Hello, everybody, and welcome to the third quarter presentation of figures from Huddlestock. My name is Leif Arnold Thomas. I'm head of Investor Relations and also Corporate Development in Huddlestock. Together with me today, I have John Skajem, the CEO of the group, and also Robert, that is, Chief Commercial Officer, and he will also come back at some point. The format of this presentation is, of course, teams. We have set approximately 45 minutes as a frame for the presentation. It will be done by John and then Robert, and we will save some time at the end if there are any questions.
If you do not have any questions during this meeting, or would like to raise your hand and ask them orally, you can use the chat opportunity, if you will. And as always, please send an email to investorrelations@huddlestock.com if you have anything you would like to have some answer on. This presentation will also be recorded, meaning that it will be available on our channels and the webpage. Our homepage is the main channel for that. So with that words, I will give the word over to you, John.
Yes. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the third quarter earnings release for Huddlestock Fintech. We are today broadcasting you from beautiful Munich in Germany, and it's very nice to be able to be here in Robert's hometown and see all the great work that is happening here. Robert is gonna join us a little later with an update from his side as well. But I will now share my screen, and we can go to the numbers and things. Okay, I hope everybody can see my screen. Huddlestock, at a quick glance, we were founded in 2014 in Stavanger, Norway, where we have our headquarters. Today, we're roughly 85 employees located in 9 offices, 7 offices—sorry, 8 offices.
We are present in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Romania, and in the United Kingdom. Our company was listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange November 26, 2020, and we have roughly NOK 100 million in annual turnover. If we look at our numbers, here are the consolidated financials for the nine months ending with the third quarter. We, in the nine-month period, we had NOK 62.6 million in revenues, which is roughly a 90% growth versus our NOK 31.9 million in the same period during 2022. Consolidated EBITDA number, we have NOK -8.4 million for the period versus NOK -6.4 million in the previous year.
The margin improvement on this is roughly 32%, where we have gone from -19.6%- 13.4%. So we're continuing to improve our margin and continuing to operate with a better improved EBITDA. Roughly, as I said, the improved EBITDA margin is about 32% year-over-year. On the pro forma financials, we had NOK 70.6 million in the nine-month period in this year versus NOK 45.4 million last year. On the EBITDA, we had NOK 10.5 million versus NOK 8.4 million last year. And again, the EBITDA margin improvement went from 18.3%- 14.8%, which is year-over-year, an improvement of 23%. A couple of the things that's very important to us is to pay attention to the recurring revenue.
During the nine months, we had NOK 29.2 million in recurring revenue. This is compared to NOK 4.7 million last year, which is a staggering year-over-year growth of 620%. This also represents about 41% of our total revenue. A significant part of our revenue stream is now becoming recurring revenue. Versus last year, we had 10.3, and of course, that's a growth of close to 500%. Now, recurring revenue is very important milestone for us, and we're looking to grow this, and hopefully, we'll continue to be improving or growing it so that we'll see that we will soon, hopefully, be at the 70%-80% of our revenue stream will be recurring revenue.
There are a few other metrics that we would like to also start reporting as we go along now, and that would be, for example, the number of assets on custody. It will be the assets under management. It will be also the trading revenue that we have and the number of customers and so forth. So this page here will, over time, be enhanced with some more metrics that we would like to focus on in order to give a better picture of where we are and what we're doing. During the third quarter, we had several milestones that we think is important, and of course, the improved EBITDA margin is very important.
It shows that we're on the road to having our target of EBITDA positive for 2024, which is well in reach, and we have a very nice road to achieve this. Then we have the recurring revenue of almost NOK 30 million, which we're glad to see that it's continuing to grow and becoming more and more an important part of our revenue stream. During the quarter, we also signed a letter of intent with Stackby.me to start enhancing their offering of products to their clients, also including equities, trading, and other financial instruments. Today, Stackby.me is on our platform, and they are today offering their clients the custody services that we have. They're offering to buy and sell mutual funds. So this next phase is to enhance their product mix and grow their offering to their clients.
