Simcorp A/S

CSE:SIM

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Operator]

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to this Q1 Report 2021 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, 19th of May, 2021. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand the conference over to the Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Klaus Holse, CEO of SimCorp. Please go ahead.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Thank you very much, and a warm welcome to all of you that have decided to join our meeting today. Today, it is about Q1 2021 and the outlook for the rest of the year. If we move to Slide #2, there, you have kind of the normal disclaimer that governs anything we're going to be saying in this call. So if you haven't read that before, then I would advise that you familiarize yourself with that. Slide #3, we have the agenda. And the agenda is we'll give kind of a highlight of Q1. I'll do this. And I'll also give you a little bit on our cloud journey. Then Michael is going to dive a little bit deeper on the financial review and also the 2020 outlook. And then we will dive into the Q&A for today. If we move to Slide #4, that has the highlights of the quarter as such. And as you can see, we grew revenue by almost 10%, 9.4%. If you look in local currency, 6.9% in reported, and EBIT went up over last year as well. The order intake was a little bit soft in the quarter. We didn't sign any new initial licenses. We had to wait until Q2, early Q2 to get that signed. Professional services continue to grow 9.5% based on all the orders we got in Q4 and all the activity that came from there, we still see strong growth in our professional services business. 12-month rolling software and updates is now at 3.2% and we have previously said we expect that to be about flat when we end the year, and we've given all the reasons for that in previous calls of all the conversions and so on that is happening, but still 3.2% growth in the 12-month rolling for this quarter. Free cash flow, quite strong, EUR 39 million, almost EUR 40 million, an increase by EUR 7 million over last year. So quite a strong cash flow, good cash conversion. Michael is going to get back to that in a minute. If we move to Slide #5. We are trying to give you kind of an insight on kind of the two new metrics that we are -- we think that are driving the business, the annual recurring revenue and then the revenue signed on contract until now. We start with the last one first, we now have EUR 341 million that has already been signed. That is up 6% compared to the same period last year. So that is revenue that is on contract by now. Annual recurring revenue is -- kind of looking at the last 12 months, and that sits at EUR 257 million so far. That is up 13% in local currencies and almost 11% in reported currency. So our recurring revenue is now growing faster than our revenue, which means that an increasing part of the revenue we generate is recurring revenue. We're quite pleased about that because that gives stability to the business also going forward. If we then move to the next slide, that is the flat list. And as I said, there wasn't any new clients in Q1. In Q2, we did sign 2 new clients, one for SimCorp Dimension and 1 for Coric, one in the U.S. and one in Canada. Unfortunately, we can't give you the names yet. That will come at a later date when we announce this. So a good start to the second quarter and hopefully a quarter where more gets listed before we meet again in August. Moving on to Slide #7. We are going to talk for the next few slides a little bit about the cloud journey. And many of you have asked about this as we've had calls over the last few months and quarters, so I decided that we should give you a little more insight into this. The cloud journey for us is kind of three different things. So it's a business model. This is this -- we're already a subscription model. We have been that for a while. We have an agreement with our clients that they will upgrade at least once a year. And you cannot stop paying maintenance or stop paying subscription, unless you have to stop using the software, exactly the same as any other SaaS business. We have since 2007 -- 2016 delivered SimCorp Dimension as a cloud solution to a number of clients. And today, we have more than 50 that are in -- on a solution by SimCorp that is hosted in the cloud, not all of them I mentioned, but quite a number of customers. What we're doing now is the technology upgrade. We are lifting the current application to the cloud, and we're building all our new applications in the cloud. That's what I'll focus on. I won't get into the business model, the delivery model, but more the technology side of this. If we move to the next slide, what you can see is that we're building what we call the unified platform that is kind of the isolating layer between all the applications, the puzzles -- the puzzle pieces that are on top or the applications, and that is how they connect to all the underlying service. In this case, on this slide, we chose Microsoft