WT Financial Group Limited (WTL) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to WT Financial Group's 2025 Financial Year Indicative Results Presentation. My name is Tim McGowen. I'm the host for this presentation this morning. I'm joined, of course, by Mr. Keith Cullen, who is the Founder and Managing Director of WT Financial Group. Morning, Keith. How are you?

Good morning, Tim.

The format for today is a short presentation followed by Q&A. [Operator Instructions] And if you have to leave early, this presentation is recorded and available for later playback. Keith, I think that's the housekeeping. Over to you.

Thanks very much, Tim, and thanks, everybody, for joining. [ Louisa ], if you can move on to the most important slide of the day, of course, our disclaimer. I'm sure you've all seen it before. Anything discussed today is not personal advice. It's for general information purposes only, and you should seek professional tax, accounting and financial advice before acting on anything discussed here today. All right. With that out of the way, let's get started. All right. Now I know that a lot of you that have registered today will know the company and know it well and/or have been following it for some time and/or, of course, amongst our great cohort of shareholders. However, we also have some new people joining us today, and we've received a lot of questions already from some of those people through that link that we provided in the announcement we put out the other day. So I'm just going to give a little recap of WT Financial Group and what we do and how we're structured. So through a series of acquisitions starting in 2018, we have built WT Financial Group into one of Australia's largest networks of financial advisers. And by networks of financial advisers, I mean we hold a number of Australian financial services licenses. And through those licenses, we authorize corporate entities whose advisers provide advice to both retail and wholesale clients. So those corporate entities are privately and independently owned, but they're acting as corporate authorized representatives of ours. This is what our organizational chart looks like, our parent company at the top there, WT Financial Group. The 4 acquisitions that we've made, some really well-known brands in the Australian landscape there, business-to-business brands, of course, rather than consumer-facing brands in Sentry Group, Synchron, Millennium3 and Wealth Today. So we've made all those acquisitions, picked up all of the corporate authorized entities that were sitting underneath them, and we brought them all together in under a single structure. Now whilst we've retained those brand names because they've got a lot of brand equity in them, many of the advisers in those groups have been with them since they were founded, in the case of Millennium3 and Synchron, 30 years ago. And so they feel a great affinity to those brands as do we, and we wanted to pick up the goodwill associated with them. So we've continued to maintain those brands, but we're not operating 4 different businesses. We've rationalized and streamlined all of the support that we provide to the advisers in those groups under a single banner called Wealth Advisor. And so you see Wealth Advisor, that's what we call our business-to-business adviser hub, and it's where we run our licensee services as well. We also provide some services to other AFSLs and self-licensed practices. Now where this journey began for us was with a retail operation under the Spring Financial Group brand. It was in 2018 that we decided to pivot away from retail, and we sold off a lot of our retail assets. And we decided to get into this advice network space, what used to be known as the dealer group space. So that's what the corporate chart looks like: WT Financial Group, the parent company; the core B2B business being Sentry, Synchron, Wealth Today and Millennium3; some 500-odd advisers, more than 500 advisers, in those groups across about 400 advice practices, giving advice to well more than 120,000 Australian consumers; managing around or advising on around $23 billion worth of assets for those consumers; and with an in-force insurance premium book, personal life insurance, TBD, et cetera, of around $500 million. So a pretty sizable business that we're operating here and a very good network all operating under the Wealth Adviser banner in terms of the services we provide to those 4 networks. And of course, we still retain, much smaller than what it was previously, a small B2C business, and we think this is important because it keeps it real for us. So by directly dealing with consumers on a day-to-day basis through that business, it enables us to stay connected with the consumer market that our advisers are dealing with every day. So that's a bit of background. Let's move on, [ Louisa ], if we can to the next slide. Now I don't like seeing my smiling face any more than you do, but here's the smiling faces of my fellow directors: Guy Hedley, our Chairman; Chris Kelesis, the co-founder of the business with me and a significant shareholder; more recently joining