Janus Henderson Group plc (JHG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Roger Thompson, CFO of Janus Henderson. Thanks so much for your time today.

Thanks, Brennan. Love to be here, in the sunshine.

In the sunshine, absolutely. Beats New York City, that's for sure. So we'd love to start out with 2024, transformational year for Janus in a couple of different ways, right? Both organic growth but also inorganic, a few inorganic growth perspectives for 2024. As you progress through the strategic shift that you guys have laid out, what's in focus for 2025?

So I mean, I guess, first, thanks for recognizing and it was a good year. It was a step in the right direction. So what's next? You've got to be true to what you do. The most important thing is listening to clients and delivering for them. We've got a very clear strategy that we've laid out that hopefully, you've seen and understand, it's about protecting and growing what we've got is a large book of business and an established book of business and how do we change that. How do we leverage the things, how do we amplify the things that we think are really interesting to clients that they haven't yet fully bought into. And to your point around acquisitions, where is the space that clients want us to be that we can't do ourselves that we need to do through acquisitions. So what we call diversified client skips the right. So within all of those, there's things that worked last year and there's things that there's an awful lot more to do. So take the U.S. intermediary business, which if you go back a few years, we were in consistent outflow. We now have 6 quarters in a row of positive flows, 2 years in a row of positive flows and a team that is excited about where they're going. What we now need to do is take that and replicate it around the world. We've got Europe to being back to flattish small positives, U.K. is still a tough market, some interesting things there. Where do we go there? On the sort of amplify side, our institutional business is very subscale. That is something we've been working on for a number of years. It's still work in progress. But again, 2 quarters out of 4 were positive last year. We're not where we need to be. We haven't got a consistent pipeline or big enough pipeline yet to be consistent in that. But I mean, in both Q2 and Q4, we had about 10 deals of $100 million to $500 million. So starting to see that core -- the cake on which you can put the icing. So those things coming through. And so I'm sure we'll talk about ETFs. I'm sure we'll talk more about some of the deals we did. But they are the things that started to work in '24 that, yes, how do we leverage those in '25 and what's next in '25.

Right. Okay. Well, we touched on this a little bit, and that's a lot to think about. We touched on this a little bit before. But I'd like to go with an unconventional question here. I'm new really to paying close attention to Janus. What you're doing seems really interesting. But give me the pitch. I come with this with 0 baggage. So why do you think, Janus -- why does Janus make a compelling investment case now?

Yes. This is a tough industry, right? So who is differentiated in this industry? Who is doing something different that will make a fundamental difference to their company? And I think we're in that space. We're a $380 billion asset manager that has been an outflow for several years that has turned it around and the thing that I need to persuade you is why is that going to continue and to accelerate. And that's the -- because yes, we saw positive flows 3 quarters in a row. Okay. That's -- is that the start of something? Or is that what you could believe is something that's going to accelerate from here? And I think if you look at what we've done, if that comes through in earnings, it comes through in margin growth. We've got a pristine balance sheet, you get leverage through all of those. Op margin improved 350 basis points last year, the flow-through of revenue through to profit over 50%. So if you can accelerate business markets obviously help, but let's not assume this market. Let's assume that we do it ourselves, and we've started to do it ourselves. That then changes people's view of you A few years ago, we had a terminal value of 0. This drop was priced to destruction. You've now got something where the price has improved. So I've got to tell you that we're not there yet. I've got to tell you that we've got an awful lot more to go. The price has improved largely because earnings have improved. So why is the PE going to improve? And that, in our industry is about consistency of growth, consistency of flow. And we think we've got a lot of opportunity for that. We think we've got a team that wants to deliver that. We've got clients who are interested in that. And I think that's what makes us differentiated -- sorry, we've got a couple of category killers. That always helps.

Okay. It's interesting. And I would commit to continue to think on it.

Well, don't be too late.

Fair enough. Fair enough. You guys recently purchased Victory Park, right? $6 billion private credit manager focused on asset-backed finance. There's a lot of attention to the asset-backed market recently. How is that integration going? Which areas are you finding most complementary to the existing franchise?

