Good afternoon, all. Indy, would you like to start off?
Yes. Good afternoon to all our shareholders. Welcome to this presentation. I think the best thing would be for us to take you through a quick review of what the organization does and what our core strengths are and what transpired over the last year. I think I'll hand you over to Rahul, who has the presentation with him. Rahul, you could load it up and please present.
Thank you, Indy. As you all know, Indy is the
I'll take any questions as they arise.
Thank you, Indy. As you know, Indy is the Group Chairman and the founding director also. He has established the company more than 25 years now, and we have been listed in ASX for 22 years. My name is Rahul Guha. I'm the Executive Chairman of Fiducian Services, one of our subsidiary, and my role is to provide the services to rest of the company. I've been with the organization for 10 years. As Indy suggested, what we might do today is hopefully you can see my screen, all of you. What I wanted to do today is just give you an overview of business, our businesses, different business, elements of ours.
Also the financials we'll look at, and we'll also ask Indy to elaborate the growth opportunities that we have in our company. With that, I might start off. Any questions? We'll set aside some time for the questions at the end as well.
You're responsible for.
Our business overview, platform administration, which is our first line of business. I'm on a conference call, sorry. If I can please request all of you just to mute yourself, and when you need to speak, you can unmute as well. Thank you. Our Fiducian overview of platform administration. We have got a market competitive offering for superannuation investments as well as SMA. We offer all of our Fiducian Funds, which is about 15 Fiducian multi-manager funds, which we'll look at in the following slides. But on top of that, we also have more than 50, almost about 60 external fund managers, and we offer a lot of SMA structures or separately managed account structure in addition with the term deposits.
We have got our own in-house system, which has been in operation for over 10 years now. Very stable system, very scalable system. You know what? On the media, we read about all the different platforms spending sometimes half a billion dollars, sometimes a billion dollars of their shareholders' money and coming up with a lot of new and really cutting-edge functionalities. When we look at that, and I've listed some of them, like electronic signatures, straight-through processing and so on and so forth. Those are some of the functionalities we have got in our system maybe one year or two years before our competitors have. Our system, what we pride upon is just the efficiency of our system.
It's a very easy to use, very efficient system, which really helps in saving our planners' time so that they can spend more time with the clients. Also clients, it's a simple system, very easy to use, and the general feedback is it's quite efficient and time-saving component for our advisors tool. In terms of our fees, like everyone else, we continuously compare ourselves and benchmark ourselves in terms of the fees that we charge. The good thing about our system is it's very very customizable.
That is, depending on how a client wants to pay, depending on how our advisors want to set up the fees, whether it's asset-based or whether it's a fixed fee, whether it's a charge monthly, quarterly, different type of fees, our systems are able to handle that. When we do our benchmarking, we are very comfortably sitting with the bottom half of the industry. That is, we have looked at a spectrum of maybe 20, 25 different platforms, and we are very pleased that we are able to sit on the bottom half. One of the reason we are able to do, and some of you have been with us quite long time, but what you know is we don't not only have Fiducian platform, but we have got other elements in our business as well.
That enables the whole group, you, to offer very competitive fees, which works for our clients as well as our planners. In the last quarter, what we have been able to do is really come up with a new product primarily targeted to independent financial advisors and the SMA market. In this section, he can give some overview as to what we see where the industry is going. Just for now, I think what we have seen in the industry is there's a lot of demand for the SMAs and especially for the more smaller planning groups. We have found a niche there and a vacuum that we think that we'll be able to fill with the smaller advisors, maybe 1 to maybe 10-adviser planning group.
We have launched the product. The distribution team has got a long pipeline that they are working through, and we expect hopefully some results will come through as well in the quarters to come. In terms of the revenue, our platform generated in the half year AUD 9.3 million revenue and contributed to a AUD 6.2 million profit, and with a AUD 3.2 billion funds under administration as of end of December. Just looking at the profitability just for a moment, and I talked about the efficiency. When I reflect back 10 years ago, our platform had a balance of roughly about AUD 800 million or thereabouts. Today, as you can see, we have got a AUD 3.2 billion.
When I joined the company, our platform administration team had a staff of roughly about 18 people, 18-20 people. It supported the number of clients that we had for AUD 800 million. Today, our number of staff ranges from about 10-12, while our funds have grown up about 3.5 times compared to what we had about 10 years back. Again, that's one of the angles of the efficiency that we have been able to roll out, and that works very well for, obviously, the clients and the planners. Again, from a management point of view and a shareholder point of view, we have been able to translate that into higher and stable profit margins, at the same time reducing the cost as well.
