Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us at the seminar today on fundraising and client strategy. This is, of course, a topic that is fundamental to ICG's prospects, and I'm looking forward to having an interesting discussion over the next 60 minutes or so. Importantly, we're focusing today on this topic through a strategic lens and very much in the long term. The slides are available on our website and a recording of this presentation will be available on the website in the coming days. We're hoping for an interactive discussion today. We'll make sure we leave lots of time for Q&A. For those of you joining online, you can submit questions through the webcast messaging function or by telephone, and you can find details in the online portal. I'm delighted to welcome two senior colleagues today who'll be speaking.
Andreas Mondovits, who has been with the firm for over a decade, and who heads up the firm's global marketing and client relations team of roughly 70 people globally. Basak Demir, who joined last year to head up our client relations function globally. We will be covering a range of topics today. Firstly, some observations on the macro backdrop, then some color on ICG's client base, its history, and where it is today, how this has been supporting our strategy of growing up and growing out, and finally spending some time looking ahead. What I hope is at the end of this session, you'll have a better appreciation of ICG's approach to client development and fundraising, and our strategic areas of focus historically, and importantly, going forward as they relate to this area. There are five key messages we want to leave you with today.
Since we really made the decision to pivot towards being a third-party asset manager, we have successfully built a global blue-chip client base. The focus over the last decade has been on increasing the number of clients on our platform, and we have executed on that across all geographies, and with a particular focus on institutional investors, who are the largest, most sophisticated, and most concentrated pool of capital within private markets. Along with investing well, our clients are, of course, a crucial component in growing up and growing out. Our client franchise today gives us a lot of confidence that we can continue to do this in the future. Building on our progress over the last decade, ICG is increasingly well-positioned to capitalize on the demand for alternatives across multiple asset classes. We have spent a lot of time historically broadening our product offering.
As you look at the pipeline of strategies today that have not yet even had a final close on a first-time fund, there is a lot of opportunity here, and the focus in the coming years is very much bringing them to market and scaling them. As we continue to become bigger and broader, we are becoming ever more relevant to ever more clients, and we see real tangible benefits, both of our franchise and of our scale. Looking ahead, we believe we have substantial runway to grow our existing client base and to increase the share of wallet in our existing clients. In all, we think some pretty long-term powerful supporters of our equity story. At this point, I'll pass over to Andreas to share some observations on the macro environment in which our clients are operating.
Thank you, Chris, and thank you all for joining today. It's been a few years since I've been on stage. Last, I think, 2018, if I recall correctly. While many of the messages are similar, our scale is notably different. Compared to 2018, we have almost 2 x as many clients now and 3 x as much AUM across a broader range of scale strategies. From my perspective, we're now a business that is increasingly able to focus on serving the world's largest investors across multiple asset classes. That is incredibly exciting and positions us well to benefit from a number of macro trends we're observing. I want to start by looking at the AUM growth in the private markets over the last 10 years.
The growth has been remarkable, over 3.5x In the last decade, and now standing at almost $12 trillion, which is around 10% of global AUM that is professionally managed. That tailwind has obviously been a huge structural support to our growth, but it's worth noting that we have grown our AUM nearly six times during the same period, meaning we have significantly outperformed the growing market. The focus of this seminar is clients, and from that perspective, we have observed a number of trends. As Chris said, I joined ICG a decade ago, so I've seen a few of these from within the firm. For example, alternatives are no longer alternative. There's not an investor globally who is not allocating or at least considering allocating to the alternative asset class. Within private markets, asset classes are at different stages of maturity.
Many investors' first taste of private markets was private equity, and globally, that remains the largest component. Private debt infrastructure and private real estate, for example, are younger with smaller AUM in the private markets. To my mind, there's no structural reason why over the coming decades, these should not converge, or at least the gap be closed. What explains this increasing continued demand for private markets? Has it all been a search for yield in a low-rate environment? From a structural long-term perspective, I can confidently say no, it's not. Clearly, yield pickup in a low-rate environment can be one driver. Our ability to offer clients exposure to floating rate and direct lending is a good example as the strategy is currently generating some unprecedented returns. However, there are a number of other reasons, in my view, that go beyond this and are far more strategic.
Attributes such as high returns. Partly a function of illiquidity or complexity premium and access to asset classes with inflation-linked protection, along with lower volatility are key attractions to private market strategies and differentiators versus the public market, as is the ability to match long-term liabilities with long-term assets. For certain types of clients, for example, insurance companies, this duration matching can be a driver. Beyond this, if you're a mid-sized business services, education, or healthcare business in the Western world today, you probably have no need to ever raise public capital in the debt or equity markets. You may choose to do so for a variety of reasons, but you do not need to, as the private markets are sufficiently scaled and mature that you can grow and monetize your business exclusively within private markets.
