Australian Ethical Investment Limited (AEF) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Melanie Hill, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Australian Ethical. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which we work, the Gadigal people, one of the 29 tribes of the Eora Nation, and recognize their continuing connection to the land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present. Please note that today's presentation is being recorded, and a recording will be made available on the Australian Ethical website. The slides used in the presentation are also available on our website. There will be an opportunity for Q&A at the end. Questions can be submitted at any time during the presentation via the webcast using the Ask a Question box. We may also have media in attendance this morning. I'm joined this morning by John McMurdo, our Group CEO and Managing Director; and Mark Simons, our CFO. John will take us through the highlights; Mark will cover off the financials; and then John will provide a short business update. Over to you, John.

Thanks, Mel, and good morning, everyone. Mark and I are also joined this morning by Ludovic Theau, our Group Executive of Investment Management and our Chief Investment Officer; and also Alison George, our Chief Impact and Ethics Officer. It's been another really pleasing 6 months of momentum for us and indeed, a strong full financial year. But before I get into the highlights, I wanted to remind you of some of the important context for understanding our results today, particularly for some of our newer shareholders. Australian Ethical is by design, a pure-play ethical investment management business. But we are not your standard listed financial services company. In addition to the burning drive, we have to be a successful listed company and create significant value for shareholders. And believe me, we are laser-focused on that. We are equally intentional about doing that in a way consistent with our purpose of genuinely creating a better world. How and where we invest, where we use our voice, how we conduct our business, it's all intentional and focused on positively influencing outcomes for customers, the community, the planet and animals. This dual purpose has been in our constitution since our founding almost 40 years ago and is in the DNA and fabric of our organization. We strive to be, and I consider today, we are a true example of these dual objectives being congruent, being symbiotic and not in competition with each other. We stand to be that example, and it's why people choose to invest with us and why people want to work for us, because of our true authenticity. We've been growing with a clear, consistent and disciplined strategy. We have identified a clear addressable market, one we still see continuing to grow, primarily in recent years, leveraging our differentiated value proposition to play into the attractive retail superannuation opportunity. More recently, we've begun leveraging our strong brand and investment capabilities built for super, to win beyond super, particularly in the advised and values-aligned middle market. The pool of capital in these channels is substantial, and our ethical investment track record positions us advantageously. As we've scaled, we've been intentional about the operating platform required to support the business, ensuring it's scalable, resilient and delivers important operating leverage for both our super and nonsuper growth channels, and we've built a highly capable team and culture, the envy of many. We have executed that strategy confident that as we transform Australian Ethical into the bigger, more influential business we're now becoming, that the results of that strategy would continue to crystallize for all of our stakeholders. I'm pleased to share this morning that disciplined execution has delivered even further growth and improvement in financial metrics on what was already and clearly a milestone year in FY '24. This year, full underlying profit was up a significant 29% year-on-year to $23.8 million, delivering on the scale benefits we've realized in recent periods. Net profit after tax was up 68% to $19.9 million. Importantly, profit growth has been enabled by a 19% revenue uplift on FY '24, due substantially to organic growth, but further bolstered by revenues attached to the successful integration of Altius Asset Management. At the same time, operating cost growth, even allowing for the operating costs of Altius and disciplined reinvestment in the underlying growth drivers of the business, has been held at 14%. As we've shared, net flows this financial year were disrupted in the period as we changed providers for our superannuation administration. Post that disruption, though, flows have reverted to stronger levels with our fourth quarter being a new record quarter at Australian Ethical at $257 million, boosted by financial year super contributions. Investment performance has been strong as our team continues to deliver high-quality portfolio performance in most