Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Netwealth Group Limited half- year results, 1H 2023. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and- answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Matt Heine, Managing Director. Please go ahead. Thank you, Lucy. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for dialing in. We're looking forward to delivering our first half financial results. My name's Matt Heine, I'm Managing Director of Netwealth Investments Limited, and I'm joined this morning by Grant Boyle, our Chief Financial Officer. If we move to page 6, and I will move through the first few slides relatively quickly, it's been a mixed half but a positive half given the macroeconomic background. Funds Under Management at the end of December were AUD 62.4, and as of Monday the 13th of February, we're near all-time highs from a Funds Under Administration basis of AUD 65.1 billion. The AUD 62.4 billion represents a 10.2% increase or growth to PCP. Our funds under management, so that is our managed accounts and global specialist funds, reached AUD 4.4 billion, a growth of AUD 1.2 billion for the half. Our managed account, which continues to be a major driver of growth, is now AUD 12.2 billion with a growth throughout the half of AUD 0.9 billion. For the first time, we have also exceeded AUD 100 million in revenue, and total income for the first half of 2023 was sorry, AUD 102.8 million, with an underlying NPAT for the first half of AUD 30.6 million. Grant will provide further information in a few slides time, but if we turn to page 7, you'll see that yet again, during the period, Netwealth Group was rewarded and awarded for that matter, with a number of accolades from various research houses, and really represents not only the investment that we've been making over many, many years, but in particular, the investment that's been flagged and made over the last 18 months. We'll come back to that. After the 12 months to September 2022, Netwealth Group was the fastest growing platform from an inflows perspective with AUD 11.9 billion, remains very focused on ensuring profitable growth of funds under administration. Market share increased to 6.3%, an increase of 1.1%. Importantly shows that we have significant headroom to grow within the direct platform market and also as we expand our total addressable market with the introduction of MAPS in the half. On page 9, we've provided a little bit more information just on the makeup of flows. You'll note that the organic flows from existing clients was AUD 4.7 billion for the half, relatively consistent with previous quarters. Slightly slower over the last quarter from new advisors joining the platform. However, we've been extremely successful in securing some very significant and important unit licensees and advice clients, who will begin transitioning during this half, and we expect to see that number increasing. We also did some analysis of the book and looked at the vintage or the amount of FUA that rests with advisors over different periods of time. As you can see from the pie chart on the bottom right, it is very well diversified with 31% of our business sitting with advisors that have joined over the last 5-10 years, an extremely loyal client base that's been with us for more than 10 years of 37%. Where we see big opportunity and continued flows is the 31% who have been with us for between one and five years. That 1% that you see at the top is obviously a further opportunity and a focus for the sales team and for the business. Really pleasing to see just the loyalty of the client base and also the opportunity set in front of us. Moving on to strategy and product update. It certainly is an interesting market at the moment. There's a lot of different things to think about at the moment. We've got a change in customer behavior, certainly a lot of change in the technology world. The investment landscape, just from the various new investment opportunities, whether that's on platform, off platform, overseas, through managed accounts, or with a big focus on ESG, Netwealth is extremely focused on ensuring that we continue to diversify the range of assets available to our customers, and that really is across all market segments. Whether it's the emerging affluent, the mass affluent or our high- net- worth clients. Our business model, no doubt we'll spend a bit of time on, maybe in Q&A, or over the next few days, with the Quality of Advice Review, well and truly underway, and now out with the industry for further feedback. We see some great opportunities as advisors, hopefully can drive efficiency across their business, with reduced retake, which will inevitably increase the amount of Australians that can provide advice, and therefore our opportunity set. I think what's been really pleasing is that the investment that we have made over the last 18 months is starting to pay real dividends. Whilst I won't go through in a lot of detail, page 13 provides some information just on the key focus areas that we're working on. Again, just to reiterate, it really is across all of our market segments. We've been, you know, certainly very focused on high- net- worth historically. That product, which is particularly suited to them being MAPS, our Multi Asset Portfolio Service, will be going live more broadly to the industry in March. The pilot's been incredibly successful with around AUD 33 million transitioned onto the service to date. We will be