Conference Transcript - SEIC 2026-06-09

Speaker 1

All right. So we are pleased to have with us Sean Denham, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer at SEI. Sean, thanks for joining us today.

Sean Denham, CFO

My pleasure. Nice to be here.

Speaker 1

So last year, the story for SEI seemed to be about inflecting sales momentum. And this year, it's very clear that SEI is executing. Conversation seems more about durability. What gives you the confidence that SEI can sustain this higher level of sales momentum that we've been seeing?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, so first off, it's always great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, we're really confident in the sales momentum, mainly because we have insight into what our pipelines look like. And so we've talked on multiple of our earnings calls about that we're confident where the pipeline sits. You know, we're coming off Q1 where we won really two of the largest wins in SEI history. We won two large mandates in our IMS business where those managers were historical insourcers of fund admin work, et cetera. They decided to move to an outsource model. So that was a huge stake in the ground moment, one of the best quarters in SEI history, record sales events. We do see that momentum continuing not just in our IMS business. Our private banking business has shown significant momentum. You know, that business is a little choppier from quarter to quarter. We typically win 10 to 12 new deals a year. Those can bunch in a given quarter. You saw that in 2025 where we actually in PV and our private banking business are in that unit had a really large Q4. But the momentum really is because we're executing incredibly well. Our sales teams are laser-focused. Our business unit leaders have our sales teams really focused. And we have a lot of momentum. And we're now selling really the entire ecosystem. We have a lot of additional solutions like professional services that has created a large momentum in the market.

Speaker 1

And what's specifically the driver of new sales? Is it more aggressive sales culture? Is it better cross-selling? Is it demand increasing, product improving? What's the biggest driver?

Sean Denham, CFO

Obviously, the easy answer is all of the above. But if you take them one by one, there is large market demand. And, again, as I just mentioned, we saw that in Q1. I think as businesses continue to look at what their core business is, those recent two mandates I think we expect to be a trend. So I think as firms are looking at what is core to their business, so in the investment manager space, they've got into the business to raise capital and deploy capital. They didn't necessarily get into doing fund administration. And where we play in the highest parts of the market, those managers are looking to scale. And having to scale the administration piece of their business as opposed to outsourcing that, I think a lot of those managers that have been classic insourcers are waking up and saying, do I really want to keep up with the technology, the hiring needs, and also do I really want to be focusing my attention where focus is needed in things like AI. They're relying on us in that outsource model to be making those investments for them.

Speaker 1

Are you seeing larger transformational mandates, or are clients still taking a more modular approach to outsourcing?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, it really depends on the business unit and just it really depends on where we're playing in the market. So, you know, in that IMS business where we play, those are really large mandates, and we've enjoyed, you know, to be the beneficiary of that. In our private banking space, you know, whether someone's acquiring or investing in our SWP platform or in our techs and ops space, Those are, again, transformational wins for us. They're also transformational for those companies or our now clients. There's also little tuck-ins here and there, like around professional services. So whether we're selling professional services as a package in our private banking business unit or we're having one-off wins around selling data cloud into our IMS clients. So it really depends, but it kind of spans across the business and whether they're large mandates or just little deals.

Speaker 1

So on the IMS side, alts have been a major growth engine. And what do you view as the differentiator on SEI's services versus some of the other competitors out there with striving to mandate wins?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, so honestly, it's really execution. So where we play, we focus our attention on the more complex parts of the market. So 70% of our IMS business is in the alternative space, 30% on the traditional. And then inside that alternative space, those can be the more difficult, you know, whether striking NAVs or everything that goes along with that work around fund admin. We're really good at that. And, you know, case in point, again, you know, I don't want to keep bringing up those two wins, but I think they're a really, really good example of those are probably two of the largest wins that have been out in the market over the last few years. And in each of those cases, SEI is the first phone call. And we're going to be in those RFP situations. They're going to be competitive. But in each of those, we, you know, we were one of the winners of both of those large wins. And that's because of the execution of how we go to market. We pride ourselves. A lot of people can say it. It's actually hard to do. But we actually provide really strong white-glove service. I was actually with one of our clients yesterday who brought that up. And, you know, some of the things that we're doing around AI and automation, the question was how, if at all, will that affect the white-glove service we've sold us on? And, you know, will that change at all? And the answer clearly is no. And the way we construct our teams, the way we support our clients, we believe is a differentiator in the market.

