Okay, good morning and welcome to Wilmington's results presentation for the financial year July 2024 to June 2025. We'll refer to that as FY25. My name is Mark Milner, I'm the CEO. Alongside me here is Guy Millward, who's our CFO.
Good morning.
This presentation is being recorded. You will find a copy on our website, and we'll turn the pages as we move through the deck. If you'd like us to send you a copy, please email Guy or myself or one of our advisors. So, moving to page two for the safe harbor statements, and then on to page three for the agenda. This follows our normal pattern of me talking through the headlines, and then I'll hand over to Guy for the financials, and then it's back to me for the operational review. If you have any questions, please hold these to the end, and then you can see on the agenda we'll leave plenty of time to answer those questions. So, onto the headlines, which are on page five. Across a year of significant external change and disruption, Wilmington has delivered another resilient set of results.
Seven of our nine businesses grew over the full year, the same as at the half-year results in February. The two that didn't weren't expected to, and we communicated as such this time last year and at our interims in February. Including revenues from the new acquisitions for the periods we have owned them, and excluding revenues from disposed businesses, our total ongoing revenue is 11%, with both newly acquired businesses in the health and safety and environmental sector individually delivering double-digit revenue growth. The impact on our U.S. events business of continued disruption in the U.S. healthcare market, combined with the expected year-on-year decline in our law for non-lawyers business, Bond Solon, impacted our organic revenue growth, which for the year was down 1%. We expect that position to change materially in FY26, and Guy will explain shortly.
The quality of our revenues continues to improve, with repeat revenues, which includes recurring, now at 80% of ongoing revenue. Ongoing operating profit is up 8% to £30.3 million, delivering a margin of 30%. And ongoing adjusted PBT is up 18% to £28.4 million. The board has taken the decision to increase the dividend, with the total dividend for the year increasing 2% to 11.5p. Following the pivot to focus on GRC, we've continued to reshape the portfolio, with Phoenix Health & Safety acquired in October of 2024 and Compliance Week disposed in February of 2025. In August, we announced the acquisition of RegTech business Conversia, which, as you know, is subject to clearance.
It has long been our strategy to move away from a media model in favor of business services and RegTech platforms, and today we are announcing we are marketing for sale our U.S. events business, which in our FY20 numbers, FY26 numbers, will be held for sale. For clarity, this business is in our FY25 numbers as the marketing commences this week. We continue our technology transformation with the rollout of our Wilmington RegTech platform and a series of AI enhancements, and I'll talk more about these a little later. So, as ever with this new version of Wilmington, there is lots going on and much to tell you about, but before we move on to the numbers, I wanted to pause and share one more slide with you, which describes our company on one page, on slide six.
We've included this slide this year mainly for those who are not familiar with Wilmington, and while this live audience today is very aware of who we are and what we do, as this has been recorded, I hope you'll forgive me spending a couple of minutes just running through these key points for those who are watching the playback or who are less familiar. Wilmington is a business that is focused on the governance, risk, and compliance markets, and we have pivoted the business to become a successful and growing international GRC pure play platform. Our focus today with the inclusion of Conversia is on four sectors, and this is expanding as we realize wider opportunities. Our strategy has been and remains to invest in our businesses, actively review our portfolio, and we have a proven track record in acquiring high growth, high quality, high opportunity GRC focused businesses.
Our group displays very strong financial characteristics with growing levels of recurring and repeatable revenues, expanding adjusted PBT margin, and a history of strong profit to cash conversion. We have over 1,000 colleagues and contractors. We reach customers in over 130 different geographic markets, and we have nine leading brands that you can see on the bottom right of the slide. On the top right of the slide, you can see what we do. We specialize in GRC, regulatory intelligence, subscription data services and alerts, training, and events, and over the last couple of years, we've developed our GRC RegTech services, which will be significantly enhanced with the acquisition of Conversia. I've already mentioned a few of our numbers, but here's Guy to walk you through them in more detail.
Thanks, Mark. Let's move it on to the first slide. Thank you. We've got our usual financial slides and one extra this time to show the pro forma impact on the overall group of our portfolio movements in the last year, including the anticipated addition of Conversia. Starting here with the divisional splits, the overall ongoing revenue growth of 11% includes growth from seven of our nine businesses. Organic growth, which excludes acquisitions and currency movements, is minus 1%, with growth from all businesses except for Axco in insurance and Bond Solon in legal in a continuation of the story of the half year. The health, safety, and environment sector contains the Astutis and Phoenix acquisitions. Both businesses had double-digit percentage like-for-like growth on the prior period. Astutis growing at 18% and Phoenix 11%, a combined 15% pro forma growth on last year.