us, the fantastic Chelsea Pottenger, who brings a lot of that field thinking to the business; and there's myself, my smiling face. Why am I putting that slide out there? This is a founder-led business. And I think that's important for shareholders. Around 30% of WTL remains in the hands of Board and management, and that really aligns our interest with all of our shareholders. So we'll hop on to the next slide there. I should say, before I move on to that, I haven't included a slide on our executive management team. But anybody that's interested in the business, I would really encourage them to hop on to our main website at wtfglimited.com and just go and have a look at the profiles and the experience of this team that we brought together through these acquisitions. It's been one of the most rewarding things about the acquisitions that we've done is whether David Newman, our Chief Operating Officer; or Ricton Jones, who's our Group Financial Controller; or many of our regional managers, these senior people in the business that have been with those entities that we acquired for many years, and we brought them all together under this umbrella and put them into a team structure that's really delivering results. So I'd really encourage you to go and have a look at just the depth of the executive team that we've brought together in this business. So let's have a look. What's so exciting about financial advice at the moment? Well, you would have thought I think back in 2018, when we had the Hayne Royal Commission and you couldn't pick up a newspaper or turn on the television or listen to the radio without hearing tales of sin from the major institutions that were involved in advice and financial services and banking in Australia. Hayne had a lot to say about it as did the consumer groups, and it really caused an upheaval in the industry more broadly and certainly, in the advice profession. Fast forward to now, it's become a distant memory for many. But 2018, we saw the opportunity. And many said we were running into a burning building in the wake of the Royal Commission, but we saw what was coming in terms of the industry tailwinds, and that's why we made a decision to go on the acquisition trial and to start putting together this network of independent advice practices. We've got now superannuation in Australia, it's risen to $4 trillion. I mean it had just gone through $3 trillion, I think, at the time in 2018. And I said to our Chairman and our major shareholders, "I really think we've got a supply-demand imbalance coming in this country that warrants us running into that burn building," as my Chairman put it. That pool has now grown to $4 trillion of superannuation in Australia. We're right on the doorstep or we've started this process of what has been referred to as the greatest generational wealth transfer in history. And that is the baby boomers all leaving their money to the Gen Xs. Now when I talk about intergenerational wealth transfer, I see a lot of our advisers' eyes glaze over because they think they're going to need to learn to deal with millennials and the younger people. The reality is that wealth transfer, some $3.5 trillion across the next couple of decades, it's not going from the old to the young, it's going from the eldest who are passing away in their 80s to the next generation, in their 50s and 60s, on the doorstep of retirement. So this is amazing, the convergence of these 2 things, this growth in super and this transfer of wealth, much of which is tied up in property, to the next generation. We've got an aging population, heading towards retirement. We've got a wall of people, a wall of capital going towards retirement, and we've got increasingly complex superannuation laws, tax laws and social security laws. People need advice. They've got the capacity to pay for it, and that's only increasing. Yet at the same time, we've got supply side constraints. Number one, contraction; and now constraints. Adviser numbers are down by nearly 45% since the Royal Commission. This has created a scarcity premium opportunity for scale advice practices and for scale networks like ours. Incredible supply-demand imbalance, numbers have dropped as far as advisers are concerned, barriers to entry have been set incredibly high. So the next tailwind that's come along, we've got a government now that's realized this supply/demand constraint is there. They've woken up to it. We've had the quality of advice review that's being all about how do we get more advice to more people in Australia. So the focus is on improving access to advice from a regulatory perspective. This is after the chokehold from a regulatory perspective that we had in the wake of the Royal Commission. The governments are looking for more ways to deliver advice to more people. And all the policy settings are supportive of growth and looking at reforming education pathways for advisers.

Keith, I'll just interrupt there with a quick question. We know a lot about strong industry tailwinds, but I get a little bit skeptical when you've got adviser numbers declining. We're going to see any growth again?

