization and technology already on BankID, but we need to get the big trading platform on BankID as well. We have our technical development tasks ahead of us, and we have it all streamlined and product planning. Our German operation is set to grow. We have excellent relationships, and we have live clients in Germany, but we need to grow the business there.
That's what we're doing now to make sure that we can, together with our regulatory business, also roll it out into Germany. That's part of extending the Norwegian and the German regulated business to all over Europe. At the moment, the German-regulated business is passported all over the European Union, while the Norwegian is basically covering all the Northern European part, including Belgium, Holland, Germany, and the Nordics. We also want to expand that to the rest of the EU. Ecosystem partners is also very important for us. We want to make sure that we focus on the things that we are good at and that we are gonna be good at, and then we have other people do what they are good at. That means we're expanding our ecosystem partners that we're connecting our system to.
For example, we don't want to be members of all the stock exchanges in the world, we then pick partners that are members of the various ones. For example, we're partnering up with DNB to execute on 60 different stock exchanges in the world. We have Baader Bank in Germany that can execute on 100 different exchanges and so forth. We focus then on partnering up with them so that we can serve our clients with the best possible solution that is available. For example, in Norway, you will not be able to have a financial services industry unless you're connected to BankID. We need to then partner up with BankID in one way or another to make sure that all our clients can utilize the system, and that's what we mean by ecosystem.
Okay, we have good visibility in the year 2023. I know somebody wanted to hear a little bit about some of the targets that we have set. We don't want to guide on what we're doing or not doing, but we have said a few things. We are aiming for having a top-line revenue in 2023 of NOK 100 million. As you can see in the first quarter, we are continuing to deliver on this promise, and if we continue to grow, we should overshoot this promise. The other thing is that by December, we want to be EBITDA positive, and I say by December. That means that the going rate of the business in December month should be positive on the EBITDA.
We're not saying cash flow positive, we're not saying bottom line positive. The reason being is that EBITDA, that's the operational side of the business. If you start talking about the technology company that's not gonna invest in technology, you will soon end up with old systems that's not state-of-the-art anymore. You always have to continue to invest in the technology, and that's, of course, being activated on the balance sheet, and therefore, it's below the EBITDA number and more part of the EBIT number. Anyway, we don't want to stop investing in the technology. Okay, the positivity of net profit, we are aiming for it, but we don't know exactly when we're gonna reach there. Obviously, we need to get there at some point soon. Okay. The numbers, again, NOK 16.6 million, EBITDA of -NOK 2.4.
This is the number that should be positive in December. Not fourth quarter, but in December. We will report on it. The total equity is NOK 111.3. Pro forma numbers, we're at NOK 25.3, EBITDA - NOK 6, and equity NOK 115.2. Sorry. I mentioned I was gonna get back to you with the Bricknode acquisition, and I really want to stress this. This is like a match made in heaven. It is absolutely perfect. They have what we don't have, and we have what they don't have in order to create a good system. Before we met Bricknode, we had alternative eco partners that would be able to serve parts of what Bricknode is doing for us. However, it wasn't controlled by us. It wasn't a part of our system.
Now that we have a full back-office system, or what we call portfolio management system, where we can onboard clients, we can receive funds, we can have the custody side for them, we can do the reporting from a tax purpose, as well as for a portfolio management system. Bricknode has about 30 clients, and they have some SEK 60 billion on their platform. We're talking about a significant business, and they fulfill the gaps that we had in our business. The other thing they have that we don't have great at the moment is the user interface, the front end of the business. We have all the engines and all the stuff on the, in the back, but they have also a front end, which is really good.
This creates a room in the middle where we have the trading facility, we have the regulatory umbrella, the licenses. We also have the operational people with back office, doing the physical settlement business and all these things. Now, with Bricknode, we are serving the whole space. I would say that the best part of all of it is this little note here, time to market. Time to market is now. We are now out there hustling to get the business on board, signing contracts, and that's what's gonna give us revenues. We, of course, have worked long term, so forth, but now with Bricknode and Huddlestock together, and of course, Tracs and Dtech and F5 IT and everything, we have now built a company that's robust.
We're delivering almost NOK 100 million in revenues on an annualized basis. We are in a position now to be absolutely the leader within Investment-as-a-Service for the Nordic space. We have ambitions to get there on a European basis. Yesterday, our dear Chairman, Mr. Øyvind Hovland, and I had a discussion with one of the largest infrastructure banks in Europe. They were excited about talking to us. They came to us. They want to have a partner that can help them with being Investment-as-a-Service. They don't have license to do investment banking, trading, asset management. They need somebody to do that. They have lots of clients. We're talking 15 million clients on their books. They are ready to take us as a part of their journey.
