Wolters Kluwer N.V. (WKL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. I'm Meg Geldens, VP of Investor Relations, and I'll be moderating today's call. The IR team at Wolters Kluwer is pleased to be able to host this teach-in for you today. We plan -- the plan for this session is to give you some context to our Tax & Accounting division and then take an in-depth look at 2 of our largest cloud products, CCH Axcess and CCH Tagetik. [Operator Instructions] Today's slides have been published on our website. Before we begin, could I ask you to read Slide 2 regarding forward-looking statements? We will not be disclosing new information on current trading today. Please refer to our recent trading update for details on our outlook for 2022. Now it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers. First, Wolters Kluwer CEO, Nancy McKinstry, will provide some historical and strategic context to our Tax & Accounting business. Second, Karen Abramson, CEO of the Tax & Accounting division, will give an overview of the markets in which we operate and the division strategy. Karen joined Wolters Kluwer 22 years ago and initially led business units in Governance, Risk & Compliance and in Health and for the past 9 years, has been at the helm of Tax & Accounting. Next, Jason Marx, President and CEO of our large North America Professional Tax & Accounting business, will provide a closer look at CCH Axcess. Jason has been with the company for 15 years and ran our GRC financial services group before moving across to Tax & Accounting. Last but not least, Ralf Gärtner, Senior VP and General Manager of Corporate Performance Management, will take you through the CCH Tagetik platform. Ralf has been with Wolters Kluwer for 11 years. He ran several of our European software units before taking on the global role at CCH Tagetik. Without further ado, I would like to hand over to Nancy to set the stage.

Thank you, Meg. I'm delighted we're able to provide you with some deeper insights into the world of tax and accounting software today and to give you an opportunity to hear directly from a few members of the leadership team in Tax & Accounting. Software made up 42% of Wolters Kluwer's group revenues in 2021. The Tax & Accounting division is our biggest software business. It accounts for more than half of the group's software revenues. This slide lists a few of the largest tax and accounting software products, all of them available in both cloud and on-premise versions. The 2 cloud platforms we are showcasing today are among the fastest-growing products at Wolters Kluwer with good prospects in coming years. These software solutions are quintessential expert solutions, delivering deep domain expertise straight into the professional's daily workflow, bringing automation and productivity benefits. Over the past decade, we have seen the performance of Tax & Accounting improve very significantly. It has taken many years of long-term planning and organic product investment to get to this stage. A few acquisitions have also played a role. Improved performance has been driven in a very large part by the shift towards software, which in 2021 made up 78% of the division's revenues. And more specifically, it's been the move to the cloud that has fueled the acceleration. Cloud software accounted for about 1/3 of the division's software revenues in 2021, and that proportion will continue to rise in the coming years. With that, I'd now like to turn the floor over to Karen Abramson.

