Welcome everybody to the Vontobel Investor Day 2024, and a special warm welcome also to everyone who is joining us over webcast today. Today you'll get to hear straight from many of the leaders at Vontobel who will be driving together with the teams the growth and long-term success of the company. We're actually particularly happy that you have a chance to meet such a broad representation from the firm. We have the client units and also many colleagues from the investment teams. It is a full day of presentations, but I hope, especially with your help during Q&A, that we can stick to this timeline and this schedule. First, we kick off with Christel, Georg, and Thomas providing an update on firm-wide strategy and financials. As I think most of you in the room know, Vontobel is investment-led.
And today we will deep dive on fixed income, TwentyFour Asset Management, and Ancala. You also know that Vontobel is client-centric, and Brian and Christoph will today cover our two client-facing units: private clients and institutional clients. Markus will cover how technology will enable us to become more efficient while also allowing for customization. After each of these slots, we will do a Q&A. For those of you joining us online, unfortunately, we have to limit due to time questions to the room. But if you're online, do not hesitate to reach out to me, Peter, or Jessica from the investor relations team with any questions or meeting requests. And with that, I would like to hand over to Georg, who is there.
Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to Vontobel's Investor Day. And thank you for being here. It's great to see so many familiar faces, but also new faces in the room. So allow me therefore also to start at the very top of some of the things we will discuss today. We have a unique business model if you compare it to many others out there. So we're an investment firm. And what we mean with that is actually very simple. First of all, we have a joint investment factory. It's pictured here under investment solutions. This is very different because you'll see a lot of players that manufacture investment products in this segment or in the other segment or in these businesses. We don't believe in that.
We believe that in bringing these together is the only way to make sure all our clients, wherever they are, in whatever segment they are, can benefit from the full range of our products and our skills. Then we have two client segments or client segment businesses. It's institutional clients, often referred to as asset management, and it's private clients, actually high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals, often referred to also as wealth management and private banking in the old world. And this is also special because those have the same size. And the same size, as we will show, brings a lot of complementarity into the business system.
So if you go out there, you will find a lot of asset managers that have small private wealth businesses trying to grow it or trying to get into this because of a lot of the things we show you afterwards. We have it at the same size. And you will see a lot of private wealth players that are trying to get into some of the asset management domains, trying to get some of those capabilities because you need more and more capabilities. We have it. And we have it with pretty much the same size. So we strongly believe in this model, and we strongly believe in our capability that drives this model. And therefore, we reaffirm our strategy to develop the investment house further. Or to put it more bluntly, we double down on our strategy. I've just talked about the two complementary businesses.
Let's go into organic growth first, organic growth, which has been at the core of this company and has been an area where we have showed during the last past year superior results. If you start with the private side that's in black here, you see that is quite constant. It has been growing as our business has been growing, but year for year we've been able to provide a constant flow of business, a constant flow of new clients. Yesterday is an exception. In 2019, that was after we have integrated a large acquisition and had pretty much industry standards attrition. This part of the business provides us, as I said, with constant growth, and it also translates into constant revenue growth, much less volatile than, for example, the institutional business. If you look at the institutional business, it's more cyclical, it's more volatile.
So when things go well, growth rates can be tremendous, number of years over 10 billion. On the other hand, if it's more challenging, we have to fight more. When is it challenging? It's challenging, as an example, during the last two, three years, when our most important investment strategies like fixed income and equity strategies in emerging markets are in an increasing interest rate environment. It's not the place to be, right? It's very difficult to keep growth rates. So then we fight much more and we see much more negative effects. However, we are very much of the opinion that we are well positioned for the coming years and for the economic environment in the coming years to benefit with our product offering. So where does this translate to? On the right side, you see a compound annual growth rate of 6%.
This volatility, the combination of those two businesses creates a quite strong year-to-year growth trend. We believe in that. We believe in those two complementary businesses, and we believe there's a lot of benefits in this for the stability of the business and hence for the shareholders in general. Some more characteristics about being an investment house and combining those two businesses. If you look at our revenue composition, you will see that 85%, I repeat, 85% of our assets are under mandate. This is very important because, again, this creates a very constant revenue flow in terms of periodic income. It shows something else. It also shows that our clients believe in our investment capabilities in terms of managing assets or advising them on how to manage assets. Secondly, let's look on our dependency on interest rates.
As you can see here, it's about a third of our competitors in Switzerland. That means that our revenues are, of course, much less exposed to changes in the interest rate environment. It also reflects the fact that we are investment-led, as you see on the left side. And we're not credit-led. We don't grow our business primarily with credit. We have some, but the main business is the investment business. And that is reflected in these figures. And it also has to do with our conservative risk appetite and with our commitment to run a capital-light business model. Christel and I, we joined, no, we didn't join. We started to take over the CEOship on 1st of January. And let me talk about a few things that we have done in the first 10 months now.
It was clear to us that we have a very strong business model and a very strong strategy to invest the investment, to develop the investment house going forward. It was clear we will double down on this. At the same time, it was also clear to us that we can do things better, faster, more to the benefit of our clients, and more efficiently. That's why you don't see a lot of activities here that are about redoing, reinventing, branching out wherever. You see tasks we took up very fast, which are around sharpening our organization and business, accelerating our growth, and anticipating client needs. We start with the first one. Very early on in February, we have sharpened our client coverage. We had a third segment. It was called digital investing.
We have reintegrated it in the business in terms of clients and also capabilities, digital capabilities, and we took out the synergies. It's much simpler now, private and institutional. We also realized having a cost-income ratio that's close to 80%, as it was at the end of last year, is not sustainable. We have to be more efficient. We have to be faster, also for the clients and the employees' benefit. And very importantly, we have to create more capital for our future investments. So we launched the CHF 100 million efficiency program by the end of 2026, and we're well on track. And also very early on, we revamped the leadership team, most notably with Christoph Ledergerber joining. He's the head of institutional clients.
Christel, you will hear from him later, was very important in significantly reducing the outflows in the institutional business and, of course, now developing the basis for future growth. We also continued down the line of accelerating our growth. The organization must be busy and must focus on creating more business. We continued to deliver our net new money and client flow on the private side, also via acquiring additional clients with the current workforce and hiring new relationship managers. Also on the private side, we conducted the acquisition of IHAG. IHAG is a small Swiss wealth manager that is solely focused on clients in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. This is a bolt-on acquisition. It's an acquisition that exactly fits our strategy and is an acquisition that will bring us more volume and more client acquisition of the platform.
On the institutional side, we built a proprietary distribution with insourcing the distribution of our 40 Act funds. This is very important because now we control the entire value chain for the client. We are closer to the client. We have no intermediary in between us. This will be an important cornerstone of the U.S. strategy on the institutional side going forward. The clients. We have said in other presentations that private markets is today and will continue to be an even more important part of both institutional clients and private clients' asset allocations. It's not something we have produced in our investment factory so far. With the acquisition of a minority stake in Ancala, we are the first time involved in producing infrastructure investments or a private market investment.
And this is significant because that allows us to also distribute this to our institutional clients and very large private clients. So the first step and the most significant step is done. On the private equity side, we have introduced fund-based products for our private clients. Also here, the frontline is starting to much more address that asset class and bringing it into clients' portfolios where it makes sense. And more operational, but not less important, we launched a new sustainable income offering that had very strong client backing. To most of these points, you will hear later on. I'll keep it with this, but just to show in the last 10 months, we very much went around the business model that we had and tried to sharpen it, accelerate the growth, and think about what clients need in the future.
For those of you who follow us longer, they know that every few years we define new priorities of what is important for the coming years. And you will see they are actually quite simple, and they're intentionally quite simple. So you will not find 50 new initiatives and strategy redoings because, as I've just said before, we believe in the general strategy, but we have to deliver better. So let's take the first one. We deliver value to our clients through advice, active management, and customization. This is at the very core of an investment firm. So within this pillar, topics like that we focus on strategies where active investing creates value, that we deliver over the cycle performance in these strategies. And thirdly, and that is partly new, that we provide clients with scalable and customizable solutions. So the area of one-size-fits-all with minimum 50 million is over.
So we need our technology. We will need our technology to provide that both to institutional and private clients. And we need our skills that we can distribute there. Secondly, we grow profitable in private clients and institutional clients. It's very at the core of what we do. It's the only 100% indicator that we do everything right is when we get more clients. In here, our topics like that we double down in the markets and segments that we are in terms of investments and improvements, but also in here that we need to further improve our hybrid offering. You know, the combination of digital capabilities and physical capabilities in both segments will become more and more important and has to be a cornerstone in order to continue to grow organically. And we must deliver on our efficiency goals. That means a cost-efficient business setup.
It also means to leverage technology available, and there's more and more technology available every month to drive innovation and efficiency. And finally, to continue to ensure diligent capital management. You will hear about all of this from my colleague in the rest of the afternoon. But with this, it's time to hand over to Christel. Thank you.
Thank you very much. And a very warm welcome from my side as well. I'll give you a bit of colors on these priorities. They are not coincidental. They strongly build on our core strength, and they will play into key industry tailwinds. So I want to start with those tailwinds. The first one may not seem so much like a tailwind, but it is very much present, and I'll explain why it is a tailwind.
The macro situation is under our eyes, fundamentally changing again in the sense that we are going back to monetary policy cycles. We have lived up until 2022 in what was 14 years of quantitative easing after the financial crisis. This was one humongous rising tide lifting all boats. And then suddenly, 2022 was a wake-up call saying, well, this can happen again, that rates go up. And what can happen again as well, which is pretty rare, is fixed income and equities correcting at the same time. It has happened a handful of times over the last 100 years, so hence the shocker. But to an extent, this is now what we will have to live with. And the proof point is the fact that volatility has gone up. We don't see it on the VIX for another reason that I'll come back.
It's the one that makes the front pages, but we don't see it. But we see it where it matters most, the macro volatility as measured through the interest rate volatility. That chart behind me shows you volatility on the U.S. interest rate curve. The level is not so much important compared to the fact that we had a given level all along prior to the financial crisis, went down because QE dampened that volatility. The Fed rescued us every time we had a little bit of a cold. And now we've gone back up in volatility. And what you have seen, it's not surprising, is that there probably is a correlation and even a causality with some of the social tension and the geopolitical tensions that we are seeing.
But what it means in terms of investment, and before thinking business, what it means in terms of duty from any investment house to their clients is to remind them about the golden principle of diversification and sound portfolio construction, to remind them that asset allocation is of the essence, and when I mentioned the VIX does not show that volatility, the S&P 500, you know, is at all-time concentration. A third of that exposure is in seven stocks. So that's the duty that we have. Diversification, portfolio construction, asset allocation are inherently active investment decisions. There are also one that require to look at your wealth if you're private, to look at your capital if you're institutional in a more holistic way, and that is why solutions have appeared in the vocabulary of institutional clients.
Indeed, Solutions is, together with private markets, one of the segments that's expected to grow the fastest over the coming years for institutional clients, seven% per annum over the next few years. That is something that has always been done for private clients, to think about how you optimize the entirety of a portfolio, not just that building block that you're buying. It is a segment that inherently plays into our cards because we own the DNA through the private client. Second, and Markus will come on, the infrastructure on which we are definitely doubling down. And third, at the front, the ability to combine with very strong quant skills. So that is definitely a tailwind that's playing into our cards. The other tailwind that plays into our cards is, Georg has mentioned, our focus for private clients is predominantly on developed markets.
Now, I've just said that volatility, whether it's a causality or not, it doesn't matter. It's a fact that geopolitical risks have been on the rise, are on the rise, and are likely to remain higher than what we've known them before, and where do we take the biggest reputational risk, if we take any, would be more on the private client side. Now, what did we choose to do to focus on developed markets, so that is a trend that favors us in terms of having low risk, so now what about the growth? Well, as it happens, our focus market over the coming years will grow or are expected to grow 5%. That's the wealth growth that is not taking into account the market share that we intend to win, does not take into account the asset growth of the invested portfolios.
I would now like to move to our three priorities. We deliver value to all our clients through advice, active management, and customization. Let me start first with fixed income because fixed income is back, and one crude way to look at it is to look at the bond yields, overall global bond yields versus dividend yields. And what you will find is that the spread in favor of bond yields is at the highest versus dividend yield since 2007. And now it comes again. That's reminiscent of pre-global financial crisis conditions. Income is back. Income is back in the sense of having the ability to play a role in a portfolio, whether it is to deliver income, whether it is to act as a hedge if you go into assets that do not bear any credit risks.
And I would argue, of course, I'm going to be totally biased being a fixed income manager or having been all my life, but that is where you start. Income is actually the start because if you are a non-investor, you are in cash. And your first step ought to be to take some risk, and the some risk brings you to fixed income, and the more risk brings you to equity. So there is little doubt that fixed income, and we see it in fact, the only flows into active this year in the industry for institutional clients are into fixed income. And we are capturing these flows. We're capturing these flows because we have two strong franchises. You'll hear from both of them, 24 Asset Management and the Fixed Income Boutique here based in Zurich. They have long-standing track records on complementary segments.
The Fixed Income Boutique has 82% of its assets in the first or second quartile over a five-year period. And 24 Asset Management has 100% of its assets in the first or second quartile. They jointly manage CHF 40 billion in assets. We are seeing flows, and we are seeing very strong interest. The second topic that I'd like to touch on is private markets. We mentioned that, or I mentioned that diversification will be of the essence. Well, private market is inherently diversifying two portfolios. Why? Because you tap in a different universe. I'd like to take the private equity or the equity example. In the U.S., 87% of companies with a turnover of more than USD 100 million are private. So if you don't do private, you don't tap into that universe. Two and a half times more companies.
You have two and a half times more private companies than public companies that have a turnover of above 500 million, so that's the first diversification. It's the universe. The other one, I'd argue, if handled with care, is the liquidity profile, and to a large extent, it's protecting oneself against one's own mistake of stopping out of some of the asset classes at a not very opportune time. In fact, I stood here two years ago in a different role telling you we will enter private markets, and we will do it in a structured way. First, for our private clients, we want to partner with an institutional GP to provide an all-weather, well-rounded private equity vintage offering. We did that last year with Portfolio Advisors. We said we will expand on that to offer more choices to our private clients.
We started logically by hiring a head of private markets, well-known in the industry that has built a private market for a similar peer, and we are now launching our third evergreen offering on our platform, externally managed, obviously. What we said is we want to expand on our own investment capabilities where we have a right to play and go into private structure, and we will be launching next year our asset-backed finance fund, and Ben will be speaking to that in a minute. And last but not least, we said we want to acquire capabilities. We want to be part of it. We're an investment house. Our eyes were set very strongly on infrastructure. Why? Because if there is a diversification play, infrastructure's got to be the play. The cash flows are generally linked to inflation, and infrastructure, you need through the cycle.
In fact, and indeed, you see that when you look at two difficult scenarios for public assets, one being risk-off in black, this is when you have correction in equity markets, and the other one being higher than average inflation in blue, you see that infrastructure delivers better return than public equities and public bonds. To us, it's about providing solution and possibilities to build a diversified portfolio and to have that important skills in-house. That's why we're very pleased to have been able to acquire the significant minority stake with Ancala. The last topic I'd like to speak about for this first priority is the solution. Let me start with a proof point because it might not be known to all of you. Six months ago, we launched the Swiss Sustainable Equity Income Plus Fund. It's now CHF 500 million. That fund does the following.
