Morgans Financial: Ansarada (ASX:AND) quarterly update with CEO Sam Riley

• Quarterly update on active customers and revenue growth.
• Ansarada is a SaaS company governing critical information.

An investor-facing update underscoring Ansarada's public-company discipline.

It was a busy quarter for us.

As you know, we were doing the deal and listing on the ASX, so we were very, very busy with that, but we were still able to put some really good stuff on the board.

You would see that our customer numbers here grew over 3,000.

But if I take you back through the beginning of the year, what happened to us is we had a stack of growth happening around February, and when COVID hit, a lot of stuff that usually gets done in cap rates , as you know, that got impacted.

So in March, April, May, that was when we were most affected and we saw a drop off.

But ever since that time from July, August, September, October onwards, we've kept climbing and climbing and growing our customer base.

And also COVID ended up creating a lot more demand for a lot more of our products outside of deals, which was good.

You will see though, that there's a difference in the customer growth to the revenue.

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As you know, when you write a subscription contract, you recognise that revenue over the period of the contract.

So we're still going to see revenue flow through from that increased demand from customers.

The other positive there, just to point out, is whilst we grew 5% in the total customer contracts, the subscription-based contracts were 9%, obviously higher quality revenue with driving more of that growth.

So that was great to see.

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Now, what is it that we do?

I thought I'd remind you guys, you know, we do help people govern their most critical information so they can make better decisions, increase their productivity, and manage risk.

And we do that in people's most critical events.

We don't store memes and cat gifs and general information.

We really just help people do audits, cap raises, high-value complex tendering projects, managing your board , board, compliance activities.

So these are all the critical things that we do.

Now, to do all of that stuff I just said, that's the reason we got together with the Dockyard and also the Athena board product.

So you've got Ansarata with all that capital markets and deals capability, and then you have Dockyard with the end-to-end management workflow collaboration, and you put together a board tool, and it creates a really compelling suite of governance, and compliance products.

What we've done is package all them up on one platform, so customers can expand and use one or more of them, and we're making it look beautiful and simple.

Our integration timeline's completely on track, but as I'll tell you and you can see, we've already been able to use this to generate more demand and increase customer growth.

So who is it that we serve?

We serve really valuable people that are the .

They're busy.

They have to make critical decisions.

They have to work very quick and be productive.

And they also carry a lot of risk personally with their reputation, financially, lots of risk.

So we help them do that.

So a quick example could be a general counsel who's also a company secretary, very common in a lot of organisations.

That person could be raising capital.

They're also liaising with the board, managing board material and disclosure and things like that.

, you know, and they're constantly collaborating with their accountants and their lawyers.

And there's a lot of critical information that needs to be governed.

So the better that happens, the better the outcome for the Cosec and GC, the better the outcome for the company.

And that's what we do.

And how we do it is the products, but also the features.

So a good example of one feature we have is the ability to let people say on their desktop and disclose it.

Even if that person's your closest competitor in an M&A deal, you can let them view information, make decisions, but have the power to pull back that document regardless of where it's been saved.

So that gives people a lot of confidence and they can move faster and get things done better.

And someone like a GC really values that.

So what we've done, guys, I'm really pleased to tell you .

So the first deal we got away with the combined platform was with an ASX 100 energy company.

They'd been using Ansarata really when they got to the due diligence stage of a deal.

But as everyone knows, there's a lot of preparation that goes on before that.

So we took to them the expanded workflow and preparation capability and we ended up re-signing them on another agreement.

So renewing that, but it's an expanded contract because they're now using more of the platform.

is a good example of what we're doing across their customer base.

And another one is Christina over at 86400.

She's been using the Athena board product and the 86400 board.

You can see what they say about there, they love it, it's simple.

Simultaneously been using Ansarata for deals, various deals, and as serendipitously, just as we announced this the following day, it was the same day actually, NAB just acquired 86400 and Ansarata was used to facilitate that.

So obviously that gives us a further expansion into NAB and all of that stuff as well.

So they're the sorts of network effects we get and with the expanded products we're trying to leverage them.

Now a key part is the Anthurata brand is already trusted and known around the world with all of those professionals.

So we're taking all this stuff across our customer base and growing them and expanding them.

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So it's a very big market.

We've got a trusted brand.

Customers are advocating what we're doing.

It's showing up in our customer numbers and growth and flowing through to revenue.

And that's really our outlook.

We're working on making the product simple and beautiful so they're compelling to all of our customers to expand into.

We've seen revenue grow.

We think it's going to continue to grow based on our customer growth.

It's a massive leading indicator.

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And we have fully recovered from COVID in the sense we've recovered with our customer numbers.

The tail end of the recovery is flowing through.

And as you know, the M&A markets, capital markets, and demand for governance and risk products is growing too.

And unlike last year, where we did see an impact when COVID created a lot of uncertainty, what has transpired in the world since then is the need for information to be shared with much greater velocity amongst board , advisors, financiers, investors, and platforms like ours have been used to do that throughout COVID so that there's much tighter control on capital, debt, liquidity.

So regardless, we feel regardless of what turn COVID takes, we're in a strong position to grow.