Progeny Half Year Results 2021

Progeny has announced its 2021 half-year results. Commenting on the results, Neil Moles, Progeny CEO, said:

“We have seen a very strong first half of 2021 with all key metrics ahead of last year. Year on year, revenue has increased in excess of £1.2m or 17% and EBITDA is up over 16% over the same period.

“We have attracted £78.2m in new assets under management into Progeny Wealth and £290.5m into Progeny Asset Management. New matters in Progeny Law & Tax, from external and internal referrals, are at record levels.

“2021 is a year of growth for Progeny. We are focusing on three key areas. Organic growth through our marketing strategy and client referrals, inorganic growth via our ongoing acquisition strategy and internal growth from referrals and by marketing more of our array of professional services to more of our clients.

“We are always looking ahead and seeking ways to improve, focusing on where our business is going, not where it’s come from. We’re proud of our points of difference and the attributes that set us apart from our peers.

“Our strengths lie in the excellence of our people, our increasing capacity for commercially successful collaboration and our appetite for using technology, data and innovation to create ever-better client outcomes.”

Financials

Asset management 

Progeny Asset Management surpassed the significant milestone of £1bn assets under management in April. This impressive progress has been underpinned by our Centralised Investment Proposition (CIP), developed in 2020 to deliver a unified investment philosophy across all portfolios. The CIP offers the ability to scale up the investment proposition and provides a consistent and repeatable process and clear messaging, all under one investment committee.

Our next project is the unitisation of our CIP, which will be transformational. Taking closer control of our investment process should help bring cost savings for clients, more consistent outcomes and increased efficiency. Technology will continue to play a key role in enabling us to create a better proposition for clients and helping us to scale our business.

Our portfolios have continued to perform well. The Dynamic range has been a consistently strong performer over its five-year lifetime, even throughout the recent challenging financial market environment. We have continued to develop our evidence-based, total return Tempo portfolio range and recently launched our Bravo ESG range – a systematic ESG solution – to meet growing client demand in this space.

Acquisitions

We pressed ahead with our acquisition plans into 2021. In February, we acquired Leeds-based legal firm, Watsons Law, who specialise in conveyancing, land and property law. They have a strong track record of unparalleled expertise and guidance in this space in addition to a quality client following. They will bring a huge amount of residential conveyancing experience to the business, and with it we can offer another vital and high-quality service to our clients.

In April, we acquired Ayrshire-based financial advice firm, Affinity. They were established in 2008 and specialise in providing comprehensive financial planning services to a select number of private clients and their families in Scotland and the UK. The deal will allow us to continue to extend our multi-disciplinary professional services offering in Scotland. We will continue to pursue our acquisition strategy throughout 2021.

Data-driven

We are committed to becoming a data-driven business. Data will help us improve client experience and add significant value by helping us anticipate client needs more effectively. It will be the foundation stone of our digital transformation and is incredibly powerful in enabling us to keep continually improving the business as a whole. We are embedding data-gathering deeply into the infrastructure of the business and making it easier to interpret, analyse and act on, all with the aim of helping us to drive growth.

A major benefit of gathering data in this way is the depth and breadth of vision it gives us. One click can give us instant access to huge amounts of information that we can refine, interpret and feed back into the process to keep improving client outcomes. This truly sustainable approach to data-gathering will enable us to glean new insight from existing data sets and identify brand new trends and opportunities. 

Technology

Technology is key to our future and we are continuing to invest and grow significantly in this area. Our strategy is built around three key priorities: harnessing and integrating data; using automation to become more efficient; and creating an outstanding client experience.

This will allow us to create opportunities for both clients and the business, using the innovation and scope of digital to ultimately forge deeper relationships, reach more clients than ever before and improve our service and offering. The next generation of clients will expect a sophisticated technology proposition as standard.

Corporate Social Responsibility

We are living through a time when we’ve never been more aware of our global environment and the wellbeing of our people and communities. We are progressing our application for B-Corp certification, underlining our commitment to our social and environmental performance, and we are on target to submit a completed assessment to B-Corp by the end of July.

We have created a new Positive Impact Champions Group as part of our pledge to become a climate positive workforce with an environmental net-zero strategy. They are a group of 14 volunteers from across the business who are passionate about promoting the B-Corp values around sustainability, the green agenda and doing the right thing in the right way for our communities – internal colleagues, external clients, suppliers and any third party that touches our business.

Marketing & PR

Marketing is driving organic growth by reaching out to new clients and demographics. We have been focused on building stronger foundations for managing our projects, developing our digital strategy and becoming more data led. We have developed our brand guidelines to make us more identifiable and set us apart as a trusted business. We have significantly scaled up our video production, seeing the potential for making meaningful connections with younger clients and we are continuing to create engaging content across all our channels.

We have scaled up our PR activities and significantly raised Progeny’s profile across trade, consumer, national and regional media. We are establishing ourselves as sought-after commentators and thought leaders in our industry, and our experts are coming across loud and clear as a trusted advisory voice in the mainstream and consumer media.

People

In 2021, we have continued to grow our team, taking on 39 new team members. We are a firm that is positioned to keep on growing. As the overwhelming number of applications for our vacancies show, people want to join us and we are attracting talented team members who can make a real contribution.

Looking after our team is something we have always taken seriously and never more so than in the last 15 months. We appointed 12 Wellbeing Champions to lead a company-wide commitment to nurturing wellbeing and launched an Employee Assistance Programme that provides a range of services to support our staff in maintaining good mental and physical health.

Learning & Development

We have invested significant amounts of time, effort and resource into developing and training our team members at all levels during this unprecedented year, refusing to let anything stand in the way of their professional and personal progress.

Our Adviser Academy continues to grow and help nurture the advisers of tomorrow. It allows us to develop a steady pipeline of new legal and financial advisers into the business from within, providing a robust succession plan for our adviser base.

We have recently recruited a Head of Training and Competence, who will drive clear, strategic learning and development pathways through the business and support the next generation of professionals within the Academy.