CI Financial Corp.

Welcome to CI Financial's third quarter earnings call. Joining me is our CFO, Amit Muni. 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 of strategic progress across our operating segments, then we will take your questions. CI Financial reported strong third quarter results with records across several key metrics. Adjusted EPS grew 8% sequentially to a record 97 cents, reflecting top-line growth, well-controlled SG&A, and a lower share count, partially offset by higher interest costs. Adjusted EBITDA per share, attributable to shareholders, increased 10% from Q2 to a record of $1.85 per share, while free cash flow of $1.32 per share also represented a record. Capital allocation remained balanced and active during the quarter. We deployed $164 million towards M&A, including new deals and the settlement of existing acquisition obligations. We remained active with share repurchases, completing a $5 million share substantial issuer bid in July and buying back 680,000 shares with the restart of our NCIB. We continue to opportunistically reduce our debt with open market repurchases of $16 million of our 2051 notes at a sizable discount to par. And we returned $30 million to shareholders through our dividend. Investor sentiment and risk appetite appears to be gradually improving. Our Canadian retail channel net flows turned positive as we saw the benefit of reduced redemption activity across balance and equity funds. Our wealth businesses in both Canada and the U.S. continue to generate positive flows, highlighting their quality and resiliency. We also continue to execute against our three strategic priorities to modernize asset management, expand wealth management, and globalize the company. The significant improvements in investment performance since integrating our platform continues. Just last week, we were recognized with 16 LIPR awards. This marks the second consecutive year that CI has been the most awarded fund manager in Canada. We completed the previously announced acquisitions of Byron Financial and Emerald Multifamily Office at the end of July, adding over $8 billion of client assets to Corriant. In October, we added an additional $2.4 billion through the acquisition of Ensemble Capital, a San Francisco-based high and ultra high net worth wealth manager. The combination of M&A, underlying organic growth, and market tailwinds and margin expansion drove an 8% sequential increase in adjusted EBITDA for the segment. I'll now turn the call over to Amit to discuss our financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Kurt, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide four, our global assets ended the quarter up 6% to $518 billion, driven by positive markets, flows across all three of our business segments and acquisitions in our U.S. segment. Turning to our financial results on the next slide, I'll focus my comments on our adjusted results. Adjusted net income was $141 million or $0.97 per share for the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $271 million for the quarter, and our adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 42%. Included in the quarter was a performance fee for $7 million, or 4 cents a share, which was generated by our asset management segment. Turning to the next slide, I'll highlight the segment results and key drivers of EBITDA and margins. Asset management EBITDA increased to $172 million for the quarter, and margins expanded to 62.3%, partly due to the performance fee as well as controlled spending in the business. Canada wealth EBITDA increased to $19 million and margins expanded to 8.4% due to higher revenues. In the U.S., pre-NCI EBITDA increased to $123.7 million and margins expanded to 44%, reflecting operating leverage in the business. Compared to the third quarter of last year, U.S. EBITDA increased 24%, which is greater than the investor group's preferred return. For purposes of modeling non-controlling interest of our U.S. segment for future quarters, we estimate non-controlling interest of 37% of U.S. adjusted EBITDA when calculating our U.S. segment adjusted EBITDA. For purposes of modeling non-controlling interest for our U.S. segment's contribution to EPS, we estimate non-controlling interest of 30% of U.S. segment adjusted EBITDA. Turning to the next slide, I'll walk through the changes in revenue. Revenues increased to $755 million in the quarter. Asset management revenues were a net $6 million due to positive markets and the performance fee, partly offset by fluctuations in other gains and losses. Canada and U.S. wealth management fees increased due to higher asset levels from positive flows and positive markets. Acquisitions in the U.S. added $8 million in revenue in the quarter. Turning to the next slide, we can review major changes in expenses. On a comparable basis, total expenses increased less than 1%. SG&A decreased due to lower discretionary-related spending reflecting operating discipline, partly offset by higher marketing to support our business segment's revenue growth. Advisor and dealer fees increased due to higher revenue earned in our Canada wealth segment. Interest expense increased due to the new bond offering, as well as borrowings to fund our acquisition-related obligation payments and stock buybacks. Looking forward to the next quarter, we anticipate interest and lease finance expenses to be in the range of $59 to $60 million in Q4. Also, a reminder from last quarter, we expect higher depreciation and amortization of 19 to 20 million in Q4, reflecting the impact from integration capital expenditures. Turning to slide 9, we can review debt and leverage. Net debt increased to $3.6 billion, reflecting the new bonds we issued in the quarter, partly offset by bond buybacks, maturities, lower borrowings on our credit facility, and positive FX movement on our U.S.-denominated bonds. Our net leverage declined to 3.3 times on a reported basis. Turning to slide 10, I'll review our segment obligations. As we have previously discussed, Canada and the U.S. have different capital priorities. The table on the right of the slide reflects the cash, debt and M&A obligations for Canada and the U.S. at the end of the third quarter. The U.S. has borrowed $175 million from Canada to primarily fund acquisition-related payments. The U.S. also has $154 million in contingent consideration obligations. Canada has 66 million remaining to pay off for U.S. acquisitions. These will be fully paid off early next year. Canada also has 74 million in other acquisition obligations, of which about half of that was already settled in October. Thank you, and let me turn the call back to Kurt.

