Praemium Limited (PPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the half year FY '23 Praemium Limited Results Briefing. I would now like to turn the call over to Anthony Wamsteker, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and thank you, everyone, for your interest in our results and joining us on the call today, the half year results for FY '23 or the half year to 31st of December 2022. Delighted to be joined on the call today by David Coulter, the CFO of Praemium, and this is the second results presentation that David and I have done together and looking forward to today's call and the questions we might get. And some of you will be catching up with on meetings over the next couple of days as well, so looking forward to that. I do just want to turn to the agenda for today's meeting. And as I said, David and I will be presenting. I'll just start out with some comments on highlights from a business point of view, over the first half of this financial year, then hand to David to talk through the financial results, and then I'll finish up with a few of our strategies moving forward prior to taking questions. Obviously, these slides have been loaded up to the ASX website. So all of you have had the opportunity to look at those. And if you haven't, obviously, they're there for future reference. If I just talk about the highlights that we've mentioned there. And of course, it is a record EBITDA result for a half year for Praemium, which we're very pleased about. As we say, it's the combination of what we've been aiming to do, which is to achieve double-digit revenue growth and to make sure that our expense line doesn't grow as strongly as the revenue growth. And I'll leave it to David to talk a little bit later about that in more detail, but that -- we've always said we don't so much have an expense -- sorry, a profit margin target so much as targets on revenue and expenses and the profit margin emerges from that with the positive jaws. So we're pleased to see that effect coming through. The half year inflows, net inflows of $1 billion is a solid result. The half year just gone was challenging for the markets and challenging environments in markets is also challenging for net funds flow for the platforms that are capturing market share. If you're capturing market share, that always seems to happen more quickly when markets are stable or rising because it's more available to a financial adviser to deal with the platform question with their client base, whereas when markets are uncertain, they're less likely to have the conversation about moving to a more efficient platform. So we have noted that stability in markets is better for our net funds flow, but we're still very pleased with what we were able to achieve despite the uncertainty in the markets in the first half of the financial year. We talked there about our FUA being at what we call scalable. And by that, we think we have a size already where we can consistently deliver strong revenue growth and maintain expenses growing at a slower rate. And that's, as I've said before, our ambition for the business, and we feel that we've got the scale to do that. It was perhaps more difficult when we had an international business because we didn't think that was yet at the point where that scale benefit had yet kicked in. And so now in the Australian business, we're seeing the results of the scale in our home market. And when I talk about international, of course, we feel it was a strong result to be able to return over $32 million to shareholders in the half year just gone in 2 formats, the dividend fully franked and the commencement of a buyback of our shares. So I'm very pleased that the discipline in Australia and the sale of the international business gives us a business that can start returning capital or dividends to shareholders. I'll just talk about the net funds flow. And what we've done with this slide is drawing out a few points. One of the points to draw out is that we have, for some time now, talked about the flows in the Praemium scheme compared to the Powerwrap scheme. In the long run, we believe both schemes have got similar growth potential, but the reality is acquiring Powerwrap a couple of years ago, it -- we've been building out the Powerwrap app offering, including the Praemium user experience tools on the Powerwrap offering. So we feel that we're just starting to get the offering fully integrated into the Praemium environment now. So we do have longer term ambitions so that scheme can do just as well as the SMA scheme, but still for the last half, the 2/3 of our net flows came out of the Praemium scheme. If I talk about the FUA in the bottom slide, that just gives a longer-term perspective by calendar year. Obviously, we're reporting the first half of the financial year is effectively the end of a calendar year. So that's a good chart to give you the last 6 year -- the last 6 calendar years, the last 4 of which we've included the Powerwrap net flows in that slide. But the net result is when you combine the FUA in the schemes with the FUA in our administration service, we're now over $40 billion, and as I say, that gives us good scale in our business. And the Praemium