Vipera Plc (LON:VIP) Chief Financial Officer Martin Perrin caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss their interim results for six months ending 30th June 2016.
Q1: Good news on the results this morning, can you talk us through the highlights?
A1: Yes, I suppose for us the biggest highlight is the revenue has come through so it certainly went up on last year and these things are lumpy so sometimes one sort of sits in a meeting saying ‘sorry, it’s not what we wanted because it was deemed a bit lumpy but on this occasion things are well. We carried on investing the money which we raised last year and that’s being deployed into getting new sales resources and people on board, finding the right people takes time but we’re doing well on that. We’ve kept a fairly tight hold on our cash and we’re, if you like, paddling furiously under the water.
Q2: Now you mentioned seeing greater interest in your card control product, can you tell us more about that?
A2: Yes, well the card control product to refresh is a product which we sell to a bank and which enables them to give their customers the possibility of using an app on their cell phone to manage a credit card and when I say manage a credit card what you’re doing as an end user is having the opportunity to do things like ‘do I want to have a notification every time my card is used’, ‘do I want to put a block on any transaction over a certain amount’, ‘do I want to block overseas transactions because I’m not overseas’, there’s a host of detail to that, essentially what you’re doing is your saving the end user the kerfuffle of phoning a call centre every time you want to do something about his card. So that’s a product we’re quite pleased with and it had a long sale cycle but we are making progress with a number of other banks besides those where it is already in use.
Q3: Now 2016 has been a year of steady progress so far, are you positioned well for the full year?
A3: Well I think at this stage all I can say is that we’re still aiming to do what we’re expected to do for the whole year, business is a bit lumpy in terms of revenue recognition but there are plenty of things coming through in the pipeline, there’s plenty of projects to work. It really boils down to how quickly things happen and that is of course partly how quickly we do things but also when you are deploying something new at a bank it’s also down to how quickly they do things.