I've got a few items of housekeeping I've been asked to go through. There's a lot of wrinkling of brows at the back of the room. Are we cool? We're good. All right. Okay. We would very much encourage you all to ask questions as and when they occur to you during the presentations, because I know that's appealing for people to have their questions answered immediately. If there are too many and we feel we're getting slightly derailed, what we might do is hold the questions to the end of a particular section and then have questions. We also have retail investors listening in, and they will be able to table questions but not interrupt with questions.
I would like to ask you all, if I might, to turn your phones to stun, so that we don't get a lot of ringing in the middle. If you would like to ask a question, I think we have to bring you a microphone, unless you're a bold person with a loud voice who wants to stand up and shout. By and large, if you have a question, I think raise your hand probably, the microphone will come to you. Okay. The next thing I have to do before we start is give you very brief introductions so you know who we are, if you don't already. As is evident from the labels, my name is Leslie, Leslie Hill. I'm the CEO of Record. I have with me this afternoon two of our young, talented...
Sorry, Steve. There are talented people who are less young, but young talent. We're talking a lot about our succession planning, and Dr. Jan Witte and Rebecca Venice. Jan is our Global Head of Sales, and Rebecca is our Chief Technology Officer. They will each have their own section to talk about the work they're doing to diversify the business. We also have some guests in the audience, including Neil Record, our Founder and Chairman, who is today as a guest here, which is a very odd thing for him. I don't know how he feels about that.
We also have some of our partners, people we're working with, Amir Bengason, Darren Dineen, Eamonn Gashier , all of whom are part of the audience and also will be part of the networking later, so you'll be able to ask them more questions about the things we're going to tell you we're doing with them. I just saw Phil Bickerton too. He's here. You snuck in at the back at the last minute. Phil Bickerton. Without any more ado, I think we're going to kick off, and I'm gonna give you a quick agenda here to give you some idea of what this is all going to be about. The purpose of this afternoon is to talk about our new initiatives, the things we're doing to diversify our business. Sorry. Nicholas. I know.
Nicholas Thuney, critical member of the RAM team, is also here today. Forgive me. I don't know why I didn't think of you, but another person you should know about in the audience who may well be talking at some point. Back to the agenda. If we're going to talk about diversification, that's really where we will spend most of our time. I have been asked to give a very quick recap of how we got where we are now. It'll be relatively short. It's just a couple of slides. You can certainly ask questions. There's a great deal more information every time we do a formal financial update, which we do on regular intervals. Let's kick off with where we've been. Record has been around since the '80s.
We've been a specialist currency manager for pretty much all of that time, and we've been a listed business for a portion of that time. One of the most important things to know about Record is that for a very long period, our business moved sideways. We didn't tend to grow. We didn't really shrink. We just kept plugging away. What we were effectively doing was trying to convince the whole of the world that specialist currency management was the thing to do and that it was enough to build a big business just doing that.
I think what I came to realize, because I have been with Record since 1992 and I spent a good part of my career also trying to convince the rest of the world that specialist currency management was what they wanted, I realized that we had a lot more to offer, we had a lot more skills and talent, and we should diversify. The reason for this picture is very simply to show you and illustrate how our assets under management and our revenue didn't grow. In the last few years, effectively since 2021, we've started on an upward trajectory, which is as a direct result of diversification and modernization of the business. If you have to remember three things about Record, you really only need to remember we want to diversify, we need to modernize, and we must have a good succession plan.
Those are the three pillars on which I have built everything we do. It's probably no coincidence that we're having a day today when we have started to really show some of the benefits of what we've been doing. We've given ourselves time to modernize, do some of the difficult re-engineering within in-house, and also start to build a more diversified income stream, which you're going to hear a lot more about today. Our object is no longer to be purely a currency and derivatives asset manager, but to be a fully fledged, growth-oriented multi-asset manager. That is what we want to do. That is what we're going to do, isn't it, guys?
Yes.
Right. Does anybody have any questions about this very, very, I accept, simplistic assessment of where we've been? We didn't go all the way back to some deeply depressing years previous to 2015 where we're even still tracking along sideways. But that gives you just the background of what we were and what we are now and what hope we hope to be. Boldly, very boldly, not long ago, we announced a three-year plan, which we've never ever done before at Record. The reason for that, and the reason we did it when we did it, was it took us one or two years to get ourselves organized, to decide what we wanted to do, how we wanted to do it, what was possible, what we should abandon, and do some of the modernization pipe work, let's call it.
Once we were ready with that, and this three-year plan, for which we are on target, it's still relatively early days, but we are heading in the right direction, is a much more diversified revenue stream and a bigger amount of revenue. Higher operating margins than we have enjoyed in the past and enjoy presently. Continuing with a dividend payout with a target dividend payout ratio between 70% and 90% to give us a bit of flexibility to do investments if we want to, and the potential from time to time to earn performance fees for either existing business or new business to give a bit of icing to the cake. Does anyone have any burning questions or concerns about anything that they see up there? It's pretty straightforward, isn't it, Rae?
There you go. Good.
All right. Excellent. That's... Many of you will have seen all this before, both the previous slide and this slide, financials. One of the things we had to work with when we started to think about diversifying our business was our client base. One of the defining factors about our client base, I always used to say we weren't very good at getting clients, but we were quite good at keeping clients, and that has been the case, is the case. The reason we show this picture is to give you a sense that we have quite a nice balance between clients who've been with us for a long time and who continue to be clients, and are very interested, by virtue of the fact they trust us, to hear more about other things we can do.
We can build on this client base, which is stable and of high quality, very high quality, I think, and acquire new clients at the same time. 10+ years , really more than half of our clients for longer than five years, is an attractive feature for a business in which one might want to invest, so long as it's not static, so long as it evolves, develops, and you will see some examples in a minute of how we have harnessed existing clients to do new things with them. While at the same time remembering that our key building block is currency and derivatives. We are not abandoning every... It's not like, that was then, this is now.
We are doing our very best to keep everything we've got and build on it, renovate the property while still living in it with guests, building more on it, but not to give up on the good stuff. Although our business didn't grow very much, it was a good, solid business. It just wasn't very exciting. We're trying to marry stability with a bit of excitement, and if we can do that, then you'll all be smiling even more broadly than you appear to be at the moment, which is very good. Has anyone got any questions about client longevity or... We've got other slides on this, but we've kept this extremely broad brush just to give you a backdrop. Cool. Either I'm being really boring or I'm saying everything you need me to say.
A little bit of both.
Thank you. Okay. This is the bones, let's call it the bones, of where we are going. The parent, obviously you would recognize Record plc, which we have now, renamed ourselves. We call ourselves Record Financial Group as opposed to Record Currency, for obvious reasons. The bits that you would have seen in the past, would be the piece that says Record Currency Management, which was all we had, effectively. Everything lived in that blue box on the far left-hand side. All of our operational activities, all of our investments, everything. What we've done is we've recast it into four pieces, and weirdly, the one I'm going to draw your attention to first is actually the one on the right. This is where all the Mr. and Mrs. Sensibles live.
These are the people who provide group services, and it could be anything from compliance, it could be operations, it could be trading, it could be risk management, it could be. It's all those things that if you're going to be an asset manager, you have to have, and it's got to be really high quality. It's, it's a sort of hygiene, if you like. What we're finding is that if we domicile all of that activity in one subsidiary, they can then outsource their services, not only to Record Currency, but to Record Asset Management, which is Jan, Record Digital, which is Becky. Potentially, and we're seeing some small signs of this, which you'll see in a little while, Record Group Services can offer services to other asset managers, other entities, if we're good enough.
