Welcome, everyone, as we continue our journey to transform the business of healthcare. We do this through a number of different software solutions, as many of you will know. We've had a very good period, which has really been part in the culmination of efforts that have been put in over the last few years, coming to fruition, and have resulted in a very strong both financial performance, but also, we believe, in a strategic performance. I'm fortunate that I've also got Craig Preston with me today, and he will cover more in detail on the numbers. However, I think one of the very pleasing things for me is seeing the culmination of many years' worth of effort on what we would call our Delight and Grow project, which is where we make customers as happy as we can, and therefore we benefit from that.
And we're really seeing that in the average length of customer tenure. Not only is in our top customer base got an average tenure of greater than 20 years, which I think the least of them is about 14 and a half years with us, but right across our customer base, if we're not already into double digits with that tenure, we're certainly rapidly approaching that as well. Why I mentioned that is obviously, I think one of the things we hope that you will appreciate by the end of this presentation is the strength of the Annuity SaaS model and the slightly uniqueness of that model, but also the benefits that can be derived from that model as we go forward. As I mentioned, strong performance across the group. Craig will cover the financial performance as we see across the various different metrics.
I think strategically we've had ongoing strength in sales, and I think this is, as I say, a culmination of a number of years of our Trisus platform play coming together. And then that's resulted in, then through the course of the year, in the first of July last year, us signing our Microsoft partnership, and then that really creates an ongoing opportunity for us not only to deepen our relationships with our customers across the board, our existing customer set, but also to penetrate into a new customer base as well as we continue to show the benefits that we can derive to hospitals. We're often asked about the political landscape across the U.S., and I think it is very valid to be keeping an eye on the political situation, the macro picture with healthcare is obviously worth keeping an eye on.
But within healthcare, I think there's a couple of sort of underlying things that are worth tempering down some of the high emotion and some of the headlines that come out. The first is that there really is bipartisan support to try and drive better value through healthcare. Healthcare in the U.S. has changed over even in time, the 26 years that we've been working in the field, in that the operational and administrative part and component of the cost base has continued to grow. That's sitting at somewhere around about 40% of the operating expense of a hospital just now will be on that operational administrative stage. In days gone by, the hospital was probably less worried about driving efficiency through there and more worried about driving efficiency through on the clinical side.
But actually, with things like the pandemic and with just structural changes in hospitals, they now really need to address that operational administrative side, and that's where we come in. We've seen a number of executive orders come out through the course of the year, but there have been none that have really tackled that driving value through in healthcare. And so we have seen the political landscape we believe is being very positive towards healthcare. That's resulted as well in actually an improvement in not-for-profit hospital margins, almost trebling over the period with an increase from a 0.4% margin, so relatively thin margins to a comparatively healthy 1.1% margin within not-for-profit hospital systems. This means that hospitals have to concentrate on return on investment.
I'm very pleased to say we've returned something like $1.5 billion back to our hospitals over the course of the last 12 months, which is a clear six to one return on investment, so very, very pleased with that. We continue to provide new and innovative insights for our hospitals, and that's really powered, and at the heart of that is our data sets that we have and we've been gathering for the last 26 years, so we're sitting with about 200 million plus patient lives coming through that data, and that allows us to both pair our current solutions to provide new feature functionality onto our current solutions, but also develop the solutions for the future as hospitals continue to drive that efficiency through there. The way that we do that is by gathering data from a number of different sources across the hospital system.
We bring that up into the cloud. That allows us to bring that data together, to normalize that data, and then to be able to analyze that data on behalf of that hospital, but also contextualizing that data for them. We can then sit a layer of optimization suites on top of that that solve real-world problems for the hospitals and then provide those results that we've talked about for them. In the period, we've seen a really positive sales performance. Again, a mix of customer wins. The orange is net new wins, and I will come back to that in a second, but net new wins where we didn't have a contractual relationship with those hospitals previously.
The first one that we've highlighted here on the right-hand side was our competitive takeout, whereby the strength and breadth of our platform, particularly on the 340B side and our independence on the 340B side, allowed us to displace a major competitor within there for quite a significant contract win in there. Second one was a brand new hospital system on our revenue integrity side of things, multi-year commitment in there. Actually came about again from our thesis of if you make our customer happy, then they will remember that, and then we will become a strategic partner for them. In this case, this was where someone from another hospital group that was very familiar with us, and we'd gone through that journey with them, had moved to this hospital group and then have purchased our solutions in there and have expanded our solutions within there.
