Good morning. Welcome to IntegraFin Holdings annual results presentation for the financial year ended 30th of September 2022. I'm Alex Scott, Chief Executive. I'll kick off proceedings with a quick overview of our year. I'll then hand over to Jonathan Gunby, Chief Executive of our investment platform Transact, to provide you with a platform update and advice market outlook. I'll then cover off the financial update and guidance before we open the floor to Q&A. Performance over the year has been resilient in the context of difficult market and economic conditions. Our group underlying earnings per share has increased by 2% over the period. Our market opportunities remain strong. We continue to invest, as previously announced, in our employees and our technology to ensure that we're best positioned to take advantage of those opportunities.
On outlook, I confirm that our cost guidance for future years remains unchanged. Our strategy also remains clear and unchanged. Our focus is to enable the delivery of financial plans to clients by financial advisors. This is what drives advisors to use us, increasing advisor numbers, increasing our client base and supporting our inflows. We continue to believe that this is best achieved through the delivery of the highest quality customer service, delivered by highly skilled staff, all underpinned by high quality technology. The best way to achieve that and to maintain our position is through targeted investment in people and technology. By maintaining our proprietary systems, we can control investment, setting the direction of development, helping to control the volume of highly skilled employees we require to deliver the quality of support advisors and clients seek.
This delivers business growth, and then with our focus on efficiency and quality, we'll continue to deliver on profit and dividend. The result of our model has continued to deliver steady growth over the financial year. The number of advisers registered on Transact has increased by 5%, helping to grow client numbers by 8% and drive net revenues of GBP 4.4 billion over the year. At the same time, the number of CURO three license users at Time4Advice has also increased, up 46% over the year. This growth has been achieved even before the launch of the new generation product. Total combined, this has resulted in growth of 8% in group revenue. Allowing for exceptional items, which I'll cover later, underlying profit before tax after an additional investment in people and technology is up 1%.
Cash generation continues to be robust, and even after exceptional payments, the balance sheet remains strong. This has allowed us to declare a dividend broadly in line with the growth in underlying earnings per share. The quality of our service and technology has been recognized through several awards over the year. Transact has regularly achieved these successes year after year, so it's especially pleasing for me this year to be able to see that Time4Advice has also been beginning to be recognized for the quality of its technology offering, CURO. In a year that has seen significant volatility in asset values, our daily average funds under direction held up well, leading to increased revenues.
Reductions in our ad valorem fees and buy commission fees, together with increased investment, has resulted in a slight reduction in the platform underlying profit before tax margin in FY 2022, following strong growth over the previous three financial years. The investment is being made to support future growth, predominantly through additional IT employees whose focus will be on delivering a mix of new and enhanced functionality and service efficiencies. The level of the group underlying profit before tax margin at 49.7% is due to this increased investment and due to the inclusion of a full year of Time4Advice losses. A higher cost base for Time4Advice arising as we have added service staff to maintain and improve advisor experience ahead of the full launch of the next generation product. This is all in line with expectation.
Additional employees have contributed to an annual group increase in staff costs of 13%, the main driver of total cost increases over the year. These additional staff costs arise from the recruitment of IT developers, the effect of the first full year of Time4Advice staff costs, and general inflationary pressures, with group salary increases averaging 7.5% over the year. The increase in regulatory and professional fees reflects the cost of business volumes and the ever-increasing array of new regulation, whilst the increase in occupancy costs generally reflects the return to the office and the significant rises that we've seen in energy and utility costs. I've referred already to our previously announced investment in technology and technology employees. How are we progressing?
We've already recruited 15 IT employees, mainly in the U.K., and they had all commenced work for us by the end of the financial year. The increase in costs from these additions was marginally lower than guided pro rata, as several of these were at lower levels of seniority. We've also successfully recruited a London-based Chief Technology Officer, who will join us late in January, and the recruitment of more senior roles is expected to follow. That results in our guidance for financial years 2023 and 2024 remaining unchanged. Whilst we intend to continue to recruit as previously guided, we will manage our recruitment in light of ongoing VAT discussions that are taking place. This may affect the timing of some of those future recruits, as will the quality of the individuals that we are able to recruit.
That quality may depend on the market in which those individuals are available. We're investing to deliver operational enhancements to ensure that we can continue to deliver a premium service focused on added value activities with strong cost control. To grow our FUD with resilient net inflows, to deliver enhanced platform scalability to operate at a high and resilient group profit margin, and to grow Time4Advice revenue to deliver a standalone profit before tax from Time4A from financial year 2024 onwards. On Time4Advice, I'm pleased to announce that the beta version of the next generation of CURO system was rolled out to a large live client on the 5th of December. So far, all is going well. Beta testing is scheduled to run through to late April, after which the rollout of the live product is planned from May 2023.
