Praemium Ltd

ASX:PPS

Earnings Call Transcript 2025-Q1

[Anthony Wamsteker, executive]

All right. As I said, we'll make a start. Once again, thanks to everyone who's attending the quarter one update for Praemium. At Praemium, we do acknowledge the traditional custodians of country and pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. We have the usual disclaimer, which I won't trouble you to read, but it's on the presentation that's being lodged with the ASX.

I'm joined, of course, as per usual, by David Coulter, our CFO. We will give you a brief update on our strategy, including our new product Spectrum, and then I'll hand over to David to talk about the FUA and Flows for the quarter. It should only take 10 minutes or so, and then we'll open it up for questions.

So we always talk about the areas of focus in our strategy, and they have not changed, but I will give an update on where we are on those. First of all, Spectrum and Scope+. So everyone will now be aware that we've changed our product names. I have no doubt that Spectrum is a better name than IDPS, and it certainly reflects that we offer the full spectrum of investment alternatives to financial advisors and their clients. And Scope+ is also a better name than VMAAS. It builds on the name Scope, which allows people to see the full scope of their investments when they use what we used to call VMA, and prior to that, it was called V-Wrap. So welcome to the new branding of Praemium.

Spectrum has now been launched, and the first clients are onboarded, and we are heartened by the rate of progress at which people are signing up to the Spectrum product. The Scope+ portfolio on FUA growth continues to outstrip the market and clearly identifies Scope+ as market-leading administration service for back-office management of investment portfolios.

We continue to transform the business at an operational level. That reflects in having the #1 ranking on a couple of the key measures in the Investment Trends survey, and we continue to enjoy the benefit of having made some pricing changes to our portfolio of products over the last 6 months or so.

On the service side, we have an aspiration to be #1 on service. Just as we target ourselves at the high-net-worth market, we acknowledge that both high-net-worth clients and their advisors are used to having products and services where the service is outstanding.

Internally, we talk about the Net Promoter Score of a lot of those businesses that our clients will be using, and although nobody in Australia gets that sort of Net Promoter Score for financial service generally and platforms in particular, that is an aspiration we set for ourselves. And what we're doing on the service side is to build that capability, as well as that we talk to our clients all the time. And one thing that we do is we have an annual client experience survey, which is about to get going.

Superannuation has been our Achilles' heel for some time, and we are now working with our suppliers to build out the superannuation offering. We're very heartened by the speed and urgency which is being shown by our trustee in improving the level of superannuation product and service so that it meets our aspiration of a Net Promoter Score in keeping with the best service providers and product providers globally, and bringing that service proposition into the superannuation market in Australia. We feel we'll make further progress, but what we've done already has certainly lifted the offering that we've got there.

We continue to explore acquisition opportunities. Unfortunately, we haven't found anything as attractive as the OneVue acquisition, but nevertheless, that gives us an opportunity to bed that acquisition down, and we're pleased that, that integration is tracking to plan. More importantly, although perhaps not as interesting to shareholders, but more importantly internally is, the OneVue people have been a wonderful addition to our business, some highly talented people, and increasingly starting to move into the Praemium world in some very senior positions in our business. So it's been a wonderful way to attract additional talent into our business.

With that, actually, I will just talk about Spectrum before I hand over to David. So this is a chart. Those of you who see our presentations know we can't get through a presentation without having a Venn diagram. So this is our Spectrum Venn diagram. We still offer as the core of the product, the model portfolios, and that is still done through the Praemium SMA scheme. So that is one of the product options in Spectrum. But you can see on the left-hand side of that chart all of the other products that are available in Spectrum, and I won't read them all, but it is clearly a standalone product in the market in the sense that it offers a much broader range of assets to clients and to advisors than any other product in the market.

All of the clients who use Praemium acknowledge the breadth of offering that we've got. And as it says there, we provide the trading and execution for all of those products. We know that others go into the market and talk about their trading and execution capability. It's something we haven't always mentioned because it's so obvious to us that you can't offer those products without offering the trading and execution capability, but we do that. We offer the administration, and importantly, we offer the most comprehensive reporting suite on those portfolios. So it's Praemium at its best, finely brought together in one product, and we're excited about the way that is being received in the market already.

So with that, I'll hand over to David, and we'll talk about the quarterly flows.

