AJ Bell plc (AJB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to AJ Bell's 2024 Annual Results video. We're shortly going to hear from Michael Summersgill and Peter Birch, CEO and CFO of AJ Bell. But first let's go through some of the key numbers from the year. Starting with customers. And AJ Bell's total platform customers increased by 66,000 in the year to close at 542,000, an increase of 14%. Platform assets under administration closed at GBP 86.5 billion, up 22% in the year. Net inflows were up 45% versus the prior year to GBP 6.1 billion with GBP 2.2 billion attributable to the advised platform and GBP 3.9 billion being D2C. Moving on to the key numbers from today's full year results. Revenue was up 23% to GBP 269.4 million driven by strong ad valorem and transactional revenues. Ad valorem revenue was up 25% to GBP 202 million due to growth in custody fees, driven by higher average AUA and an increase in net interest income generated on cash balances held on the platform. Transactional fees were up 34% to GBP 35.3 million. Dealing activity was higher in the year due to improved retail investor sentiment following a recovery in global equity markets. FX revenue was also strong due to increased levels of dealing in overseas shares, particularly the United States. Total costs increased by 23% to GBP 162.2 million whilst net finance income totaled GBP 6 million. Taken together, this resulted in a 29% increase in profit before tax to GBP 113.3 million and an improved PBT margin of 42%. And finally, the company has announced a record level of shareholder returns in the form of an increased ordinary dividend and a new share buyback program. The Board has recommended a final ordinary dividend of 8.25p per share, taking the total ordinary dividend for the year to 12.5p, the 20th consecutive year of ordinary dividend growth. In addition, the Board has approved a share buyback program of up to GBP 30 million returning surplus capital to shareholders in line with the company's capital allocation framework. You can find full details about these results on our website. Now let's hear from Michael and Peter and get some insight into what's behind these numbers and also their expectations for full year 2025 and beyond.

I think '24 has been a really strong year for us. When I reflect on the year, I always look at it through the lens of all of our key stakeholder groups, our customers, our people and our shareholders. And I think we've delivered to each and every 1 of those groups. So for customers, we've had the same service standards as we always try to deliver new products and new features to market and we've reduced prices that customers pay as well. For our staff, the continued growth of the business has meant great opportunities for them. So we've seen hundreds of internal promotions over the course of the year. And we've got the same high level of staff engagement as we've had for a number of years now. And then we've done a good job of delivering to shareholders as well, great returns for shareholders through the course of 2024. So a strong year all around. The platform market is a big market and 1 that's still growing in the U.K. So there are about GBP 3 trillion of assets that would be well served on an investment platform. There's just over GBP 1 trillion of money already on one of those platforms. So you would expect the market itself to continue to grow over time. We have about an 8% market share. So there's still plenty of room for us to grow within the platform market. Growth in the year has been very strong, so we've delivered over GBP 6 billion of net inflows onto the platform. And the key to that success is in the fact that we operate in both the direct-to-consumer platform market and in the advice platform market and having those 2 channels is what helps us to maximize the growth.

So another year of record financial performance. Revenue and profit before tax both up significantly year-on-year. From a revenue perspective, the increase was driven by 3 factors. Assets under administration were up year-on-year, which drove high levels of custody revenue. Average interest rates were also higher through the period, which resulted in an increase in net interest margin. And dealing activity was also at a more normalized level this year, which meant that year-on-year transaction revenue increased. Within that, there's a greater weighting towards overseas stocks, which drove higher foreign exchange revenue. I think all of that shows a real benefit of the diversified nature of the revenue model because we delivered that growth despite the fact that we also reduced customer prices on the first of April. So a really pleasing year from a revenue growth perspective. So underlying costs were up 19% in the year to GBP 156 million. That was about GBP 4 million higher than we originally guided to. And that was a deliberate conscious decision to invest a bit more into brand and marketing and also product development. We're seeing good traction in those areas and have the sort of ability and the confidence to make greater levels of investment. Our philosophy is that as we generate increased levels of profitability, we will reinvest that into the business into areas such as pricing, which we've already talked about and then also product development and brand and marketing. The profitability of the business was higher than we expected it was going to be when we issued our cost guidance at the start of the year. Hence, the decision to invest a bit more in those key areas. So we announced a new capital allocation framework alongside our half year results. I was very much rearticulation of how we already thought about things probably set out in a bit clearer way. Clearly, we need to comply with our regulatory capital requirements. We don't think about organic investment within the business. We're committed to a progressive dividend policy moving away from a fixed 65% payout that we've used in previous years, which then potentially gives us a bit more surplus capital to think about how do we deploy that. We'll consider M&A opportunities but we're principally organic strategy. If there are no M&A opportunities arising, we don't think about how we distribute any remaining surplus capital. And we'll consider things like special dividend and share buyback programs and we'll do that on an annual basis. How we're choosing to implement our capital allocation framework this year is that we're announcing an ordinary dividend, which is up on the previous year by 16%, and that is the 20th consecutive year of ordinary dividend growth, which is a great message to be able to give to shareholders. That still leaves us with significant surplus capital within the business. And so we're also alongside these results, announcing a share buyback program of up to GBP 30 million. Taken together, that is a record distribution to shareholders, which is a really pleasing thing for us to be able to say at this point in time.