Implementation planning work with the first of those clients has already commenced. License fee revenue has continued to grow through sales of the existing CURO 3 system. Time4Advice has been able to increase ongoing users by 46% over the year, from just over 1,500 in September 2021 to over 2,500 in September 2022. Costs have increased as expected and are being closely managed. All current CURO license fees are being increased in response to cost inflation. Time4Advice reported a profit before tax loss of GBP 1.9 million for financial year 2022. We expect this to reduce in 2023 and move into delivering profits from 2024 onwards. Before I hand over to Jonathan, I'd like to give you an update on some of the other developments that we've been undertaking over the last 12 months.
We've made good progress on recruitment of three important roles in the group. In January, we will be joined by two of these. A London-based platform Chief Technology Officer will be joining us to help drive the IT and software enhancement plan. We'll also be joined by a new Group Chief Risk Officer who will lead and enhance the strength of our risk management team. Additional to that, we are also actively recruiting for a Group Chief Financial Officer, having appointed Odgers Berndtson for this recruitment process. On environmental matters, with design assistance from our external consultants, we have commenced implementation of a structured environmental plan to achieve carbon net zero by 2050, having set a baseline year of 2019. Our plans will continue to evolve as new regulations continue to emerge and change.
We're extending the lease on our London office by two years to allow time, post the pandemic, to plan our future space requirements, ensuring we incorporate both our environmental and social goals. We have acted over the year to help employees meet the significant impacts of inflation and costs of living. From October 1, 2022, we moderately increased monthly take-home pay for all employees below senior management. In conjunction, we introduced a revised and lower bonus scheme. This now gives staff more certainty of income, but with limited additional overall cost to the group. This has been well-received by all staff. On governance, we've completed the transfer of ownership of the insurance companies directly to IHP, flattening the group structure and improving fungibility within the group. I'll now hand over to Jonathan Gunby for a platform update.
Good morning, everybody. What I want to do is refresh you on the size of the platform market and the opportunity for growth, and then also look at our place within it and the adviser market. The assets that are contestable for the platform space are very significant. At least GBP 2,500 billion could still find its way to platforms. There's various sources of these flows. Could be cash ISAs, stocks and shares ISAs, DC pension schemes, workplace schemes, et cetera. Some of them have a higher propensity than others to move to platforms. The opportunity is very significant. There's other sources too. For example, things like people selling businesses or people selling shareholdings in companies where they work.
Coupled with this, the U.K. taxation system is very complicated, particularly for individual clients. Therefore, this is really good for advisors within the U.K. We have a large market, and it grows all the time, by the way. All of these blocks that you see on this chart tend to get bigger rather than smaller. I'm not now sure that they'll ever be depleted and all moved over to platforms. There's also a lot of investment choice. Once again, this is where individual clients need the advice from financial advisors to help them organize their financial plans. To put a bit more color on this is the sort of volumes, not monetary, actual people volumes, that are holding these products. personal pensions, there's now 30 million in the U.K. These are very portable private pension schemes.
Workplace pension schemes, since auto-enrolment, it's obviously ballooned in terms of the number of people with workplace pensions. ISAs, GBP 7.9 million in stocks and shares ISAs. JISAs, already GBP 1 million in those. Lifetime ISAs, which haven't been around for that long, are already at GBP 0.7 million. Now, we offer wrappers on the Transact platform for all of these type of products that can therefore move over seamlessly to be managed on Transact. Also, it's worth mentioning that all of this ignores the substantial contributions we get from our customers, from their own earnings, from their, you know, their occupations, and that results in lots and lots of regular contributions every month onto the Transact platform. All of this leads to a very positive outlook for the advisor platform sector.
For the period 18-22, you can see the compound growth was 8%. This particular chart is from Fundscape, as they're projecting forward for the next five years, you'll see we've got a pessimistic growth of 8%, realistic of 11, and optimistic of 16. That shows the outlook looks to be for quicker growth for the platform space than the prior five years. Transact's the leading player in the advisor space, therefore we're very well-placed to take advantage of this growth. Why are we so well-placed? Well, what this chart shows, on the left-hand side first of all, this is what in independent surveys advisors tell us that they value. The factors they're considering are charges, functionality, customer service, functionality, and financial stability, and alongside that, corporate stability generally.
On the right-hand side, we can see how Transact performs in each of these areas. In terms of customer service levels, we were consistently ranked in the top 3 right across 19 service categories that's captured in the Investment Trends report, a big quantitative study that's run annually. In terms of functionality, another quant study called Data, we were ranked first for functionality. Usability, we were ranked second for usability. Financial stability, well, as you know, as part of the IHP group, we've got strong regulatory capital, no debt on the balance sheet, so we're in a strong position. Coupled with that is the corporate stability. What clients and advisors don't like is lots of change in ownership, and as we've seen change over recent years, this can be disconcerting for both clients and advisors. Our stability is valued.
