Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Objective Corporation first half FY2026 financial results presentation. I'm Tony Walls, CEO, and with me is Ben Tregoning, our CFO.

It's always good to start off with our mission statement: outstanding GovTech driving stronger communities and nations. Of course, really have an appreciation for the marketplace that we serve, which is not only empowering digital government, but also regulated industries with a suite of mission-critical software applications that collect, protect, govern the proprietary public sector data that we all depend upon.

It's also worthwhile pointing out that this is a slide that we've been running for some time now, many years. It talks about our 2,000-plus customer relationships and calls out our 20-year customers, as well as a selection of our 10-year customers.

Equally, I think you'll see at the full year, we're now starting to get into that mode where, in fact, we've got some 30-year customers coming along as well. Look, clearly they're not on the same software from 30 years ago.

We've been on an incredible journey with so many of our customers, and this is a testament to the ongoing value that we create for them. The agenda for this morning is, first of all, we'll talk about the financial summary.

We'll talk about AI and the opportunity for Objective. I'm sure you're all eager to hear about that.

I'll go through a business line overview for each of our lines of business, and then conclude with an update with our outlook. Some of the key numbers.

This is a new style of presentation for us, but I think really calls out the strength of what the organization is achieving today. We've made that transition, I guess over the last number of years, to being 100% subscription-based software revenue.

We had 13% subscription revenue growth in the first half, 24% of that being on cloud with SaaS revenue growth at 24%, an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%. If we look at that across each of the lines of business: Information Intelligence, our renamed Content Solutions line of business, which you will have heard about previously, at 23%; Planning & Building, 38%, helped along by the I-Plan acquisition; and Regulatory Solutions up 14%, all since the first half last year.

If we convert that into raw financial numbers: revenue of $67 million, annualized recurring revenue breaking through to $120 million, adjusted EBITDA of $26 million, operating cash flow a strong improvement of 72% on PCP at $22 million, net profit after tax of $19 million, research and development of $17 million, up 28%—now at 28% of software revenue, which I'll talk to in a couple of slides' time—cash of $95 million after an interim and final dividend, plus the acquisition of [IS-Service?] , again reflecting that strong cash generation, and a strong interim dividend of 13 cents per share that's unfranked.

A chart that some of you will have seen before is really looking at how the SaaS revenue has really driven our growth. I think what this illustrates more than anything else is that we've had compound annual growth rate over the past seven years of 28%.

I think that gives everyone a really strong sense of how we've been able to drive the success of the business. Non-recurring revenue, compound annual of 2%, which I guess just reflects the strength in the SaaS growth, and USP sustaining that CAGR of 2% over that same period of time.

Also called out for the very first time that USP has actually come down very slightly, reflecting that strong growth rate in the SaaS from last year, $34 million, to this year being $42 million, a very strong jump. Equally, many of you will have seen this chart before, and for year-on-year growth rate over the past five years, if you look at the investment that we've made, $140 million of the $324 million has been made in the last five years.

So 43% of the total revenue of all time since listing has happened in the last five years. We think that sort of really demonstrates our commitment.

Our customers love the commitment that we have to R&D, still representing 28% of software revenue. That's down slightly a couple of percentage points.

I'll talk to that in a couple of moments' time, but I think this sort of really just reflects the strong commitment that we have to all the things that are going on from an innovation perspective. Again, lots of people in financial markets talk about the Rule of 40.

You can see here that our Rule of 40 calculation is, in fact, more a rule of 50. We've had really strong, profitable growth in line with our strategic plan: 40% of adjusted EBITDA margin plus 12% ARR growth.

Again, no presentation on financials would be complete without talking about our flywheel of innovation. We've consistently shown that this model works.

Again, we've shown great investment in this half. I'll talk to some of the non-R&D investments that we've been making when I get to the line of business review.