scheme, which is the one that we've had for the full 5 years has achieved good compound annual growth rate despite in the earlier years, a lot of the very significant client -- what was in the biggest client in the business. We're not move forward, obviously, not just ourselves but all the challenger platforms in the platform space, and the 3 bigger ones you all know, we're one of the 3 bigger challenger platforms. There's always questions about, well, what's the composition of your growth. And so we're happy to provide a little bit more color on the composition of the net funds flow in what we think are the important categories. So we've divided it into existing services with their advisers also existing by which we mean they've been with us, the service and the adviser has been with us for a year -- for more than a year. Then we've got an existing service, but the service itself is growing and they're taking on new advisers. So those are people that have signed up with the Praemium platform in the last 12 months, even though the service might have been with us for longer and then a new service and new adviser. So they're the 3 main categories. We've separated out by percentage and shown the net flows for each of the last 4 half year periods. And on the right-hand side, we've just shown by FUA what is the composition of our total book by the adviser length of tenure. So that's -- that right-hand side is not services, it's by the advisers that we've got on the book. The key takeaway from this is even though there's a bit of underlying volatility by half year, which is a range of factors, the Powerwrap scheme tends to be more volatile, and it only takes 1 or 2 big advisers to leave their service and take with some of the assets and it's had a bad half year as a result of that comes and net funds flow, still always positive, but lower than we have been used to. Similarly, we had the loss of the major client in the early part of the -- in the first of those graph was still a significant factor. But the important thing about it is there is a consistent flow of new services and a consistent flow of new advisers coming on to the Praemium platform, as you would expect of a challenger platform still taking market share from the larger incumbent platforms. And if I go to the next slide, I might talk about why we think that has happened and why we feel that it can continue to happen. And that the one benchmark survey, if you like, is the Investment Trends survey of platform functionality. They have a whole lot of measures, something like around about 60 key measures. In fact, there's subcomponents in that as well. So there's hundreds of data points that they take to talk about the quality of the functionality. And in the last survey, which has only just come out, so this is, as I think everyone on the call knows pretty hot off the press, we were #1 in 2 of the 6 main categories. So the categories are spread into 6 main categories. We continue to close the gap between the ones that are higher up than us in that, but the top 3 are the 3 dominant challenger platforms in the gap, and we widened the gap to #4. So we're very happy with the way that our functionality is continuing to be built out, and we believe that puts us in a very strong position to continue to win new clients as we go forward. I think the other thing people sometimes ask what about the categories you won and the 2 categories we won where the decision support tools category and the security, data and integration category, where it was a very clear win that we had in that category. The other categories were, by and large, relatively close, although we -- there's -- we still see opportunities to keep building out our functionality in a couple of areas. But the one that we won by a good margin was the security data and integration, and then the other one was the decision support tools. And they are the categories that for our target client are -- we believe, the most important factors. So we continue to invest in those. If I look at some of the ones in a little bit of detail, and why we think they're important. We're first in advanced analytics and tools. We're first in tax tools and we're first in noncustodial assets as examples. And they are very important to the target market that we have of high net worth. They're clearly going to spend a bit more time on some of those areas than the adviser focused on the retail clients. So the affluent segment of the market or the emerging affluent segment of the market, we're very confident we provide the platform that best meets the needs for those advisers. If I then go on and just talk about that in a little more detail, and I won't spend too much time on those points, but we are the leader in the noncustodial offering. We are the leader in managed accounts, and we are the leader in high net worth. And so we're pitching our functionality build-out at the part of the market that we want to continue to lead in, and we're confident of our future opportunities just as in the past, you can see what has been delivered in terms of growth. But now I'm going to hand over to David, and David is going to take us through the financial results in more detail. So thanks, David.

