All right, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to day two of our financial services conference. I'm Ben Budish, the analyst covering the U.S. Brokers, Asset Managers, and Exchanges. With us for our first session today, from SEIC, we've got Ryan Hicke, CEO, and Dennis McGonigle, CFO. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks, Ben.
Maybe just to start out, could you give us just a brief overview of your business for, you know, investors who may be a little bit unfamiliar? Touch on your three pillars, the technology, operations, and asset management pieces.
That's, that's great. So if you think about SEI from kind of the external world, we're about $2 billion in revenue, 55-year history, and as you said, we're really founded upon servicing all financial services with either one of three capabilities. We have a technology pillar, an operations pillar, and an asset management pillar. And we go to market with those capabilities with a variety of different platforms and bundles. But if you think about the kind of the main intermediary and client bases, we service everybody from institutional clients. So we have a long history of OCIO capabilities to defined benefit endowments, foundations. A very successful footprint in the investment manager community, both alternative and traditional asset managers, to leverage SEI's technology and operations to enable their growth. And then intermediaries that are servicing private clients, whether they be advisors, part of wire houses, broker-dealers.
Historically, that was a very asset management centric solution that's been unbundled over the last five to seven years to offer more technology and operational capabilities. And then we have a small direct-to-high-net-worth business where SEI services a small number of ultra-high-net-worth clients across the United States.
Great. So Ryan, you've been in the CEO seat a little over a year. How's year one been? You know, what's gone well? What's been more challenging? What's on your mind?
Well, I mean, I think it's been a really positive year for us, but I think about that with a few different lenses. One, we had an opportunity, and we didn't want to waste the opportunity. So our Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Al West, when he elevated up to executive chairman, it just created an opportunity for new leadership. I took the CEO role. We also took the opportunity to kind of reset the executive team, but make sure we had, I think, the courage to look at ourselves and say: How do we kind of reinvent our growth strategy moving forward? What's working really well? Where should we pivot? What should we do differently?
We spent a lot of time in the summer of 2022, as a leadership team and a broader set of SEI personnel, really looking at total addressable markets. So not just trying to focus on the businesses that we're in today, what more do we need to do? Taking a fresh look at the landscape. So kind of if you fast-forward to where we are now, Ben, I feel really good about the focus areas that we have today, the trends that we're actually leaning into, what we're doing with our clients and prospects in the market. And then on a not-so-well front, I think we're still working through how do we operate at a faster pace throughout the organization? How do we actually identify and incubate new ideas and get them launched?
We have a rich history of innovation, you know, a DNA around experimentation and taking risk, but we're trying to really kind of unlock and unleash that mindset across the business again, because we do believe we need new growth engines beyond the current ones we have, whether that's organic growth or M&A, to get new ideas. We think about everything with a 30- or 40-year lens. We're not trying to maximize everything in a kind of a 12- 18-month window.
Great. Well, that's a great lead into the next question here. So you recently set out a target to double your revenues over the next five to seven years. So how do you get there? And, you know, I'm wondering, I think, like, three-quarters of your revenues are kind of asset sensitive. So what's the importance of growing overall assets within your existing clients, you know, cross-selling new products, expanding into new geographies? What are the sort of pieces that get you to that target?
Yeah, probably a little bit of all the above, but I'll kind of unpack it, and then maybe Dennis can weigh in here as well. So, we tried to make sure that we didn't just put the number out there because the number sounded good. I think there needs to be a little bit of a recognition for us that part of actually having that set goal was not just for kind of the external community, it was really for also our employee base. To, you know, to mobilize the 5,000 employees around a common goal, a common vision, and something that we could measure along the way.
But when we did the total addressable market work, we looked at all of our existing businesses, adjacent businesses, and we honestly came out of that process and said, "We could come pretty close if we execute well." And, and we actually did this in kind of a market-neutral environment. If we execute really well, and we lean into some of the areas that we see big growth trends, we really believe that organically, we can make a significant imprint and significant traction towards that doubling. But we also knew we were going to need to think about M&A in different ways, either as accelerants to the existing businesses or new engines. We just made a recent hire about 60 days ago for a new executive to focus on new business ventures and new ideas.