As a client, therefore, investing in private markets gives you exposure to many parts of the economy that are increasingly difficult to access in the public markets. For example, high-growth companies, particularly in Europe, business technology and healthcare services, and of course, infrastructure. In all, the reasons for clients investing in private markets are, of course, multifaceted and vary between client types, but they're based on long-term and strategic approaches, which are not really driven by a short-term tactical response to prevailing conditions at any particular moment in time. Finally, given the illiquidity and private nature of our business, dispersion in performance between managers in the private arena is huge. Manager selection really matters, and Basak will show you later how our clients view ICG's performance.
On the previous slide, I mentioned that many companies, they are and can be very well capitalized without ever needing to raise public capital. This creates a self-reinforcing ecosystem within private markets that is quite powerful, driven both by the client demand and investment opportunity. In particular, over the last decade, but beforehand as well, we have seen a substantial increase in the amount of AUM focused on private markets. This has enabled more companies to stay private for longer, and they may decide to do this for many reasons: flexibility of capital, ability to focus on long-term with fewer quarterly distractions, the regulatory burden of a public listing, and so on. In doing this, companies create a larger addressable market of investment opportunity for private AUM, there's more money chasing investments.
Both sides of the equation are growing, private markets have been able to continue to generate attractive returns at increasing scale. Those returns, along with the other dynamics I discussed on the previous slide, mean that there's an increasing demand for private markets, which helps drive that same cycle. In many ways, this is a function of private markets maturing, but we are not fully there yet, and I see this self-reinforcing cycle as becoming a powerful driver for many years to come. Of course, while we're talking today about the long term, we cannot ignore the current environment. We see structural appetite for alternatives remaining strong, in some areas, things are slower across the industry than they may have been 18 months ago. That is timing, and is also not the case across the board.
For some clients and client types, we have seen very little change in their investment programs and behavior. For example, Middle Eastern clients and sovereign wealth funds in particular, along with certain insurance companies who are not as impacted by the denominator effect. For certain clients, of course, particularly pension funds, the so-called denominator effect is important and has caused a slowdown in their ability to commit capital to private markets. We expect this to be a temporary situation. Indeed, some investors are increasing their allocation to alternatives which will help alleviate this. For example, at the end of 2022, New York City Retirement Systems, which in aggregate manage roughly $450 billion of assets, increased their allocation to alternatives from 25%- 35%. This adds approximately $45 billion of additional firepower going to alternatives. We expect this to be a long-term allocation.
As we speak today, there are a lot of our largest pension funds going through a similar approval process, underlying their structural interest in private markets allocations. Despite the current volatility and market uncertainty, and perhaps in part because of it, we continue to see clients allocate capital to private markets. Provided managers are able to continue to deliver, even in turbulent times, this will further reinforce the rationale for clients having a meaningful allocation to this asset class. Alongside successful investment strategies, a key to us being able to capitalize on this opportunity is route to market. Over the last decade, we have grown a global sales and marketing platform from scratch. As you can see on this slide, we have 40 marketers in locations across EMEA, the Americas, and Asia Pacific.
Over the last 18 months, we have been hiring into areas where we see specific growth opportunities and where geographic client or strategy knowledge are particularly powerful. At this point, I'll pass to Basak to share some thoughts on our client base and how it's fed into our historical AUM growth.
Thank you, Andreas Mondovits, and thank you to everyone for joining today. As Chris mentioned, I joined ICG last year, and since this time, I've continued to be impressed by the scale of our client franchise and really the depth of our relationships with some of the largest allocators in the world. What I would like to discuss with you today is how our client base has grown over the last decade. What it looks like today before going into more detail on what this has translated to fundraising-wise. As you can see from the chart on the left-hand side of the page, over the last decade, we've grown the number of clients 9-fold, which is really quite extraordinary. From just 69 clients in 2012 to well over 600 today.
This equates to an annualized growth rate of 23%. It's very much consistent with Andreas's comments earlier around ICG having a deliberate strategic focus on growing the number of institutional clients on our platform. Just digging into this growth a little bit more. What you can see is that it's been very global, with a particular focus on U.S. clients. In fact, since 2012, the number of North American clients has grown over 11 times and stands at approximately 160 today and includes six of the top 10 allocators in the region. This growth in client numbers has also had the added benefit of reducing client concentration. You can see this here. Our single largest client in 2012 accounted for 16% of third-party AUM. Today, this number is around 3%, to give you an idea.
