Good afternoon. My name is Doug Richardson. I am the Company Secretary of Count Limited and pleased to be your host today. Welcome and thank you for joining us this afternoon for the Count Limited Investor Briefing of Our FY 2025 Financial Results. The results were released to the market this morning. Before we begin the presentation, we would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we're meeting on today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay our respects to their elders, past and present. We extend respect to all people present today. In today's briefing, you will hear from our CEO and Managing Director, Hugh Humphrey, and our CFO, Keith Leung. There will be an opportunity for questions to be asked following the presentation. To ask a question, please raise your hand in Teams and we will unmute you.
Please check that your device is already off mute before you begin speaking. I will now hand over to our CEO, Hugh Humphrey.
Thank you, Doug, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Count's Financial Year 2025 Full-year Results presentation. This year has been nothing short of a milestone in Count's 45-year history, with very strong performance and a number of significant achievements, including boosting funds under management to over $4 billion at the 31st of July 2025, higher revenue and margins across the business, and the realization of significant cost synergies following the successful integration of the former Diverger businesses, which has been incredibly well executed and delivered benefits beyond our expectations. We continue our execution against our strategy, and we're seeing benefits emerge from the value that we create through our flywheel. We're no longer just driving value within each of our operating segments; we're beginning to drive value across our operating segments.
Our business platform means that we can onboard new acquisitions and generate additional margin from a range of value-added products and services. We delivered organic revenue growth and M&A growth across all three business segments, demonstrating a balanced growth performance. Compared to two years ago, underlying NPAT has more than doubled, and EBITDA has almost tripled. For shareholders, this has meant that our share price has almost doubled, and our market capitalization tripled over the last 24 months. More importantly, you can see the profile of the business has fundamentally shifted with the high growth wealth segment now contributing 1/3 of the business's EBITDA. Equity partnerships remain at our core, delivering around 40% of the total EBITDA, and services is an emerging contributor, around a quarter of EBITDA.
The change in the business mix with our acquisitions ensures that we're well positioned to capture the tailwinds of the wealth accumulation and accelerating intergenerational wealth transfer in the Australian market. We are very pleased with our full-year results. Here I have presented the statutory figures on the left and the underlying on the right. Laying out both sets of financials gives you the transparency of the impact in the period of the transaction integration costs associated to Diverger and the separation costs following the Bentleys Western Australia divestment and the normalization of the Evolution Advisors divestment. Whilst we're not in the business to exit businesses, divesting these two legacy underperforming assets is an achievement for the team and delivered an improvement in earnings. Revenue grew strongly by +28% to $143.6 million.
Our overall underlying EBITDA margin increased from 15% to 20%, which reflects the improved business earnings profile, particularly from wealth, and the improved margins in the equity partnership segment. Our underlying EBITDA grew to $27.7 million in FY 2025, which is a more than 67% increase on the prior comparative period. Statutory NPAT (A) attributable was $12.7 million, and NPAT attributable was $8.9 million. Underlying NPAT attributable was $10.9 million, an increase of +89%, and underlying NPAT (A) increased +84% to $14.7 million. We were pleased to see the completion of the integration of the former Diverger businesses, having achieved $5.1 million in cost synergies, outperforming our 2024 revised expectation of $4 million and well above the $3 million originally announced in 2023. In wealth, funds under advice grew to $37.8 billion, driven by new advisor recruitment, new clients, new contributions, and market growth offset by pension payments.
Our separately managed accounts or SMA portfolios increased by +24% over the last 12 months to $3.9 billion, and net flows for the period were positive at +$380 million, and significantly more than double the net inflows from the prior corresponding period when it was +$178 million. We now have 80 firms adopting our CARE SMA investment philosophy, and we're in discussions with a pipeline of firms looking to embrace it. In total, we have 159 firms in our network using our SMA Solutions, the Count portfolios, or our managed discretionary accounts, and this is set to grow. In equity partnerships, we continue to grow our segment organically and through M&A, with the benefit of prior period acquisitions flowing into this year's results. The equity partnership segment continues to improve margins despite going through a period of increased acquisition activity and some system upgrades.