Phoenix is included for the eight months we have owned it, and Astutis was included for seven months in the prior period. Legal contains Pendragon and Bond Solon. Pendragon grew at 6% with the continuing strong retention of customers, the 99% we frequently mention. As mentioned at the half year, Bond Solon declined 11% on the prior year, which contains revenue from two contracts that have not been replicated this year. However, if you exclude these two contracts, Bond Solon is still 12% bigger in FY25 than it was in FY24, with all its lines of business showing good growth. Financial services insurance contains AXCO and FRA. AXCO grew at 5% organically with 99% retention of customers and some good growth in the U.S. Excuse me. FRA declined 22% as delegate revenue reduced due to customers having to focus on regulatory enforcement action rather than attend events.
Mark will provide more detail on this on a later slide. Financial services other had a good period of growth with 7% growth from Mercia in the accountancy sector and 6% from the ICA CLTI business. Recurring subscription revenues increased by 5% to 36% of revenue, and repeat revenues, that is those that come back each year from existing customers but are not necessarily contracted in advance like subscriptions, were 80% of revenues for ongoing businesses. Currency only had a minor impact on the numbers and mainly impacts insurance, which has got a lot of U.S. dollar billing. Operating margins from ongoing businesses were 30%. Profit was up 8% on last year.
Margins last year were 31% and moved to 30% this year because of the drop in FRA profits caused by its revenue reduction and the impact of the acquisitions in health, safety, and environment, where margins are good but not yet at the 31% average that we had for the businesses last year. FRA remains a profitable business with a margin just short of 20% in FY25 despite its revenue reductions. Moving on to slide nine and the rest of the P&L. This slide details the profit increases at the various levels. You can see the variances down the side. They're all positive. Operating profits before central costs increase with revenues and margins are over 30%. We've already mentioned that. Organic operating margin is up to 32%, including FRA. So you can see the small reductive impact of the acquisitions.
The difference between the 32% and the 30% that I've just mentioned is the impact of the HSE businesses. Growth in operating profits and strong interest income on our cash and loan notes pushed adjusted PBT to an 18% increase on last year and to a margin of 27%, up from 24%. The sale of lower margin businesses and the revenue growth have driven this profit growth. Below adjusted PBT, we show M&A related items as adjusting items in the P&L. In this period, these are mainly earnout provisions for the recent acquisitions, which are required to be accounted for in the P&L and not on the balance sheet, as the earnouts contain continuing employment requirements on the sellers. Profits for the year are taxed at the U.K. corporation tax rate, as the impact of U.S. profits is significantly reduced by FRA's revenue decline in the year.
And the board has increased the dividend to £0.115, payable in December. This increase is lower than the increase in some of the profit lines, as you can see, but we're maintaining a cover of at least two times adjusted basic EPS, which we show here as the £0.2307. Moving on to Slide 10, we've added this slide this year to answer some questions that we got in August when we announced the Conversia acquisition. And this slide shows the impact on the group figures of a full year impact of all of the acquisitions, including Conversia and both of the HSE acquisitions, as if they'd been owned fully for both the periods. And it also shows the impact of the disposal of FRA in the discontinued line. That discontinued line you'll see is higher than the FY25 actuals, which only had the sale of Compliance Week in them.
We've added in FRA's revenues and profits into the discontinued lines on this slide. Revenues of the new group would have grown 7% this year, and profits would have grown by 24%, obviously supporting the case for the portfolio changes. Margins improve as well, and the margin after central cost, but before interest, goes up to 27% from 24%. Moving on to slide 11, the final finance slide, and cash flows for the year. As usual, operating profit conversion to cash was over 100%, with H2 subscription billing collections reversing H1 outflows. The significant outflow in the period was for the acquisition of Phoenix Health and Safety, the costs of which, legal fees, stamp duty, etc., are shown in the adjusting items line in the cash flow statement as they are in the P&L.
CapEx remains at zero, with, as previously flagged, investment spend going on pay-as-you-go technology and therefore operating spends rather than CapEx. We expect this year to be very similar in profile to FY25. We spent GBP 3.4 million in the year on buying back our own shares. This buyback has now ended. As you see, as you can see, or have seen, sorry, with the Conversia announcement, we are going to spend our remaining cash and a new debt facility on growing profitable acquisitions in the GRC space. I'll detail the new facility on the Conversia slide later in the presentation. Finally, for this section, a slide that confirms our capital allocation priorities. We're frequently asked what they are, and we've set them out here so we can discuss them as we go on the Investor Roadshow.
They're here in order of priority, so starting with organic growth. We'll continue to invest in our existing businesses on an ongoing basis. Much of this investment is in technology and staff training, and while we don't always capitalize technology spend due to the nature of what we buy, we continue to spend in excess of GBP 1 million a year to improve and extend our systems to achieve the standardized platform for all our businesses to operate on. Acquisitions remain our priority for any other cash, whether sourced from borrowings, operational cash generation, or raised from shareholders, and we'll continue to pay a sustainable and, where possible, growing dividend, and on the last point there, we'll keep net debt to no more than two times EBITDA. Back to Mark for slide 13.
