Marlowe plc (MRL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, folks, and welcome to the Marlowe Plc Capital Markets Day 2022. It's been a highly successful year for the group since we set out our vision to become the leader in business-critical services and software, which assure the safety and regulatory compliance at our last Capital Markets Day in February '21. At that event, Alex and the team set out a new 3-year strategy to achieve this vision, whilst doubling group revenues to about GBP 500 million and almost tripling group adjusted EBITDA to GBP 100 million with a 20% margin. We said that we would target software annual recurring revenue of at least 10% of overall group revenues. And you'll hear today how our deepened, broadened, strengthened and digitalized plan is delivering this compliance vision at pace. Run rate revenues have grown by around 65% to north of GBP 400 million and profits by over 90% to over GBP 72 million in the 14 months since that event, thanks to the consistent, disciplined execution of the Marlowe model. Underlying organic growth has now reached 8%. Acquisitions are compounding our growth and being successfully integrated into our platform. And you will hear today how the group is now delivering across the range of our clients' regulatory compliance needs. This clarity of purpose around the central theme of regulation is driving our strategy that is now being delivered by around 4,500 Marlowe team members. We thank them for their skills and commitment through this period. As our group has continued to swiftly scale throughout the year, our Board and governance has evolved too. We've recently welcomed 2 new independent non-executive directors, Rachel Addison, and Gillian Kent, who bring highly relevant digital and growth-focused public company experience from organizations such as Future Plc and Microsoft. They've taken on the chair of audit and remuneration respectively. I'm confident that we'll bring to bear their experience in our next phase of growth. The team have decided to use today's event to home in on the group's governance, risk and compliance division, which is core to our compliance vision and continues to demonstrate fast and sustainable growth. The GRC division focused on compliance, software and consultancy has transformed over the past few years, and now accounts for around 60% of group profits, along with strategic and financial updates from Alex and Adam, we'll hear from some of the key leaders across GRC. We will hear from Gavin and the WorkNest team, talking through the very successful integration of our HR, employment law and safety operations and their strategy for growth. From Simon, CEO of Optima on our occupational health strategy. Peter, our Group Chief Technology Officer, will take you through our tech strategy and introduce you to Teresa from Barbour; Josh in the VinciWorks team and Rich from our Core Stream platform to showcase 3 of our key compliance software business streams. We will demonstrate how our SaaS platforms are providing an end-to-end solution to our clients' compliance strategies. You'll hear about the positive market backdrop that the group enjoys. We are focused across resilient sectors, which are undergoing attractive, long-term and non-cyclical growth in areas such as safety, health and well-being, which continue to take on greater prominence across the business environment. It remains a source of great satisfaction for the whole Marlowe team that alongside the growth and returns that we're able to generate for our shareholders, our group plays its part in making a positive impact on organizations that our strategy, services and software is so closely aligned to the important ESG themes that support our clients in achieving a sustainable future. Today's event is scheduled to take around a couple of hours, during which there will be the opportunity to ask questions, which will be answered at the end of the presentations, along with analysts Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So without further ado, I'll pass you over to Alex and the team. Thank you. [Presentation]

