SEI Investments Company (SEIC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. So why don't we go ahead and get started? My name is Jeff Schmitt. I cover wealth tech stocks here at William Blair. And I'd like to introduce SEI Investments. They provide outsourced technology and investment solutions to banks, financial institutions, asset managers. They manage and service $1.6 trillion of client assets now. We have with us today, Sean Denham, he's the CFO. Thanks for joining us, Sean. He'll discuss the business. But before we begin, I'd like to point you to our website, williamblair.com, just for a list of research disclosures and any potential conflicts of interest. So with that, I will turn it over to Sean.

Thanks, Jeff. So nice to be with everyone today. We had some early meetings today. We're only here kind of onsite today. And so we had a few investor meetings, but really great to be with all of you today. Jeff actually did a really nice job of the overview. Are there any questions? No, I'm joking. So we actually have a really unique presentation for you today. We are going to actually go through a history of SEI. But the reason why we're going to do that is I think it really paints a really nice context of where we are today, and I think you're going to get actually a lot out of this. Brad, do you have the clicker? Okay. Great. So the most common question that my parents ask me a lot is, what does SEI do? And we get that from investors and analysts all the time, especially for folks that don't cover us. We can be confusing. I've had some analysts that were starting to think about covering us and have had read our 10-K. One individual said, "Hey, Sean, I've read your 10-K 6 times. Can you help me understand in a nutshell kind of what you do?" And so we can be somewhat complex because we're really the only company in the world that really plays across all these spaces up there. So we have really 2 core offerings. The first is our technology and operations group, and you'll see that in the blue up there. These are usually paired together. And I would say in a very, very high level, they're always paired together. There are times we may sell our tech platform on a stand-alone basis. But in general, they are always paired together. The second is our asset management piece right there. And then we live right -- currently, we live in 4 divisions. We live in our IMS space. 70% of our revenue from IMS, our investment manager space is in the alternative managers group. And essentially, the core of that is our fund administration. Number two is private banking. So private banking is where SEI was founded. I'm going to go into that in a little more detail here in a bit. But essentially, what our private banking does is investment processing in tech, our SWP platform, which we'll unpack here in a bit. And plus, we have asset management where we see a really large opportunity. We're not selling as much there as I think we can. The third is our institutional investors business. Essentially, that's outsourced CIO. So think DB plans. So we were one of the originals back in the '90s where we stood up an OCIO practice really when no one else was doing that. We claim to be -- before my time, I was graduating college in '94, but we claim to be the first organization that started OCIO. So now we're actually doing a lot more on the co-CIO and the OCIO business. So that's primarily -- and historically been corporate DB plans, but we're expanding that group as well. And then the last, but not least is our investment adviser space. So we do a full suite of solutions there from tech to custody and then building model portfolios and products. Historically, we've played in the smaller adviser space there, but we're now targeting larger RIAs. I was neglect to introduce 2 of my colleagues here today. So Brad Burke is with us. Brad leads our IR department and Michael Lane is with us as well. Michael leads asset management. And Michael recently came over from BlackRock. Michael has been with us for about 9 months. Okay. So the fun part, I am going to go through in about 10 minutes the history of SEI. And again, when people think about a history, people want to yawn, but I really think you're going to get a lot out of these next 10 minutes. So we were actually founded in 1968 by a gentleman by the name of Al West. Al is and was a luminary in this space. So our first client was Wells Fargo. So we started as a private banking -- kind of in the private banking space. So in 1974, we brought on our -- kind of our largest premier client, Wells Fargo. They are still a client today. SEI went public in '81. And through the first 20 years, we actually had some really great success. If you invested $100 at the IPO, that grew to $16,000 by 2,000. So a really nice return on that investment. Some of the early success drivers of the business. So again, we started really in the private banking space. We were a leading provider of accounting and reporting for bank trust departments. That's where we -- where Al cut his teeth. As the ' 80s progressed, there was a need. So as these banks were creating liquidity, they had come to us. We became really a trusted provider of these banks. And they said, "Hey, could you help us with some -- with that liquidity?" And we started creating liquidity funds for those banking clients. It was incredibly well received. As the '80s kind of progressed, we said, well, we've been doing this fairly successful. Can we move into some other markets? And we did that throughout the '80s, but really primarily in the banking space. Things really started getting exciting in the '90s. And so in the '90s, you'll see there, we started -- we weren't just in the U.S. We moved into Canada. We actually moved into Europe. And we organically