Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to XPS Pensions Group Interim Results Presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. Instructions will also follow at the time of the Q&A. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to management to start the presentation.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the presentation of our results for the half year ending 30 September 2025. In terms of what we are going to cover today, we'll start with the key highlights, but we thought it might then be a good idea to cover the big themes that are happening in our market today so you can see what's been keeping us so busy and why it's going to keep us busy for a long time to come. I will talk us through the details of the financials, and then we'll look at our key divisions in turn, and we'll say a bit about our culture and brand before Ben wraps up with a summary and more comments on the outlook from here. What we'll come across throughout, I think, are three key things. We're continuing to achieve strong growth, with revenues up by double digits again.
We have good visibility of continued high demand for all our services, given everything that's going on in our markets and in the coming years. We have made really good progress in expanding our addressable market.
To look at a little more detail, during the period, revenues grew by 13%, of which 8% was organic, with, of course, the remaining growth coming from the acquisition of Polaris, which completed shortly before the start of this financial year. We are also really pleased to report healthy growth in our profits, with adjusted EBITDA up 8% and EPS up 9%. This performance is especially pleasing, given it is measured against a very strong first half last year, and that included material one-off revenues from the large McCloud Remedy project. If you adjust for that and the one-off impact of the NI increase in our cost base, the underlying organic performance of the group is double-digit revenue and profit growth once again.
Now, Snehal will give you the details of all of that in a second, but in terms of what's driving it, I think it's fair to say that the pensions market is going through more change at the moment than probably any time in the last 20 years. The step change in the financial position of defined benefit schemes has created a really wide range of opportunities for our clients, and it's also against the backdrop of other things such as new funding rules working their way through the system, continued work on the GMP remedy, and quite a lot more besides. Now, these themes are going to persist for many years to come, and we're really well placed to help our pension scheme clients. We've continued to invest in technology to be able to give cutting-edge advice, and we can do so really efficiently.
We've also won new clients in the period across all of our lines of service, but perhaps most eye-catchingly, we're delighted, of course, to have been appointed to be the administrator for the Metropolitan Police. They've got around 80,000 members and will be, by some way, our largest public sector client. That appointment was, of course, really supported by our strong reputation following the successful delivery of McCloud work more widely. Back in the private sector, part of the big structural changes that are going on has, of course, been the increase in insurance transactions in recent years and the gradual merging of the insurance and pensions ecosystems. It was, of course, against that backdrop that we acquired Polaris, an insurance consulting firm, just before the start of this financial year.
We're really pleased with how the acquisition has gone so far, probably especially pleased with how it's opening up opportunities for us to deploy XPS capabilities in support directly of insurance company clients. Really importantly, more widely, we continue to do things in the right way. As you'll know, we place a huge value on having a strong employee-centric culture. We measure this, and we've been really pleased with the results of our most recent employee survey. It confirms that we've got a happy and motivated workforce. Again, that's something that sets us up really well as we look to the future. Before we get into the detailed business line review, it's helpful, I think, to just give you a quick reminder of how we structure ourselves within XPS.
We have three key parts to the business: actuarial and consulting, and this is where, in plain English, we are trying to make sure that there is enough money in pension schemes to provide all the benefits in future. It is also where we help schemes to ensure that they are compliant with the wide range of regulations that apply to them. In the investment business, we advise on where to invest the scheme's assets and associated things like risk management. Of course, these two parts of the business work really closely together, indeed, often resources are shared between them. You will often hear us refer to the advisory business, which ultimately captures both of them. The third pillar is a little different, and that is administration, and that is where we deal with the members directly themselves.
It covers record keeping, answering member questions, and ultimately anything that's needed to ensure that we pay the right benefits to the right people at the right time. Now, in terms of our markets, the bulk of our work is for pension schemes, but as we've previously mentioned, we're increasingly providing these services to life insurance companies too. For example, bulk insurers writing bulk annuities sometimes need help with actuarial calculations, which is where our advisory team can help them. After a deal's been written, the insurer needs to keep all the records and do all the administration. Again, something that's core here to us at XPS. Our markets are large. We estimate that around GBP 3 billion a year is spent running occupational schemes in the U.K., and the market for people supporting insurers is a very large one as well.
Before Snehal runs through the financials, it's helpful to explain some of the key trends in the private sector defined benefit world, which are driving our performance. Schemes come down from the top, and as they travel down the road, they need all of the typical care and maintenance support, so things like administration, regular funding, investment, and covenant reviews. They also need support to react to any market or regulatory changes. If I went back five years or so, schemes were typically quite a long way from the junction, and actually it wasn't a junction, as the only real opportunity was to head to buyout. Over the last few years, two things have changed.
The first is that due to large rises in gilt yields, schemes are now much better funded and are now much closer to the junction, and indeed, many have already reached it. This has driven an increase in the activity in the bulk annuity market, which you can see from the chart on the top right. The second thing that's changed is that schemes now have a choice, as the concept of continuing to run the pension scheme in the pensions regime, perhaps using the techniques employed by insurers, is now a valid option. It is an option that's really gaining traction, particularly among schemes with over a few hundred million pounds of assets.
For example, at our most recent conference, where we had around 300 external guests, we asked the audience which route their schemes were likely to take, and 40% said they were exploring run-on, 38% said they were likely to head to buyout, with the remainder undecided. That is a huge shift, as a few years ago, the vast majority would have been heading to buyout, and this is really, really interesting to us. What does this all mean for XPS? For schemes that choose to run on, it is very simple, as they will continue to need all of the ongoing consulting and administration services they get today. They will probably need a bit of extra support around things like risk management and how to manage surplus release. Where schemes go down the buyout route, it creates a lot of extra work.
It typically takes three to four years from a scheme deciding that they want to pursue an insurance transaction to actually completing a buyout. During this time, we typically earn a multiple of the care and maintenance fees, given all of the work associated with the transaction itself and the broader work required to ultimately decommission a pension scheme. This creates demand in the short term, but it is a double-edged sword, as in the end, we have one less client. However, for each transaction, there is an insurer on the other side, and they often need help too, whether that is onboarding the schemes or carrying out the administration that the pension scheme was previously doing. Whilst buyouts might reduce the pension scheme addressable market, it creates opportunities for XPS to help insurers and effectively increases the insurers' addressable market.
This is something that we'll touch on as we go through the presentation.
Another strong half year, as Paul said, with revenue growth of 13%, of which 8% was organic. This is particularly pleasing, as we had significant revenues from the McCloud Remedy project in the prior year comparator. During the period, we continued to invest in building our insurance consulting team. We also had the increase in employers' national insurance from 1 April this year, and the prior year comparator included strong margin contribution from the one-off McCloud Remedy project. Adjusted EBITDA margin has therefore fallen by 1.2 percentage points to 26%. However, normalizing entirely for the national insurance increase and the one-off impact of McCloud, adjusted EBITDA margin has improved from 24% to 26.3%. We remain on track to deliver on full year expectations and further improvements in the margins over the medium term.
Strong operational performance and a lower share count has driven adjusted diluted EPS of GBP 0.097, which is up 9% year on year. The first half is cash outflow heavy, with the payment of the full year bonus and the final dividend from the prior year. Despite that and the additional debt due to the Polaris acquisition, leverage remains below one times at 0.88 times. In line with our progressive dividend policy, the board has declared an interim dividend of GBP 0.041 per share, up 11% year on year, underscoring our continued confidence in the business model and growth prospects. As we said in June, due to the significant overlap between our consulting service offering, we have now moved to disclose and discuss performance in our advisory, administration, and SIP divisions. Paul and Ben will go through each of the divisional performance shortly, but let me give you the highlights.
As I said earlier, group revenue grew 13% year on year, 8% was organic. If you exclude the significant impact of the McCloud Remedy project in the comparator, organic revenue growth was very strong at 12%. Costs, which I'll cover next, have grown 15%. This includes the impact of the higher employer's NI, as well as investing in growing our insurance consulting team. Normalizing for these items, cost growth is below the revenue growth, meaning operational gearing continues to improve in the underlying business. Net finance costs have increased following the acquisition of Polaris. Adjusted profit after tax has therefore grown 7% year on year. A lower share count due to continued share purchases through the EBT has helped deliver adjusted EPS growth ahead of the growth in profit after tax.
On the non-trading and exceptional items, which are all consistent with previous treatment and largely non-cash, increase in amortization of acquired intangibles reflects the acquisition of Polaris. The acquisition-related remuneration is the build-up of the Polaris contingent consideration, and higher share-based payment charge reflects an increase in senior equity plan awards, as well as a higher share price. Total operating costs are up 15% ahead of the 13% growth in revenues due to the one-offs mentioned previously. Within that, staff costs are up 19%. Off that 19%, 5% is from the Polaris acquisition and expanding our insurance consulting team. 3% is from the impact of the higher employer's NI. Therefore, you can see that on an underlying basis, staff cost growth of 11% remains below the organic revenue growth of 12%.
The remainder of the increase is driven by an 8% increase in headcount, as well as inflationary and promotional pay rises. Increase in IT costs reflect a higher headcount, continued investment in tech, particularly cybersecurity, partially offset by some benefits of Aurora flowing through. Other costs are largely in line with prior year as we continue to maintain strong cost discipline. Adjusted operating cash inflow of GBP 22.8 million equates to a 68% conversion. The 84% conversion last year was flattened by project work with cash received in advance. Like-for-like conversion was 72% last year. Guidance for the full year and future years remains conversion of between 90%-95% as we continue to grow. We spent GBP 14 million during the half year to buy back shares, which have been used to satisfy vesting of share awards.
The CapEx includes GBP 3.3 million on continued development of Aurora, our administration platform, and the remainder on BAU IT spend, as well as leasehold improvements. The full year CapEx guidance is between GBP 10-11 million as we continue to invest in our technology. Net debt at 30 September was GBP 62.2 million and a covenant leverage of 0.88 times. Currently, we have GBP 47 million of undrawn facility from the total of GBP 120 million available until March 2029. Just to remind you of our capital allocation priorities, which remain unchanged, the focus remains on capitalizing on the organic opportunity within our core and tangential markets. We want to continue investing in creating market-leading proprietary tech that creates a competitive advantage as well as drives efficiencies. Relative to the size of the business now, we will continue to be CapEx light.
We will continue with our progressive dividend policy, and we will continue to scan the horizon for earnings-enhancing strategic M&A opportunities, but we will remain disciplined in our approach. In advisory, which, as a reminder, covers actuarial and investment advice to pension schemes and insurers, we saw strong performance. Growth was 19%, which includes Polaris, and organic growth was 9%. Now, we have been and continue to be very busy supporting pension scheme clients with a wide range of topics. The market evolution that Ben described has created a lot of demand, and we are busy advising clients on which path they might want to take, whether to look at an insurance transaction or to look at running on to benefit from surplus.
We've introduced new functionality on our software platform, Radar, to help with this debate, and we've developed some really smart financial models more widely that we believe are the first in the industry to be used with clients. Now, we've innovated in other areas too, for example, in investment consulting, where client needs are evolving in the age of surpluses. An example of this is Exchange, which is a service that helps pension schemes and others trade in illiquid assets. Something that's been really topical lately, as schemes looking to insure may wish to sell assets before maturity, while others running on may wish to take advantage of buying opportunities. At the same time, our pension risk transfer team has been really busy, and we continue to see a strong multi-year pipeline of activity in that area.
We're also still busy working through GMP projects for clients, and there are many years of this work ahead as well. Now, we've also been doing more work directly with insurers, and we're seeing a trend where the increased volume of transactions in recent years, many of which are only now being onboarded by the insurers in what's always a multi-year process, is giving rise to a need for some additional support for them as they scale up their operations. XPS is really well placed to help, and the relationships and contracts that Polaris have have proved invaluable in accessing some of these opportunities. More widely, we're just really pleased with how well Polaris has integrated.
Now, something that we've also seen is a number of the insurers have reviewed their preferred supplier lists in recent months ahead of future years where they expect to need a lot of external support. Polaris, now of course part of XPS, has been renewed in each of these reviews, and happily, in a number of cases, we've actually expanded the services for which we're now on the preferred supplier list. That is really important for the future, and it leaves us really well positioned in the years ahead. In terms of the outlook, put simply, we expect all of these things to continue. The industry is going through some really fairly seismic changes, and it will work through the system over a period of many years. It is also giving rise to a healthy new business pipeline.
Change always brings opportunity to differentiate, and we're investing in our propositions, in our technology, and our people to be able to rise to the challenge. Onto administration, this part of the business provides services to private and public sector pension schemes, as well as bulk and utility providers. In simple terms, we can split the work into core administration, which is the day-to-day admin and probably accounts for around two-thirds of the business, and then projects. Growth in the half was 6%. However, this is the part of the business where the McCloud revenues were earned in the prior year, and as we've mentioned, these were one-off in terms of the size and delivery method. Now, whilst the McCloud project has finished, it's been really positive for our reputation in the public sector.
Actually, over the recent months, subject to contract, we've been appointed to provide pension administration to the West Midlands Police Force. As Paul mentioned earlier, in the last couple of weeks, subject to contract, we've been appointed to provide administration to the Metropolitan Police, which is the largest force across England and Wales. Now, if we exclude the impact of McCloud revenues to look at the underlying performance, revenue growth was 16%, which is very strong. This was driven by growth of around 10% within core administration as we onboarded some large new clients, most notably John Lewis and the SEI Master Trust. The performance is also driven by a 30% increase in project-related revenues, reflecting the high demand from private sector schemes for support with things like data cleansing and GMP work, and also around the pensions dashboard where the first schemes are now being connected.
Looking ahead, we expect to see strong demand for projects given the broader backdrop for defined benefit schemes. We are also seeing a strong pipeline of new business opportunities across both the public and private sector markets. Our service quality and Aurora platform, we have got a really strong story to tell there, so we are optimistic about continuing our success. There is also lots going on around operational efficiency and technology. The project to migrate all of our schemes onto Aurora is progressing well, and this will reduce the payaways to third-party system providers, but having all schemes on a common platform should also bring efficiency. The next big milestone here is to complete the migration of public sector schemes by February next year, and we will then have one more system to migrate off, which we are aiming to do by the end of 2027 or early 2028.
We also have a number of other projects underway to use technology to improve our service proposition, both in the core administration business, but also around things like data cleansing. Finally, as we touched on, a lot of these services are increasingly needed by insurers as they write more bulk and utility business, so we're working to grow our footprint in that market too. Turning to our SIP business, where we set up and administer SIP and SAS arrangements, and revenue in this part of the group was up 10%. Part of this came from fee increases applied since the comparable period and an increase in the number of SIPs under administration. The rest came from the showing of interest on cash balances, and this element increased by around 18% compared to the previous period as the underlying cash balances increased.
In terms of sales over the period, these were solid, perhaps not as strong as the previous record year due to the inheritance tax changes, which impact people who might have considered pensions in their tax planning, and also more generally the uncertainty created by the budget speculation. However, looking ahead, the sales pipeline does look robust as our products are highly rated and we have a strong reputation and network among the RFA community. Also, about a third of our new SIP policies are written through our place on the St. James's Place and Openwork panels, where there's scope for us to get a bigger share of the business written through those channels. Finally, on the operational side, there's lots going on to drive efficiency and great service.
One particular initiative here is to increase the take-up of our online portal among advisors and members to enable more self-service in the future, and we're now up to around 90% sign-up, which is great. Our culture at XPS is something we think about a lot. We think it's really, really important. As we often say, we believe that happy, motivated people will look after each other brilliantly, and then in turn, they'll provide great service to our clients. We do a great deal to foster a culture where we work together, we share and celebrate success, and we provide opportunities for people to develop and have interesting, varied careers. We measure how we're getting on continuously, but we do have a particular focus on our annual staff survey, which usually runs every October.
We have literally just seen the first cut of these results, and we are delighted that they are really good. The survey is comprehensive, but the most important single figure that captures the overall mood is our employee net promoter score, and this was +32 this year, which we are told is exceptionally high for a professional services firm. We had good results last year, so it is really pleasing to see the scores in a wide range of categories getting better still too, even against those measures, as you can see on the slide. Our culture has also won more awards in recent times, and again, we are really proud of this, and we think it is important as it really helps us with recruitment of talented people. It is of course really important to maintain and build on our really strong brand in the market as well.
We held a large client conference in October. It was the biggest event that we've ever done, and you can see some of the images here of what was a very professional event with a real wow factor about it and how we engage people and energize people more generally. Truly, it was more of a kind of TED conference than it was a pension event, and it was attended by a lot of our clients and really importantly by many prospects as well. We covered all the key topics in the industry at the moment, and we got some great feedback from the attendees, and it's already led to a number of new business opportunities, which is great. To summarize, it's been another good six months for the group where we've continued to deliver on our strategy and traded in line with expectations.
The underlying business is performing well, and this is a function of all of the market and regulatory changes that we've seen, but we've also done a good job of developing our services so that they focus on what clients need. We've also had some great new business wins during the period too. More generally, we're also seeing examples where the Polaris relationships are helping us to deploy our broader pensions capabilities into the insurance market. If you strip out the change in employer NI and the impact of the McCloud project, we've continued to deliver operational gearing. Looking ahead, we expect to remain busy. It's hard to overstate the significance of the changes that we've seen in the private sector defined benefit pensions market over the last couple of years.
We expect to be busy helping our pension scheme clients decide on their long-term strategy and then helping them with the implementation, which typically involves lots of projects. The quality of our service offering and reputation in the industry means we're well placed to continue winning more clients and mandates. We'll also continue to invest in our services. We're looking at how we can use AI and technology to enhance what we already offer and create USPs. We're also expanding the services we offer to the insurance market. In terms of operational gearing, we do believe the scope for further margin improvement through the migration of schemes onto Aurora and the use of technology to drive efficiency. Finally, and most importantly, it's worth saying that our success today has been underpinned by our culture.
We are firm believers that having happy, motivated people is critical to providing a great service to clients, which in turn drives strong financial outcomes. Our culture will remain a key focus for us, and our employee net promoter score of +32 shows we are really well set there. That is the end of our presentation. Thank you for listening.
We will now begin the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your screen. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button. We will now pause a moment to assemble the queue. Our first question is from Steve Wolf from Deutsche Bank. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi all. Congrats on the strong results this morning. Just a few from me, so bear with me.
Can you just sort of talk a little bit more about the type of work that you're being referred from Polaris into pensions? And how quickly does that sort of those sort of referrals and wins come through into the top line? Is it something for a sort of full year 2027 to think of it in that area? Do you have the amount of people you need to do the work given you've been so successful with a number of these contracts? Secondly, in terms of McCloud, congrats on the Met Police. Am I right in thinking they didn't complete McCloud, or have I got that wrong? And is there opportunities in other areas? And then finally, for the investment you're putting into the insurance market at the moment and that business, does that constrain any margin improvements you might have been thinking about near term?
Just wondering now that you're sort of six to eight months into Polaris, your thoughts there.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. I'll kick us off. Steve, good morning. In terms of the type of work that, yeah, we refer to Polaris referring into XPS, of course, we don't think of it quite like that. We are all one firm these days. The opportunities that it's opening up for us to deploy sort of long-standing XPS resource into insurance is what we're referring to and think what you're asking about. Yeah, the opportunities there relate to Polaris relationships and existing contracts that they've got to do work for insurers. It's often quite difficult. You need to go through procurement. You need to be on preferred supplier lists. You need to then have a master services agreement and so on with them.
In some cases, those are only updated and renewed every few years. The nice thing with the Polaris acquisition is that they already had such arrangements with all of the big insurers in the bulk and utility space, pretty much. As such, therefore, XPS had a license to go and do work for those insurers straight away in a way that might have been a bit more difficult before that acquisition. Where we have seen that really pay off has been helping insurers primarily with onboarding of pension schemes where they have written a buy-in transaction in the last year or two and are getting to the stage in the process where they now need to assume responsibility for administering the pension scheme and paying the benefits and so on.
They've seen quite an increase in volume of work that they themselves need to do because of the increase in volume in the transactions. We are a really obvious port of call because it is our bread and butter to do the administration of pension schemes on a day-to-day basis. Offering sort of surge support to help them as they onboard new schemes is something that we've seen happen quite a bit, really kicked off in the summer in some cases. It will help us with revenues in the second half of this year, and we expect that generally to persist into the following year as well. Lots of opportunities are opening up for us in general in that market to keep helping those insurers.
In the example of one of the larger cases that we've won, it is an example where the phone rang for one of the Polaris founders who's now an XPS partner. That introduction enabled him to say, "Yes, we can definitely help. We've got lots of resources at XPS." They would not have been able to help using just Polaris capability, if you like, in the past. It is a really great example of where their relationships, their contracts, but XPS underlying expertise and resource has been able to deliver. In combination, that's great. That's exactly what we hoped to happen when we bought Polaris. It's really, really pleasing to see that come through. Now, in terms of have we got enough people, we are actively recruiting.
When we put people in to help and provide support to an insurer, they were already busy on pension scheme clients. Now we have enough people across the whole piece to be able to do that and still provide a great service to our clients. Of course, it does mean that that is a sort of surge in busyness, if you like, across the group for our people when that happens. We would like to get more people in because we believe we can keep them busy when we do do that. I would not say it is causing us operational problems, but more positively, it is actually, you know, if we had more people, we would be able to keep them more busy. We do have vacancies, and we are actively recruiting across the market to try to help to therefore fuel the fire of growth that will come with that.
You're going to talk about the McCloud and Police question.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very quick, I mean, it's an early stage in our conversations on that, on new clients. There will be discussions about exactly what support they need as part of the onboarding and going forward. It's probably a bit too early to talk about any specific work or projects that we might do. In terms of your question on investment in insurance consulting, look, I think the short answer is all of that is in the numbers that are in the market at the moment. We're not expecting any margin sort of contraction as a result of that. Of course, just to reiterate, what's in the consensus is a continued margin improvement of at least half a percentage point from FY2027 onwards. That's great. Thank you.
Ben, it's just, have the Metropolitan, did they defer McCloud? So is there work still to be done regardless of who does it? It has to be done in the future, or was that work eventually completed?
I think it's underway. It will be something we'll discuss about whether they need any support, but I believe it's underway. As I say, it's not clear yet what support they might need as and when we're getting involved.
Perfect.
That's great. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Steve.
Thank you. Our next question is from Portia Patel from Canaccord. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Portia. Morning. Thanks for taking my question. I've got one on the competitive landscape. I've noticed within the last 12 months, there's been a bit of consolidation within your space.
Howden acquiring Barnett Waddingham and Gallagher acquiring Reddington. I just wondered whether that had created or changed the landscape for you, created opportunities for you, and could you see potential further consolidation in the space occurring?
Thanks, Portia. Yeah, we have got quite a fragmented market. There are a lot of competitors. We have the big multinationals, the big three, but then there's quite a lot of companies that are probably top of the pack of the next mid-tier of competitors. There are a few that are fundamentally pretty similar in size and scale to us and quite a long run-off. Yeah, the deals that you mentioned there, Barnett Waddingham were a competitor that stood a bit like us. They were a partnership, therefore entirely employee-owned, and they were acquired by Howden, as you say.
An interesting transaction that Howden do not have a footprint in pensions advisory. They do a bit of work in employee benefits, I think. Obviously, quite an acquisitive company. A transaction like that may well be very good for Barnett Waddingham and their clients and so on, but it is a big change and probably quite a cultural shift when something like that happens. Like I say, that could go very well, but obviously, we would keep our eyes peeled for whether there are opportunities around people and clients when our competitors go through quite a lot of cultural change at times like that. That is interesting to us. In terms of Gallagher and Reddington, Reddington were a small specialist investment advisory firm, and Gallagher have a wider pensions capability. Again, you could see that transaction making sense. I do not think it is earth-shattering really in our world.
As to whether there'll be many more, I mean, there might be. There's private equity ownership out there. Some of our competitors are owned by private equity firms, and possibly part of their journey might be to consolidate and achieve benefits and so on from doing so. I think we're just very proudly independent and feel like we are on a very, very clear, uncomplicated path. We're very happy with our ownership. We think we benefit from being a public company in terms of the sheen that gives us and the transparency that gives us. We are not going through any complicated cultural changes or mergers or anything like that. While that's the case, we've got the best few years probably of demand out there from our clients to go and exploit.
We're very comfortable that I'm very glad really that we don't have any of those things to wrestle with while we just go and try and maximize the organic opportunity in our core business. Of course, we did do Polaris, but it's really pretty small in the scale of things, and it opens up a wider market and doesn't in any way distract us from the real big prize that's right there in front of us in the pension market right now. In terms of wider M&A, we do still scan the horizon, but it would be more likely to be things that accelerated our diversification into wider addressable markets than looking at the competition more directly in our historic core market of pensions.
Excellent. Thank you. Very helpful, Paul.
Thank you. Our next question is from Mandeep Jagpal from RBC.
Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hey, morning, all. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can. Good morning.
Good morning. Mandeep Jagpal, RBC. I'll stick with three for now. Firstly, congratulations on the wins for the two police schemes for admin. I was wondering if you could provide the expected revenue contribution from these wins and when you expect the revenues to start coming through. Secondly, you spoke about run-on as an alternative endgame that may be suitable for some of your clients. I think we've seen in recent weeks that some of your peers are talking about a role that commercial DB super funds can also play. Is this something that you have consulting expertise in, and is there a meaningful proportion of your clients that would consider this endgame? I think you talked at the start about new client wins across the business.
What kind of feedback are you getting from the tender processes that you enter around reasons why you do win and reasons why you do not win? Thank you.
Thanks, Mandeep. Yeah. If I kick us off with the police schemes, the two largest wins that have been confirmed, West Midlands, which is a very large force, and we are pleased that there is an outsourcing of their in-house team there. McCloud perhaps was almost a project too far and demonstrated the value of an outsourced provider with economies of scale and really deep expertise and good technology perhaps to them. We are delighted to take that on board. That involves GP transfer of some of their people into our Birmingham office to then deliver the services back, which is great. Of course, really recently, the Metropolitan Police win, which has been mentioned already, and we are delighted about that.
That's by some way the largest force in the U.K. and becomes our largest public sector client. In terms of revenues, these things are clearly a little bit commercially sensitive, but let me say a little bit particularly about the Met Police win and the feedback that we got on that, which is really, really positive. We're actually part of a consortium led by DXC to win that because DXC, what the Met Police put out to tender was a much, much wider transformation process and technology transformation process. I think pensions is about 10% by value of the contract that was put out to tender. We tethered ourselves to DXC in that as did one or two other firms with different elements of the contract. We were delighted collectively to win on the pensions aspect specifically. You get feedback from procurement about how well you scored.
We scored 10 out of 10 overall for our submission. We were clearly a very strong part of that consortium and absolutely delighted to have played our part collectively in winning that work. It is a seven-year minimum contract term. It is expected to go live in 2027 as the formal announcement, but we are reasonably optimistic that actually things happen more quickly than that. That is the latest it can go live, but probably we will go live a little bit ahead of all of that. I should say in terms of revenue size, commercially sensitive, it is clearly a healthy, good contributor to future growth for us.
It's what we have to do in order to meet the growth expectations that there are in the group in the future, of course, but it's nice to tick that box kind of a year in advance of when those revenue numbers will start to show up in our numbers to give us that extra little confidence boost that we are already making progress towards hitting those numbers in the future, which is a really nice thing. Your second question was around run-on and commercial DB super funds. I guess I'll probably start here where when we advise clients, I guess our role is to help them understand all of the different options and then help them with whichever route that they want to go down.
We have expertise to support clients across whether the pros and cons of run-on, pros and cons of an insurance transaction, and the pros and cons of different options like consolidators. The market's evolving quite quickly, so there are sort of broader kind of things to consider as well. Yes, we have the expertise to effectively support clients to consider and implement those types of arrangements. In terms of, I think you asked, do we think we'll have lots of clients going down those routes? I think it's probably too early to tell. Probably my observation, though, is that clients who are comfortable continuing bearing the risk and would like the benefit of a surplus emerging, I think like the control and therefore do it in a run-on pension scheme environment.
Schemes who believe that they want to discharge or companies would like to discharge the risk, I think have a real focus on member security, and the insurance regime is really powerful in providing security. I generally see people at the moment fall into one of those camps, and DB super funds aren't something that I think is getting a lot of traction. As I say, the market's evolving and it could change, but that's where things stand today. Your last question, Mandeep, was about feedback on tenders. I should say what we see is tenders increasingly, our pipeline reflects the evolving market. I've already covered administration. Public sector administration is a little different. Private sector administration, a very healthy tender list there.
Generally, feedback is we are recognized as a very high-quality provider with a particular expertise in large schemes and first-time outsourcings, having done, we think, probably over half of all of those that have been done now in the last decade or so. John Lewis was recent and that's onboarded successfully. I think the market can see that we've digested that and are ready to do another one of those, which is really exciting for us. I guess the other place that we're seeing quite a healthy increase in pipelines has been investment consulting, and that reflects the change in financial position, particularly defined benefit schemes in the private sector. Essentially, many had a strategy set many years ago that would involve the need to outsource quite a lot of daily decision-making because you want to really actively trade your way out of deficits.
You might use what's called a fiduciary manager, an outsource fund manager, basically to, yeah, make proactive decisions and really actively trade. With that comes quite a lot of expense. It is an expensive way, but the idea would be net of fees. That's justified if you need to chase a really high return. These days, pension schemes don't need to chase a high return. That world has shifted. If you're very well funded, a sensible care and maintenance type strategy is more the order of the day. There becomes a question as to whether you really need an expensive fiduciary manager and so on.
We have had some success in winning appointments over the last six months and very healthy pipelines. We look forward to taking on that care and maintenance type role on an advisory basis where people choose not to use those more expensive fiduciary management offerings that some of our biggest competitors in particular provide. Yeah, feedback on those tenders is we are providing services that meet the market's need right now. I would say in general, that is a theme where what we are doing for our clients today is different to what we were doing for them three years ago and six years ago, but we are always good, I think, at having the right services at the right time. That is critical. Feedback on tenders is generally, yeah, what you guys have got is very relevant right now.
When we win, that's generally wise because we're quite quick out of the blocks to adapt to the world that's changing around us.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Rahim Karim from Cavendish. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi, good morning. Hi, good morning. Hopefully, you guys can hear me. A couple of questions from me. The first just on addressable market. I noticed that in the pensions business, it's gone from GBP 2.5 billion to GBP 3 billion. I was hoping that you might be able to just talk about what's changed in terms of your assumptions there. Also, just on insurance, how you think that that GBP 1.5 billion might evolve in the next kind of year or so as the Polaris acquisition kind of beds in and the opportunities that you talked about kind of manifest themselves.
The second question was kind of a little bit more detailed in terms of the EBT scheme and the rate of purchases that you're doing there. That's seen a step up, obviously, trying to perhaps limit the impact of dilution. If you could give us a sense of where that might be for full year and what we should be thinking about in future years, that will be great. Finally, just maybe to touch on the pensions opportunity and the administration opportunity in the public sector as a whole, the announcements or the wins that you've had in the last month or two, encouraging it. How much more is there to do in that? Obviously, it's a smaller part of your business, but in the context of the group, where would you like to see that being in a few years' time?
Okay. Thanks, Rayne.
To take your first question, the addressable market. As you can see in the graph in the slides, the data is taken from the Professional Pension Survey, where they look at the statutory entities that operate in our market. Obviously, we give the most amount of detail in terms of divisional breakdown, etc., but unfortunately, we do not have the same luxury from our competitors. It is a little bit of an aggregation of the revenues of those relevant firms. Of course, we know that some of those do operate in markets that we do not, consulting markets particularly. That is what has led to the sort of the increase that, looking at their most recent accounts, they add up to just over three billion. Of course, we do not go and look at all of the sort of the long tail that may exist within that market.
I'll also just take your question on the EBT, the share purchase. We've been on a sort of journey on this that we're not trying to call the market or anything here, but it is more about protecting the dilutive impact of the share remuneration that we have. We sort of look at it very carefully in terms of the cost of the additional debt, the interest, etc., and make sure that it is overall net positive for the EPS. That's what's just happened. We had a very big sort of savers you earn scheme maturing this year, which is, of course, great for our people and the motivations, etc. We had a number of the PSPs also maturing. It is to satisfy those awards.
You will see the share count has reduced year on year, and we expect that to be the sort of the year-end position. We do not sort of assume any significant buybacks in the future, but for the future years, expect the share count to go up, as we have sort of said, in terms of the PSPs, etc., that are an issue.
Rayne, I think the second part of your first question was around the target addressable market for insurance around insurance companies. The figure of GBP 1.5 billion there. Actually, when we initially looked at that market, we had some external work done on the size of it. The GBP 1.5 billion comes from that work, and it is U.K. actuarial services in effect to insurance companies. It is consistent with other figures that I have kind of seen trying to do a similar thing.
I guess what I'd probably say is that the opportunity for us, I think, is bigger than that in terms of we do work that isn't strictly actuarial, broader consulting, and obviously administration support we can provide. Also, the line between work for life insurers and general insurers, which is a different market, another very large market, I think that line's quite gray. From our perspective, I think we think there's a much bigger market than GBP 1.5 billion that will hopefully be open to us as we go forward on our journey. Really, really exciting. That's a really big increase for us in our target addressable market.
Yep. On public sector as a whole, different market for us. Yes, we're pleased with the headway we're continuing to make, especially in blue light services.
For a focus on police, there are opportunities more widely across FHIR as well. The market in public sector, there are definitely opportunities for us to continue to expand our footprint there, but it's something that takes time. You need to be on framework agreements and so on that are only reviewed fairly infrequently. If you're not on framework agreements, you're not able to participate in bidding for public sector work and so on. We are optimistic that over time, we have an opportunity to get onto these framework agreements because of the great work we've done in certain areas of the public sector and the reputation we have for McCloud Remedy.
There are a lot of challenges out there in the public sector right now around the quality of administration on some very large schemes and indeed residual McCloud-type issues that need to be resolved in other large public sector schemes that are some way behind police, primarily because we've done police and the rest of the public sector market has a little bit of a way to catch up. We are, of course, as you'd expect, in active conversations about trying to get involved in wider work. It's one for us to report on in future periods. I think we certainly have ambition to do more there, and it is quite a wide, big market. It's all quite chunky. If you win an appointment or two in that, it can be very, very material.
It can be a little bit binary as you go through those processes. Yeah, we're on that path very much stream of trying to maximize the great reputation that we now have.
I think that was the last question about what we see the opportunity in terms of pensions administration for the public sector.
I didn't sort it out. Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Hopefully, that answers your questions, Rayne.
Our next question is from James Fletcher from Vandenberg. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Morning, gents. Just kind of two or three questions, really, within the same area from me. Just in regards to kind of bulk annuity transactions, just if you could give some commentary around that 2025 number, see if we've got a year-on-year decline. In terms of what's going on there, I guess it's a bit of run-on for surplus impact.
If you could talk about in terms of your own risk transfer team. I know in the past, you've talked about them doing GBP 15 million from almost a standing start. If you could kind of give us an update there. Just finally, you've said in terms of economics or you're agnostic in terms of run-on for surplus versus buyout. See if you can give a bit more further explanation as to why you're agnostic and kind of different economics there. Thanks very much.
Sure. Of course. The first question was about the predicted volumes and number of deals in 2025. I think, James, you've sort of almost answered your own question there.
What we're seeing there is, if you think schemes generally are getting better funded, as we talked about earlier, but if you like, run-on is probably something that's getting more traction with schemes above a certain size. It doesn't have to be that big, actually, to gain traction, but certainly bigger schemes are more interested. In 2025, what we're seeing is fewer very large transactions in the market, which is reducing the volume, but still a lot of schemes heading that way, particularly the smaller ones, which accounts therefore for the larger number of deals that we're predicted to happen. I would anticipate that will be a similar trend kind of if you look forward a year or two as well.
Yeah. For our team, I think that's the key thing. What matters to us really is number of deals in the market more than the total asset size. It is true that a large multi-billion deal will have a bigger fee attached to it, but you're better off doing three small deals than one large one. It doesn't scale linearly with the asset size. A GBP 50 million transaction still has a need for a huge amount of advice and support, just as a GBP 5 billion one does. I know we can't share the screen to show you, but if you looked back at that slide, whilst we see the total asset value of transactions beginning to plateau or quite possibly decline this year, it's because fewer big deals.
The other chart, the thing that we overlaid on that chart in a different color, was the number of deals, which is still increasing. We think that still will. Basically, the bulk annuity market has shifted from a few massive deals to lots more smaller deals. From a fee perspective, that's actually good for us. If we just hold market share in that environment, we will do more revenue. That's what we're generally seeing happen. Our pension risk transfer team's been really, really busy, probably had its best first half of this year building on the best half it's ever had in each of the prior halves for some time now. We do optimistically think that's going to happen for the next few years as more and more small schemes come to market.
Also, lots of the work we're doing is sort of year one of a three-year or four-year process still. Again, the visibility of the revenue in pension risk transfer is pretty strong with kind of record numbers of schemes still coming online starting that process. We think that's going to be a very, very busy area of our business for quite a few years to come. In terms of the economics of being agnostic, I can partly answer that question that lots of small schemes coming on is really, really good for us because we're so busy helping them all. For the larger schemes to run on, that creates opportunity in two ways. Of course, it creates an extended longevity.
If we still have the largest clients many, many years from now, that care and maintenance work that's done for them, they are the biggest payers of fees in the market. That is very healthy for us from a longevity perspective. There is lots of work to help them design and implement run-on strategies. The last bit is it really creates new opportunity. Probably there are some pension schemes out there that thought two or three years ago, "I'm not that enamored, perhaps with my actuarial provider or what have you, but why change from two or three years away from potentially doing an insurance transaction anyway?" If now you're thinking, "I'm going to run on and set a course for 10 or 20 years," you need the very best actuarial advice, technology supporting that, and really brilliant ideas about implementation.
Actually, we are starting to see some bigger opportunities are opening up where people are realizing that actually this is a slight change of direction and almost a bit of a fresh start. Rather than just hang on to the advisors that we've got, we should review the market. That is a brilliant opportunity for us because, as you know, whilst we've got some large schemes, an awful lot of them sit with the big three firms next to us. We do see opportunity to potentially unsettle one or two of those and agitate for change just by being better and quicker to embrace these opportunities.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from Vivek Raja from Shore Capital. Please go ahead.
Morning, chaps. Thank you for taking my questions of your presentation. A couple of areas I wanted to explore, please.
The first one is cost and operating leverage. The second one is organic versus overall revenue growth. On the cost and operating leverage, you usefully sort of provided some commentary in your opening remarks about what sort of underlying EBITDA margin progression was if you sort of strip out the NIC and the McCloud impact in the prior year. What's driving that within the business? What are the sort of moving parts there to drive that efficiency gain? I wonder if within that you could talk about what you've seen in terms of wage inflation in the first half. The next question was about the organic versus total revenue growth. Polaris has obviously contributed clients and demand into sort of core pensions business.
If you sort of think about that bit, I wonder if you could sort of just provide a bit more context to the organic revenue growth number with that sort of bit from Polaris into the core business. Thanks.
Yeah. In terms of what's driving the so the numbers that I quoted in the presentation, as I said, it's sort of if you take out the impact of McCloud entirely, of course, life would not be as sort of straightforward as that. If we were not doing McCloud last year, I'm sure we would have been doing something else. Obviously, it's quite difficult to estimate. That is the reason why there is a marked improvement in the margin. What's driving that? A few things. In terms of the cost itself, we have come off two of the four systems that Aurora is going to be replacing.
Some of that cost benefit has started to flow through. Secondly, the mix of the business as well. We're doing more of the risk transfer work, for example, which is higher margin. Then generally, sort of the cost discipline in the business about organization, pyramid, etc., having more junior staff joining and then developing them, reducing the sort of input cost of the business, etc. It's a consolidation of all of those things that are playing through. Those things are going to sustain and actually get better as we come off the other systems that Aurora will replace.
Do you want to take the one about the remix?
Yeah. When we report revenue for Polaris, because we just report growth figures that are organic and inorganic, is what I mean.
When we win new contracts that Polaris have introduced us to, but we're delivering with XPS Resource, which we did some of in H1 and we expect to do more of in H2, we don't record that as inorganic. We just record that as organic growth. It's being delivered by XPS Resources and so on. You obviously could argue that it could be either, but to be very clear, that means that the Polaris contribution to the group as a whole is stronger than it might look by just looking at purely what we're describing as inorganic growth because it is pushing revenue opportunities directly into XPS using XPS Resources that existed before that transaction happened. Should we take a little bit of care with that?
