GB Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
June 2, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: GBG delivered FY 2026 results in line with guidance, with revenue of £285 million, 3.2% constant-currency growth, and adjusted operating profit of £67.5 million. Management said the second half accelerated, with core segments growing 5.7%.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company said it achieved all five of its second-half priorities, including a return to growth in the Americas, more than 100 GBG Go wins for the year, and £56 million returned to shareholders. It also highlighted continued progress from its new global operating model.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management raised its medium-term ambition to 7%–9% revenue growth and above 24% margin, citing momentum in identity, location, and GBG Go. For FY 2027, it guided to mid-single-digit revenue growth with margins temporarily lower due to a £6 million one-off investment.
  • Positive Sentiment: The Americas business showed meaningful improvement, with new business up 3x year on year, activation 50% faster, and Q4 returning to growth. GBG also said a new strategic partnership with Equifax should strengthen its U.S. data advantage and support pricing power.
  • Positive Sentiment: GBG Go and related AI products were presented as the main growth engines, with early traction including the Uber win, a pipeline of 225+ qualified leads, and the launch of Foresight and GBG for Agents. Management framed these products as enabling higher retention, more cross-sell, and future platform retirements.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
GB Group H2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for GBG's FY 2026 results. Whilst we will focus on our results for the last year, we're also going to take the opportunity to set out our midterm guidance and the reasons why we have confidence in delivering it. FY 2026 was a significant year for GBG, one where the strategic choices we've made over the past couple of years have been paying off. The results we're sharing today demonstrate the quality and resilience of what we've built. David will shortly take you through the financials. I want to start by grounding you in what GBG is and why we believe the opportunity ahead of us is more compelling than it has ever been. Our purpose is simple. We're enabling safe and rewarding digital lives for genuine people everywhere.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

That's the mission that drives what we do today and what we will do tomorrow. In terms of what we actually deliver, GBG is the AI trust intelligence platform. We take billions of interactions across people, places, and businesses, we turn those into the signals that help our customers make better and faster decisions. Those decisions happen in milliseconds on a huge scale. Every time someone opens a new bank account, makes an e-commerce transaction, or verifies their identity online, we are there. You can see a selection of our customers on screen. Microsoft, Oracle, Santander, Nike, FedEx, Costco. Those aren't just well-known logos. They're businesses operating at massive global scale in highly regulated environments where trust is non-negotiable. The fact they choose GBG tells you something important about the quality and reliability of what we deliver.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

This slide is also testament to how much we've simplified the business over the past two years, and we now move forwards with consolidated and integrated positioning. The market we operate in has never been more important or more dynamic. The structural tailwinds for GBG have been building for years. The explosion of fraud, accelerating digitalization, rising regulatory pressure, and consumers like you and me who expect frictionless experiences without compromising on safety. None of that is new, and these tailwinds support all pillars of our business. What has dramatically changed is the role AI is now playing, and not just on our side of the equation when it comes to identity fraud. AI is making fraud accessible to anyone. The tools to commit sophisticated fraud, which once required significant technical expertise, are now widely available. The numbers on this slide tell that story clearly.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Synthetic fraud losses are projected to reach $23 billion by 2030. Deepfake fraud losses, $40 billion by 2027. These are enormous figures, and they're growing fast. Our customers are already dealing with these consequences. Document spoofing, deepfakes, synthetic identity fraud, account takeover. These aren't future threats. These are live, active challenges that our customers are coming to us to solve right now. What's equally important is what's coming next. Deepfakes have increased by 3,000% in the last five years. Can you imagine what that looks like in five more? We're quickly approaching a world where humans are a minority online, where bots, agents, and AI systems outnumber real people like us in digital interactions. Agentic commerce, where AI acts autonomously on behalf of customers, creates a whole new frontier of trust challenges that the industry is only beginning to grapple with.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

This is why what GBG does to detect and prevent identity fraud matters so much and is so relevant. The harder this problem gets, the more our customers need a partner who can stay ahead of it, and a platform that can adapt to new challenges. That is exactly what we are building. I want to now turn to what we said we would do and what we actually delivered in FY 2026. At the start of the second half, we set out five clear priorities. I'm pleased to report we delivered on every single one of them. On our financial guidance in November, we reiterated our full year financial guidance. We said we would deliver revenue growth of around 3%, which needed H2 to accelerate to mid-single digit. We said we would deliver operating profit of GBP 67.5 million. Against this, we delivered revenue growth of 3.2%.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Our core segments indeed accelerated to 5.7% in the second half, and we met our GBP 67.5 million profit target precisely. On the Americas, we said we'd return the business to growth, which we did in Q4. A meaningful milestone and a reflection of the significant work the team has done to stabilize and reposition that business. On GBG Go, we talked about a strong pipeline. We said we'd execute it, and we said we'd also deliver new AI capabilities into the platform. In our first half results, you heard me speak about achieving 18 wins. We closed the year at more than 100, and those new logos included a standout new win with Uber. On driving the way we operate, we have now transitioned to a global functional operating model, and that is supporting the pace of execution by ensuring we focus on our biggest opportunities.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The structural work here is done, and we're starting to see the benefits flow through, such as our innovation lab, where we've been focused on building for the threats and opportunities our customers will face, not today, but in the next two to three years. On capital allocation, we returned GBP 56 million to shareholders in FY 2026, demonstrating our commitment to disciplined deployment of our free cash. Five priorities, five green ticks, that should give you all confidence as we look ahead to FY 2027 and beyond. David will expand on the top and the bottom rows, but I want to go a little deeper on Americas and Go. Let's start with the Americas. 12 months ago, we were clear-eyed about the challenges we faced in this market.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

We had work to do on leadership, on sales productivity, and on how we were going to market, but we committed to fixing it. What you're seeing on this slide is the tangible evidence that the progress we've seen in the second half has continued to build on the proof points we shared with you in the first half. Firstly, on leadership, we now have an embedded, stable team in place, one that's fully bought in, and that's showing up in our engagement scores, which are now in the top quarter, and interestingly, ahead of our group average. You cannot build a high-performing business without the right people, and we now have them. Second, sales productivity. New business was up three times year-on-year, and activation is now 50% faster than it was. These aren't incremental improvements. They reflect a fundamentally more effective go-to-market operation.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Thirdly, we've evolved the commercial model. We successfully introduced minimum commitments at the point of renewal on what were previously pay-as-you-go agreements, improving our revenue visibility. A significant chunk of new business was also pre-committed, which is a meaningful indicator of the quality of the pipeline we're building. On operating model, we updated you at the half year that we brought together our Americas identity and location sales teams under common leadership to drive brand and cultural alignment. You can see again just how that looks. That's a shot from Times Square, where today we're hosting our largest ever customer event in New York with over 300 registered customers. The result of all this, the Americas' return to growth in Q4, the result of structural improvements that give us confidence in the long-term trajectory of our business there.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

