Hub24 Ltd

ASX:HUB

Earnings Call Analysis

Revenue Up 17% with Strong Net Flows

The company reported strong financial results, with group revenue increasing 17% to $327 million, and underlying EBITDA rising 15% to $118 million. The Platform segment saw a 21% growth in revenue and a 62% rise in net flows, driven by $15.8 billion in new funds. The company announced a 17% higher dividend at $0.38 per share. Looking ahead, the company targets funds under administration between $115 billion and $123 billion by FY26, reflecting ongoing confidence in robust net flow growth exceeding $11 billion annually.

Strong Financial Performance Underpins Growth

In the recently concluded fiscal year 2024, HUB24 exhibited impressive financial growth, with total group revenue rising to $327 million, marking an increase of 17% compared to the previous year. The underlying EBITDA also saw a substantial boost, increasing by 15% to reach $118 million. Notably, the platform segment was the significant driver behind this performance, contributing about 77% of overall revenue, while tech solutions accounted for 22%. In terms of profitability, underlying NPAT rose to $67.8 million, reflecting a 15% year-over-year growth, and the statutory NPAT surged 24% to $47.2 million. This solid financial footing enabled HUB24 to declare a full-year dividend of $0.38 per share, up 17%, alongside an underlying diluted earnings per share of $0.81, representing a 14% increase.【4:2†source】.

Robust Contributions from Platform and Tech Solutions

Breaking down the performance by segment reveals a robust contribution from the platform, which achieved a revenue increase of 21%, up to just under $253 million. This segment also posted an underlying EBITDA of $103 million, up 21%. In contrast, the tech solutions segment experienced more modest growth, with revenue climbing 5% to approximately $71 million and an underlying EBITDA of $22.1 million. The company reported a remarkable total funds under administration (FUA) growth of 30% year-on-year, with FUA reaching $104.7 billion by June 30, 2024, driven by record net flows of $15.8 billion—up 62% from the prior year.【4:2†source】【4:4†source】.

Growth Channels and Operational Strategies

HUB24's operational strategy is focused on sustainable growth and increasing its market share. The company plans to achieve custodial FUA targets ranging from $115 billion to $123 billion by fiscal year 2026, up from the previous total of $84.4 billion. The anticipated net flows are projected to exceed $11 billion annually, excluding significant migrations. Additionally, improvements in operational efficiency are underway, with investment in automation, AI, and process automation being prioritized to enhance customer service while controlling costs. This focus on scalable operations aligns with the intention to leverage a larger fixed cost base across the growing business.【4:11†source】【4:12†source】.

Dividend Policy and Capital Management Insights

HUB24's commitment to returning value to shareholders is reflected in its dividend policy, with a payout ratio target range of 40% to 50% of underlying NPAT. As the company transitions into a yield stock, the potential for increased payout ratios remains. The strong operating cash flows of $109 million for FY 2024 reinforce HUB24's capability to balance reinvestment strategies while rewarding shareholders. The company is also strategically deploying its significant cash balance, currently at $88 million, to continue investing in growth initiatives and to ensure compliance with regulatory capital requirements.【4:7†source】【4:9†source】.

Market Position and Future Outlook

HUB24 has solidified its position in the competitive landscape, recognized as Australia's top platform for retail superannuation flows. With accolades for service and technology improvements, the company is well-positioned to capitalize on industry trends. The management's outlook expressed confidence in sustaining momentum, particularly from enhanced adviser sentiment and ongoing investments to broaden its service offerings. The focus remains not only on maintaining high service standards but also developing innovative products to meet evolving market demands.【4:18†source】【4:19†source】.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q4

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the HUB24 Limited FY '24 Results Briefing. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Andrew Alcock, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Good morning, everyone and welcome to our FY '24 full year results briefing. It's great to have you all with us and thank you for your interest. We're very, very pleased to update you on what's been a remarkable year in many respects of HUB24, in terms of our performance, our strong prospects for our ongoing feature and our strategy to continue to transform and change this great industry. We're looking forward to briefing you.

And today, with me, I've got Kitrina Shanahan, as always, our CFO. I would like to try and maximize -- our time. We always say this, but trying to keep as much time as possible for questions. So we'll fly through some of the slides and pause where we need to. But absolutely keen to maximize the opportunity for those to ask questions.

In terms of our highlights and operating view. And before we turn to the financial highlights, I thought it would be good to talk about how focused we are at HUB24 on empowering better financial futures together. It's our purpose. It underpins how we operate, it underpins how we develop our products and our strategies.

It really is about us aligning with building a better wealth system for Australians. And with our vision of leading the wealth industry is the best provider of integrated platform, tech and data solutions. On this particular slide, underpinning that vision is a summary of our current position in terms of achieving that.

We are recognized as Australia's best platform. We are #1 for annual and quarterly flows into retail superannuation. In fact, we're #1 -- sorry, platform flows and retail super within platform. We're #2, if you like, in Australia across all superannuation funds, including industry funds, where members choose to switch to a new fund. So we're #2 behind Ausie super there.

We obviously have our managed accounts capability, which again has been #1 across the industry. Our SMSF space, Provider of the Year for the platform and in our class business, #2 for market share and #2 for corporate compliance software as well and we have the leading portfolio solution.

When you look at those capabilities together and how we plan to integrate those with others and other manufacturers and providers and tech players across the industry, we're certainly well on the way to playing that leadership role as having the best integrated platform, data and tech solutions.

Of course, we certainly aim to operate and grow our business with consistent and reliable shareholder outcomes. The charts on the screen now talk to our full year compound annual growth rate for our funds under administration. And you can see that's at 57%. And our revenue and group -- our group revenue and group underlying EBITDA, 4-year CAGR of 42% and 47%, respectively.

They are consistent, reliable results. We certainly try to run and operate the business to get that growth, but also to balance that with the awards to win and also balance that with the emergence of profit and revenue for shareholders. And so it's a great accolade to us to be able to do that, I think and we hopefully aspire to that in the future as well, whilst balancing that customer service and execution of strategy, delivering reliable results is key for us as well in our business.

On to our financial highlights for FY '24, Kitrina will unpack some of these numbers with you in more detail on some commentary a bit later on in the presentation. But looking at the highlights there from a revenue point of view for the Group and the Platform up 17% for the group with $327 million of revenue, Platform's up 21% and Tech Solutions up 5%.

Similarly, in our underlying EBITDA, there's a 15% growth in the group total underlying EBITDA to $118 million, and the Platform to $103 million, up 21% and Tech Solutions up a little bit as well, $22.1 million.

On the right-hand side, absolutely delighted to talk about statutory NPAT, which is up 24% to $47 million, but underlying NPAT up 15% to $67 million. We've got a fully franked final dividend that we've determined of $0.195 per share and that's up 5% as well. And the underlying EPS on a diluted basis is $0.81 per share up 14%.

Taking a look at where we finished the year with Platform FUA and FUA overall, we're at $84.4 billion at 30th of June. But now as we speak as of Wednesday last week on the 14th of August, we're $87.1 billion. And we can talk about the composition of that market moving and so forth a bit later on. But really, that's a $20 billion increase or greater than a $20 billion increase from where we were this time last year. And our PARS FUA is also up and total FUA up to $104.7 billion. Kitrina will unpack some of these later in the presentation.