Look, it's a great question, Tim. I'll answer it in 2 parts. The first thing about the decline in adviser numbers is it's really driven people to start focusing on scale because this, by and large, is still quite a cottage industry in Australia. Most of the advice practices in Australia are 1, 2, 3 practitioners with a small team of support staff, not a lot of operational efficiency in that. So when you've got huge consumer demand, unless you're a very efficient business, you're really going to struggle to take advantage of that supply-demand imbalance. So the supply-demand imbalance has been really positive because it's got practitioners thinking about how do they spend more time -- I read a trade press piece recently, Tim, and a lady by the name of Adele Martin that's a consultant to advice practices and a very good one, she couched this as saying, "Advisers need to think of themselves more like Beyoncé. It really resonated with me because what she meant by that is too many advisers, if you have used the Beyoncé analogy, are booking their own flights, booking their own roadies, being their own roadie in many circumstances, booking their own tour venues, et cetera, they've got to get better at just showing up and performing and doing what they do best. So this supply-demand imbalance is driving them towards that. That's driving technological innovation and the adoption of technology, outsourcing rather than in-sourcing to get efficiencies of scale. And most importantly, it's driving a lot of M&A activity. But you're right. So this supply-demand constraint is really creating upward pressure on prices and on valuations. But you're right, in the longer term, how is that supply constraint going to benefit the profession more broadly. It's not, unless something is done about it. So the benefit is really coming in the short term because of that rationalization I'm talking about and corporatization I'm talking about, that will continue. But in the longer term, if we don't fix the inflow of advisers, then we're going to have no one to sit in front of clients when people want to retire in 10 and 15 or 20 years' time. Now the good news there is, as I talked here about the regulatory reform that we've got coming. Minister Jones, who was the outgoing Financial Services Minister before this current government was returned, stood up in Canberra in February, made a commitment and said he and Treasury had recognized the problem. The problem is, in all these post-Hayne regulatory changes that they made, post-Hayne Royal Commission regulatory changes they made, one of them was to set this ridiculously high standard on what constituted a relevant degree to become a financial adviser. And they literally went and created a brand-new degree. Well, guess what, young people aren't doing that because young people, when they're 18 and 19 and choosing the university courses, they want to do a generalist degree, Tim. They want to do economics or accounting or finance, a relevant degree, meaning not a capitalized term, but a small R and a small D. And they want to be able to convert that with vocational training. The minister has come out and recognize that, that all needs to change. When he made that announcement back in February, I think it was. Immediately, the coalition came out in support of it. There's certainly very broad industry support for it. And so I think we'll see it change. Unfortunately, it's not a regulatory change. It's a legislative change that's needed. But the new minister, Daniel Mulino, confirmed to us at a recent event, a financial services counsel event, it's right in the priority list. And so we'll get there, we'll get that regulatory reform through, which will be fantastic because we'll have benefited from this rationalization, corporatization and people thinking about their pricing properly. And then we'll be able to start to grow into a much more robust profession. And so that's really exciting. So that's a long way of answering it, Tim, but really, it's a fundamental driver for the value in the profession at the moment, but it is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed. The good news is everybody is committed to getting it sorted.

I'll let you continue.

All right. Thanks, Tim. And [ Louisa ], I think we're ready for the next slide. So let's hop on to what today is all about, which is having a look at our full year indicative results. Now I must say, these are not audited numbers. But we're very confident that there's not going to be any issues arising in audit. So we think that the audit results, we don't expect any material changes here. Look, we've got a small team. We like to run the business really efficiently. And so we don't have dozens of people in the finance department that can pull together and respond to the audit and get it out in the first couple of weeks of August, like some larger companies do, but we do like to be ahead with the numbers as quickly as we're confident with them. And so that's why we've had this tradition for a few years now of putting our indicative results out as soon as we can. And I'll say we don't expect any material changes. We've never been written with that in the past. So I'm pretty confident that, that will be the case again this year. So let's have a look at it in summary. We'll look at gross revenue first. People often look at our business and they go, "Gee, you're reporting a lot of revenue and therefore, your EBIT margins and your profit margins aren't that great." The reality is our gross revenue represents all of the revenue that comes in to all of the advice practices in the network because at law, their customers are our customers because we're responsible for the effective, fair and honest delivery of advice and services to those people. So all of the revenue comes through us. So under the Australian accounting standards, we don't see any other way of treating it other than to book that all as revenue from contracts. So gross revenue, $216 million, nearly $217 million for the financial year. That's up 17% on the year prior. And