It combines the fundamental bottom-up skills of our Swiss equity team in the conviction equity boutique, picking stocks with dividend or income properties, with the skills of our quantitative investment boutique, who on top build an income overlay through an option overlay. This solution has had the backing of a large Swiss bank here and is open to other investors. It's not the first time we do that. In fact, we've done this type of solution, but it's certainly not the last time. Why does it fit into how we are built? Because we have those boutiques and because we have those quantitative skills in particular to combine those boutiques as well to the benefit of the clients. And our quantitative boutique is not just combining. They actually also manage 20 billion of assets in their own right, which gives that and maintains that edge.
What is about solution and what is about active management? Active management is about delivering performance, but it's a lot more than that. Because as a client, you might need more income. You might want more impact. You might need to exclude a sector. You might want to have a drawdown limitation. This is what solution is all about. And when I said it's in our DNA, again, we were here two years ago. Georg presented that. In fact, you weren't here. You were in the U.S., but you did present that. Our customization at scale with iPortfolio. We were already back then managing 8,000 different types of portfolios on this platform. We're now today managing 11,000 different types, not 11,000 portfolios, 11 different types. We have that in our DNA. And at the front, meeting with the client, thinking with the client, is those teams coming together.
The last piece that we were missing is the upping in the technical skills and how you approach those clients. And that, Christoph, we'll speak to at the later stage. I want to go to our second priority. We grow profitably in private clients and institutional clients. And indeed, so we do. You have the net new money growth in our private client segment. As you can see, it's fallen well into our through-the-cycle targets of reaching 4%-6% growth. What it has also done is beating our direct private banking peers as well as our banking peers, which are represented by the lines and other median results of those peers. We grow predominantly organically, and we grow in a focused and disciplined way, the focus being developed market, the focus being investment-led.
We look for clients who want our advice, our active investment management, not our balance sheet. We are very disciplined around that in how we choose the RM and, of course, then how they choose the clients. That's how we've grown. I've showed you before our wealth market will continue to grow in this margin, and our model has delivered. We strongly think that the complexity that the world is now bringing will precisely help in continuing to deliver this type of results. The second aspect is we will complement that growth wherever appropriate with bolt-on acquisition. We've just done so with IHAG. It has to fit the markets. It has to fit the philosophy, investment-led, not credit-led. Let me now turn to institutional clients. The last three years have been more difficult. We know why.
The trigger was indeed that joint correction of fixed income and equity that left investors quite scarred and scared. But what we've done in the meantime, we haven't stopped. Firstly, we've protected, and that's actually to the contrary of the industry, we've protected our margin. And again, today, at the nine-month now numbers, we have stable margin. And we've been managing to do that while at the same time diversifying consciously and passively through flows away from emerging market exposure. Today, only 10% of our assets are in emerging markets. Going forward, our accelerator, we said about sharpening and accelerating, it's accelerating those strong track records that we've got. There is no doubt in our mind that fixed income is really central because it will have that regaining demand, and we do have the track records.
And we will also continue beyond accelerating those strong track records in fixed income and elsewhere to build where we can have high value added and where it happens to also have high margin, which is solutions and private markets. And beyond that, Christoph will then speak to how we will also step up and sharpen our sales approach to our clients. Thomas will speak on the third priority, which is that we will deliver on our efficiency goals. He will cover the number, and in that, he will go also in depth. I will just leave you with, we strongly affirm our through-the-cycle targets. We have the skills. We have the business model. We have the ambitions, and we have the ability to deliver on this 4%-6% growth. We have the commitment to deliver on our cost-income ratio.
We have the absolute commitment to remain on our business model, which is one where we are capital-light and not credit-led. With that, I pass on to Thomas.
Thank you. Welcome from my side. Very happy to see the turnout and see you all here, and very much appreciate the opportunity to engage now and then hopefully later at the dinner. I'm starting with a trading update. The year so far has been characterized by a slow start into the year, January, then very good February to May, and then again driven by some uncertainty, a slight slowdown that we have seen, and since August, a bit of volatility in the market. Also the sentiment was a bit mixed, going up and down, so it was difficult to guess of any direction. What you can see here, assets under management grew slightly in quarter three.
That has to do with FX headwinds that we had to deal with of roughly CHF 5 million. [They] were just FX effects that you see in the assets under management. Performance otherwise would have driven us up higher. Notably here also, private clients for the first time this year, we crossed the CHF 100 billion. I mean, for the first time ever, private clients' business has been above CHF 100 billion assets under management. On the net new money, what you can see overall is for the firm, net new money has turned from negative to positive. Last year, nine-month numbers were -CHF 2.5 billion, and we're now at +CHF 2.6 billion. On institutional clients, which is the contributor to this, what we saw is a significant slowdown of the outflows.
We still have outflows in the third quarter, CHF 0.4 billion, but that is a significant slowdown over the last year where we had minus CHF 2.5 billion also in the third quarter. On what we have seen there is we saw in this quarter, we saw inflows in fixed income. We saw slight inflows in multi-asset, and we have experienced outflows on the equity side. And I will come back to this. Private clients year to date, we're in 4.2%.
Quarter three had a plus of CHF 700 million. Don't forget, quarter three in general, both on the institutional and the private client side, is the weakest quarter that we generally have, mostly driven by the summer holiday and the seasonality that we have to deal with. So we're with 4.2%, which you have shown. We're still in the band. Quarter three, I mean, I've seen some news outlets talking about the slowdown.
Last year, we had CHF 800 million. This year, we have CHF 700 million. That's a bit of noise. That's one or two bigger mandates which make the difference, right, which could come a day earlier or a day later. But so roughly, we're in line with the previous year here. So relative, if you look at the, if you put this in context, relatively, we're okay, in particular on the institutional client side. Don't forget, we're a high-conviction asset manager, right? We don't do passive. We don't do big distribution through our own branch network. We're not an asset manager hanging at a big private bank. So relative to those, if you compare us to the competitors, we're looking good. However, I mean, it's still outflows. And if you ask us whether we're entirely happy, we're not. There's more work to do.
And we'll see how this will go in the next couple of quarters. But we're on the right track, and we will continue working hard to get to positive net new money on both sides of the aisle, so to say. I'm not going to talk very long about how we work on our performance. What I want to repeat again is on the financial side. What we focus on is growing the business, top line and bottom line. We focus on having a return on equity that is higher than the cost of capital that we have to pay. And we focus on generating capital, tangible book value. This is what we look at every year. And the underpinning of all of this is to do this with a low risk appetite because what we are focusing on is consistency.
Whenever I do a half-year report, I always show you the last 12 years. I mean, you could argue, what do we care about the last 12 years? What we want to talk about is the consistency, how we deliver these numbers. That's very important for us. Of course, we're an industry that goes up and down, but the consistency of delivering against these targets is very important. And that's why for the second, for the next two years, the strategic, our focus is very clearly on earnings, delivering the CHF 100 million efficiency program, at the same time managing revenues. I'll talk a bit about this. Balance sheet to continue to efficiently manage the balance sheet and capital and the risk in order to support the strategy that we want to drive and to make sure that we can continue with our capital markets-friendly stance.
A couple of remarks on the revenues, particularly on net interest income and dividend income. I want to say a couple of words. As you know, we have a relatively, Christel mentioned it, we have a capital-light model. This means we're not using our balance sheet a lot. So net interest income is always a small part. Net interest income is slowly coming down, basically driven by this, what we call a slow grind of, of course, our clients who move from the standard deposits into term deposits, call notes, and so on and so on, term notes in order to get a bit higher interest rate. That is one where we see a monthly drip, and then, of course, interest rates have come down, in particular in Switzerland as well, which is our major source of deposits.
In general, our deposits, to give a couple of numbers, 40%, 30%, 20% is the rule that you can go for. 40% is Swiss francs, 30% is U.S. dollars, and 20% is euros. So if you do your calculation, that's roughly the number you can assume. Net fee and commission income, what I want to make very clear here is we do an active pricing and margin management. It has been mentioned before as well. We have revenue. We have a revenue management program in all of our units where we look very, very closely to keep the margins constant and not to give in to, let's buy some net new money at the expense of margin and of revenues. The trading income, it was a very good first half. The third quarter is the third quarter. I mean, there's two months where people are more or less on holiday.
But what we can say is the third quarter. There was a slowdown over the first half of the year. We would call it a budget quarter, but it was above last year's number in that one. And the half-year one has been basically driven by a lot of client demand around structured products in the MAG seven, the whole top seven. There was a huge trading frenzy coming from February to May. And we saw also some higher demand on the crypto side. So whenever prices go up, this is where the clients go. Efficiency program, we mentioned. We mentioned this is on track. We have realized almost all of our exit rate savings, what we have already. Now, before you put this into the spreadsheets or into the model, a couple of remarks.
First of all, don't forget we hired people last year, which partly came, which you don't see in the 2023 P&L fully, and some of them only started this year. And secondly, we continue to hire in private clients. We continue to hire relationship manager also this year. Second remark is we only really started in quarter two with the efforts that we talk about. And finally, don't forget people stay on our P&L for a longer time. Once we let people go, it takes a bit of time until they're fully off the P&L. But what is important is the cost-income ratio is slowly going in the right direction. And I want to say one more thing. I want to repeat again, we do understand that $1 of revenue is more important than $1 of cost saved. We understand this very well.
That's why this cost program that we're doing is not ripping out 10% of the costs. I mean, ripping out 10% of the cost probably takes nine months. We just go and rip off the Band-Aid, and the costs are out. What we do here is we want to get more efficient and not to get more cheap, which is a very big difference. We work on things like complexity, on focusing, on sharpening what we do, automation of processes, process optimizations in general. That's the kind of thing. That's why we take three years to take out this 10% of the cost base because we want to not only achieve, we don't want to only achieve that the costs go out. We want to make sure that we scale better in the future. We want to reduce our marginal cost growth when the revenues go up.
If you look into the last 10 years or the last 15 years, take the numbers, what you see is our cost income, despite good revenue growth, has not increased, has not improved substantially, and this is something we want to change. We want to be sure that our growth is more accretive to the bottom line in the future than what we had in the past, and that's what the cost program is for. I will only quickly mention a couple of points on our balance sheet, but we never have time to really properly discuss the balance sheet, so I decided to put one in here so we can discuss a little bit. First of all, our balance sheet is fully marked to market. Fully means fully, right? There is a note in our annual report, note number 10, where you can look into how this exactly works.
What we do here is what you see is what you get. Every liquid asset on the balance sheet is marked to market. We don't do accrual accounting or the famous hold to maturity. We have a highly liquid balance sheet. I mean, you can see if you take all the liquid assets to the deposits, for example, that's more than 115%. So the balance sheet, the asset side is very liquid that we show here. And we have, of course, high LCR and a very good capitalization. So it's a very solid and strong balance sheet. We are also ready, and we are ready since quite a bit to issue bonds. As you know, we have no AT1 outstanding. We don't have bonds outstanding. Why do we do this? Basically, we don't need it. As you can see, we have lots of liquidity on the balance sheet.
But first of all, we want to diversify the source of funding, longer-term bonds. And secondly, maybe sometimes in the future, we need it or we need to tap into the capital market, and then it's good if you have a good reputation. And what I see from many discussions, whenever I go to a conference or anything, we have lots of demand for fixed income. So this is one of the reasons. We're ready to go. We would have been ready since quite a bit. We haven't done anything so far because we didn't like the spreads that we had to pay. And as soon as they are in a certain range and we like them, we will start with the bond issuance. Again, we don't need it. We will do it to diversify our funding side. We will also do very, we have a very conservative risk management.
We are saying this every single time, right? We maintain high levels of liquidity. We have a very careful approach how we deal with the treasuries. We don't, with the treasury, we don't take big bets. Let me give you a couple of examples of this for Lombard loans. The Lombard loans are 4.4% of our assets under management, which is compared to most of our competitors, relatively low. This goes back to the fact we don't want to use the balance sheet. We don't want to, and we don't, we're not focused on lending-led growth. We don't go into markets. We don't acquire clients by giving loans. We acquire clients through the investment skills that we have. And loans are a service that we provide. They are not a business for us. We don't look at it with a separate P&L. It's not a business.
It's a service that we provide for our clients as part of the holistic client offering. Another example that I can give is we're using the standard approach for RWA calculations, and our risk-weighted assets in percent, risk-weighted assets in percent of the loan volume on the Lombard loans is 5%-7%, which means basically almost all of our collateral is eligible, is eligible collateral under the FINMA rules. Right? Also there, we see all kinds of things, but this is a very, very low number, so we accept only liquid collateral. The number is small. The volume is relatively limited, and we're very careful what we accept as collateral, so we're very careful in the risk management in general. I'm coming already to the last discussion, which is the capital outlook. There's a couple of information here that I wanted to take you through.
Ancala, the deal closed on the 1st of July, as we have said before. We have taken a good deal of CHF 160 million and risk-weighted assets of CHF 200 million. The risk-weighted assets are for future acquisitions that we're required to do for going from a minority stake to the majority stake. As we said earlier, I mean, you can also do the math. You end up with roughly 45%. That's the stake that we have taken and the acquisitions we do over the next 8 to 10 years. The next steps are always taken, they're linked. Whenever we increase our share, it's linked to the closing of a new fundraise. We're buying locked-in revenues. That's how we did this one. IHAG, our current estimate is CHF 25 million in goodwill and roughly CHF 300 million in risk-weighted assets. We haven't closed yet. We will see.
This is an asset deal, as you know. So we need to see all the clients that come over, and then we know what the numbers really are once we know this. Basel III final, we have never talked about this before. Basel III final. As you know, the U.S. decided to shift it for a year. The EU decided to shift it for a year. The Swiss Bundesrat has decided they introduce it at the end of this year, so beginning of next year, the new regulation. We will see an RWA increase, which will be less than CHF 500 million, so relatively, also a relatively limited amount under FRTB because we do structured, so we have a Structured Solutions business, structured product business, which will increase the risk-weighted assets on the lending. The lending side will be unchanged, and on the operational risk charges, we will go down.
That will net yield roughly CHF 500 million, a little bit less than CHF 500 million. What I wanted to mention as well is we've talked about capital management and capital creation. We run a capital management program, which we have mentioned already a couple of times. Alone this half, the capital management program will roughly contribute 0.6% of CET1 ratio. So it's not every half year the same amount, but this is what it will contribute. This is going through the whole capital stack, going to the risk-weighted assets, seeing how we do it, where can we optimize. It's a classical optimization program. For capital creation, if you look at the last three years, we've generated CHF 70-100 million per year. Again, we have a highly accretive model.
Every Swiss franc we earn, every dollar we earn, right, goes. We have spent in the last 10 years either giving it back to the shareholders or we have invested them into making acquisitions. So from CHF 2.6 billion that we generated over the last 10 years, CHF 1.6 billion we have distributed, CHF 0.9 billion we have invested, and the tangible book value has increased by CHF 0.1 billion. So that's how we distribute or how we did distribute our income. So what's important here to take away is we have a highly accretive model. We want to remain, and we are very capital markets friendly, which means we're very capital markets friendly to our equity investors and to our debt investors. Don't forget, we have bought back the 81. We were the first one after the Credit Suisse situation.
