Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Objective Corporation's FY 2025 Financial Results. Appreciate your time. Let's start off with just also, I guess, talking about our purpose. We show this at the beginning of all the presentations, regardless of whether it's investor relations, employees, or customers. That is outstanding GovTech driving stronger communities and nations. What I'm going to cover today is four areas: the FY 2025 financial summary, which I know some of you will be pouring through from the ASX, talk about the highlights of the year, go through a business line overview, and then conclude with a discussion about the outlook for 2026.
Just having a look at the financial highlights, the key numbers: revenue of AUD 124 million, annual recurring revenue of AUD 120 million, adjusted EBITDA of AUD 46 million, net profit after tax of AUD 35 million, an investment of 30% of software revenue or AUD 31 million in R&D, operating cash flow of AUD 46 million, cash at AUD 99 million, and the full year dividend at AUD 22 million. Obviously, this year we added the interim dividend, of course. We'll start off and talk just very briefly about innovation. It's been a huge year of innovation here. We talk about it in the slides further down, but as has been sort of consistent for quite a long period of time now, we've had a significant investment in R&D again this year. In the last five years, that's been AUD 135 million invested primarily here in Australia.
We also have a small R&D center in New Zealand and one in the UK. Of that, 44% of our total all-time R&D investments since we listed on the ASX, 44% of that has been in the last five years. These are all great numbers for customers and really all great numbers for employees and investors alike, as they really underpin the future growth strategy of the organization. If we look at our transition to subscription revenue, this has been something that everyone's been very interested in over the last number of years. I think as per previous reporting periods, we're very much focused on the dark blue column. As you can see, it has continued to grow. 84% recurring revenue this year, 100% subscription software revenue this year. That trend has continued on as expected.
If we look at this in terms of how this drives growth, you can see on the chart on the left-hand side there, over the last five years, we've had a 17% compound annual growth rate in ARR. On the right-hand side, you can see the growth and the conversion, I guess, from our historic on-prem USP or upgrade and support program and that conversion to SaaS. This chart on the right-hand side is dealing with revenue as opposed to the bookings, which I'll talk about in another slide's time. Overall, in terms of our profitability, this is really in line with our strategic plan. 39% in adjusted EBITDA margin and 15% growth. We've historically been very focused on getting the right balance between top-line growth and profitable growth and making sure that we're traveling well north of the Rule of 40. I think these numbers underpin that strongly.
If we look at the growth in the various segments here, you can see, I guess this is the outlook to 2026, which we'll come back to a little bit later on. We're anticipating that these growth targets are in line with each of our line of business applications. 11% - 13% in the Content Solutions space, 20% - 25% in Planning and Building, and 20% - 25% in Regulatory Solutions. Perhaps this slide might have been better in the outlook statement, but we'll come back to these numbers a little bit later on. In terms of the highlights for the year, the first thing is to recognize that our flywheel of innovation continues to deliver great results for all of us. Our investment case in R&D is very strong. The software we're producing is easily the best we've ever produced, as is the customer experience.
We'll talk about some of the customer outcomes shortly. The financial performance, again, a lot of records hit this year, which is helping us drive that increased investment. We've shown this flywheel of innovation infographic for every year now for quite a long period of time. I think it's always worth celebrating so that we all know that this flywheel continues to deliver results for us. The other big highlight for us this year is that four days ago, in fact, we celebrated our 25 years on the ASX, which was quite an occasion for us here. I'm enjoying my 50th results presentation this morning. It's lots of fun. I'm sure people will ask me how long I'll keep going for. I'm not sure I'll be here at the 50th anniversary, but there's plenty more to play for in the years ahead.
In keeping with that, it was also worth celebrating that we're now out to over 2,000 customer relationships. In fact, if I can just call out a couple, there are some here like ResMed, City of Darebin, that are up the top there that have been with us since before we became a public company back in 2000. We're very grateful for all of our customers. We've got an incredible number of long-term customers. Again, I'll talk about some of those in the next few slides. We also, a couple of weeks back, had Activate 25. This is an internal, effectively a university week for us here at Objective. We haven't run a global Activate program since before COVID. Needless to say, I think without doubt, this was a fabulous event. We had people from all over the world in attendance.
It really set out, you can see in the top left-hand corner there, the theme was Fit For 26. It really set out what we were aiming to do in the year ahead, but more so really a global celebration of the things that we had achieved during the year. I think to all of the people that were fortunate enough to be there in the Hunter Valley, in fact, the result in culture from our perspective was the strongest that I've ever seen. Fantastic event. Equally, I appreciate that you should not put out a results presentation without waxing lyrically about AI. I thought it was relevant to us this year to really talk about Objective Intelligence, which I know some of you will know about because you scour our website and our postings.
I wanted to give you a sense of the breadth of AI that we're already in Objective products. It reminded me a little bit of probably some time back when cloud first came about and we said, well, what's the big deal? We've been doing cloud for a long time. I think if I go back to a couple of the sort of prior reporting periods, I've had the same perspective about artificial intelligence. We have been using artificial intelligence in our products for a very, very long time. I wanted to call this out. People are obviously very interested in what we're doing. This gives you a bit of a feeling for each of the core areas of AI where we've been delivering this in our products. First of all, the RAG-based solutions.
We'll have a lot more to say about this over the coming months in terms of the customer work that we're doing. Automated document intelligence, which we've been using in solutions now for probably 20 years. Computer vision, which is an enormous part of what we've been doing in Build, Trapeze, and RegWorks. Finally, all the NLP work that we've been doing across all of our product sets. It's fair to say that AI is a big part of what Objective's doing today. I don't want to overemphasize it. No doubt there'll be lots of questions during the various presentations during the day. It's very much an investment focus with our R&D. Equally, I've spoken about the Objective Design Language in the past as well. There have been some really huge advancements with ODL over the last 12 months. You can see here various products.
They all look like they came from the same parents, which I think is what customers expect from solutions these days. More recently, we've been able to use the Objective design language and use Claude Code, another one of the AI models which some of you will be familiar with, to actually generate a lot of the code behind the interfaces that we generate within our design team. This has been a major step forward in productivity and one that no doubt you'll see us talk about in the periods ahead. If I can just now go through each of the lines of business and call out some of the key things that happened during the year. As we know, if we look at our three lines of business, Content Solutions, Planning and Building, and Regulatory Solutions, they're all very much driven by government regulation and providing a digital service.
In fact, I would say that even Planning and Building is just a specialist regulatory platform. Everything that we've done this year and everything that is on the horizon for 2026 still sits within these three pillars and this framework. If I first of all start off with Content Solutions, you can see the headline numbers there in terms of sales. Again, we've been pushing, if I talk about both Content Solutions and Regulatory Solutions, I think you all know how hard we're pushing downwards on the cost of implementation for customers, which is leading to a lower services revenue. Every year, we think we've compressed it to its absolute maximum only to find more efficiency. That's an ongoing trend. ARR is up, excuse me, 12% year- on- year, which was pretty much in line with our expectations.
The highlights, Scottish Government, our second largest customer globally, is in the middle of a migration from their on-prem solution to Objective Nexus. That is a major proof point for all customers. As I've highlighted there, we're now out to 20 customers that have now moved to Nexus. That includes a number of our larger customers, although it's fair to say our largest customer in the Department of Defence and several other large customers are still yet to go. At the same time, Objective Nexus, in terms of innovation, has transitioned to a cloud-first focus. All of our customers are aware that everything that we do is focused on Nexus rather than the older on-prem solutions. That's been well received. We did a lot of work in 3Sixty with Objective Intelligence and Microsoft Copilot.
It's fair to say that the interest in what we're doing with Objective Intelligence in our core Content Solutions market has never been higher. The reason for this is curated data sets have become a huge part of the story. Whilst there's a lot of discussion about moving customer data offshore or off-prem, if you actually understand the Objective Intelligence architecture, which I know some of you are willing to truly across it, private AI in private clouds is really where customers are seeking to get the most leverage from AI. Whilst Copilot has been fabulous for using AI in Microsoft tools, that has been more from a collaboration perspective.
We've got customers like the Welsh Government, the New South Wales Crime Commission, and others that we're working with, and we'll be able to talk about those in the second half of the year, that are deeply invested in using 3Sixty Objective Intelligence to deliver them high value-add private cloud AI. Equally, Objective Connect secured a whole number of new customers. We extended its bilingual capabilities, and we did a lot of integration with other solutions. Objective Keystone, which is not new to anyone, has again had a great run with Australian superannuation funds, and it's now been extended to do ESG disclosure and fund reporting. There's a lot going on in the Keystone space. Finally, we did deliver some AI capabilities and GIS capabilities for Keyplan , particularly in the UK marketplace, which, like Australia, has got its own issues with housing.
Keyp lan is an integral part of that solution. I touched on this. Scottish Government, 8,500 users, 5 million citizens served. If you work in the Scottish Government, you will be using Objective Nexus. In the second half of the calendar year, you'll be using the Nexus Cloud product. One of the other questions that we've addressed over time has been, you know, how is this Nexus conversion going? Historically, we've taken out the more information-sensitive organizations that we have as customers, but that hasn't proven to be reality. In fact, we now regard every ECM customer as a potential for Nexus conversion. You can also see here, for the first time, our USP, our traditional heritage USP, has dipped slightly. We're now talking about ARR, and it's only dipped by AUD 1 million. It's to say, really, there's still a lot to play for in terms of conversion.
We've given you the two uplift cases there, at 1.5 and 2.5. So far, of the customers that are going from on-prem to Nexus Cloud, on average, we're running at about 2.3 x in terms of the conversion. I think, you know, over time, we expect to see all customers move to the Nexus platform. 3Sixty and AI, I've already spoken a little bit about that on an earlier slide. This is just the existing infographic. We talk about it being a foundation for responsible AI. What we're really talking about there is making sure that important government information isn't going to either countries or to sort of private cloud AI that would represent a sovereign risk to us. We've been working with a whole range of customers, particularly out on the right-hand side here with transforming data, making sure it's protected, curation.
I think we all know, for all of us that have worked extensively with a broad range of large language models, we'll know that, you know, like all computing, garbage in, garbage out. The quality of the data in the data sets is quite critical to making sure that you're getting high-quality AI outcomes. I think for us, again, given our heritage in information governance, it gives us an ability to provide that high-quality curated data for customers. The broader value proposition with 3Sixty is making sure that we can federate a whole range of information that organizations have into a single platform that can then be further curated to support AI. Moving on to Planning and Building, again, we've been super efficient with the way that we've been able to keep the conversion of customers and keep the services charges down.
Sales revenue is up 6% and ARR up 31%, including the contribution from Isovist as well. A couple of key highlights. Objective Build was launched here in Australia a couple of months ago now at the PIA conference. It'll be available for deployment in the second half of the year. We've got six New South Wales Metro Councils that are part of the foundation partners that we have. We have just signed up our first Victorian customers under that foundation program. There's a tremendous amount going on with Build Australia. I think we all know you can open any media today to find something about the state of building in Australia or New Zealand or the U.K . or North America. Pretty much any major nation seems to have an issue with building and with building regulation and with approvals at this point in time.
We've been building on this platform for a long time, as many of you know. It's great to see that that's going to become available for Australia this fiscal year. In New Zealand, we've remained very focused. If you go to our website, you can see now videos about what we're doing in New Zealand. The huge amount of focus continues to go into what we're doing in New Zealand. I think that the progress has been well underway and well examined in the past. We've got 21 New Zealand councils now live on Build. We are finally getting the opportunity to sunset the GoGet product at the end of this financial year, which we've done in consultation with the local government community and with the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Everyone's on the same page.
Finally, with Objective Trapeze, which has been, I guess, the beginning of our journey in planning and building, it's broadly used. It's the de facto standard across Australia and New Zealand. We actually had 50 customer wins and expansions during the financial during 2025. We would expect to continue to expand those customers going forward. This is really just an infographic. We've now roughly half of the consents processed in New Zealand go through our platforms. I had the great honor of going and presenting at the BOINZ conference in New Zealand a few months ago now, where there were roughly 300 building officials, and really just making sure that people understood where we were going with the Build platform in New Zealand.
The response to that has been fantastic and really has paved the way for the move for a lot of the historic GoGet customers onto Build over the course of the remaining 10 months of the financial year. Equally, Andrew and the team did a great job at the National Conference here in Australia. This just gives you a sense of the number of building approvals across Australia. Very clearly, Objective Build is going to carve out a niche in this space right across Australia. The second half of the year will be where all the magic happens in terms of delivery of the ultimate solution. As I said already, we've got a lot of councils that have already been involved with us for a long period of time, including the foundation councils that I mentioned. There is a lot going on in AI with AI in planning and building.
This is just some of the screens that you can see here where we're doing a lot of the testing for inbound building consents or development applications, as they're primarily known here in Australia. A lot of the tests are being done using computer vision, a lot of the report generation being done through a private RAG-based system. If you go to our website, you'll find out a lot more about it from the videos that are on there. Finally, we welcomed Isovist. Isovist has been a company that's been in our field of view now for probably about five years. This is just a natural extension to what we're doing. We've been talking to Isovist about joining the Objective family now for well over a year. Of course, now Isovist is part of the team here. We'll give you the transaction metrics down the bottom.
Obviously, it fit well into the metrics that we would look for for an organization of this size. Contributed about 2 million Australian dollars to our ARR, and it's been a profitable company since 2022. Predominantly, it is the de facto standard in New Zealand and the de facto standard in southeast Queensland. There is plenty of white space for us to go after with the Isovist solution. Finally, the brickshole space. I'm pleased to say that the ARR is up 17%, probably slightly under what we expected for the year, but still a very solid result without any doubt. The key opportunity that was closed during the year was the WA local government. This organization has had so many names, DMIRS, as we would otherwise know it, Local Government Industry Regulatory and Safety, which is the largest regulator.
That's a recent name change, which is why I should have practiced that one. It is the largest regulator in the state of WA. New Zealand MPI also went live with its fisheries observer solution. We actually had fisheries come and present to us at Activate a few weeks back, which was fantastic, seeing the system being used in the field, out on fishing boats, etc. The New Zealand Firearms Registry system has, I think, really been a standout success for everyone involved. If you're in New Zealand, you often hear about the success that New Zealand Firearms is having with that solution. It's great. We grew our go to market capacity, particularly in the U.K.
We launched The Modern Regulator as well, which is a kind of quasi-independent website that you can go and see, which is really making sure that we're the voice of regulation or regulatory software. If you go to themodernregulator.com, you'll find out all about that. We released RegWorks version 7 very recently. I've touched on what we're trying to do with services. We introduced the accelerator program, an accelerator package, about a year ago now. You can see here the sales revenue is up slightly. That's due to the compression of what we've been able to do on the delivery side. For us, when we're looking for global scalability, being able to deliver quickly and accurately for customers and getting the minimum time to customer delight has been a big part of our push.
I'm very grateful to the team for being able to deliver these systems much faster than they historically have. We delivered two of those, Victorian Social Services Regulator and the New Zealand Physio Board. Both went live using that high-speed delivery. We've got many more lined up for the FY 2026 year as well. If we come back and talk about what has been the driver with RegWorks, it is really about creating this unbeatable value proposition. A comprehensive regulatory platform out of the box, it is a system for regulators built by regulators, faster onboarding, which I've mentioned, where 100% of the innovation investment is going into features for regulators. In fact, we also had the CEO for the Wage Inspectorate Victoria come and present to us at Activate a couple of weeks back.
He actually addressed each of these particular areas and why RegWorks is easily the system of choice for a modern regulator. At the same time, back in April this year, we got to be very much part of the Institute for Regulation National Conference. We had 270 regulators. We had 25 regulator CEOs at that event. It was also the launch of what we do in terms of being a national regulator technology survey. We do one here in APAC and we do another one in the U.K. That was launched with this conference, which would become a huge part of underpinning. As we've mentioned before, regulation is a global opportunity, just again, just a bit of reinforcement for the types of customers that we're working in, we're working with globally.
Coming to the outlook, our FY 2026 business plan, this is the format that you will have seen from last year. I don't think there's necessarily anything particularly new at the highest level here. It's really all about the outlook. I've been given a lot of counsel. I know that many people in the investment community have been myopically focused on this target ARR growth of 15%. I've been given wise counsel from many people not to focus on it, not to put it up again. I think it's important that we, you know, even though it was always intended as an internal target that has got sort of more into the public domain, look, hopefully we'll share some other targets for the various business units over the next couple of days. Essentially, we're still very much internally focused on that target ARR growth as they are up for 2026.
We are, again, very focused on making sure that we deliver what we do profitably, get the right balance between profit and investment. I don't think there's any question about our investment in R&D. Equally, during the course of this year, or 2025 year, we definitely invested a lot more in our go-to-market in almost every line of business, including and in particular the U.S. and the U.K. and domestically in Content Solutions. There's been quite a number of investments going on there. Our investment in R&D will also continue at roughly the same rate. Whilst I'm asked a perennial question of, is it going to keep going up percentage-wise, perhaps not, perhaps we've reached the peak, but certainly financially, yes, of course, it's going to keep going up in line with the growth in the business. Finally, we are continuing to assess organic opportunities.
It's been, I guess, part of the dialogue for a number of years now. Isovist is something that we knew we were bringing online during the course of the year. We are quite active in the current market where things fit the profile of our mission and also fit within the financial metrics that we set out internally for what we're prepared to do organically. It's important to trade off and look at what we can achieve with organic growth versus inorganic opportunities because it's fair to say that sometimes the organic opportunity might be longer but offers the best return on investment. It's a case of getting that right balance.
I think for anyone that knows me knows that the NPAT number is probably the one that I'm trying to drive or spend the most time focused on both internally and externally because ultimately, I think that's how these companies get valued, particularly in the GovTech space. With that, I'll conclude and hand over to questions.
I'm just going to invite Josh Kannourakis on stage.
Hey guys, can you hear me okay?
We can, Josh.
Okay, great. Thanks very much for taking my questions today. The first one was just on Build in Australia specifically. Can we just talk about some of the initial feedback from those foundational customers? What is the sort of scope of the use case versus what we've seen in Build in New Zealand? How do you sort of think about the staging of contracts in the Australian market?
Thank you. We have been, the process that we go through with the foundation customers is really they've been intimately involved with the development of the product. We go and effectively drop ship, if you will, roughly every six weeks with those customers. It's really a permanent engagement. It's not like you go on, you know, in the old days you go out with a sharp pencil and take notes and come back and develop for six months to a year and go back. We are in constant dialogue with these customers. When we've got a new capability, new module, that goes to them for feedback. It's very much a user-centered design, user engagement approach that we've taken. As I said, we've got six here in New South Wales. Quite honestly, we could double that number.
I think as people have understood what we're doing, PIA in particular lit the touch paper. We've got so many already engaged that we probably can't take on any more. We've just taken on our first one in Victoria. We'll probably have three in Victoria very soon. It is a case of constant engagement. We've got a team of people who are constantly meeting with those customers. In terms of the second part of your question, revenue, it'll be second half of the year. It'll be very back-end loaded.
Just to confirm, the broader release was second half of financial 2026, is that?
Yes. Essentially, the final first release, if I can put it that way, will see light of day in about 90 days' time. The production release will be probably another 90 days' time after that. We're getting the solution into the hands of customers very early.
In terms of the monetization model, Tony, I know obviously in New Zealand, to be frank, you're probably a bit hamstrung by the products you'd sort of start with there a little bit. How should we think about the difference in monetization model and potential monetization in Australia versus in New Zealand?
It'll be a hybrid. I think in New Zealand, as you say, we're being a little bit constrained by some of the heritage issues. I think, as we've seen during COVID, it's been very much a transactional model. During COVID, everyone sat at home and designed a back room for their house and submitted the plan to council. Whereas we've seen, it isn't post-COVID. I think the bigger issue in New Zealand has been the state of the economy, which has pushed transactions down. Much like a downdraft, it doesn't go into the ground. It just sort of goes back to long-term trends. I think New Zealand's showing signs of the green shoots, as they say. Plus new customers coming onto the platform, plus the change in the billing environment in New Zealand, but it's still a transactional system at the moment.
There are going to be more revenue opportunities in New Zealand through remote inspections, swimming pools, building warrant and fitness. These are all additional opportunities for revenue in New Zealand on top of what we're currently doing. We've got a big investment going on with resource consenting, which is a new consent type in New Zealand at the moment. I think the historical numbers that we've talked about in New Zealand will soon start to become a much larger addressable market. We are probably constrained by that transactional model. Here in Australia, it will be based on a platform fee for the councils and a transactional model. We're trying to get the right balance between who pays and how they pay. I guess underpin a little bit of the revenue from our side.
Ultimately, it's still weighted towards a transaction value because that's the, and we are indexed to the cost of building, which we know is a, there's only one way with building, which is up. I think over time that will still work out to be, we need to make sure that we align value for the customer with what they're being charged.
Got it. In terms of the actual implementation process, for new customers, and I know the foundational customers are different, once you get to the post the two periods of 90 days, for those that already have Trapeze, is it a lighter touch implementation that's in there, or how should we think about the implementation and the, I guess, the friction point for onboarding this product for accounts?
In truth, I don't know yet. I only say that we've got here in New South Wales, we're integrating with the planning portal, and that's got its own idiosyncrasies. I think on top of that, we've made great strides in New Zealand. What used to take two weeks now takes two days. I just don't have data to give you a number, we will be using the same techniques as what we've used in New Zealand. It should be a fairly optimized process.
Got it. No, that's great. Just second part, you mentioned there's quite a few of the large contracts both across Content and Reg that are in process at the moment. I assume some of the ARR from that isn't registered within the 30 June numbers until they go online. How should we think about some of those projects that you've won more recently in the last couple of months in terms of what was this side of 30 June versus what's a tailwind and kicking you off into 2026?
Yeah, in all cases where we're billing a customer, it's included in ARR, as you would expect.
Yeah, I'm just getting it. As soon as the implementation period starts there, yeah. Okay.
Unless for some reason the implementation period hasn't started, if we're billing a customer and the customer's paying us, it's included.
Yeah, got it. Just final one really quickly, Tony, just around the, I guess, defense and a few other things like that. There's a number of big tenders coming up in the markets. Just more broadly, defense specifically, broadly, federal government and government spend in Australia. Could you make a few comments on the outlook environment for that and how you guys are positioned?
I think there's a lot of commentary in the press about government spending. We haven't seen that impact us. When I say government spending, I'm not saying government spending on IT. I think there is a push in some areas to right-size some government agencies, but at the same time, there's still a push to create new agencies and consolidate agencies. I mean, I've seen no real impact.
Okay, thanks. I'll give someone else a go. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Ben. Appreciate your time today.
Yeah, thanks, Josh.
Thanks, Josh.
Tony, the next question's come through in text, which is from Wasteland Jeffries, which is that the ARR growth this year seems stronger than the revenue growth, and just how we can explain the gap there and how we translate ARR growth into next year. Maybe I'll just take that one and just keep going.
Go ahead.
The ARR growth is always, sorry, there's a few things that play into this. The ARR growth is the figure of the year-end. I think as we have highlighted through our half-year result, there was a second half skew in the bookings for ARR. That will obviously not contribute to revenue until later in the half, and that's what drives the recognized revenue number. This year also, we made the conscious decision to reduce the services revenue, to continue to reduce the services revenue. You'll see that that's actually declined year- on- year. That's what's moderating the headline growth number. Going into FY2026, the services revenue is no longer going to be a down draft. It's not going to grow at the same rate as ARR. We should probably best have been given as largely flat year- on- year.
The subscription revenue growth is obviously going to more closely reflect the ARR growth. The next question is from Sinclair Currie. I'm just going to invite him on stage.
Let's see with Josh if we want to.
I'm not sure if it's going to work for Sinclair, but his question is, is accessing the AI functionality a factor which is driving customers to shift to Nexus?
Sorry, what was the first bit?
Is the accessing of AI functionality a factor which is driving customers to shift to Nexus?
Yeah, great question. Not yet. I think we'll, because we're really only making the AI capability available on the Nexus platform.
I think as you see the use cases in the public domain of where people are getting fantastic results using Objective Intelligence with 3Sixty and Nexus, it will drive not only existing customers, but we believe a whole range of new customers as well for that platform. I think there's, again, if you're well-researched and have in AI, you'll appreciate the issues, not necessarily about sovereignty, but just around public cloud and government data. They're not happy bedfellows. Here at Objective, we have a solution for that.
The next question is a follow-on question really from way. I mean, it is something you addressed through the presentation, but just the Isovist, is the Isovist included in the growth of this year and what contribution did it make?
Yeah, that was covered on one of the earlier slides. It's roughly 2 million Australian dollars.
Okay, thanks.
This is a question from Christian Angelis of Blue Ocean Equities. He says, congratulations on the Scottish Government contract. Is that in the ARR number? How do you expect the deployment to track given it's much larger than Nexus onboardings today?
Yes, it is the same answer as I just gave to Josh. The customer is contracted, the customer is paying us money. It's in the ARR number. I don't anticipate any issues with the conversion. The conversion from on-prem to cloud is quite straightforward. We've done plenty of large customers, so we're not really anticipating any issues. It was just a follow-on question, which was unrelated, just where do you see the outlook for R&D percentage from this point? In previous results, you mentioned that it may start decreasing as a percentage, but where do you see that going? I don't see it materially coming down.
It's not like it's going to come from 30% back to 25% unless customers run out of things to ask us to do. Equally, I don't see it going from 30% to 35% either. It largely falls out of the numbers, but I think we have a very large team and a very large investment already in our various labs. That's going to continue. I know that there's a lot of layoffs in the industry, and it's been getting easier and easier to get high-quality employees, which has been great. Here at Objective, all we're focused on is how do we get more productivity out of the team that we've got. Obviously, AI and AI coding, based coding is a way to do some of that, notwithstanding it's not always the panacea that you hear about in the public domain.
I'm just trying to get Jules Cooper on stage.
I thought you made him an admin, so I hope bad things aren't going to happen, Jules.
I'm not sure we're going to get it. Here we go.
Okay, we're live?
We're live, Jules. Thank you.
All right. Thank you. All right. Thanks for taking my questions. If I could just pick up on a comment, Tony, that you made regarding the deployment of Build in Australia in the second half, you said you probably can't take on any more at the present time. Could I just dig in there and understand how you plan to resource that scale up, whether it is a people constraint or is it something else that you'd look to solve in the next six months, maybe just as the first question?
Yeah, okay. That question was more to do with the foundation program, Jules, where we're going and testing as we're building with customers. We think we're blessed with customers that trust us. If we think about it, we're probably going to sign one in Queensland shortly as well. That would give us 10 foundation customers. You can think of those as development partners as opposed to customers that we're deploying to and therefore have a constraint. It's more so, look, 10 customers of varying sizes across three Eastern Seaboard states. It gives us everything that we need to make sure that we're developing a product with broad application as opposed to, historically, if you were developing for one customer or maybe even two, you might get some nasty surprises as you started to expand your reach.
I think 10 customers gives us all of the sort of live feedback bed that we need.
Got it. I just wanted to check whether it was in relation to your expectations around deployment in the second half, but that's clear. If I could just touch on in the Content Solutions business, you mentioned around Objective Intelligence, the Welsh Government and New South Wales Crime Commission moving forward with pilots and projects there. I think from memory, the Welsh Government wasn't yet a Nexus customer. I could be wrong on that, but just to, how do I think about that Objective Intelligence moving hand in hand with Nexus for what we understand is one of your key customers in the European region?
I wish you hadn't raised that, Jules. We're doing them a special favor because they were first and we've been working with them for the last 18 months, in fact, on Objective Intelligence. We are talking to them about moving to Nexus and we are expecting it. Until that's committed, they've got other priorities. They've got quite a major expansion of their parliament that's going to occur, like, you know, about 50% growth in the size of their parliament in this financial year, and so that's the, I guess, the focus and priority for them. They will move to Nexus soon.
Got it. It's, you know, I guess we'll hear more about the private AI position and where you guys sit. To us, it looks like you're in a very privileged position. Is there anything more, if I was to press you on that, that you'd elaborate into how you think that might change the profile of the business moving forward?
I think that the timing is not right for today. We'll give a fulsome update at the AGM.
Fantastic. All right, look forward to that. Just lastly, you mentioned 17% ARR growth was slightly under your expectations for RegWorks. Now, you know, that's pretty good growth. Just sort of triangulating that with, you know, what looks like an unbeatable value proposition and also that investment in go-to-market, is that really just a timing aspect in your mind, or was there something specific in the year that just didn't quite work for you in that area of the business?
Again, I feel like I'm trotting out a well-trodden reason. There was, I don't want to call it slippage, there was an issue with the U.K. prospect, not on our side, on their side, wi th their funding, which was, I think, a surprise to all of us, including them. That probably held us back a bit. Notwithstanding, we just need to make sure that we've got enough in the bucket so that we get to the numbers that we set out in terms of our targets.
Awesome. Excellent. Thank you very much, Tony.
Thanks, Jules.
The next question is on text. It's from Evan at UBS. And just about the earnings profile, and there was a slight dip in the EBITDA margin in the second half, but just how are you thinking about margins into FY2026, given that the ARR growth target is a strong lead indicator for next year's profitability?
I'm sure you'd like to take that one.
Yeah, I mean, I think overall, Evan, the margin year- on- year was flat, as we had indicated at the half year, the adjusted EBITDA margin level. Look, we are expecting to see some improvement in that margin. That's really from the contribution of the ARR and also from the improving mix of the revenue from services to more subscription revenue. I think we're still at a, we're at a strong margin level at the moment.
We've got some areas that we are continuing to invest in, which aren't yet contributing to recognized revenue, but which are expecting to contribute to ARR growth in this year as well. Tony's just called out Build AU there in the second half. That will be much more contributing to our ARR growth for the year and set up for FY2027 than it will necessarily contribute revenue in FY2026. The margin contribution from that obviously won't come until later years. This year's ARR growth has set us up for a strong profit growth number in FY2026.
I think to add to that, Ben, for Evan and for everyone else, I think you've got to look at it through multiple lenses. We've got two new lines of business or relatively new lines of business that have got great growth profiles.
You're always trading off potential margin expansion against investing back into the business, particularly on the go-to-market side and potentially other areas as well. It's a case of getting the right mix. We could certainly grow margins, but then the next thing you go, well, but now growth's a problem. It's about getting that right balance. I think we have got the balance right. The real answer is to generate more EBITDA, more than it is to generate more EBITDA margin just in the current, you know, where we are currently. I think our modeling shows that get those things right, the EBITDA margin improves naturally over the coming periods. I think we do have that balance right.
The last question I had on the text was called Walker, which was just around the Isovist acquisition and just how this, he described it as how this opportunity came about and are there other acquisitions that we'd be looking at that might be available at similar types of prices?
We've known of Isovist for a long period of time in the space in which they operate. It's obviously sort of part of the planning and building landscape. Yeah, it's been known to us for years. The principals have been known to us for years. We've been talking to them earnestly for almost 12 months before. Most of the M&A that we conduct is self-sourced. Look, I think that the valuation is obviously keen, but it also reflects the size of the business.
I think when we're looking forward at other M&A opportunities at scale, a business at scale is probably not going to be selling on those multiples. That's probably the best way I can describe it. We've looked at a range of things at a range of multiples. I think valuations have pulled back. I wouldn't say anything at scale is cheap, but valuations have certainly pulled back from some of the crazy stuff that we were seeing a little while ago. Vendors still have a high expectation.
I think that's wrapped it up, Tony.
All right. Thanks very much. I appreciate everyone coming online this morning. I hope you've got something out of it. I think it's fair to say that we're very pleased with the outlook, and I'll look forward to talking to many of you over the next couple of days.