Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the Hargreaves Lansdown interim results. My name is Maxine. I'll be coordinating the call today. If you would like to ask a question during the presentation, do so by pressing star one on the keypad, via the web, or by raising your hand icon. Alternatively, you can type your questions using the chat box online. I will now hand over to your host, Chris Hill, executive, to begin. Chris, please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you, Maxine. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hargreaves Lansdown's 2021 interim results call. Thank you for joining us. I'm Chris Hill, Chief Executive. I'm joined on the call with Philip Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. You all already have seen this morning, we put out a strong set of numbers. There are, I think, often questions to ask about the cyclicality of our results and rates of growth. My answer is invariably linked to the external environment and its impact on client confidence. However, these results show that through the cycle, and there will be ups and downs, this business is delivering long-term growth, and that trend should be the focus rather than quarterly movements. We have just completed the strongest month to period that Hargreaves Lansdown has ever had. We now stand as the leading digital wealth manager. We now look after close to 1.5 million clients, and in the period, we experienced 153 million digital visits with an aggregate 25 million minutes spent reading our content. Our digital footprint continues to expand as we engage with our growing client base. Through this time, we have continued to develop the proposition and the service, and we've delivered strong growth in AUA, net new business, and profits before tax. I'm going to hand over to Philip now to walk you through the financials. Then I will come back and talk a lot more about how we are delivering growth through the cycle. Philip, over to you. Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. I hope you're well wherever you are. 2020 has been an extraordinary period in so many ways. In our space, there are huge sector and generational things happening. A whole new level of engagement by people with investment all around the world. Something was necessary, and in the long term, will be enormously beneficial for society. This engagement is seen most strongly in businesses like ours, ones with market-leading franchises, offering straightforward asset classes, tax wrappers, and high-quality technology and tools matched to the products and services. A business that allows its clients to take control of their wealth, their financial future, to save and invest with confidence. Hargreaves Lansdown is a digital wealth management service. We build lifelong relationships with our clients, attracting and then engaging with them to support their journey towards their desired outcomes. It's this engagement, activity, and growth that are all reflected in our very strong numbers for the first half of the 2021 financial year. Revenue increased 16% due to our diversified income streams, leading market positions, and powerful net new business tailwind. Profits, which factor in declines and client acquisition and activity consequences of this extraordinary period, grew 10% to GBP 188 million. Once again, bigger than our revenues were just four years ago. All of this growth was delivered whilst being there for our clients throughout it all. We've not had to seek government assistance, nor have we had to furlough any employees or enact any redundancies. These are challenging times, and uncertainty still lies ahead, but the board remains confident in our prospects and momentum and has therefore increased the interim dividend by 6% to 11.9p per share. Let's look at the numbers in more detail, starting with revenue. Hargreaves Lansdown allows our clients to save and invest funds, shares, and cash from their chosen providers within their chosen wrappers. This diverse offering, the diverse ways that our clients engage with us, and the diverse asset classes that our clients choose to hold provide us with a diversified revenue stream. The benefits of this are clearly shown by the revenue and asset growth we have delivered in the period. Revenue for the first half was GBP 300 million, 16% up ahead of last year, compared to a 17% decline in the average FTSE share. Assets under administration rose to GBP 121 billion, up 16% over the past year versus a 12% fall in the FTSE share, all powered by GBP 8.5 billion of net new business across the calendar year and global market rises late in the period. Within revenues, funds were flat at GBP 110 million, strongly outperforming market movements. Shares grew to GBP 113 million as clients, mostly existing but also new, engaged more actively with their portfolios in the U.K. and overseas. I'll come back to this and other guidance shortly, as I know many of you are speculating on what the new sustainable level of dealing might now be. Cash revenue fell to GBP 33 million as expected and guided following the 2020 interest rate cut and yield curve reductions. HL Funds revenue was down to GBP 29 million, in line with average market level movements, and other income was down due to our sale of Funds Library in February 2020 and reduced advisory activity in the COVID configuration. Looking at stockbroking in more detail, as promised. All of what follows is, I hope, insightful but definitely not rigid guidance. The chart on the left shows monthly dealing levels over the past five calendar years and the suggested guidance for the 2021 financial year. The chart on the right is more detailed. The blue dots are deals per day, the black line is the rolling five-day average, and the gray sections are the U.K. lockdowns, the first one ending on June the 15th, the day shops first reopened. This chart shows some interesting things. Firstly, as 2019 shows, and the three years before would have too, this might seem transactional revenue, but the activity that underpins it is remorselessly and repetitively consistent. There is a steady, dependable floor to this, generated by the subscription nature of both flows and client engagement with HL, an engagement that's always there. This is not an options business in need of market volatility. Its transactional revenue stream is more recurring than you might suspect. In 2020, the surge in engagement with investment and what this has meant everywhere across our business, client contact, traffic, logins, opening accounts, adding money, fund ownership, transfers in, and share dealing. These are important engagement trends which could even be permanent in their nature. In dealing, this has lifted volumes right across the period, and even more so in the pandemic lockdowns. This suggests our recurring floor of dealing levels may have doubled. 40,000 deals a day might be the new non-lockdown norm, or maybe trebled. 