SEI Investments Company (NASDAQ:SEIC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ryan Hicke: Yes, Owen, great to hear from you. I hope you’re doing well. So the hire of Sneha was something that we had laid out as a part of the growth strategy about 12 months ago in terms of focusing more on, I’d say kind of three things if you think about how SEI is structured today. Today, we have a couple of new businesses in SEI Sphere, SEI Ventures, SEI Atlas. And we wanted to put more structure in place, more leadership in place in terms of really thinking about how do we incubate and scale those businesses to drive business growth. But I think the second and third is really creating a system inside of SEI. We really want to promote a culture where we think of the workforce is 4,900 entrepreneurs. And how are we facilitating and fostering that culture.

So we’re generating ideas from grassroots level and putting a system in place to identify those ideas, cultivate them, see if we can get more things out into market. Kill those ideas, if they don’t have legs, but then be able to scale things, it looks like they have momentum. But also expand that thought process outside our role because one of the things we’re really starting to see with such a significant increase in client engagement and market engagement in the last 18 months, we’re starting to see some interesting partnership opportunities with our clients, with our partners. So Sneha really had a terrific track record and doing these sorts of things will be a wonderful cultural addition to the executive committee, and we’ll really put a system in place, Owen, for us to say when we think about the future of SEI, how are we going to identify that fifth engine, that sixth engine from an organic perspective alongside what we’re doing on the corporate development side with M&A.

I just think we’re in a position right now where we really can start pivoting and getting focused on new business additions and engines because we feel confident that we’ve got some really great momentum in our current core businesses.

Owen Lau: Got it. That’s helpful. And then you had an – a consulting engagement, I think it was related to outsourcing that end – the second quarter. Could you please talk about what you have learned from that engagement and then its $30 million a good runway going forward for the overhead expense? Thank you.

Dennis McGonigle: Answer the second question is, yes. That’s a good target and I’ll – the work that we did with the outside consulting firm kind of had two elements to it and I think it’s probably best to have Sanjay answer since it – the key focus was on our banking business. And then Ryan, maybe you want to comment on kind of the broader aspects of the…

Ryan Hicke: Yes. I can start first and then turn to Sanjay. So Owen, I think we may have mentioned this in the call last summer, but one of the very first things we did across leadership at SEI last summer, which was sales solutions product operational technology leaders is we stepped back and we looked at our total addressable market and not just the size of each universe. So we weren’t saying how many RIAs are out there or how many regional community banks, but we really tried to distill that down to another level of granularity and look for criteria of which firms were really growing, what was their appetite to outsourcing, how repeatable would our success be in those pools and in those channels. And then when we finished that process, we also thought it was an opportunity to think differently and bring in an external firm to help challenge or validate some of those thoughts and ideas and outcomes that we had.

So Sanjay, we did that, Owen, specifically in banking in the U.S. and UK, so if you just want to talk high level about that.