Our AUM also benefits from being incredibly diversified, this diversification includes geographically, by investor type, and by mandate. I just wanna reflect on this point for a moment because I think it's particularly powerful from a shareholder perspective, both in terms of reducing single client or geographic exposures or risks, really for underlining the broad-based appeal of our products. It's all very well and good me telling you how great ICG is. I suspect what you'll find more interesting is what our clients say about us. For background, we commissioned Coalition Greenwich, with whom I'm sure many of you will be familiar, to do a global client survey for us in 2022. As part of the survey, they went out and conducted in-depth interviews with 200 consultants and clients and prospects.
What you see here on this page is some of the direct verbatim quotes from investors on how they describe ICG and what they perceive to be our strengths. Really, the key themes to come out of this are consistent with the messages we've been communicating to equity markets for some time. To summarize, they see us as innovative, diversified, strong track record, and of meaningful scale. We also had Greenwich ask how our clients perceive us across a range of factors, including investment experience and client service specifically. Before we just delve into this, just a quick note on how to read the charts. The dark gray bars denote the Q3 of each measure, with anything below, by definition, being Q4 , and then the blue bars denote Q2 . Again, anything above being Q1 .
Finally, the very, very small dots, which are incredibly difficult to read, are ICG's rankings, which, as you can see, are all top quartile and, in some cases, top decile. Clients perceive us to be a top quartile investor with top quartile client service. For me, being responsible for our client service efforts globally, these last two slides here are an incredibly powerful validation of how our clients see ICG. This is clearly a large part of what has allowed us to grow our client base at both the scale and pace that we have over the last decade. It also gives us confidence that we can continue to grow our AUM, both with new and also existing clients. I wanna shift gears now, if I may, from the growth in our client numbers and turn to how this growth has driven AUM.
Again, you'll see that over the last decade, we have raised roughly $100 billion in aggregate from our clients. This has really been the result of increasing the size of existing strategies, growing up, and by launching new strategies, growing out. I'll talk through a couple of interesting dynamics relating to each of these points. Firstly, growing up. Here, we look at average commitment sizes. As you would expect, as our more mature strategies grow, so too do the average ticket sizes. What we show here is the data for both our flagship European corporate strategy and also our market-leading GP-led Strategic Equity strategy. These are just two examples of this dynamic in play. What you see is that as we grow, our clients are able to grow with us.
Additionally, as our funds get bigger, we're able to absorb larger individual commitments. As some of you may recall, in ICG Europe Fund VIII, we had a brand new client to ICG commit EUR 500 million. We wouldn't have been able to absorb that size of commitment in ICG Europe Fund VII, let alone ICG Europe Fund V. Now, of course, for any fund and fundraising, existing clients within the strategy are really the bedrock on which you build success. On this page here, we show the value of so-called re-ups for the same two strategies. As you'll see in ICG Europe Fund V, which had a total fund size of EUR 2.5 billion, EUR 600 million was committed by clients who were in the previous vintage, so ICG Europe Fund IV. Fast-forward to ICG Europe Fund VIII, which held a final close last year at EUR 8.1 billion.
EUR 3.9 billion was committed from investors who were in ICG Europe Fund VII. We see the same trajectory for Strategic Equity. The takeaway here is clients who've invested in a strategy with us typically like what they see. They invest in the subsequent vintage, often with larger ticket sizes. What this enables is for us to deliver increasing AUM from existing clients as our strategies scale. Again, this dynamic is very consistent with our clients' perceptions of ICG. Now growing out. The launching of new strategies has a slightly different dynamic. Obviously, with a new strategy, you don't have an existing track record. What you need to rely on is the appeal of potential returns, along with ICG's franchise and platform, to really give investors comfort that we can deliver for them.
We saw this come through very powerfully with the first vintage of our European Infrastructure fund, which held a final close last year. Many of you will know, infrastructure is a very well-established asset class globally, and many clients and investors have dedicated teams and pools of capital focused on making infrastructure fund investments. Despite this, we were still able to successfully break into this market and give clients confidence that we could deliver for them. The reasons for this were really, firstly, we were able to hire a great team, and that is a function of our brand and reputation. Secondly, we were able to develop a differentiated green generalist strategy and really build a niche offering for clients. In fact, a number of the fund's investments are in renewable assets.
Finally, although this is an equity strategy, the team could and does leverage ICG's knowledge around structuring of transactions with, of course, a continued focus on downside protection. All of these factors combined resulted in a highly attractive proposition for clients. By the end of the fundraising, three-quarters of the clients who committed to the fund were new investors to ICG. As we launch subsequent vintages, we will seek to grow commitments from these clients and also introduce other ICG products to them. These clients additions are potentially incrementally valuable to ICG in the long term from a broader platform perspective. For Sale and Leaseback, which was another first-time fund, the client split dynamic was exactly the opposite, with the majority being existing clients to ICG. Sale and Leaseback is a strategy which is less established in Europe, although it's very well developed in the U.S.