Sean, if you can please mute everyone, and then I'll unmute myself. Thank you, Sean. Just going on the next slide. I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes on how net flows have been. In the half year to December, we had a net flow of AUD 163 million, and that's a significant uplift from the corresponding December 2020 net flow that we have had. If you look at the chart on the left of the screen, but generally speaking, except for when coronavirus hit us, generally speaking, the second half of the year, we have had more stronger net flows compared to the first half.
Now 163 million, that's very close to the target that we had set ourselves, and we're very pleased to announce that this net flow is coming both from the salary and franchise networks. Also very importantly, a contribution both from the organic net flows that we are seeing coming through from direct referrals, client referrals, client campaigns and so on and so forth, but also the strategic acquisitions we have done externally in recent times. In the bottom chart, again, you can see a sort of a linkage between how the average FUA moved compared to the revenue and the profit before tax.
As you can see, the green line, which is the average FUA that has moved over the years, over the last 5 years, and that has got a direct correlation between the revenue as well as the profit before tax that the segment, this platform segment is generating. With that, I'll just wanna move on to our next business segment, which is the funds management. Again, in terms of funds management, we are a multi-manager, which means that we have got an investment team, an investment committee. Our role internally is not to select the stock for our investors, for our clients, but really to select the managers. Currently we have got roughly about 44 managers, best of the world and best of best from Australia also.
where our strength lies is really on the selection process and the regimen that we have, the rigid structure that we have got in the investment process. Our target is not to shoot the lights out, clearly. Our target is to produce a little bit extra return compared to the average by taking a little bit lower risk compared to the average. What we've experienced is that when we do that year in, year out, in about three years time, we end up in top quartile. I've got some statistic to share in the next slide, which I'll come to, just in a moment. When we measure ourselves and, maybe wrong use of words, we let Morningstar, which is an independent research house, to measure us.
When we do that, in the last 20 years, when we take our diversified funds and we do this ranking, we do this stock take every quarter. What we found that out of the 64 ratings that we had across 4 different diversified funds, in all of the 64 returns, we were able to position ourselves in the top quartile, and many of the cases in the top decile as well. All the one... Indy, you may need to unmute yourself.
Plus, I think, we were also a bit surprised when there were quite a few number one rankings, the best out of I think 200 fund managers. We've had quite a few of those too.
Absolutely. This business segment generated about AUD 14.2 million in six months to December on a fund base of about AUD 4.4 billion. Again, the profit margin remains very stable at the profit, total profit before tax remains stable at AUD 7.5 million. I just wanted to show again, as Indy touched upon before, I just wanted to show the ranking. As I said, these are not calculated by myself or my team. These are calculated by Morningstar. If I pick any funds, Ultra Growth Fund as an example, the last line. On a 1-year return, we produced 23.2%, and we were 12th best fund manager out of 134 operating in Australia. This was returns as of December, 1 year to December 2021.
If I go to 3 years return, we were third best fund manager. If I go to 5 years return, fifth best fund manager. 7 years return, top. 10 years return, third out of 100 odd fund managers. This message doesn't really dilute depending on the period, when I'm doing the measure, whether it's December 2021 or June 2021, or the investment horizon that I'm taking. It's a very consistent results that we have been able to produce, not by targeting returns, but by very strictly following our investment process and the multi-manager fund concepts that Indy introduced in Australia about 25 years or 30 years back. Just moving on to our fintech capabilities.
As I touched upon in the platform section, we have got our own development team, and we have developed our own backend, own client software administration system, which is Fast Track. We developed our own FORCe financial planning software, which is likes of Xplan and also the client reporting. Again, I don't intend to go through each bullet, but I'll just take one example on the FORCe. Like we are meeting you guys, we also meet a lot of planners and investment managers across Australia. One of the consistent feedback that we get is Xplan is great because they have developed the system for 10,000 planners and
When one individual planner wants to go and use Xplan, they're sort of lost, and they want to do one particular thing, and they need to find one particular function among 300-odd functions that Xplan has developed. The general feedback that we get is that, and again, it's a consistent feedback, that it's a great system, but very clunky and very difficult to navigate. We took those messages on board, and we worked very closely with our planners to develop a very, very simple but efficient system that works and that doesn't have all the bells and whistles that no one uses or no one needs, but really focuses on the client needs and the planner needs.