Good morning. As we've just seen, Marlowe's vision is to be the leader in services and software, which assure regulatory compliance. We deliver a one-stop approach to our clients' compliance needs from content, intelligence and consultancy through to software and assurance services. Via software, we provide regulatory data, information and practical guidance that enables key compliance decision makers to assess the regulations that are applicable to their organizations. This is our compliance intelligence capability. Our consultants and auditors then provide the advisory services our clients depend on to help them to apply these regulations to their organizations. This is our compliance consulting capability. And then our software applications help to monitor and control all sorts of risks. This is our compliance software capability. And then we deliver field-based compliance to test and inspect your business premises across areas like fire safety and water hygiene, this is our compliance assurance capability. Marlowe has become a broad compliance platform addressing the full cycle of risk, a proposition we deliver across 50,000 clients operating in all key B2B sectors. Whether by delivering innovative e-learning in the latest compliance standards providing regulatory intelligence or GRC software advice on an employee dispute, auditing health and safety standards or by certifying fire safety compliance, all of our activities, whether service or software are bound by the same mission of assuring business-critical compliance. And this cycle is not just strategically coherent, but financially compelling, too. Over 85% of our revenues are recurring and our clients take our intelligence, consulting, software and assurance services via long-term contracts as recurring services or subscriptions, resulting in very strong earnings visibility. And whilst our sectors and model are defensive, we're achieving fast-paced growth. EPS grew 50% in the first half. Operating profits were up 122%, market expectations for FY '22, see revenue growth of 61%, EBITDA growth of 83% and EPS growth of 47%. And since 2016, our first year as a listed business, our earnings per share has grown at a compound rate of around 30% year after year. Nearly everything we do for our clients is underpinned or necessitated by regulation, whether it's 1 of our 300 health and safety consultants conducting an audit to keep you compliant with Health and Safety at Work Act. One of our 100 or so employment lawyers advising you on the Employment Rights Act. Our 700 clinical professionals assessing your employees on occupational health, and e-learning course we've designed to keep you compliant with the financial regulation and annual lead, another test conducted by 1 of our 800 water compliance specialists. A risk management platform developed by our 120 software developers to help you comply with governance regulations like U.K. stocks, everything we do has a corresponding regulation. Our customers place great reliance in our software and services. The defensive nature of our markets became clear during COVID with clients requiring our services and software throughout. And across our business lines, we enjoy a similar channel to market. We sell our services to individuals such as health and safety directors, compliance officers, HR or facilities managers. These are the individuals who are responsible for compliance and safety in the workplace. Our 6 business lines operate autonomously, but they're all bound by this common channel to market, which results in strong synergy. We understand what our clients care about, and we can apply similar ideas and operational methodologies across our group. And we benefit from the major competitive advantage of being able to cross-sell across these lines, accelerating growth and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. To pick a few examples, we often sell health and safety alongside employment law. HR consultancy is often delivered with occupational health or e-learning. Health and safety software sold with contract to compliance software, water hygiene with biosafety. This is the power of being an end-to-end provider of compliance. The markets that we operate in are highly attractive and increasingly relevant. We are well positioned to benefit from the ever-increasing needs of organizations for compliance. We're keeping clients for longer by broadening our service offering, delivering superior service levels and investing in our software product road map. Our services and software are largely non-discretionary as a result of their business-critical requirements. And as we've just seen, thanks to the regulation that underpins them. Every one of our markets is experiencing structural growth. Regulations are not just complex, they're ever evolving. For instance, the employment bill currently passing through parliament will be a major source of regulatory change. Five years ago, fees to bring tribunal claims were abolished. These changes on top of an already litigious landscape have seen claims rise 30% annually for the last 5 years. This constant regulatory churn increases the need for our services. Insurance requirements often dictate the need, the digitalization of compliance, as we'll hear later this morning, is accelerating growth across our markets. And our clients' budgets continue to grow at attractive rates because of the heightened focus on the environmental, social and governance issues inherent in business. The risks and costs of not implementing compliance significantly outweigh the cost of implementing it. The areas that we address are becoming more and more important in the eyes of our clients. And our end-to-end compliance model is bringing the market to us. If you're a Compliance Director responsible to many different areas of risk, it makes sense to have a single group addressing your requirements. It's easier having a centralized provider to ensure consistency. And it is all of these factors that are contributing to our accelerating organic growth and the growth of our addressable markets. As of today, we conservatively estimate our addressable market to be around GBP 8.4 billion with attractive growth rates of between 3% and 10%. As we broadened our offer into new compliance areas, the size of the market opportunities increased. Our strategy to achieve our compliance vision is well established. We're executing on the vision via our plan to deepen, broaden, strengthen and digitalize the group, and we've delivered major progress. Deepen is all about deepening our presence across our current markets, which are all fragmented both organically and through further M&A to consolidate this GBP 8 billion addressable market, of which we've only GBP 400 million. Then we plan to continue broadening our capabilities and coverage across the compliance landscape, seizing the wider opportunity and expanding our coverage into new areas. Digitalize is focused on building the market leader in compliance and EHS software, responding to our customers' demand for digital solutions. And finally, probably the key strength, strengthen is about ensuring that we're building world-class businesses, driving integration programs to realize synergies, driving organic growth and expanding our margins ensuring that Marlowe is a platform that enhances businesses upon it. The execution of this strategy has resulted in major progress against our ambitious financial targets well ahead of schedule. At our last CMD, just over a year ago, we set out financial targets to roughly double revenues and nearly triple profits from GBP 37 million to GBP 100 million by the end of FY '24. In just over a year, we are nearly 60% of the way towards achieving these targets. As of today, run rate EBITDA is around GBP 72 million, nearly double the figure it was at last year's CMD. Our group now has revenues of over GBP 400 million. That compares to GBP 245 million last February. The progress that we've made underpins our confidence that we will now materially overachieve against these original targets. We were generating maybe 3% of our revenue from SaaS when we set these targets, and we said we aspire towards achieving 10%. We are already at 9%. Our software revenues are growing organically at over 20% a year. And when we consider further planned M&A, will materially exceed this 10% target. Last February, our divisional margin was 16%. Today, it's 19%, just shy of the 20% medium-term target. In around a year, it's expanded by over 300 basis points. That's thanks to significant operational improvements and integration synergies, the operational gearing we benefit from, the fast growth of our high-margin software and GRC activity enhanced route density and other economies of scale and the attractive financial profile of acquisitions we completed in the year. Once we've hit the 20% target, we plan to go much further and the financial characteristics of our sectors make this very possible. The cash we generate as a business provides resources to reinvest into compounding our organic growth via M&A. Our activities are highly cash generative with attractive working capital profiles. Working capital is around 5% of revenues. We targeted to achieve over 90% cash conversion. That's a figure that we've consistently exceeded since [Audio Gap] Our compliance strategy has developed significantly. We now deliver services and software across our divisions, GRC and TIC, which help our clients to stay in control and in compliance with the constantly evolving regulatory issues and operational risks that they face. We've delivered 8% organic growth, 100 basis points higher than the prior year. We expect this growth to continue accelerating as we deliver better service and keep clients for longer upsell and cross-sell across our business lines and benefit from attractive market growth. All of our markets are fragmented, offering significant scope for consolidation, and we've had a transformative year on the M&A front. Our M&A is delivering on the significant roll-up opportunity in our existing markets, deepening, as well as identifying complementary adjacent markets broadening. We've deployed GBP 318 million on 23 earnings-enhancing acquisitions since February '21. You'll hear from the leadership of a number of these acquisitions during today's event. Key ones have included, the GBP 135 million acquisition of Optima Health, making us the clear leader in the corporate health and well-being sector. The GBP 50 million acquisition of VinciWorks, building our leading compliance e-learning and GRC software offer. The GBP 32 million carve-out acquisition of Barbour from Informa Plc broadening our activities into the compliance intelligence space. The GBP 25 million acquisition of EssentialSkillz building further in compliance e-learning. The GBP 20 million acquisition of Core Stream, the enterprise risk management software provider, and the GBP 30 million acquisition of Hydro-X, further consolidating our leading position in water and air compliance. Alongside these major deals, we've continued to execute our bolt-on M&A strategy at pace. Bolt-ons like ESP HR have helped to develop our Employment Law and HR offer into the mid-market. We can bring deals like this into the group on attractive valuations of around 5 to 6x. Deals like the GBP 7 million acquisition of ACL or the GBP 4.5 million acquisition of Santia have continued to scale our TIC activities, adding around GBP 20 million of revenues and offering further synergies to extract. An acquisition will continue to be a major tool that we'll use to add depth and breadth to our platform. All our markets are fragmented and offer major scope for consolidation with our current market share only between 5% and 10% of each. Following our recent debt refinancing, and as a result of the cash generative nature of our operations, our balance sheet is in a strong position to take advantage of this opportunity. With the resources that we have available to us, we believe we can add around GBP 15 million EBITDA to the group over the next 12 months. And we're now able to fund our bolt-on acquisitions via the cash that we generate rather than relying on the equity markets. Acquisition is a tool that we use to broaden our capabilities and alongside the major Barbour and Core Stream deals, broadening our compliance intelligence and our GRC software offer smaller bolt-ons like CQC have broadened our activities into care quality compliance. Cylix back in May was our first step into the diversity and inclusion e-learning market, which we bolstered with the more recent Skill Boosters deal. Digital is where there's been such significant progress. We've executed 7 software deals since February 21. Just over 20% of group profit now comes from software. Our compliance software platforms are used by clients to implement governance frameworks and to manage, monitor, audit and control risk and compliance and performance throughout their organizations. We built a leading position in the highly attractive e-learning compliance market, which is a vital part of the compliance journey, enabling our clients to train their staff via our software in essential regulatory fields or workplace standards in areas such as health and safety, code of conduct or GDPR. As we've scaled, our investments in our product road map has increased, and we've -- the in-house expertise to bring our own SaaS products to market organically. This year, we launched Prosure360, a supplier verification tool, which allows our clients to vet and qualify their supply chain compliance. And not only are these platforms growing at a fast rate, but they benefit from highly attractive investment characteristics. We're able to add additional users with a low incremental cost to deliver, which leads to margin expansion. Revenues are locked into long-term subscriptions, and we achieved net retention rates comfortably over 100%. And we find that clients, who take both software and service from our group, achieve much higher standards of compliance. So software supports our service strategy, too. And we've continued to drive our integration programs with intensity, delivering on the strengthened strategy. The clearest indicator of this progress is the major EBITDA margin expansion to 19% that I alluded to earlier. The playbook of operational improvements that we implement to enhance acquired businesses is now well rehearsed. WorkNest, as we'll hear later is a clear example of this strategy in action. This part of the group has integrated 10 acquisitions into what was the Ellis Whittam platform before rebranding as WorkNest in October. We're now leveraging WorkNest's, highly tuned in sales and marketing machine to accelerate organic growth across the operation, selling additional products such as e-learning, HR or safety software across the client base. We'll hear later on from Rory, WorkNest's Marketing Director on how we achieve this. In a minute, we'll hear from Adam, our CFO, on the organic picture, which shows that whilst we scale and fulfill our ambitious compliance vision, we're making strides in improving the underlying business with accelerating organic growth and attractive financial metrics. But beforehand, we'll hear from Teresa, the Managing Director of Barbour, who will showcase the initial part of our compliance cycle intelligence. Barbour delivers our clients access to regulatory compliance data, advice and insights on a subscription basis via software. We acquired the platform from Informa Plc in August following our initial approach a few months earlier. Since the successful carve-out of the business, Barbour's integrated into our GRC division, trading is well ahead of expectations. And we're now working on various strategic initiatives to integrate the product into our software environment. We're adding new functionality, and we're ensuring that we're selling Barbour across our client base, providing Marlowe clients with the intelligence that they need to succeed in these complex regulatory fields.

