Wilmington H2 2026 & Strategy update Earnings Report

Wilmington EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 25.14
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Wilmington Revenue Results

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

Wilmington Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026 & Strategy update
• Date: 9/29/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30AM ET

Wilmington (LON:WIL) acts as trusted partner to customers who are operating in regulated sectors and in the governance, risk and compliance markets. We provide critical data and information to enable our customers to make the decisions needed to maintain compliance with the rules and regulations that apply to them; and we provide training and education to equip our customers with the knowledge and skills to carry out their activities in line with best practice.

Wilmington H2 2026 & Strategy update Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: FY 2026 revenue rose 37% on an ongoing basis, with 8 of 9 continuing businesses growing and organic revenue growth of 4%. Adjusted EBITDA increased 33% to £29.8 million, adjusted PBT rose 15% to £30.1 million, and the proposed dividend increased 9% to 12.5 pence.
• Positive Sentiment: Conversia performed ahead of expectations, delivering 26% growth during Wilmington’s ownership and more than 20% pro forma growth for the full year. Its Signo platform reached approximately 19,000 customers in its first year, while the business has substantial expansion potential in Spain and is expected to improve toward high-20s or 30% operating margins over the next two to three years.
• Neutral Sentiment: Wilmington is developing a common RegTech technology stack across its brands to reduce duplicated technology costs, accelerate product development, improve customer retention, and increase subscription revenue. Management said recurring subscriptions represented 41% of continuing revenue including Conversia and could approach 50% with a full year of ownership.
• Positive Sentiment: The group has more than 90 AI initiatives logged, with over 35 already live and 30 in development. Management cited early efficiency gains, including reduced tender-review times and potential savings in course development, while emphasizing human oversight and the use of proprietary data, content, and professional relationships to limit AI-related competitive risks.
• Negative Sentiment: Health, safety, and environment businesses Astutis and Phoenix faced sales headwinds and lower margins, with the division’s margin at approximately 13% for the year. Management expects stronger growth in FY 2027 and believes margins can recover toward the mid-20s within 12–18 months, but this remains dependent on revenue growth in a competitive market.

Presentation

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, good. Excuse me. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Wilmington's prelim results presentation for the FY 2026 trading year. I think I know most people in the room. My name is Mark Milner, I am the CEO. Alongside me here we have Guy Millward, who is our CFO. Thank you to Berenberg for hosting us today, and thank you to Berenberg and Singers for helping us organize this session. Our presentations are being live streamed and recorded, and we will be publishing these on our website and elsewhere. For today, given it is an extended session, we are going to change the format slightly, and we are going to start with a short film.

[Video Narrator]

The world is an extraordinary place. But it faces numerous challenges. Across the globe, people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, modern slavery, economic instability, workplace accidents, and criminal activity. At Wilmington, we are proud that our people and businesses are actively playing a part in addressing these issues, supporting laws and regulators, and working towards a better, more sustainable future. To non-legal professionals, it can be difficult to navigate complex scenarios in law, healthcare, and investigations.

[Video Narrator]

At Bond Solon, it is our mission to support the justice processes.

[Video Narrator]

To elevate standards and promote ethical practices.

[Video Narrator]

Thereby fostering a safer, fairer, and more just society.

[Video Narrator]

Axco provides a wide range of products and services to the global insurance marketplace, helping clients to understand and comply with complex laws and regulations across the world. Axco's clients provide policies that act as a safety net, allowing people to dream big, knowing they are protected from life's uncertainties.

[Video Narrator]

Insurance is the silent partner in every success story, providing the foundation of security that allows businesses to thrive.

[Video Narrator]

The true value of insurance isn't measured in GBP or claims, but in the peace of mind it brings to those who rely on it. Everyone should feel safe at work, but the construction industry remains the highest contributor to work-related fatalities in the U.K. Astutis is part of the solution.

[Video Narrator]

We stand at the forefront of health, safety, and environmental training, meaning workers are more aware, more vigilant, and return home safely at the end of the day.

[Video Narrator]

Phoenix Health & Safety believe safety is more than a responsibility, it's a right. They deliver world-class qualifications, empowering individuals and businesses with the skills and confidence to manage safety effectively.

[Video Narrator]

We are driven by dedication to excellence and a belief that safety should be approachable, engaging, and accessible to everyone.

[Video Narrator]

Together, we're not just teaching health and safety, we're changing lives by reducing deaths, injuries, and ill health at work.

[Video Narrator]

Corporate failure and scandals undermine trust in business and confidence in the economy, which can lead to loss of jobs, investments, and reduced choice in the market.

[Video Narrator]

Mercia is a leading provider of training and compliance support services to the U.K. and Ireland accountancy profession.

[Video Narrator]

Helping prevent corporate failures by ensuring their clients remain up to date with current legislation and regulations, and follow them correctly in practice.

[Video Narrator]

Conversia is Spain's leading RegTech company, specializing in GDPR and regulatory compliance services for SMEs and self-employed professionals.

[Video Narrator]

For more than 20 years, we have supported thousands of clients in adapting to mandatory regulations, combining personalized service, close customer relationships, and technological innovation. Our vision is to make regulatory compliance simpler, more accessible, and more efficient through technology, expertise, and personalized support.

[Video Narrator]

FRA are based in the U.S. and they bring together like-minded professionals to make a meaningful impact on their industry through learning and networking at best-in-class GRC conferences in the healthcare, finance, law enforcement, and legal space. Criminal gangs engage in billions of GBP of financial crime each year, and shockingly, there are more people enslaved today than at any other point in human history.

[Video Narrator]

ICA is the leading professional body for the global regulatory and financial crime compliance community.

[Video Narrator]

Our members are working tirelessly around the world to combat these crimes while upholding the highest standards of integrity.

[Video Narrator]

Pendragon provides the U.K. pensions industry with their innovative and highly acclaimed legal and regulatory information service called Perspective.

[Video Narrator]

With the ever-increasing burden of legal and regulatory change affecting pensions, Perspective gives advisors and practitioners the confidence and peace of mind that the library resource they use is both comprehensive and up to date.

[Video Narrator]

At CLT International, we help lawyers, accountants, trustees, and other practitioners who work with families to plan for their futures. While our products and services may vary, we are united by a shared ambition and purpose to have a positive impact on people's lives and society as a whole. At Wilmington, it's about more than business.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. For those of you who are new to the story, that gives you the whole portfolio, the whole group. We're going to move through the presentation this morning. If I can just draw your attention to the safe harbor statement, then onto the agenda. As I said already, we have a slightly different format today, as we have an enhanced session. In a few moments, I'll talk you through the headlines, then I'll hand over to Guy, who'll give you the details on the financials. Then it's back to me again for the operational review and outlook. We'll then start the first part of the capital market session. I'll talk to you about RegTech and about AI, and our activities and our plans. That's then followed by a Q&A on everything you've heard up until that point.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Then we'll take a 15-minute break. Then we'll have the presentation from the Conversia team, and I'd like to welcome Alfonso, who's the CEO, and Jordi, who is the Chief Revenue Officer. You'll hear from them in about an hour or so from now. If you're watching online, I will call out the page numbers. You have packs in front of you as well. So we'll move to slide 4 for the headlines. In FY 2026, we saw growth in 8 of our 9 ongoing businesses. Ongoing revenue is up 37%. Organic revenue growth held its level from the first half at 4%. Our new addition, Conversia, grew at 20% pro forma for the full year. That's 26% over the period of our ownership, which is ahead of our expectations.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We continue to have very strong revenue profile, with repeat revenue holding at 80% of ongoing revenue and annual recurring revenue up 6%, and it now makes up 38% of organic revenue. This increases to 41%, including Conversia. Ongoing adjusted EBITDA is up 33% to GBP 29.8 million. Ongoing adjusted PBT is up 15% to GBP 30.1 million. Over the last 6 years, which is our time as the executive team, our adjusted PBT has delivered a CAGR of 13%. With the increase in adjusted EPS, the full-year total dividend is proposed to increase by 9% to 12.5 pence. Moving to the right of the slide, we continue to reshape and strengthen the portfolio with the acquisition of Conversia. Our U.S. events business, FRA, was rationalized in FY 2026 and now offers a smaller schedule of core events, and the business continues to be held for sale.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Throughout the year, we completed strategic reviews of Axco, Bond Solon, and Mercia, revisiting three-year plans and investing in growth strategies. We continue to develop our M&A pipeline, building relationships with opportunities. Lastly, the RegTech platform is making progress, and we have a series of AI advancements, and I'll talk about these a little bit later. But before doing that, I'll hand over to Guy for the financial summary.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. We've got our usual financial slides today, including the pro forma we used last year to show what a full and prior year of the current roster of businesses looks like. I'll come onto that in a moment. Starting here with the divisional splits. The overall ongoing revenue growth of 37% includes growth from 8 of our 9 continuing businesses. Organic growth, which excludes acquisitions and currency movements, and therefore Conversia and Phoenix, but includes Astutis this year, is 4%. Only Astutis didn't grow in the year. It was flat on last year but has since returned to growth. It's included in the health, safety, and environment segment, HSE on this slide, which also contains the Phoenix acquisition.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Phoenix grew 9% year-on-year but was only owned for 8 months of the prior period and hence the large absolute variance on last year. After strong double-digit growth from both businesses in FY 2025, both have had sales headwinds in FY 2026, particularly in the first half. Sales were better in the second half, but not enough to bring Astutis back to revenue growth for the year. The better H2 sales contributed to improved deferred income at the end of FY 2026, which, along with the continuing better monthly sales than last year, have given both businesses a strong start to this financial year. The legal sector on here contains Pendragon and Bond Solon. Pendragon grew 8% with continuing strong retention of customers and some new business. Bond Solon got back to growth, albeit small, after a difficult FY 2025.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Conversia appears for the first time as the data privacy segment with more than 20% revenue growth in FY 2026, actually 26% in our period of ownership, and a lot more of that business to come later on this morning from the guys who you will meet later. Financial services growth was led by ICA and CLT International at 7%, Axco at 6%, and Mercia did 1% growth in the year, but actually had 6% volume growth, which offset the price pressure they had in what is a very competitive market at the moment. Recurring subscription revenues continued to grow, up 6% to 38% of organic revenue, sorry, and to 41% of continuing revenue when you add Conversia in. A full year of Conversia revenues will bring recurring subscriptions to around 50% of total revenues, as 70% of Conversia's revenues are subscription.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Repeat revenues, that is, those that come back each year from existing customers but are not necessarily contracted in advance like subscriptions are, continued to be 80% of revenues for ongoing businesses. Operating margins for the group fell just short of the 30% we usually talk about, as acquisitions that have not yet reached that margin have a bigger effect than last year. This is partly because margins and profits at the HSE acquisitions have fallen in the year as investment cost in sales has not yet been matched by sales growth. Excluding acquisitions, margins were at 37%, up from 35% in the financial services and legal segments, which are our existing businesses pre-acquisition. This is in line with expectations previously set regarding our continued investment in operational process technology in these businesses. Moving on to slide seven and the rest of the P&L.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Operating profits improved more than the interest income we lost by taking on the debt for the Conversia acquisition. Adjusted PBT, as you can see here, is up by 15%. PBT margin, however, was down slightly at 25% due to the same impact of acquisitions as we had on the operating profit margins. Below adjusted PBT, we show M&A related items as adjusting items in the P&L. As usual, earn-out provisions for the recent acquisitions, which are required to be accounted for in the P&L and not on the balance sheet, as the earn-outs have continuing employment requirements on the sellers, make up part of this, actually GBP 2.7 million of it, along with amortization of intangibles at GBP 5.7 million and acquisition costs at GBP 3.5 million. Conversia obviously increased all of these numbers year-on-year. FRA is still profitable.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

