Vipera Plc (LON:VIP) Chief Executive Officer Marco Casartelli caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the trading update, areas of growth, customer services to the Motif platform, bad debt and reinventing cash into the business
Q1: Good news in this morning’s trading update Marco, could you talk us through the headline news?
A1: Sure, the key message is that we are substantially doing what we said we would do, we increased the group revenue by 15% and we are continuing to grow the business and instigating new opportunities with additional product and service offerings.
Q2: From which areas of the business are you seeing the most growth?
A2: Geographically, the growth is now focussed on Western Europe where margins are higher than Middle East which was our traditional market. During 2015 we have invested in additional sales executives and we’re looking for the group to see the benefit of this in 2016.
Q3: What sort of customer services have you added to the Motif platform?
A3: We have continued to evolve our product ‘Card Control’ which as you know is installed at Deutsche Bank and elsewhere, however another product development focus has been in the field of loyalty and customer engagement where we are receiving good customer response to our additional offering.
Q4: How bad then is the bad debt?
A4: We are still establishing how much can be recovered which is why we have not published a number which may prove unduly optimistic or pessimistic. We have already submitted some provision however even worse case it’s not material in the context of the group.
Q5: Now you’ve had good levels of cash, how are you going to be reinvesting that into the business?
A5: Vipera’s cash flow is in the position of being able to firstly continue to develop our direct sales force which has been expanded in 2015, as I said before, and we continue to do so in 2016. Also in relation to sales force, we are continuing to develop and obviously another area where we wanted to deploy cash is the continued product development and service offering.