focusing on MDAs, high- net- worth and mid-market clients for the remainder of the year and into the next financial year. Our mobile continues to be upgraded and new features very well received with bank accounts and property being added in recent times. Also pilot now for our first integration with Xeppo, which we own 25% of. A big part of that is the data and leveraging that data to help advisors not only provide better client engagement and better service, but also understand their businesses better to drive efficiency. A lot of work being done, just enhancing our core functionality, report builder and our reporting capability is well underway with the next big release scheduled for mid to late March. MAPS we've touched on, going live, and we continue to shift a lot of our technology into the cloud, which not only helps us recruit and retain tech talent but also provides scalability and stability into the future. The final one I'll just touch on is just our focus on advisor efficiency. Clearly with the cost of advice currently going up, notwithstanding the changes that the Quality of Advice Review may implement, we are working very closely with our clients to make sure that we can remove bottlenecks within their business, whether that's through the introduction or the expansion of our Record of Advice service, through smart managed accounts, data and analytics, or mobile and client engagement, for client consent moving forward. Again, you can see a list of those initiatives on page 14. Page 15 just gives you a little bit more insight, and we've been through this historically. just the, I guess, the purpose and positioning of MAPS, our Multi Asset Portfolio Service. The business and the software, we're very excited about this, as are the clients that are on the pilot and then looking to join in the near future. We've taken the opportunity to really reimagine what we believe the platform of the future looks like and, based on feedback from the industry, we have been expanding our investments, as previously touched on. We've added wholesale funds or IMs to the platform. We've managed capital calls on the platform, and now with the introduction of non-custodial, we really can cater for a client's entire portfolio. Through that service, we'll be doing similar services to what we do for custodial clients. We're doing applications, income, pricing, tax, and reporting, as well as providing advice fee calculations on a client's entire portfolio. It's very exciting. We look forward to releasing that in early to mid-March. I'll skip through the next few pages, but if you do have time, we've just provided some examples of the latest technology that's the result of the investment that we have been making. Our corporate sustainability is continuing on. Not only is it being well received by staff, but also obviously those in the community that are benefiting from our various programs. With the return to office and some sort of normality, we've been able to engage in a greater number of volunteer programs. We've able to raise significant money and make some very meaningful grants to different organizations. There's a list of the various initiatives, listed on page 19. Beyond that, I'm gonna hand over to Grant Boyle on page 21 to give you some more information on the financial results, and look forward to, answering any questions post- outlook. Thanks for that, Matt. Good morning and Happy New Year to everyone on the call. Moving to slide 22, getting into the financials. This slide summarizes the improvement on the half-and-half financial results, but before we get into the numbers themselves, there is a minor change to the way that we account for transaction revenue and expenses that I just wanted to remind people of. In the past, we've booked our transaction revenue net. This year, we're booking it gross. The effect on this far half has been to increase revenue by AUD 1.8 million and increase expenses by AUD 1.8 million. The comparatives have been changed, but that's just something to bear in mind. I think most people didn't incorporate any of that in their modeling. That's part of the variance between some of the numbers that are out there. Total revenue increase was 18.9%. That was primarily driven by the growth of our funds and administration, which grew by 10% over that period. Also the improvement in the cash margins over that period. With the RBA rate increasing, we did get some benefit of that coming through to the cash margins in the first half. Also the cash balances at the beginning of the year were relatively strong. Operating expenses were up 30.1% and that's been flagged pretty consistently over our recent updates that we have been in an effort to maintain our innovation and scalability. We've been strategically stepping up our investment in technology, in both people and infrastructure. We've invested heavily in our operations people last year and our systems to ensure that we maintain the service levels as we continue to grow rapidly. We've now got a really solid platform for our future growth. First half also had another increase that was kind of a one-off in relative perspective in that we came out of a COVID environment last year. We had no travel or marketing expenses as we were pretty much in lockdown for most of last year. This year we're, we've returned to having financial advisor events and travel expenses, which accounts for some of the increase versus last year. Despite all that, we've