you can have a look here at the graph across the last sort of 5 years, going back to 2021 when we just had little old Wealth Today, the first practice, the first network that we acquired, $12 million. Fast forward to 2025, $216 million, $217 million there. Below that, you see our net revenue number. And we think this is the best number to assess our ratios when you're looking at sort of EBIT performance or EBITDA performance as a ratio to revenue, which is our net revenue. So that's all of our revenue. It's made up of this. It's made up of the retention we keep out of the gross payments that come through for advisers, then base fees and other variable fees that the advice practices that we support pay to us, plus there's some of our retail revenue in there as well, small contribution, sort of less than $2 million of that. So $27 million is the net revenue component. Direct costs of $6.5 million on that, giving us a GP line of $21.2 million. Total expenses of $14 million. Now let's just start there. So we've had gross revenue up 17%, net revenue up 18%, and then gross profit up 18%, pretty good year-on-year considering that growth profile of the business over the last 5 years. That delivers an EBITDA line of $6.88 million, which is up 15% on the prior year for the underlying business; an EBIT line of $6.2 million, which is up 17% on the prior year; and then we've got our interest and financing expense there. Now that expense is made up literally of interest payments on our corporate finance facility, which is drawn at $6.7 million. That's an $11.7 million facility, drawn to $6.7 million at the moment, so we've got $5 million of buffer there that is unused. And also included in that is any of you that follow the Australian accounting standards will know this crazy thing of how leases are treated. So there's what they call the financing cost associated with our premises leases in there. But that is predominant. I think that's about $200,000. So about $600,000 worth of facility interest payments -- or less, I think $500,000 on the balance being that lease financing. So delivering us a 22% growth in underlying net profit before tax. So I've got down the bottom there, a couple of years ago, over these last few years, we've been selling a number of our retail assets. So we've had some lumpy one-off revenue at times. So people criticized me a few years ago. They said, "Keith, when you're putting your numbers out, you've got to talk about the underlying business and stand those things out separately." Fair enough, fair cop, because you can see the statutory adjustments over the years. I mean, back in 2022, we had a positive impact on the underlying business of $1.4 million. It was more than the net profit before tax of the underlying business in total. So I get why people wanted us to stand it out. The following year, we had nearly a $2 million impact from some asset sales. Last year, we had a net impact of $350,000 from asset sales. So that's what those net one-off income and expenses are. There's whatever revenue or uplift we've taken in selling assets, less any costs associated with their disposal. Or like, if you look back in 2021, we wrote off a bunch of goodwill associated with some earlier retail assets that we'd sold there, and we had a bunch of restructuring costs associated with an acquisition that we needed to expense out. Under there, you'll see what the statutory net profit before tax line was for each of the years. So we think the statutory net profit before tax this year is pretty much in line with what the underlying net profit before tax is. There's only a $34,000 adjustment there. To be honest, I'm not even sure what that was from memory. I think we sold a bunch of desks and things down at our Melbourne office or something. We moved premises down there. So a negligible impact for this year in terms of the one-offs, meaning that the statutory result will be in line with the net profit before tax of the underlying business. And that, in and of itself, even the statutory result, even taking into account that $357,000 impact from one-offs last year that was a positive impact, up 14%. We haven't set it on our tax position yet. We did want to get these management accounts out. I put the pressure on the external accountants and Ricton and the team to do a tax calculation. They're not far enough into the audit process to finalize it yet. So we've ruled a line there at the statutory net profit before tax. So that's why I haven't tried to compare that. Look, I have to imagine that, and I'll shoot me for saying this, we're going to be around that $1.1 million, $1.3 million mark, something like that on tax. I'll just finish off on tax on this slide, Tim. We've had the benefit of carryforward tax losses. We've done these business consolidations over time. So we've ended up in this really unique position in the last few years. We ended up with a scenario where we had carryforward tax losses from bringing people into a consolidated tax group, but we also had franking credits. So that was a great position to be in. This year, so we haven't -- whilst we've had that tax calculation in the last few years on our profit, we haven't actually had to pay any cash tax, and we still had franking credits that enabled us to deliver about nearly $3 million worth of fully franked dividends last year during the last financial year. This year, we've still got a little bit left in the tin as far as both those things are concerned, actually, as far as the carryforward tax losses are concerned. But I'd assume, if we end with about a $1.3 million tax bill, $300,000 of it's going to need to be in cash, Tim. And on the franking credit side, I think we're down to about $450,000 worth of franking credits left, and that's because we haven't been paying that cash tax in the last few years, but we have started paying dividends. So we've been using it up. At one point, we had $1.8 million or something of franking credits, I think.

I'll just let you continue, Keith, we've got a couple of questions, but we'll go into the financials.