In our professional services division, we have several contracts being extended into 2024, and the outlook is stable. We also have, during the period, been able to spend some more money on our resources in the German market in order to be able to enhance the sales operation, and being able to build a proper structure that will allow us to take on board more clients in Germany. Robert will come back to this a little bit more in his part of the presentation. During the period, third quarter, we announced that we were selling the Huddlestock Solutions back to the management through a management buyout. Excuse me.
This is a strong signal from both us as well as from them, that we are able to adjust, we're able to see the benefits going forward, and we decided that for us, it will be very important to focus on our business, which is the investment as a service business. We bought Huddlestock Solutions two years ago or a year and a half ago, and we have now since then been able to develop our Trader 2.0. We've been able to develop more of the financial services products that we looked out to do, and we have now been able to transfer the technology and some of the people over to our platform. And then they will be able to continue to their growth with other type of businesses that is non-related to the financial services business.
This deal is actually expected to be closing today, so we'll probably make a small announcement later that it is closed. Okay. Furthermore, we've seen a great addition to our team, where we have been able to start being much more active on the marketing side of things. We're now using social media channels in a much greater way, and LinkedIn, for example, and X, and others, we're very much getting more and more active. And through our partnership with our friends at Bricknode, we have developed a new team that is basically taking care of this, and we're starting to see some great results from this.
We're starting to see much more traction, much more attention to who Huddlestock is, but also we're starting to see incoming leads that allows us to be able to sell our services to more companies. We have, just this last week, received two incoming leads from other parts of the EU platform, not Germany, not the Nordics, but other places within the EU. That is purely a result of our social media channel and our marketing business. So that is very pleasing to see. Then during the month, we went live with a Norwegian-based Swedish wealth manager called Garantum. And Garantum is one of the leading wealth managers in the Nordic space, and they are now live and active on our platform in Norway. So this is very nice to see that we are able to attract also these type of clients.
Last weekend, Friday, we announced that Huddlestock was considering to do a capital increase. We worked hard on achieving this. We went out and said we're gonna try to raise between NOK 10 million and NOK 15 million. The result on Monday morning ended up being NOK 17.5 million, which we're obviously very thrilled to see, that we managed to attract so much attention. There's 71 people that have signed up for shares, and there's more than 20 new shareholders coming in. So we're very pleased to see this. We, as a company, is always focusing on making sure we are shareholder friendly. So even though we had to give a little bit of a discount compared to where the share price was trading, we're always looking to not give huge discounts.
We want to make sure that everybody is equally taken care of, and that we're shareholder friendly. And I think that the result coming out of this event is that, yes, we gave a little bit of discount; however, it wasn't too much compared to what other participants are doing in the marketplace nowadays. As we all know, the capital-raising environment is not necessarily the most favorable at this time, so we're very pleased that we actually managed to get more money in than we had hoped for. So this was a very good result, and a thank you to the team who did a tremendous job achieving this.... After the end of Q3, we've had a few significant events that we want to highlight. One is that we signed with Norne Securities.
It's an investment bank in Oslo, and they want to now start using our system for their project financing business, their corporate finance business. And they are looking to use our system to be able to onboard their clients, doing all the KYC and the AML and these things, and also doing the capital increases or the project finance for their structured finance products. So this is a very good contract for us, and we're also looking to see if we potentially, down the road, can enhance the relationship to also include other services. We also have signed the contract with TIND Asset Management. TIND Asset Management is a new player in the Norwegian market, and it is a business that is very, very impressive.
The people behind this are the core foundation of the Norwegian Petroleum Fund, the sovereign fund of Norway. The chairman of TIND Asset Management is a gentleman called Knut Kjær, and Knut is the architect and the founder of the Petroleum Fund, as we call it. He was the first CEO and the first guy to really put one of the most successful sovereign funds in action, and he sought out all over the world to go and advise other people as well. But, he's the chairman of TIND, along with a gentleman called Øyvind Schanke, who used to be the investment director of the Petroleum Fund. And then the actual asset managers here are also the portfolio managers from the Norwegian Petroleum Fund.
So TIND Asset Management is a very exciting new asset management company that has recently hit the Norwegian market, and they're going out wide all over Europe. So they're starting with several hundred million NOK, and we are up and running with them already. So this is really, really good news. We also signed a strategic partnership with NBX. NBX stands for Norwegian Block Exchange, and this is a traditional exchange for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. Why have we joined the cooperation with them? Primarily, there's three reasons for that. One being that they would like to offer to their clients, which are some 30-50 thousand people, to be able to also invest and trade in more traditional investment products, like equities and CFDs and ETFs and funds and so forth.
