Quilter plc

Good morning everyone and welcome to our 2026 interim results. And if you haven't already seen it in the wild, I hope you enjoyed the intro with our new TV ad for Money Needs a Plan. Right, on to business. I'll start with a review of the first half highlights and our flow performance. Then Mark will take us through the financials. I'll conclude with a growth outlook for our business and why we are very well placed. Then I'll take questions. I'm very pleased with our performance in the first half of 2026. Core net flows were up to a record £6 billion. That's up over 30% on last year, and 2025 was a record too, so we've accelerated further from a strong base. Net flows were 9% of opening assets, up a percentage point on last year, despite the sharp increase in assets from market growth. Our operating margin was stable at 30% despite elevated business investment and lower interest rates reducing the income we generated on shareholder capital. Adjusted profit increased 12% to £112 million. Good momentum and a strong result. Earnings per share increased 13%. Board has declared an interim dividend of 2.1 pence, a third of last year's total dividend, in line with our revised distribution policy. And we're progressing well with our share buyback program. We're just under 70% done, with the remainder to be completed before the end of the year. Let's turn to the detail of flows, starting with a group picture. This slide shows the trend in gross new business outflows and net inflows for the first half over the last four years. Gross flows of 11.9 billion in 2026 on the left continue to demonstrate the strong business momentum with compound growth of 29% over the last three years. 2026 gross flows were more than double 2023. The strength of our dual channel model is clear. Outflows in the middle have been broadly consistent over the period, and so we've seen an excellent growth in net flows, on the right where the compound growth rate is over 100%. Net inflows of 9% of opening assets are up a percentage point on last year, and you don't need me to tell you that this is peer-leading performance. These strong flows are no accident. They're the direct result of the strategic progress we've made, building great propositions and investing in distribution. And that's why I believe the momentum we are delivering is sustainable. I'll say more about this later. Now let me drill a little deeper into flows by proposition. And the message you should take away from this is that we're delivering excellent franchise growth and market leadership. Let's start with the platform. Our assets under administration currently stand at $118 billion. That's up from $69 billion in June 2023, a compound growth rate of 19%. Over the same period, our platform gross new business flows have grown by around 140%, from $4 billion to just under $10 billion, with our market share of new business rising to 18% from 12%. that has driven a high single digit compound growth rate in fee income and an acceleration in fee income growth over the last year to 17%. I'm often asked what drives this improved performance and this slide gives some context. First, our quilter advisors have become more productive and are increasingly aligned to delivering our platform and our solutions. The graph on the left shows that while the number of advisors in our network has been largely stable over the last few years, their productivity has improved significantly from 2.7 million a year to 3.9 million per advisor. And that has meant that the amount of new business they generate onto our platform has increased by around 70% over the period. Secondly, we have broadened and deepened our relationship with IFA firms. That reflects market recognition of the quality of our propositions. The graph on the right breaks down IFA firms by the amount of flow they generate onto our platform. The two key takeaways are the absolute number of firms generating significant flow has increased and we're seeing faster growth from firms generating higher flows. Thank you for joining us. We are the largest and fastest growing platform amongst the large advised industry players. We've shown the slide before and we've updated it for the first quarter data, the most recent we've got for the whole industry. And from the Q2 reporting we've seen to date, this is a trend that's continuing. The vertical axis is the first quarter gross new business flows in billions. The horizontal axis is the net flows as a percentage of opening assets and platform size is represented by the size of the bubble. The market is clearly consolidating by flows into a handful of winners. The net flows into the top three platforms have averaged over 100% of total industry flows for the last three years. And as you can see, we are the market leader. So not surprisingly, our performance is recognized by industry observers. The quote at the top is from Fundscape, whose detailed research on the platform industry earlier this year highlighted Quilter as one of their expected industry winners. Turning to our solutions business, we've built the leading fund manager for Advise Platform Flows. We offer both MPS and fund-to-fund solutions, with MPS increasingly the preferred investment vehicle for most of the industry. As you can see, we've delivered compound growth of 37% in our WealthSelect MPS since June 2023. Thank you very much. today the impact of that has largely worked itself through so going forward we expect revenue growth to correlate more strongly with asset growth now if we dig a bit deeper into MPS here too we enjoy market leadership this slide shows the larger MPS players across the industry at the end of Q1 the most up-to-date industry data we are clearly the largest and again one of the fastest growing The story behind Flows into our MPS is not just about distribution through our own advisors. It may not be widely appreciated, but our MPS was originally built to meet the needs of independent financial advisors. In fact, around 56% of our MPS assets are from our IFA distribution channel. So this product is clearly meeting the needs of this market. Turning now to Quilt Achievement, we've had a strong start to the year. AUM has grown by 11% compound over the last three years. Gross new business inflows have been trending up nicely. You can see the pickup this year. And overall, they've increased by 16% compound since 2023. And we've grown revenues by 5% compound over that time. And again, we've seen a marked pickup over the last 12 months. But I believe we can do more. Tosin James-Odukoya and of course we'll continue to invest to make this a stronger business with the acquisition of Gillen Markets an example of that. So in conclusion we've got an incredibly strong fast-growing franchise and we're the market leader in places where scale matters. As you can see from the stats on this slide virtually all the flows generated from our advisor network go onto our platform. Thank you very much. Thank you, Steven, and good morning, everyone. We delivered continued strong financial performance in the first half of 2020.

