Okay. Good morning, everyone. It's now 9:00 A.M. according to my iPhone. Good morning to you all, ladies, gentlemen, fellow shareholders, colleagues, and visitors. Welcome to our 2020 Annual General Meeting. We hope that you're all staying well and safe, obviously. Thank you for taking the time to join us virtually today and for your continued support of the company in what has been an unprecedented and challenging year. By way of introduction, my name is Alan Watson, and I'm the Chairman of Pinnacle Investment Management Group Limited. Ian Macoun, our Managing Director, has joined me in person at the Sydney office, although as you can see, he's in an adjoining room, so we are socially distanced appropriately. Calvin Kwok, our Company Secretary, is also in attendance today, as is Dan Longan, our Chief Financial Officer, joining us from Brisbane.
Our auditor, Ben Woodbridge, morning, Ben, from PwC, is also joining us by video conference and will be able to answer any questions shareholders may have in relation to the 2020 financial statements. Registration to attend the meeting and vote has now closed. The next slide contains important information and disclaimers in relation to the presentation, which I encourage you to read and note. Okay. Perhaps I may now turn to the agenda for today's meeting, which is as shown on the screen. The meeting will commence with the formal business of the annual general meeting. After that, Ian will provide an update from the managing director, followed by Andrew Chambers, Executive Director and Head of Institutional and International Distribution, and Ramsin Jajoo, Head of Retail Distribution. Both will provide an update...
Sorry, an update and outlook on the institutional, international, and retail markets. I have been informed by the Company Secretary that we have a quorum present, and therefore I now declare the meeting open. I'm also advised there are no other apologies recorded prior to the commencement of the meeting, and that the notice of annual general meeting was sent to all registered members within the notice period required. I now table the notice of meeting, and unless there are any objections, I will take the notice convening this meeting as read. I will now proceed with the formal business of the meeting in the order that it appears in the notice of meeting.
There are four matters of ordinary business to attend to, being the formal tabling of the 2020 financial statements, adoption of the remuneration report, re-election of two of the Company's Directors, and issue of securities to Non-Executive Directors or their associates in lieu of directors' fees under the Pinnacle Omnibus Incentive Plan. Shareholders may ask questions prior to each resolution being put to the vote using the Q&A box displayed at the bottom of your screen. I request that shareholders limit themselves to two questions each and only ask questions in respect of matters relevant to the item of business being considered. Questions may be moderated or amalgamated if there are multiple questions on the same topic.
Remember, Ian will be providing a full update after the formal business of the meeting has been dealt with, and there will be an opportunity for shareholders to ask general questions after that presentation. With regards to voting, people that are entitled to vote are shareholders, representatives and attorneys of shareholders, and proxy holders. As noted in the notice of meeting, resolutions will be decided by a poll, which I now declare open. A voting card should appear on your screen now. This voting card can be repositioned on your screen. I will put six resolutions to the meeting shortly. In order to cast your vote on each resolution, please select for, against, or abstain. There are a number of voting exclusions that apply to some of the resolutions, and these were outlined in the notice of meeting.
All open proxy votes directed to the Chairman will be voted in favor of the relevant resolution. However, any such proxies in relation to the remuneration report appointed by any key management personnel will be excluded from the Chairman's proxy votes. Any such proxies in relation to the issue of securities appointed by any person who participated in such an issue or an associate of those persons will also be excluded from the Chairman's proxy votes. All valid proxies received have been recorded, and these will be reported to the ASX after the meeting. For shareholders' information, we will display on the screen prior to the consideration of each resolution, the proxy voting for each resolution.
The first item of formal business on the notice of meeting is to consider the financial statements of the company for the year-end 30 June 2020, together with the directors' report and auditors' report as set out in the 2020 annual report, which have been made available to shareholders. I formally table the financial statements of the company for the year-end June 2020, and the related directors' reports, directors' declaration, and auditors' reports. I will take all of these reports as read. If anyone has questions in relation to the financial statements, the content of PwC's audit report for the year-end June 30, 2020, the accounting policies adopted by the company in relation to the preparation of the financial statements, or the independence of the auditor in relation to the conduct of the audit, please submit them now.
Okay, we currently have no questions on those. The next item of business is to consider the adoption of the remuneration report for the 2020 financial year. The remuneration report is contained within the 2020 annual report and forms part of the directors' report. The remuneration report incorporates information required by Section 300A of the Corporations Act, which sets out the remuneration policy for the company, reports the remuneration arrangements in place for key management personnel, including all directors. Section 250R(2) of the Corporations Act requires companies to put a resolution to their members that the remuneration report contained in the directors' report be adopted. If anyone has questions in relation to this resolution, please submit them now. There are no questions.
I will now put the resolution shown on the screen to the meeting. The number of proxies received by the company as at 48 hours prior to the meeting resolution are now shown on the screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card. Okay. We now move to the re-election of directors. The board comprises seven directors, four of whom are non-executive and three of whom are Executive Directors. All directors own equity in the business. The Audit, Compliance, and Risk Management Committee and the Remuneration and Nominations Committee both fully comply with the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations as follows: The Audit Committee comprises three Non-Executive Directors, all of whom are independent, and is chaired by an Independent Director who is not chair of the board.
The Remuneration and Nomination Committee comprises four non-executive directors, all of whom are independent and is chaired by an independent director. The meeting now needs to consider the re-election of a number of directors in accordance with the Corporations Act and the Constitution. The Constitution requires that 1/3 o f the company's directors eligible for rotation, being all directors other than the Managing Director or, and any Director appointed as a casual vacancy, stand for re-election every three years. The directors to retire by rotation at each AGM are those that have been longest in office since their election or last re-election. As the company has six directors eligible for rotation, two directors are required to retire from office at this year's AGM. Therefore, Andrew Chambers and myself are retiring from office and offer ourselves for re-election.
