XPS Pensions Group H2 2026 Earnings Report

XPS Pensions Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 13
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

XPS Pensions Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $262.96 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

XPS Pensions Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026
• Date: 6/18/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, June 18, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30AM ET

XPS Group is a leading UK consulting and administration business specialising in the pensions and insurance sectors. A FTSE 250 company, XPS combines expertise and insight with advanced technology and analytics to address the needs of over 1,300 pension schemes and their sponsoring employers on an ongoing and project basis. We undertake pensions administration for over one million members and provide advisory services to schemes and corporate sponsors in respect of schemes of all sizes, including 83 with assets over £1bn. We also provide wider ranging support to insurance companies in the life and bulk annuities sector.

XPS Pensions Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Revenue grew 13% and adjusted EBITDA rose 9%, with core performance even stronger after normalizing for the prior-year McCloud one-off and the Polaris acquisition. Management highlighted underlying organic revenue growth of 12% and underlying EBITDA growth of 15%.
• Positive Sentiment: The business saw margin improvement, with underlying EBITDA margin up 70 basis points after adjusting for McCloud and higher National Insurance costs. Adjusted diluted EPS increased 8%, and the full-year dividend was raised 11%.
• Positive Sentiment: Market conditions remain favorable, as pension schemes move from deficits to surpluses and face new funding and surplus-release regulation. Management sees a multi-year tailwind from more buyouts, run-on activity, and insurer support work.
• Positive Sentiment: The Polaris acquisition is integrating well and is expanding XPS into broader insurance consulting opportunities. Management said the deal has already opened access to a much larger client set, especially in life insurance, with growing pipeline opportunities.
• Positive Sentiment: AI is viewed as an opportunity to improve productivity, differentiation, and client service, with the company already building and deploying its own tools. XPS believes its scale, specialist focus, and existing tech platforms like Radar and Aurora position it well to benefit.

Presentation

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you very, very much for coming along to the presentation of our results for the year ending 31 March 2026. I'm going to pop up a brief agenda. We're going to follow the usual format. We're going to start with a brief overview of the year, just a couple of minutes, then Snehal will unpack the results in quite a bit more detail. We thought it would be helpful to give an update on what's going on in our market, then how we're responding to that strategically and operationally. People are very important to us. We'll talk a little bit about that and our clients, of course, the very hot topic of AI. We have got a couple of slides and want to talk about that as well, then we'll wrap it up and get onto Q&A.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

In summary, we've had another fantastic year and we're really, really proud of the results that we're announcing today. Headlines of revenue growth of 13% and growth in adjusted EBITDA of 9%. We're just under 5% ahead of market expectations at EPS level. These figures are good, but actually the underlying performance of the business is much better still. To explain that, you need to remember that the picture's a little bit muddied because of the effect of the very large and very profitable one-off project that we did last year on the McCloud Remedy. If we normalize for that, if we also adjust for the acquisition we did of Polaris, we can see the performance of the underlying core business. As you can see, this grew by 12%. With operational gearing coming through, we grew EBITDA by 15%.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

That, of course, builds on a really sustained period of high growth in the previous three years as well. The operational gearing we've achieved is especially good, because don't forget, we also had to absorb the increase in NI, which as a people business was pretty material for us. It's a great performance, in terms of what drove that, well, we are operating in a good market. Pension schemes have gone through a step change in recent years, from large deficits to a new age in which many are in surplus. They have more options than ever before. They need a lot of advice and support. Regulations are changing as well. We're still working through new rules on scheme funding for clients. We're now about to get more new rules on surplus release as well.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

In this new world, many pension schemes are accessing insurance solutions. It's keeping us really busy. Our risk transfer team that helps clients to do this has just had another record year themselves. The insurers taking on all these schemes, they need help as well. That's why we're following a strategy that you could describe as follow the member, where we provide all the support that's needed for whatever institution is taking on a pension scheme and paying them in the long term safely and securely. That's working because along with the successful integration of Polaris, we are expanding our addressable market and we are seeing wider opportunities open up. On AI, we do see it as a big opportunity. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute as well.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

One thing that will always be really important to us, of course, is brand and reputation. That's why we're so pleased that hot off the press just last week, we won no fewer than four major prizes at our annual industry awards event. These awards were across all the different business lines we have. Again, our brand is really going from strength to strength, and we're delighted about that. Finally, for my introduction, as you know by now, we work really hard to be a fantastic place to work and have a really healthy culture. Again, we won some really fantastic awards and got great recognition in that this year too. We think we're doing things on a really sustainable basis. That's my brief introduction.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We'll say more about all that in a minute. I shall hand over to Snehal, who will take us through the details of the financials.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Another strong year, as Paul said, even better when we look at the underlying organic growth excluding McCloud. Total revenue grew 13% and adjusted EBITDA 9%, which include the impact of the increase in National Insurance and continued investment in growing our insurance consulting capabilities. The top right-hand chart shows the increment components of the revenue growth. You can see that the underlying business has performed very strongly. That growth is continuing to deliver on further operational gearing. In the chart to the bottom right, we have normalized the FY 2025 margin of 30.1% for the impact of McCloud and the increase in National Insurance, which were both worth about 1% each. It's showing that underlying EBITDA margins this year has improved by 70 basis points. Adjusted EBITDA was 2% ahead of consensus.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Strong operational performance and a lower share count has driven the adjusted diluted EPS of GBP 0.223, which is up 8% and also 4% ahead of consensus. In line with the progressive dividend policy, the board has proposed a final dividend of GBP 0.091, which is up 11% year-on-year, making the full-year dividend of GBP 0.132 up 11%, also 4% ahead of consensus, underscoring our continued confidence in the business model and growth prospects. Here we've got the usual P&L with revenue broken down by division. Paul and Ben will take you through the divisional highlights shortly. Just briefly, advisory grew 20% year-on-year and excluding the Polaris acquisition, growth was a healthy 8%. Administration grew 5% on a tough comparator, excluding McCloud, the growth was 18%. SIP has delivered another year of double-digit revenue growth.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

The adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% to the right includes the impact of higher employers' NI, which was an additional GBP 2.5 million cost this year. The net finance costs are higher due to the higher net debt from the Polaris acquisition, as well as the continued share purchase by the EBT. As I said earlier, the lower share count from this and the strong operational performance has helped deliver adjusted EPS growth of 8%. On the non-trading and exceptional items, which are all consistent with previous treatment and largely non-cash, the increase in the amortization of acquired intangibles reflects the Polaris acquisition, and the acquisition-related remuneration is the buildup of the Polaris contingent consideration. In terms of guidance for FY 2027 in the medium term, we continue to target mid to high single-digit percentage organic revenue growth and driving further improvements in underlying EBITDA.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

CapEx guidance for FY 2027 is between GBP 12 million-GBP 13 million as we continue to invest in tech, including bolstering our AI capabilities, and it also includes the fit-out costs for our new London office, where we will have the pleasure of hosting these briefings in the future. All of this is already reflected in the current consensus. Turning to costs. Despite the increase in NI and the full-year impact of growing our insurance consulting team and capabilities, costs as a percentage of revenue have only gone up by 1%. If you exclude the impact of the McCloud, you can see that costs as a percentage of revenue have actually improved year-on-year. Within the costs, staff costs are up 18%. Of that 18, 9% is due to the increase in headcount, including from the Polaris acquisition.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

2% is from the impact of higher employers' NI, the remainder, a combination of annual and promotional pay increases and the bonus commensurate with the performance of the group. The decrease in IT costs reflect the benefits from investment in Aurora coming through, offsetting the effects of increases in headcount and the continued investment in tech, particularly cybersecurity. Other costs are largely in line with prior year as we continue to maintain strong cost discipline. Turning to cash flow. OCF conversion was a healthy 91%, guidance for future years remain between 90%-95% as we continue to grow. Net debt at the end of March was GBP 46.2 million and a covenant leverage of 0.64x, well within our target of 1x to 1.5x, giving us flexibility for pursuing M&A opportunities.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Currently, we have GBP 63 million of undrawn facilities from the GBP 120 million total available, which we have also recently extended until March 2030. We've included the progression of return on invested capital as a KPI here, and you can see that there has been a steady improvement, and returns are now 3x our weighted average cost of capital. Strong growth in returns reflect material growth in profits on a stable asset base, which is proof of our capital-light business model. Finally, just to remind you of the capital allocation priorities, which remain unchanged. The focus remains on capitalizing on the organic opportunity within our core and tangential markets. We want to continue to invest in creating market-leading proprietary tech that creates a competitive advantage but also drives efficiencies. Relative to the size of the business, we will remain CapEx light.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

We will continue with our progressive dividend policy and will continue to scan the horizon for earnings-enhancing M&A opportunities, but will remain disciplined in that approach.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

On to the market update. To set the scene here, when we listed back in 2017, our ambition was to be the best place in our industry to work and the best firm for our clients. A one-stop shop. Provide all of the support that pension schemes need to a really, really high standard. If we could achieve that, we could become the leading mid-tier firm in our market. We were a long way off that back then, but this chart shows how the last 10 years have gone. The growth here includes some acquisitions, the largest, obviously, in FY 2019.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

The majority of the growth has been organic and driven by us doing more work for clients as we've expanded our services. In particular, the rapid increase in funding levels for defined benefit schemes over the period has created huge demand from clients. What we've done really well is keep evolving and developing our services to meet those client needs. Today, I think we can say that we are now the leading mid-tier firm. We are really proud of what we've achieved. How do we see the market evolving? Today, over half of schemes now probably have enough money to pass their assets and liabilities to a bulk annuity provider if they wanted to, with no top-up needed.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

At the same time, many companies are thinking that running their scheme on and getting some value back might be a better idea, and the rules are being changed to make that all easier. What does this all mean? First, as you can see, the market is dominated by thousands of small schemes, and the fees for running each one are quite small. We expect that most of these schemes are simply too small to run on, they'll end up buying out and leaving the pensions ecosystem. This will keep us busy as the schemes themselves will need lots of support to get ready and execute a transaction, and that typically takes years, where multiples of the BAU fees are earned.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

On the right-hand side, we then have the large schemes. These I want to explore run-on in detail, we actually expect many of them will then choose to run on, at least for a period, as the economics are generally really compelling. They'll continue to need all of the current BAU services, plus support around what to do with surplus. Finally, for those in the middle, we'll probably see a bit of both. It's also worth mentioning that the insurers taking on these schemes will also need help, it's much harder for them to do lots of small deals to meet their business targets than doing it across a small number of larger deals. All of this is going to play out over many years into the future, but it's a pretty positive backdrop for XPS.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

