XPS Pensions Group (LSE:XPS) — Half Year Results

0:00 Good morning and welcome to the XPS PENSIONS GROUP PLC half year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Paul Cuff, joint CEO. Good morning to you, sir.

0:30 Morning. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Very nice of you to have joined us. Thank you for your interest in in XPS. What we're gonna do is run through, a little brief presentation. We're aware that there might be a different level of knowledge about the company, so we'll start at at the beginning and talk about who we are and what we do. But we will get to, the outlook and the future for the business, which we think is really exciting as well. We welcome questions, absolutely, and we will be able to see them popping up here, and we'll address as many of them as we can. I should also say there's quite a lot of content about us online. We did a Capital Markets Day in May of this year. Some of the material here is abridged from that day. A lot of it is, of course, still extremely relevant. So And if you'd like to know a little bit more about some of the things we talk about today, there is a a wealth of material there to go and have a look at, which is, hopefully really useful.

1:23 Let's start at the beginning with who we are and what we do. So at XPS PENSIONS, we do all things workplace pensions. We help companies and pension scheme trustees to run pension schemes for, employees, and we do everything that's required. We aim to be the best one stop shop in the market, if you are operating and running a pension scheme to do everything that you need. And in the plainest English, you can break down what we do into three pillars. The first thing that we do is we try to make sure that there's gonna be enough money in pension schemes eventually to pay people out in full. And, of course, in defined benefit pension schemes, people have pension promises that stretch long into the future. Money is set aside to one day pay them. We try to make sure that the money that's set aside as we go is enough, and that's what our actuaries do. And there's a lot of consulting work and support and and regulatory type work required in order to run a pension scheme well in that sense.

2:18 Pillar two is quite related to that, and this is where we give advice on where the money that's invested in a pension scheme to one day pay people all of their pensions should be invested. And we answer simple questions, asset allocation questions, how much in equities, how much in bonds, how much further sort of hedging and derivatives you might use and so on as well. And then we also help people do fund manager research and so on. Now we're not a fund manager ourselves, and we give independent hold of market advice. We don't sell our own products, which is quite different to one or two of our competitors, but that's the work that we do there. Now one and two are quite related. In a sense, how much money do I need to pay somebody pensions in many years' time is connected to the return that you'll get on the money that you set aside today. And it's similar types of people doing that work, typically highly skilled people with mathematical backgrounds who then will have done specialist training, actuarial exams, or CFA exams, or similar in order to then provide advice to our clients.

3:17 Now the third pillar is a little different. One and two are our advisory businesses. The third is keeping track of the actual human beings in pension schemes. We do all of the record keeping. We track them from the moment they get a job and join a pension scheme right the way through, to the end of their retirement, and we'll even put into place dependence, pensions, and so on as required. Complex record keeping, benefit calculations, again, regulatory returns, things like that, scheme accounts, all the things that you need to do will provide in the administration business as well. Now we do this for occupational schemes. We do this for a lot of defined benefit schemes in the private sector, some in the public sector. We also do this for defined contribution schemes and other arrangements. Really, we'll do anything that is required in the workplace pensions market.

4:04 So if that's what we do, briefly, who are our clients and and how do we get paid?

4:10 So here's on one slide an an overview of all the services that we might provide. In fairness, actually, there's quite a few services that didn't make the cut to get on here. But here are the key services of what we do. And you can see in the middle of this screen is the pension scheme itself. And then there are two really, really important stakeholders. There is the company whose people it is are in that pension scheme, current and former employees, and there's the trustees. And the way the pension system works in The UK is that the pension trustees are an independent group of people whose sole job it is to make sure that members are really well looked after and that they get their pension promises in full with good administration, good record keeping, and good communication with them along the way. Now we do work for both companies and trustees in this area, but we're rather more trustee focused. We do about 75, 80% of our work is on the trustee side of this. There's a good relationship typically between the trustees and the company, but they do need independent advice and support. And the other 25% of what we do, sometimes we have company only mandates and provide support there too. In terms of the services, along the bottom, if you can just see the various services, every pension scheme needs an appointed actuary to advise on pillar one. Is there enough money in the pension scheme? And what are we gonna do if there's not enough? As is often the case, Every pension trustee board needs an independent investment adviser to get regulated advice from, and that's pillar two.