But I think what it did is it crystallized for us that maybe some of the capital allocation we had in place today, both in terms of dollars and talent, was maybe misaligned to the opportunity. So, for example, last summer, we moved a lot of resource and talent out of a couple of our other businesses to the IMS business. So when we look at the overall trend of outsourcing for alternative investment managers, the growth we have today in that business line, the continued expansion and demand of services, we really just started to move more of our capital into areas where we thought we had a longer runway of success, but also some greater medium-term success. I don't know what you would add to that.
No, we also, so we also, looking at the broader landscape, see in engagement with our larger clients or larger prospects or market participants, that within those clients, there's enormous amount of opportunity for all that SEI brings to bear. And as a company, we're more or less a little more vertical. So, and Ryan has said this in other forums, clients knew us for one thing, so it's the one thing we did for a bank was our wealth processing platform. But within a bank, there's more, there's opportunity beyond that, and we weren't really executing beyond that. In our advisor channel, excuse me. Similarly, we were selling to a certain type of advisor that, you know, had a certain need, and we were very good at meeting that need.
So we've gone upmarket, though, to much larger advisors who also have a more complete, or a broader set of needs that we can meet with our capabilities. So, we think there are, and have high confidence, frankly, that there are, firms out there that could expand significantly their relationship with SEI because of our capabilities.
And when we talk about, you know, the revenue goals we've set for ourselves, a lot of that will come from organic growth within the client base and just expanding the relationship with our capabilities. And it's changing that mindset within the company as well. It's been the past 12-18 months for our field people, our relationship people, our solutions people, to be thinking about things on a much broader footing than maybe traditionally they were just very vertical with, you know, a market, you know, single market solution. Now we're, you know, we're broadening that.
I think that's a really good point. Just to add on that, Ben, I spent a lot of time, as you would expect, right out of the gates, out in the market, with clients, with prospects, just other CEOs, other executives, and especially on the client meetings, and this was a global phenomenon, if you will. I kind of came away with three clear themes out of each of the meetings. One, they really trust and respect SEI. So we have a position in our client base where they have a tremendous amount of respect, reliance, and trust in SEI, and that's something that is, you know, really difficult. It's a really difficult spot to attain.
The second, to Dennis's point, though, was the vast majority of the executives only knew SEI for the business with which they interacted, had little to no understanding of the other business lines we had. And I have yet to do the executive meeting with a executive that wants to add the number of strategic partners they have. Like, everybody is looking for, trying to figure out how do they rationalize, how do they leverage their existing partner ecosystem in more ways. So that kind of really excited us inside the organization. But as Dennis said, we've had to kind of rethink how we go to market, how do we engage that client base, to make sure we can take advantage of that.
Great. Maybe sticking on the growth theme, you know, I think you've indicated in the past that you're not the lowest cost option. So how do you think about pricing? You know, obviously, you get what you pay for. How do you think about how you're positioned? Is that like a lever to help sort of with the revenue growth target, or is it more about sort of those other organic and inorganic drivers?
Yeah, so we stay really focused because I think a lot of people, as you would suspect, latch on to the doubling the revenue in five to seven years. But we're also really clear that that's not revenue at any cost for us. We focus really, and I think probably as equally, if not more, on the profitability and scalability of that revenue. So when we think about the types of clients we want to acquire moving forward, I think we have a kind of a clearer vision of what's a good fit for SEI, and we definitely like organizations that are in growth mode.
Because I think when we step back and look at our best partnerships, whether it's an investment advisor, whether it's a bank, whether it's an investment manager, the best partners that we have are the ones that have really clear growth ambitions, but that see the value in leveraging our technology, operations or asset management so that they can deploy their capital in other areas. So I guess when we think about pricing, you know, I kind of think about it less as kind of a point of entry and more about, well, what's the sustainability of that over the long term? Because if we do a deal for the wrong price at the outset, and our average client is 18 years tenure, that's probably going to be a slippery slope.
Other thing I think we have a lot of conviction in the service offering, and it's something we're really proud of. So when I go out, especially when I'm up in New York a lot, seeing a lot of our IMS clients, and that is usually the first thing out of their mouth around their experience with SEI, is the quality of service. And then they're willing to pay a premium for that service because they get a different delivery experience. So I think we're just kind of careful to make sure we're not just chasing revenue for the sake of revenue.
Makes a lot of sense. And what about M&A? How does... Talk a little bit about how that factors into the target, and maybe, Dennis, if you could kind of remind us your overall capital allocation framework, how you think about, you know, the best uses of cash?
You want to do that first?
