PensionBee Group H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 12, 2025

There are 4 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PensionBee Group PLC Full Year Results Investor Presentation. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during today's call. However, the company can review all questions today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to the management team from PensionBee.

Operator

Romy, Stephen, good afternoon.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I'm Romy Savova, the CEO of PensionBee. Welcome to our full year 2024 results presentation covering trading for the twelve months to thirty one December twenty twenty four. Today, we look forward to delivering an update on our vision to create a global leader in the consumer retirement market.

Speaker 1

Operating in The UK for over a decade since 02/2014 and now also in The United States, we make retirement savings simple so that everyone can enjoy a happy retirement. Since inception and throughout the last year, PensionBee has operated in an enormous market. Starting with The UK's One Point Five Trillion Pounds in DC assets over the course of 2024, we added an additional 22,000,000,000,000 to our market opportunity through our US expansion. Following this exciting move, we now cover over 85% of the global DC market, spanning over 80,000,000 consumers saving for retirement. Our customer focused offering is designed for everyday savers, helping them to combine old retirement accounts, contribute at a click, invest with global giants, withdraw with ease, manage relevant taxes, and build retirement confidence through financial education.

Speaker 1

As a result of our enormous market opportunity and our relentless customer focus, we have grown rapidly reaching £6,000,000,000 in assets and laying the foundations for future rapid growth across the world. 2024 was a momentous year for PensionBee as we celebrated a decade of operations and capitalized on the opportunities ahead of us. We maintained our pension leadership position in The UK and grew our brand awareness, innovated on our product offering and prepared for additional scalability, including through the introduction of AI across our operations. In The U. S, we cemented our partnership with State Street and commenced a series of product releases that will enable us to address the needs of millions of American consumers.

Speaker 1

Finally, we delivered on an important financial milestone of adjusted EBITDA breakeven supported by our profitable UK business. I will now turn to an update on our UK business, which is expected to generate the vast majority of our revenue and margin over the short to medium term. Since the introduction of automatic enrollment, the number of UK savers in DC pension plans has continued to grow, and approximately 16,000,000 adults are now saving in workplace accounts. At the same time, our modern and mobile workforce means that the typical Brit will hold 11 jobs in their lifetime, resulting in millions of dormant accounts left behind following a job switch. UK DC assets are now estimated at £1,500,000,000,000, of which £1,300,000,000,000 are transferable by virtue of being dormant workplace accounts or personal pensions.

Speaker 1

Core to our proposition is our brand identity and awareness. Over the course of 2024, we continue to invest strategically in our brand, including through TV, radio, our Premier League sponsorship of Brentford FC and the National Geographic. As a result, our prompted brand awareness reached approximately 60%, an all time high, while our unprompted brand awareness reported for the first time is now at approximately 15%. Growing brand awareness, coupled with data led performance marketing, enabled us to achieve record net inflows per pound of marketing expenditure with every one pound of marketing spend generating almost £100 of net flows. As a result of our growing brand presence, our share of organic traffic grew, accounting for the majority of visits to PensionBee and demonstrating the network effects of our national presence.

Speaker 1

Our commitment to our customers and to their happy retirement is reflected in our product offering and ongoing innovation. Over the course of 2024, we continued releasing exciting features to help our customers make the most of their PensionBee accounts. These included engaging features to guide our customers through the product offering and to understand the performance of their investments. As a result of efforts to make our customers' retirement confident, we saw the total amount of new contributions into PensionBee accounts, I. New contributions from our customers' bank accounts rather than consolidation of old accounts, growing to a total of £250,000,000.

Speaker 1

Over the course of 2024, we delivered on our commitment to personalized customer service, ensuring each of our customers has access to a named beekeeper customer service account manager. We supported our customers over the phone, live chat, email, earning high ratings and industry recognition for our unique model. We continue to invest in the scalability of our technology platform, ending the year with significant improvements in operating scalability, having grown the number of invested customers to FTE again. We began integrating AI into our operations, generating a data ecosystem around a customized PensionBee large language model that is being used to support teams from product development to customer service. We are very excited for the prospects of our UK business in 2025.