Good morning. I'm Teresa Higgins, Managing Director of Barbour EHS. It's a pleasure to introduce Barbour as Marlowe's environmental health and safety information provider. Barbour is actually the oldest and best known provider of specialist information. We date back to 1957, when we were first known as the Barbour Index. We've come a long way since then, and today, Barbour has evolved into a cloud-based SaaS subscription solution. We digest the latest in government regulatory data and information. We help businesses understand what legislation applies to them and how to stay compliant with those regulations. We do this in areas such as health and safety, occupational health, sustainability, ESG and fire safety. Barbour provides this essential business information to a range of customers, large and small, in order to ensure the most critical regulations are complied with. This reduces customer business risk and improved safety in the working environment. Our clients are typically health and safety directors, compliance officers, facility directors or an individual within an organization, who is responsible for managing compliance and applying the relevant standards and regulations. Due to our SaaS model [indiscernible] has been able to scale very profitably. We generated GBP 7 million of ARR from over 1,100 customers and achieved an EBITDA margin of over 50%. Our customers consider Barbour a premium, non-discretionary, product essential to understanding the law. We are growing organically at over 10% a year with very low customer churn. Cash conversion is around 100%. Our future revenues are contracted and secure and highly visible because of their subscription nature. At the start of the year, we know with a high degree of accuracy when 90% of our revenues for that year are coming from. And as we add additional subscriptions, we have been able to expand our margins. as there is only a limited cost to each additional client who use the platform. We are a really compelling fit with the Marlowe's strategy. Marlowe is a one-stop shop for all things compliance. And with Barbour as part of the group, Marlowe can offer clients all the regulatory data, intelligence and content that they need to interpret the regulations that are relevant to them. They are our software platform. It's a vital part of the compliance journey. Equipped with this data and intelligence, clients can then work with other parts of the Marlowe Group to implement regulations that they have identified on our platform are required for their organization to remain compliant. This could be via compliance e-learning, software, testing and inspection, assurance or consultancy. Barbour is firstly, an online library of environmental health information. We store the very latest information from the health and safety executive, British standards, legislation, trade associations, with bespoke legal registers designed to help customers pick and choose which legislation is most relevant to their compliance requirements. These pre-populated, legal registers save customers the time creating their own. Barbour also provide a range of tools, enabling organizations to stay up to date with industry developments, new guidance, content and legislation. Customers particularly like our technical guides on key topics, which help our users feel like instant experts, offering fully editable templates and presentations. Key to our thought leadership in this space are our monthly webinars, and we produce a lot of content to help businesses navigate the complex landscape of legislation. Barbour EHS has been helping organizations to stay safe and compliant for over 60 years. We are the trusted brand in this space, cutting through the information overload and getting straight to what matters to our customers. Our modules are wide ranging. Our regulatory expertise covers real estate, environmental energy, fire and security, international, mental health and well-being. We have over 1,100 customers subscribing to Barbour. And our international service means that we are increasingly receiving traction from companies with overseas operations, who are seeking assistance on how foreign regulations apply to them. We sell our Barbour products on a mix of annual and 3-year subscriptions, benefiting from a high retention rate of over 90%. Barbour service adds value to customers by reducing the time organization spend, waiting through legislation sites and hiring consultants to translate legislation into real-world applicability. Barbour joined Marlowe from Informa Plc last summer, and we have been really delighted with our new home. Joining a company focused on compliance like Marlowe, we have become part of the family. Marlowe is full of regulatory expertise and people are genuinely passionate about reducing risk and increasing safety. As an organization, I think it's fair to say that Marlowe benefits from more compliance subject matter expertise than any other in the U.K. Since the acquisition, we have integrated into the GRC division, and begun a journey on significantly investing in growth. Some of the immediate benefits we've received from joining Marlowe was access to Marlowe's compliance e-learning content which allowed us to displace existing third-party providers. We have also moved on to a new CRM system to allow us to benefit from access to the wider customer ecosystem of the group. We've begun to focus on more organic initiatives to accelerate growth, investing in marketing and sales. We are planning to re-platform our content management system in the coming months and the group's digital expertise has been vital in mapping this out. But perhaps the most exciting part of the Marlowe environment is the speed at which we move and the speed at which we make decisions. Autonomy, short lines of communication and a real understanding of what makes compliant businesses work. We are really excited about the future. Being part of the Marlowe Group, we hope to leverage its wide compliance expertise and create new areas of legal registers, which focus on other core Marlowe markets like HR and employment law. Marlowe's acquisition expertise also gives us the opportunity of accelerated growth by bringing in other providers of regulatory business information. This is only going to add further momentum to organic growth. So Barbour is an essential part of the Marlowe compliance portfolio. In a complex world, more and more customers are going to need Barbour, and we feel lucky to be part of a stable compliance-focused business, which is providing customers with a end-to-end approach to compliance.

Thanks, Alex and Teresa. The following metrics show the group's underlying picture is strong. Today, organic growth is running 8%. As you can see, this is a major acceleration from the 4% we were generating in FY '18. This measure has been adjusted for an artificially low COVID comparator. The unadjusted figure was 15% for the first half. It's worth specifying exactly how we measure net growth. We undertake a completely like-for-like analysis on revenue growth to give investors the clearest picture of growth. We do this by taking the current year's revenue, including revenue generated in the year by acquired businesses. We then adjust the prior year revenue to include the revenue generated by the acquired businesses, as if we had known them during that period too. This enables investors to assess the organic growth of our entire business in today's form. To illustrate this, if we go out of the business halfway through our financial year it would include 6 months of revenue for the acquired business and compare it to the same 6 months in the prior year. So we really are seeing a like-for-like comparison between current years and prior years. And crucially, our both acquired businesses along with our core business are performing organically. That picture is positive and shows the steady improvement to today's 8% figure. The current performance reflects both the attractive structural growth rate of the GRC and TIC market in which we operate, but also operational improvements we make. The enhanced service levels we now achieve and the focus we apply to sales and marketing. Another key measure for the group is our proportion of recurring revenues. Recurring revenues are key to the Marlowe investment proposition. In percentage terms, this metric has increased from 80% to 85% from FY '18 to FY '21, as a result of both our M&A and organic efforts being focused on building this base. These revenues result in very strong visibility of our future revenues and a high quality of earnings. Continuing on our underlying progress, in line with our strategy and targets, divisional EBITDA margin has improved to 19% on a run rate basis. This is crucial. This is perhaps the clearest indicator of our ability to integrate businesses and create value through unlocking synergies and operational efficiencies, such as merging back-office functions, integrating service delivery, rolling out our tech platforms within acquired businesses, and benefiting from economies of scale, such as root density, which allow us to improve the efficiency and productivity of our fee earners. We are also benefiting from higher margins and faster growth of our GRC activities. And as those activities continue to scale, both organically and inorganically, we expect there to be an -- natural improvement in margins. Cash conversion is a key organic metric of operational performance and we aim to keep this above 90%, in line with our target. Our sectors are not capital intensive, and they benefit from favorable working capital dynamics. In the 18 months to September 2022, a time period that isn't affected by COVID tax deferrals, we delivered 96% cash conversion. We are confident that we will continue delivering these sorts of levels, which will provide significant resources to fund our ongoing growth strategy. On the last chart of the page, we have tried to illustrate how restructuring costs are reducing and that we are achieving attractive returns from investing and restructuring. The chart demonstrates restructuring costs as a percentage of capital deployed. Restructuring acquired businesses is an essential part of our integration programs and ensures that synergies and returns are maximized. These costs are clearly identified in our results to ensure there is clarity on the underlying trading performance of the business. Restructuring costs are directly driven by the level of M&A activity undertaken by the business and cover areas such as redundancy payments following headcount reduction in the acquired business. The cost to closing down sites will cost to implementing new IT platforms across acquired businesses. If we stopped acquiring businesses tomorrow, restructuring costs would entirely fall away over the next 12 months. In terms of performance against our key financial KPIs, the trend continues to be positive as we continue to scale our business. Total revenues have increased from GBP 129 million in FY '19 to the current rate of over GBP 400 million per annum. The momentum has increased significantly in the last 12 months, with over GBP 314 million of capital deployed acquiring annualized revenues of GBP 157 million. Our group adjusted EBITDA is increasing at a faster pace as we continue to expand our EBITDA margin. Annual adjusted EBITDA in FY '19 was GBP 11 million, and our current run rate of GBP 72 million reflects an over six-fold increase in under 4 years. This demonstrates the progress we've made in building out the strength and scale of the group. Analysts expect our adjusted earnings per share to reach 36.8p for the current financial year. This represents a 47% growth on last year and 26% compound annual growth rate since FY '18, reflecting the increased number of shares in issue resulting from equity raise to assist in executing the growth agenda. EBITDA over the same period has grown at a compound growth rate of 64%. Following the last placing in January 22, we now have significant firepower in our balance sheet, supported by our new debt facilities, which will deliver further earnings enhancing bolt-on M&A and continue to drive EPS. Thanks to the current scale and cash characteristics of the group, this cycle becomes self-fulfilling and we're able to fund a major portion of our future growth and the cash that we now generate.

