Quilter Aktie

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2026 interim results.

And if you haven't already seen it in the wild, I hope you enjoyed the intro with our new TV ad for Money Needs a Plan.

Right on to business. I'll start with a review of the first half highlights and our flow performance, then Mark will take us through the financials. I'll conclude with the growth outlook for our business and why we are very well placed. Then I'll take questions.

I'm very pleased with our performance in the first half of 2026. Core net flows were up to a record GBP 6 billion. That's up over 30% on last year and 2025 was a record too. So, we've accelerated further from a strong base.

Net flows were 9% of opening assets, up a percentage point on last year despite the sharp increase in assets from market growth.

Our operating margin was stable at 30% despite elevated business investment and lower interest rates reducing the income we generated on shareholder capital. Adjusted profit increased 12% to GBP 112 million, good momentum and a strong result.

Earnings per share increased 13% to 6.1p, and the Board has declared an interim dividend of 2.1p, 1/3 of last year's total dividend, in line with our revised distribution policy. And we're progressing well with our share buyback program. We're just under 70% done with the remainder to be completed before the end of the year.

Let's turn to the detail of flows, starting with the group picture. This slide shows the trend in gross new business, outflows and net inflows for the first half over the last 4 years. Gross flows of GBP 11.9 billion in 2026 on the left, continue to demonstrate the strong business momentum with compound growth of 29% over the last 3 years.

2026 gross flows were more than double 2023. The strength of our dual channel model is clear. Outflows in the middle have been broadly consistent over the period. And so, we've seen an excellent growth in net flows on the right where the compound growth rate is over 100%. Net inflows of 9% of opening assets are up a percentage point on last year, and you don't need me to tell you that this is peer-leading performance.

These strong flows are no accident. They are the direct result of the strategic progress we've made, building great propositions and investing in distribution. And that's why I believe the momentum we are delivering is sustainable. I'll say more about this later.

Now let me drill a little deeper into flows by proposition. And the message you should take away from this is that we're delivering excellent franchise growth and market leadership.

Let's start with the platform. Our assets under administration currently stand at GBP 118 billion. That's up from GBP 69 billion in June '23, a compound growth rate of 19%. Over the same period, our platform gross new business flows have grown by around 140% from GBP 4 billion to just under GBP 10 billion with our market share of new business rising to 18% from 12%, that has driven a high single-digit compound growth rate in fee income and an acceleration in fee income growth over the last year to 17%.

I'm often asked what drives this improved performance, and this slide gives some context. First, our corporate advisers have become more productive and are increasingly aligned to delivering our platform and our solutions.

The graph on the left shows that while the number of advisers in our network has been largely stable over the last few years, their productivity has improved significantly from GBP 2.7 million a year to 3.9 million per adviser. And that has meant that the amount of new business they generate onto our platform has increased by around 70% over the period.

Secondly, we have broadened and deepened our relationship with IFA firms. That reflects market recognition of the quality of our propositions. The graph on the right breaks down IFA firms by the amount of flow they generate onto our platform. The 2 key takeaways are the absolute number of firms generating significant flows increased, and we're seeing faster growth from firms generating higher flows.

Let me just focus on the ones that are growing the fastest. In 2023, we had 100 firms generating over GBP 10 million of flows. In 2025, we had 252 million, a 152% increase. And that momentum has continued to build this year, which is why we continue to see the strong growth in new business flows.

And it's clear that this performance comes from a position of market leadership. We are the largest and fastest-growing platform amongst the large advice industry players. We've shown this slide before, and we've updated it for the first quarter data, the most recent we've got for the whole industry.

And from the Q2 reporting we've seen to date, this is a trend that's continuing. The vertical axis is the first quarter gross new business flows in billions. The horizontal axis is the net flows as a percentage of opening assets and platform size is represented by the size of the bubble.

The market is clearly consolidating by flows into a handful of winners. The net flows into the top 3 platforms have averaged over 100% of total industry flows for the last 3 years. And as you can see, we are the market leader. So not surprisingly, our performance is recognized by industry observers. The quote at the top is from Fundscape, whose detailed research on the platform industry earlier this year highlighted Quota as one of their expected industry winners.

Turning to our solutions business. We've built the leading fund manager for advice platform flows. We offer both MPS and fund of fund solutions with MPS increasingly the preferred investment vehicle for most of the industry. As you can see, we've delivered compound growth of 37% in our Wealth Select NPS since June 2023. Our market share of industry assets in the green bubbles has continued to grow. And on the right, you can see a marked pickup in revenues this year.

What's clear is that our solutions revenues have been held back in recent years by assets switching from active to passive and fund of funds into MPS in line with industry trends. Today, the impact of that has largely worked itself through. So, going forward, we expect revenue growth to correlate more strongly with asset growth.

Now if we dig a bit deeper into MPS. Here too, we enjoy market leadership. This slide shows the larger MPS players across the industry at the end of Q1, the most up-to-date industry data. We are clearly the largest and again, one of the fastest growing. The story behind flows into our MPS is not just about distribution to our own advisers. It may not be widely appreciated, but our NPS was originally built to meet the needs of independent financial advisers. In fact, around 56% of our NPS assets are from our IFA distribution channel. So, this product is clearly meeting the needs of this market.

Turning now to Quilter Cheviot. We've had a strong start to the year. AuM has grown by 11% compound over the last 3 years. Gross new business inflows have been trending up nicely. You can see the pickup this year. And overall, they've increased by 16% compound since 2023, and we've grown revenues by 5% compound over that time. And again, we've seen a marked pickup over the last 12 months.

But I believe we can do more. I want to achieve a net inflow rate of at least mid-single-digit levels and an operating margin in the mid-20s. We're applying the lessons learned from repositioning of our platform and solutions businesses to these operations. We've sharpened our position in the market, supported by new propositions.

And earlier this year, we've successfully restructured the financial planning force in Quilter Cheviot to drive adviser productivity, and we're starting to see the benefits of this. And of course, we'll continue to invest to make this a stronger business with the acquisition of GillenMarkets, an example of that.

So in conclusion, we've got an incredibly strong, fast-growing franchise, and we're the market leader in places where scale matters. As you can see from the stats on this slide, virtually all the flows generated from our adviser network go onto our platform.

Across the top 30 IFA firms using our platform, our market share of new business has increased by 22 percentage points. And that's why we're taking about 50% of the total net flows being generated across the industry.

In Quilter Solutions, we've now got 13% of the MPS market, and Quilter Cheviot remains #1 in net flows versus our listed peers. We're seeing increasing market consolidation of flows into a handful of the strongest industry players, a breakaway pack, if you will, and Quilter is the leader of that pack.

But over to Mark for the financials.

Thank you, Steven, and good morning, everyone.

We delivered continued strong financial performance in the first half of 2026. Let me start with 3 key messages. One, we achieved revenue growth of 12%. That was driven by excellent growth of 16% in net management fees and 6% growth in other revenue with that partly offset by lower interest income on shareholder capital.

Two, costs are in line with the guidance I set out in March as we continue to invest in the growth of the business. And three, our balance sheet remains in very good shape with a strong solvency position and healthy level of holding company cash.

Let's get into the detail of my usual analysis of our P&L dynamics. Starting top left, core net flows of GBP 6 billion were, as you heard from Steven, 32% higher than an already strong comparator in 2025. Flows in positive markets meant that average AuMA was up 21%.

Top right, you can see revenues grew 12% to GBP 379 million. Costs, bottom left, were up 13% to GBP 267 million, reflecting inflation and business investment. As a result, adjusted profit increased by 12% to GBP 112 million with a stable operating margin of 30%. And we reported adjusted diluted earnings per share of 6.1p, an increase of 13%.

Let's now turn to revenue by segment. In the Affluent segment, revenues grew 13%, a good performance. Pleasingly, net management fees were higher on both administered and managed assets, growing 17% and 21%, respectively. Margins were in line with guidance. And as a reminder, revenue margin attrition in the Affluent businesses has resulted from 3 adviser and client-led factors.

First, in our Solutions business, the success of Wealth Select reflects what has been a market-wide shift from fund of funds towards MPS. Second, in the platform, our strong flows from both large IFAs and quarter partner firms are generally at a lower margin than stock. And third, as average client holdings on the platform have also grown around 50% over the last 3 years to around GBP 210,000 today, together with the effect of Family Linking, the impact of tiered client charges has reduced the margin.

But these dynamics are positive outcomes for the business. More customers and more money on both the platform and in our solutions, which has driven the year-on-year growth in net management fees.

High Net Worth revenues also achieved good growth. Net management fees grew 12% to GBP 111 million, and advice fees grew 20% to GBP 12 million. Revenue margins in High Net Worth were near stable year-on-year. The revenue margin will be higher than the Affluent platform and solutions business lines by nature of the more bespoke higher-touch proposition.

Turning now to costs. I'm pleased to report that the group operating margin remained flat even while total costs increased year-on-year as we invested in the future growth of the business. The table on the left is our usual first half 2026 on first half 2025 comparison. The waterfall on the right summarizes the main cost changes from H2 '25 as my cost guidance for this year was based on the second half 2025 run rate.

The main cost changes in the first half of the year came from inflation and investment into the business. These included costs associated of building out our data and technology functionality and continued support to grow our brand presence, Quilter Invest and the Quilter Academy. Reductions principally came from the final benefits of our simplification program, which we completed at the end of 2025.

In terms of my expectations for the full year, I continue to be comfortable with the cost guidance I provided back in March. This gets you to a figure somewhere between GBP 530 million to GBP 540 million with the actual outcome likely towards the higher end of the range provided market-sensitive revenues remain at current levels.

Again, I underline that the current rate of investment, excluding acquisition activity, won't increase to this extent every year. Our longer-term guidance of inflation plus a few percentage points remains unchanged. I firmly believe that we should be able to get our operating margin to the mid-30s, but I'm not putting a timeline to that.

So, putting the segment revenues and group costs together, this slide shows the segmental contribution to group profitability. In Affluent, we maintained strong growth trajectory with profit up 9% to GBP 86 million and High Net Worth delivered profit of GBP 29 million, up a very healthy 21% year-on-year.