Looking to the business highlights and some of the achievements for the year, on the left-hand side of this slide, once again, record inflows of $15.8 billion for the business, including some large transitions. But also if you normalize those out from the result, there would be organic flows on the normal net flows are also in line with our record in '22.

#1, across major advisory and platform industry surveys, we've got a slide on that a bit later on. We're very delighted to have completed those large migrations this year with more to come -- sorry, last year in '24 with more to come in '25 and the completion of the integration program for Xplore Wealth, having delivered the synergies that we talked to the market about as well. There's been really strong growth and exciting news coming out of Class and NowInfinity.

NowInfinity having really strong growth. We've got some great enhancements coming out in the class business to help customers, accountants and so forth with their products and really hopefully a step change in some of the features that help the efficient administration of super funds and other products with Class.

Our myprosperity offer, we launched a national offer through licensees. We're having, as we speak, some great workshops with lots of advisers coming to demonstrations of myprosperity and seeing some great results starting to come to pass there in terms of take-up on myprosperity.

And of course, we always continue to invest in our business for the future. We certainly spent some time investing on data infrastructure, security and privacy to enable our strategy and support our customers moving ahead.

On the right-hand side of the slide, some product stuff there in terms of initiatives we've done for our customers, new products to meet evolving needs with Discover, our cost-effective offer on HUB24 platform designed for clients with less complex needs. That's been out in the market. It's going really well in terms of flows and support.

We have a pilot out there for High-Net-Wealth segment. We've integrated noncustody admin reporting attached to our platform and we certainly intend to extend that over time as well. Our reporting feature continues to lead the market and we've enhanced that during the year with HUB24 Present now enabling even more personalized client reports. And of course, we added the AGILE products being the retirement product from Allianz Retire+ onto the platform as well.

So some great highlights here about what we've done in our business and some great highlights there about us continuing to innovate and meet the needs of clients, certainly as through a life cycle and the changing needs of Australians.

Taking a look at some of the recognition here. I didn't want to gloss over this. It's an amazing accolade for us and something that we're very proud of and we know that it comes with hard work. It also comes with some humility as well that you've got to keep working at awards and customer service. But we pretty well had a great year in terms of being best overall platform 2 years running from investment trends. And the subcategories are there on the slide.

When we look at the technology needs report as well, #1, overall satisfaction for Wrap Platforms in some subcategories there. Adviser ratings, we pretty much won all categories and Wealth Insights as well with the adviser sentiment on the platform and SMSF platform for the year.

These are great accolades for us. And whilst we don't strive to win the awards, we strive to delight our customers and it's a testament to our strategy and our focus that we're getting the customer service right, we're also building the right features to support the future of this industry and what our clients and advisers need, puts us in a great position to continue our ongoing growth and to transform the industry and hopefully extend our market leadership ahead of competitors.

If we take a look at the adviser base and the financial adviser base supporting the platform and our access to that adviser base and the [indiscernible] growth to date on this particular slide, you can see that since FY '20, we had almost tripled the amount or percentage of advisers in the market using HUB24 to today's. So 10% to 29%. And that's a 4-year CAGR of about 22%.

So as we speak today, 29% of advisers use HUB24. On the right-hand side, once again, the market share of the business has grown from 2% to over 3x that in a 4-year period to 7.3% at June '24. And we've had the #1 for organic market share gains over the last 12 months as well. So a great foundation and a great scorecard in terms of our success while we hope to continue to do moving ahead.

Taking a deeper look at that, though and looking forward from that baseline performance and success, we can definitely see a remarkably strong pipeline to continue that growth as well. And so on the left-hand side of this slide, you can see the recurring flows or revenue we get from existing clients in the bar chart and the pool we get from inflows, we get from existing licenses but new advisers and from new licensee relationships.

Then notice in FY '24, that is -- the dark blue section is at 17% compared to 9% last year. It does move around. That's largely from the EQT transition with those EQT licenses being new in that period of time. It doesn't actually diminish the ongoing flows that we get from advisers, which typically come in over about 6 years from joining HUB24 onwards.

On the right-hand side of the chart, the 15,583 licensed functional advisers in the country. As we said, we've got access or we have 29% of the market using HUB24. However, there's an additional 47% or add that together, 76% of the total market that we've got access to the 47% of advisers. They're covered by a distribution agreement we have with their licensee and we're yet to have them use the platform, but there's an opportunity to access more advisers as we grow.

And in FY '24, I think we had 4,500 new advisers during the year and that's been pretty well in line with our growth, our average every year, despite the market shrinking a little bit over that time. Our FUA per adviser is up to $19 million from $8 million in FY '20. So again, a large growth over a period of time giving evidence that we're actually increasing our penetration or share of advisers book over time.

The average buyer having $70 million in the industry, but us having 10% advisers using our platform, they're having more than $50 million on HUB. So if our average is $19 million and we have the potential to get to $50 million, hopefully, you can see there's a very strong pipeline over time and it does take some time to get that share of FUA but the market share growth we saw in the previous slide, if we execute well and we continue to deliver, there's no reason why we can't continue to have that market share growth moving forward. And we're certainly focused on delivering that for shareholders and delighting our customers in that way.

Quickly going to touch briefly on myprosperity. It's in the package. If you want more details, you can certainly cover it in Q&A. But we did, during the year, launch an enterprise offer for large licensees or large national adviser networks. Two of them signed up. There are several others in the pipeline about to do that.

Those 2 represent 1,800 advisers in the market for which we can now approach and promote myprosperity as a cybersecure and great feature portal that will help them with their clients and help them with efficiency of delivering advice. So we're very excited about that.

We're also working on the myprosperity front end of client becoming the [indiscernible] portal for Class. The pilot was demonstrated in February and that's certainly underway as well.

Similarly, I'll just quickly touch on Class and NowInfinity, which is going really well from our perspective as well. The Class business growing at 1.5x system, market share pretty stable, it is a mature business, but now more than 200,000 total Class accounts. And the NowInfinity business growing at 2x system with corporate compliance tools, a great result there.

Inside Class, as I said earlier, we've got some great enhancements that will make it easier for auditors and self-managed super fund administrators and really change the feature set that the market has on hand for fulfilling that role for customers in terms of creating more efficiency and reducing friction on how you do those year-end activities for an SMSF, you can do it along the way and for beyond the Class Super products as well.

I talked about the myprosperity interface as well as had some great customer service excellence there in class and NowInfinity as well.

As always, our people at HUB24 are fundamental and our culture to our success. We really have a great team of people who believe in what they're doing, they believe in our role and our purpose and certainly how we operate. On the right-hand side, we've refreshed our HUB values, which we -- during the year, which we certainly talked about at the half. But that was about us bringing together our group of businesses because we've had some acquisition over time and aligning them with a set of values that represent us as a group and our enterprise strategy as well.

