Earnings Call: H2 2020

Feb 25, 2021

Good morning. I hope you are keeping safe and well. Given the ongoing pandemic, today's presentation has been prerecorded, and we'll be hosting a live q and a at 09:20AM. This morning's meeting will be in three sections. Firstly, a review of 2020, then a focus on the future before I provide a brief summary. It goes without saying that 2020 was an extraordinary year for individuals, businesses, and society. Our lives have been disrupted, and we've all needed to adapt, come to terms with social distancing, and had to embrace technology. Our people, together with the broader St. James's Place community, have worked commendably in the most trying of circumstances. They have demonstrated once again the core values and behaviors that we hold dear. So I'd like to start by thanking them all for their hard work, dedication, and commitment. Operationally, the performance of the business during 2020 was inevitably disrupted. However, St James' Place demonstrated real resilience supported by our recent major investment in technology together with the agility of our advisers and employees. And let's just reflect on that operational performance for a moment. Gross inflows of £14,300,000,000 net inflows of £8,200,000,000 equivalent of 7% of opening funds under management, which ended the year up 11% at a record 129,300,000,000.0. The business continued to grow during a period of social distancing and lockdown. And given these unprecedented challenging conditions throughout the year, we are naturally very pleased with the results announced this morning. And Craig will cover these results in a moment, but before I hand over to him, some comments on other 2020 developments. Firstly, I welcome Paul Manduca to the board as chair designate. Paul brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the board, and I look forward to working with him in the years ahead. Paul is replacing Ian Cornish, who steps down at the AGM after nearly ten years on the board and the last two and a half years as chair. On behalf of the shareholders and the SJP community, a big thank you to Ian for his wise and valuable counsel during his time on the board and as chair. And on a personal note, I'd like to add my gratitude for the support Ian provided to me as I took on the role as CEO. In addition, I thank Patience Wecroft, who after nine years on the board is also stepping down at the AGM. Patience has made a huge contribution to the board over those years. Secondly, the partnership. At the start of the pandemic we were sensitive to the fact that in the face of a challenging external environment financial advisers across The UK will have quite rightly been focused on supporting their existing clients and keeping their businesses secure. We therefore chose to slow the rate of experience recruitment activity. We also made changes to our academy programmes, pausing new intakes during the early period of the pandemic, and we moved all existing cohorts of students to virtual learning environments. Despite these changes, the partnership grew by 1.6% during the year to 4,338 advisers. I'm pleased to report that both the recruitment of experienced advisers and new academy intakes have now restarted as we get back to building the partnership. Our partners reacted with remarkable agility to ensure that they have been able to engage with clients despite the challenges presented by social distancing. Whilst physical face to face meetings were restricted, partners and clients embraced technology by making greater use of digital channels, including webinars, video conferencing, and social media. Partners were not only able to provide relevant and valuable information at a difficult and uncertain time, but also maintain the personal touch and provide emotional support. Face to face advice embracing modern technology, a feature that worked for both clients and partners alike. And whilst Zoom will never fully replace physical meetings, video meetings are a feature that has been welcomed by clients and are here to stay. Given the continued first rate financial and nonfinancial support provided by the partnership throughout the pandemic, it is therefore no wonder that they and Saint James' Place continue to win a host of awards. The highlight was once again being voted by clients as wealth manager of the year in the City Of London awards for the sixth successive year, proving our clients value the advice and service they receive. Turning now to our investment proposition. 2020 was an extraordinary period for investment markets, with the first half of the year in particular characterized by extreme volatility as markets reacted to the escalating global COVID nineteen pandemic. Against this backdrop, the return of our portfolios proved resilient, helping to keep our clients on track towards their long term financial goals. We continue to evolve our investment proposition with a number of changes to our fund range and investment managers. During the year, we strengthened our global equity offering through the redesign of our global quality fund and evolved our fixed income range to provide greater diversification through increased exposure to emerging market credit. 