As a result of this, our clients needed more education about the risk and return profile and how the investments generate returns. Fortunately, the nature of Sale and Leaseback played to a number of our strengths, namely credit analysis of tenants, combined with real estate valuations of the underlying assets. All of this meant we were in a prime position to bring this product to the market, given our existing in-house expertise in both credit and real estate. We were able to bring a number of existing clients from other strategies into the first vintage. What I can confidently say is that the success of both of these examples of growing out was due to the strategies being part of ICG, and that is a real and tangible benefit of our franchise and our scale. This will enable us to generate incremental equity value going forward.
I've spent a lot of time looking back. I'm gonna stop now and hand it back to Andreas, who will spend the remaining time looking forward before we open the floor to Q&A. Thank you so much, everyone.
Thank you, Basak. I open by talking about long-term growth in private markets, Basak has gone into detail on how our breadth and scale has enabled us to grow AUM historically. Looking ahead, we believe this will continue and become increasingly clear. In the medium term, private markets are expected to grow at 10% per annum approximately, depending on the asset class. This is from a public source and aligns pretty closely with our internal views. Our waterfront of products and the scale, both materially different from 2018 and let alone 2012, should enable us to capture this growth. In that sense, we're increasingly able to help clients meet their investment objectives across all key private market strategies. Different client types have different areas of focus within private markets. Insurance companies, for example, are overweight private debt because of regulatory capital treatment.
By contrast, sovereign wealth funds with their long time horizons and no regulatory capital issues are more attracted to the higher return with our structured and private equity asset class. Strategically, from an ICG perspective, the individual areas of interest is not the point. More important is that due to the successful broadening and scaling of ICG over the last decade, we're able to meet client demand across multiple asset classes globally. As I look forward to the next decade, I see a number of exciting opportunities ahead in many areas of our client franchise. I set out three areas here, and of course, there are some interrelationships between them. First, further expanding the client base. Second, increasing share of client wallet. Third, cross-selling. Firstly, in terms of attracting new clients, over the last decade, we have focused on client growth.
As you have seen earlier, we've grown at 23% CAGR over the last 10 years. However, this growth came at the expense of penetration of wallet in the short term. That was a conscious decision: to onboard clients first and then focus on share of wallet. Given the trends of client consolidating their relationships, we want to make sure we get through the door before it closes, and then focus on increasing share of wallet. Despite our historical growth, there remains substantial opportunity to further grow our client base, particularly in the Americas and the Middle East. As we launch new strategies, that will naturally attract new investors, as we saw with our infrastructure equity fund. Turning to increasing share of client wallet, the graph on the left-hand side is the natural consequence of having focused on growing client numbers in the first instance.
Now that those clients are on our platform, we have a substantial opportunity to increase our penetration of wallet for larger ticket size and subsequent vintages and through cross-selling. Some overly simplistic math. We could increase our AUM by roughly 2/3 without winning another single client, simply by getting to the average AUM per client shown on this chart. That underlines the scope of the opportunity this one lever potentially presents in the coming years. With more strategy at scale and a larger client base, cross-selling is becoming an increasing area of focus for ICG's marketing team. Of course, none of this is easy, and importantly, it takes time. This slide sets out some statistics to support that, let me walk you through what they show.
Starting at the right-hand side of this page, our oldest clients, those who have been with us since 2012 or before. Of those, 62% have invested in more than one ICG strategy while they've been a client of ICG. On average, it's taken them over four years to make their first investment in a new strategy. Roll forward to all clients who have been with us since at least 2017, the cross-sell rate drops to 33%. This makes perfect sense. The number of clients is much greater given how many new clients we have onboarded between 2012 and 2017, and we've had less time to cross-sell to those clients. That pattern is the same when you look at our entire client base today. A client who made their first investment six months ago is highly unlikely to have already invested in another ICG product.
With a cross-sell rate of roughly 24% today, there's a substantial opportunity to cross-sell to today's client base in the years to come. I just want to outline here a case study of one of our key relationships in Asia. We met them first in 2012. Three years later, they committed to Europe six. Another three years later to Europe seven. Two years later to SDP four, a new asset class. In most notably in 2021 to strategic equity four, so a new strategy, and the doubling of their commitment to Europe eight compared to Europe seven, as well as awarding us an SMA in liquid credit. It's taken us nine years since the first meeting and six years since the first commitment, but we've now cumulatively raised roughly EUR 1.6 billion from this client.
