AMP Limited (AMP) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this session of AMP's Wealth and Retirement Business Units. My name is Richard Nelson, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are all gathering today. For us here at Quay Quarter, it's the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. So I pay my respects to the Elders, both past and present. Today, we'll be hearing from 4 speakers, and we have around 2 hours or so. The speakers will be, firstly, our CEO, Alexis George, to set the scene. We'll then have our Director of Retirement, Ben Hillier; Edwina Maloney, the Group Executive for our North Platform business, will discuss the opportunities we see in that segment; and Melinda Howes, our Group Executive of the Superannuation & Investments business, will look at the great progress we've been making in this business and what the future may hold. Given we have a lot of material to get through to share with you, we'd like to hold the Q&A session at the end. So now I'd like to turn things over to Alexis George, please.

Thank you very much, Richard, and it's great to have so many faces in the room. You often in these jobs get to present to blank pieces of screen these days. So it's very nice to see warm humans. Certainly, very excited to welcome you here today. And as Richard said, we really want to give you a bit of an idea about where AMP has been in terms of wealth, but I think more particularly where we're going, and why we really think we can win in that retirement space. So there's a couple of things. I'll firstly give a bit of an overview of our strategy, the retirement opportunity that we see that exists. And then our resident expert on retirement solutions, Ben is going to deep dive into our solutions across both platforms and our Superannuation & Investments business because we often get questions about the technical behind the scenes around those solutions. So wanted to give Ben the opportunity to explain that today. And then, of course, we're going to do a deep dive into both our platforms business and our S&I businesses with Melinda and with Edwina. So let's come to the strategy of AMP. Now I know some of this may be familiar to you, but I think it's important to reflect on what we've achieved over the last few years. In those periods of time, we've simplified the portfolio. We've reduced the costs. We strengthened the balance sheet, and we established a strong and stable executive team that has started to deliver the results. At the same time of doing these things, we've repositioned this business as a specialist in retirement. And that's something we really want to spend a bit of time elaborating on today because it is important for our future. I believe here at AMP, we're well positioned now for growth, but we don't want to do it the way we've done it in the past. We want to approach this new era with the mind of a challenger brand, a brand that takes conscious risks, not unconscious risks, is more agile, embraces change, embraces technology and was willing to get out there and have a go. But at the same time, I want to acknowledge that we're a company with the 175 years of legacy and heritage. And certainly with that comes a promise of safety and security, and that's something none of us want to compromise. Now if we look at the portfolio as we sit here today, we have 4 operating business units: our platforms business, our S&I business, our bank and our New Zealand Wealth Management business. And on top of that, we have our partnerships, which we won't be discussing today. If we look at where we've been though, we really have refocused the portfolio towards the Australian Wealth Management businesses. And in fact, at the end of '24, $174 million of the $236 million operating profit or nearly 75% of the contribution came from these 2 businesses. And if we also take into account New Zealand, which Melinda also manages, it is fairly aligned with those 2 businesses, we can share ideas, we can share deliverables, we can test things in the New Zealand market that we can later bring to Australia. So we are a much more focused business. And as a result of that, I really believe we're positioned to lead in this retirement space in Australia. In North, we're #3 in terms of our wrap platform for super and pensions with about $80 billion in FUM. And I think we've proven we can innovate in this space. We've delivered our retirement solutions in both the accumulation and the pension phase. We have North Guarantees, which is pretty unique in the market these days, and we really continue to innovate for our advisers in that space. In the S&I business, again, we're the only ones to have an accumulation for Lifetime Super for our customers, and that is pretty unique. And in our digital advice solutions, we continue to add journeys and as recently as last week, we added journeys. In our AMP Bank, something we're not going to talk about in detail today, I hope you noticed that we started to reposition some of the deliverables in bank towards supporting that wealth management business. And the 10-year interest-only principal loan was exactly catering for that, a loan that gives more cash flows to those pre-retirees and retirees in the early years and perhaps less in the latter years when we know they don't need as much. So we've got retirement covered from the financial perspective. But on top of that, we understand retirement isn't just about finances. And so we launched last year our Citro lifestyle app, which is really an app which caters for the social aspects of retirement, offering cash back offers for those things we always dream of cruises. There's another cruise ship out there today as well as creating a community for ideas. And we'll soon be rolling that out, and Melinda will talk about that to our customers across the AMP S&I business. And I will note, of the customers in Citro, most are non-AMP today. So clearly, we can position our company in retirement. But why do we think this is the right space for us to position? Well, I think the data speaks for itself. We look at the population of Australia, and we can see that by 2061, 33% will be in that retirement phase. Secondly, we're all living longer. So what does that mean? We need more security around our income in retirement. We need to be able to make things simpler so we can have that dignified retirement. But on top of that, we know there's a huge opportunity here. $750 billion of assets will move into the retirement phase over the next 6 years. This is a huge opportunity for us to really grab. But we know Australians have a fear of running out. And how do we, as a major provider, help them do this. Our brand, our solutions play to this. There's tailwinds in the industry, and we're certainly well positioned to take advantage of the opportunity. So changing demographics. Let's come to Australia. We're one of the world's wealthiest countries. We know though that the household wealth of Australians is pretty much concentrated in 2 assets: their house and their superannuation. And increasingly, superannuation will become a very important part of this asset pool. But on top of this incredible wealth, the financial literacy of Australians is virtually nonexistent. And we really have to do something about that if we want to help them with retirement. So despite the significant wealth, despite the changing demographics, despite our wonderful accumulation system, 80% of Australian retirees are unable to enjoy a comfortable retirement and don't know what to do about it. So let's look at this problem. Firstly, I think we all accept we have a wonderful accumulation system here in Australia. It is kind of the envy of the world. But we know as a population, 50% are still worried that they don't have enough money in retirement. They don't know why they're worried, but they know they're worried. We come to income generation. Australians, we deem to be a laissez-faire population. We're supposed to be take it easy. That is absolutely not the way we operate. And most Australians pass away with their wealth they retire with. That means they're giving their dependents the retirement they could have had. And surely, we want to change that. And then we come to advice. We know the good advice really changes these people's financial outcomes. But we also know that we have a very complex system and not enough independent advisers to really be able to serve the complete population. And so we have to be able to solve that problem. We have to be able to give advice in all its context to be able to help people with these fears. We believe at AMP, we have the opportunity to solve these problems. If we look at accumulation, we've got lifetime accumulation features. Of course, we've got managed accounts. We've got options of every kind for our members and for our customers. But on top of that, we also have these capital guaranteed solutions. So an option for those that are a little more worried about the volatility of the markets particularly in a period like we're now. If we come to income generation, of course, we've got account-based pensions. That goes without saying. But now we've got our Lifetime Pension solutions across our Platforms business, and we'll bring those to our S&I business soon. And then again, you've got these capital guaranteed options who help give that bit of safety for the people who may be a bit more worried. And when we come to accessible advice, I think we really are a leader in AI and in putting out options to make our advisers more efficient for our Platforms business. But on top of that, that's not enough. We know not everyone can go to advisers. We know there's not enough capacity in the professional advice market to serve those customers. So we're driving heavily into digital advice and intra-fund advice, helping meet the simpler needs of those particular customers, and we want to continue to take on that journey. So I'd say to you as we go into the next session, we've done a lot of hard work at AMP, and we believe we're now positioned for that period of growth and really looking forward to hearing more from the team. So on that note, Ben, I'll bring you up.

