Well, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. On behalf of the company, welcome to the Magellan Financial Group results presentation for the year ended 30 June 2021. I'm Sarah Thorne, and I manage the investor relations function at Magellan. Today, the company's results will be presented by Brett Cairns, Magellan's CEO, and Kirsten Morton, Magellan's CFO, and Hamish Douglass, Magellan's Chairman and Chief Investment Officer. Please note that there will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. If you have joined the presentation via the webinar, you may ask a question by typing it into the Q&A icon. If you have dialed in by phone, you can ask a question by pressing star nine on your keypad. Once Paul calls upon you will need to unmute yourself by pressing star six before you can ask your question.
Please note that today's presentation is being recorded, and a replay will be available on Magellan's website. We may also have media in attendance today. With that, I would like to now welcome Brett to take you through the presentation. Thanks, Brett.
Well, thanks, Sarah, and thank you everyone for joining us wherever you are. Firstly, I'd like to say I hope that everyone is dealing with either stay-at-home, lockdown, curfew, or the many other variations that are around now appearing. Well, obviously, we hope that this will pass soon, and we get back to some part of normal life as soon as we can. Best wishes to everyone who are listening on the call. What I'd like to do is just start with a highlight that's actually not on a bullet point here, is notwithstanding the vagaries of the virus, we do believe we achieved a great deal last year. If you read the annual report, there's a very busy amount that I was commenting on in the chairman's letter that was achieved.
We do feel very good about a lot of these initiatives that have been undertaken, which are clearly going to take some time to flourish. We do think we've achieved a great deal over the year. In terms of the numbers, the key metric, of course, is our funds under management. As you can see on the slide, it grew by 9% to just under AUD 104 billion averaged across the full financial year. That led to a 7% increase in management and service fees, also a profit before tax and performance fees of our funds management business, which grew 10% to AUD 526.6 million. Of course, performance fees do move around, as we've seen from period to period this year, as we've been saying for some time.
Many of those initiatives I spoke about that we did, particularly the Global Fund Restructure, resulted in some strategic one-off costs. When they're taken into account, our statutory net profit was down 33% to AUD 265.2 million. When you adjust out those strategic initiatives, as they're outlined in the annual report, the adjusted net profit before associates was up 4% to AUD 454.5 million, reflecting the increase in fund, but also the decrease in the performance fees. If you include the associates, so our share of the associates' profit and loss, the adjusted profit decreased by 6% to just under AUD 413 million. Our total dividend for the year was down 2%, remembering we pay both ongoing and performance fees dividend. The ongoing dividend has increased, but performance fee, as I said, has moved around and is down on the year, resulting in an overall down 2% of the overall dividend.
AUD 1.141 is paid as the final dividend, in total, 75% franked. With that, what I thought we would do is similar to what we did in February. Kirsten will run through some of the numbers. She'll hand back to me, I'll talk about the business and business overview, and then Hamish will join us and talk about particularly the global equity strategy and performance and how he's seeing those characteristics. With that, Kirsten, I'll hand over to you.
Thank you very much, Brett. Welcome everybody. The group's adjusted revenue for the year ended 30 June 2021 was AUD 699.1 million. Whilst total adjusted revenue is largely steady compared with the prior year, our funds management business continues to perform strongly, and our core revenue, being management and service fees, increased 7% to AUD 635.4 million. That was driven by a 9% uplift in average funds under management during the year to AUD 103.7 billion. The other two items in revenue on page four are other revenue and performance fees. These quite often vary. Other revenue typically comprises distributions we earn on investments in our funds, realized and unrealized gains and losses on those investments, foreign exchange movements, and also advisory income on our U.S. business Frontier Group.
Given the stronger equity markets in 2021 compared to 2020, other revenue has increased 65% or AUD 13.3 million. That's mainly due to unrealized gains on investments held in our fund investments portfolio. As Brett mentioned, crystallized performance fees in the current year were AUD 30.1 million, with AUD 12.4 million earned in the first half of the year and AUD 17.7 million earned in the second half. Performance fees are down this year. As we always mention, these fees are lumpy, and they do have the potential to fluctuate significantly period to period. During the 2021 year, we made investments in the external businesses of Barrenjoey, FinClear, and Guzman y Gomez. Brett will talk to those later. We refer to those investments as associates. The accounting rules require us to recognize our share of their net profit and loss in our group's net profit.
For comparability year-on-year, we are now reporting the group's net profit, both inclusive and exclusive of the results from those business investments. For the year ended 30 June 2021, as shown on page four, the group's adjusted net profit after tax and before the results of associates was AUD 454.4 million, up 4% compared to last year. Our share of the net profit and losses after tax from those businesses in the year was AUD 41.8 million loss. After deducting that result, the group's adjusted net profit after tax was AUD 412.7 million for the year ended 30 June 2021. By way of a reminder, adjusted net profit is the group's statutory net profit, excluding certain items. These items are shown as individual line items on page four of the slide, and they comprise three adjustments in the current year.
The first, an AUD 154.1 million cost relating to one-off strategic transaction costs. By far, the largest cost here related to the global equities restructure undertaken in December. Really that was mainly due to an accounting treatment requiring us to recognize upfront the full cost of the bonus options. That's regardless of whether they were exercised. Brett's going to talk more on that later. Other strategic costs included here include the six monthly funding costs for the DRP discount into closed-ended Magellan funds, and a small cost relating to the commitment provided by MFG to Magellan FuturePay. A further breakdown of those costs are in the table on page 54 of the financial statements. The second adjustment is a non-cash item of AUD 4.5 million, which relates to the amortization costs on intangibles for the Airlie and the Frontier businesses that we acquired in prior years.
Finally, the AUD 11.2 million relates to an unrealized gain, net of tax, in the shares and units held by the funds investment portfolio. As we record market movements for those equities directly in the P&L, we consider it meaningful to remove that unrealized market volatility from our revenue, whether or not that's a gain or a loss. Please just note that those adjustments I just mentioned are all after-tax amounts. If those adjustments were not made, our statutory net profit after tax for the year would be AUD 265.2 million, down 33%. As outlined above, items like the large one-off options expense, which in effect is a paper transaction, underpins why we continue to feel that adjusted net profit provides meaningful performance information of our business, as well as comparability year-on-year.
Finally, diluted earnings per share was AUD 1.446 per share, and adjusted diluted earnings per share was AUD 2.25 per share. Both are lower compared to 2020 due to the lower statutory and adjusted net profit this year. Turning to tax and dividends on page five. Our effective tax rate, and I should just highlight, sorry, that that's the group's effective tax rate for the year to 30 June 2021 was 21.4%. This is lower than the group tax rate of 30%, or sorry, the corporate tax rate, I should say, of 30%, as it reflects the benefits of our offshore banking unit license. In simple terms, the group's effective tax rate ultimately depends on the mix of overseas and domestic income, and expenses, which do fluctuate year to year. A point to note on the OBU. As you may be aware, the OBU regime is expected to be abolished.