It shows that being Investment-as-a-Service with our group is a winning formula. A question I always get is, "Okay, what about competition? Who's out there? Who's hustling you?" There are a couple. There's one in the U.K., there's another one in Germany who offers parts of it, and there's a big one from New Zealand called FNZ, but they are a different league. They're not in our space. Other than that, there is none. There's competition in all the various parts of our business, but nobody that can deliver Investment-as-a-Service with all of the components. We have to execute now, and that's what we're talking about. Things can change in five years.
Bricknode themselves, they had ambitions to get the license and all these things because they saw that that is really a demand and sets you aside from everybody else. Here we go. We are now ready to execute on this, and there will be no excuses. No excuses, when we acquired Bricknode, we came up with a list over synergy effects on the cost side. I know this slide may be a little bit too detailed, but we wanted to promise you that we didn't just talk the big game and blah, blah, and synergies. Here is a list of what we have executed on already. We said NOK 10 million, we're at NOK 9.3 million, and there's still at least NOK 5 million-NOK 7 million out there that we are gonna capture.
We will report on this as well, how we're making progress. As you can see, we're now at 9.3, and they will have effect as of Q3 and Q4. Some will have effect in Q1 as well, but, you know, we are delivering, and we're going that way. On the revenue side, we have now come up to NOK 1.5 million in revenues. That is a part of the synergy effects between Bricknode and Huddlestock, and there will be more. We will report this as we go along, but for the time being, this is where we are. We have already signed the first client that is using Bricknode and Huddlestock services together. Show you the synergies that we're creating. Here are some other synergies we're gonna create.
We're gonna streamline the organization, and as you can see, this organizational chart is a little overwhelming. There's so many different companies, and each one of them needs to have accounting, they need to have audits, they need to have everything. That's why we want to organize it a little differently and take out the structure so that we clean it up, we merge companies together, and we have a more streamlined operation. Of course, there is certain companies that needs to be standalone. For example, our regulatory business needs to be a separate company, and we have technology development, I.P. rights companies that needs to also be a part of it. There will be reductions, but not completely.
Talked about organization. We have organized ourselves as in a matrix management style. This means that we have people that have specific responsibilities depending on functionality rather than where they're located. For example, Leif Arnold here, he's Chief Corporate Development. These are his responsibilities. He mentioned among them was investor relations. Another part that's also very important is corporate culture, change management, making sure that we're all on the same page, making sure that we're all focusing on creating this same team. Leif Arnold, he has big tasks ahead of him, and there's no better man to have it than him. This is our organizational chart with responsibilities. If you wanna look more into it, I refer to the PowerPoint on the web.
As a listed company, we are very thankful to all our shareholders, and particularly to you that are here physically today, but also to you that are on the, on the web. Without the shareholders, it will be difficult to have a company. We're very thankful, and we hope that we can satisfy your needs and your wishes as we go forward. As you can see, we are now about 1,400-1,500 shareholders. We have gained some large international groups as well. The Nordnet account on top is Swedish, Danish clients, and the big bulk of it is the Bricknode shareholders. Then you can see the rest of it.
We're starting to see tremendous interest from Germany, from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, of course. We are actually co-listed on the Gettex Exchange in Munich, Tradegate in Hamburg, Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt. We have now footprint in Germany as well. Monday, we have a meeting with something called OTC Markets Group, which is a listing company also in New York, which we will evaluate. America is not really a focus area for us, but they're in country, and they wanted to see us, then we can evaluate what they wanna bring. Shareholders is, of course, very important for us. I have talked before about our vision and our purpose of being here. Why should Huddlestock exist? That is because we want to democratize the access to the capital markets for everybody.
We wanna use modern technology of digital processes to make sure that everybody can participate. However, we're a B2B provider, and our clients have B2C, but we're gonna enable them to deliver the things that they wanna do. We're innovative, we're modular, or you can also have the full component, and we're collaborative, but also we're technology company. That means technology first. Here are the companies that we have put together in the group. I'll just do a quick little intro. Bricknode is basically the same as Huddlestock, trading, asset management, wealth management, technology solutions for back office, custody services, and so forth. F5 IT is now called Huddlestock Solutions, and that is a company that is doing technical development. They have developed Huddlestock Trader 2.0, for example. They are also developing other technical solutions for other clients.
Tracs is now called Huddlestock Investor Services, that is our regulatory business here in Norway. They do the back office, they do the custody services, they do the reporting, the settlement, and all these things. That is, in many ways, it's the heart and soul of our company 'cause that's where the real people are operating. This is really, really good. We have Dtech, who's serving the pension market with technology, we have Visigon, who are our consulting division. They are helping us with serving the clients, but also serving internal clients in onboarding and making sure that we have a greater steam at helping our clients to go live.
Mentioned before that our goal is now, at the moment, that everybody and every company and every things we do, is to have business as usual, continue to serve your clients, continue to earn your money, continue to develop your business. However, in four years' time, we're gonna be larger, and we're gonna all be focusing more on the Investment-as-a-Service concept. We're channeling everybody in there, but at the same time, we wanna make sure we keep up the revenue streams. We don't wanna cut off any revenue streams, we do not wanna cut off any of our clients that we made commitments to. This is kind of the important thing for us, is that we continue business as usual until we have gradually managed everybody over.
