Alfa Financial Software Aktie

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Alfa Financial Software 2025 Full Year Results. As always, I'm joined by Matthew White, Alfa's COO; and Duncan Magrath, Alfa's CFO. I'll kick us off with the introduction and key highlights before handing over to Duncan for the financial review. Matt will then pick up the operational delivery side of things before I talk about the business and give you a sales update before we summarize. So in overview, 2025 has been an excellent year for the company.

Subscription revenue was up 16%, and we saw an 18% growth in subscription total contract value. ARR of GBP 43.9 million was up 15% and net revenue retention of 109% was up on 2024's 103%. In total, subscription revenues were 34% of our revenue mix. We had a strong sales performance and very strong delivery momentum during the year. The late-stage pipeline was filled with 10 prospects, and we are doing paid work with 5 of the 10 customers in that late-stage pipeline.

We're also seeing encouraging activity in the early-stage pipeline, showing the buoyancy of demand within our target market. 20 customers are now live on Alfa Systems 6, which underscores the ease of implementation of that upgrade for our existing customers. And we continue to invest in people, product and planet. We've grown the team with average headcount up 6% and high staff retention at 97% during the year.

Overall, we invested GBP 37.7 million in our software with the major focus of investment being market expansion. Originations and Fleet are increasing our accessible addressable market and Commercial Finance is increasing our overall addressable market. And for the planet, the carbon offsets we purchased were greater than the total of our emissions. Looking forward, we're confident in our expectations and our prospects.

Matt will touch upon the major talking point of the moment, artificial intelligence. But I'll preempt his messages by saying we see AI as an exciting area. It's an opportunity for us to become more efficient in our internal operations, delivery and in our software engineering, and it brings opportunities to build new functionality and capabilities into our software to create business benefit for our customers.

In light of that confidence, the Board has declared a special dividend of GBP 0.031 and an ordinary dividend has been declared of GBP 0.015. So going into more detail then with the key highlights. Full year revenue was GBP 126.7 million, up 17% on a constant currency basis from last year's GBP 109.9 million. Subscription revenue grew 16%. And as I've mentioned, net revenue retention was 109%.

Total contract value stood at GBP 227.5 million, up 3% on last year's GBP 221.3 million, and operating profit was GBP 40.1 million. That's a 17% increase on last year's number, and it represents a 32% operating profit margin with EBITDA margin at 34%. Cash conversion was stronger than last year at 97%. That's up from 2024's 89%. I will now hand over to Duncan for the financial review.

Thanks, Andy. I said at the half year that the figures really speak for themselves, and I find myself repeating that for the year as a whole. 2025 really was a very strong financial performance. Revenue was up 15% at actual rates or 17% at constant currency with growth across all revenue streams. We had very strong chargeability in the first half, and as expected, this reduced in the second half with less software engineering revenues. Overall, though, it was a good gross margin performance of nearly 64%.

Operating profit grew even more strongly than revenue, up 17% at actual rates to deliver an operating margin of 31.6%. This benefited from 120 basis points from the FX hedges that we put in place to protect ourselves from movements in sterling versus the U.S. dollar. The effective tax rate of 24.9% was in line with last year. And so basic EPS also grew by 17% with diluted EPS up 18%. Overall, a really strong performance.

And given our confidence in the future prospects for the business, the Board has proposed an ordinary dividend of GBP 0.015 per share and declared a special dividend of GBP 0.031 per share. This is a total dividend of GBP 0.046, which is up 21% on the dividends declared and proposed this time last year. Along with a special dividend of GBP 0.05 paid earlier in the year, total dividends are GBP 0.096 for the year, up 20% on last year.

Turning now to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams, which was demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV in that year. We said a year ago that we expected to work through the TCV during 2025. But in fact, we have seen a small increase in the year, ending up 3% higher than this time last year. This increase was driven by the strong growth in subscription TCV that more than offset the reductions in software engineering and delivery TCV.

Next 12 months TCV is up 2%, again, with strong growth in subscription TCV with delivery TCV being in line with last year, but with software engineering TCV down 35% versus this time last year. Despite next 12 months delivery TCV being flat year-on-year, we expect delivery revenues to grow in 2026 and would expect TCV to increase as we convert the customers in the late-stage pipeline into wins.

Given the customer profile in the late-stage pipeline, we do expect software engineering revenues to drop in 2026 from the high of 2025. With the growing importance of subscription revenues to our business, we started publishing some typical SaaS metrics at the last half year's results. On the left, you can see our annual recurring revenue or ARR figures. We calculate this using the average subscription revenues over the last 6 months and then annualize them.

This picture shows what you would expect, very strong growth in ARR, up 15% versus last year and very much in line with our overall growth in subscription revenues. The graph on the right shows our net revenue retention percentage or NRR, and this is a financial metric, which represents the net impact of churn and growth in the subscription revenues.

This is calculated by taking the customers with recurring revenues from 12 months ago and calculating what their revenues are now and expressing this as a percentage. This calculation includes the benefit of upsells and expansions and is net of customer losses. We're often asked by those new to the Alfa story about churn. In reality, closer watchers of our story know that it is in effect 0, and this is demonstrated by an NRR figure that is consistently in excess of 100%.

At 31 December 2025, NRR was an impressive 109%. This was principally due to the ramp-up of subscription revenues from customers in the early stages of their time on Alfa, along with contractual inflation increases. So looking now at overall subscription revenues. It is perhaps worth reiterating that our subscription revenue is dependent on contract counts or in effect, the number of assets on Alfa, i.e., it is volume-based measure and not a per user measure.

Alfa has always priced on this basis as we make companies more efficient and pricing on a per user basis would not be appropriate. We continue to see strong growth in subscription revenues in 2025, up 16% as more customers added more contracts on to Alfa, along with some indexation. Total subscription TCV and next 12 months TCV grew 18% and underpins our confidence that this revenue stream will continue to show strong growth going forward.

Total subscription customers increased from 39 to 42, and we only have 2 customers on v4 who are not yet committed to upgrading onto modern Alfa, and they accounted for circa 7% of revenues in 2025. There are 15 contracted customers not on Alfa Cloud and converting these on to Alfa Cloud is a potential source of future growth in subscription revenues. Turning to software engineering revenues.

Last year, we had a relatively low first half for software engineering revenues and a much stronger second half. This year, we saw the opposite trend with the first half showing a 72% increase in software engineering revenues versus last year, with revenues in the second half down 18% on last year. Overall, this results in revenues up 13% on last year, and this growth was very much driven by enhancement work for new customers. Enhancement work for existing customers was broadly stable.

Perpetual license revenues being the combination of both one-off and customized license revenues totaled GBP 3.7 million in 2025, slightly down on the GBP 4.0 million in 2024 and the GBP 5.1 million in 2023. This will continue to decline over the next few years as the historic perpetual license accounting unwinds. For 2026, at the moment, we see less demand for chargeable enhancements from new customers, and this is what is driving the reduction in TCV.

As noted at the half year, our margins are quite sensitive to the amount of chargeable enhancement work we have as the cost base stays relatively fixed. Turning to our final revenue stream, delivery. The ramp-up of the new projects was the major reason for the 15% increase in our delivery revenues in 2025. We have 11 projects underway where the customer is not yet live and only when these contracts are live, will they drive up our subscription revenues.

Overall delivery TCV is showing us down year-on-year as a result of working through some of the large multiyear projects that we won in 2024. As these multiyear projects continue throughout 2026, the next 12 months TCV is actually flat year-on-year. Given that we are doing paid work for a number of customers in the late-stage pipeline, and we expect these projects to continue, we expect overall delivery revenues in 2026 to be higher than 2025. Turning now to expenses.

Cost of sales grew by 18% over last year, largely on the back of increases in costs from headcount and salary increases, along with a small drop in the amount of capitalization of internally generated software. Hosting costs increased with the growth in Alfa Cloud. Sales, general and admin expenses were up 12%. In addition to salary cost growth, there were increases in profit share due to the higher profits generated this year, share-based payments and increased amortization.

FX has been significant in the period. We had net transaction gains of GBP 0.8 million. Within this, the gain from U.S. dollar FX hedges was GBP 1.5 million, offset by other FX losses of GBP 0.7 million. Other income from R&D expenditure credit was up at GBP 0.4 million. Turning to cash flow. In March last year, I estimated the cash conversion for the year would be 80% to 90% due to accelerated receipts in 2024 from 2 projects. Cash conversion, in fact, has beaten this at 97%.

The reason for this improved performance was again better-than-expected receipts at year-end. So again, I'm guiding to around 80% to 90% cash conversion for 2026 with 90% to 100% thereafter. Dividends paid increased GBP 3.9 million on last year to GBP 26.0 million. Overall, there was a net cash inflow of GBP 5.9 million for a cash balance of GBP 26.4 million at the year-end. Now some words on capital allocation.

Alfa is a highly cash-generative business, and we have a strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends. Cumulative dividends paid in the last 5 years are now up to GBP 167 million, and our overall dividend yield from ordinary and special dividends has been running between circa 3.5% to 5% per annum. As you know, we are very disciplined about allocating capital and keep this under review. There are no immediate investment requirements for our current excess cash.

And so we are proposing an ordinary dividend of GBP 0.015 and have declared a special dividend of GBP 0.031 per share, in total, up 21% on this time last year. Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. This slide is largely reiterating guidance I have given as I've gone through my presentation. However, FX is worth highlighting. It is perhaps easier to follow what is going on with FX if you split out the gain or loss on FX hedges from other FX gains and losses.

As far as transaction and translation gains go, our sensitivity remains the same as before with each $0.01 movement in the U.S. dollar impacting revenue by GBP 500,000 and operating profit by GBP 300,000. We had an average rate of $1.32 for 2025. And if we had a rate say of $1.35 for 2026, that would reduce reported revenue by GBP 1.5 million and reported profit by GBP 0.9 million. In addition to this, we had GBP 1.5 million of hedge gains in 2025.

So total profit in 2026 will be lower than 2025 by GBP 2.4 million purely because of FX. Predicting what is likely to happen on the exchange rate is extremely difficult and seems to vary weekly. Earlier in 2026, we hedged 40% of 2026 U.S. dollar cash flows at $1.37. And so if the rate for the year was $1.35, which I used in the illustration I just talked about, we would also have a loss of GBP 0.2 million. So this will be a year-on-year swing in our hedges alone of GBP 1.7 million, and so quite a headwind to profit growth.

However, despite this and assuming the exchange rate does not move far from $1.35, we expect to see good revenue growth in 2026. So a quick recap on what was an extremely strong set of financial results. Revenue of GBP 126.7 million was up 17% at constant currency. This was at an operating margin of 32%, delivering an operating profit of GBP 40.1 million, up 17% on last year.

Diluted EPS was GBP 0.1014, up 18%. Cash conversion was excellent at 97%, resulting in a year-end cash balance of GBP 26.4 million. This cash balance, along with TCV of GBP 227.5 million gives us great strength going forward, allowing us to declare a combined ordinary and special dividend of GBP 0.046, up 21% on last year. I will now hand over to Matt.

Thanks, Duncan, and hello, everyone. Firstly, from me, as always, a reminder of our strategy. The market that we serve is extremely complex, highly regulated, infinitely demanding and ever changing. Our opportunity is huge. We're the leading player in a massive market, and we currently have only a small market share.

So our strategy for creating long-term sustainable business value is designed to maximize and enable us to grasp that opportunity to strengthen, to grow our differentiation by investing in our 3 key differentiators, our smart diverse team, our product and our delivery methodology and tooling to sell, to enable profitable growth by focusing on building our community of single-tenant SaaS customers, increasing our subscription revenue and enabling incremental sales; to scale, to increase our capacity for developing and delivering Alfa Systems and extend our reach; and finally, to simplify to enable more concurrent Alfa Systems implementations more efficiently.

Now as usual, I'll structure this update around our 3 key differentiators: our product, our delivery and our people. And Andrew will talk about exciting sales progress when I finished. But I'll start with a few words on Alfa's product and technology. And firstly, artificial intelligence. Alfa's market positioning, our product architecture and our business model provide strong foundations for long-term growth as the capability of AI technology evolves.

So we view AI as an enabler of greater efficiency and greater customer value. We're excited about the possibilities, and our approach is deliberately pragmatic and grounded in real use cases that enhance productivity, delivery efficiency and product capability.

We focus our AI strategy on 4 areas: AI literacy across the organization, ensuring that all of our people can effectively and responsibly leverage new tools; internal efficiencies using AI to streamline processes, to reduce manual effort and to improve operational scalability, including in software development.

Delivery acceleration, applying AI to reduce implementation costs and time lines for customers, for example, through AskThea, our AI chatbot, which is in use by our delivery teams, by our customers and by our partners; and product enhancements, embedding AI within Alfa Systems where it solves customer challenges and improves automation, insight and decision support.

Expanding a little on the product enhancement's theme. In 2026, we'll invest in architecture to simplify the process for expanding the use of AI by Alfa Systems customers in a secure and resilient way. Our vision is for our customers to be able to solve problems using AI, both in Alfa Systems itself and with Alfa Systems as part of a wider landscape.

We'll continue to invest in demonstrable and productionized functionality, for example, multifunction self-service agents and intelligent document processing to automate credit workflow. The capability of technology in this area is moving forward fast, and we are leveraging that progress. Now some of you may be relatively new to our story and may not be familiar with some of the intricacies of the market that we serve. So it's worthwhile repeating.

And I'll do so while adding context around our view of the future of AI in our market. We are, of course, aware that many views have been expressed in the wider area recently. This is our take on the implications for Alfa. Firstly, deep functional domain capability makes simple replication of Alfa Systems by AI impossible. Put simply, you can't vibe code an Alfa.

To the extent that development of software will become easier in the future, we have a huge head start and the resources to capitalize on our position. And we see ourselves accelerating away from competition and potential future competition as development costs reduce.

Secondly, whilst we do see generic AI automation tooling enhancing our ability to serve our customers, this will only be possible because those automation tools will be predicated on and governed by our enterprise software. Alfa provides a vast, well-structured data framework that is based on a deep understanding of the complex enterprise context in which we operate.

Our deeply embedded enterprise-wide software provides encoded institutional knowledge and system of record. Alfa Systems serves customers' line of business in an extremely complex market. And our regulated customer base requires embedded deterministic workflow and ledger transactions with clear audit trails and predictable interactions within a complex landscape. Probabilistic outcomes have no place, and this absolutely does not favor ungoverned AI outputs acting alone.

In this context, standardization, compliance, reliability, reversibility, integration, speed, authority models, security and specific industry practice matter much more than generic automation. And finally, software needs to be implemented. Enterprise software implementation projects within highly complex and regulated environments are necessarily huge business change exercises. We see AI increasing implementation efficiency, but we don't see it eliminating the implementation process.

At Alfa, we have an unrivaled track record of delivery of these projects in intricate and interconnected contexts and where competitors consistently struggle. And this is a key aspect of our differentiation. We should also be clear that Alfa Systems is priced based on the number of asset finance contracts managed on Alfa rather than per user, and this will ensure that AI-driven headcount reductions at customers will not impact Alfa's revenues.

So while we do see opportunities for Alfa Systems as an enabler for Agentic technology that reduces system user numbers, this also represents an opportunity rather than a threat to our revenue. In summary, Alfa's market-leading technology stack and architecture, the scale and complexity of our software, our expansive and culturally embedded innovation and investment agenda and our robust revenue model ensure that Alfa is positioned to maximize the potential of AI technology as it evolves.

Turning to other areas in which our product, Alfa Systems has progressed. 2025 was a landmark year. In all of our key product development areas, we have worked in partnership with customers. This is our preferred way to develop software because it ensures market fit and because our customers co-invest sharing the cost. Our product investment keeps us ahead, wins new customers and also plays a part in ensuring that we don't lose customers.

2025 was a landmark year because we have developed MSPs or minimum sellable products in our 3 key expansion markets, 2 of which expand the scope of our existing serviceable addressable market or SAM, U.S. auto Originations and Fleet, and the third of which takes us into a new target addressable market, Commercial Finance. U.S. auto Originations is exciting because of the scale of the opportunity. To date, our U.S. auto implementations have provided lease and loan servicing functionality.

But all U.S. auto finance providers require an origination system in addition, and we believe that this market is underserved. We see the value of a U.S. auto Originations implementation as between one-third and two-thirds of the value of our core servicing market, so a huge opportunity. We have already sold our origination solution to one large customer and the development that we've carried out to date has benefited hugely from partnering with that customer.

Implementation of Alfa for Originations will follow from our servicing implementation. Fleet is exciting because it opens up the European auto finance market where auto Fleet management often sits alongside retail finance. We've already secured an initial sale in this market too, and the implementation is progressing well. And Commercial Finance is an adjacent market, which will, in time, increase our TAM. We've secured 2 sales within customers that are primarily focused on asset finance.

And in 2026, we'll be stepping up our marketing efforts within the Commercial Finance world itself. I've outlined some highlights here, but it's by no means an exhaustive list. Our product improves constantly, and we release a new version every 4 weeks. Every version includes many new features and functionality. 2025 saw us increase our investment in our product again, and 2026 will see the exciting product progress continue at pace.

I've spent a lot of time talking about technology today, but our delivery track record and our people remain just as important in differentiating Alfa from competitors. If I had to cite a single differentiator, it would have to be culture. We have a culture of delivery. And it's really hard to deliver in this market. We succeed where competitors frequently fail. We achieved 35 successful deliveries in 2026, and 20 customers are now live on the latest version of our software, Alfa Systems 6.

In 2025, we started work with some smaller opportunities in the U.S., which is important because it has enabled us better to understand the requirements of lower-tier customers and to develop our Alfa Start solutions with the aim of creating a product for this market, including for partner-led delivery. We have a culture of growth individually and collectively.

We put a lot into ensuring that we can attract the best people in our industries into developing our team and to engaging and retaining our team as we grow together. We've continued to grow our team with average headcount over the year of 516. We have strong retention at 97%, and we have strong engagement at 83%. Following the success of our Lisbon Smart Hub, we've set up a new Smart hub in Gdansk, and we've welcomed new software developers and new members of our cloud hosting team.