It was a private placement, not public, but still we were the first ones that issued a significant 81, and we want to generate acquisition currency for the future. So to sum up very quickly, key takeaways from me. We are working on the cost and revenue management. We want to be efficient, not cheap. I think that's the word here. We're working on acquisition capital, creating acquisition capital every year, and we have a very attractive business model that generates a lot of equity, and we focus on consistent value and capital generation next to the P&L that everybody watches: capital generation and value creation every year to support the strategy. That's all from my side, and with that, I hand back to you.
Let us just very briefly wrap up. We are committed to our positioning, our strategy because we feel strongly about it.
It is one investment firm, synergetic in terms of skills, serving two client segments which are highly complementary in nature of the cycle, but actually evolving towards the same needs. The industry will give us tailwinds into this model. Our priorities are strongly building on our strengths, skills in investment, ability to understand and work with the clients, doubling down on the customization in the back and in the front, and certainly the commitment to delivering on our efficiency goals. With that, we're going to open up to the Q&A, which I think Peter said is in the room only, so the mics are coming.
Yes, good afternoon. Martin Emch from UBS. I have a couple of questions. If I may, I actually might have a question for each of you. Maybe starting with private markets.
I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the different approach you chose for private equity, the partnership with Portfolio Advisors, and the approach you chose with Ancala Private Infrastructure. Would love to hear your thoughts. Then another question on active margin and pricing management, perhaps for a year. Could you elaborate on how you implement that, particularly on the private client side? Are we thinking here, perhaps, trying to increase further discretionary mandate penetration, perhaps fund offering, higher penetration into the private client base, any of those? And the last question would be on slide 22 for Thomas on capital management. Could you share a bit more details? What do you mean by capital optimization? Is that essentially just going through your exposures on the credit side, looking at market risk? What can you do to manage capital there?
And also, are you counting on perhaps significant risk transfer transactions, any of that? Thank you.
Do you want to start with that because we've got this slide?
I can kick this off. Capital management is what we do. I don't, we haven't done any risk transfer transactions so far. I'm not excluding this in the future, so we probably will look into this. But what we did is we went very, very strictly through all of the operational activities. How are things being done? How are things being booked? Are we conservative in some of the areas how we book certain bonds and so on and so on? Data problems normally lead to higher risk-weighted assets and so on and so on. So we go really step by step through the whole process and basically turn every stone upside down to find p otential.
I mean, it's not very exciting, but it has quite a significant impact, as you can see.
Coming to your first question, the reason is the following. It's the two aspects. It was about providing access to private markets to private clients. And that we can do with our own skills, but have to do in an open architecture. Anyway, that's the same for the public skills, right? And so we were not yet even offering access to third party. We happened to not have the skills. So we wanted to start with providing third party access. And what we said is to also guide us through the journey, both our RMs, our clients, as well as the organization. We start with a really clearly institutionally focused GP because that fits with us to have the institutional skills. And we picked, if you want the bigger space, right?
Their expertise is buyout, so is U.S. buyout, and so that is how the choice went. Then we assessed all the players out there. Now, acquiring our own skills, we were intent on finding infrastructure for the reason that I mentioned. Now, this was less of a certain trade, if I may, because it was about finding the right partner and that it takes two to tango, so it had to work out in a sense. We are very pleased that it did indeed. I would add, in addition, on infrastructure, that it was not even we were particularly seduced by the fact that Ancala is mid-market, the fact that they operate with a lower financial leverage, but a higher operational leverage. Because rates, you've heard the views that we've got, and it's about skills. That is really the DNA and the selling point of Ancala.
So this is why the approach:
Margin management, of course, a very, very relevant question. Let's start with the balance sheet side, which is, as I've shown, much less important for us than others, and this is where we have the classic mechanisms, of course. On the credit side, it's around the risk of a credit, the size of a credit, the customer relationship. It's quite structured, but since it's not the main driver of the business, since we're not going out competing with this business, it's rather constant, and on the deposit side, it's very similar. There, of course, is always a combination of what is more attractive for our balance sheet at a certain point. There we compete more, but the other side, of course, given our revenue composition, is much more important.
There's one thing which is extremely difficult, if not impossible, is to go to a client that has a certain mandate and say, "Well, you paid, I don't know, 70 basis points," or on the institutional side, "40 basis points." And guess what? We increased our prices. It's now 45 or 75, right? You can try that. You'll never get successful, right? You either lose the client. So that is not possible. Now, on the institutional side, as you have shown, we have actually quite stable pricing. And that means we don't discount to create flows. It's very important because of what I've just said. It's almost impossible to get the prices up again. On the private side, it's a different game. We are actually moving away, and Brian Fischer will also talk about that later, from a world, you're either a discretionary client or an advisory client.
And the basic rule is the more discretionary, the higher the margins. We are already and will go more in a modular world that the modules are priced. And we observe that when we have a product or a module that performs, that really creates value for the client, we are very well able to get the relevant pricing accepted. And so we work with the margin very much in adjusting, improving, or tailoring the product offering rather than having general increases. And it is important, but luckily also clients' needs and preferences change. And that gives us then a possibility also to react in an overall client view on the pricing side. And maybe a last thing.
If you look at our pricing, the product that costs the least is actually a discretionary product and not an advisory product because I think we all agree that the industry prices wrongly, right? The industry prices advisory, that's much more difficult or much more expensive to deliver, has higher risk, generally lower, and the scalable products, whether they're delivered in modules or customization or as such, are actuall y priced too high. Now, we are too small to change industry dynamics, but we work on it.
Hi. Hello. Yeah. Hi. It's Nicholas Herman from Citi. Thank you for the presentation today. Three from me, please. One on costs, one on capital management, and one on, I guess, US. So for Thomas, please, on costs.
Now that we are well progressed through your efficiency program, can you give us some more detail, please, on how much front office headcount have you let go as part of this? I appreciate it's not the major focus of that program, but for investors to understand how much front office headcount have you let go and in what areas? And also, can you please give us two, three examples of efficiency without, let's say, a top-line impact? That would be really helpful. On surplus capital, so clearly, so the 18.3% will go to, I guess, 14 or so pro forma for all the things that you laid out. But you also recognize that you'll be generating CHF 70-100 million net per annum of capital. So what are the priorities from here?
I guess clearly you need to reserve a portion to acquire the remaining Ancala stake, assuming that that business performs as you expect. But what other areas are you keen to acquire and keep in mind some details there? And then finally, on U.S., I recall the last strategy update a couple of years ago. There was a big focus on U.S. expansion. So where are we on that, please? And can you talk about the progress that you made over the past couple of years in terms of growing with global banks, with intermediaries, and an institutional market? Thank you. Because I guess that was also a big portion. No, that was over. No, no, no. They cut you. I guess also because the U.S. is the biggest portion of your focus markets, right? That's growing the fastest. Yes. Should I get started? Yes, you get started.
So on the front office, we had no layoffs in the front office. We did some adjustments in, for example, on the institutional client side. There we did some adjustments to the capacity adjustments. But generally, we're looking not to save headcount in the front office. It's very important because we want to protect the revenues. So let me give you an example. One of the bigger savings, and I can't give you the numbers in detail, but one of the biggest savings was digital investment, which we integrated and where we realized a lot of synergies. We realized the synergies by basically what happened with digital investing. People built something that was, as it always does, independent from what we had on the other side. And by just integrating this, we could realize significant savings without any top-line impact at all.
This also should serve as an example. Another example is, we still have in the middle and back office, we have lots of efficiencies. We have lots of efficiency potential that we can still take. I mean, we've been growing very strongly in the last couple of years, and we had a very strong focus on growth. Just by switching a bit of that focus to cost management, efficiency, just process optimization, front to back, like end to end, from the client. The client asks for a loan. How does the process ripple through the whole organization? How many people are discussing and interfering and so on and so on until we can say yes or no to the client? By these kinds of things, first of all, you gain.
It makes it better for the clients because you get faster, and it will get cheaper for us in the middle and the back office. So the focus is very, very clear on middle and back office. And also, one of the things is being a small organization, we have a lot of external support, contractors, consultants, and so on and so on. And cutting there is a relatively obvious and quick and very beneficial impact. So I hope that answers the question. On the capital management, look, wherever we go, what we're currently focusing on is reducing, sorry, reducing the capital charges and making sure we generate a lot of capital buffer as much as possible. The focus is generate capital. What we will do with the capital, in the past, we invested in business. We invest in strategy. We invest in acquisitions.
We have two acquisitions that we one of them that we just closed. The second one that we will integrate over the next year, so I think for now, we're okay, so we're shoring up the buffer, and then we will see what we will do in 2026 onwards. To your question to the U.S., we equally committed. It is a core part of our focus market. You will have noticed that actually last time we had private markets on the priorities, we don't this time either. U.S. was also about acquisition in a sense, and we've done that acquisition. We've done one on private markets. But there remain core focus. Both are actually, whether it's in terms of the geography where we want to grow, the U.S., and by the way, it's also an important geography in terms of production. The Quality Growth boutique is out there.
We can also now sell the rest of our capabilities, and it was about skills now starting indeed with Ancala on the private market side. On the distribution side, as I said, it was very important to insource the distribution of 40 Act funds because of the earnings logic, because of the control of the clients. That is where we put the investments going forward, the sales staff and whatever is needed to grow that business on the one hand. On the other hand, we have integrated SFA. We are now the number one player in Switzerland. We have quite a distance in terms of serving U.S. clients out of Switzerland. It's not that many things we're number one, but that's one of them in Switzerland, and as you always have, we had it also with the acquisition.
I said before, you have a certain attrition during the time when you integrate because they're double clients who don't want their assets to be combined, etc., etc. But there we are well positioned now also going forward to grow that admittedly niche in the U.S. But every niche is a big business for us. What drives business there is, of course, uncertainty. I'm not going to comment more on that. We have watched it in the last couple of days all life. But so we're very confident that on both sides, the institutional and the private side, we can continue to grow that business forward, which is important. It's the biggest wealth market in the world. Nowhere else, within one jurisdiction, within one regulatory framework, you have that many assets, institutional side and private side.
And to your acquisition question, continue the same strategy needs to fit squarely in what we do, which is it's either scale in our focus market. If you think about, because that would be private clients, that's where you buy scale, not institutional clients. So focus market and investment-led, not credit-led, and/or skills like we did with Ancala. And yes, we are committed and we've said that we will acquire the entirety of Ancala. But that is what will continue to be our guiding principles going forward. I'm getting a serious look from Peter Skoog. Two people who want questions still. Can we? Okay. Absolutely. Then we take those two, the last two. Thank you for taking the questions. This is Daniel from Zürcher Kantonalbank. First, quickly, you were saying that you want to reduce the sensitivity of the costs to the revenues.
And I just wondered how you will do this. Is this you reduce or you're changing the pay grids for your relationship managers or other levers you can pull? And then on the up RWA relief, is this the data issues reduction you were talking about or are there other factors leading you to be optimistic about the reduction in the operational risk-weighted assets reduction? And then last but not least, just can you talk a bit about the market dynamics currently? And now obviously we are more than a year after the Credit Suisse fallout. Now the integration of the Swiss unit has started in Switzerland. Do you feel anything about this in your day-to-day business? I'll start with the first two. Look, how do you make your marginal costs lower? That's, how should I say, relatively standard and simple one.
You optimize your process, you standardize what you do, you think very hard. And with a business case of, do I do this special thing for this client or am I not going to do this? Can I replicate these kinds of things? This is mostly a matter of discipline. And if you have more revenues, one of the big things is how many new projects we are going to do. This is what we've called the sharpening. What is it? Where do we want to grow? How much are we going to invest? Do we grow outside of our current business scope? Do we grow inside? It's a lot of relatively simple blocking and tackling on how you manage an organization. And that's how we will increase it. And be very careful with how you reinvest the money that you're going to make. So that's for the first question.
The second question on RWA, that's the same thing. You just go front to back through the process many, many times. Look, it's not that we have huge data issue, but data is one of the issues. Then do you book everything right? Can you book things differently? I am coming off a phone call this morning with FINMA where we got an agreement to subtract other numbers to get to a higher CET1 ratio. I mean, it's all kinds of things that you do. You just go through one by one everything, the whole basically, you take the spreadsheet and you go line by line from where the data are emerging, where they're being booked. Do you really need to buy this bond? Can you buy another bond which delivers the same return and has a preferential treatment?
I mean, there's so many things that you do which are very simple. I wish I could give you a simple answer to this, but it's a lot of little, little things that make you more efficient on how you manage your capital. In particular, we will see with the introduction of FRTB, so final review of the trading book, Basel III Final, there are different rules all of a sudden. I can give you an example. Banking bonds have much higher risk-weighted assets than industrial companies. So basically, you go, of course, through your whole book and say, where are the banks? Do I really need them in the future? Why did we hold a banking bond? Can we find a similar one? It's a lot of this really, really basic grinding that you take one by one in order to reduce your risk weights.
Market sentiment, I guess we don't see Credit Suisse anymore, so it's UBS and the rest of the market. I think in our businesses, there's no oligopolistic or even monopoly situation, so competition works very well. There's a lot of clients, somewhat more than regularly, that are looking for alternatives just because of the fact that they have too many assets combined with one provider. We see that we acquire customers from all different types of competitors, so we can't say it's just one flow from one indie direction to others. But we like competition because it forces us to be good and to fight, and we are very confident about that. I think the last one. To finish. Yeah, hello, I'm Chantal Ryser from Octavian. Well, just one quick question. Apparently, we are on short time.
Back to the US business, I was just wondering if you could tell us, do you have already a first idea what would be the impact of now the known new political environment that will occur in the States as of 2025? Do you have any idea how that could impact your business in the positive or negative? I will tell you what the driver of the business is. The driver of the business is American Nexus clients who are in the position to diversify and want to diversify and be booked in Switzerland. One of the key drivers of Switzerland is the stability. I think that maybe answers your question. On the institutional side, on the institutional side, we don't see any change. It's too early to see. Yeah, no speculations about that. There have been enough on that topic already. Good.
We disbehaved or misbehaved. Thank you. Thank you, Lori, to try to police you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you also for the questions and the good discussion. Without further ado, let us move on then to the teams that are producing the investment products and solutions of the company. We kick off with 24 Asset Management. Welcome, Ben. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for your time. My name is Ben Hayward. I'm the head of 24 Asset Management. I'm one of the founding partners of the business. I've been with it since it launched in 2008. Until the end of 2021, I ran our ABS business. Since then, I've been the chief executive. What I'm going to cover for you in the next 10, 12 minutes is a brief introduction to our business.
I'll talk about what differentiates us versus the peers that we measure ourselves against. I'll talk about how we're set up in terms of business lines. I'll focus on a couple of our key products and then a little bit on growth. And in particular, I want to finish with a product development that's going to be key for us from 2025 onwards, which Christel's already alluded to. So 24 is one of Vontobel's two fixed income boutiques, perhaps less obviously named than the fixed income boutique, which you'll hear about afterwards. But when I think about us versus the wider peer group, there are some things that I think really characterize us as a business. And to touch on what those are, since we launched the business in 2008, we've been deliberately focused on just doing fixed income. That's all the business was ever orientated to do.
