I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Matt Heine, CEO and Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this morning's call as we deliver our first half results for financial year 2025. My name is Matt Heine. I'm the CEO and Managing Director of Netwealth, and it gives me absolutely great pleasure to introduce our CFO, our new CFO, for his inaugural results, Hayden Stockdale. Hayden, as many of you would know, joined us back in late November and officially took over as CFO on the 31st of January, replacing Grant Boyle. So thank you, Hayden, and welcome to the results call. Before I start.
Thank you.
I would just like to acknowledge Country, and we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands that we work and live on. Our office here in Melbourne is on the lands of the Traditional Owners, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin 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. If we can please turn to page seven, I'll jump straight into it. As you can see, it's been a fantastic start to the year. I'll run through some of the key metrics in a moment, and by way of quick update, as of the 18th of February, I'm pleased to announce that our FUA was AUD 105.4 billion, and we've recorded a good start to the year with circa AUD 1.5 billion received calendar year to date.
Moving back to the actual half year, FUA at AUD 101.6 billion was a AUD 23.6 billion increase compared to the prior corresponding period, a big increase of 30.2%. This reflected strong markets, but also incredibly strong net flows. And in fact, the two quarters were both records in their own right, with AUD 8.5 billion received in the half and an 80.2% increase on the prior corresponding period. Importantly, we were able to convert that FUA and flow increase into income, and income increased by AUD 32 million- AUD 155.4 million, an increase of 26%. EBITDA was up 32.8%, an increase of AUD 19.3 million- AUD 78 million for the half. And our EBITDA margin of 50.2% was a 5.4% increase on the prior corresponding period.
From an NPAT perspective, on slide eight, you'll see that we increased NPAT by AUD 18.3 million- AUD 57.6 million, an increase of 46.6%, which saw strong account growth, an increase in our cash transaction account, and the fund, that is the amount of money invested into our managed account and managed investments for the six months grew by AUD 5.9 billion, a 32.9% increase, which really reflects the continued growth in the managed account particularly and the focus of the industry as we grow that particular product. If we can move across to slide nine, I think what's really important, though, is when you take all of those numbers into account, it actually comes back to that point I mentioned earlier, which is that ability to convert the growth of the business, both in our FUA and net inflows, into EBITDA.
You can see over the last two previous halves, so first half 2024, first half 2023, we've seen a consistent and increasing growth in both our income numbers, but also, importantly, our EBITDA margin as we continue to get that operational efficiency, leading to some very strong EBITDA growth numbers, which Hayden will work through in a bit more detail in the financial section. Moving across to slide 11, one of the key parts of our strategy that we've talked about now on a number of occasions when we've caught up in previous results is just the extension into the new markets. We believe that there is significant growth still to come from our direct market, being the platform market of AUD 1.1 trillion, but also as we look to expand into both smaller balance or emerging affluent clients and also the high net worth and institutional markets.
These charts here really show that we are getting great coverage across all our key markets, so emerging affluent, mass affluent, and the high net worth, with about a third flowing into each of those markets. Importantly, we're seeing strong expansion of our high-valued customer tiers, so a 2.1% increase in the high net worth and family office space, and also really good, strong, and continued growth in our core product, which was relaunched around 18 months ago. So the strategy is working. We're seeing great growth in our core business, and we're being successful in those adjacent markets as well. Moving across to slide 14, one of the interesting parts of our business is really the mix between existing clients, which continue to provide significant inflows and support for the platform and the business, and how that interacts with the newer customers coming onto the platform as well.
For the calendar year just ended, nearly AUD 10 billion, 67% of our total flows actually came from customers that we've been working with for more than four plus years, so very mature customers writing good new organic business. The clients that have come on, or the financial intermediaries that have come on in calendar 2024, so a new sort of business and the relationship, while they contributed AUD 1.5 billion, the expectation is that in year two, that number will significantly increase. You can see that the cohort analysis on the right-hand side really shows that, which is in the first year, customers start to migrate and move customers onto the platform as well as that organic business. In year two, we really see that picking up. Why is that important? It gives us a very high level of confidence over future flows.
