Hello, welcome to St. James's Place 2026 Half Year Results Q&A session. My name is Carla, and I will be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register to ask questions by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, press star followed by two. I would now like to hand you over to your host, Mark FitzPatrick. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, thank you for joining us. Before we open for questions, a few brief opening remarks from me. Firstly, I'm very pleased that we've achieved a strong set of results for the first half. Good operating and financial performance, continued strategic progress, and further growth in both our client and advisor base. We delivered positive net inflows of GBP 2.7 billion, grew funds under management to a record GBP 240.8 billion, and continued to see strong engagement between client and advisors. These outcomes reflect the enduring demand for trusted financial advice and the strength of our advice-led model. We also continue to make good progress on our strategic journey. Over the last few years, we have focused on strengthening and simplifying the business through a series of major programs. During the period, we made substantial progress in our historic Ongoing Service Evidence review, this has enabled a further provision release, which we will be returning in full to shareholders through a buyback. Alongside all of this, we continue to strengthen both our client and advisor proposition, invest in technology and productivity tools, and enhance the pay and benefits and support available to advisors across the partnership. Looking ahead, we remain confident in the long-term outlook for financial advice in the U.K. The advice market remains under-penetrated, client needs are becoming ever more complex, the value of trusted advice continues to grow. As we move through the latter stages of the strengthen phase of our strategy, our focus is increasingly turning towards the opportunities ahead and the transition to Amplify. We believe St. James's Place remains the most compelling place in the U.K. to build, grow, and realize value from a successful financial advice business. This enables our advisors to deliver the trusted advice, service, and support our clients value. This leaves us well-positioned for the next phase of growth. With that, let's open up for questions. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Andrew Lowe with Citi. Hi, thanks for taking the question. I've got two. The first is on your advisor retention rate in the first half. Could you clarify what that was in the first half and how that compares to the 91% retention rate that you saw in 2025? It seems likely to have gone down rather than up, but your advisor numbers are up 0.3% in the first half. There have been unquantified planned exits from underperforming advisors. Can we conclude that you're doing more lateral hires from other advice firms, or has the gap been bridged by a step up in the number of advisors graduating from the SJP Academy, where presumably day one productivity may be lower? Any color there would be great. The second question is just on your pass-through of your fees to your advisors. There's been a lot of debate on this during the past couple of weeks, how you are perceived to be retaining more of the advisor fees versus other platforms who seem to be talking about passing through 80%-85% of the gross fees to their advisors. If I take the 25 basis points of ongoing advice fee that you keep as a percentage of the 80 basis points that you charge your clients, that suggests that you're retaining 30% and your advisors are keeping 70%. I'm conscious that there may be further pass-through that we don't see in the financial disclosure. Could you just clarify exactly what your advice fee retention is and whether you think that that figure is like for like with what your peers are reporting? Thanks. Okay, Andrew. Thank you. Hitting a topic I expected that we'll spend a little bit of time on today. I think maybe just some broader comments around the whole element of partner retention and the like. Then I will get to those explicit components. Firstly, I think I would say the reality for almost every wealth manager around the world is the ebb and flow of advisors. We've seen it for decades in St. James's Place. It's not particularly new. Our partner retention number is running at 90% at the moment. Last year, it was 91%. It's a 1% delta, which per the math, I think ends up at about 50 advisors in terms of the difference. It's very much at the margin, in terms of what we're doing. We unfortunately lose advisors to a broad range of firms, and many retire or leave the profession. We also recruit advisors from a very broad range of firms, including IFAs, and we have a phenomenal recruitment team. The advisor retention levels that we've seen over the course of the first half and the additions are a combination of lateral hires, experienced lateral hires. We've done that from day one, and as I said, we have a very, very good team. If anything, we've recently strengthened the team. Earlier this year, we strengthened the team. We brought some additional folk on because we indicated back in February our ambition to be able to see the advisor numbers grow from 2027. There's normally a bit of a time lag and a pipeline in terms of building up on that. We've started investing in that piece. The other component is the academy. The academy, over the first half of this year, has been very, very busy. We're