PensionBee Group plc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the PensionBee Group PLC Q4 results investor update. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your question at any time and press send. Alternatively, you can ask your questions verbally by simply placing a question mark along with the firm that you represent in the Q&A panel. We'll then unmute your microphones and then invite you to ask your question to the presenting team. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand over to CEO Rami Slavova. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon and welcome to PensionBee's Q4 2024 results announcement covering trading for the period ending 31 December 2024. I'm Romy Savova, the CEO of PensionBee Group. For those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we are creating a global leader in the consumer retirement market. We exist to help our customers prepare for and enjoy a happy retirement. We enable our customers to combine their old retirement accounts into a 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 withdraw and spend their retirement savings. Our aspiration is to build a lifetime relationship with our customers, generating predictable and scalable revenue for our company and for our investors. Over the fourth quarter of 2024, we continued to record strong growth in assets under administration, revenue, and invested customers. As a result of our revenue growth, effective cost control, and increasing productivity, we achieved positive adjusted EBITDA for PensionBee Group in Q4 2024 and for the year overall. In the United Kingdom, we were pleased to deliver significant growth with assets under administration of £5.8 billion, representing 34% year-on-year growth, annual run rate revenue of £38 million, representing 36% year-on-year growth, and 265,000 invested customers, representing 16% year-on-year growth. 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, in the UK, we have invested £64 million in the PensionBee brand cumulatively, and our prompted brand awareness now stands at 57% whilst unprompted brand awareness, reported now for the first time, was 15%. Our data-led advertising approach, combined with our household brand name, has continued to deliver marketing efficiency. Each pound of marketing expenditure generated 96 pounds of net flows over the full year of 2024, an increase of 10% year on year. At the same time, we continued to maintain a stable cost per invested customer of £242. In 2024, PensionBee entered the US, the world's largest defined contribution pension market, with $24 trillion in assets in partnership with State Street Global Advisors, our longstanding asset management partner. Since our SEC registration in July 2024, PensionBUS has been advancing at a rapid pace, leveraging our scalable technology platform. Our robust technology foundation has enabled PensionBUS to hit key milestones and progress at a faster rate than initially achieved in the UK, generating revenue by December 2024. Over Q4, we continued to build the foundations of our US business. We rolled out further components of our multi-channel diversified marketing strategy and onboarded our first customers through early testing. The year concluded with the launch of the native mobile app on both the Google Play and Apple App Stores in December. Over the coming weeks and months, PensionBee intends to launch its Roth IRA and to continue building custom rollover journeys for the largest US providers. PensionBee will also continue to build out its Safe Harbor IRA proposition, working with its partners at State Street, relevant third parties, and potential clients. I would now like to hand over to Christoph Martin, PensionBee Group's Chief Financial Officer, who will cover the financial update. Over to you.

