Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to CMC Markets plc full year results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question- and- answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Lord Cruddas, Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation.
Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining our full year 2023 results presentation. Can we turn to slide three, please? Lots to get through. Is that slide three? That's slide three, isn't it?
Yep.
Before we go into the financials for the year, I want to first update you on our vision for CMC and also to update you on our recent developments and plans for the future. Just to step back quickly, we're investing hard in people, products, and technology. Much of this heavy investment phase is now committed, and we are firmly on track to be able to deliver a very different proposition for our clients and business partners.
Our vision is to create the best-in-class, one-stop financial trading and investment services platform of the future. In my position as founder and largest shareholder, I'm convinced this will bring benefits to all of our clients and stakeholders. Slide four, please. Slide four. This, CMC's evolution has reached a pivot point.
Over the past year, we've added an additional 28% to staff numbers, hiring the best talent from around the globe to facilitate the significant changes we're making to the business. We're on track to deliver a broad financial services offering spanning the globe, and we have begun the process of centralizing all products, asset classes, and services through a group-wide Open API ecosystem.
In full year 2023, we have closed gaps in our product suite and continued to develop our offering that will include smart order routing, algorithmic access, cash equities, listed futures, options, crypto, equity and debt capital markets, corporate broking, ISAs, SIPPs, mutual funds, interest on deposit, as well as world-class content, including ETF screening and analytical tools. Wow. It's a lot we've done, isn't it, really?
You know, very important, our new ecosystem, this is the Open API ecosystem, will also host third-party products. We believe this breadth and level of flexibility will form the best-in-class B2B and B2C financial services platform on the market. Slide five, please. This is a little bit about the technology and Open API. Key to delivering this expansion and this vision comes with our investment in technology.
Our in-house technology is moving quickly to develop our group-wide Open API ecosystem, combined with our cloud-first approach for all core products. This, together with enhanced connectivity, will provide secure API access to all products and services within the CMC's ecosystem. Delivering on this will position CMC in being able to deliver the de facto one-stop investment platform of the future. Slide six, please.
Building on our track record of forging B2B partnerships in our AustralEwan business, we see the B2B expansion of CMC's business and diversification away from pure retail as a natural development for the group. The expansion of our U.K. and Singapore invest platforms continues. Our invest platforms open up significant opportunity over the longer term to increase the value of our relationships with clients and partners.
In the same vein, we recognize substantial prospects in our institutional trading arm, where we are steadily expanding volumes as a non-bank liquidity provider and actively creating fresh trading partnerships worldwide.
Looking ahead, we will continue to examine ways to expand our geographical reach, as well as deliver new initiatives such as our options offering, our recent investment in Web3 blockchain technology. That's just a little taste, a little forerunner to what we've been doing and where we see ourselves. What I'll do now is I'll hand over to Ewan to crunch the numbers. Thank you, Ewan.
Thank you, Peter Cruddas. Good morning, everyone, thank you, Peter Cruddas, for the overview of the CMC Markets plc vision and how our ongoing and new initiatives fit into that vision to deliver future value for our stakeholders. Moving on to our FY23 performance, I'll start with our group KPIs on slide eight. Top left charts.
Excluding the pandemic-affected 2021, Net Operating Income was a record GBP 288 million. This was 2% higher than 2022 and 14% higher than FY20, which was only impacted by the pandemic in Q4. Note that for context, we have added a four-year view so that you can more easily see in one place our comparatives against pre-pandemic metrics.
Next, on the top right chart, the investing share of net revenue decreased to 14%, with unfavorable market conditions in this business line, the main driver. Regarding future growth, given our geographic expansion and B2B prospects, we continue to have conviction that the share will grow over time, therefore, we'll continue to disclose this revenue split. PBT was GBP 52 million, PBT margin has reduced to 18%.
PBT margin is suppressed, given the ongoing heightened investment in technology and people as we develop new products and business lines in advance of them contributing material revenue. EPS was GBP 14.7 pence for 2023, Given our 50% of profit after tax dividend policy for the year, the total dividend per share is GBP 7.4 pence, the final dividend is GBP 3.9 pence per share.
