Hello, I'm Romi Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our 2022 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 with money managed by the world's largest asset managers. 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 2022, the market for transferable pensions was resilient, underpinned by automatic enrollment and growing national awareness of the importance of pensions and savings.
Against this backdrop, PensionBee continued to position itself as the pension provider of choice, increasing our brand awareness to over 50% and achieving household brand name recognition. We continued to use our data platform to gain actionable insights with respect to our marketing expenditure and thereby reduced our in-period cost per Invested Customers in the second, third, and fourth quarter of 2022. Ultimately, these achievements will support a long-term decline in the cost of customer acquisition for PensionBee. At the same time, we continued to invest in our secure and scalable technology, releasing innovative new features for our customers, such as easy bank transfer, regular withdrawals, and our Impact Plan.
We look forward to continuing our growth trajectory in 2023, which will see us making headway in achieving our 2% market share target and reaching 1 million Invested Customers in the medium to long term. We are also delighted to announce an upcoming partnership to offer life insurance products to our customers, they can continue to plan confidently for a happy retirement. 2022 has been characterized by our dedication to serve our customers. We continued to help them prepare for retirement. We helped them to combine their pensions, make additional contributions, and use their tax benefits, invest in line with their objectives and values, and make easy withdrawals. As a result, despite the volatile macroeconomic backdrop, we grew our assets under administration to over GBP 3 billion.
We welcomed 66,000 new Invested Customers, resulting in a total Invested Customer base of 183,000 Invested Customers. We continued to offer consumers an excellent service, as reflected by our sustained customer retention rate of over 97%. At the same time, our revenue reached GBP 18 million, growing by 38% over the year. PensionBee has been and will continue to be successful, in part because of the enormous need for our services in the GBP 700 billion market of transferable defined contribution pensions, which has grown by more than 60% from 2015 to 2019. There is approximately GBP 1 trillion in defined contribution pension assets in the U.K., of which about GBP 700 billion are resting in pensions that are not actively receiving employer contributions.
The 25 million-30 million consumers who own these pensions are often burdened by difficult administrative processes to manage them and ultimately to prepare for retirement. Our easy-to-use online pension enables our customers to make the most of their money. We expect the need for PensionBee to continue growing, underpinned by the regulatory commitment to automatic enrolment, regular job switching that generates more dormant pensions, and a growing national consciousness of the importance of pension savings. The awareness of pensions as a critical component of personal financial health has grown over the past year, as demonstrated by online search activity for pension-related topics. At the same time, PensionBee data demonstrates that transfers have continued to grow as the company completed 125,000 pension transfers in 2022 compared to 65,000 transfers just two years ago.
Similarly, the average pension contribution increased from GBP 507 per Invested Customer in 2020 to GBP 628 per Invested Customer in 2022. Conversely, the average withdrawal per withdrawing customer reduced by about 20% as consumers considered the impact of the cost of living crisis on their discretionary expenditure. Not only have defined contribution pensions remained resilient in 2022, they are set to continue growing in importance. The latest government data indicates that the vast majority of working age people are expected to have some form of defined contribution pension savings by 2060. At the same time, there is an increasing expectation that mandatory contribution rates into defined contribution workplace pensions will rise this decade. As a result, the underlying trends for PensionBee's core target market have been and continue to be supportive.
In recognition of the growing national awareness of retirement savings, we have invested in making the PensionBee brand synonymous with pensions. Having grown our customer base to 183,000 Invested Customers and having invested GBP 45 million in our marketing activities since inception, we are proud to have achieved household brand name recognition in the U.K. as reflected by prompted brand awareness of over 50%. We have been disciplined in our marketing investment, maintaining a cumulative cost per Invested Customer of GBP 200-GBP 250 and using our data insights to drive the appropriate return on our marketing expenditure. As a result, and fueled by the growing recognition of the PensionBee brand, we reduced the in-period cost per Invested Customer in the second, third, and fourth quarters of the year.