A big part of that flow, as you can see, is coming from those existing customers, but we're getting really good new inflows that continue to build in years two and three as well from the new cohorts of financial intermediaries. Onto page 16, touch on a few of these things. Our strategy is working. We continue to build it out and develop. We've successfully delivered on our roadmap for the first half of the year with a number of new features and benefits delivered not only to end customers, but also to advisers with a view to make them as efficient as possible. Through the halfway, we announced the purchase, the full purchase of Xeppo and also Flux, which are key parts of our strategy when it comes to expanding into those adjacencies, which I talked about earlier. The Xeppo business has been successfully integrated into the business.
They're all now part of our tech stack. The teams are working really well together, and now we're working together on that future roadmap to make sure that we can really deliver the market-leading data and data analytics and data management platform to the industry, which not only supports their business and licensees, but also underpins and supports the platform and a lot of the products that we have and are building out. The mobile technology continues to be enhanced with some exciting new developments coming out in the next three to six months, and they're currently in pilot at the moment with a number of groups, and the Flux business is also integrated, and we're seeing some early wins with advice groups actually adopting their technology and content to service their next generation of young adult clients.
So, really pleased with how the strategy is working and particularly the fact that it's delivering so closely to our market segments and what's been discussed previously. Jumping ahead to page 24, from a corporate sustainability perspective, it's really important that we continue to invest into our core business. The reality is that when we look at our overarching objective, which is to improve the financial futures of a million Australians, what we do day-to-day as a business through superannuation investments and helping people with their financial futures is the biggest impact that we can have. Outside of that, though, we are working on a number of initiatives across our three core pillars. That is, to foster diversity and talent and improve well-being. And really pleased to say through the period that our engagement scores for employees continue to increase and are generally very happy.
We're also creating positive social and environmental impact. And I won't go through all of those items, but we have been very active in the community. We've got a number of philanthropic partners that we're working very closely with. And one of the stats that I'm very proud of is the fact that now more than 125,000 kids have gone through our financial literacy program in schools in conjunction with Banqer Primary. Also, a range of new regulatory uplifts and frameworks that have been delivered in process. And that really ties back to our ability and desire to be genuine and transparent in all of our dealings. So plenty to discuss. Hopefully, you've enjoyed the results. We think they're fantastic. Hayden is now going to go through them in a bit more detail. If you can hold till the end, we will take questions.
But on that note, I'd like to hand over to Hayden for our financial section and for his inaugural results. Over to you, Hayden.
Wonderful. Thanks, Matt. It's a very warm introduction. And hopefully, this is the first of many of these results presentations we actually get to do together. So warm welcome to everyone as well, and thanks for everyone's participation today. And let's dive straight into some, I think, what are some very exciting numbers starting on slide 26. Now, Matt hit the high notes of these earlier, but I really want to reinforce these because I think they actually truly are quite stunning. To begin with, we delivered an 80% increase in FUA net flows, driving a 30% increase in total FUA and generating a 26% rise in revenue to more than AUD 155 million that you'll see there. Now, that's an over AUD 30 million improvement in revenue just for the half.
As we grew, we were also able to do so very efficiently, as Matt said, and we yielded a 5.4% productivity gain in EBITDA. The combination of the strong revenue growth and the efficient scaling has actually meant we've generated a 33% increase in our EBITDA to AUD 78 million for the half. Pleasingly, given we actually capitalized very little, our conversion of EBITDA was to over AUD 75 million of pre-tax operating cash, which is very, very strong, almost 100% conversion rate there. You'll also see our NPAT rose strongly by 47%, and we benefited there from a lower effective tax rate, which I'll touch on in just a bit. Lastly, on this slide, I really want to draw everyone's attention to our Rule of 40 score. Now, this is a metric that's actually gaining increasing attention outside of the SaaS sector.