If our tech stack's good enough, compliance is good enough, risk management's good enough. It's so much nicer to buy this from someone who's been doing it since 1983 and does a good job at it than trying to reinvent it yourself. Nobody enjoys putting that particular package together, but we have it. Now we have these four subsidiaries. Three on the left are revenue-generating subsidiaries. That's the intention. The one on the right can also generate some revenue, but its main job is to provide the architecture and the house in which everything else can exist. It is not, never would be the Bureau of Business Prevention, but it is looking after everyone and keeping everyone safe and providing really modern and effective technology. Tech is now cheap to buy, but you've got to get people to use it.
It's not enough just to give them toys, they've got to use them. That integration of Record Group Services with everything else. The hardest thing has been to get people at Record Currency who've done things the same way for 20 years to start using some of the new tools. It's a lesson we all learn that, you know, you have to encourage people to start using new methods of delivering. Those are the four subsidiaries. I'm not going to go into too much detail about them because I want my colleagues to take the center stage there.
I think it gives you a basic picture of what you would have seen a couple of years ago was one thing that said Record Currency in which everything lived, and now you see Record Group Services delivering services to us and others, and then the other pieces. This is probably not the end of the story, but it's quite enough to be getting on with for the moment, I think. Anybody feeling stressed apart from me? Okay. We now move on to the second of the two four blue boxes, and I'd like to introduce you to Jan.
Jan is the head of Record Asset Management and Global Head of Sales, and we're going to ask him to describe the journey he's been on since I took over and he started to work with me, which is part of our diversification story. Cool? Right. Have a little thing. It's that one.
That one moves. Does the sound work? Important question before I start talking. Yeah, Record Asset Management. So as as part of the diversification in the product range that Leslie alluded to, we looked of course at the product on the currency side and rearranged the product range there to focus on the products that we thought would in the future allow the business to reap higher revenues in what was our area of specialization. At the same time, there was a desire to expand the product range further and, you know, maybe add products that wouldn't align completely with the culture or, you know, the current servicing that we delivered to clients on the currency side.
It coincided in timing with Brexit. Brexit happened and through Brexit, we lost regulatory access to the EU, which in reality was less of a problem than one might think because when we look at the business globally, then we've got a lot of business in Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S., and we've got some business in the EU. Losing regulatory access was nonetheless a helpful trigger to ask the question, what do we want to do in the EU?
That was one of the things that got us thinking, together with the question how can we expand our product range further, accessing that large network of clients and prospective clients which we have through the existing currency business, but at the same time remain experts and not confuse what we do, deliver the same high quality service that we delivered on the currency side for decades now, and yeah, collaborate across the group. The decision we made was as was shown on the previous chart, to have a sister company to the currency management business, which we then termed Record Asset Management. Certain logic in that naming.
We decided that sister company to the currency management business would be based in the EU and should be fully licensed as an asset manager there, and thereby allow us to tick these two boxes to reopen the EU to us as an area to do business in, but at the same time, give us a second pillar across which to offer products to our clients that are different products than what we'd offered traditionally. That's what we've done.
There was a question whether the business would be based in Germany or the Netherlands, and we decided to have it based in Germany simply because through Switzerland, we're very comfortable in the German-speaking part of the world, but it had to be somewhere in the EU. Then what we did in September 2020, we registered Record Asset Management GmbH in Germany as a business and decided to now work on that expansion of the product range. I think the overall objective was to offer a product range that in terms of the fees that we...
The fees that we would be able to charge would sort of loosely start where the upper range of fees on the currency side of the business ends. Really to allow us to extend the fee range that we could offer globally as a group, and for this to be sort of neatly set above the fee range that we were familiar with. Business was registered in Germany in 2020 as a subsidiary to Record plc, thereby a sister entity to Record Currency Management GmbH, Record Currency Management Limited, sorry. Of course, initially we didn't have the license that we wanted to have in the EU.
We started to apply for the license. We got ready to put all the things in place that we needed to be licensed. We were faced with a period that turned out much longer actually. We accounted for sort of a lot of extra time in dealing with German bureaucracy, but we were nonetheless surprised how long it took. It wasn't so much that there was stumbling blocks. It just took longer than we thought it would in receiving responses from the government. We operated under a sales license for a period of time, and now recently in August last year, received our full asset management license and are now a full asset manager.
I've got another chart which shows the team. I've got another chart listing the type of business we've done. The chart will show that we started out with what was initially distribution activity, which we were allowed to do under the sales license, which has now morphed into a lot of structuring activity and now asset management mandates that allow us to have our own assets under management. Yeah. The... It just went white. Well, they were here.
Try and hit it again and see if maybe it's... Is our technology giving us...
I might be misoperating it, but I'm pretty sure...
Listen, if I can do it.
Do you wanna try? Our Chief Technology Officer. I swear-
Go on.
I just pressed the button, yeah.
Any idea, Simon?
Well, it's a new one on me. All right. You can carry on. Just carry on anyway with the...
Yeah, I can carry on. I mean.
The people don't have the...
Do people have?
They do. They've got separate one online, so it's fine.
Okay. If you don't. Right.
Yeah. I'll just, yeah.
It's probably fair to say one of the reasons why we've done what we've done has been about the people. The next piece that Jan is going to talk about is about Nicholas and his team. Without Nicholas and the team, we probably would not have had this idea necessarily of doing this the way we have. They kind of drove us. They came barreling through the door and said, "We're entrepreneurs, and we want to be with you, Record.
Yeah.
We want you to help us build this business. We looked at them and thought, "Yeah, we like the look of them.
Yeah.
What happened, Jan?
Yeah, so what we did, and the slide that, we'll show in a short moment.
Yes.
...for.
Lovely pictures of.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, shows the three people who joined us to form Record Asset Management, which is Nicholas who sat over there and Alaric van Doorn from the Netherlands and then Vanessa Lantol who's worked with Nicholas previously for I think decades at Citigroup. In having a new team join us with a completely new skill set, and that skill set being very much in the area of structuring, but also, so very much in the area of alternative assets, I'll say it.
We were then able to create a group that is now able to deliver unique value to clients out of the new entity, and is supported by a lot of things that we can offer as a group. As Leslie says, the group services, you know, the technology, the finance department, you know, the fact that we have a client team that can support sales activities with materials, yeah. There's a lot of things that we can offer as a group that previously were offered to only the currency management business that we've now made available to the new business.
It was in setting the business up, it was essential to have a new set of people join and conduct this new activity with a completely new outlook and skill set than was available in the currency management business. Then again, there's a lot of day-to-day collaboration, but it was that new team that allowed us to do that. Yeah. I'll briefly run through the CV. Nicholas, I think has 20 years of experience in. Oh, there we are. That's fantastic.
There they are.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. They made it to exist.
In banking, is a structuring expert. He's already previously worked with Vanessa in those jobs. The two of them were a closely knit team. I think Aldrick also had been working with Nicholas and Vanessa in different roles previously. They were familiar with each other. Really had only to get to know us in creating a successful joint venture. Aldrick's particular expertise is infrastructure. He added something else to the mix as well. Yeah.
Yeah, that was the team with which we set out to build this business, supported by Leslie and Record as a Financial Group now under the new branding. What we did initially... The question is, with that intention, with a new team, with a lot of expertise in structuring and a large network of... I think it's quite important to state that we have a large network of prospective clients, becauhe trying to win currency business for decades means, and the currency business is funny in that people only buy currency products. They only appoint people to currency mandates every 10 years or so.