60,000 a day seems the in-lockdown floor with spike days on top. Stockbroking is an important part of our integrated offering. Our clients like our tools, our app, and our research. They use it within all our wrappers and they value it. It is uncorrelated with market levels and provides a more attractive semi-recurring revenue stream than we have perhaps shown before. Looking at margins on our other asset classes. I have just covered shares, and once again, there is absolutely nothing to say about funds margins. On HL Funds, we announced a repricing of our multi-manager funds late last month to restore competitiveness, share economies to scale, and begin actively marketing them again following stronger performance over the past year. The financial impact is about GBP 3.5 million on a full year basis, starting during Q2 this calendar year. The margin impacts next are shown on the slide. I said in August that I expected net interest margins on cash to be higher in the first half than in the second, and that is still the case. Following the yield curve reduction since we last met, we now expect 34 to 40 basis points this year. I do not normally think it is useful to give guidance on this line 18 months ahead, especially when so much of this income is dependent on forward interest rates and so much of the cash in question is yet to mature off old rates and be placed on new ones. However, I know you are all going to ask me anyway, given current rates and what has been placed already, caveat, at the moment, our expectations for the 2022 financial year are in the 10 to 15 basis point corridor. Moving on to costs. I said up front that this has been an extraordinary period for client engagement, activity, and growth, and those themes are particularly evident here. Operating costs for the first half were GBP 112 million. 26% ahead of the period last year that had Brexit uncertainty and a general election, and where we had deliberately held back costs to reinvest and accelerate growth in the second half of our 2020 financial year. The drivers across this period are exactly the same as in the previous six months, as shown in the bullets. We remain disciplined about where we are investing, resulting in ex FSCS levy costs slightly below their run rate in the second half of last year. These outcomes are perhaps shown more clearly in the waterfalls on the next slide, which we should turn to now. These two charts show costs and these drivers over the comparative period on the left and against the run rate for the previous six months on the right. Activity, mostly dealing with its associated GBP 67 million of additional revenues. Marketing, bringing 84,000 net new clients in the period, but also GBP 3.2 billion of organic net new business from existing clients as well as new. Over the past year, this spend has brought 222,000 net new clients and GBP 8.5 billion of net new business, adding GBP 46 million to our annual revenue stream and building the flywheel of future lifetime value, as Chris will talk to more shortly. Servicing all this activity whilst working in a COVID configuration means we've had to add people in the short term, primarily helpdesk and ops, and also spend on technology to continue thriving at scale. As you can see on the right, it's pretty much only these servicing heads which are new to the run rate. You can see that the other cost lines are being controlled to create the capacity to invest in those areas which bring the biggest short and long-term benefits. A quick word on the FSCS levy before I move on. The FSCS have now published their 2021 budget with a significant increase in the total sums raised. However, the pools we are in were already full, and hence we currently expect the 2021 cost to be broadly similar to the prior year. Turning on to profits. I've shown you these two charts before. On the left, how revenues and costs have developed in recent periods, and how we managed short-term costs in line with market conditions last year, allowing us to take advantage of the opportunity to accelerate our growth over the past 12 months. On the right, our increased client numbers bring scale and efficiencies that we consciously reinvest into growth, giving clients the best proposition and service we can whilst maintaining stable unit costs. This period, again, saw a continuation of these themes, despite the extraordinary growth that we've seen in clients, resulting in profits before tax of GBP 188 million, 10% ahead of the prior year. As I said earlier, profits that are bigger than revenues were four years ago. Just finishing with EPS and dividends. The table on the left shows the EPS up 10% to GBP 0.321 per share, and on the right, our interim dividend. We continue to operate a clear dividend policy with a progressive ordinary dividend centered around a 65% payout across the market cycle, and the potential for special dividends paid out of excess cash generated from earnings after taking account of market conditions and our regulatory capital growth and investment requirements at the time. The board remains confident in our prospects and momentum and hence has declared an interim dividend of GBP 0.119 per share, 6% up on the prior year. Just slightly below the rate of first half profit growth due to the seasonal tilt of our cost base and the difficulty in predicting market conditions at present. Thank you very much, and I'll pass you back to Chris now. Thank you, Philip. We are on to slide 13 of the deck. As I mentioned before, the business model has behaved exactly as I would expect it to, given the external conditions. Q1 was characterized by widespread volatility and uncertainties driven by the U.S. election, Brexit, and the pandemic. We saw a resolution of these issues in Q2, with certainty regarding the next president, which coincided with the news regarding a vaccine, and by the end of the calendar year, the Brexit issue had moved on. All of this saw investor confidence, which had been weakening through July and August, pick up and then race ahead. Our results have reflected that journey, and the last six months have set records for an HL first half, including our biggest ever growth in net new clients at 84,000, alongside very strong net new business of GBP 3.2 billion, which has helped to drive our AUA above GBP 120 billion for the first time. HL provides a market-leading client experience that is underpinned by a proposition and service that is built around client needs. It is through this that we continue to attract and engage greater numbers of clients throughout the period and extend our leading market share. As a consequence of this, retention has remained strong at 92.9%. Stepping back and looking at the trends, which actually started pre-COVID and have accelerated during COVID, something I am going to pick on in more detail in a moment, this growth has been driven by the continued structural shift towards self-directed savings and investments. Especially younger generations wanting to plan for the future and to manage their wealth online. I will talk about the market dynamics in a moment, I want to reiterate here on slide 14 why HL is positioned the way that we are and why we focus the way that we do. I have outlined it before, HL has a large and growing market opportunity underpinned by a number of societal and structural trends. With an increasingly complex savings environment, persistently low interest rates, and the transfer of responsibility to individuals to manage their financial futures, Hargreaves Lansdown is in a position and has a strategy that can provide the help and support that clients need. We understand that need. Therefore, we have a clear purpose: to empower