Okay. Well, thank you very much, Anthony. Great summary of what we've been able to achieve in the half and what we hope to be able to grow on and build on in the half to come. My content is centered around the results, of course, given my role within the organization. The first slide I'm presenting is Slide 11, which is the group financial results for the half year '23 . What we've presented here actually keeps faith with what we published last half, even though it's not be like-for-like. We have a group result in half year '22 which includes the international business, albeit its EBITDA contribution was virtually breakeven. And then for the first half '23, that is as good as just the Australian segment, which I will provide more detail on the following slide. Perhaps best to focus here on the items that make up the difference between our underlying EBITDA and our net profit after tax. You can see in the bottom bullet point there, we do have a very detailed reconciliation that's in note 6 of the statutory financials, which have also been put on the ASX platform today, and I'd encourage you to read those and more than happy to take questions on them. But just to put a bit of color to it. It really is a thematic of having a much cleaner, much easier to manage business, having divested the international operations. The share schemes expense is greatly reduced because we have a much lower staff quotient that needs that sort of remuneration. Our restructuring and acquisition costs have greatly reduced again, albeit some of that was due to doing the divestment in and of itself. And I've given some detail and color there that the restructuring costs on roughly half-and-half retention costs and divestment completion with a small asset write-down. Again, further proof that we're really working very hard to make this business more repeatable, cleaner and easier to understand. Of great significance to the statutory profit after tax and an amount we can only introduce to the group results once we have submitted our income tax return is a large one-off benefit from debt forgiveness on the divestment of the international business. So there was a significant amount given as part of the restructure around divesting that international business, some capital, some to income, it's around a $16 million recognized loss and therefore, at 30%, around a $5 million tax benefit from that. Just turning now to our Australian segment results, and this is really where we get to the crux of the business and how it operates. And what's been really impressive about this result is the way that the jaws have opened up on operating leverage. Strong revenue growth at 17% partnered with 6% cost constraint, which is sector-leading for challenger platforms. And I'll go into some more detail on how we've been able to achieve that, especially in terms of not overdoing it on our staff complement as we seek to do a similar amount of development in each half. The breakdown of revenue is very similar to how it's been in previous periods. The platform result, however, is outstanding. We did lift our cash admin fee on the SMA solution to 130 basis points from the 1st of October, so that's had a 3-month impact as RBA rates have risen as well. That charge just brings us into line with market really for challenger platforms rather than being an outsized increase to our clients and is reasonable in relation to the cost we bear managing that liquidity margin on behalf of our clients. We've also had a [rerate] with that faster SMA growth, 43% of the overall platform FUA as opposed to 40%, it being a higher margin, and it will go into margin side as well, it being a higher margin also has a positive impact. Equity markets half-to-half when you think about the prior comparative period, they're negative overall, but we've been able to go over and above that with our FUA growth through flow and also the fee scales that we've been applying. Our cost growth has been driven largely by our FTE complement something like 70% to 75% of our costs are FTE driven, and that's to be expected in a high service business like ours. We managed to constrain those both in terms of the amount of remuneration granted in relation to market. I'd say that 6% is a reasonable representation of wage inflation overall, and that's a great complement to our management and our staff in as much as they've taken on. Yes, there's a reasonable wage impost, but it's not above and beyond the ordinary. We also have a reasonable increase in general admin and corporate net expense lines there of $1 million. We pointed to it in the full year '22 result, and it is still having an impact when you go to half year '23 compared to first half '22 and that we renegotiated our insurance contracts at 30 November every year. So we're bearing a full 6 months of higher insurance costs. And my understanding of the market is that that's to be expected with insurance premier in the market in that area going the way it has. We've also invested reasonably heavily in cybersecurity, which is a contentious current issue, I think, is something that most people would have expected us to do. Again, I point to that underlying segment EBITDA being reconciled to the NPAT at Note 6 if you have any questions over the detail that brings 1 result to the other. Just on Platform revenue margins. We published this slide for the first time last half, and we've continued on with it because it did receive a lot of positive feedback in terms of our transparency to market. The trend on platform margin uplift has continued across both the Powerwrap EPS and the Praemium SMA resulting in a really good outcome for shareholders overall. We've gone from 26 basis points as an average for the first half '23 compared to 22 basis points first half '22. And the second half of '22 itself was a 24 basis points. So that rise has been very graded, very consistent and contributed strongly to the results and the opening of the jaws that we referred to earlier. And just on costs, as [Mike] mentioned of the fact that employees, staff, FTE are the major cost base for an organization such as ours. You can see here that we've gone from 322 to 346 to 338 over the 3 halves that we're comparing, so on an average basis, you're looking at fairly consistent FTE numbers, but what we had flagged very early that we would be facing into some fairly serious wage inflation given the economic environment generally, and we've borne that through our results, but we've constrained it to a level that we think is manageable. It's also worth noting the geographic split. We have 260, roughly an 85 in Australia and Armenia, respectively. Armenia has become a very, very important part of the way that we operate in as much as there's a very talented pool of IT professionals in that geography, and we rely very heavily for the development that you saw on Slide 9 that Anthony mentioned. Not to take away from our Australian development pool, certainly, but the Armenian contribution is very strong and that we expect to have Armenia operating as a service center and a Center of Excellence for this period and any periods to come. The shift or balance between the two is something we'll manage in a moment, really more than anything. We had to look at what our development pipeline looks like, where the expertise is best located, where we best draw a good result and efficient result from as we go forward. I'll just finish up with the cash flow and balance sheet slides. I'm on Slide 15, for those following the presentation. The operating cash flow is not as strong as we would have liked given the EBITDA result we achieved. However, there's timing impacts on that in as much as we've had to service the Morningstar TSA, and we'll see the revenue from that in the current -- or in this half that we're in now. And we also had large payments out to our advisory partners for the international divestment and also some of the one-off costs for public provision in the full year '22. R&D CapEx of $3.6 million represents a return to our regular rhythm of R&D post having a fairly significant initiative on fee consents go largely through the P&L. And I think when we get to the balance sheet, it might be more to talk about how we de-risk that. The buyback is progressing based on market liquidity. And we spent about $7 million on that thus far. My last slide before I hand back to Anthony is on the balance sheet here. And overall, what you're seeing is a much cleaner, leaner, stronger balance sheet than we've had for many periods. Of course, it was fairly strong at the end of June '22 with the cash received in for the international divestment. But in keeping faith with our shareholders, we've managed to distribute a fair portion of the proceeds received both via buyback and via dividend. Made mention here again of the Powerwrap tax losses. Of course, with a large $5 million tax benefit coming through from the international divestment. We've not actually been able to apply those losses. So they're net pocket ready for deployment in future periods and to our great advantage. Noted there, we're considering what a dividend policy might look like, and we'll be putting something to the Board, an announcement for the full year. But that's talking about a policy to be adopted, it's not necessarily an undertaking on dividends one way or the other. It's just that we feel for governance purposes that we should have something in place and expect to do that for this financial year. With that, I'll hand you back to Anthony for his summation and look forward. Thank you.