Beauty. Okay. Thanks. [ Louisa ], next slide there then, please. All right. This is just showing what the growth looked like on both that gross revenue line, starting at $13 million, heading up to $216 million across those 5 years; the net revenue line starting at $4 million, now up to $28 million. Just wanted to show the consistent growth we've been able to deliver. Next slide, please, [ Louisa ]. There it is in a chart form, 5 years of profit growth. So we've looked at the revenue and here's the profit starting at a loss back in 2021 when we had those write-downs of previous goodwill and so on, tracking up every year, pretty good trajectory. We're really pleased with the progress that we've been able to make in that regard. Of course, the key to this is, Tim, we returned to paying dividends. We suspended the dividend payments back in 2021 -- or 2018, sorry, when we went through all that restructuring. But I think we did pay some of that during 2018. We had a really good history of dividend payments. Before we went into this restructuring mode, we paid out about $6.8 million worth of dividends. And so the company had a good history. But the shareholders agreed with the vision of pivoting into this advice network space and the opportunity it represented, and so we suspended dividends for a considerable time, went back to them last year, $2.8 million worth of payments out, fully franked, last year. So next slide, please there, [ Louisa ]. A quick touch on the balance sheet. Good liquidity strength in the business. I mean one thing I'll say to you is I had a discussion with an analyst the other day, and we were talking about different items on our P&L. And they said, "Well, hang on a minute. Well, how does all this match up on a cash perspective?" I mentioned to you just earlier on the other slides, $5.4 million worth of net profit before tax is what the P&L number looks like. Operating cash flow was positive $5.8 million across the period. So you see a very close correlation between the paper P&L profit and what really counts, which is cash into the business. So you've got this trend line here of the cash and cash equivalents going up each year. We closed this year out with $9.8 million. Now that was $1.8 million up on the prior year, where we closed out the 30th of June the year prior. So how do we go up $1.8 million? Well, we had cash flow of $5.8 million, and then we paid out $2.1 million worth of dividend payments. We did operate a DRP. So with the balance of those dividend payments, people took up the DRP. And we had a cash payment related to a prior acquisition from prior years. It was the final back-end payment. So $1 million worth out there as well. You see the net assets growing across that period of time from $6 million to $32 million, nearly $33 million. Next slide there, please. Thanks, [ Louisa ]. So a proven acquisition and integration track record. Look, here we are in the other businesses I said at the outset, partnering with over 500 professional advisers nationwide. We've built scale through a series of successful acquisitions that have really delivered improved services to the professionals we support, and they've created great value for our shareholders: Wealth Today in 2018, Sentry in 2021, Synchron in 2022, Millennium3 in 2023. We started small with Wealth Today to make sure that we could build a robust foundation for the business, which we did. Core to this whole exercise for us is taking these businesses, bringing them all together under a common framework. And core to what's enabling us to deliver value for both our advisers and our shareholders, central to it is our risk management framework. And you go what is our risk management framework? I'm going to hop into it in a minute. It's all about deployment and delivering significant synergies and helping drive our recurring revenue, and it's also driving leading adviser engagement. Look, we've made all these acquisitions. We really see more consolidation coming in the profession into the future, both at a practice level and probably at an advice network operator level as well. But let's hop on to the next slide, please, [ Louisa ]. And I'll just go through this. The key driver for our integration, it's really come from our risk management framework. Back in 2018, a sage individual from the stockbroking community here in Sydney said to me -- when I explained to him our proposition of wanting to get into this advice network space, I took him through the supply-demand imbalance. He was aware of the Royal Commission. He said, "What do you and your team need to work out to do? People will back your strategy. There's no question of it because it makes absolute sense. You need to figure out how to manage risk properly." Now we looked at the business when we acquired Wealth Today, and we've done due diligence on a number of other potential acquisitions at the time. Everybody was managing risk through this annual in arrears, spot checking of a handful of advice documents. What could possibly go wrong? Well, when you're only looking at 5% or 10% of documents, and advice being delivered to consumers, people make professional errors despite the best intentions. It's a bit late picking it up 12 months after the fact. And then realizing perhaps that the same practitioners made the same professional error multiple times. And I often say to advisers, Google surgeon cut wrong limb off. People make mistakes. And also, some people can take shortcuts when they're in a hurry, trying to run a profitable business in terms of having their files in order. If you talk to anyone that was inside one of the large banks in the aftermath of the Royal Commission, a huge amount of the money that was paid out in remediation to consumers was not because of faulty advice, it's because there was no file backing it up, so nobody could justify the advice. So it's absolutely critical to manage risk properly with inside these networks. And we manage it on this hierarchy. Risk to client is first and foremost. Let's make sure there's no professional errors in what's being presented. Risk to the adviser, does the file support what's in the advice document and does it all make sense. If you look after those 2 risks, most other risks look after themselves. We have chosen to do that through our risk management framework and, what we call, peer reviewing every single piece of advice in this network. So that's what we've been doing since 2018. It's part art, part science. And I've always said to people, it's 1/3, 1/3, 1/3: people, process and technology. And none of those is more important than the other. They've all got to work together seamlessly. The people is all about diligent people with a positive attitude that respect advisers and have good attention to detail. The process is all about consistent processes that are efficient and are delivered in a timely manner. There's no point reviewing every piece of advice if you leave an adviser sitting and waiting for 3, 4, 5 days, a week, 2 weeks, and their consumers waiting for the advice. You've