Telecom Plus H2 2026 & Strategy update Earnings Report

Telecom Plus EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 102.20
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Telecom Plus Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $1.94 billion
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Telecom Plus Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026 & Strategy update
• Date: 6/24/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:00AM ET

Telecom Plus (LON:TEP) provides a range of utility services in the United Kingdom. It offers various services, including gas, electricity, fixed line telephony, mobile telephony, broadband, and insurance, as well as bill protection and life cover, home insurance and boiler cover, and cashback card services under the Utility Warehouse and TML brands. Telecom Plus Plc was incorporated in 1996 and is based in London, the United Kingdom.

Telecom Plus H2 2026 & Strategy update Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Telecom Plus launched a new five-year plan to double its high-value multi-service customer base from about 500,000 to over 1 million by FY 2031, rather than focus on total customer growth alone.
• Negative Sentiment: Management said tougher competition in energy and broadband has led to more lower-quality single-service sign-ups, higher churn, and a deterioration in customer mix, which has weighed on earnings quality and the stock’s valuation.
• Positive Sentiment: The plan includes GBP 55 million per year of P&L investment across pricing, cross-sell, partner growth, brand building, and digital/AI, with FY 2027 adjusted PBT guided to GBP 80 million-GBP 90 million and FY 2031 targeted at GBP 175 million.
• Positive Sentiment: Management highlighted encouraging early execution signals, including multi-service customer growth accelerating to an annualized 9.7% in April-May, monthly active partners up 15%, and early brand pilots producing a 4-point awareness lift and a 10% increase in partner-generated customers.
• Positive Sentiment: The company sees additional upside from expanding insurance, relaunching small business, and using AI-driven digital tools to improve cross-sell, customer service, and efficiency, targeting digital interactions above 65% and a roughly 30% reduction in admin cost per service by FY 2031.

Presentation

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Good morning, everyone. I am Stuart Burnett, Chief Executive of Telecom Plus, and you will have seen that we released our FY 2026 results this morning and published a video presentation of the results online. Nick and I will take any Q&A on those FY 2026 results after the presentation today because we wanted to spend the time this morning to talk through in detail our strategy update and new five-year plan that we have launched today following the review that we announced in our trading update back in April. I am going to lead us through the strategy update together with some of our leadership team.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Joining me, you have got Nick Schoenfeld, our CFO, who you know, together with Justin Mazzina, who heads up our partner network, David Walter, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Rob Harris, our Chief Operating Officer, as well as various other members of our leadership team who I will introduce you to later. In terms of the running order, I am going to start by providing an overview of our new five-year plan, and then we will step through the important features of our business model and the impact of changing market conditions, followed by a detailed run-through of the five-year plan itself, then what delivery of the plan looks like before wrapping up and moving on to Q&A. There is a lot to cover. It is going to be about an hour and a half of presentation, followed by around 30 minutes of Q&A. Let us dive in.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The five-year plan that we are launching today is all about how we return Telecom Plus to delivering on and being rewarded for the unique and special features of the business that I suspect attracted many of you to Telecom Plus in the first place. In short, it is about building on our leading position in acquiring high-value multi-service customers. The key takeaways are set out on this following slide. First of all, we have a unique capital-light business model based on acquiring these high-value multi-service customers who have got market-leading lifetimes and financial contributions that our competitors simply cannot match. We are able to sign up these multi-service customers when others cannot because of our unique partner route to market, which has been proven over many years as a powerful way to overcome that natural inertia that exists for switching multiple services at once.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This multi-service and partner-driven business model, well, it really works. We have got a 30-year track record of profitable growth with particularly strong customer and profit growth performance over the last five years, nearly 14% and 19% CAGR respectively. That said, more recently, changes in market conditions with increased competition, particularly in the energy and the broadband markets, have made it more difficult to sign up multi-service customers in volume, resulting in us signing up more lower quality single-service customers with shorter lifetimes and lower financial contributions, which of course dilutes the quality of the overall customer base and the resulting earnings. Today, we are launching a new five-year plan focused not simply on top-line customer growth, but instead on doubling our high-value multi-service customer base from half a million today to over 1 million by FY 2031. There are four key pillars to the plan.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

First of all, optimizing our multi-service customer proposition. Second, scaling our unique partner sales channel. Third, building a nationally recognized and trusted brand. Finally, delivering a best-in-class digital experience with AI at its core and with market-leading cost reserve. Delivering on this plan will create significant value, but it will also require significant P&L investment. It's going to require GBP 55 million per annum of P&L investment over the course of the plan, and we'll step through later exactly how that all flows through. This means that for FY 2027, the current year, adjusted profits before tax will be in the range of GBP 80 million-GBP 90 million. I absolutely appreciate that this is a big move, but as you'll hear, I think as we go through the presentation, it's absolutely the right move for the business and the plan is the right plan.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Successful delivery of that plan will result by FY 2031 in around GBP 79 million a year of additional high-quality profits driven by that increase in multi-service customers, and GBP 20 million per annum in additional benefits from our digitalization and AI programs. Together, that will lead to a targeted adjusted profit before tax in FY 2031 of GBP 175 million with appropriate contingency built into that number, given of course we're looking about five years out. Importantly, these will be incredibly high quality compounding earnings with strong and growing cash generation each year driven by that significant growth in high-quality multi-service customers and with EPS growing well in excess of customer growth. Finally, and critically, this isn't just a plan on paper. The steps that we're taking are themselves an endorsement of the unique features of the business model that we know works.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

There are also a number of very positive signals that we're already seeing from various early-stage trials, which we'll come back to later and which collectively give us high levels of confidence in the deliverability of the plan. Those are the headlines with a real focus on the longstanding foundations that have made Telecom Plus different and successful for over 30 years, especially our multi-service proposition and our partner route to market, and a clear decision to take control of our future direction. Key to all of this is to really understand our business model, and in particular, the power of multi-service. Why multi-service customers are the centerpiece of the model, why they're so valuable, why we're focused on doubling our number of these special customers from half a million to a million over the next five years, and what that will mean for long-term value creation.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Some of you will already be aware of some of this, but it's important to nonetheless step through it because it provides some really important framing. There are also some very important new insights and data points which really go to the heart of why this is the right plan for the business and for you as shareholders. The starting point is to clarify exactly how our multi-service customer proposition works. This slide shows how the proposition is put together. Very simply, the more services a customer takes, the bigger the savings, which provides an incentive to join, an incentive to take more services, and then to stay with us for years.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This is structured so that as they take more services, customers receive a bigger discount off their energy bill, funded through some of the additional margin from the additional service or services they take, plus the operational efficiencies that we gain from spreading one set of operating costs across multiple revenue streams. This is what makes the multi-service proposition affordable and sustainable. It means that while we still make some additional margin from each additional service the customer takes, we also critically extend their lifetime. That's how the multi-service proposition works. Let's turn to the value of these multi-service customers compared to single-service customers. In this table, we've broken out our organic customer base into one, two, three, and four service customer cohorts.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

For clarity, what we're talking about here are core service types, where core services are energy, broadband, mobile, and insurance, and service types meaning, for example, we count energy as one, even if a customer takes both electricity and gas. Likewise, multiple mobile SIMs just counts as one core service type in this view. As you can see, multi-service customers have market-leading lifetimes with an astonishing almost 25 years lifetime for the highest quality four service homeowners. While multi-service customers as a whole average around 13 years of lifetime, significantly more than single-service customers. I would note, however, that even our single-service customers do have a lifetime that would be the envy of many of our competitors. You can see on this next slide that this means our multi-service customers have an average lifetime, which is 1.7x that of a single-service customer.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Of course, lifetime, as I said, is only one part of the equation. As you can see from the chart on the right, our multi-service customers have an average annual variable financial contribution of around GBP 185, which is 1.8x the contribution from single-service customers. 1.7x the lifetime, 1.8x the contribution. Combined, that's more than 3x the overall value. Put simply, multi-service customers have market-leading lifetimes and financial contributions, and therefore overall lifetime value. If ever there was an endorsement of our multi-service customer proposition and the partner model, which signs up these multi-service customers, then this is it. Our unique model enables us to build a long lifetime, high-value, multi-service customer base that our competitors simply cannot match. As we'll come onto, it's that high-value multi-service customer segment, which our new five year plan is focused on growing.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

There's one additional benefit for multi-service that I wanted to call out upfront given its importance, and this is what I'd call the innate multi-service data advantage. By definition, we have significantly more data, insights, and touch points with our multi-service customers than any of our competitors get from their customers. We know their energy consumption habits, both volume and time of day. We know where and when they've traveled and how often from their mobile data and their roaming behaviors. We know the number and type of devices connected to their Wi-Fi. We know the size, value, key details of their home, their card spending habits, their payment history. We know their credit quality, contact propensity rate. The list goes on and on.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This presents significant, and in the world of AI, rapidly growing opportunities for us to identify and create value in ways and in places that others simply cannot. In many ways, our multi-service customer base is the perfect use case for AI, giving us access to unique value creation opportunities, including identifying when and how to cross-sell additional products or services, tailoring our proposition to meet the specific needs of that individual customer, identifying churn propensity triggers, supporting our partners to identify which of their contacts are the best prospects for us, identifying efficiencies and service enhancements across the whole end-to-end customer experience, and pricing our services, and in particular, our insurance services, with the benefit of a, what you might call, a 360-degree inside-out view of the customer.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We'll come back to many of these points as we go through our plans, but it's a highly valuable feature that shouldn't be overlooked. We've talked about the unique value of multi-service customers, but the reason why we stand alone in building this sort of high-quality multi-service customer base, well, it's because of our partner route to market. It's the only proven model for signing them up. Indeed, our partner network has been at the core of our success for the last 30 years, exactly because of that ability to sign up multi-service customers. Why is that? First of all, there is a natural inertia and also a perceived complexity to switching multiple services all at once. It's the sort of inertia that traditional advertising or digital marketing simply cannot overcome.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