5:37 They need advice on the strength of the underlying company. If you have somebody like BP looking after you, you can take quite a different view of the future to if I don't know you have a high street retailer that's really struggling. Your decisions about risks that you're willing to tolerate in a pension scheme will be quite different. Again, we will do covenant advisory work to help with that. I've mentioned the administration already. We'll do all the scheme secretarial work. We'll organize all the meetings. We'll take all the minutes, etcetera, etcetera. Whole range of other things we do, but these are the core activities for everything that's involved in running the pension scheme for the trustees. For the company, lots of very similar advice too across the top. Sorry, Snell. I just wanna just go back one side. Thank you. The the the company advice, very similar. They still need their own independent advice, and they'll need lots of advice on things like how they account for the way the pension scheme affects their balance sheet and their p and l. They'll need advice on things like corporate m and a if they're buying a company that's got a pension scheme and so on and so forth. So lots and lots and lots of activity. And just before we skip, key features here, we do this work year in, year out for our trustee and corporate clients. Come rain or shine, these services are always needed.

6:46 We do them on the basis of open ended engagement letters. If we look after a client brilliantly, we can have them for a very, very long time. Our fees are a combination of fixed fees with retainers. Whether it's very predictable work, we'll get paid a a retainer month in, month out to do the work. And if there's project work and and things happening, then we do it on the basis of time and materials. I we put hours down on time sheets, and we tell clients at the end of the month what the bill is based upon our charge out rates and the time we spent. A little bit like big for accounting firms or law firms and so on in terms of that model. Our fees are thus quite inflation linked as well. A lot of our contracts have linkages in them to go up inflation over time. So at the heart of our business is a really repeat recurring inflation linked revenue stream. Of course, there are great opportunities for growth as well, and we'll talk about them in a second. Might be a good time now to to flip to the next slide.

7:39 Thanks now. So this is our market. These are the other people who do what we do. We make a total amount of revenue on a on a current run rate basis forecast for this year to be a little smidge under £200,000,000, and that's the pink bar that you can see in the middle there. These bars are the revenues of our competitors doing the things that we do like for like. Many of them do do other things, particularly as you'll see those big three firms next to us. So our big competitors there are Mercer, part of Marsh McLennan, Willis Towers Watson, and Aon. And, of course, they are global broking firms, huge activities in insurance and other markets and so on. But these are The UK pensions businesses alongside us. We are very differentiated to those firms.

8:24 We are a boutique, high quality specialist, UK only provider of these services into our market, and that is quite a differentiated message. And there is a gentle shift of clients that wants an alternative to those biggest firms and would like to use a really high quality provider like us or indeed one of our competitors next to us. And you can see there are a few, LCP, Barnett Waddingham, Hymes Robertson, the firms that are a bit like us and do similar things. In the middle, you've got Capita who mostly do administration or a little bit different,

8:54 but this is our market. You can see it's quite fragmented. You can see our opportunity. We have under 10% market share still, so there's an awful lot to go at, and the total fee market is well north of 2,000,000,000 a year. Indeed, it's probably grown to over 2,500,000,000 a year in recent years. We are a decent sized company. We've got scale. There are about 1,700 of us up and down the country. I mentioned our run rate of nearly 200,000,000 of revenue. We're in all corners of The UK. We have local market, local offices in the North Of England, in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, in the Southeast, the Southwest, Birmingham too. So we are in local markets up and down the country. And, yeah, that's us with a a great opportunity to grow from here. So so why why do investors invest in XPS? So XPS as a listed entity listed in FY '17, so relatively recently, but the roots of the business go back forty years plus in one guise or another.

9:55 So you could see that come rain or shine, the revenues and profits have grown. So within this chart, you you you we would we have gone through Brexit, the pandemic, war in Ukraine. But as Paul said, the services we provide are core, and they're essential to the running of pension schemes and administering them. So our revenues are very noncyclical. And in times of volatility, the you the investor has favored owning our stock. In terms of regulation, our there is a lots of rate lots of regulatory developments in the market that our clients need help with constantly. There's volatility in the market with, for example, last year with the mini budget when there was, the so called LDI crisis.

