PensionBee Group plc (PBEE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. I'm Romina Savova, CEO of PensionBee. It is a pleasure to welcome you to our preliminary results presentation. For those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we are a leading online pension provider in the U.K. We exist to make pension simple so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement. We enable our customers to combine their pension into one new online plan with money managed by the world's largest asset managers. We aspire to build a lifetime relationship with our customers, generating predictable and scalable revenue streams for our company and for our investors. Many of you have will have joined us for our Trading Update in January, and so will be familiar with the excellent results we delivered for the 2021 financial year. In addition to a brief recap of those results, which saw us achieving triple-digit revenue growth, we will update on our strategic positioning for 2022. First, I will provide an update on the market and competitive environment sharing some insights about market size from the Office for National Statistics and our performance in the pension consolidation market relative to platforms and robo-advisers. My colleague, Jasper, our Chief Marketing Officer, will then elaborate on our customer acquisition plans, while our Chief Design Officer, Matt, will demonstrate our pension-related product priorities for the first half of 2022. Our Chief Technology Officer, Jonathan will provide an update on our technology estate. Finally, our Chief Financial Officer, Christoph will share some more detailed financial information that illustrates our excellent retention rate, our cohort growth and the resilience of our revenue which is a core feature of our business model alongside our excellent growth prospects. Turning to the recap of our financial results for 2021. Our assets under administration increased to GBP 2.6 billion, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of about 100%, that is a doubling in size every year for the period since 2018. Our invested customer base exceeded 117,000 and we maintain a healthy pipeline of over 650,000 registered customers, underscoring the growth story of PensionBee. Thanks to our predictable revenue model and high retention rate of over 95%. The growth in assets has translated into similar growth in revenue. Our annual run rate revenue increased to GBP 16 million. Our revenue for the year increased to GBP 13 million, reflecting a growth rate in excess of 100%. One of the core reasons our business is able to scale so rapidly is the sheer size of the market opportunity in the U.K. In January 2022, the Office for National Statistics posted an update on pension wealth in Great Britain confirming that the overall defined contribution pension market stood at GBP 1 trillion over the 2018 to 2020 period. Importantly, the ONS now provides one consolidated and detailed data extract to allow us to quantify the size of the pension consolidation market opportunity for PensionBee, which consists of the primary types of pensions transferred by our customers to the PensionBee personal pension. That is preserved defined contribution pensions and active personal pensions. Based on the ONS market size estimates in the 2018 to 2020 period there was over GBP 700 billion in assets within the pension consolidation market. While PensionBee continues to grow rapidly, as at the end of 2021, it still only held 0.4% market share, leaving ample opportunity for further growth. Within this enormous target market, PensionBee's customer offering continues to resonate with consumers. The latest competitive market data from borrowing money, which assesses the quality of prominent platforms and robo-advisers shows that PensionBee's quality of digital experience, customer service and overall value for money is substantially above those of the average competitor. Indeed, PensionBee scores highly owing to the unique nature of its online pension consolidation offering which is differentiated to those of other personal pension providers. In recognition of our differentiated customer offering, we received 5 foreign money awards in early 2022 including Overall Best Buy for pensions. Our differentiated offering is well recognized in the consumer market as demonstrated by the growing brand awareness of PensionBee. Our prompted brand awareness now stands at about 25%, demonstrating a healthy year-on-year increase of 44%, while we continue to make strides through our marketing activities there is still ample opportunity for us to continue growing into a household name with brand awareness and [ DAPs ]. Of course, when it comes to growth, we seek to demonstrate our competitive advantage through results. Growth figures for AUA and customers continue to indicate that PensionBee is growing substantially more quickly than platform and robo-advisor peers. You will now hear from our CMO, Jasper Martens, who will expand on our strategy to maintain this excellent growth momentum.