You keep talking to people that at that point in time are not in the need of a currency solution, but you develop very, sort of friendly and intimate global relationships. The question then being: how can we use the new skill set, the global network, and combine that with the ambition of offering something new that sits at the upper end of our fee scale? What we did is, we sought out globally then other asset managers and, you know, partnered with them in accessing their products initially, especially because for the first two years, we only had the distribution license and weren't yet able to create our own products.
I mean, this is sort of an overview of the companies we've been working with for quite a while now. They're all in their own way, leading in the field in which they're active, and they're all for different reasons, I hope quite happy to be working with us, yeah. What stands out is, I think that AGL, over to the right-hand side, which is a New York-based private credit manager, and ACATS, which is a Houston-based family office and asset manager, and then Avantis and Universal are U.S.-based entities.
One of the reasons why there was synergies in working with us was that at that point where we had now decided to access the EU and become regulated through the currency management business, which is regulated in the U.K. We were, of course, regulated in the U.K. and of course, very active in Switzerland already. With the licenses that we had started to put in place, we were able to offer really European coverage, but also to in great detail explain the subtleties that Europe presents to a foreigner, but to someone non-European with the different cultures, languages, and jurisdictions.
To the U.S. managers, a European partner who can address all of these things is attractive and then it allowed us to add value in those partnerships and distribute for them in Europe. The two managers on the top left is Siegfried Capital Partners based out of Taiwan, who are a leading trade finance manager. Next to that, Fasanara Capital, who are based here in London and with whom we're at this point very friendly in a close collaboration also raising capital for them.
The one entity that stands out slightly is Khalij Group on the bottom right-hand side corner, who are also based in London, and they are a leading Sharia advisor. Their bread and butter is the creation of Sharia-compliant investments and turning conventional investments into investments that are being made accessible to investors who rely on Sharia-compliant structures. That's how we started out working our way from distribution through structuring to what is now becoming asset management. Yeah, Chris?
Can I ask? Thank you. It's Mark Jones from Investec. When you go to market, you, as you outlined, you've got the brand, the brand recognition, the relationships. Do you go, what, as Record or do you go as an AGL or Khalij Group? If I'm a customer, what brands do I see?
We're very transparent. We are very transparent in whom we are representing. Yeah.
Sure.
So, so-
Does the Record name appear on some of our funds?
Then to Leslie's point, it depends. If it is a fund that is being offered, for example, by AGL, who would have to set up a European fund to be able to sell into the EU, then that's clearly an AGL product, and we would very clearly position it as such, because we wouldn't have any credibility in that space. It becomes an interesting challenge in the sales process, because the question is: Where do you add value in the sales process? And, you know, where are you positioned to not just be a placement agent, which is a very big business in the U.S., but much less so in Europe.
Certainly for our existing network globally, that's not something that our prospective clients typically use. Yeah.
I think your next slide is particularly useful.
Thank you.
... to illustrate that.
The next slide?
I think the next slide-
We can look at it. Yeah.
is very useful to illustrate that because it gives you kind of what you're asking, which is where does Record fit in all of this? The trajectory from where we started to what we're becoming.
It's my last slide also. we have to address all content there is based on this slide. I think, you know, with the team and the very deep expertise that team brought us, really the sole focus on distribution wasn't what we wanted to do. there was the intention to add value at different points along the way. one area is then structuring of bespoke solutions. Yeah, which is one step beyond. The first step is sort of advising, for example, U.S. asset manager in what they would need to do in the EU to offer products in the EU.
The next step really is to have a client in the EU with a bespoke need that can be addressed by the U.S. manager if you have a specific vehicle that can deliver that. If you look at the right-hand side list, which is chronological in its. You know, the live ones are what it says, they're live. The other ones are an anonymized pipeline. You see that there is a chronological order in that it says Record Asset Management as a distributor, as a distributor, and then as a distributor and structurer.
It almost shows the evolution from, you know, distributing the product to offering our own version of the product in a customized fashion. Even though it's in a completely different field with different products, it's very, very close to the DNA of us as a business on the currency side, where really if you look at the client numbers, these are all very large clients. We've got relatively few clients given the GBP 90 billion of assets under management we have. The ability to create bespoke products has always, on the currency side, allowed us to win clients because it was exactly what they wanted.
We've now gone a very similar path on the asset management side, relying on the expertise of that team in then creating bespoke structures, and then now more recently, being awarded mandates, where we also act then as asset manager, which is then ultimately, of course, where we want to be. We want to manage these assets. We want to be... We want to... Yeah. I mean, it says own AUM. I meant to say that that's RAM's own AUM, but, you know, so if anybody says we want to own that AUM, because we want these assets under management to be within Record Asset Management.
We would never propose to replace a specialist manager ourselves. What we actually act as is the portfolio manager for the package.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so, wherever here it says, you know, where it shows us as managing the investments, these are solutions that.
Yeah, there we go.
... combine, investment management activity from the managers shown here in a way that is unique to the client. Yeah.
AGL with Khalij, for example.
Yeah
... would be a good example, right?
I can run through the list. I mean, I think that.
We have time for a very quick run through, I think. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I can skip the live ones because that was outright distribution activity. For example, the fourth one from the top where it says a private credit, which we expect to now go live this quarter, is a GBP 40 million investment where we collaborated with Khalij in creating an investment structure that would allow an investment into AGL in a way that is completely compliant and signed off as such. I mean, it's quite an important point in that part of the world that, you know, it's been certified as Sharia-compliant. Yeah, we added to the structure.
The private credit investment itself continues to be managed by AGL, but we added a structure to it following the guidance of Khalij that would then make it a Sharia-compliant investment. The fifth one, where it says Q1 with $260 million, is a combination of the two bottom left solutions, which is Avantis and Universa. That's an equity strategy combined with a tail hedge in a fund that is then made available to a family office for their clients. In that combination, again, wasn't available to them, but means that the equity management and the tail hedge management continues to be done by our partners.
The vehicle that is offered and the combination that is unique, that is created is created by us. Yeah, I think the last one to mention before I pass the microphone to Becky is the infrastructure equity fund, which here is listed as Q2, which again is unique in that our role there was the bundling of a number of European pension funds who individually couldn't make an investment for reasons of size and infrastructure. When appearing as a unit could do so, and we're relying on someone to do that bundling, I'll call it bundling, for them and allow them to appear as one. Yeah.
Those investments then together would then in where we're trying to go now this year would conclude the path that had started with somewhat small, to be honest, a distribution activity then to much more complex distribution and structuring activity and would then allow us to, yeah, really conclude that path with being an asset manager with assets under management.
Yes.
Yeah.
Is it worth adding to that as well that the clients in that infrastructure fund are obviously longstanding clients and the cross-selling opportunity. That's a good example of where the s elling opportunity comes together.
Yeah.
He's actually not blowing his trumpet quite loud enough here, but I'm gonna make sure he does in a minute. Rae, you had a question?
I'm gonna help with that. Rae Maile from Panmure Gordon. Steve, can we get a little bit more grubby? Because there's plenty of financial analysts in the room and plenty of shareholders who we can look at those kind of numbers. The question is how does that then translate into revenues and revenue margins? How do we think about what that actually means for the shape of the P&L over the next couple of years?