The light blue one was a significant hospital group that's been with us for more than 23 years that was moving electronic health record system to Epic. We work very well with Epic, but we can also monitor that transition from, in this case, with this hospital system, they had multiple different EHRs before they're consolidating on the Epic platform. So we're able to work with them on that and provide additional services on top of the solutions we're already providing for them.
And then lastly is a very significant expansion all the way out to 2033, both a renewal of the contract and also adding additional hospitals into here through the financial success of this hospital group, then acquiring other hospitals and expanding out our offerings right across all of their parent hospitals and all the children's hospitals and clinics throughout there, providing a very good expansion through to 2033 as well. So a real mix of different examples there all coming in in the second half, adding on to our wins in the first half. And with that, I'll hand over to Craig to allow him to highlight some of those financial wins, financial successes.
Thank you, Keith, and good morning to everyone. Keith has outlined how we're seeing continued momentum and improvement in our core marketplace. Hospital margins, operating margins are indeed starting to normalize post-COVID, but that doesn't mean they're not still facing financial pressures. There's definitely increasing cost pressures out there on them. They're still facing labor constraints. Hospitals know they need to be financially sound if they're to deliver on their mission to provide care to their communities. It's for that reason we're still hearing from our hospital CFOs that they are still very focused on the fundamentals, and that really is where we come in. So let's jump straight into some of our key performance indicators for fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2025 has been another strong year for us, underscoring the effectiveness of our ongoing platform strategy and the continued operational focus.
Our balance sheet strength, combined with our underlying business model, continues to be the foundation, and that's allowing us to drive acceleration of our growth rates, delivering double-digit growth in profitability, and indeed at our ultimate earnings level, we have far exceeded expectations. We continue to benefit from our capital allocation strategy in the prior years. We're seeing our net interest charge in the current year drop nearly $3 million compared to the prior year, and that has again contributed to our EPS growth. And then as we start our new fiscal year, we've entered into a new unsecured revolving credit facility with our banking partners on improved terms, only further strengthening the foundations that underlie our future growth. So here goes. Revenue is up 9% to $205.7 million, meeting market expectations. I'll run through a breakdown of our revenue in a later slide.
Within this, we are seeing continued success of our platform revenues. This is both with more customers signing up to these platform opportunities, these platform solutions we provide. They generate the initial non-recurring opportunity, but we're also starting to see our other longer-term customers who have been on the platform revenue model for some time starting to transition to annual recurring revenue model. We still deliver professional services. They're both recurring and non-recurring, and they continue to grow at a steady pace, but we're very focused on ensuring that they never exceed 10% of our total revenues.
And then when we look at our recurring revenue model, we do show a separation of our software licensing and our transactional revenue, but that is really just reflecting the different billing frequency, whether it be monthly versus annually, because they're both very much subject to underlying long-term contracts, and that's why they're part of our annuity SaaS model. And overall, recurring revenue continues to grow. Add to that, we have a solid base of further platform revenues that will convert to recurring revenue in the future. Moving to profitability, we've retained our commitment to deliver above 30% EBITDA margin while continuing to invest in our own future. We do this by carefully managing our cost base and ensuring we're releasing investment in any one year as we start to see our revenue growth coming through, and that allows us to keep to that commitment.
Indeed, in the current year, Adjusted EBITDA is actually up 12% to $65.3 million above market expectations and delivering on a 32% EBITDA margin. I've already mentioned the benefit we're seeing from our capital allocation decisions and the impact on our net interest charge. We've also seen an effective tax rate in the year of 18%. Those two factors combined with our EBITDA growth have directly impacted our EPS growth, and that's delivered a 22.5% increase in our adjusted and diluted basic EPS. On the basic level, EPS has increased to $1.161 per share. Our annual recurring revenue that has trailed revenue growth for a couple of years now. We were always confident that this was an impact of timing, and this year we're really starting to see that growth come through.
While it is still slightly trailing revenue growth, the NRR of 170%, I'll say 107%, and our over 90% customer retention rate means we're still very confident we will see further sales come through, and those further sales will move from non-recurring to recurring, and we'll see this metric grow yet further. Operating cash, our operating cash conversion remains high at 94% of our EBITDA. So EBITDA to operating cash conversion of 94%, that just continues to confirm the quality of our underlying earnings. Our cash reserves are still very healthy at $55.9 million. Our capital allocation focus remains from the past moving forward to future years. As a result, we've continued to pay down our scheduled payments of our term loans. So $8 million of our term loan payments have seen bank debt levels fall to just below $28 million.
