CI Financial Corp.

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's CI Financial third quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Megan, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to Kurt McAlpine, CEO of CI Financial.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CI Financial's third quarter earnings call. Joining me is our CFO, Amit Meuni. Together, we will cover the following, an overview of the highlights of the quarter, a review of our financial performance during the quarter, a discussion on some of the key fundamental drivers of our business, then we'll take your questions. Our adjusted EPS of 81 cents is up 7% sequentially. reflecting the growth of our US wealth business, growing contributions from our Canadian wealth management business, and the benefits from the capital we deployed following the sale of a minority stake in our US business. This growth was partially offset by a higher non-controlling interest. Adjusted EBITDA per share, attributable to shareholders, increased 7% from Q2 to a record of $1.47 per share, while free cash flow per share increased 37% from Q2 to a record of $1.10 per share, which reflects the seasonality in our lower share count. Capital deployment remained active during the quarter. We spent $145 million to repurchase 8.8 million shares, essentially completing our normal course issuer bid. We deployed $72 million towards M&A, including deferred and earn-out payments, and we returned $31 million to our shareholders through our dividend. The Board also declared a dividend of $0.20 per share payable in April, reflecting the normal cadence of declaring dividends one quarter ahead. While there are several bright spots, the uncertain economic environment and risk-averse investor mentality dampened the flow momentum in our asset management segments. We continue to see strong demand for our high interest savings and other short duration strategies, as well as for our liquid and illiquid alternatives, which we will discuss more later in the presentation. Our wealth businesses in both Canada and the US continue to generate positive inflows in the third quarter, highlighting the resiliency of those businesses. We also continue to execute against our three strategic priorities to modernize asset management expand wealth management, and globalize the company. We launched two unique private market strategies for accredited investors, the CI Private Market Growth Fund and the CI Private Market Income Fund. The July custody conversion of Align Capital's assets to CI Investment Services went very well. This had an immediate and meaningful contribution to our bottom line, in addition to providing advisors and clients with enhanced services and a better go-forward experience. We continue to work towards onboarding the majority of our internal wealth assets, in addition to growing our asset base from external clients. In July, we also rebranded our U.S. business to Corient, which we discussed in detail last quarter. Feedback to date has been extremely positive. We completed the previously announced acquisitions of Coriel in Canada and Intercontinental Advisors in the U.S., Early in the fourth quarter, we completed the acquisition of Windsor Wealth Advisors and the Indianapolis-based high net worth focused RIA. I'll now turn the call over to Amit to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Kirk, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide four, our global assets ended the quarter up 3% to $421 billion due to the conversion