Thank you, Guy. So we're going to move on to slide 14. This is my seventh full year results presentation, having joined Wilmington in July 2019. And over that time, we've seen a significant shift in our strategy and our delivery. And I would like to thank all of the teams that have played such an important part of that journey. Back in 2019, with 15 businesses spread across three sectors, we had fragmented technologies and low overall growth. We presented phase one, a need for us to focus on becoming a digital-first business. And this was accelerated by COVID, clearly, resulting in us being fully digital by FY21. We also presented a plan to improve our operational levers, and these were in the areas of sales, marketing, product, and technology.
In June of 2021, we presented phase two, a pivot of the group to focus on governance, risk, and compliance, creating the strategy template for assessing both our existing businesses and our M&A opportunities. We called these the Wilmington characteristics, and we've continued also to invest in our businesses through those operational levers. A key point in the journey was a conscious shift away from being a media business and moving towards a portfolio of training, data, and RegTech businesses. We entered phase three, where for those businesses identified as no longer in strategy, we set about making improvements to performance to maximize exit value, resulting in eight disposals, generating GBP 85.8 million of capital for reinvestment, consolidating the group to seven businesses. We then started to prepare for phase four, building our M&A target list, expanding wider and deeper into GRC markets, and growing our GRC PurePlay platform.
The first part of this was the acquisition into a new vertical of health, safety, and environmental, with Astutis joining the group in November 2023, and then a further expansion in the same market with Phoenix joining in October 2024, and in FY26, we have already announced the plan to acquire Conversia, a business based in Barcelona, which focuses on the data privacy market, and more on that in a few moments, so while there's been a lot of change at Wilmington, it is part of a very controlled and organized plan of phases. In our current phase, that's phase four, you can expect us to continue to develop our GRC PurePlay platform and expanding into new geographic and vertical GRC markets.
You can expect us to continue to develop our RegTech credentials, continue to portfolio manage, which includes the sale of FRA, and deliver operational efficiencies through AI and technologies, repositioning Wilmington as a growth business. On to slide 15. The group strategic map we have showed you several times is now expanding, and as we extend our reach into new GRC markets. In the last 22 months, we've added health and safety and environmental to our sector coverage and are soon to include data privacy, which you can see here on the right-hand side of the slide. An important point to make is that we're expanding in a disciplined manner. Every business or market we investigate must meet our required characteristics and must operate in a market which is regulated by a strong regulator and has government and legislation driving behaviors.
For our clients, meeting those GRC demands is increasingly challenging, and we continue to invest in skills training, data, and RegTech solutions to help our customers do the right business in the right way. We've made examples of organic growth initiatives which are helping our customers, such as AXCO's new Navigator product, ICA's development of regulatory alerts, and Mercia's expansion in content for software services, or Bond Solon's 12% underlying growth when excluding the two missing contracts. Just now I mentioned RegTech. At the bottom of this slide, you will see the status of our proprietary RegTech solution. As we committed to in February, Mercia is now live on our Wilmington RegTech platform, meaning ICA, CLTI, Mercia, and most of Bond Solon will now benefit from the increased flexibility and efficiency of a single technology platform. Conversia has its own highly developed RegTech platform, with its newest iteration currently going live.
I frequently reference the green X on the top right-hand side of this slide, which is meant to indicate our intention to invest in existing and new markets. I'll come back to this in a couple of slides, but before doing so, let me update you on one of our businesses that we highlighted in February, our US events business, FRA, which focuses on the US Medicare Advantage market. We've seen slide 16. In February of 2025, we had hoped the disruption in our core US healthcare market would settle. However, this was not the case, with significant change at the main US regulator, the HHS, and the regulator for Medicare Advantage, the CMS, and additional disruption through central administration efficiency programs. Combined, these had a significant impact on our H2 performance, requiring us to rethink our product strategy.
The result of which is that in FY26, we consolidated to our core events, meaning a smaller but more focused event schedule. While obviously less events means less revenue, we will also have less venue food and beverage costs, and our overall profitability in FY26 should exceed that of FY25. This review also led to another piece of work, which was the reassessment of FRA in the group's phase four development. You can see the table in the middle of the slide. We concluded that FRA is a GRC business. Its events tackle hugely complex and increasingly regulated content and data. We and other observers see little evidence of a reduction in demand for Medicare Advantage, our core market. FRA's RISE brand is a leader in the space and hugely respected and trusted, and the business has strong entrepreneurial leadership.
However, as shown by the question marks on the table, the revenue characteristics more closely resemble a media type model. We run annual events, selling delegates and sponsorship packages in advance on the strength of the content that we covered, much like a magazine or journal publisher will sell around a seasonal feature or event, and the main revenue streams are tied to face-to-face activities, not digital. Therefore, FRA does not meet all of our characteristics, and we've made the decision to start exploring other opportunities for the business outside of Wilmington. As Guy's already said, FRA appears in our FY25 numbers, but is held for sale in FY26. Returning to our expansion plans and on to slide 17. Conversia is due to join the group shortly, and this slide explains how the business meets the Wilmington characteristics. We presented this slide before, so a quick reminder of the headlines.
