Need to come. For IOOF today, it's a fantastic opportunity for us to share some of our strategic pillars with you, our shareholders or our analyst community. Very keen to do a bit of a deep dive into our three key priorities, and key strategic initiatives. Before doing so, I did want to spend a couple of moments just setting the macro landscape. Really, that macro landscape starts with some principles that have been a feature of IOOF's narrative over the past few years. That is that we see tremendous opportunity as an advice-led organization and an advice-led wealth management organization to capitalize on the changing world around us. That's a world that we're seeing increased per capita wealth. We're seeing an aging population with increasing complexity of needs, and that's certainly not going away anytime soon.
At the same time, and certainly as I've discussed in the context of the MLC transaction, we are seeing structural industry disruption, which provides a tremendous opportunity for IOOF. Within that context, certainly over the past 18 to 24 months, you've heard me describe the strategic journey for IOOF across three key sectors, being initially to stabilize the business, and that's certainly been a key focus and priority over the preceding 18 to 24 months. Following that, we always saw a transformation phase, which is very much the phase we find ourselves in now. Executing the transformation phase efficiently and effectively will lead us to the prosperity phase. I did want to spend a couple of moments just reflecting on what we have achieved during the stabilization phase, really since the end of 2018. It's nearly coming up to two years now.
We had a very deliberate focus on resetting our culture and building a purpose-led culture, and I think that served us very well during the early part of this year and certainly during COVID, and continues to serve us well. We have put in a tremendous amount of effort into our governance uplift capabilities across the business broadly, but also specifically in the advice segment. Generally taking a really rigorous view of the kinds of capabilities and the quality of our capabilities as a business as we look to enter into what is a very deliberate growth phase for the business. In our minds, really, the 30 June of this year was really sort of the end of the transformation, when we really tipped into the end of the stabilization phase, I should say, and we really tipped into the transformation phase.
Probably the key message to note here in transformation, even prior to having completed the P&I transaction, prior to having announced MLC, those three pillars of transformation being Advice 2.0 and Evolve21 and integration, were key pillars of our business. Certainly that was with one mind to completing the P&I acquisition, which we completed earlier this year, in February of this year. The MLC transaction really gives us an opportunity to capitalize and further leverage those strategic pillars, particularly Advice 2.0 and Evolve21, which you'll hear more about today. The reason those pillars and that strategy is very important has to be seen through the context of our industry and our communities that we serve, particularly from a client lens.
I emphasize the client lens because it's important to recognize that as an industry, as a wealth management industry, we serve and we're beneficiaries of a client journey that begins in the late teens to early twenties when people are entering the workforce. Their lives go through dramatic change over the following 30 to 40 to 50 years, and sees there being quite discrete phases of life. As an industry, our role is to support those phases, help improve decision-making, and obviously help improve the probabilities of people living the lives they want to live. It also needs to be recognized that as an industry, we're focused on the last third or maybe the last half of that journey traditionally, in what I would call our traditional advice segment.
Certainly IOOF has a leading position in this segment, be it through Shadforth, the high net worth segment, Bridges in the mass market, or our self-employed businesses throughout the middle there. You'll hear more from Darren today around how we're looking to transform that traditional advice segment. That really provides a very key pillar in our continued evolution of the relevance of advice to all Australians. There continues to be significant opportunity to make advice more accessible to more people, and particularly to that cohort on the left-hand side of the chart that you see there, which is those that have probably been excluded from advice traditionally. With the evolution of technology and the scalability of insights and customization, we think there's a tremendous opportunity to continue to increase our relevance in that segment.
Certainly with the MLC transaction, IOOF will have a captive audience or an opportunity of about a million unadvised clients throughout our business. There continues to be a tremendous opportunity to build a business and build relevance in a broader community. One of the reasons we are committed and remain passionate about the role of advice has been reinforced in some research we've undertaken recently, which was completed in the last month or so, which was across approximately 13,000, both advised and unadvised clients, but really did reinforce the value of advice. Now, the findings of this research has been consistent with previous research that we ourselves have done or others have done, but fundamentally reinforced the tremendous value that exists in advice and the tremendous value that as a business we can build by making advice more accessible to more people.
For focus on the left-hand side there, you'll see some key statistics. Just to call out a couple, 95% of people in an advice relationship agreed that receiving advice has given them greater peace of mind financially. This is more than just having more in your bank balance. This is actually about having a greater peace of mind and being more in control of your own life. 73% say they save more money as a result of receiving advice. Again, this is about changing behaviors. This is about changing people's behaviors through their life. I think particularly important and topical, over the past year or so has been that 94% have an understanding of the annual fees they pay for advice based on several advice documents they receive. There is real clarity of what people are paid and what they receive in return.
The right-hand side, I think, is really the key message to take away from this slide, which is what we call the advice dividend. This is benchmarking those clients that receive advice against the control group of clients that do not receive advice. I think what you can see there, in every instance, irrespective of whether it's under 50 years of age, over 50, mass market or affluent, in every circumstance, there is an advice dividend, i.e., the people who are in receipt of advice and are beneficiaries of advice have a higher wellbeing across a number of different metrics, as a result of that advice. We know empirically that there is value associated with advice, and the value exceeds what people pay for it.
I think through increasing the reach of advice, reducing the cost of delivering that advice, and making it more accessible, I think IOOF is at the forefront of actually creating value, not only for the community, but also for the owners of IOOF through an advice-led strategy. Just to really introduce the sessions that will follow today. You'll start by hearing from Darren Whereat, our Chief Advice Officer this morning around how are we going to make advice more accessible and more cost-effective to deliver. That's then followed by a session on Evolve21, which is about reinforcing our position and our transformation of building a leading proprietary platform, one platform across all client cohorts, which we believe is a unique proposition in this market that really looks to differentiate on service excellence.
We'll wrap up today with a presentation led by Chris Weldon, our Chief Transformation Officer, around how the P&I and MLC integrations will transform the growth potential for IOOF. Looking to differentiate by having the lowest cost to serve in our business, and we think that is a key driver of value for the business longer term, as well as developing trust through outcomes and service excellence. It's about building a reputation, continuing to build a reputation, and being at the forefront of our industry. With that, I want to thank you for your time commitment this morning. With that, I will hand over to Darren Whereat.
Hello, thank you, Renato. Good morning, everybody. My name is Darren Whereat, and I'm the Chief Advice Officer at IOOF, and I want to thank you certainly for your time today. Over the next 30 minutes, it'll be my pleasure to talk you through our strategy and our program of work, not only of what we believe the business will look like in two years, but more importantly, some of the milestones that we've achieved over the last 18 months as we've integrated the ANZ Wealth business and the IOOF Advice businesses together. Our vision is to make financial advice available to many more Australians, in a much more affordable sense. We can't do that by continuing to build on the past practices. We think the time is now to do something very, very different.
We're quite excited about the opportunity that lies in front of us, and we believe we've got a great team to be able to get this job done. In August this year, we commenced our transformational journey in respect to financial advice, and so we're really talking about making our network to continue to deliver that quality of advice that they've been known for, but to do it in a more profitable and more sustainable way, whilst making advice more engaging for our clients, and as I mentioned, more affordable. Now, each of those things are not mutually exclusive. What we are doing is we will achieve all of those things cohesively, and that's how we believe that we will make advice much more engaging and much more affordable.
We know that research indicates that there is a price point for those in the Australian population that don't currently engage with us. At the moment, one in five Australians engage with an adviser. Renato just shared with you some great research about those that are already in the system and how much more comfortable they are from a wellbeing sense and a financial sense. What that actually means is four in five still don't engage with advice. There is an opportunity to augment what we're doing today and to allow others to access the great benefits that advice do it. As I said earlier, you can't do it by continuing to do what we've done in the past, and so we need to look at new things. The opportunity for ourselves, the opportunities for the public, and opportunities for shareholders, I feel is immense.
I will take you through today how we're going to face into that. We need to embrace new technology, new ways of working, and new processes. We will be. Other areas that are underway. I'll finish up by painting that picture as to what our business will look like in two years. Also really take the time to walk you through the strategy on where we've been in the journey, because we have been on this journey for a number of years. We think the opportunity for IOOF is enormous, particularly as the market continues to fragment. Before I do this, I'd like to take you through some of the achievements that we've done. I know some of you will be sitting there thinking, "How are they going to integrate the MLC Advice business?
How are they going to take advantage of what this transaction presents? Over many years, IOOF actually has a history of successfully acquiring and integrating advice businesses. We've done it as recently as the 31st of October 2018, when the IOOF businesses, 700 advisors, three AFSLs, was merged with the ANZ Wealth Advice businesses, whereby they also had 700 advisors and three AFSL. The combined businesses, seven licenses and 1,400 advisors. Over the last 18 months, we've been putting these two businesses together. We prioritized stabilizing the business, as Renato mentioned. We prioritize our investment in assurance and governance. We've also streamlined the processes and invested heavily in technology. At the time, we did make the decision to prioritize the movement to a single advice assurance and governance model.
This would lay the foundations for us to transform the business. It's an important aspect because you cannot run seven AFSLs seven different ways with seven different processes. We made the decision over that 18-month period to actually move to a single assurance and governance framework, and we've actually achieved that. I'm sitting here today with that successful integration of those two businesses, both with 700 ARs, both bigger than the opportunity that the MLC Advice transaction affords us with 400 ARs. We've actually combined those businesses over a reasonably short period of time. More importantly, we now have one way of doing things. In terms of our advice standards, that are the rules, if you like, that are employed in the owned and operated space, in the self-employed partnerships, where we partner with self-employed planners.
The way that we operate and provide advice, the way we supervise and monitor our advisors, and the way that we ensure that we don't get any repeat of any of the issues that were highlighted in the Royal Commission. We are ensuring that our risk framework is easily identifiable and within the risk tolerance that the organization has set. We have seven businesses, but we only run one advice process. Now, how do we do this? We actually achieve this by bringing together the two shared services business from IOOF, the traditional and the ANZ, and we've brought them together to create a single way of doing things in terms of our enablement functions.
We centralized our research functions, our Xplan functions, our resources in terms of our CPD, which is our ongoing education, the way we bring advisors into the business, and the way that we exit advisors out. All that infrastructure required that we used to have two ways of doing things, we now have a single way of doing things. That's very important as we move into the next opportunity that the MLC transaction affords us because we've built the business to be scalable. Like we will with the TenFifty community and the GPL community, we can bolt AFSLs and bolt other advisors into our system, but we still only run that single advice process. That's the way that we're going to ensure that we don't get a repeat of the past. We have streamlined businesses, multiple licenses.
We are still committed to running multiple licenses where they can operate at scale and operate in a different segment of the market, but we're doing this in a way that builds scales and efficiencies into the model. We've built a strong network of training and support in terms of our CPD. We've embedded our insurance and governance program, lifted our professional standards. We now have a single model that's been independently assured by an external firm, PwC, to make sure that we are operating at the required level of the regulator in and around the market. We are wearing this as a bit of a badge of honor because we know that those advisors and clients that are operating under our AFSLs are safe.
We know that our framework has been rigorously tested and independently assured that it is operating at a standard that we believe is leading the market. To ensure that we don't get any repeats of the ongoing fee revenue issues that we're seeing in terms of the remediation programs. We were the first to announce a public move to fixed term agreements. What that is each and every year, our advised clients will reauthorize their fees for the advisors. Every year there is a conversation around the services that they've received, the services that they will receive, and the client reauthorizes those fees. The remediation programs that we've seen in and around the market, we've adjusted our processes, invested in technology, and changed the way that we're engaging with clients.
We believe Advice 2.0, the next evolution of advice, is about bringing the clients closer to the advice process and giving them confidence and building that trust in and around the advice process. We've commenced our journey on what we're calling our digital ecosystem. The reason I'm so excited about the advice opportunities in terms of the opportunities that both MLC and the new way of doing things is that we're not just building on past processes. We're investing in technology, but we're making sure that the client is the center of all the decisions we make.
We think the work that we've done in terms of streamlining the model, as I just walked through, in terms of our enablement businesses, will put us in a position to continue to run a multi-advice business, a multi-brand strategy, particularly where they operate at different segments of the market, but we're going to do this in a sustainable way. On the 31st of August, we announced changes to support the sustainability in terms of our AFSLs. Each of these three pillars need to act cohesively for us to be successful under the Advice 2.0. AFSL sustainability is really about moving away from the old industry model, where there was cross-subsidization and product subsidization in the advice AFSLs.
We've been very public in our decisions to move to making sure that each of our AFSLs, whether it's in the owner-operated space or in our partnership spaces, each cover their own costs at a minimum. In the owner-operated or the employed space, we are looking for EBIT of 30%+ . For us to ensure that we do that, we had to make some big decisions. On the 31st of August, we did announce some big decisions. Principally behind this, there was a decision to ensure that we had a big presence in the owner-operated model or traditionally referred to as an employed model. We're not talking about bank-employed models, but we're talking about Shadforth, which is a high net worth business that has been operating in that space and has the preeminent brand in that space. We're talking about Bridges.
Great relationships in the channel that really is working with those external parties in respect to the credit unions. We're ensuring that the ongoing services that clients have been promised are delivered. We are talking about doing that at scale, and we're talking about doing it in a different way. In terms of our multi-brand strategy in the middle, we're talking about unique value propositions, but using technology to remove costs and processes. The support for a more streamlined deliverable really will mean that we need to be sustainable in the way that we're operating our AFSLs. There is no opportunity to do client engagement and advisor efficiency if we don't have a sustainable model into the future. We will have that model breaking even in terms of our AFSL businesses by the 2021, 2022 year, as previously communicated.
We did make some hard decisions that we communicated to the market back in August. These changes reflect the need to move to a new model. The above the line decisions there are about the structural changes that we made, streamlining our resources, and the below the line decisions there reflect the decisions that we made in impacting on the AFSLs. Combined, these decisions will extract year on year from the 2021, 2022 year, as previously communicated, AUD 10 million worth of costs out of the advice businesses. It's important for us now for me to walk you through these. You can see that when I talk about the structure, previously, we had our multi-brands, which is on the left-hand side here.