Thank you very much, Romy. A very warm welcome to everyone. I'm pleased to cover the financial section of the quarterly trading update. In the fourth quarter of 2024, PensionBee achieved another key milestone. At the time of our IPO, we gave a profitability guidance to achieve full year profitability in the UK by 2024. And today we can confirm that we have achieved our UK profitability milestone in line with our IPO guidance. Moreover, we also achieved our group breakeven, which is again consistent with our new guidance framework introduced on the 1st of October last year during our Capital Markets Day. Those consistent achievements are further testament of our consistent and reliable execution against our public market guidance and is ultimately derived from the business core value drivers, which are first, predictable and recurring revenue, and second, business scalability. The first value driver is PensionBee's predictable and recurring revenue, which is generated from a durable base of assets and administration and is derived from the assets of existing and new customers. In the fourth quarter, we have seen a 34% year-on-year EOE growth to 5.8 billion pounds. The vast majority of our AOA base is derived from existing customers. Customers who remain with PensionBee for a long period of time and continue to build up their pension savings with us, resulting in value generation for decades to come. This is because our average customer is around 40 and they build up the pension savings with PensionBee, which means that cohorts on an underlying value basis are growing over time. Next, AOA is also derived from new customer acquired through our proven approach to cost-disciplined new customer acquisition. As a result, the compounding AOA base is subsequently converted in our revenue base owing to our resilient revenue margin. In Q4 2024, we have seen a revenue margin of 64 basis points, which enabled us to convert the 34% of year-on-year EOA growth into annual run rate revenue growth of 36% and full year 2024 revenue growth of 39%. In conclusion, owing to our compounding EOA-based and resilient revenue margin, we are driving highly predictable and recurring revenue. The second value driver is pension-based business scalability, owing to the controllability of our cost base, which is thereby declining as a proportion of revenue. The cost base for 2024 for the group amounted to circa 33 million pounds, an increase of only 2% year on year compared to revenue growth of 39% year on year. Those scalability dynamics of predictable and recurring top line growth coupled with cost discipline led to an improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin. With respect to our 2025 guidance framework for PensionBee as a group, outlying our short, medium and long-term targets, In the short term, in 2024, we expected the group to generate revenue of circa 30 million pounds and we further targeted a break-even profitability point. We delivered on this guidance, achieving group revenue of 33 million pounds and group adjusted EBITDA break-even of 0.4 million pounds of profit as measured on adjusted EBITDA. Short to medium term. In the short to medium term, spanning around three to five years, we target the group to generate revenue of above £100 million and group adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 20% by year five, whereby the UK is considerably contributing to group profitability. In the long term, spanning 5 to 10 years, we expect the group to generate above a quarter of a billion pounds of revenue and target a group adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 50%. The cash balance is strong with circa 35 million pounds or circa 43 million dollars, putting PensionBee in a strong position to further scale their UK business as well as invest in the tremendous US market opportunity to continue execution against our public market guidance. I would now like to hand back to Romy for concluding remarks.

Thank you very much, Christoph. We're very pleased with the conclusion of the quarter and are looking forward to continuing our strong growth momentum in the UK and also into the US over 2025. And we'd now like to take some questions.

That's great. Thank you, Romy, Christoph, for updating investors. Ladies and gentlemen, as I mentioned at the beginning, please feel free to just type question mark on the firm you represent if you wish to ask your question verbally or alternatively, please just type in your question in that Q&A tab and I will present that to the management team this afternoon. Romy, if I may just start off with a couple of the questions that have come in online as people have typed them in. The first one reads as follows. Achieving adjusted EBITDA breakeven is a significant milestone. But how do you plan to maintain or perhaps improve margins while investing in growth markets like the US?

Christoph, would you like to cover group guidance?

Yes, I'm very happy to. So it's an excellent question. And the way of how we're thinking about the guidance and the profitability for the UK, the US and the group is in the following way. So the guidance that we provide published on the 1st of October on our Capital Markets Day was formulated around the group guidance where we indeed highlighted that on a revenue basis we target above £100 million of group revenue and adjusted EBITDA profitability margin of circa 20% by the time. So what it means now specifically for the individual segments, so to speak, the UK and the US is the following. So the UK, we have achieved a key milestone in 2024, which is we have achieved profitability. So on the UK, we will maintain that profitability from now onwards. So you will see the UK to remain profitable. we invest the excess cash that the UK generates into the UK growth and therefore we're scaling the UK on a profitable basis. The US on the other side is a tremendous market where we have really excellent technology to pursue. And that is currently in the investment phase in that compounding growth trajectory. So we would expect that in the year or two, we will see that investments to be deployed so that we can capture that contribution to profitability in the medium to long term. So on a group basis, therefore, we will specifically target the point, the short to medium point by year five, whereby we again have this revenue target of greater than 100 million pounds and group target. and group profitability on a 20% margin, whereby the UK is again run profitably and still investing in growth, and the US is at that moment in the growth phase over the next few years.

Great, thank you. I perhaps should have thrown in Julian from Jefferies, who's asked, is there any guidance on US operating costs? I'm not sure if you've covered that. If you have, then I'll jump on to the next question. But that's from Julian at Jefferies.

Yeah, and the same, it is a related question to the one that I just gave. Again, the investment in the US, there will be an investment over the next, you know, one or two years specifically where we invest to really position the business for future growth. And the the amount to be quantified is in the low to mid single digit million dollars, you can say, but then you will obviously see that growth coming through on the top line as well. I hope that helps.

Great, thank you. If I can pose this question, it comes from Tammy at KBW who asks, can you please shed some light on the sequential dip in the flows and how they think about growth in 2025?