Thanks, Amit. We continue to rapidly scale our U.S. wealth management business. Since the minority investment in Coriant in May 2023, the business has grown EBITDA at a 27% compound annual growth rate. EBITDA growth has been driven by a combination of organic growth, our integration efforts driving synergy capture, a favorable market backdrop, and consecutive quarters of strong M&A. As we discussed in recent quarters, we are nearing the completion of major real estate integrations. Following the consolidation of our New York City offices last quarter, we moved into new space in Boston and Chicago this quarter. Consolidation of office space is important for elevating the client experience while driving collaboration, culture, and unity across Coriant. M&A has picked up in the last several months. We've now closed five transactions since April, including the previously announced additions of Byron Financial and Emerald Multifamily Office, as well as Ensemble Capital, which we closed at the end of October. As a result of the integration progress we've made, all of these deals were rebranded and fully integrated into CoriNet Close, driving benefits for clients and synergies for our business. Our investment team is generating consistently strong performance. This performance outcome is a result of the hard work we undertook to dismantle the multi-boutique structure and build a fully integrated at scale institutional grade investment platform. For the fifth quarter in a row, more than 70% of assets are outperforming peers on a three-year basis. Importantly, the strong performance is spread across numerous funds and several asset classes. Over 90 percent of our balance funds are outperforming peers, with a significant portion ranked in the top quartile. With redemption pressure easing, we are well positioned to grow disproportionately in that asset class. While CI has not been historically known for our standalone fixed income funds, performance has been excellent, with over 80 percent of assets beating peers over the three- and five-year periods, including 80 percent in the top quartile over five years. This strong performance is beginning to drive inflows, particularly into our unconstrained and global investment grade bond funds. The transformation of our investment business and the consistent results we are delivering are getting recognized. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, CI was the most awarded fund manager in Canada for the second consecutive year. We continue to make progress executing against our stated 2024 strategic priorities. In asset management, we've been active on the product front while streamlining our existing lineup and launching innovative new strategies, including the global AI ETF, which has quickly scaled to nearly $900 million in assets since it launched in May. During the quarter, we made enhancements to our innovative private market solution to further broaden its appeal as we continue to educate advisors on the merits of the asset class and garner platform approvals. In Canadian Wealth, we continue to have success recruiting advisors to both our Asante and Align Capital businesses. We also continue to scale our custody business and leverage technology to provide a better client experience. We are working towards onboarding the remainder of our wealth assets and are having conversations with a number of third parties. At Coriant, we're making progress against our strategic plan and the investments we've made to scale and fully integrate our business are reflected in our financial results. Our EBITDA grew 8% quarter over quarter, our net flows remain strong, and our solutions and alternatives offerings are growing rapidly. Margins in the business are also showing the benefit of our integration efforts with adjusted EBITDA margins up 158 basis points in the first three quarters of the year. We're proud of the recent progress we've made in each of our business segments and very excited about what the future holds. We thank you for your interest in CI, and we'd be happy to take your questions.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to remove your question, please press star followed by 2. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. And the first question goes to Kyle Voigt of KBW. Kyle, please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. So first question, on the U.S. wealth segment, you've done a really nice job expanding EBITDA margins there. I think margins hit 44% this quarter, which is a record. I know you've been active over the past couple years integrating the platform, consolidating vendor relationships. I guess in terms of what is left to do, it looks like there's some more to do on the real estate consolidation side. I'm assuming maybe some more to do in terms of technology integrations. Can you just go over what's left to complete the full integration of the business? And I guess the heart of the question here is how much more margin expansion is still left? And outside of that, how do you think about organic incremental EBITDA margins in the segment on a normal course basis?