seeing good numbers coming through in terms of graduation, and we're seeing great demand for advice and a real positive reaction to our campaign of trying to encourage more women into the advice profession. We've been active in that regard, and we've seen real tick up in interest in that for the longer term. Over the course of the last six months, the academy has actually contributed significantly in terms of our advisor numbers. In terms of the broader pass-through component, again, just a little bit of color and context. We set out as part of our strategy in 2024 that one of our key pillars is having the leading advisor offering, and we want to make sure that St. James's Place is the best place for the best advisors to join, develop in, and build a successful career in business. We are laser-focused on this. Also, that the vast majority of our investment of over GBP 260 million over the next few years is focused on improving our offering for advisors and hence for clients. No one else in the market is investing in anywhere near this scale. We think that's also why we have nearly 20% of the U.K. advisors within St. James's Place and nearly half of all new advisors to the profession come through our academy. Remuneration or advisor pay is one of the components of effectively the offering that we have to advisors. There are so many other components to it. To answer your question directly, the partner element that advisors retain of the advice fees we pay is about 80%, and I think a figure that's somewhat higher than many folk assume. Our focus as an organization, as an executive team, is on ensuring we have the leading advisor offering, ensuring we continue to retain, attract, grow our advisor base because we see the total addressable market as growing in the U.K. There is a huge opportunity. Our growth algorithm, we think, factors on two key components, one of which is productivity increases, and we're going to continue to stay focused on that, supporting our advisors in that regard. The second is advisor numbers. We're focused on both, and we expect to be able to deliver both over the medium term. Hopefully that answers your question. Maybe a little bit more fulsome, but hopefully it just gives everyone a better sense of the broader color and how we're focusing on these matters. That's great. Thanks so much. Thank you. The next question comes from Nasib Ahmed with UBS. Thanks. Morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I just want to follow up on the two points that you just made, Mark. Can you give us the numbers? You've basically hired 500 advisors. What's the split between academy hires and lateral hires? Is it 50/50, 300/200? Then on the 80% retained by advisors, it's hard to get the math. You've given us the number, but another way of asking the question would be the 25 basis points that you retain, how much of that is actually consumed in helping advisors on business rates, indemnity insurance, et cetera? Just trying to see the 25 basis points revenue margin, how much of that are you retaining net of costs for advice? Then on slide 24, you show the EY chart, which is helpful. Quilter have a similar chart, they've got 1.56% on a 10-year basis with a GBP 500,000 pot instead of the GBP 100,000 pot. They don't seem to be on the chart, I don't know what I'm missing there. I don't know if you can comment on that. Thanks. I'll ask Caroline to give a little bit more color on the element of the 80% and how that's compiled. On the chart, I think we've got 16 competitors. I don't think we name them, et cetera, or set out who they are. I would expect them to have all the usual suspects in them on that way. I can't comment on what others have done and how they have compiled their numbers. Nasib, on the element of the breakdown of the adviser numbers, we're not looking to kind of give granularity on the Academy or the recruitment element in terms of our specific numbers, other than to say I think both play an active role and the ratios shift and change broadly over the course of the years within a fairly tight corridor. We haven't seen anything majorly change in that regard. We are looking to spend more in the Academy in terms of increasing the number of cohorts that we have going in. Over the fullness of time, we'd expect to have more people coming in through the Academy. In addition, we'd also expect to have more lateral hires. We think that the new fee structure that we set out in and we've pivoted to from August last year actually means that there are some advisers who previously weren't necessarily fans of the old regime in the marketplace who would now be receptive to a conversation with St. James's Place. Finally, I'm also very conscious of the fact that there's been a lot of consolidation, a lot of movement around the market. Not every adviser that's been subject to some of those acquisitions are thrilled by those. There's an opportunity for us to be able to lift out a few advisers from some of those organizations. We're spending considerable time and energy around that. I think it's fair to say as a team, we are very focused on retention, we are very focused on acquisition, and we're very focused on creating a long-term pipeline for the profession through the Academy. Caroline, do you want to give a little bit of extra color on the? Yeah 80%? Yeah. To look at the 80%, you have to consider obviously together all the initial and ongoing advice fees that we pay to partners, plus the allowances we give them. We pay out 2/3 of