strategies, and this has all contributed to FUM growth that sees us at a new high of $13.94 billion, up 34% since June 2024. Our scale growth, as I've said consistently, has always been with a structural improvement in operating leverage in mind, so it is very pleasing to see further significant improvement in our underlying cost-to-income ratio at 71.4% for the year compared with 73.7% in FY '24. This is clearly a factor of our revenue growth, but also the cost efficiencies achieved through our recent super administration and custody transitions, the build of a more scalable and cost-effective business platform underpinning our revenue-generating business lines. Our financial momentum and the structural enhancement in our profit realization has enabled the Board with confidence to confirm a second half dividend of $0.09 per share, taking our full year dividend to $0.14 per share, 56% higher than FY '24. When we embarked on our growth strategy some years ago, we were clear that our funds under management and revenue capture, if we were successful, would result in stronger medium- to longer-term profit growth and a business more capable of capturing that further upside beyond that. As I stand here today, the Australian Ethical team continue to deliver on that promise. FUM capture has been strong, predominantly from strong and consistent organic growth. We've actually now delivered 50 consecutive quarters of positive net flows when other fund managers have at times struggled. We achieved that through various economic and political cycles, inflationary environments, even global pandemics and geopolitical tensions. That organic growth has been augmented by accretive M&A, which has delivered further valuable scale and in the more recent case of Altius Asset Management, which we completed in late September, both scale and aligned capability, that increases the strength and breadth of our economic engine, being investment management margin capture. Revenue growth, even after sharpening our pricing over the 5 years to intentionally create a better moat for customer retention, has been very pleasing, and that's enabled us now to present 5-year underlying EPS growth running at 20% compound. For me, though, even more pleasing than the results we have already delivered, is the unquestionably stronger, more diversified, more capable business that we now have and that positions us strongly for further growth. We've built with intention, one of the most trusted brands in the country with very strong customer satisfaction measures, measured by Net Promoter Scores from customers. We were awarded the NEO Brand Awards for Financial Partner of the Year. We further advanced the build of our target operating platform, with significant transitions of superannuation providers, custodians, and investment platform partners, providing us modern, agile, scalable solutions with significant underlying unit cost efficiencies at the same time, and our investment capabilities, including human capital, asset classes, and product offering are broader and deeper than ever before. That investing and impact capability is underpinning exactly what our target market is attracted to, high-quality, repeatable investment returns, while putting our stronger shoulder to the wheel on creating a better world, including using our growing scale, credibility and trusted voice to help deliver on our purpose, in boardrooms with CEOs at AGMs, via the media, through sponsoring research, and through submission to industry bodies and governments, not only with businesses and assets we direct capital to, but also in sectors where we don't, add to that, the valuable and growing work of our foundation and our customers value our approach and our efforts immensely, done for reasons of mission, but also instrumental in building our brand trust. A better series of proof points than me talking about the quality of the company are the number of external awards we're receiving across almost every facet of our business, for investments and superannuation excellence and performance, responsible investment leadership, brand resonance, for our customer experience and service, our B Corp leadership across Australia and New Zealand and lots more to boot. Australian Ethical is now a business that has been able to invest for growth, achieve growth, achieve accelerated profit realization and build a true platform to capture more. And we now have an incredibly talented and capable team, with recent hires bringing with them deep experience from the best investment and superannuation houses domestically and internationally. We have recently reorganized our leadership team, elevating the roles of 2 existing highly-experienced executives to create focus and accountability for each of our strategic pillars of growth, super and investments outside super. And when you combine this level of capability, authenticity and deep focus, I do believe we're so well positioned for the opportunity ahead. Mark, can I get you to take us through the financial highlights and results?