In terms of charges, whilst we never aim to be the cheapest, we continue to share economies of scale with clients, we've managed to reduce charges in a responsible way every year actually for the last 10 years, including 2022. As Alex mentioned, our investment in the platform helps us to sustain this leading position, and that really boils down to people and systems. Every 4 weeks we relaunch a version of the platform software. That means the system we use at the head office and the Transact Online system that advisors use is constantly refreshed. We get hundreds of suggested improvements to our website from advisors, and we've got a wonderful feedback loop that we've been doing for 20 years.
We keep a register of every single request from an advisor, and clearly when it's a popular request, these are the candidates for our software development process. What we find, though, is you can introduce new functionality, but then you have to train people to use it properly. For many years we've used live chat and co-browse. Co-browse is a bit like screen share, but a slightly more secure... Well, a more secure version of it. We can't actually click buttons to process instructions, to submit instructions.
What we have is a team at the head office which we've doubled in size, of black belt Transact Online users, and they are constantly using live chat and Co-browse, and working with advisors and their staff to teach them how to get the most out of Transact Online, which is very rich with functionality. You can see on the right the big usage increase for both live chat and Co-browse. Now with our self-serve drive, the functionality that we've built means that, for example, an advisor can open a portfolio, open a pension, open an ISA, submit dealing instructions, have everything signed by DocuSign or any 1 of the other, recognized electronic signatures, and do all of that online.
You can see on the right-hand side just how much usage is via Transact Online these days. It's very, very high. This creates lots of efficiencies for the advisor and for us. It's quicker, more secure, more accurate than relying upon postal instructions or even email instructions. It works very well. It also means that our service staff can help advisors with more complicated things, and of which there, in our space, there are complications. When people are transferring, for example, several pensions with lots of assets, it can be quite complicated. Our teams help advisors with this. We also have a large and respected technical support team. If things get really technical, then we can refer the advisors to that technical support team.
All of this investment in this functionality and this drive to digitalization means that we've been recognized by NextWealth, and they award us the status of Digital Process Champions, which is pleasing. Looking at the flows into the advisor platform space and also the funds under direction league table, this is where we sit. On the left-hand side, that was flows for our financial year 22, and you can see that we're in a solid third there at GBP 4.4 billion. True Potential and Aviva, who sit slightly above us, have slightly different models to us, as you may be aware. On the right-hand side, that shows funds under direction, and there we sit at GBP 50 billion. That gives us a share of funds under direction of around 10%.
What's interesting to note there is the two players above Transact, Aberdeen and Quilter, you'll see that we're outperforming those in terms of net flows. It's those net flows and market movements, of course, which drive funds under direction. You can see here over time, this goes back to 2012, you can see, whilst not perfectly correlated, very close correlation between the net inflows that we deliver on Transact and the increase in group revenue over a period. Those net inflows drives the growth in FUD, and it's the FUD that drives the growth in group revenues. We have a strong market share that you can see here, and you can see that that's been growing over the last five years.
Whilst these small % movements don't sound a lot, that means quite a lot in terms of inflows. We've been able to achieve this through the various enhancements, whether that's to systems functionality, processes, or the service that we deliver via our client service managers, of which there's almost 200. It's also helped by the fact that we have the financial and corporate stability that some other platforms don't have, and that's a great attraction to advisors. We've had very resilient flows over the last five years. This can be seen on the left-hand side. What was particularly pleasing in financial year 2022 is despite all of the volatility caused by the macroeconomic climate and the geopolitical challenges around the world, it was still our second highest ever year for net inflows, as you can see there.
I think it's also important to consider the sources of these inflows. I'll work around the pie chart there. The 35% is what comes from our existing clients who are happy with the platform, awarding us, are bringing more money to the platform by topping up their portfolios. We have over 220,000 clients, and they're bringing money to us, and therefore it's very significant. It's now 35% of gross inflows. The 61% is existing advisors that are happy with our service and bring more clients to us. This is by far the biggest source of new inflows, as you can see. We're constantly increasing our share of wallet of the over 7,000 advisors that use the platform.
The 4%, you know, that's coming from new advisors to the platform who are bringing new clients to the platform. Just by the pure mathematics, that's going to be a lower percentage, and therefore that sits at 4%. You know, it's important though because these are the advisors that bring their clients to us very slowly. They'll bring one or two, test drive Transact, they're happy with Transact, then they'll bring some more and some more. It's a slow process for advisor to migrate clients to the Transact platform. Whilst our closing FUD was GBP 50 billion, you'll see that the average daily FUD for the year was GBP fifty-two and a half billion, and that compares to the prior year average of GBP 47 billion. We're very pleased with that. We also in the year launched a new service, which is the...
