Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the PEXA Fiscal Year 2022 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question- and- answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Glenn King, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, everyone, and I'm pleased to welcome you all to PEXA's results for the twelve months ended 30th of June 2022. I'm Glenn King, I'm the PEXA Group's Managing Director and CEO. Joining me this morning is our Group CFO, my colleague, Richard Moore. Today, we'll cover PEXA's FY 2022 business highlights and our financial performance, and provide some perspectives on the company's trading year to date and outlook. Now, if we go to Slide five, I'll touch on some of the highlights. PEXA is a values-led organization. Our commitment to our core values, our people, our customers, and our role in the community is what underpinned the company's performance in FY 2022. Our team of around 500 PEXArians are highly engaged, as can be seen in our employee engagement score of 80%.
It ranks PEXA in the top 25th percentile of all global tech companies. Now, I must say that these solid foundations, alongside our robust property market, has underpinned our record PEXA Exchange volumes, which is up 22% year-on-year to just over 4 million property transactions in FY 2022. With a property settlement value of more than AUD 900 billion. To put this in context, PEXA's exchange transaction volumes grew from approximately 10,000 transactions per month in December 2015 to more than 360,000 transactions per month in June 2022. We're essentially essential infrastructure to the property sector in Australia. In addition to growing the PEXA Exchange tech platform in Australia, we've also made meaningful progress across multiple attractive growth paths for our business.
We are progressing our international market plans with U.K. being a priority growth market for PEXA, and it represents a total addressable market opportunity of approximately AUD 700 million. We'll talk more about this progress shortly. In addition, PEXA continues to build its reputation as a trusted leader and resource for robust real-time property data. We're properly extending our offering to enhance the property experience so we can also meet the best needs of Australians in the property sector through that data and insights. Over the past 12 months, PEXA Insights has launched new products and made several investments. I can also say that PX Ventures, another one of our growth businesses, has continued to build on PEXA's digital industry experience and also developing new products and services as we expect to grow in this area.
All of this has translated into another good operational and financial performance in FY 2022, with key positive metrics in our portfolio of products and services and setting us up for sustained growth. As I go to Slide six. Slide six actually shows the growth in revenue and earnings in FY 2022. What I can say that we're now outside our prospectus forecast period, and we're showing how the FY 2022 results compared not only to FY 2021, but also to our prospectus forecast. On all measures, we grew compared to FY 2021, and we also exceeded our prospectus forecast. A couple of call-outs. Our group revenue was up 27% year-on-year to AUD 280 million. PEXA Exchange EBITDA was up 38% to AUD 153 million, with our EBITDA margin up 5 percentage points to 55%.
Our free cash flow before CapEx, financing and tax was up 7% to AUD 121 million. Our NPATA was up 123% to AUD 77 million. Gearing, as measured by net debt to PEXA Exchange EBITDA, was down 35% to 1.47 times. Good results. Now to give you a bit more color in terms of business and the overview performance, I'll now turn to Slide eight. Our strategy. The PEXA Group strategy is a very simple strategy. We look to enhance the core exchange service in Australia for our customers, so we can continue to grow. We're looking to expand in new Torrens title jurisdictions, starting off with the UK. We plan to extend to provide innovative data insights and building deeper customer relationships across a broader group of stakeholders through additional services.
Importantly, we'll continually evolve our business, both in terms of platform and continually build and strengthen with our people and our brand. These strategic goals of enhance, expand, extend, and evolve are all in support of fulfilling our purpose, connecting people to place, and are delivered in accordance with our core values, where we always look to innovate for good reasons, ensure we're better together with our people, customers and our owners, and we're very clear about execution, making it happen and making it count. Now, if I go to Slide nine. Having established a leading and highly trusted tech platform for PEXA Exchange, we are now leveraging our knowledge, experience, expertise, and relationships with industry stakeholders and partners to pursue a number of growth opportunities and areas across three key focus areas, including continually building out our core PEXA Exchange and deepening our customer relationships.
The three growth areas, in addition to PEXA International, which is around replicating the success of the PEXA Exchange in Australia to develop digital property settlement solutions in new offshore markets, with the first priority being the UK. PEXA Insights, which is about delivering new generation data solutions that empower businesses, governments, and consumers to appropriately make more informed property-related decisions, including demand for land, use of land, transaction efficiency, and housing affordability. PX Ventures, which builds on PEXA's digital and industry experience, the innovative and entrepreneurial culture, and our established relationships to develop new business opportunities with partners, for consumers, businesses, and governments across the property ecosystem. In summary, we're executing on all those areas as we enhance, expand, extend, and evolve our business. Now with a bit more color on all four areas, turning to Slide 10.
The PEXA Exchange now facilitates the majority of land transactions in Australia. We know as a business that buying a property is one of the most important purchases many people will make in their lifetime, and it's something that we certainly take seriously. It's a role that we know that we need to make sure it's efficient, safe, secure, and reliable as possible, increasing certainty to industry participants such as our bank customers and also to home buyers and sellers alike. Momentum for digital transactions continues to accelerate. While I've already mentioned the volume and value of transactions settled on the PEXA Exchange in FY 2022 has grown, what's even more impressive is the Exchange has now processed more than 12 million property transactions since our inception, equating to more than AUD 2.4 trillion in property value.
