SEI Investments Company (SEIC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to day 2 of our Financial Services Conference. I'm Ben Budish, the analyst covering the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges. And with us for our first session today are from SEIC, we've got Ryan Hicke, CEO; and Dennis McGonigle, CFO. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ben.

Maybe just to start out, could you give us just a brief overview of your business for investors who may be a little bit unfamiliar on your 3 pillars, that is technology, operations and asset management pieces.

That sounds great. So if you think about SEI from kind of the external world, we're about $2 billion in revenue, 55-year history, and as you said, we're really founded upon servicing all financial services with 1 of 3 capabilities. We have a technology pillar, an operation pillar and asset management pillar. We go to market with those capabilities with a variety of the platforms and bundles. But if you think about the kind of the main intermediary and client bases, we service everybody from institutional clients. So we have a long history of OCIO capabilities to define benefit endowments, foundations. A very successful footprint in the investment manager community, both alternative and traditional asset managers, to leverage SEI's technology and operations to enable their growth. And then intermediaries that are servicing private clients, whether they be advisers, part of wirehouses, broker-dealers. Historically, that was a very asset management-centric solution that's been unbundled over the last 5 to 7 years to offer more technology and operational capabilities. And then we have a small direct to high net worth business, where SEI services a small number of ultra-high net worth clients across United States.

Great. So Ryan, you've been in the CEO seat a little over a year. How has year 1 been? What's gone well? What's been more challenging? What's on your mind?

Well, I mean, I think it's been a really positive year for us, but I think about that with a few different lenses. One, we had an opportunity, and we didn't want to waste the opportunity when Al elevated up to us -- our Founder, Chairman and CEO, Al West, when he elevated up to Executive Chairman, it just created an opportunity for new leadership. I took the CEO role. We also took the opportunity to kind of reset the executive team, but make sure we had, I think, the courage to look at ourselves and say, "How do we kind of reinvent our growth strategy moving forward? What's working really well? Where should we pivot? What should we do differently?" And we spent a lot of time in the summer of 2022 as a leadership team and a broader set of SEI personnel really looking at total addressable markets. So not just trying to focus on the businesses that we're in today, what more do we need to do, taking a fresh look at the landscape. So kind of if you fast forward to where we are now, Ben, I feel really good about the focus areas that we have today, the trends that we're actually leaning into what we're doing with our clients and prospects in the market. And then on the not so well front, I think we're still working through how do we operate at a faster pace throughout the organization. How do we actually identify and incubate new ideas and get them launched. We have a rich history of innovation. We have a DNA around experimentation and taking risk, but we're trying to really kind of unlock and unleash that mindset across the business again because we do believe we need growth engines beyond the current ones we have, whether that's organic growth or M&A to get new ideas. We think about everything with a 30-, 40-year lens. We're not trying to maximize everything in a kind of a 12- to 18-month window.

Great. Well, that's a great lead in to the next question here. So you recently set out a target to double your revenues over the next 5 to 7 years. How do you get there? And I'm wondering, I think like 3/4 of your revenues are kind of asset sensitive. So what's the importance of growing overall assets within your existing clients, cross-selling new products, expanding into geographies, what are the sort of pieces that get you to that target?

Yes, probably a little bit of all of the above, but I'll kind of unpack it and then maybe Dennis can weigh in here as well. So we tried to make sure that we didn't just put the number out there because the number sounds good. And I think there needs to be a little bit of a recognition for us that part of actually having that set goal was not just for kind of the external community. It was really for also our employee base to mobilize the 5,000 employees around a common goal, a common vision and something that we could measure along the way. But when we did the total addressable market work, we looked at all of our existing businesses, adjacent businesses. And we honestly came out of that process and said, "We could come pretty close if we execute well." And we actually did this in kind of a market-neutral environment. If we execute really well, and we lean into some of the areas that we see big growth trends, we really believe that organically, we can make a significant imprint and significant traction towards that doubling. But we also knew we're going to need to think about M&A in different ways, either as accelerants to the existing businesses or new engines. We just made a recent hire about 60 days ago for a new executive to focus on new business ventures and new ideas. But I think what it did is it crystallized for us that maybe some of the capital allocation we had in place today both in terms of dollars and talent was maybe misaligned to the opportunity. So for example, last summer, we moved a lot of resource and talent out of a couple of our other businesses to the IMS business. So when we look at the overall trend of outsourcing for alternative investment managers, the growth we have today in that business line, the continued expansion in demand of services, we really just started to move more of our capital into areas where we thought we had a longer runway of success, but also some greater medium-term success. I don't know, what you would add to that?

