Good morning, everyone, welcome to ICG's Capital Markets Day 2020. This is my third Capital Markets Day as Head of Investor Relations at ICG, and each event is getting bigger than the last. I'm delighted we've been joined by our new Chairman, Lord Davies, and some of his board colleagues, and they'll be with us throughout most of the morning if you've got any questions that you'd like to ask them. Coffee will be served back in the library where we were a moment ago. One piece of housekeeping, there's no fire alarm tests planned this morning, so if it does ring, please exit as directed. Our recent growth trajectory has been considerable. This has led to the inevitable question of how much further we can go.
Over the course of the next few hours, we will set out how we plan to keep building on our established platform to ensure sustainable growth. Benoît, our CEO, will open proceedings, discussing how we are positioned for further growth by both growing our established strategies, developing our emerging strategies, and adding value-enhancing strategies. Jens Tonn, Head of our DACH region for our European corporate strategy, will provide some further color on the growth potential of our more established strategies with Vijay Bharadia, our CFOO, illustrating how this has a direct impact on the group's fee base. ESG is an increasingly area of focus, and in our industry, we are one of the market leaders. Before the break, Eimear Palmer will detail some of the work she has been undertaking since joining us as our Responsible Investing Officer.
After coffee, Vijay will be back and joined by our Head of HR, Antje Hensel-Roth, to discuss our success at innovating new strategies before we showcase two examples, sale and lease back and infrastructure equity. There'll be time for questions both before coffee and at the end of the morning. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Benoît, who will take us through the opening session. Thank you.
Thank you, Ian. Good morning, and thank you all for making time and joining us for our Capital Markets Day. Two key themes that I would like to discuss with you this morning. One is growth, the other one is resilience. To start with, who are we, there we go, What do we do? ICG is a leading global alternative asset manager. With over EUR 42 billion in AUM, close to 400 people now, presence in 13 different countries, we belong to a relatively small group of large international diversified alternative asset managers. We are first and foremost investors, and as such, we're a people business. It's all about talent and culture. Everything flows from that. That's who we are. What do we do? We directly originate, select, structure, and manage investments across geographies and across strategies. 21 to date, as you can see here.
We also build on an exceptional 30-year track record to grow our assets under management. This growth in AUM, and importantly, it's a controlled and coherent growth in AUM, is what drives the increase in long-term locked-in fees, and in turn, profits, dividends, and ultimately shareholder value. Historically, ICG has delivered strong growth with a notable acceleration in recent years, and this has translated into an even greater growth in fund management company profits, as you can see here. A substantial part of that growth stems from a strategic decision to diversify into new geographies and new strategies with varying risk-return profiles. That's often a misconception about ICG because of our history, which is that we are only a debt manager. That is ignoring our diversification. Today, our investment strategies run the whole gamut of financial instruments from senior debt all the way to private equity.
You could see from that change in these pie charts. A key question when you look at the growth that we have just experienced, particularly in the past two, three years, is how much is there to go for? Putting it differently, what is the credible growth potential of the business? To answer that question, first, let's look at the overall market. The alternatives asset class has grown quite strongly over more than 10 years, we have about 10 years of history here. Looking forward, Preqin forecast a total market size of GBP 14 trillion by 2023. Many studies are even more bullish than that. They typically point to the relatively small size of the alternative asset space compared to the overall financial market. It's about 6%, 7%. Anticipating market share gains for alternatives, they forecast a potential quadrupling of the overall market by 2030.
Irrespective of their varying degree of optimism, all these studies out there, without exception, anticipate a continued considerable growth of alternatives for the foreseeable future. If that's the case, where does demand come from? Well, first of all, it comes from existing investors. One, because a number of them are experiencing significant growth of their own asset base. That's particularly true for sovereign wealth funds. Two, because many of them are further increasing their relative allocation to alternatives. There's a double effect there, pushing growth and increasing demand. In addition, there are new investors coming into the space. I've mentioned before during results presentation, Japan. Japanese investors are starting to invest into alternatives, and given their size, the potential demand they represent is quite significant. Likewise, I've mentioned before Latin America. That's particularly for pension funds there. There are also new types of investors, or new channels.
Wealth management is one that is growing quite significantly. We are also, interestingly, we are starting to see through mutual funds, some insurance products, and even new platforms that are being established, access to alternative products starting to be provided to retail investors. Any one of these new investors or channels, types of investors in itself, potential demand they represent dwarfs the total size of the alternatives market today. We have discussed this before. This is why there is such a supply-demand imbalance in alternatives. Incidentally, this is why there is no fee pressure in our industry. Most investors will tell you that their biggest challenge is to deploy an alternative to meet their long-term allocation targets. Demand is not a constraining factor in our industry. What about the investment opportunity? You can raise the capital, but can you invest it?
Interestingly, the structural shift towards private markets has also been taking place on the investment side. The addressable investment market has been growing in private markets. As fundraising increased for alternatives, so has the deployment pace of investment. You will regularly hear or read that we're reaching new highs in dry powder for private debt and for private equity, which is true. It's true in nominal terms. When measured in number of years of investment based on the current pace of deployment, actually it's remained remarkably stable at around three years. That means there is no ballooning capacity glut being created in this industry. Yes, there is significantly increasing demand in the space, but there is also growing investment opportunity in the private space.
There's another factor that is becoming more and more relevant for ICG, that is relevant when we're looking at growth overall, that is the benefit of size and scale. There is a flight to quality. Not only are investors allocating more and more to alternatives, they're allocating disproportionately to larger, more established investors who can absorb sizable commitments across a number of strategies. There's a staggering data point, which is over the past couple of years, in each of private equity, private debt, and real assets, if you take the top 10 managers, they've hoovered up 40% of the total amounts raised. Essentially, the bigger you are, the more you benefit from the market growth and the more you gain market share.
When we observe the growth trajectory of some of the established successful managers, and I've plotted a few, we can see that they all experience an inflection point after which the growth accelerates. It so happens this inflection point invariably happens when those managers hit $40 billion- $50 billion of AUM. I believe that this is what's happened to ICG over the past couple of years. I believe that we've just hit that inflection point. What that would tend to indicate is not only are we nowhere near reaching a plateau, but that our growth is just getting started. We're starting to see some evidence of that. This is the private debt investor league tables for private debt fundraising that's looking over the past five years. As you can see, ICG is in the top 10 globally.
We're making it into this rather exclusive club of large established alternative asset managers. Looking back as recently as maybe four or five years ago, ICG was largely operating below the radar, except maybe in a few narrow niches. Today, in our industry, ICG's become a global brand. Which is all very positive, what could derail that? More specifically, what could be the impact of a downturn or a financial crisis on our industry and more specifically on ICG? When you look at historical data all the way back to the mid-1980s, which is when this asset class emerged, what you find is if you had picked the worst five-year period, five-year being the typical investment period in our world, you pick the worst five-year period, either in private equity or in private debt, you would still have generated positive return.
Obviously, the same can be said for public markets, this is an average. If you were going to look at the more established players, they kept on generating double-digit returns through those cycles. That's very powerful. There are many reasons for that. We could discuss it at length. Maybe we'll do that after the presentation. There is one, I think, main reason, which is that these strategies have time on their side. These are long-term strategies. They are 10 years or more, which means they can work through a cycle. Actually, even more fundamentally, because their lifespan is 10 years or more, they have to be designed, structured, and invested, assuming that there will be a downturn at some point during the fund life because it's such a long fund life.
Also being able to take advantage of the opportunities that invariably arise in a downturn, which is another advantage of these strategies, is there is no concept of redemption in our industry. What that means is in a downturn when most institutions are pulling back, those funds have dry powder. They have capacity to invest and take advantage of the market opportunities. Incidentally, that's exactly what ICG did in the previous financial crisis. We did quite well. What applies at fund level also applies for the firm as a whole. It applies to ICG as a whole because you can raise dedicated funds, dedicated strategies that are opportunistic strategies to take advantage of a market downturn, market dislocation. That's what the recovery fund that we raised in 2008, that's exactly what it was, and it was extremely successful.
This time around, we could probably do even better and not wait for a downturn to raise, but raise ahead of a downturn. That's exactly what we're doing. We have one opportunistic product in market, and we could have another one in the not too distant future. They're essentially rainy day funds or they're contingent funds that you switch on when there is a downturn or a market dislocation. The implication for ICG is that in a downturn, not only are your fees remaining stable on existing strategies because there is no redemption, so the fees remain stable, but you might actually be able to increase the fee base by either turning on or launching opportunistic funds. An illustration of the resilience of the asset class is our own flagship European fund. It's 30-year track record.
When you look at the performance in money multiple, you can't distinguish the cycles here. For a long-term investor, that's quite compelling. Regardless of the cycle, you're going to be generating 1.8x-2x the money, and that's quite important. Investors are attracted to the asset class and to products such as our European Fund, not just because they generate higher returns and they outperform public markets, but also because they've proven to be quite resilient. Actually, when you think about it, all of our investors are highly sophisticated. They're sovereign wealth funds, they're pension funds, they're endowments. They're increasing their allocations to alternatives now, at this point in the cycle. They're committing for 10 years with no redemption. They know full well that it's extremely likely there will be a downturn during the life of their investment by investing now. They're investing more.
If they're investing more, it's not just because these strategies outperform, it's also because they are resilient. There's strong demand, and as we've just seen, for good reason. How do you take advantage of the market opportunity? If you're ICG, how do you deliver on that growth? What are the key drivers? There are three main drivers, and they have a compounding effect. One is the growth in existing strategies, the more established strategies. Two is the growth coming from newer strategies that are in ramp-up phase? Finally, growth coming from new developments, new strategies, new geographies, new products. Let's quickly look at each in turn. Our more established strategies have not, as we've seen, they have not experienced the traditional product maturity curve. If anything, their growth has accelerated.
We've seen that for the senior debt fund, and we've seen it with ICG Europe Fund VII. Because these strategies are well-established, their cost base is relatively stable. Any growth has a very significant impact on profit, which is exactly what we experienced last year. You may remember when we raised ICG Europe Fund VII, 60% larger than the previous vintage, it created a step-up effect on fund management company profits. There we go. Newer strategies. By that I mean strategies are essentially in their first or second vintage. These newer strategies have something else going for them, which is that any new money raised, even if they do not increase the size of their fund from vintage to vintage, up until typically fund 3, any new money raised is accretive because you're not replacing older funds that are in realization mode. The funds overlap.
Of course, these newer strategies, as they become more established and have a longer track record, actually tend to raise more because it's easier to fundraise, and they tend to have a significant growth from vintage to vintage. They have a double benefit. They're growing fast from vintage to vintage, and any new money raised is accretive. That is what we are experiencing right now with Strategic Equity. Strategic Equity, we have closed the fundraise of Strategic Equity III a few weeks ago. I think we're coming out with a statement today to our LPs. We have hit $2.4 billion, which is well ahead of what we had initially targeted, which was $1.6 billion-$1.7 billion. More importantly, it's in terms of third-party assets under management, it's 2.5x larger than the previous vintage.
Because we've also increased the fees on that fund, the impact on fee generation, as you can see here, is considerable. To put things into perspective and illustrate how significant the impact of these new strategies can be, I've put it against what our flagship European fund was generating five years ago. This was Fund V. At the time, ICG was not as diversified, so this was by far the biggest profit generator of the firm. If you look at it, strategic equity, which didn't exist there, it was born five years ago, is now generating just as much. Thinking about some of the new products we've launched in recent years, if they're remotely as successful as strategic equity, you can see how significant the potential growth in AUM and profit can be from these more recent strategies.
Finally, new developments, and Vijay will cover that in greater detail. We have many opportunities. One, we can expand geographically. Yes, we have a global reach today, but when you break it down by strategy, actually the geographic focus is relatively narrow. Take real estate, for instance. We're essentially just U.K. Not entirely true because we now have sale and leaseback. Kevin will discuss that later. We don't have a pan-European strategy yet. We're not present in the U.S. at all or elsewhere, for that matter, in real estate. You could take senior debt as well. We're one of the leaders, if not the leader, in indirect lending in Europe. We're only starting to establish a presence in the U.S., which is by far the largest market for direct lending. We could take pretty much every strategy and follow the same logic.
Even more broadly, even though there may not be immediately actionable opportunities there, at some point in China, in India, in Africa, there will be opportunities. The geographic opportunity of just rolling out our existing set of products is quite significant. In addition, of course, there are brand new strategies, brand new products. Yesterday, that was strategic equity or direct lending in Europe, for that matter. More recently, it was the ICG Europe Mid-Market Fund or sale and leaseback or Australian senior debt. Right now, it's infrastructure equity. Tomorrow it could be U.S. mid-market private equity or traditional secondaries or pan-European real estate, an opportunistic fund, and so forth. There is no lack of good ideas and opportunities. For me, the most important thing here is that we have now demonstrated that we are able to successfully and repeatedly launch new strategies.
We have the blueprint, if you will, to onboard team, establish a marketing strategy, structure the funds, and fundraise. That's very powerful. It's also making us attractive to new teams who view this platform as a great launchpad for their ambition and their funds. The key obviously here is execution. You can have all greatest ideas in the world for new strategies, you need an extremely strong execution platform. Is why this morning you will hear about talent, sourcing and retention, about the operating platform, about the strategic value of the balance sheet, particularly to launch first-time fund, about the growing importance, but also our leadership position in ESG, which is a competitive edge, but which we'll need to thrive to maintain.