A conversation with a local trusted friend or a family member offering personalized support with a genuine recommendation or endorsement, it does exactly that. It overcomes the inertia. Secondly, the people who respond to direct advertising or digital campaigns or switch through a price comparison website are typically what I would call savvy switchers, who are typically loss-making in year one for their supplier and will then switch around every year or the moment that you try to make a fair return by rolling them off from their introductory tariff. These are exactly the sort of customers that we don't want. The local contacts our partners are speaking to at the school gates, on the side of the footy field, in the queue at the butcher's, at the golf club, they're typically not regular switchers. They were not looking to switch.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

They like the idea of the savings, the simplicity, and the service that you get from our multi-service offer, and they buy into that personal recommendation of long-term peace-of-mind pricing and the idea of never needing to switch again. It's a genuine motor around our business. We've got the expertise in building and managing out this vast local volunteer network that nobody else in the country can match. We've consistently seen growing demand for our partner opportunity. Partner numbers have doubled in the last five years. More recently, we've even seen an increase from the 77,000 partners at the end of last year, end of FY 2026, to over 81,000 today. An increase of over 4,000 in just two and a half months, showing that it's more relevant and more in demand now than ever before.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Through this large network of partners, we are just one degree removed from the vast majority of the U.K.'s best customers up and down the country. Looking ahead, we benefit from several multi-year structural tailwinds. The cost of living squeeze, more and more people in genuine need, not only of savings, but also in income, an additional income that can help them weather the storm of rising costs and unaffordable mortgage payments and a challenging jobs market. There's the work transition. Growing numbers of people who are looking for a more flexible part-time way to earn. While traditional gig economy employers can provide short-term income, the regular income our active partners make, and especially the passive income they get, is second to none in the U.K. Finally, the pensions crisis will be a multi-decade rather than just a multi-year tailwind.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

People simply aren't saving enough for retirement. As well as providing a flexible working option for pensioners, the passive revenue share income that our opportunity provides is an ideal supplement for pension income. In terms of the size of this opportunity, we did some research with the Cebr that shows that there are currently 20 million adults in the U.K. who have some form of second or part-time source of income. As we double our current partner numbers to around 150,000 over the coming years, that will still only be less than 1% market share of this growing marketplace. Finally, a word on AI here. AI is already proving its worth in enhancing our partners' ability to perform their roles, giving them better tools and better information. We'll come back to some of that later.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

It certainly doesn't disrupt their role, just as the launch of the internet or the launch of price comparison sites haven't disrupted it either. Because it's the personal connection, the explanation, and the recommendation together with that sense of community and being a part of something that overcomes the inertia and the perceived complexity. Unlike more commoditized services like price comparison sites, we look forward to an AI-enabled world with a great deal of optimism and excitement. That's multi-service and partner. Onto one other key feature of our business model that I wanted to call out, which is our capital-light approach. We're experts at acquiring and looking after high-quality customers in what you might call the capital-light downstream or retail part of each of our markets, and we've partnered with experts in the capital-intensive upstream parts.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Part of this, we put in place long-term wholesale supply agreements across each of our service verticals, ensuring that we have long-term access to the services, the features, the infrastructure, as well as the wholesale pricing that we need to compete. As one of the largest and strongest of the independent challengers in each of our markets, and with a proposition and route to market that's not seen as a direct competitor to our wholesale providers, in fact, they view it as complementary, this means that we have good, strong negotiating leverage in ensuring we have market-leading terms. One case in point is our long-term energy wholesale supply agreement with E.ON, which runs to 2033 and provides us with insulation from price volume volatility, whether due to extreme weather conditions or macro political events around the globe.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

In addition, we're not exposed to the collateral or mark-to-market requirements associated with forward hedging. It's a similar story in broadband and mobile, where we are what you call a virtual operator, and we're not exposed to the capital costs of the networks and the upstream infrastructure. As a related point, it also means that we're not exposed to the technology or obsolescent risks or the volume risks that exist upstream. Again, in insurance, we primarily operate as a broker, albeit we do have a captive insurer in the group to provide security of supply, and we put in place extensive reinsurance. All in all, this capital-light model has enabled us to maintain a long-run net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of around one times, whilst at the same time growing the business and returning 80% of adjusted PAT to shareholders.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Pulling all of that together, here is a visualization of our unique business model, which some of you will recognize, showing how it all fits together. It all starts with our multi-service customer proposition. By bundling together energy, broadband, mobile, and insurance, we acquire those multi-service customers with market-leading lifetimes and contributions that we've talked about. As well as the more value, the more services that they take, multi-service customers benefit from the simplicity of getting all of these services on one bill, one phone number, one app, one password, combined with our award-winning customer service. Together, that means that once they join us, they don't want to leave. Essentially, we aim to be their last ever switch. We also get a number of structural financial benefits from multi-service customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

More margin, lower bad debt, lower cost to serve, a higher contribution to our fixed overheads. We reinvest some of this back into the customer proposition. That means that we can put together a compelling customer offer whilst at the same time growing profitably. This creates a proposition which is genuinely worthy of recommendation. That's how we sign up our multi-service customers, that word of mouth recommendation by our partners. See, our partners are the key that unlock the access to the multi-service customers. That's the business model. As I said earlier, this is a business model that really works. We've got that 30-year track record of customer growth and strong financial performance.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

As you can see here, that performance in terms of customer and profit growth has been particularly strong over the last five years, with a CAGR in organic customers of 13.8% and an adjusted profit before tax in 18.7%. More recently, changes in market conditions have made it more difficult, as I said earlier, to sign up as many of the high-quality multi-service customers that we were talking about a moment ago. You'll remember that back in 2022, our core energy market was then impacted by the Ukraine war and the ensuing energy crisis, and this had a number of consequences.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

It cleared out the uncapitalized, unsustainable operators who had brought this sort of destructive price competition to the energy market. Regulatory changes were introduced to make sure that unsustainable suppliers like that could never operate in the market and brought in new financial resilience and capital adequacy rules. We view these as very positive changes. They removed the unsustainable price competition that had impacted our growth between 2014 and 2021 and were designed to ensure that suppliers operated rationally and based on a level playing field. During this period, whilst most other suppliers essentially shut up shop and stopped taking on new customers and instead used that sort of hiatus period to modernize and digitalize and re-platform their technology stacks, we instead seized the opportunity to return our business to significant growth.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Our view, based on the market dynamics at the time, was firstly that single-service customers would not only be profitable, as they have always been for us, but also that they would have much longer lifetimes, given that there would be less switching. Secondly, that we'd need to invest less in both acquiring and holding onto these customers, given the market was more rational. We set our business growth targets based on these assumptions. Since then, the market dynamics have shifted. Octopus has emerged as a new type of challenger. It's the U.K.'s largest supplier now. It's up to over 25% market share from just 6% five years ago. It's achieved this by investing hundreds of millions of GBP in building a strong brand, never seen before in this marketplace, and an advanced digital platform and customer experience.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This has coincided with customer expectations shifting rapidly, and that's set to continue as the energy market as a whole modernizes and customers start to engage with and demand self-serve capabilities, as well as new developments like time-of-use tariffs and other innovative tariff types. You can see on this chart that we're the only other large supplier, alongside Octopus, that's gaining organic market share. All of the other remaining large players, British Gas, E.ON, EDF, ScottishPower, OVO, they're all now losing market share, and as a result, they've been competing hard on price to stem the losses. As you can see on the chart, British Gas technically moved forward on this chart because it acquired inorganically the customers of yet another failed supplier, Rebel Energy, out of the supplier of last resort process last year.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This chart shows how our energy competitors have been offering, linked to the above, increasingly competitive introductory pricing over the last year. Whilst the degree of competitor price investment was already fairly high in FY 2025, that you can see on the left-hand side of the chart, that has meaningfully stepped up over the last year, as you can see over on the right. This level of discounting has meant that it has made it more difficult to acquire as many multi-service customers as for even with our multi-service discounts. For example, for our three-service customers, we might often only appear in the middle of the pricing tables at moments, versus some single service tariffs being offered by competitors. At the same time, customers have greater incentives to churn, often able to save what looks like a headline GBP 150 or GBP 250 saving or more by switching.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This has resulted in us signing up fewer multi-service customers and more lower quality single-service customers across both energy and mobile and seeing our overall churn rate increase. However, there is one additional trend, which I think is really important to understand and which underpins the fact that despite the recent market shifts and this increased competition, the business model is well set with the right plan and the right actions to keep acquiring more multi-service customers, and critically, that the value of those multi-service customers remains as high as ever and is really worth investing in.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

As you can see here, when we look at the 12-month churn rate of different cohorts of our customers over time, you can see on the left that the churn rate of our single-service customers has increased quite meaningfully in recent years in response to some of those recent changes in market conditions. On the flip side, however, the churn rate of our multi-service customers has actually improved over the same period, even despite the changing market conditions and increased competition. This clearly demonstrates that the highly valuable heart of our business, those multi-service customers, remain strong and intact despite changing market conditions. It is here where we will be focusing our future growth because, as I said earlier, we have got half a million of these multi-service customers with the market leading lifetimes and contribution level and a value that none of our competitors can match.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

By the end of our five year plan, we expect to have over 1 million of these customers who are able to retain and build value even in more competitive, challenging market conditions. Before we move on, a quick word about broadband as well, as some of these changes in market conditions and competitive dynamics are not just in energy. At the same time, in the broadband market, the nationwide full fiber rollout and the emergence of Altnets. These are some of the new full fiber broadband providers like CityFibre, Community Fibre, Netomnia, and others that you will have heard of, who are needing to demonstrate to their financial backers that they can get volume on their networks, has resulted in an acute period of competition for broadband.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

You can see here the downward pressure on broadband pricing over the last few years, which is all in the face, of course, of meaningful underlying cost inflation. While some consolidation has begun to take place in this market, and we know from experience that as new technologies are rolled out in broadband, there is typically a period of margin compression followed by margin expansion back to normal levels. Right here, right now, these dynamics have impacted our broadband gross adds and our broadband churn levels. What does all this mean? Well, as those market shifts have played through, as well as our strong total customer and profit trajectory that we showed you earlier, we have also seen the following trends.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

