Objective Corporation Limited (OCL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Investor Presentation this morning for the FY 2024 Financial Results for Objective. So, I'm sure many of you have downloaded our accounts, our announcement and my Letter to Shareholders. And whilst we cover a lot of material in there and you may not have had time to read it all, I'm sure there'll be some questions as we go through. Hopefully, the presentation this morning will give you a great deal of insight into what's been going on at Objective during the year, what's ahead of us, and I'm also hoping that the shareholder -- the Letter to Shareholders will give you even further insight than what we'll have time to cover this morning. So the agenda for this morning is to just go through the financial summary. I'll walk you through the couple of the key items. We'll go through a couple of charts of our performance. We'll go through the highlights of the year. We'll have a look at the business line overview in a little bit of detail, where I'll be able to address some of the more finer points for the individual business lines. And then we'll conclude with the outlook and certainly the opportunity to ask questions. So, first of all, the highlights. So, revenue was up to $118 million. I think this is kind of well guided. Historically, we have had significant increases in software revenue, which you'll see on the chart shortly. But obviously, with our push to bring services revenue down for the benefit of customers, that sort of put a natural compression on that revenue number. I'll talk to that again on the individual business lines. The annual recurring revenue, $105 million. I'm pleased to see us break through the $100 million mark during the year. That's up 11% on last year. And we've also called out that it's 15% of the SaaS ARR revenue. Again, we'll talk about a couple of the headwinds. I've addressed those in my letter. And when we get to the individual business lines, I'll just talk you through what's occurred in each of those business lines. Clearly, no one's going to be disappointed in the EBITDA number, $44 million, up 66%. I guess you'll appreciate that some of that's been through the capitalization of some of the R&D. And the adjustment, as you'll see in the notes, is just for share-based payments of around $1.3 million in the year. Again, off the back of that, the net profit has lifted considerably. I'm sure no one's disappointed with a 49% lift in net profit after tax to $31 million. And on the -- some other material lines as well, we maintained our R&D investment at 30%, which was fantastic. It's something that customers love to see from us each and every year at $28 million. I'll show you a chart on that shortly. Operating cash flow certainly exceeded even our expectations. 127% of adjusted EBITDA at $56 million, with a cash balance of $96 million, so up 32% year-on-year at June 30. I'll talk some more about that in a moment. And then a dividend, up 26%, $0.17 per share, of which $0.08 is fully franked. So, I think, all in all, we're really proud of what's been achieved this year, certainly in terms of not only the profit result, but certainly, really, from a cash generation perspective, a really pleasing result. Moving along. I'm pleased to say this will be the last time we probably perhaps see this slide with this heading. We've taken quite a considerable number of years to move to a complete subscription model. We took this decision very early in the piece. And whilst it would have been easier to have turned the tide very, very quickly, our feeling was that, that was going to be a more painful transition for customers. And so we've sort of taken the long journey. But I'm pleased to say we've got there now. This year, we had 100% subscription revenue. And you can see there a very solid 81% of our total revenue was recurring. In terms of the SaaS revenue, you can see here in these 2 charts just really what's been driving the business. So over the last 5 years from FY 2019 through to 2024, our compound annual growth rate for SaaS has been 18%. So it's been a steady progression and we see that steady progression continuing. You can see on the right-hand side here as well, the SaaS compound growth rate has been 31%. And we're at the same time, as you've seen with other companies when they go and do the shift to the cloud, the historical support revenue, the historical maintenance revenue, what we call the upgrade and subscription program, normally tails off very quickly. In our case, it is still actually growing, albeit at a very slow rate. Equally, as I mentioned, the non-recurring revenue is only plus 2%. And I think just to kind of call out what we've been doing with services, I think when we have looked at the business strategically and where we are, I guess, a margin-focused company, we all know that the margins from services are single-digit versus the margins from software considerably larger. So at the same time as thinking about what we're doing on the services front, we really want to reduce the cost of services to customers so that we deliver the projects as efficiently as possible and let them get the value as quickly as possible. And what that means is we've passed on a lot of savings to customers, which has been a bit of a headwind on the revenue line, but as you can see, hasn't affected the profit line, hasn't affected the margins going forward. We think that's in our best interests. Our services teams going into FY '25 are very much focused on margin, not revenue generation because quite frankly, at the rate that we want to grow, we can't hire enough services people and it becomes somewhat of a boat anchor to growth. And so we think we've made all the right decisions for the long-term benefit of customers and the long-term benefit of all of our stakeholders. Looking at our R&D investment, this is a chart that we're particularly proud of. Our customers are very grateful. Every time we roll out new large sort of customer developments, this gets a mention. It's interesting to point out that during FY '25, we will break through $300 million of cumulative R&D investment since becoming a public company. And more meaningfully perhaps is that 43% of our all-time investment in R&D has happened in the past 5 years. So, that's a huge benefit to all of us, not only in our ability to drive the business going forward, but clearly, customers are getting the benefit of this R&D. And I've touched on that a little bit in my letter, and I'll talk about that shortly as well. At the same time, that, that investment has been going on. We've been able to increase our cash operating margin. And you can see here a chart that supports what we've been doing here. So if I look at the highlights of the year, probably the first thing has been our realization of where we are with our various business lines. And we've come out of COVID. It's been a bit of a slow grind, certainly in the public sector as we've come out of COVID the last couple of years. And if we look at our 3 main business lines, we've got obviously a customer -- sorry, Content Solutions business that's been with us for 30 years, has been invested in over a long period of time, has been incredibly successful for all of our stakeholders. At the same time, if we look at what we're doing within planning and building and regulatory solutions, they're kind of our teenagers. They're coming through a really interesting time in their life, and one where we can harness all the things that made us successful with Content Solutions. And so we've tagged this out, our DNA and the things that we believe have been sort of absolutely instrumental in driving the content services business to success has been a relenting focus on innovation, also being focused