Good morning and welcome. This is our first in-person investor day since May of 2019, a special welcome for everyone here. Of course, for our virtual audience, we welcome you back, and thank you for attending. Earlier, we just completed the administrative responsibility of the annual general meeting. We all really appreciate your ongoing support and continued confidence. Let's get the investor day underway. Before I begin, I want to remind everyone that particularly with Skyward Specialty Insurance now being a public issuer on Nasdaq, and with Rob Kittel and I continuing to be active Skyward board directors, we will be limiting our Skyward comments and encourage you to visit Skyward's website and subscribe to their investor communication. Today's investor presentation, as I scroll to it, from an agenda perspective, we've really organized it in four distinct sections.
I'm gonna start with a very brief introduction. I'm gonna invite Dan and Parag and members of the Arena team to come on up to the mic and prevent a fulsome overview of their growing business. I'll return to discuss Westaim's strategic path forward, and thereafter, we welcome all your questions. As many of you are aware. We work on this. As many of you are aware, each quarter, Westaim releases a very detailed investor presentation on our website. It is rich in content and provides shareholders with a thorough update and an overview of our respective businesses. Earlier this week, Westaim released Q1 2023 earnings alongside a refreshed investor presentation. Today, the opening slides of eight to 13, which will be posted on our website hereafter, were included in our Q1 update.
I'm gonna assume that you have already reviewed this content. I will make a few general observations. Page eight really reflects our ownership position in Skyward, Arena Investors, and Arena FINCOs. The biggest change being that The Westaim ownership in Skyward is now 37%, down from 44%, reflecting the post-IPO ownership. Slide nine highlights a unique and strong quarter. Specifically, Skyward's Rule your niche strategy continues to excel, and the company reported very strong operating results. Gross written premium was up 27%. Net income was $15.6 million. Combined ratio improved to 90.3%, with net investment income declining against a very strong Q1 2002. Shareholders' equity increased to $507 million, and the annualized return on equity was 13.4%.
Arena Investors produced net income of $2 million with committed AUM of $3.4 billion. Recurring revenue improved to $10.8 million. Fee-related earnings, which we all know the term FRE, improved to $5 million. Arena has six active fundraising campaigns in 2003, Parag will be speaking to this shortly. Arena is well-positioned today in a very challenging environment and difficult banking community. The attraction and attention to private credit continues to grow. On page 10, we're really summarizing Westaim's operating results. Obviously, producing a ninety-four and a half million dollar quarter stands out, this was largely driven by Skyward's successful IPO and follow-on share price appreciation.
As you know, Westaim adopts fair value accounting, with Skyward now being an actively traded public issuer, their share price has become the cornerstone of our valuation mark. As of March 31st, 2023, Skyward was $21.87, materially higher than the $15 IPO price. The FINCO portfolio declined 1.7%, reflecting the independent mark-to-market valuation process. Lastly, Arena Investors produced $2 million in net income, with Westaim's share being $1 million. Page 11 reviews Westaim's balance sheet. The 25% increase in our book value to $3.21, or in Canadian dollars, CAD 4.00, 34%, reflects the price appreciation in the Skyward ownership. Today, Westaim owns 14,567,139 Skyward shares.
Pages 12 and 13 are waterfall charts to highlight the specific quarterly activity within our earnings per share and book value growth. At this point, I'd like to invite Dan to the podium to give a fulsome overview of Arena.
Thanks, Cam. I just wanna set my timer here. I'm sorry, how do we do this clicker thing?
There you go.
The other way?
It's a little red button.
There we go. Okay. Thanks.
I'm gonna take you through the business that we've created, as well as the opportunity set ahead of us and kind of where we're going from here. Starting on page 16, I'm not a big kind of page-flipping person, but I'm gonna kind of keep loosely to this format. We wanna really walk through the business that we're trying to create. We think about that as AIGH, Arena Investors Group Holdings, which is a combination of what we'll refer to, and we'll talk about this later, as AI, Arena Investors, where we manage capital on behalf of third parties, including the Westaim Holding Company, including Skyward and others.
AIS, Arena Institutional Services, where we effectively monetize a lot of the additional intellectual property we have available in ways that don't use other people's capital. We also have, as I've mentioned before, in previous conversations, a very extensive and global network. It's key to understand, you know, as people have asked us, "Well, why doesn't why didn't AUM go up faster? Why don't you just raise more and more funds? Why don't you act like a mutual fund? Why don't you act like a private debt fund?" The question is, are we going to, you know, build ourselves on a kind of very narrow platform that subjects us to the overall macro environment, that puts our eggs in the, in the single basket of being the corporate private lender, the real estate private lender?
Or are we gonna build an enduring enterprise? Enduring enterprises kind of don't get built on, you know, tiny, narrow platforms. You know, along with that, I'd point out that within AI, you know, we talk about, and it's good to keep in mind, our three sources of edge. One is our mandate flexibility, which is powerful because in a world where people pigeonhole themselves into little areas and then impale themselves on a spike of moral hazard, we wanna be in a position to not do that which doesn't make sense, and to avoid things like many of the things that we're gonna talk about that have been subject or part of this massive asset bubble in which we find ourselves.