of custody assets from Alliant Capital, positive flows in our Canadian and U.S. wealth management segments, as well as acquisitions in our U.S. segment during the quarter. Partly offsetting these increases was negative market movement. Compared to this time last year, our AUM is up 25%. Turning to our financial results on the next slide, I'll focus my comments on our adjusted results. Adjusted net income was $133 million, or $0.81 per share, for the quarter. Net revenues increased to $670 million and adjusted EBITDA was $238 million for the quarter. Prior to non-controlling interest, both adjusted net income and EBITDA increased this quarter. However, this period reflected the full quarter effect of non-controlling interest from the partial sale of our U.S. business in May. Turning to the next slide, I'll highlight the EBITDA and margins for our three segments. Asset management EBITDA was down slightly to $156 million. However, margins expanded to nearly 60%. Canada wealth EBITDA increased 24% to $230 million and margins expanded to nearly 10%, primarily due to the conversion of aligned custody assets. In the U.S., we experienced strong EBITDA growth of 55% compared to the third quarter of last year and 5% growth compared to the second quarter. U.S. margins were 42%. For purposes of modeling non-controlling interest for our U.S. segment for future quarters, we estimate non-controlling interest of 38% of U.S. adjusted EBITDA when calculating our U.S. segment's adjusted EBITDA. For purposes of modeling non-controlling interest for our U.S. segment's contribution to EPS, we estimate non-controlling interest of 32% of U.S. segment adjusted EBITDA. Turning to the next slide, I'll walk through the changes in revenue. Revenues on a comparable basis increased slightly to $660 million. Asset management revenues were essentially unchanged as lower revenue from mixed shift due to flows into lower fee short duration products were offset by an additional revenue day in the quarter. Canada and U.S. wealth revenues were up due to higher asset levels from growth and the aligned custody conversion. Our U.S. acquisitions added $10 million in additional revenues in the quarter. Turning to expenses on the next slide. On a comparable basis, total expenses increased less than 1%. SG&A increased primarily due to the full quarter effect of stock-based compensation due to the annual granting of restricted stock awards to our employees, which were done in the middle of the second quarter, as well as other higher headcount-related costs. Advisor and dealer fees increased due to higher revenue earned in our Canada wealth segment. Interest expense declined due to lower debt levels from the tender offer for our bonds last quarter. Acquisitions added $3 million in expenses in the quarter. Turning to slide nine. At the end of the quarter, our net debt was $3.3 billion. We had an outstanding balance on our credit facility of $95 million at the end of the quarter due to our buyback-related activities. In addition, that increased from non-cash foreign exchange translation of our U.S. debt. Our net leverage was 3.3 times. Using the current market value of our debt, our net leverage would be approximately 2.4 times. As you can see from the chart on the bottom of this slide, we have an attractive debt profile for our remaining debt with an average maturity of 14 years at a 4% fixed rate. We anticipate interest expense to be in the range of $40 to $42 million in the fourth quarter. Thank you. Let me turn the call back to Kurt.

