Good afternoon, all. Thank you again for making the time for us and for giving us the opportunity to share our results with you. My name is Rahul Guha. I'm the Executive Chairman of Fiducian Services, and with me I've got Indy Singh, who's the Executive Chairman of Fiducian Group, the founding director, and has been with the organization for the last 27 years, since inception. Indy?
Yep. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for logging on. I'll get straight to the point. It's, it's been an interesting or rather strange year. We closed the year with the share market, suggesting a 15% increase, but really, what went through was a little different. Overall, because we charge on the average funds we hold, every week, the average there actually was lower. Therefore, our unrun impact over the year is slightly less year. The last 2 or 3 months, yes, the market ratcheted up, and we now have to close with the under management advice and administration of something like twelve-
This meeting is being recorded.
AUD 12.3 billion. As of August, I think, a lot more than that. We started, okay. We closed at 12.3, but actually, the average was a little lower than last year. It spells a good reason for the stock, because we're starting from a very high point of 12.3, and as of now, I think, Rahul, you said it's about 12.66.
That's correct.
It's already AUD 12.6 billion. It's a good starting point, which is much, much higher than the AUD 10.9 billion, I think we had in the previous year's start. You can see that, over the term, over this year, there are a few transactions that we've had to absorb. The first, obviously, is that the fees were reduced. There was pressure from APRA to all superannuation funds, and we were no different, so we reduced our fee as well to be competitive. We have some serious salary costs from about 40 employees who have come on through the PCCU acquisition. Of course, as I explained before, the market didn't do us many favors, but hopefully it'll be stronger this year. Now, all of that has been absorbed, and we are looking forward to a pretty strong year.
I think, Rahul, if you'd like to go through the presentation which we have, you might start.
Thank you, Indy. I'll share my screen. Ashley, I can see you. If you can, please give me a thumbs up to make sure that you are able to see the screen. Ashley? Are you able to see the screen? Okay, great. Thank you all again, and thanks, Indy, for the introduction. What we wanted to do is give you a business overview and look at our particular business lines. I'll start off with the platform administration, and as Indy said, it's been quite an interesting year. Platform administration, we saw net inflows of AUD 364 million, including about AUD 100 million from Auxilium and Badges. The good thing is, some of you have been following our company for quite a long time.
The good thing is that there's a lot of, lot of synergy opportunities in our business model. From our, from our aligned advisors, almost 100% of the funds that's come in are invested in Fiducian platform and Fiducian multi-manager funds. Funds that are under administration in end of June 2022 was AUD 2.7 billion, which increased to about AUD 3.273 billion as of end of June 2023. On the face of it, it's quite a lot of increase, which is roughly about, say, AUD 500 million increase.
When you take a small step back and look at what's happening, the averages, average actually was AUD 2.999 billion in FY 2022, and it increased slightly, including the Auxilium and Badges AUD 100 million. It increased slightly to about AUD 3.027 billion. Effectively, the average did not really move much. When we look at our June numbers . Sorry, when we look at our June, July 2023 numbers, the platform administration is sitting at about AUD 3.333 billion, which is about 10% increase compared to the average we had in FY 2023.
If I were to apply the margins that we earn on a platform, you would see that there's potentially another AUD 1.2 million extra revenue that we could potentially earn from the additional additional level of funds that we have as of July 2023.
T hat, even if, the markets stay static and don't go anywhere, then that revenue seems to be booked over the year.
Absolutely, Indy. Thank you. Our platform are, what we believe is quite advanced, and it's fully integrated to the financial planning software as well as the client reporting, which I'll cover on a separate, separate slide. What we are talking about here is the core Fiducian-branded platform, and which is really catered towards the aligned advisors that we have got. We have got an extensive range of investments. We offer Fiducian Funds, about 14 of them, which you'll see in the following slides, but also about 60 odd external managed funds and shares, term deposits and so on and so forth. When we talk to our own advisors, the aligned advisors, that's pretty much what they want, and the core platform is geared towards that. Just moving on to the next slide.
If I look at the net funds inflows now, this is an interesting statistics. If we were to take a step back and look at some of our bigger peers, be it AMP, be it FAAA or Insignia or Colonial or any other big names in the industry, last 4, 5 years, when you look at their platforms, every single one of them has had not a net inflow, but a net outflow. When you're looking at some of the big names, an outflow of AUD 5 billion, AUD 6 billion in a year is not uncommon.