As Ben has said, we have achieved our objective really of 10 years ago. We are arguably the leading independent pensions advisory and admin firm in the U.K. The question is, what next? First, we will of course be focused on maximizing every opportunity that we have in the pensions market. Our clients need a huge amount of help and advice. We will be helping lots of schemes to buy out, but for every one of these trades, there is a counterparty. An insurance company or a superfund or even a fund manager, like in the recent Aberdeen deal, is taking them on. This capital shift is huge. We're likely to see between half a trillion and a trillion of assets move over the next 10 to 15 years. Our observation here is a fundamentally simple one.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Although over time there'll be fewer defined benefit schemes, many members of these schemes are still going to be getting benefits in 40 or 50 years from now, just potentially from a different place. We'll follow the members. We'll be a brilliant provider of services to these wider institutions, taking these members on over time as well. That creates lots of wider opportunities, too. Insurance companies and other institutions have many other challenges, and it's a short bridge from providing wider support than just where the pensions and insurance worlds collide. That, of course, is what the Polaris acquisition was all about. We've been really pleased with how the integration has gone, we're now seeing a very good pipeline of wider opportunities starting to emerge. You can see in the little graphic at the bottom, this opens up a much larger target addressable market.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Ultimately, our ambition for the next 10 years is to become a market leading financial services consulting and administration provider, serving pension schemes, serving life insurers, general insurers, and more. We expect M&A to be a part of delivering on that strategy. There are broadly two types of opportunity. The first is in our traditional core market, which does remain quite fragmented. We could make an acquisition there, that's got some attractions. It would create truly the largest independent firm, clearly ahead of the rest of the mid-tier, there could of course be synergies that could be quite material. But ultimately, we'd be unlikely probably to gain capability. We're strong already in all of the services that our pension clients need. Perhaps more likely is the type of transaction on the right that would accelerate the diversification strategy into wider markets.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

That, of course, is what the Polaris acquisition did, we would be very open to pursuing more transactions like that if we can find bolt-on deals that are a good fit for our ambitions. As we turn to the strategic and operational review where we canter through each of the businesses, here's a quick reminder of how we structure ourselves. We have our advisory businesses, this is where we provide advice to pension schemes and insurers on the big decisions they face to run themselves really well. We have our administration businesses where we do the day-to-day record keeping and communication with members, ultimately, that's about paying the right benefits to the right people at the right time. We do this for members of pension schemes. We also help insurers with the schemes that they've taken on.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We also do this for SIPP and SSAS arrangements where we set them up and manage them, too. As a rough guide, we are not far off half advisory, half administration, perhaps a little bit more advisory given the results this year. How did the advisory business get on during the year? Snehal mentioned the headline growth of 20%, but this is the part of the business where we include the revenues from the Polaris acquisition, if we strip that out, the organic growth was 8%. Of this, just over 3% came from inflation fee increases, with the rest coming from an increase in volumes of work. The things that kept us really busy were advice on strategy, in particular, helping clients with their first valuations under the new funding regime, and just in general working with them in the new worlds of surpluses.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Our risk transfer team had another really strong year. In the background, we are still busy on GMP projects and have a few more years to go of this work. On the insurance consulting side of things, which is, of course, only a couple of years old, it has been a busy year building the team and integrating the Polaris business, which has gone really well. During the year, all of the existing Polaris preferred supplier arrangements were retained, and we also expanded the remit on several and got some new relationships in place, too. That all provides a great opportunity for the future.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

If we look ahead, we expect our pensions clients to keep needing lots of support as new regulations work through the system. Actually just last week, the government issued the draft regulations for consultation on surplus release.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We also think there is going to be more new business opportunities opening up, as when there is lots of change, it is a great chance to be able to differentiate yourself. That is why we were so pleased to win Run-On Adviser of the Year in the recent UK Pensions Awards, because this is a new area for the whole industry and we want to make ourselves famous for being brilliant at it. Finally, on the insurance side of things, we have been really pleased with how Polaris has opened up opportunities to help insurers with their bulk annuity businesses, and we think we will be doing much more of that in the years ahead. We also expect Polaris and our insurance consulting team to be busy more widely, too.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Turning to administration, the performance in this area of the group was absolutely fantastic.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

This is, of course, the division where the McCloud project was delivered in the prior year. Growth this year was 5%, but if you exclude that one-off project, growth in administration this year was 18%. That was driven by a range of things. We took on new clients. Most notably, we had a full year of the John Lewis contract. We are doing lots of project work. Again, lots of GMP work, where we still have a huge amount of that to get through. Now, operationally, we had a good year, too. We got all of our public sector clients migrated onto our system, Aurora, and that meant leaving one more of our legacy third-party systems behind, which brings all sorts of benefits for us.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We had more new business success in the year as well, perhaps most notably winning the mandate to provide administration to the Metropolitan Police and their 80,000 members. That win was really helped, of course, by the strong reputation that we'd built through the successful delivery of the McCloud work the year before. Although that project was one-off in nature, it's really helped to drive wider long-term opportunities as well. As we look to the future, I think we just see more of the same. First-time outsourcing opportunities are all around us, and there's opportunities where some of our competitors have struggled a little bit with client service. It's also an area where, again, there are wider opportunities, especially to help insurers with their admin, both when they take schemes on and when they would then run them for the very long term.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