Thank you, Romi. Hi. I am Jasper, CMO at PensionBee. I'm excited to share our customer acquisition plans for the year. PensionBee's marketing strategy in 2022 will largely be a continuation of what we did in 2021, alongside some extra activities where we have identified opportunities to effectively expand our reach. There are 3 key pillars for PensionBee's marketing strategy for 2022. One, accelerate our customer growth and marketing spend while monitoring the cost per invested customer. Cost per invested customer will rise in the first half of this year as we accelerate spend rapidly and subsequently declined towards the end of the year as we reap the benefits of the growth in invested customers. We will use our top 3 channels, TV, out-of-home and paid search. And with the help of our new data platform, we will optimize within these channels and between them. Two, broadening our customer appeal even more with specific product marketing campaigns. Earlier, Romi pointed out that the addressable market for PensionBee in the U.K. is fast. At the same time, PensionBee's product is designed to appeal to a broad audience, whether you're 18 or 80, PensionBee could be your new pension provider. Product innovations, such as our mainstream Fossil Fuel Free Pension and easy contributions through open banking technology have paved a way for us to penetrate further into the pension consolidation market attracting eco-conscious consolidators and self-employed individuals. Highlighting these specific innovations will make PensionBee irresistible for an even bigger audience, thereby driving customer growth. And three, building trust and customer reach through a strong media presence and educational campaigns. With our own in-house press office, we work with journalists, influencers and pension experts. It's one of the best ways to build a trustworthy brand and reach as many customers cost effectively as we possibly can. We are increasingly introducing more educational content campaigns, far beyond blocks and guides. Two great examples are patient Pension Confident podcast and our Pension Academy video series with Patricia Bright, reaching thousands of extra pension savers who want to engage with pensions in a simple manner. With 2022 off to an excellent start in growing new customers. We are looking forward to implementing our plan for the rest of the year. I would now like to hand over to my colleague, Matt, our Chief Design Officer, who will walk you through our product plans.

Thank you, Jasper. Hello. I'm Matt. PensionBee's CDO, and I'm looking forward to showing you some of the exciting new features we're developing in 2022. Products and design at PensionBee continues to stay at the industry forefront. By developing the features our customers want in line with our business objectives, we've been able to continue to grow our customer base, increasing the amount customers are saving and improving efficiency, keeping our customers happy and our retention strong. A particular focus for PensionBee has been to grow our customer base of over 50s. We've recently launched in-app withdrawal, a first-line feature in the U.K. with the aim of attracting customers with larger pension parts and therefore, AUA. After making the customer aware of important factors associated with what we're drawing from their pension, we present them with an overview of their available funds and the ability to withdraw from their tax-free and/or taxable cash as a one-off payment or as regular income. After ensuring they understand the risks involved in drawdown, they simply enter their bank account details and confirm. In addition to growing our customer base, we're growing our share of wallet. To that end, we're introducing relevant and contextual content based on customer actions and profiles into our products. By feeding targeted relevant content, we can help people manage their pension at the same time as improving their financial literacy in line with our vision and growing AUA to increased contributions alongside open banking, and transfer of additional pensions to PensionBee. We've also prioritized features that provide scalability through reduced friction at points traditionally requiring manual intervention by the customer services team. By empowering customers to self-serve, we are reducing the time it takes them to complete tasks without requiring exponentially more staff members to support them with our growing functionality. Specifically, we've redesigned the top level view customer fee within the product to provide them with improved at-a-glance understanding of their PensionBee pension. They will be able to see key information like the amounts they are projected to have a retirement and their planned performance alongside their pension balance. We're providing an overview and breakdown of their pension, including all types of money coming into or out of their account. These figures can be filtered by time scale, including by tax here for ease in filing end of year tax. We've revised our product information architecture in response to our customers' feedback to make finding key information easier. And we're improving our customers' understanding of their pension by servicing more of the underlying factors that affected such as the types of industries, companies invest in. These improvements are expected to reduce some of our top inbound queries, reducing the need to answer e-mails, live chats and phone calls, while delighting our customers with engaging and informative insights into their investments. Now I'll hand over to our Chief Technology Officer, Jonathan for a technology updates.