When you look at the slide that you've got on the screen, we have consistently produced the net inflows in Fiducian, and that's the benefit of having an aligned dealer group, and we are able to consistently produce- we have been able to consistently produce our net fund inflow numbers over the period. FY 2023 hasn't been any different. On the next slide, oh, sorry, on the next graph, on the right of the slide, you can also see a graph that shows the net revenue we have earned from the platform administration business, the linkages, the correlation between the average FUMA and also the profit before tax in the graphs. Our profit before tax margins has been quite consistent, about 66% of gross revenue.
That also shows that as the as our funds under administration grow, there's an opportunity for the additional revenue straight to go to our EBITDA as well. This margins also includes the this revenue also includes the cash margins that we hold in the platform. A quick update on the IFA market, and I'll I'll request Indy to expand as well. In the last financial year, we have launched a low-value, low-cost value proposition, Auxilium, which is directly competing, competing with the other disruptors in the industry and focused towards mainly the Independent Financial Advisers network.
We also launched about 2 new Badges during the year, and we have got a very, very extensive investment menu, roughly about 300 managed funds, 25 managed accounts, all the ASX shares, exchange-traded funds, and so on and so forth. From a standing start, we have been able to accumulate about AUD 210 million odd under funds under administration from our Badges, as well as the Auxilium product, which also includes about AUD 100 million net inflows during the year. Indy?
Yeah. Thanks, Rahul. Look, we spoke to the brokers and said, "Why are some of our competitors being valued at 150 times earnings, and we are at about 10 or 12 times?" The answer I was given was: Unfortunately, we make a profit, which came as a surprise. The other thing was they said, "You are treated like an EBITDA company, which will make a profit, pay a dividend." These guys are supposedly disruptors. I said, "Well, that's strange, because we do the same thing." W e wanted to start a line, which I said would disrupt the disruptors, which is pretty much what's happening now through the Auxilium line and Badges, where people can come and nominate the products they want, and we just charge an administration cost for it.
We have no responsibilities besides doing the administration well. That's the line that's coming along. I was a little skeptical at the beginning, but I think the take-up has been quite positive and encouraging, we're still in discussions with a lot in the marketplace. If you look at it with Fiducian, we've got about 80 captive financial planners that go into the Fiducian platforms, and the market for Auxilium and the Badges is something like 12,000 advisors around the traps. We're trying to capture as many as we can and get them registered on our platform so they can possibly start using Auxilium.
I think it's, it's, as Rahul said, a low-cost option and, possibly the lowest cost option in Australia, which has all the, the bells and whistles and services that are required, and, and it, it's being managed quite well.
Thank you, Indy. Just moving on to the funds management segment of our business, and very similar story, what we saw compared to the funds under administration. Although the fund balance is June 2022 versus June 2023, increased by more than AUD 500 million, but the average, when you look at as of June 2022, the average was AUD 4.130 billion, and that pretty much stays stable at AUD 4.105 billion as of June 2023. However, when we look at the July 2023 balances, the funds under management has got AUD 4.592 billion, as opposed to the average of AUD 4.1 billion, which is almost a 12% increase over FY 2023 average.
Again, taking our margins and applying to this number, potentially FY 2024 could contribute an additional annualized revenue of about AUD 2 billion, AUD 2 million. In FY 2023, we also launched a couple of new products. The first product is investment bond, which we badged through Generation Life, and which is really offering the Fiducian Growth Fund. Indy, did you wanna expand?
Yeah. Well, you see, Chalmers, our Treasurer, came out and said that he is going to restrict people with high values in superannuation funds to maximum of AUD 3 million, with no indexation. T here are some clients who have larger amounts than that with us. Insurance bonds or investment bonds, as they're called, if you can hold the money there for 10 years, you can withdraw it without having to pay any tax whatsoever. 9 years, it's a little bit of tax, but-- and even 8 years, but otherwise, it's, it's an isolated investment. Fiducian Growth Fund is a good fund for a long-term investor, and those who have surplus money in superannuation can easily just roll the money over and transfer to the Fiducian Investment Bond.
