IGM Financial Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the IGM Financial Third Quarter 2024 Analyst Call and Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, You may signal an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kyle Martin, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Betsy, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. Joining me on the call today, we have James O'Sullivan, President and CEO of IGM Financial, Damon Murchison, President and CEO of IG Wealth Management, Luke Gould, President and CEO of McKinsey Investments, and Keith Potter, Executive Vice President and CFO of IGIM Financial. Before we get started, I would like to draw your attention to our cautions concerning forward-looking statements on slide three of the presentation. Slides four and five summarize the non-IFRS financial measures and other financial measures used in this material. And on slide six, we provide a list of documents that are available on our website related to our third quarter results.

I'll now turn it over to James. Thank you, Kyle, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide nine, we continue to execute on our growth strategy across IGM, and we demonstrated great progress during the third quarter. Adjusted earnings per share for the quarter were $1.03, up 12% year over year, and our second best adjusted Q3 EPS on record. Total client assets, including our proportionate share of strategic investments, increased 23% year-over-year to $462 billion at the end of September, with each of the companies achieving all-time record high asset levels. Wealth managers IG Wealth, Wealthsimple, and Rockefeller continue to execute on their strategies to deliver their client value promise acquiring new client relationships and driving scale through asset expansion. Specifically on IG Wealth, I am particularly pleased with the growing evidence that they have successfully pivoted to delivering financial planning and investment management services to high net worth Canadians. Many years of investment are now clearly bearing fruit. Asset managers McKinsey, China AMC, and Norclis continue to drive strong asset growth, leveraging their competitive advantages to deliver relevant investment solutions to retail and institutional clients in Canada and across the globe. Damon and Luke will speak on these points in a moment, while Keith will also speak to how Wealthsimple's ongoing success drove an increase in the fair value of our ownership position in the company. We continue to invest to drive further growth while returning $160 million of capital to our shareholders through our attractive dividend and our share buyback program, which continues to be active. Turning to the current operating environment for our businesses, starting with recent financial market conditions on slide 10, both equity and fixed income markets continued to reflect and support improvements in investor sentiment. Our clients achieved investment returns of over 5% during the quarter. On an LTM basis, our clients experienced an average return of over 20%. This is an important point that emphasizes the value of long-term client relationships centered around financial planning and advice, especially considering the uncertainty that clients faced over that period. Continuing on slide 11, the operating environment in Canada continued to improve during the quarter with positive long-term mutual fund net sales overall. With improving investor sentiment, lower inflation, and moderating interest rates, the macro industry backdrop is likely on the cusp of becoming a tailwind for our Canadian retail-focused businesses after what has been a challenging two-year period. We continue to expect gradual improvement to persist over the coming quarters, provided financial markets remain steady and interest rate cuts continue to alleviate some of the pressure felt by Canadian households over the past two years. On slide 12, you'll see how our year-over-year earnings growth was driven by both the wealth management and asset management segments of 10% and 16% respectively. I want to pause on slide 13 to emphasize the strong double-digit plus asset growth across each of our businesses, which together drove the 23% increase at the consolidated IGM level. Each of our wealth and asset management businesses are executing well and driving growth within their unique industry context, and the horizontal connectivity across these businesses continues to unlock new learnings and opportunities to add value for our clients and other stakeholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to Damon, who will speak to the performance in our Wealth Management segment. Damon.