The future looks really bright for admin.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Our people are at the heart of absolutely everything that we do. We invest a huge amount of time in having a great culture. We talk about this a lot, I know, but we do it because we really think it drives business performance. Put simply, happy, motivated people look after each other well, and then they look after their clients brilliantly, too. Had another really good year on this front. We launched something new, our Employee Value Proposition, setting out what it means to work at XPS, what we expect from you, and what you can expect from us in return. This landed very well and it's very important in the future for both retention and, of course, for articulating the proposition to attract the right people to join us as we grow.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We measure what we can, and in our annual employee survey, our net promoter score bounced back into the 30s at +32, and we're told this is exceptionally high for a professional services firm. We got external recognition as well. We actually won the best medium-sized firm in the U.K. at the U.K. Business Culture Awards, which is amazing because that's not just a financial services award. That's across all employers across the whole of the U.K. We're really, really pleased with that recognition. Our clients have given us great feedback as well. We run our full client survey every two years, so we will have more facts and figures for you next year.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Once again, client churn was extremely low, and you can see some of the great things that our clients have said about us on the slide here. It is hot off the press, but being recognized for client service at our annual industry awards is really important. As we mentioned, we won four awards in categories that span the whole of the business, including the outright winner of Administration Firm of the Year. That was a cracking evening for us just last week. That's fantastic. It really strengthens our brand, and it's really helpful in new business opportunities going forward.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

On to AI, and we've got two slides to cover here. The first looks at how we think it will affect our industry, and the second looks at who we think the winners will be.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Across advisory and administration, the work we do there's a lot of tasks that are quite manual and quite repeat in nature. These are often very technical and specialized tasks, so are quite time-consuming. There's a clear opportunity for everyone in our market to use AI to increase automation, drive productivity, and efficiency. Secondly, technology has already been a bit of a differentiator between firms, so Radar and Aurora are key parts of our service offering. The AI capabilities we now see mean there's a much bigger opportunity to use technology to create USPs. Finally, as we've often said, there's a high level of client stickiness in our market, which makes it difficult to win new clients. If AI does lead to more differentiation between firms, we could see more client churn and an opportunity for the first movers to win market share.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Which firms do we think are best placed to take advantage of this opportunity? Probably the first thing to say is that we believe the winners are already in our market. The pensions consulting market has high barriers to entry. The buyers in the market, typically trustees of pension schemes, are cautious, and they naturally favor the established players. It's also a very relationship-driven market. There will always be a lot of person-to-person interaction in trustee meetings, helping clients negotiate complex deals, and in administration, trustees see it as critical that their members can speak to a person if they want to. More generally, training AI models requires data and domain knowledge, and generally this information isn't widely available.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Ultimately, compared to other opportunities that technology firms might have access to, we don't think the pensions consulting administration market would be particularly attractive given the relatively small size compared to the high level of specialism. Within our market, we think the specialist mid-tier firms like XPS are best placed to benefit because a firm needs to have enough scale to be able to invest in AI tools. Equally, it takes focus and agility, and if you're too big and U.K. pensions is only a small amount of what you do globally, that will be a challenge, particularly as we think this is all about building really specialist capabilities. In terms of XPS more specifically, we also have a strong track record with technology. Radar and Aurora are great examples of technology that we've built and we've deployed ourselves.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We've also had already some real successes building and deploying AI. With the right focus and investment, we are optimistic about how this will all unfold.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

To wrap things up for the formal part of the presentation before we go to Q&A. The last 10 years have been fantastic. We've executed really, really well. You could see that from the chart on one of our earlier slides, and we're really proud that it's been another year of really good organic growth building on that really strong run that we've been on for some years now. We are in a good market. There's a lot of regulatory change and changes caused by movement to this higher interest rate environment. These are multi-year changes. We are going to be helping our clients through them for a long time to come.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We're seeing a gradual merging of the pensions and insurance world opening up opportunities. We're doing evermore with insurers, helping them to onboard and run pension schemes. With the acquisition of Polaris having integrated well, we're getting access to wider opportunities at insurers too, which is helping us to expand our target addressable market. We do think further M&A could accelerate that journey for us as well. Everything that we do is based on our people and our strong culture. We're really proud of those awards that we won again this year. Our people do share in our success, and that means that we're achieving our results in a truly sustainable manner. As Ben said, we see AI as an opportunity.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

It is going to change what we do in some areas for the better. We're quite certain that the winners from AI in our market are already in our market. We think we're perfectly placed as a firm, big enough to make good investments, but not so big that the focus needed can be a challenge. With everything that's going on in our markets, ultimately, we're very excited about the future, and we see lots of opportunities for further growth. Thank you very much indeed for listening, and we'll now open the floor for some questions. Hi, Steve.

