Pensionbee Group (LSE:PBEE) — Full Year Results

0:00 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the PensionBee Group PLC Full Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, attendees will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted any time just using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand side of screen. Just please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. You wish to ask your question verbally, then just type a question mark and we'll unmute your microphones and bring you through. Throughout today's recorded meeting, as I say, you'll be in listen only mode up until the point when we go to the Q and A section. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'm sure the company

0:31 would be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to management team from PENSIONBEE, Remi Christophe. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for joining us today. And for those of you who are new to the PensionBee story, we exist to help our customers prepare for and enjoy a happy retirement. We operate in the enormous defined contribution pension market representing over $30,000,000,000,000 in assets. Our customer focused offering helps consumers to feel retirement confident. We enable our customers to combine their old retirement accounts into a new online account. We enable them to make contributions, to invest in line with their objectives, with money managed by the world's largest asset managers, and ultimately, to withdraw and spend their retirement savings.

1:25 Our long term ambition is to build a lifelong relationship with our customers. This approach not only delivers value to them throughout their retirement journey, but also drives predictable scalable revenue for our business and strong returns for our investors. We were pleased to conclude 2025 with £7,400,000,000, approximately $10,000,000,000, of assets under administration, £51,000,000 of annual run rate revenue, 305,000 invested customers, and a million pounds of group adjusted EBITDA. In The UK, we continued to invest in our brand, increasing our marketing budget from £9,100,000 in 2024 to 12,100,000 in 2025 and thereby reaching 305,000 total invested customers.

2:23 We recorded approximately 60% brand awareness, placing PENSIONBEE among some of the most trusted brands in consumer financial services. We invested in our AI search visibility, resulting in high visibility on AI overviews, the new interface for traditional Google search. We also invested in our technology, recording a 22% increase in productivity. This increase was delivered through new automations, the launch of our new interface, which modernizes and unifies the customer experience on web and mobile, and also our AI advancements. We refined our internal copilot, Beatrix, to serve beekeepers and used our learnings to develop BeeBot, our customer facing chat agent who will increasingly serve our customers on live chat.

3:18 Overall, we recorded strong customer satisfaction ratings, including an NPS score of 67 for 2025. Over 2026, we will continue to focus on customer growth, deploying an increased marketing budget through our data led multichannel approach. We will continue to raise the company's prominence through consumer advocacy, sports sponsorships, and commercial partnerships. We will also continue to modernize our user interface and invest in our customers' experience, encouraging them to continue preparing for and enjoying a happy retirement. We will take steps in our AI journey, increasing our productivity through more automation in our customer communication.

4:11 Turning now to The US. We were pleased to refine our strategy in partnership with State Street. We established our long term goal of national brand awareness and refined our localized approach to the market.

4:26 Our national brand awareness benefits our individual business in the $1,000,000,000,000 annual rollover market. We help our customers to consolidate old retirement accounts into one new IRA easily, giving them access to simple, high quality investments. Our investment in our brand also benefits our business line where we offer our automatic rollover IRA to employers through advisers, helping those employers to manage four zero one k plan terminations or small balance rollovers from former employees. Our superior value proposition enables employers to reduce their fiduciary risks and achieve better outcomes for their stakeholders in this $55,000,000,000 annual inflow market.

5:18 Importantly, our US business model is synergistic with customers acquired through our business line being served our individual product and being encouraged to consolidate accounts and advisers being attracted to our high quality consumer offering as a key point of differentiation for their clients. Given the importance of brand for our long term success, we made significant strides in growing our online presence on social media, reaching customers in large metropolitan areas through our billboard campaign, and growing our share of voice in the press. We recorded strong initial brand awareness of 5% and a high of 12% in our home state of New York.

6:05 We also completed a strong investment in our US technology infrastructure, developing multiple sources of inflows, including individual rollovers, transfers and contributions, as well as bulk transfers for our business line. We established a variety of accounts, including a traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, and the automatic rollover IRA. Within the individual Beehive, customers can monitor their investment performance, use our tools to plan for retirement, manage their accounts, and take distributions. This investment was delivered alongside group adjusted EBITDA profitability. We are now focused on reaching the billion dollar milestone in our US business.

