Thank you, Harmony, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Computershare's FY 2022 results conference call. I have Nick Oldfield, our CFO, and Michael Brown from our investor relations team with me. I'm pleased to say it's the first time we've all been in the same room for our results for a couple of years. Let's take that as a small sign that the world is returning to normal. Now, on this call, we'll take you through the key highlights of our results and the outlook for FY 2023. As usual, we've released a presentation pack to the ASX, and it's also on our website. There's a lot of information in the deck, so I'll focus my remarks on the opening pages. Nick will then take you through the financial results. Following the presentation, we will open up for Q&A.
As a reminder, we will be talking in US dollars and constant currency unless we state otherwise. Okay, l et's start with the highlights on page two. We're pleased to report overall management EPS slightly ahead of guidance. Management EPS increased by over 10%. Guidance was for around $0.57 per share, and we came in just over $0.58 per share. Clearly, it was a challenging market environment in the second half of the year, especially in the last quarter. As interest rates increased rapidly, our transaction and event-based revenues were impacted by lower volumes and activity levels. Mortgage rates shot up, reducing origination, and corporate action volumes began to tail off. The drag EBIT ex MI was, in essence, somewhat tied to the increasing rate environment.
As a EBIT ex MI came in below our guidance for the second half, but MI was a beat and more than offset. Margin income is a natural hedge in our business, and we did begin to benefit from the higher-than-anticipated rate rises in some of the key markets in the last quarter. Simply put, the mix altered. Management revenues increased by over 12%, with eight months contribution from the corporate trust acquisition in the U.S., which we completed last November. Growth in client fee income offset weaker transaction revenues along with strong cost controls. We were able to manage the impact of inflation as we began to benefit from the rising interest rates. Margin income in the second half was $125 million compared to $62 million in the first half. There was clearly more to come.
We have laid out our assumptions on future rate rises as part of guidance. Nick will also talk us through that later on. Issuer Services and employee share plans continue to win market share. Transaction-based revenues in corporate actions and employee share trading, as I said earlier, were impacted by market volatility in the second half, and the expected recoveries in bankruptcy and class actions have yet to come through. Mortgage Services in the U.S. delivered a disappointing result, although the outlook is a little more positive. Our well-timed CCT acquisition continues to exceed expectations. We're making good progress integrating the business and delivering the expected synergy benefits. Now, that business delivered $90 million of EBITDA for the year, with $80 million of that coming in the second half. Computershare's free cash flow and balance sheet are standouts in this result.
We generated over $320 million of free cash flow with over 60% cash conversion. Debt leverage has improved to 1.64 times below the bottom of our target range. However, that's probably not a bad place to be in a rising rate environment. The deleveraging has come through sooner than expected following the CCT acquisition, and this balance sheet flexibility will enable us to continue to strengthen and scale our global growth businesses, fund the integration plan for CCT, and reward shareholders. We have a confident outlook. Management EPS is expected to increase by 55% in FY 2023. Now, inflationary pressures are impacting our operating businesses and costs are expected to rise in FY 2023, and we're not immune to these pressures.
However, margin income, our natural inflation offset, is estimated to be $520 million this year, driving strong earnings growth. We will continue to invest in our businesses, simplify our structure to improve the quality of our earnings, and deliver long-term returns for shareholders. Now, moving on to slide three. This really summarizes the performance across our major business line. The main point I call out is that we have a business model that allows us to build scale and grow in large global markets. Overall, we can offset some inflation with cost controls and, of course, rising margin income. In Issuer Services, we increased revenues in register maintenance, our largest business, and we continue to win market share and outperform. In fact, over the last four years, we've won over 1,400 net new client wins.
In FY 2022, we increased the number of wins compared to the year before. The ongoing investments in front office, client experience, and product innovation are strengthening the business and improving the value proposition. Governance Services delivered another good result. Now revenues increased by 30%. Now remember, this business does not have margin income, something I used to call out as a positive. There's a tremendous amount of growth opportunity here, and all the structural trends like rising compliance and regulation and business complexity are positive. Corporate actions had a weak second half, though. Volatile equity markets led to lower transaction volumes in the second half. You can see the overall drop in completed M&A and capital raising numbers. Hong Kong IPOs, which were a prominent feature of the PCP, were substantially down. We do expect some further weakness in corporate actions in FY 2023.
Employee share plans continues to win market share and increase client paid fee revenues. Fee revenues, in fact, up over 5%. The EquatePlus platform is really driving this growth. Now, the upgrade is complete in Europe, and in Australia, 85% of clients are now on the new platform. We're now preparing for the North American rollout. Although equity markets have been weak, transaction revenues were stable for the year overall. We did see a reduction in the second half as equity markets lowered in key markets. The volume of units under administration increased 5% year-on-year. You remember me saying that this is latent earnings power in this business and should lead to transaction revenues over the coming years. Over in Business Services, the expected recovery in bankruptcy and class action has so far failed to come through.
