Wolters Kluwer Stock

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wolters Kluwer Half Year 2026 Results Webcast and Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the call over to your host, Meg Geldens, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our half year 2026 results presentation. Today's earnings release and the presentation slides are available on the Investors section of our website, wolterskluwer.com. On the call today are Stacey Caywood, our CEO; and Kevin Entricken, our CFO. Stacey and Kevin will present the highlights of the first half results and provide an update on how we're progressing with our AI strategy. After the presentation, we will take questions. Before we start, I'll remind you that some statements we make today may be forward-looking. We caution that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements.

Factors that could affect Wolters Kluwer's future financial results are disclosed in Note 2 of today's release and in our latest annual report. As usual, we refer to adjusted profits, which exclude non-benchmark items. We also refer to growth in constant currencies, which excludes the effect of exchange rate movements. And we refer to organic growth, which excludes both the effect of currency and the effect of acquisitions and divestments.

Reconciliations to IFRS numbers can be found in Note 4 of today's release. At this time, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Stacey Caywood.

Thank you, Meg. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we've had a good start to the year, in line with our expectations. Organic growth was 5%. Excluding print, organic growth was 6% and subscription renewals are going well across the group. The adjusted operating profit margin increased by 100 basis points, putting us in a good position to step up investment in product development in the coming months.

And I'm pleased to reiterate our group level guidance, which includes a margin increase for the full year. We are executing on our near-term priority of speeding up the development of advanced AI innovation, which is delivering improved productivity and outcomes for our customers. Our AI features are directly incorporated into our platforms, seamlessly integrated with our trusted proprietary content and where appropriate, integrated with client data held in our secure systems of record.

Our AI solutions leverage our advanced expert validated AI technology that keeps humans in the loop. These are differentiators which are critical for our customers. I'm pleased to report that our recent acquisitions performed strongly in the first half with revenues ahead of plan. These bolt-on acquisitions are extending our existing positions and offering us new growth opportunities.

We also made progress on executing several key partnerships, which allow us to play a key role in professionals workflow. Let me take you through the key highlights by division. Health delivered 5% organic growth, an improvement on the first half of last year. The adjusted operating profit margin increased by 110 basis points, mainly reflecting the ongoing mix shift as well as operational gearing and efficiencies. Clinical Solutions grew 5% organically. The UpToDate suite performed well with good renewal rates in clinical decision support and drug data among health systems in the U.S. and globally.

And I'm very pleased to report today that over 90% of our U.S. Enterprise Edition customers have signed up to adopt UpToDate Enterprise Expert AI and more on that in a moment. Legal Research -- Learning, Research & Practice grew 4% organically or 8% when excluding print, led by 6% organic growth in medical research, partly reflecting a recently added open access publishing partnership. In learning and practice, organic growth slowed as digital learning solutions for nursing schools faced a tough comparable, while print books continued to decline. Turning to Tax & Accounting on the next slide. Tax & Accounting grew 6% organically, in line with the first half of last year. The adjusted operating profit margin eased slightly as we increased investments in product development.

In North America, revenues grew 5% organically as continued strong organic growth in recurring software revenues was partly offset by a sharp decline in print books and other nonrecurring revenues.

Growth was led by an 18% increase in cloud software revenues as customers continue to migrate to the CCH Axcess cloud-native platform and adopt additional workflow modules, including our new agentic AI modules. In Europe, revenues grew 8% organically, driven by 16% growth in cloud software solutions with all regions performing well. Cloud-based automation and data exchange solutions, in particular, e-invoicing solutions saw strong organic growth.

Moving to the next slide. Financial & Corporate Compliance delivered 4% organic growth, in line with the comparable period a year ago. The adjusted operating profit margin increased primarily due to the divestment of FRR late last year. Legal Services delivered 5% organic growth driven by subscription renewals, upselling of services such as business licenses and strong growth at RASi in the midsized corporate market. Corporate legal services transactional revenues grew 4% as subdued M&A volumes and a ramp down of BOI activity were more than offset by good transactional growth in the midsized U.S. corporate segment.

Financial Services grew 3% organically, supported by a 6% increase in recurring revenues, while lending-related transactional revenues remained subdued. In Legal & Regulatory, we delivered 5% organic growth or 8% if you exclude print. The adjusted operating profit margin eased very slightly as increased investment in product development and margin dilution from recent acquisitions offset underlying efficiencies.

Information solutions grew 5% organically against a challenging comparable created by the German federal elections last year. The integration of Libra Technology, the German AI start-up we acquired in November last year is ahead of plan. We have infused the Libra AI Assistant directly with our legal content across 10 European countries and are seeing rapid rates of adoption among law firms.

Legal & Regulatory software saw 7% organic growth. Enterprise Legal Management Solutions saw mid-single-digit organic growth, supported by 10% growth in legal invoice volumes. Brightflag acquired in June of 2025 and focused on serving mid and large corporations continued to perform strongly. The Corporate Performance & ESG division delivered 7% organic growth. Revenue growth continued to be driven by strong double-digit organic growth in cloud software revenues. Nonrecurring revenues were weak, mainly due to a decline in software implementation projects in the first half.

The adjusted operating profit margin increased to 9.7%, reflecting operational gearing and careful expense management. In Environmental, Health and Safety & ESG, the Enablon suite grew 2% organically. While Enablon's recurring cloud software revenues grew 10%, we saw a decline in implementation services and longer sales cycles amidst the geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East. Within Corporate Performance, CCH Tagetik delivered 12% organic growth, lifted by strong 19% growth in recurring cloud revenues, driven by new customer wins and upgrades. On-premise license fees and services declined as businesses transitioned to the cloud.

In Audit & Assurance, TeamMate delivered high single-digit organic growth and the integration of StandardFusion risk and control management tools is on track. Our corporate tax unit also reported high single-digit growth. We're delighted to announce today that Marosa has joined Wolters Kluwer. This bolt-on acquisition will accelerate the development of a global indirect tax product. In February, we announced plans to speed up the pace of advanced AI innovation to capture opportunities ahead to drive growth and support our customers. We announced our intention to increase product development spend to between 12% and 13% of revenues this year and beyond.

And we said that we intend to fund this investment while simultaneously increasing our operating profit margin. We are executing on this plan and as noted, pursuing a rapid rollout of advanced AI capabilities across several platforms. While I will highlight 3 important rollouts today, I also want to note that we are adding AI-powered features across the entire portfolio, and there is more to come as we greenlight new investments.

In February, we also noted 2 other areas of near-term focus, fostering partnerships and intensifying our go-to-market. Partnerships allow us to embed our solutions more deeply into customer workflows and ecosystems. Our initiatives in go-to-market will create more data-driven and scalable sales and revenue processes, leveraging AI-powered capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, as of July, over 90% of our U.S. Enterprise Edition customers have signed up to adopt UpToDate Expert AI. This means that our Expert AI solution is now available in around 2,500 U.S. hospitals, highlighting the trust our customers place in us to deliver enterprise-grade AI for their high-stakes decisions.

UpToDate Expert AI is also starting to be adopted by international health systems. Today, we have over 230 sites activated across 36 countries. In every international market, we comply with the evolving local regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act and Medical Devices Regulation. We are now focused on activation, support and integrations, and we continue to add new AI capabilities and additional content to the UpToDate Enterprise platform. In the last few weeks, we went live with AI drug dosing, a valuable new feature, which has passed rigorous validation by our experts, clinicians and pharmacists as well as structured testing against real-world medication questions.

We are currently rolling out local guidelines in close collaboration with a number of hospital customers with a view to launch more broadly later this year. And as noted, we are continuing to develop integrated offerings with EMRs such as Epic and ambient players such as Abridge. These integrations are very important for our future platforms to support our health care customers to manage chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.

We are also making good progress with CCH Axcess Expert AI. As we enter the key selling season, we already have around 250 accounting firms who are subscribing to one or more of our new agentic AI modules. While adoption will build gradually, I'm very encouraged by the sales pickup we saw starting in June and the enthusiastic reaction we are getting from early adopters. This graphic illustrates where the agentic AI modules operate in the tax workflow. CCH Axcess Intelligence is the top-selling module.

This tool acts as an overarching assistant orchestrating agents to perform a wide range of tasks from collaborating with clients to planning and scheduling resources to ingesting and analyzing documents and generating insights. It leverages firm and client data from across the platform, along with our deep domain expertise and proprietary content.

Customers value the seamless and secure integration with firm and client data and the overall quality and trustworthiness of our content and platform. We continue to make improvements and add new functionality. In May, we launched CCH Axcess Advisor, which uses AI to identify and prioritize new opportunities for CPAs to advise their clients. We also enhanced CCH Axcess Workflow with AI-powered scheduling intelligence. And in June, we launched an enhanced CCH Axcess Scan with AI-powered ingestion of complex unstructured data from U.S. K1 partnership forms. Users are reporting up to 70% efficiencies when they use the new K1 Scan tool.

In Legal & Regulatory, we acquired a German legal AI start-up, Libra Technology in November last year. Within 3 months of completing this acquisition, we had integrated the Libra AI technology with our Belgian, Dutch, Polish and Italian content and launched the solution in market. In March, we added our 4 Eastern European countries. The Libra solution provides lawyers with an integrated AI-enabled working environment that is directly embedded into their workflows, combining Gen AI-powered search across trusted legal content with tools that support the drafting of briefs, memos and other legal documents.

We continue to enhance capabilities. In May, we enhanced contract review and workflow integration and embedded Libra into Kleos, our practice management suite for law firms, and we have further innovations in the pipeline. Feedback from law firms has been very positive, and we're finding that in addition to monetizing the AI workspace, we are able to upsell content to Libra subscribers.

The Libra acquisition will be included in organic growth next year. Let me finish with a few words on partnerships. Workflow and ecosystem partnerships allow us to embed our solutions more deeply into customer workflows and systems, allowing us to expand our role and extend our market reach. Abridge is a great example. In March, we went live with UpToDate inside Abridge, allowing doctors to pull in context-aware content from UpToDate when creating a clinical note. The integration with Dragon Copilot is also on track to launch later this year.

You may have also seen our expanded technology partnership with OpenAI, which we announced in early June, allowing us to leverage OpenAI's latest APIs and enterprise-grade platform capabilities. We've made good progress on the partnership front in the first half, and there's more to come.

Now I'll hand over to Kevin, who will take you through the financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Stacey. Let's start with the headline numbers. First half 2026 revenues were EUR 3.033 billion. The absolute decline of 1% was due to currency translation. On a constant currency basis, revenues increased 4%. This includes the effect of last year's disposal of FRR. Organic growth was 5%, in line with the first half of last year as expected. First half adjusted operating profit was EUR 893 million, up 10% in constant currencies and up 9% on an organic basis. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 100 basis points to 29.4%. This was achieved through operational gearing, operating efficiency programs and the prior year divestiture of FRR.

Our guidance for the full year margin remains around 28%. We expect the previously announced increase in product development spending to be second half weighted. First half diluted adjusted earnings per share increased 14% in constant currencies. First half adjusted free cash flow was EUR 533 million, an increase of 14% in constant currencies. This reflects the favorable movements in working capital, which are expected to reverse in the coming quarters. The balance sheet remains strong with a rolling 12-month net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.0x.

Return on invested capital also based on 12 months rolling figures was 18.2%. Let's look at revenues by division on the next slide. All 5 divisions contributed to the positive organic growth. Health grew 5% organically, which was an improvement from a year ago. Clinical Solutions posted 5% organic growth, driven by good renewals and upgrades among health systems in the U.S. and internationally. Tax & Accounting revenues grew 6% organically, in line with the comparable period and supported by a strong second quarter. Growth was driven by strong double-digit organic growth in our cloud software solutions in North America and Europe. Financial & Corporate Compliance grew 4% organically, in line with the comparable period with recurring subscription revenues up 6%.

Legal & Regulatory grew 5% organically against a tough comparable related to the German elections last year. And finally, Corporate Performance & ESG grew 7% organically, in line with the comparable period. Double-digit growth in recurring cloud software revenues was partially offset by a decline in nonrecurring implementation services. On the next slide, you can see the trends in recurring and nonrecurring revenues. Recurring revenue streams shown on the left, accounted for 85% of total revenue. The most important component, digital and services subscriptions, sustained 7% organic growth. This reflects continued good customer contract renewals.

Other recurring revenues, which include a range of repeating revenue streams such as content license and usage fees, also maintained 7% organic growth. Print subscriptions declined. The chart shows the temporary boost we experienced a year ago from the German elections for various legal publications. Nonrecurring revenues, shown on the right, represents 15% of group revenues. Here, we continue to see mixed trends. FCC transactional revenues, shown in red, were up 2% in the first 6 months. The absence of an interest rate cut has kept U.S. M&A volumes and lending activity at subdued levels.

Legal & Regulatory transactional revenues, which are fees linked to legal spend volumes in our enterprise legal management unit grew 10% organically. Other nonrecurring revenues such as on-premise software licenses and implementation services declined 6% organically. Print books, which were only 1% of revenue, saw a sharp fall in the first half, largely due to the changes in the publication schedule. Turning to margins on the next slide. As mentioned, first half adjusted operating profit increased 10% in constant currencies and 9% on an organic basis. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 100 basis points to 29.4%. The margin improvement in the first half was supported by the divestiture of FRR at the end of last year. This resulted in a notable margin increase in the Financial & Corporate Compliance margin. Health and Corporate Performance & ESG also saw margin improve.

This mainly reflects operational gearing, mix shift of revenues, scaling of expert solutions and expense management. Tax & Accounting and Legal & Regulatory margins eased slightly, reflecting increased investments in product development, the impact of recent acquisitions and currency. Investment in product development, including capitalized spend was 11% of revenues. We expect this will ramp up in the second half as we approve and kick off AI development projects.

Restructuring expenses, which we included in adjusted operating profit amounted to EUR 9 million compared to EUR 5 million in the comparable period. Now moving to the rest of the income statement on the next slide. First half net financing costs increased to EUR 56 million. This reflects higher coupon rates on Eurobonds issued in 2025. Adjusted financing costs also included an EUR 8 million net foreign exchange loss, mainly related to the currency translation of intercompany balances. The prior year included a EUR 2 million net foreign exchange gain. As a result, adjusted profit before tax increased 9% in constant currencies. The benchmark effective tax rate was stable at 23.8%. We continue to guide to an effective benchmark tax rate for the full year in the range of 23.5% to 24.5%.

Adjusted net profit was EUR 637 million, up 10% in constant currencies. First half diluted adjusted EPS was EUR 2.83, up 14% in constant currencies. This reflects the increase in adjusted net profit and a 4% reduction in the weighted average number of shares outstanding as a result of our ongoing share buyback program.

Turning to cash flow on the next slide. First half adjusted operating cash flow increased 17% in constant currencies. The cash conversion ratio was 91%, reflecting favorable timing of working capital, which we expect will reverse in coming quarters.

Capital expenditures were EUR 143 million, a slight decrease compared to the prior year, mostly due to the divestment of FRR and timing of projects. Net interest paid, excluding lease interest, increased to EUR 66 million. This reflects the higher coupon interest paid and lower interest income on cash balances. Cash taxes increased to EUR 220 million, reflecting higher pretax income in the United States and tax assessments and payments related to prior years.

As a result, adjusted free cash flow increased 14% in constant currencies to reach EUR 533 million. Now let's turn to the uses of cash on the next slide. The main uses of free cash flow in the first half were dividends and share buybacks. Dividends paid reflect the final dividend payment for 2025 fiscal year of EUR 303 million. This excludes withholding taxes, which were paid in July. Cash deployed towards share buyback repurchases amounted to EUR 215 million in the first half.

Net debt was approximately EUR 4 billion, unchanged from our position at the end of 2025. Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio remains at 2.0x within our target range for leverage. We remain in solid financial position with sufficient room to support organic investments in the business and make select acquisitions. At this time, we're committed to our progressive dividend while continuing to execute on our share repurchases. Now let me turn to the outlook for the remainder of the year. Our divisional outlook is largely the same. However, we now expect CP & ESG organic growth to be in line with the prior year, given the geopolitical circumstances have not yet improved.

This change in divisional outlook is small enough that it does not alter our overall outlook for the group. For the group as a whole, we continue to expect another year of good organic growth, further margin increase, high single-digit growth in diluted adjusted EPS in constant currencies. As mentioned in today's release, product development spending is expected to be second half weighted, we're happy to reiterate our margin guidance for approximately 28%.

In summary, we're pleased with the good first half results. Organic growth was 5% or 6% if you exclude print. We delivered strong improvements in margin, diluted adjusted EPS and free cash flow. We remain in a solid financial position with net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2x.

These strong results have allowed us to reiterate our full year guidance for the group with confidence. We are excited about the opportunities ahead of us, and we look forward to executing on our priorities. With that, Stacey and I are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question today is from the line of Ciaran Donnelly from Citi.

Three questions from myself. Firstly, just on the FY '26 margin guide, it implies quite a step-up in costs in H2. So could you just help us understand where specifically the incremental product development spend will be focused? And then just separately, could you comment on whether any of the increased cost in H2 is reflective of AI cost inflation more generally?

Secondly, again, just on margin, 2026, there's quite a lot of moving parts. Just in terms of the guide again, could you help us understand within that, the net effect of operating leverage and the reinvestment rate? And just is that reflective of how we should think 2027 is going to play out? I think consensus has broadly 30 basis points of margin improvement in '27.

And then just finally, on Clinical Solutions, implied slowdown in Q2 given the H1 results. I know these quarterly growth rates can sometimes be a function of small changes in absolute numbers and the rounding of the growth rates to one significant figure. So can you just provide a bit more color on the Q2 performance and if it was materially different from Q1?

Yes. No, thanks very much, Ciaran. Yes, so I'll start with the product development and the investments that we'll be making in the second half. And also the CS question, Kevin, maybe you can give a little bit of more detail on the margin expectations. But just to sort of set the stage on what we're doing with regard to product investments.

As I shared earlier, and you saw in the road maps, we have significant investments in the CCH tax, in our Legal & Regulatory business, and in Health. Those will continue to drive the road map. And very importantly, as we're working with customers and getting their input on which of our AI capabilities are going to drive the most impact for them, we're bringing those forward into the road map in the second half of the year.

So we're excited to be able to further those investments.

And then we're also, as I mentioned briefly, we have AI opportunities across the portfolio, and we are going to be increasing investment in particular use cases within each of those divisions. So that will start rolling in, in the second half of the year.

With regard to CS, we had a good first half in Health overall, strong renewals. You mentioned some of the nuances and slight changes compared to the first half last year, and this year, for us, that was in the Medi-Span drug solution business that is within the Clinical Solutions portfolio, where in the first quarter of '25, we had a slight pickup of nonrecurring revenue, which did cause a small grow-over this year in the CS portfolio. And then, Kevin, do you want to give a bit more insight into the margin this year?

Yes, absolutely. Ciaran, I want to make sure I got your question. The margin performance in the second half will definitely be impacted by the product development, the innovation spend, which we do expect to ramp up, as Stacey said. In the first half, it was about 11% of revenues. By the full year, I expect it to get to 12% to 13%. So a lot of the margin progression in the second half has to do with that.

With regard to AI costs, token costs, in particular, we do see that as a part of our cost base, and we do see that increasing. However, it's a very small part of our cost base. And it's something that we are managing very carefully. As you probably know, we use a variety of different AI models. And particularly for development, we can apply the most economic model to the particular use case. So I hope that gives you an insight into what we're expecting.

And then just on the net effect of operating leverage and reinvestment rate in '26 and how we should think about that for '27?

Well, we're not giving guidance today for '27. But as you know, our history over the last several years is to continue to deliver good organic growth and to continue to deliver some margin improvement. We'll have more to say about that in February when we give you 2027 guidance.

We will now take our next question. This is from the line of Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

So first question -- I've got 3. First question, you flagged that over 90% of enterprise customers have signed up for Expert AI. Can you, first of all, give us a sense of what the take-up is among users inside those hospitals rather than just who's signed up overall? And then am I right in thinking that you're mostly not charging anything extra for UpToDate Expert AI? And therefore, when might you start to see some benefit from the value you're creating there?

Second question, can you talk about the visibility that you have in the second half in tax and legal at this point, given that your guidance calls for an acceleration in both of those? Given the weighting subscriptions, can we think that, that's mostly kind of signed and sealed by now?

And then third question, just on the buyback. You mentioned at the full year results that your book equity was one factor in your decision on the scale of this year's buyback. It looks like that equity level has ticked up a bit at the first half stage. Does that give you a bit more freedom when you're thinking about next year's buyback?

Okay. Thanks, Nick. So in Health and particularly with our Enterprise Edition customers, we're very pleased with the adoption of our Expert AI solution, as I mentioned earlier. And what we've done is that Expert AI has been rolled out as a part of our Enterprise Edition subscriptions. So monetization is effectively through supporting renewals and price increases.

And then as you also noticed on our rollout and what we're doing in terms of not just our Expert AI solution, but other solutions that we deliver to our enterprises fully embedded into their clinician workflows, those are additional capabilities that would be add-ons that deliver value and get priced accordingly upon renewal of our customers. So that's how the rollout is expected.

As you know, these are subscriptions, so that has a gradual impact as customers take in those additional capabilities.

Within Tax & Legal, we had good organic growth in the first half at 6%, so very much in line with the first half last year. The first quarter, we were impacted by a change in publication dates for U.S. books. So that caused a decline in our print book revenue in Q1. This, as you can see in Q2, is lessening as we progress throughout the year. So we expect to see sort of catch-up by the end of the year.

