Fd Technologies Public Share Discussion Threads

[techcrazy] 23/10/2022 13:50

You can't have cutting-edge tech without having a skilled and experienced technology staff. So a bit of positive news is that the KX CTO (Eric Raab) was silently fired a few weeks ago.

[badger36] 23/10/2022 13:21

Sunday Business Post page 6Usual dirge and nice photo of Keating ??Imagine talking about cutting edge tech and cheap graduates in same sentence If Preston is surprised by revenue growth where has he been ?

[ghostdogdog] 21/10/2022 18:40

Look the vaunted Microsoft 'partnership' which was just adding it to the market place. 6 months. Not 1 review. Not one rating. How lucrative? It can bring $6 an hour! If the top 100 banks each ran a KX Insight instance 24/7 for a year that's 6 * 24 *365 * 100. 5.2m good but not transformational. The whole point of KX is that its fast and the cloud that you rent the machine not own. Lets say they only run the workloads M-F and lets say Microsoft takes 10% and lets say that the John Deere Capital Corporation of Reno, Nevada the 50th largest bank and below has no need to crunch too many derivative stats. 50 * 6 * 24 * 240 * 0.90. That gives us a still very generous 1.5m in new revenue! And also bear in mind, this is only for *existing* users who bring their own license. It doesn't result in any net new clients, just FD might get a cut if the client decides to move their workloads to Azure and chooses not to use vanilla Unix instance. Smoke and mirrors.

[badger36] 21/10/2022 16:03

That's why some of the clowns posting were nothing but paid shills It's truly finished and TW was spot on: a house of cards

[ghostdogdog] 21/10/2022 15:45

Long time FD employee here to vent. KDB is an ancient database query technology which is kind of useful for quants to run queries on tick data.
It's a 1 file 200k executable file built by Arthur Whitney 20 years ago that they milked for years. That's it. FD have built no other products in 20 years. Some front end graphics do da's, integrations. Not a single patent. Deployments in non finance industries are always just around the corner! Because no one wants to admit their TAM is saturated. I remember Toner talking excitedly about the move into automotive wind tunnel data, I asked him how many wind tunnels there are vs hedgefunds and he changed the subject. Then the was streaming electricity meters...

The consulting business was based on hiring grads from NI on 20k, sending them to London got 60k and making them living in accommodation owned by management/company that could be wrote off as a biz expense instead of grad paying from after tax salary. The glory days of the RBS bad bank meant they had literally 100s there. That was the business. That's why they never split it out into consulting, KX and MRP until after Conlon's departure. They could claim the consulting revenue was software revenue and scam the market with a software valuation. This is why the whole house of cards fell down after he departed and auditors who weren't in on the scam came in. The ShadowFall report from 2018 was 100%. BC got away with it as he was the company.
Onto the disastrous numbers, 3100 people creating 147m of revenue and 1.1m profit? That's 354 GBP profit *per head* in 6 months which is insane, given the margins on consulting you have to ask where on earth the money is going? Was it ever there now the InvestNI EU cash has stopped? Is it the new Chief Emotion Officer? Is it all the has been GFT execs coming to FD to retire? (Sorry I mean lead us to the promised land of cloud deployments) Baffling increase in marketing for a 20 year old product in US? The well feed Newry HQ staff on 100k? All this for the push into high value out sourced KYC document verification? A business so low margin that NI companies are outsourcing it to Portugal? Even moving the HQ a few miles down the road would allow them to get Irish corp tax instead of UK. Too easy. My theory is they're trying to drive down the price to do an MBO.

