Hello, I'm Romi Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our fourth quarter trading update for 2022. 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. 2022 has been a landmark year for PensionBee. We grew our assets under administration to over GBP 3 billion, helping new and existing customers navigate a challenging macroeconomic environment.
We welcomed 66,000 new invested customers, resulting in a total invested customer base of 183,000 customers. We continued to offer consumers an excellent service, as reflected by our sustained customer retention rate of 97%. Our revenue reached GBP 18 million, growing by 38% over the year with a GBP 20 million annual run rate achieved in December. We also reached a significant profitability milestone, recording pre-marketing profitability for the fourth quarter of the year, in line with our stated objectives and cementing our way to ongoing profitability on an Adjusted EBITDA basis by the end of 2023.
Turning to our financial and operational highlights for the year, I am pleased to report that GBP 3 billion in assets under administration represents a compound annual growth rate of 74% since 2018, underscoring PensionBee's ability to capture market share in its enormous GBP 700 billion pension consolidation target market. Thanks to a combination of the predictability of our revenues and our consistently high retention rate, the growth in our asset base has translated into similar growth in revenue. Our annual run rate revenue reached GBP 20 million by the end of the year, also reflecting an annual growth rate of about 74% since 2018. As always, our results are testament to our strategy and proposition, which continue to resonate in the enormous market of pension savers across the UK.
Over the last quarter, we continued to acquire customers, deploying the remainder of 2022's GBP 16.6 million marketing budget. As a result of our continued investment in reaching the millions of consumers across the U.K. who would benefit from PensionBee's offering, we were pleased to achieve household brand name status, recording brand awareness of more than 50% this January. We know customers love us because of our innovative product offering. After a year in development, we are pleased to be bringing our Impact Plan to market.
Reflecting a globally diversified portfolio with 200-300 stocks that have a material, additional, and measurable impact on our ability to solve the world's great social and environmental problems, we are confident this new plan will enable us to reach many more consumers and help them to save for retirement while investing in line with their values. Our Regular withdrawals feature is now also in the hands of our customers, and we are excited to help our at retirement customers make the most of their savings as they enjoy their later years. Finally, we will soon be launching our Tax Relief Calculator, helping customers make the most of their tax allowances in the run up to tax year-end. To support our ambitions, we have continued to invest in the ongoing performance of our industry leading technology platform.
We delivered further transfer efficiency improvements, internal automations, and information security enhancements to support growth, productivity, and information security. Importantly, we transitioned one of our top 10 paper pension provider counterparties to a new electronic transfer method. Our efforts translated into increasing efficiency with invested customers and revenue per FTE, demonstrating strong annual improvements in line with increasing operational leverage. Many of these improvements were designed to support our customer service team, enabling us to continue delivering a high quality of service. We are pleased to have maintained a customer retention rate in excess of 97% and excellent ratings across Trustpilot and the app stores throughout this period of customer growth. Having now launched our Impact Plan, we expect our investment offering to remain stable for the foreseeable period.
As always, we focus on achieving value for money for our customers and therefore will continue to appropriately monitor our overall plan range. Now I'd like to hand over to our CFO, Christoph Martin, who will take you through the financial outcome for the year and progress across the fourth quarter.
Thank you very much, Romi. Hello, and a warm welcome to everyone. I am pleased to cover the financial section of the Q4 trading update. The last 12 months have demonstrated the strong resilience of our AOA and our continued ability to grow. We generated close to GBP 900 million of net inflows over the period. Whilst this would have resulted in an AOA base of close to GBP 3.5 billion and around GBP 22 million of annual run rate revenue for December if the markets had shown stability, as it is the case for other companies across the sector, poor markets have impacted AOA. We closed the year at just over GBP 3 billion of AOA, an increase of 70% on the prior year. I would like to highlight the asset contributors in more detail. First of all, we have driven growth through new customer acquisition.
Our agile marketing approach enabled us to onboard more than 66,000 new invested customers, representing the majority of asset growth over the period at GBP 685 million. We have driven asset growth through existing customers who have continued to accumulate pension savings with PensionBee. Growth from existing customers over the period represented GBP 178 million of AOA. Net flows from existing and new customers contributed GBP 863 million of asset growth over the period. As previously mentioned, we have been impacted by challenging markets. As it is customary, pension assets are invested in global capital markets, which have been impacted by a number of macroeconomic factors, including increasing inflation, rising interest rates, and geopolitical tensions.
To summarize, our AOA grew despite the backdrop of market decline and exceptional volatility, thanks to strong net flows from new and existing customers. As a long-term business, the lifetime value of our customers is of great importance. Lifetime value is predominantly driven by a high retention rate and recurring and compounding asset growth from existing customers. As you can see from the chart on the left-hand side of the page, we are pleased to report a continuous improvement in our customer retention rate, which is in excess of 97% for 2022. On the right-hand side of the page, we demonstrate cumulative net flows, excluding market growth, by customer cohorts. All customer cohorts delivered positive net inflows in 2022, even the early cohorts acquired in 2016 to 2018. This serves as a good reminder of the long duration compounding nature of the revenue streams.