As the next item refers to myself, I will hand the meeting to Ian to chair this item. Ian?
Thanks, Alan. I thought it might be just worth mentioning that all directors of the board are on this call virtually. The explanatory statement attached to the notice of meeting provides information in relation to Alan. Alan joined the board in July 2013 and became chairman in October 2015. He has 35 years of investment banking experience within various global equity markets. During this period, he established, directed, and was responsible for the conduct of securities business both in Europe and Asia, advising many companies on capital structuring, IPOs, takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, and investor relations strategies. Alan has held positions as Managing Director of BZW, DLJ, Lehman Brothers, and as head of Securities Europe for Macquarie Capital.
I guess I'll just ask at this point, if anyone has any questions in relation to this resolution for the reappointment of Alan Watson, please submit them now. Kelvin, do we have any questions in the queue? I can't see any.
No, we don't, Ian.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks, everybody. I'll now put the resolution that's shown on the screen to the meeting. The number of proxies received by the company as at 48 hours prior to this meeting for this resolution are now shown on the screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card now.
Okay, Ian, that's done.
Oh, yeah. If everyone has voted. Alan, you may now resume the chair.
Thanks, Ian. Turning now to Andrew Chambers. The explanatory statement attached to the notice of meeting provides some information in relation to Andrew. He was appointed as an Executive Director in September 2016 and has been a senior executive with Pinnacle since he commenced with the firm in March 2008. Andrew has extensive multi-channel, i.e., retail, wholesale, and institutional, and multi-jurisdictional distribution experience, and is currently responsible for leading the firm's institutional and international distribution divisions. Prior to joining Pinnacle, Andrew worked for Legg Mason, one of the world's largest multi-affiliate investment management firms. Andrew is also a Director of a number of our affiliates, being Metrics, Omega, Riparian, and Two Trees. If anyone has any questions in relation to this resolution, please submit them now. Okay, there are no questions in relation to Andrew.
I will now put the resolution shown on the screen to the meeting. The number of proxies received by the company as at 48 hours prior to this meeting for the resolution are now shown on screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card. Thank you. The next item of business is to consider the approval of the issue of securities to Non-Executive Directors in lieu of directors' fees under the Pinnacle Omnibus Incentive Plan. The board considers it highly desirable that the interests of Executive and Non-Executive Directors are aligned to the interests of shareholders through grants of equity securities to them.
Accordingly, non-executive directors have agreed to apply a portion of their director fees, currently set at a minimum of 30%, towards the acquisition of performance rights granted by the company via the Omnibus Incentive Plan or the purchase of shares in the company on market at their own election. It is noted that Lorraine Berends has elected to acquire shares in the company outside of the Omnibus Incentive Plan. The explanatory statement attached to the notice of meeting provides information in relation to the proposed issue of securities. The issue of securities to each director will be considered as separate resolutions. As the next item of business relates to the issue of securities to myself, I shall hand the meeting to Ian to chair this item. Ian?
Thanks, Alan. If anyone has any questions in relation to this resolution, please submit them now.
There are no questions, Ian.
Okay. I now put the resolution shown on the screen to the meeting. The number of proxies received by the company as at 48 hours prior to this meeting for this resolution are now shown on the screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card.
Okay.
Alan, you can now please resume the chair.
Thanks, Ian. The next resolution relates to the issue of securities to Deborah Beale. If anyone has questions in relation to this resolution, please submit them now. There are no questions in the queue. Thank you. I'll now put the resolution shown on the screen to the meeting. The number of proxies received by the company as at 48 hours prior to the meeting for the resolution are now shown on the screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card. I now move to the final resolution, which relates to the issue of securities to Gerard Bradley. If anyone has questions in relation to this resolution, please submit them now. There are no open questions. Sorry, there are no questions in the queue. Thank you. I'll now put the resolution shown on the screen to the meeting.
The number of proxies by the company as at 48 hours prior to this meeting for the resolution are shown on the screen. Please cast your vote on the voting card. Thank you. Please ensure that you cast your votes on each of the 6 resolutions by selecting For, Against, or Abstain. Once you have cast your vote on each of these resolutions, please select Submit to complete your voting process. Also, please select the Raise Hand icon on your screen if you require more time to complete your voting card. Thank you. I now declare the poll closed. The results of the poll will be announced to the ASX as soon as they are available. That concludes the formal business of this meeting, and so I will now hand over to Ian for an update from the managing director.
Thanks, Alan. Good morning again, everybody. What I would like to do today is firstly, to review the key themes and outcomes for our company for the 2020 financial year. Then to provide an update on how we have fared during the first quarter of the new financial year. To briefly review the financial highlights for the 2020 financial year, to elaborate on the progress we've made during the past few years in increasing the diversity and robustness of the business and why this is so important, and to explain why we remain confident that we are poised to resume growth, to react to any further external adversity that may arise, and to take advantage of opportunities that may materialize. As Alan has mentioned, the 2020 financial year was a very challenging one.
The second half of the financial year was a shocking period for the entire world, as we know. Our company was impacted by the drop in equities market valuations, particularly in March, and the reduction in net funds under management inflows, all of which reduced our revenues relative to what would otherwise have been achieved. These negative impacts were, however, less than experienced by many, both in Australia and around the world. Our people rose to the occasion and performed superbly, working hard to ensure a business as usual environment, supporting our clients and their advisors throughout this period when their needs were greatly heightened. Our people demonstrated resourcefulness and adaptability in a very difficult, very different working environment. The result was that our revenues, funds under management, and profitability for the 2020 financial year, in fact, increased relative to the preceding financial year.