AJ Bell's purpose is quite straightforward, is to help people invest. The main way that we do that is through our investment platforms. The way that we think about strategy is we have 3 focus areas that we're always trying to bring things back to. So that's to be easy to use which means different things in the advice and the direct market. To be a trusted providers, we long to build trust by providing great service and building our brand. And we want to be a low-cost provider as well. We think that's particularly important in financial services to deliver great value to our customers. Ease of use is going to require us to deliver technology improvements over time. We're constantly going to have to improve the user interface, have new features to the platform as adviser's behaviors and customers' behaviors change. So the key capability we need to have is to deliver technology change more quickly, and that's something that we've been investing in over recent years. So we've been making sure that we've got robust automated pipeline so that we've got a quick release process. And we've seen that. We've been bringing more engineers into the business, and we're delivering more change more quickly than we ever have, and we've seen that building over a number of years now. The kinds of things that we've been delivering to market range from new products in the direct markets, we've launched a ready-made pension to make it easier for customers to consolidate that pensions in a single pension wrapper. And then there are new features that we've delivered to the advice market. So a new onboarding process that allows the adviser to far more efficiently pull the information that they need for a new customer, all the documentation that they need to provide. It aligns that process with their advice process and just makes it far more efficient for them to operate. So it's an ongoing program. Those are just examples of things that we've done in the year and it's that ability to deliver tech change that is going to be key for us for years to come. Trust is hugely important in financial services, and we've seen all the research that we do around the decision process that people go through when they join the platform, just how important it is. People recommending the platform to them, people having heard of the brand, those are crucial factors in making a decision. So we've been trying to build that brand awareness for a few years now. The TV campaign, the radio campaign that we've been running through that period have been a key part of the success. We've supplemented that with sponsorship activity. So we've partnered with the Great Run series and they have a feel good factor about those events that we're really looking to draw out in our brand, and that has been a really successful partnership for us. The combination of those 2 activities has really driven the brand awareness very successfully. Over the last 2 years, we're at all-time highs now. And the importance of that is when somebody is making that decision to decide to pick a platform, it just puts AJ Bell at the front of their minds. Once you've won people's trust, you have to, on an ongoing basis, you have to maintain it. We do that through trying to deliver a really high level of service. So first and foremost, we're trying to deliver a digital proposition. People generally want to self-serve and so that means that the system has to be reliable, it has to be easy to use. But there will be points in people's investing journey where they want some human support. They'll have a query and they want somebody to talk that through with them. So we think that answering the phones quickly, and connecting people to a knowledgeable member of the team here at AJ Bell is important. We've had 450,000 calls from customers this year, and 97% of those were answered within 20 seconds, and that's 1 of the key statistics that we monitor in the business. And you see the impact that, that has on customers coming through things like the Trustpilot scores. We've maintained a 4.8-star rating all the way through the year. And when you see the feedback that people provide, so often, it's the quality of support that they got and the speed with which the information was provided that are key. So that combination is really important to maintaining trust on an ongoing basis.

So as Michael mentioned previously, pricing is a key consideration for customers when selecting a platform. So we always want to remain competitive on pricing. As the business has scaled, we've been able to do that. And in the year, we announced changes to our customer charges and customer interest rates. The annualized financial impact of those was over GBP 20 million. So a significant reinvestment into the business in the year. So we're clear in terms of the areas we need to reinvest in to drive growth and to drive benefit for all of our stakeholders. We need to invest in ease of use, trust and pricing. And we've done all of those things in the year. We've generated significant growth. We'll continue to invest in those areas for the benefit of the business in the future.

