Insignia Financial Ltd

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Insignia Financial's full year 2024 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, General Manager of Markets, Andrew Elich. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Assignia Financial's FY24 results announcement for the 12-month end of 30 June 2024. My name is Andrew Elich, General Manager of Capital Markets. I'd like to begin this morning by acknowledging the traditional custodians on the lands on which we meet. In the spirit of reconciliation, Insignia Financial acknowledges the traditional custodians of the country through Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. Presenting today's results are Scott Hartley, Chief Executive Officer and David Chalmers, Chief Financial Officer. There will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. I'll now hand over to Scott to begin. Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to present our four-year results for FY24, which saw a strong growth in UNPAC, up 13.6%, driven by a net reduction in operating costs of 24 million as we pursue our strategy to simplify our business and reduce costs. Just unpacking the headline a little, net revenue was up slightly by around 1% driven by markets not sending a small decline in revenue margins and the impact of divestments. Our cost to income ratio improved from 75% to under 73%. Whilst this is still too high, we do have a strategy underway to reduce costs and we'll today be announcing an acceleration and increase of our cost out target. Net profit after tax was of course adversely affected by previously announced transformation costs and provisions related to remediation of legacy issues acquired largely with the acquisition of ANZ Wealth. As you all have noted, we did not pay a final dividend this year. The IFL Board acknowledges that the dividend cause will be disappointing for some of our but it is prudent for us to strengthen their balance sheet to enhance strategic and capital flexibility. In terms of deliverables this year, when I joined in March, it was important for the business to continue delivering its FY24-26 strategic initiatives that are critical to our future. I'm pleased to report the successful completion of several of these key strategic initiatives. Firstly, optimisations. We exceeded our FY24 target cost optimisation, delivering optimisation benefits of $71 million, resulting in a net cost reduction of $24 million. Secondly, in simplification, we successfully completed the largest single RAP migration in the Australian platform industry, and we migrated over $38 billion from MLC RAP to the Expand platform. We have already started to see the benefits of this migration in the scale efficiencies it has delivered. In terms of our portfolio, we have successfully completed a multi-year restructured device from loss-making to EBITDA positive. This position will be further enhanced in our FY25 results given the separation of our licensee business, Robins Advisory. Separation of Robins Advisory has created a unique and innovative partnership model. Our relationship with Rhombus Advisory and Godfrey Pembroke has been strengthened by our strong support in their successful separations to advisor-owned and led businesses, which I strongly believe is the right model for furthering the professionalism of the advice industry. Insignia had a significant opportunity not only to retain but grow platform funds under administration within these two advisory businesses, in addition to growing from the broader market. I personally remain close to both CEOs and their boards and have joined the Rhombus board given we retain 37% to remain connected and supportive of the success of Rhombus Advisory business moving forward. With the completion of our advisory structure, including these separations, we will focus on building stronger relationships with Golfie Pembroke and Rhombus Advisory and growing the profitability of our wholly owned and operated advice businesses, Shatterport and Bridges. Our other 24-26 strategic priorities remain on track for completion this financial year ahead of schedule, creating space for our 2030 vision and strategy that will be presented later this year. In addition to 24-26 initiatives already announced, we will also be accelerating cost optimisation We are extending our cost optimisation program, and David will talk through the increase to the cost reduction target, which we aim to achieve ahead of schedule. In July, I announced my new executive team. These experienced executives bring a deep industry experience and strong track record in growing your businesses, and in leveraging technology to transform customer experience and business models. We are now in the process of cascading and embedding the new operating structure to further drive accountability and efficiency. Also, simplifying our Master Trust platforms is critical as it represents half of our revenue and costs. We have commenced review of the Master Trust target end state and will communicate the outcome of this review later in the year. This review will not slow the pace of Master Trust simplification as we have to complete successful separation from that before we can simplify and transform. In terms of flows, platform flows, during the year we saw successful migration of MLC-RAP to expand, as I mentioned. Ahead of this migration, we saw disruption in our flows to MLC-RAP as some advisors lost patience with the delayed migration. While it's pleasing to see the improved flow since migration, we remain cautious in the medium-term trajectory of advice flows due to the expected one-off loss of a small Superfund admin agreement. FUA related to an historic divestment. Workplace flows remained resilient during the year, delivering positive net flows. While we didn't win any new corporate mandates, we did see consistent inflows from the existing book, pointing to sustained organic growth. In terms of asset management, the large outflows from direct capability were almost entirely driven by institutional investors rebalancing fixed income and global equities. But it's pleasing to see strong performance of our default MySuper options. Three of our MySuper default options achieved top 10 performance over one year in the Super Rating SR50 MySuper survey. And Sydney's largest MySuper option, the MLC MySuper Growth, has delivered performance in the top quartile over one, three and five years. Also important to note, the recent placement of $1.2 billion of MLC private equity via new US secondary. Points to the attractiveness of MLC's alternative asset management capabilities to the institutional market. In terms of advisors, this slide talks purely to Chad Folsom Bridges. We have seen strong year-on-year growth across advisor and client metrics, including an increase in revenue per advisor due to strong new client growth and higher fee income. This growth has occurred despite prioritising advisor numbers and rationalising unprofitable clients predominantly in the bridges business. I'd now like to hand over to David who will take us through the detail of the financial results. Thanks Scott and good morning to everyone on this morning's call.