got to be quick and efficient. And so you need the right processes and technology in 2 components. Any technology you can do to help you manage the processes and lead an audit trial and improve communication and speed, that's what it's all been about. We've been on this journey now for 7.5 years, and we've built something really special. That's what's enabling us to deliver efficiency in these networks. Now if you look at our peer review program, 11,000 documents and files in real time reviewed every year. It's a monumental undertaking, but it enables us to identify, address and resolve issues before any regulatory or client impact. What's really been exciting in the last few years, we've been on a journey now for nearly 3 years, 2.5 years, right at the forefront of using artificial intelligence to assist us in this process, not to take the people out, but to make the people super human. And it's incredible what we've been able to do. We've custom built a peer review software system using optical character recognition, and this enables us to enhance our identification of both advice, approved product list, policy, legal and regulatory guide issues to help advisers perfect their advice and their underlying files. And the reality of that is it puts a smile on their faces. It puts a smile on the consumer's face, knowing that they've had this peer review done on both the file and the advice like any sort of thing that you're doing in a professional environment and most importantly, puts a smile on our face because we sleep well at night knowing that we're backing our advisers. So I'm telling you, it's world-leading proprietary AI technology that we've deployed here. I had the pleasure of demonstrating it to a whole group of underwriters, professional indemnity insurance underwriters in the U.K. recently, Lloyd's underwriters. And I'll say, to a person, they were blown away. These are people that are underwriting risk in the advice space all around the world, and none of them had ever seen anything like it. We've had that deployed as part of our peer review process. It's been in development for 2.5 years. We've had it deployed in full production since the start of this year. Quite incredible to see. Now what we also back our risk management framework up with is real-time analytics. So you imagine all that data we're getting. We've now got machine reading of every single file and every single document. We're coalescing that data into a common database. We're producing dashboards that are letting us identify risk and risk trends. But most importantly, for advisers, we're also giving them real-time analytics on how their performance is benchmarking against their peers in terms of pricing, in terms of turnaround, et cetera, and volumes. So it's really adding incredible value. Now we reckon we're pretty good at risk management, but we don't just rely upon ourselves to do it. We also have external validation through regular, both granular and systemic third-party audits, and that further enhances and supports our risk management programs. Compliance might sound boring, but it's actually not compliance to us. It's genuine risk management to the benefit of the adviser and to the benefit of the consumer, and it's really helped us deliver on scaling these operations and making them super efficient. Next slide, please, [ Louisa ]. All right. I'd say, here are these paradigm shifts. Really, what we did back in 2018, I'd say is we threw out the rule book because we really thought that the model, the advice network operations, what used to be called dealer groups have been built on, it was probably right 20 or 30 years ago, but the institutions got involved in the process and I think really bugged it up. They started using advice networks as distribution and putting the priorities of distributing product over the priorities of both the advisers, in many cases, treating them like rubbish and the clients. And that really ruin trust inside the profession at all sorts of levels. So we came in and we said, "There's got to be a better way to do this," because we knew from a retail perspective, giving advice a really rewarding and positive thing to do. And advisers have lost their mojo and the system was broken. It just wasn't working. So we threw out the real book, we started again with enormous paradigm shifts, including our risk management framework. We've also done that in terms of our adviser engagement. We are producing well over 120 hours annually of in-person and live stream professional development programs. We're running 90-plus what we call our optimum peer groups, bringing the practice principles together within our groups into small groups of 8 to 12 people and helping them just be part of the network and learn from each other and drive their efficiencies. And we're building that sensor community and that sensor network, getting them talking to each other about how they can collaborate, perhaps even merge. So that's really terrific. I'm really pleased to say we've had record attendances of our in-person events. I mean, who would think showing up at a professional development day could be fun. I'm telling you we've had to put the sold-out sign up at our last 3 professional development days. And by that, I mean our advisers get to come to them without paying, but sold out in terms of the room capacity has been completely oversubscribed. We haven't been able to accommodate any more people. We've just had that same outcome for our annual conference that's coming up in Perth in November. So that's bloody rewarding to know that engagement with our advisers is so high. Look, we have a catchphrase we use in the business, "Advice is at the heart of everything we do." I'm telling you our peer review program is central to that. By helping advisers perfect their advice and by being involved in the delivery of every piece of advice and every file that's involved with the retail consumer, it's completely connected us. It's placed advice delivery at the center of the relationship with our practices. And that's fantastic because it's where we want to be. Satisfaction is high, and it's growing. When we do our PD days, we survey the entire attendants. Anyone that's been to them will tell you that I don't let you out of the room until you've scanned the QR code and completed the survey. Net Promoter Scores of our last few have all been running above 70. Now 70 is amazing from a Net Promoter Score perspective. Our most recent session in Brisbane just last week, 96. Just this week, CoreData conducts an annual survey of financial advisers right across the country. And we're really pleased to report that overall, the WTL network satisfaction has been on a sharp upward trend, 86%. And Andrew Inwood from Core Data tells me all of the data really highlights to them a tight bond, as they've referred to it, between our network and our advisers. So based on adviser responses, CoreData this week named WTL Industry Leader of the Year. And so that was a really pleasing accolade for our entire team. Next slide, please.