The operating margin improved by 2 percentage points in High Net Worth. In Affluent, the operating margin declined by 1 percentage point as it incurred most of the increased branding and other investment costs.

As we've underlined before, this part of our business is very scalable. So ultimately, we expect an improvement in operating margin over time. Across the business, we know there is more operating leverage to come as we focus on the management of our cost base alongside strategic investment to drive growth and further efficiency.

Now let me turn to the balance sheet. As you'd expect, we've maintained a strong solvency ratio and cash position. The solvency ratio increased marginally over the period with financing costs and the interim dividend offset by IFRS profit and the benefit of market variances.

In terms of cash, we returned GBP 54 million in the period through the share buyback program. And we made capital contributions of GBP 71 million, reflecting the cost of funding the EBT as well as our ongoing investment within the business to support our distribution capabilities. This was offset by cash remittances from subsidiaries.

On the right, you can see we've got around GBP 360 million of cash available before the payment of the interim dividend and the conclusion of the GBP 100 million share buyback program. That leaves us with a sensible buffer to cover contingencies, liquidity management and business investments while retaining balance sheet optionality. So, our balance sheet remains in good shape.

The Board declared an interim dividend of 2.1p per share. That's 1/3 of last year's total cash dividend in line with our revised distribution policy, and that represents an increase of 5% on the 2025 interim dividend. And as of the 31st of July, we have completed over GBP 68 million of the GBP 100 million surplus capital being returned via share buyback this year.

Let me conclude with our usual guidance slide. As you'll notice, we have updated our long-term guidance on net flows. We are frequently asked if the 4% to 5% ambition for the group remains relevant as our flow performance over the past 3 years has seen us continually exceed that guidance. We've materially beaten that again this reporting period.

From the position of strength, we have placed ourselves in, our expectation is that we should continue to achieve peer-leading net flows, which we expect to be above 4% to 5% for the foreseeable future. More broadly, our expectations for the operating environment in the second half of 2026 to remain constructive, and our revenue margin guidance is unchanged.

I spoke earlier in detail about cost expectations for the remainder of the year. We anticipate a higher revenue contribution in the second half from the benefit of our first half flows momentum and positive markets. So, assuming steady markets, we currently anticipate that second half adjusted profit will be around a mid-single-digit percentage point above that of the first half.

Let me finish by summarizing our 3 key points from our results. First, we delivered solid growth in overall revenue, driven by increased net management fees. Second, costs are in line with guidance as we continue to support investment for future growth with a stable operating margin. And thirdly, our balance sheet remains in very good shape, providing a strong base to support our growth ambitions as well as provide returns to shareholders.

And with that, let me hand back to Steven.

Thank you, Mark.

I'll kick off this last section with a reminder, everything at Quilter starts with advice. As our new TV advert shows, we firmly believe that money needs a plan. And we cover the waterfront of U.K. advised wealth through 2 customer propositions, our scaled platform and market-leading NPS together with our fund-to-fund solutions and a bespoke investment service built around high-touch relationships provided by our investment managers who offer personalized portfolios in Quilter Cheviot.

Across our scaled businesses, our platform has delivered net inflows of 10% of opening assets over the last 2 years with AUA up 28% over the last 12 months. And our solutions business has also delivered a 28% increase in AuM over the last year with net inflows equivalent to 10% of opening assets. Our bespoke proposition, which is inherently less scalable given its high-touch nature, delivered a 17% increase in AuM.

As I covered earlier, we are leaders in a market that has strong growth potential as independent data on this slide shows. Fundscape expects the platform industry to grow at 13% compound to 2030. And with industry assets increasingly concentrating into a handful of leaders, we expect to outperform that growth rate. And as you can see on the right, the discretionary wealth industry is expected to grow at around 6% compound over the same period. And here, too, we expect to outperform.

The 4 key drivers underpinning this growth are increasing consolidation of flows in the industry to a handful of market leaders, the need to encourage a higher level of investment by U.K. households to ensure a good standard of living and retirement, a widening of the remit of the advice industry to help create a nation of investors through targeted support, simplified advice and improvements in adviser of productivity and the expected level of intergenerational wealth transfer over the next 20 to 30 years with financial advice needed to support this happening in a tax-efficient manner.

So, we've got a strong competitive position in a market with a huge growth opportunity. That's an attractive position to be in. And we see significant opportunity from investment in technology and AI tools to drive our business harder. There are 2 areas of focus, improving adviser productivity, which will bring more assets onto our platform and into our solutions and re-engineering our business to drive down the cost of serving clients.

As you saw from the first part of my presentation, our work to improve adviser productivity has delivered clear improvement in flows. We've now rolled out market-leading AI tools, which are saving advisers' time, improving their efficiency, supporting better client journeys and more accurate targeting.

And the next stage is the end-to-end adviser ecosystem that I told you about back in March. We'll be rolling this out over the next 12 months or so. This will help adviser firms to run more profitably and serve more clients and will help our clients enhancing their experience with smoother, more intuitive digital advice. The goal is full end-to-end technology integration between our platform and the tools that the advisers need and seamless client data management.

Secondly, we can improve operationally across Quilter. While both our platform and solutions businesses are already highly scalable, the technology investments we're making will make them even more so, reducing the marginal cost of managing incremental assets. We're embedding AI across our entire business, and we see opportunities to deliver further scale benefits.

So let me conclude with our equity story. Quilter is the market leader with compelling propositions in an attractive market with structural growth opportunities. Our dual channel distribution model is translating this into peer-leading flow performance.

Flows are concentrating in the winners, which supports our operating margin progression and technology and AI investments offer further opportunities for efficiency and the potential to drive operating margin to at least the mid-30s in time. And we're confident that we will continue to deliver attractive returns for shareholders.

Thank you. Let's open up to questions.

Okay. We'll go to questions now, and we'll start with questions on the lines before taking any questions on the web.

Operator, can we take the first question on the telephones, please?

[Operator Instructions] First question is from Andrew Lowe with Citi.

There's been lots of noise about increasing competition for advisers in the first half of the year. What are you seeing here? And have you been losing any advisers to Söderberg who seem to be making headlines about their hiring? If you could quantify what your adviser churn is within your restricted financial planning business, that would be really helpful. And just help us to understand how H1 compares to prior years. That would be great.

Thanks, Andy. So, look, the market is a competitive market and always has been, but we have not seen any material change in our churn rates, more advisers leaving us. We've guided before that -- we're not going to give the exact number. We've guided before that's around 10%, which of advisers leave through retirements and through moves in the market in a year.

We have shown good net growth over the last reporting period as we have prior. That comes through our adviser academy and through the net adviser recruitment that we're doing. We have a net positive adviser recruitment of bringing in experienced advisers as well to our business. So, we're not seeing any material changes to the behaviors that we have seen in the past.

Next question is from Ben Bathurst from RBC Capital Markets.

Actually, 2 areas, if I may. Just starting on capacity. Thanks for the disclosure in terms of the growth in number of IFA firms that you're working with on Slide 7. Presumably, there's also an opportunity for you to improve the concentration of assets that you manage typically for IFAs. I wondered if you could just give an idea around where that sits currently and where you think it might be able to get to? And is there scope do you think for MPS to catch up with the platform in terms of the typical concentration?

And then secondly, if I may, on FY '26 guidance. I just wondered to what extent does the guidance that you've given this morning incorporate scope to revisit the economics of the client cash and discretionary portfolios in Quilter Cheviot just in the way that we've seen several DFM peers announced in recent months? And are there any moving parts there that we should be aware of?

Thanks, Ben. I'll take those questions. So, the first question in terms of -- I use the term capacity, we talk about share of wallet and market share. So, we're very pleased with how we're doing in the IFA space. You can see our market share improving and has been over multiple time periods.

One of the things that's really a big focus for us is becoming the primary platform for more and more advisers. And again, you can see from some of the data that we've shown that, that slide that you referred to that show how we are starting to increase significantly the number of large advisers using our platform, and that is sort of a deeper share of wallet.

We still think there's a lot of opportunity to go further there. So that job is not done, but that has built a very good base for us. And I think that bodes really well for the future because those advisers -- once advisers have really adopted you as their primary platform and are putting 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% of their market share using you as their core, they really build their business and their processes around your platform.

And it's quite hard to unseat them. And that's why we've worked so hard at that because we think it is a great position to be in. In terms of -- but we do, to be clear, that is still a big focus of ours to carry on to become the primary platform for even more advisers, and they are where we -- there are advisers where we're the second or the third choice. And obviously, our sales team's focus is to make our platform the first choice for those advisers.

In terms of the MPS market share, so MPS market share is sort of 13%, I guess, and you're sort of talking about the platform at 18%. I think realistically, that number will be lower than the platform. We do want to drive it higher, and we think that we can. But some of the very large advice firms will run their own models and will run their own MPS offerings and things like that. And that is one of the areas that they will then not outsource.

The medium-sized and the small-sized firms, absolutely, that is a core market for products like Wealth Select, and we do phenomenally well. And we're sort of continuing to push that upwards. But because there are a group of advisers who are specifically part of their strategy and the large ones are running their own MPS models for their core clients, I don't think they'll ever be able to catch the MPS share to the platform market share.

Sorry, apologies, next question. Sorry, the next question was about the guidance and specifically about the cash in cash in QC. So maybe just take that question in full, and then I'll come to the guidance part of it.

So, in terms of client Cash, "the caveat" we first of all, we're very comfortable with the value that we provide to our clients. We think we have an excellent outcome to clients. If you look at the rates that clients get, including with any charges that they are on cash. And we're very transparent in also how we disclose things.

But we are reviewing some of the stuff that the FCA has said in terms of their positioning, in terms of the consultation paper that they've got out, and we're looking at some of the operational and client impact of making some tweaks to that model, and we are working through that at the moment. But from a financial and guidance perspective, we don't expect that any changes will have a material impact at all, and they are included in the guidance.

Next question is from Alex Bowers with KBW.

Question about the IFA platform space and the level of competition you're seeing in the space and there's an impact on pricing or any pricing changes maybe competitors in the space?

