Earnings Call Transcript
SEI INVESTMENTS CO (SEIC)
Earnings Call Transcript - SEIC Q1 2022
Operator, Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here and welcome to the SEI First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. All lines are currently in listen-only mode. We will have a question-and-answer session later. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Chairman and CEO, Al West. Please proceed.
Al West, Chairman and CEO
Welcome, everyone. On our call today, we have Al Chiaradonna, Phil McCabe, Wayne Withrow, Paul Klauder, Kathy Heilig, our Controller, and Dennis McGonigle, our CFO. Also joining us is Ryan Hicke, who I will be transitioning to the role of CEO on June 1. Today, I’ll start by recapping the first quarter of 2022. I’ll then pass it over to Dennis and our LSV and the investment and new business segment. After that, each business segment leader will comment on their segment results. As usual, we will take questions at the end of each report. So, let’s look at the financial results for the first quarter of 2022. First quarter revenues grew by 28% compared to a year ago. Our first quarter earnings increased by 47% year-over-year. First quarter EPS of $1.36 has risen by 53% from the $0.89 recorded in the first quarter of 2021. During the quarter, asset balances fell by 9.4 billion, while LSV's balances decreased by 3.0 billion. In this quarter, we bought back 1.7 million shares of SEI stock at a price of $58.42 per share, amounting to $101.1 million in stock repurchases. We experienced a strong sales quarter, with net events totaling $28.7 million, of which $27 million is net recurring. Each of our segments will provide more details. The significant news this quarter is the selection of our new CEO, Ryan Hicke. Ryan is familiar with SEI and has been with us for 24 years in various leadership roles within asset management, processing, and technology. Additionally, he offers a global perspective from more than 10 years at SEI outside the United States. Recently, he has provided leadership to a rapidly growing start-up. Importantly, he embodies our culture and serves as a role model for everyone. Now, I’d like to turn it over to Al to say hello. Al?
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Thanks, Al. Good afternoon, everyone. I appreciated the opportunity to speak to so many of you over the last couple of weeks. I thought I would take a brief minute to share some of the things I am focused on presently. While we are in a very strong position strategically and financially, we need to continue to make changes to truly capitalize on our opportunities in the future. As the year evolves, you will see a continued focus on maintaining and accelerating growth in existing businesses, including margin expansion in private banking and segment expansion in other units, rapidly expanding our focus on new growth engines, including SEI Sphere and other relevant M&A activity and reinvigorating our culture and talent strategy, with an emphasis on infusing new skills, perspectives, and thinking, including diversity all across the company. I truly look forward to spending more time with all of you, and I'm excited to continue to work closely alongside Al and the team to hit the ground running in June. I will now turn it over to Dennis, but I look forward to any questions today or in the coming weeks. Thank you.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Thanks, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll cover the first quarter results for the investments in new business segment and discuss the results of LSV Asset Management. I'll also go over a couple of corporate items. During the first quarter of 2022, the investments in new business segment activities consisted of the operation of our Private Wealth Management Group, SEI Sphere, the modernization of assets and data integration of different platforms to deliver on our one SEI strategy and other investments. During the quarter, the investments in new business segment incurred a loss of $7 million which compared to a loss of $9.5 million during the first quarter of 2021. Approximately $4.1 million of expense during the first quarter 2022 is tied to our one SEI effort. Regarding LSV, our approximately 38.6% ownership contributed $32.5 million in income to SEI for the first quarter of 2022. This compares to a contribution of $33.4 million in income for the first quarter of 2021. Assets during the quarter decreased approximately $3 billion. LSV experienced net negative cash flow during the quarter of approximately $1.7 billion with market depreciation of approximately $1.3 billion. Revenue for LSV was approximately $108.5 million for the quarter with $1.3 million of performance fees. As Al mentioned in prior disclosure, we received an $88 million contract termination fee during the quarter. This fee was recorded as revenue in our private banking segment and had the net impact of increasing our EPS by approximately $0.47 per share. As we have previously discussed and consistent with others in the industry, we continue to experience inflationary pressures on personnel costs. In addition, we continue to add talent to support our growth. This has had an impact on expenses across the company, particularly in our operational groups. We expect this pressure to be with us for the foreseeable future. Also, our expenses reflect a full quarter of costs associated with our recent acquisitions, including Novus. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 23.1%. We have also included in our earnings release additional information that you should take a look at. Please refer to our soon to be filed 10-Q for more information. I'll now be happy to take any questions.
