SEI Investments Company ($SEIC)

Ahead and get started here, everyone. Good afternoon, and thank you for coming. My name is Jeff Schmitt. I cover wealth management and capital market stocks here at William Blair. I would like to introduce SEI Investments. They provide outsourced technology and investment solutions to banks, financial advisers and asset managers. We're pleased to have with us Sean Denham. He is the CFO and COO of the company. He'll discuss the business. So thank you, Sean, for joining us. And then just one quick note, just go to our website williamblair.com for a complete list of disclosures. So with that, I will turn it to you, Sean.

Thank you, Jeff. Is this -- can you hear -- yes hear me okay? Great. So nice to see everyone. I recognize a lot of faces, really excited for the faces I don't know. I've been in the chair -- in this chair for a little over 2 years now, having a lot of different investor and analyst conversations. And the thing I get the most about individuals that are considering new coverage or potentially thinking about investing in SEI is, "man, you guys are really complex and difficult company to understand." I disagree. We do have 4 different -- we have 4 segments right now. But what I find is the investors or the analysts that really covers well and make the effort to really dive down and do the research and have the conversations with us all agree, we're actually not that complex of a company. There's many more complex companies out there than us. I think the struggle historically for folks that are looking at us is that there's not one market comp, which can be a struggle. So what I'm going to do today is walk through for those who don't know us, are 4 different businesses. There is a lot of overlap. There's a lot of synergies across the businesses. So I will start there. So first off, our investment manager services business, or our IMS business, is our largest business. It's our fastest-growing. We have really strong margins. But really what that business does is fund administration for traditional and alternative investment managers. Again, really strong, great growth rates, we'll unpack some of the financials in each of these businesses in a moment. But we have a lot of tailwinds in the business right now, including thinking about in-sourcer, classic [indiscernible] in-sourcers of fund administration that have moved to an outsourced model, and we are their first phone call. Our second business is our private banking business. This is SEI's legacy business. We've been in operations for 58 years. This is the business Al West founded the company on. We provide in our private banking business, front office, middle office and back office technology through our SWP platform. So our SEI Wealth platform and outsourcing operations to the wealth management arms of banks. Third is our institutional investors business. That is essentially an outsourced CIO business for primarily endowments and foundations. We also performed a lot of work around defined benefit plans. So CIO services around benefit plans and pension schemes. And fourth is our Investment Advisors business. So that's a full-service platform for investment advisers. We used to call that our TAM business, so our turnkey asset management platform, but we've really stopped using that term because some of the things we've done have kind of outweighed and have gone beyond a classic [indiscernible] tamp business. And included in the investment business is the acquisition we made back in December of 2025, so just a few months ago of Stratos. Stratos was -- or is a $450 million initial acquisition, where we took a majority stake in that business. That is an RIA platform, which has been an incredibly strong cultural fit. Performance has been good and has met our expectations through one quarter. We see a lot of synergies between our classic or historical asset management business, including our custody platform where we're really, really excited about. So that's at the highest level of where SEI sits. And again, you'll see there are some of our clients there, and you'll see our competitors. And what you'll notice is there's not really 1 competitor that sits across all 4 of those business units or segments, which again, leads to sometimes the term, hey, you're really difficult to comp in the market and at times difficult to understand. But again, I think if you look at the individual businesses, you'll see that we're actually not to complex to understand. Okay. Let's talk about performance for a moment. So we've had incredibly strong performance over the last 4 years. And that really starts with in 2022 when we announced Ryan Hicke as our new CEO. Ryan is the second CEO in SEI history after the founder, Al West, turned over the reins to Ryan after a great 50-year run by Al created something really beautiful in SEI, but the performance has been outstanding really across all 4 of our key indicators. So you'll see revenue growth there. You'll see our huge growth in net sales events. We can unpack that a little bit as we go into the performance of each of the business. You can see the vast improvement in our margins and our EPS growth. So we're really, really proud of what we've accomplished over the last 4 years, I think prior, and I was on stage here a year ago. And last year, we talked about the history of SEI from the original concept by Al all the way