Analyst: How Much of 2025 Growth Was Bought Through Agents, and How Much Reaches Shareholders
In 2025 Analyst did not just spend more on distribution. It also lifted the asset for obtaining contracts with customers to NIS 202.5 million and agent-commission payables to NIS 101.9 million. The key question is therefore not only how fast AUM grew, but how much of the acquisition bill is being deferred and how much of the growth really reaches shareholders.
The main article argued that Analyst's 2025 rested on three legs at once: a strong market, real scale, and a customer-acquisition price tag that does not sit in a single line. This follow-up isolates the third leg. The question here is not whether Analyst grew. That part is already clear. The question is how much of that growth was bought through agents, where exactly that cost sits in the accounts, and how much of it actually reaches shareholders as profit and cash.
This matters precisely because the business result looks very strong. By the end of 2025 Analyst already had NIS 113 billion of AUM, more than 660 thousand clients, and 32% growth in client count. By March 17, 2026, AUM had already reached NIS 118.9 billion. So the debate is not about growth itself. It is about the economics of that growth.
At Analyst, the cost of acquiring a customer through agents does not show up only in distribution expense. It appears in three places at once: current expense, a balance-sheet asset deferred into future periods, and a payable to agents that has not yet been settled. When all three lines rise together, looking only at AUM growth is no longer enough. The real question becomes who is financing that growth engine.
The Three Places Where The Acquisition Bill Shows Up
Management explicitly says the increase in general, selling and marketing expense came mainly from higher marketing and distribution costs in provident products, directly tied to managed assets. In the same report, it also says the increase in the asset for obtaining contracts with customers came from a meaningful expansion in insurance-agent marketing activity in the provident business. These are not two separate stories. It is the same distribution channel showing up both in the income statement and on the balance sheet.
| Layer | 2024 | 2025 | What really changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing and distribution commissions | NIS 136.1m | NIS 218.5m | Current-period expense up about 60% |
| Capitalized additions to the contract-acquisition asset | NIS 90.4m | NIS 111.5m | New acquisition commissions deferred into the balance sheet |
| Current-period amortization of that asset | NIS 22.7m | NIS 39.7m | More of the old acquisition bill is now flowing through earnings |
| Ending contract-acquisition asset | NIS 130.6m | NIS 202.5m | Deferred acquisition cost still sitting on the balance sheet |
| Agent-commission payables | NIS 82.7m | NIS 101.9m | Part of the bill has still not been paid |
The sharpest datapoint here is not only that distribution expense rose. That part is obvious. The more important datapoint is that the increase in distribution expense absorbed roughly 44 agorot of every additional shekel of revenue in 2025 versus 2024. At the same time, distribution expense as a share of revenue did not fall with scale. It edged up from 41.7% to 42.6%. In other words, 2025 was a strong scale year, but not a year in which distribution became cheaper.
There is nuance on the balance-sheet side as well. Capitalized additions to acquisition cost rose 23% to NIS 111.5 million, but amortization rose faster, up 75% to NIS 39.7 million. That means the system is not running out of control. Older cohorts are already feeding back into the P&L. Still, even after that step-up in amortization, new additions remained 2.8 times larger than amortization, so the asset kept growing.
There is also one stabilizing point here. Despite the sharp absolute increase in the asset, it did not worsen relative to revenue and stayed around 40% of turnover. So this is not a distribution model blowing up relative to the size of the business. It is a model in which scale is still strong enough to carry a high upfront acquisition price.
What Is Really Being Deferred
This is where the issue becomes a cash question. The contract-acquisition asset grew by NIS 71.8 million in 2025. Over the same period, agent-commission payables grew by NIS 19.2 million. In practice, that means part of the asset build was financed by delaying payment to agents, but not all of it. After that offset, the agent channel still absorbed about NIS 52.6 million from the balance sheet.
That is not just an accounting observation. It is a real economic one. A meaningful part of the cost of 2025 growth has not yet fully hit expense, and has not yet fully been paid in cash, but it already required financing.
That also helps explain the cash-flow gap. Reported operating cash flow in 2025 was only NIS 10.8 million. Management notes that excluding NIS 45.2 million of purchases of marketable securities, operating cash flow would have been about NIS 56 million. That already looks much better. But even on that normalized basis, the NIS 52.6 million net balance-sheet pull tied to the agent channel almost consumes the entire normalized operating cash flow.
This should be phrased carefully. Not every shekel of operating cash flow was used only for agents, and not every payable to agents necessarily belongs to the exact same acquisition cohort. Still, the direction is very clear. Almost the entire normalized operating cash flow of 2025 was standing against the same mechanism that pushed growth forward through agents.
That point also explains why better margins do not settle the issue. Analyst did show strong operating leverage, and operating profit nearly doubled. But that improvement did not come from a cheaper distribution channel. It came because market conditions, scale and AUM growth were strong enough to absorb a distribution model that remained expensive.
And How Much Really Reaches Shareholders
Net profit attributable to shareholders reached NIS 112.7 million in 2025. That is an excellent outcome. In March 2026 the board also approved a NIS 37.8 million dividend for 2025, roughly one third of net profit. So part of the value clearly did reach shareholders.
But this is where the more important test begins. The net working-capital pull tied to the contract-acquisition asset and agent payables, NIS 52.6 million, was about 39% larger than the dividend approved for 2025. Put simply, the acquisition machine kept more resources inside the business than the company committed to distribute to shareholders for that year.
That does not mean shareholders were harmed. Equity rose to NIS 463 million, and the business is still growing quickly. But it does mean a large part of 2025 value remained trapped, at least for now, inside the distribution engine itself: part of it already spent, part of it deferred into the asset, and part of it still sitting as a liability to agents.
That is the most important distinction in this analysis. Analyst is not buying worthless growth. If that were the case, there would not also be a sharp rise in earnings, stronger equity and a meaningful dividend. What the accounts do show is a model in which growth is not free. It requires upfront payments, it weighs on cash-flow quality, and it reaches shareholders only after the system absorbs the cost of distribution first.
Conclusion
This continuation does not overturn the main thesis on Analyst. It sharpens it. 2025 proved the company can grow quickly and at a scale that is already hard to ignore. But it also proved that this growth is being bought through an expensive agent channel that shows up simultaneously in expense, in the balance sheet asset, and in payables.
That is why the right question for 2026 is no longer whether AUM will keep rising. The question is whether the acquisition price will start to moderate. If distribution expense as a share of revenue begins to fall, if additions to the contract-acquisition asset start converging toward amortization, and if operating cash flow rises above the acquisition layer, more of Analyst's value will reach shareholders. If not, the company will remain a very strong business, but one where too much of the scale still stays inside the machine before it comes out.
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