PensionBee Group plc (PBEE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, and good afternoon to those of you in London and in Europe. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day. We are excited to be welcoming over 100 attendees here in New York, in London and virtually. There are definitely a couple of new faces, both here and on the other side of the pond. And for those of you who I haven't met yet, I am Romi Savova. I'm the CEO of PensionBee, and I started this company about 10 years ago, to make pension and retirement saving simpler and easier for ordinary consumers. Today is a day about opportunity. For us, it's an opportunity to introduce and reintroduce investors to PensionBee, it's an opportunity to showcase the combination of capabilities and advantages that we have built to succeed in the global mass market of consumers. It's an opportunity to mark our 10th anniversary, cementing our position in the financial services landscape. And it's an opportunity to look backwards at everything that has been achieved and delivered since our initial public offering. It's also an opportunity to look forward and to think about how we will grow our market share in our home market of the United Kingdom. And it's an opportunity to look at what I suspect is the biggest opportunity of all. The opportunity to create a global business on the world stage for retirement savings. So thank you again for being with us today. I would like to start where PensionBee always starts, and it is the place where we serve consumers. The consumer is at the heart of everything we do at PensionBee. And as a leading full-service online retirement provider, we want to offer everything that customers are looking for when it comes to retirement savings. So we offer them the opportunity to combine old accounts to top up their contributions and to grow their savings with us, to invest with global giants so that they are comfortable knowing their money is in experienced hands. When the time comes to withdraw with ease because ultimately that is what retirement savings are for, to manage taxes because we know that pension tax is complicated. And finally, along this journey with us to learn and engage by absorbing our content and the educational tools that we create for them. Overall, we believe that we have delivered the service consumers are looking for, and that is what has resulted in accelerated growth and the achievement of our IPO goals. PensionBee is a growth company, and we are proud that since our IPO, we have delivered close to 4x growth across all of our key metrics, including invested customers, assets and revenue. Looking at our metrics and the scale that we have created, we stand at approximately GBP 5.2 billion of AUA, GBP 32 million of revenue and 252,000 invested customers, delivered by our team of approximately 200 individuals in the U.K. and now also in the U.S. Our growth has relied on a straightforward and predictable business model and profit formula. We generate revenue by acquiring customers efficiently, helping them to become invested with PensionBee by attracting them with industry-leading product and our personalized customer service. Our customers bring their accounts to us, creating a stable asset base that we then use to generate revenue using our recurring and predictable revenue margin. As customers grow their accounts with us over time, we have established a compounding asset base that enables us to keep growing that revenue into the future. From a cost perspective, we rely on scalability and control in everything we do. Our scalable technology platform has enabled us to serve hundreds of thousands of customers economically and is the bedrock that will enable our future scalable growth. From an asset management perspective, we rely on institutional asset management products sourced at institutional rates. And of course, we continue to invest in our marketing and in our brand and further fuels our customer acquisition. Overall, through our business model, we have developed the key competencies required for success in the mass market of consumers. So let's take a closer look at this global market opportunity. PensionBee now addresses over 85% of the global defined contribution market. Looking at the distribution of DC assets around the world, we can see that the U.S. represents over 80% with $24 trillion of DC assets. The U.K. adds another 7% with approximately GBP 1.4 trillion of DC assets. And of course, it's not just about assets, but also about consumers. And within the U.K. alone, we have 15 million actively enrolled individuals who are saving in to workplace accounts. Within the U.S., we have approximately 64 million consumers who are enrolled in workplace accounts. And of course, the typical consumer does not keep a job for life. In fact, the typical consumer will switch jobs many times, creating lots of transferable accounts in the U.K. and in the U.S. Indeed, in the U.K., we estimate that there are over 40 million transferable accounts left behind from old workplaces and from personal accounts that are not always being looked after. In the U.S., that number is closer to 110 million of which 30%, 35% are left behind in the workplace. And with these accounts come significant assets. In the U.K., the average asset size of a transferable account is just under GBP 30,000. In the U.S., a transferable account has over $140,000. As a result, there is a substantial asset opportunity in both countries with GBP 1.2 trillion in the U.K. and over $15 trillion in the U.S. But despite the size of this market, not all consumers are well served. At PensionBee, we focus on the mass market consumer, which frankly, represents the majority of people within the market. We can see that competitors here in the U.S. and across the pond tend to focus on the mass affluent consumer, the individual with more than $100,000 or GBP 500,000 and of course, they also focus on the high net worth individual, those with over $1 million in assets. The mass market consumer tends to be somewhat ignored. And that leaves substantial open and white space for PensionBee to compete and to win. When we look at our service levels within the mass market, we can see that our 4.7, which is the average of our Trustpilot scores and our app store ratings, when compared to the service ratings of others tends to distinguish us because we offer what customers are looking for. And so let us take a closer look at what these competitive strengths are and how they create global advantage. First and foremost, to win in the mass market of consumers you must be able to acquire customers effectively. And over the past 10 years, we have established a household brand in the U.K. and an enormous data capability that will enable us to attract customers, continue attracting customers in the U.K. and attract new customers in the U.S. as we continue to grow our operations in both countries. You will soon hear from our Chief Marketing Officer, Jasper Martens, seated here on my right, who will take you through our brand and marketing proposition. It also takes leadership in product innovation. Consumers in the mass market are looking for a simple and easy-to-use product, and that is what we deliver. You will hear from Matt Loft, our Chief Design Officer, who will share with you the emerging vision for our product in the U.K. and in the U.S. It also takes technology. Technology is the bedrock of our scalability and in London, our Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Jonathan Lister Parsons, will present our technology and, of course, some of the exciting developments that we have been looking at from an AI perspective. But beyond the technology, it takes people. And customer service, our BeeKeepers who are always there for our customers is one of the most defining features of PensionBee. Last but not least, our investment solutions. Designed for customers to help them make the right choice when it comes to their retirement savings. And so these competitive advantages, which we have established and perfected in the U.K. are now also increasingly resonating in the U.S. But without any further ado, I would like to hand over to Jasper, who will speak about our marketing strategy and what it takes to create a winning brand in the mass market.

