Welcome everyone on the call today. I'm Meg Geldens, head of Investor Relations at Wolters Kluwer, and I'll be moderating today's call. The plan for this event is to spotlight our Financial and Corporate Compliance division, in particular, the financial services side, which has been the focal point of product innovation and bolt-on acquisitions in recent years. We also plan to give you an update on our central technology team and opportunities for generative AI. At the end of the presentations, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.
To pose a question, you have two options: first, if you've joined through the conference call, you can ask a question by pressing star one, and you'll be placed in the queue for the operator, or two, if you're following this on the webcast, you can submit a question via the text box at the bottom of the webcast screen, and I will read it out on your behalf. Before we begin, can I ask you to read slide two regarding forward-looking statements? We will not be disclosing new information on current trading today. Please refer to our recent trading update for details on the first nine months of this year and our latest outlook for the full year 2023. Now it's my pleasure to introduce today's speakers.
We're delighted to be joined by our CEO, Nancy McKinstry, who will provide some context and will be happy to address questions at the end. Next, Steven Meirink, who is CEO of Financial and Corporate Compliance, will provide an overview of the division and highlight key market trends that underpin the divisional strategy. Next, Vikram Savkar, who took over Steve's prior role and now leads the financial services segment of FCC, will put the spotlight on digital lending. After Vikram, Suzanne Konstance, who runs Lien Solutions, will explain what that business does, and will provide examples of how FCC are driving innovation. And last but not least, our Alex Tyrrell, who heads up our AI Center of Excellence, will give you a brief update on developments at ESG and where we see opportunities with GenAI technology.
Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Nancy to set the stage.
Thank you, Meg. I'm delighted that today we can showcase the leadership team of Financial and Corporate Compliance. You may recall in March this year, we regrouped some of our assets. The FCC division that you'll see today is essentially the foundation of the former GRC division, minus two business units: Enterprise Legal Management and Finance Risk and Reporting, which were aligned with two other divisions. If you look at FCC, FCC is our third largest division in terms of both revenue and adjusted operating profits. Before we focus in on FCC, I'd like to highlight a few global mega trends that are foundational to all of our five divisions. You will hear all of these themes today. All of our customers, be they doctors, accountants, lawyers, business or banking compliance professionals, are facing an increasing volume and complexity of information, data, and regulations.
To handle this continuous change in growing complexity, our customers have been adopting technology solutions that essentially automate their daily tasks, supporting them in delivering better outcomes and greater productivity. These trends have been around for more than 15 years, and they continue today. The technology keeps advancing. Today, we see a continued shift to the cloud, which enables integrated solutions, and we're seeing increased adoption of AI tools across the portfolio. If you look at the history and the origins of FCC, it has a long legacy going back more than 120 years. The legal services side, the oldest part of this division, is near and dear to my heart. As some of you may know, after Wolters Kluwer acquired CCH in 1995, I ran what was then called Legal Information Services, also known as CT Corporation.
In the years that followed, the legal services side went from strength to strength, mostly developing organically, but occasionally extending through acquisitions, most notably NRAI, VCorp, and LicenseLogix. In July of 1999, we made the decision to enter the banking compliance arena with the acquisition of Bankers Systems . Bankers Systems , which form the foundation of the financial services side of the business, has some 70 years of history supporting banks in streamlining their loan operations with compliance documentation systems. We expanded this business through a series of bolt-on acquisitions, such as PCI Corporation in 2004 and eOriginal in 2020. These expert solutions help banks comply with U.S. fair lending laws, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, Dodd-Frank, and other state and federal rules and regulations. Today, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services is one of the leading providers of lending compliance, software, and services in the U.S.
With that brief introduction, I'd now like to give the floor to Steven Meirink.
Thank you, Nancy. Great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to introduce you to Financial and Corporate Compliance, or FCC, the division which I have the privilege to lead at Wolters Kluwer. Financial and Corporate Compliance is a leading provider of technology-enabled compliance services and software to companies and businesses of all sizes, law firms, banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions. FCC is predominantly a U.S. business, with 99% of our EUR 1.1 billion in revenue deriving from the U.S. market.... Most of our team members are also based in the U.S. However, we have a growing global team based outside the U.S., primarily in India, Romania, Ireland, and the U.K.
Importantly, we have a long and rich history in compliance with extremely deep expertise in the rules, regulations, and jurisdictional requirements across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as hundreds and thousands of state and local jurisdictions as well. In total, we serve over 300,000 customers across the division. We are incredibly proud of the size and quality of our customer base, which not only includes the largest U.S. companies and financial institutions, but also thousands of smaller businesses and community-based lenders that are the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. Historically, compliance activities were manual and paper-based. As our markets have advanced and evolved, we have continuously embraced technology to improve and digitize our customer solutions and our own operations. We continue to do that today, leveraging advanced technologies such as AI and the cloud.
We see our mission as providing our customers with the leading technology-enabled compliance solutions available in the market, helping to enhance the safety and efficiency of U.S. commerce and banking. This mission is shared across both segments of our business. The financial services side accounts for just over 40% of divisional revenues and is comprised of our loan compliance business, as well as a smaller regulatory compliance business. The loan compliance business supports banks and non-bank lenders, enabling compliance with federal and state regulations across a variety of consumer and commercial financial products. Some of our more prominent loan compliance brands are Expere, ComplianceOne, IDS, eOriginal, Wiz, and iLien. The regulatory compliance business provides regulatory content and change management solutions to both banks and insurers, and cost-basis accounting solutions to brokerage firms. The legal services side accounts for just under 60% of divisional revenues.
The main brand here is CT Corporation, which supports the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of legal entities on behalf of corporations, businesses of all sizes, and the law firms that support them. The legal services side also includes brands such as BizFilings and VCorp, which tend to have a greater focus on the needs of smaller-sized companies. The common thread that ties our businesses together is a shared commitment to deep compliance expertise. We believe that our ability to combine human experts, proprietary knowledge and insights, along with technology-enabled solutions, truly distinguishes our business. We have a strong position in the addressable markets in which we compete, in large part because we offer a wider array of solutions than most of our competitors, who typically focus on a narrower set of products and workflows.