Revenues were down in both businesses. Case volumes are low. Regardless of this, we do need to improve the profitability of these businesses, and we've got more to do. Canadian Corporate Trust headline results were modestly impacted by the sale of our Private Capital Solutions business. Now, this was a small retail-focused business that added unnecessary complexity to Canadian Corporate Trust. Excluding this, it delivered another consistent result. As I said earlier, Mortgage Services in the U.S. delivered a disappointing result, although the outlook is more positive. Revenues were down 5% due to the impact of the prior period refinance volume and a continued shift towards capital-light sub-servicing, which comes at a lower revenue level per loan. In the second half, new origination volumes were weaker than expected due to rising mortgage rates.
EBITDA was down $9 million - $100 million, and we reported an EBIT loss of $14 million. On the positive side, we are making progress on our strategy to shift the portfolio to a more capital-light model. Invested capital fell, and we recycled over $170 million of MSR capital. This contributed to the growth in our sub-servicing portfolio, where we added over $22 billion in new sub-servicing throughout the year. We have a pathway back to profitability and do expect better results this year. Speaking of profitability, we also returned the U.K. mortgage services to profit. While we know that book is in runoff and revenues are down, we are actively managing that cost base, and the sale process is continuing. I'll highlight CCT, our recent acquisition in the U.S. I'm delighted to say the business is performing well and exceeding expectations.
It delivered $336 million of revenue and $90 million of EBITDA for the year. Now remember, we only completed in November, so that's effectively $260 million of revenue and $80 million of EBITDA in the second half. The business had over $18 billion of balances and an additional $47 billion of money market funds on average in the second half. It clearly increases our leverage to interest rates. What I find most encouraging is, just as we did in Canada, we are slowly beginning to improve client paid fees, recurring revenue, and EBIT ex MI, which was $29 million in the second half. Now that's a good start. Integration is also underway, and we're slightly ahead on delivering synergies at this stage, but it is early days. Now let's turn to slide five, outlook.
Now, as the great singer, Dinah Washington, said, "What a difference a day makes." I think she might have been singing about interest rates too. In FY 2023, we expect management EPS to be up around 55%. That's opening guidance of around $0.90 per share EPS. Margin income is the big driver. We are guiding to around $520 million of MI this year. This includes the benefit of recent rate rises, the effect of our hedging strategies, where we're looking to deliver a smoothing earnings profile over time, and also the assumed future rate hikes. Undoubtedly, we will be wrong, but we are trying to be helpful and transparent to investors. A simple way to look at this is to think about Computershare in 2019. Pre-COVID interest rates and where yields were similar.
We delivered close to $250 million of margin income in the legacy CPU business. Rates are back to similar levels, and with the CCT acquisition, we have doubled our balances, hence the figure of around $520 million. We base our guidance on average cash balances for the year of approximately $38 billion. Exposed unhedged balances are expected to average just over $16 billion, and we assume US cash rates to rise to 3.5% by the end of the calendar year. It's all laid out on slide 10 of the deck, and of course, we'll be happy to take questions on this. The other side of higher interest rates is, of course, higher inflation.
Now, we are not immune to the inflationary pressures you're seeing, and while we will maintain our disciplined focus on cost control, we do expect cost growth of around 5% on a pro forma basis in FY 2023. As you work through the numbers, you'll see that we EBIT ex MI to be down around 5% next year. However, with such a strong financial position, we will take advantage of the opportunity to invest in our businesses and simplify our structure to improve the quality of our earnings and deliver long-term returns for shareholders. I'll now hand over to Nick to take you through the financials in more detail.
Thank you, Stuart. Let me start with our financial results, which this year are on slide 11. Revenue for the group increased 12.2% over the PCP, while revenue ex margin income was up 9.2%. Adjusting for the CCT acquisition, operating revenues fell 3.5%. Our event-based businesses, corporate actions, stakeholder relationship management, and bankruptcy were the biggest drivers here. While mortgage servicing run-off, the revenues also dropped due to book run-off in the U.K. and an increased shift to sub-servicing in the U.S. Encouragingly, recurring revenues improved to 82%, and we do expect growth in client fees across registry, governance services, employee share plans, and CCT in FY 2023. Margin income increased 74.3%, reflecting the rise in global interest rates. Excluding CCT, margin income was 22% higher. There's more detail on revenue on slide 33.
EBIT grew 19% to $530.9 million, which is largely attributable to the $79.5 million MI improvement. Excluding MI, EBIT was marginally better at $344.4 million. Adjusting for the CCT acquisition, however, EBIT excluding MI was down 7.5%. This is largely down to reduced volumes in our event-based businesses, particularly in Q4. EBIT ex MI margin was down 110 basis points to 14.2%. This reflects both the impact of the lower margin CCT business on the group and the reduction in those higher margin event-based revenues. Notwithstanding the dilutive impact of CCT margins here, do note that this business was break even on an ex MI basis pre-acquisition. We are very pleased with the improvement in performance so far.
Interest expense was $4.8 million higher, and we've now swapped all of our debt to floating rates. This acts as a natural hedge to our margin income, and so will benefit in the event rates fall in the future, but does lead to higher expense in FY 2023. Our income tax expense was higher, as you would expect, at $120.7 million. The effective tax rate, however, was lower at 25.6%. This was largely due to a reduction in BEAT expense in the U.S. as MSR values improved, and also attributable to an updated transfer pricing agreement in Canada. This agreement has had the impact of reducing our Australian royalty revenues and in turn, our ability to frank our dividends.