I've mentioned post-year end, we've entered into a new facility that actually consolidates the old term loan and the revolving credit facility into one unsecured facility that's on better terms and available to us for a further five years on a three plus one plus one basis, and indeed, that new facility has a further $100 million accordion accompanying it. That provides us with easy access to further debt financing if we find the right opportunity. Let me move to the next slide, please, Keith. Turning to our business model, consistent with prior periods, we continue to operate an annuity SaaS business model. That's a SaaS business model that you've seen elsewhere, but supported by long-term underlying contracts and a really high level of renewals at the end of those initial contract terms. The annuity SaaS model delivers prudent revenue recognition focused on long-term growth rather than short-term gain.
It delivers really high levels of cash generation, as I've shown with our 94% conversion of operating cash conversions. It also has really high levels of future contracted revenue visibility. That revenue visibility is effectively an off-balance sheet asset. It doesn't turn up in the accounting records until we invoice and bring it in through deferred revenue to be recognized in future periods. So that's out there under contract waiting to be recognized. Our benchmark is approximately 90% of our revenues are recurring, and in this current year, we are slightly below that benchmark, but I'd argue that's a really positive thing. It's because of the ongoing success of our platform revenues, these initial non-recurring revenues that we've now proven will convert to recurring revenue growth in future years so we can keep that momentum moving forward.
I think it's important to remind our audience today that our platform revenues are a result of us looking at new and innovative ways to leverage the Trisus platform and the extensive data set that sits within it. Now, this at times will involve third parties, but currently, our major successes are coming from using our own existing tools and our own data sets in yet more inventive ways. Can I move to the next slide, please, Keith? So now I'm submitting the primary statements. We've already discussed our revenue and EBITDA growth, so let's focus in on research and development. We are a software company. Research and development is the lifeblood of our future growth. It's one of the ways we invest in our own future.
In the current year, we've invested a total of $57.3 million in our research and development, and that's up from the $52.1 million we did this time last year. It continues to represent about 25%-30% of our revenues, and that's how we see it going forward. That's about the benchmark we're operating to as we build out our own internal plans. We continue to capitalize a portion of this spend. Now, albeit in the current year, it's a reduced portion because through our work on our partnership with Microsoft, we're looking at a number of new proof of concepts that will further enhance that platform revenue in future years. Those proof of concepts have yet to achieve technical feasibility, so we're expensing the costs as incurred rather than capitalizing. Again, real focus on strict criteria around anything we capitalize.
So in the year, we've capitalized $14.9 million, and that compares to $15.8 million in the prior period. I say it every year, but it's so fundamental. The key to capitalizing any development cost is that it will bring future economic benefit to the group. We consistently monitor how this is going to transpire, and we look at the total value of contracts for the Trisus products, those new products we're developing, and already we're seeing that that exceeds the total investment we've made into the platform. So we have more contracts than this cost. That means any new sales, any further sales we make of these products is only enhancing our investment case. But our current year, those two effects, the increased R&D spend and the lower capitalization means that we've actually increased the P&L charge from research and development by $6 million.
We've also had to absorb the increase that came through the increased National Insurance contribution throughout the year. So we've managed to do those two things and still deliver an 87% gross margin and an EBITDA margin of 32%. So I believe that's a real proof point that we're successfully balancing our investment and our growth whilst delivering on our returns to our shareholders. Two other points I think it's worth mentioning on this slide. One is that we did see a reduction in our effective tax rates down to 18% from 26% last year. Here, we were able to recover certain tax-related matters from the prior owners of Sentry. These matters have been charged to the P&L in prior periods because we couldn't assess collection as certain. As a result, we had to charge as we incurred them.
However, we have seen that recovery, so that reversed in the current year P&L. In effect, we've had $1.5 million of prior year charges reversed in the current period. If we adjust for that, our effective tax rate would be 24%, and that again reflects the tax-deductible portion of share-based incentives, so going forward, I think that's probably around the benchmark we will see, and then ultimately, as we take all of that in context, all of this has contributed to a 68% growth in our profits after tax. Can I move to the next slide, please, Keith? Quickly to adjusted EPS, we covered both these metrics. Both of these have grown in excess of 22%. We still clearly lay out the adjustments we've made on the right-hand side of the slide, and they're completely consistent with prior years.