[badger36] 21/10/2022 10:40

Pity we have not got class action law suits against this team. Utterly bereft of a way out a mess they created by announcing a collaboration only then to wonder if they have reached for the stars and hit a treeEither it cuts costs and sheds dross at the BOD and try and sell it before it starts to need more funding. A calamity of its own makingI don't even think it's a buy at 7-8 range as the acknowledgment that they have not learnt from previous action of forward booking business that may never be realised now

[badger36] 21/10/2022 10:02

It's getting there folks All the negative down thumbs must be sore Say what you like it's pathetic to announce a deal before you have the development done This is going under

[badger36] 20/10/2022 12:43

It might be worth a punt at 7-8 range as once they forced to layoff and trim it may be an additional bolt on to on of the dominant players. Only a bolt on and will rescue the few officers who have proven inept and incapable of actually delivering before it's announced and given the tendency of Tata to drive a hard bargain FDP will have cap in hand Did anyone notice insiders buying?One must be joking. I'm sure Mrs Conlon must wonder why she was hoodwinked to stop offloading what is now practically worthless stock given the collapse

[badger36] 19/10/2022 14:28

Well we now know the Microsoft deal is in exchange for exposure Seems those 300 hires never achieved anything close to the plan and given the state of the tech sector and valuations shareholders can thank the limited supply of labour rather than the clowns in charge The announcement of the deal is reminiscent of the now justified claim by TW that they were forward booking revenue that may never materialiseIt's time to layoff most and put a for sale sign up if indeed anyone is interested as it will just die on the vine

[badger36] 19/10/2022 08:21

Smacks of desperation They are relying on legacy development to bluff it. Making an announcement and then attempt to live up to the promise is amateurish

[techcrazy] 18/10/2022 19:27

I was surprised to see that they don't have their product ready for MS Azure. The announcement of the "partnership" was last March 1, and the H1 results indicated that the product won't be ready until H1 2023 (in software, that means June 2023).

"Strategic agreement with Microsoft progressing as planned, with joint marketing initiatives helping to build customer interest and pipeline ahead of general availability of KX Insights on Azure in H1 2023"

A little more transparency to the shareholders is in order.

[badger36] 11/10/2022 15:25

Almost 52 week lowWill need to raise at 6

[badger36] 10/10/2022 11:21

Not long now single digits ~ 50% last six months but that's not the story when you think it was 45 and then they came out with this "hiring 300" ???A mockery given the performance and lack or new products. They must have given MSFT a free pass in desperation

[badger36] 28/9/2022 10:46

At 13.52 and falling from a high of 45.I think it's not a harbinger of doom you need to blame

[techcrazy] 24/9/2022 21:31

Badger, I think you are doom-mongering a tad.

FD has a strong FinTech consulting business and will, most likely, report great numbers from that business. The KX business may be different though, as we haven't seen any new customer use-cases out of partnerships such as Keysight, BISTel, or Microsoft.

I expect the Microsoft partnership came about because of FD's long and strong relationships with many financial institutions and that MS wants to get these customers to use the Azure cloud platform. By the way, MS offers their own streaming analytics line of products (as well as dozens of other vendors)

Hopefully, their H1 reporting will shed some true light on how they are doing.

[badger36] 23/9/2022 10:16

Looks like single digits now Cost cutting and redundancy payments to follow. KX flattered to deceive All this R&D and hirings look pretty bare now Guess they told a good story for a while but as we all know repeats are tiresome and boring Turn off the lights

[badger36] 26/8/2022 09:49

They said TW was a hatchet job. Well now we know the truth of overpaid bluffers and over hyped tech which has been nothing but service revenue on legacy software The chances of a take over have disappeared and what's left?Huge salaries, stock option grants, ever decreasing market cap and NOT ONE contract win or exciting development From mid 40s to low teens and yet all we got was the promise of 300 callow graduate hire promises and silence ever since

[techcrazy] 22/8/2022 14:21

Really discouraging. They don't issue dividends anymore and the share price back to 2016 levels. No news on any big deals -- just partnership announcements.

[badger36] 18/8/2022 16:28

Looks like all those hires(300) have paid off?

[hedgehog 100] 28/7/2022 13:42

"First Derivatives to float on AIM

08 February 2002

Northern Ireland-based banking software developers First Derivatives is looking to raise £2 million through a listing on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM).

The company is issuing four million new ordinary shares under the offer at a price of 50p per share, capitalising First Derivatives at £7 million. The issue will represent approximately 28.57% of the enlarged share capital of the company. Trading on AIM is expected to commence on 25 March 2002.

