GB Group plc

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for GBG's FY26 results. Whilst we will focus on our results for the last year, we're also going to take the opportunity to set out our mid-term guidance and the reasons why we have confidence in delivering it. FY26 was a significant year for GBG, one where the strategic choices we've made over the past couple of years have been paying off. The results we're sharing today demonstrate the quality and resilience of what we've built. David will shortly take you through the financials But I want to start by grounding you in what GBG is and why we believe the opportunity ahead of us is more compelling than it has ever been. Our purpose is simple. We're enabling safe and rewarding digital lives for genuine people everywhere. That's the mission that drives what we do today and what we will do tomorrow. And in terms of what we actually deliver, GBG is the AI trust intelligence platform. We take billions of interactions across people, places and businesses. and we turn those into the signals that help our customers make better and faster decisions. Those decisions happen in milliseconds on a huge scale. Every time someone opens a new bank account, makes an e-commerce transaction, or verifies their identity online, we are there. You can see a selection of our customers on screen. Microsoft, Oracle, Santander, Nike, FedEx, Costco. Those aren't just well-known logos. Their business is operating at massive global scale in highly regulated environments where trust is non-negotiable. The fact they choose GBG tells you something important about the quality and reliability of what we deliver. This slide is also testament to how much we've simplified the business over the past two years and we now move forwards with consolidated and integrated positioning. The market we operate in has never been more important or more dynamic. The structural tailwinds for GBG have been building for years. The explosion of fraud, accelerating digitalisation, rising regulatory pressure, and consumers like you and me who expect frictionless experiences without compromising on safety. None of that is new, and these tailwinds support all pillars of our business. But what has dramatically changed is the role AI is now playing, and not just on our side of the equation when it comes to identity fraud. AI is making fraud accessible to anyone. The tools to commit sophisticated fraud, which once required significant technical expertise, are now widely available. The numbers on this slide tell that story clearly. Synthetic fraud losses are projected to reach $23 billion by 2030. Deepfake fraud losses, $40 billion by 2027. These are enormous figures and they're growing fast. Our customers are already dealing with these consequences. Document spoofing, deep fakes, synthetic identity fraud, account takeover. These aren't future threats. These are live, active challenges that our customers are coming to us to solve right now. But what's equally important is what's coming next. Deep fakes have increased by 3,000% in the last five years. Can you imagine what that looks like in five more? We're quickly approaching a world where humans are a minority online. where bots, agents and AI systems outnumber real people like us in digital interactions. And agentic commerce, where AI acts autonomously on behalf of customers, creates a whole new frontier of trust challenges that the industry is only beginning to grapple with. This is why what GBG does to detect and prevent identity fraud matters so much and is so relevant. The harder this problem gets, the more our customers need a partner who can stay ahead of it and a platform that that can adapt to new challenges and that is exactly what we are building. I want to now turn to what we said we would do and what we actually delivered in FY26. At the start of the second half we set out five clear priorities and I'm pleased to report we delivered on every single one of them. On our financial guidance in November we reiterated our full year financial guidance. We said we would deliver revenue growth of around 3%, which needed H2 to accelerate to mid-single digit, and we said we would deliver operating profit of £67.5 million. Against this, we delivered revenue growth of 3.2%. Our core segment indeed accelerated to 5.7% in the second half, and we met our £67.5 million profit target precisely. On the Americas, we said we'd return the business to growth, which we did in Q4. A meaningful milestone and a reflection of the significant work the team has done to stabilise and reposition that business. On GBG Go, we talked about a strong pipeline. We said we'd execute it and we said we'd also deliver new AI capabilities into the platform. In our first half results, you heard me speak about achieving 18 wins. We closed the year at more than 100. And those new logos included a standout new win with Uber. On driving the way we operate, we have now transitioned to a global functional operating model, and that is supporting the pace of execution by ensuring we focus on our biggest opportunities. The structural work here is done, and we're starting to see the benefits flow through, such as our innovation lab, where we've been focused on building for the threats and opportunities our customers will face, not today, but in the next two to three years. And on capital allocation, we returned 56 million pounds to shareholders in FY26, demonstrating our commitment to disciplined deployment of our free cash. Five priorities, five green ticks. And that should give you all confidence as we look ahead to FY27 and beyond. David will expand on the top and the bottom rows, but I want to go a little deeper on Americas and Go. So let's start with the Americas. Twelve months ago, we were clear-eyed about the challenges we faced in this market. We had work to do on leadership, on sales productivity, on how we were going to market, but we committed to fixing it. And what you're seeing on this slide is the tangible evidence that the progress we've seen in the second half has continued to build on the proof points we shared with you in the first