Morning, welcome to the Aberdeen Group Full Year Results 2025 media call. This call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Jason Windsor, the Chief Executive. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our results call, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Siobhan Boylan. Let me start by acknowledging we're obviously experiencing heightened geopolitical uncertainty with the conflict in the Middle East, and we hope that will be resolved as quickly as possible. I'll just now turn to a short summary of our results, then I'll open up to your questions. 2025 was a year of significant progress for Aberdeen. A year in which we grew group profits, grew in wealth, and continued to reposition our investments business. Having set out our strategy a year ago, I'm pleased with what we've delivered. We're a simpler, more efficient business, and we've positioned for growth. In 2025, we delivered group adjusted operating profit GBP 264 million, which is up 4%. We saw a very strong increase in profits at Interactive Investor.
Is now our largest business at 59% of our profit. We had improved efficiency in investments. Those gains more than offset the actions we had to take to reposition our advisor business. Our cost savings plan exceeded the GBP 150 million target, and we delivered GBP 180 million of savings. We highlighted at the Q4 update a few weeks ago, AUMA, Assets Under Management and Administration across the group increased by 9% to GBP 556 billion. With talent and culture critical to the future success of the business, I'm encouraged by the colleague engagement score increasing by 10 points this year. I'll now touch on each of the 3 businesses, starting with Interactive Investor. ii, as we call it, is undoubtedly one of the U.K.'s most exciting fintechs.
Second year running, ii was the number one direct-to-consumer platform measured by net flows. Our penny drop marketing campaign, which dramatizes the moment people see in the value of flat fee investing, has been a big success. Total customer numbers were up 14% and are now half a million GBP. Within that, the biggest success was in SIPS, which grew by 30%. Operating profits were up 34% to GBP 155 million. We launched ii's new pricing, which gives investors a simple set of options and further improved our competitiveness. I think the team are doing a fantastic job. In advisor, we've flagged many times we took a strategic decision to cut prices that obviously impacted profitability. advisor delivered GBP 86 million of profits to the group this year.
Our focus has been improving client service, better, and in December, we improved the proposition by launching the integrated SIP on the platform. I believe we've taken the necessary actions to improve the business, to improve service, enhance the proposition, set us up to return to growth as quickly as possible. In investments, the work we did on costs helped support an increase in profits by 5% to GBP 64 million. One of the key things I draw your attention to is the strength of gross flows in our core institutional franchise, which were up more than 50%, GBP 39.6 billion. That performance has been built on the growth in strategic areas, which is fixed income, quants, and our commodity ETF range. We're also building out our sizable real assets business.
We were pleased with some of the innovative transactions and developments in 2025, not least the deal we did with Stagecoach to assume responsibility for their pension scheme. We also took steps to take 100% ownership of Tritax, which we had 60% previously, and it was very exciting that last, or actually on Monday, Tritax Big Box REIT, which is its major trust that it runs, entered the FTSE 100. Investment performance, which is the key metric, improved. Three-year investment performance is now ahead of our target, reaching 80%. I'm confident that we've taken the steps to reposition investments for long-term growth. Just to conclude, as we look ahead, we're firmly committed to our 26 targets that we set out 12 months ago.
Just as a reminder, those targets were to achieve adjusted operating profit of at least GBP 300 million and net capital generation of around GBP 300 million. Running a new target today, that beyond 2026 we're seeking to grow net capital generation by 5%-10% per annum on average, absent any major market irregularities. That points to our belief in the underlying earnings power and the potential of this business. All in all, we've taken critical steps toward improved profitability. We're excited about the opportunity ahead of us. Thank you. We're now happy to take your questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a brief moment. Thank you. We'll now take our first question from Maisie Grice of City AM. Your line is open. Please go ahead. We'll move on to the next line from Iain Withers of Reuters. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for your time, everyone. Just a couple related to the Middle East, if that's okay. It looks like you guys have a small office out there in the UAE. Just checking, hope everyone's okay and what guidance you're giving to staff. Then a second one, I mean, it's very early days, but what do you think might be the impact? How are you seeing what might happen to the global outlook? Perhaps we might see a more inflationary environment. What do you think? Thanks.
Hi. Morning, Iain. Thanks for the question. Yeah, we've got a very small operation in the Middle East. For colleagues that are based there, they're advised to make every effort to shelter in their own homes. For colleagues that have been traveling, we've been taking steps to bring them home, typically through Saudi Arabia. It's a handful at most that we have, and obviously we're very keen for them to return safely and for anybody else. I think this is very hard to call. I think our broad expectation is it'll be quite short-lived, this conflict. There'll be pressures and voices within Israel and the United States that will want longer or shorter. Hard to know.
They are going to want to make it somewhat decisive, so I don't think it'll be that short. I think you're right in a broadly could be inflationary if it persists. Depends on the length of it. I think our overriding view is it won't have a major impact on global growth as we think that through. You know, whilst oil prices and gas prices could spike, we think it will be that. Again, it's very scenario dependent, so, you know, we like others, have got a range of scenarios that we're talking to our clients about.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We'll now move on to our next question from Jack Gilbert of Citywire. Please go ahead.