So this is a new possibility for us to be able to attract more traffic on our platforms. Secondly, there could be that some of our B2B clients wants to offer new decentralized currencies to their clients. So then we can introduce them to NBX, and they can be going hand-in-hand with us to serve our clients. The third reason is that there's a lot of things happening today with tokenization, taking assets and creating into liquid investment vehicles. And for example, something that has become very popular is to have a for example, an office building and buy the office building and then sell out the shares to, for example, 30, 50, 100 investors that together own this company that owns this building.
Very limited to no liquidity in this trading, but if you can create a token for it, you can have it listed on their exchange, and you can buy and sell the assets. And this is really a part of the future. And of course, securitization, or tokenization, as it's now called, is still something that it's nothing new, but it's just a new platform and a new way of doing it, and this blockchain technology is allowing all of these things to happen. So this is kind of exciting for us, actually, to see how we can, with our traditional business, be able to match the new decentralized business. So we'll see how this develops, and we will start with putting our products onto their platform, and then we'll take it from there. Yeah.
Of course, I just previously mentioned the successful fundraising, which is very, very important for us. And, as we see in our key priorities going forward, it allows us now to be more actively and more increased speed, being able to roll out and build our organization in Germany as well as in the Nordic region. So now with the added funding, we will be able to deliver quicker to our clients and to be able to onboard more clients in a faster pace. So this is, this is really exciting news for us. And here in Germany, we need to, of course, in order to handle the business, we need to have people helping the clients to onboard, we need to customize the products and so forth. We also need to have a German-speaking customer service department.
All these things are now gonna be able to happen in a much quicker way because of the funding. So, we look very much forward to seeing these things happen. Other key priorities is to grow with profitable business. That's never ending story. We have to continue to pursue new business with new clients and onboard. But we also want to make sure we onboard the right type of business, and recurring revenue is very important to us. We... You know, license fees for Software as a Service, we have back office services, we have custody services, we have the whole Investment-as-a-Service platform, which will be very important in this aspect.... Having said this, revenue growth is absolutely of vital importance, but also to have cost control is also important for us.
So we are looking to expand our business, but also make sure that we streamline and organize our business in the best possible way. Our roadmap to a positive EBITDA, as I mentioned previously, our clear target is to make sure that we have a positive EBITDA during the financial year of 2024. These are some of the points that we want to focus on, and it basically is a summary of what I've already spoken about. A little bit over to our business. Our value proposition is to focus on serving our B2B clients. We want to provide our B2B clients with a complete investment as a service or a white label solution that allows them to add on to their product mix in a much quicker way than what they would otherwise.
Just in today's world, applying for a regulatory license may take a year and a half, two years, if you even get one. That, of course, put things in motion in a much slower way. We can be up and running with a client in a matter of weeks. And then once they're up and running, we have the whole investment as a service and can start offering their clients products right away. Basically, investment as a service is that we take care of everything that's underneath the water or behind the curtain, while our clients are focusing on the customer front end aspects of the business.
They need to be out selling, they need to be out marketing, they need to talk to their clients, getting them on board, they need to do the investment advisory, they need to do the trading side of things, and they need to do the first line customer service. We do all the stuff that's behind the curtain or underneath the surface in this picture. That would be the onboarding of clients, the KYC, the AML, it will be the compliance, it will be trading actions, it will be reporting, it will be regulatory license, custody services, and so forth. So we will do all the boring stuff while our clients can do all the fun stuff.
I think that, you will all agree with me that investment as a service is a, is a fantastic new product that is becoming the next generation, of improvement or, enhancement of the software as a service concept, where we're taking the whole value chain. Some of the things that we do is that we offer our products to our clients, and our clients are typical. It could be wealth managers, asset managers, it can be online banks, it can be private banks, investment banks, pension providers, and then, of course, an interesting thing is the news portals. People that gather a lot of people onto their platform in order to provide them with financial information or these type of things. For example, financialtimes.co.uk is one. You have finanzen.net, you have Der Aktionär, and these have millions of users.