And then just in terms of the drivers of growth in tax, certainly migration of the CCH Axcess cloud platform, the upselling of our more classic modules, and the adoption of our new agentic AI modules, certainly in our -- that I shared earlier. So that is definitely helping us to drive growth and to achieve the full year guidance for tax.

In Legal & Regulatory, the major drivers there in terms of what's going to cause the second half pickup. The acquisition of Brightflag became organic at the end of June. So that will begin rolling in, in the second half. And then we'll have a slight benefit from Libra, which becomes organic towards the end of the year, November. And then the other big piece that impacted the first half of Legal & Regulatory was the effect that Kevin and I mentioned earlier around the German elections that were strong in the first half of last year, but did not repeat this year.

And then maybe, Kevin, you could talk about the share buyback.

Certainly, Stacey. On the share buyback, indeed, in thinking about the share buyback in addition to our cash position and our leverage position, we also do have to be mindful of retained earnings and our distributable reserves in retained earnings. And I've actually reached out to a number of experts in this field, and we do have to stay within those distributable reserve boundaries. So we have taken that and looked at that very seriously.

I will say that as profits do improve and as profits do increase, it does indeed expand our distributable reserves. So that will give us more opportunity as profits increase. It is worth mentioning, though, this year, we will be returning nearly 100% of our free cash flow and our profit in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

So far, we're about halfway through our share buyback program. As of today, we have bought back EUR 244 million, and we are on target to complete the $500 million (sic) [ EUR 500 million ] program by the end of this year.

We'll now take our next question, and this is from Joe Barnet-Lamb from UBS.

Three from me. The first 2 are both building off Nick. So Nick's question on the path to Expert AI monetization. You spoke about effectively bundling, and that's supporting renewals, underlying pricing, and the ability to sell add-ons. Should we assume that underlying price rises on a look-forward basis, though, will now be higher as a result of that than previously? And secondly, on the bolt-ons, is that something that comes in FY '27 or it's progressive on a multiyear basis?

Secondly, again, building on Nick, I don't think you answered the proportion of users in those hospitals that are using Expert AI rather than just the number of hospitals.

And then finally, within the tweak to CP & ESG guidance, you referenced geopolitics, you referenced macro, and in your divisional write-up, you talk about Enablon. I think, Stacey, you specifically mentioned that in your [indiscernible] as well. Can you give more color within CP & ESG and specifically within ESG and Enablon, what the issue is? You mentioned it's Middle East related, but some more color would be great.

Sure. Yes. In terms of CS, so Clinical Solutions, this is very much a gradual rollout of our additional solutions, our capabilities. And we do expect that to build over time. So at this point, again, we'll affirm our 2026 guidance for Health.

In terms of the users, thanks for reminding me of that. We are very pleased with the activation of users of our Expert AI solution within our enterprise customers. We do see a nice growth as we continue to add on additional capabilities. I've mentioned, for example, drug dosing recently added. So we expect the activation to continue to grow.

We're also seeing nice growth where customers are -- have deployed ambient solutions such as Abridge, and UpToDate content being -- flowing through the ambient solutions to be able to provide additional insights and actions as a result of being included in clinical notes. So we're seeing good user activation of our AI solutions through the enterprise.

And then in CP & ESG, our Enablon platform is really around safety, around ensuring that our customers' employees remain safe in high-risk industries. And one of those is oil and gas. So oil and gas companies, as you might imagine, heavy concentration in the Middle East. We did have some implementations that were paused because of the current situation in that region. And so that's the major reason why, yes, we have adjusted slightly the CP & ESG forecast.

We will now take the next question. This is from George Webb of Morgan Stanley.

Stacey and Kevin, hope you are having a good summer so far. A couple of questions that come back on a couple of the pieces we've talked about already. Maybe just starting with Enablon. If I look in the mix of the Enablon performance and looking particularly at the cloud software piece, which I imagine should be pretty recurring. That also decelerated quite sharply in the half. And I appreciate you called out those factors on implementations. But I guess the recurring piece, I feel should move less sharply.

Is there anything you're seeing there on the competitive environment aside from the factors you've seen? Or does that all feel quite stable to you?

And just secondly, on Clinical Solutions..

Sorry. Yes, go ahead.

Just secondly, on Clinical Solutions, good renewal rates, high uptake of Expert AI on the enterprise customer base. On that smaller non-enterprise customer base, I guess, what have you been seeing there with regards to retention and then upsell to the paid offering?

Yes. So with CP & ESG, yes, as we noted in our first quarter press release, the sales cycles are also slower in the Middle East. The impact we've had in the first half has been more on those services or implementation, but we are seeing slightly slower sales cycles in that region. And then, Kevin, I don't know if you want to add anything more to that.

No, I definitely think it is a bit of a slowdown in just all activity, particularly in oil and gas, as Stacey mentioned, and that is a big part of our customer base there. But we do expect that as we get through and navigate through this, we will see those not only software sales, but service contracts pick up.

Yes. And then, George, you -- on UpToDate Pro, which is what we call our individual segment, just to put things into context, Pro does represent less than 20% of the core UpToDate solution, so less than 2% for Wolters Kluwer. The individual segment of the market has always been more competitive, and that does remain the case as we now have many general LLMs offering free medical chatbots.

But even in this segment, we remain differentiated because of our proprietary content, the overall trust in the solution, and the way that we deliver the solution. We do continue to enhance UpToDate Pro. Expert AI has now been made part of the basic package. We've revamped the mobile app, and Expert dosing -- AI dosing is also now available as of the last month or so. So good progress in rolling out the Expert AI solution.

We will now take the next question. This is from Adam Berlin from Goldman Sachs.

Three questions from me as well, please. The first one is, can you give us an update on where you are in the migration from ProSystem to Axcess in the U.S. tax business? I think last told us you were just over halfway. Where do you think you are now?

Second question is, can you give us any color on F&CC transaction trends as we are going through Q3?

And third, I'm going to have another go at the 2027 margin question. Just -- I'm just trying to work out if we're going from 11% R&D to 12% to 13% by the end of the year. And then in H1 next year, we're not going to have the benefit of the disposal of FRR. Should we be modeling -- I know you're not going to give guidance, but should we be modeling some kind of big step down in margins in H1 '27 as those extra costs are carried forward into next year?

Okay. I will take the first one. So in ProSystem fx, as you noted, we have made it to the halfway mark in terms of migrating from ProSystem to our cloud solution. That continues to be a big focus for us migrating. It is a gradual process. What we're seeing is that with all the AI solutions embedded in the CCH Axcess platform that there is a pickup in interest and demand to move to our cloud solution. So we continue to push that hard and are now over the 50% mark.

I'll just do a quick confirmation of what Kevin mentioned earlier in terms of sort of directionally, we certainly on the margin, we certainly are not ready to share guidance for next year. But what I will say is that Kevin and I are very committed to continuing to deliver strong margins and in line with our past, continue to do slight increases on a regular annual basis. So that's still the intent. But with that, Kevin, maybe you could give a little bit more context for the margin question and then also on the FCC transactions.

Sure. I think on the margin question, obviously, we have greenlighted a number of investment programs. Some of these programs will go on beyond 2026 and into the future. But again, it's a little bit early for us to be talking about guidance for 2027, but we will have more to say on that when we get together with you again in February.

With regard to FCC transactions, as you probably know, we've got good insight into a lot of things in our portfolio, but this is the hardest one, the transaction revenue. We did not see an interest rate cut that we expected at the beginning of the year. So because of that, you do see more subdued transactional revenue, particularly in the Financial Services side of that business.

So it's difficult to predict. But if you take a look at what some projections are for the mortgage market in the second half of the year, we do still expect that the mortgage market, mortgage origination, and refinances will still be under some pressure. So that is baked into our thinking and baked into our guidance.

If I could mention a positive on transactions, BOI revenue, business ownership, the Corporate Transparency Act, as you know, that's not being enforced anymore. So we do have a grow-over in that from last year, that becomes less and less of a drag as we move forward. But this is one area where we are laser-focused, but our guidance does incorporate this caution.

We will now take our next question. This is from Steve Liechti from Deutsche Bank.

I've got 2 left. Just going back to Health and Clinical Solutions and kind of embedding Expert AI. Just -- can you give me some help here in terms of if I was a subscriber maybe in the last few years, what your average increase, I guess, price or yield would be per subscriber and then really try and link that to putting in Expert AI, would there be an acceleration in that? I know some of your peers have given examples of double-digit increases when they put in an AI layer. So anything that you can give us there would be useful.

And then secondly, on Legal specifically, if you included Libra and Brightflag on a kind of pro forma basis, what should -- what would the like-for-like revenue be if we did the first half was 5%? What would that be if we included on a pro forma basis, those acquisitions?

Yes. So I'll take the first one on the Clinical Solutions and our Enterprise Edition and the rollout of our AI solutions. Again, we're very pleased with the rollout. We are including the Expert AI solution as part of our enterprise subscription. And over time, as we see that value reflected with our customers and very importantly, with other components of our enterprise platform, including the add-on modules that we have with our patient engagement data, local guidelines, our APIs, and so on, those will be reflected in our renewals, and that happens gradually. So no more details at this point in terms of how that flows into the actual prices.

And then with Legal and the addition and the inclusion of Brightflag into organic growth in Libra, Kevin, why don't you take that one?

Sure. I would say I don't have pro forma numbers off the top of my head, but I can tell you that Brightflag, in particular, is growing quite well, in fact, slightly ahead of our expectations. So we're very pleased to see that. Libra as well, I think, is certainly meeting, if not exceeding our expectations. We have taken that business and rolled it out to 10 different geographies since acquisition, so in the last 6, 7 months or so. So again, very happy with the way that is performing.

I will tell you that Brightflag, in particular, is going to be included in organic growth for the full second half of the year. And Libra, probably not maybe December, but the effect of Libra will be much less. Brightflag will certainly contribute, and that does, in fact, inform us with our guidance that we're giving you that we expect improved organic growth for the full year.

We will now take the next question. This is from Thymen Rundberg from ING.

First one on AI, adoption metrics are clearly improving. So what I'm trying to understand is the depth of engagement behind that adoption. So are you seeing usage intensity per new customer or user build faster than adoption base itself? So for example, in terms of frequency of use, number of workflows that are touched or modules used? And then what gives you the confidence that this is moving from initial adoption to becoming really embedded in the day-to-day workflow usage?

And then on the capital allocation, so you're clearly using all 3 routes, organic investments, partnerships, M&A. So we've seen these deals like StandardFusion and now also Marosa. I just wanted to ask if you can discuss how do you decide whether an opportunity is best addressed through either build, buy, or partner? And for example, Marosa that you just announced as well, what gives you confidence that they can become a strong platform extension?

Yes. So certainly, in terms of the AI usage, yes, we are seeing nice adoption. So for example, in our -- the intelligence layer within our CCH Axcess platform, if you recall the rollout slide that I shared with you earlier, we are seeing nice adoption and increase in usage as those customers we're rolling out those solutions to those customers. Still very early days, but we're very encouraged by the adoption, the feedback we're getting.

We are seeing very nice improvements in efficiency when customers are using our solutions. For example, in Scan, one of the solutions that we've launched, there is a pretty significant increase in efficiency for our customers in automating processes that they had to do in the past manually. So we're seeing good adoption there.

Also, as I mentioned, in the Libra rollout, we are seeing very good adoption, usage, engagement, which is fueling the continued rollout of that solution. So very encouraged by what we're seeing so far in our AI rollouts and launches.

In terms of our -- how we think about our M&A activities, we've really been very successful in 2 areas where we, for example, have -- are deeply embedded in one part of a workflow and extend to another. This has been the case with our [indiscernible] Isabel Group product acquisition several years ago, certainly the case with Libra, where it's a natural extension of our content integrated into the AI workspace that's, as I mentioned, very successful for us.

This latest acquisition that we announced this morning, which is Marosa, is a very good example of that. So what Marosa does is that it's a VAT compliance, real-time reporting, and e-invoicing solution that complements our existing U.S. corporate tax business to accelerate the development of a broader global indirect tax platform.

So we're able to offer our multinational and global customers that have used our U.S. corporate tax solution to extend their -- and be able to fulfill their need to have a more broad platform, including the real-time reporting, VAT compliance, and e-invoicing.

So very natural extension and serves our current customers well. And that brings in a customer base that is very blue-chip companies, 30% headquartered in the U.S. that need the combined solution. So another very good example of how we're extending our platforms to be able to deliver more value for customers.

And we have time for one more question today. There are further questions in the queue. Please note the Investor Relations team will reach out to those still in the queue. Take our last question now, and this is from Will Packer from BNP.

Firstly, as you mentioned, the competitive intensity in U.S. clinical diagnostics has increased materially. Using third-party web traffic sources, we can observe that OpenEvidence web and app traffic has grown very strongly and is now the most used clinical diagnostics tool.

Our tracking suggests that after a period of stability, UpToDate weekly active users has fallen a fair bit since May. Is there anything specific behind this? Or is this more of a management issue? It's always potentially dangerous using these third-party sources. And could you comment more widely as to the extent to which you see OpenEvidence as a complementary or substitutable product for UpToDate?

And then secondly, within the Legal segment, we've had a whole flurry of announcements from new AI native players, the likes of Harvey and Legora rapidly scaling in the new workflow layer with combined ARRs in excess of $400 million in Q2 with strong growth. Could you talk to the extent to which you see that fast-growing workflow opportunity is core for your Wolters Kluwer legal business or the extent to which you're going to be more focused on the research side, for example? Any color there would be useful.

Yes. So in terms of the UpToDate usage stats, as I've mentioned before, public usage stats are not a reliable proxy for UpToDate usage. A significant portion of UpToDate usage is not via the web, but via EHRs are integrated into the health systems, electronic medical records and also through -- now through ambient scribes and so on. So this usage is not captured on the website -- web stats.

But that said, clinicians today do have a growing number of AI native solutions available for quick questions. And naturally, those interactions do capture a portion of their clinical decision support needs, especially simpler queries.

So those would be the types of queries that you'd see from OpenEvidence or other LLM players.

And we've always had, through Google prior to LLMs. We have a differentiated AI solution based on the most trusted and proprietary UpToDate content, and that's why hospitals have adopted Expert AI in such increasing way to be able to achieve that 90% adoption rate that we shared earlier.

So if I talk about the question on Legal, our Libra acquisition is, in fact, just what you talked about, the AI workspace that is deeply integrated with our proprietary legal content. And that's a real differentiator for us as we are launching our solution -- integrated solution into the countries where we operate. I talked about the fact that we have now launched this integrated research and AI workspace product line into our 10 countries where we have our proprietary content sold today.

Just close up with just thank you for joining the call today. We're very pleased to share the good first half results to reaffirm our guidance, and we're very pleased with the acceleration and delivery on our strategic priorities, including our AI and agentic AI rollout. So thanks very much, and look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders of Wolters Kluwer at our corporate office in Alphen. This meeting is being broadcast live via video webcast, and a recording will be made to correctly produce minutes.

During today's meeting, all members of the Supervisory Board and Executive Board are present. Our auditor for the 2025 annual report, Mr. Bakker of KPMG Accountants; and our company's notary, Ms. Leemrijse of law firm A&O Shearman are joining us here in Alphen as well.

We are pleased that many shareholders took the opportunity to exercise their voting rights by way of electronic or written proxy. We have complied with all statutory provisions and the provisions of our Articles of Association for convening this meeting and therefore, can resolve validly at this meeting on all of the agenda items. As soon as the exact number of shares present or represented is known, I will inform you.

Let us turn now to the agenda. I would like to discuss agenda items 2a, b, c, d and 3a together. To introduce items 2a and 3a, I would now like to give the floor to Ms. Caywood, CEO and Chair of the Executive Board. Stacey?

Thank you, Ann. I'd like to add my welcome to everyone who is joining us here in Alphen and those following the meeting via the webcast.

First, I will share a brief recap of our 2025 financial and sustainability performance. Then I will spend a bit more time on our strategy and our plans for further accelerating the pace of advanced AI innovation to capture the exciting opportunities ahead for Wolters Kluwer. We are already making significant progress in rolling out advanced AI capabilities across our solutions and seeing rapid adoption by customers. I will wrap up by discussing our recent trading update, the outlook for full year 2026 and our proposed dividend.

This slide summarizes our financial and strategic performance in 2025. We delivered 6% organic revenue growth, supported by continued growth in our recurring revenues, including our cloud-based software solutions. We achieved a further 40% -- 40 basis point increase in our adjusted operating profit margin to 27.5%. This strong operating performance helped drive a 9% increase in diluted adjusted earnings per share in constant currencies. Both the margin and earnings per share growth were at the top end of our guidance range. Adjusted free cash flow increased 10% in constant currencies, which was ahead of our guidance for the year. Return on invested capital was 18%, which was in line with our guidance.

Our balance sheet remains strong at 2x leverage. We maintained high levels of investment in product development at 11% of revenues. We've been investing in AI for well over 10 years and currently nearly 70% of our digital revenues are derived from AI-powered solutions. Important advanced AI product launches over the last few months have been UpToDate Expert AI in Health, CCH Axces Expert AI in Tax & Accounting and the Libra AI workspace in the legal markets. All 3 are seeing very good adoption by our customers.

I'm pleased to report that the acquisitions we made last year, including RASi, Brightflag and Libra are all performing well and are creating new growth opportunities. Overall, it was a year of strong financial results in line with or ahead of guidance and a year of important strategic progress in rolling out advanced AI solutions across our core markets.

As you can see on the next slide, we continue to build upon our multiyear track record of financial performance. The charts on the top left show our organic revenue growth. Since the COVID pandemic, we have been delivering consistent 6% organic growth, and this has been driven by continued strong performance in recurring revenues, which have been growing 7% organically. Recurring revenues have helped offset what have been weaker trends in nonrecurring revenues, such as revenue from transactions, print books, on-premise software and other nonsubscription products.

The chart on the top right shows our track record of improving our adjusted operating profit margin. On average, we have delivered approximately 60 basis points of margin expansion every year over the last 5 years through continued focus on operational efficiencies and more recently, through internal use of AI. The charts along the bottom of this slide show our track record of growing diluted adjusted earnings per share, return on invested capital and adjusted free cash flow.

The next slide highlights some of the key sustainability measures that we track closely. Our business is driven by the sheer talent and efforts of our global workforce. We spent considerable effort in ensuring the team is highly engaged and well supported. In 2025, our employee engagement and belonging scores were maintained at 78 and 75, respectively, and we continue to aim for the top quartile performance over time. Over the years, we have developed a range of training programs, and it's great to see that employees are taking advantage of that. Despite the highly competitive nature of the talent market globally, especially in tech and AI skills, we have had very consistent turnover. It increased only slightly last year.

Security and data privacy remain very important for us. I'm pleased to report that our global information security program, which is designed to protect our organization, our products and our customers continues to score well. We made strong environmental progress last year, rationalizing our global office footprint by 8% in 2025. We reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 60% in 2025, which means that we have now reduced our direct emissions by 80% since the base year of 2019, reaching our near-term target ahead of goal. We remain committed to reaching net zero by 2050. All in all, very good progress on delivering financial, strategic and sustainability goals last year. Unfortunately, this strong performance has not been rewarded by the stock market in recent times.

The next slide shows our share price performance alongside that of our competitors and other sector peers since the start of this year. As you can see, nearly all of these peers in the professional information solutions and software sector have seen significant share price declines. The prevailing AI disruption narrative has led the market to shift away from fundamental performance. We will continue to step up our communication efforts to combat this AI disruption narrative, and our teams remain laser-focused on delivering our advanced AI product road maps and product development road maps so that we remain the trusted provider of choice for our customers. I am very confident in the unique strengths of our business and the ability of our teams to deliver for our customers.

Now let me discuss our strategy and the progress we are making. The strategic plan we are pursuing remains the right one. We are building on a strong foundation, delivering expert solutions that deliver trusted insights and increased productivity for our customers, leveraging AI and other advanced technologies. Our AI-powered expert solutions strategy aims to increase organic growth, margins and returns. As announced in February, we are further accelerating the pace in a few key areas to capture the AI opportunities we see in our markets. We intend to increase our investment in product development spend to between 12% and 13% of revenues this year and beyond. And we intend to fund this investment while simultaneously increasing our operating profit margin.

My immediate focus on the 3 key areas is outlined on the next slide. One, we are speeding up the pace of AI innovation to capture strong market demand. We have a significant opportunity to scale our AI-enabled solutions while continuing to bring new products to market. We are leveraging our AI enablement platform that we call FAB to accelerate development cycles and improve customer integration. We are deploying an expert-in-the-loop approach to deliver high-quality, trusted solutions to support our customers' critical decision-making.

Second, we are expanding and scaling our strategic partnerships. These relationships allow us to embed our solutions more deeply in our customer workflows and ecosystems and extend our markets and the value for customers.

And three, we are intensifying our go-to-market approach through more data-driven and scalable sales, marketing and revenue processes.

Now let me illustrate this with 3 important examples, starting with UpToDate Expert AI from Health. Last fall, we launched UpToDate Expert AI. And at the end of April, more than half of our U.S. enterprise customers representing approximately 2,000 hospitals have signed up to adopt the solution. We are on track to reach our goal of around 70% by midyear. Before deployment, each implementation goes through a rigorous governance and security process. Feedback from our customers continues to be very strong, and we continue to work closely with customers to enhance the solution and expand its capabilities.