half. Firstly, on leadership. We now have an embedded, stable team in place, one that's fully bought in, and that's showing up in our engagement scores, which are now in the top quartile, and interestingly, ahead of our group average. You cannot build a high-performing business without the right people, and we now have them. Second, sales productivity. New business was up three times year on year. And activation is now 50% faster than it was. These aren't incremental improvements. They reflect a fundamentally more effective go-to-market operation. Thirdly, we've evolved the commercial model. We successfully introduced minimum commitments at the point of renewal on what were previously pay-as-you-go agreements, improving our revenue visibility. And a significant chunk of new business was also pre-committed, which is a meaningful indicator of the quality of the pipeline we're building. On operating model, we update you at the half year that we brought together our America's identity and location sales teams under common leadership to drive brand and cultural alignment. And you can see again just how that looks. That's a shot from Times Square where today we're hosting our largest ever customer event in New York with over 300 registered customers. The result of all this, the America's return to growth in Q4. The result of structural improvements that give us confidence in the long-term trajectory of our business there. One of the reasons for that confidence is a strategic partnership with Equifax, which we concluded in March and recently announced publicly. GBG and Equifax have been working together for over 10 years, but this agreement expands that relationship to a new level. So what does it actually mean for us? Firstly, differentiation in the US. Our partnership unlocks broad access for GBG to Equifax's proprietary data. data that creates a real durable competitive advantage in the world's largest identity fraud market. Second, hardened fraud defenses. By building signals from Equifax's data and combining it with our platform, we can build significantly stronger defenses against some of the fastest growing types of fraud. Third, mutual data integration. Our location capabilities will be integrated into Equifax's US platform in 2026, with global expansion following in 2027. This is a two-way relationship. We're not just buying Equifax's data. We're a partner contributing our differentiated capability to them. And fourth, access to new verticals. This partnership opens doors for both organisations to enter large addressable markets where they've not historically enjoyed a strong foothold. For us at GBG, that means access to public sector. For Equifax, that means access to gaming. Those two alone represent a significant incremental growth opportunity. There are benefits of this agreement outside of the U.S., but my excitement is centered on what it means for our business in America and our customers in America. We're actively pursuing more partnerships of this type because we know that they are a force multiplier for us. Next, GBG Go, where I'm genuinely excited about what we're building and the momentum we're seeing. GBG Go is our AI-powered adaptive identity platform, and the core thesis behind it is simple. The fraud and identity landscape is evolving too fast for static, point-based solutions. Our customers need a platform that keeps pace with the threats they face, one that adapts continuously, builds intelligence over time, and meets their needs as they evolve. And that's what Go delivers for them. The flywheel works like this. We win new logos by offering a platform that's more capable and more flexible than anything else. As customers embed Go into their operation, it builds advocacy because it works and because it keeps getting better. That advocacy unlocks cross-sell opportunities, which drives NRR. And underpinning all of this is a single global architecture that allows us to innovate rapidly and deploy for all of our customers at scale. The early results have exceeded our own expectations, with strong execution against pipelines taking us past 100 wins at the end of FY26. Our largest new customer win, as I've already said, was with Uber. a business that operates at enormous scale and has absolutely no tolerance for friction or failure in their identity fraud controls. Winning Uber on GBG Go is a strong signal of the platform's capability. We've been able to deliver a cutting-edge solution to allow them to build trust with their riders and their drivers in a way that nobody else could do, and that would not have been possible without Go. We've also driven forward the roadmap at pace in the last year, which means the products our customers are buying today will be materially more powerful 12 months from now. We remain excited about the ability to upgrade our customers. Several of our largest customers have already transitioned, while others have expressed strong interest. And whilst we've been able to retire one platform in FY26, the prize in terms of what that means for our other platform retirements remains large and in reach. GBG Go is not just a product. It's a growth engine. And what we're seeing in the market is telling us that we're on the right track. FY26 was a year of delivery. Five priorities set, five delivered. We are now in a position to capitalise on the momentum we've built, and we're going to do exactly that. We're making a targeted, one-off investment of £6 million to accelerate the Go roadmap further. This is a deliberate choice. to press our advantage at a time when the market is moving in our direction and our platform and our teams are ready to scale. The output of that investment will be faster, more trusted decisions for our customers, which ultimately drives retention, advocacy and growth. And from a financial perspective, we now expect to deliver sustained revenue growth of 7% to 9% whilst unlocking margin improvement beyond 24% in the mid-term. This new ambition reflects our confidence in the platforms in our team, and in the market opportunity we have ahead of us. With that, I'll hand you over to David to take you through the financials.

