PensionBee Group plc

Hello, I'm Romy Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our first half 2023 results presentation. For those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we are a leading online pension provider in the UK. We exist to make pension simple so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement. We enable our customers to combine their pensions into one new online plan. We enable them to make contributions, to invest in line with their objectives, with money managed by the world's largest asset managers, and ultimately to make withdrawals and enjoy their retirements. Our aspiration is to build a lifetime relationship with our customers, generating predictable and scalable revenue for our company and for our investors. PensionBee operates in the vast £700 billion market of transferable defined contribution pensions, and over the first half of the year, we continued to grow our market share. We added approximately 30,000 new invested customers in the first half, taking the overall invested customer base to 211,000 invested customers. With 33% year-on-year growth in invested customers and a 97% retention rate, we grew our AUA by close to 40% year-on-year, reaching 3.7 billion pounds in assets under administration. Our revenue grew by 32% year-on-year, with 11 million pounds generated in the first half, 20 million pounds in the last 12 months, and an annualized run rate of over 23 million pounds. And over the first half of the year, we have advanced our strategic goals. We have spent approximately £7 million on marketing initiatives, maintaining our household brand name status and recognition, and supporting new customer growth. we expect to continue investing in our brand awareness through the renewal of our partnership with brentford fc becoming the left sleeve sponsor of the men's first team kit in addition to becoming front of shirt sponsors for the b team academy and women's team kit At the same time, our cost per invested customer has continued to decline as we utilize our data-led multi-channel approach to reach customers and explore new channels, including TikTok. We expect to continue reducing our cost per invested customer as we benefit from a decade-long investment in generating the capabilities to acquire customers efficiently. Over the first half of the year, we also continue to develop our product offering for our customers. We are incrementally rolling out new features that encourage our customers to engage with PensionBee. Our data shows that engaged customers are more likely to grow their pensions with us and are therefore more likely to enjoy the type of retirement they deserve. Customers can now read our content in the app and will soon be served personalized content features based on our predictions of their interests. Serving tailored content will help our customers make more of their money, including by educating them on helpful complements to their pension, such as life insurance. On that note, we are pleased that our partnership with LifeSearch has launched and we look forward to helping our customers obtain the appropriate insurance to enable them to save for a happy retirement, even if the worst happens. We have also invested in the scalability of our technology through a focus on internal automation, efficiency, security and pension transfer improvements to support productivity, as demonstrated by a 12% improvement in productivity. We continue to explore and adopt artificial intelligence tooling within our departments, using it for initial content generation, project research and coding problem resolution. We are increasingly integrating our data platform within our daily product management operations, linking core KPIs to projects to ensure our multidisciplinary development teams remain productive and impactful. Finally, we continue to implement cybersecurity tools and best practices to keep our customers' data safe. While automation and efficiency are a core aspect of our value proposition, we are proud to deliver industry-leading customer support, as demonstrated by live chat and phone waiting times of 16 and 22 seconds respectively. Consequently, we continue to enjoy high ratings from our customers, including almost 10,000 Trustpilot reviews supporting our excellent rating. Our customers' positive feedback gives our team great purpose and inspiration. Finally, we continue to remain focused on our investment range, learning about new developments in the area and ensuring we deliver value for money. I would now like to hand over to our CFO, Christoph Martin, who will take you through the financial update for the first half.