Thanks, Adam. On a run rate basis, GRC now accounts for 40% of our revenues, about GBP 160 million and about 60% of our profits. It's been an area of major capital allocation focus in the past couple of years. Since the CMD last year, we've deployed GBP 271 million into 14 acquisitions with a particular focus on expanding our software offering. . Within TIC, where we've already achieved leading market positions, we've continued to steadily scale deploying GBP 47 million on 9 acquisitions, and we've done this whilst remaining financially disciplined, achieving an average 7.8x multiple before synergies. Post synergies, our return on invested capital is comfortably above our 15% target, and we're confident that we can continue achieving these valuations in the future. Our M&A capability is leading. Most of the deals we do are off-market, and we've refined and industrialized our process over the last 6 years. We are set up to pursue both large transformational opportunities like Optima or VinciWorks alongside bolt-ons or complex carve-outs that others aren't equipped to deal with like the Informa and Barbour deal. This leads to more attractive valuations. And we're proficient to sourcing targets, getting deals done, efficiently executing their integration programs. Our pipeline of M&A remains buoyant with around GBP 5 million to GBP 10 million of EBITDA in our near-term pipeline. . And we'll continue to use M&A to compound our organic growth across both GRC and TIC and to do so in a disciplined way, which drives attractive shareholder returns. Today, in particular, we are showcasing our GRC division, the quality of the platform that we've built and the scale of the future GRC opportunity. This is a GBP 160 million revenue, GBP 40 million EBITDA division for us. Over the last 3 years, we've transformed GRC to be one-stop shop, and we're very well placed to go after this GBP 4 billion market. GRC encompasses our consulting and software solutions across enterprise risk, health and safety, employment law and HR, occupational health and compliance e-learning. The majority of the compliance services we deliver in GRC revolve around our clients, employees and their organizational risks. Our consultancy services are delivered largely under 3 or 5-year contracts with subscription-based revenues. We provide a full range of business-critical services from health and safety support, advice and risk assessments, governance advice on employment law, HR or occupational health compliance. We deliver services ranging from those that protect the well-being of our clients' employees through to the training of their staff in relevant compliance standards via e-learning. Our cloud-based software applications are used to control and monitor risk across the organization. We deliver these software platforms as long-term subscriptions. All of our GRC offering share an identical channel to market. They're seen as very logical extensions of 1 another, demonstrated by the regular cross-selling across these areas. Our GRC division covers 4 main business lines. Our environmental health and safety business line comprises consultancy, software and intelligence. And -- as you've seen, we provide regulatory intelligence via Barbour to help key compliance decision makers to understand what regulation and health and safety legislation applies to them. Our health and safety consultants from William Martin conduct audits and risk assessments, provide advice and implement our Meridian SaaS platform to help customers track safety and compliance. WorkNest then extends this health and safety proposition into HR and employment law compliance, which it delivers alongside safety advisory and a range of digital products, such as HR, safety and case management software or e-learning. As Gavin and his team will highlight, WorkNest occupies a GBP 1 billion market that's growing at attractive rates of around 7%. We're comfortably outperforming that growth, achieving north of 10% organic growth each year. Occupational health is, of course, a central part of our clients' health and safety strategies. Back in 2019, we identified the market as highly complementary to our health and safety and employment law business. We saw that the decision-maker for occupational health is also responsible for other clients disciplines such as HR and health and safety. These services are seen as closely aligned with HR issues often arising out of absence management issues related to occupational health. And health and safety consulting is closely intertwined with it, too. We cross-sell a large amount of work across these 2 business lines with 550 clients cross-sold in the past year. Within occupational health, we assure regulate compliance for our clients. We improve the physical and mental health and well-being of their employees, minimizing workplace risk and maximizing corporate productivity. In many cases, the services are regulated by legislation like the Health and Safety at Work Act, they're specialists. They command attractive margins, which can be expanded with scale. The market is about GBP 1 billion in size, with growth of 4% to 5%, and there's a large amount of white space to go after with more and more owners being placed on corporates to invest in this critical compliance area. Our compliance software business line encompasses compliance e-learning and compliance SaaS products. They empower customers to comply with numerous regulations to improve governance and control. One of our key value adds is that our software is built by developers who are able to collaborate closely with industry expert colleagues who live and breathe these areas. It's developed by practitioners with huge end market expertise. And as our SaaS applications become more closely integrated, we can share content and modules and integrate functionality. Intelligence tools can be linked to GRC SaaS and e-learning can be linked to individual risks within our health and safety software, prompting the user to engage with a particular e-learning course. From a client perspective, the more integrated we become with their operation and the more integrated our capabilities are, the higher our pricing power and client retention rates. Taken as a whole, our SaaS platforms are increasingly providing an almost end-to-end solution to our clients' governance, risk and compliance strategies. Since 2016, Marlowe's incrementally built its offering into the end-to-end compliance platform that we've become today. In core compliance service areas, fire safety, water and air hygiene, employment law, HR and occupational health, we've established market-leading positions of scale. Newer areas for the group, compliant software and contractor compliance has scaled fast and present clear opportunities for further fast-paced organic and acquisition-led growth. And crucially, as the range and breadth of compliance solutions that the group offers has expanded, so too has our addressable market, from GBP 1.6 billion in 2016 to GBP 8.4 billion today in the U.K. Despite now having revenues of over GBP 400 million and leading market positions, Marlowe represents only a small segment of each market we occupy with major runway for growth. We maintain the pace of our growth, thanks to our well-designed organizational structure, which is focused on divisional entrepreneurial autonomy and agility. This structure gives our managers the resources and the responsibility to deliver their strategic plans whilst driving integration programs at pace. Each of our 6 business lines have autonomous leadership team supported by dedicated integration resources and a well-developed integration strategy. This structure enables us to integrate acquired businesses efficiently with an integration program within 1 business been largely discrete from that within another business line. So we can integrate multiple businesses concurrently without straining management bandwidth. And you can see from the table, we're making strong progress on the integration programs. We're getting better at avoiding the pitfalls with our track record and our scale, integration risk diminishes. We have the structure and leadership, integration resources, infrastructure, systems and strategy to take on more scale with increasingly attractive synergies. And we've begun the integration program between the recent acquisition of Optima and our other occupational health activities. On the other side of the integration, which will take about 12 months, we'll have 1 unified management team, 1 back office, 1 operating model and the Optima tech platform will be rolled out across the combined business. The Marlowe model for creating shareholder value is now well established, acquire, enhance, accelerate, integrate and collaborate. This is our model for effective acquisition, operational and technology enhancements, accelerated organic growth and bolt-on acquisitions and a well-oiled model to integrate businesses into our infrastructure, extract synergies and utilize scale efficiencies One of the clearest examples of this integration strategy in Acton is evident in our recently launched WorkNest brand, which brings together 11 acquisitions. WorkNest delivers a one-stop solution of subscription-based, employment law, HR and safety consultancy and software and now makes up just under half of our GRC divisional profits. The first major deal we completed in the space was the GBP 60 million Ellis Whittam deal in late 2020. Ellis Whittam was generating revenues of GBP 16 million and EBITDA of GBP 4 million, with around 98 employees. Through the integration of 10 bolt-ons and organic growth in excess of 10% each year, the business has grown to revenues of over GBP 40 million and now employs 435 people. The business now benefits from a single organizational structure and leadership, common technology platforms and service delivery has been integrated. We're seeing a reducing cost to acquire new customers and more efficiency in service delivery. SaaS revenues within the business in line with our broader digital strategy and now approaching GBP 9 million with over 20% organic growth each year, a common sales and marketing structures in place and the business has been rebranded with a common purpose and a united growth strategy. As a result of this success and the investment that the business has made in building out its infrastructure and the results in highly attractive operational leverage that we're now enjoying. In the next 3 years, on a solely organic basis, we expect profitability to increase by over 70% from the current levels. We'll now hear from the WorkNest team to talk you through their strategy for success before they hand over to Peter Bell, our group CTO, who will talk you through our digital progress

