PensionBee Group plc (PBEE) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PensionBee Q2 Trading Update. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to the team from PensionBee Romi, Christoph, good afternoon.

Good afternoon. I'm Romi Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our Q2 2026 results presentation. Today, we are pleased to share our progress over the quarter as we continue executing on our vision to build a global leader in the consumer retirement market. For those of you new to the PensionBee story, we exist to help our customers prepare for and enjoy a happy retirement. We operate in the enormous defined contribution pension market, representing over $30 trillion in assets and more than 100 million consumers across the U.K. and U.S. Our customer-centric offering helps consumers to feel retirement confident. We enable our customers to combine their old retirement accounts into a new online account. We enable them to make contributions to invest in line with their objectives with money managed by the world's largest asset managers and ultimately, to withdraw and spend their retirement savings. Our long-term ambition is to build lifelong relationships with our customers. This approach delivers value to them throughout their retirement journey while driving predictable, scalable revenue for our business and strong returns for our investors. At the end of the quarter, we reached GBP 8.6 billion, approximately $11 billion of AUA on behalf of 327,000 invested customers, reflecting 37% year-on-year growth in assets. Annual run rate revenue reached GBP 56 million, up 40% year-on-year and quarterly net flows grew 30% year-on-year, keeping pace with increased marketing investment and demonstrating efficiency. In the U.K., prompted brand awareness reached a record 62% with partnerships and sports sponsorships reaching broad audiences. AI tools enhanced our productivity with Beebot now resolving over 50% of its live chat volume, contributing to productivity improvements while maintaining the quality of our customer service. In the U.S., we advanced our dual channel strategy with business-to-business distribution growing through intermediaries and our direct-to-consumer business growing through optimized marketing activities. The U.K. was profitable for the quarter with a 15% U.K. LTM adjusted EBITDA margin, while the group was profitable on a last 12-month basis, reflecting strong operating leverage. Turning now to the U.K. We continue to invest in marketing over the quarter, increasing spend by 34% year-on-year to GBP 4.6 million in order to capitalize on our U.K. growth opportunity. The investment drove gross inflows up 34% to GBP 463 million, supporting brand awareness that made PensionBee one of the most recognized pension providers in the country. Brand investment is a long-term endeavor, and we were pleased to see it converting into customer growth with 327,000 invested customers at the period end, representing 14% year-on-year growth. Our industry-leading technology platform continues to scale effectively, driving operating leverage and the consistent delivery of excellent customer service. We delivered a 17% productivity improvement over the quarter with over 1,700 invested customers per staff member in the U.K., representing a compound annual growth rate of 20% since 2020. Two AI engines built on our over a decade-long knowledge base are enhancing our productivity. Beetrix, our internal AI copilot continues to boost productivity across our support function. BeeBot, our external AI bot, enhances customer self-service and is now able to independently resolve over 50% of its live chats, freeing our team to handle more complex queries. As we continue to become even more efficient, we maintain our standards of customer service, reflected in our excellent Trustpilot rating of 4.6 stars and an invested customer retention rate of above 95%. Looking ahead, we are focused on delivering our key U.K. growth and scalability initiatives for 2026. On customer growth, we continue to deploy increasing marketing investment through engaging multichannel activities, growing our brand awareness. We continue to broaden our reach through partnerships and new channels, including our Channel 4 weather sponsorship now live and the launch of a new brand campaign expected in August. We continue to invest in product innovations, including through our new hybrid app aimed at delivering a seamless user experience and stronger customer engagement across devices live on Android with the iOS version launching imminently. We are expanding our AI and automation capabilities with plans for further AI expansion on e-mails and operational processing. Turning now to the U.S. Our focus on building brand awareness remains a top priority. We are growing national brand channels at scale through a multichannel approach that combines digital and out-of-home advertising. Our social media following has continued to grow exponentially since we launched our app, representing broad national reach. Over the quarter, we deployed a customer testimonial campaign featuring our U.S. customers alongside an out-of-home billboard campaign across New York and Chicago, building our presence in key U.S. cities. We're pleased to see prompted brand awareness in the U.S. registering at approximately 5% as we continue to build recognition in the market. Over the quarter, we continued to build our automatic rollover IRA, which we offer to employers usually through adviser intermediaries and third-party administrators. It is competitively priced with a high-quality investment portfolio and personalized service for participants. Every year, an estimated $60 billion in 401(k) balances leave employer plans for automatic rollover IRAs, and our offering is built to capture this flow. Small balance rollovers, where employers force out former employees with balances below $7,000 are recurring and represent a potential of $4.6 billion of inflows annually. Voluntary rollovers where employers ask us to serve former employees with balances above $7,000 form part of a $1 trillion annual market and plan terminations where an entire 401(k) plan winds up and its participants transferred to us are large at approximately $55 billion of potential inflows annually with individual transactions reaching $250 million. We are building our distribution across this ecosystem, having reached recordkeepers, representing approximately 75% of the market, building towards 100 intermediary relationships that each deliver approximately $10 million in recurring annual inflows and with over 1,500 employers already [ engaged ]. Our progress is compounding as relationships established in 2025 generate further client referrals and recurring inflows. At scale, this supports our path to $1 billion of AUA. Turning to our priorities for the U.S. in 2026. We are scaling our automatic rollover IRA, building distribution across the ecosystem as we work towards our medium-term goal of $1 billion of U.S. AUA and continuing to onboard employer clients from our actively referring intermediaries. We are growing our direct-to-consumer presence. The U.S. today resembles the U.K. in its early years at the start of a similar growth trajectory. We continue to grow brand awareness and build a predictable conversion funnel supported by our 1% batch, which encourages consolidation and contributions while enhancing our retirement planning tools to grow average account sizes over time. We are building efficient foundations, strengthening our transfer protocols, including straight-through processing from certain recordkeepers and continuing to optimize our marketing and operational efficiency to build attractive customer unit economics over time. I would now like to hand over to Christoph Martin, our Chief Financial Officer, who will cover the financial update for the quarter.

