London Stock Exchange Group plc

Good morning and welcome to our first half of 2025 results. I'm joined by Michelle Anna-Frosch, MAP, our CFO, and by Peregrine Riviere, Head of Investor Relations. We've had a very good start to the year, continuing our strong and consistent track record of growth. Revenues grew 8.7%, with all businesses contributing positively. Our focus on efficient and scalable growth is paying off, with 150 basis points of margin expansion. taking EBITDA margins to 49.5%. That operational leverage continued down the P&L, with adjusted EPS growing a little over 20%. Cash conversion remained strong. We returned a billion pounds in buybacks and dividends to shareholders in the first half, while still investing in future growth and maintaining optionality around bolt-on M&A. And today, we've announced a further billion pound buyback in the second half, and a 15% increase in our interim dividend, and we are raising our margin guidance. This performance is a direct consequence of our strategy and execution. The investments we're making are driving growth today and are also building the capabilities and platforms for future growth. We're accelerating our high level of product innovation, consistently rolling out new products. We are deepening our customer relationships, building strategic partnerships that have our data, insights, and solutions at their core. And we continue to drive greater efficiency and operational leverage through the ongoing transformation of our business and application of new tools, including AI. I'll say more about the strong commercial and strategic progress we're making in a moment. But first, I'll hand over to Matt to discuss our financial performance in more detail.

Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. Let's begin with the group growth for the quarter and semester. Our organic constant currency income growth for H1 was 7.8%. This growth was consistent across Q1 and Q2. On a reported basis, our income growth is 6.8%, including the impact of FX and M&A. Overall, FX was a 1.9% headwind in H1. As you can see, growth across all prior six quarters has been consistently strong. Looking now by division, you can see growth across all four businesses in H1. Data and analytics and FTSE Russell maintain a solid performance throughout the first half, and our risk intelligence and market businesses grew at double-digit rates. The weakness in the dollar has been a headwind to reported growth in all divisions. Markets reported growth include the benefit of the acquisition of ICD by TradeWeb in August 2024. There is one last point to call out on our reporting. Effective from H1 2025, certain revenue items have been reallocated. A total of £83 million in H1 2025 and £79 million in H1 2024. This is to better reflect how these businesses are managed operationally and has no impact on group-level revenues. Details of this are set out in the appendix of this presentation and in our earnings release. Now let's look at DNA in more detail. There was a good performance from workflows with organic growth of 3.3%. We sunset ICON as planned at the end of H1, and it has been delivered on time and on budget. We continue to make significant investment in our workspace platform that David will later detail, with innovation driving around 250 enhancements in H1. Data and fields maintain its good momentum, with organic growth of 6.6%. We continue to broaden our data sets, and in H1, we added company fundamental data onto our data as a service platform. Analytics has had a very strong first half, with 8.2% organic growth accelerating in Q2. There has been a clear upward trajectory of this business over recent quarters. Sales of our new AI-enhanced Analytics API has helped drive the growth here. Turning to the next slide. In FTSE Russell, we have continued to see strong demand for our flagship equity indices and benchmarks, which have supported good growth in our subscription business, even against a very strong comparable period. We also announced our partnership with StepStone to jointly develop private asset indices and data analytics products, and we launched 25 ETFs across our equity franchise, which is a record. As I mentioned previously, this half we have seen the impact of the mandate loss from the third quarter of 2024. Excluding this, asset-based growth would have been mid-single-digit rather than the flat performance we reported in Q2. Price increases in this business occur upon renewal, which are spread over the year. Looking into H2, we see fewer renewals than usual, This is a function of contract timing, but it means that there will be a little less contribution from pricing to subscription growth. Risk Intelligence had another excellent half of double-digit growth, which continues to be driven by WorldCheck. Growth in digital identity and fraud has also been strong, where our new product launches have helped drive good volumes momentum. Looking now at our ASV metric on the next slide. ASV growth of 5.8% as we exited Q2, compared to 6.4% three months earlier. The icon to workspace migration is one of the largest ever desktop migrations. And inevitably, this quarter was a period of adjustment as migrating customers clean up their subscription. We have also seen the expected competitive reaction to our improved product and commercial performance. Across our subscription businesses, our growth sales remain strong, but they have been partly upset by higher cancellation for these two reasons. Going into Q3, ASV growth will be slightly impacted by the strategic partnership that we signed with UBS and announced last week. This is a very valuable long-term arrangement, and it also draws a line once and for all under the Credit Suisse headwind, bringing the last FX to a close in Q3. We expect to see ASV move up around the turn of the year, but as we have said before, we would not rely too heavily on ASV as a measure of progress. Indeed, we expect usage-based revenue models to increase, as it is already happening in our analytics and rich intelligence businesses. And these revenues are not captured by ASV, so it may become less and less relevant as a metric in the future. Markets had a strong half, with double-digit growth in TradeWeb, FX, and OTC derivatives. Growth was driven by elevated volumes across our market businesses. Within equities, we have seen good volume-driven growth in secondary markets, while the global primary market environment remains relatively subdued. Fixed income had another exceptional performance, with 17.9% growth in H1, TradeWeb is continuing to successfully execute on their strategy while benefiting from favorable market conditions across all their asset classes. The integration of ICD is doing well. Turning to FX, we delivered growth of 13% continuing the positive trend. Market volatility pushed volume up 14% and we saw particular strength in our matching spots and forward businesses. In OTC derivative, we drove growth-based growth across asset classes. Swap clear saw strong growth with interest rates swap notional volumes up 15%, and forex clear notional volumes were up 33%. The development of our post-trade solution business is picking up pace, and we have seen demand from both new and existing customers for this service. We onboarded over 30 new customers across the product suite, and we have seen double-digit growth in each one. The minus 9.8% growth in securities and reporting does not reflect the underlying performance, given the impact of the Euronext exit, which we previously confirmed would see a circa 30 million drag in the first three quarters of 2025. Tripping out this impact, H1 growth is 10%, which includes strong growth in repo clear. Moving now from revenue to the rest of the P&L on the next slide. I will go into OPEX and margin in a bit more detail on the following slide. I have spoken before about operating leverage. And the overall message here is that you can now really see us continuing to deliver it. The strong top-line growth of 7.8%, translating to higher levels of adjusted EBITDA growth at 11.2%, AOP growth of 13.4%, and AETS growth of 21.8%, all on an organic constant currency basis. This is operating leverage in action. Looking at the cut value in more detail on the next slide. This looks at both cost of sales and operating expenses. Cost of sales grew by 4.9%, a slower pace than the 7.8% income growth we reported. This is largely due to the revenue mix in our divisions. And also, in FTSE Russell, last year's mandate loss that I already mentioned has reduced revenue share payments. Turning now to operating expenses. Staff costs in conjunction with third-party services, reflects the total people resources we employ across our organization. The resource equation, which looks at resource costs as a percentage of total income, excluding recoveries, has improved by 90 basis points. This has been driven by discipline cost control and our workforce insourcing program, which is going well. Our total headcount is slightly decreasing and we have increased the percentage of our internal workforce to 72%, reducing our external headcount by approximately 1,500 and adding over 600 permanent employees compared to H1 2024, mostly in engineering. And as we are doing this, we are raising the bar on talent. The reduction in our other cost line is mainly driven by ongoing optimization of our property portfolio and travel expenses. This is another example of us delivering operating leverage, with total operating expenses increasing by 4.2% compared to income growth of 7.8%. Let's now turn to the next slide, where we bridge the effects of cost drivers on our EBITDA margin rate. Starting from the left, the 48.5% is the reported margin for H1 2024. Then there are last year's adjusting effects factors, namely embedded derivative and a translational impact. All in, it gets you to a comparable baseline of 48.1% for H1 2024. Next, you can see the contribution to margin from each cost line on a constant currency basis. The net benefit to margin from people resource cost leverage is a 100 basis point improvement, and from IT cost, another 10 basis point benefit. The 40 basis points from other include a 20 basis point improvement in cost of sales due to the reduced revenue share payment in FTSE resource, and 20 basis point benefit from the optimization of our property and travel expense, as I just mentioned. Taking these controllable movements together shows our very strong underlying margin improvement of 150 basis points for H1. So that brings us to an underlying margin for H1 of 49.6%. There is a net impact of 10 basis points from embedded derivative and translational effects, and that gets you to our reported 49.5%. So in H1, we have delivered a very strong margin progression, which makes us confident of reaching our improved guidance for the year of 75 to 100 basis point improvement. One more point that I would like to make is that we are not only raising the floor of our guidance, but we will be executing it while absorbing in H2 the 60 basis point negative impact of the 27 million pound EuroClear dividend that we received last year, but that obviously we won't be receiving this year anymore as we sold our stake in EuroClear. An important point while looking at the H2 margin improvement. Turning now to net finance expense. You can see that adjusted net finance expense was 66 million in H1 2025, compared to 112 million in H1 2024. This represents a 46 million year-on-year reduction. This decrease includes three elements. First, a 23 million credit from the bond tender offer we completed in March. Second, a gain of 12 million coming from the discontinuance of a U.S. dollar net investment hedge. And finally, the balance comes from a better management of the group debt structure, aka 11 million improvement versus last year. There will be a small headwind in H2 from additional interest costs from the share buyback this year. Taking this into account, for the full year 2025, I expect the total adjusted net finance expense to be slightly above 200 million. On tax, on the next slide, the effective tax rate decreased from 24.8% to 24.0%. This 80 basis point improvement puts us in a good position to meet our guidance of 24 to 25% for the full year. APS was 208.9 pence. In H1 2025, it represents a 20.1% year-on-year increase. On APS, it's helpful to take a multi-year view given the year-to-year noise from FX. This slide shows our strong continuing earnings accretion with 11% compound growth since the first half of 2021. And in the last year, we have seen a significant acceleration at 20%, well ahead of revenue growth, which clearly demonstrates the strong improvement in underlying profitability. And we have achieved this double-digit earnings growth while continuing to invest in our business. Now, looking at non-underlying items, the main point to note here is that we have massively reduced our integration costs by more than 50% compared to last year, as we previously committed. The Refinitiv integration is completed, and the only costs posted in non-underlying going forward relate to our engineering contractor internalization program that I already mentioned, and the deployment of a single ERP throughout ELSEG. These two programs will be completed by 2027. Let's turn now to cash flow. We have continued to increase our operating cash flow generating $281 million more compared to the first half of 2024. And we were able to materialize all of this increase in operating cash flow into equity-free cash flow. CAPEX was $424 million in H1 2025. This represents 9.5% of total income and a $30 million year-on-year reduction due to lower costs related to the refinities transaction, and an improved investment control process. We are fully in line with our guidance to reduce our capital intensity to approximately 10% in 2025. We have a good line of sight to it declining further after our medium-term guidance. As a result of this discipline, equity-free cash flow shows really strong growth of $284 million which is a 43.6% year-on-year improvement. As you can see, LSEG is highly cash-generative, and with higher margins and lower capital intensity, it will become even more so. We continue to be very active in our allocation of cash, as you can see from this slide. First, the dividends. The interim dividend is increasing 15% to 47 pence, in line with our dividend policy, and it's representing approximately 250 million. Second, buybacks. We return 500 million via buybacks in H1, and we plan to execute up to a further 1 billion share buybacks in the second half of the year. We ended the period with a leverage of 1.6 times net debt to EBITDA. which is almost at the bottom of our guided range. These give us significant financial flexibility to return surplus capital to our shareholders, as well as invest in M&A opportunities across our business that make sense, both strategically and financially, as we have always done. The next slide summarizes our H1 performance versus our 2025 guide-ups. Starting with revenue, H1 organic growth of 7.8% exceeds the upper end of our 6.5 to 7.5% guidance for 2025. On the basis of this performance, we are very confident that we can deliver on our revenue guidance for the full year. If our transactional businesses continue to perform well, our position related to the range can obviously improve further. Next to margin, I have spoken already about the H1 performance, which exceeds our guidance for 2025. We are now raising our BDA margin guidance for 2025 to a 75 to 100 basis point improvement, all this while absorbing a 30 basis point impact on the year following the end of the Euroclear dividend that I mentioned. This demonstrates the progress we have made and our conviction in our capacity of execution. Thirdly, we are bringing down our capital intensity as planned and we are on track to meet our full year guidance of around 10% of income in 2025. And finally, we are deploying our strong equity free cash flow for growth and shareholder returns. And as I have mentioned, This includes a new $1 billion buyback. So, in conclusion, we are very confident that we will deliver on all our promises for 2025 and in the medium term. We have a clear plan and we are very focused on executing it. Now, let me hand back to David to talk about our strategic and operational progress.