through where we were in 2025, now we're in 2026, but we've had really great momentum over the last 4 years. A lot of that credit goes to Ryan, his vision as CEO. We feel differently at SEI today than we probably did 4 or 5 years ago. There's been a massive tone change. We have certain leaders of the business, Phil McCabe in our IMS business is legacy SEI; Sanjay Sharma, who was our Chief Technology Officer, Ryan, on his very first day as CEO, named Sanjay as the Head of Private Banking. We brought Michael Lane in from the outside. Michael is ex BlackRock, who led the iShares program for many years at BlackRock. I came from the outside. And so what you'll -- what may be a trend you see is that bring some new outside-in thinking really has done wonders for SEI. I often say one of the greatest strengths of SEI has been over the last 50-some years is that no one ever leaves. It's a really strong culture and people love working at SEI. I think one of the weaknesses of SEI is that nobody ever left SEI. So I think bringing in some of that outside in and blending that with the current leadership team that's been there for a while has been a really good recipe. And what Ryan does really well is leading the executive team and working well with the Board, bringing in different thinking and what we have done over the last couple of years is move and I think some of the results can be characterized in this way. We've really shifted the business from a horizontal model -- I'm sorry, from a vertical model to a horizontal model. So SEI prior to probably 2 years ago, those 4 business units represented here. They were almost run as 4 completely distinct businesses with very low synergies across the business. So think about our IMS business having a complete opportunity of that leadership team to run their complete tech stack, complete the way they think about marketing, the way they set compensation. Those were really truly 4 distinct companies. And moving from a vertical to a horizontal model has really, really served us well. And so I think if Ryan was sitting up here, he would say that the executive team is operating more cohesively than we have in a few decades. And I think some of that results in what you see here. So the next question, which is the obvious question is, can we continue the great results that we've been enjoying? And I think the answer to that is yes. I think that we're coming off -- Q1 was our greatest quarter in SEI history. Our largest sales event quarter, our largest earnings per share quarter. Margins have improved dramatically. So we're really well positioned to continue that momentum. But really what it comes down to is execution. And so we have -- this is a slide we used at Investor Day back in September. So it was our first Investor Day we had done in 3 years, the first Investor Day we had done since Ryan became CEO. And there's really 5 focus areas of the organization right now. And by the way, we came up with these our own. We didn't have to go hire [indiscernible] McKinsey or Bain to come help us create this strategy. So we saved a few dollars there. But we do think there's really 5 key areas where we're excited for our path going forward. In no particular order, really reimagining asset management. That started with bringing Michael Lane in from BlackRock 19, 20 months ago. He's not quite -- somewhere around there. He's not quite on his 2-year anniversary yet. I think when Michael got here not too dissimilar from when I joined SEI, we had a lot of what I uneloquently say, we had a beautiful -- we lived in a beautiful neighborhood. We had great bones to the house, great bones, but we had a lot of broken windows that we had to fix. And over the last 2 years, we started fixing those broken windows. I think where we are in our journey, and Michael experienced that as well, I'll get into asset management in a second. But we had to pull those in, first off, identify all the broken windows. We pulled them out and we started systematically replacing those windows. A lot of that went to the move from vertical to horizontal. But what Michael has done an amazing job of is really coming in, looking at where we were in the market, where we are playing in our TAM. And honestly, the way I think about revenue growth or revenue in general. There's 4 drivers of revenue. That's all there is. There's greenfield, new logos, white space, pricing and retention. Really, where we were focused on asset management was retaining the smallest advisers, our smallest advisers, clients, probably not the best strategy for growth. And so Michael came in and had a -- I won't go into it, you can look at the Investor Day, but he had a 5- or 6-point plan. As all great leaders do, you have to have a 5- or 6-point plan when you come into a new organization and he systematically has been working on each of these points. That's including kind of reimagining our asset management product portfolio. We brought -- he brought [indiscernible] Bob Home with him from BlackRock. He's been amazing. -- but really reimagining what we're doing in asset management. I think that was early days. That was more of September. I think now we're executing on that asset management story. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. Enterprise excellence, huge one. So from a CFO standpoint, I had that hat originally. It was always kind of the design I would take on the COO hat. So we spent a lot of time operationalizing the business in a meaningful way. I think that's led to dramatic margin improvement. The third is strategic capital allocation. I'll speak to that in a minute. And then also boosting international returns. International is a great growth area for us right now. We've been in U.K., we've been in Dublin. We've been in Lux for a number of years. But I think thinking about what our go-to-market strategy specifically is across the business units is something that we were maybe falling down on it. We weren't spending enough attention on that. So we put Sanjay Sharma who I mentioned earlier, he's a great, great, great, great executor. He's got an engineer mindset. So we asked him just a few months ago to take on in addition to his private banking responsibility to really focus on international, and Sanjay has been spending a lot of time there. And then really just investing in improving growth engines like our IMS business. Okay. So let's unpack a little of the performance of each of the businesses now just more a bit more. So in our investment managers business, again, really, really well positioned right now. So there are incredible strong market tailwinds, especially where we play where we specialize -- while we're in traditional, really kind of across, we do fund administration across the entire portfolio of everything we can do from traditionals, mutual funds, et cetera, into our alternative platforms. real estate, infrastructure, private credit and private equity, et cetera. We are the #1 fund administrator in the world in private credit. There's been a lot of tailwinds in growing alts. We're really well positioned there. We are the first phone call, and it's something we talk about internally. We strive for us to be that first phone call in IMS -- in our IMS business when a new fund launch is occurring. In Q1, when we talk about the shift from in-sourcing to outsourcing in Q1, we announced 2 really large wins. So that would be in our sales events numbers of approximately the fifth largest and the 15th largest investment manager in the world that had decided to make a move from in-sourcing and outsourcing. We were in that RFP. It's been about an 18-month process of going through that and we won that mandate. Now inside that mandate for each of those new wins for us, from a risk profile, the mandate included 2 fund administrators. And so we were one of those, really proud of that and excited for that. In saying that it's not a 50-50 split. And this goes out to how we are executing really well. We are, in my opinion, the best fund administrator in the world, especially in private credit, private equity and some alternatives in the alternative world. So that -- just because we won those mandates, it isn't just they split it 50-50. We're winning the lion's share of that mandate, which I think is a testament to how well we're performing in that space. And then you'll just see the '22, '23, '24 and '25 growth. We're growing it across both all pieces of business, both across traditional alternatives and global. So doing extremely well there. The pipeline remains strong. The sales events numbers that we announced in Q1 was in all of them. We will continue to bring on additional funds through those 2 new large mandates in addition to our normal growth of our business. But again, definitely our fastest-growing and most profitable business right now. Shifting over to our private banking business. When I first came to my first investment conference for SEI and every analyst call I ever had. Out of 20 questions, 19 were around when are you going to improve private banking margins. We've done that. And again, Sanjay gets really all the credit for that. So we were enjoying 0 to negative margins for a number of years in private banking. Our historical margins rate for 25% to 30%. And when Sanjay took over, he said, we have a path forward to get back to historical rates. Well, in Q1 of this year, we passed 20%, really far advancing the speed of which Sanjay, I thought I think initially thought we would get there. And there's a few reasons why we're doing that. Number one, really cost discipline, making sure we're investing in the right areas of our SWP platform, rightsizing really our headcount. So everything you would expect from a demanding engineered-type thinker, Sanjay is the best. He also increased our TAM. So we were really focused on the largest of the large. So our SWP platform currently or -- currently, we look at the market, there's about 20 of the largest banks in the United States. We have about half of those banks are on our SWP platform, and we do the front office, middle office and back office services for them. We were really focused in that for a very long time. Those are -- those come about very rarely every 7 to 10 years. Those RFPs might come around and we spend a lot of time focused there. Well, Sanjay went actually went down market. When Michael Lane went upmarket, Sanjay went down market. It was really -- it turned out to be really profitable for us. And so moving to the regional community in the community bank space, specifically the community bank space, where SWP is more plug and play, we can install our platform much quicker. There's a quicker return, lower cost of delivery, et cetera. it's really profitable for us. What Sanjay also did over the last couple of years, which has been