Brian Conlon, managing director, First Derivatives, and a former capital markets consultant for SunGard, says the AIM listing will enable the company to exploit opportunities for future development requiring capital investment and selective acquisitions which may arise. Opportunities for expansion outside the financial markets are also being pursued, he adds.

The company's client list currently includes US software houses and a number of large European investment banks."




Rockpool Acquisitions (ROC) is a main-listed cash shell, which may be of interest to investors seeking other Northern Ireland investments to FDP:-

"A listed acquisition vehicle seeking opportunities in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland has a good availability of high quality, often internationally-focused, companies. Despite having an estimated 70,000 registered businesses, there are only two other publicly-listed companies predominantly based in Northern Ireland and Rockpool believes that more Northern Ireland businesses could benefit from the ability to tap into deeper pools of capital which access to the public markets provides.

With extensive knowledge and experience of the Northern Ireland market, the directors are seeking to identify and acquire a highly ambitious, Northern Ireland-based company that is focused on significant growth, and provide it with that access, helping that company meet its aspirations and full potential. Target companies will have a valuation of up to £20m."




Rockpool Acquisitions (ROC) 4.75p Market cap. £604K.




ROC has about £950K. cash, and extremely low cashburn.

ROC's large discount at the moment to its cash, despite this extremely low cashburn, looks like a temporary discrepancy - and one that is gradually being addressed by ROC's share price rise, as the market wakes up to the opportunity.

[swiss paul] 10/5/2022 09:27

Comments?
Business highlights
Successful delivery of accelerated growth strategy, with new Group structure enabling each business unit to deliver its performance targets and investment in KX driving our key metric of growth in recurring revenue

KX Insights platform launched, with 22 customers signed across financial services, pharma, manufacturing and automotive contributing to growth in exit Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of 25%, in line with our target

Go-to-market strategy on track, enabling KX to sign 99 subscription agreements during the year (2021: 40), a 148% increase, while also growing our existing customer base with Net Revenue Retention increasing to 106%

40% of KX new deal value in the year generated from Industry (2021: 19%), confirming our growing presence outside our core market of financial services driven by high return on investment evidenced by a Forrester report that shows typical payback on KX in less than six months

Landmark KX and Microsoft strategic partnership agreement, covering the native integration of KX Insights on Azure and joint development of financial services applications and services, validates our strategy and provides significant growth potential

Strong growth performance for First Derivative, ahead of our expectations and built on enhancements in our engagement model and investment in business leadership and go-to-market
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MRP delivered good growth and is well placed following the launch of Prelytix 3.0, with enhanced AI and self-service capabilities
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Positive outlook across our business units, with FY23 guidance for growth in KX ARR in the range of 35-40% and FY23 guidance for Group revenue and adjusted EBITDA which target a return to double-digit growth.

Financial Highlights

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Revenue up 11% to £263.5m (up 14% on a constant currency basis), ahead of guidance, driven by good growth at First Derivative and MRP balanced by a reduction in KX perpetual license revenue in line with strategy

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KX exit Annual Recurring Revenue of £47.0m, up 25% in line with target with recurring revenue representing 61% of revenue (2021: 51%) as we focus on high-value subscription revenue growth

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First Derivative revenue £148.0m, up 24%, driven by market demand and strategy of generating value from our expertise and investment in leadership and go-to-market capability

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MRP revenue up 16% to £51.1m, with platform revenue growth of 18% on a constant currency basis, as we focused the launch of Prelytix 3.0 on existing customers

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Adjusted EBITDA £31.0m, within our guidance range following the investment in R&D, go-to-market and operations in line with our accelerated growth strategy

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Net cash £0.3m (2021: net debt £9.9m) excluding lease liabilities, better than market consensus driven by continued focus on working capital.

[matthew palmer] 09/4/2022 11:34

Anyone on TECHINVEST, I am wanting to form a group of similar minded people to discuss its views etc and information.

Click my name and send a note.