Hello, I'm Romi Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our Q1 2023 results presentation. For those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we are a leading online pension provider in the U.K. We exist to make pensions simple so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement. We enable our customers to combine their pensions into one new online plan. We enable them to make contributions, to invest in line with their objectives, with money managed by the world's largest asset managers, and ultimately to make withdrawals and enjoy their retirements. Our aspiration is to build a lifetime relationship with our customers, generating predictable and scalable revenue for our company and for our investors. PensionBee operates in the vast GBP 700 billion market of transferable defined contribution pensions.
Over the first quarter of the year, we made great strides in continuing to increase our market share. We added about 14,000 new invested customers in the first quarter, taking the overall invested customer base to about 200,000 invested customers. With 44% year-on-year growth in invested customers and a 97% retention rate, we grew our assets under administration by 23% year-on-year, reaching GBP 3.4 billion in assets under administration. Our revenue grew by 28% year-on-year, with GBP 5.2 million generated in the last quarter and approximately GBP 19 million in the last 12 months. Over the past quarter, we have advanced our strategic goals. We spent approximately GBP 4 million on marketing initiatives, taking our cumulative marketing expenditure to approximately GBP 50 million.
We continue to deploy a data-led multi-channel approach to reach customers and our wealth of data, combined with our household brand name status, enabled us to reduce our in-period and end-of-period cost per invested customer compared to the first quarter of 2022. We expect to continue reducing our cost per invested customer as we benefit from a decade-long investment in generating the capabilities to acquire customers efficiently. We are also looking forward to generating in-person opportunities to reach a wider audience, as demonstrated by our national road show coming to Birmingham soon. Over the first quarter, we also continued to develop our product offering for our customers. We are incrementally rolling out new features that encourage our customers to engage with PensionBee.
Our data shows that engaged customers are more likely to grow their pensions with us and are therefore more likely to enjoy the type of retirement they deserve. New features include improvements to access and find our helpful content, a new tax relief calculator, and coming very soon, serving our customers customized content. Our partnership with LifeSearch will soon launch, and we look forward to helping our customers obtain the appropriate insurance to enable them to save for a happy retirement, even if the worst happens. We have also invested in the scalability of our technology through a focus on internal automation, efficiency, security, and pension transfer improvements to support productivity, as demonstrated by a 21% improvement in productivity. At the same time, we are proud to deliver industry-leading customer support, as demonstrated by live chat and phone waiting times of 15 and 21 seconds, respectively.
We continue to enjoy high ratings from our customers, which give our team great purpose and inspiration. With the launch of our Impact Plan, which has attracted customers with an average age of 42, we are confident we have the right investment range to serve the mass market of consumers. I would now like to hand over to our CFO, Christoph Martin, who will take you through the financial update for the quarter.
Thank you very much, Romi. Hello and a warm welcome to everyone. I am pleased to cover the financial section of the first quarter trading update. We had a strong start to the year as we balanced our growth objectives with our profitability targets. I would like to start by covering our growth performance on the first two pages, elaborating on the path to our year-end profitability target and finishing the financial section with our guidance framework. The first three months of 2023 started strongly and demonstrated our continued ability to grow as we reached close to GBP 3.4 billion of AUA at the end of the quarter, having added circa GBP 350 million of AUA in the period. I would now like to highlight the asset growth drivers in more detail.
First of all, we have driven growth through new customer acquisition, adding circa 14,000 new invested customers with net flows from new invested customers representing the majority of asset growth at around GBP 156 million. Second, we have driven asset growth through existing customers who have continued to accumulate pension saving with PensionBee. Growth from existing customers over the period represented GBP 77 million of AUA. Net flows from existing and new customers contributed GBP 233 million of asset growth over the period. Third, as it is customary in the markets, pension assets are invested in capital markets. We benefited from market appreciation this quarter. To summarize, both cost discipline, new customer acquisition, and healthy net flows by existing customers retained on the technology platform have driven strong asset growth in the first quarter.