Our overall markets are healthy and display most, if not all, of the trends Nancy outlined earlier, which should contribute to steady underlying growth. I will share more details shortly on our unique positioning and strategies to outperform the fundamentals in these markets, but first, let's cover some financials. I've noted that FCC is a U.S.-based business with a little over 40% of revenues in financial services and a little less than 60% in legal services. Two-thirds of our revenues are recurring, while one-third is transactional or otherwise non-recurring. Both segments of our business generate transactional fees. In financial services, these are related to various lending transactions and lien searches and filings, while in legal services, these relate to a variety of activities, such as legal entity formations and filings as well.
Some 47% of revenues are from software products and 46% from technology-enabled services, with the majority of software revenue coming from financial services, and the majority of technology-enabled services coming from legal. As I know you are aware, transactional revenues can be cyclical in nature. As you can see from this chart, we have experienced volatility over the years in the organic growth of non-recurring revenues, mainly due to changes in U.S. lending and M&A activity. During the global financial crisis, the credit crunch led to two years of high single-digit declines in our transactional revenues on a historical pro forma basis. Sometimes other factors may positively impact non-recurring revenue. A notable example being the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, which drove up transactional revenues during the COVID pandemic, as we rapidly delivered a leading solution for banking professionals during that specific time period.
Today, we are seeing a sharp downturn driven by the rapid rise in U.S. interest rates and the falloff in M&A activity in the past 12-18 months. Just to name a couple recent trends, industry mortgage origination volumes were down around 35% in the first half of the year and remained weak in Q3, while the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has consistently remained over 7% through the year, a multi-year high, in fact. Meanwhile, U.S. M&A volumes were down almost 40% in the first half of 2023, and remained weak in Q3. Through the first 9 months of this year, our own transactional revenues are down 7% organically. That being said, our team is very experienced in managing through these cycles, and we remain focused on our strategic priorities and on serving our customers, even as economic conditions evolve.
At the end of the day, the professionals that count on Wolters Kluwer know that compliance and transparency are core to their business success, and we are here to support their needs. The good news is that recurring revenues, which represent two-thirds of our total revenues, are growing. In fact, our total organic growth, including both recurring and non-recurring revenues, has remained positive in 2023. In fact, if you look longer term, you see that recurring revenues have increased as a percentage of our total mix, and organic growth has been accelerating. We have been strategically shifting our business towards recurring revenue streams by driving innovation, increasing our focus on multi-year agreements with customers, and growing our digital lending capabilities, such as the acquisition of the eOriginal business in 2020. Through the cycle, we have also been able to sustain strong margins.
This year, because we anticipated a challenge in non-recurring revenue, we activated plans to tightly manage expenses and held back discretionary spend while maintaining product investments. As indicated in group guidance, we expect to deliver a slight margin increase for the full year. While we are facing a down cycle in transactional volumes in the short term, we are benefiting from several important market drivers. Let me cover a few. First and foremost, regulatory change is a net positive for our business. We track and process hundreds and thousands of proposed changes to rules and citations every year, working closely with our customers to ensure readiness for any new or modified requirements. Second, the increasing complexity of regulations has raised the profile of compliance as a function, a trend accentuated by increasing regulatory scrutiny following some prominent bank failures earlier this year in the U.S.
We have hundreds of compliance experts on staff, which includes lawyers and former regulators, to help our customers navigate this change. The third trend, compliance workflows are becoming more digital. This provides an enormous opportunity for efficiency and quality for our customers. We believe digital adoption is still in its infancy across all of our markets and is primed for growth, particularly in digital lending. Tied to this secular trend is the growing appetite among customers for cloud-based solutions. While the banking industry has typically not been considered an early adopter to SaaS and cloud solutions, we are seeing appetite for cloud across our financial services customer segments and expanded our cloud offerings through eOriginal and IDS to meet their needs. The fifth market trend is the ongoing drive for operating efficiencies among companies and banks.
We see further potential to apply advanced technology and AI to help our customers automate their workflows, streamline their processes, and reduce costs. Our divisional strategy is perfectly aligned to these market trends. Our priorities fall into three broad themes. First, we intend to accelerate expert solutions by increasing product innovation, including the introduction of regulatory-driven solutions to support Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act, and to facilitate beneficial ownership information, or BOI reporting, as part of the upcoming Corporate Transparency Act in the United States. In parallel, we plan to promote faster digital adoption in the loan compliance workflows and to enhance technology capabilities in the corporate services market through CT Corporation. Second, we plan to expand our reach by pursuing acquisitions and partnerships that help us enter new customer segments or expand our solution set.
We will also remain focused on maintaining our product leadership, while actively engaging with both regulators and industry participants to help our markets and customers develop and mature. Finally, we will evolve our core capabilities by continuing to advance our technology architecture to ensure reliability and scalability to support digital adoption. In addition, we will keep prioritizing an exceptional customer experience across all of our businesses, and we'll do that by fostering a culture for our team members that creates a dynamic workplace environment for them to bring their very best every day. Now, you will hear from Vikram, who will discuss how FCC is addressing the themes of digital adoption and cloud capabilities within the loan compliance segment. Vikram?
Thank you very much for the excellent introduction, Steve, and thanks to all of you for taking a few moments to learn more about the financial services business within FCC, which I will also refer to as Compliance Solutions. As Steve said, I took over as general manager of the Compliance Solutions business in July of this year. But I joined Wolters Kluwer about 10 years ago and led a number of growth businesses in our legal and regulatory and health divisions prior to joining FCC. Today, I'm delighted to share some insights into the compliance solutions business, which I've come to know and enjoy in the last few months. First, I'll give you a bird's-eye view of the markets this business serves. Second, I will zoom into one of the most exciting market dynamics we are exposed to: digital lending.
And finally, I will hand off to a key leader from my team, Suzanne Konstance, to go into detail on Lien Solutions, another exciting growth area for us. Let's start with the bird's-eye view. Compliance Solutions is a portfolio of products, but at the heart of the portfolio is a common focus on the lending space, as shown on the left-hand side of this slide. We also have a strong niche position in regulatory compliance for the brokerage and insurance markets. But today, in the interest of time, I will focus on the larger lending side of our business. Now, we traditionally divide the lending space into commercial and consumer banking, and each of those are further subdivided. Consumer banking, for instance, encompasses mortgages as well as auto loans, student loans, and so on, while commercial banking includes real estate loans, equipment financing loans, and the like.
