Wolters Kluwer Nv

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wolters Kluwer half year 2026 results webcast and conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that you were in the queue to ask a question. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the call over to your host, Meg Gildens, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our half-year 2026 results presentation. Today's earnings release and the presentation slides are available on the investor section of our website, bolterskluwer.com. On the call today are Stacey Kaywood, our CEO, and Kevin Enterkin, our CFO. Stacey and Kevin will present the highlights of the first half results and provide an update on how we're progressing with our AI strategy. After the presentation, we will take questions. Before we start, I'll remind you that some statements we make today may be forward-looking. We caution that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. Factors that could affect Walters Kluwer's future financial results are disclosed in Note 2 of today's release and in our latest annual report. As usual, we refer to adjusted profits, which exclude non-benchmark items. We also refer to growth in constant currencies, which excludes the effect of exchange rate movements. And we refer to organic growth, which excludes both the effect of currency and the effect of acquisitions and divestments. Reconciliations to IFRS numbers can be found in Note 4 of today's release. At this time, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Stacey Kaywood.

Thank you, Meg. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we've had a good start to the year in line with our expectations. Organic growth was 5%. Excluding print, organic growth was 6% and subscription renewals are going well across the group. The adjusted operating profit margin increased by 100 basis points, putting us in a good position to step up investment in product development in the coming months. And I'm pleased to reiterate our group level guidance, which includes a margin increase for the full year. We are executing on our near-term priority of speeding up the development of advanced AI innovation, which is delivering improved productivity and outcomes for our customers. Our AI features are directly incorporated into our platforms, seamlessly integrated with our trusted proprietary content, and where appropriate, integrated with client data held in our secure systems of record. Our AI solutions leverage our advanced, expert validated AI technology that keeps humans in the loop. These are differentiators which are critical for our customers. I'm pleased to report that our recent acquisitions performed strongly in the first half with revenues ahead of plan. These bolt-on acquisitions are extending our existing positions and offering us new growth opportunities. We also made progress on executing several key partnerships which allow us to play a key role in professionals workflow. Let me take you through the key highlights by division. Health delivered 5% organic growth and improvement on the first half of last year. The adjusted operating profit margin increased by 110 basis points, mainly reflecting the ongoing mix shift as well as operational gearing and efficiencies. Clinical solutions grew 5% organically. The up-to-date suite performed well, with good renewal rates in clinical decision support and drug data among health systems in the U.S. and globally. And I'm very pleased to report today that over 90% of our U.S. Enterprise Edition customers have signed up to adopt up-to-date Enterprise Expert AI. And more on that in a moment. Legal research, learning research and practice grew 4% organically or 8% when excluding print, led by 6% organic growth in medical research, partly reflecting a recently added open access publishing partnership. In learning and practice, organic growth slowed as digital learning solutions for nursing schools faced a tough comparable while print books continued to decline. Turning to tax and accounting on the next slide. Tax and accounting grew 6% organically in line with the first half of last year. The adjusted operating profit margin eased slightly as we increased investments in product development. In North America, revenues grew 5% organically as continued strong organic growth in recurring software revenues was partly offset by a sharp decline in print books and other non-recurring revenues. Growth was led by an 18% increase in cloud software revenues as customers continued to migrate to the CCH Access cloud-native platform and adopt additional workflow modules, including our new agentic AI modules. In Europe, revenues grew 8% organically, driven by 16% growth in cloud software solutions with all regions performing well. Cloud-based automation and data exchange solutions, in particular e-invoicing solutions, saw strong organic growth. Moving to the next slide, financial and corporate compliance delivered 4% organic growth in line with the comparable period a year ago. The adjusted operating profit margin increased primarily due to the divestment of FRR late last year. Legal services delivered 5% organic growth, driven by subscription renewals, upselling of services such as business licenses, and strong growth at RASI in the mid-sized corporate market. Corporate legal services transactional revenues grew 4% as subdued M&A volumes and a ramp down of BOI activity were more than offset by good transactional growth in the mid-size US corporate segment. Financial services grew 3% organically, supported by a 6% increase in recurring revenues, while lending-related transactional revenues remained subdued. In legal and regulatory, we delivered 5% organic growth, or 8% if you exclude print. the adjusted operating profit margin eased very slightly as increased investment in product development and margin dilution from recent acquisitions offset underlying efficiencies. Information solutions grew 5% organically against a challenging comparable created by the German federal elections last year. The integration of Libra technology, the German AI startup we acquired in November last year, is ahead of plan. We have infused the Libra AI Assistant directly with our legal content across 10 European countries and are seeing rapid rates of adoption among law firms. Legal and regulatory software saw 7% organic growth. Enterprise legal management solutions saw mid single digit organic growth supported by 10% growth in legal invoice volumes. Brightflag acquired in June of 2025 and focused on serving mid and large corporations continued to perform strongly. The corporate performance in ESG division delivered 7% organic growth. Revenue growth continued to be driven by strong double-digit organic growth in cloud software revenues. Non-recurring revenues were weak mainly due to a decline in software implementation projects in the first half. The adjusted operating profit margin increased to 9.7%, reflecting operational gearing and careful expense management. In environmental health and safety in ESG, the Enablon suite grew 2% organically. While Enablon's recurring cloud software revenues grew 10%, we saw a decline in implementation services and longer sales cycles amidst the geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East. Within corporate performance, CCH Tagedic delivered 12% organic growth, lifted by strong 19% growth in recurring cloud revenues driven by new customer wins and upgrades. On-premise license fees and services declined as businesses transitioned to the cloud. An audit and assurance teammate delivered high single digit organic growth and the integration of standard fusion risk and control management tools is on track. Our corporate tax unit also reported high single digit growth. We're delighted to announce today that Marosa has joined Walters Kluwer. This bolt-on acquisition will accelerate the development of a global indirect tax product. In February, we announced plans to speed up the pace of advanced AI