Thank you so much, Lex. It's great to be here, and it's great to be at AMP. I feel incredibly honored to be leading the retirement function at AMP, where we have a history of 176 years of retirement leadership. One of the first solutions we brought to the market 176 years ago was a solution where people would contribute during their working life and they'd be entitled to a retirement income that started back down at age 50, just short of our life expectancy back then. And that's a tradition that we have upheld, and we are continuing to take forward with new modern solutions that are all about giving our members the confidence and comfort in retirement that they deserve. We've covered the entire market. We have solutions on our North platform that are optimized for financial advisers. These are very sophisticated solutions and have full investment choice, but keep the adviser in the retirement planning conversation for a lot longer, both before retirement, they can start retirement planning earlier with much greater effect, and they can continue to add value all the way through the retirement journey. We've also optimized some solutions that we just recently launched on the AMP Super Fund for those who may not get comprehensive advice for those of you who are unadvised, perhaps we ideally use our new digital advice services and also our intra-fund advice services. Both of these solutions, both on the platform and on S&I have retirement functionality, but also pre-retirement. And I'll take you through the mechanics of how, in particular, with the pre-retirement works -- sometimes call Lifetime Super because this is an opportunity to significantly add value to our members in retirement, but also increase their engagement and their confidence in that important pre-retirement period. The way we've done it is -- it's obviously some -- new account solutions on the North platform that advisers can utilize. We made a default feature for our Choice members on the S&I to really maximize the spread of those who can enjoy these greater levels of comfort and confidence. What we've created as a new category of hybrid solutions that sit between the traditional account-based pension or annuity. About 96%, I think, of retirement money in Australia goes an account-based pension, only a small number goes into annuities. And why is it most of it going to account-based pension, because you've got the benefits of market-linked investments. You can keep investing in the markets and enjoy that risk return trade-off. There's transparency in account-based pension. You've got flexibility on the income and you can carry forward the investments from Super to Pension and enjoy no capital gains taxes if you're using a platform such as North. Our new Lifetime solutions have those benefits of the account-based pensions. They have that transparency. They have their flexibility. They have the ability to invest in whatever the client or the adviser wants, which is really, really important. But we've also taken the best features of an annuity. Of course, the most important being income for life for the client, for their spouse where applicable. It's really strong settling benefits. And in fact, we have the strongest ability to generate aged pension eligibility of any solutions in the market. And then because we've got those combination of best of both worlds, we actually have the ability to maximize income. You think about it, in account-based pension, it's your own bucket of cash effectively. People don't know how to spend that efficiently, effectively and not be at a risk of running out of money. And so what do they do? As Lex said, they underspend. About 90% average account-based pension balance left at death. That's a terrible inefficiency. And then you think about the actual human cost. That's a lot of cruises, a lot of helping the kids, a lot of enjoyment and retirement that's really missed. On the other hand, annuities, they -- a traditional lifetime annuity has been invested quite conservatively. There needs to be reserving of shareholder capital, of course. And so as a result, the income levels are quite compressed. By combining the best of both, we've seen in real life, our -- MyNorth Lifetime members experienced on average about 60% more income in retirement. A couple that might have been spending up to $100,000, spending $160,000. And how many extra holidays is that is a really life-changing outcomes we're delivering for our members today. So there's 3 things I want to focus on in terms of unpacking how we're delivering this. Number one, we obviously overcome the fear of running out. Most important -- most common, sorry, fear that retirees have as they approach retirement is running out of money and for good reason, of course. We've focused on our solutions on market-linked lifetime income streams. These are in comparison to traditional lifetime annuities, where there was much more of a set and forget, more compressed level of income. By investing in the market, this allows our retirees to be exposed to growth assets all the way through retirement, if that's their choice. And the icing on the cake is the Centrelink eligibility. We've really taken advantage of some concessions that the government has put in place specifically to encourage us to do what we're doing, but also encourage our members to take up these solutions in retirement. The government sees figures like that 90% of Super left unspent at death as a terrible systematic waste. They're seeing that superannuation is not achieving its policy objectives. And so as a result, they put concessions in place to encourage these sorts of solutions to be taken up. So I'm going to take you through each of those in just a little bit more detail. First of all, I want to unpack. Look, how can we -- how can we pay income for life? And how can we do it with such high rates of income? Well, if you think about it, for a provider of a lifetime income stream, there's 3 risks that you need to overcome. The first and the biggest by far is the market risk. Now we have completely mitigated market risk by market-linking the income rates. So we don't need to -- we're not making any expensive guarantees about the level of income. The incomes will generally rise over time with investment returns, but sometimes the income payment rates will fall. Think about it a little bit like a defined benefit scheme, but in reverse, you think about a defined benefit scheme, there's a pool of assets and then there's a pool of liabilities, which is the incomes that are payable to the participants. When the assets grow higher than expected, the sponsor can take some of that surplus and take it back for their own use, or if there's a shortfall of assets, they'll need to tip in some extra assets to make up the shortfall. And so in that way, defined benefit schemes are always trying to get that 100% funding ratio. We're doing the opposite. When the liabilities -- sorry, when the assets have fallen, we simply reduce the liabilities. The income payment rates will reduce. But most of the time, when there's a surplus, which is what is going to happen by design, then the income rates will actually rise over time. I've just put some examples there on the slide there. So for example, just say someone was receiving a Lifetime Pension worth $10,000 a year. If we set our lifetime income streams relative to a 6% net investment return hurdle. So if investment returns were 8%, that's 2% over the hurdle of 6%. And so that $10,000 income would rise to $10,200 the following year, just a 2% rise. And correspondingly, if the returns were 4%, that's 2% under the benchmark, fee income would fall to $9,800. In that way, on the 1st of July, we're always resetting the liabilities to match the assets. It's never overfunded. It's never underfunded. This gives 3 really, really important characteristics. Number one, it means there's no shareholder capital required. We don't need to be reserving a lot of money to make this promise. And so it's very, very efficient. And similarly, that efficiency extends to the members. The payment rates we can provide to the members are basically very, very high, much higher than a traditional annuity because we're just spending all the capital on income. We're not having to reserve it. And that also relates to the third point I want to make. There's no restrictions on how we invest this money. Because we're always adjusting the liabilities to match the assets, we can invest in whatever we like. And we've taken that to the full degree of flexibility on the North platform by letting our members and their advisers invest in whatever they want on the platform. This is the only solution in the market. Perhaps the world, I'm not aware of anything else, where you can have a lifetime income stream invested in whatever you like. Clients who are perhaps conservative, can invest in more conservative assets and have a lower level of volatility in net income, those who want to take on more risk are quite welcome to do so. So that's by far the biggest risk that we've overcome completely by market linking the incomes. The second risk is that individual longevity risk or what we might call the idiosyncratic risk, longevity risk. And that's where -- one individual doesn't know how long they're going to live. And we've overcome that through a time on a method of simply pooling. We know some people are going to live longer than life expectancy, corresponding to those who live shorter life expectancy. And once there's a pool of lives, we can balance those out. So people who pass on earlier are going to leave some of their value behind mortality credits, which basically added to the investment returns for the benefit of those who live longer. Really, really simple. Again, this doesn't create a drag on the income levels because the only cost for this service is effectively what they're surrendering some of that value that they didn't spend while they're alive. The third risk, and it's the smallest, is systematic longevity risk or the pooled longevity risk, i.e., does the pool of lives, do they live longer than we expect or shorter than we expect. And we've outsourced this risk to our insurer. Currently, that's TAL. And TAL simply accepts that risk entirely. And they get paid the actual mortality credits, the amounts that people leave when they pass on. In exchange, they pay into the pool a contracted or guaranteed level mortality credits. And so our members and our shareholders simply have no exposure to that risk. That's completely outsourced. So that's actually quite an efficient risk to manage. You think about from a life insurer's perspective, that's a natural hedge to their normal life insurance book. Hopefully, that's made sense. We're happy to take questions at the end about any of the mechanics there. The other thing I want to talk about is just unpack how the age pension works, and here's a bit of an age pension [ 101. ] 63%, so most Australians are eligible in retirement for some form of Centrelink. The balance between those getting the full age pension and the part pension is changing over time as superannuation balances are getting bigger and bigger. And basically, the determinant about whether you get a full pension, a part pension or no pension is means testing. There's an assets test and an income test. And they've actually been operating for more than 100 years, so both those tests, but in various forms. And so quite simply, if singles can have a bit over $700,000 and couples can have a bit more than $1 million in assets outside the family home and still get a small amount age pension. But it's not just the age pension that's important to retirees, it's also the pensioner concession card. Retirement income review calculated the value of that card. They found it's actually an equivalent value. It's actually similar to the outlays spent on the aged pension itself. Think about pharmaceutical benefits, discounts and rates, transport, all sorts of discounts and benefits. And so that's really, really important to a lot of retirees. Even some of our more wealthy ones would still absolutely love to get $1 age pension so they can get access to that card. We did some analysis on our AMP Super Fund. We found 94% of our members would benefit from our Lifetime Super functionality by having increased that eligibility for the age pension. So these are the solutions and strategies, which I'm going to outline in a minute are very widespread. This isn't niche. This is -- the very vast majority of our members can really benefit from these solutions. And in fact, the very vast majority of Australians in general. So I'm going to talk about the assets test in particular. So normal super, your asset test is simply your full balance at retirement. And of course, your full balance is all your contributions that you put into your super compounded by your investment earnings, that's your balance and that's your asset test on a one-to-one basis. However, for what we call Lifetime Super or our lifetime feature on our AMP Super Fund, Centrelink is going to ignore the actual balance. And they're going to look at what's called the purchase amount, it's a legislative term. And the purchase amount is the contributions, any amount you actually put into your super, compounded not by the actual investment earnings, but compounded by the government's deeming rate. Now that's currently set at 2.25%. And so effectively, your contribution is rising by roughly inflation. And then even better than that, there's a discount, a 40% discount. So only 60% of your purchase amount is counted as an asset under the assets test when they're determining age pension eligibility. So hopefully, you can see already there's a couple of really important ways you can create a benefit for our members. Number one, anytime investment returns are better than 2.25%, I think that's most of the time. We got 12% last year. And so you're creating a gap between the account balance and the purchase amount. And then the asset test is only 60% of that value. So here's a case study of a couple, David and Peter, age 50 with a combined balance in Super of $500,000, and they're still contributing from a salary of $120,000. So over a 15-year period, that $500,000 is going to grow to $2 million. It looks pretty heroic, but it's only 7.8% investment returns. That's the benefit of compound earnings plus, of course, the contributions that are going in. That's the balance. But like I said, Centrelink is not going to see that balance. Centrelink is going to see the purchase amount, which starts at $500,000 and grows by the deeming rate, currently 2.25%, plus the extra contributions. That's the purchase amount. And then the asset test is 60% of the purchase amount. And so what starts off as a 40% discount over this period becomes a 70% discount. So we've got $2 million, but only $600,000 of that is going to be assessed. That's part one of the story. At retirement, it actually even gets better than that. So let's carry them through, at 65, here's a summary again of the of their situation. They've got $2 million balance, $1 million purchase amount and a $600,000 asset test. Now what we're seeing in real life is advisers putting all the client super into Lifetime Super. It's the smartest thing to do because there are simply no restrictions. It doesn't cost them any extra, and it doesn't restrict their capital in any way. But once they move into retirement, you don't want all of your money tied up into a lifetime income stream because it's not a come and go as you like type solution. It's a lifetime solution. And it's not designed for lump sum access, things like that. And so in real life, advisers are allocating on average 50% to an account-based pension and 50% to our lifetime income stream. And so let's do that for this couple. We take out half, we take out $1 million and put it into an account-based pension and the remaining $1 million stays in lifetime. But what does that do to the purchase amount? Sorry for the technicalities, but this is really, really important to advisers and their clients because it creates such a powerful impact. When we take that $1 million out and put into an account-based pension, it reduces the purchase amount dollar for dollar back to 0. And that, of course, reduces the asset test down to 0 as well. And so now we've got still a balance of $2 million, but the amount in the lifetime income stream, $1 million is completely asset test exempt. In this case -- I'm sorry, going back, that would give an extra age pension eligibility in today's dollars of about $27,000 a year. This is not a small change. This is a substantial uplift for our clients, and it's very, very easy to achieve. It's not difficult to see why we've got a whole lot of advisers now putting all their clients into Lifetime Super to take advantage of these benefits because, as I said, it doesn't cost them anything, it doesn't restrict them in any way. Lex also mentioned our guarantees. We've got income that goes for life, but also people want that peace of mind. Some clients certainly want the peace of mind about the level of funding that they have. And so our new and improved MyNorth guarantees meet that need, especially in the pre-retirement phase where clients are often derisking. Often they're concerned about sequencing risk, concerned about that critical period before retirement. So often, they go from growth investments to something quite moderate. Obviously, with a growth investment, you're going to get maximum return, but also potentially, you could have a market fall right before retirement, and that really does terrify some people. And so they do derisk very, very commonly. It's probably one of the most common advice strategies we see in the market is that derisking to a moderate portfolio. But it comes at a cost of how much upside they have. And it still doesn't completely guarantee that they won't have negative returns during that period of time. So our guarantees on the North platform provide an alternative to this strategy. Instead, we can stay invested in growth assets, but there's a hard guarantee that there will simply not be a market fall over that period of time or if not, they'll be protected. And so you can retain most of the upside. There's still an impact of the fee. But if we actually look and back test on the last 15 years of median super fund returns, we can actually see it's a superior strategy to use a guarantee instead of derisking. Here, we can see the median returns are a growth portfolio, 8.6% with 2 negative years, less the cost of a guarantee, our fee for a 10-year guarantee is 1.25%, gives you 7.35% net and no negatives. Compare that to a moderate portfolio where they've derisked median returns of 6.2%. Here's just a quick case study about how the guarantees work in real life. So in this example, someone's invested in a growth portfolio. At any point in time, they have access to their entire balance, and it goes up and down in value. But what happens on an annual basis with our guarantees is that the -- any higher value over the previous year is locked in. Basically, it only ratchets one way upwards, locking in any previous gains and protecting that capital. They can still exit at any time and get their investment value or they -- with their optional vesting feature, they can also have some of the protection during that period as well. And then at the end, they have the entire protected amount. In this case, the market has fallen quite substantially in that last year to about $800,000, but they walk away with over $1 million because of the benefit of that guarantee. This isn't for everybody, but it provides peace of mind confidence to those who really want to protect some of their portfolio, maybe they need to pay off a mortgage and they just want to make sure that that's covered no matter what. There's some really strong use cases for why you use a guarantee as part of the portfolio, and we're really pleased to be able to offer this as just another solution that differentiates our North platform from others in the market. Thank you for your attention. I know there's been quite a lot of technical stuff. We're happy to take questions later on. But now I hand over to Edwina, who's going to give a deeper dive into North.

