John Cotterell: I think you captured it there. Essentially, we’re taking the opportunity of having some good people on the bench to actually build some stuff in an interesting area to the market, and that’s helping to ease out some of the early-stage sales opportunities that we’ll get into over the next quarter or so.
Bryan Keane: Got it, that’s helpful. And then just looking by region, it looks like North America has been a little bit weaker than, obviously, Rest of World has been really strong for you guys. North America, though, has been a weaker region. Just trying to understand why North America versus maybe Europe, UK, Rest of World, doing a little bit better. Is there anything to read into that?
John Cotterell: Our experience in North America, particularly US, has been that the recession rate pressures started earlier there. So actually, we started seeing clients, West Coast Tech, we talked about quite a bit some of the retail banks, et cetera, are pulling back even as far back as Q2 last financial year. And actually, that’s what’s then impacted, because obviously that feeds forward into following quarters. That’s what’s impacted both the full year and the Q4 numbers. Having said that, we also are seeing the US starting to pull through stronger now and start to see getting to the other side of the recessionary pressures, with West Coast Tech starting to talk about budgets. They are talking about calendar year ’24 budgets, and some of the other parts where we’re strong in the US, banks and so on are also looking at budgets for next year.
So the US, we’re starting to see conversations around moving beyond these recessionary pressures, and we’re seeing that ahead of the UK and Europe. Rest of the World is actually pretty strong across the board and that has been true in an organic sense as well as, obviously, the M&A work that we’ve done out there in the last few quarters.
Bryan Keane: Got it. Thanks for taking the question.
Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Moshe Katri with Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead.
Moshe Katri: Hey, thanks for taking my question. You mentioned some of the larger deals that are taking longer to close or maybe to convert. Is there anything different in the nature of some of those larger deals that you’re taking? Are you maybe focusing more on transactions that are more focused on cost synergies, cost takeouts, et cetera, versus what you’ve done in the past? Any color on that would be helpful. Thanks.
John Cotterell: Yes. So we’re actually seeing a number of opportunities. I say seeing, a number of them, we’ve actually started work on with architecture studies and so on. One of the themes is platform consolidation, where we’re seeing clients sometimes through M&A, sometimes through developing things in parallel, where they have multiple platforms for similar product areas and actually are wanting to consolidate those into a single platform. Often very large multiyear transformations, but ones in the current environment where they’re choosing to get on with it because it is a route to substantial cost savings. So that’s one of the big areas. We’re also seeing, as I touched on in the opening remarks, opportunities in the Middle East around new digital banks kicking off new financial products being created and new digital services into the market. So across those areas, we’re seeing projects kick off, which is these opportunities that we need to ramp on.
Moshe Katri: That’s helpful. And then just a follow-up. Any view on the budget cycle for calendar ’24? Do you feel internally that the budgets or the budget decisions may be delayed for next year?
John Cotterell: So, I mean, the signs that we’re seeing are that people within organizations are wanting and hoping that there is going to be budget coming back in calendar year ’24. We haven’t really based our guide on that happening. We’ve been more conservative than that and based it on what we can see shaping up. So there is potential upside if budgets are released for calendar year ’24, but we’ve not booked that into our guidance page.
Moshe Katri: Understood. Thanks a lot.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Maggie Nolan at William Blair. Please go ahead.
Maggie Nolan: Thank you. You mentioned kind of the hints of the beginning of a recovery in the US. I’m wondering if you can contrast that a little bit more for us with the UK and Europe. Are you expecting incremental pressure from here in the UK and Europe or rather a steady state from these levels?
Mark Thurston: So I think the US, we think, is going to start to make a recovery quicker than Europe and UK. We can now start to come through, think about Q2. And largely driven, I think, by the recovery of TMT that we’re seeing. In terms of Europe and the UK, it is a much more subdued picture. I’d say that Europe looks a little bit more robust than the UK at the moment, but really showing sort of meaningful sort of uptick in Q4. And it’s a similar narrative for the UK as well. So Europe [stand back] (ph) from it, including Europe and the UK, it looks as though it’s going to be quite subdued basically until about Q4 next year. North America, we think, starts to come by about Q2, Q3 this year, and I’m talking about our fiscal year here.
Maggie Nolan: Thank you. And then on AI, we understand that a lot of companies may not be ready to actually apply artificial intelligence within their businesses. So we’re curious if there’s any kind of demand for adjacent services or other areas that you may have expertise in as companies come to you and try to consult on Gen AI and how they can move their businesses forward in light of this trend?