Right. So like you say there was -- we spent a lot of time working out which was the right place to start in this space. There's obviously a lot of business in other areas of private credit. We think the asset backed is, as my Canadian bosses called it, is skating where the puck is going to. There is growth there, and there's a team that we knew a little bit about. We spent time with them, very similar in the outlook of things, very important when doing an acquisition, is it really going to work? Because to your point, the deal is the easy bit. The real work is how do you make that more successful than it would have been on its own. VPC is a $6 billion business. How do we make that much bigger? So we're early days. We've -- they've got a product in market, so we can't talk so much about that specifically. But yes, the sales teams around the world are very interested and have got clients who are very interested in VPC. We're going to work through that. We've got vehicles to work through, we've got currency hedging to work. So we've got all sorts of things that we've got to get to, but I think the early stage is it's really good. Now we've got, like I say, interest in multiple markets around what they do. We now need to turn that obviously into business and turn it not only into success of the products in market now, but what's the next one? And what's the 1 after that? And we can do that in multiple ways. We can do that, like I say, through our teams around the world. We've got Privacore, which is a different style of distribution, if you like, how do we put that into the -- more into the intermediary space, into the wealth channels. So early days, very good, but the proof is always in the pudding.

Got it. Yes. And you sort of anticipated my follow-up, which is Privacore and how it fits in. But -- so that's still a work in progress, I guess, right?

With VPC specifically?

Yes.

Yes. Really good conversations as to the house and what. But yes, I'd be surprised if we didn't marry those 2 together.

Right. Okay. One of the big pieces driving success last year and what you guys were able to achieve in 2024 was on the ETF side, right? So innovation, notably within the fixed income side of things. So as kind of shocking that you went from pretty much nowhere in ETFs to the fourth largest fixed income ETF provider. But help me understand, given your equity heritage, why start with bonds?

Yes, I think it's a logical place to start. In terms of transparency, particularly is -- has an ETF work in the active space. What we do, most of what we do is fundamental active, I'd say a lot of it is equity. So whereas in the fixed income space, you've got unique bonds, unique QSIPs, big volumes. You don't have those same worries about transparency. So it was a logical place to start. I want to talk about where we go next. But yes, we've then developed a suite of securitized products. JAAA is obviously GBP the 600 gorilla of that or now the $20 billion gorilla, I guess, I should call it, which is fantastic. But we've got a suite of securitized. So again, you're talking to clients about what is it you want along that range of securitized products? So we've now got 4 of those are over $1 billion. JMBS, I think, is 4 million. So it's a suite, which we have branded on and we will continue to add to that over time. Again, what is it that clients want? And can we do it? You've taken a product which -- we've had a great team in this space for a long time, but it was essentially an institutional product. And by putting it in an ETF, you just opened up a completely new distribution arena. It's not just a channel. It's a whole -- I think it's bigger than that. And we're seeing that diversify over time to different people buying this asset class in an ETF form. So that's sort of why fixed income first. We have launched equity ETF. We've done some more in the quant type space. What we're very excited about in the U.S. is we launched our first fundamental equity ETF last week that will add JXX. This is -- we're really excited by that. We think that could be something which, again, it's different. It's the first we've done in that space. We're going to take. We now have a brand in ETFs, but we obviously have a big brand in fundamental equity. Team are excited both on the investment side and on the distribution side about the opportunity there. So yes, to your point, we definitely started in fixed income. But the combination of quantamental and fundamental equity, we've seen obviously some big success of that in different markets. There's no reason why that can't be a very big franchise as well. There's things you won't do in an ETF form. We won't do everything in an ETF form but a large cap, JXX makes sense in ETF form.

Got it. I was chatting with actually Greg Trinks, by the way, a great tremendous hire. Comes from UBS. Yes. Yes. I mean what you were doing just sort of had his fingerprints on it from my perspective. So we went out and we were talking and rates coming down. So JAAA is very front-end loaded. I know you were sort of trying to pull me into the equity side, and we'll get there. But I just want to hit on this really quickly first. So front-end sensitivity for JAAA and JBBB, right, they priced off SOFR. Have you noticed any change in demand or how -- or excitement or interest now that we've had front-end rates starting to come down?

Well, I guess the short answer is that, I guess, it's the facts, which is that flows have increased. So Q4 was bigger than Q3 in January, which is public data was, I think, the biggest month ever. So I guess the answer to your question is no. And again, remember, you've got a floating rate, short duration, high-quality product. So it's not -- you're not taking that enormous risk of a long-dated product. So it's also interesting when we thought that rates might come down a lot, just sort of middle of last year, if I remember right. There was a couple of weeks where flows were slower. Then actually when the first interest rate cut came, we carried on again. So we're not -- we didn't see -- that's history rather than the future. I can't tell you what will happen in the future. But when we did get the cuts through last year, there was no change in flow profile. And doing 2% or 3% better than cash is potentially even more important in a low rate environment than a high rate environment.