If you can sell more services to these people on your platform by having our plug-and-play models, you will be able to, in many ways, just increase your revenue stream, in many ways, even double your revenue stream. So here we have a really unique and exciting opportunity. And our value proposition is that we will take care of all of the business that needs to be done, either as modules that you need or the whole package. And I think one of the things that's separates us from many others is that we have all the bits and pieces, from regulatory to reporting, to all of it, but also that we're B2B provider. We're not the competitor to our clients, so we are only serving our B2B, so they can be better at serving their clients.
We will not get in the middle of their service to their clients. This is a little bit of a unique situation for us, where we're separating ourselves from many others. Our revenue streams in this business is through software as a service license, recurring revenue license. It could be also the brokerage commission that's being generated, it can be basis points based on custody or assets under management. We are heavily involved in the actual fee structure, and this allows us to take part of the success of our clients, rather than just getting a fixed monthly recurring revenue on the software as a service license. We're very excited about taking it to the next level, as I said. Then we have some of our partners. We are not gonna do everything.
Even though we have the whole investment as a service platform, we still need to have partners. We need to have a custody bank, we need to have a data provider like Morningstar. We need to have people helping us with identification, like IDnow or BankID and so forth. We need to have somebody that can take care of the actual, should we call it, the KYC and the AML, and the credit checks, and all these things, so that everything happens digitally. We have been fortunate in the sense that we have been able to partner up with many of the leading players, particularly in the European space. Okay, now over to a little bit more of the numbers.
Here you can see that we have operating revenues went up 90% to NOK 62.6 million from NOK 32.8 million last year. Then we have on the cost, fortunately, the cost is only up 80%. So as you can see, the EBITDA margins are improving. Here, this is the EBITDA, and you can see that it's increasing from 6.4 to -8.4, and in our world, that is a development that we would like to have seen the other way. But as you can see, the 4 million that we added on in the third quarter, it's mostly due to seasonality, and particularly in our consultancy business, which is 59% of our revenue stream.
They do not have many clients during July and August because of holiday, the summer holidays kicking in, and we still have to pay everybody's salaries, and the cost is relatively fixed. But when the revenue streams are dropping, then, of course, our EBITDA will be a functionality of that. So that's one of the main reasons for why the call it, negative development on the EBITDA in absolute numbers. The other thing is that we've also allocated some more expenses to Germany to start preparing for onboarding and building it on with our already existing operation here in Munich. So we're spending a little bit more money in that regards. Depreciation and amortization is always important for our bottom line, but it's not important for a cash situation.
But as you can see, it has grown tremendously year-on-year, and the main reason here is that in Q4 last year, we started using our technology with live clients in Germany, and therefore, we had to start depreciate the already invested money into our technology, and it has a big impact on the bottom line, but as I said, not on the cash flow. The other part of it is the PPA. It's the purchase price allocation for some of the acquisitions we have made. We are also starting to write off some of the goodwill that is been put on our balance sheet from that standpoint. And then the divestment of Huddlestock Solutions, the management buyout is also affected here with NOK 3.5 million.
It will be another NOK 1.5 million in the fourth quarter, so a total of NOK 5 million will be written off in that regards. Technology revenues continue to grow stable, but little bit every month now or quarter, as you can see all the way over to the right. As you see over on the left, you can see we had a big jump in the first months of this year, and that's of course, because we acquired Bricknode, we acquired Dtech. We have also acquired Trax and completed that transaction. So the year 2023 has been a significant growth year for our business. And lastly, but not least, I wanna say a great thank you to all our shareholders and all the new shareholders to welcome them to Huddlestock.
We are fortunate and very thankful that we have so many good shareholders that are supporting us, and this is one thing we absolutely saw now last week when we did our capital increase. A great thank you to all our shareholders, and a warm welcome to all the new ones. Now, Robert, maybe you are ready with an update on the commercial side.
I am. Definitely. So I will share my screen. Thank you, John. Give me just a second, please. Here we are. Yeah, hello, everyone, from Munich. I'm pleased to be able to give you an update on our sales and commercial activities. So today, I would like to focus on two topics. I would like to give you an insight in our main product, which is the investment as a service solutions, our target groups and the target markets, and a little bit in our sales process, and I would like to take another look at Germany. For our sales process, I consider two things to be extremely important.