Thank you, Romi. So in the next 10 minutes, I will talk you through how we invest our marketing activities to maximize reach, build trust, acquire customers at scale and against attractive cost for interested customers. As PensionBee's Chief Marketing Officer, I've joined PensionBee from the start in 2015, just 5 people in the room somewhere in South London. We build a direct to consumer brands in the U.K. And since last month, I've actually moved to New York to support the U.S. team on our venture to launch PensionBee successfully in the U.S., helping thousands of customers to move their old 401(k)s into a PensionBee IRA. So let's first start with how we use an effective data-led strategy to acquire customers. That's easier said than done, but at PensionBee, our marketing team has multiple tools at hand. First of all, we employ a predictive media mix model generated from 8 years of performance data and optimize with real-time insights. We can do that because we've built that platform ourselves internally, where we combine marketing channel data with performance data -- sorry, consumer behavior of data into our model. This helps us to understand what marketing channel initiates what and therefore, helps us to optimize that all important marketing channel mix. Our marketing channels undergo regular optimization to maximize their efficiency and effectiveness. This optimization has implemented at least monthly or quite often daily, if necessary. It really helps us to understand which makes us the right mix for us. And the kind of marketing channels we use can be deployed to other markets soon. Our markets -- the marketing channels we use are inherently global, 70% of them. And that really helps us to launch campaigns successfully in other countries such as the U.S. right now. For example, some of our biggest channels like paid search and app campaigns, we are working with a global Google team. What we've learned in the U.K., we can easily -- well, easily, we can apply that at scale in the U.S. Never say it's easy. It's always more complicated than we think. Now let me talk a little bit more about how channel optimization actually looks at PensionBee. First, we optimize between the marketing channels. So what does it actually mean? At various stages of our journey, some marketing channels have been more important than other channels. For example, nurturing of leads might be less important when you get started but when you've got 8 years or even longer under the belt, you've got a huge room, you can nurture successfully. So naturally, that channel will become more important to your channel mix. And don't forget, marketing platforms and marketing channels are like fashion. They come and go. So what might have been really successful in 2018 might not be successful in 2024. We monitor that on a monthly or even more frequent basis to achieve that optimal cocktail -- marketing cocktail mix. Two, we've also optimized within the marketing channel itself. So if you look at the middle column, you can see this is an example of some of -- of one of our most popular channels. And you can see that within that channel, we've been able to optimize to attract slightly older customers over time. It does also mean that it attracts higher account sizes, more AUA per customer. And that is an ongoing process that we do at PensionBee. And over time, you can see the results of that. As a result, on the right-hand side, you can see that the cost per invested customer continues to trend down. We're getting more successful and more efficient in acquiring those customers. But also look at the yellow graph, for every account we invest, we get more AUA in return. So our marketing channel mix is becoming more efficient in acquiring customers at a lower price and a higher port value. So data underpins PensionBee's marketing strategy. But on top, we've got 4 strategic pillars that leads to market success. And they applied to both markets. The first pillar is an optimal channel mix, just briefly discussed it already, but it allows us to increase the marketing budget and scaling tested channels with greater capacity to reach a mass market, including the performance channels, whilst continue to optimize our cost per invested customer. Part of the optimal channel mix is a continued investment in our brand channels, which is relative. We use cost-efficient brand channels, such as press and broadcast opportunities, TV, radio, but also a Premier League sponsorship. Now speaking of the Premier League sponsorship, for every pound we invest in that, we get around GBP 7 to GBP 8 back in media value. That's the equivalent of us buying billboards, TV or any other brand channel. So it helps us for the marketing budget we've got to actually get more value out of it. It's strategy marketing budgets. So it's been really successful in our -- not just in the U.K., we also see some really great results already in the U.S. when Brentford display in terms of sign-ups on the potential websites. Together with also a 2025 brand campaign we are deploying, which I will discuss shortly, we support our performance marketing channels to maximize reach and drive down the cost per invested customer. The third pillar is that we invest in the creation of engaging and tailored content and its effective deployment across all channels. We do this through external channels, such as our successful pension content podcast in the U.K. We expect to get around $0.5 million by the end of next year. But also through our YouTube shorts, TikTok clips, reaching millions of consumers existing but also a lot of potential. That all great, but increasingly, we are also delivering that customer-focused content such as articles, blogs, videos, guides in the app, whether it's the mobile app or the web app with our over 250,000 customers. And it's increasingly optimized, not just around demographics, but actually around how our customers behave and what kind of content and support they might need. It's not just the e-mail here and there. It's a tailored journey for customers through e-mail, push, in-app messages and SMS. This stimulates contributions and consolidation behavior and cements our high retention level of our customer base. It's one of the key ingredients to build trust, vital for financial brands like PensionBee. And four, we are evolving our partnerships to reach the next phase. Building a larger and more high-profile relationships to drive new customer growth. These are deeper product integrations with the likes of ClearScore in the U.K., for example, where we will be in the product itself next year with the millions of users they've got. But it can also be aggregators and the rise of the so-called influencers. We are very much at the forefront of that to work with them. So we discussed how we use data to acquire customers at scale while driving down the cost per invested customer. And if you look at the 4 strategic marketing pillars potentially that are built on top. Now let me talk a little bit about some key initiatives in 2025 that will grow that customer base and AUA. Very exciting, we are in the midst of producing our global brand campaign, You are in a good place. It's designed to highlight what distinguishes PensionBee from other retirement providers. Consolidation of rollovers are not new, but it's the way we do it that makes us unique. The technology we use is second to none. We provide you with excellent customer service with a personal BeeKeeper at hand. As simple is not basic, your investments -- you're moving your retirement money into a really good investor product, built for purpose and come from established money managers, such as state in BlackRock. I can go on about our USPs, and we will discuss them this morning as well. But that's at the heart of our brand campaign. How do we highlight that to our customers. PensionBee will give you the time and confidence for sure. Now with regard to the channel activities, we continue to optimize them, leveraging our growth data set and new technology -- technological capabilities. And on paid search, that means that we continue to drive new customers as we expect to increase customers in both markets with a downwards cost per invested customer and a higher average account value over time. It sounds like a bit repetitive. Well, that's what we've been doing all along. It's continued to optimize those top performing channels. Our app campaigns achieved around 