Thank you, Matt. This chart puts our recent performance in context. Despite big swings in capital markets and the global economy, we have delivered strong and consistent growth. We're not immune to economic conditions, but the natural offsets in our activities give our business model an all-weather nature. You can also see how disciplined delivery of our strategy over the last few years has accelerated growth, from mid-single digits to high single-digit growth. Almost three-quarters of our revenues are recurring in nature, subscriptions in data and analytics, with the Russell and Risk Intelligence, and member fees and data sales in our markets businesses. These businesses have very high retention rates, reflecting the quality of our offering and the importance of the services to our customers. Around a quarter of our revenues are transactional in nature, arising largely from the execution and clearing solutions we provide to customers when they are investing capital and managing risk. The double-digit growth in these revenues over the last five years speaks to the structural nature of this growth and the innovation we have driven across markets. Whether it is supporting electronification in fixed income trading, introducing new FX trading protocols like forward-first fixing, or working with the industry to provide greater capital efficiency in post-trade, we are driving structural growth across our transactional businesses. It speaks to the quality of our sales execution that our pipeline of new business continues to grow, and we have not seen any material change in key metrics such as average deal size or length of sales cycle. Matt highlighted the short-term impact of competitor activity just now, but looking out, our continued investment and high pace of product innovation position us well to strongly compete and continue taking share. An example in workflows. we displaced almost 100 users at a major commodities trading firm. That was driven by our superior market data, news, and commodity-specific research. In data and feeds, we won a highly competitive process to provide a global hedge fund with data and insights powering new AI-driven trading models. Central to this success was our leadership in news, both the breadth of our offering and the investment we've made in making it machine-readable and AI-ready. We also agreed a new multi-year data access agreement with UBS. That's a really strong partnership based on the adoption of our solutions across the full range of UBS's activities globally. We expect to see good multi-year growth from the relationship. This slide highlights four of the structural growth drivers for our business and how they have evolved over the last few years. It's a good way to think about the opportunities we have in front of us. We've seen generative AI move into mass adoption and the rise of agentic applications. While cloud distribution is not new, customers increasingly want to manage their data on cloud-based platforms too. Regulation has become more uncertain, and in some of our customer segments, the pace of new regulations has slowed, creating opportunities for clients to think more strategically about their businesses. The volatile geopolitical backdrop and the increasing sophistication of financial fraud have brought risk management to the fore. And we've seen the emergence of new digital asset classes, attracting new participants and building new pools of liquidity that, as they mature, require more robust, regulated infrastructure. As we execute and take advantage of these tailwinds, we are very intentionally creating a portfolio of growth opportunities that will realize near, medium, and long-term As you've seen from today's results, the transformation of our business is driving growth today. Through the investment we are making in our content and capabilities, we are also securing new growth over the medium term. I'll talk through a few examples of that shortly. And we are also building infrastructure and partnerships to establish the platforms for future growth that will position us to win in the medium to longer term. Workflows is a good example of these overlapping growth drivers in action. I'll start with what is driving growth today. In June, we finished one of the largest financial services workflow migrations in history, moving more than 350,000 users onto Workspace and establishing a common platform for innovation and growth. Delivering that took a great deal of focus and effort from our workflows, sales, and customer support teams, particularly in Q2. Completion of the migration brings up capacity we can now reallocate to grow. Workspace itself continues to evolve at pace, with hundreds of updates in the first half. We've increased our private markets data by two-thirds and are on track to almost double coverage by the end of the year. We furthered Workspace's leadership in news, expanded bilateral trading capabilities into metals and bonds, and added new AI-driven commodities content. Our clients recognize the continuous improvement, with the average user spending 15% more time on Workspace in Q2. Customers tell us they want more seamless workflows, with interoperable data sets and less switching between applications. This is exactly what we are building in partnership with Microsoft. The first iteration of our Workspace for Teams application is now live with target customers. and we will be adding new functionalities and expanding the customer rollout over time. Integrating workspace data into Teams enhances the discoverability of our data and insights by making them accessible in customers' existing Office 365 workflow. Using simple prompts in Teams chat, users can call up 20 different data sets with insights on bonds, equities, news, M&A lead tables, and so on, and share this information with ease. In the same way we're constantly enhancing our Workspace platform, we will continue to expand the capabilities of the Teams application, adding interoperability with Microsoft Copilot, functionality from meeting prep, and other enhancements later this year. We also launched the first iteration of our Workspace add-ins for Excel and PowerPoint. Focusing on the data and workflow needs of bankers, This uses novel Office 365 functionality to offer natural language formula building and automatic chart annotation. We'll be expanding these capabilities to cover more of the investment management workflow in H2. These are powerful initiatives, but they do not exist in isolation. There's a natural sequence to our product delivery, with each step unlocking the next evolution of our workflows offering. Without migrating users to the more modern and agile workspace platform, there would be no Teams app. And without the Teams app, there would be no gateway to our open directory messaging function in Teams. Following the really good progress made in H1, we're rolling out open directory to communities of users, giving them the ability to find, share, and discuss insights through Microsoft Teams chat function. And we are not stopping there. The rest of this year in 2026, we'll see further enhancements to our Teams app, wider rollout of open directory, as well as the first agentic AI tools for workspace and a natural language search experience. You've heard me speak many times before about our best-in-class data and analytics and the investment we are making to expand and deepen this further. Here's what the cumulative effect of that looks like in our fixed income data. We've added more than 5 million new instruments, taking our full data set to over 21 million instruments. It's qualitatively better, too, with quicker security creation and more precise data on instrument pricing. We've launched new regulatory solutions, such as FRTB, and enhanced key datasets, such as debt corporate actions. The integration between trading menus, like TradeWeb, and FTSE Russell's fixed income indices is much deeper. And we have significantly expanded the access to our fixed income data via Workspace or cloud environments, like Snowflake. I've used fixed income in this example. but I could just as easily use equities, commodities, or FX. This investment in our data is driving growth today and is increasingly recognized by our customers as a differentiator. We're also making it easier for customers to find, access, and consume our data by continuing to partner with more cloud platforms. For example, following the success of putting our flagship pricing and reference data, Datascope Warehouse, into AWS last year, We expanded distribution to include Google BigQuery in the first half. Traditionally, customers would download our data via a feed or file transfer, then use it on their own systems and platforms. In recent years, they've been accessing data via the cloud before using it on their own system. Increasingly, we hear from customers that they want to use and manage data directly in the cloud, and they are looking to Elphic to provide the connectivity and tools to support that. One of the ways we're meeting this need is through the data as a service capabilities we're building with Microsoft. We added our company fundamental data sets to this platform in the first half. This is a massive and critical data set, including financial statements, KPIs, and other operating methods for more than 100,000 companies. As well as further enhancements to our ESG and company fundamental data, we will start adding private company data from the second half. We will