Hello. Thank you for joining us today. At Tax & Accounting, our purpose is to deliver a deep impact when it matters most. Through our 7,100 employees serving customers in over 150 countries, we fuel global commerce by enabling professionals in tax and accounting firms, corporations and governing authorities to drive productivity, navigate change, gain insights and deliver better outcomes. As a division, we serve more than 1 million accountants, 93% of the Fortune 500, 84% of the Fortune 1000, all Big Four accounting firms and 1,600 multinational offices of the chief financial officer. When you think about the services we offer, contemplate that 85% are software and related services and 15% are information solutions. There are 4 business units that make up Tax & Accounting. Three of the business units are focused on the professional tax market. They are noted here in the blue circles: Tax & Accounting North America, Tax & Accounting Asia Pacific and Tax & Accounting Europe. These businesses deliver compliance and workflow solutions in firm management, in audit and in tax. In Europe, we also deliver a payroll solution. The fourth business unit is corporate performance management, noted here in green. This business focuses on processes within the office of the chief financial officer. Our financial transformation platform, CCH Tagetik, provides streamlined finance workflows for all transactional accounting from financial close and consolidation to disclosure management as well as financial and operational planning based on predictive intelligence, budgeting, reporting and analytics covering the financial workflow from close to disclosure. This year, the platform introduced new capabilities for compliance reporting with ESG and integrated supply chain planning. With workflows optimized by technology and guided by deep domain expertise, Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting helps businesses of all sizes grow, manage and protect their businesses and their clients' businesses. We continue to have product superiority over our competitors as product innovation and investment have been strong. Over the last 10 years, we've increased our investment in product development by about 70%. Tax & Accounting is the largest player in the global professional tax and accounting market and one of the leading global corporate performance management providers. The professional firm market is around EUR 5 billion globally. In the professional firm space, we are the largest by revenue. In North America, our main competitors are Thomson Reuters and Intuit. The corporate performance management, or CPM, market is around EUR 5 billion in size as well. In corporate performance management, half of the market is shared by the traditional big 3 ERP players: SAP, Oracle and IBM. The other half of the market is made up of what we consider to be specialty players. CCH Tagetik is one of the top 3 specialist players in the world with one of the most complete offerings in the market. Consistent investment in product development and the journey to the cloud have helped drive accelerated revenue growth for the division. Yet throughout, we have sustained and even improved margins. Organic growth has accelerated from 1% to 2% back in the 2010-2014 time frame to 6% in 2021 and 9% in the first 9 months of 2022. This has been driven by the business shift to faster-growing software, and simultaneously, the reduction in the proportion of print, which has been in constant decline. Today, print is less than 2% of division revenues. Margin performance reflects investment in higher growth businesses, particularly CCH Axcess and CCH Tagetik. Over 85% of the division's revenues are recurring in nature. This recurring revenue includes digital subscriptions to software and information products, shown as a blue line in the chart on the left. This revenue has proven to be highly resilient throughout the years and remained strong during COVID. Other recurring revenues, the gray line on the chart, include certain repeating transactional fees, which are more volatile. Nonrecurring revenue streams include software licenses and implementation, training and other services. These 2 are more volatile, but are only 12% of total division revenues. We're very proud of the many awards we receive, each recognizing the quality of our products and our leadership in product innovation. 2022 has already exceeded the awards and recognition count of 2021. This year alone, we've had 32 product culture and leadership-related awards. Notable is the continuous analyst recognition for CCH Tagetik by multiple analysts, including Gartner, BARC, Dresner, BPM and Chartis. CCH Axcess Validate was named top new product in the category audit tools in Accounting Today's 2022 top new products. Our success is truly driven by our people, who also contribute to our standing as one of the best places to work in North America. The Forbes awards that you see on the slide have great meaning to us because those awards are won on employee feedback. We've been named the best employer for new graduates, best employer for diversity, best employer for women and the best employer in the Americas. As we look forward, our strategy is informed by the market trends. The first trend is regulatory intensity and complexity. The EU will require green energy and carbon footprint financial reporting in 2023. The U.S. is expected to require it by 2026. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that this will be the largest change in global financial regulation since Sarbanes-Oxley. And Moody's has already announced it will be plotting ESG data for corporate ratings. At the same time, offices of finance and tax and accounting firms are grappling with new EU regulations around open banking, also known as PSD2, and new taxation and audit standards around cryptocurrencies. And governments around the world have just recently agreed to adopt the 15% minimum corporate tax. These are all seismic regulatory changes that will bring a need for new financial reporting capabilities, a new set of corporate tax penalties to navigate and a new standard for auditing. This is fundamentally changing how companies across the world calculate their corporate taxes and shifting where and how offices of finance focus their time on regulation. In Tax & Accounting, we are preparing to support our professional firms and corporations with workflow tools and reporting to help them navigate these regulatory changes. We are addressing all of these different regulations within our products, particularly within CCH Axcess and CCH Tagetik. The second trend we are tracking is cloud maturity. The pandemic was a catalyst for technology and created a shift. Companies in virtually every industry, including tax, have recognized that if they want their organizations to have the flexibility and scalability to thrive, especially during times of disruption, they need to be on the cloud. Conversations are no longer about shifting to the cloud. They're much more about cloud maturity with a focus on security, privacy and ease of conversion so that companies can get to the cloud quickly. In all of our business units, we are working on more seamless data integrations to ease cloud conversion. The third trend is around connectivity and interoperability. Partner ecosystems will continue to be strengthened by greater connectivity and data interoperability. Standardization of data is critical to make it easier to capture, access, share and analyze data across platforms, improving transparency and reducing cost. Tax & Accounting has built an iSaaS, integration Software as a Service, platform to integrate and normalize disparate data sets. At Tax & Accounting today, we are integrating data sets for workflow and analysis through our CCH Axcess Marketplace and our CCH Tagetik AI hub. The fourth trend we are tracking is around advanced technology. Advanced intelligent technologies are now being standardized within artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and robotic process automation. Today, all computation is linear. Quantum computing, which introduces simultaneous calculation capability, is on the verge of moving beyond the academic realm into a real-world setting. This will provide much faster computing capabilities to support the timely processing of enormous amounts of data. This technology will, in the long term, have a significant impact on our tax engines, enabling faster integration of complex tax changes, more robust tax analysis and better predictive modeling. Finally, the last trend is Web 3.0 and the metaverse. Decentralized ecosystems of Web 3.0 broadly encompass the virtual reality user experience that we commonly call the metaverse as well as blockchain, a service-oriented architecture for rapid application development and secure transaction, high-speed 5G and web decentralization. Wolters Kluwer has recently purchased land in the metaverse and is building out opportunities to engage our clients in training, collaboration spaces and professional services. We continue to pursue growth through organic investment in product superiority and innovation to expand our customer and market reach. We will continue to accelerate our expert solutions by leveraging technology components and platforms in different markets with the CCH Axcess Marketplace, CCH Axcess Client Collaboration, CCH Axcess Validate and CCH Axcess Audit. Focusing on the regulatory ESG solution and integrated business planning for CCH Tagetik follows our corporate priorities to accelerate our expert solutions. In Europe, we are focused on expanding firm management with CCH iFirm and delivering Global Audit to Europe where we do not offer these products today. To continue to expand our reach, we will be launching Global Direct Tax on CCH Tagetik, further expanding our position in the office of the CFO. We will also expand our cloud accounting product suite in Tax & Accounting Europe. We will continue to develop robotic process automation and data analytics to drive scale in outsourcing. While we focus on customers, we also continually look inward to see where we can develop and evolve our own core capabilities. One of our most important initiatives will be to deploy an end-to-end digital customer experience so that customers can find, try, buy, use, collaborate and renew all of our products within one smoothly integrated digital experience. Today, we are testing a digital portal in the United Kingdom that will go live in January and be the basis of this end-to-end experience for our customers. It is always a top priority to invest in our talent through training and development and focusing on improving our already best-in-class engagement. We'd like to share with you more detail about 2 of the high-growth drivers in our business: CCH Axcess and CCH Tagetik. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Jason Marx, President and CEO, Tax & Accounting North America, who will tell you more about CCH Axcess.