With an average age in the late thirties, our customers demonstrate the long-term commitment to saving with PensionBee, growing their assets with us every single year. In summary, generating lifetime value from the recurring and compounding asset growth from existing customer cohorts is evident in the achievement of both a high customer retention rate and a continuous net inflows across all cohorts. We have achieved a key milestone on our path to full profitability by the end of this year, having delivered Adjusted EBITDA profitability for the fourth quarter of 2022. Underpinned by our scalable technology platform, this illustrates the operating leverage in our business throughout the cycle, even during periods of highly uncertain and volatile external markets. A key contributor in the achievement of this important profitability milestone was our recurring and predictable revenue base, itself driven by our resilient contractual gross revenue margin.
By way of reminder, the contractual gross revenue margin is the annual fee charged to customers before applying any discounts for pension pots over GBP 100,000, which again remained resilient at 69 basis points. Looking forward, we are moving towards reaching ongoing EBITDA profitability by the end of 2023, thanks to the combination of recurring, predictable, and growing revenues and our scalable technology platform. Thanks to our well-considered marketing investment throughout 2022, we reaped the rewards and added 66,000 new invested customers at an achieved cumulative CPIC that ended the year within the guided range at GBP 248. While brand investment will continue to be important, building on our status as a household name, increased emphasis will also be placed on the conversion of customers in our pipeline using valuable data insights and learnings.
I will now hand back to Romi to cover guidance, investment highlights, and further updates.
Thank you very much, Christoph. We are pleased to have delivered financial performance in line with our guidance for 2022. This included the achievement of high double-digit revenue growth and of course, our pre-marketing profitability milestone. Following the achievement of pre-marketing profitability in the fourth quarter of the year and the delivery of robust revenue growth, both of which demonstrate the quality of the company's predictable recurring revenue and the scalability of its technology platform. We would like to take the opportunity to reiterate our long-term financial ambitions and our near-term approach to achieving these in the current macroeconomic environment with an updated framework for guidance. To reconfirm, the company's guidance does not envisage any further capital raising, noting PensionBee Group's cash balance of over GBP 21 million as at the end of 2022.
Over the longer term, we are focused on capturing about 2% market share in the substantial pension consolidation market of GBP 700 billion, our target market. That is equivalent to about 1 million customers assuming an average pension pot of GBP 20,000-GBP 25,000 and translates into an annual revenue opportunity of about GBP 150 million. Over the longer term, we expect to deliver sound EBITDA margins of more than 50%, leveraging the scalability of our technology platform. In the short to medium term, having achieved household brand name status, we will capitalize on the last decade of brand investment, acquiring more customers and helping all of our customers grow their pension balances with PensionBee as they prepare for a happy retirement. As a result, we expect to continue delivering superior and sustained revenue growth.
With regards to profitability, we reconfirm our expectation of achieving ongoing Adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of 2023 and recording our first full year of profitability in 2024. As you can see, underscoring the strength of its strategy and its execution capability, PensionBee continues to grow in the vast and growing U.K. defined contribution pension market. Our differentiated customer proposition and scalable technology platform have been designed and built to serve an enormous customer base. Our successful brand building and customer acquisition activities have enabled us to grow with a sound path to profitability ahead of us. We are delighted to be recognized as an ESG leader and the rest of the executive team and I continue to look forward to a bright future serving our customers. We wish everyone a fantastic start to the new year and look forward to engaging with investors.
Thank you for your time today.
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 webcasting page. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. Our first question is coming from the line of James Allen, Liberum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Morning. Thanks, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Yes, we can hear you. Morning, James.
Morning. Brilliant. 2 questions from me, if I can. First one, just on the retention rate, that just keeps going higher every time you report. What can you attribute that to, and what do you think is kind of a long-term sustainable retention rate? Secondly, I know you previously had maybe issues with other pension platforms, which was in the trade press, which were maybe being a bit difficult about letting their customers transfer their assets over. Have you seen some of those businesses maybe becoming even more difficult in light of, you know, markets falling off, over the last kind of 6, 9 months? Have they made it more difficult for customers to transfer their assets over to your platform?
Thanks so much for those great questions. Perhaps I'll start on the retention rate. The retention rate is very much a measure of the satisfaction our customers experience while using PensionBee. For the past couple of years, we've been making strong improvements in the product, making the product more useful to our customers, making it easier to use, and of course, just giving them generally what it is they want. We can point to features such as our easy contribution feature, easy bank transfer. We can point to features such as our Retirement Planner and how that links to contributions. There are various features in the pipeline that are going to be coming through, such as giving our customers more targeted content within our in-app and in-product experience. Overall, there's been a very strong focus on the product.