Thanks, Amit. I'll now spend a few minutes discussing some of the fundamental drivers of our business performance. I'll start with our asset management fee rate. While we've seen pressure on the consolidated fee rate, that pressure has been driven almost entirely by mix shift as investors have gravitated towards lower fee, higher interest savings, and short duration products. As you can see in the chart, since the fourth quarter of 2021, cash and money market fund assets have grown from 2% of total AUM to over 8%. During that same eight-quarter period, the effective fee rate on our long-term assets has only declined by one basis point. While higher interest rates might lead to a slightly higher natural level of short-duration assets in investor portfolios, we believe a lot of the growth is reflective of the current risk-averse sentiment. As we'll discuss on the next slide, our performance track record strongly positions CI for when risk appetites improve, but we've also taken steps to drive the conversion of short-term assets to longer-term assets with a specific dollar cost averaging plan where clients can systematically transition assets from our high interest savings and money market funds to 155 other funds. Additionally, as we've discussed previously, we focused our product development efforts on alternatives, specialty, and thematic strategies that generally carry higher fee rates. We believe much of the fee pressure recently endured was cyclical and CI is among the best positioned to combat secular fee pressure. Turning to the next slide. One of the reasons we are so well positioned for when the risk environment improves is our investment performance track record. CI currently has the best relative performance in nearly seven years, with 75% of our AUM beating their peers on a three-year basis and 80% on a five-year basis. Over both time periods, the majority of the funds are ranked in the top quartile. Digging a little deeper, we're extremely well positioned in important risk asset classes such as balanced, where we're an industry leader, as well as subsegments of equities where we also have very strong performance. I've touched on this a few times before, but I wanted to again highlight the significant structural changes that we've made to our asset management business that have resulted in these better performance outcomes for our clients. Only three years ago, we had a multi-boutique model that experienced years of challenges in investment performance and redemptions. Redundancies caused by our legacy boutique model have been replaced by true scale in all critical functions, research, asset allocation, portfolio construction, trading and implementation, and risk and analytics, creating an institutional-grade platform reflective of our size. We believe CI is the best position it has been in years. to garner long-term product flows given the performance, drastically improved investment process and team, and the expanded product offering. One of the areas we've been very focused on in product development is alternatives. When the market opened for liquid alternatives, CI was prepared and quickly became a leader. We are now looking to further expand that leadership position by building the leading liquid alternatives offering for the retail market. Sophisticated institutional investors may allocate 40% or more of their portfolios to alternative investments. However, Canadian retail investors, through their advisors, typically allocate 0%. The disconnect is not driven by demand or need, but by the lack of education on the asset class, lack of access to the underlying managers, and the inability to onboard service and administer the products. To address this opportunity, we launched the industry's first private markets multi-manager strategy to provide Canadian retail investors a single ticket solution for their illiquid alternatives exposure. CI takes responsibility for the asset allocation, manager selection, onboarding, and ongoing service and administration. We're providing Canadians with access to world-class alternatives managers such as Adam Street, Apollo, Avenue Capital, CBRE, HarborVest, Whitehorse, and more through our open architecture approach. What we've created addresses all the barriers to investing in private markets products. Over time, we believe this and other strategies we launch will help increase allocations from current levels to those more reflective of an institutional investor's portfolio. We are actively educating advisors on the product and working through the approval processes on various platforms and dealers. In addition to solving a sizable client need, the growth of our alts platform will also be important to the economics of our asset management business. Turning to our U.S. wealth business, we continue to generate strong growth, which is a metric that is top of mind for the market following the minority investment into the business in May. Over the last two quarters, we have grown adjusted EBITDA before non-controlling interest by nearly 32% on an annualized basis. This is more than double the investor group's embedded preferred return. And to remind everyone on the call, the 14.5% implied return reflects the fact that we are not required to distribute any cash to the investor group, despite them purchasing a 20% interest in the business where the owner would normally be entitled to their pro rata share of the cash flows. Any distributions we make to the investor group reduces the preferred return, which would magnify our outperformance. With the integration well underway, which is driving synergies and stronger margins, as well as an expanding client services offering, we feel confident about our organic EBITDA growth outlook. In addition, our pipeline for inorganic growth remains robust, with a number of attractive opportunities that can further accelerate growth. As we've consistently said, we take a dynamic approach to capital management. With that mindset, after deleveraging through the U.S. minority sale, we leaned heavily into buybacks in Q2 and Q3 to essentially complete our 2022 and 2023 normal course issuer bids. Given the disconnect we continue to see in our stock price from the underlying value of the businesses we built. Since the deleveraging, our shareholders have expressed a preference to lean into buybacks with our excess capital. With these factors in mind, the Board has decided to initiate a $100 million substantial issuer bid that we announced this morning. To put it in context, the $100 million substantial issuer bid is less than the cash flow generated this quarter by our Canadian businesses, or would be approximately 0.1 turns of additional leverage. As we think about capital allocation on a go-forward basis, we will continue to be dynamic, but increasingly think about the businesses independently. Cash flows generated by the Canadian businesses will primarily be deployed towards deleveraging and buybacks, with the mix driven by the operating environment and the trading dynamics of CIX shares. In the U.S., cash flow will be used to pursue inorganic growth opportunities augmented by access to credit. We will continue to update the market on our capital priorities and allocation plans in the future as our business and market dynamics evolve. We thank you for your interest in CI and we'd be happy to take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star 1. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. Our first question comes from the line of Graham Writing with TD Securities. Your line is now open.

