Well, I'll start off this next session. So very pleased to have Endava with us. I'm very pleased to welcome Mark Thurston, the CFO of Endava to Barcelona.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
So, I wanted to start off, maybe give you a little opportunity. I, my background is I look at IT services companies on the European side. Obviously, you're U.S. listed. I find it's always difficult for investors to kind of... You all look a little bit the same, but actually what you do under the hood can be exceptionally different. Could you just talk a little bit around, you know, what your differentiation is, you know, part of the market you're targeting, your delivery methodology? Just to give us a good idea and a starting point of-
Yeah, yeah.
where the business sits.
We're a UK-headquartered business, we're listed in New York. We're predominantly European in terms of the end markets, about sort of 60% is UK and Continental Europe, and about 30% is North America. 10% being rest of the world, which is mainly Asia Pacific-
Correct.
The rest of the Middle East, basically. What we do is, I suppose, the strap line of next gen IT services, so it's digital. How I think about that is we help our clients engage with their customers seamlessly and frictionlessly through using, you know, their products. So essentially we advise clients about their digital journey, but we go beyond advice because we actually build, and we tend to build a product for them. The client owns the IP. We deliver the product using a nearshore model. So when we're delivering into Western Europe, it's largely from countries in central Europe, like Romania, Serbia. If we're delivering into North America, it's from places like Colombia and Argentina.
So, you know, 10% of the workforce is largely onshore, and 90% is nearshore. And we're building out that capability in Asia Pacific. We've done a couple of acquisitions in Australia and Vietnam to build out that footprint there. In terms of the end industries, we have a strength in payments and financial services, a very strong franchise in payments and capital markets and insurance. That's about 50% of the business. About 25% is TMT, where we're working with telcos and media companies and tech. And recently, we've split out the rest of it, which we used to call other.
It was getting quite big at 25%, and about 10%, about 25% is mobility, which is basically working with companies who that movement of things and people. So we work with logistics, travel, and businesses like that. And essentially what we're doing is building products for those clients. So it's advice, but actually the capability to build in an outsourced fashion.
So, I guess the 10% that are people that are onshore would be more in that consultative capability, going to customers, working out what they need and how they build these journeys out?
Yes, broad, broadly.
Right.
I mean, we go, we focus the tip of the spear is industry vertical knowledge, subject matter experts. So people who understand the industry could think about the technology challenges, mainly through digital disruption-
Mm-hmm.
Particularly payments has been disrupted recently. And then the people who sort of build usually are gonna be our nearshore locations. Not always, but that's, that's typically the model.
The IP that you build, would you... You mentioned running as well, you would generally run that in the back end. Is that pretty consistent that customers with you?
It is. I wouldn't. People say, do we do managed service? And we don't really. We sort of build a product. So it can be traditionally building a certain merchant acquiring platform for a payments company, and that product then evolves. So we work very much with the product people and the client to evolve that product, whether it's different geographies or has different features. Now, whether that's managed service or not, but it's the evolution. And because it's high-end engineering, we're quite expensive in the market. When a product has come to the end of its sort of life and a product manager is just like, "We'll keep it in maintain mode," we're usually too expensive for that. So they either bring it in-house or they give it to another provider.
Yes. Often that run gets a bad name-
Yes
because it feels like it's commodity, but if you're in there actually continuing to develop-
Yeah
-and add value to the customer, then that, that makes it-
Yeah
Quite a different service.
Yes.
You mentioned the customers get, you know, they own the IP of the product.
Yes.
Could you talk a little bit about repeatability and how-
Yeah
there's expertise there, but then
Yes. So the key things that we do is distributed Agile development. So when we are working in Agile fashion, which is, stop me if you're-
Mm-hmm
Talking gibberish, but we
Not at all.