also begin rolling out data matching tools as part of our managed data services, establishing a strong platform for future growth. Our analytics business is a clear example of our transformation and the value of the Microsoft partnership. Eighteen months ago, we had market-leading models and analytics, but these were hard to use and deliver through a range of different platforms. Growth was okay, but the MISH IP was under-monetized. In March 24, we consolidated hundreds of analytics into a single API, making it easy for customers to access and integrate with their workflows, as well as discover analytics they probably didn't know we offered. Growth in 2024 was around 5%, with new sales strengthening towards the end of the year. Then in March this year, we made it easier for customers to adopt Elsec's analytics where they are working, for example, within Visual Studio Code. we'll be adding a number of new channels over the coming months. In H2, we'll be introducing Eltech's proprietary analytics AI assistant. This will allow clients to drive their analysis with a simple written prompt, and within seconds have this translated into action. This takes routine analytics tasks down from hours to seconds. And this all links to the release of Modeling as a Service, where we are enabling our customers to distribute their own models through our APIs, reaching new end customers, and enhancing the power of our platform. So far in 2025, growth has accelerated to over 8%, and we are confident of continued good momentum. Through our focus on innovation, openness, and partnership, we have driven sustained growth in our centrally cleared OTC solutions, as shown in the five-year growth rates on this slide. We see a similar opportunity for solutions in the unclear space, and we're making good progress in delivering on this vision. The first half saw record growth in the use of our risk optimization tools, saving customers 1.7 times more capital than in the same period last year, or around $7 billion per bank on an annualized basis. Volumes across our end-to-end service for uncleared swaps rose 73%, and we continue to expand our network, adding 3,500 new bilateral counterparty relationships in H1. The first half also saw good progress in building the platforms for future growth, with the launch of U.S. Treasury futures clearing in partnership with FMX, and the first trades cleared using our regulated clearing infrastructure for digital assets. Global fragmentation and geopolitical complexity continue to provide a tailwind to our risk intelligence business, which continues to deliver double-digit growth. In the first half, we began pilots of a new, more flexible WorldCheck platform for our sanctions and anti-money laundering data. We'll extend that to a larger number of customers in the second half. But our strategic vision goes far beyond screening. Unlike competitors that tend to provide individual solutions, we operate along the compliance lifecycle, combining digital identity and fraud solutions with screening and due diligence capabilities. There's more that we can do to stitch these capabilities together into integrated solutions. There are also new market segments we can open up over time, providing a platform for future growth. The growth of new asset classes in recent years has brought with it new market participants and new trading technologies. By leveraging our expertise in financial market data and infrastructure, we are supporting growth in these liquidity pools. Bushy Russell offers a number of digital asset and crypto indices in partnership with Digital Asset Research and Grayscale. and continues to expand its offering. In H1, Bootsy Russell also announced a partnership with Stephstone to introduce investable private markets indices, with the first products expected in the second half. Later this year, we expect to formally launch our regulated private securities market business, offering private companies a new way to access liquidity that builds on the public market infrastructure of the London Stock Exchange. Continuing the innovation, we expect to start onboarding the first customers to our digital market infrastructure, which in the first instance will focus on capital raising by private market funds. Of course, there continues to be a lot of focus on AI. I just want to spend a moment on how we see our place in the market and why I like our positioning as the technology continues to evolve. First, you have to think about what financial markets participants want from their workflows. Natural language search and the ability to automate a lot of time-consuming activities with agents is very attractive. We're all headed in that direction. But they want that and all the things they get today from an advanced desktop. Curated news and alerts, portfolio tracking, live charts, trading capabilities. So the future is AI integrated into a desktop, not AI replacing a desktop. And that desktop should combine financial markets content, insight, and workflow with enterprise workflow. A couple of other really important aspects to this. Customers also need absolute certainty around data trust, accuracy, and compliance, including the outputs from AI models. And, of course, they want simplicity and value for money. LSEC lines up against these needs very well. In Workspace, we have built a modern, modular, and customizable interface It has rich functionality and allows customers to manage entire financial markets workflows, not just research. With Microsoft, we're consolidating enterprise and financial workflows, enhancing productivity by empowering customers to do everything in one place. On data, our position is very strong. Our starting point is leadership in real time, unrivaled depth and breadth of data, and significant trust in that data given the rigor of our processes. And then our approach to applying AI to this data is differentiated as well. The truth is that even for relatively simple prompts, accuracy levels across the industry for AI model outputs in financial services remain below 50%. I'm confident this will improve rapidly, but that's the situation today. As a result, we're taking a rigorous approach to testing and evaluation to improve and refine AI outputs. And our overall commercial strategy is an important tool, Through access agreements, we offer lower cost of data ownership for major customers. On top of that, we are more liberal in our contracts and allow customers to train their own models on our data. Others do not take this approach. As you can see, our position is clearly differentiated from others in the market, and we like and have a lot of confidence in our position. We're also confident that as the world continues to change rapidly, and in particular as agentic AI functionality improves, We will remain at the forefront of that change with our data at the core. So the previous slide focused on AI and the desktop. But let's zoom out a bit and look at how we are incorporating AI into our products, our processes, and how our people work. We have over 20 live use cases in our business today, with a further 100 in development. On products, you've already heard how we're putting AI to work. from advanced dealing and the analytics API to the new Workspace Teams app and soon in Workspace AI and in various agentic AI tools. For our processes, the addition of AI tools is also making us more efficient and agile. I'll give you a few statistics, but please keep in mind that while we are moving quickly down the path of widespread AI adoption, it is still relatively early days. More than 80% of customer queries are now resolved using AI customer support tools. That's already helped us significantly improve resolution times, and there's further to go. We're also deploying AI tools to ingest data more quickly and accurately. The sourcing failure rate on our automated data retrieval has decreased by 95%, significantly reducing the need for human intervention. And then, on our people... We believe it's important that we insource more of our engineering talent and train all staff to operate in a modern AI tooling environment. Not only does that ensure we keep winning in the war for talent, but it will maintain our agility and reduce our time to market. And there is a direct line from this transformation to what you are seeing in our margin improvement. We are becoming a modern, more efficient, more skilled, and scalable business. As you saw in H1, we have built a business which is strategically aligned to a number of powerful growth drivers. We are investing and innovating to deliver on those opportunities, powering near, medium, and longer-term growth. You've heard from Matt how we're doing that in a more efficient way, ensuring our top-line growth is reflected in earnings. And we continue to generate a lot of cash, supporting returns to shareholders and investment in growth. while giving us optionality to continue to consider bolt-on M&A that meets our strategic and financial hurdles. One last point. We announced this morning that we'll be giving our shareholders a more in-depth look at the new products across our business at our Innovation Forum for Investors on November 10th. I feel more confident about the strength of our offering, particularly our innovation and new product delivery, than at any time over the last seven years, and I look forward to sharing some of that with you at November's events. And with that, I'll hand to Peregrine for Q&A. Thank you, David.