Thank you, James, and good morning, everyone. Turn to slide 15 in Wealth Management's third quarter highlights, including IG Wealth, Rockefeller, and Wealthsimple. During the quarter, we saw record-high ending AUM&A, as well as third quarter records for total, new clients, and existing client growth inflows. The record existing client inflows are important. We have proven our ability to acquire new clients through various market conditions. This quarter, we also demonstrated our investments are supporting our ability to expand and share a wallet with our existing clients. This is an outcome that we're focused on and expect to continue going forward. Focusing in on the numbers, IG Wealth ended the quarter with AU of $136.4 billion, up a solid 19% year-over-year, and up 5.2% during the third quarter driven by financial markets. Within that figure, million-dollar-plus clients now represent $58.3 billion, or 43% of our AUM&A, up 43% from a year ago. Growth inflows during the quarter were $3.4 billion, with gross sales into IGM product at $3.3 billion. Net inflows from the quarter were $330 million and were $144 million during October. Net sales into IGM product were $313 million for the quarter and $177 million during October. It's now three of the last four months where net sales have exceeded net inflows. As we spoke to all interest rates and cash balances arriving, we knew this point would come as our advisors work with their clients. We're confident that we will see clients continue to actively dollar average costs back into the markets, driving net sales. Total growth inflows from newly acquired clients were a billion dollars, with the massive and high net worth segments representing almost three quarters of these inflows. We continue to see strength in our insurance business, and positive progress within our mortgage business. And once again, this year, we ranked as leaders amongst our peers in the investment executive dealer report card. Both Rockefeller and Wealthsimple had very strong quarters, and I'll speak to both in the coming slides. Turn to slide 16. You can see IG's Q3 flows. As you can see on the left, both October and Q3 represented our best gross inflows on record, while on the right-hand side, you can see a continuation of positive momentum in both our net inflows and IGM product net sales. As clients' dollar average costs back into the market, we are now seeing decreases in cash, GICs, and high fees. This quarter proves that we have and continue to make the right investments to allow our advisors to work with their clients to build, quantify, preserve, and distribute wealth as we move towards a more positive operating environment. Turn to slide 17. Two brief comments here. The top left, you will see an increase of approximately 11% in gross inflows, which is complemented by year-over-year decrease in our gross outflows rate the first decrease since Q1-22. In the middle of the top, you can see the decrease in cash, GICs, and high in the balance. Turning to slide 18, as mentioned, the $1 billion of gross inflows from newly acquired clients during the third quarter represented our best third quarter for new client acquisition in our history. We continue to execute well on growing our AUM&A within our target market. We fully expect to see further progress as Canadians' need for financial planning advice continues to rise. Turn to slide 19, an illustration of our progress within our targeted client segments. In 2018, we directed our focus to massive fluid and high net worth clients, focusing our investments, partnerships, and business processes to support these two important segments. Through new clients and expanding our share of wallet with existing clients, both of these segments now represent AUM&A, which is well above $50 billion. The massive fluid and high net worth clients now represent 83% of our AUM&A, up from 69% at the end of 2018. Correspondingly, these two important segments now represent 37% of our total clients, up from 23% over the same period. We expect to see a continuation of this growth as we build our business to align with the industry's wealth drivers. Turn to slide 20. We've introduced a new slide here which focuses on our mortgage and insurance business. While there are no new disclosures on this slide, it's important to surface these metrics as we show the important progress that we're making in both businesses, businesses that complement the needs of our target segments and support our expansion for share of wallet. We'll continue to provide updates for these businesses on a quarterly basis. Moving to slide 21, IG Wealth ranked extremely well in the Investment Executive 2024 Dealer Report Card, including a net promoter score that continues to place us among the top half when compared to the full-service brokerage arms of the Big Five banks. While overall we continue to rank above average versus our peers, this slide also illustrates the categories where IG ranked in the number one position. These are meaningful as these categories represent where we have invested to build capabilities to elevate our advisor and client experience against the massive and high network segments. During slide 22, some updates on Rockefeller's progress. Client assets are up 33% year-over-year and 6% during the quarter driven by strong inorganic and organic growth. Over the last 12 months, organic growth has driven $6.8 billion in client assets. Rockefeller also continues to add to their private advisor network, with 52 new advisors being added over the last 12 months. Turn to slide 23 and Wealthsimple. There was another record-setting quarter of AUA growth at Wealthsimple. Wealthsimple's AUA increased by $8.5 billion during that quarter, ending with over $52 billion in assets, up 20% sequentially, and 109% on a year-over-year basis. Client count also expanded by 16% year-over-year to 2.6 million Canadians. With that, I'll turn it over to Luke Gould.