2020 also saw the appointment of some new managers with Somerset Capital Management, Fenza Investment Management, Sanders Capital, Artisan Partners and Blue Bay Asset Management all appointed to manage specific investment strategies. These developments will help to future proof our investment proposition and ensure we continue to offer compelling investment strategies to our clients. It is also important that we continue to meet changing client needs, and in the recognitions of the growing number of clients in retirement, we have recently launched an innovative range of funds designed to provide investment solutions around the challenge of decumulation. Our three in retirement funds are market leading offerings that allow clients with the guidance of their adviser to map out their objectives and find a suitable investment solution that is able to support a specific withdrawal profile according to their specific needs. Moving on to technology. Having completed the smooth migration of all of our core UK business to the new BlueDoor administration platform in 02/2019, During 02/2020, we safely decommissioned the legacy systems and completed the significant task of implementing Salesforce across the partnership. Salesforce, together with BlueDoor, provides a modern technology ecosystem. And during 2021, we will be focusing on maximizing the use of the features available. The investment in technology that we have made over the years has already served the business well, providing us with a much greater degree of operational resilience through the pandemic. It has been key to enabling the rapid deployment of complementary functionality to better service the partnership and clients during lockdown. We aspire to be a leading responsible business, one that demonstrates positive social impact from our core business functions. It was therefore a really proud moment when St James' Place achieved the business in the community community mark, one of only 37 companies worldwide who currently enjoy this status. One of our key values is to give back to those who are less fortunate through the work of the Saint James's Place Charitable Foundation. The pandemic had a significant impact on the charity sector with many fundraising events canceled. This made it a tough year for the foundation, but I'm delighted that our community still raised a fantastic £9,000,000, which enabled the foundation to provide more than £10,500,000 of grants to support many great causes through a difficult year. We were also able to advance future commitments and allow restricted funds to be used for unrestricted purposes. We also recognize our responsibility as a steward of some 130,000,000,000 to have a positive impact on the world around us. So I'm pleased to report that all 39 of our external fund management houses are now signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. We've also progressed our client disclosures around responsible investing with the launch of our quarterly portfolio carbon emissions reports. This level of transparency helps us, advisers and clients consider how the carbon footprint of our portfolio compares to equivalent benchmarks. In 2020, we also joined the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance, making public our commitment that all our investment portfolios will be carbon neutral by 02/1950. Excellent progress. Despite the disruption and distraction of COVID nineteen, we continued with our five year business planning cycle and were able to factor in the lessons we have learned from navigating the pandemic. More about this later, but for now, I hand you over to Craig to run through that robust financial performance. Thanks, Andrew, and good morning, and welcome from me. I think like many, I've run out of words to describe twenty twenty, and so I won't dig deep for anymore. Instead, I'll go straight into the results for the year. But as Andrew said, I'll come back after he's explained our 2025 planning cycle and let you know what assumptions you should have in mind for your models going forward. The order of my presentation will be a familiar one. Firstly, I'll give a quick recap on flows, funds under management, the partnership. Then I'll run through the cash results and the embedded value result, following which I'll cover solvency and the dividend announcements that we made this morning. Turning then to gross inflows, which for 2020 stood at 14,300,000,000.0, which is equal to 12% of our opening funds under management. This is a very strong outcome, and the partnership responded magnificently to the challenges posed. It's critical though that we don't just focus solely on new business because retaining investment is absolutely key to adding long term value. And again, the partnership put in an enormous effort to successfully support clients throughout the year. This is reflected in net inflows of 8,200,000,000.0, which is 7% of opening funds under management. I'll come on to the markets in a moment, but the fact that funds under management grew by 11% is a clear indication of the strength of the business model and the momentum that we consistently sustain over time. The number of advisers in the partnership grew from 4,271 to 4,338. For obvious reasons, growth plans were interrupted, but it's worth stating that we come out of the crisis with a bigger partnership than we had at the outset, but it's not all about scale. The experience of 2020 has made the partnership even better equipped to succeed and continue to deliver this momentum. Turning now to the financial results. I'll start with some observations about the cash result, which in total grew 11% in 2020. Firstly, net income from funds under management increased