Today, they are one of our largest investors globally, and I'm sure there's more to come. Interestingly, it took five years from their first commitment for us to cross-sell another strategy. In this case, going from European corporate to SDP in Strategic Equity. Hopefully this slide has helped you to see that cross-selling is something that requires some thought and time to capture the opportunity. Given the scale of our platform and the growth in our client numbers in recent years, I'm confident there's a lot of fertile ground here in the years to come. To wrap up, I finish by reiterating the key messages Chris outlined at the start. We've grown a scaled blue-chip global client base that perceives us as a top quarter investment performer and client servicer. Our ability to deliver for our clients has supported our growth up and out, and will continue to do so.
We are now at the point where we are relevant for the world's large investors across a number of strategies. That relevance will only increase as we continue to grow. Putting those pieces together, I think ICG has huge potential to continue to grow, rooted in a compelling client offering. I'm excited at how my team can continue to sort the business in the years to come. At this point, we would be delighted to take any Q&A. Perhaps we start with any questions from the room.
Thank you very much. That was very helpful. I wonder, could you say a little bit more about your cross-selling per client? Because you've shown us the number of clients you have increasing. Presumably, other metrics people often look at is number of products per client, and that's an easy opportunity for you. How have those statistics been trending, and has that changed through time? Have you found it easier to cross-sell different products to the same people over the last few years, or how are you thinking about that?
Andreas, do you wanna take that? Yeah. I don't have the stats, products per client at hand, so we would have to look it up. you know, the way it works is basically some clients just wanna invest in one particular strategy, and that's it, and they're happy with that, and they keep coming back. Others then wanna have a wider relationship because they cannot deal with so many GPs, so they wanna focus on less GPs. That's a trend we're clearly seeing, and that will benefit us. Just in terms of, I mean, in terms of numbers, we're at 24% across the client base because we've grown the client base so far. If we take our European book, that's at about 40%.
That also has grown very fast, but of course, as Bashak outlined, the U.S., the Americas, and other regions have grown faster from a lower base. If we take this as a starting point, then we would like, over time, to get the other regions to 40%. We think a good metrics probably would be something like 50%. We don't wanna give you a higher number than this simply because, as I said at the outset, not every strategy is for everybody. Not everybody wants to invest in multiple strategies. We think there's still substantial runway to go beyond that 24%. Haley. At the front. The front, Haley. Then we'll come to you, Luke. Don't worry. Won't forget you.
Hi. Yes. Can I ask two questions please? The first one, you were kind enough to give us some numbers on how your client numbers split had changed from 2012 to 2022. I just wondered if you could tell us anything about the value of AUM by client rather than the number on that same sort of metric. The second question, in terms of being larger and being relevant to more clients, is there a sort of right size of fund that ICG needs to have to stay relevant? Is it the Europe fund range is the right size, or the SDP is always around EUR 5 billion, that the funds have to stay that size now to remain relevant, or is that not the right way to think about it? Thank you.
Okay. Andreas.
Yeah. Once again, I don't have that number at hand, so we have to go and check. On your second question, the larger investors, they tend to increase the minimum size of a fund they want to invest to, right? What was maybe a couple years ago EUR 1.5 billion-EUR 2 billion, now maybe is EUR 2.5 billion-EUR 4 billion, depending on the investor, especially sovereign wealth funds. You need to have, as you lead it to a certain size and scale, to even be relevant because they don't want to have more than 10% holding in your fund, right? If their minimum ticket size is, let's say EUR 250 million, your fund has to be at least EUR 250 million. Right? That means the...
our larger strategies like ICG Europe Fund VIII, or Senior Debt Partners or Strategic Equity, these are the more scaled strategies. We see them still continue to grow with future vintages. At the same time, you know, for example, you heard about Sale and Leaseback and Infrastructure, we also obviously plan to scale up these strategies over time, right? Again, with that, making them also more relevant for the larger investors, because again, our investor base is very institutional, right? Which means they tend to write larger checks, so usually EUR 50 million upwards. Luke, I think you had something.
Thank you. Thanks for the presentation, guys. Just two questions. firstly, in terms of the new strategies that you've launched in recent years or to come, which areas you see the most potential scale? Is that like infrastructure or secondaries, for example? just secondly, I noticed you had growth in wealth as a potential driver in the future. Just how do you guys plan to address that market? I guess you've seen like Blackstone BREIT, et cetera, going on. Just wondering what you guys think about that and the wealth opportunity going forward from there. Thanks.
Yeah. Yeah. In terms of which strategies, I mean, for sure infrastructure, right? Because when you look at the investor intentions, 'cause we look at them every quarter. You can see them on Preqin, where they poll. That's probably the one asset class within private markets where there is still that appetite to commit and to invest. Clearly that's one of the areas. An area where there's, at the moment, a bit less appetite, but where we really see a lot of opportunities, not only to deploy capital at the moment, but also to grow, is the real estate platform. As you know, we hired Krysto Nikolic from Starwood. We're really setting out, you know, at the moment seeding a couple of funds.