Azure, that is kind of the cloud provider we've chosen, but the unified platform will also be able to connect to others, including customers that are on-premise. So if you have a, server farm running Windows servers and so on, in your own data center, then the unified platform is to connect to that, which means that the applications we're building in -- on top of the unified platform, will be able to run both in a customer's data center on Microsoft Azure and potentially also other cloud services should we decide so. So far, we've decided for our cloud service to be on Microsoft Azure. We move to Slide #9. Then you see the 3 pieces of the parcel that is happening. SimCorp Dimension as a service is the current service we are offering in the cloud. And by lifting that on top of the unified platform running on Azure, we're going to be able to get more flexibility for our clients. We're going to be able to scale up and down more easily given that it is a cloud service that we are providing. We are doing this 3 tier lift, and I'll get back to that in a minute what that means, but we are kind of spinning our applications from 2 tiers to 3 tiers that is going to get us an opportunity to be more efficient in what we do. It's going to provide better access to artificial intelligence, machine learning. It's going to enable us to have more open APIs. It's a better security model and so on, all technical, but something that's super important as we move forward. Lastly, we are on top of the unified platform, also building a set of new cloud-native services. I'll get into some of those as we go. But in essence, we're lifting the existing applications on top of the unified platform, we are upgrading the existing applications to be 3 tier and we're building new cloud services on top of the unified platform. That's kind of the journey we run from a technology point of view. We then move to the next slide. That's an overview slide that kind of says SimCorp Dimension as a service. If you move to the next one, that kind of tells the progress we run, we are on a progress from moving from an on-premise software paradigm where the client is responsible for most things. We are only responsible for the software as such. So a technology services paradigm where we do all of the technology-enabled services, this is what we do today on SCDaaS, the SimCorp Dimension as a Service technology. And then the customer owns kind of running the business processes on top of this. The paradigm we're moving towards is one where we also take care of some of the services adequate example of that is the DataCare service that we provide, where if this was in the old days and it was the Gain product we were selling, which is kind of the core foundation of our DataCare then we would sell the Gain software to the customer on the left hand, on-prem, they would kind of host it. They would have the business processes in place to actually do cleaning of the data and what we're now doing is, if you go to the right side of this, that we are actually selling them clean data. So that's the difference in this. That's kind of the progression we're on with many of the products we have from just selling the software to providing the software as a technical foundation to actually also providing services on top of these pieces of software. If we move to the next slide, that just a detailing of the current offering the SimCorp Dimension as a Service offering that we have. That means that all of the modules that we have today is running on top of a cloud service we are providing all of the services around this. We are doing all of them. We have a single point of contact for the customer. So if they need support, it's us that does this 24/7. We are hosting this in an environment where it has security, certifications, is SOC2 compliant and so on. So it's all driven by a set of SLAs that we have with the customer. The customer interacts with us, we provide the service. So that's kind of -- that's the journey towards everything as a service. And today, we do this for all the modules that is inside of SimCorp Dimension. If we move to the next slide, that gives you kind of a technical lift -- the cloud life we're doing and again, to the next slide, which is Slide 14. Then as I said, we are doing what we call a lift to a 3-tier architecture for all of the applications we have today. So all the 20 modules you saw on the previous slide, all of those are 2 tier today, their client server, as they are called. And we are now moving that to a 3G architecture that means you're splitting the presentation layer from the application layer. So that means we will have 1 where there's a database server running. There's an application server that actually facilitates running all of the application that's new for us. This is where the unified platform fits in, that is that application server that everything then sits on top of and then the presentation layer is just a thin client like a browser or something like that. It allows you to have multiple clients on top of it and so on. That is the split we