For those of you who have listened to me before, this is one of my favorite slides. In today's world, my good friend, Bill Gates, he says, "Banking is not, is necessary, but banks are not." The bank we talked to yesterday, they have just onboarded Renault Bank as a part of their structure. Renault in France. The three largest banks in Germany are Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler. Who would have known? They're not really banks, but they are banks. They serve millions of Germans. Here we go, Banking-as-a-Service, financial-as-a-service, and then we come in with Investment-as-a-Service. They can then add on more products to their client base, and that's what we do, and that's why it's so interesting to have all the bits and pieces that we have together.
This is a view of how you get through the factory. You have seen this before, but, basically, you can see here how all the pieces fit together so that we have now the whole specter of doing the business that we're in. Here's our products that we have in our toolbox when we're out. We're working hard on getting new ways of getting people onto these things, and for example, now we're serving family office. They will use the product we call Investment Manager, but they also can use Bricknode Broker, which is the back office system, the custody, and they can also use the Investor Services. We have now all the product tools that we need, and they are ready to be sold, and we're out there selling. Mentioned our ecosystem.
Here you can see how it has grown tremendously over the last quarter. Obviously, a lot of it comes from some of our acquisitions, where we're now partnering up with new people. The beauty here is that we allow people that have specialties that we need to serve our clients in the best possible way. We need to have them on board us, so that we can take advantage of what they're good at. We think that this is key to our business. Okay, a little bit more about the numbers. I'm gonna wrap it up relatively quickly, here you can see our numbers, how we're growing. 183% growth year-over-year from last year, first quarter to this year on the revenue stream, and then on the performance numbers, it's almost 200% increase.
Of course, with this also comes the backside, which is cost. Here we are also seeing growth, but here we also have the opportunity to now stop that growth and just focus on the revenue side. We think that the costing will be able to be controlled better in the times ahead. The EBITDA is a little bit more negative this time than last time, but we have plans, and we can control our business in a way so that we do believe that we're gonna reach our target of being EBITDA positive in December. Technology, here you can see the recurring revenue, how it's growing, and then on the consultancy side, we're also doing really well.
I would like to also say to our colleagues in the consultancy division, particularly the ones in Denmark, they have now set record months since November, December, January, February, and March. April was sideways, and now we'll see how May turns out, but they are punching above their limit. This is really good results for our Danish operation. Okay, I think I'm gonna wrap it up now. This is basically what we have to give, and I don't know, Leif Arnold, should we ask if there's any questions?
Just have to make sure that.
Are there any here that have any questions?
No.
No.
No. Any questions from the audience? Let's see.
If there's an interest in speaking to me or speaking to Leif Arnold, don't hesitate to reach out. I will stick around afterwards. We can sit down and talk a little bit for those that are present. For those that are on the web, feel free to call me, send an email or whatever is needed. Then we can communicate. We're open. We are what we want to called transparent.
Seems like no questions.
Okay.
Yeah, here's a question.
It's up there.
You can actually see it yourself. If you can read the question first, John, before you answer.
Yeah. The question from Daniel Swanberg is: When are the Huddlestock Trader 2.0 out in the market? The Trader 2.0, which you saw last time we had our presentation, is live and is functioning. However, it's not yet connected to our back office system, and we're also need to connect it to the VPS accounts. We're not 100% sure when it will be live, and you can actually go and test it in the market, but we anticipate towards the end of this year. Maybe it will be in first quarter next year, but around the end of this year, you will be able to have the Huddlestock Trader 2.0 and do your things. At the moment, we can do something we call slow trading, which is trading once a day.
For fund managers that are doing reallocation to their portfolios, they can use the trading tool and do so. For the active live trading in and out, it's not completely ready, 'cause we need to have the digital technology hooked up to VPS and BankID.
Okay, I cannot see any more questions here, but there are a lot of questions in the chat. Let's see here. How many? Okay, that's something else. Okay. I say thank you to John E. Skajem, and I will turn over the microphone to my colleague, Daniel Risberg, that will present himself and talk about a little bit on the, from the product side.
Yes. Can you hear me? Great. well, my name is Daniel Risberg.
Presentation modus.
I am responsible for the product division within Huddlestock. My title is CPO, Chief Product Officer, and I've been in several companies with similar roles before. I joined with Leif Arnold from the Dtech team. My part of this company will now to align all products that we are currently maintaining and developing. You saw this slide on John's presentation, and it shows you all the products and services, or business area, I would say rather, that we have within the group. My focus will be on the fourth upper ones. Major focus on the three upper ones, and but also the investor services, the regulatory business, because they are very much aligned, and that will make the magic happen.