For Magellan, this will remove the concessional 10% tax rate that we apply to some revenues and expenses. Instead, all revenues and expenses will be taxed at 30%. This change will not impact the group in FY 2022 or FY 2023. It will take effect in FY 2024 from 1 July 2023. That means that higher income tax is expected to be paid. Consequently, it will reduce the group's after-tax earnings. On the flip side, it will increase franking credits available to shareholders. The level of franking attached to dividends is likely to increase. The directors have declared a dividend for the six months to 30 June 2021 of AUD 1.141 per share, comprising a final dividend of AUD 1.026 and a performance fee dividend for the year of AUD 0.115 per share, bringing total dividends for the year ended 30 June 2021 to AUD 2.112 per share.
Just confirming that the dividend announced today continues to reflect Magellan's dividend policy, which is to pay out 90%-95% of net profit after tax of the funds management business, excluding amortization expense, costs related to strategic transaction initiatives, and crystallized performance fees. With respect to the performance fee dividend, 90%-95% of net crystallized performance fees after tax. As Brett mentioned, the dividend will be franked at 75%. Today, we've also announced a dividend reinvestment plan to allow shareholders to reinvest their dividends at a 1.5% discount to the market price. The DRP will apply to the dividends announced today, and if shareholders wish to elect the DRP, elections are required by 7 September.
The introduction of the DRP provides the group with an efficient way to retain a modest amount of capital and to ensure we have a strong balance sheet and provide us with ample liquidity while maintaining our dividend policy of paying out 90%-95% of our funds management business. We are targeting to retain 20%-30% of dividends on an annual basis for the next few years. If participation by shareholders results in a take-up level below that, the directors will consider having a DRP partially underwritten. Expenses. Moving to page six on the slides. There are just a couple of comments I'd like to make about expenses. As we've previously discussed, we view the costs associated with strategic initiatives, including the options which, if exercised, generate FUM, as investments and not day-to-day operating expenses.
We therefore exclude expenses relating to our strategic initiatives from the funds management results when calculating dividends to shareholders. Consistent with prior years, our main operating expense, aside from tax, of course, is employee expenses. They continue to account for about 60% of our total expenses. I think it's worthwhile to just draw to your attention the fact that employee expenses were actually AUD 3.4 million lower in FY 2021 compared to FY 2020, and that's due mainly to the remuneration decisions the group took in FY 2020 in response to COVID, and then included no deferral of bonuses, which typically would've been paid and expensed in FY 2021. Our funds management expenses for the year ended 3rd of June 2021 was AUD 106.9 million.
That was below our guidance of AUD 110 million-AUD 115 million, and that was mainly due to lower travel costs and in-person marketing events, obviously due to COVID-related restrictions, along with some lower fund administration costs due to some cost saving initiatives we undertook. Our cost to income ratio remains very attractive at 16.9%. In fact, this is actually the best result in the past five years, coming steadily down from 26.3% in 2017. The only reason I highlight that is it just really shows that the key driver of profitability of the business is the movement of funds under management, not expense movements. Finally, for the coming 2022 financial year, we expect our funds management expenses to be in the range of AUD 125 million-AUD 130 million.
The increase in expenses is largely driven by bringing into account deferred bonuses as our deferred remuneration arrangements are reset following the COVID change, along with some salary increases driven by modest hiring and salary reviews, and also higher fund administration costs, which is a function of higher FUM. As I mentioned before, the FY 2021 funds management expenses are actually lower than expected, and that magnifies that increase. With that, I will now hand back to Brett.
Thanks, Kirsten. What I'd like to do now is just quickly run through the business, and I'd like to start in the funds management segment, please. As you can see on this chart, and Kirsten's talked to a few of these numbers, the key driver of our funds management revenues and therefore profitability is obviously funds under management. The average funds under management grew 9%, as it says towards the bottom of that slide. I'd also like to highlight, and we do talk about this in the annual report, that was in the face of some headwinds from the Australian dollar. Most of our FUM is unhedged to the various currencies, the US dollar being the main currency. Consequently, an appreciating Australian dollar is a headwind to revenue and obviously our funds under management measured in Australian dollars. Now, that cuts both ways, of course.
As the Australian dollar decreases, it's obviously a tailwind. For this particular year, we saw a 9% increase in our average FUM, despite an 11% increase of the average U.S./Australian FX rate across that period. That drove the increase in management fees, as Kirsten has spoken about. That has been somewhat offset by the movement across periods of performance fees. We've been at pains to say over the years, performance fees are very lumpy and can move around quite a lot from period to period. As we've experienced this year, there's AUD 50 million difference clearly there in performance fees from last year to this year. Kirsten's also mentioned the employee expenses, which I won't dwell on.
However, I would note that the current expenses that we're expecting this year really do reflect a couple of things that Kirsten mentioned about, which is really normalizing back from our deferred arrangements that were paid out in 2020 due to our response to the virus. Also the fact that our FUM is somewhat larger, which Kirsten touched on. Some of our expenses, a bit like how we charge, are charged in basis points for FUM. That's a projection of where we think that those expenses will be given the level of FUM that we're seeing. The employee expenses as a percentage of total expenses, Kirsten mentioned 60, around 60%. It tends to travel around 60%, although this year, it's a little wider, around 65%. It's partially because the other expenses have come down.
Kirsten mentioned, of course, lack of travel, marketing, and these sorts of things, which have clearly been COVID-affected. We don't see much change in the structure of that expense base. Indeed, the cost-to-income ratio is obviously very low at this point. We would see that drifting up a little bit, but not too much around what has previously been over the last few years as things normalize through that expense line and the deferrals. Overall, from a profitability point of view and a revenue point of view, we're very happy with the way the funds management business performed. We think it's performing efficiently, and as I said at the beginning, and which I'll talk about in a moment, we're happy with the new initiatives that we've undertaken in that business. If I could have the next slide, please.
Of course, our funds management business in terms of the funds under management are influenced by two key things. One is the performance of those funds, and also inflows and outflows, which I'll come to. If we look at the investment performance, this is a snapshot of a point in time, obviously, across the various strategies. I'll start at the bottom, and in this case, with Airlie. Airlie's had a spectacular year outperforming, and we're seeing that starting to translate into flows into the Airlie Australian Share Fund. You can see High Conviction and Infrastructure, which I won't dwell on. They've had obviously good returns. Infrastructure's obviously had a difficult period with various infrastructure assets being affected by COVID, but generally has been performing extremely well.
Then the Global Fund, which Hamish will speak to, when viewed against obviously broad market indices, does look like that it's lagged somewhat, and been a bit more difficult across the year, which Hamish has spoken about in his letter. I would also say, Hamish will pick this up, the Global Fund strategy and its objectives have always been around producing that 9% across the cycle, and also having a very strong commitment to downside protection, which has been achieved as well. I'll let Hamish pick that up when he speaks. For the first part, then moving on to flows, I won't dwell on this. These have been well telegraphed over the period.
We had institutional flows of about AUD 2.6 billion this financial year, and a bit under AUD 2 billion of net retail flows, which included those monies raised through the partnership offer, in conjunction with the restructured global equities. Ange, if I could have the next slide. When you pull all that together, here you can see across the three main strategies, the impact of both flows and investment performance. We've been saying for some time that it's likely, given the size of our FUM, investment performance will be the dominant factor in the movement of our FUM, and that's occurred this year. It's three to one in terms of the net flows, taking our total FUM at the end of June to just under AUD 114 billion, which I would note as of the end of July was around AUD 117 billion.
