NCC Group plc Annual Report 2021

Our commitment to sustainability is integral to how we do business. Our approach to sustainability is focused on the recognised elements of environment, social and governance (ESG). They’re brought to life with our framework, which enables us to focus our efforts on the activities that deliver the greatest value to our people, our customers, our shareholders and the world we all live in. We will continue to secure the future today and our sustainability agenda will play a strategic role to support conscious decision making as we begin to set targets that challenge us to continually improve in making the world safer and more secure for all.

We are research driven. Our greatest strength is our breadth and depth of world-class technical capabilities. We employ some of the most talented security consultants and researchers on the planet: every researcher on our team is also an active consultant. We consistently perform independent, cutting-edge security research that supports current and future specialist technical consulting capabilities and customer and consultant needs, and responds to world events. Through our agile methodologies, we have delivered six new solutions in response to market demand in the last year, including a next generation SaaS platform for digital escrow deposits and secured digital vault storage, data science-based analytical and machine learning approaches to threat detection, and our new data-driven cyber risk quantification and peer comparison offer.

3,400 research days

6 new customer-facing propositions

35 tool releases

Read more on pages 18 and 19

We are people centric. Each day at NCC Group, our technologists and professionals wake up with one mission – to help make the world safer and more secure. Together they form a phenomenal knowledge network, collaborating, innovating and delivering value to our customers. We continue growing our technical people base year on year, even managing to increase our global headcount throughout the disruption of the global pandemic, because we invest in our colleagues’ wellbeing, career development and full potential. As we are taking advantage of remote and flexible delivery models, we have doubled our global resourcing days in 2020. This means that we truly put the best person on any job, all around the world. And we will seek to increase this even further as we grow our global talent pool and our colleagues’ skills and competencies and mature our global delivery model.

We are capex light. Unlike other businesses in the technology space, we are an inherently asset-light business, limiting our capital expenditure and promoting our agility and flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. We have strengthened our Balance Sheet through disciplined cash management and reduced overheads which positions us to exploit further opportunities in the future. It has allowed us to invest up to £3m in cloud technology, artificial intelligence/machine learning advanced analytics, and our new remediation and security improvement offer.

88.2% cash conversion ratio 2

£34.6m free cash flow

8.1% growth in headcount

+49 net movement in technical specialists