Two other important examples are covered on the next slide. In Tax & Accounting, we recently launched 6 Agentic AI-powered modules on our native cloud platform, CCH Axcess. Even before we've entered our main selling season, we have more than 150 accounting firms who have been early adopters of these AI modules. These modules introduce Agentic AI capabilities across the workflow from document intake and analysis to collaboration, insights and advisory, helping firms work more efficiently and deliver greater value to their clients. Importantly, these solutions are deeply integrated with firm and client data and feedback from customers has been very positive, particularly around the seamless integration, the security and trustworthiness of our solutions.

In Legal, we acquired a German legal AI start-up at the beginning of this year. In less than 6 months since the acquisition, we have launched the Libra AI workspace across 9 European markets, combining Libra's advanced AI capabilities with our proprietary legal research content in Europe. The Libra solution provides lawyers with an integrated AI-enabled working environment that is directly embedded into their workflows, combining GenAI-powered search across trusted legal content with tools that support the drafting of briefs, memos and other legal documents. Again, feedback from our customers has been very positive. All 3 of these examples are leveraging the unique strengths that Wolters Kluwer has.

This slide shows these 4 unique strengths, which together create a powerful and differentiated position that no LLM or native AI disruptor can replicate. This is our moat. First, our trusted proprietary content, which is a foundational strength that supports our customers in their daily mission-critical work. Second, our customer-centric software platforms, which are embedded in workflows and act as a system of record, delivering productivity, insights and control. Third, our approach to AI, which combines our deep domain expertise, proprietary data and expert validation to deliver high-quality, trusted outcomes in the regulated environments many of our customers work in. And lastly, the deep integration that we have into our customer ecosystems ensures that we are present at the moment decisions are made. Together, these strengths underpin our competitive position, they power our strong brand and our deep customer relationships and position us to lead in the age of AI.

Now I'd like to turn to the trading update and the outlook for 2026. We have seen a solid start to the year, in line with our expectations. Our organic growth was 5% and excluding print, it was 6% organic growth. Recurring revenues, which represent 85% of our total, sustaining a 7% organic growth. As expected, nonrecurring revenues were weak in the first quarter. Cloud software revenue continues to perform well, growing 14% organically. Across the divisions, performance was largely in line with our expectations. Adjusted operating profit increased 11% in constant currencies and adjusted free cash flow was up 15%. We remain confident in reiterating our full year guidance.

We continue to expect another year of good organic growth, a further margin increase and high single-digit growth in diluted adjusted EPS in constant currencies. Importantly, we expect to increase the margin while we simultaneously increase product development spending to between 12% and 13% of revenues to further advance our AI strategy.

So let me wrap up with our dividend proposal and our share buyback program. The strength of our balance sheet allows us to invest in the business organically and through acquisitions, while at the same time, return cash to shareholders. Today, we are proposing an 8% increase in our total dividend per share to EUR 2.52. This results in a final dividend of EUR 1.59 per share to be paid in early June, subject to your approval today. In February, we announced our plan to repurchase up to EUR 500 million of shares in 2026. As of May 14, we have completed over 1/3 of that program. We balance many factors when determining the appropriate amount of share buyback, including our available distributable reserves. Including the dividend and share buybacks, we expect to distribute approximately 100% of our guided 2026 adjusted free cash flow.

Thank you very much for your attention. And with that, I'd like to turn the proceedings back to Ann.

Thank you for the presentation, Stacey. Ms. Heleen Kersten, Chair of our Selection and Remuneration Committee dealing with remuneration matters, has prepared an introduction on agenda item 2d. This agenda item is submitted to you for an advisory vote in accordance with Dutch law. By voting, you can indicate whether in your view, the 2025 remuneration report provides a clear and comprehensive overview of all remuneration paid to individual members of the Executive Board and the Supervisory Board in the last fiscal year. Heleen?

Thank you, Ann. Related to agenda Item 2d, which is the advisory vote on the 2025 remuneration report, I would like to provide a summary of how the company's performance against 1-year and 3-year targets determine the remuneration outcome for 2025.

This slide shows the short-term incentive plan measures, targets and actual performance for the year 2025. The short-term incentive was linked to 3 financial measures and 3 nonfinancial measures as shown in the table. The financial measures were weighted at a combined 90%, while the nonfinancial measures were weighted at a combined 10%. As described in the annual report, the overall financial and nonfinancial performance for 2025 was in aggregate ahead of target, resulting in an above-target payout. The financial outcomes were very close to or ahead of short-term incentive targets. Revenue performance was slightly below target. Adjusted net profit was 2% above target, while adjusted free cash flow was 10% above target. Similarly, performance against nonfinancial measures was close to or ahead of target.

The employee belonging score came in just under target, which was to improve the score by 1 point compared to the prior year. The indexed cybersecurity maturity score exceeded the target, which was to maintain the score above or in line with the benchmark for high-tech companies. And finally, the reduction of the office footprint, a measure aimed at reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions was larger than target with an overall reduction of 8%, which exceeded the target range of 5% to 6%. Additional details are included in the remuneration report.

Let's turn to the long-term incentive plan on the next slide. The long-term incentive covered the 3-year period of 2023, 2025 and included targets for relative TSR, diluted adjusted EPS growth and return on invested capital. Performance across these 3 measures resulted in below target payouts. With respect to relative TSR performance, Wolters Kluwer ranked 15th among the TSR peers, as you can see in the chart on the left. With respect to diluted adjusted EPS growth, Wolters Kluwer delivered a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%, which was close to the target of 10.8%. These figures are calculated in constant currencies. With respect to return on invested capital, Wolters Kluwer achieved 18.2% in 2025, which was below the target of 19%. These figures are also calculated in constant currencies. Further detail can be found in the remuneration report.

With that, I would like to turn the proceedings back to you, Ann.

Thank you, Heleen. The financial statements for the year 2025 have been audited by the independent external auditor, KPMG, and their opinion can be found on Pages 218 to 224 of the 2025 Annual Report.

I would now like to invite Kees Bakker, partner at KPMG Accountants, to give a brief overview on the audit work performed by his firm. Kees, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Ann. My name is Kees Bakker. I'm a partner of KPMG. I'm here together with my fellow partner, Jurgen te Nijenhuis. This was our first year that we audited the financial statements of Wolters Kluwer. It's a good practice to give a little explanation about the audit process, but especially, I would like to talk a little bit about the transition process. Oh, that's small captions. Looking at the transition process, Wolters Kluwer decided early to transition to KPMG, and we started the transition process very early. So starting in the second half of 2024, we attended all relevant meetings relating to the audit.

Also, we worked very closely with our predecessor auditor, Deloitte, who cooperated very well to introduce us to Wolters Kluwer together with management. During the transition, we invested heavily in upgrading our business understanding, getting a feel for the internal control framework, the IT systems, to determine in which areas we would find the most risks that we need to address in the audit.

Also -- I have to take my notes. Thank you. We also onboarded the global audit teams of KPMG. For the audit, we used the materiality threshold of EUR 65 million, which is a little less than 5% of the adjusted normalized profit before tax. We agreed also with the Supervisory Board to report any misstatements above a little over EUR 3 million. In the group audit, we incorporated 23 components across the globe, many of them, obviously, in the U.S. With the audit, we attained a coverage of 87% of group assets and 73% of group revenues, which is a robust coverage in the audit. We also were heavily involved in supervising, instructing and being involved with the audit by our component auditors. We also did perform site visits, both to management as well as to our component auditors in the U.S., in Germany and in Italy.

In the audit, we involved specialists where needed, and these ranged from IT specialists, obviously, valuation specialists in evaluation of goodwill and the purchase price allocation process, forensic specialists, tech specialists and ESG specialists.

This all resulted in 2 opinions. One is our opinion on the audited consolidated financial statements. And thank you, Ann, for pointing to the exact pages, so I don't have to repeat them. But if you're interested, you can read more details on those pages. Also, we provided limited assurance on the CSRD statements, also on the metrics that Stacey pointed to on the slide before these have been subject to our limited assurance work.

If I then move to our observations. You may have read that our key audit matters that we addressed in our audit opinion related to revenue recognition, especially revenue recognition for revenues that are recognized at a point in time. We looked at the fair value of intangibles for the 2 major acquisitions during the year, also called as purchase price allocation process, and we looked at the impairment test for goodwill, which is the item valuation of goodwill.

There are a couple of areas where we had specific audit responses. Those related to 2 presumed fraud risks. One is related to revenue recognition, the other one to the presumed risk of management override of controls. We also looked at the going concern risk. Obviously, we did not note any risk in that respect. And also, we did not identify any risk of material misstatement relating to noncompliance with laws or regulations, climate change or cybersecurity.

Another matter to raise is the divestment of the finance risk regulatory unit. We spent attention to it, although it did not result in a key audit matter. Also, we did assess the consistency of the Board report, the CSRD statements, but also the statement of risk management, also called the VOR in the Netherlands. So we had involvement in that. We did not audit it, but we checked the consistency of the message with the knowledge that we obtained during our work.

If you look at the CSRD engagement, I already mentioned that's limited assurance, so not a reasonable assurance. As part of that, we assessed double materiality assessment. One of the key risks we looked at, again, is the presumed risk of management override of controls. And lastly, we also considered the consistency of the sustainability statements, whether they included all the relevant elements from the relevant guidance.

Looking forward to the 2026 audit, our expected audit approach is largely consistent with last year's audit approach, but we also expect a further roll out of AI and data analytics in our audit work on which we invested heavily in the first year.

That's what I would like to explain to you in a bit. I'm happy to take any questions. I would like to hand it back to Ann.

Thank you, Kees. We would now like to take questions relating to the 2025 Annual Report. This includes agenda Items 2a, b, c and d plus Item 3a, the report of the Executive Board, including the sustainability statements, the corporate governance chapter as included in the 2025 annual report, the report of the Supervisory Board, the remuneration report and the financial statements of 2025. Are there any questions from shareholders in the room?

You get a microphone. Okay. It doesn't matter. Give the mic to somebody, please. Please state your name clearly.

All right. My name is [indiscernible]. I'm here on behalf of European Investors-VEB. Thank you very much for the presentation, and thank you also for maybe stepping up the stories around AI. We've had a good engagement also with Wolters Kluwer. What can you do more? I appreciate the teach-ins. I appreciate all the things you're doing. Now you said a lot about, of course, the AI opportunities, also a little bit about the threats.

I was wondering maybe you can talk a little bit more about where you see the threats most in terms of which business segments and then also a little bit about -- you have your content, you have your data, but you also have your workflow-related businesses where there's the idea that there's more threats, too. So can you talk a little bit about that?

And also related to that, if you look over the past couple of years, you've seen an acceleration in your growth. A lot of that growth, I think, has come from workflow. So I was wondering how do you see that continuing with all the AI assistants from Anthropic, et cetera, who are today coming up?

And maybe also related to that, of course, a lot of your business is subscription-based. A lot of -- we don't see it back in the numbers, of course, if there would be customers that would be unhappy or whatever. But I was wondering, a lot of scare is there around maybe in 2 or 3 years' time, there will be a cliff and all those customers will disappear. So that's my first 2 or maybe 3 questions.

I would say 5.

You may have to repeat some of them, but I'll start in. Yes, thank you. I know I don't have to shout. Thank you for that. Obviously, AI is top of mind and our key focus as we think about the teams. And I have to say our teams, our customers have never been more excited about what we can deliver in terms of more value to customers with the AI capabilities, the Agentic capabilities. And what we see, I gave a few examples, I think important to point out health, tax and legal just because those are areas where we've sort of heard other narratives around what might happen. And we are full out. I shared the stats. But to see the adoption of, for example, our enterprise UpToDate Expert AI in the key health systems in the U.S., the pace that it is being deployed despite the very strong governance and security, those health systems need to go through to approve the AI systems in use in the health systems embedded in their, for example, their EHR workflows, we're very pleased about it. And the additional work that we're doing to partner with other players that are becoming very key to these health systems such as ambient technology. We announced 2 partnerships, one with Abridge, one with Microsoft, where the software solution is listening in the background to what's happening with the patient visit and summarizes it, but includes UpToDate content within that solution.

So what it does is really bringing so much productivity to our clinicians. And it is -- I talked to CMIOs who say, this is just a huge benefit for their clinicians and being able to spend more time with patients. So that's just one example of not only what we're doing ourselves, but how we're integrating with others to be fully embedded in the ecosystem.

I shared the opportunities in tax, where we've launched these 6 Agentic solutions, and we are seeing significant productivity improvement for tax professionals so that they can spend time on higher-value work, which is things like advisory. And as you may know, the accounting profession, I think Kees, you could point to this as well, is one where we're actually challenged from the number of professionals. There's a shortage. So having these productivity tools is a big benefit and has a strong ROI for those companies.

And similarly, within our legal markets, where I think there's been question about what's our right to play. And it is very strong. The combination of the Libra solution that we acquired at the end of the last year with our proprietary deep trusted content for the legal market is very powerful. And for us, it extends our total addressable market, right? So where we were in the content space before, we now can extend to the workflows, productivity tools, the ability for lawyers to draft and do their contract reviews in a much faster and more accurate way because of the unique content that we bring to the table in that combination.

So we feel really good about our position. We have these deep, long-standing customer relationships. And what really matters to them is the trusted way that we are bringing our AI solutions to them. We -- it's always grounded in our proprietary content, and then we add a whole layer of what we call evaluations where the experts, either our experts in health or our tax experts, are actually refining those models to be based on the accurate deterministic answer, both in content and in the way that we develop our workflows.

So yes, again, we feel really excited about the opportunity. The feedback we're getting is great and the rollouts are continuing. And as I mentioned, we're stepping up our investment to be able to deploy even more solutions.

Yes. Okay. Maybe two follow-ups related to answers you gave. I'll keep to two, very strictly. There have been a number of studies that you've, of course, noted that talk about how well these -- especially if you look at the clinical type of tools, how well these new AI models, the general AI models are in their answering. Some have said they're even on par or even better than the AI models from specialized parties like yourself. So I was wondering if you can reflect on that. Is that something that you see as a threat?

Yes, I would say that, again, the combination of the trusted data set, along with the refining that we do with our own experts is a much more trustworthy solution. You would not be seeing the kind of rollout that we're getting in the health systems that we're getting if that weren't the case. And in fact, there will be some studies, we understand, external studies that will be coming out shortly.

All right. And then the final, second. You've already mentioned legal. Of course, you're aware of that a lot of these analysts are writing about the difference between Europe and maybe the U.S. market in terms of [indiscernible] being in a much stronger position in the U.S. when it comes down to proprietary data. How likely is it that these AI models get that much better that, let's say, the European legal market is disruptive from the perspective that the information is much more public?

Yes. I mean certainly, there is the public data that is freely available. What we bring to the table that we've been bringing to the table for years and years is the proprietary trusted [indiscernible], the analytics, that is core to being able to, again, have the correct answers. And that combination with the legal workspace that I mentioned earlier is an opportunity that gives us further growth potential.

I think the VBDO has a question.

[Foreign Language] On behalf of VBDO, dear members of the Board, dear members of the Supervisory Board, the Dutch Association of Investors for Sustainable Development, VBDO, would like to continue engagement with Wolters Kluwer N.V. about its sustainability performance. Thank you for the opportunity.

For this year's AGM, we have selected the following questions. Environment, water. Water stress is becoming worldwide increasingly important. At least 50% of the world's population live under highly water-stressed conditions for at least 1 month of the year. VBDO commends Wolters Kluwer for conducting a water stress evaluation of your top 50 offices. However, VBDO also believes that the biggest impact related to the topic of water can be made in the supply chain of Wolters Kluwer, especially regarding data center providers. Large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons per day for cooling, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Question, could you tell us which insights have been gained via the assessment of Wolters Kluwer's own offices? And would Wolters Kluwer, especially in the area with high levels of water stress, consider engaging with suppliers, including data center providers around the topic of water usage.

Living wage. Considering ongoing concerns about working conditions and the fundamental role of a living wage in fostering systemic change to alleviate poverty, VBDO continues to urge companies to commit to paying a living wage across the value chain. VBDO has chosen to stick to the ILO definition of a living wage, even though the term adequate wage is used by the CSRD since the end of 2025. Wolters Kluwer has identified a potential negative impact for workers in the value chain and assessed ESRS 2 as material.

Last year, EcoVadis was selected as your vendor sustainability assessment tool. What insights have been gained from using this tool regarding the labor/human rights conditions of workers in the value chain, particularly regarding living wages? Would Wolters Kluwer consider reporting on these findings in the next annual report?

CSRD, even though the CSRD has not yet been transposed into Dutch law, the sustainability statements as presented in Wolters Kluwer 2025 Annual Report have, for the third time, been prepared in line with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. Wolters Kluwer states that it continually enhanced its double materiality assessment to ensure it remains robust and responsive to changes in strategy, data availability and evolving market trends. Some companies indicate a time line for full revision of DMA every 3 years and how in other years, minor revisions are integrated. Could more information be provided what the double materiality assessment process looks like for Wolters Kluwer?

Okay. Thank you. Appreciate the questions. And indeed, on water stress, we have across our largest offices been doing an assessment and compared the progress last year to the 2023 baseline that we did. What we found is that it is -- we are limited in the water consumption, which we're very pleased about, and we do have measures in place to continually watch and make sure that we're using various techniques to make sure that we are controlling the water use. We do recognize that through the supply chain, that is something that we want to make sure we're also tracking and are mindful of. We do assess suppliers, including the data center suppliers that you mentioned on their performance, and we are using the sustainability tool to do that. And where water management is considered relevant to sustainability for the sector, we do make sure we're engaging with them on improvement areas. And we'll obviously continue to do so. I will say that it's -- there are only about 22% of our suppliers that through EcoVadis has been found to have water as a relevant topic and only 9 of those were considered high. But again, we will continue to track and monitor and work with our suppliers on that topic.

On living wage, indeed, through EcoVadis, we also have been getting a better understanding of the visibility of sustainability risks across our supply chain. We did invite several higher-risk suppliers to a comprehensive and externally validated assessment. And what we found is that overall, the majority of our suppliers are associated with low risk in human and labor rights. And with regard to living wages, this topic applies to a very limited number of suppliers based on their sector and the country risk. But again, we will continue to monitor all the relevant indicators and developments relating to overall labor and human rights in the supply chain, and we will report if they become more relevant, yes.

And then on the CSRD, we do continuously monitor our DMA to ensure that it remains aligned with our business and the strategy. And we are on a 3-year cycle. So to answer your question, a 3-year cycle, in other years, we do also conduct light assessments and make sure that we're integrating anything we kind of learn into the process going forward. So since our last DMA was conducted in 2023, and we did the light revisions in '24 and '25, we will undertake the full revision in '26 and report on it in our 2026 annual report. Yes, thank you.

Yes?

Thank you. My name is George [indiscernible]. I'm a very happy shareholder, long term, already in Wolters Kluwer. I have just one question. As you know, you also show that the stock price compared to the peer is doing like equal, like the peers. So it's a very bad performance in the stock price, which was not so nice for us, shareholders, as you can understand.

My question is, did the Board, either the Supervisory Board or the Executive Board, consider to make like an interim statement before the Q1 figures because the share price was already falling last year, like September, and then you had a change of CEO within the company. And I found it rather late that we only got an update in Q1 of the figures and not a real feedback from the company towards the whole hype against Wolters Kluwer in terms of AI. Do you recognize what I say? And did you consider to go to the market and give some statement?

Yes. I mean we certainly are considering extending our outreach. We did do some pretty extensive teach-ins in December and then obviously, you have to be careful about disclosure ahead of results. But, yes.

Not any sort of special statements. Actually, if you look at our disclosures relative to our peers, now I'm talking about results disclosures. We're actually relatively fulsome compared to some of what our peers disclose. I think you can see from the company, if you look at press releases, they have up there talking about their AI initiatives, innovations, et cetera, to make sure people understand how much progress the company has made in AI over the years. So we have stepped that up. But no special statement on the performance of the stock price.

You did not consider it either.

I think you see it's a market-driven phenomenon. And so we thought it would not be appropriate or there was nothing really to say. Yes?

Yes. Well, the mic is closed. You have dropped 50% of your share buyback in comparison to the last 3 years. Could you give some more rationale why? Because the share price, we all know, is very attractive. And perhaps you can give us the rationale why you dropped this with 50%.

Kevin?

Yes. Whenever we're making capital allocation decisions, we consider many factors. One of them is what are our legally distributable reserves. So if you look at retained earnings, there are certain reserves there that we're not allowed to distribute. The rest we are allowed to distribute in the form of a dividend and a share buyback. So that does inform us on what we can do with regard to the dividend and the share buyback program.

I will point out that what we expect to do this year is to return nearly 100% of our free cash flow in the form of dividends and share buybacks. So hopefully, that helps you understand our thinking behind capital allocation.

Yes, over here.

[Foreign Language]

Sir, I'm sorry, but the language of the meeting is English.

[Foreign Language].

I'm sorry, the official language of the meeting is English. If you'd like to ask a question in English or have somebody ask it for you in English, I'd love to entertain it.

Anything else?

