Welcome, everyone. I'm Andrew Steinerman, your Business and Information Services Analyst here at JP Morgan for more than two decades. This is the Ultimate Services Investor Conference, and we're kicking off with Thomson Reuters. What a great way to start. Just as a quick reminder to everybody, we publish our Information Services Data Book quarterly. We published it today. You are already on the digital conference book watching this video, and so you could actually get our digital Information Services Data Book right on that platform itself. So anyhow, starting today, thank you, Steve and Mike. This is Steve Hasker, and Mike Eastwood, CEO and CFO of Thomson Reuters. I'm going to be interviewing them today, and thanks for joining.
Thanks for having us, Andrew. Good to be here.
Okay, great. So Steve, you've been in your role now two years. Obviously, you and I know each other through information services for a much longer period of time. But just for the people that are a little newer to the Thomson Reuters or the new Thomson Reuters story, just tell us what you think has worked so far two years in, and what are some things that have been challenging for you in the first two years and that you want to resolve and make better and enhance?
Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Well, look, I count myself as very lucky. When I joined almost two years ago, I obviously inherited the big, which we call them the big three franchises: Legal, Tax and Accounting, and Corporates. A great business that serves government agencies and obviously the Reuters News Agency. And these are terrific franchises. They really are extraordinarily high-quality businesses that provide information and software to the end customers. So the starting point and the underlying sort of health and well-being and everything, and as I said, I think we're very lucky. And that really is a product of the divestiture of the financial and risk business, which is now called Refinitiv, part of London Stock Exchange Group, before I joined. So we have a much simpler and I think extraordinarily valuable list of franchises to manage.
We’ve done two things over the last two years as part of our change program. The first is, we’ve said we’re going to move from a content company to a content-driven technology company. The second is we’re going to move from a holding or portfolio company to an operating company. We’re halfway through a two-year change program, and it’s going well. I would say we’re at or even a little ahead of where I expected us to be as we round the turn from year one into year two. Really what it’s about is fundamentally rewriting, transforming, and improving the customer experience that we provide. The unpleasant sort of surprise that we’ve all faced has been the pandemic, Andrew, to your question.
But that supported me the opportunity, particularly in 2020 when I joined, to talk to Mike and others and really understand our business from a level of depth and granularity that perhaps would have taken me longer had I been traveling around and doing all the things we ordinarily do. So here we are a year into the change program, at or ahead of where we expected to be. We've been able to call out seven growth initiatives. We've been able to attract a tremendous amount of talent. And I think we're poised for not only to deliver on our change program, but we're poised for, I think, a pretty exciting future.
Great. So what really intrigues me is the innovation that you brought to the organization. So my question is, how do you track and measure innovation? And obviously, I'm very intrigued that you decided to introduce an NPS score at Thomson Reuters. It didn't exist before, and I'm a huge fan of Net Promoter Scores. So just kind of how do you track and measure innovation? And then talk about your introduction of the NPS score.
Yeah, so I think that's an interesting question. I think as many of you know, one of the first hires here was David Wong, who came to us from Facebook. And then coupled or partnered with David Wong, we've elevated Shawn Malhotra, who's Head of Engineering. So they're both Toronto-based, extraordinarily talented, young executives. And then coupled with them, of course, Kirsty Roth, who runs Operations and Technology, Sarah Wilkinson, who leads our infrastructure and migration to the cloud. And we've set out a very specific objective, which is we want to be the best innovator, organic product builder in business information services. And within that, it really does require that we better understand our customer needs and we're able to translate those back into our products in a much more efficient and effective way.
Today, Andrew, the focus in terms of how we measure it is the speed at which we bring out products and how those products resonate, and so if you look at Westlaw Edge 2.0, we'll do a release of 2.0 on the back of 1.0 sometime next year. That is a very significantly accelerated timeframe to that which existed prior. We released Practical Law Dynamic last year, and I talked about it on our earnings call a few weeks ago, putting together Elite 3E, Contract Express, HighQ, and Practical Law into an integrated offering, and so the first thing we're focused on is just increasing our speed of iteration and release on our products.
The next step will be, particularly as the underpinnings get stronger through the change program, will be to actually set out some sort of financial and customer impact goals as a result of that innovation cycle. One of those will be NPS, to your point. Also, that NPS is we're starting from a modest point. The sort of B2B average is around 27. We're below that, and we have an objective to be very significantly higher than. Now, we have pockets of the business, like our government business, that have extraordinarily high NPS, but we also have pockets that just aren't good enough. And that's really where we're focusing the change program investments.
Okay. And just one more, because I love NPS. How long do you think it will take before we see that kind of significant rise in NPS? Like at next year's Ultimate Services Conference, are you going to be above 27?