Here you'll see our Rule of 40, which everyone's benefited, if you're not too sure, it's the sum of our revenue growth and our EBITDA margin. Our Rule of 40 score was 76.2%, which is amazingly strong and clearly best of breed amongst our peer group. And it really underscores the sustainability of our high growth, high margin, and highly cash-generative business model. So I think all up, a great set of numbers and something we're truly proud of and very excited to announce today. Moving on to slide 27 quickly. This morning, you would have seen that the board declared an AUD 0.175 per share dividend, which is an increase of 25% and also represents a payout ratio of about 75%.
There are some callouts on this slide in the bottom right listing some of the non-operational impacts on our accounts, which I think are important context, in particular for our effective tax rate that I mentioned earlier. I won't go into details of those here, but I'm very happy to answer any questions on these later. Next up is slide 28. Here you can see the key components of our revenue and how the base of that revenue has actually been broadening over time, and the one thing I want to point out in this slide is that transaction fees now represent just over 14% of our platform revenue.
And if you overlay this with the 24% growth that we achieved in our platform revenue in the half, you can actually do a back calculation and get to the fact that our dollar transaction revenue, so in dollar terms, grew by almost 50% in the half, which is clearly a very strong result and a very significant contributor to our growth. Moving on to the next slide, 29, and operating leverage. I think everyone knows we've been very disciplined in managing our costs, and it's been no different at all this time. Now, our cost management has actually enabled us to deliver an EBITDA margin north of 50%, which I think on any measure is clearly stunning.
But there's actually one thing in having high margins, and there's actually another thing in being able to show you have a very fine level of control and understanding of them and can actually deliver efficiencies over time while also investing for the future. And I think that's exactly what we've done here. We've shown meaningful operating leverage in very particular areas that can expand margins while we also grow. So in the half just gone, we grew revenue by 26%, and yet our largest cost item, being staff, grew by only 15.5%. So the delta there represents a massive 10.5% headcount productivity gain. And that's flowing straight through to our EBITDA. Just going into a little bit more detail there, in the half, those efficiencies were generally across our G&A, so our general and administrative function, where you'd expect to see efficiencies as we grow.
But we also got scale efficiencies out of our staff spend on technology, and pleasingly also in our delivery functions, even though they're more variable cost in nature. But as I said, we want to be investing for the future too. And so we're very deliberately edging up our spend on certain things to capture future growth and scale efficiencies, with the main area here being the non-staff investment in our platform and data technologies. And to me, this whole sort of efficiency and investment theme is super, super exciting. And while Matt said, I'm sort of new in the role, only three months in, I think this area of efficiencies together with growth are probably the two areas of CFO that I really want to concentrate on. Just quickly on the next slide, you'll see our headcount growth.
So segueing from the previous slide, it's actually no mean feat to have gotten a 10.5% productivity gain from headcount and yet have still added 55 staff during the period. Sorry, I should say 51 staff during the period. I think that really underlines the scale of what's possible, and that's being efficient and investing, being efficient and investing. And the last thing I think to note here, and Matt will get to this a little bit later, is that we are expecting to accelerate our headcount investment in certain areas soon. Moving now on to slide 31 and our funds metrics. I think it's important to stress the strength of these as they really are the engine that makes everything possible within the company.
And the first point to note here, as Matt did highlight earlier, is that our record half of net flows was actually made up of two record consecutive quarters. So that's showing that we're really running with some very strong volume momentum at the moment. And at AUD 8.5 billion, it was a massive 80% increase on last year. And that's powered us to a total FUA number north of AUD 100 billion for the first time ever. Okay, on the next slide, again, just quickly, 32, this sets out three things across the three charts there. The first is that growth in our average account size, which has been a real positive trend for us over time. Secondly, in the middle, our platform earn rate actually rose slightly since the second half of last year.