... we deliver through teams, typically a Scrum team of about eight people. They will be cross-functional, certainly in initial stages of piece of work where it's discovery. So you need subject matter experts, you need architects, UX people. And getting creative people to work with engineers or developers is difficult, and that's part of our sort of secret sauce, which is highly sort of cultural. Now, the way that we deliver, so we've got 10% is sort of nearshore, 90% is distributed agile. So you have a number of teams that can be in different countries and different cities within countries, and that requires a methodology. We call it TEAM and teams, but it's distributed, which is different locations, agile, and it's at scale....
So when clients, I suppose our proposition to clients is that we provide innovation at reasonable cost, that we can scale it very quickly, and we do that sort of seamlessly. So we can go from like 20 people up to, you know, some clients, we have about 400 people working for them. Clients struggle to do it to knit those teams together and do it in a distributed fashion. They struggle to replicate it if they try it themselves. We don't own the IP. We know the industries, we know how our methodology works. The customer owns the IP. We can't take, you know, code from one customer and use it in another. But the advantage of what we're doing as a service business, we tend to work with incumbents.
So if you think of technology sort of disruption going through, I'll keep going on about payments, but it can be anywhere. We will work with incumbents because they're worried about being disrupted by disruptors, and we will work with the disruptors. So we know what technologies are coming down the track, and we can advise and help the incumbents, you know, fight back.
So, that's the secret sauce, actually. I mean, there's obviously knowledge of the industry, but as you say, you're not building a product that you can go and sell to a third party.
Yes.
The expertise is more how you manage the resources internally and how you develop.
Yes.
That's the kind of-
Yes, I guess the sort of moat is having a strong employee proposition in a specific country. So, we're very strong in Romania. There's deep engineering talent. We have a very strong brand. We work very closely with the universities, so there's a big sort of graduate intake. Again, it's a relatively low cost compared to, you know, Germany or the UK, et cetera, but the engineering talent is, you know, world-class. Our peers look at Romania and see it as a market to come into, and they do come into it, but they don't have the brand strength to attract the quality of people that we have. And, you know, why is that? It's the culture of the organization.
Each service business has its own sort of culture, and our culture, we think, is pretty special because how do you get creatives and engineers working together sort of seamlessly? And one of the sort of proof points of that is, you know, attrition. If you talk with an Indian typical vendor, they will have attrition of 30%-40%. So if you imagine you're delivering projects and getting that amount of churn and managing the quality, our attrition is about 11% at the moment, and that is very low. It's low for the digital players in our space that we're sort of grouped with. And, you know, we attribute that to the culture that we create.
So it's about creating careers for people, it's investing in people, all good soft stuff and investing in their, you know, their softer skills and their development. And that creates cohesiveness and quality in terms of the delivery and that distinctiveness when people interact with us.
This is an interesting topic because we had the CEO of Capgemini here yesterday, and he was talking about the journey that the industry's been on from a very artisanal industry X years ago to one that's become very industrialized, and all the words we use are kind of manufacturing terminology. Where would you say you are on that kind of... Because it sounds as if there's an artisanal element to this.
Yes.
But then you need to be able to industrialize-
Yes.
to be profitable. So could you talk a little bit about how you think about that scope of?
It's interesting. I mean, we're about a billion-dollar revenue. I mean, just going. The business is founder-led, so our CEO, John Cotterell, founded it in 2000 with a handful of people. So it's, you know, it's a great story. We've got 12,000 now, about a billion-dollar revenue. And there's a way of working that we adopt. It's quite a unique. I'm a relatively new joiner, but I've been here eight years, I think. It's relatively unique the way the business is sort of put together. But as you sort of scale and you, I think the biggest worry you may have is around how do you maintain that sort of culture, that entrepreneurial flair?
How do you get people to work collaboratively across sort of geographies as you get bigger? We invest a lot of money in it, in terms of our, our people function, where we do a lot of, you know, we care activities, especially, we learned a lot actually through COVID because people weren't coming into the offices, so you had to sort of reach out to people through, you know, different sort of medium, create that sort of connectedness. But we're getting to that, that point where the processes need sort of tweaking. We have one way of doing things, and I think this is our next sort of scaling challenge. We, we have an ambit, ambition. We have something called Vision 30, which is to be, you know, 5 times the size of what we are now.
