Thomson Reuters Corp (TRI) May 6, 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is . I cover business and information services for Barclays. We're pleased to kick off the afternoon session here with the team from Thomson Reuters. As you can see on the screen, we've got Steve Hasker, who's the CEO. But we also have Gary Bisbee, who's head of IR, and Kirstie Roth, who's the chief operations and technology officer, joining us here. So we're in battleground mode here, so bear with us. Steve, maybe just to start at a high level, you know, given all the debate, the noise, maybe it's worth just taking a step back. And from your perspective, you know, how do you describe Thomson Reuters and its positioning and its moats today to a new investor?

Yeah, I mean, we've been saying for a number of years now that we have a nice tailwind behind us, which is the growing complexity associated with compliance. So that's legal compliance, tax and accounting, audit-related compliance. And we're one of the few companies that have the content-driven technology to enable companies and their advisers to meet or exceed the needs of those compliance requirements without adding a lot of headcount. So that's the first tailwind. And that's helped drive us from when Kirstie and I joined the company five, six years ago, we were growing our big three at low single digits to now we're in high singles and we've got line of sight to, we think, double-digit growth in the years to come for the big three franchises. I think the second tailwind for us is AI. We've been in the advanced machine learning space for 30 years. We put a functioning search algorithm on the front of the Westlaw dataset in the early 1990s before Google was commercialized. So it's not... When ChatGPT passed the bar exam, it wasn't entirely new territory for us, and it's certainly something that Kirsty and her teams have worked on before that and very intensively since. And essentially what agentic AI enables us to do is play a much larger role in the success of our customers. So in other words, for a tax and accounting professional, instead of merely being the tax calculation engine, we can now provide an end-to-end agentic solution which covers all aspects of the tax return process. And then for a litigator, instead of being the primary litigation research data set, we're now in the drafting business. So whether that's a contract, a motion to dismiss, a motion to compel, a rebuttal and so forth. And so the reason we are confident in this AI environment, despite all the noise, is our positioning. So we're the only company we believe that can provide fiduciary grade AI. And this is a term we've coined in the last couple of months, particularly with the sort of emergence of the horizontal players like Claude and Gemini and so forth. Fiduciary grade is basically serving those professions where they cannot afford to be wrong. They cannot afford to hallucinate. And for For those of you who follow the legal profession, you will have seen that several of the global large law firms have stumbled very badly in the last couple of months in the context of big transactions, big litigations, whereby they have used a generic chatbot, produced the wrong results, and then had the opposing counsel, in most cases supported by Thomson Reuters AI solutions, point out the holes. In other words, pull their pounce down in front of a judge or in front of their clients. And so the reason we are advantaged in this environment is, firstly, we have the content. So 85% of our content is not publicly available. It's been created and curated by our experts. Secondly, we have the experts to help train our agents. And Kirstie's team have done a wonderful job of taking all of that expertise out of the heads of 2700 deep practice experts and ensuring that our agents, including co-council next, which was launched in beta a couple of weeks ago, behave like a highly tenured expert. Thirdly, we've got data privacy and protection protocols that no one else has. What I mean by that is we make a promise to our customers, which is their input will not become part of our AI output. And that is quite unique in Silicon Valley. right everyone else is sort of putting an agent out there putting a chatbot out there are learning from the queries we are not and the reason we're not we don't have to is because we have our own experts in house we have our own content and then last but not least we've got exhaustive customer support and the reason I point that it sounds it sounds quite mundane but if you use Westlaw advantage, our AI, agentic AI product or you use co-council and you get a result that you don't understand, you can call a highly tenured attorney live 24-7 and he or she will have access to the query that you've run and also has a deep understanding of that particular practice area. And you can ask them, well, why is it producing this result? I'm in front of a judge tomorrow, I cannot afford to be wrong. I don't understand the result that's coming out. And you can track and trace it all the way back to its source. And the same in the tax and accounting, the same in the audit professions. And you've got to ask yourself, are some of the startups or the frontier models themselves going to have that level of personal support? I mean, they're not, right? And so we think that that positions us to coexist with the frontier models, but to be the only player who can truly serve this fiduciary-grade AI. And that's why we're bullish and we're particularly bullish on the back of yesterday's results where our legal professionals business X the government component grew by 11% organically. That's the highest we've seen. And we're confident that we can sort of drive this AI roadmap through our offerings and see accelerating organic growth.