From left to right on this table, Conversia is clearly a GRC business focusing on data privacy in Spain. It has just over 400 employees and is market leader in selling RegTech and training and data privacy solutions to an addressable target market of 3.2 million SME customers, with a TAM or total addressable market of € 2.5 billion. While it is market leader, it has low market share, and there is considerable headroom for growth. As a RegTech business, they have a digital-first mindset. They have very high customer feedback scores. The NPS is +71, and growth is driven by a motivated and successful go-to-market sales team. Over 70% of revenues are recurring, which will bolster the group's repeatable and recurring revenue, and the business has delivered consistent double-digit revenue growth and growing EBITDA margins.
It has a highly diversified customer base with a strong customer retention and effective cross and upselling. The management team have a proven track record and have committed for at least the next five years. And underpinning the RegTech solutions is future-facing technology with a highly skilled in-house engineering team who've developed a proprietary platform and are exploring AI-driven efficiencies. So why is Wilmington an ideal owner for this business? Well, we understand the role of RegTech and training in regulated markets. We understand the go-to-market strategies to build market share and share of wallets. We understand how to evolve products to meet increasing regulatory requirements. Having said that, Conversia is a fully formed company and self-sufficient, so we do not have to help a management team with a turnaround or re-platforming. The team are very capable, so our influence can be to help them grow the business.
Over to Guy.
We've added a further slide here, excuse me, on Conversia to show its financial performance for the last four years, something we actually promised to do when we announced the acquisition in August. I'll pick out a few points that Mark hasn't already covered. The figures here are restated to Wilmington's year-end, so June. Financial years 2022 to 2024 for Conversia used the December year-end, and Conversia files audited accounts in Spain each year, so these numbers are public, certainly up to 2024. The revenue CAGR over this period is 17%. It's some years slightly bigger than that, but an average over that period of 17%. And we expect Conversia to be earnings accretive in its first full year in the group. The 70% plus recurring revenues that Conversia brings will improve the overall recurring revenue percentage in the Wilmington group.
The debt facility that we're using to finance it allows us to draw up to GBP 80 million, GBP 70 million of which should be drawn at completion, with the rest of the price funded from our existing cash balances. The facility's for up to five years in length, and the interest rate is base plus a margin ratchet, which is 1.75% at one times EBITDA or less, going up to 2.35% up to two and a half times EBITDA. The facility will be drawn in a mix of euros and sterling, which should lower the overall base rate paid to less than the current sterling standard, which is SONIA. We anticipate not using all of the funds, but having some left over to deal with any working capital timing issues we get over the first year.
Thanks, Guy. On to slide 19.
A few slides ago, I mentioned the plus sign on the table indicating that we intend to expand into new areas. In FY25, we completed a piece of work to clearly define these areas, and this table presents the outcome showing how we are focusing our M&A. Before I explain the table, it's hugely important to state that we continue to explore opportunities in our existing markets. And in addition, we've analysed 49 new verticals and horizontals, looking at the GRC regulatory environments in each. We looked at the growth factors and the market direction or influences. And from this, we identified four new target verticals of retail, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and social care. When looking at horizontals, we have identified data privacy, for example, Conversia, financial crime prevention, cybersecurity, and supply chain management.
When it comes to the service lines or the type of businesses, we're not planning on moving away from our existing knowledge areas of RegTech, tech-enabled services, training and education, and data and information, and lastly, we're exploring international businesses in market-leading positions in sizable markets with the overriding requirement, as I've already said, that the regulator in governments enforce the adoption of regulations, so I hope this slide adds some more detail to our inorganic plans, and looking forwards, you can expect us to be exploring opportunities in each of these areas. One of the characteristics we look for in businesses is its digital capabilities, and I'd like to update you on our own technology advancements, which have been many and are playing an exciting role in driving growth, which starts on slide 20. Over the last 12 months, we have continued our digital transformation.
The RegTech single platform is now complete, is deployed, and the architecture and systems are robust and proven. The hub now supports 21 software as a service offerings. These include both public customer-facing environments and private cloud instances. We've also consolidated our website and e-commerce estate spanning over 30 domains, moving from multiple systems into a unified technology architecture, and we plan to move the recently acquired HSE businesses to the hub across FY26. Conversia, clearly, will remain on their own RegTech platform. In terms of AI, we have made significant progress pursuing a strategy of integrated artificial intelligence where it makes sense and where value can be measured. We've launched AI-powered product offerings and regulatory alerts and chatbot services, and we've embedded AI capabilities into our core product development lifecycle.