First of all, our number of organic services per customer has fallen, as you can see on the left, while on the right, you can see how our churn rate has increased back to these higher historic levels, driven by single service churn, as mentioned above, after a significant fall in the big dip you can see in the middle, which was during the energy crisis. I think it's worth digging a little bit deeper into the fall in services per customer. As you can see on that chart on the left, the fall in services per customer really started from FY 2023 onwards, and in that same period between FY 2023 and FY 2026, it's important to note that first of all, that we have still increased, in absolute terms, our base of high-value multi-service customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

You can see that on the left-hand side here, we've increased them over that period from around 400,000 multi-service customers end of FY 2023 to 500,000 at the end of FY 2026. Albeit, as you can see on the chart on the right, that that rate of increase has slowed quite meaningfully over the same period, given those changed market dynamics that we've already highlighted. Even in those more challenging market conditions, we've shown that we can still grow in absolute terms our multi-service customer base, but we've not been set up to do it at the expected rate. What this means is that over the last few years, while we've still grown our multi-service customers in absolute terms, the percentage of single-service customers in our overall base has increased, and the percentage of multi-service customers in our base has decreased, as you can see here.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Of course, that has a knock-on effect in reducing our overall customer quality. It means reduced average customer lifetimes and contributions and therefore reduced lifetime values. Reversing these trends, so growing the percentage of our customer base who are multi-service with the percentage of single-service customers therefore reducing, is, in our view, the key step if we want to return to being valued as a growing high-quality earnings compounder. You can see here why it's so important. As a reminder, these top two charts show the total customer and profit growth trajectory over the last few years, and we showed those charts earlier.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

In the bottom left here now, you can see how the quality of the customer growth, measured here by services per customer, has been falling, and how with a growing proportion of shorter lifetime, lower contribution single-service customers, where the churn rate of these single-service customers is actually increasing for the reasons we mentioned earlier, this obviously has an impact on the quality of future earnings, which over time would put pressure on future profits. One view of this is obviously the de-rating which we've experienced that you can see in the bottom right-hand side of the slide. What we're announcing today are the clear steps that will reverse those trends on the bottom of the slide, significantly increasing the quality of the customer base, enabling us to consistently build high-quality earnings faster than we add customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

All of that said, I would stress here that single-service customers still remain a valuable part of the overall business, despite their shorter average lifetime and lower contribution. They're still profitable, albeit less profitable than multi-service customers. Whilst they have shorter lifetimes, at seven years, they still have a lifetime that would be the envy of most of our competitors. They make an important contribution to covering our overheads in industries where scale is, of course, important. They improve our wholesale commercial negotiating position, particularly in the telecom space, where our wholesale economics improve with scale. Of course, single-service customers can also be the multi-service customers of the future. We know who they are, and we can target our cross-sell efforts towards them as a feeder pool. What does that mean for future inorganic opportunities?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Right here, right now, the focus is absolutely on organically growing our multi-service customer base, albeit of course, where we identify compelling value from inorganic opportunities, we will take a look at them, but only as a complement to our organic multi-service strategy, not instead of it. That brings us to where we are here today. In summary, we have a business model which has the key inherent features and the clear opportunity to create real value over the coming years through doubling down on multi-service customers. Changes in market conditions have meant that this business model is not fully maximizing this significant opportunity, resulting in an increased percentage of single-service customers with shorter lifetimes and increasing churn. As you'll be aware, we had a medium-term target of two million customers, and that remains as a medium-term target.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

As I've unpacked, it's essential that we really apply our focus on doubling our most valuable segment, our multi-service customers. They have longer lifetimes, they make higher contributions, and critically, they are resilient to changes in market conditions. The size of the total customer base will rise on the tide, but the value creation from scaling these high-quality multi-service customers is the real prize here. We have a clear plan to address this and set the business on a path to deliver high quality, compounding growth, and creating significant long-term value through doubling our multi-service customers to one million over the next five years. Let's step through the plan. The plan covers the following four areas. First of all, optimizing our unique multi-service proposition. Second of all, scaling our partner sales channel. Third, building a nationally recognized and trusted brand.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Fourth, delivering a best-in-class digital experience with AI at its core and with market-leading cost to serve. You can see the metrics that we'll be looking to move as a result over on the right-hand side. Increasing our multi-service customer growth rate, increasing in-live cross-sells, significantly increasing insurance service growth, and launching a number of new insurance products, increasing the number of active partners in our network, building our brand awareness, and lowering our admin cost per service. As we said earlier, this is an integrated investment plan across a number of different but related areas, all designed to increase the number and percentage of multi-service customers, boost our partner channel, and deliver high-quality compounding earnings growth going forward.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

It reflects the fact that market dynamics are changing, customer expectations are evolving, competition for attention is increasing, and technology is reshaping how value needs to be delivered. We see a clear opportunity to build on our existing proven strengths, harnessing the unique features of our business model, combined with the power of technology, data, and AI to transform how we acquire and deliver, both for partners and customers, and enhance the value we offer them while unlocking undeveloped areas of the business. As mentioned earlier, delivering on this plan will require significant P&L investment in order to unlock the significant value creation, and Nick is going to step you through the numbers on this.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

Thank you, Stuart. On this following slide we set out the GBP 55 million per annum planned investment during the five-year plan. This is, of course, a significant investment, but this has the key goal of doubling our multi-service customers to 1 million by 2031. In addition to enabling our digitalization and productivity projects. This plan is linked to clear measures which will be used to track the outcome of these investments. The actual targets which we have against these measures will be discussed when we go through each of these plans later on in the presentation. Starting with our multi-service price investment, we have a total envelope of approximately GBP 30 million per annum.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

Stuart will share some more detail about these pricing investments later on, but for obvious competitive reasons, we can't go into the specific details as to how this will actually be deployed in practice to the individual services and customer subgroups. But this will, of course, be carefully targeted in a way to maximize multi-service adoption. Furthermore, we plan to invest around GBP 5 million each year in cross-selling to our existing customer base. For instance, that's equivalent to a GBP 100 incentive across 50,000 of our customers to take additional services in a particular year. Where, for example, cross-selling another service to a three-service customer will increase their lifetime by 10 years from 14 years to 24 years. On insurance, we're planning an investment of GBP 6 million, which is to both launch new products and promote our insurance offering.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

This will be split between approximately GBP 3 million of incremental OpEx investment in building capability across the insurance ecosystem and approximately GBP 3 million of investment directly into insurance pricing. Building out this fourth core service will create even more opportunities to attract multi-service customers. We plan to spend GBP 4 million each year scaling our partner opportunity, which will be split between the partner commission structure and the capabilities required to broaden the partner opportunity, as we'll explain later on. The investment focuses on our key multi-service customer acquisition channel. After all, it's through the partners that we're able to acquire multi-service customers at scale in a way that others cannot through traditional acquisition methods. Our GBP 5 million brand investment is built around local impact. The aim here is to make every partner conversation easier, which enables partners to convert more multi-service customers.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

As recognition increases, the burden of proof drops, that unlocks an important compounding effect. Lastly, we plan to invest GBP 5 million of OpEx each year in order to leapfrog our digital experience to best in class and further develop our AI initiatives. That will enable the delivery of significant operating cost savings per customer and per service, whilst at the same time improving the quality of the customer service journey. As we'll see later on, by FY 2031, we expect to deliver GBP 20 million of annual benefits from this net of inflation. As you'll see when we go through each of these plans in more detail later on, this investment is targeted to deliver significant long-term value with the growth of our multi-service customer base, with its high lifetime values at its core.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

Here on the next slide, you can see how the five year plan will build over that long-term shareholder value. As mentioned, we're targeting a doubling of our multi-service customer base from approximately 500,000 today to 1 million by FY 2031, delivering the enhanced variable contribution and customer lifetime which results from that growth. To understand the impact on FY 2031 relative to FY 2027, we start on this slide with the midpoint of our indicated FY 2027 adjusted PBT range of GBP 80 million-GBP 90 million, which we'll come back to later. As we said earlier, multi-service customers provide a variable annual contribution of over GBP 185 each. We expect to double the number of multi-service customers from approximately 500,000 in FY 2026 to 1 million in FY 2031.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

Given that we expect up to 75,000 of such customers to be added in FY 2027, between FY 2027 to FY 2031, we plan to be adding approximately 430,000 of them whilst keeping the number of single service customers broadly stable. That means an incremental variable contribution from the focus on multi-service customers of approximately GBP 79 million per annum by FY 2031 relative to FY 2027. In addition, there are around GBP 20 million of expected operating cost savings, net of inflation from our digitalization plans. Taken together, that would take us to our adjusted PBT target for FY 2031 to around GBP 175 million after including a contingency, given that we're looking five years out.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

In addition to the increase in quantum of profits, critically, this plan delivers a significant increase in the quality of profits, given that it is driven by a doubling of high-quality multi-service customers from 500,000 - 1 million over the next five

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

years. These customers will each provide 1.8x more annual variable contribution than single service customers at GBP 185. In addition to that, the average multi-service customer has 1.7x the lifetime of a single service customer at 13 years. On top of that, we actually expect the makeup of the multi-service portion of the customer base to evolve and improve as the plan progresses, as we cross-sell to more customers and sell more insurance. For instance, we expect the growth in the number of four service customers to be faster than the growth of three service customers and so on.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

That further mix change within the multi-service base would increase the average lifetime of multi-service customers from 13 years to 15 years over the course of the plan. Looking at the overall plan, that will arrest and reverse the current deterioration in customer mix that we've been seeing. The expected lifetime of our customer base in FY 2031 will therefore be around 35% longer than the average lifetime that the overall base would have in five years' time if we simply left the current trends to continue. Of course, with that increase in customer lifetimes, we expect lower churn, lower bad debt, greater economies of scale, and lower cost to serve from that evolved customer base over time. That's why we firmly believe that this is the right course of action and the right plan to create shareholder value.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