The big decisions that we've made are in terms of Bridges, we made the decisions to sit it side by side with Shadforth, but operating in the mass market as a wholly owned and operated AFSL. Presently, it's combined owner-operated and operates in the self-employed. From the 1st of October, we've been working with those people that had self-employed businesses under the Bridges brand. We've been working with them to transition to one of our other self-employed brands, which appear below from the 1st of September. That body of work will be finished at or around 31st of March next year. What that will mean is then we'll have two owner-operated brands.
High net worth space, Shadforth, a great business that's been operating in that space for a number of years, and a mass market opportunity in terms of Bridges. We're going to do here is ensure that we focus on delivering high-quality, transformed advice in a sustainable way. We are aiming for EBIT over 30%, as indicated by Renato, and these combined entities will be generating over AUD 90 million worth of recurring fees authorized from clients.
A huge opportunity to do something different that we've been doing in the owned and operated model, but more importantly, to do it sustainably and at scale. The opportunity to bring in MLC Advice affords us another 100 authorized representatives along with the ongoing revenue, and we will be able to plug it into that owned and operated model, and we are excited about that opportunity, if approved by the regulators, that that transaction affords us.
In terms of the self-employed market, you can see there that previously we have multiple brands. When we were transforming our businesses, we needed to ask ourselves, "Are we comfortable with a multi-brand strategy?" We've got Bridges, Lonsdale, Millennium3, Consultum, RI, and FSP. We made the decision that we are absolutely committed to a multi-brand strategy. Why? Simply because it represents, particularly in the self-employed space, the community aspect of self-employed partnership model. Each of these businesses have around about 200 authorized representatives, with the exception of Financial Services Partners, which I'll talk about in a minute. What we're doing here is we are respecting the communities and the brands and allowing those advisors to partner with us. As I said, behind the scenes, we are running a single advice model. We are committed to multi-brand, but a single approach.
That's how we're going to make our model more sustainable. When we looked at running this more sustainably, we actually asked ourselves, "Is there two natural groups that these licenses could sit together?" The answer to that was yes. From the 1st of September, we've reorganized the front of our business in terms of that self-employed, and we've gone into two groups, and we've collapsed the five AFSLs down to two distinct groups. The first group is Lonsdale, Alliances, and Millennium3. Each of these have a significant third party working in and around their business. In Lonsdale, it's accountants. They're very big in the accounting space. Millennium3, the DNA was in and around general insurance brokers. Alliances is where we're partnering and providing services for those businesses that have their own AFSL.
We've grouped those businesses together and reorganized it to operate under one CEO. On the other side, in terms of RI Advice and Consultum, more in that holistic advice space. Again, we've moved two separate businesses to be operating under a single CEO. We're comfortable that each of those businesses were operating at scale and have a large brand presence. We did, at that time, critically evaluate our other licenses. We did make the decision to close the AFSL in terms of FSP and help those advisers transition to another of the AFSLs. Again, that work will be complete on or around the 31st of March next year. In all of those transitions out of Bridges and FSPs, they're at exactly where we thought they'd be, and we're having great success in working with those planners to move them to another license.
In terms of what we've actually closed, we are closing the FSP AFSL, and we've also completed previously the closure of the Elders AFSL. For us, this is our more streamlined business, which gives us a great opportunity in that owner-operated space, but ensures in that self-employed space that we're moving towards covering all the costs in those businesses from the 2021, 2022 year, specifically in respect to those businesses that came across from ANZ, which obviously came across with running at or around about an AUD 20 million loss. As I said, this is our pathway to ensuring they break even. They're the structural changes that we made, and they're the changes that we really now affords us the opportunity to concentrate on the other two pillars. We don't get that luxury of focusing on the other two pillars without making these structural changes.
As I said, collectively, each of the three pillars, it's important that we implement and actually have the strategy for each three. The other two important aspects here is about client engagement and advisor efficiency. I'm really hoping by the end of this presentation, you share my enthusiasm for just why we believe that we can make this work. In terms of client engagement and advisor efficiency, I think now is the opportunity where technology is really catching up to where the idea is. We believe now that the technology that underpins advice can be used in conjunction with delivering the advice by a human in terms of either our employed model or our self-employed partnership space. It's that human element with technology that really is going to make a difference.
What we're talking about here is we stood up a program of work in terms of our transform, where we critically looked at the way the advice was being prepared. IOOF has a history through ClientFirst of critically evaluating the way processes sit behind and lead to a client outcome. We're using those philosophies to actually have a look at the way advice has been provided in the past and how we can improve the production of advice. It's fair to say since the Royal Commission, with the compliance additions, that there's been an increase in the time it takes to prepare and document advice under a Best Interests Duty. What we're doing under Advice 2.0 is we're looking to automate many of those processes by using technology.
We made a big play on the 31st of August when we acquired 100% of the shares in Wealth Central, who was a partner of ours, a fintech that we've been working with for four years, and we acquired all their systems, and it is now a proprietary system that will only be available to our advisors, be they self-employed in our partnership space, working with us with their own license or in our owned and operated channels. What we've come up with is what we believe is what we're calling the IOOF Advice Playbook, which is a way to run your business, which is client enhancing, much more efficient, and offers EBIT of 30%. That is irrespective of which channel you are operating in. This is the exciting bit for mine. This is how we are going to make advice work.
Let's have a look at the IOOF Advice Playbook. You can go through this slide yourself. I'm not going to walk through it. It's about goals-based advice. It's about using re-engineered processes, and I think that's very important. We're not using technology over old dated processes. We're critically looking at ways that we can improve the client experience, improve the exchange of data. The advice process is very dependent upon the relationship an advisor has with a client and the efficient exchange of data, particularly around the client's current circumstances. I'll walk you through a process shortly on just how much time we've been able to save by using this technology and looking at the processes. The enhanced client experience is about taking out inefficient processes, making advice more affordable, and we believe by doing that, we can grow the pie for advice.
That is a very important point. We're not talking about re-engineering the way that advice is currently being provided in that one in five that engage with us. We are generally talking about growing the advice pie. The demand for advice is there. We believe that we can make it more affordable and actually more appealing to a larger segment of the Australian public. The enhanced client experience, and you'll see in the middle there, the important bit about this is it has inbuilt smarts. The guardrails required to manage risk is actually being built into the technology. That mitigates risks to ensure, again, no remediation programs into the future, and it's underpinned by technology.
You'll see a number of our technology partners there in terms of Iress, Wealth Central, which I'll take you through in a second, but also the IOOF platforms and the other platforms that we utilize in the advice space as well. To strip out cost, efficiencies, and any of the waste, we're looking to simplify and digitize the client experience and automate processes, allowing advisors to focus on the human elements. We are embracing the robo aspects that the technology provides, but we believe that's best served being delivered by humans in terms of those traits such as empathy, understanding, and the traits that Value of Advice research has reinforced that are highly regarded by the consumers of advice. On the 31st of August, we talked about Wealth Central, and we acquired it. We are very excited about the opportunity that this presents us.
Again, in our demonstrations of the power of the software with our MLC advisors, Chris will take you through where we currently stand in respect to that. What I can share with you is that this is a game changer. This is what's going to make us different to others. There are software out there. I will not run away from that. I believe this is the most integrated software with the most highly engaged client experience from both prospecting through to the review process. For us, it's a game changer. I'm actually going to talk you through some of the opportunity this affords us. The opportunity is for our advisors in our employed channels, which we'll be implementing this right across the Bridges and the Shadforth owned and operated space, but also in that self-employed space.
Again, it will be only for those businesses that choose to partner with us, given now that it's a proprietary system. We've been working with this external vendor for four years, and we will continue our journey to evolve this. The way we build this software through our innovation lab is, in my eyes, unique. Why? We're taking input from advisors. We're observing focus groups from clients. We're making sure that we're building stuff that works. Demystifying advice, bringing clients closer to the process, taking, if you like, the spooky magic out of advice. What we're doing here is we're really recognizing that there is an opportunity for individuals that go through the advice process to understand the value of advice much earlier on in the process. This is why we believe it's game changing, not just for the efficiencies, but for their enhanced client experience.
What we've got here is just the three segments, and I'll talk to you about the experience that our clients get. For those of you on the line that might want to have a play around with this software, I encourage you to go online to ioof.com and go in our community page. This is where we provided pro bono advice right across our networks, and we delivered over 1,000 hours of pro bono advice during COVID using this software and our networks of advisors, both employed, owner-occupied, and also the self-employed. You can go on there and have a play around with the Wealth Central system and get your own wealth report. In this prospecting and engagement phase, what this is about is removing the inefficiencies of exchanging information.
When we were designing this a number of years ago, we were observing clients, and it was a cumbersome process to exchange information right up front. It was very paper-based. It often was dated. What we've designed here is an online portal that the client can go in and update and provide and exchange information with their clients during the prospecting and engagement stage. It's online, cyber-secured, as you would expect. What it actually does is, it actually provides information back to the clients. As they put information into the system, their name, where they live, how many dependents they've got, their superannuation, their retirement savings goal, be it short or other goals, short, medium, or long-term, it actually enables them to put that in. It's digitized, and it's actually all icon-driven. What they can actually do is generate their own wealth report.
What this actually does is it's connected to census data, it's connected to RP Data in terms of values of houses, and it takes imagery. It also provides them with a snapshot based upon what information they've put in, under general advice on how advice may actually help them. It might be about protecting their loved ones in the event of an event. It might be about savings. It might be about any other thing to do with cash flow management. What this actually does, and the unique thing is, they can print this off. It's a bound and glossy brochure that they can take away and have as part of the process without any cost. In exchange, what we've got is a more efficient way of updating the information through the portal.
Whether they proceed with us or not, IOOF has given them, or one of our advisor partners has given them, an insight to the advice process in an efficient way for free. Whether they come back to us or proceed straight away, we believe that's a much more enhanced impression. What we're doing here is trying to improve and gain on the trust deficit there is in respect to advice. We want to show them that advice has positive impacts, both in terms of their wealth and their health. This is our way of doing that, and this advice portal enables us to do that. In the middle there, this is really what it's about. The information automatically flows from the prospect in terms of the engagement, so the client's got a much more engaging experience.
In the middle, when they come into that meeting with their advisor, that first meeting, often it's about the exchange of information. From an advisor's aspect, they spend the first 45 minutes of that first meeting, in many instances, making sure and validating the information so that they can go away and deliver a SOA, which really covers off where advice and what strategies they are going to implement. The new way of doing it through the Wealth Central technology in the middle around this discovery and advice phase. What this enables us to do, based upon the information that's been put in by the client and augmented by the advisor, it will instantaneously model in front of the client strategies in respect to how they can invest their money, be it superannuation or non-superannuation, in different tax structures as I just spoke about.
Also how they link it to the goals that they put into the Wealth Central software. What we're doing in this middle, by instantaneously modeling it, the advisor is brought into the process much earlier. It's much more engaging, but more importantly, the value of the advice is actually up on the screen or on a computer in front of them and there. They can change the model. [inaudible] There's generally this trade-off between longevity and income, or how long will my money last versus how much money can I spend. What you can do through the software is you can actually change the different examples on how much money you can have or whether you want to leave the legacy, and the advisor can model this. More importantly, the client can actually see the trade-offs.
This, for us, is the new way for the advisor to show the clients how advice can be benefit. There's the ongoing review stage. Everything we do now is through this software. For us, it's a game changer. It's a real efficient way to delivering an enhanced client experience, more importantly, by making sure that the client is brought into the process much easier. Just to give you an example here, how much efficiency are we talking about here, Darren? How are you going to make the advice delivered? On the top, you can work through this. This is the old processes on typically how an advice process works. Sit down with your clients, update the information, key the information into a system, go away and do some modeling. You can follow that yourself.
Down the bottom is that process that I just spoke about. Online digitized portal giving real-time information back to the client instantaneously. The advisor doesn't need to double-key the information in. The system will model the different strategies. We've actually modeled in one of our AFSLs using Shadforth. We estimate that there is 1.5 hours per review being saved by the use of these enhanced processes. These ClientFirst processes are taking out 1.5 hours of clunky processes and automated these. In Shadforth, in one of our AFSLs, and remember, we have seven, and we're about to, hopefully with the approval of the regulators, add the MLC GPL TenFifty and MLC Advice brands into this community. In one channel who do 10,000 reviews a year, we believe that we will save over 2,000 business days of efficiencies.
That can be used in a number of ways, to grow the demand for advice or to continue to improve the EBITs that we're generating right across the industry. We're doing this not at the expense of the client. We're doing it in a harmonized process, making sure the client experience is first rate. This is where I get really excited about Advice 2.0. We've spoken about the efficiencies, but now we're talking about the real client experience of making advice more affordable, more accessible, but also more engaging. That is a significant saving in anyone's language. That's the tip of the iceberg. If we actually have a look at this, that's six stages of the advice process. We're just talking about how the system has improved one phase.
We've got other phases that we'll go through using that ClientFirst processes to improve everything that we've got here. For mine, this is really the exciting part and what we'll be able to do. Just to wrap up there, in terms of what our business will look like in a couple of years' time, we see that we want to be a successful advice-led wealth management organization. That means that we will have representation in each of the three key segments of the market. A professional services owned and operated, where we'll be operating the Shadforth, the Bridges brands, and we'll be putting MLC Advice in there. This will give us the opportunity to run 300 professional services authorized representatives in that owned and operated space, generating EBIT above 30%.
In that middle, we will have break-even AFSLs from the 2021, 2022 year, covering the costs and making sure our partnerships in that space, where we currently have about 1,000 advisers, and we will grow that with the TenFifty community and the GPL community to about 1,300. We'll make sure that we cover costs. More importantly, we're going to make sure that our technology investment is scalable right across our enablement business and our investment in technology. That's why it's important that we partner in those self-employed spaces to make sure that we can deflect our costs over a much larger number of advisers. Scale does matter in the advice space. In that third space, it's about self-licenses. We do have a business there called IOOF Alliances, where we are actually delivering advice services to those with their own license.