[David Coulter, executive]

Thanks very much, Anthony. We've put the usual charts and tables together. The notable difference as added last quarter is that we now have OneVue in the stable of products, and that's been shown here in the little violet color at the top of the bar chart.

Across every growth metric, we've had a significant improvement, be it gross inflow, be it net inflow, be it FUA overall, be it platform, or be it noncustody. So it's a significantly improved quarter from the last quarter, and in particular, you would expect that. We have talked at length, more particularly in a lot of meetings with shareholders, about the performance in Powerwrap, and I'll get into that in a second. But just going in order here, the SMA at AUD 11.9 billion is up 5%. All these comparisons are to the last quarter. Powerwrap at AUD 12.9 billion, up 2%, and OneVue at AUD 4.2 billion, up 4%. There has been reasonable market growth in that quarter, but with the exception of Powerwrap, as I said, I'll get into that, we've had good net inflow into each of the products.

The SMA at AUD 165 million net is up AUD 16 million. It's just consistent strong performance. Powerwrap at AUD 60 million net outflow is a significant improvement on AUD 437 million from the prior quarter. It is not that the departed advisor impact is ameliorating. It is that Powerwrap itself is performing way more strongly: one, with incumbent client groups; two, having secured a new client group with very strong inflow as well. The departed advisor signal is there, and we'll probably get into that in Q&A, but the Powerwrap product itself is performing much more strongly outside the departed advisor signal that's running through it. OneVue at AUD 34 million is up AUD 160 million. So we've got a greater deal of stability now that we've been able to actually go to these clients, talk to them, tell them about what's coming, tell them about the opportunities afforded to them and what they'll be able to do for their clients with a brand new tech stack. And in particular, I think the selling point that's got this stability is the fact that we've launched Spectrum, and Spectrum is an ideal solution for a lot of those client groups.

And in the noncustodial, you can see here the Scope services continue to go from strength to strength, that is the old VMA. So portfolio growth in both Scope, Scope+, Scope+ FUA increasing significantly, and we've signed 5 new client groups in the quarter itself. Market growth, of course, has had some reasonable impact on the FUA overall. But you take the AUD 29 billion from platform and the AUD 30.4 billion, and we're edging ever closer to AUD 60 billion overall. Markets willing and the performance that we've got now, we should see a continuation of that strong growth, particularly now that we've launched Spectrum.

I've also put to the presentation the conventional detailed tables. I will draw your attention, however, to one relatively small error on here, and we will reissue it just to make sure that we've got everybody's eyes around the right numbers. In the September '24 column for the Praemium SMA outflows, it says AUD 380 million out, that should be AUD 480 million. As I say, we will correct that. So the gross inflow number is correct, and the net inflow number is correct for the Praemium SMA.

And that concludes the formal part of the presentation itself. You have the ability to submit questions through the webinar portal, and I would encourage anyone to do so. It's not that we would read out your questions verbatim per se, as we've done last time. We'll try and get a general theme, answer those questions. There's always the ability to ring me or Anthony, or put questions to us via email. So I'd encourage you to go to any questions you have through the portal now.

[David Coulter, executive]

So we've got questions on the OneVue integration and whether or not there's any more detail available for that, whether we're facing any unexpected difficulties with integration. I'll turn that one to Anthony.

[Anthony Wamsteker, executive]

Yes. So obviously, a lot of interest around the OneVue integration. We continue to talk about, it's progressing well. I think the fact that we get so many questions on it probably highlights that people understand that these things can get quite complex in the detail. And the OneVue integration is no exception. It obviously brings together a whole range of things like legal issues around migrating clients, relationship issues with clients who are used to the OneVue world and now live in the Praemium world and the like. So I'm not going to say that none of those issues have ever come in the integration to date and continue to come on a day-by-day basis.

But what I do say is that none of them are unanticipated. There hasn't been any surprises in what we've had to deal with in the integration. And all of those have been dealt with through a combination of the project management group, the team that's running that project, who have been exemplary in the way they've gone about it. And I do say publicly Brett Marsh, who leads that group as the previous CEO of the OneVue business in Iress, has done an outstanding job of running the project. But then all of the people who are working in the OneVue and gradually emerging into the Praemium world have also done a tremendous job in dealing with the clients and explaining what it is. So whilst there have been the usual sorts of things that you would expect in such an integration, none of them have caused us any surprise or have slowed us down in any way. So that's why we're able to say the progress is on track.