Thanks, David. So if we look forward at what our opportunities are, as the headline says, we feel that attractive market opportunities are bound. We use this slide a bit. We've updated for the latest data on the platform market as well as the high net worth segment of the market, which we rely on Investment Trends and we sponsor for a survey that they do into the high net worth segment. And so you get a sense of how big the overall market is. We've talked for a while a couple of things. One is that the 2 markets are converging. The needs of the people in the 2 markets are converging and that continues to occur. And as we say at the bottom there 1 platform is the goal for advisers, for each client that it's much better for them to have it all on the 1 platform. Indeed, I would argue that they can't fully do the job unless they've got a wealth view. So -- and I know that the other challenger platforms who have announced their results already have talked about the need to offer the noncustodial offering as well as the custody offering in order for an adviser to be able to give a whole of wealth view. So we continue to view that's where market is going to go. I think let me report reaffirms that's the direction of where advisers need to be with their clients. Have a good picture of their whole of wealth and be able to offer the right solution for the client. If the solution is platform, so be it. If the solution is noncustody, they should be able to do that as well. So we're very happy that we've set ourselves up to attack the market that way, and we'll continue to do so. If I just -- look, again, this is a slide -- the headings of which you've seen us talk about before, what are our core objectives for approaching that market, and that is to deliver sustainable growth to attract and retain market-leading people and creating an environment for them to perform well, maintain leadership as a high net worth or affluent platform of choice and support the evolution of advice. We're proud of our involvement in the advice sector. I think it's becoming more and more professional all the time. And it's a sector that has a fundamental role to play in Australia as the current debate around superannuation shares. Everyone knows it's a very important industry, and we want to be part of leading the evolution of that sector. If I just draw one or two things, I would like to say on the growth side, we do have a target that we mentioned. Our target now for full growth from flows is 10% to 15%. So I draw your attention to that is where our target is. It's certainly not guidance. It's an internal target that we have. The other important thing to -- that you've all seen is our largest client Escala has extended their agreement with us for a further 6 years. In terms of people, very happy to have Denis Orrock joining us, and he's driving a more detailed strategy than we've had before. I think whilst everyone in our business understands where the strategy is driving into the next level of detail has been very helpful, and Denis has done a great job on that. And I do take this opportunity for some of our staff and people who are on the call who are building a very good business with us. Thank you for your efforts over the last 6 months. It's tremendous. So they're pretty much where we're trying to go in terms of our 4 key objectives. You should expect over time that the fine details and below the headings will change over time. They will -- those objectives will change as we kick them off and get new objectives, but the overall high-level objectives, the headings there, that's pretty much -- you should expect those to be pretty stable over a period of years. So that then leads to why do we think we can continue to grow and that gets to the foundations that we've got. Now this is new, and it reflects that -- we are building out a strategy for where we're trying to go in over the next 3 years. So our journey to 2025 is what we pick out here. And obviously, I'm not going to just read out the slide to you, but I think you'll see that when you look at that, it is a strategy to deliver on what those core objectives are that we've talked about earlier. And some of those things have happened already, the divestment of the international business. As I've said many times, we were so delighted that not only that we divested it, but the quality of the acquire in Morningstar, and we are excited to see how they're building out that business on the platform that we have -- or the foundation that we have laid. And there are other things in there. I won't go through the detail but it's -- I think, a good summary of where we're trying to get to. So with that, I've spoken or taken enough time on the call because I do want to leave plenty of time for any questions that we might have. So I'll be handing back to our moderator to look at any questions that might have arisen.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Lafitani Sotiriou from MST.