And while the culture we want to maintain and the basic sort of processes, the way that we do it, we know that we're going to have to sort of tweak and mature as a business.
It's also interesting because, you know, you said, I think it was 11%-12% attrition. My initial reaction would be that's too low, because if we think about traditional IT services companies, you know, you're managing a pyramid. Profitability depends on getting people out, you know, and managing that pyramid and having that base. It sounds like that's not the approach, and actually, you want people to stay in the business who understand the culture and-
Well, I think we were until recently very fast-growing. You know, our CAGR over the last five years has been 30%. Now, there's been some M&A in that, but it tends to be bolt-on. So, you know, 3%-5% or so of that would have been through M&A. It's obviously, you know, different now. We'll probably touch on, you know, we announced our quarterly results yesterday, so it's a different story... you know, in that situation. We're sort of set up for growth, basically.
Right.
So it's about developing people and attracting people and pulling them through. And it's not, it's not a professional services model, like a big accounting or law firm, but it is somewhat similar, that we have a gradual intake. We Endavize them as they go through their sort of career, you know, for five years or so. That's when we get most attrition. But we wanna pull those people through to leadership, you know, positions. We will obviously get attrition. You know, you need to manage people out, et cetera. We also need to recruit people in, you know, latterly-
Right
Sort of stages. But it's, it's quite intentional that, that model. What we're adjusting down is to a, you know, a slowdown at the moment. So we, we believe it's gonna pick up again. We don't wanna lose good people, so we're, we're carrying what we call a bench. So they are not on client-facing work at the moment. And that sort of tests, you know, the model as we're going through that inflection point.
Maybe that's probably a good opportunity to talk a little about you. You had results overnight. Maybe just give us a quick update in terms of, you know, how the results, what are you seeing in the markets, a few highlights from that.
Yeah, I mean, we put out a good quarter, so we beat on the top line marginally. Our EPS beats, we delivered 39p as opposed to a guided 35p. The outlook is somewhat muted, so our second quarter, we have a year-end, so we're guiding to December. We will have a decline of, we're guiding between 8% and 8.5%. So we sort of slowed down during the course of this current calendar year, which is similar to what others are experiencing. And profitability is going to be low for us. So we're guiding an EPS of, you know, 29p. If you compare that with, like, a year ago, it's almost like double that.
Right.
Where we're being hurt, basically, is on our gross margin. So that's the difference between, you know, the revenue that we charge clients and the costs of people. We're carrying excess people, so our bench is quite high. It's around sort of 10%, and that impacts our adjusted gross margin, which in the, let's call it, pre-slowdown times, were about 40%, you know, or so. So it's come down to about 35%. We continue to invest in SG&A, so sales activity and integration. I was talking about, you know, the rest of world.
So we've got a nadir coming up, and then we believe we're gonna accelerate quite quickly out of it as we turn the corner into the next calendar year, because we're seeing, you know, the demand and the big deals sort of, you know, come through for us. So, I think when the market is looking at us, it's positive sentiment, it's what others, you know, are saying, it's a cyclical thing. And we think it's a, you know, good performance, you know, given the macro conditions we're in at the moment.
That gross margin was 40% coming down to 35%. Do you look at EBIT or PBT margins at-
Yes.
Well, that's so you're down?
Our adjusted PBT margin typically has been about 20%.
Yeah.
And last year was about 21%, which is high, actually. We have good profitability. We've always had good profitability and good sort of cash generation. And what we're seeing at the moment is that sort of slowdown in terms of demand from clients as they sort of pull back. So there's been a pause around innovation. It can't stop forever. You know, the world keeps going. And what we do is essentially build products for clients to be competitive in the marketplace. And you know, if they don't invest in their marketplace, they start to you know, lose that competitive edge. And certainly in terms of you know, the pipeline of opportunities that we see, it is starting to come back, so it's keeping on overtime.