So we have the first project from this new labor government back in October, and it was certainly a tax raising budget that impacted us and the users of our platform and the retail investors that we're all trying to serve. So national insurance increase for us as an employer and for the IFAs to use our platform. The IFAs using the platform, they suffered CGT relief on the ultimate disposal of that business. Those release were eroded and retail investors or CGT rates increase and also now IHT being applied to unused pensions on debt. And it was that last topic of IHT on pensions, that was 1 that really concerns me. A lot of the other measures were largely expected, but the IHT proposal is poorly thought through and actually unworkable for the industry. It will result for unnecessary delays for people inheriting those pension pots when they don't need to go to the IHT process, and it will create a lot of extra administration for the industry. So we've been very vocal in our criticism. We've spoken to the government directly about our concerns, and there's lots of work going on across the industry to try and collaborate and put forward some more workable proposals to the government to tax on used pensions on debt. So a concern, but 1 that I think ultimately will be able to work through as an industry. There's lots of speculation leading up to the budget around changes that might be made to different aspects of pensions, namely the tax treatment of contributions into pension and then the withdrawal of what's commonly referred to as tax-free cash at the point at which somebody starts drawing their retirement savings. Now neither area was actually changed, but the speculation, the uncertainty was incredibly unhelpful. Understandably these are lifelong decisions that people are making. These are big financial decisions that they're making. We saw a meaningful change, material amounts of money coming into the business and going out of those pension wrappers compared to normal levels. And so you saw the sensitivity that people have to these topics. We made a proposal to government to operate what we refer to as a pensions tax lock, basically saying that those 2 areas of the system would not be changed. It's a really long-term decisions that people are making. We simply need to have confidence in the system. Having now been through the budget and seeing the importance of that. It's something that we'll be campaigning for again in the new year because I think that having applied IHT on pensions, we've seen that changes to pensions tax are in the mind of the government, and we need some certainty around those 2 core areas of the pension system. We've been campaigning for ISA simplification for a couple of years now. Our objective is to get more people investing, and it's good for society, it's good for the individuals. Too many people in the U.K. hold cash over the long term and if they make that move into investing, they'll get far greater returns. ISA is a brilliant way to try and get more people investing because it's a well-recognized and well-liked part of the financial services system. The problem is that it's become the understanding of ISA has become eroded over the years as more and more ISAs have been added to the landscape, and it just creates confusion. So we want to pair that right back. Ideally, we'd like to just have one ISA but we probably need to get there in a couple of stages. So something like I say, we've been collaborating with industry and talking to government about for a few years now. Labour made a commitment to ISA simplification ahead of the election and my understanding is it's something that we can expect to see some progress on in 2025.

So for FY '25, we're expecting revenue margins to moderate slightly. We've said previously that we expect that to happen next year. And that reflects the full year impact of the price changes that we made on the first of April. From a cost perspective, we're expecting cost growth to moderate year-on-year that's again something that we've indicated previously will happen. Costs are, however, expected to increase a bit more than we'd originally guided to. And there are 2 main reasons for that. The first 1 being the impact of the national insurance changes that were announced in the budget. That impacts us by about GBP 2 million. And the second thing is that we're choosing to invest a bit more in product development and brand and marketing than we originally indicated. And that's a deliberate decision that reflects the fact that actually profitability is higher than we expected it was going to be when we issued the guidance this time last year. In line with our philosophy, where we generate higher margins, we look to reinvest in areas like pricing, trust and ease of use. And so we're going to do that from a brand and marketing and product development perspective. And we believe we can do that and absorb the full year impact of price changes whilst still growing profit before tax and achieving a PBT margin in excess of 40%.

So I'm really positive about the future for AJ Bell. If we look at the opportunity in the platform market, first of all, we expect that market to carry on growing. I think the way that we approach in the market, having a platform in both the advice and the direct-to-consumer market is the right way for us to make the most of that growth opportunity. Now not to say that there aren't some challenges. There always are. And we've seen with the new government that we have that they will want to raise more tax and some of that could add complexity to our industry. But the key thing is, I think we've got the right people in place to address those challenges. And we've got a great team here at AJ Bell. We've got a highly engaged workforce. I think I've got the right senior people around me and I've got a very supportive Board. So very optimistic about what lies ahead in 2025 and beyond.