really, really exciting for SEI, I'm very bullish on this was the advent of professional services. So he took a look around the private banking space and said we're installing our platform. We're doing all the operations and then they're hiring third parties to come in to various services around our offerings. And Sanjay said, we can do that. And so we've started over the last couple of years to develop some professional services that have paid off really, really well. So 2 to 3 years ago, 4 years ago, when we would announce a win in the private banking space on our SWP in ops platform. That was it. So those might be $2 million to $3 million deals, $4 million deals. Now those deals are now $10 million deals because we're selling other offerings like our Sphere offering, which is kind of surrounds our cybersecurity platform. There's other things like change management services, our data platform, which has been a big seller for us. So there -- all of a sudden, we're starting to bring the whole firm to [indiscernible] in one area which I'm also excited about, which we really haven't dug into too much, and I think it's an opportunity for us in selling asset management to private banks. So being on our platform, we know where every single penny and dollar is, every single penny and dollar is for about 120 banks across the United States and globally. And we know whether those banks in their asset management product inventory, how much is it all, how much is in traditional where it is. And we've really done very little with that, and we have sold very little of our own product into those banks. So we see that as an opportunity. We recently announced the hiring of the national leader for selling asset management to banks is not exactly sure what her title is going to be. So anyway, really strong momentum in private banks. We do believe margins will continue to prove at what rate, not exactly sure, but we've made steady progress there, which we're really proud of. This is an interesting chart. This encompasses both our institutional and investment advisers business. So in Q3 this year, we will go from 4 segments. I think Q3, hopefully, if everything works out right, from moving from 4 segments to 3 segments. So we'll combine the institutional investor segment and the advisory segment together. But I think just looking at the graphic at a very high level, you can see over the last few years of the improvement of what we've done and why I'm really excited about this business unit. So we've really been able to increase flows really across both of our businesses. The advisers business has been very successful, as I mentioned, under Michael's leadership a lot more room to grow. Again, as you're building a massive ship like Michael is right now in asset management, it takes a little time. He's been, again, in the seat for about 18 months. But I do think over the next year, we're going to see even larger improvement, including hopefully more adoption of our own products that we've created. We've curated about 8 new ETFs over the last couple of quarters. We have an inventory plan of additional launches going forward. So the opportunity to take a look at the model portfolios that we curate with our clients and for our -- for instance, in our institutional business, do we have the ability to take some of our own products. We have fiduciary responsibilities that go along with that, you can't just take out certain products and put our products in, but we have an investment manager unit that looks at all that. So -- but do we have an opportunity to take some of our own curated products and put those into some of those models, I think there's an opportunity there is just one example. Okay. So what do we do with all of our capital that we that we have. So we have committed and we have returned and committed to return about 90% to 100% of our free cash flow back to our investors. And that's obviously in the form of dividends. We have a very strong buyback program. I think, Brad, last year, we -- in trailing 12, we purchased back about 7% of our own shares. Brad nodding, Brad's Head of Investor Relations for SEI, if you don't know, Brad, he's great. And what you'll see there is an incredibly strong balance sheet, probably too strong of a balance sheet. At Investor Day, we talked about moving -- right now, we're at about a negative 1x leverage model. It's probably not the best model. We've historically worn that balance sheet as a badge of honor. I don't necessarily have that same take. I think we should be using the balance sheet in maybe a more, I don't want to say an aggressive way, a different way. And so we have spoken about at Investor Day and since then of taking on more debt, but doing it in a very smart way. And so we're not going to just go do deals for the sake of doing deals. We want the right deals. Stratos deal for us was a good deal. We're really happy in what those returns are. But when you just take a look at this and the amount of buybacks I think we're relatively unique. There are companies that do buybacks, but the amount of free cash flow we use in those buybacks, you may consider unique. So that is kind of SEI in a nutshell in 25 minutes. Jeff -- I know we have a session right after this, if there's any questions in a breakout session, but I'm happy to take any questions right now. And Jeff always has a ton of tough questions for me so if ...