Congratulations on a good result. I just wanted to get a little bit more color about the detail of the R&D program and some of the specific deliverables that you're working on? And if you could just also give a bit of color around the EBITDA margin outlook because there's a lot of talk about the positive jaws, and it would appear that the revenue growth and margin expansion should continue for the foreseeable future. So could you give us an idea as to where you think the EBITDA margin could get to?

Right. Thanks. Laf, thanks for your question. And I'll hand over to David in a moment for the EBITDA question, but I do just want to talk about our R&D and where we're investing. And as part of that, we developed a reasonable amount about what our focus is going forward. There is some aspect of our R&D that we continue to treat as commercially sensitive. So we don't lay out the whole R&D investment program. But I think what I could say because this is in the public domain is investment trends is the benchmark report about the functionality that you've got on your platform and what you've delivered. And I've said in the past and said again today that the categories that we win in that do reflect where we probably see the priority for our development spend. We think some of the things the investment trends highlights are particularly relevant to our segment of the market. Now investment trends have to do a report that shows what advisers think are important from a platform across a whole range of categories in order to meet the needs of all of those 15,000-odd advisers. But our target market is not every single one of the 15,000 adviser. Our target market is those advise who are pitching their business at the more affluent end of the advice market. And they do have a slightly different priority than the whole 15,000 advisers. So that's why we don't have to come #1, but we do have to come #1 in those areas that we believe the adviser, the more affluent end of the market, need to serve. So if you look at that survey, you look at where we're winning, they do reflect the priorities of our R&D both past and looking forward. I think the other thing that we have been on the public record about is the opportunity in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think that was -- everyone talked about it a while back. It did seem to go a bit quiet on that front, but our investment in that didn't go quite, and now it's becoming a bit more topical again with things like ChatGPT, getting everyone's attention. So, and when that broad category and the investment trends of security, data and integration, it's in that section. We do a lot of investment to make sure that advisers who use our platform, so it's a very rich data source, and we're going to make sure that they have access to utilizing the data that they've built up with their clients to build their business and advance their business going forward. But I'm going to now to now just start David to just talk about the EBITDA and the way we look at that.

Yes. Thanks for your question, Laf, and thanks, Anthony. I'd really look at the EBITDA margin as something that comes out as a ratio after having managed the P&L and complementary to that, say, your balance sheet resources as well. So we always express it as an aspiration of our revenue growth grow double digits and probably to the mid-teens to higher again, operationally. It's not a commitment to the market necessarily, but all things going well in terms of the margin we can extract from our business, the growth we get from flow and if we have some tailwinds, of course, from equity markets for the better, that's great for growing the top line. And then we have to manage that cost line effectively and efficiently in response to irrespective. I think the idea that if you've got your top line growing at 20%, 30%, 40%, you should just let your costs expand to fill the void. It's not the great way to manage the business because we do know it's very hard to get that cost structure back out once it embeds itself. And again, so we would be looking at. And again, last full year, we went we look call it, 15 on revenue and 10 on costs, I think is where we were pitching it. I think we've done a little better on costs than we thought we could. The economic environment ameliorated to a slight degree on how difficult it was to secure staff and what sort of remuneration incoming staff needed to be paid to take jobs. So whilst I'd like to claim genius status for Anthony myself and the rest of the executive, there's some of it that is structural in the economy that you can take advantage of. The promise I'd make is we'll watch that line very, very closely every month within every half because we understand that we don't open up that operating leverage that you're referring to, Laf, unless we really control the things that we know we can control. So aspirationally, seek to grow that EBITDA margin, I don't have a specific figure in mind. I note that our larger peers say are running with 4s in front of it, and we've gone from something like 25 to 32 in a single half, and we're very, very strong in that regard. Whether or not 7 percentage point improvements are sustainable half-on-half-on-half, that speaks more to that ratio I've discussed earlier. But of course, we seek to improve it. The scale at which will be driven by how well we can grow that revenue, of course, and the extent to which we apply some discipline on costs. But I want improvement out of it. Anthony wants improvement out of it. And the Board certainly expects that from us, yes.