We continue to deliver consistent and robust growth through effective new customer acquisition as well as high retention rate, recurring and compounding asset growth from existing customers, and resilient revenue margin. We are pleased to report continuous high customer and AUA retention rates of circa 97% with customer continuously consolidating further pots and contributing into their home pension pots at PensionBee. Similar to previous periods, the data shows all customer cohorts delivered positive net inflows this year, even the early cohorts acquired between 2016-2018. This serves as a good reminder of the long duration compounding nature of our AUA base. With an average age in the late thirties, our customers demonstrate a long-term commitment to saving with PensionBee, growing their assets with us every single year.
We converted the compounding asset growth into recurring revenue thanks to our resilient realized Revenue Margin, which remained stable at 64 basis points compared to the same period last year. We converted the year-on-year asset growth of 23% into revenue growth of around 30%. We continue to deliver consistent recurring revenue growth thanks to the compounding nature of our AUA, high retention rate, continuous net flows generated across all cohorts, and effective new customer acquisition, and stable Revenue Margin. We have a firm commitment to achieve our profitability objective before year-end. We shed more light on the two building blocks that we expect will allow us to achieve our profitability objective.
The first building block is to continue driving revenue growth thanks to the compounding nature of our AUA, our resilient realized revenue margin, which we covered on the previous two pages. The second building block is our scalable cost base, which can be broadly categorized into three buckets. Effectiveness of our discretionary marketing budget deployment. Thanks to our household brand name and data-led customer acquisition capabilities, we were able to acquire 14,000 new invested customers this quarter at an in-period CPIC that was lower by close to 25% year-on-year, while onboarding those customers at an average pension pot size that was almost 50% higher compared to the same period last year.
We drove close to the same level of net flows by new customers at almost half the marketing budget this quarter, underscoring the scalability of effective marketing deployment at a reduced CPIC. Scalability of our technology platform. Our technology platform cost is a key contributor to driving operating leverage and achieving year-end profitability. The scalability of our technology platform is underscored by the fact that the technology platform expenditure were flat compared to the same period last year, while revenue grew by circa 30% year-over-year. Money management costs, which are variable in nature and currently close to the lower end of the 15%-20% historical range as expressed as a percentage of revenue, an outcome which we expect will continue for the rest of the year.
As a result of the above, our scalable cost base places us in a strong position to achieve our profitability objective while pursuing our growth opportunity in the vast market of defined contribution pensions. A word on our balance sheet. We have a strong cash position at quarter end as we recorded GBP 17 million in cash, which will continue to facilitate expenditure this year prior to achieving ongoing adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of 2023. In summary, we are in a strong position to achieve our profitability target before the end of the year, and we are well capitalized with existing cash on our balance sheet. With regards to our forward-looking expectation and guidance, we are happy to reiterate the framework shared earlier this year.
The market we serve is vast with around GBP 700 billion of pension assets as of 2019 and continues to structurally grow as evidenced by greater than 60% growth between 2015 to 2019. We expect it to continue benefiting from the structural shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions and growing contribution rates.
Over the next 5 to 10 year horizon, we expect to capture a 2% market share of this enormous market, which would translate into serving about 1 million invested customers with an average pension balance of GBP 20,000-GBP 25,000, resulting in a revenue opportunity of circa GBP 150 million in the long term. Given the scalability of our technology platform and our ability to manage the overall cost base, we expect to achieve a long-term adjusted EBITDA margin of more than 50%. In the short term, we are focused on the achievement of full profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis by the end of this year. I will now hand back to Romi to conclude our trading update with our investment highlights and further updates.