on making sure that we're delivering not only quality software, but quality outcomes for customers and then that ongoing customer focus. When we think of a customer, we think of a customer for life. We don't think of a customer as a single transaction, but think about it as the start of a long-term partnership together. And those 3 core elements are really part of our DNA. So, what we did a couple of months ago, we brought everyone together for Activate '24, which is effectively a university week for Objective. So, we brought people from all around the globe together. In fact, we had 2 centers here in Australia for most of the APAC staff, and then another event in the U.K. And the core thing about what we were doing with Activate was making sure that we had 450 people that really understood our DNA, 450 people that really understood our mission and what was driving what we were doing in terms of business plans and the strategic plan, not only across the entire business, but in the individual business lines for FY '25 and going forward. So it was a really, really great way. I guess it was really a way that we started FY '25, but gives you some insight into the way we think as an organization. Whilst these things are quite an investment in terms of educating everyone for the week, we often say, can we afford to do this? I often say, can we afford not to do it? And I think it was a fantastic event for everybody. Further to that, it really reinforced our purpose. It also allowed us to sort of bring forward a really good understanding of our ambition. And if you think about what we're doing within each of our product lines, firstly, it's to have an unparalleled domain expertise. So, you're seeing more people that have been involved in the industries that we serve, come and join our organization. I think that's been a really key part to Objective's success and a really key part to our ongoing success. We want to be #1 in our markets. I know GE used to think being sort of top 2 was a good thing, but certainly, software and the markets are weird and it's a game of meritocracy. And I think the one that leads the market is the one that's the most successful. And then finally, to maintain profitable growth, I know a lot -- particularly North American companies are very focused on revenue growth. It just has never been the way that we've wired the organization. We're not interested in profitless growth. We're interested in profitable growth, and making sure that the investments and the investment outcomes are linked to profitability. And so that's been also a part of the way that we've run through our DNA as well. The other great thing that is also worth calling out, and I think for all of us, as both shareholders and customers and certainly employees, is we really have a strong sense of purpose here. You can see here just a series of just some of our customers that are on the right-hand side here by their logos. But to wake up every morning and think about delivering solutions that have national benefit and community outcome benefits, you can really relate to the things that you're doing here at Objective. And I think, again, anyone that's sort of been part of our Activate sessions or our customer collaborate sessions, has really realized the power in what we're doing. I think the other thing that kind of has been really interesting, Ben and I have spent much of our year looking at M&A. I've addressed that a bit in the letter. I'm not going to talk about it at this morning's presentation. But there's a very, very different way that our company is wired versus the companies that are very much PE fueled. And across North America, I think one of the things that I see more often in tenders and hear about is one of the questions about companies, are you owned by private equity? So, that's not to say that all private equity is bad, but it certainly has a more of a short-term focus and not necessarily focused on the sort of national and community outcomes that we have as an organization. Another big thing that's been driving us has really been around regulation. If you look at what's been driving planning and building, if you think about what drives the Regulatory Solutions business, it has been the relentless onslaught of regulation. And I think we all see articles in the media every other day, whether would they be mainstream media or whether they be Facebook pages. No one wants more regulation. But at the same time, everyone wants more regulation. And it's one of those things. You will think about -- we don't want more regulation and then in the next breath, we'll say, really, the government should prevent that from happening, or there really should be a regulation around that thing. And so regulation is constantly changing and constantly evolving. There's this huge community expectation around governance of government and of communities. And I think from our perspective, it's how do we help governments deliver that efficiently? And that's a huge part of what we do, regardless of which part of the organization you look at today. But they are permanent demand drivers. I don't think they've changed in the last 20 years. If anything, they've got stronger and we think this is just going to be the continual driving force underpinning all the things that we do. So, that got us down to -- I love having a really short mission statement. We actually dropped a couple of words this year and we got it down into 7 words. I'm sure someone can help me out with dropping it even further. But GovTech is the place that we play. No matter where I go in the world now, everyone's talking about GovTech. We happen to be in fashion once again. And so outstanding GovTech, driving stronger communities and nations is really at the heart of all the things that I've just been talking about. One of the other -- for those of you that have been Objective followers for a long period of time, you'll appreciate that this is the flywheel of innovation that we talk about all the time. Whether it be at investor meetings, whether it be at employee sessions, this always gets discussed. I think we've made one small change this year. Typically or in the past, the top left-hand corner, which has said increased investment in R& D is now really just talking about increased investment. So, I think it's fair to say that we're making investments right across the business. It's not just in R&D. Clearly, driving or having outstanding software has been critical and remains critical to everything that we do. But certainly, we're increasing our investment across the piece, as you can see from some of the other operating metrics. I'll talk more about our strategic pillars at the end there. At the end of the presentation, we'll talk about the strat plan, but it's just worthwhile mentioning these on the left-hand side, just to give some color to what the strategic pillars are that drive this flywheel as well. Innovation. I'd like to call out that we are always developing our products. And even though we're calling out just some key areas today, and there's some areas where we just -- we talk about individual products, I'd like it to be clear that we're always investing in all of our products. If we're going to sunset a product on the odd occasion that we've been, that we've done that, we've always given customers our next thing to go to. But we have called out these 4 areas. So certainly, first of all, AI. I think the world's been awash with AI for the last little while. I think we've called out that we've been doing AI for quite a long period of time. Perhaps not with large language models, which is really what ChatGPT has been all about. But certainly, in the area of computer vision, where I think we've shown over a long period of time with products like