So, I mean, you talked at the beginning around 50% exposure to financial services, 25% exposure to TMT. You've been in kind of the-
Yes
eye of the storm
Yes
In terms of the impact of slowdown in the market, which happened, got started some time ago.
Yeah.
Maybe to start off with, could you talk a little bit around how you've managed, you know, declining revenue base?
Yep.
Because to some extent, services companies have a fixed cost base because you've got people.
Yep.
how you've managed through that, and then I've always had a kind of rule of thumb that banks and, you know, these companies can't really cut for more than a year-
Yes
... because you start to lose your edge others. Where are we in that, in that cycle coming through?
So we started to see it slow a little bit about this time last year, actually, more as we crossed over from December into January. And I think that's because people were holding back on budgets. So we saw a bit of a slowdown there. It became more pronounced actually, with the... People call it variously the sort of mini banking crisis-
Yeah
- of like Credit Suisse going flat and, Silicon Valley Bank. And because of our exposure to financial, services and banks in particular, there was a big pullback there. I should say we do quite a lot of work with private equity-backed businesses-
Right
as well. About 23% of our revenue was private equity. They, I think, part of the, there was worries about what, you know, the banks going flat, et cetera, but it's also rising interest rates. So we saw a very strong pullback on our private equity portfolio. So it's about 13% of revenue. So it's like a 30% rapid reduction. So that really impacted us in the quarter to June. Players in financial services pulled back very sort of strongly. Now, the speed at which it happened was quite amazing, basically, because we reforecast the business bottom-up every month, because we're always trying to balance the way, and Endava does it, is supply demand, so I'll wave my hands around it.
So if demand is this, we're talking to the front end of the business, which is our subject matter experts, engage with clients about what they're seeing with the project work coming. And then we call it a clearing house mechanism, where we clear that work to the delivery locations. So you think about the 10% of the people is in this, you know, demand, client-facing part of the business. This is over-characterizing it. And then we've got our 90% in this, my left hand waving here. The 90%, if you're in a, say, a city in Romania, say, you're in Cluj or you're in Belgrade, they are recruiting people at a certain rate into work that they can't see. We're clearing it all the time.
So what hurts us is if the demand falls quickly, then how do you slow the recruitment engine and, you know, recalibrate? So that hurts. So when it does that, we get margin compression, which is what we're seeing at the moment. We had the complete opposite with COVID, where we had slowed down for about eight weeks because people didn't know what they were doing, and then demand went like that. We were in the sort of dilemma, do we start to, you know, increase the recruitment rate to catch up with it? Is this a new dynamic or not? And so it's always about balancing.
Right.
What we struggle with is if you get something that precipitously changes one way or the other, and then it hurts your margin because you might be carrying too few people or too many people. So at the moment, we've got too many people, but we think they're going to be utilized in the near future because we can see that demand coming back quite quickly.
So, and I think you alluded to that on, on the call yesterday, talking about carrying some bench for the next quarter-
Yes.
to see the pickup
Yes.
- in the second half of your fiscal year.
Yeah.
Could you just talk a little bit around the deal flow and what gives you the confidence?
Yeah.
to carry that bench for a quarter?
Yeah.
To see that come-
Yes.
- going through?
What we're seeing is very different to last year is the number of big deals. Now, it's big by Endava standards, so it's like a 300-400-person when it's a full flood. Now, the conversations with clients, we're seeing a number of these deals coming into the hopper. And we have a sales pipeline, which is a client has a need. We have to shape it at what we think that solution looks like for the client. Maybe it's not for us, maybe it's some other provider should do it, but most of the deals that we're seeing are for us, and then it's about presenting that proposal to the client about the shape of the solution.