Yeah, I think we've set some ambitious goals. I think we want to see at next year's conference, we want to see significant movement. So when we're sitting with you next time, we want to have seen improvement, particularly in some of our software spots, but across the board. And I'm hopeful that we'll be, if not at, then very close to the 27, but more importantly, moving in a really exciting direction.
Right. Steve, you kind of made a choice last conference call to talk about the legal end market, which obviously is your biggest and maybe arguably your best business in data analytics. You tried to say, "Hey, we analyze the legal industry, and some investors might think of this as a sleepy business," and it really isn't. And obviously, the legal industry is doing very well right now. Maybe M&A is one helpful characteristic. But why did you think that last month was kind of an important juncture to kind of maybe information services investors about the legal end market? And does the legal industry need to have strong tailwinds for you to make your three-year goals?
Yeah, so I don't look at the legal businesses as sort of any better or worse than our other couple of franchises. I think if you look at Tax and Accounting and you look at the Corporates, the opportunity in Corporates, and you look at Government, which of course is reported as part of Legal, I'm equally excited about those. But the point I was making is I think there has been a bit of a narrative that the segments that we serve, including Legal, which is our biggest business, is a little on the slow growth side. So this is a great franchise with a set of products that are extraordinarily highly valued by customers, but it's relatively slow growth. And I don't believe that's the case, which is why I took aim at it on the last earnings call.
I think there's a sort of an outside-in narrative that suggests within Legal, it's got a little bucket of spend, about 3% or thereabouts, and then there's a software bucket of spend, and that's 11%, 12%, 13% or something like that. I think if you look at Westlaw Edge, look at Practical Law Dynamic, what we're doing is putting us together. We're adding client machine learning. We're embedding a client software in the legal client workflow of the legal profession, not just the litigators, but also the court system, also the general counsel, and his or hers, and that is bringing together this sort of previously thought about lower growth area with a much higher spend, and you add to that the pandemic.
And through the pandemic, I've had the great chance to speak with the heads of hundreds and hundreds of law firms in the last year and a half or so. And what they've told me to a person is versions of this, which is, "Look, we've spent too much over time on real estate and not enough on information and technology." And I think as their labor costs are going up, that sort of trend is even more intensified because they're starting to say, "Okay, if I can use information and technology as ways to reduce my dependence on high-cost associates, particularly as those costs have started to spiral up, that'll be a good thing." So this is money well spent, no matter what happens in the economic cycle, no matter how the sort of the profitability of the firm develops over the next couple of years.
It just adds up, Andrew, to, I think, a segment that we're thrilled to be serving, that if we get our product innovation roadmap right, we think we'll see some growth on the back of meeting and exceeding customer needs.
Okay. Mike, maybe you could just kind of review at a high level the organic revenue growth and kind of goals for the, let's say, the three-year plan and why these are the right ambitions for a information services company like Thomson.
Yeah, sure, Andrew. We're certainly pleased with the progress and momentum that we've built throughout 2021, and we're optimistic about achieving the high end of the range we provided for the full year, which means roughly 5% for Q4 there. If you think about the three-year horizon, back at our March Investor Day, we highlighted that by 2023, we expect to grow Corporates between 7% and 9%. We said for Tax and Accounting professionals, 6%, 8% and for Legal Professionals, 5%, 6%. We remain very confident in these targets for 2023 from an organic growth perspective. We think there are opportunities in each of these segments. A couple of examples within Corporates. We think indirect tax and global trade management provide us the opportunity for further upsell. Within Tax and Accounting, we think we have the opportunity to expand with SMB and put the nice progression this year.
Given our relationships with many firms, we can continue to upsell Practical Law and workflow solutions. So all in all, Andrew, we remain confident for 2023 in achieving 6%-7% growth for our big three segments.
Yeah. Mike, on the last conference call, I think it was I who asked you about price increases historically, really for this year. And I just felt like when you went through the price increase, I realized these admins right now, they're already kind of healthy price increases. And my question is, to get to those 2023 organic revenue growth goals, are you going to increase price more? I know with a value proposition tied to it, or is it more about selling more product into those same end markets?
As I mentioned on the earnings call, I believe, Andrew, the pricing levels that we're seeing in 2021 are consistent with recent years. If you look over the time horizon for 2022, 2023, we're assuming consistent level of price increases. So over the time horizon, it will be price increases coupled with volume. We'll continue to improve our retention, upsell, cross-sell, along with product innovation. So pricing has been fairly stable, and that's the assumption over the time horizons. Any thoughts about that, Andrew? Pricing is important, but also, as a reminder, if we increase our retention by 100 basis points, that's $50 million approximately in revenue or 90 basis points of revenue growth plus.
I think what he said is you want to say, but to have retention is another way of driving organic revenue growth as well as selling more product to the same customer.