Yes, sure. So, I mean, historically, as a firm, our allocation of capital first and foremost starts with reinvestment in the business. So we have a, you know, fairly consistent and high reinvestment rate of revenue back into the business. And that's allowed us, I think, over the past, you know, 30, 40 years, to have kind of a sustaining, steady business that, you know, is continuing to, you know, attack market opportunity. And it's allowed us to stay relevant with our clients. I mean, our clients' businesses are changing every day. We're in very dynamic markets that are under their own set of pressures.
And if we truly are going to be a key partner or a key supplier to our clients, frankly, most of our clients could not operate without us because of the, you know, we're more of their backbone in terms of operations and technology infrastructure. That reinvestment rate is critical to them, for them to see that they're with the right partner. So capital allocation starts there. And then it's, you know, excess capital is how do we return it to shareholders? Has been historically the use, so dividend and more weighted towards stock buyback.
More recently, over the past, you know, six, seven years, we began to do some M&A in acquiring firms that we felt had either really good assets, talented people, and that were complementary businesses to some of our existing businesses, or allowed us to accelerate or give us a big- a slightly bigger footprint in certain market segments. So we've done those types of transactions over the past few years, and now it's a, you know, our, our lens and, you know, Ryan can speak to this, our lens is, is much broader than that now. So I don't know that- capital allocation will, won't continue to have those same elements, but the weightings, you know, might shift over time depending upon what, you know, M&A activity we, we wind up pursuing. It's not M&A for M&A sake.
Mm-hmm.
That's not the, not the idea. It's M&A from an, really almost through a, through an investment lens. Is it a good investment for us? Is it gonna enhance our growth foot, footing, and is it gonna, you know, help us, you know, move SEI and our clients forward?
Maybe, you know, Ryan, strategically, you mentioned accelerating growth or helping the growth or helping the clients. Do you think about it as, you know, tuck-ins with specific capabilities or, you know, kind of growth accelerants, or things that get you into new segments or enhance, you know, the or broaden the suite of services? How do you think about that from a strategic perspective?
Yes, we think about that in a couple of ways. I mean, I think we're much more proactive now than we were in the past. I think so when you look at, we've done an acquisition earlier this year in the U.K., but we've been working more closely with our board as well around, you know, how M&A fits into the overall growth strategy of the next five to seven years. I think we have a better idea, Ben, of what we're not interested in. I don't think we're interested in a big reclamation project. If it was a standalone new business, it was just a solid new business that was like a fifth engine or sixth engine to add to SEI, that's something that we're interested in, the things we're looking at now.
We're also looking at areas that would accelerate our ability to exploit what we see as kind of larger trends. So when you think about the alternative space, whether that be something that would further our technology footprint, something that would improve our automation or investment processing, or increase our asset management capabilities. So some of those areas, when you look at the RIA space and the whole wealth management space. So I think we have certain buckets that we are much kind of, I think, more specific around the types of assets we're looking for, why those assets would fit into our overall ecosystem, and what it would do, to Dennis's point, to really accelerate our capabilities moving forward.
Then in some areas, we're actually just looking at, would buying that stop us from having to build it, and would we have something that we could just get to market sooner? Maybe that's kind of more of your tuck-in question. So a little bit of all of the above, but I think we have more clarity around the size, the appetite. Then we spend more time thinking about how would we integrate it? Because we are obviously very aware of the kind of uniqueness of SEI's culture. We don't have a long history of M&A, so we want to make sure as we're doing these things, we're doing them kind of intelligently and deliberately, and making sure we're integrating them appropriately into the organization.
Got it. And-
And, you know, the past, I'd say nine months, the Street has really responded well to, you know, more clarity from us on what we're interested in, and we're seeing more ideas come our way. And, you know, some of them are good ideas. They may not be the right idea for us, but there's a lot more thought and thoughtfulness on the part of the Street coming to us in engagement. Whereas, you know, a year ago or 18 months ago, these are my terms, you know, it was more... We were seeing more -- the garage sale opportunities. So it was, you know, we tried to sell it on eBay.
You know, we tried to sell it, you know, directly, you know, you know, you know, to someone else, and now it's out on, you know, it's out on the curb, you know, with you know looking for somebody to adopt it, let alone, you know, more or less. So we're seeing a lot less of that kind of activity and much more, I'd say, things are coming to us with a lot more strategic thought and thoughtfulness about for us to engage in. And that's really been the message we've been trying to send to the market: bring us ideas. You know, we're, you know, we're open for business.
