Praemium Limited Q2 FY26 Earnings Call - Expansion of Development Capability Through Teqnosi Labs Acquisition Drives Growth and Innovation

Anthony Wamsteker, CEO, Praemium Limited: Welcome, everyone. It’s just gone 9:00 A.M., so we will start this webinar for the Q2 FY26 update for Praemium Limited. I’m joined today by our CFO, Emma Stepchik, and we want to just take you through about 10 pages of this presentation to give you an update of how the business is traveling, both from a strategic execution sense and from the growth of the business. I do just want to also say I acknowledge that this presentation, through a technical glitch, has not yet loaded on the ASX website. We apologize. We normally try to get it up in advance of the meeting to help people formulate questions and the like, rather than just having to see the slides live for the first time. But we, as I say, through a technical glitch, we haven’t been able to do that this time. I’m pretty well before market open today.

At Praemium, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of country and pay our respects to their elders, past and present. When the presentation is live, there is the usual disclaimer that I draw your attention to, although obviously, as usual, I won’t read through it word for word. As I said, joined today by Emma Stepchik and myself, Anthony Wamsteker. We will, as I said at the start, go through the update on strategy and the execution of our strategy, and then I’ll hand over to Emma for more detailed understanding of our flows and the growth rate in the business. In terms of the strategy execution, we talk each time about the five key priority areas that we focus on. And the biggest initiative over the last quarter, and the thing that we are most excited about, is the announcement of our acquisition of the Teqnosi Labs business.

Teqnosi are market leaders, both in machine learning and design-led development. And that’s very important because it greatly expands our development capability and our ability to draw on some very exciting UX initiatives that we’re working on with Teqnosi, which we will be rolling out progressively over this quarter or so. So our clients should expect us to come to them in the near future with some ideas about how to improve the way our system is made available to them and improve the user experience. But the relationship with Teqnosi has been going for a long time now, over 18 months. We enjoy working with them. They’re a very good group of people, as well as being very hardworking and highly talented and market leaders, as I said, in what they do.

What it also allows us to do is we will be able to develop an end-to-end superannuation platform rather than relying on a different administration system from the underlying investment engine. And I think that’s very important. Superannuation has always been by far the biggest segment in the wealth management market in Australia, but it’s in a stage now where, through recent events, there’s a lot more focus on how superannuation should be offered to the market. Everyone who’s involved in the superannuation market is making strategic decisions about how they go about making that offer available to the market. Some are contracting the way they offer superannuation. Others are looking to bring more in-house. And so our view about superannuation being one of our five big focus areas, I think, is vindicated by how much is going on in the superannuation market.

And our relationship with Teqnosi gives us a development capability that we’ve never had before to expand the way we offer that to the market. So we think that’s a very important change. And the relationship with Teqnosi covers all five areas. It will impact on all five areas because of the characteristics of that business that I mentioned before and the expansion that it gives us in our development capability. Expansion both in the magnitude of what we can develop and the quality of what we can develop. And everyone’s heard me talk before about how pivotal this time is in terms of technology and the way technology is able to power far more of your business than it ever has before. So we’re delighted to have formed that relationship and proceed to the transaction that we’ve announced.

Elsewhere, the strategy execution is proceeding to plan, and we are optimistic on the progress on all of the other areas, as is shown on that slide. But the big objective of a lot of that is growth, and the growth, the rubber hits the road on growth when we release our net flows as we’re doing today, so I’ll now hand over to Emma to discuss the growth on the past quarter.

Emma Stepchik, CFO, Praemium Limited: Thank you, Anthony. As these results show, Total FUA is growing, supported in the quarter by the continued adoption of Spectrum, strong Powerwrap inflows, and onboarding of new Scope+ portfolios. At the end of the quarter, Total FUA was AUD 70.5 billion, 5% higher than last quarter and 14% higher year on year, which is a very good outcome despite the flat market movements for the quarter. Focusing on Platform FUA, this increased 8% year on year to AUD 32.5 billion, supported by the growth in Spectrum. At AUD 462 million, the platform net inflow has held up in the quarter despite gross outflows of AUD 361 million relating to exiting advisors, the level of which we expect to see diminish as time goes on. Spectrum’s FUA was AUD 3.6 billion, up from AUD 3.3 billion at the end of September, with net inflows of AUD 266 million in the quarter.