The second is that we wanna leverage that mandate by being able to look at a lot of stuff, and we wanna do that without kind of breaking the fixed cost bank. Through our global network of kind of 40-plus joint ventures that complement our eight business units, we are looking at a lot of stuff. We are dispassionately comparing all of those things on a return for unit of risk basis. Even without a top-down view, it's allowing us to be clear on where the return per unit of risk is and where it isn't.
As we saw in 2017, 2018, 2019, the kind of bubble opportunities getting larger and larger in much more conventional areas like corporate private lending and conventional mortgage lending, it would've been easy to do it as long as you knew when the end was near. We didn't know when the end was gonna come, and we didn't wanna be involved in those things. Our global infrastructure allowed us to see very clearly where the good return per unit of risk was. The third, you've gotta be able to handle all this stuff. One of the many unintended consequences of the post-GFC alternative investment expansion that we will likely encounter is the fact that people have systematically underinvested in their infrastructure necessary to do this business. It's not easy.
It doesn't just, you know, scale magically. Every loan doesn't pay off in a world where there's not an easy refire on the corner. We need to have systems that handle all this. We have, you know, 1,000 bank accounts with Citibank and HSBC all over, all over the world. We're running a non-bank bank. We're running the bank that banks should be, but for the obvious profligacies they've gone through over the decades. At the same time, we're on top of our servicing. We're on top of our assets. We're not kind of waiting for, you know, some magic to take us out of things. We're doing deep and constant surveillance with our Quaestor Advisors team. We're in a position to be super proactive.
I'm sure some of you have, you saw on The Globe in the last couple of days, people talking about real estate and how people are marking or not marking their positions or dealing with the issues that they encounter. When we see an issue, we run at it, and we deal with it, as opposed to, you know, hoping we get taken out of our problem. Having a robust servicing platform and ability to kind of administer and deal with assets, not be afraid of taking assets while not gratuitously seeking them, is critical.
As I mentioned, we wanted to be clear about what we didn't do, because we really feel strongly that at this point, we have built an infrastructure and an enterprise that has the prospects for material scaling, material production of incremental contribution margin effectively, by virtue of the fact that having created the platform we have, we really have only to add assets to address an enormous market opportunity, with a minimal amount of incremental kind of people cost, to exploit that. It's taken a while to get here, but we feel very comfortable about where we are. Again, to reiterate, we don't take macro risk. We have never taken it. We have no view on the macro environment that is investable. We've, we've limited our exposure to rates, to commodities, to currencies.
You know, people, if you're not vigilant, those implicit assumptions kind of work their way into the cracks and crevices of your investments. You know, we are laser-focused on avoiding those issues because we have no competitive advantage on getting them. We obviously are not big on math investing. There are people who are experts in that. We're not, and we don't have to be. We're seeking what we would view as machete decisions, not scalpel decisions. Third, we don't need a greater fool to take us out of things. We don't need. We want to be dedicated deep value investors, but at the same time, be in situations where our ultimate crystallization is within our control. As I'm sure all of you have seen, a small-cap value investor says, "This is the greatest thing ever.
It's a discount to the sum of the parts. There's a big holding company discount, and someday it's gonna happen." Maybe, maybe. In our investments, we are crystal clear that it is within our control through structure, right? That's ultimately what kind of credit-oriented investing allows you to do, to get our way out of things and crystallize that, so that when Mr. Market does make prices bounce around, we're a beneficiary of that, what's called convexity. What we didn't do, right? Again, what I found routinely among large-scale institutional investors is a relative lack of internalization of the underlying leverage that is within their portfolios. We weren't at the bottom of the stack, you know, buying assets that seem very safe. We'll see this happen.
We'll see this as the issues kind of continue to metastasize, where you have great assets with just terrible capital structures for which people grossly overpaid, right? We were at the top of the stack with short duration, minimal exposure to rates, if not, if not any at all. In fact, we're a beneficiary of issues that might have arisen because of an idiosyncratic or macro environment where we had the leverage to say to our counterparty, "Here's what you're gonna do now, but... If not, you know, we're gonna have to monetize the asset." We weren't involved in any part of the kind of ecosystem that has grown in the last decade in kind of the middle market leverage finance world generally, which connects CLOs to direct lending to leverage finance to middle market private equity.
All of those areas needed one another in order to kind of promulgate the bubble that occurred. Now all of that is reversing itself very harshly, and we're only in the very, very beginning stages of that. Finally, you know, we didn't, you know, we didn't participate in ways that might have been easier on a marginal cost basis, you know, and might have gotten us short-term benefit in terms of fees, but put ourselves in a position where we are now up the proverbial tree dealing with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of workouts and other issues with very little flexibility given the very light covenant structures that are out there. We did basically four things. We continue to do them. We lent, you know, low LTV, short duration, high cost, always for a reason, right?