Hello, I'm Jonathan, PensionBee's CTO. It's very nice to be speaking with you today. And thank you, Matt, for taking us through the plans for our products. Technology reaches into the heart of all aspects of PensionBee's business. The technology strategy for 2022 is designed to continue underpinning the business' growth trajectory and provide the capabilities we need for expansion. To that end, we have 4 main areas of focus for the year ahead. The first area is scalability. In order to support the company's growth, we're ensuring that our technology is prepared to support 1 million customers and beyond. We're making investments in scale testing, architecture, infrastructure optimization and other areas that will continue to take advantage of the global cloud platforms PensionBee is built on. In addition, our data platform will be increasingly important as a capability for the business as it grows, used across multiple departments to improve analysis, decision-making and budget allocation. The second area of focus is increasing our operational leverage through continued investments in automation. The 2 graphs on the right-hand side of the slide show 2 different ways that we look at the effect of automation on the business' productivity. We measure both the ratio of invested customers to average employees over a year and also the commonly used ratio of revenue to average employee count. On both measures, our productivity is continuing to increase, and we're pursuing further investments in process automation to help us exceed GBP 100,000 of revenue per employee by putting a lot of work into enabling pension transfers to proceed without requiring any human action, as this is hugely beneficial for productivity. We're also investing in tooling to make our software engineers more productive such as taking advantage of Salesforce's new SFDX toolkit. The third area we're looking at is the ongoing strengthening of our information security management system and operational processes. We were certified to the ISO 27001 Information Security Standards in January 2021 and completed our first surveillance audit in November. We're now investing in the tools and business processes necessary to ensure that secure operations and effective service management continue as we grow the customer base and the size of the team. This is building on a solid track record of operational performance. For example, our technology platform has exceeded our SLA of 99.9% uptime over 2021 and we have continued to run all of our infrastructure on public cloud providers. Finally, our fourth area of focus is our technology team. In a very competitive environment for technical talent, we're investing in training to ensure that team members grow personally and professionally, helping PensionBee to attract, develop and retain exceptional talent. In summary, effective deployment of our technology is a core competitive advantage and continued investments in our scalability, automation, security and team will ideally position us for further growth. Thank you for your attention, and I'll now pass over to our Chief Financial Officer, Christoph to take you through our finances.

Hello, I'm Christoph and a warm welcome to the financial parts of our preliminary results presentation. We continue to execute on our growth story in 2021 and delivered strong asset growth to GBP 2.6 billion of AUA. The AUA growth is driven by disciplined new customer acquisition and retention and growth of existing customer cohorts. Particular retention and growth of existing customer cohorts is key to generating lifetime value on the back of embedded growth, which fundamentally is recurring and compounding in nature over time. The layer charts on the left-hand side visually shows PensionBee's AUA growth drivers. In addition to new customer acquisition, which is shown as the very top dark orange layer, lifetime value generation of existing customer cohorts are evident by the layers we need which we continue to retain and grow. Particularly the retention rate is crucially important to continue generating lifetime value over time. As you can see on the right-hand side of the page, we are pleased to report a customer retention rate of close to 97% for 2021, which in fact, has also improved over the last few years. In summary, generating lifetime value on the back of recurring and compounding asset growth for existing customer cohorts is evident in first -- a high customer retention rate of 97%, which we show on this page; and second, continuous net inflows across all cohorts, which we will cover next. As communicated during our January Trading Update, we have grown our AUA base primarily with net flows from new and existing customers. We will report on new customer growth for the first quarter in April. But we are very pleased with the start of the year. For 2022, we expect to enjoy the fruits of new customer growth and also growth from existing customers. Today, we wanted to give further insights into the net flows from existing customers, which was GBP 226 million over 2021 and the circle in red on the left-hand side chart. On the right-hand side, we visualized cumulative net flows, excluding market growth by customer cohorts in a stacked bar chart, and we show cumulative market growth separately at the top. The intention of this visualization is to drill down into the sources of the GBP 226 million of existing customer growth, as shown in the Turquoise dotted box in the right-hand side chart, the GBP 226 million of net inflows are the sum of net inflows across the various customer cohorts. The point to note is that all customer cohorts delivered positive net inflows in 2021, even the very early cohorts acquired in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Again, for avoidance of doubt, this does not include market growth, which is captured separately at the top of the chart. Seeing positive net inflows across all cohorts is a powerful point since it is evidence of our ability to generate lifetime value as we not only retain existing cohorts at a high retention rate of 97%, but also grown and we are continuously receiving consolidation and contribution. Another consequence of this is that an ever-growing proportion of our AUA is already available from prior year's cohorts. This generates a predictable asset base and derisks future AUA and recurring revenue growth. In conclusion, generating lifetime value on the back of recurring and compounding asset growth from existing customer cohorts is evident in first high customer retention rate of 97%, which we showed on the previous page; and second, continuous net inflows across all cohorts, which we covered on this page. We have turned asset growth into recurring and predictable revenue. Thanks to our resilient contractual gross revenue margin, which remained at 69 basis points. From a cost base perspective, we have demonstrated operating leverage in 2021, thanks to the scalability of the technology platform, and we've improved both profitability metrics in 2021. As already communicated in the past, we are guiding towards adjusted EBITDA profitability by the month of December 2023, and adjusted EBITDA before marketing profitability by the month of December 2022. In conclusion, we have converted asset growth into revenue growth thanks to the resilient contractual gross revenue margin. And we have generated operating leverage for the year with continued margin improvement expected for 2022. The majority of proceeds we raised during the IPO have been earmarked on marketing spend and therefore, close monitoring of the spend is critical. Particularly as we expect to spend GBP 17 million to GBP 20 million in marketing in 2022. We will continue to invest in marketing and customer acquisitions throughout 2022. And we anticipate that marketing spend will be weighted towards the first half of this year, with cumulative CPIC declining strongly towards the end of the year, ensuring that annual CPIC remains within the target threshold. In summary, we utilized a methodological approach to marketing investments to ensure a healthy growth, and we grew in a cost disciplined way in 2021 and we continue to execute on our growth strategy in 2022. Customer acquisition costs are compared to the lifetime value to ensure we deploy marketing capital with an attractive return profile. The illustrative unit economics of the return over cost calculation is simplified assumption indicates the pension which deploy marketing capital with attractive returns of mid- to high single-digit return multiples. I will now hand back to Romi to cover guidance and further updates.