Well, as Lan, as Jan alluded to slightly earlier, Rae, the sort of the start of the sort of fee rates, if you like, on any of these new products, is higher than the highest sort of current fee rate on the current products, which is around 20 basis points, as you know. We can go anywhere from 20 up to the EMSF fund that we've currently got is around sort of 50, 65 basis points. I think on occasion, yeah, and some of these, some of these funds are actually gonna be earning higher revenues, fee rates than that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
it's, I would just.
Yeah.
... stick with that.
It's without giving any sort of new financial information out, obviously, for obvious reasons, I think, you know, I would go back to the target that we set ourselves a year ago of going from sort of GBP 35 million revenue up to about GBP 60 million in three years. I think if you look at consensus for sort of the first year, which is almost up at the end of March, you know, consensus number's around sort of early GBP 40 millions, GBP 45 million. We're starting to get traction. We've got a very helpful and useful and solid pipeline of opportunities. Opportunities that are gonna increase our operating margin as well.
Going back to the targets, obviously the operating margin of 40% is something that we're that we think is achievable, based more or less on the new business. It is worth adding as well that over the last couple of years, you know, we've been adding assets to our traditional business as well. We've got a very strong, good fundamental base layer of longstanding clients with good recurring business revenue streams, and we are putting an extra layer on top of that, using cross-selling opportunities on new products at higher revenue fee rates. These are still ad valorem on the value of the assets which are raised. These are committed sums from partners that you are quite confident of already.
Yes.
Oh, yeah. These are... I mean
There, there's 2 things you should say, I think, which you haven't said yet.
What then?
I'm gonna say it for you. The first is that, as is fairly obvious, I think, if you look at an infrastructure deal or indeed the Sharia deal, these, the point of these is not just higher fees, but hugely scalable. Nobody wants to do GBP 40 million of Sharia investment. You know, there are huge amounts of money looking for homes if you can deliver the right kind of house for the investment. The same with infrastructure. The clients we're working with, this is their first foray into infrastructure. They're clients of ours, but it's the first time they've done infrastructure. There's a tremendous amount of scalability about this, which we loved about currency, and we love about this. That's the first thing.
Second thing you need to know is Record has never had a piece of business where the fees were locked up for any length of time. You could fire Record could be fired on a Wednesday. We could close everything out by a Friday. You know, the currency's hugely liquid and nobody committed long term. An infrastructure deal, by its nature, is not like that. If we are successful with scaling this, and when we bring this in, it's long-term fees, management fees, which is an extremely attractive addition to the kit of the various kinds of fees we earn.
Which is true for all of these products in that the longevity is different.
Yeah, to what we're used to.
... to what we're used to.
Infrastructure is.
Right
... because it really is, usually a 10-year lockup. The day we can say to you, "These are the fees, and we're confident they'll still be here in 10 years' time, all things being equal, the clients have committed for 10 years," that gives us a quality of earnings which we haven't had before. If you can marry that with stable fees that we already have and performance fees, it's a really nice combination of earning streams, shall we say, for you guys to look at. You should be smacked on the back for that one, mate. It's amazing.
At which point-
Excellent. Nicholas and the team, who really have done a phenomenal job on this.
At which point I'll take questions, and after that pass on to Becky.
You've said it all already. It's good, isn't it?
If no one else wants to ask one, I'm gonna add one more in before we go.
Mm-hmm.
In terms of the scalability, so you launch these funds at this size, then the idea is that you go and find more partners who want to do the same kind of thing, and there would be no restrictions on being able to do so?
I mean-
I mean, I'm thinking obviously in terms of the Emerging Market Sustainable Fund, which you launched with UBS.
Which presumably.
No lock.
... the relationship lockup comes off quite soon. You can take a similar style of fund to other people who'd want to do the same.
Yeah, I mean, the question, I mean, I think it's probably true for any business, but if you look at then the Record Asset Management specifically, if we say, you know, we have this very strong core with a unique expertise and then we ask the question, how do we intend to now grow? I think we have to either say, okay, you know, there's now product that we've created which an expanding sales team can now sell more of and offer to more people, or we. It's the latter really, where we're currently active. A lot of these are products which our client in this case, or our investor, has the intention of distributing.
Which is part of the reason that. I mean, the question is why does someone come to us with a desire to have a unique product? You know, it's frequently the case that they have investors, they have a network, and they want to be able to offer something which isn't readily available off the shelf. Even though we're, of course, you know, going to grow the team and become stronger on the distribution side, really here, for a lot of these opportunities, there will be growth just by virtue of the fact that we hope to have addressed.
That won't be true in all cases, but we hope to have addressed the need that particular client of ours was hoping to address to their clients, and that, then these really are the starting points for intrinsic roles on these mandates. Again is a makes sense because, you know, we've structured it for that purpose.
Thank you, Jan. Are there more questions at the moment? If there are no more questions for Jan.
There is one more.
Oh, I apologize.
Hiding behind a few people.
Neil, yeah.
It's Rahim Karim from Investec. There was talk earlier about the aim to build in performance fees into the business. Is this lend itself quite neatly to that? You know, kind of building on Rae's question around the revenue model.
The majorities of these asset classes have some kind of performance fee in the structure. Not all of them, but the majority in that domain do. Yeah.
It'd be fair to assume that over time this would be a natural progression for you guys.
Yeah.
... to build on the ad valorem plus
Yeah. That's also consistent with the path we've gone on the currency management side, right? Where we're now offering mandates with performance fees quite routinely.
So far we've talked about currency, and we've talked about traditional assets, fixed income, syndicated lending, trade finance, and turning Record into Record Asset Management. I would like us now, with the introduction of Rebecca Venice, to look at a new part of the world. This is the emerging world of digital assets, which we get asked a lot about at Record, the dreaded cryptocurrency and everything that goes with it. When Becky joined us quite a long time ago. How long ago did you join us? I can't even. It feels like.
6.5 years.
Six and a half years. Gosh, you've crammed a lot in, haven't you? Becky became Chief Technology Officer three years ago.
Yes.
We gave her two jobs. The first job was a horrible job, and the other job was a fun job. The horrible job was the modernization of our tech stack, which if any of you have been involved in it, for your own businesses or know of other businesses that have, it's a hard job renovating the house with clients living in it, and paying fees, and changing people's mindsets, getting them to use new technology and spending money wisely. As a reward for doing that job, I said, "You can also explore the world of digital assets with whomever you find who you think would be a good partner for us, and you can look anywhere and do anything we can reasonably do. And you can never sleep." That was the only other thing I said to her.
Yeah.
With that, I'm going to hand over to Becky, and she is first going to talk about the new world of digital assets, and then she's going to touch base on how we're getting on with our modernization, because obviously that's critical to the success of the whole venture. Madam, go for it.
Thank you. That's why it looks like I've been more than six and a half years at Record. You're not allowed to say anything about that. Okay. It's a continuation of the diversification topic at Record. Record Digital, yes, is quite a wide remit for us, but I really want to start with the questions that we were getting from that client base that Jan is talking about. Not only them, but also their investment consultants. These questions included things like, how are you using artificial intelligence in your investment strategies? What is blockchain, and how is that going to change my trading and my operations? How are you using my data as a client and your financial data as an asset manager, and extracting the greatest value from that data? What are digital assets? Do they need to be in my portfolio?