Got it. Christy, maybe from your standpoint as well, you were chief transformation officer when you guys first created what's now just legal and tax and accounting. What is the biggest change or your competitive advantages from your standpoint from your tech role as well?

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, right, like all roles are impacted by AI. And certainly, you know, whilst, as Steve described, we're putting a huge amount of effort in what we put in the products. We're also changing the way we operate as a company. And, you know, I just think that has huge implications, right? Like the, you know, the speed with which we can, we're launching features faster than we ever have done. We're, you know, putting out new products in market. We're really able, as Steve described, therefore to help our customers move from, you know, if you take tax, just a world where they're returning providing returns to getting into advisory services, right? Because you crunch the amount of time they're spending on a return. And so the up-leveling we've seen in early days, particularly in the engineering and the support teams, for how much work they can get through, that means we can move more quickly, I think is sort of super exciting. And then we'll see that sort of through every function, Manav. And I think that also gives us a real advantage. And we started that kind of work about two and a half years ago. And I talk to a lot of peers who are COOs of, I call us all legacy companies, right? You know, all those kind of companies. And I know we're in a really good spot as to what we're doing. And I think that's really important. I don't think you can be in this world and be standing still and just taking advantage. You've actually got to reinvent the whole way you operate right now so that you're moving more quickly and serving your customers even better. And that's exciting because we're seeing real results.

Got it. And talk about real results. Gary, maybe, you know, firstly, thank you for reporting and getting on a plane right away to come here. But maybe just help us with last night's results, the quick summary. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was one of the stronger quarters you guys have reported. So if you can just quick highlights there.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, you know, we reported 8 percent organic revenue growth across its old company. We had that's up from seven that reported throughout 2025. And we had we had guided for the quarter for seven. The outperformance was driven by our legal business and our corporates business. In legal, you know, we, as Steve referenced, we grew the law firm customers, so that excludes the government customers, by 11%. That was up from 9% last quarter. And the acceleration there is driven by the tremendous success we've had with the launch of Westlaw Advantage, the new top tier that we launched last August, and continued strong growth of co-counsel. the AI assistant product and so you know I think we feel really good about the result we also as Steve said discussed fiduciary grade AI and shared for the first time some incremental customer usage data that I think supports the story worse we're telling and we're seeing which is that we're seeing strong customer adoption and usage of these products that you know you see flowing through to better revenue growth and so for the full year we we reiterated our guidance across revenue and profits and and you know feel really good about the

start to the year we've had and the outlook the outlook for the business particularly on the back of that strengthening in the legal and got it Steve maybe let's start talking about some of this noise and that you were alluding to so maybe let's start with the Claude releases last night there was something around the financial plugins in February was specific to the legal plugins there was obviously a crazy reaction in February you know harsh reaction yesterday but just your but then you were on stage with Claude as well so what's really going on what's the partnership yeah so the way the way we've built our AI offerings we're model agnostic so we can and we do chop