Let me start with three key messages. One, we achieved revenue growth of 12%. That was driven by excellent growth of 16% in net management fees and 6% growth in other revenue, with that partly offset by lower interest income on shareholder capital. Two, costs are in line with the guidance I set out in March as we continue to invest in the growth of the business. and three, our balance sheet remains in very good shape with a strong solvency position and healthy level of holding company cash. Let's get into the detail with my usual analysis of our P&L dynamics. Starting top left, core net flows of £6 billion were, as you heard from Steven, 32% higher than an already strong comparator in 2025. Flows in positive markets meant that average AUMA was up 21%. Top right, you can see revenues grew 12% to £379 million. Costs bottom left were up 13% to £267 million, reflecting inflation and business investment. As a result, adjusted profit increased by 12% to £112 million, with a stable operating margin of 30%. and we reported adjusted diluted earnings per share of 6.1 pence, an increase of 13%. Let's now turn to revenue by segment. In the affluent segment, revenues grew 13%, a good performance. Pleasingly, net management fees were higher on both administered and managed assets, growing 17% and 21% respectively. Margins were in line with guidance and, as a reminder, revenue margin attrition in the affluent businesses has resulted from three advisor and client-led factors. First, in our solutions business, the success of WealthSelect reflects what has been a market-wide shift from fund-to-funds towards MPS. Second, in the platform, our strong flows from both large IFAs and quarter partner firms are generally at a lower margin than stock. And third, as average client holdings on the platform have also grown around 50% over the last three years to around £210,000 today, together with the effect of family linking, the impact of tiered client charges has reduced the margin. but these dynamics are positive outcomes for the business. More customers and more money on both the platform and in our solutions which has driven the year-on-year growth in net management fees. Our high net worth revenues also achieved good growth. Net management fees grew 12% to 111 million pounds and advice fees grew 20% to 12 million pounds. Revenue margins in high net worth were near stable year on year. The revenue margin will be higher than the affluent platform and solutions business lines by nature of the more bespoke higher touch proposition. Turning now to costs, I'm pleased to report that the group operating margin remained flat even while total costs increased year on year as we invested in the future growth of the business. The table on the left is our usual first half 2026 on first half 2025 comparison. The waterfall on the right summarizes the main cost changes from H2 25 as my cost guidance for this year was based off the second half 2025 run rate. The main cost changes in the first half of the year came from inflation and investment into the business. These included costs associated with balding out our data and technology functionality, and continued support to grow our brand presence, Quilter Invest and the Quilter Academy. Reductions principally came from the final benefits of our simplification program, which we completed at the end of 2025. In terms of my expectations for the full year, I continue to be comfortable with the cost guidance I provided back in March. This gets you to a figure somewhere between 530 to 540 million pounds, with the actual outcome likely towards the higher end of the range, provided market sensitive revenues remain at current levels. Again, I underline that the current rate of investment, excluding acquisition activity, won't increase to this extent every year. Our longer-term guidance of inflation, plus a few percentage points, remains unchanged. I firmly believe that we should be able to get our operating margin to the mid-30s, though I'm not putting a timeline to that. So putting the segment revenues and group costs together, this slide shows the segmental contribution to group profitability. In affluence, we maintained strong growth trajectory with profit up 9% to 86 million pounds and high net worth delivered profit of 29 million pounds up a very healthy 21% year on year. The operating margin improved by two percentage points in high net worth. In affluence, the operating margin declined by one percentage point as it incurred most of the increased branding and other investment costs. as we've underlined before this part of our business is very scalable so ultimately we expect an improvement in operating margin over time across the business we know there is more operating leverage to come as we focus on the management of our cost base alongside strategic investment to drive growth and further efficiency now let me turn to the balance sheet as you'd expect we've maintained a strong solvency ratio and cash position The solvency ratio increased marginally over the period, with financing costs and the interim dividend offset by IFRS profit and the benefit of market variances. In terms of cash, we returned £54 million in the period through the share buyback programme, and we made capital contributions of £71 million, reflecting the cost of funding the EBT, as well as our ongoing investment within the business to support our distribution capabilities. This was offset by cash remittances from subsidiaries. On the right