Conference Transcript - SEIC 2026-06-02

Jeffrey Schmidt, Analyst — William Blair

Go ahead and get started here. Everyone, good afternoon. Thank you for coming. My name is Jeff Schmidt. I cover wealth management and capital market stocks here at William Blair. I would like to introduce SEI Investments. They provide outsourced technology and investment solutions to banks, financial advisors, and asset managers. We're pleased to have with us Sean Denham. He is the CFO and COO of the company. He'll discuss the business. So thank you, Sean, for joining us. And then just one quick note, just go to our website, williamblaire.com, for a complete list of disclosures. So with that, I will turn it to

Sean Denham, CFO

you, Sean. Thank you, Jeff. Can you hear me okay? Great. So nice to see everyone. I recognize a lot faces really excited for the faces I don't know I've been in the chair in this chair for a little over two years now having a lot of different investor and analyst conversations and the thing I get the most about individuals that are considering new coverage or potentially thinking about investing in SEI is man you guys are really complex and difficult company to understand I I disagree. We do have four different, we have four segments right now. But what I find is the investors or the analysts that really cover us well and make the effort to really dive down and do the research and have the conversations with us, all agree we're actually not that complex of a company. There's many more complex companies out there than us. I think the struggle historically for folks that are looking at us is that there's not one market comp, which can be a struggle. So what I'm going to do today is walk through, for those who don't know us, our four different businesses. There is a lot of overlap. There's a lot of synergies across the businesses. the businesses, so I will start there. First off, our investment manager services business, or our IMS business, is our largest business. It's our fastest growing. We have really strong margins, but really what that business does is fund administration for traditional and alternative investment managers. Again, really strong, great growth rates. We'll unpack some of the financials in each of these businesses in a moment, but we have a lot of tailwinds in the business right now, including thinking about classic insourcers of fund administration that have moved to an outsource model, and we are their first phone call. Our second business is our private banking business. This is SEI's legacy business. We've been in operations for 58 years. This is the business Al West founded the company on. We provide, in our private banking business, front office, middle office, and back office technology through our SWP platform, so our SEI wealth platform, and outsourcing operations to the wealth management arms of banks. Third is our institutional investors business. That is essentially an outsourced CIO business for primarily endowments and foundations. We also perform a lot of work around defined benefit plans, so CIO services around benefit plans and pension schemes. Fourth is our investment advisors business. That's a full service platform for investment advisors. We used to call that our TAMP business, our turnkey asset management platform, but we've really stopped using that term because some of the things we've done have kind of outweighed and have gone beyond a classic TAMP business. And included in the investment business is the acquisition we made back in December of 2025, so just a few months ago, of Stratos. Stratos is a $450 million initial acquisition where we took a majority stake in that business That is an RIA platform, which has been an incredibly strong cultural fit. Performance has been good and has met our expectations through one quarter. We see a lot of synergies between our classic or historical asset management business, including our custody platform, where we're really, really excited about. That's at the highest level of where SEI sits. Again, you'll see there are some of our clients there and you'll see our competitors and what you'll notice is there's not really one competitor that sits across all four of those business units or segments, which again leads to sometimes the term, hey, you're really difficult to comp in the market and at times difficult to understand. But again, I think if you look at the individual businesses, you'll see that we're actually not too complex to understand. Okay, let's talk about performance for a moment. So we've had incredibly strong performance over the last four years. And that really starts with in 2022 when we announced Ryan Hickey as our new CEO. CEO. Ryan is the second CEO in SEI history after the founder Al West turned over the reins to Ryan after a great 50-year run by Al, created something really beautiful in SEI. But the performance has been outstanding really across all four of our key indicators. So you'll see revenue growth there. You'll see our huge growth in net sales events. We can unpack that a little bit as we go into the performance of each of the business. you can see the vast improvement in our margins and our EPS growth. So we're really, really proud of what we've accomplished over the last four years. I think prior, and I was on stage here a year ago, and last year we talked