and change between whatever is the best frontier model at any particular time so So for co-council legal, that's the Claude Sonnet 4.6, now 4.7, and, you know, it may change as things go on. For our tax and accounting products, that has been the latest chat GPT models. We also have built our own model. It's called Thompson, and that's going to go into sort of full release as we go through this year. And the reason I point that out is it's a large language model built specific for legal. It's entirely owned and operated by us, built by a number of deep, former Google deep mine scientists who are on staff. And you know, I'm starting to outperform the very best of the frontier models in terms of speed and accuracy for certain legal tasks. So that gives us a level of optionality as we go forward. So we have a relationship with Anthropic. They're a big vendor to us. We've done a lot of co-development with them, and I think there are opportunities for us to expand that set of arrangements in various ways. I think, though, there's a sort of an assumption from investors that these frontier models are going to sort of eat all before them, right? They're going to machine learn their way into the content sets. They're going to be able to perform with sort of great levels of accuracy. We are very firmly of the view, based on everything we see, the customer interactions we have and the accuracy of our products, that this fiduciary grade is a spot that a general purpose model can't and won't meet that standard. If you're a lawyer, you cannot afford to be wrong. If you're a tax and accounting professional, you cannot afford to be wrong. The fines, the risk of losing your license, the loss of client relationships, all of those things mean that you need to have co-counsel in addition to a co-work plug-in or a co-pilot plug-in or a Gemini plug-in or whatever it might be. And we're pretty confident that that's how the market will evolve. But I think at the moment, you know, investors have sort of decided, well, if you're a native AI company in one of these frontier models, you're a winner. And if you've been around for a while, you're a loser. And, of course, you know, and this is why Kirstie's role is so important. The winners will be those who execute. I think our product roadmap is fairly clear, at least to us and to our customers. And the rate of innovation is accelerating at Thomson Reuters. And for me, the only thing we're watching is just can we go faster and can we produce better and better products and more innovative products as we go. If we do that, we'll emerge not only as the unequivocal winner as we have been over time in legal research and the tax calculation engine space, we'll also move into this broader workflow space, and that's a new term for us, and that's why we're confident we can see these accelerating growth rates.

Got it. And to your point on move faster, I mean, some of this might just be perceptions. Of course, you can jump in as well. But, you know, when the FinTech competitors or the legal tech competitors are talking, people think that's it. These are the smartest guys out there. But I think a lot of your progress is buried.

Yeah, can I give you an example? When I joined the company six years ago, we used to put out a new version of Westlaw sort of a couple of times a decade. And it was a meaningful upgrade at each time, and price premium associated and so forth. Now we put out a new version every four months. And we started the work on Westlaw deep research, which is a fully organic product, at the same time that ChatGPT's deep research product came out. And we're able to outrun their deep research product in terms of its utility for high-end legal practice. And so, you know, this is something where we've got to earn the right every single day in terms of our rate of innovation and the success of those innovations. But I would, for the professions that we serve, so tax, accounting, legal, audit, risk, fraud, and compliance, I'd stand up our rate of innovation against anyone's.

Got it. And, you know, MCP is a big buzzword right now. Can you just clarify, like, your partnership with these LLMs and the monetization model and what's actually being shared?

Yeah, so at the moment they are fairly, they're fairly vanilla vendor relationships. So we haven't gone into sort of complicated rev shares or any of those kinds of things because it really is a case of picking, you know, doing comprehensive evals, picking the best model, utilizing that at that particular time.

I think though there will be options going forward. that the the asks we get very regularly from all manner of players is they want to get access to our content and to our experts and we see no reason to share that IP with with anybody at this point in time and then maybe shifting to you know I guess we would you you guys there's the content and research side of the market and there's the workflow side of the market where's more of the debate so I know Steve Kirstie both of you talk to clients a lot so can you just help us you know peel back the onion behind the scenes what are the what are the the lawyers your counterparts telling you but co-council versus Harvey Ligora all these other alternatives out there what's really going on well I would say

the first thing is at the moment the tools are 18 to 24 months ahead of the change management within the firms so I think there's this sort of narrative that these tools are there it's all said and done you know that the pick a profession that's being transformed I think within software coding that is a real simplistic but realistic picture when it comes to the legal professional the tax and accounting profession it is very early days and so what we find amongst amongst our customers is we have a number of customers who are Thomson Reuters only and they will have a number of customers who are trialing on a paid basis Harvey or Legora or some other tool and ours as well. And as I said, we're confident particularly on the back of the Westlaw, the co-council next beta test that's now going on that will emerge amongst that pack for the reasons I described. But at the moment there's a lot of experimentation and the firms are just starting the underlying change management which basically means rewiring the way in which the work product is produced and the interactions between a senior lawyer and a and a partner so maybe maybe it's the experimentation that's disconnect because I think the view is they go Harvey is growing whatever Legora so that means you've lost that opportunity but it sounds like these are shorter term contracts yeah I mean look this is a market we weren't in right so you know I think I think it's interesting to see and then to Steve's point I mean I was actually with a whole group of the sort of COOs of many of the biggest law firms yesterday.