Operator, Operator
Our first question will come from Ryan Bailey with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Ryan Bailey, Analyst
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I had a question for Ryan. I was wondering what are the key strategic priorities that you have going forward? And maybe what are the areas of the business that you spent the most time evaluating and thinking about?
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Hey, Ryan, how are you? I mean, I think pretty much exactly what I reiterated. We talked last week, but also in the call a few minutes ago, when we look, the strategic priorities are really to continue to have a clear focus on accelerating growth in our organic businesses, and looking at ways that we can kind of reposition and maybe redeploy some opportunities or capital there, but also what we do that, I think everybody in the room shares the view that we have a great opportunity to really start to focus on new business opportunities and new initiatives. And I think equally important, as I mentioned a couple minutes ago, with the workforce coming back, all the changes we have a really, really great opportunity to kind of refresh and reinvigorate what we believe is an advantage we have with such a talented workforce. So, they're kind of the real – the key three areas that we're going to continue to drive down and as time evolves, I will provide much more transparency around what we're going to do, but we'll continue working with the team to formalize those plans.
Ryan Bailey, Analyst
Got it. And hopefully I'm not trying to preview too much around this, but you had mentioned in your prepared remarks looking to expand the margin in the Private Banking segment. I was just wondering is that a change in view around how that business is operated or is that, sort of the same view as previously that you get the backlog implemented and that will come with helping incremental margins?
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Yes, Al C is going to go through that in his remarks, Ryan, but I mean, I think you're right, we're going to continue to focus on what we’ve spoken about in the past and in certain cases we'll look to accelerate opportunities we have to expand margin.
Ryan Bailey, Analyst
Got it. Thank you.
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
You're welcome.
Operator, Operator
Our next question will come from the line of Owen Lau with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. Also, Ryan, could you please talk about how you want to maybe position SEIC to navigate through the current geopolitical tensions and rising rate environment and maybe anything you would do differently based on what you said in the prepared remarks? Thank you.
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
I'm sorry, Owen, good to speak to you. I'd missed the middle of that navigate the geopolitical tension?
Owen Lau, Analyst
Yeah. Navigate through the current geopolitical tensions and also rising rate environment, anything you would do differently just like what is mentioned in the prepared remarks?
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
We're not really that impacted specifically in our day to day business by speaking kind of specifically about kind of Russia-Ukraine. So, for us right now, Owen, it’s kind of business as usual. We will obviously stay acutely aware of any influencers or impacts, anything that happens would have on our employees or our business for that front.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Got it. And then maybe one for Dennis on the LSV, I think on the press release, you also mentioned that earnings were down year-over-year due to negative cash flows from existing clients and also client losses, maybe could you please provide a little bit more color and update on LSV? Thank you.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Sure. So, it's kind of a tale of coming out of the tougher markets for them as a value-oriented firm and moving forward, being able to take advantage of the fact that they've kind of stuck to their strategy, their performance on a relative basis has been very good and strong. And somewhat reflected by the $1.3 million performance fee in the first quarter. Last year, that number was about $0.3 million. So, the first quarter is usually not a quarter of performance fees for LSV generally as a firm. So, the performance has gotten better while their cash flows are negative, it's hard to say but they've actually improved as value has gotten to the attention of investors. And one thing in talking to LSV, there's a lot more search activity in the value space that they're optimistic about relative to prospects for the year to capture new asset flows.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Got it. Thank you very much.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
You're welcome.
