Transcript

Matt Heine (MH):

Hugh, welcome to the show.

HH:

Thanks. Matt it's good to be here.

MH:

What was it that actually got you into financial services and how your career progressed from those very early days?

Hugh Humphrey (HH):

My first job, you're probably not familiar with a business called Gowings. It's very much a Sydney institution, the men's wear store there and from school through uni. That sort of supported me and I really enjoyed that. Made a lot of friends and a lot of us actually ended up where we were studying finance and ended up going into that profession. But I was quite curious when I finished my studies between economics and marketing about businesses really and how they ran and I thought I'd started in consulting. So I ended up joining a big four consulting business, spent about six years doing really interesting projects for fascinating businesses like Qantas and Telstra and a range of other organisations, which gave me great insight into where I wanted to work. And as part of that, I ended up having the opportunity to represent the staff on the corporate superannuation business. Ended up with a financial planner fortuitously, probably at the age of about 22, 23. So we've had a few planners over the years but meant that we were kind of set from early on and I guess I appreciated the value of advice from that point and was always curious about why it was so poorly communicated. But ultimately when the opportunity came up to get into advice, I think that was my starting point, was having had the first hand experience in the power of advice.

MH:

So at the age of 22, was that an employer sponsored situation?

HH:

It was, yeah, it was through the corporate super plan. They had a referral process into some employed advisors and given I was representing the business there, I thought that would be a good thing to do. And I remember sitting around the table with Carla and it was pretty new to both of us, but I mean as you know, the sooner you get into that stuff, the bigger an impact you can have. So yeah, the fundamentals of the plan that we had from back then are still in place and obviously a few twists and turns along the way. I went on from consulting into, ended up working in telecoms for a bunch of years. I sort of mentioned before I've had a different journey I think to most in terms of financial services in that this is my third career in a way consulting then telco and then advice.

And I think it was probably the combination of the two that probably set me up quite well for advice because my time in consulting helped me to understand a business and what made it tick. I think my time in Telco was very informative around a very fast paced consumer business and the importance of understanding what people are buying. When I think about financial services and in particular financial advice, I still think it's not well communicated and people don't really understand it. It's difficult and often I think advice businesses don't really understand what they're selling to people either, and it's difficult to articulate that you're selling hopes and dreams and aspirations and a future lifestyle when living is so fast paced and people are living for the now. And yeah, so by bringing in I suppose a really good knowledge of who is the customer and what are they trying to do, I think I was able to help kind of build advice businesses in a slightly different way.

MH:

And so how did you move from telco's into advice? Was that through a traditional financial planning path or at licensee level?

HH:

Boss was actually recruited into AMP to run a business called Hill Ross by a gentleman called Steve Helmich, who spent many decades in financial advice and made a huge contribution to the professional, a number of different levels and on a global stage as well. And I always say he took a big risk on bringing me in. He says it wasn't because he knew it would work out, but I wasn't so sure. Curiously, when the Hill Ross role came up, he wanted some fresh eyes on the business and I think he saw the opportunity to get somebody who hadn't come through a traditional financial planning background who did understand more about a market and a customer and what drove purchasing behaviour and then could bring a more sort of strategic perspective into the business. And the beauty of Hill Ross was a pretty self-contained business.

It was terrific business and it had the platform to grow with all of the resources of AMP around it. So Steve created an opportunity for me to take that business to the next level and absolutely loved that. One of most favourite kind of periods of my career, having the right skills and then being the right place at the right time. When Steve and AMP were looking for something different and as often happens, there was a number of links. There are board members of AMP who had been executives in Vodafone and other things. So I had a good appreciation of the business and an opportunity to talk to a lot of people before I joined.

MH:

It sounds like an obvious step when you put it like that, but I haven't actually met many people that have come into the industry from telcos, but I was talking to someone yesterday about the fact that every now and again, it is good to bring someone into the business from outside of the industry because they're able to look at the jargon and generally the view is if I'm a smart person and I dunno what you're talking about, what chance have our customers got?

HH:

Yeah, I think that's right. And it's like having a balance, isn't it, of all the skills and in that role in Hill Ross, I had a boss who had decades of expertise in the space and the technical knowledge and I had a team, people like Len Whalen who ended up spending more than 40 years in AMP. So I was surrounded by about 70 years of experience just in two people. And so I was able to bring in a different perspective and know that we were kind of long on an understanding of the technical side of the business in reflection, it made a lot of sense around what Steve did there, but I also felt more secure knowing that I had the support of my boss and my team that had the depth in areas that I didn't and needed to develop. And I think the professions moved a lot too.