First, on the first one, the Bricknode Broker, I don't know if you were attending on the last meeting we had, but that's the core system, the portfolio management system that will serve us in many ways. It's already in the market and has been so for several years, but what we are trying to do now is to align it with other services. We have the Trader solution, the first one, and the Trader 2.0 that John told us about earlier. Above that, as an umbrella, we can offer a wealth management solution or investment management solution that can, for instance, serve family offices with several custodians, and would like to aggregate all their values into one portfolio system.
That could be also sold as a separate product or service. On the fourth row, the Investor Services, I will come back to that later, but that will be the glue between everything above, and of course, we'll make it available as a service, the Investment-as-a-Service. Yes. What we have started up now, after all these acquisitions, we have collected all existing internal standardized products and services, and of course, all the partners, because they are all together creating the ecosystems that we are providing to the market. Then we are looking forward, okay, where are we going? To go there, what will be the missing parts? Because we need to cover some functional gaps, we need to mitigate risks, et cetera. Yep.
As is today, we can serve our clients in many different ways. What would make us unique, I would say, is that we have a lots of layers. If we start up with our core products, the software as a service products, for instance, the broker, trader, Investment Manager, but also we have the pension solutions from Dtech, we have a solution for lending, et cetera. They are all set in the middle. Then we can add features, services, et cetera, above that, including our solutions team, which they provides integrations, et cetera, as a layer above the core, the standardized solution that we can sell to many. Then we can add the back office operation from investor services.
if needed, we can also offer them the regulated business, and become an investor as a service provider. we can also, of course, offer loads from our partners. as John said earlier, we shouldn't focusing on things that other can do better. We should focusing on our core. For instance, Trapets or Additiv, Morningstar, Infront, et cetera, they are very good at things, we should join them. of course, this partnership should go both ways, we must make sure that if they are a preferred partner for us, we should be a preferred partner for them. this is the ecosystem that we are of course always evaluating, because there will be new needs, and there will be things changing.
I've added a few examples of client types that we can serve. For instance, the fund managers, asset managers of any kinds, that we can provide the whole value chain from the client, the client onboarding, et cetera, until the executing of orders, safekeeping, regulatory reporting, et cetera. This is the core of Huddlestock, I would say. If we move forward to the investor services, investor services are basically back office for hire and regulatory business that we can offer to our clients. We have offices in Stockholm and in Stavanger, they have bit different background, I would say, because the Stockholm team, they are based on the Bricknode Broker solution, the Stavanger team, they have external back office solutions.
I'll come back to that. We must, of course, deliver high-quality services, otherwise we're out of business in no time. The back office for hire could be sold as a stand-alone solution, of course, but it will make more sense if we can put it onto our regulatory business, our licenses, because then we will act in our own name, so to say more. We can take care of the client scale, compliance, and make sure that their business will scale. As I says, I said in the header, let the clients focus on their core business, and we can focusing on our core business, and our core business is this.
So that can make us a good vendor, we can make a scalable solution that's not possible for a small asset manager because they will need to have a staff redundancy, et cetera, so that they can cover for each other when they are on vacation, et cetera. It's not an issue for us because we have a team that can, of course, cover for each other, both functionally and on a knowledge base. Time to market, in this case, it means we can provide a solution which make it very, very easy for our clients to go from an idea to actually reach out to the market. They only need to have the client's base, actually, and we can take care of everything else.
Okay, so we have the core products, software as a service, and we have these Investor Services. If we combine those two, that will be the foundation of Investment-as-a-Service. It will also give us many other benefits. I would say that the main issue for an Investment Services as we have or any other, is to make it scalable, because there will always be a need of hands and heads. If we can optimize processes, then, of course, we can reduce risk, we can reduce bottlenecks, et cetera. That's possible when we own the infrastructure. It's, of course, we can demand, and we can send requests to our other suppliers to, "Please, can you do that?" It's not the same thing as we do it ourself.
We can make processes to streamline our services, which also could be sold as a feature to our other clients. It will be extremely win-win situation, I would say. On the other hand, benefits for the core products, yeah, the most obvious one, we can offer our service to other clients. But we will also be more sticky because the operational team, they will be like colleagues to our clients. We will have the knowledge, we will be in their day-to-day activity, day-to-day business, et cetera. At least, from my point of view, this is a relationship that is much harder to break than if we're just providing them with a SaaS solution.
We will also receive good know-how and domain knowledge provided by this team, of course. They can provide us with requirements because they will always have an ear on the market and regulatory changes, et cetera, and they can make sure that the products are qualified. Yes, one important thing as a product provider or as a tech guy, is to make sure that the things that we develop will suit the market and the users well, so that we don't provide the from the inside out, because we will always have a sanity check from our team. This is the way that a user would like to do it. This is the way that we should take care of a core protection, et cetera.