It's the discontinued operations figure shown here, and the business remains in a sale process. The business recorded a trading profit of GBP 1.3 million in the year, and the loss shown here is because there is a small impairment of the goodwill on the balance sheet from its acquisition in 2015. Tax remains at the U.K. corporate tax rate. Finally on this slide, we've increased the dividend by 9% in total for the year, the final dividend of 9.4 P being 11% higher than last year. On to slide 8 that I mentioned earlier, which is the slide that shows the full year impact of acquisitions. The FY 2025 numbers have all the businesses in them as if we'd owned them for all of that year.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Revenue growth, if we looked at it on this basis, would've been 9% versus the organic figure of 4% that I mentioned earlier. Profits improved by 6%, but operating margin goes down, again, because of the acquisition margins. Particularly, you can see on here, the profits in HSE going down year on year. We're working on a growth strategy for the health and safety businesses in H1, and there'll be more to come on that the next time we come out to talk to you. Finally, on to slide 9, the cash flows for the year. Operating profit conversion to cash was close to 100% as usual for the group. It was slightly below 100% this year following the addition of Conversia for seven months. Excluding Conversia, cash conversion was 103%.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

A full year of Conversia ownership will reverse the working capital outflow you can see on here and bring the group conversion back to 100% for FY 2027. The significant cash movements in the period obviously related to the Conversia acquisition and its funding with our cash balance and the new debt facility. We've said we expect to reduce the net debt quickly, and it's significantly below two times EBITDA at the year-end. Our cash flow remains H2-weighted, as we've explained before, and so further significant debt reduction will occur next in early calendar 2027, basically when we do most of our subscription billing. Interest expenses is budgeted within current market rate expectations, and most of the debt is drawn in euros, so benefits from the lower base rates that are in place in the EU.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

With a total debt facility of GBP 80 million, we have over GBP 10 million available today for further acquisitions, and this will expand in H2 towards GBP 20 million by the year-end. That's all we've got on the finance slide, so back to Mark.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, thanks, Guy. We are going to move on to slide 11 for our capital allocation policy, which remains unchanged. Our strategy is to expand our positions in the international GRC markets and grow the group's quality of revenues and profits, both organically and through acquisitions, by investing in our business and actively managing our portfolio of brands. Much of our investment is in technology and staff, and you will hear more about our technology progress shortly. Acquisitions remain our priority for any other cash, whether sourced from borrowings, operational cash generation, or raised from shareholders. We will continue to manage the portfolio, and we will continue to pay a sustainable and, where possible, growing dividend coupled with reducing leverage. Moving on to slide 12. At our interims, I described our markets as challenging and turbulent.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

This trend continued for the remainder of the year, and we now see this as the new norm. In this environment, Wilmington has delivered another solid set of results, which demonstrates yet again the resilience of our portfolio. Eight of nine continuing businesses grew, and Astutis was only marginally behind against a very strong comparator. A reminder that Astutis was up 18% FY 2025 on FY 2024. Our group revenue stream continues to improve, both in terms of actual as well as recurring and repeatable. Our profitability and earnings continue to show good growth. And with strong cash generation, we have reduced our net debt to below what was expected. We continue to have one business held for sale, which is our U.S. business, which is called FRA, where the restructuring around a core set of events is now being completed.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The major event in March 2027, which is RISE National and MMS, is tracking slightly ahead of last year, which is encouraging at this very early stage. On our acquisitions, Conversia is performing extremely well and is ahead of our expectations. And you will leave us today with the knowledge this is a great business run by a first-class team. We systematically review all of our businesses, and currently we are working with the management teams of both of the health and safety brands, investing in areas like sales and marketing, and I am very pleased to report that both businesses have had a good start to FY 2027, with both reporting strong revenue growth year to date. The GRC RegTech platform is now up and running across most of the group, and there is more on this in a moment.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

As we have moved away from a media focus, Wilmington has repositioned and re-categorized as a GRC RegTech business services group. And finally for this section, our outlook is that current trading is in line with market expectations, with solid Q1 revenues for all businesses. On to slide 13. That concludes the review of FY 2026, and we are going to move now straight into the first part of the capital markets section. And then following this part, we will be taking your questions. So onto slide 14. Referring back to our agenda, over the last few years, we have referenced a consistent strategy for Wilmington, but a newer part of that narrative has been the use of the terminology around our RegTech platform, and I am going to expand on this some more today.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We will all have different understandings of the term RegTech. Today I want to explain what our RegTech platform actually is, what it does for our customers, and why it matters to you in your investment cases. Moving on to slide 15, and then onto slide 16. Our vision for our RegTech platform is to complete the journey started more than four years ago to streamline our technologies such that we have a common set of technologies powering our businesses, moving away from the disparate technology architecture of the past. By creating this single stack, we can better develop products. We can increase development velocity. We have already reduced legacy technology debt, and we can increase security, reduce duplication, and improve many efficiencies. It is extensible and repeatable, meaning new companies joining the group get access to new technologies.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The RegTech platform built in this way is sector agnostic, meaning it will be as proficient in, say, financial services as it is in health and safety, meeting multiple international GRC market requirements. Let me explain the RegTech platform in more detail than we have done in the past, and also explain to why you, as an investor in Wilmington, why this matters. Slide 17. To start, I am going to recap on where we have come from because it frames everything that follows. Since July of 2019, we have pivoted away from a number of disparate media businesses and focused the whole group on international governance, risk, and compliance or GRC. As a result of that new positioning, we reduced from 15 brands down to seven, and we added three, and we are now nine businesses with one held for sale.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Moving to the middle section of the slide, as part of our portfolio playbook, we now focus on GRC sectors with large total addressable markets selling to expert regulated customers, and we do so with brands that specialize in these high-value premium markets. This approach gives us vertical and horizontal opportunities. Vertically within the sectors, we fully understand those areas, and horizontally, either geographically or through those specialisms that span multiple markets. To enable this opportunity, we have developed our RegTech platform using third-party providers' technologies built on a composable technology stack, moving towards a single technology platform. This strategy is not new to you. I have explained it many times.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Moving to the right-hand box, this shift in strategy and focus, combined with the technical consolidation and capability, means that we are now in a position to describe ourselves not as a media company, but as a RegTech business services company. From this month, we have transferred our sector classification on the London Stock Exchange from media to business services. However, as I said earlier, RegTech means very different things to different people, and the components of a RegTech platform may not be commonly understood. As we have more time today than we would normally do for our prelims, I am going to explain more about what we mean by the term RegTech. Let us start by looking at the regulatory markets in which we operate, which start on slide 18.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Whilst our brands look unrelated, they all share the common aim of helping specialist professionals meet regulatory obligations that are getting tougher, not easier. We serve many customers over many different domestic and international markets, and each of these markets has its own regulator, its own professional standards, and its own qualifications. A financial crime officer needs internationally recognized credentials and career-long CPD, that is continuing professional development. An accountancy firm needs data mapped to its own professional body, not a generic compliance feed. A health and safety professional must work within an extensive statutory framework. This chart shows some of the headline regulatory factors for each market in which we operate, and as you can see, there are many. You will see on the bottom left that we have color-coded these businesses, grouping them into four markets where we serve today, which are financial services, health and safety, legal, and data privacy.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Because these markets are separate, each needs its own product set, which means that the cross-selling between these markets is very limited. Our products are built for the regulated specialists who operate in each of these areas. For example, we cannot sell insurance data to, say, health and safety managers. Importantly, though, whilst the products, therefore, are unique to the regulatory markets they serve, they do not need their own technology stacks. Onto slide 19. On this chart, we show nine of our customer-facing brands offering nine market-specific storefronts to meet the needs of the customers in those markets, powered by one common set of technologies. Omitted from this slide is our U.S. events business, FRA, which does not operate on the RegTech platform.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

With the exception of Conversia, which you can see on the right of the slide, which just prior to the acquisition had just redeveloped its platform and therefore is not efficient to immediately re-platform it again, all of the other brands shown here take parts of the common Wilmington platform, and they deploy it as their own RegTech storefront, branded and configured for the professionals it serves. The customer never sees Wilmington. They see ICA or Axco or Bond Solon. We operate in unique markets. Our brands are GRC specialists in those markets, and we are serving our customers through nine individual GRC RegTech storefronts operating, with exception of Conversia, on a consolidated common set of technologies. These RegTech storefronts can share common components. Onto slide 20. To us, there are five components to the RegTech platform. Firstly, data and regulatory intelligence. This is the regulatory content. It is the market intelligence.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

It is the alerts that tell a professional what has changed. Next, there is compliance technology. This is the workflow and task management, the policy management, the reporting, and the evidence packs. This is the part that puts us inside the customer's workflows and daily processes rather than running alongside it. A RegTech platform should also include learning and accreditation. This will be qualifications, learning paths, and CPD tracking. These are the credentials that ensure professionals have the knowledge, skills, and awareness to practice in their specialist areas. A RegTech platform should also have a community. This might be membership, events, peer networking, building a professional community. This is very much the human interaction part of the platform. Lastly, AI and automation should be embedded across every product line, offering services such as document analysis, summary generation, risk scoring, and risk routing.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