retained a strong EBITDA margin of 46.1%, which is obviously a little down on where we've been in the past, but that's really on the back of that heavy investment in tech and operations and also a lower cash margin than normal, which is obviously starting to improve as we'll touch on a bit more later on in the presentation. We've continued to expense all of our internal development costs, so there's been no change there. The underlying NPAT was AUD 30.6 million. Earnings per share increased by 11.7% on the prior comparative period. That's obviously a very strong result in a tricky 12-month period. We retained our exceptional cash generation with very high pretax operating cash flow of AUD 51.2 million. Today, we had a board meeting and declared our final dividend of AUD 0.11 per share, which is fully franked and 10% higher than the prior comparative period. To summarize, really strong result again. We've continued our growth. We've been investing heavily for the future, we will now move to the operating metrics on slide 23. The majority of these metrics you would have seen as part of our quarterly update in January, I'm not gonna spend too much time on regurgitating those. A few items to call out. Our FUM grew 12.2% in the first half. We had net flows of AUD 5 million as Matt touched. AUD 5 billion rather, as Matt touched on before in the first half. Apart from that, as I said, the rest of the metrics were largely reported as part of the quarterly. Slide 24, please. This slide is one of my favorites. You'd be familiar with that revenue per account is a important metric for us. We've been progressively or we've been successful in progressively growing the revenue per account. Since we listed, we had a short-term blip in second half of 2021 due to the reprice and the interest rate headwinds. Pleasingly, this has rebounded really strongly in the first half, and with the recently announced improvements to our cash margin, we expect this to continue to trend in the second half. The bottom chart on the right-hand side, which is the basis points I've tried to ask you to look away from in the past, as it's heading in the wrong direction. It's not as an important metric for us as it's largely an outcome of the mix of our business. This year, our mix has remained pretty strong over the... Sorry, pretty consistent over the period, and therefore, we haven't seen a reduction in those basis points. Indeed, it's increased due to the better earn out of our cash, so cash revenue. It supports the story that it's really hasn't been really driven by pricing pressure. It's more a mix issue. It's really pleasing to see. It's the first time since we listed that we've actually seen that basis point margin heading north. Slide 25 we'll move to now. This sets out the revenue diversification. Been really successful in diversifying our revenue, and it's proven resilient through various market cycles. Ancillaries has increased to 34% and that's largely on the back of improving cash margins, which now represent close to 28% of our revenue, and that will clearly improve it with the better margin that we've achieved with our institution. Transaction revenue was a little down on the, in the first half compared to the prior period. That's really a factor of the economic environment and volumes in the market being down overall. With the uncertainty that we expect that to provide a good contribution to our revenue going forward and it's good to have that diversification in our, in our revenue. Moving to slide 26 now. I've had a... As Matt's touched on and I've spoken about, we have stepped up our investment in previous years to support the growth and innovation. We've made some strategic investments across infrastructure, our people, and our software. Operating expenses are, have increased by AUD 12.8 million on the prior period. We've only added 27 additional roles in the first half compared to 55 last year, which supports what we have been saying in recent announcements, that it was a step up, and we were hoping that the growth would return to more normalized levels, and that's certainly been the case in the first half. We've upgraded our IT infrastructure and a number of operating systems, which will enable us to provide excellent service as we continue to grow rapidly. The increases primarily relate to migration to the cloud, upgrading workflow systems, security, CRM and contact systems, and onboarding systems. Other increases, as I touched on before, relate to the T&E and marketing and advertising costs, which have risen as the economy reopens after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Moving now to slide 27. This sets out the headcount increases in the first half. As I said, we have been accelerating our expenses in previous years. We've seen that normalize in the first half. We have, as you can see, continued to invest in our tech team. That's just to ensure that we maintain our, the market- leading features that we're always endeavoring to build. Moving to slide 28. We've invested, in the first half, AUD 2.5 million in capital expenses, expenditure. That's related to the initiatives that are on that prior page, to maintain the efficiency, build some additional scale. We're enhancing some operation systems, strengthening the security, and updating the IT infrastructure. We're developing new features for managed accounts, managed discretionary accounts, high- net- worth accounts, and mid-market accounts. Upgrading the