Moving on to slide nine. Let's look at the trading business KPIs first along the top. As you can see, active clients on the top left have reduced against the high seen in 2021 and have reduced by 9% in 2023. Again, remain above pre-pandemic levels. Importantly, revenue per active client remains strong, with an indication of the quality of the clients that we continue to attract and retain.
We continue to focus on quality rather than quantity of clients, and we do expect the falls in active clients to tail off this year. On the second graph, you will see here that gross client income has increased GBP 15 million or 5% against 2022. From a revenue-generating perspective, this has been offset by lower client income retention. David will talk more about the drivers of this later in the presentation.
Finally, on the trading KPIs, we have client money, AUM. This provides a good barometer of the health of the leveraged business. This continues to remain strong and steady, despite the reduction in active clients. Moving on to the investing KPIs. Given the nascent nature of the Invest U.K. platform, we are only showing the Invest Australia figures here.
We plan to disclose more regarding Invest U.K. client numbers after we have a more complete product offering later in the year and increase our marketing spend. On the bottom left graph, you will see active clients, which have dropped year-over-year, with market conditions not being conducive to share trading. They do, however, continue to be well above pre-pandemic levels. Net revenue suffered as a result, down 21%.
For context, market volumes in Australia were down a similar amount year-over-year, illustrating the poorer revenue performance was market-related. Moving on to the second graph, you will see a big shift back into B2C. As flagged in previous presentations, this is due to the successful migration of ANZ clients before the year-end to becoming CMC clients. This was a massive exercise for this CMC Invest Australia team.
CMC now has direct access to this client base, who benefit from access to a wider product offering. We're confident this direct access will benefit CMC when market conditions improve. Finally, assets under administration continue to remain strong. Moving on to the income statement on slide 10. I've explained the investing and trading revenue performance against prior year comparative previously.
Given the rapid increases in global interest rates during the course of the year, we have benefited from higher interest income, which rose to just under GBP 14 million. Given the FY23 exit rate of monthly interest income, we expect this figure to roughly double in FY24. I'll discuss the 26% increase in operating costs in the next slide. Note that we have disclosed the profitability of our trading and investing businesses at the bottom of the table.
Note that Invest U.K. costs are included within our trading business, but will be split out for greater visibility in FY24. They were approximately GBP 6 million in the year. Moving on to the operating expenses on slide 11. For today's presentation, we've presented an alternative view of operating expenses growth by splitting between investment items and those related to inflation and expanding our operational capabilities.
As you can see, the majority of the increase in costs is due to the acceleration of investment spend that we disclosed in our results last June. During the year, certain opportunities were expedited for development, such as options for our B2C clients and cash equities for our institutional clients, both of which are now nearing delivery. This contributed to an increase in our cost guidance during the year.
To provide context as to the scale of this change going on in the business, and described earlier by Peter, you can see that headcount has risen by around 260 heads or 28% over 12 months. We now largely have the talents and resources in place that we need to support our expanded business lines.
Secondly, we are in a position to deliver more quickly than ever before, with Peter, David, and Matt all describing some big projects that have been delivered in FY23 and some due for delivery in FY24. Within the investment figure, it should be noted that in opening the U.K. and Singapore Invest businesses, we are incurring in additional costs in order to build the operational support and marketing of these activities.
Let me now talk you through the liquidity and regulatory capital position as at 31st of March on the next slide. First, you will see our regulatory capital in the top table. The group's balance sheet and overall regulatory capital remains strong, with a capital ratio of 369%. Our capital resources increased due to profit for the year, more than offsetting interim and proposed dividends.
Next, turning to liquidity in the bottom two tables. On the left-hand side, you will see total available liquidity has decreased during the year to GBP 414 million. Net available liquidity has also decreased, now at GBP 234 million. The lower total available liquidity has been partially offset by lower blocked cash, as there is no longer committed cash to the share buyback, which was completed in October 2022.
In addition to initial margin requirements of brokers have reduced due to the lower size of client equity positions. In addition to the slide that I usually present, I wanted to demonstrate how the cash position of the group has improved since IPO in 2016, to illustrate our financial strength and the platform this has given us, and will continue to give us for future growth.