And that gives us a very deliberate decision and some solutions, some results that are very much geared towards delivering for our clients, not just from an investment point of view, but across the board. And that will be everything from the data that we buy, the systems that we use, our investment processes, our product processes. But it also means that everybody, that anybody, any client ever touches at 24, whether they be PMs or sales, but also clearly risk operations and sales support and so on, they're all fixed income experts. And more than that, they are experts in only three business lines. So it's a very, very focused and high degree of relevance in any conversation that we're having with our clients. So that would differentiate us from the majority of the bigger managers out there. We have a number of specialisms as well.
I'll talk about those a little bit later on and tell you how they're relevant to the business. But that means that the client conversation that we're having often is very specific. It's very specific about things that we know a lot about and that other managers don't necessarily know a lot about. And that helps really position us in their minds as what we characterize as being the trusted partner in fixed income and really strengthens the relationship between us and them. Performance, you've seen some of that already. It has been very strong. Performance comes from a process and it comes from a team. It is not about individuals at 24. The process that we have is simple to communicate. It is replicable. It is relevant through markets. And it really has delivered for our investors and for our teams.
But not having that individual focus and always talking about teams clearly makes the business more resilient as our business continues to mature. We have a very strong ethos around product development and what we launch. And really, we start by asking two questions. One, do we, the PMs, think it is relevant? Would we put our own money into it? And two, can we do this as well as, if not better than everybody else out there? And if the answer to that is yes, then we move forward with our product development. But that clearly then means if we answer those two questions as yes, then we are very committed to the product from a personal point of view. And the vast majority of partners at 24 have got a significant amount of their own portfolios in our products.
So our alignment with our investors when our products perform or don't perform is key. And I can tell you from my own portfolio point of view, we've had a lot more of the former than the latter. Thank heaven. And then the last thing I really want to focus on is we have a very, very big focus on communication with our clients. And that goes everywhere from the education around the specialisms I was talking about and how we deliver that in multiple different ways, all the way through to very timely market notes.
We've pushed out a piece today on what the U.S. election means for fixed income, for different parts of fixed income, and how we think investors should be thinking about those and interpreting what is coming out of the U.S., for example, and what that really means to their portfolios, but also to our portfolios. And that's key. And in particular, it's key in harder times. And if you think recently stuff that wasn't relevant to us, like the U.S. regional bank crisis or things that were more relevant to us, like Credit Suisse and AT1s, we never hide at that point in time. We're very front-foot communicating with our clients. And that builds a high degree of trust between us. They come to us and they ask us what's going on. But it also means that the clients understand what is happening and why it's happening within our portfolios.
They get the performance, and when they get that, they own the performance as much as we do, and again, that is kind of key. It helps them buy in, and it really means that the best times for clients to invest are when it's uncomfortable, and if they come and talk to us and they trust us and they know that at that point in time, we're much more likely to be attracting flows when it's a really, really good time to invest rather than later on when some of the opportunity has gone. It ties them in. They make better evaluated decisions, so this is a structure of our business, just quickly running through what the three different business lines really mean, so ABS, I presume most of you know what that really means. But this for us is global, but with a very strong bias towards Europe.
That bias has really been based on historic value as well as client preference. An ABS deal can issue bonds anywhere from AAA down to single B or even non-rated transactions. And so we have products here that reflect that change in credit profile, change in risk return profile, change in volatility, and also change in liquidity, quite importantly. But characterizing it, very low interest rate risk, almost zero, and very strong credit profile. So I've been managing this since 2008. We've been managing this, sorry, since 2008. We've been through various market tumults. We have never had a default in our ABS holdings. Multi-sector bond, this is properly flexible mandates managing rates and credit products across developed market fixed income. So everything from U.S. Treasuries to high yield, including banks, insurers, ABS, investment grade, and so on and so on. But all very liquid.
No EM really, and definitely no stressed, distressed, or frontier type markets. And then outcome driven, mainly investment grade, if you want to characterize it by which part of the bond market. But the main product, I'll touch on a little bit later, is what I call a Sharpe ratio product. It's all about managing volatility versus income. And really what we're trying to do there is let investors have an engine that will give them income with very little risk, and then they can go away and do more fun stuff with their risk budget somewhere else.
So a very clear structure, products which are sized here according to how big the strategies are for us, but products that are at scale and will give us a really nice runway to scale up over the next three to five years, and then products that are scaling that will give us a much longer term runway in terms of AUM growth. Now, although these strategies are in verticals with gaps between them, they're all run by the same team. It's a team-based process, same investment process within the teams. So there is no you manage that, you manage that sort of separation of responsibilities. And again, although the products here are very clearly aligned to one of the three different investment teams that we have, those teams are all very integrated from an investment point of view.
The top-down process is one, and a lot of the bottom-up work is collaborative between the teams. They all sit back to back. There is no competing for assets. There is no competition for sales time or client time or anything else. Very, very well aligned, even though they have product responsibility. A bit more color on the key products. What you're going to see here is it's nicely diversified, very strong performance, and good asset gathering recently, despite the very negative markets that financial markets and in particular fixed income have had in 2022 and 2023. Just dealing with these in order of risk-return profile. Short-term bond strategy from the outcome-driven team. I said it was a Sharpe ratio-driven product. It is. The first focus there is keep volatility below 3%. The second focus is deliver cash plus 250 type returns.
Absolutely fantastic numbers from the team. That's led to over GBP 500 million sterling AUM growth year to date. If you want to think about the peer group here and how much more we can grow, Vanguard $55 billion, Lord Abbett $43 billion. That performance should mean that we get good growth from there. It should also mean we're not reliant on the sector growing. We should be thinking more about taking money off other managers by outperforming. Our ABS strategy, no interest rate risk. Comparative volatility over the last couple of years has been absolutely fantastic, and returns have been very good as well. It's a big diversifier for our business. We've had great flows year to date.
But for some investors where this is maybe a little bit too much of a pure play in one sector, the other two strategies, investment in ABS, and the team that does it for this strategy does it for those two teams as well. And that's a real USP for us because it lets us apply the credibility of having a standalone team to allocate a minority allocation to for the other businesses, which is a big diversifier, but one that's clearly been done very well. And they see that in our processes. So they get the best of both worlds there. And then strategic income, massive growth space over the last decade within fixed income fund management, dominated by a few whales. And again, thinking about the competition out there, PIMCO, $80 billion, BlackRock, $40 billion.
Two big things in our favor when it comes to growing in this sector. One, our performance, significantly better than the alternatives. We're fourth percentile at the moment on a one-year basis, which is fantastic. But two, we do it differently. There are sectors that we're investing in that other managers are not investing in. So AT1s, CLOs, ABS, it's not being done by the competition. And that's really important because when we're hearing from investors that are investing over the last year or so why they're investing in our product, it's to blend it with those bigger managers. They are very domestic US. We are the alternative. We're the diversifier. We smooth volatility in the investor portfolio. And we're hearing from those guys that they are capped out with the big managers now.
So they're allocating to us for diversity, but also because they've got too much of the others. So strong performance, relevant products, differentiated products. We've enjoyed very strong growth from launch of the business in late 2008 to 2021. Obviously, at that point in time, the inflation spike and the change in monetary policy was very negative for fixed income markets. And that risk tolerance change that we saw from investors saw money being sucked out of the STRIPS bond space anyway. So our MBS strategy did lose money at that point in time. And actually, interestingly, the gilt crisis in the UK also meant some of our UK investors in our ABS product had to redeem as well. And that was nothing to do with the ABS market or what we were doing. It was just because they had levered gilt strategies alongside ABS strategies.
They had to put money into the gilt strategy. They redeemed from us. We gave them great service at that point in time. That money is now coming back, in some cases coming back more than they had before because now they really believe in liquidity through a tough marketplace. One thing that didn't change through that period, though, was outcome-driven. The short-term bond strategy, really nicely consistent, a good backbone to our business, and the first to grow in the last 12 months. That growth then spread to ABS and more recently into multi-sector bond, and as investors have got much more clarity about the pathway forward for monetary policy, and then as rates have started to be cut, investors are now looking to lock in to higher returns to benefit from that. They know it's not going to go any higher.
They don't have to worry about what's been negative over the last couple of years, and money is coming in because of that. Conversely, what we'd expect to see now is that the big growth in money market funds, people were scared, put money on deposit, get a nice return because you can get a nice return now. That should reverse, and we should be the winner out of all of that. So just to finish, I said I was going to end on a highlight of a product development for 2025. Since 2013, we've been running a strategy in the UK. It's a term capital structure that is a listed investment company in the UK aimed at UK wholesale. It's been very successful for us as a business. The company, the investment company, has got big enough now. It's actually in the FTSE 250.
It invests in an illiquid asset-backed strategy designed to deliver income. So the strategy has a defined total return and income targets. And we've delivered very consistently every quarter, every year on those. And you can see here the annual dividends versus the minimum required rate, well in excess of those. In fact, we've had to increase the minimum required rate because our returns have gone up so much. And we're going to be taking this strategy and putting it into a private markets wrapper that Christel was talking about. That within the private markets, private credit type universe, that is the part you call asset-backed finance. That has been attracting flows, so it's relevant. PIMCO launched, they announced a launch last week, $2 billion AUM start for their strategy.
Now, for us, we know it's going to be a bit of a challenge to try and get into a new part of the investor's wallet with a new wrapper, even if the investment strategy we've been running for over 10 years with cumulative 100% in excess of 100% returns. But it's a challenge we're very excited about. And we've got a really good track record of launching new strategies in new structures. So we're embracing that fully. And the idea is to launch a series of these through time and use it to gradually expand the product set that we have at 24. And obviously, it brings a clear benefit of locked-in long-term revenues for us as well. So it does a good job in de-risking the business even further. So I'll now hand over to Andrew Jackson, who'll talk about the other fixed income boutique at Vontobel.
I'll be back for Q&A later. But just to leave you with the idea that this is a diversified business, it's performing very well at the moment. We are in exactly the right place at the right time. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. Five years ago, a small Irish packaging company issued a high-yield, double-B rated seven-year maturity bond that paid 4.125%. Five years later, you can get paid more by lending to the US Treasury. The market has changed. Spreads are up, yields are up, volatility is up. For us, the opportunity as an active fixed income investor has fundamentally shifted. I'm going to talk to you today about Echo, really, what Ben told you about fixed income markets and what Christel told you about fixed income markets.
I'm going to talk about who we are as a fixed income boutique, what makes us different as a fixed income boutique, and then dive into two of the different flavors that you can get from the fixed income boutique that I am the head of here in Zurich. So 2024 has been a fantastic year for fixed income markets, but it's been a slower year for active fixed income markets, particularly in the start of the year. Start of the year, there was quite a lot of money still in cash, and money gradually started to move into money markets and then into more traditional fixed income investments. Emerging market flows, a large part of what we do within the fixed income boutique here in Zurich, have taken even longer to materialize as they are perceived to be higher risk. But projections for 2025 look incredibly positive.
And against the backdrop of those yields for U.S. Treasuries versus underlying high-yield corporates, I think 2025 might be the most exciting year that Ben and I have had in our 25 years of managing fixed income. Within our boutique in 2024, we've been able to deliver outperformance of benchmarks for 98% of our assets and a huge outperformance in some areas. In fact, the weighted average alpha generated is more than 300 basis points across the boutique. We fully expect the volatility to continue into 2025 and maybe even beyond that. The events of the last couple of days probably make sure that we certainly see volatility between now and the end of 2024. In Zurich, we run three different teams.
Each of the teams focused on individual constituent parts of the fixed income boutique, but much like what Ben does, they're all focused on fixed income, and they're all focused on the process they repeat over and over again. We are an active manager. We are a high-conviction manager, and we are very much focused on maximizing our output for every trade, and that means that unlike the trend more generally within fixed income asset management, we're still very focused on execution. We believe that putting traders close to portfolio managers still offers significant value in this highly complex and diverse asset class. We're also a specialist fixed income manager, which, much like what Ben was telling you, makes us different. I think being surrounded by fixed income asset managers, being challenged by fixed income managers makes a difference, and rather than diversifying, we are continuing to aggregate that expertise.
Our clients know us as high conviction. They know us as high tracking error. And they also know us as having that short-term discipline to buy and sell instruments, which means that our turnover within our portfolios is likely to be higher than what they see from some of our competitors. I told you I was going to deep dive into two of the underlying strategies that we run. This is rather than a strategy, it's really a center of excellence. What we've done here is to bring together a group of individuals who run emerging market fixed income in pretty much all of its flavors. We do local currency, we do hard currency, we do corporate bonds, we do sovereign bonds. Sometimes we'll even dive into a niche fully, as we have done within the Asian bond space.
We've also overlaid sustainability onto most of these strategies, and our clients really appreciate the ability to go and pick and choose the flavor that they prefer. We've also launched a best ideas fund, which captures the best ideas within each of those underlying flavors and delivers that to our clients in a solutions type wrapper. You'll see the performance is incredible across the suite. Pretty much every one of those underlying strategies is first quartile, and some of them are considered exceptional, which means they are outliers and sit above that first quartile. You get that if you're in the top 5% of all of this Reuters methodology. That EM flagship has not seen the flows that Ben has seen within some of his strategies.
We're absolutely certain, given the amount of inbound inquiry we've seen over the last couple of weeks and the flows that we're starting to see, that this is an asset class that will continue to deliver for clients in 2025. In fact, EM fixed income has been the big performer within fixed income in 2024, despite the flows. I'm going to close with something for the future. This is a strategy that's been built from our codependent views that performance and client service really drive everything within our engine. This is an exceptionally well-performing strategy that goes across the whole of the fixed income boutique and selects best ideas through the lens of absolute return rather than relative return. We've coupled that with a solutions and infrastructure mindset in order to be able to deliver it for a very large Japanese client.
We're seeing tremendous flows within this space. Outcome-oriented strategies are the big growth area within active fixed income, and we expect to see that grow in 2025, and I'm looking at Christoph as I say that. I am going to close there, but I am going to tell you that in closing, I feel very encouraged by where we find ourselves. Ben and I sit within a broad family of boutiques, and we are hearing from Christel and Georg that fixed income is the area that they're focused on. That's incredibly exciting, slightly nerve-wracking, but incredibly exciting given the fact that we think there's a huge amount that can still be added by active fixed income managers within this space, but unfortunately, we will have to fight very, very hard with those passive guys to get that AUM back, and in closing, I'm going to hand over to Tim.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrew. So good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to be here today representing Ancala. And I'm here courtesy of, as you have already heard, Vontobel's significant minority acquisition of our firm within the last 12 months. So thank you very much for having me here today. The first of many to come, I hope, if I do a half-decent job. So I'm a partner with Ancala. I joined 10 years ago, and that was when we first raised our principal money. And since that time, we're now EUR 4.2 billion under management. I've led the investment team in respect to around EUR 1 billion of that equity deployment.
I'm here today to discuss with you the benefits of investing in infrastructure, why Ancala focuses on the mid-market in that respect, and importantly, what it is about Ancala and our USP that allows us to obtain outsized returns in that market and is underwritten the deployment that we have seen to date as well, very topically, as to the benefits that we are already seeing from the investment from Vontobel. Assuming this works, why infrastructure? I guess ultimately, it's essential, and it's all around us. We like to fit within the, I would say, the more boring and quite comfortably within the more boring asset class, not from a returns perspective, but in terms of the absolute dependency and necessity of the investments that we make and the asset class that we participate in.