Then there's the other one, which is the Deep Green portfolio, where we were asked also by the regulator that you don't have too many funds in the ESG environment. We said we've got two, one multi-manager and one direct, and there isn't much take-up, actually. People are not really investing in them. We said, "Okay, we'll have one more," but we don't want just the run-of-the-mill, because as you would have read, there's a lot of talk and fines being levied by the regulators, ASIC and APRA, on people for greenwashing, where the bulk of the stocks aren't actually ESG, and they're being used. We had one, which was absolutely Deep Green, we called it, and vegan.
There's a few people who have invested in it, and really, it's for people who, who believe that they want to invest in companies that promise a better future. We are very clear about that in the PDS, which says, "Look, there's a promise, but we can't assure you that it'll be realized. It's your choice. It's your money. If you wish to put something there into a company that's trying to do it, you've got to make that decision.
Thank you, Indy. As you know, we are more of a manager, manager style of fund manager. That is, we don't select individual stocks. We select fund managers, and we don't also try to shoot the lights out. Our objective is to target above average returns by taking below average risk. What we believe is that when we do that year on year, over the long term, we end up in top quartile and top decile. As of now, we manage about AUD 4.5 billion worth of our clients' money through about 40 different fund managers, both from Australia and overseas. The performances, again, on the long term, we have stacked up quite well against the world's best fund managers in Australian as well as in overseas market.
We continuously, every quarter, we do a self-assessment, and we look at what Morningstar survey results have been compared to the other fund managers on our diversified funds. 43 out of 64 ratings against up to 168 fund managers, we stacked up quite well in the top decile and the top quartile.
Yeah, I think the last year has been difficult, particularly because we have a focus and belief that technology is the third constant besides death and taxes, and that it will continue 24/7, whether you like it or not. Just look at your mobile phone and remember when people had to ring a switchboard lady to connect, and then the dial tone, and now I'm sure many of you might be watching the World Cup soccer on the phone. That will continue, and it's not going to change. We have a belief in technology, but when interest rates went up last year, people beat up on the technology stocks because they felt that when interest rates go up, and they discount them, their, their, their future cash flows will be impacted.
As you would have noticed with the Nasdaq recently, it's already up about 30%, even though it's about 7 stocks. But the realization will dawn that it's a good sector to be in. Our requirement from the regulator and Regulatory Guide 175 346 says that you need to look at the features of the product, the risk of the product, the diversification of the product, the performance, and finally, the fees. When all the other factors are better, the fee doesn't come into account, actually. We, we score well in all the other things, and why would you want to put a client in a worse product when just because of a little fee, when they will always suffer long term?
You see the appropriate period, which is the longer term, 10 years, for balanced growth, stable. When you look at Ultra Growth, it looks like the ranking seems to have fallen, and that's true, but the return is actually quite good, 7 odd % over the year even. The reason really is that it's been put by Morningstar in a category which has strange-looking funds in it, where people are investing in gold, in, in hedge funds, in, in timber futures and copper futures and Bitcoin and whatever you name it, and these are strange funds. If you look at it over 10 years, they were there, too, but they didn't seem to have performed. It'll, turn around, and our fund is purely liquid. They're listed securities, transparent, and we don't have any of that stuff.
When you make the wrong comparison, you get the wrong result in terms of ranking, but performance is not bad.
Continuing with this, with this story, just touching on the gross revenue margins. We talk about 50% of the gross revenue as profit, and we have put up a slide. As you can see, the funds management part of the business has continued to grow with the margins remaining pretty much stable. Fintech capabilities, I touched upon it very slightly earlier, but we are one of the, one of the only, one of the very few ones in Australia, if not the only one, who's got in-house capability, both in, the platform administration system, which is called, basically called FasTrack, the financial planning software, which is FORCe, and also the client reporting in Fiducian Online.
All of those systems are integrated and really, written in the same language, sits within the same infrastructure and fully integrated. We are able to provide this solution to our advisors and clients, and as a result of that, we are able to create efficiencies where a lot of our competitors are struggling little bit, little bit. In the last financial year, we have also enhanced the security that we have got, and we have rolled out multi-factor authentication in all of our systems. That has been accepted quite well, both by our advisors as well as clients. Touching about the financial planning part of the business. Financial planning is an enabler of steady flows in Fiducian Funds and Platform, and it's very critical part of our business.