[Steve Woolf, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Morning all. Steve Woolf from Deutsche Numis. Couple for me. The opportunities you mentioned on the pension surplus work that's about to kick off is when do you think the bulk of the work happens? I think you've mentioned before in a prior presentation, distributions can happen from April next year. Do you expect sort of a flurry of activity from those larger companies that might be interested in that? Secondly, just thinking about all the work and the opportunities you've got, how well-resourced you are to take on board some of that work. Then thirdly, you mentioned M&A. Likely in thoughts on where, how abouts in the insurance consulting market you might go after Polaris if that's sort of an issue.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah.

[Steve Woolf, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

Thanks.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah. Great. Thank you, Steve. Perhaps I'll take the first and the third, and Ben might take the second. In terms of surplus regulations, I would describe this as just a nice, gentle tailwind, that there isn't a sort of big bang moment for this. The draft regulations on surplus release are available. People have a good understanding of what it means. They're likely to be finalized in probably the first quarter, but possibly the first half of 2027. The point though is that our clients are thinking on an ongoing basis about this, and it fills up the agenda of things to talk about and things that we need to do analysis on and help them with. Then some clients will want to be releasing surplus as soon as 2027, the really well-funded ones that are really advanced.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Others haven't got that far in their thinking yet and will get there as probably they follow what happens in the wider market, even into 2028 and 2029. The better way of thinking about it really is that this is just a gentle tailwind all the time, that there's lots of stuff to talk about, and it's going to evolve and keep developing, and that's just a good thing. We like to have lots of good-- It's fun because it's new and it's value add for them. As we said at a mini capital markets event recently, it's so much fun talking about this than the last 20 years of talking about big black holes and deficits that never seem to go away. Yeah, we're enjoying it, and I think our clients are as well.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Thank you. I think the second question was around resourcing and kind of what the recruitment market I think is like. Staff turnover is just over 10% across the group. That's very similar to the last three years or so. It includes, I guess, involuntary and retirements as well. Actually, it's at pretty low levels in terms of voluntary turnover. Our model is now that we largely recruit into the more entry-level roles, and we've been expanding the different channels. We have school leavers, apprenticeships, and also graduates. We don't see that as being a particular barrier to us achieving what we hope to.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

On M&A, yes, we steered in the presentation to being interested in acquisitions that would accelerate us further into those wider adjacent markets. I guess one observation about where we are in insurance at the moment is it would benefit us to have that little bit more scale. In terms of the permanent team that we have at XPS, it's still relatively small, and of course, we use the flexible delivery model that Polaris have of using contractors to deliver big projects that we win. We do think it would be helpful just simply to have more scale, higher headcount in the market. If there's a firm out there with great quality that we could bring on board that boosted that, I think it would boost our credibility and market footprint and just further help us to go and win more opportunities.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We're certainly interested in opportunities like that.

[Steve Woolf, Analyst at Deutsche Numis]

That's less consulting. [audio distortion]

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

No. To be clear, this would be helping insurance companies with the whole range of challenges they face. You can think of the Venn diagram that where pensions and insurance overlap is in the bulk annuity space. Insurers have all sorts of wider challenges, their own financial reporting, wrestling with legacy systems, trying to adopt new technology, all sorts of regulatory changes and market changes that affect them, too. We'd very much like to help them across that wider range of activity. Prior to Polaris Actuaries and Consultants Limited, we didn't have that capability.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

With Polaris Actuaries and Consultants Limited, we do, but as I say, we'd probably like to enhance the scale that we've got to really build that credibility. A great statistic for you after the Polaris Actuaries and Consultants Limited acquisition, more generally, combination with XPS, but if you went back two years, XPS, fundamentally, we had one insurance company client.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Today we have 20. It's a different market to pension schemes. That's 20 clients that each have typically multi-million GBP, often multi-million-GBP budgets for transformation and change and support. To have access to that wide range of clients, it really is almost all of the U.K. life insurers that we now have a relationship with and a master services agreement contractually with to be able to go and support. That's the big step change. If you feed a bit more scale into that, we think we've got great opportunities to go and take more market share from the still only 1%-2% of market share that we've got in that space. It's a cracking opportunity.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Next question. Sorry, behind you, James.

[Ben Cohen, Analyst at RBC]

Yeah. Hi, good morning. Ben Cohen from RBC. I had two questions, if I may. Firstly, thinking about your margins going forward, I just wonder if you could talk to the sort of the headwinds and tailwinds that you see in the business and in the market for any sort of margin improvement. The second question, excuse me, was on the sort of available firepower that you see that you have for M&A-

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Sure

[Ben Cohen, Analyst at RBC]

in the context, I guess, the leverage ratio, what you might like to do from a share point of view to give a sense in terms of-

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah

[Ben Cohen, Analyst at RBC]

the size of things you could look to buy. Thank you.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Sure. In terms of the margin, the Aurora development that we did was to replace legacy third-party providers, that is going to lead to a OPEX saving. Most of that has already come through. There is some more, it's also going to increase the efficiency of our administration business. Over time, that will start to feed through. In terms of the mix of the business, we won't classify as a tailwind, it would be a good thing if, for example, administration were to grow a lot faster because there are lots of public sector opportunities following the success of McCloud and appointment with Met Police, then that mix of business could lead to a sort of a small margin contraction. That's not what we're guiding to.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

If you look at the consensus, there is improvements in margin year-over-year from here until FY 2028 and soon to be FY 2029 numbers as well. In terms of the financial firepower, we've done seven acquisitions so far. Six of those are bolt-ons and have driven IRR in excess of 20%. Those have been sort of focused on, to Paul's slide, infilling capabilities or expanding our capabilities into markets that we're not currently in. That model suits us really well because it's very easy to integrate, very quick to access additional markets. As we've sort of talked about, there are lots of adjacencies within life insurance consulting and general insurance consulting. It's a fragmented market, and there are opportunities within those. We would look to do mainly from debt. Our sort of stated target is sort of 1x to 1.5x leverage.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

If we were to go above that, the returns will have to show that we can de-leverage very quickly within that range. That gives us a lot of financial firepower to go after opportunities. James?