If we adjust for the one new advisor exits from Spectrum, which is set out in the tables on the last slide, the adjusted net inflows were AUD 312 million. That’s 9% of the quarter’s opening FUA. We are pleased that Spectrum has achieved over AUD 1.4 billion of new business gross inflows since launch just over a year ago, demonstrating the strength of the solution and its increasing traction among high-net-worth advisors. We have also seen retention of customers from OneVue choosing to stay with us based on the strong offering of the Spectrum platform. The pipeline for Spectrum is encouraging, and we will monitor trends over the financial year to inform a view on long-term performance expectations. SMA’s net inflows of AUD 24 million for the quarter was impacted as a result of belated outflows for a long-standing transition related to a former client group.

FUA lifted to AUD 14.6 billion, an increase of 18% year on year, with a transfer of AUD 933 million from OneVue. Future growth with the Morgan’s onboarding remains a key priority for the business. Powerwrap performed strongly in the quarter, with elevated gross inflows reflecting the strong engagement and growth across the existing advisor base. Alongside that, the advisor exits from Powerwrap were minimal, and outflows reflected a more normalized rate. As a result, net inflows were AUD 302 million for the quarter, which is the highest we have seen since the first quarter of the 2022 financial year. Powerwrap FUA was up 6% year on year at AUD 14.3 billion. And whilst we expect to see new growth flow to Spectrum, the headwinds for Powerwrap have subsided. Finally, the OneVue transition was completed in the quarter, with the final FUA transferred to SMA.

Further in the quarter, we also closed the final earnout for OneVue, and FUA under the earnout threshold, no FUA payments were required to be made. Moving to the portfolio business, non-custodial Scope+ FUA was up 19% year on year at AUD 37.9 billion, with two new advice groups added and an increase in portfolios to AUD 10.7 thousand. The previously announced Bell Potter win for Scope+ resulted in additional portfolios this quarter, with the initial onboarding phases completed, while the final phase is expected to be completed by the end of Q3. We have included the usual detailed tables for your reference, and we appreciate that there is a bit of noise in the FUA movements this quarter between net flows, market movements, and transfers between platforms. So we’ve included on a one-off basis new tables on the last slide that step through those detailed movements by platform.

Back to you, Anthony.

Anthony Wamsteker, CEO, Praemium Limited: Thanks, Emma. So just in light of the fact that our challenge is in getting this presentation to the ASX on time today, I am going to go to that last table, and then I will come back and leave the presentation on this table. But just to show the final table, and as Emma said, we don’t plan to distribute this every quarter. It’s a very detailed view. And in our view, it’s unnecessary longer term because we will start to just report our overall platform. But given that it’s basically been about a year since both OneVue transition started to happen and Spectrum launched, it’s been a bit over a year for both of those. But the real activities happened in this last calendar year.

So what this table does, and I’ll leave it up for just a moment, but allows you to see for each of the platforms the internal activity that happened. So taking the Praemium SMA as an example, you can see that there was transfers of AUD 933 over the last quarter, and there was some money flowed out of SMA into Spectrum of AUD 39. Now, that’s why the SMA is up a billion dollars. Basically, the market moves were small, the net flows were relatively low compared to prior quarters for SMA, but the billion dollars growth is essentially the OneVue transition. And of course, if you go to the OneVue part of that chart, you see that that flowed out.

So I think it may now be up on the ASX, but in due course, you’ll be able to look at that in detail, and you’ll see the internal flows between our respective platforms. So I think it gives a good understanding of what the internal flows are. And it’s part of us transitioning to, as I say, in the not too distant future, maybe next quarter or maybe the quarter after, just talking more about the overall platform. So I will go back to the overall platform, and I’ll leave that slide up. I can’t add any color to it other than what Emma said already, which was a very good summary of what has gone on over the last quarter.