I mean even back then 12, 13 years ago it was pre fofa advice was a different world. The economics and where the revenues came from and the costs were, it was entirely different. It's developed for the better in almost every dimension. And I do actually think a lot of advice businesses now are a lot more kind of client and consumer centric than they were even sort of 10, 15 years ago and after AMP had a phone call from CommBank say, would I come and they knew I was going to make a move out of AMP and would I come and help them sort fix up their employed advice business? Agreed to do that, went in knowing exactly what the problems were and a big commitment from ENRF as a C at the time down to solve the problem. So fees for no service and things were well and truly understood and remediation works well underway there.

That was a big rebuild pre, it was tough work. And then a couple of years into that Royal Commission landed, so the four years I spent in the bank were pretty heavy lifting, but right from the get go I'd say that all CBA did was to try and work really hard to identify and understand the problems that had been there and just worked incredibly diligently to solve them. And I think that's for the better. And I remember talking to Dean at the time and saying, we have to fix CFP because it's going to given CBA style, it was just going to define financial advice for the country. There'd been all sorts of issues and stuff in the past and if CBA couldn't get there, then I think the profession was kind of doomed and it did a lot of heavy lifting and of course now the landscape looks very different, but at the back end of that it was pretty exhausting.

The Royal Commission was a tough exercise, so having to explain issues and what we'd done about it and things were, it was difficult times. I still took a bit of a break off the back of that. I thought I'd take a quieter path for a few years and moved a little bit sideways into banking and the former premier in New South Wales, Mike Bed asked me to come join NAB and run the New South Wales business. Had a terrific year there. Then Covid hit and being in retail banking with thousands of staff in hundreds of branches across the state was very challenging, unexpectedly learned a lot about the rigour of and processes and systems there. It was never going to be kind of a heart move to shift into the bank. It was quite irrational. Just give me a bit of time to decompress from the Royal Commission. And a couple of years in I was pretty determined to get back into advice.

MH:

It's that you sort talk through those different experiences and you really have seen a huge amount in a relatively short period of time. If you think about the last decade, each of those different episodes probably required very different leadership as far as through the good times and boom and bust. Who were you taking your cues from? Sort of reported through to some pretty impressive leaders through that time. What were some of the key leadership lessons that you learned?

HH:

It was interesting. I probably would've described myself as really more of a growth leader up until some of the heavy lifting of actually probably from the implementation of fofa and then certainly through fixing advice businesses and looking at past conduct and then right through the Royal Commission and then of course, actually still a number of years later, still the remnants of some of those pieces of work. So did I think that I'd spend six, seven years doing remediation programmes like absolutely not, but I have absolutely learned from that and am definitely a better leader and particularly the experiences through the Royal Commission. I think what I took out of that, and it was part of the conversation when Mike asked me to come to NAB, was to bring those experiences of knowing how to look really hard at something, understand what's going on. There were leaders at CBA and NAB who would say not just can you do something but should you?

And as I think those sort of insights were terrific as a lot of businesses had run for growth and because they could, but some of the practises didn't really pass the sniff test and that was that sort of element of should you be actually doing that? So I think testing against a really strong value set of does this make sense outside of the industry and beyond if you walked past somebody or if you're talking to your mom about it, would they say that, yep, that's the right thing to do, or would they wonder why something happened in a certain way? I think those are the kind of lessons I took from some of those terrific leaders was to make the right decisions for the right reasons. And I think the other thing was the importance of communication too. And again, somebody like Mike, an excellent communicator, terrific at bringing people together, being very clear on where things needed to go and what needed to happen and really harnessing the power of getting a whole community of people aligned.

Those insights for me have really sort of shaped how I go about things and we talk about we've a behaviour inside count and it's our third of three and it's do what's right. We are really sort of focused on that, which is not what can we do, but actually what is the right thing to do when a situation presents. I think the other thing that I realised is problems emerge in businesses all the time and even in telco we had a lot of issues with things like deceased customers and bills and debt collectors and things like that, and they're always really regrettable, but sometimes systems are just very difficult to sort of perfect. What I've learned over the years is it's usually not the problem that's the problem, that's how you respond to it. I think if I had one regret around it's sort the financial services ecosystem was when it understood the problems, it probably didn't respond quickly enough to fix it.