2026 will see us set up a 24/7 hosting operations team in Gdansk. We've refreshed our talent management and pay and promotions process, moving away from heavyweight annual review towards a clear framework for ongoing conversations about skills development, goals, delivery and well-being. And really importantly, we have a culture of inclusion and of social and environmental responsibility.

And you can read more about this fundamental part of who we are in our 2025 sustainability report, which we released last week. We're in a fantastic position now, and we're excited about the future. Our culture remains key to that. So we're extremely grateful to our team for making possible the success that we're reporting today as we grow this special company together. And we're also continuing to welcome new customers into our community, as Andrew will outline next.

Thanks, Matt, and I'll continue with the business and the sales update. The sales pipeline has been really strong during the year. The late-stage pipeline increased to 10 prospects. And to add a little detail to that, touching on the early-stage pipeline, we've been focusing particularly on gathering industry knowledge and contacts in Commercial Finance. We've also seen strong interest in Originations and Fleet with multiple demos and overall, the activity in the early-stage pipeline has remained robust.

We've been delighted by the interest in the results of the investment work that we've been doing, which really underscores our decision to build out the software in those areas. Touching then on the late-stage pipeline. During FY '25, we added 5 new prospects, converted one into a win, one moved back to the mid-stage, and one was lost. Overall, we ended the year with 10 prospects in the late-stage pipeline, which was up from 8 at the last year-end.

And as I mentioned at the start of the presentation, we're doing paid work with 5 of them. We are a preferred supplier with 8, which gives us a huge amount of optimism that we will convert those too sold in due course. It's also worth noting that we've seen good spread across our regions with recent additions in Europe as well as our first South American prospect for in-country operations. Turning then to the outlook.

Demand for asset and automotive finance software remain robust as our pipeline demonstrates. Our people and delivery record, as always, are key differentiators. That's the case now, and we expect it to continue to be the case in the future. We've been working hard as before to simplify our implementations, but we're increasing the use of AI and growing our capability to do more implementations as a result of this work.

We expect further growth in delivery revenues, which will feed through into more subscription revenues in 2026 and beyond. We continue to invest in our product. Chargeable development work will vary depending on the mix of new customers in our pipeline. For 2026, we expect this to be below the high watermark achieved in 2025. And our success in growing our U.S. business means that we're impacted by foreign currency exchange, which right now is a headwind.

But in summary, we expect that 2026 will be a year of continued growth and momentum. So to summarize what you've been hearing today so far. 2025 has been a fabulous growth story for our single-tenant volume-based SaaS solution. Subscription revenue has grown 16%. We've seen 18% growth in subscription TCV. ARR was up 15% to GBP 43.9 million and NRR was at 109%, up significantly from 2024's 103%. Overall, subscription revenues have contributed 34% of the total.

I've talked about the strong sales and delivery momentum, a strong late-stage pipeline with 10 prospects in total, up from 8 last term. And we're working under LOE or equivalent with 5 of the 10 customers in the late-stage pipeline. We're seeing encouraging activity in the early-stage pipeline, and that activity is very much validating the software investment that we've been making in growing our addressable market.

20 customers in total are live on Alfa Systems 6, a really pleasing level of uptake that, as I said before, really underlines everything that we've said about this latest game-changing version of our software being frictionless for existing customers. We continue to invest in people, product and planet. Headcount is up 6% with high staff retention at 97%. And the investment that we've made in our key software asset was GBP 37.7 million.

That investment focused on Originations, Fleet, Commercial Finance to drive us forward and to expand our opportunity. And carbon offsets purchased were greater than 100% of our emissions. So we're confident in our expectations and in our prospects. The Board has decided to declare a special dividend of 3.1p and an ordinary dividend of 1.5p, and we continue forward with that confident outlook. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for the presentation. We have had a number of questions pre-submitted and submitted live. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is, results look solid this year, but is this the sort of growth we should realistically expect going forward? Or was this a particularly good year?

Thanks, Ivy, and welcome, everybody. That sounds like well for you, Duncan.

Thanks, Andy. Yes, they were really, really pleased, very good set of results for 2025. Revenue growth of 15% at actual rate, 17% constant currency was very strong. We very much see ourselves as there's a phrase in the technology sector, Rule of 40. So we very much see ourselves as a sort of 30% margin type business with a sort of 10% to 12% on average revenue growth business.

And we've -- over the last 5 years, we've averaged 11% growth per annum, and that we think is a sort of sensible long-term growth trajectory. So we don't expect to repeat the 15% growth next year, but we certainly still see growth next year, and we still see us over the medium term, delivering that sort of compound growth rate that we've been talking about.

Thank you, Duncan. Next, we have, do you expect recurring revenues to become a larger proportion of total revenue in the future? And I'm also going to ask the next question as well as it's relating. So we also have congrats on the excellent set of results. Subscription and delivery revenues have accounted for 34% and 50% of revenues, respectively, in both FY '24 and FY '25 with delivery. With expectations of a reduction in software engineering revs in FY '26, what may -- sorry, what may we anticipate the percentage split for each of the segment in FY '26?

That sounds like Duncan again.

Okay. Yes. Yes, great question. Subscription revenue is the fastest-growing revenue stream we have, and the strategy is to drive forward the growth in our subscription revenues. And we will see that progress further in 2026. So we -- as you say, we basically have roughly 50% delivery revenues, 34% subscription revenues and software revenues with the balance.

We see subscription revenue percentage growing in 2026, so getting up towards 40% probably. Delivery revenues probably staying around about the 50% level and with software coming down to more like the 10% level. So yes, we expect to see a step forward in subscription as a proportion of the business in line with our strategy.

Thank you, Duncan. Our next question is, are you seeing more demand from banks, leasing companies or auto finance groups at the moment?

I'll pick that one up. It's another great question. And perhaps I take the liberty of slightly repurposing the question and substituting OEMs or manufacturers for auto because that is the mainstay of our market, large financial institutions like banks and people who make assets.

And actually, a quick skim of our late-stage pipeline, which we talked about during the presentation shows that we're not 1 million miles away from half and half between banks and manufacturers. I think perhaps it's helpful to give more of a voiceover of the question, though, and guessing a little bit why it's been asked. Diversity within our world is good.

That's diversity of countries, asset classes and different end markets because having a broad market base builds resilience into our business and gives us, frankly, the opportunity to make more sales in more places. It's not a dissimilar idea to reducing customer concentration, which is another thing that we've worked on in the service of resiliency. So diversity of the sources of our business is super important, but the direct answer is roughly half and half. So all of our markets are active.

Thanks, Andy. And are you seeing more -- sorry, the question was just removed then. The balance sheet is very strong with no debt. What's the long-term plan for all of that cash?

Maybe I'll have another go at that one, even though it involves numbers, but it gives Duncan something of a break. It might be useful to tell the listeners what investment means to us so that you can get a better feel for our aspirations and why we treat cash the way that we do. Most of the things that we can do meaningfully to invest our business; the vast majority of those things take the form of opportunity cost.

So when we are building software, for instance, in 3 areas that we have made investments on in 2025, we're choosing not to sell those days, and it will be the same where we're making investment in delivery efficiency. So in terms of our aspirations and what we want to achieve in the future, that's not really about cash. That's about making decisions with the resources that we've got.

We do like the optionality because something might come along that requires us to spend some cash. But in general, we don't. And therefore, we take the view that the money belongs to investors, we make sure that we've got enough money, but anything that we don't need, we will return it to you, and that's what you've seen in the last few years.

Thank you. Our next question is, where do you see Alfa in 5 years' time? Bigger geographically, more products or mainly deeper with existing clients?

Matt, could I put you on the spot for that one? That is a product that has a bit of a sense of our purpose in terms of scaling the business and having greater impact.

The Alfa in 5 years' time point? Yes. So do we see Alfa bigger geographically? Quite possibly, yes, although I'll return to that. Do we see Alfa having more products? Absolutely. Do we see Alfa being deeper within existing customers? Yes, absolutely as well. So I'll return to all 3. So bigger geographically, it's really important to emphasize that the existing target markets in which we're working are huge for us and have a huge amount of potential.

And we absolutely see our existing target markets sustaining our growth for the medium to long term. But we do see ourselves expanding geographically. Where that tends to happen is with existing customers. So existing customers really like the product, really like the way that we work with them.

We work in really close partnership with our customers, and they'll often take us into new geographies and where those are interesting geographies for us as potential target markets, then we can expand our interest, and that's one important way in which we've grown in the past, and we'll continue to do that in the future. Will we have more products?

Yes, we've talked a lot about our Commercial Finance entry, and we've talked a lot about Fleet and Originations. Fleet and Originations are -- expand the asset finance market for us. Commercial Finance is -- it's an adjacent but it's additional target addressable market. And that is something that could power our growth for the even longer than long term. we're thinking early about that expansion into the wider lending market, and we're making good progress already.

So it was -- sorry, the question has gone. So it's geography, product, and deeper within existing customers or similar reasons, yes, absolutely. So partly -- and we're seeing that already on the Commercial Finance market, we're able to expand the products that we're helping our customers to support.

We're also able to help our customers to grow, of course. And our ongoing product investment, either internal investment or with our customers, expands our module set as well. And one area in which we've been getting better over the last few years is incremental sales, so selling those additional modules into existing customers. So yes, in all 3 in various ways.

Thank you, Matt. Next, we have, you often talk about a strong pipeline. How much of that pipeline is realistically signable in the next 12 months rather than just nice conversations?

Well, we certainly enjoy nice conversations with prospects, but the question is absolutely right that this is all about getting some tangibility on it. We often talk about different types of selling and what it means actually to close a deal. So important, I think, for everybody on the call to know that when we mark something as being sold, that's because we've got a complete set of contracts for it.

And -- the contractual process, the process of negotiating those legal contracts can go on a little bit. That's because it's really important for us. We are very, very careful with the types of contractual terms we'll sign up to. It's also, of course, really important for the customers because these are very long-lived systems, and therefore, the contractual terms is something that the customer has to live with, too. So that's our strict definition of when it's sold.

But if we think of the 10 that we have in the late-stage pipeline, which is right on the edge of being sold, 8 of them have said that we're a preferred supplier. That means that they would rather work with us. So it's not sold in the form of having a complete contract set, but it's definitely a good sign and we'd be pretty confident of bringing those 8 over the line. I won't say whether it's 12 months or not, but I would say fairly shortly.

The other thing that is worth noting is that within those 10, 5 of them have done paid work with us. So whilst we don't have that full contract set, customers very often want to get on with it and actually start the processes of associated with implementing their very own Alfa. So those 5, if the definition is chosen you and starting to give you money, then they feel quite sold as well. But the succinct answer is 8 of them preferred supplier, we'd be pretty confident of bringing those 8 across, but there is little way to go.

Thank you, Andy. Our next question is, do customers ever try to build systems internally instead of buying Alfa? And how often does that actually work out for them?

That's a fab question, and Matthew and I have both seen some fallout from that kind of thing in the past. With customers building their own systems, I will deliberately talk about it as core systems because there's a bit of a sting in the tail coming. There was a book that doesn't seem to be that long ago because I'm pretty old, actually was probably quite a long time ago called In Search of Excellence, where some American business academics talked about sticking to the knitting and the importance of sticking to the knitting.

And largely, mature companies have got a very focused strategy. So an OEM -- an auto OEM knows that its job really is building cars, and everything directly associated with that. There's software in their house, of course, but they're not authors of large pieces of software like us. It feels quite compelling, can feel quite compelling to start with. It would -- the idea of a bespoke system would definitely fit their current situation like a glove.

But of course, they'd have to execute it right. We've been building our piece of software for 35 years now. So we've had plenty of time to get it right. And you do go down wrong path sometimes, and we've had the experience and the opportunity to correct that. The other thing about fitting like a glove today is it only fits like a glove today. And I think everybody on the call is probably watching the news and has been watching the news.

There's a lot going on. And really who knows what the future will bring in our world, what requirements the future brings. So you're definitely not going to be all that future-proof, whereas across all of those areas of expansion that Matt mentioned and diversity that I talked about, our single product strategy gives the best opportunity to be future-proof.

So the 2 problems with doing that is that you've got to execute well, you've got to have the capability to execute well and you've got to be able to guess what the future holds, which is really difficult, which is why you don't often see it and where Matt and I have seen it, it's not worked out all that brilliantly. I do think that it's worth a note on moving away from core systems on this idea of ecosystems.

It's important that we allow our customers the latitude to configure Alfa in order to make it do the things that they want to do, but also through our take on ecosystem through our APIs and our integration layer, give them the opportunity to integrate point solutions in things that they might need, things that they might want to avail themselves of and actually some things that they might develop themselves.

A good example there would be a highly branded point-of-sale system so that they can have a better view over the customer experience and customer journey. So our view on Alfa these days is that it is giving the customer the best of both worlds. But the direct answer to that question is not that often these days, and it doesn't usually work out.

Next, we have a couple of questions on AI. The first one being, how is Alfa thinking about incorporating AI into the Alfa platform and are clients starting to ask for AI-driven capabilities? And the second one is, are customers asking for AI features yet? Or is the demand still mostly focused on core platform functionality?

Well, all of our AI initiatives are in Matthew's part of the business. So would you like to answer that one, Matt?

No problem. I was expecting this one, so I won't need remind me of the question halfway through. We've had -- and we've had for a long time, actually various features in our workflow, which you might consider AI. So the simplest decisioning in Alfa's workflow capability doesn't need an LLM but might be considered AI.

We've got machine learning capability within our credit decisioning functionality that, again, is AI related, not necessarily LLM related, but it is AI. AskThea is our chatbot for assisting us in our implementations of Alfa and our customers and their use of Alfa Systems and our partners as well in implementation of Alfa Systems that is LLM-based. And we have, in addition, various demos and proof of concepts for LLM or agentic or intelligent documentation production and processing integration.

The models that we're working with are getting better all the time. They've come a long way actually in the last year or so. We're hoping that we'll get to a point where interaction with Alfa to enable decisioning and workflow might be able to be configured using natural language only. That will be dependent on the progression within the models themselves.

Importantly, current investments, investment that we're working on at the moment, we'll see Alfa, the SaaS product, so the SaaS version of Alfa, which is the only version that we sell now, coming with AI tools, pre-configured as part of the deployment, enabling our developers to use these via API. So that's what I was talking about when I referred to architecture to simplify the process for expanding the use of AI by Alfa Systems customers in a secure and importantly, in a resilient way.

The second part of the questioning there was around the customers' demand. It's important to be clear that customers mainly need features. Alfa is a hugely functional system. The depth and breadth of functionality within Alfa is extreme, the extent is very, very large, very large, let's put it that way. Whether we deliver those features using AI is mainly irrelevant to our customers.

I say mainly irrelevant, sometimes we'll have conversations with CTOs along the lines of, please give me something that I can show to -- show internally that shows that I'm making use of AI, and we're able to satisfy that as well, of course. But generally, whether or not we're using AI is irrelevant. Worth noting, though, that it's great when we can show customers the art of the possible. So we can say to a customer, we have this functionality that enables the upload of a contract into the system.

It will then kick off credit decisioning and result in a process that ends up with a live contract. That is extremely exciting for our customers. And while we are often led by our customers' requirements and yes, the core functionality is still the core functionality, we are also able to show customers and lead where we're able to provide functionality that people haven't thought of.

Thank you. Our next question is, how easy would it be for a customer to switch away from Alfa once they've implemented your platform?

Really hard, but you probably want a little bit more than that. I often talk about trying to sustain a contradictory investment case. So we talk about Alfa being really sticky and hard to move away from and yet we make new sales. We talk about push and pull factors. Push factors lead people to buy a new piece of software.

And the reason we do that is it usually takes quite a big thing or quite a big emission to get people to want to change their software at all. So a push factor might be a regulatory change, or their current system is running out of support or represents a cyber risk or something similar. These are very, very big projects and big business transformations.

I mean Matt correctly points out when he answers the often posed right now AI question about delivery and business transformation being such an important part of what we do. So it's hard. These are heart and lungs systems that support the businesses in just about every way.

The job for us to make sure that we continue in a way that means that our customers don't even consider that is to continue to do a great job, continue to invest in our software, make hay while the sun shines to keep it moving forward. Give our customers that art of the possible capabilities that they couldn't even conceive of but help them out in there every day.

And of course, make sure that from a regulatory, cyber, data resiliency and technologically effective way that we continue to be the system that they need and make sure that they don't even think about taking the plunge. But if they did take the plunge, it would be a very, very big thing for them to do, which is why enterprise software is naturally quite sticky.

Thank you, Andy. Our next question is, how much visibility do you typically have on revenues for the following year?

That feels like the CFO to me.

Thanks, Andy. Yes, I think it's probably worth -- if you get to the back of our slide deck, which is available on our website, you'll see that we -- each time we release our results, we have a little table in there about revenue of recurring nature, which basically talks about how much of our revenue each year is coming from existing customers, how much is coming from new customers. And that can vary for 2025, 70% of our revenue is from existing customers, which is lower than the previous year, which was 79%.

So 70% to 80% of our revenues are generally from existing customers. So it's really that the visibility is around the balance. Visibility is the right word because -- as opposed to contracted. So we also have TCV, which gives a flavor for what we've contracted. And if you look at the next 12 months figures, in some cases, that can look quite low. But for instance, often people will only issue us statements of work in 3-month batches even though we know the project is going to last for a year.

At a very, very high level, visibility at the start of the year is pretty good. We've got a pretty good idea of where all of the revenue is going to come from by customer. There might be a small amount that we're starting the year thinking we don't actually have a name customer for that, that we need to go and find, but that's probably less than 5%.

Of course, the revenue that actually ends up at the end of the year is never exactly what we thought at the start of the year because some projects go bigger, some projects go shorter, some projects don't quite start as quickly as we expect, et cetera. So it is a bit of a moving piece. But if we just give a one number answer, I would say visibility is sort of 95%, something like that.

Thank you, Duncan. I'm going to move on to our final questions now. If you do have any further questions, please e-mail the team who will respond to any questions that weren't covered this afternoon. So our next questions are about future outlook. Which regions of the world offer the biggest growth opportunities for Alfa?

And looking ahead a few years, what do you think will be the biggest driver of growth for Alfa? And the final one is, if things go the way that you might hope, what do you think might be the revenue split between Asset, Commercial and Fleet in the medium term?