For each brand to operate its platform, it does not need to have all of this in place from the start. We can grow from our existing positions. Moving on to slide 21. This slide is a newer, more detailed version of an old slide and shows where we are on the journey against each of these component parts, brand by brand, across the top of the sectors in which we operate, and underneath this are our brands. Down the left is now a new expanded view of what we've previously shown in terms of the RegTech platform components. Areas in green are live, the orange areas are work in progress, and the empty boxes are future opportunities. A few points about this chart. Learning and accreditation is largely green across the group, and that very much reflects Wilmington's heritage.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Data and regulatory intelligence is patchier, and compliance technology is the least developed row. We're exploring solutions in these areas. For example, Mercia audit methodology embedded in accountancy customers' workflows. The other thing to point out about this slide is there's lots of empty space, which shows the opportunities for additional product growth, and that can be either organically or inorganically. AI is embedded across all of our operations, and there's more on AI in a few minutes. Just before I leave this slide, can I ask you to look on the left-hand side to the ICA column, which you can see is possibly our most advanced brand in terms of coverage of each component. Staying with ICA onto slide 22. To evidence our progress around creating this RegTech platform, I'm going to use ICA as an example.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

ICA is our business that focuses on helping customers prevent financial crime and meeting regulatory requirements. As I've already said, it is the first to approach coverage across all the components. Data and regulatory intelligence is in progress, with alerts live and dashboards in development. Compliance technology is a gap, and those tools are being scoped. For example, ICA being embedded in customers' compliance training workflows, and data from the workflow being exported and used in management information and regulatory reporting. Learning and accreditation is live and mature. The qualification portfolio anchors a professional for their whole career, and 35 hours of CPD a year creates repeating revenues. Several major international banks have now adopted the ICA Learning Hub as part of how they develop their people. Community is also live.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Well over 30,000 members are now part of a digital professional community, with peer networking built into the member journey and established face-to-face events in the U.K. and Asia-Pacific. These events and our focus on quality products and services leads to very high customer engagement, with ICA's NPS at +60 and a CSAT score of 94%. AI is being deployed across the whole company with 11 initiatives at green status. Whilst ICA is not a finished platform, you can see how the business has moved from its heritage of being a training company and is organically and through partnerships building positions across all five components, creating a broadening ICA RegTech storefront. Moving on to slide 23. On a previous slide, I showed you the current sectors in which we operate. That's financial services, health and safety, legal, and data privacy.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The same platform that serves three of these four regulated sectors today can be configured for other sectors. In 2025, we researched which markets demonstrate the characteristics we were looking for. We looked for areas with active and increasing regulation, with regulators able to employ legal and fiscal penalties, and we looked for a large and growing population of regulated professional individuals. On the bottom of the slide are the sectors which rose to the top of the list, and they are retail, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and social care. These are adjacent verticals where the platform could be deployed, and we can get there by building, but most likely by buying or partnering. Other market opportunities exist, so the Wilmington of tomorrow will include additional markets, but not new technology stacks.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

As we say at the bottom of the slide, the model for our platform has a very high ceiling in terms of markets in which we can explore. One of my and my board's favorite questions for presentations like this is, so what? What difference will a single technology stack make? What difference will this shift to RegTech business services make? We understand RegTech. We understand that you have an exciting go-to-market strategy. It all makes sense, but what difference will it make to our customers and ultimately to you as our investors? These are all very fair questions, and slides 24 and 25 will show some of the answers. Moving to slide 24. Firstly, cost and operational leverage. Our technology investment is now controlled centrally rather than repeated nine times. This leads us to a synergistic approach with better prioritization and more accountable ROI decisions.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Procurement is consolidated, and we run one engineering organization instead of several. Platform efficiencies, combined with AI, have already saved six-figure sums in FY 2026 and will continue to make us more efficient moving forwards. Speed to market. When one brand builds something, it becomes available to all of the others, and smaller businesses get a more capable tech stack. Revenue and customers. A single destination for an increasing number of needs supports our ambition of increasing share of wallet and recurring revenue. A single customer view with each brand makes upselling better informed rather than speculative. Once we are embedded in a professional's workflow, we are much harder to remove. Slide 25. Customer and user experience. We offer a continuously improving customer service. That could be speed of response, accuracy of response, preventable delays, which aids to retention and will deliver us efficiencies.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Our net promoter and CSAT scores are already very high across the group, and we can more accurately identify and measure operations SLAs to ensure that remains the case. I will talk more detail about AI in a moment, but having customers on common technologies means we can build repositories of data and develop management information with aggregated data, enabling us to build benchmarking products for use for regulatory reporting, which feeds into my last point around compliance and trust. We can offer customers regulator-ready audit trails of data usage, and security and resilience is certified once rather than nine times. On to slide 26, and in summary for this section, compliance is not one problem. Our products are built for specialists rather than for everyone. The RegTech platform means five specific component parts. Nine brands will operate market storefronts on one common set of technologies.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

ICA proves the model works and shows that we can build out from an existing position of strength. The remaining gaps get closed brand by brand through building, buying, or partnering. Our platform is repeatable into new regulated markets. On to slide 27. AI has a big role to play in the delivery of this platform. The world of AI is significantly different to when we last presented for our interims, and there is no comparison to when we first focused on AI in 2024. The two questions I get asked most often are: What impact is AI having on the business? What is your business doing with AI? The next few slides will answer these questions. Slide 28. Our approach to AI is to view it as a program, not a pilot. Let's first look at the scale of our activities.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Every one of our business units keeps an AI initiatives register on a common format. Across those registers, there are more than 90 logged initiatives, from which more than 35 initiatives are already live or in day-to-day use, and 30 initiatives are in build. The remainder of the initiatives are on registers, but they're not yet fully scoped. This chart on the left shows the split by business units. We've anonymized these as this is commercially sensitive information. The darker the color shows AI initiatives that are live. The lighter color shows those that are in build, and the gray are those initiatives that are being scoped. The balance differs by brand, which reflects the different shapes of these businesses rather than the different levels of ambition. The data that powers this chart reveals that the businesses have a combination of customer-facing and internal operational initiatives.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Following our so what way of thinking, I have a few points to make about this slide, which are on the box on the right. Firstly, AI is being applied at the point of value to a lesser or greater extent in every business. That's the blue areas on the chart. Secondly, there is approximately a 50/50 split between the total number of customer-facing initiatives and internal initiatives. That means that the management teams see the value of AI across their entire estate. As we in the center have a single comparable view of all of our AI activity, we can better assess the return on investment. Our approach to AI is informed and selective. We understand the capabilities we are adopting, and our security controls guide which features we enable and how we use them. On to slide 29.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

This next slide provides more detail from the high level of the previous slide to continue to answer the so what question and show some of the examples of the initiatives in the business which are customer-facing. We've added the detail here for you to review later, but I'm going to pick out a few from this page. Starting on the top left box at ICA, we have an AI tutor with text and voice, plus role-play grounded in ICA's own course material, and it's live. The first qualification using it launched in March 2026, and further qualifications are migrating. If we move on to the right-hand side of the slide, you'll find ICA, and we have an in-product AI agent, which is beta targeted for the first half of this financial year, alongside AI-assisted market profile summaries.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

If you move to the bottom of the slide to the shaded boxes, the pattern across the portfolio is that our central coordination of AI prevents duplication of effort. We are comfortable with our businesses experimenting with AI, but with costs largely unclear, we are putting increasing effort into measuring the ROI of AI solutions and therefore avoiding creating several different versions of the same thing. On the bottom right is a section on defensibility. In every case, the AI we are employing sits on top of something we already own. So accredited qualifications or proprietary course content, proprietary insurance data, longstanding professional relationships. We see AI as an opportunity to increase our defensibility, not reduce it. Human in the loop is absolutely at the heart of our AI strategy.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

This is a mandatory requirement, not a preference, because our customers are relying on us to help them meet very strict, very tight regulatory obligations. Staying with our so what question a little longer, we move to slide 30, where we will share some headline metrics. The challenge here is much of the data we would like to show you is commercially sensitive, but here are some examples of the operating gains we are either expecting to see or we are currently seeing. 735 hours is the projected annual saving on course development we expect to achieve through adoption of AI services in our content generation team for just one business. In another business where tenders and bids are a major part of their sales process, the time to accurately review highly complex tender documents has reduced by 33%.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Our analysts working on market reports can save up to 4 hours per report. We have made nearly 7,000 internal chatbot queries, so these would be used on our operations teams, for example, over 3 months, which will have the combined effect of reducing customer response time and improving the quality of our response. Just to be clear, some of these are expected outcomes and success measures. In parallel with these, we are also developing our return on investment measures, so we can more accurately measure the impact of our AI adoption across the group, including maintaining a clear line of sight on costs, efficiencies, and security. Slide 31. Another side of AI is how it is being used by our customers to find our businesses, products, and services. So termed Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. This slide shows the current position of Wilmington brands to a series of AI searches.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We ran 200 controlled tests across 10 brands using 4 models, making 5 sequential runs with the same prompt. The prompts were unbranded and never named a Wilmington brand. They simply described the buyer's problem in the buyer's language. In 93% of the tests, our brands were mentioned or commonly recommended by the LLM. 6 brands were mentioned in every single run on every model with no variation at all. You can see them on this slide. There is Axco, Bond Solon, Mercia, ICA, and CLT International. The sixth is FRA, which is on the next slide 32, and you can see RISE, which is FRA's main brand, was mentioned in all returns. Conversia is named in 13 of 20 tests, which mainly can be tied to one LLM using training data and yet to pick up a recently launched website. We expect to see this improve pretty quickly.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Astutis and Phoenix appear extremely highly, with 18 or 19 out of 20 returns, and Pendragon, possibly due to its specialized offering, returns 16 out of 20. There is an opportunity there. This data is hugely important and a clear demonstration of our market leadership. Businesses previously focused on search engine optimization or SEO. Then we moved to reliance on search engine marketing or SEM, or paid search. Now the major source of sales and marketing inquiries is GEO. I hope these charts show you we are acutely aware of this and have, for some time, been proactively ensuring our presence in this very valuable source of commercial activity. For clarity, this is a single wave of research at a point in time rather than a track trend. For the presentation purposes, we have condensed the feedback into headlines only.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Last on AI, I would like to look at how we are regulating and managing AI internally, which is on slide 33. We operate a human-in-the-loop protocol. We have no plans to have agentic solutions running unmonitored. Here are some examples of how businesses are exercising controls and assurance. For example, developing anti-hallucination prompt frameworks and mandatory expert review. On cost, this is being run as business as usual, i.e., it is expensed through the businesses to ensure the commercial operational efficiency is measured alongside other investments. Spending is essentially licensed cost managed through the group and business unit P&Ls with expenditure very closely monitored and controlled. The near-term ask of this program is for measurement discipline to drive growth and efficiencies, not allow a large capital commitment. In summary, AI is being applied where we already hold defensible assets.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Our registers show breadth alongside governance, and the visibility work suggests we are benefiting from AI researching. All areas of the business are maturing or developing AI initiatives to assist with growth and efficiencies. Onto slide 34. This is the final slide, and it focuses on the risks part of AI. There is a significant commentary in the markets around AI eroding established businesses. Commenting only from a Wilmington perspective, we hope that what we have shown you so far today demonstrates that AI is strengthening the group's position rather than eroding it. We have another lever, though, when it comes to managing the risks around AI, and that is the market environment in which we operate since we pivoted to focus on GRC. We call this our regulatory moat.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The regulatory accreditation achieved through our training or the demonstrable and evidenced skills acquired through our other programs provides customers with a safe environment to learn and practice the skills and decision-making that will keep themselves, their businesses, and their customers on the right side of the increasing amount of regulations. To remind you, we are working with the individuals who are required to demonstrate they have the knowledge and skills to meet regulators' requirements internationally. In addition, the proprietary data that we layer on top of open data provides a complete regulatory picture, not a partial one. Failure to fully scope and assess regulatory markets carries a significant risk. Regulator activity remains at very high levels. For example, in July this year, the FCA published it had issued GBP 129 million of fines in the 2025-2026 year.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