If we did move down to a scenario where the government said everybody goes self-licensed, we would simply pivot our business out of the self-employed. With everybody having their own license, we would become a service business. We would have our owned and operated, and we would have our self-licensed businesses with all those advisers in there. We are setting our business up to manage any regulatory risk, but more importantly, that's how our business will operate over the next two years. Thank you for your attention today, and I hope I've given you and got you excited about the opportunity about the advice, in particular, in respect to the Wealth Central. The technology that we feel will marry up with the delivery of advice and change the way that advice will be delivered to more Australians in a more affordable way.
Rather than me actually continue that, I just want to share with you a video from some of our advisers that have been the early adopters of this technology.
Model's product. It's a very powerful tool that the clients get an immediate picture of the current scenario. Then once you add in some current strategies that you would talk to the client about in the first meeting, the client's eyes just light up. They see the opportunities in regards to setting their goals and how they can achieve those in real terms.
It's really you want to do the goals-based conversation, and that's the thing that you want to focus on. You don't want to focus on the asset liabilities and the dollar amounts. It's really the core conversation that we're really looking at improving now that we have data correct.
Where I'm using it the most is the projection feature and goal-setting feature. I love those tools. I love being able to have I call it bringing a financial plan to life.
The projection models product. It's a very powerful tool that the clients get an immediate picture of the current scenario. Once you add in some current strategies that you would talk to the client about in the first meeting, the client's eyes just light up. They see the opportunities in regards to setting their goals and how they can achieve those in real terms.
It's really you want to do the goals-based conversation, and that's the thing that you want to focus on. You don't want to focus on the asset liabilities and the dollar amounts. It's really the core conversation that we're really looking at improving now that we have data correct.
Where I'm using it the most is the projection feature and goal-setting feature. I love those tools. I love being able to have I call it bringing a financial plan to life. A financial plan is not a 100-page document that sits in a drawer. That's actually not a financial plan. This actually brings the plan to life.
Thanks, Rachel.
Thank you, Darren. Thank you to everybody who has asked questions or given feedback. I do note that on the external screen, some slides and the video, they are appearing particularly blurry. There is a high-res PDF version available. It is a full presentation deck on the ASX. That has links to high-res versions of the videos as well for you to follow along with. Now to some questions that have come through for Darren. A couple from Andrei Stadnik at Morgan Stanley. Darren, are owned advice EBIT margins scalable, i.e., can EBIT margins approach 35% if more financial advisers take up the owned by IOOF model?
Thank you for that question. Look, for us with the technology, I wouldn't like to restrain ourselves and say 30% is the number. I don't know what the future number is. We do know that it is scalable in terms of adding on other AFSLs, like the opportunity with the MLC Advice, and we can certainly scale it right across. Into the future, the way technology is going, we think there is opportunities, but I don't know what those numbers may be.
Great. Second one from Andrei Stadnik. How will the self-employed financial advisors deliver suitable returns for IOOF shareholders? What changes are required along the value chain to do this?
Yeah. Another good question there. We've been very vocal in our move to equalizing the risk, if you like, that the AFSLs have and the financial rewards. The bottom line is, the advisors in that self-employed space, there is a re-rating in terms of how much they pay as the old subsidies move out, and we were one of the first ones to move away from that. The reality is, we've already opened up conversations with our advisors. There is recognition that they will be paying more for the services they traditionally get from us. The way that we're actually doing this, and this comes back to some of those structural changes.
The lazy way for us would've been just to say, "Well, x dollars, you need to pay x dollars more." What we're actually doing is we're looking at the way that we were structured and making sure that we are an efficient partner in terms of our structure, so that when we go back and ask for more money, in not only delivering more services like the Wealth Central solution, we are absolutely crystal clear on how efficient we're running our business. That exchange and that partnership model, is where we're going to exchange fair value. The advisors will need, and will be contributing more for those services that they had in the past.
Great. Thanks, Darren. A question from Matt Dunger at BAML. Why have some of your fast-growing competitors, for example, Netwealth and Hub, been so successful at winning new members, and how will IOOF advisors win new members?
I might deflect that one there, Rachel. That is not necessarily an advice-related question. I think that might be more suited to the next session in terms of Evolve for Mark to answer.
Sure.
Both of those businesses don't run advice businesses.
Yeah, good point. A couple of questions from Nick Burgess at Baillieu's . A target 30% EBIT margin for salaried advice. What EBIT margin does Shadforth currently achieve? What is the rough timeline for 30% margin for salaried advice?
On both of those, the combined owned and operated entities are achieving that 30% EBIT. Across Bridges and across Shadforth, we currently got them running at that EBIT in terms of that target as well. The time for that is now.
Thank you, Darren. Another one from Nick Burgess. It appears your competitors are not as focused on advice or advisors. Do you see an opportunity to grow advisor numbers over time post MLC to well north of 2,000?
I'll answer that in two parts. First of all, I'm glad everybody else has taken their eyes off the advice space because it gives us an opportunity to, one, reaffirm our commitment. Again, I think the advice research that we've just done and the feedback we're getting, we will be the voice of advice because we genuinely feel it's a service that the community will benefit from, and we can balance up the shareholders' risks, in terms of delivering that. In terms of out-and-out advisor numbers, my focus is not necessarily on advisor numbers. What I'm focusing on over the next two years is making sure that the businesses that we have are as efficient as possible.
For instance, I'd be more than happy to have half the number of advisors that are twice as efficient, because I've then got a lower risk base to grow the growth that I'll actually get off that. I'm not targeting 2,000. We're really targeting efficiencies. However, based upon our experiences with communicating with GPL and communicating with TenFifty and others in the market, we seem to be resonating with those external advisors, particularly around the technology and the investment in it. I think we'll get natural growth as the market continues to fragment. 2,000 would not be out of our reach, but at this stage we are focusing on that efficient delivery.
Great. Thanks, Darren. Just in the interest of time, I'll ask another question. Darren, you will be back for the all-presenter Q&A at the end of the third session. We'll save some questions for you to respond to then.
All good.
The final question for this session, which comes from James Cordukes. For the self-employed model, you say you will reprice to remove cross-subsidization and to recognize the risk premium as the AFSL owner. Yet, the self-employed model targets to break even. Do you think you need to raise the risk premium even more? Let's stop there, and we'll ask it in two parts.
Yeah, sure. The answer to the question is yes. I don't think this will be our last move. We're doing a reset. Obviously, breakeven is our first point, which we said we'd get in the 2021, 2022 year. That's our first challenge. By then, we'll continue to evolve the technology. Ultimately, we would be looking for a return, in that segment as well. That's just in the AFSLs. The other point that is important is the reason it's so important for us to have a presence in that self-employed is that any investments we make, any enablement business that we've got, the way that we scale out our business will go across a much larger pool of advisors. Breakeven's the first one. Ultimately, but we do want to get a return.
I don't know what that return will be, but I need to have a presence in that market because that's where the larger volume of advisors are at present, and it gives me an opportunity to spread my costs and make sure I'm more scalable than others.
Sure. Following on from the other half of that question, what is the marginal cost of additional advisors, i.e., will more self-employed advisors make you more profitable and less self-employed advisors make you loss-making?
The math would indicate that's the case. Yeah. If the mix was different, then ultimately the drivers in terms of the revenue are different and therefore the numbers that would come out of that are different. The answer to the question is yes. Our focus over that next period of time is to really make sure that we stabilize and transform the way advice is provided. We'll be real happy to have 300 authorized representatives post MLC Advice coming into our employee channel. 1,000 or 1,300 when we put TenFifty and GPL in that middle space, and then growing presence in that dealer to dealer. That's our aim over the next 18 months. After that, certainly we'll come back and re-communicate what it might be post that.
Fantastic. Darren, thank you very much for the session. Our next session will commence at 10:45 A.M., focused on Evolve. Darren, we'll see you back for the Q&A at the end of the third session.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Bye, everybody.
[Break]
Good morning, welcome back to our session on Evolve21. Before we kick off, I'd just like to apologize for some noise that came through during the intermission there between the sessions. I think it'll prove today why we like to keep technology in-house and use proprietary technology. Before we kick off, and I hand over to Mark Oliver, as with previous sessions, please email questions directly through to me at rachel.scully@ioof.com.au or forward them using the platform up on your top left of the screen. Now, without further ado, I'll hand over to Mark Oliver. Mark, if you could share your screen. Welcome.
Thank you, Rachel. Good afternoon, everybody. Hopefully, you can see and hear me okay. Thanks, Rachel. My name is Mark Oliver. I'm Chief Distribution Officer, which essentially gives me leadership of our distribution and product capability for IOOF. I'm also the Executive Sponsor of Project Evolve, which we're really looking forward to sharing with you over the next hour and taking your questions. For my history, I've been with IOOF for close to six years, and previously with over 20 years in global wealth specialists around the world, in Australia and the U.K., integrating acquisitions and also developing new advisor and client products. Shortly, I will introduce today's speakers. First, I wanted to take a few minutes to outline what Evolve is and some of the goals that we have set ourselves around Evolve.
As the slide talks to, the Evolve project itself is, in basic terms, an enterprise-wide program of work which is really focused on delivering what matters to our clients. It does that by creating a single go-forward platform for our retail, our advised, and our workplace products and services. We believe that we are unique in the retail market, certainly, and we believe in the broader market, in delivering that single environment for all employer, super, direct retail, and advised members and products. If you keep in mind that those labels that I've just mentioned actually aren't recognizable to the investor themselves. They are labels that the industry puts on those cohorts. We also acknowledge that those members or investors will actually, through their lifetime, fit in one or more of those cohorts. For example, they may join the super fund through an employer.
They then, at later life, may take on an advice relationship and subsequently move into retirement or, in fact, build an investment portfolio outside of their retirement savings. Our offers allow them the flexibility to move between those products with minimal friction, and importantly, for us to be able to service their changing needs really efficiently and consistently. Our key messages today will be that Evolve is very much here today, and it's growing quickly. Ahead of our full migration of heritage products or legacy products, Evolve is much more than just an IT re-platforming initiative. It's actually about enabling a number of IOOF's strategic pillars or strategic drivers. While it delivers value and great service and outcomes for our clients.
As Renato mentioned at the opening, we have an overall goal of reducing the cost to serve and making capacity for innovation through simplification of our operating environment, and ultimately delivering on our ClientFirst, which is essentially where we eliminate waste or the things that our clients don't value, to spend more time with clients on the things that they do value. In its current phase, Evolve21 is a single platform ecosystem for all IOOF heritage products by the end of calendar year 2021. That will entail two migrations occurring in mid and late calendar year 2021. In essence, what that does is streamline our current array of 73 products down to 13. You get a sense of the simplification and the opportunities that presents to focus our attentions on development and innovation.
This opens up, clearly, further opportunities for consolidation of both the P&I and the to-be-acquired MLC business. Evolve is already the home for our IOOF-branded workplace offers, our employer super products. Today, we're also seeing strong uptake in the new Evolve product, adviser products, which were launched over the last two years, and they include products branded Shadforth Portfolio Service, Expand, and IOOF Essential. Having been launched over the course of the last two years, they've now garnered over AUD 4 billion and about 10,000 client accounts in that time. In fact, our new account openings, as the chart show on the right-hand side, new account openings on Evolve now exceed both our Pursuit and our Heritage suite, and they did that during the course of late 2019, as the overall number of aggregate new accounts in IOOF continues to grow.
As you'll hear this morning, we're very proud and excited about the unique ecosystem that we're building. Important to point out that it's an ecosystem that we own and control. While our clients will always determine what value looks like, we believe it's really important for us to retain the flexibility and the agility to respond to their changing demands. Essentially, we don't want to put ourselves at the mercy of an outsourced platform provider, their frailties or fragilities, and their priorities for that matter. We'll show you some very concrete examples of this in action later today. While the system we've built under Evolve is our own, we do obviously engage with others to help us understand what matters to our clients and prospects.
In fact, in the Evolve development process, we continue to work closely with members, advisers, and in fact the general public to inform on new features, new functionality, and the all-important user experience and help us prioritize some of those aspects. To ensure we remain focused on the quality of our platform service overall for the key financial adviser market, we look to Wealth Insights for their detailed and unique independent research. Over the last couple of years, as we've been developing Evolve, Wealth Insights continues to regularly review the IOOF Pursuit platform, which is our outgoing heritage infrastructure, and will be replaced by Evolve by the end of 2021. Pursuit in those surveys continues to show great progress across some key service attributes and currently sits fifth out of 15 overall amongst competing platforms on overall service. A number of factors are taken into account there.
75% of advisers rated it seven out of 10 or higher. We think that that can only improve with the ongoing rollout of the Evolve suite of products. Obviously, we would expect that Evolve products will be surveyed by Wealth Insights in their future reports. They usually take place around April or May of each year, and are in market shortly after that. Just sticking briefly with the Wealth Insights research, one interesting aspect and the reason we continue to use them as a real bellwether of satisfaction in the market is their 2020 research, which looked at about 800 different financial advisors across the market, and surveyed over 20, about 26 in fact, service features, which Wealth Insights cluster under 10 key attributes.
Now, in analyzing those attributes, the power of Wealth Insights is their ability to drill into not only what advisors say is crucial to them and important, but also what actually does drive their satisfaction. Looking at some of the implicit matters that are considered, and they do this, at Wealth Insights, through a complex set of regression analysis to reveal, as I say, not only what they say, but what actually drives the overall satisfaction for advisors. These are elements tend to take prominence in the areas that we focus on in our quest to deliver what matters.
