All right. I think we're good to begin. For our next session, it's my pleasure to welcome Dennis McGonigle, SEI CFO, and Phil McCabe, Head of Investment Manager Services. Earlier this year, SEI announced a transition of the CEO position from the firm's founder, Al West, to a firm veteran, Ryan Hicke. The move has come with a lot of changes and an exciting growth target, but it's retained what's core to SEI, which is technology, operational efficiency, and asset management. SEI held their investor conference about three weeks ago. There's a lot to unpack. With that, Dennis and Phil, thank you so much for being here. Welcome.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thank you. Why don't we start with a question about some of the targets. At Investor Day, the team announced a target to double the size of the business over the next 5-7 years. It's about a 10%-15% compound growth rate, and achieving about $4 billion in revenues. Can you help us unpack what went into that target? Which businesses are you expecting to grow above that 10%-15%? Which ones might grow below? Markets included, M&A. Any color there?
Sure. First of all, Ryan sends his apologies because he was going to be here, but he had an unfortunate event in his family. Thank you all for showing up and giving your time. How we got to that, you know, which is kind of out of our character of a target in 5, you know, 5-7 years, really started with a focus on not just the broad markets we service, but what's really the addressable market within those broader markets that we can sell to today and deliver to today with our capabilities that we currently have.
Over time, how do we see things expanding from there with new capabilities that we have that we know are early in market, like SEI Sphere in our cyberspace, and then a couple of other areas that, you know, we're working on that we really haven't gone public with yet. We look at that addressable market across private banking, the advisor business, the Investment Manager Services business, and our institutional business globally, we saw enough market opportunity that if we executed well and captured what we felt was an achievable share, we could get pretty close to that kind of target. When we throw in the mix our, you know, view that M&A is a part of our future, we've been doing some of that over the past few years.
It's certainly a part of our longer history as a firm, that arguably would be the kind of gap closer. While we put this target kind of in the context of revenue, what's really important about SEI is our focus will continue to always be on the bottom line. We've had a lot of meetings today. This target's a big part of the conversation, but also part of the conversation is it kind of revenue at any cost or is it revenue that's, you know, going to enhance profitability as a firm? As a firm, for as long as I've been there, which is a while, and as long as Phil's been there, profitability is always a key driver of all of our revenue generation.
At the end of the day, that's what ultimately, you know, helps you build a great business and a sustainable business. I don't know, Phil, you want to comment on your market, which is one of the key elements of the higher level growth rate you asked about?
Yes. You know, Ryan put the revenue targets out there for 5-7 years. In certain businesses, like the one that I run, we've been growing before this year, in the market conditions that we're in, we were growing at that 13%-14% rate from a revenue perspective for years. I think, you know, Ryan talked to me and he said, "Do you think you can meet these goals over some period of years?" I said, "We'd be fine." I mean, we basically sat down and looked at... You know, we knew where we were growing, we knew what was hot in the market, we knew what money we needed to invest from a platform perspective, and we had a really strong operation.
You know, I think from our perspective, the particular business that I run, you know, can get to where we need to get to.
Got it. Okay. Maybe if we take the other side of that, what are some of the risk factors that you're thinking about that might be headwinds to reaching the target? Anything in particular? This is a little harder to pull levers on the, on the top-line side, but any ways to accelerate growth to offset maybe market headwinds or anything like that?
Yeah. In the context of headwinds, we're in a somewhat fortunate position that, kind of industry-wide headwinds are also tailwinds, potentially tailwinds for us. One of the big trends we continue to play into is the trend of outsourcing, whether it's in asset management. Our institutional business, which is really built off of institutional owners of assets outsourcing to Phil's business that he runs in IMS, which is a big outsourcing business, both from an operational services and technology standpoint. We're playing into that long-term trend. To the extent the market is disrupted or the market has some challenges, our clients are going to feel that or the market, the clients we or prospects we sell to are going to feel that.
