Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Fintel 2023 full-year results presentation. My name's Matt Timmins. I'm the Joint CEO of Fintel, and I'm delighted today to be joined by my co-CEO, Neil Stevens, and CFO, David Thompson. We've got an action-packed agenda today to get through, so first of all, we're going to cover off the quick overview of the business and the financial highlights for 2023. I'll then hand over to David, who will cover the financial review. Neil will then pick up with a divisional summary and a specific section on M&A, and then we'll close off by going through the outlook for 2024. So for those of you who are less familiar with Fintel, we operate in the wonderful world of U.K. retail financial services, and in that market, the market works incredibly well for consumers.
Consumers have access to thousands of financial products, everything from investments through to mortgages and general insurance, and they have access to those products which are provided by hundreds of well-capitalized and well-run manufacturers, real-quality brand names operating in the market. So for those consumers, as I said, they've got access to all of those different products from well-capitalized manufacturers at a competitive price and value. The difficulty for consumers is that there's so many products to choose from. How do they know which product is the most appropriate or the most suitable for their needs? Well, consumers can go and get information from a variety of different sources. They can look at a product's rating. They can get peer group recommendations. But the vast majority of financial products end up in the hands of a consumer via an intermediary of some description.
Around 80% of all investments and all mortgages go from product provider to customer through the intermediated channel. So retail financial services works incredibly well for consumers, but for those financial intermediaries and product providers, it's quite a tough market to operate in. It's a heavily regulated market. It's highly fragmented with thousands of businesses all across the U.K. providing valuable advice to consumers. There's a lack of quality data across the market in terms of data flows from product manufacturer to intermediary and back again from intermediary to product manufacturer. And there's also a number of different Fintech solutions used in the market, and those Fintech solutions very often don't talk to each other, so it's fragmented in many ways, this market.
But all participants in the market, all intermediary firms and product providers, have a common and binding need for regulatory support and also for data and technology. And finally, for product information and product comparison data. And so the solution in this market, we believe, is Fintel. We provide services to product providers, to financial intermediaries, and to consumers, and we help them better understand regulation and also better understand data. So we serve three different types of customer. For us, our customers are product manufacturers, financial intermediaries, and consumers. And if we focus on the outcomes of what Fintel delivers to those customer groups and look at product providers, first of all, we help those product manufacturers to design better financial products by sharing data with them on buyer behavior and consumer behavior.
Then we also help them distribute those products effectively through the big intermediary group that we provide services to. For consumers, we help consumers to better understand financial products in depth and to help them make smarter financial decisions. And we do that through the Defaqto Star Ratings service. Defaqto rates products according to the constituents of the product, the components of the product. So it's not a peer group rating or a service rating. It's a rating based on the fundamental qualities of the product itself. And then for intermediaries, we help intermediaries to do a better job for their clients, to serve more clients more effectively by providing them with a range of regulatory support and also Fintech and other solutions.
So if we focus on the intermediary for a second and we look at the complex job that an intermediary firm has to do day in, day out, whether you're made up of two or three advisors within the practice or whether there's hundreds, the complexity of the job remains the same. So you need to make sure, as an intermediary business, that you run your practice effectively and compliantly, that you've got an appropriate CRM system in place to record data and keep that safe. You need to make sure that you can go out and market and attract new clients, that you comply with elements of the Consumer Duty, and that also you record your CPD and give your clients access to their investments or their products via a website or portal in some way, shape, or form.
So that's the requirement of intermediary businesses before they even go out and see a client in the first place. And then when they go out and see clients, an intermediary business has to take those clients through a financial planning journey, including cash flow planning, potentially pension switching, looking at tax-advantaged products in some cases, managing suitability, and then being able to trade the various different products, whether they're mortgage products, protection, or investments, and then also report back to the client on a regular basis. So it's quite a complex job to run an intermediary business. And at Fintel, our role is to help those intermediary businesses with everything they need to run their business and also everything they need to provide advice to their clients.
So that's what Fintel is all about, and that's what we've been building up over the many years that we've been running this business. Particularly as we look at the businesses that we acquired in 2023 and also a couple of new ones that have joined in 2024, you can see how those businesses fit into the one-stop shop solution that we're building at Fintel. So those businesses help us to provide more services to the intermediary community, and through clever two-way API integrations, we're able to share data across the entire Fintel platform. In terms of the results for 2023, or a quick overview, we have grown EBITDA by 9%, which, given the market that we were operating in in 2023 with the sort of headwinds from the mortgage part of our business, we think is an incredibly strong performance with 9% increase in EBITDA growth.