6:54 We will deepen our national brand awareness, continuing to invest in marketing, and highlighting the simplicity and effectiveness of our customer experience. Over 2025, we created a sizable and robust pipeline of new business for our automatic rollover IRA, which we will continue to grow over 2026 while onboarding new clients. I would now like to hand over to Christoph Martin, our Chief Financial Officer, who will cover the financial update for the year. Thank you very much, Romy. Hello, and a warm welcome to everyone. I'm pleased to cover the financial section of the full year results. Turning to the financial overview, I would like to start with a summary of our full year performance before diving into details behind each value driver. For the full year 2025, The UK delivered strong financial performance with 27% year on year growth in our AOA to £7,400,000,000 and plus 33% year on year growth in ARR to approximately £51,000,000 UK adjusted EBITA profitability of £5,400,000 at the 12% margin compares to 7% the prior year.

8:12 At the group level, top line growth, coupled with continuous cost discipline, led to an improvement in our adjusted EBITA margin, achieving profitability of approximately GBP 1,000,000 at a 2% group EBITA margin for 2025. These continuous achievements are derived from the core value drivers of our business, which are, first, predictable and recurring revenue and second, business scalability. Furthermore, they are testament to our ability to consistently and reliably execute against our public market guidance. I would cover each of them in turn next. The first value driver is PENSIONBEE's predictable and recurring revenue, which is generated from a durable base of assets and administration, a function of the assets of existing and new customers.

9:02 In 2025, we achieved a 27% year on year ROA growth to £7,400,000,000. The vast majority of our ARA base is derived from existing customers, customers who remained with PENSIONBEE for a long period of time and continue to build up their pension savings with PENSIONBEE, resulting in value generation for decades to come.

9:26 Our average customer is in their early forties, and they build up their pension savings with PENSIONBEE, which means that cohorts on an underlying value basis, I. E, before any impact on market appreciation, are resilient over time. AOA is also derived from new customer acquired through our proven cost discipline approach to customer acquisition. Over 2025, we onboarded Zika 40,000 new invested customers onto our technology platform. And over 2025, customers joining were slightly younger than in 2024, aged approximately 39.7. The prior year, it was 40.6, in line with our marketing strategy for 2025. The younger customer cohorts acquired resulted in a slightly lower average balance of new customers in 2025 compared to the prior year.

10:20 As a result, the compounding AOA base is subsequently converted into our revenue growth owing to the resilient gross revenue margin of mid-60s. In 2025, we saw a revenue margin of 65 basis points, which enabled us to convert the 27% of year on year AOE growth into revenue growth of 28% and annual run rate revenue growth of 33%. In conclusion, thanks to our compounding AOA base and resilient revenue margin, we have generated predictable and recurring revenue, which represents PENSIONBEE's first value driver. The second value driver is PENSIONBEE's business scalability due to the controllable nature of our cost base. Our cost base has continued to decline as a proportion of revenue.

11:10 This scalability dynamics of predictable and recurring top line growth, coupled with cost discipline, led to an improvement in operating margin. On a twenty twenty five basis, the adjusted EBITA margin improved to 12%, up from 7% in 2024 for The United Kingdom. Furthermore, the operating margin pre marketing, a measure of scalability for The UK, improved to approximately

11:36 40%, up from 33% last the year prior, resulting in an inherent strong scalability and margin potential for the business. Reflecting on our long term track records, PENSIONBEE has delivered revenue growth since our IPO of a CAGR or compounded annual growth rate of almost 50% to 2025 and strong margin expansion in The UK with an adjusted EBITA margin improvement from negative 166% pre IPO to now positive 12% for 2025. Further operating margin pre marketing improved from negative 35% pre IPO to positive close to 40% for 2025 in The UK.

12:26 This underscores strong delivery against our growth and business scalability objectives.

12:34 With respect to our guidance framework for PENSIONBEE as a group, we have outlined our short-, medium- and long term targets. In the short- medium term, by year end 2029, we expect the group to be generating revenue of above GBP 100,000,000 and an adjusted EBITA margin of 20% by the year end 2029, with The UK considerably contributing to those targets. In the long term, by year end 2034, we expect the group to generate above GBP $0.02 5,000,000,000 in revenue and an adjusted EBITA margin of, take a 50% by year end 2034. Our take a GBP £33,000,000 of cash balance puts PENSIONBEE in a very strong position to further scale The UK business as well as invest in the tremendous U.