We do expect a slightly higher ETR in FY 2023 in the 26%-28% range, reflecting higher U.S. margin income contributions. Including CCT, management NPAT was up 23.5% to $350.3 million. Excluding CCT, it was up 2.1% to $289.7 million. Finally, and as you've already heard, management EPS was up 10.6% to $0.5803 per share. Statutory results are on slides 52 and 53. Statutory NPAT was $227.8 million, with the difference attributable to the amortization of non-MSR acquired intangible assets of $63.4 million, acquisition-related expenses of $45.1 million, and $13.7 million associated with our cost out programs.
Of the acquisition related expense, $56 million came from the CCT acquisition and ongoing Equatex integration. This was partially offset by gains on the disposal of our stake in Milestone and our small private capital solutions business in Canada. I'll now jump back to slide eight and talk about margin income. Margin income was somewhat ahead of our expectations, doubling over the second half with a full half of CCT contribution and more and higher rate rises than we had anticipated. 2H 2022 was $125 million at actual rates. On slide nine, we show our balances for the year. In our legacy business, balances were just over $21 billion. The average yield improved to 73 basis points in the second half, reflecting the general improvement in rates.
At CCT, reported average balances are skewed by the fact we only had two months of balance for the first half. In the second half, average balances of around $18 billion were slightly down on the first half, largely due to a slowing of bond issuance as rates started to rise. As with the legacy business, yields have also improved from 23 basis points to 53 basis points in the second half. On slide 10, we provide more color on our outlook for FY 2023. As Stuart has said, we expect to deliver $520 million of margin income in the next year. How do we get to $520 million? Well, firstly, we're not economists. We set out the average cash rates by quarter that underpin our forecast here. These are sourced directly from Bloomberg.
Secondly, we've set out our balance assumptions and how the book breaks down by category. Let me just make some points on balances. Exposed non-hedged balances are expected to be down around $3.3 billion compared to 2H 2022 average. This reflects our assumption that corporate actions volumes will be lower in FY 2023 given general market conditions, combined with an increased shift to hedging. CCT balances are expected to be broadly consistent with the 2H FY 2022 average, albeit there is some movement from exposed to non-exposed as we learn more about the underlying portfolio. Hedged balances are up $1.2 billion, and we're continuing to add cover as rates rise. In 2H 2022, average hedged balances were $4 billion, and our outlook ex- assumes they rise to $5.2 billion.
In actual fact, they are currently at $5.8 billion following some activity in July, and we continue to add protection. We do not believe this will materially affect our MI guidance at this point. Third and final, let's talk about yields. You can see from the table at the top of slide 10 that we expect our exposed yield to improve from 75 basis points in FY 2022 to 211 basis points in FY 2023. Now, this overall return is still a little below the expected average cash rate for the year. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there's still a large proportion of CCT balances earning below market rates from Wells Fargo as part of the transaction agreement. This will change at the end of the TSA period in October 2023.
We also have other balances earning sub-market levels due to UK retail bank ring-fencing, whilst euro market rates remain close to zero. Otherwise, we continue to play catch up on overnight rate recovery as rates rise, albeit we do expect to achieve around 90% of an overnight cash rate over time, just not in FY 2023. Looking further ahead to FY 2024, we anticipate further improvement in our exposed yields as the recovery in rates or catch up in rates continues, whilst we do continue to add hedge cover to protect the medium term. There's more detail on balances on slides 56 to 59. Next, I'd like to talk about our operating costs on slide 22. Here, we show the bridge in operating costs between FY 2021 and FY 2022. Importantly, we've highlighted our cost out programs, which yielded $42.5 million of gross benefit in FY 2022.
These more than offset the impact of $35.9 million in cost inflation in the year. Of the cost out programs, the restructure of our U.K. mortgage servicing business delivered $26 million of benefit. Equatex synergies totaled $7.7 million, and ongoing stage three benefits, which were largely related to property rationalizations, delivered the remainder. Overall, our adjusted operating cost base was at $1.885 billion, an increase of 11.3%. The legacy business was broadly flat, and so the higher cost base really just reflects the CCT acquisition. Like most organizations, we continue to face inflationary pressures across our business lines, and we anticipate overall cost to increase around 5% on a pro forma basis in FY 2023. This assumes CCT was owned for the full 12 months in FY 2022.
Our exposure to higher interest rates, track record of delivering cost out, and ability to reflect current market conditions in event-based pricing does give us comfort we can effectively manage the effects of market inflation. We also have some contracts where we have the ability to adjust for CPI. Total operating expenses detailed on slide 54, so you can see the usual breakdown there. On slide 23, you'll see the impact of our cost out initiatives, and that they have now extended this out to FY 2026. Between now and then, we anticipate delivering $56 million more savings, which will cost us around $100 million to implement. These are largely coming from the Equatex integration, whilst the UK mortgage servicing restructure is expected to deliver incremental benefits of $6.5 million.