In many ways, in many cases, when we've been through tougher cycles in the past, when we come out of those cycles, those prospects or suspects now all of a sudden are very interested in changing their business model and their operating model to be better prepared for the next time. That's what we can help them with. Certainly market activity, where a lot of our revenues are asset-based, so short-term disruption to revenue streams occur and profit occurs when there's down markets. Over a longer period of time, that's, you know, works to our, to our favor. Regulatory, global regulatory framework. The quantity and the speed with which regulatory change is occurring is somewhat of a headwind in the sense we have to absorb that in our business.
Again, it turns into a tailwind because our clients also have to absorb it. If we figure out how to deal with it ourselves in the businesses we operate, you know, that our clients, you know, also have to deal with, we can come to the market with a better solution. That's where something like SEI Sphere came in. You know, we've been in the business for 45, 50 years protecting data and protecting clients' technology infrastructure as part of them using our technology infrastructure. We turned that service into an independent standalone service we could deploy against their own technology assets and their own networks to protect them. I think there's a big opportunity with that. It's we're gonna have headwinds. The OCIO business is definitely gonna have headwinds.
Institutional markets, the corporate DB market we've talked about for a while, is under pressure and will continue to be under pressure. Rising interest rates aren't gonna help that, you know, that segment of the market. We have other, you know, market diversification that we've done that we think will help overcome that. I don't know, Phil.
Within IMS, any of the headwinds, we can turn them on their side and their tailwinds. If the clients are struggling from a profitability perspective or a turnover perspective, it's actually an opportunity for us to kinda help out. We're investing about 30% more year-over-year in the business that I run. Now is the time to capitalize on all the opportunities out there. I think now we're sort of doubling down on not only the people, but also the platform spend to kinda, you know, capitalize on the opportunity that's in front of us.
Got it. Dennis, I think you'd mentioned the prior question, the senior leadership team, salespeople, people in tech and operations. You did a review of the total addressable market and what SEI could go after. Were there any areas that were sort of tangential to what you do currently that you wanted to expand into? I guess we've hit on SEI Sphere. Is there anything else?
I mean, there's some things we're working on in the kind of employee benefit space that would be tangential to our institutional business potentially. That's not financial services market-oriented, but that's kinda early days. I would say geographic expansion. We, you know, we have a good business operating in the UK. It has some reach into Europe. We've had a presence in Asia, and I would say fairly, you know, thin presence in Asia for a long time, 20, probably 25 years, mainly focused on institutional asset management.
I would argue, and I think Phil, you know, can comment on this as well 'cause it affects his business more than anything else, that there's a, you know, pretty big opportunity for us to expand geographically with the capabilities we have in place today and with some of the assets we've added in the past year or so. You know, principally like the Luxembourg. You know, we have an operation in Luxembourg now to complement our Dublin operation. Phil, you want to?
Sure. Yeah. In the last couple of years, we launched an office in Lux. Lux is the second-largest jurisdiction for alternative funds. It, you know, it's been really, really successful so far. It's helped us grow globally. In addition to that, we spent a lot of time within our Dublin office trying to get that to scale and to be able to grow faster. All of our alternative clients in North America want to expand to Europe. The ones that are in Europe already wanna go to Asia. If they're in Asia, they wanna go to South America. You know, it's just sort of back and forth. We've expatted a few people over there, some of our best leaders, to try to get it going a little bit more in all the different countries.
We just had people in Singapore trying to grow that book of business as well. I think, you know, we're in seven different countries outside of North America, and I think there's a fairly significant opportunity over the next few years to sort of grow our alternatives book over there.
Great. I think that brings us to the next point quite nicely. Part of the plan for the next 100 days is to take the strategy of the U.K. business and sort of bring it globally. What does that actually entail? What changes might be needed for the business outside of the U.K.? Phil, for you as well, any changes to the strategy for IAS as well within that?