The slide now showing on your screens has been extracted from our annual results presentation of the fourth of August and sets out how we summarize the key themes and outcomes for our company for the 2020 financial year. I believe it's fair to say that shareholders and analysts broadly agreed with this assessment. We think it was a solid outcome in the prevailing circumstances, although below the expectations that we held at the start of the year. I'll provide further detail on that shortly. We believe the result provided early evidence of the benefits of increasing diversity of asset class and investment strategies of our affiliates, of client type and domicile, and of performance fee potential.
Although we are only partway through this diversification process, the inflows from both retail and offshore investors, the growth of our funds under management in a range of asset classes are greatly expanded beyond just Australian equities, and the receipt by our affiliates of AUD 26.7 million of performance fees, Pinnacle's share of which after tax was AUD 6.6 million in the 2020 financial year, were all very helpful in a year when markets experienced major volatility and our clients were challenged in a variety of ways.
We expressed the view that we were entering the 2021 financial year poised to resume growth, to react to possible further external adversity, and to take advantage of opportunities that may materialize in this type of environment. Now, as elaborated in the next slide, happily, we have indeed experienced a resumption of growth so far in this new 2021 financial year. The aggregate of our affiliates funds under management stood at AUD 61.7 billion at 30 September 2020. This was up AUD 3 billion or 5% from AUD 58.7 billion at 30 June 2020. Total retail funds under management at 30 September 2020 stood at AUD 13.8 billion, which was up AUD 700 million or 5% from AUD 13.1 billion at 30 June 2020.
Total net inflows were AUD 2.3 billion for the three months, of which AUD 618 million was retail, and we are quite proud of those inflow numbers for that three-month period. All of this is very pleasing, and we are delighted that our funds inflows in both the retail and institutional markets have returned to more normal levels during this new financial year to date. The retail net inflows of AUD 618 million for the three months, an average of a little greater than AUD 200 million per month, compares with just AUD 19 million of net inflows for the second half of the 2020 financial year and AUD 900 million for the entire 2020 financial year.
Institutional net inflows of AUD 1.7 billion for the three months of the September 2020 quarter compares with AUD 900 million for the second half of the 2020 financial year and AUD 2.1 billion for the full 2020 financial year. We are pleased to find substantial evidence that what occurred during the second half of the last financial year represented a deferral of demand from clients rather than the permanent loss of demand from them for increased access to our services. We had felt that this was likely to be the case, but it was very pleasing to have this confirmed and substantial net inflows realized during the early part of the new financial year. In addition to the arrival of some deferred funds, we've enjoyed significant new client demand. There was deferred and there was also new client demand.
Now, overall, equities markets did not impact fund levels very much from the beginning to the end of that three-month period. The S&P/ASX 300 index was in fact down 1% over the three months ending thirtieth of September 2020, and the MSCI World Index was up 7.7%. Market movements and investment performance accounted for just AUD 700 million of the AUD 3 billion increase in funds under management, or 1.2% of the amount under management at the beginning of the quarter. Now, shareholders will recall that over the course of the 2020 financial year, total funds under management rose AUD 4.4 billion or 8% from AUD 54.3 billion to AUD 58.7 billion.
Although this was down AUD 2.9 billion or 5% from AUD 61.6 billion at 31 December 2019, which was the halfway mark of the financial year. That was prior to the sharp drop in equities markets in late February and in March 2020, driven by the COVID-19 crisis. Overall, the Australian equities market was down 10.8% over the financial year, having dropped 11.9% in the second half of the financial year. World markets overall were essentially flat over the course of the financial year, having dropped 7.1% in the second half. New slide. This slide summarizes the highlights of the 2020 financial year. The financial highlights.
Net profit after tax was AUD 32.2 million, up 5.6% from AUD 30.5 million in the 2019 financial year. Diluted earnings per share was AUD 0.179, up 4.7% from AUD 0.171 in the 2019 financial year. Our share of the net profit after tax from Pinnacle affiliates was AUD 38 million, up 14.8% from AUD 33.1 million in FY 2019. Including Pinnacle's share of performance fees after tax earned by Pinnacle affiliates of AUD 6.6 million in the 2020 financial year, which was AUD 3.2 million compared with AUD 3.2 million in FY 2019. We had a healthy balance sheet.
Our AUD 30 million CBA loan facility was fully drawn in December 2019 and used to fund the acquisition of 25% of Coolabah, and we paid a fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.085 per share on the 11th of September 2020, taking total dividends for the year to AUD 0.154, the same as the previous year. Shareholders will be aware that we have, for some time now, been describing how Pinnacle has continued to evolve as a business that will be well-positioned irrespective of market conditions. Though it will not be immune from challenging conditions, it will be increasingly resilient in the face of such conditions so that shareholders may benefit throughout the whole business cycle.
As I indicated earlier, we believe the 2020 financial year result provided evidence of the benefits of this increasing diversity, and this resilience has been enhanced by the progressive diversification of asset classes, client type, client domicile, and the percentage of funds exposed to performance fees. The next slide, 26, shows the current extent of our affiliate platform, comprising 16 affiliates across a substantial range of asset classes and styles. I'll move very quickly through a few slides. These are all available on our website, and shareholders can refer to them at your leisure, so this will be very brief. In this next slide, 27, shows how our diversification by affiliate has increased from the 30th of June 2016. Hyperion was the largest, with funds under management of AUD 5.6 billion, representing 28.5% of the total FUM.