A quick reminder, when asking questions, please can I ask you to limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Operator, over to you. If you would like to ask a question, please do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. To withdraw your question, press the star 1 again. And as Herrigan mentioned, we kindly ask that you please limit yourself to two questions and then rejoin the two if you would like to ask further questions. And your first question comes from the line of Russell Quill, for Brock Charles.

Please go ahead. Morning, gents. Thank you for having me on the call. A couple of questions. Firstly, in regards to AI, David, can you elaborate a bit more On your thinking about the data side of the business, how you expect to increase the distribution and the timing of monetization on the data with respect to AI, will you be willing to work with other LLMs, including OpenAI, and will you be working with other external AI workflow solutions, allowing them to use your data both inside and outside of your own desktop application? That's my first question. The second question, We've recently seen a number of your peers, including Deutsche Börse, S&P, they've all taken strategic decisions to spin off part of their businesses to release value. I was wondering if that's something you would consider exploring to release value within your group.

Thanks, Russell. And good morning. So to your first question on data distribution, we do that. So a couple things. We work with a number of different models. We're not tied to any one particular model. We work with open source models. We work with the pay models. And then the second aspect of that is that we also already provide our data to many users for their consumption in their models. And, in fact, we have, I think, a more liberal approach to we're very comfortable with it from a legal perspective and from an economic perspective, but we provide our data in a more liberal way to our customers for their usage in their models. A part and parcel of this is making sure that our data is packaged and AI ready. And we have that in very good shape in a number of our data sets. And we are improving it in some of our other data sets so that that is a core part of the value proposition within our data and fees capability. On your second question, look, we're always looking at our portfolio, and we're always looking to make sure that we are adding the most value and getting the most returns across the portfolio. If you look back over the last few years, we have done some divestitures. We've done some very small ones that I would put in the category of cleanup. A few years ago, we divested the Beta Plus portfolio, business for about a billion dollars. And so you should assume that we will always continue to evaluate our portfolio in the right way. But I feel very good about the strategic coherence of our business and how the different parts of the business fit into driving our strategy of serving our customers across asset classes, across the trade lifecycle, and on a global basis.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Kyle Boyce of KBW. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Maybe it's a question on the competitive environment in the second quarter and the higher cancellations. Just wondering if you can clarify if that was simply discounting by one of your competitors on the workspace business specifically. And then maybe you could speak about the trend that you saw throughout the quarter on the aggressiveness of that competitor or competitors. Has it gotten more intense or less intense? And have you responded competitively there on your own pricing in order to resume business?