And so a lot of the criticism that we fielded and that we see out there is probably how we've gone about it. So for me, I always say to the team, I know there are problems in the business if you're running, we've got four AFSLs, there's a lot of risk involved in that. Things will go wrong. I get it. We're not going to be measured on things going wrong. We're going to be measured on how quickly and how well we fix them and how we respond when that happens with transparency and honesty and getting it done and getting it done the first time. So that's the kind of track record that we're trying to lay out.

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MH:

Fantastic. And a lot of learnings in there to take into your current gig, CEO of count. It's been a busy 24 months.

HH:

Yeah, 25 I think. This is month 25.

MH:

Month 25. You've done a lot. Do you want to give us a bit of an update on where you're at? I

HH:

Think that was sort of the brief when I came in was a terrific business but a bit subscale. We knew it needed to get bigger. We listed but really not big enough to be listed. No liquidity in the stock, a fairly stagnant kind of share price. And at the same time though, a lot of really interesting assets back then probably about when I started, about 85, 86% of our earnings came from investments in large accounting and financial planning businesses. They generated a bunch of cash, but really I knew we needed to diversify the business and our revenue streams, the growth plans and what have delivered and the teams done over the last couple years have been really aligned around that using the assets that we have to grow out. We've now got three really strong segments of equity firms, wealth and services and our services businesses we're absolutely focused really on education expertise through knowledge hub, tax banter, curium, actuarial certificates, consulting and other things.

So we have a whole pile of expertise. We know how to deliver services out to financial planning businesses and accounting firms and we're doing that now really well through our three segments. Yeah, we've moved quickly. I think we had to move quickly. I think at the same time as you're well aware, a lot of disruption across the financial services landscape, a lot of consolidation activity particularly in advice at the moment actually also in accounting. But we saw a real opportunity to strengthen the business by looking at acquiring, emerging with like-minded businesses and so of course the most notable being Diverger and we're thrilled with that. And again, if I talk about those three segments, it's just plugged in really nicely, particularly into services, but also wealth. That's our trajectory is stay true to our beliefs and our purpose, but build a bigger business that can generate better returns for our shareholders and start to really make being listed work for the business.

MH:

It's really interesting when you walk through those different segments because the role of the licensee has changed dramatically over the last five years and it really is around the type of services you can deliver and they're almost looking like many consulting firms in some ways. How would you describe what Count does outside of those or even within those three segments? Yeah,

HH:

Absolutely. And look, I still get really frustrated when I see some legacy language used across dealer group or institution and things like that because that is absolutely long gone. And you're right, we do provide licencing services, so that's really part of a professional services proposition and I think dovetails nicely into the professionalism that we have in our accounting businesses too. So the common theme right through the business is that we're all about service delivery. Sometimes that's right through to an end client. Often it's to a business partner, be that a financial planner or an accounting firm through acquiring. We have 6,000 accounting firms across country that we service in our advice business. We've got hundreds of financial planning businesses that we service and we bring the same mindset and philosophy of service delivery and we know also the beauty of I think in the licencing space is people have choice and flexibility.

There is no lock in and nor should there be our advisors choose our services because they're the best and that they want to partner with us and we are really very grateful for that and we put a lot of effort into making sure that we're a really good business partner at the same time. That's not always easy because in upholding professional standards and interpreting legislation and delivering the controls that you need, sometimes it's tough conversations. So we really strike that right balance around professionalism with service delivery and what's most pleasing is in the rare occasions when we've got to have some difficult conversations, we always get feedback around how well the team do that and the tough times as well as the good times. Anyone can kind of do well in the good times, but it's when things get tough that people really turn to the business partners to see whether we are there and we always are. So that would be our kind of real philosophy and the uniting feature of the business is making sure we understand who's consuming the service and what do they need from us.

MH:

At the same time that you've gone through a huge transformation within the account business. Obviously the advice industry at the practise level has gone through a lot of change as well. Do you have in your mind what the perfect business model looks like or where do you see the financial advice model of the future heading?