While it's down about 1.6 basis points- 31.4 basis points from 33 basis points in the first half of last year, that's actually only a 5% contraction, which can be entirely accounted for by just the market movement in our FUA for the last half alone. Okay? That's not accounting for any of the fee tiering or caps or institutional flows or the like. I think in that context, we're really, really pleased with that too. Lastly here, our average revenue per account has risen by 10% since last year. That builds very consistent growth that we've had historically as well. With that, I'll move on to my final slide, which is the summary. In short, we're in excellent financial position. As I said, we've got high-quality recurring revenue. We're growing rapidly. We've got strong and improving operational leverage.
That's all showing through in our stellar Rule of 40 score of 76.2%. We're investing for the future, and yet we've actually got a clean P&L with very low CapEx. We're generating significant cash. We're raising our dividend, and quite frankly, feeling generally very, very confident in our outlook and growth opportunities, so on that note, I'll pause and I'll hand back to Matt.
Thanks, Hayden. It's going to be hard to top that outlook from you, but as you heard from both my opening remarks and also Hayden's analysis, the business is performing really well. We remain very confident of the future prospects of the company and flows. As you saw, we've got significant support from our existing customers. We're signing up and winning good quality advice groups that are now producing and will continue to produce over the next many years. And the market outlook is certainly positive. We have flagged a number of things. One of the key areas is that given the very positive outlook for the business, we want to make sure that we are capitalizing on the opportunity. And we have brought forward, therefore, some planned initiatives to make sure that we can deliver on them sooner rather than later.
In the second half, there will be an increase to headcount. And as you'll see there, inclusive of the Xeppo and Flux headcount costs, sorry, we would expect costs to grow by about 5% in the second half and a small increase of AUD 2 million in our capitalized software. Beyond that, there's a number of minor product changes. But overall, as I said, the business is performing very well, and we're feeling confident about the future. So on that, we'll be happy to take some questions and hand over to those on the call.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star and two. If you're on speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question.
I'll take those. No questions, or someone's not taken me off.
We have the first question from the line of Bob Chen from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Thank you.
Morning, Matt and Hayden. Just a couple of questions for me. Obviously, coming off a couple of record quarters, and it looks like your third quarter has started pretty well with that AUD 1.5 billion to date. How's the balance of the year sort of shaping up on the back of that? Are you seeing the pipeline going stronger from here, or is it sort of broadly even with what you've seen in the first half?
Yes, thanks for the question. We obviously haven't made any sort of forecast flow. Not that I've provided any forecast flow numbers, but it has been a really good start to the year, and we're very confident about the current pipeline. The pipeline is large, and importantly, it is diversified across all regions. So we're seeing fantastic opportunities across each of the states. We've made some key appointments within the sales team, which has helped drive future flows. And we're seeing really good diversification across our client segments. So I obviously talked about the three parts being the emerging affluent, mass affluent, and also high net worth. The pipeline represents all of those, and yeah, feeling good about where we're at.
Okay, great. And then just on the OpEx side of things, I mean, I think your sort of second half outlook sort of implies maybe 21% OpEx growth for the year. Do you see this year as a bit of a reinvestment year, and then we could see that rate of growth slowing into the following year, or is this sort of a new baseline?
Hayden, do you want to take that one?
I'm sorry, could you just repeat the last bit of that again, Bob?
Just whether or not you guys are seeing FY2025 as a bit of a larger reinvestment year before slowing down that pace of reinvestment into next year?
Yeah. So look, we have, as you'll see on the outlook slide, we've declared that we're going to be investing an additional AUD 2 million in our software CapEx in the coming half. We haven't made any judgment or decision, I should say, about what lies beyond. But one of the things that I think is really encouraging here is the fact that the top line growth, when you mix it with the scale efficiencies that we can get by having an element of our cost base being fixed and then finding some efficiencies in parts of our variable cost base is that we can actually drive our EBITDA margin up. And I think we've shown that three half on half, as per one of the slides in the pack.