As a result, what we find is the planners that use the systems are finding a lot of efficiency to free themselves, free their administration time, and again, maximizing the client-facing time. Our fourth line of business, which is financial planning business. Now, this is a very key element of our overall offering. The way we look at this business line is more of an enabler of steady flows to Fiducian plan, funds, and Fiducian platform. Currently... Sorry, wrong use of words. As of end of December 2021, we had about 66 planners with 46 offices. As some of you may know, we have done quite a biggish acquisition, and Indy will talk about that acquisition in a moment. Since then, we have added about 16 planners also to our network and two extra offices.
Now, we've got a very selective process as to who we bring in, into our fold. We are very selective on who joins. There has to be a cultural fit, there has to be a compliance fit and a strong compliance performance and records. Only then, when all the criteria are satisfied, do we bring other planners in. Our planners has got a very distinct style of operating, and they are not fund managers. We believe the best fund managers are the investment managers in Australia and overseas, and we leave that specialist work not to do by the specialist. Our planners focus on the best outcome for the clients and deliver a holistic outcome for the plan for our clients.
We have grown our clients book as well as planner books organically, but we have also done inorganic acquisitions over the period. When we do acquisitions, and this is maybe paving the road for you, Indy, but when we do the acquisitions like the one that we have done for People's Choice Credit Union, we spend a lot of effort upfront, and we'll be spending days and hours and months to see the client base. When we look at any opportunities, we look at whether the clients are really gonna benefit joining the Fiducian process. If the clients benefit, we know that management, the company, and the shareholders will benefit too. We put a lot of emphasis on that.
One of our maybe thumb rule is that if you can't add benefit for our clients more than 50% to two-thirds of our clients, maybe that's not a good acquisition for us. We have let go a lot of acquisitions, but for the ones that we have acquired, what we have experienced is that we can add that benefit for the clients over a 1-year to 3-year period, which means during that time, wherever the clients are holding their current funds are, if it's right for the clients, that funds can move across to Fiducian platform and Fiducian funds, which in turn can also help the clients to get a proper process, proper returns, but also for the shareholders to get some extra revenue synergies. With that, Indy, if I can request you to maybe give an update on PCCU acquisitions from your perspective, please.
Thanks, Rahul. Yes, this was quite an exciting acquisition. In fact, we were quite thrilled when we were selected in a tender process. They're pretty tough people, the PCCU selection team. They're a very professional outfit, I must say, and they care for their members and their staff. We've had some very professional dealings with them. What this brings to us is a phenomenal advantage in being able to work out of South Australia and Northern Territory. These are exposures we never had before. The acquisition will also bring us about 40 staff, which includes, I think, 17 financial planners, and AUD 1.1 billion of funds under advice, with about just over AUD 8 million of recurring revenue, which will be quite supportive of our profits and revenue.
We paid about 70% upfront, and the rest will be paid after 12 months, just once we ensure that all the clients have stayed with us. We were communicated already to the clients, and of course, PCCU, the credit union, expects us to provide quality services to their members. It's we take it quite seriously because we want to meet their expectations and also those of their members. I think the transition's been pretty smooth. We've had 3 weeks of induction training days, 2 separate groups, and the last third week was this particular week, this one. I think everyone's very positive. They've cheered us when we've told them we've acquired the business. They've made some very, complimentary and constructive questions and responses. I think the management has already met the people, brought them on board.
They're an excellent group of employees that we brought on to Fiducian, and I think it'll do quite well. Meanwhile, obviously we're still looking at other acquisitions. There's one where we're doing the number crunching as we speak, and there's another one that we're in negotiation. We think these acquisitions, as Rahul explained, will be beneficial, provided we can add value for the clients, and we will only buy those businesses where we can actually add value for the majority of the clients. Over to you, Rahul.
Thank you, Indy. No, that's that sums up very much. If I can maybe just complement, Indy, what you said on a couple of angles. This has been very exciting journey for us, and the management and quite a lot of people in Fiducian Group has been working on this acquisition for the last six months. The staff are very, very excited. The PCCU staff that came across, they're very, very excited, but all of us are very excited in this opportunity. Needless to say, there's been countless hours and days and weeks, and months of effort have gone in. We have spent a lot of resources, a lot of our management time, but also some of the expenses to make sure that we're not cutting any corners to get it across.