The WorkNest Group has been created over the last 16 months through 9 targeted acquisitions assembled by Marlowe, Following the platform acquisition of Ellis Whittam back in 2020. It is now a central and high-growth part of the group's Governance, Risk and Compliance division. The WorkNest story has been 1 of strong organic growth in double-digit range, fast-paced acquisitions, highly effective integration and the development of a clear operating model. It's a very clear example of the Marlowe model in action, bringing together highly complementary compliance-focused services and software businesses to create a market-leading platform via effective integration, operational and technological improvements, investments in accelerated organic growth and expanding margins. As a business, we exist to protect and nurture U.K. employers by advising and providing solutions to prevent and manage some of the most sensitive and crucial issues concerning people in the workplace. By doing that, our clients can focus on their own organizational success. We help our clients to prevent and solve problems and ensure regulatory compliance. We do that by providing high-quality commercially minded employment law, HR and health and safety advice, combined with innovative digital solutions. Our subscription-based consultancy and software model gives us strong future revenue visibility with clients paying subscriptions on 3- or 5-year contracts. Our services are valued by SMEs and specialist HR compliance health and safety and operations teams in large organizations across some 54 vertical sectors. Now one of those sectors generates more than 4% of our revenue. Core to our offer is high-quality advisory support. We offer the surety of a fixed fee unlimited use model to most clients and a considerable number of clients are protected through a legal expenses and insurance policy. These clients are protected against fines, costs and claims on the condition that they follow our advice. [ And the ] all of our clients take a blend of services alongside our Software-as-a-Service digital platform. WorkNest serves some 40,000 U.K. employers. Employee and workplace regulations affect everyone. And our clients come from some 54 core vertical sectors across the U.K. There is huge organic growth potential, we believe, within both the SME and the mid-market target segments. Significant headroom to expand in the core SME market involves the addressable some 350,000 U.K. enterprises to employ less than 150 people. WorkNest and Marlowe as a whole benefits from strong tailwinds, pushing U.K. employees to seek advice. There have been over 40 major employment law and health and safety regulatory changes since 2010, in particular, the evolution of tribunal fees. Employers are facing growing employee claim levels stricter enforcement and more punitive fines. Insurers are increasingly penalizing employers, not able to evidence strong safety practices. Local authorities are demanding stronger evidence of safety and employee relations practices before contracting for local services, which bring an increasing enforcement burden. So employers are taking more responsibility for employee welfare and well-being. Health and safety expectations arising from both a corporate and public perspective with major costs relating to non-compliance. We have a highly resilient business model with strong earnings visibility and addressable operating margin opportunities. Our revenues per annum are around GBP 40 million, generating near 30% EBITDA levels. Most of our revenues are delivered as a secure recurring subscription. Ours is a highly valued proposition with strong brand reputation. We've delivered consistent growth every year and including strong growth during the COVID 19 years. Our services are largely non-discretionary and underpinned by attractive regulatory drivers. There are attractive economies of scale across both Software-as-a-Service and our subscriptions with decreasing incremental delivery costs as the business continues to scale. We offer our clients either 3- or 5-year contracts. And the average contract with the majority of our clients is 3.8 years. Some 93% of our clients are retained every year. So we target a sustained 15% to 20% compound annual growth rate level by focusing first and foremost on our organic growth. We will continue to secure profitable multiyear contracts with annual RPI increases across both new business and renewals. We have a strong brand high-quality and well-resourced service delivery and established sales and marketing competencies in place to deliver that. We will look to cross and upsell our Software-as-a-Service and other value-add services to our existing clients both within WorkNest and the Marlowe Group. In the Marlowe Group, there are some 50,000 existing clients addressable for e-learning and other Software-as-a-Service offerings. We will grow Software-as-a-Service through continued product road map development, enhancing sales and marketing impact and realizing integration benefits. We will deliver continued operating margin growth. Thanks to the rollout of new advisory support platform, management information and resource by competencies, we expect to be able to further improve utilization and absorb more work activities across largely the existing base of advisers and consultants. And we are confident that we'll be able to achieve that without compromising quality levels. All of this will allow us to increase our gross margin position. We'll be able to leverage our back office roles across various support functions that don't need to grow at the same rate as our revenues.

Firstly, I want to talk to you about our investment in marketing to deliver scalable and predictable growth. Over the last 5 years, we've continually refined how we use SalesForce, our CRM platform and our associated marketing technology and data providers to build ever increasingly intelligent inbound and out by marketing programs as well as understanding important metrics like cost per acquisition across our various channels, we can now forecast sales qualified leads and ultimately revenues through our in-depth understanding of the engagement pipeline volume and velocity. This improved understanding of what works and the use of multiple channels and techniques to engage our prospects means that we're able to feed our telemarketing team with much more engaged prospects. The result of this is that over the last 2 years, we've halved a number of calls, our telemarketing team need to make to book an appointment. And we now convert an average of 1 in every 2.5 meetings we set into a sale. When we started our journey with Marlowe, we worked with the specialist brand agency to understand how we can create a brand structure and strategy, we would maximize the opportunity of bringing a range of people-led services and SaaS solutions together. The output of that work was the creation of the WorkNest brand, creating a master brand with a clear structure for products and services below it, makes it easier for clients to navigate across our services.

Joining Marlowe was a highly attractive route for all the businesses that have now formed to create WorkNest. Targeted M&A achieved by combining WorkNest the main experts and Marlowe M&A specialists to approach and attract acquisitions. Our acquisitions have been across Software-as-a-Service platform providers, notably e-learning and HR software. SRO regulated law firms, enabling access to public sector, education and corporate client markets and HR consulting practitioners who bring additional capacity and expertise and access to new nonprofit-making sectors. We have a sizable e-learning presence. Some 2,200 clients with over 1.5 million users and now plan to create a single leading compliance-based e-learning business. We bring high quality, immersive remote learning courses. Some 330 courses covering the full range of clients and health and safety subjects. Safety and compliance with e-learning is a highly attractive part of the compliance landscape with Software-as-a-Service, operational and financial features in a fast growth segment of the compliance market. Our platform is made up of numerous customizable e-learning courses with a built-in compliance platform, learning management system, [ altering ] and risk assessment tools. In a nutshell, our platform is aimed at ensuring the compliance of your workforce and minimizing people risk.

We've invested significantly in our project resources, building our WorkNest integration framework, our business analysis and project execution capabilities. Our project teams are executing up to 30 in-flight integration synergy projects at any one time because we've now done this a number of times before, we're developing a very clear and well-rehearsed playbook. We identify and prioritize synergy opportunities by leveraging the WorkNest of Marlowe platforms, displacing third parties and using centralized WorkNest departments wherever possible. We forecast to realize a further GBP 3 million of synergy savings as a result of various projects that are ongoing. We've invested significantly in our CRM and marketing automation platforms and we focus on deploying this capability to all acquisitions as soon as possible. A centralized CRM platform enables our cross-sell initiatives, providing us with a single view of our client base. CaseNest our enterprise legal and HR case management system introduces standard ways of working, document automation and the ability to distribute work to our U.K. population. We consolidate our back-office functions such as IT support, HR and finance.

We have made major progress in the 18 short months since Marlowe acquired Ellis Whittam. During this period, revenues have grown from GBP 16 million to GBP 40 million per annum. We've developed a clear and cohesive operating model and rebranded our platform for growth.

We've delivered effective integration programs and are in the process of extracting significant further financial synergies

Organic growth is accelerating amidst markets that enjoy highly attractive backdrops. We have a major digital progress and now have Software-as-a-Service business lines across health and safety software, compliance e-learning and HR compliance.

We have a clear strategy and major further growth plans. I can see a clear path to achieving revenues of GBP 90 million over the next 5 years.

We will achieve this growth by a continued strong organic growth supplemented by Marlowe's investment further targeted acquisitions.