Across both segments, we are proud to serve more than 6,000 customers, spanning banks, credit unions, non-bank lenders such as independent mortgage banks, commercial lenders, and other financial institutions. We are truly unique in the market, and our commitment to serving all types and sizes of institutions operating in the U.S. lending market, from the largest global banks to the smallest community lenders. Now, as Steve discussed earlier, there are a lot of near-term and midterm dynamics at play in the lending markets that are driving cyclicality right now. What I'm going to focus on today, though, is the longer-term secular macro dynamics that are influencing our markets and underpin our long-term strategy. The most important such trend that we are observing is that lending activities are in the midst of a steady transition from analog to digital lending. Analog, of course, refers to paper-based activities.
A consumer sits in front of a banker, and they both sign documents. Digital lending means that all of these activities are conducted online: the loan generation, closing, signature, document storage, and so on. It may surprise you to know that the transition from analog to digital lending in the U.S. is still fairly nascent. For example, as you will see on the left side of this slide, a relatively low percentage of U.S. mortgage lending is digital today. But as you see on the right side of the slide, digital adoption is growing rapidly and will continue to grow steadily as banks and non-bank lenders come to realize the benefits of digital lending. That is already happening in auto and mortgages, and we are seeing it grow in other segments like equipment finance as well. So what are those benefits to digital lending that are driving the transition?
First off, there's efficiency. Digital lending clears out a lot of administrative roadblocks. Second, there's customer access. Digital lending can reach a much larger population and expand liquidity. Third, digital lending eases the collateralization and securitization of mortgages and loans, which is an increasingly important part of the liquidity foundation behind lending. So while it is still nascent, we believe digital lending is one of the most exciting growth opportunities for our business, and that's why we acquired eOriginal in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, for EUR 231 million in cash. I don't have time today to go into deep detail on why it is so special, but briefly, eOriginal is a cloud-based platform that enables lenders and their partners to create, store, and manage digital assets from closing through to the secondary market.
eOriginal utilizes advanced technology to provide a stamp of authenticity to digital promissory notes that enables these digital assets to move through the secondary markets with high confidence, unlocking massive liquidity for the economy. The platform also has state-of-the-art tools that help manage the workflow of generating the promissory notes, digital signature tools, and so on. We call the whole process digital closing and the digital storage capability, the eVault. Today, eOriginal is an unquestioned market leader in digital lending and fits with our other loan compliance businesses in an extremely strategic and complementary way. To illustrate what I mean by that, let's take a look at the end-to-end workflow involved in loan compliance. The eOriginal solution addresses what you can think of as the middle of this lending workflow, digital closing. Before closing, lenders need to generate lots of compliance documentation.
In the trade, we call this doc prep or doc gen. This is where Wolters Kluwer has traditionally been well-positioned with products such as ComplianceOne and Expere. After closing, lenders need to run advanced analytics on their lending portfolio to make sure that their actions are compliant with government regulations such as fair lending laws, and then they need to protect their investment by perfecting liens against the loans. In these latter steps, Wolters Kluwer has strong market positions with our Wiz and iLien products, respectively.... So our footprint for our customers spans from doc prep to digital closing, to compliance analytics, to lien solutions. As you would assume, therefore, our product development focus moving forward will be to build a strong, combined focus on this market via linked-up platforms that constitute a true lending expert solution.
We're excited to go on this journey, and I think we have a very critical role to play in helping lenders grow their footprint and magnify their feed-through impact on the economy at large. I'm happy to say that we are today, I believe, the only player with leading solutions in all of those workflow steps. As you can see on this chart, we cover the waterfront for the full loan compliance workflow, and we also do so across multiple markets, by which I mean auto, mortgage, equipment, finance, and so on. Whereas our competitors typically either have point solutions, or if they have broader solutions, focus on a narrower set of markets, such as just mortgage. I think we have a very strong competitive position across the board, and a clear right to play in this market.
Within that right to play, I will say that eOriginal is the ace up our sleeve. The closing piece and eVault, and the ability that this gives us to feed secondary markets, is at the heart of the lending market and is very difficult to deliver credibly. We have what we believe is far and away the strongest solution and a good moat for that core need. And now it's my pleasure to invite Suzanne Konstance from my team to expand on another of the key reasons why we have the right to play in this space, Lien Solutions. Suzanne, over to you.
Thank you, Vikram. Hello, I'm Suzanne Konstance. I lead the Lien Solutions segment within Compliance Solutions. After many years in banking, I joined Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions about seven years ago and now lead this business. Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions helps banks and other lenders establish and ensure the accuracy of the liens that secure the underlying collateral on their lending portfolios. Lien Solutions and our iLien online product is the long-established leader in this relatively mature but important market, with a reputation for innovation. Let me start with an overview of what we do in Lien Solutions. Typically, when banks or other lenders issue larger loans, they require borrowers to provide protection in the form of assets or collateral, on which the lender has legal rights in the case of non-payment. A good example is the pledging of the home to a bank when obtaining a mortgage.
The same concept applies in commercial lending, where inventory, equipment, or other assets may be pledged. The lien helps protect the security interests of the lender. While this may sound straightforward, the United States is a very complex place to do business. There are thousands of jurisdictions, down to the county level, with different rules, processes, forms, and levels of automation to contend with, depending upon the asset type, the lending type, and the location of the borrower and the lender. The Uniform Commercial Code attempts to harmonize the laws of trade and other commercial transactions across the United States. Liens related to many commercial transactions fall under the code and are called UCC liens. Let's talk about the Lien Solutions process here step by step, as shown on the slide.
First, we help lenders search public records across the country to better understand the borrower and determine whether assets have already been pledged to another lender or have any other encumbrance. Then, we help the lender file a lien. We call this perfecting a lien, because, well, every detail has to be done perfectly to secure rights to the assets if for any reason, the borrower defaults on the loan. We are proud that our UCC filings are accepted 99.5% of the time, an exceptionally high standard. We also help lenders manage their liens over time, including renewals or changes to ensure the lien remains active. Finally, at the end of the loan, we help the lender release the lien, so the borrower's assets are no longer pledged when the borrower pays back the loan.