Trapeze. There's been a lot going on in the AI area. No doubt, you'll get some more from our letter on that side. Also, Objective IQ is into its 2024 edition. I think for anyone that's using our products, the response to Objective Nexus, Objective Connect, all the products that have got the 2024 IQ user experience has been phenomenal. You always know when you get internal comments about products. And now that we run Nexus internally, for Objective with 2024 IQ, the response has been outstanding. On top of that, we're doing a lot around standardization for integration. We are also bringing our product families together. So historically, when we've spoken about Content Solutions, we've spoken about sort of individual products and we've consolidated down from a series of 7 products to a series of 4 core products that you can see on the left there. There's also been some changes to iconography to make sure that people understand that they're in a particular portfolio family. And so the experience that you get as a customer, when you buy into the Nexus suite, you can also buy these other individual capabilities. Obviously, 3Sixty has been a big driver for us and will continue to be as our Connect and Redact. And then finally, in the area of security, we have a huge investment, an ongoing investment in security. We are scanning our applications every night. We had quite a large series of security credentials. We've listed some of them there on the left-hand side. And as we've called out in several places, we clearly work with quite a number of sensitive organizations. Well, actually, I'd probably say that they're all data sensitive organizations and some are even more are extreme data sensitive. And we've given you a link there to our certificate for Nexus for the IRAP certification just out of interest. But again, you can get a website, see all the things that we're doing on the security side. This has been a big area of innovation for us in the last 12 months. But as I said, there are some of the things that we're calling out this year, but clearly, there's innovation going on in every product. Some of the things that we've been doing in terms of market expansion, the core things have been product as we've called out. The second big thing has been what we're doing in terms of new geographies. We invested very considerably with the Objective RegWorks product for regulators in the U.K. And I'm very pleased to announce that this year, we won our first U.K. customer in the U.K. Gambling Commission. So, that product will go live for the Gambling Commission in the second -- sorry, in the second half of this calendar year, but it is our very first regulatory customer in the U.K. Now, we've got a big pipeline ahead, but it's certainly been great to see us translate from being market entrants, even perhaps in some respects creating a market and then seeing that come through to the first customers has been very rewarding for everyone that's been involved. The other element has been Objective Build. I think we've been talking about Build as a part of planning and building now for quite some years. We've made great progress in New Zealand that's ongoing, and that's given us the market ambition to take Build to other markets. And I'll talk about that in a couple of slides time. And then finally, sort of operational excellence has been also a driver. We have made huge advances in the way that we go and deploy Objective RegWorks in particular. We've dropped the cost of customer onboarding considerably, not only in terms of dollars, but certainly in terms of time. And last weekend, we took live the NRAR, one of our -- the water regulator here in New South Wales, that we brought -- that we sort of got live with their first phase last weekend and that was the fastest ever deployment of RegWorks and I think really underpins the progress that we've been making in terms of costs to deploy. And then finally sort of getting -- sort of back into some numbers around Nexus. On the right-hand side here, you can see just a broad cross section of new customers who have gone straight onto the Nexus platform and of course, existing customers who have made the transition. And whilst you can see the 2 charts on the left-hand side, our USP number isn't going down or hasn't gone down over the past couple of years. We've given you some insight into the uplift case when we convert. So far, the conversion rates running at about 2.1x has been the ECM on-prem to Nexus cloud conversion ratio. So, you can see there's, obviously, a degree of latent uplift there. Again, we're not relying on the cloud flip as a big driver for the organization. We're quite happy if we do the migration of customers to Nexus cloud. Over the next sort of 4 years, that'd be fine. It's a case of working with customers, taking them on the journey, making sure that they're supported and making sure that they have a great experience. And I think those are all things that we've seen with the customers that have converted so far. I thought it was worthwhile just for each of the lines of business to touch on the addressable market again. This gives you some insight into the target addressable market just for Australia and New Zealand for Content Solutions. You can see the Nexus on-prem market there at $600 million, Connect and Nexus at around $100 million. Nexus cloud, obviously, roughly double the Nexus on-prem uplift and then 360 -- $300 million, and probably quite considerably more if we think about the international opportunity with that product. If we look at the addressable market for Planning & Building, we've called this out in terms of number of consents. I mean, each market in terms of the revenue works a little bit differently in terms of the way we charge for the platform and certainly in terms of the number of participants that are involved in planning workflows. But 80,000 consents in New Zealand, 300,000 in Australia and 400,000 in the U.K. gives you a sense of the size of the market. I think, equally, in terms of talking about being #1 in the market, in Australia, we have 230 councils with over 3,000 professionals using the Objective Trapeze platform. That's around about 70% of the market. And in New Zealand, we have 63 councils, 90% of the market, with 1,300 professionals using the platform there. But that's purely Trapeze. Build can come through on top of some of those. And then finally, if we think about the size of the RegWorks market across Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., it's around about a $300 million market that we've identified so far. You can go and get some -- there are some -- an annual report that we do, that we've done the last couple of years for both the U.K. and Australia about the state of this marketplace. We see this as a somewhat embryonic marketplace. So, you can see there the technology adoption rates about where people are on their journey. So, we think that this is going to be an expanding market. So it's not just the regulators and the regulated, but even government agencies that have an element of regulation will ultimately become part of the target addressable market. And I think that U.K. market at the moment is probably a little bit understated, but it's been driven by initiatives in that market as well. So if we have a look a little bit more -- in a little bit more detail about the business line overview, first of all, just -- I guess, I'll call out the consistency across the 3 lines of business. So, Content Solutions, Planning & Building, Regulatory Solutions, they are all driven by governance, regulation and digital service. People often think about, well, isn't that just Planning & Building? Isn't that just regulatory services? But if you think about Content Solutions, Content Solutions really