Thank you, Karen, and good day. Tax & Accounting North America is a leading global provider of tax, accounting and audit information software and services. We offer innovative, integrated and customer-inspired solutions that support the workflow of CPAs, corporate tax and accounting departments and auditors, all enabling growth, enhancing productivity and increasing profitability. Our expert analysis, authoritative content, customer-driven software applications and integrated workflow productivity tools allow professionals to turn information into action. Today, CCH Axcess is the only integrated cloud-based tax and accounting platform for U.S. accounting firms, comprising 14 integrated modules and a marketplace that supports the entire workflow of the CPA, including tax, audit and firm management. The CCH Axcess platform has over 99,000 customers, 380,000 individual users and 2 million clients in the U.S. market. CCH Axcess is used by 90% of the top 100 accounting firms in North America, processing nearly 43 million tax returns. The platform is supported by significant technology infrastructure, supporting 2.8 petabytes of client data. Imagine that as 56 million 4-drawer filing cabinets, and the platform can handle some 4,500 transactions every second of the day. The CCH Axcess platform of today is 15 years in the making from development to launch to the continued acceleration of its robust capabilities. And while it started with a vision for a centralized platform to improve how accountants do business, there's been steady investment in innovation and organic development of solutions that drive the foundation of a firm's business, automation, standardization and optimization, and the tools for rethinking business processes and ensuring that firms are working at the peak of their capabilities. In 2013, the full CCH Axcess cloud platform launched with 7 core modules. Since that time, we've added capabilities to digitize workflows and improve client experiences. Modules like CCH Axcess Client Collaboration track client workflows from beginning to end with a unified hub for firms and their clients with the tools to send and receive engagement letters, require information with customized organizers, review and deliver returns and send invoices. We've added emerging technologies to make it better, like adding blockchain capabilities to drive bank confirmations for audit with CCH Axcess Validate using predictive intelligence to help firms gather client insights, grow tax advisory services, fight commoditization and expand revenue opportunities with CCH Axcess iQ. With the acquisition of XCM Solutions in 2020, we added capabilities to help firms address capacity challenges and simplify tax preparation, accelerating turnaround and increasing client satisfaction. Through the launch of the CCH Axcess Marketplace, we added partners for cryptocurrency accounting, resource planning, scheduling and payment solutions that enable firm automation through API integration to the CCH Axcess platform. And CCH Axcess Engagement, our newest addition to the CCH Axcess platform, solves some of the most common audit workflow challenges facing firms today with the delivery of data-driven audit and its cloud-based workpaper management and trial balance solution. Collectively, over the last 10 years, these solutions have transformed an entire profession. The CCH Axcess ecosystem brings increased productivity for firms while creating growth opportunities for the business. Customers benefit from the significant enhancements to productivity driven by the automation of workflows and the support for both remote and hybrid work models. Firms benefit from the standpoint of business continuity and disaster recovery with their data in the cloud, removing the burden of maintaining internal IT systems on their own. Wolters Kluwer benefits from a recurring annual subscription model with strong retention rates and the opportunity for market share gains with additional cross-sell and upsell potential across the portfolio. Wolters Kluwer has a strong position in the North American professional firm market as the only complete cloud-based suite. In the professional tax and accounting business, we remain focused on firms of all sizes in North America with a comprehensive portfolio offering across tax, audit, firm management and research and learning. With our extensive cloud offering in CCH Axcess, we remain well positioned to drive future growth. And with our growing audit portfolio, we're well positioned for global expansion with our customers. We face several formidable competitors, but through our early and consistent investment in innovation, we have maintained and even grown our market share in North America. This is a market where deep domain expertise and trusted reputation in the areas of tax, audit and firm management, combined with state-of-the-art technology, creates a competitive moat that is hard for new entrants to overcome unless they're willing to make the kind of investments we have made and will continue to make in the future. Now looking to the future, we'll continue to invest in driving innovation that grows our expert solutions and extends our market reach, opportunities to further invest in no-touch returns, leveraging source data extraction, expanded APIs and advanced technologies. We're continuing to expand browser-based capabilities by market, accelerating the opportunity for cross-sell and upsell across CCH Axcess. And we continue to focus on the expansion of market share through both new logo acquisition on core platforms and expansion of customer wallet share. This is our land and expand strategy that gains a foothold usually in tax or audit and then looks at opportunities to expand across the rest of the portfolio. We also plan to further commercialize APIs in the CCH Axcess Marketplace to serve as a growing online resource center for firms to find software integrations that leverage the data and their systems and enable firms to automate many of the most time-consuming tasks in their tax, audit and firm management workflows. And finally, we intend to invest in the tool sets that support efficient firm migrations from on-premise solutions to the cloud-based CCH Axcess platform and investment in our digital customer experience through the continued evolution and standardization of our back office. Thanks for listening. I'll now pass it over to Ralf Gärtner, Senior Vice President and General Manager of TAA Corporate Performance Solutions, who will provide you with a deep dive into CCH Tagetik.