Thank you, John. I agree, FY '25 has delivered a very strong set of results aligned to our strategy. There are many financial highlights this year, but let me begin with a snapshot of the annual financial results. Underlying profit increased 29% to $23.8 million and net profit attributable to shareholders of $19.9 million was 68% better than last year. The increase was driven by both organic and inorganic growth in the business, and the greater scale and disciplined cost management has driven more than 2 percentage point improvement in operating leverage. Improving our operating leverage as we scale continues to be a core focus of ours with a 7.7 percentage point improvement in the past 2 years. This improvement, coupled with our revenue growth, has accelerated our profit growth. Our underlying profit excludes nonunderlying costs, which include the super admin transition project, due diligence and transaction costs in connection with the Altius acquisition, along with other due diligence costs on M&A opportunities aligned to our strategy and the amortization of Altius intangibles. The successful Altius transaction has met our capability, operational and financial objectives. The annualized EBITDA contribution of $1.15 million exceeds the deal metrics reported to the market, is EPS accretive and represents greater than 20% return on this investment. FUM was up 34% on last year and represents over 3x growth as we look back 5 years to the $4.05 billion FUM we recorded in June 2020, giving us a 5-year compound annual growth rate for FUM of 28%. FUM growth during the year was delivered through organic flows, investment performance and Altius acquisition. Excluding the impact of Altius, organic FUM grew a commendable 15%. Customer numbers during the year were impacted by a large number of closures of low balance in active accounts as part of the Protect your Super legislation. Excluding this impact, super members were up 2%. FY '25 was a challenging year for net flows given the disruption caused by the super admin transition to GROW. Despite the transition, we saw a strong uptick in net flows during the last quarter throughout FY '25 following the resumption of marketing campaigns, the ongoing resolution of transition teething issues and strong end of year financial contributions. We continue to work with GROW to optimize the digital experience for all channels connecting to the super fund. We were pleased to report organic net flows of $593 million for the year. Net flows were primarily driven by super net flows, which were underpinned by the continued strong super guarantee contributions. We also benefit from a lower proportion of members in the pension phase versus industry average and therefore, experienced lower outflows through pension payments. On a macro view, the super market -- superannuation market is seeing far lower levels of member switching between super funds, resulting in lower rollovers in than 2 to 3 years ago. However, with our brand awareness and targeted marketing campaigns, we hope to see an uptick of this inflow driver over the coming year. On the investment product side, we are seeing good traction from the values-aligned middle market channel, where we have increased sales efforts and are seeing a solid pipeline. This channel focuses on NGOs, including charities and foundations, as well as values-aligned businesses looking to invest their funds with an aligned fund manager. We recorded $118 million in net flows from this channel. Following the acquisition of Altius, we've experienced some anticipated churn in the institutional channel as one of our clients uses the Altius funds to manage their capital requirements with seasonal and cyclical fluctuations. Our fee strategy is a key component of our strategy to ensure our products are competitive for current and future customers, while at the same time driving profitable growth for our shareholders. We provide premium ethical products at top quartile price. Our key focus is delivery against leading ethical standards and meeting our investment objectives after fees. On an annual basis, we benchmark our fees against competitors. And as we scale, we will continue to fine-tune our pricing. The average fee margin reduction during FY '25 was primarily due to the change in product mix following the acquisition of Altius. On the 1st of August '25, we reduced the super admin fee across all super options by 1 basis point, which was offset by the introduction of an insurance admin fee to ensure equity among members. In FY '26 and beyond, we expect our pricing structure to continue to moderate downward following annual benchmarking as we target lower end of the top quartile pricing. Revenue growth of 19% has been driven by average FUM growth of 31%, which was partially offset by the previously mentioned lower average revenue margin mix. Revenue has grown at 19% compound rate over the past 5 years, notwithstanding our strategic fee reductions. At the end of the financial year, our revenue run rate is $127 million based on the closing FUM and the current revenue margin. In order to best position ourselves for the growth opportunities that lie ahead, it has been critical that we continue to invest in a scalable institutional-grade business platform. Over the course of the year we have added capability to support this investment-led product offering. We've completed the super admin transition to GROW for 80% of our super members as well as completed the transition of our new custodian and investment administrators to State Street. We invested in our technology strategy by boosting our data team capability to enable a secure, data-driven digitalized business alongside advanced acquisition and retention strategies, and we're setting up for a future operational efficiency to be achieved through automation and innovation. We are partway through implementing the new front and middle office investment systems in a staged approach by asset class. Our operating expenses increased 14% to $84.5 million. Our FTE has increased from 125 to 138 at year-end as we have continued to enhance our capability with a high-performing, high-caliber team. The increase in FTE included the 6-person Altius team, strong new capability in the investment team as well as other hires to strengthen our data and technology, governance and middle office functions. Fund-related expenses, which are variable in nature, increased 20%, were primarily driven by the continued FUM growth, cost to implement the upgraded investment management platform, and partially offset by the commercial benefits of the transition of our super admin and custody services, which will also enable enhanced customer experience and investment processes. And with this, the underlying administration custody fees have decreased 4% on FY '24. IT expenses increased 10% due to our further investment in our technology platform to support business growth and continued improvement in cloud and digital capability and investment in our cybersecurity defenses. A modest 5% increase in marketing spend reflects our ongoing commitment to build our brand, driving a strong uplift in our brand awareness, which should underpin further growth. And we've experienced lower external services, recruitment and consulting costs this year. We continue to retain a strong balance sheet with excellent cash conversion, no debt and surplus [ rate ] capital. These charts show our positive net shareholder metrics over time, with our underlying profit growing at a strong 20% CAGR since FY '20. Confidence in our business and momentum has resulted in the Board declaring a record final dividend of $0.09, which brings the full year dividend to $0.14, up a strong 56% on the last year. We are proud to deliver such strong financial results, underpinned by our high-performing team and culture, resilient and robust business model, trusted brand and successful execution of our strategy. With this momentum, we look ahead to the coming year with great enthusiasm and confidence. I'll now hand you back to John to provide a business update.