Okay. Fair enough. Yes. Okay. So the active equity ETF to JXX but also, I believe, J-Mid is another. So it's an interesting development. Is it sort of my growing sense that maybe the fixed income ETF offering was a proof of concept, so to speak, right? And then you can show the PMs and whatnot, hey, this can work. We can pull it look at all these assets we can pull in. Is that fair? And what would you add to that?

Yes. I mean, I'll take a $30 billion proof of concept at any day of the week from nothing and something that more than doubled last year. I think you -- and again, I think it's true for the company as a whole is you get a level of excitement, We're doing things. We're showing success. People want to do things. So if that's what you mean by proof of concept, I think the answer is yes. But we've been -- this isn't something that we started a week ago. The genesis of the ETF product was a business that Janus bought in 2015. So it's 10 years ago. But yes, we're seeing a great trajectory of that. And I think people are more comfortable than they were -- the difference between J-Mid and JXX, one is more quantitative and JXX is a pure fundamental product. So that's the first 1 that you said, okay, we're absolutely fine with transparency. And like I say, we can be in that one. But yes, the teams want -- we're all human, yes, I want some of that success you've got. So I'm sure the equity guys want some of the success of the fixed income guys are seeing. That's a nice -- it's a nice thing to have. But it's very much -- so yes, like I say, if you mean proof of concept in that way, then yes, I don't think it was -- it wasn't designed that way.

Okay. Fine. Overplayed the hand. No problem. Okay. So Tabula is now closed, right? And you launched your first ETF in Europe. So how quickly do you expect to scale those strategies?

Yes. I mean this is important because of where the European market is. So the European market is quite often a few years behind the U.S. So we think that the growth of ETFs over the next period, 1, 3, 5 years is going to be dramatically increased over where it has been over the last 5 years. That has started to happen. When it started to happen, potentially, it's going to shortcut a little bit what's happened in the U.S. where ETFs were passive for a period of time. And the active market is still the smaller part, but in percentage terms of a smaller number is the fastest-growing part. We think in Europe, that may shorten, so you're going to get a growing ETF market and an active market that grows with it. And we wanted to be there at the early stages. With the success we've seen in securitized is in part because we were early. You've got to be good as well, but being early is important. So that was why we bought Tabula. You could build that platform and those relationships over time yourself. It will take time, though. And what we found and we knew because we've been working with Tabula for a number of years, was a team who were really good with really good infrastructure and plumbing and some really good relationships. So that has enabled us to completely shortcut that process. We've now launched 3 or 4 ETFs in Europe. There are a number of others in the pipeline. They are both equity and fixed income to your questions earlier. We're obviously very excited about the replication of success that we've seen in the U.S. So we've launched a product called JCL0, which is a European CLO in UCITS form. We've got that brand. We think that market is interesting, and we want to be quick to market. And we've pulled out all the stocks to make sure we are. So we're very excited about it. Yes. Do I expect that to be $20 billion like JAAA, which has done it in basically 5 years, I think. I don't know. What I can tell you is that the products that have come after have got out of the blocks quicker. So a JBBB, a JSI, they're getting to 100 and a few hundred and $1 billion to some of them is quicker than JAAA got there. We're out of the blocks in with JCL0 with Tabula for the European CLO with a -- it's a seeded product at $100 million. It's got its first client trades in. Those first client trades are earlier than the first client trades were in AAA. So good start, client interest, but these things take a little bit of time. A few hundred million will be a nice start.

You touched on this before, but Europe, the distribution dynamics in Europe were very different than they are in the U.S., right? Might have a little something to do with why the ETF adoption is. But do you think those differences will result in a different trajectory and a different ending point as well?

A lot of the things are converging there. You get into a lot of models. Again, ETFs and models have sort of worked very well together. You're getting to -- the commission models are changing. So I think the European marketplace, it will be interesting to see over time, and I can't tell you what's going to happen. But the direction of travel looks to be similar. There are opportunities, which is why we're very interested.

Yes, sure. Fair. Shifting gears a little bit to the institutional pipeline, right? Rebuilding that is a big focus for investors. So where does that stand?