created 3 new offerings. And those 3 offerings were really kind of the hallmark of who we are today. About 90% of our revenue or so comes from institutional investors. Again, that's really our OCIO business. We created our investment advisers group and then investment managers, and we'll unpack those a little more. And then also what we did in the '90s, and we may argue this was the greatest investment in the United States of America. So in 1994, we made a $1 million investment to seed a company called LSV. It's probably not the greatest investment in the history of the U.S. But -- so that investment has been an incredible return for the organization. So I think $1 million investment, we earn to the bottom line, about $2 million a week from that investment in 1994. So it really was a home run, and we own about 38%, 39% of that JV with LSV. Okay. So it's not all good news. So in the 2000s, we were really debating are we a tech company? Are we a financial company? And if you remember in the 2000s, in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst. And as a technology company, we were affected, and you'll see the drop there. Well, on top of that, later in the '90s, we had the financial crisis. So for being a tech company and a financial company in the 2000s -- early 2000 -- 2000 to 2010, it wasn't great. And however, the good news there is $100 investment in 2001 resulted in a $115 investment at the end of the -- or early 2000s. So not great, but not terrible when you're thinking about the dot-com bubble and also the financial crisis. So as we move out of the early 2000s into the 2010 through 2020, we kind of refer that as the hangover period. So we've had really great success at this point. We've launched 3 great new businesses. We had really great returns early as we launched those businesses in the '90s. We talked about what happened in the early 2000s. As we moved into kind of the mid-2015 time frame, to be honest, SEI got a little bit back on their heels. And competition grew. I think we were a little bit slow to adapt. Things were occurring. We were -- in our asset management business, we were really heavily indexed to active, and there was a huge shift from active to passive. As we know, we're still experiencing that. And really, we did not adapt. We also spent a lot of time internally at SEI talking about why we weren't winning. And we would put a period at the end of that conversation. We would put a period at the end of the conversation to explain why we were losing. As opposed to having a comment and saying, yes, we were losing, but why, what were we doing about that? So a lot of time not on greenfield or new logos and trying to win. We spent a lot of time with our sales team focused on retention. So not great. What else was happening at SEI? So our legacy banking platform is something to this day, part of the business was something called TRUST 3000. Well, TRUST 3000 was built on the back of COBOL. Anyone knows COBOL, anyone know that. So very few people know COBOL today and not a lot of development being done on COBOL. I think that was built like in the '50s and '60s. So we made a shift and decided to build our own custody platform, which is our custody platform today, SEI Wealth platform, which is known by SWP. That was built off of C++ and during this time frame, we had a budget, we had a time frame to build this, and it took a lot more money, a lot more money than ever expected, and it took a lot more time than it was ever expected to build. So that build versus buy model, SEI historically has been a builder of technology, not a buyer of technology. And SWP was really the hallmark for that. So the good news there -- well, the one thing I'd add there on top of kind of being on our heels, we really became risk averse. I think Al West, who truly was an entrepreneur at his heart, if you have ever been to campus, we were -- our campus is very, very, very, very unique. No offices, everything open concept. I think was kind of -- if you know Al, he was that entrepreneur. As we're in this period, this hangover period, we really became risk averse. So Al is creating 3 new businesses because he saw an opportunity in the marketplace in the '90s, really became a little more risk adverse, incredibly siloed very vertically led -- pure vertically led organization and again, focus on retention. So there is some good news here. So as we started graduating, Al started the business in '68, went public in '81. Al decided that he was about to turn the reins over to someone new. So having the second CEO in the history of SEI after founder led. So in 2022, SEI announced the appointment of Ryan Hicke as CEO. Actually, this past Monday was Ryan's 3-year anniversary as CEO. Al remained the Board Chair, and he's still the Board Chair today, just was reelected by proxy last week or 2 weeks ago. So when there's a transition from founder-led organizations to kind of that second level of leadership and new leadership, generally, what happens, especially as a relatively young CEO, 44-year-old CEO, there's 2 things that happen. A question arises whether that CEO, that founder is really going to step down or they're really going to be pulling the strings from behind? And will that new 44-year-old CEO play it safe. That's usually sometimes how it goes. The good news is SEI did neither of those and Ryan did not play it safe. Ryan has taken a very bold approach over the last 3 years. And that's really been evidenced, I think, over the last 12 months, but even broader than that. So what you're seeing over here is kind of the growth trajectory of SEI share price since Ryan has taken over. We were really flat. We were kind of in that $50, $60 range for probably 15 years after really healthy growth, again from '81 to kind of 2000. SEI has 