about the history of SEI from the original concept by Al all the way through where we were in 2025, now we're in 2026, but we've had really great momentum over the last four years. A lot of that credit goes to Ryan, his vision as CEO. We feel differently at SEI today than we probably did four or five years ago. There's been a massive tone change. We have certain leaders of the business, Phil McCabe and our IMS business's legacy SEI, Sanjay Sharma, who was our chief technology officer. Ryan, on his very first day as CEO, named Sanjay as the head of private banking. We've brought Michael Lane in from the outside. Michael is ex-BlackRock, who led the iShares program for many years at BlackRock. I came from the outside, and so maybe a trend you see is that bringing some new outside in thinking really has done wonders for SEI. I often say one of the greatest strengths of SEI has been over the last 50-some years is that no one ever leaves. It's a really strong culture and people love working at SEI. I think one of the weaknesses of SEI is that nobody ever left SEI. So I think bringing in some of that outside in and blending that with the current leadership team that's been there for a while has been a really good recipe. What Ryan does really well is leading the executive team and working well with the board, bringing in different thinking. What we have done over the last couple of years is move, and I think some of the results can be characterized in this way. We've really shifted the business from a horizontal model, I'm sorry, from a vertical model to a horizontal model. SEI, prior to probably two years ago, those four business units represented here, they were almost run as four completely distinct businesses with very low synergies across the business. Think about our IMS business having a complete opportunity of that leadership team to run their complete tech stack, complete the way they think about marketing, the way they set compensation. were really, truly four distinct companies. Moving from a vertical to a horizontal model has really, really served us well. I think if Ryan was sitting up here, he would say that the executive team is operating more cohesively than we have in a few decades. I think some of that results in what you see here. The next question, which is the obvious question, is can we continue the great results? that we've been enjoying? I think the answer to that is yes. I think that we're coming off, Q1 was our greatest quarter in SEI history, our largest sales event quarter, our largest earnings per share quarter. Margins have improved dramatically. So we're really well positioned to continue that momentum, but really what it comes down to is execution. This is a slide we used at Investor Day back in September, so it was the first Investor Day we had done in three years. The first Investor Day we had done since Ryan became CEO, and there's really five focus areas of the organization right now. By the way, we came up with these our own. We didn't have to go hire McKinsey or Bain to come help us create this strategy, so we saved a few dollars there but we do think there's really five key areas where we're excited for our path going forward. In no particular order, really reimagining asset management. That started with bringing Michael Lane in from BlackRock 19, 20 months ago. He's not quite somewhere around there. He's not quite on his two-year anniversary yet. I think when Michael got here, not too dissimilar from when I joined SEI. We had a lot of, what I uneloquently say, we had a beautiful, we lived in a beautiful neighborhood. We had great bones to the house, great bones, but we had a lot of broken windows that we had to fix. And over the last two years, we started fixing those broken windows. I think where we are in our journey, and Michael experienced that as well. I'll get into asset management in a second, but we had to pull those windows. First off, identify all the broken windows. We pulled them out and we started systematically replacing those windows. A lot of that went to the move from vertical to horizontal. What Michael has done an amazing job of is really coming in, looking at where we were in the market, where we were playing in our TAM, and honestly, the way I think about revenue growth or revenue in general, there's four drivers of revenue. That's all there is. Greenfield, new logos, white space, pricing and retention. Really where we were focused in asset management was retaining the smallest advisors, our smallest advisors clients. Probably not the best strategy for growth. And so Michael came in and had a, I won't go into it, you can look at the investor day, but he had a five or six point plan. As all great leaders do, you have to have a five or six point plan when you come into a new organization. And he systematically has been working on each of these points. That's including kind of re-imagining our asset management product portfolio. He brought Bob home with him from BlackRock. He's been amazing. But really re-imagining what we're doing in asset management, I think that was early days. That was more September. I think now we're executing on that asset management story. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. Enterprise excellence, huge one. So from a CFO standpoint, I had that hat originally. It was always kind of design I would take on the COO hat. So we spent a lot of time operationalizing the business in a meaningful way. I think that's led to dramatic margin improvement. The third is strategic capital allocation. I'll speak to that in a minute. And then also boosting international returns. International is a great growth area for us right now. We've been in UK, we've been in Dublin, we've been in Lux for a number of years. But I think thinking about what our go-to-market strategy specifically is across the business units is something that we were maybe falling down on. We weren't spending enough attention on that. So we put Sanjay Sharma, who I mentioned earlier. He's a great, great, great, great executor. He's got an engineer mindset. So we asked him just a few months ago to take on, in addition to his private banking responsibility, to really focus on international. And Sanjay's been spending a lot of time there. And then really just investing in improving growth engines like our IMS business. Okay, so let's unpack a little of the performance of each of the businesses now just a bit more. So in our investment managers business, again, really, really well positioned right now. So there are incredible strong market tailwinds, especially where we play, where we specialize while we're in traditional really kind of across we do fund administration across the entire portfolio of everything we can do from you know traditionals mutual funds etc into our alternative platforms real estate infrastructure private credit and private equity etc we're the number one fund administrator in the world in private credit there's been a lot of tailwinds and growing alts we're really well positioned there we are the first phone call and it's something we we talk about internally we strive for is to be that first phone call in IMS in our IMS business when a new fund launch is occurring you know in Q1 when we talk about the shift from insourcing to outsourcing in Q1 we announced two really large wins so that would be in our sales events numbers of approximately the fifth largest and the 15th largest investment manager in the world that has had decided to make a move from insourcing to outsourcing. We were in that RFP, it's been about an 18-month process of going through that, and we won that mandate. Now, inside that mandate, for each of those new wins for us, from a risk profile, the mandate included two fund administrators. We were one of those, really proud of that and excited for that. In saying that, it's not a 50-50 split. This goes out to how we are executing it really well. We are, in my opinion, the best fund administrator in the world, especially in private credit, private equity, and some alternatives in the alternative world. Just because we won those mandates, it isn't just they split it 50-50. We're winning the lion's share of that mandate, which I think is a testament to how well we're performing in that space. Then you'll just see the 22, 23, 24, and 25 growth. We're growing across all pieces of business, across traditional alternatives and global. Doing extremely well there. The pipeline remains strong. The sales events numbers that we announced in Q1 wasn't all of them. We will continue to bring on additional funds through those two new large mandates in addition to our normal growth of our business. But again, definitely our fastest growing and most profitable business right now. Shifting over to our private banking business. When I first came to my first investment conference for SEI and every analyst call I ever had, out of 20 questions, 19 were around, when are you going to improve private banking margins? We've done that. Sanjay gets really all the credit for that. We were enjoying zero to negative margins for a number of years in private banking. Our historical margins rates were 25% to 30%. When Sanjay took over, he said, you know, we have a path forward to get back to historical rates. Well, in Q1 of this year, we passed 20%, really far advancing the speed of which Sanjay, I initially thought we would get there, and there's a few reasons why we're doing that. Number one, really cost discipline, making sure we're investing in the right areas of our SWP platform, right sizing, really our head count. So everything you would expect from a demanding engineer type thinker, Sanjay is the best. He also increased our TAM. So we were really focused on the largest of the large. So our SWP platform currently, or currently, we look at the market, there's about 20 of the largest banks in the United States. We have about half of those banks are on our SWP platform and we do the front office, middle office, back office services for them. We were really focused in that for a very long time. Those come about very rarely, every seven to 10 years, those RFPs might come around. and we spent a lot of time focused there. Well, Sanjay actually went down market. Where Michael Lane went up market, Sanjay went down market. It turned out to be really profitable for us. And so moving to the regional community and the community bank space, specifically the community bank space where SWP is more plug and play. We can install our platform much quicker. There's a quicker return, lower cost of delivery, et cetera. It's been really profitable for us. What Sanjay also did over the last couple of years, which