One of the reasons for that confidence is a strategic partnership with Equifax, which we concluded in March and recently announced publicly. GBG and Equifax have been working together for over 10 years, this agreement expands that relationship to a new level. What does it actually mean for us? Firstly, differentiation in the U.S. Our partnership unlocks broad access for GBG to Equifax's proprietary data that creates a real, durable, competitive advantage in the world's largest identity fraud market. Second, hardened fraud defenses. By building signals from Equifax's data and combining it with our platform, we can build significantly stronger defenses against some of the fastest-growing types of fraud. Third, mutual data integration. Our location capabilities will be integrated into Equifax's U.S. platform in 2026, with global expansion following in 2027. This is a two-way relationship. We're not just buying Equifax's data.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

We're a partner contributing our differentiated capability to them. Fourth, access to new verticals. This partnership opens doors for both organizations to enter large addressable markets where they've not historically enjoyed a strong foothold. For us at GBG, that means access to public sector. For Equifax, that means access to gaming. Those two alone represent a significant incremental growth opportunity. There are benefits of this agreement outside of the U.S., but my excitement is centered on what it means for our business in Americas and our customers in Americas. We're actively pursuing more partnerships of this type because we know that they are a force multiplier for us. Next, GBG Go, where I am genuinely excited about what we're building and the momentum we're seeing. GBG Go is our AI-powered adaptive identity platform, and the core thesis behind it is simple.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The fraud and identity landscape is evolving too fast for static point-based solutions. Our customers need a platform that keeps pace with the threats they face, one that adapts continuously, builds intelligence over time, and meets their needs as they evolve. That's what GBG Go delivers for them. The flywheel works like this. We win new logos by offering a platform that's more capable and more flexible than anything else. As customers embed GBG Go into their operation, it builds advocacy because it works and because it keeps getting better. That advocacy unlocks cross-sell opportunities, which drives NRR. Underpinning all of this is a single global architecture that allows us to innovate rapidly and deploy for all of our customers at scale. The early results have exceeded our own expectations, with strong execution against pipeline taking us past 100 wins at the end of FY 2026.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Our largest new customer win, as I've already said, was with Uber, a business that operates at enormous scale and has absolutely no tolerance for friction or failure in their identity fraud controls. Winning Uber on GBG Go is a strong signal of the platform's capability. We've been able to deliver a cutting-edge solution to allow them to build trust with their riders and their drivers in a way that nobody else could do, and that would not have been possible without Go. We've also driven forward the roadmap at pace in the last year, which means the product our customers are buying today will be materially more powerful 12 months from now. We remain excited about the ability to upgrade our customers. Several of our largest customers have already transitioned, while others have expressed strong interest.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Whilst we've been able to retire one platform in FY 2026, the prize in terms of what that means for our other platform retirements remains large and in reach. GBG Go is not just a product. It's a growth engine, and what we're seeing in the market is telling us that we're on the right track. FY 2026 was a year of delivery. Five priorities set, five delivered. We are now in a position to capitalize on the momentum we've built, and we're going to do exactly that. We're making a targeted one-off investment of GBP 6 million to accelerate the Go roadmap further. This is a deliberate choice to press our advantage at a time when the market is moving in our direction and our platform and our teams are ready to scale.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The output of that investment will be faster, more trusted decisions for our customers, which ultimately drives retention, advocacy, and growth. From a financial perspective, we now expect to deliver sustained revenue growth of 7%-9% whilst unlocking margin improvement beyond 24% in the midterm. This new ambition reflects our confidence in the platform, in our team, and in the market opportunity we have ahead of us. With that, I'll hand you over to David to take you through the financials.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Thank you, Dev. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I will now take you through the FY 2026 financial performance in a bit more detail, which I should confirm upfront is in line with the April trading statement. We are pleased to report that revenue. Sorry. Keeping up with the slides. We are pleased to report that revenue for the year was in line with expectations at GBP 285 million. This represents a 3.2% increase in constant currency over the prior year. As we had expected, growth was weighted to the second half of the year, and we were very pleased to see growth in H2 for our core segments of identity and location accelerate to 5.7%. Adjusted operating profit for the year was GBP 67.5 million, and we maintained our profit margin within our target range of 23%-24%.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Our earnings per share on a diluted basis increased by 9.3% to GBP 0.191. We finished the year with net debt of GBP 80.1 million, which represented a net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio of just over 1.1 times. Cash conversion of our adjusted operating profit was 87%, and during the year, we completed our first acquisition for three years when we acquired the DataTools business in Australia. The integration of that business has gone very well, and we are now already executing on the cross-sell opportunities for the integrated identity and location solution that we now offer in the region. Reflecting the board's confidence in our long-term outlook and strategy, during FY 2026, we repurchased shares equivalent to approximately 8% of our equity through GBP 45 million of share buybacks.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Alongside the FY 2025 final dividend paid in the year, this means that total capital return to shareholders in FY 2026 was GBP 56 million. Share repurchases resumed on the 1st of April 2026 for a further GBP 10 million extension, which was approved by the board in addition to the recommended GBP 0.044 per share final dividend. Zooming in on revenue. We achieved full-year revenue growth of 3.2% in constant currency, and this translated into 3.4% growth in our core segments of identity and location after excluding the impact of the revenue acquired via DataTools and the drag effect of the decision to retire the compliance platform. 95% of our revenue came from the repeatable revenue types of subscription and consumption, with 56% of this being from subscriptions. We expect this proportion to continue to increase as we drive greater upfront commitments, particularly in our Americas business.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Dev has already mentioned that. NRR remained consistent at 100%. We believe this measure is now primed for acceleration as a result of the drag effect from the compliance platform now washing through the NRR calculation and improving picture, specifically in Americas, where the leading indicators around gross retention are now looking much more favorable. We expect to see the positive effects of GBG Go. A quick review of the income statement, which is shown here on an adjusted basis. I have a separate slide coming up later on exceptional items. I've already covered revenue, I'll skip that here. Gross profit margin decreased slightly due to changes in sales mix, with relatively more sales of partner solutions. We made some important investments into securing access to differentiated data, an example being the exciting new partnership with Equifax that Dev has already explained earlier.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We continue to manage our operating expenses tightly, mitigating the impact of inflation and the U.K. higher national insurance costs. More importantly, we continued to drive efficiency in our operating model, which allowed us to recycle the savings generated into further investment into technology and innovation. Driving those operating model improvements did incur exceptional costs of GBP 1.9 million, we are confident that investing in these changes will offer strong returns in the medium and long term as we capitalize on going to market as one fully aligned global business. The increase in adjusted operating profit, together with lower finance costs, a lower effective tax rate, and as well as some of the impact of the share buyback that was executed in the year, led to the 9.3% increase in earnings per share. Let's now take a look at how each of the segments performed.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Starting with identity, which accounts for 61% of group revenue, growth was 2.2% and was driven by the strong performance in EMEA and APAC, with Americas improving and returning to growth in Q4. The growth of this segment, and particularly the performance in Americas, was impacted by our decision to retire the compliance platform solution, which had become non-core and expensive to maintain. Excluding the revenue drag this caused, growth for identity was 3.3% for the year, and growth in the second half was over 6%. It was great to see our relatively new KYB solution, or know your business, offering landing so well with customers and prospects. While this is still a small part of the identity segment, we saw year-on-year growth of 600%, while also developing a very promising pipeline.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We expect this to continue to be a force behind our growth through the medium term, particularly as it gains scale. As you know, the Americas business for identity was a very big focus for us during the year, and we focused on re-accelerating growth through better operational execution while retaining our strong profitability that that business has. Dev has already explained the initiatives we ran and which ultimately led to the business in Americas returning to growth in Q4. With this growth also continuing so far into the new financial year, too. It was particularly pleasing for us to book three times the level of new business in FY 2026 versus the prior year.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