Thanks, Kyle. So the first point I should just make on this is that we have – literally a cancellation or two in each of DNA, FTSE, and risk intelligence, and that can have this kind of impact on ASV. You know, we've always shared with you all to be careful on reading too much in ASV because of this kind of sensitivity. So, you should not look at these numbers as a big shift or a big wave. You know, it can really be those kinds of numbers that I'm talking about here in terms of one or two in each of these areas. The second point I make is that we have seen this before. You know, just an example, a couple years ago, one of our competitors was basically giving their real-time product away for free for two years or so. And we did see a couple cancels associated with that, and that had a short-term impact on the data and feeds growth rate. And then those customers came back. And you see the data and feeds growth has been very strong over the last few years. So... The next point I would just make on this, it is not surprising to us to see a response from our competitors in this way. And you go back over the last few to several quarters, and we have been taking share from them. And this goes back over the last couple of years. And you've seen, I don't want to get into any specific competitors, but you have seen for some of them their growth rates come down pretty significantly and their ASDs come down pretty significantly. And a lot of that is because of what we are doing to them competitively. To your specific question, we do not see their pricing in these areas as sustainable. And, you know, as I said, we've seen it before. It wasn't sustainable before. We see the same kind of behavior now, and we don't think it's sustainable now. So from our perspective, we are not matching irrationally discounted pricing. We will continue to invest in our products. We are continuing to do that. And this is really important, we are continuing to see a build in our sales pipeline. So I'll close on this topic. We look forward to continuing to invest in our product, making better and better product. We've seen our customers willing to pay for greater product, greater return on what they're seeing in our product. And we look forward to continuing to share from our competitors.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Michael Warner of UBS. Your line is open.

Thanks for the presentation, guys. Just one question for me. You know, as we look at the 2026, I believe, you know, there was an intention to accelerate pricing in the desktop space. You know, I know we're getting to that point where you start these, you know, conversations in the next couple of months with clients about pricing for 26. I'm just wondering, you know, is that still the intention? How are you feeling about it? You know, how is the environment looking for you guys to be successful here? Thanks.

Thanks, Michael. So we are having that conversation as really over the course of these next few weeks. That's a summertime conversation for us. We do it every year. We look at the value that we are adding in our product. We look at the new investment we've made, the changes that we have rolled out. We always evaluate, and over the last few years, we've always evaluated the inflation environment. We evaluate the competitive environment, but I think we feel very good about the positioning of the product. We feel good about the changes that are being introduced and the new functionality, so we'll be making that decision over the next several weeks, and then we'll be communicating with our customers in the fall.

Thanks. The next question is from the line of Arno Juggla from BNP Paribas Exxon. Please go ahead.

Hey, Nick. Good morning. Can I ask about the ASD growth, which has been slowing? Could we expect this to lead to constant currency growth and data remaining a bit more static at around 5% for the next 12 months? In essence, what I'm asking for is how much of the revenue basis is represented in the ASB growth and what are the other moving parts to consider? I think you talked about usage-based contracts, increasing usage there, and you talked also about 15% increasing usage. Could that offset and could that lead to an acceleration in 2026? My second question is on data as a service. Could you maybe spell out some of the key milestones we should be looking out for for this to be really a material part of your panel? Thank you.

Thanks, Arnaud. Matt will take the first question, and I'm happy to talk about data as a service.

Yeah, sure. Hello, Arnaud. So on ASV on that quarter, before going into the detail, just two points. I think David mentioned the volatility of ASV from one quarter to another. I'm not going to go back on this. But the second point I want to make, because you mentioned it, and I think it's a very good point, is that, yes, it's true, ASV is not capturing volatility. the use-based revenue, and we actually see an increase of our usage-based revenue, both in analytics and risk intelligence. So both of these revenue lines are not captured by ASV by itself, just mentioning it. So maybe, you know, in the long run, it's symmetric as usage-based revenue is increasing, which is going to become less and less relevant. I'm not saying tomorrow, but I'm saying more in the long run. On the decrease of the ESV Q2 and Q1, I think David already mentioned the expected competitive response. I just want to remind you, what I've said in Q1, which is we see a continued normalization in FTSE Russell and in risk intelligence trajectory following a period of very elevated growth. And finally, which is, you know, kind of a one-off, but it's really important to mention, the sunset of ICON have led to some cancellation. We mentioned it. a kind of a cleanup if you want at some time but there were two effects this one that i've mentioned in the remarks and another one which is our sales team has been extremely focused at making this twist from icon to workspace a success and it was as I said, delivered on time and on budget. But obviously, while they were doing this, and particularly our customer excellence team, they were not saying all the things, you see. So I see this as really as a one-off for this quarter. I think we have indicated, if I carry on your reasoning, we have indicated that in Q3, you will see the low point of ASV with the impact of the UBS LDA deal that we've signed. It's about 30 to 40 leaps. And I want to mention, too, that it was anyhow what we were expecting coming from the previous termination. So now it's going to be behind us, and we're not going to repeat this every quarter. And looking at what you're mentioning, the 5% and, you know, 2026, when we look at the pipe that David and I are reviewing every month, the sales pipe, the sales pipe is increasing, both in terms of value and in terms of duration. We have a great roadmap of products. So you put this all together and the pricing that we're going to, you know, work on in the weeks to come, it makes us confident in the capability of DNA to accelerate growth in 2026.

And Arnaud, your second question on data as a service. So putting the fundamentals together, data set into that capability this year is significant in terms of moving down that path. We also talked about how we're adding more data in terms of our private data set, and then we have more data sets coming next year. And I would expect, and we've talked about this a little bit in the past, that we get to critical mass in terms of the data sets that are available in that in that mode near the back half of next year. What does that mean in practice? It becomes much easier for our customers to access our data and use it in the way that they want in, I'll say, sort of an integrated capability and an integrated architecture. And maybe just by way of analogy, in our presentation that we just went through, we talked about the impact of that we have seen in analytics, which is a much smaller business, but what we've seen in analytics over the last year, year and a half, in terms of improving that architecture, creating an integrated distribution capability, and allowing our customers to use that and discover our analytics in a very different way. I think that's an interesting analogy. I think that it's a different business, and data and feeds and analytics And data as a service is a larger business. So I wouldn't say expect the almost double of what you've seen in the growth rate from analytics in terms of that 4% to 8%. But it gives you a sense of the kind of benefits that we are looking to drive from serving the customers better in this kind of integrated architecture.

And your next question comes from the line of Cupid Lamb.