If I was to sort of summarize, it would suggest that the bells and whistles of platforms, extensive investment menus, sophisticated trading tools, and the like, are nowhere near as impactful on satisfaction compared to well-integrated IT systems, prompt and efficient service from call centers, and of course, client value for money. In fact, whilst the individual IT and web attributes surveyed by Wealth Insights, of which there are half a dozen or so, individually didn't rank particularly highly, 11th, 14th, 17th, and eighth. When you collect them together, when you bunch them together, they actually, this IT and web functionality is the single strongest bearing on whether an advisor rates a platform well or not. Sorry, I want to make sure I'm still on.
Today's speakers, to underscore the enterprise-wide nature of the Evolve project, in this session, you're going to hear from several of our leaders across the business. All of these individuals contribute, along with their teams, to the success of Evolve. In fact, they and their respective teams are also beneficiaries of Evolve in serving our clients. Each of the speakers' functions and capabilities are complementary, but we do all have one single focus, and that is delivering what matters for our clients. That's what I call the ClientFirst way. This morning, I'll first pass to Cable Rickard. Cable is General Manager of Product and will showcase some of the features of Evolve that are in market today, focused on delivering what matters or solving problems or pain points for our advisors. Cable will pass to Shahram Hekmat.
Shahram is our Chief Information Officer. He'll showcase the unique technology underpinning the Evolve suite. Finally, he'll pass to Frank Lombardo. Frank is our Chief Operating Officer responsible for the delivery of our service and support to those three cohorts I mentioned, direct members, our advisors, and employers. He'll speak to how Evolve is helping bring this critical service element of IOOF to life. Now, all three speakers in this segment have five or more years experience with IOOF. Interestingly, all three of them have also worked at MLC prior to joining IOOF. As Rachel mentioned, they'll have time for questions at the end. If you can hold your questions till then. I'll pass over now to Cable.
Thank you, Mark, good morning, everyone. As Mark said, my name is Cable Rickard, I'm the General Manager of Product at IOOF. I've been in the industry for over 15 years now, having previously worked at Aviva, UBS in London, and MLC. I've been with the IOOF Group for over nine years now, I've been heavily involved in all of our major platform transformations, integrations, acquisitions, and product initiatives. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the Evolve platform, the journey so far, and how it's enabling improved client outcomes through efficiency, sustainability, and our ability to innovate. I'm also going to share a number of short videos with you that will help showcase the Evolve platform. Within our IOOF Heritage business, pre-P&I, we have operated two core platforms.
Over the last five years, we've been heavily investing in the Evolve platform, creating a go-forward platform to house all of our proprietary products. Everything from MySuper to retail advised super and pension and IDPS solution. We spent considerable time a number of years ago building out the core foundations of a platform. We rebuilt the tax engine, the fee engine, the way the investment menus would operate. We relaunched and rebuilt the client site, the adviser site, and the licensee site. We have been iteratively releasing features, as you can see from the top half of this slide, and we've done that progressively over the last few years. As I said earlier, the Evolve platform has historically been one that has housed our Workplace and MySuper solutions. Since 2018, we started to introduce retail advice platform and products.
Those products already administer some 10,000 clients and near AUD 4.5 billion worth of funds under management. As we come into 2021, the Evolve project will see a consolidation of our two core registry system. Upon completion, and we expect to complete at the end of next calendar year, the Evolve platform will be administering north of 260,000 clients and near AUD 40 billion worth of funds under management. I'm shortly going to show you a short video that will help demonstrate just some of the ways the Evolve platform is addressing pain points, creating efficiencies, and adding value to advisors and their ability to add value to their client.
No two advice businesses or clients are the same. Advisors need a solution that can be adapted to suit the way they provide advice and the types of clients they service. What remains consistent is the need to create efficiencies and deliver value to their clients. At IOOF, everything we build is in collaboration with advisors and investors. We conduct interviews to understand client needs. We ideate and test different functionality before we begin the building process. Let's take a look at some of the purpose-built functionality that creates efficiencies and enhances client outcomes and service experience. A key advantage of the platform is the reweight feature, which allows advisors to establish an automatic rebalance. This ensures that the portfolio stays true to the client's recommended asset allocation.
The portfolio automatically rebalances while utilizing straight-through processing to place the client's orders instantly without any manual intervention, and importantly, provides peace of mind. Prior to submitting the reweight instructions, the advisor can view the current versus future portfolio asset allocation. Contra trading. The administration burden on advisors' businesses and making it a simple transaction. This is particularly important during times of market volatility. We've made it easy for advisors to participate in corporate actions on behalf of their clients, removing the need for manual communications and paperwork. The corporate action screen provides an overview of the corporate actions, including the offer documents. Advisors can see a complete list of their clients who are eligible to participate. Our accounts list page has been purpose-built to streamline the advice business process by giving advisors the freedom to submit individual instructions for each client on one screen.
In building our platform, we aim to consider what our clients need now and anticipate what they will need in the future. An example of this is the delivery of online fixed-term agreements, looking ahead to the proposed legislation and aligning our technology to the future of advice standards. Advisors can establish a new fixed-term agreement or start a new ongoing agreement. This provides the advisor with flexibility. From time to time, an advisor may receive a request from a client to urgently access their money. We have made it as simple as possible for advisors to assist their clients with this request in a timely way. When an investment or portion of an investment is sold via the platform, clients don't have to wait for this sale to complete to access their funds.
If their IOOF account is linked to their bank account with one of the major banks, they can have access to their money within 15 minutes. Owning the technology enables IOOF to adapt quickly and provide tailored outcomes that suit what our clients need. IOOF online. Intuitive, seamless, and in real time.
Thanks, Mark. In a changing world of compliance, technology, and business challenges, the one commodity no one gets more of is time. Considering the efficiencies managed accounts can enable, we're seeing a growing number of advisors consider managed accounts. They can offer and do offer a range of benefits both to advisors and to clients, whether that be the enabling the timely response to changing markets, reducing compliance and admin burden, or improving client engagement. We've had a managed account solution on Pursuit Select for some two years now, but earlier this year, we extended our managed account solution on Evolve, and it's already gaining considerable momentum and positive feedback. I'm shortly going to show you a short video that will demonstrate just how easy our managed account solution is to implement and the benefits it can have for both advisors and clients.
In today's ever-changing environment, advisors are facing increased regulatory and compliance requirements, which add operational complexity and increased costs to their business. Advisers need solutions that enable them to efficiently implement and actively monitor portfolios. A growing number of advisers are embracing managed accounts to solve this problem. Our IOOF managed account solution has been purpose-built on Evolve to improve operational efficiencies, help advisers be responsive to client needs, and also free up their time so that they can focus on servicing clients and growing their business. Let's dive in to show you how simple it is for an adviser to set up and manage a new managed account. To begin, the adviser can search for a specific client account using the simple or advanced search function. After selecting the client, they click on the Investments tab.
Under the Managed Portfolio Service section, the adviser would select Add a New Model Investment, and then the client's chosen model. To simplify the managed account implementation process, advisers can choose to transfer existing assets into the model. This purpose-built functionality allows the sell-down of existing assets to release cash in a single step, and to transfer existing assets into the model if the client already holds them. Clients can hold the same asset inside and outside the model, and advisers can purchase one or many models within the one account, saving advisers time, reducing administration, and providing their clients with transparency and timely execution. When submitting the order, the client's buy, sell, and transfer summary will be shown. If the adviser is ready to proceed, click on Submit. The password will need to be re-entered to confirm the order.
Once the client is invested in the model, advisers are able to see the full portfolio online. They can also see trade and transaction activity, including any buys and sells generated by a rebalance. Portfolios are reviewed weekly and rebalanced as required. The client can also benefit from reduced brokerage. Here are what our clients are saying.
Sorry, unmute Cable.
Apologies there, everyone. Apparently, we could hear the sound, but unfortunately, you couldn't see the video. Just a reminder that those videos are embedded in the documents that are available on the ASX release, that you could view in your own time. As you saw in the first video, with a modern functionality and a contemporary user experience, we do offer a leading proposition in the market as advice businesses continue to change and their client propositions continue to change. I'm now going to hand over to Shahram Hekmat, who is our Chief Information Officer. Shahram will shine a light on the modern technology and the thinking that has underpinned the Evolve platform. Thanks, Shahram.
Shahram, perhaps before you start, I just make sure that the operator can get your slides working. I'm gonna stop the share and restart it.
Sure. Good to go?
[crosstalk] Go ahead, Shahram.
Thank you, Mark and Cable. Good morning, everyone. My name is Shahram Hekmat. I'm the Chief Information Officer at IOOF. Today, I'm going to talk briefly about the exciting technology that underpins Evolve. Next slide, please. I'd like to start by summarizing the six key benefits of Evolve as a contemporary platform for serving our clients. First, Evolve is an important enabler for reducing our technological complexity. By consolidating onto a single go-forward solution to satisfy all our platform needs, we are reducing the number of systems in our portfolio, and hence, the overall complexity. Second, Evolve is enabling us to reduce the cost of doing business, not only in IT terms, but also product and operations, which ultimately benefits members as well as shareholders. Third, one of our key objectives in creating Evolve is to create capacity for future growth.
In other words, we are very conscious of the fact that the needs of a growing business like ours are best satisfied by a modern platform that looks beyond current capacity requirements, but more on this later. Fourth, Evolve is developed with business simplification in mind. We're moving away from a myriad of products on multiple registry systems onto a smaller and simplified set of products on a single registry system. Fifth, we've adopted a ClientFirst way of working throughout our business, which Frank Lombardo will shortly talk about. Within operations, ClientFirst way of working is enabled by a bespoke solution that has been developed using Evolve technology. Finally, Evolve is a wholly in-house developed and owned solution.
We've adopted this approach because we want to be in control of our future and not at the mercy of a vendor whose interests, in the long run, might not align with ours. In developing Evolve, we've adopted a state-of-the-art software architecture. If you look at the history of the evolution of software architecture, earliest applications had a monolithic architecture that consisted of a central system, typically a mainframe class database, that was accessed using dumb terminals. Such legacy systems are still in use today. The next generation of applications were client-server, where the client was typically a PC on a user's desktop that connected to a central server in a data center. This was a good step in load distribution and scalability. More recently, microservices have become popular as a more scalable means of building enterprise servers.
Evolve's architecture is represented by the stack on the far right of this slide. It delivers unparalleled flexibility and scalability by extending the microservices concept to the front end using the concept of micro front ends. Because of this, we believe that Evolve is at the cutting edge of modern software engineering. We have intentionally avoided building a partial solution by putting a shiny front end in front of an outdated back end. Evolve is a modern end-to-end solution. What are microservices? Put simply, rather than developing a large system such as Evolve as a monolithic piece, we've divided it into hundreds of smaller components that can exist in their own right, but communicate and collaborate to deliver the required business functionality. Think of each microservice as something that implements a well-defined business task, such as authentication, switch, withdrawal, rebalance, and so on. This architecture has significant benefits.
It's not only highly scalable, but also highly fault-tolerant. If a service fails, the rest of the system is unaffected and continues to work. Because microservices are decoupled, the overall design is simplified and easier to maintain. A key engineering benefit is that services can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. This makes the architecture highly suited to agile development, which is how we work. We have many agile teams who work largely independently on separate services. Finally, reusing third-party services to gain development speed is straightforward. All we need to do is wrap the third-party service as a microservice and add it to our solution. I mentioned the scalability earlier, so allow me to explain why it's so important. There are two distinct methods of scaling a system. The first method is called vertical scaling, shown on the left. This is how you scale older monolithic systems.
Because the system must run on a single server, your only means of scaling it up is to increase the power of that server with more CPU and memory. The analogy for this is a skyscraper. You can create more floor space by adding more floors. In both cases, there is a hard limit that cannot be exceeded. The second method, horizontal scaling, shown on the right, gives you almost unlimited room for growth. To grow the capacity, you simply add more servers. The analogy for this is a city which can grow not only upward but also outwards to create space for tens of millions of people. Evolve is designed for horizontal scalability, and that's why we are confident about its ability to future-proof our business. In designing Evolve, we've paid close attention to the proper design of the user experience, or UX for short.
This is important because good UX can make a system a lot easier and more enjoyable to use, thus lifting productivity. To achieve this, we've developed a Global Experience Language, or GEL for short, as a shared framework to give all our digital services a consistent look and feel. As I mentioned earlier, we develop all our user interactions using micro front ends, which deliver similar benefits to what microservices do for the back end. Additionally, we support all popular end-user devices, be they desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Importantly, we've adopted the progressive web app, or PWA for short, style of development, which means that we can support all popular devices using a single code base without developing native apps for Apple and Android. One of our key design principles is not to reinvent the wheel.
To this end, Evolve has a very flexible plug-and-play capability that allows us to easily integrate best-of-breed functionality, be it third party or in-house developed. By way of examples, we've integrated PortfolioCloud's portfolio modeling functionality into Evolve. The MDA solution that Cable attempted to demonstrate earlier is powered by PortfolioCloud's engine. We recently integrated a customizable chatbot sourced from Intercom. We've partnered with Deakin University's Machine Intelligence Research Lab, who assisted us in developing automated demand classification for ClientFirst. More recently, we've developed in-house machine learning solutions for things like automated signature comparison, form scanning, and classification. All these solutions have been successfully integrated into Evolve's microservices architecture and are currently in active use. I now hand over to Frank Lombardo to present the ClientFirst way of working.
Good morning, everybody, and thank you, Shahram, for that very insightful piece on our technology, and I'll look to build on that. Frank Lombardo, the Chief Operating Officer for IOOF. In addition to working at a number of organizations, I've spent 30 years in the industry, with the last five at IOOF. What I can say is that I've worked across products, operations, projects, and transformation. In addition to working at different organizations, that's given me a real sense of what's most important when it comes to teamwork and having a deep alignment around what's really important when it comes to strategic initiatives at any point in time, and working together to deliver outcomes for our clients.