169 million impressions last year, a channel in terms of reach, and we will invest that channel more and more in 2025, increasingly for iOS device owners. And the last one is certainly not the least, which I'm really excited about, which is the global interval platform rollout in the U.K. and U.S. It will allow us to build that more tailored journey, not just on demographics, but more on our customer behavior. And we already see some really promising results with the new platform in the U.K. So I can't wait to get my hands stuck into rolling it out to the U.S. in the next couple of weeks. On the on the right-hand side, the third set of activities I can group are the things around our present content campaigns. Our press campaigns are already meeting some really significant reach figures, I would say, often outstripping some of the larger financial institutions in the U.K. with much bigger teams. So I'm very happy how that press team is performing. But I think we will emphasize a little bit more about broadcast opportunities to really bring up more on our Press Public Affairs. And like I said, we expecting to reach $0.5 million on the podcast, but also reaching millions of people on some of our social platforms. And it's where the people are these days. They're on their phones, they're not watching television as much anymore as they were. So we want to be where our customers are. And that's going to be a really exciting year, not just in the U.K. but also increasingly in the U.S. I now will hand over to Matt Loft, our Chief Design Officer, who will walk us through our products at PensionBee.

I'm Matt Loft, Chief Design Officer of PensionBee. I've been here for around 9 years now. And today, we'll take you on our product store, showcasing some of the latest work our products and UX teams have been doing, evolving our industry-leading product based on latest customer insight. With our expansion to the U.S., we're now applying the same customer-first approach internationally, so more people to look forward to a happy retirement. I'll demonstrate how we're creating consistent user experience across both the markets, allowing us to continue innovating rapidly to ship new features quickly whilst maintaining the high quality and simplicity our customers rely on. Let's dive into the product store. So we've redesigned the initial experience customers see when they open the app. We're bringing more of the information that they see correctly from within the app to the forefront, such as the ability to see the performance of the plan in line with their pension balance. And we've reduced the transaction summary here for the latest transactions, which enables us to give more precedents to timely betterment content such as transfer updates. For example, if a provider has requested some additional information about a transfer that the customer needs to enter. They can do that quickly and easily here. Finally relevant content pieces, such as those Jasper was talking about earlier, for example, a market update, which helps customers better understand the movements in their performance. It's a great case to talk about in-product feature releases, such as the onboarding checklist, which helps people understand the breadth of the actions I can take within the app. And details about cross-selling or partnerships initiatives such as our partnership with LifeSearch to offer life insurance to our customers. We're enriching the experience with content pieces, we're able to target based on certain demographics or customer characteristics. And we're introducing more learning resources to help empower our customers with the knowledge and important concepts relating to retirement. Anyone familiar with the products will notice that we're introducing an overview tab. This is a great way to digitalize the various components that comprise the customer balance, such as different types of money coming into the accounts and the different types of money leaving the accounts. These, in conjunction with the performance give the customer total transparency as to every component that comprises their balance. Another great feature of this tab is that we're able to then filter this overview by a date range, including a previous tax year, which is very helpful for end-of-year accounting. We're making it easier and faster than ever before for customers to take key actions such as transferring additional retirement accounts to us or making contributions. We've redesigned the account tab, making it easier to find the information customers need, such as the ability to update their personal details, add beneficiaries on their accounts, view their documents and resources. And our help in support section, we're making it easier and faster for customers to access the information they need using the wealth of information that we have available. This enables customers to self-serve quickly and easily. It also reduces the load on our customer services team, enabling them to focus on more specialist cases. My Pension tab or My IRA in U.S. is where we bring together the various types of information relating to the customer's plan. They can see an overview of the plan, and they can access a more detailed breakdown of various aspects of the plan, such as how the plan works, who it's intended for, the risk level associated with the plan, historical performance of the plan, what is invested in and the types of industries and sectors, down to a level of individual company holdings and geographic diversity. This gives customers a really powerful overview and understanding of what it is they're investing in. And it's the kind of feature that leads to our excellent ratings in the App Store and on Trustpilot and also our NPS score on an annual basis. If we jump over to the actions tab. This is where customers could take actions to move money into or out of their accounts, such as, I think, additional retirement accounts, giving the faces of those accounts and taking an action, if needed to progress the transfer. I can do a more detailed breakdown of the status of that transfer, providing more information to help speed up the process, complete the details of their completed transfers and general information about how the process works. On the contrary section, customers can add money into their accounts via various different resources. They can view an overview of the current tax year, details of any contributions I've already set out, such as regular personal or employee contributions, which they can then easily amend or edit. Similarly, on the withdrawals tab, customers can see an overview of the current tax year, details of any regular withdrawals they have set up with us, any ability to easily make new regular withdrawals or one of withdrawal. Our withdrawal offering is best-in-class and the considerable differentiator for us. It helps us to attract older customers with bigger parts and which is helping us to increase average pot size from around 21,000 currently to 25,000 per invested customer, which is our target. This flexible and reliable withdrawal products gives customers confidence that they're able to keep more of their money invested into their pension because they know they can easily access additional funds later if needed. This section also houses our referral friend scheme, where customers can share a link with friends and family, and we'll compensate them for any that join. Finally, we have the Discover tab, which brings together all of the content and educational resources, such as Jasper was talking about earlier. We're a thought leader in the retirement space, and we have a track record of presenting complex financial topics in a way people can understand easily. It's access to this content that provides really high-value powerful tools for financial education and empowerment. It also really increases the perceived usefulness of the app, which increases engagement. We have circa around 150,000 monthly active users, and it's about 12% of those users currently that are accessing content. We're aiming to double that by the end of 2025. This also has the added benefit of promoting good saving habits just contributing more or transferring more types of retirement account over to us. The types of content you can access are in long-form articles. We can target these articles based on customer demographics, such as their age, whether they're able to withdraw or not, their behavior within the