To conclude, we are fortunate enough to operate in an industry and an asset class that is very attractive because it's generating high returns, because it's consistently outperformed public markets, but also because it's proven to be resilient. As a result, it's experiencing very significant increase in demand. We're very well-positioned to not only take advantage of this market growth, but to continue to increase our market share. For that, we can rely on our size, a 30-year track record, and a brand. Of course, as we will hear later, we will need to ensure that we keep an execution platform that is at the highest level to be able to continue to grow, to be able to continue to deliver these new strategies, which for us, preserving that diversification is key to sustainable growth.
Finally, I think it's worth pointing out, by the very nature of our business and with fund cycles, our growth cannot be linear. There will be years of higher fundraising than others. There will be years when we raise a significant fund with fees uncommitted, like last year, and profits immediately step up, and years when that is not the case. The long-term growth prospects are quite material. On that, we have selected a number of case studies this morning, starting with the flagship European fund, Europe Fund VII, for two main reasons. One, it's a good illustration of what I was mentioning earlier, which is that even our more established strategies still have significant growth potential. Two, because at some point we will eventually raise Fund VIII, and it is likely to have a material impact on AUM and particularly on profit.
On that note, I'd like to introduce Jens Tonn, who's a Senior Managing Director in the strategy and a member of the Investment Committee. Jens.
Thank you very much, Benoît. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Jens Tonn. I'm in charge of our DACH region, which is Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I've joined ICG from Vestar Capital, a U.S. private equity firm, about seven years ago. I do know ICG for more than 20 years actually, because on the private equity side, I've been a regular client of the European corporate strategy. When I got the call if I want to join, I jumped at the opportunity, and the next few slides I'll explain to you why. As we've just heard, we're one of the very few firms in Europe that have a 30-year history of successfully investing and more importantly, achieving reliable returns. Very few people have managed to do that over a 30-year period in Europe. What's the secret sauce to our European corporate strategy?
It is basically a very differentiated strategy, and it all starts with origination. If you want to see the right deals, if you want to have a high-quality deal flow, you have to be locally present. We have a well-established local network. We got teams on the ground. We believe that you see that quality deal flow if you are local, if you are able to blend in, if you speak the language, if you can build relationships of trust with local business community, the company owners, and the management teams. We've been able to achieve that. Ingredient one to the secret sauce, the network. Ingredient two of that secret sauce is the team itself. The team, as Benoît mentioned, is very senior heavy. A lot of people with the senior executives in our team with more than 20 years of European investment experience.
20 years means that we have all seen various cycles and not just one. You want to know what to do if the cycle ever goes against you. We have the team that knows how to respond and how to react. The 3rd one, and last and not least, of course, is the mandate we have. Our mandate is a very flexible mandate. We can invest in every single tranche of a capital structure. We can pick and choose. We can decide which layer of the capital structure gives us the best risk/reward profile, and we put it into practice. As a result of all this, we've been able to invest in 383 opportunities over the last 30 years. Along the way, we've been deploying EUR 20 billion, and almost more importantly, we've been able to achieve a very reliable 1.8x our money on these investments.
What's the market like today? You've probably seen slides like this before. If you look at them, you think, "Oh my God." Rather mixed picture. You may have recently heard that Germany may not be in fine form, technically in recession six out of the last 12 months. If you look closely, this gray line almost dropping off the slide, that's your automotive industry. We are not involved. No exposure. More than 10 years ago, we took the deliberate decision to stay out of it. If you take that automotive sector specific issue out of the equation, what we're actually seeing through our local network is a very robust European economy. We're seeing the same quality deal flow like in previous years, and we're actually looking forward to deploying.
If you look at the rate of our deployment, you can see that it doesn't hold us back from doing the right deals. Again, remember, we can pick and choose where we go. If we feel a market is too expensive, a case overpriced, we don't have to, and/or we can go in a different layer of the capital structure. Very few people can do that. Sounds all very interesting, so maybe someone else might also want to do it, and the question, of course, whom are we up against? The honest answer is, on the continent, very few, if any. There's a number of well-established debt providers, and they can do more than one tranche of a capital structure, sure. Yes, there's a number of private equity colleagues of ours.
They would do the equity, but they couldn't and wouldn't want to get involved in the debt structuring of a transaction. We can do everything across the whole range, and that is a big advantage. If you see how we've been investing in recent years, we're working with families, management teams, NPE colleagues still. They like the approach. We're different. What we bring to the party is clearly a differentiator. This strategy, as you know and have heard, has been sort of with us for a while, and we have continuously developed it, organically growing it. If you look at these circles, you could probably get the impression that we might have moved away from our core. No, we haven't. What actually happened is we have grown with the companies we've been backing. We've been growing with the management teams we've been supporting.
I'll give you a couple or maybe just one example out of sort of real life. We had a company in the German portfolio, Nora Systems, the world market leader in rubber flooring for hospitals. We got first involved in the business during the investment period of Fund Five. Just a mezzanine investment with a tiny equity contribution. Company, rough numbers, made EUR 20 million profits. Two years later, the management team wanted to buy out the previous fund, stay in control of their own destiny. We supported them all the way through the capital. We underwrote the whole balance sheet, senior debt, mezz, pref equity, and some of the remaining core equity that they themselves couldn't provide. It was a EUR 20 million business, rough numbers, in the investment period of Fund Five. It was a EUR 40 million profit business during the investment period of Fund Six.
We sold it last year to an American strategic, and if he didn't have his own American financing with him, we would probably have done it with an expectation that the business would eventually achieve 60. Point being, if you want to stay with the right companies, they are growing. You want to be ready. You want to have the fund to support them. In our view, this is a rather organic growth profile, well executed, and the market kind of needs and wants it. In order to do it well across all regions with the increasing size, we've recently added to the team the last 12- 15 months, a number of executives in basically every geography that we are currently covering, just to make sure that we got the same quality, same base that we can deploy the larger arrangements we have.
We have also, as Benoît just mentioned, started to basically bed in the new colleagues for future fundraisings. A Fund Eight, a Fund Nine is likely to be bigger, as I just outlined on the previous chart. We have gone, and again, that might be different, differentiate in our strategy. We've gone for senior people. The majority of the new hires are managing directors. They all come with relevant, very relevant experience. Some of them from KKR, from Carlyle, so well-known competitors on the equity side. We're quite happy with our team. What we have pulled together for you also in terms of market opportunity, what are we seeing, where is the market heading, is a typical, for us, typical, so last 12 months snapshot of our funnel. Funnel from origination to getting the deal done.
If I'd shown you the year before that and the year before that, it would probably look almost identical. Point being, we're seeing over 300 investment opportunities through our network every year. That's what we originate. We're talking real deals here, proper discussions, first initial financials being exchanged. As you can see, just under 10% make it into, through our funnel, the next diligence phase, discussion phase on the IC level. Very disciplined approach. Wrong sector, wrong size, can't agree on terms, we move on. If it's too complicated, we move on. We want to have a portfolio of companies we like, managers we trust. 17 make it to the final stage. Ultimately, and that's been the average for the recent years, we invest four times a year into new transactions.
You could now probably say, Well, isn't that a rather small number, the four compared to the 17? Please bear in mind, that final decision-making stage could involve us supporting someone on an add-on which he can't get done. This could involve a family situation, various tribes, they need a unanimous decision, they can't get to it, deal does not happen. That wasn't wasted time then, but that was unfortunately a deal that didn't get through when we were planning to do it. As the result of this approach, the current Fund VII portfolio in Europe shows exactly what we want to get to, a very diversified portfolio. Diversified from an industry exposure as well as a geographical perspective. Two deals in the U.K. and Ireland, three deals in France, one deal in Germany, one in Italy, and one in Spain.
If we were to look at each of these deals in detail, which we don't have time for today, you would see that in each and every deal, we contribute at least two elements of the capital structure, in some cases, three or four. We're really making use of that flexibility of our mandate. We're also making sure, it's kind of prerequisite for us, but actually our partners like it, that we have full board representation. Each and every case with full board representation. If the case, for example, were to involve early on a full potential program, that could go as deep as weekly meetings with management, monthly operating committee sessions, and definitely quarterly board meetings. We are always heavily involved. We like to know from within what's going on. We don't want to be told by someone else.
It goes both ways, by the way. Most PE friends of ours, most families, like us in this structure. They like to hear what's going on in the financial markets pricing-wise. We help them with our local network originate add on acquisition targets. We evaluate CapEx projects. It's a very mutual relationship. We like it that way and our clients, too. As a result of all this active portfolio management is rather rigid funnel management in the early stages of a deal. We've been able to achieve what we believe is a very impressive and very reliable performance. You can see that we are very narrowly centered around the 1.6x or 1.8x money mark, which is in line, by the way, with pure private equity, but we have a considerably lower standard deviation.
It also shows you how resilient our portfolio is. That goes back to the selection process. Finally, and I've mentioned it's obviously not only us, it is the partnership approach that we are practicing. If you're working with the right team, if you're working with a family that you know and you can trust, you're getting different information. You're getting a lot more reasonable business planning assumptions. It's kind of all thrown together, allowing us to show these returns. There's one other aspect I should mention. We're actively managing the portfolio, the cases as such, but we're also actively managing the fund. Another reason for this very narrow band of reliable returns is the moment we can refinance a tranche, the moment we have a window for an early exit that will give us the originally contemplated return, we do execute on it.
The earlier you anchor, the more predictable and reliable the ultimate outcome. We do that on a regular basis. We do focus and look at the fund from that perspective. Let me summarize what we have achieved so far with our European corporate strategy. We've created this, what we believe is, clearly differentiated platform in Europe. We provide a flexibility to capital structuring problems that no one else currently offers. We have delivered on the back of that a 30-year record of very consistent performance. We do see, back to Benoît's point, a significant market opportunity out there. There's more and more private companies. The companies we are backing are growing, and the teams that we're working with have ambitions. That it's just natural for us to take this model forward. In order to capture future growth, I just mentioned that we have built out the team.
We have a deep origination capability. We've added to it. We are ready for when it happens. One thing that we don't really want to change as the final point, we will continue to be very disciplined on the investment decision process. I hope that I've been able to demonstrate that we've created a very robust and scalable fees on committed business here in our European corporate strategy. With that, I would like to hand over to Vijay, who has the next section. Thank you, Vijay.
Thank you, Jens. Good morning, all. My name is Vijay Bharadia, and I'm the CFO and COO of ICG. I joined ICG just over eight months ago. Prior to ICG, I was at Blackstone. I was the international CFO of the firm responsible for finance and all of its operational requirements outside of the United States. I will now provide an overview of how a growing business like ours impacts the growth of our fee revenues. Growth drives fee revenues higher. The key components of the fee revenue growth are derived from larger sizes of our existing vintages, new strategies, and in stable case fees, or in some cases, higher average fee rates. This coupled with the fact that actually the three of these would result into a higher management fees and higher performance fees.
I will now illustrate what this means. If you take our European corporate business that Jens touched on, our most recent fund, Fund VII, which had EUR 4 billion of capital, 60% higher than the previous vintage. This fund earns fees on committed capital. We were able to maintain the headline fee rates at 150 basis points. However, we were able to reduce the level of discounts we give to our clients. This resulted in average fee rates of 143 basis points, or 9 basis points higher than the previous vintage. This translates into EUR 24 million of incremental revenues per annum. The same is similar for our direct lending strategy, Senior Debt Partners. These are the bubbles at the bottom of that chart. Here, we were able to increase the fee rates by 10 basis points to 85 basis points, and importantly, not give any discounts.
This has a significant impact on the profitability of the firm. This fund earns fees on invested capital. For this strategy, we announced at the half year that we're actually starting to raise the fund for the next vintage, SDP IV. We started the fundraise this financial year, and we expect that to straddle into the next financial year. To put this into perspective, this chart shows the cumulative fees of the three vintages of both our flagship funds, Senior Debt Partners on the left-hand side and European Corporate on the right-hand side. For SDP III, our direct lending strategy, the existing fund is expected to more than double in fee revenues over the life of its cycle. For European Corporate, the story is similar, with expected fees of over 70% over the life of its fund.
Importantly, we've actually not increased the level of our teams, investment teams or operation teams, at the same rate, therefore driving operating margin growth. This demonstrates that larger funds and higher fees or stable fees can have a significant impact on our fee revenues. We have continued to grow the number of strategies that are earning fees on committed capital and also earning performance fees. In 2010, the first two bubbles on there on the left-hand side, we had only two strategies, European Corporate and the Asia Pacific Fund. Today, we have seven earning such fees. In addition, as we've mentioned in the past, given we have around 85% of our funds that are in closed-end funds, we have revenue visibility over a very long duration. As we continue to grow the number of funds, we expect the management fees to grow and the performance fees to grow in line.
Looking at our fee profile, this chart shows the quantum of our performance fee revenues relative to our third-party management fees. We recognize performance fees when the whole fund has passed its hurdle rate or is expected to pass its hurdle rate over the short term. Hurdle rates are typically 8%. As a proportion of management fees, performance fees in the last three years have been 10%-15%, as shown by the orange line on there. The right-hand side of this chart is showing the annualized revenues from the first half. Our current performance fee guideline is GBP 20 million-GBP 25 million per annum. As I mentioned earlier, we expect our performance fees to grow in line with our management fees. We are therefore updating our performance fee guidelines to represent 10%-15% of our third-party fees, assuming current product mix.
To conclude, growth of fund strategies will accelerate the growth of high-quality earnings. Our model, with a large proportion of fees being earned on capital that is tied up for long duration, provides long-term visibility on our revenues. Performance fees are expected to grow in line with management fees and as long as market fundamentals remain attractive. There is therefore a significant potential for increase in shareholder value. Thank you. I will now pass on to Eimear, who will talk about ESG.