I was over in London about five weeks ago with our new CEO, and we went to visit a trillion-dollar asset management firm. What we learned very quickly is a lot of the firms view SEI as, you know, an advisor business or a TAMP or in the private banking market or the alternatives, but they don't really know what our combined capabilities are. We very quickly decided, you know, maybe we have to have a little bit of a different approach from a sales perspective in those markets. I think, I think the way we've gone to market in the past may not be the way that we should do it in the future based upon the way the clients are structured in different countries around the world.
Yeah. I would add that when we went out, left North America and went to the U.K., we made the right decision around how to get started. We picked 1 or 2 of our vertical businesses and used that as the approach to go to market and to start to establish ourselves. It was mainly institutional business. We when we started to build our SVP platform for global wealth processing, Al West, our CEO, you know, founder at the time, he was very adamant that we start outside the U.S. with that technology development project because he wanted to make sure at the end of the day, we had a global system. Not a U.S. system that has some modifications that process global assets, but a global system that we could port back to the U.S. and be truly global.
It was a, you know, big lift, you know, big investment, and we kind of ran the business in those verticals. Now I think we're at a point of maturity where we aren't necessarily looking at running that particular market or even beyond that market in that same vertical dimension, but rather because of the cross-pollination of our capabilities, as Phil mentioned, look at it as a single market, you know, with a rich closet full of assets that we can bring to bear in the market where the opportunities exist. we're at a point of maturity, I think, where that we can do that now. We probably couldn't have done that, you know, five or six years ago because we weren't as fully developed in our capabilities.
Now I feel we're at that point of maturity where that might make more sense than trying to run it like we run the business here in the U.S.
Understood. Maybe, Phil, a question for you, on IMS? You talked about sort of taking a challenge and flipping it on its side. It's probably a pretty challenging environment for a lot of your clients. Markets have been volatile. A lot of the commentary from the conference today from the private managers has been the deployment is gonna be down. How are you thinking about growth of the business for sort of the next 12 months? Anything to do to offset that in terms of winning new business?
Now we're capitalizing on the trend towards outsourcing. Anybody that's an insourcer wants to look at considering outsourcing. We're focused on, you know, as I said before, the global component and getting that business going a little bit faster. We have a lot of business coming in on the private side, whether it's private credit or private equity or real estate. All of our clients also want to get into the high-net-worth channel, we're kind of trying to help them with that. We have a very good, solid investor platform, that's helped us help those clients grow. We're not seeing as many of the headwinds as other people might be seeing. We play in the very, very difficult, complex side of the market.
Our clients are very, very large. Their distribution capabilities are pretty amazing. You know, some of our clients are launching very large funds and our job is just to keep up with them and support that growth. We don't really see that many of the headwinds right now.
Interesting. Okay. You brought up an interesting point in terms of high-net-worth. It's also been a big topic at the conference. SEI is in a unique position, not only because you're between asset managers and distribution providers, but because you also have those capabilities internally. What is the best strategy for SEI to capitalize on the theme of alternative products into high-net-worth? Is it manufacturing, distribution, some of both? And what would be the required build-out for that?
Dennis just answered that question, and he did a really nice job about 15 minutes ago, so I'll let him do it. He framed it up a little bit nicer than I would.
We have a long train ride back, so I'm sure Phil will pay for that comment. We really see it in three elements of opportunity for SEI because of our capabilities. You know, to start with that, we have three really strong pillars. You know, we're a really strong investment technology and processing technologies, really strong in the investment operations space, the ability to process operationally all types of assets and all types of clients. Then finally, investment management. We're a strong asset manager ourselves. Incorporated in that asset management is the fact that we do have our own SEI manufactured, if you will, alternative products.
Whether it's private equity, we've had energy debt, you know, a number of kind of more esoteric products that we've taken to market, principally in institutional space. As part of our OCIO offering to institutional owners of assets, we incorporate alternative products in that overall portfolio construct for clients. We will continue to manufacture product. We'll continue to build products, some of which is sub-advised. Our private equity funds are manager of manager products that we oversee the construction and allocation of capital to. And we'll continue to do that. That manufacturing process will continue and the sale to the institutional markets will continue.