Our employee engagement went up during the year. It's now at 76% in the top quartile of Australian companies and that's through culture app. We are in the top 10 best places to work, banking and financial services according to financial review survey. We've been endorsed as an employer of choice by Work180 for women.

And we're certainly focused on all of the normal initiatives with development, recruitment talent and so forth, but also expanding our graduate and intern programs and increasing our focus on early career professionals to supplement our workforce and also give people opportunities to work in a great environment and make a difference in the industry in which we work.

So some great results there in our people side and thank you to the team, as always, for your continuing passion and commitment to our customers and our business.

We also published this morning our sustainability report. And before I pass it on Kitrina, I just want to say we've made some great progress with our focus areas, the 7 focus areas, here on the slide in front of you here. Report's out with full details if you'd like to see that from the ASX call, it'll be on our website as well.

Notably, we've committed to the United Nations Global Compact for sustainable development goals. We'll talk more about that as we go ahead. We've certainly got our emissions road map and targets for net zero by 2030. We're continuing to invest in data and privacy and cyber initiatives to build a sustainable business and absolutely working towards and continuing to contribute to our community in the broader sense in terms of having right products on our platform for sustainable investing, but also contributing to worthy causes about wealth and financial advice and helping people empower better financial future through philanthropy as well.

So thank you very much. I'll be back a bit later on to talk about our outlook and strategy briefly, but I'll hand over to Kitrina Shanahan, our CFO, to give us a breakdown of the financial performance [indiscernible].

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Excellent. Thank you. So thank you, Andrew. I'll run through the financial results. So if we could just roll forward to the group snapshot slide. Here, we have the group, the Platform and Tech Solutions for the revenue mix, underlying EBITDA and customer numbers.

As Andrew called out, group revenue grew to $327 million and underlying EBITDA of $118 million. From the revenue composition, 77% of that is driven by the Platform and 22% comes from Tech Solutions. On the Platform side, we have just under $253 million worth of revenue, an underlying EBITDA of $103 million. And again, as Andrew called out, we've got 4,525 active advisers using the platform, which is about 13% year-on-year. And as Andrew mentioned, represents 29% of the total licensed financial advisers within Australia.

Tech Solutions had a good year with revenue of just under $71 million and underlying EBITDA of $22.1 million. The customer base has grown from 6,000 in full year '23 to around about 6,500 in full year '24. So a good result across all the businesses and all the segments for full year '24.

So if we can just move to the next slide. We've got the group financial results with operating revenue up 17%, operating expenses, up 18% and underlying EBITDA up 15%. I'll talk a little bit more as we get into the segment slide as to the mix of the revenue and the expenses.

From a group perspective, the underlying EBITDA margin was down year-on-year 0.5% down to 36.1%, largely driven by [indiscernible] deposit spread and region of the [indiscernible] as expected in the forecast for a loss of [indiscernible] market share [indiscernible] into the Platform segment this year.

Underlying NPAT was up 15% to just under $68 million, $67.8 million and statutory NPAT was up 24% to $47.2 million. Full year dividend for the year was $0.38, up 17%, in line with the growth metrics for revenue and underlying impact and underlying diluted earnings per share was up 14% to just over $0.81 per share this year.

The graph on the right-hand chart side show the operating revenue and underlying EBITDA growth by the various segments. Platform revenue delivered $44 million of the uplift and 17 -- just under $18 million, $17.9 million of the growth in the underlying EBITDA. And Tech Solutions revenue, up $3.2 million year-on-year, an underlying EBITDA of $0.3 million year-on-year.

Turning to the next slide. We have the Platform segment. So we have total FUA growth of 30% year-on-year to just under $105 billion, $104.7 billion at the 30th of June. With very strong record net flows for the year of $15.8 billion, up 62% year-on-year. Included in that is $4.4 billion from large migrations and $11.4 billion from the underlying business momentum.

The Platform revenue was up 21%, operating expenses up 21% and underlying EBITDA up 21%. So all the key growth metrics, 21% there. Underlying EBITDA margin was broadly stable year-on-year, just under 41%, 40.7% for full year '24. I'll talk more about the drivers of the underlying EBITDA margin movement year-on-year as we get to those slides.

On the right-hand side, you can see custody FUA included $5.9 billion in the year for market. Positive market movements and the $15.8 billion from the net inflows and the PARS FUA was up $2.7 billion year-on-year.

Moving to the next slide. We have the Platform custody revenue and revenue margins. On the right-hand side, we've given you a graph of the momentum for the Platform FUA, the custody FUA and the custody revenue. 5-year trend for this shows the FUA, the custody FUA growing from $17.2 billion back in full year '20 to the $84.4 billion at 30th of June '24 and the revenue of group has grown from $74 million back in full year '20 to the $253 million in full year '24. So this graph demonstrates the continued momentum and growth within the Platform business.

The graph on the bottom right-hand side has the platform revenue margin at 36 bps in full year '23 coming down to 35 bps in the first half '24 and 34 bps in full year '24. $5.9 billion in the positive market. We've seen [indiscernible] in our average balance is increasing, which is the impact of tiering and capping and had a 1.5 bps margin compression year-on-year.

And then also within our analyst and investor pack, we've provided the average cash of a percentage of custody FUA half-on-half and year-on-year. Over the year, the average was 7.4% with the reduction largely in the second half, down to 7% over the second half and that's what's driving that 1 bps on the right-hand side graph in cash and other.

The number of accounts on the platform for full year '24 was up 30% year-on-year, which is driven by the new advisers that you can see 13% up year-on-year and a higher penetration for the existing advisers on the platform.

Moving to the next comp slide. We have the composition of the platforms FUA, the custody FUA and the custody revenue. So you can see the donut on the right-hand side shows that institutional as a percentage of custody FUA has increased from 14% in full year '23 to 16% in full year '24. This has been driven by the large migrations that were actually tilted largely to the second half of the year.

So you can actually see when you look at the revenue composition, the retail revenue has grown from 93% to 94%, with solid and very strong retail flows throughout the whole of the year, which is why position of those donuts might look a little unusual until you think about the timing of those flows.

And then on the bottom right-hand side of that graph, you can actually see the custody revenue margin by retail and institutional with the tiering and the capping impacting both retail and institutional.

If we move to the next slide, we have the platform underlying EBITDA and the margins. Again, we've provided a 5-year trend to show the momentum within the revenue and the expenses and the underlying EBITDA margin. So you can see that the revenue has grown from $74 million back in full year '20 to $253 million in full year '24, which is a CAGR over that period of close to 36%.

And the underlying EBITDA has grown from $28.7 million back in full year '20 to the $103 million -- just under $103 million in full year '24, which is a CAGR that's close to 38%. And the underlying EBITDA margin for the platform business has trended up, trended up from circa about 38.5% to close to 41% in full year '24.

If we then -- the graph on the bottom right-hand side actually shows the growth in the operating leverage coming through the platform business, which is the bar of 2.2%. And that's been offset by the change in the ADI and the alignment to where the industry deposit spreads are at, which is the 1.1% drag on the underlying EBITDA margin.

