AGM Statement
29/07/2022 07:00
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RNS Number : 1724U Tintra PLC 29 July 2022
THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONTAINS INSIDE INFORMATION FOR THE PURPOSES OF REGULATION
11 OF THE MARKET ABUSE (AMENDMENT) (EU EXIT) REGULATIONS 2019/310.
29 July 2022
TINTRA PLC
("Tintra", the "Group" or the "Company")
AGM Statement
The Annual General Meeting for the year ending 31 January 2022 will be held at
9.30 am today (the "AGM"). Richard Shearer, Group CEO, will make the following
AGM Statement and provide a Group Strategy Update.
"It is a year since I took over as CEO in July 2021, and today is the date
where we draw a line in the sand from the legacy businesses towards the
restructured forward looking Deep Tech & Banking Business that we are
developing, built on the legacy payments business.
We had intended that today would start with the issuing of the Annual Report,
but this is now expected to be published later today, and this will be a
defining moment in many ways for Tintra PLC.
Much of my first 6 months as CEO was focused on rationalising a business that
had been ineffectively run for a number of years, understanding what we had,
where we could take it, and what actions needed to be taken to do so.
The first 90 days involved analysis of business units as diverse as gambling,
payments, legal services and even soccer pitches. The result of this process
saw urgent change management. In my view, to succeed, a business needs to have
a core focus, the right team to execute, a defined strategy and no
distractions of non-contributing businesses. This is how we proceeded.
During that process, we very quickly disposed of the legal business, it was
non-profit making and had little chance of scaling to the kind of size that we
thought would bring value to shareholders.
PPSL was analysed and whilst it had been a good contributor to the Company
since its original IPO in 2006, it had not been showing great growth potential
for a number of years, with major competitors having started more recently and
doing better. It was resolved to dispose of that asset. We were able to reach
terms with one of the premier operators in the country in a deal that provided
decent commercial terms along with the certainty that the many worthy causes
it supported were going to be well looked after by the new, very capable,
owners.
We had envisaged that transaction being smoother than it turned out to be.
Some commercial decisions by the management of PPSL meant that the regulatory
complexity was also increased, coupled with the client base which includes
hundreds of small charities up and down the country. PPSL now sits outside
the Group but we continue to expect the original sale to be completed on
materially the same terms as previously announced.
The most significant challenge in those first six months was with St Daniel
House ("SDH"). The payment business had reported a loss in the accounts to 31
January 2021 but it was not until we undertook a deep dive review that we
realised the challenges were greater than we at first understood. SDH is the
tech entity that forms the foundation for our go forward strategy, so the
legacy issues found here were a major concern.
At the end of that process, it was understood that SDH had incurred
significant losses. By that time, we were very advanced in our strategy and I
did not want to burden Tintra plc with having to undertake further onerous
obligations on behalf of SDH, which it had become clear it was unable to meet,
and, consequently, as announced on 8 December 2021, Tintra Acquisitions
Limited ("TAL"), the Company's largest shareholder that which I ultimately
control, provided guarantees to support SDH in excess of £1.3m. By TAL taking
that burden we were able to ensure that this legacy issue did not affect our
go forward strategy or our ability to raise funds.
All of these steps meant that we have now right sized the business, dealt with
legacy issues, normalised the operation and started work on that strategy that
will take us well into the future.
During that same period, a separate team were developing the Groups
operational strategy, publicly evidenced by the signing of the Strategic
Venture Agreement with TMC2 to assist us to build out our revolutionary
banking platform. That relationship has already proved to be a huge success,
resulting in 4 patent applications in the UK and USA along with some major
advancements into web3 and the metaverse; we will start to share these soon.
This year has seen a laser focus on building for tomorrow. Our strategy is an
unusual one, we are running what in many ways is a private US style VC
strategy from a public UK business. Not least is this demonstrated in our
first main external funding round earlier this year which raised funds that
valued our concept at $100m.
We intended that round of funding to last through to the end of 2022, as we
anticipated quite a long incubation period. However, during Q2 we undertook a
massive project to fast track our development, the result of which has been
reported in small part, with further updates expected to be released in
September.
The result of this process means that we are some 6 months ahead of our own
roadmap. As such immediately after the AGM we will be commencing a funding
round based on these new fundamentals. The round intends to raise $25,000,000
for not greater than 10% of the Company.
This fundraising round will see the Company scale to some 130 staff members in
4 countries over the next 12 months and in that same period deliver more
patent applications, likely two of our primary banking licences, as well as
the full tech stack, moving us toward a launch of these major operations in Q3
2023.
A substantial amount of additional information on the strategy will be further
outlined in the Annual Report."
For further information, contact:
Tintra PLC 020 3795 0421
(Communications Head)
Hannah Haffield
h.haffield@tintra.com
Website www.tintra.com
Allenby Capital Limited 020 3328 5656
(Nomad, Financial Adviser & Broker)
John Depasquale / Nick Harriss / Vivek Bhardwaj
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