by 7% to GBP 455,900,000.0 in spite of the shape of the markets. The average margin on mature funds behind this was approximately 63 bps, which is in line with the guidance that we've given previously. As you know, growth in net income from funds under management comes from net new ISA and use unit trust investments made during the year, but also the maturing of bonds and pension business from gestation. This maturity for the year helped to drive growth even though the market dip worked against income. Funds in gestation now amount to 43,400,000,000.0, which means that using market values at the December, by 2026, net income from funds will benefit from additional income of some 370,000,000. It's also worth noting that costs associated with administering funds in gestation are already included in the margin and elsewhere within our cost base. So this additional income comes with no additional associated cost. It's this consistent maturing of funds together with new business going into the hopper that will deliver operating leverage in the future. The margin arising on new business of GBP 116,800,000.0 has been very consistent with the result that we saw in the first half and includes the impact of some fixed cost gearing that emerges when volumes are lower than in the prior year and vice versa. Turning to expenses. Establishment expenses were very much in line with the guidance I gave last July. I'm gonna come back after Andrew's next piece to explain how they will evolve in the future, but it's worth reminding you that our cost base, which is largely people, property, and technology related, has generally increased in line with the scale of the business in the past. Scale is perhaps best seen in the context of the number of advisers together with their professional support staff, but we must also remember the need to navigate the additional complexity and cost involved in running a successful advice business where we take the responsibility for advice and manufacturing risk as well as wider regulatory compliance. By making sure that we have an infrastructure designed and executed to protect all of these areas, we're able to stand behind the advice guarantee that is so important to clients and keep clients, partners, and shareholders safe. We've continued to invest significantly in a range of well known technology related programs ranging from Salesforce, which is giving us a a leading edge CRM system through to DocuSign, Quill, and Capture, all of which have supported smooth operations and facilitated growth in the most challenging lockdown conditions. We've also replatformed over two and a half thousand partner business websites to enable more dynamic content and optimization in search engine rankings. All of these costs are reflected in operational and strategic developments, and the total costs for the year are in line with the July guidance. In order to simplify our cash result presentation, we'll be combining these two lines into one strategic and operational developments heading from the half year onwards. One area during the pandemic where our learning has been significant is in academy. What was almost an exclusively physical experience is now a blend of virtual and physical learning and development, and we see this as a permanent and progressive change that will give us broader reach and greater scalability in the future, which is an exciting development given the increasing importance that the academy will have in the future. Lower costs for the year reflect the temporary pause in the period between the first lockdown and the reformatted kick start during the summer. I'd now like to turn to our investments in Asia and DFM, both of which have, of course, experienced the same trading conditions as the group as a whole. The overall picture for both is one of income growth coupled with cost control. In Asia, we now have funds under management of 1,200,000,000.0, and more than half of this has the same cash emergence profile as The UK business and currently sits within gestation. It will, of course, therefore contribute to the Asia result as it matures. Asia contributed a breakeven result to the embedded value in 2020 and will become cash positive by 2025. We remain excited about this asset for the future. In DFM, we now have over £2,900,000,000 of funds under management, and that's 3% up on last year. During 2020, we took the next step of aligning DFM and stock breaking services with the overall SJP investment management approach, and we've made it easier for partners to create bespoke investment outcomes for clients. It's this sort of alignment that will drive DFM growth in the future and deliver on our plan for DFM net investment to break even by 2024. Taking all of this into account and, of course, other items, including the FSCS levy, our underlying cash result was 264,700,000.0, which is 3% lower than for 2019 and a very strong outcome given markets and operating conditions. Our total cash result is 11% higher for 2020 at GBP 254,700,000.0, And this, of course, reflects a much lower back office infrastructure charge now that all of our UK products are on BlueDoor and that legacy systems have been successfully decommissioned. I'll now turn briefly to EV, which continues to be a good measure as to how the overall economic value of the business has grown over the year. The resilience of the business in challenging circumstances is reflected in the new business contribution