10:47 We we were called into action. And and that volatility has sort of continued with the increasing guilt yields, and clients need lots of advice and support. We as Paul said earlier, we we work on open ended engagements, which has inflation linkage, whether it be RPI, CPI, or average weekly earnings. There are various measures, and we we pass them through to all our clients. Clients value our services, and so there is hardly ever any, conversation about, the inflationary increases that we put through. Important to say that it's not just inflation that helps us grow. We have expanded our services, which Paul will explain in in a in a little while. We have a high cash conversion rate.

11:34 More than 90 to 95% of our EBITDA converts into cash. That's not to say that we write off the remainder. It's just timing. We have very, very low bad debts. We we get paid largely from the pension scheme assets, So we're not, exposed to any sort of economic cycles that might impact corporates. In terms of sort of profit margins, we've been on quite a journey, and we are seeing a significant improvement in our EBITDA margins, which have grown from around about 25% to 26. And the consensus has us improving those margins by at least half a percentage point every year from now on. We we have a great opportunity to take market share, as Paul said earlier, and and also to consolidate in the market.

12:23 Since listing, we've we've delivered a 22% CAGR in revenues and 10 plus percent CAGR in terms of EPS. So great great sort of company to to own in in in sort of rain or shine. How do we do that? We pay a lot of attention to our culture. Our people

12:44 are really sort of what makes us a a successful company. We're 1,700 plus across 18 or so locations in The UK, and we we consider our culture to be very important. And it the all the attention care that we pay to our employees is reflected in our net promoter score. This is plus 31, so this is a a score that says, how many of your employees are strong promoters versus any detractors? And it's a very, very high bar. And within professional services, anything that is a positive, I e a plus one, would be considered quite good. So to get to plus 31 is actually very, very good. We were also named in the Sunday best time best places to work for in 2023, and our internal surveys has 98% or more, of our employees think that we are a great place to work.

13:43 This is also, reflected in lots of industry awards. This is just a choice of awards that we've won in 2023. In the appendix, you will see that we have a a track record of actually winning lots of accolades, and that really helps to promote our brand in the market. So in terms of the market itself, what are the developments? As I said earlier, the market volatility has continued, which can which continues to drive high client demand. In in in times of rising gilt yields, there's lots and lots of conversations about how to continue to derisk the pension liabilities and how to do asset allocation to match the the liabilities of the pension scheme.

14:31 The another feature of the market has been that the DB schemes have generally become more and more well funded. And there is a a shift towards something called risk transfer, which is essentially a pension scheme giving their liabilities to an insurance company and the company removing that off their books. This drives a a significant demand, for for our, for our services. And in in terms of the the liabilities in the in just in the private sector DB market, it's around 2,000,000,000,000. And with the improving gilt yields that has come down, but it is still a significant amount. And we would sort of risk transfer, I e, passing on the on the risk onto insurance companies limited to sort of $4,050,000,000,000 a year, it is a it is a significant opportunity for us to take market share within that.

15:31 Obviously, headline inflation, which has been quite high in the last eighteen months or so, impacts our fees and our cost base. But as you will have seen in our results, we we grow our profits quite faster than our revenue, and that is a a a significant advantage that we have developed over the last eighteen months or so. In terms of regulatory changes, you would have heard about the Mansion House speech and also in the autumn statement. I mean, pensions is in, in the Feet, in the in the press quite regularly these days. And just think that every time there is a regulatory reform, think of us because our clients will need lots and lots of advice to deal with all of that.