There's never any magic to our investments. There's never a, "How did they get that return?" right? Both buyer and seller, both borrower and lender have the same view on value, but we're gonna look for a process issue. I need it in a week, right? No one likes energy now, right? I don't understand Puerto Rico, whatever it might be. We're gonna demand excess return for unit of risk in a very straightforward manner. You know, when people ask us to compete, we say, "Well, you need to go seek a solution elsewhere. And when you've run out of alternative solutions, then come on back." Number two, we try to explain this a lot of times to our investors, 'cause we wanna keep reminding them of it.
As the bubble inflated, the regular way opportunities to lend a piece of money, make a normal coup-coupon, clip the coupon every month, create that calm, lack of quote-unquote volatility people love, became more and more difficult because everyone wants easy and no volatility and a coupon every month. We use the infrastructure that we have to do a lot of other things that were far superior return for unit of risk, but weren't quite so, you know, quote-unquote non-volatile, by insofar as you would kind of clip a coupon each month.
Buying charge-off credit card receivables in Colombia, liquidating airplane engines, hypothecating or factoring various forms of collateral where you're effectively investing into a liquidation, which implicitly is a low, can be a low loan-to-value, can be very short duration and be very, very predictable, but not down to the 30-day increment, just like a coupon, right? We like that. We like situations where for non-economic reasons, people are less likely to be involved. As things got crazier, our ratio of number two to number one got higher and higher. Now we're gonna talk about how it's gonna circle back the other way. Two other things we did, and again, taking advantage in the first case with Mr.
Market, there are situations where we can create through convertible structures large amounts of cheap or free call optionality. You know, sometimes those things hit, and once they do, they kind of bounce around between the time where they've hit and you're monetizing them. People say, "Oh my goodness, that's more volatility." Actually it's free vol. You're a beneficiary of that bounce. For a variety of reasons, we're, we see a lot of opportunities to own cheap optionality in a world of 10,000 small and micro caps, very few of which can access capital in the world. Finally, you know, we are very concerned about the overall environment. We would never take a directional macro view, but we would certainly buy insurance.
This notion of what we call and a couple of others call portfolio volatility protection is important. Every month we take about 8 basis points or about 100 basis points a year, and we buy the most asymmetric, i.e., a big upside if there's a big downside, such that if, for instance, the S&P's down 20 in a month. We're gonna insure ourselves quite handsomely. If not. Given the nature of where we are and what we're facing economically, we view this as money well spent. We talk about the pipeline. Again, reminding folks that we have there's six buckets there, but eight business units, North American corporate, North American real estate, North American structured, global markets, natural resources, secondaries and liquidity solutions, European privates and Asia-Pacific privates.
Again, those are areas where we're not gonna subject ourselves or our investors to moral hazard. Those are relatively wide swaths of activities though among those eight businesses. We're gonna complement that with the 40-50 joint ventures that have much more particular capabilities, either a sourcing capability, analytic one, a servicing one, that will be episodically of interest to us, as all of these things, you know, generally are, these different areas. Put us in a position to kinda go at it when it makes sense and avoid it when it doesn't. We talk about our kind of returns. We try to be as transparent as possible about our returns. The only way to really understand it is to look at the vintages, look at the outcome.
We've done here about 350, including our pipes, probably something like 400 transactions in eight years. We continue to grade ourselves every day, every month on the loan-to-value that we're creating, the return we're making, and the duration over which we're making it, in order to really kind of, you know, aggressively optimize for the return that we're seeking. Again, in the marketplace, what you're seeing is a lot of obfuscation. The private debt fund that says it's all senior, except it's from zero in the capital stack all the way into the mezzanine or equity. The firm that says it's the direct loan fund, it's corporate loans, it's no problem, except that it's two or three times levered, right? The CLO that's 10 times levered, right?
There are a lot of these ways where people try to move the bouncing ball away from the investor such that they don't necessarily explicitly internalize the leverage they're taking on, and we're gonna see how that impacts the market in the next couple of years. Our defaults. How do we do this? Again, referring to the article on the Globe a couple of days ago, we ruthlessly look at ourselves in the mirror, keeping in mind we have a servicing enterprise, Quaestor Advisors, that puts a separate independent person or persons on every transaction we have.
Our front office folks can never really be the victims of Stockholm Syndrome, can never fall in love with their counterparties, because we have a stone-cold view as to what we're doing and what we have, and when we see a problem, we're running at it, right? We're not masking it. We're not afraid, "Oh my gosh, we're gonna have to report a default, and everyone's gonna think the sky's falling down." We want defaults, right? You can mask defaults and interest rate coverage by having very weak covenants and charging nothing, right? We focus on leverage and coverage, right? We want to keep leverage low. I'm sorry, leverage and severity. We wanna lose very little, if not negative, when we have a default.
The only way to do that is to charge a lot and measure your covenants all the time and have them be very, very tight. As the knife falls, you catch it and you act very proactively. What you see here is we have the notion of levels zero, one, two, and three. Zero being, you know, we have what we have, it's performing, it's fine. Level 1 being some sort of technical default because someone's breached one of our very tight defaults. Level two is where we're getting into more of an amendment discussion, could be a bit of a scrap, et cetera. That happens and that will happen. It's gonna happen a lot more in this market. Level three is situations like level two, except where I think we have a shot at losing money, right?