you can see we've got around £360 million of cash available before the payment of the interim dividend and the conclusion of the £100 million share buyback programme. That leaves us with a sensible buffer to cover contingencies, liquidity management and business investment while retaining balance sheet optionality. So our balance sheet remains in good shape. The board declared an interim dividend of 2.1 pence per share. That's a third of last year's total cash dividend in line with our revised distribution policy. And that represents an increase of 5% on the 2025 interim dividend. And as at the 31st of July, we'd completed over 68 million pounds of the 100 million pounds surplus capital being returned via share buyback this year. Let me conclude with our usual guidance slide. As you'll notice, we have updated our long-term guidance on net flows. We are frequently asked if the 4% to 5% ambition for the group remains relevant as our flow performance over the past three years has seen us continually exceed that guidance. We've materially beaten that again this reporting period. From the position of strength we have placed ourselves in, our expectation is that we should continue to achieve peer-leading net flows, which we expect to be above 45% for the foreseeable future. More broadly, our expectation is for the operating environment in the second half of 2026 to remain constructive and our revenue margin guidance is unchanged. I spoke earlier in detail about cost expectations for the remainder of the year. We anticipate a higher revenue contribution in the second half from the benefit of our first half flows momentum and positive markets. So assuming steady markets, we currently anticipate that second half adjusted profit will be around a mid single digit percentage point above that of the first half. Let me finish by summarizing my three key points from our results. First, we delivered solid growth in overall revenue driven by increased net management fees. Thank you, Mark. I'll kick off this last section with a reminder. Everything at Quilter starts with advice.

As our new TV advert shows, we firmly believe that money needs a plan. And we cover the waterfront of UK-advised wealth through two customer propositions, our scaled platform and market-leading NPS, together with our fund-to-fund solutions, and a bespoke investment service built around high-touch relationships provided by our investment managers who offer personalised portfolios in Quilter Cheviots. across our scaled businesses our platform has delivered net inflows of 10% of opening assets over the last two years with AUA up 28% over the last 12 months and our solutions business has also delivered a 28% increase in AUM over the last year with net inflows equivalent to 10% of opening assets Our bespoke proposition, which is inherently less scalable given its high-touch nature, delivered a 17% increase in AUM. As I covered earlier, we are leaders in a market that has strong growth potential, as independent data on this slide shows. Fundscape expect the platform industry to grow a 13% compound to 2030. and with industry assets increasingly concentrating into a handful of leaders we expect to outperform that growth rate and as you can see on the right the discretionary wealth industry is expected to grow at around six percent compound over the same period and here too we expect to outperform The four key drivers underpinning this growth are increasing consolidation of flows in the industry to a handful of market leaders, the need to encourage a higher level of investment by UK households to ensure a good standard of living and retirement, a widening of the remit of the advice industry to help create a nation of investors through targeted support, simplified advice and improvements in advisor productivity. Thank you for watching. Steven David Levin, Mark Oscar Satchel, We've now rolled out market-leading AI tools which are saving advisors time, improving their efficiency, supporting better client journeys and more accurate targeting. And the next stage is the end-to-end advisor ecosystem that I told you about back in March. We'll be rolling this out over the next 12 months or so. This will help advisor firms to run more profitably and serve more clients. and will help our clients enhancing their experience with smoother, more intuitive digital advice. The goal is full end-to-end technology integration between our platform and the tools that the advisors need and seamless client data management. Secondly, we can improve operationally across quilter. While both our platform and solutions businesses are already highly scalable, the technology investments we're making will make them even more so, reducing the marginal cost of managing incremental assets. We're embedding AI across our entire business and we see opportunities to deliver further scale benefits. So let me conclude with our equity story. Quilter is the market leader with compelling propositions in an attractive market with structural growth opportunities. Our dual channel distribution model is translating this into peer leading flow performance. Flows are concentrating in the winners, which supports our operating margin progression. and technology and AI investments offer further opportunities for efficiency and the potential to drive operating margin to at least the mid 30s in time. And we're confident that we will continue to deliver attractive returns for shareholders. Thank you. Let's open up to questions.