16:19 So I'll briefly show you the highlights of the half year that we've just closed, which is the best half year we've ever had. And then I will say a little bit about great growth opportunities, and and what we expect to then happen into the future. It was a brilliant half. Lots of client demand. We grew revenues by 23%, of which almost 20%, almost all of it, was organic. We did pass on inflation successfully to clients. We proved that we could do that, but we grew very materially above inflation as well. And it was a combination of things, new client wins from the previous year coming on stream, particularly in administration, and just a very, very high level of client activity with all this market turmoil, the long term fallout of the mini budget crisis, rising interest rates, etcetera. That may be now over a year ago, but it takes years for that to echo down through the system. And our clients have needed a huge amount of advice

17:14 about where it leaves them and how they should realign their asset portfolios and so on and so forth. A couple of other really things to mention really briefly, but we might come back to you maybe a bit in q and a. We successfully developed and went live with a new admin system, IT system that we use in our administration business. Why do I mention this? It's very important because we're coming off third party systems that we've used for many years now using our own, and that will drive margin improvement for us, reducing pay away. And we've now got the best system in the market that we've just made from scratch, and it will be hugely helpful in new business opportunities. It's a good time to mention John Lewis. Two weeks ago, it was announced that we will be the administrator to the John Lewis Partnership's pension scheme with a 165,000 members in The UK. That will be going directly onto our new system and will be live as a as a contract in 2025 with a lot of paid transition work between here and there that has started already, and that will be a new biggest client for us in administration when it has gone live. We also announced the disposal during the half, but a disposal with a twist.

18:23 We sold, our defined contribution master trust business to a firm called SEI who already have a master trust themselves, and we'll merge ours in and create a larger one. This goes a little bit to what Snell was referring to a minute ago about the long term future of DC being some really, really very large super fund type master trusts, and SEI would like theirs to be one. If you're wondering why we sold it, first of all, we were delighted with the very high price that we got relative to the margin and the and the profit that it makes. But, critically, we didn't exit our exposure to that. We have signed a long term contract to be the service provider to SCI going forward on their bigger expanded master trust. And if they become one of the biggest master trusts in the country in time, we will have a new biggest client, and we have direct economic exposure to that still too. So as I say, a sale with a twist where, actually, we've probably got more upside. Somebody else will spend CapEx trying to create something really tremendous for the future. And if they're successful, we will ride along with them, and we wish them very well. We are partners with them now into the future on that journey.

19:31 So let me just unpack a little bit of growth. That that's the half. Before I open it up to questions, I just wanna highlight the growth areas in each of those three pillars and the sustainability, really, of the revenue in each of those three pillars. So very briefly, in actuarial consulting, Snail's already touched on this a little bit.

19:50 The need for advice from our clients about the new options that they have, pension schemes are generally in a better position than they were for rising interest rates. That causes the value of their liabilities to go down a lot more than the value of their assets declines. Both have probably gone down, but liabilities more, and they're in a better place. This creates opportunities for them. Many of them would like to access derisking opportunities. They'd like to talk to people like legal in general about taking part of their liabilities on. And these are huge projects if they decide to do them, so called risk transfer projects. We've invested in our team in this area. We made some senior hires a couple of years ago, and we've grown this part of our business very quickly. It's grown from probably a a run rate of around 1,000,000 a year, so not really a great deal a couple of years ago to today doing a run rate of more than 10,000,000 a year, a very high quality, high margin advice.

20:43 And that is a core part of the growth that you can see in the Cheryl Pensions Consulting business. Now we expect that to continue. It is a market that over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a large volume of transactions, and they are very big projects when they happen. There's a huge amount of work in breaking the deal. You act like a sort of boutique m and a adviser helping your clients to access the best terms and contracts in the market. But then there's also masses of work around data cleansing, wider wind up work, and communications work. They're multiyear projects, and we are beginning to win our fair share in the market. I don't believe at 10,000,000 a year with anything like capped out. We're very pleased with the growth, but we believe we'll do a lot more in this space. In terms of investment consulting, the biggest opportunity there is the fallout from the so called LDI crisis a year and a bit ago.

21:36 In what happened there, many clients were in with fund managers that struggled to support them. And the fund managers, particularly those that do something called fiduciary management,

21:47 which is essentially where the day to day asset allocation decisions and so on are given by the pension trustees directly to the fund manager who might make direct decisions. There's quite a blurring of roles here, and some of those fund managers are our competitors. They're consultants. And we don't do the fiduciary management. We don't have our own funds. Some of our competitors sold their clients their own products. And lo and behold, they were supposed to be the best performing products in the market. And when something like the LDI crisis happens and they are not, demonstrably not, and there are quite significant problems in some of them, then that creates great opportunities for the honest hold of market brokers like us to be able to question whether people are really in the right place. We won 17 new mandates in the first half that we've just reported on that are called fiduciary oversight, where we are helping our now new clients to understand if they've got the right, fund managers, if their LDI is safe and secure, and whether they should do something different. And there's lots of opportunities there that, again, are sort of multiyear opportunities that will echo down the years following all the turmoil that we had late last year.