initial advice charges to advisers. This obviously increases substantially to all the initial advice charge when you add the other allowances we pay to the partnership. That's consistent with what we've said under our new charging structure, the sort of new business makes minimal profit. When you add in the amount we pay on an ongoing basis, there's two elements to this. There's obviously the 55 out of 80 basis points under the new charging structure. You've also got, under the old charging structure, advisers got all the ongoing advice fees. It's a combination rather than specifically picking out any of the specific costs. You have to take all that together, Nasib. Once you're off gestation, can you just confirm that 80% becomes 75% or greater than 75%? Sorry, say that again, Nasib. You're paying out 100% on all of the firm that's in gestation. Once that runs off in, let's say, 2032, that 80% becomes 75%. It reduces, not 75%, but it reduces a little bit, yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from Andrew Crean with Autonomous Research. Good morning, all. Three questions if I can. Caroline, on slide eight, you make the point that results were lower in the first half of 2025, because of the lower initial and ongoing margins. You say whether this effect extends to full year 2026 will depend on how markets develop in the second half. I just want to explore the implication of that. If markets are normal, is the implication of what you're saying that the second half profits will be higher than the second half 2025? That's the first question. Second and third questions, can you update us a bit more on the High-Net- Worth Initiative and also on the Flagstone cash transmission? If I'm transferring cash now from Flagstone into St. James's Place, how long will it take me? Perfect. All right. Why don't I start with the High-Net-W orth piece and the Flagstone, and then Caroline can pick up on the second piece. High-Net-W orth will continue to be part of our strategy. Over the course of the last six months, we've got a dedicated High-Net-W orth program and leadership team. They've begun significant increase in high-quality private client events to be able to deepen engagement. We're expanding our central adviser support to enhance the servicing of High-Net-Worth. We've launched a pilot High-Net-Worth training program with one of the largest practices, paving the way for a broader rollout next year and increasing the volumes of high-quality practices serving the complex High-Net-Worth client need. The High-Net-Worth component continues to be a very important aspects, and I think our investment in this area and the energy and commitment of resources we think will deliver more consistent and somewhat differentiated High-Net-Worth experience. In terms of Flagstone, in the second half of this year, we are expecting to dramatically change, and we're working closely with Flagstone on dramatically changing the length of time it takes to move money from Flagstone into St. James's Place. I would expect we'll be able to report that that is all done and dusted when we chat to you again. It's a key component of the engagement with Flagstone. In the meanwhile, with Flagstone, what they've done is they've massively facilitated take-on procedures. Most of the information is now auto-populated from across from St. James's Place. The rates that clients are getting has improved. The level at which clients invest has been lowered a bit to make it more accessible. We're seeing an increase, I think it's to GBP 5.9 billion, looking at the team. For GBP 5.9 billion now in Flagstone. A meaningful increase. Clearly just talking about clients in the markets generally, the U.K. markets, confidence in global economy and in the uncertainty, and wishing to have some in cash. This is an incredibly effective and efficient way of being able to get your cash to work a little bit. Ultimately, as we all know on this call, the U.K. has a broader issue in that people are over-saved and under-invested. At least through Flagstone, our advisors have great visibility of what's in Flagstone, and as part of their general engagement with clients, are exploring the size and scale of what's in Flagstone and what possibly could be, should be, invested because the opportunity cost of being in cash versus being in the market is quite significant, as I'm sure you're aware. Caroline? Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Yes, look, I'm actually not sure what a normal market is anymore, actually, [Andrew]. Putting that aside, if we think it's something normal second half of the year, yes, we would expect probably that half two 2026 profits would be higher than half two 2025 profits. As I said, it all depends on markets. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from David McCann with Deutsche Bank. Morning, team. Thanks for taking my questions. Two from me, please. The first one to follow up on the adviser retention piece. A few questions you've had already about the split of shareholder and adviser economics, but I just wanted to drill into that a bit more. Your questions are really focused on what is the current split. The question really is, do you see this changing going forward given the comments you made about the competitiveness of the market and what we're all seeing? Adjacent to that point, are you still expecting roughly flat overall adviser numbers over the whole year? The second question is on flows more generally. I think it's fair to say they remain at the softer end, I think, where most people would perhaps like to see them. Maybe you can drill into why is that the case. What do you think it will take for them to positively inflect? Indeed, do you have any medium-term aspirations of where you'd like them to be for the business of your size? Thank you. David, thank you. In terms of adviser retention, adviser numbers just generally, as I said earlier on, the element of advisers and our leading advice offering is fundamental to who we are as an organization. We are laser-focused on ensuring that we have the very best offering to advisers in the round. When we talk to partners, advisers about why they join us, why they stay with us, they tell us the Academy is just so valuable to them. The element of really joining a community, they don't feel alone, isolated, they're part of something much bigger. The ongoing technical support, training, advice, et cetera. We also have the highest concentration of chartered financial planners in the U.K. It's another way of saying we have the highest quality financial advisers, the unique investment management approach, the BSP program, kind of growth and succession component. We also guarantee our advisers' advice, which is really important for the advisers and the clients, gives them great confidence. A massive recognizable and supported brand. All of those components are part and parcel of what the leading adviser offering component is, and we will ensure that we continue to have a leading adviser offering. We're constantly looking at it, constantly looking to see what we need to do to ensure that we are providing the best all-round offering. Part of that is around the element of how we support around technology and how we make the overall profitability of our advisers' and partners' businesses better. The element of how we do more for them, how we facilitate, how we support them, will continue to be really, really important. As for adviser numbers going forward, I think our ambition would be that we would look to see kind of numbers flattish, as we said at the beginning of the year. In 2027, we would look to be seeing growth kicking off again in terms of adviser numbers. Based on the element I mentioned earlier this morning around the fact that we have invested further in the Academy, and we've invested further in our recruitment team and all of these, by definition, have got an element of a lead time. I'd expect to see them starting to come through late this year, early next year in terms of their contribution of that investment. Caroline, do you want to comment on the flows, please? Yes, absolutely. Thanks, David. Look, if I take the flows apart into their component parts, if you take the gross flows, we attracted GBP 10.5 billion of gross flows for the half, which is consistent with our record result, which we achieved in half one 2025. That's despite the sort of heightened macroeconomic and sort of geopolitical uncertainty during the period. We're happy with that. Advisers are busy. Case volumes are up 9% on H1 2025, although case size is down a little bit, about the same amount. On that's what I'd say on inflows. Outflows in absolute terms are up because that's given the strong sort of FUM growth. Average FUM in H1 2026 was up 18% on the previous half, well, H1 2025, outflows have only increased by 16%. Our retention rate for the half was 95.4%, up from 95.3% in last year. It's above our 95% ambition. Total outflows also fell period on period from 6.9% of average FUM last year to 6.7% this year in H1. That's all of it. If you come to net flows, which we know is obviously the sum of the two, with average FUM higher, 18% higher than a year ago, it's obviously a really good result for our clients, we're pleased with that. Inflows don't scale to the same extent as outflows, which generally increase with FUM. This dynamic is obviously reflected in our net flows, but they are in the 2%-3% of opening FUM, which is sort of our expectations right now. That's good, I think as you go forward, to your point going forward, obviously, there are two factors we look at here. Obviously, the partner numbers and adviser numbers and obviously productivity. We're switching our attention to Academy and lateral hires, we've invested into. Also we're about to Amplify. We're continuing our work and increasing our work on the productivity work within Amplify. What I would say is the 2%-3% is definitely not a cap Great. Thank you very much. Thanks, David. Thanks, David. The next question comes from Christiane Holstein with Bank of America. Good morning. My first question is just following on from the discussion on adviser retention. I wanted to ask, there's been a lot of media speculation about a potential exit from one of your flagship practices, Sovereign Wealth. I was just wondering if you're able to provide an update here and whether they've actually provided notice to leave. How do you also intend to retain advisers and some in the event of a practice or partnership leaving? My second question is relating to AI. I was just wondering how you think about shared economies of scale from your productivity benefits relating to AI, and how do you also intend on reinforcing your large-scale advantages versus peers? I just had a follow-up question as well on net flow expectations. I know you were talking about how you've done quite a bit in terms of the academy and improving productivity. Pricing's obviously not lower now. Remediation's pretty much behind. In terms of accelerating