Well, thank you for your questions, and I would ask that you now prepare for the first voting item. Please make sure that you are connected to the voting platform or otherwise, please raise your hand for assistance. Before we proceed, I will pass on the notary's formal observations, which are, according to the registration list, shareholders are present or represented who can jointly cast 159,080,876 shares, representing 70.95% of the issued and outstanding share capital at the meeting. Before the meeting, shareholders submitted a total of 159,068,499 votes to the notary by proxy. May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 2d, the advisory vote on the remuneration report. Voting is now open. Do you need assistance?

[Voting]

Okay. Voting is now closed. I'm pleased to report that agenda Item 2d received a majority of 85.19% of the vote in favor.

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 3a, the adoption of the 2025 financial statements. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. I am pleased to report that Agenda Item 3a passed with 99.99% of the vote in favor. I propose we now proceed to the next set of agenda items. Item 3b, explanation of the dividend policy and Item 3c, the proposal to distribute a total dividend of EUR 2.52 per ordinary share, resulting in a final dividend of EUR 1.59 per ordinary share. I will describe the company's progressive dividend policy.

Wolters Kluwer aims to pay a higher dividend per share in euros each year compared to the prior year. The annual increase depends on factors such as our financial performance, market conditions and our need for financial flexibility. It is also part of our policy to pay an interim dividend after the first 6 months of each year. We intend to set the interim dividend for 2026 payable in September at 40% of the prior year's total dividend. As in prior years, the Supervisory Board has carefully reviewed the financial situation of the company and the company allocation and feels confident that the proposed dividend is appropriate. I also refer to the earlier presentation of Stacey Caywood in this respect.

In line with the progressive dividend policy, we proposed a total cash dividend of EUR 2.52 per ordinary share to be paid for the full financial year 2025, which represents an increase of 8% over the prior year. Since an interim dividend of EUR 0.93 per share was already paid in September 2025, the final dividend payable in June will amount to EUR 1.59 per share. Upon your approval of the dividend proposal for 2025, this will be the 20th consecutive year in which the company has increased its dividend per share in euros under the progressive dividend policy.

Are there any shareholders who would like to raise a question on this item?

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 3c. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed, and I'm pleased to report that agenda Item 3C passed with a vote of 99.9% in favor.

I would now like to discuss agenda Item 4. The proposals to release the members of the Executive Board and the members of the Supervisory Board from liability are separate agenda items and will be voted on separately. However, I will deal with questions on items 4a and 4b together. Are there any shareholders who would like to raise a question?

Then may I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 4a, the proposal to release the members of the Executive Board for the exercise of their duties. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed, and I am pleased to report that agenda Item 4a passed with 97.48% of the votes in favor. May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 4b, the release of liability for the members of the Supervisory Board. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I am pleased to report that 97.48% of the votes have been voted in favor of agenda Item 4b, and it is passed.

Moving to agenda Item 5. As detailed in the explanatory notes to the agenda, the first 4-year term of Ms. Heleen Kersten will expire after today's Annual General Meeting. We are pleased that Ms. Kersten is available for reappointment for a period of 4 years. Her term of reappointment will run from today until after the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in 2030.

The term of Mr. De Kreij will expire upon conclusion of this meeting, and he will retire from the Supervisory Board as planned, in line with his decision in 2024 to make himself available for a reappointment for one final 2-year term. On behalf of the Supervisory Board, I would like to express our gratitude to Jack for his highly valued and appreciated contributions as Vice Chair and member of this Board and in particular, for chairing the Audit Committee. Jack, we will miss your commitment, your eye to detail and your words of wisdom. We enjoyed working with you, and we wish you all the best, and I do still have your cell number. Thank you, Jack.

With Jack retiring, Chris Vogelzang will take over as Vice Chair of the Supervisory Board. The Supervisory Board is pleased to propose the appointment of Mr. Maarten de Vries as a new member of the Supervisory Board with effect from today until after the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in 2030. It is our intention to appoint Mr. De Vries as Chair of the Audit Committee after his retirement as CFO of AkzoNobel in about 1 year's time. Until that time, Mr. Chris Vogelzang will also act as Chair of the Audit Committee. We appreciate your willingness to step up and take this additional role, Chris.

Upon the reappointment of Ms. Kersten and the appointment of Mr. De Vries by the General Meeting of Shareholders, the Supervisory Board will continue to consist of 9 members, of whom 5 are women and 5 are men in line with our profile.

Let's proceed with Item 5a, the reappointment of Ms. Kersten. Heleen has extensive knowledge of corporate law and corporate governance. We highly value the contributions Heleen has made as a member of our Board and Co-Chair of the Selection and Remuneration Committee and are pleased to nominate her for appointment to her second 4-year term.

Are there any shareholders who would like to raise a question? Yes, sir.

[Foreign Language]

Again, I'm sorry, unless you can ask the question in English.

Shall I give a quick comment? Yes, as a Vice Chair of, let's say, the Supervisory Board, I will do it in Dutch quickly. [Foreign Language]

Just the answer was, I advise the shareholder to liaise with the corporate legal counsel after the meeting. Yes.

Okay. If there are no other questions, let's proceed with the voting. May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda item 5%.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I'm pleased to report that agenda Item 5a has passed with 95.94% of the vote in favor.

Let's proceed with Item 5b, the appointment of Maarten de Vries. Maarten is an experienced leader with extensive international management experience and financial expertise. Before we open the floor for questions and go to the voting on agenda Item 5b, I would like to give Maarten the floor for a brief introduction.

Thank you, Ann, and I'm very pleased to be here today with all of you. In fact, I'm very honored with the proposal for my appointment to the Supervisory Board of Wolters Kluwer. If I reflect on the discussions I've had so far, I must say I'm very impressed with the caliber and the dedication of the people in Wolters Kluwer. And I'm also looking forward to working closely together, of course, with the colleagues in the Supervisory Board.

A bit of my background. I'm currently, as Ann said, I'm the CFO and member of the Management Board of AkzoNobel, in fact, since 2018. Prior to that, I have been in the same position at TNT Express and Intertrust as CFO and as member of the Management Board for a period of 3 years. Before that, in the period between 2011 and 2014, I was CEO of TP Vision, which is a globally operating stand-alone company. And before that, I've held various senior positions in Philips Electronics, amongst others, Chief Information Officer, Chief Procurement Officer and various other functions, also part of a member of the group management committee. And indeed, apart from Wolters Kluwer, I don't have any other nonexecutive functions because as you know, I accepted to stay and extend my tenure with another year at AkzoNobel to support the merger and the completion of the merger with Axalta.

From a personal perspective, it's maybe interesting to know that I lived for more than 10 years in Asia. I worked and lived for more than 10 years in Asia. That's also where I met my wife. My wife is Chinese. Currently, obviously, we live in Amsterdam. Our 2 kids have grown up in the meantime. They live in London. The oldest one is working already in London and the younger one is still studying in London. So we are empty nest here in Amsterdam with a dog.

With that, yes, I look very much forward to be part of the Supervisory Board and to share my leadership, my experience and my global perspectives and of course, also, therefore, to support the growth and the innovation of Wolters Kluwer. With that, thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Maarten. Is there anybody who would like to raise a question? Then let's start the voting. May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 5b.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. I'm pleased to report that agenda Item 5b has passed with a 99.12% votes in favor. Congratulations, Maarten, and we look forward to working with you.

Now Heleen Kersten, Chair of the Selection and Remuneration Committee dealing with remuneration matters, will introduce you to agenda Item 6.

Thank you, Ann. Based on a regular review by the Supervisory Board of its remuneration, which was amended most recently in 2024, it is proposed to increase the Supervisory Board remuneration with effect from January 1, 2026, to more closely align the remuneration with benchmark data provided by the independent consultants to the Supervisory Board. The Supervisory Board took into consideration the responsibility of Supervisory Board members, remuneration levels at other 2-tier Board Dutch-listed AEX companies and selected European companies as well as the international composition of the Supervisory Board. The increase is in line with the remuneration policy for the Supervisory Board, which was adopted by the General Meeting of Shareholders in 2024. The precise remuneration amounts for the Supervisory Board members for the financial year 2026 and onwards are included in the explanatory notes to the agenda. Are there any shareholders who would like to raise a question?

If there are no questions, may I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 6, the proposal to amend the remuneration for members of the Supervisory Board. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I am pleased to report that Agenda Item 6 passed with 98.26% in favor. Thank you.

I would now like to discuss agenda items 7, 8 and 9 together. These are the authorizations given to the Executive Board that return to the agenda each year.

Under agenda Item 7a, it is proposed to extend the Executive Board's authority to issue shares and/or grant rights to shareholders -- or grant rights to subscribe for shares for 18 months as of today up to a maximum of 10% of the share capital issued as of today.

Agenda Item 7b concerns a proposal to extend the Executive Board's authority to restrict or exclude the preemptive rights of holders of ordinary shares for 18 months as of today up to a maximum of 10% of the share capital issued as of today.

Under agenda Item 8, it is proposed that the Executive Board will be authorized for 18 months to acquire shares in the company up to a maximum of 10% of the share capital issued as of today on the stock exchange or otherwise.

Agenda Item 9 requests a resolution for the Executive Board, if it so wishes, to cancel the ordinary shares of the company's share capital that the company has purchased or will purchase on the basis of agenda Item 8. The precise wording of these resolutions can be found in the agenda with the accompanying explanatory notes.

I would now like to turn to questions about agenda items 7, 8 and 9. Are there any questions from shareholders in the room?

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 7a, the extension of the authority of the Executive Board to issue shares. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I'm pleased to report that agenda Item 7a has passed with 99.87% of the vote.

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda item 7b, the proposal to extend the authority of the Executive Board to restrict or exclude statutory preemptive rights. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I'm pleased to report that this agenda item has passed with 98.07% of the vote in favor.

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda Item 8, the proposal to authorize the Executive Board to acquire shares in the company. Voting is open.

[Voting]

Voting is closed. I am pleased to report that agenda item 8 has passed with 99.09% of the votes cast in favor.

May I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda item 9, the proposal to cancel shares. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. I am pleased to report that agenda item 9 has passed with a vote of 99.23% in favor.

I now turn to our final agenda item, the proposal to amend the Articles of Association of the company by lowering the majority for adopting the remuneration policy of the Executive Board from a super majority of 75% of the votes to a simple majority of the votes cast. Dutch law explicitly provides for the possibility to do so. Let me provide you with some additional explanation.

Wolters Kluwer is a talent-driven global technology company competing worldwide for talent. It is critical for Wolters Kluwer to be able to compete on a fair and level playing field globally when it comes to attracting and retaining talent in order to create sustainable long-term value for our stakeholders. Currently, such a level playing field does not exist due to the Dutch rule setting a 75% supermajority as the default to pass a remuneration policy. This supermajority is unique to the Netherlands. In all other EU member states, in the U.K. and in the United States, adoption of the remuneration policy requires a simple majority, a situation in which a minority of shareholders can block majority supported provisions could stall progress and create attraction and retention risks for our talent.

Over the past few months, we've engaged extensively with institutional shareholders regarding the proposed amendment. A substantial majority of the shareholders we consulted understood the rationale for aligning with the global standard of a simple majority. We firmly believe that aligning with the global standard serves the best interest of both the company, its shareholders and its other stakeholders. We will continue to actively engage with our shareholders on remuneration topics, and we aim to achieve high levels of support for remuneration policy proposals.

I would now like to see if there's any questions on agenda item 10.

Yes. [indiscernible] on behalf of European Investors-VEB. I'd like to make a statement, and I'd like to ask three questions, if I may. First of all, the VEB was unpleasantly surprised to find out that Wolters Kluwer is seeking shareholder approval for lowering the statutory minority required for adopting the remuneration policy. As far as we are aware, this is the first time that a listed company proposes an amendment of this nature. The VEB strongly opposes this proposal and intends to vote against it. The VEB has always and consistently advocated for a 75% threshold for remuneration policies. Strengthening shareholder oversight of executive remuneration has long been a focus point of the VEB, even before the implementation of the Dutch Governance Code in 2004.

The current supermajority requirement was intentionally introduced to ensure broad shareholder backing for remuneration policies and to strengthen shareholder oversight. Against that background, we do not find the rationale presented by the company particularly compelling. I understand the company's argument regarding the international competitiveness and the global market for talent, particularly in technology and AI-related fields. However, lowering the threshold appears to reduce an important shareholder protection mechanism rather than improve engagement or governance quality. The reference to more recent IPO companies applying a 50% threshold before the listing, in our view, is misplaced and far removed from best practice.

In fact, Wolters Kluwer itself has demonstrated in recent years that broad shareholder support can be achieved through meaningful engagement and responsive dialogue with investors. The remuneration policy received very strong shareholder support both in 2021 and 2025. As a matter of fact, in our view, there is no compelling reasons whatsoever for such a fundamental change. It entails a serious curtailment of shareholder rights.

Now three more questions. First of all, could the Board explain why the current framework is insufficient and why reducing shareholder rights is preferable to continuing constructive dialogue with shareholders on remuneration matters?

Second, in preparation of this proposal, Wolters Kluwer has engaged extensively with governance and investment teams. What percentage of shareholder capital was engaged? And how was the shareholder feedback reflected in the final proposal?

And then lastly, and I think this question is already a step up to next year. Should shareholders interpret this proposal as a signal that Wolters Kluwer is preparing for a substantial revision of the remuneration policy at the 2027 AGM, potentially including a materially higher level of executive compensation?

Okay. Let me speak to our engagement on this topic. We have over 1,000 institutional shareholders, right? So we engaged with many, many of those shareholders. But as you can imagine, we can't engage with 1,000 shareholders. The shareholders we were able to engage with -- and keep in mind, some people don't want to engage, right? There needs to be an organization that wants to have the conversation. The ones we spoke to, the significant majority were in favor of this once we could explain it to them, right? Many of our shareholders not based in the Netherlands and only a very small percentage of our shares are represented in the Netherlands. Many of them were not even aware of the requirement.

And so I do think it's critical in our minds, the level playing field for us is critical given the markets that we compete in. We're a global company. We're competing for AI talent, technology talent. We felt it was very important that we have this level playing field. I understand what you're saying. We may be the first listed company to propose this. But as you mentioned, companies now before they list -- the trend is before they list, they move to the 50%. And I think the statistic now is 13 or -- 13 of the AEX, the 29 AEX companies have adopted the 50% policy. So there is a trend even within the Netherlands to go to this option, which the statute clearly provides.

I guess we'll agree to disagree.

Yes, that's also been the conclusion of our conversation. The conversation, we agree to disagree.

We look forward to continued engagement in the future. Are there any other questions?

Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't answer your third question. I'm going to let Heleen talk about that.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Ann. Yes, as to your third question. At this stage, no specific changes are planned. And any future amendments to our remuneration policy will continue to follow our governance process, including objective benchmarking, extensive shareholder engagement and detailed disclosures. So any adjustments in the future will be explained clearly as we have done in the past and of course, will be submitted to the AGM for approval, again, after shareholder consultation.

So yes, just to reinforce what Ann also said, I mean, we remain committed to reaching high levels of support among shareholders for our remuneration policy. And yes, today, I mean, we're just really here proposing the amendment of the articles to lower the threshold. Thank you.

So may I ask the operator to open the voting system for agenda item 10. Voting is now open.

[Voting]

Voting is now closed. Agenda item 10 has passed with 54.17% of the vote in favor. As you can see, opinions on this resolution are divergent.

Let me make a couple of remarks in relation to the voting result. First, on behalf of Wolters Kluwer, we would like to express our deep gratitude to those shareholders who supported us on this proposal. We spoke to many institutions in a very extensive government engagement. In the process, as I mentioned, we discovered that many investors around the world were not familiar with the supermajority provision default rule in Dutch Civil Code. We also found that once we had the opportunity to explain it and explain our situation and our rationale, the significant majority of those investors with whom we spoke understood our point of view.

As I mentioned, we have close to 1,000 institutional investors, making it impossible to speak with all of them, which in part, we think, explains the votes against. We also know that there are shareholders who feel strongly about the supermajority rule for Dutch companies, and we want to thank these shareholders for their time and consideration, and we want to reassure them, as expressly stated in our agenda, we remain committed to achieving high levels of support for remuneration policies. We are committed to engaging with shareholders on remuneration, both in advance of putting forward a policy and if there is significant dissent following an AGM. Thank you.

Okay. Before closing the meeting, I want to ask if anybody has any final questions for any other business. Seeing no final questions, I want to thank you for your participation and input today. They're greatly appreciated. Have a good remainder of your day. Thank you, and goodbye. I now close the meeting.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wolters Kluwer Full Year 2025 Results Webcast. My name is Lauren, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today's call is being recorded.

I will now hand over to your host, Meg Geldens, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin today's call. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our full year 2025 results presentation. Today's earnings release and the presentation slides are available on the Investors section of our website, wolterskluwer.com. On the call today are Nancy McKinstry, our CEO; Stacey Caywood, our Designated CEO; and Kevin Entricken, our CFO.

Nancy, Stacey and Kevin will present the important aspects of our results. After the presentation, we will take your questions.

Before we start, I'll remind you that some statements we make today will be forward-looking. We caution that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. Factors that could affect Wolters Kluwer's future financial results are disclosed in Note 2 of today's earnings release and in our annual reports.

As usual, we refer to adjusted profits, which exclude non-benchmark items. We also refer to growth in constant currencies, which excludes the effect of exchange rate movements. And we refer to organic growth, which excludes both the effect of currency and the effect of acquisitions and divestments. Reconciliations to IFRS numbers can be found in Note 3 of today's release.

At this time, I'd like to hand over to our CEO, Nancy McKinstry.

Thank you, Meg. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. I'll start with a brief introduction, summarizing the highlights of 2025. Next, Kevin will take you through the financial results in detail. After that, I'll return to cover the divisional performance, and then hand off to Stacey, who will provide an update on our strategy and her near-term priorities as she takes over as CEO. She will finish with an outlook for 2026.

So let's begin with the highlights on Slide 4. We delivered another year of good organic growth and an improvement in our adjusted operating profit margin. Recurring revenues, which account for 83% of total revenues grew 7% organically. We've made significant progress in adding important Generative and Agentic AI capabilities into our integrated productivity platforms, leveraging our trusted proprietary content, our deep domain expertise and our advanced AI technology.

Today, nearly 70% of our digital revenues are from AI-powered solutions. Among our many innovations last year were UpToDate Expert AI and CCH Axcess Expert AI, which embed our AI technology and provide significant productivity benefits while keeping experts in the loop.

Last year's acquisitions, RASi, Brightflag and Libra are all performing strongly and are offering new growth opportunities. All-in-all, it was a good year financially during which we made significant progress on our AI strategy.

I'll now hand to Kevin to cover the financials.

Thank you, Nancy. Let me start with a summary on Slide 6. Full year 2025 revenues were EUR 6.125 billion, an increase of 7% in constant currencies. Organic growth was 6%, in line with the prior year. Adjusted operating profit was EUR 1.687 billion, up 9% in constant currencies. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 40 basis points to 27.5%, which was at the top end of our guidance range. Diluted adjusted earnings per share increased 9% in constant currencies, in line with our guidance, which we raised in July of 2025. Adjusted free cash flow was EUR 1.348 billion, an increase of 10% in constant currencies. This was above our expectation and reflects strong year-end collections. We continue to have a robust balance sheet, ending the year with a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.0x. Return on invested capital was 18.0%.

Now let's look at revenues by division on the next slide. Health grew 5% organically, in line with our guidance. Within Health, Clinical Solutions sustained 7% organic growth. Tax & Accounting delivered 7% organic growth, in line with the prior year. This was supported by strong double-digit organic growth in cloud solutions in North America and Europe.

Financial & Corporate Compliance grew 3% organically. As we had guided, this was slower than the prior year due to a more subdued environment for transactions and the suspended enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act in the United States.

Legal & Regulatory grew 5% organically, in line with the prior year and supported by strong 7% organic growth in digital and service subscriptions in Europe and the United States.

Finally, Corporate Performance & ESG grew 7% organically ahead of the prior year. This was driven by continued double-digit growth in cloud software solutions.

Let's turn to Slide 8 to review revenues by type. The chart on the left shows our recurring revenue streams, which account for 83% of total revenues, while the chart on the right shows our non-recurring revenues.

Let me first address Print, which is shown in both charts. Print makes up under 5% of group revenues. The long-term trend is still one of decline. In 2025, the Print decline reduced group organic growth by 50 basis points. The largest and most important component of our revenues, digital and service subscriptions, shown by the blue line, grew 7% organically. It slowed slightly in 2025 due primarily to the slowdown in financial and corporate compliance. Other recurring revenues grew 8% organically, a slight improvement on the prior year.

Turning to non-organic revenues, which can be volatile. We experienced an overall decline of 1% last year. FCC transactional revenues shown in red were up 2% for the year, driven by improvement in the second half. The backdrop for U.S. M&A and lending volumes remained subdued last year.

Legal & Regulatory transactional revenues are volume-linked fees in the ELM solutions unit. These grew 9% organically, in line with the prior year. Other non-recurring revenues, which are mainly on-premise software licenses and implementation services declined 5% organically. Our customers are continuing to opt for cloud subscription offerings.

Turning to the divisional margins on Slide 9. As mentioned earlier, the adjusted operating profit margin increased 40 basis points to 27.5%, reaching the top of our guidance range. Health and Tax & Accounting drove this performance. This reflects operational gearing, the mix shift of revenues, scaling of expert solutions and operational excellence programs.