I'll now give an example of how we innovate by staying close to the customer. While the lien product has traditionally been a search, file, release capability, over the years, we found that our customers desired greater visibility into the health of their lien portfolios over the course of their loans. We also learned that almost 20% of all liens experience issues over time, which could weaken the lender's rights to the assets. In response, we launched Lien Manage as a distinct technology-enabled service to improve our customers' ability to proactively manage their lien portfolios. This solution includes a monitoring service that automatically searches across jurisdictions for borrower updates, such as company name changes or tax lien filings, and provides these updates to the lender.
Auto continuation replaces manual lender processes to track renewal dates with a service that alerts lenders before the lien expiration dates and facilitates automated extensions. Analytics and reporting applies advanced technology to multiple data sets in order to provide lenders with insights on the health of their lien portfolio at any given time, surfacing potential errors in liens and comprehensive reporting on the lender's priority position. Portfolio Sync is a service that addresses situations when lenders inherit new lien portfolios. That typically happens with mergers or acquisitions. It automatically pulls these inherited liens into customer dashboards, allowing them to better manage these expanded portfolios. Overall, our Lien Manage solution has been a breakthrough innovation that provides our customers with greater transparency, information, and intelligence. It is used by some of the largest banks in the country to manage risk, and now contributes close to 10% of our overall revenues.
I would like to highlight another innovation, one where we are leveraging augmented intelligence to improve our own internal processes. In this example, we are using a digital twin technology to dramatically improve performance in our iLien Motor Vehicle product. Liens on motor vehicles must be filed within the vehicle title department at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMVs, of a given jurisdiction. DMVs have very little automation and no meaningful standardization between states when titling, often requiring multiple paper documents, original copies, and signatures to file the lien. Approximately 20% of vehicle liens are never processed. With over $1 trillion in outstanding auto loans, there is significant exposure. The image on the left is a vehicle titling form from Texas, one of the largest and most complicated states to correctly file a lien. In this one state, our employees must be highly qualified subject matter experts.
They must understand 94 forms, 2,000 fields, and 800 conditions. If they make an error, the filing will be rejected by the jurisdiction, delaying the lien and adding risk for the lender. Through the application of augmented intelligence, we codified these Texas requirements to create the digital twin. It helps our human expert processors ensure document packages are correct by checking for completeness, validating data, cross-checking fields, and populating forms for fulfillment, for fulfillment. Our Texas submissions to the DMV are now at 96% accepted at first submission, which is virtually unheard of in this industry. To add some perspective, our team visited a very large vehicle financer a few weeks ago, and we learned that their rejection rate is higher than 30%. This technology is transferable.
We are expanding its scope across all states, which should drive higher accuracy, faster speed, and lower risk of financial loss for customers. In addition, it will provide greater efficiency for our operations, reducing processing time by up to 45%. This is another example of deploying advanced technology to make the complex simple, automate the manual, and move from information to actionable intelligence. And now I'll hand back to Steve to touch on our legal services segment and share some final remarks.
Thank you, Suzanne and Vikram, for sharing these exciting developments. Before closing my section and handing it over to Alex, I wanted to share some comments on our legal services segment. Since taking over FCC, I have been consistently impressed and excited by CT Corporation, so let me tell you a little bit about the business. CT Corporation is the leading provider of corporate services and entity management solutions to all types of companies in the U.S. market. Our technology-enabled expert services support the entirety of the business life cycle while providing transactional support for the M&A deal workflow in partnership with law firms. In addition to formation and dissolution services, we provide entity management capabilities, including registered agent services, annual report filings, and business licensing filings as well, along with a variety of other services tailored to the requirements of the 50 states and local jurisdictions.
Importantly, we marry a premium service experience with leading technology and tools for our customers. For example, our entity management software automates data entry, integrates workflows for our customers to ensure that corporate records remain accurate and accessible. As another example, we provide technology-enabled capabilities for UCC filing and due diligence, which includes interactive charting, e-filing, and monitoring as well. Across CT, we offer a variety of content and compliance tools, such as our web-based platform for customers to review their business licenses portfolio and review details around renewal dates, jurisdiction fees, and application status.
It is in these areas that the long history and breadth of expertise at CT Corporation across all 50 states and the District of Columbia truly stands out from the market, resulting in a customer base that includes 70% of the Fortune 500, 95% of the Am Law 100, and well over 300,000 companies and businesses of all sizes. CT Corporation has placed the customer at the center of everything it does since its founding in 1892. To that end, we continue to invest in tools and technologies to drive efficiency and automation, while deploying new products and services to enhance the leading customer experience in the market. We see a very bright and promising future for CT Corporation. I will conclude by summarizing the key points we discussed today.
FCC is a strong and vibrant franchise with two leading businesses that are rooted in deep compliance expertise in the banking and corporate sectors. We are perfectly aligned to key market and regulatory drivers that are shaping our industries, and importantly, we stand ready to help our customers respond and navigate these changes. We see digital adoption as the future and are weaving technology capabilities into our products and services to accelerate this transition, drive efficiency, and improve customer outcomes in both of our business segments. I would end by saying that I could not be more excited about the prospects of the FCC division. I hope that this portion of the session has been informative and educational, and I thank you for joining us today.
Now, I would like to introduce Alex, who leads the AI discipline within Wolters Kluwer ESG and who will provide an update on technology innovation underway across the company. Alex, over to you.
Thanks, Steve. Hello, everyone. I'm Alex Tyrrell, and I serve as Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology and Product Engineering in the Digital Experience Group , or ESG. I will be discussing ESG and our mission within Wolters Kluwer. ESG was created over 10 years ago, and during this time, it has grown both organically, as well as through the integration of software development teams that were part of a Wolters Kluwer business or division. This year, we made significant progress in centralizing the ESG group, more than doubling its number of FTEs. Today, ESG is a cohesive virtual organization spanning the globe. Our mission is to drive faster, more efficient innovation, and to leverage our technology investments to drive value for our customers.