Great. Thank you, Damon. Good morning, everyone. Turning to page 25, you'll see a few highlights for McKinsey and asset management for the quarter. Record high AUM of $212 billion is up 13.8% in the last year, and 5% in the quarter driven by continuing strong client returns. We're pleased to see improving investor confidence in the quarter with meaningful year-over-year improvement in gross and net sales. Net redemptions of $296 million in the quarter compared to $700 million last year, and we saw similar improvements in October and positive net sales of $52 million in the month. We received the results of the 2024 Advisor Perception Study in September, and we're proud of the results. Our overall score improved, and we saw improvements across many dimensions. We remain number two in advisor sales penetration, the percentage of advisors actively selling our products, and we are number two across all three advisor types, brokers, planners, and insurers. We also maintain our number two rank on brand. Our overall score remains number two relative to large players, and out of the 22 rated firms, we ranked number four this year, down from third last year as a result of a smaller firm newly included in the study. In the first section, we had a busy launch cycle this period, focused on active equity ETFs and quant. We launched four active equity ETFs in the period, in places where we have strong capabilities in relevant spaces. This brings our total of year-to-date active ETF launches to eight, and this complements our successful active fixed income ETF offerings, which we introduced in 2016 to 2018. We also launched three mandates advised by our global quant equity boutique in the period, And we've launched nine year-to-date for this boutique as we trailblaze quant investing in retail with our very strong Boston-based quant team. In the bottom left, you can see we established a partnership with CGI during the period on back office processing to ensure an industry-leading client experience. Through this expanded partnership with CGI, we will automate and improve our platform to ensure a leading client experience for the thousands of advisors and over one million retail clients who rely on our plan administration and processing capabilities. This partnership builds on our proven track record of partnering to leverage the scale and expertise of global leaders, and we're proud to have partnered with CGI, a Canadian firm with such strong capabilities and similar values to our own as an employer. During the quarter, we continue to see strong net sales at China MC, where long-term investment fund AUM is up 46% in the year and 23% in the quarter. Noteworthy in the quarter, obviously, with government stimulus focused on domestic equity markets, which led to stolen investment returns at the end of the quarter, with equity markets up 25% in the last week of quarter and about 15% during the full quarter. Also noteworthy was continued market share gains at China MC, driven by their 96 billion yuan, or around $18 billion in net flows this quarter. And in the bottom right, you can see Northleaf continues its trend of averaging around 1 billion in fundraising each quarter. And this quarter, they raised $1.5 billion, and nearly five billion over the last year, diversified across their private equity, private credit, and infrastructure offerings. Turning to page 26, you can see the trended history of McKinsey's net flows. As mentioned, we started to see year-over-year growth sales improvements, with a 20% improvement in Q3 and a 30% improvement in October. This has been accompanied by a peak in redemption rates, and we've seen net sales starting to improve in the context of an improving industry environment. While we've seen While we have year-over-year net sales declines within a few of our larger boutiques, with softer near-term investor performance, which I'll review, we are seeing very good sales momentum in many of our other offerings that have very compelling performance within very large categories. Turning to page 27, just a few quick remarks. In the top right, you can see that overall Morningstar ratings at September 30th by share of assets remains relatively consistent with June 30th. In the table in the bottom left, You can see we have seen improvements in both retail and institutional investment fund net sales. I want to call it institutional, where institutional investment funds have been quite strong with improvements through our partnerships with Pramerica, Laurentian, and Wealthsimple. And while retail started to improve, it remains in net redemptions and slightly behind the industry net sales rate, as we referenced in the last slide. Turning to page 28, you can see our performance in net sales for our retail mutual funds and ETFs by boutique. As we spoke to last quarter, we are seeing some short-term relative underperformance within our blue water and green shift boutiques. Though I will reiterate, gross sales remains resilient and these boutiques continue to manage in line with their discipline approaches and continue to have very strong long-term track records. Across other boutiques, I'd highlight the growing net sales within the global quant equity and the global equity and income boutiques where we have very compelling performance within very large product categories. I'd also highlight in the top right the strong performance of our Putnam-advised U.S. all-cap growth mandate, which is included in this column and is a very strong five-star fund. Turning to page 29, you can see the regular view of the Chinese investment fund industry. On the left-hand side at the bottom, you can see that the third quarter saw slight net redemptions overall driven by money market funds, and this was partially offset by long-term fund net sales at 59 billion yuan. Industry long-term fund AUM grew by 6% during the quarter, and it's up 18% year over year. And I'd highlight, while domestic equity markets generally increased by 15% in the quarter, driven by the government stimulus, over 55% of industry long-term fund assets are actually fixed income. And so that muted part of the increase that you'd expect from the stock market increases. On the right, you can see China MC's continued strong market position, ranked number two in both long-term funds and overall investment funds. with very good increases in market share in the quarter and in the last year. Turning to page 30, you can see continued growth in China MC's AUM with investment fund assets of 11% in the quarter and 34% year-over-year. Total investment fund net flows in the quarter were 30 billion won, and as