Trading update May 2018

The Board of the Company confirms that trading for the year ended 31 March 2018 was in line with market expectations, with growth in revenues, margin and profit.

The Company continues to make good progress in the US, with strong momentum in the Secure Payments business. The US Secure Payments order book continued to build, with new contract wins totalling $9.3m in the 12-month period (2017: $8.3m). US Secure Payments revenues more than doubled during the period. As previously announced, during the year we won a four-year contract to provide our Secure Payments solution (CallGuard) to a US Fortune 250 retailer and secured a partnership with a US global payments solutions company.

In the UK, in more challenging market conditions, we have started to see the benefits of our restructured UK sales function and renewed focus on larger, more strategic accounts. As previously announced, the Company has secured several sizeable contract wins across the payments, insurance, healthcare and mobile telecoms sectors since half year results in November 2017. As a result, we have won significantly more contracts in the UK in the second half of the financial year than in the first, revenues from which will start to feed in to this current year.
Eckoh's balance sheet remains robust with net cash of £3.6m at the period end (2017: £0.2m).

The Group has a strong pipeline and is seeing an increasing number of larger-scale opportunities at the enterprise level. We expect the introduction of European GDPR from 25 May 2018 to present further opportunities for Eckoh, as US organisations as well as those in the UK seek to comply with EU consumer data regulations.

The Group will report its audited results for the year ended 31 March 2018 on Wednesday 13 June 2018.