Thank you, Jason, and good day. CCH Tagetik is a leading corporate performance management platform supporting the office of CFO, enabling finance functions in large and global enterprises to prop up their strategy with faster and better informed decisions. Like CCH Axcess, CCH Tagetik is a unified integrated platform. That means that every solution, whether it is consolidation or financial planning or operational forecasting, are all using the same advanced technology capabilities from the platform. For example, this includes AI-based predictive intelligence technology, workflow capability, unified data management and all the APIs that connect CCH Tagetik to the multiple enterprise resource planning, ERP, systems typically used within the medium and large enterprises. Currently used by 1,600 corporations, CCH Tagetik can be used in almost all industry verticals. Today, we are holding strong positions in 4 industry sectors, including banking and financial services, insurance, automotive first- and second-tier suppliers, manufacturing and consumer goods. Amongst other customers, this includes worldwide leading brands like Franklin Templeton, Generali, Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, Aegon, Prada, Gucci and Keurig Dr Pepper. CCH Tagetik is organized into 3 product groups. In the red, you can see the financial close process that is fully automating the full process within the office of CFO from account reconciliation to consolidation and disclosure management like annual reports, quarterly reports and, in fact, management reporting. CCH Tagetik is, in fact, the full close to disclose solution. We call it the finance intelligence platform. By automating the financial process using advanced technologies, enterprises gain time that they can use to deliver better forecasting and produce actionable insights, not only on financials, but on operational data as well. In the green, you can see the predictive integrated business planning capabilities that include financial planning and analytics as well as operational planning like supply chain planning, demand planning and others, fully leveraging advanced technology like AI or ML. In the blue, you see the regulatory reporting capabilities. Our solution makes regulatory reporting simpler for the office of CFO as it is part of the same workflow. This includes solutions for IFRS 16, IFRS 17, ESG performance management and corporate direct tax, including the current Pillar Two minimum taxation. The CCH Tagetik platform supports the whole finance transformation journey, which is, in fact, the digitization within the office of CFO. The office of CFO then transforms from a gatekeeper of financial data to become an adviser to all business units within an enterprise. CCH Tagetik fully supports the finance leaders during that journey. Most companies start their experience buying 1 out of the 3 product groups, using 3 to 5 modules at the beginning of their journey while further expanding the usage of CCH Tagetik into the other product groups and into other parts of the organization, for example, from the corporate into the operational business or from one country into others, adding additional modules and users. Founded in Lucca, Italy in 2007, CCH Tagetik was acquired in 2017 by Wolters Kluwer as a true finance intelligence platform that supports the office of finance during their finance transformation journey. Since the acquisition, Wolters Kluwer has significantly invested in both geographic market expansion as well as product development. For example, in 2019, we launched our account reconciliation solution that further automates the financial close process. In 2020, amongst other innovations, we launched our explainable predictive intelligence module that helps enterprises better forecast their business and drive simulations based on internal and external data sources. This innovation was something that was very important for enterprises during the uncertain times of COVID-19. In 2021, we entered into the integrated business planning market based on the acquisition of Vanguard Software, a U.S.-based specialist within the sales and operational planning that we fully integrated into the CCH Tagetik platform, to offer the strong integration of both the financial and operational planning. In March this year, we launched our new ESG and sustainability performance management solution to support customers with nonfinancial KPIs, all within the same platform and process landscape where they already plan and consolidate their financials. We expand our market reach significantly across the globe. And while we operated in Europe and North America since 2017, we expanded significantly within APAC, just this year expanding into South Korea. Importantly, we have also rapidly expanded our network of implementation partners to accelerate deployment. We work together with hundreds of local and regional expert partners as well as with all the Big Four accounting firms, Accenture and other global service providers. As already mentioned, CCH Tagetik enables enterprises to spend less time managing and controlling financial and nonfinancial processes and to spend more time focusing on strategy, delivering business insights and driving the business. CCH Tagetik creates significant benefits for the different worlds within the office of CFO as well as for the IT department. For example, CCH Tagetik empowers the office of CFO to make faster and better-informed decisions and to streamline reporting, analytics and compliance. CCH Tagetik helps CFOs retain and develop top performers as they experience an improved reputation within the enterprise and execute higher value work. Additionally, they can better optimize resources and capitalize on big data to improve decision-making. The FP&A professionals can handle in-depth planning and analytics, more comprehensive plans and forecasts with faster results. CCH Tagetik aligns operations and finance to provide insights for sustainable value creation and actions. The controller can easily handle new regulatory reporting and in-depth analytics with less reconciliations and spending more time for analysis with faster, more reliable and auditable results. And last not least, the IT professionals significantly benefit from CCH Tagetik. IT can provide the office of finance with just one unified platform that is easy to maintain, fits into almost every IT architecture landscape, works together with different ERP systems and allows a reliable master data management process. For both IT and the office of CFO, CCH Tagetik helps to establish a data governance strategy for corporations working in a very diverse IT landscape. And very importantly, CCH Tagetik supports the market-leading hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. CCH Tagetik runs natively on SAP HANA and is directly integrated into SAP's ERP system, S/4HANA, which is a huge benefit for every IT department working in that environment. CCH Tagetik holds the leading specialist position in the EUR 5 billion global CPM market that is growing 6% year-over-year. Historically, the major ERP players, SAP, Oracle as well as IBM dominated the market. However, they lost market share as the so-called specialized vendors like CCH Tagetik grow significantly faster than the market. This is mainly driven by the fact that enterprises are replacing their fragmented legacy solutions with a unified finance intelligence platform that can be integrated into different IT landscapes and sit on top of the ERPs. A second growth driver is in financial planning and comes at a time when many companies are replacing Excel solutions with integrated operational planning tools to arrive at one reliable integrated business planning view that requires a single source of tools. Amongst the so-called specialized vendors, CCH Tagetik is in a very well positioned as we are holding a strong position in both financial close as well as integrated business planning and regulatory reporting. Finally, there are 2 important regulatory changes currently impacting the office of CFO: the ESG regulatory reporting, driven by the ESG regulation in the European Union; and the upcoming so-called Pillar Two taxation or the minimum 15% taxation ruling. Looking forward, CCH Tagetik will continue to expand the geographic footprint and to further deliver innovations for the office of CFO in line with what they need to drive their finance transformation. CCH Tagetik's success is based on the strategy to further expand our market reach as well as to continuously deliver innovative product expansions for the office of CFO. In particular, we are currently working to further automate the financial close process, including a unique offering for corporate global direct tax and for managing the Pillar Two taxation. We are going to further expand our predictive intelligence-based integrated business planning offering, including operational planning like HR planning and by further delivering insights based on best-in-class analytics and reporting. And while we just launched our new ESG performance management, we are further expanding the scope into planning and forecasting to allow enterprises a holistic view of all their financial and nonfinancial and ESG-related planning data and actuals. We are evolving our go-to-market by further driving partnerships with implementation companies across the world and by expanding into new geographies like South Korea. And finally, as one of our company's values of focusing on customer success, we stay committed to delivering best-in-class quality results reflected in outstanding Net Promoter Scores known as the best in the market. Our high growth requires continual attention on talent, development, engagement and belonging. With this, let me hand it over to Karen.

