Hello and welcome to AJ Bell's 2025 annual results video. In just a moment, you'll hear from our CEO, Michael Summersgill, and CFO, Peter Birch. But first, let's take a look at some of the standout numbers from the year. Platform customers increased by 102,000 to close at 644,000, an increase of 19%. Platform assets under administration closed at GBP 103.3 billion, up 19% in the year, driven by record platform net inflows and positive market movements. Revenue was up 18% to GBP 317.8 million, driven by strong recurring ad valorem and transactional revenues. Total costs increased by 15% to GBP 185.9 million, while net finance income totaled GBP 5.9 million. Taken together, this resulted in a 22% increase in profit before tax to GBP 137.8 million and a profit before tax margin of 43.4%.
On capital returns, the board has recommended a final ordinary dividend of GBP 9.75 per share, taking the total ordinary dividend for the year to GBP 14.25, the 21st consecutive year of ordinary dividend growth. In addition, the board has approved a further share buyback program of up to GBP 50 million, returning surplus capital to shareholders in line with the company's capital allocation framework. You can find full details about these results on our website. Now let's hear from Michael and Peter and get their insight into what's behind these numbers.
2025 has been a brilliant year for us, and I feel like I'm saying the same thing every time we do one of these videos. But if I look at the achievements in the year, some of the records that we've broken, we've taken over 100,000 new customers onto the platform in the year, a record net inflows figure, and that's taken us through GBP 100 billion of assets on the platform. There's so many just in those achievements for the teams to be proud of. So, a really strong year for us. Our growth has been sustained over a number of years now. If you look back over the last five years, we've broadly doubled the size of the business by most key metrics in that time. And that growth has come from really three areas. So, we've got a growth opportunity just from our existing customers.
So, our existing customers contribute more to the platform every year. On average, they're contributing about GBP 13,000 a year, and we keep customers for 17 or 18 years on average. So, you can see there's a significant opportunity there. You then look at customers who are already in the platform market but have not chosen AJ Bell as their platform. The market is GBP 1.2 trillion now in total value, and the small number of customers who do move between platforms every year represent a bigger opportunity as the years go by. We've got about an 8% market share, but we've taken 16% of the net inflows available to the market over the course of the year. So, it shows that we are generally winning that competitive battle.
And then you add to that the assets that sit outside the platform market that can be well served on a platform, and there's another GBP 2.5 trillion there approximately in things like personal pensions and legacy workplace pension schemes that can be consolidated onto a platform. So, you add all of those together, and you can see why we're confident in the future growth prospects for the business. And so, we're going to carry on investing in the areas that we have been for some time to carry on driving that organic growth. So, the business is very scalable. We have a dual-channel platform. It operates off a single operating model. Alongside that, we are continuously automating aspects of our business and automating key processes. You take those things together, and we've got a very scalable model that will absolutely support our growth ambitions.
There are two principal benefits to operating at scale. The first is that we can become more efficient over time and keep the cost to serve customers lower. That then is a benefit we can pass on to customers through reduced prices. This year, our cost to serve actually reduced from 16 basis points down to 15 basis points. The second benefit to operating at scale is that we can then generate the resources we need to invest in the future growth drivers of the business. And we've done that successfully in the period as well. We're getting good returns on the investments that we're making, and that investment has been centered around our market-leading customer service, our trusted brand, and our easy-to-use propositions. The reason that service is so important to me is that trust is crucial in financial services.
Now, on a platform, first and foremost, that means getting the digital service right. So, it needs to operate at scale. It needs to be easy to use. It needs to be reliable. And you can see from some of the figures that we've delivered in the year that that's what we've built at AJ Bell. So, we've processed about 12 million trades for our customers. We've processed about 3 million payments in and out of the products that they have on the platform. But the thing that you've got to get right in addition to that is offering human support when it's required. So, there might be something that a customer doesn't understand.