Firstly, that we can communicate our product, which is quite complex, clearly and simply to our potential customers, and show which requirements we can cover with that solution. Since we operate in different countries, it's also important for prospective customers to see that we can respond to country-specific requirements. If you don't mind, I would like to put you in the perspective of a prospective customer and take a look at our solution and its components, and show you the possibilities we have here. So when a potential B2B partner comes to us, they usually have very individual requirements that we have to map in our solution. Every customer is different and has different initial requirements. The good thing about our modular structure is that we are able to respond to each of these-...
requirements. Here you can see all the modules of our investment as a service offering that we can present to our customers or our prospects. So you can see the back office platform, front end, the partner portal, the API, which is quite important, our custodian services via Huddlestock Investor Services, and of course, the licenses that we have in Norway and here in Germany. So if you want to make an investment offer to your customers, you definitely need our back office platform, which is the core of our offer. Therefore, this is kind of mandatory, so everybody needs that. Everything else that is part of this offering is optional. That means a prospective customer can bring it along themselves or may not even need it for their setup.
So an example could be a private bank that wants to offer its customers a self-directed investment offering, has its own license, wants to develop its own front end, and can also cover the custody side itself. So in this case, this means that the customer needs our API for the connection to the core system and to get markets access. But yeah, of course, there are other customers, for example, yeah, we could look at an independent asset manager, for example, that requires our entire setup, including license and advisor portal, and in order to be able to operate on the market. Yeah, what does this look like in practice?
So, this asset manager would, therefore, first receive a front end that he can make available to his customers, so that they can carry out securities transactions. Then the asset manager would need our API, which connects the front end with the back office system and gives access to the markets at the end. Then the end customers' accounts have to be managed, and their securities and cash transactions have to be booked, which we can map via our custodian services in cooperation with the global custodian. So all of this can be supplemented by an advisory portal, if advisory services are to be offered, and the necessary license, which is guaranteed by our regulatory or liability umbrella.
Yeah, some of these components, you can see here, need to be customized for the countries in which we want to offer our services. So there are country-specific peculiarities in terms of regulation, as well as on the tax or on the reporting side. For Germany, for example, we have reorganized the entire regulatory setup in close cooperation with the German Financial Supervisory Authority, in order to be able to connect now the first B2B partners as tied agents. So we want to offer our partners the best possible service, but at the same time, of course, minimize our internal risk as far as possible. So what comes on top is that we want to work with the various custodian banks, regional custodian banks, because they know the regional specialties, and can solve them together with us.
Here, too, we had to create the appropriate technical connections. So this is exactly what we have been working on from the sales side, together with our product and the development team, in order to have a complete investment as a service offering for our most interesting markets in the Nordics and in Central Europe. And thanks to this work and the ability to further invest now in resources, we can now strengthen and better target our sales activities. So, to this end, we have defined specific target groups that we consider to be particularly promising. So our current focus for the investment as a service offering is on Norway, Sweden and Germany.
We have interesting prospects, very interesting prospects in the pipeline, in both the Nordic countries and in Germany, which we have been working with intensively in the recent month, and with whom we intend to conclude concrete contracts in the coming weeks. In addition to these, you can see it here, in addition to this Investment-as-a-Service offering, we can offer a pure software-as-a-service market approach. That means, the selling of pure technology without regional restrictions. Yeah, with the product development now largely complete, we can start not only to talk to individual interested parties, but also to target this market with large scale and structured approach, I would say. So in order to proceed this structured approach, we have supplemented the sales process with so-called sprints.