Good morning. I'm Peter Bell, Group CTO. I joined Marlowe from Constellation Software in early 2021, driven by the major opportunity of developing and delivering Marlowe's digital compliance strategy to support the group with its mission to be the market leader in compliance software. The scale of the digital opportunity at Marlowe, particularly within the GRC side of the group is huge. Digital products are supplementing the group's compliance services as the core tools for ensuring, controlling and prompting compliance standards across our clients' businesses. The deployment of our software significantly improves our clients' compliance standards and customer experience, resulting in high switching costs. From a standing start and following our entry into the softer market in 2018, Marlowe has built a rich suite of software compliance solutions through both M&A and organic initiatives. With SaaS subscriptions now contributing around 10% of group revenue. In the last financial year, 6 software business joined the group. We expect SaaS revenue as a proportion of our total revenue to continue to grow as we benefit from the fast growth this market demonstrates. Our diversity of products and the organic growth benefits that our cross-sell strategy and our large client database create. We're positioned very favorably to benefit from the further digitalization of the compliance landscape, and we see a long-term opportunity to transform our markets through greater adoption of software and digital applications. The developing Marlowe portfolio of software products addresses all aspects of an organization's compliance needs. Customers rely on our risk and compliance software to track and report regulatory risks such as AML, DAC6 or KYC across the organization. Our contractor management platform, Elogbooks, monitors compliance standards of service providers working at our clients' premises, giving stakeholders real-time visibility over one of the biggest areas of risk in the commercial organization. Since Elogbooks joined the group in 2020, we have developed and launched a new product, Prosure360, to verifying new credit contractors and integrated to the platform with Meridian, creating an integrated health and safety and supply chain compliance proposition. Our digital EHS solutions police and promote safety in the workplace, recording incidents and highlighting areas of noncompliance. Compliance e-learning is playing in an ever more important role for companies in ensuring their staff are compliance across such diverse topics as inclusion, GDPR and health and safety. We have a range of e-learning platforms covering all aspects. Our HR software addresses employee relations and compliance issues from absence management to disciplinary and creates an audible record of actions taken. We'll hear from CoreStream, Marlowe's enterprise GRC software to demonstrate how they are helping large enterprises manage their risks innovatively. In combination with our other products, CoreStream's platform enables us to offer clients a complete GRC risk management solution to improve corporate governance and control, reduce risk and enhance compliance. It also strengthens our ability to support clients with their ESG objectives.

Good morning. I'm Richard Eddolls, and I'm the Platform Director of CoreStream, Marlowe's lead enterprise governance, risk and compliance software. CoreStream is a SaaS platform that helps blue-chip private and public sector clients to address a multitude of risk and compliance challenges across their organizations. The platform centralizes activities, allowing clients to comply with regulation and legislation as well as internal and external standards. CoreStream is a modularized product delivered as a SaaS subscription, which can be sold as an integrated solution or as individual modules. It is used by a large number of Fortune 100 clients to undertake risk management, assess their control environment and adhere to ever-evolving regulations. CoreStream is also suitable for smaller businesses and has a significant public sector footprint. Having originally worked as consultants at Deloitte, we founded the business when we saw a gap in the market for a software platform to manage the same GRC activities that we were consulting on. CoreStream currently employs around 40 people, roughly half of whom are software developers, and we are growing at a fast pace. We have software revenues approaching GBP 6 million. Over the last 3 years, these revenues have grown at over 30% each year in the face of a global pandemic and a replatforming exercise. We've managed to achieve this growth whilst maintaining profit margins of over 25%, striking the right balance between profitability and growth. In software parlance, that makes us something like a rule of 55 business. We joined Marlowe in July last year and have big plans to accelerate growth with their support. Since we joined, we've been working closely with the group CTO and his team, and Marlowe has appointed a Nonexecutive Chairman, who has led some of Europe's largest SaaS businesses to help guide our growth. We are working with the group to expand our enterprise marketing, sales and alliance capabilities. It is great being part of a growth-focused organization that really understands compliance. The Governance, Risk & Compliance market is experiencing fast growth rates with increasing social, environmental and regulatory drivers, placing pressure on organizations to consider broader stakeholders in their decision-making. Solutions that can bring order to this chaos are now seen as value-adding rather than cost lines. There is a compliance as a competitive edge dynamic at play that is driving decision-makers towards software that helps them see through this fog. Customers are increasingly recognizing the need to digitize their processes, visualize their risk environment and monitor the actions required to enable a compliance enterprise. The key part of this is that it is their processes. We regularly advise on cross industry best practice, but we also ensure clients are able to reflect their uniqueness in how the platform is adopted. CoreStream is steadfast in its belief that GRC solutions need to be both intuitive and flexible to be successfully embedded within an organization. Our technology is about supporting our clients' processes and frameworks, not dictating what they should be. The CoreStream platform has a very broad range of use cases within GRC. Some of the key capabilities it offers our customers are the ability to document risk, compliance and regulatory content in an integrated emission-controlled environment; access views that demonstrate the linkages between the various areas of your GRC activity, enabling a risk-based coordinated approach to mitigation, audit and assurance activity; associate global content types, such as policies, risks and controls with your compliance and regulatory data to assess your level of coverage and identify areas of exposure; map your business processes and our online Visio style capability, both to optimize the process itself and to identify risks, controls and actions through a process levels; assign and track accountability through clear ownership of tasks and actions; and to access reporting dashboards, providing real-time tailored insight for your GRC stakeholders and beyond. The flexibility of the CoreStream platform is enabling the creation of new solutions that Marlowe can provide to its extensive client base. One example of this cross-sell synergy in action is the recent development of an online environmental register with integrated risk and action tracking. This is a solution we configured in response to a specific cross-sell opportunity that now provides the chance to market an entirely relevant offering to a large number of existing Marlowe clients within its tech division. We are also linking synergistically with the rest of Marlowe's GRC division. We are building an integration through the VinciWorks, Marlowe's lead e-learning brand, to enable our clients to seamlessly access training on specific risk and compliance topics. This is a new and exciting area for CoreStream as we receive frequent client requests for online training. This integration allows us to provide a seamless CoreStream-like user experience with an industry-leading e-learning platform, whilst avoiding the cost of developing the capability ourselves. Our strategy has enabled us to grow circa 30% for the last 4 years, whilst obtaining an EBITDA margin of over 25%. We have been very successful at landing and expanding with customers where we sell 1 module, implement it and successfully widen the scope of the product into other customer use cases. Some of our largest customers are spending around GBP 150,000 a year with us, several of which started as much smaller engagements. This is the best demonstration of how much our clients value the platform we provide. Our net revenue retention is approaching 110%. Revenue visibility is extremely strong. We very rarely lose the clients. And our margins are expanding as we add further scale to the group. Each additional client has a lower incremental cost to deliver. In the medium term, we see no reason why our EBITDA couldn't be around 40% to 50%. A large part of the success of CoreStream is stemmed from providing a leading solution, both in terms of technology and the subject matter. The best example of this is our work with channel partners, the key one of which is Deloitte. We worked together in a number of ways; collaborative projects for clients, the design of several joint offerings and a tech enablement of their traditional services. This has provided the blueprint to develop other partnerships, a key focus for the new financial year. The next phase of our growth is an exciting one. The management of risk and compliance obligations are only going to grow in importance and the emerging focus on the environmental and social aspects of corporate responsibility is a significant challenge. We are well placed to help existing and prospective clients respond to the next regulatory challenges, such as U.K. SOX, and we will continue to innovate in ways that our clients value.