Thank you very much, Christoph. As you can see, PensionBee is a leading online pension provider, solving genuine problems for its customers as they prepare for retirement. We operate in the vast GBP 700 billion transferable pension market, serving a broad consumer opportunity. Our household brand name status, the result of years of investment, is enabling us to grow while reducing our cost per invested customer. Our scalable technology platform leaves us well positioned to deliver on our financial ambitions. Our simple long-term business model demonstrates growth and increasing operating leverage as we move into adjusted EBITDA profitability this year. Our committed leadership team is here to serve our customers and our investors. Thank you very much for your time today. Good morning, everybody.
Thank you. We will now start the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your touch-tone phone or on the keypad on your screen. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star and then two. Participants can also ask a question using the Ask a Question button on the webcasting page. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. The first question we have is from William Hawkins of KBW. Please go ahead.
Hi, Romy. Hi, Christoph. Thanks for an excellent presentation. Three questions, please. First of all, your flows per new customer, they're up very strongly year on year, but first quarter 2022 was a very weak quarter. First quarter 2023 does seem to have dipped a bit from the end of 2022 and be below the 2021 run rate. Can you help me understand that metric a bit more? What's the outlook for the number, please? What are the key drivers of it? 'Cause at least from my point of view, I can see how marketing spend changes affect the number of customers you may acquire, but I'm not sure how marketing spend would necessarily affect the size of the pots you're getting. That may be a distraction.
If you just help me understand the outlook for flows for new customers, that would be great, please. Secondly, presumably by now you've got a better visibility on the outlook for marketing spend. I think the last range you left us with was GBP 8 million-GBP 12 million. You've just done GBP 4.4 million, so you're kind of halfway to the bottom end of that range, but quite a good cushion to the top end of that range. Do you have any more visibility to narrow that range of 8-12? That would be helpful, please. Lastly, I guess around slide six, you've already in your prepared remarks, talked about some really interesting commercial initiatives.
If I was to ask you just to pause again, you know, what are the key commercial initiatives over the next 12 months that you're most enthusiastic about? Thank you.
Good morning, William, and thank you for your three questions. I think perhaps we can start with question one, and Christoph can cover some of the seasonality that we tend to see in quarterly net flows for a new customer.
Yes. Very happy to do so. Good morning, William, and thanks a lot for the question. Yeah, it's correct that we saw quite strong net inflows by net new invested customers this quarter compared to the same quarter last year of around 45% higher. And to your specific question around the comparison to the Q4 2022 pot size, which was around the 15,000 GBP mark, while it's just 11,000 GBP this quarter. I would like to remind everyone around the seasonality that we typically see in the data when we look from Q1 to Q4. Q1, we typically see lower pot size that come in compared to Q2, Q3, and Q4.
The reason is driven by the tax year end, in April, and the tendency fer customers to actually start with contribution compared to transfers, which usually come later. What we then see in Q2, Q3, and Q4 is that we usually see the transfers coming first and the contributions to start after. That means that the pot size appears to be becoming better, becoming larger, from Q2, Q3, and Q4 compared to Q1. Historically, when you look at the historic data, the past three years would underscore that kind of trend from a data perspective. Those are kind of the drivers behind the pot size.
I think to, with regards to an outlook, it's obviously early in the year to tell precisely. I think we saw the leverage that we saw this year, we saw two years ago in 2021. I think we ended the year in 2021 at around the GBP 15,000 mark, which might not be unreasonable to look at. Again, it's early in the year to tell that precisely. I hope that answers your first question.
I'm happy to move on to the second question, unless there's any follow-ups on that.
No. Perfect. Thank you.
Okay. The second question was about marketing expenditure, and whether we have anything new for you in terms of the range. We previously guided to marketing expenditure of around GBP 8 million-GBP 12 million. I would say that our current expectation is to end up somewhere in the middle of the range. Based on what we've seen in Q1, the investment that we've made so far, and our expectation for trading conditions into the rest of the year, we think somewhere in the middle of the range is probably quite appropriate. What could change that to the lower end is any changes in market sentiment or kind of geopolitical changes.