When we look at our advisor channel and it as a source of capital flows into our asset management programs, it's taking those same product capabilities, those that can be wrapped with a different product wrapper for the high-net worth kind of mass affluent market, and then can be incorporated in a portfolio strategy for an advisor to implement with a client. We wanna be very thoughtful about it in the context of, if you're asking an advisor to use these types of products in client portfolios that they build for their clients, you need to help them figure out what are they replacing in the overall portfolio construct. You know, how is it gonna change the investment profile of that portfolio, the risk profile of that portfolio?
Because as fiduciaries, they need to, you know, be on a good footing if they're gonna put this product in a, you know, in a, in a client portfolio. But we have that outlet of distribution as we sort through that, but we also have the modeling and operational capabilities to support the delivery of those products and the incorporation of those products in a model portfolio. Then third is really, you know, Phil's business, the Investment Manager Services business, where we build our business on helping our clients with providing them a platform off of which they can take their business in whatever direction they choose to. If there's a market that they want to go after, and they need a certain product construct to support their entrance into that market, we can support that operationally.
Not only that, we can support that from a data and information standpoint, then ultimately from a front office technology standpoint. It's giving our clients on the Investment Manager Services side, the platform off of which to go to market. We have capabilities that Phil's team has built in our IMS business around, you know, trading. Taking a highly paper-intensive process and turning it into an automated process. We acquired a company last year called Novus, which we acquired principally for institutional business, but it is a kind of connective technology between alternative firms and the institutional markets. To the extent we can help those institutions, those investment managers with the right product wrappers use that same platform for greater access.
If an investment manager happens to cross paths with an SEI advisor, then know that we'll have a platform that can incorporate the trading and implementation of their product. We really have these three tiers of, or three areas of opportunity, both distribution for ourselves, advisor application, and reach to the high net-- and use of alternative products in the high net worth markets, and then giving a platform to investment managers to attack the markets they choose to in this space.
To add to that quickly, for our traditional clients, we are administrator for some Auction Funds, some interval funds to get retail alts to those investors. On the alternative side, we help them partner with CAIS or iCapital as an administrator. We also help them go direct to Morgan Stanley, UBS, or wherever they wanna go. So our job is to support their growth. We're helping, you know, a lot of our clients sort of grow their book of business in that way.
Phil, you mentioned Auction Funds and interval funds. Do you get a sense that there's one structure that investors, or that the asset management community is leaning more towards than others?
Yeah. I'm not sure I know the answer to that. As far as I have a guess, it looks like the interval funds are doing a little bit better than the auction funds right now on that traditional side of the business. I think if you talk to some of the largest alternative managers, if they could go direct and not through an intermediary, they'd love to do that as well. I just think it's a little early on to kinda figure out where it's all gonna end up, but we're trying to put our chips all over the board.
Got it. Got it. Do you think there's a timeline in which the winners in the space are ultimately gonna be decided? If there is, roughly, what do you think it is, and how vigorously is SEI putting its resources behind this to be one of those winners, regardless of which of the three options you're going after?
Yeah. I think we're gonna... You know, at least the way I look at it is this is additive to our existing capabilities and our overall business. If this were just a standalone business we were trying to build independent of anything else we did, it'd be a tough road to go down. You could have success, but you don't really know how big the market opportunity is really going to be in the end. Because this is additive to existing platforms and existing capabilities, and it's expansive of what we're doing today, even if it's modestly successful, it will be additive to the overall, you know, business success we're having. Because I'm not... You know, personally, I'm not...
You know, I know there's a lot of, you know, noise and smoke and interest in accessing the mass affluent high net worth markets with, you know, in some cases, some, you know, complex products. I think it's really important to make sure the market is, we're helping the market incorporate those products in the right way for the right clients for the right reasons. To the extent we can do that, it'll be additive to what we do overall versus having to stand on its own as a, kind of an independent opportunity. I don't know if you would-
No, I mean, I think you nailed it.