innovation to capture opportunities ahead to drive growth and support our customers. We announced our intention to increase product development spend to between 12% and 13% of revenues this year and beyond. And we said that we intend to fund this investment while simultaneously increasing our operating profit margins. We are executing on this plan and, as noted, pursuing a rapid rollout of advanced AI capabilities across several platforms. While I will highlight three important rollouts today, I also want to note that we are adding AI-powered features across the entire portfolio, and there is more to come as we greenlight new investments. In February, we also noted two other areas of near-term focus, fostering partnerships and intensifying our go-to-market. Partnerships allow us to embed our solutions more deeply into customer workflows and ecosystems. Our initiatives and go-to-market will create more data-driven and scalable sales and revenue processes, leveraging AI-powered capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, as of July, over 90% of our US Enterprise Edition customers have signed up to adopt up-to-date Expert AI. This means that our Expert AI solution is now available in around 2,500 US hospitals, highlighting the trust our customers place in us to deliver enterprise-grade AI for their high-stakes decisions. Up-to-date expert AI is also starting to be adopted by international health systems. Today, we have over 230 sites activated across 36 countries. In every international market, we comply with the evolving local regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act and medical devices regulation. We are now focused on activation, support, and integrations. and we continue to add new AI capabilities and additional content to the up-to-date enterprise platform. In the last few weeks, we went live with AI drug dosing, a valuable new feature which has passed rigorous validation by our experts, clinicians and pharmacists, as well as structured testing against real-world medication questions. We are currently rolling out local guidelines in close collaboration with a number of hospital customers with a view to launch more broadly later this year. And as noted, we are continuing to develop integrated offerings with EMRs such as Epic and ambient players such as a Bridge. These integrations are very important for our future platforms to support our healthcare customers to manage chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. We are also making good progress with CCH access expert AI. As we enter the key selling season, we already have around 250 accounting firms who are subscribing to one or more of our new agentic AI modules. While adoption will build gradually, I'm very encouraged by the sales pickup we saw starting in June. and the enthusiastic reaction we are getting from early adopters. This graphic illustrates where the agentic AI modules operate in the tax workflow. CCH Access Intelligence is the top-selling module. This tool acts as an overarching assistant, orchestrating agents to perform a wide range of tasks from collaborating with clients to planning and scheduling resources to ingesting and analyzing documents and generating insights. It leverages firm and client data from across the platform, along with our deep domain expertise and proprietary content. Customers value the seamless and secure integration with firm and client data and the overall quality and trustworthiness of our content and platform. We continue to make improvements and add new functionality. In May, we launched CCH Access Advisor, which uses AI to identify and prioritize new opportunities for CPAs to advise their clients. We also enhanced CCH Access Workflow with AI-powered scheduling intelligence. And in June, we launched and enhanced CCH Access Scan, with AI powered ingestion of complex unstructured data from US K1 partnerships forms. Users are reporting up to 70% efficiencies when they use the new K1 scan tool. In legal and regulatory, we acquired a German legal AI startup, Libra Technology in November last year. Within three months of completing this acquisition, we had integrated the Libra AI technology with our Belgian, Dutch, Polish, and Italian content and launched the solution in market. In March, we added our four Eastern European countries. The Libra solution provides lawyers with an integrated AI-enabled working environment that is directly embedded into their workflows, combining Gen-AI powered search across trusted legal content with tools that support the drafting of briefs memos and other legal documents. We continue to enhance capabilities. In May, we enhanced contract review and workflow integration and embedded Libra into Cleos, our practice management suite for law firms. And we have further innovations in the pipeline. Feedback from law firms has been very positive, and we're finding that in addition to monetizing the AI workspace, we are able to upsell content to Libra subscribers. The Libra acquisition will be included in organic growth next year. Let me finish with a few words on partnerships. Workflow and ecosystem partnerships allow us to embed our solutions more deeply into customer workflows and systems, allowing us to expand our role and extend our market reach. A bridge is a great example. In March, we went live with up-to-date Inside a Bridge, allowing doctors to pull in context-aware content from up-to-date when creating a clinical note. The integration with Dragon Copilot is also on track to launch later this year. You may have also seen our expanded technology partnership with OpenAI, which we announced in early June, allowing us to leverage OpenAI's latest APIs and enterprise grade platform capabilities. We've made good progress in the partnership front in the first half, and there's more to come. Now I'll hand over to Kevin, who will take you through the financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Stacey. Let's start with the headline numbers. First half 2026 revenues were 3 billion and 33 million euros. The absolute decline of 1% was due to currency translation. On a constant currency basis, revenues increased 4%. This includes the effect of last year's disposal of FRR. Organic growth was 5%, in line with the first half of last year, as expected. First half adjusted operating profit was €893 million, up 10% in constant currencies, and up 9% on an organic basis. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 100 basis points to 29.4%. This was achieved through operational gearing, operating efficiency programs, and the prior year divestiture of FRR. Our guidance for the full year margin remains around 28%. We expect the previously announced increase in product development spending to be second half weighted. First half diluted adjusted earnings per share increased 14% in constant currencies. First half adjusted free cash flow was 533 million euros, an increase of 14% in constant currencies. This reflects the favorable movements in Morgan Capital, which are expected to reverse in the coming quarters. The balance sheet remains strong with a rolling 12 month net debt to EBITDA ratio of 2.0 times. Return on invested capital also based on 12 months rolling figures was 18.2%. Let's look at revenues by division on the next slide. All five divisions contributed to the positive organic growth. Health grew 5% organically, which was an improvement from a year ago. Clinical Solutions posted 5% organic growth driven by good renewals and upgrades among health systems in the U.S. and internationally. Tax and accounting revenues grew 6% organically in line with the comparable period and supported by a strong second quarter. Growth was driven by strong double-digit organic growth in our cloud software solutions in North America and Europe. Financial and corporate compliance grew 4% organically in line with the comparable period, with recurring subscription revenues up 6%. Legal and regulatory grew 5% organically against a tough comparable