A service we've launched with BlackRock, it's the Transact–BlackRock Model Portfolio Service. That's where we provide a range of model portfolios. There's about seven, and it's very attractively priced. The DIM fee is 6 basis points, and then the OCF on the underlying building blocks within the portfolios is 20 basis points. That's a very low-priced but quality proposition using BlackRock's expertise and their Aladdin investment methodology. We're excited about the launch of this new MPS. It's literally just a few weeks now, but we've already got lots of wrappers that are linked to these, this model portfolio service. The other thing that we launched over recent weeks was something called the inheritance tax index.
That's helping our advisors highlight the growing incidence of inheritance tax and how important it is for clients to take advice and put in place the appropriate plans to mitigate their own inheritance tax liability. Looking at those advisor and client numbers then. You'll see we now have 7,500 advisors using the Transact platform. That's up 5%. We're happy with that. It takes time to bring on new advisors. We not only have to train the advisors, we need to train the administration staff, train the power planners. That's very nice.
With such a large supporter base, we don't have any advisor concentration, and you can see that below there. On the client side, up 8% tends to grow a little bit faster than the advisor growth, and that now stands at 224,000 clients. The important thing to notice here is that we are working in the mass affluent market, so you can see the average single portfolio is GBP 223,000. Probably more important is the value of the family portfolio. This is where typically there'll be husband and wife and children. Obviously, the children portfolios tend to be a lower value, so that brings down the individual average. If we look at the family level, that's GBP 351,000. That's, you know, a good amount of portfolio value.
These type of customers, of course, they're not immune to the cost of living crisis that we're seeing at the moment, but they're not amongst the most vulnerable either. What we're seeing is high retention rates. You can see we have a 97% client retention rate on Transact. We're very pleased with that. In terms of the sources of new advisors and new flows, our calculations are that there's 35,000 advisors in the UK, but this does include those that are tied to a single provider like SJP, or they work for a bank and therefore are restricted again. What we're really working with is the 7,500 existing advisors and another 5,500 that we would like to sign up to Transact.
What I should emphasize here is that most of the growth is in the 7,500, where we continue to increase our share of wallet amongst that 7,500. Some of those have been with us for many years, where we have a high percentage of their wallet. Others have only joined us in recent years, therefore there's lots more for us to bring across. The 5,500 that aren't Transact registered are those that we continue to promote our services to and successfully sign up more advisers every single month. The firms that we focus on are the high-quality independents, small to medium-sized firms. We do have some large ones too, but in that 5,500 it tends to be the small, medium, regional players.
There's lots for us to go at, both amongst the 7,500 and the 5,500. With that, I'll hand back to Alex to provide the financial update.
Thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, as Jonathan says, as we continue with our recruitment for a group CFO, for now, I'll cover off the financials. Group revenue has increased 8% due to growth in average daily FUD, growth in the platform client base, increase in wrapper fees, and the growth in CURO license numbers and revenue. This has in part been offset by platform fee reductions and additionally, particularly in the last quarter of the year, by lower average daily FUD than we'd originally expected due to the reduction in market values that happened predominantly across August and September. As I mentioned earlier, there are exceptional items that have affected the underlying profit before tax for both financial year 22 and the prior year 21. The two major items are VAT and Time4Advice post-combination remuneration.
In particular, the payment to HMRC in 2022 of prior year VAT and interest on software services of GBP 8.8 million. For clarity, this is all set out in the appendix. After adjusting for the positive and negative exceptional items, underlying group profit before tax is GBP 65.8 million, up 1%. Whilst at the post-tax level, underlying earnings per share has increased by 2%. As expected, we continue to see a gradual decrease in platform revenue yields as the effect of price reductions offset increased revenue from higher FUD. As the full-year effects of the price changes from March and July 2022 flow through, this reduction is expected to continue in financial year 2023. These price reductions help to embed Transact in our clients' business and position us better for the requirements of value for money under the new Consumer Duty regulations.
Group and platform revenue has been steady over the year, with the majority of group revenue being recurring. Total investment platform revenue increased 7%, with the recurring element increasing at 8%. Growth in fixed sterling charge wrapper fees, which give a good guide to the underlying growth of the platform, increased by just over 9%. We also passed all interest earned on client cash back to our clients, as we believe this is fundamentally the right thing to do. Non-recurring buy commission is gradually being removed. We'll keep chipping away at the buy commission to improve the value for money of the platform offering to our clients. Time4Advice revenue increased by 63% over the year, and of this, 82% is generated from recurring license fees, which themselves increased 52% over the year.
I've talked a little about our increase in IT staff already and the reasons for these increases. You can see here that the majority, 13, are in the investment platform business, whilst two are actually caught in the Time4Advice number. Platform operational and support staff are marginally down at the year-end, but most of this is actually vacancies in the process of recruitment. We've found recruitment easing over the last few months and the rate of turnover falling as employment markets ease. Time4Advice staff numbers have increased as we grow the business and with the advanced development of the next generation of CURO. The group continues to have a healthy liquidity position after payment of historical disputed VAT and allowance for the dividend payment. Risk appetite requirements have unsurprisingly increased in the current economic and regulatory environment.
