Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Netwealth Group Limited Annual Results, FY 2024. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Matt Heine, CEO and Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Travis, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for dialing in. My name is Matt Heine. I'm the CEO and Managing Director of Netwealth, and I'm joined by Grant Boyle, our CFO. It gives me great pleasure to deliver today the FY 2024 financial results. Before we start, I would also like to acknowledge the country. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that we work and live on. Our office here, and where we're presenting from this morning, is in Sydney, on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We celebrate the stories, culture, and traditions of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of all nations, and pay our respects to elders, past and present. Moving across to the business and financial highlights. Last year was a fantastic year for Netwealth.
We finished the financial year, with the funds under administration of AUD 88 billion, which represented a record AUD 22 billion of growth inflows and a net inflow of AUD 11.2 billion. Pleasingly, and as a result of this growth, we delivered, total income of AUD 255.2 million, growth of AUD 40.5 million, and 18.9%. EBITDA, as a result, for the year, was a growth of AUD 23.9 million or 23.8%, delivering an NPAT, Net Profit After Tax, of AUD 83.4 million or a 24.1%, growth rate.
We also were able to pick up a number of awards, and given Australia's success at the Olympics, it'd be remiss not to mention that we were the number one platform or rated by Chant West for Best Advised Product. We won the Best Product Offering and Best Transaction Tools for in the Investment Trends Report, and we were named the leader in the high net worth segment. Whilst we also delivered a number of CSR outcomes throughout the year, I'm also really pleased to say that approximately 25,000 additional children went through our financial literacy program, taking the total to 125,000 for since the program began five or so years ago.
If we turn to page nine, this is an important slide and really shows that the Netwealth strategy and also the tailwinds that support it have been very successful. We grew our market share to 7.7% at the end of March, and as you can see, the dominance of the specialist platforms continues with both us and the specialist platforms continuing to lead the way, whilst, as many of the incumbents, despite their significant market share, have resulted in negative net inflows. This is further seen on page 10, where you can see the trends, which we believe will continue for many years to come. Turning to page 11, we are really pleased also just with the continued diversity of the platform across all of our key market segments.
While there's a number of charts here, the takeaway is that our key segments, being the emerging affluent, established affluent, and the mass affluent, continue to deliver, and the platform is now very evenly split, spread between our investment product, super product, and also our institutional wholesale clients. From a product perspective, of the AUD 88 billion in FUA that we recorded at the end of the financial year, we saw an increase in our Accelerator Core 4.4%, which was the result of AUD 476 million dollars of new flows into the product subsequent to its launch. For the total year, it was a 179% increase.
From a new business perspective and from a composition of the flows, looking at page 12, also really pleasing to see that the bulk of the flows, so 83% of our inflows for the year, or AUD 9.3 billion, came from existing clients. So that is clients that were already on the platform. However, 17% of the flows, or AUD 1.9 billion, came from advisers that joined throughout the financial year. As many of you on the call would know, it is these new clients, or the newer financial intermediaries, that actually pave the way and will deliver flows now for the next two to three years, giving us a very high level of confidence in our flows. On page 13, I'm also very pleased to announce the accelerated acquisition of Xeppo.
Xeppo has been a business that we've been working with for a number of years, and own already 25%. We increased this to 100% as of yesterday, and it's really part of our broader strategy, which I'll talk about shortly, and we believe will be critical as we move further and further into an AI-driven future. The Xeppo business provides us with significant data to now not only deliver fantastic services to our own clients, but also to advisers to help them further improve their business efficiency, and also to audit governance. Skipping across to page 16. Well, just a quick recap on our strategy.
As the platform continues to evolve, it's been really important for us to make sure that we've got a very clear focus on what it is that we're delivering to our customers, and the earlier announcement of Xeppo feeds into this. We've built the business across four key segments. That is our wealth solutions, so the financial products that we offer, the Investment Wrap, Super Wrap, and also the managed account. Our Wealth Tech products, which is the client portal and all of the customer-facing technology. Insights and analytics, which includes a lot of the Xeppo dashboards, as well as very detailed reporting on the platform. Partners and integrations, which continue to grow at a very rapidly, including both data integrations but also new partnerships, including the iCapital partnership that was announced earlier in the year.
