Great. Thank you, Beth. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today.
My name is Scott Wharton, and I am the Managing Director and CEO of SmartGroup. Joining me on the call today is Jason King, our Chief Financial Officer. First, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I'm speaking to you, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. As this event is broadcast nationally, I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the various lands on which you all join this call. I recognize their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Today, I'll start by providing some of the key highlights of 2025 and a recap of SmartGroup's investment proposition. I'll then talk through the progress we have made across our strategic priorities.
Jason will then take you through the full year performance in more detail. To conclude, I'll provide a brief outlook.
Now, let's turn to slide five of the investor presentation. SmartGroup reported strong financial results with solid operating momentum in 2025. Revenue increased 8% versus 2024 to AUD 329.3 million, and total expenses increased 5% to AUD 182.7 million. The strong revenue growth was underpinned by higher novated leasing volumes, driven by demand-generating activities and new client wins. We also continued to invest to deliver our strategic priorities. We are enhancing our scalable and customer-centric platform that delivers great customer service and experience. EBITDA of AUD 135.3 million was up 14% on PCP, and EBITDA margin was 41% for the year, an increase of two percentage points on PCP.
NPAT A increased by 11% to AUD 80.2 million. SmartGroup also delivered return on equity of 30%, an improvement of 1.2 percentage points on PCP. Our strong financial performance and high level of cash generation have enabled the board to declare a final fully franked dividend of AUD 0.215 per share. The board also declared a fully franked special dividend of AUD 0.12 per share as a further return to shareholders. Together with the AUD 0.195 per share interim ordinary dividend declared in August 2025, this brings fully franked dividends to AUD 0.53 per share, representing 90% of 2025 NPAT A. Turning to slide 6. During the year, SmartGroup continued to retain and attract clients by investing in client relationships, market-leading service, and customer experience.
We continued to grow salary packaging customer numbers, novated leases under management, and fleet managed vehicles to record numbers. Our proposition generated solid novated leasing demand for both electric and internal combustion vehicles. In 2025, battery electric new vehicle orders grew 49% compared to 2024. While the EV share of our novated lease portfolio is growing, ICE vehicles remain an important and growing part of our business. In 2025, the number of ICE new vehicle orders increased 4% compared to 2024. SmartGroup remains actively focused on managing yield while also growing volumes. In 2025, leasing yield was stable compared to 2024.
We are also making strong progress against our strategic priorities. I will speak about this later. In short, we are well on track to achieve our ambition of delivering smarter benefits for a smarter tomorrow.
In sustainability, we are proud to have been ranked in the 85th percentile worldwide in the S&P Global Sustainability Assessment. SmartGroup was again recognized as an inclusive employer by Diversity Council Australia. We've held this citation since 2019. This morning, we also released our 2025 impact report, a voluntary report which contains additional information on our sustainability achievements and progress over the past year, as well as our new 2028 sustainability strategy. These outcomes recognize the importance of ESG and diversity and inclusion to SmartGroup and our customers.
Moving to slide seven. We believe our investment proposition remains highly compelling. SmartGroup's differentiated position underpins our ability to deliver strong growth and sustainable returns over the long term. SmartGroup is a leading employee services and fleet solutions provider, with a client base that employs around 2.5 million Australians.
Our existing client base represents a significant growth opportunity. In the last 12 months, we provided services to around 584,000 of those people and managed over 120,000 vehicles across novated leasing and fleet. We are the largest salary packaging provider in Australia, and this scale enables us to continue investing in superior customer experience and in the systems and protections that safeguard our customers. Over the last 2 years, we have consistently demonstrated improvements in operating efficiency. In 2025, the number of customers per operations, FTE, has improved 16% to 1,645. SmartGroup's operating platform continues to demonstrate strong capability in attracting, migrating, and retaining some of the country's largest and most complex clients.
Our scalable technology foundations, sector expertise, and customer-centric service model enable seamless transitions for new clients.
The group has significant recurring revenues and long-term contracts with clients in attractive and growing segments like government, health, education, and not-for-profit. Our offerings are even more relevant to our customers during tough economic times, when people are looking for ways to make the most of their take-home salaries. We have a track record of revenue growth and a resilient and scalable earnings base with strong cash flow conversion. SmartGroup's investment proposition to shareholders is underpinned by our capital light business model. This model means that we carry relatively low levels of vehicle, residual value, and credit risk. Combined with our strong balance sheet and high free cash flows, this means that we can pay fully franked dividends to shareholders at the same time as we are investing for growth. Finally, we have articulated a clear set of strategic priorities to drive profitable growth into the future.