We've also developed an internal AI agent solution with chaps and voice-enabled capabilities, and we will be reviewing making this customer-facing throughout FY26, so put simply, our plans for the next 12 months are to continue to integrate AI capabilities into the digital hub, transforming our product development lifecycle, our customer service, and our overall customer experience, and a final and important point is that our new architecture allows us to simultaneously deploy these AI enhancements across the group rather than updating individual systems or taking a brand-by-brand approach, which leads to scalability, so slide 21. Finally, for today, we have included a review of our responsible business activities and plans. Reviewing against external benchmarks, you'll see we've made good progress in FY25 in areas like achieving Investors in People Silver Award, Investors in Wellbeing Silver Award, and achievement of ISO 14001 certification, which covers environmental management.
There's a lot on this slide. If you'd like any more detail on these areas, then please do contact us after the presentation. So to slide 22 for the current trading and outlook. In a challenging year with many external pressures, we've delivered another strong financial performance with ongoing revenue and profit growth and improved margins. We are successfully implementing our M&A strategy, with the group strengthened by the acquisition of Phoenix, and Conversia is on course to complete in November. Conversia adds to our existing RegTech capabilities with the Wilmington single platform rolled out to ICA, CLTI, parts of Bond Solon, and Mercia. As I've just mentioned, we've made continued progress with our responsible business strategies, and we can say today lastly that the current trading is in line with our expectations. So that completes our presentation for today.
We're going to drop the slides, and it's now time to take your questions. If we can ask you to come off mute to do so, and if you could put your cameras on, that would help us so we can see you. Thank you. Steve, I can see you have your hand up. Good morning.
Yeah, morning. Can I take three, please? One, just in terms of the Q1 outlook commentary as expectations, any more color you can give us there in terms of end market ups and downs overall. Second question is kind of linked to that, which is in Legal Bond Solon. Can you just give us an update there and remind us there were two specific contracts you mentioned that washed out last year? You also mentioned that some might come back, I think, on the last call, just whether you've seen that, and is it fair to assume that in this current year, the growth is kind of lapping at that sort of 12% that you mentioned in 2025, ex the two contracts? And then the last question is on FRA. Just in terms of I kind of get why you're selling it structurally and fundamentally.
It feels like a relatively tough time to sell that asset. Just really in terms of your motivations and price expectations and potential buyers, any color you can give us there, because as I say, it doesn't feel like the great time to sell it. Thanks.
Okay, thank you. We'll take them in the order. Did you want to talk to the first?
Sure, yeah. So Q1 outlook. We've seen fairly steady demand. August's always a quiet month, so it's difficult to do your results announcement in mid-September after probably the quietest month of the year, just because obviously most people are on holiday, etc. But we've seen pretty steady demand, certainly in our non-U.S. market. So FRA tends to start the year quite quietly anyway. It doesn't have many events in the first half of the year. You may remember that more than 70% of its revenues actually fall in the second half of the year, and it's a little bit early to tell if forward demand for some of the events that take place in March to June next year is going to be higher.
It is actually running quite well at the moment, demand for events there, but it's very, very early days, so we wouldn't like to call it and then all of our other businesses, primarily based out of the UK, are seeing solid demand. We had one or two businesses that had very strong Q4 order books, and that gives us very good first half revenue for the half we're in now, so we're seeing that come through well in the numbers. We're anticipating the growth that a lot of you've got in your forecasts coming through as we expected it to, and not really any indications on the downside at all at the moment.
Okay, the second question was around legal and what the forward-looking picture looks like for that.
Yeah, so Bond Solon's one of those businesses that's taking in a lot of contracts at the moment. It's certainly running at the levels it was last year, so this 12% excluding the other contracts. There is an opportunity for at least one of those contracts to come back. It hasn't yet, so we don't want to call it, but it's not necessarily gone forever. It's just the customer's timing. And so that business should get back to growth this year, and given that the prior year doesn't have these contracts in it now, it should give us growth, and let's hope it's in double digits as it has been running at the moment.
Steve, your last one was around FRA, and I think if I summarize it, it's a decision-making process. So lots of important points to make here, but keeping it as short as I can. We review all of our businesses, not just FRA, all the businesses in the group on a fairly regular basis, and that's annually. We have obviously an annual budgeting cycle, but every business has a three-year plan, and that three-year plan gets refreshed every year. Part of that process is we therefore look at addressable markets. We look at the characteristics of the business, the shape of the business, its position, its marketplace, and a whole range of other factors as you'd expect. The major part, though, is we review it against the six characteristics that we consistently have talked about.
FRA meets many of those, but the one that in particular it doesn't meet is its revenue model, which very much more closely aligns with a media company. I tried to explain in the presentation that the way we sell against an event is very much like a magazine publisher or a content publisher would sell around a special feature or around a certain edition. It has an annual event, and we get one go at that. It's a media-type model. We've consistently said for several years now that we are looking to exit the media space. If you look at the disposals we've made from those eight businesses, several of those, in fact, quite a few of them have been media companies. We've explained that as part of the process. Now, today is day one on a journey of exploring other options for the business.