There might be something that they only come across very infrequently in their investing lifecycle, and they just want to talk that through with somebody and make sure that they've understood the system properly, they've understood their options properly, and that's where I think we excel at AJ Bell. We've handled about 450,000 calls over the course of the year, and 96% of those have been answered within 20 seconds, and that's connecting the customer to a member of the team here at AJ Bell within that 20-second time period and then giving them the support that they need, and that's a big part of our service reputation, and I think a big part of the reason that we've got our 4.9-star Trustpilot rating, which is the very best in the industry. The investment in brand is crucial.
There's a huge growth opportunity for us still in the market, but we need a powerful brand if we're going to carry on driving that organic growth. People need to have heard of us if they're going to join the business for the first time, so there's lots of activity that we're undertaking there. We have a strong PR team. We create lots of technical content, and that helps us to support media institutions and to answer questions that customers have and to be that industry expert. You've then got advertising activity, and we've been doing more in that space over recent years, so more TV advertising, more radio activity just to build the brand awareness, and then we have sponsorship as well, so the Great Run Series is the key event that we sponsor, a great feel-good event and one that we're really proud to be a part of.
All of that activity is about trying to build the brand awareness. We've done that very successfully over recent years. The brand awareness is as high as it's ever been. Ultimately, that is about building awareness to attract more customers to the business. You either have to be attracting more customers at the same cost of acquiring a customer, or you have to drive down the cost of acquiring a customer. We've actually done both of those things over the last two or three years, and in 2025, we saw a record number of new customers join the business. That investment in brand is certainly paying off, and given the growth opportunity that we still see in the market, it's an area that we're going to carry on investing in. We're continually investing in our platform products.
It's an ever-changing market, and we need to make sure that we're always responding to advisor and consumer demand. The first thing that we focus on is making sure that we can deliver as much change as possible as quickly as possible. So, for a number of years now, we've been investing in our change capability, new processes, and more engineers into the business to deliver more change more quickly. But then crucially, it's about what we're actually delivering to market. And that's different between the advisor market and the direct consumer market. So, for advisors, it's really about their efficiency so that they can then spend more time focused on the end client and deliver a better service to the client. So, that's had us focusing on things like data integrations and on more automated processes on the platform.
In the direct consumer market, it's really about the customer journey. The user of the platform is the end customer. It's about making things as easy for them as possible. So, that's seen initiatives like a new public website launched in the year, and we're now focusing on our mobile app, reworking the journey and the technology there to make sure that it's as slick an experience as possible for the customer. So, this has been a year of record financial performance for the business, with revenue up 18% and profit before tax up 22%. We've got a well-diversified set of revenue streams, and they were all firing on all cylinders during the year.
In particular, transactional revenue, which was up 50% in the year, as dealing activity returned to long-term average levels, and we saw heightened levels of FX revenue around the time of the U.S. election and the tariff announcement. Ad valorem revenue, which comprises custody fees and net interest margin, both of those were up as a result of higher AUA balances and higher cash balances. So, costs were up 18% in the period before exceptional items. Within the overall cost increase, 6% of that came from business-as-usual costs. This is where we're increasing headcount to support the growth of the business, but also having to absorb things like the national insurance increase and higher levels of FSCS levy. We actually also delivered GBP 2.9 million of annualized cost savings through that category this year, just to highlight that we are focused on efficiency.
Business investment costs accounted for 9% of the overall cost growth. This is where we're investing in things like brand and marketing and also proposition development. Those investments are really paying off for us at this point in time. And so, we went a bit harder on brand and marketing than we'd originally planned in the second half of the year. So, those costs are slightly higher than we originally guided to, but the returns are excellent. The final cost category is performance-related variable costs. Those account for 3% of the overall increase, and that was driven by two things. The first is high levels of customer dealing activity, and the second is high levels of variable pay. So, we're generating very strong shareholder returns.
As we sit here today, we've returned GBP 100 million to shareholders over the last 12 months in the form of dividends and a share buyback program. Today, we're announcing a 14% increase in the total dividend for the year, alongside another share buyback program of GBP 50 million that will take place over the next 12 months. The regulatory and legislative landscape is ever-changing, so there's always something to consider. The U.K. budget is probably the most recent example of that, and it's worth highlighting there because there were a number of, I suppose, anti-business and anti-capital measures in the budget, but there was nothing that is particularly detrimental to AJ Bell as a business.
Yes, we're about helping people to build retirement savings and to save and invest over the long term, so there could be some concern there given what I've said, but there's a long-term societal need that we're fulfilling with that service, and so, some haphazard policy intervention is not going to detract from that long-term need, and there's nothing there that concerns me about providing the core services that we do to the market. Plenty of missed opportunity, but nothing that concerns me. More positively, as we've known for quite some time, there is the implementation of Targeted Support coming in 2026, and that will mean that we are able to give more support, in particular to our direct-to-consumer customers. There we'll be able to give some guidance, some nudges, and just give them more specific support to their circumstances without straying over into the world of financial advice.
A positive development in regulation there that will help us to ultimately help more people going forward. There were a number of changes to the ISA market announced in the U.K. budget, and honestly, I've been with the business for 18 years now, and I've not seen a more confused and misguided set of interventions into the ISA market. Having said all of that, the key point to make is that there's nothing that detracts from the core service that we offer to our customers. As we sit here today, our customers can invest GBP 20,000 a year in a Stocks and Shares ISA and get the benefits of long-term investing. Even after all these changes are implemented over the next few years, our customers will still be able to invest GBP 20,000 per annum into a Stocks and Shares ISA and invest over the long term.
So, really, this is about a missed opportunity. There's no negative impact on what we do today, but a missed opportunity to improve the ISA landscape for consumers over the long term. There was an extended period of uncertainty leading up to the 2025 budget, actually even worse than we saw in 2024. That period of uncertainty was more damaging than the contents of the budget itself, and it is something that I think needs to be managed in a very different way going forward. The bit that caused us particular concern and caused our customers concern, more importantly, were the rumors around the removal of or reduction of tax-free cash on Pension Commencement Lump Sums. It has a material impact on someone's retirement plans, and so you can understand people at that point in their life being very concerned about it.
We engage with the Treasury and with government, and we've been campaigning for a pensions tax lock to try and get some more certainty and more stability around that aspect of the pensions market. It's something that we'll carry on campaigning for as we move into 2026, so the outlook for revenue is that we expect revenue margins to moderate slightly during FY 2026, and that's a factor of two things. One is the heightened levels of FX activity that we saw this year. We expect those to moderate during FY 2026. We also expect cash balances as a percentage of assets under administration to be a bit lower during the course of FY 2026 as well, so those two things together do reduce the overall margin. The other factor that impacts revenue next year is that as we wind down our non-platform business, the revenue from that business reduces.
So, there was GBP 12.7 million of revenue this year that won't recur in FY 2026. So, we're expecting costs to increase by around 16% in FY 2026, and that's comprised of two principal areas of increase. The first is around business investment costs. Those are expected to account for about 8% of that overall increase. And this is where we're investing in brand and marketing and proposition development. We're having a lot of success in those areas, and that's causing us to feel confident about investing further. In addition to that cost category, we have business-as-usual costs. They're also expected to grow at around 8%. That is really just caused by the growth of the business. We expect profit before tax margin for FY 2026 to be between 39% and 40%. That's a reduction on the FY 2025 PBT margin.
That's deliberate and reflects the additional investment activity that we're making, and that's because we see the opportunity to accelerate growth in the business. We've always said we would reduce margins if we saw the opportunity, and that's what we've chosen to do. The fact that we've got underlying costs well under control means that we can, should we choose to, allow profit margins to increase in future years, and that opportunity remains. The other item that we'll feature in FY 2026 is that we'll have an exceptional item relating to the disposal of our Platinum SIPP and SSAS business. That transaction has now completed, and so there'll be an exceptional item of around GBP 21 million, which will be a profit in FY 2026. As ever, I'm very positive about the broader outlook for the business. We've had a very strong year in 2025. We're still in a very attractive market.
It's growing well. There's lots of opportunity there for us in 2026 and beyond. The crucial thing for me is I feel like we've got everything in place here. We've got a great culture in the business. We've got lots of fantastic people. We've got strong products. We give great service to our customers. I've got a great senior team and a very supportive board, so I think everything's in place there for us to take that opportunity that we can see in the platform market.