Yes. It's something that, again, we can all get -- I can sit up here and pitch you the stock all day and give you 101 reasons why we're on the accelerator. This is a tough business, though. It's a tough market. It's a tough business. And institutional is an area that we are subscaling. And it's taken us a long time, longer than we thought to really start to get some momentum. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But again, part of it is it's hard. We've got to make sure we've got the right people doing the right thing. We've got to get consultants on site. We've got to make sure we've got the right vehicles. We've got all of these things and we don't have as much brand in that space. The brand is more of an intermediary and retail brand. So again, that's -- we would argue we got -- we know we've got work to do in that space because we think we can deliver in that space. And we're starting to see good progress in that. We were positive 2 quarters out of 4 last year. And we were positive in a way that I think is starting to be repeatable. Both Q2 and Q4 were about 10 fundings of $100 million to $500 million. So it's not one deal or a couple of deals because we can all be lucky. This is about building the cake that you can put the icing on. And that -- but that relies on a big pipeline. It relies on something that we are still building and we're not there yet on. So I can't tell you yet that we're going to do that every quarter. That's obviously what we want and expect to do and the opportunity set is huge given our relative size in institutional for who we are and what we do and the quality of what we do, the opportunity institutional is very, very big. We move it in the right direction, but we're not there yet.

All right. Okay. And there were some stats quoted on the call, right, Ali said that 30% and 35% Europe and North America, right, with RFP activity.

Yes. So the early stages, the things you can measure, the interactions, the number of people coming to our events right the way back. They just -- people want to talk to us more than they did before. Then through 2 RFPs, through to next stage of process, we're building it, but that -- we need more at the front end, and we need that to move through the digestive system.

Yes. Do you have any guess about range of time that you think it's going to take to get to where you would prefer?

Well, again, to go back to your question on what's the opportunity set. To get to consistently positive, we're not there, but you could see it. Now how long does it really take for that bit that you're looking through the tunnel at. It's taken us a little bit longer than we thought to get here. Therefore, I'm not going to tell you it's going to be tomorrow that we're going to deliver 4 quarters of positive flow in a row. It's going to be sequential. If we could do 2 again this quarter, that might be a good answer. If we could do 3, that would be even better. But the light at the end of the tunnel is the opportunity in institutional, which is multiples of where we are.

Right. Sure. Fair. So we've seen performance improving, right, with recent quarters, at least 3/4 of AUM beating benchmarks. So what have you noticed on the back of that as far as engagement goes? I know we can all see the flows and we can grow sales and everything like that. But to me like sort of engagement is more forward-looking, right? So have you noticed anything -- any change?

We've always had good investment performance. I mean that's something if you look -- and again, it's the consistency of investment performance that's important. And we've got things in there that are good here and here, but there's a hole in the middle. And that makes it more difficult. People -- that's a bigger jump leap of faith, people want that consistency of performance. Overall, as a firm, we've got fantastic, let's say, 1, 3, 5, 10 years, our numbers against benchmark and even better against the competition. It's pretty tough in a couple of areas in the large cap space, and it's tough to beat the index. And actually the same in mid. But yes, our consistency in that area means that people -- like you say, the engagement is good. We're not having to prove our investment performance, like I say, but it hasn't -- it's a consistent story. It's even better now than it was actually dropped a little bit in the fourth quarter. But if you look over a period of time, it's been a strong run. So that's not something where -- it's the most important piece of the pie. It's the most important ingredient is your investment performance. If you haven't got it, you're in a lot of trouble. We've got it. Now, how do we make sure that we can leverage it, which is through client relationships. It is through the quality of the service we deliver. It is through the vehicles that we can deliver it in because if you're delivering something which isn't what someone wants, they'll go somewhere else. So that core is really good. And what we're working on, we still have more to do. What we're working on is making sure that we can deliver that as people want it and have those deep relationships with people that we're the core person they come to.

Right. I mean there's basically 2 deliverables in the industry, it's performance and it's service?

Yes.

Okay. Ali used a term that intuitively makes sense to me, profitable AUM, right? But could you maybe give a few examples of what he means by that? And how are you managing the business through that lens?