[James Fletcher, Analyst at Berenberg]

James Fletcher from Berenberg. Just a couple on AI, if I may. Just kind of in your conversations with clients and, in particular, pension trustees, to what extent does AI come up, and is there a kind of knock-on impact on pricing kind of expectations to date? Just kind of with regards kind of big three players in your market, if you have sight on to what extent they've been investing in AI, and are you ahead of the pack or ahead of those guys? Or are they kind of slow to update?

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Sure. Okay. I guess at the moment, most of the conversations we have with clients around AI are, if you go back, I think one of the comments made in our presentation was that they're quite cautious in nature. Most of the conversations are around how are you using it, where is the data being held, where is it being processed, and how are you still compliant with GDPR? In fact, on the 20th of May, just last month, The Pensions Regulator issued a statement about AI, and that I guess sort of acknowledged that there were potential opportunities to, for example, give members better service through AI. A large part of it was reminding trustees that they're ultimately responsible and that they need to be governing this properly and making sure people are doing it safely.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

I would describe most of the questions we get are around how we're doing it safely. We haven't really had much

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

conversation as yet around the impact on pricing. We'll have to see, and that, I guess, really will be driven by what our competitors also do. It is true that in the past, though, where more automation has come into services, particularly on things like administration, delivering better member outcomes, that hasn't put pressure on prices. People have seen automation as a real positive and actually a higher value service than one that doesn't have automation. As I say, we'll see how that plays out, but we're not seeing that pressure today. In terms of the Big Three, I guess we don't say much about exactly what we're doing on AI in this forum because we know our competitors watch it and listen to it, and they know that we scour their websites too. People are all a little bit coy.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Probably a good anecdote to add is with one of the insurers I was speaking to. We went and did a session about the sort of AI that we've got and the tools that we've built to help them, and their feedback was, You're the only firm we've seen that's actually got something tangible about how they can use AI to help us. That's an example of one, but I don't believe that other firms out there are ahead of us.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Next question. Vivek?

[Analyst]

Morning, chaps. Thanks for your presentation. Three, I suppose is the usual number, please, from me. Traditional. I wanted to ask first about Polaris. If you could just talk about the revenue that you achieved in FY 2026, what you expect at the beginning of the year. Appreciate that some of that has also fallen into the core business too. If you just sort of unpack that. You talked briefly about the pipeline for insurance consulting revenue. Just if you could talk a little bit more about that. Are you expecting some improvement in the Polaris revenue line? The next question was about your underlying organic growth in 2026 was really good if you strip out McCloud. On the base of consensus, that assumes a slowdown in that path, or, sorry, that rate of growth. What's in there?

[Analyst]

I mean, what's exciting you about 2027, what are you a little bit more cautious about compared to what you achieved last year? The last thing, just if you could help us now on share count, what we should expect for this year.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah.

[Analyst]

If I could just throw in there potentially with the firepower or the balance sheet strength you have, what you've thought about in terms of a buyback. Thanks.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Do you want to take the first one on Polaris?

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah. Most definitely. Yeah, Polaris, in the year, if you unpick the organic or inorganic figures, you'll see a number for Polaris revenue of about GBP 16 million, something like that. In the year before, we probably expected it to do about GBP 15 million, it's probably done a little bit better than we ultimately expected. It did do GBP 17 million in the year we bought it, there was a big tailwind, loads of insurance projects on implementation of IFRS 17, which were coming to an end. Overall really pleased with that performance. You're right, there's a little bit of nuance in the performance, I think it's worth unpacking it a little bit because it demonstrates another nice feature of the transaction that we've been really pleased about.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

One of the big contracts that we won and delivered mostly in H2 that was a Polaris contract is providing support to one of the bulk annuity providers who are struggling a little bit to cope with the number of schemes that they're taking on, having won them over the last few years. In a sense, victims of their own success, and needed to scale up their internal team to handle that quite quickly, and ultimately also probably need to adapt and change their systems and modernize the way that they do things. That was a very big project for us, and the phone call for that project came into Polaris, part of XPS now, of course, but it came into one of the Polaris founders.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

We had an MSA with this insurer, a contract that you could just go and start work on the next day, because of Polaris, where XPS didn't have that previously. We mobilized, at one point, as many as 30 of our people in there, helping and making this right, and they were very successful in doing so. I'm pleased to say that said insurer is continuing to provide a really good service with the help of XPS. We did a good job, and we're still there today doing it. The run rate for that contract this year is likely to be pretty material and pretty significant. You could characterize that certainly as a Polaris deal, but it's in a Polaris contract. It is interesting that Polaris would not have been able to deliver that without being part of XPS.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