app if they have a contribution set up yet or not. And so we can drive very regular and targeted content with those customers. Jasper also mentioned our podcast. Customers can play the podcast directly from their PensionBee app. It's also available in all usual places such as Spotify or Apple podcasts. And we have a wealth of video content available to our customers for those customers that prefer to learn visually. It's a very good way of generally upskilling them in the area of retirement savings. Because this is all based on a global design system, it's very easy to switch over to the U.S. prototype and get a feel for how that experience is for the U.S. market. So tons and tons of dollars, pensions in our 401(k)s or IRAs, the user experience is very, very similar. So My Pension tab becomes My IRA, and it's a very similar experience. But underlying this tab, it will be ETFs rather than pension funds. Similarly, on the Actions tab, we're now talking about the rollover of 401(k)s for the transfer of IRAs, a very similar experience from the top level. But as you dive down the journey of rolling over or transferring the U.S. product, you'll see considerable differences there. And of course, the Discovery tab now reflects the U.S. market, providing content more relevant to that market. So thanks, everyone. I'll now hand you over to Jonathan, our CTO, who'll presents the underlying technological capabilities that make this kind of user experience possible. Over to you Jon.

Hello, everyone. I'm Jonathan Lister Parsons. I'm the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder here at PensionBee. I'm thrilled today to be able to talk you through how we approach using technology to support our business. The areas that I want to cover will show how our globally scalable technology supports our sustainable competitive advantage, both in our exceptional customer service and product experience as well as the operational leverage that it brings for the business. So first, I want to give you an idea of how our technology is laid out. So we based our technology and large-scale global public cloud platforms that process billions of transactions a day such as Salesforce, Google, Amazon and the like. And then we focus our efforts building applications on top of these platforms so that as much time as possible is spent bringing value directly to customers. Over the last 10 years, we've built up a wealth of data specific to the challenges of combining customers' pensions as well as point-to-point integrations with providers, all of which adds up to a sustainable barrier to competition. And our technology has not stood still since our IPO in 2021. Powering a data-driven approach to decision-making across the business, we've put a lot of work into our modern data platform, which unlocks strategic value inherent in the large amount of data that we generate as a modern digital business. You've heard already from Jasper how data helps us optimize our marketing and acquisition, but it also helps us understand how our product is being used by our customers and analyze our operations. Our U.S. technology platform is already launched, and we're now iterating the product as we do in the U.K. Our U.S. product build was a case study for us in the value of being able to reuse technology and know-how despite differences in the regulatory and product landscape between the U.S. and the U.K. markets. So through leveraging our work in the U.K., we were able to accelerate the build of the U.S. product. So as a technologist, I like to be able to measure the impact that technology is having on our business. An important industry benchmark shown on the left of the screen is called DORA, which originated at Google, stands for the DevOps Research and Assessment metrics. This analyzes an organization's ability to sustainably deliver software. Across the 4 key DORA metrics, PensionBee scores at least 9.8 out of 10. This places us significantly higher than the average across financial services. And it gives us confidence in the machinery that we are using every day to iterate a software-driven product experience. Furthermore, we track a number of metrics that demonstrate that within our operations, our technology is supporting the business. Our top level metric for productivity shown in the chart on the right is the ratio of invested customers to employees in the business. This went over 1,000 for the first time at the end of 2023 and has continued to rise, reaching over 1,200 by the end of the first half of 2024. And as a measure of operational leverage, there's no inherent cap on this metric. To give you an example of the work that we undertake that's continued to increase this metric, only a couple of years ago, a member of our operations team had to touch every single pension transfer request that a customer brought in. And as a result of incremental internal automations, now over 1/3 of our transfer requests go straight through without any human touch. Technical health metrics shown at the bottom of the screen here, are also showing us to be in a good place with high levels of uptime across our online platforms and lower response times. So I now want to connect our technology to its impact on our customer service. We integrate all sources of information about customers into one view that our operations team, our BeeKeepers and Nectar Collectors look at. This single view means they always have relevant information to hand and the actions that they need to take can be done through the same interface. This integrated approach has enabled us to deliver exceptional levels of customer service even as the scale of the business has grown. Our Trustpilot score of 4.7 across more than 10,000 reviews plus our metrics related to call and live chat pickup times and the email response times are a really strong signal of the value in this approach. Another benefit of an integrated approach is it aligns well with the data strategy that seeks to analyze the business operations and provide tailored insights and actions at scale. We've built a proprietary data platform, leveraging a cutting-edge technology stack. This provides the ability to automate comprehensive reporting, understand our customers' behavior and analyze the complexity of the pension transfer operations. The insights we get from our data analytics allow us to evolve the product to help customers self-serve instead of contacting our BeeKeepers. For instance, we've recently introduced a chart that shows planned performance. We were able to clearly see across multiple feedback funnels that many customers had expressed a need for more information here. Now you can't have an AI strategy without today's strategy. So on top of our data platform, we started to run experiments to bring the benefits of large language models to the analysis of customer feedback and communication. Initially seeking to automate the classification of customer comms. I'll be diving into this exciting area in just a minute. Another great example of leveraging advanced analytics is with speech analytics, which uses machine learning to transcribe and classify conversations with customers, helping us ensure security procedures are being followed and identify where early intervention will avoid dissatisfaction and complaints. Just finally on this slide, it's worth pausing a moment to think about the governance that wraps around all our work with customer and company data and allows us to operate safely. Alongside an internal information security program that aligns with industry best practice. We've been independently certified to the ISO 27001 international standard for Information Security Management Systems since 2021. So as a quick detail into the world of AI, I'm sharing some output here on an internal experiment applying large language models or LLMs to content analysis of our customer communications, which is using AI tools within our data platform to analyze a sample of 37,000 live chat transcripts. This chart on the left shows the results of summarizing and transforming these chat transcripts into high-dimensional vector embeddings, which we can then condense into 2D space and show you a chart that shows clusters of similar communications, and we've highlighted some in colors just to show how they cluster together. We can then use same AI to apply these labels automatically and perform sentiment analysis over the conversations. The dashboard on the right-hand side is a hypothetical example of where this is all going. This will allow us to perform real-time sentiment analysis, and trend analysis and identify opportunities for interventions and early reach out to customers. So just to close off this section, I hope that has helped to give you a flavor of our unique approach to deploying scalable global technology in service of our exceptional customer service, a differentiated product experience and increasing operational leverage. [Break]