Good morning. Maybe I could just follow on from your commentary about cash flow and debt leverage. So given the planned substantial issue bid here in Q4, assuming you successfully complete that, and then I think you've got some two wealth tuck-ins that you're closing in the quarter, and then perhaps any contingent liability payments, can you give us an idea of where you see net debt to EBITDA moving to Graham Johnson, M.D.: : In Q4 and then more broadly, how about looking into 2020 for what range of leverage should we expect you to be started operating in an overall company wide basis.

Graham Johnson, M.D.: : Sure, Graham. So, you know, you're right, we do have M&A obligation payments that we have in Q4, we have the issuer bid. You know, if you look at the guidance that we gave on interest expense, we do expect that going higher in Q4. So, yes, leverage, net leverage will be higher in Q4 compared to Q3. You know, as far as further guidance than that, you know, we're not really ready to give any further guidance. I mean, Kurt talked about our dynamic approach to capital. You know, where we're leaning into right now over the short term is on stock buybacks. So that will sort of define how we think about leverage going forward. But again, we take a dynamic approach to that.

And Graham, just to pile on quickly to Ahmed, as you saw probably in the slide in the presentation, a little over 50% of our capital this year had gone to prioritizing deleveraging. Subsequent to that event, we did take advantage of the disconnect in our shares. And I mentioned, I believe on the previous call, if not the one before, As the businesses continue down different trajectories, cash flow generated from Canada will be used to de-lever and to take advantage of buybacks where the U.S. cash flow will be discreetly earmarked to continue to grow in organically. So if you do see a, call it a shorter-term lift, as some of those obligations get flushed out, as you think on a more normalized level, you should see that trending back down.

Okay. Um, maybe I could touch on your custody platform and in, uh, Canadian wealth. So you've added aligned capital. Um, what, I guess what pieces are next or what's the timing there. And, um, can you give us some indication of either done lift that would be associated with moving the remaining, you know, Canadian wealth anyway, over to that custody platform.

Yeah, so we have outlined a timeline to continue to migrate our own assets while also continuing to migrate third party assets as well. So as I mentioned, the conversion went very well. When you do a conversion of that scale successfully, it starts to spark more demand. So the pipeline from third parties is bigger than we've ever seen, but we also intend to move custody for our remaining wealth businesses onto the platform as well. We anticipate That'll ramp up over the course of next year, and as we start to formalize those milestones, just like the aligned capital, I think we announced it a quarter or two in advance, we'll give some clarity on when we expect those assets to migrate at that time, and then what the associated impact of those assets will be then.

Okay, understood. And then one last, if I could, just, you know, Offset's made some changes, I guess, to the capital treatment for... these high-interest savings issuers that source funds through third-party ETFs such as yours. Would you expect any impact here on your flows or perhaps the yields that these vehicles pay out? Maybe just any color implications on your end.

Yeah, I won't get into the specifics of that, but what I will mention is if you look at what we've made in anticipation of this potentially happening, you would have noticed that we made some changes in some fee cuts to our associated money market product over the course of the last quarter. um i believe we have the lowest if not one of the lowest price strategies in the market in addition that i touched on in my prepared remarks the dollar cost averaging program where we do see the increase in the cash balances being being obviously driven by rates but more driven by the risk averse incentive risk averse sentiment so our dollar cost averaging program which we launched in the quarter has started to see some flows as well so i think it's really a combination of continued um commitment to the high-interest savings strategy, a more compelling and better-priced money market offering than we've had historically, and then also a dollar-cost averaging program that allows people to systematically move to a more kind of risk-on environment, which we've seen good uptake on. So hopefully we feel we're well-prepared on all fronts for that.

Okay, that's it for me. Thank you. Thanks, Graham.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nick Prebe with CIBC. Your line is now open. Nick, your line is open.

Oh, sorry. I think I was muted there. Yeah, thanks for the question. I just wanted to circle back on the discussion around liquidity and the balance sheet. I'm just thinking about some of the various moving pieces there. there are about $550 million of acquisition liabilities classified as current. How should we think about the settlement of that? Would most of that be cash-based?

Yes, they are all cash-based.

Okay, that's good. And then just on the asset management segment, I think you had pointed out that the strong demand you're seeing for cash products has been offset by redemptions in long-term funds. That's a trend we see across the industry. Are you able to break out what your long-term fund sales would have been in the quarter, X to high interest savings or money market products?

No, we don't have that specific breakout provided. But I think you'll see if you look at, obviously, the increase in our cash positions, our overall flow rate of being $100 million net out for the quarter in retail, you can draw a pretty tight conclusion.