We're delivering outstanding software as normal, which is enabling us to deliver this outstanding customer experience, and the financial performance is allowing us to continue our investment in not only innovation, but also go-to-market and customer support activity. That flywheel is well and truly alive today.

If we move on and talk about the AI opportunity, it's quite substantive, and let's reflect on that over the next couple of slides. There's been a lot written in the press and media in general, whether you're a podcast subscriber, YouTube viewer, everywhere you've looked in the past probably two months, there's been a lot said about the death of SaaS.

I think, look, from a certainly Objective perspective, and I could probably say this on behalf of all enterprise software vendors, really there's a lot more to SaaS than just lines of code and the coding that's happening. We've called out the broad range of things that make up a SaaS company here, just for you to consider.

Certainly, there's no doubt that, like most progressive organizations, we are using AI IDEs, or integrated development environments—such as Claude Code, things like OpenCode, which is the one that we've more recently standardized on for the near term, that are really driving great opportunities for efficiency for the coding part of our operation. You can see here from the broad range of things that we do as a SaaS solution provider, coding is a really, really small part, and whilst we're benefiting from the productivity, and there's no doubt that coding has changed forever, it is but a small part of what we deliver for end-to-end customers.

Now, I'll take questions on this a little bit later on in terms of what we're doing for those that are interested. I think you embrace AI in terms of the coding aspect of what you're doing as a software organization, or fundamentally you are going to be challenged.

As you can see here, just so many things make up the core part of what we do. More than anything else, domain expertise, systems architecture, these are all sort of really core to the products that we deliver, independent of all the other ancillary pieces that make up SaaS.

The permanent demand drivers: I've spoken about these before with respect to what drives our opportunity. There's this ever-rising expectation and increased scrutiny around what our customers do.

There's community expectations around government that's at an all-time high. There's a lot of effective regulation compliance that needs to take place, and that often comes at a high cost.

Efficiency through end-to-end digital service delivery in a way that brings an end-to-end business process from everything from citizens through government agencies and back again. I think the big promise with AI, though, really comes through productivity.

I think the benefits of productivity that are coming through AI is really what's driving the opportunity. When sort of people talk to me about what is AI going to do for enterprise software companies, and I wouldn't say this is particularly narrow to GovTech and RegTech, but what's it going to do?

It's going to drive real opportunity because customers are going to come to us, and are coming to us, looking to embrace AI for genuine productivity. I think for me, I haven't seen this productivity drive probably for a couple of decades when we really started to embrace the benefits of the web.

I think whilst cloud has done a lot in terms of getting SaaS vendors to take responsibility for the complete end-to-end solution and allowing customers to remove many of those costs from their organization, the big driver with AI for me is really all about productivity. We'll get to see some of that in a couple of slides' time.

Just to give some context to why AI is going to be a big thing for Objective. I feel like we've been training for what AI can bring and what LLMs in particular can bring really for the past couple of decades.

Those of you that know us know that all of our solutions are underpinned by great record-keeping. There are a lot of standards that customers need to adhere to with respect to record-keeping.

Equally, not only are those records important from a statutory perspective, but records and information always goes on a journey through organizations. You can see that middle layer there: not only are we the system of data record, but we're the system of workflow record.

When we come to what AI is doing, it's really all about bringing that human context, bringing the customer domain expertise into what we're doing. If you look at the productivity for most of the things that I'm sure that all of you are doing with AI, but certainly our customers are doing with AI, it's really that productivity element: being able to ask questions of the data that's stored within Objective systems, being able to interrogate that data through private AI, being able to interrogate that data through highly-cleansed records to absolutely minimize or remove the prospect for hallucination.

The other thing that's happening also, especially within the government regulated environment, is to make sure that we've got great systems of AI record. What I mean by that is, what were the records that were used to actually inference over to deliver the AI results?

Does the particular individual have access to all the information or only part of the information? When they only have part of the information, can they make sure that the AI is only inferencing over information that they have access privileges to?