Overall, the average EBITDA margin across the firms has increased from 21% to 23%. As we increase exposure to financial advice revenues in this segment, this sort of trajectory should continue. As an overall group, we're pleased to increase our final dividend to $0.0275 per share. This is up 22.2% on last year's final dividend, and this uplift in dividend is an outcome of the step change in the company's scale and financial performance. For investors, a total dividend over the year of $0.045 per share represents the highest dividend Count has paid out in the last eight years. Similar to the half year, we'll introduce a dividend reinvestment plan for the final dividend, and we recommend that to shareholders. Now I want to turn to the segment performance.
The wealth segment's grown significantly, with underlying EBITDA at $13.0 million for the half, driven by the scale of our financial advice firms and growth in our SMAs to $3.9 billion in funds as of 30th of June , 2025, and total firms embracing the philosophy now stands at 80. As one of the largest wealth advice firms in the country, we see a tremendous growth opportunity for this within our network of 500 firms, as well as potential outside our group. The wealth segment reflects this half some streamlined back office functions and the enhanced service offering across the three AFSLs. EBITDA in the equity partnership segment grew by + 5%, the combination of organic revenue growth and M&A, and reflecting increased demand for financial planning. Around 25% of the total revenues in this segment now come from our 73 employee financial advisors.
We see significant upside in further growing the financial advice revenues as a proportion of total revenue over time, and our EBITDA margin has improved over the period as we saw further uptake of outsourcing in our equity partnership segment. While still at an early stage, we are starting to see substantive use cases for automation and AI, and the returns and efficiencies that they can generate for our firms. M&A activity, of course, is very beneficial for us in the medium to long term. However, we do tend to see one-off productivity dips in the 6 to 12 months following completion of those transactions within our equity partnership segment, and we expect those firms to return to normalized trading in FY 2026.
Separately, over the period, we had four equity firms undertake strategic CRM upgrades that have positioned them well for the future but did affect their production in the period. We have a very successful M&A function that's highly regarded with a strong pipeline, and we continue to execute tuck-ins to grow scale in our equity partnership segment. In FY 2025, we successfully completed a transaction every five weeks. The services segment grew significantly with revenues up +113% compared to the PCP and exceeding $30 million for the full year. EBITDA margins continue to be stable at 30%. We've unified our sales functions under one team to drive sales across the various service offerings, and over the period, we continue to engage with our clients through running 219 events with 15,000 clients attending them.
We're fortunate to be well positioned to benefit from a series of wealth megatrends underpinning Count's future growth. Our strong FUM growth in the wealth segment is reflective of the growth and popularity of managed accounts. Across the market, underlying managed accounts FUM is growing at +24%, and industry statistics indicate 42% of advice firms have yet to adopt managed accounts. For Count, that means there remains a long growth path ahead, and this is because the benefits that managed accounts deliver for clients and for advice firms are clear and compelling. They help deliver more advice at scale, they reduce risk, they enable client investment decisions to be enacted very quickly, removing the legacies of delay, they improve the profitability of firms, and they allow advisors to meet the needs of more clients.
Count presents flexibility and choice to its network with three unique investment solutions, ranging from simple low-cost solutions through to more complex solutions for sophisticated investors. Over the period, we saw increased firm take-up across the network, evidenced by 80 firms now adopting CARE , FUM increasing +24% to $3.9 billion at 30 June, and by way of an update, to more than $4 billion as at the end of July, just last month, and net inflows of +$380 million, which exceeded market growth, which was +$364 million. All of this demonstrates the confidence in the CARE investment philosophy and its successful 14-year track record.
The Count portfolio is a paper-based, externally managed, and we'll transition another $865 million of FUM to be under Count management, which is expected to be completed before the end of this calendar year, and we will confirm to the market once that is complete. We continue to see tremendous opportunities within our network for driving funds under management, and in particular, our ambition of reaching $10 billion of funds under management within five years. We're well on track to deliver this target, and with only 14% adoption of the Count Investment Solutions across the network, there's significant opportunities to grow funds under management organically and deliver better and more consistent outcomes to clients. The feedback from our clients and our firms has been extremely positive, and we've documented a number of case studies illustrating the benefits of the CARE investment philosophy to clients and to the advice firms.