Speaker 1

And then what's driving the demand for outsourcing? What are some of the biggest pain points that you are solving for alternative asset managers?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, I think it's a couple things that I said. And so as the largest managers in the world continue to launch new funds, as they continue to scale, as they have larger capital to deploy, they did not get in the business to do that. So do they really want to be scaling the headcount as we sat here today, maybe less today than a year ago, with the advent and increasing rise of AI and the role that plays in the administration business? they don't necessarily want to be using their capital to focus on the technology that's required the headcount that is needed to scale at least where it was and in all the investments they need to make in AI they're staying on top of it they you know each of these managers have really strong governance systems where they call us they want to understand as their outsourcer what we're doing and how we're thinking about disruption, how we're thinking about investment, where AI is going to play a significant role, where automation is playing a large role, and then what is our governance that surrounds that? So while they are outsourcing in a meaningful way to us, they still have those same process controls that you would expect from them.

Speaker 1

Let's shift to private banking. So private banking margins have remarkably improved over the last several quarters. What is structurally driving that improvement? Yeah, so number one, number two,

Sean Denham, CFO

and number three is great leadership. So Sanjay Sharma, who took over that business four years ago, has an engineer's mindset. He would approach the business in that way. And so when Sanjay took over, we were anywhere from maybe slightly negative margins, depending on the quarter to zero margins, and he really just instilled a level of discipline from an overall cost standpoint, how we think about technology spend, et cetera. He did a really amazing job there, right-sizing that technology team, the workforce, et cetera. On top of that, as you can increase revenue the way we have in that space, you're going to improve margins. And so being able to scale PB and how he did that, our previous focus was really focused on the largest institutions in the U.S., which about half of those are our clients. Moving down market was really critical and integral to the success of not just revenue growth, sales events, but also margin improvement. So that's number two. Number three, the advent or the newly launched professional services that has been really successful in our private banking space that's now starting to drip in other parts of the business. That was huge. So if you rewind two years ago, we were winning great work selling our SWP platform, our technology and operations together. We were doing implementation work, which we characterize as professional services. But we've actually identified 15 to 20 additional services where those margins are closer to 30 to 40 percent. And so every new deal that we're doing has three or four, five, six, seven different professional services that are going along with our technology and our classic ops platform. That's been huge for us. So when you can add our historical margin rates on those technology and operations, add on top of that five or six professional services. So where a deal maybe was $2 million to $3 million a few years ago, those deals now are $7 million, $8 million with much higher margins. That's where you're seeing the margin improvement. And the next question we often get is, okay, can that continue? And so we've gone from zero maybe four years ago in margins. We've touched in Q1 20% margins. Sanjay, when he took over the role with Ryan Hickey, our CEO, said we expect margins to be able to get back to historicals. As a reminder, historical margins were somewhere in the 25% to 30% margin rates. We still see an opportunity to go further there.

Speaker 1

And is that a multi-year story?

Sean Denham, CFO

I don't think you're going to necessarily see linear growth up and to the right there. We're probably a little further along. than what we expected four years ago when we built out the five- or six-year plan to get there. I wouldn't say probably. We're definitely ahead of schedule there. But, you know, that's actually not how we run the business. So we're not looking quarter to quarter, hey, it was 20% last quarter. How do we get to 21% next quarter?

Speaker 1

You may see a little choppiness.

Sean Denham, CFO

You may see 20 down to 19, back up to 20-ish. But, you know, that's kind of our run rate right now, and that's where we're focused.

Speaker 1

yeah, so that's how I would think about it. And how do you manage margin expansion goals against needing to invest for growth? Yeah, so that's the hardest part about being a public company

Sean Denham, CFO

is, you know, SEI, we have a very strong balance sheet where we are, we have no debt, etc. So capital really is not the issue for us. It's where we can make the right investments to maximize that I call it expense versus capital, how we can maximize the expense of those investments with future needs, et cetera, versus what we can really afford from managing our own internal expectations and what the street's expectations may be. I think we're doing a lot better job today than we were doing a couple of years ago. We've instilled a lot of processes, accountability controls to make sure every dollar spent is really in a fashion where we are going to have the maximum return on that invested capital. All right, let's talk about the transition

Speaker 1

underway in asset management. So there has been an improvement in net flows. What is SEI doing in product development, distribution, and marketing to continue this improvement?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, so Michael Lane has been with SEI, former BlackRock, led the iShares program at BlackRock, came to SEI as a reminder. A little less than two years ago at Investor Day, we talked about Michael's vision of reimagining asset management, and he's done that. I think we're moving from the phase of reimagining asset management to now executing on a lot of the bullets he laid out there. But it's really refocusing on the ecosystem sale, where historically we may have led in that space with trying to sell custody against Schwab or Fidelity just on a one-on-one basis. We're probably not going to necessarily win that deal. But when we couple it with our technology, our asset management, some of the other services that we can provide, especially as we move up market, we're finding that that story and that sale becomes a lot easier story to tell, and it's resonating with the market. Over the last, I would say, couple quarters, definitely over the last year, we've had some of the largest wins in SEI history in that space or in Michael's business, and it's a result of kind of changing the mindset of leading with custody, how we package custody with our asset management product, building out our investment capabilities, reducing our reliance on sub-advisors, what we should be doing in-house versus externally. We've upgraded our distribution talent. We've been investing significantly in upgrading our talent in Michael's business. We've been expanding our alt positioning in partnerships, like our recently announced partnership with Carlyle. So there's a number of things that Michael is launching, and that's, I think, a big driver of where you're seeing the increase in flows.

