Larry Donald Zimpleman
Analyst · UBS
Sure. Let me just make a couple of comments and I'll see -- kind of looking at Dan and Terry. Let me make a couple of comments relative to pretax return on net revenue. As I said before, if you look at a quarter like second quarter and again, we should all be careful to take a quarter and somehow annualize that or assume that, that now reflects a new dynamic going forward because as I said, particularly in second quarter, because of the strong sales, strong net cash flow, I would say it's highly unusual when all of your -- actually, more than the increase in account value all came from net cash flows, meaning the market was negative and it was a net cash flows that grew your account value. In that scenario, again, there's going to be pressure not only on ROA, there's going to be pressure on return on net revenue. That's why you've seen a slight diminution in return on net revenue in this quarter. If you go out to this, 2015 and you say, "Well, why aren't you going to see more sort of lift in that pretax return on revenue?" What I would say to that, Suneet, is we'd like to sit here and tell you that there's tremendous operational leverage, but the reality is, think about it, if the reality is, if a $25 million plan becomes a $50 million plan by 2015, they're not going to allow you to charge the same fees when their $50 million plan in 2015 that you charged in their $25 million plan in 2012. So what happens in this business is what would happen in any sort of competitively efficient business, in that you're going to see sort of a paralleling, if you will, between the fees. The fees are going to go down as the plan gets bigger and you're going to have to just kind of reprice that periodically and that's just the new dynamic of the environment we're in. So that's why you hear our comments, talking about aligning expenses, aligning expenses with revenues. And so that's the reality of the business. But we should not be negative about that because again, you talked about a pretax return on net revenue of 30%, that would be one of the highest returns in all of financial services. And if you talk about an ROA, return on assets of 24 to 26 basis points, that's an ROE that's again, in that 25%, 30% range. So these are very, very healthy margins. And again, to assume that we could increase them further I think would be a little bit naïve. So hopefully that helps.