this 2%-3% net flows, given it seems like a lot of the building blocks are in place, how long until you expect to see this start to improve? What are your expectations maybe over for the more medium term? Thank you. A nice cross-section of questions, Christiane. Firstly, unsurprisingly, we're not really going to comment on any individual partner business within St. James's Place, if you don't mind. I'm sure you'll understand the reasons for that along that. I think just a couple of things just to remind or maybe inform people about. Firstly, when an adviser leaves, as we say, it is normal that we will lose some and we'd much rather not lose advisers, but we understand everybody's got their own personal reasons for that. It doesn't mean that the clients leave. The clients often find that actually what they have with St. James's Place is incredibly attractive for all the reasons that I've set out earlier in terms of investment performance, in terms of service, in terms of support, in terms of the brand, the advice guarantee, all these different components. They really matter to clients. We generally find that we retain, on average, 50% of client FUM. Another key component is that when a partner that has multiple advisers in a practice leaves, we do have those as well. As I said, we don't generally try and encourage that, but we'd much rather them stay. If they do go, we tend to retain at least 50% of their advisers. That's just what the stats show. The element of, there is some dislocation, there is time and attention that needs to be spent, we'd much rather not have it. It's not an immediate flow that if somebody leaves all their FUM and all their business leaves with it. That, I think, just talks to the testimony of the strength of relationship we have with multiple partners and advisers and with clients as well and what it is that our clients value. On the question of AI and technology, thank you for the question. Shared scale of economics and economies of scale and the like, scale benefits for us really coming through in a few ways. One is in terms of our ability with fund managers to be able to extract greater margins, and unfortunately, you and others on the call will be just generally seeing that across the sector. Two is because of our size and scale, most of the big global IT brands work with us, talk to us, and because of our scale, we can negotiate very good prices for either ourselves and for the partners and advisers, making sure that they pay well below rack rate for any of the kit that they use or that they need. Whether it be conventional technology or whether it be some of the newer AI capabilities and technologies. Effectively, the scale benefits we look to put back into the business. The scale benefits and just general kind of efficiencies are part and parcel of how we've been able to pay for and fund the elements of the changes we made to the fees that we're paying to the advisers from later this year and for next year. It also, going forward, I think will be how we will look to reinvest back into the business in terms of technology, because the pace of technology is constantly evolving. It truly is exponential, not linear. Therefore, I think how we continue to evolve our technology stack and how we continue to ensure that advisers get the most streamlined process as possible is going to be really, really important. Ultimately, what advisers love doing is being in front of their clients. The admin piece just generally, you speak to any adviser around the world, that's not why they do what they do. Wherever we can, minimize that component, maximize the opportunity to spend in front of clients, because that's where the buzz, that's where the adrenaline, that's where the rush comes from. That's the piece that we are really laser-focused on. We have mapped out the client journey, we've mapped out the adviser journey, we understand where the pain points are, and one by one, we are knocking these on the head to give the advisers more time, greater efficiency, and greater ability to improve. Part of the pilots that we've been running have shown increases in new client acquisition for those parts of the business that have been part of the pilot. We've seen for some of the smaller practices, where they're using some of the AI, a significant uptick in terms of client numbers, and a significant increase in terms of productivity. As we roll these new technology and capabilities out throughout the partnership, as we help them optimize that technology into their processes, into their systems, we'd expect to see the advisers being able to do more and actually be able to support their profitability, a la one of the earlier points. On the net flows expectations, one of the things that we have tracking quite carefully is through partner productivity. Partner adviser productivity, we have seen from a case count, increased quite significantly. Last year was a very busy year, and we all know why it was a very busy year. It was a very busy year. First half last year and first half this year, we've seen a 9% increase in the number of cases that advisers are talking to clients about and engaging with clients on. The case size is down 10%, largely, I think that's a function of the confidence in the economy. We're seeing a lot more on Flagstone, as we mentioned earlier, talking to Andrew Crean, answering his question. We do think that actually the advisers are very busy. When I talk to them, they tell me how focused they are on what they're doing