What could change that on the upper end, is of course the converse of that, so kind of better than expected, market performance in the U.K. and in the U.S., and other such, you know, positive trading conditions. I think given what we know now, we are probably considering somewhere in the middle of the range to be quite right. I'll move on to your third question, which is about the commercial opportunities for this year. As you know, we've outlined a three-pronged approach to driving a value. The first part is, of course, acquiring as many customers as we can.
We made great progress on that this quarter and will continue to maintain a primary focus on growing the customer base and growing the AUA base through growing the customer base. Our, our second focus is really on ensuring that the customers that we do have are invested customers, are contributing as much as they can to their pension so they can look forward to a happy retirement. Here on this second part of our value approach, we have a lot of exciting new initiatives which have to do with engagement. Our data shows that the more customers engage with us, the more they read our content, the more they learn about us, the more they learn about pensions, the more likely they are to put more money into their pensions.
A lot of our focus in the first quarter, and gearing up for the second quarter has been around creating those engagement features to help customers either find, or rank, or simply read, content that is relevant for them. By relevant for them, that could mean, at retirement content if they are in that age bracket. Or it could mean, gender-based content, because women's saving patterns are different to men's saving patterns. Or it could mean mid-career, content, generally content that is suitable for them. Our feature focus is really on making sure that our customers can find that content and they can access it easily because we know that will lead to higher contributions into their pensions and to more transfers into their PensionBee pensions.
We're very excited about that. Then the third part of our value creation strategy is about additional products. We've already commented that we are working with LifeSearch to bring forward a life insurance referral offering, and we expect that to launch in the second quarter of this year. I would say that we are making great strides in terms of part one, onboarding lots of new invested customers, part two, helping them save into their pensions, and then finally part three, offering them additional products that can help them save for a happy retirement.
Excellent. Thanks, Romi Savova, and well done to your team. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is from James Allen of Liberum. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, guys. I've got two questions if I can. Firstly, on annualized recurring revenues, I noticed you'd stopped putting that number in the reports. Are you able to tell us what that was at the end of Q1? Second question, the average age of new customers has increased year on year in the quarter. How exactly are you attracting these older customers? Is this something to do with the marketing mix or just power of the brand over time? Thanks.
Good morning. Good morning, James, and thanks for your two questions. I may start off with taking the first one around the annual run rate revenue, which you, as you pointed out, we have stopped reporting, instead referred to the LTM, so the last 12 months revenue in the presentation. For reference, the ARR at the end of Q1 was close to GBP 22 million, to be precise, GBP 21.8 million, at the end of the first quarter.
I'm very happy to take your second question, which is around the age mix. Yes, indeed, we have seen a slightly older customer base coming onto the PensionBee technology platform in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year. Some of that has to do with the general macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, namely that the first quarter of last year was quite a consumer shock in many ways as consumers digested the impact of the war in Ukraine. We expect that to have impacted on consumer sentiment, particularly in some of the older demographics a bit more last year.
Therefore, as you will recall, we changed our marketing mix, because we considered it more productive to deploy capital onto channels that would attract a slightly younger customer base, whose retirement plans are less likely to be impacted by current geopolitical events. There is a bit of that general macro and geopolitical change that has certainly had an impact on last quarter and is somewhat less present this quarter, which we can see in the data. I suppose the kind of overall riding kind of longer term trend that we expect to see is that customers, you know, of older ages, potentially customers with substantially larger pension pots, will continue to increasingly choose PensionBee because we make it easy for them to manage their pensions.
We make it easy for them to, of course, process withdrawals when they need to. We expect to continue attracting a very broad customer base, including older customers. Now that those geopolitical events and macroeconomic events have become a little bit more kind of business as usual in the mindset of consumers, we expect that sort of long-term trend of PensionBee being the primary pension provider for customers of all ages to continue on its trajectory.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
The next question is from Philip Middleton of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, thank you for that very clear presentation. Just two questions. Firstly, you've explained why pot size in Q1 is typically lower. Does the same argument mean that transfer, that subscriptions from existing clients is typically higher in Q1? I mean, that 'cause it did look a very big number in the first quarter compared to previous history. Is that also a tax driven thing? Secondly, incredible scalability in the tech platform. Given that, given where inflation is and given the fact that you are growing quite fast, how much more scope do you have for that level of scalability before you have to be investing sort of visibly more amounts of money into the tech platform?
