Wolters Kluwer S/Adr

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.