has been the underpinning governance platform over a very long period of time. So if we come through and have a look at some of the highlights here, you can see, we've called out the sales revenue and the ARR growth. You can see that the difference between the 2 is the compression around service delivery and our desire to drive services down. It's probably fair to say there are a couple of opportunities that we really expected to close in June that have not yet closed, and that sort of put a little bit of a damper on the Content Solutions end state. But you can see some of the things that we've done here. I've spoken about the adoption of Nexus. It is gathering momentum. We've got 14 customers onto the Nexus platform now. Certainly in terms of what we're doing around AI and Objective 3Sixty. At our last night, I addressed this at some of the last presentations that we did. 3Sixty has been a game changer for us in terms of the things that we're doing with 3Sixty around things like privacy protection, getting rid of obsolete information. These are huge drivers for government organizations. And there hasn't been a presentation that I haven't seen yet where the customer says, wow, you can do all that to which, of course, we can. So, we've got an enormous number of 3Sixty opportunities going forward. Equally, we have been winning new customers in North America with 3Sixty. We've called some of those out. We'll see quite a number more. We've equally had our first wins in the U.K. I believe we've called out the Ministry of Justice previously in the U.K. So, there's a lot going on in the 3Sixty world. We brought new Objective Connect customers to market. And one of the interesting ones -- you haven't heard a lot about Objective Keystone and Keyplan for a number of years now. But Keyplan -- sorry, Keystone had probably its best year ever. And now, I'm sort of happy to say that 17 of the largest 25 Australian Superannuation funds are now customers. So in fact, it'll be -- I think it'll be 18 in the next week or so. We've still got 7 more to educate. And certainly, we've had also interest in climate risk disclosure when we won our first customer in New Zealand off the back of that legislation. We're a little bit slow here in Australia. The U.K. has just adopted some climate risk disclosure regulations as well, that will drive more opportunities for us in the U.K. And we equally see opportunities up in Singapore as well. So, Keystone is in very good shape. At the same time, what was born out of Keystone was Keyplan, what is really behind the strategic planning element for local government, both in Australia, the New Zealand and particularly in the U.K. And in the U.K., we've had some drivers around initiatives around the Department of Levelling-Up and the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Act, which essentially is the same things that we see in many parts of the world. There is a huge drive for providing greater and more affordable housing. And I think no matter where I go, no matter which country I go to, this has become a very big social issue that we're helping to address. If I move on to Planning & Building, it's probably fair to say that the interest rate scenario in New Zealand, probably more than anything else has driven a lower level of activity. Whilst we still manage a 15% year-on-year change in New Zealand, we were battling probably about a $0.75 million headwind in like-for-like. Clearly, we won't have that same headwind as we go into '25. You only kind of have the headwind once on an ARR basis. But equally, from a performance perspective, we had 40,000 applications go through Objective Build in New Zealand. Very impressive for what is essentially a brand new product. Equally, we had some new customers come on board in BCAL. We upgraded 7 consenting authorities to Build. We've got a further 10 in transition. So, we've got roughly half that New Zealand market now on to Build. And again, we're holding customers hands. We're giving them time to migrate from existing and giving them a path. But ultimately, the transition is progressing well. We also released Inspections. There's information that's available on our website to have a look at Inspections. We think that's just been a critical component to allow remote inspections, photo essays of technical elements of the building process and very, very comprehensive checklists. So, there's a lot to see there. And I had to use that word game changer, but it certainly is changing the game for the people involved in inspections in New Zealand and that will soon roll out to other places as well. And then finally, we had more than 6 million development applications being passed through Objective Trapeze across Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. So it's really been a solid time. We think they are all setting us up for a really great FY '25. And then, finally, just to talk about Regulatory Solutions. This is probably the other part of the business that had some last month headwinds. We're expected to sign a major deal -- a second major deal in the U.K. that's been deferred to the second half of the calendar year, and another one here in Australia to an existing customer that just didn't make the June 30 cutoff. So, some headwinds here on the ARR that we certainly weren't expecting. But again, just to sort of call out the dimensions of the sorts of customers that we're winning, the Gambling Commission, $3.4 million, 6-year contract. A lot of the contracts really are of this dimension and larger in terms of the RegWorks platform. So, we think there's a lot of really, really solid growth ahead. The team has made incredible progress on the platform. The team is delivering, have made incredible progress on the efficiency with which they delivered the solution and I think we're in very, very good shape. And so finally, just really one outlook slide to talk about. And I thought I'd just share with everybody the core of the strategic plan that we outlined at Activate '24. I just wanted to share the top slide. We think it's really, really important that you're able to put your business plan on a page. And whilst this is the top level slide for the detailed business plans, each of our lines of business has its own business plan and each of -- equally, each of our central services department has its own plan that supports this overall strategic plan. So, very clearly stating our mission. I've talked about the ambition earlier on in the presentation. We talked about requiring energy. We -- perhaps there'll be some questions about M&A, which I can address a little bit later on, but we really need this energy to grow. So, our target ARR growth, not the SaaS ARR growth, but the overall target ARR growth remains at 15%. I've addressed this in my letter. And I think equally important has been this realignment around what are the strategic pillars that drive our flywheel innovation? So, investing in people, building outstanding products, making sure that we achieve the go-to-market plans, delighting customers through customer success programs that we've been heavily investing in over the last 2 years and being ready to scale. And I think that certainly all of our central services teams have been implementing really world-class systems that support scale. And so M&A becomes a very straightforward affair. And last but not least, as is celebrated if you've ever been to an Objective office, we celebrate our values all the time. Every month we celebrate at our monthly get-together and I think they underpin this strategic plan. There's way more underneath this, of course. But I think that, as I said, I just wanted to share this with you in terms of what was driving us going forward. So with that, I'm happy to open up to good questions.