In the last half, in the first half, we have had maybe a little bit elevated level of expenses compared to what we have had in the past, mainly to support this acquisition, which includes the staff costs, the transition costs. When a client size of this, which is over 5,000 clients are coming in, we need to make sure that our systems are fully ready. We had some legal costs, some consulting costs, and some implementation costs. Good thing is that we have already factored in all of those costs in the results. What we're expecting that going forward, the cost will be very much well managed and we'll go back to the previous levels.
What really excites me on the financials is not so much on the cost, but really the opportunities. One of the thing that Indy's mentioned now and then, and he had an industry presentation this morning also, which was a live telecast. When we, you know, when we bought these acquisitions, we priced it based on a revenue of AUD 7.6 million or thereabouts. When today we look at the numbers, that annual recurring revenue is sitting at more than AUD 8 million. We are starting this acquisition, so it's about half a million AUD more revenue compared to what we expected. Some of you know the industry very well, and you know that it's very, very hard to make money in financial planning business alone.
Our group strategy and the board's direction is that if you're able to break even on financial planning, that's a good outcome. Now, when we looked at the PCCU acquisition, our objective to this was to break even. Now, we did not anticipate that we'll start the acquisition with AUD half a million dollar extra revenue compared to what we expected. Also one other upside is that PCCU planners used to write a lot of one-off revenues. Again, we hadn't counted any of these one-off revenues in our calculations on a conservative basis. We're expecting that some of those one-off revenue might continue in the current year as well as the years to come.
Again, long and short of it is that in case there are instances, there are some client losses, we have got added capacity in our balance sheet and in our P&L to absorb those and some to produce some extra benefit for our shareholders and to the bottom line even before any revenue synergies start to come through. With that, I just wanted to look at on the financials. Again, I don't intend to go through each line by line on this slide. What's pleasing is just the last column. We have got two numbers, two digits on each of these metrics. As you know, just reiterating our board's strategy and the board's objective is to produce double-digit returns for our clients.
We can see all of these metrics are going in the right direction. Operating revenue increased by 20%. Our underlying NPAT, statutory NPAT increased by 17%. We have also been able to generate an increase in the dividends that we pay out to our shareholders. Promising thing is the funds under management. One of the slides we talk about, which I'll come toward end of the presentation, is that there's a very strong correlation between the level of FUMA that we have got and the EPS that we are generating. We'll look at that in a moment as well. FUMA also grew very strongly during this last half.
In terms of our segments, funds management, financial planning, platform administration, and for the last half we have split out the corporate services also. I'll just start off and maybe spend a minute or so in each of the segments. The funds management segment is a pure funds management business, and that's a very, very scalable segment. Unlike some of the fund managers, when they have got more monies to manage, when their costs can go up, in our case, actually the costs come down. I'll again try maybe, in 10 seconds to explain how it works. When we contract out to our mandate manager, we give them, say, AUD 50 million. For AUD 50 million, we give them a certain fee to manage.
When that 50 million goes up because of net flows coming in or market rising, then the additional 10 million that we would give to them, we can negotiate a better rate. So whatever we've negotiated before, X percentage, we'll, for the extra, the extra money that we allocate, we'll give them a little bit less. So what that means for us is that as the FUM, as the funds under management grows up, our margins would tend to increase as well. We produce a return of AUD 7.5 million profit before tax on the funds management business segments. Financial planning business, that's a strange one, for want of better words. The way we report our financial planning business is, we report only the direct cost in this segment.
That is the cost to service our clients, and that is the financial planners cost and also the direct support cost. With that view, financial planning business generated a profit of about AUD 1.3 million. Platform administration business, AUD 6.2 million. Corporate services, which is the board cost and other management costs, like IT costs and finance and so on and so forth, generated a loss of about AUD 3.6 million, but that's very much expected to support the rest of the business. That's the segment reporting. Looking at just quickly on our share performance on slide 18. Again, the slide tells the picture, so I don't need to explain too much on this slide.
Looking at 10 years back, the Fiducian stock has performed 112.6% returns compared to 172% return on All Ords. We have outperformed All Ords really quite strongly. Our dividend payout policy remains at 60%-70% of net profit after tax. Again, the shareholders could enjoy a 20% uplift in the dividends of AUD 0.148 compared to the previous period compared to December 2020. In fact, if one of our shareholders had invested AUD 1,000, and I know some of you have been longstanding investors in our company.