Speaker 1

And then in the investment advisors business, How does the opportunity for SEI change as the wealth management industry consolidates? You're seeing RIAs simultaneously getting larger, more sophisticated. How do you adapt to that environment?

Sean Denham, CFO

I mean, we see ourselves as a beneficiary as we see consolidation. As RIAs continue to consolidate, you see more of that. they're much more receptive to what I just mentioned of the buying into an integrated ecosystem. We still sell individual capabilities. You can still buy custody. You can still buy our asset management products. But when we can tell an ecosystem story, we become the beneficiary. So as we see consolidation, we really just become a beneficiary. They're looking for a complete platform. And we're really one of the only firms that sells at a complete platform.

Speaker 1

What about Stratos? What's the long-term vision for the Stratos platform?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, so Stratos was a really important transaction or deal for us. And just to remind, you know, the reason why we felt we needed to do the Stratos deal, you know, Hickey, or, you know, Ryan Hickey, our CEO, probably three or four years ago said, He talked about two areas where we would expect some inorganic growth. One of them was in a US RIA. And the reason for that was multifold. The first was we felt we needed to be closer into the advice space. Stratos did that for us. And so where you'll see margin compression, you'll see pricing pressure on different parts of the business or inside the financial service industry. The one component that has been relatively untouched is the advice base. So whether an advisor charges 80 to 100 basis points for advice 10 years ago versus today, it's been relatively unchanged. So we felt we needed to be closer to the advice base. On top of that, you know, over the last few years, we had seen without having a RIA, we felt we weren't providing our advisor base who have been with us a very long time with an opportunity to potentially monetize their business so as they were maybe thinking about an exit we were seeing some outflows not that they weren't happy with SEI they really loved our offerings our platform etc but we didn't have an answer for it so there was a little bit of a defensive position in order to making sure we had an RIA so our advisors had a home to land in if they got to the point around monetization. So those were two key areas. The third was the obvious one plus one equals three. So now having a advisor channel where we can sell, you know, provide our custody platform, our asset management platform into those advisors has been critically important. And I think a third thing that has been was a little bit of a surprise where we didn't have as much of a focus, at least in our original thesis, was in our institutional business. So as we've educated the Stratos Network advisors on our capabilities, including what we do around OCIO, you know, in foundations, et cetera, there has been a lot of curiosity from the advisors. And just as a reminder, we only closed the Stratus deal maybe six months ago, almost to the day. I think it was around December 1st or 2nd or somewhere around there. So sitting here June 6th, it's been about six months. But we've had a lot of interest, so we're continuing to educate that market. We feel like we've now just expanded our sales force, not just in institution, but across the advisory network or investment advisors business unit from a sizable team but to a much more scaled team across the country. And so that's been a really nice added benefit. But that's kind of the thesis for Stratos. And what early returns have been is, you know, through Q1, it's, you know, As we mentioned when we did earnings, it's met up to all of our expectations, including the cultural fit, which was really important to Jeff Concepcion, the founder of Stratus, and really important to us.

Speaker 1

All right, let's talk about AI. So a lot of opportunities for you. Before we get to that, the market narrative has shifted in the last few quarters from opportunities to risks. and how do you view AI changing barriers to entry in the servicing businesses? What are the risks that you worry about? And how should investors think about SEI protecting the moat that's been built?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, so obviously we can't do a session without talking about AI. As we think about it, first off, in our business, we do believe we built some moats. How we think about it, AI lowers the barriers for point solutions, but not necessarily for integrated, regulated platforms, and that's really what we have. We have integrated, regulated platforms. Our client base looks at us in a way where, you know, they entrust us with their outsourced models, and we obviously take that very seriously. So, you know, having it, it's not just one solution that we provide. we've built moats around technology operations and that regulated infrastructure. So we think about AI from a risk standpoint like a brick wall, and we've said this now a few times publicly. We don't believe that the brick wall necessarily has the opportunity to be completely disrupted, but we do see there could be bricks in that wall that have the opportunity to be disrupted, and that's really kind of those point solutions.