And in the year before this number was even higher at GBP 186 million of fines. Our experts have deep understanding of the many, many regulatory environments, and we work very closely with the accreditation bodies, of which we are one, to ensure the accuracy and quality of our services. Our customers recognize these strengths, which is why we are embedded in some of their workflows. They recognize the accuracy and traceability of our information and services, and they are very aware of the punitive nature of failures to comply with regulations, and they choose trusted partners. This is evidenced by our 80% repeatable revenue rate with customers coming back time and time again. Lastly, AI recognizes our strengths too, with their models recommending us or mentioning us 93% of the time over the testing period I mentioned earlier.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Rather than replacing us, AI models are recommending us, and I think that is a fitting note on which to end this part of the presentation. I shall ask Guy to rejoin me, and we will now be ready for your questions. If you are online, please put your questions in the chat, and I will see them on this tablet down here. If you are in the room, then we have got a roving mic, so please put your hand up. In all cases, could you please introduce yourself with your name and your company? We will start off in the room. Alastair.

[Alastair Reid, Analyst at Investec]

Thanks a lot. Alastair Reid from Investec. Three from me, please. FRA was included in your opening video. You just talk about the attempted sale process. When does it come back to being part of the ongoing business? Secondly, can you just talk about the outlook for health and safety side of the business in terms of the scope for margin improvement? Lastly, banks always need more help meeting their compliance requirements. Can you talk about your pipeline of potential new clients for your RegTech platform in financial services? Thank you.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Of course. Okay. I will take the first one. Do you want to do the second one? We can talk about the FRA. The FRA process has been, we have documented this very clearly, which is that FRA operates in the GRC space because of the content it is working with, which is in the Medicare Advantage space in the U.S. The content of that is GRC, but it is a media business. We are moving away from media. The repositioning of FRA to really focus on its core events has repositioned the business into a much better place than it was previously. That is the first piece, and that has been quite a lot of work over the last 12 months. We have been really clear about the disposal process, though, because this is a very good business. As Guy has already said, it is profit-making.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We're looking for an acquisition there which has got the appropriate value attached to it for the business. We'll take our time to do so. We'll take our time to make sure that the valuation we get for the business is appropriate given the new shape of it in terms of its new operating model. That's the first part. There is no timetable to that because when it comes to these sort of processes, they can take some period of time. Certainly, we're in no rush, and we've been really clear about this when we've talked about FRA previously. We're in no rush to make that happen, make that disposal. In terms of timings for FRA. You're probably aware of the accounting standards. You can hold an asset for sale for at least 12 months before you have to count it as continuing again.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

That 12 months is nearly up, so by the time we come to report our interims, and if we haven't sold it, we will have to be looking at putting it back in the numbers. FRA is a much restructured business from the one that has been presented in the past. It's much less than half the size that it was then. The headcount is much lower. It runs a much different set of events. Essentially, it's a different business than it was. When that gets reflected in our numbers, the comparative will have to show the real comparative and not the old business that was doing 40 events a year when now it's only doing six. Do you want to take the HSE margin question? Sure.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We fully appreciate, and you could see it on one of the slides, that HSE hasn't lived up yet to the margins we expected it to make when we bought it. It didn't have the best sales year. It had a much better second half than first half, and that's given it a very good platform to move into this year. Its cost base is now at a size that it can sell a lot more than it did in the past. We shouldn't need to increase that a lot more, and as we get revenue growth, the margins will improve. We said when we bought both these businesses, there was no reason why they couldn't get to the same kind of margins that our other training businesses are at, and they're all at 30% or even slightly better.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

There's no reason why this business. I know it only did 13% in the year just gone by, but there's no reason why that shouldn't be in the mid-20s in 12, 18 months' time. Provided, of course, the revenue growth comes. That's what we're aiming to do and get it back to the 30%, so I don't have to stand up here every time and explain why our margins are slightly lower because we've got HSE in, and we don't want to be doing that anymore, obviously. The last question is in the financial services space about new clients. We have a monthly board with each of our businesses, and one of the focuses of that is pipeline development.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Just to expand on what Guy was saying, one of the challenges we had in HSE for this financial year is a lack of pipeline building in the first quarter of the year, which then created a lag throughout the rest of the year. We are really pleased to say the HSE businesses are both showing strong growth. All the work we put into sales and marketing over FY 2026 is now coming through in growth into 2027. That is same for all the businesses. I could say that for each of the Wilmington businesses. The market you are referring to in the financial services space, that pipeline development, is something which very much is at the core of Wilmington business. When we restructured the group 6, 7 years ago, we changed the sales structure to make pipeline development a mandatory part of it.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Rather than being quite reactive, we became very proactive, and that has built healthy pipelines across all the businesses. Okay. Great. Thank you. Ron to Steve.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Yeah, morning. Steve Le Stitt from DB Norris. Just following on HSE, can you just explain a bit more clearly the competitive environment there? I know Astutis and Phoenix had a certain positioning towards the top end of the market. Just explain what is happening there, and is there a kind of competitive thing going on underlying as well? Just differentiate the performance of Astutis relative to Phoenix overall. That is the first question. Well, questions. Bond Solon, can you just delve into that a bit more? Obviously, it had a tough year last year, and it kind of felt like the message there was it was comp led initially, but the growth has remained relatively modest against previously. Just explain a bit better there. The last one on FRA, can you give us like a pro forma revenue and profit number for the business in its new form? Thanks.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. I will talk to the first two. Guy, we will come to you for the FRA. The first one was about health and safety and the competitive environment. We are part of that competitive environment. We have two businesses in the health and safety space, Astutis and Phoenix. Up until very recently, Astutis has been on an earn-out. The Phoenix earn-out completes in March of 2028, so both businesses running in parallel. One of the things that we are now able to do, and are doing, is looking at how we can start to work on things like technology and marketing and product, where we can get the expertise of both businesses involved, which is a new opportunity for us. Yes, there have been competitive elements to this.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

If you look at the Google ad spend, for example, it's become an increasingly competitive marketplace that has increased marketing costs, and we are part of that because we have two businesses competing for that attention. Part of the work which we'll be undertaking from now on, I said earlier, we strategically review all of our businesses, and health and safety is no exception to that. We're reviewing these as well. The output of that is going to give us a lot of efficiencies in terms of marketing, technology, and product in the areas I've talked about. Yes, it is a competitive environment, and we are part of that competition. Bond Solon's.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The Bond Solon's story is an interesting one because it operates in four areas, and it had a very tough comparator from FY 2025 versus FY 2024 due to a number of one-off contracts that we talked about at the time, which we knew at the time when we guided against this, were not going to renew. That had a bit of a lag into FY 2026. But if you look at the performance of the business, it's very much moved through that now and is showing relatively good levels of growth as we stand here today. Yes, it is. Again, all of our markets are competitive in every space in which we operate. Bond Solon's, though, was actually just getting through these large unwinding contracts historically.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Coupled with some other changes we've made to the group in terms of product development and the move to the new technology stack as well, puts it in a really strong position moving forward. The markets in which it's growing in are largely showing good positive signs. There's nothing too structural there to mention. The FRA pro forma picture.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Yes. FRA did GBP 8.7 million of revenue in the year just gone, which is substantially down on the prior year where it did over GBP 11 million. But that decrease was planned. We said at the time we were reducing the number of events that it did significantly, and obviously that made the revenue go down. The profits went down slightly, but actually, nothing like as much as the revenue. It did GBP 1.3 million in the year, and we would expect in the year we're in now to make more profit because we've taken half the overheads out at the end of the financial year 2026. The business should get back to some revenue growth, and in fact, the only indicator we get this side of Christmas is the one major event that it runs in Q1, which ran at the beginning of September.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

That ran very successfully and larger than the event equivalent in the previous year. So it has got growth, or it is back to growth, in the set of events that it has got now, and it should be a lot more profitable because of that in this year. It is going to take a bit longer to recover than just this financial year. Some of it will have to come from its market. Its market has been quite heavily affected by the current U.S. administration and the previous one, which had big changes to the healthcare insurance market in the U.S. That does seem to have settled down a bit now, and the customers are back to spending again. Not as much as they were before the cuts, but they certainly are increasing on last year.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

We hope to see some growth to report this time next year, and then hopefully better growth after that.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, thank you.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Thank you.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Thanks, Mark, Guy. Melvin Mehta from Sterling Investment Management. One for each of you. You mentioned RegTech, and obviously that's a superb initiative and an idea. But the question then, Mark, is one of the fundamental things about small businesses is its high fixed costs and just the cost of running the business is increasing. What else can we do with these 8, 9, 10 businesses, and hopefully some more, where we really extract cost, either using AI or whatever, but really taking away and reducing that fixed cost beyond RegTech?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Did you have two questions?