Got it. So maybe one last question, kind of on the growth algorithm. We've talked about the revenue growth, inorganic and organic. So maybe a little about the company's operating margin. So you're planning to double the revenues. What does that mean in terms of EPS growth? And maybe can you talk about sort of natural operating leverage in the business? You know, and in terms of, like, OpEx, what are your top priorities in terms of R&D? And you know, you've kind of indicated organic investments anywhere. In particular, is it, you know, personnel, engineers, that sort of thing?
Yes, we're going to remain really focused on growing EPS. So I mean, I think as we believe and think about how we're going to add revenue, as I mentioned earlier, that'll be revenue that has a lot of the same characteristics in terms of, do we believe that's something that we could scale, that we could drive leverage? It may not have that day one. I think we also think about that kind of holistically across the company, because if you look at a couple of the businesses and you take banking, if, for people that are familiar with SEI, but banking right now is very low margins. We have a pretty clear plan in place to kind of systematically grow those margins.
When you look at the investment advisor business, though, that's a business that as we deploy and sell more technology and administration-only capabilities, we expect to see some really great revenue growth there, but that won't be at the same margin as we were selling asset management for years. So we're looking at it from a, kind of a total picture of saying, "Hey, we really think we can grow a lot of these businesses, not all at the same rate, but somewhere we may grow the revenue, maybe not at historical margins."
We have other businesses that as we see growing, we actually think that those margins will be much more accretive. So over... When you look at the sum of the parts, we really still think that the company will continue to grow EPS. That's what we're paid to do by our, you know, shareholders and investors, and, that's not something we're gonna take our eye off the ball.
I mean, that's the approach: all revenue is not good revenue.
Mm-hmm.
So it's very much about quality revenue and quality relationships, and relationships that are sustaining and enhancing to not only our clients, 'cause that's what's most important, but then ultimately to us in our operating models. We all know we're operating in markets that have their own pressures. So our clients in certain segments are under their own pricing pressure. They're under their own revenue, revenue pressures, that they're trying to figure out how to grow through that themselves, and certainly their cost of operation, their cost of delivery, has an impact on their profitability.
So while we're dealing with, you know, we recognize that because we're in the same business. I mean, one of the assets of SEI is, we understand our clients really well because we are in the same markets, selling similar services. So we, you know, we get that, that part of the equation. So it's really finding, you know, areas where we can add more value to our clients to help them grow, to deal with that pricing pressure they're facing. Us focused on technology deployment, automation capabilities-
Right.
... and scale operationally, because one way you offset a little bit of the revenue squeeze is get more efficient in how you operate. So our kind of allocation of capital, if you will, in this space, is, A, client-facing, making sure we're delivering value to our clients through capabilities and through our service offerings, but at the same time, reinvesting some of that capital in a way that I call kind of behind the curtain. Kind of the stuff that's not really exciting, it's not gonna get a lot of attention, but if you don't do it, your system's gonna get clogged, and you're gonna have a much more difficult time dropping that revenue to the bottom line.
So it's making sure we have the right balance of a client-facing service offering, coupled with efficient and high-quality delivery on the back end. So we'll, we, you know, we work hard to balance those two things and, you know, sometimes you, you do get out of whack. Your clients and market activity tends to have a much more attractive draw for capital, and it should in some respects, because nothing happens unless you have a client.
But on the back end, if you're not delivering efficiently, what's the point of the revenue if you can't get it to the bottom line? And we, as a firm over our history, have been very, very successful at producing profits. I think, you know, I believe, you know, maybe in the past few years, profitability wasn't as attractive an attribute, you know, of a good company, but I think that has changed. That has kind of come back into vogue, that at the end of the day, you do have to make money, I mean, you know, to sustain yourself.
Great. So maybe let's shift the conversation to some kind of, you know, your growth and how it factors in or is impacted by broader market conditions. So one of the headwinds you've talked about in the past is sort of the impact of interest rates on defined benefit plans. So maybe to level set, can you kind of remind us what's the role SEI plays here? How big is the business, and how is the trend sort of evolving?
Sure. So our institutional investor business, you know, so a global business operates mainly in North America, the U.K., and some of the European markets. And a segment of that business, about a third of the business, is defined benefit contribution plans. And if you, if you rewound the clock five years or six years, it was, that was probably more than half the business. So we've done a good job, I think, and Paul Klauder, who ran that business for a number of years, did a great job of kind of diversifying that business across other institutional markets.