I personally believe, you'll see some good things coming out of that platform. That's probably the two I would put high on the list. Time will tell. We'll see. The second question was wealth. Now, wealth, we raised so far around EUR 2 billion from the wealth channel. Relative to what I should've just shown, EUR 100 billion, that's a very small number. Again, our focus was very much on growing the institutional franchise. Simply because, as I said earlier, the door is closing because of GP consolidation. We want to make sure we get on board. Second, we didn't have the I mean, our brand keeps evolving, but when you want to go into the private wealth channel, brand is quite important. Blackstone is a good example, right?
Some of the other names. For us, building out an institution side, there's obviously positive spillover on the wealth channel, but that's also a reason why we were a bit more careful, even before the BREIT and BCRED things happened. What we've done, we've done it through feeder funds, just really traditional locked up structures. For example, if you take Strategic Equity, we raise 10% of that strategy through the wealth channel with two partners. They're also very keen to get on board for the next vintage. We actually probably onboard one or two others. I can see potential there. Yes. We'll definitely play in the channel. Compared to some of the big players, that hasn't been our first and foremost priority.
Partly also because, as I said, with let's say 600 odd clients on board, there's still a lot of runway in the institutional world for us to keep growing. It's something we are mindful. We wanna definitely have the discussions, and we have dedicated people for the channel, but it's not gonna be a huge part of our fundraising anytime soon. As it concerns semi liquids, we're obviously carefully tracking this, 'cause we were actually in discussions with some potential partners on semi-liquid structures. let's see. It will be interesting to see how this, how this evolves given what's going on in all the gating. David.
Thank you. Yeah, two for me as well, please. Early on in the slide deck, you had a slide that I guess outlined the traditional reasons as to why us owners, allocators would want to invest in private markets. I mean, how has that been evolving, particularly with the course of events in the last year? Are kind of new factors coming into the fold? Are clients challenging some of those traditional, you know, pull factors as to why they'd want to come in? I'd just be interested in sort of any thoughts you might have there. Just in terms of, you know, when you're talking about the re-up as part of the growth strategy, how important is it when clients do decide to put more money into a new fund?
How important is it that they've already had, say, cash returns from the vintages they're already in? You know, I guess, what's the balance of, like, fresh money that they're putting in that you haven't yet returned? How important is it that they've already actually had some money back from those prior vintages to actually reinvest?
Darius, I think they probably both sit well.
I'll take the second one.
Okay.
I think to your point around re-returning capital, that's obviously very, very important because it effectively serves as proof of concept, right? You do what you say. It also makes an investor's decision a lot easier when they're going to their own committees to invest in a subsequent vintage when they can show that they've had money returned. Fortunately, we have. I think I did the benchmarking not too long ago. Top quartile and top decile DPI almost across every strategy. And I think that reinforces and facilitates new commitments to subsequent vintages. A very roundabout way of saying very important.
Follow up on that just very quickly. I mean, obviously, one of the features we've seen in ICG in recent years is that the gap between vintages has probably, you know, reduced, particularly in, you know, the last five or so years. To what extent does that present a challenge that the, I guess, the tighter the fundraising timelines, they've actually had less money back?
Well, look, I don't think that's an ICG specific phenomena. That's the general market or vintages of the timing between vintages has narrowed. I'll give you one example. Fund VII, Europe Seven has already returned, I think 45% DPI. Yes, but it doesn't mean then that you can't still return capital, even though the vintages... It's a matter of, you know, picking the right investments, and I think we're particularly good at that.
Now the first question escaped me.
You had a slide early on where it was, you were talking about, I guess, the traditional reasons as to why people would want to invest.
Right.
in private market. I just wondered how that may have evolved, particularly with events over the last year, with obviously interest rates being the obvious one, but other factors as well. Yeah, is the reason for investing in private markets as clients are seeing it evolving in any way, both positive and negatively?
This complex. There's no simple answer to this. Well, first of all, the Denominator effect has hit a lot of investors, as we talked about earlier, and different investors have different ways of dealing with it. You saw the example of the New York plans, and this is actually a lot of U.S. plans at the moment doing this, going to the boards, getting increased allocations to alternatives, partly just to deal with Denominator effect and be able to still keep deploying. When you look at sovereigns, they learned in previous crisis that you just have to keep deploying 'cause otherwise you miss out. The vintages now will be very good vintages, right? You don't wanna miss out.