If one of you have invested AUD 1,000 on July 1, 2012, today your dividend yields would be AUD 152 for 1 year, that is more than 30% on an annualized basis. As I mentioned before, we have been able to produce double-digit EPS growth based on our negative debt in 17 out of 22 years. This is one of my last slide before I hand it back to Indy. Now, this is not a projection or a forward-looking statement, it's more of a conceptual representation. In this slide, if I look at, and this slide captures the data from 2013 onwards. All the solid graphs or lines are the actuals, and all the shaded or the dotted ones are really conceptual projections.
If I go back to 2013, our FUM balance, which today is about AUD 11 or AUD 11.5 billion as of end of December. In 2013, that was AUD 3.1 million. The blue graph, the vertical graph that you can see, had an EBIT of roughly about AUD 5 million. Now, at that point of time, our red line, which is the fixed cost, that was at certain level. As our FUM has increased, that line has increased, but very, very slowly. If I contrast that with our green line, the revenue line, the net revenue line, in fact, as you can see, as our FUM has grown, it has got a clear divergence between the red line.
The jaws of growth is very much expanding in the past, and what we believe will continue with this trend in the future if we are able to manage our costs and manage our margins. What this graph tells me is that there's a distinct possibility that our EBITDA will grow so long as we keep on growing the FUM. As you can see, the FUM, as I mentioned, AUD 11.5 billion end of December, but this doesn't include the AUD 1.1 billion acquisition that Indy touched upon before. As this AUD 1.1 billion acquisition from PCCU finds its way, if it's right for the clients of course, finds its way into Fiducian platforms and Fiducian funds, that AUD 1.1 billion funds under advice will translate to additional funds under platform and funds under management.
We expect that as that happens, that FUM has got a prospect of growing as well. With that, Indy, if you're able to sum up the growth opportunities that you see for the in the industry as well as in the company, please.
Well, thanks, Rahul. Yes. Basically as Rahul mentioned, we have three key revenue-generating businesses. First is obviously the platform business, which does administration for superannuation and IDPS for ordinary investments for investors. What we plan to do there is obviously capture some share from the disintegration of some of the larger wealth businesses. We want to attract IFA firms to use our platforms, and we want to expand the SMA and software-as-a-service business. Now, we just launched one or two new products. One is for super and one is for normal money called Auxilium, which is purely focused now on the SMA market. These are external groups, external financial planners, not Fiducian planners who have been supporting us, and this product will be targeted to them.
As I hear from the business development and distribution team, there seems to be quite a bit of interest being generated for it. So we'll see what happens over the coming year. The second part is the funds management business. That's growing exceptionally well, as Rahul showed you. The performance has been quite superlative. I think any fund manager anywhere in the world would be envious of these numbers. We're continuing to work very hard to deliver those returns for our investors. We've already expanded into New Zealand with the new funds passport regime that the government has allowed. We have about five or six funds registered on platforms in New Zealand and one KiwiSaver account, which is also there. We're looking at other countries right now.
We will be distributing these through other platforms overseas to clients who are advised by other people, not Fiducian. It'll just expand our capturing the market for our funds from other investors besides those referred by Fiducian financial planners. The third, obviously is the financial planning division. It's got about AUD 4.3 billion under advice. A lot of those are clients who would be better off in the Fiducian process, and as I speak, our planners are already talking to many of them. Once you add the AUD 1.1 billion coming from PCCU, that will raise the financial planning's funds under advice to about AUD 5.1 billion-AUD 5.2 billion, and that's a big boost. I think all three areas are being explored. Work is being done. New products are being launched.
Yes, we're constantly looking for acquisitions. There's another one, as I might have said, where we're doing the number crunching. There's the one that's already there, which we are actually negotiating and then trying to get on board. That will continue the acquisition. Along with that, I think there's about five financial planning businesses that are negotiating with our business development team to take up franchises from Fiducian. Yes, it's looking quite positive for the whole business in all three areas. Over to you, Rahul.
Thank you, Indy. With that, brings an end to our presentation, but we might open up for questions for Indy if any one of you have any questions. Any questions from the floor? With that, I just wanted to thank again all of you for your time, and really appreciate your ongoing support for the Fiducian company and to the management. Indy, any final words?
Oh, just got a message from John Percival. Thank you, John. You commended us for our excellent results. All I can say is, mate, I can assure you we will continue to work very hard to keep up this result and to deliver good returns for our shareholders. Thank you very much from my side, and thank you as well for having confidence in Fiducian and for supporting us. Have a nice day and thanks once again.
Thank you all.