Thank you, CoreStream. Marlowe is fast becoming the acquirer of choice for established an ambitious compliance software business because of the support that our software ecosystem offers. We identify successful software businesses that have a track record of growth and in which we see huge potential. We then help these businesses to accelerate their growth and take the next leap forward as part of Marlowe. We provide access to 50,000 clients to cross-sell to and sales and marketing support from software sales specialists. With over 120 software developers proficient across multiple technologies, we usually have someone in the group who has already tackled a technical challenge to collaborate with. We benefit from unparalleled compliance subject matter expertise in-house in product development. Backed by our access to capital, we are able to support acquired businesses in investing in credible new product initiatives with a long-term outlook. A great example is an ESG compliance tool that we are funding for our recent VinciWorks acquisition to implement. As well as capital, we are providing VinciWorks' expertise in environmental monitoring from our 4D platform, understanding of social aspects through our HI expertise and platforms as well as our core governance understanding. And businesses benefit from readily leveraged best-in-class central technology functions previously beyond the means of stand-alone software businesses. And now I'm going to hand over to Josh and the VinciWorks team in Israel. Vinci is the U.K.'s leading regulatory compliance e-learning and software solution and provides compliance e-learning Software as a Service and compliance management software in areas such as GDPR, anti-bribery, cybersecurity, tax evasion, code of conduct and health and safety. It has become a core pillar of our compliance software offer. And in the 6 short months since acquisition, as you will hear, we have made major progress. We have invested in a number of organic initiatives. We have accelerated investment in software development and course content creation in areas like money -- antimoney laundering, an area in hot demand for our clients in the legal sector. And we have completed the bolt-on acquisition of SkillBoosters, the leading diversity and inclusion e-learning provider that we are integrating into Vinci to broaden their capabilities for clients in this fast-growing segment of the compliance market. Thank you. Let me hand you over to Josh.

Good morning from Israel. We are VinciWorks, a market leader in compliance software and e-learning. It is a pleasure to join you today for the 2022 Capital Markets Day, our first as part of the Marlowe family. VinciWorks story began with a collaboration between 14 leading law firms, who, under our guidance, work together to establish a best practice benchmark for compliance. We work with the top global law firms to put their differences aside, VinciWorks continues to cultivate that deep relationship with the legal sector. And today, 20% of all U.K. solicitors use VinciWorks for compliance.

Increasingly complex regulation over the past 15 years such as the money laundering directives, the Bribery Act, the Criminal Finance Act, the Modern Slavery Act and GDPR continuously increase the regulatory burden that organizations are facing. Today, we work with hundreds of companies and a diverse set of industries such as accounting, banking, finance, property, telecom, engineering, manufacturing and retail.

Our e-learning courses cover all regulatory and voluntary areas of compliance with topics such as GDPR, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, modern slavery, health and safety, cybersecurity, all the way through to specialist compliance areas such as the DAC6 International Tax directive. We differentiate against our competitors, not only through our collaboration with law firms, but with investment in e-learning technology that makes our process relevant to each industry, each geography, each job role and is customized to each individual customers' preferences. VinciWorks training includes multi-jurisdictional and multi-industry content in multiple languages, which was the catalyst for growth across multiple industries and to dozens of countries around the globe.

We are on a mission to reinvent the impact that compliance tools and training can make. We strive to solve real compliance issues with a focus on usability, elegance and best practice knowledge. That integration of legal expertise and world-class technology can be seen in our compliance workflow platform, Omnitrack. Omnitrack is a simple, yet powerful no-code tool for building compliance workflows and centralizing compliance processes. Omnitrack leverages our expert knowledge and deep relationship with leading law firms and with EU and U.K. regulators to help businesses manage their compliance processes across a range of use cases. These include customer due diligence in KYC for anti-money laundering, the EU whistleblowing directive, gift registers for anti-bribery, health and safety risk assessments and diversity surveys.

Because Omnitrack is a no-code solution, our clients can take our prebuilt software and tailor it to their internal needs. Every time we show Omnitrack, we hear gas placement at how easy it is for nontechnical customers to set up sophisticated workflows that work to build automations that create efficiencies and save time and to connect Omnitrack to existing software in their organizations. This double focus of VinciWorks on both training and software has helped us grow by over 20% every year for the last 5 years to generate GBP 6 million of ARR and approximately GBP 3 million of EBITDA. We serve over 600 clients, including 60 of the top 100 global law firms. Our focus on creating an international offering has positioned us to expand throughout the EU, the U.K. and the U.S. as well as to target large multinational companies who have a need for global compliance solutions across multiple industries. We are obsessive about customer support, building deep lasting relationships with our clients, which result in retention rates of over 93%.

Part of our growth and customer retention is due to the trust customers have in our expertise. VinciWorks has a dedicated team of experts scanning the regulatory horizon and tracking legislation as it progresses into law. We publish regular updates to help our clients understand the impact of emerging regulation. Over the past 6 years, VinciWorks has consistently been first-to-market with compliance solutions as new regulations come into force. This includes money laundering directives, the Modern Slavery Act, the Criminal Finance Act, GDPR, DAC6 and the new EU whistleblowing directive.

We leverage our thought leadership to create high-quality content that attracts new clients and drive lead generation. This includes monthly regulatory updates alongside resources such as podcasts, policies, webinars and guides to best practice. In 2021, our guides and templates were downloaded over 24,000 times, demonstrating the value that customers place on our compliance expertise. Since our brand is so tightly associated with best practice compliance, professionals from the community turn to VinciWorks first to help solve compliance challenges. The steadiness and certainty of leads through our content marketing process is what drives our reliable 20%-plus growth over the past 5 years.

We joined Marlowe in October 2021 after a competitive process with a range of industry and private equity buyers. We felt that Marlowe was the most ambitious home and the most natural fit for what VinciWorks was trying to achieve. We had some concerns about joining a plc. VinciWorks has a small, super talented and very agile team with a modern startup culture. We have deeply rooted core values that focus on rapid innovation, and on freedom and responsibility. But unlike other buyers, Marlowe was receptive, even enthusiastic about our culture and has worked closely with us to integrate VinciWorks into the group in a way that builds value along with independents.

The Marlowe team has also been collaborating with us on a new and exciting ESG software product that takes a simple and systematic approach to ESG that cuts through the noise and focuses on the practical and straightforward steps that organizations can take to kick-start an ESG process. Environmental, social and governance issues, ESG, are top agenda items for business leaders. Pressure from investors, customers and employees are driving companies to formalize their ESG disclosures. And interest in looking beyond profit and assessing an organization's ability to positively impact its local community, its supply chain and its employees' lives is bringing ESG initiatives to the Board level. The tool that VinciWorks is developing will help organizations improve their competitive edge through improvements to their ESG disclosures. It will help organizations understand their current ESG strengths, identify gaps, define goals and create an action plan for ESG improvements.

Just a few months after we joined, Marlowe assisted us in our first bolt-on acquisition of SkillBoosters, a video-based training provider, whose mission is to address meaningful workplace challenges in areas such as diversity, equality and inclusion, leadership and teamwork. SkillBoosters uses actors in real-life scenarios, films, brave individuals relating their lift experiences, and interviews leading experts to affect organizational change in these areas. The Marlowe integration playbook has allowed us to seamlessly bring our businesses together into a true e-learning leader with a significantly expanded offering. Looking to the future, we are really excited to grow our businesses together with Marlowe, leveraging synergies across the group as well as benefiting from Marlowe's expertise in both acquisition and integration. That will accelerate our growth and build our brand into a leader in global compliance solutions.