But because it’s only just gone up and people might not have had the chance to see the numbers, I will leave that up for a moment in case there are any immediate questions that come from that. But obviously, as I say, one of the five areas that we focus on in our business as a strategy is to grow. I’ve said before in these forums, growth is a strategy in itself as well as an outcome of our overall strategy. The reason that growth is a strategy is because, as everyone acknowledges, these businesses are very technology-heavy. And the more we can spread that technology over a larger and larger FUA base and revenue base, the better. So clearly, I think everyone who’s invested in Praemium understands that we are in a market where the valuation multiples are heavily driven by the growth rate of the incumbent.

We acknowledge that growth has to be both a strategy as well as an outcome of all that we’re trying to achieve. I’m just going to leave it there. I’ll leave the call open for a minute or two and happy to take some questions. We do have some questions starting to come in. We will try to avoid answering the same question twice and so occasionally, we might combine some questions. There has been a question just about the Bell Potter. As we said, Bell Potter is not all completed yet. It’s well on the way. We’ve seen some good growth in the Scope+ portfolio because of the Bell Potter onboarding. There’s more to come, and we would expect that to complete over the coming quarter.

But we can’t speak more highly of the Bell Potter business and delighted to be a supplier to them and to help them with the objectives that they have in their own strategy. I’ve been asked just given there were some outflows on SMA, just to recap, we’re trying to get away from splitting the SMA into, "Here’s what happened with A, B, and C in terms of clients." And we try to preserve an element of client confidentiality. But what we have said this time is we’ve given a number in there of the outflows that have occurred because of advisors who have either left firms or firms who have left the platform. In one case, a firm that left the platform more than five years ago.

I again won’t do it, but everyone probably knows who I’m talking about, a major bank who left the platform many years ago. Some of the outflow came from them, and some of them were from departed advisors who have left. They are, and we can see how much is left from all of those people that left. A lot of it was the OneVue advisors who had already notified us that they were going to leave. Collectively, there’s a range of factors that we don’t regard as ongoing, and we’re starting to see them reduce somewhat in terms of the magnitude. Together, they added up to the number that we mentioned of AUD 361 million over the last quarter. There are some questions about the newer relationships, and they continue to. There are quite a few newer relationships.

We’ve had quite a few wins that we’ve been asked about in the past, and our onboarding for all of those progresses. But there’s also more to come. Bell Potter, we did call out on Scope+, but all of the other important relationships that we’ve got are onboarding at various rates. There’s some of those flows in here. Again, we don’t break it into each of the individual clients. We are in a competitive market, and our competitors all tune into these calls, and you’re all welcome. I’ll pay my acknowledgement to you. But we’re not going to give too much away, but onboarding is progressing at various rates of pace.

Still, quite a few questions just asking for a bit more detail about some of the names that have been in the public domain that have chosen to work with us, not just Bell Potter, Morgan’s, Euroz Hartleys, Taylor Collison, and the like. So as I say, I’m not going to go into any more detail on this call. We do think a lot about how much we can say, but we are very—we’re both respectful of the client relationships. We are delighted to have the quality of firms that we’ve got as clients. But we also are sensitive to our competitive position and the fact that everyone wants to know how they’re going. All our competitors want to know how they’re going as well, and we don’t particularly want to give that out.

So we’ve said as much as we will say about the individual rate of progress of the individuals. There’s a question about the Morgan Stanley departures. Morgan Stanley, again, I won’t go into too much detail, but Morgan Stanley obviously are a client of our non-custodial part of our business. Some of their advisors are leaving, but Morgan Stanley is still an amazingly strong business. And again, it’s another relationship that we greatly value. In terms of the OneVue exit advisors, I was asked, "Have they been the 361?" They are part of the 361, and they’re the biggest part of the 361, but they’re not the whole 361. Some of the 361 are still advisors’ departures, either firms or advisors who left firms many years ago. But the lion’s share of the 361 is the OneVue, which we expected as part of the FUA that was based on the.