We expect our growing brand awareness and use of data to continue to enable us to maintain efficiency in our marketing activities and to reduce the cost per Invested Customers over time. Over 2022, we also continued to invest in our technology. Our technology stack is scalable and secure, built in-house with the purpose of serving our customers. Efficiency and productivity have been and continue to be a key theme as we progress on our medium to long-term objective of onboarding 1 million Invested Customers. To that end, we focused on automation, further enhancements to our pension transfer journey, and essential self-service features for our customers, such as rapid contributions and intuitive withdrawals. As a result, we increased our ratio of Invested Customers to staff members, demonstrating operating leverage in our technology.
Over 2022, we maintained 99.9% uptime and a response rate of 128 milliseconds on customer-facing systems. Our rapid deployment cycle enabled us to make approximately 1,700 releases in the year. As we continue into 2023, we are focused on delivering against our strategic pillars. We will continue to invest in acquiring customers efficiently. Having achieved household brand name recognition, we are well positioned to continue to reduce our cost per Invested Customer this year. We will further enhance our brand awareness using efficient channels and use the insights from our data to optimize our performance channels. We remain focused on delivering innovative and useful features for our customers through our product.
As a trusted companion to our customers, this year we will deliver them more targeted and engaging content, helping them to grow their pensions with us by keeping them well informed. We will also offer further engaging features with respect to their investments, helping our customers to understand how they can prepare for a happy retirement through savings in the capital markets. Finally, we will soon be introducing a life insurance partnership with LifeSearch, a leading broker for life insurance products in the U.K., to help our customers maintain peace of mind while they prepare for later life. This year, we will also continue to invest in our scalable and secure technology. We will continue to make pension transfers more efficient to support our objective of serving 1 million Invested Customers.
We will also expand the use of our data platform across the business, helping our team to make more data-led decisions as we serve our customers. Of course, we will continue to invest in information security through our proprietary BeeSecure program, which increases the education and technical sophistication around our cybersecurity activities at the company. While we hope our customers will enjoy their online experience, if they do need support from a human, their personal BeeKeeper, we will continue to maintain industry leading response times. We are proud to pick up the phone in under two minutes and to respond to live chat in 30 seconds or less. 2022 was also important to us from an investment perspective.
Having worked with our customers and BlackRock to create a plan that enables our customers to address the world's great social and environmental problems while saving for retirement, we were pleased to launch the Impact Plan in February. Our focus this year will be on embedding the plan into our offering and maintaining value for money across our range of investment products. I will now hand over to Christoph, who will provide a financial overview of 2022 and the outlook and guidance for 2023 and beyond.
Thank you very much, Romi. Hello and a warm welcome to everyone. I'm pleased to cover the financial section of our update. In this finance section, I will start with a brief overview highlighting some important elements of the PensionBee business model and the significant market opportunity. Second, I will cover the long-term compounding nature of our AUA, which is underpinned by strong net flows from new and existing customer and high customer and asset retention rates of around 97%. Third, we will review the profit and loss statement, demonstrating the ability of our scalable technology platform to drive operating leverage and achieve profitability on an Adjusted EBITDA basis by year-end. Next, we will touch on the balance sheet and a healthy capital position that sees us reaching ongoing profitability without the need for any further primary capital.
Lastly, thanks to the vast and structurally growing market opportunity that lies ahead, strong customer acquisition capabilities and our scalable technology platform. We expect PensionBee to further evolve into a high-growth, high-margin business in the long term. Next, we will turn to look in detail at how our business model works. Our growth strategy is underpinned by the attractiveness of the market opportunity. Our core target markets, the transferable pensions mass market, is vast, at approximately GBP 700 billion in pension assets as of 2019. We address that mass market opportunity by solving genuine customer problems. The customer journey often begins with the consolidation of prior pension pots, enabling customers to place their pension savings into one of a simple selection of funds. Our customers' pensions are then invested with our money manager partners, which are amongst the world's largest and most reputable investment institutions.