Speaker 1

So there's a number of things that we're doing.

Sean Denham, CFO

Number one, a number of years ago, we created a Ventures Committee. That Ventures Committee is led by Sneha Shah. Today we actually announced, elevated her role to the head of AI for the company, someone who wakes up every day thinking about artificial intelligence and the role we play from a governance, et cetera, technology, and everything that goes along with it. But so that's one thing we do. So the Ventures Committee spends a lot of time working with the venture capital groups from around the country, identifying, you know, is Jane Doe and John Doe sitting in a garage trying to disrupt certain parts of our business? And so making sure we understand what is out there. Is there investments we want to make? And we've done that in the past. We've made investments into companies to get closer, have a front row seat to certain things we want to be smarter about. So that's in the Ventures Committee, that's in the PE community, et cetera. That's number one. We've also classically, as a lot of companies are doing today, have an internal disruption team, and we've identified areas of our business that we think are ripe for disruption. And so that team all day long has a very handsome budget and are helping or creating agents and brainstorming with our business units on the opportunity for disruption. So trying to disrupt ourselves before, you know, there's opportunities for others to do so. So that's number two. And I think those are probably the two largest areas where we're focused. And then just everything else that we're doing around, you know, creating the right levels of budget for our technology teams. You know, we've announced the partnership a few months ago with IBM. IBM has been a great partner over the last four or five months, doing a full assessment of the organization. And that's really to make sure we're using agents that in classically in our fund admin business and other parts of our business has been very labor intensive. So how do we think about automation at scale? How do we think about where the right spot for agents are at scale? And so, you know, those are the three areas that we think about from a risk. But we feel, and I think our clients feel, that we're doing all the right things today.

Speaker 1

So it sounds like you are very proactive in thinking through risks on AI.

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, look, we're humble enough and not arrogant to think that we have figured it out because we haven't. No one has figured it out. But I think we're doing a lot of things that other companies are doing. We're putting the right tools in the right hands, creating the right budgets, putting the right governance controls around, you know, everything I just said. So I think we are thinking about it the right way. I don't feel, you know, the million-dollar question that I think companies always ask themselves, are we behind, are we on par, are we slightly ahead? I don't think we're behind. And so I'm really comfortable where we are. Again, I think we have the right controls in place right now. And I think the three or four things that we're doing has put our clients at ease. But, again, we're not being lackadaisical.

Speaker 1

And what about opportunities? Clearly there are a lot of opportunities for AI to enhance the SEI business model, maybe enhance margins. What do you see as the biggest positive use cases for AI?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, I think the same things I just talked about from a risk are really the opportunities for us as well. I had mentioned three or four times at the opening of this that as companies have in our IMS business classically have thought of themselves as insourcers, I think those folks with the rise of AI are thinking, do we really want to be making those same financial investments, time investments, in order to get up the learning curve on AI, or should we be relying on third-party partners to support us in that? That is an opportunity. There still are, I don't know, 20 to 30 large insourcers of fund admin that I think with the announcement in Q1 of those two large insourcers and outsourcers that have become client of SEIs, I think they're starting to ask themselves questions of everything I just said. Is this really the right business model for us in, you know, early days, but we've had some additional conversations with those folks. you know i think the with the kind of the blip in the market in q1 around when the market stepped around uh when the street kind of woke up and said hey you know how are we thinking about ai what are the what are the firms that are ripe for disruption we had already been thinking about you know the scaling of the automation with ibm and creating agents alongside of them so uh that's not new That's been in the works for a while now. Yeah, so that's kind of how we're thinking through it.

Speaker 1

Turning to capital allocation, SEI continues to generate significant free cash flow. Historically, SEI has operated with very little to no leverage, depending on the period, sometimes negative leverage. And then you made the Stratos deal. So looking forward, how has your framework around capital allocation changed over the last year or so?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yes. So it has changed modestly. At Investor Day, we spoke about moving from a negative one-time leverage model to maybe somewhere in the future, maybe to a one-time positive. And so that is still directionally where we're headed. And, you know, I think the uses of capital, we've said publicly we will continue to do this. We expect to still return 90 to 100% of free cash flow back to our investors. That'll be in the form of dividends, and the remaining will be stock buyback. I think in Q1, we purchased back about $200 million of our company stock. We saw a little bit of an opportunity there with the drop in stock price related to some of the things that happen in the market around AI. That's proved to be beneficial. But so our strategy really hasn't changed. I think where you will see an opportunity for us to move from that negative one time to closer to zero or maybe even positive, we own 57.5% of Stratos. There are markers over the next seven years where we will acquire the remaining portion of that. And so that is where we would expect to take on some debt really for the first time in many, many years, or at least take on debt and not immediately repay it back. As we think about other inorganic opportunities for us, you know, historically, we've talked about two things. Again, you know, the one was USRIH. We checked the box there. We made that acquisition. We talked about European fund admin. And so, you know, I think our thinking has changed a little bit there. I think we had thought about over the last couple of years, whether we needed to do a big bang, something to scale our IMS business overseas. I think we've stepped away from that a little bit. You may see, you know, small tuck-ins to support some maybe missing solutions in our overall solutions deck. in IMS. But I wouldn't expect anything significant other than purchasing the remaining options that we have on Stratus over the next seven years.