Thank you, Deb, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I will now take you through the FY26 financial performance in a bit more detail, which I should confirm up front is in line with the April trading statement. We are pleased to report that revenue... Sorry, keeping up with the slides. We are pleased to report that revenue for the year was in line with expectations at £285 million. This represents a 3.2% increase in constant currency over the prior year. As we had expected, growth was weighted to the second half of the year and we were very pleased to see growth in H2 for our core segments of identity and location accelerate to 5.7%. Adjusted operating profit for the year was £67.5 million and we maintained our profit margin within our target range of 23% to 24%. And our earnings per share on a diluted basis increased by 9.3% to 19.1 pence. We finished the year with net debt of £80.1 million which represented a net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio of just over 1.1 times. Cash conversion of our adjusted operating profit was 87% and during the year we completed our first acquisition for three years when we acquired the data tools business in Australia. The integration of that business has gone very well and we are now already executing on the cross-sell opportunities for the integrated identity and location solution that we now offer in the region. Reflecting the Board's confidence in a long-term outlook and strategy, during FY26 we repurchased shares equivalent to approximately 8% of our equity through £45 million of share buybacks. Alongside the FY25 final dividend paid in the year, this means that total capital returned to shareholders in FY26 was £56 million, Share repurchases resumed on the 1st of April, 2026 for a further 10 million pounds extension, which was approved by the board in addition to the recommended 4.4 pence per share final dividend. Now zooming in on revenue. We achieved full year revenue growth of 3.2% in constant currency and this translated into 3.4% growth in our core segments of identity and location after excluding the impact of the revenue acquired by data tools and the drag effect of the decision to retire the compliance platform. 95% of our revenue came from the repeatable revenue types of subscription and consumption, with 56% of this being from subscriptions. And we expect this proportion to continue to increase as we drive greater upfront commitments, particularly in our Americas business. Deb has already mentioned that. NRR remained consistent at 100%, and we believe this measure is now primed for acceleration as a result of the drag effect from the compliance platform now washing through the NRR calculation, an improving picture, specifically in Americas, where the leading indicators around gross retention are now looking much more favourable, plus we expect to see the positive effects of GPG go. Now a quick review of the income statement, which is shown here on an adjusted basis. I have a separate slide coming up later on exceptional items. I've already covered revenue, so I'll skip that here, gross profit margin decreased slightly due to changes in sales mix with relatively more sales of partner solutions. Plus, we made some important investments into securing access to differentiated data, an example being the exciting new partnership with Equifax that Dev has already explained earlier. We continued to manage our operating expenses tightly, mitigating the impact of inflation and the UK higher national insurance costs. More importantly, we continued to drive efficiency in our operating model which allowed us to recycle the savings generated into further investment into technology and innovation. Driving those operating model improvements did incur exceptional costs of £1.9 million, but we are confident that investing in these changes will offer strong returns in the medium and long term as we capitalise on going to market as one fully aligned global business. The increase in adjusted operating profits together with lower finance costs, a lower effective tax rate, and as well as some of the impact of the share buyback that was executed in the year, led to the 9.3% increase in earnings per share. Let's now take a look at how each of the segments performed. Starting with identity, which accounts for 61% of group revenue, growth was 2.2% and was driven by the strong performance in EMEA and APAC, with America's improving and returning to growth in Q4. The growth of this segment, and particularly the performance in Americas, was impacted by our decision to retire the compliance platform solution, which had become non-core and expensive to maintain. Excluding the revenue drag this caused, growth for identity was 3.3% for the year, and growth in the second half was over 6%. It was great to see our relatively new KYB solution, or Know Your Business, offer offering landing so well with customers and prospects. While this is still a small part of the identity segment, we saw year-on-year growth of 600%, while also developing a very promising pipeline. We expect this to continue to be a force behind our growth through the medium term, particularly as it gains scale. As you know, the Americas business for identity was a very big focus for us during the year, and we focused on re-accelerating growth through better operational execution while retaining our strong profitability that that business has. Dev has already explained the initiatives we ran and which ultimately led to the business in America's