We offer competitively priced solutions at an all-inclusive fee of 50-95 basis points. The average realized fee is 63 basis points. We pay a variable percentage fee of between 15%-20% of that to our money manager partners and keep the remainder on our own accounts. Thanks to the power of our scalable technology platform, we can serve an ever-increasing customer base in an efficient way, which we see in the achievement of operating leverage over time. Technology platform costs are predominantly fixed in nature and capture costs relating to our employees, technology platform subscription, and other corporate expenditure. Lastly, we invest in marketing to drive current and future growth and are pleased to have achieved household brand name status, with prompted brand awareness in excess of 50%.
Strong brand awareness supports our customer acquisition capabilities, leading to a reduced cost per Invested Customer over time. In conclusion, we operate in a vast and structurally growing market and serve the need of the mass market of the U.K. consumers. Our business model sees us generating recurring and predictable revenue, accompanied by our ability to drive operating leverage as we continue to grow. Our high customer retention rates of 97%, coupled with the nature of our customer base on average mid-career savers in the pension accumulation phase, leads to compounding AUA. As you can see on the left of the page, we show cumulative net flows, excluding market growth, by customer cohorts. All customer cohorts delivered positive net inflows across 2022, even the early cohorts acquired across 2016-2018. This serves as a good reminder of the long-duration compounding nature of the AUA and revenue streams.
With an average age in the late thirties, our customers continue to demonstrate a long-term commitment to saving with PensionBee, growing their assets with us every single year. On a total AUA basis, the last 12 months have demonstrated the strong resilience of our AUA and continue to grow, even despite challenging global capital market conditions. We generated close to GBP 900 million of net inflows over the period. Had markets been stable, this would have resulted in an AUA base of close to GBP 3.5 billion. As is the case for all companies across the sector, poor markets have universally impacted AUA. We closed the year at just over GBP 3 billion of AUA, representing an increase of 17% on 2021.
To summarize, generating lifetime value from recurring and compounding asset growth from new and existing customer cohorts is evident in the achievement of both high customer retention rates and continuous net inflows across all cohorts. We take a closer look at how we generate operating leverage on our path to profitability as we serve our customers via our scalable technology platform. A very important milestone in 2022 was the achievement of our Adjusted EBITDA before marketing profitability target in the fourth quarter of 2022, a precursor to the ongoing Adjusted EBITDA profitability milestone expected by the end of this year in line with guidance and expectation. Adjusted EBITDA profitability is in sight owing to the combination of our recurring revenue on the one hand and the scalable technology platform and carefully managed cost base on the other, as outlined as follows.
With regards to revenue, thanks to our high customer and asset retention rates of 97% with a mid-career customer base and accumulation phase, as well as a stable realized revenue margin, our revenue is recurring in nature. In fact, despite market volatility in 2022, we grew revenue by 38% year on year to reach GBP 18 million. Turning to the cost base, the technology platform costs are a key driver of operating leverage. The technology platform cost bucket increased in 2022 by 27% to GBP 17.8 million owing to investments in product improvements, feature releases, and automation initiatives. Thanks to all of those investments into the technology platform, we are well placed to continue to drive operating leverage for 2023. Another key driver of operating leverage is more efficient marketing investment.
We invested GBP 16.6 million in marketing for 2022, which allowed us to increase our brand awareness to over 50% and which corresponded with a reduction of customer acquisition costs over 2022. At the end of the year, the marketing investment placed us into a very strong position for 2023 and will enable us to reduce marketing expenditure this year while growing to keep advantage of the substantial market opportunity ahead of us. In conclusion, thanks to high customer retention rates and associated recurring revenues, combined with our scalable technology platform and cost base, we are looking forward to continuing to drive operating leverage and expect to achieve our next big milestone of full ongoing Adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of this year. A word on our balance sheet.
We have a strong cash and capital position, and as at the end of the year, had GBP 21 million in cash, which will facilitate expenditure this year prior to achieving ongoing Adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of 2023. With regards to our forward-looking expectation and guidance, we are happy to reiterate the framework shared at the beginning of the 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 from 2015 to 2019. We expect it to continue benefiting from the structural shift from defined benefits to defined contribution pensions and growing contribution rates.