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Let's go one by one.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. The first one was, so this is around RegTech fixed costs. It's important that I just outline how we run the group, because the answer will be in our operating model. Areas where we can see opportunities working across the group are largely centralized, and we do that so we can develop skills, capabilities, rather than creating individual pockets of expertise in individual businesses.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Yeah.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

So those areas, for example, Guy's finance area, the technology area, the data area, the hosting, the security, our people teams, and increasingly over the last 12 months, we've also done this in marketing to create centers of expertise there as well. We run that across the group, and that gives us a tremendous efficiency, because then we can have a central operation filled with the experts in those areas and those disciplines, and we can then offer those skills into the individual businesses. That helps reduce the cost of the running of the businesses, because we remove this effect of duplication, but it has a double effect of then increasing capability and capacity as well. That's what we've been doing systematically.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The other area, of course, is, I know you said apart from the RegTech, but I'm going to go back to the RegTech platform, which is that with this new platform and this common set of technologies as well, as we develop, we can measure things like engineering velocity far better in terms of the output from our engineering space, which we couldn't do previously when we're on siloed individual technology stacks. So it's not just about cost efficiency, it's also about productivity improvements as well. I think that's something which we are looking forward to as well.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Okay, thanks. In terms of our debt and acquisitions, is the management and the board thinking of saying, "Okay, fine, we're happy to lever up," or is the focus in the next 12 months going to be driving down that debt and that ratio?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

We'll certainly be keeping it at 2 times EBITDA or lower, which is what we've always said we would. Our natural cash flows will pay down the debt if we don't spend that debt on anything else. Can't say that we've got anything lined up to immediately spend it on, certainly this half of the year. But things come along. The M&A market is quite interesting at the moment. It's all over the place. I think people are trying to get their valuations in line with what public markets are happening, and that doesn't work for them. So we're seeing lots of processes push out. So we're not expecting to do much in the next few months. We're sticking to what we've already got. But there will be the opportunity going forward to, within 2 times EBITDA, to make further acquisitions. I mentioned a GBP 20 million number.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

By the end of this year, we'll have that much or more in our debt facility undrawn at that time. We'll see if we can put it to good use, if not, we'll have to look at alternative things.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Sure. Thanks. Any CapEx figure you can share across the group?

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

There's very little. Most of the technology that Mark Milner's been talking about is paid for on a pay-as-you-go basis, just like lots of technology these days. Conversia is more of a software development arm or has more of a software development arm than the rest of the group does, so it develops a product that it actually sells. They'll talk about something called Signo when they come to the presentation in a few minutes. Some of that gets capitalized, but it's to the tune of about GBP 1 million a year. It's not significant in our cash flows.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Thank you.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, we have time probably for a couple more, so just at the back.

[Richard Jeans, Analyst at Hardman]

Richard Jeans from Hardman. Two questions. Firstly, just curious, what percentage of the group is still face-to-face? With the advent of the RegTech platform, how do you expect that to evolve over the next five years to shifting to, say, to online or to blended learning? Secondly, just further on the previous question about RegTech costs. Obviously, the costs have gone through the OpEx rather than CapEx, but maybe give a bit of color on your LLM strategy. Are you able to direct to open weight models, for example, when you're doing certain tasks or rather than using frontier models for more complex tasks? Maybe just what your AI costs are. That is great.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Sure. The first one, just prior to COVID, if we can all go back to those days, we started a process, and this started in September of 2019. We started a process of digitizing a lot of what we were doing, so that by the time we got to February of 2020, about 30% of our training revenues were being delivered digitally, primarily through one brand, in fairness. When COVID then hit, we already had that digital model to work with, so we were able to roll that out quickly across all the other businesses. Interestingly, since that time, therefore the customer at that point had no choice around digitization, but since then, we have kept our range of services. You can do everything from a face-to-face in a room like this, in a session like this, all the way through to an online solution.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

What we now offer clients is their choice. They can choose almost, in some cases, they can mix and match whether they want to do online learning combined with some face-to-face or virtual tutors, which is a digital version that sits in the middle. It is entirely their choice. That has put us in really good stead because there are still individuals who would rather sit in a learning environment which is in a classroom base than there are individuals who would rather not do that and go and be online. What we did after COVID is we looked at our pricing around our individual products, and where the cost of delivery increased, we were able to push that through on some of our pricing as well, protecting the margin on that individual training course.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We do not have a generic across the group percentage face-to-face to online, because a lot of people actually start to blend these together. They will have a period of online learning, then attend a face-to-face part of it, but it is entirely their choice, which I think puts us in really good stead because at the end of the day, the customer is going to make the decision as to the format they want to use rather than us telling them they must attend in a certain way. It differs brand by brand. There are some things that we train which we need to be face-to-face with you for. There are some things which we train which you can do very competently and capably just online if you need to. To remind you about all of it, very high quality.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

We do not do huge groups of seats training, so the quality piece is intact all the way through. Second question, I think it was around the use of LLMs and our adoption of LLMs. Our CTO and a think tank, we split that into two areas. We have the, let us call it, the productization and the use of AI piece, and we also have an AI security council as well. The two meet to look at our adoption of LLMs and our use of LLMs in those two environments because the security element has to be taken obviously very seriously. I will leave that to one side. We will move to the product side for a second. In each of those, we sit down with the individual businesses, and we look at it not from a technology perspective but from a customer's perspective.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

What is the customer experience we are trying to achieve, and what is the technology, and how do we use the technologies to achieve that? Lastly, there is the internal view, which is how do we operate more efficiently as a business? There is a separate group who will look at that and say, okay, if you go to our operations area, where we have a new leader in that space in the group, they will be looking at their operations team, and they will be working with AI to see how they can deliver efficiencies in that operations area. I am trying to get the point across. This is done on a very local level within the operations area, but we see it in three very distinct areas. There is the security and protection piece, there is the productization using AI, and there is the operational and operating efficiencies part as well.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

In all cases, the model is designed, and the AI is then selected, and then we test ourselves. In each case, that is why we are working with a number of different LLMs across the group. Does that answer your question, Chris? Okay. One more? When we are ready. Then we are going to come to the online very quickly after this.

[Roddy Davidson, Analyst at Singer Capital Markets]

Hi, yep. It's Roddy Davidson from Singer Capital Markets. Thank you for the presentation. In the interest of time, just one quick question. Coming back on acquisitions, you traditionally have had a pretty full pipeline of things under consideration, pretty active in that regard. Could you give us a sense of how the current pipeline splits between businesses that would be pretty much discrete, a bit like Conversia, and those where there might be some scope for cross-selling or a little bit more integration with existing businesses? Do you have a preference either way?

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Yeah, sure. The pipeline is split 50/50 pretty much in the manner you described. So things we could integrate, put on the platform, and be another pillar on those different businesses, but with the same underlying technology, and versus businesses like Conversia, which already have their own platform that's had a significant amount of investment in it and really isn't something that it would be financially sensible to change a lot of for some years to come. Some of those businesses cost multi-hundreds of millions of GBP, which is beyond what we would be able to afford, at the moment anyway. But lots of them do cost double-digit millions that would be sensible add-ons for us. As I say, it's not something we think we're going to get to this side of Christmas, but in the new year, we'll be looking more. Typically, that changes processes as well.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

More companies either come up for sale or don't, as the case may be, depending on the market conditions, and so on. It's very hard to say when they will drop and become available to be in transactions, but that's what the pipeline looks like.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. There is a couple of online questions, but I am going to say to the people watching online that I think we have covered those. One was about HSE space. Forgive me if we have not, in which case you can make contact with us, but I am going to bring this session to a close. Thank you very much. We are very excited about the next session you are going to hear, which is the Conversia team. Alfonso and Jordi will be on stage. I think we had scheduled a 15-minute break. I am looking to the back of the room. Are we going to keep our 15-minute break, or are we going to meet at quarter to? Okay, I think we are going to be back in here quite quickly. Grab a coffee. Back in here at quarter to for the Conversia team. Thank you

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

[Break]

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Good morning. As Mark mentioned, my name is Alfonso Corral, and I am the CEO of Conversia. Here with me is Jordi Jimenez, the CRO of our company. We will try to cover in this presentation all these items in our agenda, starting with a brief introduction of our history. Conversia was founded in 2007. Jordi and I joined the company in 2009. In 2014, we launched our property managers vertical. Property managers are professionals or companies that manage homeowners associations, HOAs. In 2015, we began a major digital transformation of our training services, moving from distant learning to online training. At the same time, we began increasing our investment in technology, making our service increasingly technology-enabled. This is the only way to deliver compliant services of high-quality standards at an affordable price. We call this second phase of our development the tech-enabled service model.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

In 2015, we launched Signo, the first Software-as-a-Service solution powered by advanced algorithms and AI that enables any Spanish business owner or professional to bring their business into compliance with regulatory requirements, initially GDPR, in around 15 minutes, and with very high standards of personalization and quality. In just one year, almost 20,000 clients are registered in Signo. Conversia became part of Wilmington that same year. In 2016, the timeline you see here includes the launch of Magno, our service platform for property managers. Here we have the evolution of some key KPIs in our company. As you can see, from 2013 to 2016, our revenue has evolved from EUR 27.1 million to EUR 44.7 million. If we talk about net renewal ratio, this evolution has been from 75.3% to 84.6%.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

If we talk about FTEs, people working in our company, the number increases from 327 to 503, working in two headquarters and in 31 branches this year. This slide shows how the scale of the company has developed. From our perspective, it presents a solid, consistently growing business whose service is increasingly valued by customers, and which has built the capabilities to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities in the market. Customers engage us to comply with the law. We specialize in making expert knowledge accessible to SMEs and self-employed professionals who need a solution they can understand and manage in their everyday work. Data protection, an area subject to particularly close regulatory scrutiny in Spain through its supervisory authority, the Spanish Data Protection Agency, is a central part of our activity alongside other areas of compliance.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