Thank you very much, Christoph. I am pleased to confirm our medium-term and 2022 guidance. It would be remiss not to mention the impact, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is having on the market and on the world more generally. Like all companies, we will continue to monitor the situation, our own exposure to Russia in terms of investment is minimal, in fact, rounding down to 0%. However, broader market volatility will impact AUA. It is still relatively early in the year, and our new customer growth since the start of the year has been exceptionally strong, but we will keep a watchful eye and update further if there is reason to do so. I'm also pleased to announce that we will make a further announcement regarding the transition to the premium segment of the London Stock Exchange in April. Thank you for taking the time to join our presentation today.

We take our first question from Paul Bryant from Equity Development.

Interesting presentation. Question from me on flows from existing customers. You presented some new interesting data on Slide 14. And it looks like there's been quite a big jump in flows from the 2020 cohort above -- over and above the 2019 cohort, far bigger than the actual money they originally put in. So the question is, could you give us an idea of the marketing efforts and spend you're putting into driving flows from existing customers kind of levers you can pull in that? And are there any kind of internal KPIs you use that perhaps percent of existing customers contributing by direct debit, those sorts of things?

Yes. Paul, I'm happy to take that one. So I think on the first point around the net flows from 2020 cohort in 2021. There are -- typically, you can think about, is this the initial consolidation or a subsequent consolidation. What we see with a lot of those initial cohorts of 2016 all the way to 2019 that from customers who have completed their initial consolidation with us that they then bring over subsequent pots into their pension pots in addition to contribution that we see as well. What do you have in the 2020 cohort in the -- for the financial year 2021 is a few of those initial consolidations that would come in, particularly around customers that have been acquired at the end of the 2020 year. So yes, you would see a little bit of a higher proportion of that net flows from existing customers to come from the initial transfer, so to speak. And that explains why this number is proportionately a little bit higher to the flows you see from prior cohorts. Another question you asked around the KPI that we metric to ensure that customers and -- to ensure that existing customers to grow over time is the underlying core growth number of roughly 5% that we are typically referred to, and that is something that we monitor on an almost monthly basis across each month and each month reports to ensure that we see that flow to come in from existing clients. I hope that answers your question.

Yes. Anything on the kind of marketing efforts to encourage existing customers to start contributing or increase contribution?

Yes, it's Romi here. I'm happy to jump in there in terms of marketing to existing customers. We have a pretty extensive e-mail marketing campaigns, and we update our customers on a fairly regular basis, at least once a month regarding new customer features that they may want to take advantage of. So, of course, a primary example of that would be introduction of the Easy bank transfer, both on a one-off and recurring basis, which highlights the best to our customers that it's very easy to make contributions within the app. But beyond marketing to them proactively, a lot of our customers enjoy digital accessibility to the pension. And so when they log into their app or into their online account, they can very easily see that it's simple to make a contribution in under 60 seconds. And so they proactively do that themselves just by finding the ability to do that within the technology estate. I hope that helps.