With product superiority and continued innovation, TAA has opportunities to take advantage of extremely positive technology and regulatory trends: cloud acceleration, Web 3.0, ESG and Pillar Two for corporate taxation. We'll continue our land and expand strategy that is driving successful growth for our expert solutions, particularly CCH Axcess and CCH Tagetik. We will never stop enhancing the customer experience and continue to focus on the customer as we strive to delight our customers as we help them manage, grow and protect their businesses. Thank you for your time today. We'll now turn to the question-and-answer session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Tom Singlehurst from Citi.

It's Tom here from Citi. Thank you very much for the presentations. It was great to get the detail and insight into the [indiscernible]. A couple of questions, if it's okay. First of all, high level, if the tax code becomes simpler both for individuals and corporates, both in the U.S. and worldwide, can you talk about how that would impact your business? Does that reduce the need for what you're providing? That was the first question. And then secondly, it strikes me that a lot of the sort of the core data that your products are based on, i.e., the tax code itself, is sort of universally and sort of freely accessible. Can you perhaps talk about the risk of disruptive new entrants coming in and creating a sort of better platforms based on that data? Or maybe putting it another way, can you just talk about how you add value to the publicly available data to sort of create sort of a competitive moat?

Thank you, Tom. I think, Karen, if you could answer that question, please.

Sure. Thank you, Tom. The U.S., as you know, has a very complex federal tax and state and local taxation regime. And over the years, there are constantly attempts to simplify it. But in the end, what ends up happening is we end up getting some changes to the tax code that a new administration comes in and changes a few years later. As a result, there are thousands of changes in the rules, the rates and the forms every year. In fact, last year, there were close to 5,500 compliance changes. So that constant change is pretty regular even when the attempt is that we're trying to simplify the tax code here in the U.S. So -- and it's why people buy our products, because they need that understanding of what's happening when they're sorting through that kind of regulatory change. Sort of moving into the second part of your question, understanding the tax code and what all of those changes means requires quite a bit of specialization and expertise. We have a very large team of tax analysts who work with our software developers to update all of those solutions. Those are all updated remotely through the cloud software. It takes a lot of significant investment plus that deep and trusted expertise to understand and to keep up with the changes and to ensure that then they become part of the customer workflow. So generally speaking, what we've seen over the years is that the level of change, the level of expertise, the level of analysis that needs to be done and the speed at which it has to be done really set up a lot of barriers to entry into the space, and they create the reason why customers do not use, for example, a quick search of a free copy of the code on the IRS' website.

Our next question comes from Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I've got 3 questions, please. First of all, can you talk through why it is easier to roll out new modules, new functionality, et cetera, in CCH Axcess for customers done in an on-premise solution? How materially has that supported your revenue growth rate? I mean we do hear about that from Nancy on cost. Second question, you've had a cloud solution in the market for a number of years now. Everyone can see that, that's working pretty well in terms of your growth. Why are there not really 3 or 4 such solutions where you have everything in the cloud like CCH Axcess? What makes that so hard? Is it a question maybe of investment, technical challenges, just execution? And a third question, following on from that really, presumably Thomson Reuters will ultimately have a cloud-based offering across all of the different categories that you were showing comparable to CCH Axcess. At that point, where are the next legs of innovation that will maintain your competitive moat?

Thanks, Nick. I think those questions are good for Jason.

Happy to, Nick, and I'll take them in the order that you asked them. So in terms of taking up solutions in the cloud, that's one of the benefits and the power of CCH Axcess, is that it combines that common core data base we have with the capabilities and the integrated modules. That database and that common core offers the efficiencies that allow us to deploy very rapidly. Now that's separate from the data migration or conversion, which does take some effort with the client, and we have professional services that support that, but it allows us to deploy the innovation fairly quickly. I think tied to that is just looking at where we are in the market. We've got 14 modules available with CCH Axcess today. Most of them are recently launched. So as we said, we started with about 7. We've had new innovations like CCH Axcess Validate, CCH Axcess Client Collaboration and CCH Axcess iQ, which are more recent modules versus the on-premise solution, which has an existing 8 modules. So there's clearly more scope for growth with the cloud platform. Your second question was around really the competitive market and what's happening with other companies like Thomson. We've wondered the same thing. They're a formidable competitor, and we expect that they and others may follow us, but this takes persistence and focus and investment, and it's hard to do. So it requires a lot of that to continue with the investment over time. And then the third part, and I think related to your second question was Thomson Reuters and their cloud-based offering. What my focus is and really in the business is continuing to advance our products to meet the needs of customers. We're exploring innovation, as Karen and I both talked about, in terms of new modules, new capabilities like CCH Axcess Validate, which leverages blockchain and audits. We're looking to expand browser capabilities and our no-touch returns. We've expanded the capabilities of our marketplace, which really bring the broad ecosystem to our customers across the tax, the audit and the firm management workflows.