Okay, moving forward, okay, we need to sell what we have, as John said earlier. We have great products, great services that are already out there, and we have a lot of prospects just calling us to have a next step meeting. Of course, we should take care of them at the first step. We must, of course, harvest the fruit of our attractive bundle. Software as a service and licensed services as a product. We have already received prospects on that, both in Sweden and Norway. That will definitely be an easy next step.
If this is the short term, I would say that this is the medium term to adapt our services to new regions, because we have to align with the regulatory rules, taxes, et cetera, and we must make sure if we need to set up a subsidiary or something like that in our new regions. The long term, of course, we need to always focusing on what will happen next, because my role here is, of course, to make sure that we have a product portfolio that aligns with the market request, but we must always be ahead of the market, of course. We need to at this moment, prepare for the next generation, and that is already happening.
If we started here with the existing products, we have a roadmap moving forward, and we have a lot of stones that we need to put on. Everybody who has built a tower like that need a strong foundation, and that foundation is Huddlestock. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Daniel. We will now go forward to... Oh, no! Okay. Just a sec.
You're back.
Let me see. I'm back? Yes. Good. Thank you very much, Daniel, and we'll now go forward to our next presenter. That's Robert, is situated in Germany. He will present himself, and he is one of the presenters that are not presenting from here. I'll now do a switch over to the Zoom and give the word over to Robert. One sec.
Can you all see me and hear me? I just needed a quick. Okay, good. You can see and hear me. Very good. Wonderful, good day to all who are in Stavanger or listening to us online. My name is Robert Fuchsgruber. I'm responsible for all sales and commercial activities at Huddlestock. Besides that, I'm also co-CEO of our German unit, the Huddlestock GmbH, together with John, and work for the group also today here from Munich. Warm greetings to all from sunny Munich. I have almost two decades of experience in the securities business, and it's really particularly exciting at the moment to see how this business is changing and what opportunities are arising, especially for us. Let me share my screen now. I hope you can see that.
Yeah, I think you can. Yeah, please allow me to first take a brief look at these changes I was talking about, and what's happening in the market, and then turn to Huddlestock and our sales and commercial activities. I'd like to talk about how what we have now, what we have now in terms of products and solutions, you just heard that from Daniel, fits the needs of the market. If we have a look at the European markets, this is clear to see at the moment, we have seen continuous growth in the securities business for a number of years. Assets under management are growing steadily. Yeah, we see UK, France, and Germany as the largest markets.
With the Pan-European market, with EUR 35,000 billion assets under management, there are a lot of opportunities for the industry and, of course, for us. What else can be observed is that the share of retail investors is also growing steadily. If you look a little bit closer at these private investors, there are some trends that are interesting from my point of view. Next slide. Yeah. Forgive me for choosing Germany as an example, but on the one hand, this is my home turf, and on the other hand, I believe that these developments can easily be transferred to the whole of Europe. I think there are three notable developments here.
First, never before have so many people have been invested in equity-based investments. Secondly, the younger generations, in particular, are discovering, trading, and investing. We have a clear development here in Germany, and I think all over Europe. Third, people are investing mainly in mutual funds and ETFs. Of course, this overall, yeah, pleasing development is no coincidence. Here you can see some factors why this is so. As you all know, nowadays, everyone has easy access to financial news, research reports, or communities that allows to make more informed investment decisions. The reason for this is the technological developments of the last 10 to 15 years. The internet has done a great job here.
We had little or no interest for many years. Even minus interest had to be paid. This has led people to turn to alternatives investment options, such as stocks and mutual funds. Yeah, as pension systems in many countries no longer deliver what was promised, and we have that problem, especially here in Germany, there is an urgent need to build up individual pension provisions. For this, too, the capital markets are the best long-term option, and of course, online platforms offer increasingly low cost or even zero cost trading, simplified investment options, and user-friendly interfaces that make the whole thing affordable, understandable, and easy to approach. That these developments, I would say, have put pressure on the traditional players in the market in many places.
These players have to rethink their fee structures and reduce costs. At the same time, it is a matter of improving their technological capabilities to meet the expectation of the modern investor. The younger generation, as I said, in particular, expect more flexibility, more transparency, and the control over their investment decisions. In addition to that, the legal requirements have risen sharply, I would say, and these must also be handled efficiently. That means these players need to adapt and innovate to continue to be successful. Many as far as I can see, many banks and financial service providers have taken initial steps to meet these requirements, but there are factors that hinder these efforts.
First of all, and I think this is the most important point here, is there are legacy systems and infrastructures almost everywhere that cannot be easily adapted to newer technologies. In my experience, many banks, not to mention all banks, would actually have to reinvent their entire IT and build it up newly in parallel, and then replace the legacy systems. But nobody does that because it's too expensive and at the end, too risky. I also hear from many institutions that necessary digitization investments have to be postponed again and again. I know that from my own experience, because the ever-new regulatory requirements have to be implemented first. The insiders among you know what I'm talking about. I'm just mentioning terms like MiFID II, GDPR, Basel III, EMIR, you name it.