Great. Thanks for the question, Kyle. So your assumption around the two major areas of what's left from an integrating the platform standpoint are spot on. Real estate integrations, as you're seeing, we're working through those and getting to the back end of those in relatively short order. And we're in the final stages of our technology integration, primarily the unification of our portfolio accounting solution that will take place over the course of 2025. From there, I mean, there's always opportunities as we continue to grow and scale the business. we've set up the operating platform in a way that has a lot of positive operating leverage. So we do anticipate to continue to see margin expansions even after the completion or the finalization of our integration efforts.

Okay, great. And then second question. We're sitting here, equity markets are near all-time highs. Seems like we're prime to start seeing the ECM markets open back up in 2025. Can you just remind us of the structure of the preferred equity instrument? Do you have the ability to repay that prior to 2026? And would you be willing to head down the IPO path as soon as next year if the markets were to cooperate?

Sure. So, I mean, there's a lot of flexibility in terms of the structure itself as it relates to the timing for the IPO markets, kind of the opportune time to look at the separation of the business and pursue the Corian IPO would probably be sometime in early to mid-2026. So, as you mentioned, we've been laser-focused, heads down on driving maximum integration, maximum growth, really setting up the business to continue to scale, which we've done. But we'll continue to keep an eye on markets, see how the IPO market unfolds, and then look at the timing as it relates to all those factors.

Okay. Thank you, Kurt.

Thank you. The next question goes to Arya Samazida of Jefferies. Arya, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. With the recent creative planning transaction being reported at 23 times EBITDA, can you talk a little bit about how you think about this transaction and how you believe Corient compares in terms of margin profile, high net worth mix or geographic reach? Is there any reason that you can justify a premium or a discount for Corient versus the recent creative planning transaction?

Yeah, I mean, thanks for the question, Ari. I'd rather kind of not compare and contrast our business to others. But when I look at the business that we've built, so five years ago today, the Corian business didn't exist, right? So we outlined an ambitious strategy to enter the U.S. market and really scale that business up. In a span of five years, I'm quite confident to say we have the fastest growing kind of wealth platform by far. I believe we have the leading integrated ultra high and high net worth, RIA, as you've seen our operating margins and our growth, I think they're both very attractive. So if you look at a fully integrated at scale, ultra high and high net worth wealth management business, I think there's a lot of desirability for a business with those characteristics. And I would, you know, just that would be kind of my high level take on the business is we feel very, very good with what we've built to tie it to Kyle's question, we're continuing to finalize the integration and our combination of our organic growth and our M&A remains very strong. So we're very pleased with where we're at right now and continuing just to progress the business going forward.

Okay, thank you. And then the second question I have is, you know, you're operating at a pro forma dividend payout ratio that's much lower than when you last increased your dividend. And then thanks to you know, the aggressive share purchases, a nice increase can be sustained without increasing your dividend obligation. With your yield now lagging tiers, how should we think about dividend growth and the factors that management is weighing before making an increased decision?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we're at the board level, we're constantly looking at our capital allocation strategy and we're really trying to strike the balance between obviously continuing to pay our dividend and look at flexibility to increase that over time. We're looking at weighing share buybacks against deleveraging with the Canadian business cash flow. And as everyone saw and heard in Amit's remarks, we've made great strides at reducing Canada's obligations to the U.S. business, and those will fully run off within the next little less than two months. And then the U.S. business, the focus there is continuing to reinvest that cash flow to grow the Corient platform overall. So we're looking at it dynamically. We're constantly evaluating the appropriate tradeoff across all of those different capital allocation priorities.

Thank you for taking my questions. Thanks, Arya.

Thank you. The next question goes to Nick Prebe of CIBC. Nick, please go ahead.

Okay, thanks. So adjusted SG&A was flat sequentially, but the share price was up pretty sharply in the quarter. Can you just remind me, do you fully hedge your exposure to any unvested share-based comp? It doesn't look like you've adjusted for any associated compensation true up in the quarter, but I just wanted to clarify that.

Hey, Nick, it's Amit. Yes, we do hedge that. Yeah, Nick, we do hedge that. We go out and buy the shares that do cover the stock grants that we do.

Got it. Okay, so that's why we don't see the variability there. And then there's also a performance fee, I think, that was called out in the quarter. Can you just give us a bit of color on which strategy that came from?

Yeah, so that came from an investment that we have from one of our Australian business that we have in Monroe. They generated a performance fee this quarter. It's variable. It's sort of one time a year. So just caution, don't put that into your run rate models.