Thank you very much. It's really great to be here talking about -- a little bit about North today. North is one of Australia's leading investment and retirement platforms. It is designed to help advisers grow their business by helping their clients prepare for and live well in retirement. Our funds under administration has increased to $83.2 billion, and now we have just over 25% in managed portfolios. We continue to see amazing growth in that managed portfolio area with North outperforming in that segment due to the strength of our offering and ongoing innovation. We have 132,000 clients, and we're one of the largest pension products in the market. We see North as more than just a platform but a vital partner in our clients' retirement journeys, and that's what we see stands us apart from our competitors. Our pension account is the largest platform pension product in terms of funds under administration. And we've had many accolades, as you saw on the previous slide. This year, we won the Best Advised Product of the Year at the 2025 Chant West Awards, which was highlighting our commitment to excellence in our intuitive digital interface, our efficient and effective service offering, enabling our advisers to grow their businesses and our ongoing innovation in super and retirement. So let's talk a little bit about the market. The platform market is growing about 10% per year for the overall platform market getting to $760 billion. And super and pension is a subset of that market, growing at about the same rate, 9% to $374 billion. We are the third largest platform in that super and pension market. However, we think this vastly understates the market opportunity for North and for our Platform business. Given our focus on retirement and given our focus on that mass affluent advice segment, we see the addressable market closer to $2.4 trillion, which includes funds in retail, industry and public, super funds with client balances over $200,000. Many of these clients, we know will benefit from advice as they need that to navigate our complex retirement system. You just heard about some of that complexity from Ben, just navigating the aged pension system. Our competitively priced proposition, our lifetime solutions and our broad range of customization options in our managed portfolios are examples of how we are uniquely positioned to win in this market. You heard a little bit from Lex about the access to financial advice. We know only 10% of Australians currently receive financial advice, and most of those are aged 55 or older. A significant reason for that is many mass affluent and affluent Australians don't or can't access it because of the cost. The average advice fee is now $3,960 according to adviser ratings. While there was an exodus of around 12,000 advisers since 2018, and that did create a significant gap in the supply of advice, those numbers have now stabilized, and we're talking to a lot of practices who are now very focused on growth. Advisers are looking for efficiencies in their practices to make advice more affordable and accessible. And many practices who are averaging around 100 to 110 clients per adviser are now targeting 200 clients per adviser. Most of those, that growth comes from that mass affluent segment, where there is mass affluent adviser segment because there's limited upside for them in increasing advice fees. We're a high net wealth adviser, there's more price elasticity, and they can increase advice fees. This, we believe, will help serve the 2.3 million Australians who are seeking or want financial advice to help them navigate our retirement system. We know and we heard from Alexis that most of their wealth is sitting in their home and their superannuation. We know this segment are cost conscious, so competitive pricing is very important as is having great solutions to navigate retirement, and we're very well positioned to take advantage of this. So our vision is to become the easiest platform for advisers to do business with, while differentiating through market-leading retirement solutions. We believe we create value by powering advisers to inspire clients to prepare well and thrive in retirement. We're specifically built to help advisers thrive in that retirement advice market by empowering those advisers to deliver the best possible advice experience for their clients, efficiently, profitably and at scale. We have many strong advocates within our current adviser base, and they call out our main points of difference as our market-leading retirement solutions, our competitive pricing, our digital-first platform and our tailored managed portfolios. These are some of the unique features that North has, along with, of course, fractional shares, simultaneous buying and selling, quick and easy recontributions and fast track withdrawals. In Q4 of this year -- in quarter 4 of this year, we will have completed our simplification journey. We will have a clean front book offer and strong foundations, which positions us very well for future growth. We're built on in-house technology, and this enables us to scale quickly, it lowers our cost to serve and it accelerates our speed to market. We're also harnessing the power of AI in our product and software development process, which will further drive efficiency, quicken and shorten our delivery time frames and improve the quality of our offer in market. Together, this will help us differentiate and win. So back to the challenges that Alexis outlined earlier. We help our clients accumulate wealth as they prepare for retirement through our unique Lifetime solutions that you just heard a little more about from Ben, our managed portfolios and our capital guaranteed investment options. Our lifetime income solutions and our capital guarantees support clients to thrive in retirement by enhancing retirement income and easing that fear of running out. And finally, an area we're really passionate about is expanding access to financial advice to help clients navigate the complexities of the retirement system. As I mentioned earlier, our in-house technology positions us really well for growth. We're doubling down on our digital and technology development to unlock further efficiencies in the advice process, enabling them to see more clients and expanding access to financial advice. This will help also increase switching opportunities to North. I'll take you through these opportunities in a bit more detail. Firstly, MyNorth Lifetime. 2.5 years ago, North launched the MyNorth Lifetime solutions. They are a unique and innovative range of accounts that address those critical concerns for our clients, that fear of running out of funds in retirement. And they were a response directly to the retirement income covenant, which is a key area of focus for the regulators. Instead of regular super, as you heard from Ben, MyNorth Lifetime can enhance retirement outcomes for clients and combines the compelling features of an account-based pension with a traditional annuity to enhance retirement outcomes. And we are seeing those benefits of 60% uplift in income for our members as they hit retirement. Given these benefits, some of our advice licensees and advice practices are now implementing policies to ensure their advisers must consider a lifetime solution or a lifetime income stream such as MyNorth Lifetime when they're assessing certain client segments. We're the only platform in the market that has Lifetime solutions today, with a similar solution only available on AMP Super. As of the 1st of July, we decided to remove the small additional fee on the Lifetime Super account, not the other 2 accounts, as this reduces the barrier for advisers to recommend MyNorth Lifetime Super to their clients. We think that will make those products even more compelling for mass affluent and affluent clients in accumulation and pre-retirement. Our advisers love the full investment flexibility that they get on the platform because that certainly helps in improving client retention and engagement through retirement, unlike annuities, which are set and forget strategies. The data, as you can see here, also shows quite a diverse client base. We have our youngest client being just 17 years old. Yes, his father was a financial planner, so he got good financial planning advice to go into the product. And the average age for our Lifetime Super members is 50 and 70 for our Lifetime pension clients. Moving to MyNorth managed portfolios. As you would all have observed, managed portfolios continue to increase in popularity. 3 in 5 advisers are using them because they deliver efficiency in reporting, administration and compliance whilst they also give advisers the flexibility to choose a solution that best meets the needs of their clients and aligns with that practices' investment philosophy. They offer clients direct ownership transparency, professional management, cost efficiency, tax efficiency and transferability. We are unique in terms of the range of solutions we offer, having just added the blend series to our range of managed portfolio solutions. So this enables practices and licensees to customize at the portfolio level. We are the sole platform in the market offering this comprehensive set of solutions, tailoring portfolio management for all preferences, which we're seeing practices, consultants and their clients really embrace. And it's helping us be one of the fastest-growing managed portfolio offers in the market. Our managed portfolios are now $21.8 billion, which is evidence of the success with advisers and their clients, and we expect that to continue. Efficiency, as I said, is also a key tenet of our vision and our value proposition. This is really important to support those advisers to move from circa 100 clients per adviser to 200. Our intuitive platform has many key features that drive efficiency where advisers have seen measurable time savings they can reinvest in spending time with clients. For example, advisers and their support staff cite a 24-hour a week saving on average from using our managed accounts. Our market-first AI file note is saving up to 30 minutes per client review. And our interactive reporting provides seamless visual access to client accounts and performance data saving time and improving client engagement with interactive snapshots and custom reports. Our recontribution wizard streamlines what used to be a multistep manual process, enabling advisers to implement a common investment strategy using a single workflow with no time out of market and certainly drove significant benefits for us in the recent financial year-end process. We're improving our service efficiency via activity management and straight-through processing, which enables advisers to more efficiently serve their clients, but it also means there's less follow-ups to our North Service Center, which is reducing our cost to serve. We'll continue to invest in adviser efficiency, working with our advisers to understand their needs and ensure we support them to maximize their time with clients. When advisers see more clients, more clients get access to North. I'd just like to share a quick video on how the North interactive tool works in a client review. [Presentation]