Total FUM was AUD 19.8 billion, compared with now, 30th of June 2020, when Resolution Capital had become the largest of our 16 affiliates, with funds under management of AUD 9 billion, and that represented just 15.3% of the total of AUD 58.7 billion under management. Slide 28 shows the greatly increased diversity by asset class over this period, the four-year period from June 2016 to June 2020. Australian equities has become a smaller proportion of our funds, now representing about 46% of the total, compared with 67% in 2016. We have exposure to global equities, global REITs, private capital, fixed interest and credit, and liquid alternatives, all been added and grown substantially as a portion of the total. Of course, Australian equities and global equities exposures are further diversified by style and by market cap segment.
Slide 29 shows the increased diversification by client type that has continued apace, with retail and offshore having both grown significantly. Growth in the intermediated retail client base has been occurring for some years. The pace of growth from offshore clients is now starting to accelerate. On slide 30, the growth in the importance of retail can be readily seen from this slide, with revenue from retail clients having grown from 27% in 2016 to 43% in June 2020. We also have more than 180 individual institutional clients now, compared with 60 at June 2016. Slide 31 shows how retail has increased 14.6 times over this period to represent 23% of our total FUM, compared with a 5.4-fold increase in the total FUM over this four-year period.
Slide 32 illustrates the significant growth in both the absolute and percentage of our funds under management that is potentially eligible to earn performance fees. Performance fees adds diversity to our revenue sources, being uncorrelated with market movements and each affiliate's performance being uncorrelated with the others and with other revenue. Other than in Palisade, but now Metrics and Coolabah, performance fees will be additional to budgeted or forecast revenues. I mentioned earlier, our affiliates' performance fees after tax increased from AUD 3.2 million in FY 2019 to AUD 6.6 million in FY 2020. Slide 33 illustrates the growth of our FUM, institutional and retail, over the past 13 years. Slide 34, the FUM growth history by affiliates, which shareholders like to look at. Can we just get that next slide, please?
Slide 35 shows the performance of our affiliates with a track record of five years or more. Difficult to read on the screen, but as I said before, this is all up on our website and shareholders can read at leisure. This is in keeping with industry best practice. We continue to report our proportion of affiliate strategies that have a track record of five years or more, that have exceeded their benchmarks over the past five years. This is the classic measure of medium-term performance, consistency, and excellence. It's pleasing to report that 90% of such strategies have exceeded their benchmark to the 13th of September 2020. Slides 36 and 37 show our affiliates' investment performance over one, three, five, and 10-year periods, and since inception.
Although some strategies will inevitably underperform their benchmarks over the short term, our affiliates' medium to long-term records remain very strong in what have been challenging recent conditions. Slide 38 shows that Pinnacle and our affiliates have continued to receive recognition from independent experts for the quality of our investment offerings. A number of our affiliates, including Pinnacle itself, are nominated for the Zenith Awards, which will be announced tomorrow evening. It's a significant achievement just to be nominated. Best of luck to everyone for those awards. Now, slides 39 and 40, I'm almost finished. Just to point out that Pinnacle is passionate about enabling better lives through investment excellence. Our charitable foundation has continued its commitments to existing partners. Together with our affiliates, Pinnacle and the affiliates have made jointly donations of AUD 450,000 during FY 2020.
This reflects a strong recognition of the need to provide stability and security to our charity partners, given the increased, enormously increased demands on the not-for-profit sector in the past, you know, months. This has occurred at the same time as the ability of many organizations to generate funds and engage volunteers have been severely impacted. Our major focus remains on mental well-being and early prevention of strategies to reduce mental illness and suicide, especially in young people, and on strategies aimed at both preventing domestic and family abuse and aiding the long-term recovery of sufferers. Thank you everyone for listening. I'm sorry I went on a little bit long. I will now hand over to Andrew Chambers. Thank you.
Thank you, Ian. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for your attendance and your interest. Over the next few minutes, I'll summarize for you the financial year to date. In particular, what's driving our institutional and international flows. I'll then cover the investment themes in the Australian and global institutional environment before concluding how Pinnacle is placed to navigate and take advantage of these both secular and cyclical trends. Let's begin with the financial year so far. What we've observed since the significant drawdowns in the March quarter of this year has been the steady origination and crystallization of our sales pipeline. This has been really the conversion of allocations which were coming close to closing out prior to the pandemic, the onset of the pandemic. These are now actually crystallizing in the form of sales.
We're seeing the resumption of suspended search processes by investors fully across the board, without exception. We're seeing the origination of new search activities, some of those in response to the experience of the drawdowns during the March period. Certain asset classes didn't provide either the liquidity or the diversifying characteristics that investors were looking for. We've also seen a meaningful contribution from international channels. I'd highlight in particular the Americas, the United Kingdom, Korea, as well as New Zealand as being major channels where we've raised capital. The two affiliates of which probably have raised the most capital from those channels has been Resolution Capital and Antipodes Partners. The second major driver of our flows has been really active portfolio rebalancing by investors. It comes in two forms. The first is tactical or systematic, and the second is strategic.
On the tactical side, investors are very actively re-weighting between asset classes based on their future expected return to those asset classes and in response to portfolio performance of those exposures. It's been impacted in the asset class returns. We're seeing increased weight into Australian equities and also into global real estate securities. Money coming out of global equities and also out of direct property. On the output side as well, we're also seeing very active rebalancing. We've had a number of managers which have spectacularly outperformed during the course of the crisis, and the investors have actually actively rebalanced those investors back to a strategic weight. What might be construed as a negative outcome in terms of outflows from a manager is a simple, systematic rebalancing of a manager back to a neutral weight.