Then making sure that we're keeping an audit record of those AI answers, because you won't be able to point to systems where you say, "AI told me." You'll have to have a record of what AI told you at that time that you relied upon.

This is a big part of why Objective is in the ideal place to make the most of delivering customers AI productivity. On the right-hand side of this slide also pulls out, I guess, the elements that we see of why Objective will win in the AI world.

I know many of you will have been at our Investor Day and heard about Objective Intelligence, and if you weren't, I'm going to summarize what we saw there in a couple of slides' time. We have been investing in this platform for quite a number of years now, and it's a platform that delivers a cost-controlled, model-agnostic AI capability.

As I've mentioned, we are a trusted information source for our customers. We give context in terms of we have mission-critical workflows.

All of our customers are highly-regulated, and so they have regulations and compliance that they need to adhere to. We work in a secure environment, I think it's broadly known that we're very active in the defense and intelligence industries, and those protections and those access controls are well-tested in those environments.

There's been a lot said about pricing. Again, per-seat pricing has been one of the things that people have been talking about with respect to the poor outlook for SaaS-based companies.

I think most SaaS-based companies have made the transition to other forms of pricing. Whilst per-seat still works for some of the capabilities that we rely upon, or our customers rely upon, many of our pricing models now are built around customer value.

Then finally, we've got a great in-house talent pool with respect to AI, but I think most organizations would say that today as the capability becomes more prevalent. Just to give you a little bit of context, we are delivering AI results now for customers.

It's not a thing that we're working on. I've just sort of highlighted four of those use cases here.

The first one there is to support an inquiry that we're doing for one of our large customers up in Scotland as an example. On the right-hand side, talking about cleansing data for Microsoft Copilot, which we've been doing with the Welsh government, a couple of other organizations that are using private RAG, and using redaction.

These are all things that we are doing today, not things that we're working on or capabilities we're thinking about releasing. These are genuine production uses of AI that Objective is delivering for its customers today.

Just to recap on Objective Intelligence for those of you that weren't at the Investor Day, Objective Intelligence is this layer that we have been building that's central to all of our applications. At the center is data and workflows, as I've mentioned.

Accessing that data and workflows are all of our software solutions, and then those software solutions use this single point of engagement out to the service providers and model providers. This allows us to really control where our information's going or where our customers' information is going.

I have completely ignored from this infographic where we're doing on-prem AI with local GPUs, and I'm also, I guess, I'm not sort of giving the full color around how we're controlling the costs of the use of AI here at Objective. To give you again some context, we recently processed 4 billion tokens at an aggregate cost of $4,000.

It's pretty clear that Objective Intelligence is not only delivering this broad-scale capability, but is also doing it in a way that keeps cost control central to our customers' well-being. Just to give you a sense of it, here is our primary applications that are all benefiting from OI today.

Most of our solutions have RAG as part of the solution today. We do a lot of automated document intelligence, where we're interrogating the content of documents.

We've got some of our key Planning & Building applications that utilize computer vision, which some of you will have seen before today, to do things like plan compare in Trapeze, to look at application submission and evaluation in Objective Build. Then finally, natural language processing, which has really become, I think, part and parcel of what most people expect from a key RAG solution today.

Just to sort of wrap up this section and to make it a little less infographics and words, I thought I'd step you through a couple of screens from Objective RegWorks as it sits today and how it's benefiting from OI. This is implementation of the Department of Mines, and this is an investigation case, as you can see at the top of the screen there, for community dust and noise complaint at the Willow Creek drilling.

You can see that the Ask OI pane down the bottom. It's clearly an NLP, natural language processing interface, where you can choose to summarize the investigation, summarize the latest inspection notes, what's the compliance history of the location, for example, and summarize the key evidence of the investigation.

In this case, the user is asking to summarize the case, and Objective Intelligence, having access to the complete case file, really summarizes the case for you. Now historically, this would have taken someone to go into each of the documents that makes up the case file, pulling out the relevant pieces, and summarizing them into an overall case view.