Infrastructure, it's the cogs of the cities, the societies, the economies that we all coexist within. As a result of the resiliency of the demand and typically the low or no correlation to GDP, infrastructure investments tend to have a very low correlation to other asset classes and are inherently resilient to economic downturns. An infrastructure asset, on account of its stock standard place within a community and its defensive nature, often has a very long lifetime. And on account of that, you have long inflation-linked and dependable defensive cash flows, which attracts us to the investment class. There's a monumental opportunity in infrastructure right now for a variety of reasons, and many of which you no doubt will have heard. The big one is the megatrend, the energy transition.
So if I could think of a megatheme that is going to be driving investment markets for decades to come, I would say that it sits within that category. And that is, regardless of the politics of the day, we are seeing companies, industries the world over invest through the cycle, taking on the challenge of the energy transition. And so it's wonderful, I guess, to be operating within an asset manager that focuses on an asset class that is now very much in vogue, but it ultimately depends on a skill set and an investing track record that is taking account of investing in large, often complex and very complex value chains and supply chains of services.
And so operating within the infrastructure spectrum means that we have access to that megatrend, and we are absolutely seeing the benefits of that every day within the office and within the fundraising environment that we participate in. The average age of infrastructure is increasing, and asset conditions are deteriorating. Global economic and population growth is also putting pressure on existing infrastructure and the aging assets that I've just described, which are in need of redevelopment and replacement across many developed and developing countries. Coupled with this, and certainly post-COVID, public sector budgets are very much under pressure. There has been a refocusing on social security needs and social services and, of course, in recent years, defense. And that has opened up and probably broadened the gap for infrastructure investment at the exact time that larger and larger amounts are required.
So that is the basis for investing in the space. I'd like now to explain why the mid-market is of substantive attraction to us. So, I mean, ultimately, we believe that it gives us the opportunity to create more value. For us, in addition, as you see on screen, and I think as Christel referred earlier, to the level of private market opportunity that exists, that is even more magnified once you step into the mid-market. You can see here we're referencing five and a half times the volume of mid-market transactions than large cap in recent years. I think probably more importantly, however, for us, in addition to the volume opportunity, is the opportunity to execute transactions away from the chaos and competition of public auction processes. And this is typically because of size and for some other reasons that I would mention.
In one example, a large corporation decides to sell an asset that may be smaller relative to its overall portfolio size. Usually the focus is on how to do this quickly and with as little interruption to the base business as possible, and therefore they will prioritize certainty of execution and other value levers other than just price. It's also very common in this size bracket for issues, as I mentioned, other than just price to be valued. Often you're dealing with private families, you're dealing with entrepreneurs, you're dealing with small- and medium-sized institutions. In those cases, vendors are looking for, I would say, the custodianship of the new owner becomes very important.
The strategy that the new owner intends to deploy, their ability to protect the legacy of the business that was built and to coexist within the community while doing that becomes very important also. So we pride ourselves on understanding the needs of the relevant stakeholders and being flexible to these needs within the processes that we find ourselves in. And these tactics are typically not available for larger investments where it's all about maximizing price through well-run processes. So I think just to give a small insight, I mean, everybody says that they make bilateral investments within our sector, but we truly do. We've made 80% of all investments since Ancala's inception have been sourced on a bilateral basis.
I know six of the six investments out of fund three, two in the last three months, have all been completely bilateral transactions with the sorts of owners that I just referenced: private families, corporates, and other institutions of that type. I guess in addition to acquiring investments at a better price in the mid-market, there's also more opportunity to create value. And so we have a very substantive priority within our business model on our asset management credentials. We bring industry partners who are ex-chairpeople, ex-CEOs of major industrial infrastructure businesses. They team up with us from an investment execution perspective to ensure that we are pulling all levers within the businesses that we invest in.
Ultimately, during due diligence, and we spend a lot of time on this, we build a conservative case which incorporates, in our view, only what is really tangible within each of the targets that we pursue. We identify potential upsides, but we do our best because we are in the mid-market, because we are in a bilateral setting, because there are other levers than price to ensure that we're not necessarily paying full value for upsides that we foresee within the targets that we pursue. And then once you step into these businesses, whether or not you've paid for the upsides, and we do our best not to, obviously within reason, we do need to meet the market. But also you have a substantive set of opportunity within the mid-market to access levers to pull that you would often not typically see within larger-cap businesses.
caps, you might find yourself more set within regulatory contexts or tariff or operating controls than you may find within a mid-cap business. So ultimately, less competition if it's done right, if you're covering the sector and the opportunities very substantively. My passport goes to show, as I was told by the passport commissioning officer today on my way in, that I'll need a new one soon. But it's traversing Europe and other geographies, very, very regularly speaking to businesses, understanding the needs of owners and trying to pitch that if they do wish to transact, if they do have a capital requirement in the foreseeable future, that we are a partner for them in doing that rather than just a party that can pay the highest price.
And so, with that less competition, combining with the value adds that we're able to leverage, and we have wonderful opportunities of what we were able to do through COVID with our mid-market businesses that I do not expect other large-cap managers had the opportunity to do. And then you have the team and the skills and the mindset to pursue investments in that way. That is what we believe unlocks the opportunity within the mid-market that we are accessing. So on that note, that is exactly what we are doing. So this is where Ancala fits in. Our managing partner, Spence Clunie, who was unable to be here today, set up Ancala after spotting the opportunity in the mid-market during his prior career in a major principal investing firm.
Because at the time he believed no one else was doing it or at least doing it well, we set up Ancala. From the beginning, the team comprised not just investment executives. We have, and I've been very responsible for a lot of the hiring within the Ancala team itself. We have focused very heavily on bringing in people of a caliber with backgrounds in engineering, operational, and commercial strategy, finance, and accounting, so rather than just your typical investment executives. Very importantly, as we say on screen, we have at the moment four and likely to increase shortly dedicated industry partners. They are exclusive to us. They have run major companies across Europe that would be well known to people within this room, some of them listed.
They work with us on all of our opportunities to ensure, I guess, appropriate governance within the businesses once we step in and understanding of local contexts and nuances, but also helping us with origination in the first place and developing business plans, but ultimately implementing business plans. Because what the model and the valuation says in the spreadsheet that we derived during due diligence isn't necessarily how it turns out in real life. We need the management teams that represent our businesses to translate what sits in Excel into the real world. I would say that industry partners are wonderful assets that allow us to do that. We continue to deliver on the mission that we set out in 2010.
We strive to be the preferred infrastructure investment manager for institutional investors globally, known for our differentiated approach to infrastructure investment, delivering enhanced returns and creating value within critical infrastructure companies. We've invested across the full spectrum of the asset class, as you can see on screen. We've invested across energy transition and renewables, telecoms, transport, roads, rail, air, and otherwise, all your traditional utilities and grid assets, circular economy, so waste and waste management businesses, social infrastructure, hospital portfolios, and your classical energy infrastructure and generation portfolios. So it's a very diverse asset class. As I mentioned earlier, it does touch all walks of life, and probably on your way to today's presentation, you've used elements of the supply chain that we would very happily invest in.
But I think the other thing that I would say in terms of what we have achieved is that we're probably the only infrastructure firm that I know, certainly in London and potentially within Europe, that started completely from scratch. So we had no financial backer, no portfolio that was spun out, no institutional funding sitting behind us. So from zero in 2010, people, that is, within the team to over 50 people today. The same in funds management, close to zero. When I joined, we now preside over EUR 4.2 billion, and we see a very strong potential to continue raising to bolster that. Our investor base is very diverse. We started off with a collection of managed accounts, certainly when I joined, and now we are well covered by a diversified investor base with some of the largest, actually most sophisticated investors in the globe.
There's a lot more for us to do and plenty more momentum to build, however, in this case, and I think it's very topical to say that we have already been onboarded, I guess, with Vontobel's global relationship partners. They have already, I'm proud to say, introduced us to certain investors and other network that we had not originally had within our network, so we're doing our best as we speak to take full advantage of the distribution base that Vontobel has provided us with, but we do very much reflect our gratefulness for the trust that the investors have supported us from the very beginning, as well as now Vontobel have placed in us, so I think finally, what is it about us? What is it that we do? What is our ultimate selling point?
I just wanted to reflect with a little bit more character on some of the, I guess, things that we do to achieve the returns that we have and that we believe creates a growth engine that will be sustained well into the future, so we are prudent. People say they are, but I think that if you've ever sat on an investment committee within Ancala, it is all about downside protection. It is all about rigorously testing, stress testing, and prodding business plans to understand how they respond in downside scenarios. It doesn't mean that we don't value upside.
It doesn't mean that we don't think about the growth opportunities within our investments, but absolutely, we spend probably 80% of our time thinking about what could go wrong and how we can manage that and how we achieve capital recovery within the business plans that we are essentially bidding from when entertaining a transaction. So on top of that, I guess this approach has allowed us to deliver everything we've promised on the tin and then more while staying on mandate. So our track record reflects a business that is very much focused on consistent cash yield, which is real investment return, not a valuation mark that is sitting on a balance sheet as marked by an accounting firm or otherwise. Total returns tracking well ahead of expectations, and we've had no write-offs.
We will regularly turn over assets that don't make sense for us from a due diligence perspective. Very recently, I presided over one that we'd spent a few months looking at, and the due diligence just didn't stack up. Capital recovery case for us on certain downside outcomes was not sustained, and on account of that, that transaction was set aside, and we've refocused on several others that should come to fruition within the coming months. And so we do know from our investors that this combination is actually not that common, going through a period where yields dropped to the floor, where equity managers were probably incentivized to move toward the lower bond yields, we stuck to our knitting. That meant that we needed to be very versatile.
We needed to be very aware of the various value levers that we could exercise for the targets of the businesses that we acquired. And I think that was a very important stress test for us, is that through that cycle, the track record that we continue to demonstrate the exits that we have made within the business are always substantively uplifted on our internal marks. And that track record has stood the test of time through a low-yield environment and now, as we all know, into a high-yield environment. We continue to target the same risk-adjusted returns that we always have, and that is what you would expect of an infrastructure manager that is worth its salt. Our approach to bilateral sourcing of investments also sets us apart. I mentioned this earlier.
It does take time and energy to find the sorts of opportunities that we pursue and not to participate in processes that are run by investment banks lined up against many well-heeled bidders. And as I said earlier, with very little opportunity to influence the outcome on valuation once the asset is acquired. I would say just anecdotally on that note, some of these transactions can happen quickly. Some of them can take years to come to fruition because of macro climate, because of the intentions of corporates. Private individuals can change just as the wind blows in terms of their ultimate ambitions for their businesses. But within Fund 3, there is an asset that I think was on the screen previously, just out of interest, a very large industrial base in Norway. It's actually the largest port in Norway as it stands. That could have been a Fund 1 investment.
It turned out to be a Fund 3 investment. The amount of time that that took to convince we went through, obviously, COVID. We went through the Ukrainian war, and we had to restructure that deal many times. But because we were connected with the owners, because they trusted us to be a long-term custodian of their business, we were able to reset the price, renegotiate the terms. But in saying that, not all deals take that long. We've just made two transactions in Germany in recent time in a smart grid investment platform. Both have started and finished within six months. So I guess the point is just to say bilateral sourcing takes grit, takes commitment, it takes understanding of people and the things that make them tick, and ultimately patience at times. But then we achieve the returns that we set out to achieve.
As long as we have enough coverage of the volume set, we continue to deploy at a fair pace. Asset management, as I mentioned earlier, is a very, very fundamental aspect of value creation for us. Our team is very, very substantive relative to the size of our overall team. The asset management team is a material contributor to our return and to our overall makeup. We've returned on average 65% revenue uplift across all of our businesses since acquisition within all three of our portfolios. ESG and our approach to sustainability gives us the currency to continue investing within the world setting that we exist within. We've integrated our ESG and sustainability approach into the various teams within our business. It's the responsibility of our investment and asset managers to ensure that we are always investing sustainably and with a focus on decarbonization and the energy shift.
Finally, and as I've mentioned, but it's very relevant to note, we are often acquiring businesses from entrepreneurial or private investors. Being one ourselves, having set Ancala up from scratch, being out there in the market, fighting to raise capital to find opportunities to then raise further capital, I think gives us a mentality and a certain level of ingenuity with targets that allows us to take them on a journey that is often bilateral, which we wouldn't be able to do had we not done what we've done. So it's very, very useful in the markets that we participate in that we actually were and are one of the companies that we are seeking to acquire. So with that, I better wrap up.
I guess I've tried to give you an initial flavor today of what Ancala does, why we operate within the infrastructure segment, but most importantly, why we invest within the mid-market. And I hope also why Vontobel saw fit to invest in us, which we are very excited about. So it's been a wonderful track record for us, but we do believe the best is yet to come. The relationship that we have with Vontobel is only just scratching the surface of opportunity. So we'd love to report in years to come on the wonderful things that we've achieved together. And I hope you've enjoyed today's presentation. So I'll hand back to Peter, and I'll be back for some Q&A in due course. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. We want to make sure that today you also get a picture across all our asset classes.
And next up would be a brief introduction covering the teams and the capabilities across equities, quantitative, and multi-asset. And after this, we'll go straight to Q&A on Ben's and Andrew's and Tim's pieces.
We operate as a family of highly specialized independent investment units, each owning a unique and proven approach to investing and fully accountable for their investment results. Our investment capabilities span across multiple asset classes.
I'm Matthew Benkendorf, head of Quality Growth. We have a rich 40-year history with our roots in the U.S., but our reach extending to a diverse global clientele and global investment universe. We are among the pioneers of quality investing with a track record spanning over two decades. Our flavor of quality growth is unique with a heavy emphasis on predictability. Our entire investment team is driven by this quality or nothing culture. We're seeing a shift in the market and global environment with an increasing demand for our distinctive approach to quality, a welcome change after a period of challenging conditions. Our immediate strategy is to leverage the support of our consultants in the institutional channel and robustly expand our recently introduced 40 Act fund lineup in the U.S.
I am Jean-Louis Nakamura, Head of Conviction Equities. Our expertise lies in Swiss large and mid-small caps, high-quality emerging markets companies, and global businesses with a high exposure to measurable impact pillars, or mega trends. We are passionately committed to a bottom-up approach. Markets are subject to environmental and technological transitions, rapidly moving perceptions, and structurally higher volatilities. That's why we focus on resilient stocks. For us, these combine strong quality characteristics, including solid sustainability credentials. This may lead us to deviate significantly from traditional benchmarks. Our vision for growth is to remain and expand our position as a leading expert in the Swiss equities, emerging markets, and measurable impact strategies.
I'm Andrea Gentilini, Head of Quantitative Investments. Our approach is rooted in deep data, cutting-edge technology, and a team of diverse talent ranging from classical macroeconomists to advanced computer scientists. We focus on two distinct investment styles: systematic and hybrid, where humans and machines work together. If it's multi-asset or single-asset strategies, quant is at the heart of everything we do. Quant offers a unique style of investments for investors out there looking for diversification. It harnesses data and makes bias-free decisions. While technology is easily accessible these days, you still need experts like us to make sense of it. We dive deep into the fundamental principles underlying the algorithms, and we're always ready to explain how we work and how it works. We are great at listening and customizing solutions because we know investors out there need tailored exposures.