I think also customer service, as you know, is something we really pride ourselves on. We take pride in the fact that when customers call us on the phone, we pick it up very quickly. We are instantly available on live chat, and of course, we respond to our customers' emails, which, you know, sounds very basic but is quite different to the way the rest of the industry sometimes treats their customers. You know, we take great pride in the fact that overall our customers are happy to be with PensionBee. That was exceptionally important last year during a time of great market volatility because providing that assurance and that customer care, of course leads to our customers feeling more pension confident and therefore staying with us.
With regards to the long-term ambition, we for a while outlined that we expect retention to be greater than 95%. Of course the 97.3% that we recently reported is within our expectations. We continue to focus on making the product and the customer service as excellent as we can for our customers so we can serve them.
Your second question about pension providers making transfers very difficult. You know, I can certainly, you know, vouch to the fact that some of them like to make things harder than they should be for consumers to move their own money. However, over the past year, the countervailing trend has been that post-COVID, and post-Royal Mail, we are seeing more providers interested in joining electronic frameworks for transfers. We've actually recently added one of our major postal providers to a new electronic protocol, which we're very pleased about. Yes, while I can sympathize with some of them, and their desires, we've actually seen the opposite trend of more providers being open to electronic work.
I would say we're in a fairly good position around work with providers at this stage. We don't currently have open, you know, open, unresolved issues with any single provider.
Thank you very much.
Cheers.
The next question is coming from Philip Middleton, Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning. You've hit all your targets for 2022. You've reiterated all your future guidance in spite of markets in 2022, indeed sentiment making it a truly dismal year. How have you done this? Have things gone better than you expected? Have you outperformed in other ways? Have you changed your approach to marketing spending? Were your original targets just a bit sort of conservative?
Well, thank you, for the question. I would say it's been a year of incredibly focused execution across all of our teams. Of course, the key reasons that we have achieved our targets is that we've had robust net inflows from new customers and also robust net inflows from existing customers. On the new customer front, the market opportunity remains enormous, and we provide a very valued service to consumers who want to take control of their pensions. Of course, our brand expansion over the course of 2022 has been critical. It's been critical in helping us to reduce the cost per invested customer on a quarterly basis over the last four quarters.
That investment in becoming a household brand name and achieving brand recognition of over 50%, we think has been a key factor in our ability to acquire customers in this enormous market. With respect to net flows from existing customers, I think, you know, there has been much in the press about how times are challenged from a cost of living crisis. The flip side of that is that consumers are very focused on their finances, and that includes short-term finances, but also longer term finances, which for many means making sure that their pensions are in one place, and of course, topping up their pensions where they can afford to do so.
Overall, I think last year was a reflection of the strong execution of our strategy, and of course, the overall enormous market opportunity, which presents an excellent growth path for us over the coming 10 years. Christoph, anything to add there?
No, I think those are the main points. I think the only last bit maybe on the cost side as well, is that given that increased uncertainty in the external environment, we have been quite closely focused on cost control, and that obviously helps. That is I think a theme that will be recurring into 2023 as well, because we have a very firm commitment on our EBITDA profitability target by the end of next year. I think that's the only other point to note.
Okay. Thank you.
The following question is coming from the line of Alexander Bowers, Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi. Just two questions from me. The first one, in terms of your sort of net inflow outlook for 2023, how are you thinking about the year given the current economic uncertainty? Should we expect net inflows perhaps to kind of dip off a little bit in 2023? My second question was on the Impact Plan new product. Could you talk a little bit about the sort of pricing of that and how that kind of differs from your existing product set? Thanks.
Hi. Good morning, Alex. Maybe I take the first one on net flows for 2023. Maybe I refer to a few data points that may be helpful in triangulate in a potential answer to that particular question. I think when you look into 2023 and you observed the increase in brand awareness from now to over 50% that we reported in the presentation, that means that we can be much more effective with our marketing spending. As I just said, around cost control, we really focusing on achieving more with less in a way.
I think from a marketing deployment perspective and really focusing on returns on that side, what we would look at for 2023 is levers that you have probably observed around 2020, 2021. This will come at on the back of a much more improved CPIC, so to speak. If you were to look at the CPIC for 2023, particularly the in-year CPIC, so the incremental CPIC, that is marketing spending over the incremental customer, I think what we would target there is probably at the lower end of the GBP 200-GBP 250 threshold that we typically impose on that particular metric.