Thanks, Josh, Ruth and Yehuda. So as we've heard from Peter and seen in action from CoreStream and Vinci, we have a clear digital strategy. Our compliance software business now generates over GBP 36 million of ARR with each product growing organically between 20% and 30% a year and delivering a consolidated EBITDA margin in excess of 40%. Our digital products serve over 3 million users. On a stand-alone basis, Marlowe's compliance software division would be 1 of the largest GRC software businesses in the U.K. So what are our digital priorities in the short- to medium-term? First, we are focused on maximizing the potential of and delivering maximum value from software businesses in the group by accelerating growth and enhancing profitability. And then we plan to continue developing the group's digital offering organically, leveraging the compliance and technology expertise within the group to launch organic initiatives such as the new ESG reporting software that we'll be launching later this year. Then we plan to expand the areas of compliance that we can address using software by bringing new businesses into the group via acquisition. This could be in new areas of supply chain risk, quality management or information security. ESG is a key focus for our customers, investors and colleagues. As a group, our proposition is strongly aligned with the following UN sustainable development goals, good health and well-being; clean water and sanitation; decent work and economic growth; gender equality, sustainable cities and communities; and peace, justice and strong institutions. Our services and software generates significant social value. We manage workplace risk through regular audits and assessments; protect life and property from risks such as fire; safeguard employee legal rights; assure our clients' compliance; enhanced corporate governance standards; test and improve water and air quality to meet environmental standards; improve and protect employee health, well-being and mental health; train people via e-learning in areas such as diversity and inclusion, anti-money laundering or bribery and corruption; and we've been making progress with our internal ESG strategy. At our half year results, we announced our ESG Committee have been established. We have group-wide representation to make sure we collaborate on ideas and developments. Key progress has been made in writing and improving our policies. And we started to consolidate ESG data tracking to be in a position to report on the group ESG metrics in areas like energy consumption. We plan to set group targets once all data is consolidated, but in the meantime, we're making great divisional progress. Our fire safety business is targeting to reduce its CO2 footprint by 10% between 2021 and 2025. And our water and air business is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2035. It's worth noting, too, that we use our own services and software to maintain ESG standards across the group. We use CoreStream to monitor risk. We use Meridian to monitor safety. Our staff have access to the Optima Health Employee Assistance program. We use our e-learning to educate staff in key governance areas and to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Our staff have access to Barbour to inform them of key environmental compliance areas. Our HR teams work on employee engagement initiatives such as enhanced paternity and maternity leave, holidays for life events and volunteering initiatives. We're constantly looking to strive forward, and we look forward to announcing further ESG progress, actions and targets at our FY '22 results. So before I hand over to Simon Arnold, CEO of our occupational health activities, some key takeaways. We've made major strategic progress with the disciplined execution of our deepen, broaden, digitalized and strengthened strategy. Progress towards our FY '24 financial targets has been very strong. Organic growth at 8% is accelerating. Our scale and position in GRC has developed rapidly and presents huge opportunity. Our software activities have become a major part of our story and present exciting growth prospects. Our integrations are on track. Our balance sheet is in a strong position at 1.5x leverage, and we have the financial firepower and cash generation to continue to execute on the bolt-on opportunities in our pipeline at pace and without the need for further financing. We enter FY '23 as a broad compliance platform, providing intelligence, content, software and assurance across defensive end markets that are all experiencing attractive structural growth. Before we open up to Q&A, I'm going to leave you with Simon to talk through his occupational health strategy. The recent Optima deal transformed the scale of our existing GBP 23 million revenue business, adding about GBP 70 million of revenue and GBP 11 million of EBITDA, and we'll add a further GBP 2 million of EBITDA through integration synergies in the first year. The deal is forecast to be over 10% earnings enhancing in year 1. Thank you very much.

Good morning. I'm Simon Arnold, CEO of Optima Health, the U.K. leader in the occupation health and well-being market. We assure regulatory compliance for our clients, improve the health and well-being of their employees, minimize workplace risk and help maximize corporate productivity. Now excitingly, Optima recently joined the Marlowe Group, and I now head up the entire Marlowe occupational health and well-being business line with revenues of over GBP 90 million. Optima Health has become Marlowe's flagship brand in the market. The GBP 1 billion occupational health and well-being market is undergoing attractive structural change with growth of about 4% to 5% a year with increased corporate and public focus on compliance and employee well-being and mental health, all resulting in our clients allocating bigger budgets to their markets. Around 80% of employees don't offer the comprehensive occupational health services they should, which also provides a major runway for future growth with ever more onus being placed on corporates to invest in this essential compliance area. We're the leader in the corporate health and well-being sector. Marlowe's enlarged occupation health offering, headed by Optima Health, employs around 1,250 people, including around 750 directly employed clinicians. We provide the most comprehensive range of health and well-being services in the market, delivering around 0.75 million interventions across a portfolio of over 3,000 clients and covering more than 2.5 million of the U.K. workforce from SME due to large corporates across all sectors. Our mission is to empower our clients to bring out the best in our people by actively managing their health and well-being. And our focus is to understand and respond to the impact of work on health as well as the impact of health on work. And in doing this, we undertake in-depth clinical assessments and implement proactive workforce health and well-being strategies. The results, key outcomes delivered for our clients in terms of what's important to them, strategy and regulatory compliance, capacity release at times of great pressure, productivity improvements, absence reduction and an increase in staff loyalty and obviously, a financial return on investment. The Optima Health business model is centered on the delivery of contracted annuity-type services. Over 80% of revenues are recurring with an average client relationship length of 9 years, and our clients tend to be on 3- to 5-year contracts. Now our services are vital to our clients, requiring specialist knowledge and often are so complex to deliver effectively that the costs and inconvenience of switching service providers can be undesirable, leading to interdependence. Our organic growth has been running at about 12% a year over the past 3 years. And our net client retention last year was over 100%. And our business is highly cash generative, with cash conversion running at close to 100%. Alongside this model under the Healthwork Group, we also have the existing SME taxed services, providing walk-in and direct services across the service portfolio in a wide range of locations across the U.K. Our services are driven by regulatory needs, which makes them nondiscretionary and largely recurring. And on top of this regulatory requirement, organizations are both recognizing their ESG social responsibilities and also appreciating the return on investment that's delivered by improved employee well-being, improved productivity and reduced absence. The cost of noncompliance in this area are, of course, very significant. We work in partnership with our clients to help them define their overarching strategy and deliver their performance goals and we enable that through a full spectrum of integrated health and well-being services from proactive preventive solutions through to more traditional reactive services. Occupational health and well-being is a natural fit for the Marlowe strategy as it benefits from a channel to market that the group understands and is common with many of the other business lines in the group. The decision maker for occupational health is usually also responsible for other compliance areas that Marlowe covers, such as employment law, HR and health and safety. These services are seen as logical extensions to one another with HR issues often arising out of absence management related to and/or impacting on work. Like the rest of Marlowe, Optima Health is bound by the same mission of assuring business-critical compliance for our clients. We can now access Marlowe's very large client base and look to support the group's existing clients in occupational health and well-being as well as offering Marlowe's broad range of compliance services to our clients. And this compliance focus was key to our decision to join Marlowe as the right home for Optima Health. There was also a clear feeling that Marlowe is a growth-focused organization. They were set up well to get deals done and to help our future strategy. Workplace Health and well-being has never been more important. And looking ahead, we're excited by the potential shown in the corporate health and well-being sector. And NHS, which will continue in backlog for years, a health and well-being agenda that's now at board level, a growing mental well-being agenda, a move to greater remote intervention and a need for organizations to provide support for their people. We're perfectly set to ride on this forecast wave of growth. The integration of Optima Health brings significant synergy potential, and we've begun delivering this already. As we integrate Healthwork, we'll be able to take advantage of opportunities to remove duplicated cost in the overhead and we'll seek to improve the efficiency of the Healthwork operation by integration with our digital platforms. Our leadership team, supported by dedicated integration and project management teams are developing a clear program to bring businesses together over the coming 12 months, and its implementation is now underway. Once integrated, we target to have 1 unified management team, 1 back office, an integrated operating model with unified processes and the Optima Health technology platforms at the core of the combined business. We will also leverage the Optimal Health sales and marketing approach across the group, which we expect to accelerate organic growth as we extend our share of wallet with each client. For instance, selling EAP services to Healthwork clients couldn't offer this capability internally prior to the acquisition. So we have a clear strategy for growth made up of several components. Firstly, we are a clear market-leading platform provider in the U.K., and there's significant expansion potential in our core market. Organic growth of new contracts and expansion of our services such as active condition management with greater direct intervention in key conditions such as diabetes and also leveraging existing strength in the SME sector. In addition to this, our in-house and first-generation outsource opportunities, which we are extremely well placed for. Secondly, we continue to use technology to innovate, integrate with our clients and become an even more fundamental part of their health and well-being offer. We see a future where technology plays a much greater role in clinical delivery and reduces the need for human intervention, leveraging the data asset that's rapidly emerging. We plan to build proactive, preventive and ultimately, predictive interventions to embed ourselves deep within our clients, operational and technological operating models. The final section of our growth strategy is M&A. The occupational health market is highly fragmented. Having invested in our operating model and technology platform, we believe we're uniquely positioned in our market to be the platform to consolidate the market. And we have a number of discussions with attractive targets in exclusivity at the moment, which we expect to be moving on in the coming months. We believe this combination should allow us to more than double the size of the business over the next 5 years.