The aim of these sprints is to gain a complete overview over the market and their participants. Of course, gaining new prospects and customers to make everyone aware of Huddlestock and our offering. This is also important to regularly process and further expand the resulting database out of these sprints of interested parties. So the first sprints have already begun, and we will extend into the second quarter of 2024, of next year, these kind of activities. Yeah. As we're reporting from Munich today, let me take a look at Germany and our opportunities here. So on this slide, you can see some official figures published by the German Stock Institute, the Deutsches Aktieninstitut, for 2022. I think I showed these figure.
figures a few months ago, but I think it's worth recalling the key messages. So first of all, Germans have changed their equity culture in the last, yeah, around five years, I would say, as you can see here. The key messages are: yeah, one in five Germans is meanwhile invested in shares. Most of them are invested in investment funds and ETFs. We have seen high increase in equity savers in the recent years, and this is perhaps the most important message, young people in particular, are starting to save based on equities. So here you can see some more detailed information about that, what I have just told you. Yeah, maybe just to summarize that, just, yeah, around 20% of the Germans are now invested in equities.
Among young people, in particular, there was an increase of 40% compared to the previous years. That's a tremendous figure, I think. Around 60% are purely invested in ETFs and funds. Around 20% are purely invested in equities, and a further 20% are kind of mixed invested in both. This development naturally has an impact on the financial industry, and the industry wants or has to react on this. Due to this increased interest, there are new players on the market who wants to capitalize on this. This leads to more competition and therefore to a better and cheaper offering.
So we can see that clearly that the neo-brokers that stepped in here on the German market during the last years have improved the whole situation significantly for the end clients. We are seeing rising margins in the consulting sector. And of course, the growing interest among savers is also leading to a growing interest among financial regulators. Yeah, this is not necessarily reflected in new rules. I think the market certainly has enough of these rules, but in significantly tighter controls. So bottom line for us as Huddlestock is that there is a growing need for securities investment products in the B2C sector in Germany, but this has to be modern, easily accessible, and reasonably priced. So, and with our offer, we can help everyone to fulfill these kind of expectations.
So as there are no figures for 2023, yes, yet, let me share my personal impressions of the current situation in Germany with you. So you can see here, Germany is over-banked and possibly also over-brokered. I don't know if this word even exists, but you know what I mean. So we have many people in Germany say we have too many banks and possibly too many brokers on the market. I think this is certainly the case, but in my view, this is not bad for us, quite the opposite. All banks will have to reinvent themselves to some extent, if they want to remain competitive. And looking at the broker side, there won't be an unlimited number of new brokers, but the ones that are on the market will continue to grow and become bigger.
The keywords for market existence and growth are digitalization and scaling. As you all know, we can definitely help with that. Of course, we have to keep our eyes open and keep a close eye on what's going on in the market. You can see that here on the right side of this slide. We are seeing changes in the behavior of savers, traders, and investors because of the interest rate situation has changed. The regulatory environment is, yeah, constantly presenting new surprises, and the overall economic environment is making people a bit more cautious, I would say. But, yeah, the factors that are forcing people to save in shares, you only have to look at the situation of the statutory pension scheme, are still strong, and the positive trend for us will continue. I'm definitely convinced about that.
Of course, there are also competitors in what we do, but for me, this is more a positive fact, because it shows that others also see this market opportunities and want to utilize them. Yeah, just to tell you, I was in dialogue with one of these competitors a few weeks ago to discuss the situation in Germany, and yeah, we will continue to do so because we both believe that there are and will be enough market opportunity for everyone. So on that premise, you can also talk to competitors, of course, without exchanging internal information, just to be very clear on that. So I'm really totally convinced that the German market offers great opportunities for Huddlestock. Now, our investment as a service rocket is on the launch pad.
The countdown is ticking, and we will launch it to reach the first stars, so to say, next year, and I'm really looking forward to that. Finally, I would like to recommend a video that we have produced. This should also help to us to attract the attention of the market to Huddlestock. Yeah, as it is difficult to stream the video in optimal quality via this Teams meeting, please find the link to the YouTube version in the chat. By the way, if you, if you haven't already done so, you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel there. So enjoy watching, and thank you for your attention. That was my part.
Thank you, Robert. Thank you very much. That concludes our quarterly earnings presentation. Since there are no questions, I just wanna encourage everybody that if you do have some questions, don't hesitate to send us an email on investorrelations@huddlestock.com, and then we'll answer as good as we can. Without any more, I again want to say thank you very much for being involved in Huddlestock and showing your interest and support. If there should be anything, don't hesitate to reach out to us. Okay? Thank you very much, everyone. Have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.