Good morning everybody. Thank you very, very much for coming along to the presentation of our results for the year ending 31 March 2026.

I'm going to pop up a brief agenda, but we're going to follow the usual format. We're going to start with a brief overview of the year, just a couple of minutes, then Snehal will unpack the results in quite a bit more detail.

We thought it'd be helpful to give an update on what's going on in our market and then how we're responding to that strategically and operationally. People are very important to us, we'll talk a little bit about that, and our clients, and of course, the very hot topic of AI.

We have got a couple of slides and we'll just talk about that as well, and then we'll wrap it up and get on to Q&A. In summary, we've had another fantastic year, and we're really, really proud of the results that we're announcing today.

Headlines of revenue growth of 13% and growth in adjusted EBITDA of 9%, and we're just under 5% ahead of market expectations at EPS level. These figures are good, but actually the underlying performance of the business is much better still.

To explain that, you need to remember that the picture's a little bit muddied because of the effect of the very large and very profitable one-off project that we did last year on the McCloud remedy. If we normalize for that, and if we also adjust for the acquisition we did of Polaris, then we can see the performance of the underlying core business, and as you can see, this grew by 12%.

With operational gearing coming through, we grew EBITDA by 15%. That, of course, builds on a really sustained period of high growth in the previous three years as well.

The operational gearing that was achieved is especially good, cuz don't forget we also had to absorb the increase in NI, which as a people business was pretty material for us. Great performance, and in terms of what drove that, well, we are operating in a good market.

Pension schemes have gone through a step change in recent years from large deficits to a new age in which many are in surplus. They have more options than ever before, and they need a lot of advice and support.

Regulations are changing as well. We're still working through new rules on scheme funding for clients, and we're now about to get more new rules on surplus release as well.

In this new world, many pension schemes are accessing insurance solutions. It's keeping us really busy.

Our risk transfer team that helps clients to do this has just had another record year themselves. The insurers taking on all these schemes, they need help as well.

That's why we're following a strategy that you could describe as follow the member, where we provide all the support that's needed for whatever institution is taking on a pension scheme and paying them in the long term safely and securely. Now that's working, because along with the successful integration of Polaris, we are expanding our addressable market, and we are seeing wider opportunities open up.

On AI, we do see it as a big opportunity. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute as well.

One thing that will always be really important to us, of course, is brand and reputation, and that's why we're so pleased that hot off the press just last week, we won no fewer than four major prizes at our annual industry awards event. These awards were across all the different business lines we have, again, our brand is really going from strength to strength, and we're delighted about that.

Finally, from my introduction, as you know by now, we work really hard to be a fantastic place to work and have a really healthy culture. Again, we won some really fantastic awards and got great recognition in that this year too, we think we're doing things on a really sustainable basis.

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

Another strong year, as Paul said, and even better when we look at the underlying organic growth excluding McCloud. Total revenue grew 13% and adjusted EBITDA 9%, which include the impact of the increase in National Insurance and continued investment in growing our insurance consulting capabilities.

The top right-hand chart shows the increment components of the revenue growth, and you can see that the underlying business has performed very strongly. That growth is continuing to deliver our further operational gearing.

In the chart to the bottom right, we have normalized the FY 2025 margin of 30.1% for the impact of McCloud and the increase in National Insurance, which were both worth about 1% each. It's showing that underlying EBITDA margins this year has improved by 70 basis points.

Adjusted EBITDA was 2% ahead of consensus. Strong operational performance and a lower share count has driven the adjusted diluted EPS of 22.3 pence, which is up 8% and also 4% ahead of consensus.

In line with the progressive dividend policy, the board has proposed a final dividend of 9.1 pence, which is up 11% year-on-year, making the full-year dividend of 13.2 pence, up 11%, also 4% ahead of consensus, underscoring our continued confidence in the business model and growth prospects. Here we've got the usual P&L with revenue broken down by division, and Paul and Ben will take you through the divisional highlights shortly.

Just briefly, Advisory grew 20% year-on-year, and excluding the Polaris acquisition, growth was a healthy 8%. Administration grew 5% on a tough comparator, but excluding McCloud, the growth was 18%.

SIPPs has delivered another year of double-digit revenue growth. The adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% to the right includes the impact of higher employers' NI, which was an additional £2.5 million cost this year.

The net finance costs are higher due to the higher net debt from the Polaris acquisition, as well as the continued share purchase by the EBT. As I said earlier, the lower share count from this and the strong operation performance has helped deliver adjusted EPS growth of 8%.

On the non-trading and exceptional items, which are all consistent with previous treatment and largely non-cash, the increase in the amortization of acquired intangibles reflects the Polaris acquisition, and the acquisition-related remuneration is the build-up of the Polaris contingent consideration. In terms of guidance for FY 2027 and the medium term, we continue to target mid-to-high single-digit percentage organic revenue growth and driving further improvements in underlying EBITDA.