What you see here is, frankly, in the last, you know, three years, we've probably had, in our multi strategies, one situation of $10 million that kind of went into what I would call the operating room. I actually, you know, think we've solved the solution with the gentleman involved, who didn't do what he told us what he would. I think over 400 transactions, the number of times that we have lost any material dollars due to any other reason than kind of obfuscation or fraud is zero, right? We're not losing because we didn't judge the E&P market, we didn't judge a country, we didn't judge the credit markets. It's when someone doesn't do what they told us.
In the vast majority of those times, because of the covenants that we have, we run at the situation and we deal with it. What that shows is not only are those very infrequent, but even in the couple of times they are, they do happen, we mark the heck out of it downward, right? Which basically nobody in our world does, because we wanna be stone cold, you know, truthful with ourselves so that we identify a problem, we run at it, and we deal with it very proactively. You'll see the returns here across our product platform, which P arag will tell you about. Ultimately, the greatest predictor of whether we raise ASOP III or NZ REC 3 or whatever the subsequent funds are gonna be is that we're delivering what we said.
We deliver what we say by sticking to, again, what are our attachment points? What's our loan-to-value? What are we making? How short are we making it? And how are we effectively inuring ourselves to the overall cycle? You know, we've continued to do that. We have a big opportunity in front of us. You know, we are the victims of a combination of really profligate monetary policy since 2012, with the initiation of QE2 by the Fed and effectively its peers, which we created the largest asset bubble that's ever been, both absolute and relative. As well as the kind of grossly profligate fiscal policy that we've had since 2020, both in the U.S. and around the world. You kind of can't have both of those without a real problem, right?
What Japan showed is you could have an asset bubble and reasonably responsible fiscal policy and kind of slowly deal with that bubble over a couple of decades. That's our best case. It would appear, we're no macro experts, political experts or otherwise, but it is highly likely that we are certainly in the U.S., committed to fiscal and discipline for the near to mid-future, which effectively ties the hands of monetary authorities, which means that ultimately a combination of rates and inflation will be highly likely to be higher than and for longer than people currently expect.
By the way, if none of that happens and Powell drops rates and all is well, and there was never a problem, and it was all just a dream, we're okay with that too, given the nature of our investments, right? We don't need that to happen in order to be successful and very successful. We've talked about what's happening in CRE, and we'll mention what's happening now is a slow rolling out of problems, generally in conjunction with the degree to which there's a cash need or asset liability imbalance. We first saw it in kind of the growth and venture world where people hit a wall, and they're now going through a kind of existential crisis.
We've seen it begin in the entire world of GPs and LPs and the overcommitment for over, you know, for too long a duration to things people didn't understand, and we're gonna see the results of that. Over the last two months, though it was clear and present and obvious for two years, the market's woken up to the CRE issues. Not just office, right? The whole thing, right? Because even clean non-office apartments were bought at cap rates that were ridiculous, financed at levels that were unsustainable, such that you're looking at values that go from, you know, generically a situation where someone bought a wonderful apartment building at a five cap financed at 75%, at 4%, and now that building's worth 70% of what it was.
The equity's gone, the debt's impaired, and the cost of that debt is gonna be 2.5x what it was before. That's gonna cause a big, big change, and virtually none of that has kind of been shown through the mark, so to speak, in what we're seeing, but it's beginning. We've talked about also what's happened in corporate. It's a little delayed. I think in the next six to nine months, we'll see a lot more. You've seen more bankruptcies filed this year so far than we've had since 2010. In almost every instance, when you read about them, you see these notions of restructuring support agreements. What those basically are is a way to defer the problem.
They're, you know, in a world where you had covenants people and you had people who, didn't have an institutional imperative to kind of perpetuate, a tough and difficult situation, what happened was people went and got their collateral restructured and moved forward. What you now have is agreements among creditors to kinda delay, delay. We're seeing that in these, what they call restructuring support agreements that permit, basically something worth $0.40 or $0.50 to be continue to be marked at 80, 90 par. We're gonna see more and more articles like we saw on The Globe this week about people questioning, you know, whether that's how real that is.
Ultimately, you know, the ratings downgrades will happen, the cash flows won't be there, and the walls are going to be hit in corporate and structure, just like they have begun in real estate. Finally, to mention structure, we're seeing delinquencies move up across the board in consumer finance, in related structured finance areas. Again, there's a lot of paper that's held. We saw with SVB and First Republic this notion of held-to-maturity. There are versions of that in other financial industries where effectively people don't have to take unrealized losses into their income statement. Ultimately, those chickens have to come home to roost and we'll be a beneficiary. How? One big barbell.
as an opportunity set, Arena is in a great position to pursue both sides of this barbell that we talk about. On the one side is the demolition of this long-term asset bubble and all of the existing obligations that are gonna be bought and sold, all the new assets from these things that are gonna be financed, all of the opportunistic process-oriented transactions that will arise from the midterm, minimally midterm rationalization of all these terribly priced and misstructured assets. The total addressable market is in $ hundreds of billions. On the left side, though, and you know, it's, it's certainly in some ways music to the ears of us as owners of the enterprise, is that there's a whole lot of areas where the.