related to the German elections last year. And finally, corporate performance in ESG grew 7% organically in line with the comparable period. double digit growth in recurring cloud software revenues was partially offset by a decline in non-recurring implementation services. On the next slide, you can see the trends in recurring and non-recurring revenues. Recurring revenue streams, shown on the left, accounted for 85% of total revenue. The most important component, digital and services subscriptions, sustained 7% organic growth. This reflects continued good customer contract renewals. Other recurring revenues, which include a range of repeating revenue streams such as content license and usage fees, also maintain 7% organic growth. Print subscriptions declined. The chart shows the temporary boost we experienced a year ago from the German elections for various legal publications. Non-recurring revenues, shown on the right, represents 15% of group revenues. Here we continue to see mixed trends. FCC transactional revenues, shown in red, were up 2% in the first six months. The absence of an interest rate cut has kept US M&A volumes and lending activity at subdued levels. Legal and regulatory transactional revenues, which are fees linked to legal spend volumes in our enterprise legal management unit, grew 10% organically. Other non-recurring revenues such as on-premise software licenses and implementation services declined 6% organically. Print books, which are only 1% of revenue, saw a sharp fall in the first half, largely due to the changes in the publication schedule. Turning to margins on the next slide. As mentioned, first half adjusted operating profit increased 10% in constant currencies and 9% on an organic basis. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 100 basis points to 29.4%. The margin improvement in the first half was supported by the divestiture of FRR at the end of last year. This resulted in a notable margin increase in the financial and corporate compliance margin. Health and corporate performance in ESG also saw a margin improve. This mainly reflects operational gearing, mixed shift of revenues, scaling of expert solutions and expense management. Tax and accounting and legal and regulatory margins eased slightly, reflecting increased investments in product development, the impact of recent acquisitions and currency. Investment in product development, including capitalized spend, was 11% of revenues. We expect this will wrap up in the second half as we approve and kick off AI development projects. Restructuring expenses, which we included in adjusted operating profit, amounted to 9 million euros, compared to 5 million in the comparable period. Now, moving to the rest of the income statement on the next slide. First half, net financing costs increased to 56 million euros. This reflects higher coupon rates on euro bonds issued in 2025. Adjusted financing costs also included an 8 million euro net foreign exchange loss, mainly related to the currency translation of intercompany balances. The prior year included a 2 million euro net foreign exchange gain. As a result, adjusted profit before tax increased 9% in constant currencies. The benchmark effective tax rate was stable at 23.8%. We continue to guide to an effective benchmark tax rate for the full year in the range of 23.5% to 24.5%. Adjusted net profit was 637 million euros, up 10% in constant currencies. First half diluted adjusted EPS was 2 euros and 83 euro cents, up 14% in constant currencies. This reflects the increase in adjusted net profit and a 4% reduction in the weighted average number of shares outstanding as a result of our ongoing share buyback program. Turning to cash flow on the next slide. First half adjusted operating cash flow increased 17% in constant currencies. The cash conversion ratio was 91%, reflecting favorable timing of working capital, which we expect will reverse in coming quarters. Capital expenditures were 143 million euros, a slight decrease compared to the prior year, mostly due to the divestment of FRR and timing of projects. Net interest paid, excluding lease interest, increased to 66 million euros. This reflects the higher coupon interest paid and lower interest income on cash balances. Cash taxes increased to €220 million, reflecting higher pre-tax income in the United States and tax assessments and payments related to prior years. As a result, adjusted free cash flow increased 14% to constant currencies to reach €533 million. Now let's turn to the uses of cash on the next slide. The main uses of fee cash flow in the first half were dividends and share buybacks. Dividends paid reflect the final dividend payment for 2025 fiscal year of €303 million. This excludes withholding taxes, which were paid in July. Cash deployed towards share buyback repurchases amounted to €215 million in the first half. Net debt was approximately €4 billion, unchanged from our position at the end of 2025. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio remains at 2.0 times within our target range for leverage. We remain in solid financial position with sufficient room to support organic investments in the business and make select acquisitions. At this time, we're committed to our progressive dividend while continuing to execute on our share repurchases. Now let me turn to the outlook for the remainder of the year. Our divisional outlook is largely the same. However, we now expect CP and ESG organic growth to be in line with the prior year, given the geopolitical circumstances have not yet improved. This change in divisional outlook is small enough that it does not alter our overall outlook for the group. For the group as a whole, we continue to expect another year of good organic growth, further margin increase, high single digit growth and diluted adjusted EPS and constant currencies. As mentioned in today's release, product development spending is expected to be second half weighted. We're happy to reiterate our margin guidance for approximately 28%. In summary, we're pleased with the good first half results. Organic growth was 5% or 6% if you exclude print. We delivered strong improvements in margin, diluted adjusted EPS and free cash flow. We remain in a solid financial position with net debt to EBITDA ratio of two times. These strong results have allowed us to reiterate our full year guidance for the group with confidence. We are excited about the opportunities ahead of us and we look forward to executing on our priorities. With that, Stacey and I are now happy to take your questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question on today's call, please press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please stand by while I retrieve the first caller's details. Your first question today is from the line of Kieran Donnelly from City. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks a million. Three questions for myself. Firstly, just on the FY26 margin guide, it implies quite a step up in costs in H2. So could you just help us understand where specifically the incremental product development spend will be focused? And then just separately, could you comment on whether any of the increased costs in H2 is reflective of AI cost inflation more generally? Secondly, Again, just on margin, 2026 is quite a lot of moving parts. Just in terms of the guide again, could you help us understand within that the net effect of operating leverage and the reinvestment rate? And just is that reflective of how we should think 2027 is going to play out? I think consensus has broadly 30 basis points of margin improvement in 2027. And then just finally on clinical solutions, implied slowdown in Q2 given the H1 results. I know these quarterly growth rates, they can sometimes be a function of small changes in absolute numbers and the rounding of the growth rates to one significant figure. So can you just provide a bit more color on the Q2 performance and if it was materially different from Q1? Thanks.