This may take several hours, or historically may have taken several hours. In this case, OI is doing it for you.

The next question of that might be, we just want a high-level summary of each of the breaches. You get this type of result where you've got the combination of all the information from the case file that's actually being overlaid with the regulations.

Against each of the regulations, we're getting the key breaches that are occurring within this particular case. You can see here excessive dust emissions, noise levels exceeding the allowable level, incomplete or missing logbook entries for the mitigation activities, and inadequate maintenance of the suppression equipment.

Again, these are all things that would take hours and hours, if not days, to do under the non-AI methods. Then finally, has the site operator responded to the complaint?

Yes, here the site operator has responded to the complaint and provided several documents, and here's a link to the correspondence back with the operator in terms of addressing this particular investigation. Again, if we think about these things in the context of productivity, which I firmly believe is what AI delivers our customers more than anything else, these are really good examples of where this is delivering real-world productivity.

It's fair to say, in each of our domain-specific solutions—Information Intelligence, Planning & Building, and Regulatory Solutions—they're alive and well, and the bulk of innovation that's going on and the investment in R&D that's going on in these areas, in these lines of business, is really to drive these productivity efficiencies through AI. Let's move on and talk about the line of business overview.

Let's pick on Information Intelligence. The last 12 months has really been very interesting around Information Intelligence.

Those of you that are up with our story will know that this has been quite an evolution as we've moved from Content Solutions to this Information Intelligence platform. It delivers a broad range of capabilities, and customers now can buy these capabilities as a single product suite on top of this platform.

We've also been doing a lot of conversions to cloud, and the rate at which we're converting is accelerating. We've now got over 2,000—20,000 users.

You can see some of the customers on the right-hand side here that have moved from on-prem solutions to our Objective Nexus cloud platform. You can see that the range of, I guess, commercial outcomes where the uplift cases is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 what the on-prem would be.

I think overall, it's probably, on average, north of certainly the 2x case. This has been delivering incredible value for customers.

I think they're seeing the benefit of moving to Nexus cloud progressively. To sort of pick up some of the highlights.

At the top, the SaaS revenue is up 5%, but the ARR growth is 10%. This, again, is a testament to how we've been driving down the cost of deployment for customers and highlights that case.

Again, I'll touch on, I guess, some relevant points from these dot points here. I've spoken about the line of business being renamed.

I've spoken about the momentum that we've had in customers moving from on-prem to the cloud. There's been a lot that we've been doing on the AI side with 360 in particular.

If you can imagine that the things that you saw for the RegWorks solution, they've been even multiplied even further on the Information Intelligence side of the organization. We also brought out some new things with Objective Connect: things like digital signatures, customers have long been asking for something that's robust but more cost-effective than things like DocuSign, which we delivered; and tag-based access control, which has been a strong driver for us for export control markets, which is a new market for us with Connect.

Then finally, Objective Keystone, where we've been doing a lot more work in climate-related disclosure and fund management documentation. You can expect some interesting new developments there as the rest of the year sort of comes to light.

We've got some new and exciting big customers coming on board on the Keystone platform internationally. If we move on to Planning & Building.

I guess the key difference between now and a year ago was we added I-Plan into this end-to-end solution, and I think that's been very, very successful, not only acquisition, but also integration for us, which I'll talk about in a moment. Again, our customers have been certainly well-engaged on what we've been doing from the end-to-end process, not only engaging with applicants, but also other industry participants that are perhaps outside the local councils.

If you look at the footprint, it's been a really robust expansion. We've got a broad footprint for Trapeze, as we've long spoken about.

I'll talk about the Build expansion shortly, but we've certainly got our foundation partners and our foundation customers that are well-entrenched in the ongoing build process, not only in New Zealand, but certainly here in Australia. I-Plan, which I guess has the bulk of New Zealand customers and the cluster of Southeast Queensland, we're starting to see far more interest in I-Plan across the country as well, and I'm sure it's not going to be long before we see our first I-Plan customers here in New South Wales.