Over the next five to 10-year horizon, we expect to capture a 2% market share of this enormous market, which would translate into serving about 1 billion Invested Customers with an average pension balance of GBP 20,000-GBP 25,000, resulting in revenue opportunity of GBP 150 million in the long term. Given the scalability of our technology platform and our ability to manage the 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. Year-to-date trading has been strong, driven by net flows from new and existing customers. We expect to continue to execute against our business plan for 2023.
I will now hand back to Romi to cover the investment highlights.
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 for your time today. We look forward to engaging with investors.
Allow me to inform everyone. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. Participants can also ask a question using the Ask a Question button on the webcast page. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. We will take our first question from an individual who did not register their names. If you pressed star one to ask a question, please kindly introduce yourself and go ahead. Your line is now open.
Could that be William Hawkins from KBW? Can you hear me?
Good morning. We can hear you well.
We can hear you, sir.
Hey, guys. It's the man of mystery. Thank you for that comprehensive update. Very helpful. Three questions, please. Could you offer anything more precise about how this has been a strong start to the year? It's great to hear that, but if there's anything quantitative, that would be helpful. Secondly, please, I think, back in January when you were talking about the outlook for this year, and you've just alluded to it, you know, I think we were talking about marketing spend of maybe GBP 10 million-GBP 12 million, and the, in period cost of about GBP 200.
I've been kind of backing out 60,000 new customers for this year, which is great, but it's down on 66 last year, and it's gonna be very hard, if you keep at that run rate, to get to the million customers. I'm assuming that what's going on here is some kind of consolidation of the business, so there's a more efficient acquisition of better value customers that could then take off again. If you could help me understand that dynamic over time, that would be helpful, please. Thirdly, thank you for that teaser about LifeSearch. It sounds quite exciting. Is there anything that you could tell us about kind of growth and maybe the economic impact of this?
Clearly, we're not expecting anything for next month, but I really have no idea about how to gauge the scale of this opportunity.
Thank you.
Thanks very much for your questions. Perhaps I'll start with the first one. We've had a very strong start to the year. As you know, January and February tend to be back to school, back to work kind of months, where consumers are quite engaged in their personal financial matters as well. Tax year-end is, of course, approaching too. Certainly what we have seen last year but also this year is an increasing national focus on pensions. With PensionBee and the brand having become quite synonymous with pension management and easy pension solutions, we have benefited from that in the start of this year, hence why we've updated to say that trading has been strong in the form of bringing on new customers onto the platform, but also receiving net flows from existing customers.
As you know, we tend to publish very regular trading updates. We will be back with you kind of mid-April with the more specific numbers around the first quarter. What we did want to offer is some context on how the year is going so far, and that for us it is very much business as usual, and in line with, in line with our expectations.
Good morning. I take the second question around the marketing spending and the expected customer growth for 2023. The first point to make is, yes, it's a correct summary that we would envisage to spend this year in and around the 2020 to 2021 levels, which we narrowed down in the last trading quarter GBP 10 million-GBP 12 million at a in period CPIC at the lower end of our GBP 200-GBP 250 range. The number reported is a reasonable number. I think how we're thinking about it, given your comment that compared to the 66,000 in 2022, it might be a little lower than that comparison.
I think the way of how we're thinking about it is just to look at it from a growth versus profitability perspective. I think, post-IPO, it was pretty much focus on the growing component. I think as we are coming now closer and closer to this very important profitability milestone, we wanted to rebalance that balance towards profitability a bit more. A way to thinking about it is that it really underscores our firm commitment to achieve profitability by the end of this year on an Adjusted EBITDA basis. That is also a proxy for a very good proxy for cash flow. That means that at this point we become self-funding.
once we achieve that point, that we believe will substantially de-risk the business. We will then, you know, recalibrate that growth versus profitability balance accordingly. I think another point to mention is around the pot size. as you have noted in 2022, we saw it particularly at the beginning of the year that there was that some incoming pots have been a little bit below the historical average, which was driven by markets, sentiments and so on, also in each mix. I think as we progress through 2022, there we saw a revision to kind of the mean over the period. When you look at the fourth quarter 2022 and compare it to the fourth quarter 2021, it appears that this has kind of normalized again.