The other big focus for identity in FY 2026 was the launch of GBG Go, which only launched commercially at the start of FY 2026. With our initial focus, you'll remember, being only on new logos.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

As Dev has already explained, GBG Go is our new flagship adaptive identity verification platform, through which, in the future, all GBG customers will configure, process, and monitor their identity verification transactions. Progress has exceeded my expectations, with strong demand and over 100 customer wins now achieved across a number of sectors, including fintechs and gaming, and a strong pipeline of more than 225 qualified leads. A few examples of larger enterprises now utilizing GBG Go include Remitly, Revolut, and bet365. As Dev has already mentioned, we would not have been able to win the U.K. business of Uber without GBG Go.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

These are just some of the important proof points that demonstrate why after just one year after launch, we are very pleased with the progress, and we feel now is the time to accelerate our plans for the platform and bring forward some of our planned capabilities and AI-driven insights. We will do that by way of a one-off GBP 6 million investment in FY 2027. This spend will almost entirely be via our existing outsourced development partners. The schedule of work has already been agreed and fully costed and cannot spill over beyond FY 2027. In a moment, Dev will explain more about the benefits this investment will bring. Turning to location next, which represents almost one-third of group revenue. The story here in FY 2026 was continued resilient growth driven by strong demand for data quality solutions and another year of good growth from our channel partner business.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

This more than offsets some softness from e-commerce, which was most likely due to macroeconomic weakness. We were very pleased with the excellent growth for location solutions in Asia, which continued at 25% growth here in FY 2026. The contribution margin for location remains strong at 43%. In terms of notable customer activity, I would call out wins or upsells with Microsoft, Equifax, Oracle, and FedEx. Our final segment, Global Fraud Solutions. The contribution margin here showed a material improvement over the prior year following the strategic review we completed last year, with focus and investment diverted from GFS to our core segments of identity and location. While ARR did decline modestly due to customer churn, we did see revenue growth driven by successfully securing some important customer renewals, with some of these licenses being on a multi-year basis.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Looking now at exceptional items, which split between non-cash and cash items. The decision to retire the compliance platform solution has necessitated a write-off of the associated intangible assets. These had a carrying value of GBP 16.5 million. This was a non-cash item. Moving on to goodwill impairment, which is also a non-cash item. As required under IFRS, we conduct an impairment review of goodwill and intangible assets each year. This year that resulted in a goodwill impairment of GBP 73.1 million against the assets related to the Americas identity business. As you will appreciate, the valuation environment today is very different than it was back in 2019 and 2021 when GBG made two large acquisitions in the U.S.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

The pressure on observable valuation data points has taken an even further step down in the last few months, given the war in the Middle East and the perceived specific challenges for valuations of software companies, given developments in AI. It is important to say that this impairment charge is not a reflection of any change in the confidence held by the GBG board or management in the outlook for the Americas business, which remains strong. It is just a result of accounting assumptions. Aside from the two non-cash items, there are also other exceptional expense items totaling GBP 8.4 million. We invested GBP 4.4 million on improvements in corporate systems and data. These investments came in exactly as planned and as previously communicated and are already delivering significant business benefit through GBG Foresight and unlocking go-to-market synergies from single CRM.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

You will see a short introduction to the new Foresight product later in the presentation. It really is very cool. I hope you enjoy it. Foresight would not have been possible without the investment into structuring our corporate and operational data. We spent GBP 1.9 million on our move from AIM to the main market during the year. As I mentioned earlier, the costs associated with the continued restructure to our new operating model totaled GBP 1.9 million. Finishing now on our outlook for FY 2027, the new financial year. Dev has already mentioned our target of a high single-digit growth rate in the medium term, but I want to be specific about what we expect in FY 2027.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We expect mid-single-digit revenue growth, reflecting a continuation of the momentum that we built in the second half of FY 2026, and which we have seen continue so far into the new financial year. We expect that the momentum we have carried into the new year will be further supplemented by continued improvement in the identity Americas business, accelerating contribution from new innovations, and increasing market opportunities as customers look for ways to combat fraud and implement AI strategies. On margin, of course, this will be impacted by the GBP 6 million investment I've already mentioned. Margins here are expected to be in the range of 21%-22%, but these will then bounce back in FY 2028 to our target range of 23%-24%. We continue to expect cash conversion to be approximately 90%.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Moving on to the right-hand side of this slide and how we're thinking about capital allocation in FY 2027. We arrived into the new year with a leverage of just over 1.1 times EBITDA, and we expect we will exit the year also at around one times levered. When we think about the best way to allocate capital for the best possible returns for shareholders, first, there is the dividend to pay in respect of the year just finished. We believe that the GBP 6 million investment announced today offers the best and strongest return on capital. Better than any reasonable bolt-on we would be able to achieve with that value, and better than any share buybacks or debt repayment. We do still have additional capital to deploy, over which we have some options.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We've already committed and announced an incremental GBP 10 million buyback on top of the GBP 45 million we did last year, and we expect we still have some optionality for the remainder of the year over the excess free cash flow we will generate. With that, I will now hand back to Dev.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Okay. Thank you, David. FY 2026 was about proving we could execute. FY 2027 is about acceleration or going faster. GBG Go is at the heart of it, this is a broader story about a business that has done the hard structural work and is now ready to move with pace. Let me take you through how. This slide tells the story of our journey in three steps. When I took on this role, GBG was a 2%-3% growth business. Today, we are growing mid-single digit with the structural work done. We are now fully focused on delivering sustained high single-digit growth, we have a clear line of sight to the three things that will get us there. You will find those three things familiar. First, accelerating the Americas. We've returned to growth, it's now about pressing on. Second, innovating through GBG Go.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The platform is gaining traction and we're investing to broaden our capabilities. Third, operating as one GBG, bringing our global capabilities to bear in a coordinated, efficient way that creates competitive advantage. This is a high-quality, cash-generative business now with momentum. The question is no longer whether GBG can grow faster, it's how fast can it grow. We talk about belief a lot in our business, and if you would ask me the strength of my belief in accelerating growth, this slide would be a huge part of my answer. What you're looking at on this slide is two years of deliberate, consistent effort laid out half year by half year. What I want you to notice is the progression, not just the volume of what we've done, although there is a lot, but the quality and the direction of travel.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