Just talk about some of the highlights of the half: sales revenue is up 39% on the prior half, and with ARR up 29%, again very, very strong. We've been migrating customers at a pace, a very rapid pace ahead of the June 30 sunset date for GoGet.

We've now got 40 councils that are now live on Build or in migration, and that together represents more than 50% of New Zealand councils by number. We've moved all councils to the aligned pricing model from June 30.

In terms of Build Australia, the foundation customers have been very much across this solution on the way through. As many of they've been getting their regular six-weekly updates, and we are pretty much on track for our go-live with Build AU at the end of next month.

We've also expanded the foundation partners from just New South Wales to include partners in Queensland, Victoria, and WA. As word has spread about what we're doing, we've had just far more engagement, and I guess I'd say it's been demand pull as opposed to us really actively going out there and engaging these other states.

As I mentioned, I-Plan has been rapidly integrated into this solution for us. Customer success and go-to-market functions have been completely engaged, and for us, it's really been another strong showing of our M&A playbook.

We also released Remote Inspections. We I think we had a video of what we're doing with Remote Inspections at our Investor Day.

You can jump on our website and have a look at how Remote Inspections has been working. That's that that's also now rolling out across New Zealand quite a rapid rate, and we have I think the first 15 first 15 councils that are in process of of going live or or contracting at the moment.

It's been a very strong uptake for those that are I guess I'd say the the the more progressive councils in New Zealand, and the feedback has been fabulous. We're really pleased with the way that that's that's rolled out for us.

Then finally, Objective Trapeze has had a lot of enhancements that give give us broader use across the organization and just make that more valuable solution for for customers. If I move on to the Regulatory Solutions line of business, just a summary again of what this solution does: it is really regulator in a box.

Licensing and registration, compliance and monitoring, enforcement regimes, investigation, prosecution, and education. All of these capabilities are being assisted with AI deployment, and you've got to see a little bit of that on one particular use case earlier.

Again, the team has done an incredible job with getting our brand out there and our capability out there. Over the past 12 months, our brand recognition and our recognition generally in the market as the software for regulators has been extremely strong.

Strong, in fact, that we've also been up in Canada very recently. The Canadian government in particular has been taking a little bit of a dislike to a number of the US software vendors, and they've been looking not only across the UK, where obviously we're very active, but also to Australia and New Zealand for what's been done software-wise in those marketplaces.

We've had a very warm reception in Canada, not only just for RegWorks, but for other solutions as well. I think it's just a matter of time before you'll see more activity up there from us.

We think Objective RegWorks has quite an unbeatable value proposition for this market. Domain-specific workflows and features, onboarding far faster and with less risk than with generic capabilities.

We've got feature parity on the things that matter with the generic platforms, and it's really seen as this regulator in a box, and that's the cut-through that I think we're seeing at every industry event that we've been to for the last 12 months or more. Just some highlights: sales revenue up 8%, ARR up 9%, probably slightly softer with a bias to the second half is, I guess, where we are in FY2026.

Not only have we done the activity in Canada, but we've also recently been IRAP certified here in Australia, which really puts us in a strong position for a lot of the federal government activity that's sort of underpinning our pipeline going forward. We've spoken about Accelerate before, which is our methodology for deploying at speed, and there is a huge, huge driver for how to make customer onboarding faster, cheaper, and those two things is really so we can bring on more customers across the globe, and we can allow our partners to accelerate their deployment of more customers across the globe as well.

I guess the other highlight of the first half was really the Gambling Commission going live. That's our first high-profile reference site in the UK.

Many of you will know that the gambling is a huge industry in the UK. I believe it represents 9% of GDP, extraordinary.