Moving to adviser growth and what's underpinning those great cash flow results we talked to the market about today. We've made a significant investment in our platform and our proposition over the last couple of years, and that's driven growth in our productive advisers who are strong advocates for North. The number of advisers on North with greater than $1 million in funds under advice has grown by 25 advisers in the last 6 months to 2,213 advisers. But what's even more important is we're seeing a really strong pipeline of new advisers using North for the first time, evidenced by those opening more than 3 accounts in the last -- sorry, 80 have opened more than 3 accounts in the last 6 months with a further 80 opening their first or second account. In addition to this, we continue to see an increase in the number of advisers with positive cash flow and a decline in the number of advisers with negative cash flow, supporting our long-term cash flow growth potential. We see the future growth with existing advisers coming from 2 key areas: one, increasing the share of wallet as we move them from secondary to primary user and supporting our primary users with efficiency gains so they can see more clients and therefore, bring more -- expand their client base and bring more money to North. By deepening our relationship with existing clients, we actually have an opportunity to take a larger share of the estimated $200 billion that they -- and funds under advice that they manage. That's based on an average of $89 million per adviser. In the latest Adviser Insights Program prepared by NMG Consulting, it noted that North lead users defined by the platform where an adviser intended to place most of their new clients placed 86% of clients with North, which is well above the industry average of 81%. In that same study, 70% of all North advisers reported no intention of switching their existing clients to a new platform. This was the highest of all platforms in the study with the others averaging 57%. An additional 70% of North advisers would only switch less than 10% of their clients depending on their circumstances. Finally, we're also looking to unlock future growth via the 8,000 advisers who do not use North today, but many of whom have mass affluent clients who would benefit from North. We've focused on fostering relationships with new users has become crucial. We have signed 35 new distribution agreements this year so far, and we're seeing a number of advisers who try North for the first time and continue to partner with us and take us on as their primary platform. In the last 3 years of the advisers who have opened 3 or more accounts, 39% opened their third account within a week, and 77% were opening 3 accounts within 3 months of opening their first account. And finally, our cash flow growth. In the first half of 2025, we saw net cash flows, excluding pension payments, increased by 99% versus the first half of 2024, up from $1.16 billion to $2.3 billion. This is a result of our sustained effort to improve cash flows within the Akumin network, previously known as AMP Financial Planning, Charter and Hillross and with the broader adviser population. Our strong partnership with Akumin continues to result in strong net cash flows, which were over $1.5 billion this year so far. In addition, our work in attracting new advisers from outside of that network in the last 2 years now continues to pay off with a turnaround and acceleration in cash flows from that cohort of advisers. We look forward to continuing to partner with all of our advisers to help them run profitable and growing practices, which will ultimately help more customers prepare for and thrive in retirement. I'll be happy to take any questions, but I might hand over to Melinda now, and we'll come back to questions at the end.