But on the point of interest rates, when interest rates were really low, the funded status of defined benefit pension plans were under pressure, so therefore, the need for firms like us and solutions to help solve that business problem, corporate sponsors, particularly of defined benefit plans had, and we were a good solution for that. As interest rates have gone up and that funded status is closing or has closed, a lot of corporate sponsors really don't want to continue to offer a defined benefit pension benefit to their employee base, and their goal, their business goal is to, you know, shut it down, is to annuitize it and move away from it. So that market pressure is ever present.
Now, the good news is we've diversified, so we're less reliant on it, but it's still a headwind to the business, as, you know, firms do, you know, go through that kind of plan shutdown phase. And to us, it's, you know, sometimes it's the, you know, the pain of being successful. So when we started in this business many years ago, our objective was, you know, stated objective to clients was: What's your business objective with this plan or this benefit offer? And our job is to help you achieve that objective. Well, for many clients, it was close the funded status, so in a way that we don't have to write a big check to do so, so we don't have a big capital outlay, so we can shut it down.
So to the extent we've helped our clients get there, you know, now we're, you know, we, we have a, you know, a headwind as a result of that. But, you know, that's, you know what? If we're not in business to solve our clients' problems, you know, I don't know what we're in business to do.
It's a high-quality problem to have.
Yeah.
What about other recent trends you're kind of seeing, you know, thinking about things like sales cycle elongations, anything else that's sort of, you know, kind of topical, and that may be more kind of macro impacted that, I don't know, could be poised to change if things improve, you know, deteriorate, you know, going into next year?
... I don't think we've seen any big, huge change to the kind of sales cycle. I think, you know, a couple of trends we've definitely seen in the market, which we touched on a little bit earlier, but, I think a recognition. If you look at a couple different segments, a recognition from a lot of our banking clients, banking prospects around the importance of wealth, and how that could be a diversifier for them moving forward. If they're not in that business, how do they actually get in that business? How do they amplify that business? That's definitely ratcheted up in the last 12 months. When you look at the overall, I mentioned this already, but when you look at the alternative space and the investment management space, I think the appetite for outsourcing grows daily.
One of the things that I think was maybe an unintended outcome of COVID, was a lot of the firms that were insourcers and historically said that they would never outsource, that tune has changed kinda dramatically because they can't get the talent. And we hear that directly from some of the CFOs, the CEOs. So those trends are things that we're definitely leaning into because that's a we're well positioned for that, but that's not one that I think is gonna change kind of moving forward. That's gonna magically, you know, reverse direction. And then I think, one of the overall trends that have been talked about the last few years is this, this whole idea around, you know, the growth of the RIA, where that's gonna kind of end, you know, breakaways from broker-dealers, but how do firms respond to that?
I don't know if that's kind of really kind of shaken itself out yet, because there's still a lot of consolidation in that market, a lot of change, but it's definitely an area that, you know, we're right in the center of that and with a different offering. But it's definitely a trend that I think is gonna be really impactful over the next kind of three to five years.
Great. You know, I'd love if you could, maybe somewhat selfishly, but we all... You know, we cover a lot of alternative asset managers and a lot of them are here as well. Could you maybe, you know, click into that theme a little bit more, talk about what you're doing there, what the appetite of your customers is, to kind of get deeper into alternatives?
Yeah. So when you look at our existing alts client base, I think one of the things that we benefit from, we talked about this earlier, is around our service offering. So we continue to see, I think, a pretty significant expansion in our client footprint. As clients launch new funds, we tend to, they actually tend to be working with SEI, you know, on the overall structure and construction of those funds, and especially in areas like private credit, real estate, you know, we do really well, CITs.
Mm.
So I think on the alternative asset manager side, they're looking at how do they expand their suite of products. So I think one of the trends is a lot of those firms, whether either through acquisition or their own organic growth, are trying to become more of a one-stop shop for their client base. So we're benefiting from some of that in some of the acquisition space, but also as firms launch new funds. On the traditional side, I think it's kind of a tale of two cities there.
There are some firms that are just trying to figure out, you know, what the future looks like for them, and others that are really leaning into how do they expand their product suite. We've been working with a lot of our traditional asset managers, both how do they change some of their product types? I mentioned earlier, CITs, and a tremendous amount of momentum. But some of our traditional investment managers are saying, "How can we help them actually get into the alts business?" If they have the engineering talent, they have the investment talent, we have all the infrastructure-
Mm.