If I go next slide, Angela, we will go to the next slide, please. I would like to just spend, very quickly, just discussing the restructure of the global equities retail funds. That was a major effort to simplify the number of funds that we had. It is a hallmark, unfortunately, of trying to simplify things, that it becomes quite labor intensive and sometimes quite complicated to simplify things. Having got through that, we do believe now we have one trust which has two classes of units. That trust is roughly about AUD 18 billion in total of funds under management, split between a closed class unit, which is quoted on the ASX under listing rules, and it has got the code MGF.
There's an open class unit, which is effectively the active ETF quoted under the AQUA Rules, and can also be accessed off market, a lot of people call this the one unit structure, which allows people to both enter that unit class off market and on market, and move seamlessly between those two access points. We believe, whilst it did take some effort to get there, this has simplified our investment proposition, and does, as I said, allow investors some greater flexibility in accessing our flagship strategy. In terms of the closed class units, we do think over time, and it will take a bit of time because also there are options involved here, which I'll discuss in a moment, that will lead to, we think, improved trading on the closed class units.
It's not a panacea, but it does, we think, help provide an extra layer of demand as that basis risk, as I've spoken about before, is removed, and now there's a clear choice between the open and closed class style of units for the underlying global equity strategy. Really, this was a culmination, as it says at the bottom there, is a progression of the number of things that we're doing over the years, which started with that active ETF, single unit fund, et cetera. If I could move the next slide. In conjunction with that, we undertook a partnership offer, which pleasingly raised AUD 780 million. From that, investors, as part of that partnership, were offered 7.5% benefit of extra units, which Magellan paid for, which was in those strategic initiatives.
Also a 1 MGF option, which was a three-year option when it was issued, to be able to exercise a closed class unit at a 7.5% discount to the net asset value. Separately, we also issued bonus options, same terms of those to all closed class unit holders of MGF options. The discount on those options will be funded by MGF, not the unit holders or the fund, and hence Kirsten mentioned this, the accounting treatment of that effectively assumes the entire amount of those options are exercised up front, if you like, and the 7.5% is paid. We expensed all that up front. As it says there, AUD 148 million of that. If that proves not to be the case, if those options aren't exercised, of course, that will be written back over time.
At the current unit prices, as it says here, if all those options were exercised, that would represent another AUD 2.1 billion of fund in our closed class units. Just lastly, Andrew, before we move on, to fund those partnership benefits, we do have a corporate debt facility, and we also believe we've got sufficient cash resources within the business. Just turning to the recent fund initiatives, I won't spend too long on some of these. We've spoken about them before. We're very pleased, obviously, to launch the Core Series, which is the Core International, the Core ESG, and the Core Infrastructure Fund. The Infrastructure Fund being around for some time as an institutional fund, wholesale fund. We're very pleased to be able to launch those. They each have, obviously, an AUD 0.50, 0.5% management fee, which we believe will be attractive to some people.
We are seeing quite a lot of work done on these funds from a research point of view, from an approved product list, an APL point of view, as it's working its way through the various things that need to be done for people to be able to consider investing in them, particularly in the advise channel. We've been very heartened by the feedback that we've had. Similarly, on the Magellan Sustainable Fund, we're very happy to be able to make that differentiated product available, again, on exchange via an active ETF, which can be both accessed through exchange and also direct off market. Lastly, which was a little bit more recently, in early June, we launched FuturePay. Again, an active ETF in the sense that it can be accessed both on and off market.
It has, obviously, an applicability for those in retirement, which I'll talk about in a sec. Just turning now to FuturePay. The goal here was to try and look to fill a void here, where those that have retired and are looking for what to do with their savings to produce some form of income really are stuck with quite a difficult challenge in trying to juggle the conflicting interests that exists. With FuturePay, what we've tried to do is to develop a product where a lot of the characteristics and the risk management, structural risk management techniques that are required to help offset some of these conflicting objectives are managed within that one product and have that as a listed liquid instrument, and that is FuturePay.
The solution really that we've come up with is a managed fund that has a predictable monthly income that grows with inflation. Importantly, that's a fixed dollar amount, not a percentage. It's been going now, the first unit, the first distribution was AUD 0.0203 per unit in the fund. Inflation has since come out. That's now moved to AUD 0.0205 per unit, and that will increase each quarter. It's a fixed dollar amount. That's driven by a combination of a portfolio which leans on both our global equity strategy, our infrastructure strategy, which we believe gives great characteristics for supporting this type of investment and these type of payments. They do have historically exhibited quite low correlation and therefore quite low volatility when combined, which is quite important in this.
Very importantly, we've introduced a reserving strategy and a reserving process that effectively takes some money and puts it aside in a mutualized trust, which is there to help underpin those very important fixed distributions that investors are receiving. That's an innovation we believe that has great utility for people as it helps offset the volatility needed or that's assumed as you're investing in growth assets and allows that fixed dollar amount of income, as I said, to be paid with some great confidence. We've also, as I've mentioned, made sure that this product is available both on exchange and daily via off market to allow investors access to capital, which we also understand is a very valuable part for particularly retirees who want the peace of mind that if they need that money, they can go and reach for it, and they have access to that.
The feedback we've had so far has been extremely positive. There's something of the order of 125, 130 unit holders in FuturePay already. The fund is still small and growing, but I would say from a take-up point of view, it's been one of the faster take-ups of funds that we've done. The feedback, as I said, is positive around the characteristics that we're aiming to deliver. The process of running through research houses and approved product lists, et cetera, as I've spoken about, is well underway. We're very optimistic that FuturePay over time will find quite a relevant home amongst people's choices when they're considering their retirement income. Just an update on our principal investments. As you would've seen in the annual report, we've just split these out so we can be a bit clear about how we're talking about these.
We've split them into our fund investments and also what we're calling Magellan Capital Partners, which is really the strategic investments that sit outside our funds management business. If I could turn to the fund investments, this is a slide many of you may have seen previously, I won't dwell on it too much. Our total investments in our funds, alongside with our investors essentially, and indeed some seed portfolios, now total about AUD 453 million. They're somewhat in the money, there's about AUD 45 million worth of tax that would be payable if we were to liquidate those today, leaving a net investment of around AUD 407.5 million or just around AUD 2.22 per share. The board has set a pre-tax hurdle, as we've said over many years now, of around 10%. As you can see on the right-hand side there, that's broadly been met over that period of time.
In terms of Magellan Capital Partners, again, reiterating what we've spoken about previously, we have loosely four key things that we wish to achieve, in reviewing investments that may be made through Magellan Capital Partners. First and foremost is that second bullet point in that number one, is that we don't want to distract from our funds management business. There's been some commentary around this. It's a key part of what we're doing here, is not to get distracted from our funds management business. That is our core business. To be able to consider these investments, we don't want to have operational involvement by Magellan in these businesses. We would typically look to have oversight through a non-executive representation, but we really are searching for high-quality management teams, such that we can leverage their skills, and not distract our time from the funds management business.