HH:

I think there's a few elements of it. Like a lot of businesses, I think there's a driver around scale, so there's a certain element of fixed cost in an advice business that you can scale beyond and create efficiencies. Though I think typically the larger that the businesses are and the more advisors they have, usually that's a real benefit. So when I think about business of the future, it's probably a large scale business, a number of advisors, which means it creates capacity for new clients and for illness and absence and other things. Technology I'd say is finally starting to actually work in advice far from perfect, but with workflows and plugging bits and pieces in and taking advantage of elements you can actually deliver. I think now quite an impressive client experience through some client portals and other things, you can get some workflows going through the business where it's much easier for clients to interact and I think the advisors and paraplanners and others are finding that actually the tools are supporting easier delivery and development of advice out to clients and the implementation of that as well. So I think that the future business advice business looks like nice large scale multi advisor business, probably stronger investment in technology, particularly around how the firm interacts with their clients, streamlining some of the backend, taking advantage of things like managed accounts and other opportunities to focus on more quality conversations with clients and less sort of backend admin and technical work and then really measuring themselves around the engagement that they've got with their clients.

MH:

One of the trends that we're seeing very broadly at the moment is the outsourcing offshore of fairly key functions within a firm. Are you seeing that across the account network as well?

HH:

Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a lot of accountants and financial planners and I hasten to add, I also think that accounting is playing a huge role and will play a huge role in the future delivery of financial advice and primarily because a lot of the information required for both professions is quite similar and from my own personal experience, I love having integrated accounting and financial planning provision because you are often asking the same questions, giving the same information and one's kind of looking back and maybe helping you understand where you are now and the other in financial planning of course looking forward, but same sort of baseline information and it's very frustrating when you've got to move that information or the client has to interact with multiple parties. We don't think that the model has to be that every financial planning business is embedded with an accounting firm, but invariably all of our successful financial planning firms have at least high quality relationships where with accounting firms where there might be introductions of their clients into the FP firm joint ventures, there might be equity holders or it might be an integrated firm that also then provides some real efficiency around again, this sort of scale and cost base sharing of some sort of similar resources to get great outcomes.

So we have a big focus on increasing that. Outsourcing then plays a big role for both accounting and financial planning. Almost all of our firms now would use some form of outsourcing for workload management. I think obviously covid really accelerated if it wasn't obvious to everybody already. It became very evident that actually there may not even be an alternative for resourcing. We've got businesses in a lot of regional towns in Victoria and New South Wales in particular with the kind of drain in terms of the workforce, it just didn't have any options. But that's really refined and working well now to the point where we've taken some big investments into the space as well. We've just invested in a business called solution centric that has accounting and financial planning, outsourcing to terrific business in India. We have collective outsourcing on the Gold Coast owned by business account business on the Gold Coast that leverages a model in the Philippines. And then a lot of our AFSL licenced firms use a range of other service providers and we see that working really well and it's a great way, I think of de-risking the business of generally getting some economic efficiency, but often to improving the client experience of getting better turnaround times for client requests and things.

MH:

It's interesting you say de-risking the business. One of the objections that we get from firms not currently outsourcing is obviously the lack of control of data and some of that processing that does get done offshore. As a licensee, how do you deal with that? What are the frameworks that you've put in place?

HH:

Firstly, I'd say you've always got to weigh up the different risks. So the risks of not having resourcing, being able to deliver to a client sometimes perhaps underestimated, and I would imagine that some people, it's fairly obvious to say there's risk of moving data around. Frankly, we just feel uncomfortable about data full stop, and I think we don't feel that having data onshore is any protection either, and I think we've seen a lot of instances recently, big Aussie businesses with lots of issues there. So we know that particularly in financial services in Australia, it's a big target for people. We apply the same rigour and controls around information regardless of where it is and work as well as we can to kind of keep ahead of the curve, but we know that those threats are just constant and constantly evolving. We have got some businesses now a terrific business corpor priority networking that came to count through the diver acquisition where we spend a lot of time understanding the sorts of controls that we can implement around our business and that we can recommend or implement to our financial advice businesses. And like I said, I sort of use a phrase, I'm just chronically uneasy about it, and I don't think that the country necessarily plays a big role in that. I think that the issues exist regardless of where the data is.

MH:

You touched on one of the key drivers clearly being resources, particularly in some of the regional areas. The statistic that I find fascinating at the moment is that nine and a half million Australians are looking to retire in the next 10 years, at which point or five years prior they'll go to see a financial planner, the circa 10,000 active financial planners. How do we start to address that issue? Because at the end of the day, you can outsource a lot of the back office, but most planners I'm speaking to are actually really struggling with how do I onboard the number of clients that are wanting to see me, and in some cases it's taking 2, 3, 4 months to get back to a prospect just because they're so busy with the new business,

HH:

Definitely an issue and an opportunity, and I think our financial advice businesses have never been busier. I think that's a good thing. In a lot of ways it's taken a while for I think people to really understand and appreciate the role that financial advice plays. And of course now we've got, as you said, big group of people who are approaching a stage where they need to make some big decisions. I'd love to think that in time actually it won't just be those people that are focused on retirement, younger generation in order for that to happen. I think a few things there, whilst we've seen a big drop off in the number of financial advisors, not every kind of authorised rep on the far is credit equal, and in fact in count with a licence called Merit Wealth, which has a lot of limited authorised reps or accountants who might from time to time give some advice in sort of establishing SMSF or something.