We combine tailored documentation, specialist guidance and training, and use our own technology to organize and automate service delivery tasks. Our offering includes ongoing support because needs change as the customer's business and the regulatory environment evolve. The value lies in helping customers implement requirements and keep up to date. Pay attention. Every day, 3.2 new provisions are introduced that business must apply, and businesses themselves evolve every day. That is why our service needs to be continuous. This slide brings together Conversia's main activities across its two verticals, SMEs and property managers. For SMEs, we combine our tech-enabled service with Signo, our digital solution. Training complements this offering, and for property managers and homeowners associations, Magno provides the platform for organizing service delivery. The rounded figures shown here give a sense of our scale.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Around 31,000 customers in our SME service and around 19,000 customer registrations on Signo in just one year. In the property manager sector, the presentation shows approximately 2,400 property managers and 71,000 HOAs. If you compare this data, TAM and our actual customer, one perception arises. The gap between our customer base and the potential market gives a very clear picture of the growth opportunity ahead of us. We are now market leaders, but our market share still give us room to be very ambitious about the future. If we talk about why, the starting point is the gap between the complexity of the obligations and the resources a small business can devote to managing them. Any SME whose employees, customers, or suppliers are people must comply with GDPR and equality requirements. As you can see in the figures, the Spanish government is especially intense in the GDPR enforcement.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

EUR 48 million in fines, 31 complaints received, 32,000 inspections in one year. In addition, if the company have a website and communicate with customers by email or WhatsApp, they must comply with the Spanish Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce Act, known as LSSICE. If criminal offenses could be committed within the organization, they must put a criminal compliance system in place, and et cetera. An SME needs support to cope with this overwhelming regulatory burden. Regulations and changes to them require interpretation, and implementing them involves procedures and documentation that the business owner must incorporate into their operations. For the vast majority of small businesses, employing in-house specialists in every area is simply impossible. Our role is to make that complexity understandable and easier to manage. How? The diagram shows the relationship between customers' acquisition and service delivery.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

It's a little bit complex, but one of our routes to market is through referral partners, professionals and organizations with trusted relationships with SMEs who can recommend our services. This recommendation helps us establish contact. We then need to identify the need, explain the scope of the solution, and guide the customer through onboarding. Once the customer has signed up for the service, the documentation and subsequent contact help sustain the relationship. To deliver the service properly, we must ensure that the customer's business network, that's very important, the companies in its ecosystem with which it works as a supplier, a customer, or a partner, also complies with the regulations. This is a legal requirement. By assessing the companies in that network, we will find new business opportunities, as many will not be fully compliant, as well as opportunities to meet potential referral partners again for our services.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

The diagram illustrates this relationship between commercial activity and service delivery. This map shows how our presence is distributed across the SME market in Spain. Colors of this chart are not very dark, meaning market opportunity. Here you can see how we connect personal service with technology. The process begins with a consultant's visit and the digital capture of the required information. Contracts are uploaded to the system and work is organized according to the type of customer and service. Tasks that can be standardized are supported by automated workflows. Documentation is made available through the customer portal and the relevant communications are generated. Where a case requires intervention, the process provides for a specialist work to be assigned. This approach aims to reduce repetitive tasks and support consistent service delivery. It also helps our professionals focus on matters that require judgment or guidance.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

The process continues after the initial delivery. Customers may need guidance or implementing a measure, maintaining documentation, or resolving a query. That is why ongoing support is part of our offering. Training here addresses a complementary need. To apply certain procedures correctly, people need to understand them and know what to do in their work. The process begins by identifying the customer's training needs. We then arrange the contract, manage the relevant documentation, and deliver online training with tutoring and follow-up. In Spain, the government supports vocational training by allowing part of employers' contribution to be set aside for training such as Conversia's. This is administered through the public body FUNDAE. That is why the service includes FUNDAE-related administration subject to applicable requirements. Throughout the program, learners receive support and their progress is monitored. At the end, we carry out the planned assessment and certification activities.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

For the customer, the value lies in receiving support through the learning process, as well as access to the content. For Conversia, this activity allows us to address another aspect of compliance needs within an existing customer relationship. Let's talk about Signo. Signo brings our experience into a digital solution for SMEs. Guided onboarding collects information about the business and enables documentation to be tailored to its circumstances. Customers then have an environment in which to manage the service and access the support provided. The platform brings together tools that make follow-up and updates easier. For Conversia, Signo expands our service delivery options. It allows us to serve customers who prefer to interact digitally and to complement the support provided by our teams. As businesses across Spain and Europe become more digital, more customers will prefer to use software to maintain compliance in their organizations.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

This allows them to ensure compliance using a more affordable and convenient tool while maintaining high standards of quality and personalization. That software must be backed by specialist expertise and allow for human intervention when needed. For example, when dealing with a regulatory inspection. Signo provides all of this. It is Conversia's response to a future that is already here and is making a turning point in our sector. The Signo journey is built around an initial assessment, as I mentioned, tailored documentation, and ongoing support. Information about the business helps identify its needs. The platform makes it easier to generate and manage documents, alongside features such as signatures and evidence storage. A quick setup can make adoption easier. But implementing the measures requires the customer's involvement. That is why expert support and updates are important parts of the offering.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

In our view, the value comes from combining an accessible digital experience with Conversia's expertise. This is the principle guiding how we want to develop the solution and serve its users. So far, we have looked at our SME service and how we support it with technology. Now Jordi, please, will explain the model for property managers and take a closer look at our customers' competitive advantages and develop opportunities. Jordi.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

Thank you, Alfonso. Hi, everyone. This map shows that Conversia has a strong market share across Spain, especially in northern Spain and the Balearic Islands. As you can see, although we are the market leader in Spain's property managers market, there are still many light-colored areas on the map. This means that we also have significant room to growth in this market. This diagram shows how we deliver the service in this market. Our relationship is with the property manager, who may manage dozens or even hundreds of HOAs. Magno centralize the information for every HOA. It creates the necessary document, shows the status of every service, and identify compliance needs that are not yet covered. Our key account managers and support team review the situation with the property manager throughout the year.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

We mainly offer three services in this market: data protection, contractor management, and digital certificates. In contractor management, Magno combines the technical inspection of the HOA with compliance checks on its suppliers. We usually identify compliance gaps among the HOA suppliers. Each supplier has three options: stop providing the service to that HOA, find a consultancy that can solve the problem, or subscribe directly to Signo to resolve the gaps easily and affordable. The model, therefore, creates value in two ways. We provide a strong and secure service to the HOA and the property manager as well. We attract new SME customers to Signo. This allow us to make the flywheel that Alfonso show even bigger. Let us look at two real Conversia customers. The first example is an independent fashion shop with five employees.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

The owner is effectively the CEO, the CFO, the CRO, all the Cs in the company. She manage every area of the business. She has little time, limited resources, and a low to medium level of digital maturity. Her main concerns are data protection and electronic invoicing. She knows that she has other obligations, but the daily priorities of the business have not allowed her to address them. For this customer, our value is simple: trust, peace of mind, and freedom from bureaucracy. We make compliance easy to understand and manage so she can focus on her business. This profile represents the core of the Spanish market. As we said, Spain has around 3.3 million active businesses. Of these, 1.8 million have no employees. Another 1.2 million have between one and five employees.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

This means that more than 3 million Spanish businesses, over 90% of the total, have 5 employees or fewer. The second profile is a logistic and transport SME with around 50 employees. It has more structure, greater digital maturity, and more people involved in its internal processes. Its compliance needs are broader, so these type of customers normally buy more services from the beginning. It values expert advice and good coordination with its internal teams. These two profiles have different needs. The smaller businesses value simplicity, speed, and close support. The larger company needs greater expertise and better integration with its own processes. Conversia can serve both, but we must adapt the service to each customer. One of the things we are most proud of is our customer journey and our ability to cross-sell. We see the relationship with our customers as a long-term relationship.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

We normally start with data protection. It is a familiar need with significant regulatory and performance pressure, as Alfonso said, and our product is simple, safe, and affordable. From that starting point, our advisory service makes the sales process natural, consultative, and without friction. As we build trust, the customer becomes more aware of its compliance needs and gradually buys additional services. As the chart shows, during the first year, a significant percentage of customers go from one product to 4. When we combine this with our high renewal rate, customers continue to buy additional products over time. This slide shows our NPS. As you all know, it is one of the most widely used KPIs for measuring customer satisfaction. We are very proud of our NPS of 69 because it confirms that we are moving in the right direction.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

We believe it is especially meaningful because compliance is not naturally a source of customer satisfaction. Quite the opposite. Having to deal with more laws and obligations can be frustrating for customers. So an NPS of 69, therefore, tells us that we are taking a heavy, complex, and unproductive burden away from. Why do we win? Our position is based on several other strengths that work together. Our network of referral partners and our sales presence give us access to SMEs. These relationships take time and constant work to build and maintain. Our local presence also helps us stay close to the customers and partners. Our customer base gives us a deep understanding of real customer needs. It also gives us the opportunity to develop each relationship further. The regulatory knowledge we have built over the years is embedded in our content and processes.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

Our ability to offer additional solutions builds customer trust, strengthens loyalty, and increases profitability. Finally, Signo is a game changer in the market. It combines the knowledge of the market leader with the power of AI, and just as important, Conversia guarantees and support. Extraordinary figures of more than 19,000 customers in its first year shows that we have something very special and disruptive. We are on the right path at the right time. We must continue to develop these strengths. What about the future? We see 3 clear growth opportunities. First, we can broaden our offer. We have a clear product roadmap that combines new regulations with existing obligations that are becoming increasingly important to our customers. These products will be developed for our tech-enabled services and especially for Magno and Signo. Second, we can reach more customers.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

We are the market leader, but the map still contains many light-colored areas. The rapid growth of Signo and Magno gives us the opportunity to turn these maps deep red within a relatively short period of time. Third, we can provide more services to our existing customers. Our digital products do not make us lose our sense. Quite the opposite. They strengthen our ability to retain customers and cross-sell additional services. What about AI? Is it a risk, or is it an opportunity? We do not see artificial intelligence as a threat to Conversia. Quite the opposite. We see it as a clear opportunity. We base this view on three main reasons. The first is the digital gap among Spanish companies. We have seen that Spain is mainly a country of micro businesses. These customers generally have a low level of digital maturity.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