And these are companies that have never really been through a huge amount of change. They're not great at change anyway, right? Even compared to corporates that are often not great at change. So I think it's just fascinating to see. They've got all these tools they've bought to sort of feel like they're trying stuff out and feel like they're ticking a box, but they don't quite know what they want them to do. I think what they do know and where we get a lot of feedback is people don't really want to buy five things. So they might buy a Claude or a co-pilot for some of the generic things they're sort of doing, office, admin, et cetera. They really like one tool. And that's partly why we've moved to sort of packaging co-counselors, gives you access to Westlaw and practical law and everything. And sort of an old speaker sort of single pane of glass that does everything for you. So I think that's going to play very much in our favor. But, you know, honestly, the change management right now isn't super early days, I would say, in these firms. And a lot of where I'm spending time with them is to help them figure out how you do that. Because it's not just about, you know, which tool you want to be using. They've got to think about their data and their integration and how that works. And there's a lot of anxiety to Steve's points earlier on. They, you know, they can't afford to be wrong. Actually, one of the interesting discussions yesterday was obviously they're getting GCs who are the general councils that are obviously using many of these tools and then sending them wrong inputs to do their work. And that's not great either. So a lot of concern, you know, I think Steve mentioned many of our winning points earlier, but one I get involved in a lot is the security and privacy. You know, our customers can't afford for their data to end up in the wrong place, and they want to work with partners that can do that. So really thinking about how they put their whole sort of integrated suite of products together in a way that's effective for them. So a lot for them to do, and I think that's going to be a multi-year journey.

If I could just add, Manav, in our simplistic way of thinking about it, we have our legacy markets of content-enabled technology. So Westlaw in legal research, practical law, content around transactional areas of the law. The competitive dynamics there haven't changed a lot. It's a duopoly for the most part. LexisNexis is a strong number two in both categories. We're both innovating with AI. We think we're ahead there, but we're seeing that drive growth as we drive upgrades to these new AI-enabled offerings. Then you've got another market, which we think is a significant incremental new TAM white space for us. That's AI workflow solutions. There are more competitors there. We're one of the leaders in that. We've had strong growth in that market. The question for us is how much of that incremental TAM do we win, and then how impactful is it on our growth rates? And we've been a leader to date, we think, with the next-gen version of CoCouncil, which more powerfully uses our content for the AI to do more. That's our play as we execute to be a clear winner in that market going forward. But even if we're one of a handful of players playing there, it's a significant incremental growth opportunity for us.

That makes sense. And you guys obviously gave us some user stats on CoCouncil recently, But, you know, obviously some of the legal tech competitors give us like an ARR number and growth rate. Anecdotally, any way to compare co-council?

Yeah, we haven't sort of come out with a precise number as some of those companies have. Ours is in the same zip code. Okay. So we're, you know, notwithstanding that the co-council next that Gary just mentioned is really the first time that we've harnessed the full power of our content sets and our expertise to train that agent, that co-counsel agent. Notwithstanding that, we're at a million users. We're at an ARR that's similar to some of those players. So we've made a good start, and now watch us accelerate.

I think two dynamics to add. One, the main sort of fireside lobbying I got yesterday was people are hearing the beta's really good, and they want to get on the beta, and obviously we're still in beta phase until the summer. And the other thing is, you know, we're now solving about three times more problems. So for many of our clients, they'll tell us, you know, we love co-counsel, but it doesn't do this and that and the other, and we'd like it to do more. The folk who are in the beta are now immediately going back and retesting those things. They would hope it would do, and it didn't do them, and it does them all. And so, you know, they're sort of literally getting a sort of 3x uplift on the things that it can do. So we accept that to accelerate very quickly. I think in my day job, I'm going to have a scalability challenge just to make sure we can go fast enough to keep up with demand. That's certainly what keeps me up at night at the moment.

Got it. So outside of the workflow, the other debate, like you said, you're in a basket and nobody listens to these hallucination stories that come out every day, which should help you. But the other debate, obviously, is the data, right? You said 85% of it is close to proprietary, fiduciary grade. Can you just double-click on that, talk a little bit more about where the raw data comes, how do you get that?