22:51 In administration, great growth opportunities. This is quite separate to all of that. What interest rates do and don't do, etcetera, doesn't have much impact on the day to day administration of the schemes, but the opportunities here again are very wide ranging. John Lewis was a outsourcing, as in John Lewis have 25 or so people that work directly for the partnership there, providing administration to the pension scheme in house. That model is increasingly strained. It's hard to do it well. If you look after one large pension scheme and face into all the difficulties of GDPR and cybersecurity data protection, if you need to keep systems updated and make everything available for people online and so on, But running one pension scheme with no economies of scale, that is really hard to do. Running pension schemes for a combined million people like we do, we've got economies of scale. We can do that really well. So you can see the logic in Xumba is saying to us, okay. You take our people.

23:45 They'll cheaply transfer to you. You run this service for us better, and and and and we'll pay you to do it. That's that contract. There are another couple of 100 employers out there that still do their pension scheme administration in house who frankly probably shouldn't and will be thinking about whether a firm like us is better placed to do it for them. So there could be more John Lewis' potentially into the future. I should say John Lewis is just one in a long list of many before. It's our largest, but our prior big first time outsourcing was IBM, which went live over the summer onto our new administration system. So you can see the type of blue chip organizations and large pension schemes that we're dealing with in this space, and we're quite famous for being really good at this stuff. And there's plenty of growth, we think, in this administration market as well.

24:33 So, look, thank you for listening. We've covered a lot of ground there. It's a good time to be us. Very topical. Pensions is in the news. The government can't leave it alone. It's looking at further changes in regulations and so on. That that only creates more work. Our clients need more advice and more support. And as you've heard in different areas of the business for different reasons, there

24:54 are some really nice healthy growth drivers too, and we think it's a very good time to be us. A lot of hard work that we've put in making XPS what it is today, over the over the last few years, really paying off. You can see that in the results that we published, and we're really quite bullish about what it'll mean for the for the years ahead as well. So that's us. I know we had a couple of questions presubmitted. Please do, send any more. I can see a few more now beginning to appear. Why don't we start working through these? Alright. Should we Alessandra, do you wanna just play Yeah. You. Yeah. Perfect. Paul, now thanks very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions, and you can do that just by using Q and A tab which is situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via your investor dashboard.

25:48 As you've mentioned, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And, somehow, if I could just ask you to read out those questions where appropriate to do so, I'll pick up from you at the end. Okay. Great. So the first question we have is with balance sheet leverage coming down, please can you discuss capital allocation plans and whether we should expect further m and a or cash returns? Please remind us of the criteria for undertaking acquisitions and scale of deal you will focus on. Great question. So with the the balance sheet leverage now having paid down post the NPT sale is point seven times. So well sort of below our usual sort of one to one and a half times target. And, yes, you're right that it it does open up potential sort of headroom for doing deals, and that's sort of a combination of debt reduction as well as the the healthy sort of the share price increase that we've seen. Now I must say that with we have all of the services that our clients need under one roof.

26:54 So the bar for m and a is that much higher. The the the key criteria that we use to evaluate m and a deals is that it's, first and foremost, gonna be great for our people, our clients, and our shareholders. And it's gonna have a good cultural alignment. We are a people business, and culture, as I said earlier, is very re important to us. Any deal has to be,

27:22 be complementary to our services or be able to enable us to access new markets, for example. So those are the key criteria that we look at. And, of course, we are always scanning the horizon. The opportunities pass our desks on a regular basis, and we don't sort of just engage in m and a for for the sort of the glory of it. And we we do sort of walk away from quite a few deals. But, Paul, do you wanna just say a bit more about what kind of adjacencies we might be talking about? Yeah. I can see there's another question that this relates to a little bit too about how do we expand our target addressable market. The the the markets that we operate in, that well, there's there's a bit of a Venn diagram really that the pensions market is here, the insurance market is next to us, and really there's quite a substantial overlap. There's a poorest divide really between the two. There are more actuaries in The UK who work in life insurance than there are in pensions.

