Hi, I'm Danni Hewson. I'm a financial analyst here at AJ Bell. I recently joined the business after spending 19 years with the BBC as a journalist and presenter, and what a time to come on board. I'll be joined today by AJ Bell Chief Executive, Andy Bell, and also CFO, Michael Summersgill, who will be discussing highlights from the 2021 interim results, which were announced today. Don't forget, if you want more detail about these results, you can find a full presentation on the investor relations section of the AJ Bell website. Andy, the company delivered another strong set of results with revenue and profits both up on last year. How would you reflect on those results? It's been a strong first half of the year. We've seen revenue up by 21%, profit before tax up 39%. That's really been driven, as usual in our business, by strong growth in customer numbers, strong growth in asset inflows, and probably what's been slightly unusual, really since the start of the lockdown, as we've seen the elevated levels of dealing activity in our D2C customers, that's really continued. It's seen peaks, but it feels as though we're starting to find a new normal there. Throughout that period, we've had our staff working from home and managed to continue to provide a high quality service to our customers. What do you think have been the key drivers of the performance? Well, obviously, really the engine room of our business are the new customers we get in and the net inflows. Both have grown very strongly, as we said before. Platform customers now at 332,000, which up 18% in the six months and 34% in the year. Platform assets under administration now sits at GBP 58 billion, which again, are up 17% in the six months and 38% in the year. Really, as I said before, that the elevated dealing activity, you'll see that coming through in heightened transactional income on the D2C platform. Looking specifically at the advised platform market, what were the key developments in this period and how did AJ Bell perform? Yeah, the advisers just went into lockdown. I think like all of us, it took a while to adjust, but then they got used to working on Teams and Zoom. New business carried on. Yeah, our advised platform, as a result, has seen strong growth in both the areas we've discussed. The advised customers now sit at 118,000, up 9% in the six months and 14% in the year. The advised assets under administration, just over GBP 40 billion at GBP 41.1 billion, up 13% in the half year and 31% in the year. Really, we've seen our customer profiles on the advised platform broadly stable. Average age of the customer 56. The average assets under administration per customer is just shy of GBP 350,000 at GBP 347,000. We've seen the Retirement Investment Account has done well. That's really our simplified pension composition targeted at smaller value customers. We also acquired a small business in Bristol called Adalpha in April. That is a simplified mobile-led adviser platform in the process of being built. We're going to rebrand it as being called Touch by AJ Bell to sit alongside our main advised platform, and we're looking to do a soft launch in the first half of our next company year. Let's move on to the direct-to-consumer market now, because there's been a lot of media coverage about really strong investor engagement. What are your views on the current market dynamics in the D2C market? Yeah, it does feel as though investing has almost become a front page news, which in itself has helped increase engagement of either existing customers or actually possibly more importantly, new customers who are coming into the market. We've seen the vaccine announcements in November. We've had two lockdowns in the U.K. We've seen the U.S. election. We formally left the EU. Crypto and meme stocks have been all over the press, and all of this in a low interest environment where people are looking at how best they can work their money for the best return. COVID has been a wake-up call for people taking personal responsibility for their finances, which has played out mainly in the D2C market, but also in adviser land as well. We've seen a trend towards slightly younger customers, and I mentioned the heightened dealing activity. We've seen our younger customers now coming through. The average age of a new customer is 38 compared to an average age across the whole book of 43. The average AUA per customer, just shy of £80,000. These are good quality people coming into the business. I think would stand the test against any of the other DIY platforms in the market. We've also seen this dealing activity, really, you can actually see the correlation between lockdown and dealing activity. I think we will return to a new normal, but everything we're seeing is that it will be a new normal and dealing activity will remain at high levels, although maybe not at the very high that we've seen during the peak of the lockdowns and big announcements I talked about before. With that in mind, how did AJ Bell help these new customers coming into the market? Our approach is simple. We help people to invest, and we do that by ensuring we have the easiest platform to use. When we think about new customers, we tend to categorize them into what we call confident control, hungry for help, or nervous newcomers. Our main focus is on the last two groups, which has really paid dividends for us, certainly in the first half of the year. We talked about the new customers coming into the business being slightly younger, maybe five to six years younger than the average. Still, 70% of these are investing in tax wrappers, which really is confirming this, the point I made, that they aren't coming in investing in meme stocks and on short-term. They are investing long-term in nature. We don't provide the complex or high-risk products like crypto or CFD