We're clearly looking for high-quality companies that have the potential or can grow meaningfully in their sector, have scale. Ideally, if we can find it, we'd like situations that can contribute to our intellectual capital of our business, even it might occur in a sort of somewhat of a tangential way, at times, or it may be more directly applicable to what we're looking to do. Indeed, it'd be ideal if it did provide us with some meaningful optionality that we could look at down the track, and review as time goes on. Of course, number four, which is from a shareholder's point, very important. Of course, we want to achieve attractive returns, and we're not shy in looking at achieving those attractive returns in terms of where we think pricing and outcomes should be.
If I could turn to just the three that we've made, which many of you are aware of. I'll start with Barrenjoey Capital Partners, which of course we're a partner with the management there, along with Barclays, as it says there. We invested AUD 156 million for a 40% non-dilutive economic stake. The non-dilutive is obviously very important in this context. The firm itself has started extremely strongly. It's hired around 250 people, which we consider to be extremely high quality. It's managed to, within a very aggressive timeframe, to establish many, if not all of the key systems and processes that were required, get through licensing and all the things that have needed to be done to establish this firm.
To the extent that the corporate finance and the cash equity businesses have been up and going, there has been an array of work, a number of which have been in newspapers around M&A and capital markets activities. The research part of the business is up and going. There is covering more than 80 stocks. It should be over 100 by the time at year-end. Most pleasingly, as I said in the annual report, the partnership with Barclays is proving very beneficial for Barrenjoey's clients as looking for underwriting and financing solutions. Overall, we are delighted with the business. It has been a very impressive build-out and, it is without a shadow of a doubt, building and developing ahead of our expectations.
FinClear is a much smaller investment, a little bit more strategic in the sense that we were looking to leverage their connectivity and some of the work they've been doing across a number of things, particularly at the ASX, around the DLT. That business on its own has continued to build and establish itself. It's managed to attract a number of new clients, some of which are their Praemium, Superhero, and Stake. Very importantly, in July this year, FinClear completed the transaction to purchase Pershing Securities Australia, which is quite a large business, on very attractive financial terms, and it's allowed FinClear to expand its offering meaningfully across that. The statistics here speak for themselves. Their HIN platform, if you can think about it that way, has moved now from AUD 7 billion to AUD 130 billion across HINs that they operate with.
On a combined basis, they'll now have around 250 wholesale intermediary clients and 300 active end users. To us, this gives a great platform for us to consider many of the things that we've been thinking about in terms of reducing friction for investors as that connectivity of FinClear's builds out, and we are excited to continue to work with them, and looking forward to see where we can take that over time. In Guzman y Gomez, which won't spend too much time on, we invested AUD 103 million for a 12% fully diluted share on that. Guzman's had a very strong year, beating where it thought it would be from a budget perspective by about 50%, despite obviously all the vagaries of lockdowns and the interruptions of that.
It has been interesting, and it's been, I think, interesting from an investments learning point of view as well, the impact of things like COVID on that broadly on the business, particularly as it's driven many more people to try Guzman's product, particularly through drive-throughs, through the convenience. That's resulted in more word-of-mouth network and more familiarity with the food, which would not perhaps have been the case or not in the same timeframe, perhaps, as COVID came around. Some interesting investment sort of lessons there, and observations, frankly. Most importantly, it's achieving its restaurant rollout targets. It's now up to 157. It's got a set program of restaurants that it's looking to roll out, which will expand its network and build a greater sales flywheel over time. With that, I might hand over to Hamish, and we can clearly pick up questions in the Q&A.
Hamish.
Well, thank you very much, Brett. Thank you very much everyone for joining us. I'm going to focus a little bit on the global equity strategy. Obviously, it is a very material part of our current business. I say that word, our current business. I think it's therefore important for people to understand how our principal clients look at our global equity strategy and how they analyze the strategy and what we are seeking to do for our investors. To put the last year into context, which clearly we have underperformed the MSCI World Index in the last 12 months. There's much more to the viewpoint of how people see that. Before I just go into the global equity strategy, I would comment that we have been over many years, laying many seeds and planting trees effectively to grow other parts of our business.
We don't want to be solely a global equity business. We've obviously built one of the largest global equity businesses in the country. It's immensely profitable. We already have, I would regard, the best infrastructure securities business in the country, and I think we're on our way of developing the best Australian equities business in the country as we start to build out the retail platform of that. I think what we've launched, other seeds we've put in the ground is around the Core Series, which is a lower cost series, our Sustainable Funds, and I'm very pleased that in the next few months, we are getting some of our first mandates institutionally, with the Sustainable Funds. That's still early days, but it's very much on track of what we're wanting to see. I'm personally incredibly excited about what FuturePay represents for the future.
These are seeds that take time to grow, but FuturePay has the potential to be very meaningful for the business alongside infrastructure and alongside the Airlie business. Now we've launched Magellan Capital Partners with the three investments. Brett and I couldn't be more pleased with those investments. Although we're recording sort of non-cash sort of startup costs, largely related to the sort of startup nature of the Barrenjoey business. It was a blank sheet of paper. We had 250 people join, believe it or not, to leave other organizations. Some people needed some form of comfort. There are payments that were made to some people. Over time, and of course, they're very conservatively accounting for some of the massive infrastructure startup costs that they've had at Barrenjoey.
Guzman y Gomez, the underlying restaurant economics of Guzman y Gomez are eye-watering and are just getting stronger, and we have an enormous amount of confidence in the Australian business, and they've got a seed being planted in the U.S., which is very early days, and FinClear, I think, I wish it was larger, but already, these collective investments, in our opinion, would already be meaningfully more valuable than we paid for them. Notwithstanding we're recording an accounting non-cash charge of AUD 41 million, these investments have the potential to be meaningful to Magellan over time. Many of them are growth businesses in the early days. Magellan, in its early days, lost money, but you invest in great businesses with great people early on, and you can get incredible financial returns. We have an opportunity over time, particularly around Guzman Gomez, to deploy more capital over time.
We have preemptive rights there. It's one of the reasons we're wanting to make sure we have ample liquidity on our balance sheet. We're very modestly wanting to retain a little bit more capital around the flexibility with the DRP. We think this is a very sensible way, even underwriting at 25%, at sort of 1% per annum in additional shares. Of course, on the other side of those additional shares, we're getting cash, and hopefully, that cash can be deployed and earn returns very materially above our cost of capital. I think everywhere we've deployed capital so far, whether in partnership benefits, the out-of-the-box returns where we've invested in those partnership investments in our funds have been 20%. Actually, if you look at what's increased the funds under management with market performance and performance fees, the return is materially above 20% pre-tax per annum.
I think we're going to earn very attractive returns on each of FinClear, Barrenjoey, and Guzman y Gomez. They're not diluting the returns in our funds management business, where the ROE in that business is just off the chart. It's just you can't incrementally deploy much more capital into that. We're not diluting any return on capital in the funds management business. We're just deploying capital at very attractive rates. Let's see what happens over time, but I understand it's early days for people, and these are relatively small at the moment. Let's talk to the global equity strategy because this is what people are focused on. It's rightly people-focused. It's very important to the business at the moment. The core global equity strategy has two objectives for our clients.