Thanks, America. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thanks for asking my question. Well, I've got two of them. Firstly, on your organic growth guidance for this year, 6.5% to 7.5%, you've left that unchanged even after delivering 7.8% to 7.8% H1. So why aren't you narrowing the range at this stage? What are the risks you see into the 6.5%? First question. The second question is a follow-up on pricing. You know, with the new houses you're making, across, you know, workspace, including open directory and other functionality. Isn't that a good reason to increase your raised pricing to, you know, above the average you had over the last couple of years? Or is competition just, again, much harder to do this? And maybe more pricing increases in 27 rather than 26? Thank you. Thanks, Hubert.

Matt will take your first question. I'm happy to take your second.

Yeah, sure. So on the way we look at the guidance, we've looked at the mix of our business between our subscription business and markets. On the subscription business taken together, we believe that in H2 we are going to have roughly the same organic growth as we had in H1. And we have a very strong line of sight on this because these are recurring revenue. And on the market, obviously, there is a certain volatility. Now, we have studied three possible scenarios. The first one is that markets carry on at an elevated growth, as the one we had in H1, around 10%. If this is the case, we're reaching the upper part of the guidance. So that justifies and explains the 7.5%. Then there is our central case, which is that we see a normalized growth for markets. So it can be normalized for trade web within markets at low double-digit growth and the rest of markets. And all together, let's say, you know, a market division at around 7%. And that takes you to the midpoint of our guidance. And again, it's our central case. And obviously, we are in a situation of very, you know, uncertain macroeconomic environment, there is the possibility of a strong slowdown that would be like, you know, 3 or 4% of growth for markets. Again, it's not something that we see, but, you know, that's the environment we are at. And that makes us the 6.5%, which is the low part of our guidance. So, you know, with this current environment, it's difficult to be more precise today, but we will be better informed in Q3, and we'll update the guidance at that time.

And, Hubert, on your second question around pricing, similar to what I touched on earlier, you know, this is something that we're actively looking at now and over the next few weeks, and There's a lot that we are rolling out. There's a lot of new capability, new functionality, new product. There will be more next year. So, you know, I could make the argument both ways in terms of how you ask your question. We've got plenty of good reason to do things on pricing this year. We're going to have plenty of good reasons to do pricing, to do some good things on pricing next year. We'll keep an eye on the competitive environment. and we'll make the decisions. We just haven't made those calls yet. But I think the broader perspective or answer I can give on this is I really like our positioning in terms of how we are delivering on new innovation, product, new capabilities. You know, as you all know, and as we've been talking with you about over the last few years, we have been investing a lot in our business. And we're really seeing the benefits of that. And there's a lot of focus on what we're doing in data and analytics, but there's also lots of new capability coming out in Pussy Russell. We've had a record number of new products in Pussy Russell. We've got new capabilities in risk intelligence. We've got new capabilities in FX. We've got new capabilities in LCH and post-trade solutions. So, As I look across the business, we'll make the decision that we make about pricing for this year and going into next year. And we'll have that same conversation next summer going into 2027. If you just take a step back for a moment and think about the trajectory of this business and the strength of the relationships that we have with our customers, we're in a very good position. We provide critical services to these customers. And we are, I would say, in the industry, we're the one providing the strong pipeline of new product and new capability.

Yeah, I recognize the innovation behind it, but, you know, hopefully it can be translated on the monetization or maybe not just short-term focus.

No, I think, look, I agree with you. It certainly is a goal. But by this game token, we also... And the way I've answered an aspect of this question over the years, people ask us about the discount of, for example, our desktop product or workspace relative to one of the big competitors and that being at sort of a 30% or so discount. And we've always been clear we're never going to take the price up 29% in the new year. Now, obviously, I say that as an exaggeration, but The reason I mention that is that part of how we are rolling out our price increases over the years is in a way that works for our customers. They understand the amount of innovation, the amount of capital that we're putting into our new product. They appreciate it, and they respect the fact that we need to get an appropriate return on that investment. So that's part of the discussion as well, just in terms of making sure that we're maintaining the good, healthy, long-term relationships that we have with really the industry. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next question is from the line of Benjamin Goy of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Good morning. First, on the share buyback of 1 billion, which is, I guess, the largest one for half a year for you, maybe you can put it in context of thinking how much is driven by being close to your leverage or the low end of your leverage range, how much is simply the OIA test generation or the current price performance and also compared to M&A opportunities currently in the market. and then a follow-up on the usage-based price. Is there any sense to quantify that, how much of the revenues are already usage-based and how this compares to the level one or three years ago? Thank you.

So I think the first question on the buyback and the capital allocation. So we have always taken a very active and disciplined approach to capital allocation. the group is very highly cash-generated. You've seen the performance in cash, the plus 40% compared to the first semester we had. So you look at this performance in cash, it's driving our leverage ratio to 1.6 at the end of June, which is almost the low part, the bottom part of our range one and a half to two and a half. And that's the reason why we decided for a buyback of a billion. And this buyback is funded by our cash flow. Because if I give you a bit the capital allocation for this year, so we said at least 2.4 billion, okay, of free cash. And obviously with the performance we had on the first semester, it makes us more comfortable on the at least, right? So you look at the first semester, it was 500 million in dividend, 500 million of buyback. In H2, it will be 250 million of dividend, because of the interim dividend, and 2 billion of buyback. So by doing all this, we are distributing 2.25 billion of the 2.4 billion. And so it means that we would still be with the leverage that, you know, give or take 1.6, which gives us the opportunity, the space to have, you know, M&A, you know, both on, that David mentioned several times, but obviously always with our discipline, both strategically and financially.

And on the... usage-based pricing question. So as Matt mentioned, we have it today in analytics. We have it today in risk intelligence. And just to be clear on this, when we have more and more usage-based pricing, that doesn't mean that we're getting away from the subscription model. We like having the subscription, the contractual relationships with our customers and the usage-based pricing is embedded within those subscriptions. So within the context of analytics and risk intelligence, those are two attractively growing businesses. They're relatively on the smaller side of our business today compared to workflows, compared to data and feed. So, on the smaller end, but an attractive element of the incremental growth is the way I would think about it.

Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Enrico Bolzani from JP Morgan. The line is open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So, one, I just wanted to go back on a comment you made. You said, I think, that all things considered, you are confident that you'll be able to accelerate growth for data analytics next year. Sirat, would you be able to extend that comment to the group level or at least to the group, including markets, which is a bit more volume dependent. So that's my first question. And my second question is a very generic one, but I was hoping you can provide some color. You clearly say that some of the competitors have been very sector, what is the risk of seeing a race to the bottom for data consumption? And perhaps if you can spin it specifically to your case, what gives you confidence that your data are unique and what you offer is so unique that we will not see a continuous spike in practice going forward over the next two, three years? Thanks.

Thanks, Enrico. Matt, we'll take your first question on how we're thinking about next year, and then I'm happy to talk about the data question.

Yeah. So, obviously, we are only in July, so we are not set yet for the budget of 2026, so I'm not going to give you, you know, a guidance for 2026, but I think it's a fair question, and I can give you some color. So we said, you know, Acceleration of DNA, it's not going to be a step change, but it's going to be progressive. And when you look at, you zoom out a bit and you look at the subscription business, DNA, Futsi Russell, and Risk Intelligence, we are confident into this progressive acceleration in 2026, yes.