It was that people had told us that they were leaving, and that continues to happen, although there’s less to go. There’s a question about the OneVue synergies, and we’ll say more at the half, but there’s no change from our expectation on the contribution that OneVue can make to our business in terms of EBITDA. We always talked about a AUD 3 million number, and we’re still talking about that number, but we’ll do an update at the half year if we think it’s moved from that. But we’re not expecting it to move significantly from that. There’s questions about the individual components like Powerwrap and SMA and Spectrum in terms of the overall platform going forward. The way we think about it is our leading product from a sales perspective, but not our only product, is Spectrum.

We wouldn’t sell any new advice firms into Powerwrap because Spectrum is a superior product, but the Powerwrap clients could stay with Powerwrap. And in that case, their organic growth will contribute to strong net flows for Powerwrap from time to time, as it has in the last quarter. But it is possible. They do have the option of moving out into Spectrum, but it’s not a requirement there. And most of our Powerwrap clients are looking at Spectrum and considering that. And it’s a relatively seamless transaction for them to be able to do that if they so choose. In terms of SMA, SMA still can be the lead product for some clients. It depends on the advice firm and how they’re set up. Some advice firms are set up that SMA would be the lead product for them rather than Spectrum going forward.

But it’s a more limited market. When we talk about the growth of SMAs, and it’s the fastest growing segment within the platform market, managed accounts, but it’s still most advisors have assets that are not suited to managed accounts. So if you’ve got a portfolio of AUD 100 and AUD 50 is suited to managed accounts, but AUD 50 is not, then Spectrum would be a better solution for you. But within the Spectrum, SMA would become one of your investment options. So we expect that SMA will, in fact, grow over time. We’ve actually broadened the market for SMA by launching Spectrum because of those very firms.

The firms that previously said, "It’s only half my assets, so I’m not going to use your SMA," can now say, "Well, I’ll use Spectrum, and therefore, half the assets will go into SMA." So we’re very optimistic about the outlook for SMA, but we’ll see over time just how much Spectrum money flows into managed accounts. But everyone reads the articles about how managed accounts are making up the fastest growing section of the platform market, although they’re still well under half the total market, as everyone knows. I asked a question about future acquisitions. Look, we still have books open on some things. Indeed, the acquisition of the Teqnosi Labs business means that we’re more confident about our ability to bid on acquisitions going forward because of the increased technical capability that we’ve got.

But there’s no acquisitions that are imminent right at the minute, but there are books open on a few things. But building on the Teqnosi relationship is a higher priority for us at the moment. In simple terms, how does Teqnosi improve the super offering? That’s a good question. At the moment, we run two systems to run our superannuation product. We run an investment system, which in the case of superannuation is our managed account engine. And we run a super admin system, which is a system. It would be unfair of me to call it legacy, but it is an older system. And there’s more modern systems in the market now than the system that our super runs on. So deliberately, the first exercise we did with Teqnosi was say, "Look, superannuation is a very challenging market, and the admin is the bit that we don’t do.

We can fix up the investment part ourselves, but we don’t run an administration platform. But it would be good if we did." And so now that we have built with Teqnosi a superannuation administration platform, we can combine the two key parts of the service proposition for superannuation: the super admin piece, the processing of contributions and pension payments and the like, and the investment part, which we already do. So combining it into a platform that we control the platform end to end is very significant.

I think even though this is not our accounts, when we do our accounts and people get a chance to look at the CapEx of what we’ve spent on that superannuation and compare it to the more modern systems that have been built in the market, I think it’s an amazing story in terms of the CapEx we spent building it compared to what has been spent in the market building out these superannuation systems, which can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it just highlights the capability that we’ve brought in by bringing that into our business. In terms of the return on investment from Teqnosi, the business case for us stacks up just on the automation possibilities alone.

If all we did was take some of the automation opportunities that Teqnosi brings us and put a net present value on that, that would justify the investment easily, on its own, easily. We’re a business that spends in our last financial year, we spent something like about AUD 75 million running the business and another 8 million or, sorry, 10 million on CapEx. So we spent over AUD 85 million running our business in cash out the door, some CapEx, some operational costs. You don’t have to get much saving out of automation to see that it will be a very significant return on that. But there will also be likely, as long as we continue to build out our or continue to deliver on our distribution side, which under Dennis’s leadership, we’ve done an amazing job on that, I think, and keep winning clients.