We are focused on our customers and our core businesses of salary packaging, novated leasing, and fleet, while investing in digital and technology, accelerating growth, and delivering scale efficiencies. Turning to slide eight. Since we announced our strategic priorities in February 2024, we have delivered strong financial performance.
Revenue has grown 31% through disciplined execution of our strategic priorities. This has included continued investment in digital to enhance our customer proposition and stronger account management and business development capabilities. Over the same period, EBITDA increased 35%, reflecting the increased scalability of our operating model, and PAT increased 27%.
Turning to slide 10. This slide recaps SmartGroup's strategic priorities and focus areas, as communicated to the market in February of 2024. SmartGroup is committed to delivering smarter benefits for a smarter tomorrow through a disciplined execution of its strategic priorities. Our strategy has four priorities.
The first is centered around digital and technology investments that improve customer experience and driving operational efficiencies in our core salary packaging business. The second priority is focused on leading innovative leasing, where we have delivered tremendous growth since embarking on our strategy. The third is broadening our product range to meet our customers' growing needs. Finally, we are making targeted investments in our fleet business to strengthen its competitiveness and profitability, including enhancements to our product offering.
Turning to slide 11. This slide outlines our strategic roadmap. While our strategy focuses on the four strategic priorities, we have deliberately Phased execution. The first Phase focused on growth and demand generation to build our leadership position in novated leasing. We've also invested in our front-end digital assets to enhance customer experience and sustainably fuel growth into the future.
The second Phase, which commenced in 2025, is focused on building a scalable business platform. This Phase includes investments in consolidating our brands, removing duplication of operations, modernizing our technology, and automating processes. The third Phase focuses on innovation of propositions to meet evolving customer and client needs. We have made good progress. For example, we expanded and novated leasing network through partnerships including BMW Financial Services and Qantas, and broadened our employee benefits proposition by adding Intellihub, Count, and Finspo to the platform. Our fleet funding offering has also been expanded with Volkswagen Financial Services, Australia.
As a result of these three Phases of focus, and as mentioned at our 2025 half-year results, we anticipate EBITDA margin to be in the mid-40s during 2027. Beyond 2027, with sustained investment, particularly in automation and AI, we see opportunities to further elevate business performance.
We will continue to develop our product offering to meet evolving customer needs and strengthen our value proposition. Turning to slide 12. A key focus of Phase I of our roadmap is digital transformation, I wanted to provide some examples. We have now delivered enhanced market-leading digital solutions, improved customer experience, and expanded our digital reach. As I mentioned in our full year results, in 2024, we launched our enhanced car leasing portal, We also delivered smart.com.au, our new customer digital home.
These investments have made it easier for customers to engage with us on their salary packaging and their novated leasing needs, how they want and when they want. In 2025, we have delivered our new digital salary packaging sign-up journey, marking a significant milestone in our platform modernization. This digital asset enhances customer onboarding by offering an improved experience that simplifies the sign-up process.
Feedback has been positive from clients. We've also developed a new smart app, which is now in testing with customers and will be rolled out in 2026. Importantly, over the last year, we have improved our digital product and technology capabilities to ensure we continuously enhance our digital assets. These capabilities will ensure that our products remain market-leading and continue to meet customer needs into the future. Turning now to slide 13, which outlines some of the work underway in Phase II of our strategic roadmap. A central objective of Phase II reducing operational complexity. We've already reduced our brand footprint from eight to four.
Early in 2024, we divested non-core businesses to sharpen our focus. This consolidation allows us to concentrate our marketing investment, better leverage our ongoing investment in product technology, and remove duplication across the organization.
Operationally, we're also simplifying the way we serve customers. We've already reduced our contact centers, and we're now on a clear pathway toward a more unified and streamlined contact center operation. We've also made significant progress in enhancing our technology. When we began this journey, we were operating multiple legacy systems inherited through acquisitions, including duplicate product platforms. Today, we've delivered a meaningful improvements, with 45% of our compute now running in the cloud. By 2028, we will reach 100% modernization of our technology infrastructure.
This reduces operational risk, accelerates the delivery of new digital experiences, and enables future automation. In 2023, our automation activity was limited. In recent years, we have stepped up significantly, introducing AI-driven knowledge management, AI operative intelligence, and automation of key high-volume processes such as claims.
We will continue to expand automation as we build out our highly scalable omni-channel operation. As a result, we are already seeing tangible efficiency improvements, including sustained gains in customers per operational FTE. As these initiatives come together, brand consolidation, contact center rationalization, full technology modernization, and deeper automation, the efficiency and platform scalability benefits will continue to grow. The third Phase of our strategic roadmap is about enhancing our propositions, expanding benefits, strengthening feature sets, and introducing new products into our operating platform that create even more value across our core markets.
Moving to slide 14, which highlights some examples of what we delivered against our strategic priorities in 2025. A new digital customer home, smart.com.au, has attracted 3 million total users since launch at the end of 2024, educating and enabling our customers to easily find the information they need to understand our products and services.
We also achieved efficiency improvements, including increasing the number of customers per operations FTE by 16% in 2025. In novated leasing, we delivered strong improvements, record customer numbers, as well as ongoing enhancements to our car leasing portal. Small to medium-sized business clients continue to play an important role in SmartGroup's strategy. With over 1,500 SME clients, last year they constituted around 10% of our novated leasing orders. We remain committed to anticipating our customers' needs and forging partnerships to build a service offering that truly resonates with them. In Fleet, we onboarded Volkswagen Financial Services Australia as an external funding provider.
We also expanded our fleet team to build capability and drive our next Phase of growth. Moving to slide 15. SmartGroup is well-positioned and is unlocking value through scale and disciplined investment and execution.
As we continue to enhance the customer experience and expand our market reach, we are generating operating leverage that benefits clients, partners, and shareholders. This reflects the strength of our leading capital-light digital platform , which connects employers, employees, and partners at scale. These outcomes demonstrate that the delivery of the strategic priorities announced two years ago are now translating into sustained improvements in efficiency, scale, and financial performance. Our approach to value creation remains unchanged.
Firstly, we are focused on winning additional clients to expand our total addressable market. This is now at around 2.5 million Australian workers. In 2025, we continued to grow our customer base to record numbers. For example, we were successful in winning Monash Health and Grampians Health in Victoria.
We were also added to the Transport for NSW leasing panel. We welcomed many new clients across all segments while retaining all major contracts up for renewal in 2025. Since announcing our strategic priorities, we have grown our eligible employee customer base by over 300,000, which represents a 40% increase between 2023 and 2025. Secondly, we are focused on the organic opportunity to expand the uptake of our packaging and benefits offerings within our eligible customer base to leverage the great work of the operations teams that are already in place to support our clients.
Since announcing our strategic priorities, active customer uptake has had a relative improvement of 9%. Our approach for driving uptake is working well and gives us a clear pathway to further organic growth.
Finally, we are focused on expanding our products and services to better meet customer needs, as we have already outlined in our strategic priorities. This will increase customer lifetime value. We are making good progress, showing a relative improvement in the cross-sell of our products by 13% since announcing our strategic priorities. In combination, improvements in total eligible customer base, customer uptake, and product cross-sell have underpinned our growth over the past two years. These improvements will drive improved financial returns over the medium term. I'll now hand it over to Jason to talk through the key drivers of our financial performance in more detail.
Thank you, Scott. Good morning to everyone on the call.
I'll start on Slide 17 to cover our financial performance in 2025. In 2025, we continued to deliver broad-based growth across product lines, customer segments, and vehicle segments. Our active number of salary packages increased 10% year-on-year to 491,000. Novated leases under management continued to grow, reaching 85,300 leases under management, an increase of 15% year-on-year. Our fleet business reached 35,200 managed vehicles, an increase of 9% year-on-year. Turning to Slide 18. Our novated leasing business continues to show strong growth. In 2025, new lease vehicle orders were up 13%, and total settlements, which include new, used, and refinanced vehicles, were up 7% year-on-year.
The amount of pipeline unwind reduced in 2025 relative to 2024. The growth rate in new lease vehicle settlements in 2025 reflects this higher base. My group remains actively focused on managing yield. In 2025, leasing yield was stable compared to 2024. As we outlined in the first half results, we experienced a modest decline in yield in the first half, associated with the increased PHEV volume. Yield recovered in the second half as we maintained our focus on product attachment rates.
Delivery time frames continued to improve in 2025 and, on average, are now 35 days. Electric vehicles are becoming more accessible, with new models available in the market in 2025. For ICE vehicles, we continue to experience some variation in availability across makes and models.
However, we do not currently see vehicle supply as a constraint on our business. Moving to slide 19. Demand for novated leasing continued to be strong across battery electric vehicles and ICE. Combustion engine vehicles remain an important part of our business. In 2025, ICE new vehicle orders increased 4% compared to 2024. The federal government Electric Car Discount policy for plug-in hybrid vehicles ended on the 31st of March last year. As a result, PHEV demand accelerated in the first quarter of 2025.
Following the end of the discount policy for PHEVs, demand for this type of vehicle has reduced, but was offset by increased interest in battery electric vehicles. New orders for plug-ins declined 31% year-on-year, while new orders for battery electric vehicles grew 49% year-on-year.
As legislated, the government has now commenced a review to assess the Electric Car Discount policy's performance over its first three years. The review findings will help inform broader policy development on how to continue expanding EV choices for more Australians and bring transport emissions down. SmartGroup has been a key enabler of making EV ownership more accessible through novated leasing. A market-leading offering, digital platforms, and dedicated education initiatives have helped thousands of working Australians understand and benefit from EV leasing, ensuring the government's policy delivers meaningful outcomes for employees and employers across the country.
Turning to the P&L on slide 20, NPAT A for 2025 increased 11% compared to 2024 to AUD 80.2 million, off the back of sustained revenue growth and improved EBITDA margin.
EBITDA grew 14% to AUD 135.3 million. EBITDA margin was 41%, an increase of 2 percentage points on 2024. The EBITDA margin remains a key focus for management, as Scott mentioned earlier. We anticipate EBITDA margin to be in the mid-40s during 2027. 2026 in particular, is expected to be a significant year of technology investment and change delivery for the organization to achieve this. Revenue growth was driven by novated leasing and new client wins. In 2025, revenue grew 8% to AUD 329.3 million.
Net revenue grew by 9% to AUD 318 million. Product costs reduced 19% year-on-year through a mix of improved supplier pricing and lower attachment rates. Total expenses increased 5% to AUD 182.7 million.
Staff costs increased 3%, reflecting a combination of increased wage costs with lower average headcount. These outcomes were achieved while significantly growing our customer volumes, with active salary packages growing 10% year-on-year. In 2025, SmartGroup serviced 1,645 customers per our operations FTE. Non-staff costs increased 12% and were largely driven by enhanced marketing, lead generation activities, and expenses relating to our technology investments.
We remain focused on growth while operating efficiently and differentiating our offering to strengthen our competitive position. Depreciation and amortization expense increased 40% in 2025, mostly driven by capitalized IT development costs to deliver our strategic priorities. Slide 21 highlights our continued strong cash conversion at 122% of NPAT A. This was influenced by favorable timing of working capital movements and tax payments, which are outlined in the appendix.
Capitalized IT development costs were AUD 12.6 million in 2025, in line with guidance. Our balance sheet on slide 22 shows that we ended the year with a conservative net debt position of AUD 38.1 million and 0.3 times leverage. Since 2021, we have been piloting fleet funding products with selected clients utilizing our balance sheet capacity. This pilot has successfully assisted us to refine our product proposition to this market, and we have moved to providing a more complete offering with the integration of external fleet funding providers. We expect internal funding of this product will therefore be significantly lower in the coming years. The business is well positioned.
Our low net debt and strong cash generation provides us the flexibility to invest for growth while delivering dividends to shareholders as per our stated policy, which I'll now turn to.
As many of you would have seen before, slide 23 articulates our capital allocation approach to ensure that we deliver long-term sustainable growth and maximize shareholder value. Our strategic priorities provide significant opportunities for SmartGroup's medium and long-term growth. To ensure we make the most of these opportunities, we will continue to invest in core and digital technologies, as well as customer experience improvement initiatives.
These necessitate allocating sufficient capital to ensure we can execute well. Similarly, we will maintain flexibility to take advantage of attractive acquisitions, partnerships, and other organic and inorganic growth opportunities. It is our intention to pay fully franked dividends in line with our current policy of 60%-70% of NPAT A. We will look to return excess capital to shareholders whenever appropriate. Other returns to shareholders may include special dividends or share buybacks.
For 2026, we have allocated technology CapEx in the range of AUD 11 million-AUD 13 million, similar to 2025. This represents between 3% and 4% of 2025 revenue. We expect CapEx to remain at current levels in the short term as we deliver our strategic priorities before returning to a more normalized level. Consistent with this capital allocation approach and factors, including our solid returns and cash generation and our meaningful ongoing investments in growth in the business, the board has declared a final fully franked dividend of AUD 0.215 per share. In addition, the board has also declared a fully franked special dividend of AUD 0.12 per share.
Together with the AUD 0.195 per share interim ordinary dividend declared in August 2025, this brings fully franked dividends to AUD 0.53 per share, representing 90% of 2025 NPAT A, and an increase of 9% compared to 2024. This special dividend shows SmartGroup's commitment to its capital allocation policy of returning capital to investors where prudent, while ensuring we continue to invest for growth. Finally, as evidence of our disciplined approach to capital management, you can see from this chart on the page our continued delivery of strong returns on equity for shareholders, which in the last 12 months was 30% after tax.
With that, I'll hand back to Scott.
Great. Thank you, Jason. Moving to slide 25 and in summary.
In 2025, SmartGroup again delivered strong financial results and solid operating momentum through disciplined execution. We delivered record customer numbers across salary packaging, novated leasing, and fleet. These results reflect a business that is performing very well across all meaningful metrics. We will continue to remain focused on driving further growth and scalability through the delivery of our strategic priorities. Turning to slide 26 and the outlook. We continue to see a supportive environment for further growth. Demand for our products and business is robust. In January, leasing orders and settlements increased compared to PCP. January yield also increased compared to PCP. Our distribution partnerships have received a positive response from clients and customers, validating our strategic direction and unlocking new channels for scalable expansion.
As we have said before, 2026 will be a significant year of technology, investment, and change delivery. This will position the group to realize the scale benefits associated with our strategic priorities. As we have mentioned, we are targeting EBITDA margin to be in the mid-40s% during 2027. With sustained investment, including automation and engineering capabilities, we see continued opportunities to further elevate business performance beyond 2027. Through a continued strong execution of our strategic priorities, SmartGroup is well positioned for sustained, profitable growth, enhancing value for our shareholders. A big thank you to SmartGroup's customers, partners, and of course, our team. Thank you also to our investors for your ongoing support. I'll now hand back to Betsy for questions.
Thank you.
If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question.
Your first question today comes from Tim Lawson with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Gentlemen, thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple of questions. The growth seems to be pretty strong, both across the salary packaging and novated. Can you just talk about the sort of underlying sort of operating metrics that you're getting there to sort of drive that growth? It seems to be outperforming the market a little bit, and just maybe the conversion into novated seems to be good as well.
Yes No, sure. I agree with your observation of outperforming versus the market. I think, maybe I'll take you back to slide 15 from our deck that we went through today. As we sort of talked about before, as far as organic growth goes, the focus has been firstly growing our TAM, so total addressable market. We've made really good progress there over the past couple of years. Obviously, Tim, as you know, with onboarding clients like the South Australian Government through to Monash Health and many others. In fact, if you look over the past couple of years, we've been onboarding new eligible employees at record levels, which is great.
It goes to the quality of our digital investments and the customer experience that we're offering in the market, and the reputation is coming with that. To your question, it's really then down to how do we, with that TAM, which I was aiming to keep growing, how do we increase the uptake within our TAM? Yeah, a number of areas of focus there. Firstly, through the more traditional means, working with clients to be out educating their employees. That's how we've traditionally done things. That's been enhanced now with much more sophisticated and targeted digital marketing and use of data to target in a personalized way marketing to customers.
And then also, we've expanded, as we touched on in today's results and our half-year update, our partnership network, so that we can work with the likes of BMW Financial Services or Qantas to be also out engaging our total addressable market. And again, educating them and drawing them into either salary packaging or novated leasing. And then if we look across, then onto the right-hand side, it looks at effectively the cross-sell improvement. Really, the number that has been in addition to what I've already mentioned, getting far more targeted in our current salary packaging client base, understanding the nature of our clients better, and presenting targeted and tailored offerings around novated leasing to those customers.
That, again, is why our partnerships have been very important and the strengthening of our partnerships because that's enabled us to offer quite often differentiated offers both in terms of pricing and overall value proposition for specific novated leasing products to those customers, to cross-sell to them out of salary packaging.
That's very clear. Also, just in terms of your margin, your sort of medium-term margin commentary, can you just talk about what you're assuming there on government policy in terms of the EV FBT benefits for non-sort of government etcetera workers?
Yeah, and obviously, as it alluded to, you know, the government was required under the Electric Car Discount policy to do a review. That review is underway at the moment. We don't know the outcomes of that review. As we look at the medium term, you know, suffice to say, you know, there's a range that, you know, could be impacted by any significant changes to that policy, but we don't anticipate that happening. We obviously need to wait and see what happens from a government perspective. That being said, I'd point us back to the fact that, and in fact, this slide 15, is relevant.
It shows that we've been able to, you know, drive significant growth, and that's not just in EV. It's also been able to drive growth over the past two years in combustion engine vehicles. From our perspective, Tim, to your question, irrespective of EV policy, obviously, the current policy is helpful for demand, and we'll make it continue. We've successfully been able to drive growth in combustion engine vehicles through novated leasing, which itself is a fantastic pro-product. In summary, obviously, there may be some slight swing, depending on what, if anything, the government decides to do with the Electric Car Discount policy off the back of this review.
As you would see in the media, even as recently as yesterday, I point to Mr. Bowen being out in the media, highlighting the success of the policy, in driving EV transition in Australia.
Okay.
Other point to add to that, Tim, actually, is also with respect to SmartGroup, it's important also to think about the nature of our customer base, which we've talked about before. Teachers, nurses, education, not-for-profit workers, these are people who are going to drive to work, right?
Yeah.
Novated leasing is the best way to get into a car, and often for many of these workers, the only way they can get into a car.
Yeah. You're obviously spending, regarding the platform transformation as well, but you sort of call out, and there's obviously a number of sort of productivity benefits you're already getting. You referenced that sort of mid-40 sort of margin target. As you work through that sort of platform spend, are you seeing-
Yeah.
sort of further opportunities? Obviously, you're getting some productivity benefits already, but are you seeing further opportunities to suggest that mid-forties is not enough, not high enough?
Tim, it's Jason. I think, you know, we're comfortable that we're on track for what we put out there as a target with the mid-forties. Scott went through the Phase 2 of the strategy roadmap, what that entails. There's a reasonable amount to be delivered there, but the progress to date has been very good, and that is what has driven the efficiency improvements that we've seen to date. There's more to do, but I think we're pretty comfortable with how we're tracking towards that medium-term goal of getting to mid-forties during 2027.
Yeah, okay. Thanks for that.
The next question comes from Phil Chippendale with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Good morning, team. Thanks for your time. A couple of questions from me. Just in terms of performance so far for the year. Obviously, the PHEV expiry was 31st of March last year. You've said that January volumes were up. I'm just interested in a February comment. I know I'm not normally one to dwell on such short-termism, but I guess this is sort of, you know, we're in the two months leading into the Feb expiry in terms of the cycling of tough comp. Just wanted a sort of comment on how Feb is trading so far.
Yeah, that's an excellent question, Phil. We won't comment on February. I mean, what I'd point to obviously is that, you know, commenting on January, the message we're giving is the year's off to a great start and, you know, on the Feb numbers, as you would have seen in the slides, not surprisingly, there was a shift in Feb volumes. It remains a good area of business for us, but what we've seen is customers, you know, switch out into then either ICE or battery EV, and net volumes remain very, very strong. That thematic is continuing into the start of this year, which is great.
Yeah, thanks. Just touching on headcount. I think it was Jason earlier, you mentioned that in 2026, it's sort of a significant year of IT and change investments in order to achieve your 2027 targets. Can you just give us a sense of what does that look like from a headcount perspective? You know, CY 25, and the FTE came down a little bit, but does some of this investment require some additional headcount, sort of in the shorter term?
Yes, you're right. If I look at the 2025 result, we did have modest headcount reduction. What we're doing through the efficiency gains and the technology investments, we're really looking to reinvest that capacity into the capability within the business in order to achieve the next Phase, and that next Phase being Phase 2 of the platform. There's more to do, again, in terms of efficiency gains. What I'd say to the direct question about headcount is we're a growing business, as far as the efficiency gains, they're coming not from taking costs out of the business, but we're actually growing customer volumes, and we've been able to support much higher customer volumes without having to increase the number of headcount in the last year.
That's really the track that we're on. Whilst we could be adjusting the cost profile of the business in response to external demand changes, at the moment, we're tracking very well as far as growth goes, and that's the way we're positioned.
Yeah. Just to add to that, Phil, I'd, again, draw you back to slide 13 from our presentation. That's why we were keen to talk a bit more about the Phase two work we kicked off last year. We are starting to really see that scalability come through, and that metric at the bottom we've provided there, which talks about, you know, customers to operations FTE just brings that to life for you. Obviously, there's other efficiencies that are not headcount related, but that's something we look at very closely across the business as far as driving scalability in the platform. That name of the game being to get more widgets through the system without increasing headcount, and we're tracking really well then.
Okay, thanks. Last one from me, just on the contracts. I think, Scott, earlier you mentioned that you retained all the major contracts that were up for renewal in calendar 25. You know, I guess, you know, for the next 12 months, you know, is there a particularly, sort of significant number of renewals coming up? Yeah, just a comment on in terms of just how, like, how busy you'll be on that renewal side of things.
Yeah, it's really interesting. The last two years, there were a lot of contracts that came up, and we got through all those renewals. I mean, as we disclosed, for example, you know, the ATO was obviously a real bellwether account that went to active RFP. So the ATO oversees our policy in many ways, as far as salary packaging, and after a very active, competitive process, they reappointed us for all their staff for five years, which was wonderful. Yeah, that thematic applied to all our other renewals.
As we look ahead, over the next couple of years, it's a very sort of typical turn, and by the nature of contracts, yeah, there's 3 to 5 years, and there's always contracts coming up, but there's nothing abnormal. If anything, by the volume, I think looking back, we've kind of got over the hump of many of the renewals we need to get through over the past couple of years.
Okay, great. That's all from me. I'll jump back. Thank you.
The next question comes from Hayden Nicholson with Bell Potter. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Maybe just coming back to medium-term EBITDA margin targets and headcounts. You know, like, volumes aside, or just with that in mind, do you think you can, you know, maybe just can you outline the parameters? I'm just thinking, if we are cycling tougher comps, do you imagine you're going to be able to pull cost out of the business in line with that and some of the efficiencies? You know, just trying to work out how we build to mid-forties, if we have a downturn in the volumes stuff.
Yeah, Hayden, it's Jason. I think the way that we think about that when we consider strategic planning is that you can hypothesize about different scenarios in the future and what they mean to the business, but they all tend to lead you back to the same place, which is that we should continue to invest in the efficiency of the business because that's the way that we can continue to grow the customers efficiently and have improving operating margins, operating leverage in the business. The same logic applies in the reverse. That's why we're so focused on the delivery of the roadmap. If we are expanding our ability to operate efficiently, that applies to any scenario based on different levels of customer demand.
I mean, just to build on that, as we look forward, again, we've been building scalability in the platform, which goes to, you know, co-cost efficiency, but also ability to scale up and scale down capacity more easily as well. Ultimately, though, as we look forward, and obviously, there's a range of things that might evolve in the market over the next few years. Look at the sort of spread of things that might happen, you know, we're really excited about the revenue trajectory that we're on. Why is that?
Again, the proof points that we've given today on the momentum that we have, ultimately, that's underpinned by us realizing the benefits of the technology investments that we're making, the customer proposition that we've been sharpening, and we've removed hobbies from the business and doubled down on our three key core propositions around salary packaging, novated leasing, and fleet, and are winning in those propositions. You know, coupled with, you know, much better account management capabilities, much better business development capabilities. At this point, too, obviously, the revenue line is the one that is particularly important in the equation here for us.
Cost is important, but revenue is even more important, and we're confident in the strategy that we have, and our ability to respond to any changes in the market.
Just to follow up, if I may, you know, just thinking about growth as well, I mean, you're still spinning off good free cash and even just seeing in the paper, you know, are you thinking about M&A at the moment, maybe to plug some weakness that could come through? Thinking about, you know, even just in the near term, March and April comps, is that something that's on the table or would work, or should we not think about that as an additional lever to pull?
I think as we've said pretty consistently, we've got a flexible balance sheet and an ability to look at things opportunistically, but we don't feel compelled to do something to achieve the strategic goals that we're pursuing because we've got a lot of capability to achieve that organically. If there is something that was compelling, we do have an ability to do inorganic. There's nothing active. I know there's always, you know, media in, about this sector, and we try not to get too distracted by that. We try to stay true to the capital allocation approach, which is, you know, we're firstly allocating to the organic plan, but we re-reserve reasonably substantial capacity for further initiatives if they are compelling.
I'd probably just also add one of the things where we are focusing on the organic opportunity, and we spoke about, is the fact that we now have an external fleet funding provider. We're maintaining our capital light approach more generally, including in fleet. Again, we're really excited about the opportunity to pursue fleet based on the capabilities and the funding options that we now have.
All right. Thanks, gents.
The next question comes from Kenny Wong with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Sorry, I was jumping a bit on and off the call, so maybe I did miss this, but I wanted to come back on EBITDA margins and that midterm guide there. I thought I heard you say for 2026, that it was gonna be a significant year of tech investment and change delivery to kind of deliver that mid-40s% in 2027. Obviously, you know, the January numbers to start this year have looked pretty good, and I guess your outlook's also positive. With that positive top-line momentum, generally, this, you know, would translate to margin expansion.
Just trying to marry, you know, that, I guess, historical trajectory, if you like, with your comment on investment, how should we kind of be thinking about EBITDA margins in 2026, obviously, before that mid-40s% in 2027?
Hi, Kenny. It's Jason. As I said before, obviously, increased revenue growth does contribute to the operating leverage. When we're talking about the mid-40s ambition for 2027, the reason we tie that back to the delivery items, and I'm referring here to page 13, is 'cause that there is the articulation of what we believe we need to achieve to underpin those outcomes. Whilst we are also focused on delivering a result for 2026, the majority of the benefit from the actual program, we feel won't necessarily come in 2026. There'll be more organic opportunities for growth in 2026, but delivery of these investments is what we're focused on when it comes to that target.
I think, I mean, Kenny, yeah, obviously, just to build on that, again, you know, some important work to be done this year. You know, I'd say, obviously, you know, the main game is driving the expansion in 2027, but I'd say that, you know, things are pretty stable this year, on the EBITDA margin front. Next year, definitively, we're very focused on the EBITDA margin expansion.
Got it. Thank you. Then, maybe just one on the new lease vehicle orders. Look, like, I don't wanna kind of maybe read too much into this, but I did want to pick up on that half-on-half decline of 2%. Just kind of curious what you saw there. You know, was that just seasonality? Yeah, was that just seasonality or was there something else there? Yeah, some color there would be great.
Yes, I guess, you're referring to slide 18.
Yeah.
Yeah. there was a modest dip in orders in the second half relative to what was effectively a very strong first half. As you can see, it's up on PCP. Settlements were up quite strongly on PCP. As we said in the outlook statement, January was also up on PCP. We weren't overly concerned by the number. There's still good momentum in the business, I would say.
Got it. Maybe just one last one, just in terms of your order mix. Obviously, I think historically, you've given some color on broad customer mixes, but just in terms of that order mix, more specifically, anything you can share in terms of % from corporate versus, you know, healthcare, education, government?
I guess what I'd say is that it's actually pretty broad-based. Looking at the penetration numbers and back to the story about how we are focused on penetration on the customer base and the product uptake, we're achieving that across most sectors. We tend to be more weighted towards health, education, so that therefore does, when we're growing, contribute more to the growth. When we look at the sectors, all the sectors are growing.
Got it. Thanks, guys.
This concludes our question and answer session. I'll hand the call back over to Mr. Scott for any closing remarks.
Great. Thank you, Beth and thank you, everyone, for your interest in SmartGroup, and look forward to speaking with many of you over the coming days.
That does conclude our conference for today.