Keith, before you go, I'm conscious of time, too. But you got a comment there, maybe we're not crazy at all, was there a certain disbelief in what you're doing? And what's the kind of context of that comment?

I thought I was going to get away with that, Tim. Look, it started with running into the burning building back in 2018. The next thing was people said we were mad. People said we were mad with what we intended to do with our peer review process, that we'd never be able to do it efficiently and in a timely manner. People told our COO, Frank Paul, that when he started talking about AI and deploying it in the business nearly 3 years ago that he was mad. When he said that AI was going to have an impact bigger than the Internet or television, people said we were mad. And look, a lot of advisers said we've mad. You got to think we've made these acquisitions, and we've moved everyone's cheese. And so advisers have gone, "This is all different. It's all crazy. You guys are insane." And look, a few of them ran away because of that. The nice part is now currently, we're not so mad, as you can see it in our adviser retention and our engagement with the network and you can see it in the financial results, I think. So I thought I was going to get away with that, Tim. Next slide, please. Thanks, [ Louisa ]. I just want to say, I think there's more industry consolidation coming. It continues. Valuations are rising and global PEs increasingly coming in. There's some deals there that you've seen recently, going back to Oaktree coming in on a $240 million investment into the advice practice aggregator, AZ NGA; you see AMP divesting its advice business in December; you see Crestone buying CB's high net worth business; more recently, TA Associates backing Viridian on a $309 million valuation; and CC Capital solidifying its $3 billion all-cash bid for Insignia. There's a lot of money being attracted to this supply-demand imbalance in this space in Australia. A lot of money being attracted to it from within Australia, but also global eyes on it. So next slide, please. Speaking of private equity and capital deployment. Those of you that follow the company will have seen our joint venture announcement with Merchant Partners, forming a business that we're calling WTL and Merchant Invesco Proprietary Limited. I really shouldn't call Merchant Partners private equity because although they're a private business, they're not a fund, they're an operating business. So they're a capitalized operating business that globally takes minority stakes in financial advice practices. They've deployed hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S., a brilliant team of people backed here in Australia by David Haintz. We've partnered with them in a 50-50 joint venture to drive integration within our network and beyond. And so we're doing that by taking noncontrolling interests and backing the entrepreneurs in our network to consolidate, get more efficient, more profitable and to expand and grow. So next slide, please there. I'd encourage all of you that are new to the company to go back and have a look at previous videos that we've put out about this JV, if you really want to understand it, but the key highlights of Invesco: really deploying capital to back growth and consolidation within our network and beyond, consistent risk management because we're coalescing these businesses together and merchant, go and have a look and you'll just see what an impressive organization they are. So they're a great JV partner, bringing a lot of capital to the table that's really going to benefit our practices. Next slide, please, [ Louisa ], and we'll wrap up and get on to Q&A. We've put another announcement out this morning just with an update on Invesco activities. The first HubCo that we've done that's coalescing these businesses together as hubs, Titan Advice Group is the name of it, bringing together 3 practices, Invesco ends up owning 35%, 36% of it. WTL owns a further, nearly 6% because we're providing the advisory services, and we're originating all of these transactions and running the due diligence programs and so on. Great business brought together. One of our leading advisers in the group, David McLean, appointed as CEO of that. And already, that first HubCo, Titan Advice Group, already has signed a heads of agreement to make its first tuck-in acquisition, acquiring Rushby Financial up in Queensland. So big exciting things ahead for that first hub. Next slide, please, [ Louisa ]. And we also announced this morning an establishment of our second hub, which is unnamed at the moment, but bringing together a select advice group in Newleaf Tailored Financial Solutions, rolling them into a hub under the -- who will be the CEO, Eric Bow, another of our great advisers, and really helping Eric and his partner, Dechlan Doolan, have grown that business through both M&A and organic growth. So super excited about that one. More details on our release earlier today. Again, Invesco is going to end up holding about 36% of that, and we'll end up with close to 6% by having run all the due diligence and originated the opportunity and