Thank you very much, Romi. Hello, and welcome to everyone to the financial section of our Q2 2026 results. Turning to the financial overview, I would like to start with a summary of our performance for the quarter before diving into the details of PensionBee's core value driver. For the second quarter of 2026, the U.K. delivered strong financial performance with 37% year-on-year growth in our AUA to GBP 8.6 billion and 40% year-on-year growth in ARR to approximately GBP 56 million. The U.K. revenue increased 42% to GBP 14.3 million and U.K. adjusted EBITDA expanded profitability to GBP 0.8 million for the quarter. On the last 12 months basis, we delivered a 2-year CAGR on the revenue side of 34% while maintaining cost discipline with our cost base growing at a lower compounded annual growth rate of 20%. This resulted in a U.K. adjusted EBITDA of close to GBP 8 million on a last 12-month basis, expanding the U.K. adjusted EBITDA margin to 15%, up from 8% last year. At the group level, top line growth, coupled with continuous cost discipline led to group profitability on the last 12 month basis with last 12 months adjusted EBITDA of GBP 2.7 million at a 5% group margin in comparison to around negative 1% a year ago. These continuous achievements are derived from the core value driver of our business, which are: first, predictable and recurring revenue; and second, business scalability. Furthermore, they are testaments to our ability to consistently and reliably execute against our public market guidance. I would next cover the 2 value drivers in turn. The first value driver is PensionBee's predictable and recurring revenue, which is generated from a durable base of assets under administration, a function of the assets of existing and new customers. In the second quarter, we achieved a 37% year-on-year AUA growth to approximately GBP 8.6 billion. The vast majority of our AUA base is derived from existing customers, customers who remain with PensionBee for a long periods of time and continue to build up their pension savings with us, resulting in value generation for decades to come. Our average customer is around 42 years of age, and they build up their pension savings with PensionBee, which means that cohorts on an underlying value basis before any impact on capital markets appreciation are resilient over time. This is reflected in our invested customer retention rate of above 95% and our value retention rate of approximately 100%. The AUA is also derived from new customers acquired through our proven cost discipline approach to customer acquisition. Over the quarter, we onboarded 12,000 new invested customers onto our technology platform. New customers joining were slightly older than in the second quarter of 2025, aged approximately 40, which with a higher average transfer in value. As a result, the compounding AUA base is subsequently converted into our revenue growth, owing to our resilient gross revenue margin in the mid- to high 60s. In the second quarter of 2026, we saw a revenue margin of 68 basis points, which enabled us to convert the 37% year-on-year AUA growth into revenue growth of 43% for the quarter and annual run rate revenue of around 40%. In conclusion, thanks to the compounding AUA base and resilient revenue margin, we have generated predictable and recurring revenue, which represents PensionBee's first value driver. The second value driver is PensionBee's business scalability due to the controllable nature of our cost base. The cost base has continued to decline as a proportion of revenue. This scalability dynamics of predictable and recurring top line growth, coupled with cost discipline led to an improvement in operating margin. On the last 12 months basis, the U.K. adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 15%, up from 8% a year ago. Furthermore, the operating margin pre-marketing, a measure of scalability for the U.K. reached 42%, reflecting the inherent strong scalability and margin potential of the business. Reflecting on our long-term track record, PensionBee has delivered revenue growth since our IPO at a compounded annual growth rate of 44% and strong margin expansion in the U.K. with an adjusted EBITDA margin improvement to positive 15% on the last 12-month basis and operating margin pre-marketing improved to positive 42%. This underscores strong delivery against our growth and profitability margin objectives. PensionBee operates a proven and scalable growth model designed to consistently expand our fee-generated asset base. Asset growth is driven by the following mechanisms. From a marketing investment perspective, which you can see on the left-hand chart, we have accelerated our marketing expenditure while delivering profitable growth, a trajectory we intend to maintain. Our conversion predictability, which you can see on the middle chart, demonstrates the reliable rate at which we're converting marketing spend into gross inflows per pound of marketing budget deployed, thanks to the strong correlation between customers' age and gross inflows. This makes our growth engine predictable. Subsequently, through increased deployment of marketing and converting it predictably into gross inflows, we continue to drive gross inflows over time. In short, PensionBee operates a proven and predictable growth model where increased marketing investments yield growing gross inflows. With respect to our guidance, the framework for PensionBee as a group, we have outlined our medium- and long-term targets. In the medium term, by year-end 2029, we expect the group to generate revenue of above GBP 100 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 20% with the U.K. considerably contributing to those targets. In the long term, by year-end 2034, we expect the group to generate above GBP 0.25 billion in revenue and an adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 50%. Our circa GBP 31 million cash balance or approximately $41 million of cash balance puts PensionBee in a very strong position to scale the U.K. business as well as invest in the tremendous U.S. market opportunity, continuing to execute on our long-term strategy and delivering on our public market guidance. I would now like to hand back to Romi for concluding remarks.