I think that is something that we might expect for 2023 as well. I hope that answers the question around how we're thinking about it, from a perspective of putting the balance right between growth and profitability. I hand over to Romi on the third point.
Yes, indeed. As you know, we've been flagging for a while that our approach to growth and to business model development is first focusing on bringing as many Invested Customers as we can to enjoy using PensionBee. Second of all, helping them to invest as much as they can into their pensions. Then third of all, offering them additional products that can help them prepare for a happy retirement. We see the partnership with LifeSearch and the opportunity to offer our customers life insurance product as being very much within that three-step approach that we've outlined. You know, the worst can and does happen. We would never want that to impact our customers' ability to save.
Our research with our customers, which of course drives all of our product development, indicated that life insurance would be a product that is well received and well demanded. We are also quite excited to be bringing this to fruition and bringing this to market. Our primary focus, of course, does remain bringing on as many new Invested Customers as we can and of course helping them to maximize their pension savings with us. We will be exploring this opportunity and bringing it to market at the appropriate pace. As we have more details around financials and the growth prospects, we'll continue to update.
For now, we wanted to flag that it's coming, that we are certainly excited about it and that we hope that everyone thinks about it as well when they think about the potential and the opportunity for the company. Thank you very much.
That's fantastic. Thank you. Looking forward to April.
Our second question today comes from James Allen from Liberum. James, please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, guys. I've got three questions if I can. First one, on competition, we can see that some peers are starting to take note of how well you're doing and are looking to get in on the action. For example, AJ Bell launched its own pension finding tool at the end of last year. Have you seen any impact from AJ Bell launching that tool? Second question, are there any other competitors in the market launching anything similar? Third question. I noticed in the IPO prospectus that you used Silicon Valley Bank for banking and payment services alongside other banks like Barclays. Assuming no impact on you guys from events last week, how did you circumnavigate what was going on with SVB? Was it just a case of just switching to Barclays when it all unfolded? Thanks.
Let's start with the first question around competition. The first point around competition is that the market is incredibly vast. There is an addressable defined contribution pensions market of about 1 trillion GBP. Of course, 70% of those pensions are considered preserved, dormant, resting, and not really receiving, you know, very much in the way of pension contributions from employers. From our perspective, you know, we haven't really seen much of an impact from competition because our growth opportunity is so very clear in such a very big market. As you know, our value proposition is rather differentiated from the offerings of other, of others in the market.
We offer a very simple and easy way for consumers to take control of their pensions, to make contributions, to invest and ultimately to withdraw. We believe it's rather difficult to replicate that level of user experience, to replicate it with the customer service that we offer, with the investment offering that we offer, and of course with the product innovation that we offer as well. Yes. I think that should cover our thoughts on competition. Christoph, do you want to add anything?
Nothing further to add. I think just on the second point, where you ask with regards to new entrants into the market, I think it's correct. Right after the right after the IPO, we did see a few new startups to come into the market and try to do something similarly as we do. I think what we have seen now over the last 12-18 months unfolding is that they appear to have pivoted into other kind of niches, if you will. Expands from focusing more on workplace pensions or those kinds of things.
I think we did see, some initial noise after the IPO, but I think when we look at the competitive landscape right this second, I don't see very similarly propositions that have the same traction as we have at the moment.
I'll come back on your, on your final point re, Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank was a bank that had opened a bank account for us a very long time ago, and I think they have played a very important role within the technology ecosystem, essentially doing the same for many, many businesses across the U.K. There's no impact to us from any of the events at SVB. There hadn't been and there isn't any impact on us now. We'll take any further questions.
Thanks very much.
Our next question today comes from an individual who did not register their name. If you pressed star one to ask a question, please kindly introduce yourself and go ahead. Your line is now open.
I think I'm your second man of mystery. It's Andrew Watson at Singers. Good morning.
Good morning.
