Good morning, welcome to Generation Development Group's first half of financial year 2023 results presentation. From the company today we have Generation Life CEO and Managing Director, Grant Hackett, and Generation Development Group CFO, Terence Wong. Before I hand it over to Grant and Terence, I'll just remind you that we will conduct a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. W e'll have a hard stop just before 11:30 A.M., it will be reasonably punchy. Grant, I'll hand it over to you now to get started. Thanks very much.
Fantastic. Thanks very much, Simon, thank you to everybody for joining us this morning to discuss GDG's FY 2023 first half results. Overall it's been a pretty good run for us in the first half of this year, notwithstanding here's been a few headwinds. Obviously, consecutive interest rate rises, inflation, all the macroeconomic events taking place right now have made it a little bit more challenging than what we've seen in the last three years. In saying that, we're still pleased with the result. On this slide, basically it's a snapshot of our business. The three core pillars to what really drives Generation Development Group. On the left-hand side, 100% owned subsidiary, Generation Life, which has got two core products, the investment bonds and a lifetime annuity product.
On the other side is our 41% equity investment in Lonsec, which has absolutely shot the lights out and been well above expectations for the first half of this year. It doesn't seem to be experiencing any headwinds at the moment. In fact, it feels like it's got more tailwinds than anything else. Just quickly, just on the investment bonds front, AUD 2.4 billion sitting in FUM there, so 24% three-year CAGR growth, which has been outstanding, considering where we were just a few years before that. We're number one now in total market share. It was a position last year when we were putting our strategy together that we wanted to attain, so it's been nice to be able to get the total market share position. For some years now we've been winning in inflows.
We've been number one in that space. It's been great to see that we wracked the 50% threshold throughout the course of 2022. You can see that number there as well. That was a big goal for us as well, is to get through 50% market share and take number one position for both inflows and total market share. Down the bottom there you can see AUD 3.5 million in underlying profit in the investment bond business, which is 34% three-year CAGR growth. Great numbers considering all the challenges that we've had in recent times. On the annuities front, I'm very pleased to see the snowball of this. It's one of those products that you're investing in investment-linked lifetime annuity into volatile market conditions, whether we would get the sales traction around it.
Considering, you know, these sorts of products are more known in the traditional lifetime space, of course Challenger's product, which has done really well, we saw their results, and has really come back into flavor, and there's been a lot of positive commentary more broadly around annuities, which is great to see. We've really been getting some great sales momentum and traction with financial advisors around this product. To be totally honest, the education piece has been a little bit easier than what I anticipated. Starting out with bonds almost six years ago, the education took a lot longer in comparison to our new investment-linked lifetime annuity. You can see there we've got the guaranteed income for life, which we've got 100% reinsurance with Hannover Re. We've got investment choice, currently got 23 options.
I'm gonna talk more broadly in a second about what we're doing in the second half of this financial year in terms of new PDS. Then we've, you know, been able to crack that AUD 10 million threshold in terms of total FUM. Lonsec, like I said, it continues to shoot the lights out. They're currently researching over 1,700 products. One of the big growth drivers that we actually made the investment or the rationale that we made the investment in this business for was for Lonsec Investment Solutions. Coming back to 2020 it was less than AUD 1 billion. Closing the first half of FY 2023 at AUD 7.5 billion, and the lion's share of that is mainly organic growth.
Only AUD 1.85 billion of that has come through an acquisition, which was of course Implemented Portfolios, which we completed in August of last year. Looking at the dashboard very, very quickly, and then I'll throw it over to Terence to discuss the financial profile of the first half of this financial year. You know, number one, in inflows, I've already discussed that. You can see the 13% sales growth, 24% FUM growth. Continual NPAT growth of 34%, so good consistent growth in the underlying P&L there. Resilient FUM. Our average duration for every dollar that comes on the platform sits around 17 years, so it's a nice annuity stream for this business. We continue to invest in our products.