The first question we're going to have is from Jules Cooper at Shaw and Partners.

Can you hear me? Fantastic. Sorry, I took a bit to just navigate that. All right. Look, a really strong margin result we've seen here in FY '24, even when you've included the capitalized development, which is the way we tend to look at the business. I guess you've stressed profitable growth in your commentary this morning that is not dissimilar to how you've run the business over many years. I guess I'm just curious as we look into FY '25, given that strong result in '24, is it realistic to expect a further expansion potentially in that margin? Or is that more sort of a FY '26 and beyond story?

Yes, it's a good question. Thank you. We are still expecting margin improvement. But I think if I think about where we've been on the M&A journey over the past 12 months, it's been pretty much a PE-fueled marketplace as I've sort of outlined in the letter. And as a result, you kind of -- you end up reflecting on what makes more sense. I mean, obviously, we're not short of cash. And I just purely look at it from an investor perspective and go, what makes sense here? Because some of the things that are happening, particularly in North America don't make too much sense to me. But, hey, perhaps I'm wired just a little bit differently. So where we end up getting to is, I go with the cash position that we've got, there's an ability to invest in their own business to drive stronger organic growth. But as a public company, you have to use some margin to get that organic growth because the investment needs to come from somewhere. So, you're constantly between, do I use some margin to drive future growth? Or do I pay ridiculous amounts of money to buy that growth? And it's about getting that right balance. And so I would say that whilst we will get margin expansion, I would rather use some of the cash or some of the margin that we're generating. As you know, investments come straight off the -- go straight into sort of operating expenses. And so we're constantly moderating between the 2.