Thank you, Vijay. Good morning. My name is Eimear Palmer, I'm Responsible Investing Officer at ICG. I joined over a year ago from The Carlyle Group, where I did a similar role and spent seven years working to integrate ESG into the investment process and also working directly with portfolio companies to improve their ESG performance. My role has evolved, and that's partly been through to my own personal career progression, but is also really reflective of the importance that ESG has taken on in the industry over the last few years. It's really moved from being a nice to have and a check the box to being an absolutely essential license to operate.
Discussions at Davos last week were dominated by climate change and loss of biodiversity. We are acutely aware that investment managers such as ourselves have a key role to play in building a more sustainable economy in an age of urgent transition. As such, ESG is fully embedded within our investment process. I work very closely with the investment teams during initial screening and due diligence. We have many examples of deals that we've turned down solely for ESG reasons. Firstly, I wanted to highlight our ESG priorities. These reflect our key areas of focus and illustrate some of the material ESG topics that we consider when we engage directly with portfolio companies where we have significant influence. These also help to define our own firm level ESG priorities as well.
Our ESG journey formally began seven years ago when we became a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, or the PRI, in 2013. That was the year we established our responsible investing policy, and we began to integrate ESG into the investment process, strategy by strategy. After considerable efforts, we are very pleased to report that our responsible investing policy now covers 100% of our AUM. This timeline illustrates some of our key milestones over the past six years in terms of responsible investing, D&I, and also our charitable initiatives. As you can see, we've really been doing a lot. I'm not going to talk through all the points on the slide, but I just wanted to highlight two or three achievements from an ESG perspective. Firstly, engagement and training, secondly, transparency, and thirdly, benchmarking.
In terms of training, it's so important that our investment team understands ESG issues, because they are the ones who are responsible for the day-to-day implementation of our responsible investing policy. Since 2014, we've provided ESG training every two years. In 2018, we partnered with the PRI Academy to deliver a bespoke program, which was delivered to over 170 ICG professionals, and we are partnering with them again this year to launch our new training program in June. We also actively engage with our portfolio companies, and we'll be talking a lot more about this later, through our annual ESG survey and our ESG KPI process. We collaborate and engage with peers in the industry. One example of this is the new PRI working group to improve ESG reporting, corporate reporting, which we're now a member of.
That's really one of the key challenges we face as an investor in private equity and private debt. It's the lack of consistent, comparable ESG information. That's why transparency in our own ESG efforts is really important, and we've been working over the last year to improve our ESG reporting and increase transparency to you and other stakeholders. We released our enhanced annual ESG reports in October, which for the first time included 10 case studies from across all our strategies. In November, we released our first European fund ESG report, which is a fund-specific report for Fund VI and Fund VII, detailing company by company, the targets that we've set in terms of ESG and the progress that we've made. Finally, benchmarking. As you can see, we are a constituent of the FTSE4Good, and we've just recently been reconfirmed.
We also complete a PRI assessment and a CDP climate change assessment annually. These are really important tools in terms of benchmarking our responsible investing practices. Last year, we achieved an AAB score for our PRI assessment, outperforming our peers in the private equity module. We are very pleased to report that we recently achieved an A- score in our CDP assessment, that was up two grades from our B score last year. This is a result of our more recent climate change initiatives, which we'll discuss shortly. To put that into context, our A- score puts us in the top 6% of all companies globally that are reporting under the CDP. The average for financial services firms was a C. Now just to highlight some of our more recent achievements.
We've had a very successful year formalizing and deploying our enhanced responsible investing framework. This framework sets out how we integrate ESG into the investment process from screening, due diligence, and monitoring, through to eventual exit. Each strategy incorporates the relevant elements of the framework, depending on the nature of the strategy and the level of influence and access we have to management. What have we done specifically over the last 12 months? Well, we have three new components. Firstly, we have our firm-wide exclusion list, and this ensures that we don't make direct investments in companies that are incompatible with our corporate values. Secondly, we've developed and implemented an ESG screening checklist, which we use to assess every single investment opportunity.
This is a really comprehensive checklist which considers ESG risks such as sector and geography, along with environmental, including climate change, corporate governance, and also ethical concerns. We attach this checklist to every single investment committee memo. Finally, we rolled out an online ESG screening tool called RepRisk, and this captures negative ESG news, which helps also to inform our investment decision-making. Now moving on to climate change. This has been a huge focus for us and has really been around three key themes. Firstly, understanding the risks. Secondly, engaging with portfolio companies. And thirdly, setting our own targets. In terms of understanding the risks, firstly, we conducted a TCFD review. For those of you that aren't aware, the TCFD is the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure.
This is a set of voluntary disclosures that help you as investors understand how we assess and manage climate risks. These might be physical risks from flooding or drought, or transition risks from changing policy or legislation and changing consumer behavior. All of these risks that might impact the valuation of the underlying assets in our portfolio. We performed a gap analysis of our practices versus the TCFD recommendations, and we are pleased to report that we had our first TCFD disclosure in our annual ESG report, which was released in October. We also engage with portfolio companies on climate change, and we work with companies where we have access and influence to management to help to improve their energy efficiency and to reduce emissions where this is a material issue for them. Finally, as a firm, we set our own targets.
As a company, we've committed to reducing the emissions from our own operations by 80% by 2030. Our move to our new London head office, shortly, we'll source 100% renewable energy, which will help us towards achieving this goal. Now moving on to engagement. Our annual ESG survey is one of the key tools we have in terms of engaging with our portfolio companies. We use this in our corporate strategies in our European fund, our Asia fund, and in Senior Debt Partners. We first circulated our annual ESG survey back in 2015 to understand how portfolio companies manage ESG issues. Initially, we sent it to about 40 portfolio companies, and it had just seven questions, so it was quite light touch. Over the years, we've really enhanced and extended the survey. This year it included 27 questions.
We circulated it to almost 70 companies and had a 93% response rate. Here you can see a snapshot of results from our European fund portfolio companies. Just to clarify, achieving 100% on each target is not always possible, as this includes companies, where we invest alongside a sponsor, and ESG may not be as high on their agenda as it is on ours. As you can see, however, 80% have set environmental or social targets, which is up from 65% last year. Also climate change has been a particular focus. One quarter of the questions in the survey now specifically address this topic, and we're starting to see some really good progress here, with over 60% of the companies having set climate change or energy-related objectives and targets.
A really significant engagement project, which we've rolled out over the last 12 months, has involved working directly with portfolio companies, to improve their ESG performance. Over the last 12 months, we've conducted 19 ESG reviews across portfolio companies in our European Fund, where we have access and influence to management. The purpose of these ESG reviews is to help us understand the company's ESG risks and opportunities. We then collaborate with management to set company-specific targets and KPIs, which we'll be monitoring annually. As you'd expect, these companies vary a lot in terms of their ESG capability. Some are very sophisticated and have dedicated teams, while others are in the much earlier stages and have just recently started recruiting dedicated ESG professionals as a result of our engagement activities.
Our objective through this engagement is really to drive meaningful progress from the date of our initial investment through to our eventual exit. The results of these really extensive projects were summarized in our fund-specific report, which I mentioned were sent to those investors in Fund VI and Fund VII in November. Just to give you an idea of the engagement that we do, this is one example, which is Euro Cater. Euro Cater is a Scandinavian food service supplier to restaurants, hotels, and caterers, so it's a B2B. ICG invested almost EUR 200 million in 2013, and since then, we've engaged with the company to structure and formalize their approach to sustainability, and we collaborated with them to launch a number of new initiatives.
Responsible sourcing has been a key focus since we invested. Purchasers receive extensive training on sustainable procurement. Euro Cater have committed to phasing out cage eggs in their own production by 2020 and from across their supply chain by 2025. The webshop's also been redesigned to promote more sustainable products. For example, when a customer searches for cheese, the first options that come up are vegan cheese. If you search for fish, it comes up with line-caught fish. They also really work to prevent food waste. To put it into context, food waste in the U.K. was 9.5 million tons in 2018. It requires an area almost the size of Wales to produce the food and drink that we currently waste, which is frankly shocking.
This was a key priority for us, and we worked with Euro Cater to launch a new web shop initiatives where customers can choose to purchase food nearing its sell-by date at a discount. As a result, Euro Cater prevented 284 tons of food waste in 2018. They also work with organizations to distribute surplus food to shelters and asylum centers. From an environmental perspective, they're really focused on implementing more energy-efficient cooling and also lighting systems, which obviously helps to reduce costs and reduce corresponding emissions at the same time. Now to focus on our two new sustainable strategies. We believe that the financial services industry really has a significant role to play in achieving the transition to a low-carbon economy.
We are committed to supporting this, and as such, we recently launched two new sustainable strategies, sale and leaseback and infrastructure equity. To give you some background to these lovely colored squares at the bottom, these are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or the SDGs. They were adopted in 2015 by all UN member states. They're a blueprint for sustainable development to end poverty, protect the planet, and to ensure prosperity for all. It's actually very clear now that progress is not occurring fast enough to achieve the SDGs by 2030, which is the deadline, and that urgent action is needed now to change the current trajectory. Between our two new strategies, we contribute to achieving five of the 17 SDGs. Sale and leaseback has a dedicated pool of capital to improve the sustainability of the fund's assets.
Infrastructure Equity excludes high emitting industry sectors such as coal, oil, and gas, and it also excludes nuclear. Kevin and Jérôme will talk you through both strategies in more detail shortly. In summary, we believe we've achieved a lot over the last few years, and particularly over the last 12 months. We also have a lot of initiatives currently underway. Climate change remains high on our agenda. We're standing on the brink of a decade that will be defined by our action or lack of action on climate change. We will continue to prioritize this. We're excited to be kicking off the process to assess the carbon footprint of our two corporate funds, our ICG Europe Fund VII and Infrastructure Equity.
Transparency also remains high on our agenda, and we'll continue to update our website to ensure that you are fully up to date with all of our progress. Our responsible investing policy and our annual ESG report are already there, so please do take a look, and please feel free to reach out at any point, if you have any questions or would like to hear more about any of our initiatives. In summary, we are proud of our achievements to date, but very conscious that there is more to do. Thank you very much. Now I'll hand you back to Benoît for a brief Q&A session.
Thanks, Eimear. I've been surprised by how quickly our efforts in ESG have turned into a competitive advantage, and I think this is only the beginning. You will hear later about sale and lease back, but it's really fascinating how for sale and lease back, we are showing ESG as a cost. Generally, people are showing ESG as an opportunity, saying, "Invest in my green fund, it'll magically create value." We are going out, and we're saying, actually, to make this fund ESG friendly, which essentially in sale and lease back means improving the insulation, lighting and so forth of building, it's going to be a cost. I think Kevin will go through that later. This has really resonated with investors. That's quite an important topic, and we absolutely need to remain a leader in our industry, a leader on that front.
On that, we're all happy to answer a first set of question on what we've heard so far. We'll have another session at the end, of course, if you want. Go ahead .
Yeah. Hi. It's Jens Ehrenberg from Citi. Two questions, if I may. I suppose the first one refers to what Jens Tonn said earlier, growing with the companies you invest in. Do you provide any split of how many of your investments are actually kind of new investments in new companies, and how many are follow-on investments from previously invested companies?
We don't really. It varies dramatically from strategy to strategy. The one where we probably have so far, it may also be linked to the maturity of the strategy. The one where so far we've had the greatest success in accompanying business is, unsurprisingly, our oldest strategy, which is that European fund. If I look at, for instance, in senior direct lending, we're starting to see that as well. We are just in the process of exiting, although, we'll keep a small piece, so it's not completely over. We're in the process of exiting a transaction. It's a French business, flooring business called Gerflor, in which we've been invested nonstop for 26 years, I think. In the last iteration, that's an indication of why we quite like to do this. We really understand those businesses from the inside.
In the last iteration, we've made 8x our money over the past nine years on that Gerflor business.
Okay.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah. On the other one is really just to confirm on your ESG efforts. I think you mentioned your PRI score of AB. Did I hear you correctly that that would be outperforming your private capital peers in Europe?
I think so, but Eimear, you may want to take this.
Yes. Yes, it outperforms the average of our peers in our industry. We have an A score as opposed to B.
Maybe this is European alternative asset managers or?
Yes, within our size range as well, so from the, I think it's GBP 30 billion-GBP 50 billion.
All right. Thank you.
Also just to clarify, that score was from last year, so it was the result of our efforts from the previous year. We're now in the process of doing our current PRI assessment, which will reflect a lot of the new changes and the enhanced framework that we've put in place.
Understood. Thank you.
Hi, good morning. It's Gurjit Kambo, JPMorgan. Just three questions. Firstly, in terms of the sort of shift of public towards private. We've seen q uite prominently at the moment. Does that mean in terms of realization, I guess the IPO was a good exit route historically. I think that's changing now more towards trade buyers and maybe other PE firms. Is that impacting the way you exit investments?
What you're describing is right, but more so in the U.S. The IPO market in Europe was never really a big route of exit for transactions. For Europe, that's not really changing much of anything. In the U.S., yes, that is clearly the case. If anything, it's making it easier. The biggest downside of an IPO exit for a private investor is that you're locked in for a period of time, and then you're mark-to-market on your investment. A private equity owner will always prefer to do a private exit. It's cleaner. You have your full valuation immediately. If anything, it's a positive development. Behind that, it's more the capacity that is meaningful than is it the public market versus the private market?