mentioned earlier, long-term fund net flows were 96 billion won or 18 billion Canadian dollars. As reviewed at Investor Day by our CEO, Yimei Li, China AMC is the market leader in ETFs in the Chinese domestic industry, and strong close to ETFs in the period was the key contributor to these strong net sales. And on page 31, you can see another quarter of continued strong growth at Northleaf with $1.5 billion in new commitments in the quarter and $4.8 billion over the last 12 months. The fundraising during the quarter was well diversified across Canadian and international investors and spread fairly equally across private credit, private equity, and infrastructure investments. I'll now turn the call over to Keith Potter. Thank you, Luke, and good morning, everyone. On slide 33, you can see key highlights for Q3. As James commented, adjusted EPS was $1.03, excluding other items at Lifeco. Adjusted earnings are up 12% year-over-year, our second-highest third quarter on record. We returned $160 million to shareholders in the quarter through the quarterly dividend and continue to be active with our NCIB program, repurchasing $27 million in shares. But the continued exceptional performance of Wealthsimple, which Damon spoke to already, we have marked up the fair value of our investment by 46% to $1.2 billion. I'll speak more to this on a later slide. Turning to slide 34, you can see our AUM&A and flows coming off a strong first half for market returns and asset growth. Q3 got off to a rocky start but ended up almost 5% with average assets increased And on a trailing 12 month basis, average AUM&A is up approximately 7%. Turning to slide 35, we have our consolidated earnings up 12% year over year and then 11% sequentially. On point two, as guided last quarter, operations and support and business development expenses were up 5.1%. And on a year to date basis, expenses are up 3.5%. And we continue to guide to 4% growth for the full year over 2023. We look forward to providing our 2025 expense guidance on the February call. On slide 36, we present the key profitability drivers for IG Wealth. Highlight a couple of points here. On the left, you can see average AUM&A was up 3.7% over last quarter. And on the right, the advisory fee rate is in line with our guidance and reflects the quarterly increase in market returns as clients moved up wealth bands. This includes our continued success with the acquisition of mass affluent and high network clients and strong flows from existing clients that Damon spoke to. On slide 37, IG overall earnings were $125.5 million in Q3, up 10.8% year-over-year and 12.3% sequentially. And on point one, advisory and product and program fees were up year-over-year and relative to last quarter, driven by AUM&A growth. On point two, other financial planning revenues reflect continued strong performance in the insurance business that are impacted by fair value adjustments in the mortgage business. During the quarter, the downward movement of swap rates drove a negative fair value adjustment of approximately $4 million from mortgages pending sale that did not qualify for hedge accounting, but were effective economically. The insurance business had another quarter of growth relative to Q3, 2023, and it was in line with our expectations following very strong growth in the first half of the year. And as a reminder, other product commissions will move in a similar direction as revenue, and you can see in the table under point two that this is 64% of revenue this quarter. Moving to slide 38, we have McKenzie's AUM by client and product type, as well as net revenue rates. On the left, you can see average AUM is up 2.8%, And on the right, all rates remain relatively unchanged versus last quarter. Turning to slide 39, you can see McKinsey's earnings of $59.4 million is up 5.1% year-over-year and 6.3% sequentially. With higher AUM, net asset management fees are up year-over-year and relative to Q2. And higher net investment income reflects seed capital returns from positive market growth in the quarter. Slide 40 has Chinese sea results. First, on the left, AUM increased 9.2% versus last quarter, and growth came from very strong market returns in the last few days of September. And given the timing of the market rally, average AUM increased by only 2% in the quarter. And on the right, you can see Chinese earnings at $32.9 million. As called out in the slide, the late quarter market rally resulted in positive fair value adjustments also some other one-time items impacting the quarter and adjusting for this, Q3 earnings would have been more in line with Q2. Slide 41 has earnings contributions from companies in each segment. A couple of comments. First, Rockefeller was close to break even this quarter and expect to see continued progress toward positive earnings. And north of the earnings of $2.7 million are up from 2023 and also reflect continued investment in the business. Slide 42 provides a summary view of earnings and ownership and value of our strategic investments by segment. On Wealthsimple, we have revised the fair value upward based on public peer evaluations and revisions to revenue expectations. And in addition, as noted in our press release, our valuation of Wealthsimple is also informed by a secondary transaction with a third-party investor that is expected to close in the fourth quarter. From an IGM valuation perspective, our strategic investments now represent approximately 5.9 billion in value. And as a reminder, Wealthsimple is fair value through OCI and Rockefeller currently does not contribute to earnings, but both have significant value. Slide 43 highlights execution against our capital allocation priorities. We continue to execute on our share repurchases during the quarter while maintaining financial flexibility with leverage remaining at 1.6 times and unallocated capital increasing to approximately $450 million during the quarter. That concludes my remarks, and I'll turn it over for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. Thank you for your patience. The first question today comes from Tom McKinnon with BMO. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Question with respect to if you can give us any indication as to what you're thinking about for the expense guide for 2025. It might be a little bit premature, but is the 4% that you had sort of guided for 2024? Maybe you can give us some color as to whether that should apply for 2025 as well. how that might be related to if we had better markets or worse markets, how that might impact what you'd be thinking about for the expense guide for 2025. Thanks.