Thank you very much, Christoph. We are very pleased with the quarter. We are looking forward to a successful remaining 2026, and we are delighted to engage with the investor community on your questions over the last 3 months.

That's great. Thank you, Romi, Christoph. Thank you for updating. [Operator Instructions] There will be a recording available and that should be about 15 to 20 minutes after the meeting has ended. Romi, Christoph, you've had a number of questions from investors and attendees today. Thank you, everybody, for your engagement. Perhaps I could start off with the first one. At what point do you expect the group to become consistently profitable on a quarterly basis?

Yes, happy to take this one. So as we have outlined in our profitability guidance on an annual basis, we have a 2029 guidance that say 20% adjusted EBITDA margin on at least GBP 100 million of revenue. So that means about GBP 20 million in that particular year. And then the second target thereafter we have in 2034. So with regards to specifically around the quarterly results, we, as a management team, focus very much on an annual basis because when you look at our marketing deployment, we actually see that there is a higher marketing deployment usually at the first half of the year because this is usually when we see a very strong return, but also it positions the business very well for the second half of the year, given that we build up the top end of the funnel and then converting customers through. That basically also means that some of the costs might occasionally be front-loaded to the first half. So it's a little bit difficult to say at what point it will be precisely on a quarterly basis because of that nuance in terms of doing the best for the business. But on an annual basis, again, we target more than GBP 100 million in revenue by 2029 with around a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin, which would be around the GBP 20 million mark.