are doing of the existing software. So the application that's going to sit on top of the unified platform will be this 3-tiered application that is a lot more flexible in the way it runs. It's a more secure way of doing it because it's all centralized and so on. So it is also more scalable as it has shared resources and so on. We don't have -- the unified platform built will lift all the existing applications on top of that. That's the cloud lift we're doing. We will build all of our new applications on top of the Unified platform as well, which is what we'll talk about now. If you move to Slide #15, that kind of gives you the cloud-native services and moving to 16, that kind of gives you that all of the services we are now building, we're building on top of this unified platform, and we are not -- we're moving to a paradigm where we'll kind of have the applications running, but we'll also potentially provide services on top of this. As I said, DataCare is a good example of where we are providing a business process as a service. We see other opportunities for doing this as well and providing a SLA to the customer service level agreement with the customer of a service rather than just a piece of software. If we move to Slide #17. There's two examples of this we have now a client digital engagement portal that allows asset managers to engage with all of the ad customers in a digital way. We are running that -- we are providing an SLA to the customer of a service that is set for that. And the customer, then they can kind of put their data into this and their customers can access that. So something we are operating fully as a service, something we're building as a service is performance analytics. That's a product that we're building out right now. We have a performance attribution module inside of SimCorp Dimension today. But to make that truly scalable and real time, we want to move that to a cloud-native model. And that's one of the services we'll be building. Again, something where customers can sign off for this performance analytics. They can host their own data in this and get performance analytics on the slide. So that's kind of the explanation of the cloud services. Summarizing, we're building the unified platform that allows us to run on pretty much any service, that be Microsoft Azure, on-premise, whatever. We are moving all of our applications that is in SimCorp Dimension to that, we're doing that by doing this move from a 2-tier model to a 3-tier model. And we are building all the new applications on top of the unified platform. So that's the cloud journey we're on from a technical point of view. From a business model, we've been there for a long time. From a deployment model, we've been there for a long time. And with that, Michael, and all the technical explanations over to the technical explanation of the financials of Q1.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes. Thank you, Klaus, and I will do it relatively short. And the reason for doing it relatively short is that we believe that our Q1 results are very much like we expected. And maybe as an opening remark, I just want to remind you on what we stated in connection with our annual report where we gave the guidance for the full year, where we also quite clearly stated that we expected H1 to be impacted by COVID restrictions and that we also expected H2 to be more opening up the societies and thereby also influencing, you can say, our interactions with prospects and clients. And we'll come back to that, but we stick to that prediction. So going straight into Slide #19, where you have the traditional waterfall diagram showing the revenue growth and the EBIT margin. We believe that we have a resilient business model, and that shows -- that generated at a 9% organic growth for the quarter. And just in comparison, the Q1 2022, we had a 0 growth organic. So you can say, on a like-for-like, we went from 0% growth in Q1 2020 to a 9.4% organic growth in Q1 2021. Looking at the EBIT margin. Again, a like-for-like comparison in local currency, at 22.5% margin compared to 70% in Q1 '20, so a 5.5 percentage point increase in the margin. And the reported margin was 22%. Then moving on to Slide 20. I would say a modest order intake as we also expected. At 13% -- not 13%, but a EUR 13 million order intake. And that was, of course, impacted by what Klaus also said that we didn't add any new clients in Q1. Good thing is that we added 2 new clients in April, 1 Dimension client and 1 Coric client, both in the North American market. We have signed some additional license sales and then also a little [indiscernible] as no new clients coming in in Q1, we also saw a lower order intake of DataCare and other subscription services in Q1 compared to Q1 last year. Then moving on to Slide #21. Looking at the order book, we did have a large increase in the order book in Q4 last year. And some of it was from a revenue recognition point of view, depending on some conditions to be met. And those conditions were as expected, met in Q1. And thereby, we could, again, as expected, revenue