Actually, my barbells are switched here, but, on the right side on the page, there are opportunities to do things that are much more conventional. You know, why wouldn't you do that all the time, right? We just created another asset-based lender similar to the one that I created in the wake of the crisis in 2010. We are offering a new fund in our excess capacity pools for more conventional commercial bridge lending. We're gonna see a version of that in cash flow lending. There are a whole series of opportunities that are much more scalable, much more homogeneous, much more, compelling as shareholders, as long as the risk-reward makes sense. In the last several years, they were terrible, and we didn't do them.
Now they're coming back around, and all of these things cycle. Nothing's ever good or bad all the time in this, in the things that we pursue. It means that the size of the opportunity is enormous for us, but also the nature of it for us as owners of the enterprise is enormous because of these two, of each side of this barbell that we're seeking to exploit. I think with that, I'm gonna pass the baton to Parag to talk about our kind of product set and what we're seeing out there in the market as we try to scale assets.
Dan. You know, as Dan noted, we certainly have a very compelling going forward opportunity for Arena. Dan, after this section that I have, will speak to the fact that we have the infrastructure to capitalize on it with the corresponding margin opportunity. Also importantly, we have the product platform to go after it. You know, this first slide, which you've seen before and has been in the supplemental presentations for some time now, you know, we've had several good years of fundraising, several more to come. When I started Arena five years ago, we were around $800 million of committed assets under management and invested. Based on the foundation that had been laid before I joined, and a lot of effort, we now have about $3.5 billion.
Equally importantly, if you look at the next slide, we have a product platform that allows us to have effectively a core offering that we can, you know, importantly have a good compelling return, but also not be exposed to the market cycles, as Dan conveyed. Then it allows us in what you see on the right side, the upper right side of this slide, to flex into opportunities that are very attractive at a point in time in what we call our excess capacity offerings, where there's more to do than we can do in a multi-strategy, which is on the left side. It's very compelling, and it's right in front of us, and investors kinda can decide to take advantage of that opportunity as it's available.
Also where on the lower yielding side of things in sort of more, kind of asset class exposures where we can deliver a very differentiated return per unit of risk, in those lower yielding things through our stable income offerings. You know, we'll always be evolving this platform, but this is a good design and a good base to have. It's a great position as we look at the investment, landscape ahead of us. You know, just to say a few words on the environment right now. There are both headwinds and tailwinds. Certainly it is a challenging fundraising environment for a couple of reasons. One, there's a lot of uncertainty about what kind of lies ahead, and so that effectively has certain investors on pause.
You know, recognizing that risks could be skewed to the downside. For those that have been very active in private markets, there's the notion of what Dan referred to in terms of a lot of those assets not really being properly marked to reality. You have this divergence of people looking at their private portfolios and their public portfolios and kinda saying, "Well, where are these things gonna end up?
I'm over-allocated at a moment in time to those things." In general, kind of, I don't know, obfuscating or complicating all of that is the fact that, you know, in general, across the money management industry, you know, kind of regardless of what's happening, the incentive is to say, you know, "Now's a great time, and this time is different." You know what, Ed, who's one of our salespeople who's here, you know, speaking to investor recently who is saying that, you know, historically, he was getting these literal numbers, kind of 200 inbounds a day from managers, you know, senior professional at a pension fund. Today, it's 400 a day.
Just to give you a sense of, you know, kind of how much people are soliciting, you know, and how, you know, challenging is it on that side. At the same time, while there are those headwinds, and there are always gonna be headwinds of some sort, our tailwinds are greater than our headwinds. We have a great client base, for which we have delivered very good returns. That client base continues to grow with us and be supportive as we continue to have new offerings. You know, we have a very differentiated approach. This has been communicated to investors globally over thousands of meetings, over the time that I've been here and beyond. We have a track record that supports all of what we said.
As well, you know, I think as investors are looking for where there is opportunity and where they wanna put money, you know, generally, we fit into certain labels that people are using in certain buckets and things like opportunistic fixed income, special situations, you know, even areas like distress where people are looking for opportunities. There's a matching up of people are even looking to find us as much as we are looking to find them and communicate to them. One of the things I was asked to kinda clarify as well on the asset growth, which I think is, you know, important for everyone to understand, is that our asset growth, while it's been significant, has been a bit lumpy timing-wise.
This is because, as you see kind of on the left side of this page, we've tended over the last several years, and I think that'll continue, you know, through the next kinda year and change as we continue to build and evolve the platform. We've tended to raise money around different campaigns and product launches as we've been kind of building and evolving this platform. For our multi-strategy offering, you know, we've had two big launches of our closed-end funds. That's what you see here with Arena Special Opportunities Partners I and Partners II at the bottom. That's been about $1.5 billion plus of money that's come in.