On one specific area, the latest pronouncements on Solvency II from the Treasury and Bank of England continue to indicate a good outcome for all life insurance companies. The majority of the positive elements, though, do not affect our insurance company, as we did not need to use transitional arrangements when Solvency II was introduced. Matched adjustments do not apply, and the risk margin release that's expected to apply across the industry is focused significantly on longevity risk life insurers rather than investment-based life insurers. All of that said, though, we are still expecting a small positive outcome from the changes. On dividends, just to remind you, our dividend policy is based on paying out 60%-65% of profits after tax.
This year we have done this making allowance for the one-off VAT payment, giving a level of dividend growth that corresponds broadly to that of our underlying earnings. Slide 29 sets out our capital and cash priorities. These have not changed, I won't dwell on them today, save to emphasize our strong balance sheet and the organic investment opportunities. Moving on to guidance for financial years 2023 and 2024. During 2022, we've provided greater insight into our cost guidance for the full year, We set out again here for brevity and benefit of clarity our guidance for 2023 and 2024. There are no major changes from the shape of costs previously announced. To recap, performance over the year has been resilient in the context of difficult market and economic conditions.
Our group underlying earnings per share has increased by 2%, with platform net inflows for the year at GBP 4.4 billion. Our market opportunities remain strong, and we will continue to invest, as previously announced, in our employees and our technology to ensure that we're best positioned to take advantage of those opportunities. The market opportunities remain compelling, and we are well positioned to take advantage of those opportunities in 2023 and beyond. I'll now open up to questions and answers.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your line is unmuted locally as you'll be advised when to ask your question. Once again, that's star one if you would like to ask a question. The first question comes from the line of Alex Medhurst from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. I hope you can hear me okay, and thanks for the presentation. Well, three from me, if that's all right. Firstly, I noticed the comment on not pushing through any ad valorem pricing reductions next year, which is obviously positive for the revenue margin. Can you flesh out a little bit the thinking here and what that means for how you're sort of thinking around the sort of responsible pricing strategy going forward beyond what's obviously pretty exceptional market conditions at the moment? Secondly, a question on Time4Advice. you know, you've had the business for a year and a half now or so, or even slightly longer, so presumably having conversations with your existing advisor base.
Can you give any color on sort of what the potential demand is from the existing customer base and what the reception is to that transaction, ahead of the launch next year? Thirdly, just a quick question on competition. We've obviously seen some of the big players, refocusing a bit on the market. Can you just give an update on how the competitive landscape is developing? Thank you very much.
Okay. Thanks, Alex. I'll pick up on the first two of those, and then I suspect Jonathan will have a little bit to say on the first, and I'll leave the third one of those to Jonathan. The... You know, you raised the fact that we haven't made any changes to the ad valorem fees. I mean, there are several reasons for that, not least of which is the current outlook for economic conditions, which still remain somewhat unstable. You know, we always have this in mind. We've talked regularly about being responsible with our price reductions. That needs to take into account competition in the market and our own positions as well, and I'll leave that piece for Jonathan.
In terms of our own position of revenues and in terms of the market condition, we decided that this year was not the year to be making those reductions. You're well aware they have more cost to us than, say, taking the buy commission reduction that we have done. In terms of outlook, our outlook hasn't changed. We've been very clear as to what we think the path is over a period of time, but we've also been very clear that path of time isn't fixed. You know, in terms of our sort of long-term expectations, they haven't changed. It's just, the path there will take the time it needs to take to get us there.
On the Time4Advice piece, the Time4Advice is going to be effective with Transact user, adviser users, and we are building an integration piece of software between the Transact Online adviser piece system and the Time4Advice CURO system. I think it's not right to focus just on that cross-sale. Time4Advice has access to the whole of the U.K. adviser market as an addressable market, and actually, a lot of the focus of the Time4Advice sales team is actually on adviser groups that are themselves consolidating, as that will help grow their business faster. We have all of that in mind when we're considering, you know, the growth of Time4Advice and where the focus of their effort should be. Jonathan?
Yeah. Hi, Alex. Yeah, just a couple of things to add on the fee reduction, first of all. We decided to re-reduce the threshold for buy commission to 100,000. A lot of this was based on feedback from advisors. Most advisors have a minimum size for their customers of 100,000, and therefore we wanted to align ourselves with that. This will mean that in practice, very few clients will be paying any buy commission at all. There's a little residual, and as Alex said, we'll reduce that. We'll eliminate the buy commission over time. What's also important when thinking about fees is the fact that we pay all interest that we earn to clients. Advisors take this into account.