That's great. I just to jump a couple of questions to Gautam. Gautam's got 3 questions. So let's start with the first one. You reached 75% recordkeeper coverage. U.S.A. AUA is at GBP 4.8 million on around 400 customers. What's the actual lag time you're seeing between signing a recordkeeper intermediary relationship and converting into meaningful rollover inflows? And can you provide a rough time line to getting to that USD 1 billion AUM?

Thank you for those excellent questions on the U.S. As you know, in the U.S., we have a dual channel model. We maintain our direct-to-consumer marketing approach. And here, we are really focused on optimizing the conversion funnel. The conversion funnel is different to the U.K. conversion funnel. There is a lower cost of marketing at the upper end of the funnel, which we've kind of stated numerous times. And conversely, because the prevalence of accounts in the U.S. is lower than in the U.K., there is also a lower funding rate. We are now at the point where we feel we're well optimized on the upper end of the conversion funnel in terms of the marketing spend, and we are progressively working our way through the conversion of the accounts from a funding request to a funding actually occurring. And I say that because you know the total AUA volume and the number of customer accounts, and most of those are coming through our D2C kind of channel. The question then turns towards the intermediary market, where we are using our automatic rollover IRA, and we are really distributing through intermediaries, which includes advisers, third-party administrators. We know recordkeepers because they are important gatekeepers for making that flow as smooth as possible. So the recordkeeper relationships here are really about how easy is it for an employer to use the PensionBee automatic rollover IRA. And the 75% figure there that is referenced points to the fact that we now have really broad relationships established across the recordkeeper market. So if you wanted to use the PensionBee automatic rollover IRA as a Fidelity client or as an Empower client or an Alight client, we either have a direct integration with you or we have worked with you or we are in the process of working with you. And so that broad coverage around the recordkeeper market as gatekeepers is really important. And we continue to add new recordkeepers, and we'll be sharing more news on that in the coming quarters and in the coming year to increase the ease of throughput through that B2B channel. The intermediaries themselves are typically advisers or third-party administrators, who have strong working relationships with the employers. As we have stated in the release, we are targeting 100 intermediary relationships over the medium term, and that USD 1 billion AUM goal is a medium-term goal as we have previously stated. What we've given you here is really the inputs into the USD 1 billion AUM. The inputs are, of course, the B2B line. We've spelled out that we believe 100 intermediaries with $10 million of annual recurring inflow from those intermediaries, and I'm happy to go into more detail in terms of how that's generated. We see that getting us to $1 billion of AUA, but we also see it being substantially recurring. And then similarly, on the D2C side, we've given you some of the ingredients around the funnel. We continue to establish the funnel. It's getting really well optimized on the marketing side, and we are continuing to push through on the conversion side through more automations and more kind of pushing of the transfers to get them [ through ] the system.

Just turning around to U.K. marketing spend. The question reads as follows: that U.K. marketing spend rose 34%, whilst gross inflows -- sorry, whilst gross inflows rose 34% new customers were 12,000 versus 11,000 with growth increasing coming from higher transfer in values from older cohorts average 40 versus 39. Should we read this as a shift in strategy towards wallet share over customer acquisition? And is that sustainable given the GBP 250 CPIC target?

Great question this time on U.K. marketing and the approach there. We remain very committed to our 1 million invested customer goal for the U.K. We see ourselves well on track for that. We are onboarding more new invested customers every year. And as you noted, we are increasing our marketing spend to be able to increase the rate at which the new invested customers are being onboarded. As you also know, we make money on AUA. And so there is, of course, a priority to continue driving higher account sizes. We've been very transparent around that. And you can see that reflected in the average balances that are coming through on the PensionBee platform. So yes is the short answer, very much committed to growing towards the 1 million invested U.K. customers with a focus on optimizing flows per pound of marketing spend. And the GBP 250 CPIC is, of course, very important. It's a key driver of our LTV, so kind of long-term returns from customer acquisition activities. However, we will always expect to see an increase in CPIC, especially because we are increasing marketing spend, and there's always a lag between marketing spend and the customers transfer actually completing. So very much on track for our long-term goals there. And hopefully, everyone will be very pleased with the growth in those gross inflows.