So what that enables us to do, Bob, is really, I suppose, moderate potentially a little bit of what flows through to EBITDA and invest where we see there's good returns into the future. Now, I'm not making any commitment there about what we're planning to do in FY2026 or beyond, but we certainly have the levers to be continuing to invest in CapEx, whilst I think at the same time either maintaining our EBITDA margins or potentially letting them just continue to expand as well slightly.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We have the next question from Nick McGarrigle from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Good day. Thanks for taking questions. I just had a question around some of the pricing changes. Obviously, the revenue margin was quite strong in the half. I assume part of that was the acquisitions coming through for a more complete period. But can you just talk through the rationale around the cash rate change? And then does that have any implications for fees elsewhere across the rate cut?
Yeah, thank you. So I talked all about the total revenue mix, as you know, and we saw great growth across a number of those revenue lines, in particular within transactions. Having said that, we have done analysis, and as part of our annual review, we're probably slightly out of market when it came to the cash rate that we're paying. And we wanted to make sure that that was sort of at the median or market. It also just means that we future-proof any sort of pricing compression in the future. So we want to make sure that we can pass on attractive pricing to our customers for some of the largest strategic accounts. We are seeing a little bit of pricing pressure in the market, and that will obviously allow us to absorb it. But yeah, it's just part of the broader pricing review and pricing matrix.
So it's more in response to pricing pressure, having flexibility to be able to drop admin but keep the overall margin the same, or are you kind of leading some of that pricing?
Pricing's part of it, but there's also a number of areas of the business that continue to be uplifted. So clearly, the regulatory environment continues to make sure that we're doing the right thing and that there's good coverage across all of the different teams. So it's just an appropriate time to do it.
Okay, thanks. And then I guess in terms of the flow outlook, I think the year obviously tends to start a bit more seasonally quiet, but you've commented on some transition wins. I mean, have they been maybe in the last three or four months that you've had additional wins that give you confidence about the outlook for further flow growth?
Yes, the pipeline's very strong at the moment. We've had some good wins in the last 12 months. We've had good wins in the last six and three months. So as per normal, there is that sort of seasonal element to it, but equally, we've got some good transitions starting as well as some new accounts that have confirmed that they're going to be moving in the last month or two as well.
All right, great. I'll hop back in the queue. Thanks.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Cameron Halkett from Wilsons Advisory. Please go ahead.
Hi Matt. Hi, Hayden. Might just start, I suppose, quickly on the tax side of things. Obviously, a bit lower than usual this half. Hayden, is that best framed as a one-off just due to the nature of expenses incurred this half, or is it something we should all be considering looking ahead?
Yeah. So Cameron, there are really two parts to that. If you have a look on slide 27, we've given some numbers there in the bottom right. So the largest part was AUD 2.8 million, and that was a tax credit relating to an employee share trust. Now, that is effectively a timing difference. So we would have received that tax benefit at the time anyway of incurring the share-based payment expense. So it's really just moving when that tax benefit's actually recorded. And then the smaller component, which is the R&D tax incentive of AUD 1.6 million, to the extent that we continue to do R&D tax claims, then you should expect that we would be receiving a benefit of some sort as to whether it's 1.6 or something different. I don't know.
But the one thing to point out there is that that tax incentive claim benefit was for a full financial year, FY 2023, and clearly, we're only reporting half-year financials here as well.
Yep. Okay. And then one, I suppose, around the additions to headcount seen through the half. Matt, in particular, quite the step, I suppose, on the distribution product and marketing side. Usually, they've been adding around the sort of mid-single digits in terms of net new staff members. So I suppose what's the story here is that's been to ramp up exposure to other areas of the market you're looking to target, or Netwealth is just getting larger and just naturally needs more people?
Yeah, there's certainly an aspect to that. But clearly, we're seeing really good opportunity in the market and want to make sure that we capitalize on it. There's a few extra heads in there as well in our training relationship team. So where sort of senior BDMs come on, they typically will work individually for a period, and then we add a training relationship manager to what we call a sales pod. So there's a little bit of that. But overall, it just really reflects growth in the size of the business, but also our desire to make sure that we capitalize on all the opportunities in the market at the moment. And that really is across the board in each state.