Right. Selling more product, upsell, cross-sell. Certainly, if there's opportunity for us to further optimize our pricing, we will. But pricing is just one of many levers that we have to sustain and accelerate our organic growth over the time horizon.
Right. And do you think that higher client retention is part of Steve's ambition of having a higher NPS score, having higher customer satisfaction, or is it about choosing better clients, maybe clients that are just not going to go out of business?
Yeah, Andrew, I'm a strong believer that we're going to see a very strong correlation between the improvement in our Net Promoter Score and our retention. We've seen slight improvements thus far in 2021, but with the continued investments in the overall end-to-end customer experience, quite optimistic that we'll see improvement in NPS and thus improvement in our retention rates across each of our businesses. Just as a reminder, retention does vary by our customer size. Using Legal illustratively, we normally see lower retention with the smaller law firms and higher retention with the large law firms.
Right. And that's what I sort of said. Are you going to shy away from serving small law firms because obviously small law firms have bigger risk to them, or that's not particularly a mindset? That was sort of part of my last question.
Yeah. Just for clarity, we are absolutely not shying away from small law firms. We have a great leader in Mark Haddad who drives our Small Law Firm business for us, part of Paul Fischer's team, and we're quite optimistic, Andrew, as we continue to evolve with our digital offerings. We'll be able to provide even better support and higher retention for smaller clients, including small law firms.
Great. So you already went over, Mike, that you have already healthy price increases and you want to drive higher innovation. I don't know if you guys use this thing called Rule of 40. We have it in our Information Services Data Book. That's margin plus organic revenue growth. But if you look at your 2023 goals, you're going to go from a Rule of 40 for being kind of below average in information services land to notably above average. And as you know, this is a rockstar block to be on. What do you think Thomson is doing relative to the information services company, which is, again, a tough benchmark, that you're going to become an above-average Rule of 40 company?
Yeah, Andrew, just to remind everyone, in 2023, our guidance for total organic growth is 5%-6%, coupled with the EBITDA margin of 38%-40%. I'll also mention the free cash flow of $1.8 billion-$2 billion. We remain very confident in achieving those items. Andrew, I think Steve mentioned earlier that pivot to the operating company. That has been an important lever for us, but also the talent that we have added in the nearly two years that Steve and I have been in our respective roles. I think the talent additions of Kirsty Roth, David Wong, etc., are really, really important for us. But 2023 is just one milestone, Andrew, if we go beyond 2023. We'll continue to work very diligently to improve on that, the confidence in 5%-6% and the 38%-40%.
Right. But again, let me just ask again, do you think about the information services industry as a whole? Does it seem like Thomson's going to be in a position for above-average pricing? And that has to do with the competitive landscape too, above-average cross-sell, above-average client retention. It's kind of a tough benchmark. Or do you just sort of play your own game and compare [audio distortion] ?
Sure. Certainly, we follow very closely the Business Information Services Group. We follow very closely all of the work that you and your team provide for the Biz Group. We are very well positioned, and we'll just continue to be even better in the year.
Yeah, so Steve, you guys started a corporate venture capital business just recently, kind of a sizable VC fund, and my question is a simple one. What's the purpose of it? Is it to learn more about adjacencies? Is it to prospect for potential M&A down the line? Is this more like something you want to learn about and help you become highly innovative in your core? Or is this also a financial proposition to bear returns?
Andrew, it's all of the above. I mean, I'd say that in my mind, the sort of priority would be something like first and foremost to open our aperture to all of the innovations that are going on at the periphery of our big three. That's the first. I think the second is to just open our aperture to or enlighten us as to what some of the other step-out growth opportunities for us might be. As a funnel for M&A, sure. As a sort of talent tension tool, to the extent which we have young product and technology executives who will be advisors on some of these companies to some of these companies and gain exposure to the investment process, we view that as a really interesting way to skill up some of our up-and-coming talent. And then last but not least, the financial returns.
We're in the market looking for a very talented leader of this corporate venture capital fund. And that person's world-class investors expect to make world-class returns and get paid accordingly. So we don't want to sort of in any way, shape, or form impair their ability to do that. But certainly, for me, this is about opening the aperture of the company and making sure that our knowledge of the latest and greatest innovations is as good as it can be and as informative as it can be on our own efforts.
So did you say, Steve, do you think acquisitions are going to come from this? Is it more like we want to be partnered?
I think they will. I mean, I think particularly in the current environment, you've got to look everywhere for acquisitions. And I don't think we can sort of sit back and wait for assets to be auctioned. I think we've got to be very proactive in terms of where we're going and what we're looking at and what we're assessing and the relationships we're building in the ecosystem. So it's not the only, certainly, it won't be the only source of M&A opportunities, but it ought to be one of them for sure.