Am I missing out on anything? What happens if a central bank digital currency is issued, right? The list continues, but this combined with the emerging digital landscape for us kicked off Record Digital. This was launched in April 2021. In order to answer those questions, also to be able to do something about those questions, we had to learn and we had to be involved. The best way to learn and to be involved, we believe, is to invest. We had to have skin in the game in order to understand. This is where we focused on bringing in new capabilities into the business, new products and services, and new clients to the business by ring-fencing GBP 2 million in capital and investing that in early-stage companies through funds or direct investments. Now, that's fantastic, right? New capabilities sounds great.
New products and services sounds great. New clients sounds fantastic. How do we get access to those early-stage companies? Luckily for Record, we're 40 years old, and I won't be saying that when I go through modernization. That means that we've got a really broad and rich network, okay? This means directors, non-executive directors, clients, people who've invested in the business before we listed, have been living and breathing this space for ages. We don't have to go out and build our own network over three to five years organically, we can go to our friends. One of those friends is here today, Phil Bickerton, who's sitting at the back.
He is the CIO of the Denlow Family Office , who is a family office that has known the Record business since its beginning, and he, very, very generously, agreed to help us with this initiative because the family office has an extensive venture portfolio themselves, which means they already have this kind of network. They already have access to the entrepreneurs, and immediately Record could tap into that kind of deal flow quite quickly with what is quite a modest amount of money.
Very modest amount.
We also managed to strong arm the lovely Chris Trier into helping us as well, who until very recently was the head of Fidelity Digital Assets, which grew rapidly over the last few years. For those of you that know, Fidelity has a really robust venture platform where they do everything from seed, early stage, series A, all the way through to quite mature businesses. This core team, which included myself, worked together because Record wanted to make sure that this capital was deployed effectively and efficiently with the appropriate due diligence, but also to make sure that that actually achieved our objective of bringing in those new capabilities, giving us the ability to launch new products, and bringing in new clients.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna focus on a couple of examples of how the investments that we've made are impacting our business today, and I'm gonna give some examples of how the network that we have built and we've been brought into has created partnerships. If you take one thing away from my message about Record Digital today, that is it for me, is the value of this activity is greater than that GBP 2 million that we've invested. It is in the network and the partnerships and the people and the talent that we have established. Now luckily for me, some of that talent is here today, so you can prove that for yourselves. Okay. The first two examples, investments. The first one I'm gonna focus on is a company called Block Scholes.
This is a company that was launched in 2021, and they are looking to be the Bloomberg of digital assets. The CEO and Founder, Eamonn Gashier , is actually here today. Thank you, Eamonn. I've also been appointed a non-executive director on the board of Block Scholes. They have been growing the business since launching. They're now 16 people. They launched their platform and services in December last year. They now have an institutional clients that tap into their data, which includes us. There's, you know, fantastic signs there coming from the capital that's allocated. The real value that we get from our partnership is greater than that. What we get from-
Sorry. Do you want to actually work through the timeline? I think it's the logical sort of steps we took. It's quite illustrative of the way.
Yeah, sure.
You've been thinking.
Oh, I'm glad 'cause, that's exactly why it's up there.
Yeah.
Yeah, we were introduced in April 2021, and this was a direct introduction from Phil, which I'm always grateful for. After getting to know the broader team, watching how Block Scholes established themselves and were rapidly growing, we then became a shareholder. Very recently after that actually, I was then appointed a NED, which I've not included there and I should have. In November, we actually became a client. We became a client because not only did we need their insights and their research, but we also needed their data. I'm actually gonna give you an example of how we've used that insight and that data to our advantage in a little bit.
Really what Block Scholes has enabled Record to do is better analyze and better due diligence not only other investments, but also other asset managers, emerging managers, strategies, intellectual property, all that kind of stuff. We extended the Record Currency Management tied agency to Block Scholes. What does this mean? It means we have extended our regulatory cover over Block Scholes for marketing. That then enables Block Scholes to take those research, that insights, and work alongside other asset managers and provide things like trade recommendations and insights, which Record benefits from 'cause we have a revenue share for that activity, which is great. The last of those is we're actually supporting with their investment round. By that, I mean, I've asked Eamonn and the team so many questions.
I'm basically their walking due diligence pack, so very often I get onto the phone with new potential investors. Maybe I can give some real tangible examples of how we're also helping Block Scholes. In the institutional client base that Block Scholes has is one of the two fully regulated digital asset banks, Sygnum Bank. I don't know if you're aware of these. SEBA Bank and Sygnum are the two.
In Switzerland.
They are in Switzerland, exactly, yeah. Record's had a relationship with those banks since they were fully regulated in 2018. Eamonn and I have been to see Sygnum together, and we've hopefully helped and facilitated that relationship, and Sygnum has since become a client of Block Scholes. That's quite nice evidence, hopefully, of how what they're able to offer, their insights helps us not only with revenue, but new products, as well as us helping them. It's sort of a greater than the sum of its parts partnership there. Leslie, that's the sort of the timeline as it stands today. Does anyone have any questions, actually? Yes, please.
Can I ask how you feel about investing in companies like in this example versus investing in people and expertise? Obviously, in this instance, and in most instances, you're doing both. You're acquiring intellectual property, you're acquiring expertise. Would you look at just sort of hiring teams that bring expertise that you don't have, or does it always need to be an investment with the opportunity?
Yeah.
The sort of things you talked about?
Yeah, that's a great question. What we feel when we invest is that we're actually buying the brain and the time and the energy of the people, and that can very often create a deeper partnership more quickly, because that's what we have here. We have opportunity cost against our competitors as well as those teams themselves. Now, that doesn't mean we wouldn't look at that or evaluate them, but what we've seen is when we do invest, you're so closely aligned and you're so knitted together that you don't miss many opportunities to help each other, and I think that's really valuable.
Thank you. Can I ask a sort of related follow-on one?
Go for it.
Often in sort of digital currencies, the regulatory environment is slow-
Yes.
... to catch up with, you know, business development.
Yes.
Do you find that? Is that a hindrance or is it actually a positive 'cause you can actually go to your existing client base and help them with that?
Exactly, yeah. I love this question. I'm gonna answer it from both perspectives, right? I totally agree with your observation that there is this coming together of these two worlds, okay? That, of course, helps Record. We have lived and breathed this world. I'm pretty sure we've been through every audit there is to be through, which we love and we're very happy with, as well as our regulations. We're very happy with those two worlds coming together. For Block Scholes, I think this is why that tied agency was so critical for them, because they want to operate in the cleanest possible way from the very beginning.
It might not even necessarily be a requirement for them to grow their business or have the relationship with those asset managers that they might need. They want it because they can see it coming. We're very happy to help them with that.
It's the right way to run a business.
Thank you.
Thank you. I really appreciate the questions. It's really helpful.
That's example one.
Yes. Yes, sorry. That's example one. For those beady-eyed of you will recognize the name Fasanara, which Jan mentioned as one of the key partners from RAM. This is a relationship that was brought to us by Nicholas and the broader RAM team, and that was quite a few years ago.
2019?
Yeah.
Yeah.
2019, exactly. I mean, Fasanara, big business, right? here in London, Milan. They founded in 2011. They've just hit GBP 3.5 billion under assets. You know, a really, really fantastic outfit which we have a lot of respect for. We invested in their venture arm. Just to be very, very clear, this is not taking an equity position in the Fasanara Capital business. This is a very specific product that they offer, which is venture.
Do you want to run through the timeline for that as well? Nicholas, if you want to pile in at some point, do.