Yeah. And maybe I'll just add to that too is the heads there cover distribution, product, and marketing. So distribution and marketing, clearly sort of sales-oriented, sort of growth-oriented. Product is probably more akin to technology in some ways. So it's an unusual sort of grouping of those. And there was actually a little bit of movement within the groups as well between tech and product during the half. So some of that is a reflection of that as well.
Okay. And so just quickly on, I suppose, the headcount, the key focus there for second half, given you've sort of flagged it's looking to continue to be another strong half for hiring. What should we expect given Netwealth is usually sort of added on average around about 16 heads a year? Thanks.
Do you want me to just add that, Matt?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah. So look, the outlook statement that we've provided there is that headcount growth will increase. So not necessarily headcount will increase, but headcount growth will increase. So if you have a look that we added 51 during the half, that's a base number on which to establish that outlook statement. So I think you just need to read those two things together, Cameron.
Great. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Hayden.
Pleasure. Next question.
Thank you. We have the next line of Simon Fitzgerald from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Morning, Simon. Thanks for taking my quote.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Just really briefly on the tax rate, what is your expectation for the tax rate for the full year?
Yes, that's not something that we have published. But look, it wouldn't be too hard to back calculate that. As I said, the employee share trust is effectively a timing difference. Yep. And look, we are in the process of doing our FY2024 R&D tax claim. Whether or not we actually manage to achieve that in the current half or not still is open. But look, everything is very, very clean, very clear. And it's really those two impacts, the share trust and the tax incentive that are going to the R&D tax incentives that are going to move that around. There's nothing else we're expecting.
I'm just curious though, why an R&D tax incentive tax credit of AUD 1.6 million is claimed in the first half 2025, which relates to FY 2023?
Because we have only recently processed that claim and have brought that to account.
Was there anything done in the FY2024 year for R&D tax incentives that relate to the FY2023 year?
No.
Okay. That's fine. And then just a broader question for you, Matt. Obviously, superannuation is a big component in your flows and your FUA. There's probably likely a larger pot out there which relates to non-superannuation private assets held. And I would imagine that Netwealth would have a good exposure to that just because you do have quite a good exposure to higher net worth individuals. Have you had any thoughts about what the size of that market looks like and how much is actually coming onto platforms? And I'm not talking about the sort of non-custody stuff. I'm just sort of for a minute thinking about the size of that pot of privately held assets that are not part of superannuation.
Yeah. So that's obviously we see as a huge opportunity. So the actual number is quite difficult to quantify. I know some of our peers have attempted to, and we hear anything from AUD 3.5 trillion-AUD 7 trillion. So it's one that you'll sort of size up yourself if you like. But we're certainly seeing movement. So if we look at our own book and a number of the discussions that we're having where we've either been successful moving across or will be, it's institutional accounts where they've been on more traditional custody platforms which have got limited functionality and can be quite expensive. We're seeing family offices moving significant money across where they may have historically invested directly whether locally or internationally and run that on Xero, some other systems, spreadsheets, etc.
And obviously, the broking market is something that we're actively pursuing with a number of discussions where we're looking at combining individual HIN reporting with our broader platform capability, so that broking market's something that we certainly want to participate in and will continue to build out throughout the course of the next couple of years.
Sounds good. And then just the final question. I'm sorry if you've mentioned this already or I missed it in one of the slides, but I was just curious in terms of the heads that were added this time around how much related to development versus distribution and other areas?
Yeah. We haven't provided it. Yeah. We haven't provided a split of the 13 in distribution, product, and marketing. We haven't provided a split as to what is distribution, what is product, and what is marketing.
Any thoughts on that then?
It's 13 across. Let me take that one offline.
Okay. Sure. No worries. All right. No more questions. Thank you.
Thank you. We have the next question from Siraj Ahmed from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi, Matt. Hi, Hayden. Morning. Some of these questions might be repeats because I'm just focusing on multiple results. Matt, first one, on that AUD 3.5 billion, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think last year you had AUD 1.5 billion as well. Can you just let us know if that's correct? And maybe second part on that, I know you've flagged quite a few large transitions, right, especially from one of the competitors' consolidating platforms. Has that really kicked off? Yeah, just that would be helpful. Thanks.
Yeah. So the AUD 1.5 billion, I believe, is very similar to this time last year. So there is the seasonal aspect, but it is good start to the year, and those flows are coming from a variety of sources. So as I mentioned earlier, we're not making any flow forecasts, but we're comfortable where we're sitting at the moment. So there's a number of transitions happening across the board from a number of competitors. I think the one that you're referring to, there's a couple of very large ones. One is well underway, and the other one is still very much at the beginning. So they're certainly not going to drive all of our flows moving forward, but they'll contribute well in addition to everything else that's coming in.
Super. That's helpful. Second one, maybe for Hayden. And I know you were not there when the initial cost guidance was given, but it was supposed to be, I think, modestly higher. It's come in at 20%, right? So I think last year was 15%. So it seems like some of this is tech and comms pressure. Just keen to understand if that was unplanned. And secondly, I think Bob might have asked this, but I think second half is accelerating to 23% growth in terms of OpEx. Is that the level we should take into next year, or do you reckon some of this tech and comms spend can come down?
The best thing for me to point you towards there again is what's in the outlook statement. So we are expecting our operational expenses in the current half we're in to grow from the first half run rate by about 5%. And on top of that, there's a little bit more on capitalized software. Now, that 5%, you can take it that the vast majority of that will be in headcount. And then that obviously links back to the earlier comments about growing 51 heads in the half and expecting headcount growth to increase as well. So yeah, that's where the majority of the additional spend is.
Yeah, thanks. Just clarifying, that 51 included Xeppo and Flux, right? Are you saying second half will be more than the 51 or excluding Flux and Xeppo?
No, it would be including Flux and Xeppo. So more than 51.
Okay. Interesting.
There's clearly a large number of heads to add, and I think in the past, we haven't necessarily been as successful in hiring people as quickly as we would have liked, but I'm not too sure what will play out, obviously, for the remainder of the half.
Got it. Last one, maybe one for Matt. Matt, in terms of trading revenue, that's a pretty solid outcome. I think this is partly a function of in-housing that you did last year. Is there more to go here? I know you're doing some bulk functionality, but just keen to understand, is it cyclical or is it structural in what you have done? I guess just in terms of us modeling it, looking ahead. Thanks.
Yeah. So obviously, this is the one part of our business that's not totally predictable or recurring in its nature, but we've seen a big uplift in the volume of it. So there's a number of things that we've done that have contributed to that increase in the volume of trades. One is, as you correctly say, we've set up and released our trading desk. So the trading desk effectively helps large clients and advice firms that are looking for more of a high-touch service to trade via us as opposed to external. So we've seen really good success in that. We've also now started to trade international for certain groups via that desk, but also we've uplifted our international trading capability. We've actually seen really big uptake of international in general across the platform.
So that's grown pretty significantly as people look to get overseas exposure through direct holdings as opposed to through funds. That's driving some of it. And as the managed account grows, a reasonable component of that is through direct equity. So the bigger the managed account, the more turnover, the more trading. So across the board, there's a number of initiatives that have been put in place to really sort of drive that trading revenue up. And now we're starting to see the benefits of that.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. We have the next question from Scott Hudson from MST . Please go ahead.
Good morning, Matt and Hayden. Just a couple of questions from me. Firstly, just referencing your slide on page 35 on, I guess, AI, could you maybe give us a sense of what benefits AI have delivered already from a cost perspective?
Yeah. So probably can't give you quantifiable at this stage, although we are starting to look and tie headcount savings to the different initiatives. But there's been major upgrades made to our contact center technology and how they operate. So we're seeing a lot of time being saved on the responses that are provided to clients, the quality of the responses that are being given to clients, and also just the overall quality makes it a lot easier to assess and review it at scale. But also small things such as call wrapping. So rather than agents now having to spend sort of two to five minutes typing up notes post-call, all of the calls are transcribed and automatically summarized, which agents can then check in and move on fairly quickly.
We're seeing really good capacity being released there, and that's resulting in more time to train, lower waiting times. And over time, we would expect that to reduce the requirement for headcount growth as well. We're also pushing ahead and further automating a lot of our documents. We're indexing, I don't have the numbers on me, unfortunately, so categorizing, indexing, and recognizing a lot of the paper that comes into our business. They're working at the moment to now extract data from those forms and, more importantly, automatically process that data straight through into our system so that we believe we'll have some major efficiency gains. The developers, we're pushing the take-up of that so that it's making them more efficient. And that will certainly be a big focus for next year.
If you believe the hype, Microsoft's suggesting that using their Copilot tools, you should be able to get at least 30% developer efficiency. So we want to make sure that as a target, we are absolutely working towards those numbers. Personally, I know I use it all the time, and that's freeing up probably hours, if not more, a week. And that's certainly consistent across the business. We're seeing some really interesting use cases. So we're continuing to implement, identify, and use it wherever it makes sense and where possible. So yeah, we absolutely believe that's going to have a big impact moving forward.
That's great. Thanks. And then just, I guess, you've seen a very robust net flow environment over the past two quarters and the start of this quarter. Could you sort of give us a sense of where you feel that or what's driving that robust uplift? It seems across the broader market, to be fair, so not just yourself and maybe your closest peer, but it seems like the overall advice market is pretty buoyant. Could you maybe give us a sense of what's driving that?
It's pretty multifactor. So certainly, we're seeing good flows from incumbent platforms where advisrs see benefits to moving across to Netwealth, whether that's for the product range that we offer, the service, the capability, the whole range of reasons why different advisers may choose to work with Netwealth. But clearly, that's a key driver of flows. The advice industry is definitely seeing a buoyant environment. Markets have been good, and that definitely drives positive sentiment and new client growth. But also picking up, I think it was on Scott's comment earlier, we are also being successful in dragging money from non-traditional platform sources into the platform, whether that's through sort of industry funds or emerging affluent channels, and also that high-net-worth channel as well. So we're working with new clients that traditionally wouldn't have been platform clients, and that's been a really successful strategy.
So yes, buoyant market, but also delivering on our strategy across all those other aspects as well.
Thanks. And I noticed in the APRA data that your sort of competitive flows from a superannuation perspective are very strong or have been very strong. Is that taking share from retail superannuation, or do you feel like you're also starting to maybe eat into some of the industry funds from a superannuation perspective?
All of the above. So a couple of years ago, I think we called out that we'd obviously spent a number of years focusing on building out our high-net-worth proposition. And while our mass affluent and superannuation growth was good, we felt there was more that we could do there. And so we've added a number of platform features to sort of drive that efficiency for the mass affluent adviser, but also the core product, which we were seeing earlier in the deck, has really hit the mark and had really great market fit. So that's helped advisers move money from industry funds, but also service that cohort of clients better. So again, it's not just one thing.
It's a number of things that we've done, but certainly really pleasing to see that superannuation part of our business firing as well as obviously the other parts that we've talked about historically.
That's great. Thanks very much.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Simon Fitzgerald from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Sorry. Just a quick follow-up. I was just a little bit more curious and wanted to unpack a little bit more about the competitive landscape. You did mention, Matt, that you've changed your pricing structure to be ready and be a bit more flexible there. And you did say you're noticing some minor price competition. But just interested to know whether you're seeing new participants starting to turn up at the tendering process or anything like that.
So not new participants. There is obviously all the usual suspects. And inevitably, it's likely to be us in the final two with the incumbent. CFS Edge is coming up occasionally, and that's where we're seeing certainly a bit of pricing pressure. But again, nothing's really changed since we last caught up.
Okay. Thanks, Matt.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand the conference back over to Mr. Heine for closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the comments at the end. We're really pleased with the result. Great to have Hayden on board, and congratulations to him on his inaugural set of results. Look forward to catching up with everyone.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you. That does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.