Our stage three program, which includes our global operational transformation program, adds a further $5 million in savings. We continue to evaluate opportunities for a stage four cost out program, and have started a new employee driven cost out initiative in U.S. mortgage servicing. We're excited to see how that turns out. I'll finish with some comments on our balance sheet and cash flow on slide 24. In the period, we generated $438.4 million of net operating cash flow, representing an EBITDA cash conversion rate of around 61% at actual rates. Free cash flow was $322.6 million, a 24% improvement over the PCP. CapEx increased to $42.8 million, largely as a result of the CCT acquisition. Net spend on MSRs was $73 million.
We recycled $178 million of mortgage servicing capital over the year, with our net investment in MSRs being 65% of amortization. We expect net MSR investment going forward to be 50%-60% of amortization, with amortization itself roughly flat in FY 2023. Net cash outflow was $621.4 million after spending a net $737.7 million on acquisitions and $206.3 million on dividends. Net debt at year-end was $1.18 billion. Our balance sheet has repaired faster than we expected as earnings have grown and CCT integration-related expense has been lower than anticipated. As mentioned earlier, net debt to EBITDA improved to 1.64 times, and we expect this to improve further over the course of the year.
Finally, as a result of the $800 million in public market bond issuance we did in the first half, the weighted average maturity of our drawn debt has increased to 4.4 years. I'll now hand back to Stuart.
Thank you, Nick. Just to wrap up, we've had a pretty solid year with earnings slightly ahead of guidance, and our earnings are accelerating too. Now, we delivered 15% growth in management EPS in the second half of FY 2022 versus the PCP, and we're guiding to a further 55% growth in FY 2023. Now this performance is an outcome of our long-term strategies to strengthen and scale our global businesses and also increase our optionality. This time it's paying off and there's more to come. As I said at the beginning, we have a business model that delivers high-quality recurring revenues, has the ability to offset inflation with margin income, requires little capital to grow, and generates significant free cash flow to self-fund investments and enhance returns for shareholders. The question on the table is. What are we gonna do with all that cash?
Well, we will continue to invest it in our businesses and assess complementary acquisition opportunities while maintaining a conservative capital structure and also reward our shareholders. I'd just like to say thank you to all my colleagues at Computershare for delivering these results, and also to our shareholders for your loyalty and support. Thank you very much. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?
Thank you. Your first question comes from Kieran Chidgey from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. A couple of questions, if I can. Maybe starting with second half 2022. I was wondering, Stuart, if you can unpack a little bit more, I guess, around what sort of transpired between February and June. I know sort of ex CCT and ex margin income, your guidance back in February was for about $204 of EBIT, ex margin income. In the legacy part of the business, you delivered $158, which is about 23% lower. Is that purely, as you've said, due to much weaker transactional revenues through sort of the back end of the half, particularly in the June quarter? Just wondering if that is the case or if there were other parts of the revenue lines, more recurring revenue areas that were also softer.
Secondly, if that is the case, you know, what is embedded within your guidance or your outlook for 2023 in regards to those transactional revenues? Are you assuming sort of a continuation of what we saw through the June quarter or some sort of pickup as we move through the course of the year?
Thanks, Kieran. Good question. Obviously, when we were at the half, we had quite a EBIT ex MI number at the half. You know, we guided to an increase in that number. It really became a story about the last quarter. You know, I think it is important to understand that, you know, we do have a business that is sensitive to markets. We saw interest rates pop up, you know, and the quantum of these rates were probably higher than anyone expected. You know, as a result, that did have, you know, a fairly quick sort of second quarter of the half impact on some of that transactional revenue, employee share plans. You know, corporate actions were delayed. A number of IPOs were pulled, etc .
As a result, that was very much correlated to the interest rate environment which impacted markets. Saying that, there was also some other businesses that perhaps were less exposed to sort of the interest rate side that didn't come through as well, such as, you know, bankruptcies and class actions. As I said, it really became a mix issue, where the punchy rate rises helped us on margin income, but lowered it on the event based and the transaction revenue in the last quarter. You know, that's a mix issue. You know, that's exactly what it is. The mix just changed. Still able to hit the guidance, but just the component parts were a little bit difficult.
Of course, we then sort of look forward into FY 2023, and you know, quite specifically looking at the businesses on an ex MI basis, etc . You know, we still think there'll be a little bit of a drag with equity markets, and we think ex MI will probably drop to about 5% before recovering into FY 2024. That's what we see.
Okay. At a very high level, I know there's a whole bunch of different transactional revenue lines, but, you know, is that implicit within that sort of a continuation of sort of more the second half 2022 type weaker levels of transactional activity rather than sort of what we saw through full year 2022 with the stronger first half?
Yeah. Look, I mean, it's always a little bit difficult on a judgment call, trying to work out what corporate actions are gonna be doing. We do expect sort of corporate actions to be a little bit weaker. You know, lots of reports out there about, you know, M&A and what it's gonna be doing, et cetera. You know, we think that will tail off. You know, we'll keep an eye on the Asian markets as far as employee share plan trading is going to be there, but we also expect some 2H 2023 recovery and bankruptcy, et cetera. Yeah, there's lots of moving parts on some of that sort of transactional stuff.