We're also seeing strategic or secular gravitational allocations in portfolios, which have been occurring for the last 10 years. This has been a shift away from traditional asset classes to alternative asset classes, public markets to private. What we're observing in the market is that traditional asset classes are subsidizing those of alternatives because of the fee load. In fact, alternative asset classes globally comprise about 15% of global allocations, but 45% of the fee load, to give you a sense of proportions there. Industry consolidation is also impacting the timing, the magnitude, and the probability of flows. What we tend to find is consolidating entities are reluctant to make new manager allocations during the courtship and consolidation phases. This can take anywhere from 12 months up until around three years for some of these consolidations to actually materialize.
Consolidation typically benefits incumbent managers over new managers as part of that process. It's really important to note that asset owners very quickly need to demonstrate scale benefits, so inevitable tension tends to occur with their asset managers over fees and capacity. Really important to highlight to everyone here that managers may actually willingly, and quite rationally, forego enlarged mandates to repurpose that capacity into higher fee margin investor channels such as international and also retail. Let's talk about the domestic themes in the Australian market. We talked a little bit about the pursuit of scale benefits on the previous slide through the merger processes. This is an unending trend, seemingly here in Australia. Consolidation is occurring across all major investment segments.
Profit-to-member funds, which are the industry funds, wealth management funds, and we've seen, of course, IOOF acquire ANZ OnePath and now MLC, and public sector funds, where I could really highlight someone like TCorp New South Wales, which has rolled up effectively the state-owned entities of New South Wales to aggregate them together. There's great regulatory pressure to demonstrate scaled benefits. The mantra is do more for less, deliver large capacity with reliable alpha, heavy customization at competitive fees. This interestingly, for us as a manager for backed startups, is a very attractive environment for startup managers to raise FUM, 'cause we can offer large capacity and have discounting flexibility as well relative to more mature managers.
It's also an opportunity for mature managers to liberate and redirect low-margin institutional capacity, which was very helpful in the early stages of that boutique's life into higher margin and more diverse retail and international channels. The next key theme I wanted to highlight to everyone was really this concept of building defense without bonds. I think everyone here would be well and truly aware of the sustained low returns on both bonds and cash. Risks are really to the downside. When the next equity market correction occurs, will you be protected by fixed income? With the yield cushion gone, capital losses will no doubt be magnified. We're seeing this gravitational trend away from fixed income to alternative assets to supplant them.
That comes in the form of private markets, which is infrastructure, real estate and agriculture, and of course, we're represented by Palisade and Riparian in those asset classes. Alternative credit by public and private, and we have Coolabah and Metrics Credit represented in alternative credit. Then also in the hedge fund category. We're talking about macro equity market neutral and our managers such as Reminiscent Capital, Two Trees, Plato, Firetrail and Coolabah all provide those types of strategies to investors. Finally, I want to touch on the awakening of the engaged investor, which has been occurring over a number of years here in Australia. There's increased focus on explicit integration of ESG, increased advocacy and active engagement with companies, the expectations of our plan sponsors of us as investment managers. Increasing focus as well on decarbonization.
I use this concept that is institutional herding on green pastures. What I mean by that, if you have enough institutional investors moving en masse, it starts impacting asset prices, so you ignore it at your peril. Sorry, excuse me. Bear with me one moment. Carl, will you just provide some assistance if that's okay? Just very quickly. Okay. So sorry about that, everyone. Now turning to global themes. The question is, for many people, we've got this concept of lower for longer, but the question is how much longer? I think all of us have observed the bidding up of long duration assets globally and also the compression of yields. This is encouraging investors to take greater risk-taking to ultimately meet their liabilities. It's also driving extreme asset class and style performance.
The most obvious example of that is this between growth and value investors globally, which is an all-time high. I saw a study just the other day which suggested that this current value drawdown relative to growth is the worst in 200 years. In addition to that, we're seeing this great migration from public markets to private, and I alluded to this a little earlier. There's $6.5 trillion in private markets as of the end of December. Global private markets over the last decade have grown at a much faster rate than public markets, 170% versus 100% over that period. 2019 was the largest fundraising year on record.
Important to note that private credit, where we have obviously Metrics Credit Partners as part of our managers, has exceeded $100 billion for the last five years in a row. The reason for that is it offers high yields on public debt, and attractive risk-adjusted returns in a low-rate environment. Of course, we're seeing the wholesale withdrawal of bank capital from lending as well globally for regulatory reasons. Infrastructure as well has grown substantially 17% annually over the last decade, making it the fastest-growing of all private asset classes. Of course, we have Palisade in our stable there. We also wanted to highlight a theme of globalization and specialization. They seem somewhat diametrically opposed, but the thing they do have in common, the common thread is that investors are following the alpha.
On the globalization side, we're seeing the migration of North American portfolios, particularly the U.S., which contains half of the global capital in terms of long-term savings from the partitioning U.S. and international equity portfolios and transitioning those to global equities. Important to note what underwrites this is global equity managers have outperformed U.S. and international equity managers on average. On the other side of the spectrum, we have specialization. An interesting one for everyone to note here is the growth of China. China is very well underrepresented in client investor portfolios. The average weight held by foreigners in China's equities and bonds is around 3%. The neutral weight is more like 15%.