One is the minimization of the risk of a permanent capital loss, and what we've embedded into the strategy is a whole series of very unique downside protection measures and risk management processes. The other side of the returns is we have set out to our clients to deliver them attractive risk-adjusted returns over the medium to long term. If you are an institutional client, and you've got pension obligations, or if you're a retail client, the only thing that matters to you in the end, over time, is the return you get on your capital.
People do not retire on a relative basis; they retire on an absolute basis. We have a strategy that looks nothing like the broad equity markets, but it is very focused on delivering at a retail level, net of all fees, 9% per annum over the long term. Institutional, because the fee structure is slightly different, we've set an objective of 10% per annum over the long term. Let's have a look of how we've gone over time over those objectives. The first one, very critically, is downside protection. The red bars is measured over time. In any quarter where the markets have gone down, we measure how our strategy has performed over those three months compared to how the MSCI World Index has performed over those three months.
Consistently over any time period when you've had a down market, we have captured about half of the market return. If the market's down 10%, on average, we've gone down 5%. If you look at that and you measure that against global equity managers who are long only, we are in the top 1% of any global equity manager measured over sort of 14 years, which is this series, and we've provided people with a little bit more granular information around this in terms of splitting out our up market and down market. We've captured nearly 100% of the upside over time, and we have captured about 50% of the downside.
That sort of ratio, when consultants and institutional investors analyze it, kind of takes their breath away because it's very, very hard to do, to maintain most of the upside while putting in a very, very strong downside protection measure into the strategy. We tend to get most of when the markets are really bad, if you look on this chart, this is where we get most of our excess returns. In the down market, where markets are down more than 5%, on average, we've outperformed by 6.4%, and our largest outperformance when the market was really bad was 15 percentage points. If you look at the up markets over time, any quarter where the markets have gone up, we've lagged by 0.2 or 1%. Where markets around the sort of index, we've kind of performed in line with the index.
When the index has had a very, very strong quarterly return, that is when we've lagged a bit. Actually, our largest underperformance in a quarter was 10 percentage points, when the markets were up very strongly. Our largest outperformance when the markets were down very strongly was 15 percentage points. What's happened in the last year is not out of context with the other side of the tail of where we get our largest outperformance when markets are down. We're just giving people a little bit more granular information, particularly analysts, to understand the characteristics here. Now we'll move on to the absolute returns over time. We've said this is at a retail level, 9% per annum. We have delivered above our 9% per annum objective. We've delivered nearly 12% per annum.
If you had invested in a low-cost index fund, since inception of our strategy, you would have AUD 28,000. If you had invested with Magellan, your AUD 10,000 has grown to AUD 48,000. We would regard that having AUD 20,000 more from investing in an index fund is statistically relevant. That is what active management's about. It is about, over time, delivering excess returns. We do have tails in our strategies. In extreme up markets, we can underperform in the short term, and quite meaningfully. In extreme down markets, we have had a very, very strong record of outperforming. Actually, if you think about investor psychology, people are not that concerned if they are lagging a bit when they are all making a lot of money, what worries advisors and what worries clients is when everything goes red.
When normally everything goes red for investors on their sheets, we normally get an enormous amount of calls coming in from advisors and clients saying, Thank God for Magellan. It's the only good thing we have to talk about in our strategy. It actually happened in March last year. Advisors were ringing over and over again, Thank you again, Magellan, because you're making our jobs easier. We've had very, very few calls when everybody's making money, Oh, it's a little disappointing we're not making as much money with Magellan. It's very deliberate what we do. Maybe we'll turn to the next slide, because this is really when you get to how we perform against that MSCI benchmark index. Institutional clients and consultants really look at sort of returns on a three-year basis. It's a kind of magical benchmark they look at.
There's actually been 133 months of three-year returns. You had to wait for the first three years of our strategy, we didn't have a three-year return. After you clock up the first month of three-year returns, then every month you can get another data set of three-year returns. There's been 133 months, which you can observe a three-year observation. Just looking what happens on the 30th of June is one month. If you looked at every month over 12 months, you've then got 12 data points. What we're showing you here is three columns. How our strategy has performed before fees, what is the institutional view, and this is the smallest institutional client who would pay 80 basis points, and then the third column is after all retail fees. What I'm going to take you down to the bottom one relative to the benchmark.
If you look at our strategy and people are going, Oh, well, you've underperformed a lot this year. If you look at the three-year rolling returns, those 133 months, how often our strategies outperform the MSCI over a three-year period before fees. The strategies outperformed the MSCI 133 months out of 133. There's never been a month where, on a three-year basis, the strategies underperformed the MSCI index, including what's happened in the last year, and the average outperformance has been 6.1%. When people look at those statistics and say, Well, you get half the downside risk, and you've got 100% batting average before fees of beating the market on a three-year basis, we don't get a lot of complaints from institutional clients.
If you look at the next one of the institutional after 80 basis points of fees, now we have 130 months out of 133 after the maximum institutional fee. 98% of the time, it's beating their index on a three-year basis with an average return of 5.2% per annum. Actually, the average, when we underperformed in those three months, the average underperformance was 0.5%. If you look on a retail basis, obviously the fees are higher, and we've got a performance fee there. We have outperformed the MSCI of 117 months or at 88% of the time with an average excess return on a three-year basis of 4.2% per annum. In those months, those 13 periods in which we underperformed the MSCI, the average underperformance was 0.4%, almost nothing. I think the largest underperformance we've ever had on a three-year basis was 1.5%.
I'm just trying to put some context that it's easy just to look at what's happened in the last 12 months and get yourself worked up. That's not the conversation that our institutional or the consulting clients are having with us. If we underperformed materially when the markets went down, I'll be honest with you, we have a problem. It hasn't happened, but I'm not saying it won't happen. We have a problem. Did I get a few things wrong in the last 12 months? Yes, I've written about that if you want to read the investor letter. In no ways am I perfect here. I didn't put enough risk on before the vaccine results.
Not that I could put an extreme amount because of our downside protection, but there's some things we could have done slightly better, and China's been a bit of a challenging place where we had about 10% of our strategy. It's less now directly in China-related investments. I will leave it there. There are some more statistics and analysis that really consultants and institutional clients look at for the global equity business. We wrote about this both in the global equity write-up with more detail and also in the chairman's letter, just to put the context of our global equity business. It is a business that is relatively mature. We closed it a number of years ago to institutional investors, and we're in nearly every model account. We can't pick up really any more market share domestically.
Our seeds are the place where we can grow funds under management, as Brett has talked about in Core, Sustainable, Core Infrastructure, FuturePay. I think there's a lot of value creation in Magellan Capital Partners ahead of us as well. I may leave it there, Brett.
Okay, thanks Hamish. Sarah, are you going to orchestrate the questions?
Yes. Thank you, Hamish, Brett, and Kirsten, for a very comprehensive presentation, and you've actually answered a lot of the questions that have come through. We will go to Q&A. A reminder, you can type your question into the Q&A icon, or if you're dialing in by phone, you can press star nine on your headset. We'll try to get through as many questions as we can. Firstly, I suppose I'll just pick up, Hamish, where you just talk about performance. Our first question comes from Elizabeth Miliatis. Just in regard to flows, with flows shifting from inflows in the March quarter to outflows in the June quarter, how have conversations with clients changed over the last six months? How are we positioned for flows and conversations tracking over the last month or so?
Yeah. Look, we have to put it in context here. We only show people net flows. We don't show what we get on a gross inflow basis and a gross outflow basis to get you net flows. We always have outflows because people are redeeming money every single day, just for their own expenses in other periods, particularly when they're in retirement. Institutional clients do that for fees and other reasons, that they're always taking out little bits of money. If we just have a slight slowdown in the gross inflows in a month, we can suddenly have a net outflow. Nothing has really changed in the outflow side of the equation. It's really that the inflows may have slowed down, and we don't give people that breakdown.
In the context of our business of now AUD 117 billion of funds under management, it's almost immeasurable whether we have AUD 100 million inflow or AUD 100 million outflow. It's just such a small element of the business. Our global equity business, we had substantial inflows last year in the global equity business. We are getting to a maturity point on the institutional side of that because we've been closed for a number of years to any new clients. It's actually been a number of years like that. We're not accepting any new clients into the global equity strategy. There's some existing clients who did have some reserve capacity, and most of them have used that up there. The retail business, as I say, there's very limited opportunity outside the direct retail business. In the advised business, we're kind of in every model portfolio.
We're kind of on all bases there. We're not seeing any substantial movement in terms of people redeeming money. As I say, very small changes in that inflow number can turn the net thing into outflows because there's always outflows. What I'm very pleased to see now is we're starting to see the very early seeds in sustainable with a few mandates in the next quarter likely to be seeded there. I'm very encouraged what we're hearing from the consultants and others on FuturePay, but that's going to take time. Airlie is really now getting to the point of the snowball, where the snowflakes in retail land are starting to land. The infrastructure business on an inflows business continues to be very consistent. In the context of our business, a few hundred million AUD is absolutely nothing.
A 1% market movement that literally happens daily is now AUD 1.7 billion. What we see every day, just up and down of little fluctuations, is in the billions, where people are getting caught up into flows in something that's a fraction of 1% here. I'm very happy. The global equity business is much more mature, but I'm very happy with the seeds that have been built up over many years, which is going to take more time for Airlie and FuturePay and Core and Sustainable to start to mature. Obviously, infrastructure is much more mature, but it continues to gain market share.
Great. Well, we'll move on to the second part of Elizabeth's question, which is also commonly asked. Brett, probably one for you. Can you please provide some color on the pathway to profitability of the businesses in Magellan Capital Partners, either asset by asset or collectively? Should we assume larger losses in the short term as Barrenjoey builds out?
The main losses, as we've said in the report, and Hamish mentioned, I think I mentioned as well, were really our share of what Barrenjoey's been investing to build that business. The business itself is tracking, as I said, ahead of expectations. There's obviously a gale force wind at the moment from market conditions, so you've got to sort of take those into account, how long will be in place. It is tracking towards getting towards break even sooner than what we anticipated. There are, and Hamish mentioned, there are a number of still startup costs, the few sign-on bonuses and these sorts of things, which I did mention have been conservatively accounted. They've been amortized on a straight line basis. Some of those are already in those losses that have been reported.
Look, markets can move, things can change, but we're very pleased that the way Barrenjoey, in particular, has come together. It has a great opportunity, subject to markets, to get to profitability quicker than what we thought, and it may not be that far ahead, depending on where markets get to. There's obviously some startup costs still to be absorbed through that, which will turn up in our accounts as our share of that as it works through. Over the next few years, we're very confident, and our confidence is growing, that Barrenjoey will be a very profitable and meaningful business. Hamish, I'm not sure, you want to add something?
I'll just add a very few things. We've invested a little shy of AUD 300 million into these businesses, which is kind of 3% of our market cap. We're recording this AUD 41 million of sort of largely startup losses related to Barrenjoey, but there is a little bit in there. We're not breaking it exactly out. I would say if you take a three-to-five-year view, that these businesses are going to be meaningfully profitable. The next 12 months is a little hard to exactly predict the revenues. We're very happy where it's up to on Barrenjoey. We've probably got a greater sight on the costs of Barrenjoey in the next 12 months, but the revenues in an investment bank is, you lodge a large transaction, you can have AUD 20 million or AUD 30 million of revenue in a single transaction at Barrenjoey.
The equities business is developing incredibly well. I think they're going to end up having one of the leading equity businesses in a fairly short period of time, and be very profitable in their equity business. Their M&A business, which is really a client relationship business, they've already done two of the largest IPOs this year, and done some of the largest M&A transactions, including the very innovative bid for Boral, for the Seven Group, which is a real tribute. They've been acting on the sale of the Telstra Towers business. We're very happy where it's up to. If I took a three-year view, I'm very confident about the profitability in five years into the future.
Given what we paid for a non-diluted interest in Barrenjoey, I'm pretty confident if we were to sell that, which we have no intention of doing it, we would probably get it meaningfully higher. People are amazed, how on earth did you get that stake in that business for that price? It was a startup. There was a lot of risk with it. But where it's up to, I would say FinClear is worth meaningfully more than we've paid for it post the Pershing deal, and I think the Guzman stake is worth meaningfully more than we probably paid for it because of what's happening in the economics of the restaurants and the confidence now on the rollout, particularly in Australia.
Whilst we recorded losses, our viewpoint and when we're looking at it and when we're tracking things at the moment is we're already ahead, and if I look out three to five years, I think you're going to start to see material profitability start to come through from those investments three to five years from now. It's the nature of investing in growth and sort of startup businesses, that you have losses in the first few days. Importantly, the losses won't affect shareholders' dividends in any way. They're non-cash to us, and the dividends are 90%-95% of the funds management business and the cash flow out of that business. If these businesses will record a loss, we don't have to write a check. We've written a check for these investments, and the value of the investments have gone up.
These losses, we haven't written a check for AUD 41 million to anybody. We wrote a check for AUD 270 odd million for these investments. Our view is that that is worth more than AUD 270 million, and we've recorded an accounting loss that we didn't pay for that loss. Ultimately, the dividends are coming out of the funds management business. It's in great shape. These businesses in three to five years, I think you're going to look back and you're going to say is, They look pretty smart investments. How did these guys get these investments? I would probably like to have owned more than FinClear and more than Guzman y Gomez. It's kind of all we could get at the time. We obviously got a larger stake in Barrenjoey.
It's ahead of our expectations, and I wouldn't get caught up with these early-stage accounting entries. It's about the value creation here, and it won't affect people's dividend flow at all from the funds management business. Obviously, if we start to record real dividends out of these businesses, we'll have to think about what we want to do with those dividends in the future. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. We're, Brett, we're very happy with the progress. Really happy.
Yes. I couldn't agree more. I just want to echo the accounting lesson that you go there. I tried to write it out in the annual report as well. Equity accounting often is not straightforward. If we weren't equity accounting, for example, Barrenjoey, for example, those losses wouldn't appeared in ours. We would've just had the value of our investment, and we would've had to make a decision as we've done this time around, whether or not it's impaired or not, and we don't believe it's impaired by any stretch. We would just see the value of our investment in the accounts. It's the fact that they've got this equity accounting treatment that the requirement is that we show our share of the profits and losses, and it rolls into our accounts. Effectively, it becomes apparent in that sense.
As you say, we can't lose more than we've invested, Hamish, in these losses. To me, as I look across that, as I was trying to say with even the other businesses outside of Barrenjoey, FinClear is clearly more connected now through the purchase of Pershing, and there's a great deal that can be done there, and we're very excited by that. I agree with you, it's early days, but it is moving directionally in the way that we anticipated and hoped, frankly.
Great. Thank you, Brett and Hamish. Just a follow-up question on Magellan Capital Partners from Russell Gill. We've previously stated a 10% return hurdle for our principal investments. Now we've split out fund investments in Magellan Capital Partners. Are we still applying a more than 10% return hurdle to the Magellan Capital Partners, or is this viewed slightly differently?
We actually applied a materially higher return hurdle when we made each of those investments. I don't want to get into exactly. The internal rate of return assumptions was materially higher than 10% per annum when we made those investments.
Thank you. Moving on to the DRP. We did announce the DRP today, and the intention to retain about 25%-30% of the dividend. Do we have plans for the use of these funds?
Well, I think I mentioned, we do have all those options outstanding. We've got a debt facility. We don't like using debt. Whether they get exercised or not, we will have to see. We don't want to ever get caught where we don't have the flexibility. If people exercise the options, we'll be delighted. We're going to get more than a 20% return on that capital over time, so it would be a very value-accretive thing. Having the flexibility there, obviously, it's backed by a liquidity facility at the moment, but also particularly in relation to Guzman y Gomez. It is likely over time that shareholders may want liquidity. There's other shareholders and staff and things in that business.
We want to make sure we're in a position that should that happen at periods in the time that we just have the financial flexibility to exercise any preemptive rights we may have there. Frankly, Brett and Craig who runs Magellan Capital Partners, Craig Wright and Brett, they're being shown opportunities all the time. Some of them are small, some are larger. I'm not predicting we're going to do anything in the near term. It's nice to have flexibility. We had flexibility, and we could make those three investments because we had a very strong balance sheet from a very small placement we did a number of years ago, both the partnership benefits and those all got funded out of cash flow and that. I think we're just wanting to retain some modest flexibility in our balance sheet.
Optionality in terms of financial flexibility is very valuable. Often you get the best opportunities when things are most difficult, you want to be acting from a position of strength, we've always wanted to do that. We think there's very prudent shareholders who just want to take the cash dividends, paying out 90%-95%, can get the cash dividends, people who want to reinvest dividends will get that option as well. Brett, I'm not sure if you've got any more comments. In the context, if we underwrite it at 25%, it's kind of 1% per annum. On the back of even issuing more shares, don't forget, we're getting cash. We're increasing the asset backing of Magellan, if we invest that sensibly, hopefully we can create some real shareholder value with that retention.
We only want to retain dollars where we have a high degree of confidence that we can create more shareholder value from that dollar retained.
Yeah, you've hit on everything. To me, the one thing I think I've learned over time there is, and you've touched on it, some great value for the flexibility and the optionality that being ready, if you like, and having that flexibility with a strong balance sheet gives you. We've had this for a long period of time across Magellan, and providing that strong balance sheet with that flexibility and optionality around how we deal with things like strategic initiatives or if some of these other things possibly appear over time, I think is highly valuable. As you say, for a relatively small amount of reinvestment of that dividend, it does, we believe, give us meaningful optionality to consider things. Yes.
Moving on to the next question from Alan Markham. Brett, you'd mentioned in your presentation the options that we've issued at the 7.5% discount to net asset value. We've touched on this in the past, but can we just talk about the economics behind the options discount of 7.5%, which Magellan's paying for, and the time that it will take for us to earn a return on that payment?
Yeah. Well, the options themselves are effectively American-style options. You can exercise them any day if you like. They're not a fixed price option. They're a percentage of the net asset value. In a sense, whatever the net asset value of the closed class unit is at that time, multiply it by 92.5%, and that's what you pay for that unit. The difference, that 7.5%, Magellan will pay for that rather than the fund itself diluting existing members. That's the option cost, if you like, from Magellan's point of view. All those options, and there is, I can't remember the exact numbers now, a billion something of them are on issue. Effectively, each attract that 7.5% discount.
From an accounting perspective, we've had to upfront that expense as though that expense has actually occurred, and that's what's in that strategic initiative line of AUD 148 million after tax, I think it was, from memory. Of course, we've not paid that. That's accounted for that now. Over time, if all those options are issued, then roughly, depending on where markets get to, that would be the ultimate cost of that. What we would get in return, of course, as with other partnership benefits that we've done, is the management fee on those new funds that are invested, which is currently 1.35 at 1.35% plus the performance fee. The maths of, Hamish talked about this previously, the maths essentially is 1.35% divided by 7.5%. That's our investment.
That's the return on that, which grows or has the potential to grow over time with market movements and also possible performance fees.
Yeah. Brett, just the simple math of that for us is, 1.35 on 7.5 is slightly over 18%.
Yeah.
We get an initial return excluding any performance fee of 18%. At market performance, we actually get fees on any increase in funds. If over time, which we would expect average funds, those funds which we pay for effectively raise over time. Effectively, another way of looking at it, of these options is, we are buying closed-end funds under management for a multiple of 5.5 times.
You cannot go and buy funds under management at 5.5x. This is very creative. We think it's very nice for the shareholders that they can get in at a 7.5% discount to the daily net asset value. That's why we call it a partnership benefit. If they do, their cost to us, we get a very attractive return on our capital. We would love all the options to be exercised, but at the end, it's up to the individual unit holders whether they exercise them over the next three years or not. We expect they won't all be exercised, by the way. That's the nature of it.
Thanks.
Although the accountants assume that they all will be, even though we think that's very unlikely.
Thanks very much. We might just move to a question on the line. Will the caller ending in H22 please unmute yourself by pressing star six and go ahead and ask your question. Please go ahead and ask your question. Okay, we're having some issues there, so we'll just move on to another caller. Will the caller ending in 4759, please press star six to unmute yourself and go ahead and ask your question.
Hello, Sarah.
Hi, we can hear you.
Hi. Great. Fantastic. Listen, I've just got a few questions here, just for some extra context and maybe a little bit of help. I just wanted to explore a bit more about that share of loss from associates. I fully understand that a lot of it's got to do with those startup costs with Barrenjoey and the like. Just given some of your comments, Brett, it sounds to me like you'd be considering that for FY 2022, sounds like that loss will be greatly reduced. If not, we might see a maiden profit there for the FY 2022 year. I'm just trying to get a bit more context of what that line looks like for FY 2022, the share of associates there, please.
Yeah, look, I don't want to give a projection on that, frankly. I guess what I'm saying is that the business itself is well-positioned. Obviously, markets are quite favorable on that. There's really two parts to this, is the operating business itself, and there's of course the remainder of the sign-ons and various other bonuses that need to come through. Look, it's likely that that will result in a loss again, I think at the Barrenjoey side of that. I don't want to put a level on it versus.