No, we also -- say, we also, looking at the broader landscape, see an engagement with our larger clients or larger prospects or market participants that within those clients, there's enormous amount of opportunity for all that SEI brings to bear. And as a company, we're more or less, a little more vertical. So -- and Ryan has said this in other forms that clients know us for one thing. So it's the one thing we did for a bank was our wealth processing platform. But within a bank, there's more -- there's opportunity beyond that, and we weren't really executing beyond that in our adviser channel. Similarly, we were selling to a certain type of adviser that had a certain need and we were very good at meeting that need. So we've gone upmarket, though, to much larger advisers, who also have a more complete or a broader set of needs that we can meet with our capabilities. So we think there are -- and have high confidence, frankly, that there are firms out there that could expand significantly their relationship with SEI because of our capabilities. And when we talk about the revenue goals we set for ourselves, a lot of that will come from organic growth within the client base and just expanding the relationship with our capabilities. And it's change in that mindset within the company as well has been the past 12 to 18 months for our field people, our relationship people, our solutions people to be thinking about things on a much broader footing than maybe traditionally, they were just very vertical with a market solution, now we're broadening that.

I think that's a really good point. Just to add on that, Ben, we did a lot of -- spent a lot of time as you would expect right out of the gates out in the market with clients, with prospects, just other CEOs, other executives. And especially on the client meetings, and this was a global phenomenon, if you will, I kind of came away with 3 clear themes out of each of the meetings. One, they really trust and respect SEI. So we have a position in our client base where they have a tremendous amount of respect, reliance and trust in SEI. And that's something that is really difficult. It's a very difficult spot to attain. The second to Dennis' point, though, was the vast majority of the executives, only knew SEI for the business with which they interacted, had little to no understanding of the other business lines we had. And I have yet to do the executive meeting with an executive that wants to add the number of strategic partners they have. Like everybody is looking for just trying to figure out how do they rationalize, how do they leverage their existing partner ecosystem in more ways, so that kind of really excited us inside the organization. But as Dennis said, we've had to kind of rethink how we go to market, how do we engage that client base to make sure we can take advantage of that.

Great. Maybe sticking on the growth theme. I think you've indicated in the past, you're not the lowest cost options. So how do you think about pricing? Obviously, you get what you paid for. How do you think about how you're positioned? Is that like a lever to help sort of with the revenue growth target? Or is it more about those other organic and inorganic drivers?

Yes. So we stay really focused because I think a lot of people, as you would suspect, latch onto the doubling the revenue in 5 to 7 years. But we're also really clear that that's not revenue at any cost for us. And we focus really, I think, probably as equally, if not more, on the profitability and scalability of that revenue. So when we think about the types of clients we want to acquire moving forward, I think we have a kind of a clearer vision of what's a good fit for SEI, and we definitely like organizations that are in growth mode because I think when we step back and look at our best partnerships, whether it's an investment adviser, whether it's a bank, whether it's an investment manager, the best partners that we have are the ones that have really clear growth ambitions, but to see the value in leveraging our technology, operations or asset management so that they can deploy their capital in other areas. So I guess when we think about pricing, I kind of think about it less as kind of a point of entry and more about what's the sustainability of that over the long term because if we do a deal for the wrong price at the outset and our average client is 18 years tenure, that's probably going to be a slippery slope. Other thing -- I think we have a lot of conviction in the service offering, and it's something we're really proud of. So when I go out, especially when I'm up in New York a lot, seeing a lot of our IMS clients, and then it's usually the first thing out of their mouth around their experience with SEI is the quality of service. And then they're willing to pay a premium for that service because they get a different delivery experience. So I think we're just kind of careful to make sure we're not just chasing revenue for the sake of revenue.