Yeah, no, thanks very much, Karen. Yeah, so I'll start with the product development and the investments that we'll be making in the second half. And also the CS question, Kevin, maybe you can give a little bit more detail on the margin expectations. But just to sort of set the stage on what we're doing with regard to product investments, as I shared earlier and you saw in the roadmaps, we have significant investments in the CCH tax. in our legal and regulatory business and in health. Those will continue to drive the roadmap. And very importantly, as we're working with customers and getting their input on which of our AI capabilities are gonna drive the most impact for them, we're bringing those forward into the roadmap in the second half of the year. So we're excited to be able to further those investments. And then we're also, as I mentioned briefly, we have AI opportunities across the portfolio, and we are going to be increasing investment in particular use cases within each of those divisions. So that will start rolling in in the second half of the year. With regard to CS, we had a good first half in health overall, strong renewals. You mentioned some of the nuances and slight changes compared to the first half last year and this year. For us, that was in the MediSpan drug solution business that is within the clinical solutions portfolio, where in the first quarter of 25, we had a slight pickup of non-recurring revenue, which did cause a small grow over this year in the CS portfolio. And then Kevin, do you want to give a bit more insight into the margin this year?

Yeah, absolutely. Karen, I want to make sure I got your question. The margin of performance in the second half will definitely be impacted by the product development, the innovation spend, which we do expect to ramp up, as Stacey said. In the first half, it was about 11% of revenues. By the full year, I expect it to get to 12% to 13%. So a lot of the margin progression in the second half has to do with that. With regard to AI costs, token costs in particular, we do see that as a part of our cost base and we do see that increasing. However, it's a very small part of our cost base and it's something that we are managing very carefully. As you probably know, we use a variety of different AI models and particularly for development, we can apply the most economic model to the particular use case. So I hope that gives you an insight into what we're expecting.