Whilst there are big opportunities there, there is a possible substitution effect, right, that our people who were very busy doing chargeable work for clients in pensions have been deployed at an insurer and are doing chargeable work. That substitution effect does not necessarily instantly mean that we earn more revenue. We are just earning it from a different end client. In fact, we probably do see an incremental benefit because it drives increased busyness as people within the pensions business have to do a little bit more work where their colleagues have gone and started being deployed at insurers. It is not necessarily pound for pound is what I am sort of guiding you to be a little bit careful on that.
Now, clearly, if we can backfill resource and we're sustainably deploying resource at insurance companies, which we think to a significant degree is going to happen, then actually it does drive organic growth too without that substitution effect ultimately happening. It is very positive news that we're managing to deploy resource into insurance because it's just broadening and deepening relationships more generally. It opens up all sorts of wider opportunities. It boosts the brand that we have in that market. For the wider, more pure insurance consulting work that we'd also like to win, it clearly gives us a big head start and opens up that opportunity more generally too. We are really, really pleased. We've had seven months or eight, nine months now of Polaris. We are really pleased with how that's generally going and what it's doing for the group as a whole.
Thank you. Could I just push you, if you could provide a bit of detail there? On Polaris versus core and organic, how much of the organic print came from Polaris if you could just quantify that? Secondly, Snehal, if you could just talk about what wage inflation you've seen first off.
Sorry. Yeah. The wage inflation within that was probably about 4%. This is sort of the promotions on the 1st of April. In terms of the contribution into the work that we sort of started for the large insurer, which is staffed from the actuarial team, that only started in September, really. There is a very small contribution within the pensions number for the half year.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from Thomas Ryan from Davie. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Good morning.
Thank you for taking my questions. Hopefully, you can hear me. Two quick ones, more broad-based if I can. Firstly, I know at the full year results, AI projects were mentioned as maybe driving some efficiencies. I was wondering if you had any updates on that area. Secondly, with the budget next week, there is a lot of speculation out there. I was wondering if there is anything specific that you will be focusing on that you think could have a big impact on your clients and how that will affect XPS as well. Thank you.
Sure. I will take the first question on AI. Yeah. With the full year, we talked about a few initiatives that we had, which achieved one of two things.
One of them was about improving our service and the way that we can analyze call information that we get within our contact center. The other was about the way that we ingest post and how we can make that process a little bit more efficient. We continue to look for those types of opportunities. We're exploring, for example, at the moment, how we might be able to use more technology and AI around things like data cleansing, which is one of the sort of challenges within the industry. There's probably not a huge amount new to say other than that we're on the same trajectory as we were before. We still do think that there are a lot of opportunities to use technology more generally to improve what we do and also improve our efficiency, which is Snell.
That's one of the things that we think embeds his optimism about future margin improvements. In terms of budget changes, in general, as a reminder, things change to tax rules, wider regulatory changes, and so on, legislative changes, but are almost universally good for our business because it means that our clients who are affected by it need advice and support as to how they're going to respond to such changes. We do work with bated breath. I don't think anything hugely dramatic is likely to happen that will affect the big picture landscape of defined benefit, defined contribution schemes that we advise, but definitely some fiddling at the edges that's being talked about, changes in salary sacrifice arrangements, and so on, if those affect pension contributions. There could be changes in things like thresholds for lifetime allowances and so on. You never know.
If those things do happen, then yeah, we'll have a wide range of clients that need advice about how to respond to it. I don't think any of that would be earth-shattering, but it would be nice to be incremental. Each client across our many hundreds of clients needing probably a few thousand GBP or more of advice. It can never do us any harm when those things come through. We shall wait to see. Wider government policy has been set for some time to try to release pension scheme surpluses. That's the bigger news. That has been confirmed earlier this year. A pension bill is making its way through Parliament. We're awaiting regulations and so on and all of that. I don't see any question that that's going to change.
It is part of this government and indeed the prior government's agenda to try to help drive growth in the U.K. economy. We're very supportive and think it's very sensible. It has cross-party consensus. It doesn't affect tax revenues, but it does help drive the growth agenda in a positive sense. I think we can probably be pretty confident that that's all robust and going to continue.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our final question is from Mandeep Jagpal from RBC. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hey. Thanks. A couple of areas that I don't think have been addressed yet. Firstly, could you please provide a reminder on whether the impact of McCloud remedy work in H2 earnings was similar to H1? Great to see the inroad you have with the BPA players.
Does the M&A in the PRT space create a change in addressable market now compared to when you bought Polaris, either from consolidation of insurers meaning fewer to serve or actually mean there's more work for you to do in the short term as they look to integrate?
On the McCloud revenues, broadly last year, the revenue was split 50/50 H1, H2. In terms of the BPA players, I guess in terms of the opportunities for us in that market are across all of the operations that the BPA providers have. As they've written more business, they often need more support around cash flows and pricing, more support around onboarding and cleaning data and transitioning and migrating it, and then more help around administration. I don't think any of the transactions in the market impact that opportunity.
In terms of activity itself, well, clearly, we have an insurance consulting team who is able to support insurers going through change, understand kind of these transactions, and support them through it. From that lens, it should create a bit of short-term extra opportunity for David in the Polaris team. In terms of the underlying opportunity around the bulk community market, I do not think it has any real impact on that.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no more questions. I will now hand back to management for closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, for joining. Thank you very much for all the questions, which were really addressing all the key areas, I think. Thank you for that. Look, we are really pleased with another really, really positive half year.
We're delighted the growth in the core business of 12% and profit growth of more than 12% when you adjust for the very large one-off project that we had last year is extremely healthy. The sort of core big beast, if you like, of our pensions, actuarial administration businesses are just rolling on and producing great performance against the backdrop where there's a lot of market tailwinds. Our clients need a huge amount of help. We are very excited about continuing to exploit the opportunity to be agile and to be ahead of the competition in supporting clients against the backdrop of all this change that's multi-year in nature and going to roll on for some time to come.
Of course, at the same time, really enjoying the fact that we're making some really good headways in broadening our horizons and deepening relationships with insurance companies at the same time. Thanks very much for listening and attending. I guess we wish you all a very good day.
Thank you for joining today's call. We are no longer live. Have a nice day.