And then on the question around, you know, the risk of the race to the bottom of the data. So we don't see it that way really at all. I think if you – and there are a couple different ways we could talk about this for the rest of the hour or two. But just a thought on this. First of all, with respect to the AI ecosystem, there are three legs to that stool. There is the computing power. and that includes the data centers and the chips, and we're seeing enormous capital and investment go into that, and you're seeing some potential commoditization over time there. Then you're seeing the models themselves, and you're seeing enormous investment go into that, and lots of competition and some open source models and some cheap models coming out of, or cheaper or smaller models coming out of China and other jurisdictions. So and potential commoditization there. And then you have the data as the third leg of the stool. And it is, you know, it is hard to commoditize the data. The data quality is incredibly important in terms of informing, training, feeding the development of the AI functionality in these models. You can have synthetic data, but synthetic data, is of the same quality, if synthetic data is built off of, I'll say, commoditized, cheap, low-value data, then it is relatively cheap and low-value. If synthetic data is built off of high-value data, it has higher value itself. So it's challenging to get to a race to the bottom or a commoditization of high-quality data. And that is what we have. And we've actually, you know, we've been getting this question really since ChatGPT first entered the public consciousness in December 22. No, I guess November 22. You know, questions about or concerns about whether people would just go to a sophisticated chatbot and get all the information that they need. That's clearly not the case. Those kinds of... tools and models can be, you know, they can be pretty cool, they can be fun, you can get a lot of information from them, but especially when you don't know exactly where they are sourcing that information and especially when you get into financial analysis and market analysis, you know, it's well documented that they're not even close to capable of providing the kind of certainty and quality and accuracy that our industry demands. So, I think that if anything, that's sort of the fortress of quality, credibility, accuracy that has to exist within our industry while we're going down this path of using more and more AI functionality. And it's something that we take very seriously. We are investing in AI capabilities. We're doing it on our own. We're doing it with Microsoft. We're doing it with other partners. But we're very focused on making sure that we have that kind of, I'll say, quality control.

Thank you. Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Andrew Poon. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I just wanted to come back to the point on revenue growth in the AFC. You talk about data analytics revenue growth accelerating into next year at the same time obviously ASB has gone backwards and you have the CSPBS hit coming Q3 before it might be down to Q4. I get all of your points about not to rely on the ASB metric as a point in time measure can be distorted by one or two cancellations but given that your revenue growth from data analytics, risk intelligence is currently running slightly above the ASB metric year on year. Is there a risk here? Is there a risk to revenue growth going into next year? Or is the case of you are adamant simply into the ASB, more usage-based models, therefore you are confident on revenue still improving next year?

Thanks, Andrew. As Matt said, we're in the process of planning our 2026 budget. So I'd love to give you a rock-solid answer and say this is the answer one way or another. So we do see all the things that Matt was talking about. We see the pipeline growing well. We see the product functionality rolling out well. We see really good receptivity amongst each of those three businesses. So we feel very good about 2026. I don't know, Matt, if there's anything you want to add.

No, I mean, it's basically our – there is always a risk, obviously, but, I mean, our central scenario is an acceleration altogether of our subscription businesses. Now, it's not a step change. It is what we told you. You're not going to see a change of, you know, like 2% from one quarter to another. But it's a progressive acceleration. And the reason why we believe that's our central scenario and we can see them today, right, is because we have in our hands a better product deriving a good pricing. We have a sales pipeline, which is increasing. So we have a deal flow coming in. And as you mentioned, Andrew, we had some one-off, negative one-off during 2025. And again, I don't want to stress too much this, but again, we have a large sales force who have been concentrated on making sure that the largest migration of desktop in history actually went well. And it went well, and it's great, and that's exactly what we were supposed to do. But during the time they were doing this, well, they were not selling something else. So that's basically what I can tell you. I mean, I know it's not a number, and apologies for that, but that's the color I can give you for 26.

No, it's very helpful, Carla. I mean, just one final thing is you mentioned that ASC doesn't capture the usage-based models and that you're rolling out more of those. Can you give us any indication on what portion of the revenue base is usage-based now? I know you said in risk incursions, you have a fair bit, but any guidance you can give around that would be helpful just to understand the disparities.

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, to another question. I think it was Ben's question. We haven't put that specific percentage out there. We're seeing more and more of it in analytics and in risk intelligence, but I would say the interest, the curiosity is noted, but at this point we haven't put that out.

Thank you.

The next question is from the line of Ben Bathurst of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Good morning. My question is on the 53-cap flow. So it's like 17.

I know this method is typically much stronger in the second half than the first. Is it fair to assume that this method of non-cap and working capital will unwind in the second half this year as it has been in previous years? I'm really just hoping to get an idea of the bridge from the 935 and H1 to the 2.4 billion guide for the full year.

and in the same line, are there any one-offs that you'd highlight from the first half that helped really drive that 45% growth, perhaps in the non-fash or non-operating lines?

Thank you.

So, thanks, Ben. Two points. The first one is that the seasonality of our free cash flow H1 to H2 is It's very normal. It's very normal. We always have a much larger cash flow in H2 than in H1. So that is not a problem at all. Then in terms of change in working cap, same thing, and it's one of the reasons for this seasonality, obviously. You've seen the minus 500 in H1, which is equivalent to the one of last year, and this will reverse during H2, which is the major reason for this seasonality. Then after, you see that we managed to materialize the totality of our operating free cash flow into equity free cash flow. And why? Because we have a good control on our net interest on debt and net tax. We are going to pay a bit more cash tax in the second semester because we are running out of non-operating losses, but it's included into the guidance. And you see the reduction of the capital intensity in H1 will carry on in H2. So, no, I feel very confident on delivering the at least 2.4 billion, and actually, well, even more confident than at the beginning of the year.

Sorry, sorry.

Sorry, André, I did not address this. So in this line, we have two things. We have the reversal of the IFRS 16 charge for the shares, you know, the performance shares of the executive. And that's, it's relatively stable from one year to another, but with the increase of the price of the share, it's more in 20 years. And the second thing and the reason why you have such an increase is because last year in H1, 2024, we had a positive impact of embedded derivative so that we reverse in cash flow. So it was a big plus, if you want. And then we have the reverse in H1 2025. That's the reason for it.