With the power of data and technology, we are able to scale and enhance human expertise while driving efficiencies in the process.
I'm Dan Scott, Head of Multi-Asset. Firm believers in active management, we rely on fundamental research to support our high-conviction strategic and tactical investment decisions. We build diversified portfolios across all asset classes, aiming to achieve equity-like returns but with lower volatility. Active asset allocation that aims to deliver optimal risk-return outcomes according to clients' needs. We tailor portfolios to specific needs and financial goals at scale, and we recognize the importance of ESG investing, integrating climate change into all of our investment processes.
At Vontobel, active management is at the heart of everything we do. We empower our people to think independently with an ownership mindset to deliver results. This is what sets us apart.
I hope that gave you a good understanding, or at least a brief introduction to all those asset classes that we show in the half-year and full-year presentations in terms of our investment capabilities. With that, let's go straight to Q&A. And if Andrew and Tim and Ben could please come back on stage.
Yes, thank you. It's Nicholas Herman from Citi again. Three from me, please. I guess this is also a broader question, but I probably shouldn't. I'm asking the wrong people here, actually, because this is talking to fixed income managers. But I guess this is also for Christel too. Obviously, we've been in a period where treasury products and fixed income have been in really high demand given the rates environment. From your discussions with investors, I mean, how do you see the path in 2025? And when do you kind of expect an inflection back into equities at some point? So just kind of curious on pipelines at present. Second question on 24, please. What private markets wrapper will you be using for this ABS product, please? And which client groups will you be particularly targeting? And then the third one on Ancala, please.
Just what is the plan in terms of the offering here? Are you going to be launching new product structures to target also the wealth clients as well? Or is this going to remain very much an institutional incoming funds type thing? And could you just give an update in terms of where you are deployed? Sorry, current fund for where it is in terms of deployment and how you're thinking about then the activation for Fund 5? Thank you.
Shall I go at the first one?
Yeah, you go. I don't think you needed me then.
I think the first half of 2024 has been characterized by people rebalancing their portfolios based on beta rather than alpha. What I mean by that is actually you've seen most institutional and retail clients move towards a heavy cash allocation and a pretty heavy equities allocation already, particularly in the U.S. What we're expecting to see is that those moves through beta cycles will evolve into going and seeking more alpha as the absolute level of beta return reduces. So as interest rates come down, it's likely that the income that you get from pure beta reduces and people will come back to look for more alpha. Why do I believe that? It's normally what happens. It's certainly what happened post the financial crisis. It's happened again in 2013 after the European sovereign crisis that we saw this move into passive and beta and then back into active.
But I think it's also based on the inquiry that we're getting from our clients. Christoph might be able to cover that off more, but actually what we're seeing is people moving from short-term money market within fixed income to, let me go back to where I was previously, which might be emerging markets or asset-backed securities.
Okay. So I'll field the other question to the extent I am able. So I guess strategically for Ancala, nothing changes. We intend to continue focused on the, as you say, the institutionally led investment cycle within infrastructure, and particularly within the mid-market. We see that opportunity, as I mentioned, continuing to grow. So it's not like the market is sort of in a stasis and we need to somehow maintain market share. There's a very real opportunity to continue to grow. Every time we've been back to the market fundraising, we've essentially doubled our funds under management. And we do expect that trend to continue. And we still have ample room within the mid-market to stay in our patch. I think you might see some geographical diversification over time.
We're allowed within our fund mandate to pursue that, but primarily focused on our European mid-market infrastructure investing core skill set is the goal. I would say, and that's the benefits of now being within the Vontobel operation, is we can actually sit down with a manager that has global reach, that has a bunch of ideas about how we could potentially access, well, the same funds on a greater scale that we always have, but other strategies. So there is, and there will be, of course, a period of turning over stones to understand whether retailization is an option, I think you mentioned. Also, whether growth fund investing rather than more core plus as we're currently focused on is an opportunity set that we would look to participate in.
We certainly have demonstrated our ability to invest in core infrastructure assets that have growth credentials, and primarily because we are investing bilaterally within the mid-market and still obtaining the usual infrastructure characteristics while investing in growth. So those are opportunity sets, absolutely, and we'll always consider over time. But the primary core mandate for Ancala is to continue being an institutionally led mid-market infrastructure manager within Europe, adding some potential bandwidth across other geographies and potentially a growth strategy over time. Deployment, I think all I would say there is we closed our third fund last year. We typically have a three-year investment cycle, and we tend to deploy evenly across that investment cycle. We are on track as it stands. And typically you would start raising a fund toward the back end of that. So we'd be looking into that later part of next year, I suspect.
And then just starting on the asset-backed finance, the private market vehicle, just a traditional GPLP structure, I think domiciled in Ireland. So nothing particularly different that we're looking to do there. Just picking up on Jacco's comments on pipeline, a couple of things really there. I mean, I agree with his comments about beta versus alpha. I think sort of slightly more specifically what we've seen, particularly in the wealth space, is that when yields are high and spreads are wide, some investors are sort of tempted to build a bit of a bond portfolio themselves. When spreads tighten, then they sort of turn to us more for that. And then I think the other sort of two things, pipeline very good, led by significant engagement with clients.
So a lot of the product we're putting out there is getting enhanced degrees of pickup and questions and feedback that we're getting from them. That clearly points in one direction. Pipeline is building. It is the biggest it's been for a good couple of years now. That is spread pretty well across investor type and geography. But I go back to what I said when I was talking about the individual strategies. What we're doing, we're doing very, very well versus much bigger competition. So what we are after is taking their assets to a certain extent, and they are well distributed. So it's quite nicely blended by product type, by investor type, and by geography. Good. Any more questions? Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you. Very good. We then move on to our first client-facing unit and specifically private clients where Brian will take us through the growth path. There, Brian, thank you.
Here I am. Thank you very much, Peter. We're minus five minutes before the break, so that's a tough one. I promise I will make it short and crisp for you. Warm welcome also from my side. My name is Brian Fischer. I'm the Deputy Head of Private Clients, and it's a great pleasure for me to walk you through the update on the private client segment, so as we already heard, we serve ultra-high net worth and high net worth individuals, also financial intermediaries like family offices and external asset managers. We offer holistic wealth management advice service, including discretionary and advisory solutions, selective financing solutions, and general wealth services. With volt by Vontobel, we also offer a hybrid investment application for our core affluent client segment. Actually, all our clients have one thing in common. They come to us for investment solutions, active investment solutions.
I want to reiterate that we are investment-led and pursue a client-centric hybrid servicing approach. We need to offer tailored investment solutions to meet our client needs. We provide an open architecture when it comes to products, including giving our clients full access to all our investment boutiques you have just seen. We serve our clients out of 16 locations globally with a focus on developed markets. What is very important to understand is that we have primarily one booking center in Switzerland, with the exception of Germany onshore. We are able to leverage our state-of-the-art Swiss booking platform, leading to a very efficient and scalable cross-border business model. We have a long track record of growth, very strong, solid growth in assets under management over the recent years. We have clearly surpassed the 100 billion mark the first time this year.
As per end of Q3, we are at CHF 109 billion in assets under management. This is reflected also in a solid compound annual growth rate of 7%. We set ourselves through the cycle target of net new money growth between 4% to 6%. We already heard that. In the recent three years, we have been able to beat our own target range and have also achieved above industry growth rates. We grow with the existing clients by increasing share of wallets, but of course also by continuously winning new clients. To the operating income, despite the lower interest rate environment, we have been able to successfully operate the private clients business. So we showed repeatedly strong revenues, thanks of course to this constant increase in the asset base, but also because we apply a very strict pricing discipline, which leads to stable margins.
We do not buy growth in the market. Moreover, light blue, you see that the distribution of Structured Solutions has contributed positively to our operating income. This continuous growth actually is based on four key success factors. One, we are investment-led, truly investment-led. We have an institutionalized investment setup, and our clients, our private clients, have access to over 300 investment experts covering all major asset classes globally. We are client-centric with this hybrid service model. This means that this is a dual consulting concept. Our clients can individually choose how much they want to be involved directly with the relationship manager and the team, or only communicate with us through digital channels like our platform, Wealth, or a combination of both. Our capability to grow in developed markets is a third key success factor.
We have demonstrated strong capabilities to grow organically as well as inorganically through value-adding bolt-on acquisitions. And this is in a strict set of focus markets and based on a proven integration concept. And last but not least, and maybe the main growth driver, is this continuous development of our relationship management workforce. So please let me deep dive into these four success factors in the coming minutes. You have previously heard from my colleagues, Ben, Andrew, and Tim, but also the other boutique heads. What we produce in investments is at the core of our offering in private clients. This is an institutional-grade investment capability we have there, and also a lot of research competence. Our clients have full access to this through this open investment architecture.
As Georg pointed out before, we do not want to have clients, or we wish to have clients who buy more or less all the products we have, all the mandates we have. We are constantly working, of course, on this offering shelf. We are now at the moment in modularizing our product offering in order to also increase here the scalability. We want to put a new offering, a hybrid solution between advice and discretionary in the coming year. We also constantly enhance our efficiency and scale our production through mass customization capabilities. Currently, we are running around 10,000 model portfolios on our iPortfolio, as it's called iPortfolio asset allocation and portfolio management engine. Then we need to deliver fast and efficient, and most importantly, also relevant investment solutions to our clients.
So first, we need to have a thorough analysis of all the portfolios, and then an effective sales process in order to be fast again and relevant to our clients. And of course, our digital platform Wealth helps us in that. And this all results actually in a relatively high mandate penetration of almost 80%, and this has been stable throughout the years. Some comments on our platform. So we constantly try to improve this, of course, our digital platform Wealth, to offer there a best-in-class digital client experience. I'm happy to walk you through our digital onboarding at the dinner later, so that you know what I mean with that. And the numbers are quite impressive. So we have 2 million logins per year from our clients. 10% of our client base is on a daily basis interacting through this platform Wealth with us.
And we have been able to increase, actually double the trading volume within two years, so since the last Investor Day, although we are not positioning ourselves as a pure trading platform. So this is investment-led clients who have done this trading on the platform, doubling it as in volume, as mentioned. So when we talk about these developed markets, that's very important for us. So this organic growth in developed markets, you see that this has been a strategy since many years. We are working on that constantly, and we demonstrate here that more than 75% of our assets under management from clients are domiciled in developed markets. You see the list of developed markets, I mean, Switzerland, North America, U.K., Italy, Germany, and other selected E.U. countries. Also, the growth comes out of these developed markets.
This year, over 70% of the net new money growth is out of these developed markets. So that's the organic growth part, organic growth, meaning the expansion of existing client relationships, as I mentioned, but also coupled with a very disciplined RM hiring and development process. And I will touch that in a minute. But also the inorganic growth, we want to, or we are playing an active role in the Swiss wealth management M&A landscape. And more or less every two years, we have been able to buy client books since 2015, which is adding to this inorganic growth. So when it comes to the RM workforce, and that is on the one hand not rocket science, but it's super important that we have there a very strict process in place.
First of all, the market screening, we expect from our leadership, but also from our relationship managers to be in the market, to know the peers and to be able to capitalize on RM hiring. Then we believe that our values are truly differentiating. So we need to make sure in the interview process that relationship managers who are being onboarded with us, that they understand our values, that they know what business we want to do and what business we don't want to do. That's a very thorough due diligence we do in this hiring. Then, once onboarded, we want to get them up to speed to understand the beauty of the products we have just presented before, but also the complexity. They need to understand how to position these products to their clients. They need to explain performance, past performance, and understand the products.
Then, of course, proactive talent development, retention, as well as consistent education and training. I mean, this is, we invest heavily in the knowledge and the capabilities of our workforce. Ensure efficient client book load of RMs. There, we, of course, benchmark with the industry. I think it looks very good here. You see on the right side how this has developed over time. So we have, as you may know, we have increased our relationship manager workforce quite a lot over the last two years, three years. And we have grown the number of RMs by 22% now at 306. And also the load, the client load, as the AUM load per relationship manager has increased by 18%. So in line, of course, also thanks to performance. And then another important topic is the timely succession planning. It takes years.
You need to take time to transfer a relationship from one relationship manager to the other, so succession planning when relationship managers get older and we have the next generation of relationship managers following is very important and key. Some words on the IHAG client book we have been able to acquire, so this, as has been mentioned already, but this is very important for us to expand and scale our business in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, so expand the presence in the developed markets we are focusing on, and the clients, but also the relationship managers can expect a seamless transition due to our proven execution and integration capability, so we have a team who knows how acquisition works, but also who knows how integration works on the platform side, but also on the people side. That's very important.
The transaction is expected to have a positive impact on Vontobel Group net profit immediately and also is being financed by existing capital. We are expecting a closing in Q1 2025 of next year. Some words on next generation, a buzzword more or less, and the great wealth transfer, I mean, is on everybody's minds. This is also extremely important for us. We need to know the next generation of our clients. We have implemented a systematic structured approach to win the next generation of our clients. It's all about transparency. It's about building relationships. And there we have developed many initiatives in order to win and gain the next generation, the different segments of this next generation. And then, of course, also the pairing is important. The next generation of our clients is expecting next generation relationship managers as well.
So, there, that perfectly fits together if you do it right. So, to conclude, the key takeaways, again, investing is at the center of all our activities. Our scalable hybrid service model allows us to efficiently distribute mass customized investment solutions. We gain market share thanks to the continued strong profitable growth path in developed markets. And we are attractive for the next generation of our clients and also of the next generation of our staff. Thank you very much, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Please.
Thank you.
Yes, Martin and Ash from UBS. A couple of questions, please. The first one would be on relationship manager hiring. Obviously, you've been quite active last year, and I think the intention also to continue to a certain extent. Can you talk a little bit about the business cases? You mentioned you're tracking this and monitoring this actually quite consistently. How do these business cases look like? What is the typical kind of break-even period you expect? What is the typical duration of a business plan? And also linked to that, what is the success rate of newly hired RMs? Is it 80%, 60%? Any color on that would be helpful.
Yeah, I think you mentioned color. I can give you maybe a little bit color, and I see Georg is also here, the head of private clients is also here, so that's important. Now, first of all, I think the most important question is, do we really talk about the same thing when it comes to business, right? We need to, this investment-led, I'm saying it again, all the credit-linked portfolios, we even say a high percentage of the interviews we did after this certain event last year, we have simply stopped because of that. So we need to make sure what we get, and especially also the relationship manager needs to know what he gets. Then the business cases depend on the markets as well, so the size. And so we go through, not by name typically, but the business case, we benchmark it with other existing business cases.
The timeline, as you know, it typically takes a certain time, of course. We track that, we try to enable. And then after 6, 12, 18, 24 months, you really see where it's going. The success rate, well, again, we benchmark this toward our competitors, at least what we hear is relatively high. I cannot give you a percentage there, but we're happy with the development because it's not only the new business cases we acquire, but it's also, of course, the existing workforce which needs to grow.