Good afternoon or good afternoon, everyone, in London and still good morning in New York. I'm Lisa. I'm the Chief Business Officer for the U.K. I've been with PensionBee for almost 5 years now, having previously led the company's IPO and its subsequent transfer to the premium segment in close collaboration with Christoph and Romi. In my newly created role, I very much look forward to facilitating the continued execution of the company's well-established strategy and supporting further the corporate development of the business here in the U.K. I'm delighted to be taking you through this next section, where we will take a closer look at the U.K. business and its prospects for the coming years as we continue on our upward trajectory, growing our presence and growing our market share. PensionBee has been solving genuine consumer problems for almost a decade now. Fulfilling its mission to build confidence and enable everyone to enjoy a happy retirement. We have firmly established ourselves as the U.K.'s leading online pension provider and a trusted financial services company. We focused on the key elements of our strategy that together make us the pension provider of choice. Our brand and marketing capability, our innovative product offering, our leading customer service, our scalable technology platform and our purpose-built investment range. The execution of our strategy together with more than GBP 60 million of investment in marketing in the U.K. since inception, has seen us firmly established as a household brand name. We are embedded into the consciousness of the consumer with the majority of people across the U.K. having heard of us. Our unprompted brand awareness sits at the 58% mark. Our ability to serve our customers with a unique combination of smart technology and exceptional customer service distinguishes us from the competitive set. Our 4.7 star composite service rating really powerfully demonstrates the strength of this position. We consistently gain industry recognition across the core consumer categories, so that includes value for money, customer service, web and app experience and ease of use. We're pleased to see strong customer engagement. We measure this by looking at significant app interaction versus the alternatives. We plan to very much keep that lead with an innovative and smooth product experience and the flow of engaging customer content. So with a solid foundation in the U.K. and the strong competitive moat around the business, let me next take you through how we think about the growth of the business over the next few years. The next 5 to 10 years will see us continue to grow the U.K. business, balancing the maximization of growth with increasing profitability. In the U.K., we will look to grow both our invested customer base and our customers' account values in order to grow assets under administration and revenue. Today, we serve in excess of 250,000 customers. The continued execution of our strategy with our existing business model should see us achieve baseline growth such that we reach between 0.5 million and 750,000 U.K. invested customers in 5 to 10 years' time. Our proven approach to efficient customer acquisition, together with a healthy double-digit pound million annual marketing spend, which is expected to increase over time as the business continues to generate operating cash flow that will underpin and derisk this path. But we've talked about our ambition to reach the 1 million customer mark over the medium to long term. And we have prepared the business with that goal in mind. To do this, we have multiple internal drivers of customer growth that are available to us. So if I take each in turn, firstly, we can deploy an increased marketing budget on existing channels. We use a multitude of different channels, including performance marketing, social media, radio, TV and sports. We manage channel allocation responsibly and optimize for efficiency, but there is potential for us to go further, scaling channels that we've previously held back on, we've guided the U.K. business towards breakeven. Secondly, the brand effect. We've invested heavily in the brand, which has been instrumental in growing our brand presence. Our reputation as a trusted financial services company and enabling us to attract new customers efficiently. Deepening these initiatives can further power our invested customer growth, for example, elevating our sports sponsorships and broadening our press campaigns that build trust and maximize reach. Next, targeting new customer segments. We appeal to the mass market that there is scope to expand our reach to appeal to more specific demographics. For example, segments such as at retirement customers with self-employed and younger audiences. With further investment in the creation of engaging and tailored content and its effective deployment across all channels. So for example, podcasts and videos, we see potential to drive further invested customer growth. We can also explore new partnerships. We very much hope to evolve our partnerships to reach that next phase to build larger and more high-profile relationships driving new customer growth. We've had a successful start with ClearScore, and there's potential to drive this further. There is certainly scope to evaluate and pursue many other partnerships. And lastly, product extension. We can extend our product to attract more customers. An illustrative example is the addition of family accounts that connect our existing customers, encourage them to add their family members, thereby expanding our audience and supporting customer loyalty. In addition to the internal levers of growth, there are also other external factors such as regulatory developments, which may shift consumer behavior and impact and indeed accelerate customer growth. The pension dashboard, it makes it easier for people to locate their lost pensions and therefore, transfer them. The pension switch guarantee, which we continue to campaign for making it quicker for pensions to be transferred. And auto enrollment reforms, which may see the customer net widened. In addition to growing our invested customer base, we will also look to grow our customers' account values to drive AUA and revenue. Historical cohort data demonstrates that average account values typically reach around the GBP 25,000 mark after 5 years, naturally and organically. This is driven by both rising consolidation behavior and also increasing contributions over time, together with market returns, but an opportunity exists to accelerate and drive this further. Product innovation will enable engagement and encourages contributions and consolidation. We will continue to develop an even more engaging product, enhancing the visual user experience to delight our customers as demonstrated by our Chief Design Officer. We will release new features, for example, further investment clarity and more retirement optimization tools to enhance both the accumulation phase and the retirement journey. We will improve our health and support functionality to enable customers to easily and seamlessly self-serve. On engaging content, we will continue to invest in the creation of more content designed to drive greater engagement. We will expand to the delivery of content where we have seen great success for our pension confident podcast and our YouTube videos. We'll make a further investment in product [ hosted ] content to ensure that it's easily available to our customers. We'll employ our new marketing platform Iterable to nurture our customer pipeline and our invested customer base, encouraging, again, consolidation and contributions, we will adopt a right message, right time approach with a customer-led optimization of comms by type, by preference and in response to consumer behavior. Maximizing the resonance and the effectiveness of these communications be they by e-mail, by push notification or in app message. And lastly, excellent customer service. We very much see exceptional and personalized customer service continuing to differentiate us from the competition. Investment in our technology and our processes supports productivity gains, enabling us to serve more customers. An increasingly specialized skilled workforce allows us to serve our customers better. And lastly, I'd like to wrap up this section with some reflections of where the U.K. business is with respect to its financial profile. 2024 has been a pivotal year for PensionBee. The U.K. business has been growing rapidly and efficiently and has reached an important inflection point. This year, we've used a restrained marketing budget to grow our AUA with a higher focus on customers of more than 50 years of age, thereby increasing our net [ flows ] for every pound of marketing spend. We maintained our brand awareness, reaching in excess of 250,000 invested customers across the U.K. We've grown our top line significantly since our IPO, achieving a 45% compound annual growth rate. With our June ARR already having reached GBP 32 million, we expect to finish the year with revenue in excess of GBP 30 million as will be covered later by Christoph. We've also demonstrated continued strong and effective cost control throughout the company's history, helping to drive towards the achievement of our adjusted EBITDA profitability milestone, which we expect to deliver in the U.K. for the full year 2024. The U.K. has reached escape velocity. Beyond this point, a scalable U.K. business is inevitable. It will continue to grow rapidly, propelled by its own cash generation and against the backdrop of an enormous U.K. defined contribution pension market. In the earlier years, we will optimize our growth. I'm more laterally for profitability. We are really excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and the chance to help more customers save for a happy retirement. And with that, I'd like to hand back to Romi, who will take you through our U.S. business in greater depth.

Thank you very much, Lisa. We will now transition from our established U.K. position to our establishing U.S. position here in the states, and I'm delighted to share our exciting plans with you. PensionBee's U.S. expansion will enable us to broaden our market because the U.S. has $24 trillion in defined contribution assets. Our target market opportunity will increase substantially. We see that there are approximately 100 million defined contribution workplace accounts of which approximately 30 million has been left dormant. And that's because the typical American switches jobs and doesn't have a job for life as might have been expected by the retirement system many decades ago. Despite this abundance of workplace accounts, the vast majority of Americans do not have a traditional individual retirement accounts. And that, as a result, creates a great opportunity for PensionBee to be the first retirement account for millions of consumers in the mass market. We are approaching our U.S. expansion in partnership with a long-standing cornerstone of ours, State Street. We've been working with State Street in the U.K. for about a decade and in the U.S., we are delighted to partner with them through a marketing and investment product partnership that will see State Street offering our underlying ETFs within our IRA while also providing meaningful marketing support over the next 5 to 7 years. PensionBee will use its tried and tested marketing approach perfected over a variety of different channels to onboard new customers. And in doing so, we will capitalize on the growth opportunity in front of us here while also minimizing risk. Turning to our progress so far in the U.S. We are delighted to say that our service is operational. Having received SEC registration in July, we have now started onboarding customers, and we've started completing some of the first rollovers. We are calibrating our marketing channels and optimizing provider journeys so that we can establish the scalability required to increase marketing spend further. Let us take a short step back and look at the DC market in the U.S. In the U.S., DC assets have been growing substantially since the 2000's. One big driver of growth has been the fact that Americans are generally enrolled within the workplace. Approximately 50% of Americans are enrolled in a workplace defined contribution account. But the average American switches jobs around 12x, creating a substantial issue of account dormancy within the system. Indeed, since 2000, the proportion of dormant accounts has increased substantially from 22% of all workplace accounts to approximately 1/3 of all workplace accounts. At the same time, IRA penetration is low and less than 1/3 of American households have a traditional IRA. As you might imagine, the penetration is higher amongst wealthier households that are older and more likely to be married, again, demonstrating that the mass market remains vastly underserved. At the same time, consumer sentiment for an easy way to save for retirement is high. Across all generations, the intent to roll over exists. People know it's a good idea to have control of your retirement savings. In fact, 9 and 10 intend to roll over in the near future. These rollovers and transfers happen at the point of job change or at the point of retirement. But consumers feel less than confident about choosing investments and deciding how to manage their savings. And that is particularly acute with savers who have less than the typical amount, the average amount saved in their retirement accounts. One of the most striking aspects is the search for simplicity. In fact, 6 out of 10 Americans would like to push an easy button in order to have retirement sorted. And that is very much where we step in. Over the past month, we have been testing and continue to test the PensionBee proposition, and there are some emerging conclusions. First and foremost, PensionBee resonates nationally. We have been testing across the East Coast and across the Midwest, demonstrating that there is consumer appetite for an easy retirement solution across the country. Enabled by our SEC registration, which allows us to operate federally, we do not need to restrict our market to various states, we can grow across the country. Our product is being well received and the proposition resonates. We can see that from the moment a customer leaves a name and e-mail, to the moment they request a rollover, our conversion rate is high, meaning customers want our product. In fact, the conversion rate is approaching U.K. levels. At the same time, given the size of the U.S. market, we are experiencing lower cost per click than we experienced in the U.K. The U.S. cost per click is evidence of an enormous market that remains very much accessible to us. And while we continue to scale our performance channels, relying on our global advertising partners like Google, we will also be scaling our brand channels. Jasper alluded to the prominence of the Premier League growing prominence in the U.S. were approximately 0.5 million Americans watch Premier League matches. And we can already see some of the evidence of spikes on our U.S. website when Brentford plays in the Premier League, giving us good confidence to continue increasing our brand investments on a global scale. Over the long term, we expect the U.S. business to contribute substantially to the group financial approach. We've replicated our tried and tested business model for the U.S. market. Over the long term, we expect to onboard about 0.5 million invested customers. In the U.S., account sizes are larger with over $50,000 expected in the median account, not the average account, the median account. And that creates substantial opportunity for us to grow our asset base to $25 billion. At the same time, our revenue margin in the U.S. is higher and therefore accretive to the group financial profile at 85 basis points. The U.S. creates an opportunity for over $200 million of revenue in the long term. Our scalable technology platform and our tried and tested marketing approach will also enable us to achieve our expected EBITDA margins for the U.S. over the long term. Overall, we see our plan as being deliverable. The U.S. market is enormous. And in the context of that market, our market share is very much achievable. I would now like to hand over to Christoph Martin, in London, who will cover the financial considerations and group guidance.