returning to growth in Q4. With this growth also continuing so far into the new financial year too. It was particularly pleasing for us to book three times the level of new business in FY26 versus the prior year. The other big focus for identity in FY26 was the launch of GBG Goat. which only launched commercially at the start of FY26. With our initial focus, you'll remember, being only on new logos. As Dev has already explained, GBG Go is our new flagship adaptive identity verification platform, through which, in the future, all GBG customers will configure, process and monitor their identity verification transactions. Progress has exceeded my expectations, with strong demand and over 100 customer wins now achieved across a number of sectors, including fintechs and gaming, and a strong pipeline of more than 225 qualified leads. A few examples of larger enterprises now utilising GBG Go include Remitly, Revolut and Pet365. Plus, as Dev has already mentioned, we would not have been able to win the UK business of Uber without GBG Go. These are just some of the important proof points that demonstrate why after just one year after launch, we are very pleased with the progress and we feel now is the time to accelerate our plans for the platform and bring forward some of our plans, capabilities and AI-driven insights. We will do that by way of a one-off £6 million investment in FY27. This spend will almost entirely be via our existing outsourced development partners. The schedule of work has already been agreed and fully costed. and cannot spill over beyond FY27. In a moment, Dev will explain more about the benefits this investment will bring. Turning to location next, which represents almost one-third of group revenue, the story here in FY26 was continued resilient growth driven by strong demand for data quality solutions and another year of good growth from our channel partner business. This more than offset some softness from e-commerce, which was most likely due to macroeconomic weakness. That said, we were very pleased with the excellent growth for location solutions in Asia, which continued at 25% growth here in FY26. The contribution margin for location remains strong at 43%. In terms of notable customer activity, I would call out wins or upsells with Microsoft, Equifax, Oracle, and FedEx. And our final segment, Global Fraud Solutions. The contribution margin here showed a material improvement over the prior year following the strategic review we completed last year, with focus and investment diverted from GFS to our core segments of identity and location. While ARR did decline modestly due to customer churn, we did see revenue growth driven by successfully securing some important customer renewals, with some of these licenses being on a multi-year basis. Looking now at exceptional items, which split between non-cash and cash items, the decision to retire the compliance platform solution has necessitated a write-off of the associated intangible assets. These had a carrying value of £16.5 million. This was a non-cash item. Moving on to goodwill impairment, which is also a non-cash item. As required under IFRS, we conduct an impairment review of goodwill and intangible assets each year. And this year that resulted in a goodwill impairment of £73.1 million against the assets related to the America's identity business. As you will appreciate, the valuation environment today is very different than it was back in 2019 and 2021 when GBG made two large acquisitions in the US. The pressure on observable valuation data points has taken an even further step down in the last few months given the war in the Middle East and the perceived specific challenges for valuations of software companies given developments in AI. But it is important to say that this impairment charge is not a reflection of any change in the confidence held by the GBG board or management in the outlook for the Americas business, which remains strong. It is just a result of accounting assumptions. Aside from the two non-cash items, there are also other exceptional expense items totaling 8.4 million pounds. We invested £4.4 million on improvements in corporate systems and data. These investments came in exactly as planned and as previously communicated and are already delivering significant business benefit through GBG Foresight and unlocking go-to-market synergies from single CRM. You will see a short introduction to the new Foresight product later in the presentation. It really is very cool. I hope you enjoy it. Foresight would not have been possible without the investment into structuring our corporate and operational data. In addition, we spent £1.9 million on our move from AIM to the main market during the year. And as I mentioned earlier, the costs associated with the continued restructure to our new operating model totaled £1.9 million. Finishing now on our outlook for FY27, the new financial year, Dev has already mentioned our target of a high single-digit growth rate in the medium term. but I want to be specific about what we expect in FY27. We expect mid-single-digit revenue growth, reflecting a continuation of the momentum that we built in the second half of FY26, and which we have seen continue so far into the new financial year. We expect that the momentum we have carried into the new year will be further supplemented by continued improvement in the Identity Americas business, accelerating contribution from new innovations, and increasing market opportunities as customers look for ways to combat