St. James's Place plc (STJ) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

I will now hand over to Mark Fitzpatrick, CEO, to begin. Please go ahead. Thank you, Lucy, and good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. It's Mark Fitzpatrick here. I'm aware today is an incredibly busy day in the marketplace, so we'll try to keep our timings as accommodating as we can for you. I'll open for questions in a moment, but before that, I wanted to reiterate three key takeaways from the full year results announcement. First, it's been a year of challenge, change, and hard work for SJP, but also one where we've achieved a lot. The partnership has delivered very strongly this year in being there for clients, guiding them through the changes from the budget and the ups and downs in the economy, and their hard work has helped to grow our client base, mainly through word-of-mouth referrals from existing clients. We've realized strong investment returns for clients and collectively maintained a high client retention level. All of this adds up to strong flows and good financial results. We've also refreshed our strategy and we've made progress on each of our key programs of work. I want to acknowledge and thank everyone in our SJP community for their contribution in driving this. It's not been easy, but as I said in the presentation, they have all delivered brilliantly. Secondly, 2025 is going to be another year of heavy lifting for the business. I am confident that this will strengthen SJP further and put us in good stead for the future. Beyond delivering our key programs of work, we'll be investing to support and underpin our long-term growth ambitions. The role of the partnership is critical to that, so we'll help our advisors to do more and be more efficient in how they do it. For example, we're developing and trialing tech-enabled tools to suppo...