Ongoing investment in the advisor and client engagement tools to support adoption is critical, and our clients really value direct access to our Chief Investment Officer, who directly delivers communications, presentation, and investment updates to clients. As investments get more complicated, wealth increases, and the world continues to be volatile, clients are seeking better, more timely information to make the right decisions. Our award-winning wealth segment continues to go from strength to strength. Count won the CoreData Advice Network of the Year for 2025 and was a finalist in the 2025 IMAP Awards for Innovation with our SMA. This builds on our success last year with the CoreData Licensee of the Year for 2024. Our leading wealth model ensures our network of advisors have scalable advice tech that reduces advisor preparation time. We perform well ahead of industry benchmarks.
Our risk and compliance function is highly rated by our advisors, and in particular, we carefully monitor our approved products list. We're not afraid to move ahead of the research houses when we need to, and we will always put the needs of our clients first, as evidenced by our recent proactive decisions to adjust client exposure to some private credit markets. We're constantly vigilant and proactive across our network with audits of advice and their investment recommendations and provide tailored coaching and development to advisors each and every day. Our long-term approach, backed by independent external board governance with deep expertise and investment committee structure, ensures our client needs are always placed first, not the desires of a product manufacturer. We continue to grow through mergers and acquisitions, with 11 transactions completed in the year, which includes the divestment of the legacy and underperforming firm, Evolution Advisors.
We've remained disciplined in our approach and have focused on larger transactions to scale up our equity partnership segment. We see the benefits of driving scale in this segment as firms become acquisition hubs for further M&A activity. In particular, we are prioritizing acquisitions that add wealth revenues to the segment, complementing our core strength in accounting and growing firm margins. In financial year 2025, we deployed more capital in the equity partnership segment than the prior period. With the additional scale, we've grown average firm revenues across the segment, and we anticipate further benefits to come from scale as we grow, particularly in margin improvement. The Count Adelaide acquisition of Johnston Grocke is a terrific example of how we're executing our strategy within the equity partnership segment. Revenue here in this firm has grown from $2.8 million to nearly $10 million in just three years.
Financial planning revenues have been boosted through acquisitions and fresh leadership. Their take-up of Count services continues to grow, with the firm already adopting our outsourcing solutions, and they're looking to adopt other Count services such as our IT managed services and our CARE Investment Solution. Our integrated model is increasingly critical to delivering scale in the equity partnerships model, removing the noise and enabling our leaders to focus on what they do best, delivering for their clients. We're encouraging the emergence of use cases in driving operational efficiencies through outsourcing, AI, and automation. We have a three-pronged approach to embedding AI within our strategy, which is policies, education, and selected projects.
The firms that have adopted this are seeing improvements in productivity and client service, and Smart Business Solutions is a perfect example where they've achieved significant operational efficiencies from AI and automation, for example, of the small business BAS process. We believe our role is critical in driving better client experiences and engagement through operating efficiency gains, and these productivity gains give time back to our frontline staff so they can spend more quality time with their clients and improve the client experience. Before I hand to Keith to take us through some more detail about our financials, I would like to thank our firms, our partners, and our people who've delivered for our customers and clients and contributed to these strong results for the full year.
This year, we celebrate 45 years in business, and I'd like to acknowledge our founder, Barry Lambert, and the Count Foundation, which has never been bigger or more important to us in serving and making an impact on everyday Australians. Keith, over to you.
Thank you, Hugh, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to see so many investors on the call today and look forward to engaging with new and existing shareholders over the coming weeks. We have delivered an exceptional set of full-year results, benefiting from the acquisitions completed in the last financial year and the organic growth achieved over the period. Underlying revenue on a like-for-like basis, removing the divested operations of Evolution and Bentleys , show a 28% revenue increase on the prior corresponding period. Our cost increased over the period at a lower rate relative to the top line, which reflects the increased scale of the business and the cost synergies that were achieved. More pleasingly, we have delivered the $5.1 million of cost synergies for the full year, which are reflected in the financials across mainly the corporate, wealth, and services segment.