We did that at a 36% margin, and we increased our dividend to shareholders by 6%. So a good, strong financial performance during the year. We also invested well into the business. We spent GBP 4.8 million on developing our technology solutions within Defaqto and within SimplyBiz. We've invested into a product that we call Matrix 360, which is an extension of an existing product that we have in the general insurance market. We acquired four businesses in 2023 and a further two at the turn of this year, so six acquisitions completed in total. And Neil will come on to talk about why we were so prevalent in terms of M&A in 2023 and what our outlook is for further M&A in 2024.
We had some really strong new client wins in terms of extending our relationship with great partners like BlackRock, HSBC, and also quite a large extension of services that we provide to MoneySuperMarket through our Defaqto business. We were delighted to be voted the 14th best financial services company to work for in the UK, up from 20th place in the previous year. We delivered high-quality recurring income with 66% of our revenues coming from SaaS and subscriptions. We finished the year with GBP 12.7 million in cash, which was underpinned by a really good RCF facility that we've got with GBP 69 million of headroom still in our RCF facility. And we delivered strong underlying operating cash conversion at 88%. And all this was underpinned by positive market dynamics.
I'll hand over now to David, who will take you through the finance section, and then David will hand to Neil to cover off the divisional highlights and also our M&A strategy. So over to you, David.
Thanks, Mark. Morning everyone. As you've just seen from the opening section there, with the acquisitions and strategic delivery, there's quite a lot of activity to cover this year. What we'll do is we'll focus on the key value drivers of the business being core in this next section. We've included additional financial analysis in the appendices, and that should cover any additional questions or analysis you might want to see. On slide 8, you'll recall the key value drivers are core revenue growth, core EBITDA margin, and SaaS and subscription revenue percentage mix. Here you can see that core revenue is up slightly year-on-year. However, there's a revenue bridge in the next slide that shows how the organic SaaS and subs business, which is the key driver of value, has grown at 5.6%.
We continue to deliver on profitability with the core adjusted EBITDA now at GBP 20.2 million, and that's an EBITDA margin of circa 36%, so in the target range we're aiming for in the medium term. SaaS and subscriptions revenues are going further to 66.4% again, so progress across all our three key value drivers. On slide 9, we've got that revenue bridge, and you can see the constituent parts of how the revenues progressed over the prior year. You know, working left to right, so the growth in the year comes from organic growth at GBP 2.5 million, and that's 5.6%. Plus, you've got another GBP 1.5 million growth from acquisitions that we've made in the year, and that's just the period post-acquisition. Two made in July, two made in October, so that on an annualized basis.
There's a slide later on that shows the pro forma full-year effect of that, and actually go a bit further and show the FY24 expectation of how the acquisitions will progress, because that's an important link to what we've paid for the businesses upfront and what the full-year EBITDA will deliver. So you can see that there are value accretive acquisitions based on the relative multiple. So next, we've got reduction in core software revenues at GBP 2.8 million, and that's purely down to the fact that in May 2023, we amended our contract with Intelligent Office, and it moved it from a gross accounting basis to a net accounting basis. So, you know, EBITDA in that contract still stays the same at GBP 1.3 million. We simply lower revenue and cost of goods sold by GBP 2.8 million each.
So again, you've got to take that into account and looking at the true inherent like-for-like growth. Finally, as Matt says, you know, 2023 was a challenging year for the mortgage market, but again, we've got a certain scale that means that it dropped 21% or GBP 1 million down from GBP 5 million to GBP 4 million. But we definitely see that part of the business poised to recover in 2024 and 2025. Over in slide 10, we've got the revenue stack slide, and again, you know, the gray card segment being non-core. That's again been affected by the housing market and reduced to GBP 8.3 million. The core business isn't immune, so if you look at the dark middle section of GBP 19 million, that reflects the GBP 1 million reduction in mortgage revenues. However, it's partly offset by good growth in the Defaqto Ratings product.
Again, it's important to reiterate that that dark middle segment, while it's not SaaS and subscription, it is repeating revenue, so it is high-quality revenue. That leads to the key driver of value, which is SaaS and subscriptions, and that's grown 2% or GBP 0.8 million. Over in slide 11, it shows the performance in the operating segments. Now again, intermediary services, it's reduced 5% to GBP 22.4 million, although that's clearly not the full story, because that's net of a GBP 2.8 million reduction due to the change in accounting for the Intelligent Office contract. That's offset by inherent growth of GBP 1.8 million across other memberships, other software products, and additional services. The gross profit also benefits from the removal of the accrual of the costs of the Intelligent Office contract, and other costs have been managed well and get a strong incremental margin from other growth.