The Gambling Commission plays a very important role in that UK economy. Equally, it's seen as one of the best gambling regulators in the world, and we're seeing an increasing amount of engagement with other gambling regulators in other countries off the back of what we've been doing with the UK.

There's also a broader range of solutions that we've been delivering. The Firearms Registry in New Zealand continues to get great plaudits in the community.

Even people that originally were skeptical seem to have come around to that solution, which is great to see. In Victoria, the Social Services Regulator achieved 98% of registrations online within statutory timelines, and I think for a regulator, that's an outstanding stat.

They are some of the things that are going on within our lines of business, some of the highlights. As you can see, they've all grown revenue, they've all grown ARR, they've all have investments going on with AI, and they're all making great progress with their customers.

Let's just have a look at the outlook as a point of wrap up. The strat plan: you've seen this shape of the plan on the page before from us.

I don't think anything's particularly changed here between FY2025 and FY2026, and I think if you look into FY2027, you'll see pretty much the same thing again. We think it is very good for our customers, and certainly our employees, to understand the things that we think are underpinning the driving of Objective Corporation for them.

If we look at the four I guess components of our outlook: we've spoken about our target of 15% ARR growth many times before, and I guess to say where we're seeing ARR growth at the moment is in this range of 10% to 14% on a constant currency basis. I guess we're a percent off in terms of that range versus the 15%.

I guess it's probably fair to say we're taking a somewhat more conservative approach to onboarding Build customers in Q4. We're going to make sure that our first three customers get the love that they expect and need to make sure that they're onboarded, rather than driving more and more revenue in Q4.

That's probably a change in approach that we want to have, and that's probably a slight slowdown, speed up in FY2027. We'll maintain our strong EBITDA margin without any doubt, and you've seen that come through in the first half.

I've spoken about AI. There's no doubt that we're going to be able to leverage a leadership position, that all of our customers are talking to us about delivering for them AI projects, and certainly this will be no different over the next six months and leading into 2027.

I'm pretty sure at the half year, I'll be able to share with you a lot more of the things that customers are achieving. I guess there's a little bit of nervousness with some customers about being named at this point in time, but I think I've probably named the Scottish government, the Welsh government earlier in the presentation.

We'll be able to talk about a lot more at the full year. Our R&D investment continues at a clip.

There's been a lot of people talking about they're going to cut their R&D investment because AI and IDEs are making them so much more efficient. That isn't the way we're seeing the world.

I think the way we're seeing the world is we've had large backlogs of AI opportunities and innovation opportunities, I should say, over a long period of time, and we'll be using the efficiency that we get out of AI coding tools to allow us to deliver that innovation faster, and I think that's the outlook that I've shared internally and with our customers. I'm expecting to do more, a lot more, with the same team that we have today.

I know it's sort of come down from 30% to 28%. I think those of you that have sort of looked at that chart before, but I would not expect that our R&D investment is going to continue to track down materially over the next 12, 24 months.

Then finally, focusing at the moment just on organic opportunities. I think there's so much going on in the lines of business that we already have that's really taking up a lot of our focus.

That's not to say that we still aren't engaged on M&A, but I think what's happened over the past two months with valuations, we want to see that sort of shake through to private markets and shake through to vendor expectations. I think it's prudent to just, in terms of the responsible deployment of capital, I think it's just prudent to take our time with the things that we've got in our M&A pipeline at the moment.

That's it. That's the half that's being, I think, really, really strong numbers, really strong case for how we're going to prosper in the world of what AI is doing for us.

Again, just underpin that with Objective with its systems of record and systems of workflow record, and its requirement to keep records of all things AI for our customers, puts us in a really, really strong position. Look forward to sharing with you more stories over the next six months and beyond.

Thanks very much. I think, are we now opening up to questions, Ben?

[clears throat] The first person we've got here on stage is Jules Cooper. Seems to have Jules there.

Just, yeah, tech issue, but [clears throat] Josh, are you there?

Yep, I'm on. Thank you, Jules.