Well, thanks, Edwina. That's an amazing business, that Platforms business. I think it's fair to say that Edwina is Alexis' favorite child. However, I've been brought in here to get this business growing. So what I'm going to show you is how I'm working my way into Alexis' affection. And my goal is to be her favorite child and be even better than the Platforms business. So there's 3 things I'm going to be talking to you about today. The first one is how we now have a really strong customer value proposition in AMP Super. The second is that we've stabilized cash flows and shut the back door, and you've seen some of those results today. And the third is that we're now really positioned with strong differentiation to grow the hell out of this thing. And that's -- we've got some good early indications that we are going to be able to do that. So I'm very excited. Okay. You can see here the scale of the current business. It has been growing over the last 2 years, '24 and so far in '25 after many years of decline previously. So I think it's fair to say we've been the problem child. The fund does have more choice than my Super members, and it's got also a significant footprint across employer arrangements or corporate super as well. We continue to be well rated by research houses. And we also won a recent Chant West Award for innovation, which was very exciting. So we're recognized as a high-quality offering. And then only this week, actually, I think it was at the tail end of last week, we've seen some core data research on the best possible retirement 2025 industry report. And that measures how funds in Australia are comparing for pre-retirees and retirees in their service proposition. And AMP Super is in the top 3 funds in the country, scored by pre-retirees and retirees. We're the highest ranked retail fund. There's a midsized industry fund as #1 and the Commonwealth Super scheme is #2. Interestingly, across that survey, retail funds did outperform industry funds by a considerable margin in terms of how we're doing in retirement servicing. We think there are 3 aspects of market dynamics at the moment that are really providing some opportunities for AMP Super. And the first one, Lex has already covered, the retirement income gap with 2.6 million Australians or 62% of people aged over 67 are getting access to the aged pension at the moment. Now Lex put up the number before that 80% of people can't reach a comfortable standard of living in retirement. But tragically, 60% of people can't even reach a modest standard of living in retirement at the moment. Despite many of them having significant wealth in their homes, it's really hard for them to turn that into retirement income. And as we face into the baby boomers continuing to retire, our solutions really need to change to deal to that problem and help our members and Australians more generally have a retirement that matches their expectations. So this has regulatory support and government support through the retirement income covenant. And I think we've heard some really strong statements by regulators that they're not happy with how quickly or super funds are actually changing their arrangements to provide better retirement solutions. And frankly, many funds aren't equipped for the scale of changes need to do that. Secondly, member servicing. Fees across the industry have converged and the last battlefield now is the servicing that's being provided for those administration fees. We've seen some examples of really high-profile service failures recently. A couple of funds are being sued by ASIC and another fund had a 7-week outage due to a systems transition, which hit the front pages of the news. So technology and digital capabilities are really critical for providing those excellent member experiences. I'll show you in a moment, we've had a really high take-up of our digital advice service. I think it's now up to nearly 8,000 journeys through that since we launched. So very exciting. And so there's a real unmet need as we've been talking about for advice and guidance, and this is one of the ways we're helping meet that need. And last but not least, cyber investment. We're not just starting this investment. Cyber is core for AMP. We have a bank as part of the AMP Group, and we're governed by bank-level security, and we extend that same level of security over to super members as well. So we've been doing a lot of work for the last few years really and certainly in the 18 months since I've been here at AMP on our value proposition for AMP Super members. And the main challenge this product or this offering had has been retention of customers. So what we've been doing is focusing on improving that core value proposition, and we're now in a really strong position to -- and we have been turning the dial to stem those outflows. So first of all, in terms of our core offer, Anna Shelley and the team, our Chief Investment Officer, reset with the trustee, the investment strategy 3 years ago, and that's now producing market-leading returns. We've got the advantage of in-house investment capability. And we've also simplified a lot of our back office and investment structures to provide efficiencies. So our returns to 30 June, we're really pleased with our MySuper returns, which you can see up there. It's the second year running of having those as being market-leading in the top few returns across the industry. At the same time that many of our competitors' returns have come off the boil somewhat. Some of them are this year significantly below the median, which we think is going to be around 10.5%. So it's not fully analyzed yet. And then as I've already mentioned, fees have converged. Our fees are really competitive. We've got significant discounts there for large corporates. But certainly, we think fees are appropriate to both compete and to also maintain and support our growth. Where do we think our value adds are? Our insurance is particularly important in the corporate supermarket. We've got a really flexible and strong offering there with TAL, strong terms and conditions, low-cost, modern digital solutions for our customers to engage with us, and we did deliver a 27% premium reduction last year. So we feel we're in a good position there. Then we've got some key differentiators. We've got the unique Lifetime proposition, which I'll talk more about in a moment. But as Edwina mentioned, no other fund in the industry, except for North and AMP Super have this offer. And we think it's going to be quite some time before any other corporate or MySuper style of offering has a Lifetime Super solution. So if anyone who's a corporate or an individual member wants that, they can give me a call, and I'll be happy to talk to them. Secondly, we've got a digital advice journey, which really supports that offering and a range of other services for members, and I'll talk a bit more about that in a moment. Thirdly, we've got dedicated in-house contact centers and administration. So we've got a high degree of control of that front-end customer experience, and we've got very strong customer satisfaction scores. We've got a comprehensive digital app and portal and a range of new services on that, including the digital advice, well-being services and digital insurance. And very excitingly, we are about to launch AMP Rewards, and that's an offering via Citro, as Alexis mentioned. And what that means is that anyone can bring their own card. We're not -- they don't have to open a new account or open a new card. They don't have to register for things. They just link their card to Citro. And then as they spend on that going about their normal business, as they're spending with the partners in the program, they can choose to have credits into their bank account or add it into their superannuation account. So we're really excited about that. We think it will really help us with loyalty and retention. So what have we been doing? Over the last number of years, AMP has simplified its multiple legacy products in this space, and we've got a single, very simple go-forward offering. And that behind the scenes has led to a much simpler operating model, creating efficiencies. We're now focused on how to drive even more efficiency, and that's right through the value chain. So that's focused on both cost efficiencies, but also how we can provide better services to our members. So we have the advantage, as I mentioned, of in-house administration and servicing. So we do have that high control of the member experience. But we're not resting on our laurels there. We're making significant investments as we speak to optimize -- assess and then optimize all the component parts of that existing technology stack that's delivering that value chain. And we're looking at where we can optimize each of those elements. And then as part of that, where it makes sense to partner for some of those services, such as where there's no competitive advantage in us providing it ourselves, then we will be doing that. But our aim is to really retain a high degree of control over that front-facing customer experience. We're also working to drive service efficiencies through deeper straight-through processing. And as part of that, because we've got an in-house AI hub and significant AI capability, we're really looking at where we -- that can assist us in our deep automation. So all of that's going to let us to continue to uplift and improve member outcomes through enhanced offerings, and we're going to be able to further uplift our digital servicing. We think we're up there towards the top of the industry right now, but we're not -- we're going to continue to improve that. So AMP Super right now is more flexible and more nimble than we've ever been in our history, and we're working to even further improve our speed to market. So what this is going to let us do is deliver services and offerings where members and potential members are actually engaging with their superannuation now online. So this program of work, whilst it's focused on value chain efficiency is putting down the foundations for an even deeper D2C capability at AMP Super. So I'm really excited about that. Important to look at our workplace partnerships or corporate Super. It's a key part of our heritage and still a really important customer for AMP Super. We've got deep experience in this area. We've been in it for tens of -- for numbers of decades. And we've got, over that time, built a really flexible offering that can cater for different needs of larger and smaller employers. As I mentioned, strong insurance is a requirement in this part of the market. But we've also got a high degree of flexibility depending on the size and scale of the employer, we can go all the way up to almost a white label arrangement where their brand is on the fund versus our brand. Now we've been looking to strengthen our overall value proposition for our members, but we've also, at the same time, been looking to do that for our employer clients. And our key differentiators here are our quartile 1 investment performance, the new Lifetime Super offering, which they can't get anywhere else. And so those 2 things together give us real proof points now to have a conversation with an employer as to why they should stay with us or why they should be joining us. Corporate super new members have grown 17% year-on-year, and our corporate super book is in positive net cash flow. We're now looking to add to this momentum. We're targeting business growth. We've partnered with a couple of different payroll partnerships to help us with both acquisition of new members and retention. So we started this in August '24. It's been in pilot mode, and we've been just gradually rolling out and piloting initiatives. But we started with Employment Hero in a default super journey in August last year. We added Flare default advertising in October last year. In November last year, we added advertising to existing AMP Super members with Employment Hero, and we're now just about to implement the same with Flare. So we've been piloting and as we find that things work, and we've made sure they're working well, we are then adding more spend into those areas. So we're quite excited about the opportunities for that going forward. So you've seen Alexis and Edwina talk about this slide. This is how AMP Super maps across those different opportunities, with Lifetime Super for the accumulation stage; Lifetime Pension, which is coming in the first half of next year. And then intra-fund advice is really how we are going to be helping customers understand those offerings. And bearing in mind, most members in AMP Super are below the asset level where most advisers can cost effectively service them given their compliance requirements. So I'm going to talk a bit about Lifetime Super and then intra-fund advice, which is a key supporter of that offering. Now we've just released this in May, the Lifetime Super for the mass market, as I like to think about it for the AMP Super Fund. As I mentioned, it won the award -- it won us the award, AMP Super won Best Fund Innovation at the recent Chant West Awards. Now what this makes this offer innovative is it's been rolled out to 140,000 members on day 1 when it commenced in May. So this is why I'm now further up the favorite child stakes. Edwina has got 2,000 customers in Lifetime Super.