You can see this on slide 13. First thing that you can readily observe is that our overall liquidity has improved significantly over time, while still paying dividends to our shareholders. Looking at the top blue part of the bar, you will see that blocked cash has increased over time. Geographical diversification and growth have caused the rise, with the main contributors being growth of the Australia Invest business as a result of the ANZ Bank white label agreement and consequent acquisition of that client base.
The setup of our German subsidiary post the U.K.'s decision to leave the EU, and also the setup of the Invest U.K. business. You will see variability in IM at Broker, the main liquidity consumer of the group. You will see we have classed as surplus own funds.
This provides the group with the ability to invest in diversification, with recent examples being the setup of CMC Invest U.K. and CMC Invest Singapore, and expansion of our Dubai subsidiary without taking on debt. Secondly, it provides us with enough liquidity to endure our rigorous internal stress testing scenarios. In summary, the group continues to be in a strong position to invest in our large on-going strategic projects, whilst maintaining a buffer for the highs and lows in the broker margin requirements.
Moving on to shareholder value on the next slide. As well as building for the future with our diversified growth prospects, we continue to provide good income for our investors. We give returns nearly GBP 220 million to our shareholders in the last four years and continue to pay out 50% of profit after tax.
In summary, we have a great growth story whilst continuing to pay income to our shareholder base. I'll now move on to the financial outlook on slide 15. Firstly, we will look at the cost outlook. In a similar format to how I have addressed the cost increases in FY23, a few slides earlier, I'll run through the outlook by splitting what we are classing as investment spend versus inflationary or other spend.
I've already highlighted that we recruited heavily during FY23, and as a result, our exit rate headcount was 28% higher than the FY22 exit rate. For context, without any further headcount rises, the annualization of this exit rate alone would lead to an increase in costs of circa GBP 12 million. The ongoing investment spend, which includes most of the headcount increase for the year, will contribute GBP 15 million of additional costs.
This includes additional marketing spend, mainly for the release of our CMC Invest Singapore platform and other investment costs of GBP 5 million. Inflation and other cost increases are likely to contribute an increase of GBP 14 million, GBP 6 million of which relates to pay rises across the group.
Overall, this will lead to an increase in our operating expenses of roughly 10% to the region of GBP 240 million. We're focusing on cost efficiencies in parallel with the implementation of our strategic initiatives and expect cost growth to moderate in FY25. With the anticipated cost increases explained, let me summarize what this looks like for the business performance in the short and medium term on the next slide.
Firstly, looking at net operating income. Regarding the start to FY24, we have experienced quiet market conditions in the first two and a half months of the year in both the trading and investing businesses, with client activity down by around 15%-20% versus expectations. This will impact Q1 net operating income. As explained through today's presentation, we have a solid platform for growth in both our existing trading and investing client base.
Growth in the activity of this base, combined with new products and business lines starting to generate revenue, mean we continue to have confidence in meeting our three-year, 30% net operating income growth objective. We also today extend our guidance for a further year to indicate sustained NOI growth post FY25.
With cost growth moderating due to the business already having most of the people and technology required to support new business activities in place, we expect PBT margin to improve in 2025. It should be noted that the effective tax rate will rise in FY24 due to the change in U.K. corporation tax rate from 19% last year to 25% this year. ETR will likely be in the region of 26%-27%. I'll now hand over to David.
Thank you, Ewan. Good morning, everyone. Moving to slide 18, I'd like to start by running through the results from the trading business to help to provide some additional color around performance in the period. Looking at slide 18, the table and chart show client income and net revenue by half year.
The top line of the table shows the gross client income, and as a reminder, this is the spreads, financing, and commission clients pay to trade. The gross client income for the year was GBP 303 million, up 5% against FY22, and a record outside of the pandemic period.
As stated at half year, the increase is primarily driven by an increase in our B2B client income, although it's also led to an increase in hedging costs, as this type of flow requires enhanced utilization of automated algos to minimize the market impact and reduce the spread decay. As CMC continues to diversify its flow while also diversifying the products offered, we would expect hedging costs to remain at the current run rate of circa GBP 20 million per half. This is dependent upon market activity.
In terms of client income retention, this was lower in H2, primarily through the weaker returns from the FX asset class. However, it should be noted that performance can vary by asset class between periods. As we continue to enhance our FX Spot products to institute clients, we would expect the blended client income retention rate to be in the range of 75%-80% going forward.