recognized those in Q1 2021. That has the impact that the order book declined by EUR 7 million compared to year-end last year. But if you compare to one year ago, so end of Q1 2020 actually, the order book increased by EUR 8 million. And that increase of EUR 8 million was primarily related to subscription services like DataCare, that we have seen that now accounts for EUR 17 million in our order book, while it was EUR 6 million, one year ago. So we have seen a big increase in the order book related to subscription services, which will be revenue recognized as we go over time. If we look at the different revenue lines, they actually all increased in Q1, some more than others, but all revenue lines saw an increase starting with the licenses. We had -- you can say, in percentages, had a pretty large increase in new licenses as we were revenue recognizing some of the orders we have won in 2020. But I will also say the comparison was relatively low. So in nominal numbers, it was modest, both in Q1 2021 and in Q1 2020. I'll come back to additional license sales and also the contribution of where we saw the growth in additional license sales. Then moving to professional services and hosting. There we see -- we harvest the benefit of what we did, especially in Q4, where we were gaining a lot of orders on professional services. And also, as we have more and more SCDaaS clients, we get more and more revenue, both on hosting, but also in the adjacent services in relation to the hosting. So you can see both professional services and hosting fees increasing by more than 10%. Finally, our software updates and support increased slightly by 1% organically and as Klaus also said, we expect that to be flat when we get to year-end for the reason explained earlier. Then moving to Slide #23, where we have a split of additional license sales. And as you might recall, additional license can be threefold. It's more selling to existing clients, it's renewals and it's conversions. We didn't have any conversions in Q1 2020 nor in Q1 2021. So there's no impact from conversions. On the other hand, we had an increase in renewals, which is, of course, also part of our business model that, as Klaus also said, we started with subscription in 2016. And now we start seeing some renewals coming in. And in Q1, we had the value impact of two renewals in North America on Dimension. We had some Coric clients, which renew and then traditionally, SimCorp Italiana, they have many 1-year contracts, which are also reviewed on -- in Q1, and that's also what we saw in this Q1. So renewals actually increased by EUR 4 million and accounted for EUR 10 million of the additional license sales. On the other hand, you could say the most [indiscernible] client was relatively modest in Q1. And there, we had a decrease of EUR 3 million compared to the comparison quarter last year. Then going to the cost base. In our opinion, it's the right cost lines, which are increasing, and it's the right cost lines, which are decreasing. So if we look at admin costs, that is decreasing by a little more than 10% organically. While R&D costs, we are still investing into the future. And our R&D cost increased by 5% organically. Then you have cost of sales increasing 6%, and that's, of course, related to that the underlying business activity in professional services and hosting. We're also increasing and [indiscernible] increasing by more than 6%. We saw earlier on that, that was increasing by 10% plus. So still some scheme in that business as well. And then finally, sales and marketing costs, that's actually not something we'd like to see it decreasing because that's very much related to our sales activity, our meetings with clients and also commission but as there were less travel due to COVID restrictions compared to 1 year ago, where you don't have the full impact of COVID-19 in Q1 2020. So we have less traveling costs. And we -- due to not gaining new clients in this quarter have less commission. Then going to Slide 25, the cash flow development. We believe it was a relatively strong cash generation, which also underpinned the resilient business model. We increased the free cash flow with 22% and bear in mind that Q1 '20 was actually also a quite strong cash flow quarter where we increased the free cash flow by 26% compared to Q1 '19. So you can say it's 2 consecutive years where we have had a good start of the year in terms of free cash flow. And the 12-month rolling cash conversion is a little more than 100%, which is quite pleasant. Then my last slide before we go to Q&A on Slide 27. It's quite simple. We -- as Q1 was as expected. And as we see a good pipeline for the rest of the year, we will most likely come back to that in the Q&A. Then we maintain our expectations for the full year, so we maintain a revenue -- expect a revenue growth in local currency between 6% and 11% and an EBIT margin in local currency between 24.5% and 27.5%. And by that, I would like to hand over to the Q&A session.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Daniel Djurberg from Handelsbanken.