They're not just looking at the, you know, the prices, they're also looking at what's happening with cash interest. Across the platform, it's probably something like 8% that's sitting on cash, and that can earn interest in one of 2 ways. If it's instant access, what we call pooled cash, then that is earning over 1.5% at the moment, and that's increasing. That all goes through to the customer. No skimming whatsoever. If they hold money on term deposits, which is anything from 6 months to 3 years on our platform, then that can pay as much as 4.5% per annum. As you can see, that has quite an impact on the overall charge if you're giving all of this interest to our customers. It's a...
It was a judgment call, and we decided that was the most appropriate reduction for this year. In terms of the competitor landscape, then yes, it's always competitive. You know, it keeps it very, keeps it very healthy. We're really competing on 3 areas: the overall proposition, the service we provide, and the charges. In all of those areas, I think we're performing strong. On the proposition side, we're one of the very few platforms that own not only the technology but also 2 life insurance companies. The wrappers that are provided for the offshore bond, our onshore bond, our insured pension, are all controlled by the companies we own, and that means that our service is much more joined up than many others who are outsourcing those particular type of providers.
What that means in practice is if you're dealing with an ISA on the platform or one of the insured wrappers, the processes and the forms and everything, the online functionality is the same. It's very, very consistent service. You'll also have noticed over recent years that some of the players that were our competitors five years ago, companies like Embark, Nucleus, Novia, have all been bought, and they're now part of other groups. We know that, you know, some of our competitors are either re-platforming or working on those integrations of companies that they've bought. We're very focused on what we're doing. We're not distracted by any of that.
Great. Thanks very much for those answers.
The next question comes from the line of Greg Simpson from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning. Morning, guys, thanks for the presentation. A few on my side that I think I missed a bit of your commentary earlier, but on the staff breakdown on slide 27, the 389 of operational and support staff was 419 at the half year stage. It's a 7% decline in six months, which is quite sharp. Can you just talk through why the decline there and if that's a concern in terms of the business being able to handle more scale, more advisors going forwards? The second one would be on the BlackRock model portfolio service. Does that have any revenue potential for Transact in terms of fee margins?
Is it just, you know, about enhancing the service? And then thirdly, the gross outflow rate did step up in the fourth quarter to about 6% of opening funds under direction. It was about 5 percentage points beforehand. It... Just wondering if that's kind of a sustainable level you think kind of going forwards in terms of the visibility you have on client drawdown requests and so on. Thank you.
Okay. I'll just pick up on the staff point there, Greg. Yeah, I mean, the number of operational staff has eased, and that's because we're already starting to see the effect of some efficiencies that we've brought in. Some of those have been, systems developments that are starting to take effect, and Jonathan talked about some of the guided application work that is still being finalized. The effects of what we've done so far is also already having helpful effects. We've also done a bit of a reorganization and restructure following the return to office.
I think I've mentioned before some of the issues that we were having with efficiencies first from moving out of the office and then moving back into a more hybrid environment. We've just taken a little bit of time to sort those out and actually get ourselves into a better position. No, I'm not concerned, and as I said in one of my slides, actually we're finding the recruitment market easier. We're actually finding less pressure, and there's less poaching of our well-trained staff, which we're always unfortunately open to because they do tend to be prized by other of our competitors as well. Then, you can pick up MPS, Jonathan. Yep.
Yes. Yes. Our primary motivation for launching with the BlackRock MPS was to extend the choice that we provide to advisors. We already have about 100 DIMs on the platform. As I say, we've got a very good feedback loop with advisors. What they were telling us is that they saw the need for something that had a robust process and was also very well priced. There's some particular facets of the BlackRock approach whereby they stick to tight volatility bands, whereas which fits much better with the financial planning process and the advice process. Whereas some MPSs, actually the volatility of portfolios can fluctuate quite a lot, and they've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with some of those.
We saw a gap in the market to launch something that was very, very cost-effective and actually stuck to tight volatility bands. Our primary motivation is for, to provide that choice and this extra option, and particularly for those advisors that want to use a DIM for the first time and were concerned about cost or those that were concerned about an existing proposition. We are not looking to make money from the MPS per se. We do receive a small amount of the 6 bips. We receive 1.5 basis points, so not a lot. And really that's to cover costs, our marketing costs, our training costs, et cetera.
Because it's exclusive to us for a quite a few years, we hope that it will bring more advisors and more flows to the platform. That's our motivation.
Picking up on the outflow piece, Greg, actually the uplift in outflows in the last quarter, is, A, not unsurprising given the sort of the state of the market and what's been going on recently. Actually is not even, in some ways back to historical levels pre the pandemic. We've seen a very, very gradual return to what we might call normality over quite a period of time post the pandemic. The numbers that you quote, the sort of 6% there, are well within our expectations, year-on-year and don't cause me any concerns at all.