As Stuart's already mentioned, and will be demonstrating later by describing the results of trials that we've been undertaking, we have a high level of confidence in delivering the plan. Stuart.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Nick. Now let's go through the actual detail of the plan itself. I'm going to kick off talking through how we will optimize our multi-service proposition before then handing over to some of the team to talk through the other three pillars. There are four proposition areas where we intend to focus. First of all, sharpening our price investment. Second of all, implementing a world-class cross-sell capability. Third, building out insurance as our fourth core service. Then finally, relaunching our small business offering. You can see the metrics that we'll be looking to move over on the right-hand side. Looking at each of these in more detail, starting off with price investment.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Ensuring that our multi-service proposition is compelling to customers on the way in and provides peace-of-mind value over time is key to building a long-term multi-service customer base. Given the competitive dynamics we discussed earlier, plus the fact that multi-service customers have such a high value, we'll be making targeted price investments across all of our core services and the multi-service bundle itself for both new and existing customers. Nick mentioned this earlier, I can't signpost in full to all of our competitors exactly what that pricing strategy will be, but it will include carefully targeted investments across the following areas. Underpinning our energy competitiveness with more competitive fixed tariffs and a new tracker tariff. Repositioning our broadband offer at the competitive frontier. Continued investment in our market-leading mobile offering. Extra sign-ups or welcome bonuses for new multi-service customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Adding new features and rewards into our Cashback Card. Broadening the range of recontracting and retention offers across the bundle, while also ensuring that our in-life prices are competitive for our long-standing loyal customers. These price investments are expected to drive a significant increase in our rate of multi-service customer growth. We're targeting over 10% increase in our multi-service customer numbers in FY 2027, the current year, and a doubling to more than 1 million multi-servicing customers in total by FY 2031. The price investment will be focused not just on driving multi-service itself, but in particular driving those highest tiers of multi-service that Nick talked about, given those outsized lifetimes and value that you get from four-service customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The target that Nick mentioned of shifting the mix within multi-service towards four-service so that we see the average multi-service customer lifetimes rise to 15 years over the course of the plan. As we build out and implement these price investments, we'll also be building out a more, what you might call, intelligent pricing engine to enable more bespoke data-driven pricing, which will support our cross-sell plans, and in particular, our insurance pricing strategy, both of which we'll come back to later. That's the pricing investment across the bundle to ensure that the proposition is compelling, even in a more competitive marketplace. Let's now turn to how we plan to supplement this by building out a market-leading cross-sell capability. As mentioned earlier, our partners have this unique and proven ability to drive multi-service uptake for new customers on day one.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Motivating customers to add additional services to their bundle in life is an opportunity that we've just simply not yet maximized. Around 60% of our organic customer base today is still single service. Only around 3% of our current customer base today takes four or more services. Cross-sell into our existing customer base is effectively a greenfield opportunity. The value from cross-sell from single service to multi-service is significant. We've touched on some of these earlier, but as we went through, the step-up from multi-service results in 1.8x the contribution and 1.7x the lifetime on average. Plus those particular opportunities of adding 10 years of lifetime as you take someone from three services to four services by adding insurance. Of course, even though it's a greenfield opportunity, we don't begin from a truly standing start.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Following the acquisition and migration of those customers from TalkTalk, we were able to upgrade and cross-sell around 14,500 customers over the course of last year. This strong performance was possible without all of the various capabilities needed to be best in class being in place. Accordingly, our confidence is high that as we build out those capabilities and deploy cross-selling across our whole base, that we'll see material further progress and upside. How will we deliver that cross-sell momentum and shift the value of the customer base? From the outset, with an annual target of at least 50,000 service cross-sells, we'll be increasing the intensity of cross-selling across the existing customer base using those learnings that we've got from our TalkTalk trials.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

This will include more regular, direct digital campaigns across all services, as well as activating our partners. This will also be in place to support new product launches, like motor insurance, later in the year, which we'll come back to. With this momentum established, we'll begin adding data-driven sophistication to it with specialized, what you might call, AI agents offering personalized digital cross-sell journeys for existing customers using things like tenure and service behavior as triggers, amplified by prompts to convert through the app, through the contact center, and through various partner touchpoints. As trailed earlier, these multi-service data points we have on our customers means that we have deeper insights than our competitors do, and that creates real opportunities for this sort of AI-driven cross-sell to outperform industry norms.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

For example, we already know that if you've downloaded and used the app, then you're three times more likely to respond and add another service when prompted. We already know that you're four times more likely to switch a service to us if we contact you within a certain time window of your renewal for that service, enabling us to do things like capture renewal dates for the services we don't provide to you, and then market to the customer at the right moment. This is just the beginning, just a couple of early examples. By 2031, as you know, we're now targeting 1 million multi-service customers, and by this stage, cross-sell will no longer be a campaign mechanic. It'll be a continuous AI-driven program running across digital partner service channels simultaneously with 50,000+ service upsells a year being just part of how we operate.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

I mentioned it earlier, but one of the services that is perfectly set to benefit from this cross-sell opportunity or this capability is insurance, where we're focused on turning this massive opportunity into our fourth core service. Let's now take a look at how we will do that. U.K. personalized insurance, our target market here. It's a GBP 40 billion+ market, and it's characterized by poor retention, commoditized pricing, low trust. They're exactly the conditions where a differentiated relationship-led model like ours wins. There's a key reason why we're so excited about the opportunity in this marketplace. You see, typically, insurers price risk from the outside in. They take your postcode, your credit score, your declared behavior, and so on. We have a unique opportunity to price from the inside out.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

As mentioned earlier, we know our customers' behaviors really well across energy, broadband, and mobile, even their Cashback Card spending habits. We understand their home stability, their payment reliability, their tenure across multiple services. The cross-bundle data sets that we hold on our customers is effectively a, you can think it was a proprietary risk signal providing a unique right to win. Our existing customer base represents essentially, therefore, a largely untapped pool of pre-qualified, high-tenure insurance prospects, giving us a structural underwriting and pricing advantage that no pure-play insurer can replicate. How far are we on our insurance journey? Over the last five years, we built out our insurance ecosystem, building both a broker and an internal underwriter to give us control over the product design and pricing.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Our broker is fully FCA regulated in the U.K., whilst our underwriter is established in Gibraltar, fully capitalized for growth, and regulated by the GFSC. We've launched a home insurance product and a boiler cover product as our sort of core insurance products. We have around 113,000 policies in force, and that represents, I think, just under 8% of our current customer base. Over FY 2023 and FY 2024, as you can see on the chart on the right, we saw rapid growth in insurance services, almost 140% growth in the number of policies being taken out. However, you'll also recall that this came to a halt with the voluntary pause in new sales of insurance products whilst we were in dialogue with the FCA around one of our non-core legacy products.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We restarted insurance sales early in FY 2026 after a positive dialogue with the FCA, as the graph shows here, growth is yet to recover. In that intervening period, we've built out the team, and we now have a clear plan to drive scale in insurance, including leveraging the unique data sets that we already hold on our customers that I just spoke about. How exactly will we do that? Well, here are the three steps we're going to take. First of all, we're investing in re-platforming our insurance business onto Open GI, which is a more comprehensive insurance platform, which will broaden the panel of underwriters that we're able to work with, whilst also provide a more modern, slicker platform for launching new products.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We'll also be strengthening our pricing of both acquisition and renewal, and increasing the sophistication intensity of our insurance cross-sell campaigns, leveraging the capabilities we've spoken about earlier. Secondly, we'll be launching our first motor insurance product in the second half of this year, which moves us into an additional roughly GBP 22 billion marketplace for a product which is an essential purchase for nearly every household in the U.K. This is going to be our first major new product launch in around five years, and it has the potential to drive significant penetration into our existing customer base. If you simply assume one and a half cars per household and just 8% penetration to match our existing insurance penetration rate, that could amount to over 200,000 policies over the next five years.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Looking further ahead to FY 2028, we expect to extend into pet, with then travel and life as potential followers. We'll be aiming for one new insurance product launch per year. Finally, we'll be leveraging these data advantages that I've spoken about earlier to really power growth across each of these insurance product lines. Just to give you another example, we've identified a correlation between energy usage patterns and home insurance claims. This is a data point that nobody else out there can see and nobody else can therefore price for, but we can. To give another example, we will be able to see when our existing customers are shopping for insurance online, for example, on a price comparison site, which is where most households these days shop for their insurance.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We'll then be able to quote for them on that price comparison site, knowing that they're an existing customer of ours for other services and with the benefits of what we already uniquely know about them, all of those different behaviors and insights that I mentioned earlier, plus the knowledge that they'll be deepening their multi-service relationship with us, with the increase in lifetime that comes from that. Hopefully now you're beginning to see and share some of our enthusiasm about the scale of the opportunity we had in insurance and why the features of this business are really well set to leverage that. By FY 2031, we expect to see insurance as a true fourth core service. We'll be targeting 20% penetration of a much larger customer base, generating significant gross profit and materially extending customer lifetimes.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The last of the elements of this pillar is the relaunch of our small business offering, which is focused on micro businesses. This is a large and highly adjacent marketplace where we have a very relevant proposition and also the experience here to know that we can play to win. There are around 5 million of these micro businesses in the U.K. We're talking about these are local businesses employing fewer than 10 people, local shops, hairdressers, estate agents, your high street premises, many of which are run from these dedicated premises, and they need energy, broadband, mobiles, and insurance. These owner-run local businesses are a real obvious add-on to the core residential offering that we already have. In many cases, our partners might actually be the small business owner, or they know the people who are running these businesses.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Some of these business owners may already be residential customers of ours. Small business owners typically have utility needs that are very similar to those of a residential customer. We've historically signed up and serviced these small business customers, even without a fully fledged small business proposition. We built up to over 25,000 small businesses in the past, almost by accident, stopped actively seeking them out during the energy crisis back in 2021, 2022, given the scale of the residential customer growth opportunity that was there at the time. As a result, the number of our small business customers today has dropped from around 25,000 to 10,000. We're working on relaunching this offering to the market next year, and we view this as an exciting additional opportunity to really broaden our target markets and provide an additional stream of leads and income for our partners.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

To frame the size of this opportunity, at its peak, between 5% and 10% of our new customers being signed up each month were small business customers like this. That's the first pillar, all focused on optimizing our multi-service customer proposition. Over to Justin to talk about our second key pillar around how we take that multi-service proposition to market. Justin.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