Thank you very much, Romi. Hello, everyone. My name is Christoph Martin. I'm the Chief Financial Officer here at PensionBee. Having joined the company back in 2019. Over the past 5 years, I'm proud to have seen the business scale 10x from around GBP 500 million to over GBP 5 billion at the last reporting date. Established itself as a household brand name, go international by entering the U.S. market as well as term profitable in the U.K. I know it has been a very long presentation so far, but the message that I will cover today is really simple, which is that we are really confident in our guidance and I will elaborate on that by highlighting our execution capabilities, which gives us confidence in guidance as well as the core value driver that also gives us confidence in the guidance and combined, this is how we think about it. So turning to the next page. Back at around our IPO at the London Stock Exchange. We made public a set of forward-looking guidance statements that cover medium- to long-term ambition. And as it is very well known at this particular point in time is that we have executed and delivered on our top line growth by delivering 45% of CAGR from the time of our IPO to the last reporting date, increasing our ARR, our annual run rate revenue from around GBP 9 million to GBP 32 million. Furthermore, we have executed and delivered on our profitability guidance by effectively achieving premarketing profitability in the fourth quarter of 2022. Full profitability at the fourth quarter 2023 and we are well on track to achieving full year profitability this year on an adjusted EBITDA basis. That execution and delivery of our guidance is against the backdrop of heightened volatility in 2022 and 2023, I think, which we are all very well aware of which increased geopolitical tension and rising interest rate environment and they have a resulting capital markets volatility. Within that context, the execution and delivery of our IPO guidance really highlights the execution capabilities of the management team, which you saw today. In summary, we have confidence in our guidance, thanks to the execution as well as our core value drivers, which I will cover next. So our 2 core value drivers are: number one, predictable and recurring revenue; and number two, business scalability. On the first one, predictable revenue is really derived from our assets and administration that we have on our books which you can further break down into assets from existing customers, which is around 85% of our total asset. Those are customers who come to our platform remain with us over a long period of time because they're still building up their pension savings, thereby generating value for the company over a very long period of time. We further accelerate AUA growth with new customer acquisitions. So those things -- to our proven acquisition approach is spearheaded by Jasper, who we met before, and bringing on to our platform customers with an increasingly attractive financial profile. We're taking that compounding asset base and turning that into our predictable revenue, thanks to our resilient revenue margin. So that is the first one. The second one is business scalability. So when you look at our cost base, it has -- it is highly controllable and it has come down as a percent of revenue thereby generating effectively profitability margins, and that is across the main cost categories. So let me start with the first one, technology platform and other costs, that has scaled very effectively by effectively allowing us that we now serve double the number of customers per FTE, if you compare that metric to the IPO and you saw the detailed chart with Jonathan earlier, it was 630 at the time of the IPO customers per FTE, and that has increased almost 1,300. And as Jonathan said, there is no inherent cap to that. The next one is marketing costs which is there to acquire customers effectively and the customers that we do and bring them to the platform comes with an ever-increasing attractive financial profile. And then the third one is money manager costs. This is how we deliver our investment solutions to our customer. So in summary, we get confidence in our guidance, thanks to the core value drivers. So jumping into a little bit more deep into the [indiscernible] which is predictable and recurring revenue. I would like to reflect on the delivery over the last few years, so since our IPO, we have executed and delivered a 3.5x increase in both assets and administration as well as revenue. And I would like to break down the core aspects of that value driver to make it a little bit more understandable of how it works and why it gives us the confidence in the guidance that we announced later today. The first starting point really our existing customer base. So that are, again, customers who come on to the platform. And because the average age of a customer is around 40, they are still building up the pension savings over a long period of time. That translates into value for the company over a long period of time. In fact, when you look at the net retention figure, which is greater than 100% at PensionBee, and that effectively means that when you look at the cash movement in any particular cohort and that includes consolidation, contribution, withdrawals and attrition. When you take all of those combined on a cash basis, they are positive. So that means that they are growing over time. So what I'm basically saying is if you look at the cohorts that we acquired with our marketing spending in the past, not only remain on the book, but also growing over time. And that is before any market depreciation. So this is, again, just on a cash basis. So that is the first point. We then further [indiscernible] this new customer acquisition, where we have a very proven model of acquiring new customers into our technology platform, thanks to our strong brand asset as well as data acquisition capabilities. Third as it is very -- as is customary in the industry, with an invest pension assets in capital markets, so there is a further acceleration of their churn over the long period. That compounding asset base, you should then see here basically on the left, is then converted to our predictive and recurring revenue, and that is why it is predictable and recurring. It boils down to the asset the dynamics of the cohorts to the left. But if it's converted to our revenue, thanks to our resilient revenue margin, which is resilient, robust and very consistent. And when you look at the margin over the last few years, since 2019, we saw that the revenue margin to be around 64 basis points, which means that we take that asset base, and we just explained what makes it so predictable and recurring and then convert it into particular and recurring revenue, thanks to the resilient revenue