We're now seeing a lot of dedicated specialist allocations to a country like China to get much more to a benchmark neutral weight. The China A-shares market, in particular, is now the second-largest equity market in the world, has large retail ownership or therefore low institutional ownership. It's around about 80% of volumes are traded by retail investors and therefore the market is highly inefficient and alpha rich. It's a great environment for active stock pickers. I want to finally touch on fiduciary consolidation globally as an important theme. Not a lot of people talk about this, but fiduciary consolidation is occurring on three levels, at the asset management level, at the asset consulting level, and also at the asset owner level. On the asset manager side, about 80% of global M&A is occurring in North America and in Europe.
I believe this highlights the inorganic growth ultimately of both markets. The middle-sized managers, in particular, are finding it harder to distinguish themselves from the large scale players and defeat the boutique sharpshooters, which Pinnacle typically backs. Roger Urwin of Willis Towers Watson made the recent observation, the top 500 global asset managers of the last 10 years, half of those have now disappeared to those brands. There's an urgency to boost scale, diversify product lines, and increase geographic reach of those managers. It's important to note that post-merger integration is fraught with danger, and a lot of friction. It typically occurs around corporate culture and capacity limits associated with those particular strategies and overlap of competing strategies. This typically sows the seeds for team walkouts.
In fact, a number of our most successful boutiques have been a result of this exact dynamic. Now let's talk about asset consultants. Globally, we've seen extensive insurance broker consolidation. Embedded in most insurance brokers is our asset consulting businesses. The most recent example of this is the world's second-largest asset consultant or insurance broker is Aon acquiring Willis Towers Watson, which is expecting to close early next year, which is the third largest asset consultant insurance broker. That would be to compete head-on with Mercer. We're also observing founder-owner succession events in these asset consulting businesses. Many of these were established in the 1980s and 1990s, and the original founder is looking to retire and is thus selling either to other asset consultants if they're a specialist player or to private equity.
We're seeing both Russell Investments and Wilshire, for example, being acquired by private equity in recent times. Important to understand the dynamics in terms of the economics of asset consultants. Traditional non-discretionary consulting business is very low margin and not really scalable. The biggest growth area for asset consultants being in what they call discretionary outsourced CIO, where they hire and fire managers on behalf of plan sponsors. It's scalable and offers asset management style fees. They typically charge somewhere between 30 basis points to 100 basis points to provide this outsourced service. This occurred in Australia over 10, possibly 20 years ago now, where we had 4,000 plans in Australia on the corporate side. We now have less than 20 today. This is now happening as a global phenomenon.
The race is on to scale these OCIO businesses very quickly. It's a $2.4 trillion industry with 19% year-on-year growth. It's a very fast growth market. Most of the people outsourcing are those participating in the endowment foundation market and the defined benefit contribution market. We believe this creates enormous opportunities for high-quality startups to partner with these OCIO platforms because like the very large super funds in Australia, they need low fees, and they need high scale, scalable relationships with their preferred partners. Let's finally touch on asset owners. This relates to the points I made above around asset consultants and OCIO. We're seeing enormous amount of corporate and nonprofit outsourcing, particularly out of the United States. This is really for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of performance.
It's now very challenging for DB schemes to meet their actuarial assumptions and the litigation risks for trustees associated with not meeting those targets mean that outsourcing is a very good option for many people. Also, price is a key factor. For a smaller fund, it's cheaper simply to outsource. It's less complex and particularly if it's a non-core function as well. I want to turn my attention to sovereign and public pension plans who are consolidating, insourcing, and globalizing. We're continuing to see the large build-out of teams located in all regions of the globe for the largest, very large sovereign wealth funds and public pension plans.
Even the Australian super funds are doing this. If you were to take something like the PIF out of Saudi Arabia, for example, $350 billion, you had a staff of 40 people back in 2016 and has over 1,000 today. We're also seeing the capital increasingly allocated outside of their home markets. The PIF again, had zero allocation outside of Saudi Arabia only in 2016 and has 20% today and moving towards 25%. That's just the tip of the iceberg for what other sovereign wealth funds such as the Malaysian EPF, the Taiwan Pension Fund and others around the world are now doing. There's an ongoing role for independent boutiques with scarce expertise to complement the internal skills of a lot of these groups.
There's still a very strong role for independent sharpshooters to partner with these very large plans. Let's all bring this all together in a conclusion. Pinnacle, I believe, is very competitively positioned to partner with talented teams disrupted by global M&A, as described on the other page. Pinnacle is very well placed to partner with the winners in this consolidation race. Supported startups can offer capacity, fees, viability, and alpha potential that large growing investors demand. Our strong international and retail distribution allows us to redirect liberated capacity from Australian institutions into more diversified and high-margin client base. Our broad suite of alternative asset classes make us more relevant to the secular change in investors' portfolios. Global investment solutions, which is the asset management function, infrastructure, and distribution, fundamentally mean that we are more relevant to more investors more often in more markets.
This enables us to substantially grow and diversify our business by asset class, by investor type, and geography well into the future. Thank you for your time. I'll now turn it over to Ramsin Jajoo to lead off on the retail distribution side.
Andrew, thank you for that very in-depth overview of the institutional market trends. Good morning, everyone. Over the next 10-15 minutes, I will take a little bit of a different tack and, I'll briefly touch on some of the key trends I talked about at last year's AGM, just for a few minutes, and then we'll get into what financial year 2020 looked like for us and give a more quick update over the last three months what's happening. Let me see if I can control the slides. Here we go. For those of you that tuned in last year, you may recall that I touched on three secular trends that are impacting everyone in financial services. The first big trend that we talked about was digitization. The fact that technology was changing the way we're doing business.
