Insignia Financial Ltd

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Andrew Ellick. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Insignia Financial's first half of our results, the six-month sentence, 31 December 2024. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet today and pay our respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. Presenting today's results are Scott Hartley, Insignia Financial CEO, and David Chalmers, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now hand you over to Scott. Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew, and welcome, and thank you all for joining us today. My reflection is almost one year into the role. We had a long list of things we had to get done, and I'm really pleased with our progress. Some of the key things that we had to get done was was to migrate our MLC RAP platform to expand, Rhombus separation, the organisational design and the appointment of a refreshed executive team, the IT separation from NAB, we launched our 2030 vision and strategy, and we announced plans to partner with SS&C to simplify and transform our Master Trust business. Throughout today's presentation, We'll share with you a number of milestones we've achieved in the first half of financial year 25 and that are critical to our ongoing plans to simplify our business while continuing to lay the foundations for long-term sustainable growth. So the reason we're all here today, our half-year results, as you can see from the chart on the left, we have four individual complementary lives of business with insignia that together generate value for customers and shareholders. In the first half of 2025, these businesses delivered $124 million of underlying profit after tax, which was an increase of 30% on the same period last year, driven by market growth and a continued reduction in operating expenses. Pleasingly, OpEx reduced by $36 million, or 7% on the prior period, as we see the benefits of our cost optimisation program. The growth in revenue combined with the cost reductions have resulted in a reduction in our cost of income ratio of six percentage points to 68%, and notably this is back to IWS cost to income ratio prior to its acquisition of MLC. In fact, you'll see throughout today's presentation we've actually achieved a growth optimization target that we announced in 2023 early, which has allowed us to accelerate our reinvestment plans for our 2030 strategy and bring forward some of this investment into the second half of 2025. As I mentioned, we had a long list of things that we said we were going to achieve as part of our FY24-26 strategy, and pleasingly, we did them. In addition, we've also unveiled our strategy to become Australia's leading and most efficient wealth management company by 2030, embedded a new operating structure in the executive team, confirmed our strategy to simplify and transform a master trust business, and successfully separated from that. We also remain on track to achieve our full year cost guidance through our cost optimisation program, We continue to enhance the functionality and advisory experience of our WRAP MLC Xpand platform and uplift our risk and governance capability, including the appointment of Danielle Press as chair and non-executive director of Insignia Financial's trustee boards late last calendar year. And invest in MLC as our go-forward consumer brand with plans to be back in market in the first half of FY26 but with some initial activity planned for the second half of this financial year. All this work has been about continuing to simplify our business, reducing our costs, and setting ourselves up for long-term sustainable growth. But wait, there's more. Pleasingly, we've also had significant additional achievements. We've embedded our partnership with Rhombus Advisory following separation, and we continue to experience the strong net flows from that business. In fact, flows from Rhombus are up 75% year on year. We finalised our Australian Equity Trustees transaction with the ending of the transaction service agreements. We implemented pricing changes across parts of our Master Trust book to help improve retention. We improved RAP flows following from the MLC RAP to expand migration. We achieved $1.1 billion of net flows into retail multi-set products. We launched the MLC Reinsurance Fund Investment Fund with new institutional mandates. We had 25 of our ShedForce advisors recognized in Barron's Top 150. more than any other financial planning firm, and we implemented a single unifying enterprise agreement across our organisation. All these achievements in the first half of FY25 have helped lay the foundations for our 2030 strategy. Looking at flows now, in Master Trust we continue to see challenges. However, through our Master Key reprice and with imminent improvements in member engagement, we've taken steps to improve flows and retention. These changes will take time to impact on flows, but they will indeed impact on flows. In WRAP, we've seen stable flows momentum in MLC expand platform with consistent flows over one billion for half in the last three halves. We've also seen the worst of the disruption from the MLC WRAP to expand migration. In asset management, good performance in asset management in the first half of financial year 25. This has driven ongoing strength in MLC's contemporary managed account solution and retail multi-asset offerings and strong net flows in the domestic institutional fixed income capability. We continue to consistently deliver strong investment performance for our customers. Pleasingly, our flagship MySuper product, MLC MySuper Growth, was top quartile over three and five years. Four of our multi-asset offerings were awarded best of the best honors in the 2025 Money Magazine Awards, and the overwhelming majority of our MLC multi-asset fund has outperformed the benchmarks, as you can see from the sea of green on the table on the right. We also continue to innovate, grow, and look for opportunities to further commercialize, which in the first half of FY25 saw us launch our new MLC Reinsurance Investment Fund, which already has more than $200 million invested by external institutional clients. This is the first time we've packaged our in-house alternatives capability for the external market. We've grown our SMA capability with now $3 billion in MLC's multi-asset proposition. In the advice business, Bridges and Chadford, we've seen a growth in net revenue, revenue per advisor, revenue per client, driven by improved advisor efficiency and a focus on higher value clients. It's worth noting this is the first period since we cleared away other advice businesses to just focus on Shadfalls and Bridges. There's still work to do, as we spoke about at our strategy presentation late last year, and we have a plan to further improve efficiency and grow advisors and the clients they serve. This plan includes lifting advisor efficiency and capability, accelerating new client growth, growing the brands of these two businesses, and continuing to invest in and developing our advisors. I'll now hand over to our CFO, David Chalmers, to go through the full financial results with you.