It's important to note, we are looking to obtain greater share of wallet through our enhanced product suite to our high net worth clients, whilst in parallel, building out the best-in-class institutional offering, ensuring we offer all asset classes to those direct relationships, and we compete to win flow where we're the liquidity provider. Trading net revenue was marginally higher than FY22, at GBP 233 million. It's important to note again, the growing diversification in the revenue, as we see a growing contribution from our institutional division.
Overall, this represents a strong performance outside of the pandemic-related periods, and we remain confident in our ability to deliver the product suite to service the growing demand across all channels. Moving to the next slide. The growth in B2B I just mentioned can be seen here when looking at the contribution splits. Not only have we successfully released our FX Spot product during FY23, we are also expanding our product suite for institutional B2B clients.
Investing in our infrastructure, driving down latency, enhancing execution, and the liquidity offering. Whilst B2B flow is typically lower margin due to narrower pricing and less predictable flow, the market opportunity is far higher. Adapting to this change in flow is a continuous learning process, but sets us apart from our competition and enables us to compete in new segments of the market.
We believe that building out the offering and adding further products will continue the revenue diversification for the group. Thank you all for your time. I'll now hand you over to Matt.
Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everyone. Today, I'm going to walk you through the performance of our CMC Invest Australia business, starting with the full year 2023 results and finishing with the strategic initiatives planned for FY24. If I can focus your attention to slide 21. FY23 net operating income declined 9% year-on-year, coming in at GBP 44 million. While a small decline, pleasingly, this remains 39% above pre-pandemic levels.
Net revenue declined 21%, principally driven by macro factors, with the highest inflation seen in 32 years, which resulted in steep interest rate rises over the course of the year, dampening investor appetite for cash equities off the back of reduced disposable income. For context, the reduction seen in our domestic equity turnover was in line with direct competitors and compared favorably to our largest direct competitor.
The decline in net trading revenue was partially offset by higher interest income earned from client cash deposits, which was materially higher than prior year, up more than 600% and circa 15% of total revenue. Looking at the graph on the bottom left, the underlying health metrics of the business remain robust, with 217,000 active clients in FY23. While this is a modest 12% decline from the prior year's pandemic record high, it remains 19% above pre-pandemic levels.
Encouragingly, we've seen an uptick in Q4 active clients, up 4% from the third quarter. Client engagement across our platforms continues to track well, with logins up 5% year-on-year. Mobile logins, in particular, rose 15% year-on-year. These trends demonstrate clients are engaged and ready to trade at the right market opportunity.
Pleasingly, we've seen client acquisition trend higher in Q4, with these numbers coming in strongest of the financial year, which serves as a testament to our continued investment in technology to increase client engagement and acquisition. The continued strength and resilience of the business saw it contribute circa 14% of total group net revenue.
Our position as the second-largest retail stockbroker and the largest provider of options to retail clients in Australia, combined with the breadth of features, functionality, industry-leading pricing, and products we offer, we believe, continues to set us apart from our competitors. Externally, we've been recognized by Canstar as the Online Broker of the Year for a record 13 consecutive years. Moving on to slide 22. The graph provides a breakdown of the change in client assets we managed since we last reported at half year.
We're not on 22.
We're not on 22.
Sorry. Can we just move to 22?
Yeah, there it is.
We saw a small increase in overall assets under administration to AUD 73.2 billion , driven by marginal increases in asset prices and partially offset by small net cash outflows, which was pleasing given the reduction in disposable income seen across the broader economy.
At the half-year presentation, I discussed a number of our initiatives, which I'll provide an update on now. Firstly, I'm pleased to announce that we've successfully concluded the acquisition of the ANZ Share Investing client base. The project completed in March with over 600,000 ANZ client accounts, with an AUA value of AUD 37.6 billion migrated to the CMC retail business.
Importantly, we now own the end-to-end communication with these clients, and they enjoy access to the full CMC retail ecosystem, including significantly better pricing, our market-leading mobile app, trading strategies, and education. During the period, we also rolled out our award-winning mobile app to more of our white label partners, including Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks. We're excited to share that we've achieved a 4.8 star rating in the App Stores, the highest-rated investment app in our sector.