13:25 S. Market opportunity, continuing to execute on our long term strategy and delivering on our public market guidance.

13:33 I would now like to hand back to Romy for concluding remarks. Thank you very much, Christophe. It's a pleasure to be here again with everyone today, and we hope that some of the additional context, that we have provided on the 2025 results is helpful to you. We'd love to take some questions. That's great, Romy, Steve. Christophe, thank you very much indeed for updating those on today's call. I'm just going to bring your cameras back up. Thank you very much indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. I just want to we just take a few moments before we address some of the questions received. I'd just like to remind you, we're recording this presentation along with a copy of slides and the published Q and A will be available on your Investor Meet company dashboard.

14:21 Thank you to everybody. We've got a number of questions, Romee. So if I may, I'll start off with one from Paul. Thank you, Paul. 67% NPS is an excellent result. Congratulations. Could you just confirm the actual number of investors who responded to the request to score you? This is a very excellent and precise question for which I do have a precise answer, which is 7,177 responses on the NPS questionnaire. And, yes, we we are pleased with the number. We always feel that there is, however, more that we can be doing for our customers, but, of course, very happy to have it at this level and to, you know, to be to be positive on that. Great. Thank you. Question from Jonathan. Thank you, Jonathan. Do you expect UK revenue margin to increase or decrease or to be maintained at 65 basis points? And what drove the expansion to 65 basis points in full year 2025?

15:18 I'm happy to take this one. So generally speaking, on the margin, the gross revenue margin, we do guide that it will be in line with historical figures. So you can see clearly that it has been pretty much in the mid-60s since inception, so it's a very resilient margin. We do expect it to remain at those kind of level going forward. And the very slight change has to do with a mix effect across the funds. So there is some movements that results from the blend or the mix across the area as just spreading through the fund. But generally, again, going forward looking forward, we expect the revenue offering to remain with historical figures, and it has been very resilient pretty much since inception of the business.

16:06 That's great. I've got a question from James. Let me just see if I can unmute your microphone there. James, if you just press allow, we should be able to take your question verbally, you'd be so kind just to there we go. Thank you very much indeed.

16:21 James That worked okay? Yes, James. Thank you. Please do go ahead, sir. Perfect. Hi, Romy. Hi, Christophe. Congrats on another good set of results. Just one question for me. I think at the end of Q4, from memory, there was around $3,000,000 of AUA onboarded from U. S. Customers. Are you able to kind of give us any sort of steer us to what that number is, say, at the end of February so far in q one? You're going to have to wait for the q one results, I'm afraid, which will be out in April. We'd really like to focus on the 2025 results. What I can give you some commentary on is that we are exceptionally busy in both countries. In The UK, we are obviously approaching tax year end, very similar in The US, and we also see some increasing developments in our business line in The US as well where we work with employers and advisers to help them solve their needs around terminating four zero one k plans or around small balance rollovers, but you will have to wait for the exact details until the end of the actual quarter.

17:26 Yes. No worries. I thought it was worth a try anyway. Thank you very much. James, thank you very much indeed. I'll just return your microphone to mute. Thank you. Let's move on to a question from Jonathan R, if I may. How are you thinking about the split of investment between The UK and The US going forward?

17:48 Sorry. I'm happy to take this one. So the split between investment, I think was the question. And the best way to think about our two geographic segments is The UK and The US, as you as you alluded to. You can think about that The UK is actually, is, generating its own, you know, profit and and cash and is therefore fully self funded. So The UK business will, at this point, continue to scale. We expect the marketing budget to, know, continue to increase while we're keeping The UK, of course, profitable. So the profitability is something that is very firmly established, and we want to, you know, grow it and scale it as quickly as we can, but basically reinvest in the excess profit into the organization and The UK business. For on The US, on the other side, The US, we specifically, raised, think about now one and a half years ago, around 20,000,000 to fund the entirety of The US business plan, and that is, you know, solidly earmarked for scaling The US business.