and how they're growing their practice, on how they're looking for new advisers, and how they really feel they're making a difference in society. To me, that's why I'm here, because I want to facilitate and enable more of that. What we do, what our advisers do, matters. It's really important. It helps people's lives. Net flow expectations over the medium term, I would expect them to start pushing through the 3% level on the basis, again, we need to be very alive to what happens in the economy, what's happening with confidence, et cetera, because we don't operate in a vacuum. We are moving into the Amplify phase next year. The Amplify phase is a serious growth phase. You've seen the consensus numbers in terms of the profitability. We're looking to continue investing in the firm. St. James's Place is very different from what it was a year ago, and it'll be very different in a year's time and in two years' time. We're getting better and better at what we do. Great. Thank you. The next question comes from Ben Bathurst with RBC Capital. Morning. Questions in two areas, if I may. Just on the flow outlook and trying to tie that back to some of the adviser growth discussion this morning. I wonder, do you think that the high-profile departures that we've all been reading about will be noticeable in the net flow result in 2027, just in terms of outflows? Or given the movements you're talking about and the sort of general ebb and flow, should this effectively be a wash, given that capacity is expected to be constant, and the guidance around growing the adviser numbers next year? Just secondly, on the BSP process, can you provide some color on how that process typically works for larger firms? How do you mitigate for the complexity of splitting up larger books of business to help retain those assets? Is that complexity playing any part in any of the higher profile adviser movements that we've been reading about recently? Thank you. Ben Bathurst, hi. Good morning. Thank you for those two questions. I'll ask Caroline to pick up the BSP process. BSP world reports into her, so she's all over it. In terms of net flow results for next year, there's going to be so much more at stake than necessarily a number of advisers leaving. How the economy does, what the government does in terms of any budgets and the like is going to be a real factor, and just general consumer confidence I think are going to be very real elements. Ben, if you think of the stats I gave just in responding to Christiane's questions on our retention of FUM generally and our retention of advisers when a partner leaves with a number of advisers, that if you get into that world, you effectively say that quite quickly you're talking more like 25% of the FUM that may be at real risk of an outflow. As you can imagine, we are very keen to try and retain as many of the clients as possible. We have lots of clients who do stay and will continue to try and support our clients if they wish to stay. Clients are free to move as advisers are free to move. Therefore, like in your business, every day the IP walks in and out of the door, we need to create an environment, a culture, community and environment that people want to be in. That's where we are laser-focused. That's where our time, energy, as an executive and as a board is focused on that piece. Caroline, BSPs. Yeah. No. Thank you for the question, Ben. I am very passionate about this area. It's one of our big USPs. It's an absolutely fantastic thing we have here. We're spending a lot of time and energy and effort on this. The short answer is no, it isn't a problem for larger practices. We work very hard. We're doing management buy-ins, management buyouts, employee ownership trusts. We have a succession consulting team we've set up that now works with businesses. Like the real world, if we have time to work with people, we can do basically anything. We can work with teams on any of those measures. We've got a great corporate finance team. We've got great relationship with our lenders. We've got a lot of people who can work through the different problems that come with larger businesses. To give you some real live examples, in the first half, we did our biggest BSP ever, which sold one of our top 10 businesses into another one. That's the biggest one we've done. Also this half, we had a smaller business buying a business, I think it was about 3x bigger than it. We're also helping businesses. You can have things like that. Absolutely not. The bigger they are, the more time it takes. We have all the people, the funding, and the ability to do that. It's exciting times and we're continuing to evolve that proposition. Ben, thank you, Caroline. Just a little bit of an adjunct on my response to your first question as well is, feedback we've had from the partners off the back of the announcements on Friday last week have been incredibly positive. Partners and advisers up and down the country are saying that they plan on using the catch-up payment that we will pay them in March next year to invest back into their business in terms of capability, in terms of advisers, in terms of growing their business. There's a real confidence in the partnership in terms of growth. Every quarter, we are releasing new and improved technology and elements which are giving people and giving our partners and advisers greater confidence in our ability to get things done so that we can progress, and we can make their lives easier. All of that should support the earlier message