Great comments, Keith here. Yeah, I know we're currently working through the 2025 plan and we'll share more details in February, but we have been pretty consistent, you know, commenting that in the next couple of years, we do expect to invest in the business as we have this year. And I think as you're thinking about 2024 and modeling 2024 expense guidance, like you mentioned, 4%, we're going to be in a reasonable range to that. So that would be a good assumption as you think through 2025. To the extent that we continue to have market rally or we continue with that perspective, and as we've demonstrated in the past with extreme volatility in the marketplace, we make decisions that circumstances, but we are committed to growing and strengthening our businesses.

Where do you see the most investments needed in the business?

Yeah, I think there's a few areas. Technology continues to be an area of investment. Luke commented on our back office expansion with CGI. We've commented on middle office in the past, so you're going to continue to see investments there. At IG Wealth Management, it would be similar for advisor client platforms. We have a leading technology platform for advisors today, and we'll continue with that. And then there's also commitment to build out our mortgage banking and insurance platforms.

And has those investments kind of picked up more so than this 4% that you would have guided to for 2024? Yeah.

Tom, we're achieving what we want to achieve in terms of investments in these parts of our business within that guidance that we provided in 2024. It's just finding efficiencies along the way and reinvesting those to achieve these investments in these areas.

Understood. Thanks for the color.

You bet.

The next question comes from Graham Riding with TV Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning. What can you share with the increase in value for the Wealthsimple stake? What can you share about this secondary transaction, if anything? I know it closes next quarter, but is there any detail that you can provide there? And then secondly, of the three factors that you cited, peer multiples, then performance of the business, and then this third-party transaction, which one's or which one would have had the biggest impact on the fair value increase?

Hi, Graeme, it's Keith again here. In terms of the fair value increase, maybe the last point, the first thing we look to is an identifiable transaction. It is a meaningful third-party transaction, and you can think about the value that we're placing on Wealthsimple being right on top of that particular transaction. Having said that, we do look at the performance of the company, revenue expectations, as well as just what's happening in the industry in terms of market multiples, and it's all aligned. But really, the value that we put on Wealthsimple is pretty much in line with the third-party transaction.

Okay, that's helpful. You did, at IG Wealth, you flagged at, I think, 43% of the assets there are being held by households with greater than 1 million in sort of household assets. Is there much change to that sort of overall client mix or AUA mix year over year? I know there's been a big change since 2018, but what about more on the near term? Has there been much progress on that front?

Yeah, Graham, it's Damon here. So we've been making steady progress over the last four years on this. And Quite frankly, it's just accelerating. So when you take a look at our success in both massive foot and high net worth, our advisors are doing a great job at, first of all, identifying them, second of all, about sharing what we do as an organization and our value proposition and then bringing them in-house. We're also doing a very good job at recruiting advisors. It's something that we don't talk a lot about, but this is a destination of choice. for a lot of advisors that are looking to focus on true financial planning for their costs. So I would say to you over the last 12 months, we've made significant progress.

Okay. So that 43% of assets are in households greater than a million. That's likely higher than what it was last year.

It is definitely higher than it was last year.

And then great. And then my next question would just be for, for Luke. It looks like your ETF is, sales are solid. Uh, your mutual fund sales, uh, long-term fund, they tend to be, they seem to be lagging in the industry, uh, long-term fund sales trend. And maybe just what needs to happen in your view to, to get that, uh, those McKenzie mutual fund flows to sort of catch up. Is it, is it heavily dependent on the performance here at Blue Water and Green Chip, Green Chip, or is it more than that?

