I'm Ben Tregoning, Company Secretary. Prior to the commencement of the formal meeting, I will cover some administrative matters. Shareholders who have registered to join will be able to ask questions and vote on resolutions during the meeting. All resolutions will be determined by a poll vote. Votes received prior to the meeting will be displayed on the screen during the meeting, and the final voting results, including votes cast electronically during the meeting, will be released to the ASX later today. Instructions for how shareholders can ask questions and vote on resolutions were included in the virtual meeting guide distributed to shareholders and will be shown on the screen.
If you progress to the first slide.
To ask a question, you can ask a question in two ways: either through a written form as described on the screen here, or via live audio to speak via your computer's audio. We ask that if you are choosing the live audio option, that you notify us in the written form so that we can invite you to speak. There are three resolutions that require voting today. Sorry, to vote will be clearly displayed on the screen, the three options that you can select. The votes will remain open for one minute during the meeting, during the time which you'll be able to select your vote. I'll now hand over to Tony Walls.
Thanks, Ben, and welcome, everybody. Welcome to the 2024 Annual General Meeting for Objective. So I'm going to read from the script and go through the formal part of the agenda, and then I will, as per usual, I will go through my address, talk about the financial highlights for 2024, go through the company strategy, have a look at each of the business lines, and summarise with the strategic priorities. Then we're going to hand over to questions at the end. Hopefully, we'll get through all of that within about 25 minutes. So let me, first of all, start with the formal part of the agenda. Okay. So I wish to welcome you to the Annual General Meeting of Objective Corporation Limited. My name is Tony Walls, and I'm the Chairman and CEO.
I'm reliably informed that we have a quorum, and I declare the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Objective Corporation open. The AGM is being conducted as a virtual meeting, and I would like to introduce you to our board members who are attending the AGM: Darc Rasmussen, Stephen Bull, and Nicholas Kingsbury, as well as Ben Tregoning, our Company Secretary, and Nathan Balban representing our auditor, Pitcher Partners. So, as I said, immediately after the close of the formal part of the meeting, we intend to have a short update which will deal with the past year and the future prospects for the company, and there'll be an opportunity for shareholders to ask questions at this time.
So the notice of meeting, the notice of meeting has been circulated to all registered shareholders in accordance with the ASX Listing Rules and the Corporations Act, and the notice of meeting is taken as read. Note that voting exclusions relating to each resolution are detailed in the notice of meeting. We'll now move to the formal meeting agenda and agenda item number one. Pardon? Agenda item number one, the financial statements and reports. One back. Statements and reports of the directors and the auditor for the company for the year ended 30 June 2024.
The financial statements and reports have been in the hands of members for the statutory period. Shareholders are not required to vote on the reports or financial statements. However, you have the opportunity to ask questions to the directors and the auditor. Are there any questions concerning the 2024 annual report or financial statements?
I'll turn to you to ask questions.
Okay. This is a question from Stephen Mayne. Did any proxy advisors recommend against the remuneration report, and which of them did reports? I can advise that we did not, we were not aware of any recommendations of voting against the report. So the proxy results will define that, but I think that's more relevant to item number two.
Is that the only question?
In relation to the financials, also, Stephen Mayne has asked, when did we last tender the audit, and when will we tender the next audit? I've answered that question as well. The last tender of the audit, well, Pitcher Partners was appointed as the auditor in 2002. However, since that time, there has been a number of different auditors, audit partners who have been responsible for the engagement, and we and Pitcher Partners have always complied with the requirements around partner rotation to maintain independence. We don't currently have plans to tender the audit.
Thanks, Ben.
There are no further questions on that item.
Okay. Thank you. I declare the financial statements and the reports of directors and the auditor of the company for the year ended 30 June 2024 received. So we will now move on to the item number two, the first resolution. Please note that pursuant to Section 250R(2) of the Corporations Act, it requires that a resolution to adopt the remuneration report be put to a vote of shareholders, and shareholders have the opportunity to discuss the remuneration report at the Annual General Meeting.
However, under Section 250R(3) of the Corporations Act, the vote on this resolution is advisory only and does not bind the directors of the company. I now move that the remuneration report of the company, as set out in the directors' report for the financial year 30 June 2024, be adopted. Before voting on this motion, is there any discussion?
I think we've already addressed the question around the proxy advisors that was related to this resolution.
Okay. Thank you. A summary of the proxies received are displayed on the screen. The Chairman will vote all undirected proxies in favor of this resolution. If you have not lodged a proxy and are voting during the meeting, please indicate your vote in the poll now on the screen. Is there a statutory period for which we wait for the votes, Ben?