Then you go down the sort of process of our sort of selection, client comes out to you. So that pipeline of work that we've got is big, and as it goes down towards, you know, signing the contract, we have higher and higher probability. So it starts off at 10%, and then it goes to, you know, 90%. That hopper is a lot bigger than it was last year and has been increasing actually during the course of, you know, this calendar year, say, from March onwards. Now, our year end, we announced about sort of 8 weeks ago, so it's mid sort of September. We saw a lot of very big deals for us, and in terms of, are we gonna win all of them? No, but we know what they, our win rate is.
What we're seeing at the moment, we are winning some. Stuff is moving out, which is a lot of what we saw, you know, prior to sort of September. I, people delaying decision-making-
Right.
Because they don't want to spend the money. We're not seeing so much of that happen. If it moves out, it's because of particular reasons for, with a client, like a change in CEO. You know, I want to think about this before, you know, I push, you know, the button on this. And if we're losing stuff, that's usually when we're trying to win against an incumbent, with a client. And if the incumbent is gonna fight hard to keep that business, they will, you know, reduce rates, and we typically won't go below a certain rate to win the sort of business. But we're getting a lot of encouragement from going on to, you know, preferred supplier lists with those larger sort of clients.
That's one of the things that we've noticed more recently, is that we are going on to preferred supplier lists. If I compare it with sort of pre-COVID, we weren't, and it's maybe because of the scale that we're getting to about 12,000. So we, we tend to work with larger clients, they wanna work with large providers, and so it's the start of that journey, sort of building trust with them.
Does that preferred supplier status give you more visibility into what, into the win rate and the expectation and helps you?
It just brings you closer to it. I mean, the way that we're very much relate-- We're very sticky. Once we're in with a client, we tend to just stick with them. You know, one stat is, you know, about 90% of the revenue in any one year comes from clients who were with us in the previous year. You might think, well, what on earth is happening? Before, you know, we sort of slowed down, it meant that we have a cohort of clients that are growing at about an 18%-19%. So once we get in there and they can see what we do, it's very, very sort of sticky, and it's a very close relationship.
So part of getting on to a preferred supplier list is you've got past the first hurdle, which is usually procurement. You are now easier to sort of do business with, and it started that sort of relationship and that stickiness with them. So it's, it's a pretty important first stage.
In terms of the visibility that you have in improvement to the second half, it sounds like it is deals with existing customers. It's not a bet on private equity deals suddenly starting to close or?
So, well, it's to a certain extent. So we're strong in payments, so our biggest client is Mastercard, at about 10%. That is actually going to be quite flat and declining. It's just where they are in the business. They've come off peak work with us. We signed a five-year MSA with a master service agreement. We have visibility on that work, and it is not going to sort of crank up in this fiscal. It will FY 2025, which is June 30th onwards. Our next biggest client, about 5%, is Worldpay, which is part of FIS. They are part of a PE transaction at the moment, that should go through in January. Now, again, we've assumed nothing happens.
We don't have the visibility into it, but the market view, and we know from the management teams that they have underinvested in the product, which is what we built. So our revenue should pick up, but that's not factored into the guide. We're not factoring anything about PE as well. We don't think that is going to pick up anytime soon. So we're tempering what looks like a strong sort of recovery with an overlay of conservatism. The pricing environment for us is stable. You know, there's some competitive sort of positions, you know, others where we are getting full rates, which is, you know, usually the new sort of clients. And then it's also about, you know, the supply/demand, what you can get for people in the market price.
It's about being sensible with the cost base in terms of... That comes down to really what you pay people, and it's a subdued sort of labor market at the moment.
In terms of the top-line acceleration that you're talking about, I mean, you've traditionally been high teens plus kind of a grower. Is the assumption that you can get back to that-
Yeah.
Toward the end of the year?