Combining those two data points would give you a kind of, you know, approximation on the new invest customer number to be acquired next year. I think when you then look at pot size, I think, you know, given what has occurred in the market more generally around volatility and challenges around flows in general, what we observed and you will see this as well when you look at incremental flows over incremental customer over the four quarters in 2022, you might actually see that they have been challenged in particular Q1, Q2, but Q3 saw a recovery, and Q4 was actually at the same level that we have observed in Q4 the prior years, that is 2021.
You could use that kind of data point to inform your net flows for that incremental customer to be acquired in 2023. That hopefully gives you net flows from new customers. If you look at net flows from existing customers, we are very pleased that as we highlighted in one of the slides on page 10, where you basically can see that we generated net inflows across all cohorts, even the one that we acquired very early on. That gives us comfort around the underlying cohort growth figure of mid-single digits, which is now around 4%, that this will continue, or there's sufficient evidence that would suggest this to continue.
If you apply that kind of metric to the existing stock, would hopefully give you the flows for the existing base. If you combine those two, then I think you would have a good approximation on net flows for the year. The last piece to complete the puzzle is around markets, and it's obviously everyone's guess of how this will turn out, but that would then be all the data points that should hopefully inform that particular outlook. If that makes sense on the first question.
Very happy to comment on the second question, which is around the launch of our Impact Plan. As you know, we've been looking for an Impact Plan and really scouring the market for about a year now. We've explored a multitude of different solutions with different asset managers and to really serve our customers' preferences and what they've been asking for, which is for a plan that is very deliberate about the companies that it includes and also very deliberate about the companies that it excludes. It was clear to us that an actively managed plan by the world's largest asset manager with access to the level of data needed to construct a portfolio that is still incredibly well-diversified and liquid would need to be presented to the market.
With an active plan, you do tend to get a different approach, of course, in cost structures as well. The overall pricing for that, which includes the PensionBee proportion and also the asset manager proportion, comes out at 0.95%, which makes the plan equivalent and in line with some of our other specialist plans, including the Shariah compliant plan and also our 4Plus Plan, which also has an element of active management, but using passive building blocks. The pricing fits well within the nature of our overall plan base, and we believe is appropriate for the nature of the underlying asset management that is deployed to deliver the plan.
Thank you.
The next question is coming from Greg Mason, KBW. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Can you hear me?
We can hear you. Good morning.
Yes. Good. three questions. The last one is two data points. The first one is just, Christoph, could you just confirm, are you saying that the marketing expenditure in 2023, so the client acquisition expenditure is gonna be between GBP 8 million and GBP 13 million as it was in 2020 and 2021? I just wanna confirm that that is exactly what you're saying. The second thing is, the FCA requires, I think the term is an inertia in the process, when you transfer pensions from one company to other, to, you know, to give the clients time to contemplate and think about the consequences of their transfer. I was just wondering how you have embedded that theme within your processes.
Just the third is just two questions, two numbers or stats. One is could you just tell us who that top 10 customer that's moved from paper to electronic and what has the average age changed over the year? Thank you.
Morning, Greg. We'll take a stab at those four, perhaps in order. Christoph, perhaps on the first one.
Yeah, I'm happy to. Good morning, Greg. On your clarification question on the marketing spend. Yes, those are the correct data points, but I would like to just further clarify that we would probably think within that range that you outlined to be at the higher end, the high, you know, the higher proportion of that end. We are obviously really focusing on remaining flexible in line with markets, and there's obviously a higher degree of uncertainty in the external environment. We will be quite flexible to adjust it, but under the theme of achieving more with less, particularly that we have now such a strong brand awareness. I hope that helps on the first question.
I'm happy to take the second question. There is, and perhaps you can specify, you know, which requirement you're particularly looking at. The first one that comes to mind is the stronger nudge to guidance, which exists for customers over the age of 50, and encourages them as part of the sign-up flow to obtain guidance from the Money and Pensions Service. That is digitally embedded within our sign-up journey and was last year at the time the regulation came into force. Is that the reform you have in mind?
Yes, I think it is. I was just speaking to some of your competitors and management, and they came up with that comment, so I just wanted to understand what it was.
That's-- I think you must be referring to the stronger nudge to guidance. That's a reform that came in last year that is electronically embedded in our journey. Then I think on who's the top 10 provider, we wouldn't disclose the top 10 provider, but it is one that has been in the press from us before around its paper transfer. That's probably the maximum amount of hint that I can give on that one. Then I think on average age, I'll hand back to Christoph.
I think on that the average age, as you know, obviously came down a bit from the very high thirties last year to the 37 kind of region. I hope that gives you sufficient guidance. If you want, if you want a specific number, I'm happy to follow up on that, on that one as well.
All right. you said from high thirties down to 37.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you. Cheers.
There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand back over to Romi Savova for co-closing remarks.
Thank you very much. We've enjoyed this morning's session and presenting results to you. If you have any further questions, you know where to find us, wishing everyone a great rest of the day and week.
Thank you.
Thank you all.