Throughout the course of the year, we've made significant progress on our strategic priorities, a number of which are set to launch in FY24. These include a physical crypto investment offering, stock lending, which will directly add to the bottom line, and the complete rewrite of our front-end web platform, which will enhance usability and overall client experience and engagement, further complementing our market-leading mobile app user experience.
Moving on to slide 23. As flagged in H1, our geographical diversification has progressed with the expansion of Invest into Singapore, which was soft launched to staff in March and on track for a full retail launch in Q2. We're excited by this opportunity, as it's not only limited to the Singapore market, but will serve as a launchpad into other markets across Southeast Asia, which have a total addressable market of over 10 million investors.
Finally, to recap on our Invest platform strategy, we've now successfully rebranded our AustralEwan stockbroking business under the CMC Invest brand. This business already boasts AUA at AUD 73 billion and is firmly positioned as the region's second-largest stockbroker and number one retail options provider. Our launch of U.K. Invest continues to go from strength to strength.
We now offer over 3,500 products, including flexible ISAs, ETFs, and increased equity offering, with SIPs and mutual funds also expected to be rolled out in the coming months. We believe the U.K. is an incredibly attractive market, with a total available market opportunity of nearly GBP 300 billion of assets under administration.
As previously stated, we've also recently soft launched our CMC Invest Singapore venture, post gaining all regulatory license last year, and we'll be looking to fully launch the product over the summer. Looking forward, we're also exploring a New Zealand invest offering in FY25. These businesses mark a significant longer-term opportunity for us and will help drive our core diversification strategy over the coming years. I'll now hand you back to Peter.
Wow. Impressive, Matt.
Thank you.
Thanks, Matt. Let me now summarize. I think we're on to slide 25 now, please. Let me now summarize some of the messages we've heard from the team today. That's it, yeah. CMC is changing quickly, and we've been investing over the last past two years to reposition the group. We're now boasting a much stronger platform for growth than at any point in our history.
We have a lot of new initiatives. One in particular I'd like to highlight is our expansion into options. We're making significant investment in the development of our options offering. CMC is already number one in exchange trading options in Australia, and options have been the most requested product by our existing client base. Options trading growth represents the fastest growing product in the marketplace.
Average 2023 market volumes are 15 x bigger than the volume seen in 2010. More importantly, the vast majority of retail brokers offer institutional-grade options to retail investors. We think that this is inadequate. We see our offering as more relevant to the retail market. CMC will offer a pure OTC product that clients can fully customize to their requirements.
Phase I will consist of offering options products to the U.K. clients only, with a targeted September 2023 release. Phase II will be to expand our offering geographically, building on the strong presence we already have in Australia, Singapore, and Europe. Quite excited about options. I wanted to mention it today. Slide 26, please. Got a great options team, by the way. Premier League. Premier League, these guys. We're gonna do all the pricing ourselves internally and so on.
Slide 26. To summarize some of the recent achievements, full year 2023 was a record net operated income result outside of the pandemic period. We're continuing to invest, diversify, and grow our business while maintaining a strong cash return focus to shareholders. Near GBP 220 million of cash has been returned to shareholders over the last four years. This equates to circa 45% of our current market capitalization.
It's not bad, actually. If you hold your shares long enough, you'll get them for nothing, won't you, if you think about that? I digress. We continue to be a highly cash-generative business, with overall liquidity, while providing the platform to deliver new business expansions. Our institutional expansion is on track, with a 95% growth rate in B2B volumes in 2023.
We've delivered the successful completion of ANZ Share Investing migration and the expansion of Invest U.K. with SIPs and mutual funds soon to follow. I can remember a year ago, people were saying, "Well, why are you confident that you can launch this platform?" Well, there you go. We've launched it.
Also, our strategic initiatives remain on track with the imminent release of Invest Singapore, options, cash equities onto all of our trading platforms, smart order routing, algorithmic execution, best-in-class thematic content, and ETF analysis are also all to come. Technology upgrades, our OpenAPI infrastructure framework provides significant improvements to latency, connectivity, enhanced automation, and analysis to drive the quality of execution for our clients, all aimed at driving our B2B growth.