Thanks very much, Mark. In terms of business update, we're making very meaningful progress in every element of our strategic execution. Our brand strength, the investment outcomes we're delivering for investors and their advocacy of and for us continues to strengthen. Our investment capability has advanced manifestly with an expanded investment in ethics, capability and team, the completion of the Altius acquisition, stronger asset class capability in fixed income and private markets and a stronger product offering overall. We now have recommended ratings for all of our multi-asset funds, our Australian Shares, Emerging Companies and High Conviction Funds, and in more recent days, our Green Bond and Sustainable Bond Funds. We're winning numerous awards for many aspects of our investing capability. Indeed, one of our flagship funds, our retail Australian Shares Fund celebrated its 30-year anniversary during the year and has delivered an amazing 12.5% per annum investment return, gross of fees. Over the 30 years, this is around 3% per annum compound above the ASX 300. And it's a really strong evidence point of our successful long-term investing capability, delivering strong outcomes for our customers. Our successful transitions to GROW and State Street are enhancing our customer delivery and our operational efficiency while delivering valuable unit cost reductions. Our implementation of the Charles River and Alpha Data platform will first and foremost support the resilience of our investment business, but also allow us to present a more institutional-grade platform to market, secure further investment consultants and other external stakeholder support, and position us even more strongly to compete in the values-aligned middle market space. We're making meaningful progress in the use of our improved data capability, aided by more agile service providers to further optimize and target our marketing and retention activities. This now includes the early use of AI to support optimization. And as I've shared, the people capability we've been able to build and secure really underpins a great platform for further growth. In FY '26, revenue growth will be supported by our opening FUM run rate, the increase in the superannuation guarantee rate, which was raised to 12% through legislation on the 1st of July and our continued push into the middle markets. On costs, we'll continue to see the full year benefits in unit costs of our now successfully delivered operating platform enhancements, including our administration platform consolidation. Of course, some of that will be applied to prudent reinvestment in our growth platform, but we will continue to apply a very disciplined approach to core cost management, which I expect to see results and further incremental improvements in our underlying cost-to-income ratio. Our medium term opportunity is really exciting to us. We believe the drivers for and the demand for responsible investing will continue over time, even as political regimes change and rhetoric oscillates because the existential threat to the planet and the urgency of many, if not all humans, to address these problems is growing. The strong authentic brand that Australian Ethical now has positions us very strongly. We've worked hard and as a priority over the last few years to build deep and perpetual capability in the high-margin, sticky, high systems growth part of the market being retail superannuation and believe we are now very strongly positioned with brand trust, investment capability and performance, direct-to-consumer marketing capability, channel breadth and momentum. It's been our priority, and I'm pleased with the traction. It will underpin our forward growth. But as I've highlighted also in more recent times, we've been systematically building the capability and infrastructure to compete and succeed in the investment or non-superannuation space. We see potential for new revenue capture through the asset class expansion we've already embarked on in private markets and fixed income and future potential in active international equities. The investment talent, product expansion, systems and process we continue to build and believe we can package in the years ahead, combined with our natural reach into the adviser market and now further augmented with resource pointed at the values-aligned middle market is, we believe, deeply prospective for us. We expect the early green shoots of that work to continue to emerge over the next 12 to 24 months as we present recent and new product developments to market and build what is already a growing pipeline of opportunities. We also remain intent on landing the benefits of scale over time. In summary, I'm describing a strategy that sees us start to leverage the optionality and the growth platform we've built for revenue growth and continue to focus our effort to build and partner for more efficient systems and process and leverage our scalable rate cards over the medium term. We're adamant that we can continue to grow the top line, both organically and periodically inorganically also, as you've seen, and also further the cost-to-income jaw widening that you've seen in recent years. This is a strategy that will benefit all of our stakeholders. Thanks very much for joining us again this morning. We do appreciate your ongoing interest and support of Australian Ethical and look forward to answering any questions that you might have.