We haven't got new products, we've developed a lot of products over the last 12 or 18 months. Now it's about refining those products and building more features once we receive the feedback from the market, financial advisers and their clients, to be able to tweak those to make those more attractive, and obviously invest in those to make sure that our CVP is clearly differentiated from our competitors. The licensed PDF, it was one of the areas where we had to make a few announcements last year to the ASX because it was going to be revoked. The PDF committee did write to us. However, after close consultation with them, we've managed to retain that license moving forward, which means for investors that any capital gains that they receive is tax-free, and any dividends that they receive are also tax-exempt.
Just another incentive on top of the broader business there. We've always said it's not something that we'll retain forever ’cause it is meant for growth businesses, that type of license. We've certainly played within the rules of the PDF Act and we'll continue to do so moving forward. Very much a capital light business model. Obviously going to annuities, we get a lot of questions around what are the capital requirements from an APRA point of view to be able to satisfy them with these style of products. We're very much a light business when it comes to capital. The reason is that is because when you look at annuities, the investment risk is borne by the policyholder, and it's only about 40 basis points in our investment bond business.
Overall, for our total FUM, it averages 40 basis points, and that includes our own internal buffer as well. We feel quite positive about the second half of this year, notwithstanding that those headwinds that we experienced in the first half are still there. We've got a lot of great activity, a very busy calendar of distribution activity with industry events. We've got media roundtables, we've got various other boardroom sessions, master classes, webinars, and also two PDSs to come out across both products. We've got plenty in the pipeline that we wanna get out to the marketplace.
We've also seen, you know, 14% growth in active advisors over a three-year period, and we'll continue to look at other products with our life license that we will continue to leverage that look attractive. I'll now just pass it across to Terence just to talk through the financial result.
Thank you, Grant, and everyone for joining on the webinar. It's been another solid result for us with underlying profit for the life admin business up 6%. This has been driven by revenue growth of 11%, underpinned by increasing FUM and then some expense growth. Two things to call out on the expense growth. One is the amount that we've spent on marketing and travel, just to ensure that we've got sufficient activity in current volatile markets. Just anecdotally, we did four master classes PCP, but this time around we've done 24 master classes. It's very important that we stay in front of our advisors in the current market. The other thing that we haven't been compromising on has been on cybersecurity.
We spent about AUD 200,000 extra this time around in terms of ensuring that we've got our cyber defenses in place. Overall, a very happy result with the underlying admin business there. In terms of investment in associates, that's primarily the Lonsec line. As you can see, 84% increase, so again, very, very happy with that investment, and we expect that trend to continue in the future. The next item is the full run rate of our annuity product, which is now running about AUD 2.2 million after tax. In terms of dividends, we're keeping the dividends steady. It's fully franked. As you can see, we pay underlying income tax expense now, so we generate franking credits to pay the fully franked dividend. Important reminder that we do pay exempt dividends because we're a PDF.
The last thing on that page is to highlight that we remain very well capitalized with underlying cash north of AUD 18 million. With that, I'll pass it back to Grant. Thank you.
Thank you. So some of the highlights just on the first half on the dashboard here that you can see is life business FUM. I've already touched on that. It's up 10%, AUD 2.4 billion. Our life product sales, we're comparing to, I guess, the record half that we had in the first half of FY 2022, so that's down 27%. When you look more broadly in the industry and businesses that you could probably make similar comparisons to, such as some of the platform businesses, which are a little bit different in the sense that they receive, I guess, default money through super guarantees, et cetera. They are down obviously quite significantly on the first half. Even a lot of those businesses from Q1 to Q2 saw quite a decline in their inflows.
That result on a relative basis is actually quite good, and we're on track to have our second biggest year in the history of the business. One of the big, I guess, indicators is if we're performing quite well relative to conditions is obviously market share, where we're over 50%, which we've already touched on. The next metric really talks around approved product lists, APLs. Is the distribution team out there trying to get on more APLs to access more financial advisors to obviously sell our products, and that's up significantly 17% to 636. In terms of investment ratings, great for investment bonds. We've also got four out of five stars for our LifeIncome product, the investment-linked lifetime annuity.