[Daniel Djurberg, Research Analyst]

A couple of questions, if I may. First, starting off, it's always interesting to listen to your comments on the prospect database or your funnel in terms of geographical outlook and so on. To start off that perhaps if you compare year-over-year?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes. So you're asking the pipeline, basically, how do we see that? I think there we see -- yes. So what we see is that there's an increasing activity level in kind of both our existing customers but predominantly in prospects as a new customers we're seeing more getting into selection processes, announcing either that they will be doing an RFP or they are in an RFP process. So we think that there's more activity, our sense is that people see kind of the end of the pandemic or at least some end of the pandemic, getting back to the offices, getting back to something that's a little more normal. And that kind of drives more to want to do something. So we think the activity level is high. And if people what they say they will do, if they actually go through this, then we think second quarter is going to be quarter with a good activity level.

[Daniel Djurberg, Research Analyst]

That sounds good. And then a question on the SG&A if the or year year drop of 10%. And obviously, of course, some measures but also on COVID and new way also working, I guess, when the market starts to open up more and more, how should we think in modeling this? Going ahead, I think, should we be a little bit more aggressive on SG&A, but perhaps not going back to the historical levels compared to sales? Just your view on it would be great.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I think Michael will answer that. What I said a [ minute ] ago, the answer to you is that we will see more activity in Q2. We are seeing more activity in Q2. But what I meant was it's going to be the second half of the year. We actually think that more is going to come to a conclusion, some coming to a conclusion in Q2 as well, but it is really all the activity in half 2, just so I'm correct on what I said [ minute ] ago, With the cost, I'll leave it to you, Michael.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes. And I think for the modeling, like for revenue, we are comparing, you can say, 3 months, where we have the COVID-19 impact by by Q1 2020, where it was only part of Q1 2020, which was COVID impacted. It's the same with the cost. So you can say we haven't traveled at all in Q1 2021, while we did travel in part of Q1 2020. So I would say, in general, this will be the best cost quarter you will have. So you should expect to see some increase in cost levels as we go into the next quarters because we are very, very eager to come out and visit our prospects and clients. And that also means we will not -- well, like any other company, not travel as much as before. But we would certainly like to increase the activity level, both internally for motivational reasons, but especially externally with our clients. So I will say you should expect cost to go up in the coming quarters. Everything is, of course, built into our guidance for the full year. But it's a bit abnormal that we were able to decrease the admin cost by 11% this quarter.

[Daniel Djurberg, Research Analyst]

Perfect. And then a question on seasonality. Recent years, we've seen a more even seasonality compared to the history of the company with the worst on Q4 and so forth. But then, of course, a new revenue model and so on has been changing a little bit this. But the underlying demand and the willingness to sign orders, would you say that we will go back to more historical pattern this year? Or is it more ad hoc based on other stuff that on normal seasonality? Just your view on seasonality for this year would be great.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I would say we expect for this year will be a more normal year. And I would say it was probably -- it was primarily 2019, which was an abnormal year. And then we saw something more normal in 2020. And we expect 2021 to be more like a normal year. And that means that we have high expectations for Q4, as we have also seen in the past. It seems like that, that's where most people take the final decision. And thereby, that is impacting our revenue quite dramatically that most decisions are taken in Q4, which...

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Which is probably even further amplified by the fact that COVID has decided to also leave us in Q4 this year, right? So we expect to really be fully back in a normal phase and only in Q4.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Magnus Jensen from SEB.

[Magnus Thorstholm Jensen, Senior Equities Analyst]

I just have two questions. First, on your professional services, revenue was quite good this quarter. And you say that it's because of the sort of the tailwind from Q4 where you've got a lot of orders. Will that tailwind continue into Q2? Or is that sort of over now?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

There's still a very good activity level on professional services in Q2. So there's just a lot of work to be done as well. We expect the professional services to stay at a healthy level also in Q2 and Q3. And if we keep signing deals in both as we've done so far in Q2 and we do in Q3 and Q4 as well, then professional services is going to follow that.

[Magnus Thorstholm Jensen, Senior Equities Analyst]

Okay. Very clear. And then the other question goes to the order intake. If -- I don't know if you will answer that, but if you exclude renewals from the order intake of the EUR 12.6 million, how much was order intake then?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

That's relatively clear. I think we state how much is -- oh order intake, sorry, that's different from revenue.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

[indiscernible].

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

No, because it's -- because some of the revenue was actually order intake in 2020. I don't have the -- you can get the number from Anders, I don't have -- I don't think -- it's less than the impact on revenue because the two Dimension deals, which is renewal in revenue, those were actually order intake early on. So the impact on order intake is less than what you see in revenue. If that gives you some kind of reason.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Claus Almer from Nordea.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

A few questions from my side. The first question goes to the number of employees. As I see, it seems like the number of employees is flattish year-over-year and also versus Q4, can you try to explain what are you seeing? Is -- are you still adding people, but people also leaving SimCorp? And what are your plans for the rest of the year?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

So from an attrition point of view, our traditional attrition in SimCorp sits around 10%. So our voluntary attrition sits below 7% typically. And ones we add to these sit in the 3%, 4% range, typically. The attrition rate we've seen throughout last year, 2020 was a little lower, given that people were a little less risk-taking in leaving good jobs and going somewhere else. We are seeing that return to more normal levels in 2021. So yes, we are still hiring new people into the company, but we've also stated a year ago that we would try to keep headcount flattish, and that's what we've been able to do. We have staffed up in a number of areas on contingent workers. So more subcontractors and so on for some of our consulting work and also for some of the R&D work. So in that sense, there's more people working for SimCorp, but not as employees.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

And Klaus -- and why is that normal -- these people are more expensive having on your own books...