people to save and invest with confidence. Our purpose is reflected in our values and our culture, that underpins a client-focused strategy that aims to deliver the outcomes and experience that clients need. Our growth strategy is client-led. We attract clients with a strong brand, a broad proposition to help people to manage their wealth with cash savings, funds, shares, investment solutions, guidance and advice, and simple choices across the full range of wrappers. A clean, simple pricing structure and ease of access across digital channels. We engage with clients with best-in-class digital marketing and best-in-class experience, providing research, updates, and engaging content supported by online tools and investment solutions. We retain clients with a relentless focus on client service and continuous development that continually evolves our proposition to meet the evolving needs of our clients. By continuing to invest in line with our strategy, building the foundations to enable our ongoing scalability and capability with a strong client service ethos at the center of it, we are well-placed to capitalize on the market opportunity and continue to drive our market-leading position, which enables people to manage their wealth across their savings and investments, their liquidity, their income, and their financial future across the leading digital wealth platform. In short, our simple strategic focus differentiates us and underpins our confidence in driving client growth as demonstrated in this period. What this period has shown us is that Hargreaves Lansdown and the broader wealth management industry is experiencing structural growth, and that our client-focused strategy has positioned HL to be a leading beneficiary of these trends. We have a small but growing share of a growing GBP 2.4 trillion market. We understand the dynamics, and we're capturing that growth, shown here with a doubling of clients from 736,000 in 2015 to 1.5 million in 2021, and doubling assets from GBP 55 billion in 2015 to GBP 120.6 billion in 2021. Over that same period, our market share of just the direct market has increased from 37.5 from 4 to 42.5%. Our share of retail stockbroking from 27.5% to 40.3%. What this shows is that while there may be fluctuations on a quarterly basis, the execution of our strategy is helping us win in a growing market. Now let me talk a bit more about what we see in the market. We talked before about the secular shift onto individuals to manage their financial futures. When you think about what this really means for people, they're having to contend with living longer and having to manage this into their financial planning. Low yields mean it's harder to get a return, more uncertainty from global politics and volatile markets, and managing through a complex saving environment. In short, as I've said many times before, people need more help and support than they ever have before. All of these trends are having a generational impact on how individuals look at their savings and investments. We have been seeing them for some time, and COVID has perhaps made them more pronounced. As the market matures, its average investor is getting younger. The U.K. is not boomer-driven because the young and wealthy are coming through. A shift towards younger audiences has become more pronounced. Millennials account for the majority of potential future investors and also those for whom investing shows the most increased appeal. Generation X has already reached that point and has the greatest and most rapidly growing savings potential. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of saving and investing and the need for individuals to be financially resilient. We've seen a surge in engagement because this event has reinforced long-term trends. The story here is a massive surge in individual engagement with financial affairs within the U.K. and around the world, as evidenced with various results and releases over the last few weeks. Now let me talk about what these trends have meant for HL. As the demographic changes that we talked about come through, we've invested in our proposition and service to capture this opportunity to attract, engage, and retain clients across all age cohorts. Let me highlight a few points that are brought out on this slide. As I said earlier, we've doubled clients and assets since 2016. This has meant that the total number of clients and assets on the platform have clearly grown across all age segments. However, we've experienced a demographic change with an increase in mix of younger clients under 55, who've come onto the platform and represent a bigger proportion of the total assets. As a consequence, the average age of new clients has reduced from 45 in 2012 to 37 in 2020. Clients under the age of 55 now represent 63% of clients. What's interesting is not only the growth in client numbers in this age group and their assets, but how fast as a group their assets are growing. These age groups, on average, invest in the most products of all the age groups. As they progress from the 18 to 29 phase and on into the 30 to 54 phase, they grow their wealth substantially, and they want to put it to work. These younger clients have money, are engaging with saving for the future, and want help to put their money to work. What this tells you, by getting clients onto the platform earlier, we are able to support them for longer as they grow their wealth over time, and this enhances the lifetime value opportunity. As I say, what's interesting about the age groups under 55 is the rate at which they grow assets. As we then look at the underlying trends, given the changes in the market environment and age demographics, this shouldn't actually be a surprise. This chart on slide 18 shows various client cohorts by birth date and sets out clients' behavioral patterns in building their investment pots. I want you to focus on the bold dotted line. This is the line of best fit that demonstrates how clients grow their holdings over time. The striking thing is when you look at the behavior of clients over time, the investment trends and patterns are remarkably consistent. Specifically for new clients in 2020, we've now had COVID-era clients for close to nine months, and on average, they have the same behavioral pattern and trends as previous annual cohorts. Looking at the average age of 37, we are adding those clients at the point where they are building their wealth. You will have seen this slide 19 many times, and I'm only briefly going to touch on it now, but it does bring together a number of things which we're discussing. We are building a larger client base across a broader offering in response to our clients' evolving needs. We're bringing clients onto the platform at a younger age than we've done so before. Those below 55, on average, invest in the most products of all the age groups, and over time follow similar behavioral patterns in terms of wealth accumulation. Very simplistically, this will enhance the lifetime value of our client base. It also reinforces the need for wealth managers such as Hargreaves Lansdown to support the lifetime savings and investment journey of these individuals. The only way to manage this demand for wealth management is through digital means, which brings me on to the next slide. We've recognized