We're waiting one minute.
One minute. Okay. Just talk among yourselves for a minute, or we'll be back shortly. All right. Thank you. We now move to agenda item number three, retirement and re-election of directors, and the second resolution, the re-election of Mr. Nick Kingsbury as a director. Mr. Nick Kingsbury retires by rotation. The explanatory notes provided with the notice of meeting give a brief description of Nick's experience. I move that Mr. Nick Kingsbury, who retires as a director in accordance with the company's constitution and being eligible for re-election, is re-elected as a director of the company. Before voting on this motion, is there any discussion?
There is a question from Stephen Mayne around the director election. Could Nicholas summarise his full history with Tony Walls, how independent is he? I think just before you address this question, Tony, I think it is worth pointing out that the assessment of Nick's independence and the board's rationale for that is detailed in the Appendix 4G corporate governance statement for 2024, which I would refer all the shareholders to read on this basis. But further question is, could Nicholas summarise his full history with Tony Walls.
Okay. Well, we've never been on holidays together, but I'll pass over to Nick. Are we going to bring Nick to the stage, or would you like me to just cover that off?
I think you can cover it, Nick. Sorry, I think you can cover it, Tony.
Okay. All right. Thanks, Stephen. I should have said earlier, it's a pleasure having you here at our board meeting again. I know you're an alumni, and I do know that you were going to attend 41 AGMs today, so I look forward to hearing how many you got through. But we put this on nice and early to accommodate you, so thanks for joining us. Look, with respect to Nick, clearly I've known Nick for a long period of time. Nick has been through, obviously, Nick is based in the U.K., and Nick has sort of worked for several VC companies over time.
I'm in the U.K. reasonably regularly, and Nick obviously spends a reasonable amount of time on his role at Amadeus, where I think you will note from the other information that's already been circulated, Nick's got a number of non-executive roles with respect to his four-day-a-week engagement at Amadeus and a couple of minor sort of professional and non-professional roles that he does in his own time. So I think it's fair to say that Nick has a full day a week as required to participate in Objective Corporation matters and has always made himself available whenever required. So I think the - look, the history of Nick is I didn't know Nick prior to his invitation to join the organization.
We met in the UK at an event, I believe it was 2009, and subsequent to that, Nick's work in the VC community in the UK was outstanding, and we invited Nick to join the board at that particular point in time. Over the years, Nick has obviously got to know each of the directors, and I think that probably the conversation between the non-executive directors is closer than Nick's relationship with me per se. I'm not sure what else I can really contribute apart from that. Are there any further questions?
There's another question on that from Stephen Mayne. Board candidates should give a speech. Will you commit to introducing this practice in future years?
Stephen, thank you. We'll certainly consider it, and perhaps we can engage offline, and you could give us your thoughts on what you would like board members to speak about.
I think we should open the poll.
Okay, so resolution number two, retirement and re-election of Mr. Nick Kingsbury.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. A summary of the proxies received are displayed on the screen. The Chairman will vote all undirected proxies in favor of this resolution. If you have not lodged a proxy and you are voting during the meeting, please indicate. Well, I've done that bit. You've voted on the screen now. So we'll now move to agenda item number four and the third resolution. This is the approval of the Employee Equity Plan. The company operates the Objective Corporation Limited Employee Equity Plan, which was last approved by shareholders at the 2021 AGM.
The purpose of the Employee Equity Plan is to further enable the company to attract, retain, and motivate outstanding employees who are driven to deliver superior long-term returns to shareholders by their shared ownership in the performance of the company. The explanatory notes provided with the notice of meeting give an overview of the Employee Equity Plan.
I move that for the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 7.2, Exception 13(b), and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the adoption of the Objective Corporation Limited Employee Equity Plan and the issue of equity securities under the EEP on the terms outlined in the explanatory memorandum during the three years following the date of this meeting. Please note that a director who is not eligible for participation in the EEP, please note that as a director who is not eligible for participation in the EEP, I recommend voting in favor of this resolution. The chairperson will vote all undirected proxies in favor of this resolution.
There is a question.
There is a question for Tony as well before we move to the poll vote, also from Stephen Mayne. Please summarise the history of vesting with past grants. Also, when disclosing the outcome of the poll, please include scheme-like disclosures so retail sentiment is made public. I think just to interpret this question, the history of vesting with past grants is detailed in our financial statements, and there are numerous different grants under different categories. I think it would be, we can take the question on notice to provide that, but there is a lot of different tranches of shares which are vested over different time periods.