28:21 A lot of them work in house with some of the big insurers, but there is a big insurance consultancy market adjacent to us too. And lots of the insurers thriving in this market and growing in this market do need a lot of outsourced support. We provide that to some insurance companies already. We do a lot of work for PensionSurance Corporation. We do a lot of their calculation work when they write new business. Another simple example, we've recently had a large US insurer approach us directly and say, we would like to start writing business in The UK market. Looks a good opportunity, we don't have anything in The UK. Can you help us to establish over here? And they asked us for a wide range of support. Obvious support that we can help them with, and happily, we've signed a contract with them on, is to be the administrator. If they write business, we will look after the members and and pay them their pensions long into the future, which as you can see is pretty core to us, different end clients, insurer rather than pension scheme, but fundamentally the same type of work. They also asked us for advice on things like solvency, dealing with the PRA, complying with solvency two regulations, and so on.

29:24 And that's where we've got a reasonable understanding, but we're not deep specialists. And so we were not able to fulfill that part of what they needed. And I think it's a really interesting thing for us to grow by hiring organic growth into life insurance consulting, which, by the way, leads then into lots of other wide insurance opportunities, or indeed, inorganically, looking at an opportunity to accelerate a bit of growth there. But we shall see. Those are the types of things that Snell says we're very, very careful about because we're producing tremendous returns for our shareholders right now. But, yeah, there are bigger markets that are quite logical places for us to go and play while we try and maximize the opportunity in our own. And just to answer the other part of the question about cash returns, so just a reminder that, we've had a progressive dividend policy since we listed, and we've continued to progressively grow the dividends even through Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, etcetera.

30:21 And that that remains our policy. We will continue to grow dividends in in in the sort of coming coming years. The other question that we've had is, please, can you discuss the competitive environment? You've exit exited verticals which are more more pricing facing more pricing competition. Why isn't this a feature of other areas that we're focusing in, and why are you able to keep winning market share?

30:50 Paul, do have any Yeah. I think I I think I sort of answered the we haven't exited a vertical. I do understand the question in selling NPT. Did we exit the Master Trust space? Because I explained, we signed a long term contract to be service provider to the people we've sold it to. And, actually, it's borderline EBITDA neutral. The contract that we've signed replaces more than half of the revenue that MPT generated on a gross basis and has a nice margin attached to it. And as I explained, if actually MPT now as part of SCI grows really strongly, we'll end up with a really great client, and they'll be spending the CapEx trying to achieve that rather than us. So it works for us. And and as I said, actually, I have great friends of ours now. We're very excited about helping them, but but there's a different, yeah, a different dynamic to our exposure to that market, but it is has been retained.

31:41 I think The other part of the question was, I think, that why do we not face the same kind of price pressure in the other No. Thank you. So so so wide I mean, wider opportunities. They they are different in the different pillars as I as I outlined. Administration is a growing market with more John Lewis' outsourcing, which is great. But, also, there's, of course, a massive outsourced market already. Most pension schemes are looked after by a third party administrator like us. The quality of that is mixed at best, and there are certain high profile pensions companies out there that haven't looked after people very well over the last few years. They've had a different model probably to us. They've they've charged clients less, run lean, and it hasn't always gone all that well, and their data hasn't been well protected and other other problems have emerged. You've probably seen some of the headlines over the last few months that one of high profile competitors have had.

32:33 So suffice to say there's a good opportunity to win clients directly off competitors there too, not just first time outsourcing. So the opportunity administration does does look really, really strong. In in advisory, different source of opportunities, as I say, you get a chance to prove yourself a bit in a crisis, and your business model also can be validated in a crisis. The LDI crisis a year ago showed that some people's business models were were a bit challenged. Ours was not. We came out of that very well, and the world does look to us as sort of, like I say, this independent broker that can help you to understand the challenges and risks that you face without any conflicts at all. And that's really, really important and has been really beneficial for us. And, frankly, just being just being who we are, our culture, our integrity, our energy, and our enthusiasm, these things all matter. And we can just win scheme actuarial appointments where the incumbent has not done a great job. It's rarely on price.