So philosophically, would you be disappointed if you didn't have a fall in front of it over the medium term?

Well, it depends on how you define medium term, again, Laf, too. I wouldn't expect to fall in front of it by year's end, for example. End of 2024, we would be trending that way. I wouldn't again think we'd get there just yet because there's...

No, 3 to 5 years.

Well, again, without making a promise. All other things being equal, that's where we should aspire to get to. That's where our competitors are, albeit on a roughly double scale or more. If we run our business efficiently, then that's what we should aspire to, yes.

Our next question comes from the line of Danny Younis from Shaw and Partners.

Well done on a good result. I want to follow up that question on the expenses line and the EBITDA margins, too, if I can. So if I look at Slide 12, the cost of operations, clearly, that's going to grow with your business. But if I look at the other 3 lines, IT, sales and marketing, general and admin, are you now saying that, that $15 million should be the half run rate going forward? That's the new normal. And in terms of the margins, I think if I went back 12 months ago, you split out the Powerwrap margins and the revenue contribution, what's the split between Powerwrap and Praemium EBITDA margins, please, if you can?

Yes, I haven't got the EBITDA margins on there. I can go look that back, take that question on notice. The question on cost itself at the $15 million run rate, I wouldn't be banking that as the new base because we have a remuneration year that goes from 1 October, 30 September with our people. So baked in will be the increases that we've experienced for only 3.5 months following through for a full 6 months, albeit our pricing increases on the revenue line also match that. So in terms of EBITDA, I'm comfortable with where we got. We could afford to grant the 6% to 7% wage increases on the basis that we knew we had a better revenue line coming in. but it will flow through for a full 6 months. Insurance, I pointed to there in terms of transparent disclosure. We're largely at the same rate of insurance that we were for the half that we've just disclosed. So I'd expect that would be a flat line. However, that's on a smaller business. So insurance Praemium, the pressure is still largely on those who seek to gain insurance and the pricing there. That's going to be expensive, I suspect, for years to come.

Okay. Then maybe another way to ask the Powerwrap EBITDA margin question is. If you look at the margin, you've seen an improvement from 17, 18 bps up to the low 20s now. How much higher can you get that to 25? And what's really driving that?

25, sorry, referencing?

Yes, Powerwrap?

Powerwrap would be expected in the absence of any pricing increase to level out, without going into detail again through commercial in confidence on. So we've renegotiated with the Escala. We would expect that strong relationship to result in significant or reasonable volume growth, albeit that they have extracted some better pricing. I think we're a bit more than happy to concede that. It's not significant to the group overall, so long as we get good volume growth from that business one way or another. There's every opportunity to look at our pricing across the board because I think if you look at our platform margin overall, we're roughly keeping pace with one of the challenger platforms, but we're a little behind on margin extraction one of the other competitors. And if that's where the market is set, then I think we're still reasonably under market on basis point rates on some of our service offerings. Now I'm not flagging that, that necessarily comes out as some sort of definitive outcome, but I do know that internally, we're turning our attention and doing a lot of analysis and modeling on what we look like relative to competitors. It's just to talk any about the labor [indiscernible]. The Powerwrap margin there too, you can't actually apply to their FUA to look at revenue. And the EBITDA breakdown is getting harder and harder to really put to the market is one of the reasons when you say you used to disclose it because we had so many cross-functional teams working on both Powerwrap and Praemium.

Our next question comes from the line of Nicholas McGarrigle from Barrenjoey's.

Just looking at the Escala contract, you mentioned that they were able to extract maybe slightly better pricing. Is that on future growth? Or is it on future volumes from existing customers? Just trying to get a sense of where the circa $9 million of revenue that they accounted for last year might track in an absolute sense?