fraud and implement AI strategies. On margin, of course, this will be impacted by the £6 million investment I've already mentioned. So margins here are expected to be in the range of 21% to 22%, but these will then bounce back in FY28 to our target range of 23% to 24%. We continue to expect cash conversion to be approximately 90%. Moving on to the right hand side of this slide and how we're thinking about capital allocation in FY27, we arrived into the new year with a leverage of just over 1.1 times EBITDA and we expect we will exit the year also at around one times levered. When we think about the best way to allocate capital for the best possible returns for shareholders, first there is the dividend to pay in respect of the year just finished. We believe that the £6 million investment announced today offers the best and strongest return on capital. Better than any reasonable bolt-on we would be able to achieve with that value and better than any share buybacks or debt repayment. But we do still have additional capital to deploy over which we have some options. We've already committed and announced an incremental £10 million buyback on top of the £45 million we did last year. And we expect we still have some optionality for the remainder of the year over the excess free cash flow we will generate. With that, I will now hand back to Dev.

Okay, thank you, David. FY26 was about proving we could execute. FY27 is about acceleration or going faster. GBG Go is at the heart of it, but this is a broader story about a business that has done the hard structural work and is now ready to move with pace. Let me take you through how. This slide tells us the story of our journey in three steps. When I took on this role, GBG was a 2-3% growth business. Today, we are growing mid-single digit with the structural work done. We are now fully focused on delivering sustained, high single-digit growth, and we have a clear line of sight to the three things that will get us there. You will find those three things familiar. First, accelerating the Americas. We've returned to growth. It's now about pressing on. Second, innovating through GBG Go. The platform is gaining traction and we're investing to broaden our capabilities. And third, operating as one GVG, bringing our global capabilities to bear in a coordinated, efficient way that creates competitive advantage. This is a high-quality cash-generative business now with momentum. The question is no longer whether GVG can grow faster, it's how fast can it grow. We talk about belief a lot in our business, and if you would ask me the strength of my belief in accelerating growth, this slide would be a huge part of my answer. What you're looking at on this slide is two years of deliberate, consistent effort laid out half year by half year. And what I want you to notice is the progression, not just the volume of what we've done, although there is a lot, but the quality and the direction of travel. We start at the bottom. In the first half of FY25, we were laying foundations. We launched an elevator pitch that articulated who GBG is. We had our first ever company-wide hackathon focused on AI to encourage our teams to experiment with that technology. We rolled out high-performance training for our key leaders. We started using our secure and trusted position as a key selling point with customers. We drew up competitor battle cards so our sales teams knew exactly how to win head-on with competitors. And we launched GBG Trust, creating our first market-facing proprietary data asset. By the second half of FY25, those foundations were turning into real initiatives. We migrated our website to a domain that better suited our US ambitions. We had a new brand, a new purpose, a new performance framework for all of the people at GBG. We started developing Go. We launched our KYB product. And we made the decision to migrate our infrastructure to AWS, choosing a single cloud provider instead of using four. Then, in FY26, we moved into execution. We built out our data lake. We tuned our document verification product to leverage AI to beat AI. We acquired data tools in Australia. We stood up our innovation lab. We retired our first technology platform. And we started to move towards a functional operating model to keep things together and keep us focused. And in the most recent six months, you can see what all of that work has started to unlock. The launch of Foresight. Wins with FedEx. Timu. Uber. Partnership with Equifax. These aren't coincidences, they are the direct output of two years of compounding effort. That's what gives us confidence. Not that we have a good strategy, but that we've already started to prove we can execute it. And based on that forward visibility, we are now ready to stand behind mid-term guidance. I want to bring that compounding effort to life with three specific examples, because I think they really illustrate that compounding better than anything else can. So let's start with Uber. Many of you will have received an email in the last few days from Uber telling you about a new initiative to introduce a verified badge on their platform. If you scrolled further down that email, you'll have also read that in the UK, Uber works with GBG, our identity service provider. That was a pretty cool moment for all of us at GBG. As I've already said, solving Uber's challenges would not have been possible without Go. But equally, it would not have been possible without trust. whose consortium data is integral to the solution we built. Migrating