Morning. Hi. Just wondering, do you still plan to close your Elevate platform to advisors and move all assets to Wrap? If you are still planning on doing that, can you give us any time frames on when that migration might happen? Thank you.
Morning. Yeah, Elevate, for those that don't know, we bought about nine years ago. I think we do anticipate probably next year bringing the two platforms together. They're quite similarly serviced. They're on the same technology from FNZ. We run the two platforms, the same level of customer service and attention to improvements. I think just to go forward, likely to be one platform. Elevate does have some extra functionality that clients like, and we support that Wrap doesn't have, which we continue. We will merge them, it'll probably be done by the end of 2027.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now move on to our next question from Jeremy Gordon of Citywire. Please go ahead.
Morning, Jason. Sorry, I'm calling in separately from Jack, so sorry for the questions. I've got two questions. Firstly, how far through the transformation savings program are you? Secondly, of course, the Schroders deal with Nuveen raises, you know, questions about scale and what is a large enough asset manager now. What are your thoughts and how are you thinking about M&A at the moment?
Sure. Well, on the first point, I think we're about 90% through it. You know, we've done the lion's share of it. I'm always pushing for more funds, but also we wanna support the business. We're looking for there's a bit of completion to some steps we've taken partly to insource certain contracts, build our own teams and capability. That takes a bit of time to bed that in, but that's pretty well progressed. We'll move from a, my words, a phase of cost reduction to one of cost efficiency. I think on the strategic side, I mean, look, I'm sort of torn here. Nuveen and Schroders have bent over to say that they're not going to change the business or integrate them.
Actually, what the benefits of scale are, who knows? I think from my perspective, you know, there's plenty of scope for players, you know, that have scale positions in the areas that they want to play. That's what we're doing with our asset managed business, is to create specialist strengths where we can differentiate ourselves, produce something that's cost efficient and at the right price point, but has an opportunity to work with clients. That's the strategy that we set out last year around specialist equities, fixed income, real assets. Real assets in particular need on-the-ground skills, and the scale of that, frankly, the efficiencies of bigger and bigger scale are necessary. We've got products that we can be competitive on. That's our, that's our focus.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Maisie Grice of City AM. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Morning. Just a quick one. On in the results mentioning pursuing ambition to become the U.K.'s leading wealth and investment group, I'm interested to see how much scope does Interactive Investor have to bring that goal into fruition? What will it be in one of the strongest performers? Just coming back to, again, as previous mentioned about Schroders, you know, the U.K. wealth and investment space has come under a little bit of questioning right now. Just going forward, how you plan to become leading in the space?
In terms of the growth of the wealth business, for us, that's our two businesses, Interactive Investor and Adviser. We're about GBP 180 billion. That's very, very large. Put those two together compares to anybody else in the market. Probably not far off number one already, actually. It's not just scale that I'm after. It's about performance, it's about quality, it's about customer growth. Actually, the potential in ii, I'm not even sure we know how it is, but it has been growing spectacularly in 2025, and that's continuing into 2026. We're seeing phenomenal growth. We're having to add people, add capacity, work weekends to maintain the level of service that our customers need. You know, we're seeing, you know, really outsized growth there, and I think we expect that to continue for the foreseeable.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Mark Latham of Funds Europe. Please go ahead.
Hello, morning. If I'm reading this correctly, the net outflows seem to have more than tripled from GBP 1.1 billion - GBP 3.9 billion. Is that a source of concern?
Hi, morning.
Morning. Yeah.
I mean, obviously we'd rather it be an inflow, but I think there's a lot going on within those numbers. The growth in ii, we just touched on growth in the core institutional business is about GBP 5 billion better. I think when you pick that number up, you've got, you know, quite a lot of asset allocation changes for Phoenix, which is quite low-margin stuff. In the area overall of the business, we're pretty comfortable, you know, that we've got, you know, plans in place to grow where we want to grow, and that's what we're expecting out of the business. In a business with over GBP 550 billion, at that level of turnover in terms of flows, you know, whilst we'd love it to be positive, it isn't a cause for concern.
Do you have a target for what outflow might be in 3-5 years' time?
No. We don't, and, you know, as we continue to reposition our business, we're working through areas of strength where we can grow, areas of, you know, improvement that are necessary. We've, you know, never hidden that we're not the finished article. You know, we continue t o improve in certain areas. Not set a close target. Partly because we're after high-quality product with clients that performs rather than just volume for the sake of it.
Yeah, okay. Thank you very much.
Pleasure.
Thank you. As a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a further moment. Thank you. With no further questions on the line, I would like to pass to the management team for closing remarks. Thank you.
Okay. Well, thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining and your interest in our business. I very much do appreciate that. I think our efforts over the last 12 months do mean Aberdeen is in much better shape as we pursue our ambition to be the U.K.'s leading wealth and investments group, and I look forward to keeping you updated.
Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.