WT defines success by growing businesses, not selling services

WT Financial Group managing director Keith Cullen believes the licensee’s commercial success isn’t centred around offering more services to charge advisers but rather lifting the commercial capabilities of the underlying businesses.

Cullen spoke to investors on Monday morning off the back of last week’s indicative FY26 results. He said the firm’s commercial success isn’t dependent on finding new ways to charge practices more, but on helping them become more successful businesses.

“That’s fundamentally a different relationship, certainly than what existed in what was then called ‘dealer groups’ that we acquired when we coalesced this network together – and what exists in other advice network operators in the market,” Cullen said.

“We’re not simply supplying services, we’re investing our time, our people, our technology, all of our IP of course, into helping practices improve their commercial outcomes. When they improve it improves our financial results.”

The group announced its indicative FY26 results last week showing gross revenue and other income was up 13 per cent to $246.4 million in FY26 (compared to $217.7 million in FY25); earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) was up 22 per cent from $6.9 million in FY25 to $8.4 million in FY26; and net profit before tax was up 20 per cent from $5.5 million to $6.6 million.

“FY26 represents an important transition in the evolution of WT Financial Group,” Cullen said.

“Our first five or six years were about building one of Australia’s leading advice platforms and in that we mean building the scale, the infrastructure, building our risk management capability and the technology that sits behind that, building adviser engagement and building our professional development engine.”

Cullen said this is why he believes WT has one of the strongest alignments of interests between the licensee organisation, advisers in the network and shareholders.

“Our advisers want their practices to grow, practice principals want their businesses to become more valuable,” Cullen said.

“WT wants the same thing, and our shareholders benefit when that happens. That’s a healthy alignment and it explains why we’ve invested heavily over recent years.”

Cullen said the future of the company is exciting, not because of the development of any new strategy but because of the maturation of its existing strategy.

“The financial results tell you where we’ve been in the past 12 months, the strategy tells you where we’re going,” Cullen said.

Cullen said the firm has invested to improve its practice development, professional development and expanding its risk management capability to help develop practice principals and advisers in its network.

“Why are we doing this? Every one of those investments that we make, makes our practices better businesses,” Cullen said. “Every improvement they achieve ultimately improves the economics of WT.”

Cullen said this investment was necessary as practice principals look for greater mentorship to develop their businesses.

“Over many years, Australian financial advice has remained remarkably fragmented,” Cullen said.

“[There are} excellently run, privately-owned financial advice businesses, but there’s thousands of them. Many of them are highly profitable, many of them are exceptionally well-run, and most of them have wonderful client relationships.”

However, Cullen said practice leaders all face the same challenges with succession planning, attracting capital and developing scale.

 “They’re not advice problems so all the technical training in the world won’t help with those,” Cullen said.

Cullen said this was the reason it began its “Hubco” strategy model, where it partnered with Merchant Wealth Partners who would help provide capital for equity stakes in underlying practices willing to participate.

Merchant provides the capital, which WT has the right to dollar-match, but typically defers to its revenue-based fee model as “quasi equity” which benefits from the capital investment.

“We wanted another way to help good businesses become great businesses,” Cullen said.

“The Hubco strategy was the natural evolution of everything we’ve been doing for years now.”

The business started as Spring Financial Group in 2010, which was founded by Cullen. The firm acquired the Perth-based Wealth Today licensee in 2017, and the parent company rebranded to WT Financial Group in November 2019.

Spring FG rebranded in January 2026 to Vesta Wealth Partners, which was sold to Titan Advice Group at the start of July.

WT also acquired Sentry Group in 2021, Synchron in 2022, and Millennium3 from Insignia Financial in 2023.