our cloud to AWS has enabled us to deliver the scalability to support Uber's huge volume requirements, and our information security protocols reassured one of the world's leading B2C brands to trust us with such an important consumer-facing proposition. And the sales team that drove this opportunity were all part of the first cohort of our high-performance leadership program. where they learn about setting and delivering on ambitious goals. Now let's look at Foresight. Yes, it's our latest innovation, but it's one that would not have been possible without infrastructure decisions we've been making over the last few years, as David shared. Foresight started as a pitch that came through our first ever company-wide hackathon, where we invited our teams to pitch in a Dragon's Den format to central funding based on proofs of concept they have built leveraging AI. Our data lake, built in FY26 under the code name Alchemy, gave us the rich, structured data foundation that allowed us to apply AI across it at scale. That data lake encompasses trust, and Foresight is delivered to customers through Go. We expect Foresight will have the biggest impact on our America's business, but it's actually been worked on by our data scientists from around the world, including Australia. which is a huge benefit of a functional operating model where we can place our best talent on our biggest opportunities. Foresight is an eye-catching product. It's the kind of product that makes our customers lean forwards. But what makes it defensible is that it's built on an architectural foundation that took us two years to construct. Competitors can't just copy the output. They'd have to replicate everything underneath it first. And that's a meaningful competitive moat. And then finally, Teemu. Timu is a customer I've spoken a lot about over the last couple of years, and it's one that really illustrates the power of operating as one business. Our relationship with Timu started by enabling their global e-commerce operation outside of China, successfully demonstrating a lift in address quality over competitors like Google. That relationship has grown into supporting them in 27 markets worldwide, including the US, in terms of their fulfillment. But what's really exciting is how in the second half, or since the second half, we're now also providing age assurance for them across 34 markets. This win would not have been possible without the work to tune our document verification solution to be able to deliver more than 50,000 document checks per day, delivering strong AI fraud detection alongside record response times and the highest transactions per second that solution has ever delivered. Expansion of the relationship has also been supported by our privacy team, who it turns out are one of our best sales teams. They've partnered with Timu to help them navigate local regulatory challenges in markets they weren't familiar with. And a team effort across identity and location go-to-market teams in the UK and in Asia. Timu is a proof point for what a unified go-to-market can unlock. And as we scale this model, I expect to see more wins of exactly this type. Larger, more complex, and more valuable. As you can see from the three examples I've shared, no single piece of work gets us there. It's a combination of the building blocks. And that combination has taken two years of disciplined investment to put in place but is now delivering dividends. The second part of my answer to why are you confident that growth can accelerate or will accelerate to high single digits will be to point to the parts of GBG that are already demonstrating that they are able to grow at a much faster rate than the group average. Wins similar to Timu are driving high double-digit growth in our Asia e-commerce business. Our global gaming practice continues to grow ahead of group average, fueled in 26 by expansion in the US as it deregulates. Revenues for the highly differentiated GBG Trust solution doubled in FY26 in Australia. Our location businesses in ANZ and Americas grew at double-digits. The business we acquired in New Zealand in 2021, known then as CloudCheck, now as GBG New Zealand, posted more than 35% growth last year. International data had another strong year in EMEA, where we expanded our relationships with key global customers and supported others become global. And KYB was our fastest growing product, with 30 new customers signed and growth in triple digits. KYB has also started FY27 particularly strongly. So when we talk about accelerating the top line to high single digits, we're already seeing at least that in the areas we've been placing additional focus on. And lastly, the third reason I'm confident in our ability to accelerate growth further is innovation. I'm sure, I hope, I'm sure you've detected that the pace of innovation has picked up since the last time I spoke to you in November. We have some rock stars in GBG driving forward our innovation agendas. Before I outline our plans for the investment that David and I have shared, it's probably an appropriate time for them to share more with you about what we've already delivered and why we are so excited about what's ahead. With that, I'd like to hand you over to Gus Tomlinson, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, for a short video that will outline the foundations that we've built, which will support our long runway of innovation, the progress we're making on GBG Go, our latest innovation, Foresight, and how GBG has already entered the agentic era.