5,200 employees about. We have another 2,000 consultants. Ryan takes over and made some really bold moves. But it's really difficult, as you all know, to move a large oil tanker very, very quickly. So it has taken a little bit of time. So what Ryan did and what I give Ryan a tremendous amount of credit for, Ryan started as an intern at SEI and became CEO at 44 years old, really challenging, really challenging. I wonder myself if I would have had the ability to do this. But Ryan knew he needed some -- a kind of new leadership team. He kind of recognized the stagnation of SEI over the last 15 years or so. By the way, when we moved into Europe in the '90s, you saw that on one of the previous slides. Actually, Ryan as 25, 26 years old, went over and ran Europe for about 12 years or so. But Ryan knew he needed an outside-in lens. And what you're seeing up here is really a complete change of the leadership team. You'll see Phil McCabe up there. He's been in his role for 7 years. He's been kind of a lifer. But outside of that, for the most part, the leadership team has completely changed over. Sanjay -- the first thing Ryan did on day 1 as CEO was name Sanjay Sharma, who is our Chief Technology Officer to take over private banking. And if you know anything about the company where private banking was on that date in 2022, private banking was really, really struggling. We were flat to negative margins. We had negative sales events. All the questions from the analysts and investors were, how are you going to get private banking back on its feet? And Sanjay did that. And we can talk about maybe that in some of the Q&A. What he also did, really genius move. He found this new CFO to come in place and replace Dennis McGonigle, I'm joking. So I came in about 15 months ago and took over as CFO. A few months ago, also took over the Chief Operating Officer role. We had mentioned SEI's slow move from active to passive in our asset management space. So we went into the market and found Michael Lane. Michael Lane is here -- and Michael's background is BlackRock. And so when we talk about the move from SEI from active to passive, what did you run in the wealth department? So iShares. So Michael spent a decade leading the iShares practice over at BlackRock. So you'll see some of the changes. [indiscernible] here a long time. She took over our Family Office services business. We bought that for $80 million. We sold it recently for $120 million, a really kind of stagnating business for the most part, Sandy has really helped to turn that around. We brought in Sneha Shah. Sneha is kind of a visionary and helps us see where financial services are moving not today, but from 5 to 10 years from now. So she leads our new business ventures. She helps us think about things around automation and AI and the like. So how are we doing? So here are the numbers. So I think the good news is we've done pretty well under Ryan's leadership. Sales events are up 125% over the last few years. Margins are up 300 basis points. Our earnings per share was up 55% and the share price is up 46%. So things have gone fairly well under Ryan's leadership. So in that 2015 to 2020 time frame, kind of stagnating. Ryan comes on. We've had -- we've made a lot of advancements. We've moved -- what I think Ryan has done better than anything. We've now put a comma at the end of all of our sentences. So if there is anything going on in the organization, we need to shift, we're making those shifts, and we're making those bold moves. It also has the company really -- really in front of the market right now. So even thinking about my move to COO, that wasn't for me, that was for Ryan. So Ryan is in front of all of our clients. He's in front of the market. He's in front of our people. And I think that alone is kind of a test, and I know that's hard to feel, but it really has been a mindset shift. And we can talk about probably 5 or 6 things on the next slide of where our attention is focused. So these are really the drivers of where we believe the company is going. Number one, the expansion of asset management and the focus there. So we've historically played in the smaller adviser space there, the independent broker-dealers. And with Michael coming on board, not dissimilar, not dissimilar what Sanjay has done over the last 3 years. I liken them very similarly. So when Sanjay took over the private banking, again, very -- kind of the hallmark and what SEI was built upon, what Sanjay did in those early days is he took a look at the overall business. He took a look at the business, so we were overspending, our retention rates were low. We had a very large kind of the largest of the large banks. And Sanjay looked at the total addressable market and said, I think we need to shift. And we've done that very, very successfully. But he ran the business. He ran the business differently, and you've seen incredible margin improvement from really 0 mark to historical 25%, 30% margins again. Michael is doing really the same thing. Michael has been in the seat for the last 9 months, 10 months now, and he's been taking it overall look at the business, and he's actually moving us upmarket, where Sanjay decided to go downmarket into the community and retail bank space, Michael is moving us upmarket to kind of the large RIA market. And there's many other things. And Michael is here sitting in the front row, and we can have some Q&A with him if interested. Even in that asset management space, we recently had a really nice win. And some people have asked us why we made a press release on Summit Wealth. So Summit Wealth, we announced over the last month or so. Summit Wealth is a breakout RIA away from Commonwealth. Commonwealth was recently acquired by LPL. But that win came prior to the LPL acquisition of