Gary, do you want to take that one? He and I have debated this over time, and I know it's near and dear to your heart.

Yeah, so the first thing I'd say is we went in quite a bit of depth on our third-quarter conference call in November, and so there are a couple of, I thought, reasonably compelling slides and five minutes of Steve's talk time on this, so I'd point people to that to understand this. But, you know, we think there's a significant moat around Westlaw and our other content assets, and I'd just make a couple of points. one you know a lot of the data is just not publicly available so when it when a court issues a ruling the judge will put out a summary judgment effectively summary of the outcome and what happened in the case we get lots of other content briefs and other things from from from the courts and from other sources there's there's also a bunch of it the docket information that's behind paywalls so the models you know can a competitor could buy those but billions of pages you know at ten cents a page it's it's a significant cost then all the data we get is completely unstructured we get it from more than 3,500 sources we process more than 300 million documents a year into Westlaw and and there is a significant process people technology to standardize and and and and be able to use that data how you organize it is really key we've got a ton of software tools that we've developed that are part of this things like the key number system it's our taxonomy or indexing system 140,000 legal matter deep updated twice a year everything in Westlaw from summaries to head notes to citations are all organized against that that is that is a difficult thing to do and it is why we can be both comprehensive and accurate because it's all organized that way. Things like Keysight, it checks your citations. It also tells you when a case has been overruled, and you need to know that, right? It's not just about, hey, a model could go find something online about some case that's relevant. It's, is that still valid law? And a lot of those tools we have to wind this down and not talk too long are really key to the final step of anyone who does legal research which is verifying the outcomes that's incredibly key with an AI you know AI output where where they can make it up and so we have the best tools around verification and and and and that is you know something that our customers I think really need that there was Steve alluded to this there was a you know a very public a couple of weeks ago incident where a large law firm turned in a brief that had some hallucinations in it and you know and the other side that found the hallucinations and and showed them to the judge use Westlaw Advantage put the other team's brief into a tool we have in there called litigation document analyzer it said here's the four mistakes they turned it in this is a great example of this fiduciary grade AI really hard to do we've spent a ton of time and effort process technology people to create not only the content but the tools that deliver this and and we think that would be incredibly difficult to replicate the other debate within the data we get is like you know this relevance of the size of the firm and if they're doing transaction law versus case law like how much of them really need this data how How do you approach that?

Well, law firms, they're always looking for new clients and new growth opportunities. And they are prepared, therefore, to extend into new practice areas where they don't have necessarily a corpus of information in their own document management system or in the minds of their partners and associates. So one of the things that we bring in both Westlaw on the litigation side, practical law on the transaction side is a comprehensive across jurisdictions, across practice areas, robust up to date. And so even if a firm is really deep in a particular area, chances are they're going to want to go elsewhere and they want that source of truth. So that's you know, that's and there's a set of investments that we just continue to to to make. Got it. And if he if he kind of moved a little bit into the corporate segment sticking to the legal side like how do you think of the opportunity there yeah yeah so it's a great question because the sort of the heritage of of of Thomson Reuters legal professionals or legal business has been Westlaw which is litigation and that's law firms predominantly I mean they're obviously general counsels are in industries where there's a lot of litigation but by and large the litigation practice tends to focus on on the outside counsel and so that's been the sort of heritage of the company. The opportunity with general counsels for us is, you know, we've been chipping away at it for a few years, but it is to a very large degree white space. And what we're starting to see is general counsels who perhaps work with a CTO who's saying, okay, to Kirstie's earlier point, you know, let's use Copilot or let's use Gemini for various sort of aspects of knowledge work. But the general counsel, and for that matter the head of tax or head of internal audit, needs a specialist tool that ensures they're accurate and you know they come to TR because we've already got a set of relationships with their corporation particularly through the one source suite and so we think is a pretty big opportunity for us to grow and become the leading provider of that workflow solution set to the general counsel and in doing so help them drive significant efficiency and effectiveness through both their in-house and external spend.

Got it. That's helpful. Before we move to tax and accounting, just on the corporate side, towards the end of last year, you talked about realignment in the sales and creating a little bit of a timing hiccup.