At the beginning of my journey with IOOF, I felt this, and to this day, feel quite privileged at the support that I was provided in being assigned the task, or being brought to the organization, to help to transform the client experience and the service delivery from IOOF to our clients. It's been a while since I've talked to you at an Investor Day, and what I'd like to do is do a quick refresh. What's it all about? You've heard the word, but let's just spend a little bit of time just unpacking the word ClientFirst. I want to share with you what we've done in the last four years. Finally, what I want to do is share some of the results. These indicate to us that we are absolutely on the right track. Products, operations, and technology working together is more than a platform.
In my team, or across client and process, I should say, and for the team members within ClientFirst, it's all about delivering a unique human experience. Unless all the pieces of the puzzle that support you are working harmoniously at that moment of truth, when the client is relying on you to deliver what matters to them in minutes, it all has to come together. I'm especially proud of our purpose, understand me, look after me, secure my future. If you recall, when I launched the ClientFirst strategy, I talked to you about the fact that we listened to and did the work for over 5,000 client demands, the purpose was born from that work. It's a simple purpose. Understand me, look after me, secure my future. It's written from a client perspective, outside-in thinking, if you'd like.
It's very powerful, and it's a very high standard. The work we've been doing over the last four years has been all about bringing that to life for our clients in those moments of truth, in every interaction that we have with them. We empower our people to deliver what matters. We've redefined roles. We've added tools. We've increased their knowledge. Most importantly, we've created a system of work that allows decision-making rights at that point of contact, that point of contact that is closest to the client. We have built new capabilities, as Shahram has just talked to. Those capabilities not only enable us to deliver what matters to clients and to work in this new way of working, but also provide the data and the insights necessary for ongoing improvement activity. Finally, the role of our managers and leaders. We've redefined the role of a leader.
It's all about being in the work. The only way that you can remain relevant to clients and to our people is to be in the work, in the trenches, if you'd like. That's led to a flatter structure. Today, I can confidently be here and tell you that we have scaled a highly personalized experience for all clients. It's all about a cohort of one. What matters to you is individual and it's unique. That's what we mean by delivering what matters. It's about delivering that unique individual experience to you. It's client-agnostic, it's channel-agnostic, it's location-agnostic, it's product-agnostic, it's agnostic to the demand at that moment of truth for you as the client. At the centerpiece is single-point accountability, end-to-end ownership for the client demand without any handoffs. This is unique.
I've worked in organizations where that personalized experience is the domain of your highest, most valued clients. We have developed a system of work that enables us to deliver that to every client. What have we done? The unique ClientFirst operating model has involved redefining each and every role in the team. It's involved multi-skilling each and every single team member. We've done that through building a learning and development capability, as well as introducing new tools to help us deliver and distribute knowledge to our people when they need it most. We've collapsed the front and the back office, if you like. We do not run a traditional call center and functionally specialized administration teams. That equals handoffs. We cannot deliver that client experience that I talked about with those handoffs. Equally, Mark talked about ClientFirst removing waste.
The design of the operating model has been all about removing waste in the pursuit of delivering a differentiated client experience. Shahram talked to you about new tools. One of those tools is our CRM and workflow. We call it Rocket. Rocket empowers our people to work the way that I've just described. It has been built in the Evolve ecosystem. It is embedded in that ecosystem and integrated into the underlying platform and other capabilities that we choose to introduce into that ecosystem. That's proven by the introduction of robotic automation, AI, chatbot, knowledge management, and speech analytics. Shahram talked to the reduction in time and the efficiencies. Cable talked to a withdrawal request being able to be completed within 15 minutes. That is true online for advisors when the demand is received by them.
It's equally true if that demand is received by a non-advised client into ClientFirst or, in fact, is received by advisor into ClientFirst. When we started this journey, it took over five days on average to complete a withdrawal. The knowledge management system is enabling us to distribute knowledge to our people at home in an easy-to-digest format whilst they are on the phone with clients, with a Google-style search engine attached to it. The speech analytics is enabling us to lift unstructured data from calls and combine that with the structured data from our CRM and workflow, from the underlying platform, and from any system that we integrate into the Evolve ecosystem. Primarily, it's creating the efficiencies so that we can spend more time talking to clients. What that does is drive richness and intimacy and more valuable client data.
We are growing our financial education and wellbeing team. This year, we appointed a GM of financial education and wellbeing, Anthony Kneebone. Anthony comes to us with an advice and digital background. This team also includes a scaled advice team. Anthony's main priority is to leverage those capabilities that I've just talked to deliver a digital proactive experience for our members. The combined IOOF, P&I, and MLC business will have approximately 1 million non-advised members. Anthony and the team are focusing on building digital capabilities to engage with those members in a way that drives a deeper, more intimate relationship. We're also partnering with Darren Whereat. You heard about Advice 2.0. The work that we're doing with Darren is leveraging the knowledge that we've built from ClientFirst and applying that to our advice businesses.
In addition to the work that Darren's outlined and the technology capability that Darren talked to, we believe further efficiencies and an improved experience can be delivered through removing waste and duplication in the advisor office in the same way as we have done through ClientFirst. Finally, growing our digital capability. We are currently doing that through what we call test and learn pilots. What Anthony and the team are doing is engaging with our members through pilots, and what we're doing is testing the response as we start to think through and build the future of the digital experience for our members. Just to share with you, the screen on the left is the Rocket system, the CRM and workflow that both Shahram and myself have talked to this morning.
I wanted to share with you on this slide is that this capability is ready now for the future of flexible work. In fact, we could not have moved seamlessly in a COVID environment to work from home without these capabilities. These capabilities enable our employees to choose when and how they want to work. This is a minimum standard for all organizations today. We're there today. The front end, so the Rocket system, which front ends the platform administration system, currently front ends both the legacy Pursuit platform that Mark and Cable spoke to and the new Evolve product suite. If you like, it shields our people from the underlying system. Through microservices, integrates seamlessly to enable our people to deliver what matters to clients.
The key point that I raise is that this is a proof point that we can commence the ClientFirst transformation for both P&I and for the MLC business prior to and in parallel with the product transformation, product rationalization. We can front end those legacy administration systems with Rocket, the new CRM and workflow, and enable us to bring forward that ClientFirst transformation whilst the rest of the team is working on the rationalization of the underlying systems and processes. Some of the data. Through 2020, we had on average a 37% increase in demand volume. That in isolation doesn't tell the true story. At some point, the demand volume was up to 100% more than the same time last year. April and July were great examples of that, where early access to super demand skyrocketed.
The system of work has to be able to cater for an increase in volume, has to cater for and adapt to unexpected change and to variation in demand. What I can tell you is that through the course of the year, over 65% of all demands, every demand into our system of work was completed in one business day. Our early access withdrawals were leading from an industry perspective. At the same time, we increased the amount of time that we spend with our clients, on average seven to eight minutes per call. In many cases, over 10 to 15 minutes per call. If anything, we learned in 2020, the importance of human interaction, real conversations with real clients, and we're really proud that we're able to deliver that. At the same time, we managed to keep the average wait time quite low through the 2020 period.
As a whole, we feel in what was probably a one in 100 year event, that our service performance lifted and stayed true to our purpose. I touched on Anthony Kneebone and the financial wellbeing and education team. Through the last few years, we have freed capacity. We are reallocating that capacity to value work. That value work includes retention and scaled advice. Over the last 12 months, the team has retained over 800 non-advised members and AUD 140 million in funds under advice. We will continue to invest aggressively in this space. As I mentioned earlier, approximately 1 million non-advised clients in the combined IOOF, P&I, and MLC entity. NPS, a measure that I'm sure you're familiar with and as Mark opened up with, the client, the adviser, the employer of the member is the ultimate arbiter of our performance. We measure this through NPS.
Our member NPS is 46% and our advisor NPS 59%. I could also share with you that the advisor NPS for the Evolve product sits at 70%. We're very confident we are on the right track as measured and assessed by our clients. On the far right-hand side, Bain & Co, who basically introduced Net Promoter Score to the world, has a classification system. We consider our current performance excellent, that's not good enough. Our aim is to be world-class, it's only once we're world-class that our clients are truly receiving the service that they expect from us. Finally, Mark opened up with Wealth Insights, I thought I would share with you a couple of the key measures for the service parts of the organization, administration support, and ease of doing business.
For both of those, we sit fourth out of 15 platform survey, and the gap between the top four, it's not significant. I am very confident that with the ongoing investment and the maturity of our operating model, that we will continue to improve our ranking in Wealth Insights. Just to close my part of the presentation today before I hand over to Mark, I thought I'd share with you some of the feedback we're receiving from our clients. I'd have to say in my 30 years that the level of positive advocacy and feedback which clients are taking the time to write to us about is the highest that I've ever seen. We receive hundreds of these, and we proudly store them on our intranet site as inspiration for our people to keep going to deliver what matters. I'll hand back to Mark now.
Great. Thank you very much, Frank, and thank you, everybody. Hopefully, you took a lot from that session. As I outlined at the start, key in our approach to developing our service and a class-leading service is the delivery and testing of new features and getting feedback from our clients. I think the testimonials, as Frank said, certainly give us strong encouragement that we're on the right track and gives us the confidence to keep going. These are in addition to the advisor testimonials that Cable had in some of his videos, if you were able to see them. We continue to receive fantastic feedback, particularly around the Evolve suite, and it gives us great confidence for the future. To close out before we move to questions, I think really the key points from this session have been that Evolve is very much here today.
It's growing strongly amongst our advisors and our clients, and it's unique insofar as it's a single offering across a range of different offers from Workplace, MySuper, right through to an advice client relationship and non-super investments all in one place. In so doing, it's enabling the whole organization to focus squarely on what matters to our client. That core ecosystem brings together the latest technology, value-add functionality, and what we believe is our differentiated ClientFirst service. Rachel, I'll pass back for questions, and I'll ask the others to join.
Great. Thank you very much, Mark. Yes, if everybody else could join back and put their videos on. Thanks, Mark. We have seen overwhelming demand for this virtual briefing from shareholders, analysts, other interested parties, and from our people at IOOF and future colleagues from MLC, which has caused increased bandwidth demands when it comes to the video live streaming. However, as Cable noted, I do encourage you to re-watch using the links on the public PDF so you can really see the benefits and points of difference on our Evolve technology. Mark, first question, we might turn to you. This was asked at the advice session earlier, but thought it was more appropriate for this session.
Matt Dunger at Baml asks, "Mark, why have some of your fast-growing competitors, for example, Netwealth and HUB24, been so successful at winning new members, and how will IOOF advisors win new members?
Yeah. Well, I think the point I would make is we do continue to win new members, and if we look at the industry, I think Frank really called out well in his session that us and a few others have a large existing client base, and they remain a significant focus for us. For us, that will continue to be a tremendous area of focus. If you think of the growth of some products have come from movement across the industry, if you like, flow between providers. We're really focused strongly not only on continuing to grow, but also to nurturing the substantial stock of members that we have. A number of our competitors haven't had the client base to be spending that time on.
Great. Thank you, Mark. Mark, another question for you. The external platforms, for example, BT Panorama, that IOOF gets revenues on. Are there any further risks to these revenues in a world where cross subsidies are being reduced? Are you planning to bring more of the fund from this onto Evolve?
I think really our clients will be the key arbiter of that. In terms of those arrangements, we are confident that they are fit for purpose into the future. Ultimately, what we want to offer our clients is choice, and we have a unique perspective on how the market is operating to also focus on uplifting our proprietary capabilities. I think it's really the best of all worlds that we can offer our clients and advisers choice across a range of market-leading offers, but also continue to inform our own proposition.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Cable, a question to you. How much FUA will there be on the combined platform post-integration? I believe that means post completion of Evolve.
At the completion of Evolve 21, which will see the consolidation of our platforms from two to one and our product set from 73 to 13. We'll have near AUD 40 billion worth of funds under management and about a quarter of a million customers, around 260,000.
Great. Thank you. Shahram, a question for yourself. IOOF is widely considered to have old technology and a lot of legacy technology issues. How would you respond to that?
Well, if you go back many years, that might have been true, but over the past few years, we've built considerable capability internally to develop the Evolve platform. I would say that the team that we currently have is actually one of the best in the country. The fact that they've been able to develop this completely in-house, a very advanced solution, which is market leading, is evidence that that statement is just not true. I think the view out there in the market is totally outdated and not on par with our current capability.
If I could add to Shahram's answer, because I wholeheartedly agree, and I'm really passionate about this one. Maybe our reflection is that we, as an organization, haven't done a good enough job talking to our capabilities, and that's what we're here to do today. Having led operations teams for a long time, I can tell you that the partnership that we've got with Shahram's IT team, and the agile way that they work, is delivering capabilities faster to the team than I've ever seen in my life before. The early access to Super was an incredible example where they responded almost within a weekend to deliver new capabilities in the face of huge demand, never seen before in the industry, position us to preserve what we think is industry-leading service.
The proof points of the tech capability are numerous, and it's a myth that we're here to debunk today because it's simply not true.
Yeah. Thank you, Frank. A final one from Mark before we wrap up. When can we expect to see Evolve ranked in Wealth Insights data?
Yeah. Thanks, Rachel. I think as I tried to outline in the opening, we will expect that to be surveyed in the 2021 survey, which I believe is in field April, May. The published results usually is shortly thereafter.
Great. Thank you, Mark, Frank, Shahram, and Cable. The guys will be available for Q&A after the end of the third session. Thank you, guys, again, and the next session begins at 12 o'clock, focusing on transformation at IOOF. Thanks again, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Rachel.
[Break]
Good afternoon and welcome back to IOOF's third and final session of our investor briefing. Again, I hear that there was a bit of a clash with two streams during the breaks to the two sessions, so apologies for that. It seems that we got overlapped with another livestream. Our final session is around transformation, and Chris Weldon and Mel Walls will be taking us through the presentation. Questions, as always, can be submitted via the link at the top left of your screen or emailed directly to me in advance. Thank you for those who have sent through questions to the other presenters as well. We'll endeavor to get as many answered as part of the Q&A session at the end of this presentation. Without further ado, I'm handing over to Chris Weldon. Chris, go ahead.