CapEx guidance for FY 2027 is between £12 to £13 million, as we continue to invest in tech, including bolstering our AI capabilities. It also includes the fit-out costs for our new London office, where we will have the pleasure of hosting these briefings in the future.

All of this is already reflected in the current consensus. Turning to costs, despite the increase in NI and the full-year impact of growing our insurance consulting team and capabilities, costs as a percentage of revenue have only gone up by 1%.

Now if you exclude the impact of McCloud, you can see that costs as a percentage of revenue have actually improved year-on-year. Within the costs, staff costs are up 18%.

Of that 18%, 9% is due to the increase in headcount, including from the Polaris acquisition, 2% is from the impact of higher employers' NI, and the remainder a combination of annual and promotional pay increases and the bonus, commensurate with the performance of the group. The decrease in IT costs reflect the benefits from investment in Aurora coming through, offsetting the effects of increases in headcount and the continued investment in tech, particularly cybersecurity.

Other costs are largely in line with prior year, as we continue to maintain strong cost discipline. Turning to cash flow, OCF conversion was a healthy 91%, and guidance for future years remain between 90% to 95% as we continue to grow.

Net debt at the end of March was £46.2 million and a covenant leverage of 0.64 times, well within our target of 1 to 1.5 times, giving us flexibility for pursuing M&A opportunities. Currently, we have £63 million of undrawn facilities from the £120 million total available, which we have also recently extended until March 2030.

We've included the progression of return on invested capital as a KPI here, and you can see that there's been a steady improvement, and returns are now three times our weighted average cost of capital. Strong growth in returns reflect material growth in profits on a stable asset base, which is proof of our capital-light business model.

Finally, just to remind you of the capital allocation priorities, which remain unchanged. The focus remains on capitalizing on the organic opportunity within our core and tangential markets.

We want to continue to invest in creating market-leading proprietary tech that creates a competitive advantage, but also drives efficiencies. Relative to the size of the business, we will remain CapEx-light.

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

On to the market update. To set the scene here, when we listed back in 2017, our ambition was to be the best place in our industry to work and the best firm for our clients.

A one-stop shop, able to provide all of the support that pension schemes need to a really, really high standard. If we could achieve that, we could become the leading mid-tier firm in our market.

Now we're a long way off that back then, but this chart shows how the last 10 years have gone. The growth here includes some acquisitions, the largest obviously in FY 2019, but the majority of the growth has been organic and driven by us doing more work for clients as we've expanded our services.

In particular, the rapid increase in funding levels for defined benefit schemes over the period has created huge demand from clients. What we've done really well is keep evolving and developing our services to meet those client needs.

Today, I think we can say that we are now the leading mid-tier firm, we are really proud of what we've achieved. How do we see the market evolving?

Today, over half of schemes now probably have enough money to pass their assets and liabilities to a bulk annuity provider if they wanted to, with no top-up needed. At the same time, many companies are thinking that running their scheme on and getting some value back might be a better idea, and the rules are being changed to make that all easier.

What does this all mean? First, as you can see, the market is dominated by thousands of small schemes, and the fees for running each one are quite small.

Now we expect that most of these schemes are simply too small to run on, and so they'll end up buying out and leaving the pensions ecosystem. This will keep us busy, as the schemes themselves will need lots of support to get ready and execute a transaction, and that typically takes years where multiples of the BAU fees are earned.

On the right-hand side, we then have the large schemes. These will want to explore run-on in detail, and we actually expect many of them will then choose to run on, at least for a period, as the economics are generally really compelling.

They'll continue to need all of the current BAU services plus support around what to do with surplus. Finally, for those in the middle, we'll probably see a bit of both.

Now it's also worth mentioning that the insurers taking on these schemes will also need help, and it's much harder for them to do lots of small deals to meet their business targets than doing it across a small number of larger deals. All of this is going to play out over many years into the future, but it's a pretty positive backdrop for XPS.

As Ben has said, we have achieved our objective already of 10 years ago. We are arguably the leading independent pensions advisory and admin firm in the UK.

The question is, what next? First, we will of course be focused on maximizing every opportunity that we have in the pensions market.

Our clients need a huge amount of help and advice. We will be helping lots of schemes to buy out, but for every one of these trades, there is a counterparty.

An insurance company or a superfund or even a fund manager, like in the recent Aberdeen deal, is taking them on. This capital shift is huge.

We're likely to see between half a trillion and a trillion of assets move over the next 10 to 15 years. Now our observation here is a fundamentally simple one.