Operator, Operator
Our next question will come from the line of Ryan Kenny with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Hey, good afternoon.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Hey, Ryan.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
First, a question for Ryan. Understand the announcement is fairly recent. So, I don't think anyone's expecting a detailed comprehensive outline of the strategy yet, but just as a follow-up to the first question, I just wanted to dig in a little bit about the big picture on your approach to operating leverage. How do you think about balancing the need to invest to grow versus being a CEO more focused on expense management? Thanks.
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Sure. I think it's kind of a couple of parts, Ryan. I mean, as we've said in the beginning, I mean SEI is in a really fortunate and privileged position to be as financially strong as we are. And I think we're going to continue to look at how do we allocate that capital and that will include investments that we're making today to look at ways maybe in the short term that we may redirect or redeploy some discretionary investments that we think best aligned with revenue opportunities, but also to continue to invest in new opportunities that we either started in the last couple of years or things that we see on the horizon to position ourselves for future growth.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Thanks. And then just a follow-up question for Dennis. So, SEI had the $88 million termination fee as a revenue tailwind this quarter, is that something that you want to reinvest into the business or is it something that you think would be distributed to shareholders through accelerated buybacks?
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
I mean, ultimately, that's a decision for our Board to make relative to capital allocation from a dividend perspective. But clearly just – it's a good problem to have to have a very strong balance sheet to have a highly liquid balance sheet and one that gives our board as well as Ryan and Al optionality relative to investment opportunities or capital return. So, but that's something our board will talk about. The logistics of the actual capital is – that piece of business was signed through one of our foreign subsidiaries. So, there's a little bit of a process to get that capital moved, which we'll actually work on before ultimately our board here would address that issue.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Thanks.
Operator, Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Robert Lee with KBW. Please go ahead.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Great. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I guess my main question, most of my others were asked already, but Dennis, was curious to know the investments in new business, you called out that I think the ongoing cost from the One SEI initiative was $4 million, can you just remind us or update and kind of how we should think, is that kind of at a level where it's more of a permanent fixture around that $4 million or should we think of that continuing to kind of maybe trail off as we work our way through the year into next year?
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Yes. I would suspect that cost specific to that project will trail down as we move forward, but just a reminder, the investments in new business segment is an investment segment. So, while it may trail down relative to One SEI, some of the technological investments we're making associated with One SEI, based on particularly with Ryan, building on Ryan’s comments, there are other things and other ideas we have that we would probably reallocate some of that spending too. So, I wouldn't look at it as a big opportunity for pickup on expense as much as continuing our ability to add to our asset base. So, there's things in that segment. For example, we are investing in cloud, and that's part of that segment. We are investing in the data space working with Snowflake. So the cost associated with that work is in that segment. So, these are additional R&D projects at the company level, enhancing our learning, enhancing our abilities that we think will benefit most of our businesses, if not all of our businesses over time.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Great. That’s all I had. Thank you.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
You're welcome.
Operator, Operator
And the final question we have in queue at this time comes from the line of Michael Young with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Michael Young, Analyst
Hey, thank you for taking the questions. Al and Ryan, I understand you're not rolling out sort of any new thoughts or goals yet or anything like that, but just given kind of the long-term legacy of SEI. I'm curious, how much of sort of the legacy way of doing business is sort of on the table and what sort of magnitude potentially have changed should we expect going forward? Is this more of a wholesale review of the way things are done, can we expect balance sheet leverage to be an option M&A to become more aggressive? Any larger shifts in kind of strategic thinking or is this more of a marginal change? And it's just a question I'm getting from a lot of investors.
Al West, Chairman and CEO
I'd say – I feel that there should be a lot of change and I'll leave the rest of that to Ryan.