And that's very different to a financial advisor who's got a couple of hundred ongoing financial advice clients. So whilst we've seen a big reduction in the number of authorised representatives, I don't think we've seen the same sort of reduction in terms of the number of advised clients, which is important. As you point out, there isn't enough capacity in the system to continue to service everybody. I'm personally very excited about the fact that we have this opportunity or problem because the inverse would be a much darker place if there wasn't the people or the interest, but it isn't yet resolved Keen to see and good the governments are talking about making some changes, but that's a long journey and that's been a particularly slow one, but we're not going to waiting for anything to happen there, but we think that the conversation is in the right space around making it easier for advisors.

Do think technology is going to play a big role? You and I were touching on earlier, the financial advice process is not the easiest process and the reason that the whole profession exists is to declutter and simplify and communicate to client and that people want to outsource the complexity of they may have had a terrific career in their profession, but they're just not experts at all the complications around money and what to do with it and managing risk. I think ultimately people will need support, but with technology that can support advisors and clients, I think the role of superannuation funds and platforms in terms of being able to help people make better decisions will be key, getting more people into the profession. But that takes time and won't solve the problem quickly. But I think probably the most important thing that we're seeing is through technology, process efficiency, outsourcing, creating an ecosystem where advisors can serve more clients. If the average advisor instead of a hundred and something clients is 200 something clients, you've doubled the capacity of the system. And I think that's very possible, particularly when you look at some of the inefficiency in these businesses, but also the opportunity that new technology is providing.

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MH:

Presumably back in your roles at AMP and CBA, you would've overseen the Horizon programme or some of the graduate programmes. Is Count looking at anything in the PY space to help bring through that next generation?

HH:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When I was at AMP, Tim Steele ran the Horizons programme and it was a terrific, terrific programme probably ahead of its time in terms of its thinking, and I think alongside my time at CBA, what I really observed there was how we could grow financial planners through a very large banking workforce and people could learn the ropes in a branch in banking and then do the technical skills and end up being a terrific planner. So those systems have disappeared. I think that's a big shame both from the Horizons programme, but also the role that the banks played in recruiting, developing, and growing financial planners. We have a great PY offering. I think that's definitely part of the solution. In fact, today as we sit here in your building, Matt, we've got our emerging advisors in for a session and we're hooked up right across the country with the Netwealth team to talk about how we improve the skills there, particularly in terms of giving some of our younger advisors the skills to have difficult conversations with clients, talk about fees and all that sort of tough stuff. And so we are investing in that and looking for new ways to create career paths for people to enter the profession, get the skills they need and grow into the businesses.

MH:

There's a lot to be excited about. What most excites you about the next five years?

HH:

If I think about the phases for about a decade, there's been a lot of conversation around the problems of advice, but I think clearly the whole superannuation system has really come of its own and the dialogue around financial advice, its role and its importance I think is now really well understood. So for me, it's terrific to be in a place where we're spending a lot less time defending and explaining what we're doing and a lot more time finding ways of doing more of it and doing it better and being able to give more Australians access to this terrific capability. So I get really excited about the impact that we can have on people. We talk about, we are there to help understand people's hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears and concerns and help them live the life they want to live. And there's probably not much more important in terms of work to do than that.

So that energises me. I know it energises the team. We get up in the morning being pretty excited about knowing that at the end of the day we'll be able to reflect on how we've helped so many people do what they want to do, which is live their life the way they want to live it. And without us and our advisors, we know that that just doesn't always happen. You leave it to chance. That's probably what excites me. Then our business count is a terrific business. We've got an awesome board a lot with great tenure and understanding the business. We've now got a really complete executive team with some recent appointments that team is firing and engaged and excited, and I think about the terrific business that we already had, and I look at the skills and capabilities and the people we've got in there and the firms and the assets. It's super exciting to know what we'll do next. We really don't want for anything in the business, we've sort of got all the moving parts, we're in the right space, and I think you'll see us really take advantage of that over the next few years.