That change in the ADI provider happens to HUB24 back in December '22. So it had a negative impact from the second half of '23 onwards. And then the inclusion of the myprosperity, $1.5 million underlying EBITDA loss as we focus on growing that part of the business, had an impact of 1.2% on the margin.

So we're very -- we're really pleased with the way the platform margins trajecting and the 2.2% operating leverage and growth is what we're focused on and we'll continue to build on going forward.

Okay. So moving to the next slide. We have the Tech Solutions result, which includes Class and HUBconnect. Class has been delivering consistent growth in all metrics. So you can see the Class accounts are up 3% to just over 207,000 and [indiscernible] 7% to 191,000 and companies using corporate messenger is up 23% to just under 800,000, the 792, 922 companies using NowInfinity for corporate compliance.

This has driven revenue to be up 5% to the 70.7% and underlying EBITDA margin has contracted 1% to 31.3%. On the graph on the right-hand side actually called out there's a $1.9 million investment in technology, data, infrastructure, HUBconnect capabilities to help advisers with compliance and industry productivity. So again, very pleased with the Tech Solutions, the growth of the Class business from the investments that will continue to drive growth going forward.

Then if we can move to the next slide. Here, we have the group expenses, which are up 19% year-on-year. Investment in our people is the largest driver of this increase and you can see in the graph on the right-hand side, related expenses were up to [indiscernible] year-on-year. This is largely driven by the increase in our people and headcount. So headcount is 893 at the 30th of June to just under 900.

The hiring was tilted to the first half of '24. So if you roll back to 30th of June 2023, the headcount was 838 and that grew to 883 at the 31st of December, so in the first half. And then we added a net 10 extra people in the second half.

The second half from a headcount perspective and from our operating expenses is more indicative of what we're expecting to come in full year '23. That obviously is subject to business conditions and some of the growth that we're seeing come through, but that's certainly where we're thinking at the moment.

Then if we roll forward to the next slide, we have the walk from the underlying EBITDA to the underlying NPAT and the stat impact. So again, underlying EBITDA of $118 million, up 15% year-on-year. We then recognized $13.5 million of share-based payments, just under $14 million for depreciation and a more interest expense as expected the underlying NPAT of $67.8 million up 15% year-on-year.

And then we have the strategic transactions and project costs of $9.5 million, which relates to the Xplore integration program. We've closed that program of work and the large migrations that we have here in the year will be rolled forward to '25. Xplore would be part of the normal platform business and any expenses related to large migrations will be reflected in underlying EBITDA. So you won't see strategic transactions and project costs going forward.

Acquisition amort of $22.9 million, which includes a likely a catch-up of circa $7 million, which related to us aligning the acquired software through the Class and Xplore and myprosperity acquisitions to the useful life that we used for internally generated software as well.

There's also a gain on the sale count acquired diverted during the year. And as part of that transaction, HUB24 recognized a $3 million gain on sale that's been recognized in notable items. That take -- after tax, that takes us to $47.2 million statutory NPAT, up 24% year-on-year.

Then if we just move to the last slide for the financials. Just reiterating again the strong financial performance and the strong capital management, we had a final dividend of $0.195, up 5% year-on-year, taking the full year '24 total dividend to $0.38 per share, up 17%.

You can see the graph on the right-hand side with the dividends and the underlying diluted EPS with a CAGR of 15% over the 5 years, 4-year CAGR, 53%. And underlying EPS of 52% CAGR over the 5 years, a 4-year CAGR in that.

Group operating cash flows are very strong with a cash balance of $88 million and operating cash flows of $109 million for the year with a CAGR of 43% over that 4, 5-year period for operating cash flows there. This time last year, we announced a share buyback to broadly remove some of the dilution from the shares issued as part of the myprosperity acquisition.

Over the last sort of 9 months, we bought back 360,000 shares at a cost of $12.5 million. And we've also purchased $10 million of treasury shares or share buybacks that we put into a trust to service the Employee Share Schemes.

Okay. And with that, I will hand back to Andrew for the strategy and outlook.

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Thank you. Before we open up the line for Q&A, a brief update on our strategy, some of the market trends influencing our industry, our focus on delivery and our outlook moving forward. We will, of course, be hosting our Investor Strategy Day in November. So we'll brief them at on details of that coming up in terms of when that is.

But the opportunity for us in HUB24, in this particular industry, is remaining unchanged or in fact, it's more favorable, perhaps [indiscernible] than you could have said 12 months ago. If I go straight to the bottom right side of this slide. Look, we're not seeing compelling advances in institutional platform competition.

There are still issues with strategy and ownership, delivery and investments and so forth. And so specialist platforms are continuing to dominate net inflows as a result of our focus and innovation. And in fact, there's only 2 or 3 platforms in positive inflow or platform providers in the market.

So the opportunity is there for us to continue to grow and continue to take advantage of the dynamics that are changing for the industry. The industry does continue to evolve, but demands are changing. There's even more important reasons for it to be responsive as a platform provider or a participant in this industry to respond to clients' needs.

The demand for advice is increasing. There's 2.3 million Australians with unmet advice needs. And of course, Hub and Class and NowInfinity work through professional intermediaries and accountants and advisers into our core marketplace. The cost of advisers and the price of advisers continue to increase. It speaks to how can we make that more efficient and the demand for those professionals is there.

So the trend is also towards High-Net-Wealth clients as well. So we think about that in terms of how we build our products and our services and making sure we've got solutions for all phases in a client life cycle. SMSFs, the client needs column are continuing. The start-ups are continuing to grow. There's demand from younger generations. That plays well with us having our Class business and the integrated products we're launching.

The aging population is retirement products. It also speaks to the nearly $5 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer at looking for solutions, and we as a business, think about that in terms of how we can help customers and advisers, taking their clients on that journey with the intergenerational wealth transfer and have the right solutions to do that.

And certainly, cybersecurity is also top of mind in terms of how we provide information interface to clients, and we can protect them and their data and their assets absolutely a focus and a demand in the industry.

Professional -- finance professionals need productivity. Our industry has not been great at providing advisers and clients with a complete view of wealth, something we certainly aspire to is key to our strategy. It's been very product-centric over the last few decades and certainly shifting towards having a complete view of wealth for clients that makes the advice process more efficient, increased engagement.

There is the adoption of managed portfolio solutions. We lead in that in the marketplace. That's a trend that's continuing. And compliance and cost and complexity is still there. And we certainly are investing in that space to mitigate that and help with that.

The [indiscernible] landscape continues to evolve. The quality of advice review Tranche 2 has not been legislated. It does have the potential to improve advice accessibility and we're certainly watching with that and influencing that across the industry and working with government and regulators to have a voice in that space.

As I said, the summary of it is that the dynamics are changing. Specialist platforms are very, very well positioned to continue to grow because we are being responsive but we are responding to those demands and drivers with our product development and our strategy and our customer service.

So in terms of our strategy, how are we at HUB24 responding to those industry demands? Well, our 4 pillars of our strategy and our focus, we've talked about this before, is that leading today in our chosen markets and continuing to deliver customer value and growth, creating tomorrow, not settling for today's solutions, but continuing to transform and shift and create integrated wealth Tech and Platform solutions that will speak to those demands for clients.