I won't spend a lot of time on the strategy, and we can take questions on it after the, during, at the end of the call. However, if you skip to page 21, you'll notice that across all of these four parts of the business, we've delivered very significant and meaningful enhancements to the platform. That included, as I've mentioned earlier, the relaunch of our Accelerator Core product, enhancements to our new non-custodial offer, the launch of small bond parcel service , mobile app, digital consent, adviser efficiency, as well as the iCapital announcements that I touched on. From a corporate sustainability perspective, again, it's a really pleasing year for the business.
As we touched on earlier, or previously, the main impact that we can have, as a business, is actually to continue to enhance our core business, given the nature of the business that we are in. Outside of that, however, we are also very focused on fostering diversity, talent, and well-being. A number of major investments throughout the year, but we're also really pleased to have set measurable gender diversity targets of 40/40/20 for the Board and Executive team. In 2024, we met that board target. We've also rolled out our inaugural three-year inclusion and diversity roadmap. From a positive social, environmental impact perspective, we've continued to expand the range of ESG options on the platform.
And across the various products, we now offer 76 themed funds and 200 funds with an above average or high sustainability rating as assessed by Morningstar. We've also granted AUD 116,000 to different charities from the Netwealth Impact Fund since its inception in 2021, and we'll continue to grow that and to make sure that we've got a positive contribution in the community. In regards to being genuine and transparent, this is also the first year that we've received our SOC 2 reasonable assurance from our auditors.
And this really provides external assurance that the effective controls are in place for the Netwealth platform over the security, availability, process, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of customer data, which we know is so important to our customers, in this day and age. We've also improved our human rights and modern slavery programming, and provided training, to our employees and our board. So on that, I'm gonna hand over to Grant Boyle, our CFO, who's gonna run through the financial metrics, for FY 2024. Thank you, Grant.
Yeah, thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Back to the numbers now. We'll go to slide 26. Matt went through these highlights before, just so they sink in, how we had really good revenue growth of AUD 40.5 million, which was 18.9% on the previous year. That landed in at AUD 255 million. EBITDA was at AUD 124.7 million, an increase of AUD 23.9 million or 23.8%. Really, really strong growth for the year, and we were very excited to hit those numbers. Moving through to slide 27, the revenue growth of 23.8%, which was predominantly driven by the growth in funds under administration, which grew by 25.2% over the same period.
Also had really strong transaction revenues, which were up 33% on the prior year. These were somewhat offset by the reductions in the cash balances and lower overall admin margins, but overall, we're very happy with the revenue growth we're able to achieve over that period. Increases in total operating expenses, on the other hand, grew at 14.5%, and that gap between the revenue and the expenses obviously contributed to an improving EBITDA margin, which was at 48.8%, and for the second half was approximately 50%. Tax-free NPAT was at AUD 83.4 million, an increase of AUD 16.2 million or 24.1%, and no coincidence, EPS increased by 24.1% also. As usual, we had exceptional cash generation.
We had very high pre-operating cash flow of AUD 127.3 million, and that flowed through to a dividend that was declared this morning at AUD 0.14 per share, which brings the total for the year at AUD 0.28, and that dividend was again, fully franked. So to summarize, the finances were... It was another really good operating result, really strong profit growth, and at the same time, we've been able to continue to invest for our future growth. Moving now to slide 28. These are some of the operating metrics that we report at the quarterly. Some of the, I think it's important to highlight them again, as they drive a lot of the, the profit growth that we've achieved. The FUA growth, again, was 25.2%. That was on the back of AUD 11.2 billion of net flows.