It makes a lot of sense. And what about M&A? How does -- talk a little bit about how that factors into the target? And maybe Dennis, if you could kind of remind us here your overall capital allocation framework, how do you think about the best uses of cash?

Sure. So I mean, historically, as a firm, our allocation of capital, first and foremost, starts with reinvestment in the business. So we have a fairly consistent and high reinvestment rate of revenue back into the business. And that's allowed us, I think, over the past 30, 40 years to have kind of a sustaining steady business that is continuing to attack market opportunity, and it's allowed us to stay relevant with our clients. I mean our clients' businesses are changing every day. We're in very dynamic markets that are under their own set of pressures. And if we truly are going to be a key partner or a key supplier to our clients. Frankly, most of our clients could not operate without us because of the -- we're more of their backbone in terms of operations and technology infrastructure. That reinvestment rate is critical to them for them to see that, that they're with the right partner. So capital allocation starts there. And then it's excess capitals, how do we return it to shareholders has been historically, the use of dividend and more weighted towards stock buyback. More recently, over the past 6, 7 years, we began to do some M&A in acquiring firms that we felt had either really good assets, talented people and there were complementary businesses to some of our existing businesses were allowed us to accelerate or give us a slightly bigger footprint in certain market segments. So we've done those types of transactions over the past few years. And now it's -- our lens, and Ryan can speak to this, our lens is much broader than that now. So I don't know that capital allocation will -- won't continue to have those same elements, but the weightings might shift over time depending upon what M&A activity we want to pursuing. It's not M&A for M&A sake. That's not the idea. It's M&A from really almost through an investment lens. Is it a good investment for us? Is it going to enhance our growth footing? And is it going to help us move SEI and our clients forward.

And maybe Ryan, strategically, you mentioned accelerating growth or helping the growth or helping the clients. Is it -- do you think about it as tuck-ins with the specific capabilities or kind of growth accelerants or things that get you into new segments or enhance or broaden the suite of services. How do you think about that from a strategic perspective?

Yes. We think about it in a couple of ways. I mean I think we're much more proactive now than we were in the past. I think -- so when you look at when -- we did an acquisition earlier this year in the U.K. But we've been working more closely with our Board as well around how M&A fits into the overall growth strategy over the next 5 to 7 years. I think we have a better idea then of what we're not interested in. I don't think we're interested in a big reclamation project. If it was a stand-alone new business, it was just a solid new business, that was like a fifth engine or sixth engine to add to SEI. That's something that we're interested in, the things we're looking at now. We're also looking at areas that would accelerate our ability to exploit what we see as kind of larger trends. So when you think about the alternative space, whether that be something that would further our technology footprint, something that would improve our automation or investment processing or increase our asset management capabilities to some of those areas, when you look at the RIA space and the whole wealth management space. So I think we have certain buckets that we are much kind of think more specific around the types of assets we're looking for why those assets would fit into our overall ecosystem and what it would do to Dennis' point to really accelerate our capabilities moving forward. And then in some areas, we're actually just looking at would buying that stop us from having to build it and would we have something that we could just get to market sooner and maybe that's kind of more of your tuck-in question. So a little bit of all of the above, but I think we have more clarity around the size, the appetite. And we spend more time thinking about how would we integrate it because we are obviously very aware of the kind of uniqueness of SEI's culture. We don't have a long history of M&A. So we want to make sure that we're doing these things. We're doing them kind of intelligently and deliberately and making sure we're integrating them appropriately into the organization.

And over the past, I'd say, 9 months, the Street has really responded well to more clarity from us on what we're interested in. And we're seeing more ideas come our way. And some of them are good ideas. It may not be the right idea for us, but there's a lot more thought and thoughtfulness on the part of the Street coming to us in engagement, whereas a year ago or 18 months ago, these are my terms, it was more -- we were seeing more of the garage sale opportunities. So it was -- we tried to sell it on eBay. We tried to sell it directly to someone else. And now it's out on the curb with looking for somebody to adopt it, let alone, more or less. So we're seeing a lot less of that kind of activity and much more. I'd say things are coming to us with a lot more strategic thought and thoughtfulness about for us to engage in. And that's really been the message we've been trying to send to the market is bring us ideas. We're open for business.