140,000 -- just saying.

So no other super fund in the market, except the platform, as I mentioned, the North platform has this offering. So if employers or members want it, they have to come here to get it. There are no fees for members who switch it on, and it doesn't change anything about their account. It actually works in the background, doesn't change their investments, doesn't change anything. It just gives them the opportunity to get those benefits that Ben described later on should they choose to put some of their money in the Lifetime Pension. Now the pension version is on track for release in quarter 2 of next year, and it's a simpler version of the North offering. It has the assurance of money back options, and it also has an aged care bonus. Ben has already explained how the offering works to create that concessional balance. The important thing to note here and why we're so excited about this as a retention tool for our current customer base is that, that concessional balance cannot be taken with you if you roll over to another super fund. So if a member has built up this concessional balance in AMP Super, so they're the 1 of the 140 we've switched it on for or they elect the Lifetime Super feature, they need to stay in AMP Super to be able to retain the value of that. So we do think it's going to help us quite dramatically on that retention side. Now when someone gets to retirement, the power of this offering is the combination of the account-based pension, the allocated pension and the Lifetime Pension. Now the digital advice tool, which I'll talk about in a moment, is the way that we are going to be able to tailor a recommendation to a customer as to what proportion of their money at retirement they should have in the allocated pension and what proportion they should have in the lifetime pension depending on their circumstances. So that is how we're actually taking what, if you look under the hood, as Ben described, can be quite a complex offering and making it really simple for the member. Here's what it will do for you. If you give us all your information, we will tell you what to do. So before I talk about this digital advice offering, just important to step back and clarify what is intra-fund advice. So intra-fund advice is advice that's included in the cost of the fund. It's not charged separately, and it's usually about the super fund only or its related retirement offerings. So here at AMP Super, we've had a salaried adviser team for a number of years. They're fully qualified advisers, and they give phone-based advice only to members and only about their AMP Super Fund or the account-based pension or when it's available, the Lifetime Pension offer. We're not providing comprehensive advice. If a member has more complex needs or they want comprehensive advice, we refer them to a panel of IFAs. So what problem are we trying to solve with this service? We've been talking about that problem a lot today. Core data research indicates retirement income is the top concern for Australians, but planning supports lacking. Only 1/3 of pre-retirees feel connected to their financial future and only 41% understand how to reach their retirement goals. So AMP Super offers and has offered for a number of years, a retirement health check that takes care of this and helps solve that problem. The chart on the right there, the black bars show you that in 2024, when this retirement health check could only be done through our phone-based team, our team did 1,688 pieces of advice in total, and some of those were retirement health checks. So in 2024, we only had phone-based advisers. The number of phone-based pieces of advice we've given in total has been about the same first half '24 to '25, a slight increase. But since we released digital advice on the 31st of January this year, you can see the bright blue line here, the only digital advice journey we've had available has been the retirement health check for most of that time. And we've done nearly 8,000 pieces of advice. So 8,000 retirement health checks have been delivered in just that 5 months since release. That's more than 12x the number we did in the whole calendar year last year. So that's just evidence of the scale, reach and appetite for smart and accessible financial guidance. Now we've just rolled out some more digital advice journeys in the last couple of weeks, and we've got more coming in October, so watch this space. But I'm going to show you a video featuring Andrea Boss, our Head of Advice, who will talk a bit more about this offering. [Presentation]