Yep, sure. Thanks for taking my questions, guys.

First one, just with regard to Build. Can you guys hear me okay?

Yep.

Yep, okay, cool. Just with regard to Build, obviously a little bit of a pushback in that version from the foundation for the revenue impacting as the guidance as you mentioned.

Can we give a little bit more in terms of where those foundational customers are at, maybe how many you've got, how we should sort of think about that timeframe, and just maybe also a little bit more detail or color around the initial feedback from that customer cohort?

We've got around 15 foundation customers. We know who the first three are going to be, but I can't name them at this point in time.

Look, we're really holding them back, but I think it's prudent. I've been releasing software for often over my career, and I've just sort of said to the team, I think we, first of all, we'll give our foundation customers financial benefit in certainly first year ARR for being I guess on the journey with us.

Secondly, it's really important that we have a concept here called First Five. We're making that first three for Build Australia.

It's really important those three customers have an incredible experience with us as they onboard, and they then tell their fellow foundation customers and beyond. I just, again, having done this many, many times, I just think that's more prudent than us going and signing up 15 customers in three months, and then, if there's any issues, we've got to do it 15 times rather than three times.

I think that's really just needs to be part of our brand promise. I think it's a little bit irresponsible of us to just try and drive a purely financial ARR outcome for the final quarter versus let's make sure these customers have a great experience.

Yep, no, that's very fair. In terms of, I guess, pricing model going forward, has there been any changes or feedback?

I know historically, obviously, we're expecting it to be materially higher than NZ because of some of those restrictions, but has there been any changes to that in terms of the go-to-market strategy on pricing?

No, I think obviously the solution's priced to value. We're still, I guess, finalizing the ultimate pricing structure for Australia.

I think we take some inputs from what we've seen in New Zealand over the past three months—sorry, three years, rather—as we've seen some of the transactions rates moderate so that we don't get caught up in some of that as we roll that in Australia.

Got it. No, that's great.

Just second part, just with regard to Intelligence Solutions. Within this period as well, you talked around guidance.

As we started back in let's say the full year, there's some pretty large renewals and things that were probably expected in the period. I know you can't give exact context as you mentioned, but is that fair to say that some of those potential renewals that were expected for this period have been deferred or haven't come through, and have they been allocated as of yet?

That's a great question, Josh, and I should have addressed this with the outlook discussion. We have got one or two material moves to the cloud as opposed to renewals, but moves to the cloud opportunities, which quite frankly should have closed in H1, and have not yet closed.

I just don't have the level of conviction that they will close in the current half to being as bold as to say they're definitely going to close. I'd rather just be a little bit more cautious.

Often the question is, well, if they move to the right, will that mean that next period's higher? I normally say no, but probably in this case the answer would be yes.

It's just that I just don't have confidence in the timing.

Got it. Then as we look, final one on RegTech, obviously that was probably a little bit softer than expectations, but I think you did a great job on the Investor Day in terms of some of the opportunity there.

The pipeline looked extremely strong. Can you just maybe flesh out a little bit, is that pipeline still there?

Has there been a slowdown in conversions? What are you sort of seeing in the marketplace in terms of RegTech?

Look, the pipeline is absolutely still there. I don't think that the first half delivery was softer than expected.

Sorry, more the full year, just playing into full year guidance. Look, the the full year

the full year ARR growth is certainly going to be better for for RegTech. It's certainly going to be stronger than last year.

I think there's any any question in our minds about that. I think, what we're seeing, it's still a relatively new domain, and so, as we've experienced with other applications, that takes longer to get those opportunities through the funnel.

Again, we we're just being we're probably being a bit cautious with the words, but certainly I expect it to have a strong second half.

Great. Ben, just final one, can you just chat on operating leverage?

Just in terms of how we should be thinking about, obviously mentioned '26, we can see that in the numbers, but more so as we head into '27 and beyond, how investors should be thinking about operating leverage and cash flow generation in the core business?