Got it. So maybe one last question kind of on the growth algorithm. We've talked about the revenue growth in organic and inorganic. So maybe a little about the company's operating margin. So you're planning to double the revenues. What does that mean in terms of EPS growth? And maybe can you talk about sort of natural operating leverage in the business and in terms of like OpEx, what are your top priorities in terms of R&D? And you kind of indicated organic investments anywhere, in particular, is personnel, engineers, that sort of thing.

Yes. So we're going to remain really focused on growing EPS. So I mean I think as we believe and think about how we're going to add revenue, as I mentioned earlier, that will be revenue that has a lot of the same characteristics in terms of do we believe that's something that we could scale, we could drive leverage. You may not have that day 1. I think we also think about that kind of holistically across the company because if you look at a couple of the businesses and you take banking for people that are familiar with SEI, but banking right now is very low margins. We have a pretty clear plan in place to kind of systematically grow those margins. When you look at the Investment Advisor business, though, that's a business that as we deploy and sell more technology and administration only capabilities, we expect to see some really great revenue growth there, but that won't be at the same margin as we were selling asset management for years. So we're looking at it from a kind of a total picture of saying, "Hey, we really think we can grow a lot of these businesses, not all at the same rate. But somewhere we may grow the revenue, maybe not at historical margins. We have other businesses that as we see growing, we actually think that those margins will be much more accretive." So over -- when you look at the sum of the parts, we really still think the company will continue to grow EPS. That's what we're paid to do by our shareholders and investors, and that's not something we're going to take our eye off the ball.

I mean so -- to add to that, the approach is all revenue is not good revenue. And so it's very much about quality revenue and quality relationships and relationships that are sustaining and enhancing to, not only our clients because that's what's most important, but then ultimately to us in our operating models. We all know we're operating in markets that have their own pressures. So our clients in certain segments are under their own pricing pressure. They're under their own revenue pressures, that they're trying to figure out how to grow through that themselves. And certainly, their cost of operation, their cost of delivery has an impact on their profitability. So while we're dealing with -- we recognize that because we're in the same business. I mean one of the assets of SEI is we understand our clients really well because we are in the same markets, selling some more services. So we get that part of the equation. So it's really finding areas where we can add more value to our clients to help them grow to deal with that pricing pressure they're facing. Us focused on technology deployment, automation capabilities and scale operationally because one way you offset a little bit of the revenue squeeze is get more efficient in how you operate. So our kind of allocation of capital, if you will, in this space is, a, client facing, making sure we're delivering value to our clients through capabilities and through our service offerings. But at the same time, reinvesting some of that capital, in a way that I call kind of behind the curtain, kind of the stuff that's not really exciting. So it's not going to get a lot of attention. But if you don't do it, your system is going to clog, get clogged, and you're going to have a much difficult -- much more difficult time dropping that revenue to the bottom line. So it's making sure we have the right balance of client-facing service offering coupled with efficient and high-quality delivery on the back end. So we work hard to balance those 2 things. And sometimes you do get out of whack. Clients and market activity tends to have a much more attractive draw for capital, and it should in some respects because nothing happens unless you have a client. But on the back end, if you're not delivering efficiently, what's the point of the revenue if you can't get it to the bottom line. And we, as a firm of our history, have been very, very successful at producing profits. And I think, I believe, maybe in the past few years, profitability wasn't as attractive an attribute of a good company, but I think that has changed. That has kind of come back into vogue that at the end of the day, you do have to make money to sustain yourself.

Great. So maybe let's shift the conversation to some kind of your growth and how it factors in or is impacted by broader market conditions. So one of the headwinds you've talked about in the past sort of the impact of interest rates on defined benefit plans. So maybe to level set, can you kind of remind us what's the role SEI plays here? How big is the business? And how is the trend sort of evolving?