[David Coulter, executive]

Thanks. There are questions coming through around increased trading activity, impact on pooled cash accounts. So I'll take those.

Yes, we did observe increased trading activity in line with volumes more broadly in the SMA. And the SMA reprice itself is now far more attuned to trading volumes. So we'd benefit from that. There will be some enhanced volatility through that, should trading volumes decline in future periods. The basis points from the SMA will be more volatile than they have been previously. But they'll be volatile at an elevated level.

And the growth in pooled cash, I'm not seeing necessarily any signal there. The percentage seems to be declining as market growth outstrips that, which comes from contributions. And the allocation of cash, as we've said many times, is a liquidity margin over and above everything else. And clients and their advisors seem to be managing that quite efficiently, because the idea at the moment is to trade into the markets while they're zooming up.

The other question around Scope concerns whether or not the repricing has been disruptive. You can see from what I'd said earlier, no is a simple answer to that. Very minimal disruption from our client groups, very minimal pushback. It seems to have been well absorbed and well taken.

We've got further questions about capital allocation, dividend, buybacks in preference to M&A as we've bed down OneVue. Anthony, any reflections there?

[Anthony Wamsteker, executive]

Obviously, we'd love to do another deal like OneVue, but they're just not available to us at the moment. And so, buying back shares seems to be the most efficient use of capital right at the minute.

[David Coulter, executive]

Okay. And just forgive me, we've got to go here. We've got questions on whether or not Scope and Scope+ repricing is proceeding. I think it's fair to say that it will make its way progressively through FY '25. We'll have more to say on that when we hit the market with our December '24 result for the first half, because we'll have a reasonably consistent signal across 6 months rather than just a quarter. As you'd be aware, we're not producing financials per se for this quarterly update, but appreciate that everyone's interested.

And what I do actually appreciate is that people have been taking good note of what we've been saying in our results presentations and are interested in the impacts these are going to have. But we will report on that at half year. And we've got questions. This is a good one that I'll leave to Anthony, of course, whether or not the -- just some more color, I guess, is what's being asked for here, on departed advisor impacts and what we can expect going forward.

[Anthony Wamsteker, executive]

Yes. So I think last time we did an update, we said there's probably a couple of quarters left of outflows at roughly the rate. I think the questioner there has said that, that appears to be AUD 250 million a quarter. It's still running at about that level. Our forecasting seems to have held up pretty well to date. And I think we said in our release that we suspect there's another quarter to go. So there's always, as I say, a bit of crystal ball gazing about it. But so far, it's proved to be a reasonably accurate barometer to expect the flows to continue. And we would expect them to continue for another quarter after that based on the size of the amount of money that departed advisors got left with us. It's not inconceivable that it could continue, but it doesn't appear like it's going to. But we monitor that on a regular basis.

[David Coulter, executive]

Okay. Thanks for that, Anthony. Look, there are a lot of questions coming through that are asking for very prescriptive detail, revenue margin, EBITDA margin, OpEx. I appreciate that you're interested, and I appreciate that it does help you in as much as value, you'd appreciate that this is a quarter end. These are not audited results. There aren't even financial tables in here. Even if I really wanted to answer some of those questions, it's not appropriate in this forum. Appreciate that you're submitting them.

All I can say on the revenue margin is what I've said earlier about the SMA. I think that's the most telling is that we haven't had significant disruption from our clients, that the elevated level of pricing is more attuned to trading activity, and that the exit rate from the fourth quarter has largely been able to be maintained on revenue basis points to FUA.

We're just looking through these questions, and I've got the sense that really thematically, generally, we've answered what has come through. So absent any further submissions, I'll just turn to Anthony to wrap up the presentation. Look forward to your inbound interest over the course of the day.

[Anthony Wamsteker, executive]

Yes, once again, it's very pleasing to see so many people on the call. Thank you for attending. I've said it before, but all of you should be reminded that this is the webinar technology that we use when we're talking to financial advisors. Obviously, there's a high degree of interest in our webinars because of the way we've repositioned the company to have a high-net-worth focus. And with the Spectrum product now launched and the repositioning and the rebranding of the company, those webinars attract good interest. So we give you the opportunity to see how that technology works, so you get a bit of an experience that many financial advisors get. But thanks again for the interest and for the questions, and look forward to catching up with you all at our AGM coming up and then later in the year as opportunities arise. Thanks again.

[David Coulter, executive]

Thank you.