The fact that there is so much capacity in private market, that's clearly helping the, certainly exits, but it's helping the growth of the market as a whole. That is what we are experiencing today.
Then I think it was slide 16, you give the three different strategies. When you think about your business over the next sort of five years or so, how much do you think about the existing strategies? I think it was slide 16.
Well, it's going to be too much work then for the next person, so I won't do that.
No, just really the existing strategies and then your sort of follow-ons, and then the new strategies. How do you think about growth between the three different areas?
All of them?
Yeah.
Intuitively, when we started doing that, and actually if you go back to some of our presentations from several years ago, our anticipation was that, and we're actually still using that slide, which I think is not a great slide because it's showing the more traditional maturity curve of a product, which is not what we're experiencing. The more established strategies keep on growing. They keep on growing quite significantly. There is no rule. Because the private market has been growing, we've been surprised by the growth of the market. Five years ago, if you'd asked, okay, what is the market potential for direct lending in Europe, for instance? We probably would have said, "Well, we might be able to invest a fund of GBP 2 billion, GBP 3 billion," which is pretty much what we did because that was our estimate of the market opportunity.
The market has run well ahead of us. We raised more last time, and the market kept on growing, so we're raising more now. It's a difficult one because the whole market is growing, and so it's impacting both the well-established strategies, the more recent strategies. The one where there's a question mark because it require quite a lot of execution capability and marketing is newer strategies. That's a lot more difficult. The prize is quite big as well, which is why we need to keep coming up with these new strategies and making the effort rather than milking what we have. We could easily grow for the next 10 years and more just milking all the strategies that we have launched. There is very significant growth potential there. If we're thinking further out, then you need the brand-new strategies today.
They take a long time to bed in.
Yeah. Just the final one. In terms of the proportion of investments that you actually do versus what you actually look at, I think it's remained relatively consistent. Your fund size are clearly getting larger. How much bigger are the deals becoming in terms of, if you're doing it the same investing with fewer, same level of deals?
Yeah. The average size tends to follow the growth of the funds. There are differences strategy by strategy, but essentially that's what you're seeing. Putting it differently, you're not seeing necessarily many more deals in a vintage because the vintage has increased. You're just doing bigger deal. Incidentally, that is one of the reasons why we launched last year the European Mid-Market Fund because suddenly we had started to no longer look at or do the more mid-market investments, which was a missed opportunity because it's a sizable part of the market. We raised the fund dedicated to that part of the market.
Great. Thank you.
Sure.
Hi. Sam Mahon from Lloyds Bank. Eimear mentioned in our ESG presentation that sometimes ICG partners with sponsors that have less of an ESG focus than you do. What's the approach for that going forward? Are you going to work with them less to make sure that you stay on top of the ESG priorities?
It's a very good question. It's quite difficult to do when you are essentially leading the field. Eimear is right. There are different sensitivities. By the way, they could be very different geography by geography. We have to work with them. There's only so much you can do. If you're purely in a debt instruments, for instance, it's very difficult to have an influence. You can ask for the information, but it's very difficult to have influence if you want to set up KPIs, for instance, for management. It's very difficult if the private equity sponsor doesn't feel that this is top of their agenda. What we do, however, systematically is screen at the due diligence level. Where we will decide not to do a transaction is if we feel that clearly there's no focus at all on ESG matters upfront.
Once you're in the transaction, depending on our involvement, we may have more or less influence. Yes.
Hi. Liz Miliatis f rom Merrill Lynch or Bank of America now. Firstly. You guys obviously dominate the European market and have some presence in the U.S. and Asia. How do you feel you're able to invest in the U.S., which is obviously very competitive? Asia, which is obviously a very different market from the other two. Secondly, I was hoping for perhaps a revision to your AUM guidance, actually. Given we've got the Senior Debt Partners being launched, fund four being fundraised soon and t he ICG Europe Fund VIII, and they're both going to be quite large funds on my estimates. Why didn't you revise the guidance?
Oh, my. You've had a whole raft of questions.
Three questions.
You get another shot at the end of the presentation.
I have more. On ESG.
No trust I'll remember them all. Okay.
On ESG, is it safe to assume that you won't launch an ESG specific fund because they're all sort of ESG approved? Thank you.
Okay. U.S., Asia. Yes, you're right. We are a European manager. The U.S. market is quite a protected market, actually. Very few European in alternatives managers have done well there. Which is why we've taken our time, and we've been in the U.S. for quite some time now. We always apply the same recipe, if you will. Is we launch one strategy, we bed it in, we wait for that strategy to be established, and we build on that to raise another one. We don't want to get carried away. That's what we've done, and we've done it quite successfully. Now, we have a profitable franchise in the U.S. We have about GBP 10 billion of AUM in the U.S., which for a European manager isn't bad. Actually, it's quite good in our industry.
There is more to be done, but we're adding those pieces progressively. You will later see a video of Alan Jones, who we've hired out of Morgan Stanley to launch a mid-market private equity business in the U.S. Again, we haven't brought in an entire team. We brought him in. He's building a team around him. We're going to progressively, during the course of this year, probably make a few investment out of our own balance sheet, get comfortable with the risk-taking, the approach of the team, and then fundraise. We're doing it step by step. I think my answer to you for the U.S., it's a great market, but you have to be careful as a European manager. We're doing it step by step. So far with reasonably good success. Asia, it's a different environment.
We've been in Asia for a long time now, 17, 18 years. The difficulty in Asia is it's a collection of relatively small markets for alternatives. The difficulty there is managing teams that are spread apart with a market opportunity that is not as deep yet as it is in Europe or the U.S. You need to have presence there because this market is growing. It will continue to grow. You have to be there, and continue to grow with that market. There's also an added benefit, which we've already seen, is the fact that we've been present, investing in the region for so long is very beneficial when we're fundraising because we are known, we are recognized by the investors there. That's true for the sovereign wealth fund in particular. For instance, it's true in Japan.
If Andreas, who's leading our marketing effort is here, and he was fortunate enough not to have to speak today, but I'm sure he'll be happy to answer questions. Japan, for instance, that's had an impact. The fact that we've had presence there and we've been marketing there now for years, we're recognized. As this market grows, I think we should benefit. Your second question is on AUM guidance, right? This is not an easy one. You're right to point out that if you look at what we've delivered on AUM growth, the guidance that we gave actually not that long ago, it's we adjusted that guidance, what, a year and a half ago. We already increased it by 50% a year and a half ago. We far exceeded it. The difficulty with it, is that it's a rolling target, which is not necessarily always understood.
By nature, our fundraising cycle is a cycle. This year, we had wrongly anticipated to be a low year in our fundraising cycle, but that's before we brought forward the fundraising of SDP IV. Now it looks as though it's going to be a high year, but next year then is likely then to be the low year. It's very difficult to anticipate, and I think we'll see. I think for now, we're trying to give better guidance for the year, for the medium term, rather than try to work through an entire cycle, which I think is actually quite difficult to do. Last question was on ESG, which I think is that's another one for you. Quite popular, Eimear.
On a dedicated ESG fund?
Yes.
Yes, I think so. We have our two sustainable strategies, but I think there is definitely the opportunity to go further and something we're considering possibly an impact fund in the future.
Yep, absolutely. That's on Eimear's to-do list. We do not want to fall into the greenwashing trap. We will not launch a fund if we don't believe there's an investment case for it. I think there might be. So far we've launched strategies that are essentially made green by our approach to them. A pure impact fund, where the very nature of the investments are impactful. That's a possibility. There is not a great history of it, but there's no doubt there's an opportunity there, and that's one we're looking at. We still need to establish where can we defend there is a proper investment case beyond the fact that it's impact.
Thank you.
Great. I think one more question, but I think then we need to resume the presentation, and we'll take more at the end.
Thank you. Melwin from Sterling Investments.
Yeah.
I was a happy shareholder this morning. You also made me proud with a very good show. I've got two questions on this slide. One is balance sheet, and one is off balance sheet.
Sorry, can you show the slide again?
This one.
You were too quick for me. Okay. Yes.
I'm focusing on the GBP 100 billion, yeah.
Yes. Wonder why?
I think it's a absolute achievable target under your leadership. The question or rather, a concern from the market perception side is, how much of our own balance sheet will be deployed, as we head towards GBP 100 billion?
I think that's one for Vijay.
Yeah. Well, actually, if you don't mind waiting, I'm actually going to be touching on that in the presentation.
Okay, cool. Thanks for that, Vijay. The second question is, I think Jens referred to saying that you kind of recruited people, the senior MD level, et cetera. The question is that, how much would the cost increase, and how much of new talent is yet to come and join the team to get to GBP 100 billion?
Well, I don't know. That's too broad of a question. There are many ways to get to GBP 100 billion. I think what you're referring to, what Jens was mentioning, I think Jens was also mentioning the fact that we were tactically recruiting because we're thinking of subsequent vintages. It's actually an opportunity for us. Not so long ago, we would not have been able to hire that quality of talent. We weren't as visible. We had to essentially home-grow the talent, which works, but to an extent. The fact that we're now able to attract people from the best players out there is clear. It means essentially, we can accelerate our growth. That's what this means. At the end of the day, I mentioned in my very first slide that it's a people business. It's all about talent.
You can't originate the deals if you don't have the senior people with that ability. That should enable us to accelerate. You're mentioning cost. I think we need to bring it back to what it means when Jens has dramatically increased the size of his team in Germany. It's doubled, which means he's hired two people, okay? This is what we're talking about in our industry. I wouldn't worry too much about costs running out of control. It's not exactly our style.
Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you for all your questions. We'll resume the presentation, and we'll have another session in the end, so don't feel too frustrated if you still have many questions to ask. We have a coffee break. Yeah, I think we well deserve a coffee break.
Thank you all, and welcome back. I will now provide you an overview of how we think about new strategies. As you saw earlier in Benoît's presentation, there are three key drivers to growing our business. Benoît talked about the first two of these, growing established strategies and developing emerging strategies. I will now give you an overview of how adding new strategies is important, and why that plays a critical role in our objective to diversify and create long-term shareholder value. Examples of current new strategies which touched on earlier are the sale and lease back fund and the infrastructure equity. My colleagues, Kevin and Jérôme, will talk about those a little bit more in detail later on. Adding new strategies to complement our existing offering is key to growing our client base. There are three key dependencies to this. One, attracting and retaining talent.
Two, ensuring we have a scalable operating platform, and three, having the capital to invest. I'll touch on all these three later on. What is our track record in adding new strategies? The left-hand side of this shows the strategies we had only 10 years ago. We only had four strategies 10 years ago. Since then, we've launched 17 successful strategies. We now have 21. The breadth of our capabilities enables us to continue to innovate. What lies ahead? There are a number of strategies that are in development. A few of the more advanced ideas are shown on here on the most right-hand side with the four strategies that are still being worked on. While there's no guarantee, given our track record, we are optimistic that these will be successful additions to our offering.
In addition, as Benoît showed in his matrix of our current capabilities across geographies and products, there are many gaps. We remain selective and continue to explore opportunities depending on client appetite and our ability to attract talent. I will now explain the process that we follow in considering new strategies, which typically follows a four-phase cycle. During the first phase, ideas are sourced by various combination of our investment teams, our marketing teams, or our CEO. Sometimes we get inbounds on opportunities as well. Once we get an opportunity that we think is interesting, we will test that by soundboarding with some of our investors and also assessing the market dynamics. If we think an idea is worth developingwe'll explore the options of entering the market and how we will be able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We also seek to look for talent.
This is the most challenging part. Talent in our industry is tied over a long term to the funds they manage. Typically, there are significant levels of unvested carry that are expensive to buy out. We therefore have to be very selective in choosing and picking the talent that we pick. I will touch on the forms of talent onboarding that we take later on. Once we have a team in place, the team will explore investment opportunities as well as work with our marketing and our legal teams to develop the fund. During this phase, the investment process that we apply is the same as our existing strategies. The same level of rigor and the same level of discipline is applied in looking at investments that will then be warehoused on our balance sheet. This is where our balance sheet plays a key role.
We will use the balance sheet capital to invest selectively and create a proof of concept. Finally, if successful, we will begin fundraising and generating fees, and that depends obviously if the fund is paying fees on committed capital or on an invested basis. Creating strategies is a long and time-consuming journey in our industry. It can take many years. As I mentioned earlier, there are three factors that are dependent in our ability to launch new strategies. One of them is predicated on the ability to attract new talent. Sometimes our efforts pay off, and we're able to find whole teams. This was the case in case of infrastructure equity and our Strategic Equity business. Mostly, we tend to find an individual. We then mandate that individual to build a team and develop a strategy.
This was the case in the case of North America Private Debt Fund, where in 2012 we hired an individual in New York. That strategy now has over 80 investment professionals, and as Benoît touched on, we now have a very large office with nearly over 50 people and 10 billion in AUM. Antje, our head of HR, will touch on later on our talent sourcing capabilities and the process we follow. Occasionally, we may acquire a business, as was the case in our U.K. real estate business when we acquired Longbow. M&A in our industry is extremely challenging. There are different cultures, and as I mentioned earlier, people are tied for long term on their funds. Whilst we never say never, we don't actively pursue M&A, and if we did, it would have to be meaningfully accretive to shareholder value.
We believe at current point in time, there isn't that much value out there in our industry. The second factor in adding value-enhancing strategies and growing our business is the ability of our operating platform. New products, funds or segregated mandates, together with increasingly bespoke client reporting requirements, create a lot of complexity for our industry and ICG. We therefore continually assess the capability of our platform, focusing on the following key components. Organization. As we grow, we want to ensure that we don't become fragmented. We are nimble. We want to remain nimble and entrepreneurial. We therefore have to ensure that we can figure out a way that we can functionalize some of the services that we provide to our clients and our businesses. This entails attracting and retaining talent, operational capabilities that are very significantly difficult to find in our industry.