We touched on key ideas such as big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and yes, some of these trends have played out on the retail market this year as well. We touched on regulation. We mentioned last year that, you know, fiduciary obligations are on the rise. You heard Andrew talk about in the space, where fiduciary obligations for advisors has been an area of focus for the last number of years. There's been a greater focus on transparency across the value chain and some of those regulatory headwinds have impacted advisor businesses. The third topic we talked about last year was personalization. Basically, service providers aren't really personalizing their collateral, their point-of-sale material, or the service model.
They will struggle to engage and grow their retail footprint when consumers are demanding a lot more personalization and high-touch service. Now, what we didn't predict last year was a global pandemic. As you can see, in the first set of bullet points, we talk about how COVID-19 conditions have simply accelerated some of those trends that we talked about last year. Advisor business models are under pressure. They are struggling somewhat from productivity and profitability because a lot of advisors are focusing on their FASEA requirements. They're focused on having to, like, get additional educational qualifications. While the regulator has pushed some of those milestones out to 2021 up to 2025, advisors have been somewhat inwardly focused.
What that essentially has meant is that the advisor market has shrunk somewhat in the last 12 months. Now, year-on-year it's shrunk about 15%. There would've been about 25,000 advisors this time last year. Today, we're looking at the retail market or the intermediated retail market being around 21,000 advisors. What's perhaps a little bit more alarming was quarter two of this calendar year. The April to June period about 21% annualized reduction took place. About almost 1,300 advisors left the market, and they left their authorization on the asset register. Yes, it is shrinking.
The good news from a Pinnacle perspective, we have an ongoing relationship today with 16,500 advisors, and that number is growing in terms of what we're doing in the retail market. Some of the other headwinds that is really kind of shrinking the retail market has been corporate activity. You'll see more recent times, and MLC now is getting out of advice. Some of the other banks are already exited. Some retail businesses are switching from retail to wholesale advice so that they can bypass the additional compliance that's required of them to be offering personal or retail advice. The concept around personalization that we touched on last year is that people, including clients, including advisors, are scrutinizing the value of service greater than any time in the history of mankind.
Because in the advent of the digital age, where there's so much information at your fingertips, people are demanding simply more value. That scrutiny of value means that what's played out over the last 12 months is a trend towards passive strategies being beneficiaries of that trend. It's been great news for a company like Pinnacle and our affiliates, where we've got very strong, capable, highly rated active managers that are delivering alpha. If you're a strong performing manager, we've seen, as you've seen Ian touch on, we've had some strong retail growth over the last three or four months now. In terms of the other big trend really is from a technology perspective. We've seen over the last three, four, five years the rise of managed accounts and the rise of SMAs, separately managed accounts.
This is where advisor businesses are using technology to basically operationalize their advice proposition and also reduce the risks so that you're getting all the advisors using a managed account service with scale. When they're using these managed accounts, they come to Pinnacle and our boutiques, and they do negotiate some better margins than pure retail fees. The good news is, as Ian touched on, the margins are still better than institutional market, and the margins are still better when you have these vertically integrated businesses like AMP, like Colonial First State, you know, the INGs back in the day. They've been negotiating heavy volume discounts, whereas in the managed accounts, our practices, our margins are getting better. We do get scale.
We're getting strong flows through these technology platforms, but the margins are a bit healthier than what they would've been three, four, five years ago. The other big trend really this year, and in this COVID-19 period that's really accelerated this, is what I've termed the analog to the digital distribution practices. In an environment where there is a lot of digital content being disseminated in the retail market, you know, all the fund companies delivering digital webinars, content, advisors are time-poor. There is a little bit of fatigue that's settling in.
We've had to really embrace staying ahead of the competition by creating content that's timely, it's shorter and punchier, and we've had a lot of success over the last six to 12 months in capturing advisor attention because the affiliates that we have are performing strongly and advisors do wanna hear more from boutique highly regarded managers. The other thing really is changing the distribution practices from moving around product selling to being consultative. Ian mentioned that tomorrow afternoon is the Zenith Fund Awards and it'll be the fifth year in a row that we've been nominated. We've won the award for the last four years, and we're up for our fifth year for the awards. Really the retail distribution team has embraced consultative practices. We get to know our clients.
There's 16,000 advisors on our CRM today, 16,500. We're increasingly having to understand their portfolios and explain how our affiliates and our boutiques fit within a portfolio context. We've been heavily focused on disseminating thought leadership. Perhaps even two years ago or even last year, a lot of fund companies would be planning quarterly campaigns. You get your whole marketing area, your sales team, and your affiliates getting together, and you say, in quarter two or quarter three, we'll go on the road. We'll travel the country and really touch advisors. Well, in the COVID-19 you know working from home environment, we've had more than 60 webinars so far this year. Instead of planning these campaigns, getting on the road, everything's being done in a nimble fashion, and you're doing it in real time.
For instance, if there's a company doing a reporting, our sales team is issuing short five-minute videos into the marketplace on the same day. That really never used to happen back in retail, you know, a couple of years ago. We're having to embrace some of these more short-term, in the moment, content creation. We've touched on multi-channel content amplification. We've had to move all our on-the-road content into the virtual world. The good news has been that our webinars last year would have had about maybe 80 people join some of these webinars, maybe 100. We're seeing some webinars having up to 800, maybe 1000 participants joining in. We've embraced podcasts.
People are increasingly on their way to work or going for a run listening to their digital content on devices. Increasingly our affiliates are producing podcasts, including hearing from Chris Joye at Coolabah. You've got, you know, Antipodes creating some of those contents and even some of our emerging managers, Riparian on the agri sector and so forth. And the other real technology solution that's coming to market has been this concept of martech stack. It's marketing and sales working hand in hand to get digital content out. The insight that you're getting when you're digitally distributing content is a marked improvement of how we used to distribute in the years of the past. Such that we can see exactly who in our clients are engaging with our content.