No, but please feel free if anyone has a question. Or else I will -- I have a question on IMS. So your fund administration clearly, your strongest growth driver of the business. Could you maybe discuss like how are you differentiated what stands out there? And what gives you comments you can kind of maintain you probably average double-digit revenue growth for a while.

So I mentioned it, but honestly, it's execution. And so I said probably everyone sits up here and says they're the world's best at certain execution. But we really believe we are. And so -- and that comes in the form of -- these are -- don't quote me on these numbers, but when there's closed-end funds, that fund closes and they launch a new fund, industry averages for fund administration of renewals of that same administrators high 70%, low 80%. We're in the kind of mid- to low 90%. I think that's a really good indicator of our performance. I mentioned the 2 large insourcers to outsource model or investment managers have changed their model. We won both of those mandates, 2 really large ones. They don't come to market that frequently and the fact that we want both of them, and we're winning the lion's share of that work, I think it's a good indicator of really what our performance is, especially in the alternative space.

How many have the type of global capabilities you really have there?

Yes. Great question. So we recently -- I don't want to say announced, but we spoke about it. We are opening a Singapore office, and that's not because we, at SEI like to plant flags all over the globe. We've had some of the largest managers in the world that come to us and asked us, "Hey, they want to use you, overseas specifically, in that Pacific Rim area like Singapore. And so we've announced we're opening an office in Singapore." That's based off of demand and so when our -- the largest managers in the world say, "Hey, we want to use you there, but you need a presence there. That's exciting for us. So again, we're not here to plant flags and really extend cost, we try to be as efficient as we can. But that -- I think that's a good indicator from what our global footprint is. We also publicly had talked about, Ryan did, our CEO, a few years ago about where did the 2 inorganic growth areas where we may be thinking about. One was U.S. RIA. We just did that deal. Stratos is the perfect one for us, great footprint, great one to kind of build off of, not that we're necessarily thinking about number 2 there. But the second inorganic growth area was a European fund admin, do we want to expand or do something significant there? There's always the classic buy versus build analysis that's done. We put some of our best U.S. talent overseas in Europe and really found out that we could actually build something and create great momentum just from a build standpoint. There are certain pieces of our admin business. If you look at the total pie of every single thing a fund administrator can do for a client, we probably do 96%. We currently have about probably 96 out of 100% of the things somebody would buy. There may be certain tuck-ins that maybe we want to buy to round out and complement the rest of our IMS business or fund admin business that we still need to do. But that's how we think -- are thinking about our global footprint.

[indiscernible].

So we'll take private banking for a moment. So we have asset management that sits kind of in our investment advisers, Classically, those investment products that we sold into the adviser in our model portfolios for our OCIO business has really sat there by itself in a vertical. We can sell those same products into private banks. So they have investment product portfolios. We think -- so I think that's probably the most obvious synergy also from a professional services standpoint, we are selling 99% of our professional services right now or consulting services inside our private banking space. We see opportunities in our IMS business and actually in our asset management business as well. So there are -- there is some overlap. But historically, asset management has sat over here, we don't jump over the fence to other parts of the business. They kind of lived in silos. So breaking down those silos and moving to the horizontal model, there are things we can sell across the platform.

[indiscernible].

Yes, we have. So I had mentioned that we're bringing in someone to lead who has done -- been there, done that before, who has led asset management and selling directly into banks. So that person is going to be coming on board here in the next, I don't know, a month or so. And we are upgrading all of our people who have historically -- not all, but our sales force who have historically sold technology and ops. I know technology and ops, I know technology and ops. I can't sell asset management. They now have gotten their Series 7. So now they have the opportunity to go sell into those relationships. So that's just some of the thinking. It's a couple of examples.

I think we're out of time here. So Sean, thank you.

Thank you very much, Jeff. Appreciate it. Thank you all.