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
I agree with Al, Michael. I don't think it's a wholesale review of what we're doing. We have a lot of really strong assets and things that we do really well. But it's not going to be marginal change and we're going to continue to work through that. We have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us and we expect to take advantage of that opportunity. So, that's going to require change.
Michael Young, Analyst
Okay. And as a follow-up, just it's been mentioned a lot that you had international experience, now is kind of a reason why you were selected for the role, could you just talk about kind of the conversation with the board there and what the opportunity set is ahead that you feel like made you uniquely qualified to take this position and kind of where the international piece is going to play in?
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Yeah, I mean, Al mentioned that earlier. So, I think part of it is when you look at our international footprint and my time over there, a lot of it was really around starting new businesses, really trying to kind of put an imprint together with the other SEI folks on creating that culture and the environment that we're also proud of here. We’re really looking at ways that we could expand our growth opportunities in many cases leveraging things that we had in the U.S. or actually some of the businesses that we started there bring some of those capabilities back here. So, I think it was a combination, Michael, it would just be exposure to the global markets being so different than the domestic market, but a lot of that experience between 2001 and 2012 was really around starting and growing new businesses and that's something we highly value here, especially when you can do that alongside the right culture.
Michael Young, Analyst
Okay. Thanks very much.
Ryan Hicke, Incoming CEO
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
And we have no further questions in queue at this time.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
We would like to remind you that during today's presentation and in our response to your questions, we have and we'll make certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks. Uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our notices regarding forward-looking statements that appear in today's earnings release and in our filings with the SEC. We do not undertake to update any of our forward-looking statements. Now, I'd like to turn it over to the other Al. Al Chiaradonna?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Alright. Thanks Dennis. Good afternoon, everyone. First quarter 2022 revenues totaled $213.5 million, which was up $95.9 million as compared to revenues from the first quarter of 2021. First quarter 2022 quarterly profit of $91.6 million was up $84.7 million from the first quarter of 2021. As Dennis mentioned, revenues and profits benefited from the one-time cancellation fee of $88 million, which net is $86 million in profit. In turning to sales activity during the quarter, we closed approximately $8.4 million of net investment processing events, excluding the termination of HSBC. $7.1 million related to recurring revenues and $1.3 million related to one-time revenues. During the quarter, we signed two clients of note. We signed an SWP agreement with Grove Bank & Trust, headquartered in Miami, Florida currently running on a competitor solution. Grove Bank’s selection of SWP represents the platform's continued success in the community bank space. As I mentioned during the last quarter call, we've been working with HSBC to address their changing needs with respect to the business that was contracted in 2020. Last month, we filed an 8-K disclosing that HSBC Private Bank terminated one of its agreements with our UK subsidiary for convenience. We also discussed on that fourth quarter call, the sale of new business and alternative processing space with HSBC. This quarter, we will also sign an agreement with HSBC to move its U.S. Investment processing book of business to the SEI Wealth Platform. Our evolving relationship with HSBC demonstrates our ability to help our most complex and large clients, respond to ever-changing market environments that impact our strategic goals. The change in environment for our most complex clients creates opportunity and adjustments in our relationships. And turning to implementation activity. In the first quarter, we successfully installed two new clients from competitor platforms to SWP and installed one additional new client to our TRUST 3000 platform. Tompkins Financial Advisors, the wealth management firm of Tompkins Financial Corporation has successfully converted its wealth management business with SWP from a competitor platform. Central Pacific Bank headquartered in Hawaii and a primary subsidiary of Central Pacific Financial Court, also migrated their wealth management business to SWP from a competitor platform. We're also pleased to announce that Central Pacific is further expanding the relationship with SEI by adopting SEI’s asset management distribution products to help grow their business and serve their clients. Also, during the quarter, we successfully migrated Principal Financial Group's institutional, retirement, and trust business to our TRUST 3000 platform. We look forward to continuing to work with Principal and grow our relationships as partners in the industry. As an update on our backlog, our total net new recurring investment processing revenue backlog is approximately $54.4 million, including the signings and implementations I just mentioned and the netting of the canceled agreement. We continue to work with our clients with longer tail type timelines as their business needs change and opportunities present themselves. From an asset management standpoint, total assets under management ended the period at $25.3 billion, which was flat to the first quarter of 2021. Our cash flow for the first quarter of 2022 was approximately a positive $362 million. As we go through 2022, we remain committed to our strategy of building a global pipeline and associated backlog, matriculating that backlog, gradually improving our operating profits and prudently investing in the businesses to create sustainable growth. We have a talented team across SEI as that is focused on these goals. We remain excited and optimistic. That concludes my prepared remarks, and I will now turn it over to any questions you may have.