MH:

Hugh, that would've been a great spot to finish our podcast, but it would be remiss, given you're here not to ask you about QAR and where you think that's actually going to benefit the industry and if it's going to end up delivering the efficiencies that we're all desperately hoping for.

HH:

Look, been. It was a long time coming and then when it arrived, it's been a long time since anything happened, probably alluded to before. We're definitely not sitting around waiting for it. We are doing some work on how do we continue to pursue these ambitions around greater access and more affordable advice to more people. And there's a lot of work that we can do and we don't need to wait for QAR and I'd encourage other businesses to think the same way. You don't need to sit and wait for legislation to innovate and develop your business model. As disappointing as it is that things haven't moved quicker, like I said, the fact that the conversation is happening is a positive. Does it happen? Who knows? But cabinet reshuffled this weekend change up. That can be good. That can be bad. At the end of the day, I think we just need to really focus on getting on with finding ways to get more advice to customers.

I do think that there's more that other players in the ecosystem can do, and I would like to see customers and clients being able to access more services through experts that aren't necessarily financial advisors. If we can get the right kind of frameworks in place and manage the risks around that for sure. There's a lot of knowledge and expertise out there in a lot of businesses that could be shared with customers to help them and clients to help them make better decisions on a day-to-day basis. That doesn't have to be financial advice with a statement of advice, a lot of common sense in the QAR recommendations. So hopefully it comes through. But in the meantime, I think we're just sort of cracking on.

MH:

Agree with that. Before we go, you've obviously got incredible knowledge across a very wide and broad range of areas. How do you best keep up to date with what's going on, and are you an avid reader of industry magazines? How do you keep on top of everything,

HH:

Get the morning emails from all the industry rags? We're in JI and Eastern suburbs in Sydney, about a 20 minute bus ride into the city in the morning. So yeah, I love getting my seat on the bus. Mostly work through the fin review and then all the industry rags get up to speed, both myself and the team. We spend a lot of time looking at other industries and professions and developments, particularly in technology, but also in terms of customer experiences and employee experiences and other things to make sure that we're not sort of being too insular about our profession. And a lot of the really big moves we've made have come from ideas from outside of our space, and I think that's appropriate. We consume a lot. I love getting reports through your business, spits out a lot of very good information. You work with a lot of different people so you can aggregate data and share that with people like us. And then we spend a lot of time bringing outside voices in just today we're organising for an external speaker to come in. We've got two speakers coming on the same day in a couple of weeks time. We'll open up to all of our staff, both in person in Sydney, but around the country to hear from some experts again that are just a bit outside adjacent to us to sort of critique the business and talk about their experiences and offer up some new opportunities.

MH:

Gen AI and AI, obviously a huge area of focus for the industry and very vast differences in how some practises are adopting it versus others. What's K doing in this space and what are you suggesting advisors do?

HH:

It'd be the only business if I didn't sort of drop the AI term a thousand times. It's the AI of the ai. That approach is probably twofold. We're spending a lot of time encouraging our people to understand it and leverage it again in sort of controlled ways. I'm still quite curious about the different applications of the emerging capabilities in in a few areas of our business. We'd love down the track to think that we can deploy some of that into the accounting and advisory and financial planning work that we do across the business. At this stage, we're using it more in some of our knowledge businesses. So for example, knowledge shop and tax banter. We do a lot of complex training and we have a help desk where we respond to complex queries from accountants about complicated tax matters and other things we can use.

And we do use AI in that part of our business to help interrogate our knowledge bases with thousands and thousands of previously answered questions and things and serve up draught suggestions to our experts on the help desk rather than them have to create that from scratch. So that's one way we can dramatically reduce the amount of time that takes to respond to a question or a query through our knowledge shop business and through tax banter and aurum. So we are deploying, we already have deployed it there. Some of our accounting practises are using it to support things like time sheeting, so using AI to kind of query email and calendar and other, and phone records and things to serve up draught time sheets of client fees, and again, just saving on the admin for the staff. So we think there's terrific applications in relatively simple ways for now. I think the big price for us will be how can we then start to use all of the expertise that exists within our accounting and financial planners and the advisory work that we've delivered to clients to spot trends and give even better advice some down the track. I think that'll open up for us too.

MH:

Sadly, we've run out of time. Always great to catch up. Congratulations on an incredible career and what you've achieved at Count in the last 25 months and can't wait to see what's next.

HH:

Thanks Matt. Thanks for having in. It's been great to chat.

MH:

Thanks a lot.

HH:

Cheers.