Yeah, sure. I know that's a little light, actually. I apologize for that. Look, the relationship really started when, you know, Record brought a client to Fasanara, which is of course fantastic. RAM was also then able to help Fasanara by structuring a product on their behalf, and they were actually investing in a Record Currency Management client. This is where it all gets very love triangle, but it's kind of the point, right? Is that in that group structure, you don't drop a ball, that everyone is able to do something, so no matter what you need or what the opportunity is, you're able to act on it. We then invested in May 2022, and actually then, one of the RAM clients has since invested in the Fasanara product base as well.
It allows us to come a lot closer to what is a strategic partner for both Record Currency Management and RAM. It helps us understand what Fasanara do more deeply, and it makes us more important to them, which, you know, is always nice to be. That's what we get out of our relationship with Fasanara, adding products, being able to wrap them into our client portfolios, which is in demand from clients, as well as offering something to Fasanara, services and clients, which of course we get paid for as well.
There were a number of other examples which I encourage Becky not to put up there. We thought that we could get, you know, information overload, so we've given you two examples of two different types of partnerships. We have one more actually two more examples to go here.
Yeah, which are slightly different actually. Leslie's right. She does do a lot of work stopping me talk too much, you know, thank you for that. These are now opportunities where we have a partnership with a group or an individual which allows us to do something that we couldn't before, okay? This is not necessarily linked to the investment, but because we are making that investment and we're having that activity, and we have relationships with Phil, we're able to meet these kind of people, draw them in, and build businesses with them. The first example I'm gonna give is of Dare Capital. Dare Capital was founded in 2016. Darren Dineen, who's the CIO, Chief Investment Officer, and founder is also here today. Hello, Darren. He really built that business from the ground up.
That is everything from consulting to advising, to then running capital, to running external capital, and this group has been growing rapidly. Actually, I'm gonna sort of take us back in time because since 2018, Record has been watching managers. We had strategies being monitored, and sort of two things happened. First is we started to get the insights from Block Scholes. Fantastic. We can now analyze those strategies in more detail, understand really how they're performing and what is behind them. Actually, none of those managers were able to do what Dare Capital have been able to do, which really is risk management. Last year was one of the most brutal years in the digital asset markets, and the Dare Capital strategy closed at 158% return.
That is after a strategy which from January 2018- January 2023 has posted an average rate of return on a yearly basis of 128%. That tells me that risk management in that team is unbelievable. Why is a glorious man like Darren and a strong team like Dare Capital, what are they doing with Record? Well, they can do it themselves, right? They can build out regulation if they need it. They can build out compliance and operations and risk, and they could do all of that if they wanted. There is an opportunity cost to them to take the time to do that, and there is a marginal cost for them spending their time doing that rather than what they're really, really good at, and that's where we come together.
Record can offer a foundation for an emerging manager like Dare Capital, which is then able to grow faster than it would by itself, then we are rewarded by having a fantastic investment talent join our team, as well as a share of revenues where there is management and performance fees against those numbers, which of course we're very happy with. Now Darren is here and I really would encourage you to talk to him, ask him any questions. This is a partnership that we're really excited about. I promised you two examples, the second is a really nice extension of what Jan was talking about. I sort of want you to see this as, you know, infrastructure project 2.0, right?
This is a natural extension and expansion of the infrastructure deals that we are facilitating and structuring for our client base. This project specifically focuses on renewable energy and the digital infrastructure, and that is because of the clear and sustained demand from things like impact investors and development banks and development financing and the sustainability drive.
Amir's background as well, right?
Well, because of those initiatives, because it's sustainability, because it's impact, very, very often the areas of focus for the infrastructure deals is in the emerging markets. This is where Amir comes in. Amir Bengason is also here today. Maybe I was scared no one would turn up. I had to fill the room. I don't, I don't quite know. Amir's, you know, entire history, his life, his own investments, his experience in the investment banks, his trading, has been living and breathing the emerging markets. Not only does he have the experience, he has the access, understanding, and relationships that will allow Record to suitably risk manage the kind of infrastructure deals that we might facilitate for clients, and that is critical for us, especially in these kind of markets.
Again, you know, keep him busy in the Q&A.
We can build on Jan and the RAM team's.
Absolutely.
... credibility.
Absolutely.
Marry it with another subsidiary and access the client base.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm very conscious that I've already been talking for a very long time, and I'm actually covering the next section as well, where I put on my... Was it my Mrs. Sensible hat or am I the decorator? I can't quite tell.
You're the one with the shovel.
I'm the one with the shovel. That's it. Okay. This is where we're gonna switch to modernization.
Yeah.
Okay? Out of Leslie's three key topics, done diversification. She's covered succession planning, and this is about modernization. Okay? Please feel free to ask questions as we go.
Yes, sir. Please.
It's clear there are a number of intangible benefits from the investments that you're making. How should we think about the types of financial returns that you're targeting?
Yeah.
The parameters that you think about when you make an investment? Second, where are you in terms of the utilization of that GBP 2 million, and are you reinvesting profits to grow that arm?
Okay, cool. Two questions. I'll answer the first one. Okay. In terms of the infrastructure deals, that is securing long-term revenue. We'd like to marry that if we can and make that look as similar as we can to the achievement of the RAM team. Okay. That is, as Leslie mentioned, different from the types of revenue and fee levels that we see from the currency side of the business and securing much more long-term revenue. That's the infrastructure piece. On the Dare Capital piece, as you can imagine, if we are delivering a fund for that kind of manager, we would see a share of those fees, which are two and 20 against those returns. There'll be... That's meaningful for Record.
Yeah. I should add, I think, in terms of sort of reinvestment, if you like, that's kind of links into the dividend policy that we've set ourselves, which is sort of to target a payout ratio on ordinary dividends of 70%-90%, which allows us the flexibility to move up and down that band, depending on sort of the opportunities that are coming our way, to reinvest into the business. You know, we're a very cash generative business as it is. We've managed to sort of fund, you know, some of these opportunities and projects ongoing from the cash generation of the business and still manage to pay out, you know, a very healthy dividend as well.
That's kind of the model that.
Yeah.
That we've used to date.
Thank you, Steve. Sorry, I know you had two questions. The second of which was where are we with the deployment? If I understand you mean the GBP 2 million ring-fence? Great. GBP 1.75 million of that has been allocated. Of course, these are rather slow moving, which means not all of that capital has been drawn down. Only GBP 1.25 million of that has been drawn down. Of the difference, that GBP 250,000 we are keeping that on the side in order to reinvest in either follow-on opportunities that come out of some of those early stage funds. Basically, where we see people rising, teams rising, or something that is becoming really interesting either to us or our clients that maybe wasn't the case before, we've got a little bit extra there to make ourselves important and make a nice introduction.
Great. Okay, cool. All right. Oh, yeah.
Hi, James Allen from Liberum. You've obviously made investments into kind of the infrastructure piece and also digital assets. Are there any other areas where you're thinking about investing but haven't yet as part of that GBP 2 million? Are there any areas, kind of part of the jigsaw, which you're, you think you're missing?
Hold on. Shall I take that one?
Sure, yeah. Oh.
Oh.
Dramatic moment here, Leslie.
Yeah. That's good. We're not moving enough.
Maybe-
I think we need to move more, don't we? Anyway, we have had quite a lot of capital at Record. We've obviously got regulatory capital that we keep in bank deposits, and we've tended to use the capital either to seed new ideas. For example, when we first got involved with trade finance, we put some of our money to work to see how the whole process worked and satisfied ourselves that it's something we wanted to show to clients. Investing in venture capital is a learning tool, but also can generate results, we believe, we hope. Those results we've always felt could help defray the effects of inflation on our regulatory capital. I suspect that we might at some point retain more earnings to do a bigger investment.