And the second question is just on -- I think in the statement, you kind of flagged the recent change in U.K. political leadership as speculation ahead of the October budget. Is there anything you kind of say around potential impact of that on kind of flows in H2?

Thanks, Alex. So, in terms of competition in the platform space and pricing behavior, it is a competitive market. But as we've shown and you can see from the data yourself, it is a market where clearly winners are emerging, and we are the front of that pack and clearly the winner in the market. That is something that we work very hard to achieve. And it comes down to a range of things.

Actually, when you look specifically at what drives customer and adviser behavior, price is not the most important thing. Typically, it is about service, it is about proposition. It is about support. Price is on the list generally, but in most sort of surveys, price will come in #4 on the list, for example. We offer a great value platform.

But I think platforms that just try to pull the price lever, if your proposition doesn't stack up, I don't think that's really going to work and be effective. But obviously, it is a sort of competitive market. So, we think we offer very good value. But we're not seeing, I think, any material changes in the behavior because of sort of other competitive activity. You've really got to have a good platform to win advisers for.

I think also very importantly, since the consumer duty and some of the sort of more maturing of the market, actually, advisers are realizing that it is all about value and value is a much more -- value for money. It is a much more complicated nuance than just what is the exact basis point price. So, I think that is important to understand.

In terms of the U.K. politics and speculation and impact on flows, look, what we really want is we want stability, and that's why we've made a comment, and we've said that we believe that if you want to encourage an investment in the market and to look after individuals and to provide a strong and resilient U.K. economy, I think what you really need is you need consistency and stability.

Continuous speculation is very unhelpful and continuous changes in long-term regimes like pension regimes, which are sort of a long-term commitment, effectively a contract between the sort of government and the citizens about how tax works on pensions. That's not something that should be changed every year or speculated that's going to be changed every year. That's really, really important.

Having said that, our business is an advised business. And while we did see an increase last year in outflows at the time of some market speculation because of particularly speculation about the tax for cash and pensions, you've seen our numbers for last year and that numbers are incredibly strong.

I think the D2C businesses find it's a bigger impact than the advised businesses because advisers do talk to their clients and clients if they do want to react to something they're reading in the newspaper, which is speculative. Advisers, in most cases, are able to explain and sort of give clients the right answer, which is not to act on speculation.

We, in fact, have published some research just for interest, where we surveyed a whole lot of people in the pension market. And I think 60% or 2/3 of the people who withdraw money out of their pensions in last year's budget cycle, the speculation regretted. So that's really important.

But that is what we are talking about. I can't be absolutely certain about what impact they could or may be on flows. But I think given our advice business, we're the most resilient to it, but we do strongly encourage stability in the market.

Next question is from James Allen with Berenberg.

Two questions from me, if I can. First one, how do you measure the return on the increased marketing investment in areas like the Quilter Nation Series, given presumably the returns there are not as easy to measure as if you were a D2C platform, for example, where you just measure based on customer growth. Obviously, you've got the advisers, which maybe sit in between.

Second question, the MPS market feels like it's becoming more competitive. There are some small firms trying to cut to get the flows moving in the right direction. Is that putting more pressure on fees in the MPS product range than maybe you had seen in previous years?

Okay. Thanks very much, James. It's Mark here. I'll just comment firstly on the marketing spend. Look, the measurement on it, one of the key things that we're doing is trying to get sort of better consumer awareness of our brand. So, we do look at prompted and unprompted consumer awareness and scores like that. We can see significant pickups. And we've seen -- we had experience of that before.

We think that exposure gives us a lot of retail consumer brand awareness. It also helps with persistency and those sort of things. But to get down to actual hard numbers, I'm sure you can appreciate, which I think is the point of your question, it's actually very hard to measure in actual absolute terms of sort of the data that you can use to measure that. So that's how we look at it.

And our brand awareness coming through from it has been exceptionally encouraging, but you've got to keep spending in order to keep that brand awareness up, which is what we have had experience on before. You remember when we sponsored RFU in 2016 to about 2020, that sort of period. So, we've got experience of this. We can see how it trends -- it helps trends improve both in persistency and in new customer acquisition. But it's hard -- I can't give you a precise number on.

Thanks, Mark. I mean, James, just to add to that, we've got a business called Quilter Invest, which is now in the space of helping customers directly with targeted support and things like that. So, the brand investment, which, as Mark says, is the start of a journey. The brand investment will help that business as well, which is really important for us.

In terms of your second question about the MPS market and becoming more competitive, look, we're very comfortable with the strength of our MPS propositions, both in WealthSelect and in QC, we've got very good investment performance. We've been doing this for a long time and the value that we offer is excellent.

I think that we're not seeing any specific challenge or pressure on fees. Our MPS actually does offer very good value. Because of our size and scale, we're able to negotiate very good pricing for the underlying managers and the customers get the benefit of that. So, we think that our MPS is offering fantastic value. We do our value assessments every year, and it's got great performance. And it's also got very strong reporting, nicely integrated into our platform, all sorts of things. So, we are very confident about the strength of our MPS propositions.

Next question.

Next question is from Christiane Holstein from Bank of America.

My first one is on adviser productivity. So, GBP 3.9 billion is quite a strong step-up already. I just want to ask if this is already the benefit of AI or what else has been driving this? And then I just wanted to check, do you still continue to expect AI to essentially double adviser productivity over the medium term?

Then my second question was just on some peer commentary that they've been seeing case volumes increase, although case size decline just driven by the macro and political uncertainty in the U.K. at the moment. I was just wondering how does this compare to what you've been seeing? And if you're seeing different, what has been driving this?

Thanks very much. So, the adviser productivity number has actually -- there is some AI in there, but very small because in terms of when we rolled out some of our AI tools for advisers, which is only at the beginning of this year. That productivity number has been driving up over multiple years.

So, it is mostly down to focusing on quality advisers. It is about some other non-AI changes we've made to advice processes and systems. It is about the back book transfers and getting advisers to focus on consolidating assets from non-Quilter platforms onto Quilter platforms and things like that. That's been the historic driver or drivers of the adviser productivity growth over the last few years.

We think the AI benefit is still to come and some of the other benefits of the new technology that we're going to be putting in place for advisers, which -- some of which is AI, some of which is not, some which is better process and avoiding rekeying and really simplifying and streamlining advisers' time.

The comment about can adviser productivity double? We do believe that, that can happen. That's not necessarily in the GBP 3.9 million number. We've talked about that in the number of clients that advisers would have, for example. Advisers in the U.K. serve 100 to 150 clients on average. They spend about 2/3 of their time not in front of clients. Those are some of the stats that are out there.

We think that with better technology and AI, you can reduce the amount of time that advisers are spending not with clients, and that will give them the opportunities to increase adviser productivity materially. Now we're not giving an exact number. And the objective is to turn 150 to 180 first and then 200, those sorts of step-ups. So, 10%, 15%, 20% gains in productivity would be fantastic. Over time, that may amount to a doubling of adviser productivity.

But the one further point just to point out is I wouldn't do an exact translation from that onto the pound number of adviser productivity because the advisers will -- as they get more productive, they'll start picking up probably smaller clients, and that will be how the advice gap is dealt with. So, certain clients that are currently a bit too small to get face-to-face advice. That's one of the benefits and one of the things that we think will happen.

So, it won't be an exact one-for-one translation when you go into a pound basis, as I'm sure you can imagine. But still, it's a very significant opportunity. It is easier for us to increase adviser productivity by 15% or 20% than to increase adviser numbers given the lack of advisers in the market as an example. So that's such a big focus for us.

In terms of your question about case size-based volumes, that was a bit of a surprise to us that what you're referring to, you saw elsewhere. We have seen an increase in both case numbers and in case sizes. And that is what we would have expected because the vast majority of business in the industry is transfers of existing pension assets. Ans that's about 60% of the flow, and transfers of existing assets are related to market levels and market levels are up.

So it should be expected that with rising market levels, people consolidating pensions as they're nearing 50s, talking to an adviser, consolidating pensions they've got from their accumulated or scattered around from working lifetimes, getting ready for a drawdown, we would expect that those case sizes would be increasing, and that is what we have seen.

Next question is from Michael Sanderson from Barclays.

So just a couple, if possible. First of all, when we were talking about the margin pieces, you obviously pulled out the 3 different themes and tiering effects being the last of those. I was wondering, do you quantify or are you able to quantify sort of the impact of tiering effects and what -- if we see another 10% growth in AUA, what that means straight through to the revenue piece if we try to split out the other pieces that are factoring in the margin at the moment?

And the second one, you obviously made reference to the Quilter Invest proposition. I mean very recently launched. But I guess, from my perspective, just interesting to know sort of early messaging you might say around that and where we should see that flow through and where you would hope to see that in the various metrics that you're talking to on an ongoing basis, please?

So, Mike, just on the margin and the tiering and what a 10% increase, I don't have precise numbers in front of me to actually sort of quote to you now. I mean it has obviously has a slight impact and it reduces overall. What we're also finding is having a sort of quite a big impact in a positive way or we certainly see in a positive way is the family linking capabilities that we have on our platform.

And the -- I mean, I was quoting earlier on in my script, just some of what's happened to some of the averages across sort of individual accounts and you put that into the family linked accounts, which actually forms quite a considerable proportion of the book. You're having some even sort of bigger impacts.

But if we do have sort of about a 10% increase in sort of average client levels, well, there will be a slight reduction in the margin as a consequence of that. But it also sort of depends on the profile of when they actually hit different tiering levels because they sort of kick in at different sort of things. So, I'm not able to give you a precise number on that at the moment, but that's more or less some of the dynamics that we've seen in the tiering.

Thank you, Mark. And then the second question on Quilter Invest. So, it is -- Quilter Invest is something we're really excited about, but it is obviously very early days. We have -- we've just launched Targeted Support a few months ago, and it is something that we are expecting to see grow over time. But ultimately, this is a fledgling operation.

In terms of where you will see this in metrics, I mean, I think probably just to be realistic, Quilter Invest is a -- it's a 10-year strategy for us. It's not something that you're materially going to see over the next 1 or 2 or 3 years, especially given the size of our current established channels, which are very big and very fast growing.