Final slide before we throw it open to questions and try to contain your excitement over what we've been doing here and what we've been achieving. 27 slide, please. I know we struggle to contain our excitement at times, even you, aren't you, Ewan? Yeah. Slide 27. As I said at the start of the presentation, CMC's evolution has reached a pivot point, and I really mean that. There's been so much going on here.
It is very exciting, and we're on track to create a best-in-class, one-stop financial trading and investment services platform of the future. Our three-year growth plan, introduced last year to increase net operating income by 30% between 2022 and 2025, is on track. Additionally, the new initiatives we've spoken about today will sustain growth through to 2026 to drive net operating income up and above our current near-term goals.
We've been investing heavily, but we now expect operating expenditure growth to slow in coming years based on our current initiatives and investments as projects are delivered. This, combined with efficiency initiatives, will enhance profitability and PBT margins in years to come. That's it. Thank you all for your time today, With that, I conclude today's presentation and pass this back to the operator for any questions. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, participants can submit questions in written format via the webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. If you are dialed into the call and would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star, then one on your touchtone phone or on the keypad on your screen. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may press star, then two to remove yourself from the question queue. We'll take our first question from Kim Bergo of Numis. Please go ahead.
Morning. Thanks for the presentation, and thanks for taking my call. I thought I'd get in early and just to ask a question, slightly more longer term and about your investments. Clearly, you're making a lot of investments, but I'm sort of getting a little bit confused.
If you could talk a little bit about what the focus is, if I'm looking three, five years ahead at CMC, what am I looking at? Is this a gambling venue? Is it market access? What is it? You talk about new geographies, new products, new clients, B2C, C to C or B2C. I know it's a slightly open question, but you know, how should I be thinking about CMC going forward? When you think about investments, what are the return hurdles? W hat's the narrative that ties it all together? Thanks.
Morning, Kim. Thanks for your question. It's Peter Cruddas to answer this one. Good question. Thank you. If you look at the journey of CMC and where we started and, you know, our development of technology, which really transformed CMC from a boutiquey business into a worldwide player, because of internet.
We're the one of the first, if not the first, to have an internet platform for buying and selling. you know, we had a 20-year period where we were really focusing on retail clients. They were trading, the markets were expanding, more people had access to the financial markets.
What we've seen in our AustralEwan business, and they've done a really great job there, was that we bought a stockbroker, and we found that, you know, there's a much bigger market, a much deeper pool to go into to expand our business. The problem with, you know, investment type products is that, you know, they're quite slow to develop. You can build up a good reputation, and you can make good money from B2C, but you need scale in these products, like shares, for example, and the way you get scale is to expand your B2B offering.
Where we want to end up in the next three years, and just thinking of the U.K., and this would apply to most regions, subject to sort of regulations, is that we want to build the de facto financial portal that you go on to every morning, and you can see everything that you need to see.
For example, open banking. You can have your bank accounts on there. You can see your investments. You can see your tax returns. You can see your portfolios. You could be able to drag and drop portfolios from other people. We've developed something really exciting on our invest platform, where you can transfer your positions over quickly. You'll have multicurrency accounts. You can move currencies around. You can see your credit cards, debit cards.
We don't want you to go anywhere else other than our financial portal, we're gonna keep investing in that. We've got the infrastructure. We've proven that we can handle 1 million clients in our Australia business, and we're gonna keep expanding. We primarily see our future in the investment space. It's a much bigger market, but we'll never neglect our roots, which was CFD, so, you know, and technology, providing technology to partners.
We're already speaking in the U.K. to half a dozen potential white label partners. I hope that in a year's time, we would have made an announcement and have other partners on our platform. Roughly, that's it, I think. Anybody to add anything to that?
Hi, it's David here. The only other thing I would add is that when we're speaking to our institutional clients, our high-net-worth clients across the group, there's a couple of things that are sort of crying out in terms of the feedback.
One was consolidation. Our clients are demanding consolidation of positions, accounts, et cetera, rather than funding numerous parties. They're crying out for consolidation with CMC. You've got the breadth of product. Again, they don't wanna be having shares on one platform, FX on another, so they want the full breadth of product with one provider. Also what's crying out is the robust technology.
I think a lot of them have encountered in the past, dealing with various firms, whereby technology has, there's obviously been a lack of investment, so they're crying out for that robust technology that Peter's continued to echo through today.