Thank you, Stuart. I'm Justin Mazzina, and I'm responsible for leading and managing our network of partners. You've already heard from Stuart how Team Purple, our partner network, is so important. Quite simply, they're the reason we're able to sign up so many multi-service customers, building a happy, long-term, high-value customer base that nobody else could match. A wide and deep moat around the business model. We have a three-step plan how we're going to really scale partners, fulfilling this channel's unique potential and driving our multi-service customer base to 1 million by FY 2031.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

These three steps are all about opening up the opportunity for more people to be a partner so we can double partner numbers over the next five years, providing a best-in-class digital experience to make it easier for partners to succeed and be more active more often, and putting in place strategic partnerships to broaden our access to high-quality customers across the country. Firstly, it's about building the tracks that the partners of the future can run on. What does that mean? Today we have, in essence, one way to earn, the UW partner. You join, you do training, you generate your own leads, you sign up customers, sign up other partners, and help them get going. It is an incredible model, one that's been at the core of our growth, as Stuart said, and we are absolutely committed to it.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

However, it's not how everyone wants to earn. It requires you to be all in with us when perhaps you don't want such a committed relationship, at least at the start. We're going to be launching two more ways to earn. The first we're calling customer-focused partners. We have lots of people who love talking to customers but who are not so keen on building teams of partners, and that's a core part of the current partner proposition. These partners just want to get on with recommending our multi-service proposition to people they know. We want to build a track for them to succeed at their passion, sharing the increasingly compelling customer opportunities Stuart was talking about. The second we call connectors, and they're like affiliates.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

This is a really well-developed market, very digital, very social media-friendly, and it taps into the influencer market, both small and large. It's not one we're a meaningful part of at present. However, plenty of people want to refer us but don't want to complete the sale. Conversely, there are plenty of partners who are excellent at explaining what UW does but can run short of people to speak to. This opportunity marries both of them up. The really good news here is that we launched this as a pilot last year, just getting the proposition out, letting it organically grow. The quality of customers that we gained from this pilot was excellent. Over 2,500 customers, 88% on multi-service. We know there is a demand. There's a plethora of businesses, charities, PTAs, and people who want to do this.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

Over the next year, we're going to really beef up the journey, communications, incentives, experience, and so on, to make them feel a real part of UW. Those different tracks, not only do we increase the overall numbers of partners, but we also increase the range of people we can reach. As Stuart said, having doubled partner numbers over the last five years, now we're looking to essentially double again over the next five. 150,000 seems eminently achievable with these tracks. Secondly, it's all very well having these partners, but they need to be regularly active. In that respect, we can draw on some reliable and mature industries to really energize the network here. Firstly, gamification. We do this already, and we do it pretty well. For example, with our Free Energy Club, where we currently have over 600 partners on a streak-based incentive.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

It's not quite as joined up as it might be, and it also isn't really digital first, and that's what we'll be investing in. Think of all the nudges you're served to keep you active on Strava, Duolingo, or whatever your app of choice is. We're going to be leveraging those insights to build out the journeys, nudges, recognition, and so on, so we can significantly increase the engagement and therefore activity from partners. Secondly, removing the friction in signing up to Utility Warehouse. Multi-service bundles, by their very nature, include multiple options in each service and within each bundle. This can trip up customers and particularly newer partners, which is why we have a buddying system with experienced partners supporting new partners. That's been really successful, but it hinders explosive growth if we have to rely on it.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

Emerging copilot technology is going to be key here. Instead of having to rely on an experienced supporting partner, they can have their questions and objections answered by our own copilot, enabling partners to do what they do best, recommend, without having to be utility geeks. We're using an early version of this called Ask Me, which is already managing 1,400+ queries a day from our partners. That's what Stuart meant when he said we won't be disrupted by AI. We'll use AI to keep disrupting others. Third, we're building out significant digital expertise, which we'll use to allocate inbound leads to the highest converting partners based on skill set, demographic, geographic area, and so on. This architecture can also be used for partners to cross-sell to single-service customers, further increasing our services per customer at a low cost and high attachment rate.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

Our goal here is to increase the number of partners who are active each year in signing up a customer from 20,000 in FY 2026 to over 40,000 in FY 2031. To move that, we need to move the number of partners who are signing up a customer in any one month, and we're targeting an increase of over 10% this year versus the second half of FY 2026. Finally, our recently launched strategic partnerships build on the other elements in the plan. We've already signed up the National League with its 72 football clubs, which make up the fifth and sixth tiers of English football. We chose them as a strategic partner very deliberately because they have fiercely loyal and local fan bases. These are clubs like Chester, Weston-super-Mare, so they're perfectly matched to our local partners.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

For every supporter who signs up through a partner, we're making a contribution back to the league, which helps support clubs and the communities around them. Any new multi-service customer gets a voucher to spend in their team's club shop, so for a new club shirt, and that puts money directly back into the coffers of their team. All of that is incredibly powerful. Our National League partnership reflects the brand values, which Dave is going to talk about, and crucially, our local presence in every club. We talk about being in your corner and around the corner, and you can see in the image there our brand sponsorship at Wembley for the National League playoff final a few weeks ago. Following on from this, we've recently signed an agreement with the Post Office.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

We're trialing space in several Post Offices with partners actually in-store all day in a smart conversation with your bank manager type space. That's something only we can provide authentically. They'll be speaking to customers about how they can get a better deal on their home services, and we'll reach places other suppliers could not hope to reach. It's a big pilot to revitalize the high street, and we are a key part of that with the services we offer and how we reach the public. Now, we can afford to be picky here and really choose the best partners, learning from these trials with the Post Office and National League, and our general learnings from connectors.

[Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network at Telecom Plus]

Over time, we expect to build up a handful of similar relationships, ideally with organizations that have both national reach and local presence, and with whom we can work to build on our partner-led customer base. Which brings us onto our next key action area, building out a nationally recognized and trusted brand, which Dave is going to talk through.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

Thank you, Justin. I'm David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer. Pillar three is all about building a nationally recognized and trusted brand. Some businesses have a problem because they overpromise and they underdeliver against those promises. For UW, the issue is really quite different to that because we have outstanding customer satisfaction and really high levels of trust amongst our existing customer base, but almost no one outside of our customer base really knows who we are. This plays out in our brand funnel, as you can see here, where we have genuine awareness at 22%, consideration at 11%, and amongst the overall U.K. population, trust of just 10%. This really narrows the growth audience, because if you haven't heard of us, you're really much less likely to trust us to provide those essential services into your family and into your home.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

Now, our partners, as Justin's just described, are really tenacious in turning that around one conversation at a time. It's a headwind, and it's a headwind that just doesn't need to be there. Our brand refresh very deliberately puts partners front and center. We believe in the power of people helping people. It's a brand idea that we can really own, it's emotionally distinctive, and most importantly, it directly connects the reality of how our partners show up and how our service teams show up for customers every single day. So building our brand will remove that headwind that partners are faced with when they strike up a conversation. But more than that, it's going to drive partner pride, partner recruitment, partner confidence, and the lead conversion of prospective customers into actual customers on the books.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

I guess the message is that building a nationally recognized and trusting brand isn't a soft metric. It's not a soft metric, it's an essential part of the growth ecosystem at Utility Warehouse. We launched the brand refresh to customers, partners, and staff in April. We also ran a pilot campaign so that we could gather some data on how this would play through and how it would land, and the findings have been really exciting. What we saw from the pilot was a four percentage point increase in brand awareness, and we saw a 10% increase in customers gathered by partners in the pilot areas relative to the control areas. I'd love to give you a sense of the brand direction that we're taking. So on the left here, you can see how the brand identity shows up on our website.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

On the right, we introduce our new brand ambassador, Cat Deeley. Now, Cat today is an integral part of the partner appointment, where we use videos like the one I'd love to show you now to explain our proposition to customers.

[Cat Deeley, Brand Ambassador at Utility Warehouse]

Remember when we used to have a gazillion remotes just to turn on the telly? Now one does everything. Hello. Now we're talking. Or like when you had shelves heaving with CDs from your favorite artist. Now our entire music collection is available at the touch of a button. Fancy. That's exactly what Utility Warehouse does. Award-winning energy, super fast broadband, affordable mobile, and insurance all in one place. They've even got a snazzy app so you can keep an eye on it all. The exclusive Cashback Card, which gives you up to 10% cashback whenever you shop at retail partners. So spending money on your new hobbies means money comes off your next bill. I'm literally saving money here. And you'll be helped by a real person Like Nora here, she's a Utility Warehouse partner who made switching easy.

[Cat Deeley, Brand Ambassador at Utility Warehouse]

She also put me in touch with insurance services and got me money towards my contract exit fees. Let's do this. Because life is better when you get it together. Woo-hoo.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

Perfect. Thank you, Cat. Here you have a still from the pilot campaign that I mentioned a little bit earlier. It highlights that special role that partners are playing as a friend, as a neighbor who really can't help but help. We position it here, "Saving you hundreds of pounds on your household bills," but really doesn't look like any Utility Warehouse company that you've ever seen before. Let's talk through the plan that we'll execute to build this nationally recognized and trusted brand. We'll be taking a local-first approach to building national fame. We'll go town by town, where our partners are most active, and we'll be leveraging out-of-home and hyper local activations. This will pair together with a focused investment in national media so that we really effectively prime the pump for partners.