-to get those funds set up, to do the administration, to give them the technology, that puts us in a really, really good spot. I mean, that, that's a business that we're just really excited about the current and future growth, just because of the client base we have, the growth trajectory of that client base, and I think the overall changes in the market position us well, if we stay really attentive to the needs of the existing clients and the prospects.
Got it. Very helpful. Maybe let's talk a little bit about some of your newer ventures. Can you talk a bit about SEI Sphere and what sort of early traction you're seeing there?
Yeah. So, just for the room, SEI Sphere is a cybersecurity managed service offering. I think one of the kind of historical tenets of SEI is things that we do for ourselves, once that has scale, we then look out and see would that have value in the market as a platform, as a service. So we've been protecting client data, protecting our own data for over 50 years, and we definitely started to see a demand, especially in the kind of the small to mid-size enterprises in the wealth management arena, for more outsourced services around cyber, remote email protection, data protection.
So I would say two things there, Ben. We're really excited about the early adoption from... And we consciously decided to go to new names, not existing clients first. So a few years ago, when we launched the business, two years ago, we thought it was better to see if the value proposition could stand on its own two feet, and could we get non-SEI clients-
Mm.
-to buy SEI Sphere, as opposed to bundling in with some of our existing services. But I think when we look at that business now, we need to accelerate client acquisition. So when we're winning clients, one thing that is really interesting and exciting is those clients are consuming more and more services. So a few of the existing original Sphere clients have come back, and we've been helping them with cloud migration or other professional services in the IT space. I don't think we're getting enough client acquisition traction because we're gonna need... They're not huge deals, so we're gonna need a bigger base.
And as Dennis mentioned earlier, that's another area where we think about M&A as an accelerant to maybe we go and buy a larger organization and put Sphere inside of that, or do we bring things that are complementary services to add on and make that a more robust platform? So definitely excited about the traction, excited about the response, and definitely the organic growth of the existing clients buying more services, but we need more clients in that business.
Got it. And, and where else are you investing? What are your other sort of ventures that you think, you know, have the potential to turn out to be quite promising? And, and maybe, you know, kind of going back to your longer-term or your medium-term growth targets, how important are newer ventures versus, you know, the stuff we talked about, the organic growth, the, you know, acquisition, and that sort of things?
Both. We definitely need new growth engines. So I think a couple areas and, you know, kind of repeating certain themes, but we have a couple ideas and investments underway in the alternative space. So if you look out into the market and you think about the demand for intermediaries to have more access to alts, the demand for alternative investment managers to increase their distribution, we see our footprint on both sides there is, you know, pretty significant. And our knowledge and capability about technology and operations, we think we can facilitate more of that distribution and platform.
We have spent a lot of time over the last five or six years really investing in unbundling some of our capabilities, so that some of the technology, especially on the front office side, both in the banking space and the investment advisor space, definitely resonates and has a lot of value. But some firms don't want to go through the process of moving custodians or changing investment processing, but they see a lot of value in some of our capabilities. So that's another area that we've been investing, not to go out just as a single product, but to be able to allow us to avail some of those capabilities to clients so that they can start really engaging with SEI and experience SEI without a full stack transformation.
And then within some of our core businesses, there are, I'd say, newer elements that are opening up additional market segments. So in our banking segment, and this has gotten some attention, but it's not as well understood at the, at this point. But U.S. Bank is converting and is kind of halfway through the conversion of their entire book of business on the trust and custody side over to SWP, our, our new platform, as a technology-only consumer of our capabilities. And it's an event in the market that a lot of other firms are looking at and watching closely, that have similar books of business, are large operators. They want to retain operations, but they need to upgrade their technology stack because they're running their business today on technology that's 25, 30, you know, 40, even 40 years old.
So that's an event that we've been investing in. So we've been investing in that U.S. Bank relationship and getting that in place. The good news is, you know, we're well along on the implementation, you know, phase. The technology is delivered. They're running a portion of their business on that technology, and they'll continue to convert books of business over the next, you know, 12-18 months. But other bigger players are looking at that, and it's kind of one of these investments that's been embedded in the overarching SWP or technology spend that's now starting to, you know, see the sun here in terms of opportunity. But we know those types of relationships are a long time in establishing, but once you establish them, they are, you know, high.