Yes. Thanks, Nick. It was -- again, obviously, it's subject to the confidentiality of a client contract. But the reality is the way that we negotiated with Escala or we negotiated with each other, was not just to say what's the absolute number of dollars that we should be getting from the client relationship, but what's the right mix. So we did take the time. It took while the contract negotiations was most of the time was about what's the right mix for both our businesses. So we'd be confident that there wasn't cross-subsidization, but that was important to them, too so that they can grow their business knowing there's no cross-subsidization going on from one part of the business than the other. And as you know, there's a whole range of new levers in a platform from the base platform fee to the cash margin, the trading revenue that you get and a whole lot of other revenues. So all of those were in conversation that we had. But the net result is on the current volume, the pricing, there'd be a slight reduction in our revenue but nothing stays the same. And so the opportunity as they grow their business, we're pretty confident that our revenue from that particular contract will go up over time and probably significantly if they're able to continue to achieve the sort of growth that they have achieved, which has been tremendous. As you know, I was not, I was on the Powerwrap board and we always thought we can grow our business and they'll become a less significant client in our business, but no matter how much we grew the business, Escala was growing their business just as fast as we were going. So it is a tremendous success story the way that the Escala guys have built that business. And so we're delighted to keep them on benefit. And I know it's not lost on unit or others that when you talk about scale and the importance of scale in our business, they give us quite a lot of scale in our business. As you said, it's -- we did disclose in the annual report last year, the amount of revenue that we derived from that arrangement. And you can see the importance of that gives in the overall scale of our business. So there's a lot of merit in that relationship for us. There's a scale -- there's the fact that it's a tremendously successful business. They give us lots of ideas around the R&D that we were talking about just before and where they see the advice market going that ultimately, as we build that out, can be utilized across the platform for a lot of our other clients. So we're delighted to have that relationship. It will -- if their business was going to stay the same, it would be a marginal drop in revenue that we get, but we think that's highly unlikely based on the track record.

Cool. I think as my follow-up question, I get, I guess I've been receiving a few questions just about the option issuance to Escala and how you, how that was derived and how you managed the conflict there. I guess the dilution is only 1.3% and the revenue is 14%. So I guess, to put it into perspective in terms of the value of issuing them versus protecting the revenue, but just some comments on that.

Yes. Well, obviously, we've looked at all of the factors that you just talked about and covered very well in your summary of both the magnitude and the importance of the relationship. At the end of the day, the thing that was important to us is that, as I say, the relationship with Escala not only contributes to scale that delivers some great opportunities for R&D investment for us. Our R&D, if you look at R&D, and we disclosed quite a significant investment in what CapEx or our R&D, so it's very important that we get good bang for our buck. And you're always when you run your business trying to balance how much of that is driven just responding to client needs, how much of it is internal needs that you've got, and it shouldn't ever be lost on people that part of the reason you can keep your staffing level is relatively stable as you grow is because you're investing in productivity enhancements in your R&D work. And how much do you take the bold decision to say we know what the market wants. The old Henry Ford line, if I ask the market what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses, but I built a motor car. And so you've got to get that big R&D spend that we got, which we think is significant. It's less than many others in platform land. But for us, it's significant, and we get good bang for a our buck and a big driver of where we spend the money is the feedback that we get from clients and the clients who are at the leading-edge in the market and are growing their business fastest are likely to have the ideas that are going to be much valuable for the way you spend your R&D. So all of those were factors in saying would it be good for some of the key people at a Escala to be incentivized with a relatively small position in our business. And the answer is yes, it's great that they are keen to be with us in a financial sense on the journey.

Can I squeeze in another question? Or are we limiting two?

One more for you, Nick.

Just a quick one, should be an easy one. Just on CapEx, I guess, you spent $3.6 million. I think last year's CapEx was $2.5 million, but it was depressed on the back of some things that went through OpEx as opposed to CapEx, but is that kind of a $7 million annualized run rate, something you expect to carry going forward? Or will it step down post the divestment of international?

It -- I would expect it to just go up, but not -- some tech businesses, which we are, we're largely a tech-enabled business, talk about the percentage of R&D as a percentage of revenue. I don't think that's exactly the right revenue, but the right measure, but nor should it be completely flat. If your revenue was to -- in 3 to 5 years, if your revenue was double you should invest some of that revenue growth in staying ahead of the game on R&D. So I wouldn't expect it to grow as quickly as revenue. It's part of the opportunity per jaws. But on the other hand, I wouldn't expect it to be flat. If nothing else, inflation would see it go up a bit over time. So somewhere between the inflationary growth that you might expect over time and reinvesting a bit of the revenue growth to make sure you stay ahead of the competition in those factors that you believe your clients really need.