Thanks, John. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type your question into the Ask a Question box. We have had some questions coming in already, the first one being, it's been another year of significant growth. Is this level of growth sustainable organically?

Thanks for the question. Yes, I've just mentioned, we're delighted with the position that we've built in superannuation, strong brand trust, great investment performance, direct marketing capability and a very unique value proposition, which is so attractive to a growing number of Australians. It's a systems growth mandated sector, and we're really delighted with that and think that will continue to underpin our growth. But I'm equally excited about what we're building in the investment space, traction now with advisers, pipeline of opportunities in what we call the values-aligned middle market space, great investment capability, the product ratings we've been building, underpinned by strong system and process. These are capabilities we think we can naturally package and deploy into an equally large pool of capital outside of superannuation. And so we're really excited about now having 2 growth engines in this business to underpin our forward organic growth.

Thank you, John. I've had a couple of questions in regarding marketing expenditure, particularly around the difference between H1 and H2, the difference in marketing expenditure within FY '25. A couple of questions about how this might be tracking in FY '26 and what do you foresee for marketing expenditure in FY '26?

Yes, it's a good question. As we had signaled throughout FY '25, FY '25 was unusual for us in that in our super administration platform change, we were ostensibly out of the market for 2 months, which is far from ideal. And we -- that was a difficult period for us. But naturally, we turned off our marketing spend during that period through that major transition. That was very beneficial for us overall, but did slow us down on our acquisition during the period. On switching that back on in the second half, so you see higher cost in the second half, naturally, as we've turned that activity back on. But it's been really pleasing to see the momentum return with customers joining us again, uplifting cash flows. And I think you saw that well represented in our record fourth quarter of net flows.

Great, thank you. And in terms of marketing spend, are you still getting good ROIs on that spend? And how is the acquisition cost for new members changing in the superannuation market?

Yes. Look, we're very happy with it. We're happy with the level that we're running at. So I don't see a major change to that into FY '26. It's been very effective for us. As most know, we're growing at a very fast rate relative to many competitors. So pleased with that program overall. Acquisition costs have been pretty strong and good for us. We're still very, very satisfied with the return on investment we get for that. Of course, as others compete with you, that gets more challenging over time. But what I've been excited about in recent months is the opportunity to use data more clearly in a more targeted manner with the help of our stronger service providers. And we're expecting the benefit of that to broadly offset any competitive tension we have.

Great. Thank you. A question about pricing strategy and the outlook about what you're doing with pricing strategy across Super and investment management from here.

Yes, good. Mark, do you want to pick up on that?

Sure. Thank you. As I was mentioning in the presentation, we do have a very intentional pricing strategy. A thing to remind everyone, with our product mix, that's part of our pricing strategy, obviously, that does change the revenue margins. Our revenue margin as at 30 June for the blended portfolio is 91 basis points. We do an annual benchmarking exercise, but what we do represent to the market is a premium product across all our products, including our super and our investment management products. And that premium is referencing the ethics, our stewardship, our advocacy, and that commands a premium price. However, we always are looking at our pricing strategies in connection with being more competitive for both current customers and future customers. And so with that, we obviously will be considering our pricing over the coming period, and we believe that it will just moderate downward but it'll be incremental. Thank you.