The first phone call they made was to say, well, this is fundamentally pensions work. That's not their expertise. They probably would've turned it down if they hadn't been part of XPS, but instead we mobilized people and sent them in. That's fantastic because that's what the deal was about, is bringing the best of both, and you could call that a revenue synergy. To your point, Vivek, which is a subtle one but important one, it is fair that the 30 people that we deployed were already busy somewhere else. There is a sort of substitution effect that you don't see a net revenue growth for the business, the group as a whole, because we just did a little bit less of other projects that weren't, say, time critical within the pensions business because we threw resource over to insurance.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

No, it's a nice problem to have that because as you then recruit more people because there's just more demand because you're having such success with insurers, you ultimately can get to the point where that is revenue accretive. For the group this year, it arguably wasn't, but there's every reason to think that it certainly can be as we continue providing that support. We should say we've had calls from other insurers with very, very similar challenges. The insurance industry is genuinely creaking with taking on the pension schemes at the pace at which that's happening, and we are delighted to help and one of a small number of firms who can genuinely help. In the example I've given, by the way, before, alongside calling us, if you like, a Big Four accounting firm was called.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

They also sent in a bunch of bodies. They couldn't deliver the project because their expertise just isn't the right expertise, whereas for XPS, it absolutely is because of our heritage and history.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Pipeline for Polaris, to unpack it, we think insurers had a relatively fallow year off the back of IFRS 17. What we saw last year was a lot of reviews of preferred supplier lists and master services agreements. It was a great year for us in the sense that we renewed everyone that we were on, and we added more. I won't give you client names, but they're FTSE 100 level insurers, where we have been added to wider services that we can now provide under preferred supplier agreements and so on, which is fantastic and really sets us up.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

What we're seeing is the volume of support that insurers need definitely looks like it's ramping back up, and our weighted pipeline of opportunities for 2027, or FY 2027, the rest of this year and into 2027 is really healthy. Importantly, a bunch of things that are not going to need resourcing from the pensions world, but instead are truly going to be Polaris engagements. A bit of all of that going on makes us genuinely really excited about what we might achieve. It leads into a second question about what we're really excited about for FY 2027. Which that is a part of it. Yeah, more widely, really excited about the opportunities that there are around this emerging world of surplus and run-on. There's a lot happening. There's new providers, there's transactions like the Aberdeen deal that might be replicated.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

There's superfunds beginning to appear into the market. We're in detailed discussions with some of those and so on. Just the range of advice that our clients in general need. Yeah, we're excited about opportunities to keep the momentum going.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

In terms of that, the organic growth rate moderating from 12% this year and the consensus mid to high single digits. Inflation does play a part in that. Inflation is coming down. Secondly, some of the high margin businesses which have grown from a standing start, such as risk transfer, three or four years ago, generating about GBP 1 million. Last year, we delivered about GBP 20 million from that. To compound at that rate is not possible. There's a sort of a slowdown within that growth rate. It will still continue to be very strong. Just this year, we've been involved in writing 46 deals.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Obviously, as you know, these are multi-year projects. They don't just complete in one year. Yeah, look, I think it certainly doesn't reflect the ambition of the management, as you know. In terms of the capital allocation, the share count, yes, we don't try and call the market on this, but when we spot the opportunity to top up the EBT, which is used to satisfy the vesting of awards and therefore protecting shareholders against dilution, that's what we've done. In terms of formal buybacks, we see plenty of other opportunities of more effective capital deployment. You can see that from our track record of M&A and also the pipeline that Paul talked about in terms of what's available. That would be our first option in terms of capital deployment.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Of course, the board will consider all options if we're sitting on a pile of cash.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Okay. Rahim?

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

Morning, it's Rahim Karim from Cavendish. A couple of questions, if I may. Just on the medium-term outlook, the five-year ahead slide, I think, Paul, that you presented. The right-hand side didn't include the word U.K., whereas the left-hand side did, and I was just wondering if that points to some international ambition. I'll leave the smiles maybe to answer that question.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

No, yeah, I'm smiling a little bit because that certainly wasn't some kind of intentional subliminal signaling. I think the answer is probably, in the pensions world, in our heritage, the U.K. is a unique market. While there are defined benefit schemes and complexities around other parts of the world, in Germany, the U.S., and so on, we're not going to enter that market and be better than the people on the ground locally. We're not going to go international, probably, in the pensions world. In the wider financial services consulting world, absolutely. There is a broader international market. London is a true center, actually, for excellence in things like insurance company regulation, solvency, et cetera, that the regulations are much more universal and much more similar in other parts of the world.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

If you do an acquisition in the future, it's possible that you will get a business that already has an office in New York or an office in Paris or Milan or somewhere, in which case And we'd be very open to that. It would be more into that diversification play into the future, I think, than in what's been historically our heritage, our core.

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

Okay. Maybe if I can

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Sure

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

build onto that a little bit. It also feels like there's a slight pivot, not away from actuarial services, but consulting more generally. Is that fair as well?

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Not quite, because the services we're talking about to insurance companies, a lot of them are actuarial services and support. That's Polaris's heritage as well. There's a broadening here, wider finance transformation programs, implementation of technology, the way insurers consolidate and handle big data safely, securely, all things we do for big pension schemes apply very well across the board. No, an awful lot of it is still actuarial consulting work just for a different end user rather than a pension scheme.