Hello, can you hear me?

We can indeed.

It's Greig from KBW. In terms of the first quarter, I wonder if you could give us some color -- I mean if it's possible, registered customer and invested customer growth. That's the first question. Second one is I wonder if you could just give us some idea what the drivers or levers you pull in 2022 to increase your revenue margin. And thirdly, I wonder if you could just talk about your feature -- our new feature in order to allow people post-retirement to extract money more easily?

Yes, I'm very happy to take those questions in order. So we would have noted in the presentation, and you will have seen that we're very pleased with the growth so far delivered in the first quarter of the year. We expect registered customers to have grown around 20% for the quarter and invested customers at around 15% for the quarter, which is very much in line with our annual objective and also historically strong growth across the entire year. So very, very pleased with the development of the new customer growth in the first quarter. You'll remember that we stated, we intend to front load a fair amount of our marketing expenditure into 2022. And indeed, we've been delivering on that exact trajectory having followed the science behind our data model and having reached the benefits of the multichannel approach to marketing across digital and across brand campaigns. And I hope that everyone has seen our presence on digital channels, but also on radio, TV and billboards across the country. And so we're very pleased with the execution of that marketing campaign and the emerging results of that at the start of this year. On your second question regarding revenue margin, we are continuing to guide and that margins will be in line with historicals and will remain very resilient and indeed, we can continue to see that throughout the evolution of the financials into the first quarter. As you know, we are always on the lookout for new products as well. We updated last year that we have significant demand for an impact-oriented products. And we are in the process of searching for one. As you know, we like index-based investments, and this will be a substantially innovative new product that we would seek to bring to the market once it is available. And then on your third point regarding withdrawals and making that easy for customers within the product. Our view is that within defined contributions, customers will withdraw their pensions. What makes for excellent service is that once they've decided to do that, making it easy for them to do so, making it intuitive, ensuring that they understand the progression of the expenditure and how long it will last them and making sure that they can tax optimize to the extent possible. And so our in-app withdrawal feature, which Matt modeled onto the presentation in which you've got the chance to see very much takes those objectives into account. And of course, to us, at PensionBee from a revenue and profitability perspective, customers over the age of 50, typically transfer larger pension pots to PensionBee and therefore, can continue to add substantially to the assets under administration base that we continue to grow at a very, very rapid pace. Does that answer your questions?

Yes. Just in the in-app withdrawal feature, when was that launch? Is there a card associated with that?

We filed various things with the in-app withdrawal feature. We do have card functionality. We find that a lot of people prefer to do straight through withdrawals. But yes, you could use a card. We are currently emphasizing that a little bit less and people are finding straight through withdrawals to be substantially easier to use.

We take our next question from James Allen of Liberum. [Operator Instructions]

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, indeed.

Three questions for me, if I can. Please could you elaborate on how you were targeting the female customer base more proactively going forward given the opportunity there? And then second question, you mentioned a high employee retention rate. What is the current retention rate for the group? And then thirdly, I noticed that where -- there have been a very small number of customers that have left a bad review on Trustpilot. You recently moved from kind of personalized responses to their reviews to a more automated generic response. I was just wondering what the reason behind that was...

Thanks very much for your questions. I'm happy to start on the first one, and I'll hand the second one over to our CFO, and then I'll come back on the third one. On the first question regarding the female customer base. We are very focused on growing pension savings for everyone in the U.K. In fact, our vision is to live in a world where everyone can look forward to a happy retirement and due to historical reasons women have often been excluded from retirement products, from pension products and that has to do with some very complex reasons around, of course, first and foremost, the gender pay gap, which persists into this day, but also the relatively unfair spreading of unpaid labor including care between men and women. Over the past year, we've been conducting a lot of research around what we can do to change this. And predominantly, we are focused on raising awareness of the issues but also proposing solutions around them with those solutions, focusing on women and men taking on equal paid and unpaid labor within their households. So you can expect to hear a lot more from us on that campaign in the coming quarters. And it's our belief that a pension provider who is incredibly understanding and aware of the reasons why women chronically have smaller pension parts on average, 38% less than their male counterparts. And why the pension provider should be the pension provider of choice. We intend on exploring further feature development that can be specifically tailored towards women's experiences including pension modeling that takes into account career gaps, which tend to be more prevalent amongst women to show and forecast the true impact of those breaks. I hope that answers your question. Christoph, if you could cover retention part.