Yes, just to add to that. I think if you're looking very short term, just in terms of the second half of the financial year and run rate, yes, slight increment, but not significant to cash flow. So at $7.2 million, I gather, if you're just multiplying by 2, you do have the wage inflation 3 versus 6 months in there as well.

Our final question comes from the line of Dylan Jones from Ord Minnett.

Just a quick follow-up on the expenses. So did I hear correctly your insurance contracts will be negotiated in November. So is there also going to be obviously the impact in the second half of a full 6-month contribution of higher premiums. And then just to also confirm the insurance uptick, is that the bulk of that $1 million delta in the general and admin expenses?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Dylan, and nice to hear from you. First time around for us, I think. The insurance is done at the 30th of November each year. The uptick itself is more a reflection on what was negotiated. November, year ago, 2021, that is November 2022. We've managed with the cleanup of our business and the resetting of certain policies to keep costs very flat, November '22. What you mentioned, no, I do not expect insurance to come through at some further uplift through the second half of the financial year. But it has had a reasonably significant impact first half '22 to first half '23, given the timing of it. It is -- for that $1 million, it's about half of that. Yes, close to about half of that. So the cyber is not insignificant in its own right as well. There is just general wage inflation that hits that line also because we have our what was formerly called out as corporate costs is mystifying to me to some degree, kind of put below the line but put back up depending on the side you're looking at. That's likely in that line as well now, which really is just mine and as new salaries more than anything else that just generally not allocated out given where we see it.

Got it. And if I could just squeeze in one more. So the target of 10% to 15% of starting through, so does this still stand as an internal target for FY '23? Or is the second half expectation only been adjusted, I guess, to sort of reflect the first half flows. And then I guess in speaking to that, if you can also just provide some comments on the flow outlook and if there's any update you can provide on flows calendar year-to-date.

So thanks, Dylan. When we did the full year '22 results, we said what our internal target, which was 15%. We talked at that time about 15% would reflect a similar flow volume or amount as what we achieved in the previous financial year. And some people might think you're being a bit soft on yourselves because you're growing business shortly, you can aspire to have flows increasing year-on-year. And we accept that criticism if people think that, but we had to be conscious of the fact that the reality of the way the markets work and the flows worked consequently was that we had a very strong first half in FY '22 and a weaker second half, so we had to rebuild. And we felt if we rebuilt to the full 15% of the starting FUA balance, that would finish up being a good come back to the previous levels and the where would that bounce back come, we hope that would come progressively over the full financial year '23. The reality of how we went in the first half of financial year '23 or the half just gone, is that it was less than we would aspire to given that outlook to try to get to 15%. And so that's what this is now to say, well, we now internally are targeting 10% to 15% net flows. And that -- whilst I won't go into exactly how we're tracking in the first 6 or 7 weeks of the second half, mainly because I don't want to get caught into almost monthly flow updates. It's enough to be giving quarterly follow updates. I think -- but I do acknowledge that January was as it often is seasonally slower, and all that's in the mix for when we say well, let's say, internally, our target is 10% to 15%. We haven't -- and I know this might seem semantics, but I do want to make the point for all shareholders on the call. It is an internal target. It's not our guidance. It's just been -- it's been open enough with shareholders. That's what our internal target is, but not, but also being open, that we're not so confident that we would like to call that guidance. So I know that's a long answer, Dylan, to your question, but I hope that gives a bit of flavor on guidance, our internal target is now 10% to 15% of the starting FUA balance, which mathematically is $2 billion to $3 billion because we started at $20 billion.

I would now like to turn the call to Anthony Wamsteker, CEO, for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, Randy, and thanks, everyone, for being on the call. We look forward to the opportunity to continue the dialogue with all of the people who have been on this call over the coming few days and week or 2. I can assure you that both David and I, these half year and full year presentations twice a year just getting the opportunity to get out and talk to our shareholders and people who are covering our stock is a great opportunity for us. We do enjoy the opportunity of the dialogue, and we greatly appreciate the interest that you've shown. So thank you again, and I look forward to continuing the dialogue with all of you over the -- as I say, the next few days and week or 2, and it's a good once or twice a year opportunity for David and I to just give a sense of where we think we're going and what our strategy is and take feedback on what a critical stakeholder group for our business thinks about that. So looking forward to the next week or so, and thank you again for your interest today.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.