At the unadjusted level, growth rates are actually over 60%, so real sizable growth there. No change in the shares in issue at $35.5 million, and we do still have about 132,000 shares held in treasury, and that's as a result of our prior year share buyback program. If I could move to the next slide, please, Keith. Let's have a look at the balance sheet. I said it before, and I'll say it again. It is simply a strong software company balance sheet, healthy cash reserves, strong banking relationships, which have culminated in this new unsecured facility on improved terms, and we have access to a further $100 million accordion should we find the right opportunity to deploy it. If I could move to the next slide, please, Keith. Cash flows, again, here more of the same financial performance.
Operating cash generation at 94% of the Adjusted EBITDA, sensible capital allocation decisions, and we continue to pay the appropriate level of tax in the appropriate jurisdictions, with the year-on-year fluctuations in cash tax being a fact of timing and when we make our payments on accounts. If I could move to the next slide, please, Keith. So bringing it all together, how do we think about our capital allocation? It is a balancing act. There's different stakeholders out there looking for different things. So the decisions we've made in this current year, our banking partners, there's been a total of $10.2 million in loan payments and interest in the year, reducing our overall levels of bank debt. For ourselves, I've mentioned the $57.3 million invested in product development, again supporting innovation and future growth rates.
And for our shareholders, we've paid out $13.3 million in dividends in the year, and we are continuing our progressive dividend policy. We're proposing the final dividend for this year to be GBP 0.185 per share. That gives a total dividend for the year of GBP 0.32, up 10% on the year, rewarding our shareholders as we see the continued growth in our own company. So our strong cash generation, disciplined cash capital allocation is really providing that foundation for continued investment and future value creation. And then the final slide for me, it's just a step back, a reminder of the last five years. It has been quite a five years indeed. And while it feels a lifetime ago, within this five-year period, there was a global pandemic. Our hospital customers were on the forefront of the battle against COVID.
We've completed and integrated the Sentry acquisition, doubling the size of the group in the process, and that's never easy, but it's now successfully completed and in the rearview mirror. There's been raging inflation and rapidly increasing interest rates. And as all these charts show, we've successfully navigated these challenging times. So for me, believe it or not, as CFO, it's not just about the numbers. It's about the underlying momentum in the business, the combination of high customer retention, market opportunity, expansion within our existing base, and the transition of yet more revenues to recurring. All of that is driving sustainable, profitable, and cash-generative growth. So with that, I'll hand back to Keith and say thank you.
Thank you, Craig. Really appreciate that. So as we look forward to the future, what have we done differently through the course of this year?
What we've really done is we've extended through a program internally we call the Delight and Grow. As I mentioned earlier, this is not rocket science. This is about making sure that our customers are getting the most out of our software and our solutions that they possibly can. Happy customers and customers getting a return on investment then have capacity to be able to then be successful in their own right, treat the patients within their communities, and therefore that success then drives their ability to be able to then work more with us, which will drive our success. That's a virtuous circle. As I mentioned, we already see hospital executives moving and team members moving from one hospital system to another, and we get taken along with them because we've been a contributing part to their success previous to that.
Delight and Grow just means we've aligned our customer support teams and our customer engagement teams across our customer portfolio, and then from there, our direct sales teams bringing together everything that relies on the contact with the customer and promoting that success through sales, marketing, both our strategic partnerships, and then also our Microsoft relationships and our corporate development team all coming together under our Chief Growth Officer. So between the Chief Customer Officer and the Chief Growth Officer really dealing with our customers and driving us forward at pace. Why have we done this? Well, actually, we've done this because we've seen lots of success in doing this with our top customers. On the chart on the left-hand side of this screen here, you can see those top customers as you look at them over the last 10 years. We've taken them all the way back.
We've analyzed pre-acquisition, whether there was revenue on the Sentry side, whether there was revenue on the Craneware side, and also where they were joint customers, where there was combined revenue there, and then we've seen that effect going through. The acceleration is really twofold. One is the start of our cross-sell, which you can start to see coming in in sort of 2022 and through our fiscal 2020 into our fiscal 2023 results, and then the next big step up is as we've moved onto the Trisus platform, and what that's really allowed us to do is to turbocharge our land and expand strategy. Historically, we would have, when new products were brought to market, we would then wait until hospitals were approaching the end of their multi-year contract, often three to five years out. We would then present new product and negotiate the renewal at the same time.
What that would do at that point is that would then result in growth opportunities for us. Now, with having the hospitals' data there, we can demonstrate far earlier on in that cycle the benefits that they will get and therefore drive growth for them based on the back of success that they will get and return on investment they will get from our product. When we look at that, that's been a six-fold increase in the size of our revenue opportunity with these customers that we've put through. We believe that over the very near term, there's probably, and with existing products, there's probably another two-times growth that we have within that cohort of our most successful customers. As you will see, and as we have often said, this is by no means ever straight line. It's real-world, not spreadsheet on this.
This is actually data that we have delivered on already. You'll see various rates of growth. It's not always straight line, but it reflects the reality of the hospital marketplace. As I say, we believe we've got another doubling. Importantly for me is that these top 10 customers, there's not a heavy dependency on them. They account for about 30% of our total revenue. Then when we look at doing that same analysis that gets us a two-times on these top 10, we do that right across our entire customer base, the blended rate is sitting at about eight times growth opportunity for us to be able to deliver to our customers with existing opportunities. Now, bearing in mind that top 10 is 20-plus years on average with us, we think that that is something that's worth emulating.
We are enhancing those relationships utilizing AI and our Microsoft partnership. But what that really means is it's all about catalysts for growth for future. And so we believe that this very much proves the case for the Delight and Grow and why we've doubled down that investment through the course of the period with that alignment that's come through. So I've mentioned the first of our three catalysts for growth. That's working with our existing customer base and promoting and demonstrating the return on investment they can get from our existing solutions, which we already have available. We also have 60% of the market that we believe that we can penetrate and we can work into, which again should be a big growth for us in future periods.
And then on top of that, the platform has a robustness in it that we can then layer on other solutions through there. And we can do that through our build, partner, or build, borrow, or buy strategy. So with our platform, we can add on third parties into there. We can trial third parties to see if we're going to be able to deliver a return on investment for our customers. We can do M&A through there, and we can generate revenues and more opportunity for our sales team, but more interestingly and more importantly, more opportunity for our hospitals to improve their operations and transform from there. We also see Microsoft as being a significant catalyst, particularly into new hospitals and as consolidating into new hospitals where it's a win for the hospital because they get more effective compute power as we leverage the Microsoft relationship.
It's a win for Microsoft because they get into more hospitals and potentially get into some of the biggest consumers of AI in the future. And it's a win for us for success for us getting our solutions out there as well. I will mention the Microsoft relationship again because we do think it's a very unique relationship with Microsoft. We have weekly calls between the Microsoft teams and the Craneware teams with regards to strategizing and synchronizing messages across the customer base and across potential selling targets from there. We're operating and organizing joint executive customer advocacy meetings. In fact, actually, we're co-hosting with Microsoft across Redmond and Seattle later this year a number of our customers there as well where we can work through the benefits of healthcare and how we can continue to improve healthcare and transform healthcare for the future.
Although we will say that the Microsoft relationship has been very strong, it is still early stage. And we still think that the opportunity is very much ahead of us with that. So those joint marketing and co-sell initiatives have really commenced in earnest during the period and will continue on through the course of this year.
At the same time, we are focusing on utilizing AI on a number of different strategies within the organization, everything from my office, and trying to make me a little bit more efficient and more effective in my role there in both testing strategy and developing strategy, and continuing on with that through our engineering teams and our development teams, through our customer service-facing teams utilizing AI to make them more efficient in their day-to-day role, taking away some of the drudgery and automating where we can so that every individual has not only got a more exciting role but is also more effective and more productive in each of their roles.
Mirroring that on behalf of our customers with our Trisus Assist solution, which then will continue to be rolled out across all of our Trisus applications, which really sits as a coworker with them to be able to help them make informed decisions as it goes forward. Then lastly, with AI, utilizing AI on top of our data sets to spot new product opportunities, to be able to help our customers to be able to really drive home and successfully transform the business operations of their hospitals for that as it goes forward with those unique insights. With that, I'll come to my last slide, really to say that today's results are really, really pleasing for us.
Not for any reason because we doubted them, but because what we can do is we can actually demonstrate what we've been saying and we have been building on for the last few years, and particularly since we came out of COVID in May of 2023. It's that building on that's there. It's the clarity and the visibility that those results give us going forward and our confidence that we can continue to, and our passion is to delight our customers in its own right that will create success for us as a group.
So as we say that, NRR growth that we're seeing, the ARR growth that we're seeing, continuing with an evolving opportunities which are still out there for us, the disciplined capital allocation that's brought to bear by Craig and his team and by the board, ongoing investment in innovation, not resting on our laurels at any stage, but driving that forward, all means that we have this huge opportunity in front of us, and actually, I would argue very significantly a growing opportunity in front of us as well, and so we're very positive about the future and very excited about the future and being able to work with our customers to improve the very important role that they have within their communities.