Fabulous, Rachel. Thanks for joining us here for our last session of today. My name as Rachel mentioned, I'm Chris Weldon. I'm the Chief Transformation Officer at IOOF, and I'll be joined today by Mel Walls, who is our Chief People Officer. I've had over 16 years experience at IOOF and MLC. During that time, at IOOF, I've led a number of our business integrations and change programs. I have background that spans both products and clients and process and have a very deep understanding of the business. In this session today, we're going to provide an overview and update of our transformation and integration activities. I think a lot of the things that you've seen in the sessions before, you will have noticed a thread that does tie those together. The aim of this session is to sort of bring it all together.
I'm going to start by providing a short recap on the MLC transaction, and then share some of the lesser-known insights as to why we think we can move at pace with that integration. I'll explain how the MLC and ANZ Pensions and Investments, which I think we referred through this session as P&I, why those acquisitions can leverage IOOF's strategy of investment in advice, technology, people, and process.
I will share how we're approaching the integration and provide an update on the progress we've made today, which I'm sure many people are really interested in. Then I'm going to hand over to Mel, who will provide, I guess, what's probably the most important update, which is an update on an aspect of our business I think isn't well understood either out of the market, and it's how IOOF's unique culture is really supporting our transformation into a leading financial wellbeing business. In this session, we're going to try and share as much information as we can, but there will be some areas where we will be limited in the extent of the information that we can share at this point in time. Following the session, Mel will hand back to Renato Mota, our CEO, and we'll be joined by our other presenters for questions.
If you have questions around transformation, you can certainly ask them of myself or of Mel, but the other presenters will be with us at the end of the session as well. On the 31st of August this year, we announced the acquisition of MLC from NAB. This was an opportunistic acquisition and one that is going to position IOOF at the forefront of the industry. The MLC business is highly complementary to both IOOF and our recent acquisition of the ANZ P&I business. MLC brings with it a number of advice businesses. While we're not acquiring the licenses, the advice businesses itself is highly complementary to our existing offer, and Darren touched on some of that in his earlier session today. They bring with them a range of platforms across both workplace, simple, and comprehensive advised platforms. Again, they are complementary to the platforms which IOOF operates.
MLC brings the MLC Horizon series and investment management capability that is complementary to IOOF's strong multi-manager capability. In addition to that, MLC is also adding direct asset management capability to our business and asset consulting capability into our business as well. Those similarities and consistencies are important when we consider how we're approaching our integration program. Also importantly, underpinning all of those is a consistency in the culture that we're observing across all three businesses, MLC, ANZ P&I, and IOOF, in a desire of its people to deliver great outcomes to the clients and secure their financial futures. Following the completion of the MLC, and you would have seen this slide before, we have presented this previously when we announced the acquisition of MLC.
The important thing to note is that post the completion of the acquisition, we will have the largest footprint of advisors in the country. We will have the largest platform company in the country, and we'll be second largest ranked by superannuation assets in Australia. Through that scale, and some of the things you've heard earlier today, we can reduce the cost to serve and generate benefits for both our clients and our shareholders in an increasingly what can be a competitive market. We're going to achieve that through our transformation and integration program. Certainly, the aim is to leverage off our investment that we have made in advice, technology, people, and process.
Before we move any further, I think it's important just to take a moment to understand some of the aspects of the MLC acquisition that mean that we think we can move at a relative pace with that integration. Firstly, there are limited interdependencies between the MLC wealth business and MLC Life. In 2015, NAB commenced a program of work to separate the wealth business at MLC from the life business to accommodate the sale of MLC Life to Nippon and allow the two businesses to operate independently. That has been largely occurring since 2017, and there are now only limited transitional services arrangements in place between the two organizations. There is also limited interdependencies between the wealth business and the bank. In 2018, a program of work was undertaken by NAB to separate MLC from NAB to facilitate either a demerger or a trade sale.
The trade sale ultimately what a merging with through sale to IOOF. That program of work can now be leveraged to support the separation of MLC from NAB and reduce the period of time which we know we need to rely on transitional services arrangements. Thinking about it, they haven't waited until the sale to start that process. They actually commenced that two years earlier. Also, in preparation for a demerger or a trade sale, MLC has undertaken a lot of work to simplify and improve the competitiveness of its products. Competitiveness has improved through our investment in digital capability, improved product features, and more competitive pricing. This has resulted in recent improvements in client retention. Complexity has also been removed, with MLC reducing the number of RSE licensees from three to one and the number of superannuation funds from 10 to four.
Noting that of those four, two are private labels. As a result of this, we're acquiring a business that has far less legacy and complex arrangements embedded within it, which means that we can get on with the job of integrating in a much more timely manner. In respect to the advice divisions, as we've already noted, we're not acquiring the advice licenses, which means that the liability and remediation activities remain the responsibility of NAB. This will allow IOOF to focus more of it on continuing to improve our advice proposition, and improve the efficiency and sustainability of our advice services. Lastly, there's no doubt that this acquisition and the integration program is a complex one. To help us with this, we do have some experience. This is not the most important thing, it does certainly help.
There are a number of senior personnel and also less senior personnel within our business that do have experience across both MLC and IOOF. Some of them include our Chief Operating Officer, our Chief Information Officer, our General Manager of Product, our National Manager of Product Development and Digital Experience. Our program manager for Evolve, who Cable and Shahram spoke about earlier, prior to joining IOOF earlier this year, was the head of technology at MLC. Of course, there's also myself. As you would have picked up on the theme through the presentations today, the purpose of transformation integration is to leverage off IOOF's strategy and maximize the investments we have been making in advice, technology, people, and process. Let's look at some practical examples of that.
Darren Whereat spoke earlier today about the investment we've been making in Advice 2.0 to enable our advice businesses to operate more efficiently and sustainably. A great example of that was our investment in Wealth Central. That technology can now be leveraged and applied across an additional 500+ advisors following the completion of the MLC acquisition. The Evolve technology platform, which Shahram, Mark Oliver, and Cable Rickard spoke to you about earlier today, that technology is capable of supporting direct-to-consumer, workplace, simple, and comprehensive advisor needs in a single ecosystem. We will be able to leverage that technology investment to improve the product and service offering to MLC and ANZ P&I clients and their advisors and employers. To do that, we will leverage off our existing mature and ongoing product simplification integration capability.
We have a program of work, which Cable talked about earlier, which is planning on consolidating all of IOOF's Heritage products in by the end of 2021. That is a mature capability that we have stood up and is running very effectively. With the additional specialist resources from MLC and ANZ P&I, we're able to augment that and continue that program of work to integrate the products and services quickly and leverage the technology investment we have made with Evolve. Frank Lombardo talked to you about how we've transformed our client service model with ClientFirst. The foundations of this approach can now be extended to improve the service experience for clients across both MLC and ANZ P&I.
Our investment in growing and developing our financial education and wellbeing program can be extended to, again, both MLC and ANZ P&I clients, which as Frank mentioned, will be in excess of 1 million customers following the completion of the MLC acquisition. To achieve all of that, we have scaled up our core integration capability, which we developed for the integration of the ANZ P&I business, which I'll cover now in a little bit more detail. IOOF has had a long and successful history of acquiring businesses and integrating those businesses, and I've certainly been involved in quite a number of those integrations. But as we've grown and changed, we've adapted our approach to be fit for purpose. And with the acquisition of the ANZ P&I business, a transformation and integration management office was established, which had included specialized and experienced resources in large-scale business integrations.
Following the acquisition of MLC, we reviewed the current structure that we had in place, and we further scaled up this capability with the creation of a standalone transformation division being led by myself, reporting directly to the CEO. We have a large program of work with a number of individual work streams underway to ensure that we can complete the MLC acquisition as fast as possible, separate both MLC and the ANZ P&I businesses from their respective bank parents, and integrate the three businesses' operations together to maximize the capabilities and realize the synergy benefits. We've resourced up with an additional 40 new roles being added to our transformation capability since the acquisition of MLC was announced. These people will support our experienced business leads from within the organization.
At IOOF, the way we approach integration is very much supporting our existing underlying business layers that have a lot of experience in integrations, that layer that you see at the bottom of this slide around source knowledge and expertise for individual streams. We're adding experienced resources around them to support them in the leading of the transformation to deliver a successful integration. There is a high-level roadmap that we have developed. This is a very high-level one. I just want to go through some of the key milestones. The important thing is here that our integration activities and transformation activities are remaining on track. We completed the full acquisition of the ANZ P&I business on the 31st of January this year. As you'll see in a moment, we're on track to complete the acquisition of the MLC business before 30 June next year.
In both these acquisitions, the first phase that we enter is one called protect and serve. This means taking a proactive approach to ensure that the client's experience is not affected in any way as a result of the acquisition. Making sure that all people can come in and do their job from day one, that the change experience for our people is minimized as much as possible following the completion of the acquisition. That the client experience is not adjusted or changed. We do that through identifying key talent and knowledge within the business and making sure that frontline teams are fully supported through those initial phases. Secondly, we need to make sure that any remediation activities that are underway are continued and worked through at pace.
We bring our experience to those programs of work to close them out in a timely manner and ensure that processes are simplified to prevent further remediations in future for clients. While doing that, we're working in parallel to plan out our broader integration roadmap through product and technology. You've seen earlier today, it's got to feed down through and into that Evolve program of work. We have a program that's already running. We will pivot that program to include the ANZ P&I product set and also the MLC product set to leverage off the technology investment we have made. We will, as part of that program, also consider where appropriate to insource or outsource, depending on how fast we want to move and where our capabilities lie. It will be a multi-year program of work. As we described, we have a program that's been stood up.
It's progressing well already with the integration of IOOF's products and services. It will bring in experienced people from both ANZ P&I and MLC to assist with that, and we believe we can move at pace with integrating the products and services from our acquired businesses. The next question I think is around, well, how fast are we moving and what sort of progress are we making towards that? Some proof points we can provide today are shown on the slide here. We announced the acquisition of MLC on the 31st of August 2020. Since that point in time, we have successfully lodged our submission with the ACCC, and we expect to receive the response on that on the 4th of February. That date may move out, or it might move in, depending on responses that the ACCC receive from their public review.
We've funded the acquisition through a combination of equity and debt. We successfully were able to do that. We have also agreed on a joint transaction implementation plan with MLC and NAB on the 4th of November. We've moved quickly to mobilize. We submitted our first draft, that Section 29 APRA change of control application, on the 9th of November. We're now working collaboratively with APRA to finalize that application. We'll have a better sense of when APRA approval is likely to be received as we progress through that process. All this means that we are very much on track and preparing for a completion as early as the end of March.
We're expecting that between April and June, we will be prepared for a completion as early as the end of March 2021, because all the wheels are in motion and we are moving with pace. Another area we've been asked, there has been some interest, is how our engagement is going with advisors, with the MLC advisor group. There was a lot of activities from some competitors in the market. We're pleased to say we're on track with our retention efforts with MLC advisors, and we expect to be able to retain the vast majority. I think, Darren, we announced it shortly after the announcement went out that we're not arrogant enough to think we will get every single advisor, but we think we'll get the vast majority.
This chart shows we moved into it and mobilized very quickly into an engagement program to cover the TenFifty advisor practices, ensure that we went out and we listened to what their needs were. We engaged, and we listened with the advisors across TenFifty and also the Godfrey Pembroke and the salaried advice channel through MLC as well. What that enabled us to do was put forward a compelling offer that enabled the ease of transition and removed friction for advisors, provided continuity of things that mattered to them, so key processes, technology, and supported them through the change. Recognized the importance of communities and brands to advisors. We're really pleased with our progress, and we believe we're definitely on track with our retention efforts here.
I think an excellent proof point of that was the recent press release from Godfrey Pembroke, where their practice development group indicated their intention to join IOOF. IOOF has demonstrated a commitment and strong belief to the value of advice. We do believe that advisors, and listening to advisors means that we are at a very strong chance of retaining the vast majority of advisors and remain on track in this space. We completed the full completion of ANZ P&I on the 31st of January this year. Our integration activities for that remain on track. Since February, we've been working with ANZ to separate out the business and progressively transfer people out of transitional services arrangements and across and into IOOF's employment.
By the end of the year, we'll have around 75% of staff under transferred through to IOOF, and we have plans already locked in for the first quarter of next year to transfer further operational staff across and into IOOF. The slide I think that everybody wants to see, which is around how are we tracking on the scoreboard and the numbers. There has been really strong progress in this space. How does it translate? I think we could have turned up today, and there would've been a number of reasons why we could have justified a delay in synergy benefits. We completed the full ANZ P&I transaction on the 31st of January this year. We then got hit with a global pandemic. We made a successful bid for MLC. It would've been easy to turn up and say, "Look, we've been distracted by COVID.
We've been distracted by our bid for MLC. Pleasingly, that has not slowed our progress. We're on track to deliver cumulative annualized synergies of AUD 43 million in FY 2021, with AUD 25 million of new initiatives delivered during this year, this financial year. That means that around 50% of the overall synergy targets would have been realized from the full date of completion, the 31st of January 2020.
At this stage, the total synergy target for MLC of the AUD 150 million, of that target, we're targeting a range of around AUD 65 million-AUD 80 million in the first full year following completion. It depends on when that date ultimately falls. That sort of full 12 months, we're expecting AUD 65 million-AUD 80 million of annualized synergies to be realized in that first full 12 months. Following the completion, we will be wrapping the two integrations together and providing ongoing consolidated reporting.
We do look forward to continuing to provide regular set of updates to our progress here. The key message from this slide is we're remaining on track with our synergy realization. Just to summarize before I hand over to Mel. The acquisition of MLC is highly complementary to IOOF's businesses and can leverage the strategy and investments we've been making in advice, technology, people, and process. We're on track to complete the MLC acquisition before 30 June 2021. We're on track with our advisor engagement program and very confident with the progress. We're also on track with our integration of the ANZ P&I business. We're very confident in our ability to execute on the combined MLC and IOOF and P&I integration, and we look forward to providing regular updates as we progress. With that, I will hand over to Mel.