Although over time there'll be fewer defined benefit schemes, many members of these schemes are still going to be getting benefits in 40 or 50 years from now, just potentially from a different place. We'll follow the members.

We'll be a brilliant provider of services to these wider institutions taking these members on over time as well. Now that creates lots of wider opportunities, too.

Insurance companies and other institutions have many other challenges, and it's a short bridge from providing wider support than just where the pensions and insurance worlds collide. That, of course, is what the Polaris acquisition was all about.

We've been really pleased with how the integration has gone, and we're now seeing a very good pipeline of wider opportunities starting to emerge. As you can see in the little graphic at the bottom, this opens up a much larger target addressable market.

Ultimately, our ambition for the next 10 years is to become a market-leading financial services consulting and administration provider, serving pension schemes, serving life insurers, general insurers, and more. Now we expect M&A to be a part of delivering on that strategy.

There are broadly two types of opportunity. The first is in our traditional core market, which does remain quite fragmented.

We could make an acquisition there and that's got some attractions. It would create truly the largest independent firm clearly ahead of the rest of the mid-tier, and there could of course be synergies that could be quite material.

Ultimately, we would be unlikely probably to gain capability. We're strong already in all of the services that our pension clients need.

Perhaps more likely is the type of transaction on the right that would accelerate the diversification strategy into wider markets. That of course is what the Polaris acquisition did, and we would be very open to pursuing more transactions like that if we can find bolt-on deals that are a good fit for our ambitions.

As we turn to the strategic and operational review where we canter through each of the businesses, here's a quick reminder of how we structure ourselves. We have our advisory businesses, and this is where we provide advice to pension schemes and insurers on the big decisions they face to run themselves really well.

We then have our administration businesses, where we do the day-to-day record keeping and communication with members. Ultimately, that's about paying the right benefits to the right people at the right time.

We do this for members of pension schemes, we also help insurers with the schemes that they've taken on, and we also do this for SIPP and SSAS arrangements where we set them up and manage them, too. As a rough guide, we're not far off half advisory, half administration, perhaps a little bit more advisory given the results this year.

How did the advisory business get on during the year? Snehal mentioned the headline growth of 20%, but this is the part of the business where we include the revenues from the Polaris acquisition.

If we strip that out, the organic growth was 8%. Of this, just over 3% came from inflationary fee increases, with the rest coming from an increase in volumes of work.

The things that kept us really busy were advice on strategy, in particular helping clients with their first valuations under the new funding regime and just in general working with them in the new world of surpluses. Our risk transfer team had another really strong year, and in the background we're still busy on GMP projects and have a few more years to go of this work.

On the insurance consulting side of things, which is of course only a couple of years old, it's been a busy year building the team and integrating the Polaris business, which has gone really well. During the year, all of the existing Polaris preferred supplier arrangements were retained, and we also expanded the remit on several and got some new relationships in place, too, and that all provides a great opportunity for the future.

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

We also think there's going to be more new business opportunities opening up, as when there's lots of change, it's a great chance to be able to differentiate yourself. That's why we were so pleased to win Run-on Advisor of the Year in the recent pension awards, because this is a new area for the whole industry and we want to make ourselves famous for being brilliant at it.

Finally, on the insurance side of things, we've been really pleased with how Polaris has opened up opportunities to help insurers with their bulk annuity businesses, and we think we'll be doing much more of that in the years ahead. We also expect Polaris and our insurance consulting team to be busy more widely, too.

Turning to administration, and the performance in this area of the group was absolutely fantastic. This is, of course, the division where the McCloud project was delivered in the prior year.

Growth this year was 5%, but if you exclude that one-off project, growth in administration this year was 18%. That was driven by a range of things.

We took on new clients, most notably we had a full year of the John Lewis contract. We're doing lots of project work, again, lots of GMP work where we still have a huge amount of that to get through.

Operationally, we had a good year, too. We got all of our public sector clients migrated onto our system, Aurora, and that meant leaving one more of our legacy third-party systems behind, which brings all sorts of benefits for us.

We had more new business success in the year as well, perhaps most notably winning the mandate to provide administration to the Metropolitan Police and their 80,000 members. That win was really helped, of course, by the strong reputation that we'd built through the successful delivery of the McCloud work the year before.

Although that project was one-off in nature, it's really helped to drive wider long-term opportunities as well. Now as we look to the future, I think we'll just see more of the same.

First-time outsourcing opportunities are all around us, and there's opportunities where some of our competitors have struggled a little bit with client service. It's also an area where again there are wider opportunities, especially to help insurers with their admin both when they take schemes on and when they would then run them for the very long term.

The future looks really bright for Admin.

Our people are at the heart of absolutely everything that we do, and we invest a huge amount of time in having a great culture. We talk about this a lot, I know, but we do it because we really think it drives business performance.