I'm writing those down, so I don't get halfway through a great answer and forget. Okay, let's -- I'll have a bit of a go, but I'm sure the others might weigh in on that final question. In terms of market opportunity, what do you need for growth? Matt picked up when he was speaking about the idea that Alfa actually tries to remain very focused.

I get -- in my investment portfolio, I like companies that have clearly articulated and focused strategies. It would be very easy for an organization like ours with a lot of opportunity to fall into what I would call strategic dissonance, and you just got a lot of things competing for your attention. So we do try to be focused. And we focus very much on the European and U.S. markets, and we focus on auto and equipment.

And together, those 2x2, 2x2 matrix of Auto and Equipment, Europe and the U.S., they make up roughly two-thirds of the global spend on asset finance, technology and services, which is about GBP 3.5 billion. So that's a GBP 2 billion opportunity. He said making the math a little bit easier. And if one thing that you need is runway, well, then there's runway there very much because you've got GBP 130 million and a big company that it's a market leader.

And in terms of our focus markets, there's a couple of billion to go after. What else do you need? Well you need a competitive edge in those markets, and you need drivers for change in those markets. And we see that across all of them. So absolutely, the things that will -- the areas where we will be seeing a lot of growth are in those markets. Again, we have talked today across all of us about the plays that we're making in expanding our serviceable addressable market and our target addressable market.

And in particular, thinking back to Matthew's words in the presentation replay, then if you add Commercial lending, then you're increasing the addressable market even more. Why would we spend all of that money on increasing our addressable market and indeed our serviceable addressable market when we've got so much runway is that it is absolutely our intention to eat up a lot of that target addressable market in the coming years. And we think it's important we think about making it bigger now.

Plus if you're going at more market, then you're able essentially to buy more, more lottery tickets give yourself more of a chance of a win in terms of the sales process. In terms of the growth driver, again, if you'll forgive me, I'll slightly re-purpose the question and talk about operational gearing. If you think about parts of our business, and we spoke about the revenue mix earlier, there are some parts of our business that involve essentially reselling people. We take somebody and then we charge for their time.

That's the professional services model. If you look at the subscription parts of our business, then you've got operational leverage in there and some big chunks of that have nothing to do with people's direct time or they're not related in such a direct way to people's time. So all of our revenue segments are good. We make good money in all of our revenue segments.

But essentially, I'm answering the question by saying our strategy to grow the repeatable annual revenue in our business in the form of subscription revenue in the form of SaaS-based revenues will be over the longer term, the absolute growth driver of our revenues because we can build those revenues independently of the speed at which we build our workforce, and therefore, we can make a greater margin.

The final one was about what the split looks like going forward. So I've been doing these 30 years. And over those 30 years, in general, you've got equal demand across all of those parts of the market. So if we bring it back to the fact that we focus on equipment and auto in the U.S. and in Europe, if I were to take the clock forward, then I would see fairly -- over the longer term, you'd see fairly even demand across all those market segments.

I think the thing that might be interesting is that we are definitely -- and Matt mentioned this as we talked about growth. We will definitely continue to increase our geographical growth, and I certainly wouldn't bet against if you wind the clock forward, Asia-Pac in some way becoming part of our target market. And that will absolutely be net new revenue from countries where we've not had opportunity before.

And of course, the thing that we do keep coming back to, which is Commercial lending, which is a whole new market for us with a whole new go-to-market strategy. So going forward, it's those 2 things that would affect the balance. But normally, one would expect to have fairly even demand from all of those markets because all of those markets are subject to push factors, as I discussed before.

Thank you, Andy. That's all the questions that we have for today. So I'll hand back over to the management team for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Ivy, and thank you for your support in this. I would just like to thank everybody on here for genuinely a very insightful set of questions, which we've enjoyed answering and talking about. You're clearly people who do pay very close attention to our story and what we're doing, and we hope that you'll continue to. But everybody's got things to do and everybody is busy, and it is a weekday. So we really do appreciate you giving us a little bit of your time to hear from us and hopefully speak to all of you this time next year.

Thank you to the management team for joining us today. That concludes the Alfa investor presentation. Please take a moment to complete a short survey following the event. A recording of this presentation will be made available on Engage Investor. I hope you enjoyed today's webinar.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Alfa Financial Software 2025 Full Year Results. As always, I'm joined by Matthew White, Alfa's COO; and Duncan Magrath, Alfa's CFO. I'll kick us off with the introduction and key highlights before handing over to Duncan for the financial review. Matt will then pick up the operational delivery side of things before I talk about the business and give you a sales update before we summarize.

So, in overview, 2025 has been an excellent year for the company. Subscription revenue was up 16%, and we saw an 18% growth in subscription total contract value. ARR of GBP 43.9 million, was up 15% and net revenue retention of 109%, was up on 2024's 103%. In total, subscription revenues were 34% of our revenue mix. We had a strong sales performance and very strong delivery momentum during the year. The late-stage pipeline was filled with 10 prospects, and we are doing paid work with 5 of the 10 customers in that late-stage pipeline.

We're also seeing encouraging activity in the early-stage pipeline, showing the buoyancy of demand within our target market. 20 customers are now live on Alfa Systems 6, which underscores the ease of implementation of that upgrade for our existing customers. And we continue to invest in people, product and planet. We've grown the team with average headcount up 6% and high staff retention at 97% during the year. Overall, we invested GBP 37.7 million in our software with the major focus of investment being market expansion. Originations and fleet are increasing our accessible addressable market and commercial finance is increasing our overall addressable market.

And for the planet, the carbon offsets we purchased were greater than the total of our emissions. Looking forward, we're confident in our expectations and our prospects. Matt will touch upon the major talking point of the moment, artificial intelligence. But I'll preempt his messages by saying we see AI as an exciting area. It's an opportunity for us to become more efficient in our internal operations, delivery and in our software engineering, and it brings opportunities to build new functionality and capabilities into our software to create business benefit for our customers. In light of that confidence, the Board has declared a special dividend of 3.1p and an ordinary dividend has been declared of 1.5p.

So going into more detail then with the key highlights. Full year revenue was GBP 126.7 million, up 17% on a constant currency basis from last year's GBP 109.9 million. Subscription revenue grew 16%. And as I've mentioned, net revenue retention was 109%. Total contract value stood at GBP 227.5 million, up 3% on last year's GBP 221.3 million, and operating profit was GBP 40.1 million. That's a 17% increase on last year's number, and it represents a 32% operating profit margin with EBITDA margin at 34%. Cash conversion was stronger than last year at 97%. That's up from 2024's 89%.

I will now hand over to Duncan for the financial review.

Thanks, Andy. I said at the half year that the figures really speak for themselves, and I find myself repeating that for the year as a whole. 2025 really was a very strong financial performance. Revenue was up 15% at actual rates or 17% at constant currency with growth across all revenue streams. We had very strong chargeability in the first half, and as expected, this reduced in the second half with less software engineering revenues. Overall, though, it was a good gross margin performance of nearly 64%.

Operating profit grew even more strongly than revenue, up 17% at actual rates to deliver an operating margin of 31.6%. This benefited from 120 basis points from the FX hedges that we put in place to protect ourselves from movements in sterling versus the U.S. dollar. The effective tax rate of 24.9% was in line with last year. And so basic EPS also grew by 17% with diluted EPS up 18%. Overall, a really strong performance. And given our confidence in the future prospects for the business, the Board has proposed an ordinary dividend of 1.5p per share and declared a special dividend of 3.1p per share.

This is a total dividend of 4.6p, which is up 21% on the dividends declared and proposed this time last year. Along with a special dividend of 5.0p paid earlier in the year, total dividends are 9.6p for the year, up 20% on last year. Turning now to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams, which was demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV in that year. We said a year ago that we expected to work through the TCV during 2025. But in fact, we have seen a small increase in the year, ending up 3% higher than this time last year. This increase was driven by the strong growth in subscription TCV that more than offset the reductions in software engineering and delivery TCV.

Next 12 months TCV is up 2%, again, with strong growth in subscription TCV, with delivery TCV being in line with last year, but with Software Engineering TCV down 35% versus this time last year. Despite next 12 months delivery TCV being flat year-on-year, we expect delivery revenues to grow in 2026 and would expect TCV to increase as we convert the customers in the late-stage pipeline into wins. Given the customer profile in the late-stage pipeline, we do expect software engineering revenues to drop in 2026 from the high of 2025. With the growing importance of subscription revenues to our business, we started publishing some typical SaaS metrics at the last half year results.

On the left, you can see our annual recurring revenue or ARR figures. We calculate this using the average subscription revenues over the last 6 months and then annualize them. This picture shows what you would expect, very strong growth in ARR, up 15% versus last year and very much in line with our overall growth in subscription revenues. The graph on the right shows our net revenue retention percentage or NRR, and this is a financial metric, which represents the net impact of churn and growth in the subscription revenues. This is calculated by taking the customers with recurring revenues from 12 months ago and calculating what their revenues are now and expressing this as a percentage.

This calculation includes the benefit of upsells and expansions and is net of customer losses. We are often asked by those new to the Alfa story about churn. In reality, closer watchers of our story know that it is in effect 0, and this is demonstrated by an NRR figure that is consistently in excess of 100%. At 31 December 2025, NRR was an impressive 109%. This was principally due to the ramp-up of subscription revenues from customers in the early stages of their time on Alfa, along with contractual inflation increases.

So looking now at overall subscription revenues. It is perhaps worth reiterating that our subscription revenue is dependent on contract counts or in effect, the number of assets on Alfa, i.e., it is volume-based measure and not a per user measure. Alfa has always priced on this basis as we make companies more efficient and pricing on a per user basis would not be appropriate. We continue to see strong growth in subscription revenues in 2025, up 16% as more customers added more contracts on to Alfa, along with some indexation.

Total subscription TCV and next 12 months TCV grew 18% and underpins our confidence that this revenue stream will continue to show strong growth going forward. Total subscription customers increased from 39 to 42, and we only have 2 customers on v4 who are not yet committed to upgrading onto modern Alfa, and they accounted for circa 7% of revenues in 2025. There are 15 contracted customers not on Alfa Cloud and converting these on to Alfa Cloud is a potential source of future growth in subscription revenues.

Turning to software engineering revenues. Last year, we had a relatively low first half for software engineering revenues and a much stronger second half. This year, we saw the opposite trend with the first half showing a 72% increase in software engineering revenues versus last year, with revenues in the second half down 18% on last year. Overall, this results in revenues up 13% on last year, and this growth was very much driven by enhancement work for new customers. Enhancement work for existing customers was broadly stable.

Perpetual license revenues being the combination of both one-off and customized license revenues totaled GBP 3.7 million in 2025, slightly down on the GBP 4.0 million in 2024 and the GBP 5.1 million in 2023. This will continue to decline over the next few years as the historic perpetual license accounting unwinds. For 2026, at the moment, we see less demand for chargeable enhancements from new customers, and this is what is driving the reduction in TCV. As noted at the half year, our margins are quite sensitive to the amount of chargeable enhancement work we have as the cost base stays relatively fixed.

Turning to our final revenue stream, delivery. The ramp-up of the new projects was the major reason for the 15% increase in our delivery revenues in 2025. We have 11 projects underway where the customer is not yet live and only when these contracts are live, will they drive up our subscription revenues. Overall delivery TCV is showing us down year-on-year as a result of working through some of the large multiyear projects that we won in 2024. As these multiyear projects continue throughout 2026, the next 12 months TCV is actually flat year-on-year. Given that we are doing paid work for a number of customers in the late-stage pipeline, and we expect these projects to continue, we expect overall delivery revenues in 2026 to be higher than 2025.

Turning now to expenses. Cost of sales grew by 18% over last year, largely on the back of increases in costs from headcount and salary increases, along with a small drop in the amount of capitalization of internally generated software. Hosting costs increased with the growth in Alfa Cloud. Sales, general and admin expenses were up 12%. In addition to salary cost growth, there were increases in profit share due to the higher profits generated this year, share-based payments and increased amortization. FX has been significant in the period. We had net transaction gains of GBP 0.8 million. Within this, the gain from U.S. dollar FX hedges was GBP 1.5 million, offset by other FX losses of GBP 0.7 million. Other income from R&D expenditure credit was up at GBP 0.4 million.

Turning to cash flow. In March last year, I estimated the cash conversion for the year would be 80% to 90% due to accelerated receipts in 2024 from 2 projects. Cash conversion, in fact, has beaten this at 97%. The reason for this improved performance was again better-than-expected receipts at year-end. So again, I'm guiding to around 80% to 90% cash conversion for 2026 with 90% to 100% thereafter. Dividends paid increased GBP 3.9 million on last year to GBP 26.0 million. Overall, there was a net cash inflow of GBP 5.9 million, but a cash balance of GBP 26.4 million at the year-end.

Now some words on capital allocation. Alfa is a highly cash-generative business, and we have a strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends. Cumulative dividends paid in the last 5 years are now up to GBP 167 million, and our overall dividend yield from ordinary and special dividends has been running between circa 3.5% to 5% per annum. As you know, we are very disciplined about allocating capital and keep this under review. There are no immediate investment requirements for our current excess cash. And so we are proposing an ordinary dividend of 1.5p and have declared a special dividend of 3.1p per share, in total, up 21% on this time last year.

Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. This slide is largely reiterating guidance I have given as I've gone through my presentation. However, FX is worth highlighting. It is perhaps easier to follow what is going on with FX if you split out the gain or loss on FX hedges from other FX gains and losses. As far as transaction and translation gains go, our sensitivity remains the same as before with each $0.01 movement in the U.S. dollar impacting revenue by GBP 500,000 and operating profit by GBP 300,000. We had an average rate of $1.32 for 2025. And if we had a rate say of $1.35 for 2026, that would reduce reported revenue by GBP 1.5 million and reported profit by GBP 0.9 million.

In addition to this, we had GBP 1.5 million of hedge gains in 2025. So total profit in 2026 will be lower than 2025 by GBP 2.4 million purely because of FX. Predicting what is likely to happen on the exchange rate is extremely difficult and seems to vary weekly. Earlier in 2026, we hedged 40% of 2026 U.S. dollar cash flows at $1.37. And so if the rate for the year was $1.35, which I used in the illustration I just talked about, we would also have a loss of GBP 0.2 million. So this will be a year-on-year swing in our hedges alone of GBP 1.7 million and so quite a headwind to profit growth. However, despite this and assuming the exchange rate does not move far from $1.35, we expect to see good revenue growth in 2026.

So a quick recap on what was an extremely strong set of financial results. Revenue of GBP 126.7 million, was up 17% at constant currency. This was at an operating margin of 32%, delivering an operating profit of GBP 40.1 million, up 17% on last year. Diluted EPS was 10.14p, up 18%. Cash conversion was excellent at 97%, resulting in a year-end cash balance of GBP 26.4 million. This cash balance, along with TCV of GBP 227.5 million gives us great strength going forward, allowing us to declare a combined ordinary and special dividend of 4.6p, up 21% on last year.

I will now hand over to Matt.

Thanks, Duncan, and hello, everyone. Firstly, from me, as always, a reminder of our strategy. The market that we serve is extremely complex, highly regulated, infinitely demanding and ever changing. Our opportunity is huge. We're the leading player in a massive market, and we currently have only a small market share. So our strategy for creating long-term sustainable business value is designed to maximize and enable us to grasp that opportunity.

To strengthen, to grow our differentiation by investing in our 3 key differentiators, our smart diverse team, our product and our delivery methodology and tooling; to sell, to enable profitable growth by focusing on building our community of single-tenant SaaS customers, increasing our subscription revenue and enabling incremental sales; to scale, to increase our capacity for developing and delivering Alfa Systems and extend our reach; and finally, to simplify, to enable more concurrent Alfa Systems implementations more efficiently.

Now as usual, I'll structure this update around our 3 key differentiators: our product, our delivery and our people. And Andrew will talk about exciting sales progress when I finished. But I'll start with a few words on Alfa's product and technology. And firstly, artificial intelligence. Alfa's market positioning, our product architecture and our business model provides strong foundations for long-term growth as the capability of AI technology evolves. So we view AI as an enabler of greater efficiency and greater customer value. We're excited about the possibilities, and our approach is deliberately pragmatic and grounded in real use cases that enhance productivity, delivery efficiency and product capability.

We focus our AI strategy on 4 areas: AI Literacy across the organization, ensuring that all of our people can effectively and responsibly leverage new tools. Internal efficiencies using AI to streamline processes, to reduce manual effort and to improve operational scalability, including in software development. Delivery Acceleration, applying AI to reduce implementation costs and time lines for customers, for example, through AskThea, our AI chatbot, which is in use by our delivery teams, by our customers and by our partners; and Product Enhancements, embedding AI within Alfa Systems where it solves customer challenges and improves automation, insight and decision support.

Expanding a little on the product enhancements theme. In 2026, we'll invest in architecture to simplify the process for expanding the use of AI by Alfa Systems customers in a secure and resilient way. Our vision is for our customers to be able to solve problems using AI, both in Alfa Systems itself and with Alfa Systems as part of a wider landscape. We'll continue to invest in demonstrable and productionized functionality, for example, multifunction self-service agents and intelligent document processing to automate credit workflow. The capability of technology in this area is moving forward fast, and we are leveraging that progress.

Now some of you may be relatively new to our story and may not be familiar with some of the intricacies of the market that we serve. So it's worthwhile repeating. And I'll do so while adding context around our view of the future of AI in our market. We are, of course, aware that many views have been expressed in the wider area recently. This is our take on the implications for Alfa. Firstly, deep functional domain capability makes simple replication of Alfa Systems by AI impossible.

Put simply, you can't vibe code an Alfa. To the extent that development of software will become easier in the future, we have a huge head start and the resources to capitalize on our position. And we see ourselves accelerating away from competition and potential future competition as development costs reduce. Secondly, whilst we do see generic AI automation tooling enhancing our ability to serve our customers, this will only be possible because those automation tools will be predicated on and governed by our enterprise software.

Alfa provides a vast, well-structured data framework that is based on a deep understanding of the complex enterprise context in which we operate. Our deeply embedded enterprise-wide software provides encoded institutional knowledge and system of record. Alfa Systems serves customers' line of business in an extremely complex market. And our regulated customer base requires embedded deterministic workflow and ledger transactions with clear audit trails and predictable interactions within a complex landscape. Probabilistic outcomes have no place, and this absolutely does not favor ungoverned AI outputs acting alone.