Speaker 1

We have begun increasing our marketing expenditure and assuming supportive markets throughout the year, we'll continue to do so, particularly ramping up Q2 and Q4. We have begun the process of simplifying our plan range to six plans, offering clear defaults and choices for our customer segments. Over the course of the year and as demonstrated at our Capital Markets Day in 2024, we will launch a new visual experience for our Beehive, modernizing the experience customers love and engaging them with supportive analytical features. Finally, we will continue to invest in scalability through AI initiatives, having recently launched our internal AI bot, Beatrix, who is on hand to support beekeepers as they deliver information to customers. I will now give an update on our US business, which is expected to grow to a similar scale as our growing UK business over the long term.

Speaker 1

Following an extensive research period, we established our US business in 2024. Operating in collaboration with our long standing partners at State Street, our U. S. Business has been hitting key start up milestones rapidly and is evidently leveraging our technical stack and deep expertise to move at pace. The year culminated with the release of our app in December 2024.

Speaker 1

Over the course of 2025 and particularly over h one twenty twenty five, we will continue laying the core foundations for our U. S. Product, establishing our brand awareness and customer acquisition capabilities, automating our sources of net inflows, offering the required products and functionality to attract customers at scale. I will briefly touch on each of these pillars for strategic success. Customer acquisition is the engine of PensionBee's growth, and it is important for us to establish the key components of its success.

Speaker 1

In The U. S, PensionBee will run a direct to consumer and an employer to consumer distribution model. Our direct to consumer acquisition model is similar to our UK model, but given the different stages of development of our UK and US subsidiaries, different channels will be more and less prominent over time. In The US, we expect social media to play a core role in the formation of a national brand identity. Our performance channels, including search, app campaigns, and email campaigns, are demonstrating similar customer behaviors at a lower cost to reach.

Speaker 1

In addition to our direct to consumer marketing, we are marketing directly to employers seeking a good home for the smaller accounts of their former employees. Our safe harbor IRA is being delivered in partnership with SS and C who have given us direct access to large record keepers. Our work on four zero one k rollovers continues to progress at pace, and we expect our current methodology to automate the majority of four zero one k transfers to similar levels as what we experienced in The UK. Before we increase our marketing expenditure in The US, we must complete the technical work related to inflows. We have established a very solid and automated position with respect to IRA transfers for individual consumers.

Speaker 1

We expect to launch individual contributions imminently, helping our customers contribute to their IRAs at a click. We have established the appropriate vehicles to accept transfers and contributions, including a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, and a safe harbor IRA. We will soon be launching a self employed IRA to enable self employed customers to maximize their attractive contribution tax allowances. For all of our customers, we expect to launch distinctive and easy to use functionality, including past performance monitoring, a retirement planner, automated account detail management and distributions to attract older customers. Turning to our marketing initiatives over the last few months.

Speaker 1

We are expecting national awareness of PensionBee to play an important role in our long term success. Our marketing strategy has always been to leverage cost effective marketing channels with national reach to access a broad mass market audience. In The US, the channels we consider to be well suited to these endeavors are social media and search. We have created and continue to produce original content to build trust and financial education amongst our target customer base, and we are beginning to see very successful results on the back of the strategy. Leveraging our UK web domain and its history, we began investing in written content and explainer articles.

Speaker 1

We can now see over 1,000 of our keywords having top 20 positions, accounting for approximately 235,000 monthly searches. This compares to almost 6,000 top 20 keywords in The UK, accounting for approximately 2,800,000 monthly searches. Across social media, our followership is growing rapidly on numerous channels, and we will continue to increase brand touches through original and engaging content. Our Retirement one zero one series received phenomenal organic viewership in its first week post release, garnering 20,000 views on YouTube. We are seeing excellent results from our brand awareness initiatives in The US and expect to report on prompted brand awareness by the end of the year, which we have started measuring internally.