Other income reported has increased over the period, and that is a result of business as usual activity, including rebates from suppliers, deferred consideration adjustment, sale of fee parcels, lease variation gains, and impacts from share ownership movements within the equity partnership segment. Whilst corporate costs have increased, the overall underlying corporate cost as a percentage of total revenue has declined from 8% to 6% over the last few years. We've managed the corporate costs appropriately, and we continue to see the corporate cost as a percentage of total revenue to trend downwards over time. In respect of interest costs, our proactive cash management has resulted in a stronger interest income in the second half, and we expect to continue to proactively manage our debt and optimize our interest costs appropriately on a go-forward basis.
Moving on to the waterfall, we have provided a comprehensive reconciliation from FY 2024 statutory to FY 2025 underlying results. Organic growth contributed 7% on the underlying FY 2024 results, noting that this represents the organic growth of the business, excluding Diverger and other acquisitions during the last financial year and current financial period. In the waterfall, we have also called out other one-off costs that have impacted the results, in particular the additional system upgrades that were incurred by four equity partners during the period, impacting EBITDA by $0.2 million. Acquisitive growth stated in the waterfall includes the full 12 months of Diverger and other acquisitions, such as Count Adelaide's acquisition of Johnston Grocke and some partial year acquisitions and tuck-ins that were completed in FY 2024 and 2025. The EBITDA from acquisitions contributed $11.2 million over the period.
We also closed off the Diverger integration and transaction costs in line with the $8 million total cost announced at the time of the acquisition. We incurred $5 million in FY 2024 and the rest of the $3 million in FY 2025. In terms of the segment performance, we have seen all three segments grow over the period. Our equity partnership segment has delivered another solid year, driven by acquisitions and operational efficiency improvements through the adoption of AI and increasing use of outsourcing. During the period, due to significant increased acquisitions in FY 2024 and 2025, we saw one-off impacts of integration costs hit the equity partnership segment towards the second half of FY 2025. Combined with the additional system upgrades of four firms, the overall growth rates for the equity partnership segment have been lower than expected.
However, we do expect these one-off costs to be normalized in FY 2026 as the reoccurring revenues continue to flow through. To give you an idea of these one-off costs, these relate to time spent on client transitions for fee parcel acquisitions, where firms would spend more time on the initial meeting, which would be subsequently written off. In our wealth segment, our SMAs experienced growth of $744 million, underpinned by net inflows of $380 million and market movements of $364 million. It was pleasing to see the net inflows exceed market movements over the period. In the services segment, we have been driving operational efficiencies through AI adoption. We can see significant benefits in assisting with the marketing materials for the education and expertise offerings and using large language models to mine tax responses for our tax technical help desk.
Combined with the unified sales team and the expected completion of the CRM system in services by the end of the calendar year, these efficiencies can help us further scale our offering and drive improved sales. With the full impact of the significant acquisitions flowing in the full year, we are seeing a commensurate step change in the cash flow of the business, driven by the increase in the size and scale of the business and the profitability, with higher margins flowing across the portfolio. Better management of cash flow from operations can be evidenced with cash flows from the second half stronger than statutory EBITDA.
The cash flow increase is also a result of the outcomes of various structural initiatives that we have executed over the last 18 months, particularly in relation to tax following the acquisition of 25% of Occurum and 15% of Count Financial that Count didn't previously own in FY 2024. We have proactively managed our cash flow to drive better interest income outcomes, and we continue to optimize our payment schedules and cash levels to drive optimal cash outcomes in respect of interest income on an ongoing basis. We have increased the final dividend to $0.0275, which is about the mid-range of our dividend payout policy of 60%- 90% of maintainable net profit to Count shareholders. This increase represents a 22.2% increase to the final dividend declared last year.