We opened up about three new offices in NSW, in Illawarra, Ultimo, and Sutherland, as of today, we have got offices in all states in Australia, across Australia. We have got about 80 financial advisors, about 41 of them salaried, and 39 franchisees, who operate roughly about 45 offices across Australia. In the comparative last financial year, we have, in FY 2024, we have, we have changed our targets a little bit. If you, Indy, if you want to expand on that, please.
Yeah, well, we've talked to advisers, one of them we've said is that if they want to stick around, they've got to have higher inflows. People are, I think, in some cases, a bit slack, but there's been no resistance. Also, I think the fees of clients will also go up, given to be in line with the industry, which has gone up much higher than what we are suggesting, because the regulatory requirements are much higher, the compliance requirements are much higher. The costs have all shot up, and you would know that from when you go to do your grocery shopping, even how high prices have gone. That will go up, and that'll help to bring some more revenue in.
Now, with financial planning, as we said, we know our, our ecosystem of, of money coming into the platforms is purely the core business is our own financial planners. We can employ them, or we can franchise them. When you franchise them, it doesn't cost us much, except they pay us a fee for using our, our technology and our services. We can acquire a business which requires some form of tailoring, acclimatization, getting them inducted into the process, and that can be a little difficult, as we saw with PCCU, where we had a bit of a challenge to bring them all on board, and I think they're doing pretty well. Obviously, the third is the Auxilium, which is the additional business we've started.
I'm positive about it, that we look forward to it doing, doing well. For the franchises and Auxilium, really, we don't have to pay, whereas the salaried people, we buy out, those people, we have to pay.
Financial, under financial planning, we had roughly about AUD 4.4 billion end of June 2022, which grew to about AUD 4.613 billion as of June 2023. Of these amounts, roughly about AUD 1.9 billion sits in external platforms, and as both Indy and I touched upon before, the real synergies that our organization benefits from is that when it's best for the clients, when it's in the best interest of the clients, potentially these external, potentially, these funds held in the external platforms could be migrated into Fiducian platform and Fiducian funds, which would be beneficial for the organization as well. We do estimate that out of these AUD 4.6 billion funds under advice, roughly about AUD 700 million of that are non-prepaying, non-advised clients.
What that means is that these clients were, used to be Fiducian clients, perhaps a long time back, or maybe the acquisitions that we did, they used to be our clients long time back. In the product provider's records, it's, Fiducian is still listed as the advisor. In reality, we don't have any engagement with these clients, we don't provide any advice, and neither do we get any fees from them. We are going through a process of trying to re-engage with these clients, and if we are not able to re-engage, we will be formally disengaging. From an optics point of view, the funds and advice that we have may potentially drop up to about AUD 700 million.
The key point that I wanted to make is that we are not anticipating any revenue impact, because this AUD 700 million worth of clients are not paying a fees to start with. We only see an upside through this exercise. That is best case scenario, we will be able to re-engage, and the clients will be paying a fee. Worst case scenario, there won't be any impact on fees anyway, but we won't be having these clients listed as our clients and create a noise as a result. Staffing, Indy, did you want to cover this slide, if you can please, on-
Yeah. Look, we started the year at about 180, 178 to be exact. We brought on these new staff in Adelaide. We brought in new staff for certain activities in the office. Fortunately, the way we managed it, the number of staff has still remained static at 178. You can see there in the slide that we've got practice managers. We've got a new HR manager. We needed additional support for IT because the number of planners and the network has grown all across Australia. People need support for IT when they can't get into the system or they need help how to operate the software. We brought that on.
The staff costs have increased, I think AUD 4.6 million, largely through the 40 people in Adelaide. That's all baked into the numbers now, and we've taken that in our stride, along with the other costs.
With that, let's look at the financials for a couple of minutes or so. FY 2023, as we saw, the FUMA, the funds under management, advice, and administration, that grew from AUD 10.9 billion for the previous year to about AUD 12.34 billion. That's quite a lot of change, 13% uplift. Just give me a second, please. I just need to mute one of you guys. If you're able to mute yourselves. Thank you. What I was saying before is just reiterating that although the funds under, although the FUMA grew end on, end on, year, year-on-year, about 13%, the average FUMA really remains stable. We had a 6% uplift in operating revenue.