That makes sense. How about the London Stock Exchange position? Obviously, through your divestiture, we're left with you now have a $7 billion stake in London Stock Exchange stock. How do you think of that position? And I know there's sort of a two-year unlock underway also, but how do you think of that position? And let me say specifically, how important is it for the London Stock Exchange stock to do well for you to drive value back at Thomson?
Yeah. Andrew, we view our stake in the London Stock Exchange Group as a financial investment. As you mentioned, we do intend to sell our positions when we're allowed. We do have three respective lockup periods that are in place. The lockup periods are January 2023, January 2024, January 2025. Based on our current thinking, we would monetize upon the respective expirations of those lockup periods. As a reminder, we do generate about $75 million in dividends on an annual basis prior to any monetization. So given the already significant free cash flow that will generate, as I mentioned, $1.8 billion-$2 billion in 2023, coupled with monetization of the London Stock Exchange, we're going to have significant capacity, providing a lot of optionality to do acquisitions, Steve just discussed, but also additional share buybacks. We did complete the $1.2 billion buyback that we initiated in August.
And we'll also have the flexibility to consider higher dividends as we move forward. All in all, Andrew, a nice position to be in, and it creates a lot of optionality for us. Certainly, any appreciation in the London Stock Exchange just gives us more firepower and more capital to deploy to grow our business.
So I want to go back to innovation at Legal. Obviously, Steve, you whet my appetite by saying Westlaw Edge 2.0 will be introduced next year or sometime next year. My question is, with so much success in Westlaw Edge, and surely I know you have lots of clients and whatnot, and Westlaw Edge is being adopted by Westlaw users and it's been added 100 basis points of organic revenue growth to your Legal segment. You expect to introduce a Westlaw Edge 2.0 that is like a second premium on top of Westlaw Edge customers. What do you expect to be putting in Westlaw Edge 2.0 where they're going to pay another premium? And I'll remind you, since Westlaw Edge was introduced, you keep on adding modules to that.
And so it's hard for me to imagine what Westlaw Edge 2.0 is going to look like and why there's going to be a second premium on top of the first premium.
Yeah. I mean, I won't sort of give away any competitive or trade secrets here, Andrew, but what I will say is a couple of things. Firstly, Westlaw Edge 2.0 includes a pretty significant step up in terms of the content and the practice area modules. It includes a pretty significant step up in terms of the application of AI and machine learning and the core search functionality. So we've tested it with a very large number of customers, and the feedback has been extraordinarily positive. So we put a beta version in front of a very large number of customers and got very, very robust feedback. So I think as we sit here today, it's early days. We haven't launched it. We won't launch it until sometime next year. We haven't announced a launch date. We still got a lot of work to do.
We see it as a sort of a continuation of the tailwinds that Westlaw Edge 1.0 has provided our Legal Professionals business. That's an exciting prospect. I think it's an exciting prospect for our customers and the industry, given the value of that product as it is from our shareholders.
Right. But what I noted is the Westlaw Edge has certainly inspired competitors to also innovate. So I just wanted to make sure that I said it right. You expect Westlaw Edge customers to pay really two premiums, right? For Westlaw Edge 1.0 and then Westlaw Edge 2.0, it's like a double upgrade. And will the market be receptive to that type of premium pricing? Again, assuming the value proposition's there.
Well, I mean, look, we're not asking for anything that doesn't deliver value to customers. And so if the quality of the answer that the core Westlaw platform provides is significantly better and the time to get to that answer is materially less, then we think that deserves a premium. And how much that premium is, which customers take it up, we'll have to see. But certainly, in terms of the quantifiable material improvements that Westlaw 2.0 promises, we're pretty intrigued by what we see. And as I said, we'll work our way through 2022 and see what happens.
Okay. Last question, Steve. Give us a little peek to a year from now when we're sitting here at the Ultimate Services Investor Conference in November 2022. What is something that investors maybe don't appreciate as much now? Maybe it's really just not kind of, let's call it there yet, but something you think a year from now you and I could be talking about.
Yeah. I think this time next year, we need to be drawing to a close most of our change program. We'll still have bits and pieces of work to do in 2023, completion of the cloud migration and some other things. But this time next year, we need to be talking about a materially better customer experience, first and foremost. We need to be talking about being poised to, therefore, to Mike's earlier points, see that translate into better retention and therefore better growth rates. And as long as we're talking about those things, then I think that gives us the license and we will have earned the right to be starting to explore some other growth opportunities over and above the big three or in and around the big three. And we ought to be starting to talk a little bit about those.
But we are very focused on earning the right to have that conversation with you. And we're not confused. We've got another 12 months to go. So there's lots and lots of hard work to get through.
I love it. Okay. That's a wrap. Thank you, Steve and Mike. We much appreciate the conversation.
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.