I'm happy to talk a bit about net flows in 2024 and some of our aspirations and goals for 2025. Over the course of 2024, and in line with achieving our first full year of profitability, we were exceptionally focused on the efficiency of every single pound that we spend on marketing expenditure. And as a result of that focus and that efficiency, every pound that we spent generated almost 100 pounds of net flows for Pension B, which is an exceptionally high efficiency ratio on marketing expenditure. It is also therefore fairly formulaic from a NetFlows perspective, with a focus on the total marketing budget in particular. Over 2025, we've been pretty open about the ambition to grow and re-accelerate the deployment of marketing capital in the UK and therefore you can expect to see a higher marketing expenditure from us in 2025 funded by the asset revenue base that we have created in the United Kingdom. And so we will be very much looking forward to continuing to drive the growth of invested customers, continuing to drive the growth of net flows, and really leaning into the marketing expenditure to capture that full market opportunity ahead of us in the UK.

And can I just maybe add to this because I think the question was saying a dip in net flows. So net flows on a total basis actually increased slightly by 2% on the back of a reduced marketing budget. And this really highlights Romy's point around the efficiency of the marketing deployment so that from a net flow pound number for each pound of marketing spend, we get a higher return this year compared to last year. And I think it made the dip in net flows that I think the question was relating to was potentially in Q4. And usually Q4, you see when you compare every quarter is usually a month that is a little bit lower than the other quarters. And this has to do with generally December and also November to be a little bit lighter compared to the months early in the year, which are a little bit stronger. And that has also to do with Christmas comes and therefore there is other marketing budgets that we usually don't compete with. But I think the point to reiterate is that net flows on a total number has increased and grown versus last year on the back of a reduced marketing budget and therefore we have been more efficient with our marketing budget as compared to last year.

That's great. Thank you very much indeed. Tong W, you did request to open up your microphone, but I see that you've removed that and have submitted your question. So thank you, Tong. The question reads as follows for you, Romy or Chris. In a news release, you mentioned that you had 10,000 customers in the USA. Currently, you have around 10,000 plus downloads on the Google Play for the US app. Are you able to provide any insight on the proportion of those downloads that translate in to invested customers?

A great question on take up in the US. In the US, we are still in the early phases and we're building out localized transfer technology. And therefore, the level of marketing deployment and marketing campaigns that we execute is very much focused on testing, learning, capturing data and understanding how to optimize. We certainly do have a lot of promising interactions across all of the channels that we have in the US, and we'll keep you posted more closely on specific customer figures when it's appropriate to do so over the course of 2025.

Thank you, Romy. If I may just give you a couple of questions from Arjan from Centillion Investment Partners, who has got a couple of questions. I might merge one with another question from Peter. Arjan asks, can you talk about the progress you've made in the US this quarter? And really, what kind of key KPI should we look out for? Do you measure in terms of measuring that success?

Thanks for the question. The fourth quarter in the US was very much focused on continuing to lay the foundations for growth in the US over the longer term. And so what we are very focused on internally is building out the reach of our product. And one of the most momentous achievements we had for 2024 was the launch of our US app, which occurred in December. We are also very focused on extending our product features in a localized fashion. And this quarter, we are particularly eyeing the launch of our Roth IRA, which is another type of IRA investment where we have customers indicating that they would like us to offer this alongside the traditional IRA that we are currently offering. And so the core KPIs and milestones that we are looking at at the moment are, of course, the upper funnel marketing figures, including some of the registrations and the downloads. But even more importantly, for the long term, we are very focused on the product rollout and the product build out. Because that is what ultimately lays the foundations for our medium and long-term guidance with a focus particularly on ensuring that those foundations are strong and that they're very technology-led so that we can generate the kind of scalability that we have in mind for this market.

Thanks, Saromi. Arjun's follow-on question, if I may, can we expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be around 0% for the next few years, so you invest everything into growth, or rather see margin increase to a certain percentage?

So I think there are The way of how we think about generally is again, that we have a margin target for the short to medium term by year five with the 20%. In the UK business, we have achieved in the last quarter, so in 2020, in Q4 2020, for a profitability EBITDA margin of 7%. And I think on the UK, we probably see that slightly staying at the level or slightly growing. So again, the UK is growing on a profitable basis. The US on the other side is as when we said we're building the foundation we invest into future growth to capture a significant market share in the tremendous market That means then from a group perspective How does to netting out? I think we would focus more on the short to medium-term guidance, which is again a 20% profitability margin with a top-line target of 100 million plus for the group as well.