account opening and onboarding systems. These initiatives are critical to allowing us to support our future rapid growth into the future. Now moving ahead to my final slide. Netwealth remains in a extremely strong market and financial position. We've got a strong balance sheet. We've got low capital expenditure. We have no debt, and we've got significant cash reserves. There's a really strong correlation between EBITDA and cash flow. We've got high levels of recurring revenue, and the revenue continues to grow. At the same time, we're investing for the future with ongoing strategic initiatives to upgrade IT infrastructure, people and software. We are a leader in the mass affluent, high- net- worth and private solutions, and we have the highest Net Promoter Score by advisors in the market. With that, I will hand over to Matt, who will provide an operating outlook and invite you to ask some questions. Thank you very much, Grant. Great summary as always. Moving forward, Netwealth remains very positive, notwithstanding that there is still clearly a risk of further market deterioration. As a business, we continue to gain market share. We have a very strong pipeline, a very diverse pipeline, both geographically and across different market segments. We have been very successful in winning some very large and significant clients, in recent time, which we expect to start funding new accounts, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. We maintain our net inflow guidance for the financial year 2023 of approximately AUD 11 billion. As previously reported, back in our quarterly update, the margin on the balance of the Netwealth cash transaction account has increased to approximately 1.35%, so getting very close to our historic earnings on the cash account. One of the keys is after a period of increased investment in our people resources and technology, we have a very large team now, and our focus is now really on driving productivity, efficiency and operating leverage from the resources that we have. This is really important for us to ensure that we not only build a sustainable growth profile, but also that we can maintain our profitability. A lot of exciting things coming out over the next six months. I've touched on a number of them, a number of times now. With MAPS, our partnership with Xero is coming to fruition through our data integration. We will be rolling out a range of advisor efficiency tools, as well as a number of the strategic initiatives that Grant just listed off previously. Overall, with a mixed background and macroeconomic environment, we remain positive, and are looking forward to the next six to 12 months. On that note, we might hand over to questions. Have we got any lined up? Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Please limit your questions to two per person. If you wish to ask any further questions, please rejoin the queue. Your first question comes from Bob Chen from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Morning, guys. Just a couple of questions from me. I mean, in terms of your non-custody FOA, it looks like it's grown sort of around AUD 2.7 billion since the last update. Can you give us a little bit of color on, you know, how much of that was market- driven versus flows- driven? Are you talking about total FOA or the non-custodial? The non-custodial. Non-custodial ... pilot? No, the non-noncustodial pilot I'm talking about. Oh, sorry, total custody FOA, sorry. Okay. Yeah, obviously between the quarterly and our current FOA, it's a combination of net-net flows and market growth. We're not providing the breakdown at this stage. Okay, sure. No worries. Just for some clarity on your outlook comments on the cost base. Looks like you're trying to sort of limit other expenses growth, we should still see some employee expenses growth. Should we see sort of the same quantum of employee expenses growth into the second half? Good day, Bob. Yeah, the guidelines that, the guidance that was given, right, the headcount increase, which we think will be similar numbers to what we had in the first half. In terms of how that plays out in terms of the cost, that's gonna depend on the timing throughout the half. It's certainly the magnitude of the increases is pretty similar to what we've experienced in the first half. Okay, great. If I just may just finally, it looks like your revenue growth for the business tracking around that 18%-19% level. The OpEx is still elevated. Do you expect that to revert back to more positive jaws into the second half into next year as well? Yes. Certainly, one of the comments we did make in the announcement was we expect the non-people- related costs to be flat, half on half or largely flat. Certainly we would hope our revenue would grow in the second half given what we know about the FOA increase and the better cash margins. We would definitely expect part of that equation to be heading in the right direction given we've got revenue going up and non-operating expenses flat and relatively low increases in headcount. Those sort of things should contribute to a better second half than the first half. Great. Thanks, guys. Your next question comes from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Morning, Matt and Grant. Just on the first question, just on that FOA update, it does seem like the flows are below your sort of the runway required to hit the $6 billion in the second half. It also means that you've not started or you're still