The next question, Tony, is going to be from Josh Kannourakis at Barrenjoey.

Yes. Thanks, Josh.

Perfect. I've lost my nice background of my illustrious office behind me. Sorry. Can I ask a question just around the deals? And we talked about some of those that have moved across, especially in RegTech. Is there any extra context, Tony, you can give us around some of those that have been awarded so far and those that haven't, and just your confidence level on some of those?

Yes, I'm pretty confident. I'm pretty confident about what slipped. We'll pick up. Yes, look, it's really unfortunate. Pretty much everyone slipped has been because there's been a change in personnel or there's been someone missing in a position of authority. And I think as you would -- will appreciate when you've got multimillion dollar contracts, more junior people are reluctant, if not, don't have the ability to sign off on sort of $5 million, $10 million contracts. And as I said in the letter, look, I can't fault our team here. The team has done a great job. And I think there is -- I think you probably know us well enough. We are highly frustrated, but it is beyond our control. And even pitching in uncommercial deals to try and close things, to me, I don't see any sense in that. You're just setting yourself up for long-term failure. So it was a very frustrating final 2 weeks of June, reminded me of the old perpetual right to use days, if I'm fair. But these are customers that we will get. And look, a couple of them are existing customers, so it's not like we're writing lots of new business. The U.K. one wasn't, but there's a couple of them here that certainly are with existing customers.

And can I ask, maybe to be a bit cheeky, but if you had won all of those prior to the end of June, would that have hit the 15% or close to it?

I think you'd find it hit 14.7%.

14.7%. Okay. No, that's highly accurate. Maybe another decimal point next time. Perfect. Second question just really quickly, Build. Obviously, we've been focusing on that and that New Zealand's taken a bit of time because of all those issues we've talked about. The Aussie market always seems right for it. Can we talk a little bit more on both go-to-market and maybe the timing of when you think or see sort of first wins for Build within Australia?