We offer scalable services and technology to all five divisions at Wolters Kluwer, with 4,500 people, including over 60 AI experts, who work closely with our teams around the world. Our organizational structure includes divisional leads, who provide vertical alignment, along with horizontal support from the specialized talent in our centers of excellence. We have 6 centers of excellence, as you can see on this slide, ranging from user experience to artificial intelligence to application security. These COEs are at the heart of our strategy to transition from information products to expert solutions. Now, Wolters Kluwer has been using AI in our products for more than 10 years. A growing part of the company's investment has been devoted to embedding AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and deep learning into our products.
We view large language models as another powerful tool that can be deployed to add value for our customers. Today, around 50% of our digital revenues are from products that leverage AI to some degree. We are using AI to enhance solutions such as UpToDate, CCH AnswerConnect, or to optimize back-end operations, such as those of CT Corporation. Products such as CCH iQ , Sepsis Monitor, and LegalView Bill Analyzer would not exist without AI. We are currently evaluating dozens of use cases across all five divisions, some in close collaboration with customers. We use these use cases aim to redefine product experiences through enabling next-generation, cloud-native, hyper-personalized products, which deeply embed and automate customer workflows, support their decisions, and naturally interact with users. Examples range from adding a human-like conversational interface to our content to providing tools that support document drafting and summarization.
In some cases, we are partnering with large tech firms, including Google and Microsoft. All this work is seen across Wolters Kluwer, with each division leveraging AI to drive customer-facing innovation in existing new products. In our specific professional markets, it is critical that we deliver accurate, reliable, and up-to-date answers and that we follow a careful, responsible process, as guided by our AI assurance framework and responsible AI principles, to ensure that technology is deployed with the right guardrails. Wolters Kluwer strives to create AI systems that are human-centric, focused on solving business problems and benefiting our customers, while also considering the potential impact they may have on society and our environment. We follow a lean methodology that governs our approach to innovation by ensuring we adhere to development standards and processes that promote responsibility and accountability for AI and their outcomes.
The lean methodology also ensures we meet a true customer need, that it brings the customer value, and that we do not invest time and resources without customer validation. As part of the lean approach, we begin with a conversation between the customer and our UX research team. We focus on the customer journey as part of a discovery process... and work towards a common understanding of a particular problem. We call this the nascent stage, and this is where we validate a customer problem solution fit before we invest or scale. In this early phase, we introduce a business canvas model, which will help us understand the commercial value over the lifetime of a project, and we begin the process of IP protection and identifying any new inventions.
Prior to beginning even the earliest design phase, we strive to identify if AI is needed, whether it be traditional or generative. This is a critical stage gate at which we begin our responsible AI product lifecycle, as depicted on this slide. First, we focus on privacy and security early in the design, development, and deployment of AI in our products and services. We also aim to design and develop AI systems with sufficient transparency and explainability to enable users to understand and use the system appropriately. Wolters Kluwer recognizes the importance of treating people fairly and without discrimination in the design and development of AI products and services, and that we, and we therefore perform a bias and fairness assessment. Once a solution is determined to be a good fit to a customer problem, we develop a business model and conduct product validation.
This will determine whether a problem solution fit will be a candidate for further investment into a commercial product. As we move toward the mature stage, we address risk mitigation and risk management, which also continues after deployment as part of our continuous MLOps processes. Rigorous testing then ensures the accuracy and reproducibility of outcomes. Controls and monitoring functions are created to ensure ongoing reliability and adherence to our standards and processes. Recently, we announced AI Labs for UpToDate, a collaborative resource that brings the power of generative AI to UpToDate, our market-leading clinical decision support solution, helping medical professionals make more informed decisions. Gen AI and LLMs have taken the world by storm. However, hallucinations and data biases are a major concern in the medical field, and healthcare professionals are looking to us for direction.
Therefore, we have been hard at work to incorporate these technologies into UpToDate in an ethical and responsible way to enhance user experience and productivity. Using AI Labs, clinicians can ask questions, for example, about a diagnostic testing or a medication, and get a direct answer using Gen AI that is grounded in trusted and verified UpToDate content, avoiding problematic hallucinations. By saving time at the point of care, healthcare professionals are able to spend more of their attention, focus on patients, and deliver best care everywhere. On this slide, you can see an example, which begins on the left-hand side of the screen, with the relevant passages related to a user's request to identify the preferred antibiotic for community-acquired pneumonia in an outpatient. This is the type of search result that an UpToDate user would experience today and may include a number of relevant passages.
With Gen AI, a synthesized summary can give a more direct answer, which is shown on the right. Further, the synthesized answer is grounded in trusted and verified UpToDate content and includes the relevant sources from UpToDate, which the user can confirm for accuracy and relevance. Now, in addition to our focus on driving innovation and customer-facing solutions, we are also evaluating generative AI across a number of internal use cases. While adhering to the same responsible AI standards by focusing on internal business process transformation, we can leverage the power of Gen AI at scale in the hands of our highly skilled subject matter experts, technologists, marketing, and customer service professionals. One important example includes our customer support functions.
Here, we have the advantage of an existing chatbot platform that has been in development for over five years, using large language models to solve traditional NLP tasks, such as understanding the user's intent, extracting semantic information from a large corpus of content, and providing direct question answering within specific domains. By developing the newer class of foundational models in a generative capacity, we can potentially expand the scope of our chatbot platform, answering more questions across different domains, all with much lower technical investment required in traditional applications of AI. Another very promising direction involves placing generative AI in the hands of our software engineers, testers, and subject matter experts to improve productivity and streamline the software lifecycle. Technologies like Microsoft Copilot can assist in writing code, testing software, and can even help improve application security. Lastly, I'd like to mention editorial, marketing, and sales functions.
Here, the goal is to automate the more mundane and repetitive tasks, making our dedicated and talented editors, marketers, and salespeople more productive and moving their expertise up the value chain to focus on more of the customer experience and improving customer ROI.
Thanks for your time. We're all happy to take your questions, and so I will now hand back to Meg to moderate.
Meg, you're on mute.
