SWF - General Discussion, page-31

Retail brokerage is a dead business model, you can't expect to be profitable without massive customer volumes and owing the entire value stream from trade to settlement and clearing to try and keep the costs down. FUM or AUM is the only solution to this issue, without it this selfwealth will limp along like a sick dog waiting to be put down.

Heres a quick back of a napkin breakdown
$9.50 per trade
less settlement + clearing cost $3.00 (perhaps $2.25 with FNZ)
less ASX fees (data, live pricing and more)
less refinitiv fees (data)
less ANZ fees per transaction
They're making maybe $2 per trade tops. That is a raw cost to place a single trade let alone cover the rest of the operations of the business and executive salaries.
The current business model is that of a Bank- Step 1) acquire customers , Step 2) get them to deposit funds and not spend them, Step 3) make profits off funds deposited through NIM paid from the actual bank. (unlike a real bank they don't loan out the cash for a tidy profit)

Sadly, the business has zero control over both of these profit levers, they can't force customers to trade (market all you like to them but you can't make people trade) and the can't stop customers from withdrawing funds or not keeping funds on the platform. At the peak of their Covid halo effect they had something like $750m in customer cash sitting on the platform earning NIM, I guess about $3.2m per month from NIM, not bad, but now that has retracted to $448m close to pre pandemic levels. Shareholders should be appalled at the lack of strategic foresight by the executive team and appalled by the boards negligence to let it go on unchecked for so long.