The other component in assessing our operating platform is sourcing. As we get bigger, we continually to think about whether we carry our processes in-house through our third-party administrators or create centers of excellence that can actually support our businesses and our clients on a 24/7 basis. We apply a smart approach to sourcing. Smart sourcing, if structured and managed well, can create significant capacity and productivity. Process. This is an area that requires ongoing assessment. As we become more complex, business processes can become disparate and duplicative. We therefore need to figure out how we can implement process standardization. This would improve and streamline workflows. We can then introduce digital workflows to systemize complex processes further. Finally, technology and data. These can be game changers. Having the ability to store data in one place which the whole organization is able to utilize and apply is valuable.
Having a single source of truth can be transformational for any organization. We continually look for opportunities like that across our organization. These four components form the basis of assessing our platform and our execution capabilities. I have found our operating platform to be impressive since I joined eight months ago. We've been able to grow the revenues and improve operating margins. As we look towards longer term sustainable growth, we expect to continue to invest in our operating platform selectively as well as create sustainability and ensure that our platform is fit for the future and therefore take a competitive advantage against our competitors while maintaining operating leverage. The third factor in growing new strategies is having access to capital. This is where we have a differentiation. Our balance sheet is a differentiator in that regard.
It plays an important role throughout the growth of the strategy. During development, we use the balance sheet to hire teams as well as seed and warehouse investments in respect of strategies that we haven't launched yet. This allows us to take advantage of making investments and creating value for our future clients. It also enables us to develop a track record. Our balance sheet is also an accelerator. Once we launch a new strategy, we are the anchor investor, which is pivotal for our marketing efforts. Finally, once a strategy is established and mature, our balance sheet supports the fund by co-investing in our funds, demonstrating strong alignment with our clients. We believe our balance sheet is an enabler and an accelerator for our long-term growth and shareholder value creation. Just to give you some perspective, looking at what our balance sheet has committed over the years.
Over the last seven years, we have committed GBP 1.4 billion across all of our four businesses. This excludes capital that we have to put aside for regulatory purposes for our CLO business. In this financial year, we've committed over GBP 350 million in three strategies to date. This is a significant commitment that few of our competitors can match. This is our advantage. There was a question earlier about the size of our balance sheet.
What has been the profile of our balance sheet relative to our AUM? In 2010, our total AUM was EUR 11 billion, and our balance sheet was EUR 3 billion or 27% of total AUM. We gave a trading statement update today. Our total AUM is just under EUR 43 billion, and our balance sheet is EUR 2.7 billion. As we continue to grow, we expect our balance sheet to remain around EUR 3 billion.
If hypothetically we had EUR 100 billion, that translates into 3% of total AUM. We expect our balance sheet to be a relatively small but a very important component of our long-term growth. To conclude, we have an unrivaled record of successfully adding new strategies. Our brand is becoming more prominent, and that is helping to attract talent. As we grow, we will continue to invest in our operating platform to ensure it's fit for the future, as well as use our balance sheet to invest in that growth. We believe we have a significant growth potential while ensuring we maintain our operating leverage. Thank you. I will now pass on to Antje, our head of HR.
Hello, everyone. I'm Antje Hensel-Roth. I'm the head of HR. I've joined ICG in 2018. Prior to that, I spent 15 years in consulting, most recently, running the global asset management practice at Russell Reynolds, the executive search firm. In that capacity, I have actually worked with ICG since 2011, and been an external advisor on succession planning, on diversification strategies, as well as on senior hiring more broadly. We've heard a lot about growth strategies and diversification today, and when we look at the people who underpin this, what do we actually look for? I think by way of background, ICG's success is built on a culture of entrepreneurialism, of business building, and of innovation. At the same time, our background is very much certainly from an investment perspective, in downside protection, in risk-adjusted returns, and that filters through the organization as well.
Therefore, the kinds of people who we look for and the kinds of people who do best at the firm tend to be the ones who are very proactive, very ambitious, want to make a mark, want to build a business, but crucially, they have their risk management and they need their egos quite well under control. In return, we offer them a multitude of opportunities to make this impact, and as a result, the turnover tends to be very well adjusted at about 8%-10% in total. This is geared predominantly towards the more junior end of the spectrum, and we believe that's actually quite healthy to ensure that both we get new impulses from fresh blood, but we also retain stability across the firm.
Undoubtedly, the talent market has become a lot more competitive in recent years, and that also holds true, particularly when looking at attracting people from rival asset management businesses rather than necessarily from banks or consulting firms. Therefore, we've revamped our recruitment approach slightly, and we believe very much in a holistic strategy which both incorporates intermediaries and planful hiring, but it also incorporates more opportunistic recruitment with an always-on mindset. What that means is, the best people, when we are ready and when they become available, we will find ways to work together. It also is predicated on a proactive outreach culture, meaning we build relationships over many years. We cultivate them.
We ensure that we're forefront of mind, and that has enabled us, particularly in the last three, four years, to hire some significant heavy hitters across the investment side in fundraising, as well as in terms of the operational infrastructure of the business. When we look at staff growth, we've seen earlier AUM have quadrupled over the past decade. Staff numbers have tripled in the same period. The U.K. remains by far our biggest location, but we steadily diversified geographically into new areas. The U.S. now has almost 60 people and is rising, but we're also augmenting in continental Europe, and indeed in Asia-Pac. It's important for us, clearly, to ensure that across both private and public debt as well as in private equity, the U.S. remains a big growth market. Real estate is probably slightly further out, but certainly on the radar screen.
In Europe, our local for local model, meaning deal executives and indeed fundraisers originating from local markets, sourcing and originating money from local markets as well, has served us incredibly well. To Jens Tonn's earlier point, the fact that we've been able to create proprietary deals in many geographies across Europe and also in Asia-Pac is very much due to the fact that we have presence and that we have shown commitment to those regions for many, many years, and in some cases, indeed, for a couple of decades. We then look at the shape that our hiring has taken over the last few years and will likely continue to take, there are team hires. We heard some of this from Vijay just now, and you will hear from Jérôme in our infrastructure private equity team in a moment. Infrastructure being a prime example.
We've hired a seven-strong team in Paris. We've just augmented this with an additional hire in Frankfurt. We continue to keep our eyes very much open and build relationships with interesting teams all across the markets globally. Team building is equally important. We'll hear in a moment via video from Alan Jones, AJ, our most recent recruit in the U.S. He is someone who's first been on my radar about 10 years ago. We've known each other a long time.
Clearly, having looked at the U.S. for a very long time, we wanted to be absolutely sure that we hire the right person who can attract the right people, who can do great deals, who can have an impact in the market, who is a cultural fit as well, and can make this a sustainable business rather than, as some of our European cousins, charging into what is the world's largest market and not necessarily taking the longer-term view. We're delighted to have A.J. on board. Lastly, we still continue to practice team augmentation, particularly in the European corporate business. We've made, over the last year, three significant hires. Zeina Bain from Carlyle, whom we very long admired for her exceptional deal-doing in the U.K. and Northern Europe.
Jamie Rivers from BC Partners is another example, who did great work in U.K. private equity, but really wanted to come to a firm that allowed him to go up and down the capital structure and take advantage of opportunities more broadly rather than purely in the buyout market. Another example being Thierry Beyard, who joined us from ADIA and therefore brings both the asset owner mindset, but also a lot of experience working previously for a third-party asset manager. Let me hand over to a little video of A.J.
I spent a little more than three decades in the industry, and the last 25 of those years had been at Morgan Stanley, where I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to build and lead a number of the firm's businesses. Most recently, I spent the last 12 years rebuilding the firm's alternative investment platform, and that's an opportunity that I really enjoyed and really stands me in good stead for the opportunity that I have now at ICG. I've known ICG for more than 20 years. In the late 1990s, I was given the opportunity to relocate to London to build Morgan Stanley's European leverage finance business. At that time, ICG was already an important leader in the European credit markets.
For me, I got to know them originally as a very tough and very disciplined competitor, and I was very impressed by that. What struck me about ICG at the time was their well-deserved reputation for pragmatic creativity. What I mean by that was they're very good at looking at the specific needs of their clients and working very creatively to bring them the best possible solution. I knew them originally as a competitor, but I came to follow them over the years as they continued to grow in the asset management business. I think what attracted me to ICG was really the excellence across what I regard as the three important pillars of strength in the asset management business. To succeed in asset management, you really need to be excellent in three important areas.
One, of course, is investing excellence, and ICG has an extraordinary and sustained track record for investing excellence across a broad number of funds. The other two areas are equally important, however. Fundraising and fund administration. ICG has really built a fundraising machine that has continued year in and year out to deliver extraordinary results, and that's critically important for someone like me who's setting up a new fund. The third leg, the third pillar, is really fund administration. Fund administration, we can occasionally take for granted, but having the excellent fund administration that ICG has built over many years is critically important because it's often the point of interaction between our limited partners and ICG, where people assume that everything is going to go perfectly.
The good news is, at ICG, it typically does, and having all three of those pillars be equally strong was really what attracted me to ICG. It's interesting. What I've found exceeded my original expectations. I really had very high expectations coming into ICG, inevitably, when you start at a new firm, you expect to discover things that are not quite what you'd hoped they would be, the opposite has been true at ICG. It's really been about the people. Importantly, as I've spent more time here and get to interact directly with more and more of the people at ICG, I'm daily reminded of the exceptional quality of the people and the excellence that they all bring to bear on their opportunities. I think if I could characterize it simply, it's a level of entrepreneurial energy.
The people at ICG just get up every morning eager to innovate, eager to do good work, and eager to perform in really outstanding ways. If anything, the actual results have exceeded the expectations that I brought to ICG.
We've heard a bit about talent attraction and seen an example. I think really what underpins our growth more broadly is the retention of great people. We focus on three elements in order to achieve that. The first is to offer outstanding career opportunities. The second is strong levels of engagement, which includes diversity and inclusion strategies. Thirdly, economic alignment of interest. When we talk about career opportunities, this is not really about accumulation of titles and how to get promoted every other year, et cetera. Our focus is really all about how can people bring the best ideas to the firm. How can they develop new initiatives? How can they be at the forefront of the market, whether that's an investment strategy or a fund administrative process.
Whether it's fundraising, where we've perfected, dare I say it, the first-time fundraise, for example, and ensuring that we enable people to really make the most of their skills and experiences. We are probably one of the very, very few firms in our industry in alternative investments to have a proper and a developed learning and development offering. We have an in-house coach who is a clinical psychologist, and works both one-on-one with individuals, but also with teams to help them in their evolution. I think that really impacts culture quite sustainably, but it also ties us together because we look at more than just the immediate deliverable. On the engagement front, we have placed particular emphasis in the past couple of years on diversity and inclusion, but also on ensuring that the different parts of our firm come together and collaborate effectively.
We've just, hot off the press, concluded our employee engagement survey globally. Mercer, the leadership consulting firm, has helped us with the conduction and the analysis of this. We're quite proud to say that we are well ahead in terms of overall engagement levels, in terms of collaboration, in terms of thriving at the firm, both of the overall financial services industry, and we have been compared to 1.4 million datasets. Also very comfortably in the top quartile, compared to over 6 million datasets across all industries globally. I think that really makes an enormous difference to the retention of talent and also to their flourishing within the firm. Lastly, economic alignment. We commit to each other over a very long time, whether that's through co-invest, whether that's through the long-term incentive plans.
As a result, our bad leaver rates, which is individuals who leave us to go and compete somewhere else immediately, are exceptionally low at less than 3%. Just to give you a little bit of color around the focus on diversity and inclusion. Here there are clearly two elements at play. One is diversity, and for ICG, commensurate with many of our peers and indeed the wider financial services industry, the real issue here is around gender. The second part is inclusion more broadly and enabling people to be themselves, bring the best of themselves to the firm, and achieve their goals. In order to address the first point around gender diversity, we have signed up to the Women in Finance Charter. We have committed ourselves to achieving 30% of female representation at the senior level by 2023. We did this last year.
In order to achieve that, clearly there is an element of hiring, then there is an element of retaining and developing women within the firm. On the hiring front, we are challenging ourselves enormously in terms of, are we dealing with preconceived ideas? Are we dealing with unbiased, excuse me, unconscious bias even, properly? Are we doing the best we can on the hiring front in terms of balanced shortlists, attracting women through the language we use, et cetera? As a result, last year, this may not be the case every year, we have achieved a 50/50 split of senior hires in the firm. That has brought us up from 23% to almost 28% of female representation within one year. We hope that that will continue. It may not be linear, but it's certainly something that we take incredibly seriously.
The second is development. That includes coaching, it includes mentoring from the senior management team to help women make their way through the firm and flourish. Thirdly, it's engagement. That really cuts across the diversity agenda and the broader inclusivity agenda. This includes a committee that takes best ideas, filters them up, and ensures they are put into action. It's networking opportunities for specific areas. It's a wellbeing program that covers everything from elderly care to IVF to mental health. It is also engagement with our corporate PLC board, both in an informal way, through lunches, et cetera, but also formally in focus groups to ensure that all sides really learn how we can do better and how we can get the most out of each other.
In summary, the point around people being key to the sustainable growth of a business is really much more than just a cliché. We are investing in our most valuable asset significantly. We are taking it incredibly seriously. We're creating opportunities for our people, and we're enabling them to create their own opportunities. We do it inclusively and collaboratively, and we align our interests across the board. I think that has led to an exceptional brand of employment for ICG in the last few years. I think if we couple this with a more holistic approach to talent attraction, I think we have something quite special here. We are fast becoming the place to be in global alternative. Thank you. I will hand over to Kevin now, who will tell you a bit more about sale and leaseback.
I will get that. I'm Kevin Cooper, Co-head, Co-founder of the real estate business at ICG. Sale and leaseback is an initiative that I've led since inception. It's a initiative that's been strongly sponsored by senior management since its inception, particularly Benoît. In this short presentation, I'm gonna walk you through the sale and leaseback journey. Why we picked sale and leaseback as a value-enhancing strategy, which was slide 16, far right in Benoît's earlier presentation, and why the investment thesis has been well-received by our clients. For context setting, I'd like to remind people there has been a first close, and the strategy is very much up and running. We started on this journey three years ago. At that point, the firm had a very strong private debt real estate business in the U.K., and the broader firm was very strong across the whole of Continental Europe.
Expanding real estate into Continental Europe seemed the natural and low-risk growth option for the firm. Rather than just assume that what we did already in the U.K. could be exported to the rest of Europe, we did a far more fundamental bottom-up market opportunity analysis, over here, to find a compelling investment opportunity. Investors want to invest in compelling investment opportunities. That thesis needed to be strong from a risk-adjusted basis. We've heard earlier about the firms very focused on risk-adjusted returns. That's something that the real estate business is also very focused on. Our investors, middle column, don't just want something that works for fund one, they also want something that's enduring. We were looking for a opportunity set that was going to have multiple fund vintages as its potential.
The firm needed to be credible from an investor perspective, i.e., something where they thought we had existing expertise and would be well-placed to execute the strategy. Lastly, per Vijay's earlier comments, we wanted a strategy where investors would pay fees on committed capital. Our search covered office development in Germany, non-performing loans in Italy. That was quite a contrast in those few months, looking at those two markets. Debt, equity, hybrid, and everything in between and above geographically. Where we landed was sale and leaseback. What is sale and leaseback? Far right of the slide we're on now. We acquire, and it is an equity strategy, mission-critical real estate from corporates in sale and leaseback transactions. The leases are long, and they're normally RPI linked.
What's key to our investment approach is that those real estate assets need to be critical to the operational success of the business. More simply, paying the rent needs to be of utmost importance to the tenant. The aggregate outcome of multiple sale and leaseback transactions is a diversified pool of highly predictable real return income that we distribute to investors. Quarterly income targets are in the 7%-8% range. To deliver on the strategy's objectives, there are two key components and competencies that a manager has to have. The first is real estate origination and underwriting. The second, very importantly, is corporate credit. These leases are long.
The creditworthiness of the tenant in paying the rent for over that long period and the industry it's in and the likely success of that industry over the long term are very important underwriting aspects. In response to those two key requirements, we formed a collaboration between the real estate business and SDP, which is our corporate lending business. It's a genuine, deep collaboration. Half of the investment committee is real estate based, and the other half is corporate credit based. That collaboration's been well-received by our investor clients. They see the joint approach as a key differentiator for the firm and a key driver of investment returns going forward. Turning to the scale of the SLB opportunity, the line in red here is the proportion of real estate transactions which are sold and leased back in the U.S.
The lower line here is the proportion of sale and leaseback transactions as a proportion of the total real estate market turnover in Europe. You can see there's a substantial difference. One's four, one's 15. There is no causal reason for that gap. Sale and leaseback transactions are undertaken mostly for cost of capital efficiency reasons. The businesses in Europe run for the same profit methodology as the businesses in the U.S. At the moment, this 5% is around GBP 13 billion per annum of annual sale and leaseback turnover that we can invest into. That works for the strategy, but we also think that this gap's going to get closed as European corporates operate a more efficient capital model, and that GBP 13 billion will grow over time and provide a great environment for the strategy to invest into.
Important in terms of scaling the market is how long is this going to go on for. At the moment, in the U.S., only 30% of the real estate is now owned by corporates. They've been sale and leasebacking for quite a while. In Europe, 50% of the opportunity set is still owned by corporates. Closing that gap of 20% is EUR 1.1 trillion of transactions. To put it another way, we're all going to be long retired before the sale and leaseback opportunity set is played out. Within that steady volume and what we see as growing volume of deal opportunity, we have to compete with other investors and managers to win the deals we like. Competition is relatively limited, and it's predominantly U.S. anchored. All these are U.S. entities. The only European multi-manager targeting this space in Europe is ICG.
Worth noting as well that the largest manager in this space, which has been doing it the longest, W. P. Carey, which is a U.S. REIT with a market cap of around $14 billion, is a public vehicle. They acquire assets in Europe and it goes into the U.S. vehicle. If you invest in the shares at the moment in W. P. Carey, for every dollar you put in, you'll get $0.70 of net asset value. The shares have had a really strong run, and net lease REITs, as they call them in the U.S., have been one of the best performers for years. If you invest with ICG through its private market strategy, for every euro you invest in our private markets funds, you get a euro of NAV.
If you're an institutional investor, and as they do, they look at can I access this opportunity set publicly or privately, there's a significant private market advantage from working with ICG to target this space. The aggregate effect for us of the competitive set, the depth of the opportunity, is that we think we can establish a leadership position in this space in the relatively short term. Pipeline and winning deals isn't anything unless you can source investor capital. The value proposition that our investors have bought into is actually correlated with our rationale, of course, for getting into the space. They see the strong market opportunity. Almost all our investors that we speak to are multi-strategy. They understand the rationale for corporates from a cost of capital basis to sale and lease back their property. They think the opportunity set's going to be enduring.
They think there's going to be fund one, fund two, fund three. They see the strategy as defensive. The leases are long. Income streams are very predictable. They get the mission-critical element of the real estate, and they believe, as has been our experience, that in adversity, if you do have operationally mission-critical real estate, that rent is paid in preference to finance obligations. Finance obligations are paid from trading profits. You need to operate from real estate for many companies to generate those trading profits. Lastly, in terms of the value proposition, what's been key is the way we have combined our in-house existing real estate and credit skills, and added a direct European investing experience of Chris Nichols, who joined us as part of our talent recruitment, talked about earlier by Antje, to lead the strategy.
I think you've already heard from Eimear on ESG. Benoît kindly gave us another heads up in terms of the fact that we are investing part of the fund, not for IRR, but actually for ESG outcomes. Within the fund, and this has been very well received by investors, there's a EUR 20 million allocation to generate positive ESG outcomes. Investors recognize, and we recognize, that the real estate environment, or what's known as the built environment, is a big contributor to greenhouse gases. I think in Europe it's around 40%. Actions you take in real estate can have a big impact in terms of ESG. That EUR 20 million is focused in three areas, and most likely the top one, climate action, where energy is a key component, is where we're going to be investing most of the capital.
To give you an example of what we're doing at the moment is the first transaction we did, which is a portfolio of supermarkets in the Basque region of northern Spain. We are working with the tenant to install solar panels on the largely flat roofs of our estate, in what is an extremely sunny climate, to create clean energy. That's all the theory. What's the reality on the ground? In 2018, Jones Lang LaSalle said that the primary sale-leaseback market in Europe is EUR 13 billion a year. Our experience on pipeline for the past 12 months is that we saw EUR 13 billion. We've either got the best team in the world, or the stats aren't very good. By the way, imperfect stats are great for us as a private market investor.
It means the fact that we're in the market and we have proprietary data that we believe is true is an advantage. 2019, we looked at 394 deals, 110 made the pipeline, and we closed on three. Importantly, those deals were proof of concept that created the momentum for the successful first close and the level of interest we have going forward. Those were funded by the balance sheet under the strategy that Vijay identified earlier. Pipeline's great, but you've got to win the ones you like. What's been key to vendors choosing us to lease back their property to rather than the competition, has been the ICG brand recognition. The fact that many of the advisors already know the real estate franchise of ICG or its broader corporate private credit or corporate private equity franchise. Our local geographic footprint has also been very valuable.
We were able to tap into a very fluent in Spanish-speaking executive in SDP, to help us win the Eroski deal. That deal was agreed in the ICG Madrid office. That deal that was agreed in our Madrid office is our case study. It's Eroski. It's six supermarkets across the Basque country in northern Spain. It's Spain's fourth largest supermarket retailer. It's effectively the largest retailer in the region that it serves. In the analysis that we undertook, we focused on two areas, the ability of the tenant to pay rent sustainably, and in adversity, the alternative users that would take occupation and pay us rent, if for some reason, Eroski had an unexpected failure. Our assets are in Eroski's top quartile in terms of supermarket EBITDA generation per sq m. Where they're located are supported by strong local brand loyalty. It's prosperous there.
The Basque region has GDP per head about 33% higher than the national average of Spain. It's an attractive place to have supermarkets. The EBITDA margin, which we had full transparency on before we made the acquisitions and was a key part of our underwriting, is 8.9% in the assets that we're supporting, which is double the industry average and very high in Eroski's own portfolio. All of this contributing to our belief that these assets are key operationally to the tenant in its generation of profits for its investors. What that all added up to is that the EBITDAs generated within our assets covered the rent 2.7x , which in industry norms for supermarket, which is a fairly steady business, is a strong level. From a real estate perspective, most important thing was that the assets are well located. Eroski's been in the Basque country for decades.
They were a first mover. They got the best locations on their home turf. That was supported by the alternative user work that we did. We interviewed, in direct conversation, Carrefour and Alcampo to ask them, would they like to let our units? They didn't actually know we're undertaking the sale-leaseback transaction. They thought there might be an earlier opportunity for them to take ownership or tenancy. Both of them were extremely interested at the rents that we've set with Eroski. Indeed, if they were operating these supermarkets, the yield on the real estate would be significantly tighter given their significant scale. Lastly, the business plan on this case study, simple one, leverage the rental income one to one to create that quarterly dividend stream that our investors like. That's rising by CPI. Secondly, detailed asset management in each location.
We're looking at putting a Costa Coffee and a McDonald's in one of the car parks, but also one of the assets is extremely centrally located and surrounded by residential towers, and our asset is single story. We're looking at a planning permission for residential there, which will create significant additional value. Lastly, from business plan perspective, we're monitoring the performance of the tenant, and we do think there's going to be an opportunity in the future, due to its improving performance and de-leveraging, that we will be able to sell our investment for a tighter real estate yield because the covenant has materially improved from a credit perspective. Summing up. It's a scalable strategy with a large and enduring opportunity set. It's been well-received by investors. We're in the market executing the strategy today. We believe we're uniquely placed to establish a leadership position in Europe.
On the earlier subject where Benoît touched on the cumulative effect of growing strategies, we think this strategy is particularly well-placed. The average hold period here is in excess of eight years expected. There won't be any attrition from disposals, we think, until at least fund three. That's going to have quite a big cumulative effect on growth. Lastly, just worth mentioning, I think, acknowledging the tools in the ICG platform that this strategy has used. Investment insight has driven the thesis. The balance sheet has funded seed assets. HR has helped us recruit a new team and talent, and the ICG brand and fundraising team has given us the ability to reach and to secure investments from a diversified pool of international institutional investors. That's the end of my presentation. Thanks for listening. I'm going to hand over to J é r ô me on the infrastructure side.
Hi, good morning. I'm Jérôme Sousselier. I'm a managing director, in infrastructure equity team. Today I'm here to detail this new strategy for ICG. I arrived at ICG 20 months ago now with a team that came from EDF Invest. Basically, I have a 20-year background in infrastructure and also working at some leading European corporates in the energy and transport sectors, which are two of the main sub-sectors in the infrastructure world. ICG had been looking for about four to five years to enter an established asset class, infrastructure equity. It actually fits well, infrastructure, with ICG's DNAs, which is really focused on downside protection, because this is what infrastructure is all about. It's providing resilient returns with a lot of downside protection for investors. It also offers long-term growth potential.
It's a scalable strategy, fees uncommitted, and also with seven to eight year investment horizon. More specifically, what is the market opportunity in infrastructure? The infrastructure asset class is about today $500 billion worth of deals annually. It's about 2,000 transactions, primarily in Europe, North America. It's actually still relatively young compared to private equity. It's maturing fast. What we've seen is that some of the traditional infrastructure asset managers have scaled up quite massively. This has opened up a new space in the mid-market segment. This is how we differentiate ourselves. First, we focus on the mid-market. We also have the ability to invest across the capital structure. You have heard that this morning from Jens. We invest in equity. Also in quasi equity, such as mezzanine instruments.
We think this is a sourcing advantage, and it also offers downside protection for our investors. Finally, we have designed from the start a sustainable strategy. You have heard from Eimear, we have actually excluded some sectors altogether. We will not invest in coal, oil and gas or nuclear projects. Our clients tell us that this is quite unique compared to some of our peers. We are fully integrated in the platform using the distribution teams. More broadly, again, I can't insist enough, we really focus on downside protection and resilience, which is very well with what ICG has been doing for 30 years. To launch the strategy, ICG decided to onboard a team, seven of us now in Paris and an eighth member in Frankfurt. ICG brought that team from the outside.
What that meant is that ICG looked for a team that had a proven and established track record. As a team, we have invested now EUR 1.8 billion across 10 transactions. We have been working for six years together. This provides a clear track record as we're fundraising for our first fund to investors. We also have all, as a team, industrial backgrounds. It's important because we source our deals from corporates, primary transactions, whether it's in the energy, transport, or telecom world. We think that this corporate background allows us to find, as I mentioned, primary deals, but also some bilateral situations, as I'll show you in a case study a bit later. What attracted us to ICG? We thank Benoît for his support. It's really the platform, a pan-European platform with a network of offices across Europe. It's a mid-market focus.