Yeah. So our fourth quarter, which is the quarter of June, so if I compare it with you know, let's call it probably pre-COVID, we're around sort of 38%-40% gross margin. We think we'll be touching around about that 38%. Our SG&A, we sort of target about 17.5. It'll be about 18.5. It's a scaling thing. It doesn't grow at the same rate. So our adjusted PBT margin, which is our key measure that we look at, will be about 18.5%. So we'd get on our way to that 20%, which has been a typically you know, what we have you know, delivered. So we we've basically gone through this period where we sort of, we've come down to a trough, and then we're coming out of it.
I think it's, from a market perspective, it's like, how quick is that acceleration out?
From the top-line point of view, I think you were still slightly down in the quarter just reported. How do you... Can you help us with the guidance of where, of the pace of that reacceleration?
Yeah, yeah. So we shaved a little bit off the full year. So we said we tend to guide, we give a number, but we focus on the constant currency aspects of it. So we narrow it a bit. I think in September, we said 3% constant currency at the high level. We've narrowed it down to about 2.5%. And I think we've gone a little bit shallower in Q2 than we were anticipating. So there's a little bit more of a ramp as we come out into Q4. But basically, the story is the same, the narrative is the same. You know, people have been asking about the color around the geographies and the sectors. It's just a little bit of movement.
You wouldn't expect much to actually change in 8 weeks.
No.
And it's basically, you know, it all comes back to, you know, what are you seeing in terms of deal pipeline? What are you seeing from a pricing perspective? And everybody's, you know, trying to triangulate what is going on there. I think everybody is waiting for, when's the turn? When is it sort of coming? And I think there's a general consensus that it seems to be this quarter, if you listen to our peers, that tends to be the consensus. They have the advantage in that they don't have to guide into next year, which is what we do-
Yes.
-because it's a June year end. When we get to first of January, that sort of dynamic sort of changes. They then have to guide out to December.
And that guide for low single digit at the end of the year, what would that imply that you're exiting this fiscal year?
It would be on a constant currency basis, about 20%.
Okay, so you're getting back to that.
We're getting back to that level, but the one caveat, it is off for a week...
Okay.
Q4 by our standards. But it's, you're back... You know, people will probably forget all about that. It'll be, it's 20%, the margin is picking up. But I think people are just gonna be looking at that recovery, how quickly is it coming from?
You're comfortable that you feel with the pipeline you have, existing customers and new customers, you can get back to that without a big pickup in Worldpay, for example, without PE-
Yeah.
coming back. It's
Yes.
That's...
Yes. Yes.
If we think so, I follow payments companies as well. We were involved in the Worldpay IPO in the UK many years ago. I probably would agree in terms of the investment in the products there. Could you give us a way to think about the upside in a company like that? Because I think the private company-
Okay.
have said, "Yeah, we want to make investments to get this company competitive again.
Endava's been involved in Worldpay for, like, forever. Just a bit of potted and why we're involved in PE, this sort of explains it. Originally, Worldpay was bought by Bain and Advent. We were brought in to build the product for them, basically.
Okay.
And it was about getting it to market quickly and innovating that product, and they had great success. They floated, they were bought by-
Vantiv.
Vantiv, that's right. We continue to grow with Worldpay because basically we're building the product that's made them successful.
Yeah.
They were then bought by FIS. FIS had a different approach. I think it was a bit of a disaster. They were a traditional sort of payments business, Worldpay, something different. So they underinvested in Worldpay. Worldpay has lost its competitive edge. We've still, you know, we are at our peak with Worldpay. They're about 10% of revenue. It came down to 7%. FIS put out a profits warning last year. They reduced spend down to 5%, and they said they were going to split it off, and that is very welcome news to us. There's a general recognition that they have underinvested in the product. GTCR, who are coming in, are saying they are going to invest in it.
We don't know exactly what the shape of that work is or the quantum or how quickly they're going to do it, but we have sort of, you know, confidence it will, it will pick up, but we haven't factored that into the numbers because we, we don't know.
Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to come back. You mentioned 2030 vision, earlier on and that ambition to scale the business. How much of that is gonna come from these existing verticals that you're in? How much do you need to get out into other areas-
Yeah.
to be able to achieve that revenue ambition?
