Half Year Trading Update - October 2019

Eckoh, the global provider of secure payment products and customer contact solutions, announces a trading update for the six months ended 30 September 2019. Figures relate to this period, unless otherwise stated.

The Board is pleased to announce that trading for the six-month period was in line with expectations. It has been a very strong first half to the year with excellent levels of contracted business and double-digit revenue growth in both the UK and US.

The US business continues to perform strongly, and total business contracted was $14.4m (H1 2019: $12.5m), an increase of 15% year on year, which was an impressive result given that the prior half year comparator included our largest ever contract valued at $7.4m.

We continue to have excellent momentum in our US Secure Payments business, with ongoing success in the retail and healthcare sectors and we have recently won our first client in the gaming sector. The pipeline for the second half of the year is encouraging, reflecting the long-term structural drivers for our Secure Payments products: tightening regulation, and the growing risk of data breaches and fraud within challenging parts of our clients' businesses.

In the UK, total business contracted was £7.9m, an increase of 8% year on year. In the period we had strong renewals in the UK with our existing clients and we continue to maximize client value through cross-selling. Our new UK business is increasingly coming from sales delivered through our recently launched Eckoh Experience Portal ("EXP") which enables organizations to purchase our Customer Engagement and Secure Payment solutions in a modular fashion.

As announced on 1 July 2019, we secured a contract extension with a Fortune 100 telecommunications company for our agent desktop tool Coral. The contract is worth a minimum of $3.8m, and of this, $2.1m will be recognized in this six-month period. Consequently, while the Company expects revenue growth to continue in the second half, the first half is expected to have a greater weighting this financial year.

The Group's financial position remains robust with net cash of £10.9m at 30 September 2019 (30 September 2018: net cash of £3.4m), and management remain confident of further progress in the second half of the year.

The Group will report its results for the six months ended 30 September 2019 on Tuesday, 19 November 2019.

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of Regulation 596/2014.

For more information, please contact the media team.