Investment in product development, including capitalized spend was broadly stable to last year at 11% of revenues. We are realizing the benefit of internal use of AI and the completion of several large projects. Adjusted operating profit included EUR 37 million of restructuring spend, an increase as compared to the prior year.

Moving to the rest of the income statement on Slide 10. Adjusted net financing costs increased to EUR 86 million. This reflects lower interest income on cash balances and higher coupon rates on euro bonds issued in 2025. Adjusted financing costs also included a EUR 10 million net foreign exchange gain, mainly related to the currency translation of intercompany balances. The prior year included a EUR 9 million net foreign exchange loss. As a result, adjusted profit before tax increased 7% in constant currencies.

The benchmark effective tax rate increased to 23.6%, reflecting unfavorable movements in our deferred tax positions. In 2026, we are guiding to an effective benchmark tax rate range of 23.5% to 24.5%.

Adjusted operating profit was EUR 1.225 billion, up 6% in constant currencies. Diluted adjusted EPS was EUR 5.29, a 9% increase in constant currencies. The increases in net financing and tax were offset by a 3% reduction in the weighted average number of shares outstanding.

Turning to cash flow on Slide 11. Adjusted operating cash flow increased 12% in constant currencies, and the cash conversion ratio was 103%. This was ahead of our expectations due to year-end collections, which were largely timing related.

Capital expenditures were EUR 303 million, a slight decrease compared to the prior year due to the completion of large projects in financial and corporate compliance. Net interest paid, excluding lease interest, increased to EUR 72 million. This reflects the higher coupon interest paid and lower interest income on cash balances. Cash taxes increased to EUR 358 million, reflecting higher income. All-in-all, adjusted free cash flow increased 10% in constant currencies to reach over EUR 1.3 billion.

Now let's turn to uses of our cash on Slide 12. Acquisition spend was EUR 896 million, reflecting the acquisitions of RASi in Financial & Corporate Compliance and Brightflag and Libra in Legal & Regulatory. All three acquisitions are performing ahead of initial expectations.

The divestment of FRR generated cash proceeds of nearly EUR 400 million. Dividends paid increased 8% to EUR 563 million. Cash deployed towards share repurchases amounted to EUR 1.096 billion as we completed the 2025 buyback and brought forward EUR 100 million from our envisioned 2026 buyback program.

Together, dividends and share repurchases totaled EUR 1.7 billion. We returned more than 120% of our free cash flow to shareholders last year. We ended the year with net debt of just over EUR 4 billion. Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio increased to 1.0x and remains within our targeted range for leverage.

We remain in solid financial position with sufficient room to support our organic investments in the business and make select acquisitions. At the same time, we are committed to our progressive dividend while continuing to execute on share repurchases.

Moving to the next slide. We are proposing to increase the total 2025 dividend per share by 8% to EUR 2.52 per share. This would result in a final dividend of EUR 1.59 per share to be paid in June of this year, conditional on shareholder approval at our Annual General Meeting in May.

As indicated in our release, we announced our intention to repurchase up to EUR 500 million in shares in 2026. Of this amount, EUR 100 million has already been repurchased in the months of January and February. Starting this Friday through the end of May, we have a third-party mandate in place to repurchase shares for EUR 60 million.

Let me sum up results on the next slide. We delivered organic growth of 6% with recurring revenues up 7%. The adjusted operating profit margin increased 40 basis points to 27.5%. Diluted adjusted EPS increased 9% in constant currencies. Adjusted free cash flow increased 10% in constant currencies. We remain in a solid financial position with net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.0x. Return on invested capital was 18.0%.

I'd now like to turn the call back to Nancy.

Thank you, Kevin. I'd now like to begin the divisional review, starting with Health. Health delivered 5% organic growth led by Clinical Solutions. The adjusted operating margin increased by 180 basis points, reflecting operational gearing, ongoing mix shift, efficiencies and the absence of prior year write-offs. Clinical Solutions grew 7% organically in line with the prior year. Growth was driven by good renewal rates at UpToDate clinical decision support and drug data solutions globally. Most of our large U.S. institutional customers are now on the UpToDate enterprise platform, and we are rapidly rolling out our conversational AI interface UpToDate Expert AI.

Learning, Research & Practice delivered 3% organic growth. Excluding Print, organic growth would have been 7%. Medical Research recorded steady 3% organic growth while Learning & Practice grew 5%, driven by continued strong growth from our nursing education solutions.

Now let's turn to Tax & Accounting on Slide 17. Tax & Accounting delivered 7% organic growth with continued strong performance across North America and Europe. The adjusted operating margin increased by 200 basis points driven by operational gearing and cost efficiencies. In North America, revenues grew 8% organically led by 19% growth in cloud software as customers continue to move to the CCH Axcess cloud platform and adopt more modules.

In 2025, we launched several agentic AI modules integrated into the CCH Axcess platform that provides significant productivity benefits to customers. We also made major enhancements to our cloud-based audit suite, CCH Axcess Audit, adding expert AI capabilities. In Europe, revenues also grew 8% organically, driven by 17% growth in cloud software solutions with all regions performing well.

Moving now to the next slide on Page 18. Financial & Corporate Compliance delivered 3% organic growth led by legal services. The adjusted operating margin was broadly stable, supported by cost efficiencies. Legal services delivered 4% organic growth, driven by 5% growth in recurring service subscriptions. As expected, the slowdown was partly due to the suspension of the Corporate Transparency Act and subdued corporate transactions. Recently acquired RASi performed very well and brings opportunities to grow in the midsized U.S. corporate market.

Financial Services grew 1% organically, supported by a 3% increase in recurring revenues while lending related transactional revenues remain subdued.

Turning now to Legal & Regulatory on Slide 19. Legal & Regulatory delivered 5% organic growth with strong 8% organic growth in digital and service subscriptions in Europe and in the U.S. The adjusted operating margin eased slightly due to the absence of last year's onetime pension gain, which was, to a large extent, compensated by strong underlying margin improvement.

Legal & Regulatory Information Solutions grew 5% organically supported by 8% organic growth in digital and services subscriptions. We continue to enhance our legal research platforms with AI embedded functionality throughout the year.

In November, we acquired Libra Technology and are now integrated the Libra AI Assistants into our trusted proprietary legal content across Europe. Legal & Regulatory software delivered 5% organic growth. ELM Solutions sustained mid-single-digit organic growth, supported by 9% growth in transactional volumes.

In June, we acquired Brightflag, a provider of ELM Software serving midsized and large corporations globally. Brightflag delivered strong revenue growth ahead of expectations.

Now let's finish up with Corporate Performance & ESG. This division delivered 7% organic growth, supported by 18% growth in recurring cloud software revenues. On-premise license fees declined as customers continue to prefer subscription-based cloud solutions. The adjusted operating margin decline, reflecting the decline in licenses and a higher proportion of services provided by third parties.

In EHS and ESG, the Enablon suite grew 10% organically, driven by 19% growth in recurring cloud revenues through new customer wins and upsell activity. Within corporate performance, CCH Tagetik delivered 5% organic growth, driven by 19% organic growth in recurring cloud revenues as a result of new customer additions and upgrades.

Audit and assurance delivered robust organic growth, also driven by recurring cloud revenues. Last month, TeamMate acquired StandardFusion, which extends the platform into risk and control management.

With that, I'd now like to hand it over to Stacey to discuss the strategic opportunities for Wolters Kluwer and her near-term priorities.

Thank you, Nancy and Kevin. As I take over as CEO, I've never been more excited about what's ahead for Wolters Kluwer. We are seeing the fastest technology adoption in history and the opportunities for creating value for our customers and shareholders are tremendous.

Wolters Kluwer is built on a strong foundation, a foundation that we are extending to drive growth and profitability. The business is diversified with strong market positions and high-quality recurring organic revenue growth. We see opportunities across the portfolio to leverage these strengths to create additional value. 85% of our revenues come from digital solutions, and the majority of that revenue approaching 70% comes from products that are powered by AI.

But our ambitions go much further. We are launching products with advanced AI functionality, which leverage our proprietary content, our deep domain expertise, our workflow expertise and our advanced technology platforms, all to deliver enhanced value to our customers. Embedding advanced AI capabilities into our solutions is one of our most important growth opportunities, and our customers who have placed their trust in us for decades are telling us that's exactly what they need and we are uniquely positioned to deliver it.

Let's turn to the next slide. The strategic plan we set out a year ago is the right one, and I plan to accelerate it in a few areas to capture the incredible opportunities we see. This will require some additional investment, taking our product development spend to between 12% and 13% of revenues this year and beyond. And we will fund this investment while increasing our operating profit margin. The increased investment and focus will help us accelerate the pace at which we are capturing the AI opportunities we have to deliver improved productivity and outcomes for our customers.

My immediate priorities are, one, to accelerate our pace of innovation to capture strong market demand. We all know that AI will fundamentally change how professionals work. We have the opportunity to scale our current AI solutions while driving more new products into the market. Our proprietary FAB AI enablement platform enables us to accelerate development cycles and improve customer integration.

Two, we will foster and scale our expanding list of strategic partnerships. These relationships allow us to be fully embedded in our customers' workflows and ecosystems, extending our markets and the value to customers.

And three, we will optimize value capture by using data-driven, scalable sales, marketing and revenue processes that intensify our go-to-market approach.

Moving to the next slide. We bring four unique advantages to the table that in combination no LLM or AI-native disruptor can replicate. This is our moat.

First, trusted proprietary content, a foundational strength that supports our customers in their daily mission-critical and high stakes decision-making.

Second, customer-centric modular software platforms, which deliver productivity benefits and data-rich insights, while providing audit and traceability capabilities as the system of record.

Third, market-leading validated AI that builds on our 190 years of domain expertise. We ground our AI models and proprietary content and data, and we also apply expert reasoning layers, deploy our deep expert network to validate and tune outputs and operate with enterprise-grade security and compliance. This is a scalable AI designed for high stakes regulated professions where our customers cannot afford to get it wrong, and it is already deployed and being used daily across our markets.

And lastly, we have deep ecosystem integration. It's not just about being right. It's also about being so embedded that we are present at the moment decisions are made, both inside and alongside the customer ecosystem. These advantages power our strong brand, our deep customer relationships and position us to lead in the age of AI.

So let's look at some examples. Our CCH Axcess software suite for U.S. accounting firms is a cloud-native modular platform that leverages our proprietary content and domain expertise and integrates with the accounting firms data and the end clients' data. Our expert AI technology amplifies this foundation with agentic capabilities that drive significant efficiencies for firms.

We have recently launched six Expert AI-powered modules that cut across the workflow, from document intake and analysis to faster collaboration to conversational intelligence and to provide proactive advisory and insights.

Feedback from accounting firms on these new AI modules has been very positive. They love the seamless integration with their own data and the security that our solutions offer. With these launches, we are also evolving our pricing models from tiers of users for our classic desktop offering to hybrid approaches that factor in firm characteristics, usage or outputs such as the number of returns or engagements.

Turning to the next slide. Let's move to legal. We are the leader in proprietary legal research in Europe and offer deep expertise in specialty areas such as securities law in the U.S. Our position is grounded in the unmatched depth and authority of our legal content.

And just a few weeks after closing the acquisition of Libra, we have launched the Libra legal AI workspace in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Poland, a significant expansion of our capabilities. The workspace provides lawyers with an integrated working environment that combines Libra's powerful AI capabilities with our proprietary content. It is also connected to our workflow tools such as Kleos practice management. Our corporate legal software tools such as ELM, Legisway and Brightflag are not shown in this wheel, but we are actively deploying Expert AI capabilities across these as well.

What differentiates us from other players in the market, including stand-alone AI assistance is a single platform for research, analysis and document creation seamlessly integrated into existing workflows and customers' data. Trusted AI output based on current, curated and country-specific legal content, including legislation, commentaries, specialist literature and practical guides, and comprehensive transparency and traceability of sources.

Customer feedback is very strong and leading law firms have signed up. They appreciate the unified workspace, the way the output is presented, the integration with outlook and the quick time to market.

In Health, UpToDate has evolved from product to platform from its original focus of providing clinical decision support. Today, UpToDate Enterprise offers an integrated modular platform that drives clinical outcomes for the enterprise. Our harmonized content and tools provide value across the continuum of care, from diagnosis to treatment to drug dosing and patient level education. 75% of our enterprise customers today purchased additional modules beyond core UpToDate.

It is also embedded directly into the clinical workflow. API connectivity with all the major EMRs, partnerships with leading ambient scribe vendors, integrations with local hospital guidelines and connections to pharmacy and other systems.

Last year, enterprise was enhanced with UpToDate Expert AI, the conversational interface that gives clinicians fast, accurate answers grounded in our own proprietary content. We also recently launched Medi-Span Expert AI, which provides medication intelligence for hospital pharmacies and third-party developers for a range of use cases, including Agentic workflows like AI-driven prescription renewals and medication verification.

Let's dive into UpToDate. UpToDate is long focused on supporting clinicians within healthcare institutions. Over 80% of UpToDate revenues and usage are from institutional customers. The UpToDate user base has grown to reach over 3 million currently. Our user base is strong and enduring. We have been driving growth by upselling across our solution suite, adding new functionalities and launching new offerings for care areas.

In terms of usage, the metric we track for UpToDate is clinical content interactions. Each year, UpToDate supports between 600 million and 700 million clinical content interactions. Importantly, public web traffic is not a reliable proxy for engagement as it excludes usage outside the public web, such as EMRs. And what matters most is that retention remains very strong. NPS is world-class and the core value proposition of evidence-based clinical decision support at the point of care remains highly resilient.

We take our competitive edge seriously and continue to innovate with our customers. With a large loyal institution base and sustained engagement across workflows, the next phase of growth is about expanding the enterprise platform while driving rapid adoption of UpToDate Expert AI.

UpToDate Expert AI is the market-leading solution for health enterprises. Our customers rely on us for our trusted foundational content and our triple layered expert in the loop process. Also important for our clinicians is that UpToDate Expert AI is the only leading clinical solution with accreditation for continuing medical education.

Moving to the next slide. You can see the strong demand for our solutions and the trust advantage we have in response to the rollout of UpToDate Expert AI. As of this week, we've signed on about 1/3 of our enterprise customers across the largest and most prominent health systems in the U.S., representing approximately 1,600 hospitals. These include health systems that are piloting tools from other LLMs or medical AI vendors.

Before going live, Expert AI has to go through rigorous governance process and security reviews and activation is also accompanied by training for clinicians. Feedback is positive, thumbs-up rating to answers is high, and we are in active engagement with customers to expand capabilities, including dosing and local content.

The individual offering, UpToDate Pros Plus is also making progress. This is a premium bundle with Expert AI and other value-added features, and we are also seeing strong usage trends by those who have chosen to upgrade. This is available at discounted rates for students and trainees to encourage early career adoption. I am very excited about the momentum of Expert AI, and we are laser-focused on continuing to improve and expand the capabilities of our platform.

As I said at the start, we see opportunities for growth across all parts of the business, both in enhancing the core and extending our addressable markets.

So let's turn to the next slide. AI is powering growth across both levers. On the core side, AI takes capabilities customers already rely on and makes them meaningfully better. These use cases drive growth by increasing the value and stickiness of our core products, supporting higher retention, consistent annual price increase, and in some cases, upsell.

On the market expansion side, AI powers entirely new use cases that we do not address in the workflow today such as drafting and review in our legal workspace and proactive insights scenario modeling and advisory in CCH Axcess and Tagetik. It also allows us to build offerings for new segments such as Ovid Guidelines for medical societies to streamline development of clinical practice guidelines.

Here, we monetize through premium packages, add-ons or new offerings, but always tied to clear customer value, and many of our premium packages are tied to tiers of usage, productivity or outcome improvements. This is a transformational opportunity, and our competitive position has never been stronger.

We will increase our investments to deliver more AI solutions, while also increasing operating margins and expanding our innovation capacity. As we scale AI-powered expert solutions, we benefit from operating margin leverage driven by stronger retention and higher customer lifetime value. The deployment of AI internally is driving margin improvements as well. It is already raising our development team's productivity and increasing our developers' capacity, allowing us to do more with the same number of engineers.

Similarly, in customer support and other functions, we are seeing significant savings from the use of dedicated AI agents that can handle routine calls, allowing us to not replace natural turnover and staffing levels. The combination of these actions allows us to increase investment in our AI road maps and deliver growth while increasing our margin.

Now let me turn to the outlook. As noted in our release this morning, we expect another year of good organic growth with all divisions contributing. While there will be some quarterly phasing to take into account as detailed in our release, for the full year, we expect Health and Tax & Accounting to deliver organic growth in line with 2025. We expect Financial & Corporate Compliance, Legal & Regulatory and Corporate Performance & ESG to deliver organic growth ahead of the 2025 levels.

The outlook for the group as a whole, as shown on the next slide, is for good organic growth, a further margin increase and high single-digit growth in diluted adjusted EPS in constant currencies. Importantly, we expect to increase the margin while we simultaneously increase product development spending to between 12% and 13% of revenues in 2026 to further advance our AI strategy.

Let me wrap up on the next slide. We are well positioned as a market leader in growing markets with a track record of driving growth through innovation and of creating value for shareholders. We are excited about the opportunities ahead of us, and we look forward to executing on our priorities.

Operator, we can now turn to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I've got three questions, if possible. So just first of all, you've got that chart on Slide 34, showing your margins going up over time. I guess some people will say that in 2026, the sale of FRR and some lower restructuring accounts for at least all of the guided margin improvement. So excluding those factors is kind of sideways. As at the same time, you've moved your product development spend up to 12% to 13%, and that's permanent. So can we get some reassurance that margin improvement of a similar rate to that chart is what you expect beyond '26? And what kind of savings can you put in place to continue achieving that? So that was just one question.

Second one, can you talk a bit more about customer reaction to your AI offerings, UpToDate and in tax as you've been collecting those up in the last few months?

And then third question, given where your shares are, I guess, it seems like it would make sense to do a higher buyback than you are doing. Do you consider slightly changing your thinking on gearing, given that the share price is at a low level and how accretive it would be to buy back your shares?

Okay. Thanks very much. Why don't I take the first question, Kevin, and then I'll hand over the margin and other question to you.

So yes, in terms of the customer reaction, we're seeing very strong positive reaction to all of our AI and Agentic solutions that we've been launching. With respect to our Expert AI solution within Health, feedback is terrific. We hear from our Chief Medical Officers that the expert clinician in the loop approach, which I described earlier, gives them confidence in our product as opposed to training on raw medical literature. They love the interface. They like the quick summary, along with the underlying assumptions, the nudges that we include in the interface as well as the seamless platform that we provide to them when they also include patient-oriented content on the enterprise solution, drug dosing, guidelines.

And very importantly now is the integration with the ambient players, which allow for a much more efficient clinical note taking and our partnerships that we are expanding are very well received by our customers. And one of the things that's really important in these high stakes environments is that they trust both the precision that they get from our solution as well as the protection in terms of data privacy and safety.

So they're rolling out the systems quickly. We're very pleased that we have 30% of our enterprise base already signed up, and we expect that number to rise to about 70% by the half year. So very strong feedback.

We're seeing also very good adoption of our AI solutions within our tax business. As you saw earlier, we recently launched AI and Agentic solutions. We are seeing a very positive reactions. They love the fact that they drive significant productivity gains. In one of the solutions we've been testing, there's about 3 to 4 hours of savings per week for our professionals. So again, they feel that combination of trust that we have in our solutions that are very much embedded in their overall enterprise. So a strong reaction so far.

So with that, I'll hand over to you, Kevin.

Great. Thanks, Stacey. Nick, I'm going to address your margin question first. Yes, you're right, the FRR business unit was below the group average. But I'll remind you, it's relatively small, just over EUR 100 million. So while it does improve the margin, not by a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

You were asking questions about beyond 2026, what margin development will be. While we're not giving guidance beyond '26 today, I can tell you that you've seen a good improvement in the margin over the years due to a couple of reasons. First, mix shift in revenue. As we scale our expert solutions, they tend to have better margins overall. Another thing I would point to is operational excellence is embedded in the DNA of Wolters Kluwer. And every year, we're looking to work more efficiently. And certainly, internal use of AI tools is also helping on that grade.

So the improvement in margin you've seen over the last several years, we're certainly guiding to that for 2026. But based on the reason I've given you, I do expect that, that trend would continue.

The next question you had was on the share buyback. And on the share buyback, one of the priorities we have or we try to balance our priorities in capital allocation. First, investing in the business, both organically and through bolt-on M&A. Secondly, pay down debt. And thirdly, we want to make sure we reward our shareholders with our progressive dividend and share buyback program. So that is what we are constantly looking at, striking the right balance. And we believe the EUR 500 million share buyback that we're announcing today for 2026 is at that right balance. We've considered acquisitions of the past. I think in the last 18 months, you've seen us spend EUR 1.3 billion on acquisitions, most notably, [ Firmcheck, ] RASi, Brightflag. And those have all been very strong acquisitions. In fact, they're performing ahead of our initial expectations. So we're delighted about that.

Our leverage right now, our leverage is at 2.0x. We are in the good middle of our leverage range. The buybacks we've done in the past were EPS accretive. We expect this buyback will be EPS accretive. And finally, I want to remind you, we'll be returning close to 100% of our free cash flow to investors through our dividend, through our share buyback program. So I hope that gives you a little bit of insight into our thinking as we announced the share buyback program today.

Our next question today comes from Ciaran Donnelly from Citi.