seeing outflows. Can you just comment on that? Yeah, as I mentioned before, we're not giving the split of that. As far as, I guess, the quantum of the flows to date, it's tracking to the seasonal patterns that we've seen historically. Flows are a bit subdued across the industry, as you know, we've revised our forecast to approximately AUD 11 billion to reflect what we believe is still coming in. Sure. Matt, just on the guidance for the flows, how much of that is from these, large transitions? Or if you can quantify the pipeline, like, how big is the pipeline that you're talking to? Yeah. We're, we're not don't have that split at the moment. Historically, when we had a range of 11-13, the upside was really from some of the large institutional accounts. We're still expecting to see that business trickling in, but we, yeah, we haven't got visibility or not providing visibility over the mix at this point. Yeah. When he said we don't have visibility, we certainly build up that forecast based on our existing clients and the known transitions. We haven't provided that to the market. Okay, thanks. I'll jump back in the queue. Thank you. Your next question comes from Nicholas McGarrigle from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead. G'day, guys. Hey, Nick. -of the query around outflows in the last half, can you talk to just some of the more qualitative trends of that? Is that money that's moved from the higher net worth accounts into off-platform cash, so it's sort of sitting on the sidelines, not sort of redeployed into market sources also? We've done quite a lot of work on that. We've done a deep dive and analysis of where the larger, chunkier outflows went. The big outflows were definitely from, I guess, our high- net- worth or ultra-high- net- worth family office- style accounts. Therefore, the quantum of them is bigger, but the revenue impact's less. Interestingly, a number of them pre us launching MAPS more broadly, so the non-custodial aspect, have actually been deployed to off-platform alternative investments for a number of our larger groups, where they're looking at getting non-market related returns. We would hope that slows down in the future as we're able to actually administer the whole spectrum. There was a few large philanthropic outflows. Outside of that, sort of your normal, business. I think. Yeah. Just on your point around the TDs certainly would account for some of it, we imagine. Yeah. We actually haven't drilled down. Where it goes. to the individual adviser level and account level because it's just too much detail to ingest. You would expect, given how many, how much the TDs on the platform have increased, that some clients would be wanting to take that off the platform so they don't have to pay admin fees or adviser fees. There was also a couple of accounts which moved to different advisors to groups that didn't use Netwealth. Bit of a mix. Yeah, we don't see that being systemic. Yeah, sure. Some permanent into alternative asset classes and some maybe being held off- platform in cash and TDs. Yeah. Just, like, given. I'll send my second question on, just a question around the strategic capital expend. I think mentioned that. Sorry, Nick, we've lost you. Lost you. We haven't killed Nick off. He's actually dropped off the line. Are we still connected? Nick, are you? There we go. Yes, you're still connected. Pardon me. Sorry. Yes, he did drop. We'll move on to the next question. If he could join back in the queue, we'll take the rest of his question. The next question comes from Brendan Carrig from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Good morning. Just one from me in addition. Just that new chart that you provided on the, on the tenure. Mm-hmm. I'd just be interested in that 1-5 year cohort. Do you have any commentary or insights into, I guess, the expectations of how much of the flows have sort of been coming from that group? I mean, the purpose of my question is just trying to understand, you know, have you had a large amount of flows in coming across from that group over the last sort of 1-3 years post Royal Commission and large advisor movements? Is the risk, I guess, that those transitions will start to slow, and then you'll be more reliant on new advisors and new flows because you're getting less from that existing cohort? Yeah. The upside's gonna obviously be determined where in that particular cohort they came from. Year 5, there's gonna be less upside. Those that have come in over the last couple of years, certainly greater upside. We have seen a big uptick in advisors. There is, you know, still significant opportunity within that cohort. The 1% and the pipeline and also the licensees that we've signed up in the last sort of 6 to 12 months also provides ample runway. Just a very quick follow-up. Just on the other income, looks like that was predominantly interest income that drove that bump up. So, you know, there's nothing else that's sort of more one-off in nature in that line item, so we can probably continue to expect about AUD 3 million a half in your other income? Yeah, certainly that's the most significant driver. It's interest rates and return on the ORFR, so those two elements. Cool. Thank you. I'll drop back in. Your next question comes from Scott Hudson from MST. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, gentlemen. Just a, I guess, a question around the Quality of Advice Review. Do you see any, I guess, upside or risks to some of the findings disclosed in that in that review? It's still pretty unclear as to exactly what the outcome of that review will be. If it was to be taken entirely, as per presented, it would be a very positive outcome for the industry and also for the broader Australian population who can't currently pay for advice. There's a number of research reports out there and commentary to suggest that in the event that a lot of the current regulation was reduced, so the removal of SOAs, for example, advisors would be able to increase their capacity by maybe another 20% to 30%, due to the lack of paperwork that would need to be done to actually service those clients. Still a long way to go. It's out with industry for consultation and it'll be very interested to see where it goes. We're certainly very supportive of it. I think there's some great recommendations in it. Do you think the shift from best interests duty to good advice, helps drive the flow of, I guess, further away from legacy platforms onto platforms such as yourself? Look, at the end of the day, whether it's best interest or good advice, the advice being provided needs to be appropriate to the client. If the advisor believes that we're a better proposition, which is not just price, which seems to be unfortunately where it's gone in the past, to broader capability, functionality, I think it's absolutely a positive for Netwealth. Again, that reduction in, you know, potential reduction in requirement to provide SOAs, will make it easier for transitions to occur. That's great. Thank you. Your next question comes from Simon Fitzgerald from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi there. Thanks for taking my question. Just a really quick one in regards to slide nine, just with the existing financial intermediaries accounting for 94.2% of flows in the half. I'm interested to know from your point of view, Matt, whether you still see the same sort of trajectory of transition period when a new adviser comes on board. Does it still take as long? If you had any comments to make in terms of what the average adviser is using in terms of number of platforms and where you think that will go. Yes. I think the, you know, the traditional timing still stands up. I do caveat, though, with the current market volatility, we have seen delays in funding and process, anecdotally, feedback from advisors, and we certainly saw this come through in the flows for the first half. It is just taking longer for clients to agree to recommend to proposals and to then proceed. That's just really around market volatility, investor behavior and, I guess, people not necessarily wanting to be out of the market in case they miss a rally or vice versa. We do need a period of or some optimism to come back into the market to really get back to that normality. It's a, it's a short- term trend as opposed to a longer term one. Yeah. One final question, just on sort of longer- term thematics. You know, consolidation may be a thematic in, within this industry at some stage. What's your sort of opinion about how easy or how difficult it is to put two platforms together, just given some of your competitors have really struggled with that? Thank you. It's incredibly difficult. You know, there is a perception out there that you can easily merge platforms or put them together. There's a whole raft of issues that go with it, technology, people, clients. It is not an easy thing to do. Whilst consolidation, hypothetically makes sense, and, you know, there's certainly opportunities out there, it's not an easy process and can be horribly distracting. Great. Thanks, Matt. A follow-up question from Siraj Ahmed from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Can I just clarify on the employee expenses comment, that the quantum of increase will be lower, actual dollar spend? I don't think I made that comment. Okay. All good. Yeah. All I said was there's two bits of guidance around costs. One is the headcount increase in the second half will be similar to the first half, and the non-people- related costs will be similar to the first half. In dollar terms, the non-people costs will be similar. In headcount terms, the people increase will be similar. Okay. Just thinking more, medium term, you're clearly the focus is shifting to productivity and efficiency and operating leverage. Should we expect margins to get back to sort of the 55% levels or is 50% sort of the benchmark? Any color on that? I reckon 90. No. No. Obviously, we've never provided long- term sort of predictions around where the EBITDA margin is gonna get to. It's there's so many factors that come into it. We certainly wouldn't have expected necessarily the margins to be where they are three years ago, so we're not gonna provide predictions around where it's gonna be in the future. All I would say is that we're very focused on making sure that we do get leverage out of our operations and all teams. Certainly the last couple of years have been more exceptional than the ongoing will be. We don't plan on adding the amount of people that we've been adding over the last few years in the future. That should help us achieve better margins, but we're not providing any predictions. It's a big team now. All of the key areas have been resourced up, and we've got a lot of embedded capacity. Now it's really around maximizing the people and resources that we have invested in. Okay, that's quite clear. Matt, can I just also ask, I mean, you're