It's certainly about not doing it alone. It's about, as we said earlier, empowering better financial futures together, how can we work and collaborate across our industry with government, with regulators, with financial product manufacturers, asset managers, insurers and technology providers to reshape and build the best outcomes for our clients in this industry.

So we are certainly working together with our industry to do that. Talking about being future ready, being able to have the scalability in our business to continue to grow, being ready to have the capabilities and infrastructure to support and think about the future ahead.

So how do we do that? At HUB24, we want to be the best provider integrated platform, tech and data solutions. In the middle of the slide, you can see 4 quadrants there. We have the HUB24 platform, which is a leader. We have data and infrastructure leadership in terms of our HUBconnect products and the infrastructure that supports that with the permissioning and sharing of data hub and the data feeds we have in the platform, sort of the data feeds we have in our Class business as well.

myprosperity is about a great client experience sitting on the front end of our business over time and also being a portal that aggregates services and data from across the industry, not just from within our own stable. And NowInfinity and Class being software applications that certainly drive to wealth and wealth accounting.

So we're well positioned to have the right market-leading businesses to deliver on those pillars on the left-hand side. And what we're aiming to deliver on the right-hand side of the slide for our customers is one way of doing business across market-leading solutions. Getting that single view of wealth really working well for clients and professionals so they can see where they stand in an easy, efficient way.

Sufficient access to ecosystem partners, whether that be third-party product manufacturers or technology providers to be able to create an ecosystem or a tech spine, if you like, that brings about efficiency, lowers the cost of advice and increase access flexibility and reporting and insights.

So a snapshot of our strategy and how we're working towards that, specifically, if we look at some of the strategic objectives we're working on. And I'll just touch on a few of those that we haven't talked about already in the presentation. But in terms of leading today, we're certainly adding additional investment options for individual client targets and enhanced our FX capability, building products and features for the future. And there's more on the slide but feel free to read subsequently.

In creating tomorrow, we're actually working very hard to get more data sources and have them trusted, so we actually can work on how do you create that ecosystem in that single view of wealth. We've expanded HUBconnect with insights and we're continuing to expand and benchmarking for advisers and practices beyond its original purpose at HUBconnect license being a compliance and efficiency tool for licensees or advice networks getting into practices and advisers.

We've got a digital mail house using AI, that's actually creating better outcomes for customers with their contract notes and so forth, being able to automatically pause and sort information and create a better proposition there. We're working with the industry to build together with industry bodies and regulators and collaborating with think tanks as we have done for many years. That's evolved in us having an enterprise version of myprosperity to roll out across large networks.

We really are saying, here is a solution for record keeping, here is a solution for client engagement and here is a solution to securely storing client information [indiscernible] to protect from fraud and hacking and bad actors, intercepting communication between advisers and clients.

And on the right-hand side, we're certainly continuing to focus on making sure, as we always have, we have the scale for our business to continue to grow, but we're also delivering the profitability for shareholders along the way. And continuing to focus clearly on risk management, cyber resilience and privacy. It's core to what we've done to date. It's core to what we'll continue to do. So our business is sustainable in terms of thinking ahead, but also thinking about how we operate today.

Touching on, before we move to Q&A, our last slide here. And really quickly, they are similar statements. We do have a strong business. We intend to grow it with reliable growth from both new and existing client relationships. We're certainly going to leverage the industry dynamics to maximize opportunities for growth.

We're being very disciplined in how we manage the business in terms of expense management and emergence of profit whilst we still invest in extending our market leadership. And we intend to capitalize on our unique group capabilities, as I said on a couple of slides ago to unlock value for customers and shareholders, to reinvent the way an ecosystem or what management can work, provide more information and get the outcomes that clients are seeking.

In terms of outlook, we traditionally have an outlook statement for our custodial or platform FUA target, which excludes our noncustody or PARS FUA. And the statement we've got there moving ahead for FY '26 is a target range of $115 billion to $123 billion. That's up from the $84.4 million at 30th of June this year.

So for FY '26 in 2 years' time or just over 2 years' time, that's the target range we're publishing today. It obviously comprises, as we normally say, net flows of -- in our estimate is greater than $11 billion per annum, excluding large migrations. You'd be aware, we still have some migrations to do for EQT and that's all been talked about before.

And a range of market growth assumptions in terms of average rates of return in the market. So we built a range to give you some guidance on how we think we're going to track in that time period.

And we're delighted to be talking about those sort of numbers given our history not so long ago and having tripled our market share over the last 3 or 4 years. We hope to continue to grow remarkably and we hope to continue to deliver for shareholders and our customers.

So thank you very much for tuning in. We will now hand back to our facilitator for Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Cameron Halkett from Wilsons Advisory.

[Cameron Halkett, analyst]

Just 2 quick better questions to begin. If I start with the outlook. Last year was an incredible year as you highlighted, whereas the kind of next couple of years outlook caused the net flows above that $11 billion level. It seems you're no longer entertaining a level of 10% to 12%. So just wondering what's giving you the confidence that the margin there sort of upgrade [indiscernible]?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Look, we certainly had a very strong start to the year and it's always difficult to provide guidance. We don't want to be providing guidance and restating it. We aim to give a range and it is a range deliberately. And our goal is to head towards the top of that range or in some cases, even overshoot it.

So we've had a very strong start to the year. We're not seeing any resurgence from traditional platform players or participants in the marketplace. And so we decided to say greater than $11 billion. We didn't want to cap it. We certainly know that we've got $2 billion to $2.5 billion on our plan still as we previously disclosed for EQT. So the $11 billion plus that gets us into the range.

I think that the adviser sentiment is there. We're winning the awards, the accolades from a service point of view and a product point of view. And so the beauty in our business is you continue to win flows from existing clients, continue to win new clients. We still had 500 new advisers last year. We still signed 141 distribution agreements. I think all those things add up to us being very confident in the growth prospects and leading to those -- that statement.

[Cameron Halkett, analyst]

Yes, makes sense. Just turning back to your comments around hiring. You mentioned in the second half, there was about 10 new heads joining the business. The audio was a little bit mixed at the time, but can I just get you to reiterate the expectations for hiring looking ahead?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes, Cameron, it's that the first half '24 was really where we did quite the bulk of the hiring and then it slowed in '20 -- in the second half of '24 and that the second half is more indicative of what we're expecting each half over '25.

[Cameron Halkett, analyst]

Okay. Now that's a bit lower than I suppose your usual run rate of net adds. So what's changed, I suppose? Are you just at a little there in terms of headcount where it's much more stable relative to your side? Or just some color there, please.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. I think there's a number of factors to call out. We have -- so absolutely the scale and the operating leverage that has been talked about for a long time and we always knew would come through. But in addition to that, we are -- we have been investing in robotics, automation across -- particularly across our operations and the processing space, but also the technology scalability as well.

So in addition to the scale coming from the net flows and the growth of the FUA, we've also got automation that's supporting the operating leverage come through as well.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Nicholas McGarrigle from Barrenjoey.