Yeah, the only other thing I'd just add on that is obviously as we continue to expand our offering away from traditional asset classes into more alternatives, the opportunity for these to become more recurring across the range of strategies we've launched does increase.

And maybe just staying in that same vein, I mean, you've got the liquid alt suite. I don't think it's a large component of your AUM today, but is there a performance fee component that you would expect to recognize in the fourth quarter from a seasonality standpoint? Like, is that something that we should expect?

Nothing at this time, no.

Okay. All right, that's it for me. I'll pass the line. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, followed by one on your telephone keypad. And the next question goes to Graham Riding of TD Securities. Graham, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I came on the call a bit late, so I apologize if you talked about this, but anything on the expense front that you would call out that helped your margins this quarter or... would you say this is a reasonable margin to build from? And I'm sort of more focused on the U.S. business, but I'll take any commentary overall.

So specifically as it relates to the U.S. business, I think it's a reasonable quarter for comparison. There's nothing kind of unusual that drove lower expenses that you'd have to make adjustments to.

Okay. On your the Canadian wealth side with onboarding the remaining Canadian wealth assets into your custody business. What's the sort of timing that you're expecting there? And will we see a noticeable EBITDA or margin impact in your Canadian wealth business when that plays out?

Yeah. So first on, on timing and then Amit, you can cover the, margin piece. We anticipate onboarding the remainder of our own wealth assets sometime within the next 12 months, probably in the next 10 months. So we're targeting conversion date kind of late in the third quarter, early in the fourth quarter for the remainder.

And Graham, on the margin expansion, once we do get those custody assets onto the platform, as Kurt said, we do expect a slight margin expansion, not as much as we saw on the line conversion. But we do expect to see margin expansion once the Asante assets come onto the platform. And then we also have, obviously, other third parties that we can bring on as well.

OK, understood. And my last question would just be, organic growth from flows at Coriant. Any update there? And are you seeing clients get more constructive and start to move away from cash and into investing here?

Yeah, I'd say

Organic growth at Cori remains consistently strong. In terms of rebalancing and repositioning portfolios, we're starting to see some of that across the board as well as people repositioning into equity markets, driving more interest in alternative strategies and things like that. So becoming a little more opportunistic.

Okay. And you used to give us an organic sort of flows rate. Is that something that we will get in the future or are

are you moving away from yes we do we've just done it episodically so um on the wealth side we're um but yes it is something we will uh we will continue to provide uh periodic guidance on or updates on okay that's it for me thank you thanks thank you and the final question goes to tom mckinnon of bmo capital tom please go ahead

Yeah, thanks very much. Question really with respect as you move towards a potential IPO of Corient here, and then you have sort of a Corient IPO, you have this Canadian business. At the end of the day, where do you think the Australian business lands? I mean, it's a long way away and it's not that huge. So any thoughts with respect to what that adds and Is there any opportunity? How are you thinking about that business going forward? Thanks.

Yeah, so as it relates to our Australian business, it's a business we've had for a number of years now. As you mentioned, it's very small in scale and a very small contributor to our $500-plus billion asset base. The way we think about Without kind of addressing that specifically, the way we think about deployment of capital and effectively growing our businesses is we're looking for local scale. So we're huge proponents of building scale in local markets. So you saw when we entered the U.S., it wasn't entry into the U.S. to dip our toe in the water. We wanted to really build a critical scale in that market. We've done that. We see phenomenal growth. opportunities to continue to grow. We also have obviously tremendous scale in Canadian asset management, and our Canadian wealth business in the last few years has more than doubled in assets as well. So when we think about the deployment of our capital across our business segments, the priorities would certainly be the Canadian and U.S. businesses as the primary means of investment for us.

So if you're not investing in it, is it sufficient enough to to grow, um, is it core?

I mean, it would be, it depends on how you define core non-core be non-core is because it's a fraction of the size of our, of our, of our business, right? We're talking approximately 1%, a little more than 1% of our, of our total asset base. So in that sense, um, it would be non-core, but it is a self-sufficient business that contributes, contributes to our earnings. My point was just as we think about the next new dollar of capital to deploy, we see greater opportunities to generate a return, continuing to add scale into the U.S. and Canadian business lines.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. We have no further questions. I'll hand the call back over to Kurt for any closing comments.

I just wanted to thank everyone for participating, and we look forward to the call next quarter.

Thank you. This now concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.