So you can see that the gross margin in that business is up to nearly 50%, which we're really pleased with. In the middle distribution, that's got a circa GBP 1 million decrease, again, mainly due to the mortgage revenues. Marketing remains in line with the prior period, although the focus there has been to convert that annual revenue to 3-year distribution as a service contract revenue, and that's now circa 80% converted. So it's a relatively stable period-over-period. The quality of that revenue has increased. And again, fintech and research have performed well. Double-digit growth in both revenue and margin, thanks in part to additional software license sales that are practically 100% flow-through margin. But the business is all about investing for growth, and over in slide 12, you can see the track record of us earning the right to do that.
So you can see the deleveraging and strengthening of the balance sheet since the acquisition of Defaqto in 2019. That business is integrated really well. It's very complementary to the group, and it's clearly a key part of the Fintel story, and it's now doubled its EBITDA since that acquisition. We've also commenced further investment, and you can see that utilization of our own funds and some of the revolving credit facility invest in both external businesses and further development expenditure in our own software products. We work on more service offerings and new integrations. So at the balance sheet date, we've had a gross cash balance of GBP 12.7 million and GBP 69 million of undrawn revolving credit facility, and that gives us excellent liquidity to further invest in the business and undertake more strategic M&A.
So in slide 13, just to bring that to life in the year, we've got more detail just on how that cash that's generated has been invested or returned to shareholders in the year. So as we continue to invest, we'll provide greater clarity of how that investment's been made. So if we start on the left with GBP 12.8 million of opening cash, we generated just under GBP 20 million in the year from operating activities.
We drew down 11% of the debt facility, and we got GBP 0.6 million from realization of deferred consideration from a previous asset non-core disposal. That's given us gross cash resources of just over GBP 44 million in the year. So we've invested the majority of that, the next green segments, and that's into investments, acquisitions, internal software development, and there's another slide in the appendices that shows the four pillars of how we're approaching that.
We returned GBP 4 million to shareholders by way of dividend, and we paid GBP 3.3 million in tax and debt service costs, ending the closing cash balance at GBP 12.7 million. I think the cash balance is relatively static year-on-year. It doesn't tell the full story of the cash generation of this business and the investment for further growth that we're making. So in slide 14, we've got the cash conversion statistics. And again, you can see the operating cash conversions, 88%. Now the key driver of that, as you can see in the bottom right-hand side, was investing more into DevEx in a period. If we hadn't invested the GBP 4.9 million in DevEx and CapEx, and we'd keep to a similar level, the cash conversion would again have been over 100%. But we're not in that mode as a business.
We're in an invest-to-grow period, and on a run-rate basis, having an operating cash flow conversion of between 90% and 100% just tells the strength of the business model, despite a period of significant investment. Again, just in summary, before I hand over to Neil, we can see, you know, a real pivot point in the year of having Defaqto integrated well, completely deleveraged the balance sheet, built up a cash war chest and stability. And we're now using that balance sheet and cash generation to fund additional growth opportunities and strategic delivery. And again, an important hygiene factor, the dividends growing 6% to GBP 0.0345 per share in line with the progressive dividend policy. So with that, I'll hand to Neil, and Neil will take you through the strategic progress we've been making in a bit more detail. Thank you.
Thank you, David and Matt. So yeah, just to think about the divisions in our business, as you've heard, we're building a connected platform. Everything's interlinked. What we do in one division creates opportunities, new data, new insights that can generate sales opportunities and product development opportunities in the other divisions. These things are all connected. However, it's important each division performs well in its own right as well. The first division we'll focus on is intermediary services. This is a very mature part of our business. We've got fantastic scale and really highly engaged long-tenure clients in the intermediary market. We are always working to develop our services, and 2023 was no exception. We've been able to respond to changing regulation and help financial advisors, mortgage advisors, protection advisors deal with the implementation of new regulations. This has created opportunities for growth for us.