Commonwealth. And there was a reason why we won that. So what we do really well, and actually, we're very unique in the marketplace. We play across the entire life cycle of asset management. And if you want to unpack that, I'm just being careful of time here, we can do that. So what we're doing there, we're expanding our products, our distribution, our talent, Michael is looking very similar to what Ryan did. What is the talent we need to continue to move that business forward. And then we're capitalizing on the alt momentum. So 70% of our business in our IMS business is focused on alt, specifically in private credit. Whether we're lucky or good, we're at a really smart time right now. We're really well positioned in the alt space. If you know our business at all, the IMS business is what some analysts and investors would call the golden child right now of SEI. And the alts area for our IMS business really positions us well. And then on top of that, as we think about asset management and the move to retail alts, Michael is positioning the business there around asset management. So as we move into the larger RIAs, those larger RIAs have much more sophisticated investors and they're demanding alts. And so we are playing a role there. Also in our Access platform. So our Access platform competes with iCapital and [indiscernible]. So when you think about the overall ecosystem, the overall ecosystem of asset managers, there's really not a firm that looks like us. Number three, operational excellence. We've done a really great job of maintaining cost. And so as we've moved, which is kind of on #4 there, the enterprise mindset, we have made a full 90-degree shift from a vertical strategy to a horizontal strategy. That makes to be okay, a lot of companies do that, but it's actually really changing the way we go to market and the way we think. But from an operational excellence, hard look at where we're spending our money, how we think about cost management wasn't -- that discipline was not necessarily there -- it was not there. So living inside verticals, really those leaders could almost do whatever they want, whenever they wanted kind of under -- before Ryan took over, now much more disciplined around automation, how we're thinking about automation, AI and offshoring. Still really early stages there in the 9-inning baseball game. We're probably in the second or third inning when we think about AI automation. We just opened up an offshore facility in India. One of the most shocking things, I think, that I've experienced when I came to SEI is that we didn't have an offshore presence. So we had consultants offshore, but we didn't actually have our own employee base anywhere from a talent standpoint, from a cost or salary arbitrage. So in April or May this year, we opened up a shared services center in India. So that's on operational excellence. So enterprise mind shift. I had mentioned the shift from vertical to a horizontal strategy. So again, that sounds pretty basic. And not that a vertical or horizontal is one is better than other, but where we are in our life cycle, the enterprise mindset shift has an incredibly impactful. In the mid -- in that 2015 to 2020 time frame, living in the verticals, those were almost autonomous businesses. And if you think about how we play across the financial services spectrum, incredibly important that we're working together. So as an example, recently, in December, we won a very large client in Europe called Trinity, it was Close Brothers. Historically, we would have gone with an offering of selling our SWP or custody platform. The enterprise mind shift of how we bring asset management, professional services, cybersecurity was a true testament of a very large win, and that's why we won. We brought the entire organization to bear. We were not doing that. We were not doing that in those 2015 to 2022 time frame. So that's been a huge shift in the organizational philosophy. And then one that is really near and dear to my heart is capital allocation. So we have an unbelievably strong balance sheet. We have no debt. I think historically, SEI has worn no debt as a badge of honor. I think analysts and investors would say it's probably not the best strategy. So we have a negative 1 leverage model today. I think analysts and investors would say, I think you can take on a little more risk than that. And so you'll see up there how we have historically kind of redeployed or provided capital back to our shareholders. So we are providing dividends. We do a significant amount of stock buyback, which we will continue to do. But as we think about inorganic growth, we've talked -- I've talked publicly, Ryan's talked publicly about where we believe we should be from an inorganic growth standpoint. We've talked about potentially doing something on the advice side with an RIA here in the U.S. We've also talked about how maybe we expand our IMS business in Europe through maybe an acquisition or something along those lines in Europe. So European fund admin, maybe somewhere in the RIA space here in the U.S. is how we're thinking about capital and capital deployment, but it's not just here for shareholders. It's actually how we're deploying capital internally. So again, historically, we -- I wouldn't say we were super disciplined in the way we're even deploying our capital from an R&D standpoint. So we put rigors in place, how we think about really every capital deployment and allocation is a focus on how do we maximize return to shareholders in that enterprise value. So we have an EBA committee now where any new investment that comes through, we're talking at the leadership team and really looking at what that return is. And that, for the most part, we have a few minutes left and wanted to keep a few minutes for Q&A.