In these excess capacity opportunities, the main one has been our New Zealand real estate franchise, where we're financing the construction of affordable housing in New Zealand, where the government protects our downside through an offtake guarantee. We've done three successive fund launches on that side, mostly coming between 2019 and 2022. That's been about $800 million. Also we started a pilot program, which I'll talk about also in the going forward campaigns, for an ABS product in our stable income offering. If you look at, you know, the fundraise, this slide combines the previous slide with the slide 2 before that. If you look at how our assets have grown, they've grown around these campaigns that we've had.
As we have done the launch of, you know, these multi-strategy funds in Arena, you know, the excess capacity, you've kind of seen that asset growth come through. Coming back to now what that means for going ahead and how we see the, you know, the assets kind of evolving from here, and this is what we're working on, and this is what we're excited about. Just a caveat, these are not projections or guidance. These are our targets for what we are hoping to achieve. You know, I mentioned the kind of excess capacity New Zealand Fund III, and we're, you know, that was raised mostly into 2022, although we just recently closed, formally closed that fund at a little over $300 million.
You know, we'll expect that probably there's gonna be more to do in that and/or other offerings. On May first, we're very excited about our new insurance-dedicated fund. We launched a partnership and a feeder fund on a platform called SALI, S-A-L-I, where basically into one of our existing or our open-ended fund, we have the ability to work with individuals and wealth managers and different insurance companies to effectively offer U.S. taxable investors a way to invest in our strategy that is highly tax-advantaged. That opens up, we think, a market where we've had some success, but where, you know, given the nature of what we do, which is very high current income, is very tax punitive, and so it makes what is very compelling, even after tax, that much more compelling.
As one anecdote on that, recently in a report by Goldman Sachs on the family in their global family, in their, sorry, family office study, you know, only about two-thirds of family offices are even invested in private credit, if that's nominally kind of the bucket that we're, you know, associated with. The average allocation among those is only about 3%. They see and project kind of 30% of those kind of family office, high net worth individuals and families are planning to expand their allocation. By the way, that's based on taxable allocations to this world, not, you know, kind of tax advantage. We're very excited about that vehicle. It just launched May first.
We're starting to develop and nurture a pipeline into that, we think that'll create, you know, a good amount of AUM growth there. We also believe we're, you know, close to launching, having the first close of our third drawdown vehicle. That's one where it's gonna be anchored by commitments from folks that have been investors in the first and second fund. We're looking to kind of close that into the summer. You know, those funds, if you look in kind of the previous slide that Dan had covered, you know, are returning to those investors kind of mid-teens net returns. Again, very attractive. The track record is there, we're excited about that.
I think as a, as a fact of the matter, I think, you know, our last offering was close to $1 billion. We think that, you know, we're gonna target at least that, if not more, for the next one. We've also, Dan alluded to this, have signed a fundraising partnership, and ourselves are really looking to raise money in this excess capacity opportunity in short-term commercial bridge loans in the real estate world, where, you know, we can make with a slight with the application of leverage, a mid-teens type of net return in kind of 18-24 month loans against, you know, income-producing or near income-producing properties.
Again, very attractive as the world of kind of real estate and real estate investors are starting to migrate from this idea of, you know, real estate being an equity investment to debt being very attractive. Us having managed this also on a, you know, on an unlevered basis in our stable income offering for some of our insurance clients for now, you know, going on 7 years or so and having a track record that shows that, you know, we have, again, differentiated return per unit of risk that we can offer in this space, and a great track record across nearly $1 billion of global real estate deployed since our inception.
Finally, you know, kind of as we look, as we look to this year and into next year, you know, for our stable income ABS offering where we're buying kind of asset-backed securities, again, with sort of roughly kind of double the return and half the duration of what the market is, you know, we think that we're working on a partnership where we may offer that in an interval fund format, and that the natural buyer for that is likely more the, you know, the retail consumer and it's a world where such an offering does not exist amongst those types of vehicles. We're very excited about that. Look, we have a lot to do. We have a great set of offerings.
We continue to expand the team. Our team is mostly all here. Lindsay is sitting next to Ian, and then we got the back row, I guess, over here with James and David and Ed and Amanda. You know, love to talk to you afterwards and, feel free to meet the team, and they can tell you know, kind of how it, how it is out there and, you know, what we're doing and what we're working on. The pipeline continues to grow. We remain very excited.
We think that, you know, what we're building and how we are doing on the assets under management front should only continue to increase, you know, just as it did from, you know, us going from about $200 million a year of new money in our first kind of four or five years, you know, then jumping to kind of $700 million raised in 2020 and about $1 billion in the last two years. We, you know, we see that continuing to increase. We see the brand recognition continuing to get there. On a bottom-up basis, again, you know, we're having, you know, thousands of conversations with investors and finding those that, you know, are very compelled to participate alongside this giant opportunity along with us. With that, I will pass it back to Dan.