Put simply, happy, motivated people look after each other well, and then they look after their clients brilliantly, too. Had another really good year on this front.

We launched something new, our Employee Value Proposition, setting out what it means to work at XPS, what we expect from you, and what you can expect from us in return. This landed very well, and it's very important in the future for both retention and, of course, for articulating the proposition to attract the right people to join us as we grow.

Now we measure what we can, and in our annual employee survey, our Net Promoter Score bounced back into the 30s at +32, and we're told this is exceptionally high for a professional services firm. We got external recognition as well.

We actually won the Best Medium-Sized Firm in the UK at the UK Business Culture Awards, which is amazing cuz that's not just a financial services award, that's across all employers across the whole of the UK. We're really, really pleased with that recognition.

Our clients have given us great feedback as well. We run our full client survey every two years, we'll have more facts and figures for you next year.

Once again, client churn was extremely low, and you can see some of the great things that our clients have said about us on the slide here. It is hot off the press, but being recognized for client service at our annual industry awards is really important.

As we mentioned, we won four awards in categories that span the whole of the business, including the outright winner of Administration Firm of the Year. That was a cracker evening for us just last week.

That's fantastic. It really strengthens our brand, and it's really helpful in new business opportunities going forward.

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

Across Advisory and Administration, the work we do there, there's a lot of tasks that are quite manual and quite repeat in nature. These are often very technical and specialized tasks, are quite time-consuming.

There's a clear opportunity for everyone in our market to use AI to increase automation, drive productivity, and efficiency. Secondly, technology has already been a bit of a differentiator between firms.

Radar and Aurora are key parts of our service offering, but the AI capabilities we now see mean there's a much bigger opportunity to use technology to create USPs. Finally, as we've often said, there's a high level of client stickiness in our market, which makes it difficult to win new clients.

If AI does lead to more differentiation between firms, we could see more client churn and an opportunity for the first movers to win market share. Which firms do we think are best placed to take advantage of this opportunity?

Now probably the first thing to say is that we believe the winners are already in our market. The pensions consulting market has high barriers to entry.

The buyers in the market, typically trustees of pension schemes, are cautious and they naturally favor the established players. It's also a very relationship-driven market.

There will always be a lot of person-to-person interaction in trustee meetings, helping clients negotiate complex deals, and in administration, trustees see it as critical that their members can speak to a person if they want to. More generally, training AI models requires data and domain knowledge, and generally this information isn't widely available.

Ultimately, compared to other opportunities that technology firms might have access to, we don't think the pensions consulting administration market would be particularly attractive given the relatively small size compared to the high level of specialization. Now within our market, we think the specialist mid-tier firms, like XPS, are best placed to benefit because a firm needs to have enough scale to be able to invest in AI tools, but equally it takes focus and agility.

If you're too big and UK pensions is only a small amount of what you do globally, that will be a challenge particularly as we think this is all about building really specialist capabilities. Now in terms of XPS more specifically, we also have a strong track record with technology.

Radar and Aurora are great examples of technology that we've built, and we've deployed ourselves. We've also had already some real successes building and deploying AI.

With the right focus and investment, we are optimistic about how this will all unfold.

To wrap things up for the formal part of the presentation before we go to Q&A, the last 10 years have been fantastic. We've executed really, really well.

You could see that from the chart on one of our earlier slides, and we're really proud that it's been another year of really good organic growth, building on that really strong run that we've been on for some years now. We are in a good market.

There's a lot of regulatory change and changes caused by movement to this higher interest rate environment. These are multi-year changes.

We are going to be helping our clients through them for a long time to come. We're seeing the gradual merging of the pensions and insurance world opening up opportunities.

We're doing ever more with insurers, helping them to onboard and run pension schemes, and with the acquisition of Polaris having integrated well, we're getting access to wider opportunities at insurers, too, which is helping us to expand our target addressable market. We do think further M&A could accelerate that journey for us as well.

Everything that we do is based on our people and our strong culture. We're really proud of those awards that we won again this year.

Our people do share in our success, and that means that we're achieving our results in a truly sustainable manner. As Ben said, we see AI as an opportunity.

It is going to change what we do in some areas for the better, and we're quite certain that the winners from AI in our market are already in our market. We think we're perfectly placed as a firm big enough to make good investments, but not so big that the focus needed can be a challenge.

With everything that's going on in our markets, ultimately, we're very, very excited about the future, and we see lots of opportunities for further growth. Thank you very much indeed for listening, and we'll now open the floor for some questions.

Hi, Steve.

Morning, Paul. Steve Woolf from Stifel.

A couple from me. The opportunities you mentioned on the pension surplus work that's about to kick off is when do you think the bulk of the work happens?