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes, but they're also more flexible in terms of in and out. So that's the way we've got it.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

And then it also depends on where in the world you hire those people. So especially in PD, we are having our, you can say, our subcontractors, our more flexible people, they are higher, primarily new employees. And that is not more expensive than hiring in high-cost countries.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

Okay. The reason why I'm asking...

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

And then you ask for the rest of the year, you will most likely -- if everything goes as it should, you should see head count going up for the rest of the year.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

The reason why I'm asking, you have this high-growth guidance. And normally, that means more people. So just trying to figure out whether you are more uncertain about the outlook, especially about timing, are you going to be more depending going forward based on independent contractors? Or is anything changed to your business model?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

No. So we still have a good mix. We've set for consulting. We previously said we want up to 20% of the work for the flexible in terms of shop contractors and we not at that level at this point.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Maybe one thing to highlight is that COVID has kind of given us more flexibility to where in the world, we hire people because you can now deliver more remotely. And that has put some fuel to, for example, what we've done out-of-home

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

Sure. Okay. That makes sense. Then a question regarding the pipeline or projects that has actually been awarded. Have you lost any projects that you thought you would win year-to-date?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I think we have 1 prospect in the U.S. where we were quite close, where they ended up making another decision. And then we've had one project in the Middle East that was postponed. But other than that, no.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

Okay. And then just also about your order intake. Order intake from existing clients within Dimension is at a low level from a historical point of view. Can you give some more color to why is it that you -- that the existing installed base and not buying more Dimension functionality?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

It's now a quarter-to-quarter comparison, we still expect ALF to be at a healthy level for the year.

[Claus Almer Nielsen, Senior Analyst of Capital Goods and IT]

So in Q2, it will be bounced back to a more normal level, is that what you're saying, Klaus?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I don't know if it will be Q2 or Q3, but our expectation and the engagement we have with our existing customers indicate that we will be able to have a healthy level of both software and services sales to our existing customers.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Hannes Leitner from UBS.

[Hannes Leitner, Equity Research Analyst of Software]

Hannes. Congrats to the result. As Michael mentioned, you want to talk about the guidance. Clearly, with 9% organic growth in Q1, maybe you can talk us a little bit what keeps you from moving that upwards, especially as you believe the second half will be -- it will be second half loaded. So what keeps you back? And then maybe you can talk a little bit of the expected phasing in terms comps are in Q3, especially in Q3 are easy. And then the second one is APL Italiana, a lower recurring revenue payment in Q1 versus infer that you are almost done with Generali. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your insurance vertical. And then also in terms of the State Street signed deal, how did you progress there? And then maybe I have a follow-up afterwards.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes. So on the first one on kind of the phasing and so on. So it's -- if we knew if we were confident that people were going to do exactly what they say they're going to do, then life would be a lot easier. But we would like to see them actually execute on some of their promises before we do anything. So I think that's the easy answer to that one. And I will also say Q1 is a relatively small quarter. So I think you have to be careful not extrapolating too much on Q1. And then also in all fairness, Q1 2020 was not like a great quarter. So growing 9% in Q1. As I said, the beginning, that was as expected, but it's not something extraordinary, and that calls for that we need to change our guidance. So what we do is that we look into what did we do in Q1 compared to what we expected. And then what -- how does our pipeline look for the rest of the year? And that support our guidance. And that's why we stick to our guide. And the second one, maybe on the APL, that does reflect that Generali is coming to an end. So that's the case. Maybe Christian, just give an update on insurance in general and then how is the State Street thing going?

[Christian Peter Kromann, COO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes, I can certainly do that. So the insurance segment as a whole is progressing quite aggressively. I would say there's quite a lot of trends. It also feeds into that. And if you follow through the -- walk through the cloud set on the slides, at some point, we talk about business process as a service, which is, to a certain extent, also driven out of that segment where we have a very strong foothold already. So what we see there is there's still very large interest in engaging directly with SimCorp with a traditional front-to-back discussion. So that drives a considerable part of our existing pipeline. But we can also see that there's quite a great interest in working with SimCorp and our partnerships on the asset services side in combination. And State Street is one of them. And that project is kind of grossing well and generates a lot of interest in the market in Europe. But there's also other partnerships in that space. Whether that's [ Cassis ], KBC or whether it's SocGen. We have quite a nice portfolio of these now starting to generate additional pipe. Some of that pipe is our traditional addressable market, but more importantly, some of that pipe is also outside of our addressable market, which is obviously nice for us that people go out and sell their services based on our platform. So we're starting to have a kind of a multi-faceted approach to that segment of the market. And it's something I expect we can kind of continue to build, will strengthen that space. And it's clear, state Street has taken that to another level, but it's not all dependent on stage 3 only.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