We now turn to Adam Berlin from UBS.

I'll just stick with 3 questions, please, if I could. Firstly, there's a lot of -- going on and lots of initiative. Is the goal to maintain the organic growth in division? Or are you trying to accelerate the rate of organic growth? That's the first question. The second question is you talked a lot about the modules in CCH Axcess now available to customers. Is there any evidence yet that you can share with us to show that the cloud-based customers are taking more modules than the on-premise customers and so that we should believe in the story around upsell to additional modules? And the third question is about progress in Tagetik in the U.S. It just looks like you've only got a small amount of revenue in the U.S. today from Tagetik. Can you explain why the progress in the U.S. has been slow and what the strategy is to get more customers in the U.S.? What are the initiatives you're using? And is there any evidence of better progress so far in 2022?

Thanks, Adam. I think, Nancy, could you answer the first question about organic growth for the division and whether the plan is to maintain it or accelerate it? Obviously, we can't give any additional guidance today. And the second question, Jason, you could address that one. And then third question on Tagetik and its U.S. journey, if Ralf could take that, please.

Thank you, Meg. So just in terms of organic growth, just in the broad -- even outside of TAA but across all of Wolters Kluwer, what we've been doing is driving a very consistent reinvestment of 8% to 10% of our revenues back in innovation. And it's really the innovation that is driving organic growth improvement across Wolters Kluwer. If you look specifically at Tax & Accounting, as you'll note through the first 9 months, we had 9% organic growth. There were a few things in that result that were due to nonrecurring factors in North America. But in general, we are very pleased with the results coming out of Tax & Accounting from a growth perspective. And I think what you've heard so far today is that there's much innovation going on across the division, and that innovation will help continue to provide us with good performance. Jason, yes?

Adam, Jason Marx. I'll take the second part of your question. So again, just to reference, for CCH Axcess, we've got 14 modules, several of them being quite new into the market. In terms of our experience, on average, we see new customers with our on-premise solutions take about 1.5 modules, while our CCH Axcess customers on average take 2.5 modules. And what we see is, particularly with CCH Axcess, these customers, as that cohort ages over time, they take more modules. So once you get a couple of years out, the average number of modules that a CCH Axcess customer would have a few years into the platform is about 4. Ralf?

Then I take your question related to CCH Tagetik in the U.S. And indeed, when we acquired the company in 2017, over 85% of the revenues were from Europe. And it has been our plan to leverage the Wolters Kluwer brand and assets in the United States to drive expansion in this market. And since then, honestly, we have made very good [ wealth in ] here in North America. So under our ownership, the U.S. revenue of CCH Tagetik has more than tripled. And following the acquisition of Vanguard, we have now bought several enterprise software businesses together under one leadership team, which will help drive this further. Combining forces with our U.S. corporate tax unit has put more feet on the street, a team who are already serving some of 4,000 clients. And while in 2017, when we acquired CCH Tagetik, 85% of our revenues came from Europe, all of our global regions are growing these days. However, let's say, 70% is now European related. While in North America, we generate 20% of our revenues already.

Our next question comes from Matthew Walker from Credit Suisse.

I just had 2. So the first one was why the growth accelerated from 6% last year to 9% this year. And if you can just isolate the one-offs and strip them out, what would the growth be in 2022 for the 9 months, if you took out the one-offs? And then you mentioned in the presentation around Axcess that you'd increased your market share in the U.S. So you didn't really give any stats, I don't believe, around that. So can you just give us a sense of over what time period and how much you've increased your market share in the U.S.?

Nancy, perhaps you could answer the question about the financial results. I think that's probably best addressed by you. And the second question, probably Karen. Was it around general market share, Matthew?

I think it was on Axcess, yes.

I couldn't tell whether it was specifically for CCH Axcess or whether it was for Tax & Accounting in general.

The pie chart for our global addressed markets on the professional side. So global, yes, includes Europe and Asia Pacific, which -- where we have obviously a very big footprint. But Karen can perhaps cover a bit more about our global footprint.

Yes. So just in terms of...

Just to get a sense of how much the market share...

Yes. Sorry, there was a delay there. Sorry to talk over you. So this is in response to your question around the organic growth. We don't strip out the figures in the way that you described with backing out the sort of nonrecurring part, but there were onetime things that happened through the 9 months that did, of course, support the 9% organic growth in Tax & Accounting. With that said, what I can say again is that all of the units are performing very well, driven by the innovation, the movement to the cloud. And as you will recall, in these software businesses, we have very high retention. And so the whole land and expand strategy is about finding not only new customers, but very importantly, upselling. And as Jason mentioned, that's been a very critical strategy in driving the growth of CCH Axcess as we have a significant number of modules. It's also true in Tagetik. It's true in Europe where customers start with 1 or 2 components and then we work to upsell them. So that fundamental strategy will continue to drive growth across the enterprise. And then, Karen, if you want to just talk about the share position broadly, yes.