A very substantially reduced spread, I would say. It's going to be much better.
I don't want to put a level on it. Yeah, look, I think given that the first part of this, there was no operational revenue coming through. Clearly, you're seeing lots of operational revenue starting to develop and come through with a great potential on that. It's likely that that loss will be materially small.
It's really hard to predict. It's just very hard to predict. They are six weeks into a new financial year. They pull off another big M&A transaction with a AUD 20 million fee. Suddenly they're in a profit. You cannot predict at six weeks into a year what you think the revenue of that business is going to be for the year. We're very happy where it's tracking.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Absolutely. A second question relates to the investments held in the Magellan funds. AUD 407 million there. I think it's across maybe about 13 or 14 different funds at the moment. Do you see a recycling of capital or a continuous recycling of capital there? Some of these divestitures could end up being a lever that you have at your disposal to smooth earnings through time as well. Interested to know your thoughts there.
We don't think about it in terms of smoothed earnings. Of course, we can use some of those investments in one fund to help seed or develop other funds, which we've done, frankly, on that. Yes is the answer. We've looked at that portfolio in that context. Yes, we've lent on, for example, the Global Fund to help seed some of the, in effect, not directly, but indirectly, the AUD 10 million in FuturePay, for example. Yes, we do think about it in those terms.
Yeah. I would add to that, we regard that sort of AUD 450 million as operational capital for the business. We can hold a lot of that. It's liquid. Therefore, if we ever had operational risk in our business, we've got AUD 117 billion of funds under management. We do have to hold operational capital. We're very conservative about how we view that, and it's very efficient because we're getting a very decent return on that. It's highly liquid, and it's flexible to move amongst different strategies to seed them. It's a very effective way of holding operational capital and getting a decent rate of return on it.
Yeah, good. My final question is, and I apologize if this is buried somewhere in the text or that you've explained this before and I've missed it, but in terms of the Magellan Capital Partners, each one of those investments, will they be marked to fair value on a regular basis, say, every reporting period, or are you going to hold them at book value? How's that going to work going forward?
Well, under the accounting rules of equity accounting, you only look at impairments, you don't mark them up.
Yep. Okay.
What happens with the carrying value, of course, it does go up, or down, frankly, by the amount of your share of the earnings, less any cash dividends that you receive. The carrying value does move according to what you book in terms of those profits or losses.
Let's say Barrenjoey have a revaluation of their equity base at some stage when they turn to a profit or they turn into a bigger business than they thought, that would obviously impact your valuation on your balance sheet. Would you still be able to hold it at book value because it's equity accounted?
Well, it's still an equity accounted. If we moved from equity accounting to a mark-to-market regime, for example, then it would be de-recognized equity accounting, and it would be done. It's a bit like Magellan Asset Management, 100% controlled. We don't mark that to market, obviously.
Maybe I can just sneak one more question in. Final one. Thank you. In terms of the tax change that'll happen, can I just confirm, it'll be going to 30% in 2024, or will it be closer to that? All you've said is that you'll be paying a higher tax rate. Will it be going to 30?
Well, it'll go to 30 because 10 will no longer be available in effect.
Yeah. Okay.
That's what will happen.
Yeah.
I would add that we actually think it has very, very little impact on actual shareholder value.
Yeah.
The report of profits will be down, but we are only franking at 75%. Because we pay out most of our earnings, the franking is very, very valuable to our shareholders because the shareholders are effectively paying that extra 10% tax on receipt of their dividends. If we have the franking credits, that is a straight flow-through, given we're not retaining those earnings, or we're paying out virtually all of them. Given we've got such a high payout ratio, we don't think from a shareholder's point of view and a value point of view, it's that material. We're just pointing it out. Obviously, that's public news. We just wanted to make sure people were very aware that that change is happening in FY 2024.
Understood. Thank you for taking my questions.
Okay. Just given the time, we might just do one last question, and we'll try the caller again ending in 822. You press star 6 to unmute yourself, and you can proceed to ask your question.
Hi. Hope you can hear me now.
Yes, we can hear you.
Great. Sorry about before. Look, a couple of questions. Just on MGF, so the closed version, a closed-end version of the global fund, that's trading at nearly a 10% discount to NAV. You bought back 90 million of units in the last six months. The discount hasn't closed. My questions are, what can you do to close the discount? Under what circumstances would you consider a conversion to an open-ended fund like MHH? Will you honor the options if you move to an open-ended vehicle?
Yeah. Look, obviously on MHH, there were no options. It's a bit cleaner. The options themselves are intersecting with the discount on this at the moment. Look, we're content with letting that structure find its feet, essentially, within that. I'd note that arbitrage that we've mentioned over time is still available, and I know potentially people have been looking at that. I do think that there's some time to see how that structure works its way through, noting that those options are still available. Of course, as we've demonstrated with MHH, we'll always act in the interest of unitholders over time on that. We'll consider things at that time. Hamish, you and I debate this constantly. I'm not sure whether you've got any other thoughts to add to that.
Yeah. All I'd say to people is, we obviously looked at MHH very closely. It was very clear and very obvious what we should do on MHH. The options are a very valuable asset of the unitholders here. Honoring options into an open class unit, we are fiduciaries of both the unitholders and also shareholders at Magellan. That is a very tricky thing to do from a Magellan point of view. The options had a three-year term. They're very valuable assets of the unitholders. It makes it quite different. I think over the longer term, I think Brett's just made the statement that we will always act in the interest of the unitholders, provided we don't have some fundamental constraint that makes it impossible. The option's too complicated at the moment. They're valuable.
There are genuine arbitrage mechanisms that have been put in place. We do want to give that some time to play out. Ultimately, I think the message is, we will act in the context of the unitholders of the funds. We believe that's a very important principle. The options are very valuable assets at the moment of the unitholders, and they're actually quite difficult to deal with. MHH was simple.
Yep.
All right. Thank you very much. Just more broadly with MHH and the loyalty units, how do you think about using loyalty units in the future, given what's happened with that fund? Appreciate you can put the options aside, but on a go-forward basis, do you think we'll see these used to support new product launches?
They were really loyalty units into closed class units, is how those structures worked. On MHH, we're absolutely delighted. Actually, we've had most of the capital we put out, most of it's been returned to us in terms of fees, and opening that up now is, I would do it every single day of the week. Those loyalty units into closed and now opening it up. I think the closed structures have become more problematic across the board. We still have loyalty elements on our DRP in the closed class units. There, I think they've been very generous. I think unit holders have really liked them. They are applicable to a closed structure, and I think the applicability of closed structures have become more problematic, to be honest with you. I'd expect probably less use of loyalty units in the past.
If we did a loyalty unit in an open structure, we may as well be throwing money off the top of the MLC Centre. People would just arbitrage it. You would come in and you would take the loyalty unit, and you would redeem the open unit. We may be generous, but we're not stupid.
Right. Thanks very much.
Great. Well, just given timing, that will be the last question for today. Thank you to Hamish, Brett, and Kirsten for the presentation. We thank you everyone for joining us and wish you all the best. I hope your families keep safe. Thank you very much.
Run.