that I gave as well. Thank you for those questions, Ben. Thanks for the answers. Thank you. The next question comes from Gregory Simpson with BNP Paribas. Hi. Morning. A few questions from my side. Firstly, are you seeing any behavioral changes or different client conversations around pensions, given the inheritance tax changes going live next year? Just where it's a big part of your flow base. Second question is, wanted to ask if you did see a pronounced shift into index funds like some other advice businesses have seen in the U.K. How would you see that impacting your net profit margin from fund? Finally, just on that 50% retention rate of clients and advisors that do leave, just wondering, do you think you can proactively increase that over time through better efforts in connecting advisors with clients and so on? Thank you. Greg, thank you. The world of advice has become more complex because of the inheritance tax changes which land in April next year. We are seeing advisors, partners talking with clients, where they have a large pension fund, and engaging with them on how they and what they might do that might be different from the original plan before the tax rules changed. There's undoubtedly been a degree of a shift. I don't want to tell you necessarily what the shift is, because that might be tantamount to giving you financial advice, and I've got 5,000 experts who can do that incredibly well. Suffice to say that actually the element for many folk is actually use the pensions, in terms of what's been done. In terms of index funds, we have seen an impressive take-up on Polaris Multi-Index since launch. Launched in October last year. It now stands at GBP 4.6 billion. Some of that is new money coming in. Feedback from clients has been overwhelmingly positive, that many clients have been asking for something like this for some time. It's been great that we've been able to give it to them on that particular patch. The margin, the profitability of Polaris Multi-Index is appropriate, and we don't feel that it would necessarily be a drag in terms of our margin because there's quite an active asset allocation layer that sits above it. Finally, in terms of the 50% retention, let me just elegantly say that we're not sitting on our hands. We will do and we will engage with advisors, partners, clients, to try and make sure they understand the direction of travel that we are taking, what we're doing, and why we believe that St. James's Place is the best place for them to grow and run a business, regardless of what competition may or may not be offering. The environment is more competitive. There's more consolidation happening, and I expect that to be a case. In light of that, we are going to be active in the market as well, as we have been for the last 34 years. I'd just add on that, Gregory, on the index fees, obviously it's our fund manager that where our cost benefits comes from. We can use our scale advantage and work with their scale advantage, that's where we get the benefit of the value on those funds. Thank you. Can I just quickly follow up, actually, all the changes around adviser remuneration in the last week or so, do you see that as being kind of fairly neutral to that net fund margin kind of guidance? Yeah. It's within that. Any funding was done within efficiencies we've made within the business margin. The margin guidance still stands, yeah. Thank you. Just as a reminder to all attendees that to ask a question, it is star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Alex Bowers with KBW. Morning. I just had two questions from my side. Just firstly, a number of firms obviously scaled very successfully under the SJP model historically are now being poached by consolidators. It feels kind of logical that consolidators will continue to target these top firms within your business. Just interested to hear if you can give us any color on conversations you've had with other big partner firms within the SJP network and how you're kind of responding to this threat. The second question is just around the kind of size of new partner firm you're looking to bring into the network. Given you've lost some large firms, are you looking to replace these with kind of like-for-like size firms, or are you happy to add smaller firms and allow them to scale? Thanks. Alex, thank you. I think it's fair to say, Alex, that we have a very active program of engagement with our firms, within St. James's Place. We will continue to have a very active program. We have a number of consultation groups where we consult with partners and advisors on various matters, before we decide on them. We're trying to do as much as possible with the partnership rather than to the partnership, and ensuring that what we do lands well, is clearly understood, and is really focusing on the things that matter to the partnership. We have a very active line of dialogue, always have, and I expect we always will because it's our USP and you look after, you protect, and you polish your USP. We're very focused on that piece. In terms of size of folk coming in, we have, and have had, practices of all different shapes and sizes coming in, et cetera, along the way. Our existing firms are growing. We have a good smattering of firms that are very large, some that are medium-sized, and a lot that are in the smaller element, et cetera. They all share one thing in common, which is focus on client and through that, a real element of growth into the opportunity that's there. There isn't a particular size or cut that we are looking for. If somebody is excited by the culture, the environment, the community that we create here, that we think is very different, then they're very welcome to join us, and would love to have them. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Charles Bendit with Rothschild & Co Redburn. Hi, Mark. Hi, Caroline. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, Charles. Hi. 2023 to 2030 Sorry, Charles, would you mind starting that again? We missed the beginning of your question, Charles. Of course. Don't worry. The first question is, you reiterate your confidence in doubling adjusted profits from 2023 to 2030. What markets and net flow assumptions from here are now embedded in that doubling assumption? Do you expect to revise that profit target up or down as we get closer to 2030? Are you going to manage the business so that that's roughly where you end up? Second question, you talked earlier in this call about your growth algorithm having two drivers, productivity and adviser growth. Where do you see that second driver trending over the medium term? Noting that it's been a period of relatively slower adviser headcount growth versus history in the last few years. Just keen to understand where you'd like that to settle long-term, and whether the Academy and the adviser headcount movement in the industry more broadly can support that long-term rate. Thirdly, I think you've talked in the past about SS&C as being one of the expenses on FUM. Can you quantify it in terms of basis points on FUM? Just trying to deconstruct the new simplified expense on FUM margin into adviser fees, third-party FUM fees, and then other ongoing costs like SS&C. Thanks. Okay. All right. Why don't I deal with the second element in terms of the growth algorithm question and then ask Caroline to pick up the first and the third? Yeah. In terms of the growth algorithm, as you said, I mentioned productivity being very important and advisor growth also being very important. We said, last year, that actually advisor growth in the short term would slow down as we went through an element of looking at some of the partners where productivity was particularly low and looking to see what we could do to try and support an increase in terms of activity. Which led to some partners leaving, and that trickles through in terms of some of the numbers from last year and a little bit of the numbers this year. I would expect advisor growth to increase to low single-digit growth going forward. I do think that the industry as a whole has been, in terms of advisor numbers, growing at less than 1% for quite some time. Therefore, the Academy is going to have to do the lion's share, the heavy lifting, on that. We've been doing the Academy for the last 10 + years. We know what it takes. We know what's required. We have a great pipeline of recruiters. We know the type of people we're looking for. We think the market's actually very attractive for people to come in and join us, through the element of the Academy. Advisor growth, we think will be real and meaningful, and we think the productivity will also be a very, very important lever for us to pull. We are focused on both, and we're looking to grow both productivity and advisor growth from 2027 onwards. Caroline, in terms of the doubling? Yeah. The doubling. Look, that's our ambition rather than a specific formal guidance. We're staying with that. We set that in 2024 when the world was a challenging place to get people to look out further. We're not necessarily going to retrade that right now. Obviously, we guide every year. The assumptions around that are mid to high single-digit increases in FUM every year, going back to normal markets type thing. I would absolutely say, as I did with those, it's not a cap. Definitely not a cap on our ambition. We will obviously guide every year as we go towards that. On the actual income, so expenses on FUM, when we did our new simplification of the reporting, we had a lot of debates about how we should do this. Really for simplicity, we don't give that breakdown. We find that both income and expenses obviously vary with things like daily FUM levels, but other than the margin, we pay out significant amounts of that. We're not giving that amount of granularity. Yeah. Charles, just to reinforce what Caroline has said. We wouldn't see the ambition as a cap on the stretch. I'm not going to manage this business and curtail growth. We're going to grab every piece of growth that we sensibly can, that is quality growth, because the opportunity is so huge out there. U.K. advice, on average, 9% of folk take advice. In the U.S., it's something like 27%. The U.K. market should be able to grow at least 2x to 3x. Therefore, the growth opportunity for us is huge, and we're going to look to prosecute that as best we possibly can. Thanks so much. Thanks, Charles. Thank you. That was our final question, so I will hand back over to you, Mark, for any final comments. Oh, okay. Thank you for your time today, everyone, and questions. As I said at the outset, we are very pleased with the progress we have made in the first half, both in terms of performance and in terms of operational execution. We think that with strong foundations, continued investment in our client and adviser proposition, and a clear strategic direction, we remain very confident in the opportunities ahead. Thank you very much, I will no doubt be chatting with you over the course of the coming days and weeks. Thank you.