Yes. Certainly, FY '25, we'll see Build wins outside of New Zealand. Let me put it that way, whether it's Australia or whether it's other parts of the world. I mean, what we've done in New Zealand has got the attention of a lot of people. It's known around the world. I've got a meeting with another country tonight. What we've done there is pretty unique and there's just a lot of interest in it. It's very hard to do. And so, look, I think it's going to -- as I said, I think that what we're doing there is it's like a teenager. We're just applying everything that we know and I'm very confident.

Got it. And just on the unit economics, Tony, like if we compare what you've got in New Zealand or the sort of dollars per consent, if you want to look at it that way, across whether it be in the U.K. or Aus or other markets, in line, above, below?

Look, for now, I think from a numbers perspective, if you thought about it in the same context as New Zealand, that would be a good starting point. I think the value that we provide to people on that platform is incredible and it would be perhaps nice to think that we would share a little bit more on the value that we create over time.

Thanks, Josh. Next questions is from Christian Angelis at Blue Ocean.

Tony, Ben, can you hear me?

We can.

You can? You got it? Better just go for it. Tony, just a comment in the CEO Letter around the conviction around the 15% ARR growth. Can you kind of talk to where you sit today and saying that 15% is the right number and you guys think you can execute on that versus where you were in '24? Obviously, some contracts slipped. But do you have better foresight over that? Or is there a stronger pipeline that you're looking at that you guys have a bit more conviction over that number?

Yes. Yes. I always hate talking about pipelines, as you know. Look, we know -- we obviously know where the headwinds occurred. It was very, very narrow, and it just happened to be the core material deals that needed to get signed off. So it's not like we had a -- if you think about it in the context of the pipeline, it's not like we had a big slip. It's the fact that we had a couple of the needle movers didn't move, as I say, very much similar to the way we used to feel 10 years ago with perpetual right to use. So, I think on the whole, the pipelines, the pipelines are really solid. And I think we just need to get on with the job. And those things that have slipped, well, I'm confident that they will come through. So, I think it's fair to say we probably start the year with little bit of a tailwind, given that we've got those things.

Okay. Perfect. And then just one other one for me is just on the Nexus and the 2.1x that you guys were speaking to. Do you think that's a fair representation of what we can expect out of the larger cohort? And I guess, to that point, can you just talk a little bit about who you've actually done this upgrade with and whether they're new versus existing and just give us a feel for that?

Yes. So the ones we've done it with are, are existing. Obviously, you don't have a conversion rate from old to new if it's a new customer. Look, I think the sample size is small at the moment. If I'm fair, the 2.1x seems higher than I was expecting. But look, it's probably a question for next year when we've got a bigger sample size. But yes, certainly the things that we're pricing, the value equation stacks up for customers. And so as a result, all of the drivers have been based on customer value. And so that seems to be where it's sitting. Whether it's -- whether it's 1.8x next year or whether it's 2.3x, I can't really say at the moment. But, yes, we always thought that the average was going to be high ones. It's just ended up. It's probably -- it has been better than expected.

Thanks, Christian. The next question is from Evan Karatzas at UBS.

Perhaps we'll develop a presentation platform next.

Just wait for Evan to join. But in the meantime -- in the meantime, I'll invite James Filius of Morgans to the stage.

Tony and Ben, I just had a quick question.

Yes, we can hear you. Thanks.

Brilliant. In your letter, you mentioned expectations for project services revenue to grow in '25. Can you help us sort of understand the expected uplift year-on-year? And as you win, I guess, some more contracts, particularly in the regulatory space, are you sort of expecting this to grow further from here? And I think, previously, you sort of talked about potentially longer-term looking to outsource some of this deployment type revenue over longer term. Can you sort of talk to whether that's still something you look to do over the long term?