Non-custodial flows were at AUD 284 million. New service, as Matt mentioned, is now at AUD 448 million, which has been some really decent growth off a standing start. Market movement contributed AUD 6.5 billion to the growth in FUA, and this is something we've highlighted in recent updates, that market growth is definitely a positive contributor to our revenue, but it's much more muted impact than on our revenue than normal new flows due to the structure of our revenue model, which we can touch on a bit later if you choose. The cash transaction account is at 6.0%, which is down from 6.4% in the prior year. Moving now to slide 29.
This sets out the growth in our average fund account size. This is a really positive trend for us. The larger the account sizes deliver the next slide, which is the next chart across, which is the increasing revenue per account. We've been very consistent in being able to grow that metric, and that's, for us, the most important revenue metric, in that if we can grow our revenue per account, the economics for Netwealth remain very strong. So we grew the revenue per account by 117 per account this financial year, and the slide on the right shows the basis points, which on the surface looks like a disturbing trend, but you can see it's actually flattened out pretty nicely over recent years.
It did decrease in FY 2024, and that's really on the back of positive market movements, predominantly. The positive market movements actually have an inverse effect on basis points, as some of the revenue streams don't move up with the market, due to the fee caps that are in place. Also, we had lower average account. So we had lower average cash balances, so that had a slight drag on the basis points, particularly in the second half. So the second half, we had 31.1 basis points versus the average of 32 basis points for the year. One other thing to highlight on the revenue, we reclassified one item that, which was outside platform revenue this year.
The cost of capital recovery that we for the capital we provide for the super fund, we moved that into platform revenue. That's really probably where it always should have belonged. So we've now made that decision, and all the comparatives that you see there are on the same basis. It had about 0.8 basis point impact, a positive impact on the revenue basis points for the platform fee. Moving now to slide 30, which is just which shows the components of our revenue. We've achieved very impressive compound annual growth of 18.6%, steady improvement across all of the categories, and some demonstration of the diversification since we've progressed along the journey.
The only major change for the year, not that major, but the transaction revenue did grow as relative to admin fees over the last 12 months, and we're certainly off to a good start this year with transaction volumes due to the volatility showing some good signs. Slide 32. This sets out the changes in the... Actually, move to slide 31. Apologies. Back one slide. We've always been very disciplined in managing our costs, so we sort of try and balance the long-term growth objectives that we have, but whilst keeping the rate of expense growth under control, and this year we had operating expenses, which were up 14.5%. Major driver of that was, as always, employee benefits expense, which was up AUD 13 million for the year.
We added 60 roles, which I can touch on in the next slide, which is slide 32. Most of the roles historically have been in the technology area. We've got more of a mixture this year. If you call it the end of last year, we had an abnormally large number of vacancies in operations areas, so we filled those during the early part of the FY 2024. So that's why you see more roles hired in the SaaS and investment operations areas than normal. But we still added 16 to the technology team and similar amounts to operations, so 60 hires during the year.
So with that, we'll move to the final slide, which is sort of the summary, which is that we are in excellent financial position. We've got strong, strong balance sheet. We've got low capital expenditure. We've got cash reserves. We're growing at a rapid rate, but we've got plenty of runway, runway ahead, and therefore, we're, we're very confident in our, our outlook and our growth opportunities. And with that, I'll hand back to Matt Heine.
Thank you, Grant. And just to build on that outlook, we're obviously in fantastic financial shape, as Grant mentioned. We are very positive about our new business pipeline, and also our conversion rates, and we're seeing really good growth, and opportunity across all of our key segments. There's been several significant new client wins, that have all begun transitioning, at the start of the year and at the end of last year, and as you were saying on the first slide, that's resulted in approximately AUD 1.2 billion of net inflows, for July alone.
We do plan to continue our significant investments in our people, product, security, and technology capabilities, to ensure that we capture the substantial number of existing and emerging opportunities in the market, which we believe, in addition to the structural tailwinds, will continue our sustainable profit growth. This investment will result in a small percentage increase in the rate of expense growth in FY 2025 compared to 2024. All that said, we are very confident in our outlook and future growth opportunities, which we believe still remain extremely significant. And with that, we will open up to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then two. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. The first question today comes from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Morning, Matt. Morning, Grant. I'd like,
Hey, Siraj.
I'll ask three questions, if that's okay. But the first one, just on flows, and it's got multiple parts. Just can you just confirm that July is seasonally a quiet month? Just wondering whether, yeah, it's whether it's super strong because it's seasonally strong or seasonally soft. And just in terms of the transitions, d o you reckon this is, you know, it's front-end weighted towards the first half of the first quarter? Just trying to understand whether this continues for the whole of the financial year. And lastly, on the flows as well, you saw the news from AMP. I've had a few questions on whether this could be another tailwind for you. I know it's a bit early, but just, we're just keen to understand, how you're thinking about that. Thanks.
Yeah. Hey, thanks, Siraj. You're a little muffled, but I think I got the whole gist of it. Yeah, so we obviously reported the flows for July, which is different for us, but that was really to stop all the guessing games in terms of how much was market movement, how much was flow. So we just thought, let's, we know what the flow number is for July, so let's give it. It is diversified. It's not just any particular large group, but we did flag at the back end of last year that we had quite a few transitions that were lined up, and some of those had kicked off, but they were at the early stages.
So that's just those, that pipeline that we've been calling out for a while, is starting to flow through. In terms of how you think about for the rest of the year, we're obviously confident about the rest of the year, but we're not giving any particular guidance on whether that's a reflection of what the monthly flows is going forward because it's just too early to say.
Yeah, but you are correct that July is typically slightly softer than other months, and it has been a very strong start to the year.
And Matt, just on AMP, the changes announced last week, yeah, whether that's... Yeah, I mean, you had mentioned, you know, one of the other groups, change was positive, whether this has any impact at all. I mean, I know it's a bit early, but still.
Yeah, obviously, I mean, the news is only less than a week old, but, look, certainly we're always working closely with AMP, and we were getting good support out of the group. But, Entireti and Fortnum practices are all very good supporters of Netwealth. And we've got good relationship with the new licensee. So, we would imagine, as with all of these major changes, that there should be some really good opportunities as a result.
Just one quick one. The mention of practice management and advice management is pretty interesting. That seems new. So Matt, just keen to understand, you know, what you're trying to do there, and what you see as the opportunity. And is this a new revenue stream or just more about supporting the platform business? Thanks.
Sorry, Siraj, just the first bit of that question is a bit difficult to hear.
Just, just advice management and, practice management, the fact that you're heading into that area. Yeah, just keen to understand the strategic reason for that, and is that, is that a new revenue stream for you? Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely. So, it's certainly our real focus for the business over the last, you know, couple of years, and moving forward is really around what we're sort of at a high level classifying as advice enablement. Efficient, so that they can see more clients. And you'll have seen us reference a number of times throughout the announcement, that ability to sort of multiply our existing client base, by giving them tools such as records of advice, and much better transaction tools on the platform. The Xeppo acquisition is a big part of it. That now allows us to further capture data from other pockets within the industry. So for multidisciplinary firms, we can connect into data from around 40 different enterprise solutions, that can be delivered via the Netwealth portal.
So we can and will continue to develop the ability to show other platform information through our portals. But as a by-product of that, we've also got very significant data sources to provide very detailed practice reporting. So through the acquisition of Xeppo, we're able to move and offer a much broader solution to our clients without deviating or going into anything that's too, you know, creates new adjacencies.
As far as the new revenue stream, the business is effectively breakeven at the moment, and we will look to continue to grow the profitability, as there are a number of services within the Xeppo business, such as CRM, obviously the data piece, that we can sell to our existing client base. So, I wouldn't expect it to move the dial per se, but it's a really important part of the broader Netwealth stack that gives us a key point of differentiation in the market.
Thanks, Siraj.
Thank you. The next question comes from Nicholas McGarrigle, from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hey, team. Can you just give us a sense of the type of adviser groups that are making up the AUD 1.2 billion and maybe, or, you know, just the kind of momentum in the pipeline? And if any of those types of groups maybe have changed in composition versus, you know, a year or two years ago, because it feels like you're making really great progress across a broader suite of clients now than you may be used to?
Yeah, so, great, great mention before, there's no sort of one-off institutional accounts within that AUD 1.2 billion. It is extremely spread across those three key market segments that we've talked about, being the emerging, established, and mass affluent parts of the market. And I think if you were to look at the makeup of the platform first, so whether that's super retail, investment retail, or wholesale, the months would reflect that broadly. So, we think that that's going to continue. And, you know, whilst we will certainly from time to time see sort of, you know, those larger institutional flows, the flows achieved last financial year only included a couple of very sort of small institutional accounts, if you like. When you actually back those out, the growth on the previous financial year was significant.
Congratulations, congratulations on the new role, Nick, too.
Thank you. Now, my most passionate role is covering Netwealth, so-
Well, we hope you stick on it!
Y eah. In terms of the OpEx growth you've guided to, I think the wording's usually very considered. I think it's kind of a slight percentage increase on the 15% rate. Can you just talk through the kind of types of hires and maybe even a headcount number, if you've got that to hand, that feed into that guidance?
Yeah. We won't, won't give a particular headcount number. As we said, we had added 60 last year. We, if we're gonna grow by more than, in percentage terms than last year, you've got to think that it's gonna be a small increase on that. But we're not-- The reason for giving that was really, there is a lot of disparity amongst the analysts' ranges, just to try and narrow that out. We're not flagging it a massive increase, or else we would have said a small increase. So it's just, don't get too excited by it, but we've always put these things in for a reason. So just assume there will be the number will increase in percentage terms on what the increase was last year.
And I think as far as roles go, you know, it's the usual split. A couple of additional IT headcount and some small, or some one-off IT costs as well.
Yeah. They're pretty spread. Clearly, if we're growing at the rate that we expect to grow at, we're gonna have need to add some more service-type people to handle that growth. It's gonna be pretty much across the board, we would expect.
Just the last one from me. There's obviously been a bit of revenue margin compression from cash coming down, and I guess, account balances growing. The composition of new flows, does that look different in terms of the size of opportunity and hence the pricing that you're doing? Or how should we think about the revenue margin compression, moving forward?
I think the trend obviously has been that our account size is getting larger. But we talked about that for years, so you would need... You would think there would be some obvious compression. Revenue per account will go up, but there will be an increase in a decrease in revenue margin, all things being equal. And in terms of how steep that is, just depends on how skewed the mix is. These groups coming in the first quarter, and it's obviously early days, are very well diversified. But if we did have a success in a particularly high net worth group, that could move the revenue margin more quickly than obviously if it stays diversified like it is currently.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Bob Chen from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Morning, Bob.
Hey, guys. Morning, guys.
Hello.
Just to follow up on the cost guidance question. Yeah, obviously, a good step up in second half EBITDA margins. Should we expect that EBITDA margin to maybe see a bit of pullback on this step up in cost growth into next year?
Depends on what happens to the revenue line, yes. Yeah, like, we're not going to give any further guidance in terms of what we've provided today. So that's kind of where we're landed. If you've all come to a view in terms of what our likely flows are gonna be, and that will drive our revenue. Our expenses will be a small increase in percentage terms from last year. So that's as much as we're gonna provide you today, Bob.
Okay, cool. And then just looking at your sort of cohort charts, it looks like the newer advisers contributed more this year compared to last year to your net inflows. Was that because they joined the platform earlier, or are you seeing some new advisers accelerating their transitions onto the platform?
No, I think, you might call 2023 a long time ago now, it was a pretty tough year. So whilst we recorded pretty good net inflows, for that year, a lot of the transitions that had been one, had paused or not started, whereas, they really started to gather pace, early in the, FY 2024 year. So, it was really, I guess, the, the backlog of, opportunities and, and business transitions from 2023 that, kickstarted, earlier in the year.
And we had a very a very strong year winning new groups, so.
Correct.
I think typically, you'd see that would be more 80/20, I think, if you're or maybe even 85/15. So this is a little higher than normal.
Okay, perfect. And just the final one, yeah, obviously, a fair bit of tech investment at the moment. I mean, how should we measure the success of this tech investment? Should we sort of look at your full growth accelerating on the back of this tech investment, or is it more the revenue side with, you know, additional non-platform revenues coming on as well?
We've always invested into our tech, as you know, it's effectively what our business is and our proposition. So the success of the investment will be continued sustainable growth.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. The next question comes from Olivia Cullen, from E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi, gents, can you hear me okay?
We can.
Perfect. Just a question on Xeppo. Apologies if I missed it somewhere in the disclosure, but what's the size of that business at revenue, if you could? And then, is the costs, that will, I guess, get consolidated, is that included in the kind of cost growth, guidance, or is that on a like-to-like basis?
Yeah, so the cost guidance is not, it does not include Xeppo specifically. And as Matt said, it is breakeven. The revenue is approximately AUD 3 million.
Okay, thanks. And then I guess, you know, on the cost growth again, like, longer term, do you expect, you know, do you expect to return to a significant degree of operating leverage or, you know, is the view that, well, as long as the revenue opportunities are there, you're gonna, you're gonna continue to invest to maintain your gap between yourself and, you know, the other platforms?
Yes, I think we've always been hesitant to predict expanding EBITDA margins, although we've always been able to achieve very good EBITDA margins. So, at the moment, our second half was about 65%. We don't have a long-term target for it, but we have the ability to let that expand if we do slow down expense growth at any particular stage. At the moment, we've flagged there's gonna be a small increase, but we're not, we haven't flagged, like we did a number of years ago, that we were accelerating our expense growth in any significant way.
So I think the answer is that it's there if we choose to let it expand, but at the moment, we see the opportunity more around building functionality, so we can continue to grow into the future and make sure that our technology is in the best shape it can be to handle the level of growth that we think is available.
And it also allows us, which we've demonstrated over the years, to absorb any pricing pressure that might come into the market.
Yeah, no, perfect. And, sorry, just to follow up on maybe Siraj's questions where, you know, he asked about the shape of some of those transitions, you know, from that backlog that started flowing through in the fourth quarter and in the first quarter. You know, is there a view as to, you know, how much of that backlog kind of delivers into first half versus second half, or do you think it's gonna be relatively even?
We've got good strong flows, and we're very positive about the year. It's always difficult to predict the exact timing when it's outside our control, but we know that it's started well, which is great.
Okay. All right, perfect. Thanks, guys, appreciate it.
Thank you. The next question is a follow-up from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Grant, can you give us an update on the cash balance? Just wondering whether that's picked up or staying steady.
We haven't reported that number. We'll report it again at the quarter, but in terms of the seasonality, as those who have followed us for a while, it always builds up somewhat in the first month or two of each financial year, and that's just on the back of the fund manager distributions and share dividends. So, it is typically higher this time of the year than at other times, and that's proven the case this year.
Okay, thanks. And just one last one. In the outlook statement in the annual report, there's a mention about, you know, you're taking control or, you know, doing more in-house development of the key platform features. Can you just expand on that? I'm just wondering whether you're moving away from Iress or something like that. Just keen to understand that bit.
Yes, I just on that comment particularly, so we've been lifting and building out a lot of our capability on the platform now for many years, and that includes some of the key features of Acurity. So we are gonna continue that strategy and make sure that we've diversified any risk away, but also more importantly, by building it in-house and developing a lot of those, that sort of core capability, it gives us complete control and flexibility over the product into the future. So where it makes sense, we will continue to lift capability out of Acurity and build it ourselves.
Thanks.
Thank you. At this time, we're showing no further questions. I'll hand the conference back to Matt Heine for any closing remarks.
Thanks very much. Thanks, everyone, for dialing in today. As mentioned, we're really pleased with the results that we've achieved for 2024, and feeling very positive, about the outlook for this financial year. Look forward to catching up separately.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.