We've been able to grow the profitability of this business and expand the service offering. This part of our business is a great customer base, as Matt described earlier, to deploy the new software to. So we've got these long-standing customers, great engagement, long-standing relationships, and knowledge of their business, and we're going to be onboarding more software and more solutions to them. So we expect to see the organic growth in the intermediary services part of our business continue to be strong, and for incremental margins to continue to widen as we continue to deliver this part of our strategy. Next up is the distribution channels division. This is where we help product providers get their products to market. David said earlier that we are materially increasing the quality of revenues in this area.
We're signing the product providers up to longer-term recurring contracts, and we're also deploying more IP services and data services. It's going to be a big component of growth for us as we help those product providers understand the market, do their own work for Consumer Duty and client outcomes, and be much more precise about how they get their products in front of the right people, and also how they build the products of the future using our intellectual property. The part of our business that delivers events and training and engagement directly has also been very, very strong, and this is great to see that engagement increasing, and I think it'll be another key component of growth for us as well. Finally, our fintech and research division, good growth in software, very strong growth in software, and as David has described, a big target for our investment.
We are widening the scope of our software, launching new modules and new capabilities, and all of that's going to further bind those customers to us as we deliver more and more value and grow the average revenue per customer. Product ratings. Revenue equally has done really well, some strong growth, and that's been accelerated now with the acquisitions of MICAP and AKG, which give us new data sets to build into those products. So it all just kind of creates more momentum and creates more value add for our client base as part of that growth drive. M&A has been a real feature of 2023 and into 2024. It's part of our strategy, as Matt said. We, since 2021, have had a really clear strategy in our business for creating value. It's about building out really strong brands that people understand and trust.
It's about building out a product platform that increasingly delivers digital products and data products to help people make decisions. There's a strong component of organic growth, and it's defensive organic growth that can deal with the turns of the cycles in the market, can deal with volatility, and continue to deliver good levels of organic growth during different market conditions. And then M&A is clearly a key part of that, which has been particularly advanced in the last 12 months. I think the positive debt has caused some people to pull out of the market for acquisitions who were really getting the biggest components of return from leverage. And I think there's a fairer market now, and prices are more fundamental.
So the companies that are successfully making acquisitions are the ones that are the natural owners for a business and can create value from operating the business more efficiently rather than, you know, solely through financial leverage. This has really been to our favor. We didn't make any acquisitions in 2021, 2022 because we didn't think the market was right. Obviously, we've maintained a pipeline and kept in good dialogue with firms. Then last year, I think, has been the right year to take action. We've got a strong balance sheet, and we've got a great team who know this market. We originate the deals ourselves, and we work with founders or people selling part of their portfolio to tell them how Fintel is the right home for their business.
I think that strong reputation of delivering good quality in the market and creating value from acquisitions has been a real asset to us in the last 12 months, and it's helped us create some fantastic deals, all of which are core to our strategy, core to our model, right in our heartland of the customer base. They bring new capabilities in the areas that are most important to our customers, helping them connect with the end client, helping them access more data on specialist products, helping them learn and develop their people and fulfill their CPD requirements, and also providing thought leadership on the future of the industry and engaging with C-suite level people about the future of their businesses and what they're going to need to be successful.
So a really good suite of acquisitions, great culture in these businesses as well, very high alignment of culture with what we're about and what we exist for. Each of these businesses brings some customer extension and some capability extension. And I think that's a really powerful combination. As we start to join these businesses up, connect their products, make the data flow between them, create more value, we think there'll be, you know, really excellent components of organic growth for us and part of that Fintel strategy. You'll see that four of the acquisitions fit squarely within the intermediary services market. The other two have tucked into the fintech and research, and they'll be direct product extensions of the Defaqto offering. I'm going to ask David to come back in now to talk about the financial impact and approach to the acquisitions.
Sure thing. Thank you, Neil. And again, you know, one of the key questions is when you make 6 acquisitions and ostensibly a sort of 7- or 8-month period, you know, you've got to focus on how well you integrate those acquisitions and how you keep driving performance out of them to make sure they're value-enhancing. So not only do they complement the product set that we take to market, they've also got to make a financial return as well. So we've included a full acquisition disclosure note in the RNS towards the end of the results, RNS, and thought we would reiterate it in here just to give people as much granularity as possible. So this slide is the contribution in the period post-acquisition. So here are the financial results we've consolidated into our FY23 numbers.