In this context, standardization, compliance, reliability, reversibility, integration, speed, authority models, security and specific industry practice matter much more than generic automation. And finally, software needs to be implemented. Enterprise software implementation projects within highly complex and regulated environments are necessarily huge business change exercises. We see AI increasing implementation efficiency, but we don't see it eliminating the implementation process. At Alfa, we have an unrivaled track record of delivery of these projects in intricate and interconnected contexts and where competitors consistently struggle. And this is a key aspect of our differentiation.

We should also be clear that Alfa Systems is priced based on the number of asset finance contracts managed on Alfa rather than per user. And this will ensure that AI-driven headcount reductions at customers will not impact Alfa's revenues. So while we do see opportunities for Alfa Systems as an enabler for Agentic technology that reduces system user numbers, this also represents an opportunity rather than a threat to our revenue. In summary, Alfa's market-leading technology stack and architecture, the scale and complexity of our software, our expansive and culturally embedded innovation and investment agenda and our robust revenue model ensure that Alfa is positioned to maximize the potential of AI technology as it evolves.

Turning to other areas in which our product, Alfa Systems has progressed. 2025 was a landmark year. In all of our key product development areas, we have worked in partnership with customers. This is our preferred way to develop software because it ensures market fit and because our customers co-invest sharing the cost. Our product investment keeps us ahead, wins new customers and also plays a part in ensuring that we don't lose customers. 2025 was a landmark year because we have developed MSPs or minimum sellable products in our 3 key expansion markets, 2 of which expand the scope of our existing serviceable addressable market, or SAM, U.S. auto originations and fleet, and the third of which takes us into a new target addressable market, commercial finance.

U.S. auto originations is exciting because of the scale of the opportunity. To date, our U.S. auto implementations have provided lease and loan servicing functionality, but all U.S. auto finance providers require an origination system in addition, and we believe that this market is underserved. We see the value of a U.S. auto originations implementation as between 1/3 and 2/3 of the value of our core servicing market, so a huge opportunity. We have already sold our origination solution to one large customer and the development that we've carried out to date has benefited hugely from partnering with that customer.

Implementation of Alfa for originations will follow from our servicing implementation. Fleet is exciting because it opens up the European auto finance market, where auto fleet management often sits alongside retail finance. We've already secured an initial sale in this market too, and the implementation is progressing well. And commercial finance is an adjacent market, which will, in time, increase our TAM. We've secured 2 sales within customers that are primarily focused on asset finance. And in 2026, we'll be stepping up our marketing efforts within the commercial finance world itself.

I've outlined some highlights here, but it's by no means an exhaustive list. Our product improves constantly, and we release a new version every 4 weeks. Every version includes many new features and functionality. 2025 saw us increase our investment in our product again, and 2026 will see the exciting product progress continue at pace. I've spent a lot of time talking about technology today, but our delivery track record and our people remain just as important in differentiating Alfa from competitors. If I had to cite a single differentiator, it would have to be culture. We have a culture of delivery. And it's really hard to deliver in this market.

We succeed where competitors frequently fail. We achieved 35 successful deliveries in 2026 and 20 customers are now live on the latest version of our software, Alfa Systems 6. In 2025, we started work with some smaller opportunities in the U.S., which is important because it has enabled us better to understand the requirements of lower-tier customers and to develop our Alfa Start solutions with the aim of creating a product for this market, including for partner-led delivery. We have a culture of growth individually and collectively. We put a lot into ensuring that we can attract the best people in our industries into developing our team and to engaging and retaining our team as we grow together.

We continued to grow our team with average headcount over the year of 516. We have strong retention at 97%, and we have strong engagement at 83%. Following the success of our Lisbon Smart Hub, we've set up a new smart hub in Gdansk, and we've welcomed new software developers and new members of our cloud hosting team. 2026 will see us set up a 24/7 hosting operations team in Gdansk. We've refreshed our talent management and pay and promotions process, moving away from heavyweight annual review towards a clear framework for ongoing conversations about skills development, goals, delivery and well-being.

And really importantly, we have a culture of inclusion and the social and environmental responsibility. And you can read more about this fundamental part of who we are in our 2025 sustainability report, which we released last week. We're in a fantastic position now, and we're excited about the future. Our culture remains key to that. We're extremely grateful to our team for making possible the success that we're reporting today as we grow this special company together. And we're also continuing to welcome new customers into our community, as Andrew will outline next.

Thanks, Matt, and I'll continue with the business and the sales update. The sales pipeline has been really strong during the year. The late-stage pipeline increased to 10 prospects and to add a little detail to that, touching on the early-stage pipeline, we've been focusing particularly on gathering industry knowledge and contracts in commercial finance. We've also seen strong interest in originations and fleet with multiple demos and overall, the activity in that early-stage pipeline has remained robust. We've been delighted by the interest in the results of the investment work that we've been doing, which really underscores our decision to build out the software in those areas.

Touching then on the late-stage pipeline. During FY '25, we added 5 new prospects, converted 1 into a win, 1 moved back to the mid-stage and 1 was lost. Overall, we ended the year with 10 prospects in the late-stage pipeline, which was up from 8 at the last year-end. And as I mentioned at the start of the presentation, we're doing paid work with 5 of them. We are a preferred supplier with 8, which gives us a huge amount of optimism that we will convert those to sold in due course. It's also worth noting that we've seen good spread across our regions with recent additions in Europe as well as our first South American prospect for in-country operations.

Turning then to the outlook. Demand for asset and automotive finance software remains robust as our pipeline demonstrates. Our people and delivery record, as always, are key differentiators. That's the case now, and we expect it to continue to be the case in the future. We've been working hard as before, to simplify our implementations, but we're increasing the use of AI and growing our capability to do more implementations as a result of this work. We expect further growth in delivery revenues, which will feed through into more subscription revenues in 2026 and beyond. We continue to invest in our product. Chargeable development work will vary depending on the mix of new customers in our pipeline.

For 2026, we expect this to be below the high watermark achieved in 2025. And our success in growing our U.S. business means that we're impacted by foreign currency exchange, which right now is a headwind. But in summary, we expect that 2026 will be a year of continued growth and momentum. So to summarize what you've been hearing today so far. 2025 has been a fabulous growth story for our single-tenant volume-based SaaS solution. Subscription revenue has grown 16%. We've seen 18% growth in subscription TCV. ARR was up 15% to GBP 43.9 million and NRR was at 109%, up significantly from 2024's 103%.

Overall, subscription revenues have contributed 34% to the total. I've talked about that strong sales and delivery momentum, a strong late-stage pipeline with 10 prospects in total, up from 8 last term. And we're working under LOE or equivalent with 5 of the 10 customers in the late-stage pipeline. We're seeing encouraging activity in the early-stage pipeline, and that activity is very much validating the software investment that we've been making in growing our addressable market. 20 customers in total are live on Alfa Systems 6, a really pleasing level of uptake that, as I said before, really underlines everything that we've said about this latest game-changing version of our software being frictionless for existing customers.

We continue to invest in people, product and planet. Headcount is up 6% with high staff retention at 97% and the investment that we've made in our key software asset was GBP 37.7 million. That investment focused on originations, fleet, commercial finance to drive us forward and to expand our opportunity. And carbon offsets purchased were greater than 100% of our emissions. So we're confident in our expectations and in our prospects. The Board has decided to declare a special dividend of 3.1p and an ordinary dividend of 1.5p, and we continue forward with that confident outlook. Thank you for listening.

[Operator Instructions] And we will now take our first question from Sven Merkt from Barclays.

Maybe first on Software Engineering, which you expect to drop this year. Can you comment how you see Software Engineering develop over the midterm and the extent we should anticipate this to become less of a headwind over the next years? And then secondly, thanks for the details on the AI-related product enhancements. Could you also speak there a little bit about how much customers are already demanding such features? Or if this is less a focus for now as customers want to see this technology mature more first? And with that in mind, when should we expect to start to see a more meaningful adoption of AI features?

Thank you very much, Sven. I think probably I'll ask Duncan to address the software engineering question, if that's okay. As I understand your AI question, let's take that first. And you're broadly speaking, asking about customer demand for AI. And I think across our customer base, there are lots of different levels of adoption on the AI side as there -- if there is in the broader industrial world? Our job, of course, is to make sure that we lead with the art of the possible, and we ensure that -- we create an ecosystem whereby customers can innovate their own artificial intelligence products, services and capabilities.

And as much as we can, like any piece of technology, we integrate it into our software, and we use that to make our customers more. In terms of time scales, well, I'll ask Matt to perhaps comment on the agenda at the moment. But we already, as you know, spend, but perhaps other listeners don't that we have our large language model, our chatbot. Our steer is in use by customers, partners and indeed by our teams. And we've got a pretty full agenda of things that we're putting into the software.

But Matt, you might like to talk to that briefly before Duncan talks about software engineering.

I would agree with you, yes. Customers are -- in the same way as we are, customers are positive about AI, but they're also balanced and they're also pragmatic. And for the most part, customers have functional requirements. I'm not going to pretend that we haven't had any conversations with customers along the lines of, we need to say something on AI, tell us your story. And of course, it's a part of the service that we provide that we are absolutely able to empower them for those internal conversations that they're having.

But for the most part, they are -- they have requirements. They have functional requirements, and we are able to serve those requirements using the system, and they don't necessarily care whether we do so using AI. Depending on your definition of AI, we've been using AI for very many years. And we've been -- we were early adopters of various AI technology. In terms of features in Alfa already, so we have lots of decisioning features in our workflow. Those aren't necessarily LLM related, but they may or may not be referred to as AI. We have ML for credit decisioning. And he has already mentioned AskThea. Then we have various -- in addition, various demos and various proof of concepts where we are integrating with large language models or agentic or intelligent document processing. And there's more to come in this area as well, expanding that functionality this year.

On software engineering, it's probably worth -- just taking a headline view on it. So 2025 was a really strong year for Software Engineering. We did a lot more chargeable development work for customers, very specifically, there was a lot of work around originations. And for next year, we see less demand from the type of customers and the nature of the markets they're in the pipeline for that Software Engineering work. So you can see from the slides, the 42% reduction in TCV for Software Engineering -- will, we believe, lead to a reduction in Software Engineering revenues next year.

Your question really was whether that will be a headwind beyond that into the medium term. It is quite difficult for us to forecast because it does depend on the customers that are coming, the markets they're in, the changes that they may wish to have for the system. The way we think about it is that 2025 is a very strong year. 2026 is definitely down on that. If I look beyond that and it's difficult to say, but probably I wouldn't necessarily at this moment, expect a headwind, i.e., '27, I would expect to be perhaps broadly in line with '26 or could be up. And beyond that, it's getting even more difficult to predict. So I think where we sit today, the big headwind is '26, and we wouldn't expect much of a significant headwind beyond that. But it very much depends on what's coming through in the pipeline.

Thank you, Duncan. And a quick additional comment from me on that before we move on. The one thing that we do know is that software engineering customer-facing workload is driven by newness where we're going into new areas, new countries and so on. So definitely, there will be an impact from the new functional areas that we have invested in as well as the continued expansion of our geographical reach.

We'll now take our next question from Harvey Robinson from Panmure Liberum.

I think 2 or 3 from me. Just picking up on that Software Engineering point. Obviously, at the trading update, you commented about a beat on revenue expectations largely due to that. And obviously, this was very strong year -- last year. How much of that beat, if you like, was taken from '26. I mean, could you quantify, is it more than that GBP 2 million number? I really trying to sort of smooth out the trajectory there? And then I've got a couple of other follow-ups.

Duncan -- sorry, Duncan, can you figured that?

I think the GBP 2 million is still broadly a good number. It's quite difficult. We do plan ahead the certainty that we have Software Engineering for the next 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks is pretty high. And then obviously, it drops beyond that. But there was certainly work that we were expecting to do in 2026 that was accelerated in '25. And that obviously creates a very different picture. If we had slightly less software engineering revenues in 2025 and more in '26, that will be painting a slightly different picture and would reduce the headwind that Sven was just talking about.

So I think GBP 2 million is probably still a good number. Of course, actually, as Andy said, it's very much dependent on the types and units of projects and when they arrive. And that's -- so this is one area where a smooth growth path is never going to be -- is probably never going to happen. It's always going to be moving around a bit depending on what's happening with the pipeline.

And then just, I suppose, 2 related. In terms of implementation, you're obviously talking about increasing capability, you have been looking to partner with people to do that. Also has a reasonably consistent number 8% for some of that. But to what extent does implementation accelerate that subscription growth towards the 50% mark? And then coming back to the Software Engineering point, you've got that new commercial loan products coming. How much -- I don't know enough about the requirements there. Is that an area where the newness drives an acceleration of software engineering.

Could you just give us a bit of color for how your pipeline in commercial loans is building -- jumping around a little bit, but I think keen to understand when that becomes a real revenue contributor across the business? I think the most important question is to what extent -- what extent does implementation becoming easier to drive subscriptions towards that 50% target you've talked about in the past or near-term target?

Thanks, Harvey. I'll probably ask Matt to talk about the implementation and frankly, our continued drive to remove frictions from -- friction from our deliveries so that we can turn on more subscription. On the commercial loan side, you will be more aware than most people on this call of the size of the prize in terms of the commercial lending market. For us, because it's so big, we need to be able to bite off certain product types individually. And so we've started off with syndicated lending, which is in itself a massive addition to our addressable market.

One thing that we have said with commercial lending is there's a nice overlap with our home market, if you like, and in the asset finance businesses very often will have a small-ish commercial lending capability. And that means that in the first instance, we have a really good opportunity to get a greater share of wallet. And that's what's going on. So we're seeing some early-stage demand across all of those areas of investment. But on the commercial lending side, we've got some good conversations with a couple of existing customers, which is fantastic.

So yes, we're hoping that 2026, we'll see some real progress. One of the things that Matthew pointed out, we've got a minimum sellable product in those areas, which for us means that when we sell one, we're ready to go. So strong progress in all of those areas of investment, and we're very excited about commercial lending. You've asked the sort of repeat point around Software Engineering and the extent to which these new areas will drive it. The one thing that we do know where we have put -- well, anything we know that where we have gone into new areas, then the first, second, third, fourth, probably fifth organization that takes it at least will drive quite a lot of software engineering revenue, even within our home market, there's still stuff to do.

There's still development that we need to do on Alfa that people do something that's a little bit different or as I said, we've moved into a new jurisdiction or a new market. The sheer size and scale of the commercial lending market, I would imagine that as we start to become established, it will drive quite a lot of Software Engineering revenue as well as a requirement for investment from us. So yes, kind of yeses on all of those, but I'll ask Matt to talk about where we're going with delivery.

It's the strategy, Harvey, as you know. So the strategy is to reduce the number of days from the Alfa team per Alfa Systems implementation. And we've been doing that steadily over the last, well, several years. I've given some examples of the sort of thing that we've done in that area in the past. But all of it means that we can take on more and more new projects, and we can satisfy the demand that Andy and the revenue team are generating for us here at Alfa without growing the team to the same extent as we might have required had we not been able to simplify our implementations.

So our sphere is helpful in that area. It means that we require -- we're able to share expertise much more easily, including with our partners. Migration tooling is not very sexy, but it's very helpful in reducing the amount of time to increase volume on Alfa Systems, which speeds up the rate at which we're able to increase subscription revenue. Configuration was tooling, similarly, sharing configuration between environments, testing, configuration, bulk uploads, not super sexy, but really helping us to reduce the amount of effort required to get new customers live and to get new customers live with volume. And that plus the sales performance accelerates the growth in our subscription revenue, as you also outlined. So really exciting times for us.

Our next question is from Harold Evans from Singer Capital Markets.

A couple. Yes, I just wanted to double-click on that last question because I guess there's an argument that AI makes your delivery more efficient, software engineering are more efficient, therefore, charging on a T&E basis, you reduce that. And Andrew, I'd be really interested in particularly your perspective in over the longer term, is this -- it seems like that if there is a step change in efficiency and you can do more projects.

I'd be interested in your perspective because I assume that, that's possibly nothing that's completely new insofar as do you see this as a headwind or rather as Matt, you touched on, is it actually just the number of concurrent projects has been able to increase and such it hasn't been a net headwind to the business? And then I've just got one follow-up, if that's okay.

You've kind of answered your own question, Harold. That's absolutely right, but I'll put it into bold, italic and underline it. We see it as an accelerator for the longest time, as Matt said, we really like the consistency of strategy that we have at Alfa. We have been pushing in the same direction for quite some time now, driving towards that 50% level of subscription revenue that Harvey mentioned earlier. And directionally, anything that takes friction out of the implementation process is good news for us.

So AI comes along, and we think this is fantastic. This accelerates what we're already trying to do. Matt talked about things that may or may not be glamorous. I found all of those things glamorous, but that makes Matthew and myself in a minority. But AI is currently a very, very glamorous accelerant in being able to do more faster. But there are lots of ways we're able to do more faster. But there's an argument that Alfa Start as an accelerator is certainly short term, more profound in the effect it has on our ability to go faster.

But the strategic hypothesis, which is why I said you sort of answered your own question, is that we are an organization that is a market leader in a market that is much more massive than our current level of revenue. We're confident in our ability to sell into that market. We believe that we will, in general, be in a position where demand outstrips supply. So on the assumption we keep our delivery teams busy at all times, then AI will give us the ability to do more with the same number of people, and that has to be a good thing. And it's not new. To us, it's just an underlining of the same strategy.

And then just one go-to-market question, if that's okay, is that you've historically said it's difficult to persuade a prospect to spend GBP 50 million. But I wonder whether your move to becoming a more sort of modular vendor, whether it's originations fleet in that are you thinking any differently about your strategy given that -- obviously, it seems like originations is a very valuable product, but whether you're thinking more differently and being more sort of outbound such to sort of really capture what seems to be a large market opportunity.

That's a great question, Harold. And I'm going to put a quick postscript on my previous answer, by the way, because I think it's important. You asked us about the prospects of AI and making Alfa more efficient. You didn't, but I'll answer anyway the prospects of AI making our customers more efficient. And yes, it will. And of course, one of the things that we are doing is looking to deliver capabilities and functionality for our customers using AI and to give them the ability to integrate AI into the Alfa ecosystem. That makes them more efficient. But to remind everybody listening that Alfa does not license on a per seat basis.