It's great, thank you. Thank you to all our speakers for those great presentations. So we're now going to open this session for questions. And so at this point, I'm gonna hand over to the operator, who will remind you of the instructions to pose a question to the team. And after we cover a number of questions on the conference call, we will move to questions that have come in via email or on the webcast platform. So Bruno, would you go ahead and open for questions?
Sure. Thank you, Meg. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. That's star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, star followed by two, and please do also remember to unmute your microphone when it's your turn to speak. We'll now wait a couple of seconds to gather any questions. Okay, we do have our first question, comes from Adam Berlin from UBS. Adam, your line is now open. Please proceed.
Hi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for the presentation. I'm gonna try three questions, if that's okay. The first question I have, just following up on the final speaker, have you tried to quantify how large the cost savings from deploying generative AI internally might be? You know, it could just be a range or something like that, but is it 5% of your cost base? You know, can you give us some sense of how material you think the opportunity can be in terms of cost savings for the business as you deploy those really interesting ideas that you talked about in the presentation? My second question is on... Do you want to do them one at a time, or do you prefer to do all three?
Let's do them one at a time. Nancy, why don't you cover that question about cost savings?
Yeah.
So, it's still early days in terms of, you know, how much we can quantify. Where we actually are really focused is less on the cost savings, we believe that will come, but really on freeing up, you know, kind of resources. Because where we're deploying GenAI, in particular, is around some of our editorial functions and some of our technology software development functions, and those are sort of the most precious resources, you know, within the company. So if we can free them up, we can, again, increase the velocity of our innovation. So that's really, you know, a big part of the focus, and it, again, of course, we will...
you know, I'm confident we will achieve some level of cost savings, but precisely how much that is, it's too early to tell at this stage.
Okay. Look forward to hearing more from that from you about that in the future. My second question was on legal services. You gave us on page 11 some examples of competitors, but one that wasn't on there was LegalZoom, which talks about doing registered agent services and is obviously growing quite quickly. Just interested why you didn't mention them, and are they kind of an interesting competitor? Can you just talk about maybe the competitive dynamics in that space and LegalZoom in particular, if you can?
Thanks, Adam. Steve, would you take that question?
Yeah, happy to, Meg. Adam, you know, what I'd say is CT Corporation is focused on serving corporations, small businesses, and the law firms that support them with kind of a full array of corporate services. And so our premium offering is less suitable for some segments of the market, like certain small start-ups and individual entrepreneurs. So given the difference in our target markets, as well as some differences in our service offerings and solution set, we generally do not consider ourselves as competing directly with LegalZoom. You know, as just a reminder, part of our value proposition is deep expertise in the rules and regulations at the transaction level across all the jurisdictions that we support, and that really is then delivered through that more comprehensive expert solutions, suite of products.
Okay, thanks very much, Steve. And then one question on Compliance Solutions and particularly the digital lending products that you talked about. To what extent are you selling that software directly to the banks, you know, that are then, you know, using that software and deploying themselves? Or are you sending them to intermediary software companies, and you're providing kind of a module within the broader digital lending workflow? Can you explain that? And if it's more the latter, what is the risk that those broader workflows can kind of create their own solutions and not need to use things like eOriginal or Expere anymore because they can kind of build the document preparation part of it themselves?
Thank you. Vikram, are you willing to address that question?
Absolutely. Happy to take that. Thanks for the thoughtful question. So it's important to understand that we go to market with our digital lending software, eOriginal, and most of our compliance solutions products, both directly and indirectly. So we have a substantial channel of selling directly to banks and non-bank lenders through our own sales team. We also have a substantial channel of working with other companies in the space, like ICE and other partners, to sell as part of their larger solutions. So I would emphasize that largely we collaborate with those companies that focus on loan origination systems. However, in both cases, for the most part, the end transaction and end relationship is directly with the bank. So even in those channel partner situations, the channel partners create relationships for us, but by and large, we sell directly to the banks.
The larger part of our book of business regardless of which channel we sell through, is a direct relationship between us and our customers, and that's why we have extremely high retention rates. It's a very sticky business with multi-year contracts, and it's why we also have seen a lot of success in working with those customers to upsell and cross-sell our other solutions across the portfolio. So we think we're in a strong position in terms of direct banker relationships. We are a highly valued partner to those banks, in some cases, their most valued partner, and the risk of disintermediation for us is fairly low.
Okay. Thank you very much. That was very helpful.
Our next question comes from Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Nick, your line's now open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, guys. I've got three questions as well. First one, do you have any opportunities to move your transactional revenues more aggressively to subscription revenue by perhaps offering some discounts to achieve that in the next couple of years to reduce divisional volatility, which shows up on a Wolters Kluwer level and becomes a bit of an issue sometimes for market participants looking at the business? Second question, as you hit easy comps in transactional revenues next year, should we logically see an improving revenue growth trend for the division as a whole, or does that logic not follow through for next year? And third question, just on the Gen AI enhancement to UpToDate that you were helpfully presenting to us, does that have the potential to change the revenue growth of that product?
When might we start to see any revenue benefits from that?
Great. Thanks, Nick. Steve, perhaps you could take Nick's first two questions on the shifting more to recurring, if that's possible, and whether going into 2024, you think you have easier comparables that might be helpful to the revenue trajectory.
Yeah, definitely, Meg. Nick, what I would say from a transaction versus recurring revenue mix, you saw in the earlier charts, that we've been focused on working with our customers to move that percentage up as an overall total mix over time. So that is gonna continue to be our strategy. And oftentimes, we find with customers, you know, they're very interested in multi-year agreements, even when the transaction is something that drives that first activity. And that's because it gives them also some scenario certainty as they plan and they budget. So we're gonna continue to have those conversations with customers. We've been on a slow and steady, I think, pace in terms of converting customers over to more recurring type revenues, and it also just speaks to the product mix that we have as well.
So I would say we should continue that trend, that's our strategy. As it relates to 2024, I would say, you know, in speaking with customers, just in general, you know, I think our customers look at 2024 as hopefully a more stable interest rate environment in the U.S., and with the possibility in the back half of the year of potentially some easement on rates, although I would say that's still quite a ways out. And coming into 2023, you know, rates have been higher and have stayed higher longer than I think most of our customers anticipated as well. So, you know, I'm optimistic that we'll see again more stability in the environment for both our customers and ourselves.
Great. Thank you, Steve. Alex, will you be able to address the third question that Nick had?
Yeah, sure. So AI Labs, which is powered exclusively by UpToDate, is working right now in tight collaboration with our customers to find areas where generative AI supports their needs. Yeah. So therefore, it's really too early to say when this will be ready for a commercial launch. We are gonna wait until both we and our customers are certain of the reliability of the solution, and therefore, it's also really too early to say how we will monetize or what we expect in terms of revenue growth at this time.
Yeah, if I can just add, Nick, to that. You know, what if LLMs, you know, kind of go the way of all the other kinds of AI that we use, like natural language processing and machine learning, what we have found, because as you know, 50% of our digital revenues already touch AI in some way. So what we have found is that, often it enhances our retention rates. You know, we now have very high retention rates, even for some of our traditional digital information products. And then in some cases, when the product is sort of a 100% an AI product, of course, it does lead to new revenue streams.
So just to echo what Alex said, I think it's too early to tell, but we clearly believe that this new developments around LLMs is gonna be more opportunity for Wolters Kluwer, just in the broad.
Thanks. That's great.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. That's star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Thomas Singlehurst from Citi. Thomas, your line's now open.
Thank you, and thank you very much for the presentation. It's been excellent. I have three questions, the standard three, I'm afraid. The first one was just on of cyclicality beyond just, I suppose the interest rate environment and some of the sort of transactional activity. I mean, obviously, as you've described, you've got a lot of long-standing relationships, so I know that they, you know, a lot of customers onboarded. But I'm just interested in whether there has been any slowdown in the, in the pipeline in terms of bringing new customers on board, on board and, and sort of lengthening sales cycles, or whether because of the structural drivers of demand that you outlined, that process hasn't been impacted at all by the cycle. That was the first question.
The second question was on the cost side, because I think Steven made the point that you had sort of anticipated and seen the pressure on transactional revenue, and therefore decided to pay careful attention to the cost base. I'm just wondering whether there are any implications for that. You've obviously protected margin this year, but are there any consequences in terms of scope for growth next year? And if not, why not? And then the final question is, internationally, are there opportunities for you to take what you're doing and sort of do it elsewhere in the world, or you know, are those positions already taken by other players? Thank you.
Thanks, Tom. I think all three of those are for you, Steve.
Okay, let me take them one at a time here. On the cyclical nature of the market that we operate in, definitely, as I mentioned earlier, Thomas, interest rates and M&A activity are two of the key drivers. As we think about just our core base, though, with our customers, we've seen continued high retention rates on existing customer relationships. And typically, in the markets that we serve, regulations, and I would say, the complexity of what we've seen over the last several years, typically leads to conversations of what more we can do. And that—why is that? At the end of the day, whether it's good times or bad times in terms of a specific transaction cycle, compliance, transparency, and safety don't wane.
So that's really led to what I would share is just continued steady conversations with customers, often exploring what we can co-create together to just meet some of those emerging needs in the marketplace. On the cost side, and I mentioned this in my comments earlier, we did anticipate potentially a more challenging year on the transaction side of the division. And so again, we've just been good managers of expense, but very smart in terms of continuing to invest in our key product investments that are really fueling more longer-term growth. Linked to what Vikram spoke to, Suzanne, some of the innovations she shared, Alex touched on it, but we also have pending regulations, as we do every year, that our customers are counting on us to bring them an expert solution. So it really didn't slow down for us.
The team is just very experienced in managing through these different types of economic cycles. On the international opportunity, maybe what I would say, Thomas, there is, you know, the U.S. really is a very large, and we believe has strong secular trends for growth, and we really like the positions that we're in, to support those customers. However, you know, oftentimes we're working with customers, and they will lead us to, "Could you help?" And then just fill in the blank, whether that's international, a different type of transaction, or a different market. And so a good example would be, we do support some of our CT customers with global transactions, and we're able to meet that request.
And so we're constantly scanning the marketplace, you know, really focused on the customer's needs of where some of our existing solutions may extend, again, to whether it's a different geography or just a different workflow.
That's very clear. Thank you.
We currently have no further questions, so I would like to hand the call back to Meg, please.
Great. Thank you. So we have a question that's come in through the webcast, which I will try to do it justice. It's quite a complicated one, and I think it's for you, Vikram. So this participant would like to know more about ICE Mortgage Technology. And, you know, they're reminding us they own both loan origination software for mortgages, mortgage servicing software, electronic registration clearinghouse called MERS, Simplifile, which does connectivity to county clerks, and a pricing engine. So this participant would like to understand better, how do we exactly compete with them? Which parts do we compete with? Can you tell us what eOriginal's market share is, where they compete with the ICE Mortgage Technology?
You know, where are we competing with ICE, and where are we complementary? Basically, I think is what it boils down to. So, Vikram, please explain.
Good. Happy to. I think it's a very fair and very thoughtful question. In broad strokes, when we look at the market, we look at ourselves, ICE, Constellation. But when you come down to ground level and look at the market, it is important to understand that we play in the same market from very different perspectives. ICE and other companies like that are largely centered around loan origination, the actual activity of creating and selling the loans to customers, pricing the loans, selling them to individual customers, and that's obviously a very crucial part of the lending market. We choose largely not to focus on that piece of the lending market. We focus on the compliance aspects of the lending market, and so we are very complementary to what companies like ICE are doing.
We're complementary to almost all of those pieces that you mentioned, and that's why we partner with ICE. We partner with Dark Matter, which is the rebranded version of Black Knight that was disposed of as part of the ICE acquisition. We partner with most of the leading loan origination systems in the market because our strong and deep compliance focus makes us the leader in those compliance points that I touched on. And eOriginal is an aspect of that. Our Wiz Analytics business is an aspect of that. The iLien Lien Perfection is an aspect of that. Those are areas where we have a leading market position in all of those markets, if you look at those markets from a like-to-like perspective. So in the larger lending ecosystem, ICE is a very large company with a strong share in mortgage.