Thank you very much, Romy. Hello and a warm welcome to everyone. I'm pleased to cover the financial section of the first half trading update. We had a strong start to the year as we balanced our growth ambition with our firm profitability target. I would like to start by covering our growth performance on the first few pages, then elaborating on the path to our year-end profitability target. The first six months of 2023 started strongly and demonstrated our continued ability to grow as we reached close to 3.7 billion pounds of EOE at the end of June, having added close to 700 million pounds of area in the first six months of 2023. I would now like to highlight the asset growth drivers in more detail. First of all, we have driven growth through new customer acquisition adding approximately 30,000 new invested customers with net flows from new customers representing the majority of asset growth at around £365 million. Second, we have driven asset growth through existing customers who have continued to accumulate pension savings with PensionBee. Growth from existing customers over the period represented £104 million of AOA. Net flows from existing and new customers contributed £469 million of asset growth over the period. Third, as it is customary in the markets, pension assets are invested in capital markets and we benefited from market appreciation in the first half. To summarize, both cost-disciplined new customer acquisition and healthy net flows by existing customers retained on the technology platform have driven strong asset growth in the first six months. We continue to deliver consistently strong growth from new and existing customers. I would like to cover those growth drivers in a bit more detail by first focusing on growth from new customers on this page before covering growth from existing customers on the next. Thanks to our household brand name and ever-improving data-led new customer acquisition capabilities, we were able to deliver an increase in gross inflows compared to last year, while almost halving our marketing spending over the first six months. Over the first six months of the year, we spent circa 7 million pounds in marketing to acquire approximately 30,000 new invested customers at a reduced CPIC year-on-year. We acquired slightly older customers with an average incoming pot size that was higher than the same period last year, which allowed us to deliver 6% higher gross inflows year-on-year. We continue to deliver consistent and robust growth from existing customers through our high retention rates, recurring and compounding asset growth, which subsequently translates into strong revenue growth thanks to our resilient revenue margin. We are pleased to report continuous high customer and AOA retention rates of circa 97% of existing customers who are continuously consolidating further POTS and contributing into their home pension POTS at PensionBee. Similar to previous periods, the data showed all customer cohorts delivered positive net inflows this year, even the early cohorts acquired in 2016 to 2018. This serves as a good reminder of the long-duration compounding nature of our AOA base. With an average age of around 40, our customers demonstrate a long-term commitment to saving with PensionBee, growing their assets with us every single year. Next, we converted the compounding asset growth into recurring revenue thanks to our resilient realized revenue margin, which slightly improved to 65 basis points compared to 63 basis points in the same period last year. As a result, we converted the year-on-year asset growth of 38% into revenue growth of circa 30%. In summary, we continue to deliver consistent recurring revenue growth thanks to the compounding nature of our AOA, high retention rates, continuous net flows, generation across cohorts and stable revenue margin. In addition to driving strong growth, we look forward to reaching our profitability targets in the second half of the year. On this page, we shed more lights on the two building blocks that we expect will allow us to achieve our profitability objective. The first building block is to continue driving recurring revenue thanks to the compounding nature of our AOA and resilient realized revenue margin, which we covered on the previous two pages. The second building block is the operating leverage in our cost base, which can be broadly categorized into three buckets. First of all, the effectiveness of discretionary marketing budget deployment. As already highlighted earlier, we were able to achieve more with less this year by spending almost half the marketing budget while achieving stronger growth inflows in the first half of the year. Second, the scalability of our technology platform. Our technology platform cost is a key contributor to driving operating leverage and achieving year-end profitability. The scalability of the technology platform is underscored by the fact that technology platform expenditures only grew circa 10% while revenue grew by more than 30% year on year. Third, money manager costs which are variable in nature and currently at circa 15% of revenue at the lower end of our expected 15 to 20% range, an outcome which we expect will continue for the rest of the year. Our scalable cost base, therefore, places us in a strong position to achieve our profitability objective while pursuing our growth opportunity in the vast markets of defined contribution pensions. A word on our balance sheets. We have a strong cash position as of June as we recorded 14 million pounds in cash with marginal cash utilization expected for H2 as we very close to achieve our profitability milestone by the end of 2023. I will now hand back to Romy to conclude on our trading update with our guidance, investment highlights and further updates.

Thank you very much, Christoph. We are pleased to reiterate our guidance, confirming that we aim to deliver sustained high revenue growth. While we have demonstrated significant growth to date, we remain of the view that our focus on the mass market of pension savers will enable us to deliver substantial further growth as we pursue a market share of 2% of the £700 billion transferable pensions market. We are preparing to onboard approximately 1 million invested customers with 20,000 to 25,000 pounds in their pensions, creating a revenue opportunity of about 150 million pounds in the long term. At the same time, having invested in our brand and technology over many years, and with our expectation to achieve ongoing adjusted EBITDA profitability in the second half of this year, we are poised to continue delivering increasingly profitable growth over the medium to long term. Thank you for your time today.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one on your touchstone phone or on the keypad on your screen. If you, however, wish to withdraw the question, you may press star and then two to remove yourself from the question queue. Participants can also ask a question using the ask a question button on the webcasting page. We'll take our first question from William Hawkins of KBW. Please go ahead.

Hi, Romy and Christophe. Thank you for the opportunity and well done to your colleagues for all the hard work behind these numbers. Two questions, please. On slide nine, first of all, a short-term question. How do you feel about quarterly net flows into 3Q and 4Q? You've been running in the mid-230s for the first and second quarter. And as I looked into the second half, part of me was hoping that that number could accelerate because we've talked about the seasonality of contributions on the last call and new customer growth. On the flip side, you know, I do notice, you know, there's a fall in new customers second quarter on first quarter and an uptick in outflows. So can you sort of help me scale, you know, 230 is a figure that should be rising in the second half, or is that kind of the level for the foreseeable future? And then secondly, please, a longer term question. Slide 13, it's really interesting that you've introduced those two charts on the right hand side and the one in the bottom right hand corner does beg a really interesting question about how you're thinking about managing the business over time. So how do you want us to interpret that chart? You know, you're highlighting, I think, that you're going to be the right side of breakeven for a period while you focus on growth once you achieve that breakeven. But how long is that breakeven and what growth potential are you seeing during that period? And I guess once we get out of the flat period, how long does it take to sort of hit 50% margin once you've kind of got that takeoff? Forgive me if this is a long-winded question, but I suppose the other way of asking that may be, at what level of customers or funds would you be likely to say, okay, now we're going to focus on margin rather than just growth? Help me interpret that chart a bit more, please. Thank you.