I think you've mentioned before in a prior presentation distributions can happen from April next year. Do you expect sort of a flurry of activity from those larger companies that might be interested in that?

Secondly, just thinking about all the work and the opportunities you've got, how well-resourced you are to take on board some of that work? Then, thirdly, you mentioned M&A, likely thoughts on how about in the insurance consulting market you might go after Polaris if that's sort of an issue.

Thanks.

Yeah. Great.

Thank you, Steve. Perhaps I'll take the first and the third, and Ben might take the second.

In terms of surplus regulations, I would describe this as just a nice, gentle tailwind, that there isn't a sort of big bang moment for this. The draft regulations on surplus release are available.

People have a good understanding of what it means. They're likely to be finalized in probably the first quarter, but possibly the first half of 2027.

The point, though, is that our clients are thinking on an ongoing basis about this, and it fills up the agenda of things to talk about and things that we need to do analysis on and help them with. Some clients will want to be releasing surpluses as soon as 2027, the really well-funded ones that are really advanced.

Others haven't got that far in their thinking yet and will get there, as probably they follow what happens in the wider market even into 2028 and 2029. A better way of thinking about it really is that this is just a gentle tailwind all the time, that there's lots of stuff to talk about and it's going to evolve and keep developing.

That's just a good thing. It's fun because it's new and it's value add for them.

As we said at the mini capital markets event recently, it's so much fun talking about this than the last 20 years of talking about big black holes and deficits that never seem to go away. We're enjoying it and I think our clients are as well.

Thank you. I think the second question was around resourcing and kind of what the recruitment market, I think, is like.

Staff turnover is just over 10% across the group, and that's very similar to the last three years or so. It includes, I guess, involuntary and retirements as well, actually, it's at pretty low levels in terms of voluntary turnover.

Our model is now that we largely recruit into the more entry-level roles, and we've been expanding the different channels we have: school leavers, apprenticeships, and also graduates. We don't see that as being a particular barrier to kind of us achieving what we hope to.

On M&A, yes, we steered in the presentation to being interested in acquisitions that would accelerate us further into those wider, adjacent markets. One observation about where we are in insurance at the moment is it would benefit us to have that little bit more scale in terms of the permanent team that we have at XPS.

It's still relatively small, and of course we use the flexible delivery model that Polaris have of using contractors to deliver big projects that we win. We do think it would be helpful just simply to have more scale, higher headcount in the market.

If there's a firm out there with great quality that we could bring on board that boosted that, I think it would boost our credibility and market footprint, and just further help us to go and win more opportunities. We're certainly interested in opportunities like that.

That's less consulting activity, but more of the pensions sort of admin helping...

No, no, no. Sorry, to be clear, this would be helping insurance companies with the whole range of challenges they face.

You can think of the Venn diagram that where pensions and insurance overlap is in the bulk annuity space. Insurers have all sorts of wider challenges: their own financial reporting, wrestling with legacy systems, trying to adopt new technology, all sorts of regulatory changes and market changes that affect them, too.

We'd very much like to help them across that wider range of activity. Prior to Polaris, we didn't have that capability.

With Polaris, we do, but as I say, we'd probably like to enhance the scale that we've got to really build that credibility. A great statistic for you after the Polaris acquisition, and more generally combination with XPS, but if you went back 2 years, XPS, fundamentally, we had one insurance company client.

Today, we have 20. It's a different market to pension schemes.

That's 20 clients that each have typically multimillion-pounds, often multi-multimillion-pound budgets for transformation and change and support. To have access to that wide range of clients, it really is almost all of the UK life insurers that we now have a relationship with and a master services agreement contractually with to be able to go and support.

That's the big step change, and if you feed a bit more scale into that, we think we've got great opportunities to go and take more market share from the still only 1% to 2% of market share that we've got in that space. It's a cracking opportunity.

Next question. Sorry, behind to James.

Hi, good morning. Ben Cohen from RBC.

I had two questions, if I may. Firstly, thinking about your margins going forward, I just wondered if you could talk to the sort of the headwinds and tailwinds that you see in the business and in the market for any sort of margin improvement.

The second question was on the sort of available firepower that you see that you have for M&A in the context, I guess, the leverage ratio, what you might like to do from a share point of view to give a sense in terms of the size of things you could look to buy. Thank you.

Sure. In terms of the margin, the Aurora development that we did was to replace legacy third-party providers, and that is going to sort of lead to a OpEx saving.

Most of that has already come through, there is some more, but it's also going to increase the efficiency of our administration business. Over time, that will start to feed through.

More in terms of the mix of the business, we won't classify as a tailwind, but it would be a good thing if, for example, administration were to grow a lot faster because there are lots of public sector opportunities following the success of McCloud and appointment with Met Police, then that mix of business could lead to a sort of a small margin contraction. That's not what we're guiding to.