Thanks, Parag. Here we just want to kind of circle back to some of the ideas I started the presentation with when we're talking about us as co-owners of this enterprise and what outcome are we trying to create and how are we gonna get there. As I mentioned, keeping in mind our three sources of edge, in addition to this mandate that allows us to avoid moral hazard, we have this global sourcing infrastructure and a similarly global servicing and surveillance infrastructure that allows us to kind of gain the edge that we do. I'd keep in mind as we think about our expansion and the operating leverage we're seeking, note that our largest office is in Bengaluru, and our 2nd largest office is in Jacksonville.
The point here is that the Bengaluru effort arose as a result of a decade-long experience I've had in a previous business building substantial infrastructure in India. It is not, it is, you know, there are certain capabilities and skills necessary to do that thoughtfully. We have built the groundwork such that that can, that office, that supports all of our different functions can scale very materially and very cost efficiently. The level and scale and capabilities that we encounter in our employees there is really excellent. It means that as we grow substantially, our ability to just add there is going to be very high because we've done the hard work up front to set that in there on its right course. Second, in Jacksonville. Why Jacksonville?
We spent a lot of time, six or seven years ago thinking through, what's the right time zone, what's the right, tax regime, and importantly, where on a temporal basis has the largest kind of bank implosion happened. Non-Miami, Florida really, rose to the fore. It's only gotten better, given the kind of relative tax regime and kind of climate there. It has allowed us to very materially scale as well our Quaestor servicing, capabilities, in a really thoughtful, incremental way.
With those two as the engine, we can, you know, lightly put people into the world's capitals and be in a position where our incremental costs associated with very large-scale asset growth relative to what we've developed thus far can be very limited, and thus we achieve operating leverage. Again, reminding you of the structure. AIGH is the enterprise that we're trying to grow equity value in. Again, we have AI, where we are investing on behalf of other people, and then AIS. Again, AI, we have our Arena Investors asset manager. And associated with that, we have Quaestor Advisors doing surveillance and workout, as well as its associated entity, Quaestor Strategic Advisors, where we are doing operational improvement.
Again, the more in a tougher situation that requires operating skills, whether it's corporate or structured or real estate, the more you are utterly comfortable and indifferent to taking the keys, the less you're gonna get them. The opposite is the case. To be in a position where we have great operators who can handle, can lease up a real estate asset, can develop a marketing plan, can build a board, can develop IT infrastructure for a company that we take over or are building up, is vital to make sure that we're always kind of dealing with the downside before we encounter it. From AI, we're gonna go and seek to maximize two of our three line items that we're gonna focus on as an enterprise.
One is FRE, our fee-related earnings, which is our management and servicing revenue, minus all costs other than those associated with kind of incentive compensation for our employees from our investments. Net incentive fees, which is what we make from the our investors, minus what we pay out to the folks on our eight business units and others related to those gains. You know, generically, in my head, I won't assign numbers to it, but, and, you know, public and private comps fly around. Certainly in my head, I think to myself after speaking with innumerable bankers in this area of kind of a 10x FRE and a 5x net incentive fee. I hear those numbers a lot out there.
Second, Arena Institutional Services, we put into three buckets. One is Quaestor Capital Markets, right? We found obviously that we use a lot of banking services in our enterprises. Do we need to do a refinance a loan? Do we need to auction a company? Lots of things out there where, you know, the ability to control that outcome on behalf of our investors is valuable, and we do that. You know, when you know where the bodies are buried in terms of, you know, the raising of capital, as we do it very intimately, your ability to do that for third parties, you know, escalates.
People start to ask us, "Can you find me that money that maybe Arena wouldn't necessarily do for a whole variety of reasons, but is available in the marketplace?" We're aware of it, and we'll do that. Number two, QCG, Quaestor Consulting Group.
Again, as we've talked about, when you have the wall of corporate and structured and real estate assets coming at us that we do, it is logical to think that a number of folks have either systematically underinvested in their ability to deal with their assets, either in terms of workouts, or operational issues, or they're just simply not positioned given their scale or scope to be able to do that thoughtfully, and are faced with the choice of not doing anything at all or paying really, really high prices for large-scale brands in those areas that are otherwise focused on multibillion-dollar situations.
you know, when you think about three big things across QCM and QCG, people will happily pay for, and you think about finding money where it's tough, dealing with very, very difficult, painful workout situations or, you know, getting, you know, something that's not making cash flow to make some cash flow. I think people are happy to pay for that, and we found that our people are beginning to pay us for doing that for them, and I think there's a lot more where that came from. third, in Arena Business Solutions, we have found, again, situations, and I alluded to these 10,000 small and micro-cap companies that are public out there. It's provided us a lot of opportunities on the investment side, certainly, but also as a kind of facilitator.
Ultimately, a large number of those smaller cap companies feature business models that are capital intensive, that are not necessarily moated, that leave them always looking for another dollar. At the same time, when you take into account the secular change in the, what we'll call the gamification of retail investor, investment, it turns out that a lot greater proportion of those 10,000 have actual trading volume than they have ever had before. That creates opportunities for these small companies that otherwise wouldn't have access to capital to get it because of the liquidity and the volatility of those stocks.
