Good afternoon. Thanks, Jake.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much indeed for joining our full-year results presentation for Premier Miton Group. I'm Mike O'Shea, I'm the Chief Executive Officer, and I'm joined today by Piers Harrison, our CFO.

We very much appreciate your ongoing support and interest in Premier Miton, especially in a year that has tested the whole industry. We value the opportunity to update you on our recent developments, the challenges that we face, and our outlook for the business, and, of course, to answer any questions that you may have.

Let me start with the key headlines for the year ended 30th of September 2025. We closed the year with £10.3 billion of assets under management.

Whilst this figure has reduced to £9.7 billion by the end of November, primarily due to outflows from our US and European equity strategies, this reflects short-term market dynamics rather than any structural weakness in our business. This is a pattern that we have seen across the industry, and we are confident in our ability to respond and adapt.

Our diversified platform is working as intended: strong inflows and momentum in our fixed income and absolute return franchises, for example, are helping to partially offset these headwinds. We are well positioned for a market recovery.

I think, historically, periods of concentrated market leadership, such as we are seeing in US equities, for example, have rotated, and that creates renewed opportunities for active managers. While we can't predict exactly when market conditions will turn, our experience tells us that cycles do change, and our conviction-led approach means we are ready to benefit when this happens.

In summary, while short-term outflows reflect broader market trends, our strategic actions and diversified business model give us confidence in our ability to deliver long-term value for our shareholders, and we are well placed to rebound as market conditions evolve. In the meantime, we are taking proactive steps.

We've strengthened the management of our investment teams, we've enhanced our product pipeline, and we've expanded our distribution into selected international markets. Our balance sheet remains robust, and we continue to invest in operational efficiency and growth initiatives, ensuring we're ready to capture upside when market conditions improve.

Our adjusted profit before tax for the year was £11.5 million, and we've delivered £3 million of annual run-rate savings this year, with a further £2 million identified and on track to be delivered by September 2026. We remain focused on making our platform as efficient as possible, delivering further cost savings where these can be achieved without restricting our ability to flourish as conditions improve.

We have a strategic focus on adding to our long-short capabilities, building on the success of the Tellworth team, and we have several interesting opportunities developing in this area. Elsewhere, we have a strong pipeline developing across fixed income, absolute return, infrastructure, and thematic multi-asset funds.

We are proposing a final dividend of 3 pence per share, which will bring the total for this year to 6 pence. Finally, I'm delighted to confirm that Christopher Williams joined the board today and will take over as chair following the conclusion of the AGM in February 2026, when Rob Colthorpe will have completed 9 years as a non-executive director at the firm.

Despite the market backdrop, Premier Miton does remain resilient. As I've mentioned, closing AUM was £10.3 billion, with average AUM slightly up year-on-year.

Net outflows for the year were £618 million, reflecting continued pressure on our equity strategies in US and Europe. However, we did see decent inflows into our fixed income and absolute return franchises, and we have largely stabilized outflows in our UK equity business and in our multi-asset business.

Adjusted profit before tax was £11.5 million, and we ended the year with a robust cash position of £31.3 million. Our diversified product mix not only provides us with stability in more challenging times, but it also enables us to maintain an attractive dividend policy, reflecting our commitment to delivering consistent value to shareholders.

We're proposing a final dividend of 3 pence per share, bringing the total for the year to 6 pence. I know how important this dividend is to many of you, and it's a decision we've made carefully, balancing prudence with our commitment to rewarding your trust in us, even as we work through these near-term challenges.

Since 2017, we have now paid out nearly £100 million in dividends, demonstrating our focus on shareholder returns. This compares to our current market capitalization of approximately £90 million.

It is important to be open about the challenges that we face. We know it has been a difficult period, not just for Premier Miton, but for many of you as shareholders and as clients who hold our funds.

Our contrarian, high-conviction approach in equities has served us well over the long term, and we remain committed to it. In the current highly concentrated market, it has struggled, and we're not immune to these pressures, and I want to acknowledge the frustration that can come with short-term underperformance.

As you can see from the chart on the left, concentration levels in the US equity market are now at historic highs. A small number of mega-cap stocks have driven much of the market's returns, making it a particularly challenging environment for active, high-conviction managers like ourselves.

Our approach is built on diversification and on seeking value across a broader opportunity set, but in periods where market leadership is so narrowly focused, strategies that differ from the index can experience short-term headwinds. Whilst this has impacted our US and European equity strategies recently, history shows that such periods of concentration are rarely permanent, and when market leadership broadens, our conviction-led approach is well positioned to capture the resulting opportunities.

Several high-value clients of ours have capitulated in the face of relative underperformance against the index, and that has impacted both our assets under management and our revenues. At the same time, UK equity markets remain out of favor, and industry-wide retail flows have been affected by budget speculation and the ongoing US exceptionalism trade, which continues to favor passive over active management.

Now, we recognize that rebuilding these strategies will take time, but we remain confident in their long-term prospects, and when market conditions change in equity markets, we are very well placed to capture market share with a strong line-up of independent-minded investment teams that can deliver good returns for investors. There are grounds for confidence.

Looking ahead, I genuinely believe that there are reasons to be optimistic. We've made some tough decisions and important changes in our investment teams, and whilst it's early days, we are already seeing some encouraging signs.

These improvements don't happen overnight, but I'm confident that our renewed focus will deliver results. We have introduced leadership changes across our UK and global investment teams, and that has sharpened our focus on performance outcomes, and, as I say, we're already seeing some early signs of improvement.

Looking forward, the interest rate environment is likely to be more favorable over the next 12 months for equities, and at the same time, our fixed income, absolute return, and certain multi-asset funds continue to perform strongly, with a healthy pipeline developing. We are launching new products, including plans to have a contingent convertibles fund in Dublin to meet client demand, and we are progressing well with our plans to add a new long-short capability to our investment team.

Our offshore fund platform is now above £100 million in assets under management, and we are broadening distribution channels, including South Africa, Ireland, the Channel Islands, and now Switzerland. We have strong demand for our Global Dynamic Credit strategy, which has now raised over $100 million since launch in February this year.

Our outflows from the UK equity strategies have noticeably slowed, and we are actively pursuing inorganic growth opportunities, which, of course, will be supported by our new chair's M&A expertise. Our platform remains well-balanced.

At year-end, our assets under management was split across UK equities at 17%, international equities at 23%, multi-asset at 26%, absolute return at 10%, and fixed income at 24%. This diversification provides us with a far more stable revenue base than a business that, for example, solely focused on equities.

The successful integration of the Tellworth acquisition has grown our absolute return assets to over £1 billion, and our fixed income team now manages £2.5 billion and has significant momentum, positioning us well to capture demand across key credit pools. We do run high active share portfolios, and we remain committed to running genuinely active portfolios.

Our open-ended equity funds have an average active share of nearly 87% and a tracking error of 6.4. This conviction-driven approach means we're not afraid to be different from the benchmark, and we believe that this will deliver superior long-term returns as market leadership broadens.

It has been painful, particularly as our US and European strategies, which both have a quality growth focus, have struggled relative to their comparator indices. We stand by our convictions, and we believe that in the long run, this is the correct approach.

I just want to spend a couple of minutes on one or two of our strategies. Our fixed income team are delivering really good investment outcomes, and I think represent a strong, long-term growth opportunity for us.

We now manage, as I've said, £2.5 billion in fixed income assets across 5 actively managed funds run by an experienced team. The Premier Miton Strategic Monthly Income Bond Fund, for example, has outperformed its sector and ranks in the top quartile over 1, 3, and 5 years, and its risk-adjusted numbers are amongst the best in the sector.

Our Dublin platform, as I've mentioned, is expanding to capture offshore demand, and our recently launched Global Dynamic Credit Fund, which is a mirror of our strategic bond fund, is proving popular with investors, and that gives us confidence that we will see further growth from offshore markets into our fixed income strategies as we move through 2026. In absolute return, we're gaining momentum, and our strategies are performing well.

The Tellworth UK Select Fund has delivered steady returns since inception, with a low correlation to traditional bond and equity markets. This is a market-neutral long-short strategy, and it's resonating with investors seeking diversification and lower volatility.

In addition to almost £400 million that we've raised for this fund during the last year, we've also added over £150 million in segregated mandates and are on track to build on this as we move into 2026. We are strategically focused on building out more long-short investment capabilities and are making good progress with adding additional capacity in this space.

I wanted to just touch on our US Opportunities Fund. It stands out in its sector for its differentiated, high-conviction approach.

The fund is an actively managed, multi-cap, quality growth strategy with 35 to 45 holdings across all industry sectors, and a clear focus on bottom-up analysis and a rigorous valuation discipline. It has a strong long-term performance record against peers, but has seen significant underperformance between April and October this year.

We've highlighted above the huge concentration that has taken place in the US market, and our fund has very much struggled against this backdrop. In turn, this has led to several high-value clients reducing or selling their holdings in favor of more index-aligned portfolios, and this has been a significant headwind for us.

On the positive side, we do take comfort from the fund's strong long-term performance record, and we know that despite the challenging period it experienced between April and October this year, it has actually delivered outperformance against the S&P 500 of 3% in November alone as the market has rotated. Our sector allocation is much more balanced than the index, with significant weights in industrials, financials, and healthcare.

In the era of the dominance of mega-cap tech stocks in the S&P, if that era changes, then the fund is very well placed to recover significant lost ground and, hopefully, to return to net positive inflows. We actually think the interest rate environment in the US as we move through 2026 will be very beneficial for the portfolio of stocks that we hold in this fund.

We also continue to pursue selective M&A to enhance our platform. Our approach is disciplined: we look for opportunities that bring scale to existing capabilities that can introduce new products or open access to new client segments.

The Tellworth acquisition is a case in point, and was fully integrated within 5 months of acquisition. It has now added over £1 billion in assets under management, and it is very much broadened our distribution channels.

It has also created a platform on which we can build further investment capabilities. We believe that our platform, our culture, and experienced management team that we have here make us an attractive partner for talented managers and for teams to join us.

I think when we look at the Tellworth acquisition, our long-short capabilities are particularly attractive in the current environment. These are high-margin products, often with limited capacity, and which generate performance fees for the firm when they perform.

The current interest rate outlook, as I've said, will favor the return of these types of products within investors' portfolios. Actually, changes to the cash ISA limits may also help the general backdrop for risk-controlled, low-volatility products such as these as well.

Overall, this acquisition has broadened our distribution, including wholesale and institutional channels, and provides us with a platform for additional hires and teams. These are exactly the type of opportunities that we are actively seeking in the market today.

I would now like to hand over to Piers to take you through the financials for FY 2025.

Thanks, Mike. Afternoon, everyone.

In summary, we closed the year with assets under management, or AUM, as we like to define it, of £10.3 billion. We had a net management fee margin of 56.7 basis points and a resulting adjusted profit before tax of £11.5 million.

Now, the group's revenue continues to be that of management fee income, which is generated based on the level of assets being managed across our investment teams. As Mike has mentioned, performance fees can also be generated on some of our strategies.

There was continued demand for our fixed income and absolute return products, and we saw AUM in these asset classes increase by 19% and 87% over the year to end at £2.5 billion and £1.1 billion, respectively. We saw net outflows for the year totaling £618 million, and these were partially offset by positive market and investment performance of £261 million, resulting in the AUM ending the year 3% lower than the opening position at £10.3 billion.

The group's average AUM for the year was broadly flat on last year at £10.4 billion. If we look at the summary income statement, whilst the average AUM was unchanged, the blended net management fee margin decreased by 4% to 56.7 basis points.

Now, as noted at our interim results, the decrease continues to be primarily driven by changes in the group's product mix, and as I've already mentioned, specifically the strong traction in the fixed income assets, which is at a lower pricing point. The resulting net management fees for the year were 2% lower than the previous year at £59.4 million.

Performance fees totaling £2.3 million were generated, resulting in a gross profit of £61.7 million, again, marginally lower than in 2024. Administration expenses increased by 3%, and I'll provide some more detail on these shortly.

The adjusted profit before tax was £11.5 million, representing a decline of 6% on the comparative period. Now, the amortization charge was broadly flat at £5.2 million, and this relates to the unwinding of the group's intangible assets, the largest of which becomes fully amortized in November 2026, which will reduce the annual charge by £3 million in the financial year 2027.

Share-based payments fell by 41% to £2 million, really reflecting the rolling off and vesting of nil-cost contingent share rights. Non-recurring items totaled £1.9 million, and the majority of which related to employment restructuring costs associated with the operational efficiency initiatives completed in the year.

The resulting profit before tax decreased to £2.4 million from £3.2 million. Now turning to the cost base, these totaled £52.7 million for the year, and when adjusting for the non-recurring items I've just mentioned, they were actually flat on the previous year at £50.8 million.

Fixed staff costs were unchanged at £21.9 million, and the average headcount increased to 157, really reflecting the full year of the Tellworth team, which was then offset by headcount reductions completed in the second half of the year and a closing headcount of 150. Variable staff costs decreased by 7% to £8 million, reflecting the lower net revenues and underlying profitability of the group when we compare it to the last year.

Overheads and other costs increased by 4% to £20.2 million. Now this predominantly related to increased marketing activities and the launch of the group's new visual identity in February, with the associated advertising costs, and also along with a full year of Tellworth-related costs when we compare it to 2024.

At the half year, we announced that we completed a comprehensive review of our operating model and identified efficiencies that we expected to reduce our annual run-rate costs by approximately £3 million, whilst maintaining a resilient and scalable platform. The majority of these have now been delivered.

A key focus was on our products, and we successfully closed 2 subscale funds and completed 1 merger, whilst incorporating a restructuring of our global equities investment team. Across our operations, we have driven simplification by eliminating internal processing and increasingly leveraging third-party platforms and outsourced capabilities.

We've completed changes to the COO organizational structure, strengthening accountability and delivering efficiencies across headcount, operational effectiveness, and governance. We continue to seek savings by leveraging relationships with existing strategic suppliers, and where appropriate, moving to new, more disruptive suppliers where it's advantageous to do so for our business model.

Now, building on these efficiencies already delivered, we've announced a further £2 million of annualized savings to be realized in the 2026 financial year. These savings will be driven primarily by optimizing our office footprint through the closure of the regional office, alongside continued operational enhancements that will deliver both scale and cost efficiency.

We'll provide further detail at this when we do our interim update. Now turning to the dividend, as Mike has already mentioned, the board has proposed a final dividend of 3 pence per share, and this is unchanged from the final dividend last year.

When added to the interim dividend, this brings the total for 2025 to 6 pence per share, again, unchanged from last year. Now this represents a payout ratio of approximately 110% of the adjusted profit after tax.

As noted in previous updates, the board continues to take a pragmatic approach to the level of dividends, considering balance sheet strength, regulatory capital requirements, the market outlook, and returns to stakeholders. At the 30th of September, the group had £31.3 million in cash, and after the proposed dividend, the group has surplus regulatory capital of £11.4 million.

I'll now hand back to Mike for the summary.

Brilliant. Thanks, Piers.

Let me close with our outlook. I think we are positioned for growth and a return to positive flows with ample capacity across a well-diversified fund range.

We have clear momentum in our fixed income and absolute return areas, and our culture of thinking differently continues to attract talented individuals. We also have a meaningful opportunity in the retirement income market, with several high-performing multi-asset income funds well placed to capture market share as this sector grows in popularity with advisors and their clients.

The cash ISA changes will, we believe, at the margin, also be of assistance in supporting demand for these types of strategies. We have, as Piers has highlighted, a robust balance sheet, we have proven operational gearing, and an experienced team ready for significant M&A opportunities.

We are excited about the opportunities ahead, and we remain committed to delivering long-term value for all of our shareholders. Behind every fund and every number are teams who care deeply about delivering for our clients.

Their resilience and their commitment give me confidence in our future. Thank you again for your continued support and for joining us today.

I hope this update has been helpful and transparent on both the challenges we have faced and the opportunities that we see ahead. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions or share your thoughts, as your feedback is always very helpful to us.

I'll now hand back to Jake.

We'll do. Thanks, Jake.

That's great. Okay.

I'll work from the top down. We'll try and get through as many of these as we can.

In terms of the first question: "In terms of variable staff costs, how do you balance retaining and motivating staff when performance is challenging?" Do you want to take that one, Piers, or shall I take that one?

Why do you take that one, and I'll—

I'll take that

one. Okay.

You'll take the regulatory capital one. I'll take that one.

It is difficult. Obviously, the business has been through a challenging time over the last 12 months.

AUM is down. Profits were broadly flat year-on-year.

It is tough. We have to strike a balance here between returns to shareholders, but we are a people business, we do need to work hard at ensuring that our people are well looked after.

Part of that, clearly, is financial, but also part of that is cultural. I think the culture here is strong in terms of being collaborative, in terms of being collegiate.

I think it's an environment that people actually quite enjoy working within, by and large. I think that is helpful.

I think we do a lot from an HR perspective to make Premier Miton a great place to work. I think during periods when investment performance is challenging, I think being part of a team that has lots of different perspectives, whether that's from fixed income or long-short and US equities, European equities, UK equities, and so on, I think being part of a team where, as a manager, you can challenge or be challenged by other members of the teams around you, is actually helpful and supportive, and does give you an environment within which you can think about what you're doing and challenge yourself, are you making the right decisions from an investment performance standpoint?

There's a whole suite of things that we do. Clearly, financial is part of it,

but also

I think the cultural aspect has a decent role to play when performance is challenging, as it has been of late. Then we have another question: "Can you explain why the regulatory capital requirement increased from £13.3 million to £13.8 million, even though average AUM was only up 1% year-on-year?"

That's a good question. I'm glad you're taking this one, Piers.

Right. Yes is the answer to that.

The regulatory capital requirement is driven really from something called the ICARA process, which is an exercise that we go through once we've completed the year-end financial statements and once they're audited. The first starting point is you work from your sort of fixed overhead requirement, which is basically, sort of the amount of fixed cost you've got in your group, and that's your sort of starting point.

Then you build out various different scenarios and work out, well, what would it cost to wind down the group, what are the risks of ongoing harms, and it sort of builds up from there. Actually, if we look back at it, this is based on effectively our 2024 results, where the AUM actually was higher.

The AUM opened in 2024 at £9.8 billion and it grew to £10.7 billion. In that year, you would expect it to effectively increase where you've got more assets under management, you have a bigger business.

We actually had 3 regulated businesses within the group during that year, where we acquired the Tellworth business, which was a regulated entity in its own right. Since then, we've obviously simplified the group.

One would expect it probably to pull back a little bit as we go through the ICARA process over the January period this year. If there was a material change to our business, then we would revisit the ICARA and actually recalculate it at that point in time.

The short and long is we expect that may come down a little as we go.

I would anticipate it would come down a little bit from there, yeah.

Fantastic. Thanks, Piers.

This looks like another question with finance written all over it: "You've identified another £2 million of annualized cost savings, but given an administration cost base of more than £50 million and underlying cost inflation, is it the case that your costs in FY 2026 will still be higher year-on-year, or are you expecting a fall in nominal costs compared to FY 2025?"

We are expecting a fall in nominal cost. In FY 2025, we had a total sort of where it's just over £50 million of costs.

We're expecting that to pull back where we delivered the £3 million of run-rate savings in FY 2025, but obviously, it wasn't baked into the FY 2025 numbers, because it will take time to come through. It was only partially realized in the year.

We're expecting that full effect to come through in FY 2026, and indeed some of the additional £2 million will come through in FY 2026 as well. We're looking forward out into 2027, one could assume that actually the full £2 million of the FY 2026 savings will come through, which should hopefully negate inflationary increases into FY 2027.

You could assume that maybe the 2027 cost base remains pretty much at the same as the 2026 level.

Okay. Next question: "Our statement makes a number of references to M&A.

With a regulatory capital surplus of £11.8 million, though, presumably you're only able to spend single-digit millions on M&A. Why not use that money to buy back your own shares instead?"

I think that's a good question. We as a board do discuss how we allocate capital.

Clearly, in the current year, we have used a little bit of our capital, not a lot, maybe £800,000 or so, to support the dividend whilst we're going through this downturn. I think buying back the shares reduces our regulatory capital surplus.

It would leave us with less flexibility in terms of things like doing the dividend. It would leave us with less flexibility in terms of doing things like M&A.

The acquisition of Tellworth, for example, was completed with a combination of cash and shares. I think if we were to buy our shares back, we wouldn't have been able to use our cash to make that acquisition.

As you've seen, that acquisition has been a positive one for the value of the business and for shareholders. I think we like to have a bit of a buffer over and above.

I think from an M&A perspective, we want to have that flexibility to use our shares and some cash in order to do transactions. I think, with the sort of bolt-on deals that we've been looking at, like Tellworth and some others that we are currently chatting to, I think that having that flexibility is really really helpful.

The next question: "What is your view of the M&A market, and what opportunities are there for equity value enhancement through a sale?" There's a lot of capacity.

That's another great question. I think there's a lot of capacity in the UK market.

We've seen data this morning from Calastone, I think it's been mentioned in the press, about outflows from the industry, both active and passive, in the run-up to the budget, and the challenges that we've been facing in this sort of retail and wealth management space here in the UK. I think M&A is a natural part, I think, of that difficult environment, and need to reduce capacity and consolidate.

I think we have tried extremely hard to do M&A, both smaller and larger. We looked at a transaction last year in quite some detail, or quite close to it, actually.

Since we didn't buy it, its assets under management are down by about 40%. Sometimes not doing M&A is the right thing to do.

I think these are people businesses, and whilst we would be very happy to take on a larger transaction, they are people businesses, and you need to undertake them when the stars are aligned in terms of being able to deal with the people issues. Of course, in the same way that we look at larger businesses and identify that there are significant synergies to be achieved by bringing businesses together, other people will be looking at our business and thinking the same thing.

I think the answer to that is that we will either do M&A or M&A will be done to us. I think that is a natural progression over the next 2 or 3 years given the overcapacity in the sector.

We're open-minded to anything, as a board, to anything that can deliver shareholder value. A question from Brendan: "Do you have any passive products?

Is passive M&A a part of your growth strategy?" No, we don't have any passive products, and we're not actually looking at passive as part of any of our M&A activity.

I think to be in passive, it's a massive scale game. We don't have that scale.

It's not quite a duopoly, but it's almost a duopoly. The incumbents have such vast pricing power and such vast scale that it's very, very difficult for others to break in.

No, that's not an area we're looking at. We are clearly focused on the active market, and very much at the high end of the active market.

Then we have another question: "How optimistic are we about the Mansion House Compact, and do you expect to benefit from pension funds investing in the UK market, attracting some of this potential funds?" We'd love to think that that will be the case.

Ironically, we have seen non-UK investors investing in the UK, money coming in from the US and from Europe. We were with a bank this morning who told us they've seen some significant flows into UK equities from European institutions, unfortunately put on hold by the recent sort of budget delays and shenanigans.

I think that there's a lot for the UK. There's been a lot of selling from UK domestic.

They've been buying, by and large, US equities. The government and the regulator and others have all been working hard to try and encourage investment into the UK.

It would be great to think that now we've got this budget out of the way, as interest rates look like they start to come down next year, that we will see some renewed interest in UK equities. We have a very strong bench in UK equities.

We do value, we do growth, we do income, we do multi-cap, we do small-cap. We really do have a strong bench in that space.

The challenge has been that no matter how good our performance has been, we haven't been able to attract assets. All we've seen for almost 10 years is outflows virtually every month from UK equities, it's been very challenging.

Then we have a question here with regards to EU companies and the poor performance of the equities: "Could we please have your thoughts on setting up an ESG-focused fund, and focus on ESG-focused companies?" The whole ESG area is an interesting one.

Obviously, it was hugely popular from sort of '17, '18, '19, '20. It's struggled, I think, over the last 2 or 3 years, really as a function of performance.

I think that whole sort of sustainable area has struggled whilst we've had this very high concentration in US equities and this big move into passive. I think the political will in the US is obviously changed with regard to sustainability, and I think we need to see a period of strong performance from sustainable strategies.

We do have sustainable strategies, and obviously we build ESG into all of our strategies, but we only have 2, I think, pure sustainable strategies. I think we really need to see them come through with some strong performance, and for the industry to see strong performance from those funds, to reignite, if you like, customer demand for those ESG-focused funds.

Then we've got a follow-up question. This is on ESG, on our European Mid Cap.

We have obviously European Mid Cap Fund. We did launch a sustainable version of that fund, but it failed to gain traction with investors for the reasons that I've outlined.

Okay. He's saying it's the right time to buy, yeah.

You're right. The gentleman who was asking about ESG was saying it's exactly the right time to buy, and he's probably right there.

Then another question here: "If the bubble bursts, as many as are increasingly predicting, how will this affect your returns? When the bubble bursts, what is the likely relative impact on your business?"

I'm assuming from that question that the questioner means if the bubble bursts in the sort of whole AI and technology area. I think the answer to that is it depends.

I think if the very high valuations in sort of the tech sector deflate slowly, then I think that will be very beneficial for us, because I think our funds, with their broader exposure, will perform very well in that environment, and we will benefit as investors look to reallocate away from those very tech-heavy indices into more diversified strategies. I think a sudden collapse, given how much US household wealth is invested in stock markets, I think that would be negative for the US economy, and I think that would have a negative knock-on really around the world.

I think what one would hope for is a sideways period or a slowdown period. I think a massive collapse would be unhelpful, for all of the reasons that these massive collapses always are: that they damage confidence, they have a knock-on on economic growth, they have a knock-on in terms of liquidity.

As we saw in 2007, 2008, those sort of liquidity-driven corrections are really, really difficult to get through. I think, from our perspective, we would far prefer to see a sort of slow deflating of that kind of US exceptionalism trade, rather than a massive collapse.

Actually, I think in some ways, we are sort of seeing that. We're seeing people buying the dips, the highs are not quite being hit again, markets are drifting off again.

That sort of gentle decline of those highly rated stocks would suit us very well indeed, I think. Hang on, let me just scroll down, see if we've got any other questions.

Okay. Then there's another question here: "Are we using AI queries or agents yourselves yet?

Do you worry about end users using them for self-directed investments?" Two questions there.

We are using AI a lot. We have an AI committee, which is headed up by one of our IT team, and we're using that as a forum through which to share AI ideas.

Where people are using AI, where people are seeing interesting opportunities, where people are using it to improve efficiency, to improve productivity, to ensure that that gets disseminated around the group. Clearly, we worry about data transfer on the use of AI.

We use Copilot extensively within the organization, and we're finding that hugely beneficial in terms of processing information, processing data. We're also using, forgive me, I can't remember the exact names of them, but we are using a couple of large language models that are specifically targeted at investment research, and I know that the investment teams are using them to process research and to download and assimilate information, and I know that's going down very well with the teams as well.

I can't remember the name of what we're using, but anyway. Yes, we are increasingly using AI.

Is it going to drive huge efficiencies in our business? I think it will help in terms of things like processing transactions and so on.

I think that will be helpful. We've used AI to investigate sort of market reporting and so on, and that's speeded up some processes.

I think it will allow us to do more. Will it allow us to deliver cost benefits?

I'm less certain about that, but I think it will allow us to be more efficient and more effective. That's AI.

Then we have another question here. Okay.

Oh, sorry, yeah, there was a question we may have missed earlier. "What's our normalized effective tax rate, please?

It was very high in FY 2025 at around 50%."

Yes, it was. That is due to a function of the share-based payments, and the charge to the nil-cost options.

The fair value that goes through the profit and loss is based on the share price at the time of the award. What you're seeing is a sort of a higher share price when they're awarded, and actually what the tax deduction that we get for them is effectively the exercise price when those shares are exercised.

That's why it's been effectively higher. If you look at the adjusted profit, the tax rate in there was actually 25%, I'd expect the tax rate to normalize as those share awards roll off.

Our normalized rate will be 25%.

That's where it'll go to, yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

I'm not really good at using the mouse here. That's it.

Those are all the questions that we've had. Let me hand back to Jake.

Thank you, everybody, for spending time with us today. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for your questions, incredibly helpful. It it has been a tough year and a tough environment.

I think, we've done as as well as we can in terms of diversifying the business so that we're not overexposed in any one area. We've got quite a few reasons for optimism.

There's some exciting projects coming down the pipe as we move into 2026. We recognize it has been a challenging time for our shareholders.

We can assure you we're doing our best to to get ourselves back on the front foot and to deliver as much share shareholder return as we possibly can. Thank you once again for joining us, and I look forward to updating you at the half-year stage.