We executed new funding facilities with Westpac in early January, which increased our headroom and ensured we had sufficient capacity to fund growth given the robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities. We have a strong focus on capital discipline and optimizing returns through new and existing investments, and we're focused on accretive outcomes where we can further improve and grow our earnings. We will continue to operate the dividend reinvestment plan, which we initiated for the interim dividend. This provides shareholders to further increase their holdings, and the funds from the DRP will assist with additional cash to enable the group to continue deploying capital at accretive returns for shareholders. In summary, we have delivered an exceptional year with increased underlying EBITDA and net profit compared to prior period and have delivered great shareholder outcomes.
We exceeded our initial expectations of Diverger cost synergies and have realized $5.1 million in the period. We have a great platform of organic growth and a pipeline of acquisition opportunities to continue execution of our growth strategy, and I look forward to delivering on our growth ambitions. I'll pass back to Hugh for some reflections and outlook for 2026.
Thanks, Keith. As you said, a very strong set of results against all metrics. Over the period, we've also refined our strategy with the board and the involvement of all of our employees. We have a bold ambition to be the leading provider of integrated wealth and accounting services, and this has been supported by relentless execution by the team against our purpose, pillars, enablers, and behaviors. We give our people, partners, and clients the confidence to look ahead. Our strong position in the fast-growth market of wealth management, underpinned by the stability of our accounting business, gives us a long-term advantage. These results can only be achieved by delivering on our enablers across branding, systems and technology, and people and culture. We do all of that through living the Count behaviors of thinking with an open mind, acting with bravery, and doing what is right.
This bold ambition is fueled by our flywheel, which ensures that we have a sustainable, profitable, and integrated business model that delivers superior returns for shareholders. Our execution against the flywheel has been reflected in the results reported today for the full year, and we have a very strong platform to execute and deliver on our bold ambition. I did want to just thank you again for your time this afternoon. We know it's a particularly busy time of year, and at this stage, I'll hand over to our Company Secretary, Doug Richardson, to open up for Q&A.
Thanks, Hugh. We'll now move to the Q&A session. We have a number of analysts and investors on the call, so if you could please raise your hand virtually, we will answer your question in an orderly fashion. First question, I think it was a question from Joe, was it? No, from Andrew. Go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew, we'll take your fear of this interview. You could just check that you're unmuted at your end as well.
How does that sound?
We've got you now, thanks.
Great, thank you. Thanks for taking the questions. I just wanted to start just around the operating leverage within the equity partnerships business. I appreciate that you didn't take the CRM costs above the line, nor below the line, I should say, and nor the integration costs. Just thinking about that sort of relationship going forward, if you achieve, let's just call it 5% revenue growth, what's your feel for what the operating leverage should be through the equity partnerships to the EBITDA line?
Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I might make a couple of comments and then invite Keith to add some as well. When we talk about the introduction of some of the CRM capabilities in those projects, they do deliver some disruption to production, and that often affects the core of the accounting business. I think in that space, we accept that general sort of organic revenue growth is always in the sort of the low single digits, that sort of 3%, you know, 2%, 3%, 4% type range. Where we're seeing some real opportunity, of course, is from the financial planning revenue perspective. As we mentioned earlier, only 25% of our total revenue in the segment comes from financial advice, and not only are the margins higher in the advice space, but so too is the revenue growth rate. Maybe Keith, you want to add a couple of points on that.
Yeah, so look, I think one of this is really around timing, Andrew. You know, whilst it has impacted productivity, the reoccurring revenues are pretty much there. That has obviously deferred some of that revenue and pushed that into the first half of FY 2026, particularly in relation to those systems. A good majority of those firms, and that's why we don't take that to the bottom line in statutory, and we don't call them out as one-off items, is because we do have 19 firms, and they do have those system upgrades. So a majority of them have gone through that. We're probably towards the back end of the firms that will undertake those system upgrades.
In regards to those one-off, particularly the integration, we did see a big step up in our acquisitions, particularly in 2024 and the start of 2025, and we had a few that came through, obviously announced in the last few months. There is significant work, particularly in that first, meetings with clients, as I referenced. Once again, those reoccurring revenues are still there. It's just being pushed, from a timing perspective, into FY 2026.