Okay. All right, fair enough. That's all I had. I'll recue. Thank you. Thanks, Nick.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kyle Voigt with KBW. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning. This is Gerard filling in for Kyle. Just wanted to ask on the competitive environment you're seeing since the recent ownership change in one of your U.S. peers earlier this year and With the marketplace for RAs then and just M&A commentary, if you can provide any. Thank you.

Sure. We continue to see a very active market. I believe there's give or take 15,000 individual RAs. It seems like as one acquisition gets completed, a new RA gets formed typically from scratch or from a transition from another wealth management business model. So we continue to see a very active pipeline. As I mentioned before, 2021 was an unusually busy year, just given low interest rate environments, strong markets, potential tax changes. So I wouldn't consider that to be the norm. But I do see a very active and robust market. And I would say it does feel like things are picking up a little bit more in the second half of the year after a little bit of a quieter period of targets early in the year, late last year. Perfect.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tom McKinnon with BMO Capital. Your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks. I was wondering if you'd be able to split your free cash flow into what comes from Canada and what comes from the U.S. wealth management business? Just roughly or in percentage? It's not...

Yeah, Tom, if you look at the EBITDA, that'll probably give you a good rough estimate of the general direction of cash flows coming in from each segment. Obviously, still, the asset management part of the business is a large driver. I think going forward, we will start to disclose more information about how we think about the businesses separately, given our comments around how the cash flows of each business are going to be generating growth going forward. So you'll see that, you know, starting sometime in Q4.

Yeah, and Tom, the way to think about, I guess, the placement. So all contingent considerations are the obligation of the U.S. business. All the go-forward acquisitions are the obligation of the U.S. business. So Canada's call it obligation to contribute for kind of deals that had closed prior that have future payments runs off pretty soon. And then Tom's point, we'll have very clear guidance on Canadian cash flows, what they are and what they're ultimately being used for. And as we've mentioned, the U S cash flows will be used to continue to grow the business as long as we see good in organic growth opportunities, um, that exist.

So to summarize, if the, uh, the bulk of the cash flows, if I justify the adjusted EBITDA are, um, probably from the Canadian business, but still the U S free cash flow, the first thing is to extinguish the five 50 and, current liabilities and then to use the rest for some acquisitions and then in Canada I think you said the objectives are to do you leverage and buy back some stock question about the leveraging though like it you still have some attractive debt and it's long out there and what is the plan there to to use the Canadian free cash flow to buy back stock or what what's what's Why do you say you want to deal with that?

Yeah, so just perfect. So just one point of clarification, Tom. So think of the cashflow to Amit's point as proportional to the EBITDA contribution. Um, and then as you think about the payments, um, there's, um, all contingent considerations are the obligation of the U S all new acquisitions are the obligation of the U S there's, there's a little bit of tail of guaranteed payments from acquisitions that were completed through the second quarter. that will remain the obligation of Canada, but those will be settled up in the coming months. And then you'll have the clarity I guess you're asking about as it relates to Canadian cash flow and those uses. So the way that we think about Canadian cash flow, to specifically answer your question, is we're going to pursue on a go-forward basis a combination of continued deleveraging of that business. while opportunistically buying back shares when that opportunity presents itself. So as I touched on, we showed a slide in the presentation that 50 or 50 plus percent of our cash flow that we received this year was going towards deleveraging. The rest was going through a combination of buybacks, dividends, and M&A obligations. And as we look forward, you're going to continue to see that. So we do anticipate continued deleveraging of the business, but opportunistically, like we saw this quarter, an opportunity to either use our Canadian cash flow or the equivalent of 0.1 terms of leverage to acquire up to $100 million of our shares back. So that dynamic approach we'll take. You'll see more of it deleveraging, obviously, as the share count continues to reduce.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. There are no additional questions waiting at this time, so as a reminder, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. There are no additional questions waiting at this time, so I'll pass the conference back over to the management team for any additional closing remarks.

Just wanted to thank everyone for participating in today's call, and we appreciate the interest in CI, and we look forward to speaking to you next quarter.

That concludes the CI Financial Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Thank you for your participation. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.