These are or were money and resource-eating projects. Banks and financial service providers might be more hesitant than others when it comes to adapting new technologies because they have concerns about security, privacy, operational risk, and so on. Of course, we could talk about traditional organizational structures that do not always provide an environment that suits rapid innovation and agilities. At the end, they are supposed to invest when, at the same time, the margins in the business keep shrinking and shrinking, and they have to compete with new players in the market. All in all, this is not an easy situation for traditional banks or traditional players. And here come the good news, we can help these players overcome almost all of these hindering factors.
Except for the issues around organization and culture, the Huddlestock Group can help and support. When we talk to market participants who have been on the market for a long time, we can say, "You don't have to redevelop anything. We have existing solutions to your problems that can be easily connected via API." Our solutions comply with current regulatory and legal requirements, and therefore risk requirements. We can help meet your customers' needs by doing the-- My colleague, Erik, is always saying, "By doing the boring stuff, reliably and efficiently in the background, while you can develop a unique customer experience with a modern front end." If you don't want to develop the front end yourself, we can do that too.
With our solutions, we can make your work more efficient and your offer more attractive and therefore more competitive. On top of that, I think we have modern and fair pricing models built on a spirit of partnership. If that is not a good fit, I don't know what is. This is also important for me to say, we can do all this not only for the existing and traditional market players, but for anyone who has access to their own customers and wants to make them an offer in the area of trading and investing. For example, we can address and serve financial portals, liability umbrellas, asset managers, IFAs, you name it. There are many, many areas in which we can and will be successful with our offering. I'm totally confident about that.
Of course, you may ask now why I am so confident with this when we are certainly not the only ones who have recognized these developments and the resulting consequences, and of course, are building also corresponding offerings. Well, there are several reasons for this, for my confidence. First of all, I think we were smart with our decisions to gather solutions and know-how through M&A activities. John told you everything about that. I think being small will not help the market, and it's certainly difficult for two small market participants to survive. The past has shown that often enough, especially in the fintech environment. Therefore, I really would like to express my thanks in the direction of our board and John and the rest of the management team.
The bundling, or call it huddling, of authors and forces within the Huddlestock Group was, from my point of view, super good and very, very helpful to fulfill our ambitions. What's more, yeah, the way we have set ourselves up now, I think we can increase our speed. There are 100 of us now, and we will continue to grow. Of course, more people can do more and reach goals faster. Yeah, we have great technology that we still need to merge at one point or another, but with our product and services, we cover the value chain from front end to trading engine, to back office solution, to custodian services, plus licenses.
With the solutions we have now, we can be at the customer site very, very quickly, in brackets, if no individual adjustments have to be made. We want to deal with our customers as partners, fairly and at eye level, I would say. We know that we are in the same boat, and that's how we want to behave and work together. This combination of outstanding technology, everything from a single source, speed, and partnership-based setup is, in my view, unique to the market or on the market, and will give us a competitive edge. On the sales side, we can and will now make more of everything. We will increase our outbound sales activities, launch the appropriate marketing activities to build the brand, and increase inbound leads as well.
Yeah, to show you what we are currently doing, here are some specific examples of our current sales focus. That focus is as far as our software as a service solutions are concerned, on corporate finance companies, on small and medium brokers, and on wealth managers without safekeeping. Just to show you, we have identified the relevant target groups now, the corresponding target markets, and the solutions on our side that fits to their requirements. Similar to the Investment-as-a-Service area, we will focus there on fund companies, on fintechs or tier two to four banks that currently do not have an investment offering. That area, the Huddlestock licenses will come into play in addition to our technology solutions, sorry.
In summary, I can say for the moment, we have marketable products. We will continue to bring that products to the market, and we will add more and more of our solutions over the next few months. John and Daniel have told you about that, and thus, be able to serve even more customers and regions. For now, the focus is clearly on the solutions and customers that I just showed you. Another focus, and I would like to end my remarks with this. Another focus in the sales and commercial team is to optimize our marketing tools, and here I'm talking primarily about our websites and our activities on social media. As you may have seen, we relaunched the Bricknode website in April.
This was done deliberately, I would say, even though Bricknode was already part of the Huddlestock Group at that time, because we want to leverage the awareness and the power of the Bricknode brand for the time being. Basically, however, we are in the process of working out a concept that we will then present to the ExCo and the board for a decision on how we will deal with the issue of the brand in the future. We have five brands that needs to be reconciled, and the trick or the art will be to act as one brand in the future, but not to lose the advantages of the other brands. I'm pretty sure that we will find a good solution for that.
We have also completely redesigned the Huddlestock website, and I expect the launch of the new website before the end of June 2023. Be excited. I think we have developed something really cool and modern. We have also started to increase our social media activity, especially on LinkedIn. There's a lot more going on here, and we are going to do that. Last but not least, we are working internally to bring our sales tools together, so for example, the CRM system or the social media tools. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we have initiated a lot. We have a lot to do and are full of verve, I would say, to achieve more, much more for the group and for our shareholders and our investors.
