Wolters Kluwer Moved the Rulebook into Software
Hello Business Enthusiasts,
Welcome back to Business Knowledge, where every week we look at one public company that sells something forgettable and earns serious money from it. We tell the story, then dissect the habit worth stealing for your own business.
- Company in focus today: Wolters Kluwer, Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Euronext: WKL)
- What they sell: tax, legal, medical, and compliance software that shows professionals the rules while they do the work
- Read this twice if: Your customers have to follow rules that change every year, and you still sell them a guide they read once
In today's issue, we look at the autumn of 2003, when a new chief executive took over a Dutch publisher that still made most of its money from paper. You'll learn how to move your know-how into the tool your customer works in every day, all in about four minutes.
The publisher that was running behind
On September 1, 2003, Nancy McKinstry became chief executive of a Dutch publisher that earned three quarters of its revenue from print.
That figure is hers. McKinstry has said that 75 percent of revenue came from print when she started and that the company was "lagging behind."
She was the company's first non-Dutch CEO, an American who had run its North American business. Her career had begun at CCH, a tax and accounting publisher that the group later bought.
Two places for one job
Think about what a tax accountant's day looked like back then. The rule lived in a publication on the shelf, and the return got prepared in a separate program on the desk. The accountant read in one place and worked in another, and the publisher owned only the reading half.
That split was the weak spot. A reference book gets bought once and swapped for a cheaper one when budgets tighten. Software that holds a firm's client files gets opened every morning, and swapping it out in the middle of tax season would be a nightmare.
The call that split the company in two
McKinstry's answer was to move the content inside the software where the work happens. If professionals must follow the rules, own the screen they read them on.
Getting there meant selling a lot of the old company. In her first ten years, Wolters Kluwer divested more than 50 assets, most of them legacy print businesses, and bought mainly digital ones.
The people changed too, from an editorial staff toward a blend of software engineers and subject experts. McKinstry later called that first decade "this journey to go from analog to digital."
What the accountant sees now
Today the tax rules sit inside CCH Axcess, the cloud software accounting firms use to prepare returns. CCH Axcess grew 19% organically in 2025 as firms kept moving to the cloud and adding modules. In health care, the same idea runs through UpToDate, the clinical reference doctors check on the ward.
The rules keep moving deeper into the work. In October 2025 the tax team added AI modules that handle routine steps inside CCH Axcess, and UpToDate gained a chat-style assistant that answers clinical questions from its own checked evidence.
The 2025 totals show how far the change went. Revenue reached €6.1 billion, and print fell to €291 million, under 5% of it. Recurring revenue made up 83% of sales, and the tax and accounting division ran an adjusted operating margin of 35.2%.
When the rulebook changes against you
Owning the rules cuts both ways, and 2025 showed how. In March, the U.S. government suspended enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act, and revenue from the company's beneficial ownership filing product fell with it.
A rule that disappears takes its screen time with it.
The bigger worry is AI.
Investors fear cheap AI tools will read the rules for anyone, and the share price shows it. The company bought back stock at an average of €128.45 in 2025 and €75.79 in early 2026, roughly 40% lower. Its shareholder return ranked 15th out of 15 peers for the 2023 to 2025 period, so the executive share award tied to it paid nothing.
Management's answer is to spend more inside the screen. Product development spending rises from 11% of revenue to 12 to 13% in 2026, and about 70% of digital revenue already comes from AI-powered products. Stacey Caywood, McKinstry's designated successor, has made speeding up those tools her first job.
One screen share will show you where to sit
You don't need a software team to borrow this idea. You need one hour and a customer willing to share their screen.
Ask them to do the real job your product supports, the way they did it last Tuesday. Don't help. Just watch for the moment they stop, open a new tab, and go hunting for something: a rate table, a deadline, a checklist, an old email from you.
That pause is the whole lesson. Every time they leave their work to look something up, someone else owns that moment. Wolters Kluwer spent ten years making sure the pause happened inside its own software.
What you build for that moment can be small.
A bookkeeper might send clients a filled-in deadline calendar every January. A safety consultant might put the inspection checklist straight into the form the site manager already fills out. A wedding planner might share a live supplier timeline in place of a PDF that's out of date by Friday.
One warning before you get excited, though.
Add up how much of your income depends on a single rule or regulation. If one rule carries more than a fifth of your sales, 2025's filing-product slump is your preview. Start building a second line before somebody in government makes the choice for you.
The next screen fight
McKinstry needed ten years to move the rulebook from the shelf into the software. The next fight is already underway, against AI tools that can read the rules too. The winner will be whoever sits closest to the moment the accountant clicks submit.
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