Some more colors, a color we gave about that topic earlier is it's very important to make sure in advance that you hire the right people so that they can operate in our business model. So we have last year interviewed more than 700 relationship managers. We've hired 42 net. So that shows that there's a big fallout because the client portfolio doesn't fit, the risk appetite doesn't fit, the culture or whatever, right? So that is number one. Then secondly, if you look, we have continuously been able to increase the loan assets per relationship manager. And behind that is, of course, strict management of the business cases that we have. We give people time because this is not a linear development, right?
But then, of course, we start acting rather soon if we see that for whatever reason, and sometimes it can just be bad luck, because the client dies, or have a patent, or there can be other reasons. And then we help, we coach the people to make sure we get to the load, or if the person is very skilled and makes a good impression and for whatever reason it doesn't work, of course, there's also other ways to help people. We have relationship managers who retire. We have sometimes a flow, inflow of clients due to our digital activities or through referrals. And so we are trying to make sure that over the time period we give, everybody starts contributing positively to the bottom line and hence fulfilling the business case.
Hello, this is Daniel Regli from Zürcher Kantonalbank. Thanks for taking my question. One follow-up on the relationship manager hiring you did particularly in H2 2023. Can you already tell whether this was a good vintage compared to other vintages or not? And then secondly, I heard from one of your, let's say, peers that the investor sentiment about private clients has just started to improve, let's say, since August. Is this something you can confirm? And then last, on the Structured Solutions business, can you maybe talk a bit about the development? And obviously, Thomas has said previously that the reason for moving Structured Solutions into private clients was also mainly on synergies. And I just wondered to get a bit more color where exactly these synergies are.
Okay, so we wouldn't call it vintage, but I can only say we are very happy with the development of the business cases we have been able to acquire, not only in second half 2023, but they are developing nicely. Again, we need to make sure that they understand what we offer and that this works. When it comes to, well, maybe the Structured Solutions part, I mean, there are a lot of businesses where it is possible from a product perspective to offer to external asset managers, to our private clients. This is seamless and that works very well. So these teams are together now again, and we work closely to enable that. And there were some synergies in there. That is true, and the second question, sorry, that was the third one.
Investor sentiment.
Investor sentiment, well, no, I'm not commenting on the figures, but I mean, we're happy with, I mean, you saw the operating income and also in the Structured Solutions part. So the investors are very active at the moment, what we see.
Okay, thank you very much. Please.
Yeah, hello from Octavian. A question on your slide on the next generation and the success. So first, do you have a big difference by market being that the current generation, the average age? Do you have a difference in your mature market with the age of your current client? And you see some area where you have more burning needs to prepare to have the next generation transfer in place. And also, do you tackle also by market? You mentioned a few initiatives, but where do you see the best way to really engage with the next generation?
First of all, I do not see big differences, but the further away the market is, the more difficult it gets, of course, I mean, in Switzerland, Vontobel has a different brand recognition than in other markets, but it's developed markets of our focus, so there, you typically have a third, fourth generation of wealth, and so the typical questions which are there in order to do this wealth transfer are very similar, and then what we try to do, we try to have them physically here, so we do young investor conferences. We want to transmit our knowledge. We let our next generation staff present to them, and that's a very efficient way to do it, and it really depends, of course, on which segment we talk about.
So the 20-30-year-old segment is very open to knowledge and to learn, and our clients are very happy that we take care of them. And then getting older, we have different kinds of event formats which are attractive for them.
Hi, Brian. I know you said you're happy with the 2023 hires. I guess for a typical year, or I'm trying not to use Daniel's vintage term here, how much of the business case assets would you have typically brought in by the end of year one and year two? That's the first part. And I guess presumably you would, well, actually, let's go with that first, and then I'll just have a follow-up afterwards.
Typically, I mean, again, it depends a little bit on the client segment they are in. If they have one or two really large clients, you see the bulk of assets coming in right at the beginning as soon as they are really ready to onboard. I would estimate maybe 60%-70% in year one and the rest coming in year two.
Got it. And so on that basis then, it would be one should therefore not assume an acceleration in net new money next year, like all else equal, with a, let's say, a high proportion of net new money from new hires versus existing. I'm not asking you to disclose the mix compared to this year, but I'm saying it would be the wrong assumption therefore to conclude that the mix should shift towards new next year because you typically bring in a large portion of AUM upfront. Is that fair?
Not necessarily because, I mean, you need to keep in mind that our existing, so after a three-year period, they typically are in the normal RM growth plans. So as any other RM, every single RM of ours has growth targets. And so they go into there. And I mean, it depends a little bit on the year. Georg, what do you have? You have discussed this before. I remember very well. And I think just to make sure we give a consistent answer, you know the problem with, I understand very much that you want to simulate that, right? I understand that very much. The fact is that there's no general rule, right? It is so that every relationship manager, given the portfolio, given the market he is in, and given partly luck and circumstances, the trajectory is very different.
That's why it's for us so important to individually have that exchange, right? If it's not coming, is it because we have a fundamental problem with the person and her or his client base, or is it because X, Y, Z, right? If it comes very fast, we need to understand, is that it, or does it continue? Have we underestimated the situation, et cetera? That makes it very difficult for us to give an indication in general. It would be lovely if we could say an average portfolio that is sufficiently profitable is CHF 150 million, and it goes CHF 50 million, CHF 50 million, CHF 50 million. That would be the perfect world for analyzing this. Now, maybe over 10 years, you could even take these numbers, but from year to year and quarter to quarter, it's not like that. It fluctuates a lot.
Sometimes also the contribution of new relationship managers is a much higher share in terms of total flow that we have. Sometimes it's different because, for example, we acquire a big mandate among the existing relationship managers. So as much as we would like to help you here, we can't.
Fair enough. Thank you. I appreciate the candid answer.
All good?
All good.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Brian, for that. And also thank you for the questions. Learned a new word, vintage. We take a 10-minute break, slightly shorter than planned, and we'll get back here then at 4:30 P.M. Outside, you have some coffees and snacks and so on. 4:30 P.M., please. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, everybody. If we can please start having our seats and we can get going. We'd love to have you here all the way until midnight, but maybe you want to do other things. Thank you. We move then on to the second client unit, which is dedicated to serving our institutional clients. I would like to hand over to Christoph.
Thank you very much, Peter.
Thank you, and again, welcome to the institutional client segment and session. I guess my colleagues from investments have already made it quite clear what their expectations of me are, which is perfectly fine. It's something that after 30 years in financial services and 20 years in sales, doing sales, building sales businesses, accelerating sales platforms, I'm quite used to. Investors should be opinionated. I agree with that. They also usually know quite well how to actually do sales, which is even more welcome, but all jokes aside, it's great to be here. I just thought I'd spend some time on sharing with you my initial observations and impressions of our institutional client segment and talk about a few of the key initiatives that we've planned to do and that we've already engaged in.
A little spoiler alert: it's a very good business with very good people doing a lot of great things. So that is certainly my impression after, I would say, seven months into the job. But more importantly, maybe let's go right into it. As you can see, our institutional client business, at a glance, we have managed about CHF 112 billion in AUM, as we saw earlier. We do that from 20 locations around the world. And we cover the true institutional clients, which are pension funds, official institutions, insurance companies, but also the big intermediaries, whether global, regional, or national, local in character. Again, I just think I share with you some of my initial impressions. They are very good. But at the same time, clearly, there are some initiatives that we have already taken that then we will take.
What I would just say in summary is we are, when we go out to clients, receiving very good feedback. We are a well-established business. We're clearly differentiated. We're an actively managing investment firm. We have 100 years of history. And our Swiss heritage resonates really strongly with institutional investors, as does our commitment to sustainable investing. If then we take a step back and look at the development over time, you will see that clearly in 2022, we, as the asset management industry, have entered a cyclical downturn. And you see that clearly in the uncorrelated selloff across equities and fixed income markets that we discussed earlier, which clearly led investors to retrench, whether to cash their benchmarks or even their home markets. This was clearly driven by geopolitics, invasion of Ukraine, but also the overall economic outlook, which has created enormous uncertainty and volatility.
As you look at the middle of the chart, we have not been immune to that and have, thankfully, during the course of this year, managed to slow down the attrition and actually stopped it. We're at this point flat, hoping to improve. We're quite optimistic on that, that we will continue to do better in the years to come. I think equally important is not just to talk about the absolute performance, as we've just done, but also the relative performance. What you see here are fund flows into Vontobel funds versus the competition in Europe as a proxy to how we're actually performing in the markets. On the left-hand side, you see the long-term perspective. Here you see that we have done exceedingly well with very high asset raising capability over time, outperforming many of our peers in risk-on environments.
When you then look at the middle, which represents more of a risk-off mode, we've also done quite well, achieving median results versus our peer group. And as you see on the right-hand side, in a year that is still characterized by volatility but nevertheless more constructive as an environment, we are again moving up the ranks and are continuing to do well. And of course, we want to continue to do well in the times to come. Now, some of you may ask, what are you actually doing to differentiate and what will you improve? So there are three elements to our future commercial strategy that we have already started working on. Number one is our sales strategy and how to drive profitable growth. Number two is our client experience and our ability to create a scalable and profitable client journey.
And number three is our product offering, commercializing, bringing to scale some of the capabilities we've heard about earlier and others while building newer strategies and our solutions offering. So let me go into detail here what we are planning to do. First of all, on our sales strategy and sales evolution. I think if you look at our industry, it's fair to say that we've been a little bit prone to selling funds, well-performing funds, often equity funds, to fund selectors. And I'm simplifying, but we've been selling good performance to fund selectors. And it's fair to say that the world around us is changing quite rapidly. And we, as a sales effort, we, as a client segment, also need to change. We need to evolve our coverage model.
What that means is that we'll be moving from a fund sales approach to much more of a strategic, holistic approach. We need to cover our clients at the most senior level with a partnership mentality in a way that we bring geopolitical dialogue, macroeconomic input, that we bring a strategic partnership dialogue to the C-suite clients across the world, and that we do that holistically as an institution. But at the same time, also, that means that we are quite technical in our approach, that we have salespeople that are both strategic and technical, that can pivot from one end to the other, that are focused on the right clients, and that are very active in the way they actually transport our investment knowledge to our client set. We also have to recognize that clearly not every Swiss franc, every dollar, every euro is the same.
So in the way we choose our prospects, choose our clients, we have to be deliberate and clear that we focus on generating profitable growth and not just top-line growth. And that's something that we're going to be quite focused on. And we earlier had a question on pricing discipline, and that is something clearly that we're aware of, to be selective and to be driving the business towards profitable growth. We will also continue to evolve our product offering. And we heard earlier around some of these strategies, whether it's our Ancala infrastructure offering or our 24 Asset Management, asset-backed finance strategies. Those are strategies that we're very excited about. Those are strategies that, frankly, every salesperson ought to be excited about. And it's something that we're keenly focused on commercializing in the years to come. And finally, we're a people's business.
It's all about people, hiring, retaining, training, and developing the right people. And that is something that we've already embarked on with internal conferences, training modules that we will continue to do and continue to invest. The second element is what I would call creating and designing a globally scalable client journey. Historically, we've grown more in local and regional hubs, and we've done quite well. What we can do better off is ensuring that every client around the world, whether in Asia or in Switzerland, has the same client experience, the same processes, the same standards, the same response times, and an experience that entices them to stay with us, but also allows us to be scalable, efficient, and profitable in our growth. That is a project and an initiative that we have already kicked off.
And we are focusing on just pure alignment, efficiency, automation, digitalization, whether across the whole value chain or individual elements thereof. The reason for that is indeed efficiency and profitability. And then the third element, indeed, is to bring our products to scale, whether the ones that we already have, the scalable products that we talked about earlier, our fixed income boutiques, our quality equities offering, our multi-asset capability, and our proposition around sustainable investing. We heard earlier from Christel and others around solutions, something that we have a track record in, we're doing quite well, and that we want to do more of, whether it's cross-selling the individual boutique from the fundamental side, but also with the support and engagement of our quant business to tailor and leverage the existing offering.
Then finally, I talked about that, building out the more illiquid alternative space, whether it's around 24 Asset Management or Ancala. I certainly believe that we are well positioned for future flows and commercial success. Let me talk about solutions for a moment because I think that's something that the whole industry talks about. It means many things to many people. For us, it's a key element to long-term client partnerships, and it's certainly core to our commercial strategy. Clients often seek to co-design, sometimes even co-brand. It may include incorporating the CIO view top-down. It may be co-designing product. It's oftentimes co-aligning across organizations, partnering with organizations. And in many ways, it's activating multiple investment capabilities. Here is kind of what I talked about earlier when I talked about the future of the client engagement.
This is kind of the Champions League where we are strategic in nature with an eye on mass customization, but we're building long-term relationships that allow us to evolve the customer journey. The one example we heard about is indeed the Swiss equity income strategy that we co-designed with one of the large distributors in Switzerland and has led to over CHF 500 million in AUM raised year to date. And that's certainly something that we feel we can build on and do more of in the years to come. So where does this actually lead us? Our ambition is clear. We want to partner with the leading asset owners and asset distributors globally.
When we put the client at the center around our core values and we bring each and every one of these components in various shapes and forms to our clients, then I certainly believe that with our Swiss heritage, our ownership structure, and a holistic client experience, we strongly appeal to clients around the world. So let me conclude with these key takeaways. We are indeed focused not just on growth, but on profitable growth for our shareholders. We will continue to build a scalable and flexible operating model. And we're looking to grow through activating a set of diversified, high-conviction active strategies, both by scaling up long-term track records as well as activating and building additional capabilities. I'll stop here. Thank you for your attention. I'm happy to take any questions you have, but I'll conclude my formal remarks here. Thank you very much.
Hi, Martin Emch. Two questions, please. First one would be on the sales evolution that you mentioned, that you're moving from a classic kind of fund sales to more of a holistic partnership, high-level coverage. I'm just wondering, how do you exactly implement that? Isn't there a conflict perhaps between the boutique structure and a high-level kind of holistic, very much customized solution? Could you perhaps talk about the process? Could you talk about the organization that you have at disposal? That is the first one. And the second one would be the solutions. Could you talk about how margins compare to those of classic open-ended funds? Is it simply about the content, or are there perhaps other factors in play as well?
Yep. Sure. Thank you for the questions, and if you take a step back and look at what's happening in our industry, both providers see consolidation, but also our clients are telling us very actively that they want to reduce the number of parties that they do business with, and we see that everywhere in the world, so what that means is that the fewer relationships become more meaningful and oftentimes more senior and strategic in the way that our clients want to engage, so we're effectively following the client. When you're getting to a senior client level, what I call the C-suite dialogue, you're automatically talking about, given the market environment, what are you trying to achieve as an institution for your clients, for your stakeholders, and we are then responding to that, saying, here's what we can offer. Here will be our advice. Here will be our views.
And given that those relationships tend to be more meaningful in size, they also allow more tailoring. And that kind of is what I call mass customization. So clearly, with customization, there is always an element of size that goes hand in hand. And I think fair to say, I'm not proposing that we're moving the whole organization purely into this type of dialogue because there are effectively two types of sales. There's the flow business, which is activating funds that we have. And that is something we're also very focused on by having created initiatives such as focus lists, clear alignment from clients to marketing to sales to servicing. And we need to capture those flows and build blockbusters, really large, very profitable fund vehicles.