Sure. So our Institutional Investor business -- global business operates mainly in North America, the U.K. and some of the European markets and a segment of that business, about 1/3 of the business is defined benefit contribution plans. And if you rewind the clock 5 years or 6 years, it was -- that was probably more than half of the business. So we've done a good job, I think. And Paul Klauder, who ran that business for a number of years, did a great job of kind of diversifying that business across other institutional markets. But on the point of interest rates, when interest rates are really low, the funded status of defined benefit pension plans were under pressure. So therefore, the need for firms like us and solutions to help solve that business problem, sponsors of corporate sponsors, particularly of defined benefit plans had, we're a good solution for that. As interest rates have gone up and that funded status is closing or has closed, a lot of corporate sponsors really don't want to continue to offer a defined benefit pension, benefit to their employee base. And their goal -- their business goal is to shut it down, is to annuitize it and move away from it. So that market pressure is ever present. Now the good news is we've diversified, so we're less reliant on it, but it's still a headwind to the business as firms do go through that kind of planned shutdown phase. And it's -- to us, it's -- sometimes it's the pain of being successful. So when we started in this business many years ago, our objective was, stated objective to clients was, what's your business objective with this plan or this benefit offer. And our job is to help you achieve that objective. Well, for many clients, it was, close the funded status, so in a way that we don't have to write a big check to do so. So we don't have a big capital outlay so we can shut it down. So to the extent we helped our clients get there. Now we're -- we have a headwind as a result of that. But that's -- if we're not in business to solve our clients' problems, I don't know what we're in business to do.

It's a high-quality problem to have. What about other recent trends you're kind of seeing thinking about things like sales cycle, elongations, anything else to sort of kind of topical that may be more kind of macro impacted that, I don't know, could be poised to change if things improve, deteriorate going into next year?

I don't think we've seen any big, huge change to kind of sales cycle. I think a couple of trends we've definitely seen in the market, which we touched on a little bit earlier, but I think you recognize -- if you look a couple of different segments, the recognition from a lot of our banking clients, banking prospects around the importance of wealth and how that could be a diversifier for them moving forward if they're not in that business, how do they actually get in that business, how do they amplify that business? That's definitely ratcheted up in the last 12 months. When you look at the overall -- but when you look at the alternative space in the investment management space, I think the appetite for outsourcing grows daily. One of the things that I think was maybe an unintended outcome of COVID with a lot of the firms that were in-sourcers and historically said that they would never outsource. That tune has changed kind of dramatically because they can't get the talent. And we hear that directly from some of the CFOs, the CEOs, so those trends are things that we're definitely leaning into because that -- we're well positioned for that. But that's not one that I think is going to change moving forward. It's not just going to magically reverse direction. And then I think one of the overall trends that have been talked about in the last few years is this whole idea around the growth of the RIA, where that's going to kind of end breakaways from broker-dealers, but how do firms respond to that. I don't know if that's kind of really kind of shaking itself out yet because there's still a lot of consolidation in that market, a lot of change, but it's definitely an area that we're right in the center of that and it's with a different offering, but it's definitely a trend that I think is going to be really impactful over the next kind of 3 to 5 years.

Great. I'd love if you could maybe somewhat selfishly, but we have -- we cover a lot of alternative asset managers and a lot of them here as well. Could you maybe click into that theme a little bit more, talk about what you're doing there, what the appetite of your customers is to kind of get deeper into alternatives?

Yes. So when you look at our existing [ ALPS ] client base, I think one of the things that we benefit from, we talked about this earlier, is around our service offering. So we continue to see, I think, a pretty significant expansion in our client footprint. As clients launch new funds, we tend to -- they actually kind of be working with SEI on the overall structure and construction of those funds. Especially in areas like private credit, real estate, we do really well, CITs. So I think on the alternative asset manager side, they're looking at how do they expand their suite of products. So I think one of the trends is a lot of those firms, whether either through acquisition or their own organic growth, are trying to become more of a one-stop shop for their client base. So we're benefiting from some of that in some of the acquisition space, but also as firms launch new funds. On the traditional side, I think there's kind of a tale of 2 cities there. There are some firms that are just trying to figure out what the future looks like for them, and others that are really leaning into how do they expand their product suite. We've been working with a lot of our traditional asset managers, both -- how do they change some of their product types? I mentioned earlier, CITs, tremendous amount of momentum, but some of our traditional investment managers are saying, how can we help them actually get into the [ ALPS ] business? If they have the engineering talent, they have the investment talent, we have all the infrastructure to get those funds set up to do the administration, to give them the technology, that puts us in a really, really good spot. I mean that's a business that we're just really excited about the current and future growth just because of the client base we have, the growth trajectory of that client base, and I think the overall changes in the market position us well if we stay really attentive to the needs of the existing clients and the prospects.