Great. Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Mel Walls. As Chris said, I'm the Chief People Officer. It's a great opportunity today to have to talk to you about the culture at IOOF and how we're thinking about that through integration. I'm going to cover today a little bit about the IOOF culture, but also how we're seeing that play out, both with the integration that has occurred as well as that that's coming. Before I do that, I'll just give you a little bit of context on myself. I've been at IOOF for 14 months now. I have 20 years experience in HR. Chris mentioned there are some of the executive team who have NAB and MLC experience. I'm one of those people. I had nine years at NAB, predominantly in the business bank in HR and business roles.
I want to start off just giving you a little bit of a sense about our culture at IOOF. If I can just get the next slide. Some of my observations when I first joined the organization. When I came in, I suppose one of the questions on my mind was what shape was the culture in and how fractured had it become in that post-Royal Commission environment? I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to find that the culture was in good shape and what I describe as the core of the culture being really strong. As I spoke to people and observed what was going on, it really came down to a couple of things. One was this real purpose-led, genuinely purpose-led attitude that existed in the business at all levels. The client first culture, which was palpable in the organization.
I know that many organizations and many that I've worked in have client first or customer first or customer centric kind of programs. I haven't seen one like this where ClientFirst is alive every day in the decisions and actions that people are taking from top to bottom that guide the way that work is done in the business. For that reason, we really see culture as a unique differentiator and competitive advantage for the organization. I think as context for this session is the ecosystem in which we're executing everything we've talked about and what gives us the confidence to feel that we can achieve what we're laying out. The other thing I've observed is there's actually really strong cultural alignment across the organization.
That's not just from an observation perspective, but we've done quite a lot of cultural diagnostic work over the last six months that I'll talk through a little bit more in a moment. You might expect from a business that's grown up through acquisitions to have subcultures or different ways of working. In actual fact, the cultural alignment that you observe, the attitudes, the beliefs are observably quite strongly aligned, but also through the diagnostic work we did came out as being also very aligned. Although we recognize we have a strong culture, we also recognize that there was an opportunity to really invest in making that very clear and being very deliberate about the actions we take on culture to make it fit for purpose for the future and the organization will be.
I'll talk a second in some of that diagnostic work and deliberate work that we're doing to help to dial up our culture. At the heart of this ClientFirst culture and what makes it so unique are a few things that I'd like to give you a bit of insight on. The first one is about being people-centered, and I think that plays out in a number of ways. Firstly, we've touched on terms like empowerment and responsibility, but there's a real concept in ClientFirst about putting decision-making authority and the ability to service a customer, a client, in the hands of those closest to them. That sense of empowerment and ability to make something better for somebody else really gives a great sense of purpose and achievement to those delivering the work.
What we've seen is that they're really flourishing in that environment. It also means for our clients that it's not a cookie-cutter approach. People have the ability to be serviced on their needs, and that looks different for every person. As you listen to our client calls, it's really one person having another conversation with another person. It's very real, and it's very human. The other thing is delivering what matters. There's a real focus on cutting out waste, cutting out noise, keeping things simple, and just delivering what it is that's going to make a difference to the customer and ensuring that we deliver to that every time, and again, putting that decision-making authority in the hands of those who can get that done quickest.
One of the things we hear most commonly from new people joining the organization is just reflections on how there's a lack of bureaucracy and how flat the structure is. That's something we do deliberately to ensure that people are able to escalate concerns, questions, decisions get made quickly, and that there's no bureaucracy or hierarchy slowing down the ability for things to get executed quickly. The other hallmark of IOOF that I've noticed is this real agile culture, and having worked in a number of transformation environments, it's something that more traditional organizations are always trying to build in, but culturally, it's really hard to achieve.
IOOF has that through the history of the way that it's grown up, the ability to adapt quickly, to change direction, and to respond really rapidly to changing environments, not just externally, but self-driven determinations of things that need to be done differently. What we're seeing is, as this ClientFirst culture really grows and amplifies, that this is playing out in very positive proof points to our people. From our last engagement survey, which was conducted in May this year, which was post the P&I integration, our engagement scores went up 12 points to 71 points, and other factors also measured in the survey also moved very positively, like long-term direction, senior leadership, performance focus, and alignment. Alignment is about the extent to which people are feeling that we're all on the same page and moving in the right direction.
Diversity and inclusion is also looking very positive through the way that we measure in engagement. I've pulled out the gender differences engagement there, but across a number of different gender diversity segments that we measure, we're seeing that people experiencing the culture positively, despite what kind of backgrounds or groups they may fit into. There, both our males and females scoring 71% on engagement. Just to note on those scores, I appreciate if you're not in these surveys all the time, some of those scores don't mean a lot. Just to highlight, the senior leadership score at 71% places this in the top decile, and most of the other scores are in the top quartile. Engagement sitting just one or two points outside that.
That's a bit of a snapshot of our proof points of culture, but just a few things on what our people are saying on the next slide. There's a real sense of pride and noticeable support for the way the culture is evolving and helping people feel like they're getting the best out of themselves at IOOF. Pride is a word you hear a lot when people talk about IOOF. There's a real commitment and personal connection to the organization. Also they're appreciating, particularly through COVID, but through all the change that we've been through over the last few years, that sense of support and that the employee experience along with ClientFirst culture is really being prioritized and amplified in the way that we're developing.
If we move to the next slide now, I'll just talk a little bit about some of the diagnostic work, which I touched on briefly before. As I mentioned, we feel like there's a really strong core of culture there, but we wanted to do some work to just make sure that we're really clear in the way that we're communicating that to people and really deliberate in the way that we want to continue to evolve our culture to be fit for purpose in the future. We engaged an external partner to help us do some of that diagnostic work, which involved surveys, some focus groups, and interviews with the board executive team, frontline staff, broader employee base, and also our customers.
One of the observations made through that partner who do this work as their core business was just the level of consistency that came through across all the segments of our business, top to bottom, and across different areas of the business about how consistently the organization is perceived. Again, that sense of great alignment about what it means to work at IOOF. What came through in terms of what we call a cultural archetype was that the organizational driver for us was about belonging or being an every person organization. What that means is that for an every person organization, we prioritize work or ways of working that mean customers feel that they're reassured and supported in what they need. Put another way, that we cater to the needs of every person despite the differences that they may present with.
From an organization perspective and our employees, what that means is that you're free to be yourself. You don't have to fit a certain stereotype to belong at IOOF. We welcome and include difference. We want people to fit in for who they are and is in fact part of what makes our organization a rich tapestry that we want everybody to be the best version of themselves, which we believe will be the real version of themselves. We believe through this culture, it's one that is very accepting and inclusive of all types of people, and again, really helps to nurture a culture of diversity and inclusion and welcome people from different types of backgrounds. Again, we're seeing that play out very positively in some of the integration that's occurred to date.
On the right of this slide is just some proof points around culture that sometimes get lost as we talk about synergies and numbers. What's the people experience that's taking place behind some of that synergy realization? I think it's heartening to see what the employee's experience is. Some of our ex-ANZ employees who've been here for the longest period, so through the ANZ advice transfer, we've seen engagement uplift 22% through that period to 76%, which places that score in the top quartile. When rating the change processes post their transition, our ex-ANZ employees rated an 80% agree on IOOF have a positive and welcoming culture and overall assess the change experience to be a good one.
Through the pulse surveys that we've done regularly with our entire workforce, the P&I employees, just as a touch point, rated 88% on average across our wellbeing and support measures, again, reinforcing that they're feeling well supported in our environment. I think talent is also an important part of the way that cultural integration occurs. I think these two stats below really show how well that is occurring. Ex-ANZ employees make up 30% of our senior management roles in IOOF. The turnover rate we've seen of transferring ANZ employees is below industry comparatives at just over 8%. We know that we're seeing some positive proof points on integration, and that gives us real confidence for the future.
If we jump to the next slide, I can just talk you through a little bit more about the way that we're thinking about doing this at a bigger scale. The work that we've done to date on really defining and communicating our culture has been really helpful in preparing us to transition a whole lot of people across to IOOF. There's three areas we're focusing on particular to help people make that transition successfully. The first one is clarity. Being really clear about our culture, our expectations, and the principles that guide how we all work every day. Again, that's not to say everybody has to fit a cookie cutter, but we need to make sure that people understand what it means to work in a ClientFirst culture.
There's context, which is about making sure that people understand and can individualize what our culture means for their work and their role. That's really about making it real for them and ensuring they understand what a ClientFirst culture means, even if they're in a role that is not touching our customers on a regular basis. Finally, convergence, which is about seeing culture play out in all their ways of working. The underlying ways of working and systems and processes, so that this isn't just lip service. It's not just something that's talked about and put on posters, but it's something they feel playing out in a one way, same way consistently across the whole organization to really bring it to life.
What we've been doing over the last few months, if we jump to the last slide, is starting to do work with MLC to ensure that they're understanding what the culture at IOOF looks like. Part of that is really focused around communication. From the first day following announcement of the deal, on the first of September, we had a whole of company webinar with the workforce at MLC, and that's continued each month. There's getting about 2,500 people attending those sessions. We have lots of just open questions, which is something that's very emblematic of the way that we interact with our own IOOF existing workforce, where Renato has a weekly webinar with our people, just very open and conversational, where everyone has the ability to ask questions and have their things answered real-time.
That's something we're starting to do with MLC. We're also introducing less formal engagement channels, where we're having lunch and learn sessions or leader-led engagement, just in a more intimate session setting to allow people to start to understand what will the future look like and how do I fit into that picture. So far, this has resulted in very positive feedback on communications. MLC employees are typically saying through the surveys run by MLC that they're feeling optimistic and really curious to find out more about what the future holds. Part of the feedback we've received from both MLC, but also through the ANZ work and reflections that we've done, is about the importance of feeling that they belong to a dedicated wealth management organization.
That goes again to that part of a belonging organization, that rather than being part of a bank that's much more diverse, that to feel they're part of an organization that's dedicated and the whole purpose is around wealth management and financial wellbeing is something that gives a great sense of comfort in being part of that. Our focus as we support people through change, and obviously that's one of the biggest priorities for all of us, is again, continuing to make sure that we've got regular communication and giving people as much clarity about what the future holds as possible. That's not always possible, but just continuing to make sure that we're open and sharing as much as we can as soon as we can. The other key to change is making sure that we can move with pace. Through change, people don't sit well with uncertainty.
The longer you keep people in an uncertain space, the worse that plays out from a morale perspective. Trying to give certainty and continue to move the change with pace is a priority for us. I think finally, just that at IOOF, because of the history of the business, change management is very much part of the DNA of all leaders, of all people. It's not something that gets outsourced or is put outside for somebody else to do, whether that's fronting up to talk to teams or understanding the importance of being able to give clarity or move with pace. These are the decisions that everybody in management roles understands from their history and is very much part of the way that they do work.
I think while there's a long way to go, there's some strong plans in place to make sure that we're really supporting people as we move through the change that lays ahead in the coming months. I'm going to leave it there, but I'm happy to take questions as we move into the final Q&A. For now, I'll hand back to Renato for some closing remarks.
Thanks, Mel. Thank you, everyone. We are reaching the end of the session. It's been a lengthy session. I think we've covered a lot of ground over the last three or so hours. What we've in fact covered are really some deep dives across the three pillars of our continued strategic transformation as a business. I think it creates a very unique opportunity in the Australian context, increased relevance in the community, and I think increased growth prospects for the business, both for the business itself and obviously translating to earnings growth over the medium term. Just to close out and really wrap up some of the key messages out of today before opening up to questions.
From Advice 2.0, we heard Darren talk about the importance of the three pillars in the model, the owned and operated model, the self-employed licensee model and then the self-license model. We heard that MLC actually brings us to around 300 employed advisors in the owned and operated model, the commitment to 30% EBIT margins. Obviously a healthy and large continued self-employed model. In the Evolve session, we heard about the importance of one single operating platform across all clients and really serving the clients through their life journey. Really the importance of service and service excellence as a key differentiator and really that target of being top three, both in terms of NPS, but importantly the Wealth Insights key metrics.
Finally, we heard from Chris and Mel talking about the transformation through integration, reiterating that we remain on track on all the key metrics despite some of the challenges of this year. As I started with, in fact, I think this year's presented some real opportunities for us as a group, and I think it's been really pleasing for us to sow the seeds and really capitalize on those opportunities over the past 12 months. We're really confident that with these priorities and this strategic focus, we're actually placing ourselves really well to deliver on the promises, not only short term, but importantly, medium and longer term as well. With that, I do sincerely want to thank you for your time. It's been a big investment of your time, and we'll open up to questions, Rachel.
Thank you, Renato. Welcome back to all of the presenters. Operator, if you could just ensure that all presenters from today are allowed into this meeting room, that would be great. To kick off while we have Mel and Chris, a couple of questions on transformation. Chris, synergy realization is fundamental to the success of the MLC transaction from a shareholder perspective. Are you really that confident in the synergy targets in the current volatile COVID-19 environment?
I think the best evidence proof point on that is our current experience with ANZ P&I, which we showed today. We're on track in respect of the synergy realization with that acquisition, which has been achieved in a COVID environment. We are confident.
Great. Thank you, Chris. Mel, COVID has had a massive impact on all staff. Have you seen a lot of turnover during the COVID period? How do you go about making people redundant in such challenging times for them, both emotionally and financially?
Sure. Acknowledging it has been a really difficult period, but sometimes challenge brings opportunity. I think in some ways it's allowed us to really dial up our visible support for people and ensuring we're taking them through this journey safely. We've been running webinars and wellbeing sessions to help them feel that support and deal with the circumstances they might be facing. We've actually seen turnover drop, so it's below 8% now for the broader IOOF organization. Dealing with redundancy in these situations, as it is always, is tough. What we do is make sure that we do it with as much respect and care as we can possibly deliver to support people through these tough decisions.
