PensionBee Group plc

Hello, I'm Romy Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our Q1 2024 results presentation covering trading for the three months to 31 March 2024. For those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we are a leading online pension provider. We exist to make pensions 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 had a strong start to 2024, recording approximately £5 billion in assets under administration, representing 44% year-on-year growth. Our focus over the quarter has been to increase our marketing efficiency by investing in our brand appropriately and optimising our online expenditure. As a result of our efforts, net inflows per pound of marketing expenditure increased by 24%, and for every pound of marketing spent this quarter, we brought in 66 pounds of net inflows, putting us on track for a very efficient year. As a result, revenue grew 42% to £7 million for the quarter. To continue capturing the market opportunity, we believe it is important to own our customer relationships so that we can fully understand the evolving needs of the consumer base and ultimately serve them more effectively. To that end, we have invested £59 million in the PensionBee brand cumulatively, and our prompted brand awareness now stands at 55%. Key highlights from this quarter include our National Geographic sponsorship, further investment in our award-winning podcast, partnerships with other financial communities, and our long-standing Brentford FC sponsorship. Our brand investment, coupled with the growing data capability and marketing deployment, resulted in a year-on-year drop in our cost per invested customer. Throughout the quarter, we were proud to serve our customers, particularly during the busy tax year-end, supporting them rapidly and effectively on the phone, over email, and over live chat. This quarter, we were excited to release our onboarding checklist, providing our customers with a handy tool to help them get the most out of their PensionBee experience. The onboarding checklist encourages customers to transfer more pensions to their PensionBee account, and to add contributions. Finally, we continue to invest in our productivity through automations and process simplifications, resulting in an 18% increase in invested customers per FTE over the past year. I will now hand over to our CFO, Christoph Martin, who will cover the financial update for the first quarter.

Thank you very much, Romy. Hello and a warm welcome to everyone. I am pleased to cover the financial section of the Q1 trading update. Over the first quarter of this year, we continued to demonstrate our ability to grow strongly as we reached an asset base of approximately 5 billion pounds at the end of March, having added over half a billion pounds of asset under administration. 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 more than 11,000 new invested customers representing 150 million pounds of asset growth for the period. The average age of customers joining our platform was approximately 40. and the average account size of each new invested customer was approximately £13,000, representing an increase of more than 20% to 2023. 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 85 million pounds of asset administration, representing an increase of 10% for the same period last year. Net flows from existing and new customers contributed 235 million pounds of asset growth over the period and which was an increase over last year. Third, as it is customary in the market, pension assets are invested in capital markets and we benefited from market appreciation over Q1, which represented £272 million of asset growth. In summary, we have grown our asset base efficiently with strong net flows, leaving us well placed to deliver on our objective of profitability growth this year. We are pleased to report continuous high customer and asset administration retention rates of more than 95%, which positive underlying growth across all cohorts in Q1 2024. This serves as a good reminder of the long-duration compounding nature of the asset base. We converted the compounding growth of our asset base into predictable annual run rate revenue of £31 million or $38 million, representing a year-on-year growth rate of 41%. In summary, we continue to deliver consistent, predictable revenue growth thanks to the compounding nature of our asset under administration, high retention rates, continuous net flow generation across cohorts, and stable revenue margin. While we delivered revenue growth of 42% in Q1, compared to last year, the cost base was reduced overall by 7% compared to the same time period last year. This was achieved with a combination of stable money manager and technology platform costs growing at circa 1% year on year, as well as a more efficient deployment of marketing costs, reducing by almost 20% while achieving the same amount of net flows as in the same period last year. Q1 is an important growth quarter representing a higher quarterly budget compared to the rest of the year given the tax year ending in April. Nevertheless, we continued to record improving EBITDA margin. In summary, we delivered our predictable revenue growth of more than 40% on the back of our scalable technology platform, positioning us well for continued growth and expected full-year profitability. We are pleased to reiterate our guidance for the UK, 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 around 2% of the 1.2 trillion pounds transferable pensions market over the next five to 10 years. We are preparing to onboard approximately 1 million invested customers with 20 to 25,000 pounds in their pensions, creating a revenue opportunity of around 150 million pounds in the long term. At the same time, having invested our brand and technology over many years, we are poised to continue delivering increasingly profitable growth over the medium to long term. Our primary financial goal for 2024 is to deliver full year financial profitability, being also clear, as stated in the previous quarters, that we will consider this goal on a full year basis rather than on a quarterly basis. As we look forward to the next few years after 2024, we expect to grow our marketing investment and invest in our growth. always maintaining our focus on profitability as an underpin. We have recently announced our proposed US expansion in partnership with a large US-based global financial institution. Under the proposed strategic relationship, the US-based partner will provide its expertise and substantial marketing funding. Correspondingly, PensionBee's financial contribution will be financed from the existing resources of PensionBee Group PLC. As a result, our US business does not change our existing guidance. I will now hand back to Romy to cover further updates.

Thank you very much, Christoph. We are heartened to see investor excitement and momentum following our US expansion announcement. Our US expansion and work with our partner continues to progress in line with our expectations and in line with our expected launch date in late 2024. The second quarter is developing well, and we look forward to updating investors again in July. Thank you for taking the time. We look forward to engaging with you further.