A few for myself. Firstly, on the increase in product development spend. Can you help us understand why the 12% to 13% is the right range and how you've landed on that? And just in terms of your comments around the increase in spend to capture the AI opportunity, how should we think about the time line to see that translate to accelerated organic revenue growth?

And maybe secondly, just going back to that margin question from Nick. Could you quantify the contribution from the FRR disposal, just to understand that like-for-like margin progression in 2026, that would be great.

And then just lastly. On the dynamics around deferred income, I'd say it hasn't increased year-on-year, perhaps it is a timing factor, but if you can help us understand the dynamics around that, that would be helpful.

Yes. So why don't I start with the question around the increase in product development. And let me just start by kind of giving a little bit more detail on the foundation and beyond, platform that I briefly mentioned earlier.

The foundation and beyond platform is a platform that we built to allow all of our product and engineering teams to rapidly develop and integrate AI and agentic capabilities into both our content and software products. And it leverages our proprietary content and deep domain expertise.

So this is the internal model that we use to be able to deploy solutions quickly. And the key strength of the platform is that it's model agnostic, so the teams can switch between different LLM models to select the best model for their use case. It also gives us the guardrails that allow us to give the trusted and very protected content that our customers rely on us for.

So because we created that offering and really deployed it across the enterprise, midyear last year, our teams are able to develop our AI and Agentic solutions more quickly. That's why you've seen six of the releases that we were able to do in CCH Axcess for example, and the solutions across our portfolio.

So what we're able to do is to increase the resources, product leads, our subject matter experts to be able to leverage that platform and deploy more quickly. So we have this great combination of having an efficient way of building our Agentic solutions, and we're able to move our road map up more quickly. So we got all of our teams focused on our Horizon 1 launches and now the investments can support the kind of Horizon 2 and 3 work to begin. So we think it's a great way for us to balance the -- our ability to get our launch done more quickly. And we also have increased investments to improve and accelerate our development.

And maybe, Kevin, you could hit on the other question.

Sure. Yes, coming back on FRR, Ciaran. As I mentioned, the business unit was a smaller business unit, just over EUR 100 million. The margin was below our group average. In fact, margin was like mid-single-digit margins. So you can use that to factor into your modeling going forward. So the exit of that business will be a positive for margin. But again, probably a smaller impact as compared to the more important mix shift of revenue and continued operational excellence programs throughout the business. So I hope that helps you.

On the deferred income, I may ask you to repeat your question, but I think it was about the deferred income increase on the balance sheet. And yes, indeed, with the growth of our subscription revenue portfolio, signing contracts for longer-term periods, you do see an improvement in deferred income. But I'd also remind you that on the balance sheet, the face of our balance sheet, you will also have to consider the deterioration in the U.S. dollar as compared to year-end 2024.

And let me just go back to the question earlier, where you also were curious about how the investment turns into -- shows up in the revenue. So as you know, the vast majority of our revenue is subscription based. And as we roll out our solutions and adoption increases, you'll start to see that flow through into our revenues in the midterm.

Our next question comes from Christophe Cherblanc from Bernstein.

I had two questions. The first one was on Tax & Accounting. The operating leverage was super impressive in '25 with a drop above 60%. Is that a level we should expect again in '26?

And the second question was just on the buyback. Because of the buyback, you've been shrinking equity. So is there a need to retain positive book equity? And is that the reason why you cannot buy more than -- buy back more than EUR 500 million or EUR 600 million given the level at which book equity is at the end of '25?

Okay. Thanks, Kevin, why don't you take these?

I did not quite get the first question on TAA, Christophe, but I will say -- okay, I will say.

He's asking about the operating leverage, why a drop? Yes.

Okay. I will say. Let me start with the share buyback. Obviously, we consider a lot of things when we consider the allocation of capital. Obviously, we do have to consider equity as part of that. But as I said, we're trying to balance the priorities of this allocation between investing in the business organically and through bolt-on M&A leverage and finally, rewarding our shareholders. Obviously, we want to have a robust balance sheet, so we can take opportunities as they come. So all of these go into our thinking when we are thinking about dividends, share buybacks and other capital allocation considerations.

Also on Tax & Accounting, I think you were saying the leverage, the improvement in the margin in Tax & Accounting. Well, certainly, we are seeing good throughput on the revenue growth in that business. Revenue growth at 7% certainly gives us the ability to improve margins. Tax & Accounting, just like every other business, you do see a positive impact of the mix shift in revenues, the more and more that business moves to software and SaaS software. We do see an improvement as these products mature. And again, operational excellence is key throughout Wolters Kluwer. So that does underpin what you see in the improvement in the margin.

And just sorry to insist on this, but is it by low legal constraints that you have to maintain positive book equity?

We absolutely take equity into account as we do other priorities I've mentioned.

So you cannot go into negative equity, correct?

Like I say, Christophe, this one part of our capital allocation criteria, we consider that amongst other things.

Our next question today comes from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

Thanks for taking my questions, And just before I go into those, I guess one final congratulations from my side, Nancy, on your extensive career achievements, and I wish you the very best in your future endeavors.

On the question specifically, I think there's three areas I'd like to get -- yes, no worries at all. I think there are three areas I'd like to go into some of the questions. Firstly, you mentioned partnerships being a priority for you, Stacey. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what partnerships those might include? Are we sticking to the, I guess, more traditional playbook of SaaS vendor partnerships and other areas you can get your content and product in front of people? I think more recently, we've seen some players out there decide to do more specific partnerships with certain AI labs. Would that be something you consider or would you prefer to keep a more multimodal approach?

Secondly, on the Health division, I guess within that mix, you're talking to the kind of growth rate being steady year-over-year. UpToDate is an important part of that. You mentioned the retention remains very strong. You mentioned the number of clinical content interactions that move to the system being pretty consistent. Could you kind of add any color on where your gross retention runs at for UpToDate, I believe it's low 90s, but anything over that and how that's been evolving would be helpful.

And also if you're seeing any specific usage pattern differences between users that now have the conversational Expert AI front end versus those that are not using that or don't have access yet.

And just lastly, maybe one for you, Kevin, on the product development increase of 1 to 2 points. How much of that do you expect to come through CapEx versus OpEx this year?

Yes. Thanks, George. I'll take the first two. With regard to partnerships, we are very focused on making sure that we can be deeply embedded in our customers' workflow. So as I mentioned, in Health, we're all very focused on extending the partnerships, many of which we've announced, but we will continue to move in that direction to make sure we've got strong partnerships. So this is all about making sure we're embedded in our customers' ecosystem.

Similarly, in Tax, we've always -- over the last many years, we've had a Tax marketplace with the API connectors. We're looking at how do we enhance that as we think about the Agentic capabilities.

In terms of our use of the foundational models, our FAB platform, which I mentioned earlier, includes all the core foundational models. So we make sure that we are using those capabilities that are the right ones for the right use cases. So that's our approach for now.

In terms of our Health business, as I mentioned, our business is very strong. Our enterprise customer base, as you know, has high renewals and continue to have very strong renewals and up-selling last year. In fact, we signed more multiyear contracts for longer durations with higher annual contract value last year than we had in prior years. So what's happening is that our customers are -- certainly, we're very focused on the adoption of Expert AI. But we're also very engaged with our customers to extend the value along the full platform that we offer. So expanding with drug information, drug dosing, patient education, guidelines and so on. So again, the health of the business is very strong.

And in terms of usage patterns, yes, in fact, we see that when our customers move to Expert AI, they do very deep conversational interfaces. They're much faster in their ability to get to their answer. So we see strength there. And you see that across the portfolio, strong productivity improvements when our customers are adopting our AI and Agentic solutions.

And I think the last question, Kevin, for you.

Yes. On product development, the mix between CapEx and OpEx, I would expect it to be very similar, George, to what you see today. Usually, our CapEx is about 5% of our revenues or so. Going forward, even though we're going to invest more, I think the balance between those two will be similar. It really all depends on IFRS requires us to capitalize costs once we reach technical feasibility. So we'll evaluate this on each product and each investment idea going forward. But my thinking is it's going to be very similar to what you see today.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Thymen Rundberg from ING.

Two from my side. So looking across the business, are there parts of the portfolio where customer needs or market dynamics are evolving or perhaps have evolved faster than you expected? And where that might lead to you to perhaps adjust your priorities over, let's say, the next 1 or 2 years?

And then the second is on pricing. So as your products continue to add a lot more functionality and support more workflows for your customers, so you're consistently adding more value to them. How do you think about your pricing over the next few years? And in particular, how do you approach, let's say, this more value-based pricing model so that's a greater impact that your solutions deliver or will deliver is just more systematically reflected in monetization?

Yes, I'll take those. In terms of the approach for where -- how we make sure that we are at pace in terms of the customer demand for our solutions, our -- the relationships we've had with our customers stands decades. And so we are with our customers daily and really helping them to understand the productivity gains that can be created when they deploy our solutions. And in fact, I was talking to the leader of our tax business who just came off of his sales meeting. And he was saying that the difference between last year and this year in terms of customer interest and recognition that these solutions can really deliver value has increased a lot.

So we feel like we're at the right time now with the solutions we've launched. And as I mentioned earlier, we're just really excited to be able to launch even more of our capabilities because I think the customers recognize now that there are really nice opportunities for them, particularly with many of our customers, they have challenges with just having enough supply of professionals. So they see the benefits of this. And we're -- again, we're moving quick.

What I would say around pricing is that our core strategy is to price on value, and we have a variety of pricing metrics across our products today. We don't use a single metric. For example, CCH Axcess is based on the firm size plus the number of returns.

The UpToDate enterprise is based on institutions. And with our new AI solutions, we're really using those to -- in some cases, particularly for the AI solutions launched in '23 and '24, it was more about supporting our renewal rates with price increases and upselling that reflects the value. But with some of the newer AI solutions, we are discretely monetizing those solutions, and again, always focused on price to value. And I'd say the unit of value varies based on the benefit we provide for our legal content businesses.

Expert AI is embedded with our content. We typically sell that with kind of an upsell model for Libra, which is the solution that moves us into new addressable market with the legal workspace. We are -- the average price is about 2x the value of the content offering that we would sell to a law firm. And what we do is we get the benefit of combining the trusted deep proprietary content into the legal workspace, Libra solution, which provides an extension to do contract drafting and contract review. So the value is evident.

In CCH Axcess, for example, for the client collaboration AI tool, we tie it to request lists that are sent out, which is a measure of output. And then in intelligence, we have consumption tiers. That's also a solution within the CCH Axcess suite. And so we're really looking at the value we're offering and reflecting that in the value and the way that we deliver our pricing.

We have no further questions. So Stacey, would you like to have any closing remarks?

Yes. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all the questions. We're excited to build on our momentum and to accelerate our strategy to deliver more value for customers while delivering continued good growth in 2026. Thanks so much for joining us today.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining, everyone. You may now disconnect your lines.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wolters Kluwer Investor Teaching Webcast and Conference Call. My name is Brika, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I will now hand you over to your host, Meg Geldens, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin today's call.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, Brika. Hello, everyone. I'm Meg Geldens, Head of Investor Relations at Wolters Kluwer. Thank you for joining this event, which will focus on artificial intelligence. AI has been, by far, the #1 topic of discussion with investors and analysts in the past 4 months. So today, we brought together several members of our team to tell you about our AI technology and 2 of our largest product lines are leveraging advanced AI to meet customer needs and use cases. Before I introduce the speakers, can I ask you to read Slide 2 about forward-looking statements. We caution that any forward-looking statements made on today's call are qualified by certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what is contemplated by these statements. We will not be disclosing new information on current trading today.

Now it's my pleasure to introduce today's speakers. Nancy McKinstry, our CEO, will start us off with a brief introduction; then Alex Tyrrell, CTO for Health and leader of our AI Center of Excellence, will talk about the DXG organization, how we developed our platforms in close collaboration with our customers and how we're building AI into our solutions to drive enhanced value and enhanced decision-making. Next, Jason Marx, CEO of Tax & Accounting, will put the spotlight on one of the fastest-growing solutions in our North American tax and accounting business, the CCH Axcess Cloud platform, which is designed for professional accounting firms.

Then Cathy Rowe, Head of Professional segments within our U.S. Tax & Accounting group will demonstrate 1 of the 6 agentic AI tools that we are rolling out across CCH Axcess. After that, Greg Samios, CEO of Health will provide a deep dive on up-to-date clinical decision support, its unrivaled body of content and how its new conversational AI interface delivers on the needs of our enterprise hospital and other health care customers. Julie Frey, VP Product, will then give you a brief demo of the UpToDate Expert AI. Finally, Stacey Caywood, member of the Executive Board, who will succeed Nancy as CEO next year, will summarize her strategic priorities, how we expect to make a return on our AI investments and why we are well positioned for growth in the future.

With that, I hand it over to you, Nancy.

First, I will take you through how the tax professional sets up their work for the purpose...

Thank you, Meg. And welcome, everyone. I'd like to start off by reminding all of us how over the many years, we've transformed this company in so many ways, through organic investment and portfolio actions we have transformed from a fragmented print-centric holding company into a digital expert solution company, which is now being powered by Expert AI, approaching 70% of our digital revenues come from products that are AI-enabled. This transformation has accelerated our organic growth and increased our margins as we continuously enhance the value we bring our customers. innovations that improve their analysis, their decision-making and their productivity. Perhaps less visible to all of you on the outside is the transformation in our operations and in technology.

Over the years, we have centralized all of our core functions from product development, to HR, to finance, among others, in order to drive excellence and scale in these areas. Our transformation and our focus on customer-led innovation, coupled with substantial investment has brought us to a place where today, our portfolio is stronger than ever. We have the key assets, market positions, technology platforms and talent to take advantage of the latest round of next-generation AI technology, particularly in agentic technology.

It is part of our culture and our strategy to keep innovating and transforming. We don't stand still. We are continuously reinforcing our competitive strengths whether that is our data, our customer relationships, our technology or our brands. In product technology alone, we are investing some 7 -- sorry, EUR 650 million this year, much of that is going towards product development powered by AI.

AI offers Wolters Kluwer substantial opportunities to leverage our proprietary data and content, our leading market positions, our deep expertise and our advanced technology architecture to drive faster growth and deliver enhanced value to our customers.

Today, we will give you some insights how we have centralized our technology team and what benefits that brings. Before we do that, it's important to know that over many years, we have been streamlining, standardizing and advancing our technology. This continuous investment puts us in a strong position to develop AI-powered platforms in a fast and efficient way.

In our market segments, we were among the first to invest in cloud platforms and to build APIs that connect into ecosystems. Our early move to cloud-native architecture is giving us an advantage as it enables more seamless AI integration and delivers a better user experience. We have also been on the front foot in embedding AI. Starting some 12 years ago, the proportion of our digital revenues that is AI enabled is approaching 70%, which is up from 50% just 2 years ago. Every month, we are rolling out new AI tools and enhancements.

More recently, the technology team has created a proprietary AI-enabled platform called FAB, which is allowing us to speed up development cycles and drive economies of scale. You will hear more about that from Alex shortly. Our strategy has remained consistent throughout. We combine trusted expert content with advanced technology to bring increasing productivity and improved outcomes to our customers. This strategy has delivered sustainable and profitable growth and positions us well for the future. With that, I'd now like to hand it over to Alex to talk about DXG.

Wonderful. Thanks, Nancy, and hello, everyone. I'm here to give an overview of our technology organization and AI strategy. Let me start by describing our current product technology organization. The Digital Experience Group is a central technology organization that supports all 5 divisions. Our mission is to drive faster customer-facing innovation, and to leverage our technology investments to drive efficiency and scale. We are vertically aligned, with a CTO for each division, ensuring our technology strategy stays aligned to business needs. We offer reusable and scalable assets to all 5 divisions of Wolters Kluwer with approaching 6,500 technologists in support.

We also maintain a number of centers of excellence. They are aligned horizontally, which provides uniform access to specialized talent, enhances our ability to scale while ensuring proper governance. And importantly, the AI center of excellence is a key part of our innovation strategy, really focusing on how GenAI can transform our products and services and deliver the right outcomes for our customers.

So we've been investing in AI for about 15 years. And as part of our strategy, we established our AI center of excellence 12 years ago. Now from day 1, our strategy has been consistent, use AI to deliver measurable end-to-end outcomes for our customers' most important workflows. We have continuously supported this strategy by investing in the technologies and platforms that power workflows at scale. At each point in our AI journey, safety and trust have been hallmarks. And we always have grounded AI in our curated and verified content. Today's AI technology lets us accelerate this strategy by building on our prior investments and continuing to widen our competitive advantage.

Now on the left, you have traditional AI and machine learning, which has been sort of our historical focus, predictive models on structured data, often rules driven and narrow, good at specific tasks like document review, but humans still had to stitch the workflow together. Now in the middle, we have GenAI, where large language models have represented a step change in AI, unlocking content generation, things like text, images, code, but mostly a single turn transactional moments, like drafting an e-mail or generating a contract clause, productivity goes up but the loop is enclosed. On the right, agentic AI. This is where the technology really accelerates our strategy and builds on our prior investments. Agents plan, they take actions and interact with enterprise systems, augmenting and assisting users by executing multistep workflows on their behalf. Importantly, we have made continuous investments in our cloud solutions, our APIs and platforms that are the necessary prerequisites to make agentic AI work at scale to solve hard problems and deliver the right outcomes for our customers.

Now in terms of value creation, our decades-long history curating trusted content to drive our AI as well as our investments in scalable technology assets built to support workflows gives us a unique competitive advantage. Agentic AI builds on these prior investments, giving us the foundations to capitalize quickly, continuing our delivery of durable, high-quality growth for shareholders.

Now to compete and win in this new agentic world, you need a deep understanding of the customer and how their work actually gets done. When you truly understand the workflow, the steps, the frustrations, the information gaps, you can streamline or even automate a complicated end-to-end process. Tasks that once had to be done sequentially because information was scattered or systems didn't connect and require different people to manage, can now be executed in smarter and more efficient ways, taking advantage of parallelism and increased automation that is orchestrated towards the right outcome.

The next step in our evolution is workflow transformation using agentic AI. A key to this transformation lies in our subject matter experts who know the jobs to be done and can translate that knowledge into the design of agentic systems. Their collective skills and expertise curating the trusted information that our customers have relied on for decades is now unlocking new value through agentic AI. And this is where our Expert AI strategy creates meaningful competitive advantage. Our approach starts with something no general purpose AI can replicate. Deep domain expertise, combined with our trusted and verified content, our specialists understand exactly how professionals work, the decisions they need to make, the information they trust and the risks that they must manage.

We capture the experience and knowledge of our specialist, translate it into structured guidance and adapt AI models to think and act like experts, all grounded in our proprietary content, preventing hallucinations and establishing trust. We also fine-tune and capture expert reasoning through techniques like chain of thought, all reviewed and continuously improved by our domain experts in the loop, working closely with our AI engineers. For complex tasks, we may adapt multiple models, each capturing unique aspect of how experts perform work.

We will see an example of this later when we demo UpToDate Expert AI. Now this creates an AI capabilities competitors cannot easily copy because it's built on our decades of proprietary expertise and content that is guided at every step by experts in the loop.

Now Expert AI is a cornerstone of our strategy, which we need to execute quickly at scale without compromising on safety. This is made possible through our proprietary AI enablement platform that we call FAB. Now the vision for FAB is to move beyond foundation and frontier models to solve end-to-end workflow. This unlocks new value in our decades-long investments in scalable technology assets and proprietary content, which increases our competitive advantage. Now FAB development begins with high-value use cases and clear ROI targets. As part of our governance framework, we immediately established guardrails at the earliest design phase, ensuring responsible and ethical use of AI.

Within the FAB ecosystem, we provide a number of key features and innovations that drive scale and adaptability. Foremost, we focus on model pluralism, pick the right model for the right job and adapt quickly. From there, we provide the ability to fine-tune and ground models using our trusted content. In the middle is our agentic layer where we build reusable capabilities, allowing us to scale.

Now pin board and labs provide low friction environments for orchestrating agents and running lean experiments. In XP, we have our standard UX design patterns, ensuring our interfaces are consistent and intuitive. And finally, Bridge is our gateway to external systems, extending the reach of FAB into new ecosystems while remaining safe and well governed.

Now undergirding our FAB ecosystem is a suite of proven GenAI productivity tools that accelerate delivery. These tools target the entire development life cycle from design to writing code, testing and deployment. As we will see in today's demos, FAB is delivering significant value for our customers today. With FAB, we are AI ready in the enterprise on day 1, professional grade, trusted and secure, not bolt-on, not point solutions, which is key to scaling our Expert AI strategy.

And with that, I will hand over the next to Jason Marx.

Thanks, Alex. My goal today is to provide a clear understanding of how Wolters Kluwer applies AI and agentic AI workflows in tax and accounting, what it looks like in practice, and why that matters for tax and accounting professionals.

Tax and accounting is one of Wolters Kluwer's growth engines, a leader in the professional accounting firm market, delivering $1.6 billion in revenue last year with approximately 60% of those revenues from North America. As a global provider, we serve tax and accounting professionals with cloud-based, AI-enabled solutions that help them manage compliance, optimize workflow complexity and deliver value to their clients. Flagship platform is CCH Axcess, a cloud-native suite of 16 integrated modules that embeds Expert AI across tax, audit and practice management workflows. And the scale is significant. 10,000 firms, including 95 of the top 100 and 1.4 million users of CCH Axcess. And this scale and this breadth of a platform is a critical differentiator. CCH Axcess is the only true digital core in tax and accounting, a unified cloud native platform where AI is built in, not bolted on. And this is the foundation that firms need for the agentic future to move from generative to embedded to agentic AI with unified data, expert embedded content, rigorous security, audit trails and explainable outputs.