Operator, Operator
Our first question will come from Ryan Kenny with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Hi, good afternoon.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Good afternoon, Ryan.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
So, I know a few years ago, SEI was talking a lot about investing to bring on more global wealth players and understand you're still working with HSBC on several services, but it does seem like a lot of the new wins that are announced are more in the domestic mid-sized super regional camp. So, I guess the question is, do you need to invest more to attract more global players or do you think that there's any strategic shift to focus more on the mid-size or super regional institutions that at least from the outside view seems to be more of your sweet spot.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Ryan, great question. I'll take it in two parts. So, I think we continue to have some success on the global side. So, in the fourth quarter of 2021, we talked about some significant wins in our alternative platform for HSBC. So, we saw some wins there, but I also discussed in a comment on that call, how we were reinvesting in some sales talent. We established a sales culture there. And I think that's going to be a big ingredient to our success globally. And then I think, when you think about our global expansion, it's really been limited on the investment processing side outside the U.S. anyway to being in the UK and that's really related to the complexities of managing tax, regulatory, and different strategies. So, we're kind of delivering. I don't think we'll be dialing that back. The investment in personnel right now is to try to see as Ryan mentioned, can we continue to expand our organic growth in this IP by looking at that global environment? And then, the other part, Ryan, the other part of your question, I'm so sorry. You are correct. We are having some good success in the regional and community bank space over the last two quarters, and that probably represents most mature solution and the one we can sell the quickest and install the fastest. So, I think that's a fair observation.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Thanks.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Yes. Of course.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
And then just one follow-up on the lost HSBC contract, are there any expense offsets to revenue loss there?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
As Dennis mentioned, the $88, the impact of the $88 was $86. So there was about $2 million of that. Beyond that, the other stuff that we invested would be leveraging. So, there's really no other expense left out of that.
Ryan Kenny, Analyst
Okay, got it. Thank you.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Sure. My pleasure.
Operator, Operator
Next question will come from the line of Owen Lau with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Thank you. So, it looks like the margin has come down a little bit if you exclude the termination fee, is there any kind of like one-time expense, I think you just mentioned $2 million, but what drove that margin decline? And if you can also remind me, sorry I may have missed that. The revenue and cost impact from HSBC Private Banking going forward, how should we think about that? Thanks.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Yes. So, Owen thanks for the question. I think your first question was related to the slight margin deterioration in the quarter. If you net out the cancellation fee from HSBC and the two things that really drove that quite candidly, one was capital markets. So, we saw capital market pressure on the asset side of our business. And then secondly, as we discussed in the press release and I think Dennis just mentioned, the competitive labor market and the pressures of that have caused us to make some investments in our talent to retain that talent. And you're seeing that impact our margins. And then your second question, I think was related to the $88 million, the net impact of that $88 million is the $86 million and there's really nothing else inside that related to that cancellation. Of course, as we install the other HSBC business, we'll begin to invest in implementing that which we already have, which is in those numbers in the first quarter and then as they implement we'll begin to recognize that revenue over 12 to 18 months. So there's really nothing else related to what has been canceled.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Got it. And then the follow-up it's related to the previous question, how do you think about large scale M&A outside of U.S. and UK in order to expand globally? Are you, like is this option off the table or you would still consider that? Thanks.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Owen, this is Dennis. I think, large scale M&A or just M&A in general is kind of driven corporately and while one of the lenses we look through is how M&A can help enhance our growth opportunities and our strategic positioning in our existing businesses, and certainly geographic expansion were acceleration of geographic expansion through M&A, which would benefit any of our businesses not just private banking, we would take a hard look at and be interested in considering. So, it's really not a specific question for private banking as much as it is a strategic initiative of SEI, the company around one of our rationale for M&A.