[indiscernible]

So I won't say the -- well, I wouldn't say we have holes to fill. What I would say is where the opportunities lie. And where Ryan and I are most excited is actually asset management. And having Michael come on board, that's really where the opportunity lies for us. IMS is going to continue to grow at a very, very healthy rate. We're, again, really well positioned to private credit in that space. We are -- I would argue we are #1 in the world in that space. Private banking is back on track. We have an incredibly robust pipeline in private banking, really in the community and regional bank space. We have an opportunity there in asset management. But what really excites us when we turn on the third engine of asset management that is when we're going to have something very, very special. So that's where the opportunity lies, and that's where bringing Michael Lane in from BlackRock reimagining the asset management space, that's the opportunity. I wouldn't say we have holes, but we have opportunity there.

I would say we have holes within asset management [indiscernible].

[indiscernible].

We are. We are open to -- yes. I don't think we're going to fundamentally change the balance sheet, but having a negative 1 leverage, but we're going to do it. We're not going to do it for leverage sake. We're not going to move from negative. But we're not afraid of taking on debt where historically, again, we've kind of had that badge of honor with no debt. So we're open to it. We're not afraid of it.

What's the best way to think about how stock buybacks [indiscernible] over the next few years?

In terms of -- say more.

[indiscernible].

So I mean, in the last 2 quarters -- I think in the last 2 quarters. I mean we bought back $450 million of stock just in the last 2 quarters, where I think historically, maybe for the year, we were around $300 million. I think that's a really great use of capital of just kind of with $700 million, $800 million of cash sitting on the balance sheet earning 4% to 5%. We will continue to be very, very aggressive. I can't give you -- I'm not sure what that number would be. I get that question a lot. Will we stay with the same velocity of buyback over the last 2 quarters that we have? It's really about cash management. So obviously, I'm looking at cash with my treasurer on a monthly basis on future cash needs, inorganic growth strategy. All of that just comes into mix. But you can expect us to continue to be aggressive with buyback.

All right. We're coming up on time. So the breakouts are in [indiscernible], and thank you, Sean.

Thank you. Thank you all.