Yes. Thanks. I'll just sort of keep the discussion to the regulatory solutions RegWorks projects for context. So, yes, I mean, it won't keep going down because there's only so much efficiency you can drive out. And I think we kind of -- we're probably at a bit of a natural compression point where we've driven the costs down. It's not to say that there isn't another efficiency leg for customers, because I think there's still more that can be done. But certainly, the win rate and ARR growth from regulatory solutions will grow materially in '25, and we will just naturally need more people to do -- to deliver project work. It won't be crazy. We're trying to keep it to a manageable amount. But I would expect that -- we're probably going to see a 10% rise in services over the course of the year in terms of services revenue. The second part of your question, equally important is the view about having other people deploy, particularly RegWorks, going forward. That's definitely on the agenda. We're still proving that out to ourselves. We're likely to actually do something with a customer first, whereas customer internally stands up its own services group, operating as a Quasi systems integrator. And that will be the next sort of step on the journey. And assuming that that's successful, then we'll go to the following step. But the system's very much becoming a point-and-click configuration. The term being low code, no code, I mean, I'm all for no code. Forget the low code, I just want no code. And as that product -- the deployment profile of that product has become more mature and therefore, more efficient, that gives us operating leverage. We're not interested in services as a service or any of that other kind of stuff where we really want to keep. The more we keep deployments down, the faster we can onboard more customers, the greater benefit customers get, the greater margin expansion we get. So it really is the driver is margin. And if the driver's margin dollars and margin percentage, then we don't get confused about trying to drive services revenue, which, ultimately, we don't want because that just builds a different style of company.

The next question is from Wei Sim at Jefferies.

Sorry if I missed this before. Just one from me. Just one of the things that you mentioned previously was the headwinds on reg side. So, not seeing some of those contracts being signed before 30 June for Australia and U.K. I just wanted to confirm, have these now been signed or are they still kind of, like, in the pipeline?

No. Neither of them have been signed.

Okay. Perfect. Okay. That was all from me.

The next question is from -- we're going to -- Evan is on the line. Evan Karatzas from UBS.

There we go. I think you've got me now. Okay. Second time lucky. Apologies for before. Look, I mean -- sorry to -- I'll ask one on the deal slippage. I just want to get this straight because it feels like this is something that you haven't really seen before in terms of, like, the deal slippage occurring because people have changed jobs, changed roles. They're not absent like. Just trying to get an understanding if this is like a one-off type event or if this is, I guess, a constant theme we should think of going forward?

I think it's a bit of both, Evan. So it is a constant theme that deals get delayed. It's not a -- it's a common occurrence. What's uncommon is to have pretty much all, your large deals slip together. But whether that's a sign of the times, I'm not sure. One of something I didn't raise earlier. But I think if you follow the cash, we were well ahead of our own expectations about cash collection. And my theory is that having done this June 30 gig many, many times now, I think the -- a lot of projects for a lot of things got delayed. It wasn't just Objective. I think that there's been -- the broader sense of it is there's been, I think, a push for governments to not contribute to inflation, people not being around necessarily to sign off projects. And therefore, the budgets that they do have go into prepaying next year's expenses, which is why I think our collections were probably $10 million higher than what we were expecting. And so, yes, look, I think, as I said, the deferrals are just a natural part of business. You've got to expect some level of deferral. Not everything that you're chasing in any reporting period. It's not a perfect world. You'll always get some. I think in our case -- and we had scope for -- we had scope for some to get deferred. We just didn't have scope for all of the major ones to get deferred.

Okay. Yes. Got it. All right. So it's the fact that it was all of them is the sort of the unusual part of this June period. Yes. Okay. Just one more if I can. Just on that...

Also related to size.

Yes. Sorry to interrupt. There's, obviously, a bit of a lag. Just on the Nexus cloud sort of customer migration, a little bit of a tick up this year just taking your comments. Is it the expectation that now FY '25, we should see a bit of more of an acceleration in that step up? And also just curious to get your broader comments, just given how you talked about before, the government pressures on budgets, just how those conversations to shift to cloud are going with, obviously, the higher price point that it comes with as well?

Yes. I don't think there's no real issue on the conversions. That seem to be happening because the values there. It's just an economic calculation. They are getting -- it's an easy return on investment. So where you have to work harder is where it's a new initiative of an expenditure that don't already have.. But, I mean, even when you think about the ECM on-prem to Nexus cloud conversions, they're spending that money on something, somewhere with someone. If you -- so it's really just more of a case of we're taking revenue from something else or OpEx from something else.

Yes. Okay. All right. That's a good point. Okay. All right. I'll pass it along. Sorry for taking some issues with the tech before as well.

That's all the time we had available, Tony. So, returning to you for any closing remarks.

All right. Look. Thanks, again, for everyone's attendance this morning. I really appreciate your interest in the company. Hopefully, we've given you confidence and insight into the year ahead, and I look forward to doing it all again in 6 months' time. Have a great day. Thanks.