Thank you very much for your attention, and now I hand over to our CTO, Stefan. Thank you.
Thank you, Robert.
Now.
I will go ahead and share my screen. There we go. Stefan Willebrand is my name. I'm sorry that I cannot be in Stavanger today. I spent the last 20 years, I would say, on the 1st of June, being in Norway for the general opening of the salmon fishing season, but my schedule doesn't permit that today, I'm coming to you online.... I've now assumed this role of the CTO of the whole group, and from the start, I was also the originator of Bricknode. I want you to give you a little bit of details around what we're doing on the tech side of the business. As we have been talking about, we are really three legs within tech of Huddlestock.
We have the products and services, we have the solutions, as we call them, and we have consultancy. Within the product and services, that is where the software as a service businesses lie, and also what we call the B2B brokerage or the Investment-as-a-Service. Everything that is trying to generate recurring revenues and that are products owned by Huddlestock is located within that area. Within the solutions area, that's where we do custom applications and custom product development. For example, we have a lot of customers within the product section with the source business that needs or wants their bespoke customer portals, for example, like a customer front end, that should be very specific and offer a specific customer experience. Now, with joining together with Huddlestock, we actually have a division that can also provide that.
The solutions area works very, very efficiently within their own silos, so to speak, to deliver these sort of solutions. On the consultancy side, we're providing competence to customers and can actually be out and help with customer issues and work there for the long term. This kind of joins together the whole value chain of what we are offering in a very, very nice way. The main value that we have from the tech side, I would say, is the domain knowledge that we have. It is very easy today to find the technologically, you know, the tech competence. Everyone has access to the internet. Everyone can do the same courses, get the same education, basically.
When it comes to the domain knowledge, that is where the whole value is, and that is where it's very difficult to find competence. It takes years and years to gain that. By having that and combining that with the tech skills, we can create a lot of innovation. One of the things that I'm from the Bricknode side is most proud of that we have is an invention that we did within our transaction layers, which we call dimension-based transaction layers. This can only basically be invented if you know the domain by heart, and then you can combine that with your technical skills. That is the main value that we are building up and that we have in Huddlestock.
People and the team members is the most important asset, I would say, that we have. We have a mission to get, what I would say, three user types to really love what we build, and it's usually a very big challenge to cater to one user type. Here we have three different ones that are very, very different. First off, we have the admin worker, who just wants automation and basically no software. They would just like everything to be done automatically and not really have to do an interaction with any manual software. That's one user type to cater to. We have the active investor and the wealth manager, who are really want to get the software tools and wants to be able to do a lot of great things and interact with stuff.
That's a whole different sort of requirements. Then we have the passive investor, and they just basically want the end result, which are profits and good returns. There we are mostly focusing on providing reports and an easy way to interact with that end result. We're trying to then focus on each of these areas to make sure that we have a strategy for each user type. Since Bricknode now came into Huddlestock in April, what have we then done? First off, we've been focusing a lot on the internal systems. To be able to do stuff externally and really perform and scale, we need to have very, very streamlined and good internal system that can also scale.
We put in a lot of effort into that, and that is a huge task that usually takes half a year or something when you join together different operations. I would also say that the different silos within Huddlestock have very, very good systems set up for themselves. We're kind of combining these different components and have established kind of a management organization layer on top that can tie all this together. That is the first thing that we focused on. We then came into alignment around our roadmap. As we said, we have the Trader 2.0, for example, within Huddlestock. We have Bricknode Broker, Bricknode Lending, and all that stuff in Bricknode, and also the Investment Manager, as I showed you a little bit about in March.
We've been aligning that together and are now putting together the roadmap for when to launch what. That is also a big task, which we've made a lot of progress on. While doing this, we have also been able to continue to ship products and ship projects that we've done, both in the product area, service area, and the solutions area, and the consultancy side. It has been business as usual, so we've been focusing on business continuity through this whole process, which has also been able to actually do that in record time, I would say. We're really, really proud of that. That's a big, big feat that we managed to do. Also a few words around how we, on the tech side, structure our teams.
I'm not really a believer of doing it on a functional basis, but rather on a per product or domain basis, because you need to be able to become an expert within your domain, and we have many domains within Huddlestock. For example, we have one, what we call platform team. They deal with the technical underlying things that needs to work, like, for example, how to manage the subscriptions that our customers sign up for, and how do we deliver all the stuff in a common way. That's a platform team. We then have a broker team, which focuses on Bricknode Broker and that domain within money management and so on. There we have a team that is highly focused on that. We have a lending team that is, you know...