I would say the segment which is the most challenged is clearly pensions. And there, it depends a little bit, as I said, in which region you are. The other thing probably worth to say, since the base rate is higher and you can get decent returns in just guilds or whatever, right? I would say strategies which are offer lower returns, you have to make the case, right? You have to work a bit harder to explain why that makes sense for investors to invest, let's say, direct lending or so. Whereas when you look at the higher octane strategies, 'cause a lot of funds still just want in the mix get to a certain return level, right? They're, I think there I don't really see a broken appetite, right? Simply because they operate in a different class.
What alternative do you have to get double-digit returns? You know, going public equities? I don't know, maybe not. You don't have so many ways to get double-digit returns, and that's why I think it's bifurcating a little bit.
All right. David, I think your question was also maybe more longer term, right? Was it, you know, look at client discussions you were having a decade ago versus today, were you looking at a sort of longer arc as well in your question, or was it a very narrow one today?
No, I mean, yeah, look it was more the longer term.
Oh, sorry.
You've been here a long time, Andreas. We wanna hear some of the wisdom you've learned.
The wisdom is that it was 10 years a good time to move into alternatives. I came from traditional asset management. Because the appetite just keeps growing, right? That's the one thing. Really one of the reasons I outlined is that the public markets, actually the listings are shrinking. For investors that's really another way to access growth, right? That is a good way in private markets. Generally speaking, we see... I mean, take the New York employees, right? Unfortunately some clients we haven't yet published. I could give you another dozen names who are doing the same exercise at the moment, and they're big investors.
The point is, I don't think, and I don't know, but I don't think that 35%, going from 25%-35% will be down in a year's time. I think that's structurally long term. That's why I do believe that there is basically a long-term appetite for the asset class.
Thank you very much.
Robert, I think you had a question.
Sorry. Yes, thanks. I think in responding to a previous question, you were talking about how some of your funds need to be of a certain minimum size to be relevant to certain of your investors. Looking at it from the other way around, is there a sort of a minimum size among the prospective investor base that you look at for them to be relevant to you? I mean, what sort of size of investor out there who's not currently on your books, how big do they need to be really for you to sort of be interested in them? Secondly, sort of probably quite a remedial question, just in terms of how you sort of go about sort of signing up new clients. I'm sure you know who they are, do you sort of cold call them?
Do you operate through agents? Do you sort of manage the whole process internally? How does that sort of practical side of it work out? Finally, obviously the growth in customer numbers has been. Sorry, investor numbers has been extremely impressive. They're presumably net numbers. Do you ever lose clients? If you do, sort of how many and sort of what are the reasons generally for that?
Okay. they're three questions in one.
Yeah.
The minimum size in some ways is almost predicated on when you look at the PPMs, we usually say EUR 10 million is the minimum ticket. That's kind of, it's the starting point, right? That would still include quite a lot of family offices, right? Maybe smaller pension funds and other investors. That 10 is actually a decent size to get started, right, for people. That's the first question. Do we lose clients? Yes, we do. Because what happens is sometimes investors just do not re-up. If you haven't cross-sold to them, you have another strategy, it can happen to you that they may not come into any other strategy, 'cause why? Maybe the CEO has taken a different view or, I mean, there's many reasons, right?
You also see this in the re-up rates, right? You barely get more than, numerically more than 70%-75% re-up rates in the funds, right? It means every vintage you do, you have your attrition. That doesn't mean they don't come back. They sometimes skip a vintage, that's because there's some internal changes, sometimes don't have budget, like at the moment is a bit more the case, things like that. I think the keys, and that's then the middle question is how do we go about finding new clients? I think one of the keys is that you really stay engaged, and I wanna give you an example. We recently onboarded an SMA that was EUR 1.6 billion in size. That SMA is a client who was in Europe, year three or four and didn't come back.
Just nothing interested them. We kept going there, kept going there. Most... What most people would do, they said, "You know what? two or three years of going there, not worth it. Let's just forget about it." No, we kept going, kept going, kept going. All of a sudden, change in what they wanted and bingo, got a huge mandate from them. I think one of the keys is that you keep engaged, right? In addition to these 600 odd investors, we have a prospect base of, I would say 1,500- 2,000 names we talk to regularly. In my view, it's a function of time until most of these people will give you money somehow, somewhere. That's also back to what we said earlier. If your platform is very narrow, then it's very binary, right?
They like it or don't like it. If your platform is broader, then you have more to offer. The other thing is because we had quite a few first time funds who are now coming, like Infra two, Seven Spec two, they had done their first vintages. A lot of investors just don't do first time funds, full stop. That means you need to go for this second fund, third fund iteration until you can attract them. How do we find investors? We obviously map the markets, we have a list of people we would like to talk to, then there's many ways how we get to them. We have our own marketing team, we don't hire agents to do this for us. I mean, it's really cold calling. It's going to conferences.