19:03 So in short, The UK is self funding, so to speak, and The US, has sufficient funds to fund the business plan, to its profitability point. I hope that answers the question, but if there is a follow-up, happy to take this one. Great. Thank you very much indeed, Christophe. Turning to three questions here from, from William. Thank you very much indeed, William. Q1 twenty six is almost over. Are there any developments that we should know about in The UK or The US? I would refer to my earlier commentary on The UK and The US. Obviously, the quarter will end at the end of March, and we will be reporting back to you in April on that. And what I can say in the meantime is that we are exceptionally busy on both fronts. Great. Thank you. Follow-up question. Can you update us on the expected timeline to The US $1,000,000,000 milestone, Slide number 14?

19:54 We will update on The US development as we continue to to proceed. Obviously, 1,000,000,000 is a significant number. It's certainly a a number that we feel puts a very strong marker in the sand. There are a number of milestones that we will, of course, report to you in in advance of that number, but we wanted you to have in mind the same kinds of figures that we do and that we envisage for the business. And, of course, the constituents in terms of getting there, we have the individual

20:25 business where we continue to see strong interest from individuals with very large accounts. And we have our business, to business to consumer line too, where some of the deals that we are looking at are, well worth a $100,000,000, alone. And so, you know, we feel that we have the pipeline to be able to achieve that number, and we will report on milestones against it, as we continue along. That's great. Thank you. And, William's final question, where are you seeing the most and least demand for the fund offerings in your UK suite? Well, we continue to believe that customers deserve a simple and straightforward approach to high quality investing, and therefore, we spend a considerable amount of time and attention to our default solutions.

21:14 This is a very well established framework within The UK and ensures that even if customers are kind of not financial PHD holders that they can receive access to excellent investments. And so we continue to see very strong interest within our default products. Those are products for 50 year olds and products for 50 year olds. And our product for 50 year olds in particular is very focused on managing volatility, which as I'm sure you will agree is very important in this particular time. Thank you. William, I hope that addresses your questions. Jude from RBC. Thank you, Jude. Couple of questions. I think you can take one of them. I'm not sure about the other, but let's see. Can you elaborate more on your AI comments from earlier? It sounded like you got some really interesting developments there, and it would be good to get any additional color.

22:06 And then as we're nearing the end of q one, are you able to give any update on customer acquisition so far? So over to you. I am certainly able to take the first question about AI developments, which I believe we've been keeping you fairly fairly apprised of. And, of course, last year, we spent a lot of our time developing and implementing Beatrix, which is our internal copilot. Beatrix helps our beekeepers to answer customer queries and is trained on our proprietary internal knowledge of pensions, pension transfers, and all things in the world of retirement savings. Recently, we have taken steps to develop bbot is our customer facing chatbot and will imminently begin serving customers.

22:57 Bbot is expected to begin answering the first 20% of queries that are regular, nonpersonalized queries, quickly moving to address another 40% of those types of queries before moving into slightly more personal account based questions such as, did you receive my contribution? How far along is my transfer? And so on. But the initial expectation is that BeeBot will be serving about 20% of our live chat coming through. Now you may ask what proportion of our communication is through live chat. The answer is that it is actually still a small component of our overall kind of communication framework with our customers.

23:46 As you know, we have live chat, we have phones, and we have emails. But over time, we will be transitioning written communication more into our BeeBot live chat environment, which we think customers will enjoy more than email anyway. But you can always rest reassured that when a customer wishes to speak with an individual at the company with their beekeeper, that beekeeper will always be available. I hope that helps to give a bit more color. Great. Thank you. Question from Paul. Paul, thank you. When do you expect to be regularly regularly reporting on AUA from The U. S? I believe Christophe is taking it while on mute.

24:45 Go ahead, Christophe. Oops. Let me just take control there, Christophe. Just press allow there for me. Sorry. One sec. Okay. Go ahead, Christophe. We can hear you. Okay. Yeah. With regards to the reporting question, this we will commence the reporting on The US specifically when the AOE becomes and other metrics becomes material. You will see that in the announcement that some of that will is already reported reported on a segment basis. But I think we will embed it more formally into the regular presentations as well as the numbers become more material. Thank you.

