SEI Investments Company (NASDAQ:SEIC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dennis McGonigle: The new product comment is — and Phil’s team has done such a great job of building really strong relationships with our clients and the — particularly the clients that continue to grow and expand. And when they tend to come to market with a new product, we kind of be in the room when they’re designing the new product. So, that’s really what the reference is to new products. It’s our clients launching new products into the market and then leaning on us to be there to support them.

Phil McCabe: That’s a great point. Thank you.

Owen Lau: Got it. If I can add one more quick one, which is on the cost side. I noticed that there’s an increase in personnel costs and investments. I think you mentioned related to compliance infrastructure to meet new regulatory requirements. Could you please talk about what these new requirements are? And are they recurring expense or it’s more like onetime expense?

Dennis McGonigle: On the personnel side, you’re looking at kind of second quarter to third quarter. Remember that — we talked about this on the last call, I believe that midyear is when we — for the bulk of our workforce, we go through salary adjustments and we make compensation changes that typically go on year in, year out. So, you saw some cost growth in personnel as a function of that. And then on the compliance regulatory front, we operate in many different regulatory jurisdictions. So, in some of the — all the jurisdictions we operate in are highly regulated with continued change in not only the regulations that exist in addition to those regulations, but the scrutiny under which firms that operate are put by the regulators themselves, and that just has increased the workload relative to all of our jurisdictional operations.

When you layer on top of that the fact that we expanded into a new jurisdiction in Luxembourg, we’ve had to add some capabilities and talent there. And then when you wrap it all up with the combination of who we hire and who are kind of in full-time roles and then the use of outside professionals to help guide us as we sort through some of the regulatory changes that have occurred, that drives us some of our costs. Finally, in certain jurisdictions, we’ve been able to operate at a different type of leverage with using talent in certain jurisdictions to support the requirements in other jurisdictions. Well, what’s happened is almost every jurisdiction now requires that talent to be local, and that’s also added to our personnel requirements and cost increases.

It’s the regulatory employment program, I call it.

Operator: And we’ll go over to the line of Ryan Kenny of Morgan Stanley.

Ryan Kenny: A couple of questions. First, you mentioned migrating a large chunk of the private banks booked to SWP this quarter. Any update on where that leaves TRUST 3000? And should we expect any change in strategy on how long you plan to keep that asset up and running or how you plan to manage the TRUST 3000 system?

Ryan Hicke: Yes, I’ll take that first and then kick to Sanjay. Ryan, hope you’re doing well. So right now, that does not change our kind of strategic plan because we have clients that are happy on TRUST 3000. What I would say is two things. One, we’re probably more proactively engaged right now with those clients trying to understand what that time line looks like, what those operating models would be and what books of business they will be bringing over to SWP. So Sanjay and his team have done a terrific job there kind of really increasing the engagement. But the other more important thing with the U.S. Bank conversion, and I think Dennis had this in his script, is to have that size of an organization operating with the software-as-a-service model really opens up a different level of conversation in the market for Sanjay and the team around either existing or prospective SEI clients that don’t want to outsource the back office that are looking for technology-as-a-service.

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