Yes. I'm very happy to. And yes, thanks, James, for the question around retention. So generally speaking around entry retention that has remained exceptionally high. So the number that we typically see in the data over the last few years is above 90% retention, which is obviously great to see that this remained at this high level. And if you drill down into retention or attrition, you would see a little bit of bias as expected on junior levels, we see a little bit of a higher attrition. But then if you look at more managerial or managerial levels, that it actually decreases quite substantially. But yes, overall, we are quite pleased with that retention rate of greater than 90% on the employee base.

And I'll come back on the third point regarding review responses on Trustpilot. All of our reviews are responded to on a personal basis. We actually have people looking into our reviews and monitoring and aggregating the types of reviews that we're receiving. Over the course of the first quarter, given market volatility, we will have received negative reviews around performance and that is related to global stock market. Unfortunately, there isn't much that we can respond around global stock markets because we don't control their direction of movement. And so the responses that we would post on Trustpilot very much will inform customers that these are long-term investments, that volatility is expected and that pension can and do go up and down, and that is part of the risk reward trade-off for growing a pension in the long term. In addition to the Trustpilot responses, however, we do have personal phone conversations in the back end with these customers so that they have the opportunity to engage and ask questions. Obviously, Trustpilot is not an interactive medium and so we believe that the personalized sort of conversation can also happen on the phone and in the more personal medium. But we are fairly experienced. We're seeing market downturns and have experienced them in the past as well. And as markets rebound, we expect customers to also come and revise their ratings as we have seen in the past. And in addition to that, we do expect them to have a better long-term understanding of the way the pensions behave. And indeed, what we've observed is that new time customers seeing their pension balance fluctuating for the first time and will often be slightly alarmed. Customers that have been with us for longer periods of time are much more used to these fluctuations. And so we rarely hear from them when market volatility knocks around. I hope that answer your questions.

We take our next question from Andrew Watson of Singer Capital. [Operator Instructions]

I appreciate the kind of broad and more detailed one through this morning. It's just really to build on Greig's question around registered customer and invested customer growth. I mean, clearly, there's more uncertainty in terms of geopolitical backdrop and headlines that the people will pick up being reading. Have you seen a change in engagement from registered customers and making that progress through to active and invested? I appreciate these are kind of relatively short-term trends. But are you seeing any hesitation to kind of cut the big red button and to progress to invested?

We're not really seeing a deviation in trend from historicals on that front. I think in the first quarter, what tends to impact registered to invested customer conversion is simply the time lag that it takes from the moment someone requests to transfer their pension to the moment that the pension is actually transferred. And so when we have periods of big marketing expenditure, the registered customer base tends to tick up quite significantly and then the invested customer base follows through. And so the behavior that we're seeing is fairly in line with historicals.

Okay. Perfect. And just obviously, Q1 is tax year-end. I mean, bearing in mind the segment of the market that you're focusing on. I appreciate that there is a trigger to kind of put some more marketing effort in there. But given the kind of thresholds that we'll be talking about with these mass market consumers, can you just explain a little bit how you're paring the marketing around tax year-end and kind of playing on certain messages to kind of use tax year-end as a trigger?

Yes. So tax year-end triggering is normally part of our e-mail communications to the registered customer base in the earlier part of the year. It's really the type of trigger where people have been mulling should I do it? And the tax year-end can provide a good emphasis and a good push for them to do it. So it features quite heavily in our e-mail marketing campaigns. Our sort of new customer campaigns and what you can see on sort of paid search or on TV, radio, billboard, et cetera, is very much geared towards our core message of sorting out your pension. Consumers already know that it's tax year-end without us having to necessarily remind them as part of the new marketing campaign and so really, we focus quite heavily on helping them to understand why PensionBee is the provider of choice, why we make it easy for them to consolidate. And they, by association, also know that, therefore, it's likely to be easy to contribute.

Okay. So in terms of our e-mail marketing, it's very simple in terms of tax year-end user allowances now otherwise, you're going to lose them. There isn't any more kind of nuances around the messaging in that?