has been really, really exciting for SEI, I'm very bullish on this, was the advent of professional services. So he took a look around the private banking space and said, man, we're installing our platform, we're doing all the operations, and then they're hiring third parties to come in to do various services around our offerings. And Sanjay said, we can do that. And so we've started over the last couple of years to develop some professional services that have paid off really, really well. So two to three years ago, four years ago, when we would announce a win in the private banking space on our SWP and Ops platform, that was it. So those might be two to $3 million deals, $4 million deals. Now those deals are now $10 million deals because we're selling other offerings like our Sphere offering, which kind of surrounds our cybersecurity platform. There's other things like change management services, our data platform, which has been a big seller for us. So all of a sudden we're starting to bring the whole firm to bear. And one area which I'm also excited about, which we really haven't dug into too much, and I think it's an opportunity for us, is selling asset management to private banks. So being on our platform, we know where every single penny and dollar is. Every single penny and dollar is for about 120 banks across the United States and globally. We know whether those banks, in their asset management product inventory, how much is in alts, how much is in traditional, where it is. We've really done very little with that, and we have sold very little of our own product into those banks. We see that as an opportunity. We recently announced the hiring of the national leader for selling asset management to banks. I'm not exactly sure what her title is going to be. Really strong momentum in private banks. We do believe margins will continue to prove at what rate, not exactly sure, but we've made steady progress there, which we're really proud of. This is an interesting chart. This encompasses both our institutional and investment advisors business. So in Q3 this year, we'll go from four segments, I think Q3, hopefully if everything works out right, from moving from four segments to three segments. So we'll combine the institutional investor segment and the advisor segment together. But I think just looking at the graphic at a very high level, you can see over the last few years of the improvement of what we've done and why I'm really excited about this business unit. So we've really been able to increase flows really across both of our businesses. The advisor's business has been very successful, as I mentioned, under Michael's leadership. A lot more room to grow, again, as you're building a massive ship like Michael is right now in asset management, it takes a little time. He's been, again, in the sea for about 18 months, but I do think over the next year we're going to see even larger improvement, including hopefully more adoption of our own products that we've created. We've curated about eight new ETFs over the last couple of quarters. We have an inventory plan of additional launches going forward, so the opportunity to take a look at the model portfolios that we curate with our clients and, for instance, in our institutional business, do we have the ability to take some of our own products? We have fiduciary responsibilities that go along with that. You can't just take out certain products and put our products in, but we have an investment manager unit that looks at all that. Do we have an opportunity to take some of our own curated products and put those into some of those models? I think there's an opportunity there as just one example. What do we do with all of our capital that we have? We have committed and we have returned and committed to return about 90 to 100 percent of our free cash flow back to our investors and that's obviously in the form of dividends. We have a very strong buyback program. I think Brad, last year we, in Trailing 12, we purchased back about 7 percent of our own shares. Brad's nodding. Brad's head of investor relations for SEI. SEI, if you don't know Brad, he's great. What you'll see there is an incredibly strong balance sheet, probably too strong of a balance sheet. At Investor Day, we talked about moving. Right now, we're at about a negative one turn leverage model. It's probably not the best model. We've historically worn that balance sheet as a badge of honor. I don't necessarily have that same take. I think we should be using the balance sheet in maybe a more, I don't want to say aggressive way, different way. We have spoken about at Investor Day, and since then, taking on more debt, but doing it in a very smart way. We're not going to just go do deals for the sake of doing deals. We want the right deals. Stratos deal for us was a good deal, we're really happy in what those returns are. When you just take a look at this and the amount of buybacks, I think we're relatively unique. There are companies that do buybacks, but the amount of free cash flow we use in those buybacks you may consider unique. That is kind of SEI in a nutshell in 25 minutes. Jeff, I know we have a session right after this if there's any questions in a breakout session, but I'm happy to take any questions right now. And Jeff always has a ton of tough questions for me.