One of the things I really like is to get to know people we do business with and sort of date them rather than marry them right away. We like the dating bit, which we're doing quite a bit of.
Excuse me.
It's a really good way for them to get to know where our weaknesses are and our strengths and for us to know what they're good at. I would say it would be evolutionary. We might put some money in and see how we get on, maybe put more in or build a project together. Maybe they bring some of their capital, and we do something separate. Nothing is really off the table, but we're not on the acquisition trail, except acquisition of talent, partnerships, friends, you know, supporters who can make the whole thing bigger than the sum of its parts. This is people driven because my job, I have only one job. I have to get the right people in the right jobs, and then I have to support and nurture them, and that is it.
If I get that right, you guys will all be... It's very difficult to do. Identifying talent, supporting it, helping it, giving them share options, LTIPs, partnerships, that is the key to making this work, I believe. At least it's the way I know how to do it. So far, I think so good. Is it answering your question sufficiently? Okay.
Okay.
Here it is again.
Yeah.
That old house.
We're gonna switch from modernization. We're gonna switch from diversification to modernization. Okay? This is focusing us back on where we were at the very beginning of the afternoon. Okay? This is where we were a few years ago, very stable, very robust. We were doing everything the same way because we didn't need to change. We didn't have the kind of client change that maybe a lot of other asset managers do, which meant there weren't a lot of, you know, exit interviews. You know, what can you be doing better? They're happy, right? We're not gonna fix something that isn't broken. A few things came together, when Leslie took over actually. One was fee pressure. Okay. Jan has even spoken to this.
This is known, this is known by all asset managers, this is known by the investment consultants, this is something that was impacting really specifically the Record Currency Management product base. Okay. That wasn't going away anytime soon. The second thing was our competitors. The landscape of our competitors was changing. They were becoming financial technology firms, were offering things to our clients that, you know, we said, "Well, hold on. Now our competitor base is bigger and broader and shinier and a lot younger and, you know, they wear caps. You know, oh my goodness, we've gotta be paying attention." Okay. The third thing, which is critical, is that we decided to become a growth business. Okay. When you bring all of those three things together, you say, "All right. What can we do?" This picture is obviously before diversification.
In order to change that situation, we had to change our behavior, and we had to change the way that we interacted with clients. That is not very easy to do when you have been doing something well, the client is very happy with, for a very long time. You have to bring everybody along with you, and this means you have to get everybody in a position where they are comfortable with change. We're all humans, so, you know, that's a, that's a varied spectrum depending on how we feel in the morning, right?
No, it's always terrible.
Fair enough. Okay.
Right.
If we can change our behavior, and we can get our clients to be willing to change how we interact with them, we might have a chance. Okay. We might have a chance to reduce our cost base, make ourselves more scalable. We might give ourselves a chance to be able to say, "Okay, we're gonna change for the better, and everybody is gonna be able to recognize this." Obviously, as a CTO, part of my job is to drive that change. That comes specifically with changing our technology stack. Yes, it has been a very interesting journey for us as a firm. Critically, we have taken an incredibly hybrid approach. Okay. This means that we are an agile company. This means that we are able to use tools which are not only on-prem but also cloud-based.
It means that we can buy, borrow, or build anything that we need in order to support our clients and to support the delivery of our products and services. I've given you a few examples here. Microsoft Azure, of course, for data warehousing and extracting the greatest value from client data. Microsoft Power BI, we're a Microsoft house. This is all about visualization, improving client reports, helping our investment teams understand how we're trading, what we're trading well, and have a greater level of insight into data that we own. Accepta. That's a slightly different one. This is actually an automation tool. An automation tool that has a UI layer which enables non-programming business users to build processes once, and this is critical.
This allows us to say we can design a process, we can now let it run, as opposed to having one, two, three extra people for every new mandate or every new product. This was the remit given to me by Leslie. You know, put us in a position to scale. This includes things like, you know, automated services, straight-through processing of execution, basic hedging mandates, basically supporting scale at a systems and an operational level. Now, yes, the build once model is fantastic, but how does this link to everything that we've been talking about, right? That group structure that you were shown at the very beginning? The point here is that when we bundle those operations, that compliance, those systems, and those solutions together, they can actually then deliver and support those services against the entire group.
We don't have to build every single time we have a new entity. We don't have to build everything from scratch, RAM is a really nice example of this. This has been a new business for Record, and we were able to deploy solutions to it so quickly. Quickly enough that RAM can actually respond to that full client pipeline with very low CapEx. That's what's quite exciting. There's a few other things going on here. Clients are very interested in this kind of service as well, specifically our asset management clients.
I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but obviously as a client, they can see the journey that we've been on, recognize how difficult and painful that is to do, and, you know, we're hopefully very helpful to those clients as well, answering their questions, offering services to them, potentially even revenue-generating services to them from that entity too. Look, the key message from me here is we don't have to build everything every time we expand. We're in a position to support growth across the group, and we're in a position to do that in a cost-effective way. Leslie, I think you wanted to.
Yes.
Link that Record Group Services piece together with some of our financial targets. Is that right?
Yes. Well, in conclusion, you know what they say, after you've told them, you better tell them what you've told them. As you may remember from the beginning, I had mentioned there were three critical pieces to the work we're doing. One is to diversify away from pure currency. The second, as Becky's described, was to modernize what we offered and make it more fit for purpose. The third was to have a really robust succession plan, which I'm hoping that the two individuals sitting to my left have demonstrated to you the investment we have made and continue to make in the talent that we find, which enables us to build a business where they can run it. That gives us a really strong and robust business for the future.
We're on target to do all the things that are described here and some other exciting things maybe as well. I'm happy to take any other questions at the moment, but hopefully you have now had a bit of diversification, a bit of modernization, and an illustration of succession planning. I'm happy to answer anything that springs to mind. Mr. Maile.
I've got the mic again.
You have.
Um-
Did you actually give it up or have you been holding it the whole afternoon?
I've got a spare one. Rebecca, you talked about the scalability of the business.
Yes.
I mean, we are all bitterly aware following financial services.
Yes.
... that everyone builds a new platform which is immensely scalable until two years' time, then suddenly the CapEx budget goes through again. On the work that's been done-
Yes
... what's the best guess of what scale of AUM you could run?
Yeah
Compared to the 80 something you've got now?
Yeah. Yeah.
You or Steve.
Yeah. I'll go first, and then you can fill in every gap that I miss.
Go ahead.
Scalable to the point where the technology is probably not our limiting factor, right? I think that is the critical remit that has been given. By this, I mean, we might be able to offer things like FX execution quite seamlessly, where the scale of that is not necessarily limited. The market is incredibly liquid, and it doesn't require too many human hands. Of course, we want oversight, and if clients want to pay for that, which they do today, and they probably likely will, then of course we'll scale in line with that. It probably becomes to the question of the operational risk that we want to take.
YeahT
If we look at some of the products that Jan and the RAM team are building, we're probably sometimes even more excited by those and the fee levels that we get against them. I suppose my response would be that it's probably not gonna be the technology that would limit that AUM. It might be the decision of the business to limit.
Stay diversified.
The operational risk.
Yeah.
That comes with often commoditized financial products.
Mm-hmm.