the need to provide this service through the changing demographics. We are ensuring that we continue to invest in the development of our proposition and service to enable the digital future that will meet the needs of our clients on that lifetime journey. We are using our scale to enable us to continue to invest in the platform. We're using our scale to develop the market-leading insights that enable us to continuously build our relationship with clients through the service and the support that we provide. This focused investment has enabled us to double the clients on the platform. We saw the importance of this investment in a recent system outage resulting from the high levels of volume associated with market volatility. This was managed swiftly by our technical teams, with lessons taken forward to avoid future events of the type and ensure that we're able to maintain our client service over the long term. This experience only reinforced the necessity and benefits of the historical and ongoing investment that we've made in our systems and processes to ensure appropriate capacity and upgrades to meet the demands of an ever-growing client base. The areas that we've invested in are logical. They support our attract, engage, retain strategy. We've added people to the help desk and into our processing operations. We continue to invest in the scalability and resilience of the platform and moving to more digital and connected technology. We've developed smart tools to support clients in making informed choices. We've focused on the accessibility of a simple, easy-to-use digital experience, on engaging content that informs, builds knowledge, develops insight, on our choice architecture that helps clients to the right outcomes available for them. Each of these focused investments and developments help to ensure that we've got the capacity and capabilities to offer the experience to maintain a lifelong relationship with our clients. In summary, we've delivered a strong set of results. The second half has started well, similar to other lockdown months. Tax year end, important as always. Like everyone else, we're cognizant of the external environment and the uncertainty that remains. As we all know, that it does influence client confidence in the short term, as we've seen over the years. What we do know is that we are well-positioned to deliver a through-the-cycle growth opportunity in our market. We have the leading digital wealth service to do so. We'll continue to invest to maintain this leadership position whilst delivering on this opportunity. With that, Maxine, can I open it up to questions, please? If you would like to ask a question, please press star by one on your telephone keypad now. If you're joining us via the web, you can register your question by clicking the flag icon. Alternatively, you can also type your questions using the chat box online. Our first question comes from Andrew Sinclair from Bank of America. Your line is now open. Thanks, Maxine, and thanks everyone. Good morning. Three from me as usual, if that's okay. Firstly was on cash margins. I thought the guidance you've given us is really helpful today. Just really wanted to clarify if the 10, 15 basis points you've guided for 2022, is that essentially in line with what you're getting in terms of new investments to date? Secondly was just you've cut the charges on your HL funds range, as you mentioned, after the value for money analysis. Really just wanted to see if you feel they've gone far enough. The funds are still charging between about 1.06% and 1.56% annual management fees. That's quite a bit higher than some of the other fund of fund ranges out there in the market, including available on your platform. Just thoughts on that. Thirdly, on stock trading, again, you've given us super helpful color today, one thing that perhaps wasn't mentioned was some of the Reddit trading stocks and things like that we've seen over the last week or two. Just really wondered if you have any color of what you've seen there. Thanks. Right. Sorry, just working out how to take those questions. I'll take the first of those. Cash margins on 10 to 15 basis points. I hope you heard me say there are massive amounts of caveats around this. If you look at the bank interest rate and the bank yield curve, you can see without me telling you what sorts of breaks we can get right now. When I say we, I mean every provider that's putting money forward for 12 months will be getting similar rates right now. I think the yield curve actually for 12-month money isn't very far off, if not below the base rates. These things are always a combination of bank demand for your money and also the rates that you can achieve. I don't pretend to be an interest rate commentator. I'd suggest if market data exists on this one, it's just like equity markets, they go up and down. Interest rates have come down. On the bright side, most of the space to move from here is downwards. Kristy, you want me to take this one as well? Yeah. Okay. This is a value proposition, Andrew. Like all fund managers, we have to look at the client and the types of how well our proposition delivers value for an enormous number of factors. I would encourage you to read our value for money publication. It's very helpful in terms of the categories through which we consider value, of which fees is but one. You'll see the way that we have concluded on the various categories of those, including fees, and therefore the responses that we're proposing. Clearly, we at the moment believe that what we have done is appropriate. We think that in particular, sharing economies of scale as you grow is an incredibly important fee and something that the industry hasn't really offered for our clients. Remember, unlike some other parts of the market, when we deliver price cuts through to our investors, on our own or other funds, that all flows through to them. That's what we're focused on is, in this as in every other part of our business, is delivering an extremely strong value proposition. You can see in the growth in client acquisition and engagement and activity, that what we have is a really powerful offering for the future of all digital wealth management. Thanks, Philip. I'll take the next one, Andrew, about your question around the stocks. Clearly, we're the largest retail stockbroker. We've got a 40% market share. We'll see that share of any of the retail activity that you see going through. I think for us, looking at the events that happened last week, and you'll see this if you look at the content we put on the website, which is very much a cautionary one, making sure that clients understand the difference between speculation and investment. Our focus, and I've said here, our purpose, is helping people to save and invest with confidence. We talked about this at the full year numbers and the content that we were providing to people who were starting to save and invest, very often who were investing in shares as their sort of their first experience. The material that we were providing to them was about the benefits of investing through tax wrappers, the benefits of diversification, the attributes of successful long-term investors, that's our focus. Obviously, this isn't the first rodeo that we've seen. We've seen Bitcoin, gold price speculation, 2008 financial crash, the dot-com bubble, all of these things. The way that we focus on this is to make sure that our clients are well-informed and make sure that we've invested in the platform to ensure that we can execute when they've decided what it is that they want to do. I think if you look at some of the metrics that I've put in there, 153 million digital visits. Even 25 million minutes being spent reading the content. We're providing that content that helps engage clients and help them to be informed as to what's happening and to make it easy for them to be able to act. Our emphasis is on long-term value. Our emphasis is on building a lifelong relationship. These younger clients, you bring a client on in their thirties, you want to have them as a client in their late eighties. At that stage, you want the money that's gone into the Junior ISAs because it's been passed on to the grandchildren. That's where our focus is. Very helpful. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Hilary Tam from Credit Suisse. Your line is now open. Morning, gentlemen. Congratulations on a strong set of results today. Can I have two, I'm afraid, quite numbers type questions for you, please? First one in terms of revenues. I think you say in the statement that the GBP 8.6 billion in net new business you saw in 2020 is equivalent to GBP 46 million of future annual revenues. I just think that comes out about 53 basis points fee margin. Given your funds platform margin is about 40 basis points and your shares is 59, I think this suggests about three-quarters of your net new business was shares and 25% was funds. I just wanted to check whether that sounds right to you. The second question was actually about operating margins and costs. Your 63% operating margin is pretty much in the realm of your recent range, 61, 64. Help us think about how this might shift from here. I was just looking at slides eight and nine, I noticed that on slide eight, you talk about GBP 67 million of additional revenues from record volumes. On slide nine, a GBP 6.5 million increase in activity-based costs, so I guess a GBP 13 million annualized increase. On that basis, it looks like the marginal operating profit margin for the increased trading activity is about 80%. Again, I just wanted to check if that was correct. Sorry for the numbers. Thank you. Thanks, Hayley. Those are both somewhat in the detail, to be honest with you. On the revenue side of it, I think you're being way too clever, to be honest with you. I appreciate the way you're trying to research our comment. It's just the average revenue on the entire group times the average rate that we earn. The whole point of it is really not to get gum down in terms of giving you incredibly insightful financial guidance, but to make the point that every single year, the clients that we add and the monies that are mostly our existing clients, I'd remember, it's about 80/20 proportion in terms of existing. That's what happens when your book gets bigger. It's more and more driven by the existing client base. Is forever accreting the amount of current and lifetime value of the business. This is a long-term business, and I think we want you to understand that and our investors to understand that, because our clients are with us for an extremely long period of time, and while they're staying with us, and Chris has shown me the accumulation of the assets that clients bring on their journey to their long-term outcomes. This is what we were just trying to give in that particular piece of insight. On the operating marginal contribution of share dealing. It does on the margin, everything that we add has a reasonably high attractive incremental margin. I would have to be honest with you, take that away, and I think James and I would just have to get back to you because it's a question of kind of details I don't have quite at my fingertips. Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you. Just to confirm, the 80/20 in terms of existing new clients, that hasn't changed. That's still the same this period as it was before then. No. This is a stronger period for existing clients. I think it's very easy to sometimes focus on new clients, and sometimes I read stuff that almost implies that new business comes from new clients and is all driven by marketing. That's not the case, as we've spent some time in results talking about. Marketing is something that we do to engage with our entire 2.5 million customer base, and the flows that come from our existing customer base is incredibly important to driving the accumulation of assets in the business, as Chris was showing you on, I think it was slide 18. Okay. Thank you. Our next question comes from Shimoli Ravishankar from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Hi all. Thank you very much for the presentation. Just a few more slightly following up on Hayley's questions. On the net flows and operating leverage. Thank you for the detailed color on the longer-term lifetime value of the clients. That was helpful. Looking over the next few years, GBP 3.2 billion for the first half was a strong number. When we delve down into the flows per customer, this was about GBP 38,000 for the first half, comparing to about mid-50s over 2018/2019. It's been ticking down over the last few quarters. Can you comment on the strength, whether you're seeing a fundamental change in the customer behavior in terms of the split between longer-term investing and stock trading? How does this impact the cost nearer term, presumably operating leverage is impacted if guidance is to think about cost in line with customer acquisition? Secondly, on the cash margins, you've given us a bit more color on the assumptions, but can you sort of tell us what kind of buffers you bake in on ability to negotiate better rates from partner banks and how we could think about margins if theoretically rates were to go negative in the U.K.? Finally, on technology, should we expect more ongoing investments here given some capacity issues last quarter? Are we largely done there? Thank you. Okay. Jimmy tend to all three for me. Let me take the first bit of that. Look, 221,000 new clients in a 12-month period is most certainly a record for us. Therefore, we've got a million and a half overall. I think, as I've demonstrated, we've got a pretty small market share of a 2.4 trillion market. I think that there is plenty of opportunity and we have the ambition to grow within that. The dynamics that I'm showing you on slide 18, demonstrating the consistency in terms of how clients build up their investment pot over time and reflecting the changing demographics that I have been talking about for the last four or five years with the increase in that younger mix coming through. Obviously, when clients start out, they don't have so much money, but they're starting earlier and then they're building those assets over time. When we look at This is part of what I talk about having an insight at scale. You get to see actually at scale how cohorts of clients are behaving and how they're growing assets over time. I think there are different trends that come within that in terms of what comes through in transfer. Younger clients won't have so much to transfer through. Older clients do. We've got more older clients. We've got more