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Welcome to our first half year 2021 earnings call. Especially today, we are streaming out of Berlin, our new office, which we acquired together with the Business Keeper acquisition. My name is Marcus Sultzer, Chief Revenue Officer of EQS Group; and next to me, Andre Marques, CFO.
Warm welcome also from my side.
Then let's get into it. We have 4 parts, a small highlight part then of course, the financials, a deep dive into our customer development and then, as usual, the outlook in the end. Let's start with the highlights. We informed in an extraordinary investors call in between this call and our last quarterly call on the Business Keeper acquisition. We are now the leading European cloud provider for whistleblowing solutions, and we made a lot of progress. We closed the deal already on 14th of July, 3 weeks earlier than we initially planned, thanks to a lot of hard work of the entire team, thanks to a lot of hard work of my colleague Andre. And in these 3 weeks until now, we already made a lot of progress. We worked on integration topics across the company. We work on strategic decisions and are really happy that we already could make strategic decisions on the product, on the tax strategy going forward, on the brand strategy and this is the reason why we are streaming out of Berlin. We have -- we had yesterday and have today, 2 days of global sales workshop with all the sales, marketing and partnership people in the company, and it's really exciting to see how everyone is working hand in hand to make this acquisition, this merger a success. We're also going to have a fantastic party today evening, the first one after 1.5 years with the whole team here in Berlin, and I'm really looking forward to the next weeks and months. And I'm pretty sure that this will be a very, very successful integration. That also has an impact of our group structure. Just to remind everyone and those who follow us the first time, we are working in the field of RegTech with the specifics of Corporate Compliance and Investor Relations. We are having about 8,000 customers, 3,400 approximately where we deliver pure SaaS solutions and another -- a little bit more than 4,000 customers for our filing services. With the Business Keeper acquisition, we won additionally approximately 360 SaaS customers. We are now a bit more than 550 employees. And what hasn't changed, of course, with the acquisition is that our headquarters are based in Munich, company incorporated 20 years ago, 21 years ago Business Keeper approximately the same time in the market, and we are listed in Frankfurt at this scale. When we look at our core KPI, group KPI and the results for half year for the first half year 2021, we are really happy that we could acquire 367 new customers that includes the customers acquired by Business Keeper. Because with this, we are fully in line with our guidance. We said 10% to 20% of the total customer amount for this year, we want to acquire in the first half year. Saying we are happy about the results with the new ARR. We signed EUR 4.25 million. That's almost half of the total ARR we want to achieve by the end of the year as a minimum basis. So all in line there. And I'm very, very happy that also on the Investor Relations side with our Investor Relations COCKPIT we made huge progress, 809 contracts signed. We finalized the whole transition in Switzerland, except one customer, all customers are on the IR COCKPIT platform, and that overall leads to the 3,400 customers, approximately, which I mentioned before. The total amount of customers includes the customers of the 2 acquisitions, Got Ethics we did end of last year and C2S2 with their rule book. And maybe, Andre, on the revenue and EBITDA?
Yes, exactly. So the same picture here. On the revenue side, we are fully on track. So we expected -- or we expect for the full year 30% to 40% increase in the Compliance segment, which is also including the first-time consolidation of C2S2 and of Got Ethics, which started in January and will add an additional part of Business Keeper where we now have had the closing in July. And we will start the consolidation here as well. So here in Compliance, we're fully on track, also Investor Relations, expectation 8% to 18% for the full year, with 10%, we are on track, and we believe that's going to continue for the full year. On the EBITDA figure, we have EUR 1.3 million EBITDA as of 30th of June for the first half of the year 2021. This compares to around EUR 3 million of EBITDA in the last year, why we have the decrease. I will now show on our EBITDA bridge slide in more detail what happened here. As you know, we are investing in marketing and sales, but let's have a more detailed look here. So if we see what were the main impacting factors here, we see at the very right at the very end, the marketing and sales whistleblowing with nearly EUR 2 million of an impact. So what we also show is EBITDA clean, and that has increased actually to around EUR 3.3 million, so roughly 10%, 9%, I think. The effect between last year's EBITDA and this years EBITDA on the side of the acquisition, it also important to mention here, we had -- in the middle here, we see EUR 200,000 positive contribution on EBITDA from our acquisitions as of January, Got Ethics and C2S2. And on the other hand, with the acquisition of Business Keeper, we had a couple of onetime expenses for lawyers and for consultants here to support us in the -- on the M&A project, which amounted to EUR 400,000. We will have additional ones in Q3 but way less in the amount maybe of EUR 100,000 to EUR 150,000. And obviously, next year, we don't expect them. So that's a one-timer. In the operating business, we again had a positive contribution from the global businesses. So global expansion added another EUR 70,000 EBITDA, and this is despite investing in new markets. So also, as you know, we opened up the Italian business as well this year. And additionally, we are still building up for growth in France, but also in the U.S. and overall year by year. Again, this year, we see a positive dynamic here and an increase in the contribution. On the domestic business side, we have a slightly negative impact. This is a specific effect we had in the first half of this year because for the first time, we added new business in the compliant services area with the ESEF XBRL filings. And here we are, especially on the onboarding of the customers, we are working with third