Speaker 1

And valuations across FinTech and WealthTech have reset meaningfully from peak levels. So

Sean Denham, CFO

is that an opportunity for you? Yeah, we are trying to stay pretty vigilant in our strategy. So I talked about, you know, being strategic on a couple things, the USRIA, maybe something in the European fund admin space.

Speaker 1

We do get inbounds a lot.

Sean Denham, CFO

We evaluate those inbounds. Those are more opportunistic than strategic. I think we've been pretty steadfast when those inbounds come in. Yeah, we'll take a look. We'll understand, you know, is there anything we want to rethink? We have an M&A committee, as all firms do. And so we'll visit those, but we're really trying to stay down the middle of the fairway on our strategy as opposed to being more opportunistic.

Speaker 1

Let's talk a little bit about culture. So SCI has always had reputation for innovation from your roots and an entrepreneurial culture, despite now you're now a much larger company. So how do you preserve that culture as the business skills?

Sean Denham, CFO

We talk about that all the time. Ryan talks about that all the time, whether it's in a town hall, whether it's with a leadership team. But if anyone's ever been to Oaks, if you walk around the campus, it's a beautiful campus. You know, the way Al West, our founder, constructed the campus was very intentional, intentional to spur that entrepreneurial spirit. And I think making sure we never lose that is so critical. You know, I think if you look at even some of the things we've done over the last few years, we talked about some of them just now, striking that, hey, where are we missing? What do we want to invest in? We talk a lot about on campus best idea wins. We've had a lot. We have contests around best idea wins. It's not just a term, but it's something we take to heart. and there's a lot, I won't go into them, but there's a lot of things we've deployed by using the best idea wins concept. Some of the more meaningful wins or opportunities around striking, keeping that entrepreneurial spirit alive was really the creation of professional services practice. So that came through truly being an entrepreneur. When Sanjay took a look at the private banking space, and it wasn't just all him, it was his team, we started looking around everything that third parties were selling to support the implementation of the swp platform it could be an assessment of you know you know pre-rfp it could be the change management or the sun setting of the current technology could be the transformation the the origin of our sphere platform which you can think about that as our cyber security platform that we're now selling into the market. That was all born through the classic SEI model. We had built a world-class cybersecurity. We built it for ourselves. We built our cybersecurity platform ourselves for ourselves, for our technology. And as a result, it became so strong, we started saying, hey, is this something we should be marketing outside? And that's actually how that was created. A number of our businesses that we have today were created because we were actually doing it for ourselves. We did it really, really well. And clients were asking us, hey, that's really interesting. Would you mind talking to us about that? And we ended up creating services. That's how professional services were born. So striking that balance of how Al founded the company, it got to a certain size and scale. And we did have to adapt. We couldn't run the company exactly the way we were in order to get where we needed to go. And I think Ryan has done an amazing job of striking that balance about keeping that entrepreneurial spirit alive but also advancing the company forward at the exact same time.

Speaker 1

So to wrap up, when you look across SEI today, where do you think the company is still underappreciated by investors?

Sean Denham, CFO

Yeah, I love that. That's my favorite question, and it's one that actually most of our analysts

Speaker 1

and investors ask first.

Sean Denham, CFO

I think in a couple areas. I think our asset management business is the market hasn't built into the opportunity that we have in front of us. And by the way, rightfully so. I think people are watching. I think they understand the reimagination of asset management. I think they understand the four or five areas where we're building out product or we're investing in our technology platforms. I think they understand, you know, why we acquired Stratos. And I think they understand that. I think they're waiting and seeing how we execute across that. I think another huge one is we have a massive opportunity in selling asset management into banks. We've done a little bit of that, but I don't think we've done that at scale. You know, we're putting a lot of new leadership roles in place in order to make sure the right level of attention. So I would say those two areas are probably the area that the market hasn't priced in quite yet.

Speaker 1

Sean, thank you so much for your time today.

Sean Denham, CFO

Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for having me.