We're looking at more research ratings for that to be able to open up more APL coverage and obviously further our distribution for that particular product. Active financial advisors, I just wanted to touch on this one for a second. This is up 2% on PCP to 1,627. However, the number is probably slightly understated. The reason that's the case is that a lot of advisors that sit in the same practice are using the same corporate code. We've actually got a project underway at the moment where we'll be able to get complete look-through, so we can see each individual authorized representative or financial advisor instead of capturing maybe two or three advisors.
That number would actually be a little bit higher than what you're seeing in this presentation, but we just don't have the technology yet to look through to that level of detail. We obviously recognize that a lot of advisors are using that corporate code now, which is obviously feedback that we've received through our various distribution teams. In terms of new bond numbers, flat year-over-year, but still, you know, decent. Over 10,500 new applications written in the first half. Great to see that savings plans is up. As much as probably the initial capital investment through our financial advisors has come off a little bit. Obviously, people are keeping a little bit of capital on the sidelines as they work through this market volatility and obviously all the uncertainty that we've been going through.
It's great to see that people are still attaching savings plans. They wanna make sure they've got that consistent savings plan, particularly for things like future costs, like private school fees or, you know, a home deposit, whatever it might be. That's up 41% year- on- year, that's a really, really solid number. Investment options you can see there. We'll continue to increase our investment menu as we get advisor demand, and we're able to find other financial products that provide a great tax arbitrage for a lot of our clients in the investment bond space. We're gonna expand the LifeIncome menu after receiving feedback from financial advisors since distributing that product over the last 12 months. Again, I've already touched on the maturity profile. That's 17 years just for the investment bond business.
We don't have any analysis on the lifetime annuity as of yet. Touching on, I guess, the competitors and total market share and inflows. This slide really wraps it all up in terms of the performance. You can see there, I've already touched on several times, over 50% of inflows, so we're definitely number one in that space. We did take this, or the calendar year just gone, we took the number one position in total market share. We've got 23% of the total market of investment bonds. What you wanna see on this slide is the biggest disparity between the line and the top of the bar chart, which you can see on the left-hand side. We're still getting a little bit more than our natural market share in comparison to some of our key competitors, you can see.
Just moving through to the next slide, just around our FUM growth over the past few years. So you can see that's still trending in the right direction, albeit the growth hasn't been quite as much over the past 12 months given market conditions, but still trending in the right direction. On the right-hand side there, you can see annual sales, so gross sales, net sales. As much as it's not quite up to where we were this time last year, it's still on track to be our second biggest year ever in investment bond sales. And the lifetime annuity product called LifeIncome continues to snowball and grow in momentum coming into this calendar year, which has been fantastic to see and getting quite excited at the traction that we're starting to get around that particular product.
I'll now pass it back over to Terence just to talk through the Lonsec result. Oh, sorry. I've got one more slide before I do that. Apologies. Just the profit per employee. The easiest way to talk through the operational leverage of the business is this particular slide here. You can see, since FY 2018 through to FY 2022, that has been trending in the right direction. We don't cut the numbers midway through the year on this particular result because there is a little bit of noise, as you can imagine, over the course of the financial year, so we only do this on an annualized basis. I can share, you know, that we do analysis every single month just to see how we're tracking to make sure that we're fully across it.
It is trending in the right direction, and we should have a pretty positive outcome for this number as we steer towards the end of FY 2023. I'll flick it now across to Terence just to talk through Lonsec.