You know, I think some of that will be offset for employee share plans even though equity markets are down, the number of units are going up, so that's sort of latent in earnings power and, you know, that will allow it to come back. Yeah. I think that, because of the quantum of these rate rises, was more than anyone was really anticipating, to be honest with you. We knew rate rises were coming. You know, that just caused some, in my view, some short-term challenges in some of that event- and transaction-based stuff, and I think once it settles, they'll start coming back. Of course, we've got the benefit of the MSRs. As I said, the mix changes.
Yeah. A second question just on the margin income outlook. Nick, sort of on the exposed non-hedged balances, you're guiding to 2.02 within your guidance for 2023, and that sort of appears to be relative to around, say, a 3% average global cash rate based on the quarterly numbers you published there out of Bloomberg. So a conversion rate or a capture rate maybe of around 65% through 2023. Now you mentioned in your comments 90% is still what you see is achievable over the medium term. Just wondering around the timing around how quickly you think sort of that moves to 90%.
I know there are some overlapping features with some of the things you mentioned, such as the TSA on CCT and maybe the U.S. Mortgage Services banking arrangements changing as well. You know, can you give any more clarity around how we think about the pathway from 65 to 90 over the next couple of years?
Yeah, look, absolutely. Kieran, as you point out, the biggest contributor or the biggest factor is the CCT TSA agreement. As you say, that expires in October 2023. If you look at our exposed non-hedged balance, $7.7 billion is at CCT. It's earning 2.3% relative to, you know, you might expect it to be closer to 3%. You can see that that amount there is the single biggest contributor. We expect that to be at sort of market rates by end of October 2023. We've then got another couple of billion in US mortgage servicing where our current rate is materially below market.
That is, we also call that out in our FY 2024 bubble at the bottom right of that slide 10. Really that is a reflection of the current banking arrangement is sub-economic. It's become sub-economic in the last couple of years, but it didn't really sort of come through how sub-economic it was, because the market generally just wasn't paying up for cash. Now it clearly is. We need to unpick that. You know, operationally, we've got, you know, a couple thousand bank accounts that we need to move, and it's not straightforward. We're targeting FY 2024 to get that back to market rate. We may be able to do it quicker of course, but that's our target now, FY 2024.
They're the two biggest items. There's a few other bits and pieces that are currently sort of earning, you know, closer to, you know, between 60% and 70%. That's something that we'll just address in time. FY 2024.
With that to the U.S. Mortgage Services, when you say FY 2024, you know, you're talking start sort of the year, I mean, sort of CCT, that.
Yeah. I'd like to think we'd get it done by start of the year.
Maybe a quarter of the way through the year.
Yeah, start of the year is a reasonable target.
If those two things do occur, we should be fairly close to the 90 in second half 2024. Is that the-
Yes, we'll be much closer in the second half of 2024.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Thanks, Kieran.
Your next question comes from Ed Henning from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions. Just the first one. Just to follow up from Kieran, just to clarify, the $50 million-$75 million you've called out in 2024 in the margin income on slide 10, that includes a full capture rate of the 90% of the pass-through. Is that how we should think about it?
$50 million-$75 million, Ed, is really three key things that are in that bubble. It's the Wells Fargo CCT TSA expiry. It's the U.S. mortgage servicing upside that we've just talked about. It's recapture-
Yeah.
...of about $4 billion of money market fund balances at between 25 and 50 basis points. It's that $50 million-$ 75 million is just those three items, nothing more.
What I'm saying, what I'm trying to get at, included in those, obviously not all of it's been captured to 90%-90%. Is there anything over and above that $50 million-$75 million in moving from the 65%-70% pass-through rate you've got now to get to 90%? Is there any additional above the $50 milllion-$75 million if you do get a 90% pass-through rate? That's what I'm trying to get at.
If we can get 90% pass-through rate across the rest of the book, there is more upside. Absolutely.
Okay. While I can go and calculate it, can you give us any guide on what you think that is?
I think you can calculate it, Ed.
Okay. I thought I'd try. Now just a second one. You've talked about a stage four cost out program. You know, you've already got cost benefits coming through in 2025 and 2026. Is this plan likely to be more long dated than cost savings coming through in 2023, 2024?
We've been working with a third party organization to assess a number of our operating businesses. You know, as part of that, they come in, you know, lots of interviews, time with the staff, looking at workflows, et cetera. It takes a while to sort of work through to identify other opportunities. We've actually had them in our Mortgage Services business, you know, as we move to sub-servicing. Important to reduce the cost to serve on a per loan basis. Look, that sort of work is sort of completing. It's coming up for review over the next few months. We'll assess, you know, the cost to achieve investment and work that through.
Look, I think that, you know, in this rising sort of inflationary environment, you know, Computershare has had these cost out programs, you know, in train. You can see the benefit that we got from that very clearly on our cost slides for the year in terms of trying to offset the challenge of inflation that we're all seeing. Of course, we do need to do more, and we'll continue to attack it. You know, we should be able to announce something certainly this financial year on some of our other sort of stage four, exactly what businesses they're actually in, et cetera. You know, there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit. Some of them are sort of major architectural redesigns of process flows, et cetera, et cetera.