I think, I think for us it's about diversification. I mean, one lesson we've learned is, and it was a comment at the IPOs, you know, we were 50% in payments financial services. five years later, we're still 50% in payments because it's been a great place to be, basically. And it's been difficult to diversify away from it when it's growing like a sort of train. But it's fair criticism. So the focus for us is to diversify away from it. And what we try and do with that is we focus on other industry verticals, which requires we bring in people who have knowledge of different industries. We try and accelerate that strategy through M&A, which tends to be bolt-on, so it's small. So it's about 10% of revenue or headcount.
So it doesn't disturb this model, but where I was waving my hands around earlier. And that's, you know, that's how we do it. And we have a sort of model that if, say, we want to, you know, push for like 25% growth, then five, you know, percentage points would on top of that would come from something like M&A. And you can't predict when it will-
Right.
-when it will come. So Vision 30 is about diversifying the industry verticals. For instance, you know, mobility, we've pulled out more recently, which is, you know, the move of people and things. It's mainly the digital platforms that underpin them. That has the potential to be a big industry vertical because we're all about spotting disruptive technology waves. You know, we're a services business. We think we've got smart people. It's about spotting disruption, making sure you have the people that can advise clients through that, and recruiting people that can build innovative solutions and make them competitive in the marketplace. So we think there's gonna be a big disruption for that. So we think mobility is going to be a big sort of set for us. And then there's geographic diversification again.
I think, back in sort of 2015, we were very much a UK-centric business, about 80% of our revenue; it's about 45% now. But we want to diversify more. We want to be bigger in North America. We want to be bigger in Asia Pacific than we are at the moment. And the way that we'll do it is through organic growth, typically working for larger clients who will sort of take you there from a geographic sort of perspective, but also sort of buying businesses with usually a geo angle to them in terms of where you deliver from and to, and also the industry sort of vertical. And, you know, the company will evolve, and I was saying earlier about this billion-dollar market revenue, and we want to go to, say, five.
It will require a tweak to the way that we do things, but I think we essentially think the model is sound. It just needs tweaking for that scale of organization.
When you look at M&A geographically, would you be comfortable buying in existing verticals where you have that expertise, but wouldn't help the diversification from an industry point of view? Would you really want to-
So we don't tend to want to buy anything in payments for financial services. One caveat, though, is if you're going to somewhere like Asia Pacific, where we aren't, we have, you know, until recently, any presence, you would tend to want to go with what you know. So we wouldn't go and buy, I don't know, a healthcare business-
Something completely different.
We don't know anything about it in a flash. So, the businesses we bought there do have payments and insurance, et cetera. So we know, and we can actually add something to a business like that because, you know, it's what, what we do very successfully, you know, in the, in the rest of the globe. But when we're looking at businesses, we're looking for geo diversification and also just taking us out of that payments and financial services. That's the sort of key.
Outside of mobility, is there another vertical that you've talked about?
So in other, as which we don't break down, but we have retail and CPG, we have healthcare, we have something called Incubator, which is looking at, you know, future industry verticals so that we, if we can see a disruptive wave, do we put some people around thinking about what is going to be happening in that space and how technology is going to, you know, disrupt it? I think the other way we will diversify is through payments as a horizontal. So there's payments that we disclose, which is about 30% of our revenue at the moment, is working for a Mastercard, Worldpay. So these are payments companies. Payments as a horizontal or embedded finance-
Yes.
is looking after payments for a retailer or an automotive company. Now, that, it's not the traditional stuff, so it's. We're doing a lot of work under the mobility umbrella at the moment for OEMs in automotive. So these are car manufacturers thinking, how do you embed the ability in the software in the car so that it will pay for the parking, it will pay the tolls, and it's attached to the car rather than the individual. How do you, you know, ensure. If we go the whole thing about autonomous vehicles, how do you insure a vehicle for 30 minutes or 45 or whatever? So you get dragged into insurance, nano payments, et cetera. And again, with retailers, it's again, why would they outsource it to another provider when it comes to paying for something.