Just lay this on that. Yeah. Basically, what we did was we sort of moved more of our activity to a global accounts model, and in doing so, we upset territory and quotas for a bunch of salespeople. We're now 12 months sort of through that, and we're starting to see that really settle down. So we like the look of that. We've had some big wins among some of the marquee, you know, sort of Fortune 10 and Fortune 50, both in the General Counsel's office and particularly in the indirect and the e-invoicing space. So optimistic about the sort of rest of this year and next. You know, a lot of those basket traders are not giving legal a shot. they don't give tax and accounting a shot either so can you just help us with what the modes there are and why that's growing so nicely for yeah so i'll start and i'm sure gary and kirsty will add but essentially we are um we are in uh we're in duopolies in terms of the um the tax calculation engine space so as it pertains to serving tax accounting professionals so tax preparers we and one other player have sort of a pretty equal shares in in that space and then when you go across to the serving the head of tax and the and the big four tax and accounting firms we're the largest provider of direct and indirect so direct being income tax and uh and indirect being sales excise vat and so forth we made an acquisition a couple of years ago of the leading e-invoicing supplier so as e-invoicing mandates are rolled out by tax authorities across the world we're seeing tremendous growth from that asset in Peguero and so this is a space where the the sort of moat to use your term is around the fact that these tools are extremely accurate like we spent a lot of time and effort making sure that all of the input information is perfectly accurate. They are very cheap to run and they're very efficient. So there's not a lot of incentive for a head of tax between tax filing systems to go tear that tax calculation engine and try something else, right? Because we've got the last seven or more years of data in that. So you've got that sort of time series of tax return data. You've got a team that are used to using the system and you've got all the interconnects to the IRS and the other tax authorities. So So it really is a bit like concrete and the opportunity for us is to add the agents in terms of sort of on the shoulders of that so that the document ingestion is fully automated all the way through to the e-invoicing and the queues for advisory services. And so that's the ready-to-review proposition that we put in the marketplace earlier this year and the ready-to-advise proposition we put in the marketplace last year in a series of co-council agents that are around it so we think that's a that's a deep and broad moat and it gives us the ability to drive fundamental efficiencies throughout the tax preparer space by adding agents and automating some of the things that take a long time and candidly a sort of tragedy in terms of the work got it and it's also I'd add one thing to that which is this concept of automation is key for this industry because the number of people coming out university in with accounting degrees is down the number of people sitting for the CPA exam down by

like a third in the last 15 years and and so this industry needs technology to do more number of returns goes up every year number of audits goes up the complexity of both is rising and yet head count is in a best case stable and so that in some ways in some ways the propensity to adopt new technology, including our AI offers, one could argue is actually better in that industry than legal.

Got it. Investors are often surprised when I tell them that the pricing and tax and counting is firmly in the mid-single digits and more than legal, but then the counter is because of AI and solutions, it's going to be price deflationary. So how do you guys think of pricing in T&A and across?

Well, as I said, I think these tax calculation engines represent a very significant You know, there's neither the incentive at the customer side to experiment with a new mouse trap, nor is it an easy thing to do. You know, and it's not something that AI has sort of cracked the code on. And so I think our rate of innovation in adding the agenda capabilities ought to outpace sort of a, you know, any startups that look to get into that space. So we think that we can continue the sort of pricing component, but also there's a quantity component in that if we play a larger role in that broad end-to-end tax prep process, that we're saving significant amounts of money for our customers. And therefore, with value-based pricing, we'll extract some of that.

Think about the macros of what's going on, right? Whether you're a CPA or you're a corporate, basically now everyone is looking at it in roles like mine and saying, OK, I used to spend 100% or 95% of my costs on people and 5% on software. Now I'm going to shift it. And so actually, surprisingly, very little or very rarely does this come down to price. People are just making a different choice. They're not going to hire as many people. They're just going to spend more on software. And so I think that gives us a really nice sort of new market to sort of step into. So it's quite a different dynamic to probably what we even saw 12 months ago in terms of how people think about it.

And, Kirstie, actually, this time last year, I remember you saying you were more excited about some of the AI stuff going on in tax and counting than in legal. What's the latest?