being quite positive on MAPS, right, and the pipeline. Any way for us to think about the revenue opportunity in the pipeline? Not sure if everyone converts and comes on board, but, like, how big is it, the revenue opportunity that you're seeing compared to what you have today? We, we've talked about this bit in the past and we'll continue to provide information on it. MAPS all the assets that sit within the non-custodial component. It's not gonna be a major contributor to revenue or profitability sort of in the near to medium term. That said, and the reason that we're investing in it and enthusiastic about it, is that it really provides a solution to a problem that's existed in the industry for a very long time. It will enable us to have different discussions and discussions with groups that may have not been willing to entertain one historically, but it also opens up significant new market segments and opportunities. Therefore, we believe we can expand the total addressable market through the product. Examples of that would be private wealth firms, you know, high-net-worth firms that have been operating on in-house systems or spreadsheets that have worked to a point and have really reflected the fact that in the past there hasn't been solutions that catered for all of their asset requirements. The conversations we're having now with that style of group are very different to what we would've been having 12 or 18 months ago. It's an important product evolution, and we think will be a very positive one, even though the non-custodial component might not initially make a major contributor, as the broader FUM opportunity or full flow opportunity will. Very great. Can I ask one more, or is there other questions on the line? Yeah, we'll make an exception for you, Siraj. Thanks. Just on admin fees, I mean, I think for the first time that seems to have gone up as well, half on half. I'm not sure if that's a mix or because the outflows from the high net worth. Just, what are you seeing in terms of pricing and how we should think about admin fees? I think as we've said in the past, there hasn't been a lot of change to the marketplace in terms of admin fees. Any changes to admin fees that we're seeing is really related to what the opportunity set is that's coming on. If it's a particularly large group with large accounts, there's gonna be cheaper fees that are offered for to by any competitor. We're going to have to match that. I think overall, the fees aren't really changing too much in the marketplace. If the mix stays the same, we're hoping that the admin fees should be similar. Yep. Thanks, Grant. Your next question is a follow-up question from Nick McGarrigle from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead. G'day. I've had a lot of clients also say that maybe I should consider a permanent name change to MacGregor. I'm putting that in the mix. In the strategic investment in technology, can you just talk through the quantum and style of that? I think you mentioned internal developments all being OpEx, just can you sort of quantify what that amount and what that comment really relates to? I think I'm glad you asked that question. We didn't hit the dump button, by the way. In the first half we had AUD 2.5 million. It's gonna be something similar. It's very much connected to those projects that we've listed. We don't, we haven't in the past had a significant CapEx expense. It is really around purchased or third-party software that or services that we're having to pay in order to achieve those initiatives. We're not making any change to the process around capitalization for our headcount, our internal headcount, at this stage. Who knows what may happen in the future, certainly at currently we're. Everything, all of our staff that are within the IT team are continuing to be expensed. Cool. Those specific projects are very much project-based, or you'd expect to be continuing to spend that amount in forward years as well? It's very much project-based. I'm not saying that we won't spend capital expenditure in the future. It's around those projects that are listed. We don't have a long-term capital budget budgeting plan at all. It's around the list of projects that are in this 12-month period. Cool. Thank you. Your next question comes from Dylan Kelly from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Morning. Obviously had a few moving parts over the half, namely the higher cash balances at the start of the half. Are you able to give a sense of the exit platform margin, I guess based on the last 1 or 2 months? Probably the short answer is no. We sort of, we leave that to you guys to work out. We provide pretty good details in terms of what the split of revenue is. We've increased the disclosures around the split of revenue and expenses this year. Certainly we've also added in or have advised what the new cash margin is. We also are aware how much our balance in cash is, so it should be relatively straightforward for you to hopefully work out. No, fair enough. In terms of hiring, does the company tend to be more active during any particular month? I guess what I'm getting at is if you look back at your headcount additions over the last three or four halves, is it fair to assume that these were relatively even, evenly added over the half? A lot of it's actually around whether we can actually find the people when and when we can find the people. We've had vacancies over the last two years in various areas. It just depends on where the employment markets are, how many particular vacancies we have. I wouldn't say there's a particular seasonality. It's just around when people leave. Hire teams and the availability of those staffing in particular areas. Certainly in parts of IT, it's been very. It's taken quite a while to set the teams up. We've been, you know, we've been, in some cases, trying to set up teams for, you know, up to six months before we get the team in place. Great. No, thank you. I'll leave it there. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Oliver Connell from EMP Financial Group. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Congrats on a strong result, by the way. A couple of questions just on the ROA tool that you've got in planning. Mm-hmm. Is there any view on what the potential productivity saving, you know, could be for clients? How does that kind of integrate in with their existing, you know, I suppose, advisor software kind of, platform? Yeah. We've offered a Record of Advice solution for many years now, I couldn't tell you exactly, for bulk rebalancing. Through our smart technology, effectively an adviser could attach a range of clients to a mixed model or an individual model and then rebalance across all of those clients through a single transaction and generate the Record of Advice either via paper or electronically, which the client could then consent to. The project that we're working on at the moment is really bringing a slightly new technology to individual transactions, where they can effectively do a individual client rebalance, generate the document, and then get the client to sign that without having to do it separately through a different process in their financial planning software or potentially even in Word. That, that ability to already have the data pre-populated into the Record of Advice without having to transpose it into a separate system and then generate the document will provide pretty significant cost savings. We haven't done the a time and motion study per se. Might be something we can have a look at, but I think just the, you know, the high- level understanding of what it does provides pretty good insights into that. As far as... Sorry, the second part of the question was? it was just how that integrated with their existing- Oh, okay. -financial planning software. Obviously this is something that, you kind of overlaid originally on rebalances and... Yeah. It's separate to their kind of software. The client will go into our portal. They'll do the switch, so buy and sell managed fund shares, generate the document, have the client sign it. It's not part of this initial release, but in future releases as we upgrade to API 4.3, which is the latest data file transfer protocol for the industry, we'll be able to add those documents into that feed, which will then electronically put them into Xplan, as an example. Yeah. Okay. No, that's perfect. Just on employee expenses, digging into that one again, what are you seeing in kind of the front- end inflation on especially tech roles? Are you starting to see that slow down? I guess, you know, your best guess on the year-on-year in the second half versus year-on-year kind of last year. I know that there's a whole bunch of mix issues, et cetera, that you'd be looking at. Yeah, there is. It is. It just depends on what the role is. You know, we certainly see inflation when new people come into your team. Within a couple of years they need a lift pretty quickly or else they're gonna go to a competitor. That pressure is still there. In certain areas, it's there is a lot of demand. It's not possible to give a percentage overall because some areas are relatively normal within that tech space, but some are definitely growing quickly. I'm sorry I haven't helped you too much, but there's definitely there are some hotspots there still. Okay. No, that's great. If I could just have a last one, that would be great. just digging into Siraj's point on the current FUA balance. Mm-hmm. relative to the closing FUA balance. Obviously, you know, I guess he was trying to back- solve what the flows were relative to market movement. Can we just confirm that? You know, 'cause for the last couple quarters, especially when the market has performed very strongly, seems like the average balance performance has lagged and obviously, you know, they're not all invested in equities. I think probably there's an overweight to tech and some long- duration stuff that might not be performing in line with the overall index. Are you seeing that continue in this current quarter? look, it's pretty hard to map back the increase in FUA and market to the exact asset classes. What we've generally seen over many years now, is that the bulk of the money on the platform would sit broadly in what one would expect to be a balanced profile. You might use that as a proxy for trying to understand what the market growth is. Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. No worries. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Heine for closing remarks. Thank you very much. It's, been a good session. Thank you for dialing in. Hopefully we're able to answer your questions and give you a bit more insight into our results. As, as per the outlook, you know, we are positive about the future. We've got a great pipeline, and we look forward to us continuing to keep you updated as we progress. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.