So a lots of different super funds have a digital advice offering. I think there's some key things that differentiate this one. The first is that it's integrated digital and human advice at no additional cost. The second is the advanced personalization. So members can select their desired retirement income. It's not just pre-populated. And it includes age pension, and there's significant ways that can tailor what they're trying to achieve. It's full personal advice. It's got strong compliance guardrails around it. And if a member is identified as having more complex needs, they are sent out to speak to the phone-based advisers. And lastly, it gives practical action plans. So it actually tells them what to do next and makes it really easy to implement the advice. So we believe this will lead to stronger retention, higher net cash flows and earlier retirement engagement. Now speaking of higher cash flows, I've covered our stronger customer value proposition. I've shown you how we're going for growth with new market-leading offers. And last but not least, I'm really pleased with the momentum that we've got on our cash flows at the moment, even before some of those new initiatives start to take effect. So we've stabilized the cash flow position. We actually had positive cash flows in quarter 2 for the first time since 2017, and we continue to work towards getting the fund into a sustainable positive cash flow position. And you can see from this chart that the trend is heading in the right direction there. The factors that have led to this are improved retention through that stronger CVP I've been talking about, including those payroll partnerships as well. We've seen reduced switching to competitors. We've got very strong peer relative investment returns the last 2 years, which have sent us into quartile 1 across multiple time periods. We've got a deep investment in digital services, which we're continuing to support. We've got strong in-house control of the front-facing customer experience and our customers who deal with us rate us very highly on service. And last but not least, overall, AMP's improved reputation has now also led to improved sentiment in the employer part of the market. So we've only just started on this growth journey, but we're incredibly excited about the opportunities in front of us. I think there's still quite a bit of low-hanging fruit in terms of things that we can continue to do. And then we wait with great interest to see how these new offerings help us improve that momentum. Thanks very much. And I'll hand back to Alexis now.

Thank you very much, and thank you to the team for doing an excellent job of representing us. I think when you look at where we're at today, the rewards don't come quickly in this business. We've been working really hard for a number of years to improve our service, to improve our returns, to improve our reputation. And to be able to stand up here today and put a set of cash flow numbers in front of you, where you can see the quarter-on-quarter-on-quarter improvement that we've committed to for the market for ages. And to actually be able to say, albeit June is an unusual month, but to say that our S&I business delivered positive flows for the first time since 2017 in the second quarter is an amazing feat. And I know we're all very committed to continuing that trajectory. So if I look at where we are at AMP today, I think we're in a genuinely the best position to be able to help people with their retirement. We have repositioned the business. We have got a stable and experienced executive team. We've reduced complexity and we're creating value. We have a point of difference. I know many talk about retirement, but we're out there actually delivering the solutions today. And we have a brand now that is well recognized in the community, and it's synonymous with the super and retirement space. And we're in a part of the market where there are tailwinds, and we think we're uniquely positioned to take the real progress in this opportunity. So I think we're a different company today. We're a company that's adopting a different approach to growth going forward, and we seriously look forward to sharing that journey with you. So on that note, Richard, you're the boss. I'll get the team up on the stage.

Thanks very much, Lex. And just while the team is coming up, just remind, we'll take questions from the room. And also for those online, you're able to put your questions into the webinar. So please feel free to do so. [Operator Instructions] So firstly, are there any -- do we have any questions in the room?

Lafitani from MST. My first question is to Edwina. I'd like to get a better understanding about the managed accounts blended portfolio. You said you've got something differentiated in the market. It's resonating. You've got 3 options. Can you unpack that a little bit? And also, can you give us an idea of where net flows are coming from that you're winning? Is it coming from other sort of retail platforms? Or is it coming from industry funds? Do you have an idea on what's winning?

So to the first question, where managed portfolios have been traditionally and where most platforms are playing is the sort of 2 bookends. You either -- a practice is either buying an off-the-shelf managed portfolio solution which many will do, particularly when they don't have particularly large FUM or that tailoring. So that's where most of our competitors are offering and indeed where our offer was sitting off the shelf or fully tailored. Fully tailored for it to be economical for us to deliver, you really need -- the adviser needs a balance of kind of circa upwards of $250 million to make that economical. What we've done here is we've enabled advisers to take a portfolio that might be sitting on a menu and customize it for their group. So it enables a degree of tailoring, which really benefits -- many of them would say, I can't use the buy menu because I'm bringing a client across. They've got portfolio holdings already. Capital gains tax implications means on bid basis, I can't bring them across. It enables them to tailor through exclusions or inclusions that portfolio based on their clients' needs. So that is quite unique. The way we've delivered it through technology means, again, some were sort of doing that, but they were having to build multiple managed portfolios. We've enabled it through our technology to enable that to be delivered really in a streamlined way. So that's absolutely filling that sweet spot between kind of a $50 million and $250 million adviser, where they had to use a shelf off-the-shelf menu. Now they can use these tailored. So we think that's a real opportunity. And we started delivering that through that Lonsec and BlackRock alliance we had with Akumin, but we've now rolled that functionality out. So I think that's the opportunity there. Back to where our managed -- our flows are coming from, really broadly all over. As I said and the chart demonstrated, what's been really pleasing is the Akumin -- we continue to see strong growth out of our Akumin network. They are in that sweet spot. Matt Lawler and Neil will talk about taking -- their strategy is taking clients from. They are the example of 110 to 200 clients. They are very focused on that. They've topped out in terms of the advice fees they can charge. They repriced advice fees a couple of years ago. So they're very focused now on organic client growth, and we're starting to see that coming through because we have such strong advocacy in that group, we're going to benefit from them becoming more efficient. So we're certainly seeing growth there. And then more broadly across the industry, it is a broad array of practices, many who are now -- we've gone into RFIs where we're winning up against -- I won't name them, but many of our competitors directly winning secondary or primary platform spots and then the money is starting to flow in. They're not bulk transitions, but the money will come -- starting to move across. And we're certainly seeing industry funds because, as I said, the proposition here, and I think the real opportunity is as people go and seek advice, we know, and there was a Conexus report recently that most of the switching now natural switching is coming to retail platforms from industry funds. So industry funds natural flow into industry funds, switching by that, I mean, not contributions. Only 3 industry funds are in net inflow. Three out of the whole market. So we're certainly benefiting from that flow out of industry funds.

May I push it with a question. So a question for Melinda. And first of all, even though Edwina may be the golden child, I can assure you, you are not the problem child in AMP. But anyway, can I get a -- for a better understanding, can you sort of unpack so whereas North is primarily through advisers, you've got a very different distribution model. You're going through payroll, you're going through corporate. You mentioned direct-to-consumer, you would also have advisers. So can you give us a better understanding on how those channels look at the moment? And there's a real competitive advantage now with the Lifetime offering. Where will you be focusing on where you can get best bang for buck in the next sort of 6 months to a year?