Sure. So thank you, Matthew. So in our professional markets, we're #1 globally when you look across the world in terms of revenue, and that's largely because of the strength of our position in the United States and our significant footprint in Europe and Asia Pacific. Now where we stand within each market in terms of share, it tends to be relatively different as each of these markets are actually unique markets and especially in Europe, they all have unique competitors. That said, in the U.S. market, this has been, I think, forever, a sort of like a race, a little bit ahead, a little bit ahead, a little bit ahead between Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer. So we continue to see that sort of neck and neck. Everybody's running the race in North America. In Europe, we hold the #1 or #2 market position across all of the countries that we operate in. And in our CPM market, in the group of specialty providers, Tagetik holds the #3 position.

[Operator Instructions] We now turn to Konrad Zomer from ABN AMRO.

I've got 2 questions, please. The first one is on the difference between the cloud-based services and the on-premise services. You've given us some few good examples as to why the growth in cloud services would be higher. But I'm still struggling a little bit to understand because from a client's perspective, what is the main reason why the growth will be so much higher? Is that because it's easier to use? Or are there other reasons why the cloud-based business would generate higher growth? And the second question is on the Tax & Accounting division overall. Could you give us a broad breakdown of FTE that specifically work on the content, like the tax code or changes in the tax ruling, and the people that specifically work on the technology, the IT system behind it?

Great. Thanks. Perhaps, Jason, you could address the first question, and then Karen can talk about the workforce.

I sure can. Thanks, Konrad. So your question around -- really is around deployment of cloud versus on-premise. And I think there's 2 components. One is the ease of deployment for the customer once we have the initial footprint in there for them, the ability to turn on additional modules is pretty straightforward. Now again, that's different from any data migration or file migration that may need to happen, but the ability to turn on additional modules that are integrated with the common core database is pretty straightforward. What we see as a result of that is that adoption as that customer cohort ages over time. Generally, they start with 1 or 2 modules usually in the tax or audit space. And then they see the capabilities of document or workflow or portal or collaboration, and they bring those on within their environments. So that's what's leading to that difference in the on-premise versus the cloud capabilities and just the sheer difference in the number of modules. We have 14 modules many of them being newer within CCH Axcess.

And Konrad, I'll take your -- it's Karen. I'll take your question related to the FTEs in the division. So I think the first one you asked about was how many tax analysts across the group do we have. So because our professional footprint is very wide across the globe, in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific, we are employing tax analysts in all of those locations, and it's roughly around 1,000 employees across the division. The second part of your question was around our development personnel. So we have development centers where we really centralize our development around the world. In the U.S., we centralize in Dallas, Texas. In Europe, we centralize in Barcelona and in Lucca, Italy for the CPM business, which is really kind of a circle of a number of the Milan area, the Lucca area and a little bit down south in Salerno. And then in India, we have a large facility where we do the bulk of our development work across the division. So the totality of those development employees is just under 2,000.

We have a follow-up question from Tom Singlehurst at Citi.

Just one follow-on. I mean you've talked at a couple of points about acquisitions and how they've played a role, at least with Tagetik itself in [indiscernible]. The question is really how you decide between buy and build when it comes to additional capability. Is there a sort of strict cookie-cutter type approach? Or is it more of an art than a science? I'd love some insights on how and when you need to use acquisition as a mode of expansion rather than building it organically.

Karen, do you want to take that?

Sure. Tom, we always prefer to build organically. That is our go-to position. We drive innovation, and we want to build our products out as much as we can organically. However, there will be cases when there is a particular asset that would cost us too much time or cost us too much money or might take us into a little bit of an adjacency, and that would be the time where we would contemplate acquisition activity. An acquisition might bring us a new technology. It might bring us market share and new customers. We do tend to try to keep our acquisitions as bolt-ons where we look at something that's in our space already and we're adding that market share of their customer acquisition or some kind of technology that will advance the organic activity that's already going on.

Perfect. And a bit of a leading question, obviously. But I mean, is there any obvious sort of large gap or white space in terms of the offering as far as you see it? Or do you anticipate the build-out of capabilities in M&A to be sort of bolt-on in nature, especially...

We're always looking to expand organically. So we drive through our global innovation tournament, through our Code Games innovation tournament. We're always driving that innovation to continue to build out the suites. And we learn what our customers need next as we develop new products. So as we will add a module to CCH Axcess or CCH Tagetik, the customer's workflow changes, right? We've changed something. It's made it easier, it's made it faster, it's made it better. And now they realize -- it's a little like peeling an onion. Now they realize, hey, there's something else that would make my workflow even better. And when that happens, we'll go and we'll start to build what that next innovation is. And so we continue to advance their workflows. And this is why you hear Jason saying that we see a 10% to 30% efficiency gain that our customers report on the CCH Axcess platform because each time that we're delivering one of these new modules, we're really advancing what they do.

Yes. And I would say broadly on acquisitions, right, is that all of Wolters Kluwer's strategy now is not dependent at all on acquisitions in terms of meeting the goals that we have. And so we look primarily to organic growth. I would say partnerships are playing more of a role today than they did a few years ago. The marketplace that Jason referenced is very critical to advancing the concept of the ecosystem and partnerships. And then, of course, we're always looking for some acquisitions that might accelerate what we're doing, whether it's from a technology perspective or as Karen referenced, sometimes a market share perspective. But I would say organic growth is really the cornerstone of what we're focused on.