We have a leading share in compliance across mortgage, across auto, across equipment finance, across all those segments. So again, I would summarize by saying we are largely in a frenemy mode, but there are some small places around the edges where we do compete with ICE, but they are very small. Largely, we are a collaborator with them and other companies like ICE. So I hope that clarifies our market position. I will close by emphasizing, we focus on the compliance aspects. That's because that's very much in line with our overall Wolters Kluwer philosophy of marrying deep investments in human-led expertise in the domain, in regulation, with deep expertise in software.
Combining those two is our stock and trade in most of our divisions in Wolters Kluwer, and that's very much at the heart of what sets us apart and gives us a leading market position in the compliance aspects of the lending market. I hope that clarifies, speaks to your question. Back to you, Meg.
Thanks very much, Vikram. So I've got two further questions, and then I'm gonna hand back to the operator because we have another conference call question coming in. We've got a question here on Lien Solutions. Perhaps this is for Suzanne. Can you talk a little bit more about the revenue profile? Is it largely transactional, or do you have any recurring plans on that front? And can you talk a bit about how you are differentiated from your competitor that was mentioned on the side called CSC? And then the second question I've got here coming in is, Steve, you mentioned the Corporate Transparency Act. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about that. So first to Suzanne.
Sure. So the first question was about the nature of our business. Essentially, Lien Solutions is a transactional business today, but through our new solutions that we've been launching, we have the potential to drive some recurring revenues. Some of these solutions are at 40% subscription, even though they're still small in the penetration, so we are actively working that. And then, as far as our competitors, we are the market leader in the space. We have premium service with the highest customer satisfaction rates based on our research. We have a retention level over 95%, and we also have these innovations that we've worked on that I mentioned, like Portfolio Sync, that no one else in the market has. So we're very well-positioned in our market.
Great. Thank you. Steve, Corporate Transparency Act?
Yeah, Meg, and thanks for the question. So let me just start with the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, amended a U.S. regulation called the Bank Secrecy Act, generally aligned around anti-money laundering and additional transparency on the actual owners of entities. So it's estimated that the CTA will require over 30 million small businesses and other entities to start reporting their beneficial ownership information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which is a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, starting on January 1st, 2024. So Wolters Kluwer and CT Corporation have been out front in driving market awareness and thought leadership, working with all stakeholders in the marketplace to prepare for this.
In parallel, we've developed a technology solution to help both our customers and the professionals that we serve as well, in addition to other market participants, to complete this important reporting requirement on time next year, and more importantly, the ongoing reporting requirements, that this new regulation will require. This is just a great example of FCC's strategy of combining deep expertise with technology to meet a market need and help our customers and the professionals that serve them comply with new regulations, here in the U.S. Thanks, Meg.
Yeah, I think yeah, Meg, maybe I can just add a quick comment, you know, having, you know, been involved with the CT business for my entire career, more or less. A couple things. One is this is a major change for the customers, so this is a very, you know, kind of important regulatory event. Second, which I think is quite interesting from our perspective, is that Steve is partnering very closely with Jason Marx in TAA, because this is a relatively, I think, unique situation where, you know, accountants play a role with their clients in terms of meeting the requirement, as do legal departments and corporations and law firms.
So I think this is a great example of increased collaboration that we're seeing across Wolters Kluwer, not just on the technology front, but in some situations where, you know, accountants become a channel for this as well. So we're excited about the potential opportunity. Let's see how it unfolds, though, of course, it's early days.
Great. Thank you, Nancy. I'm gonna hand back to the operator 'cause I believe we have one more question that's come in on the conference call. Bruno?
Thank you, Meg. Yes, we did have another question coming through. We have a question from Konrad Zomer from ABN AMRO. So Konrad, your line's now open.
Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question. It's related to the decision by Wolters Kluwer to split up the reporting structure of the GRC division into two new divisions, which was announced to us about a year ago. Has anything changed in terms of your internal procedures? And in particular, if one of your clients wants to attract additional services, maybe ESG related, are you now supposed to divert them directly to the other division, or are you able to handle those requests internally within your division?
Perhaps, Nancy, you would start on that?
Yeah.
Yeah, just to give the overall-
And then Steve can-
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, so, so one of the driving forces behind the creation of the new division is that we put together four business units. TeamMate, which serves the internal audit professionals, financial risk and reporting, which was in GRC, that serves the banking with risk managements and reporting solutions. Enablon, which is squarely in environmental health and safety within larger corporations. And then, of course, CCH Tagetik, which is the corporate performance management suite, which serves the office of the CFO. So each of those businesses were basically beginning to assist clients who were coming to them and saying, "You know, I have these, you know, these ESG, whether it was reporting or operational things that I need to work on.
Can you help me?" And so it was because we were beginning to develop solutions across these four lines of business, all which were in three separate divisions. We decided that by moving them together, we could better satisfy customer needs. We're very well positioned in the market. We're the only real player out there that has these four components. We believe as we integrate them, we will be able to capture, you know, additional growth. So that was the motivation behind that. So a large part of what-
Mm-hmm
Y ou heard this morning from the team, they are not really, you know, serving customers that are responsible for ESG. So we believe there's a rather clean break, you know, between the ESG, kind of needs that our clients have now that we've formed the new division. So I don't know, Steve, if you wanna add further commentary, but there isn't really the sort of handoff kind of thing required today. But if there were to be, we would figure out a way to manage that from a process perspective. Steve, do you wanna add anything additionally?
Yeah, Nancy, I would just reiterate within financial and corporate compliance, we're really focused in on the financial services and the corporate professional persona, which does differ from the typical ESG professional persona. But of course, from a go-to-market perspective, you know, we are able to match the right expert solution with any customer's need. You know, again, as Nancy referenced on the Corporate Transparency Act, you know, we're definitely collaborating and working across divisions to ultimately just meet customer needs. So, we continue to do so with customers.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Okay, I think that concludes all of the questions that we have coming in on current channels. So, thank you to everyone for listening to our FCC and ESG update, and for the great questions. We hope this event provided you with a better understanding of our business and where we see opportunities. Please feel free to get in touch with IR if you have any follow-up questions or feedback, and we look forward to seeing you again in the near future. Thank you.