There's also a question of also when disclosing the outcome of the poll, please include scheme-like disclosures so retail sentiment is made public. I believe that that has been done by disclosing the number of holders voting under each resolution, sorry, under proxy votes.
But again, I mean, I can take feedback on whether or not that meets the requirements.
Okay. Thanks, Ben. We move on to the poll now for that question.
Okay. Thank you. Just before you, if you're ready to close, just there are one last question, one of which I'll address and one other, both from Stephen Mayne. The question is, how are you linking up the online voting with the share registry, and how long will it take to get poll results to the ASX? We're linking it up with the assistance of our registry provider, Boardroom, and we will put the poll results to the ASX this afternoon as we have done in past years. The last question was, will you commit to doing a hybrid AGM next year? Virtual AGMs are poor practice, and very few ASX 300 companies do them.
Yeah. Thanks. Well, we're not an ASX 300 company at this point in time, and at this point in time, we are going to continue with the digital AGM or the virtual AGM until further notice. Okay. Thank you. So that brings us to the end of today's meeting, and I declare the meeting closed. I'll now move to the fun part and talk about an update of the company and its future directions. At the conclusion, look, hopefully, I know that there's a few of you that have got actual operational questions about how our company is actually performing, and so I'll try and give plenty of time for that at the end, or we'll give plenty of time for that at the end. So thanks. For those of you that are dropping off now, thanks for your attendance today.
Let's, first of all, just reflect on where we got to at June 30, the financial highlights. Revenue, AUD 118 million. Our annualized recurring revenue, AUD 105 million, which was up 11% in total and 15% on the SaaS ARR number versus the prior year. The adjusted EBITDA was up significantly. Obviously, there was an accounting change in terms of best practice for software companies being the capitalization and amortization of software, but as that rattles through, I can't promise a 66% increase on the current year.
That also led to, obviously, quite a lift in NPAT using the same accounting policies as what globally all SaaS companies are adopting these days. Further than that, research and development was up to AUD 28 million, which represented 30% of software revenue. I've got some other slides on that which we'll look at shortly.
Operating cash flow up significantly, AUD 56 million, and cash also up significantly at AUD 96 million at the close. We have noted before we were certainly ahead in terms of cash collection for the half, so I wouldn't expect it to be up 32% in the current year, notwithstanding there was a lot of forward payments from customers, which is a good indication of hopefully how happy they are with our work, and then the dividend per share up to AUD 0.17, of which AUD 0.08 was fully franked. All in all, we know shareholders were delighted with those numbers, and as were we as a board. If we look at the big story, and I think for those of you that have followed us for a long period of time, it's really this recurring revenue story.
We worry a lot less about the headline revenue number because we know what drives, I guess, our flywheel, our economic engine room, as well as that as sort of long-term customer vitality, is really this recurring revenue number. So we're now out to, for the first time ever, 100% subscription software revenue, and currently, or as of June 30, we were at 81% recurring revenue, and I think we'll find, well, we'll definitely find by the end of 2025 that number has continued to march on as a percentage and in dollar terms as well. This probably gives you a bit more of a fine-grained analysis. We've got this very strong ARR/CAGR over the last five years of 18% on the left-hand chart, and on the right-hand chart, just showing you really what's happening with the SaaS growth.
So I think if you look at most companies that have done what's euphemistically called the SaaS flip, what actually happens is as SaaS grows markedly, the traditional revenue lines tail off, and there's a balancing effect. Over time, you would expect that is going to happen here at Objective as well. You can see our upgrade and support program there, the light blue chart at the bottom. USP stands for Upgrade and Support Program. That has been still growing very modestly at the same time as our SaaS revenue has gone up. And you can see here that the SaaS line has been, the CAGR over that same period of six years has grown at 31%. So I think that's really the underlying story. I think there's probably many of you on the call will appreciate that.
And at the same time, we've been driving the non-recurring revenue down, and you can see this over time. This is largely services. We had some software in here in prior years, as you would know from the perpetual right to use trail off, but you can see very much from the 2021 year, we've been sort of tidying this off as we've completed the conversion to the SaaS-only model. So I think the takeaway there is that's sort of driving very healthy margins. If I move along to company strategy, first of all, sort of a slight restatement of our mission. We've just tightened this up. I love removing words from company missions. We're probably down to the minimum now. Outstanding GovTech driving stronger communities and nations. It's just the use of the word GovTech.