[Nicholas McGarrigle, analyst]

Just a question around the run rate impact of lower proportion of cash and the mix of institutional FUA on the revenue margin as we head into first half '25?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. So the cash is obviously subject to customer preferences. We -- the whole of the second half '24 saw the -- you would have seen we've provided the average in the analyst and investor pack and that was around 7% for the whole of second half '24. We have seen a slight uptick in that over the last 6 weeks.

So that's not to say that, that will hold for the whole year. But it's certainly not at the 8% to 10% that we've historically spoken about. So it's still at that lower end of the range that we've spoken about before.

[Nicholas McGarrigle, analyst]

Okay. Maybe just 2 more questions. So the OpEx, you kind of guided to not a whole lot of headcount addition. Does that mean potentially overall group OpEx is only up in the kind of low to mid-teens percentage year-on-year?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

I think where we are today, I think that's a reasonable assumption. As Andrew has called out and as you guys have noted, we've had a really strong start to the year. That may well -- we'll see how the rest of the year goes and we'll see if that changes plans, but certainly where we are today. I think that's a reasonable assumption.

[Nicholas McGarrigle, analyst]

Great. And then I think obviously the $2.7 billion FUA added in the first 6.5 weeks, is it fair to say the market was a small positive only. So maybe there's a circa $2 billion FUA flow embedded in that number?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Yes. That would be pretty close. There is market movement announced and other company said they didn't have. We certainly had correlation largely to the market or just under market correlation. So that's thereabout [indiscernible].

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Olivier Coulon from E&P Financial Group.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Just on the flow number, around $2 billion ex market movement. Is there anything from the EQT transition embedded in that?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

No, Olivier. There's no EQT money in there. There is a client that moved about $300 million rapidly in that, but that happens from time to time. It's an educational institution that was able to move money quickly with the custodial, but it's a retail rate card. So those things happen, but there is one small lumpy client in there as well.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Yes. I appreciate that. And just the thinking on the tax rate going forward, one for Kitrina.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. So the tax rate, we're benefiting from two things at the moment. One is we've got R&D. So we're always innovating and we've got myprosperity, Class and HUB24 that are all innovating on the solution. So there's a benefit in there for R&D. We've also got -- you've seen the long-term incentive plans, in the Employee Share Schemes that we've got in place.

Over the last, I think it's circa 3 years, we've seen rather than issuing shares on market. We've been purchasing shares and in the last financial slide, you would have seen that we purchased $10 million worth of shares put in trust to service the Employee Share Schemes.

As we utilize those shares in the employee share trust, we get a tax deduction for those. So they are 2 things that's driving it down to the 20% at the moment. R&D is expected to continue as we continue to innovate. The treasury shares and the benefit that we'll get on that, once we're 100% hedged in there, that's more likely to normalize. So you can expect the tax rate to move up from the 20%. And without a crystal ball, but it could go somewhere in the mid-20s, I would say.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Okay. No, that's appreciated. And sorry, just on a follow-up on that OpEx growth expectation, was that commentary around platforms or, I guess, as the business as a whole, including the Tech Solutions business?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

That's more of a business as a whole. So you can see even this year, the Platform operating leverage is absolutely coming through. You can see that on the waterfalls that we've provided. But the sort of information I will provide to you guys is more at a group level.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Yes. Okay. And then I presume that also captures kind of the interplay of not taking any further kind of transition one-off charges below the line?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes, as we called out, you won't see notes in line for large migrations going forward.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Yes. Okay. But effectively, the OpEx growth is potentially going to be somewhere some of those employees who might have been doing that work are effectively recaptured into the underlying cost base?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Absolutely. So there was the number of contractors we called out before. There was a number of contractors helping us with the large migrations and some of the Xplore integration. But absolutely, where we've got skilled employees, we've moved those above the line and there again, called down the numbers that we've been talking about.

[Olivier Coulon, analyst]

Okay. Perfect. And sorry, just one last, if I could, just on Class, the price increases that you took, the thinking on the flow-through of that into '25?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Big Class price increases can flow through, yes.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. So there's a customer reprice that went through this year, there wasn't one in '24, but there is a customer reprice similar to other software businesses keeping up with CPI and inflation, et cetera. And you'll see that come in, in the '25 revenue numbers.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Bob Chen from JPMorgan.

[Bob Chen, analyst]

Just a couple for me. Just in terms of investment in intangibles, it's obviously stepped up a little bit. Can you give us a sense of how we should be thinking about that number going forward?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. So I think you would have seen the Platform was circa $13 million, $13.5 million, something like that and the Tech Solutions was just under the $8 million. Certainly, from a Platform perspective, I would say that that's more of a normal run rate now. It was -- for the last couple of years, '22, '23 was a bit lower. It's down at the $8 million, $8 million, $9 million mark, and that's because we did have quite a large integration with Xplore and a large number of our Tech team. We're also supporting that integration.

Now that we're coming to end of that Tech teams, again, refocusing back on to the Platform or the whole team, I should say, as we're focusing back on to the Platform as it were. Then on the Class and the Tech Solution side, look, we've called out before that we are looking at extra ways to scale that business and make it more efficient. You may well see that trend down over time, but it's certainly not going to be a massive step change. It will be trending down over time.

[Bob Chen, analyst]

Okay. Great. And then just on the average cash balances, again, 7% in the second half. I mean, is that a good base to forecast into the next few periods?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Look, it really does depend on macro cycles. It's not actually something we control or can forecast. It depends on how people are thinking about equity markets versus cash markets. And so right now, you've got markets at historical highs. People have put them only into the market if that changes, the cash rate arguably would go up and then interest rate cycles.

So not something we can comment on. It has gone up in the last few months. But that might be as a result of the large flows we get. So it depends on behavior, it depends on how assets join the platform. It's very difficult to forecast.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup.

[Siraj Ahmed, analyst]

Just 3 questions. First one, on the flow, the strong start, Andrew, of $2 billion,or $1.7 billion. What are the large transition numbers? Just what's changed there, Andrew. It seems like you and even Netwealth are speaking to a pretty strong flows. Is it from some one platform provider? Or is it just broad-based? Just keen to understand. And do you think that continues for the rest of the year?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

It's broad-based. And a natural fact, our last quarter, the results we reported for last quarter were impacted by the exit of a large client -- or not a large client, but exit a few hundred million dollars where we terminated a relationship. We actually felt what we wanted someone to leave us.

So our last quarter of flows were actually down, if you like, because of that. So if you normalize that back in, it's consistent with Quarter 4 in terms of -- so if I sit back and go for the last 4 or 5 months, there's been more stability in the market. There's been better consumer sentiment. Advisers are getting on with it. The impost about fee consent seems to have changed a bit in terms of slowing down June.

So as we always say, look, it's the long-term trend is your friend, that we don't get excited about. Is it sustainable? There's a whole lot of macro stuff going around the world. But the accolades and the sentiment I get when I talk to advisers and licensees are about our value proposition. It's about competitors not quite getting it right. It's about our attitude and our customer service and our footprints increasing.

And so I think it's just the result of us executing well on strategy and we need to keep doing that, and we need to keep delivering customer service excellence. It's ours to grow or ours to lose. I hope it is a trend, but hard to say, Siraj, given the macro itself.

