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20 April 2022

Cornerstone FS plc

("Cornerstone" or the "Company" or the "Group")

Trading Update

Strong Q1 revenue

Cornerstone FS plc (AIM: CSFS), the cloud-based provider of international payment, currency risk management and electronic account services to SMEs, provides an unaudited update on trading for the first quarter ended 31 March 2022.

As announced on 14 January 2022, the Group expects to report annual revenue growth, subject to audit, of approximately 38% to £2.3m for full year 2021 (2020: £1.7m). As the Directors anticipated, this strong trading momentum has continued into the new year. For the first quarter of 2022, Cornerstone achieved underlying revenue growth across the business and received the first contribution to revenue from Capital Currencies, which the Group acquired during the period. As a result, total unaudited revenue for Q1 2022 was approximately £946k; the Group's highest ever unaudited quarterly revenue. Excluding the contribution from acquisitions, the Group's three month Q1 2022 unaudited revenue of approximately £888k has surpassed the six month revenue reported by the Group for H1 2021 of £837k.   

Revenue generated by clients that the Group serves directly continued to increase significantly during Q1 2022 to approximately 77% compared with 28% for the first half of the previous year. A key contributor to this was the Group's Asia team that was brought on board in the second half of 2021 As announced in its trading update on 14 January 2022 this change to majority direct revenue has had a positive impact on the Group's gross margin, increasing to approximately 51.5% for the full year 2021 (unaudited) from 29.8% for the full year 2020.

The Board remains confident in the Group's prospects and looks forward to updating the market on further progress in its audited results for the year ended 31 December 2021, which it intends to announce in June 2022.

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About Cornerstone FS plc

Cornerstone FS plc is a payments focused fintech business that makes managing currency simple for SMEs. It provides international payment, currency risk management and electronic account services using a proprietary cloud-based multi-currency payments platform. These services are delivered directly and via white label partners on a SaaS basis to UK-based SMEs that engage in international trade. Cornerstone also serves some high-net worth individual clients.

Headquartered in the City of London with offices in Tunbridge Wells and Dubai, Cornerstone is admitted to trading on AIM under the trading symbol 'CSFS'. For more information, please visit www.cornerstonefs.com.