Indeed. And maybe just one other point to comment on the growth engine because it is really important for us as a business is that our growth engine is really predictable, and let me tease out a few additional points on this one. But before maybe also quickly on the CPIC target, yes, very committed to it. You did see that we have indeed accelerated marketing investment this year and CPIC has come up a bit. But also we have already -- we have seen this in the past as well. So when you go back actually to 2022, you see actually a similar CPIC level at the time where we also increased that marketing spend and on the back of that had really accelerated customer acquisition. So we usually look at CPIC target by year-end and the main reason is the acceleration in marketing. But I think the second point that we want to tease out is which is also new that we -- in our presentation on Page 18, which is the strong metric around gross inflows per pound of marketing spend. And that's quite important because as Romi just said, ultimately, we are making -- we're generating revenue based on the assets, on the fee-based assets. So we see marketing as just a growth vector, a growth driver. And therefore, it's very important if we invest marketing that, that translates into gross inflows and therefore, drives revenue. And so therefore, we monitor gross inflows per marketing deployed. And you can see on Page 18 that there's a strong correlation with age in particular. And I think we are really happy about delivering a gross inflow per marketing spend that is in line with last year. Yes, customers were a little bit older, but also we spend a little bit more towards the back end of this first half. And so that means given that there's always a little bit of a lag effect that when we deploy marketing until customers come into the door and customers are -- the ports are transferred in, there's always a little bit of a lag effect. So that means closer to you to deploy towards the end of the quarter, if you will, the more is actually pushed -- the value is pushed into the next quarter. So I think despite that really strong gross inflows per marketing spend, and it basically highlights Page 18 in particular, that the growth engine is really, really predictable and reliable because we have provided data back from 2022 to 2026, and it shows a strong correlation we spend marketing. We have a certain marketing strategy that translates into gross inflows.

That's great. Just changing the subject, the final point of the question here around margins. U.K. LTM EBITDA margin hit 15%, already closing in on the group's 2029 target of circa 20% for the whole business. Does that imply that margins alone need to run well ahead of 20% to offset ongoing U.S. losses?

Yes. Very good question. And the short answer is yes. So I think the U.K. will -- given that the U.K. is much further down its growth trajectory, will contribute much, much more strongly to the medium-term guidance by 2029. So that means that on a group level, we target around 20%. We probably expect the U.K. to be at or above 20% at around that time and the U.S. to be around breakeven levels. So I think your suggestion is correct. And I think that's a reasonable understanding.

That's great. Question from Jude at RBC. Again, a number of questions here. On the Channel 4 weather sponsorship, it's great to see PensionBee on the TV in the evenings. What's the rationale for this booking this particular slot? And is it replacing something else that PensionBee used to sponsor?

Great question, focused on the U.K. marketing strategy and particularly around building brand awareness. And Jude, I am so pleased to hear you commenting on the visibility of the brand. We are really focused on becoming an even better known household brand in the U.K., and we think the Channel 4 weather sponsorship will contribute significantly to that. It's a very repetitive format. And so we expect consumers to see us multiple times a day. And it greatly enhances, we believe, the visibility of the brand and also the long-term trust that we are seeking to establish. We have some exciting pending product-related activities that will feed in nicely with this brand sponsorship. So pleased to keep watching. And in terms of what it is replacing, we have concluded our sponsorship of Brentford. It's been a wonderful relationship, and we really feel proud of everything that has been achieved over that 5 years working with Brentford. Over that period of time, we saw brand awareness growing significantly. We have previously stated that brand awareness grew significantly amongst male audiences. And therefore, we believe that the football sponsorship was really effective in driving that given the audience representation around that sport. And so with a lot of that having delivered significant value, we are turning our attention to slightly different and perhaps broader audiences, including around the Channel 4 sponsorship. We have more sponsorships that will be announced very soon, some of which have been in the live environment already. And we believe that the combination of the repetitive Channel 4 sponsorship and a slightly deeper brand-related sponsorship, again, on the sporting front, will enable us to continue to reach a broad section of the audience, while maintaining the diversity of the sponsorship mix.