And then just on the net effect of operating leverage and reinvestment rate in 26 and how we should think about that for 27.

Well, we're not giving guidance today for 27. But as you know, our history over the last several years is to continue to deliver good organic growth and to continue to deliver some margin improvement. We'll have more to say about that in February when we give you 2027 guidance. All right. Thanks, Monique. Thanks.

Thank you. We will now take our next question. This is from the line of Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good afternoon, guys. So first question, I've got three. First question, you flagged that over 90% of enterprise customers have signed up for expert AI. Can you first of all give us a sense of what the take-up is among users inside those hospitals rather than just who's signed up overall? And then, am I right in thinking that you're mostly not charging anything extra for up-to-date expert AI? And therefore, when might you start to see some benefit from the value you're creating there? Second question, can you talk about the visibility that you have in the second half in tax and legal at this point, given that your guidance calls for an acceleration in both of those? Given the waiting subscriptions, Can we think that that's mostly kind of signed and sealed by now? And then third question is on the buyback. You mentioned at the full year results that your book equity was one factor in your decision on the scale of this year's buyback. Looks like that equity level has ticked up a bit in the first half stage. Does that give you a bit more freedom when you're thinking about next year's buyback?

OK, thanks, Nick. In health, and particularly with our Enterprise Edition customers, we're very pleased with the adoption of our Expert AI solution, as I mentioned earlier. And what we've done is that Expert AI has been rolled out as a part of our Enterprise Edition subscriptions. So monetization is effectively through supporting renewals and price increases. And then, as you also noticed on our rollout and what we're doing in terms of not just our expert AI solution, but other solutions that we deliver to our enterprises, fully embedded into their clinician workflows, those are additional capabilities that would be add-ons that deliver value and get priced accordingly upon renewal of our customers. So that's how The rollout is expected. As you know, these are subscriptions, so that has a gradual impact as customers take in those additional capabilities. Within tax and legal, we had good organic growth in the first half at 6%, so very much in line with the first half last year. The first quarter, We were impacted by a change in publication dates for U.S. books, so that caused a decline in our print book revenue in Q1. This, as you can see in Q2, is lessening as we progress throughout the year. So we expect to see sort of catch up by the end of the year. And then, you know, just in terms of the drivers of growth in tax, certainly migration, of the CCH Access Cloud Platform, the upselling of our more classic modules, and the adoption of our new agentic models, certainly that I shared earlier. So that is definitely helping us to drive growth and to achieve the full year guidance for tax. In the legal and regulatory, the major drivers there in terms of what's going to cause the second half pickup. The acquisition of Bright Flag became organic at the end of June, so that will begin rolling in in the second half. And then we'll have a slight benefit from Libra, which becomes organic towards the end of the year, November. And then the other big piece that impacted the first half of legal and regulatory was the effect that Kevin and I mentioned earlier around the German elections that were strong in the first half of last year, but did not repeat this year. And then maybe Kevin, you could talk about the share buyback.

Certainly, Stacey, on the share buyback, indeed, in thinking about the share buyback, in addition to, you know, our cash position and our leverage position, we also do have to be mindful of retained earnings and our distributable reserves in retained earnings. And I've actually reached out to a number of experts in this field, and we do have to stay within those distributable reserve boundaries. So we have taken that seriously. and looked at that very seriously. I will say that as profits do improve and as profits do increase, it does indeed expand our distributable reserves. So that will give us more opportunity as profits increase. It is worth mentioning, though, this year, we will be returning nearly 100% of our free cash flow and our our profit in the form of dividends and share buybacks. So far, we're about halfway through our share buyback program. As of today, we have bought back 244 million euros and we are on target to complete the 500 million dollar program by the end of this year.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you. We'll now take our next question. and this is from Joe Barnett-Lam from UBS. Please go ahead.