Thanks, Christoph. Just turning to another question that has been submitted, with cost per invested customer remaining stable, what are your plans to optimize this metric further, I guess, especially as you start to target customers with larger account balances?

Great question. When we look at marketing efficiency, there are a number of metrics that we focus on. Cost per invested customer is important. Last year, net flows per pound of marketing spend was our most important metric and where we paid the greatest amount of attention with regards to optimization. And of course, we also focus on payback. And so we do have multiple different KPIs that we track internally around marketing efficiency with cost per invested customer being one of them. We kept cost per invested customer stable in 2024 while growing net flows per pound of marketing spend substantially. And so we delivered what we expected to deliver on the marketing front for the net flows in the UK. As we look forward to 2025, and perhaps this combines with the next question that I see in front of us, we are going to be increasing our marketing budget. And that marketing budget will be deployed across a number of different segments that we didn't target as much in 2024. In many instances, those segments and those channels can yield slightly younger customers. And that is of course correlated with the level of account size that we acquire. However, it does result in a higher absolute number of invested customers. And so this year, we will be looking at a bit more of a balance between the growth in invested customers and the growth in net flows as we seek to deliver the most optimized spend for our growing marketing budget in 2025.

Thank you. And I take that takes Arjen's follow on question into that response as well. I guess the final question that we have for now, unless other questions come in, is from Tong, who asks for the USA market. Could you provide any overview on how the competitive dynamics are different compared to that of the UK?

Well, the US market is in many ways very similar to the UK market in that defined contribution in general is the prevailing form of retirement saving for the future. The US market also exhibits very strong concentration of retirement account providers, which is very similar to what we see in the United Kingdom. Of course, every market has its own custom practices too. And certainly one area that we are very focused on is on the rollovers and the transfers and ensuring that we are localizing the approaches that we pioneered in the UK for the US market so that they work with the current record keepers here. And so, yes, there are absolutely quite a lot of similarities in the competitive market. I would say that the US market is just substantially larger, but also a lot of localizations that we are taking into account when designing the product and particularly the transfers.

Thank you very much indeed, Romy. A follow-on question from Tamin at KBW, if I may. Thank you, Tamin, for your question. How is your thinking evolving about the impact of likely government pension reforms on DC consolidation opportunities? Do you see any changes to the total addressable market, and might it change the source of flows by customer or legacy fund type?

This is a very interesting question because the UK market and pension reforms in the UK market have been dominating the pensions news cycle and occasionally the national news cycle, too. And we we are all very aware that the UK government is considering pension reform in ways that can unlock more investment into productive assets and including some some UK assets, including UK listed assets. We've taken a closer look at some of the current proposals and the likelihood of many of the current proposals, and really the focus is on segments that are kind of tangential, I would say, to the areas where we operate. There is a very strong focus on local government pension schemes and consolidating those so that capital is deployed more efficiently. That is not a particularly large source of inflows for us. There are also some discussions around creating larger master trusts and potentially larger contract-based schemes in the UK. We would see that as quite a positive move because it would kind of take out of the market many of the pension schemes that are currently not operating particularly well from an operational standpoint and are therefore also not as efficient on the transfer front. So we would see that as a positive move. I think the likelihood of those reforms completing very quickly, I would just draw your attention to how quickly pension reforms are completed in general in any country, but it's certainly one that we are keeping on the radar. We feel quite positively about it and we'll continue monitoring that. I hope that answers your question.

Tamin, if it doesn't, please follow up in that Q&A tab. Another question from Steve. Steve L. Steve, thank you for your question. Looking at the 45% increase in gross outflows, can you give some more colour around this and how you plan to minimise these outflows in the future? I think you might touch on that historically, but that's from Steve.

Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. It's a good question. I think the year-on-year growth of outflows that you're referring to is one metric to look at outflows. I think what we usually also look at is gross outflows as a percentage of beginning of period AOA, because that then brings the outflows in relation to the scale of the business. And so when you actually do that, you will see that total gross outflows as a percent of beginning of period was around 10.6%. And that is pretty much in line with historical numbers. So last year we had 10.5% and in 2021 we had 10.7%. So it is pretty in line with historicals. I would thereby also highlight, The first value driver, which is around a predictable and recurring revenue stream that is coming from our asset base. And here we are very focused on the underlying cohort growth of existing cohorts. And so when you look at all of our existing cohorts, you actually see that they keep on growing because customers remain with us on the platform. and they are building up their pension savings with us. And that is a really important point to understand for a pension-based business model, because that AOA is thereby very resilient and remains on the book. And because of our resilient revenue margin, we convert this into predictable and recurring revenue. So, and I think this is really the crux of the top line and the predictability and recurring nature of the revenue base.

Thank you there, Christoph. Tamin, thank you for your comment. I'm glad we answered your question. One last question at the moment, if I may, from Tong. Do you think the new CDC and pension dashboard may impact your business?

Thank you. Great questions around industry dynamics in the UK. CDC is quite a unique approach to retirement savings that I think only a handful of employers are currently adopting or considering adopting. For those who aren't familiar with CDC, it's a bit of a mixture between defined contribution and defined benefit. And it has been in discussion in the UK for a number of years. And it's believed that the UK Postal Service will be looking at this type of approach. It had a number of years of operations in the Netherlands. to kind of disputed success. But we, you know, we will keep an eye on it. We don't see it growing particularly strongly in the UK based on current dynamics. CDC certainly doesn't prevent transfers out. And it's about understanding exactly how those transfers out will work for the handful of employers who do or don't adopt it. And then for the pension dashboard, this is a great question. Pension dashboard has been trudging along for many years and potentially decades now. We feel that we are getting closer to having a pension dashboard in the UK, and we've certainly seen some positive momentum over the last quarter. We are well known in the market to be likely beneficiaries of a pension dashboard, as it's expected that once consumers are able to see and locate pension accounts that they may have lost, which is one of the main functions of the dashboard, that they will then seek to consolidate those accounts. And of course, we have been investing in our brand awareness within the UK. In fact, we published unprompted brand awareness for the first time in this results announcement. And our unprompted brand awareness stands at around 15% in the UK. So we expect to be one of the prevailing beneficiaries around pension dashboards. given that unprompted brand awareness really puts us at the upper end of the table for pension providers that consumers recall on an unprompted basis.

Thanks, Remy. Another question has just come in, if that's OK, from Paul. Paul says, hi, have you seen any immediate impact from the budget decision to pull pension assets within inheritance tax liability? And do you see any increased risks or perhaps opportunities arising from this in the future?

Great question. We have not seen immediate reactions to this particular reform. It will still be a year or so in the making before the exact intricacies of how that inheritance tax is ultimately charged are worked out. By and large, we serve the mass market consumer, and so many of them won't necessarily be impacted by inheritance tax because of the existing inheritance tax thresholds that exist within the market. That being said, we are certainly thinking about the likelihood that an increase in inheritance tax on pensions is likely to encourage greater expenditure of pensions during our customers' lifetimes. And therefore the investments that we are making in our drawdown and withdrawal journeys in the United Kingdom will be particularly important. We are one of the few pension providers that enables customers over the age of 55 to make withdrawals easily, simply from their pensions without filling in lots of paperwork and sending it to the post office. And we continue to invest in that product because we know that when our customers come to retire, it's a really excellent opportunity for them to also consolidate old accounts together and to have that one nest egg to fund their retirement spending for the next 20, 30, 40 years, however long it may be.

Romy thank you very much indeed that in fact does conclude the questions that we've received from attendees today so thank you to everybody for your engagement this afternoon no taxes beeping in the background there in New York Romy I noticed so we saved that one I know investor feedback will be particularly important to yourself and to Christophe and I'll shortly redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback but before doing so if I may just ask you for a couple of closing comments and then I will send investors to give you their feedback

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the engagement and for joining us on our earnings call today. We're looking forward to speaking with investors on a one-on-one and group basis over the coming weeks.

That's great. Remy, Christoph, thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. If I could please ask investors not to close this session as we're now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the company can really better understand your views and expectations. This may take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at PensionBee PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon, good morning to you all. Thank you.