being only 3% down at £766,000,000 compared to 2019. And at the end of the year, the EV net asset value per share stood at £14.49 compared to a share price of around £12.30. I have little to update you on regarding capital as our approach in The UK Life Company remains the same at a 110% of the standard formula, which given the simplicity of the business and the resulting risk profile remains prudent. That leads to a combined life company solvency ratio of a 112% at the year end. Finally, on dividends. We've made a number of announcements regarding dividends this morning, and I'll deal with two matters now and the forward looking guidance a little later. Firstly, we announced the decision to pay the 11.22p per share that we retained from the 2019 dividend. As we said at the time, the decision to retain this amount was a prudent response to a number of very challenging potential scenarios that could have materialized. These scenarios, which were considered at the point of greatest uncertainty, have not played out, and the business has shown resilience throughout. The board therefore no longer sees the need to continue with this retention, and the amount will be paid as an interim dividend on the March 31. Having not paid an interim at the half year, we also announced today a proposed final dividend in respect of 2020 of 38.49p per share. This is clearly lower than the total amount payable in respect of 2019, but it reflects a lower underlying cash result and a 78% payout ratio, which is broadly in line with past guidance. So that's about it on the 2020 outcome. But as I said at the outset, I'll be back shortly to talk about the future. And so I'll now hand back to Andrew. Thank you, Craig. As I said earlier, given the unprecedented external environment, a very resilient and robust set of results which we are naturally pleased with. I mentioned in my opening remarks we continued with our five year business planning cycle, and I'm now going to spend some time on this topic. And let me start with a couple of really important business model confirmations. St James' Place is an organic growth business, and this will remain the case. We do not see value to material M and A activity, and we'll forever be conscious of indigestion by trying to do too much too quickly. And secondly, we are a people business with strong bonds throughout our community, and change where it may be required is best achieved through evolution and not revolution. Now let's reflect on the market in which we operate and you would have heard us talk many times over the years about the supply and demand dynamics of the financial advice market. We remain convinced that the demand for trusted advice is as strong as ever, and we are excited about the growth prospects ahead of us. Total UK retail wealth remains large and growing. We know people are living longer, which together with the demise of defined benefit pension schemes requires individuals to take responsibility for their own retirement income and long term care or find a trusted adviser to help them. We also know that 87% of total UK personal wealth is concentrated in the hands of those over the age of 45, very much our target market. This highlights the extent of future asset accumulation and the size of opportunity that intergenerational wealth transfer presents. And let's not forget, we live in an interconnected world with complex tax regulations and an increasing tax burden. Individuals must navigate these challenges to protect and build their savings over the long term either alone or, as I said earlier, with a trusted adviser to help them. All these factors make planning for one's financial future difficult enough already, but adding to that, we have been and remain in an era of essentially nonexistent return on cash savings. Interest rates are unlikely to increase anytime soon. Some argue that there's the prospect of negative interest rates. Yet savers still need to protect their nest eggs for the future. And as an aside, it's not just financial benefits that advice provides for clients, but there are also significant nonfinancial benefits too. And we were delighted to have recently worked with the International Longevity Centre in preparing their 2020 report that explored the nonfinancial benefits of financial advice. Their work found that people who take advice are more confident about their financial future and better prepared for retirement, and that advice improves financial literacy, confidence, and delivers greater control, reassurance, and peace of mind. All these factors support our view that the demand for trusted face to face advice is as strong as ever. Financial advice has an important part to play in helping to close The UK's savings gap, estimated to be more than 300,000,000,000 today and projected to grow to 350,000,000,000 by 2050. As the clear market leader in financial advice, we are well placed. Whilst financial advice has an important part to play in helping to build The UK savings gap, there is also a recognized advice gap. With just some 33,000 qualified advisers in The UK, this is half the number of advisers per capita than in both The US and Australia. Quite simply, there is an insufficient supply of qualified financial advisers in The UK. This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it dampens competition in the financial advice market, but on the other hand, it limits the pool of recruiting experienced advisers to the