Steve, maybe you want to.
Yeah, again, I think it's striking that balance and, you know, being in a fairly nice position of being able to say, you know, where do we want to allocate our resources. You know, we've seen historically that the fee rates, the fee pressure on passive hedging particularly, was really starting to bear, and we changed our tactic a little bit on that and started doing tenor management. But we, in terms, I think the business now is a technology-led business rather than previously technology was always sort of running behind the new ideas and the products and the strategies. We will, there will be a continual investment in technology.
Yeah.
I can't see a point at this stage where we wouldn't want to invest if we can see an opportunity. That's obviously what we've been doing over the last couple of years. You know, everyone's we've seen the bounce in the revenues and the profits. As Becky said, if we get to the point where we feel that the allocation of capital and resources is better spent elsewhere because of the operational risk, then fine. Again, Becky's already answered the technology side. The being limited by the technology is not really something I can sort of see.
What a challenge to the sales team there to you, Steve.
Well.
I like that. Go for it, Jan.
If I can follow up on the GBP 60 million revenue target.
Mm-hmm.
... with consensus at GBP 45 million.
That'll be me.
How much of the gap was just on that slide that Jan put up of the pipeline that's already known about?
When we built the three-year plan, we put in some... Oh, hang on. How about that?
Yeah.
That.
Yeah.
Let me just maneuver my thing. There we go. When we built our three-year plan, we built in some growth, a little bit of growth from currency, quite a lot of growth from Record Asset Management, very, very little from the digital effort. This is really numbers that we could pretty clearly nail down. We were not sort of thinking, "Oh, something will happen in 2024 that will change everything." If you know Jan as well as I do, he is very detailed and reliable. If Jan tells you something will happen, it's gonna happen. The trouble is, you've got to get him to tell you it's gonna happen because he came to me and he said, "Oh, I don't know, three-year plan." I said, "You've got to put some numbers in there, Jan. You know, there's got to be some numbers.
Let's go through exactly what you're gonna do and exactly what it's gonna look like. These are really strong, concrete numbers, and they're not purely aspirational, maybe Becky will meet an interesting person we can do something with.
Is it's worth, I think. Is it? Sorry.
That could happen too.
Well, it's worth underlining as well that, you know, I think I said it earlier on, that the traditional side of the business has continued to grow over the last couple of years.
Yeah.
We've seen sort of inflows, of sort of GBP 9.2 billion so far this year into the sort of hedging side of the business. Prior to that, GBP 2.5 billion. There's a lot of focus on the new side of the business, you know, if we can continue growing the traditional side of the business and making those efficiencies through the technology enhancements, you know, that will lead to increases in our operating margin as well.
On the currency side of the business, we have benefited quite meaningfully from the interest rates, which are now much more dynamic again, which means there's more movement in the market, which makes it easier for us to deliver value add, but which also means people tend to worry more about their currency positions or their currency risk in other investments. So we've had a lot more incoming inquiries where we could respond as opposed to be out there in market.
Steve, I think you might have just started to touch on what I was gonna ask. I was interested, you've got this uplift in operating margins, and I can see, higher margin products, and I can see sort of centralization of modern services. I'm trying to understand in that uplift of margins, how much of it is higher margin products, and how much of it is just operational gearing with all the sort of central modern services that you talked about? That sort of split would be...
It's probably 50/50.
It's a bit of both I would say.
Yeah, 50/50.
Okay.
One of the things we know is when you start to diversify, you generally get which strand is really going to take off wrong. For example, we were saying, well, there won't be a lot of growth in currency. Actually, there's been quite a bit of growth in currency because of the change in interest rates, 'cause now we have a modern tech stack, we can offer asset managers hedging services, which they like. We can get big mandates which are sticky, and the fees are quite good, better than you would get from a local authority pension fund, for example. I would say the strands will probably. It's a bit like a race. I'm trying to think of. It's not a horse race, but it's some kind of race where first the dog runs a bit ahead, then the other one runs.
There's not one that just goes like this. I don't want that. Because we had that, well, effectively just before we went public, where we had one product, it was a hedge fund, currency hedge fund, did very well, made us lots of money, it was like a one-horse race. We need to calibrate, and again, as Becky said, operational risk and how much of our business comes from this business which is locked in for 10 years, that's great. What about something that's got higher performance fees like our tenor management, where you could be fired tomorrow? The trick is going to be to calibrate all of those so that the horses or dogs or whatever they are kind of balanced. That will be the key.
My job, sort of sitting there with these subsidiaries is to say, "I know you want to do this, and we're going to do some of it, but actually we also need to deploy some resource over here." I'm pretty sure I'll get some of it wrong. We need to have the diversification so that we have a really robust business with different types of revenue. Every dog has his day, right? We all know that.
Thank you.
Sir.
Rob Murphy, Edison.
Yes. Hi.
Just that last point. Are you applying that also to the asset management business? You know, you're not gonna just build a lot of exposure, say, to credit-related funds or just purely
No, diversification is critical for us. That's why we're very happy that Jan and the team have got multiple partners doing different types of things with them. The weird thing is that we've discovered, I think I knew this, but I've just really discovered it. I live near Barnes, and in Barnes, it's a village, but they have a cheese shop, and the cheese shop's really good, and then they have a fish shop, and then the fish shop attracts a butcher and then a patisserie and a Scandinavian food place. We got a cluster, and now we get really cool people, I'm looking at them now, who want to work with us because we've got a cluster.
As long as we don't let anyone down, and we carry on being what we are, what we've always been, which is reliable and high integrity and good to work with and professional and energetic, the cluster will grow because someone like Darren can meet Amir or Eamon, and Eamon and Darren can do work together. Phil brings us an idea. Phil wants to start a business, you know, the cluster builds. Nicholas brings us someone we can invest with, you know. All of those things... In fact, it was Nicholas who told me about this when we first started three or four years ago, build a cluster. You know, get the talent, pull it together. Let people be entrepreneurs if they want to be under our umbrella.
Continue to be what we are, you attract talent. My job now is actually turning people away, where I think, or Becky's or Jan's, "Hmm, don't really think that one's for us." Neil is always sending me fascinating people to meet who he meets all the time, I have to go, "Hmm, don't really see that one at the moment." It's in a good position to be in. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. If we build the right house, we can attract new people, then it'll be about calibrating what we do, not getting ahead of ourselves, not getting greedy.
Just coming back to the revenue target.
The GBP 60 million?
Yeah. The trajectory. Are you just, are we just seeing a big change in the sales pipeline now or, you know, is it, are we talking it's more back-end loaded, or is it more of a steady kind of progression that you think is realistic?
We're just starting. This is the beginning.
Right. Okay.
This is the beginning of a journey. It's the beginning of a journey in technology terms, in digital asset terms, definitely for RAM, and for other initiatives we have which we're not describing today because they're further back down the road, if you like.
Great. Thanks.
Is that enough, guys? It is a bit, isn't it? It's an awful lot of material. You've no idea what this looked like before we started.
I had like 50 slides.
Yeah.
You're lucky. You're lucky.
Thank you all very much for coming. I don't know, we're stopping early, right? Is that good? That's good, isn't it? Yeah. Is it drinking, or are we not allowed to do that?
Yay.
I think it's drinking.
I mean.
Thank you all very much for coming. Our doors are always open if you have more questions. Anyone who is listening but not in the room and wants to send us questions, they can. If you think of other questions, if you want to visit us, we're very happy to see you. Here we are doing
Thank you.