[David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer at Telecom Plus]

What we'll be optimizing for is awareness that compounds into partner confidence, partner performance, and the ability to convert leads into new customers. A brand headwind that we flip around and shift into a brand tailwind. As a result, genuine awareness will rise over time to 50%, trust will rise to 33%, so that our brand fame opens up the opportunity and partners close it. There we are. Now let's move on to the fourth pillar and the final part of the plan, how we will deliver a digital experience underpinned by AI with market-leading cost to serve. I'm going to hand over to Rob, who will talk us through this part of the plan.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. I'm Rob Harris, Chief Operating Officer. Customer experience at UW has been historically strong and often award-winning. Just last year, we gained the Which? Recommended status for both energy and broadband. Whilst our customer experience has been very strong, it's also been very traditional, almost solely through telephony. Today, customer and partner expectations have changed, and digital capabilities have advanced dramatically. Many of our competitors used the 2022 energy crisis to replatform and transform their digital assets. During the same period, as Stuart mentioned earlier, at UW, we prioritized maximizing growth. Now is our moment to transform. Our plan is not only to progress our digital capability to match the best in market, but to leverage AI to leapfrog this last generation of change. It's how we bring this to life that really matters.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

I was leading the retail network at Barclays when we launched the first banking app. We used our branch teams to educate, support, and demonstrate what our customers could now do without waiting through this new app. It was those teams that created the shift in customer behavior. Our partner teams at UW are unique in our sector, and they'll perform exactly the same role ensuring pace and depth of digital adoption. Our approach has switched from being voice and agent first to digital first, which transforms both where and how our customers are served. We'll soon offer omni-channel assistance, meeting our customers where they are and how they want to be served, either in-app, online through chat, WhatsApp, and of course, through email and telephony channels. Enabling our customers to solve problems on their terms when and how they want.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

This omni-channel model enables us to make the shift from a reactive service model to a proactive one. We're also transforming how we serve our customers. We're making the shift from a homogenous service where everyone receives the same level of service to a value-based model, much like what is common in banking, airlines, and hotels. Our most valuable and loyal customers will receive a differentiated level of service with teams focused on retaining, growing, and optimizing, thus improving experience, value, and cost to serve, rather than teams simply processing requests and answering queries. We're creating intelligent next best actions using this unique multi-service data that we have on our customers and leveraging that, combining it with external insights, we can deliver personalized offers, personalized prompts to help our customers get the best of UW.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

Much of this capability will be leveraging AI, and we now have a dedicated agentic team that is currently designing and building specialized agents that are quickly resolving the most frequent queries our customers have and often solving issues before our customers even recognize them. We'll be using these agents in both the front, middle, and back office to drive improved value, improved experience, and efficiency. The agents remove complexity from pretty sophisticated workflows, removing friction from our system, and thus dramatically reducing failure demand, which is expensive, and thereby accelerating the speed of resolution for our customers. We expect digital interactions, those with no human intervention, to increase from below 10% today to in excess of 65% by the full-year 2031. These changes will not only deliver a step change in customer experience, but significant cost efficiency too.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

Our admin cost per service type is targeted to reduce by around 30% post-inflation over the same period. On this next slide, we bring this to life. These are the costs associated with customer operations. Essentially, our variable costs. You can see how this program will broadly offset the additional cost of servicing customer and service growth, as well as inflation over the period to full-year 2031. Our fixed cost will remain essentially flat over the period, as will our payroll. As our cost base remain flat, but our cost per service materially reduces. AI is at the heart of our digital-first strategy. What we're talking about here is more a fundamental modernization of customer experience at UW. Let me bring to life how we're using AI to accelerate that shift. The multi-service proposition, in many ways, is the perfect use case to leverage AI.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

It's perfect because it's so rich in data, and it's also pretty complicated to deliver well. AI will help us leverage our data to generate greater value and simplify complicated processes. We've already touched on how this will play through with revenue generation through enabling cross-selling or supporting and enabling our partners more effectively. For our customers, we're making progress now, and we'll deliver material benefits this year. I've set out a number of initiatives that are either in pilot or early rollout. To call out a few, regarding our quality and compliance, we have three regulators at UW. Our compliance framework is complex. We're currently training AI agents to mark and score interactions. This will give us 100% coverage and real-time agent feedback, as opposed to the current analog model, which covers under 10% of all interactions.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

This new solution will always be on and requires less than 10% of the existing team. We also have Agent Copilot. This is an AI-powered assistant embedded into our agent systems, listening to calls. This supports the agent in real time, providing knowledge, service, and sales prompts live on the call with our customers. This enables us to develop true multi-service agents, speeding up support and enabling our agents to deal with more complex requests confidently. Our voice and email channels are currently piloting agentic agents. These are AI voice agents answering simple queries in real time. We also have the same equivalents on email that are directly responding to our customers' request. Again, increasing the speed of resolution and dramatically reducing wait times for our customers.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

With regards to software development, by the end of this current financial year, our technology teams expect AI to be writing around 20% of all code. These changes will lead to a material shift in productivity, quality, and customer experience. They'll also enable us to reduce our admin costs by around 5% this year. Genesys is our customer platform provider. All chat, email, and voice interactions run through this software. We're really pushing them to innovate and enable us. As such, they've awarded us the Pioneer of 2026 just last month. Mainly, I think, because we're their biggest user of Copilot across Europe and the first globally to go live with their agentic agents. We're embracing this new wave of AI and seeing firsthand how it's enabling us to improve the speed and quality of experience at a lower cost.

[Rob Harris, COO at Telecom Plus]

The nature of the multi-service model really lends itself to leveraging these capabilities, so there's much more to come in this space. Back over to you, Stuart.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Rob. There you have the plan. Now let's talk about delivery of the plan, starting with what we expect the business to look like in FY 2031 after successful delivery. We've talked about all of these things as we've gone through the presentation and the update today. I won't go through it line by line, but I'll call out a few highlights. Hitting 1 million+ multi-service customers is, of course, a key metric. All of those other key operational metrics here are really important in making sure we build out the ecosystem or the platform that will set us on our path to our next multi-service customer target once we break through 1 million.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Critically, with the multi-service mix evolution we expect to see during the course of the plan, as we focus on bringing in more customers all the way up to those higher tiers of three and four services, we expect that the average multi-service customer lifetime of those million customers will be around 15 years. The 2 million total customer target is still there, but the focus is absolutely on growing the multi-service customer base, with the 2 million total customer target being a secondary measure over the medium term. You can see the strong financial metrics at the bottom of the slide as well. The key here is that because of all of those key operational metrics being hit, the quality of the earnings that result is incredibly high.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Underpinned as they will be by the long lifetime multi-service customers and a business that is really playing to its strengths. In terms of tracking progress and delivery against the plan, we've got a number of key progress metrics, I'm calling them, that we've mentioned during the presentation. I'm sure you'll hear lots of ambitious five year plans promising stellar growth and returns. First up, this is a refocus on our proven strengths, not a wild new strategy. Secondly, we want to be completely transparent with you about how we're progressing, which is why we will report on these metrics at each full and half year results update while the plan is running, so that you can really measure how we're performing against our targets and really track progress against delivery of the five year plan.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

I don't plan on running through them again here, but you can see them all set out on the slide, and there's both the FY 2031 target, but also each year that comes will have a year ahead target, and obviously set out on here you have our FY 2027 target. In terms of what that all then means for the current year, FY 2027, you can then see our outlook summarized on the next slide. We plan to achieve at least a 10% increase in multi-service customers, which is a more than doubling of that growth rate in multi-service customers compared to the 3.9% growth rate we saw in FY 2026. The investments that we've talked you through today will impact profits in the short-term, and we expect adjusted profit before tax this year, FY 2027, to be in that range of GBP 80 million to GBP 90 million.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Note that our H1, H2 profit split will be roughly 15%/85% due to the timing and phasing of those planned investments across the year, which will broadly follow our revenue split, 40/60 H1, H2. There's a slide in the appendix of the deck for people in the room, for people not in the room, that they can find on the website, and we can also cover that off in Q&A as necessary. We intend to continue to distribute at least 80% of adjusted profit after tax to shareholders. As we set out in our trading update in April, we intend that at least 50% of that distribution to be by way of dividend, with the balance allocated to share buybacks if our forward PE is below 20x, otherwise by way of special dividend.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The investment plan for FY 2027 will also see our leverage ratio rise modestly, but we expect it to remain at a very comfortable level for a profitable, growing business providing essential household services at about 1.5x before coming back to 1.0x as we go. As we move through the year, we expect to be able to show that we're making really strong initial progress with delivery of our five-year plan, taking tangible steps to really refocus on what makes this business special, multi-service customers and the high-quality compounding growth they deliver. I mentioned this early on, critically, this is not just a plan on paper, it's a plan grounded on reality and deliverability. As you can see here, over recent months, on the left-hand side, we've been trialing a number of early-stage initiatives. The early indications from those initiatives are already very promising.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

First of all, we've already seen, over on the right-hand side, our multi-service customer growth rate in the first two months of the new financial year, off the back of these initial trials and tests we've been doing, more than double from that 3.9% growth rate last year, FY 2026, to an annualized rate of 9.7% across April and May. That trend is actually continuing and actually accelerating as we move into June. Second, we've begun to see insurance returning to growth over the last few weeks, in fact. It's early days, it's small numbers, but the tide is turning. Third, our partner activity rates have been increasing. I mentioned earlier the significant increase, the 4,000 increase we've seen in total partners in the last few months, but our activity rates are increasing as well.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Monthly active partners, which provides an early indication of the improvement of yearly active partners, is up 15% in the last two months compared to the second half of last financial year. Fourth, as David mentioned earlier, we ran a pilot or a trial of local advertising utilizing some of the new brand positioning, and we saw a four percentage point increase in brand awareness and 10% increase in customers gathered by partners in the pilot areas compared to the control areas. Collectively, these early-stage positive signals give us a high level of confidence that this is the right plan and that the plan will deliver.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We've stepped through the five-year plan in detail and shown why we have high levels of confidence in delivery, and we also have the experienced team in place to implement and deliver on it, with decades of experience both in the business, combined with extensive external experience at other leading businesses. Now, you've heard from some of the team today, and the others are in the room, and you may hear from them in future updates and presentations. Before we move on to Q&A, let's return briefly to where we started and the key takeaways. In essence, we're prioritizing and focusing on growth in multi-service customers rather than simply total customers, given that multi-service customers are our special feature, the core of our business, and the key driver of value.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Our plan is to double the number of these multi-service customers to 1 million over the next five years, leveraging our unique business model with its 30-year track record. This plan will involve P&L investment of GBP 55 million a year over thecourse of the plan across four key pillars: optimizing our multi-service proposition, scaling our partner sales channel, building a nationally recognized and trusted brand, and enhancing our digital and AI capability to improve both the customer experience and drive down costs.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Delivering on this plan and doubling our multi-service customer base will not only result in targeted adjusted PBT of around GBP 175 million by FY 2031, but critically, these will be higher quality earnings generated from a loyal and secure multi-service customer base, with market leading lifetimes of up to around 25 years, as well as lower bad debt, lower churn, lower cost to serve, and with average multi-service customer lifetimes increasing during the plan to 15 years. Taken together, the actions that we'll be taking will result in a strong, competitive, profitable, and growing business designed to embrace the latest technology and growing its high-quality earnings through focusing on its unique strengths. As I mentioned, critically, it's not just a plan on paper. We're already seeing some tangible positive signals from these early-stage trials giving us high confidence in delivery of the plan.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Together with the team, I can't wait to get cracking and get Telecom Plus really motoring again. Thank you. We now have time for Q&A. I think Nick's going to join me Up on the stage. I'm happy to take questions both on the strategy update and new five-year plan we've just been talking you through, as well as, of course, on our FY 2026 full-year results. There's a microphone in the room, so if you could please raise your hand for a question, and the microphone will appear.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Lovely. Thanks.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