[Siraj Ahmed, analyst]

Got it. So yes, just -- because I was trying to clarify if you're doing this sort of flows, I mean you could get to $15 billion, $16 billion, right, for the full year, if this continues. So that level...

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

You could strike [indiscernible] Sorry.

[Siraj Ahmed, analyst]

Yes, Yes, Yes. So just the $11 billion is just uncertainty, but current trends are quite positive. That's the way to think for it.

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

The $11 billion is there. We know that we've got transition. So if you had the EQT money, that will be $13.5 million to $14 million. But you're right, it could be hard if you do straight mathematics. But we know that November, December, January, February can be muted. So we don't know what's going to happen. And we'd rather be giving a sensible range of aiming for the mid- to the top of that in terms of the 2-year statement.

So yes, don't read a lack of confidence in our business in that $11 billion. Know that we're always as aspirational as we can be or we're always trying to do as well as we can. It's just about balancing getting distracted by guidance versus delivery.

[Siraj Ahmed, analyst]

Yes. That makes sense. Second thing, Andrew, it seems like there's a shift towards now driving operating leverage, right? Is it -- what has changed here? Is it -- I mean, just trying to -- I guess the question that will come is, is this a 1-year thing where your head count, you're only adding 20 people, let's say and then it rebounds again. Just as keen to hear if something's changed now you're at scale?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

A couple of things and then Kit wants to add, jump on in. Look, we certainly are a larger business. We certainly did have expenses further ahead than we would have liked in the first half because of changes in the labor market. And normally, we carry vacancy rates and we didn't carry those vacancy rates in the first half. So you saw a step up and that's impacted the full year results.

If you look at normalizing our margins, there's growth there, if you take out the cash impact and the myprosperity impact and possibly even if we not have the vacancy rate issue. So we're also very much investing in automation using AI and robotics and process automation to make customer service better and also lower costs. So the scalability in our ops team is changing remarkably.

We're not putting on the normal amount of heads, we would, for our growth because we've invested in that automation. And so there is a deliberate focus on that in terms of operations. And we've got a larger fixed cost base that we can leverage across a bigger business and that's the nature of building a business. You can [indiscernible] fixed cost base. And hopefully, you manage your variable costs moving ahead.

So it's about us trying to get productivity out of the cost base as well as some of those blips with the vacancy rate. But we always try and balance with the accelerator and the brake, the investment and change in the business. We try to not have step change in expenses. We try to have it incremental.

It could change, Siraj, if we shoot the lights out with full growth. It could change if we decide to invest in or dial up, the speed of strategy execution, but we'd let you know in advance of that. But we certainly are focused on getting the leverage out for shareholders. And the market's been asking us to do that. The fact is we're balancing it with delivery as well.

[Siraj Ahmed, analyst]

Pretty clear. And just last one, for Kit. In terms of revenue margin looking ahead, can you just confirm that it seems like the custodial fee paying for has gone up in the second half. So do we -- does that actually help admin fees into FY '25? I know cash is a negative, but just wondering why the spot custody fee in FUA has gone up, it should still be higher.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes, I mean that's the mix of the portfolio that's impacting the percentage of cash paying FUA. The positive market obviously does drive higher average balances and tiering and capping. And as we've mentioned and talked about on the call, the percentage of capital also has an impact on that revenue margin.

If we're expecting -- if we -- if in '25, you do end up with more normal market growth and the cash as a percentage of FUA stabilizes. And just for argument sake, let's say it stabilizes somewhere between 7% and 8% or somewhere between 7%, 8.5%. It could be anywhere around that range. Then you would expect maybe up to a bit of revenue margin compression coming out of that, just as average balances, et cetera, go up. And certainly capping is in there. But it does all depend on that mix of the portfolio.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Nic Burgess from Ord Minnett.

[Nicolas Burgess, analyst]

I think most of my questions have been answered. Just a couple of quick questions on myprosperity. So you mentioned, Andrew, a couple of times that revenue momentum is perhaps a little bit less than what you initially anticipated. Are these network sales or the network sale likely to get myprosperity back on track on the short term from a revenue perspective? And do you think myprosperity overall will hit that sort of breakeven mark that you initially flagged when you made the deal?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

I'll start and Kit, you might finish. Certainly, the revenue was slower than we'd anticipated and we qualify that with we published the earn-out, the revenue, and we budget as we put the earnout for the shareholder of the vendors of the business, which was very aspirational.

The licensing fee is actually gaining traction. We had [indiscernible] is in the demo, the other day, we've had people signing up. So we certainly think that it will speed up adoption of myprosperity licensing. And yes, it's happening as we speak. So the 1,800 is access to, not sales to but the sales too, are increasing every day and we're certainly mobilizing to support with onboarding.

And those licensees actually help with the onboarding. And in some cases, there's 1 licensee who anecdotally said, I'm going to mandate this. Not all the mandated, but I'm going to mandate it for cybersecurity. So yes, it should accelerate that whether actually catches up and I haven't done the math on that in terms of the breakeven point or where it replaces or speeds up. But have you got a comment on that?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes, yes. So I think when we first did the transaction, I think like Andrew said, we're probably anywhere between 12 and 24 months later than we were expecting when we first did the deal and did the announcement. But like Andrew said, when we put those revenue targets out there, we were very aspirational and driving for growth. And I would say that we're probably anywhere between 12 and 24 months behind those original targets that we set for being breakeven. So rather than it being '25, '26, it's more likely to be '26, '27 before we are breakeven.

[Nicolas Burgess, analyst]

Yes. And just going back to sort of EBITDA margin or operating leverage implications, there should be still incremental improvement over that time period? Or do you envisage more of a single sort of step up at a point in time?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

So at the group level, so when we roll in myprosperity into the Platform and then you look at the Platform, we're still expecting operating leverage and growth within the Platform subject to normal business conditions. And then that will roll through to the group as well. So absolutely, taking into account that 12, 24 months later for myprosperity, still expecting to see the operating leverage come through.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Simon Fitzgerald from Jefferies.

[Simon Fitzgerald, analyst]

Just a couple of questions to you. Look, I might start with the amortization of intangibles. The $21.4 million was capitalized. I appreciate that you're allowed to do that given the accounting standard suits but HUB certainly has grown a lot over the years, $100 million worth of gross operating cash flow. I was just interested to know whether you've had any sort of thought about whether you might change that over time in terms of expensing those internally-generated intangibles?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

We're not expecting -- I wouldn't be expecting to see something come through in full year '25. Certainly, you never know what the future holds but there's certainly no plans at the moment to change that approach. And like I said, '25 is expected to be reasonably consistent compared to '24.

[Simon Fitzgerald, analyst]

Okay. And what about the amortization for next year, if you could help us with that just for the internally-generated intangibles.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

So the depreciation on amort should be reasonably similar year-on-year. And I think when you look -- when you walk forward to that side that I was talking about, you've got appreciation amort roughly about $14 million, excluding the acquisition amortization, so I would say that if you're looking around that number, maybe another mill or so addition, but it's going to be around that number.