Although we had a 6% uplift in operating revenue, the primarily the increase in revenue was actually coming from the business that we acquired in February 2022 from PCCU, or People's Choice Credit Union in South Australia. As we have built that revenue, but primarily the revenue has still remained the financial planning revenue and has not translated, or has not translated to a large extent in FY 23 into the synergies in platform as well as funds revenue. Although the, effectively, the net revenue remains the same, re- enjoyed the, the increase of 6%, the EBITDA actually fell about 3%. Maybe let me take a quick step back and try to see the reasons why do we have an increase in 6% revenue, but the EBITDA is falling as a result 3%.
What I would assign that to is mainly 3 reasons. 1 is what Indy touched upon before, that when we took on the PCCU acquisition in South Australia, we also took on their staff, which is about 40 staff, and that staff is required to provide the service that we need to provide to our clients. Essentially, what happened was we got the 1 set of revenue, which is a financial planning revenue, while we had the full set of costs as well. None of the synergies happened in FY 2024, 2023. As a result, PCCU acquisition, on a cash basis, has actually contributed a loss to us in FY 2023, and I'll come back to this point. That has been 1 of the reasons for the decline in the EBITDA.
The second reason I would assign is. You might recall that in last financial year's presentation, we told you that we wanted to remain very competitive in the market, and we had some pressures in the industry, as well as from APRA on the fees, and we introduced our counseling fees on the core platform in February, in June 2022, which resulted in a decline in revenue of roughly about AUD 1 million in FY 2023. The key point here is all of those expenses, as well as the reduction in revenue, have already been baked in in the FY 2023 results, and we expect that from FY 2024, we won't have any additional impact. The final reason for the EBITDA decline is the market.
Again, as we touched upon, there was lots of volatility in FY 2022. June 2022, it fell about, market fell about 8% of their values, and it turned around in July 2023, and then it fell again, and then it raised again. There was a lot of volatility, and effectively, as a result of that, we had a slight decline on our FUMA, excluding the Badges, and that also contributed to a decline on, on the revenue. On the third point, as you saw on the earlier slides, compared to FY 2023 average, the June, July 2023, we are already ahead.
If the market stays as it's, as it is currently, we expect there's a potential to, for the revenue to go up roughly about AUD 2 million in funds under management, an extra AUD 1.2 billion, million in funds under the platform. With that, I just wanted to go back to what I mentioned on the financial planning acquisition of PCCU's business. Although in FY 2023, we saw a cash loss contributing roughly maybe about AUD 700,000 or AUD 800,000 cash loss, but as of today, we can confirm, and very pleased to confirm, that the business is cash positive. We have got roughly, as of end of July 2023, roughly about AUD 185 million net inflows coming from that part of the business.
Some of them is transition from the business that we bought, but some of the others are brand-new business. We are very pleased to confirm that the business has turned around and currently contributing to our cash positive results when we include our synergies as well.
Yeah, I think Rahul's right. I'm very positive about the PCCU acquisition. Every large acquisition that any financial planning business makes, there is a bit of a hiccup about what, where you get your revenues, where you get your synergies. Typical, typical example are like IOOF's acquisition of ANZ and the other big ones. This was no different, but I think I need to congratulate the staff and the people who have worked with the PCCU people, they've really done a great job to turn it around in about a year. I think this could be possibly the, the jewel in the crown for Fiducian. They're very supportive, very cooperative. They're doing great business. There were lots of clients coming through to them, and this could be a real winner for us.
A quick mention on the segment reporting. Funds management, financial planning, platform administration, looks out and reports on their respective revenues. Corporate services is the area of more of the service functions, for example, legal, finance, et cetera, which provides the businesses to the first three business segments, which is the profit segments. Revenue from external clients, funds management, financial planning, platform, respectively, about AUD 25.9 million, AUD 27 million, and AUD 19 million. The next line is the in-segment sales, which is the corporate services, providing their services and charging a fee for that. Not so much based on the actual cost incurred, but also partly based on the capacity that each of these businesses are able to able to pay to the corporate services. Essentially, funds management, very profitable business. Platform administration, quite profitable business as well.