I think in, like in IMS, if you take that business, you know, the fact that we can support mutual funds and CITs and separately managed account program participation and partnerships and onshore activity, offshore activity, institutional account processing. However a manufacturer would, you know, look to wrap their capabilities to go to market with the right product wrapper, we can support. Each of those individually standalone could be good businesses, it's really the fact that we have this platform that allows firms to choose how they wanna go to market, what product wrapper they wanna go to market with, and that we can support it in aggregate, is really what differentiates us.
Each individual piece doesn't have to economically make sense on its own, but the richness of it all is what, you know, increases the value of what we do in this business, and that's true really across all of our businesses.
Right. Right. Maybe switch gears a bit. You mentioned SEI Sphere earlier in the conversation. It's clearly an important part of the Investor Day. It's very exciting. I think SEI is coming from a differentiated angle in terms of offering cyber networking cloud. I was wondering if you could expand on what you think the growth outlook is for SEI Sphere, and then how it fits into the broader firm as you're thinking about one SEI bundled solutions, potential pricing benefits, any of those considerations.
Sure. SEI Sphere, for those that may not know, is a cybersecurity data protection network, protection service that we're offering to really any market. We're targeting a certain size client, clients with maybe 1,000 or and above employees. It's industry agnostic because everybody has this issue if you're operating a company today. We're focused and oriented our start in this business around more the financial services segments, and have been able to attract both existing clients of SEI to adopt these services more broadly within their institutions, but also non-clients of SEI. This is the only relationship they have with SEI. You know, We've been in market for, let's say, about a year. It takes time to get some traction.
We do have some traction, but we don't have, I'd say, kind of the explosive moment yet of, you know, our phone ringing. We're still out, kind of really, getting ourselves established. We have some very good relationships. Two things we've noticed with those relationships. One, there is organic growth kind of embedded in them. You know, we have one of our clients is a, is a commercial bank. They're not a client of SEI in any other space. Every time they open a branch, every time they expand themselves, it adds more endpoints that require protection. That addition of endpoints increases revenue, you know, for us in terms of the overall client size. We have high expectations for this business.
It's an area that, you know, I believe that there'll be a tipping point for us that we'll reach a certain size, certain amount, you know, level of clients. We will start to have higher demand coming our way versus having to, you know, try to generate that demand. That's when we'll get the growth. It's very scalable. They're relatively quicker implementations. We've had good results in, you know, these are not good stories that you like to tell, but they're good stories in the sense that we have real events that have occurred that we've been able to prevent from causing damage in our, in the clients that use our services.
The complexity is getting, you know, greater, and our 45-plus year history of doing this in protecting our own assets and the client assets that are with us is, you know, something we're building off of. Maybe you can talk about cross-selling?
Yeah. I think within our world, a lot of our traditional and alternative managers, especially the ones that are small to medium size, could very much avail themselves of the services. They're in every deal. We're talking about how we can help our clients with that, and I think it's gonna create some sales momentum over time. I think we're definitely making progress.
Great. Nearly hit the 30-minute mark and haven't had a question about private banks yet, so. There's $44 million in the backlog. Confidence in getting that implemented over the next 18 months. We've got some headwinds this year coming up. What does success look like for private banks 18 months from now in management's view?
In my view, it's stability, it's implementation of the backlog, it's replenishment of the backlog as we install it, and it's, you know, by the end of next year, showing a real trend line in margin improvement that we have confidence will carry into 2024. It's, you know, first and foremost, it's, you know, making sure our clients are taken care of, installing the clients that we have committed, and we're very good at that. At, you know, getting clients on board, which includes additional implementation events with U.S. Bank on our SaaS version of SWP. Those are big milestone events. The one we had at end of September was a big milestone event as the first SaaS user of SWP technology.
The other additional books of business we'll bring on next year and then the following year are really important. Then it's selling in those addressable markets that we talked about. Then it's the work that Sanjay Sharma is doing in running that business and getting the cost side of the business aligned better to where revenues are. That's already in flight as well. Did you have any?
No, I think.