We'll see if we can be a little more specific in future quarters, but our expectation is we'll sign our partners in this space, will sign multiple deals in 2021 based on SimCorp Dimension and in the market segment that's here just below where we would normally sign.

[Hannes Leitner, Equity Research Analyst of Software]

And then -- great, that's very helpful. And then the last bit is just on the latest trends around cryptocurrency. So do you expect to develop a module, which you can then sell to your installed base? Or is this part of the current -- just of the normal development and progress to add that potentially going forward?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

It is, unfortunately, just another currency.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Gautam Pillai from Goldman Sachs. Can you hear us, Gautam?

[Gautam Pillai, Equity Analyst]

Yes. Can you hear me?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes.

[Gautam Pillai, Equity Analyst]

Great. I just wanted to come back on the pipeline points which you made. And looks like, obviously, the activity has been weak, but it is in line with your plan. But my question is more around the dynamics of how the pipeline was built. Has anything structurally changed through COVID, especially from a competitive landscape standpoint?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I would say the -- one of the reasons why we have good confidence is that a lot of the deals we see coming through the pipe now are what I would say, SimCorp [ Classic ]. So they really play well to our key capabilities. What is coming on top is that increased interest that we see based on the service offerings that are now starting to get more and more validation in the market. So that combination is quite strong, and that also plays into the existing customer base. From a regional point of view, I would say, balanced. So North America, and you can also see they signed the first 2 deals of the year, are still generating good activity. Europe is kind of catching up. And Asia is also there. So I think the positive side is that we see a lot of good deals that fit what we do quite well. The risk is predominantly a timing risk. But that's serious because we might start to feel here in Denmark that things are a bit more open. But there's still -- to a very large extent, we are into Q4 before we can start to plan face-to-face meetings on a global scale. So -- and we can see deals take longer time if you can't get together face-to-face. So that's really what still drives a lot of uncertainty, I would say.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

We want to see people start to execute on what they say they'll execute on. That's nice.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes. There's a lot of progress out there.

[Gautam Pillai, Equity Analyst]

Sure. Makes sense. And secondly, I had a question to Michael on the ARR definition. Extremely helpful. But is it -- just to kind of understand what you're putting in there, is it maintenance? Some of maintenance subscriptions and recurring services. Any kind of thoughts on how the shift -- mix shift is happening between maintenance and subscriptions? And also, is there any IFRS 15 impact in the ARR metric? I would assume not, but just wanted to be sure.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

No, there should not be any IFRS impact on the ARR. And I think that's actually the beauty of ARR that it's probably a better metric or KPI for explaining you can see the underlying development of our business. So that is not the case. And I think the stuff you mentioned there with SBL and the maintenance and the recurring services, that is exactly what we have included in the ARR. So it's all the recurring revenue and not the [ one of ].

[Gautam Pillai, Equity Analyst]

And on the mix of maintenance with the subscriptions in the ARR right now versus perhaps 2 or 3 years back, any [indiscernible] color on that?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

But it is clearly that the maintenance part is becoming less in the group. So you see the other lines. That's a driver of the increase.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

If you see kind of what we are saying on the first page, where we're saying, we think that on a last 12-month basis, then maintenance is going to be flat over the year. And yet we are growing ARR by 10%. So that kind of tells you that, that 10% growth is something different than maintenance there.

[Gautam Pillai, Equity Analyst]

Sure. Makes sense. And lastly, a question on the cloud part of the business. And as you explained, Klaus, your platform is built on Azure. Is it some sort of a limitation when more customers are employing a multi-cloud strategy and application software vendors try to be infrastructure agnostic?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

So the unified platform we're building is infrastructure agnostic, if you will. So that will run on a window server. It will run on the IBM infrastructure we are providing to a number of our cloud clients today, and it will run on Microsoft Azure. In kind of the native cloud, we have decided to go Microsoft Azure, first. We have a very good partnership with Microsoft. They are helping us quite a bit, both on kind of the technology side. They're also engaged in bringing the product to market to their clients and so on. So we have a very good relationship with those. If we end up with a number of customers that are saying, we really, really want to do something different. We want to be a Google or Amazon or something different, that is an opportunity we have, then we can take the unified platform and make the connection to whatever that cloud solution is. Our wish is to not do that because fewer platforms we are going to operate on, the better. If a customer says, I want to take your product and deploy it on Amazon, and I'll run it, I, as a customer, run it because I'm cloud agnostic you can do that. We've got several customers who runs Microsoft Dimension on Amazon today, but they are self hosting it, if you will. They're not asking us to run as SimCorp Dimension as a Service.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I think the trend we are kind of reacting to is if you go 5 years back, 1 of our customers would typically go out and choose a company-wide cloud relationship. And then they would gradually move their applications onto that. That's not really the way it works these days because if you look at what some of our biggest customers, they do, they basically rank their top 10 technologies. And if they -- those top 10 technologies have a service offering. They go with that first, and then they will choose a cloud vendor for the rest. And that's because they, ultimately, want the SLA to be owned by the software provider in the end. And then obviously, in that context, whoever fuels the service offering is of less importance. But in that case, we still believe that Microsoft give us even further power in that space.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

So as an example, I'll tell you that we've moved all of our infrastructure at SimCorp, all of our development servers and everything else we can find. We have moved to Microsoft Azure. We've also implemented Workday at our new ERP system. And I don't think we've mandated Workday to be on Microsoft Azure.

[Operator]

We have one final question, and that comes from the line of Thomas Poutrieux.

[Thomas Poutrieux, Analyst]

Yes. I just have two actually following up on the previous question. First of all, on services, so it's quite impressive to see the a 12.5% organic growth at CC. And I think it wasn't supposed to include contribution from the services delivered to the stage 3 deal that you signed in Q4 so as of Q2, there will be stage 3 contributing to professional services and also lower comps. So is it reasonable to expect an acceleration in the growth year-on-year of professional services for the rest of the year from the one that was recorded in Q1?

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

I will say for the professional services, that consists of many things. It consists of some implementation projects and that is, of course, related to what we have signed over -- both in the past and recently. And then we have also some services related to our hosting and some ongoing recurring services. And what we saw in Q4 was that as we were building up the pipeline for going into 2021 and of course, we're benefiting from that in Q1. And as Klaus also said, we see that going into the coming quarters as well. And then, of course, we need to win some new implementation projects, which we also expect to do to keep up the high momentum. I'm not sure that answers your question, but it is a combination of all these, which means that we believe that we will be quite busy in professional services in 2021.

[Thomas Poutrieux, Analyst]

All right. Okay. That's helpful. And maybe a very last one. On the pipeline, again, I was just wondering because last year, in 2020, maybe what was a bit disappointing was the average sale deal size that you signed on Dimension? How do you see the pipeline evolving from a size of the deals point of view? Do you see this largely coming back to the pipeline?

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

So the pipeline is a good and healthy mix of small and large deals. And you can say if you add up all the pipeline, then it fits at a value that is higher than what we saw at the same time a year ago. The mix is big and small amongst each other. So whether it becomes a bunch of small deals that ends up signing or a few large deals that ends up signing, that depends on who is willing to put the pen on paper. But we are negotiating both small and large deals.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

And I think it's fair to say, we see more of the larger deals in our pipeline now than we saw one year ago.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Yes.

[Operator]

And no further question at this time. Please continue, sir. That's the final question on the line.

[Klaus Holse, CEO & Member of Executive Management Board]

Very good. And we don't have any questions on the web either. So we will conclude the call here and say a big warm thank you to all of you for participating and we hope to see you all back in the call we have after the first half of the year. So thank you, and have a wonderful day.

[Michael Rosenvold, CFO & Member of Executive Management Board]

This concludes our conference today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect. Thank you all for joining. Stay safe, everyone.