So, Quilter Invest is something that's really interesting for us, but you need to just understand the context. It's starting out very, very small. When we bought the business, it had a negligible client base. It had a proposition that we are building on and using that as a foundation to build something from.

Next question.

Next question is from Greg Simpson with BNP Paribas.

I guess there still is a bit of a marketplace about the impact of AI on financial advice demand. I was wondering if you could maybe talk about the kind of client growth Quilter is currently seeing in percentage terms and maybe the mix of flows between existing and new clients?

And then the second question, there was a recent article about Quilter changing the fee model a little bit for the national advice arm, I think, including cutting initial charges by about 1%. I just wanted to check in what drove that decision? And do you think it could impact adviser retention and productivity if they maybe earning a bit less for new flows?

Thanks for those questions. Look, we don't disclose the exact client number growth, but I can tell you that it is very good. We have -- and in fact, we've added more clients last year than this period than we did over the prior period. So, we are continuing to see very strong client growth. We're not seeing an impact of AI on client growth or any of those things. And we don't really expect that, that's going to become an issue in the future.

In terms of a little bit of your other question about the split between new clients and top-ups, it's about half-half in terms of the flows in terms of where money comes from, sort of money from brand-new clients versus money top-ups and regular investments from existing clients.

Then your second question was? I forgot to scribble it down.

QFP.

QFP, yes. So, to be honest, actually, there was a very small change that was overreported by the press when we made that change. We have set of tramlines for advisers, and we made some minor tweaks to it, and it was reported as we've increased our fees and things. And I think that actually, it was a bit of a sort of red herring. It hasn't been a material change.

Next question is from Vivek Raja from Investec.

I wanted to ask about Targeted Support. I appreciate it's early days. I wonder what are you doing that you think is different to your competitors in terms of addressing that market opportunity?

And also, as the government changes once again, I just wonder how does sort of your discussion with the policymaker about what they want to achieve with Targeted Support change? How do you think that, that might change?

I'll take those questions. I may answer the second one first. So, in terms of the new government, look, we believe that the new stakeholders are just as focused as the previous Chancellor on growing the number of investors in the country, on the benefits of Targeted Support and really addressing things. And we've got consistency in things like the city minister as well, which is helpful and supportive.

So, we haven't heard a lot, but we have no indications that there's any difference in focus. I mean the Treasury pushed and supported a retail investment advertising campaign, which we're a part of. Again, we believe that, that will continue to be really important, and we hope and look to expect to see the government continue to support things like that.

I mean that hasn't directly -- we won't see anything positive or negative to that, but we have no indications that anything there will change. And certainly, the industry is very committed to continuing to work with government to make sure that we get people to invest more because that is very good for the country and it is very good for people and people retiring.

In terms of Targeted Support and differences to competitors, look, I don't think there are that many differences. I think most of the companies that are out there doing Targeted Support and those that are still coming are focusing on the cash-to-investment journey. That seems to be the most prevalent journey.

And in that journey, it really is about designing a simple process, making sure you screen out people who've got debt and issues where they shouldn't be investing, but people who've got excess cash to take them through a simple journey to help them invest, figure out how much they can invest and then help them pick a fund. So that's what we're doing.

And to be fair, a lot of other people are doing that. Some people are using different models. Some people are trying to do it with various screens that you enter with structured questions. Others are trying with AI chatbot-type approaches, et cetera. But ultimately, the cash-to-investment and helping find the right risk profile fund is the predominant Targeted Support use, which is what we're doing.

There are some other companies that are doing things in the Targeted Support space about pension drawdowns and things that would be more appropriate for D2C businesses or businesses with very big orphan books, which is not us. But having said that, we think Targeted Support is a very big opportunity. I don't think it's one where you have to be unique to be able to take advantage of that opportunity.

The one thing that we are doing differently that I think is important about Targeted Support, which we said before, is we are doing this in partnership with advisers. And the benefit there is that where a client comes to an adviser and they've got too little money to invest -- to get advice, sorry, to get full advice, a client with GBP 20,000, for example, who wants help to invest.

What actually, we built our Targeted Support offering such that advisers can refer them to Quilter Invest. The client can invest that way, but the adviser keeps sight of that client. The client will be ring-fenced. And if the client ever wants help, they get referred straight back to that adviser, and we guarantee the advisers that we will never try to service those clients on an advice basis because they've introduced them to us and things like that.

And effectively, it's our adviser incubation model, which is getting very positive feedback from advisers and very good early signs of take-up from advice firms. We think that is something that is compelling and unique about our offering and one of the things we're excited about.

Next question is from David McCann with Deutsche Bank.

Two questions from me that haven't already been asked. The first one is on revenue margin guidance. You touched in the remarks, Mark, that the guidance is overall unchanged. But if I look at the first half movements in the actual margins achieved, the pace of decline did appear to be higher than, say, the 1 bps that you traditionally talked about in the admin fees. It's probably more like 2 bps annualized. And similarly, the solutions margin was close to the low 30s and tracking towards the low 30s. So, a little bit of pressure in the first half. So maybe you can talk about the drivers there that have caused that. And does that 1 bps guidance in the admin margin, for example, still hold going forward? That's question one.

And secondly, within Quilter Cheviot, the number of RFPs reported did fall quite meaningfully in the first half from 64 at the year-end to 47. So, what's going on there?

Thanks, David. David, on the revenue margin guidance, I mean, the sort of the trend that we've seen is pretty much in line with our guidance, and that's still what we expect. But there obviously are a few factors that will come into it, and I touched on a few of those in the presentation earlier.

There are going to be mix effects, which are often client- and adviser-led, and that's particularly relevant when it comes to the Quilter Investors propositions, whether they're going into WealthSelect or Cirilium, and we've provided quite a bit of disclosures around the various movements over there. So that drives quite a bit of that.

And then within those, whether it's blend, active or passive solutions that they're choosing. Increasingly, and we've been saying this for a while now, we see more advisers and clients choosing the blend or the passive solutions within WealthSelect rather than Cirilium Active at the other extreme. And that has an impact on the margins overall. We're in sort of the low 30s on that. I think I had guided towards that sort of level within Quilter Investors for a while now.

On the platform, there's probably been a little bit of a pickup, and I'm talking in sort of decimal places here in terms of the 1 basis point in comparison to guidance, which we do see a little bit of fluctuation in the guidance in comparison to actual. And that has been largely driven by the increase in average holdings, which I also commented on in my script.

And really, the guidance around that, if we see continued increased stock market gains coming through, which is increasing average client holdings quite significantly, then we'll probably be a little bit worse than the guidance that I've guided towards.

If market levels are more or less where they currently are, then I expect my guidance to hold, and there's going to be some fluctuation and degree of fluctuation around that. Some of it's within our control and some of a factor of market movements, which overall is positive for the business if we're getting more pounds, actual pound notes, for the assets that we're managing. That's really what I'm expecting there.

I mean -- but David, the key is the operating margin in our business and the operating leverage. So even if market levels go up faster and it sort of means 1 to 2 or something as an example, basis points over a period, that is not sort of a massive concern for us because of the operating leverage in our business. So -- and we believe we can drive that up further, as we've said, because of the benefits and opportunities with things like AI and the core scale anyway.

In terms of your QC RFP question, that was what we actually talked about at the first half. If you recall, in March, we talked about how we were doing some restructuring of our advisers within QFP -- sorry, within QC, QCFP, we have lots of here with QC financial planners. And that was where we looked and we did a productivity review.

There were some changes made, and 12 advisers left as a result of that process, and that happened in sort of between March and June, and that is the delta. But that has improved the quality of our business. It has driven up productivity. We want to make sure that the advisers are the right advisers for QC, and that is the review that we've done, but it is what we told you about.

Right. And just to follow up on that. So, would you anticipate that had an implication for the advice revenues in that segment in the future? Or with the productivity review, would you say that's going to be negligible?

No, I think it is, in fact -- revenues are, in fact, going to go up. Those were -- I mean, those advisers who weren't covering the cost of their seats, the productivity of those advisers is very, very low. And so, we do not expect any negative impact on revenue, but there is a positive impact on costs for that thing in the scheme of things; it is a small benefit. But certainly, I mean, that is again within our guidance, but you don't need to be too concerned about that.

The other point is, obviously, we're looking to grow adviser numbers from this. It is about getting the right people. Within QC, we focus a little bit less on the absolute headcount, but we focus on the quality of that is with RFPs and with investment managers. And that is really what we're doing. We're making sure we have absolutely the best people for that market and for the types of clients that we should be dealing with in that market, and that's what we're doing with QC.

Okay. We have 2 questions or 2 participants and the questions on the web. The first is from Michael Christelis, a 2-part question.

Firstly, asking what current level of RFP assets under advice are sitting on other platforms, i.e., what's the current back book on other platforms?

And secondly, also then asking about the current pipelines of investment managers who may join Quilter Cheviot, how does that look relative to recent years, given that some peers have been going through regulatory issues.

Okay. Thanks, Mike. So, the first question in terms of assets on other platforms, that is -- it's a few billion. We still guide towards about GBP 1 billion a year of flows from other platforms, and we expect that will continue.

The number that is on other platforms moves up and down a bit based on the bits that you've moved on, but new advisers that are joining our network. So, when new advisers join, they obviously join experienced advisers with assets elsewhere, and then those assets move over time. So, it is a few billion, and it seems to stay at about that number, and we seem to bring about 1 billion in a year through those transfers.

The second question on the pipeline of QCIMs. As I said a moment ago, I mean, our real focus is on getting the good quality of IMs. So, there is turmoil, as you pointed out, in the market. That does create an opportunity for us, which we are obviously working on. We are really focused, though, on making sure we get that we add really strong, really high-quality IMs to our business. It's not a numbers-chasing game, but it's a quality-chasing game for us. But yes, we do see that there are opportunities, and that is something that we are working on.

Second question from Abid Hussain at Panmure Liberum. One on productivity and one on margins. The first on productivity, your quarter channel productivity has jumped to 3.9 million per adviser, up 18% year-on-year. How much further can that go before you hit a natural ceiling? And what is the read across for Chia investment manager productivity as you apply the same playbook here?

And second question on margins, which I'll come to after you've answered that one.

Okay. All right. Sorry. So, look, I think we've already commented a bit on that 3.9 million number. We do see upside still to that for a range of reasons. We talked about the number of -- We talked about the adviser productivity. But we have also said before, and just to be clear and to repeat, those are 2 elements within that 3.9% that are worth noting.

One element, as I've said before, is because a large part of the business is transfers. So, there is a market level in that, and the market levels are up. So, if markets are up 10%, that number can easily go up by probably 5% to 6% just because of market levels, because about 50% of the assets are transfers, vice versa the other way. So just note, obviously, if there's a stock market crash, I would expect the 3.9% to go down the other way. So that's just how some of that stuff works. So that's one of the drivers.

And the other thing is we are recruiting new advisers from our adviser academy, and the faster growth that we get from advisers from our academy, obviously, adviser academy advisers come in with a lower productivity, but we're also continuing to recruit experienced advisers as well. So, I'm not sort of guiding that it's going to be down, but I'm just saying that there are multiple factors within it. But having said that, we still believe that there is positive upside in that number. But it may be, depending on market cycles, it may move around a bit from time to time.

In terms of your next question, Quilter Cheviot, that is a -- so that's sort of what's the equivalent for IMs. As I sort of touched on, we do track that, but that's not a number we're talking about externally today. But that is one of our big focus areas is about driving up productivity and efficiency of our own advisers within QC.

One of the things we've talked about in the past that we've been doing is we have got some clients who are sitting in discretionary portfolios who we believe would be better served because at the smaller end in MPS portfolios, and we're busy moving them within QC at the moment. That reduces revenue margin, but actually increases operating margin for us because of the cost dynamics, and it frees up capacity of our investment managers to take on more rail discretionary DFM clients, the larger clients, et cetera.

So those are the types of initiatives that we are doing that will then drive-up adviser or IM assets AuM per IM, for example, which should be how we would look at that. So that is our focus there, too.

Second point from Abid was on operating margin. The move from a 30% operating margin today to at least a mid-30s ambition is worth roughly GBP 40 million of profit on the current revenues, material earnings upside before any growth. What's the realistic time frame to get there? And which levers AI, scale, mix, the heavy lifting?

Abid, I'll pick up on that one. Our margin is obviously a function of the numerator and denominator in profit and revenues. And there are a combination of factors that influence both, some of which impact both of them.

Net flow is obviously a big part of it, and our distribution capabilities and the ability to carry on attracting very strong net client cash flow contribute towards it. Market performance, obviously, in the underlying asset base, given that most of our revenue is generated through a basis points charge on the assets that we manage, obviously, has a big impact on it, and then our containment of costs. And I've guided there in terms of what the expectations are there.

Now some of those things are very much in our control, some are partially in our control, and some we have very little control over. And it really depends on the timing and length to pay off those. But when we've set out this guidance, I'm not expecting it's going to be in the immediate future. I'm not expecting it's going to be in the long-term future. It's going to be somewhere in between. But again, that's going to be dependent on sort of market conditions and what happens more on a macro level rather than anything else.

Okay. One, I think, final question on the web at the moment from Nick Judge at Man Group, noting the great sort of flows, but also noting that the revenue-generating staff-based costs were up 18% in the half. Does that suggest competition for advisers is elevated currently? Or is that more reflective of the quantum of advisers you're hiring?

Yes. So, most of the revenue-generating staff-based cost isn't really around advisers because most of our advisers are self-employed given the network model that we have. A lot of that has more to do with other revenue-generating staff like the investment managers. We also put sort of the distribution teams within that line in terms of the external disclosures that we make, et cetera.

So, what affects -- and you would have seen that the number of IMs, for example, has gone up slightly. We also acquired a small business in Dublin, which is included in there. It doesn't have a material impact on it, but it does sort of shift a little bit more. And we have been increasing our focus on distribution activities and hiring in those sort of areas.

So, it's just more effective of a lot more of the other strategies that we've already spoken about, Nick, in terms of the investments we're making and where we're channeling our efforts. And in some respects, sort of see costs that we incur in terms of increasing the people that actually have a direct interaction with clients and advisers and improving revenues has kind of been, if I can put in good costs or certainly better costs to have than maybe in other parts of the business. And that's really reflective of the effort that we're putting into those areas.

Okay. That's it from the web. There's no other questions on the phones. I think we're probably at an end there. If you want to summarize, Steven just to...

Yes. Thank you very much. I mean, we're very pleased with how we performed in the first half and thank you all for your support.

All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2025 results presentation. Before I start, we are all conscious with the very uncertain global political environment that we see, geopolitical environment. Across Quilter, our thoughts are with our colleagues and our clients in the Middle East right now.

Let me get on to the results. I will start with a review of the year. Then I will cover our business highlights and talk through our flow performance. Mark will take us through the financials, and then I want to spend some time today talking about the growth outlook and the exciting opportunities that we see ahead. After that, we'll finish with Q&A as usual.

I'm very pleased with our strategic and financial performance in 2025. We delivered another good year of strong profit growth from a very strong base in 2024. We saw excellent momentum in flows, taking market share in growing markets. Let me run through the highlights. Core net inflows were up a record -- to record GBP 9 billion, that's 75% higher than 2024. Our operating margin is at 30%, in line with our medium-term goal. Adjusted profit increased 6% to GBP 207 million that reflects higher revenues and good cost management, combined with increased investments. Earnings per share increased 4% to 11p and the Board has declared a dividend for the year of 6.3p, an increase of 7%. We've also announced the share buyback and a change in distribution policy, which Mark will cover later.

Let's now drill down into the flows. This slide shows gross new business, outflows and net inflows for the last 2 years. New business flows on the left have continued to build momentum with sequential period-on-period improvement across both channels. Our flows in the middle temporarily picked up with a protracted speculation and uncertainty around the U.K. budget in November last year. But even so, we've seen consistent improvement in net flows on the right. And given the market share gains we achieved last year and the current level of net flows of around GBP 2 billion a quarter feels broadly sustainable.

Our strong flows are no accident. It's the direct result of the strategic progress we've made. First, in distribution. We've delivered flows ahead of our targets. We've added to the number of advisers and adviser firms in our Quilter channel and we've increased their productivity. More than 100 advisers graduated from our academy, and they're now starting to build their books. In High Net Worth, we added investment managers and announced the acquisition of GillenMarkets in Ireland, building out our footprint there.

Next, in propositions, our high-performing WealthSelect MPS is the largest in the market and is now on 6 third-party platforms. And early in the year, we launched smoothed funds with Standard Life. This is a unique product for clients nearing the accumulation or retirement. We've been working on our targeted support proposition, and I'll say more about this shortly. And in High Net Worth, we've added a private market proposition for those wanting alternative asset classes and a new decumulation offering for clients in retirement.

In terms of becoming future fit, we've completed our simplification program, invested in our brand and progressed our advice transformation program. And we started rolling out AI productivity tools to advisers, as you will hear shortly. We've achieved a lot and we're doing it from a position of strength. We're already the U.K.'s largest single adviser platform and the fastest-growing of the large platforms. The vertical axis here shows gross flows of each platform in 2025. The horizontal axis is net flows as a percentage of opening assets and the size of the bubble is the total AuMA. We are clearly the largest and fastest growing. This gives us scale in a market where scale matters.

Now what's especially gratifying is that we've been increasing flows onto our platform consistently month-on-month, year-on-year, as you can see here. The charts show cumulative monthly net flows with Quilter channel in green and the IFA channel in gray. As you can see, inflows onto the platform from the Quilter channel up 12% year-on-year, and net flows are around 18% of opening balances. Similarly, in the IFA channel, net inflows were up 92% year-on-year, and these are running at 9% of opening balances. The key to delivering results like this is providing a market-leading proposition to customers combined with excellent distribution, and that's been our focus over the last few years.

Let's step back to 2020. Back then, we were only capturing around half the platform flows generated by Quilter Advisers. Following the successful migration to our new platform in 2021, we started focusing on adviser alignment and began reviewing the productivity of our adviser force and we streamlined where appropriate. As you can see on the top right, our adviser force is now smaller, more aligned and far more productive more than doubling the gross flows it generates onto our platform.

In the IFA market, our focus since launch of our new platform was growing market share by deepening our share of wallet with existing relationships and winning new friends. And you can see the success of that in the black line in the bottom right, which combined with the improvement in total flows across the market has driven a trebling of gross flows over the period. There's also a slide in the appendix, which gives a helpful perspective of our performance against the market.

So we've done well, and we've got real momentum, and we're continuing to invest where we see opportunity. There are 3 areas I'm focused on to drive our distribution even further. First, building the advice business of tomorrow. Our advice transformation program is giving advisers the tools to materially increase their productivity serving more customers and bringing in more new business. Quilter partner assets are also growing significantly, and these are assets that are both on our platform and in our solutions. Brand will also play an important role here.

Second, on recruitment. We'll continue to add firms like the 6 we announced earlier this week, and the Quilter Academy will deliver a higher number of graduates this year. Our goal is for the Quilter Academy graduates to offset the natural attrition from adviser retirements so that all the recruitment into the advice business drives net adviser growth. Third, support. We'll continue to invest in the award-winning service and propositions which sit behind our platform and our solutions. This is key for our network and for the broader IFA community.

Now let's turn to our Solutions business. We want to be recognized as the leading asset manager for advised flows. As you know, across the industry, we're seeing a move away from active management towards passive and blend solutions and a trend away from fund to funds towards MPS. That's reflected in what you see on the left. Our growth is biased towards our WealthSelect MPS as well as to passive and blend solutions with outflows in Cirillium Active. The regulatory environment is also encouraging advisers to focus on planning and to outsource investment solutions. And we've been clear beneficiaries of this.

On the right, you can see our managed assets have increased from GBP 26 billion in 2023 to GBP 37 billion at the end of 2025. The strong performance and competitive pricing of our WealthSelect MPS means that it's now got over GBP 25 billion under management. It's recognized as the market leader and in direct response from requests from IFAs, it's now available on multiple third-party platforms. That means they can use it as their core investment solution across their entire client base no matter which platform those clients are on.

Now to High Net Worth. Net flow growth improved year-on-year, and we continue to outperform our listed peers, as you can see on the left. We've broken down the flow picture by channel on the right-hand side, and you'll see good net flows from our own advisers in green. The more challenged picture from the IFA in the direct channel. This is generally a more mature book with higher natural redemption rates. It's also worth noting that the uncertainty caused by the pre-budget speculation was a notable concern amongst High Net Worth clients, which led to above-average outflows in Q4.

This is a strong business with strong foundations, but we know it's got more potential. Over the last 12 months, we've made good progress. Advice and investment management permissions are now in a single entity. We've digitized a number of core processes, and we've launched a mobile app to provide a much better client experience. We've expanded our client solutions, and we've continued to deliver strong investment performance, but we still need to do more. So when John Goddard took over the reins in September, I gave him a clear mandate to grow the business. We are refocusing our distribution strategy across both our own advisers and the IFA markets. We've reviewed the fit of our own RFPs to deliver high net worth products and services more effectively, and we are realigning and rationalizing the team in some places. The advisers impacted by this change can explore options within our Affluent segment or exit the business. Once we've done that and enhanced productivity, we will grow the team.

We're also leveraging our MPS capabilities. We're moving smaller-scale clients from DPS to MPS, which are more suited to their needs and come at a lower cost. This also frees up investment manager capacity, allowing them to concentrate on higher-value clients where discretionary solutions are more appropriate. We were the first U.K. retail wealth business to offer private market evergreen solutions, and we've led the way with decumulation offerings. It's important to offer a broader proposition range beyond the traditional DFM offering. We're aiming to attract a broader client base and as ever, distribution is the key.

We intend to build a high-performance business. That means building out our digital capabilities, continuing to invest in proposition and distribution, and maintaining the strong client service and investment performance culture. We're working towards delivering mid-single-digit rate of net flows as a percentage of assets and operating margin in the mid-20s.

Right. With that, let me hand over to Mark.

Thank you, Steven, and good morning, everyone. Let me start by echoing Steven's comments that our business is in great shape. We delivered a strong financial performance in 2025. Let me give you my 3 key messages. One, we delivered revenue growth of 5% That included 7% growth in net management fees, partly offset by lower interest income on shareholder capital, which reduced revenue growth by around 1 percentage point. Costs are well managed and came in below our GBP 500 million guidance. We invested in initiatives such as our brand and Quilter Invest and absorbed higher national insurance costs. Our cost discipline and the remainder of our simplification initiatives contributed to 1 percentage point increase in our operating margin which has now reached 30%. And our balance sheet remains in very good shape. I'll cover the conclusions of our capital review later.

Let's get into the details with my usual analysis of our P&L dynamics. Starting top left, net flows of GBP 9.1 billion were, as already covered, significantly ahead of 2024. Strong flows and positive markets meant that average AuMA was up 14%. Top right, you can see revenues grew 5% to GBP 701 million despite the impact of lower interest rates. Costs, bottom left, were up 4% to GBP 494 million, reflecting inflation and higher national insurance as well as planned business investment. As a result, adjusted profit increased by 6% to GBP 207 million. Positive [ draws ] gave an operating margin of 30%. We reported adjusted diluted earnings per share of 11p, an increase of 4%, with the difference in growth between EPS and adjusted profit attributed to a small rise in our effective tax rate.

Now getting into the moving parts. Let's start with revenue margins, which are in line with guidance. On this slide, each chart shows the average revenue margin for the past 4 half year periods. The main point I'd like to draw out is the relative margin stability into the second half. In High Net Worth on the left, the overall margin was down 3 basis points from 2024, largely reflecting mix and changes to some fee structures. Touching on Steven's point earlier, in time, we expect the mix of DPS to NPS to result in a slight attrition in High Net Worth margin. That mix change will provide greater capacity for larger clients, which in turn will improve the operating margin.

In Affluent, the year-on-year reduction in the managed margin largely reflected mix shift with Cirillium Active outflows offset by growth in MPS and other solutions, and this is in line with our previous guidance. I expect the managed margin to fluctuate around the low to mid 30s basis points level with the mix being the driver of movement. Given the success of our MPS solution, I expect that range to hold. And finally, our platform or administered margin was 23 basis points.

Let's now turn to revenue by segment. Our High Net Worth revenues grew modestly. Higher net management fees and advice fees were offset by lower investment revenue with total revenue up 3%. In the Affluent segment, revenues grew 7%, a good performance. The main contributors were higher net management fees on both administered and managed assets and a stable contribution from advice fees.

Turning now to costs. I'm pleased to report that while total costs increased 4%, that was lower than revenue growth, giving us positive operating leverage for the year. The waterfall on the right summarizes the main cost changes year-on-year. Increases came from inflation, higher national insurance and regulatory levies and the investments we've made. And these include bolt-on acquisitions such as MediFintech, brand building activities and the money needs a plan campaign, continued support to grow and develop Quilter Invest in the Quilter Academy as well as costs associated with cyber and technology functionality.

Reductions principally came from our simplification program which I'm pleased to report is now completed, and I'll touch more on that shortly. With our large transformation programs now complete, many of you have asked how we expect our cost base to evolve. As a people and technology-focused business, the main drivers of our cost base are linked to salaries and technology contracts. So I previously guided to inflation plus a few percentage points. We do, of course, remain vigilant on costs and continue to focus on effective cost management to provide capacity for reinvestment in revenue-generating activities. Looking to 2026 with a significant growth opportunity ahead of us and the returns we have already seen, I expect the business to invest a bit more to support the growth opportunities we see for our business. These include costs associated with acquisitions, including GillenMarkets in Ireland.

We plan to develop Quilter Invest proposition further, including targeted support. We will continue to grow the Academy to add new financial advisers. We expect to spend a bit more on technology, including AI capabilities, and we do intend to build our brand profile and we'll continue with the marketing campaigns that we kicked off in 2025. As some of this investment started in the second half of 2025, that level of cost run rate is a reasonable base to add inflation on to. And on the far right of the slide, you can see the first half versus second half cost split.

So in terms of thinking about the outturn for 2026 costs, I would take the second half level, double it and add around 4% or so for inflation. That would get you to a figure somewhere between GBP 530 million to GBP 540 million, which seems a sensible base for your models with the actual outcome likely to be managed with an eye on market-sensitive revenues. I'll provide further updates on our cost expectations at the interims.

I should underline that the current rate of investments, excluding acquisition activity, won't increase to this extent every year. And our longer-term guidance of inflation plus a few percentage points remains unchanged. While on the topic of transformation, I wanted to take a step back and reflect on what we've achieved with our cost programs since listing in 2018. Since then, we've done a huge amount. I won't run through it all and you can see it here on the slide. With savings coming across the business, particularly in the technology, estate, operations and support functions, while we've continued to invest in revenue generation opportunities. In total, we've delivered over GBP 160 million of savings. And this has enabled the operating margin we report today. And importantly, it also provides the foundations for efficient and disciplined growth as we continue to scale.

So putting the segment revenues and group costs together, this slide shows the segmental contribution to group profitability. Affluent profit showed a healthy 14% increase to GBP 169 million, and High Net Worth delivered profit of GBP 47 million, broadly in line with the prior year. The operating margin declined marginally in High Net Worth, but improved by 2 percentage points in Affluent. As you've heard before, this part of our business is very scalable. So there's scope for further improvement here.

Now let me turn to the balance sheet. As you'd expect, we've maintained a strong solvency ratio and cash position. You'll recall that last year, we raised a provision of GBP 76 million in relation to potential remediation for ongoing advice. We have now started our remediation program. And based on our current expectations of expected remediation and administration costs, we anticipate that this cost -- that this will cost us some GBP 20 million less to complete than we originally anticipated and we have, therefore, reduced the provision by this amount.

You can see that come through as a positive contribution to the Solvency II ratio. Together with the utilization of the provision during the year, the provision balance at the end of 2025 was GBP 42 million. More broadly, the solvency ratio reduced marginally over the period, largely due to regular dividend payments and our proposed capital return, which I'll come to shortly. In terms of cash, you'll note the capital contributions into subsidiaries where we capitalized our regulated advice business to cover both the original GBP 76 million ongoing advice remediation provision, and provide funding for modest acquisitions to support our advice and high net worth businesses. The subsequent GBP 20 million provision release from the remediation provision is not reflected in the cash position and will be netted off against future capital contributions into the advice business.

On the right, you can see we've got around GBP 270 million of cash available after payment of the recommended final dividend and the proposed buyback. That leaves us with a good buffer to cover contingencies, liquidity management and business investment while retaining balance sheet optionality. So our balance sheet is in good shape. The Board has recommended a final dividend of 4.3p per share, given a total dividend for the year of 6.3p, an increase of 7%. That was modestly ahead of earnings growth with the payout for the year at the midpoint of our current dividend payout range. The total cash distribution for the year was GBP 85 million.

This next slide sums up our revised approach to capital allocation. Going forward, we plan to return 70% of adjusted post-tax, post-interest earnings to shareholders. And the other 30% will be retained to support growth, including funding bolt-on M&A as well as investments supporting business growth and development.

Of course, we'll keep the amount of capital we have under review. If we do build up further excess capital, we will, of course, consider additional one-off shareholder distributions. As well as the distribution policy, the Board's capital review also looked at our stock of capital and concluded that given the strength of our balance sheet, we currently have around GBP 100 million of excess capital over and above what we are likely to need for the foreseeable future. So we'll return this to shareholders through a share buyback, which will start as soon as practical and which we anticipate will complete before year-end. And given the strength of our business, coupled with this high cash generation, we intend to switch from a dividend payout policy to a distribution policy.

From 2026 onwards, we'll distribute around 70% of post-tax, post-interest adjusted profits to shareholders. Within this, we expect to see progressive growth in the ordinary cash dividend in sterling terms which, together with the reducing share count from share buybacks, will lead to progressive dividend per share growth. And starting from our 2026 full year results in March 2027, alongside the final dividend announcement, we'll also set out the amount of any buyback for the year. The buyback will represent the difference between the 70% distribution target and the dividend cost for the year. The interim dividend will be paid in cash and in normal circumstances, I expect this to represent 1/3 of the previous year total cash dividend measured on a per share basis. So for 2026, you should expect an interim dividend of 2.1p per share.

Let me conclude with our usual guidance slide. Our expectation is for the operating environment to remain constructive and our margin guidance is unchanged. I spoke earlier in detail about cost expectations for the remainder of the year and dividends, distributions and capital I've already covered in detail. So let me finish by summarizing my 3 key points from our results. First, we delivered solid growth in overall revenue despite a lower interest rate environment. Second, costs are well managed, even as we stepped up the investment for future growth. And thirdly, our balance sheet remains in good shape which has given us the scope to announce the capital return plans I've set out today.

And with that, let me hand back to Steven.

Thank you, Mark. I'm now going to talk about the opportunities that we see. We've successfully established the leading position in the advice market, and we're continuing to grow our market share. Furthermore, the market is growing driven by a need for advice in an increasingly complex tax environment, the need for individuals to invest more for their retirement and the demand for financial planning to minimize tax leakage on future intergenerational wealth transfer. As you know, there is a fundamental supply-demand imbalance. There simply aren't enough advisers to meet the overall need.

Let me share some data that we've collected from Boring Money to give you a perspective. Our current adviser market is the circle on the left, around GBP 1 trillion of assets across about 4 million people. That's an average investment portfolio of around GBP 240,000. Beyond this, in the advice gap, there are a lot more people who need our help. We need to turn a nation of savers into a nation of investors. There is significant excess cash sitting in the banking system, generating subpar returns and being eroded by inflation. And there's a huge amount of wealth that will be transferred down the generations over the next 20 to 50 years. Work by Boring Money suggests they are around 12 million people with over $800 billion in assets who are currently unadvised and have got low confidence around investing. They need help, and that's the circle on the right.

While the average wallet size across this portfolio is about GBP 90,000, that's smaller than our typical advise clients, they're also younger and still accumulating, so they have good long-term growth prospects. Policymakers have woken after the scale of the problem. Their response has been targeted support and a national advertising campaign on the benefits of investing. Both of these are constructive steps. We want to be recognized as a customer champion. A big focus is on breaking down the barriers to brighter financial futures for customers and unlocking the potential of their money. We believe advice and support is key to that.

On the left-hand side, our customers with less complex needs that can benefit from prompts and edges from guidance and targeted support to help them make better decisions with their money. And as we move up the complexity spectrum, in the future, we expect simplified advice to reach more clients and at the far end of the spectrum, those customers with the most complex needs will continue to seek holistic personalized advice.

With an additional 12 million potential customers, this is a huge market. At its heart, is the need to deliver better outcomes for customers and for society. And Quilter can be a home for clients throughout their financial life cycle from targeted support to simplified to full financial advice, and clients can move up the curve as and when it's relevant for them to do so. Importantly, we believe the role of advisers will remain critical for customers who recognize the value of having a personalized financial plan.

There's been a lot of debate in the market recently about the role of AI in advice. Our view is that AI has an important role to play in making advisers materially more productive. But what AI won't do is remove the need for advice. Here's why. First, navigating the U.K. financial landscape is challenging. Each individual is different and most clients don't have the time or confidence to do it themselves, it is very complicated. The U.K. has an incredibly complex tax and pension system that changes on a regular basis. While AI may be able to provide the answers to basic planning questions or provide simple investment advice, when it comes to more complex situations, long-term tax planning, it's completely reliant on the individual knowing the right questions to ask.

The role of the adviser is to help clients through the complexities of U.K. income tax, inheritance tax, trust and legacy planning and to provide the reassurance and help to make -- to let clients take actions at the key moments of their financial lives. Clients want the empathy and the coaching that an adviser provides. The more complex or vulnerable their financial situation, the more they want the help of a trusted experts. That human personal relationship and the trust that underpins it is something that AI just can't replicate. Critically, we give a regulated financial advice. This gives customers comfort and strong protections. With AI tools alone, there is no comeback. So how are we going to build on the power of AI for our adviser capabilities? We need technology and AI tools to deliver the propositions and the services needed at scale, and we need a strong brand that's recognized as a customer champion.

Let me start with technology and AI. Advisers are crying out for tools that will make them more effective. The stats on this slide summarize some recent research by Next Wealth. Frustratingly, advisers say only 1/3 of their time is actually spent with clients. More than half of advisers say site compliance and regulation as their top challenge. They want streamlined compliance, automated onboarding and better system integration. Nearly half believe AI will positively impact their workload. We agree.

So we spent the last 2 years working with advisers to deliver a solution to them to meet this need. As you know, driving up adviser productivity is something we've been working on for years. It started with ensuring adviser alignment and back book transfers. We've now rolled out market-leading AI tools, and I'll say more about this in a moment.

The next part is a brand-new end-to-end adviser support system that we're in the final stages of development work with FNZ. It includes further AI capabilities. The aim is to help firms run more profitably, advisers to work smarter and service more clients for clients to have a smooth, intuitive digital advice experience. Our new technology will be all encompassing. We're already rolling out some of the elements ahead of full implementation in early 2027. The goal is full end-to-end technology integration between our platform and the tools that the advisers need to avoid them having to repopulate data fields across applications and allow seamless client data management.

We see 3 high-impact ways in which AI will support further growth in our business. First, in enhancing productivity. We've already rolled out an AI solution for advisers that allows them to record, transcribe and summarize meetings and actions, work that took hours now takes 10 to 15 minutes. We expect it to materially expand adviser and paraplanner capacity over time, helping generate additional flows onto our platform and into our solutions, which is where we make our money.

Secondly, improving client and adviser engagement through next best actions, client reporting and portfolio insights, helping advisers and investment managers to have higher-quality conversations; and thirdly, operational and process redesign, reducing the steps in the process and speeding up fulfillment while reducing operational costs. These tools will also enhance risk management by making compliance file checking and adviser oversight a lot faster.

And a more efficient advice network brings greater scalability and operating margin potential. Of course, we've done all the testing and the research to make sure the systems we're giving to advisers are robust and their client data is safe and secure. Investment in AI is therefore critical to us, and it's incorporated in the guidance that Mark set out earlier.

Let's now turn to brand. As we move to a world of digital delivery, it's important that the market knows who we are, and most importantly, what we stand for. So we're investing in the Quilter brand. We launched our brand awareness campaign late last year in conjunction with Quilter Nations series. The strapline is money needs a plan and the feedback has been extremely positive. This is the first step in what is a multiyear effort. We want Quilter to build on our position as a leading adviser brand to being a trusted consumer brand focused on retirement, advice and savings and investments. And ultimately, we want to be recognized as a customer champion.

Let me return to our business growth plans and draw things together. Our 3 key profit drivers are platform, solutions and high net worth. We have clear goals for each, which I've summarized on the left. We know exactly what levers we've got to pull to enable us to deliver on them, and I've set these out on the right. Collectively, these will sustain our growth, deepen our competitive position and drive our operating leverage.

So to conclude, we're really pleased with our performance in 2025, and we've started 2026 with strong momentum across our business. The messages I'd like to leave you with are: we operate in a large, fragmented and growing market helping us deliver sustainable growth. And there's a new nascent market opportunity that could be significant in time. Our propositions and the breadth of our distribution are both market-leading and they're delivering strong inflows. Our platform and solutions business allows us to generate scale efficiencies and operating margin progression. And through investment in technology and AI tools, we'll be able to augment these existing strengths to meet customer needs across a larger market and deliver faster growth over time. That's why we're excited about the future. All right. Let's open up for questions. We've got a mic in the room, and we'll go to the room first.

Jacques-Henri Gaulard from Kepler Cheuvreux. The question is on cost. The way you've looked at your '26 guidance looks more like a multiyear program and don't view that negatively at all. It's more you're growing market share. It's working very well. You're going to need to invest probably more. Is there a section of your cash flow of your liquidity that you've just mentioned that you would dedicate the same way that you're dedicating part of your profits back to shareholders? I think it's a very important point because it's a bit ignored in the industry right now.

Look, I mean, it's included within the overall guidance I provided. I'm not sure if you mean sort of part of the sort of the capital piece of it. I mean most of our costs -- capitalized are very little cost. So most of our costs, we expense as we incur them. So it's kind of driven through the P&L rather than necessarily through certainly the investment that we're making and that sort of stuff. When you look at our balance sheet, we've got very little capital builds up in IT and software development and that sort of stuff. Virtually everything is expensed. So the way that I like to or prefer to treat it is through the P&L, get it all out when it's incurred. Provides better flexibility later on. You don't have a recurring depreciation charge and things like that.

So that's how we tend to look at it. But the reason why I've typically guided to inflation plus a few percentage points is there's a few percentage points are already there for that sort of stuff. And in different years, it will be different things and those sort of things. This year, it's sort of it's a slightly higher amount than normal. But if you think about it in overall terms, I mean, effectively -- and maybe if I sort of just maybe just a bit of a broader question on the cost side. I previously guided that I expect our costs to increase by inflation plus a few percentage points.

Inflation this year for us is about 4%. That's what our salary increases are on average, et cetera, et cetera. You had a couple of percentage points of that you get into 6 percentage points. The actual guidance I provided today is the same as 8%. So it's really 2% higher than what my previous guidance has been in any event. 2% in our world is about GBP 10 million. And of that GBP 10 million, about half of it is in things like targeted support and Quilter Invest and the investment we're making there. The other half is kind of split between some of the acquisitions we made, so that's more inorganic add-on and a bit more going towards brand build and some tech investments. I mean in the grand scheme of things in pound million terms, it's relatively small amount.

Thank you. Three questions. The first one, just to clarify on the new dividend policy. You said that it will grow in absolute terms. Is that on both the per share and a total pound basis?

The second question, you mentioned the opportunity in targeted support and simplified advice. Is it possible to give us a sense of where you think the margins on that may land and how long it will take to show in earnings?

And the last question, you've had impressive growth in your NPS range in recent years. Any thoughts on competitors entering the market, for example, Vanguard willing to launch a low-cost product...

You take the first question, I'll take the other 2, Mark.

First one very quickly, per share.

So in terms of targeted support and the margins, so one of the key things about the targeted support solution is that it will be Quilter-based funds. So actually, the margin should be pretty good because we'll get a platform margin, and we will be using our core Quilter Investment solutions. So that's good. It is -- you sort of asked about what would it do to earnings over time. I think one's obviously got to recognize it's a small business that's going to take time to build out and to grow out, and we've obviously got a very substantial business in our advice space.

So I think it is going to be -- it is going to build out over time. And we look at this market and sort of say the targeted support market over the next 10 years could be very exciting. There's obviously not going to -- it's not really going to move the dial from a profitability perspective in the next 1, 2, 3 years. But from a flow perspective, hopefully, it will start picking up. And on a medium-term view, we think it's very important, but it should be a good operating margin business.

In terms of MPS, our MPS range, WealthSelect is absolutely market-leading. It has got 12 years of first quartile investment performance, a phenomenal track record with a consistent investment philosophy, team approach, et cetera. I think we're quite a formidable competitor. You can see the growth that we've got. We also have -- our MPS is also very broad in terms of its options, possibly the broadest in the market.

We've got -- we actually got 56 different portfolios within WealthSelect across different risk profiles, active blend, passive, responsible, sustainable, managed solutions. So a lot of people are coming up with they're launching quite simple offerings. We are very holistic in terms of the support we can provide advisers. And finally, the reporting and tools that we've got around WealthSelect are absolutely market-leading. So we're very comfortable that WealthSelect is in a very strong position and will continue to perform incredibly well. Yes, James.

James Allen from Berenberg. Could I ask 2 questions. First one, you've obviously done a really good job over the last 2 or 3 years of revamping the business, particularly in Affluent. But playing devil's advocate looking forward. So in revenues, you've still got the investment revenue drag from interest revenues coming down, interest rates coming down. The cost savings plan has now played out and the upsized shareholder returns policy is now out there in the market. So I guess if you're a new investor, where is the scope for outperformance going forward?

Second question, just on the private market solutions. There's obviously been a lot of noise in the U.S. over the last few weeks around the kind of duration mismatch between wealth investors in stuff like private credit and real estate funds, which obviously have a much longer duration in their time horizons from an investment perspective. How do you plan to manage that, particularly around kind of redemption windows and things like that?

Sure. Thanks. So I think the first thing that is about our Affluent business is our business has got incredible operational leverage. I mean we have, as we've said before, both our platform and our asset management business, we can add a lot of extra assets without adding much in terms of extra cost to our business, and that will continue to drive strong profitability, and we would expect to see the Affluent operating margin continue to rise over time. So I think that is what is going to drive the sort of future upside as we talk about.

The other thing is the size of the market and the size of the opportunity. I mean we've built up a significant market share. We still are focused on driving up our market share even higher and we believe we can. But actually, we look at the market and say we actually really see that the size of the market is continuing to increase. There's reports from independent companies who look and analyze the platform market, looking at the growth, Fundscape data on how much they expect the platform market to grow, for example. It is the place where people have to save and invest.

We've got a nation, as I've talked about, of people who are oversaving and underinvesting and that is starting to change. We've got a nation where people have got to take more responsibility to look after themselves. The age of defined benefit pension funds is over. The contributions that people are typically making in this country into pensions through workplace arrangements is too little to reach appropriate replacement ratios.

So this is a nation that's got to invest more, and we are incredibly well placed to do that. We are seeing improvements there, but there's more work to be done, including across all the industry, including with some of the government support. But I'm really pleased because we've got the dominant market share position in a business that's highly scalable, and we're going to continue to do things to make our business obviously more efficient. But I think there's a huge amount of upside for those reasons.

Your question about private market solutions. So we've launched private market solutions. Ours are focused on private equity, not private credit. They have liquidity options. You are able to take money out in -- you have to give notice and you can take money out. There's a small 5% discount if you withdraw. But liquidity is managed. It's an evergreen solution. So we think it is appropriate. Obviously, we're not recommending clients to put large portions of their money in it. So you put sort of 5% of your portfolio and things like that. And now it is only appropriate for clients in our High Net Worth business, but it's something they have been asking for. And it's not obviously for every client, but we think it is a very attractive sort of thing to have in our toolkit. Yes, David.

David McCann from Deutsche Bank. Just 2 for me. Steve, maybe interesting remark, and obviously, we've seen it through the increased marketing that they want to resonate more with consumers rather than just advisers. Obviously, the business has come very much from an adviser-driven background. At what point does this potentially cause some kind of internal conflict in the business, particularly with the advisers if you are going down in more of the consumer channel for the reasons you've articulated around targeted support and so forth. And I guess what gives you the right to win in that area when there's a very well-established direct-to-consumer marketplace out there?

And the second question, probably for Mark just more of a technical point here. You mentioned inflation exponation at 4% a number of times. Obviously, market expectations are close to 3% for that number. So I just wondered what is driving the 4% forecast for inflation rather than sort of the more market consistent 3-ish.

Thanks, David. Mark will enjoy that question. The -- so in terms of brands, so actually, advisers are very supportive of what we are doing in the brand. It helps them and the advice -- the brand campaign as you'll see is about money needs a plan. It is about people needing to have a plan. So it's very constructive towards advice. The plan doesn't only obviously need an advice, you need an adviser. You can do some of these things with a bit of targeted support. That's why we put those words quite carefully, but that still is a plan. You can't just sit and expect your money sitting in cash to perform for you.

The -- we are not, though, looking to go and create a D2C business, just to be clear. We are working with advisers. Our targeted support proposition is about -- I talked about how clients can move through that spectrum. We've talked about how we're using targeted support, in particular through Quilter Invest to work with advisers to incubate clients for the future for them and things like that. So we're doing it very much in a way that is working to our advice core. I think that's one of the strengths that we have. Clients can start in that journey. And then if they need help, we've got one of the strongest adviser businesses and based on penetration in the IFA space to help them along the way. So that's how we look at it. We look at it as absolutely complementary and that is consistent with the feedback that we're getting from advisers as well. Mark, do you want to take the inflation question?

No. David, thank you very much for that question. Just on the inflation, look, every report that we use to look at our own workforce inflation, which is about 60% of our cost base is salaries probably from about August last year was closer to 4% than it was to 3%. And that's why I'm using our numbers. It's about 4%. 4%, you'll see when our annual report comes out. This is what we're saying is the sort of average salary cost increase of our workforce across our business for this year, going from 25% to 26%, I'm referencing 4%. Using our numbers, that's what I'm getting it from.

Other questions in the room? No. Should we go to the lines or the web?

Yes. I think we just have nothing on the lines at the moment. We have one at the moment on the web from Mike Christelis at UBS. A 2-part question, one of which you partially answered, but he says, can you provide an update on New Wealth, Quilter Invest and the strategy for that business, which we've touched on it, but maybe I just want to just reinforce the points there. And then he also asked, how has the launch of the smooth managed fund being received by advisers?

Sure. I'm happy to take those. So Quilter Invest, the key thing that we're doing there is we are getting targeted support permissions for Quilter Invest. That is the business that we will be entering the targeted support market in. Those regulatory applications that just opened this week, and we submitted our application to be registered and authorized by the FCA to provide targeted support. So that's what we're doing and working on Quilter Invest. We're continuing to enhance the proposition and to gear up for that. We've built the capability now to do that adviser incubation that I've previously talked about. So advisers can refer clients to Quilter Invest. They can then track those clients and they can see what contributions they make. When those clients want to press a button, I want a bit of help, they go straight back to that same advisers, introduce them, et cetera. So that's the sort of stuff that we've been doing in Quilter Invest, both through our sort of adviser incubation strategy and as we're leaning into targeted support.

And then the smooth managed fund that's only just very recently been launched. It was launched in January. And the feedback from the market has been very positive, but these things obviously do take a bit of time. You got it out there. We're doing -- our team out there doing lots of sales presentations and explaining the funds to advisers. It is a lot more transparent than some of the other smoothed managed funds out there, which I think has been very well received by advisers. So we're optimistic about the future there.

We've got a call on the line from Gregory Simpson from BNP Paribas.

Go ahead, Greg.

We have a question from Gregory Simpson.

Just 2 questions. Firstly, on targeted support. I'd imagine a lot of the assets in bank accounts and workplace pensions. And so I'm wondering if you can outline how you access the 12 million adults if you're not a bank or workplace pension provider and don't have that direct relationship with what might be quite unengaged customers. That's the first question.

And then secondly, just on AI. Do you think there's an opportunity on Quilter's own cost base from leveraging AI. There's GBP 220 million or so base costs, a lot of support staff. And you talked about inflation plus cost growth in the medium term, but why couldn't that be better if you can leverage AI to sort of manual processes?

Sure. So in terms of support, there is a few things to say. It's obviously a very big market. We think that there are lots of different companies that are going with different strategies. I'm sure the banks are going to participate in the targeted support market as well. But we don't look at this and sort of think there's only one model that is going to work. We've got a different model to the way I think some of the other players are going to participate through our close tie and link with advisers. And we think that gives us a really interesting angle. We are also working in our -- we've got a workplace channel as well, where we do provide support in workplaces and targeted support will also be used there. So we have got a range of distribution strategies, and we think it is an exciting market that there's going to be a lot of people that participate in it and a market of 12 million people is a significant market.

In terms of the AI -- the cost base and AI, we are obviously looking at and we are implementing AI solutions across our business. We're implementing things in our call center, in our back office, in various of our -- in our middle office functions, which will look to improve productivity, reduce cost and improve efficiency, et cetera. So we will -- we are looking to things like that. We haven't changed our cost guidance as a result. But obviously, we are looking to make sure that we run our business as lean and efficiently as we can, and AI is one of the tools that we are deploying. Do you want to add anything to that, Mark?

I'd probably say, Greg, look, I think there is potential in time from getting cost reductions coming from AI efficiencies. But I think given the relative immaturity of all of that at the moment, it's still a little early to actually sort of pinpoint sort of precise numbers or targets or anything else like that on it. I think it's something that will play out in the more medium term rather than having sort of a more short-term impact right now.

Okay. I think we're done. Thank you, everyone, for your time.