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

Sorry. I promise to ask my questions together now.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

I like it this way.

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

Just on the, I think it was in James's question earlier around pricing. If you have time and material pricing agreements with your clients, how do you think about that, and how are they thinking about that? I'm going to throw in Sorry.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah.

[Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish]

Snehal, you talked about capital allocation and use of capital. It's a pleasant surprise that the dividend's up 11%, to that point, isn't there something better that you could do with that extra few percentage if there's attractive M&A delivering 20%+ returns?

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yeah, sure.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Just on the pricing one, yeah, with our clients, we've got a mix of fixed fee contracts and time cost. Probably up until now, we're pretty neutral. They roughly come out with the same answer, and it's just a phasing of when we get paid versus when we do the work. Going forward, we see ourselves moving far more to fixed fees or fixed pricing for contracts. Often a project, you don't see in advance, you wouldn't cover that in a fixed fee. I think rather than say we'll do that work on time cost, we'll be looking to quote pretty fixed fees for more of the work than we currently do, and I think that's probably going to happen across all professional services businesses.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

On the dividend, as I said, the dividend was about 4% ahead of market expectations. In cash terms and leverage terms, it doesn't sort of move the dial a lot. Obviously for the future, you would've seen in the consensus, the guidance, it's about a 5% growth, it would be more in line with profits, continuing with the sort of progressive policy. Yeah, I do take your point about if there is capital deployment opportunities available elsewhere, then yes, that would get reflected in what we do. We will continue with a progressive policy. Yeah.

[Analyst]

Good morning, everyone. Thomas from Davy here. Just two questions, if I may. Firstly, on the insurance business, I noticed that you added the general insurance to the tangible addressable market, total addressable market. I was wondering, do you see more growth opportunity there, or is there more growth in life or general, or what the split is for the insurance business specifically? Then secondly, on AI, if it continues to drive efficiencies, do you think there's any scope that it could change hiring practices in the future for XPS?

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Great. I'll take the first one, maybe Ben take the second. Your first question about the insurance market. Yeah, the general insurance market and the life insurance market are also a Venn diagram that overlap, they do have quite different characteristics as well. The life market is dominated by a smaller number of very large institutions, and the general market is a much wider market of even a few hundred, much smaller institutions. The Venn diagram overlaps with somebody like an Aviva and so on. Actually, they are fundamentally quite different markets. Yes, the model that we've successfully deployed, that Polaris historically successfully deployed, that we've acquired, works into the general insurance market as well, and we've begun to deploy contracts into that market where there's XPS capability to understand the needs of the client and to fulfill it in that manner.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

That's a little start and it's only a very small start, but we definitely see big opportunity in that market. Again, in looking for an acquisition target, an acquisition target that would enable us to bridge that gap from life into general would be really, really interesting to us. There's a lot of technological change there. Because they're smaller, it's a different market, but you generally are probably going to find it slightly easier to just get access to the very senior people and just deliver them value. It isn't gigantic procurement-led processes that it can be at the giant life companies. It's rather more agile than that and a market that we feel that you could penetrate therefore reasonably quickly if you've got something genuinely interesting to say.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

The second question was on AI and efficiency and hiring practices.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Yes, we're spending a lot of time and effort looking at how we can roll out AI in a really agile way, but make sure we've got the governance around it. Part of that is looking further ahead at how it might change kind of exactly what's done in the business by kind of automation versus people. Absolutely that will kind of change, I guess, the way we look at resourcing in the future. Probably we see this as being, we'll have more capacity. We have clients that would love us to do work for them, they'd love us to do it more quickly for them. Actually, we think that's probably the outcome. Having kind of similar sized workforce or it growing a little bit more slowly than it otherwise would've done, but us being able to effectively provide more services than we probably currently can.

[Hal Potter, Analyst at Bank of America]

Hi, gents. Hal Potter from Bank of America. Just the one from me. Going back to that margin point, would you consider compromising on margins to go after those larger public sector schemes you were talking about earlier? Can we really consider margin expansion to persist regardless of client type?

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

I think it sort of boils down to, and forgive me for this analogy, but would shareholders prefer more profit? If some of those public sector opportunities are very big, public sector pension schemes are obviously still open, and therefore they can persist as sort of evergreen schemes. Our reputation in public sector is very strong, enhanced by the timely delivery of the McCloud Remedy project, et cetera. Absolutely we would go after those big opportunities, because ultimately we believe that that's going to be in the interest of the shareholders.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Any more questions?

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

I don't think there are any online anyway.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Online? Okay.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Thank you.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Okay.

[Snehal Shah, CFO at XPS Pensions Group]

Thanks everyone.

[Paul Cuff, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Thank you very much for coming.

[Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO at XPS Pensions Group]

Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• Ben Bramhall, Co-CEO
• Paul Cuff, Co-CEO
• Snehal Shah, CFO

Analysts

• Ben Cohen, Analyst at RBC
• Hal Potter, Analyst at Bank of America
• James Fletcher, Analyst at Berenberg
• Rahim Karim, Analyst at Cavendish
• Steve Woolf, Analyst at Deutsche Numis
• Analyst
• Analyst