I can assure you, we're working hard on the costs.
No, no, that sounds good. It does sound like if there's not low-hanging fruit, it's more back-ended as opposed to 2023, 2024 at this preliminary stage.
Yeah. That's right. You know.
Yeah. No, that's good. Thank you. I might just try and sneak in one more if I can. Just on your guidance going forward. You know, you've touched on obviously event-based revenues being subdued. You know, if you do look at it now, obviously it's your best guess and, you know, generally you try to be conservative or considered at the beginning of the year. Where do you see some potential tailwinds coming through if things do go your way? You know, Nick talked a little bit more about the margin income side, if you can get the rates coming through a little bit better for the mortgage servicing. Is it just more the event-based business coming back quicker as potential upside, or how should we think about that?
Yeah. I think that's probably about right. You know, we did try to sort of talk through a little bit of sort of headwinds and tailwinds when we were doing our sort of guidance slides, just to sort of you know. I think that as markets settle, you know, some of that event-based revenue will come back. As the cost to service debt increases, you should expect to see certainly in the second half of FY 2023, things like bankruptcy come back. You know, I think, you know, second half, I also think, you know, M&A may well creep up compared to first half, and get some recovery there.
Look, you know, I think we're not sort of banking it in as far as guidance is concerned. You know, we are seeing that at an EBIT ex MI level, we'll probably be down around about 5%, but of course, significantly offset by margin income. But we do see recovery in some of these areas coming through later on in the year. Yeah.
Okay. No, that's great. Appreciate your time. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Andrei Stadnik from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Can I ask my first question around CCT? Can you talk a little bit more about some of the opportunities you're seeing there? It also looks like, you know, from the disclosures that on a pro forma basis, the trust fees were up 7% year-on-year in 2022. Does that actually lock in some of the growth into 2023?
Yeah. Just at a high level on the CCT business. Obviously we only closed it in November. Our number one priority has been, you know, basically maintaining all the people, continuing to serve the clients in the way that we have, and really providing the high quality of service that Wells Fargo were actually known for providing. The background, our absolute focus is really about moving the technology out of the bank and into Computershare. That gets us. You know, that's probably about 90% of our focus at the moment, right? Now, just in terms of market, you know, I think certainly the first half of 2022 was fairly robust as far as, you know, residential mortgage-backed securities issuance and the trustee work that we do around that.
You know, we saw growth in our market share and the commercial mortgage-backed securities space and sort of maintaining that. You know, that's on public record. You can go out and do that. You know, I think the underlying, you know, from a sort of revenue perspective, it's been strong. Now we do break out, you know, the MMF fee revenue, the other fee revenue, and obviously margin income on our slides to try to give you a little bit of insight to that. But our focus continues to be about integration on this business. You know, some parts of it are performing well, other parts of it we've got to continue to improve.
It's all about getting the platforms across, investing in the technology, lowering the cost to serve, and providing better quality service and technology to the clients. You know, as I said in you know, earlier on, we're pleased with progress so far, but it's early days.
Just to check, you know, given there's a multi-year contracts, so if trustees were up quite, you know, mid-high single digits in 2022, surely that sets you up for good 2023 and beyond.
Yeah. They are multi-year contracts. It's recurring revenues. It was one of the reasons why we liked the business model. You know, on ex MI business basis, you know, we've got to make that business sort of more profitable. That's what we did up in Canada over a great number of years, and we will continue to work on that. You know, the structure of the contracts, you know, the recurring revenues of these contracts, the roll forward from one contract to another, you know, from sort of structural basis is positive for us. Yeah, we do expect to continue to grow the fee revenue in that business.
Great. Thank you. My second question, just wanna ask around some of the opportunities in U.S. mortgage servicing. You mentioned you're moving more capital- light model. Can you also talk a little bit about opportunities for non-performing loans? Also, does it seem like the growth in balances was maybe skewed to late in 2022?
Yeah. Look, that's right, Andrei, in terms of the balance pickup. We saw a couple of nice client wins in Q4, and that obviously helped the portfolio, but didn't have a material impact in earnings. As Stuart said, Q4 was also a challenge for the mortgage servicing business because the large increase in rates sort of led to origination volumes falling. Looking to the special servicing opportunity on non-performing loans, look, we think that's still some way off. Clearly, with rates rising and general talk about the potential for a recession, you would think that there will be special servicing default opportunities likely to come up potentially in the second half.
The challenge that we have in the U.S. is that there is still significant and record levels of home equity out there simply because of the level to which house prices have risen over the last few years. That really combined with high levels of employment across the country means those pressures that might create those special servicing on non-performing loan opportunities just aren't there at the moment. Now, that's not to say that they won't come, and clearly we anticipate our bankruptcy business will improve in FY 2023 off the back of higher rates. We expect it's going to come. It's just gonna take a bit more time.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Matt Dunger from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you for taking my question, gentlemen. Just wondering if you could talk to apologies for going back to this, but the 2023 guidance. Historically, you've talked to a 40-60 split in terms of the seasonality around first half and second half earnings. Understand we've got margin income and a full year contribution from CCT. Excluding these, should we expect that traditional 40-60 split on FY 2023?