partnership. However, we believe our proposition for advisers and clients is stronger than ever, so we remain confident in our ability to attract advisers of the highest caliber to our community. And with both the recruitment of experienced advisers and new academy intakes having now restarted, we will be getting back to building the partnership in 2021 and expect a recovery in growth in adviser numbers by around three to 5% for the year. Looking further ahead, the external market of experienced advisers has not been growing materially and taking account of the average age of these advisers, we expect overall numbers to reduce in coming years. Consequently, the importance of the academy will continue to increase and it's therefore pleasing that we started the year with 244 students in our academy and we expect to see a further 350 new entrants to financial advice join the academy this year in one form or another. Supporting and developing the partnership will continue to be critical to our success over time, and we are pleased to have made further progress in 2020. In addition to adapting our professional development programs to accommodate virtual engagement, we invested in technology and process improvements to make it easier for our advisers to engage with clients and manage their own businesses. As I said earlier, our collaboration with Salesforce gathered pace throughout the year, and we now have a leading scalable technology infrastructure that will further benefit all stakeholders in the years ahead. We believe there is considerable potential for further growth in partner productivity in the coming years by both making us easier to do business with and by supporting our partners to help them further grow their businesses. So a growing need for financial advice whilst at the same time the country faces an advice gap. This means we are excited about our future growth prospects. When considering the sheer scale of our flows today and looking forward over five years, we think now is the time to recalibrate our growth ambitions, and we believe we can achieve growth in new business of around 10% per annum going forward, although there will of course be years when it is better or perhaps behind this medium term target. Achieving this growth ambition whilst maintaining our very strong retention rates together with modest growth in the investment markets will see funds under management in excess of 200,000,000,000 by the 2025. And as a stretch ambition, you may have seen that at our recent annual company meeting, I threw down the gauntlet to St James' Place to actually double funds under management over the next five years to more than 250,000,000,000. While we will continue to invest in the business to support our continued growth and maintain our market leading position, the technological foundations that we have put in place over the last few years provide us with greater operating flexibility and efficiency, such that our expense growth going forward will be around 5% per annum. The combination of these planning assumptions, together with the continuing increase in the cash emergence from those funds in gestation will provide for strong growth in the underlying cash result over the coming years. And from 2021, the dividend payout ratio will be set at 70% of this underlying cash result. This takes account of three factors, an increasing capital requirement with the growth in funds under management, other business investment needs, and the influence of growth together with the changing business mix. As you will hear from Craig in a moment, this last point has an impact on the timing of when distributable profits emerge in the life company. So strong future growth in the underlying cash result, which will translate into strong future shareholder return. I'm now going to hand you back to Craig. Thanks, Andrew. So let me pick up on a number of points following on from what you've just heard, and let's start with growth. As Andrew explained, he set the goal of exceeding 200,000,000,000 of funds under management over the next five years. Clearly, the markets need to play an important part in achieving this, but there are a number of things that we can control to achieve this objective. These include continued future growth in the partnership and investments in technology and processes that will make it easier to do business and increase productivity. Both will help us achieve the aim of growing gross flows at a rate of 10% a year over our planning period. This rate of growth is broadly consistent with the numbers that many of you are currently using in your models. As part of our planning process, we've also reassessed the way in which we'll use our resources in the future. In the past, we've had a headcount intensive approach to growing operational capacity. This has supported exceptional, consistent and safe growth over the years, but our investment in core systems and technology means that our future use of resources will involve much lower growth in people related costs and much more focus on technology and smarter processes. And all of this to support our face to face advice model. The journey we've planned for the next five years is defined within a very clear financial envelope. The net result is that we will be able to contain our overall cost increase in the controllable operating cost base to no more than 5%. And we're defining this as all costs within our cash results other than FSCS and