Yeah, thanks, Graham. Yeah, on page 28, you can see the boutiques and I remind, we have this boutique approach and, uh, Again, we believe it inhibits a whole bunch of things like group think, which are very good and gives us a diversified roster to have something relevant and compelling for all client needs and in all market environments. Right now, you hit the nail on the head. You've got some softness in blue water and in green ship in terms of flows, and that's what we need is for the places we have strength in places with compelling performance in relevant categories to overtake it, and we're starting to see that happen. So we've got both of those tailwinds, one being an improving industry environment, combined with a bunch of stuff on the shelf that has some real compelling performance in really relevant categories. So we think we are on the right track, but those are the two things it's going to take right now.

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

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and 1 to join the question queue. The next question comes from Jamie Goyne with NBF. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, just wanted to dig in a little bit more on that McKenzie question again. You know, obviously, like, number two brand in Canada, number two sales penetration. Like, you know, we've heard about the blue water and green chip, I think, for a few quarters now. But, like, where is the gap here? Like, why is it lagging? you know, so significantly over the last few quarters here, basically since 2024 relative to the industry?

Good question, Jimmy. So right now we've got about 6% of our assets in five-star funds. And when you look at flows right now in this quarter and the last one, those have been extremely concentrated within very few products in the industry. Now, right now we are very fortunate with our global coin equity team, global equity and income team, the Putnam Advised Mandates, we have some very strong performance in these categories and we're pushing. But right now, if you wanted one single lead tagline, is we don't have as many five-star funds as we typically do. And there has been a lot of concentration and a very few key mandates in the industry.

Okay, and is there anything from like, let's say like a distribution channel where you're seeing that miss the rest of the industry?

Yeah, not at all. We feel we're well set up in terms of distribution. We like where we're at. I'd also highlight if you look at kind of our peers' net sales rates and how they travel, with our boutique approach, and we don't take it for granted, we've got the most resilient net sales in the industry. And so right now we're lagging by a little bit the industry rate. But for most players in the industry, it's kind of feast or famine in relation to us. So we've got a very resilient net sales. We're always very close to the industry rate in good times and bad times. And right now, we are focused on getting back above the industry net sales rate, and we are pushing on the things that are most compelling in this environment.

Yeah, so just on what you said there, like the feast or famine, could you just give us a little bit more color in terms of who's feasting and who's starving out there, assuming McKenzie's kind of in the middle?

Yeah, I'd say we're very close to the industry. Right now, Fidelity's doing very well. They're the industry leader, and they've got Very strong performance in a lot of mandates, a lot of five-star funds. And so they've captured a lot of the flows in the last period, if you look. PIMCO is another fund company that's obviously done quite well. And Dynamics had success in their premium yield offering. So we're focused on what we do well. We've got a very broad offering. And, yeah, there's been some very concentrated flows in the industry the last two quarters.

Okay, understood. Then a quick one for the IG Wealth. Net promoter score looks pretty good relative to the big six banks. Has that been consistent? Has that improved over the last few years? Can you give us a bit more of a timeline on how that net promoter score has progressed?

Yeah, Jamie. I believe over the last few years we've seen very strong net promoter scores. relative to what the banks have been producing on the full-service brokerage side. So if you take a look at it, I would say in 2022, we started to make a move. 2023 was quite strong, and in 2024, it's also quite strong. So I'd start with 2022. It's a build. It follows kind of what we've been doing, and the build of our platform, the build of our advice capabilities, and what we're doing at the organization.

Okay, great. And then the last one for Keith, just to refresh on the dividend payout ratio, I believe you've kind of said you want to see it get to adjusted cash earnings of 60% or below. Is that something you'll look at more on like a retroactive, so looking backwards as opposed to maybe looking out at the next year and having some more confidence in markets and the potential earnings coming off of that, cash earnings coming off? So what's your frame of mind? Is it looking backwards or will you look forwards in terms of thinking about that dividend?

Hi, Jane. It's Keith here. Yeah, we're currently at about 68% on a adjusted basis looking at LTM. That's historically how we looked at it when we said we, you know, obviously approached the board and had that conversation. But I would say we looked at it, we looked at a number of factors. We looked at, you know, the past, you know, the future, you know, running off of the current run rate. But I think when we start getting closer to 60%, we'll be looking at it from a number of different dynamics.

James, it's James. I would just add that it continues to be my view that we need more growth more than we need more yield. And so you should expect our focus to continue to be in growing EPS.

Great. Thanks, guys.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Kyle Martins for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Betsy.

And we'd just like to thank everyone once again for joining us on the call this morning and wish everyone a good weekend here. Thanks, Betsy. And with that, we'll end today's conference call.

This brings an end to today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.