Yes, great question. Probably if you look at the size of our current where we're growing. Corporate super is still the largest. And I think we've got -- what we're working on at the moment is how do we deepen our relationship with the corporates who are already -- who already have AMP Super as their default super fund. Because as you'll find with most workplaces now, members have individual choice, so they're not all with the corporate super fund. But the combination of the returns we've got and the Lifetime Super offer, we've got employers quite interested in publicizing that offer again with their employees to see whether more people want to join the fund. So I think we've got considerable opportunities for growth there. We're also participating in a range of RFI processes around the market. So again, research houses are very positive on our offering at the moment and those ones that are running tenders. So yes, corporate super is still important. The second area of focus is the D2C market. So as I outlined, a big investment in both servicing our current members better and making sure we've got all of their super is a big opportunity, but then how do we start to attract more new members. We've been quite successful for a pretty low spend on attracting more direct customers, and we're certainly amping that up at the moment. And then last but certainly not least, we've got a big heritage group of customers on our books that have advisers or had advisers. Advisers now are writing their large customers on to platforms because it's more administratively efficient for them. But we want to be the place that they send those smaller clients or the children of those clients versus to an industry fund. And I think we've got a very good value proposition for that as well.

All right. While we're looking for the next question in the room, I'll just take one from online. This is from Sid at JPMorgan. Alexis, in the June quarter, sharp improvement in flows influenced. Was it influenced by any seasonal factors, or should we expect the net flow trajectory to continue to improve from here? And can you talk about expected revenue margin trends as well?

Let me talk about the flows first. I mean, firstly, I think we have to acknowledge that June is an unusual month in Australia given the fact that it's the financial year-end, so there is contributions. We have talked to the market for a number of quarters now about the fact that we want to see quarterly improvement on flows, and that remains the ongoing commitment. We want to improve our flows quarter-on-quarter-on-quarter. And I think all of us are absolutely committed to doing that, and that's the trajectory we expect to go forward. I'm not going to sit here and say it should be X or it should be Y because I think at this point in time, our total FUM is probably more important than our flows. I'd like to get to the point where our flows are just as important as our FUM, but certainly, that's not the case today, but we want to see quarter-on-quarter on improvement. When we come to margins, I think you would all appreciate we've got our financial results in a couple of weeks' time. But you can see the trends in terms of the cash flows. There's not significant change in the trends from what there was at the year-end there. We've seen a continued growth in managed accounts, and that was to be expected. We forecast that at the end of year results. So I don't see any particular change in the mix of trends there, but we'll certainly have the opportunity to discuss that in more depth in a couple of weeks.

Thank you. In the room?

It's Nigel Pittaway from Citi. Lex, you said that you don't get quick returns. Rewards do not come quickly in this space. Obviously, you've had this MyNorth Lifetime product for 2.5 years. I mean the flows have stopped picking up, but there's still a little bit of a trickle. What do you think it takes to bring flows -- stronger flows into that product? I mean is it complexity with advisers? Is it the fact that people need to -- advisers need to be persuaded more to focus more on post-retirement? What's going to make this thing really clear, do you think?

Yes. Let me make a few comments, and I'll get Edwina to follow that up. I firstly think it's important to understand why we launched the Lifetime solutions. Clearly, they're a great solution for customers. I mean it's pretty hard to argue that. You've all seen the dynamics of that today. But at the time we launched that 2.5 years ago, I want to remind you where we were at AMP. We've been through some difficult times. There was no reason for people to open the door to us. There had been a number of platforms continue to improve their service proposition at a time when we were really introspective. So I think it was really important for us to come out with something that was innovative and kind of got that attention to allow us to get the foot in the door because we just were not going to get a foot in the door. And that's why you can see the improvement in cash flows because we have got the foot in the door. And I think retirement solutions was the main reason for that. So I just think it's important to remember that because sometimes we just look at the flows into the lifetime solutions, and I think it's a far bigger story than that. In terms of what I would see is the learnings from the experience, and I know Ben and Edwina both have had learnings as well, it is complex, right? If you're an adviser, and you're short on time, is wanting to improve the amount of time you spend with customers, it's complex. And I don't think originally, we probably spent enough time working on the tools and the automation of the tools to make it easy for advisers to use. So I think that's a learning we've had. And as a result of that, you can start to see the flows spin up a bit more. But Edwina, did you want to say anything else?

Yes. I'd second that. We certainly -- the real benefit here has been getting access to advisers we wouldn't have been able to speak to. So I think that's absolutely showing through in the numbers. I think the other thing I'd add, it is a new category. And so if you actually cast your mind back in time, account-based pensions, then you probably have these stats better than I do. But when they started, they were nascent, like there was no flow. They trickled in. Now an account-based pension is used in every single adviser portfolio. But it took a while for advisers to get their head around it. I would say these are exactly that. It is a brand-new category of product or account structure. It's never been delivered in this format. It's only -- you've only been able to access an annuity before an adviser hated annuities. They liked it for a small component, but it was a black box, and it didn't enable them to continue having an advice relationship with the client. So there has been some confusion from advisers about where this sits in an advice portfolio and an advice strategy. And so there's been some reluctance to probably they're interested, they come and listen to the seminars and then they kind of sit on the sidelines. That is absolutely shifting. We welcome -- there will be more competition in this market. We know of others coming to market. We welcome that because I think the more in the market talking about the category, the more momentum we're going to see. But Ben, anything? Ben is talking to these advisers every day. So anything else you're seeing?

Similar to account-based pension, we're also on a similar trajectory to our managed portfolios when they were introduced, it starts small and then it's now a row. And Edwina is right. We -- for the last couple of years, we've got the early adopters. And I think you saw on Edwina's chart, we've got some advisers with more than 100, more than 150, more than 170 of their clients using Lifetime. And then there's a bunch we just still waiting to see what everybody else does to be frank. But now we also have -- we've sort of done a bottom-up early adopters. Now we've got some top downs. We've got some large groups who are mandating their advisers must consider a lifetime income solution when you've got a client. Pretty much a very large wide set of playing field to consider. We're starting to see that be implemented in advice policies sort of top down. So we think that will also further change the trajectory.

Is that particular element going to be significant? I mean, are you going to see sort of widespread adoption of that, do you think? Is that something that's sort of going to move flows near term? Or -- because you're not the only people talking about that, but there is sort of some skepticism, obviously, but...

We're not the only one talking about. We're doing it, I would say...

Look, like both Lex and Edwina said, we specifically made a choice when we launched MyNorth Lifetime that we weren't producing a product. And it wasn't intended to be, okay, we're going to make a lot of money off this product, and that's what we're going to focus on. We're making North the best platform for people to prepare for and enter retirement with confidence. And so there are solutions that are embedded in the platform. When we're selling our solutions, we're actually just -- sorry, we're selling Lifetime, we're selling North as a platform. And I think 75% of our Lifetime clients are new to North. The majority of the advisers who are using it are not Akumin. They are previously IFAs and everyone is an IFA. It is absolutely being successful in expanding our range of advisers who are using the platform. It's not just for their Lifetime clients, but more and more for all their clients.

So I think, Nigel, what we're trying to say is, of course, the Lifetime solutions in their own right are important, right? Because I think it helps with a sticky client that's there for lifetime. But I think it is more part of the grand proposition. And to your point, yes, others are talking about it, but I think we've done it. We're working on the next thing now, which we're not going to talk about today, but we're working on the next lot of innovations. And I think that does give us the first to-market advantage. And if others come, I think it would be great to have a few others in that space talking about the category because a lone voice is not easy.

And just to add to your question, Nigel, I think absolutely, as more licensees actually go, the benefits there do absolutely require a bid assessment and possibly if ASIC come in and also say...

And for those novices best interest.

Best interest is, sorry. If ASIC also come in and say, you've got to consider it as part of best interest, that will absolutely create a groundswell. But we are talking to some licensees and advice groups. We've got one large advice group who's now mandating that. There's another group more softly mandating that, and I think that will shift.