That's great. Thank you. Just one more question, if I could, while I've got the floor, just around the appeal on the court case, more just not so much a view on how you think it unfolds, but just a timeline, if you're any clearer on what that timeline looks like at this stage.
Sorry, I missed the question. I was reading one of the questions online.
Yeah, I see. Yeah, yeah, sorry, Andrew. Thank you.
Do you want me to repeat that?
No, got it. I think.
Okay.
We had a similar question just coming through online. I just want to start by acknowledging and then thanking Matt Comyn and his team at the bank. They've been a terrific supporter of the business. They've been our largest shareholder for 14 years now. As we know, nearly six years ago, they did declare their intention to exit their holding in an orderly fashion when the market conditions were right. Those conditions haven't emerged yet. We do feel, though, that we're coming to the point where those conditions are likely to emerge in the coming period. That's really driven by a completion of a lot of the remediation activity and whatnot. You'd have seen clearly that the class action against Count Financial was dismissed and costs awarded.
There is an appeal that's been lodged there, and this is still a process to play out in that space.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew, for those questions. Is there any other questions that we have?
I might extend because Andrew Dalziel had a similar question, but also had a question. Keith, I get you to comment around, notwithstanding the decline in corporate costs as a percent of revenue, can you give us some more detail over the two-man increase in costs and what should largely be a fixed cost business? I'll start with a third part of his question, which is, have the multiples you're paying for tuck-ins and the like changed in the last year? I will start there. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of interest in both financial planning and accounting businesses. We have seen some examples of where businesses, particularly private equity and particularly offshore private equity, are paying higher multiples, both for accounting and for financial planning businesses. In terms of the transactions that we've been doing, you'd see that we continue to be very disciplined.
We're clear on our return on equity hurdles, and we don't push through transactions that don't meet those hurdles. Our key advantage is in the 19 large-scale accounting and financial planning businesses that already count as an equity partner, and the 500 firms that we deal with day in, day out through our financial advice licensee businesses, which means we're the first port of call when somebody has a transaction to undertake a succession planning or want to exit a business. We see a real advantage of working our network, and that's where we come back to our integrated flywheel and the value that we add to those relationships. Keith, did you want to touch on the costs?
Yeah, I'll add a few, just particularly around the corporate cost. Yes, they have increased. I mean, it is also, whilst it has decreased as a percentage, there is still an increase because the shareholder base, and there's still a number of fixed costs, costs sort of associated with relative volume type, particularly with the employee base going up to 180 people. You can imagine the software costs, certain elements of the shareholder base, particularly with Computershare, there still is an increased cost to that. There is a benefit, obviously, through the synergies that we've talked about. Whilst previously, you know, Count and Diverger, a good example is the insurance cost. It's not exactly 1 + 1 = 2 . It's, you know, one account's insurance, Diverger's insurance, but it ends up being, you know, sort of, you know, the 1.5 type outcome.
There is absolutely the synergies there, but there still is a slight increase due to the size and scale of the organization. That's what effectively that $2 million cost represents.
Importantly, obviously, we track it and have done for some time as a percentage of total revenue, and we've seen that come down over the last two years, and that would remain our objective looking forward as we continue to build scale.
Yep. Just touching on the multiples, we do see that generally the market activity has increased, and no doubt about that, most people would see that in terms of accounting multiples being paid as well as for financial planning generally across the sector. Where we have, and particularly how Hugh has talked around our existing kind of footprint, we've got these 19 firms, and where we are, particularly when we do those transactions and where we drive obviously quite superior return on capital outcomes is because we have a number of cost synergies that enable us to meet the investment hurdles, which is, you know, our ROI is in the teens.
That's through synergies, whether it's through lease savings when we look at acquisitions and building these 19 firms into larger scale organizations, back office synergies when we look at these acquisitions, and we increasingly look at that, and that drives a much lower kind of post-synergy multiple. That's increasingly the benefit of our footprint, and how we would then drive those superior returns.
Ollie, I can see you've been waiting patiently from EMP. Go ahead with your question, Ollie.