Got it. Very helpful. So maybe let's talk a little bit about some of your newer ventures. So can you talk a bit about SEI Sphere and what sort of early traction you're seeing there?

Yes. So just for the room, SEI Sphere is a cybersecurity managed service offering. I think one of the kind of historical tenets of SEI is things that we do for ourselves. Once that has scale, we then look out and see would that have value in the market as a platform, as a service. So we've been protecting client data, protecting our own data for over 50 years, and we definitely started to see a demand, especially in the kind of the small to midsized enterprises in the wealth management arena for more outsourced services around cyber, remote e-mail protection, data protection. So I would say 2 things there, Ben. We're really excited about the early adoption from, and we consciously decided to go to new names, not existing clients first. So a few years ago when we launched the business 2 years ago, we thought it was better to see if the value proposition could stand on its own 2 feet. And could we get non-SEI clients to buy SEI Sphere as opposed to bundling in with some of our existing services. But I think when we look at that business now, we need to accelerate client acquisition. So when we're winning clients, one thing that is really interesting and exciting is those clients are consuming more and more services. So a few of the existing original Sphere clients have come back, and we've been helping them with cloud migration or other professional services in the IT space. I don't think we're getting enough client acquisition traction because we're going to need -- they're not huge deals, so we're going to need a bigger base. And as Dennis mentioned earlier, that's another area where we think about M&A as an accelerant to maybe we go and buy a larger organization and put Sphere inside of that or do we bring things that are complementary services to add on and make that a more robust platform. So definitely excited about the traction, excited about the response and definitely the organic growth of the existing clients buying more services, but we need more clients in that business.

And where else are you investing? What are your other sort of ventures that you think have the potential to turn out to be quite promising? And maybe kind of going back to your longer term or your medium-term growth targets, how important are newer ventures versus the stuff we talked about the organic growth, acquisition and that sort of things?

We need new -- we definitely need new growth engines. So I think a couple of areas, and we're kind of repeating certain themes, but we have a couple of ideas and investments underway in the alternative space. So if you look out into the market and you think about the demand for intermediaries to have more access to ALPS, the demand for alternative investment managers to increase their distribution. We see our footprint on both sides there is pretty significant, and our knowledge and capability about technology and operations, we think we can facilitate more of that distribution and platform. We have spent a lot of time over the last 5 or 6 years, really investing in unbundling some of our capabilities so that some of the technology, especially on the front office side, both in the banking space and the investment adviser space, definitely resonates and has a lot of value, but some firms don't want to go through the process of moving custodians or changing investment processing, but they see a lot of value in some of our capabilities. So that's another area that we've been investing, not to go out just as a single product, but to be able to allow us to avail some of those capabilities to clients so that they can start really engaging with SEI and experience SEI without a full stack transformation.