In high states professions with regulated compliance, expert judgment and nuance are critical for accounting professionals to trust the solutions that they use. For CCH Axcess, this is made possible through decades of proprietary expert validated content, the compliance foundation of CCH Axcess. To do this, we analyze over 180 primary content sources. We process 250,000 to 300,000 regulatory changes annually across federal, state and local domains. And at the heart of CCH Axcess is a layered intelligence model. Now it starts with public tax and regulatory data, which includes U.S. federal tax legislation, state codes and regulations and even local codes and regulations.

Then our editorial experts, they analyze this information. They enrich it with proprietary content including CCH tax analysts, expert insights, published content from CCH editors and detailed state-level analysis through our CCH state tax reporters. Then we embed the compliance and calculations across federal and state tax forms, and we integrate both firm-specific and client-specific data that would come from sources like the prior year tax return.

All of this comes together inside CCH Axcess creating a single intelligent platform that combines public data, proprietary expertise and client context. Our Expert AI amplifies this foundation, delivering trustworthy expertise with capabilities that drive efficiencies for the firm. Smart document collection that predicts needed information and streamlines client uploads, intelligent processing that automates classification and routing with expert oversight and proactive insights that are able to surface advisory opportunities by the CPA before their clients even ask. And the result, professionals spend 20% to 30% less time on manual tasks and more time delivering strategic guidance and advisory services.

The CCH Axcess Suite is a cloud-native platform of 16 integrated modules, unifying tax, audit and firm data into an intelligent, scalable experience. Now this past October, we announced the commercial launch of 6 new AI-powered modules that you can see here around the core. And because it's a unified platform with Expert AI embedded throughout, we can deliver an agentic-ready experience, one where we can orchestrate workflows and automation across the modules with trusted compliance built in.

Take, for example, a typical tax workflow. Now the ultimate goal here is that no touch tax return. And with Expert AI agents and APIs, we can extract and classify and import data directly into the return. Our Expert AI agents coordinate tasks and externally import client financial data, things like bank statements or accounting data, and they do it securely and at scale. And this is the foundation to move customers to full agentic task orchestration. And the entire process on CCH Axcess will evolve to be agents, from initial agents from initial data gathering and client collaboration to initial return preparation delivered to the CPA for final review. Then agents coordinate e-signatures and e-filing, all within a single integrated, secure, digital environment. For the accounting firm, this drives efficiencies and frees up time for higher-valued advisory work. And for WK, this drives opportunities for upsell across modules and greater stickiness and retention of firms across the CCH Axcess platform.

Cathy Rowe, our Senior VP for our professional business in the U.S. is going to do a deeper dive and highlight and demo the power of CCH Axcess client collaboration. It's a great example of how AI moves from concept to practical application.

So let me set the stage for what you're going to see. CCH client collaboration transforms the firm client engagement by automating the intake, the document exchange and the communication between the CPA and their clients. Now why does this matter? Because these steps are often the most time consuming and error prone in the tax preparation process. With Expert AI and unified data interactions become predictive and proactive, moving us 1 step closer to the no touch tax return. Here, agentic AI is contextually aware of the unique circumstances of each taxpayer, anticipating what information is needing, reducing the back and forth nature of the process between the CPA and the client.

And the benefits while they're clear and immediate, time savings, they free up staff for higher value work, we elevate the client experience, which, for the firm, builds trust and retention. Operational excellence accelerates responsiveness and improves accuracy. And importantly, these efficiencies create capacity for the firms that are able to grow and offer new highly valued advisory services. This is a great example of how the power of Expert AI becomes both trusted and tangible for the firm.

Now I'll turn it over to Cathy for the demo.

Thanks, Jason. In just a moment, I'm going to show you an end-to-end integrated tax experience that will leverage Expert AI to achieve touchless, ready to review workflows. This starts with how the tax professional interacts with the taxpayer. The goal is to have a frictionless experience from signing an engagement letter all the way through obtaining, understanding and populating that fund and finalizing the return.

As Jason noted, AI is leveraged throughout the entire process to help understand and harness the data to get insights and automation. In the next few minutes, I will take you through this experience that enables review ready tax returns, leveraging agentic AI to set apart the client experience for the firm.

First, I will take you through how the tax professional sets up their work for the purpose of engaging the taxpayer. By understanding what was done for that taxpayer in the prior year, we can create a request list effectively by using work previously completed. We also give customers the ability to automatically generate an engagement letter essentially a contract for the work. These will both be created with AI, keeping Expert in the loop.

Next, we will look at the taxpayer experience. The goal is to make it as effortless as possible for the taxpayer to provide what the tax professional needs. After a simple log-in and seeing what's changed, they can provide the documents needed with just a simple drag and drop everything at once. Imagine bringing a shoe box of documents with all kinds of data and to your tax professional. This is exactly what the taxpayer is doing here. AI automatically identifies, classifies documents against the request list, showing what's provided, what's missing and whether enough was applied for the tax professional to proceed. The CPA immediately sees these updates and then can see the phase of the tax engagement.

Subsequently, when the return is prepared, the taxpayer reenters the experience, sees whether they are due money, whether they owe money, can download their return and ask questions of their data, review and sign the necessary forms and then get their CPA to file. Once the return has been completed, there is another Expert AI element for the taxpayer to engage. They are shown their completed federal and state returns and enabling the taxpayer to ask questions about the return, again, using Expert AI capabilities.

Now switching to the tax professional's perspective. The tax professional can see what's happening across all the tax returns for the firm. AI is used to summarize the activity, and there is a list management area that shows statuses that will update automatically. Expert AI highlights what needs attention, whether there's follow-up tasks, and accordingly, the system will update automatically. The data that was previously provided by the client is made available directly here to the CPA so they are able to review and then flow directly into the return, at which point we have a touchless, ready-to-review tax returns.

Now I will hand it over to Greg.

Thank you, Cathy. Hello, everybody. I'm Greg Samios, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, and welcome, everybody. My goal today is to provide you with a deeper understanding of UpToDate, its proprietary content that's designed for point of care, its integration into the health care ecosystem and the Expert AI interface that we are busy rolling out right now. So let's get started.

UpToDate is the largest single product in our Health division, and it's part of our Clinical Solutions group. It offers a range of point-of-care solutions for hospitals, pharmacies, payers and other providers in the health care ecosystem. UpToDate is the global leader in clinical decision support, trusted by more than 3 million clinicians who consult the application 50 million to 60 million times per month. It consistently had a Net Promoter Score above 70 and retention rates above 90%. About 80% of UpToDate comes from enterprises, purchased by the C-suite and by committees of hospitals and other institutions. The remainder comes from individual clinicians and small practices.

Uniquely, UpToDate's contest draws on the knowledge and experience of our more than 7,600 clinical experts who are among the world's leading practitioners in their area of medical practice. Over the years, UpToDate has evolved from a single product that provides decision support for clinicians into an integrated platform that drives clinical outcomes for the enterprise. This enterprise platform touches every part of the care journey. Step inside a hospital, and you will see it immediately. Physicians rely on our clinical decision support at the point of care, nurses rely on our drug data to administer drugs. And when the care team discharges patients, they send them home with our educational materials.

And administrators monitor and improve quality metrics through our analytics and dashboards. And we paired that with deep workflow integration. API connectivity with all the major EMRs and partnerships with the leading Ambient scribe vendors, ensuring that UpToDate Enterprise is embedded directly into the clinician workflow. So whether a doctor is looking at a patient chart in Epic, or using Abridge to capture the encounter, the power of UpToDate is at their fingertips.

This is the power of a common, trusted evidence base across the enterprise workflow. It has taken significant content harmonization and technology effort to get here, and we continue to expand the platform. Most recently, we've introduced UpToDate Expert AI, giving clinicians fast, accurate answers to their questions grounded in our proprietary content.

But before I discuss our new AI initiative, let me describe our unique editorial model that ensures we always have the latest clinically relevant evidence. We follow a rigorous editorial process that's been refined over 30 years, which results in what's considered the gold standard in clinical decision support. More than 7,600 leading experts supported by our 100-plus in-house physicians, nurses and pharmacists, continually evaluate new evidence and translate that into actionable point-of-care guidance. Together, we monitor thousands of primary sources, including medical journals and clinical trials. But interestingly, only a small portion of primary content is relevant for clinical practice. And this is where the experts are critical. They're able to filter out research papers that are not clinically relevant as well as those studies that might be statistically interesting, but don't change clinical practice.

They also apply their clinical judgment when new medical evidence falls into the gray zone, which is quite often. Only about 20% of recommendations in UpToDate are Grade 1a, meaning supported by overwhelming evidence where there is a clear yes or no answer. The majority of recommendations are underpinned by our experts who apply their judgment to identify exceptions, contraindications, population-specific considerations as an example. These aspects cannot be derived from research journals alone, and finally, our experts explain what the findings mean and how to apply them. Think of diagnostic pathways or algorithms or dosing considerations or workflow implications.

Our integration partnerships with EMRs and ambient scribes and others, ensure this trusted content reaches clinicians at the moment of decision, increasingly repairing patient data or ambient clinical conversations with UpToDate to deliver tailored, real-time decision support. And we do this through a bring-your-own license model that protects our IP.

And importantly, our process is fast. Practice-changing updates often appear in UpToDate well before the research is published or before the society guidelines are updated. This has real-world impact. Roughly 30% of the time a clinician uses UpToDate, they change their treatment plan, driving better outcomes and well-documented ROI for health systems, and that's important.

This slide shows 2 examples of practice-changing updates that we made in 2025. You can see the details, but to summarize, the first example we show how our oncology experts were tracking emerging evidence very early. And when an oral abstract at ASCO symposium showed promising randomized trial results, our experts convened, debated and ultimately issued new recommendations before the publication in NEJM and before the NCCN guideline revision. In the second example, an NEJM study on methotrexate as a steroid-sparing option, showed promise, but wasn't definitive. Our pulmonary specialists debated which patient groups would benefit and where steroid therapy remained essential. The result was a nuanced practice-changing update in UpToDate, where society guidelines remained unchanged. Therefore, a clinician following only published research or guidelines for using an AI tool that relies on them could end up with a suboptimal treatment plan.

In addition to their role in maintaining our gold standard content, our experts are now playing a critical role in developing our Expert AI technology. In high-stakes clinical settings, even an occasional hallucination is unacceptable. And to address this, our Expert AI technology uses multiple large language models, more than 30 proprietary AI agents and uses expert in the loop in 2 AI-powered layers on top of our foundation content. The combination of technology and expert oversight is what makes our clinical reasoning unique. Our patent-pending clinical reasoning layer breaks the natural language question into core elements, assembles the decision pathways, identifies what proprietary content is needed and then evaluate relevance and produces a synthesized answer.

Next, our validation layer, which is based on expert developed rubrics with guardrails and answer sets. It scores the quality of the AI response ensuring accuracy and tightening the model over time.

UpToDate Expert AI is purpose-built to accelerate time to answer, but importantly, to deliver the accuracy, clinical relevance and workflow integration that our customers need, we are relentlessly focused on delivering the right information at the right time to the right person in the right modality in the right format. In discussions with customers, our triple layer expert in the loop process is a meaningful competitive differentiator. The foundation layer, the clinical reasoning model and the validation process that leverage our experts are so important in high-stakes decision making. Drug dosing is a good example, highly complex, high-risk. Drug events are the single largest category of adverse events in the hospital. Simple AI tools lack the full patient and clinical context required to get dosing right. The UpToDate suite includes comprehensive drug dosage and indications fully harmonized with the UpToDate clinical content.

Another differentiator is our AI answers, which are optimized for point-of-care use. Not only are they accurate, but they're accompanied by clear assumptions and treatment considerations that prevent wrong conclusions and missteps and by clinical nudges that support a richer diagnosis.

Integration into clinical workflow is what really differentiates us. We are deeply embedded at the enterprise level integrated into major EMR vendors and expanding through partnerships and ambient scribes.

I'm really pleased to see that we're making rapid progress in the rollout of UpToDate Expert AI. Two years ago, when we first showed an AI interface to hospital customers, many had reservations about using AI in their high stakes decision-making. Today, after extensive collaboration, we are in full launch mode with a product that meets their needs and addresses their concerns, and customers are ready to adopt. In just 45 days, we've had over 80 enterprises sign up to take Expert AI. So far, we've gotten live with over 20 enterprises, all have completed a rigorous governance and security review of our new product. Among the 80 preparing to go live are enterprises in key international markets where strict privacy laws will be a challenge for any ad-based tool. We've launched UpToDate Pro Plus for individual physicians. It's early days, but currently, about 1/3 of doctors up for renewal are upgrading to the AI package, highlighting the value we deliver.

And the pace of innovation continues. We've delivered 8 new releases in the last 45 days, pushing the bar on capability, performance, speed and drug coverage. As a team, we are really excited about the launch -- how the launch is going and with the impact that it's having on our customers and the patients they serve.

And now I'll hand it over to Julie Frey for a short demonstration of UpToDate Expert AI. Julie?

Thanks, Greg. Hello, everyone. I'm Julie, VP of Products and UpToDate. As we've been bringing our AI capabilities to customers, the feedback has been truly energizing for our team's hard at work. And customers tell us, they're especially excited about giving trainees, medical students, residents, a trusted approved AI tool right in their workflow. What you're about to watch is a demonstration of UpToDate Expert AI. So let's go ahead with the demo.

Let's look at the case that looks simple, but is potentially high risk. So we have a pregnant patient 36 weeks, who's water is broken, but who's not yet in labor. Is it safe to send this patient home for a few hours of observation? This is a scenario where accuracy is nonnegotiable because the risks, infection, hemorrhage, cord prolapse, they can escalate really, really quickly. So let me take you through how UpToDate Expert AI handles this question. What I'll point to you first is our assumptions. They're a really unique part of our offering. But the way that assumptions work, the intent behind it is to mirror the way a clinician thinks as well as to prompt the user to ensure that they've added everything that is relevant to answer the question. That is one of the first areas that we found our users really focus on and really love about this solution. we also always above that, will note that this is, we're using AI as part of the solutions. This is critical to be transparent. We actually have taken transparency really to the next level. We show users every single step that we take in order to respond to this query.

I don't expect that clinicians will always have the time to go into all of that, but it's available to them and should they want to use if they can access it. The assumptions, though, it's really the first unique pillar of what our offering and our solution is.

Then let's go into the second pillar, which is providing clear evidence-based management guidance that is grounded in UpToDate's Expert curated content. It ready tells you directly that hospitalization is recommended. That's an alignment with ACOG guidance. It doesn't stop there. It includes treatment considerations. That's really the second pillar of differentiation, explains the risks of infection and neonatal sepsis. It outlines why induction is preferred and it gives the criteria that would need to be met before even considering home monitoring. These are considerations that encourage critical thinking. They reinforce that home management applies only in extremely select cases. They point out that the risks the clinician may face as they're making these decisions that they really need to be aware of. And then finally, they summarize the key safety issues and the way that guides the next safe action.

Below the response, you'll see a section titled Learn More. This is actually what we internally call our clinical nudges. Another unique component of our solution that our users so far have really, really provided a lot of positive feedback on. What we're focused on here in this section is encouraging the clinicians to remain curious and to think of the optimal next best set of actions, even if those are not intentionally stated in the question. The clinician and the clinician's autonomy and agency to take care of the patient is paramount to the way that we structured this.

To summarize, by including our assumptions, our treatments guidance and then ultimately, our clinical nudges, the output is truly optimized the point-of-care use case and will drive optimal clinical outcomes. We tested the same scenario across several leading other LLMs, medical and otherwise, and some did answer the question correctly. But even when they were answering them correctly, they gave such a definitive tone with such confident statements such an approach that you risk not encouraging the clinician to remain curious and be at the center of the decision making. In others, in fact, we found that they recommended home management for 12 hours is reasonable. In other words, not immediately going into a hospital or a clinic to be monitored. Some even cited the home management for 12 hours was supported by leading medical societies. This is not correct and can be dangerous.

And because you have this very definitive confident tone, the model can unintentionally teach the incorrect practice and ultimately could lead to deskilling of our clinicians, and this is really the core clinical challenge that we're faced, how does the clinician benefit from the speed and information processing power of AI without endangering the patients?

Finally, I'd like to point you to a unique component of our solution. I'll zoom in a bit there so you can see it. We are gathering feedback really at every step of the process, and users can give us a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. We are also encouraging them to give us some more information around what they like or don't like. And just as a headline, we have very favorable thumbs up, which we're really encouraged by, and we continue to strive to do better. But most importantly here, on the thumbs down component of this, we have one of these pre-selected options, which is a critical concern. Effectively here, this is the opportunity for a user to flag anything that they're really worried about with this response so think of patient safety or some sort of harm concern. If a user selects his and click submit, this then goes directly to our clinical team.

We have a team of clinicians whose sole responsibility is reviewing feedback, prioritizing that feedback based on patient safety, accuracy and harm and triaging that. We have a 24-hour response time for any of those critical concerns. And then we will get back to the user, and we'll have a dialogue with that user around their concerns. It's really important to have that feedback loop. If there is anything around our clinical intelligence, our content, our validation framework, our safety framework that needs to be adjusted to improve, we'll take that as a priority and act on that very quickly. We really see this as this level of transparency and this level of working with our users to continue to enhance the system and optimize it for the point of care, the transparency that we want to provide behind is really paramount to the way that we're approaching, uniquely approaching, delivering AI and enhanced solution tuned for this point of care.

I'm especially heartened to see users giving us an 80%-plus score and that thumbs up feedback mechanism that you just saw.

With that overview of UpToDate Expert AI, I will now hand things over to Stacey.

Thank you, Julie, for that great demo. And let me add my welcome and thanks to you all for joining us today. Our expert solutions support professionals in their mission-critical work. They help them make high stakes decisions and stay productive at a time when many of our customers are facing real talent shortages. As Jason and Greg highlighted, these expert solutions are now evolving into AI-powered modular platforms. Our proprietary data and content, along with our deep understanding of customer workflows allow us to identify the right use cases and extend our value proposition.

Our foundational AI capabilities, including FAB, which Alex highlighted earlier, combined with our significant cloud investments are helping us build and scale these agentic use cases efficiently across the portfolio. As we evolve into broader platforms, we orchestrate more complex workflows that draw from multiple content sources, including data held by our customers. Our long-standing experience with APIs and secure data exchange allows us to connect seamlessly into customer ecosystems, whether directly or through partners.

For our customers, this delivers meaningful productivity gains and better outcomes. For us, they drive stickiness and open clear monetization pathways.

Our approach to monetizing AI depends on the value delivered and the market context. Historically, we monetized continuous innovation through regular value-based subscription price increases. This approach has long supported our organic growth and consistently delivered strong returns on our investments. Expert AI with an UpToDate Enterprise is a great example of this.

In some use cases and markets, we're now seeing a clear willingness to pay more for specific AI features. This is especially true where customers see tangible productivity gains or cost savings. And this can take the form of a premium package or add-on modules. As an example, UpToDate Pro Plus for individuals includes Expert AI and other value-added features for a 20% uplift in price above the standard version. And as Jason mentioned, the CCH Axcess platform, with its 16 modules, including several AI-powered ones, is a great proof point where customers purchase additional modules to leverage productivity gains from our AI solutions. And we expect AI pricing models to continue to evolve. For certain use cases, consumption-based pricing may become the standard component, especially where our customers' AI usage drives variable model run costs.

As you can see, we tailor our approach to use case and product context and see multiple pathways to upsell as we build out our platforms. I am proud to say we are moving from strength to strength, and today's event has demonstrated that we have the key assets, including talent, proprietary content and know-how and trusted customer relationships to win in an AI world. We start with a strong foundation, a business that has, over many years, continuously deployed the latest technology combined with our deep domain expertise to deliver value for customers and reinforce our competitive advantages.

When it comes to our strategy, I'm laser focused on a few areas. One is to accelerate the pace of innovation and this is well underway. Our FAB AI enablement platform has already helped speed up our development cycles in 2025. We will fund our AI investments while still improving margin by shifting the focus of our road maps to agentic development and increasing our capacity through the internal deployment of AI tools. A second near-term priority is continuing to develop strategic partnerships. We strive to be fully embedded in our customers' workflow and ecosystems. Partnerships will be important in some markets to deliver end-to-end solutions. And the third area of focus is enhancing our go-to-market capabilities. I'm making sure we are supporting sales teams with data, technology and the insights they need to capture revenue opportunities.

We all know AI is moving fast and will fundamentally change how professionals work. With the strength of our AI road maps and the early adoption and strong feedback we're receiving from customers, the team and I are confident that our GenAI and agentic solutions will be a driver to expand value for our customers and propel growth for Wolters Kluwer.

Now I know you have questions. So operator, if you could please move to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question we have comes from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

I've got 3 questions, please. So the first one, there was a recent study, I think it was posted last week to Archive showing that for some medical questions, particularly U.S. MLE style questions. generalist AI models were scoring higher for accuracy than specialist ones, OpenEvidence and UpToDate AI. That's what was tested. Can you maybe talk about how relevant those type of medical questions are for the world of point-of-care decision-making? And is it concerning that those generalist models scored a bit higher in that one study?