Yeah, just on the money that you're insourcing from GDG, can you remind us when you think you'll be bringing that in? I suppose your contribution, I mean, it's obviously not going to be sheep stations, but I guess it's all incremental.
Thanks, Ollie, and a good tip from you. That process is underway, and it will be complete before the end of this calendar year in terms of its contribution, relative to its, I'll ask Keith just to make a couple of sort of observations around that.
Yeah, look, we'll get a few basis points exposure as a result of that. It's not like a CARE that generates 22 basis points, but it will be representing a few basis points benefit to Count , obviously, by bringing that in-house.
Yeah, and just on CARE , could you expand a bit on how you're seeing the pipeline there of firms that are thinking of using it, that you're in discussions with, and your aspirations on, I suppose, further stepping up the amount of net flows as more firms come onto the system?
Yeah, great. Ollie, just as a reminder to investors, the backstory with CARE was it was coupled with the GPS Wealth business and had been that way for nearly 14 years. On taking over ownership of those businesses, we've invested in CARE in a number of ways. We've increased the resourcing and the investments function. We have invested in the brand, and we're making investments in the advice technology that underpins the client experience as well. We've also appointed a business development resource in the team, and we've expanded the offering outside of the GPS network to include Paradigm and Count Financial. What that does is really say that this sort of historic sort of circa 80 firms that were sitting inside primarily the GPS network, we can now talk to the 500 firms right across the licensees. In fact, we don't limit it there.
We have some interest from outside the group as well and some users of CARE outside of the group also. We see a big, big opportunity. The process there, it is an advice philosophy. We go through a process of educating the firms around it. If it fits their client needs and they choose to adopt it, we encourage them to pick up the technology, the process, the whole experience. It's not just an SMA. It's a philosophy to run your business by, which means that I suppose the uptake is, in a sense, a little slower, but then the scale comes later. Our approach has been to introduce the firms to it, educate them around it, and build a pipeline and take them through the first client case and see where it goes.
At any stage, we have a pipeline of 20 to 30 firms that we've identified, and we go through that change management process and show them what that first piece of advice would look like for the client along with the client engagement tools. It's quite a, as we said, it's sort of hand-in-hand combat type approach because it is introducing them to those client engagement and getting them to adopt that process with how they engage with clients.
A really good starting point for us is our 19 equity partners. As you know, historically, most of those have come from being very strong in accounting and are building their capabilities in financial planning. Standing up a complete set of tools, capabilities, client experiences, and advice process efficiencies have been very powerful for those firms. We see good, solid opportunities in our equity partners as well.
Yeah, no, that's perfect. MDA still looks kind of a bit embryonic, your offering there. Can you talk to us about your plans there, I suppose, maybe try to accelerate that?
Yeah, look, it's probably fair to say it's not our primary focus. Ollie, you know, CARE is really at the heart of what we offer. Because of the depth of the capabilities and the philosophy there, that's where we're focusing a lot of our attention. We also recognize we have a broad range of needs across the group, and we want to make sure we're relevant to all of the firms. Some of our businesses, because of our size and scale and history, are very sophisticated businesses. They've already got extremely well-defined advice processes, investment philosophies, investment committees, etc. In those situations, they're looking for a more bespoke managed discretionary account solution, and hence we do offer that. Obviously, we lead with CARE and then we follow with the account portfolios and with the MDA Solution as well.
Yeah, perfect. Thanks.
Thanks, Ollie. Any further questions early?
All right, I might just have another quick call around of the meeting if there's any further questions from investors or analysts.
Anything come through online, Doug?
No, nothing additional. With that, Hugh, I will now hand back to you to close the briefing.
Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for making the time to attend our investor briefing today. I know that Count has distracted attention away from Coles and Wesfarmers today, but we appreciate it's a busy time of year. We're coming towards the end of the results period, and we thank you for choosing to be with us and for your questions and feedback. We value your engagement. Appreciate you being investors in Count. We look forward to continuing to work very hard to deliver for you. I think this officially concludes our investor presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you.