25:31 Question from Andrew. Please, can you comment on the actual audited P and L results rather than management figures excluding many costs? When will the company make a profit? So with regards to profit before tax, we is one metric that we obviously have in our KPI framework. We primarily focus on adjusted EBITA because that is the best approximation for cash. So this is the reason why adjusted EBITA was chosen. With regards to profit before tax, that is again another metric that that we monitor, I think, but our primarily, we focus on the adjusted EBITDA number.

26:22 In the meantime, given that, you know, it's about the self funding element And also when we still want to scale The UK business, we want to do it while basically being self funding. Therefore, we're using the adjusted EBITDA number as the primary guide. And then I think once we are have scaled the marketing number to a level where we feel comfortable with to to, know, keep it more stable or slower growing, this is, I think, when the other metrics would come more and more into into the floor. That's great. Thank you very much indeed. Gautam, thank you for your question around retention rates. Could you split the churn between pension withdrawals versus customers moving to other platforms? And on the latter, where do people typically move to, traditional incumbents or new wealth techs?

27:13 Yeah. So, crudely speaking, it's roughly half half, the split, and it has remained, you know, that kind of split for for a while. And with regards to the attrition question, where do consumers go if they choose to go to another providers? This tends to really be a very idiosyncratic question in a way that many consumers have very specific, you know, needs and aspects of going to another provider. For instance, some quote that we record in our exit interviews. For instance, they want to consolidate this to work with pension. Some prefer to pay a premium price for adviser.

27:59 Some want to have a very specific asset exposure. So there tends to be various, you know, specific individual specific or idiosyncratic reasons of why consumers are leaving. But I think what is important for us is that the retention is very high. So it has been 95% pretty much since inception of the company, and that is what we primarily are focused on. That's great. Thank you. Question from Tong around marketing. Thank you for your question. Are you able to provide any commentary on the dynamics between spending and customer acquisition? For example, if each customer acquisition costs, say, pounds $2.50 per customer, is it roughly proportional if we spend 10 times that that the amount, that you normally see in terms of, 10 times the amount of customers being onboarded?

28:52 In certain parts of the funnel, broadly speaking, yes. So certainly in the earlier parts of the funnel where we see kind of the early parts of the conversion. So for example, when a customer first registers interest by leaving a name and an email address, there's certainly a very strong correlation between sort of instant marketing spend and instant registrations. Where things then become a little bit more different is how long it takes for any particular individual customer to ask us to transfer their pension or or their account. And, of course, depending on the nature of the customer, how busy they are, how big their assets are, and various other life factors, that is not always an instant request. And then, of course, the second kind of aspect of the timeline is how long it takes for a pension provider to save to send that money.

29:47 And we've seen in our experience both in The UK and in The US that some can be as quick as five days and others can take many months and throw additional roadblocks into the process, which our beekeepers and operations executives are very well equipped with dealing with, but which can obviously take time. And so broadly speaking, yes, at the earlier parts of the funnel, we can absolutely see a strong and early correlation. It does, however, because of the nature of the transaction, you know, this is not a video game, for example, take some time for the conversion to actually flow through. But we feel very confident in terms of the numbers that we see moving through the funnel, and we have a lot of systems and processes in place to actually keep each and every single pension moving through that funnel of ours.

30:40 Christophe, Romy, that's perfect. Thank you very much indeed. We've taken all the questions that we've had through from investors today. So thank you to everybody for your engagement. Romeo and Christophe, I know investor feedback will be particularly important you both. I'll shortly redirect those on the call to give you their thoughts and expectations. But perhaps, Romeo, I could just ask you for a couple of closing comments. Well, thank you very much for attending today. We're pleased to offer some additional color on the 2025 annual results beyond what we offered at the trading update. We hope that you will join us again for the q one results later on this year, and we look forward to seeing many of you later on in the coming weeks and then as well. Thank you. That's great. Romy, Christophe, thanks once again for updating those on today's call. Could I please ask attendees not to close this session as we're now automatically redirect you so you can provide your feedback? On behalf of the management team of PENSIONBEE, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good evening.