If you look at the consensus, there is improvements in margin year-on-year from here until FY 2028 and soon to be FY 2029 numbers as well. In terms of the financial firepower, we've done seven acquisitions so far, six of those are bolt-ons, and have driven IRR in excess of 20%.

Those have been sort of focused on, to Paul's slide, infilling capabilities or expanding our capabilities into markets that we're not currently in. That model suits us really well, because it's very easy to integrate, very quick to access additional markets.

As we've sort of talked about, there are lots of adjacencies within life insurance consulting and general insurance consulting. It's a fragmented market, and there are opportunities within those.

We would look to do mainly from debt. Our sort of stated target is sort of 1 to 1.5 times leverage, but if we were to go above that, the returns would have to show that we can deleverage very quickly within that range.

That gives us a lot of financial firepower to go after opportunities. James?

James Fletcher from Berenberg. Just a couple on AI, if I may.

Just kind of in your conversations with clients, in particular pension trustees, to what extent does AI come up, and is there a kind of knock-on impact on pricing kind of expectations to date? Then just kind of with regards kind of big three players in your market, if you have sight on to what extent they've been investing in AI and are you a kind of ahead of the pack, ahead of those guys?

Were they kind of slow to update?

Super. Okay.

I guess at the moment, most of the conversations we have with clients around AI are, I think one of the comments made in our presentation was that they're quite cautious in nature. Most of the conversations are around how are you using it, where is the data being held, where is it being processed, and how are you still compliant with GDPR?

In fact, on the 20th of May, just last month, the Pensions Regulator issued a statement about AI, and that I guess sort of acknowledged that there were potential opportunities to, for example, give members better service through AI, but a large part of it was reminding trustees that they're ultimately responsible and that they need to be governing this properly and making sure people are doing it safely. I would describe most of the questions we get are around how we're doing it safely.

We haven't really had much conversations yet around the impact on pricing, we'll have to see. That I guess really will be driven by what our competitors also do.

It is true that in the past that where more automations come into services, particularly on things like administration, delivering better member outcomes, that hasn't put pressure on prices. People have seen automation as a real positive and actually a higher-value service than one that doesn't have automation.

As I say, we'll see how that plays out, but we're not seeing that pressure today. In terms of the big three, I guess we don't say much about exactly what we're doing on AI in this forum because we know our competitors watch it and listen to it, and they know that we scour their websites, too.

People are all a little bit coy. Probably a good anecdote I had is with one of the insurers I was speaking to, we went and did a session about the sort of AI that we've got and the tools that we've built to help them, and their feedback was, 'You're the only firm we've seen that's actually got something tangible about how they can use AI to help us.'

That's an example of one, but I don't believe that other firms out there are ahead of us. Next question.

Vivek?

Morning, chaps, and thanks for your presentation. Three, I suppose, is the usual number, please, for me.

Traditional. I wanted to ask first about Polaris.

If you could just talk about the revenue that you achieved in FY 2026. What did you expect at the beginning of the year?

Appreciate that some of that has also fallen into the core business. Just if you could just sort of unpack that.

You talked briefly about the pipeline for insurance consulting revenue. Just if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Are you expecting some improvement in the Polaris revenue line? The next question was about so if your sort of underlying organic growth in '26 was really good if you strip out McCloud, and on the basis of consensus that assumes a slowdown in that rate of growth.

What's in there? What's exciting you about '27, and what are you a little bit more cautious about compared to what you achieved last year?

The last thing, just to help us nail on share count, what we should expect for this year. If I could just throw in there, potentially with the firepower or the balance sheet strength you have, what you've thought about in terms of a buyback.

Thanks.

Do you want to take the first one on Polaris?

No, definitely. Polaris, in the year, if you unpack the organic or inorganic figures, you'll see a number for Polaris revenue of about £16 million, something like that.

In the year before we acquired, we probably expected it would do about £15 [million?] , it's probably done a little bit better than we ultimately expected.

It did do £17 [million?] in the year we bought it, but there was a big tailwind, loads of insurance projects on implementation of IFRS 17, which were coming to an end.

Overall really pleased with that performance. You're right, there's a little bit of nuance in the performance, and I think it's worth unpacking it a little bit because it demonstrates another nice feature of the transaction that we've been really pleased about.

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

That was a very big project for us, and the phone call for that project came in to Polaris, part of XPS now, of course, but it came in to one of the Polaris founders. We had an MSA with this insurer, a contract that you could just go and start work on the next day, because of Polaris, whereas XPS didn't have that previously.