Great. Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of James Allen from Liberum. Please go ahead.
Two questions if I can. First one, are there any updates on the VAT dispute? From memory, there were ongoing cases with both HSBC and Barclays, which you were waiting to hear about how those concluded before launching an appeal, if that's right? Second question, I think consensus has got a reduction in EPS next year due to the additional investment going into the business. In terms of how you think about the payout ratio on the dividend in FY 2023 and FY 2024, are you planning on keeping a progressive dividend if EPS falls next year? How should we think about that, say, 3% dividend growth year-on-year? Would that be a reasonable assumption?
Okay, picking up on the VAT point. As I mentioned, you know, we're having many and several discussions. In fact, I was in one only earlier this week with King's Counsel, discussing some of the points that have so far been raised in the preliminaries of the HSBC case and actually going into a little bit more detail on the Barclays case. It is slow progress, to be perfectly honest, because those cases are in front of ours, and they are taking some considerable time. We continue to assess our options and the things that are open to us to do in the meantime. We're also cognizant of trying to do that in as efficient and cost-effective way as possible.
To be perfectly honest, if I can stay behind others and not be incurring large legal costs, to be able to get to an end result for as long as possible, I will do so, whilst ever it makes sense for us not to be making changes of our own. That's why we have to consider carefully how we, how we shape our business, how things work going forward to make sure we're not tripping over our own two feet. As I say, it's very much an ongoing one. There have been developments on the HSBC case. They are somewhat mixed, and we are still working through them to determine what the real implications of those messages are for our own case. Whilst they're very similar, they're not identical, and we have to work through those differences.
On your second point, on the earnings per share point, to be clear, and I did make this clear in my presentation, our dividend policy as set out at IPO and onwards, has always been based on a 60%-65% payout of profits after tax. This year we've been very clear that the VAT position is a very much a one-off issue that quite clearly should be removed from that calculation. With the capital strength of the business, we've been able to do that. We will judge next year on its own merits. Sat here at this point, the dividend policy of the company is clear, and that's what I'd sort of expect us to be working towards.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Next question. It comes from the line of Rahim Karim from Investec. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. 3, if I may. I'm just looking at slide 16 where you provide some interesting data points on interactions with clients on Transact Online. That 91% in terms of transactions occurring through that medium in the fourth quarter. I was wondering if you could give us a sense of how that number has evolved over the last, say, 12 to 24 months, and if there is a reason why that number could not be 100% in the long term. The second question. You talked a lot about the proprietary nature of your platform, and slide 17 kind of ranks all of your peers and whether they're proprietary or not.
I'm just trying to get a sense of whether that's something that your clients or the advisors see as a really important virtue of your model and something that they appreciate. The third question was just around interest income. If I understood correctly, what you were saying is you believe that all the interest income should sit with the client. Some of your peers would argue that they're able to enhance the interest that their income that their clients receive and that's why they should get some of that interest income as remuneration for it. How would you respond to that? Are you yield enhancing so that the clients are getting a better outcome than they would otherwise, or is that something that you just don't participate in?
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'll take each of those in turn then. First of all, the usage online, and how that's developed. It's the shape of it really. I mean, there's certain things that we've always done a lot of online. Trading is a good example where, you know, trading activity, buy this, sell that, was already at 85%. With the extra training that we've been providing for advisors, that will be 100% within a few months. We've got a small portion of advisors that are still doing some trading through what we call, you know, manual activities, either send in as a form or send in as an email. What we're doing is we're actually withdrawing that. We're withdrawing that option completely.
We're forcing the activity to be online just to get the last few % there. If we think of things like application forms, then what we've been doing there is, we added different wrappers over time, over the past, over the past 2 years, and we've still got one wrapper area to complete, which is insurance bonds. What we're doing is once the functionality is there for advisors to be able to do it online, then we will gradually make that the compulsory option as we withdraw things. We build the functionality. Once that's bed in, once everyone's used to it, then we take away the manual option. I suspect there's actually quite a lot of forms overall for, you know, things like pensions, beneficiaries, et cetera, et cetera.
What we're doing is we're putting the long tail of forms all online. We're probably 85% of all the forms. All the big incidence things are all there online, and they will move to 100%. That's the functionality online. Moving to... What I should add, it's easier to build the functionality than it is to train everybody. You know, you've got 7,000 advisers and their support staff. That can easily be 20,000 people that you have to train. That's the harder job than the functionality actually. In terms of proprietary technology, what our advisers value is being able to give their feedback, give their input, and we listen to it. They'll say, "I always forget to do X, Y, Z.
Could you put a reminder on that particular page?" Or, "Could you do this? Could you do that?" A very recent one, we have the ability on the platform to have a peer review process, and people have, advisors have said, "Oh, could you give me the option to email colleagues to ask them to peer review things before it's submitted?" We added that. That's just a small example. What our advisors value is the fact that they can influence the shape of the platform software, particularly Transact Online, over time. I would say that advisors see it as a big plus.