Thanks, Grant. As you can see from this slide, Lonsec continues to really deliver. Revenue's up 32% of PCP, with EBITA up 41%. We've been very happy with this investment. The two key businesses for this business is Lonsec Research, which delivers more than half of the group's earnings, and the other one that really excites us is our Lonsec Investment Solutions, which you can see from this slide, the FUM growth in that business. When we acquired or made the investment in this business back in 2020, FUM was south of AUD 1 billion. Now post the IPL transaction, as you can see, it's sitting around the AUD 7.5 billion mark. We've been very pleased with this investment. We've seen gross flows of between AUD 250 million-AUD 300 million per month, and we can see this trend continuing into the foreseeable future.
I might pass it back on to Grant. Thank you.
Cheers. Yeah, just quickly on Lonsec, Michael Wright and his team have done an outstanding job there of growing that business. Michael comes in with such strong leadership skills, really strong strategic focus on the business, and the execution has been seamless. It continues to surprise us on the upside, which is always nice to see that investment outperforming expectations. In terms of GDG moving forward, over the course of the back half of this financial year, given all the activity that we've got going on, subject, of course, to market conditions, we expect to grow in the back half of this year. We've seen some green shoots, I have to say, so far, as we enter 2023, which has been nice.
LifeIncome, as I've already touched on, we're going to be launching a new PDS at the back end of this financial year. We've received some great feedback from financial advisors. We've got some features, which I'm not going to give away now, coming into that product that I think is going to continue to differentiate ourselves between us and the competition. As that space is becoming more and more popular, as post-retirement assets doubles over the next seven or eight years, those products are going to continue to be more attractive to financial advisors to solve longevity and sequencing risk as people continue to live longer. We'll continue to innovate also on the investment bonds side, particularly around estate planning, which is a very, very popular part of this product and why financial advisors use it.
It also allows them to broaden their practice in terms of their advice. Instead of just looking at investment or structuring or insurances, they're able to look at estate planning with a lot more detail with our products. We're going to be launching a new PDS very, very soon for that. That's going to have some great features for them to better facilitate conversations around intergenerational wealth transfer, which of course, like post-retirement assets, is the biggest opportunity in terms of all that wealth transitioning over the next 20 or 30 years from the current generation to the next one or to their grandchildren. We'll continue to support the team at Lonsec. We obviously meet with them quite regularly in terms of their strategic focus and the results that they continue to drive, and as I've already said, been extremely pleased with that investment.
We just wanna continue to watch that team, Michael and his team, shoot the lights out there. I'll now pass it back to Simon just to facilitate any questions, thank you to everyone for their support.
Great. Thanks, Terence, and thanks, Grant. First question's from James Bisinella at Shaw and Partners. "Can you please provide any commentary on the broader flow environment currently and how you're seeing things? Anecdotally, we saw lower advisor availability in January. Have you experienced greater activity going into February?
Yeah, we've actually. It was funny, our January results surprised us. We were quite pleased with those relative to that time of year, of course. Not to get everyone too excited. It was actually a very good result. Activity has been, I mean, I literally ran up the top of Collins Street to present to 28 advisors 10 minutes after this call. We've had so much activity going on. I find the big difference with our business is that we speak to a lot of asset managers and a lot of their distribution teams. They've had a bit of trouble getting appointments. We've had no trouble in terms of filling up our boardroom sessions or, you know, opportunities to be able to do face-to-face sessions with advisors.
It's been really, really encouraging in terms of the level of engagement that we've seen. The other part of that question more broadly of inflows in the industry, I mean, you just have to look at the likes of Praemium, Netwealth, HUB24, just to see the, you know, first half results and, you know, the difference between Q1, Q2 of their inflows and the fact that, you know, people aren't going into investment markets like they were 12 months ago. I think that's just a headwind that we're all experiencing given, you know, nine consecutive interest rate rises, uncertainty around inflation. However, the positive start to markets in January certainly did kick off this calendar year with a little bit more momentum than what we've seen recently.
Perfect. Thanks, Grant. Another question from James. What's your degree of confidence in the group being able to achieve investment bond flow levels seen during FY 2022? What would it take to see activity back to those levels?