In fact, a recent survey found that only around 13% of businesses with fewer than 10 employees, which account for approximately 95% of Spanish businesses, use AI in some form. But simply using AI is not enough. Writing a good prompt and providing all the necessary context is still not easy or obvious for many companies. However, we know that this barrier is temporary. The digital maturity of Spain businesses is increasing quickly, and so is the adoption of AI. This brings us our second reason. Let us imagine that this first barrier has disappeared and that most companies are using AI extensively. With the right information, AI will, of course, be able to create legal documents that are as good as those provided by Signo. But as also has already explained, having the correct documents does not mean that the companies comply.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

In fact, creating the document is only the beginning. They must be implemented, signed, and stored. More important, they must always be updated when the regulation change or when something change with the company. For instance, the company may hire a new supplier, launch a new marketing campaign, or create a new website. But let's suppose that a more advanced company could even build an AI agent that not only creates the current documents, but also automates some processes to help meet these requirements. Technically, this would be possible. It would be not easy or quick, but it would be possible. This bring us what we believe is the most important reason. The third reason is security. If you think carefully about everything we had explained today, you will see that our customers do not really hire us to obtain documents.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

They do not even hire us simply to help them manage or update their doc compliance. This is how we do what we do. But the reason why they hire us is that they want peace of mind, security, and guarantees. Conversia service, both tech-enabled and digital, are backed by Conversia Guarantee, providing protection in the event of an inspection or penalty. No general AI model guarantees its answers, and no one ever will. In fact, these models always include a clear disclaimer. AI can make mistakes. There is also a bonus reason, the economic argument. Let us take the example to its limit. Imagine a company that is highly advanced in its use of AI. It decided to build an AI engine that creates and manage its entire compliance system. It then arranged its own insurance cover and legal defense. How much would this cost?

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

Would it make sense when Conversia can provide all of this continuous support and great expertise for an average cost of around EUR 600 per year? For most SMEs, it simply would not make sense. This is why AI will not take away the value we provide. Quite the opposite. We can use AI. We are already using it to deliver that value faster, better, and much more efficiently. This is exactly what Signo is about. AI will create more value for our customers and greater profitability for Conversia. With that, I hand back to Alfonso for some closing remarks.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Thank you very much, Jordi. To close, I would like to highlight just three points. First, we address an ongoing need, helping SMEs and HOAs comply with demanding regulations in a simple, accessible way. Second, Conversia is leading provider in Spain, but our market share remains small. We have opportunities to reach new customers and provide more services to those who already trust us. Third, we have a solid foundation to build on. Our businesses is delivering double-digit revenue growth, combining technology with personal support, and Signo has already generated seven-figure incremental revenues in its first year. These results give us confidence. Our priority is to keep growing with discipline, improving efficiency, and delivering value to our customers. Thank you, Jordi, and I will be happy to take your questions.

[James Fletcher, Analyst at Berenberg]

James Fletcher from Berenberg. I'll ask two just not to hog the microphone. First of all, what attracted you gents to Wilmington, and how has the relationship been subsequent to the ownership? Also, how is it different from the previous private equity ownership, if there is a difference? Then, I guess, my second question is, it feels very much a first-mover advantage here play. I guess, why has no one done this already before? Why is the market still so fragmented and no one's already seized the moment? Thanks.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Thank you. The experience within Wilmington has been very positive. We are, for the first time in our life, inside a group that has the same ambition of us. Obviously, in our past private equity experience, the horizon was selling of the company. Here, we can develop all our capabilities, not only in Spain, but maybe in the future in Europe. Not only in our company, we can combine capabilities and synergies with other companies inside the group. We are analyzing them, and we have a very good personal affinity with Mark, Guy, and the rest of the team. We have the same analysis of the future of our sector. We are aligned in the roadmap that we think that we must follow in order to make bigger this project.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

The second question about why is the market so fragmented in Spain, it is shocking, it really is. This sector was in the hands of lawyers in the past. Many of our competitors are lawyers, generalist lawyers that provide services of any different lines in law for their clients, not specialized in compliance, but they offer all the different services. There are many local, small companies that are trying to imitate what Conversia has been doing in these 15 years. I am talking about the SMEs, obviously, because bigger companies, they are in the hands of the Big Four, et cetera. But yeah, traditionally, this has been a sector in the hands of professionals, of lawyers.

[James Fletcher, Analyst at Berenberg]

Thank you very much.

[Alastair Reid, Analyst at Investec]

Thanks very much. A couple from me. Firstly, I think even if you, depending on what you mean by a seven-figure revenue number for Signo, even if you took that out of your revenues in 2026, there seemed to be a big acceleration in the growth you saw in that year relative to the growth the previous year. Could you just talk about why that happened? Secondly, can you just remind us, if you are allowed, how long are you guys locked in working for the business for, and are your targets revenue or profit-driven? Thanks.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Do you want to do the financial part?

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Yeah, sure. We think, and you can ask the guys to see what they think as well, is that the business was going through, last year, a sale process for quite a number of months. And the guys can tell you how much time they had to put into that sales process. It was a very thorough one. It went on from January till about August and took up their major selling time in the period. You will see when the half-year numbers come out that the second half of the year is much busier, our financial year, that is, much busier than the first half. Their January to June period in that year was taken up more with the sales process. Their eyes, frankly, back on the ball now, and you have seen the result, the numbers.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

All they are doing is pushing the revenue and the products and everything else. And I think that is the reason I would say

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Unless you want to add to that

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

was the sale process got in the way.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

The second one was, excuse me?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The second question is around your incentive plans. I will take it is easier. The team are with us for a minimum period of 5 years. We announced that when we made the acquisition. The metrics of that, I am not going to go into too much detail, but broadly, it is all around growth and improvement of margin as well. We have a 5-year plan in place that is constructed by the management team. We then apply our own oversight to it. Not just Jordi and Alfonso, but the six strong management team are all hooked in for that 5-year period and incentivized around growth, with margin improvement across that period as well. Okay. Great. Roddy at the front.

[Roddy Davidson, Analyst at Singer Capital Markets]

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. It is very striking looking at the map how many areas there are where you are either under-penetrated or just not very active. So a huge opportunity geographically. How, in practice, will you go about that? Are you targeting particular regions, or how does that look? Also, I think you said you have, was it 21 offices at the moment?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

31.

[Roddy Davidson, Analyst at Singer Capital Markets]

31, sorry. How many will you require to build things out? Could you give a sense around how scalable the central cost base is within the business, please?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yeah. I think I can answer the two questions together because really, our penetration with our branches is oriented to have this special relationship with referral partners that are experts, that are in these provinces providing service to the final customer. We are in the areas when there is a higher density of these kind of professionals. Now we are quite happy about our network, and there is not an urgency to increase the number of branches. How can we cover these areas in a deeply way and the rest of the areas? The answer now is Signo. Signo gives us the opportunity to reach every part of the country with less effort and in a more profitable way.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. Alastair, I am going to come back. Just one thing I should have mentioned on the incentive scheme. This management team chose to roll an equity piece as well into the new scheme, which I think is a really important part I should just come back to. The six-management team rolled a phantom equity scheme into their new scheme given the belief they have in the company going forward, which is a point I should have made. Okay. Okay.

[Sebastian Whitehead, Analyst at Kestrel Partners]

Sebastian Whitehead, Kestrel Partners. Could you talk a little bit about the revenue models of the revenue model of your business and also whether Signo is different in that regard? On the face of things, it is an ARPU of EUR 50 a customer, but it is a new business. Are you using a freemium model to drive growth, and what is the potential there in terms of ARPU? Thanks.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, so we are not going to go into the details. Commercially sensitive piece, we are not going to go into the details of the numbers, but you can talk about the shape of the sale.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yeah.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

I think that would be the right thing to do.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yeah. Well, in general terms, you have seen we offer a continuous service. That is why we have a model of paying the same amount of money every year, more or less the same, unless the situation of the company requires an update of the price. We have an amount of money for every service. So we try to obviously serve with more services to our client, time after time, provide them with different solutions and increase the ARPU with our clients.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

That is one of the things around Conversia which really caught our attention at Wilmington, was that the ability to upsell is tremendous. You saw the chart we showed, the timescale of that upsell. So it creates from the initial entry point, you can get additional, a share of wallet is our expression for it. You can get a fairly quick share of wallet gain, but then it does not stop there because the additional products, if you remember the sliding chart, come in over the next years. This business has very high recurring revenue. It is around 70% recurring revenue. Not repeatable revenue, recurring revenue, which our definition, that is contracted for a year or more, which is a hugely appealing KPI for a business.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

The upsell piece is incredibly efficient at then working with those customers over a multi-year period, adding layers of additional products on top. I am afraid we are just not going to give you the numbers in terms of what the pricing point is, but that should give you the shape of the sale. Steve?