So our customers becoming more efficient means that they can grow faster, and that is good for us, and there is no second order effect around our ability to generate revenues from our software. And I'm sorry for laboring it, but I think it is an important point when lots of people are talking about, I'm doing air quotes here, the death of SaaS. SaaS will only get bigger for Alfa. Great question on GTM. I've always said that demand generation is not a massive thing within enterprise sales at the scale that we do them. But your question is insightful, noting that as we move into some smaller areas of the market by partnering and all the things that Matt was talking about, Demand Gen may become more of a thing for us. But what is definitely a thing for us is incremental selling.

We've not made a big thing about it because we've had plenty of news to deliver to you, but we are advancing very, very quickly in product management. It's been an area of focus in terms of bringing new products and new modules to the market as well as being more intentional on the way that we go out to prospects and customers. And more modules means you don't necessarily -- it doesn't necessarily make a difference in terms of bringing people to market at all. But of course, it does give the opportunity for us to both new prospects and to existing customers -- and offer them more cool new stuff within Alfa that hopefully they'll take and that drives incremental sales. You're very right to point to originations as being, if you like, a mega incremental sale because it's much bigger as an opportunity than your average Alfa module. So go-to-market has changed, bigger opportunity in incrementals and yes, therefore, well said.

It appears there are currently no further questions. With this, I'd like to hand the call back over to our speakers for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. And this leaves me to thank everybody that took the time to listen to us this morning. I'll probably just parrot what Matthew said before, but maybe expand the remit a little bit. These are very, very exciting times for us at Alfa. We'll continue to turn in a good financial performance for you all. But at least as importantly, we are making great, great progress on strategic execution and moving into this great opportunity that presents itself going forward. So exciting times. We look forward to speaking to you next time around.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Alfa's 2025 Half Year Results. I'm Andrew Denton, Alfa's CEO, and I'm joined as always by our CFO, Duncan Magrath; and our COO, Matthew White.

In overview, Alfa has had an outstanding first half. We've continued to focus on growing Subscription revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong growth in Subscription TCV at 12% versus the first half of last year.

This year, for the first time, and in subsequent years, we will be publishing annual recurring revenue and net revenue retention. Duncan will outline the detail behind this, but in summary, we have seen annual recurring revenue of GBP 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year, and net revenue retention of 112%.

I'm delighted with the growth in annual recurring revenue and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alfa's industry-leading customer retention is just as strong in a SaaS-only world as we grow our customer base with new Subscription sales.

Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues and we have 23 Alfa Cloud customers, which is up from 20 this time last year.

More generally, we've seen strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year. The late-stage pipeline is strong with 7 prospects. We are working under letters of engagement or equivalent with 6 of those 7 customers in the late-stage pipeline. And really importantly, we are seeing normal levels of activity in the early stages of the pipeline.

From a Delivery perspective, we've again seen a strong period, and I'm delighted to say that we now have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6, which underscores our messaging around this breakthrough new version of our software. Alfa Systems 6 is a frictionless upgrade opportunity for our existing customers.

As always, we continue to invest in product, people and planet. Our average head count is up 7% with continued high staff retention at 97%. We've invested a total of GBP 19.4 million into our software in the first half with particular focus on expanding our target addressable market with commercial finance and expanding our serviceable addressable market through developments in the areas of originations and automotive fleet.

From a financial perspective, our full year expectations remain unchanged. We continue to be confident in our future prospects. And as a result, the Board has declared a special dividend of 5p.

So on to the financial highlights. Revenue was GBP 62.5 million, which is up 22% at constant currency on 2024 first half revenue of GBP 52.3 million. We've maintained our excellent momentum in Subscription revenue growth at 17%, being around the same level we saw last year. And as I've already said, net revenue retention was 112%, which demonstrates outstanding customer retention.

Our excellent performance in contracting new business is demonstrated by a total contract value of GBP 210.7 million. This is up from GBP 193.3 million this time last year. That's 9% growth in our TCV versus last year, with Subscription TCV growth of 12% as I've mentioned and Software Engineering TCV growth of 12%.

At GBP 21.6 million, operating profit was up 33% from this time last year. Our operating profit margin was higher than normal at 35% in the half, which was up from 31% in the first half of last year. This was driven by increased chargeability in our Software Engineering teams.

EBITDA margin at 37% showed significant growth from last year's 33%.

And finally, cash was at GBP 23.9 million, up from GBP 22 million this time last year.

I'll now hand over to Duncan.

Thanks, Andy. The figures really speak for themselves, and the first half of 2025 was a very strong financial performance.

Revenue was up 20% at actual rates or 22% at constant currency, with growth across all revenue streams. There was particularly strong growth in Software Engineering, which was up 72% on the back of significantly higher chargeability than the first half last year.

The improved chargeability improved the gross margin percentage up 130 basis points to 64.2%. Operating profit grew even more strongly than revenue, up 33% to deliver an operating margin of 34.6%. It is worth noting that I estimate that the FX hedges that we put in place to protect ourselves from movements in sterling versus the U.S. dollar added 240 basis points to the margin in the first half.

The effective tax rate of 26.0% was in line with last year, and so basic EPS also grew by 33% in the half. Diluted EPS was up 34% at 5.35p per share. Overall, a really strong performance, and given our confidence in the future prospects for the business, the Board has declared a special dividend of 5.0p per share.

Turning now to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams, which was demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV in the calendar year. We said in March that we expected to work through the TCV during 2025, and we have seen a 5% reduction in total TCV since the year-end, but it is still up 9% on this time last year.

Next 12 months TCV is up even more strongly versus this time last year, particularly in Delivery and Software Engineering due to the new contracts we won in the second half of last year.

We have calculated TCV on a consistent basis for many years now, but a number of people have noted that because we only include 3 years of Subscription revenues, which is a much shorter time period than our average customer life, that it may understate the impact of subscription on our business.

There is a benefit in consistent measures that you can view over time, but not if it misrepresents the growing importance of the Subscription revenues to our business. So to help this and reflecting our transition to a SaaS business model, we've decided to, going forward, supplement the TCV disclosure with the more traditional SaaS metrics of ARR and NRR, which you can see on the next slide.

On the left, you can see our annual recurring revenue or ARR figures for the last 3 reporting periods. We calculate this using the average Subscription revenues over the last 6 months and then annualize them. We exclude any revenues that we do not expect to last 12 months at the start of the contract. This picture shows what you would expect, a very strong growth in ARR, up 16% versus last year, very much in line with the overall growth in Subscription revenues.

The graph on the right shows our net revenue retention percentage or NRR, and gives a financial metric, which represents the net impact of churn and growth in the Subscription revenues. This is calculated by taking the percentage of recurring revenues from 12 months ago that we have retained, including where we have sold additional services. Whilst we are often asked by those new to the Alfa story about churn, in reality, closer watchers of our story know that it is in effect 0, and this is demonstrated by an NRR figure for the last 3 reporting periods that is considerably in excess of 100%.

At 30th of June 2025, the 112% NRR was particularly high as we had some new Subscription customers at very low levels this time last year. Over the last 12 months, these contracts have started to ramp up through implementation, a typical pattern I explained in some detail at our last results presentation and hence, the 112% NRR. We would not necessarily expect to be at such a high level going forward with the figures from June and December last year perhaps being better representative of a more normal level.

So looking now at overall Subscription revenues, Subscription revenues continue to grow each quarter. For the first 6 months, they were up 17% versus the same period last year.

The growth in our Alfa Cloud customers has been a significant contributor to our recent growth in Subscription revenues, and you can see that we've increased Alfa Cloud customers from 20 last year to 23 this year. We now have 16 customers on v5 or Alfa Systems 6 who are live but not on Alfa Cloud. We don't expect to convert all 16 to Alfa Cloud, but would expect to convert the majority, and so this can continue to be a source of growth for the next few years.

12% growth in Subscription TCV also underpins our confidence that this revenue stream will continue to show strong growth going forward.

Turning to Software Engineering revenues. Last year, we had a relatively low first half and a much stronger second half. The strength from the second half has carried through into H1 2025. And comparing this with H1 2024 gives a 72% increase in revenues. This revenue is largely off the same head count base and is simply due to changing the nature of the work being performed, resulting in much higher chargeability than last year. And this is a significant factor in the very strong operating margin percentage that we generated in H1.

The biggest contributor to this increased chargeable work was from new customers we won in the second half of last year, with chargeable development from new customers increasing from GBP 1.2 million to GBP 4.5 million. At the moment, we are anticipating this to ease off slightly in H2, but it's also potentially an area that we could outperform our expectations if we get client approvals signed off more quickly than we expect.

Perpetual license accounting, both one-off and customized license, totaled GBP 1.3 million this year, slightly down on the GBP 1.6 million last year, so a relatively small drag in this period from the move to a SaaS model.

TCV is up 12% from last year on the back of these new projects with good coverage for the next 12 months.

Turning to our final revenue stream, Delivery. As expected, with the ramp-up of the new projects, our Delivery revenues increased 10% versus last year. We have 11 projects underway where the customer is not yet live, and only when these contracts are live, will they drive up our Subscription revenues. Of course, as these projects come to an end, we would expect them to be replaced by new projects.

Overall, Delivery TCV is showing as flat year-on-year. You can see that the coverage for the next 12 months has increased significantly, and this is driving our increased recruitment needs. The after 12 months element shows a drop, but this is mainly a function of taking quite a cautious view of our largest implementation project, where we have only counted up to the end of 2026, which is the first phase of a multiphase project and including nothing thereafter. We fully expect the project to continue beyond that date and generate further Delivery revenues.

Turning now to expenses. Cost of sales grew by 15% over last year, largely on the back of increases in costs from head count and salary increases. Hosting costs increased with the growth in Alfa Cloud. Sales, general and admin expenses were up 11%. There's growth in salary costs, but more significant was the increase in profit share and share-based payments.

FX has been significant in the period. We had net transaction gains of GBP 1.1 million in the period. Within this, the impact of realized and unrealized gains on the U.S. dollar FX hedges was GBP 1.7 million, offset by other transactional losses of GBP 0.6 million. The exchange rate at the 30th of June 2025 was $1.37, so we could see some reversal of these gains in H2 if sterling weakens against this level.

Other income was flat at GBP 0.3 million, and this was the income from our R&D expenditure credit that is shown on this line. I will cover it under modeling guidance, but the impact of not expecting FX hedges to repeat and the impact of higher head count and salary costs and depreciation and amortization in the second half will result in a lower operating margin in H2 compared with H1.

Turning now to cash flow. In March, I estimated that cash conversion for the year would be 80% to 90% for 2025 as a result of accelerated receipts in 2024 on 2 projects. Cash conversion of 88% for H1 was in line with this estimate. For 2026 and beyond, we would expect to be in the range of 90% to 100%. Dividends paid increased GBP 1.5 million on last year to GBP 11.2 million. Overall, there was a net cash inflow of GBP 3.4 million for a cash balance of GBP 23.9 million at the period end.

Now some words on capital allocation. Alfa remains a highly cash-generative business. As we have transitioned to a SaaS model, this has reduced the upfront license payments we received under the perpetual license model, but this is making the cash flow smoother.

We have a strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends. Cumulative dividends paid in the last 5 years are now up to GBP 153 million, and our overall dividend yield from ordinary and special dividends has been running between 3.5% to 5%.

There are no immediate investment requirements for our current excess cash, and so we have declared a special dividend of 5.0p per share, up 19% on this time last year.

Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. This slide is largely reiterating existing guidance, which remains unchanged as regards full year outturn, investment, cash flow and currency sensitivity. So I will just touch on 2 things now.

Firstly, to reiterate what I mentioned earlier that we expect to see a lower level of Software Engineering revenues in H2. And this, along with increases in salary costs and assuming no further gain on the FX hedges means we expect lower operating margins in H2 than H1. So whilst we will see similar levels of revenue in H2 to H1, we will see lower operating profit.

Secondly, a minor point, but due to starting up some projects in new overseas territories, we expect a small increase in our effective tax rate for the full year to 26%, 1% higher than the U.K. statutory rate.

I will now hand over to Matt for an operational update.

Thanks, Duncan. We've had a great start to the year in every team across the business. And the result is fantastic performance now and really good progress with our strategic objectives as we build for the future.

We're strengthening our 3 differentiators, our team, our product and our delivery. We're selling, as Andrew will describe later on. We're scaling our capacity to deliver for the future, and we're simplifying so that we can deliver even more Alfas even more efficiently.

Now everything starts with our fantastic team. So our people are always the first differentiator that I mention. Our team is growing with an average head count up 7% on H1 last year. In fact, we've recruited around 40 people this year so far to enable the delivery of that strong pipeline that Andrew will cover. And this head count growth will feed into our H2 costs as set out by Duncan.

And we put a lot of effort into making sure that we recruit very, very talented people. And because we recruit high-quality people and because we have a growth mindset culture and because we're always striving to achieve more as a company, developing talent within our team will always be a focus for us.

Ensuring world-class leadership at all levels is a particular focus at the moment, and that's why our continuous conversations initiative is really important. We're giving our people the tools to make one-to-one conversations across the business even more impactful for performance in current tasks, but also for development, for career goals and for well-being. And it's initiatives like this that have resulted in us retaining our Gold accreditation from Investors in People. And we've seen improvements in our ratings in every area.

We avoid complacency, but we're really pleased with our engagement score and with our stellar retention rate. And people sometimes ask whether retention at Alfa is too high. The answer for us is no. Retaining our talented team is hugely important because we're building something special here. And the higher our retention rate, the faster we can build on the experience within the business.

Our Lisbon Smart Hub has shown that we can access talent beyond our long-standing office locations in the U.S., London, Sydney and Auckland. And we've now started recruiting in the Gdansk area in Poland. We're finding some great talent.

In Lisbon, we recruited software engineers only, and we did find great talent. In Gdansk, we're recruiting more engineers, but also for our cloud hosting operations team.

Our Delivery track record is perhaps our most important differentiator. We delivered 11 upgrades in H1 and another 5 since then. More frequent customer upgrades is really important to simplifying and to ensuring quality delivery for our customers. And when we've spoken to you in the past, we've described Alfa Systems 6 as a low friction upgrade, and we contrasted that, contrasted the move from v5 to AS6 with the upgrade from v4 to v5. We already have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6, which clearly demonstrates the success of this strategy.

Progress on all of our projects remains excellent. Our software maintenance remains first class and our cloud hosting operation remains both gold standard quality and superefficient.

Maintaining the quality of our product and our delivery is hugely important in ensuring that we maintain our position as the premium provider in our industry.

Partner-led delivery will enable us to access new markets and enable us to do more in some of our existing markets than we can achieve by growing the Alfa team alone. A key next step in making partner-led delivery a reality will be to deliver a minimum viable product of a partner-led delivery project for a U.K. Equipment Start project. Now we're still waiting for the right project to come along here.

Our pipeline as a whole is strong, but the right project in the right region and the right industry is required for this particular next step, but we haven't just been waiting. We're working on our U.S. Auto Start product. We're making sure that we use our existing U.S. auto projects to build our product for the future, and we're learning more about the lower-tier U.S. auto finance market, which we believe will be key for partner-led delivery in the future.

While we expect partner-led delivery to contribute a relatively small proportion of our revenue, we do expect revenue for these customers to be weighted towards higher-margin subscription.

Our headline strategy for Delivery is simplification. Our market opportunity is huge and simplification will allow us to deliver more Alfa Systems implementations more efficiently.

So we're investing in our Alfa Start Accelerators for larger customers and our Alfa Start products for smaller customers. And we're investing in migration tooling to enable legacy portfolios to be converted to Alfa Systems more easily. We're investing in automated testing to simplify the upgrade process for our customers. We're investing in our Alfa Cloud hosting operation to make it even more efficient as it scales. And we're investing in AskThea, our large language model chatbot for system documentation.

All of this means that projects today require considerably less effort from our highly skilled delivery team than in the past, and that allows us to layer on Subscription revenue from more and more customers more efficiently.

And finally, we are extending our product differentiation. We're delivering new functionalities for our customers now with some really important product enhancements being carried out directly for customers for deliveries now. Our Alfa development model is bedding in, and we're seeing the results in some great KPIs. And we're also investing for the future. Our focus here is on U.S. auto originations, fleet and commercial finance, all of which will increase the market that we can access.

We're there with demonstrable products in all 3 areas, and we're making good progress towards our goals of sellable products by the end of the year. And really importantly, we're also working with -- closely with customers in all 3 of these areas. And this is always our preferred way of working. We're confident that this will result in a product that's a great fit for the market as a whole.

U.S. auto originations and fleet functionality allow us immediately to service an additional part of our existing target addressable market in asset finance. So they increase our serviceable addressable market.

The commercial finance market is something we've been working on for a while, and investment in this area will continue into next year and beyond. At the moment, we're working with customers in the asset finance market who have commercial finance offerings. The longer-term goal, which may be a number of years away, is to open up a brand-new addressable market and to sell to stand-alone commercial finance customers. The potential for the long-term prospects here are really exciting. In the short term, the late-stage pipeline is also really exciting, and I'll hand over to Andrew for an update on that.

Thanks for that, Matthew. As I said at the top of the presentation, our late-stage pipeline is strong. With 8 new customer wins in 2024, our Delivery teams have been fully utilized in the first half of this year, and this has kept TCV high. Today, we have 7 prospects in our late-stage pipeline, and we are preferred supplier with all 7. With 6 of these prospects, we are doing paid work under letter of engagement or equivalent.

Returning to the theme of Subscription growth, it's worth noting that 3 of the 7 have an annual Subscription revenue of over GBP 2 million once they get to full run rate.

And that strong late-stage pipeline is backed up by an equally strong and dynamic early stage, and I will discuss market demand on the next slide. Our strong pipeline demonstrates that there is strong demand in our end markets, and our exceptional sales performance in 2024 has driven growth across all our revenue categories. This is building our future performance in Subscription. We continue to invest in our product to widen and deepen our competitive moat and to expand our target addressable market and our serviceable addressable market. Subscription will see growth in the mid-teens as new customers ramp up. And our expectations for this year, as I said, are unchanged with an expectation of double-digit revenue growth.