I mean, businesses die. Just to add to that, I mean, they're great points, David. Businesses die if you do not invest. Whilst some of the market watchers will look at our numbers and say, "Oh, they're spending a lot of money," we often get asked, "What are you going to do with your cash surplus?" Well, there it is. We haven't made a big acquisition. We bought a stake in StrikeX, which is Web3.
If you look at what we're doing, we're launching new products, getting new licenses, getting into new markets. We're paying a dividend, we're adding cash to our balance sheet, we're not incurring debt, and we're making profits. Profits are reduced because we're investing, and you're seeing some tangible results of those investments with the way that, you know, Australia has now got 1 million clients, AUD 73 billion.
Yes, we know we want to see an uptick in results in there. You've seen the launch of our U.K. Invest platform. We're building B2B infrastructure. We hope to sign at least one B2B, big B2B, ANZ-type client on that. Options is gonna be absolutely phenomenal for us. What we'll do with Options, now we've got the infrastructure and we've got a Premier League team came from Morgan Stanley, is that we will then start to build structured products around our investment platform, so mom and dad can buy and sell products with capital guarantees.
This is all high-level stuff for now, but you'll see a radical change in this business digging into the investment space and the investment community. We don't think it's done very well. We're not going into this because we've got good technology.
We're going into it because we think that the business models are too expensive. Just think about if you deal with some of the people in the investment space, the costs of foreign exchange, the cost of commission, the cost of managing your portfolios with them, the constant switching in and out of different currencies. We're gonna give you currency, multi-currency accounts, so you can hold U.S. dollars.
We think there's a massive opportunity, commercial opportunity, business opportunity, and with our technology and our new API open ecosystem. What does that mean? It means we can launch things fast. I mean, just think about it. In the last year, we've launched Invest U.K., we're launching Invest in Singapore, we're gonna launch Options in September, we're still paying a dividend. We're gonna pop physical shares on all of our platforms, our CFD platforms. I mean, it's just stuff off the top of my head.
Thanks, Peter, thanks very much for your question, Kim. We've got some questions coming in from the web now. Let's start with Stuart Duncan from Peel Hunt. We've got three questions. The first is for Dave, the second is for Matt, and the third is for Ewan. For you, Dave, on hedging income retention, can you give us a feel for which assets have higher and lower retention rates?
For Matt, for you, on Invest Oz, can you give us a sense of the revenue model? Is this all transactional revenue, or is there a base platform fee? Lastly, for Ewan mentioned cost efficiencies. Could we take this as being a more moderate rate of growth, or are there areas where you would still be able to reduce costs going forward? Start with Dave.
Yeah, sure. Thank you. When you look across the various asset classes, you've got things like equities, which have a more stable income retention, given the margins that we see in the financing revenue and commissions. When you step across to other asset classes like indices, that's where we see most of our turnover, so that typically can have a higher income retention percentage as well as commodities.
Like I was saying throughout, is that it can change per asset class throughout the period based on the sort of market conditions, but that's probably where we're seeing it at the moment.
Thanks, Dave. Matt, over to you.
I'll take the second question. Thanks, James. But I'll speak a bit broader than just the Invest AU business. I'll talk the APAC business. Where we stand today, predominantly the revenue model for Invest AU is a transactional model. All the work that we've been doing this year and the year ahead is to, you know, move away from purely transactional to, I guess, a more annuity-style business with products and launches, such as the stock lending, which will give that consistency in revenues moving forward.
We're also exploring, you know, for our launch in Singapore, a subscription-based piece, which again, will show those smooth revenues outside of purely transactional revenues. In terms of a platform fee, no. At this stage, we don't charge that, and there's no immediate plans.
Transparency in pricing is a big differentiator for CMC Invest. We think, you know, many of our competitors across the APAC region and beyond, across Europe, you know, are not transparent in their pricing model by having those hidden fees such as that. At this stage, no plans for a platform fee per se. Over to you.
Thanks, Matt, on the efficiencies point, I think there are kinda two things. When we were talking about costs, cost increases moderating, in the future, a lot of that is because of the great foundation that we now have in place around the number of staff that we've recruited in order to support that, the operations of the new business lines going forward.
There's going to be a slower growth of headcount in this year ahead, where we're looking to reach more of a peak. When it comes to efficiencies as well, as we grow the business, we're looking constantly in areas of the operational parts of the business that we can automate, and also utilize any technology, usually from third-party suppliers, to help us work more efficiently as well. That's all of those initiatives are ongoing concurrently with all of the great strategic initiatives that Peter, David, and Matt have been talking about.
Thanks very much, Ewan, and thank you for your questions, Stuart. Let's move over to Ben Bathurst at RBC. Three questions from Ben. The first for Dave, I think. First is, "In the trading business, is the stronger gross client income in Europe that's up 20% year-over-year, a reflection of the fact you've a higher proportion of institutional revenue there? S hould we expect that region to continue to see outsized growth looking forward as investment in institutional delivers returns?" Dave, do you wanna start with that one?
Yeah, sure. The growth that we're seeing in Europe, this was institutional business that formerly contracted with the U.K., then post-Brexit, is now contracting with our GmbH entity. It's been a long-term relationships. It's not just one, it's a number of them. This also goes back to my point about growing relationships and then through breadth of product and service.
We're seeing a good uptick there. Yes, I would like to continue to see growth in Europe. Like we keep saying throughout, you can either plug what you've got today, or you go out there with a full suite of products. It's, yeah, it's an area of focus, but that's the reason for the growth we've seen today.
Thanks, Dave. I'll take the second question from Ben. You've noticed you've made significant investment in the CMC Invest brand around the U.K. tax year. What sort of traction did you get in terms of that spend, and how did the number of users increase over March and April? You're absolutely right, Ben.
We did pick up marketing to focus on the ISA season through that period. We did have some very good traction from the team. We haven't disclosed numbers yet on either client numbers or AUA. The team's delivered some very good traction. Obviously, with the rollout of SIPPs and mutual funds to come in the next few months, we expect that traction to continue. It rolls into your first question, third question quite nicely, actually. I'll pass this over to Peter.
Your last question is: Are there any more developments with respect to B2B plans for UK Invest? Are you in discussions with any institutions at the moment, or is it still too soon to be building a pipeline? Peter, over to you.
The simple answer is yes. As I said earlier, we are in discussions with some very large institutions. They're very early. I don't wanna get people excited, but I'm excited by them because what we're seeing... I mean, I often sit, you know, and think about: What's the best opportunity that CMC Markets has? I don't know exactly 'cause there's so many exciting things going on.
If I had to name three of them, one of those would be the U.K. investment B2B space. It's very hard to get a white label for these major institutions that... I mean, we had one company came to us, and you will know them. They said, "You know, we get clients come to us. They start saving with us for a pension when they're 25, 30. They save with us for 25 years, 30 years. They then take a cash lump sum out, buy an annuity, then with the cash lump sum, they send it over to Hargreaves Lansdown for investing. Then we lose the client after that 'cause they've bought their annuity, and then they're investing with somewhere else."
We would like to offer, you know, clients a platform so they can continue working with us. I don't know many companies in the U.K. that can offer what we offer. In fact, I don't know any. Generally, if you want to build a B2C or D2C client, direct client-client, you have to own your own technology.
We're offering, you know, major institutions a white label solution, and not only will we add the products that clients want, we can even add on to the platform, the white label partners products as well, so clients can continue to buy and sell the partner products and also, you know, shares.
We'll do the foreign exchange for them. We can add cryptos. We can add capital market products, and so on. I think a big opportunity, and we saw this in Australia. You know, the B2C business, where you go directly to clients, retail clients, was really the sort of bait to bring in large institutions on the white label. When you look at the AUD 70-odd million under asset, assets under administration, they're primarily through partnerships. Australia has the biggest partnership, white label partnerships in Australia.
We are beginning to see the early signs of that. We love to do that business. We do it really well. We're not precious about owning our own technology. We'll license it, or we will white label it to potential clients, and if we just sign one big client in the next year, that will move the dial big time. Very exciting.
Thanks very much, Peter, and Ben, thank you for your questions as well. I think that concludes our banker questions today. I'd like to thank everybody for joining the CMC call. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with myself or any other member of the team here. With that, I'll pass it back to the operator to close. Thank you.