There we go.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Stuart, could I just start on the single-service customers? Obviously, there's been a lot of focus in this in multi-service, and you're expecting single service to be broadly flat over the five-year plan. How confident are you that you can keep it flat if all the emphasis is going on to multi-service, both in terms of pricing and initiatives with the partners?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah. We still expect that we'll be signing up new multi-service customers as we go forward. Single-service customers as we go forward. We also continue to generate single-service customers from home moves, which is a dynamic where a multi-service customer that we currently have in one property, they then move to another property, they leave their energy service behind, and a new single-service customer comes in. Both at the front end, though, will still be just as part of the general new customer sign-up mix, some single-service customers, and there'll also be a group of single-service customers that just appear from that home move dynamic. I think we're actually relaxed if that number is slightly below broadly stable, or whether it's slightly above broadly stable. The key focus and the value creation comes from the increase in the multi-service customers over the timeframe.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

That absolutely is where the focus is. For those two reasons, we expect to see single-service customers continuing to be added into the mix.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

One of the notable charts had multi-service churn actually coming down last year. The issue was very much on the churn side, was very much in the single-service. You're saying that you're happy for that single-service churn to remain high because you're not putting as much emphasis into them.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah, those single-service customers, critically, they're still profitable for us, and they still have a reasonable lifetime, and certainly a higher lifetime than most competitors of ours will have for their single-service customers. They're not bad customers. They're just not the unique customer type that we're able to generate through our partners, these multi-service customers and the customers that are really worth investing behind and building this business around.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Now you've split out that multi-service versus single-service churn. Is that why you're looking at putting the price emphasis at the new customers rather than on retention?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The pricing investment will actually be split across a few different areas. It will be split across both each of our individual services at the front end, across roughly a third of the price investment. Roughly a third of the price investment on what you might call multi-service incentives. Incentives beyond the pure price of the individual tariff or the service to take more services. What you might call a welcome bonus or a broader bundle incentive. Roughly a third on what you might call recontracting, retention, loyalty benefits for existing customers. There'll be a spread across all of those. It's not just at the front end.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Nick, the contribution, the GBP 185 that you highlighted, can you just walk through how that's being calculated and how much of the initiatives that are coming through are contributing to that moving over time, like adding insurance products?

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

Absolutely. That is a variable contribution. In other words, you've got the revenues from that. Imagine an additional customer coming online. It's the incremental revenue, the incremental raw cost of sales, the incremental bad debt, commissions paid to partners, the incremental operating costs as well that are associated with that bad debt, I think I might have mentioned. That actually at the, if you like, at the FY 2027 level of costs. For instance, within that number is not the digitalization benefits that we are expecting to get. That's the first point. The second point is that within that number, we've got that number for FY 2027. We've used that in the construction for FY 2031. It does not include, for instance, general price rises over and above, which are inflationary, for instance, on the one hand.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

It also is assuming that within that multi-service mix, that the mix of two service, three service, and four service customers is exactly the same, when actually we know that there is upside, if you like, from the fact that we're going to, with the relaunch of insurance and the various initiatives and the pricing initiatives we've talked about, that mix will change in favor of three service and four service customers. The upside associated with that is not within that variable contribution number, if that makes sense.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Yep, that makes sense. Then you also talked about small business opportunity. How would they compare in terms of the multi-service mix and the contribution?

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

They're obviously a small part of that embedded contribution at the moment. Very, very small part. Obviously, as those plans develop, that will also be incremental upside to that. Yeah.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

That's great. Thanks. Nick?

[Michael Donnelly, Analyst at Investec]

Hello, it's Michael Donnelly from Investec. Two for me. One for Stuart, one for Nick. Stuart, when you looked, as I'm sure you did, at what Octopus and OVO was investing in for their growth, was there anything that you specifically saw and thought, "No, I'm not going to do that. That's not right for our business," or is everything that you can see them doing to drive their growth mapped onto your four sub-bits of your 55?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah.

[Michael Donnelly, Analyst at Investec]

that's question number one, and I'll do it.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Okay. Whilst of course we look at what other people are doing in our marketplace, and the competitive shifts in our marketplace is obviously something we've talked about today. We are competing differently from them. They are trying typically to sign up single-service customers, and they're therefore prioritizing what they're doing with that mindset. We're an energy supplier signing up single-service customers. We don't think of ourselves as just an energy supplier, and we're not prioritizing signing up single-service customers. The way we've actually thought about and constructed our plan is based on the unique features and fundamentals of our business model, which actually don't really map that closely to their business models because they're typically very similar to each other, and we're differentiated in a number of ways.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Our plan is a bespoke Telecom Plus plan based on investing in our proven strengths, and the critical bit is, we've already got the last two months showing that the initial trials of the decisions that we've taken and put into the plan are working, which gives us the confidence it's the right plan as well.

[Michael Donnelly, Analyst at Investec]

That's great. Thanks. Then for you, Nick, just building a bit on Charles' question, can you talk us through the main leakage points between what you're calling the contribution level and the adjusted PBT, and what might surprise us about the difference between those two numbers over the five years of the plan? Because I'm not totally sure I understand the contribution bit just yet.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

The contribution bit, the most important thing is it does not include fixed costs. It only includes, if you like, the variable contribution piece. Just to make sure that is absolutely clear, that includes the revenues, including, by the way, the discounts that we are providing. If you like, it is an average of the first-year discount that is provided, say, in the first or second year, and then the ongoing pricing. It includes the discount that we are providing to customers embedded within that. You have got the raw material costs associated with the provision of those services that we pay to our wholesale partners. You have got the commission that we pay to our partners because that, of course, is variable. You have the bad debt associated with those customers, which is also variable. Those are the individual dynamics that are within there.

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

It is taking the FY 2027 number, just to explain in terms of the overall ruling. It is looking at the FY 2027 mix of multi-service customers, if you like, as things stand as of now. When insurance, which is back in growth mode as we put in those additional insurance initiatives into play, the mix, if you like, the four service type mix within multi-service, which comprises two, three, and four will grow faster than three service types, three service types will grow faster than two service types. As a result of that, if you like, that upside is not captured into that static number that has been used. I do not know if that helps clarify what the positive is to the upside, if you like.

[Michael Donnelly, Analyst at Investec]

I think qualitatively it does help us think about what that line is going to look like in five years' time. Okay, I will leave it there. Thank you.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

Hi, Alex Smith from Berenberg. Just a quick one on that GBP 185 number, just what the contribution energy is to that overall number in terms of the mix and the nominal number, I guess. I assume that is the largest contributor, and therefore, I guess in the short-term, is that the biggest hurdle to almost deliver savings there, given the competition in energy markets, and I guess what has stopped competitors also beginning to deliver extra cost savings for customers like your Octopus's effort?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

I'll jump in. I think first of all, obviously at the moment, we apply our energy discount. Our multi-service discounts are loaded against energy, and they're obviously set at a certain level. That is effectively built in, as Nick said, into that 185 number because it's looking at things today. Over the course of the evolution of the plan, that could change. We could either change the way in whichwe deliver those discounts, so we could shift away from energy, or we could change the level of the discounts within energy. Both of those are absolutely options. The way that we fund our discounts, though, is through two places. First of all, it's the additional margin that we get from the additional services that a multi-service customer takes out.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Second of all, it's the broader benefits that we get from that multi-service customer in terms of what you might call the operational savings that we get from spreading multiple revenue streams across one set of overheads, plus the lower bad debt, the lower churn and cost of replacement, the lower cost to serve that you get from looking after a multi-service customer. We're funding our energy discounts in the current structure in a different way to how someone like Octopus or OVO or whoever will be funding theirs. Therefore, I'm not sure they're the right read-across.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

I guess, do they need to take energy really to get that major discount?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

At the moment, the way that our discounts are structured, with the discount being loaded into energy is the dominant service. Of course, in different market conditions, we could decide to shift that and apply the discount to a different service. At the moment, energy is the largest share of wallet. It's the most high profile, the most emotive of the services, that's where we put the discounts at the moment. Again, the key thing I would say is the competitive environment that we've been talking about during the presentation today is the competitive environment that we've been seeing over the last few months, which is the few months in which we've been deploying some of our price investments and seeing the positive initial signals from that that I've mentioned a few times.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

Sorry, one last one. I guess a bit of shift in the partner model, more of a cross-sell element to maybe going out and getting new customers for that organic growth. I guess there's probably a bit of teaching incentivization programs that you probably need to roll out there. Plans for that.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The partner model is still focused on those pillars that Justin talked about. Our traditional partner model, our customer gathering partner model, and the connector model, which is the side of the partnerships with small local businesses. The cross-sell will be predominantly centrally managed and all of the different touch points we have with customers, looking at ways where we can offer them at the right moment, using all the data that we have on them, additional service prompts at the right moments. One of those interactions that they will have will be through our partners.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Educating and supporting our partners. When we launch motor insurance later this year, we'll be asking our partners to go back to all of their customers and talk to them about motor insurance in the same way that we will be communicating that centrally to them as well. That element is how we'll be using our partners in it, but it's not the core role of the partner. The core role of cross-sell is to be managed by us using partners as one of the incremental touch points that other people don't have along the way. In terms of the education piece, again, we're increasingly using. In the past, we used to do schoolroom, classroom teaching, to update our partners.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We've shifted it all to online, and we're increasingly using AI-driven teaching tools where our partners can both hone their skills and learn new things in an interactive feedback online AI tutor. Our ability to provide quite bespoke coaching to a large and growing partner network is changing rapidly.

[Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg]

Thank you.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Oh, thanks.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Thank you. It's John Karidis from Deutsche Bank. Just a few questions, please. The first one is, I'm trying to understand how the gross profit per energy customer compares with that of a broadband customer versus mobile versus insurance. Also just to check, when you talk about energy, you talk about both services, right? Gas and electricity, I suspect.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

When we talk about energy as a core service type, we're talking about electricity and gas as one. When we're talking about our multi-service customers, a two service customer would have to take energy, electricity, and gas, and one of broadband, mobile, or insurance as well, for example. Just to be really clear and simplify that. Nick, in terms of the gross profit, it's not a number, it's not a breakout that we formally disclose. That's partly because of the way in which we do discounting between our different products. The fact that we apply discounts to our energy service by taking a broadband product, that obviously has an impact, therefore, on the relative gross margin. Because of the way that the discount lands. Therefore, it can create complexity and confusion as a result.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

What we really focus on is the customer level view rather than the individual underlying service level view.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Correct. Yeah. Sorry, I'm trying to understand. If I take insurance and mobile, am I as valuable versus someone who takes energy and broadband? We're both multi-service customers.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Broadly speaking, that customer would be of similar value. Obviously, there will always be differences, but there's obviously the lifetime, and there's the contribution side that you need to look at. When we look at and done both the contribution and the lifetime analysis, it's been looking at obviously like a blend of all these different customer cohorts that sit underneath that.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Okay. Thank you.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

John, just one follow-up on that. Remember, when you look then below at the contribution line, there's a very different cost to serve associated with the different products as well, where energy has by far the highest cost to serve. Actually, in any event, stopping at the gross margin level is the one place to stop.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Correct. Okay. Thank you. Secondly, you talked about monthly active partners being up 15% in the first two months. I've got two questions around there. The first one is, what's the year-on-year change? Secondly, is the number still about 3 - 4,000 in any one month?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

The year-on-year change is even bigger than the 15%. I don't have the exact number to hand, but it's even bigger. New partners coming on board is over 4,000 a month. Yeah.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Sorry, in terms of monthly active partners, in the past, you'd say that in any one month, that number is 3 - 4,000. Has that changed?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

It's higher than that. Higher than that at the moment. In some of the recent months, it's been over 5,000.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Okay, thank you. Then a couple of easy numbers questions. CapEx went from GBP 12 million in FY 2025 to GBP 18 million in FY 2026. What's the right number going forward, please? The opposite of that is that your working capital outflow has been much smaller than the GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million. Why would it revert to GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million going forward per annum?

[Nick Schoenfeld, CFO at Telecom Plus]

In terms of the CapEx, the first part of that question, the CapEx going forward, we expect to be in the region of GBP 20 million. Slightly higher as a result of the various digitalization and AI initiatives that we've been talking about, but broadly the same envelope as FY 2026, slightly higher than that. Working capital going forward, we continue to indicate around an outflow of about GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million. In particular, because of the focus on multi-service customers. Multi-service customers, as a result, requires more working capital outflow. Examples of which are either routers or partner bonus payments, which are paid because we are very confident that those customers last for a long amount of time. Those are the sorts of things that influence that working capital, and that's why we continue to indicate GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million outflow per year.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Thank you. My very last question is why 20x P/E? Why is that the right multiple for a buyback and not 15 or 12?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

We looked back at both other high-quality businesses with growth rates similar to ours, and also back at our historic multiple over an extended period of time, and formed the view that this was an appropriate multiple as a result.

[John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Okay. Thank you both.

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

Thank you. It's Tim Ramskill from Bank of America. I've got quite a few questions, but I'll start basically just perhaps with the single service piece. You've given us an awful lot of information and data today to work with, which I'm sure will take us a bit of time to work through. If my maths is correct, then your single service customers, you said it's 60% of the business, and therefore it's probably the best part of 45% of the contribution to the group based on that GBP 103. As you've said, you've got excellent customer lifetime values that are 7 - 8 years. My slight concern is have we misdiagnosed the issue? Because we've shown a chart with a P/E multiple declining very dramatically alongside a relatively modest decline in the number of organic services per customer.

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

It looks to me like you've got best part of 50% of your business from single customers with very long lifetime values. Question one is, are we overlooking the ongoing benefit of that? And then my other questions I'd largely group into a category of is the investment adequate? Is it sufficient given, again, a lot of what you've pointed to. GBP 30 million of price investment against a backdrop in the market of 15% discounts, Stuart, as you showed of your chart. Does that touch the sides? Similarly, GBP 5 million of spend on digital and GBP 5 million on brand awareness. Again, what gives you the confidence those are adequate levels of investment to make a difference? Because they're not huge numbers in the scheme of things.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah. I might answer it slightly back to front. Taking that, what gives us confidence that this is the right number? Well, we are effectively deploying in the first two months of this new financial year, the annualized run rate of the price investment that we have been trialing over the last few months. It has been working and delivering in this existing competitive environment. As I mentioned, we have seen more than doubling in the number of multi-service customers that we have been signing up in the last couple of months. They have increased partner activity and so on and so forth. That gives us very high confidence that it is the right plan, the right level of investment, and that it is already working.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

In terms of things like the brand, well, we have already, again, David talked about the fact that this is not intended to be a more large business, national, high profile above the line campaign. This is getting national fame through local executions because that is where our partners are, that is who our partners are, that is where they find their customers. It is focused on putting a halo, in effect, around our partners and the proposition that they are talking to people about. Opening the door for them so they can have better quality conversations. Again, we are doing it in a different way to how others are spending their money. We are spending it in a more local targeted way.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Once again, we have done this pilot campaign, which again was local, fits in with the budget and the spend envelope if we were to roll that thing out more widely across the country, and we saw very positive results from that as well. Again, when you look at the digital capabilities, what we are talking about here is a P&L number. There is some more pounds being spent in total. There are some CapEx as well. It is a slightly bigger number than that. Again, we have got an experienced team who have delivered these sorts of programs in the past. Again, we are already starting to see the effects of some of the things that we are doing already.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Rob took you through some of the things that we are already deploying in line with our investment envelope for the year ahead, and we are already starting to see the benefits of that, and we expect to generate from that In the orders of magnitude of 5% efficiency gain across the course of the year, just from what we are doing this year. Now, some of that will be redeployed in moving faster and more productivity rather than.Because that is the phase on the stage that we are, rather than take that out to the bottom line. Again, across each of these different pillars, we are already trialing and testing and doing in line with the plan, and seeing that the plan is working in line with that level of investment. That is what gives us very high confidence. In terms of your first question.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Sorry, can you repeat the first question?

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

Yeah. It was a bit elongated, with apologies. I guess in essence it was single service is a very big chunk of your existing contribution.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah.

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

I guess, what's wrong with that? I get the fact that it's very obvious multi-service customers have a larger lifetime value, right? That's very clear and very obvious. I'm struggling a little bit with whether we're pivoting too aggressively-

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

in response to a big de-rating on the stock. You've just delivered 5% profit growth this year. I'm not sure I've ever seen a company reposition its outlook so dramatically-

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

On the back of what, on the face of it, isn't a bad set of results.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Yeah. No. We're very clear that the focus on multi-service customers, and this degree of focus on multi-service customers is absolutely the right thing to do. When it comes to single service customers, we've got no real point of differentiation. There's a lot of people out there trying to sign up single service customers with very similar business models, and they're competing in the same way for principally the same pool of customers. Trying to build a business in that way, to my mind, is not the right way to build long-term value. There isn't a problem, as I said, in having single service customers for all the reasons that you mentioned. They're profitable, and they have a lifetime where they're going to give you an appropriate level of payback for whatever you invest in acquiring them.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

If we want to build a business that is playing to the unique strengths that we have, which is a multi-service proposition and a route to market that can sign up multi-service customers, we should really be doubling down on those unique features. If we look to where the business would be in five years' time, following certain alternative paths, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever, that more value will be created over thecourse of this plan by doubling down on multi-service customers and focusing on multi-service customers than it would be if we were to pursue a plan that had at its heart a continuation of the level of single service growth. There's no doubt in my mind there'll be more value created than going for multi-service customers, therefore it's clear to me it's the right thing to do.

[Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America]

If I can, just one last one. I don't think you've mentioned at all today, the TalkTalk customer base that you'd acquired and the cross-sell ambitions you had. Just give a quick update there, and is there any risk of a write-down on some of that acquisition spend if it isn't going quite as well as planned?

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

As we've said previously, the TalkTalk customers, we see delivering a return on investment in excess of the WACC even without cross-sell, and we are cross-selling them into them as well. Therefore that return on investment will be even higher than it otherwise would have been. I think when you look at what that means post-amortization, it's maybe a handful of million GBP a year of therefore contribution embedded in the numbers that we're talking about. Critically, what we've got from this is the insights to give us both the knowhow and the confidence about how we develop and build out our cross-sell across the broader business. That's what, again, we've already started rolling out some of those insights, and we spoke today about how we're going to build out a world-class cross-sell capability, leveraging some of those insights, and that's the key thing. Brilliant.

[Stuart Burnett, CEO at Telecom Plus]

Do we have any other questions? No other questions? Nope. Brilliant. Okay, in that case, I would like to say thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it's been a long update, but a lot of important material to cover. Just to reiterate that this is a very comprehensive and considered plan, to really set this business on a very different trajectory over the next five years. Me and the team are really chomping at the bit to get stuck in and set Telecom Plus on its deserved trajectory. Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• David Walter, Chief Commercial Officer
• Justin Mazzina, Head of Partner Network
• Nick Schoenfeld, CFO
• Rob Harris, COO
• Stuart Burnett, CEO

Analysts

• Alex Smith, Analyst at Berenberg
• Cat Deeley, Brand Ambassador at Utility Warehouse
• Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt
• John Karidis, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
• Michael Donnelly, Analyst at Investec
• Tim Ramskill, Head of Small and Midcap Research at Bank of America