margin. So that's the first point of why we are confident in our forward-looking guidance. If we can have the next slide, please. The second value driver that gives us confidence is business scalability. Since the IPO, we have executed and delivered an improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin of 100 -- almost 170 percentage points as a percent of revenue, which is thanks to the scalability of the business and the fact that the costs came down consistently over the long period of time. And that you can see here on the left, and I would like to walk you through each individual cost line item to give you a little bit of sense of how that then translates into the margin improvement. Let me start with the technology platform and other costs, which is around 60% of the total cost base and it really powers our delivery to our end customers. So since the IPO, we have improved that cost category with around 60 percentage points as a percent of revenue and as Jonathan alluded to earlier, this is really driven by internal automation as well as powering and giving power to our customers to self-serve on the platform. So that is when you look back. When you look forward to that cost base in the U.K., how are we thinking about that. We see half of that cost base is employee costs where we think -- where we expected to grow single digits going forward. The other half is fixed costs as well as FTE-driven costs and volume-driven costs whereby we expect fixed costs to grow single digit, volume-driven costs and FTE-driven costs will grow in line with FTEs and volume which basically makes the whole for the U.K. to grow high single digits, low double digits. The next one is marketing costs. So marketing is really there to power and accelerate the growth of our book over and above the embedded growth of existing customers. And here, we have seen an improvement of that particular cost category by around 100 percentage points as a percent of revenue in the past. And going forward, how do we think about that marketing budget going forward. We obviously have in the U.K. a tremendous runway of GBP 1.2 trillion of addressable market. And we want to capitalize and grow as effectively as we can. Thereby, we see that marketing budget to increase to the levels that we have seen in 2022, while keeping the U.K. profitable. And so what we would expect over the long period of time is that the marketing cost as a percent of revenue to further come down, so is the CPIC that means the acquisition costs on a unit basis. And the third one is money manager costs and that is really helping us deliver the investment solutions to our customers, where we're working with our world-leading partners. And because those costs are variable in nature, as you would expect, they have seen a very resilient development. We did see a small improvement by 2 percentage points as a percent of revenue, but we would expect that to continue to be in line with historical figures. So bringing that all together, the business PensionBee scales effectively, as you can see here, as we're bringing down costs as a percent of revenue, thereby generating the margin improvement that you can see to the right. So in conclusion, of this -- of the value driver number two, we get confidence in our guidance, thanks to the controllability of the costs and our ability to manage margin in line with our long-term ambition. So we have spent some time now around the aspects, which is the execution [ capabilities ] as well as the value drivers, that gives the management team as well as the Board the confidence in our guidance. Before I walk you through that particular framework, I would like to pause and comment briefly on the 2 segment contribution to the U.K. and the U.S. So first, with the U.K., as you have seen with the value drivers, the U.K. is delivering like clockwork, year after year after year. And we talked about the value drivers, and those are really the powering force of that. The U.S., on the other side is earlier business, as you can imagine, it is early on in its compounding gross trajectory, and that means that the risk profile about the U.S. is a little bit higher but it has caused also therefore, a tremendous upside and return potential. So for us, as a management team, we are committed to execute and deliver the U.S. effectively so that we can realize that opportunity. And in comparison to the U.K., we will do so by managing the U.S. carefully alongside the U.K. business. So with that in my end, I would like to walk you through the guidance framework which is structured in short, medium and long term. In the short term, so this year, we expect group revenue to be above GBP 30 million and profitability at around the breakeven point. In the short to medium term, which is 3 to 5 years, we target over GBP 100 million in group revenue, and profitability of circa 20%, whereby the U.K. to significantly contribute to that target. And then in the long term, which is 5 to 10 years, we target a group revenue of above GBP 0.25 billion and a group adjusted EBITA margin of circa 50%. A quick word on our balance sheet. So we have, at this point in time, a strong balance sheet with circa $20 million on the balance sheet. That means that puts us into a very strong position to continue executing and delivering against our guidance. So in conclusion of the finance section, we are confident in the guidance that we are showing you today, thanks to our execution capabilities of the management team, which you got to know today as well as the value drivers that are inherent in the business. With that said, I would like to hand over to Romi in New York.

Thank you very much, Christoph, and I will take you through a summary of what you've heard today. As I'm sure you can tell, we at PensionBee are excited about the next decade of growth and opportunity. As a leading online retirement provider, we focus on the underserved mass market of consumers. We address the vast DC pension market now looking at over 85% of the global market. We've mastered the core capabilities of competitive advantage that we believe it takes to win in the mass market, namely marketing, product innovation, technology and customer service. In the U.K., we continue growing our customer base, and you've heard details of our plans to reach 1 million invested customers. As a result, we'll grow our assets under administration using our established position as a household brand. In the U.S., we are pursuing a substantial growth opportunity in partnership with a long-standing cornerstone, capitalizing on our existing strengths and capabilities as we harness substantial consumer appetite that is already evident today. And overall, our predictable and scalable business model will allow us to continue growing rapidly, and now also profitably.