Phil's gonna help as much as possible to help Sanjay grow that business with clients that are manufacturing also.
In terms of the margin, we've had some big positive tailwinds, big negative tailwinds this year in terms of, top line dynamics, and some expenses. How should we think about operating leverage into next year, as kind of part A and then part B, if the business does double over the next 5 to 7 years, where do you think the margin could go?
Do you wanna take the first part?
No.
You want me to take the whole thing. Thank you. Well, I'll take the last part. I think that the, as I mentioned earlier, the revenue target is really important, and that's A, because we feel really confident that it's doable and achievable with the markets that are right in front of us, you know, and then with a little bit of add-on on the back end. The way I've modeled it, I would say more or less on the back of the envelope, is just kind of margin maintenance. You know, if we stay in that 29%-30% margin range in terms of operating margins, we'll have a very profitable business. Our growth rate on the bottom line will be, I think, very satisfactory.
I think to the extent we get, growth in IMS and, you know, we get growth in areas where we have a little more scale and leverage opportunity, you know, we could see some margin improvement. One thing we're very clear about is we will continue to reinvest in these businesses. That, you know, you know, Phil mentioned that, you know, he increased the investment spend in IMS this year. That's true. You know, that's always true at SEI. We're always looking at two things. What are the new things we can invest in to have longer tail opportunities? What are the things we need to invest in to maintain the businesses we're in and to maintain the relevance of the businesses we're in to our clients?
I'm very kind of loath to say, "Oh, margins will be so much higher," because there's so many variables that go into it. One is, you know, kind of opportunities are kind of beyond that horizon that you're going to be spending money on.
Yeah. From a, from a short-term perspective, we could pop the margins, you know, a number of % within the business that I run. We're always looking 1, 2, 3 years out. Now we're investing as heavily as we can within the current framework that we have, just to kind of capitalize on opportunities that are out there. You know, we could always get the margins to be higher, but we're focused on growing as fast, as quickly as we can, as safely as we can. We just want to keep our clients happy. We think if we do the right thing for the clients, it's gonna pay huge dividends over time. We're a little less focused on, you know, what exactly that margin is, but we're much, much more focused on growth.
That doesn't mean we're gonna sacrifice the margin because we manage it aggressively.
Understood. We're gonna continue to be consistent with our, the business models we feel are, you know, we've operated under over for a long period of time, very recurring revenue-oriented, scalable businesses. As we grow to the top line, there is the opportunity for margin improvement, you know, ex the reinvestment. High cash flow generating businesses that don't require the use of our balance sheet or high uses of capital beyond just kind of the reinvestment, to generate revenue and profitability. One thing we are going to invest in more going forward is automation. One thing that will help us with margins is not just top line growth and scale, but that top line growth over time in some of our businesses, you know, pricing pressure is gonna be ever present.
It's ever present today. You have to get more efficient and kind of focus on and driving efficiency in how you operate to help you offset some of that kind of top line pressure on pricing. It's, you know, one of the things that's not very interesting, you know, from the outside in, but all the stuff that happens behind the curtain to deliver services every day, that requires investment and it requires improvement. You know, it's not the exciting stuff. It's not the shiny object on the that sits on your desktop. When you push the button on your desktop, something happens. It's that kind of behind the curtain stuff that, you know, we're in that business. We're in an operational business. We're in a technology services business.
We have to deliver that as efficiently as possible with the highest quality as possible. That requires kind of constant investment. Automation is a big theme of ours, you know, right now.
Try to squeeze one in the last couple of seconds here. We had the dividend increase earlier. Any changes overall to capital allocation plans?
No. I mean, we're our board's pretty consistent about use of capital. You know, we're a high capital generating firm and certainly reinvest in the business. You know, M&A may have, you know, an impact at some point, there will still be a consistent approach to buyback and dividend, and probably in that same kind of weighting that we're at today.
Got it. All right. With that, I think we're at time. Dennis and Phil, thank you so much for the time today, for all your insights. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having us. Thanks, everyone.