But at the same time then, and that's kind of the other end of the barbell, there is more and more of that strategic dialogue and alignment coming. And there, the dialogue is quite different. The best salespeople can do both, of course, but again, not all clients want the same thing. And that, I think, comes to your second question also. There are no two solutions that are alike. So it always depends on clearly what the client wants. We have to position the business in a way that you can respond to those different demand types. On the one hand, some people just want a tailored product or a certain outcome in a product, which is reasonably easy to customize. Others indeed want a much broader partnership, a co-branding opportunity, and a co-development opportunity.
There, clearly, you are moving on a curve of complexity versus price point, and you need to be, again, kind of cautious and careful and considerate in your business selection and your product design. But that's something that I think, as an institution, I always call ourselves as large enough to be meaningful yet small enough to be nimble. We're very fortunate that we have a very close dialogue with the investors. We have short decision times, and we can customize in a way that it's flexible and profitable at the same time. But it also means saying no sometimes, of course, to be fair. Thanks.
Yes, hi. Nicholas Herman, Citi. Could you just talk about the cross-sell rate across your investor base, please?
Sorry?
The cross-sell rate. As in, how many of your investors have two, three-plus products with you? I'd be interested to hear that, please. Secondly, obviously, the Swiss Sustainable Equity Income Plus Fund has been a really big success. What other product launches do you have coming that you're particularly excited by? And then the final question I had was multi-asset. You seem to have actually generated inflows in multi-asset, whereas most asset managers that we seem to look at have been seeing quite heavy outflows in multi-asset in a higher rate world. It's less attractive. What are you doing differently?
Yeah, sure. So the first one very much depends on the market you're in. So in markets where we've been well established, let's take this market here, for 100 years, we, of course, have much more ability to cross-sell than in a market where we're new. So there are no specific cross-sell rates that we are particularly targeting. There's also not a specific measurement around it because it, frankly, depends on the journey where we are. The ideal relationship, of course, allows you to cross-sell two, three products at the same time. So that is something that, strategically, we want. But we're not demanding and measuring that of our RMs because it may also be that there might be a new client that could be more profitable than the cross-sell with the existing client. So I think it's both. It's a holistic discussion, but also an isolated discussion.
The second question is, indeed, the Swiss equity income strategy has been quite successful. There are things that we are considering. Clearly, that we're looking at, I cannot disclose that right now. We'll gladly share that once we're ready to roll. But clearly, we're quite encouraged by what we've seen there. And then in multi-asset, we're in a very fortunate position because we have actually two boutiques that offer multi-asset, one from the quant side and one from the more discretionary side, I would call it. Both are, of course, fundamental in view. And we're quite keen to activate both. I think they tailor towards different client groups, generally speaking. The more fundamental one is, of course, more at one end of the curve, whereas the quant one is much more flexible in the way it can be used.
It can be as a standalone asset solution, but also it can be in terms of overlays and just like in the Swiss equity income strategy, tailoring into some of the existing strategies.
Are these absolute return strategies as well?
It depends on what the client wants, really. I mean, there can be absolute return, outcome-driven, risk parity strategies, risk return parameters.
So which client groups and which products level have been particularly successful? Because I said we've seen across the rest of the industry quite heavy outflows.
Yeah. No, exactly. I think people have seen outflows in the traditional multi-asset strategies that have historically sold into the advisory business in large markets such as Italy or Germany, for example. And nevertheless, I think we're quite encouraged by what we have because we have really good performance in that product category. So I tend to take a little bit of a longer-term view and believe in positioning the business and the strategies in the right way because, as we know, things are always cyclical. They always come back. So just because it's out of favor and we've seen outflows does not discourage me at all. But that, I think, is more the fundamental business that we see. The other one oftentimes is, as a standalone, oftentimes can be an overlay hedging strategy or something that can be more institutional.
But I want to be a bit cautious because, again, Swiss equity income strategy, the covered call writing on the strategy by the quant boutique was indeed done for a wealth management product, if you will. So the answer is always it depends, like in real life. Good. Sure.
I'm not sure if you're the right person to ask.
Okay. Let's find out.
I mean, we haven't talked. You haven't never touched upon you losing the Raiffeisen contract. And I also am not sure to understand if it is relevant for you in your business and your job or if it's only relevant to the investment boutiques. But maybe you can comment on that, how this changes your job or your organization, maybe in terms of the investment boutiques.
Sure. Maybe I defer to Georg for the broader relationship.
No, on the broader relationship, let's start with that. We have, in many areas, a cooperation with Raiffeisen for many years, and I think it's natural that over the time, one asks oneself, how will this look in the future? I think in this case, we have all noticed that they have insourced it, so for us, of course, we accept that. We also understand the decision. It doesn't come entirely as a surprise. They have signaled that early on, and again, that's the best outcome because losing it to a competitor, that would have been a different thing. Now, this is in 2027, so business continues as usual, and also, it has a marginal impact on our revenues, and in addition to that, we have three years to overcompensate everything that we might lose. Christoph.
There you go. There's a lot of good expectations for me, certainly, that I take away from this thing.
Yeah, so that's on Raiffeisen. I mean, in case the other topics we cooperate is, of course, their online situation. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. I hear you. So no changes within the organization is needed. That's what you're saying.
That's certainly not the case.
It's your job to.
Not for the next three years.
It does impact your job.
We're still a strategic partner for the next three years to come. So, of course, we will maintain very high service levels, commitment to the client. And other than that, we would have loved to keep them, of course, like Georg said. It's least worst outcome. But clearly, we will continue to do as good a job and where we can. And if we can, find compensation for whatever we will lose in three years' time. Good. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you, Christoph, and thank you for the questions. Our last session for today is Operations and Digitization, and as I mentioned in my intro, focus will be on how we'll use technology to drive efficiency, but also we'll see some showcases on how we will enable customization. With that, I would like to welcome Markus.
Good. Thank you. And also a warm welcome from my side. I'm pleased to provide you with some insights into operations and digitalization. At the beginning of this year, we launched a new organizational structure. The primary goal was to align the areas in accordance with customer focus rather than grouping them by functions. In this context, we distinguish between tech-driven technology management and client-centric technology management. In the tech-driven management area, here on the screen, the red lower box, the pure technology platform is provided. This includes the entire technical infrastructure, such as servers, networks, storage, cloud access, cybersecurity. And this forms, therefore, the stable foundation of the house. Then the blue pillars, they all stand on this stable foundation. Together, the pillars form the client-centric technology management. They are divided according to customer groups to be as close as possible to the clients and their needs.
The various pillars, or you could also call it business ITs, are connected by a small transformation team, here this green bar, to ensure a uniform architecture and the best possible coordination. The strategic priorities for the technology and service organization, in short, T&S, stipulate that the technology must be reliable and easy to use. In addition, we always want to find the closest sustainable path to client value. Another big and important topic is the end-to-end or front-to-back automation of processes within the entire company. This is absolutely necessary for us to be able to scale cost-effectively. But T&S does not see itself as a house that simply provides some services. The aspiration is very clear: to be an innovative powerhouse that supports us as a company to enable more business and support efficient and sustainable growth. Even today, our key figures show our strength in scaling.
Here, I would like to pick out just two examples. For instance, we send three to four billion quotes per day to provide our customers with current prices in structured products. That is impressive. It's 100,000 market orders per second. Already today, we have an SDP rate of more than 98% in client execution area, and we can offer connection to more than 125 markets worldwide, and finally, T&S has made a significant contribution to the efficiency program. The largest contributions were identified through the consolidation of the IT infrastructure and the application landscape. Additionally, in end-to-end process automation through the standardization of interfaces and many small findings that add up to substantial amounts. One of our major goals is to offer customers tailored solutions as each customer has individual needs.
Our aim is not just to make this possible, but to be extremely efficient in the production of these individual solutions. This requires various building blocks that I would like to present in practical use cases. One of the building blocks is client profiling because the better we know the customer, the more targeted our individual solutions are. Here, I have prepared existing AI use cases. A second building block is scalability because providing an unlimited number of tailored solutions requires the scalability of many systems. Here, I have brought two use cases of current cloud usage. A third building block is standardization because products and data must follow standardized processes in the background to be used in massive quantities. The use of all these building blocks enables then the efficient mass customization. So let us have a closer look at case study number one on client profiling using AI.
While Vontobel is already using large language models in many areas, the goal is always to seamlessly embed them into processes to promote efficiency. I have brought four specific examples. For instance, relationship managers can formulate a spoken summary of the customer meetings. From this, a customer report with tasks and opportunities is created in Salesforce, which is our CRM system using AI. Another example is the creation of investment proposals. We take investment proposals, which were created with the help of our portfolio management system, enrich them with our research reports, and suggest individual justification texts to the relationship manager using AI, which can then be directly adopted. The next example is the creation of summaries about our B2B customer relationships. From the customer data, emails, events, and transaction behavior, summaries of the relationship, insights, and opportunities are shown to our employees using AI.
The last case is the evaluation of documents and data to check for completeness and integrity. Of course, we have many other use cases. Most cases are based on our own API, which allows internal software developers easy access to the large language model in a secure environment. This will ensure and promote the rapid spread of these services across the whole firm. What brings me to case study number two, the scalability using the cloud. This is an important topic as the key component for efficient mass customization is scalability. I would like to bring two practical examples of what we do in the cloud for this purpose. In the trading area, we face the challenge that we must perform many more calculations during a market stress than in a normal market environment.
Since it would not be efficient to maintain a large amount of reserve hardware for potential market stress, we have developed a scalable cloud business case. The cloud allows us to multiply our virtual machines' capacity within seconds, depending on our needs. This is also cost-efficient as we only pay for the additional servers during the usage time, but the cloud is not just efficient from a cost perspective. Our system is also very resilient. It uses two regions and three separate data centers in each region, and on top of that, we use modern deployment methods for quick updates and multi-cloud capability. So in short, we have built a robust, scalable, and efficient system that can adapt to our business needs and market changes within seconds. The second scalability case is using the cloud, but combined with the use of deep learning for derivative product pricing.
As the complexity and volume of structured product increase, we are moving to innovative approaches like machine learning to speed up derivative pricing and hedging. We are using deep neural networks to learn the typical elements of derivative pricing. The learning process is fueled by large, meaningful training sets that we generate using our scalable cloud environment. These trained models are then smoothly integrated into our valuation and risk infrastructure. It allowed us to speed up our algorithms significantly by a factor of three to five. So the question is, what does it bring to our clients? They get faster access to prices, and we can calculate risk figures more frequently. And the best part is, even as we are increasing the frequency of all these recalculations, the overall cloud computation costs are decreasing. This proves that the efficient and cost-effectiveness of integrating machine learning into our processes works.
And now let me move to case study three in the field of standardization. I'm excited to share how we have amplified scale and efficiency by implementing standardization in IT and back-office operations within our institutional clients' business. Previously, we had a fragmented IT landscape with diverse processes. Our goal was to standardize IT and business processes while retaining each investment boutique's independence and creativity. We transitioned to a single, centrally supported global IT solution, created a harmonized data platform, and unified investment controls, execution, and client reporting. This transformation has led to enhanced agility, faster time to market, simplified maintenance, and reduced complexity. Importantly, the standardization of data opens the way for efficient mass customization across different areas. So in the previous slide, I have shared several case studies that serve as crucial building blocks for our efficient mass customization.
The case studies enable us to know our customers as good as possible, perform calculations on scalable platforms, and build on standardized processes. Our staff and processes are seamlessly supported by AI at various points. Thanks to our hybrid advisory, these customized solutions can efficiently reach our customers as it allows us to also communicate digitally. In the example on the left-hand side, we have developed an interactive investment proposal that can be sent to our clients via our e-banking app. The proposal can then be assessed and, as a consequence, be accepted or declined. But if accepted, it is executed without manual interventions. The whole process is fully digitalized. Next steps will involve distributing our leading research based on portfolios and customer interests and moving towards near-time analysis of customer portfolios.
Ultimately, we will be able to approach clients with individual, perfectly tailored investment proposals on our hybrid advisory channels. To conclude, I would like to highlight the following key takeaways from my presentation on operations and digitalization. We follow a strong focus on customer centricity combined with an easy-to-use technology foundation. The priority is on reliable technology, end-to-end automation, and sustainable client value. The key building blocks for efficient mass customization are client profiling, scalability, and standardization using embedded AI functionalities. And we have proved that the standardization of IT operations has enhanced agility, simplified maintenance, and reduced time to market for our products and services. So thank you for the opportunity to demonstrate that Vontobel has laid the foundation and has all the components needed to result in a highly efficient, industry-leading hybrid journey that is supported by the efficient mass customization.
With this, I'm happy to answer your questions.
I'm Chantal Ryser from Octavian. I think you have made clear that technology is key in the banking world. Maybe could you elaborate also what are you doing against possible cyber threat here at Vontobel?
Yes, it's an important topic. We have increased investments in this area over the years, to be honest. We are also having a lot of specialists that came from competition or from other tech careers. And we sleep very well, to be honest, because we invested over the years. We never stopped to invest there. And I think we can say with a good feeling that we are ahead of the curve in this area because it's substantial. I mean, it's digital. It needs to work.
A question from my side on the cloud usage and specifically structured solutions. I think you mentioned that you're using the cloud business to cost optimize the structured solutions, calculations, and pricing, and also using deep learning. What does that bring you actually in terms of a margin improvement or margin benefit versus perhaps your competitors? And also, is that simply a margin story, or does that perhaps contribute to higher activity levels, anything along those lines?
Interesting question. So maybe looking really back, so 20 years ago, we had a huge server in the middle of the trading floor with a post-it saying, "Please do not switch off." Today, the cloud is really safe and fast. What does not work is just copy everything to the cloud and then make use of it because you have to adopt the whole software and models to the pricing models of the cloud. So this is one thing we do. What does it bring us? On one hand side, it brings the client faster prices. This is important to them. Then many products are listed on exchanges. It's important that when the underlying prices or any other parameters move around, that we are faster than the others to adjust our pricings. And for this, we need, as an example, this deep learning.
I think we can wrap up if there are no more questions. We've covered a lot of ground. I think one message from us all that we would be keen also for you to take and I think came to be seen today that is absolutely key to our success and is fully realized now is the alignment amongst the key people that you've seen here and in the firm in general. We said we have one production engine, one investment distributing to two client segments, and we have that strong alignment at the ExCo team with our client segments, with our boutiques. And there should be no confusion about the independence of the investment boutique. Independence in the investment process, independence of thought is paramount to success in a world where you have to generate active performance. It's a brave world out there. It is difficult to generate performance.
You have to have an edge, and you have to want to keep that edge. However, the alignment is the accountability that each and every single investor in each and every single boutique has towards the final clients in delivering performance, in delivering the outcome, in delivering the transparency, in delivering the discipline in the process. So independence is a means to an end, but we are absolutely united because we are all accountable towards our clients. This is what we do as a job. So take that because that has been a clear level up in this alignment and also through the new model and the new team. And I think we've given you a lot of info, and Peter is going to come back for the light part and the.
Yes. Okay.
The drinks and.
I get the honor, I guess.
Et cetera.
Yes. Thank you so much for joining us today. And for those of you who have registered for the dinner, we'll be.