I think our activity levels are better than what they were in FY 2022, to be completely honest. The biggest challenge there is financial advisors getting their clients to invest in the current market conditions or to invest the same quantum that they would've, you know, back in FY 2022. That's the big challenge that we're experiencing at the moment, and we also see a lot of deals get scattered over a wider timeframe. In terms of the AUD 639 million that we achieved in FY 2022, the fact that we got AUD 250 million in the first half of this year suggests that that target's going to be a big, big stretch unless market conditions change vastly, which none of us can see at the moment.
I think for us right now we're tracking to do our second biggest year that we've ever done in the investment bond business. At the same time, the other two pillars of the business when it comes to the LifeIncome product, that continues to build momentum in the second half, and we're seeing some good numbers there, and also just on the Lonsec business. I find, you know, probably two areas are going to get some outstanding results. The other one will still a good result, but not necessarily a record result.
Perfect. Congratulations on reaching number one position in market share on investment bonds. What is the strategy from here on that business, do you look to extend market leadership or perhaps look to execute more strategic type actions?
All of the above, really. Like I said, we've got a new product disclosure statement coming out very, very soon. A lot of the features that we've put into the product mostly around estate planning, new investment options, as well, will be contained in that PDS. For us, we feel like we're refining that product more at the moment, and we're able to leverage a lot of those features that will be coming out over the next few weeks with that PDS. On the other side of that is we're starting to build a really, really strong track record in our Tax Optimised investment series. That's the tax aware investing that we do inside the investment bond structure, which allows us to bring our tax rates, our effective tax rates down quite materially.
A lot of our Tax Optimised series is, you know, sort of achieving a, an effective tax rate of between 12%- 15%. The tax arbitrage that is created, particularly for a highly affluent, high net worth individual, is quite significant. And it's quite significant even compared to a bucket company, of course, which has the same headline tax rate of 30%. I feel like we need to, and we're doing that at the moment, be able to leverage that track record across the 18 options, which is moving to 20, that are in the Tax Optimised series, to really show advisors and investors, the great after-tax performance that we're able to achieve here at Generation Life.
Thanks, Grant. Last couple of questions from James. Just on annuities, how's activity looking on the APL front, and could you talk us through any progress or potential for white labelling?
Yeah, good question. Yeah, activity's been great. We've got plenty of opportunities to be in front of advisors. We've been talking at a lot of industry events such as professional development days. You know, we've probably been in front of, I would say, 300 advisors this week when I think of all the distribution activity, so just for that product, that is. It's been quite remarkable. I think the interest that we've had there, it's probably been better than what I anticipated. In terms of further APL coverage, I think as we get more research ratings, that'll give us an opportunity to get that additional coverage and obviously distribute that product even more widely.
Perfect. Just moving on to a couple other questions submitted. What do flagged changes to super such as the AUD 3 million max balance mean for the investment bond business?
Excellent question. Every now and then you get some great opportunities in life, and this is definitely one of them. I think back in 2017, the rationale that we actually came into this business was because of the caps in super back then, which was the $1.6 million cap and the concessional, non-concessional caps as well. If people are forced to take out their balance over $3 million in super, that will impact 36,000 individuals. It will mean that $200 billion will come outside of the super system. The most logical place for it to land, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I run this business, would be inside an investment bond.
The reason I say that, a lot of people, instead of having it in their own personal name, where they're obviously gonna be generating a high marginal tax rate and paying, you know, the earnings at 47%, we pay the earnings, like I said, in that Tax Optimised series between 12%-15%, regardless of what your marginal tax rate is. Also, it would seem a better alternative than a bucket company, 'cause of course once the funds go into a bucket company, into the corporate tax structure, the company owes those funds. The only way that you get the earnings out of there is through a dividend or you pay the top-up tax, which is not something that happens inside the investment bond. Everything is tax-free after 10 years. There's no personal tax liability.