So in summary, we've had an outstanding first half, and we are set fair to deliver in line with our expectations. We continued our focus on growing Subscription revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong sales growth in Subscription with TCV growing 12% versus the first half of last year.

We've seen annual recurring revenue of GBP 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year, and net revenue retention of 112%. As I said, I'm delighted with the growth in annually recurring revenue, and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alfa's industry-leading customer retention is just as strong in today's SaaS-only world.

Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues, and we have 23 Alfa Cloud customers, up from 20 this time last year.

We've seen really strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year. The late-stage pipeline is strong with 7 prospects, and we are working under letters of engagement or equivalent with 6 of those.

From a Delivery perspective, we've again seen a strong period. And I'm delighted to say that we have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6. That reinforces what we've been saying about this breakthrough new version of our software. Alfa Systems 6 is a frictionless upgrade.

And we've continued to invest in product, people and planet. Average head count up 7% with continued high staff retention at 97%, investing a total of GBP 19.4 million into our software in the first half with particular focus on expanding target addressable market and expanding our serviceable addressable market.

And finally, from a financial perspective, as I've been saying, our full year expectations remain unchanged, and we continue to be confident in our future prospects. So as a result, the Board has declared a special dividend of 5p. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you to the Alfa team for presentation. We've had a number of questions that have been pre-submitted and submitted live. [Operator Instructions] Now moving on to the first question that has been submitted. How is demand for software from banks and finance companies right now? Maybe that's one for you, Andy.

Thanks very much. And first of foremost, from all of us at Alfa, thank you very much for taking the time to attend this afternoon's presentation. We appreciate it, and we appreciate all the excellent questions.

I tried to cover this off in my part of the presentation, and we looked at the late-stage pipeline where we have 7 good customers at that well-developed state; 6 of them are doing paid work with us. That's something that we try to do at Alfa to start that level of engagement as early as we possibly can in the sales cycle.

I also touched on the early-stage pipeline or the earlier stages in the pipeline that are backing up that late-stage pipeline. And we're seeing an awful lot of dynamism, a lot of activity in the early-stage pipeline. And perhaps the question within the question is what are the things that are driving that?

It's, as everybody on the call knows, a very interesting world at the moment. And interesting worlds tend to bring a couple of things along with them. One of them is regulatory and governance change. And in general, we deal with large regulated, highly governed entities. That means that as those things change, they need systems to support that change and heart and lung systems like Alfa are very much fundamental in that. If your existing systems don't support that, you need to change them.

Systems like Alfa are also a platform for innovation and particularly with Alfa with the level of configurability, techniques like business rules and workflow and so on, if you don't have systems that have those kind of capabilities in an increasingly competitive market, then you need to replace your system in order to give yourself a platform for new product development and innovation within the market.

So those are a couple of factors that are driving that early-stage pipeline. But the summary answer to the question is that we're seeing really strong demand, and we're very, very happy with the sales pipeline at the moment.

Next question. What sectors (auto finance, equipment leasing, fleet, et cetera) are showing the strongest growth?

I suppose the obvious answer to that is that we are seeing growth across all of the sectors that we work in. We're fortunate in terms of the resiliency of the business that we operate in a lot of countries, a lot of end markets, and that gives the business a natural resilience as we progress forward.

It might be useful in thinking about why is growth coming from all of those markets, perhaps to develop a little bit my answer to the first question. We tend to see the reason for buying systems. We categorize them as push factors and pull factors. Push factors are things like regulatory change, as I discussed, cybersecurity. The fact that somebody might be sunsetting, decommissioning your old system that you're currently running on, those are things that you've got no choice in. Pull factors are that kind of innovation stuff that I talked about, automation, innovation, being more competitive in general.

And if we look at the push factors, again, developing the answer to the first question, there's just a lot of push factors around at the moment. I touched on regulation and the governance environment. There is an awful lot of old systems around, which are being sunset or frankly, are just no longer fit for purpose. Probably about 2/3 of the total addressable market, one way or another, could be described as legacy. So as long as there are those good push factors, and I'm in my 30th year this year. And for that full 30 years, there always seem to be push factors one way or another. Then that means that we'll see strong demand across all aspects of our target markets.

Thanks, Andy. Another question for you. How exposed are you to the health of the car finance market given the high interest rates?

It's a great question. And I'm going to assume that the question is coming a little bit from the recent headlines around commissions that were made in the -- the U.K. markets and certain other markets actually have already been through that journey and come out the other side.

I guess the first thing to talk about in answering that question is the fact that cost of borrowing, which I think is what we're meaning here by high interest rates, is not as much of a factor in asset finance as it is within plain vanilla finance. Asset finance and auto finance, one way or another will take the future value of the vehicle of the asset into account, which means you're essentially funding the gap. And secondly, because the asset is very, very much at the center of things, nobody is ignoring APR or equivalent, but most people will go to a dealer thinking, I've got this amount to spend on a car, how much car can I have for my money?

So cost of borrowing is less important in terms of influencing the headline rate. The other point to make is a lot of car finance, probably the majority of car finance, is supplied by the manufacturers. And the manufacturers really, really need to do finance in order to sell cars. People don't tend to walk into dealerships with enough money in their wallet to just drive out with a car. That funding then is being provided from the balance sheet of the manufacturer itself. So cost of funds is at best an internal measure for them. And secondly, it's the thing that they just have to do, which is another thing that makes our end market very resilient. No asset finance, if you're in what we call vendor finance, then no asset sale is pretty much the mantra.

From Alfa's perspective, yes, probably just slightly over half of our total revenue will come from automotive finance. But it's important to break that down. Knocking on the door of about 40% of that is in the U.S., just over 15% is in EMEA, and then a fraction of that is in the U.K. So we are doing business in the U.K. Our customers in the U.K., along with our other customers are continuing to provide high demand for us software and services, but auto finance we actually think as an end market is also a very resilient market.

Thank you. Are you able to scale into new markets? And if yes, which ones are you looking at and why?

Yes. There are 2 kinds of market that I guess we would be looking at. And let's pick them off in turn. Countries, different countries and different competitive arenas from a geographical perspective. Asia Pac, North America and Europe, EMEA tend to be the big markets. Alfa is very applicable to all of those markets, and the vast majority of the work that we do is across EMEA and North America.

We are moving into other target geographical markets. We're doing that now. There are a number that we're looking at. Germany, for instance, is a really successful market for us within Europe. And there's a chance that, that might become in due course what we would call a target geographical market.

Why am I bothering to explain the fact that a particular country or a particular geography may or may not make the grade as a target Alfa market is because we believe that strategic focus is super important. We can't be running off in every single direction at the same time. So it's super important for us to understand the geographies that we're targeting and to make sure that we do the best possible job in doing that rather than trying to, what my father would call, boil the ocean all the time that we're doing business.

So that's geography. Great opportunity for Alfa because it's so good at doing international business.

And then the other one is actually, Matthew touched upon in the presentation, functional target markets. We've talked about expanding our serviceable addressable market through originations and fleet, which is sort of -- one of them is a different flavor of asset finance, handling large fleets of assets. The other one is moving what we do a little bit further down the value chain of finance so that we're covering the start point of our customers' customers' journey as well as the servicing part of it. So both of those are great opportunities for us.

And the next one that we talk about is commercial finance, which is a little bit longer range for us. Matt described very eloquently that we're able to sort of shuffle our way into their at-minimum risk for the company because an awful lot of our existing customers do commercial finance. But the flip side of that as that medium-term opportunity is that we believe it is a multiple of the size of Alfa's existing target addressable market, which will give us excellent headroom in our medium- to long-term future.

Thanks, Andy. So one for you, Matt. How easy is it for a customer to switch from Alfa to another system or vice versa?

Thank you, Scott, and thank you as well from me to everybody who's joined us today, and for the really good questions as well, of which this is one. So we describe Alfa as heart and lungs software. What we do is we manage the revenue-generating products for highly complex, highly regulated organizations. This is line of business software and our customers are banks or finance companies or the finance arms of manufacturing companies, OEMs.

So we shouldn't be looking at this as back end or accounting software. It's not the likes of Sage or SAP or Workday, although, of course, implementation of those systems is complex in its own right. And the result of that is that any implementation project in this space is necessarily a major business change program.

So the simple answer is that it's resource-intensive to implement Alfa Systems. But it's very, very time-consuming, very, very expensive and even more importantly, very, very risky to implement software that isn't Alfa Systems.

I was talking about our delivery track record as one of our differentiators, and perhaps our most important differentiator, our projects succeed. And it would be very, very difficult, therefore, and very, very risky as well as resulting in less functional software, if you are thinking about taking out Alfa Systems and implementing perhaps a competitor product instead of perhaps something internally written.

And so the result of that is customer retention that we have to date. And if you have the slide deck from today available, you can download it from our website. If you don't, you can see an illustration of that on Slide 31. Broadly speaking, people don't leave Alfa Systems having implemented, unless they're leaving our market.

Very much related to that is how scalable is Alfa's platform? And can you handle much bigger clients without heavy extra costs.

I'll tend to be a bit briefer. There's loads of engagement, we could run out of time. The very simple answer is, it's extremely scalable and yes, we are able to scale without significant additional costs. The largest portfolios live on Alfa Systems have millions of asset finance contracts. The smallest have hundreds of asset finance contracts being administered, although they would tend to be the very, very high value portfolios.

But to be a really important point on that and which we should be really clear on is there is one version of the software. Everyone is running the same software, and that's important for that simplification agenda. And we can change the size of our single-tenant SaaS, cloud hosted environments with the push of a button through our automated cloud management platform.

It's a good question because the scalability of our systems is one of the key selling points for our customers.

Thanks, Matt. I not wanting to leave Duncan out, but so how much revenue is recurring versus one-off project work, Duncan?

Yes. So Matt referred to the sort of appendices of the slides. And again, if people have got them available, it's Slide 33 is how we try and answer this question.

So in terms of the pure numbers, 72% of our revenue in the first half this year came from existing customers with 28% from new customers. I think what we're trying to do with that is also talk about that as revenue recurring nature. So even when a customer goes live, you might think that might be the end of our relationship and that, for instance, delivery revenues may come to a stop. But for most customers, there's an ongoing relationship where we continue to get revenues going forward. So actual -- even if you looked at the definition of actual one-off, which might be just a one-off license receipt that we get, very, very, very small in our numbers. If you're talking about the split between sort of existing and new business, then, as I said, 72% comes from existing -- came from existing clients and 28% from new clients in the first half.

And Duncan, do you earn extra fees for system upgrades? Or is it included in that recurring contract?

Yes. Matt just referred now just to actually the fact that we've only got one system and we have one system with an upgrade that's released every 4 weeks without fail.

Clients can -- customers can take that upgrade at no cost. There is some -- normally, some support for that. So when they do take an upgrade, generally, we're helping with them, so we get some delivery revenues for that and they may just be taking an upgrade to sort of keep up with the latest version, but they may be taking an upgrade to take available some new functionality that we've released. Sometimes that new functionality is bundled into a module. And that new functionality in the module, they would have to pay for the module.

So it's sort of a mix. We do get extra fees -- extra delivery fees for helping people do upgrades. Some of the functionality and upgrades they get for free. If it's a big piece of functionality sitting in a module, then there'd be an extra subscription cost for that.

Another question around the subscriptions and fees. How much of growth in Subscription revenue is from price increases versus new clients?

Yes. We don't specifically disclose this. But I think if you look at something like the NRR figures that we disclosed for the first time at these results, you can see that the NRR is 112%. So that basically means we got 12% growth from the clients that we had 12 months ago. And that's obviously a subset of the business. I think we had 17% growth in Subscription revenue in the first half. And broadly, I think you could say that about half -- just under half of that came from new customers and about half of that came from growth with existing customers.

Thanks, Duncan. Andy, I know recruitment and retention is an important part with Alfa. But a question saying, are staff retention and recruitment in tech a challenge? And how are you addressing it?

I might perhaps repurpose the question a little bit and replace challenge with important. Right now in both of those areas, we're going really, really well. But we don't take our success in talent acquisition and retention for granted in any way.

So Matt talked about our 97% retention, super, super important to us. We celebrate retention. We certainly don't want retention to go down because it's the best recruitment that we do, keeping the incredible talent that we already have here.

In terms of talent acquisition, again, we do really well at it, but noting that in general, we are picking the best of the best in terms of talent. We want to make sure that we keep that high-performance culture in Alfa going.

So again, we don't take it for granted. We bring experienced hires. We bring in graduates. And we do that from diverse talent sources to make sure that we continue the culture and the sense of innovation that you get from diversity of background, heritage and thought.

And we're also expanding our talent pools. I can't say Gdansk anywhere near as well as Matt, but having opened up in Gdansk, having already set up an office in Lisbon, those 2 offices are as much as anything else about increasing our access to technical talent.

So in all aspects of things, whether we're talking about innovation and product investment, investing in our talent and our company, we will always try to mend the roof while the sun shines. Retention is good. Talent acquisition is going really well, and we can get the people in the door that we need to fuel our growth, but we won't take it for granted.

Thanks for that, Andy. I think that the additional question, I think you maybe covered it, but whether you want to add any element to it is how does your approach differ from other tech companies with regards to the staff retention and people?

Yes, it's a great and related question. I mean both of those questions are driving things that are very much the -- well, genuinely actually, the beating heart of Alfa, our culture. And that's something that really does differentiate us. I think a lot of the things that we talk about, we're very much doing them. They're very much embedded in our organization.

And whenever anybody asks you a question about what you do different, it sort of opens the door a little bit to saying mean things about other people. But what I will say is that none of the stuff you hear or read about our culture is performative. It's very important to us, and it's what we are.

To the extent that actually with institutional investors, with new prospects, the thing that we're really keen to do is to get them out of a meeting room where they're getting a nice PowerPoint and access to myself, Matt and Duncan and our revenue team and get them to come into the office where you can meet the Alfa people and understand how it really works and what's going on and just to feel to this place.

And I'm talking all aspects of our culture. I touched on inclusion and belonging, but social impact. Innovation isn't just high days and holidays. It's continuous communication, early and imperfect open communication and community. And in my mind, you can tell I'm passionate about it. It's really hard to separate those things.

And then you layer on that high-performance culture, I talked about the fact that quality and delivery, those are also culturally embedded. So we're walking the walk in all of these areas, and that makes Alfa, I think, very different.

I'll use the phrase purpose-driven organization, which is very often reserved for the not-for-profit sector. But that's us. That's how we feel. It makes us proud about what we do. And then that has a really great business outcome as well as making it a more pleasurable place to work because it makes us more committed, more effective. And yes, it just makes it a fun place to be. So hopefully, that gives a flavor of why we're different. The three of us have to come to work as well. So we wanted to make it an enjoyable place, and we want to be proud of what we do.

Thanks, Andy. I've been to a few of your hackathons, and there's no doubt about it. They're slightly different from the standard ones that are there. Next question is for Matt. How does AI impact on revenues, staffing levels and R&D development?

Okay. And there's a few questions on AI as an opportunity and also a little bit on AI as a threat coming up that I can see as well, Scott. So hopefully, keep me honest, but I'll attempt to answer them all in one, partly in the interest of time. But if you feel I've missed anything, then please feel free to come back to it.

So we -- at Alfa, we love technology. We love all aspects of technology and new and evolving technology, and we love AI. Just to define our terms here, I'm talking about AI as a generic term for a number of really exciting technologies, of which large language models are a part, but -- and perhaps the most exciting part, the most fast-moving part at the moment, but by no means all.

And we're really excited here at Alfa about both the reality and the possibilities of AI technology, and we have been for a long time now. We don't see AI as an end in itself, except insofar, of course, as we need to show customers and perhaps investors and potential investors as well that we are ahead of the game with AI. But what we do see as an end in itself is developing fantastic new functionality to deliver more and more for existing customers and to sell to new customers in Alfa. So that is an end in itself.

We're ahead of that. We've been ahead of that for a while with automated decisioning, machine learning, prediction. We're ahead of that with AskThea, which is our large language chatbot that I was talking about in the presentation there. We're also ahead of that in some more innovative areas. And we've got some really exciting proof of concepts for the use of agentic AI with Alfa Systems. I'll perhaps come back to that a little bit later.

And we stay ahead of it. Both Andrew and actually you, Scott, you've talked about our commitment to innovation. And as you might expect, our innovation program is dominated by an AI at the moment.

Innovation is really important to all of us at Alfa. You mentioned the hackathons. We have quarterly innovation days. We've got also really importantly, a well-established process for turning innovation into production reality. And that well-established process includes very experienced and senior mentors for each initiative, and we have dedicated AI innovation mentors.

Improving operational efficiency, you talked about -- I think you talked in the question a little bit about the costs and how we can improve efficiency. So operational efficiency is another end in itself in which AI can help. AskThea is a part of that. Tools for improving coding efficiency is a part of that. And all of that's in the innovation agenda as well.

AI is also a sales opportunity because there is a risk presented to our customers, particularly perhaps in cybersecurity. And Alfa's cloud hosting is built for security and monitoring and perhaps we'll talk a bit about that later on in this session as well if we have time.

Just a little bit on AI as a threat. So perhaps people will be able to build software from nowhere using AI and overtake Alfa. We don't see that as a clear and present danger at this time. AI is very good for writing code from scratch for very simple or well-understood use cases, but it's got a long way to go at the moment before it can write or maintain complex code for use cases at the scale at Alfa. And to the extent that it can help us in the future, we will start very far ahead. Actually, writing code is a relatively small part of the software development life cycle, understanding what a customer wants to achieve, why, making that happen and then delivering it is a huge part of that as well, of course.

And another way in which we see AI as an opportunity for us is that I talked a little bit about agentic AI earlier. To stay ahead of operational efficiency for our customers, there's a need to use the latest tools available. In order to do that, you need software that provides an open AI for that line of business processing, and that's Alfa Systems. So in order to get on that journey, implementation of modern software is extremely important. So again, it provides an opportunity for us. Perhaps I've covered everything.

That's good. Thank you, Matt. Very good covering of AI that's there. And in the interest of time, I will move on. But Andy, for you, how do you ensure client data security when more customers are moving to cloud deployments? Just if you need to, just unmute yourself, Andy, if you don't mind.

Well, somebody had to be that guy, didn't they, Scott? Sorry, it's always me. It's a huge and important question. I'll try to answer it fairly quickly.

