Skyfii (ASX:SKF) tracking crowd movement at malls and stadiums to improve customer experience

Skyfii Limited (ASX:SKF) CEO & Managing Director Wayne Arthur talks about the company's SaaS cloud-based solution that helps venues visualise, measure, predict and influence customer behaviour, creating better experiences for their visitors and customers.

Michael Luu: Hello. I'm Michael Luu for the Finance News Network. Joining me from Skyfii (ASX:SKF) is the company's CEO and Managing Director Wayne Arthur. Wayne, welcome to the network.

Wayne Arthur: Michael, thank you. Great to be here.

Michael Luu: First up, can you start with an introduction to the company for those who are new?

Wayne Arthur: So, we are a global software and services company, and we've developed a solution that gathers data from a variety of different location-based technologies to help physical venues like shopping centres, airports, retail stores understand movement and flow of people. I guess our core proposition is just that — helping venues understand how people are moving through and interacting with their space, and then make actionable decisions based on the information, which lead to operational changes and also sometimes changes in marketing initiatives as well.

Michael Luu: Great. So, could you elaborate a little bit more on the business case for data collection at venues?

Wayne Arthur: I guess the basic use case for us is we help these venues — airports is a prime example — understand how many people are coming in through the doors, how many people are queuing in certain checkpoints and security and ticketing checkpoints, how long it's taking people to get from ticketing check-in through to their gate lounges. In shopping centres, it's about understanding the journeys between different retail environments, which stores are attracting more people than others and which ones are not performing, for that matter. In restaurants, it's more about understanding loyalty. It's understanding whether loyalty programs and rewards programs are actually driving customer acquisition. And then in smart city deployments, which is becoming a pretty common area for us to focus on, particularly recently, it's more about pedestrians and also understanding vehicle traffic at major checkpoints.

Michael Luu: Let's move on to finances and strategy. Can you provide an update, starting with the highlights for the third quarter of this financial year?

Wayne Arthur: Yeah. So, third quarter this year, we were up actually 24 per cent on the previous calendar period. We have certainly rebounded out of the COVID situation. So, Q4 of last year was probably the most heavily impacted quarter for us in terms of COVID. But, since that point, we've been steadily recovering quarter on quarter to be back to what was our biggest quarter in Q3 to date. The company has delivered a CAGR over the last four years of close on 56 per cent in terms of our recurring revenue growth year-on-year, and we've also maintained a positive operating EBITDA position over that four-year period as well. So, the future looks extremely bright. We've sort of rebounded back to pre-COVID growth trajectory. We've also seen our sales pipeline return to pre-COVID levels as well.

Michael Luu: In terms of the outlook for the company, what does the future hold for Skyfii?

Wayne Arthur: So, we're on a pathway to becoming the global market leader in the space, and this space broadly defined as behavioural intelligence. As part of that organic trajectory, we're also looking to become the industry consolidator. There's a number of different businesses out there that do parts of what we do, so certainly acquisitions is a key part of that growth strategy looking forward as well.

Michael Luu: So, let's move on to the last question, Wayne. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Wayne Arthur: Sure. So, we recently announced an acquisition of a company called CrowdVision, which is a US- and UK-based technology company focused on predominantly airport analytics. And these guys have developed a solution which uses advanced object detection, basically, for analytics. These guys have secured a partnership with the TSA in the United States as the only sanctioned security checkpoint analytics provider. And so we're pretty excited about taking that product further in the airport space, but also its applications in other verticals, like stadiums, as well. What they focus on is large volumes of people, moving through queues, actually. So, more security, ticketing and immigration zone checkpoint analytics — something that the Skyfii business previously couldn't do on its own. And so we've acquired a technology product. We've also acquired a very strong customer base there. They're in 13 out of the top 30 United States airports at the moment as customers, and obviously growing. And so, that's been a pretty exciting acquisition for us, accretive acquisition on day one, already demonstrating growth, and obviously over the next few months, we'll be looking to fully integrate that product into our overall offering.

Michael Luu: Wayne Arthur, thank you for your insights. We wish you the best of luck with your future endeavours, and look forward to hearing more updates from you in the future.

Wayne Arthur: Great. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it.

Source: Finance News Network