The opportunity around potential super changes, could be huge for our business and as you imagine, we're actually doing quite a bit in terms of marketing and PR activity just to build up to that. Of course we've gotta wait and see how that actually looks, and then we'll be going out with a lot of case studies to be able to capture that opportunity as it presents.
Great. Thanks, Grant. Well answered. Last couple of questions before we have to wrap up. How should we think about the cash balance? What's the optionality for acquisitions or is there scope to increase dividend payout ratio? One for you, Terence.
We're very comfortable with cash position right now. Overall, I would think of the business as a cash flow neutral business. All the earnings from the investment bond business is used to pay our dividend, and what's left is used to fund the annuity business. We end up being fairly cash flow neutral. Over time, as the annuities business becomes more profitable, that could be an opportunity, but at this stage we see plenty of opportunities to keep reinvesting in the business, coming up with new product offerings and so forth, that we're comfortable with where things sit in terms of our overall cash flow. Naturally, we're always keen and on the lookout for acquisitions and as, and when that comes up, depending on the size of the opportunity, we may or may not have to go to market, but again, that's on a case-by-case basis.
Great.
In the meantime we remain very well capitalized in the current folded up market.
Perfect. Thanks, Terence.
Thanks.
Last question. How should we think about negative earnings contribution from LifeIncome moving into the second half? Should it be similar to H1 or a further step up?
I think it'd be very similar to stage one, to first half. Where we have spent a fair bit in the first half is on marketing as well and as sales, just to really throw the product out there in terms of advertising on a market and getting in front of advisors with our product. We expect to maintain that spend, and potentially come up with, I guess, tweaks to the product offering as well to make it a even more compelling offering for the lifetime annuity product.
All right. Thanks, Terence. That concludes the Q&A segment. Grant, I'll hand it back to you for closing remarks before you run up Collins Street.
Great. Thanks very much, Simon. Look, just in closing, wanna thank all the supporters that we've got out there. We've had a lot of investors sitting on the register, quite consistently over the years, so we thank you for that support first and foremost. Secondly to that, we feel pretty confident coming into the second half that we'll continue to build on some of the momentum, and the effort that we've put into the distribution activity, to hopefully see a sales uplift on the investment bond side. We're certainly seeing that in LifeIncome. Look, when you're introducing a brand-new product to market, you are creating a market, so there is a lot of work, there's a lot of investment, there's a lot of time spent in that, and we think that'll be a hockey stick eventually for us.
I think it's been quite nice to be able to see the traction and feedback that we've received there. Also I'm really, really excited about some of the features that we've got coming out for that product as we introduce the new PDS later on in this financial year. We've discussed Lonsec a lot. We bought that business because we love the asset management side, their SMA business. When we looked at it when we were doing the DD, it was AUD 659 million, and that's only going back to June 2020. To see that business at AUD 7.5 billion today has been a remarkable result. You know, at GDG we have no debt. To Terence's point just then, we're well capitalized.
We've got a great team, very, very focused on a lot of activity that we've got set up for the second half of this financial year. As much as there's been an uptick in expenses, we made a conscious decision not to pull back on any sales or marketing initiatives. Markets will turn eventually. Confidence will be restored, and we wanna make sure we're there to capture that. We've done the work now. As much as you don't get the full fruit of all your, all of your labor in the current conditions, we will eventually. Also on the other side of that, I think we've all seen the news around cybersecurity and just how things in the technology space have accelerated from a hacking point of view over the past few years.
We're making sure that even whether it's from an insurance point of view, whether it's all of our controls, internally, that we're not under-investing anywhere, in this business. We wanna make sure it's completely secure. I'll wrap it up there. Thanks to NWR for all of your support and all the investors out there, and we look forward to bringing you the Q3 results in a couple of months' time.
Great. Thanks, Grant. Lot to look forward to. Thanks all for joining.