Speaker 1

In addition to our direct to consumer customer acquisition model, we have recently launched a safe harbor IRA for employers, offering a consumer oriented solution in a shameless market. Our research uncovered exorbitant fees that erode customer accounts to zero and sweep up to 4% of interest out of customer accounts. We've had very positive engagement with employer clients and the media to support the availability of the product. We believe the PensionBee Safe Harbor IRA offers employers and their former employees a better home for their old four zero one ks, and we look forward to onboarding many employers in the launch of the product. I would now like to hand over to Christoph Martin, our Chief Financial Officer, who will cover the financial update for the year.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much, Romy. Hello, Nevem. Welcome to everyone to the finance section of the 2024 announcement. 2024 has been a pivotal year as we have achieved our long standing financial objectives since our IPO. Strong double digit revenue growth delivering a CAGR since our IPO of fifty three percent as well as adjusted EBITDA profitability in our UK business for the full year.

Speaker 2

This important profitability milestone was delivered through growth in new invested customers, strong and continued net inflows from existing customers, the scalability of our technology platform and our unwavering focus on cost discipline. In addition to The UK goal, whilst making a significant investment in our new U. S. Business, we achieved adjusted EBITDA breakeven at the group level. Turning to our UK performance.

Speaker 2

Consistent with that long term guidance and delivery of full year UK profitability, last year was focused on the high returns from our marketing budget. Therefore, the marketing budget was deployed against the marketing strategy that was focused on more mature customers with a higher incoming account size, the average age of new customers acquired was close to 41 compared to 39.5 in 2023 and 38 in 2022. This led to an average incoming account increase from £16,000 in 2023 to £20,000 last year and an increase in gross inflows by 14% to above £1,300,000,000 The higher net inflows from new customers as well as the strong net flows from existing customers owing to our high retention rate of greater than 95% and together with market appreciation led to an increase in the AOA base of 34% year on year in 2024. From a long term perspective, 2024 was another year of consistent growth. In fact, since our IPO, we have grown AOA with an CAGR of 44%.

Speaker 2

This consistently strong revenue growth arises from the predictable and recurring nature of our revenue base and as such, it is our first important value driver. The underlying reason for our predictable and recurring revenue is the high retention rate of greater than 95% of customers with an average age of slightly over 40. These customers are therefore still building up their retirement saving results for years and decades ahead. Therefore, existing cohorts are growing over time on an underlying basis, excluding markets. Growth from existing cohorts combined with efficient new customer acquisition generates consistent AOA growth over time on an underlying basis.

Speaker 2

We have seen a resilient revenue margin of 64 basis points consistently at those levels over the last six years, which translates into strong AoA growth into consistent, predictable and recurring revenue growth. As a result, we converted the 44% of AoA CAGR growth since our IPO into a 53% CAGR of revenue growth. Benshould B's model is highly scalable, driving consistent margin improvements over time through consistent, predictable recurring revenue growth combined with our scalable technology platform. Thanks to disciplined cost control in 2024, our overall cost base has remained flat in The UK and our largest cost buckets, technology platform costs grew modestly by only 3% year on year, while our top line grew by 44% year on year. As such, our total cost base has reduced as a percentage of revenue from 135% in 2023 to 93% in 2024, underscoring the scalability of our platform.

Speaker 2

As a result of strong growth and the scalability of our technology platform, we delivered a full year of profitability in 2024. We expect The UK to grow profitably from now onwards, while we increase our marketing budgets to continue strong momentum of growth and capitalize on the vast market opportunity in front of us. From a long term perspective, the scalability of the technology platform becomes even more apparent as evident in a decline in our cost base as a proportion of revenue. As we scale the business, which can be seen in the long term trend on the left hand side, we drive adjusted EBITDA margin in the long term, which can be seen on the right hand side. In conclusion, the scalability of our business and our effective cost control allow us to bring costs down consistently as a proportion of revenue as shown historically, thereby positively improving adjusted EBITA margin.

Speaker 2

Turning to The U. S. Business. In 2024, following our Capital Markets Day on the 10/01/2024 and following strong demand from investors,

Operator

we

Speaker 2

successfully raised £20,000,000 to accelerate the delivery of our US strategy. Marketing investment support for The US business in 2024 was approximately $1,000,000, which was fully funded by States REIT. The US business is currently in its investment phase, building out capabilities and capitalize on The US market opportunity. In 2025, PensionBee intends to use the £20,000,000 of proceeds raised to accelerate investments in its US business by increasing marketing expenditure on paid advertising channels, accelerating the development of localized product features, including Roth IRAs, account search functionalities, calculators, educational content, retirement provider integration, pursuing employer or sponsor opportunities to bulk transfer former employees' accounts. The marketing support from State Street is expected to be approximately $5,000,000 In summary, we continue to prepare our product in H1 and envisage to start deploying marketing in H2 to start the growth engine for The U.

Speaker 2

With regards to our guidance, in the short to medium term, spending around three to five years, we target the group to generate revenue of above £100,000,000 and the group adjusted EBITDA margin of, take up, 20% by year five. In other words, over that time horizon, we see The UK to contribute the vast majority of revenue and profit to the group. In the long term, spending five to ten years, we expect the group to generate about $0.02 £5,000,000,000 of revenue and target a group adjusted EBITDA margin of tick up 50%. Over

Speaker 1

the

Speaker 2

time horizon, we see the two segments, The UK and The U. S, to contribute more equally to the group guidance. I will now hand back to Romy for conclusions and closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much, Christophe. It's been a pleasure to regroup with everyone today, and we hope that you found the information we've presented around our U. K. Business, our U. S.

Speaker 1

Business and plans for 2025 and beyond helpful. We have a number of further updates that are coming up over the course of April and May, and we hope that you will join us for those too. We're now very happy to take any questions that have arisen either verbally or through the written submission.

Operator

That's great. Romy, Christophe, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions. As Romy said, if you wish to verbally ask questions, just type question mark in the Q and A panel. Alternatively, type the text of your question.

Operator

Romy, let's start off. We have a question here around The U. S, a bit of focus there. Are there plans for acquisitions to accelerate growth, particularly in The U. S?

Operator

Or will expansion, in your opinion, be purely organic?

Speaker 1

At the moment, our plans are very much focused on organic growth. We're seeing really excellent traction in terms of building national awareness of PensionBee, particularly through the social media strategies that we have started deploying since the beginning of this year. And so we foresee the momentum for U. S. Growth to come from the internal activities, which we, of course, have a lot of experience in doing from our time in The UK, building a brand with national recognition, both that we are also supplementing in The U.

Speaker 1

S. With a lot of local knowledge and localized operations, especially on the marketing side so that the PensionBee brand can resonate widely.

Operator

Thank you, Rami. We've got William Hawkins from KBW. William, your microphone is available for you to activate. So please feel free just to activate your microphone and then please feel free to post your question to Romeo and Christophe. Just click on the icon at the bottom of the screen there, William.

Operator

It's the microphone allow permissions in the top in in case your browser is not allowing you. There we go. Yes, please. You're now live, William. Go ahead.

Operator

William, just while you look at that, let me just move on, if I may, Romy, to a question from Peter. What sorry, from John, I do apologize. What product enhancements are being prioritized for The U. S. Market?

Operator

And how do you plan to differentiate PensionBee from existing competitors?

Speaker 1

Great question. The U. S. Is, of course, an absolutely enormous market, approximately £22,000,000,000,000 or $28,000,000,000,000. So there are a lot of existing financial services companies within The US.

Speaker 1

Our focus has always been on the mass market consumer, and the needs of the mass market consumer are very different to the mass affluent or the high net worth or the ultra high net worth customer. Mass market customers are looking for an easy way to manage their retirement savings. And so, of course, all of our service and our offering focuses on that ease of functionality. I started off by commenting on some of the channels we're using to reach customers, which in retirement can sometimes be the biggest problem to overcome inertia and to actually reach consumers. And as I said, we think social media and brand building and financial content and education will be a huge part of that.

Speaker 1

I've also commented on our ability to do transfers in a really seamless way, and that applies to not only four zero one k transfers, but also IRA transfers. I've spoken a little bit about contributions and being able to contribute in sixty seconds or less, which is the promise of ease that we have also made to our UK customer base. And then, of course, there is the ability to to move over a variety of different accounts, whether those are old four zero one k's, old traditional IRAs, old Roth IRAs. We have the capability to accept them all. And then in terms of actually managing the account once the money is with us, we are rolling out a series of features around performance monitoring, our kind of iconic retirement planner, which helps customers understand where they are today and where they need to be for the future to have a happy retirement in addition to, of course, embedding our financial education within the product.

Speaker 1

And so the way that we differentiate within The U. S. Market will be by relentlessly focusing on the mass market, which is what PensionBee specializes in. I hope that answers your question.

Operator

That's great. Thank you, Remy. William, just going to return to you. Hopefully, now that we can unmute your microphone, it should be read. There we go.

Operator

William, over to you, sir. You are unmuted, William. Okay, William, let's just park that, if I may. Romeo, to a topic around AI, which I know you did touch on during your presentation. A question here asks, can you provide some more detail on how AI is being used and the expected impact on potentially cost savings and also the customer experience?

Speaker 1

Absolutely. We covered some of the AI developments that PensionBee has been working on during our Capital Markets Day last year. At that time, we were primarily using AI to inform research around the customer experience, and really automating some of the more manual tasks, that present themselves when sorting through a lot of customer feedback that that we get, whether it's through phone calls or emails or reviews through the multiple different review channels that we use. So we found that AI had been incredibly helpful in sifting through that information and pulling out actionable insights, which can then inform the product road map, which is, of course, something we were already doing, ourselves as as people, but it's always great to have the help from, from an automated assistant. The second area where we've been, focusing a lot more recently, is through the introduction of our AI bot called Beatrix.

Speaker 1

At the moment, Beatrix is available internally to our operations team and is essentially answering questions that arise when we are serving customers. So Beatrix is not yet interacting directly with customers. But over time and given the high quality of responses that we're seeing, we think that this could very much be a possibility to introduce within the mix, of our customer communication channels. So this is definitely an active area of development within the PensionBee technology and data teams, and we think it's we think it's pretty promising. That being said, we absolutely have no intention of reducing the level of human support that our customers can receive.

Speaker 1

We think that access to a human is one of the distinguishing features of PensionBee's customer offering, and the named beekeeper is what regularly comes up in in the reviews that we read as as as a management team. So taking a very appropriate approach and intentional approach to integrating AI, we definitely think that we can generate cost saving and reduce manual work, but we wanna be really mindful of the fact that our customers love having a personal beekeeper. And therefore, we're going to integrate it in a very, in a very appropriate way.

Speaker 2

I hope that answers your question.

Operator

Thanks, Romy. Certainly does. William, coming back to you, sir, if I may. If you could activate your mic at the bottom of the screen, that would be great.

Speaker 3

Hi, guys. Can you hear me?

Operator

We can, sir. Go ahead.

Speaker 1

Yes. We can hear you.

Operator

I think

Speaker 3

I needed some help from Beatrix. Two questions, please. Yes, is there anything you can share with us about trading experience in The U. K. To date?

Speaker 3

We're getting to the end of the first quarter, so you must have some visibility. Again, I'm not sure you kind of mentioned seasonality in marketing spend more in the second quarter and the fourth quarter. So I don't know if we should be prepared if that implies headwinds for flows or customer acquisition in the first quarter in The UK on a seasonal basis. So anything you can say about how the year has started would be great. And then secondly, in The U.

Speaker 3

S, I just wanted to make sure I understood tidbits you were giving us about the financials so far. So if I'm understanding correctly, last year, the 1,900,000.0 EBITDA loss, that was all non marketing expenses, if I understand that correctly. And if I do, what's the outlook for the non marketing expenses in 2025, please, as you continue to invest in the business? And then also, did I understand that you said that the £20,000,000 raise would all be spent on marketing in 2025? Or my assumption was that it was sort of either be spent more over time.

Speaker 3

So is that $20,000,000 all coming this year? Or is it spread out over time? And then lastly, thanks for your patience. Did I understand correctly that flows and asset accumulation in America is more of a second half issue? I think you said nothing in the first half as you're continuing to invest in building out the platform.

Speaker 3

Thank

Speaker 1

you, and we will certainly endeavor to answer all of the questions. I think the first one relates to trading experience in the first quarter and any guidance that we can offer for the rest of 2025. And I suppose I would kind of take a step back to some of the comments that I made earlier about marketing spend and the phasing and the seasonality of the marketing spend. Q1 in 2024 was actually a pretty well funded quarter. We spent a significant portion of our marketing budget in 2024 in the first quarter.

Speaker 1

And so as we think about 2025, the marketing budget would certainly be expected to increase somewhat, but it was actually more in q two and '4 last year where, excuse me, where we felt that the marketing budget could have been amplified with certain opportunities. And so for us, the big focus for 2025 will be taking advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves, which based on our experience of last year, we think we're predominantly focused in Q2 and Q4. But overall, we are expecting to see a higher level of marketing expenditure in The U. K. In 2025 relative to 2024 with an emphasis on quarterly higher expenditure in Q2 and Q4.

Speaker 1

Now having said that, all of our plans are, of course, kind of subject to daily monitoring and overall stable markets over the course of the year. We've obviously experienced some volatility over the last week or so, and we're keeping a very close eye on that. However, it's not impacting our philosophy and our approach to this year. In terms of more kind of precise trading numbers for the first quarter, you'll have to join us in April, where we give you a bit of a deeper update. But from our perspective, we're executing against our plans for Q1.

Speaker 1

So that's kind of the first part of the question. I think the second part of the question comes to you, Christophe.

Speaker 2

Yes. Happy to take this one. So the second part of the question was around The U. S. Financials and what the 1,900,000.0, in loss entails.

Speaker 2

And, you read it correctly. So the 1.9, million pounds in in losses is is including marketing. But please do note that the $1,000,000 in marketing was refunded, and paid for by our partner, State Street. So that means that, you could look at that 1,900,000,000.0 indeed as the premarketing costs because of that rationale. Then you also ask around an outlook for 2025.

Speaker 2

I think we would expect probably that The US is we are still building out, you know, the foundational capabilities and and element and in the second half, to, start the the marketing engine a bit. So that means that probably from a, outlook perspective, outlook perspective, we will probably expect it to be around low to mid single digit, of investment requirement, for this year. So that was question number two. You then also made a question number three around the 20,000,000 if all is spent in 2025. Maybe cover part of it also directly while I'm on the phone.

Speaker 2

So it is not all spend in 2025 indeed. That is correct. That is spread out over the first few years. So 2025, '20 '20 '6, '20 '20 '7. But, certainly, towards the end of this short to medium term guidance, the the three to five years, it is it is it is spent within within the first part of that, if you will, or the first few years.

Speaker 2

I I think those are the finance related question. I will hand over, back to Rumi to add anything on the first the second question or the third one, And and then we can cover the fourth question around the flows in the second half for The US as well.

Speaker 1

Yes. I think and the only part to add is really around The US dynamic and the priorities for Q1 and for Q2. I think I laid them out as we see them in the presentation. We have established a great baseline for customer acquisition. We haven't turned up the dial.

Speaker 1

We haven't turned up the volume yet because we think it's important to complete the product work that we have in mind. First and foremost, of course, is transfers and making transfers as smooth as possible. There's been a lot of progress on that over the past couple of months. And the view on transfers and four zero one k transfers in particular is that the vast majority will will be automated through the work that we're doing at the moment. So we're pretty pleased pretty pleased with that progress.

Speaker 1

We also think that in areas where the transfers are already pretty easy for us, so in the IRA transfer space, that the the key investment that we need to make over the next kinda two two quarters is to introduce the features that distinguish us within the mass market, and that will enable us to market to individuals who not only have old four zero one k accounts, but also old IRAs that they may not be as happy with. And so I would conclude by saying that product and product development is the main focus for Q1 and for Q2, and that we expect to turn up the marketing budget in the second half of the year.

Operator

Great. Thank you, William. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Remy, let's switch gears.

Operator

Got a question from Julian. Julian asks please maybe this is one for you, Christophe. Please can you talk us through the deferred income, which has caused an increase in the trade payables, please?

Speaker 2

Payables, so to speak. Can you can you clarify which which part that is precisely so I can Yeah.

Operator

Julian, if you just like to add further detail for, Christoph there in the q and a, I will present that to the guys momentarily. Carl B. Carl, thank you for your question. How have U. S.

Operator

Customer acquisition costs compared to The U. K. So far?

Speaker 1

On The U. S. Side and in terms of the marketing activity that we're doing, on the direct to consumer front, we we kinda split it in in two. We have our brand activities, and then we have the performance activities. On both sides, what we can see, and I'll I'll start on the brand side, which is where we have been using social media predominantly to reach a a large audience base.

Speaker 1

We are seeing a very effective cost per impression, and we have very good reason to believe that this will be one of the predominant ways with which we achieve national brand awareness. On the performance marketing side, we have continued to test the performance marketing channels. We are continuing to see low costs on that front. We will turn up that expenditure, as I mentioned, in the second half of the year and really sort of optimize it even further from there on.

Operator

Great. Thank you. Question from Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. To what extent is The U.

Operator

S. Potential customer different from that in The UK, particularly in relation to the performance of the plans being offered?

Speaker 1

I'm not entirely sure that the performance of the plans and the customers are entirely related, but I will attempt to answer the question as to what I think it is. So in The US, the the customer base is very much in the mass market, so similar to our UK offering. We believe that the customers, whether they're in The UK or in The US, are looking for an easy way to invest. There's a lot of data that supports that. When we look at what the mass market consumer has done within their workplace savings accounts, we see similarly high investment in default products in The US as we do in The UK, meaning that most individuals within the workplace are going inside a default that has been selected by by the employer.

Speaker 1

And that indicates to us that customers are generally looking for an easy way to get diversified diversified exposure. So, you know, to in many respects, you know, that is the same challenge that that we have been solving in in The UK. And, really, it's about the localization of the marketing and the localization of the features and the way that they're presented to the customer, where you can really start to see kind of the difference between a customer of ours in The UK and a customer of ours in The U. S.

Operator

Thank you, Remi. Christophe, just coming back to Julian, who said, please, can you talk us through the deferred income, which has caused an increase in trade payables, please? He goes on to say, I think it's Note 22, something to do with prepayments. I don't know if that's any clearer. We can always return to this question post the meeting, and I can send the answer if needed.

Speaker 2

No. No. That's right. Thank you for highlighting the specific notes you're interested in. So the deferred income, what this is relating to, so this is relating to the marketing reimbursement we receive from State Street.

Speaker 2

So as you know, State Street is a partner that we have that we're working with in The US, and we know the partner very well in The UK already. So they are part of the, UK journey since inception. So what has occurred in 2024 is that part of that marketing, budget was already, received by PensionBee in 2024. So that is really underscoring the trust that we have between our two institutions. And so the 4,100,000 that you see there in note is relating to a $5,000,000, of, marketing, prepayment, and that is, included in the deferred income line.

Speaker 2

So it is related to the marketing, that is about to be spent in this year, and it relates to the refunding of that, so to speak, by our partner.

Operator

Christophe, thank you very much indeed. Remy Christophe, well, that takes care of the questions that we have from investors and attendees on today's call. If any further questions do make themselves available, I'll, of course, make them available to you post today's meeting. Remy, I know investor feedback, as usual, is particularly important to you, and I will shortly redirect those on the call to give you their thoughts and expectations. Before doing so, maybe, Romeo, I can get back to you for a couple of closing comments.

Speaker 1

I think that's all on our side. We want to say thanks to everyone who joined the call today.

Operator

That's great. Romy, Christophe, thank you once again. The company is asking investors not to close this session as we're now automatically redirect you to the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the company can better understand your views and expectations. This may take a couple of moments to complete, but I'm sure it be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at PensionBee, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation.

Operator

Good afternoon to those of you in London, and good after or good morning to you

Speaker 2

in The U.

Operator

S, I guess.

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Earnings Conference Call
PensionBee Group H2 2024
00:00 / 00:00