Great. Thank you, guys. Some questions on advice. We'll probably jump around as the questions come through, guys. Apologies in advance. Renato, one for you. Renato talked about his ambition to have lowest cost to serve. Will those benefits be passed on to clients through lower pricing to grow market share and continue to stabilize the business? Is that about expanding profitability?
Rachel, that question really goes to the heart of our platform strategy and platform business. I'll maybe touch on advice separately, but it's really important we differentiate the different strategies for different parts of our business. Absolutely, we are committed to ensuring we have lowest cost to serve in our platform administration business. I think much of what you heard through today, whether it was from Cable or Frank or Shahram or Mark, is about sitting in the infrastructure, the mindset, and the capabilities to be able to deliver that. I think historically, it's something we've done very well. We've done that through simplifying businesses. We've done that through increasing our scale for acquisition. In fact, we're very confident we can replicate that going forward. On the advice side of the business, the dynamics and the strategy are a little different.
I say that because we're not seeing top-line pressure downwards on the cost of advice to clients. If anything, there is a real risk that the cost of advice to clients goes up the other way. Why is that? Fundamentally, we believe that the advice interaction is the most valuable part of the interaction for the end client. As we saw in the survey results, they value advice. There is no downwards pressure. The advice is actually about reducing the cost of delivery to allow, A, for reinvestment, but B, for realization of an economically viable business model. The advice industry of the past was not an economically viable business model as a standalone. We do think that there are economics there. We do think we can extract those through the owned and operated model. That's the primary purpose.
The primary purpose is absolutely to make sure we can generate a return for our shareholders. Likewise, though, by reducing the cost of delivering cost to serve, we open ourselves up to serve a different cohort that may in fact not currently be able to afford it. We actually build an opportunity for ourselves to expand the target market or the addressable market through advice.
Great. Thanks, Renato. A similar question in a slightly different way. If the goal is to remove the cross-subsidization across the model, why is break even an acceptable outcome for the self-employed model? What benefit do investors get from running a model that only targets break even?
The break even in the self-employed model is the current target simply because it reduces our marginal cost to serve. I think to the earlier question, which Darren answered, if you're serving more advisors, if you're serving 1,500 advisors, for argument's sake, the marginal cost per advisor is lower than if you're serving 400 or 500 advisors. By reducing the marginal cost to serve, it does in fact have a positive effect and positive outcome on our owned and operated model. It also creates a really healthy, what I call platform effect or network effect in your advice community. Having different ideas, different visions, working with different advisors actually makes our business a more vibrant business. I think to simply back one part of the model, I think is somewhat myopic to the richness of advice.
In fact, some of the best ideas we have, and as Darren suggested, some of the Wealth Central developments have come from the advisors themselves. Putting [inaudible] at the center of that advice community, I think makes us a better business.
Great. Thanks, Renato. Following on from that, a question from James Cordukes, of Credit Suisse. Darren, Wealth Central seems to deliver a lot of efficiency benefits. If those are flowing through to the self-employed advisors, can't you monetize that rather than just targeting the break even?
Thank you for the question. Look, I think the break even is our first target, as I was talking about earlier. We want to prove our technology, show the advisors in that self-employed space the benefits of partnering with us through greater efficiencies. From that, the next conversation post-breaking even is about a fair exchange for monetization in respect to the technology. We're not going to put the cart before the horse, going to ask for more. We're going to prove it out, break even, because that was our stated goal. Then I think we start up with a very different conversation, one about genuine partnership and a genuine exchange of fair value in respect to what we're saving in their business.
Great. Another couple of questions for you, Darren, from James. Becoming more efficient and pulling costs out is needed to deliver an improved EBITDA margin. How do you weigh that up against offering cheaper advice and hence opening up the growth opportunity to the four out of five that don't have advice? Seems like conflicting goals. How should we think about them together?
Yep. Well, the way I'm thinking about it is twofold. First of all, we've got one in five people that currently engage with advice, and the research shows us that they get a huge benefit, both emotionally and financially. That, for me, is what we would call the traditional advice. We're about reducing the cost of preparing that advice, and we've spoken to that today in respect to how we're going to do that through the technology. I think the competing priorities would be if you were to cannibalize that market and say, "Right, well, we're going to make it at a lower price point." What we're actually saying is, we feel we can offer a different experience. You can't have the same experience for a high-net-worth investor as you would do for somebody with more modest means.
What we're attempting to do through our technology is to come up with a new model that will engage with another segment of the population that currently doesn't do it. It won't be the same offer. It won't be apples and apples. It will be a different solution. Still advice in the best interest, but we'll be preparing it in a different way and delivering it in a different way. What it's actually about, it's complementary because we're looking to grow the demand for advice. If you contrast that with the reducing number of authorized representatives throughout the industry that are able to provide advice, that's where we really think this opportunity to use technology to open up a market that currently isn't being serviced is afforded to those brave enough to go down that path.
Rachel, just to follow up on that. I think it's a really important point that Darren makes, which is this isn't just about making it cheaper to deliver, which is a priority. I think to really succeed, we've seen this in other industries, we need to transform how it's delivered. We need to do it differently. I think there's plenty of lessons, whether it's in the entertainment and media industry, whether it's retail. It's not just using technology to do it cheaper. You need to do it differently, and you need to do it in a more meaningful way to your consumers.
Sure. Actually, the next question, Renato, from James, was any more color on the current cost of advice and how low you think you can get it. I think that alludes back to your similar comment.
Yeah. Look, absolutely. It's making sure that, A, you are making the delivery process as efficient as possible is sort of the first objective. The second objective is making sure that each advice interaction is fit for purpose. For example, if you are serving a 30-year-old with two young kids and a mortgage who wants a subscription model, that it has to be a different delivery model and different delivery process than someone who is going to retirement who is a high-net-worth. What I would say, though, it will all leverage off the same infrastructure. Making sure that infrastructure is modular is really important. As we said, so the marginal cost to serve continues to drop.
Great. Thanks, Renato. Shahram, a question for you has come through on the platform. You are not a technology company. How will you keep up with the latest technology trends and the spend required to keep your technology at market best?
You don't need to be a technology company to do those things. The fact of the matter is that we do invest quite heavily in technology as a company in order to serve our business. Because we don't outsource our core platforms, we have to make that investment. As a result, we have quite a strong capability on par with some of the best startups in the market in terms of keeping up with the latest and greatest tools and technologies to build our systems. I think given the size of our investment, given the size of our team relative to the overall size of the company, we are well-placed to ensure that we have access to the best technology going forward.
Rachel, just to add to that one as well. Sorry. I think the complexities in wealth management, and financial services more broadly, should not be underestimated. Having that domain expertise embedded in technology is of critical importance. Whilst, whether we are or are not a technology company, technology is a core enabler for our business. It's not simply something you can outsource. I think there's plenty to point to in recent history that those that have proprietary technology have been at the forefront of the evolution of the industry.
Renato, just to add to that from my perspective, the spend is still quite significant. We spend over AUD 40 million a year, and that's in terms of genuine technology development. That's not including about another AUD 40 million we spend externally on servers and third parties. It's still quite a sizable spend. I guess the difference is, unlike a lot of companies, you don't see it going through CapEx because we put that through OpEx. Certainly we feel that there's been a strong investment there.
A great point from Dave. Mark, what do you consider to be the key strengths and weaknesses of Evolve versus its principal competitors? Can it compete in all market segments?
I think the key strengths, as we've outlined, is really that it's designed with the customer back and the adviser back. It's reflecting what the modern-day consumer need is and what the modern adviser needs. I think that's unique in the marketplace. Also acknowledges that clients' needs will change through time, and the corrosive effects of moving your wealth around the system is actually one which is still to be brought to life with clients. I think there's tremendous value in that. In terms of weaknesses, we would rather be further along than we are today, but we're going at a good pace and we've got some ambitious goals ahead. Otherwise, I genuinely think we've got something which is really compelling and differentiated and is built fit for the future.
As Shahram ably talked through, the modern technology stack that underpins all our systems and processes and functionality is future fit. We haven't just put a shiny front end on old technology. I think there's some substantial differentiation there. I'm sorry, I forgot the last part of your question, Rachel.
Can it compete in all market segments?
We genuinely believe it can. We intend to do so, and we are doing so today. I think we've got a unique opportunity there to continue on that track.
Great. Thank you, Mark. Renato, a question for you regarding financial wellness. Renato talked about wanting to do more for those entering the workforce. Can you monetize that in the near term, or is this about lengthening the customer relationship, with the dividends of those long relationships more likely coming over the longer term when they can pay for it?
It's a combination. In its simplest form, we already have relationships with those people entering the workforce, and we do that through our employer super footprint. Admittedly, that's through a product relationship. That said, there is an opportunity that through those relationships to contribute more insights, more customization, and more personalization to those members via the product. I think to the hypothesis that I think was being set, what we expect is that we expect to build, engender more equity, more goodwill in that relationship, which does mean that you extend the relationship. At those critical points in time, they are more likely to opt into advice, we'd like to think because they have a better understanding of what advice actually means. We see the current challenge in the advice relationship is that it's got a very high barrier to entry.
I've described it as a binary industry, the advice industry, where you pay a lot and get everything, or you pay nothing and get nothing. We need to break that down and to allow people to consume it on a fit for purpose basis. Which so not only does it extend the product relationship, we think it actually opens up that target market, if you like, or the addressable market for advice.
Great. Thanks, Renato. Mel, a question for you. When you were talking about giving people clarity, are you able to let MLC or IOOF staff know now if they will have a role at IOOF under the merged group, or do you have to wait until the transaction is completed?
We're working through that now. Certainly it's not something we want to do or be in a position to do until we have the appropriate approvals in place.
Around the time of completion, we will be in a position to share more about what that integrated org design would look like.
Great. Thanks, Mel. Chris, one for you on transformation. Actually it might be for David Chalmers as well. To what extent is P&I integration impacting revenue margins, and when will you be able to quantify margin expectations?
I'm happy to pick that one up. In terms of what we've seen the integration work so far, we're not seeing that impact margins. A lot of that is coming through those efficiencies of putting the two teams together. I think it's a separate issue around, and we've talked around what we see around the flows of P&I and what we're looking to do there. That, I think, is a separate decision or discussion to what we're seeing in the synergies. Specifically on the synergies, though, I wouldn't see that as being a trade-off between we're getting cost out at the cost of margin.
Great. Thank you, David. One, Renato, on overall strategy. MLC adds substantial investment management capabilities. Will you retain these businesses? Can you unlock value by potentially selling these assets?
The asset management business, and if you follow the history of IOOF, we've had a variety of different exposures to that space. From Perennial, which we founded Perennial, we grew Perennial as, at the time, a leading boutique, and then divested it. We've clearly got our exposure in more recent times. We've limited our exposure to the multi-manager in what I call investment and solution packaging arena. We continue to learn more around that business, so we're continuing to deepen our knowledge of the boutiques, of JANA, of the broader footprint. We're not ruling anything in or out at the moment, other than to say that having proprietary investment capability has always been core to IOOF. The nature and the footprint of that has changed over time, and we'll make an appropriate assessment over the coming months between now and completion.
Great. Thanks, Renato. A further question received via the platform. I note that neither MLC or IOOF are getting substantial net flows. How do you stop the targeted scale disappearing over time? I think that the flows point would relate to MLC and P&I. Mark, I might pass to you to start on that one, and then maybe Renato to give some overarching views.
I think, in plain English, we were mindful to the flow trajectory of both businesses when we acquired them. While we continue to bring everything together in a single platform, we are mindful of addressing some of the drivers of those flows. We don't need to wait for the product rationalization or system rationalization necessarily to do that. We'll continue to address them appropriately, in the products that they have. I think the main point is we observed that trend when we acquired these businesses and have factored that in accordingly.
Right. Yeah. Look, I clearly agree with Mark. The other piece I would add is that, we should not lose sight of the fact that the four major banks were large participants in this marketplace up until probably a couple of years ago. That they had been in that marketplace for between the decade or two, let's call it 20 years. One of the reasons they've divested it, they've come to the realization that it's very difficult to run a wealth business when your core business is banking. There had been underinvestment, and I think that underinvestment has manifested itself in, yes, their clients leaving the incumbents and to other players and particularly a couple new entrants. This is as much around the incumbents being able to deliver what matters to the advisors.
I'd like to think that from what we've spoken through today, we have a core capability which we've invested in heavily over the past five years. It's scalable and is actually positioning to be that incumbent that can deliver to those requirements. Not only is it retaining what it has, it is in fact growing new client relationships. I think it's somewhat misleading and potentially dangerous to draw a parallel of what the banks did and just equate that to our future direction.
Oh, great. Thank you, Renato. With one minute to go, a final question, and it again is to you, Renato. You have had a number of exec changes this year, some of whom we've seen on today's webinar. How is this new team positioned to deliver synergies? IOOF as a business has a strong track record, but what are your thoughts about this newly appointed team?
Thanks for the question, Rachel. I'm the first to acknowledge that as executives, we have the privilege of taking credit for a lot of work from a lot of people throughout the organization and the depth of knowledge where, frankly, the real domain expertise exists around dealing with really complex issues. I've been really pleased with the addition of the new executives. I think they bring a fresh look on our culture, a fresh look on our capabilities, and a challenge of an organization as a whole in a way that's consistent with our cultural settings, but really challenging ourselves to set ourselves and set our capabilities for a much larger business and one that can continue to excel. The knowledge exists in the business. Yes, there's been changes in executives, but I think that's generally been additive.
Great. Well, thank you all for your time today. With that, it's 1:00 P.M., so the briefing has ended. Please do feel free to shoot through any questions via email. Happy to engage later on this afternoon. Thank you all for your time. Thank you for dialing in, and look forward to speaking soon. Thank you all.