or options. We've also seen our range of in-house investment solutions prove very popular. Both our Favourite Funds, but also we now see over 3% of the D2C assets are now held in our own range of low-cost multi-asset funds, which is really pleasing. A lot of highlights there. Is there anything else that's caught your eye in the first half? Yeah. I think on the investment side, it's starting to really get traction now. We've got GBP 1.4 billion under management on the investment side now. That's up 75% in the last six months, which is exceptional growth in any market. That's proved popular with both advisors and D2C customers. We recently launched the Responsible Growth Fund and the Responsible MPS, or the Managed Portfolio Service for advisors. Really our investment product suite is now largely complete and having a good distribution of what we've got. Also, one other point to make is that we announced the appointment of Helena Morrissey as Chair designate and Evelyn Bourke as a non-exec. Both will join us on 1st of July. What do you think is the outlook for the market and for AJ Bell? Well, some growth drivers that we've talked about ever since we came to market are still there. They remain strong. I think COVID has been a wake-up call, which I think will remind people some time that they do need to engage with their own financial futures and be that through advised or the D2C sector. The low interest rates again, whilst there's a sign of inflation on the horizon, I still think the low interest rate environment is going to be here for a number of years to come. Our aim is to continue developing the propositions, always challenging ourselves and making them easy to use. We'll be launching a new Touch platform over the course of the next six to 12 months. Our culture is strong. We've got a scalable, robust platform, and we have a compelling offer for both advisors and the D2C retail investors. It's really all about growth and increasing our market share. In summary, the outlook for the business remains very positive. We're joined now by Michael Summersgill, CFO, to talk about financial performance. Michael, with that in mind, what are the highlights for you? Yeah. The financial performance was strong across the board, but there's two data points that show a particularly impressive aspect of our performance in H1. The first of those is revenues. The revenue, GBP 73.9 million, up 21%. Strong growth, but you'd expect that, to be honest, in our business. For me, the particularly pleasing nature of the growth was how high quality it was. The second point that really highlights that fact is the PBT margin. That was 42.8%, up 5.6 percentage points versus the prior period. It's a strong performance, and that supports an interim dividend of GBP 0.0246 per share. That's 40% of last year's total dividend, and that's in line with our ordinary policy. What are the key drivers of this financial performance? High level, it's all about the continued growth of the platform business, but as ever, there's a few specific factors in H1 that really drove the performance. The first of those factors was the dealing activity on the D2C platform. This was a big story in H1 across the industry. Retail customers have been very active for a number of reasons, partly the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact that had on markets, partly the U.S. election, and then various other factors as well. For us, that's meant that the D2C revenue margin was up to 43 basis points. That's a five basis point improvement on the prior period, and that was quite a strong period in its own right. Dealing was an all-time high. That was the first factor. You've seen the scalability of the business evidenced in H1 as well. Focusing on the cost base, our figures show that the operational costs increased 18% in the period. If you adjust that figure to take out the non-recurring cost of that heightened dealing activity, then you see the operational cost have increased around about 5%. You compare that to the increase in customers and AUA and revenue, and you can really see the efficiency of the business model coming through in that single figure. Looking forward, what are your expectations around revenue and costs for full year 2021 and beyond? Yeah. Probably best to split that answer into two parts. Focusing on the more immediate term first. In the second half of this year and then in our next financial year, there's two main things that we expect to impact, and both impact our revenue. The first is the low interest rate environment that we're now in, and the second is our expectation that D2C dealing activity will start to moderate. Both of those factors we've talked about in guidance previously. They're both old news really, but they start to have their full impact in the second half of this financial year and then in our next full financial year, FY 2022. We'll see our D2C revenue margin fall from its current levels to sort of high 30 basis points for FY21 as a whole, and then fall into around about 30 basis points in FY 2022. We look out beyond FY 2022, and we see those revenue margins starting to build again. There's a bigger contribution from our investment business there, and that will help revenue margins expand. We see the same PBT margin expansion opportunities as we always have. The operational gearing inherent in our business model means as we continue to grow, it should still be that opportunity to increase profit margins still further. A very positive view as we look out beyond FY 2022. Thank you very much indeed, Andy and Michael, and thank you very much for joining us. Don't forget, you can find a full copy of the results presentation on the investor relations section of the AJ Bell website. You can also look out for our Q3 trading update on the 22nd of July. Thanks very much.