Still hugely excited. So I think as Steve described, you know, I think we've acquired all of the pieces that mean you can go from sort of that, you know, we all pay taxes, right? So we all know that lovely joy of how long it takes you to get everything together, right, the way through to filing. But when you talk to CPAs, that's, A, not when they have the most fun. And it's also not where they make the most money. So they want that process to be as effective and accurate as possible. But they want to get into the advisory side of the business. And that's why we launched the product, Ready to Advise. And so they want to be able to come back to you and say, look, you're spending too much on this or that. And you could do these other things. And there's an awful lot more revenue for them to pick up with those products. So it's, again, a whole sort of brand new space for us, where I think there's a ton of opportunities. So that's what I get excited about.

Got it. Maybe the last five minutes if you can touch on capital allocation. I mean, we know the dividend. We know the buyback philosophy. We can touch on that later, too, if you have time. But more on the M&A side, Steve, I mean, you have a generally a lot of cash flow. You have a lot of balance sheet flexibility. I think you talked about nine billion available capital. How is your thought process around M&A change? Maybe a year or so ago you would consider buying a software company. I'm sure you're not doing that today. So just what should we think about the priorities there?

Yeah, I mean, we've, as you said, we've got about $9 billion in dry powder, so that's the sort of cash on hand, plus the additional leverage we can put on, plus the natural free cash flow generation of the business, which will hit $2.1 billion or so this year. And that affords us, I think, an advantage position in this environment where there's a dislocation in terms of the valuation of a bunch of businesses, and I think a lot of uncertainty as to how this sort of AI environment will play out. We have, if you look over the last six years, we've been, I think, very disciplined. So we haven't done any sort of outsized deals. We certainly, I don't think Minav have done any head scratches. We've basically stuck to the following criteria, which is let's focus on the big three. So that's legal, tax, corporates. Let's look at products that are additive to the customer experience within that group, products that are pristine in terms of the tech stack so we don't want to require tech debt and that typically means that they are AI native products products that are of course accretive in terms of their financials to our shareholders not just the outgoing shareholders and then last but not least a culture that is additive to ours that's not to say they need to look and feel like TR people but what we want to make sure that when the businesses come together there will be you know a real focus on better serving our customers from the combined teams. And so if you look across the portfolio, Peguero, SafeSense, SurePrep, Additive, Materia, Noetica, these have been relatively small deals that have sort of pretty seamlessly plugged in. The playbook tends to be to buy those products and then push them through our distribution. I would expect enough that we will continue to do those. You know, we've got a keen eye on valuations, just given the dislocation I described. We are open to doing something bigger. again you're not going to see any head scratches from us. We're open to doing something bigger but at the moment I think there's still a difference in between the bid and the ask particularly of those assets that are owned by private equity you know to the extent that sort of the world has changed in the public markets there's still private equity firms no no no the multiple's still up here and so you'll probably see us continue to do the sort of singles and doubles and be patient in looking at and opportunistic in terms of anything bigger. But Gary, Kirsty, anything to add?

No, I would agree with that. We'd like to do something somewhat bigger, but we don't have to because we have such strong underlying momentum, so we can be patient. And I think we think that will work well. And to your framing, I would say one thing. We just had an investment committee last week to discuss a bunch of things. The first question we ask now, what is the AI disruption risk? Because we don't want to take on more. And we need to make sure we understand that it has to be as durable as we see our existing franchises.

Maybe just to wrap it up then, you know, $9 billion is a lot. You don't need all that for singles and doubles. And so, you know, we always get the question, why don't they just lever up and buy back shares?

But there are some considerations there. Yeah, where I've been minded about it. I mean, we recently completed a $605 million return of capital, which is tax-deferred for the Canadian shareholders. And we're a third of the way through a $600 million NCIB. And so when the board meets again in a month or so's time, we'll sort of re-look at that. We could certainly do something bigger. But again, it's weighing up, you know, being opportunistic and focused in terms of the M&A versus returning to shareholders. Certainly at these share price levels, it's highly accretive. Fair enough.

All right. Let's leave it there, then. Thank you, Gary and Kursi, for your time. Thank you, everybody.