It's balance sheet capital that has allowed us to already do two transactions on the balance sheet of ICG, which are seed assets that will be transferred at the first close. That offers proof of concept to clients. It's also ESG. It's not a light word for us in infrastructure. We have designed a sustainable strategy with the help of Eimear. I'll touch base specifically on that. Maybe touching a bit more on the market opportunity. I mentioned it's about $500 billion worth of deals annually. The asset class is actually maturing fairly quickly when you compare it to what happened to private equity 20 years ago. It's about 2,000 deals, really concentrated in North America and Europe, which are the two largest infrastructure markets.
What's interesting is what you see also on the right, when we see that there's a space that has opened up in the mid-market. The reason for that is. At or below the GBP 1 billion size mark is where about 90% of the deals happen. At the same time, you can see that as the traditional funds have scaled up, you actually see that a lot of the dry powder that has been accumulated the last few years has been concentrated for the very large deals. Maybe to illustrate that graphically, this shows you a bit the landscape of some of the infrastructure asset managers. You can see that some of the large ones have been raising multi-billion funds.
This is where the dry powder is concentrated, and they're all now deploying in large transactions, where also they're competing against some of the direct investors, such as the big Canadian pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, or even the large insurance companies that are going direct. We think that this has opened up a space in the mid-market for new managers such as ICG. The way that we think that we can offer a differentiated proposition to clients is the following. Within the mid-market, we have people on the ground within each of the geographies. That means that we're not all London-based as some of our infrastructure peers are. We have a pan-European team based across the offices. That means that we can source deals locally in each of the markets, understanding the different regulations. It's also as a team, we have a proven track record.
I mentioned that we deployed EUR 1.8 billion in 10 transactions since 2013. This shows visibility to clients as we are fundraising. Maybe more importantly, the way we focus to deliver returns, it's really a combination of returns and downside protection. The way we can offer that is really threefold. I haven't commented a lot on what is infrastructure, so if you bear with me. What I mean by critical infrastructure, the easy way to characterize it, I call it the three Ps. First, it's physical assets. We're talking electricity networks, we're talking roads, we're saying telecom networks, but it has to be physical assets. Second, they have to be protected assets. Either they have some type of monopoly feature, very long-term contract concessions. Finally, they have to be predictable assets. Predictable also because of these monopoly or long-term contracts, but typically have cash yield.
We offer to clients annual cash yield year by year. We are also active investors. That means that whether we invest as majority shareholder or as minority, we always have board seats, we have veto rights, and we have very strong governance and liquidity rights throughout our investments. The way we also look at operational accretions is that we have buy and build strategies. We typically put the money that we invest goes to do CapEx in the companies in which we invest. We also have buy and build. We do small M&As, small add-ons. Last, in terms of how we differentiate our proposition is when we say that we're fully integrated in the ICG platform, it means that we have access to different teams, whether it's on the financing side, basically to raise senior debt for our portfolio companies. It's also leveraging the distribution platform.
Obviously, we are doing all the fundraising internally with Andreas' team. We have the balance sheet that has allowed us to do already two deals, and I'll touch base on our first case study a bit later. Another way that we differentiate ourselves is that sustainable strategy, which clients have told us is fairly unique. We have actually focused, you have heard Eimear a bit earlier today, and we have focused on four of the UN's Development Goals. First one is about climate change energy. There's actually one that is about affordable and clean energy. That's the easy one. Here we have actually decided to exclude some sectors altogether. We will not do oil, coal, nuclear, gas, and we actively look at opportunities to finance the energy transition. That means that we look at the moment, we're looking at a solar photovoltaic opportunity across Europe.
Another SDG, number nine, it's actually linked to infrastructure. That's an easy one for us. It has to do about what they call building resilient infrastructure. This is typically financing telecom networks to promote inclusiveness, to connect, to bring high speed internet to communities. This is the first investment we have made. We took an equity in mezzanine instrument in a fiber optics companies that basically provides ultra-fast internet. Last one about waste. Here, if you allow me, I just want to focus on one. It's actually SDG 12. That's my personal favorite. It's about responsible consumption and production. If you want to have an impact, in terms of energy transition, you shouldn't only focus, for example, on doing renewables and financing wind or solar farms. You can actually play more at the consumption side. This is what we have done.
We have invested late last year in a company called Ocea Smart Building. What it does is it buys sub-meters that you install in people's homes to measure heat and water consumption. The impact of that, once they're installed in people's home is that energy use and water use declines by 15% . This is what we call having really an ESG impact and still delivering the returns. More broadly, Eimear commented, we have integrated ESG throughout our investment process. We look right from the start at every deal, whether it fits our ESG criteria. We also work with Eimear extensively at portfolio company level, where we set KPIs to the managers of the companies, and some of their incentive compensation is actually linked to respecting ESG KPIs. It's quite powerful. That's also how you deliver ESG, that you incentivize people to act on that.
We will do GRESB ratings. I don't know if you're familiar, but GRESB is basically a leading benchmark in the ESG field. It's worldwide, effectively it's a way to compare how companies perform based on different set of KPIs, ESG-related. Pipeline. We think that there's a compelling market opportunity with a team with a track record, with the support of ICG to do that. The question is, can we deliver on that? Do we have the pipeline to do that? The answer is yes. We actually see a lot of deals. The reason for that is, as I mentioned, the focus on the mid-market, where, as you've seen, 90% of the deals are where the action is. Since we joined 20 months ago, we have seen broadly about 200 opportunities after different filters in terms of looking at risk-return competitive dynamics.
About a quarter of that went to our pipeline. That's the 44 on which we're working now. We have closed, as mentioned, two transactions. One in fiber optics, the other one in the energy sub-meters, as I mentioned. Both transactions are sitting on the ICG balance sheet. They're proof of concept deals. They are being warehoused as we speak, and as we're in the midst of the fundraising, they will be transferred to the fund at the first close. To ensure this very high selectivity, we have also very heavy involvement of senior ICG leadership. That means that we have Benoît, who chairs the investment committee. We also have Max Mitchell, who heads the direct lending fund, and two members of infrastructure, Guillaume d'Engremont and myself. Maybe I'd like to take you through our first investment, which is for us, for you, a proof of concept here.
The company is called Océan-Net Communications. We invested last year about EUR 50 million. This is a company that was, until we arrived, 100% owned. It's a family-owned business by a founder manager who was looking for capital to grow his business and to put more money, basically, more cables in the ground and more fiber. This was a bilateral deal for us. We can still get these deals in the lower mid-market segment on which we're focused. The reason for that is we invested through a mix of equity and mezzanine. Benefit of that for us is we have strong liquidity rights, we have upside through the equity, and the mezzanine offers a lot of downside protection for the founder. Why would he accept to do that with us?
He's looking for someone that can provide worth capital, that knows the fiber space, and more broadly, the mezzanine avoids dilution for him. He sees all the upside but didn't want to get too diluted. What we like about the business is it operates in a favorable regulatory environment. Infrastructure is typically often about regulations. So here, this company is based in France. It's one of the leading regional networks. Basically, the way the French regulatory regime works is that the operator that builds a network has a monopoly in the zones where it operates. That means that we do not have a market share risk, which we love. In effect, it means that the only risk that we have is how fast clients shift from the slow ADSL, the copper, a few megabits by second, compared to fiber, which is a gigabyte by second.
If you want to download Netflix in five seconds, you need fiber, as opposed to one or two hours with a slower internet. This is a mid-market company, very entrepreneurial management with add-on opportunities, and that's what we like. I think you heard also Jens say that. We like to find companies where we can continue to put capital later on. There are further opportunities within that company looking to roll out fiber. They're also building a network of mobile towers to sustain data needs in the switch to a digital world. We think that in addition to this initial investment, we have further add-on opportunities. It's really a proof of concept, ability to invest in equity, mezzanine, and follow-up investments. To conclude, I like to remind we only focus on the European infrastructure market.
We focus on mid-market because we see that the traditional infra managers have scaled up significantly and have left quite a big part of the market underserved. This is where we will be active. We have a track record. As a team, I mentioned we deployed EUR 1.8 billion. This is what investors want to see when they look at a first-time fund. They want to see, does the team have the track record of deploying funds successfully? They want to see that we're also fully integrated in the platform, have the backup of the ICG balance sheet to do proof of concept deals, which we have done. Finally, this is a scalable strategy. As a team, we are committed to being very active investors. We have a sustainable strategy, and we think that this provides a solid basis to create long-term sustainable growth and shareholder value. Thank you
It's a lot of information this morning. I hope it has given you a better feel for the industry and for our business. Before we take some more questions, key takeaways of what we've heard this morning. ICG is a leading player in an attractive and quite resilient asset class that is enjoying increasing demand and growing investment opportunities. We are very well positioned to not only take advantage of our market's growth, but to continue to increase our market share. For that, we can rely on our size, we can rely on an exceptionally strong 30-year track record, and on what has now been established as a global brand. We must, however, preserve our competitive edge in ESG. You've seen throughout all these presentation how prevalent that has become. Keep the focus on talent and culture, which you've heard from Antje.
More generally, keep investing to maintain a high level of quality of our execution platform. To reflect the growth we've been experiencing, and we're likely to continue to experience, we've updated, as you've heard from Vijay, our guidance on performance fees. Finally, although, as I pointed out earlier, by the very nature of our business, our growth in AUM, in fees, in profit cannot be linear, the mid to long-term prospects are very exciting. On that note, all of us will happy to take some more of your questions. We thank you for your attention through the morning. Ian, no. I don't think you're eligible.
Gary Greenwood from Shore Capital has sent through the following two questions. Talking about the investor base in funds, at the moment, it's mainly institutional and high net worth. Are there any plans to open a more broad retail investors, and how would this work? Secondly, about the performance fee guidance, does all the revenue uplift drop straight to the bottom line, or will you reinvest some in the business?
On our investor base, so actually there's not all that much of wealth management. I think you mentioned wealth management in the question. That's not really the case today. There is some, but it's not that significant. We're mostly sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, if you want to break it down. Andreas can give you some more detail. There is growth in wealth management, but if we look at the split today, it's not a significant part of our investor base. On the retail, as I mentioned earlier, we're starting to see things happening. There are a number of hurdles, including regulatory hurdles. There are some changes in the U.S., interestingly, as we speak, in regulation, which could open up the space more to retail, even potentially, which is the, certainly for U.S. managers, the holy grail 401(k)s. We're not there yet.
You need to create feeder funds. There are a number of difficulties. Structurally, these asset classes are not liquid, so that's also something that needs to be understood and accepted if it is to go into the more real retail space. What is true is everybody's reaching the same conclusion, which is, typical retail investors will have a significant proportion of their investment in bonds, which today is a problem because as you know, it's not generating anything. That's creating a problem for the banks, for anybody who's catering to these retail investors because it's hard to charge fees if you're not generating anything on a portfolio. Everybody is working on this, on how do we give access to alternatives. There's no reason why all institutional investors should have a growing allocation to alternatives and not retail, but there are hurdles.
I don't think it's going to happen overnight, but it's a significant potential in the future. Remind me the second question.
How much of the performance fee revenue uplift will drop to the bottom line?
All of it. All of it. Do we then use part of our profits, but it's all fungible, to keep on further growing the business? Yes. Performance fees flow straight through to the bottom line, unless our CFO has a different view.
Just to the second point that was made, is that we have a dividend policy, and we stick to that dividend policy in terms of driving that value creation to the shareholders as well. We stick to that performance fees in the 85%-100% under our policy.
Question over several.
Hi, it's Luke Mason from Exane BNP. Just a couple of questions, please. Just coming back to Senior Debt Partners, just wondering whether you think there's a ceiling for fundraising in Europe. I think the largest fund to date has been kind of GBP 6.5 billion. Wondering what restraints are to go past there. That's the first question.
The largest, to my knowledge, is GBP 10 billion. That's Ares a few years ago. When they did, we thought they were mad. Actually, they were proven right because the market has grown. Don't know. The largest fund that has been raised is significantly larger than ours has been so far. Is there room for the market to grow further? So far, we've been quite surprised by the growth of that market, and particularly at the higher end. What's quite interesting is that market is more attractive as you grow in size. There's less competition in the larger deals, and. Again, a few years ago, if you had told us that there would be private debt deals of GBP 700 million, we would not have believed it. Typically these deals went to at least the syndicated market and perhaps even the public market.
Actually what we're finding is more and more are going to the private debt market.
Just secondly, there's clearly a lot of demand for alternatives. I guess, as you're going out speaking to investors, what's the main concern that they're flagging up or what questions keep coming up when you're speaking to investors?
On just generally?
Yeah, just generally across the market.
They're all thinking about the cycle. To my earlier point, alternatives suits that concern quite well, just because it's how long the investment periods are and the strategies are. Many of them are thinking about, and I mentioned opportunistic funds. When is the right time to start investing into opportunistic funds to take advantage of some market dislocations? Of course, there is no right time because nobody knows, but that's some of the questions that they are grappling with. It's very different by geography, the level of preoccupation. ESG and climate change is coming back more and more.
Thanks.
Hi, it's Jens Ehrenberg from Citi again. Just one quick question, and that refers back to the first half of the presentation previous to the break. You touched on your activities in the U.S., and appreciate that it's quite a competitive market over there, and that your presence there has been growing. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think so far the only geographic presence over there is in New York. If I look at that as compared to, I think what Jens referred to earlier, the boots on the ground approach that you really want to be, where your investments are. How does that fit together, and what are your plans going forward? Do you consider opening new offices somewhere across the U.S., or do you really focus on New York as a key hub?