Excellent. Thank you for taking my questions. Three from me. The first two are both building off Nick's. So Nick's question on the path to expert AI monetization. You spoke about effectively bundling and that supporting renewals, underlying pricing, and the ability to sell add-ons. Should we assume the underlying price rises on a look-forward basis though will now be higher as a result of that than previously? And secondly, on the bolt-ons, is that something that comes in FY27 or it's progressive on a multi-year basis? Secondly, again, building on Nick, I don't think you answered the proportion of users in those hospitals that are using expert AI rather than just the number of hospitals. And then finally, within the tweak to CP and ESG guidance, you referenced geopolitics, you referenced macro, and in your divisional write-up, you talk about enable-on. I think, Stacey, you specifically mentioned that in your spiel as well. Can you give more colour within CP and ESG and specifically within ESG and Enablon what the issue is? You mentioned it's Middle East related, but some more colour would be great. Thank you.

Sure. Yes, in terms of CES, so clinical solutions, this is very much a gradual rollout of our additional solutions, our capabilities. And we do expect that to build over time. So at this point, again, we'll affirm our 2026 guidance for health. In terms of the users, thanks for reminding me of that. We are very pleased with the activation of users of our expert AI solution within our enterprise customers. You know, we do see a nice growth as we continue to add on additional capabilities. I've mentioned, for example, drug dosing recently added. So we expect the activation to continue to grow. We're also seeing a nice growth where customers have deployed ambient solutions, such as a bridge and up to date, content being flowing through the ambient solutions to be able to provide additional insights and actions as a result of being included in clinical notes. So we're seeing good user activation of our AI solutions through the enterprise. And then in CPE and ESG, Our Enablon platform is really around safety, around ensuring that our customers' employees remain safe in high-risk industries. And one of those is oil and gas. So oil and gas companies, which you might imagine, heavy concentration in the Middle East, We did have some implementations that were paused because of the current situation in that region. And so that's the major reason why we have adjusted slightly the CP and ESG forecast.

Very helpful. Thank you, Stacey.

Thank you. We will now take the next question. This is from George Webb. Morgan Stanley, please go ahead.

Hi, Stacey and Kevin. Hope you're having a good summer so far. A couple of questions that come back on a couple of the pieces we've talked about already. Maybe just starting with EnableOn. If I look in the mix of the EnableOn performance, and looking particularly at the cloud software piece, which I imagine should be pretty recurring, that also decelerated quite sharply in the half. And I appreciate you called out those factors on implementations, but I guess the recurring piece I feel should move less sharply. Is there anything you're seeing there on the competitive environment aside from the factors you've seen, or does that all feel quite stable to you? And especially just on clinical studies.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. On clinical solutions, good renewal rates, high uptake of expert AI on the enterprise customer base. On that smaller non-enterprise customer base, I guess what have you been seeing there with regards to retention and then upsell to the paid offering?

Thank you. With CP and ESG, yes, as we noted in our first quarter, press release, the sales cycles are also slower in the Middle East. You know, the impact we've had in the first half has been more on those services or implementation, but we are seeing slightly slower sales cycles in that region. And then, Kevin, I don't know if you want to add anything more to that.

No, I definitely think it is a bit of a slowdown in just all activity, particularly in oil and gas, as Stacey mentioned, and that is a big part of our customer base there. But we do expect that as we get through and navigate through this, we will see those not only software sales, but service contracts pick up.

Yeah. And then, George, on UpToDate Pro, which is what we call our individual segment, Just to put things into context, Pro does represent less than 20% of the core up-to-date solutions, so less than 2% for Walters Kluwer. The individual segment of the market has always been more competitive and that does remain the case as we now have many general LLMs offering free medical chat box, But even in this segment, we remain differentiated because of our proprietary content, the overall trust in the solution, and the way that we deliver the solution. We do continue to enhance up-to-date pro. Expert AI has now been made part of the basic package. We've revamped the mobile app. expert AI dosing is also now available as of the last month or so. So good progress in rolling out the expert AI solution.

That's great, thank you.