[Simon Fitzgerald, analyst]

Perfect. And then just a final question on the latent opportunity. The FUA paid adviser at FY '24, $19 million up well. Is that just simply the amount of advisers that are on platform and the effect of your FUA as well? Because like if you win an institutional mandate, that could look a little bit lower. And there might not be any sort of advisers attached to some of those institutional mandates. I'm just interested to know how you sort of think about that?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

It's a straight calculation. The institutional mandates are not large enough at all to really change that number at that level given there's 4,500 advisers. But it's a straight calculation of fully divided by a number of advisers and it has been publishing it, yes.

[Simon Fitzgerald, analyst]

Perfect. And just then finally, how do you sort of see to try and really take advantage of that latent opportunity, Andrew?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Look, as we always do, we look at how we market and go to market with products and services across different segments and channels. We've got our key accounts, team working at a national level. The effect, to be honest, back to, I think, someone else's question, myprosperity in itself is -- and Siraj's question about the confidence in flows. The strategy with myprosperity, Class and NowInfinity is actually driving flows into the Platform from an adjacency perspective because people see what we are doing.

So -- and they can see that the ecosystem, the build-out of the integration is there. So we focus on it from a marketing perspective and activations between [indiscernible] academies. We do targeted marketing to advisers. We help with transition support. It's the same stuff we've done since inception. And we have the BDMs around the country working through it. And we've got a strategic sales team as well as the key accounts to work in a national level.

And I think that the nature of these businesses are that when you are the primary or chosen platform for advisers, unless you have operational issues or errors or you go off the boil, it will just continue to happen. So as I said earlier, for us to lose as opposed to we'll keep that momentum as we keep delivering and the resurgence of competitors isn't occurring -- same as.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Hayden Nicholson from Bell Potter.

[Hayden Nicholson, analyst]

Most have been asked. I guess [indiscernible] on the last question about the opportunity for flows. Looking at the proportion you got there by the adviser relationships, and I think you called it out, Kit, what does it look like if we normalize for EQT like in terms of the percentages coming from the new licensees and your adviser relationships. Is there still growth? Or is that just sort of a movement through EQT integration?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

I think you understand the question, Kit.

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Yes. So I think going back to the latent opportunity slide and I think Andrew called out that coming from the new licensees, it was impacted by the addition of EQT coming in. Look, it's difficult for us to tell and forecast out, but there is no reason once you get -- once you roll forward, there's no reason why it won't go back to more of the normal trends that you see in...

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

We haven't done the math. If you normalize that EQT, I imagine if those trends exist. It's just that we had the $15.8 billion. So the trend is underlying. If you normalize out EQT, there's no reason to suggest that, that wouldn't continue.

[Hayden Nicholson, analyst]

Sure. And then just secondly, you touched on focus on High-Net-Wealth, myprosperity and some of those directly held assets. You just unpack the demand that you're seeing there and the investments that were made throughout the year?

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Look, the demand is -- I mean, advisers in some cases, are migrating up the curve to have High-Net-Wealth clients for a number of reasons; fees, costs, affordability but also wholesale compliance regimes versus retail compliance regimes. We've always got a lot of High-Net-Wealth product there, Evans and Westpac Private, who are 2 marquee clients of ours in that space. We've got bonds on the platform. We've got foreign currency.

We certainly do unlisted or -- sorry, unregistered managed schemes and international unregistered managed schemes and so forth in that capability. So we're continuing to enhance that. The foreign exchange capability on the HUB24 platform will be even greater in the next couple of months in terms of the ability to settle into foreign currency, whereas currently, there's some hiccups there when you're buying and selling international assets.

So we're enhancing those features. It's something -- it's about the how, in the process and the settlement and payments as well as the accessibility of products and we're certainly working with other providers on providing access to alternatives as part of strategic asset allocation and how do you get access to those illiquid investments in our context and working through just the investments on the platform and so forth.

So for a range of investment options to new asset classes through to the processes, there's a lot going on there. In terms of the admin piece with having a noncustody admin and reporting capability hedged to the platform. So custodial assets from the platform, structured core products, all sorts of stuff there bonds pretty much whatever you want to have, we'll do the administration, the reporting on [indiscernible].

But we're in pilot mode only to be clear on that, we're in pilot mode. We've got more development to do. Is there demand? Well, there's certainly demand that people want to know that you've got that feature set, they might not use it today, but down the track they will. So advisers and customers are looking for, are you building for the future. That's where the demand is. But the take-up is earth shattering in the short term. I think that's the trend that we're heading towards, given what's happening in markets and private markets versus public markets.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from James Bisinella from Unified Capital Partners.

[James Bisinella, analyst]

Congrats on the results. Just a couple for me. Firstly, I mean, just around the strong growth coming through in organic flows in the quarter-to-date period, you obviously got the rest of EQT coming this half as well. So I guess just keen to understand the environment or the pipeline for potentially further large transitions in the pipeline looking forward.

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

As always, we're actively in conversations and then the things we try to say that typically you'll see and come through every couple of years. There are some active conversations underway. They're not at the size of EQT, which could amount to $5 billion higher, but there are conversations underway. And so it's quite possible we're not secure or other. But it's never known until the ink's dry and these things require, in some cases, regulatory approval and consumer approval. So it's not [indiscernible]. Let's just put it that way, James.

[James Bisinella, analyst]

Certainly, Andrew. And just last one for me. Just on the significant cash balance, I guess, strategically, how are you thinking about potentially deploying that? And are there any key focus areas for the business on that front moving forward?

[Kitrina Shanahan, executive]

Again, that's a very good question. We -- as you would have seen, we're relatively regulatory capital light. We do have AFSLs. Obviously, we have Regulatory Craft capital and also the superannuation fund and we don't have a loan at the moment for the support of the operational risk financial reserves. The offer within the super bond, but that's not to say if we continue to grow that, that wouldn't be required.

So just calling out a couple of things there just from the -- what might be needed from a regulatory capital perspective. But absolutely every single year because we are relatively capital light, the operating cash flows continue to grow. We do look at investments, so we will continue to invest.

We've got the Create Tomorrow and Building for Tomorrow strategies that we've got there. But we've also got an underlying NPAT dividend payout ratio range of 40% to 50%. And as HUB24 continues to grow and we move into a yield stock, absolutely, those cash flows will -- it's potentially likely that the payout ratios will increase.

[Operator]

That does conclude our time for questions. I'll now hand back to Mr. Alcock for closing remarks.

[Andrew Alcock, executive]

Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today and for some excellent questions. We are very, very excited about our growth prospects moving ahead and certainly focused on continuing to work on those. So hopefully, you'll agree, it's been a remarkable year in many senses with the balancing of strategy, customer service awards and record-breaking flows that are records for us are arguably for the industry as well.

We're certainly going to continue to work hard for our customers and shareholders moving ahead. Look forward to seeing you out on the rounds. If you've got a meeting booked with us and certainly tuned for us providing details of our Investor Strategy Day in November. We will be letting you know when that date is, once we've locked that in.

Thanks very much. Goodbye.

[Operator]

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.