I think we can do even better on that because, as I’ve said in what I had to say, it’s a design-led business. It’s very focused on the UX of what they do. It’s not just building out back-office capability. It’s UX. And once we get to the market with what we are very excited about showing to our clients, we think we can improve our growth rate. But the business case is not predicated on growing more, but we would think that’s a potential opportunity as well. As I say, and I don’t think this should ever be forgotten, you can do more with technology now than you could ever do before. It’s very powerful what you can do, but you’ve got to have the right team doing it.

We’ve got a very good internal team, but this expands the capability and the quality of what we can do at exactly the right time, at the time where technology is doing more for businesses than it could ever do before. So that all allows you to bring better product to market going forward, and that should drive revenue growth, as well as, as I say, the business case stacks up just on the savings that you would get in terms of automation and productivity gains. About the new super offering, we are now working with our suppliers. Our super offering, we have key suppliers as well as ourselves because of that aspect of not being, we’re not a superannuation trustee, and we haven’t owned a super tech. We’ve never owned super admin tech.

We’re working with the suppliers of those two parts of the offering to get this product to market as quickly as we can. Does the addressable market materially change with the new superannuation offering? It could, is the answer to that. I expect it will long term. What we really want to do is bring our loyal clients along the journey to give them a better offering first up. That alone would give us substantial growth in the super. Our super, in total, is about 20% of our platform, our retail super. There’s a lot of money on our platform that’s in self-managed super, which is part of our target market, is high net worth, and they have more self-managed super. If you look at every other platform that we compete against, the super is a much bigger percentage of their total platform.

It’s crucial for many of them. It’s basically what the platform is. So if our super was to grow, again, there’s no guidance, hypothetically, from 20% of the platform to 40%. As the platform itself is growing, it can drive a lot of growth for us. So yes, it will expand the addressable market, but we’ll be working very closely with our existing clients first. What sort of P&L leverage can we expect from the growth in funds, and is AI being looked at to improve leverage? And that’s a very good question. So there are people with better analytical skills than me, but you can see that platforms that are much bigger than us have got much higher drop-through to the bottom line of the revenue. Their cost-to-revenue line, if you like.

As everyone knows, some of the cost-to-revenue line costs are only about 50% of revenue, whereas costs are more than 70% of our revenue. And a lot of that is scale. Some of it’s because of our high-net-worth segment, and we do have more manual processes. And that gets to the AI part. The beauty of AI is there’s a lot more that you can automate now than you could automate three or four years ago. And that, again, is part of the power of technology. So even though we are a highly customized offering for our high-net-worth clients, which is why it’s part of the selling proposition, why the platform can be a very attractive alternative for high-net-worth advice firms. And they don’t lend themselves to automation, or they haven’t in the past, but AI is certainly being looked at.

And the way we do it is when we’re using AI, we look for we earn the right to invest more in AI by taking costs out first. So we look for productivity improvement opportunities. And there’s a lot more that can be automated with AI than that could be automated three or four years ago. So very excited about the prospects of just power of technology generally, including AI, to automate more of our business. And we do expect that both the scale and the automation should see our cost-to-revenue ratio drop over time, but we’re not providing guidance on that at this time. We will have a bit more to say when we do our actual financial results rather than our funds flow. So look, once again, apologies for not having it up right at the start of the presentation. Thank you for everyone patiently persisting with us.

Thank you very much for the engagement, both tuning into the call and the questions. And we’re now about a month away from our financial results, which I think they’re the two things we really focus on: the profit and the growth. Today is more about the growth and how that’s tracking. But in a month, we’ll be presenting more about the profit and where the revenue and the costs are going in the business. So look forward to being able to talk to you all in a bit more detail then. And once again, thank you very much for your engagement with us. And I look forward to meeting up with you all again in about a month’s time. Enjoy the rest of your day.