We mobilized, at one point as many as 30 of our people in there, helping and making this right. They were very successful in doing so, and I'm pleased to say that that insurer is continuing to provide a really good service with the help of XPS.

We did a good job and we're still there today doing it. The run rate for that contract this year is likely to be pretty material and pretty significant.

You could characterize that certainly as a Polaris deal, but it is interesting that Polaris would not have been able to deliver that without being part of XPS. The first phone call they made was to say, 'Well, this is fundamentally pensions work, that's not their expertise.'

They probably would have turned it down if they hadn't been part of XPS, but instead we mobilized people and sent them in. That's fantastic, because that's what the deal was about, is bringing the best of both and you could call that a revenue synergy.

To your point though, Vivek, which is a subtle one, but important one, it is fair that the 30 people that we deployed were already busy somewhere else. There is a sort of substitution effect that you don't see a net revenue growth for the business, the group as a whole, because we just did a little bit less of other projects that weren't so time critical within the pensions business because we threw resource over to insurance.

No, it's a nice problem to have that, because as you then recruit more people because there's just more demand because you're having such success with insurers, you ultimately can get to the point where that is revenue accretive for the group. This year arguably wasn't, but there's every reason to think that it certainly can be as we continue providing that support.

We should say we've had calls from other insurers with very, very similar challenges. The insurance industry is genuinely creaking with taking on the pensions schemes at the pace at which that's happening, and we are delighted to help and one of a small number of firms who can genuinely help.

In the example I've given, by the way, alongside calling us, if you like, a Big Four accounting firm was called. They also sent in a bunch of bodies, but they couldn't deliver the project because their expertise just isn't the right expertise, whereas for XPS it absolutely is because of our heritage and history.

Pipeline for Polaris, to unpack it, we think insurers had a relatively fallow year off the back of IFRS 17. What we saw last year was a lot of reviews of preferred supplier lists and master services agreements, and it was a great year for us in the sense that we renewed everyone that we were on and we added more.

I won't give you client names, but they're FTSE 100-level insurers where we have been added to wider services that we can now provide under preferred supplier agreements, and so on, which is fantastic and really sets us up. What we're seeing is the volume of support that insurers need definitely looks like it's ramping back up, and our sort of weighted pipeline of opportunities for 2027, for FY 2027 the rest of this year and into 2027 is really healthy.

Importantly, a bunch of things that are not going to need resourcing from the pensions world, but instead are truly going to be Polaris engagements. A bit of all of that going on makes us genuinely really excited about what we might achieve.

It leads into your second question about what we're really excited about for FY 2027, which that is a part of it. More widely, really excited about the opportunities that there are around this emerging world of surplus and run-on.

There's a lot happening. There's new providers.

There's transactions like the Aberdeen deal that might be replicated. There's superfunds beginning to appear into the market, we're in detailed discussions with some of those, and so on.

Just the range of advice that our clients in general need. We're excited about opportunities to keep the momentum going.

In terms of that sort of the the organic growth rate moderating from 12% this year and consensus sort of mid-to-high single digits, inflation does play a part in that, inflation is coming down. Secondly, some of the sort of the high-margin businesses which have grown from a standing start, such as risk transfer, three or four years ago generating about £1 million, last year we delivered about £20 million from that, to compound at that rate is not possible.

There's a sort of a slowdown within that growth rate. It will still continue to be very strong.

Just this year we've we've been involved in writing 46 deals, and obviously as these are multi-year projects they don't just complete in one year. Look, I think it's it's it certainly doesn't reflect the ambition of the management, as you know.

In terms of the capital allocation, the share the share count, yes, we have we don't try and call the market on this, but when we spot the opportunity to sort of top up the EBT, which is used to satisfy the vesting of awards and therefore protecting shareholders against dilution, that's what we've done. In terms of formal sort of buybacks, we see plenty of other opportunities of more effective capital deployment, and you can see that from our track record of M&A, and also the pipeline that Paul talked about in terms of what's what's available.

That would be our sort of, first option in terms of capital deployment.

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

Okay. Rahim?

Morning. It's Rahim Karim from Cavendish.

A couple of questions, if I may. Just on the medium-term outlook, the five-year ahead slide I think, Paul, that you presented, the right-hand side didn't include the word UK, whereas the left-hand side did.

I was just wondering if that points to some international ambition. I'll leave the smiles maybe to answer that question, but...

No, yeah, I'm smiling a little bit because that certainly wasn't sort of some kind of intentional subliminal signaling. I think the answer is probably in the pensions world, in our heritage, the UK is a unique market.

While there are defined benefit schemes and complexities around other parts of the world in Germany, the US, and so on, we're not going to enter that market and be better than the people on the ground locally. We're not going to go international probably in the pensions world, but in the wider financial services consulting world, absolutely.