We used to learn in school that, you know, total value of a client, that well, they are highly valuable clients long-term financially. That's, you know, one example within a business. You know, Ryan, you know, touching this, a large RIA space within the advisor business. It's a new segment of the market for us. We've gone upmarket, we've had success. We know it takes, you know, some additional investment there because the needs are more expanded, and the alternative access to alternatives is one of those areas of need, but that'll open up a whole new channel for us. So there's other investments going on that we wouldn't necessarily put in the category of new business, but they are new relative to the, you know, businesses we're operating.
We also know from, you know, our experience in any business, you know, sure, you can launch a product, and it gets struck by lightning, and it accelerates very rapidly. But as we look at our business and look out, you know, most of our growth over the next five years is gonna come from our established operating businesses. But we also know that when we get to year three or year four of that time horizon, we want other propellants kicking in and making more significant contributions to growth. Because our job is not to have a great SEI in 2024, right? You know, that is our job, but our job is really to have a great SEI in 2030.
And the only way you do that is to be ahead on the investment spectrum and start to build businesses that are gonna be contributors down the road. And they all won't be home runs. We also know that from experience. Which is why, you know, Ryan mentioned we hired an executive to lead kind of new business initiatives for the company, and that's partly to be a little more expansive in what we're doing. Get more, I call it dots on the bottom of the business curve kind of started, because not all of them will, you know, be successful.
Dennis, you talked a little bit about SWP. Can you maybe dig into that a little bit more? Talk about, you know, the platform. What does it look like in terms of the upgrade from its predecessor? What has it enabled you to do once a new client is sort of up and running on that platform, what's the opportunity like there?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to call it new. It's because, you know, it's been around for a little while now. But at its core, it was a platform designed for wealth management. So prior to that, SEI's our core technology platform was a trust accounting system, which was designed for trust departments. It did wealth processing, and we used that platform very successfully in our advisor business, but it was a trust accounting system, and it was not a global system. So it was single currency. It didn't really integrate well globally. SWP is a truly global wealth management system, so all account types can operate on it effectively, including trust accounts.
So it has embedded in it the principal and interest accounting requirements of trust accounts, but it's much more oriented around wealth management, which means any entity that is in the wealth management business can operate their business on SWP. So in the U.K., which is where Ryan really helped us get that business started there, most of the clients in the U.K. are—well, I don't even know if we have a bank client in the U.K. at this point on SWP. They're all investment management firms. They're all private wealth firms, either regional or national advisory firms, because the orientation of that platform was to that broader market, and it's global.
So we run very complex books of business on that platform that's probably more pertinent outside the U.S. than inside the U.S., although our, you know, the bigger banks here do have pockets of business that are global, so it'll help them solve for that problem. And whereas today they might be running on a more fragmented technology stack, well, this allows them to consolidate that technology stack down to a single platform.
On a tactical basis, Ben, I know we're running out of time, but like, if you think about the investment advisor business, Dennis said, that's been all on SWP for four years now. We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing in the RIA space with an administration-only solution without SWP. The scale that that has in terms of rebalancing, the modern architecture that we have, it's, it's very cloud native, it's API-enabled, so the ability to kind of integrate other third parties, the ability for us to kind of deploy our services in more modular ways. So as Dennis mentioned, I think when you think about SWP and say, when the U.S. Bank conversion's done, we now have a totally different operating model. We have 1 million accounts a day running every day.
We have more breadth of capabilities for that kind of larger investment manager, wealth manager in the RIA space. So I think it really has, like, opened up new avenues for us, not just with existing clients, but also a way for us to compete and kind of engage a whole different suite of prospects. Now, we have to turn that into, you know, real traction and revenue, but it's positioned us really well.
And I would argue, we're one of the few, if not only modern technology stack in the investment processing, wealth processing space. And again, it's one of those things kind of behind the curtain. You know, we're all used to being in front of the curtain. We hit a button, and magic happens, you know? Well, it's not really magic. You know, there's a lot of work and investment kind of behind the curtain, and we've upgraded and, you know, we bit. It was a long march, and we bit the bullet, and that's behind us now. So if you're looking to engage in SEI, now it's a good time because you don't have to—didn't have to suffer for the, you know, the long decade mark of new technology build.
But we did.
We did.
All right. Well, gentlemen, we're just about out of time. We'll leave it there.
It's a pleasure.
But, yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Ben.
Thanks, Ben.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
Thanks, guys.