It is a very good question. That really depends on the strategy we deploy. If you look at the strategies we have today, they're centralized in New York for all the market participants. As we start moving towards, for instance, more mid-market private equity, that becomes a real point. Actually, if you were to ask AJ, who you saw on screen earlier, as he's building his team now, he's thinking about a matrix, and he's thinking industry specialization, because the U.S. market is so big that actually you need to have industry specialization to originate. He's thinking of people who have that expertise, but also he's thinking geographic map out. He's thinking about an individual who has a really strong background in the Midwest, for instance, because he's thinking about him to source in the Midwest. Will we locate that person there?
Will they keep flying all the time? Don't know. We'll see. There's a critical mass aspect to that as well. Yes, you're right. That depends on the strategy. If you're doing the standard mass products that we have been doing so far, you could do that out of New York. If you're doing strategic equity, which is the GP-led secondary play, that could be done out of New York. Actually, it's a global strategy. It's not just U.S. Yes, if we start drilling down to more equity-led mid-market strategies, then the local piece will become more important. Incidentally, on your point, we don't put them on map because we don't have proper offices there. We do have marketers in San Francisco and Boston.
Florida?
Miami. Yeah, exactly. We have presence. It doesn't really count as proper offices, but yes.
Can I just quickly follow on on that? When you say marketers, does that focus on.
Fundraising. It's fundraising.
Fundraising.
Yeah, sorry. Yeah, this is pure fundraising.
Yeah, okay. Got it. Thank you.
The U.S. market is so large, that in fundraising, actually, you do need to have some, where it's preferable to have some local presence.
All right. Thank you.
Sure.
Hi, it's David McCann from Numis. Just taking a step back, we heard a lot today about how a lot more capital is coming into the alternatives industry generally. I guess the common thread there is why are people allocating more money? You made reference to it actually about five, 10 minutes ago, the context of fixed income offering no return. I guess it's people seeing private markets offering superior returns to what they're getting at public markets. With all this new money coming in to the alternatives industry, how confident are you for ICG and I guess for the alternatives industry as a whole, that those kind of returns are actually sustainable? That seems to be the common thread which is pulling people in. If that relationship stops, that may not necessarily happen.
Sure. We can only look at history through cycles, and those returns have withstood quite well through various cycles. They also haven't come down with the increasing size of the market. That's one of the typical question, and you can boil it down to a single fund saying, if your fund suddenly doubles in size, can you actually maintain the returns? The evidence has shown that there's no correlation. The returns will be maintained. There are players that have done better than others, but there is no correlation between size and returns. You can grow and maintain very high returns. The other point, perhaps to point to is, there are many reasons that we've discussed before, why the alternative asset space is so attractive.
One of them is that the return premium that you are gaining for a supposed illiquidity, which is a whole other debate, is very large. Even if you had a down vintage for private equity or private debt, you'd still be generating returns that far exceed anything you can achieve anywhere else. I think there was another. Yes.
George Luckraft, AXA Framlington. Can you just say something on how you incentivize sales forces not just to sell the easiest product?
You've just opened Pandora's box. Do you want to give us a one-minute primer on your matrix? I told you.
Okay. We designed a system that we don't just reward quantum, because a lot of our competitors do is you raise GBP 1 billion, you raise sales guy, and the guy who raises GBP 100 million is not great. What we do is, it's a four-dimensional matrix, so it's a bit complicated. Actually, we programmed that into Salesforce. Thank you. The starting point is, can you source new investors? We want to grow the investor base. Can you source capital for a new strategy, sale and lease back, infrastructure, difficult to raise funds, because not all funds are easy to raise. Are you bringing money into the first close, which is super critical? That's the hardest part. First-time fund, first close, that's really, really difficult, and most funds fail in that stage.
Are you the guy who just brings money into final close, which is usually quite easy when it's established and running. Let's assume two marketers raise GBP 100 million each. The marketer who does final close, existing client, not really the hunter type, actually, we don't have many of these because they usually don't stay with us. Let's say you would get 200 sales points, a factor of two. The guy who brings the new clients, can do the first close, difficult to raise strategy, first time strategy, can get up to 1,500 points. There's a huge difference in the way the points you're getting. That's programmed into Salesforce, so they can see it any time. We are very transparent. Everybody can see everything. That's a nice little feature. They can see all the sales.
The call notes are published every morning, everybody can see them. The PMs can see them as well. Basically, the way we remunerate is simply, we look at how have these people performed, not just in quantum, as I said, but according to the points. We look at how do, let's say, your top quartile marketer, how does this marketer get paid in their region? This is the other thing. The organization I joined from eight years ago, they were just averaging everything. That's a problem because you pay too little in the U.S., you pay too much in European countries, for example. We're trying to overcome that by really figuring out, okay, are you a top quartile marketer within ICG, in your peer group? If you are, we'll make sure that you're paid in that.
At the same time, if you do not have such a good year, we don't mind bringing the bonus down a lot. Good people can make a lot of money. If they have a bad year, they also make much less money, which allows us to spread that bonus pool further. Everybody who joins us, we spend a lot of time explaining this to them when they join so that they understand what they're signing up for. So far, the turnover is very low. Most people are with us for several years, I mean, five, six years and more. They quite like the system, even in times when their bonus comes down a lot because they haven't had a great year. They understand what it's all about and how the principles work.
I would argue, I mean, in our peer group, we are the most successful first-time fundraiser there is out there. Nobody has delivered this. We have four first-time funds in the market right now. I mean, most of my peers, I met a couple of them this week, they're like, "Well, even one is very difficult. How can you do four in one year?" Right? I mean, just like, how do you do this? There's an art to it, there's a science to it, but part of it is also the people you hire and how you measure them. You get what you measure. I'm sorry.
Excellent. Thank you, Andreas. For those who haven't been introduced, Andreas Mondovits, who's running our all marketing and sales effort.
Hi, it's Gurjit again from JPMorgan. Just a few questions. Firstly, in terms of the balance sheet intensities, a lot of the new strategies you've got clearly are more balance sheet intensive, certainly it's by infrastructure. I guess the plan is that the balance sheet remains broadly stable. Where are you recycling that from? What's sort of coming out? That's the first question. The second one is on the infrastructure, the track record in terms of deploying, you're giving us some numbers there. Is there anything in terms of track record, in terms of performance of the infrastructure team that's come?
Sorry, I missed that.
The performance of the infrastructure team, because I think you've talked about the deployment track record right now has been good. Finally, just on the investing across the capital structure, how do you differentiate yourself? If I think about Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, these guys, are they not doing that? Why can they not do that versus maybe ICG?
Okay. Many very different questions. You may want to take the first one, although as a preamble to the first one, we're not investing more. They are not more capital intensive. Infra and sale and lease back, we're not investing more than we have in other strategies when we launch them. We're typically between EUR 100 million to EUR 200 million. What happens is how we manage it over time. On the recycling, maybe you want to come.
Yeah. To answer your question, first of all, a lot of the seeded strategies, seeded assets for the newer strategies, both Kevin and Jérôme talked about fundraising. We've had a first close on sale and lease back, so we are already in the process of transferring all of the sale and lease back assets onto the fund, and the same will apply for the infrastructure equity fund. It will create more capacity of the balance sheet. We talked about raising SDP IV, so we'll put some capital for that. It's not going to be as big anyway, but generally we would have that. As we continue to raise more funds, we will look to You saw three new or four new strategies potentially in the future.
We will commit more capital to those kinds of strategies if we think they're going to actually be marketable. That's how we'd expect to see the margin go.
The second question, I think that's for you, Jérôme. Great track record in deploying, but what's your performance?
Sure. It's actually quite an easy way to measure it, because we came from EDF Invest, which is a public entity, so it's actually on the annual reports. It's about 11% returns, w ith 7% cash yield. Very high cash yielding. That's the predictability that I commented about.
That's why these strategies are in high demand, because you're getting quite a high cash coupon, and they're still generating double-digit. To the earlier question about people worried about the cycle, that is one of the strategies where they like to invest more. They like the downside protection and the yield. Your final question was about investing across the capital structure. You'd be surprised. This is referring to just one of our strategies, which is the ICG Europe Fund VII. You'd be surprised actually, no. As Jens described, what you have in the markets is you have people who are highly specialized, and if they're doing a pure private equity fund, they'll never consider investing in debt instrument because in their mind, it dilutes their return, which actually it does. It changes the risk-return profile.
We just happen to think that you can get a better risk-return profile if you play well around that capital structure. That's not the way it's perceived. Very few, I can't think of any actual example at the top of my mind, of the private equity sponsors do any debt. They actually tend to do the contrary, is they put as much debt as possible on the company to push the leverage and push their IRR. Likewise, debt funds are pure debt funds. There it's not just a question that they don't want it. One, it's not their mandate, and two, they just don't have the capability, because that's a different set of expertise to source those deals, to sit on the board, to help the company. You can't do it if you have a pure debt team. That hybrid approach actually doesn't really exist.
You have some opportunistic funds that can resemble it. There are some tac opps, for instance, funds, that have that flexibility, but they tend to be more distressed focused than what this strategy does.
Great. Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you. Portia Patel from Canaccord. I was just hoping you could talk a bit about the fee structure. Specifically, what determines your ability to charge on committed versus deployed in certain instances? Where you do charge on committed, is that industry standard, and do you expect that to change at any point in the future?
In most instances, we are following the industry practice. If it's an established strategy, there's an established practice. If you're in private equity, anything that's higher yielding will typically charge fees on committed. Anything that is lower yielding, certainly single digit, will tend to charge fees on invested. There are situations where it's not so obvious, and where it's more art than science. I did mention, I think it must've been a year ago or so, when we were thinking about launching sale and lease back in infrastructure, that we were going to try to go with fees on committed, because these strategies are on the margin. They're generating double digit, but it's low double digit. It's not so obvious. In the case of infrastructure, it's easier because there is a market practice. All of our peers are charging fees on committed, so that was easier.
In sale and lease back, there was no real precedent in Europe. We created our own. It just becomes a question of how much appetite is there for that asset class. How much do people view the risk return, the downside protection? In the case of sale and lease back, that combination of corporate risk, and real asset protection proved to be quite powerful, and people were willing to pay for that. Could it change? We've never seen it change. Things tend to stick to where they are. We've never seen a shift. As I said, given the amount of demand in the market, fees is not the number 1 item on people's agenda. It's deploying in alternatives.
Thank you. That's helpful.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah. Thank you. Could you just remind me what percentage of fund earns fees on committed?
That's a good question. I don't have the answer off the top of my Vijay, do you know?
It's just over 30% of our total currently. Yeah.
With the sale and lease back and infra?
Yes.
Okay, because that's what I think. Both are useful. I've made this comment before. Both are useful, particularly in if, as we are, you're a public company, because fees on committed are quite attractive. You get all the fees day one. They have one downside is your fees jump up the year you raise the fund, and then they keep going down for that strategy because you have older vintages that are running off at the same time. For that one strategy with fees on committed, the fees goes up in the year you raise the fund, then they come down over time until you raise the next fund.
Therefore, it's quite useful to have a mix of strategies with fees on committed and fees on invested because the strategies with fees on invested do exactly the opposite, is you don't start with a fee base, but the fee increases as you deploy your fund. The mix of having a Fund VII, for instance, with SDP is quite useful. Otherwise, we'd have to manage the messaging of why we have fees that come down and then go back up and come down. It's providing a smoother transition.
Liz Miliatis from Bank of America again. Two questions. I know you're fundraising currently for SDP 4. Can you give us an update on how that's going currently and the potential size? Secondly, on staff and carry. At what point in a typical investment professional's career would carry really start to kick in, and when does it become an impediment to moving, and therefore quite expensive to hire those kinds of people? Thank you.
On the first point, I'm limited in what I can comment on for market reasons. It's no secret that it's a strategy. The asset class is in very high demand. Direct lending is in very high demand. ICG's fund is one of the leading funds in Europe, so it's doing well. It's more of a question for us or where do we want to set the bar. To an earlier question is, how big can it grow? It's not a game. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that we can deploy it well because that's more long-term value than shooting for the fences on a massive fund and then struggling to deploy. That's the equilibrium we need to find with that fund.
As we've pointed out before, because it just physically takes time to onboard investors, the fundraise for SDP 4 will straddle both this financial year and next. On your question on carried interest, it very much depends when people join, because it's a duration play. Typically, carried interest starts to make a real difference when people are in their late 30s. It depends on many things. Depends on the size of the fund, how successful it's been, and so on. Call it late 30s, early 40s, and that's when people are really locked in. They're not just locked in, and that's an important point. We probably don't make it enough. They're not just locked in because they have value in carried interest. They're also locked in because they're investing in their funds. They're co-investing. That triggers a lot earlier. It triggers day one.
Of course, we're asking people to invest proportionally to what they can. Even the most junior people invest a significant part of their wealth into their funds, and that is locked. It's not just the carried interest, it's also with their investing of their own money in their own strategy that's locking them into our strategies. The reverse means to your, I think, what was part of your question is that's why it's very difficult to unlock people from other funds. Typically, something has to happen, change in leadership, or there's been an underperforming fund. Something has to happen for someone good to become unlocked.
Mm-hmm. Thank you.
One more question, perhaps? We'll obviously be happy to take more questions downstairs with a coffee. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Very much enjoy this. Thanks for your attention today.