Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Praemium (ASX:PPS) CEO, Anthony Wamsteker
Lel Smits: Praemium provides technology and product solutions enabling advisors to deliver outcomes for their clients, including achieving their financial goals and having a positive wealth management experience. The company has just delivered a robust performance in the first half of the 2025 financial year, showcased by a substantial jump in revenue, operating earnings and profit. Joining me to discuss more is Praemium’s CEO, Anthony Wamsteker. Welcome to the Stock Network.
Anthony Wamsteker: Thanks, Lel. Great to be here.
Lel Smits: Now, you’ve just released your half year results. As I’ve mentioned, revenue and other income are up by 32%. Your interim net profit grew 45% over the half year. What factors do you think supported the strong start to the new financial year?
Anthony Wamsteker: Well, we were fortunate that we’ve got the benefit now of having acquired the OneView business. So some of the increase in revenue arose out of the OneView acquisition and the revenue that that drives. And then the balance of it is because our business is growing strongly. We have got good growth in the amount of money that is on our platform, or the FUA, as well as growth in the number of portfolios on our software service. So all of the growth that we’re getting, including the OneView acquisition, has driven up the revenue line. And then as we’re getting bigger with that growth, we’re starting to get the benefits of scale.
And so whilst our expenses have to go up a bit to accommodate that growth in revenue, and certainly our costs go up because of inflation as well, as we’ve got to pay people more, quite rightly. But nevertheless, the costs are not growing as fast as they are for an expansion in the overall profit margin. So we get the double benefit of both higher revenue, plus an expanding profit margin, has led to the profit being up even more than the revenue.
Lel Smits: Excellent. Now, over the interim period, the praemium has also been rated the top platform across two categories in the 2024 Investment Trends Platform Benchmarking Report. How are you getting to this market leading position and also ensuring that you’ll stay there?
Anthony Wamsteker: Yeah, so the reality is that our business is a little bit unusual in that we started being a reporting service for share portfolios in Australia many years ago, over 20 years ago.
It was the first comprehensive reporting service for shares, and including all the complexity that goes with Australian shares. So every time there was a corporate action, there was a rights issue or a restructure, as well as the normal dividends and capital returns, all of that gets captured by our engine. And it’s unique, really, that we capture everything to do with shares.
So with that heritage, we’ve always had a capability to service high net worth clients and high net worth advisors who are trying to service those high net worth individuals, whereas most of the other platforms started life really trying to just cater to the reporting and transactional requirements of retail portfolios or the average wealth and the average financial advisor in Australia. So we’ve had that leading position with high net worth, and the categories we win are the things that reflect our leadership position for the more complex portfolios. How we intend to sustain that is that we own our own technology, we always develop our own technology, and our developers focus exclusively on the needs of that higher net worth segment, as opposed to what the reporting requirements might be for a more typical retail portfolio, which is the focus of all of the other platforms.
So by the investment we make in our technology and by the focus our technology has of catering for the more complex and the more sophisticated portfolios, we feel that we can sustain that advantage that we’ve got. And the survey you mentioned, investment trends, is the independent verification of that leadership position.
Lel Smits: Now, building upon that competitive advantage, you’ve also launched a cutting edge spectrum solution, restructured operations offshore, and also returned earnings to shareholders over the period. Looking ahead, what do you believe will be your focus for the remainder of the financial year?
Anthony Wamsteker: Yeah, so with the launch of Spectrum, for a little while what we’ll be doing is gradually adjusting with some minor modifications in response to the market feedback of the early adopters of that platform. And then after, you know, we’re very confident that’s exactly what it needs to be, we’ll focus on a couple of other areas where we feel we can improve further. One of those is superannuation.
We’re very excited about the superannuation market, we feel we could do more there. And then the other area is, because we service high net worth clients, we want to get our client service as high as possible. High net worth clients are used to getting very good service in every aspect of their life, and so we don’t feel anyone really drives service to the levels that high net worth people need, and we would love to lead the charge on that.
So those will be two of our big priority areas going forward. And finally, just bedding down and completing the acquisition of OneView and bringing all of that client and product into our technology stack.
Lel Smits: Great. Well, thank you, Anthony, for running us through your success today, and also all the best for the remainder of the financial year and beyond.
Anthony Wamsteker: Thanks again, Lel and once again thanks for having me on.
Ends