Thank you. We will now take the next question. This is from Adam Berlin from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Three questions from me as well, please. First one is, can you give us an update on where you are in the migration from pro system to access in the US tax business? I think Lars told us you were just over halfway. Where do you think you are now? Second question is, can you give us any color on FNCC transaction trends as we are going through Q3? And third, I'm going to have another go at the 2027 margin question, just to I'm just trying to work out if we're going from 11% R&D to 12% to 13% by the end of the year and then in H1 next year we're not going to have the benefit of the disposal of FRR, should we be modelling, I know you're not going to give guidance, but should we be modelling some kind of big step down in margins in H1-27 as those extra costs are carried forward into next year?

Okay, I will... Take the first the first one. So in a pro system FX, as you noted, we have, you know, made it to the halfway mark in terms of migrating from pro system to our cloud solution that continues to be a big focus for us migrating. It is a gradual process. what we're seeing is that with all the AI solutions embedded in the CCH access platform, that there is a pickup in interest and demand to move to our cloud solution. So we continue to push that hard and are now over the 50% mark. I'll just do a quick confirmation of what Kevin mentioned earlier in terms of sort of directionally, you know, we certainly, you know, on the margin, we certainly are not ready to share guidance for next year. But I will say is that, you know, Kevin and I are very committed to continuing to deliver, you know, strong margins and in line with our past, continue to do, you know, slight, you know, increases an irregular annual basis. So that's still the intent. But with that, Kevin, maybe you could give a little bit more context for the margin question and then also on the FCC transactions.

Sure. I think on the margin question, you know, obviously we have green lighted a number of investment programs. Some of these programs will go on beyond 2026 and into the future. But again, it's a little bit early for us to be talking about, you know, guidance for 2027. But we will have more to say on that when we get together with you again in February. With regard to FCC transactions, as you probably know, we've got good insight into a lot of things in our portfolio, but this is the hardest one, the transaction revenue. We did not see an interest rate cut that we expected at the beginning of the year. Because of that, you do see more subdued transactional revenue, particularly in the financial service side of that business. It's difficult to predict, but if you take a look at what some projections are, for the mortgage market in the second half of the year, we do still expect that the mortgage market, mortgage origination and refinances will still be under some pressure. So that is baked into our thinking and baked into our guidance. If I could mention a positive on transactions, BOI revenue, business ownership, the Corporate Transparency Act, as you know, that's not being enforced anymore. So we do have a grow over. in that from last year, that becomes less and less of a drag as we move forward. But, you know, this is one area where we are laser focused, but our guidance does incorporate this caution.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. We will now take our next question. This is from Steve Lichty from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi, thanks for taking the questions. I've got two left. Just going back to health and clinical solutions and kind of embedding expert AI. Just can you give me some help here in terms of if I was a subscriber, maybe in the last few years, well, your average increase, I guess price or yield would be per subscriber. And then really try and link that to putting in expert AI. Would there be an acceleration in that? I know some of your peers have given examples of double digit increases when they put in an AI layer. So anything that you can give us there would be useful. And then secondly, on legal specifically, if you included Libra and Bright Flag on a kind of pro forma basis, what should the likelihood What would the life-for-life revenue be if we did the first half was 5%? What would that be if we included on a pro forma basis those acquisitions? Thanks.

Yes, I'll take the first one on the clinical solutions and our enterprise edition and the rollout of our AI solutions. Again, we're very pleased with the rollout we are including. the expert AI solution as part of our enterprise subscription. And over time, as we see that value reflected with our customers and very importantly with other components of our enterprise platform, including the add-on modules that we have with our patient engagement data, local guidelines, our APIs, and so on, those will be reflected in our renewals, and that happens gradually. So no more details at this point in terms of how that flows into the actual prices. And then with legal and the addition and inclusion of Bright Flag into organic growth and Libra, Kevin, why don't you take that one?

Sure. I would say I don't have pro forma numbers off the top of my head, but I can tell you that, you know, Bright Flag in particular is growing quite well. In fact, you know, slightly ahead of our expectations. So we're very pleased to see that. Lieber as well, I think, is certainly meeting, if not exceeding our expectations. We have taken that business and rolled it out to 10 different geographies. since acquisition. So in the last six, seven months or so. So again, very happy with the way that is performing. I will tell you that Bright Flag in particular is going to be included in organic growth for the full second half of the year. and Libra, probably not maybe December, but the effect of Libra will be much less. Bright Flag will certainly contribute. And that does, in fact, inform us with our guidance that we're giving you that we expect improved organic growth for the full year.

Great, thank you.