Okay, thank you. The next question is from the line of Bruce Hamilton of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and morning, Sam. Most of my questions have been asked. But maybe just on this sort of AI topic, I mean, clearly there's been some worry in the market about that as a sort of disruption risk in work close to the industry as a whole from sort of, you know, new fintech AI platforms. But it sounds like you see more of a sort of revenue opportunity. So just to check I've understood, it's just sort of the underlying data is the key combined with, a very effective desktop. That's what you think is the kind of best offering in the market. And then maybe this is a stretch, but in terms of the scale and timing of potential revenues linked to that sort of AI opportunity, any way to think about that? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Bruce. And let me dig in on that a little bit because we have heard some noise about concern, you know, potential FinTech competitors, et cetera. And let me just touch on that. So I'm going to start where you started, which is with the data. And the data is the key to this topic. You can have a really cool user interface, but the quality of the product depends on the quality of the data. And we have the broadest, the deepest, the highest quality data sets. The second point I would make is that users don't want just a sophisticated, I used this phrase before, sophisticated chatbot. that great AI functionality and they want that AI functionality embedded in all of the other workflows. And that can be news curation, charting, order and execution management, analytics, risk systems. We provide all of that in our user interface, in workspace. And we are building AI into all of that. And so I think that's a really important aspect of this in terms of You know, again, you can have a, as I said, sort of a cool user interface. But that on its own doesn't get you there in terms of what our industry is looking for and what our industry expects. Users also, our users also want that workflow and that AI capability to be interoperable with their enterprise workflow, which is what we are doing in terms of integrating with Excel and Teams and the Microsoft Office 365 tools. And then the last point, I touched on this earlier, but the last point I think you cannot emphasize enough is that users want data that they can trust and they can rely on. And so with respect to some of the new offerings that are out there, and we've seen and we've played with some of the flashy demos and other things, but in one of those in particular that has gotten a lot of attention, if you go into their own press release, there's that press release points to their – there's a link in there that points to what they're relying on, and their accuracy in finance is at 51%. And their accuracy in market analysis – they don't define what market analysis is, but I think we do a lot of market analysis – their accuracy in market analysis is 14%. So – And I think, you know, coming back to your question in terms of some of the fintech offerings, they may be cool and they may be fun to try out, but they cannot meet the demands of this sector, the demands of our customers today. And I think that's really important to keep in mind. And so, yes, we have the high-quality data. We have the right workflow in our desktop. We're making both of those better and better. We are embedding AI functionality in our offerings. And we're certainly not sitting still. So I think there's more to come. So as I said before, I like our positioning. We welcome the tech innovation. We welcome the tech change. And I think we're in a very good position to keep driving the change in this industry and driving the change for our customers.

Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Oliver Carruthers of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi there, morning. Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking my question. It's a two-final one for me. Anyway, I thought your comments around the requirement of absolute certainty on data quality from your customers would be really interesting, particularly given the risk-oriented and regulated nature of financial services at the high level and maybe taking kind of your answer to Bruce's question a step further. You think this means that data procurement and data delivery can't really be decoupled in the value chain here because your customers want to verify and query the data that they're ingesting. So that's the first one. And the second question, in the Q&A, you've made the point several times that the sales force has been distracted through the ICON migration. Interested how short versus long-term this comment is. Do you mean since the last quarter or do you mean since the migration period 2021? And if it's the latter, what are the implications now that your sales pipeline is building and we're not through this migration process?

Thanks, Oliver. I'll take your first question, and Matt can answer the one on the Salesforce focus. So I think there is an element of what you said in terms of data procurement and data delivery having to be coupled. And we see this. We see this already. In other words, you could say that this has been an issue. People can look up a lot of stuff. Long before chat GPT, people could look up a lot of stuff on the Internet. And that doesn't mean that vast amounts of our data business were just intermediated by the Internet. In many ways, large language models that are trained on information off the Internet and can come up with answers to a lot of questions you know, it's a much more souped-up or high-powered version of that, that's not good enough for our industry. So are there products? Is there certain functionality where it is good enough and it's okay and kind of, you know, an individual is looking up something in the same way that they would do a Google search? Sure, that's fine and it's helpful and it actually, you know, can be really useful. But that's not what we're talking about for our industry. So I think the notion of data procurement being really focused on what we refer to as data trust, which is a concept that basically means you can validate the data itself, you can validate where it came from, you have the ability to audit it if you need to. We think that notion of data trust is really critical in our industry today. I think there's a separate question as to whether the regulators require it, which is conceivable down the road, given the importance of this issue in our industry. But at this point, it's just something that our customers expect and require when they're going through this process of data acquisition. Let me turn it over to Matt in terms of the second question.

Yeah, sure. I mean, my comments was really relating to Q2 because it was – the crux of the shift. I mean, we committed ourselves to a sunset at the end of June. So, obviously, we were extremely, extremely focused on this. But, I mean, obviously, we did not, the Salesforce did not begin to work on this on Q2. It was the case in Q1 and Q4 last year. But the real, real big push was the last quarter.

Thank you very much. Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Ian White of Autonomous Research. Your line is open.

Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. The two from my side, please. Firstly, on meeting prep, what progress has been made there, please, over the last few months? Has the development work that you mentioned previously now been complete and that product ready for broader rollout? Or is there still some iteration going on there? That's question one. And to revisit this topic, I know there's going to be a few other questions, but across the three data segments, organic constant currency growth is about 6% in 1.8, and consensus has it going above 7% and then on to 8% in 2027. Are you comfortable with the consensus trajectory there? and what needs to happen for that to be delivered. Is that mostly about pricing, client product usage, growth in clients, new products, specific clouding? What are the main building blocks to get us from six to eight over the next couple of years, please? Thank you.

Thank you, Ian. I'll take your first question on meeting prep, and then Matt can touch on the second one. So meeting prep is going through – an iteration from basically version one, which we released, I believe, at the very end of last year coming into this year. And version two, I would think, should be ready over the next few months. The big change, and I can get into a lot of specifics on what we're changing. The big change is that meeting prep version one is a Microsoft product. And it is the Microsoft product that includes our data. MediaCraft version 2 is an LTEG product, and I wouldn't even call it a distinct product. I would call it a feature that is going to be embedded into Workspace and the Workspace Teams app. And so similar concepts, similar functionality, but we've taken the feedback from the users on version 1, and we're making it more flexible and addressing a lot of the feedback. So, for example... Some of these are going to sound incredibly mundane, but that's what our customers are looking for, and that's what will make it a better product. People want to be able to access it in different areas. They want to be able to access it. I think there was one button in one screen where you could access it before. Now it's going to be embedded and easily accessible. People want to be able to take the document and put it into a PDF and send it out. or share it with their teams that wasn't available before. So as I said, different language capability, being able to adjust the dates that it includes news on a particular company or a particular person, all those kinds of things, which you can see how that would make the product more flexible, easier to use, et cetera. Those kinds of things we are building into that. And as I said, it will be a feature, And I would expect we'll see it over the next few months in the second half.

On 2026, maybe I, you know, I give you maybe a more global answer, if it's okay. Because if you, we committed ourselves medium term. you know, guidance at the Capital Market Day in November 2023 for 24 to 26. We are well on track on all these guidance being the acceleration of revenue or being the posting 250 basis points of improved EBITDA margin on this period of time. And actually on the latter, you see that with the performance we had this year, plus the performance we had last year, we are very well placed to reach these 250 bps. So, all together, I think on a very good path on our trajectory for 2026. And on the top line, I'm not going to comment versus the consensus, but I can reiterate what I told you, which is that We are confident into an acceleration of our subscription business, but a progressive one. No step change, but a progressive acceleration, and we're very confident into our margin progression.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Ian. And there are no further questions on the conference line.

I will now hand the presentation back to David Springer, CEO of LSED, to close the call.

Well, thank you all for your time and attention this morning, and we certainly appreciate it. If you have any further questions, you know where Peregrine and the team are, and I'm sure we will be in touch with you soon. Thanks again. Thank you.