I think sort of globally, we've seen more and more people adopt that term for what we do, and I think it's a good way to make sure that we're all talking about the same thing. So apart from that, no real other changes to this mission. I think the other thing that happened during the year and certainly during the last couple of months, and in particular, I'll talk about our event in a moment, is really getting back to post-COVID. I think the post-COVID era, certainly in the markets that we serve, being predominantly public sector, not so much getting back to the office, but just getting back into also the rhythm of doing business, fitting with annual budgets, getting projects underway, making sure that government agencies are appropriately resourced.
We've found quite a new balance in this past sort of 12 months, and a big part for us is just reinforcing what our DNA has been. So our focus on innovation, our focus on quality, and really ensuring that customers are getting the best out of the solutions that they get from us over a long period of time. I think where historically people appreciate just how low our churn rate is from a customer perspective, I think that really has been core to our financial performance as well. As I mentioned, we had a fantastic event for the first time in five years. We brought everyone together for our Activate Conference, which we've done historically; I think it dates back to sort of the mid-2000s.
Obviously, during COVID, we attempted to do that digitally and were moderately successful, but this year was the first year we brought everyone back together. Look, that cost us a lot of obviously money, but also a huge investment in time by the team here, and it was really fabulous to get everyone back together. As much as I think at first blush, we thought this was a lot of effort that we would do every couple of years, I think that the response from our people has been so fantastic that we've committed to making sure that this becomes part of our ongoing or returns as being part of our ongoing DNA again, including bringing people from the U.K., the U.S.
We obviously have the New Zealand crew here this year, and just a really strong event for talking about where we're going, getting people aligned, and outlining the strategic plans and the changes that we've made to the operating business, as well as having customers come and join us. So we had a lot of customer presentations about the value that they were getting from Objective Solutions, and I think that's good from a company DNA perspective to bring all people together. I think the things that are really called out for me, if I look at what's driving the market today, we have just these ongoing and rising expectations around scrutiny. Look, some people sort of say Australia is one of the most regulated countries in the world.
I think probably most of the Western world these days is a highly regulated environment, and if you think about what we do, we are providing efficiency to regulation, and we're providing transparency to regulation. So you can see these things here. There's some clippings on the right-hand side, and these things, we know that, I guess, and through all the social channels that we have, that there's increasing and driving expectations around governance. People expect regulators and new regulators to be stood up, and they expect them to be digital, and they expect them to be efficient.
And I think if you look at all the things that we do, it's in many places. New Zealand is probably a callout where there's a push to smaller government, and the first thing that happens with a push to smaller government is the embracing of technology to help support more efficient government regulation. So I think all those things have allowed us, and those demands and community pressures have allowed us to really sort of rise to the top in terms of the agenda for what our customers are trying to do. I've always said that I've never run a presentation internally or externally without this slide, and I hate to labor on it, but we've got sort of some, I guess, some small tune-ups. This is really our flywheel of innovation.
As you can see, it all starts at the top left-hand corner, and historically, we've said that was an increased investment in R&D, but I think if you look across our entire business, there's investments being made everywhere from customer success teams, from support teams, from engagement from a go-to-market perspective, from engineering, which is obviously the most significant part of our business today. We're investing in all of these facets, not just R&D.
That's delivering outstanding software, as you can see from all of the things that are resident on our custom pages on our website, the number of videos that we're putting out, that customers are talking about their experience with us has come to the fore from our small but effective marketing team. And ultimately, if we get those things right, we deliver this financial performance, which allows us to sort of do this over again.
And I think if you look at some of those charts that I showed earlier, this is just a manifestation of this flywheel of innovation, and we all know that the investment comes first, which is why you've seen the investment in R&D that you have seen over the past couple of years. Some people have asked me, "Has our investment in R&D peaked?" Look, it's probably as a percentage of revenue has peaked, but we have a deep-seated commitment to innovation as part of our DNA, as I showed earlier, and so that investment's going to always continue to expand.
I'll talk a little bit about our strategic pillars later on, but clearly, they're a deep part of the culture here at Objective as well, and it's those pillars, or really our mission combined with those pillars, and this flywheel of innovation that keeps driving those charts that you saw on the prior screens.
I've just been talking about this at a high level, but I think this chart really embodies the history of that investment over a period of time. This doesn't go back to the beginning of time, but certainly goes back to the beginning of Objective Corporation as an ASX-listed company. This is our 25th year. Ben just told me at the board meeting earlier that we get the opportunity to go and ring the bell for 25 years as a listed company somewhere next year, so looking forward to that.