33:31 This is important. It's about service and quality and and who you are. Price, if a new opportunity comes up, I'll say this carefully, but, you know, we don't want to be the cheapest provider. If you're trying to persuade somebody leave WTW, well, if that's what's not what have you, biggest firm in our market, then they're not coming to you because they want a a a sort of lower cost but probably lower quality service. If you're running a billion or a £5,000,000,000 pension scheme, you just want the best advice. And if it costs you an extra 50 k or a 100 k to have it, you'll pay it because the difference in outcomes is tens of millions, even hundreds of millions in long term difference in outcomes. So it's a false economy to try and use a sort of more cheap and cheerful provider. So we're not that. We're not cheaper than the biggest firms, and we're not lower quality than the bigger firms. And we can still win those mandates because for various reasons, some in our market have decided that they'd rather not be looked after by the giant global multinational, and they'd rather be a really important client to us. And over the years, we've won the Pearson pension plan. We've won Mercedes Benz, Toyota, I'd say, administration, IBM, John Lewis. We we are capable of winning at the very, very top table, and we continue on that path.

34:46 I think we've answered part of this question, but I'll just add a little bit more color to it. The question is given the strong revenue growth, what are the key factors driving this in terms of client activity, new wins, fee increases, and how sustainable is this growth in the longer term? So I think as Paul said, I outlined a lot of reasons why we continue to see high demand from our clients and also the new wins that we're registering. Just to say in the half, of the 19% organic growth, only 10% of that came from inflation linkage in our contracts. So the rest of it was driven by providing more services to our clients, more high value, high, high margin services such as risk transfer, and also the new wins that came on board.

35:36 In terms of sustainability, clearly, as I said, the inflation linkage to our contracts, if inflation comes down, there will be a you know, the the slowdown in terms of what inflation rate we can pass. But our experience over the last eighteen months has shown that we are able to pass on more than the headline inflation rate in especially projects that we do, such as the risk transfer business, DC Consulting, etcetera. So the consensus shows us, you know, growing at circa 12% in f y twenty five. It shows us growing at about eight to 9% the year after, and we're comfortable with with those growth rates that are shown.

36:22 In terms of the other question, can you quantify the benefits you're seeing from Aurora platform? So yeah. Absolutely. So the if I just unpack the current model, we have four, legacy sort of, system providers. These are third party providers for administration platform. And we pay between 3 to £4,000,000 a year to use those platforms, and then we pay additional fees every time we win a new client. So having developed our own platform, which is best in class, taking the best, out of all of those four systems and also, with an eye to the future in terms of what the potential addressable market could be for us, that's what we are developing and have developed.

37:11 So over time, when we come off all of those legacy systems, there will be a cost saving of between 3 to £4,000,000 from after f y twenty six onwards. So it's not in the market numbers just yet. The other sort of significant benefit that it provides is a competitive advantage in new pitches. So owning our own platform where we can develop whatever capabilities are required to onboard new clients, we are in control, very importantly, of the cybersecurity over that platform. That is very, very key, especially when we are going after public sector appointments. We do the administration for half the police force in The UK. And, obviously, they are very, very sensitive about all of that data, And owning our own platform is a requisite for for going after bigger appointments in the public sector.

38:04 The other thing that, you know, it could manifest itself into in the in the in the longer term future is that having developed the best in class system, it it could open up a new vertical, and we're thinking about it in terms of providing that as a software as a service, especially in the public sector. So, yeah, lots and lots of positives of Aurora. The last question that we have, and please do sort of, you know, keep the questions coming. There there's somebody who's been following us for about a year and regrets us regrets not buying us at £1.40. Have I missed the boat? Clearly clearly, it's not it's not our place to to be able to sort of core the market, etcetera.