Yes, that's pretty much it. It is a fairly simple transaction that they need to go through. A lot of our customers are also set up for regular contributions. And so the tax year-end they tend to be less kind of focused on optimizing it because they're optimizing throughout the year. And in terms of our product positioning, we, of course, tend to feature regular contributions more prominently because they scale much more effectively over time than one-off contributions.

That's really interesting. Can you tell me roughly how many of your invested customers are set up for regular contributions? Is that something you...

Offhand. No, but we can come back to you off-line on that.

It is our next question from Greig Paterson of KBW.

I have quick three ones. One is I wonder if you could quantify marketing spend in the first quarter, I was asked earlier on about do you have a number for assets under management at the end of the first quarter. And then finally, new product features are going to roll out in the second quarter. I'd be interested to hear what those are?

Yes. On the first set of questions, which is more detailed financial metrics on the first quarter, we'll be releasing those on the 21st of April. I think today, we wanted to provide an overview of how it's going sort of customer number-wise, but we'll have the detailed numbers for you once we've gone through the quarter end closing process. So we do hope you'll join us for that at the end of the quarter. On the second point around new feature launches that you can expect to see from us, definitely more functionality on the open banking side making it again easier for customers to get to those contributions to recognize the value of those contributions. More optimization on the withdrawal side, and you saw Matt demonstrating some of the features that are coming through. We are delivering on a regular withdrawal feature that's we're quite excited about and that customers have been asking for. And so that is very much in progress. And then a fair amount around automation and straight-through processing of pension transfers where we've been working in the background through the technology to reduce manual friction and to help customers get their pension transferred with as its old friction as possible.

There are no further questions on the conference line. We will now address the questions submitted via the webcast page. We take our next question from [indiscernible] of KBW. The question is, has high inflation had the strong customer growth since the start of the year?

Inflation in and of itself doesn't really impact customer growth. Inflation is more of a metric that we look to when we consider the impact of interest rate rises. And what we can see rapidly emerging as a consensus in the global economy. And I think yesterday's rate action by the Fed emphasize that, is that investors want to see inflation come under control, it makes for a much more predictable economic environment. And so even though the Fed did raise rates yesterday, I think the stability around the messaging of the plan has been well received. Fundamentally, the economy across the world and especially in the United States, remains exceptionally strong, and we continue to see record levels of employment which is really what's driving kind of the boost and the need to pull things down a little bit. So inflation is interesting to us as a measure of how central banks will respond and ultimately, how the economy overall from a GDP perspective will respond.

We will take our next question from Manjit here of adding partners e-mail, adding partners. The question is, Hi, Romi and the PensionBee team. Could you talk about what is the contract revenue margin expecting going forward? What is the likely trend?

Christoph, would you like to take that one?

Yes, of course. And I would refer to the guidance that we provided in the presentation on Page 19, where we guide to a revenue margin that is consistent with, so to speak, historical levels. So we see a continuation of that resilient gross revenue margin to continue into the future, and that's why we put this on as one of our guidance on top line revenue margin.

We take our next question from Jonathan Richards of Berenberg. You stating that Q1 growth has been strong so far. Could you please an idea on numbers of new customers acquired since the start of the year?

So we expect quarter 1 growth of registered customers at around the 20% mark and quarter 1 growth of invested customers at around the 15% mark.

And we will take our last question from Phillip Haggard of KBW. Regarding the split of flows from existing customers between new contributions and consolidation transfers, the ceasing tendency to consolidate should we understand this phase quite strongly after the 2, 3 years?

Yes, I'm happy to take this one. So I think what we see is cohorts mature and remain with us over a longer periods of time is that we see both consolidation to come in and also customers to contribute and it's, I think, roughly equal when you look at the total size and maybe slightly higher in terms of consolidation, so to speak. So we see both, of course, to continue. And when you look at the overall number, maybe a slightly higher flows from consolidation, but also very strong contribution as well. I hope that answers the question.

Thank you. And there are no further questions submitted via the webcast page. I will now hand back over to Romi Savova for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. We're very pleased that you took the time to join us today. We look forward to engaging with everyone over the coming few days and remain available for further Q&A. We look forward to seeing you in April otherwise. Thank you very much, everyone.