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Yeah, thank you. Can you just talk about margin in the business and operational gearing? Obviously, there is the sort of technology piece, and then there is the consulting piece and people piece. I guess you want to keep the people out of it as much as you can. So really, if we take a growth business in revenue terms, how operationally geared are you and what is a good midterm margin for us to think about for the business? And maybe you just fill in the gaps in terms of what the margin

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Sure

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

was historically and what it is now.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay, Guy, do you want to go? Come on.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Sure. Can you It is on this, I think, isn't it?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

I don't know.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

You can hear me? Steve, you see the margin figures for the year. The 7 months that we've owned it were on the finance slides earlier. It was 21%. Historically, the business has been slightly lower than that. It's been in investment mode. It's been building up its sales force, et cetera. From here, we don't expect a great deal more cost to need to be added to the business. It's got 31 branches already. Some of those branches are reasonably recent and so haven't reached scale yet. They're going to get bigger, and that will deliver more profitability. This is a business over the next 2 to 3 years that we expect to move towards in a high 20s, even 30% operating margin from where it is now.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

That's what you can model going forward, as where you would expect it to be, and I think that's what's in some of the modeling already.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Can I just throw in a cheeky second one? Just cash flow profile of the business, and it doesn't feel as though it's a capital-heavy business to just-

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

No, not at all.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Okay.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

It's got some CapEx. It will be close to EUR 2 million this year, but obviously that's just over GBP 1 million. The cash flows are generally up front, so they're selling subscriptions, and therefore, it's quite similar to our cash flows. We'd expect 100% conversion of profits to cash in the year. Certainly what it's done historically. It had a strange effect on our cash flows this year because we owned it for a seven-month period. At the beginning of that period, there was quite a lot of outflow and therefore you've got a working capital outflow for the group overall. That will iron out when we have a full year of it in the business in the year we're in now. We don't expect it to change our cash flows at all. Actually, it's pretty cash generative.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

It's massively increased our daily receipts, which is great as far as I'm concerned.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Thank you for that, Will. Alfonso, you made a right decision of coming to Wilmington. They're lovely people.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yes. Thank you.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

In terms of competition, I know you used the word market share, but I did not hear a number. Can you share with us how many companies are there in this space, and what is our market share roughly?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Okay. Surprisingly, we have less than 2% in SMEs. You can see that we have a huge room to improve and to grow in the Spanish market.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Yeah.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

That is why go abroad is not one of our priorities, because there are a lot of companies waiting for our solution here in Spain. They are in Spain. Yeah.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

In the last few years, have we really gone aggressively in terms of sales and marketing? What was the problem with private equity that we are now trying to address?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

No, I think that they were very satisfied, but the horizon of investment came, and it was a very good decision.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

No, but what I am trying to understand is, were we not spending on marketing and sales? Was that a constraint because we are trying to preserve profits? Because they wanted to sell, obviously.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Well, I would not say that there was not. We were just focused, generating, developing, and Signo, and that was our priority there. I think that we are following the roadmap consistently and making the right steps.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

Thank you.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

You are welcome.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Are there any other questions in the room? Nope.

[Analyst at Slate Investments]

Igor, Slate Investments. On Signo, the new customers you have added, are they new to Conversia? How are we looking at getting customers? Is this still through referral partners? Yeah.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

All the customers in Signo are new to Conversia. Maybe you could be concerned about cannibalization, but it does not happen. Only five cases wanted to change from our tech-enabled service to Signo. In three cases, when we explained the differences, they were quite satisfied about the previous experience, and they stayed as they wanted, as they were. We are not concerned about that. Signo is giving up a different source of leads and clients because we continue with our partnership strategy with our referral partners that are the bookkeepers, professional associations. Signo gives us the opportunity to reach different clients in different environments, and we want to accelerate both in parallel.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Tim.

[Analyst at Memfree Investments]

Hi. Tim Harch from Memfree Investments. First question just on Signo and the growth there. Is 19,000 a number that you expect to grow per year, or is that a good number per year of new customers? The second question was just about the other property management space. Is that a growth area as well?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Yeah. Sorry, Tim, but we are not going to put out a projection in terms of customer numbers, but we can talk about. Excuse me a second. I think the market share factor is an indication of what we expect this business to do. In the SME space, which Signo is aimed at, we are running at less than 2% market share in an addressable market of 3.2 million customers. Yes, you can expect to see growth. The point about Signo, which came through, I think, loud and clear, is this product was only launched last year, and it has got 19,000 customers already. That is a fast-moving. Just process that, which is when we agreed the deal between that, and the deal was completed in December, we saw Signo, and we saw the opportunity of Signo.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Over that year, that 19,000 customer growth shows you the level of growth that we have had, and this thing is a brand-new product in the marketplace. You can expect that to continue to grow moving forwards.

[Analyst at Memfree Investments]

Second question.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Yeah

[Analyst at Memfree Investments]

About the property management.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Property management, do you want to take that?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

What was the question, please?

[Analyst at Memfree Investments]

What is the growth strategy there? Is that a growth area?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yeah. It's quite similar because we want to use Magno as we have used Signo for growing in these areas that we are not as red as we wanted. We manage this digital product with our key accounts. Property managers are quite different. It's a niche of 30,000 professionals that manage more than 1.2 million HOAs. So we need to manage with digitally but personally as well. We have 25 key accounts around Spain that manage all this market, but we are combining with Magno, so digitally and personally as well.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yes. These are professionals that are becoming more and more digital in order to be more efficient, and we want to accompany them with Magno that allow them to serve their homeowners' association in a more digital way and in a more profitable way for them. Okay. We have one more in the room, and then we have some online. Over to you.

[Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management]

What investment would be required if you were to expand outside of Spain, and what would be the most attractive areas? Thanks.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. That question is almost identical to the question we have online here, which says, this from Rob Platz of NFU Mutual, "Thanks for the presentation. Could Jordi talk about any changes in Spanish regulation which may impact Conversia? Is there scope to expand Conversia into other European geographies?" This is a question that we've talked about many times about focus on the Spanish market

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

Yeah

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

versus focus on maybe Italy or Germany, where the regulations are very similar. Over to you.

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

I think that Alfonso already said that we have a lot of room of growth in Spain, in SMEs and in property managers as well. We are focused on the Spanish market. But we saw some opportunities, especially with digital products, because it could travel very well. We want to need a high number of branches in, I don't know, Germany, France, or Italy. We have just to change some mechanism inside of the Signo or Magno. Magno is different because I think property managers is not a kind of professional in rest of Europe. It's something very special in Spain. But SMEs, we could travel to Germany, Italy, or this market. But I think that not in the short term. We have a lot of work in Spain and a lot of great room of growth in Spain.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

That's something which Wilmington will certainly look at, looking at those. The two markets which really interested there are Italy and Germany, where the regulations are enforced in the same sort of way they are in Spain. There was a second part of the question, which is, are there any changes to the Spanish regulation which may impact Conversia?

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Yeah. We are waiting for, I would say, a major regulation that will impact in our business. That is the e-invoicing. The government will enforce, on January?

[Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia]

On January.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

On January, a law forcing all the small businesses in Spain to use the electronic invoice. That we are prepared. We have prepared a digital solution inside Signo to make it possible, easier for our clients. It will be a dramatic change because many of our clients, they use Word or Excel to do their invoices, and now they have to digitalize their businesses, and it is a very good opportunity to present Signo, and we will try to combine all the tools that are inside this magnificent tool to take them as company customers.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Any other questions? Hayley?

[Hayley Palmer, Analyst at Canaccord]

Thank you. Hayley Palmer from Canaccord. This is more of a group level question, but as Conversia grows and there is more subscription and recurring revenue going within the business, I am just wondering how much you expect the revenue model and mixture change within the group, particularly in the context of the RegTech platform. Is there an opportunity to see additional subscription revenue coming from the other businesses as well?

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Sure. Guy?

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

Yeah. Conversia immediately improves our recurring revenue. When we have a full year of them, we should be around 50% of subscription business. So that is things that are-

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

60, 5

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

contracted at least a year in advance. That is already sort of almost baked in the numbers from having them in the group. Conversia have about 30% of their revenue is training, which is not on a subscription basis yet. It depends on whether we can change that to sell. We have businesses like ICA, like Mercia, that sell training on a subscription basis. There is the opportunity to perhaps improve, just change the way it is billed. The other businesses within the group are all pushing towards more subscription revenues as we go. Mercia is about 50% at the moment subscription. It can go a lot higher. ICA is only about 10% at the moment and can go a lot higher.

[Guy Millward, CFO at Wilmington]

There is a lot more opportunity to get to an ARR number, if you want to call it that is 70%-80% like our repeatable number is.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

One more. Just one more, and then I think we will wrap.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Yeah. Sorry, I know you kind of talked about it before, but I just want to hear you say it again. In terms of the competitive position, I am trying to think of Everybody speaks to me about Conversia in terms of, well, we do not really understand it. Where are the risks? I guess the disruption risk is the one that is biggest and topical at the moment. Just go back to the potential for, say, someone who is a bigger software business that could bundle a service like yours with an existing service and kind of give it for free or whatever to small clients, and maybe explain in the context of, say, Italy and Germany, who is doing the equivalent of your business in those countries to see if there is any kind of alternative models that are out there in the market.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Okay. When we were in the M&A process, and we raised a very good interest in some bidders. We are with the best, Wilmington. When we have the initial meetings with them, we tell them Signo is the only software that can be used by a taxi driver or an owner of a shop to implement GDPR in their business in 15 minutes. Obviously, the first reaction was to doubt about this statement. They were searching in all the countries if there were something similar. In the second meeting, they came saying, "Okay, there is nothing similar. You are right, because the rest of the softwares are addressed to professionals that has a previous background in law, not the final customer." Obviously, we have a window of opportunity, and someone else can build and develop a tool like Signo.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

But remember the rest of the elements of our mode, the prestige that we have inside the Spanish market, sorry, that makes people trust in Conversia, all the elements of expertise, human expertise that we have around Signo, all the referral partnerships that we have built in these almost 20 years. So it is possible to have a competitor, a software competitor, yes. But the task for this competitor will not be easy to compete with Signo, because we have some other elements.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Okay. Thank you. We are going to call that a day. Thank you to the Conversia team.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Thank you very much.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Thank you.

[Mark Milner, CEO at Wilmington]

Just to wrap up for today, thank you all for coming. Thank you for people online for joining us today. I hope we have answered your questions. Wilmington, as a group, has had a good year. We are well-positioned in FY 2027 to continue that momentum moving forward through businesses like Conversia, where you see a high-growth business with plenty of opportunity within its marketplace. That is a similar characteristic to the other businesses we have across the group in terms of growth opportunities, and you can see us realizing those. We have already said in the outlook, we are achieving our market expectations, and we are very excited about the plan moving forward. Thank you for joining us today, and it is nice to see you.

[Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia]

Thank you.

[Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris]

Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• Mark Milner, CEO
• Guy Millward, CFO

Analysts

• Video Narrator
• Alastair Reid, Analyst at Investec
• Steve Le Stitt, Analyst at DB Norris
• Melwin Mehta, Analyst at Sterling Investment Management
• Richard Jeans, Analyst at Hardman
• Roddy Davidson, Analyst at Singer Capital Markets
• Alfonso Corral, CEO at Conversia
• Jordi Gimenez, Chief Revenue Officer at Conversia
• James Fletcher, Analyst at Berenberg
• Sebastian Whitehead, Analyst at Kestrel Partners
• Analyst at Slate Investments
• Analyst at Memfree Investments
• Hayley Palmer, Analyst at Canaccord