Financial planning, including the including the amortization, is although the profit before tax is $3.7 million, including amortization, just about breakeven or slightly better than breakeven. What we believe is that the strategy that Indy mentioned before is in financial planning business, is to increase our revenue by at least about 20% and to raise the net income targets towards $6 million. We believe that the position would improve in FY 2024 for financial planning business as well. A quick snapshot on our share price versus All Ordinaries Index, cumulative, cumulative index. Going back about 10 years, we have outperformed the ASX Index by about 900%. In fact, Just going to the next slide.
In fact, a pensioner who might have invested in Fiducian about AUD 1,000 in July 2012, today they would be getting about AUD 312 on dividends, before considering franking credits. 31% yield on an investment that is in 2012, plus franking credits. Anyone would argue or rest assured, that's quite a good return they're getting, excluding any of the capital gains that they may have received as well. In fact, out of the 23 years we have been listed, we have been able to produce double-digit returns 17 out of those 23 years, including the GFC period and the COVID periods. Unfortunately, this year hasn't been one of them, but the board's strategy remains to produce double-digit returns over the long term.
As we discuss some of the strategies that we are taking, the board and the management is quite confident about FY 24.
Yeah, I was surprised actually, that, to learn that Forbes magazine has actually ranked Fiducian as one of the top 10, I think, stocks in Australia, globally. We do have some international shareholders from the U.S. and, U.K., and possibly a German one who's looking. Yep, you can only do what you can do best, which is work hard and deliver the results.
Funds under administration, management, and advice. This graph shows that it's quite a steady graph over the last, what, five odd years, we have been able to grow our FUMA by about 84% pretty consistently from, both from organic as well as the inorganic flows. Maybe I'll just reiterate this point. The FUMA reflects recent acquisition, but that only reflects the funds under advice component. Majority of the FUA, funds under advice, that we've acquired from PCCU, hasn't translated yet, although it's on a journey, but hasn't translated yet fully to the Fiducian funds and Fiducian platform. With that, I'll probably go to my last slide. Which is, which is more of a conceptual representation rather than a forecast.
What this slide does, is that it plots each of the years, going back last 10 years, each of the years, what, what, what the level of FUMA has been. For example, in 2013, our FUMA has been about AUD 3 billion. It also plots what our total expenses, which is include fixed costs and variable costs. We used to report this only on fixed costs, but felt that it might be better for the shareholders to appreciate the total cost, including the variable cost, how it's moved over the years. The red line depicts that.
As you can see, the red line, looking at this graph, this scale on the right side of the graph, while the FUMA was roughly about AUD 5 billion in 2013, the red line graph was roughly about a little bit over AUD 10 million, about AUD 15 million, AUD 14 million-AUD 15 million in 2013. The green graph, which is the net revenue line, was roughly about AUD 20 million, and that resulted in an EBITDA of roughly AUD 5 million. Yeah. Now, that has grown in 2023 to about AUD 11.9 billion in FUMA.
As you can see, over the period, our costs have, of course, grown as our business has grown and inflation and et cetera, has also the red line has grown, the green line, the growth in green line, has far exceeded the rate of growth in the expense line. As a result, you can see all of those solid lines are the actuals, while the dotted lines or the gray, or the grayed out ones, are more of a, a conceptual projections. We can clearly see the difference between the green line and the red line in 2013 has very much expanded in 2023.
Hopefully, if we continue to go up, grow our FUMA, we expect that the jaws of growth has got the potential to expand further in future years as the scale, scalability of the business kicks in. That's, and that's really what, what I wanted to share, but just reiterating again, the last point here, what I meant before, that what we believe that as the, as the advisors work through the BCU, the clients acquired from the BCU, that has got the potential of accelerating our growth in this, in, in the, in these graphs, and bringing some of the scalability a little bit quicker. Indeed.
No, that's fine. That's good. We can take questions if there is.
That's the main things we had to share. I'll just pause for any questions that anyone any one of you might have. You may need to unmute yourself if you if you want to raise a question, or you can put on the chat.
Hi, guys. Luke Durbin here from Oracle Investment Management. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. I just had a question on the fee reductions there. You said that was from pressure from APRA. I'm wondering if you could maybe just elaborate on that a little bit. Maybe in, in what form did that take? Was it across the board, or was it just applied to a subset of your products?
Luke, is it?
Yes.