Where you see systems making headlines for cyber problems, one thing that they have in common is they're very often multi-tenant systems. So there's no logical or physical separation between the compute and data environments across these organizations. And that means contagion is going to be a problem if there is a cyber threat.

Within Alfa Cloud, from the get-go, we figured actually you can have all of the advantages, the operational, the economies of scale of multi-tenancy through some of the things actually Matt touched upon like configurations code, like using automation techniques and have single-tenant environments. So you might ask what happens if there is some kind of hack on a customer environment, we simply delete it and we spin up a new one. They're not even properly connected to our environments. They can operate on their own even if we have an issue. And that's at the heart of our approach there.

Single-tenant SaaS is something that we think ultimately, everybody will come around to because it's the right answer for heart and lung systems, as Matt described. If you've seen our recent publicity, then you also might have seen Data Guardian, which is then talking about how we take that a level further, single tenant with dedicated compute power and resources.

And then you've got a primary backup, you've then got a backup in another region. In case AWS goes down in your region, you've then got a backup in a different cloud provider in case AWS just isn't there at all. We call that a triple shield. We're very, very aware of who we're serving and what they're concerned about. And we think we do something different there, and it's very much part of our sales proposition and our differentiation.

Thanks, Andy. Matt, how is adoption of Alfa 6 progressing amongst existing customers?

So it's another really good question. It's very important to us that the move from Alfa Systems v5 to Alfa Systems 6 is a very, very low friction upgrade.

The move from v4 to v5 included replatforming and a brand-new user interface. Although really importantly, we maintained 20 years of functional investment in the product that we'd accrued to that point in 2010. And actually, the conversion of our existing code set remains one of the reasons that we're ahead of the competition now. But the progression from Alfa Systems v5 to v6 is incremental.

And for our customers, the process of taking an Alfa Systems 6 upgrade is the same as taking an upgrade within v5. And that's why we're really pleased that at the half year, we already had 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6. But Alfa Systems 6 is really important to us, in that it gave us an opportunity for a fantastic marketing event for the system as a whole and to launch some really exciting new modules that can help us sell to new customers and also give us a platform for incremental sales to existing customers.

And Matt, will Alfa Systems 6 reduce the implementation time compared to previous versions?

Yes. Okay. So simplification is a really key part of our strategy, and I talked about it a little bit in the presentation. We've got an absolutely huge opportunity to grow into, and that's the reason that simplifying the implementation of Alfa Systems. I said earlier that it was necessarily a major business change program, but both simpler and less risky than implementing competitor systems. Simplifying, however, is really important to us so that we can layer on more and more implementations of Alfa Systems software and layer on more Subscription revenue.

And again, that's one of the reasons for the acceleration in wins that you can see in the appendices to our presentation. Alfa Systems 6, though, isn't specifically a part of that, although all product innovation has simplification of the implementation process as part of the considerations for that product innovation.

The key things that simplify the implementation of the product are those that I talked about in the presentation. So our Alfa Start Accelerators and Products, that automated testing and the system documentation, including through AskThea as well as migration tooling, really importantly, enabling customers to move new portfolios to Alfa Systems and to move their existing portfolios to Alfa Systems and Alfa Cloud itself, which is one of the major advances in simplifying the implementation of Alfa Systems that we've seen since Alfa Systems v5 was launched. And again, just to refer to that appendix, Slide 39, I think, gives a really good overview of the strategic change that we've achieved incrementally since the launch of Alfa Systems V5 in 2010.

Thanks, Matt. Duncan, is the dividend safe and will it grow?

In the interest of time, I'm winning the shortest answer, price, yes and yes. On a slightly more expansive note, we have a relatively low ordinary dividend, which will grow. We pay out all the excess cash in special dividends. That could go up and down depending on particular cash flows in that year. We'll just make sure that we maintain a minimum level of cash in the business. But yes, as the business grows, we expect to grow the overall cash returns to shareholders.

Thanks, Duncan. Final question is for Andy. Share price has fallen over 9% in the last 6 months. Would be interested to know how the management team's thoughts on this. Do you think the business is fairly valued by the market at current levels?

It's fun timing for that question because the ticker I'm looking at, which is not real time, is saying that we nearly got that back today.

Look, I live and breathe this business. We love this business. We rate it very highly. We're very confident in the business and its prospects. And it's almost impossible for me to think that it's fairly valued. So what's the answer to that? Well, I think we all here think that it's important not to run the business with constant reference to the share price. We need to make sure that the investment community is aware of our equity story and what is different about this business, which we work hard to do, particularly at times like this in the cycle.

But ultimately, the thing for us is to understand the fundamentals of the business. In our mind, you get great financial fundamentals, good growth, great profitability, great cash conversion, as Duncan has outlined, all of those basics whilst also having an exceptional growth opportunity.

So we keep focused on that. We keep focused on strategic execution and the assumption is that the share price will catch up. But the most important thing I think you should hear from the leadership is that they're focused on the success of the business, not constantly looking at a ticker.

Thank you, Andy. So that's all we've got time for at the moment with regards to questions. Andy, maybe if I could just hand back to you for any closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks very much, Scott. Look, this has been great for us. We really appreciate the opportunity to talk to personal investors. It's not something that we get a chance to do all that often. So your support is really important. We appreciate the level of engagement that we've had this afternoon, and as I said, you taking some time out of your afternoon to listen to us. Hopefully, you'll continue to monitor the company maybe by a share or 2, and we'll see you, hopefully, next time we report.

Thank you to Andy, Duncan and Matthew for joining us today. That concludes the Alfa Financial Software investor presentation. Please take a moment to complete the short survey following this event. The record of this presentation will be made available on Engage Investor, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation today. Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Alfa's 2025 half year results. I'm Andrew Denton, Alfa's CEO; and I'm joined as always by our CFO, Duncan Magrath; and our COO, Matthew White.

An overview, Alfa has had an outstanding first half. We continue to focus on growing subscription, revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong growth in subscription TCV at 12% versus the first half of last year. This year, for the first time and in the subsequent years, we will be publishing annual recurring revenue and net revenue retention. Duncan will outline the details behind this. But in summary, we've seen annual recurring revenue of GBP 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year and net revenue retention of 112%.

I'm delighted with the growth in annual recurring revenue, and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alfa's industry-leading customer retention is just as strong in a SaaS-only world as we grow our customer base with new subscription sales. Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues, and we have 23 Alfa Cloud customers, which is up from 20 this time last year.

More generally, we've seen strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year. The late-stage pipeline is strong with 7 prospects. We are working under letters of engagement or equivalent with 6 of those 7 customers in the late-stage pipeline. And really importantly, we are seeing normal levels of activity in the early stages of the pipeline. From a delivery perspective, we've again seen a strong period, and I'm delighted to say that we now have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6, which underscores our messaging around this breakthrough new version of our software. Alfa Systems 6 is a frictionless upgrade opportunity for our existing customers.

As always, we continue to invest in product, people and planet. Our average head count is up 7% with continued high staff retention at 97%. We've invested a total of GBP 19.4 million into our software in the first half with particular focus on expanding our target addressable market with commercial finance and expanding our serviceable addressable market through developments in the areas of originations and automotive fleet.

From a financial perspective, our full year expectations remain unchanged. We continue to be confident in our future prospects. And as a result, the Board has declared a special dividend of 5p.

So on to the financial highlights. Revenue was GBP 62.5 million, which is up 22% at constant currency on 2024 first half revenue of GBP 52.3 million. We've maintained our excellent momentum in subscription revenue growth at 17%, being around the same level we saw last year. And as I've already said, net revenue retention was 112%, which demonstrates outstanding customer retention.

Our excellent performance in contracting new business is demonstrated by a total contract value of GBP 210.7 million. This is up from GBP 193.3 million this time last year. That's 9% growth in our TCV versus last year, with subscription TCV growth of 12%, as I've mentioned, the software engineering TCV growth of 12%. At GBP 21.6 million, operating profit was up 33% from this time last year. Our operating profit margin was higher than normal at 35% in the half, which was up from 31% in the first half of last year. This was driven by increased chargeability in our software engineering teams. EBITDA margin at 37% shows significant growth from last year's 33%. And finally, cash was at GBP 23.9 million, up from GBP 22 million this time last year.

I'll now hand over to Duncan.

Thanks, Andy. The figures really speak for themselves, and the first half of 2025 was a very strong financial performance. Revenue was up 20% at actual rates or 22% at constant currency, with growth across all revenue streams. There was particularly strong growth in Software Engineering, which was up 72% on the back of significantly higher chargeability than the first half last year. Improved chargeability improved the gross margin percentage up 130 basis points to 64.2%.

Operating profit grew even more strongly than revenue, up 33% to deliver an operating margin of 34.6%. It is worth noting that I estimate that the FX hedges that we put in place to protect ourselves from movements in sterling versus the U.S. dollar, added 240 basis points to the margin in the first half. The effective tax rate of 26.0% was in line with last year, and so basic EPS also grew by 33% in the half.

Diluted EPS was up 34% at 5.35p per share. Overall, a really strong performance and given our confidence in the future prospects for the business the Board has declared a special dividend of 5.0p per share.

Turning now to TCV. 2024 really was a standout year for our revenue and commercial teams which was demonstrated by the 34% increase in TCV in the calendar year. We said in March that we expected to work through the TCV during 2025, and we've seen a 5% reduction in total TCV since the year-end, but it is still up 9% from this time last year.

Next 12 months TCV is up even more strongly versus this time last year, particularly in delivery and software engineering due to the new contracts we won in the second half of last year. We have calculated TCV on a consistent basis for many years now, but a number of people have noted that because we only include 3 years of subscription revenues, which is a much shorter time period than our average customer life, but it may understate the impact of subscription on our business.

There is a benefit in consistent measures that you can view over time, but not if it misrepresents the growing importance of our subscription revenues to our business. So to help this and reflecting our transition to a SaaS business model, we've decided to going forward to supplement the TCV disclosure with the more traditional SaaS metrics on of ARR and NRR, which you can see on the next slide.

On the left, you can see our annual recurring revenue or ARR figures for the last 3 reporting periods. We calculate this using the average subscription revenues over the last 6 months and then annualize them. We exclude any revenues that we do not expect to last 12 months at the start of the contract. This picture shows what you would expect a very strong growth in ARR, up 16% versus last year, very much in line with the overall growth in subscription revenues.

The graph on the right shows our net revenue retention percentage or NRR and gives a financial metric, which represents the net impact of churn and growth in the subscription revenues. This is calculated by taking the percentage of recurring revenues from 12 months ago that we have retained, including where we have sold additional services. Whilst we are often asked by those new to the Alfa story about churn, in reality, those who watches our story know that it is in effect, 0. And this is demonstrated by an NRR figure for the last 3 reporting periods that is considerably in excess of 100%.

At 30th of June 2025, the 112% NRR was particularly high as we had some new subscription customers at very low levels this time last year. Over the last 12 months, these contracts have started to ramp up through implementation, a typical patent I explained in some detail at our last results presentation and hence, the 112% NRR. We would not necessarily expect to be at such a high level going forward with the figures in June and December last year, perhaps being better representative of a more normal level.

So looking now at overall subscription revenues. Subscription revenues continue to grow each quarter. For the first 6 months, they were up 17% versus the same period last year. The growth in our Alfa Cloud customers has been a significant contributor to our recent growth in subscription revenues. And you can see that we've increased Alfa Cloud customers from 20 last year to 23 this year. We now have 16 customers on v5 or Alfa Systems 6 who are live, but not on Alfa Cloud. We don't expect to convert all 16 to Alfa Cloud but would expect to convert the majority, and so this can continue to be a source of growth for the next few years. 12% growth in subscription TCV also underpins our confidence that this revenue stream will continue to show growth -- strong growth going forward.

Turning to Software Engineering revenues. Last year, we had a relatively low first half and a much stronger second half. The strength from the second half was carried through into H1 2025, and comparing this with H1 2024 gives a 72% increase in revenues. This revenue is largely off the same head count base and is simply due to changing the nature of the work being performed, resulting in much higher chargeability than last year. And this is a significant factor in the very strong operating margin percentage that we generated in H1.

The biggest contributor to this increased chargeable work was to new customers we won in the second half of last year, with chargeable development from new customers increasing from GBP 1.2 million to GBP 4.5 million. At the moment, we are anticipating this to ease off slightly in H2 but it's also potentially an area that we could outperform our expectations if we get client approvals signed off more quickly than we expect.

Perpetual license accounting, both one-off and customized license totaled GBP 1.3 million this year. slightly down on the GBP 1.6 million last year, so a relatively small drag in this period from the move to a SaaS model. TCV is up 12% from last year on the back of these new projects with good coverage for the next 12 months.

Turning to our final revenue stream, delivery. As expected, with the ramp-up of new projects, our Delivery revenues increased 10% versus last year. We have 11 projects underway where the customer is not yet live, and only when these contracts are live will they drive our part subscription revenues. Of course, as these projects come to an end, we would expect them to be replaced by new projects. Overall Delivery for TCV is showing as flat year-on-year. You can see that the coverage for the next 12 months has increased significantly, and this is driving our increased recruitment needs. The after 12-month element shows a drop but this is mainly a function of taking quite a cautious view of our largest implementation project where we have only counted up to the end of 2026, which is the first phase of a multiphase project and including nothing thereafter. We fully expect the project to continue beyond that date and generate further delivery revenues.

Turning now to expenses. Cost of sales grew by 15% over last year, largely on the back of increases in costs from head count and salary increases. Hosting costs increased with the growth in Alfa Cloud. Sales, general and admin expenses were up 11%. There's growth in salary costs, but more significant was the increase in profit share and share-based payments.

FX has been significant in the period. We had net transaction gains of GBP 1.1 million in the period. Within this, the impact of realized and unrealized gains on U.S. dollar FX hedges was GBP 1.7 million, offset by other transactional losses of GBP 0.6 million. Exchange rates at the 30th of June 2025 was $1.37, so we could see some reversal of these gains in H2 if sterling weakens against this level.

Other income was flat at GBP 0.3 million and this was the income from our R&D expenditure credit that is shown on this slide. I will cover it under modeling guidance, but the impact of not expecting FX hedges to repeat and the impact of higher head count and salary costs and depreciation and amortization in the second half will result in a lower operating margin in H2 compared with H1.

Turning now to cash flow. In March, I estimated that cash conversion for the year would be 80% to 90% for 2025 as a result of accelerated receipts in 2024 on 2 projects. Cash conversion of 88% for H1 was in line with this estimate. For 2026 and beyond, we would expect to be in the range of 90% to 100%. Dividends paid increased GBP 1.5 million on last year to GBP 11.2 million. Overall, there's a net cash inflow of GBP 3.4 million for a cash balance of GBP 23.9 million at the period end.

Now some words on capital allocation. Alfa remains a highly cash generative business. As we have transitioned to a SaaS model, this has reduced the upfront license payments we received under the perpetual license model, but this is making a cash flow smoother. We have a strong track record of returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends. Cumulative dividends paid in the last 5 years are now up to GBP 153 million on our overall dividend yield from ordinary and special dividends has been running between 3.5% to 5%. There are no immediate investment requirements for current excess cash, and so we have declared a special dividend of 5.0p per share up 19% on this time last year.

Next, a brief update on modeling guidance. This slide is largely reiterating existing guidance, which remains unchanged as regards to full year[ outturn ] investment, cash flow and currency sensitivity. So I will just touch on 2 things now. Firstly, to reiterate what I mentioned earlier that we expect to see a lower level of Software Engineering revenues in H2. And this, along with increases in salary costs and assuming no further gain on the FX hedges means we expect lower operating margins in H2 than H1.

So whilst we will see similar levels of revenue in H2 to H1, we will see lower operating profit. Secondly, a minor point but due to starting up some projects in new overseas territories, we expect a small increase in our effective tax rate for the full year to 26%, 1% higher than the U.K. statutory rate.

I will now hand over to Matt for an operational update.

Thanks, Duncan. We've had a great start to the year in every team across the business. And the result is fantastic performance now and really good progress with our strategic objectives as we build for the future. We're strengthening our 3 differentiators: our team, our product and our delivery with sterling, as Andrew will describe later on.

We're scaling our capacity to deliver for the future and we're simplifying so that we can deliver even more Alfa's, even more efficiently. Everything starts with our fantastic team. So our people are always the first differentiator that I mention. Our team is growing with an average head count up 7% on H1 last year. In fact, we've recruited around 40 people this year so far to enable the delivery of that strong pipeline that Andrew will cover. And this head count growth will feed into our H2 costs as set out by Duncan.

And we put a lot of effort into making sure that we recruit very, very talented people, and because we recruit high-quality people and because we have a growth mindset culture and because we're always striving to achieve more as a company, developing talent within our team will always be a focus for us. Ensuring world-class leadership at all levels is a particular focus at the moment. And that's why our continuous conversations initiative is really important. We're giving our people the tools to make one-to-one conversations across the business even more impactful for performance in current tasks, but also for development, for career goals and for well-being.

And these initiatives like this that have resulted in us retaining our gold accreditation from investors and people, and we've seen improvements in our ratings in every area. We have always complacency, but we're really pleased with our engagement score and with our stellar retention rate. And people sometimes ask whether the retention of Alfa is too high. The answer for us is, no. Retaining our talented team is hugely important because we're building something special here. And the higher our retention rate, the faster we can build on the experience within the business.

Our Lisbon smart hub has shown that we can access talent beyond our long-standing office locations in the U.S., London, Sydney and Auckland. We've now started recruiting in the Gdansk area in Poland. We're finding some great talent. In Lisbon, we recruited software engineers only, and we did find great talent. In Gdansk, we are recruiting more engineers but also for our cloud hosting operations team.

Our Delivery track record is perhaps our most important differentiator. We delivered 11 upgrades in H1 and another 5 since then, more frequent customer upgrades is really important to simplifying and to ensuring quality delivery for our customers. And when we've spoken to you in the past, we have described Alfa Systems 6 as a low friction upgrade, and we contrasted that -- contrasted the move from v5 to AS6 with the upgrade from v4 to v5, and we already have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6, which clearly demonstrates the success of this strategy.

Progress on all of our projects remains excellent. Our software maintenance remains first class, and our cloud hosting operation remains both gold standard quality and super efficient. Maintaining the quality of our product and our delivery is hugely important in ensuring that we maintain our position as the premium provider in our industry.