Just a few from me. Just on marketing mix first of all. Was watching some live sport and noticed your branding all around the side of pitch. Are you starting to adopt some slightly more expensive modes of marketing? Can you just comment on the ROI and how that blends into the overall mix? My second question is on the gross outflow component of your net flows. That GBP 197 through the FY 2022 year, can you just comment on how much of that is natural drawdown, regretted lost direction, and just really how you're trying to prevent that regretted attrition? My final one is around the 50%+ margin target. Sorry, call it aspiration, obviously long way into the future.
Can you just comment a little bit on what the business looks like in terms of the range of sizes, in terms of Invested Customer numbers, but actually more importantly for me, at which point you start and look to translate some of those returns into economies of scale benefits for the underlying customers and start to think about bringing pricing down and in turn promote more absolute growth?
Very happy to start on the first question and glad you have been watching the Brentford Bees doing so well. Our approach to marketing is very much a diversified one. We adopt multiple different channels, and we tend to segment them across two dimensions, the first being brand channels and the second being performance channels. On the brand side, we will include channels such as television, radio, and as you mentioned, sports sponsorship. That would very much fall on the brand side. Of course, on the performance side, we tend to include online channels such as search, whether that's on Google or on the app stores.
With regards to our marketing expenditure and our brand channels, what we have observed is the increase in brand awareness over the course of 2022. Having now achieved prompted brand awareness of over 50%, we see ourselves as a household brand name here in the U.K. As a result of that, what we have been considering and implementing is perhaps a bit of a change in the channel mix around our brand channels. In the past, in order to establish that level of prompted brand awareness, it's been necessary to invest in certain channels that can have a higher cost of brand repetition, such as primetime TV, such as outdoor.
While we will continue to invest in these types of channels, we have also increasingly been diversifying them with channels that have a lower cost per brand repetition. Channels such as radio and actually channels such as sports. What you can see from us going forward is we still have an ambition to increase the brand awareness of PensionBee. We're a household brand name, we aren't yet at the stage where, you know, 80% or 90% of people can recall having heard of us. We have an ambition to continue increasing that. Given where we are today, we can afford to do that with slightly different channels in our brand mix.
Sports sponsorship is actually one of the most effective ways to do that, alongside channels such as radio, in order to reduce that cost per brand name repetition. Then of course, on the performance side, we'll continue optimizing with our data, and ensuring that the lessons that we've gathered over the past 10 years around brand bidding and around conversion are well translated into our marketing funnel.
Okay. It is lower league football rather than Premier League at the minute.
Yes. Pardon?
It will be optimized towards the more value for money. Let's say lower league in terms of my analogy rather than kind of Premier League high cost.
I'm happy to take the second question around gross outflows and the mix. I think overall speaking, what we have observed historically and also in 2022 was that the mix between drawdowns and attrition to be roughly 50/50%, over the last, you know, few years. I think as we have pointed out on one of the pages, particularly on page seven, is that the average withdrawal amounts have come down over that same period, while at the same point the retention rate has improved also over that same period. This mix marginally saw some higher proportion of withdrawal compared to attrition. I wouldn't see any material deviation from this historical average.
Let me hand over to Romi to cover this third point around pricing.
Our pricing approach is very much set by our approach to value for money. We look at ourselves on a comparative basis on a regular basis. We compare the offering that we present to customers on a fully priced basis, so including all fees, whether that is of course, the underlying fund fee, whether that is the proportion, you know, the PensionBee receives. As you know, we don't have additional fees for trading and contributions and all other sorts of hidden fees that are very hard to find on fee pages that, you know, that take multiple hours to decipher. We compare ourselves very much on a relative basis. Our aim is to offer a good value pension product.
Value has been defined across the sector as performance, as cost and also as service. That will be the primary driver of any pricing decisions that we make.
Okay. Thank you.
Do we have any further questions?
The following question comes from Philip Middleton from Bank of America. Philip, please proceed.
Hey, good morning. Thanks to both for the presentation. Just a couple of things. First of all, Christoph, could you just confirm that what you're saying is that what you're looking for this year is possibly slightly less new customers, but bringing slightly higher balances? Secondly, I wonder if one of you could talk about... I suppose there's three questions. One, have you seen any impacts from the recent volatility we've been experiencing? Thirdly, what are you reading into the debate around the changes in pension regulation that came out of the budget and sort of carried on today with Labour saying they'll reverse at least some of them and such like?