But again, I think what's an interesting takeaway from this slide is just how deep our commitment to innovation is. And if you look at the five bars on the right-hand side that have been called out there, 43% of our all-time R&D investments happened in the last five years, and I think for me, nothing gives customers more comfort than to see the level of investment that's going into the products that they've acquired from us. Equally, the core themes of this year in terms of innovation, like many, we are deeply invested in AI. It's a little bit like when there was a lot of talk about the cloud during the sort of the mid-teens. We've been there for such a long period of time, we kind of didn't really feel the need to talk about it so much.
I think we feel the same way a little bit about AI. We've been doing a lot of AI work for over a decade now. People have seen a lot of this stuff come through in computer vision, among other things, but you'll see us increasingly, and certainly in the second half, talk a lot more about the AI capabilities that have been borne out in the products today, and you'll see a little bit of that sort of filter into the mainstream media.
I think you will appreciate that the way that Objective works is we tend to announce things well after they've happened, as opposed to talk about moonshots and plans and aspirations that we might have. So let me just reassure you that there is a lot going on here that we're just not ready to surface yet, including the work that we're doing around AI.
So we'll be back in the new year to talk about that. Equally, without sort of laboring on about this too much, our work in ODL about our seamless user experience, our single pane of glass way of looking at a lot of our applications is being driven very, very hard here. Today, the product, the user experience of products is truly outstanding, and people know here that I'm a fairly tough marker, but I'm truly proud of the work that all of the teams are doing, not only in terms of the design, but then delivering those designs up, and I think we've even internally here, we have delighted end users of our own products, and I think you're well versed in the thoughts of sipping your own champagne, and we get the opportunity to do that every other day.
Equally, just to touch on the bottom two slides, I'll pass the slide. We are increasingly standardizing the way we take our product sets to market. So if you look across the Content Solutions business, it's really formed up around the Nexus brand, and you can see there the iconographies kind of changed a little, and those products are forming around that Nexus brand. Equally, in Reg Solutions, around the RegWorks brand, and also within planning and building around the Build brand. So you'll see more of that come through. As I often joke, once upon a time, people said, "You don't have enough products, and what are you doing? You're running out of market." And then eventually, you address that, and people say, "What's going on? You've got too many products.
You need to reduce those." So hopefully, we're getting to a sweet spot with the way that our product sets are seen in the marketplace, and I think that the way we're taking the product suite to market now is truly holistic, and customers really see the benefit in that sort of holistic approach, as well as the ability to buy individual pieces within one of the portfolio products. And on the right-hand side, it seems that we can't invest enough in security. The investment here in the security team, as you can see here, the security credentials, the amount of work that we're doing, obviously, we have some very sensitive customers and some not so sensitive, but the amount of work that we're putting into security is unparalleled here at Objective and will remain so well into the future.
So again, those credentials give customers the comfort that they need. Moving on to some of the business line insights, I'll try and whip through these just to give people the opportunity to ask questions around them individually, because I'm really just going to touch on some of the highlights that you've already seen at the full year. I think it's fair to say that everyone really understands that the three drivers for us are governance, regulation, and digital service. If you look at any of these solution sets, they really talk to each of those core pieces. And I liken the history of this to if I was doing an internal presentation, I'd show some Lego images right now, but it's probably a bit inappropriate to put up on the ASX.
But the way I tend to think of this is sort of back in the earlier years with Content Solutions is we had a pile of Lego bricks, and we could pretty much build anything, but we had repeatability was really a common theme. And sort of today, when you walk through the app store, you don't see bricks so much. You see the finished police station, the finished town hall, a lot of these things that are sort of pre-packaged. And if you will, in the simplest possible ways, think about what we're doing in Planning and Building as being a repeatable content management solution. You think about what we're doing in Regulatory Solutions. It's a repeatable content management solutions.
What underpins all these things is really great governance and workflow efficiency, along with digital engagement from round-tripping cases between the public, between government agencies, all the way back to the public again. And I think when you go and look at our website, you'll see that coming through in abundance, the amount of synergy that is occurring between these product sets. So I'll just go quickly through these couple of slides. Content Solutions here, you can see the core products. You can see the change in ARR for the year.
This is kind of historical information now. But just to sort of reassess, sorry, restate the target addressable market, we're just sort of calling out here the Australia and New Zealand market. Many of you will be aware now we've had a push on with 360, particularly in the U.S. We're seeing more customers come through the U.S. market.
We've just hired our first go-to-market people in the U.S., particularly focused on the Objective 360 platform. So we will talk about that in the fullness of time. I don't think we had any meaningful data for that market that we wanted to share at this point in time, but certainly in terms of the ANZ market, that gives you a picture. Some of the things here, I'll just sort of call out the transition to Objective Nexus.
These data points are as of June 30. We will give an update at the half year, but it's fair to say that there's been an ongoing push or pull really from customers to go from Objective ECM on-prem to Objective Nexus in the cloud, and that has been ongoing in this first half of the year, and as I said, we'll report that a little bit more at the full year.
I think I could talk for a long time about AI and government. It's fair to say that AI, and in particular, the way that information needs to go out to generative AI tools causes quite a lot of concern within government at this point in time. And I think you'll see in the new year the things that we've brought to market allow customers to both get the benefit of large language models and all things from OpenAI, but at the same time protect government's own information by doing the compute on-prem as well as compute in the cloud.
So we'll talk about that more at the full year. I think we may even have a white paper out on that shortly if it's not already out, but we'll give this some more color then. I've probably really touched on what we're doing.
This is really the picture around 360 in particular, how we're bringing objective intelligence to a lot of the applications that we've got, particularly in the content solutions area. We've got well over 100 customers globally that are all either already engaged in these platforms or are looking to move to these platforms, and again, if you want to know more about 360 and what we're doing around this transform, protect, curate, and federate area, that information's available on our website, and there are white papers available for that.
If I move on to planning and building, we continue to march ahead in New Zealand, particularly with Objective Build. As I said, at the half-year results, which I guess were only sort of eight or 10 weeks back now, so just to sort of restate, we are looking at taking Build to new markets.
We've got some data points here for you in terms of just to give you a sense of the scale. There are 80,000 consents in New Zealand. There's roughly 300 consents per annum in Australia and 400,000 in Australia, 400,000 in the UK. So this is a really large market without considering other markets that we are beginning to engage in. So I think from our perspective, the investments that we've been making over the past six years and the investments that were made before that by the companies that we acquired are in very safe hands. You can see here the ARR last year was probably a little more modest than what we would have expected, but I can reassure you that the full year ARR number for planning and building will be strong. Again, I've probably talked to this slide.
I've probably jumped ahead, but you will note, again, we've got some media clippings on the left-hand side of this particular slide, and it doesn't matter where you go. I'm sure anyone that's on the call would not have missed the discussion around affordable housing, the housing crisis that's occurring. I mean, pretty much everywhere I go in the world, this is an issue. It's not just Australia. It's not just New Zealand. It's even not just the UK, but everywhere this is an ongoing issue, and we certainly are in the right place at the right time with solutions that really help alleviate this issue. So again, at the half year, I think there'll be a whole bunch more that we can update you on, but certainly, there is a lot of political pressure being applied to solving this problem.
Here in Australia, you see this being addressed at state level, particularly in the most popular states. Here on the Eastern Seaboard, New South Wales, Victoria, this is a topic of hot debate at the moment, and governments willing to invest to alleviate the problem, as you can see by the, I guess, the level of media attention that it's currently getting.
Then RegWorks, while it was a fairly modest increase last year at 11%, again, our RegWorks solution is having a very strong start to the financial year. You can see here we have been asked the question of why is AUD 175 million in ANZ and only AUD 125 million in the U.K. We've been investing in the U.K. market for some period of time now, and we're trying not to get ahead of ourselves in terms of sizing that market. Do I think it will eclipse ANZ over time?
Without any doubt, again, the U.K. is a highly regulated world, and we're finding more regulators all the time. We are very active with the Institute of Regulators in the U.K., as we are with other industry groups here and industry bodies across Australia and New Zealand. So again, I think we're in a market, a niche market with a niche product in a market that's certainly alive and well, given the number of new existing regulators that don't have the best technology, as well as new regulators that have been stood up that have had a lightweight, digital-first, efficient regulation mindset. So again, I'm very encouraged by what we're seeing with Regulatory Solutions. The other part of the puzzle has been how do we deliver? Historically, these have been very large delivery projects.
That brings with it, I guess, cost to customers, as well as risk to both customers and Objective. We've got a new model here with the Accelerator Program, as I mentioned, at the full year, and probably half our projects now are falling, and half of the work that we're bidding for is falling into this accelerator model where we can go in and deliver customer outcomes at a much, much faster rate and at a lower cost, and I think that's some of the driver that you're seeing in terms of the reduction in non-recurrent revenue, because we're really driving down the cost of delivery, and we're not trying to monetize that and turn that into SaaS.
We're delivering that up to customers in terms of just lower cost to acquire the technology, but you can see here sort of the net effect of those couple of things.
And then finally, final slide before we open up to questions. I'd sort of touched on the overall way that we look at the Objective strategic plan these days. Everything here at Objective happens off this overall strategic plan, and then each of the business lines, as we've spoken about, content solutions, planning and building, regulatory solutions, they all drive off their own overall plans. Part of the key for us has really been around. I think it's becoming a bit of a worldwide thing that certainly in the GovTech space, investors are looking at EBITDA and impact.
I happen to be a I think I've always been of that view as to that's sort of what drives innovation at these companies. And we talk about it here in terms of the energy provided. We've got a target growth rate of 15%. It really drives enormous energy into the company.
But I think if I look at the overall thing that kind of drives a lot of what we do is this unparalleled domain expertise. You can see it there at almost the top left-hand corner. And I think for us, within each of our business lines, we've got this deep domain expertise, and I think that's what sort of drives a lot of the success that we have here at Objective.
Again, I just sort of call out these five strategic pillars: invest in our people, building outstanding products, achieving our go-to-market plans, delighting our customers, and being ready to scale, or operational excellence, as I often sort of term it here, and these enduring values, which I think for any of you that have ever visited one of our offices will know this is something that we celebrate not only with the graphics around the offices, but every month we have an overall company meeting where we celebrate these values. And we've got one on today, in fact, which I'm really looking forward to. So the overall strategic plan and the way that we've restarted this year has really set us up for, I think, the next decade.
We've got a lot of telemetry that drives the business off this plan as well and gives sort of feedback to the large number of people managers that we have here at Objective. So with that, I'm going to open it up to questions.
Okay. The first question, Tony, is from Christoph Cosmic. The question is, in terms of the products, which do you see as the primary engine for growth and customer acquisition in the next several years, and which capabilities in particular get potential customers most excited?
I think they all. People often ask me, "Who's my favorite?" I think they all have their own opportunity, and I genuinely could not tell you in five years' time which is going to be the biggest business unit or which is going to have had the greatest growth.
I think if I come back to it and I think sort of I probably think of it more holistically in terms of the Nexus brand, in terms of what we're doing in content solutions. I mean, this has been a long-tailed investment to get to the Nexus portfolio that incorporates 360 and a whole bunch of other technologies. It's almost a reinvention of what we've historically done. So as much as people sort of say that's the heritage product, while it is the heritage product, it has been largely reinvented over the last three years and certainly continues to be reinvented by a really talented group of people that are deeply invested in that tech. So I think that's going great. Build, I guess, I've been heavily involved with that team over the past five years.
Again, Build's not even a teenager yet, and it has a long way to go. We're able to also leverage what we've done in Trapeze. We're able to leverage what we've done in Keystone over time, which is now part of that. That's become Keyplan, which is a core part of what we're doing with planning and building. So I think from that perspective and the drivers that I've mentioned during the presentation, I think that has an enormous future. And certainly, from a regulatory perspective, I mean, with RegWorks, I mean, we've had some outstanding successes. You've seen the things in the media. No doubt around what we did at New Zealand Police and how well that's gone. I think we'll announce some other large contracts this financial year as well. It's driving really well.
And I think if we can capture the market's attention with what that product set can do and deliver it efficiently, I think we're going to have another massive driver of growth. So look, they'll all ebb and flow in their individual years. I'm often looking at two, three, five-year, and in some cases with things like Build, a 10-year horizon and beyond. People might say, "Well, that seems to be a long period of time." Well, a great example of that is we released the first versions of Objective ECM in 1997. And so we've built on that platform for a long period of time.
Here we are in almost 2025. So these products, you are building the foundations for a quarter of a century. I'm absolutely sure that what we're doing with Build will last a quarter of a century. And so we're building on really solid foundations.
And everything back in the early days of ECM, we would have said we would have cut corners to get to where we need to be. We just didn't have the funding or the expertise. Whereas today, with things like Build, we have the funding. We have the balance sheet. We have the expertise, and we're prepared to invest. And the same can be said for RegWorks. And so each of these things has a really long trajectory ahead.
Thanks, Tony. Same, it's another question from Christoph. In terms of regulatory solutions, the EU is known as a regulation superpower and a big market in its own right. Are there any plans to expand into the EU for the foreseeable future?
I wouldn't say the EU is a near-term target. It was better when the U.K. was part of the EU than I would have said yes.
But no, our focus at the moment is really Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. We've got a lot of activity in the UK, and it's quite possible that that would drag us into the EU, but it's not on the near-term horizon.
Okay. This question is from Christian Angelis from Blue Ocean. Tony, you mentioned that R&D may have peaked as a percentage of revenue. Is this driven by better use of capital elsewhere at this stage, i.e., in go-to-market, or is it around less opportunities for R&D, i.e., the products needing investment in?
Look, I think it's probably a little bit cyclical. I think to your question, I think we have an opportunity to invest a little bit more in go-to-market, most certainly. And I think if you were to benchmark our investment in R&D and innovation, we'd be up there with the biggest.
So in terms of percentage of revenue or percentage of software revenue, and I think it has grown substantially in terms of percentage, and it's grown very substantially in terms of dollars over the past five years. As I said, we're going to continue to invest. We certainly will be increasing our investment in dollar terms. It's just I would expect the growth rate to be. I'm sure you've done the math. I'm expecting the growth rate to be strong, and just hiring that number of people would become more of a challenge. So I think you'll no doubt do your own analysis on that, but I think we're not going to go to 40%, that's for sure. And we're really not going to drop back to 20%, but we are where we are.
Thanks, Tony. This question is from Sinclair Currie at MA Financial.
Is it possible to get some more insight into your plans and progress in the U.S. market?
We'll address that at the full year. We're signing new customers at the moment. As I mentioned earlier, we've hired sales capacity. We're looking to grow that sales capacity. I think we're well telegraphed. We have spent a lot of time in the last two years investigating M&A in the U.S. We've been closed a couple of times, but I think the best use of capital when do you just look at how much capital needs to be deployed to acquire a capability. I think in the current environment, for us anyway, it makes the most sense to build it, and that also gives us less complexity, and I think that's just a stronger way to go forward at the moment.
That's not to say that we're not continuing to look at M&A and we're not continuing to look at the U.S., but I think that the fastest way we already have an installed base of customers in the U.S. to draw upon, and I think we just need to have some go-to-market firepower that we can rely upon on both the East and the West Coast. And I think that will sort of continue to inform what we do going into the 2026 year.
Okay. Thanks, Tony. This question is from Andrew Swaffer. It's been a while since you've updated us about Objective Connect. Could you please give us some insights into the product's progress or investors not being updated because the product is not enjoying the success of past?
It's a good question. So look, Connect continues to grow.
It hasn't grown in the last 12 months at the historical growth rate that it had, but it's one of the areas that we're investing in at the moment. We still think it has all the promise that it originally had. It's not to say that it's not growing, and it's not to say that the margin's not growing. It's just that we think there's an opportunity to accelerate that beyond what it was historically doing. So I think it's fair to say that we don't split out lots of the products now. You end up getting analysis paralysis because, as I said earlier, we look over the term. I kind of look at the world in terms of what does the rolling two- to three-year trajectory look like, and I think that's a better way to do it.
We know that products perform differently in different years for different reasons. Sometimes they need a feature. Sometimes they need more investment in marketing. And you can't invest in every last product at the same rate every year. So I think, again, we'll probably talk more about this at the half year, but there is a- I'm not sure if I should call it a doubling down, but there's quite an investment going on in Connect as we move into the 25 calendar year.
Okay. This question is from Evan Karatzas at UBS. Any additional information you can provide on Build's expansion into markets outside of New Zealand? Should we expect to sign contracts to what you speak to at the half-year result?
The best I can give you is there's clearly activity.
I'm not going to talk about the activity until deals are closed, and I think then we've got something to talk about. But look, we're active in lots of markets. I can't give any more color to it than that. I mean, so there's competitive situations as well as I think at Objective, we like to stay under the radar until we've achieved something. Anyone can win the Talk It Up Cup. I'd just sort of rather deliver the result and then talk about that result if that's okay.
Okay, Tony. That's all the questions we had. All right.
Thanks, Ben. Look, I really appreciate everyone joining the AGM today. And look, I look forward to what have we got? We've got a bit over 90 days until we're back again. And no doubt update you on the first half's progress.
And hopefully, some of the questions that have come out of today, I'll be in a position to give you a whole lot more information on. Thanks again. Enjoy your day.