PEXA is a tech platform business for the property sector, and we are an essential service. In FY 2022, market conditions were positive, with 12% growth in total market volumes from FY 2021, 4.7 million transactions in FY 2022. We grew with that, but we also grew above it to where we're now just over 4 million transactions at 22% growth. We also grew with the refinancing, noting that we do refinancing and sale and transfer, and it was particularly strong in the refinance area with the total market up 31% year-on-year. We continue to serve now over 9,500 lawyers, practitioners, and conveyancers, 160 financial institutions, and we served over 1.1 million consumers in FY 2022.
We also successfully launched in the ACT, reaching 59% transfer market penetration as of 30th of June 2022. An incredible result within 12 months. We also saw continued growth in Queensland, where we doubled our performance over the past 12 months, increasing our market share now to about 77% at the end of the financial year. On Slide 11, just talking about a couple of other highlights around the PEXA Exchange. We continue to enhance our PEXA Exchange and service by adding new services and geographies such as ACT, but also expanding our services such as PEXA Tracker for financial institutions. We've also maintained our ongoing engagement with regulators in relation to industry reform, and our customer performance is continually strong with a net promoter score of +74.
PEXA has also maintained a 99.9% platform availability across FY 2022 and reaffirmed its position as the number one trusted provider across the industry. While we've been very strong in FY 2022, we have a continued focus in FY 2023 on the Exchange. That includes continued investment in infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity. We're gonna continue to roll out our APIs and integration in banks, panel firms, and further removing customer friction points. We're gonna continually enhance certainty around settlement on behalf of the industry and home buyers nationally. We'll also continue our roadmap to become a truly national platform with productive dialogue in Tasmania and Northern Territory as we expand across the entire country.
In addition to that, we'll keep our constructive involvement with regulatory reform, but we'll also ensure that we maintain a focus on a secure system for system citizens, customers, government, and the community at large. Importantly, our key essence is to ensure we provide great service for our customers. Talking about great service, if I go to Slide 12, we're now expanding internationally. We're on target as we deliver in the UK. UK does represent a growth area for PEXA, and our initial focus has been on the remortgage process in England and Wales, and we're making good progress. In April 2022, we announced the successful deployment of a brand new payment scheme, PEXA Pay, with central settlement payment scheme with the Bank of England, and we're acting as a settlement agent. We're pleased with that progress.
The platform and payment scheme has been successfully tested with 7 mortgage lenders, and the Bank of England has agreed to another cohort of lenders to test in October this year. As we also committed, we plan to go live with our first lenders using the PEXA platform for their remortgages. We're scheduled to go live with our first lender in September 2022, with subsequent wave of lenders expected to join over 2023. We also work closely with conveyancers, regulators, and government stakeholders as we will further develop PEXA's UK proposition and build out our services across the country. We aim to have 4 lenders transacting on the PEXA UK platform in 2023 and continually grow from that position. As we grow, we'll explore and identify potential opportunities in the UK to deliver on our strategic intent.
As part of our intent, we're already working on our sale and purchase tech concept. Now, building on the international progress, which we're pleased with, we're also now extending into data and insights. If I go to Slide 13, Australia's AUD 10 trillion housing market is continually rapidly being transformed by digital tech innovations like the PEXA Exchange. The creation of significant volumes of property data is generating significant opportunities to enhance decision-making in the market as economic, environmental, and social factors continually change. PEXA is at the center of this evolution. Now, we said before, we estimate that the data market for land information could grow from approximately AUD 520 million TAM annually today to about AUD 1 billion annually over the next 5 years. With businesses and governments rapidly digitalizing their services, data sharing is gonna be a key opportunity for the Australian economy.
We believe that open data flows has a potential to reduce friction points for consumers and businesses, while also driving competition that stimulates innovation and economic growth. We are excited about this opportunity, and we're gonna continually advocate for more open and ethical regulatory regimes for use of data to the benefit of Australian citizens. Now, as on Slide 13, we're building our property data ecosystem and service to answer four key questions for Australians. Where is the demand for land now and into the future? How can the use of land be optimized to increase valuations? How do we increase the supply of housing to ease housing affordability challenges? How do businesses in property value chains improve their business efficiency and in turn, to deliver value to consumers?
PEXA has made a number of investments and acquisitions across all that area or those four questions to ensure that we can deliver and add value. Our aim is to grow and deepen our customer base through PEXA Insights. If you turn to Slide 14, you can see in 12 months, it's been a very busy year for PEXA Insights. We've built now a team of over 60 data specialists within PEXA Insights, focused on building the property data bureau and developing solutions that appropriately leverage our unique access to near real-time and accurate national property data. We've implemented partnerships with universities such as Deakin and the Melbourne Business School, and we've released our first products aimed at helping financial institutions improve efficiency with our quarterly property and mortgage insight reports. This provides a first taste of the power of our data.
With new product concepts under development and others in beta, we are charting a path towards several new product launches in FY 2023. In addition, though, we completed several strategic investments in FY 2022 and two shortly after the financial year end. As announced this morning, PEXA Insights undertook its first 100% acquisition of the leading Australian growing demographic-based company, .id. .id, in its own right, is a land information business that is a trusted provider of demographic and economic data and forecasts at the microgeographical level to more than 300 local councils across Australia and New Zealand. Separately, we also announced the acquisition of a 70% interest in Slate Analytics, a progressive property analytics and tech solution co-developed by the University of New South Wales city and Frontier SI.
