Craig Herman: Sure. I think our success is really a culmination of the groundwork that we have — we laid down over the last over the last several quarters — or the last few quarters. The introduction of our usage-based pricing, coupled with the product enhancements that we made to Knomi and AwareID, all of these things have really helped drive the bookings as well as — since I started working at Aware, we’ve worked to really perfect and we talked a lot about this, our customer success team and our partnership program. We now believe we have the right people, processes and best-in-class products to position our sales and CS teams for success. I know we’ve talked a lot of the improvements we made to Knomi and AwareID, so I won’t rehash those details, but the combination of more robust products and the debut of usage-based pricing enabled our sales team to market to more customers than we ever had before.
And resulting in, in some cases, larger and higher quality deals that we signed in Q2.
Matt Glover : Thanks Craig. Our next question is, how is the competitive environment?
Robert Eckel: Craig, do you want to take this one? .
Craig Herman: Yes, sure. Thanks, Bob. The competitive environment is frothy, to say in a word, and we are continuing to aggressively pursue deals. Everything is competitive right now in this market. Despite pressures on functionality, we are winning lucrative contracts, displacing competitors around the globe, through our improved fraud prevention capabilities and our strong footholds in North America, Latin America and the Middle East. Regarding market opportunities, we are seeing the improvements in Knomi and AwareID gaining a lot of traction with commercial customers in Latin America and the Middle East, in particular, Brazil and Turkey, specifically. Not only did we expand four new partners in Latin America, but we also extended and upsold several deals like the one with Itau in Brazil, as Bob mentioned earlier.
With the addition of contract management to Knomi used cases and strengthen fraud prevention capabilities, we really believe there are significant growth opportunities overseas and in these new verticals. .
Matt Glover : Our next question, can you provide an update on the share repurchase program?
David Barcelo: Yes, I’ve got that, Matt. In short, our previous announced plan is in place. As a recap, in March of 2022, we announced a share repurchase program that would allow us to buy up to $10 million of our common stock. So that’s active through the end of 2023. And as of June 30, we repurchased about $1.7 million worth of shares.
Matt Glover : Thanks Dave. We’ve got a 2-part question. First, can you talk more in depth about the improvements that were made to AwareID and Knomi. Second question is, since deploying the product enhancements mentioned earlier, are you seeing increased traction for Knomi and AwareID?
Robert Eckel: All right, Matt, I’ll take the first part, and then I’ll let Craig talk about the market’s response. So just in general, today’s security challenges are consistently and constantly evolving. And after we did a lot of voice customers speaking with a few customers, we continue to evolve, we’ve aligned our product market fit. To identified a few areas that Knomi and AwareID solutions could benefit from making them more secure, reducing additional customer friction and expand their use cases with focus on some new use cases. For Knomi, we concentrated on improving its liveness excellence to make it more robust. While we revamp to AwareID’s infrastructure to strengthen its facial recognition and document authentication from the bottom up. And now that we’ve enhanced product capabilities, we’re seeing an improved market fit for both the AwareID and Knomi. And I’ll let Craig talk a little bit more about what he’s seeing as well. .