We have another follow-up from Adam Berlin at UBS.

The first question is, can you just talk about the ERP players, IBMs, SAP? They seem to have given up half of this market in corporate performance solutions. Why are customers using the specialty providers instead of the incumbents? And are the incumbents biting back? And what's their strategy to deal with this kind of loss of market share? That's the first question. And secondly, can you just go into a bit more detail about the sales process, particularly for Tagetik? Like is it sold by your own sales team? Or is it more often sold by IT integrators and the accounting firms? What's the -- can you give us any sense of the channel split, how that works? I just wasn't quite sure from listening to you exactly what the dominant model is.

Great. Thanks. Ralf, can you take both of those?

Yes, of course, I can start. So indeed, our significant market is within, let's say, the ERP businesses, and lots of, let's say, companies that are running ERP are choosing, let's say, solutions like CCH Tagetik. Why? Because there are 2 important benefits. Number one, a corporate performance solution like CCH Tagetik is really a platform solution. So it's a solution, let's say, where the office of CFO is running all the activities behind the accounting, whether it's consolidation, financial close, integrated business planning on one reliable platform rather than, let's say, having isolated solutions. That's a very important differentiator. And the second important piece is the structure in enterprise. Most of enterprises in the world, they are dealing with a number of ERP systems from one vendor in different versions or, let's say, from multiple vendors. And it's very important in the office of CFO to have one reliable source where you have all your financial and key nonfinancial data together. And it's the advantage of the specialized vendors like CCH Tagetik -- in particular of CCH Tagetik to sit on top of the different ERPs and to connect with all ERPs and from there, let's say, to create really one single source of tools for the office of CFO. Let's say, the most important advantages, I would say. And the second question, again, can you repeat what it is exactly? It was related to sales? What's the sales strategy?

How we go to market.

Yes, perfect. Thanks. So let me take those. So CCH Tagetik is a direct sales organization. So we are selling directly across the world. We sell in Europe. We sell in North America. We sell in APAC. So sales is done by our own sales team. Partnership plays a very significant role in our ecosystem. Why? Because the implementation of CCH Tagetik is mainly done, let's say, by boutique partners, by the Big Fours, by the Accentures in the world. So let's say, we are dealing together -- let's say, we are working together nicely with all, let's say, the Big Four companies, with the Accentures in the world to really create this customer experience within the office of CFO based on our direct sales force.

We have another follow-up from Nick Dempsey at Barclays.

I just wanted to ask about Intuit. It's there on your chart on Slide 10. I know they've been in the market, your specific market [ with the 1/3 ] for a long time now. So it's more like a new entrant. But do you see much overlap with them when they aim more of the smaller end of the market, you're more of the middle? And where you do overlap, should we worry that you're bumping into a very significant software player that has a lot more scale than you?

Jason, could you take that one?

Sure. Happy to, Nick. So look, you're right, we look at Intuit as a formidable competitor, but their strategy and their focus is a bit different. So their priority has been on the consumer side of tax, so what's referred to as the do-it-yourself market, and within the SMEs, the small to medium enterprise on the accounting and bookkeeping side. That's been their primary strategic focus. They have a professional unit that we do see. We run into them on the lower end of our market, but that's primarily as a distribution vehicle for them into the small business. So again, we see them in the smaller end of our professional market, but that's primarily where we run into them.

Our final question comes from Tulu Yunus from Lord Abbett.

Just 2 questions. One was the migration from CCH ProSystems to CCH Axcess. Is that -- is there a concerted effort to get customers to migrate to the cloud solution? And what are the margin implications of that? Second, just a question on comparing Tagetik to another CPM pure play that you have in your table, Anaplan, recently acquired. Just pulling up their financials, they were generating nearly $600 million in revenue, 75% gross margins and growing nearly 30%. Are those the types of KPIs that you aspire to or you can generate? So if you could just speak to sort of comparison to Anaplan financials, that would be helpful.

So Jason, if you could perhaps tackle the margin question on what happens as we migrate people to the cloud and all the new modules you're launching? And if Ralf could perhaps comment on Anaplan.

Sure. So really 2 parts to that. In terms of the overall migration strategy, we are following the path that our customers want in terms of migration. We expect that transition to happen over the next 5 to 8 years. Today, about 90% of what we do in selling is migration of existing customers, primarily from ProSystem fx over into CCH Axcess. About 10% are pure new logos coming into Wolters Kluwer. In terms of the margin implications and pricing, in the early days, they were priced pretty much the same, but because we've added so much more value to the CCH Axcess platform, we've gradually moved that pricing up. So nowadays, Axcess is priced as a premium to the on-premise solution. So if the customer takes the equivalent number of modules when they come on board, the revenue for us is higher.

Jason, let me take up the second question related to Anaplan. So as you know, let's say, over the last couple of years, Anaplan invested very aggressively into sales and marketing, driving their growth with results that they have been, let's say, quite significant loss-making for many, many years. They have been acquired, as you know, I think it was in June by Thoma Bravo. And just it appears that a couple of months ago, the company has been streamlining its cost base restructuring. I think it was just last week when they announced the new CEO that gave the statement at its Anaplan strategy to drive profitable growth now.

This concludes our Q&A.

I think we'll leave it there. It's almost a quarter past the hour. I think we're trying to wrap up pretty soon. So I want to say thank you to all the listeners for listening in, for the great questions from the analysts and the great answers and presentations from our speakers. So thank you all very much.