Yes. I mean, we've been very consistent. I've been CFO of this company for 12 years, and I've been very frustrated with the obsession of assets particularly of people in your seat, not specifically the UBS seat. But as Ali said, not all flows made equal Yes. So we're not about trying to be bigger. If bigger is assets. That is not interested. We want to be bigger in terms of profit, we want to be more relevant. We want to be more recognized, which all of those lead to bigger profit. So when we talk about -- good business is in all sorts of shapes and sizes. At the same time as growing JAAA, which is a sort of 20 basis point product, but massively scalable. We've got products like our biotech innovation fund, that's a proper hedge fund at proper hedge fund fees. They're both good business. We do business in enhanced index or core fixed income or buy and hold at low fee. It's good business, but we're very careful about that. And we do turn business down. I think which is your question, which is what do you not do? Well, we don't give away capacity. We price things correctly. We do back our investment performance. And we do find that clients -- good clients are willing to pay the right price for the right product. Obviously, there is price competition, but overall, as you say, what do people really care about? We're here to deliver you an outcome. And that outcome is investment performance with the service and with the vehicle around it. But -- so our fee rate is a massive differentiator compared to an awful lot of our competitors. Fee rate is basically flat. It's down 1 basis point over 2 years, a couple of basis points over 3 or 4. And that's helped, again, to be honest, it's helped a little bit by equity markets going up. But it's also helped by the range of products we're selling. And the fact, as I say, that we're proud of our investment performance. We're proud of what we do. And if you just coming to ask for price, there's probably someone who'll sell it to you for cheaper. And in a capacity constrained world, which in the most places, we operate in, then we will be very, very protective of selling the right product to the right price.

Sure. Yes. sympathetic for that. We came up with a metric many years ago that flows less than fee rate. Kind of a net growth. So Ali talked -- I'd love to shift gears and touch on expenses with our last few minutes here. Ali talked previously about making our expense base more variable and certainly positive signs with the operating leverage you delivered in 2024. Do you see a pathway for further operating leverage in your business? And how much investment spend is needed to continue these early positive signs we have around the organic growth and all of this innovation that you're doing as well?

So yes, we delivered 350 basis points of margin improvement last year. The marginal profitability on revenue was in the sort of mid-50s. And again, these businesses have a scale to them. You've got a fixed cost base that you need to feed a little bit too, but it's largely a fixed cost base. And then we've got the other pieces around it, variable comp and how much are we spending on things like marketing. But there is definitely scale in these businesses. So again, if you're doing good business, and I come back to that, repeat and repeat and repeat, if you're doing good business, the margin can improve from here. It's not a straight line. It doesn't go forever because of the dynamics of how we -- how a comp pool works, how things like that. But yes, can we make it more variable? Well, you make it more variable if your fixed cost base stays relatively flat, yes? We want our variable cost base to go up, okay? That means we're being successful. But we want to be as -- our fixed cost to be as flat as possible. There are investments that you need to make. This business gets more complicated, we're running more vehicles than we were before. We're in every jurisdiction in the world just about. There is technology that's moving things which helps and costs as well. So there are -- there's a lot of things that we need to do that we continue to invest in. What we've done, I think -- I'd like to think and I'd like to think people have recognized it relatively well is decide where it is we're going to invest and try and find as much as possible from other areas to help fund that. And we will continue to do that. We'll continue to try and be more efficient. We'll continue to try and see that leverage you talk about, but there are areas in the business we will continue to invest in. We need to invest, we want to invest where we can see growth in the future. So yes, should there be margin improvement? Yes, the easiest part is just the market goes up. But if we get consistent flow over time from good business then you get margin improvement.

Sure. The last question, I'd love to just touch on capital. So you have been investing in the business, both directly and through inorganic means. Are you now -- do you have the pieces that you were looking for? Or should we continue to expect that kind of a capital allocation? Obviously, that I don't let me know what you're going to do on the inorganic side, you don't want to take my hand. But is this the general approach to the strategy to add on? And should we continue to expect that? Or is there a shift?

Yes, we've been -- we've hopefully been very consistent in our capital methodology. We bought back 21% of the stock since 2018 in a pretty consistent flow. At the same time, we've got about the same -- like you say we've got a healthy dividend. We've done buybacks. We've invested in the business both organically and inorganically and I got the same -- I've got slightly more net cash at the end of '24 than I had at the end of '22. So we're in a very strong balance sheet position. You do not want to leverage these businesses up. We're very cautious on that. But yes, should we do more in the inorganic side, then there's plenty of opportunities to have to do that either from the balance sheet we've got or tap in markets in different ways. But we'll be very consistent in what we're doing.

Is that the stake rank though, like invest in the business inorganic?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. We'll invest in the business organically, inorganically. We haven't got a better use of it that we can see in the future -- in the relatively near future. We're not trying to build a massive cash reserve over above what we've got.

Perfect. Great. It's a really interesting conversation. Thanks for your time, Roger.

All right. Pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks a lot.