Mm-hmm.
You know, buy now, pay later, when they can capture that, that transaction, that value within their, their chain? So payments as a, as a horizontal, as a way of getting into other-
Yeah
-industry verticals, and then when they can see how we deliver, and the quality, of the work that we do, it would then take us further up into that industry vertical.
That makes sense. We're coming up to the end of the session. I'll maybe open it out to the floor, see if there are any questions in the audience. Got... Can we take one? It's got two over here. Maybe take one at the back first and then the gentleman in front. Just get you a microphone.
Hello, thank you for the question. Just thoughts around opportunities and threats from AI. So AI, in terms of revenue, is small for us at the moment. What we're doing is talking to clients about what it means because they don't quite get it. Where it's becoming more compelling is we've built our own AI platform with our bench. And that is something that is more fenced off. So it's not using information from the internet, but you can actually take it to a sales situation, actually show them something rather than using sort of PowerPoint. And we fashioned that so that it goes in each of our industry verticals. It tends to, at the moment, focus more on efficiency, so it's like augmented process flow or automated, you know, chatbot.
So it's intelligent chatbots, that type of thing. So it's more, it's mainly around sort of efficiency, but there's, there isn't large work at the moment coming from it in terms of building stuff for clients because they are thinking about it. There's a lot of caution around it. For the, for tooling, for us, we are looking at it and piloting it at the moment from, a Copilot, so the Microsoft sort of product, around actually, you know, producing sort of code. It will have a productivity, impact, so it will improve our productivity because it will write code pretty quickly. But actually, most of what we spend our time doing is thinking about what to code and what the solution is and organizing the work rather than the, the banging out of code. But it will improve, productivity.
I don't think it will compress margins, which is what a lot of people have been saying. I think it just... It speeds up the delivery for clients so that they can get through their backlogs quicker. And then we're looking at it from a support functions perspective. So, you know, we can get it to look at our contracts and draw first drafts of contracts. We can use it in finance for working out what's the revenue recognition, you know, from that contract. So we're just looking at the implications of it and how we can use it to take propositions to the marketplace.
There's one here, please. Thank you.
... Deep speaking. Actually, I understand 50% of your revenue comes from financial services, and you are developing products for your clients. You're gaining 20% PBT. The products you are developing, is this mostly T&M or fixed price and fixed?
Sorry, can you say that again?
The services you are doing for your clients, is this mostly T&M or fixed price?
Oh, yeah. At the moment, it is. So 85%-
T&M
Of our revenue is time and material. Now, the rest of it is, I wouldn't call it... There's an element of it which is fixed price, but that's short duration. Our largest client, Mastercard, pay on a, an output basis. So they pay a fixed, amount each month. They basically then have a true up around the velocity that we deliver for them. So that velocity is basically the lines of code that we are producing for the most story points. But there's a very heavy linkage back to, you know, the amount of time and material that people are working on that. So that, that tends to be outcome-based and, the volume and velocity that we deliver work. So, they would probably, in the case of sort of AI, we became more productive, and we're producing more lines of code.
They would change the metrics around which they measure, you know, our productivity. I don't think it would change the amount of revenue. We would, again, just get through their backlog quicker. But at the moment, we're time and material. I think because of the way that we work, it's innovative, it's agile. If you think about when you start work with us, the client doesn't know what they want. We come in to help them think about what they want and scope that work. We call that phase ideation, and it doesn't play to a fixed price sort of model. You know, build this in 9 months, we'll switch it on. And so they don't know where they're quite going with it, so it lends itself to the time and material model.
But the market will probably evolve into something more like what Mastercard does, you know, with its outcome-based delivery, because they're sophisticated. We're sophisticated. It will probably move that way, not anytime soon, though.
Perfect. We've bumped up against time there. Really interesting. Thank you again for joining us. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
See you.