Owen Lau, Analyst
Got it. Thank you very much.
Dennis McGonigle, CFO
Sure.
Operator, Operator
Our next question will come from the line of Robert Lee with KBW. Please go ahead.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Thank you. Good afternoon. I appreciate taking my questions. A question on the backlog. So, I think it was $54.5 million backlog in recurring. Can you maybe parse that down for us? I mean, since I'm assuming that there’s a fairly significant chunk of that. It's still Wells Fargo, which seems to be kind of open-ended in terms of when may or may not begin converting. So what should we reasonably expect over the next two years of that backlog and where you sit today to convert or begin converting?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Robert, thanks for the question. The $54 and change in backlog, if we think about where that stands today over the next 12 months, about 25% of that would be converting. And then over the 13 to 24 month period, we should feel the remainder of that converting. Your comment on Wells Fargo, yes, Wells Fargo was still in that backlog. And the biggest challenge with the backlog overall is large jumbo clients. They just take time. They have M&A. They’ve restructured. They have leadership changes and we continue to work with them in that as we implement those clients.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Yeah. And maybe along the lines of a follow-up, unless I kind of misunderstood, I think a couple of years ago one of the ideas was while converting the community banks is great and smaller regions is great to really kind of scale the platform to, kind of needed to get more of the true SunTrust kind of more and more bigger and bigger banks which seems to take a long time. So, I don't know, as you sit here today and you look at your pipeline, is there a reasonable expectation that you could see this acceleration of those kind of big chunky wins that would drive the scale on the platform or do you feel like the pattern you are in the kind of community and some of the mid-size or smaller regional bankers? Kind of, that's quantity that's kind of where we're going to reasonably expect for the next 18 months or two years.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Robert, that's a good question. When I think about the pipeline, the pipeline is healthy, we have good activity in the market. I think outsourcing trends in the market are leaning our way, which are helpful to us. I do think you're right. A lot of our pipeline activity has been in terms of wins and installations has been regional community. We'll continue that because those are things that we know we're going to get off and get done. The jumbos, we are focused on those. We are talking to them every day. They're active in the market. What I can’t do for you, Robert is predict when they'll actually close. Unfortunately, these sales cycles, it's not really driven by SEI’s ability to close it. It's driven by the time it takes to negotiate it and then the time it takes to implement it. And those are just a little less predictable in your region and community, but in no way, are we shaping our pipeline strictly around regional and community. We would more than continue to push forward on those jumbos, and then as those jumbos land, we'll discuss them, and it will come with the same caveat I mentioned on the last two calls, which is, it's just hard to predict how a multi-year implementation will land, not just because of what we're doing, but because the banks themselves have development and integration they're doing on their side.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Appreciate that. And can I ask you, maybe just, I know you're giving us the funding of the backlog of 25% over the next 12 months, but I apologize in this kind of the second part of your comments with subsequent to the next 12 months?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Yes. Robert, I think you had said, in your question, can you give me an idea of what it looks like over the next three years? What I did was I said on the $54, you could expect 25% of that to matriculate in 2022 and then you could expect the remainder of that to matriculate across 2023 and 2024, that's where those implementations fall today.
Robert Lee, Analyst
Okay. Great. Thank you for clarifying that.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Yeah, of course, my pleasure.