Also gives us control of the cost, of course, because the people building the platform are all employees, so we know exactly what that platform tech is going to cost us, both now and in the future. Then on the interest that we pay for to clients. We do use a range of banks, and one can always increase the return further by using banks with lesser rating. For us, it's a matter of, you know, we'll use banks in a way that meets the risk appetite that we're prepared to take and on behalf of our clients. We're always reviewing the list of banks that we use, and it is very actively managed. We've got access to exactly the same banks as everybody else.
It's determining which ones we think we should be... which is appropriate to use for our clients.
Very clear. Thank you very much, guys, and have a great Christmas period.
Thank you.
Thanks, Graham.
The next question, it comes from the line of Ben Bathurst from RBC. Please go ahead.
Morning. I've got two quick questions, if I may. Firstly, on Time4Advice, you mentioned that you expect that business to continue to make a loss in FY 2023, I wonder if you could just unpack that a little and maybe give an idea what sort of top-line growth you expect from the business next year. You know, is the 2022 growth repeatable? Secondly, on Consumer Duty, as we move towards that regulation going live, I wonder, do you envisage compliance there creating disruption for advisor businesses, to the extent that it might have an adverse impact on flows in the first half of calendar 2023? Thank you.
Okay. Picking up on the Time4Advice point, the rollout of the new product isn't going to happen until probably May. We're not going to see significant new license revenues coming in from the new product until sort of June, July time, sort of 2023, which obviously in our year is sort of into the final quarter virtually of our financial year. In terms of sort of big pickups in revenue from the new product, that's why we sort of expect that to sort of roll in and move us into profits in 2024. I am expecting to see some revenue growth next year.
As I've sort of mentioned in my presentation piece, we have actually increased all the license fees across Time4Advice, as well as add-in licenses. Most of the license fees are going up in the region of around about 10%. That's gonna help drive. That's been accepted by all clients, so that will drive through. On top of that, are the increases gonna continue on the old product at quite the same rate as they have over the last 12 months?
Our expectation is not quite at that same rate because, as the new product becomes ever closer and people become aware that it's in the market, those that can will be more prepared to sit and wait to get onto the new product rather than actually taking the view that they need something now, and they'll move across to the new product in 12, 18 months, two years' time. Given that those changes are coming through, we are expecting that loss, overall loss to narrow. And I would expect to be seeing numbers sort of around about 50% to 60% of the numbers that are there today in terms of the loss on Time4Advice for next year. Some of that will be dependent on how quickly we can grow the current license fees that are in there.
Do you want to pick up on the Consumer Duty, Jonathan?
Yeah. In terms of how Consumer Duty is affecting advisors and whether that will affect flows, I mean, obviously we talk to advisors about this all the time, and I think the areas that it will impact them probably the most, it might shape their due diligence a bit. Advisors always undertake due diligence on platforms on a regular ongoing basis. I've seen some of the questions have changed a bit. You know, things we've talked about, cash interest, that's more important to advisors than it was a couple of years ago, with interest rates being higher and Consumer Duty, you know, Consumer Duty being on the horizon. I think we might see the type of questions that we get in due diligence change, continue to change.
The other thing I see changing is one of the things that platforms have is a wealth of information on behavior on the platform, and that enables advisors to ask us questions and monitor things. For example, we have advisors asking us how their fee that they're charging compares to others. You know, and perhaps an advisor that doesn't have a tiered fee structure will be asking us, "How many advisors charge their fees on a tiered structure, and can you give us some data?" We actually provide a benchmarking service for advisors, so we can say, "Here's how your charges compare. Here's how your holdings per portfolio compare. The DIMs that you use, here's how they compare. Here's how many times your clients log into the portfolio.
Here's how many have switched off paper," et cetera, et cetera. We are seeing an increase in a request for benchmark data. The other good thing on the behavior side is that advisors, particularly the owners of advice firms, are able to see the activity of everyone that logs in. They can download reports or we can bespoke things for them. They can say, "Okay, I've got six advisors. Can you tell me how often they're logging in?" They can actually download the reports. I think we'll see a lot more of advisor firms, perhaps the compliance arms or the owners, actually monitoring the activity of advisors and their support staff, exactly what they're doing in terms of servicing their clients.
We're thinking about providing even more enhanced reporting to advice firms on their behavior if they're gonna find that useful, and I think they will.
If I can just add to that, Jonathan, in part, you know, we've had all this in mind when we've been looking at investment in technology staff and the like, because the more that we can do to help support the advisors, the more they can get on with doing their business, which helps us in the long run.
Thanks for that.
No problem. I think that's probably all we have time for this morning. Thank you everyone for attending. I wish you a pleasant day and a happy Christmas when you get there.