Matt, thanks. I think you'll see a usual type of first half, second half split in 2023. I'd make a couple of comments. You know, within our legacy business, the usual trends and seasonalities remain. CCT actually is less seasonal, so that would kind of bring it back, you know, would help balance the swing off a little bit. To the same point, you see on slide 10, we anticipate higher rates in the second half than we do in the first half. Margin income should also be skewed more to the second half. I think that will offset the CCT broad neutrality. You can expect the usual first half, second half swing in FY 2023.
Thank you very much. Just a follow-up, if I may. I appreciate you made some comments, Stuart, on what you'd like to do with the strong free cash flow generation. Net debt below the target range, is it too soon to consider additional M&A given that you're still digesting CCT?
It's all gonna be about the size of the M&A. I mean, we do have to be mindful of, you know, the organization's capability to do a really good job in integration. Our focus, clearly, we've still got a lot of work to do with the CCT acquisition. I find myself with a balance sheet that has repaired probably 12-15 months quicker than I had anticipated. In fact, you know, we had a couple of bolt-ons that we kind of, sort of put on the ice a little bit just to make sure that we did that balance sheet repair.
What we can do and what we are doing is sort of resurrecting some of these discussions, looking at investing and strengthening and accelerating our growth in, you know, some of the Governance Services spaces, and elsewhere. I think we're, you know, in a good position. As I said, the repair and the de-leverage came through a lot quicker than anticipated, and we will seek out appropriate opportunities to sort of grow and strengthen the business. Absolutely.
Fantastic. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Nigel Pittaway from Citi. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I wonder if I could return to U.S. mortgage servicing. Stuart, you obviously highlighted that capital light sub-servicing is impacting the margins in that business, and they have been sort of on a downward trend as a result of that. Given we're now expecting a recovery in U.S. mortgage servicing, have we reached the low point of that, do you think? You know, do we see some recovery in that line moving forward, or is that trend still gonna be there as we look forward?
Good question, Nigel. Mortgage Services in the U.S., it's a little bit like whack-a-mole. You know, just as you sort something else comes along that you feel is a little bit out of your control. I think we are at a bit of a low point. You know, you've got to, you know, as Nick alluded to, there's still a fair amount of equity in some of these homes, so foreclosures are a little bit slower than we had anticipated. Then, of course, with the real pop in interest rates, which sort of popped mortgage rates above 5% in the U.S., origination slowed, so fulfillment business was not as active, as we want. We're taking steps to sort of right-size that, as a business.
Look, I do think that it's at a cyclical low. We do expect improved performance in U.S. Mortgage Services going forward. You're right, we are, you know, moving to more of a capital- light model. In fact, you'll see that we reduced invested capital in this business over the last 12 months. You know, I do think that it's got a pathway forward to profitability. We can clearly see that, and that's what we're working on. Yeah, I think you're right. It's at a low, but we have that pathway.
Mm-hmm. That does apply to the sort of fee margin line as well, that's been coming down? I mean, that was both a broader comment on the business and that line specifically or-
Yeah. I mean, on the fee side, I mean, when you recycle some of that capital and you move from MSR owned and into, you know, the sub-servicing, you know, the revenues on sub-servicing are less than MSR owned, so that's also a part of that as well. Yeah.
That might continue a bit given the sort of trend is towards more sub-servicing.
Yeah. Look, I think that may well happen. You know, our challenge is to get the revenues back up in some of the ancillary services. Yeah. You know, we do have a strong pipeline of loans, sub-servicing loans from third-party companies. So it's not just about us recycling capital. A lot of these loans were onboarded in the last quarter. So we'll get the full year benefit of that in FY 2023. Of course, you know, the run-off situation that we have, or we had, has significantly slowed, so that will also benefit on the revenue line as well.
Okay. The slides also refer to some regulatory environment concerns. Are those sort of how serious are those?
Look, I think you've just got to. You know, this is really the CFPB, you know.
Yeah.
You know, I think what you saw was, you know, they were kind of all-powerful, and then Trump Administration came in, and then they were less powerful and, you know, now they're sort of coming back up. It's really about all the frenetic activity that went on through, you know, calendar year sort of 2020 and 2021 as people were asking for forbearance and, you know, what that was doing to, you know, their credit and other bits and pieces and, you know, I think it's an industry-wide sort of component. Yeah. I'm not overly concerned about it, but it just takes up more time for us.
just a quick one on that, Canadian tax transfer pricing. I mean, you mentioned that was an impact on the franking this year. Does that actually roll forward, so that impacts franking moving forward? Or is that a one-off impact?
No, that's an ongoing agreement now, Nigel. That will impact the. You know, typically, these agreements last five years or so. When you do these agreements with the tax authorities, they tend to be longer term.
Yeah. Maybe just finally, obviously you had some delays with sort of border controls, etc. , on the EquatePlus rollout. Can you give us just sort of an update of where you're at with that and whether or not you're full steam ahead now on revenue growth in that business or whether there's still sort of-
Yeah.