We can see where their lead scores are actually improving, and we're giving very focused lists for our sales team to approach the right customers and really meet their needs. It's not really a sales tactic as opposed to understanding your client, understanding your advisor, and if you know that they have a hot interest in a topic, we're making sure that we're using our automation tools to reach those customers. Something that we've built on in the last 12 months, and I think will be an increase in the Australian marketplace in particular, is business intelligence. Having spent two years before I joined Pinnacle in Chicago and in the U.S., I saw many fund companies in the U.S. post GFC built to have these business intelligence teams.
This is where people in your organization are using the big data, all the marketing engines that we have to again, lift the productivity and deliver superior outcomes for the business. Now our own business has set up this business intelligence team. We've got three or four people across the organization, couple people sitting in marketing, couple people sitting in sales, that are working on, delivering these insights to the distribution team. Now, our vision over the next, few years and in future AGMs will be to demonstrate how business intelligence is gonna move into predictive analytics. Already today, our sales team can see if an advisor is starting to get a little bit cold on one of the funds or a capability that we have. We want to get ahead of that trend.
Over the coming years, just by understanding the consumer behavior, we can get ahead of that trend and really predict what an advisor is likely to do from supporting or becoming detractors of any of our capabilities. Now, I'm gonna move on to the next slide. I thought for those of our AGM attendees that might have a bit of interest in analytics, I reached out to the Morningstar Chicago data science team. Morningstar in 2015 had one data scientist. Today, they've got about 100 data scientists. They are doing.
Using big data, looking at their global database of 500,000 funds and trying to see what factors in funds what features of funds are likely to lead growth or what features of funds are likely to mean that some funds will shrink and ultimately be wound up or terminated. For the purpose of this AGM, I asked the head of that team to run analysis only on Aussie equity funds. Aussie equity funds, we're talking about global equities, Australian share funds, small cap funds. They ran the analysis, and the funds had to be minimum AUD 100 million fund size, so we don't have small funds perhaps creating noise for the analysis. The funds had to be five years in existence to look at those trends.
We can see here all the different features. For instance, if you're an ESG fund, if you run your eyes down the left column, you can see an ESG fund. If you're a yes ESG fund in Europe and U.S., you're getting a positive flow. In Australian retail, it's not really getting support. Chambers, Andrew Chambers will talk about our institutional; there's demand. In retail in Australia, we haven't seen that demand eventuate. What has driven funds to get support in retail has been momentum. This is what our retail team does. When we bring a new boutique to the marketplace, we slowly start finding the advisor businesses that we initially support. We will go and look at research houses, and we'll deal with platforms, and bit by bit build momentum.
What the analysis tells us is that momentum is a key factor in retail. Once you get the snowball effect, lo and behold, year in, year out, you're gonna get strong momentum around your offering. What is also telling is the biggest criteria for your fund shrinking is outflow momentum. If a fund suddenly starts losing fund, it's harder to turn that ship around. A couple other real quick analyses is looking at the second biggest criteria has been five-star rated funds. What essentially that's telling you is alpha generates strong month-on-month growth for your funds, and passive has been a strong retail phenomenon, as I touched on earlier. Active being five-star alpha producers and passive have been the other key drivers of growth.
What's holding us back in terms of growing would be issues such as if your fees are one standard deviation more expensive, that's gonna be a headwind. This is where advisors I touched on, or consumers are scrutinizing fees. If you're an older fund or if you're performing poorly, like one-star rated, all those will be headwinds. Now, what's interesting is the concept of age. At Pinnacle, with the boutiques that we're bringing to market, what essentially that's telling you is that there is an appetite for new managers, new strategies. Some of the legacy products that have been around for 10, 15 years are less likely to get that support than what Pinnacle and our boutiques bring to market.
Now, if we go to the next slide, Morningstar ran the analysis over the last decade, and you can see that there is persistence on these factors since the GFC. Essentially, what this is telling you is that momentum continues to grow your retail funds. Index fund has been strong momentum. Alpha has been a marginal positive, but fees and outflows have been holding back success in the retail market. What these essential insights do is enable our sales team to hone in on some of these buyers in the marketplace and make sure we're bringing the right products, the right strategies to the right advisor. Which essentially brings me to my last slide, which is a quick glance on what are some of the funds in our retail suite of products that are delivering some of these features.
You can see Hyperion, Resolution Capital, Solaris. Some of these names on this list, not only are they some of the best performing funds on a three-year return basis in their categories, they have star ratings that are high, four or five-star rated, meaning risk-adjusted return has been strong. They're highly regarded from a ratings perspective, being gold, silver, bronze medalists. You can see their fee level versus competitors in their class, many of them are below average or low. In some cases, when they're a little bit high, you've got to turn your attention to the star ratings, actually a bigger predictor. If you're generating alpha post-fees, that's actually a stronger factor than having perhaps a higher fee. I hope you found this a little bit valuable from a big picture trends update.
At this stage, I'll hand over back to Alan to continue the meeting and take questions later on.
Okay, Ramsin. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Andrew, and also to Ian. I think that's very fulsome presentations. Let me just see whether we've got any questions as we speak. If you want to log any in, if you want to type them in as we speak. Just give another few seconds. Okay, we've got no follow-up questions at this stage. I think it's a compliment to the fulsomeness of the presentations. With that, I would like to thank you all for logging on and tuning in and again for your ongoing support of the company as shareholders. Hopefully next year we'll be able to meet everyone in person at the next AGM. Until then, perhaps we could declare the meeting closed and wish you all a very successful day. Thank you.
Thanks.