parties that support us in the growth process. And we had a lot of services rendered here in the first year -- first half year, while the impact in the first half year is negative, but is going to change in the second half. So overall, we're coming out at EUR 1.3 million EBITDA, which means we are fully on track. The overall guidance for the year is EUR 2 million to EUR 3 million. If we look on the key financials of our P&L. On the group level, we see that we had a 22% growth combined with 2 areas, which is fully in line with our expectation for the year. This does not include, at the moment, any revenue from Business Keeper. So we will have the first time consolidation from July on, so from 14th of July, to be concrete. Excluding the acquisition of Got Ethics and C2S2, we had an organic growth in the first half of 14%, which is still great because especially last year, we had positive -- very strong positive onetime effects in the area of Newswire, but also in the area of webcasting from COVID. And this year, we don't have them so much anymore. But on the other hand, we had a couple of IPOs, which were also nice. The operating expenses due to investments we are taking in marketing and sales, as already mentioned, have increased over proportionately by 37% to around EUR 23 million. And if we adjust for these marketing and sales invest, then we are at around EUR 3.3 million, and be an increase of 9%. The investments are also reflected then in negative earnings, EUR 1.3 million negative earnings due to the investments, but we believe that's worth it because now it's about conquering the market. Equity ratio at the moment is at 56%, very comfortable. This is going to change, obviously, with the acquisition of Business Keeper, we took a loan, a EUR 50 million loan from our bank Commerzbank to finance this, and we will see this reflected in the balance sheet as of 30th of September. But still on a comfortable level, and we believe, of course, very verse to do this investment here. So let's have a more detailed look on the most important topic for this year, winning customers. So handing over to you, Marcus, again.
Absolutely. Thank you, Andre. So a more deep dive what have we achieved on the customer acquisition side. I'm extremely happy about the first half year. When we look at some key facts here, second quarter Business Keeper won another 2, that's 30 clients for the whistleblowing system. We are now together, having 18 customers alone in this premium segment, making us the by far leading provider in this large cap segment. But not only there, we grew. We also grew across different market segments. We want smaller clients, we want medium-sized clients across industries. So I'm really happy what we achieved with our compliance business and specifically with the whistleblowing business. But not only there, Also, our Investor Relations business grew very successfully, another 19 IPO clients, especially in Germany and Switzerland, where we won them gives us a good basis for growth in the first half year, but of course, also in the future. Total customer numbers reflect exactly what we -- what we intend to do this year. We have a much stronger growth in new customer numbers this year compared to last year. We talked about the 367 by end of June. We are now at 445 by end of July. That includes the Business Keeper customer numbers acquired. And so we see a trend, a clear trend towards further growth in new customer acquisition quarter-by-quarter where we said by the end of the year with the Whistleblowing regulation, there will be the big hike in new customer acquisition. But we have it reflected already over the past months. When we look at the new customer numbers by segment, then on the left-hand side, you see the first quarter 2020 compared to the first quarter 2021, you see a clear increase in customer acquisition -- new customer acquisition in both Investor Relations and Compliance. But of course, the big contributor here, the new customers we acquired in the compliance segment. The area in the middle are customers who bought both services in both segments, Investor Relations and Compliance. And of course, we see a good development over the first half year there, too, so that we often manage to sell Investor Relations services as well as Compliance services. That slide is a new slide is showing the consolidated market opportunities moving forward, a combination of sales opportunities. What do we mean by this? We always generate leads at the top of the funnel. And at a certain point of time, they get handed over to the sales team when we believe we have a closing high closing possibility. So we work closely with these companies to win them as customers. And I'm really, really happy that when we look at the combined sales funnel of EQS Group and Business Keeper, then there is only an overlap of about 12%, 90 opportunities. So the acquisition of Business Keeper led to a total pipeline of 750 sales opportunities, our global teams are working on right now. And if we assume a conversion of 1/3, then we talk about 250 companies, clients in the pipeline right now, which we are going to close over the next weeks and months. But that is not all what we want to achieve. We want to grow much more. We want to win 5,000 whistleblowing customers. To explain again, our assumptions, we have a market of 50,000 companies, above 250 employees in Europe. This is the segment which falls under the Whistleblowing Directive this year, another 250,000 companies will follow in 2 years when it's going down to 50 employees. We believe that as always when regulations are put through, there are companies following this. There are countries not following this. So we assumed that 50% of this total market is our real market for digital Whistleblowing solutions and our goal is to win 20% of these 25,000 companies. For whistleblowing, this is only our entry into the company. It's the base for building up then the Compliance COCKPIT up in cross-selling the whole platform, more applications to these companies. And we are strongly convinced that the regulatory triggers, we have already translated now. We have in the pipeline to be approved by the government. The low standards we compare have in Europe and the position we have with the international offices, the teams and, of course, now our leading market position will enable us to really grow with the Compliance COCKPIT and maybe Andre, you could say a couple of words on the Compliance COCKPIT.
Absolutely. Yes, because we have a big vision here in place. Actually, we have to say it's not a vision anymore. It's already very concrete. We have a lot of modules already in place, and we are creating -- as we did for Investor Relations, we are creating 1 integrated platform that allows the compliance officer within the company to run the whole compliance program, digitally have every key workflows in place and what we already have as of today is, aside from the whistleblowing obviously, we have the approval conflict of interest. We have a third-party tool. Actually, Business Keeper is adding this to our portfolio. We have policy management solutions. The pull and the push. So we have the rule book, but also the policy management tool in place. And we're going to create in the near term also risk management and assessment solution. So at a certain point in the next couple of years, we will have a fully integrated solution to offer to our clients that we are now acquiring. With the whistleblowing direction, we are acquiring them through this product and will then continue the journey, the compliance journey with them -- the whole portfolio.
Yes, absolutely. And besides our market position in the products we already have. We have already once proven to be capable of building a platform with the Investor Relations COCKPIT. The first platform world wide really integrating Investor data, data management, the CRM and the news and regulatory news part. So there is a lot of ground technically already and a lot of experience we gained to really execute taking this also for the compliance target group.
Which also means that the investments for this platform are majorly already taken because we have the tax stack now set up. We've built that up over the last year. We have the platform, we have back end. We have core functionalities that we can now build up on. And that's really great because with this setup, we can really advance quicker. So looking on to our 6 key KPIs that we are guiding for the year -- for the full year 2021. We already basically put the figures at the beginning into this into this perspective. But important to mention, with the acquisition of Business Keeper, we have increased our guidance across all the 4 sales and financial KPIs. So we increased the number of new SaaS customers that we want to acquire this year from 1,500 to 2,000, which we have previously ex-Business Keeper out to 1750 to 2,250. The same with the new ARR, we increased it from EUR 6 million to EUR 9 million. And as Marcus already mentioned, we are currently at EUR 4.25 million. So really on track, having in mind that the second half of the year is the one where the Directive comes into place. And this also reflects or is in accordance for the revenue growth, 30% to 40%. Now we are at 22%. But in the second half, we also -- we will also have the consolidation effect of Business Keeper, which we don't have in the first half. And EBITDA, fully on track, as mentioned, in the first half, we had EUR 1.3 million. We expect EUR 2 million to EUR 3 million [indiscernible]. So very comfortable guidance. And aside from the sales and financial KPIs that are really critical and important, it's all about keeping at the same time customer and employee satisfaction at the high levels where we are because that's really key for our success to make our team happy, to make our clients and customers happy and to build up long-term relationship here.
Yes. And to add on, just to tell you a little insight on how the integration goes again, the spirit we see, in the EQS team, in the Business Keeper team working closely together, that's not normal in my experience. And that's wonderful to see, and we are very convinced that this will help us not only to achieve this group KPI, but also, of course, to achieve our growth goals and further integration steps.
And what we also have out is a midterm forecast for 2024, 2025, sorry, when it comes to the financials, revenue and EBITDA. We have a clear plan now to build up the customer base then to start with the cross-sell. And we believe together now with Business Keeper, we have also certain synergies on the revenue side when it comes to an improved offering, which we can combine here, this overall will lead to an increase of the compliance revenues from EUR 20 million in 2020 to roughly EUR 100 million in 2025. So fivefold, which is basically a 37% annual growth year-over-year. Strong growth here. Also Investor Relations, we will grow double digit, and this is also a very strong number compared to the market growth, which is around 3% -- 2%, 3%, 4% because the market was mainly consolidating here, but with our enhanced offering with the new COCKPIT, we have the chance to grow faster than the market here. We will add another EUR 32 million from Investor Relations by 2025. And by growing this revenue a natural consequence due to the SaaS model we have in place, due to the scalable products we have in place, we will increase our EBITDA to EUR 39 million which is 30% EBITDA margin, and we're very confident that we have everything in place to achieve that. And this at the end, should lead to the goal we have for 2025, which is basically being the leading cloud provider in Europe for global corporate compliance and Investor Relations solutions. In certain markets, in the Investor Relations field, as you know, we are already there. So we, in that area, we are a clear market leader, and it's also true for whistleblowing. For whistleblowing, it's even for whole Europe, but the goal is, of course, to be out there, the market leader with the whole platform, with the whole COCKPIT. And that's what we are working on very intensively.
And where we strongly believe that there is no other competitor in Europe who is so well positioned with the platform fundamentals out there with the locations across Europe and the world, with the team. And of course, with the references of now already over 1,200 whistleblowing customers, we are leading already, and we are in a clear pole position to achieving this.
So that's from our side. Thank you very much for your attention. We now look very much forward to your questions.
I will now move to our chat function, and we will see if there are already some questions that came in. So the first question that we achieved -- that we received are from Knut Woller from Baader Bank. Marcus and Andre, here are several questions from my side. So the first one, how successful have you been to win back customers that did not use your new IR COCKPIT after the migration. Maybe that's one for you, Marcus.
Yes. Thank you, Knut, for the question. I mean, first of all, it was a very small amount of companies where we did not manage to migrate to the new COCKPIT, who are not willing to pay an additional license fee for the platform. Just as I mentioned, in Switzerland, it was one customer who did not go to Germany with us. In Germany, it was single-digit percentage. And we constantly have one, 2 customers now in the second quarter coming back to us who said, you have the more reliable, the wider news network and let's go this journey together. So we do believe step-by-step companies will -- we will have the chance to work closer with them and to get them understanding what the real value of the platform is.
The next one also from Knut is, with acquisition of Business Keeper now closed, can you share some insight on the expected cost synergies?
I can take that one. So as you know, we have closed the acquisition, but we didn't close the integration, right? So we are in the integration, strong focus now as we are here in Berlin. Now also these days, it's about -- all about marketing and sales team, getting them integrated, working together. Also in parallel, we look at the tech stack and teams and see how they can support each other and work here with each other. But the cost side is something that is going to be realized in the midterm. Now it's all about winning clients. It's all about the market side. And we will look -- we will see where we can integrate. Obviously, we have a couple of solutions with the learning solutions, where we will have a clear strategy with what solution we go for which market. This is clear.But then there is a process of getting the existing clients on the product that, that is decided and doing the migration in a proper way and so on. So these things will take certain time, and we will see the effects over the next years, but it's nothing for the short term.
Then we have another one here, what is the initial customer feedback post the acquisition or not?
Yes. Thank you for that question, too. We did not yet go out with a global general customer communication. We, of course, have the financial market communications, the corporate news around that. This hasn't been seen by everyone. The reason is that we first wanted to make a couple of strategic decisions on the product strategy, branding strategy before we communicate. So that will happen in the next weeks, this month. The initial feedback we got was, of course, as always uncertainty around product strategy, which products will be continued, which not. The good thing is that we decided to continue with the BKMS System for the enterprise segment. So all the large clients there will be happy to stay on the platform. And of course, we will continue investing also into mid-market and low-end segment so that we are capable of providing this segment a state-of-the-art solution for the whistleblowing needs.
And Another one on the Whistleblowing Directive. How is your pipeline ramping up for the EU Whistleblowing Directive. Should we expect any -- an accelerating momentum already in Q3 2021?
Yes, we will see a constant growth over the quarters. We grew first to second quarter. When we look at the current pipeline I showed, we will see a growth in the third quarter as well. We, of course, have still to wait on how all the EU countries transpose the Directive. But towards the end of the year, there will be a constant growth in customers.
And the last question from Knut here, growth slowed in the IR second quarter-on-quarter from 17% year-on-year to 5% year-on-year in Q2 2021. Is that just reflecting the strong basis last year? Or are there any other reasons? Do you expect growth to accelerate again in the second half of 2021?
Yes, actually, we expect that it's going to be again a bit better. So just as a background, last year, we had a very strong Q2, I already mentioned that with the whole figures in the presentation and that was also driven by strong IR business, where we benefited from COVID, from some COVID impacts. So there were a lot of announcements in the area of regulatory filings, but also the voluntary one. So all the Newswire business increased is strongly and especially we saw this in April. And additionally, we had a lot of webcasting business. On the one side, our core business, which is audio and video webcasting conferences like we're doing now today, but also with annual AGMs. And here that hasn't been a focus in the past. We're not really a provider. We don't have the full-service in-house. We source a lot of partners here in to provide a full package. And that's something that we have done mainly for our customers last year because with the situation they were there were somehow in a bit stressful case, they knew us as their partner, and they somehow were very happy to get a solution from us in the short-term and to get this covered last year where they -- everybody had to reorganize very spontaneously. And this is something that we saw in Q2. We will also -- we also had this in Q3 still because some of the AGMs have been delayed. And then for this year, a lot of those companies have organized this very slowly. It was clear that they could do or would do another virtual one. They did it maybe with their own partners in the area of video streaming or their own departments in-house. And we didn't -- we had a decrease in that business. But that's all fine for us because it was compensated by way better business. First of all, by still growth impact from the COCKPIT as a whole, right? So the COCKPIT contribution, adding new customers, having the full effect of the COCKPIT this year in. And also, with IPOS, we added a new business that is way more profitable and that's compensating this. So overall, the product mix has changed, has improved. So we see now and maybe Q3 also a bit lower growth rate here, but that's going to be the -- that's going to improve from Q4 and also in the next year.So for us, overall, fine development. It's not part of our strategy to grow with AGM. It's not a part where we put our resources into and our sales efforts and so on. So it makes totally sense for us.
Okay. Then let's move on. Hopefully, Knut, we have answered so far this all well, and let's move on to the next questions coming from Lucas [indiscernible] from Tegus Capital. Can you please tell us a bit more about the new customers you win in the whistleblowing area. You showed us some names, but these were mostly bigger known brand names. Are you also winning smaller companies until or around 250 employees? Or is this currently a topic for bigger ones? And do you see maybe some trends in terms of the industry?
Yes. Thank you, Lucas, for the question. We have won clients across sizes, company sizes, employee sizes and industries. We want to -- just to give you that number out of this 370 roughly new clients by end of June, a bit more than 200 were whistleblowing customers. And a small amount of those is really large capital customers because there is simply not so many, many companies out there. So the bigger amount of these customers were midsize and some smaller sized companies not necessarily listed companies, private and German Mittelstand companies, for example, we won for this solution. So we really sell across the segments. We see, of course, a difference in perception of the whole topic compliance and whistleblowing for midsize and bigger companies versus midsized and smaller companies where there is an understanding of compliance and the importance of compliance more in the midsize and bigger companies, while it is fairly new for the smaller ones. Therefore, for now, we focus on the intrinsically motivated companies. So those who want to install something, and we need, of course, support of regulatory trigger for those which are -- which are not yet there from a mindset perspective. But the customer base we acquired is really widespread. We don't see so much differentiation in industries. So this is really a mix of industries we won.
All right, then let's move on. Another question coming from Yannik Siering from Stifel. Actually 2 questions. So the first one is, what should we expect in terms of the Business Keeper integration? Have you decided on the technology and the software already? You alluded to it in the beginning. Could you give some more details on this?
Yes. We decided that our core technology, let's phrase it vice versa. The strategic technology we will use is the Business Keeper technology. We will right away start this for the enterprise segment because Business Keeper has a very advanced offering here with a lot of certifications, fantastic hosting infrastructure. So we will use this, and we will use the offering in the essential, so the small segment for online sign-ups where there is a very advanced technology existing tool. Where we need to work with different technologies for the short and midterm is in the mid-segment because there, requirements differ. You have companies with the 2,000 employees who have very high requirements on what they want to implement, and you have some which really just want to fulfill the Directive. And that's why we're going to have for now various offerings there. The technology we acquired with the Got Ethics acquisition will prevail there for the moment. We think that's a very scalable solution, but midterm, it is our intention to obviously have everything in one COCKPIT to have everything on 1 technology, but it's also our target to now close the market in whistleblowing and to not make technological impact now slowing us down in new customer acquisition.
Yes. So we have clearly on the agenda. It's all basically decided and understood, but priority now is getting the customers, and then we can take care about that. And that was going to be a process also with existing customers already, right? It's not only about the new one, it's also about the existing ones to migrate and then move that.
Absolutely. I mean, we have contractual commitments to the existing clients. And once we can offer something of additional value, where we can say it's actually good for you to migrate, then we will execute this, but we won't make this a primary topic now as our primary topic is winning new customers.
And another one from Yannik Siering here, your current view on the EU Directive, please. It seems unlikely that this will become national law in Germany, for example. Do you expect this to have an impact on your customer demand?
I take this, Anders?
Yes.
So we don't think that it's unlikely to become national law in Germany. The question is when it will become a national law. So we know that in the current legislation, it will not happen anymore. That was made clear, but there is still the EU Directive that by 17th of December this year, it has to be transposed international law. If that does not happen, then regulatory wise, the EU Directive is still in place, and there is whistleblower protection in place. So it will cause a lot of uncertainty more on the company side if there is no clear guidance out there, what has to be done which we think will increase pressure on governments to make fast execution. The impact on our customers will be different. We think that the intrinsically motivated customers. So those who believe in this, who those understand okay, there is an EU Directive, doesn't matter if Germany transposes the law or not, they will still proceed. They know that there is a process of implementing such a software and they will go ahead. And this is the segment who pays us well. So this is where we get the majority of new ARR, where it might have an impact is the smaller client, the smaller companies who are not really believing in compliance and who needs to be pushed by the regulation. So there, it could happen that some companies just wait. For us, this means it might have an impact on new customer acquisition numbers. We don't think it has a big impact on the new ARR because the amount we earn in this segment is comparably low to the intrinsically motivated segment.
And this is also true for the revenue and EBITDA because it's basically the consequence and it's more impacted by new ARR then by the small companies. And also, if we think again, mid term, I think if it's a 1 or 2 quarter, there is a delay in the legislation. That's a very short-term thing but for the midterm, it's completely irrelevant. For our midterm forecast, it's irrelevant. And especially be thinking also about the compliance COCKPIT here, we, of course, will sell to the bigger companies. And we -- I mean we saw on the slide that Marcus showed on the dynamic of the customer acquisition in that area that we have a strong dynamic and it's going to increase. So we don't feel too concerned about that.
Exactly.
All right. And lets move on, we have more questions coming in here is -- are 2 questions from Dirk Verbiesen from EValuation Capital. Comparing the new ARR at EUR 4.25 million in the first half versus the full year target of more or at least EUR 9 million also to the new SaaS customers, 367 in first half versus the whole target. It leaves the question if the new ARR target is not set very conservatively. And when adding the numbers of new SaaS customers to reach the full year 2021 corridor, it appears that new ARR could come in much higher than EUR 9 million.
Yes. Thank you, Dirk, for this question, and I fully agree that this view on our numbers, this perception can happen. It's a little related to what I said before. We are, at the moment, winning all the intrinsically motivated customers, yes. So they have compliance teams in-house. They want now a proper digital system. They roll it out over different countries with a lot of case managers working with this system, and hence, they pay a lot of money. We believe that the more we come closer to the regulation, we -- and with our goal to win the wider market, this will have an impact on the new ARR per customer we acquire because there is -- on the bottom, there is some competitors who are offering low level whistleblowing systems. And we don't want to let companies going to them because we strongly believe in the SaaS theory of switching costs. So once we acquired customers, it is much easier to sell other services to them. And we have now an entry possibility with the directive who pushes companies into buying compliance services, the first compliance service, at least. But we might not be able to achieve those high ARR in this segment. And that's why we feel comfortable at the moment with the ARR guidance. But as Andre said, the guidance is at least EUR 9 million ARR. So we feel comfortable that we can achieve this minimum level.
Great. Okay. So at the moment, I will cross check again, while it seems that this had been all questions. So thank you very much for all the questions. And we as always, we remain open to any follow-ups. So just please reach out to us, and we're happy to deep dive in some more topics. And yes, it was great. We will have here another great day in Berlin with our Business Keeper colleagues and looking forward to talk to you latest with the Q3 9-months results or at some of the conferences that we are going to participate. So we are going to be at the Baader conference -- Baader Investment Conference in September. We're also going to be at the Equity Forum, but that's after the Q3 results actually.
Yes. If you want to see if that's all true with the spirit, what we told, follow us on LinkedIn, there are going to be probably pictures about our summer party today. And look forward to seeing and speaking to you as well.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you.