Everything is based on the same core, you still have a lot of differences between these different domains. There's different terminology, different ways of interacting with processes, and so on. We need to have different teams for that, and we're small still, but as we grow, we try to round out these teams so they can actually be working independently in a way and just interact through clear interfaces. We also have the Investment Manager team, which we have been showing a little bit about, and we have the Huddlestock Solutions team. We build up these teams in manageable chunks, I would say. There's a certain number of people that should go into each team and make them autonomous, so they can really perform on their own. As CTO then, I see my main responsibilities as, first off, it's the team.
Develop the team, put a lot of education into the team to make them into experts in the domain. The technical competence is certainly there, and we need to expand that as well. The main piece is to have the domain knowledge together with the technical competence. Team is the first order of priority for me. It's optimize and the allocation of resources, both when it comes to team members and the technical things that we have. That's another piece of another responsibility that I have. Ensuring scalability and continuity. Everything has to be able to scale in an affordable way. It's always easy to throw more hardware on the problems, but that becomes very expensive, and at some time, it kind of peaks.
Everything needs to be then scalable and ensure that it is operating in a safe manner. We also need to put in well-researched designs. Every time we build something, it's very easy to do something quick, and then you end up in a kind of in a dead end, where you cannot really. You need to redo stuff or build it differently. If you really dig down into the problem and find out how it interacts with the whole domain where you are operating, then you can actually make something that will work for the long term. That is why it's so difficult to use things like AI and stuff when it comes to building our code.
Well, boilerplate code is easy to do, but you need to understand the context and everything about the domain to able to do that. That's another thing that I need to keep an eye on and watch and educate team members. Then we need to be competitive, so that we make sure that we can compete with others in the different areas where we provide both products and services. Well, it's a lot of buzzwords that always come and go. And lately, it's been AI. Before that, it was crypto and blockchain, and media just continues to blow these things up into stuff that they are simply not. At Huddlestock, we are focusing on what we call Real Intelligence, RI, and that is really the competence of deciding what tools to use for what.
I use ChatGPT to come up with different things, but I'm combining it with all the other stuff that we know. That is very, very important, to not get hooked up on the buzzword of the day because they will disappear as quickly as they come up. Prioritization is the key for us. We're always going to have a lot of stuff to do on the tech side, but we are small, and we are up against giants, I would say, in the different areas that we are interacting. We cannot be small and slow. We need to be very, very agile and quick, and move our attention according to where we have the greatest reward, and actually make sure to act on that first. Prioritization is key. We also need to be great at something. We cannot be okay on many things.
Instead, we need to have this domain-focused teams that can be experts and the best in the industry, basically. That's why we need to keep it in that manner and not have a lot of generalists. We need to have the teams set up in that way. Then we always have a clear priority list that we work through. That is the things that I wanted to relay to you today. Before I kind of move it over for questions, I have one question that come in that I want to also address, and that came from regarding the Bricknode shareholders.
There's obviously a lot of stuff that needs to happen there to complete all the aftermath, I would say, of this deal that we've made. There's also a lot of formalities that needs to come in place. When it comes to delisting Bricknode from the stock market and so on, that needs to happen before all of the other stuff can take place. There is certain number of dates or days that have to pass between different events. We are communicating that through the regular channels with the press releases and stuff, since it is subject to all the market regulations. When we are delisted, we will be able to do things probably more easily and even more, be more active on the communication with our shareholders.
Now we have been also focusing on the continuation of the Bricknode business and the Huddlestock business and the integration. That has been the first order of priority. We've been trying to stretch the days to having a few more hours, but unfortunately, we haven't been able to get more communication out than we've had. We will come back with more information as quickly as we can and do that through the regular Bricknode channels. I'm also one of the biggest shareholders now going into the Huddlestock, so I'm very, very keen on getting all this done, and also so we can also remove a lot of costs and stuff within Bricknode to have that done.
Both I and my colleague, Erik Hagelin, will come back with the direct information, during June, to Bricknode shareholders. With that said, I'm thanking you all for listening, and will pass over this to Leif Arnold or John. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Robert and Stefan. You can all hear me, I hope? This is our presentation for today. I hope it has been informative. I hope it's been something that is inspiring everyone to continue to remain positive to Huddlestock and to join our journey. We are certainly a very motivated team and we think that we now have all the bits and pieces in place in order to make a big impact on the future. As you can hear from both Robert, Stefan, Daniel, and myself, and Leif Arnold, we do see that things are happening, and we're gonna focus on executing and getting the low-hanging fruit on board and making sure that we continue to grow our revenue stream, continue to grow our recurring revenue stream, and keep the cost under control.
These are the key aspects that I wanted to really relay today. Now we opened up for questions. I don't know if there's any things that anybody wanna talk about. Please, the floor is open. Anybody on the web or... No? If there are no questions, then, please thank you, everyone, for joining us. I hope it's been valuable and well-spent, your time. If you have something anyway you wanna talk about, don't hesitate to call or send an email or reach out to us. Thank you, everyone, for joining.