so on. Both those hubs, debt-free on formation when we get them all set. So that means that the next series of acquisitions that they can do will be predominantly debt funded with bank debt. So next slide, please there, [ Louisa ]. People have asked me, they're trying to get their head around what the scale opportunity is when it comes to Invesco. And Tim, you were talking to me about this yesterday. And so Louisa and I cooked up this slide overnight that we think explains it really well. But where does the opportunity sit? We're currently a network of 400 practices. If you looked at what the capital value of those businesses was, about $500 million of underlying capital value there. So how do we get to that? The average practice is doing around 40% EBIT margin, and those smaller businesses are trading at sort of 5s and 6s, maybe a slightly bigger business trade at 6.5x EBIT, but you'd probably average 6x EBIT. So that gets you to $500 million worth of asset value there. Well, what's Invesco all about, it's about helping those advisers get that to $800 million or $900 million because that same amount of opportunity that sits there, without even growing the revenue of the things, just by organizing them, getting more efficient, there's an uplift of perhaps even more than double in that. And so you go, how do you do that? Pretty simple, as I've noted here, our best practices are doing 65% EBIT lines, not 40% or 30%, 65%. So let's just say a really well-run scale practice can get to 50%, which is very, very achievable, when you get to $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million, $10 million worth of EBIT in these practices, you're not trading at 5 and 6x EBIT multiples. You're trading at 8s and 9s. And in the U.S., all these things -- this is why U.S. capital is coming here, all these things are trading at 10 and above, up to 18x EBIT. In the U.K., 8 to 10x EBIT very readily, some recent transactions at 14x EBIT. That's where this exciting opportunity is, not just for us and Invesco, but importantly, for the advisers. Because why retire and just sell your business at whatever multiple it might be at the time when you can be involved in something that builds potential intergenerational wealth there for you, something that you can hang on to in retirement and keep a retirement stream. So that's why we're so excited about the Invesco opportunity. And that, I think, slide really explains it well, Tim. So next slide, and that might wrap us up. I'll just scroll there. The last one there is just throwing about all the great things and why we think we're a great investment. It's just a summary of what we've talked about. I'll leave you to read it, and we'll dive into the Q&A. But one thing that I will say to you is I think there is a real re-rating of this profession, and financial services more broadly, underway in Australia. People tell me often that our superannuation system is the envy of the world. Well, look, I'll leave consumers to rate that. I think consumers do like it, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I'll tell you who it is the envy of globally, Tim, and that's investors and fund managers and asset managers because there's nothing like it in terms of this baked-in statutory growth in terms of the business that you're in. And so we think people are waking up to that globally. The Royal Commission and all the negativity was a bit of a hit. We think that's all gone. People are waking up to it, and we think we are super well placed in terms of our relationships with our advisers, our relationship with merchant and the Invesco opportunity and what we're doing to continue to scale and be part of this consolidation and that re-rating and uplift. So that will do it for me as I know there were some questions came in during the week.

Yes. And there's a lot more that's followed through actually. Let's just start on you touched on valuations, where you ended on valuations. Probably now, if we look at CAF or we look at account, how does WTL compare in terms of that?

Yes. Look, 2 really good businesses. And I should say, right up there with us, and this is new for us in terms of adviser satisfaction, if you look at that core data survey, some really good things happening within our business, within CAF, that really, together, we've got really this whole institutional nonsense that had beset advisers for so long. And I think we're all really driving the way. Personally, I reckon we're doing the best job of it, but I would say that, of course, and I think our advisers are saying. I think we're all undervalued is the short answer to that, Tim. But if you looked at us against our peers in terms of an EBIT ratio to an EBIT multiple or so on, we're certainly well undervalued. If I line this up, I think, with where CAF is trading at on its recent sort of indicative results announcements, where counts trading at, if you just doubled its half year that it's got in the market, anyone could get a spreadsheet out and do that, but I reckon you'd see our share price to be relevant to either of those 2, should be more like $0.17 or $0.18, not where it's been trading recently.