Hello. Good morning, Philip. I'm happy to take the first one around net new ICs and the pot size. I think you did summarize it quite accurately. I think the way of how we think about it, as I mentioned at the beginning, is kind of that rebalancing between growth and profitability to really underscoring our firm commitment to profitability and therefore, you know, making the decisions that are in line with that. I think we are quite pleased, as Romy mentioned, that the 2022 investment in marketing really yielded quite attractive fruits in terms of brand awareness, which is now over 50%.
That puts us into a very strong position from an acquisition perspective, to really optimize that ROI from a marketing budget perspective. To spend basically less than 2022, but still drive quite attractive volume, considering the costs that we are spending. On the first part of your question on net new ICs, I think the number that was mentioned earlier is a reasonable, a reasonable number to look at.
On the second part of the question in terms of what we would expect from a pot size perspective, I think I would refer to the recovery tendencies that we observed in 2022, where we saw, you know, smaller pots coming in at the beginning, given, you know, a surprise in a surprise moment around that with the invasion that occurred in with Russia and Ukraine and the associated market volatility. I think that shocked or that surprised some customers. We saw some inertia there from certain customer segments.
That has kind of normalized and over the rest of the year, so that when you look at the end of the year, the pot size for new customers that actually recovered to levels that we have seen before the whole situation unfolded. For this year, we would expect that trend to continue. I think the way of how we're looking at it, what occurred in 2022 is there was an initial deviation from the mean in the first half and then a revision to that mean in the second half. I think we are now back at that average level, if that makes sense for the first question.
Yeah. I'm happy to take the second question around volatility. I think, you know, volatility is going to be a very normal and ongoing aspect of investing in the capital markets and in investing in pensions. I know, you know, sometimes for us within this sector, every time feels a little bit different. I think from a long-term perspective, you know, there's always going to be periods of volatility and, you know, we certainly haven't seen any impact of that in the short term. We'll keep a close and watchful eye. You know, we expect that volatility will come and go, and this period will come and go as well.
Just with regards to the regulatory changes, you know, yesterday was a fairly busy day on the budget side. I think it had been rumored for a number of weeks that the lifetime allowance and the annual allowance changes would come through in a way that is favorable to pensions. We are of course supportive of anything that simplifies the pension system. Certainly the abolition of the lifetime allowance is one of those factors that will make it much easier for consumers to understand, you know, what it means to save into your pensions and what the limits are with regards to that. You know, I think we see it as a marginally positive development.
You know, equally, had the changes been in the opposite direction, and had allowances been frozen, you know, I think we wouldn't have foreseen too much impact of that either, because the reality is that most people don't come anywhere close to their annual or their lifetime allowance, and certainly won't probably for a number of decades. I think the bigger trend that we are seeing within pensions regulation is I think the dominant and driving one. That's the move away from having defined benefit as a way that retirement is provided for for most people in the country. The move away from those defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions. Some of the developments that we've seen coming out of Westminster are certainly very interesting.
The government is supporting a reduction in the automatic enrolment age, expecting to bring that down to 18 from 22. They are supporting the abolition of the lower earnings trigger, meaning again that more people will be brought into automatic enrolment at higher rates of effective contributions. I think over the past couple of months, we've certainly heard more noise coming out of Westminster regarding the raising of contribution rates more generally. As we know, they have to reach around 12% in the medium term, in order for us to be able to actually fund the retirement of, you know, of the country.
I think those longer term trends, that commitment to defined contribution pensions, is probably the regulatory, kind of impetus that we'll be paying most attention to. Although of course, you know, positive changes in the budget that, you know, fuel pension savings are always welcome.
Okay, thanks. That's very clear.
We have received no additional questions on the audio line, and no written questions have been submitted. I will now hand back over to Romi Savova for closing remarks.
Thank you very much for joining us today. We've enjoyed engaging with the community, and we look forward to having further conversations with everyone over the course of today, tomorrow, and next week. Thank you very much, everyone.