Jeffrey Schmidt, Analyst — William Blair

So if enough, no, but please feel free if anyone has a question or else I will. I have a question on IMS. Sure. So your fund administration, clearly your strongest growth driver of the business. Could you maybe discuss like, how are you differentiating what stands out there and what gives you confidence you can kind of maintain? I mean, you probably averaged double digit revenue growth for a while.

Sean Denham, CFO

I mentioned it, but honestly, it's execution. Probably everyone sits up here and says they're the world's best at certain execution, but we really believe we are. That comes in the form of ... Don't quote me on these numbers, but when there's closed end funds, that fund closes and they launch a new fund, industry averages for fund administration of renewals of that same administrator is high 70%, low 80%, we're in the kind of mid to low 90%. I think that's a really good indicator of our performance. I mentioned the two large insourcers to outsource model, or investment managers have changed their model. We won both of those mandates, two really large ones. They don't come to market that frequently, and the fact that we won both of them and we're winning the lion's share of that work, I think is a good indicator of really what our performance is, especially in the alternative space.

Jeffrey Schmidt, Analyst — William Blair

How many have the type of global capabilities you really have there?

Sean Denham, CFO

Great question. We recently, I don't want to say announced, but we've spoke about it. We are opening a Singapore office, and that's not because we at SCI like to plant flags all over the globe. We've had some of the largest managers in the world come to us and ask us, hey, we want to use you overseas, specifically in that Pacific Rim area like Singapore. We've announced we're opening an office in Singapore. That's based off of demand. When the largest managers in the world say, hey, we want to use you there, but you need a presence there, that's exciting for us. We're not here to plant flags and really extend cost. We try to be as efficient as we can, but I think that's a good indicator from what our global footprint is. We also publicly had talked about, Ryan did, our CEO a few years ago, about where do the two inorganic growth areas where we may be thinking about. One was the US RIA, who just did that deal. Stratos is the perfect one for us. footprint, great one to kind of build off of. Not that we're necessarily thinking about number two there, but the second inorganic growth area was a European fund admin. Do we want to expand or do something significant there? There's always the classic buy versus build analysis that's done. We put some of our best US talent overseas in Europe and really found out that we could actually build something and create great momentum just from a build standpoint there are certain pieces of our admin business you know if you look at a total pie of every single thing a fund administrator can do for um for a client we probably do 96 we currently have about probably 96 out of 100 of the things somebody would buy there may be certain tuckings that maybe we want to buy to round out and complement the rest of our ims business or our fund admin business that we still need to do um but that's you know that's how we think are thinking about our global footprint so uh so we'll take private banking for a moment um so we have asset management that sits kind of in our investment advisors you know classically those investment products that we sold into the advisor or in our model portfolios for ocio business has really sat there by itself in a vertical we can sell those same products into private banks so they they have investment product portfolios we think uh you know so i think that's it that's probably the most obvious synergy also from a professional services standpoint we are selling 99 of our professional services right now or consulting services inside our private banking space we see opportunities in our ims business and actually in our asset management business as well. There is some overlap, but historically, asset management has sat over here. We don't jump over the fence to other parts of the business. They kind of lived in silos. Breaking down those silos and moving to the horizontal model, there are things we can sell across the platform. We have. I had mentioned that we're bringing in someone to lead who has been there, done that before, who has led asset management is selling directly into banks. So that person's gonna be coming on board here in the next, I don't know, month or so. And we are upgrading all of our people who have historically, not all, but our sales force who have historically sold technology and ops. I know technology and ops, I know technology and ops, I can't sell asset management. They now have gotten their series seven. So now they have the opportunity to go sell into those relationships. So that's just some of the thinking, it's a couple examples.

Jeffrey Schmidt, Analyst — William Blair

think we're out of time here. So, Sean, thank you. Thank you very much, Jeff. Appreciate it. Thank you all.