Good morning, Philip, thank you very much for those questions. Q1 tends to be quite special in terms of consumer behavior and the way that the process works at PensionBee. What we tend to see is quite a rush, especially in February and March, to meet the tax year-end deadline for contributions. When customers sign up, they will add their pension transfers that they wish to transfer to PensionBee. In Q2, and three and four, they will wait for those transfers to complete, and then set up contributions. In Q1, because of that tax year-end deadline, they will add their transfers, but also immediately set up their contributions so as to be within the deadline. The transfers will of course flow through as they naturally do.
We expect to see that dynamic continue into Q2 and into Q3. What we observe kind of on a Q1 basis is if you look at 2020, 2021, and of course 2022, what we can see in 2023 is that our average net flow per new invested customer in the quarter is actually at an all-time high compared to the previous first quarter of the years that I cited. It comes in at around GBP 10,900 for the quarter, and of course, that compares to GBP 7,500 in 2022, which had that macroeconomic backdrop that we've already discussed. Does that answer your first question?
Yeah. No, that's very helpful. Thank you.
Okay, great. Then your second question around the scalability of the technology platform. We invested quite heavily in the engineering capability over 2021 and 2022 in order to bring on board the, you know, the team that can help us to continue to drive that value that I discussed earlier. Bringing on new invested customers, creating features to help them engage with us and contribute into their pensions, and then ultimately to deliver new additional products. We believe that we are actually very well positioned from a cost perspective given the investments that we made in the past two years.
Of course, you know, with us because we own our technology and because we are responsible for building it, and for maintaining that scalability, the primary investment that we of course make is in our people. The drive to continue to increase productivity, it, you know, coupled with the investments that we made in the past two years, we think leave us very well positioned to continue to maintain those technology platform, costs at fairly stable levels.
Of course, the final point to make there is that to the extent that we do use any kind of third-party services or third-party suppliers as, you know, as we inevitably will, the fact that our scale continues to grow enables us to offset, some of the investments that we make in people and increasing salaries of our current team, by reducing some of our supplier costs. I hope that makes sense.
Yeah. No, that's fine. Thank you very much.
Great.
There are no further questions on the conference line. We will now address the questions submitted via the webcast page. The first written question is from Paul Bryant of Equity Development. His first question goes as follows: We saw average new pot size fall in 2022 because of markets and because of targeting a younger customer base. Could you comment on the trajectory of average incoming pot size in Q1? His second question is, are you seeing older customers start to become more active again following the sitting on their hands in 2022?
Yeah, good morning. Good morning, Paul, and thanks a lot for the question. I'm happy to take those. Just on the first part of the question, the new incoming pots from the net new invested customer base, that was much higher this quarter compared to last year, as we already commented on, by around 45% at close to GBP 11,000. This is predominantly also driven that we, so to speak, increased that average age of new customers that came onto the platform, which was 39 this year, and then compared to 37 in Q1 2022. That drove also the that higher average pots size this year, this quarter. Hope that answers the question.
Are there any further questions?
There are no further questions submitted via the webcast page. I will now hand back over to Romi Savova for closing remarks.
Thank you very much to everyone joining us today. We're very pleased with the outcome for the quarter because it of course demonstrates our excellent growth trajectory, which enables us to take advantage of the huge opportunity in front of us, while reconfirming, of course, our profitability, deliverability, and the objectives that we've set for ourselves by the end of 2023. Thank you all very much for joining us today, and we look forward to subsequent calls that we have lined up with you.