38:55 But, hopefully, what we've outlined in the last half an hour or so is that we are certainly, you know, very optimistic about our future. There are lots of regulatory tailwinds that will continue to drive growth. We are making operational improvements, especially in terms of owning our own systems, etcetera. And I think, you know, we we have a great future ahead of us. So, hopefully, you haven't missed the boat. But, Paul, do you wanna say anything else to that? I I wholeheartedly endorse your remarks. What I what I I I would add is that there's a couple of other areas of of of underlying revenue and growth that we'll just mention quickly as we begin to get towards the end of time on on this webinar. We haven't discussed something called GMP yet. And GMP, I will spare you the gory details of GMP, but it's a tiny little element of people's benefit if they're in a defined benefit pension scheme.

39:52 And, there was a court case a couple of years ago that essentially ruled that across the entire industry, we've not quite been calculating GMP correctly. And that might sound astonishing, but, effectively, men and women were treated differently with the way their GMP works. And the court ruled that that was sex discrimination and not not okay, and we needed to correct things and do things differently. That creates a huge amount of work for us and indeed our competitors who now need to go back and effectively recalculate benefits that have been paid over the last twenty or thirty years and make backdated payments to true them up and change the way that those benefits are then paid going forward, adjusting all of the systems, the administration records, and so on and so forth. And these are huge jobs for each client because you need very good data, so you need to do a lot of data cleaning work to do it. The actuarial mathematics behind how to rectify is all really rather complicated, I'm afraid.

40:48 And then, of course, the administration changes are, you know, quite substantial pieces of work to put through. We have been doing this work on our clients for the last year or two. We've been gradually growing the work that we do, there's a bandwidth issue. I mean, we've now finished this work for something like 30 clients out of the 500 that need to do it, and there is a big bandwidth issue here. Our clients don't have enough time to talk to us about it when there's so much else going on. So you would have had GMP, which is not time critical to do. There is no firm deadline. You'd have had GMP work on the agenda for a meeting, and then the mini budget happens. And all we talk about instead is how we're gonna respond interest rate changes and everything else. So GMP has sort of been bumped a little bit down the line. We are working our way through it. Our clients do want us to.

41:35 They're pushing us hard to get through it, but they understand that there's a lot of other stuff happening. Now all I would say to you is if that is a kind of underpin for the amount of work that we'll get through, if if we got quiet, if there were no regulatory changes, if financial markets became completely benign, none of which is gonna happen, of course. But if that did happen, we would just do more GMP work, and we have a few years of it backed up. And so to sort of underpin to the work that we'll get through is is is really quite significant. Now, of course, in a perfect world, we'll manage to do the GMP work and all of the wider consulting work, risk transfer work, and everything. And if we do achieve all of that at once, then, you know, there's very healthy revenue growth in the next few years ahead of us if we can achieve all of that.

42:21 That's our challenge. It's a very first world problem to have enough bandwidth at our clients to talk to us about it and also internally to have enough resource to be able to get through all of that. But I hope that gives a bit of sort of reassurance. And I know GMP is techy, and it's it's not best will in the world, the sexiest thing in the world. Our clients don't relish having to get through it. But it's a feature of our industry that this kind of thing falls out the sky sometimes a little bit in our industry. Regulatory changes, court case changes, really, really, really, really good for business for us as we help our clients as best we can to navigate their way through. Great. Don't think we have any more questions. Yeah. Perfect. Paul, somehow, thank you very much for that. I think you've addressed those questions you can from investors. And of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform.

43:11 But just before redirecting investors to provide feedback, which is important to the company, Paul, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Gosh. Yeah. Well, thanks very much for coming. I I mean, I I guess you'll get a strong sense. We're we're a motivated, fairly passionate bunch here. We're enjoying being us at the moment. We've got masses of opportunity in the different various business verticals. Every time you hear Jeremy Hunt or somebody talk about pensions or read about it in the Feet, do think of us because probably they've just made us even busier with what they've just said, and that's been a feature of our industry for a long time. And I don't think any of that's about to change. So, yeah, we're we're very excited about our future at the moment. Perfect, Paul. So now thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations.

44:02 This will then take a few moments to complete, but some should be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team for XPS PENSIONS GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye.