Why don’t you think the advice cti would drop too, thereby allowing the cti to be lower than 48% eventually? Presumably increased automation should decrease costs (although margins will presumably continue to be under pressure).
Yes, I do think the Advice CTI ratio can go lower over time. At constant percentage fees and non-decreasing FUAd, at least, I am pretty confident it will. What I mean to say is that, even in an environment of increasing automation, the Advice business is inherently more people-intensive than Platforms or Investment Management (or Life Annuities), hence less scalable.
Therefore, for as long as Advice continues to represent a large portion of the Company’s total revenue, I do not see IFL as being able to replicate the sort of downward trajectory in the CTI ratio that CGF (for instance) has experienced over the past decade.
Also, while it does seem reasonable to me that a business such as Platforms can eventually achieve a CTI ratio in the low 30s, that is likely to take more than just a couple of years to materialise.
That’s why, all things considered, I see those 500bp (i.e. from 53% down to 48%) as a first approximation of the CTI ratio improvement that IFL can conceivably achieve within the foreseeable future, any further improvement being dependent on a wider range of variables (such as the speed in the future automation of the Advice business) that are much harder to forecast.
IFL Price at posting:
$8.93 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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