If we start at the bottom, in the first half of FY 2025, we were laying foundations. We launched an elevator pitch that articulated who GBG is. We had our first ever company-wide hackathon focused on AI to encourage our teams to experiment with that technology. We rolled out high-performance training for our key leaders. We started using our secure and trusted position as a key selling point with customers. We drew up competitor battle cards so our sales teams knew exactly how to win head-on with competitors. We launched GBG Trust, creating our first market-facing proprietary data asset. By the second half of FY 2025, those foundations were turning into real initiatives. We migrated our website to a domain that better suited our U.S. ambitions. We had a new brand, a new purpose, a new performance framework for all of the people at GBG.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

We started developing Go, we launched our KYB product, we made the decision to migrate our infrastructure to AWS, choosing a single cloud provider instead of using four. In FY 2026, we moved into execution. We built out our data lake. We tuned our document verification product to leverage AI to beat AI. We acquired DataTools in Australia. We stood up our innovation lab. We retired our first technology platform, we started to move towards a functional operating model to keep things together and keep us focused. In the most recent six months, you can see what all of that work has started to unlock. The launch of Foresight, wins with FedEx, Temu, Uber, partnership with Equifax. These aren't coincidences. They are the direct output of two years of compounding effort. That's what gives us confidence.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Not that we have a good strategy, but that we've already started to prove we can execute it. Based on that forward visibility, we are now ready to stand behind midterm guidance. I want to bring that compounding effort to life with three specific examples because I think they really illustrate that compounding better than anything else can. Let's start with Uber. Many of you will have received an email in the last few days from Uber telling you about a new initiative to introduce a verified badge on their platform. If you scrolled further down that email, you'll have also read that in the U.K., Uber works with GBG, our identity service provider. That was a pretty cool moment for all of us at GBG. As I've already said, solving Uber's challenges would not have been possible without Go.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Equally, it would not have been possible without Trust, whose consortium data is integral to the solution we've built. Migrating our cloud to AWS has enabled us to deliver the scalability to support Uber's huge volume requirements, our information security protocols reassured one of the world's leading B2C brands to trust us with such an important consumer-facing proposition. The sales team that drove this opportunity were all part of the first cohort of our high-performance leadership program, where they learned about setting and delivering on ambitious goals. Let's look at Foresight. It's our latest innovation, but it's one that would not have been possible without infrastructure decisions we've been making over the last two years, as David shared.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Foresight started as a pitch that came through our first ever company-wide hackathon, where we invited our teams to pitch in a Dragon's Den format for central funding based on proofs of concept they have built leveraging AI. Our data lake, built in FY 2026 under the code name Alchemy, gave us the rich, structured data foundation that allowed us to apply AI across it at scale. That data lake encompasses Trust, and Foresight is delivered to customers through Go. We expect Foresight will have the biggest impact on our Americas business, but it's actually been worked on by our data scientists from around the world, including Australia, which is a huge benefit of a functional operating model where we can place our best talent on our biggest opportunities. Foresight is an eye-catching product. It's the kind of product that makes our customers lean forwards.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

What makes it defensible is that it's built on an architectural foundation that took us two years to construct. Competitors can't just copy the output. They'd have to replicate everything underneath it first, and that's a meaningful competitive moat. Finally, Temu. Temu is a customer I've spoken a lot about over the last couple of years, and it's one that really illustrates the power of operating as one business. Our relationship with Temu started by enabling their global e-commerce operation outside of China, successfully demonstrating a lift in address quality over competitors like Google. That relationship has grown into supporting them in 27 markets worldwide, including the U.S., in terms of their fulfillment. What's really exciting is how in the second half, or since the second half, we're now also providing age assurance for them across 34 markets.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

This win would not have been possible without the work to tune our document verification solution to be able to deliver more than 50,000 document checks per day, delivering strong AI fraud detection alongside record response times and the highest transactions per second that solution's ever delivered. Expansion of the relationship has also been supported by our privacy team, who it turns out are one of our best sales teams, who they've partnered with Temu to help them navigate local regulatory challenges in markets they weren't familiar with, and a team effort across identity and location go-to-market teams in the U.K. and in Asia. As we scale this model, I expect to see more wins of exactly this type, larger, more complex, and more valuable.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

As you can see from the three examples I've shared, no single piece of work gets us there. It's a combination of the building blocks, and that combination has taken two years of disciplined investment to put in place but is now delivering dividends. The second part of my answer to why are you confident that growth can accelerate or will accelerate to high single digits will be to point to the parts of GBG that are already demonstrating that they are able to grow at a much faster rate than the group average. Wins similar to Temu are driving high double-digit growth in our Asia e-commerce business. Our global gaming practice continues to grow ahead of group average, fueled in 2026 by expansion in the U.S. as it deregulates. Revenues for the highly differentiated GBG Trust solution doubled in FY 2026 in Australia.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Our location businesses in ANZ and Americas grew at double digits. The business we acquired in New Zealand in 2021, known then as Cloudcheck, now as GBG New Zealand, posted more than 35% growth last year. International data had another strong year in EMEA, where we expanded our relationships with key global customers and supported others become global. KYB was our fastest-growing product, with 30 new customers signed and growth in triple digits. KYB has also started FY 2027 particularly strongly. When we talk about accelerating the top line to high single digits, we're already seeing at least that in the areas we've been placing additional focus on. Lastly, the third reason I'm confident in our ability to accelerate growth further is innovation.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

I'm sure, I hope, I'm sure you've detected that the pace of innovation has picked up since the last time I spoke to you in November. We have some rock stars in GBG driving forward our innovation agenda. Before I outline our plans for the investment that David and I have shared, it's probably an appropriate time for them to share more with you about what we've already delivered and why we are so excited about what's ahead. With that, I'd like to hand you over to Gus Tomlinson, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, for a short video that will outline the foundations that we've built, which will support our long runway of innovation, the progress we're making on GBG Go, our latest innovation, Foresight, and how GBG has already entered the agentic era.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

Apologies for not joining in person. I'm in New York this week hosting 300 of our top customers and partners at our Unlocked event. As Dev mentioned, the pace of innovation coming out of our product and technology teams has stepped up dramatically, a reflection of the talent we've developed and brought in, the technology foundations we've laid, and now in the way that we're scaling AI across our organization. Gonzalo and Kartik will bring much of that to life as they trail both Foresight and GBG Agents. Before they do, I want to set context of three foundational investments that we have made over the past 24 months. Together, they're what is driving our pace today. First of all, GBG Fabric. Fabric is our engineering foundation, a single, secure AWS-native platform on which every new GBG product is built and run.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

Before Fabric, every team built infrastructure differently on different clouds with no shared standards. Fabric eliminates that entirely. Teams get a compliant, production-ready environment in hours with security, observability, and compliance built in by default. The result is that our engineers focus entirely on building products, and in a world where AI can multiply individual developer output by three, four, or five times, this is the platform foundation that ensures those gains compound across the organization rather than getting lost in the complexity of infrastructure. This is absolutely critical for our customers, as speed is how they achieve market growth and defend against fraud. One thing we repeatedly hear from customers who've gone live on Go is how quickly we're releasing new features or upgrades following their feedback. Secondly, GBG Alchemy. Alchemy is our data foundation, the engine underneath every AI capability we will ever build.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

We invested nearly GBP 2 million in this this year, and we're already seeing the benefits of this come through. Before Alchemy, every product held its own data in its own silo. Verification events, journey signals, behavioral data, location intelligence, and customer outcomes, all isolated with no model being able to learn across them. Alchemy pulls it all into one place, every single product, every region, every transaction, with a full ML stack built in. Training inference, generative AI, the speed from data to deployed intelligence is transformational. In the past 12 months, we've connected our core identity platforms with documents and location to follow. GBG sits in a unique position globally, leading in both identity and location data at huge transaction scale. The more those signals compound together in Alchemy, the more powerful our AI becomes. Alchemy is the fuel behind GBG Foresight.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

An early market reaction of over 20 EMEA customers has been extraordinary. Third, GBG Go. Go is the product that we take to market, but it's also a live orchestration engine designed to serve our capabilities in the most future-proofed way possible. At its heart is an asynchronous API that dynamically sequences identity checks in real-time, data verification, document capture, biometrics, fraud signals, sanctions screening, adapting in real-time in each journey as the results come back. It's built entirely on open standards. Every capability plugs in as a composable module without touching the underlying platform. That is the architecture that gives our customers speed. As Alchemy has matured, the benefits of Go's orchestration layer include continuous intelligence feeds. That is turning powerful workflow engine into a continuously learning identity and fraud system.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

An adaptable platform is only as powerful as the recommendations that drive it, which is where Foresight provides a true advantage to GBG and to our customers. Fabric, Alchemy, and Go are three things that are shaping our AI trust intelligence. They power how we build and deliver the best outcome for customer performance. It is a highly complex and fast-moving world. They provide our customers the speed, the intelligence, and the accuracy, and importantly, the peace of mind. Behind these platforms is the talent we have in our business. Luuk, our CTO, is driving GBG's vision to become an AI-first engineering organization. AI-assisted development embedded in every single squad. An AI champion skill spreading capabilities across teams. This approach started with the three teams behind Fabric, Alchemy, and Go to accelerate our most strategic initiatives that underpin the capabilities that will differentiate us in the marketplace.

Gus Tomlinson
Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG

It will place us as the category leader of choice for our customers. Now over to Gonzalo to talk about Foresight, one of the first innovations to emerge from the foundations that we've built and the investment that we put behind Project Alchemy.

Gonzalo Ponce Pestana
Director of Presales and Professional Services at GBG

10 years ago, identity verification was a checkbox exercise. Name, date of birth, signature, done. Today, it is a moving target affected by three key forces. Number one, our customers. 80% of them say that the first impression they get from an organization is more important than the products and services they consume afterwards. One in every three drop from the onboarding journey and never come back. What they expect now is to be remembered every time. For them, the bar is no longer secure. It's effortless. The second force is fraud as a fully functioning business model with 24/7 support. The third is regulation. By the time you have adapted to one, three more have been shipped. How can you compete and perform in this environment? More importantly, how has our industry responded? More vendors, more point solutions, more complexity.

Gonzalo Ponce Pestana
Director of Presales and Professional Services at GBG

When buyers cannot tell vendors apart based on capability, the decisions are based on a mathematical equation between price and performance. The winners in this environment will be those that turn identity verification into an ongoing intelligence layer that learns, adapts, and recommends in real-time. It is against this backdrop that we're introducing Foresight, your always-on intelligence for optimized performance and maximization of your results. Foresight changes everything because through its uniquely powered AI recommendations, peer benchmarking capabilities, and real-time performance and alerting insights, we will not only help every customer maximize ROI, but respond faster, enhance customer experience, and ultimately better manage resources. We didn't get here out of nowhere. For the last two years, GBG has been building the data platform that underpins Foresight.

Gonzalo Ponce Pestana
Director of Presales and Professional Services at GBG

For the last six months, we've been running a very structured beta program with 10 selected global customers that not only helped us brainstorm and design what Foresight is today, but had 100% influence on what the roadmap looks like.

Gonzalo Ponce Pestana
Director of Presales and Professional Services at GBG

Having launched the solution earlier in May, we're now really excited with the initial market reactions that we're currently getting. With that, I'll hand it over to Kartik.

Kartik Venkatesh
Global Head of Innovation at GBG

A year ago, every CEO was asking, "Should we be using AI?" Today, they're asking something different. "Can we trust what AI does on our behalf?" Something has shifted. AI agents are no longer just answering questions. They're taking actions, onboarding customers, processing payments, making decisions on their own, which means every business must answer something new. When an agent acts on your behalf, who is on the other side? That's the trust challenge of the agentic era, and it's the one that GBG was built to solve. We bring together identity and location data at scale around the world. No AI-native startup can replicate that. There's something else. In an AI-driven world, the outcome alone isn't enough. The explanation of the outcome matters just as much. Explainability wins. That's why I'm so excited about what we've just launched. It's called GBG for Agents.

Kartik Venkatesh
Global Head of Innovation at GBG

It's a portfolio of agent-native capabilities already live, built on top of our market-leading products. We took on something genuinely hard, building products AI agents can use natively, not just retrofitting yesterday's stack to look agent-friendly. We have shifted in record speed to market, under 30 days, and that pace itself is worth a moment. We're using AI across our entire process, from ideation through engineering into go to market. Reach is live today. It's GBG Locate's agent experience layer. Put simply, this provides our market-leading addressing capabilities into the hands of AI agents. When an agent calls Reach with a customer's address, email, or phone number, it doesn't get codes a developer has to interpret. It gets policy aware recommendations that power decisions that agents can act on.

Kartik Venkatesh
Global Head of Innovation at GBG

For our customers, that means agents that don't ship to wrong addresses, don't onboard fake identities, and don't quietly lose revenue at checkout. This is the world's first agent decisioning layer for addresses. As Gus described, GBG Go was built API first and orchestration native. Already designed for the agentic era, no retrofit is needed. To bring this to life, an agent native control plane is required, which means agents can launch entire identity journeys and learn from what works and what doesn't. For our customers, the main difference we can provide them is faster onboarding, fewer abandoned applications, and lower fraud. We call this GoPlane, it's launching within the month, as I said, allows agents to take advantage natively of the full stack and breadth of our Go platform.

Kartik Venkatesh
Global Head of Innovation at GBG

This will be our first step in providing continuous trust signals for agents throughout the customer relationship. GBG for Agents is rapidly gaining traction with our enterprise technology partners such as IBM and Oracle. This isn't future ambition. It's already shipping, already being used by customers, and we are ready to be pulled into the platforms where agents live and can handle the growth demand they will create.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

I told you they were good. The products you have just heard about are not coming soon. They're all live in the markets we operate. GBG Go is winning. GBG Foresight was launched last month. Just like we did with Go, we engaged a beta group of customers, 10 of them. We proved the concept with them, we've already signed our first three commercial contracts for Foresight. Reach, our first agent-ready product, is already creating interest with our channel partner, IBM, who's interested in plugging it into watsonx. The pace at which we are shipping is not slowing down. It's accelerating, that's why we have decided to invest a one-off GBP 6 million in FY 2027 to further enhance our platform. Let me now show you what that additional investment will deliver. Let's start with our customers. This investment accelerates four things that will provide value for them.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The first is a platform built to lead the AI-powered identity era. Identity has never mattered more. The world is moving towards agentic commerce, AI acting on behalf of people to make purchases, open accounts, initiate transactions. Go is being built to orchestrate identity decisions in that environment, adapting quickly with non-negotiable privacy and security that you'd expect from GBG. Second, helping our customers stay ahead of fraud that never stands still. Fraud evolves continuously and increasingly, it's evolving using AI. Go is designed to stay ahead of it automatically, updating its models and signals without customers having to reconfigure. Third, going live with less engineering effort. You heard about GoPlane. For our customers, this means faster time to value, lower cost of implementation, and the agility to respond to market changes without lengthy development cycles of yesterday.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Fourthly, the ability to see what's working and optimize continuously. Real-time insights via Foresight can be acted on directly in the platform. I'll let one of our first three Foresight customers, Evoke, speak to this one. Their head of onboarding products called it a game changer, that probably says it better than I can. We expect that the capabilities the investment will build out will be particularly beneficial for our customers in the U.S. The previous slide was about what this investment delivers for our customers. This one is about what it delivers for you. Three mechanisms drive the shareholder value case. First, it will increase NRR through cross-sell and pricing. As we embed more capability into Go, the platform becomes stickier. Customers don't just renew, they expand. That's a powerful lever for revenue quality and predictability. Second, it will accelerate new business.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

A stronger product market fit means higher win rates and larger wins, just like Uber. Third, it will sustain efficiency and drive profitability. Go will enable us to retire legacy platforms, freeing up capacity to focus on what drives growth, not on maintaining infrastructure we no longer need. The financial output of all of this, in the midterm, an additional 2% contribution to revenue growth. This is a meaningful part of our path to that high single-digit guidance and enabling a profit margin of more than 24% as we harvest those legacy platform efficiencies. These benefits are not speculative. They're grounded in what we're already seeing in the business, and those are the direct consequence of the strategic choices I've been describing throughout this presentation. This investment pays for itself and then some.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Before we go to Q&A, let me close with a summary of the new GBG you're investing in today. There are five key drivers of that investment case. Firstly, the market opportunity, a GBP 50 billion market driven by structural forces such as fraud and regulation that are not cyclical. They don't slow down in a downturn. If anything, they accelerate. This is a durable, expanding market, and we are well-positioned within it. Diversified global reach. We have over 20,000 customers across the globe, including many of the world's leading brands who trust us with mission-critical solutions. Competitive differentiation. GBG is the AI trust intelligence platform. We have a combination of data, technology, and domain expertise that it is genuinely difficult to replicate, and we're investing to extend that, not just defend. A focus on execution. We're building a high-performance culture.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

FY 2026 gave us a real evidence point that that's taking hold. The targets we set, we hit, and that's a fair reflection of what's to come. Finally, an attractive financial profile. We have a clear path to high single-digit revenue growth, three consistent initiatives with an operating margin above 24% in the midterm. Taken together, this is a business with a strong foundation, with a clear plan, and one that will continue to be disciplined in its capital allocation in order to maximize shareholder returns. We'll now have time for Q&A, which I will hand to David to orchestrate.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Just check the microphone's okay. Yep. Thank you. Julian. Thank you. First question?

Julian Yates
Julian Yates
Analyst at Investec

Thanks very much. Julian from Investec. Just a couple of questions. On the revenue growth, the 7%-9%, you're already exiting at 6% in identity. You're doing 5% in location. You've highlighted many areas of the business that are doing double digit. What am I missing in terms of contingencies that you're putting in there for the 7% part of the 7%-9%, when all this sort of comes through? I just can't quite square that properly. On the second part, GBG Go, the investment to an outsourced party, could you tell us a little bit more about the party you've chosen, why you've chosen them, why you chose to go down that route, and the confidence you have it won't spill over into further development that's required because this is clearly a very fast-moving market. Thank you.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yeah. Okay. Good questions. Thank you, Julian. I'll have a go at both first.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Both for you.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Dev will chip in. On the revenue growth, I think you're right. We're a group. Estimates for FY 2027 are around GBP 300 million of revenue. There are going to be parts of our business growing faster and there are going to be parts of our business going a bit slower. I think the way probably reading between the lines of our commentary today, you can probably pick up that in our Global Fraud Solutions business, that has become slower growth for us. We're driving it for higher margin, it is slower growth. There are some bits that are powering our growth, as Dev has said, there are also some bits that are a little bit slower. That all winds up at the moment expectations, until we announced today, expectations were for mid-single digit growth.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We are announcing today that we are accelerating that to high single digit growth. That is our view. The way we will get there is we will continue the initiatives that we've been running with, for example, improving the Americas, driving GBG Go into the market. In addition to powering that, we're going to spend on this investment that we think will accelerate GBG Go even further.

Julian Yates
Julian Yates
Analyst at Investec

Is there something within the 7% number that you built in that?

Julian Yates
Julian Yates
Analyst at Investec

is not working because if things come through, the 9% seems quite realistically achievable. It's the 7% piece that I don't quite get. It feels like there's a bit of contingency in there.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I think-

Julian Yates
Julian Yates
Analyst at Investec

that you built in

David Ward
CFO at GBG

guidance is generally a range. Yeah, we've given investors a range to think about. It's also important to say it's guidance, it's not ambition. Those two things are very different.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

The only thing I would add to that before you go on to the outsourced provider is, I think two years of giving very precise guidance, we have learned. The world is an uncertain place, and we just don't want to miss. We're giving ourselves a range, which gives us flexibility to deliver within it.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I will just deal with the second part of Julian's question. I can see that there are other eager hands. The Go investment, we do mention in the release, and we have mentioned again today, that we are going to be using an outsourced development partner. We regularly use outsourced development partners. There are two in particular that we use in Identity relatively extensively. What those partners allow us to do is expand squads. We have squads that are working on products, and when we do our quarterly planning, we allocate work to each of those squads. What this will allow us to do is have additional development squads. That is effectively what we have planned for the next 12 months. We plan that work very detailed on a quarterly basis. It is all fully costed.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

It will be one of the two development partners that we rather extensively use that will be getting most of the work. The name of the partner doesn't really matter. The reason we've used the language of an outsourced partner is so that actually investors can have great confidence that we are in control of the tap. Once the work is finished, we will turn the tap off. As I said, it's all fully planned, and that's why it will not spill over beyond FY 2027. Okay. Keeping the microphone passing easy. Go to Kai, if you don't mind.

Analyst

Thanks.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Morning, Kai.

Analyst

Just want to confirm the 7%-9% and 24%+ mid-term, is that sounds like a fiscal 2029 guidance, essentially with the next two years, just to confirm?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yes, that's right. We do have a slide, actually. I don't know if, Richard, we do have a slide we could call up that it's in the pack that will be available anyway. We do spell that out in a slide in the pack. Your interpretation is exactly right. For FY 2027, we are still, as I said in the presentation, still mid-single-digit growth, and the margin will be impacted by the investment. In 2028, the investment comes back out. Operating margins are back to 23%-24%. In revenue growth terms, it's a bit of a bridge year. 2029 is the year where we expect the full 2% acceleration, FY 2028 being a bridge. It'll be somewhere around the 1% we expect.

Analyst

Just on the pathway there, last few years, there's been a fair amount of price compression also in the industry. How do you expect that to play out and potentially impact those growth targets? The other question around margins, last year you had GBP 4 million investments, which you took through exceptional GBP 6 million this year. Are investments maybe just part of the day-to-day operations and GB Group is more of a low 20s margin business rather than 24%? Thank you.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I'll take the second question first. No, I think that's wrong. I think GBG Go development is a pivotal moment for us as a group. I think, hopefully, that's been clear from the presentation. It really does change what we were to what we are going to be. Yes, you're right, we've had some investment through exceptional items in the year just finished, and we've announced this morning GBP 6 million through operating cost. In developing a platform that will future-proof the business for many, many years, I think that's only right. Price compression, I think all businesses face some challenge on price, and we have that with some customers, but I think it's a misunderstanding that there is widespread price compression in our markets. For the customers we deal with, we've got some compelling examples of where we've been able to increase prices.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Even where perhaps customers have been on longer-term arrangements with us on price, when that comes up for renewal, we've been very successful in being able to correct that, even on a multi-year basis. I think that's a bit of a misunderstanding. Certainly, in most of the sectors and customers we deal with.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

I would just add, on the exceptionals point, I think we need to remember where we were. 16 businesses acquired over a period of time that weren't integrated. There was a lot to do. We are now at the end of that, I think you'll see that taper away. On the Go investment, I think we talked about should we capitalize it? Should we exceptionalize it? We've been very clear we aren't doing that. We're expensing it just like we do all of our R&D through the P&L. On the price compression point, a point I didn't make actually in the presentation is the power of this Equifax contract gives us some real pricing power in the U.S. I won't say more than that because it's commercially sensitive, that makes us feel really good.

Analyst

Thanks. Could I just sneak in another one quickly? Just on prediction markets in the U.S.?

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Yeah

Analyst

If that sector or vertical gets regulated at some point, perhaps like sports betting in the past, how do you feel positioned if that were to happen? Thank you.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Yeah, good. I was actually with one of our partners that focuses on gaming in North America, and in their view, actually, a bit of regulation would be good because then they have to ingest more of the fraud prevention and other signals that we would have to offer them. Actually, we would be positive about it. The worry, I guess, would be if they never did, and then the regulated market thought that they wanted to move into prop betting instead.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Oh.

Tintin Stormont
Tintin Stormont
Analyst at Deutsche Bank

I got-

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Tintin's got the microphone. Okay.

Tintin Stormont
Tintin Stormont
Analyst at Deutsche Bank

Two questions from me. Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Bank. In terms of the existing customers that have transitioned to the GBG Go platform, what are the observable metrics so far in terms of what happens to their revenue run rate, or at least line of sight into future revenue run rate? Secondly, in terms of the 100+ customers, how many do you think of them has the capacity to be 1+ million type customers? In the case of Uber, is there opportunity with them in the U.S.?

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Maybe I'll take that one. On the customer transition, I think one of the key reasons, if I give you a few anecdotes, maybe rather than try and give you a broad brush. We said in our presentation that we've integrated digital identities into Go. We aren't integrating them into our classic platforms. A customer like bet365 that now needs to ingest Italian digital identity had to move to Go. That's just net new business for us. The other customers that we've seen on the platform, more than a quarter are taking multiple products. That should grow steadily as they get more familiar with the platform. I think the other point to make is we've also introduced on nearly every one of those 100, by the way, the 100 is now 121 since we closed the year, we've introduced a platform fee successfully.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

That also makes us feel good as early proof points. On the point of the 100 that have the ability to reach a million plus, I think it's somewhat subjective because it depends what they do. I would say it's probably the 80/20 rule. I think 20% of those are significant value customers. Some of them are already past the million. That nicely links me on to your third question about Uber. There's opportunity with them in many parts of the world, not just in the U.S. We're testing at the moment with them in another core GBG market. We only have three, so you can work out which one it is.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

That's also, having spent a lot of time with Uber, having flown to San Francisco to meet the dev team to pitch, there is a lot of opportunity there for us as long as we continue to successfully execute.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I'll just jump back to, I think it was the middle question about the opportunity for larger customers on GBG Go. I think it's one of the reasons behind the investment. We talked about, in the presentation, we talked about a pipeline of 225 customers in that pipeline. Not all of those are mega customers, there are enough mega customers there that give us the confidence that now is the time to invest in the platform because those customers are showing an interest. We need to deliver. If there's some capability they need adding, we're going to add it quickly. Charlie?

Charlie Brennan
Charlie Brennan
Analyst at Jefferies

Yeah. Hi, it's Charlie Brennan from Jefferies. Just two from me. Firstly, in terms of this investment that you're putting down, how do we get comfortable that that's you moving ahead of competitors rather than playing catch up? Is there anything tangible in something like win rates that you can track and share with us that highlights that? Then secondly, in terms of the margin, you've got a longer-term opportunity to retire legacy platforms. As we've seen with the compliance product, as you retire these platforms, is there the risk of any revenue loss?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I'll take the second one first, and maybe Dev can help on the first one. On retirements of platforms, the compliance platform was somewhat unique in this respect, in that actually it was a platform that historically had a lot of volume going through from the cryptocurrency platforms. As you know, we've talked about that for many years. That volume just isn't there anymore. It wasn't a particularly good match for GBG Go. There was some functionality there that we were walking away from. It wasn't possible to be able to migrate all of those customers. We knew that going into it. For the remaining platforms that we have on our list to retire, that is not the case. It's a very different case.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

All of those customers we would want to stand behind, and we will make sure that by the time they are ready to migrate or upgrade is the better for word, by the time they're ready to upgrade to Go, that the functionality is all there to welcome them. We're not expecting a revenue headwind, quite the opposite.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

On the point on the features and functionality, I think, look, as you'd expect, we spent a ton of time going through this with the board, then reviewing in detail where this puts us against the competition. Commercially sensitive, I'm not going to go through all of it. We are very clear where this puts us against the competition by the end of FY 2027, then what that enables us to do in 2028. That is not catching up. That is creating category leadership in the things that we've spoken about today. In terms of proof points, maybe something we can take away, Charlie, but I think you'll see them in more case studies that will talk to you about customers that we would not have been able to attract and win or scale prior to what we're delivering into Go.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Maybe actually frauds that we're able to see and stop, which again, is really where the value lies for customers.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Alex Short from Berenberg.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Morning, Alex.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Three from me. Maybe I'll take them one at a time. The first is just a clarification. You talked about the momentum continuing into FY 2027. Are you explicitly saying that you've been doing mid-single digit growth so far in 2027, with harder growth comps in H1 2027 than you had in H2 2026 in mind?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yes, we are saying that we continue our momentum into the start of FY 2027.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Yeah.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I think in terms of the comps, that's not really how we think about it in terms of tougher comps or not tougher comps. I think we carry into the year some good momentum in terms of growth. We're confident that what we're doing now will continue to drive growth into the second half as well, even if obviously the second half of last year was a bit stronger.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Let me give you an example. Temu. I talked about getting Temu up and running in 34 countries. That started in December. That will continue to, but it wasn't an immediate tick-up to what we now see. I think most of the big ticket things that we've seen drive revenue growth will continue to drive growth consistently through the year.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Okay. Second one, I guess we're comfortable that there's a revenue growth acceleration, I guess one of the questions I've had this morning from investors is around the underlying IRR on these investments, specifically the GBP 6 million. I'm quite interested to know at a higher level how you think about the ROI on these sort of upfront investments. Just allow me some overly simple math. You've got a GBP 6 million upfront investment for 2% of revenue gain per year, which is roughly GBP 6 million, right?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yeah.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Which you probably get about GBP 1 million in cash, which would be a six-year payback period.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Not quite sure how you got to.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

No.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Our gross margin is quite a bit higher than GBP 1 million.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

cash margin. Like a free cash.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

No, you're assuming we're not having any margin accretion, which we are.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Okay.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

No, I think high level maths, you're about right. We're spending GBP 6 million in one year to get at least GBP 6 million of revenue incrementally into the midterm. That even with a gross margin of 70% is a good payback. The return on that is very strong.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Okay. Finally, just on the enhanced Equifax partnership. I guess what gives you comfortable in the sustainability of that as a competitive advantage? What stops competitors doing something similar? Like how hard won is it, basically?

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

It helps that Mark and I did the deal, so that helps. Mark's the CEO of Equifax. It helps that since we signed the deal, we've had six team meetings where we've had 20 people from Equifax, 10 from GBG, talking about the addressable market for gaming, the addressable market for public sector. It helps we put out a press release. That's the first global press release Equifax have put out with a partner like us in four years. It helps that we're already adding value to them, and they're adding value to us. In terms of the competition point, that's really key. We've got access to some Equifax data that none of our competitors have. Especially the new-to-credit, hard-to-find individuals, which as you can imagine, they're the hardest people to identify, the hardest people to match. We've got differentiated preferential access to that data set.

Alex Short
Alex Short
Analyst at Berenberg

Thank you.

Harvey Robinson
Analyst at Panmure Liberum

Hi, it's Harvey Robinson at Panmure Liberum. Just coming back to this one-off nature of the investment. I think going through the presentation, you showed how you created a product from the hackathon. We're obviously talking about agents, which I don't think many of us were talking about that long ago. Could we get a feel for, of the new products you've identified in this six, when do they become ideas? I think I'm struggling to think that this is a one-off. There'll be new stuff that you haven't thought about that will come along. To what extent were these ideas this year? Is it long-term planning? Is it out of the hackathon? Could you just give us a feel for that? It does sound that you're very clear that it's a one-off, and I don't think people here are quite as clear on that.

Harvey Robinson
Analyst at Panmure Liberum

Thank you.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

It's a really good question. I think what I would start by saying is we invest nearly GBP 45 million a year in technology and innovation every year. We are constantly innovating, and today you've seen some of the examples of what we're able to develop out of that GBP 45 million. What we are doing, as I said earlier, I think it was to Julian's question, what we're doing here is we are creating a new platform, and what we saw during the last 12 months was that because we've got strong customer demand, it's quite easy actually for us to be diverted onto what customers need, and we saw some of that in the year just finished. What we need to do in the next year is finish the platform.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

We will finish the platform, and we will continue to respond to customer needs for one year, and then our ongoing spend will be fine to cover continual development of the platform and customer needs. I think that's the easiest way to.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Have you ever met David? He's quite tight. The one thing I would add to that, just in all seriousness is, you asked the question about when did these. These ideas are not massively new. Yes, technology has jumped them forwards and yes, we're being more effective in how we're producing code in our teams. Actually what's made the biggest difference to me and my comfort level is we've moved our product and tech teams. I've spoken about this for two years. Everybody is a salesperson. Everybody needs to meet with customers. We moved Gus, who you heard from, to the U.S. a year ago.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

When Gus is telling us now, "I've met with 400 customers this year, they all want this," makes the decisions a lot easier. That proximity to the customer is a massive change.

Harvey Robinson
Analyst at Panmure Liberum

Sorry, can I follow?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Follow up, sorry.

Harvey Robinson
Analyst at Panmure Liberum

There's a sort of tangential follow-on question on chat. Why don't you just spend more and go even faster?

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Have you ever met David?

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yeah.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

I refer you to my previous question, my answer.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yeah. We feel we've pitched it at the right level. I think that's the best answer I can give you on that.

Tanzila Ali
Tanzila Ali
Analyst at Peel Hunt

I have two questions. I'm Tanzila from Peel Hunt.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

Yeah.

Tanzila Ali
Tanzila Ali
Analyst at Peel Hunt

Coming back to the investing question again. You mentioned that you're investing GBP 6 million for 1%-2% incremental revenue. How much of that uplift is already visible, for example, in your existing pipeline versus dependent on new product capability landing? My second question is on the AI part. For example, a lot of the tech companies we are seeing that globally they're cutting workflow given the AI driven. While of course GBG, you guys are saying you're making a new investment. Is this incremental spend like saying, what extent is this catch-up driven by under-investment in the past, for example? Yeah.

David Ward
CFO at GBG

I thought we might get that question today. Under-investment in the past. No, as I said, we invest GBP 45 million a year in technology and innovation. This is a one-off step change in order to complete the platform. I think it's a very similar question to the one that I gave to Harvey earlier, that actually there's so much in the pipeline that is customer demand led. That is what we're building, in addition to making sure that the platform is ready for all the future capabilities we want to launch onto it as well.

Dev Dhiman
CEO at GBG

Great. Very good. Thank you. Thank you for your questions, and thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you. That concludes the presentation for today.

Analysts
    • Alex Short
      Analyst at Berenberg
    • Charlie Brennan
      Analyst at Jefferies
    • David Ward
      CFO at GBG
    • Dev Dhiman
      CEO at GBG
    • Gonzalo Ponce Pestana
      Director of Presales and Professional Services at GBG
    • Gus Tomlinson
      Chief Product and Technology Officer at GBG
    • Harvey Robinson
      Analyst at Panmure Liberum
    • Julian Yates
      Analyst at Investec
    • Kartik Venkatesh
      Global Head of Innovation at GBG
    • Tanzila Ali
      Analyst at Peel Hunt
    • Tintin Stormont
      Analyst at Deutsche Bank
    • Analyst
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