And then within some of our core businesses, there are, I'd say, newer elements that are opening up additional market segments, in our banking segment. And this has gotten some attention, but it's not as well understood at this point, but U.S. Bank is converting and is kind of halfway through the conversion of their entire book of business on the trust and custody side, over to SWP, our new platform, as a technology-only consumer of our capabilities. And it's an event in the market that a lot of other firms are looking at and watching closely that have similar books of business are large operators. They want to retain operations, but they need to upgrade their technology stack because they're running their business today on technology that's 25, 30, 40, even 40 years old. So that's an event that we've been investing in. So we've been investing in that U.S. bank relationship and getting that in place. And the good news is we're well along on the implementation phase. The technology is delivered. They're running a portion of their business on that technology. And they'll continue to convert books of business over the next 12 to 18 months. But other bigger players are looking at that. And it's kind of one of these investments that's been embedded in the overarching SWP or technology spend that's now starting to see the sun here in terms of opportunity. But we know those types of relationships are a long time in establishing. But once you establish them, they are high, as we learn in school that total value of a client while they are highly valuable clients long term financially. That's one example within a business. Ryan touched on this large RIA space within the adviser business. It's a new segment of the market for us. We've gone upmarket. We've had success. We know it'll take some additional investment there because the needs are more expanded. And the alternative -- access to alternatives is one of those areas of need, but that will open up a whole new channel for us. So there's other investments going on that we wouldn't necessarily put in the category of a new business but they are new relative to the businesses we're operating. We also know from experience in any business, sure, you can have a launch of product and it gets struck by lightning and it accelerates very rapidly. But as we look at our business and look out most of our growth over the next 5 years is going to come from our established operating businesses. But we also know that when we get to year 3 or year 4 that time horizon, we want other propellants kicking in and making more significant contributions to growth because our job is not to have a great SEI in '24. That is our job. But our job is really to have a great SEI in 2030. And the only way you do that is to be ahead on the investment spectrum and start to build businesses that are going to be contributors down the road. And they all won't be home runs. We also know that from experience that, which is why Ryan mentioned, we hired an executive to lead kind of new business initiatives for the company, and that's partly to be a little more expansive in what we're doing. Get more, I call, dots on the bottom of the business curve kind of started because not all of them will be successful.

Dennis, you talked a little bit about SWP. Can you maybe dig into that a little bit more, talk about the platform, what does it look like in terms of the upgrade from its predecessor? What does it enable you to do once a new client is sort of up and running on that platform, what's the opportunity like there?

Yes. I mean, it's hard to call it new because it's been around for a little while now. But at its core, it was a platform designed for wealth management. So prior to that, SEIs, our core technology platform was a trust accounting system, which was designed for trust departments. It did wealth processing, and we used that platform very successfully in our adviser business. But it was a trust accounting system, and it was not a global system. So a single currency, it didn't really integrate well globally. SWP is a truly global wealth management system. So all account types can operate on it effectively, including trust accounts. So it has embedded in it the principal and interest accounting requirements of trust accounts, but it's much more oriented around wealth management, which means any entity that is in the wealth management business could operate their business on SWP. So in the U.K., which is where Ryan really helped us get that business started there. Most of the clients in the U.K. are -- we only -- I don't even know if we have any bank client in the U.K. at this point on SWP. They're all investment management firms. They're all private wealth firms, either regional or national advisory firms, because the orientation of that platform was to that broader market, and it's global. So we run very complex books of business on that platform. That's probably more pertinent outside the U.S. than inside the U.S., although the bigger banks here do have pockets of business that are global. So it will help them [ solve ] that problem and whereas today, they might be running on a more fragmented technology stack. Well, this allows them to consolidate that technology stack down to a single platform.

On a tactical basis, Ben, and I know we're running out of time. But like if you think about the Investment Advisor business, Dennis said, that's been all on SWP for 4 years now. We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing in the RIA space with an administration only solution without SWP, the scale that, that has in terms of rebalancing the modern architecture that we have, it's very cloud native, it's API-enabled so the ability to kind of integrate other third parties, the ability for us to kind of deploy our services in more modular ways. So as Dennis mentioned, I think when you think about SWP and say, when the U.S. bank conversion is done, we now have a totally different operating model. We have 1 million accounts a day running every day. We have more breadth of capabilities for that kind of larger investment manager, wealth manager in the RIA space. So I think it really has opened up new avenues for us, not just with existing clients and also a way for us to compete and kind of engage a whole different suite of prospects. And we have to turn that into real traction in revenue, but it's positioned us really well.

And I would argue, we're one of the few not only modern technology stack in the investment processing, wealth processing space. And again, it's one of the things kind of behind the curtain. We're all used to being in front of the curtain, and we hit a button and magic happens. Well, it's not really magic. There's a lot of work and investment kind of behind the curtain. And we've upgraded, and we -- it was a long march, and we bit the bullet, and that's behind us now. So if you're looking to engage in SEI, now it's a good time because you don't have to -- didn't have to suffer for the long decade [ worth ] of new technology build, but we did.

We did.

All right. Well, gentlemen, we're just about out of time. We'll leave it here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, everyone, for coming.