There is a broader international market. London is a true center actually for excellence in things like insurance company regulation, Solvency, etc., that the regulations that are much more universal and much more similar in other parts of the world.

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

Yeah. Maybe if I can

just

build on to that a little bit. It also feels like there's a slight pivot, not away from actuarial services, but consulting more generally.

Is that fair as well?

Not quite, because the services we're talking about to the insurance companies, a lot of them are actuarial services and support. That's Polaris's heritage as well.

There's a broadening here at wider finance transformation programs, implementation of technology, the way insurers consolidate and handle big data safely, securely. All things we do for big pension schemes apply very well across the board.

No, an awful lot of it is still actuarial consulting work, just for a different end user rather than a pension scheme.

I promised to ask my questions together now.

I like it. It's fine.

It's good.

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

I'm going to throw in a

sneaky

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

Sure.

Just on the pricing one. With our clients, we've got a mix of fixed-fee contracts and time costs.

Probably up until now, we're pretty neutral. They roughly come out with the same answer and it's just the phasing of when we get paid versus when we do the work.

Going forward, we see ourselves moving far more to fixed fees or fixed pricing for contracts. Now often a project, kind of you don't see in advance, you wouldn't cover that in a fixed fee, but I think rather than say we'll do that work on time costs, we'll be looking to quote pretty fixed fees for more of the work than we currently do.

I think that's probably going to happen across all professional services businesses.

On the dividend, as I said, the dividend was about 4% ahead of market expectations in cash terms. In leverage terms, it doesn't sort of move the dial a lot.

Obviously for the future, you would have seen in the consensus the guide it is about a 5% growth. It would be more in line with profits, continuing with the sort of progressive policy.

I do take your point about sort of if there is capital deployment opportunities available elsewhere, then yes, that would get reflected in what we do, but we will continue with a progressive policy. Yeah.

Alex from Davy here. Just two questions, if I may.

Firstly, on the insurance business, I noticed that you added the general insurance to the total addressable market. Was wondering, do you see more growth opportunity there or is there more growth in life or general or what the split is for the insurance business specifically?

Then secondly, on AI, if it continues to drive efficiencies, do you think there is any scope that it could change hiring practices in the future for XPS?

I'll answer the first one, then maybe Ben take the second. Your first question about the insurance market, yeah, the general insurance market and the life insurance market are also a Venn diagram that overlap, but they do have quite different characteristics as well.

The life market is dominated by a smaller number of very large institutions, and the general market is a much wider market of even a few hundred much smaller institutions. The Venn diagram overlaps with somebody like an Aviva and so on, but actually they are fundamentally quite different markets.

Yes, the model that we've successfully deployed, that Polaris historically has successfully deployed, that we've acquired, works into the general insurance market as well, and we've begun to deploy contractors into that market where there's XPS capability to understand the needs of the client and to fulfill it in that manner. That's a little start, and it's only a very small start, but we definitely see big opportunity in that market.

Again, in looking for an acquisition target, an acquisition target that would enable us to bridge that gap from life into general would be really, really interesting to us. There's a lot of technological change there, and because they're smaller, it's a different market, but you generally are probably going to find it's slightly easier to just get access to the very senior people and just deliver them value.

It isn't gigantic procurement-led processes that it can be at the giant life companies. It's rather more agile than that and a market that we feel that you could penetrate therefore reasonably quickly if you've got something genuinely interesting to say.

The second question was on AI, efficiency, and hiring practices. Yes, we're spending a lot of time and effort looking at how we can roll out AI in a really agile way, but make sure we've got the governance around it.

Part of that is looking further ahead at how it might change kind of exactly what's done in the business by kind of automation versus people. Absolutely that will kind of change, I guess, the way we look at resourcing in the future.

Probably we see this as being we'll have more capacity. We have clients that would love us to do work for them, they'd love us to do it more quickly for them, actually, we think that's probably the outcome, having kind of similar-sized workforce or it growing a little bit more slowly than it otherwise would have done, but us being able to effectively provide more services than we probably currently can.

Hi gents, Hal Potter from Bank of America. Just the one from me.

Going back to that margin point, would you consider compromising on margins to go after those larger public sector schemes you were talking about earlier? Or can we really consider margin expansion to persist regardless of client type?

I think it sort of boils down to and forgive me for this analogy, but would shareholders prefer more profit? If some of those public sector opportunities are very big, public sector pension schemes are obviously still open, and therefore they can persist sort of evergreen schemes.

Our reputation in public sector is very strong, enhanced by the timely delivery of the McCloud remedy project, etc. Absolutely, we would go after those big opportunities because ultimately we believe that that's going to be in the interest of the shareholders.

So.

Any more questions?

Don't think there are any online either.

Okay.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.