Operator, Operator
And our next question comes the line with Chris Donat with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Chris Donat, Analyst
Hey, good afternoon Al. Thanks for taking my question. I just had one more about the backlog. Last quarter you quantified at $81.7 million, and so this quarter, I think $54.4 million, can we think of the difference as solely HSBC or do some of the other activities affected the backlog or I say solely, but mostly HSBC, is that the right way to think about the change quarter-on-quarter or the backlog?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Chris, that's a great question. Thanks. I think I can help you and I can provide some clarity. So, yes, of course, HSBC is in it, but the truth of it is, it is also affected by the three installations I talked about that happened in the first quarter. So that would negatively affect the backlog it would drop down because we're matriculating that, but then it would be really refilling that with the sales I just talked about in the first quarter. So, while HSBC was a large number, there was still a significant amount of revenue matriculation and new revenue added back. And it's the combination of those events that give you that delta.
Chris Donat, Analyst
Okay, that's helpful. Thanks Al.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Of course, my pleasure, Chris.
Operator, Operator
And our next question will come from the line of Michael Young with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Michael Young, Analyst
Hey Al, thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to touch on, kind of with the pandemic subsiding, it sounds like people are coming back to work more and more, is that a tailwind to sales activity, should we expect sort of an uptick in the pipeline of building for new implementations all else equal or any other color there would be helpful?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Yeah, Michael, good question. I think we've been kind of fortunate. One of the things we were able to do during the pandemic is think about how to digitize our sales channel, and we had some deals that I know my predecessor talked about that we closed almost completely remotely. So, I don't think it slowed down our ability to reach clients, but it did slow down, I think decision making at some level because people were wondering where they stood and what they could do with the pandemic. So, I think the bringing back of people is not going to be an accelerating factor in the pipeline. These people have been working on that pipeline throughout the pandemic. We might begin to see people willing to make at the client level. The decisions is a little bit quicker, but I can't tell you that I'm certain of that. As I think about implementations, I would give you the same answer. Our implementations as of March, the year of the pandemic we went digital immediately. So, we have done almost all of our implementations in a fully remote environment. Now, what has benefited us is as the pandemic is weighing and people have gotten back into the office, we are making more and more client visits and I just think as you make client visits, the level of your intimacy improves and as the level of your intimacy improves opportunity should manifest itself. But I don't think it's – I don't think it's going to change dramatically just because of people getting back to work.
Michael Young, Analyst
Okay, great. And then the last one, just maybe on pricing power, we're seeing a lot of inflation. I think that was mentioned in terms of upward pressure on personnel costs, are you all able to get, sort of pricing power within the contracts to kind of offset that impact or should we expect a little bit of margin compression as a result of, kind of just core inflation pressure?
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
I mean, I think as Dennis talked about in his, I think the labor markets are tight, so I think we will have some compression inside those numbers today. I don't think it will be dramatic. I do think we're able to, I don't know that I would call it in reaction to inflation. I think as we continue to advance our solution, we can sustain and improve our price points across it. I think it's a little hard to say it in a general term across all deals, Michael, just because each deal has a negotiation attached to because it's a multi-year contract. But I think we'll be able to preserve and probably modify our price point positively. I don't think we'll have to succumb to any significant pressures there.
Michael Young, Analyst
Okay, great. Thanks. That’s all from me.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Okay.
Operator, Operator
And we have no further questions in queue.
Al Chiaradonna, Segment Leader
Great. I'd like to turn the call back over to Al West.
Al West, Chairman and CEO
So, ladies and gentlemen, we're excited about Ryan is going to do a great job. And for me, it’s time to hand this over. Since going public in 1981, some 41 years ago, I have been involved on a quarterly analyst call. A total of 164 times. Enough is enough. My new role for me as Executive Chairman, I'll see you all in the future and I look forward to your visits to SEI. Thank you for attending our 164th quarterly call, and have a good day.
Operator, Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference. I'd like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.