My second question, DynaMed had Dyna AI out there, I guess, a year ago or year, sorry, before UpToDate AI. How was it that they were able to get an AI offering out there that much earlier with a fairly similar type of offering?

And my third question, what is Harvey doing in tax that you can see can may be a threat to some of your plans on workflow? Is that something that's on your competitive horizon?

Yes. Just to interject here. For that first question, I think it will be useful if Julie, Alex and Greg comment on this, Julie, I think you're very close to our own testing. So if you could perhaps kick off with that one, and then I will come back with the other 2.

Sure, Meg. Happy to take a first part of this. I think we're going to see lots and lots of different tests come out. I think what I would really start with is we have a number of internal tests that we do consistently, they're already tuned from the point of care. That's where we're focused. And we see that we consistently outperform both the Frontier models as well as ones tuned for medical use cases.

And I would also say that we do still consistently see hallucinations and other things that are unacceptable when clinicians need the right answer at the point of care. Alex, anything you wanted to add?

Yes. I might add, I've read the study, it's interesting. I think the study even itself alludes to the fact that many of these generalist models have been trained on U.S. MLE and other benchmark test sets as well as having model alignment perform using the same data sets. So there could be some potential for bias there that they're more focused on the factoid-type questions and not necessarily what we look at in terms of clinical decision support.

The other finding is that they're introducing potential model knowledge, which, while it could potentially add more context, more clinical context, which could be important, you run the risk of hallucinations, I think that's a key difference.

And just to close off, just to remind everybody, we were built for point of care and going back to our value. We've integrated and spent years harmonizing our diagnosis, treatment and drug information with our patient education and being designed for point of care with that precision and accuracy is critical for our solutions.

On the DynaMed AI question, perhaps, Greg, you could start off with that one and maybe Alex also on the speed of our development.

Yes, just go back to our journey. So we started 2 years ago. We worked very close with our customers in our first AI interface. And at that stage, it was too early. For the enterprise level and the standard of UpToDate, over the last 2 years, we've worked with those customers to design a clinically -- clinical grade, high-quality result. And over those 2 years, we believe today is the right time and at the right level of quality to deliver to those customers. So while maybe others would come out earlier, UpToDate has set the bar for the standard for clinical decision support. And so over that time, we worked with our customers to deliver a solution that meets the UpToDate standard. And so that's the driver for our timing.

Yes. And I might just add that we codeveloped, as Greg mentioned, with our enterprise customers in very high stakes environments, built for day 1 for scale, safety and an emphasis on privacy and security, making us the first truly enterprise GenAI solution for clinical decision support in the market.

And maybe 1 more comment on that. At the enterprise level, as you know, it's very important to demonstrate transparency and trust. And UpToDate Expert AI, which you saw from Julie, demonstrates that. So that was a key addition for our launch.

And then on the question about what is Harvey doing in tax accounting, perhaps, Jason, you can comment on that.

I can take that. Thanks for the question, Meg. So CCH Axcess has strong and a durable competitive advantage that creates barriers to entry for competitors. So we have a deep domain knowledge, close relationships with our customers, proprietary data. And importantly, because it's a cloud-native platform, we're contextually aware of the client circumstances. So we can -- as Cathy showed you, we can connect what's happening with an AI and Expert AI solution like client collaboration with the unique circumstances of each individual clients that the CPA is working for. And it's only because we have that cloud-native, agentic-ready workflow that we're able to do that around the core of the 16 modules with deep integration around that product suite.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question from the phone lines comes from George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

I've got a few questions. Firstly, maybe just on the process with regards to enterprise customers on UpToDate onboarding to Expert AI. What's the type of governance checks you see them going through to onboard the solution in terms of those kind of 30 of the top 100? And how do you think about maybe the steps that the other enterprise costs would maybe need to go to?

Second question, more of a kind of a midterm road map. When we talk about UpToDate, we're still talking a lot about the content and how you can build out the kind of suite of solutions around the content. But on maybe some more tangential areas like AI scribes, you've chosen to partner rather than build native capabilities. Do you want to play on a broader clinician workflow, which we're seeing maybe other players try to go after? Or are you taking more of a kind of UpToDate content everywhere type of approach?

And then just a final question. On the Enterprise Edition, you've talked about the AI functionality being part of the annual price increase. How do you see the ability to capture back the potential cost of serving from an LLM perspective, obviously, as the cost of doing those queries.

So I think quite a few of those are for you, Greg. So if you could talk about the process that you go through, the governance and security checks, and then the partnerships with the scribes, et cetera.

Yes, that would be great. I'll start and then Julie jump in as well. The government's process, yes so we worked very closely with our enterprise customers. What we find is very important, as I mentioned before, the transparency and understanding exactly where the answers are coming from. So black box solutions are very tough for them. If you look at the demonstration, we showed sort of each step of our reasoning model and knowing that the information is coming from a trusted source was really important for them. We're working hand in hand and different institutions are at different levels of maturity. So continuing to work with them to drive the adoption of UpToDate AI has been a big part of our focus, and Julie's team has been spending a lot of time there.

Let me cover the second one, and then Julie kind of fill in the gaps from there as well. Your question on sort of how we're working with AI scribes. And as you probably saw, we have several announcements, partnerships with AI scribes. We think it's important to integrate deeply in the workflow, and we're going to continue to drive greater value by working with those AI scribes and other emerging workflows as well as with EMR players. So our goal is, as I announced -- as I mentioned in our presentation, is getting the right information to the right clinician at the right time in the right format. We're about driving greater ROI. And I would go back to that statistic I had in my presentation where roughly 30% of the time a clinician uses UpToDate, they change their decision. They follow a treatment plan. That's real ROI to institutions.

So the more we can embed that reduce the friction of clinicians getting to that answer, there's real productivity value in that speed to answer. And then if you think about downstream changing decisions, that has real impact on hospital outcomes, length of stay, and those are examples. So driving clinical decision, lowering friction, driving it deeper into the workflow to drive downstream outcomes, that's where we're going. And those are -- those scribe announcements and partnerships we have are good examples of that strategy. But Julie jump in if I missed anything.

Yes, sure. I would just add one insight on the governance process with our customers. It is a fairly nascent kind of muscle in health systems, but also critically, critically important. And so what has been a big effort on our part, but very important, has been collaboration. We've really taken a consultative approach to help organizations think about trust and safety and compliance in the context of launching an AI tool widely across all employees -- clinical employees in the health system, and it has yielded fantastic results. And I consider -- I think it will continue to be consultative in nature as the market matures on the health systems side.

And then on the question about the pricing and monetization of UpToDate Enterprise Expert AI, the question, George was asking about how we -- with the decision to roll that into normal price increase, maybe Stacey, you can address that and also comment on how the costs -- the variable costs might be driven by usage of some of these tools? If you could start with that, and maybe, Alex, you can supplement on how we keep control of these costs?

Yes, sure. As I mentioned earlier, when we have these enterprise kind of platform product lines, we typically tend to price based on value. So we have subscription-based pricing, and with UpToDate expert AI, we are folding the Expert AI version into the overall offering. And as Greg described, this is a full platform where customers as they move to the enterprise addition, they tend to also purchase the additional modules, including the drug information and patient education information. And so it really becomes a very negotiated price based on those factors, what upselling they might be doing along with the number of sites they have and the number of practitioners.

So every year, we go through and really look at the productivity that our customers are getting from our solutions, particularly when they expand their reach of the offerings, and we price accordingly based on that value. And then, Greg, I don't know if you want to talk about the specifics, but again, that's the approach for how we make sure we are monetizing the value that we're delivering to our customers, and that's the case with that UpToDate Expert AI as well.

That's good. And I can add a little context on just the cost, if that be appropriate?

I think so because I also have some e-mailed questions about how we control the variable costs.

Absolutely, yes. So costs are variable and depending on the complexity of the workflow, I think Greg alluded to, you're talking about multiple LLM models and the UpToDate Expert AI, 30-plus agents and potentially hundreds of interactions, right? So this is quite complex. So first of all, we work with our scale -- our hyperscaler partners to select the right models to help manage costs. But more importantly, we've made the investments and sort of our enterprise-grade offerings, our micro services, our API, our cloud-first strategy that really allow us to focus on the information that we need at that point of care. Rather than overwhelming the models with a whole bunch of information we can carefully select the right information that we need and that dramatically lowers the token cost and it improves the speed. So those are a few ways that we're managing it.

And as I mentioned earlier, if we find that the productivity and the use of the AI solutions increases, we do have experience in doing hybrid models, where there could be tiering of use levels for these enterprises to ensure that we capture value and are -- have the appropriate levels of use accommodated in our pricing.

Greg, you may want to also comment on UpToDate Pro because I think it's illustrative of how we price to -- we differentiate pricing depending on the segment of the market and what we're trying to accomplish, whether it's penetration for more scale or value capture. I think that's a good example.

Okay. The one example is around UpToDate Pro+, which was a unique package that we launched only a few weeks ago in the marketplace. And it's a combination of UpToDate Expert AI, so the technology advantage of an AI interface plus some value-added content. And we're finding a really nice uptake on that package. We're finding about 1/3 of our renewals are choosing to upgrade with a 20% increase to that package. And we're still early stages right now, but it's a really nice indication of we are working with customers put together a package that provides value that we can see that in the marketplace and grow the business based on that value.

Okay. I have a couple of questions coming through the website. George, if you've mostly covered your questions?

I mean I don't want to dominate. I just one final one. I mean we talk a lot about the shift towards conversational AI as a search mechanism. I'm guessing there will still be a decent airless search queries or the way that people want to interact with the tool is the more traditional way of chaptering and looking through topics. I mean to what extent do you see that as a pretty fat tail in terms of still existing in a few years' time or at least a competitive differentiator as well?

Yes. No, what I would say, and then, Greg, feel free and Stacey to chime in. But at the end, sort of one of the core endurable strengths of Wolters Kluwer is the proprietary data. So even as customers may want still that conversational and this is true not just in health, but in legal tax and the other verticals, they always want to be able to go back to the substantial content and data that can validate what decisions they want to make. And I think, as Greg mentioned before, this notion of traceability and being able to audit how they came to a conclusion is very, very important. These are high-stake decisions that they have to get right. And so yes, I do think customers want the natural language. They want that conversational, but at the end of it, they also need the combination with a substantial validation of what they're doing.

And I would say that more and more it's sort of the customers are doing the research, they want productivity and how they get to the right insights and answers. But with our AI and agentic capabilities and the fact that we're integrated into their workflows the agentic tools, allow us to move into productivity tools around improving outcomes. So it's really -- we believe this -- this is a part of the workflow and the conversational interfaces, as Nancy says, with these -- with the backstop of the trusted, ability to trace, particularly in the professions we serve is so critical, but then also tying into the workflow to be able to deliver the results faster. You certainly saw that in the collaborator example that Cathy showed in Julie's demo as well. So it's really the value of the entire solution, George.

Great. So can I pose some questions I'm getting from the webcast. I'm wondering if both Jason and Greg could comment on how renewal rates have been trending this year? And secondly, can they just comment on why can't start-up just hire experts and replicate what both of you do? So that's -- so if you could comment on that. And then I have another question after that from the web.

Starting with Jason.

So our -- as a market leader, we've got a deep relationship with our customers, and our renewal rates are very sticky. In fact, we see improvement as more customers choose cloud-based solutions. Retention rates have generally been in the mid-90s. We're seeing consistent uptick in cross-sell and upsell as customers move into the cloud. And because it's a cloud-native platform and connected around what we showed is that wheel, it becomes very simple for customers to take the next module. So if they start with tax, they can move to document or practice management or any of the other Expert AI like client collaboration, which all work together around the core of that core platform.

You want to do renewals, first. So we continue to see very strong renewals. As we -- as I said in my presentation, north of 90%, that's been consistent over the years. And as we look into next year, we see strong renewals in the future. It's really based on our value that we described before. Having that integrated solution of diagnosis treatment, drug information and education material all into one platform with our embedded nature into our AI solutions and into the ambient scribes, that full value wield is really resonating, and that's helping to continue to lock in renewals and provide growth going forward.

If you want to switch to the other question, Meg, I can pick that up and then hand back to Jason. As we mentioned before, our editorial process has been developed over 30 years. It's really rigorous. And while the slide showed the headlines, below that is a very, very well matured process that allows us to have the level of clinical quality that we deliver in the marketplace. And it's leveraging those experts in each of their medical specialties, but also the processes that we've delivered and developed over the years to curate that content and so we come out with the absolute gold standard for clinical decision support.

And now with the 2 extra layers of clinical reasoning on top and validation levels, it's even the deeper moat that we built. The technology is one element, but bringing in our clinical experts to help develop those different stages of expert in the loop is really, really a differentiator.

Yes. Like one of the things that maybe Stacey, you can elaborate that I think it's so powerful is if you think about your own visits to your doctors, they're spending that visit in the EHR, right? They're literally looking at that screen, and we are deeply, deeply embedded in that. And everything that Greg described is that we're extending that integration across the hospital enterprise, and that's really, again, supports the renewals. And you can see that through the 9 months, our recurring revenue is up 7%, which I think speaks to the strength of the renewals and the new sales of subscriptions across the enterprise.

Absolutely. We see that, Nancy, just to kind of elongate that point when it's the clinician along with the care team, right? So it's a full integration across the workflow of those care teams in order to deliver deeply embedded within the workflow and across the care team. So really supports that important tie-in and delivers really solid productivity gains in addition to the best high stakes -- the answers that serve them well in this high stakes diagnosing world.

If I can just pile on that point and then maybe ask Cathy or Jason to elaborate. I think not only are the experts that we have again across the company so critical to ensuring that trust and accuracy and efficiency in search, which Alex talked about from a cost perspective. But the second thing is that we have this very, very deep knowledge of customer workflow down at sort of what I would call the micro task level. And as you think about in agentic technology, which is really at the cornerstone of Stacey's strategy going forward, that leverages not only all the investments we've made in cloud, but that deep knowledge. And I think that, that is where you're again, going to again see not only more growth across the customer base in terms of the tools that they adopt, but also this productivity benefit that I think the market is highly, highly focused on. So Jason, I don't know if you or Cathy want to just give an example of how we're leveraging the agentic within tax and accounting.

I can start and then Cathy can add on. But it goes back to where Greg was talking about it. Similarly in tax and accounting, we have decades of regulatory interpretation that are codified in the layered cross jurisdictional logic that is used to build the proprietary content. And what's really critical is because all of this unified data is in a core platform like CCH Axcess, it is client aware. So that is very unique in the way that we're able to deliver information that is connected to the specific compliance and what client collaboration, what Cathy showed, is how that comes to life in an agentic workflow, where you can take the interpretation of proprietary content, match it with the specific unique needs of each individual, unique client and serve that up. And we can do that over and over at scale for each individual need, for each individual client.

Yes. Just to also build on that. The unique position that we have is that we have an open integration cloud platform that supports end-to-end, whether it's through capturing that data. And then as Nancy was saying, we really have decompose those customer workflows across whether it's audit or tax workflows, which have APIs available throughout the entire workflows to enable the agentic workflows. Just recently, we launched at our user conference, many different agentic solutions to enable you to capture data, understand that data, whether it's structured, unstructured and to be able to then flow it into the tax return as an example, even agents for audit as well to really help you interact with the documents and help you understand what you need to consider as you're doing the audit.

And that's only possible because we had that deep understanding of the customer workflows with the APIs across our entire ecosystem.

And I would add that because of the investments we've made into our cloud solutions that whole process that you just described, Cathy, for your customers is a very -- it's a superior user experience because it is seamless. And it really speaks to the integration that makes it easier for us to launch, but also seamless experience for our customers.

And also seamless for our customers' clients, which is also very key.

I've got another question from the web here. This is for you, Greg, and Julie, if you want to add on to it. So it's really about how are you able to increase prices for UpToDate Pro Plus or UpToDate Enterprise Expert AI when you've got a competitor who's offering a product for free and advertising funded so can you describe the dynamic there and what you hear from your customers about ad-funded options?

Well, let me start with price first and then jump in Julie as well. And we can talk about the 1 example that I mentioned before, which is UpToDate Pro Plus. I think it's a very good example where we're hearing from our clinicians, our users that they really are valuing not only the AI experience, but the bundle that we put together. And the positive feedback -- when we were developing the product to help drive that package itself. So we're hearing positive feedback on the trusted content that it's trained on is really important. And so this is a high-stakes environment where the risk of a hallucination is just something that they really can't accept. And so the fact that we put the same AI interface speed to answer, but it's trained on trusted content that they've used for years is a real differentiator.

And then, as Julie mentioned, as you saw in the demo, there's aspects that are really important to clinicians. So understanding the assumptions, understanding that this treatment plan is for a pediatric case, not an adult case. And all the other considerations when you're delivering care, it's very unique. Our deep domain expertise allows us to deliver that.

Those are differentiators. And in the high stakes market, there's high value to that. And we've seen that now in UpToDate Pros Plus and the uptake of 20%. But Julie, maybe you want to comment more on what we're hearing from customers and sort of our ability to deliver.

Yes, I would just add 1 -- maybe 1 nugget on the enterprise side, and that is, our health systems are looking for an enterprise-grade partner. That's what we hear time and time again. Whether that is being able to support them on the governance process and the checks and balances, whether that's the customer success teams that come in and train and teach clinicians how to use AI, whether it is the ability to work with administrators on ensuring that any tool they use does not contribute to deskilling of clinicians, whether it is the security and validation we put around it, ultimately, those things together make us an enterprise-grade vendor, which is truly what they're looking for.

Maybe Julie, you can just talk -- sorry, Stacey, maybe you could also about...

While Julie was talking about the enterprise, I would just add in, we have long competed against lower cost solutions going into the enterprise. And to all the points that Julie and Greg raised, even during COVID, when budgets were very tight, we have been successful maintaining strong renewals, strong upsells. So this is kind of standard practice for us and all of the -- for all the reasons that Julie and Greg described, we continue to be very successful.

And maybe, Julie, you could yes, just talk about the advertising risk there because Meg specifically asked about that.

So as you know, 80% of our business is at the enterprise level. And so an advertising model at the enterprise level is just -- it doesn't really work. And the other thing I would say is, our customers, a lot of them, use UpToDate and receive CME credits. And so an advertising model, it's more complicated with that model. And they want to be sure that they can get ACCME accreditation through a subscription-based business.

Great. I've got 2 final questions from the web and then I think we can call it to an end. So I'll pose them both and maybe Stacey and Greg can comment on these 2 questions. One is just general, what is happening with usage in UpToDate, and perhaps also generally with information solutions? How -- what are the trends and where do you see that going in the future? And secondly, could you talk a bit more about your partnership with what we're doing with Microsoft, Microsoft Dragon CoPilot? What should we think about with that particular partnership?

If you want to Stacey, I could take the usage and then Julie might start the Microsoft and then hand it over to you to go in depth there. And so for usage, we know that our users are experimenting with new LLMs and MLMs, and that's expected. One thing for UpToDate is, early on, even before LLMs really kicked in, we designed UpToDate to provide greater efficiency for our clinicians. We expected usage to be impacted by that. So we designed clinical summaries and key points panels that will get our clinicians to the answers faster. So the usage impact is not a surprise to us because even before LLMs kicked in, we saw our users becoming more efficient, and we see that as a move from volume to value. They're getting more value out of it. It's a productivity tool to get them to the right answer faster. And as UpToDate Expert AI penetrates more and more, that trend is going to continue.

So what we're looking at is how we can deliver real ROI downstream and real productivity gains. And as we're more integrated, we reduce that friction from when a clinician wants to get to an answer to that answer itself deeply embedded in workflow through UpToDate Expert AI, we're going to continue to add more value for our customers and especially at an enterprise level, where we're more deeply integrated at the enterprise level and that's going to continue to drive our growth going forward.

On the Microsoft side, we've been -- we've had a long-term relationship with Microsoft. It's been a very productive one. We're seeing some really good experiments with them over the years. And our collaboration with Microsoft is really going to help drive that strategy of being more deeply embedded in the workflow and providing greater outcomes to customers. Julie has been right in the mix on this so may give her an opportunity to kind of chime in on where we are with that relationship. But it's a trusted relationship that we're really looking forward to the impact.

Sure. I can give some more color on the use case and the use cases that we're working on, we're working very closely with the Dragon CoPilot team as well as with joint customers, and we have a large base of joint customers to source kind of their priority needs. As customers are investing and have been investing significantly in Ambient, they're asking us to ensure that their gold standard of clinical decision support can be truly incorporated into that kind of new priority workflow. So that's been our focus.

One of the things that's really, really exciting about the partnership is the ability to provide what I would call context aware guidance. And so what you have is you have this new, highly valued workflow, the Ambient workflow, what it also includes is information specifically about that patient, the patient encounter, you marry that up with the gold standard decision support, and you can drive meaningful impact in care. So that's really where we're focused. And just from a customer perspective, we have a number of customers lined up in terms of being our sort of our Alpha group there and lots of excitement about the opportunities to sum up.

Great. Thank you. Operator, are there any more questions on the call?

There are no further questions on the phone line. So I would like to hand it back to your host for some final comments.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. All very good questions. I hope we answered some of your AI questions. And if you've got further ones, feel free to reach out to us, and we will try and help you out. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you for joining. I can confirm that does conclude today's webcast and conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect, and please enjoy the rest of your day.