We've gotta wait for the rollout.
It's a fair point, you know. We've completed the European rollout. All clients in Europe are on the EquatePlus platform now. In the markets where EquatePlus is rolled out, that's where we see the, you know, the client base fee revenue growth coming from, additional products that we can sell them with the platform, and then also new client wins. You know, there's been a lot of sort of change around the competitive environment there and, you know, as a result of that's positive. You know, Australia was delayed. Couldn't get anyone in, you know, when we wanted to get them in. Pleased to see that we've now got 85% of clients actually converted onto the EquatePlus dividend. Sorry, the EquatePlus system, which is positive.
Now we're sort of full steam ahead in terms of moving our North American businesses onto the platform. After a little bit of a delay in some areas, we're getting on it. That delay is more I mean, you see that just on some of the cost synergy stuff. But we're full steam ahead.
Excellent. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Siddharth Parameswaran from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. A couple of questions, if I can. One is just on the pass-through rate. Just on, I mean, relating to margin income. Just on slide 10, you very kindly show us how you expect your margin income to change by quarter. Going from $110 million in the first quarter to $140 million in the fourth quarter. You also show us your cash rate assumptions there, which go from 2.19% to 3.35%, so almost a 50% increase in that rate. The margin income does not increase anywhere, I mean, in that proportion at all. I'm just wondering, it seems like you're assuming that the pass-through efficiency drops materially.
I'm just wondering if you can give us an idea of what rate you're earning today on your average balances and why you're assuming that that drops materially into the fourth quarter. Is it conservatism or is it something else that we should really focus on to understand those trends?
Well, look, I think what you're seeing. The first thing to point out, Siddharth, is that not all balances are the same. There's a little bit of a mix that happens over the course of the year, and that's reflected into the plan. You know, in certain areas where we have some of the challenges that I've already spoken about, because we don't get 100% of the rate rise, you know, the gap is actually widening over the course of the year.
I think the key point is that, with the things that we previously spoke about from a FY 2024 perspective, the recapture rate should improve in FY 2024 and get us closer to that 90%, particularly in CCT and in mortgage servicing. I think the other point is, you know, when it gets to Q4, you know, the curves are suggesting now that we should see a bit of a you know, they're going to sort of drop away and rates are gonna start to fall in Q4 now. To the extent that that happens, there may be a bit of conservatism in the forecast.
Can I just clarify? I was confused, Nick, by your answers to Kieran and Ed's question about the $50 million-$75 million. Like, I wasn't sure if that's included in the 90% target rate or if that's on top. Because to Kieran's question, it seemed like you said the $50 million-$75 million is the majority of what will get you to that 90% pass-through. I don't make those numbers work.
No, no, no.
Because I get more upside if you.
So if you look at-
No? That's on top of it?
If you look at.
Okay.
The 90% pass-through generally isn't included in those numbers.
Yeah.
Pass through of the $50 million-$ 75 million.
Okay. The $50 million-$75 million is on top. Okay.
The $50 million-$75 million is simply those three items, U.S. mortgage servicing, CCT TSA expiring, and the money market fund recapture. The achieving 90% on the rest of the book is not included in those numbers.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Could I ask about the balances as well? You've been guiding to balances for the second half at $24.2 billion. They came in lower at $23.7 billion, and you flagged that there was weakness in the second half on transactional revenue, corporate actions, et cetera. You're now guiding to $21.6 billion for 2023. You know, it's quite a drop again on the second half 2022. When I go back through history, like that's quite a sharp drop compared to sort of we might have seen in FY 2020 or early periods. I'm just wondering if you could give us an idea of why you're assuming that level of drop to $21.6 billion.
If you could break it down by division, if there's anything. You know, we don't know a lot about corporate trust in particular. I'm just wondering if there's any actions from clients which might lead to that.
No.
Due to those exposed balances dropping.
The CCT balances are broadly unchanged in FY 2023. The drop is in corporate actions where we're anticipating a reduction in corporate actions volume over the course of the year. Within the you know, there may be a little bit of movement, so I'm not sure whether you're picking up the movement between categories. You know, in CCT, there's a bit of a swing between exposed and non-exposed. Within the exposed category, there's a bit of a movement from non-hedged to hedged simply as we add cover protection into the book. At an overall level, client balances are broadly dropping because we expect corporate actions volumes to be lower. Everything else is broadly flat.
Thank you. That does conclude our time for questions. I'll now hand back to Mr. Irving for closing remarks.
Thank you. As always, we appreciate you dialing into the call. As you can see, we've developed quite a unique business model at Computershare. Structural growth and client paid revenues across our largest business. Cyclical event and market-based revenues, which were impacted in Q4, as we called out, but we know that these businesses also have the potential for recovery. With cost controls and margin income, we can more than offset that market volatility and inflationary pressure. Guidance, after all, is for management EPS to be up 55% this year. Finally, we do consistently generate strong free cash flow. With our balance sheet deleveraging ahead of time, we have the optionality to invest in growth, consider complementary acquisitions, and reward shareholders. Thank you once again, and I look forward to seeing many of you on the road over the coming days.