Good morning, William, and thank you very much for your questions. I suppose we can take them in order, kind of looking at net flows year to date and then providing some high level commentary around net flows until year end. We're very happy with the quarter. As you can see from our presentation, we reduced marketing spend substantially in the first half and yet still grew our gross inflows. And that is, of course, a testament to our very strong brand awareness, which remained at household brand name status, but also the continued optimization of our performance marketing as we focused on using our data to acquire customers efficiently. So we believe that the first half is really a testament to that outcome and very much in line with our objectives and certainly has helped to deliver results that are ahead of consensus. And so as we look forward towards the rest of the year, I would refer... to our objectives, which are to deliver adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of the year. And so the marketing expenditure and associated net flows will be managed on that basis. And as you can see from the trading update, we feel very confident about continuing to deliver on the guidance that we've given to the market. The core KPIs, I believe, are coming out very much in line with what you would expect and what we would see in our historical figures. So I hope that that answers your question as well. On the guidance slide, and yes, you've noticed that we've introduced some new charts to help frame the discussion around the go forward nature of revenue and profitability. I think there are two points that we really wanted to make. The first point is that we see an enormous growth opportunity ahead of us, which is illustrated by the chart on the top right. And although we have grown significantly to date, we still remain focused on onboarding a million invested customers with 20 to 25,000 pounds of revenue. pension savings in their DC pot and thereby acquiring 2% market share. And that will result in formidable AUA and revenue growth over the medium to long term, especially because of the compounding nature of our business. And so that is very much illustrated in the top right. On the bottom chart, we have been focusing on making some points around how we manage expenditure and how we manage margins. And Because of the enormous growth opportunity ahead of us, I think that you can expect us to continue growing rapidly and using our resources to pursue that growth. At the same time, we remain committed to profitability. We know that that is an issue. important milestone. We believe that it's important for everyone to see that being delivered. And so we remain committed to that. We know that profitability will grow and we would refer back to the guidance of EBITDA margins of over 50% in the long term as we pursue growth and profitability at the same time.

Thank you, Remy. Thank you very much.

The next question is from James Allen of Liberum. Please go ahead.

Hi, morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First question, gross outflows ticked up a little bit. Is that just a function of the higher AUA on the platform now? Or is there anything else to read into that? And then my second and final question, how is the revenue per staff member trending?

Hi, good morning, James. Let me take your first question around cross-outflows. So I think just in a nutshell, there is nothing particularly to highlight. I think what we have seen this year is outflows statistics that were in line with the year 2021 and 2020. I think we know 2022 was a little bit of a, you know, a unique year. And so we basically saw that that historical trend line be achieved again. Obviously, I appreciate on a year-on-year basis, it looks like an uptick, but on the comparison to prior years, it's pretty in line with the historical figures. I think it's also worth highlighting on the inflows and on the average age of the customers who came in, who were a little bit higher and definitely coming in was larger as well. But yeah, on the outflow statistics, they are kind of in line with the historical numbers.

And then I believe the second question is around revenue per staff member.

On revenue per staff member, that has also experienced an obvious improvement. a year-on-year basis and that improvement is around the high single digit, low double digits, so in line with the IC over FT scalability metric as well.

Hope that answers your questions.

Brilliant. Yeah, brilliant. Thank you very much, guys.

The next question is from Paul Bryant of Equity Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thanks, Romy and Christophe. Two questions, please. Could you give us a bit more detail behind the drivers of flows from existing customers and how you expect to see those increasing over time, particularly on a per customer level? I'm quite interested in that. And then the second one, just a point of clarification. I think previous guidance was positive adjusted EBITDA on a monthly basis by the year end. I think Romy, I don't know if I'm reading too much into words, you said you expected it to be positive for H2. So if you could just clarify that little difference there, that'd be great. Thank you.

Hello, good morning, Paul. And let me maybe start off with the first point around net flows from new customers. I think we have seen indeed very strong income imports from new customers that have been increased by more than 50% on a year-on-year basis. The reason for that improvement was, so to speak, that the average age of customers that we acquired this year versus last year has come up again to the 39 years of average age. That number was 37.5 last year. And that 39 is kind of in line with what we have seen in 2020 and 2021 over the same period, you know, within that 39 kind of bucket. um so what what that basically means is pretty much what we have seen what they've said last year is that last year we saw it's a little bit a deviation from the long-term trend line that is upward sloping um and and i think what we have seen uh this year with the first two quarters is kind of this revision to the mean uh in that regard and so that income imports uh therefore would come back we would expect uh to the kind of higher average trend line, given that when we customer acquired in our book, that obviously drives then the future flows as well. So I would probably expect that because the average age that we acquired this year will then have, you know, medium term impacts on the flows that we generate, which will then, you know, be higher than what we have seen probably 2022 on a per cohort basis.

And I can very quickly cover the second question around guidance. So the guidance for year-end profitability remains as previously communicated. We expect to hit the point of ongoing profitability by the end of the year, which will of course be in the second half.

Hope that helps to clarify. Okay, thank you.

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We will pause a moment to see if we have any further questions.

There are no further questions at this moment. I will now hand back over to Romy Sovova for closing remarks. Thank you very much.

We appreciate the time that everyone takes to join our trading updates. And if you do have any further questions, you know where to find us. Thank you again very much and wish you all a good rest of the day.