We don't have a timetable for that, but the thinking around the disposal is back to the characteristics and the business not meeting the characteristics. The last one quite clearly is it is a face-to-face business. We've looked at digital solutions, but our sponsors want to meet people in person. They want to meet the delegates in person. And therefore, this is a face-to-face, some would describe it as an analog trading mechanism. And we've also very consistently said we're looking for digital-first businesses for this new shape of Wilmington. So that's what's driving the decision. It's very early days. Today is day one of that process. And from these meetings, we will now be marketing the company to see what levels of interest we can get.
Okay, thank you.
I can see an order of the hands. So James, I can see your hand is up.
Good morning, James. Can you hear me?
Yes, good morning.
Great. Just a couple for me. One in terms of the portfolio, in terms of both its size and geographical diversity. I guess on size, is there kind of a target number you have in terms of brands or businesses kind of over the medium term? And then geographically, seeing coming out of the U.S. with FRA. In terms of those four kind of sectors you targeted, is there anywhere geographically you're trying to break into and diversify the group, which, with the U.S. going, it's getting a little bit more concentrated? And then second question was just on the kind of tone of regulators in a post-Trump world, if there's any kind of feel like there's movement to deregulate versus increasing regulatory burden, which we had before. Thank you.
Okay, thanks. I'll take those. The first one is the simple answer is no. We don't have a number of brands or a certain scale. But I think as phase four, if you look at that slide, it says FY26 and FY27, we certainly see ourselves growing as a group. This is part of the reason to show you the phase chart was to show it's a very considered action, set of phases in a very controlled and disciplined manner to reduce the size of our portfolio before we then very carefully rebuild it back out again, firstly with Astutis, then Phoenix, and now is going to be with Conversia. And this portfolio management will continue moving forward. We'll all the time assess the businesses we have, and we'll use the same sort of characteristics to then review the opportunity moving forward.
But one thing we've hopefully demonstrated to everybody is a very structured and disciplined M&A channel. So you won't see us doing a significant number of transactions in a very short period of time to do the rapid portfolio expansion. That's not our model. It's not what we're set up to do. We will make an acquisition, and we will very carefully integrate that business into the group, making sure that we're delivering as much value as we can to that business, and then we'll move on to the next. So a very measured and structured program, which is what we've done to date so far. In terms of geography, there are very interesting actually this question because there are lots of geographies. I've talked about this in the past, lots of areas where you look at size of markets and activity levels.
We look at another dimension here, which is the regulatory shape or the framework of those markets and how is that regulatory framework enforced, let's call it. So is there a regulator? Does the regulator have the ability to make steps in its market and insist that activities and behaviors change? Because if it's just publishing content and saying this is best practice, it doesn't create the market environment that we're looking for. So we are being very selective. And one of the things we're doing with the international options we look at is we spend as much time looking at the regulatory framework and investigating that as we do looking at the business because we're looking for both great businesses but operating in that very, very strict regulatory environment.
And that leads you to. I'm trying not to give you a list of names of geographies, but that leads to certain parts of the world where that characteristics can be found. Others where you see maybe the right messaging, but you don't see the regulatory activity are less attractive for us, and therefore we're not looking at those. And then the deregulation piece. I think you have to, yes, there is a lot of narrative around deregulation. I think you have to go back and look at what we do. We are providing RegTech services, data services, information, training, accredited training, skills training in areas where the regulations are there to protect effectively at the end of the day people and businesses from suffering from harm.
If you look at financial crime prevention, anti-money laundering, and health and safety, they are regulations which are there to protect us as individuals and businesses and society. I can see how deregulation in some other areas may weaken as it becomes easier to do business or so on and so forth, but I'm finding it's hard to see, and there's no evidence of this, but regulations in areas where they're designed to keep people safe and society safe, I see it hard to see a relaxation in those areas. And that's mainly where we are with the training and services and data RegTech solutions that we do. So no, we don't see any short-term or mid-term deregulation impacts on the businesses.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, Hayley, good morning.
Morning. Thank you. Two questions from me focusing on the RegTech solution, please. I was wondering whether you could give an update on the progress with the ICA retail banking customer that you flagged earlier in the year where they're using the digital hub to consume and monitor training. And are there any other customers that are close to getting to that stage of rollout? And then in terms of the SaaS solutions that you had on the slide, I was wondering how you're seeing demand for those type of solutions and when they might become revenue-generating for the group. Thank you.
Sure. The ICA piece, we don't identify the retail banking customer. We had, I think from memory, at February, it was like 30,000 people on that platform. That's now moving its way closer to 36, excuse me a second. Sorry about that. 36,000, 37,000 or so. We did say in February that we were onboarding tranches of customers. That's a total customer count. That's not for that individual customer. That individual customer, it's still embedded. It's a multi-year contract to use the RegTech digital hub solution, and other customers are being onboarded. You can see the progress we've made over that six-month period of onboarding many other customers. The SaaS product we mentioned is a feature of having this RegTech solution means that we can create what may look like customized or bespoke solutions for individual customers, but they're not. They're actually all using an underlying technology.
We come from a technology background. I think the mistake you can make is to effectively make a sort of root and branch network of a single code base and then have loads of different variants you have to then manage moving forward. The software as a service type solutions we have for our customers are all running off the same back-end technology and code base. They have a layer of customization at the front end to meet those customer requirements, but everything behind that is consistent on one platform. When our tech teams make changes, they're rolled out across all those software services, and they're charged on a case-by-case basis. This is a whole new territory for Wilmington because it only comes by having the single RegTech platform that we spent many years developing.
So you can expect to start to see us expand that kind of activity moving forward. But to keep making the point, that doesn't require us to make a whole new technology stack for every individual customer. This is very scalable. It's just the front end which is being personalized or customized. I think they're your two questions, Jess.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
Were there any other questions? We can't.
I think Roddy's got his hand up on the.
Roddy, good morning.
Yeah, good morning, chat. Thanks for the presentation. Just three, maybe three questions. And apologies, my slides have been dropping in and out a little bit, so apologies if you've covered these off. But just in terms of the portfolio, you've got the performance slide there indicating some of the financial metrics going forward. Just wondering about ARR and how you expect that to build over the next couple of years or so with that portfolio. On FRA, I know that the process is literally just getting underway, but any aspirations, any thoughts in terms of timescale on that one? And also, and I'm assuming probably not, but any cost savings as a consequence of not having the business within the group and equally any one-off costs associated with its departure?
And then finally for me, just wondering in terms of the current acquisition pipeline, could you give a sense as to perhaps how many opportunities you're considering? And also whether Conversia means that there is a sort of maybe a pause at the moment or whether it's sort of business as usual and you can accommodate people, you can accommodate on the transactions sort of over the next sort of six to nine months? Thank you.
Thank you. So I'll take those in order. The first one was the ARR build. Yeah. So I mean, just mathematically, you can work out that 70% of their revenues that we said were EUR 36.6 million. You add that to our recurring revenue number of 36% of basically GBP 36 million of the GBP 99.5. You can see that our percentage is going to go into the 40s immediately. And as Conversia grows, and it has been growing high teens over the last three or four years, that's going to increase, pushing towards the 50. And then when you also take FRA out of the calculation when it actually leaves, because FRA doesn't have any recurring revenue, that will also bump the total percentage up.
So on our way to 50 and looking to grow that as much as we can, obviously, the businesses that don't have recurring revenue specifically have repeat revenue. And some people would call that ARR as well, but it's already 80%, and Conversia is only going to help that go up as well. On FRA, no, we don't have a timescale that we're talking about. I said this a little earlier, which is that it's very early stage. We're announcing it today, and we will start marketing the business and looking for expressions of interest over the next few weeks or so. So we're not providing a timetable on that. But you had a follow-up question on there, which is whether any cost savings or one-off cost efficiencies as a result of FRA leaving?
No, when we sell any business, we always make sure that it takes one way or another its share of central costs with it. FRA doesn't have a huge share of central costs, but those will be going, so there'll be no costs for the rest of the group to take up, but there won't really be any particular savings either, and we don't think other than the normal deal costs, there won't be any sort of one-off costs of it leaving the group. It's very much a standalone legal entity. You can get your hands around it quite easily without having to do any big carve-out or sort of extrication from the rest of the group. Okay, and the last question was around M&A and the number of opportunities.
We've used these sort of numbers in the past, which has been that we have a dedicated M&A team within Wilmington, and they are scanning the market looking for opportunities, and they do effectively the first pass in terms of, do these businesses meet the characteristics that we're looking for? There will be a very long list in terms of either target companies that we're reaching out to or inbound promotional materials that we receive, and they'll be processing through there. I'm going to kind of repeat what I've been saying consistently now for a few years, which is that we are going to take a very measured approach to M&A. We're going to find a target, be very clear about what Wilmington adds to that target and its characteristics.
And then we're going to spend a lot of time and energy integrating that business into the group, but also ensuring that we provide as much value as we can back the other way into that business. And that's what we've been doing with Astutis, and we've been doing with Phoenix. And we will have that to do with Conversia as well. Having said that, Conversia is a very fully formed company, and we've been there a number of times, and it's a very impressive setup in terms of their strategic plans and their capabilities. So you can expect more of the same from us in terms of the kind of volume that we've been working to date. Now, you make a point, which is Conversia is a significant size of transaction, significantly bigger than the two we've made previously. So there will be an integration plan.
We're waiting for that clearance, but we're ready for that clearance to be granted, and in anticipation of that, we've got ourselves in a position where the day that clearance is given and we can complete, we can start working closely with the team. Having said that, we're already in discussions with them around the individual workflows, so that's going to be for a business of our size, that's going to be a lot of work to do to integrate that, and therefore, we're going to put the energy into there and then keep the M&A pipeline bubbling away, but make sure we deliver that integration piece, and we've actually been discussing those as a board very recently, so I'm very careful about timetables because you never know when opportunities are going to arise.
But our plan is to do what we've been doing so far, find the business, make the acquisition, integrate very carefully, deliver the value in both directions, report to you on the performance of the business, and then move on to the next one. And you can expect us to do the same sort of same process moving forward. Fiona, good morning.
Good morning. My questions are around Conversia. And first of all, you said one of the goals for them to join you was to, or one of the things you could do for them is help them grow. But they've actually got a very significant recent growth record. So I'm just wondering how you envisage being able to turbocharge that. And the second question is around the whole new segment you're opening up here with data privacy. Obviously, this is a very dynamic and interesting area to be in. Do you intend addressing it through Conversia, or are you looking to add data privacy to your existing platform hub that you've got now? Thank you.
Thank you. Okay. You're absolutely right. They are extremely good at growing. And they have a very efficient and well-run and very large sales operation, all of which are selling a very modern technology stack. And actually, they're in the process of rolling out a new version of that as we speak now. So yes, they're extremely good, but there are pockets we've already identified where Wilmington can help. AI is an example. We're doing a lot of experimentation, and we're doing a lot of deployment of AI into solutions. Conversia. So getting in a room to discuss not just the soundbite of, "We have AI," but what does that really mean in terms of driving value to the customer and driving value to the business as well?
And there'll be a lot of learnings that we can share between the two businesses, the two sort of tech teams, the Wilmington tech team and the Conversia one. But other smaller areas, for example, the use of digital marketing, yes, they have some experience. We have extensive experience across the group. So we're not doing a sort of one-size-fits-all piece here. We're breaking down the individual components of the business. And we'll be making introductions between the marketing team at Conversia and the marketing team at Wilmington and say, "You can learn. There are definitely things you can learn from each other. We know today there are things that we can help Conversia with. And equally, we know there are things that they can help the Wilmington businesses with." So I don't want you to think this is a one-way traffic of us going in there.
This is definitely going to be a lot of two-way conversations, and the Conversia team, we know them very well now, are looking forward to being able to have a wider pool of people to talk to because they've been very much a standalone business in their own right. They haven't worked in a group like Wilmington where they have access to lots of other experience levels, and they're looking forward to doing so. Data privacy, yes, it's a new market for us. Sizable market. In Spain, it's sizable, but we've also recognized other international opportunities, and the last part of your question, we have both options. Conversia has, well, it's fine to have a target M&A list of businesses that it's looking to, would like to look at more closely, both in Spain and overseas, as does Wilmington.
That's how we and then we will do a piece of work at some point where we overlap those two and look for where Conversia sees opportunities and where we see opportunities within Wilmington as well. Having said that, that isn't the priority. The priority is really the onboarding, the embedding, the integration of the business into the group, and making sure that we have a seamless transition of ownership and that six months into being in the group, the Conversia team are feeling very positive about the influence that we're having. So that's the main focus rather than the M&A channel. Okay. Thank you. I don't see any other hands, but I'm going to give people a chance to come off mute in case.
Yeah, I've got my hand up for one additional, if possible. Sorry, arguably I should know this, but just on FRA, are there any obvious competitors or peers in the area that it operates that we should know about? Or you could give us some hints on. I'm just thinking about ICA when ACAMS changed hands, and it was really kind of interesting that there was a peer out there. Just anything you can give us there in terms of, well, on a potential buyer or just other businesses we can look at to compare it.
Name-wise, I'm going to talk slightly differently about this. The potential acquirer for this is quite a broad range, and that's what makes this, I think, an interesting prospect. FRA has carved out, with its RISE brand, a really strong market reputation in the Medicare Advantage market. And I'm being very careful with this. It's not the entire healthcare sector within the U.S. It's the Medicare Advantage part of the U.S. health sector. And the RISE brand is very well respected, RISE National being a major event which runs, as you know, around March every year. So that makes FRA quite a very focused business. It's not a general exhibitions company or a general events business. It's very much focused on that singular market.
So when you look at potential sort of competitors or so, you're limiting yourself to effectively quite a small market by comparison to the bigger exhibitions and events companies. However, it has carved out this strong position, meaning that to a larger company that doesn't have that penetration into the U.S. healthcare market, FRA might be a very interesting target to look at, bringing into its portfolio because of its standing within the Medicare Advantage market. Equally, it might be into a smaller business where they understand events, for example, or the media model, and they're looking to build out in the U.S. space into the healthcare sector. So we've got, obviously, a wide list of potential acquirers that we will be talking to very soon. But no, I don't have a sort of peer-to-peer direct comparator I can give you for FRA as an individual business.
So hopefully, that answers your question in terms of who the potential acquirers might be.
Yeah. Thanks.
Thank you.