Thanks, Josh. Look, I think the same story that we've had previously continues.

Even in this half demonstrated with the 40% EBITDA margin and the strong free cash flow generation. That we're able to grow at that sort of 12% to 13% on the subscription revenue line and still maintain that margin.

In going into next year, we would expect that we would continue to see that margin improvement as we add the ARR and don't add at the same cost base at the same rate.

Yep. Currency, just quickly, can you just cover off on that if that's possible?

We've had a bit of a negative move on currency, which does tend to continue. This is why we've moved to the constant currency basis to try and take that out.

There's been quite a bit of volatility in it. It was worth a bit over $1 million in the first half, and who knows where it'll land in the second half, but at least that much.

Great. Thanks, guys.

No problems. Thanks, Josh.

This is a text question from Evan Karatzas at UBS. The Planning & Content Solutions ARR was flat to a touch down from where we were at June '25, and just what are some of the factors driving that?

As you called out, FX played a decent part, and we've touched on that. Is there anything else we should be looking to in terms of expected churn or anything else out of the ordinary?

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was churn was probably slightly higher, and we did churn also some Connect customers off that we wouldn't have expected to because we had a missing capability, but that capability has now been built into the product, we would expect to recover some of those in the next 12 months. Apart from that, no.

To be fair to our team, the Information Intelligence team exceeded their bookings target in the first half, it was quite strong.

I think you touched on this earlier, there, but Evan had a separate question around sort of the breakdown of the line of business growth and the incremental ARR, to get us that sort of $12 million to $16 million incremental ARR, where that comes from between the lines of business? The split between.

I think my response to it would be, as you've touched on, Planning & Building is got the characteristics around Build AU. The heavy lifting is going to be done by Content Solutions when you talk about the in-dollar values, and also with a contribution from RegWorks.

Are you asking

me

or you telling me?

[laughter] I need to cover that, Tony.

Look, we're expecting a strong contribution from the Information Intelligence line of business. I think historically everyone's sort of thought that was a mature business.

I've never been of that belief, and I think the benefits that have been driven by AI are predominantly for today the productivity benefits from a customer perspective are really around LLMs of textual data. If you think about that in the context of Objective, we've been building these incredibly valuable to customer data sets for them for the last couple of decades, and so, of course, Objective is the first port of call when it comes to, hey, how can we leverage all of the information that's in our Objective system?

It's been a very, very positive conversation about how we see the Information Intelligence line of business being driven. AI is the big driver.

Productivity for customers is a huge driver, and with AI also becomes the requirement for more records. I think those attributes really put that line of business, which I think people considered mature, in a really, really strong position, not just for existing customers, but we're seeing an influx of requests from people that historically we wouldn't have seen as traditional customers, and equally within the traditional marketplace, more and more people looking at Objective as the strong performer in this space.

I think it's all to play for.

Thanks, Tony. I'm going to get Jules another go.

It seems to have some problems getting Jules on the stage. I've got a text question here over what proportion of R&D spend has been going to AI coding, and you talked about how these tools affects the headcount and your thinking on hiring?

Yeah. Look, it's hard to put an exact number on what percentage is going to AI: a lot, but that's not a numeric number, I appreciate.

Look, a great deal of it's going towards what we can deliver with AI across all lines of business. I did address the headcount issue earlier.

I think just with the innovation opportunities available to us, at any point in time, we've got three years of roadmap of things that we want urgently, and so we will be using the coding efficiency of the AI IDEs to go and address that. There's probably less upward pressure on hiring.

There's probably less upward pressure on salaries because a lot of people seem to be removing coding staff from their development groups, but that's not what we're planning on doing at Objective at this point in time.

They're having problem getting other people on stage. I think we might just say that we'll wrap it up there.

All right. Thanks, everyone.

Really appreciate your interest, and I look forward to updating you during the half, and certainly at the full year. Thanks again.