Hi, Luke. Thanks for your question. Look, yes, it was also market-driven, and it was pressure from APRA that was driving everyone to reduce their fees slightly. It started with our Fiducian Superannuation Service, the platform, and then we extended that to Fiducian Investment Service, which is the non-super platform, to make them both consistent. See, because our fees are scaled as volumes grow, then a client pays less fee, and up to AUD 2 million, I think, and then there's zero after that. A person who has AUD 5 million only pays fees up to AUD 2 million, and then from AUD 2 million, it goes to zero. Yeah, well, we, we had to do that just to be competitive. You know, as they say, you never want to take the regulator on, and it's a no-win situation.
When they were hinting about this, we just said, "Let's do it quickly." Well, we were a bit cocky because things were going really well, and so we brought it forward, actually, to June, the previous year. Then we realized the market had just tanked, and so it didn't help. It's all absorbed now, and, going forward, I think, it shouldn't matter.
Thank you.
Any other questions? You can also type in in the chat box as well if you have any questions.
Oh, hey, guys. This is Jack from Oracle Investment Management. I'm a colleague of Luke Durbin's.
Good.
I just had a question around your advisor numbers. It looks like you lost 3 franchise advisors during the half. Can you just expand on that, please?
I think a couple were because they just weren't performing at all. I think another one was wanting to retire, so we actually acquired that business. I think one person actually passed away.
Okay.
We managed that business for a short period of time till another one of our salary planners wanted to start a franchise herself, and so we funded her and to take this business on. So far, we don't really lose people. It's only when they want to retire or want to transition to some other arrangement that this happens. Also clients, I think it's pretty, a captive audience, pretty sticky with our clients. They, they believe our service is excellent, and they're looked after well by the planners because we're very conscious about the fact that our planners must be well trained and understand the client's needs and provide the best interest. Sticky clients, rarely do we lose planners. In fact, there's more coming on.
W e've just signed on another couple and two or three in the pipeline who are ready to sign up. These are people who are coming from some of the other dealer groups. Yeah, that, that, I suppose, answers your question, I think.
Yeah, that's good. Thank you. Yes.
Thank you, Jack. Any other questions?
Hi, guys, just a quick question from me. With nearly, like, AUD 20 million in cash, and then the PE after the cash is, like, low teens sort of going forward, have you considered a buyback at all with all the cash that you've got available?
I didn't get that question.
I'll just repeat the question, Joshua. I think the question is that we have got roughly about AUD 20 million in cash. Would the management or the board consider buyback at this stage?
We haven't thought of buyback because we're generally looking for new acquisitions. We find that a new acquisition, like, say, for example, a PCCU, brings much better long-term benefits. If there's nothing at all, well, certainly we may consider that. I t's not like we've got hundreds of millions of shares, Josh, and that a buyback can be meaningful. We have done it in the past. We haven't really found any benefits from that, if there's nothing and certainly we consider a buyback. We've actually upped the dividend this year. We measure it on underlying NPAT, because we were building up cash, to pay it as a % of net profit after tax, people were possibly getting less.
We've gone to underlying NPAT to return some of the cash to shareholders as a fully franked dividend.
Thank you, Indy. Thank you, Joshua, for the question. Any other questions? If not, Indy, if I can please request you to summarize and just wrap it up, today's session, please.
Yeah, I think we've pretty much covered what happened over the course of the year. There were 3 expense items that we had to bring in. The fee had to come down, the salaries went up, the market didn't really help us much. The year starting off is very positive. There's even if the market stayed static, the revenue would be much higher. Whether or not a recession unfolds by the end of 2023 or 2024, early 2024, is anyone's guess. If that happens, obviously, it would impact our revenue as markets generally come off if a recession ensues. Our starting point is pretty strong. We're about AUD 2 billion ahead, on now even more, another AUD 600 million more, just over the last 2 months.
The starting point is pretty good, and I think that could cushion if there is any decline in assets and revenue. We're quite positive about the future now, though, as I said, if, if Mr. Putin was to back off, then everything would change, and it'd be all good. There are risks there. The risk of inflation is still there with so many interest rate rises. We're, we're well, well positioned, and we're getting more, more inflows coming through. We expect revenue to go up, and I think it's, it's a positive future for us. Thank you so much for spending time to understand Fiducian. Thank you so much for your support. We really appreciate that very much.
Thank you, all. Enjoy the rest of the day.