Partner-led delivery will enable us to access new markets and enable us to do more in some of our existing markets than we can achieve by growing the Alfa team alone. A key next step in making partner-led delivering a reality will be to deliver a minimum viable product of a partner-led delivery project for a U.K. equipment start project. We're still waiting for the right project to come along here. Our pipeline as a whole is strong, but the right project, in the right region and the right industry is required for this particular next step. But we haven't just been waiting, we're working on our U.S. auto Start product. We're making sure that we use our existing U.S. auto projects to build our products for the future. And we're learning more about the lower tier U.S. auto finance market, which we believe will be key for partner-led delivery in the future. While we expect partner-led Delivery to contribute a relatively small proportion of our revenue, we do expect revenue for these customers to be weighted towards higher-margin subscription.

Our headlines strategy for delivery is simplification. Our market opportunity is huge and simplification will allow us to deliver more Alfa Systems implementations more efficiently. So we're investing in our Alfa Start accelerators for larger customers and Alfa Start products for smaller customers. And we're investing in migration tooling to enable legacy portfolios to be converted to Alfa Systems more easily. We're investing in automated testing to simplify the upgrade process for our customers. We're investing in our Alfa Cloud hosting operation to make it even more efficient as it scales.

And we're investing in AskThea, our large language model chatbot for system documentation. All of this means that projects today require considerably less effort from our highly skilled delivery team than in the past, and that allows us to layer on subscription revenue from more and more customers more efficiently.

And finally, we are extending our product differentiation. We're delivering new functionalities for our customers now with some really important product enhancements being carried out directly to customers for deliveries now. Our Alfa development model is bedding in and we're seeing the results in some great KPIs. And we're also investing for the future. Our focus here is on U.S. auto originations, fleet and commercial finance, all of which will increase the market that we can access. We're there with demonstrable products in all 3 areas, and we're making good progress towards our goals of sellable products by the end of the year. But really importantly, we're also working with -- closely with customers in all 3 of these areas. And this is always Alfa Start way of working. We're confident that this will result in a product that's a great fit for the market as a whole.

U.S. auto originations and fleet functionality allow us immediately to service an additional part of our existing target addressable market in asset finance. So they increased our serviceable addressable market. The commercial finance market is something we've been working on for a while, and investment in this area will continue into next year and beyond. At the moment, we're working with customers in the asset finance market who have commercial finance offerings. The longer-term goal, which may be a number of years away, is to open up a brand new addressable market and to sell to stand-alone commercial finance customers. The potential for the long-term prospects here are really exciting. In the short term, the late-stage pipeline is also really exciting. And I'll hand over to Andrew for an update on that.

Thanks for that, Matthew. As I said at the top of the presentation, our late-stage pipeline is strong. With 8 new customer wins in 2024, our delivery teams have been fully utilized in the first half of this year and this has kept TCV high. Today, we have 7 prospects in our late-stage pipeline, and we are a preferred supplier with all 7. With 6 of these prospects, we are doing paid work under a letter of engagement or equivalent.

Returning to the theme of subscription growth, it's worth noting that 3 of the 7 have an annual subscription revenue of over GBP 2 million whilst they get to full run rate. And that strong late-stage pipeline is backed up by an equally strong and dynamic early stage, and I will discuss market demand on the next slide.

Our strong pipeline demonstrates that there is strong demand in our end markets and our exceptional sales performance in 2024 has driven growth across all our revenue categories. This is building our future performance in subscription. We continue to invest in our product to widen and deepen our competitive moat and to expand our target addressable market and our serviceable addressable market. Subscription will see growth in the mid-teens as new customers ramp up. And our expectations for this year, as I said, are unchanged with an expectation of double-digit revenue growth.

So in summary, we've had an outstanding first half and we are set there to deliver in line with our expectations. We continued our focus on growing subscription revenue, and we've seen that grow by 17%. We've also seen strong sales growth in subscription with TCV growing 12% versus the first half of last year. We've seen annual recurring revenue of GBP 42 million, which is up 16% on the first half of last year and net revenue retention of 112%. As I said, I'm delighted with the growth in annually recurring revenue, and our net revenue retention figure shows that Alfa's industry-leading customer attention is just as strong in today's SaaS-only world.

Subscription revenues now make up 34% of total revenues, and we have 23 Alfa Cloud customers, up from 20 this time last year. We've seen really strong sales and delivery momentum continue through from the full year. The late-stage pipeline is strong with 7 prospects and we are working under letters of engagement or equivalent with 6 of those.

From a Delivery perspective, we've again seen a strong period. And I'm delighted to say that we have 9 customers live on Alfa Systems 6, that reinforces what we've been saying about this breakthrough new version of our software. Alfa Systems 6 is a frictionless upgrade. And we've continued to invest in product, people and planet. Average Alfa headcount up 7% with continued high staff retention with 97%, investing in total of GBP 19.4 million into our software in the first half with particular focus on expanding the target addressable market and expanding our serviceable addressable market.

And finally, from a financial perspective, as I've been saying, our full year expectations remain unchanged, and we continue to be confident in our future prospects. So as a result, the Board has declared a special dividend of 5p. Thank you very much for listening.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now take our first question from Sven of Barclays.

I have 2. Maybe first 1 on AI, which is currently once again, a very heavily debated topic in the investment community. And I would really appreciate if you could just share your thoughts how it's impacting Alfa in the industry where do we see opportunities to leverage AI within the organization where it's perhaps less useful?

And then maybe secondly, on the growth outlook. I appreciate that growth every year is driven by slightly different factors. But can you give us some color how we should think about the main building blocks of growth going forward? How much, of course, will be driven by new wins versus expansion of existing customers?

Sven, I think I'll pick up the first one, and Duncan is well placed to answer the second. On the AI subject, as you can imagine, we spend quite a lot of time talking to many stakeholders about it. Matthew mentioned in his part of the presentation, the work that we've done around our large language model which supports our customers, simplifies their lives and allows them to take more ownership of the Alfa application. And therefore, allows them to take control of the value that, that delivers.

And I think that's probably a good way to characterize AI for Alfa in terms of what we're doing now, it's a well-established strategy. Matthew talked about simplification every reporting period. And AI is very much a tool for us and for our customers across all of our delivery and indeed our business activities that allows us to simplify and therefore, puts us in a position to deliver more Alfas.

There is clearly an opportunity within AI to do more. And we continue to look at that within our innovation frameworks. And it wouldn't be right to speak about AI without talking about some of the [ tropes ] that are out there in terms of what it will do to software overall. I think that there is a really good opportunity that the large language models that are out there. Well, we know that they can write code. We know that they can create simple apps. But you have to know the question that you're going to ask the machine. And so we do not see any future where AI is going to be essentially replacing us and developing the kind of software that serves the asset finance market like Alfa. There is no 1 question, 1 succinct way of getting all of those requirements together and asking a machine to develop it. So we don't see it, in the very near future as a massive competitive threat. We do see it as a simplification opportunity for both us and our customers. Duncan, perhaps you can look at the second.

Yes. Sven. From a growth perspective, I think it's probably worth thinking about 3 categories because first of all, you're right, we've got expansion with existing customers, which may be an existing customer where we're already in, got an installed system, and we may be selling some extra modules, expanding -- they may be expanding and our revenues are increasing in that respect. I think 1 thing we've seen over the last couple of years is also expansion with existing customers getting into new territories as well. So there's not a sort of huge sales effort in that respect. We do a great job in 1 territory and increasing, we're seeing customers ask us to do work in a new territory. And that's definitely been some driver of the growth that we've seen and also we can see that in the late-stage pipeline.

We treat those as new customers because generally, you do have to win them. You do have to work [indiscernible] a different entity. It's normally a different entity's decision to take off or not, but obviously, we get great internal referrals. And then the third area, which is brand new existing customers that we haven't worked with before. I think from a headline perspective, you can see from our figures this time around, perhaps buried in the appendices, you may not got there yet of the slide deck, but you can see that actually the work from new customers, the revenue from new customers in the first half of this year was much higher proportion than last year. And that is a function of those 8 wins that we had. And as we said last year, those win starting up, and that's what's driven a lot of the revenue growth in the first half of this year, which is the growth of the implementation of those projects.

And I don't have any -- of the 3 buckets, I think the second and third buckets are clearly the biggest ones. I think the incremental sales to existing customers is -- it's extremely helpful, often it is all drops to the bottom line to help from a margin perspective but it's relatively small percentage numbers, we would expect our main growth to be coming from either new territories with existing customers or brand-new customers. And I don't have any particularly strong figures to give you, I will think about whether there's a better way of guiding on that.

But certainly, in our internal modeling, the way a significant contributor. The way we've modeled things internally, we would treat both of those last 2 buckets the same, be it a win with a brand-new customer or win with an existing customer in a new territory, and we look at small, medium and margin, obviously, they drive different levels of Delivery and Software Engineering and Subscription revenue growth. So I don't have any quantitative numbers to give you. I think about whether there's an easier way for us to present numbers in a way to guide the market going forward.

And we'll now take our next question from Carl Smith of Zeus Capital.

Just 2 questions for me, please. The first 1 is on FX. Could you just remind us to what extent you're naturally hedged in the U.S.? And whether going into FY '26, you're going to sort of take out new hedging products? I know you said you haven't at moment, but it might be sort of close to 50% of the revenue. So just what your plans are for hedging FX in '26?

And the second question just around -- can you give any more details on the time line of Commercial Finance products, you said sort of medium term? Do you think the able to get coming out in the next couple of years? Or what's the time line?

Sounds like you're up first, Duncan.

Yes. Carl. Our natural hedge is around 40% of our U.S. revenues half with U.S. costs. So yes, we are -- we do generate a lot of excess dollars, and we look to hedge. For the current year, we talked about, we are largely hedged last year when we got towards the end of the year, and we started to take out some hedges for this year. And they obviously proved to be very beneficial, as you've seen from the first half because generally, we took those out at about [ 1.25 ] dollars and pounds, obviously. There is a challenge for us. If we weren't public, and we were just thinking about the economics, then you would potentially just want to hedge away. The downside is that it actually what you're trying to do is protect your P&L.

You've got a mark-to-market hedges at the end of the year. So any hedges we take out this year to gain -- any gain or loss that you generate may come into the current year. So there's always a little bit of thinking we have to do around that, as I said, from an economic perspective, if you want to hedge, then you just go ahead and do it. So we will think about hedging for next year in Q4 this year. We may, because of that sort of accounting impact, we may do some this year or we may think about doing it in Q1 next year, which then avoids having to mark-to-market at the at the year-end. And so it might have been a longer answer than you wanted, but hopefully, that gives you a flavor for what our current attitude is.

I think, Matthew, you're probably best person to talk about commercial finance.

The first thing we should be clear on is that Alfa is being used by customers to administer commercial loan portfolios now. We have asset finance customers who are also playing in the commercial loan space, and they're using Alfa Systems for the administration of the commercial loans portfolio. So in a matter of speaking, where they are already. We're building on the existing functionality to enable us to better cater for customers or potential future customers who operate and tied in the commercial loan space.

In terms of time scale, as I said, we've got something that we can demonstrate now, we're beginning the process of attending specific commercial loan conferences and other events. We're increasing our understanding, we're deepening our ties in that industry. In terms of it, when could we sell something to a specific commercial finance customer? We haven't gotten involved in any sales process specifically for Commercial Finance yet. Might we do next year if something comes through perhaps for a customer that we have some connection to.

Yes, we might look to answer something next year. We might look to answer something a bit more speculative, we can always learn through those businesses and then we'll be into the year beyond that, and we'll be getting more confident as time goes up. So that's doesn't give you anything concrete but it gives you an idea of the sort of way that we're thinking about this and hopefully helps you to understand that movement into the Commercial Finance world. We think it's the right way to do it to start with something that's is a small jump in terms of the functionality and something that we can leverage existing customer relationships in terms of progressing that way.

I think just to layer on a quick point, which was very clear in Matthew's answer. It's very much incremental, the work that we're doing to make Alfa work within that Commercial Finance arena. If you look at it based on the overall size of the Alfa products. And experience Alfa watchers, many of whom are on the call will understand that part of the investment case is that we have an incredible piece of intellectual property that we could use in a number of different ways. So a big part of this is making sure that we're in a position in terms of both our serviceable and new addressable markets of continuing to invest, to expand the reach of that intellectual property.

And we'll now take our next question from Harvey Robinson of Panmure.

A couple of questions, pretty 1 for Duncan and 1 for the rest of the team. Just in terms of the bridge for the OpEx implications of your guidance, Obviously, you've got that stated currency gain on the hedge in the first half. If you could give us a bit more color about what other items are going to be driving that margin down because it does look like the guidance is pretty conservative, as framed today on that point.

And then just coming back to the TAM/SAM sort of conversation. I mean, I think historically, people have market commentators has suggested that the commercial loan market is 3x the size of your target or asset finance market. Do you still think that's a sensible number? And also, you've been pretty strong on how much of the originations opportunity is in the state. And I believe 1 of your key customer wins was driven by our increased capability there. Could you give us a feel what sort of quantum of that SAM is and maybe the fleet as well, if there are some numbers you can put some flesh to the bones on that. That's probably my question, maybe a follow-up.

Brilliant. Thanks, Harvey. Duncan is in charge of bridges. So you start Duncan.

Yes, great question, Harvey. Yes. So perhaps just a bit more color on it. In terms of thinking about the cost base and how that moves between first half and the second half. We're continuing to recruit more people and particularly to help with a strong delivery side of the business. So additional people, along with additional work with partners that we're expecting to increase the user partners in the second half along with a 6-month impact of the salary increases that we gave on the 1st of April. All of that sort of is a GBP 2 million to GBP 2.5 million impact on salary and partner costs for us second half versus first half.

And you mentioned the FX of GBP 1.7 million, that was one-off in the first half. Going back actually to Carl's question. If you mark to market the hedges as of now, we have a GBP 300,000 loss in the second half at $1.34. So you're talking about a GBP 2 million impact on FX. Obviously, with the heavy investment we've done over the last few years, the amount of invested capitalized has gone up, slightly less this first half compared with first half last year. But nevertheless, the depreciation, the amortization rather is catching up. So we've got another GBP 0.5 million of amortization in the second half.

And there are some other sort of cost phasing things conference season, and Q3 is conference season, both internally and externally, and that drives some extra costs. And so all of that adds up with a significantly bigger OpEx for the second half compared to the first half, and that's really what drives the big changes.

Harvey. I'm picking up your point about target addressable market and service addressable market. As we often do ask these questions more dramatically than in terms of hard numbers, but I'll certainly risk a kick under the table from Duncan by saying that 3x feels a bit conservative for the overall commercial finance market, but it's not something that we could give you precise numbers on.

I think we could be probably a bit clearer in terms of the serviceable addressable market initiatives that were going on. You're quite right. Originations is something that we're already working with the customer on. And actually on the fleet side, we're working with somebody within our late-stage pipeline. We said a number of times, Matthew reiterated that we absolutely love it when we do investment initiatives like this alongside a customer because you're going to get it more right, you're going to get that first referenceable customers. So it's a really, really good thing to be able to do.

If you look at originations, clearly, with originations, we've put a big focus on U.S. auto because of the secular characteristics of that part of our market. But originations is a cross-cutting initiative. Similar with fleet. Fleet very much about automotive fleets right now, but there are all sorts of fleets that are out there. And I think you could characterize it as a much bigger incremental sale. We know that an originations project in terms of both subscription revenue and delivery would be a reasonably large percentage of the servicing projects that we used to. Similarly, with fleet everybody who is involved in any kind of vendor finance, so the manufacturers and captives and other types of vendor finance will all need origination systems.

Certainly, every auto finance company has got some form of fleet capability or ambition. So the way to characterize, I think, the addressable market for both of those 2 in the first instance is definitely go resell it and resell a big incremental sale to our existing customers. And of course, going forward, it increases our competitive advantage, broadens our competitive moat by giving us even more of an end-to-end solution for those new sales.

Just a high-level question. Could you -- is it -- is there a simple answer to this. What is it about Alfa that lend itself [indiscernible] to term loan structures? Is there a simple answer to that. Obviously the...

There is an answer actually, and it comes from our heritage, but I do -- Matthew might want to layer some narrative on to this as another Alfa, I hate to use the word veteran, but when I turned up for work 30 years ago, everything that we were -- we're doing at that time was around, what you call -- what we call big ticket leasing, more structured leasing. And that involves some of the most complicated structures on the planet, widebody jets, shopping centers, nuclear power plants, all the things. So in terms of that clarity of the things that Alfa serves, that was very much in the complexity in the transaction rather than the business processes, whereas a lot of what we do today, the complexities of the business process because they're cookie-cutter transactions, about thousands of users, millions of contracts. That capability, 1 of the things we're most proud of is that capability still lives within Alfa.

So its heritage is actually being able to do pretty much anything that you could think of, and retaining that what you might call an engine is a real advantage of our true product approach and the way that we've evolved the capability. And I'm going to use the word simply and my colleagues in product leadership would probably give me just another 1 of those kicks. It's not simple, but it's a case of taking that highly fungible adaptable engine and just making it work in different markets with different vernaculars and different channels. But the building blocks are there because of our heritage. Can I get a tick in the box from you Matt?

Yes. Exactly what I can say, the bullet proved financials for the term -- for those base term loan structures, the other customer Andrew will remember this many years ago, he said, it adds up, and it takes away. And it always has and it will continue doing so. I'd probably though adding some other features of capability for volume scalability, the fact that a single platform for asset finance is extensible to other term loan markets. It's also advantage for us with the data resilience and the cloud security and the model platform probably wouldn't have been something we have been considering when we were just making an add-up and takeaway. But the other base answer is those bulletproof financials.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions in queue. I will now hand it back to the speakers for closing marks.

Thank you First and foremost, thank you to all of you for continuing to watch our company and for your continued attention and of course for joining us this morning. Thank you for the entire Alfa team. It's been a great period. And as we said in the notes earlier, we're looking at the second half and beyond really confident in our end market. In our product as it grows and evolves in our delivery capability, as Matthew says, 1 of our key competitive advantages and actually more fundamentally in our culture and our company. So thank you again, and we'll see you at the next period.