It's just finding ways to get the first dialogue, right? Which is hard, because a lot of investors are over-banked, if you wanna say, and they're not really keen to meet you. It just takes time, right? I think, as I said, we have a long list of names we have dialogue with. The way I think about this is, if you call them at 2:00 A.M. in the morning, could they say something sensible about ICG? You know, not just, "Yeah, I know ICG." No, I mean, can they talk about what this firm is about? That's, that's what I meant by these 1,500+ names. It's probably more. There's a big prospect base, and, yeah, you just have to keep knocking at the door and over time.
The case study I gave, that's another good example, right? I mean, 2012, 2015, for three years. We have another big investor who gave us a EUR 1 billion mandate two or three years ago, and I remember when we won that mandate, it was in Asia. The marketer, who's been with us for almost 10 years, he pulled out the business plan he written five years earlier and said, "Andreas, remember?" I didn't remember, of course. "This is what I had in mind, and now I won the client." It took him five years. That's the point. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. You can't sprint into this stuff, you need to really just keep going, right?
That's why I think it's also important that the strategy deliver what they say they will do, which our strategies do, and so you can keep coming back, right?
Are there any more questions in the room? We've got a couple online. Please.
Thanks. You touched on it a couple of times, it's just how many GPs do LPs like to work with? I mean, is that reducing in size? Is there a maximum that they kind of look to work with? Just a bit of color on that, because you've touched on it a couple of times. Thanks.
I think it varies by LP, right? I think the overarching trend is very much one of GP consolidation. The LPs themselves are resource constrained. Sometimes very small teams managing billions and billions of dollars of capital. It's no one size fits all answer. What I can say definitively is that they are consolidating their relationships. Having a diversified product offering, you can cater to that a lot better. Now, of course, there'll always be certain niche managers either that are doing something very specific or unique that can be added to any given LPs roster. I think really there's a huge trend of consolidation at the moment. Definitely reducing.
It depends a bit on the asset class, right? If you take traditional secondaries, you don't need that many managers to cover the universe, right? That would be a much smaller number. If you take traditional private equity, and then you go through the whole thing, buyout, BC, growth, and then global and all that, you need a bigger group of managers, right? Direct lending, again, you can be a bit more concentrated, right? Senior direct lending. It depends a little bit, but you would probably see across the board, normally, let's say 50 GPs, and then they're usually in multiple vintages, typically. You would have maybe a track 150 funds. As Basak said, some people have much bigger books, and we have seen people who have well over 100 GPs with several hundred fund positions.
It's... Depends also how much firepower they have, right? There's also... You're also constrained by that, right?
Anything else in the room? In which case, there are a couple of questions online. First of all, one for you, Basak, I think. A big topic in the public markets is valuations of private assets. Do we get any pushback or questions from clients on our fund NAVs and valuations?
No, in short. I think we're fortunate enough that our investors can look at and focus more on realized returns that, you know, for funds, and again, as I mentioned, where, you know, we've done particularly well there. I guess we benefit from the fact that we don't really have many pure equity strategies, so it's slightly less of an issue for us. I think as a house, we are very conservative, and this is validated by the fact that if we are in a transaction with another GP, our valuation marks. In a minority position, our valuation marks are almost always lower than them. I think really not really.
Fair enough. Maybe I should segue from that. To ensure we remain relevant with the largest investments, as investors that want to consolidate their investments with fewer GPs, down the road, do we think that we might need a pure play private equity product within the product suite? Does what we have currently allow us to sort of address that market as well? Andreas, I guess that's one for you.
That's a good question. Look, if you take our flagship fund, the European Subordinated Equity Fund, that is a hybrid, right? It's majority debt, but it also plays in the equity space. When you think about who are we competing with in deals, it's actually not banks, it's not direct lending funds, it's private equity funds. That's the competition for deals. That fund sits in quite a few of our clients' accounts on the private equity side. Sorry. The reason why I'm explaining this is because you need also to think about if you then start say, "Oh, let's have a private equity fund," just a, like, general private equity fund. You're starting competing with yourself, which I'm not sure that's very clever. Right? You could.
What one may do is to say, "Okay, are there any verticals?" I don't know. We have a life sciences fund, right? Healthcare verticals, where it may make sense to do that, right? Where you have specialist know-how and all that. At least at the moment, it probably doesn't make sense because the European fund, and we have similar strategies in other regions, can be scaled up, and the fund can be much bigger. Right? You've seen it from EUR 2.5 billion, EUR 3 billion, EUR 4.5 billion, EUR 8.1 billion. That fund can be bigger and then become half the size of a proper buyout fund. Right?
Perfect. Well, with three minutes to spare, if there are no more questions, thank you ever so much for joining. We will look forward to speaking soon. Thank you very much.