You can see there that we've got a GBP 0.4 million EBITDA contribution pretty evenly throughout the four businesses that were acquired in the period. Now, it's important to say that acquiring these businesses well meant that we acquired them at the right time in the cycle, and some of them were still in a break-even position on the back of significant investment. It's only because the deal team at Fintel and Matt and Neil in particular have got a really deep awareness of the market. We were able to tell where companies were in the cycle and engage in strategic dialogue with them over a number of months. So we're able to buy these companies well. What we include as well, we take the additional step of showing a pro forma of how they would have done if we'd acquired them all on the 1st of January, 2023.
You can see it would have contributed GBP 700,000 to EBITDA. But most importantly, these numbers are factored into the sort of consensus numbers in the market for 2024. We show what we firmly believe that they will do, clearly if they're in consensus, and would like to seek to do more. The whole point here is we paid GBP 13.3 million for these businesses that on a day one multiple seemed high. However, we were absolutely rock-solid in the belief that we'd bought it at the right time in their cycle, and that they would generate at least GBP 1.3 million of EBITDA in 2024. You can see that net upfront consideration to EBITDA multiple is lower than Fintel's current trading multiple, and hence we believe that they're value value accretive in a financial way as well as adding to the product offering.
With that detail, pass back to Neil.
Thanks, David. So yeah, we're continuing to work hard in this space. We've got a really clear strategy. We know what we're here to do and how we want to build a platform. And so with that in mind, we continue to pursue an active pipeline of M&A. We're trying to have the right strategic conversations at the right times, to be patient as well when that is required, because we want to originate deals and we want to find the best quality assets and create the right environment for them to transact. We've got a lot of strategic capacity and financial capacity and team to bring these businesses in. I think the leadership team in Fintel is the strongest in the sector, our exec team throughout the business, and very high caliber individuals.
They have lots of experience in different organizations before they came to us, but the tenure at Fintel to really understand our business and the strategy. So I think we're in a really strong position to continue to pursue strategic M&A in 2024 with the facilities to look for bigger deals when that time is right and we can get the circumstances right. I think what you've seen up until now is a nice collection of smaller bolt-ons that are all value-accretive and all capacity-adding, capability-adding, sorry, to the platform. But, you know, we're working hard on more material things as well. When the time is right and the circumstances are right, we've certainly got that in our sights. We use a focused approach. We've got a very targeted approach from the kinds of areas we're looking to make these acquisitions.
They are quantitative and qualitative in terms of the culture, the management team, and the positioning of a business that we want to bring into the Fintel group. So a clear idea of what we're looking for, and I think the environment and the circumstances are going to be really supportive to us making progress in the year ahead. Just a couple of words from me on outlook. As I said, we are a defensive growth company. We have three divisions that are all very connected, and growth in one area creates opportunities in another. The fundamentals are strong in the medium term, and I think they're improving in the short term as well. We see clear evidence of a growing demand for financial advice. All metrics that we track are trending upwards.
The number of clients requiring advice, the scope of the advice they need, and their willingness to engage a professional on an ongoing basis are all strong indicators of underlying growth in the sector. We know this year the mortgage market will see around 1.6 million fixed-term deals come to an end, and 80% of those customers will be looked after by professional mortgage brokers. So notwithstanding, there'll be some more shocks and turbulence, I'm sure, in the macro picture. There's 1.6 million households who've got to make a decision this year, and they're going to turn to a professional advisor to help them with that. We've seen Consumer Duty driving changes in the price comparison websites and the direct-to-customer robo sector, which is a big, you know, growth trend for us as well.
We are suppliers of data and decision software to that intermediary market for robo advice and price comparison websites, not just professional advisors. So I think that's the right time for us to make the investment Matt talked about in more connected data to help the general insurance market particularly drive out that channel. There's ongoing growth in the product provider market generally as we start to bring more data products online. And I think we're going to be in a very unique position to take all of the learning we have from around the sector and really help people figure out what's going on and what's going to happen next. I'd mentioned the strategy earlier. M&A is a really important part, but it's not the whole story. David's described our increased investment in digitization, building more digital products, reg tech, and more data-driven products.
They're faster to bring to market, very high margin, and uniquely value-adding because other people would find it very hard to replicate what we can do because most of our data is proprietary. It's originated from the different businesses we have in the market and understanding what's happening in the market. Organic growth will continue to be a real focus for us. And in addition to the M&A, I think we'll see it come through strong in 2024. So we're confident in our outlook at the start of the year, which has started well. We're trading in line. We see all of the environmental factors we'd want to see for continued organic growth alongside that M&A pipeline and the need the sector has for integrated technology and for good data and help making the big decisions, I think, are all very significant tailwinds for Fintel.