regulatory fees and the back office infrastructure costs that have now ceased. Behind the headline 5% figure, the makeup will be far more technology driven, and this change in approach will become more pronounced over time. We set out the impact on this slide. In 2021, you should assume that establishment expenses will be held flat. We've already taken steps towards our plans to achieve this, including a restructuring exercise, the cost of which will be approximately £9,000,000 in our cash result, and this will be separately disclosed as a one off nonrecurring charge in 2021. Operational and strategic development costs in 2021 will grow by around 25%, which will reflect a repurposing of resources away from establishment expenses towards technology and process investment. Academy costs will increase by 15%, and technology will enable us to achieve greater reach and intensity. So to recap, taking all of this into account for 2021, we're planning on an increase of around 5% in our total controllable cost base together with a separate one off below the line charge of £9,000,000. For 2022 and beyond, you should also assume a 5% increase rather than the 10% that features in many of your models. A sizable portion of our operating cost base will continue to be in support of future growth. And over the coming months, we'll provide more granularity and share with you the nature of our cost base. There is in the back of the slide deck a guidance summary, which sets out this 2021 guidance on costs and other relevant information for you to consider in your models. I'll turn now to dividends. Andrew has already commented on the changing business mix with pensions and investment bonds now representing over 70% of our total new business flows. We consider this to be a structural shift for the purposes of our planning time frame. You might recall that the DAC and DER adjustment within the IFRS rules requires part of the margin arising on new business for investment bonds and pensions to be deferred and recognized over the first six years even though the cash has been received. This isn't new, but in the short to medium term, as we continue to grow our gross inflows, the accumulated effect of this mismatch in our planning horizon will result in emerging cash exceeding the available IFRS distributable profits. This is, of course, only a temporary timing difference. But given the dynamic of cash earnings emerging faster than distributable profit, we'll be moving to a payout ratio of around 70% of the underlying cash results starting in 2021 in order to accommodate the mismatch. This will provide a certain and sustainable payout ratio throughout and beyond our planning horizon As well as catering for the longer term timing effect of IFRS, it would of course enable us to continue investing in the business to support future growth. Finally, you'll have also seen that we're simplifying our approach to interim dividends, whereby we'll take a purely formulaic approach to calculating the payments. And these will be set as an amount equal to 30% of the prior year total dividend. For 2021, however, you need to remember exclude the payments of the $20.19 11.22p per share from your models. Well, that's it, and I'll now hand back to Andrew for his final comments. Thank you, Craig. So some final words for me. 2020 was a year like no other, and we are now approaching the anniversary of the first lockdown. Whilst our operations and performance during the year were inevitably disrupted in the most challenging of conditions, our communities performed admirably to deliver another robust set of results, a summary of which you can see on the slide. It was a tough year, and had we been offered this outcome at the start of the pandemic, then we would have embraced it with open arms. I am immensely proud of how the whole of the SJP community adapted to the rapidly changing conditions, supporting clients, one another, and the wider society. Now aside from navigating and managing through the pandemic, we also made progress across many fronts and continue to consider our five year planning cycle, the outputs we have shared with you today. Whilst there is nothing fundamentally changing with the business strategy, you will note that we have included a Capital Markets Day within the 2021 investor calendar. We believe shareholders would value further insight into the partnership, the development of Asia and Rowan Dartington, the road map for our technology investment, how we use our resources, and business efficiency. What will 2021 bring? Well, we're not yet operating in normal trading conditions, and there is a challenging external environment. However, we and the partnership are in good shape for whatever market conditions we face. In the near term, whilst we're encouraged by the moderate growth we have seen in the early weeks of 2021, the external environment does remain challenging. There remain difficult months ahead, but as COVID nineteen restrictions ease, we are hopeful there will be an economic recovery, and we will see a return to more normal growth in client investments. Beyond the pandemic, we remain very excited about our growth prospects. Achievement of our planning assumptions would see St James' Place continue to deliver attractive growth and boosted by the release of cash from funds in gestation, significant growth in the dividend. Thank you for watching. And as a reminder, we will be hosting a live q and a at 09:20AM.