Both represent the third and fourth strategic investments undertaken as part of our PEXA Insights growth strategy. Across FY 2022, PEXA Insights, PEXA's data analytic insights and service business also announced the acquisition of a 38% stake in the data proptech Landchecker and a 25% stake in the AI software leader, Valocity. All four are cash investments. Now, what I'll just quickly then go on to is how we're also extending through PX Ventures, which is about delivering new digital property products and services. Now, PX Ventures was launched in 2021 with a goal of building on our tech and property industry expertise into entrepreneurial culture with like-minded innovators, and we're making good progress.
PX Ventures offers funding with both services and mentoring support to enable continued innovation and enhancement of new and existing products and tools for Australian consumers in the prop sector. Through our innovative PX Launchpad, we now are targeting a number of startups to offer products and services that could significantly transform the property journey for Australian consumers, businesses, and the government sector. In fact, our PX Launchpad has received more than 100 ideas from several up-and-coming Australian businesses interested in scaling and commercializing their offering in the prop sector. We've already launched or progressed with external partners through PX Ventures in FY 2022, including Business Advantage, Honey Insurance, and Smoove. Today, I'm pleased to announce our strategic partnership with Sorted Services, a local Melbourne proptech.
Sorted is in fact Australia's first digital home services tech platform designed to help homeowners organize their entire household in minutes, including things like electricity, gas, and internet connections. A very exciting and practical resource that further will deepen our services to our customers. You can only do this, see Slide 16, in terms of the growth that we've developed and built out in FY 2022 through engaged people. Given the critical role played by PEXA's ecosystem, it's important for us as PEXA that we continually, as a group, have engaged PEXArians building and maintaining a culture of trust in the community and with our customers. We truly believe that having an engaged team translates to highly satisfied customers and a great business performance. We do this by our values of innovate for good, better together, make it happen, and make it count.
We're privileged to say that our workforce has an 80% engagement score, which translates to a positive experience for our customers on a whole. In FY 2022, we set a new watermark for brand trust, where we received a score of 8.9 out of 10, which is number one in the market, and a member of customer satisfaction score of 97%. Further to that, we're really pleased to say that we were in the top three in 2021 for the Best Place to Work awards within Australia. Our engaged PEXArians, for which I'm deeply grateful, are engaged with the community, and we're working with Homes for Homes, a not-for-profit organization focused on creating sustainable and affordable housing for our most vulnerable communities in Australia. We also work on diversity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability elements within Homes for Homes.
In fact, we at PEXA are a proud member of the global ESG Benchmark for Real Estate Assets, having achieved a five-star GRESB rating in FY 2022, which is a score of 92 out of a hundred, up from 84 in FY 2021. We're not only continuously work on ESG initiatives from our inaugural environmental statement, but we outline a commitment to achieve carbon net zero by 2025. In addition, we're now working with indigenous consultants to establish an indigenous engagement strategy, as we are committed to supporting the First Nations of Australia. All in all, FY 2022 has been a strong, good results for our business, and those results are translated into strong financials. I'll now hand over to Richard, who'll take you through the FY 2022 financial summary.
Thank you, Glenn. It is great to be here today to talk through such a strong set of financial results for PEXA in FY 2022. Before I start, I should say that all the figures in this section reflect a pro forma P&L, showing the operating cost of PEXA as a listed company. What that means is we remove the one-off costs as a result of the listing on the first of July, and we add in AUD 6.5 million of public company costs into the prior period to make it comparable to the current cost base of the company as a listed entity. The pro forma results are reconciled back to statutory on Slide 33 of the pack.
Additionally, any reference to forecast in this section is the FY 2022 forecast from the prospectus that we launched before we listed in July last year. Going to Slide 18, you can see PEXA delivered a very strong financial performance in FY 2022. Our revenue was up 27% to AUD 280 million. Our combined COGS and operating costs were up 15% year-on-year. What that meant was an increase in PEXA Exchange EBITDA of 38% to AUD 153 million. EBITDA, after investing in our growth initiatives and one-offs, was up 28% to AUD 131 million. Our net profit after tax of AUD 38 million was up AUD 43 million from a small loss last year.
NPATA, which is net profit after tax, excluding the non-cash amortization of acquired intangible assets, which is our best measure of after-tax cash profit, also grew by AUD 43 million to AUD 77 million. All of these measures were ahead of prospectus forecast. What that means is our financial metrics are also very strong, with our gross margin growing by just under one percentage point to 87.7%, and the Exchange EBITDA margin of 54.6 being up 4.6 percentage points from FY 2021. Overall, it's a great result in FY 2022 from a financial standpoint, and I'll now use the following slides to explain the key drivers of the financial result in the PEXA Exchange. Our revenue is a function of market size, market share, and price.
Slide 19 explains the first two of those. As Glenn said, the market grew strongly in FY 2022, up 12% to 4.7 million transactions or billable events, as we call them in PEXA. You can see Slide 31 in the appendix for more details on the market growth. On top of that, the PEXA Exchange penetration or market share grew 7 percentage points to 86%. On the left-hand chart on Slide 19, you can see that by transaction type. We saw our transfer penetration grow from 80% to 85%, driven by growth in Queensland and a launch in ACT. We saw refinance penetration being stable at 99%, and other transactions growing 16 percentage points to 72%. Combined, that delivered a 7 percentage point increase in total penetration to 86%.
Adding that to the 12% growth in the market means a 22% increase in PEXA transactions to 4.05 million, as seen in the right-hand chart. PEXA conveyancing transactions were also up 16% compared to the prospectus forecast, driven by a 14% higher market and 2% higher market penetration. On Slide 20, we then explain how volume and price determine revenue. The top left-hand chart shows PEXA volumes from the prior Slide, up 22% year-over-year. We also saw an average price increase of 4% to AUD 68, driven by the annual CPI increase during the year and the end of the discounting campaign in Queensland in the prior financial year. That ended on the thirtieth of June 2021. That resulted in an average price for transfers increasing by 6%, obviously ahead of CPI for that reason.
This was slightly offset by a mix shift towards the lower priced refinances, and that resulted in the total average price increasing by AUD 2.50 or 4%. Adding the 4% price onto the 22% volume previously discussed delivered a 26% increase in PEXA Exchange revenue from AUD 218.6 million in FY 2021 to AUD 276.6 million in FY 2022. PEXA Exchange volume was also up 13% on prospectus forecast, driven by the 16% increase in volume noted earlier, offset by a 3% reduction in price due to the higher proportion of lower price refinancing transactions compared to forecast. On Slide 21, we then look at gross margin and cost of sales.
As a reminder, our main cost of sales are lodgement support service fees, which are incurred when a workspace is set up. It reaches out to the land registry to get bundled property information. They're charged on every workspace, whether it's a multi-party transfer, a two-party refi, or a single party discharge or other transaction. This means if we do more transfers, the cost per transaction drops, and you can see that on the top right-hand chart on Slide 21. The higher mix of transfers also improve the average revenue per transaction, which you can see in the top left chart. That combination means that our gross margin has improved by just under one percentage point to 87.7%, and our gross profit has grown by 28% to AUD 245 million.
Gross profit was also 14% ahead of the prospectus forecast. Slide 22 shows our operating expenses within the exchange. We group our expenses into three categories, general and admin, sales and marketing, and product design and development. Our general and admin costs, which cover our shared corporate teams, our board and executive remuneration, as well as professional fees and occupancy, increased by 24% in FY 2022. This was driven by the corporate functions and advisory fees growing to support our continued expansion. Also, we saw higher insurance premiums and the cost of our new long-term incentive plan. It is worth noting that FY 2021 was understated due to COVID-19, and the FY 2022 spend is up 26% from two years ago. That's a 12% annualized growth rate.
Our sales and marketing spend held relatively flat in FY 2022 due to both this year and prior being somewhat impacted by COVID-19. Early in the financial year, we were unable to host our regular practitioner events, and we also reduced our overall marketing spend due to COVID. Finally, our product design and development expense has increased by 12% in FY 2022 due to the higher hosting costs driven by higher exchange volumes, together with investment in architecture, cloud, cyber security and API development, as Glenn mentioned earlier. You'll also see from the bottom chart that we capitalized a similar amount of product development expended in the exchange. The total cash spent on product design and development was AUD 51 million or 18.3% of exchange revenue.
Operating expenses were 14% ahead of prospectus forecast, and total product development costs in the Exchange were broadly in line with the prospectus forecast. Slide 23 shows the benefits of scale flowing through the Exchange. The chart on the left shows total costs, including cost of goods sold, and also shows cost per transaction. The growth in volume, combined with prudent cost control, has resulted in a reduced cost of transaction, down from AUD 33 last year to AUD 31 in FY 2022. This has also resulted in good growth in PEXA Exchange EBITDA, as shown on the chart on the right of Slide 23, growing by 38% to AUD 152.7 million. We've also seen growth in our PEXA Exchange EBITDA margin, which has grown from 50% to 54.6% in FY 2022.
It was, however, lower in the second half of FY 2022 due to the reduction in PEXA Exchange volumes compared to the first half. We are expecting to operate the exchange in the 50%-55% EBITDA margin range going forward. In summary, from a P&L perspective, a year of very strong revenue and EBITDA growth, and we are happy to have achieved all of the forecasts that we set in the prospectus just over 12 months ago. The final slide on financials, Slide 24, shows our FY 2022 cash flow in two ways. Chart on the left shows the movement in our cash balance over the year and the key drivers. We started FY 2022 with AUD 51 million of cash.
We generated AUD 153 million of exchange EBITDA, spent 25 on capitalized product development within the exchange, and had AUD 14 million of other exchange-related cash outflows. Before investment in our growth initiatives and IPO costs, we would have had approximately AUD 165 million dollars of cash in the business at the end of the financial year. We invested AUD 44 million in our international insights and ventures businesses, and AUD 30 million in the investments in Landchecker and Valocity. As part of the IPO process, we also had net offer costs in cash terms of AUD 15 million dollars. This resulted in an actual cash balance of AUD 75 million dollars on the thirtieth of June 2022.
The table on the right-hand side of Slide 24 shows our pro forma cash flow, and you can see a strong free cash flow conversion before financing and tax of AUD 69 million, which equates to a 53% free cash flow conversion. That's after the OpEx and CapEx investment in the exchange and in all of our growth initiatives. Before I close, I should add that there are more details on the financials in the appendix, should you need to see them. Now I'll hand back to Glenn to run through our outlook and to close.
Thanks. Thanks, Richard. I'll just run through here on the last Slide 26. I think that if you just go through the robust financials that Richard just shared, that performance delivered through FY 2022 has really placed us well for FY 2023. While the momentum in PEXA volume slowed in the second half, as shown on Slide 26, it still ended up 9% above the same period last year. Overall, the FY 2022 volumes were up 22% year-over-year against FY 2021. While the property market is slowing, it is still well supported by strong economic fundamentals, including high household saving rates, lower levels of unemployment, increasing inward migration, and knowing that demand for housing is greater than housing supply.
Further demand, we're also seeing that refinancing volumes are also remaining elevated, and this is basically due to a number of changes in the market just generally. This means that PEXA Exchange volumes are holding up well. With more than 300,000 transactions in July, quarter one is now tracking to be above 900,000 transactions. That in the mix, we believe we've still got a very robust performance with the PEXA Exchange platform. In terms of FY 2023 outlook, we expect the Exchange EBITDA margins to still stay in the 50%-50.5% range. That's also due to that we're gonna invest approximately 20% of our revenue in the exchange technology. As we say, we need to invest in exchange technology to ensure we keep up with resilience, cyber, and improving our customer experience.
We will also invest approximately AUD 45 million in our international expansion and approximately AUD 15 million in PEXA Insights before any M&A activities. We will invest to grow. In the UK, we aim to have four lenders transacting on our PEXA UK platform by the end of FY 2023. We also confirm there'll be no dividend paid for FY 2022 as we continue to pursue programmatic M&A and continually invest to grow. On Slide 27, and in closing, overall, on behalf of the PEXA team, it's been another strong and successful year for PEXA. We continue to build and grow with our people, with our capital, and with our capabilities. By any measure, we have a highly engaged PEXA team working in a PEXA Flex First environment. Our brand trust and our customer NPS are at good levels.
What you also heard is we have a strong PEXA engagement score of 80%. You heard today we've delivered on our clear strategy of enhancing our service, extending our service, expanding our service, and evolving our business, and we continue to execute. Both operationally and financially, we've delivered on strong outcomes across the group in FY 2022. The PEXA Exchange platform delivered strong year-on-year volume and revenue growth. We've exceeded all our FY 2022 financial metrics in the prospectus forecast. Our focus on efficiency in exchange continues, achieving a 55% EBITDA margin in FY 2022. Lastly, we continue to invest in new sources of future growth and value that we're expected to underpin shareholder value growth over a longer term. We believe there's good economic fundamentals that will continue to support volume growth through the exchange.
The launch of PEXA in the UK is tracking to schedule, with our first remortgage transaction is imminent. We're building a meaningful PEXA Insights business, both organically and through inorganic activities. Lastly, PX Ventures is extending our reach into the broader property ecosystem. This concludes our presentation, and both Richard and I are now happy to answer any questions from the participants. Thank you.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. Our first question will come from Josh Kannourakis with Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi, Glenn and Richard. Thanks for taking my call. First question, just with regard to the margin commentary of 50%-55%, could you give us a little bit more color around just, I guess, the bookends of, you know, volumes that would allow that? And maybe just talk through what costs you guys have within your control to sort of manage to that margin.
Yeah, I can take that one, Josh. If you assume the middle of that range, you get about an 8% ± in volume to get to 50% or 55%, assuming you keep your costs unchanged. It gives us about an 8% wiggle room ±, compared to what our sort of baseline forecast for FY 2023 would be, which obviously we're not saying. You know, it's dependent on the information we have at this point and our estimates for the future. In terms of cost management, you know, our probably two-thirds of our cost base are people-related. We, as Glenn said, are very keen to continue to invest both in the core and in the growth aspects of the business.
We also have a degree of discretion we spend around our sales and marketing, which there may be some flexibility in. We also have some fixed costs predominantly around, you know, technology and support. We do believe that range gives us sufficient wiggle room to work within what may happen in terms of business volumes, but we also do have a few levers that we can pull if required.
Okay. Got it. I mean, obviously you're not gonna talk through your expectations next year. Can we assume that even if it's a decent, you know, some bearish forecast of 20%+ sort of volume decline that some people are calling out who are more negative on the Street, is that you can still hold a 50% margin at that point?
That's certainly our target, Josh. I mean, you're absolutely right. There are some commentators that are quite bearish on the market. As Glenn said, you know, we're seeing a reasonably good market in the first quarter. We do see those fundamental economic factors still at play in terms of high saving rates and low unemployment. You know, we have made quite a statement around our volumes for the first quarter. If they do track over 900,000 as we're expecting them to, you know, we'd be looking at a year-on-year drop circa 10%, something like that, which would be, you know, I think better than many of the market forecasters are predicting.
You know, we're relatively bullish about those numbers that we've put forward.
The other thing, Josh, just to add is, we've also got the refi transactions and the sale and transfer. Therefore, that gives us a degree of diversity. We've also still got growth opportunities in markets such as WA, South Australia, Queensland, and ACT, which also gives us diversity as well. Further to that, the platform is not dependent on the housing price. It's purely based on number of transaction types.
100%. Thanks for that color. Just following on from that, Glenn, next question was just around those other markets where you've still got some room to move in terms of market share gains. How should we think about that in terms of 2023? Just maybe just to talk through, you know, the unlocks in volumes and your initiatives to try and, you know, get more market share across this coming year.
Yeah. A couple things there. As we planned, firstly in ACT, at the end of the financial year, we're sitting around about 59% share. So we see that continually growing. While it's a small market, it's an important market because it's part of a national footprint that we're committed to. Secondly, Queensland, we still got some services there to grow that market. And so we expect to see some growth in that market, knowing that we said we're around about 77% at the end of the financial year. In Western Australia, which we're sitting closer to 80%, market share. There's some particular transaction types that haven't yet been digitized, and we're working with the relevant public service and agencies in Western Australia. We're gonna get those digitized in FY 2023.
Expect growth in that one as well. I would suggest the other element that I would add, because that's just purely on the exchange aspect. We haven't factored in any new areas such as potential government policy reforms and some of those other dimensions which, as many will know, could be upside as well, but they're not factored into any of our thinking.
The final one, just for Richard, on the investment guidance. Richard, could you give the breakdown of how you're thinking about the UK and insights just in terms of the OpEx sort of CapEx mix?
Yeah, can do, Josh. As we said in the outlook, AUD 45 million in total cash outflow in international and AUD 16 million in Insights. To give you an indication of what that was this year, in international was AUD 31 million. I think we referenced that in the pack. That was AUD 12 million of OpEx and AUD 19 million of CapEx. A sort of 40% OpEx, 60% CapEx mix. I think it's fair to apply something like that into FY 2023. Insights, we invested AUD 11 million in FY 2022. That was about 50/50 OpEx, CapEx. Again, you can probably assume something similar for FY 2023 on the AUD 15 million.
Just on there. We are cautiously pleased with the progress we're making with our UK platform build, actually. We do believe that we'll be able to execute exactly as what we're saying. It's encouraging signs.
Thanks for taking my questions, guys.
Thanks, Josh.
The next question will come from Ed Henning with CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. First one just on the UK. What confidence or line of sight do you have achieving that 20% target of lenders in the UK by year end? With that, what percentage of those lenders are the 7 you've already got who you already tested with and the 4 that you've got lined up for October as a first one?
Yeah, look, I think there's a couple of points in there. We've already had 7 tests with the PEXA Pay scheme, and that was an important part of the mandate and commitment from the Bank of England. That tested well. Of those 7, we're now working through the transition of those 7 onto the platform in the FY 2023 and also the calendar year 2023 period. When we say the transition period, we can't put them all on at the same time. That's why we've said that 4 to go on in the next 12 months. In saying that 7 will certainly give us a % of that 10. Not 1%, but certainly a reasonable % of that 20%.
We've got a number of other organizations of the financial institutions that we're talking to. Again, we don't wanna be overly futuristic in terms of our confidence on all those, but yet we do have confidence that we will start to convert some of those, and they'll be testing partners of the next four cohort. That's a reason why we've made the statement that we aspire and aim to at least get a size representing 20% of the remortgage volume signed up, not necessarily on the platform, doing volume by the end of calendar year 2023, but certainly coming on in the FY 2024 period and beyond. I'm reasonably confident. That's reasonably confident. That's why we put it in there. We wouldn't put it in there if we weren't that confident.
Yep. No, I appreciate that. Thank you for the color there. Just further the prior question, you look at your project and your expansion costs, which you've given us some insight into. Just going forward, can you just talk about the trajectory and maybe it's more near-term on the insights business, where you see the costs peaking in that line or the loss peaking in that line and where you start to see it start trending down and then you start to see some growth come through in the P&L?
Insights is a good case study, Ed, because it will be a combination of the core business itself and the acquisitions that we're making. You'll see this morning we announced an investment and a full 100% acquisition of a couple more businesses within Insights. Now, one of those you'd have seen in the ASX release has generated AUD 11 million of revenue last year. We will start to see reasonably material levels of revenue coming through Insights. We are continuing to look at programmatic M&A. I think, you know, that business will undoubtedly not be profitable in FY 2023, but we would certainly hope it will be in the short term thereafter. There's certainly an opportunity within Insights.
In terms of international, you know, we're launching the remortgage solution in the next few months. Wouldn't expect any revenue this financial year, but we would expect to see remortgage revenue in FY 2024. In terms of sale and purchase, you know, we're releasing an initial product in calendar 2024, financial 2025, and probably revenue in FY 2026. That's certainly how we're looking at it from an internal standpoint.
Can we just also add to Richard's point. On the data insights business, as you can see, we're knitting together an organic and as well as an investment acquisition business. The .id business is a very interesting business. That's what Richard flagged, and why we're attracted to it. There is AUD 11 million revenue in there. But what is also very good is the way they're utilizing publicly available data, putting that data into products and services that adds value to 300 local councils that are not currently customers of the PEXA Group. Now, we believe that that provides us numerous opportunities, including the way that's been done in terms of providing those types of services and capability to our existing customer groups, but also has started expanding to new customer groups just generally.
We see some broad growth areas that we can now start to deepen relationships in Australia on that area. We also believe some of the things we're learning here in the data insights area can also potentially look in other markets such as UK as well, coming back to Richard's point. We're encouraged with the progress we're making, both in terms of building the UK, but some of the dynamics in that UK market as well.
Just to clarify, the revenue that's coming through from the insights and then eventually from the UK at this stage, is it just gonna be all netted off in that project and expansionary line, if you look at Slide 33?
It is at the moment, Ed, but obviously in the future, we will just have a segment view of PEXA. If you actually look in our annual report, you'll see we have pulled out a full segment note in terms of the exchange international insights in three separate columns. That's how we'll report the business going forward. We deliberately left it unchanged for this set of results because that's how it was captured in the prospectus, and we didn't want to confuse in the first year.
They'll start to become meaningful businesses too, Ed, to Richard's point.
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, understand. Just one last one while I've got you. On the Australian business and basically the price mechanism going forward, do you think you'll be able to achieve continued CPI increases? Or do you think given how sharply CPI is increasing, they'll be potentially below that?
Well, we did increase on the first of July by the CPI figure for the end of March, which was 5.1%, Ed. My assumption is that by next March, the CPI will be coming back down again. I think it'll peak probably at the end of this calendar year. At this point, there's nothing to suggest that we won't be increasing by CPI. Obviously, no promises can be made depending on where it trends.
No, that's great. Thank you for your time.
Thank you too.
The next question will come from Elizabeth Miliatis with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. The first one is just a follow-up on the UK expansion and the profile of the expansion there. So you said that you've got two that will be transacting by the end of the year. On our estimates, they're both pretty small lenders in terms of market share. The four that you're mentioning in FY 2023, how much market share do they represent? And then, just a follow on with the 20% of market share that you'll hopefully have signed on by FY 2023, approximately how many lenders do you think will be in that cohort? Just sort of getting an understanding of each sort of bucket.
Yeah. No, no problems at all. I think there is a couple of points. Let me just break it down firstly for the first two. What we've purposely done is we wanted to go with a couple of small ones 'cause we want to build the platform, test the platform, get a couple of transactions to ensure it's working well, and we continually tailor it to meet the customer needs. Both the first two, which is Hinckley & Rugby, which we announced, and Shawbrook, had that fast-moving digital approach that is allowing us to move quite rapidly, which is good. That's the first point. With those two, then we'll start to scale more volume on the platform with the support of both those organizations.
Both those organizations, while small, you're quite right there, they're also planning for the long term as well and a bit of the dynamics in that particular marketplace. That's the first point. The second point coming back, in terms of other organizations going on the platform in 2023, that they do obviously have more percentage market share. I'm not gonna say what size market share it is because it alludes to which ones they may be, because we're under obligations with those organizations, but we're not gonna announce them until they're ready and we're ready to announce that they're gonna go live doing their first transactions as well. It's fair to say that our intent is that we'll keep building the platform and keep putting organizations that represent both small, medium, and large.
That's one of the reasons why we're aiming to get the 20% type of organizations in total signed up in terms of using the platform. Now, what I should also say, 20% does not necessarily mean that they'll put 20% volume on straight away. That's a growth path. What we expect, though, that will happen if you look on the learnings in the Australian market as well. Why is that? Well, a couple of things. It's more efficient and effective for the customer. Secondly, there's a lot of fragmentation and broken processes in the UK. And thirdly, it leads to a better experience not only for the banks, but the government and the consumers just generally.
All the indications so far to date is the work that we're doing would suggest that hypothesis will be true, and that's why we're again putting some of these benchmarks in terms of our plan. The thing I can also add, because everything we said in FY 2022 and also put in the prospectus we've delivered on and executed well. We expect that will continue on as well. We're strong in that. As I said, we're also working to get meaningful volume in terms of revenue in 2024, Richard, really re-emphasize that as well.
We're also already developing some of our work on the sale and purchase, which we expect to start to have in the market from that sort of 2024, 2025 with meaningful revenue in around the 2027, 2026, 2027 period.
Okay. Thank you. Just to clarify, what kind of lag is there from actually signing the lenders through to actually transacting? It seems like it might be potentially one to two years. We're just wanting to get some color on that.
No, it's not necessarily on that. It's one of these things you learn as you build out. Just a couple of things that in there. You've got to get things such as the bank agreements, and you've got to do the relevant testing. You've got to get contracts and participation agreements in place. Both organizations have to ensure you've got the relevant signing and security dimensions in place as well. We've been learning that as we've been developing as have our potential customers. That's why the first two have been quite helpful for us in terms of that process. What I can also say on that, if you take the platform build that we've been doing with our international UK, you know, pretty much within a 12-month period, we've actually been building that, testing it.
It's using new services, like our own with all the technology around microservices that allows us to move, very, very fast actually. We're really encouraged by what we've actually built to this day in partnership with Thoughtworks. Again, one of the other elements is in the platform, and this is part of our strategy, should be able to be exported into other markets. Obviously we're evaluating some of those other markets as well.
Okay. Thank you. If I can ask a second question just on interoperability. You know, we're just drawing closer to the end of the year, and ahead of the New South Wales election next year. Particularly with Dominello retiring a week ago, also, is there increasing risk that that gets delayed again? Or how are you seeing that at the minute?
Well, look what I can say, and which, PEXA's been consistent on this throughout. We certainly support competition. We think that the right form of competition that actually helps consumers and businesses is always appropriately, if done well, a good thing, and we've been active participants in that area. In saying that, what we need to ensure that we don't go around doing something that is difficult and does not add benefits. I think interoperability, I think we've all realized is quite complex. If you remember, it's really taken a number of years to work it through, both from a policy perspective, a technology perspective, a regulatory perspective. PEXA in Australia took 10 years really to get up and running to build it out. It's not easy.
It's taken us a lot of time to work this through and I can't predict what the future will look like except you know we'll certainly keep working with the right team with the regulators on the benefit for customers citizens shareholders and the community at large.
Thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you.
The next question will come from Brendan Carrig with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Just two follow-ups. Most have been covered in pretty much in pretty good detail till now. Just on the WA and Queensland penetration. Queensland does look like it's sort of tapering off a little bit. Is there anything specifically that you think you need to do to get that trending higher again? Do you think that without it being mandated in Queensland that you're kind of reaching a bit of a ceiling in the near term?
No. Well, first to Brendan, just on Queensland. You know, we're still encouraged about where we're going on the Queensland market. As many things, it's getting people to utilize the platform. You know, when you reach that 77% type, if we use that one as the indication, you can get a sense that more and more people are using it becomes the way of doing business. I expect that still to progress the right way is probably the best answer I can give you on that. In terms of Western Australia. Western Australia is slightly different because it's already mandated. It does require certain transaction types to be digitalized.
Those ones require not just us to do the work, but also requires the relevant government agencies in WA to work with us on that. What I can say is all parties are working together to achieve that outcome. I'm generally encouraged that we should see some progress there as well. It's all being done with the right spirit and intent.
My second question, which partly follows on from the WA answer. So on the Australian business, the investment of 20%, so call it AUD 45 million-AUD 50 million, give or take next year. How much is maintenance versus investment in projects? So as an example, investment in growth with the WA, you know, product expansion or transaction increases, be part of that investment in the core business.
We don't have exact numbers. We can't really give you exact numbers on that one. I mean, it's fair to say if you look at the mix today, which is sort of 50/50 OpEx/CapEx, you can see that it is a good blend of both growth and maintenance. We will continue to do that. We have quite a strong trajectory of spend that we are spending on at the moment in terms of, as Glenn said, cloud and cyber, API and, you know, the broad resilience in the platform. It is a good combination of both, but we're certainly, as we move into a more competitive environment, continuing to invest not just to maintain but also enhance the platform.
Thank you.
Can I also just add, Brendan, that investment actually, you know, some alluded to some of it being maintained, they're also important for growth. You can't grow if you don't have a real robust cyber platform as an example, and you've got to be up and running 100% of the time, basically. That's another reason why we're doing all the APIs and removing friction points as well. It's a very blended model. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. No, that's fine. I might just leave it there. That was all I really needed to know. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Brendan. I think we've probably got time for one more. We're right on time.
The last question will come from Scott Russell with UBS. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Two quick questions if I can please, Glenn and Richard. The ACCC is obviously looking at vertical integration of ELNOs and software providers. If they took a dim view there, which seems to be their preliminary opinion, how would that impact your business?
Well, in reality, it doesn't impact our business because we're not a practice management software provider, which the ATI Group is. We're agnostic to any practice management software provider, for a start. It doesn't have an adverse element from our view on our business. What I can also say is that we're proactively providing appropriate information to the ACCC as they look at things such as Dye & Durham and other aspects in terms of the market from the vertical integration perspective. I don't see personally that that's necessarily an adverse in terms of vertical integration. That's the first point.
What I do also believe, though, it's important to ensure that there's clarity for all participants, not just from an ACCC, but also from an ARNECC perspective, and we'll make sure we're active and constructive participants in that process. So that's probably as much as I can answer it, Scott, at this stage.
Would it be fair to say it'd be more disruptive to your major competitor?
Oh, look, I wouldn't necessarily wanna comment on competitors in terms of their business. I think that's up to other people to make the comments. What I can say, though, is that us at PEXA are always looking about how we can continually appropriately grow our business across multi markets, multi services within all the spirit of delivering for our customers and all our stakeholders.
Okay, fair enough. Hey, just one other thing on the what you're seeing in terms of volumes at the moment and the 1Q tracking towards over 900K. Just interested in how you framed that expectation. It looks like it's just 3 times what you saw in July. If I look at listings, the July volumes obviously reflect listings from 8-10 weeks prior, which were very weak prior to the federal election and the property market jitters. Listings have come back in the last, call it 6 weeks, which would be a pretty good lead indicator for your volumes going into August, September. To what extent have you reflected that in the 1Q message?
We do obviously with the nature of our platform see workspaces set up before settlement. We've got a pretty good line of sight out by sort of six weeks. You can imagine at this point in time we're fairly confident in our first quarter numbers. We've said greater than 900. We've set that as a floor. We're certainly very confident that our numbers will be greater than 900. I won't. I can't really go any further than that, but we've got high confidence in the guidance that we've put out there. We certainly haven't just multiplied July by 3. It's actually based on what we're seeing flowing into the exchange.
Okay, no worries. Thanks very much.
All right. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the call back to Mr. King for closing remarks. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Look, just quickly, I just want again to say thank you to everyone who's participated on the call and asked the questions. We greatly appreciate it. We also greatly appreciate the interest in the PEXA Group. We've had a strong FY 2022. We believe we're in a good position for FY 2023. We look forward to supporting our customers, shareholders and all our broad stakeholders. I wanna say thank you to the PEXA team. Thank you.
Thanks, all.
This concludes our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.