younger clients. Clients who, as I said, are starting out with an investment in a share. That's how they've been introduced. That's how they've started. Actually, if you look at what those clients do over time, as we engage with them and help them to understand the benefits of long-term investing, you've got more clients then who are moving into investing in funds. In this year, we've got almost twice as many people investing funds as they did last year in terms of new clients. You have to look at the scale. The scale is the important bit here, because that's how we understand and get the insight, and can understand what clients are doing, but also understand then how to engage with clients. On your point around technology, we are building the leading digital wealth management platform, and we will continue to invest in the technology that supports that. I think if you look over the next three to five years, you'll see the increasing importance of digital technology and how that is used to interact with and improve the client experience. Now, that is much clients on the front end, but also ensuring that we are investing in the scalability and resilience of the platform. We had the issue on Vaccine Monday, which impacted a small number of clients that we then worked on, needed to resolve, and we've acted as a result of that. That day we did 125,000 trades. Philip's already given you the metrics that pre-COVID averaged about 20,000 a day. Now, probably that has shifted to about 40,000. We still see these spikes. We've got the capability to deal with those spikes. Even the day after Vaccine Monday, we had over 100,000 trades done, and we've had days over 100,000 a number of times since we've seen that. I'm really clear that we have put in the investment to ensure the scalability up until now, we will continue to invest in technology to support both the scalability, also to develop and enhance the experience with clients, because that's what a digital wealth management platform needs to be able to do. You had a question about cash margins as well. I don't have anything to add to what I said already. You can see out there cash margins and base rates. I've said at previous results that we'll do the best thing we can to get best rates we can from banks as a counterparty. I think if rates go negative, we'll have to respond and deal with that as the whole market does. I really wouldn't get hung up on that. We're now talking about a sliver of income in our entire business. As Chris has just outlined, the most important exciting thing about this business is how we help our clients on their journeys and what that means for the asset accumulation. It's the asset accumulation in funds and shares, because we want our clients to be invested. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Ria Shah from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Good morning, Chris. Great set of results. I have two questions. In the statement, you talked about launching a new Cash ISA. What can you tell us about that in terms of the timeline, its connection to Active Savings, and also any margin guidance you can provide? The second question is on the pipeline for back book transfers. Has COVID impacted any discussions on this? Is there anything in the pipeline at the moment? Okay. Thank you. Morning, Ria. It's early days for us on the Cash ISA. We only soft launched at the end of November to a very small number of existing Active Savings clients. We then highlighted to a further 2,000, I think it was, clients in December. Over the next few days, we're going to start marketing it to the rest of our 80,000 plus Active Savings clients. Later in the year, we'll start marketing it to our wider client base. There's currently only one offer available with the Coventry Building Society, but we'll look to add further banks in the coming months. We're also working on the functionality to enable transfers of existing Cash ISAs held elsewhere. Remember, transfers are where there is significant opportunity. There's about GBP 270 billion of Cash ISAs out there, much of which is currently earning very poor rates of interest. Active Savings remains part of our core strategy for the digital wealth management proposition. With interest rates how they're at present, I think it remains a tough environment for cash savings products. What we offer helps clients to manage their savings more easily, and typically, it enhances the rates of interest that they earn. I think your second question was just around the back books. Look, as and when opportunities come along, we're interested. We see ourselves as the go-to platform for fund groups to deal with, given the experience that we've got of such deals and the quality proposition that the migrated clients end up with. We've seen through the period, there's been a couple of books of business that have been made available through a tender process. We looked at both in the initial stages, we decided not to proceed with those. We remain open to those that arise, and we'll look at them very carefully and scrutinize them when they come around. Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Treen from Autonomous. Your line is now open. Good morning, everyone. I just had a couple of questions. Firstly, could you give us any guidance on the marketing spend in this next six months? Usually, there's a lot more marketing spend in the second half, you seem to be going hammer and tongs at the marketing spend from my email box in the last six months. If we come to slide 18, I know you can dodge this question, in broad construction, could you give us the scale? If you looked at clients between 45 and 50 versus your new clients at 37, what is the increase in the average portfolio values? I don't need the exactitude, just give us a sense of it. Interesting questions there, Andrew. Look, on marketing spend, going into the second half, we've clearly got tax year-end just ahead of us. That is extremely busy time from marketing. You'll see actually as well, over the next few weeks, there's an additional marketing campaign that we're pushing out, really associated with building the brand awareness. That'll bring you back to the comments I made about attract, engage, retain. Building the brand awareness, I see us having a relatively small market share of that GBP 2.4 trillion. Building and enhancing our brand has proved successful to date, and I'm keen that we continue to do that. On slide 18, no, I'm not going to give you the scale. We've got in the data pack the average holds per client. The important thing that I'm getting you to do is to think about, you know what the average client age is, you know what the average holding is. It's to think about actually how, in aggregate, cohorts of clients will build and scale their investment over time. Okay. Our next question comes from Gregory Simpson from Exane. Your line is now open. Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Just a few. Firstly, the data pack shows there were quite strong flows into the Vantage Fund and Share Account in the period, I think GBP 1.2 billion versus GBP 0.8 billion for the ISA and SIPP each. What's the retention rate on this type of account versus the 93% group average? What efforts are you doing to try and ensure that any shorter term traders stay with the company and become longer term investors? The second question is about the PMS advice business. I know it's small, but in the data pack, it looks like it has GBP 2.8 billion of AUA. That's the same as what it was in June, despite the strong markets in that time. Is it fair to say the advisor business is having some outflows and losing clients? If so, what are the drivers of that? Then lastly, at a high level, it was interesting your comments around the Cash ISA opportunity. Did you see a lot of transfers from Cash ISAs from banks into stocks and shares ISAs today with the zero rates environment? Or do you think having the HL Cash ISA offering is an important step to accelerating that? Thank you. Thanks for those, Greg. The first one on Fund and Share Accounts. Yes, you can see the numbers that we've got in terms of people opening those. The retention rates across the three of them are broadly consistent. Give or take. We're looking at high levels of retention and they're around 93%. As I've said, when we have seen people who have come along and have started to invest and their first experience is by investing into a share, then if you were a client who had done that, you would find the content that you were starting to see from Hargreaves Lansdown was talking to you about the benefits of long-term investing and the diversification. As a consequence of that, when I look at the 2020 cohort, I can see that there is a consistency, if you like, a behavioral trend, that people are then starting to diversify. They're also then starting to diversify by understanding and moving into those tax-efficient wrappers. This is my point about making sure that you've got the right broad proposition in order to be able to support clients on a lifelong savings journey, helping them understand diversification, helping them understand the benefits of the tax wrappers. We're certainly seeing those trends go through. That's where our focus needs to be. Then as far as the advice business, PMS doesn't give you the full scope of the advice business because there will be plenty of clients who we will advise and support who will not be in the PMS. The percentage is slightly over 70% of the advice fees that we get is from one-off advice. Clients will come, they will engage with an advisor because they got particular questions that they want to understand. They'll work with an advisor who will then set them up. They then understood their strategy, and they're probably then comfortable as long as things stay within the sort of the tramlines that they understand how they're staying over the next few years. I think that that is a very strong value selling point because more and more people are now thinking harder and harder, "Well, what am I actually paying an advisor for year after year for that 1%? I can get all of the admin support that I want through the platform. I can get the engaging content, the information, the support, all of that, and I can get that through Hargreaves Lansdown with a platform fee of 45 basis points. Why am I paying the extra?" I think that's a very important aspect to this when you think about it in the context of a much, much broader market. Your final point about the Cash ISA. Yes, we are seeing high levels of transfers out of the banks and onto the Hargreaves Lansdown platform. That's not a surprise. We've certainly seen that trend in the past when there's been focus on rates. It's part of the commentary, the insight that I'm giving you on the market when I talk about what real people are thinking about right now in terms of the complexity of the savings environment, the longevity issues that they've got to manage. Financial resilience is much, much more important. Low-interest rates are a concern for them, and people are moving from the banks onto an investment platform. Our ability to support our clients with both their cash savings, which helps them to build up that short-term resilience, but also those longer-term savings supported in the long-term tax wrappers and educating them and helping them in terms of diversification over time. That's the focus of the business, and that's what people really need. When you look at that in the context of how our clients behave, and I've said, the 2020 clients, they are similar in terms of quality over time. They are similar in terms of their investment behaviors. They are similar in terms of them starting to invest in a breadth of savings funds as well as shares. It's building up this demographic really in that sort of 29 to 44 age group. Building those up in terms of numbers, 47% of new clients that we brought on, they are then going to follow this trend in building up their savings. That's how to look at how this business is building up the long-term value for shareholders and in fact, keep the clients because we're supporting them over the long term. That's great. Can I ask just a quick, a cheeky follow-up, if possible? The chart on slide 18 is really interesting. It kind of cuts off at age 60. Is there any sort of high-level comment on what Is that kind of the peak for portfolio value? Or does it keep increasing after retirement? How do retirees behave on the platform? Are they still? I think local to those or? It's a different dynamic because what I'm showing you here is wealth accumulation mode and how clients build up. The dynamic when you get on and into retirement and why we've talked about the online drawdown process. I've talked about investment outcomes, retirement outcomes rather. We launched our investment pathways last week. We're providing people in that age group with the means and the support to then be able to live off their capital, live off their investments through on into retirement. When it becomes a concern about managing and understanding your income and your investments and your liquidity and your cash alongside that. That's what a digital wealth platform means to that cohort of clients. The interesting dynamic for Hargreaves Lansdown which despite the fact we're going to be 40 this year, the interesting dynamic for that is we are relatively young, and we have clients who are now getting into retirement. Whereas in the past, pre-Pension Freedoms, which remember only came in in 2015, when people would convert to an annuity and go from the platform, people are now holding the investments, holding them on the platform for longer. That again, represents a different dynamic for us in terms of managing the lifetime value of the clients. Great. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Our next question comes from Paul McGuinness from Shore Capital. Your line is now open. Good morning, guys. Very interesting presentation in terms of the overall theme, moving to the younger demographic and general interest in terms of retail participation, obviously with your leading market share. I have to say, in terms of my own two student sons, the bombardment of texts I've had off them for the last week in terms of their general interest, and I suspect it's for the wrong reasons. Two questions. One for Philip and one for Chris. Philip, I think you said that you thought that the baseline for retail trading might now have either doubled or trebled. I was just wondering what gives you the confidence to think that there might be a slightly more permanent nature to that. Chris, I was interested in what you were saying around the advice piece as to whether there's a chance that the whole advice model could move a little bit here in terms of people maybe use the platform in the main, but rather than having an ongoing advice fee or perhaps use it on a more one-off fixed price basis. I'm presuming that if the market can move that way, would you have any issues in terms of being able to recruit enough advisors to actually sort of service that model, and whether you could assign specific advisors to specific clients on an ongoing basis or whether they would just get whoever was available for a specific piece of advice. Thanks. I'll take your baseline share dealing one. I think the thing that I would say, which is observational and in a sense, I stood up in August and said, "I don't know what's going to happen. I need more data points." Here we have a whole load more today, is it's pretty consistent. I went back into history, and there's some years where it's almost the same every day. You see that come up now, and in the period in between lockdowns, it came down to, again, to being quite consistent, but at a much higher level. Actually it came down less in the sort of like in between lockdown two and lockdown three. I think the only thing that will settle this over time is kind of more data. What I would say is, as you've noted, people are just much more interested and engaged in the investment than probably as a society that I can think of in my career in financial services. There's an absolute wall of money that everyone observes has been saved during the past year. We don't know how much of that will get deployed into investment over time, but it would need to be. That engagement that therefore people have with investment will likely, and I think we can help them build balanced portfolios and build over time. This isn't a particularly trading book, it's an investing book. Whilst we're providing that level of engagement, then I think there's a strong likelihood that the base level has picked up and the business is much bigger than it was. The number of clients is much bigger than it was. It sort of seems common sense that therefore that floor level will pick up and when combined with the level of engagement and we'll have to wait and see, but I think it really stands a very good chance of being pretty solid. Okay. When you say investing book rather than trading book, what do you mean by that in terms of what frequency of trades from the clients that you've taken on? Yeah. I think there's a propensity of people to come in, I think there's a lot of commentary as Chris was talking about a very small portion of the business or sorry, portion of the market. I think if you're really looking at trying to execute what's probably an options-driven, margin-driven, leverage-style strategy. This is quote "share trading," but it's really kind of a lot of it is about building positions and opportunistic responses to price movements. Thank you. Thanks, Philip. Paul, your second question around the development of advice, I think you're right to pick up on it because I have mentioned it a couple of times. I do think that there is a significant challenge for the advice model. I do think when people engage more with their financial futures, which is quite clearly what we can see happening right now. As that knowledge builds, I think people become a lot more challenging about what they're getting in return for what they're paying. I think you've got a regulator as well that is really trying to get consumers to understand a lot more about value. I think that poses real challenges for advisors if people are paying them 1% plus a year, for what? That's a question that people will ask. As that then relates to Hargreaves Lansdown, look, I see advice as being I talk about building capabilities and having the right capabilities to support the digital wealth management service. Clearly, advice is an important capability. I want to make sure that capability is easily accessible to all of our clients as and when they need it, and they only pay for it when they use it. I do think there's an opportunity for that. I think technology, as I've said, technology is a key one to ensure that we can support people in that way. Your question as to, well, how would you do that with numbers of advisors? Would you allocate particular people to clients? That I think is a different level of detail, we'll have to think about that as it develops. What I'm focused on is making sure that advice capability is available to all clients as and when they need it. We have a huge amount of insight, 676,000 calls coming into our help desk, 375,000 emails interacting, 163 million digital users. That gives us a tremendous amount of insight to understand actually what clients are looking for and what they're asking for. If we're able to give them the guidance to do that, if they're able to get the confidence to do what they need to do next, sometimes they don't need to have advice. At the times that they do, are those important times we want to make sure that it's easily accessible for them. Okay. No, thank you for that. It's very interesting. Thanks. Our next question comes from Ben Bathurst from RBC. Your line is now open. Morning. I've got two questions, please. First I'll just try it again, I think, on the marketing expenses for H2, please. Completely agree, it feels like there's a big opportunity around ISA season this year. Should we expect an increase in the marketing expenses in H2 kinda commensurate with that opportunity? Maybe you could just comment as to whether or not you think growth in H2 on the lines of the growth that you saw in that line in H1 might be kind of a reasonable assumption. The second question is around Neil. I think there is still some background noise in the press around the potential for class action from the Neil issue. Is there any update or clarification you can offer on that sort of background noise today? Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Ben. Look, firstly on the marketing. I think Philip's done a pretty good job actually, giving you the visibility of when things get busy, what our activity related costs are. There is a large part of marketing that is activity related. Secondly, I talked about the additional campaign, which is similar in size to a campaign that we did around about tax year-end last year. We've both always said that when the market conditions are such that people are interested, they want to engage, that's when we will ensure that we're doing everything we can to turn on the taps to make sure that we're able to pick up that. I think that is very much linked to the demand that we see, and we'll spend into that demand. Finally, the comment on Neil. I haven't got any comment. I really haven't got any comment to make on that. We can all see what's going on in the background. I've got nothing direct that I need to talk about. Understood. Thank you. Okay. I think we've come to probably the natural end to the questions. James, Philip and I are around for the rest of the day, if you've got other follow-ups that you'd like to have. In the meantime, thank you for your questions. Thanks for dialing in. Have a good day. Maxine, I can hand back to you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.