Thank you. We will now take the next question. This is from Timon Rundberg from ING. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks for taking some of my questions. First one on AI, adoption metrics are clearly improving. So what I'm trying to understand is the depth of engagement behind that adoption. And so are you seeing usage intensity per new customer or user build faster than adoption base itself? So for example, in terms of frequency of use, number of workflows that are touched or modules used, and then what gives you the confidence that this is moving from initial adoption to becoming really embedded in the day-to-day workflow usage. And then on the capital allocation, so you're clearly using all three routes, organic investments, partnerships, M&A. So we've seen these deals like Sterinfusion and now also Marosa. I just wanted to ask if you can discuss how do you decide whether an opportunity is best addressed through either build, buy or partner? and for example, Morosa that you just announced as well, what gives you the confidence that they can become a strong platform extension? Thanks.

Yeah, so certainly in terms of the AI usage, yes, we are seeing a nice adoption. So for example, in the intelligence layer within our CCH access platform, if you recall the rollout slide that I shared with you earlier, We are seeing nice adoption and increase in usage as those customers were rolling out those solutions to those customers. Still very early days, but we're very encouraged by the adoption, the feedback we're getting. We are seeing very nice improvements in efficiency when customers are using our solutions. For example, in scan, One of the solutions that we've launched, there is a pretty significant increase in efficiency for our customers and automating processes that they had to do in the past manually. So we're seeing good adoption there. Also, as I mentioned in the Libra rollout, we are seeing very good adoption, usage, engagement, which is fueling the continued rollout. of that solution. So very encouraged by what we're seeing so far in our AI rollouts and launches. In terms of how we think about our M&A activities, we've really been very successful in two areas where we, for example, are deeply embedded in one part of a workflow and extend to another. This has been the case with our Finca Isabel Group product acquisition several years ago. Certainly the case with Libra, where it's a natural extension of our content integrated into the AI workspace. That's, as I mentioned, very successful for us. This latest acquisition that we announced this morning which is Marosa, is a very good example of that. So what Marosa does is that it's a VAT compliance, real-time reporting and e-invoicing solution that complements our existing US corporate tax business to accelerate the development of a broader global indirect tax platform. So we're able to offer our multinational and global customers that have used our US corporate tax solution to extend there and be able to fulfill their need to have a more broad platform, including the real-time reporting, VAT compliance, and e-invoicing. So very natural extension and, you know, serves our current customers well and brings in a customer base that is very, you know, blue chip companies 30% headquartered in the US that need the combined solution. So another very good example of how we're extending our platforms to be able to deliver more value for customers.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And we have time for one more question today. There are further questions in the queue. Please note the investor relations team will reach out to those still in the queue. Let's take our last question now. And this is from Will Packer from BNP. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Many thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, as you mentioned, the competitive intensity in US clinical diagnostics have increased materially. Using third party web traffic sources, we can observe that open evidence web and app traffic has grown very strongly and is now the most used clinical diagnostic tool. our tracking suggests that after a period of stability up-to-date weekly active users has fallen a fair bit since May is there anything specific behind this fall or is this more of a management issue it's always potentially dangerous using these third-party sources and could you comment more widely is the extent to which you see open evidence as a complementary or substitutable product for up-to-date and then secondly within the legal segment we've had a whole flurry of announcements from new AI native players, the likes of Harvey and Ligura, rapidly scaling in the new workflow layer with combined ARRs in excess of 400 million in Q2 with strong growth. Could you talk to the extent to which you see that fast-growing workflow opportunity as core for your Waterskiller legal business or the extent to which you're going to be more focused on the research side, for example? Any color there would be useful. Thank you.

Yep. So in terms of the up-to-date usage stats, as I mentioned before, public usage stats are not a reliable proxy for up-to-date usage. Significant portion of up-to-date usage is not via the web, but via EHRs or integrated into the health systems, electronic medical records, and also through now through ambient scribes and so on. So This usage is not captured on the web stats. But that said, clinicians today do have a growing number of AI-native solutions available for quick questions. And naturally, those interactions do capture a portion of their clinical decision support needs, especially simpler queries. So those would be the types of queries that you'd see from open evidence or other LLM players. And we've always had through Google prior to LLMs. We have a differentiated AI solution based on the most trusted and proprietary up-to-date content. And that's why hospitals have adopted expert AI in such a increasing way to be able to achieve that 90% adoption rate that we shared earlier. So if I talk about the question on legal, our Libra acquisition is in fact just what you talked about, the AI workspace that is deeply integrated with our proprietary legal content. And that's a real differentiator for us. as we are launching our integrated solution into the countries where we operate. I talked about the fact that we have now launched this integrated research and AI workspace product line into our 10 countries where we have our proprietary content sold today.

Okay.

All right. Well, I'll just close up with just thank you for joining the call today. We're very pleased to share the good first half results to reaffirm our guidance. And we're very pleased with the acceleration and delivery on our strategic priorities, including our AI and agentic AI rollout. So thanks very much and look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect.