Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for taking the time to join Richard and I, here in Belfast. We're here to talk about our full year results for the year ended 31st of March 2026. As always, before we start with the presentation, just some very quick housekeeping points. The presentation will last, for Richard and I, between 35 and 40 minutes. During the presentation, your microphones will be muted, and at the end of the presentation, FTI will moderate the Q&A session. We are recording this broadcast, and we will publish it to our website later today. In terms of preparing for today's presentation, I asked Cowork to look at last year's transcript in terms of the results, and it told me it was just over 7,000 words long.
Indeed, the word count was 19 words less if I exclude the page numbers. It was a very helpful addition to the information they provided. Over the next 40 minutes, we're gonna cover kind of largely the same content. We're gonna use 32 slides. We're gonna use 7,000 words, there's, I guess, really just one message that Richard and I want to convey today is that, you know, Kainos are back in growth mode. Let's use those slides, those 40 minutes as a way of unpacking some of that detail. In terms of structure today, I'm gonna give a quick overview of the business and talk about performance in the last 12 months. Gonna dive into the divisional performance and talk about the underlying trends there as well, which is gonna take us through a detailed analysis on the finance.
I'm gonna finish off with a quick outlook statement before heading into the Q&A session. We use this slide regularly to convey, I guess, the three divisions that we have and the kind of growth profiles across them. The things that we kind of draw out from this ourselves internally is that we operate in really large markets. You know, if you look at the market size, that black circle across each of the graphs, you know, that's over GBP 7 billion of TAM for us to get after. Our business is international in terms of scope. The three areas that we operate in give us the opportunity to achieve strong margins. The one thing after 15 years in each of these markets, we really do feel that we're well-established in them.
The charts also, I think, tell the story of the challenges of Fiscal 2025. You can kind of see that contrasting performance in the column in Fiscal 2026, kind of back into growth mode. We work with some absolutely fabulous organizations. We are always very proud of the work that we do for them and the long-term nature of the relationships we have with our customers. We work with, at this stage, just over 1,250 customers from around the globe, and I do mean the globe, meaning it's really an international client base we have. Almost half of our customers are based outside of the U.K.
In the past 12 months, we're delighted to see that our existing clients have placed their trust in us and given us additional work, so our revenues from existing clients are up over GBP 70 million in the last 12 months. We've added over 150 new clients to the roster as well over that same period of time. Jumping straight into the details. I mean, this time last year we talked about the early signs of growth, something we were able to reinforce at the capital markets event in October, and our interim results in November underscored as well. We're delighted to be able to share the results we have today and really underscoring that return to growth we have. The team have delivered, I think, just an absolutely excellent result.
To point some of the kind of relevant facts here, I mean, our sales booking has increased 32% up to GBP 505 million or GBP 500 million in terms of sales orders. That is at a record sales period for us. Because of that really strong sales performance, we've seen our revenue grow strongly as well, up to GBP 431 million in the last 12 months. It's also given us a really strong backlog figure for the years ahead, over GBP 430 million. Great visibility into Fiscal 2027, but also increased visibility into future years as well. Now, if we move beyond the headlines, you know, the sales performance wasn't just in one area, it was across all three of our divisions. Digital Services sales up 29%.
Workday Services sales up 44%. Workday Products saw the ARR increase by 23%. We remain firmly on track for our GBP 100 million ARR target at the end of this year. The sales performance has also increased the revenue across all three of the divisions, and you can pick up those numbers from the chart on the left-hand side. The strong sales and revenue performance has also required us to significantly increase the use of contractors, we refer to as supply partners. That has had a moderating effect on our margin growth, and Richard will take you through the moving parts of that later in the presentation. Across the business, but particularly in Digital Services, we see strong traction within our customers for AI and data projects.
That's most evident in Digital Services, where the revenue from AI-related projects is up 11% year-on-year. Kind of taking a step back from all the detail, for us, just a really strong set of growth-oriented figures on the screen here in front of you. Delighted to be able to tell them, and obviously just to commend the team for an excellent performance over the past 12 months. We use these 3 charts really to underscore how we think about our business. The durability of our revenue, the length of time that we have our clients to balance across different sectors and indeed across customers, and obviously the global nature of the business. On the left is the breakdown of our existing versus new customer revenues.
To have 86% of existing clients, existing client revenues is absolutely brilliant. For us, that gives us a really good view both in terms of our contracted backlog, but also kind of visibility of our customers' plans and how we fit within those plans as well. We've got great customer satisfaction. Again, an NPS or Net Promoter Score of 61 has us in the excellent category, and it's great to get that feedback from our clients about things that we're doing well, helping them achieve their business objectives. In the middle chart, we have the sector balance, I think is really the correct term. We're getting, you know, a really nice balance between private and public sector, a strong growing health sector as well. There's also balance across customers.
The reality is we have now over 1,200 customers, so we have got a real broad spread of revenue from different sources. In the chart on the right, we break down the revenues across the regions. North America grew strongest, up 20% year-over-year. It's now a third of our revenues. I have to say, we probably don't say it enough in terms of our business that we don't hide the fact that 1/3 of our business comes from the U.S. We're also seeing strong growth in the U.K. region as well as in Europe. The driving force behind our business is always our people, their energy, their expertise and their experience. Lots of figures again on this slide.
I wanted to draw your attention really to the graph on the bottom left, which describes the growth in staff numbers over the past 12 months. I really just two points to make on this graph. The first one is the increase in the overall workforce, up 21%. That growth theme coming through in terms of our hiring plans as well. The second point is around that light blue segment you see inside the chart. That is the number of contractors in the workforce. We obviously have those figures over the last six years. Today there are over 280 contractors working on our various projects. They're an important part of the scaling activity we have to respond to that strong sales and revenue growth.
To me, the use of contract staff is really just, it hides the dynamics of different hiring patterns. For us, it's about four weeks to hire a contractor, get them in and deployed onto projects. For us, it takes about five months for us to hire a permanent member of staff. You know, if you look back over that time period, you can see that contractors back in 2021 were 15% of our workforce. Today they are 7%. You can also see that over time that number reduces. We do expect to see the mix of our staffing going forward to change, more employee-based, staff members as opposed to use of contract staff. In terms of locations, you can kind of see a strong growth in the Americas. That's partly to do with, our colleagues joining us from Davis Pier.
119 people joined as part of that. The U.S. and Canada is a strong growth opportunity for us, and that is reflected in those hiring numbers today. In terms of our responsibilities, we are really conscious of doing more than just building our businesses about our commitment around climate action. After a six-year journey, we've finished up achieving our net- zero score. We have reduced our carbon impact over that time period very successfully. We are pleased that we continue to make progress around the gender imbalance in the technology workforce, but also inside Kainos. We see our female members of staff now up to 37% of the total workforce. I'd really like to focus on this final segment around education.
We do believe that today's young person is gonna have a significant impact in the technology landscape in the future. We also believe that, I guess the news flow around graduate jobs and graduate employment kind of disappearing, that AI is replacing those jobs, I think is just wrong. We see significant opportunity for today's young person, and we can see a really important contribution. If I think about our Earn as You Learn program, where the people join us from school, we've done an AI-enabled course for them to give them all the tooling they need to deliver AI programs, and they've been really impressive with what they've done with that work. For us, you see it in our numbers there.
We hired almost 130 young people into the company last year. In the course of this year, we expect to hire another 200 early careers colleagues as well. Moving across the divisional performance. Starting off with Workday Products. I mean, it's been just another excellent year by the team. I mean, the revenue chart on the right-hand side really does talk to that point about the consistency, that progressive pattern of growth over the last five years. Switching our attention to fiscal 2026, as always, ARR is the key metric that we look to.
It's up 23% year- on- year, and we continue to make progress towards those ARR targets we talked about a lot, the GBP 100 million ARR by the end of this year and GBP 200 million ARR by the end of 2030. The team have told us that they're going to hit the GBP 100 million target in December, which probably means they're going to hit it in November, perhaps the week of our interim results. That'll be a nice kind of backdrop around that. We're really looking forward to achieving that milestone. One thing to really to, probably you have the time to unpack is looking at the ARR number. We increased the ARR by GBP 5 million in H1 and by GBP 12 million or further GBP 12 million in H2.
Really was a strong H2 performance by the team. Across the portfolio, all the products performed really well. Smart Test continues to be our largest product, and Smart Audit and EDM are our fastest growing 46% and 100% respectively. Over the last 12 months, we've been working hard to add experienced talent to our Workday Products leadership team as we build towards that GBP 200 million milestone. Before I get to talk about the people who are joining the organization, I really just want to take an opportunity to recognize and thank our colleague Malachy Smith, who created our Workday Products business back in 2014, alongside running our Workday Services business as well. You know, I have to say, it's just been a remarkable achievement.
You know, less than 1% of software companies ever actually achieve the GBP 100 million, $100 million ARR target. The achievement that we're able to talk about today is very much down to Malachy's intellect and his energy, his vision, and his leadership. It's been such a pleasure to watch him build one of the U.K.'s most successful software businesses, which really is on a charge at the moment. Thank you, Malachy, I look forward to continuing to work with you as you transition to your advisory role across the group, focused on new areas with significant growth opportunity for us. In terms of the new team, Malachy has been leading the recruitment of that over the last 12 months.
As you can see there, we have signed up a Chief Marketing Officer, who joined us from Google, a Chief Revenue Officer who is joining us from Splunk, a Chief Product Officer who has joined us from UiPath, and a chief customer officer who has joined us from Mimecast. The final member of that team, Derek Brown, joins us from Quantexa and will be starting on the 1st of June. In terms of Pay Transparency, you will recall this is sold exclusively by Workday through a reseller engagement. It has had a good start to life. We have signed about 30 customers in what really was our Q4, so the first three months of this calendar year, and that momentum has continued into Q1.
Over the last few months, there has been some slippage on the legislation implementation, which is really extending the opportunity from beyond the current year, fiscal 2027, into fiscal 2028 as well. Delighted to see that kind of widening of the opportunity. To give you an example of that, at the moment, Poland is on track to sign and put the legislation in at the start of June. Germany is widely expected to slip. It could well be the second half of 2027 before they're able to implement the legislation. Those dates are changing almost on a weekly basis, but you can kind of see that there's a significant opportunity, and it's now extended over a longer period of time.
As noted on the slide, our investment level has increased in the last six months as we've built out the Pay Transparency solution. As always, our R&D investment is expensed to the P&L in the year. We've used this slide before, both at the Capital Markets event and at our interim results, and talk about the Clear Skies Program. For those of you not familiar with it, you know, Workday is very focused as an organization on building functionality into their platform that supports all or most of their users. They want to avoid building in this kind of regional or seen as being industry-specific. The Clear Skies Program is the name they give to this partner program which encourages partners like ourselves to build functionality, products, agents, apps into areas that Workday are not planning to build.
To kind of unpack the diagram on the top right. That, that dark blue, the no-fly zone, is where Workday are currently innovating, so they're building product right there today, and they don't want partners to be involved there. The light blue is, we describe as the flight risk zone. There are no near-term plans from Workday to build in this, in these areas, but they do expect to be innovating there in the future. Finally there is the Clear Skies area where Workday want to see partners innovate, and they will help and help curate and give advice about the application areas inside that white space. That curation is really important.
It gives us great insight into what's going on. The fact that Workday are across our 10,000 customers means they have really good insight to share with us. It also means that they're gonna manage which partners build which products across our white space. Pay Transparency, I've mentioned already, is a good example of this process working in real life. Back in the summer of 2024, Workday approached us highlighting there was an increasing number of requests around Pay Transparency and the EU Pay Transparency Directive. They had decided not to build that and asked do we wanna get involved in building that solution. It's always an obvious thing for us to build. You know, 70% of the information required to fulfill the EU Pay Directive is held inside Workday.
We said yes, obviously built the product, and launched it in November of last year. In terms now of looking at the bottom of that slide, Workday have come to us and given us some further ideas in terms of innovation. They started off with a list of 10. We shortlisted that down to five, and we refined that further down to three. The bottom of the slide really gives you a sense about the innovation pipeline we have for ideas inside Kainos. In total, just over 60 ideas are currently going through an evaluation process. Some of those are generated from customers, some from our services colleagues, and some from Workday Products colleagues as well. The one idea that we have in build is due to launch late summer.
That's a Kainos-generated idea. We'll be able to disclose more of that closer to the launch date. Yeah, in terms of that pipeline, it's a strong pipeline. Most ideas in the insight and filtering category will probably just stay there and die there. There'll be very few ideas make it through to the validation and prototype stage. We see a good flow of ideas, a good way for us to put those ideas in the hands of customers. Skyscanner are just a brilliant customer, and they have an instantly recognizable brand as well. They're a user of Test, of Audit, and of Shield. The quote at the top of the slide is really just a great summary of the value that Test delivers to clients.
Greater coverage, greater accuracy, all for less effort. You know, Skyscanner from the very start of the engagement back in 2022, 2023, were really focused on getting value from tests. Really engaged around how could they best use test inside their operations. As a result, they're getting some fantastic results in terms of reduced effort. Their figures is that they're reducing the manual testing effort by 97%, down from six weeks to just a few hours in terms of testing, which is just a great case study to be sharing here today, but also with prospective customers as well. In terms of Workday Services, just another really excellent sales performance across the company, a really excellent sales performance by the team. You know, a 44% increase is just a stunning figure to be reporting here today.
There was a strong H2 kind of component to that. We closed GBP 68 million of deals in the second half, GBP 54 million in the first half, and really provides us a great foundation for Fiscal 2027. In terms of that performance, I think it's really been a case of focus by the team. You know, the team worked really hard to work out which customers and which opportunities work best for us. Focusing on those that are more complex, where we can demonstrate our value to our clients by helping them get live as quickly as possible. That focus has meant that we've been more effective in terms of competing in the marketplace, despite that higher number of partners were introduced 18 months ago. That's kind of flowing through to our sales success.
In fiscal 2026, we closed twice as many high-value deals as we did in Fiscal 2025. We define a high-value deal as one that is over GBP 1 million in size. It's great to see that performance coming through as a result of the focus. Something to kind of highlight, I'm sure we'll come back to it in the Q&A as well. Over the last two years, we've been increasing the amount of fixed price engagements we've been undertaking. It's now just over 37% of our total revenues inside the division. The annuity-style arrangements, so we have year-long arrangements as well, are about 19% of revenue as well, so GBP 21 million in the current year. Great to have that kind of visibility around our business.
Allows us, I guess, to be more planned and more thoughtful about how we staff those engagements as well. We do expect to see those trends continue. Our fixed price engagements grew 41% in H2. The yearly style arrangements increased 11% year- on- year. Back in November, we highlighted the growing opportunity for us to deliver services linked to our own products, particularly around Employee Document Management and Pay Transparency. In the year just closed, those consulting services around our own products amounted to GBP 3.1 million.
With the rapid adoption of EDM in particular, which doubled in size over the course of last year, and PTA, which is obviously launching at the moment, we do expect to see our own product revenues increase by a factor of 100% over the course of the next year. That's going to be a meaningful revenue stream in the year, but also increasing in the future years as well. Since our last update back in November, we have established our Workday AI Centre of Excellence, which has got three areas of activity. The first is looking at how we can deploy Workday more quickly for clients, enhancing their time to value, so getting them live more quickly.
Also allowing us to bring differentiation as to how we go about those deployments and allowing us to manage how we recognize our margin as well. The second area is around helping our clients use the AI features are built into Workday's core platform, to helping them adopt them and using them for their benefit inside the organization. The third area, and the most important one for us, is about how do we surface ideas from across our customer base, from across our colleagues, that may be appropriate for us to develop into future products. I touched on that on the Clear Skies slide as well. Very much complementary with what we're doing in Workday Products. Let's surface these ideas, assess their viability, and where appropriate, build an agent, an app or a product to bring that to our customers.
Trimble are an organization most people on this call will not have heard about. They are a 12,000-person organization headquartered out of Westminster in Colorado, and they work in the again, they refer to as the connecting the physical and digital worlds across construction, agriculture, and transportation. They came to us looking for a partner to help them deploy Absence Management and payroll across their entire organization, but particularly with the complexity across Europe. They have over 4,000 of their team based in Europe, in over 40 countries across the world and in almost all 27 member states in the EU. That's a very complex HR legislation, lots of complexity in there as well.
At the time, before they started the project with us, Trimble talked about using a plethora of absence systems, sometimes even using Excel to record different information. A very fragmented, very manual process. No single view of their global workforce, and also, could be very error-prone as well. We deployed Workday Absence Management and Workday Time Tracking, allowing them to automate and harmonize their systems across all their different locations. Every tax regime, every leave entitlement, every labor law, all running on the single system. They're live with that deployment. Again, another strong sales performance in this part of our business, Digital Services. I think it's always, given the size of our Digital Services business, it's just an extraordinary strong performance by seeing our bookings go up by 29%.
I get to use the word record 3x on this slide. Record revenue, record bookings and record backlog. The team have done a really impressive job over the course of the last 12 months. I really want to draw your attention to the last row on the chart on the right-hand side of this slide and looking at how our revenues have grown in H2 over H1. That's a 33% increase, H1 to H2 in terms of growth. That's our single biggest growth period in our history in Digital Services. Our next biggest growth period was back in late 2021. Even then, that's just half o f what we've achieved over the past six months. Again, an amazing result by the team.
It's this part of our business we have deployed the most of the contract staff, and Richard will talk about that in more detail during his section as well. You can kind of see why we need contract staff, that very rapid scaling, driven by our sales performance and the revenue opportunity for us as well. H2, as in the other parts of our business, had a very strong performance from a sales perspective. We closed just over GBP 145 million in bookings in the second half of the year, again, giving a strong momentum into the current year and setting us up well for Fiscal 2027. Looking across the various parts of the business, in public sector, I think we describe it as a busy market.
There are certain challenges inside public sector procurement as well. You know, our assessment, it has returned to being a much more predictable market than it has been over the past 18, 24 months. The health sector team have had an amazing year. You're winning a series of high-value contracts early in the year, which has driven that high growth in the revenue through the course of fiscal 2026. Across our healthcare landscape, we work with 50 different customers in the health sector, so we're seeing strong momentum from that customer base. We've talked in the past about possible disruption about the transfer of responsibilities from the NHS England into Department of Health and Social Care. We haven't seen any real disruption as part of that transfer of responsibility.
In Canada, you know, yes, the focus over the last six months has been about supporting our customers. It's also about bringing the two teams together of Davis Pier and Kainos, particularly in our Halifax location. That's gone really well. We've done a, I think, a good job of supporting customers during that transition as well, and business pace across Canada has remained strong for us. There's also a couple of important trends worth talking about here in Digital Services as well. First is the increase in the size of contracts. Customers are, I guess, introducing wider scope. They're introducing longer periods of time for the contracts as well, and that's driving contract values to go up.
The second kind of trend to call out is that in the sum of these cases for the larger projects, our client is asking us to take on the role of prime contract, so overseeing third-party suppliers alongside our own service engagements. It doesn't happen in every contract. We really see it as being a trend that's likely to persist over a long period of time. In common with Workday Services, there have been an increasing number of fixed-price engagements, so it's now 20% of our revenue for Digital Services. By value, it grew 44% from Fiscal 2025. We see that as being an increasing trend again, going forward in the business. That gives us more control, more commercially predictable way for us to deliver value to our clients.
One of the trends I noted on the previous slide was the move towards larger contracts with longer durations. That's really outlined in the table on the right-hand side. At the bottom of the table below the line, it's really just what we see as typical contracts for us. Typically two years in duration. Above the line, you can see some of the more recent contracts that are longer duration and of higher value. Don't get me wrong, we are delighted to be awarded these contracts. These larger awards are not always being represented in their bookings and backlog figures. It's a function of our internal recognition policy, which as you might expect is quite conservative.
If I use a working example to explain the point I'm trying to make, when we sign a contract, our sales and booking recognition approach would be to recognize the value of what we term as committed spend by a client. That might be a year in duration. It might be a phase of a project. What we see is clear plans by a client to spend the money on the contract. That would mean, in most cases, that we recognize between 50% and 70% of the initial contract award for a two-year contract. That would be for the MOD strategic cloud partner. We recognized GBP 8 million of the GBP 14 million award in our Fiscal 2026 numbers. The remaining GBP 6 million will be recognized in the future. That's what we've done historically.
It's always worked very well for us. That policy really does begin to break down for those larger contracts. To use an example, the DVSA with the Driver Services Platform. We recognized GBP 20 million of GBP 73 million into bookings and backlog, with the remaining GBP 53 million to be recognized in the future. That's quite a large amount of money. We think that moving to the industry standard Total Contract Value or TCV is a more transparent way for us to share information about bookings and backlog. We'll be using this results cycle to solicit feedback from both analysts and shareholders to decide if we want to change this element of reporting during Fiscal 2027.
To make it all kind of real, at the bottom of the slide on the left-hand side, you see there, you know, if we use the industry standard TCV around recognition of backlog and bookings, then our backlog figure that we would be reporting today would be just over GBP 400 million rather than the under GBP 80 million that we have reported across our various slides and documentation. We do some obviously large projects for customers. We also do some small ones, this is just a really good example of a really important project that we did with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the FCDO.
This is about standing up a Register your presence service for our for our customer, FCDO, to service requests from 150,000 people in the Middle East whenever the conflict broke out there at the end of February. As you might imagine, being able to stand up a service at very short notice is a really demanding thing and just both our team and the FCDO team have been really impressive about how they were able to stand up the service so quickly and then to roll it out across different regions.
Having rolled out that service to allow people to Register your presence, so the government knows where you are, then to be able to roll out services to allow people to sign up for the evacuation flights out of Oman and the United Arab Emirates. It's been a great relationship with the FCDO over the last almost 10 years. We used a similar kind of service for the evacuation of Afghanistan, where we had 9,000 people to handle over the course of that evacuation. You can kind of see just the scale of what happened in the Middle East during February. It seems amazing to me saying that our AI journey is almost 10 years in duration, but that's true.
We started our AI practice and machine learning practice back in 2016. Over those 10 years have worked with some amazing customers and seen some amazing advances in terms of that technology. You can kind of see those customers, some of the larger contracts down the left-hand side of the screen. At the bottom of that column, you get to see our revenues from last year, so just over GBP 41 million, up 11% year-over-year. In terms of Tussell, the market intelligence company, they rank us number seven in terms of contract awards since 2018. We've been a long-standing and significant supplier to the U.K. government.
Microsoft and Palantir head up that list, but great to be in the top 10, and we are the highest ranked U.K. headquartered company as part of that. Those 400 projects that we've done over the past 8, 9 years have given us a strong track record inside government, but it's also given us a strong insight as to how governments are approaching the deployment of AI. As you can kind of see from the quote on the right-hand side from HM His Majesty's Treasury, real appetite for U.K. government to deploy AI technology inside their solutions. I think for us, our observation, having been a digital transformation partner with the government for the last 15 years, it's never about the technology.
It's always about how do you redefine, redesign a service to operate, using the latest technology. For digital transformation, that was all about cloud. For the AI transformation, that will always all be about how we embed artificial intelligence inside those solutions. In the same way as government looked for organizations to partner with them around digital transformation, they're looking for the same type of arrangement for AI transformation as well. Many of those building blocks required for a successful AI service are ones that are very familiar to those who've been involved in digital transformation. It's about redesigning work to have AI at its core. It's about having high-quality data that's AI-ready.
Make sure that the what you build is secure by design and that there is inbuilt safety, but also there's an external assurance to make sure that bias does not creep into the model. Then there's the question about how do you want to design that service so that you can run it for years in production as opposed to just months. I think the other observation we have is that while there's clear stated ambition from government and funding around that ambition as well, there will be a uneven adoption around that. Internal capability is obviously a constraint. The ability to recruit AI experts into government is going to be a real challenge for them.
There remains those kind of widespread concerns around safety, security, and concerns about cost and vendor lock-in. There's a significant opportunity for us internally as well. Back in 2023, we announced a significant investment in enabling our entire workforce to be GenAI enabled and also look at the tools that we could use to help streamline and increase the productivity of our entire workforce. That has really paid dividends for us over the last three years. Today, our entire organization has tools deployed to make it easier to get the work done. That's engineering tools, consulting, R&D, just tools for our central services colleagues as well.
That 20% kind of productivity gain, we've used that figure quite regularly over the last couple of updates, and it remains our guide as to how we think of that productivity improvement. That allows us to build services quicker for our government clients. You know, our government clients are looking at a 10-year program of work. The fact we can get that done in seven or eight years is something that's really attractive to them. They're pushing us to do as much as possible as quickly as possible. For our Workday customers, they start paying for their Workday subscription on day one. The quicker we can get a working Workday system deployed to them, the quicker they're able to achieve value for that investment inside Workday.
We get to ship many more features inside our Workday Products because of that increased productivity, and we are now increasingly embedding AI features into our own products, enhancing the value we deliver to customers as well. We find it kind of a really exciting time in terms of technology. Allows us to do more for our clients and to do it at a greater pace as well. With that, I'll hand you across to Richard.
Thanks, Brendan. First of all, I'd like to start by talking about our profit before tax margin. Clearly we've had a very successful sales year, as Brendan has alluded to, and a fair part of that has translated into revenue, but very little of that has translated to profit, and I wanted to try to look at the key themes behind that. I'll start with the key operating elements of our services business, which has actually helped grow our profitability by 2.9%. That's because of growth in utilization and the growth in effective rate. There's also a number of other smaller factors in there clearly, but that is in a good position for us to start. However, there are a number of factors going the opposite way. Brendan also talked about the need to use an increased number of contractors and supply partners.
In this part of the cycle, we always rely on contractors and supply partners to scale quickly, and over the last year, contractors almost quadrupled from about 69 in March 2025 to 259 in March 2026. This does impact on margins, and it's responsible for an almost 1% fall in margin overall. Historically, as Brendan showed you in that graph earlier, as growth moderates, contractor numbers fall, and I'm sure that will happen in this case as well. Brendan also talked about strategic partners, and as we win bigger pieces of work, we're increasingly being asked to lead consortia. That also has an impact on margins. We do make a margin on this work, but it is clearly lower than our own staff-based margin. However, it does allow us to win some large contracts over multiple years.
In my opinion, that's a price worth paying. In terms of Built on Workday costs, when we did this deal, we explained that it would impact margins. We estimated break-even somewhere around four years, and FY 2026 was the first full year of costs, which led to an increase over the previous year. Employers NIC increase, you're all well aware of this. It just is something. Thank you very much, Rachel. On a more positive note, bonus costs have increased significantly, and that's because we've had a very successful year. Ultimately, I'm happy to pay staff when things are going well. Finally, interest income fell as well. Two separate reasons for this. Firstly, interest rates were lower this year, and secondly, we returned substantial amount of cash to shareholders. Clearly, that helps the EPS, but it does impact on the PBT margin.
Overall, these various factors outweighed the operational improvements that I talked about at the start. Adjusted PBT margin has fallen by 2.4%. I move on to the individual business units. I'll start with Digital Services and kind of call out how some of these things have impacted the business. At a revenue perspective, it was a very good performance from the public sector, growing by 11%. Clearly the standout performance here came from healthcare, which grew 55%. I kind of think of healthcare now as the Bad Bunny of Digital Services. It's growing really fast historically, but was slightly under the radar, and it's absolutely come to the fore. By the way, for those analysts who like to have a song title pun in their question, could I suggest Tití Me Preguntó or Debí Tirar Más Fotos?
If you can work that in, you're a better man than me. Fittingly, that kind of brings us on to the Americas. Organic growth was 57%, but that was supplemented by the addition of Davis Pier partway through the year. Finally, commercial sector continued to contract. It now represents just over 2% of group revenues. Within the gross margin, which fell by 0.8%, we've talked about the negative factors, the use of contractors and partners, and you can see that partner revenue more than doubled during the year. This was along with the employers NIC and was an offset the growth in utilization and effective rate. The biggest factor in the growth of expenses was bonuses. That was about 34% of the 41% increase.
In terms of Workday Services, it's a slightly complicated picture because revenue grew in, by 12% in constant currency. As Brendan mentioned earlier, and I explained at the half year, we moved Employee Document Management services and implementation from products to services. As you would expect, margins are poor on any new product implementation as we upskill the team. In terms of growth, standout performance was in the Americas region, but also APAC grew well, albeit from a low base. It grew GBP 3.4 million during the year. Gross margins fell. Again, we talked about a number of the factors here. EDM was about 2% of that. Again, bonus costs impacted on direct expenses.
If we look at Workday Products, revenue growth was 15%, that was negatively impacted by exchange rates and also by the transfer of the EDM implementation services out of the products business and into the services business. I think as Brendan mentioned, ARR is probably the best way to measure underlying growth, and that was an increase of 23%. The transfer out of the low margin EDM services actually increased margins to some extent. Even if you exclude that, margins increased by 2% on an underlying basis. Full year cost of Built on Workday we talked about earlier. Again, always like to say we continue to invest in product development, and we continue to fully expense product development. If we sort of summarize that from a group perspective, overall revenue grew by 17%.
I've already talked about the movements in the various gross profit and pre-tax profit lines. Interest income fell as part of this as well, and our tax rate remained about 27%. If we move on to the balance sheet and cash flows, a lot of information here. I'll just pick out the highlights. We have started constructing the Bankmore property just under GBP 6 million in fixed assets. Obviously, we did the acquisition of Davis Pier, which increased goodwill and intangibles. Our underlying trade receivables and WIP both grew at the year-end. That is partially a result of having a very strong Q4. Growth in Q4 of 35% sort of feeds into the year-end figure, and it's not reasonable to compare it to the growth over the entire year.
Lock-in days historically in Kainos have been kind of mid 60s. Last year was a very good result at 57%. 64% is a part, you know, is in the long-term average. In terms of other liabilities, we have the increase in bonus accrual that we talked about and also the increase in contractor and partner accruals that you would have expected as well. We also had increased corporation tax and VAT liabilities just based on the timing of putting in some tax returns. In terms of cash flows, the key thing to note is that our cash conversion was 99%. We had a comp that we could never have matched. We've always sort of guided towards 80%, 85% cash conversion.
That has gone up on an underlying basis over the last couple of years, largely to do with the growth in the Workday Products business, which has a very good cash conversion profile, but also the fact that we didn't grow as much. Going forward, if we grow faster, we would expect that cash conversion figure to come down. We've also committed to the HQ property at Bankmore Place. We expect to spend somewhere in the high GBP 20 millions next year on that. Finally wanna move on just to our capital allocation strategy. You will have noted that we have not renewed our share buyback this morning. We've always wanted, first of all, to grow the business organically, and we wanted to have cash to be able to do that.
We will need working capital in order to be able to do that, given the growth in the business in FY 2027. We've always had a progressive dividend policy, and we've continued that this year. We always, as a conservative organization, want to have a robust balance sheet. That allows us to do a couple of things. It gives us confidence in the ability to grow the business if we need working capital. We have committed to Bankmore, as I said, and it also gives us the capacity for targeted M&A. It's not our main growth method by any manner or means, but we always want to have the ability to look out for really good fit businesses like Davis Pier as part of that. Brendan?
Richard, thank you very much. Really just to close out, as we always do in our presentation, we jump into detail and unpack the numbers and explain how the last year has gone. Really for us to zoom out and look at the business. In terms of, you know, for us, you know, we see really strong opportunity across the business. Our existing three businesses, we see strong demand for our core services. That's really reflected in the numbers that we've shared with you today in that detail. We see AI increasing the scale and pace of what we can do for our customers, and that's particularly exciting for us as well.
If you think about the next few years, lots of those kind of components of growth are really in place and performing very well. The growth in ARR, the international expansion that we have as well, increasing product mix and the opportunity around the AI adoption. I think we get to that future that we think about, the one we're excited by, I guess, execution. Really we've set out here our priorities for Fiscal 2027. Really looking forward to achieving that milestone later in the year around the GBP 100 million ARR target, but also then kind of charging on towards that GBP 200 million point target as part of that.
In terms of Digital Services, it's about supporting our clients in the U.K. public sector and healthcare and increasingly inside Canada. There is just such a significant amount of things to be done through the course of the next year. For us at Workday Services, the team have really demonstrated the ability to focus on those more complex deployments, you know, proving value to our customers. There is an increasing opportunity around our own product services as well. As we talked about, you know, we want to hire into the opportunity. We want to see that reduction in the contractor mix by being replaced by permanent members of staff. I guess we get to be really confident about the year we're now started really to do with the foundations we built in Fiscal 2026.
Of all the good numbers are on the slide there in front of you, I just think the bookings number is the one to pick out. That's the reason that we can be really confident about not just the year we're currently in, but in the years ahead. You know, the team have done an amazing job of securing those additional contracts and creating both, you know, strong revenue in year, but also a strong multi-year backlog as well.