We have found that on a kind of service basis, we've been able to kind of place capital for folks, through the ABS business, and we think there's gonna be a lot more of those things happening. It's, you know, very high margin, very lucrative and leaves our counterparties very happy. That's the third line, which is this notion of AIS FRE or AIS EBIT that we're gonna deliver. Again, in my head, which is completely my purview and opinion and not a projection of any sort, I think in my own head, a kind of seven times that. I go 10 times line one, five times line two, seven times line three. Those three lines we're trying to maximize.
We take away our small debt that we hope to extinguish soon. We get to an equity value for our enterprise that we're seeking to optimize. As we talked about, we're gonna show you this more and more clearly. As an enterprise, we are basically sitting down monthly with our business units, our eight business units, and going through our business planning and what we call, or what is called OKRs, objectives and key results. Very with a great focus on not just what are we gonna invest in, which is important, but also in what areas and how are we gonna do it through what vehicles, right? That's not just Parag and his team off to the side.
That's intimately tied into the activities and priorities that are set at the business unit level that say, "We should do these kind of investments through these types of vehicles, coordinating with our marketing people and our infrastructure to make sure that we can deliver that total package." As we play with those levers, how does that affect the return on invested capital to our owners, right? We are laser focused on the optimization of ROIC at a business unit level that will then roll up to the overall enterprise that we're talking to you guys about.
As the subsequent quarters come, we're gonna be ever more explicit about articulating that clearly so that we're as kind of transparent and open as possible about driving those numbers and give our investors and owners the chance to focus and prod us to make sure we're kind of staying on top of that optimized ROIC message. With that, I will turn it back to Cam.
Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Parag. We're on the third section here, our strategic path forward. In the years past or in past presentations, you've heard us often use or the thematic undertone of Westaim is that we acquire, we build, and then we harvest. You know, in talking about this in the last little while, you know, and to some of Dan's points, you know, philosophers will say that the only thing that's constant is change. Obviously, in the last four years, between a pandemic, inflation, the banking issue, world tension, there's a lot of issues that have got our attention. That said, we've been fortunate in both Arena and Skyward to have businesses that have been able to prosper through this particular period. We should look back and say over the last few years in this environment, what's happened?
When we look at Skyward, completing the loss portfolio transfer was a really important ingredient. In that, in that regard, we took away prior reserve development and arrested them. With the success of the FinCo returns, we participated in a $100 million rights offering, and we really did so to position Skyward for growth and to stabilize their credit rating. We found Andrew Robinson and made him CEO. We put him in place, and we dropped him in Houston in May of 2020. Because of my work visa, I actually could travel. When we arrived in Houston that day, it was there was no one on the street. There was no one in the office. When he walked in, he walked in pretty much unannounced and started making his impact. The impact quickly became immediate and evident.
He refocused business lines, an immense change to the culture, and how the industry saw this business and its leadership became apparent. All this activity resulted in the company being rebranded as Skyward Specialty Insurance. When you look at it forward, he made additive acquisitions in Aegis, which was a high-quality surety business, and attracted A towel. Now the company was positioned to seek a public listing. We retained EY as the auditor. S1 was filed. Through this period, we did 50 test the water campaigns. Through that, the messaging was clear that the company was being embraced by the community. In early January, the company launched on the Nasdaq market. It was the first U.S. IPO. It was seven times oversubscribed. From a $15 IPO price, today it trades around $24.
The company has six analysts following, all with buy ranges in a target price of about $24-$34. When we look at Arena, through this period, and repeating some of the points Dan and Parag Shah made, we've watched the AUM grow from $1.3 billion to $3.4 billion. The Finco performance as talked about allowed us to participate $44 million into the rights offering, and that was a very good capital allocation. Today, Arena's platform is global. It's spread among seven offices with 158 professionals. As Parag Shah noted, the sales activity is really afoot. There's no question, as you've seen it in the press, the attraction to a private credit platform is immense. All the mega firms are very active in the space and positioning their organizations accordingly. With all this activity, where are we at?
Well, you know, clearly value is being created. We can see it in our NAV. The CAGR growth on that over this period since we started is approximately 8.5%. You might say, given that the, and I'll speak in Canadian dollars, CAD 4.34, that CAD 4.34 reflects a Skyward share price of $21.87. I think a lot of us would believe or take the view that the valuation we employ on fair value accounting on Arena Investors is probably understated. It's currently around $27 million with $24 million of that in debt. As 22% insiders, we are well aware of the disparity between what not only is the net asset value, but the intrinsic value against our own share price.
The Skyward IPO was clearly an important event, and it positions Skyward or positions Westaim an ability to harvest those returns and to use that capital in an effective manner going forward. Going forward, we are going to be clear, we are going to seek to accelerate the growth on our intrinsic value. In doing so, we are absolutely focused on closing the gap to the share price to that intrinsic value. How do we do that? Well, we go back to, again, build, evolve, and unlock. When you look at what our mandate being opportunistic investing, where we are at today with Skyward, we're coming up on our objectives of a 15% IRR. Today, it's approximately 12 and a half. We are in the early innings of a very good company, and we expect that IRR to improve.
Our partnership with Align and capable management teams has proven to be correct. As we our most important characteristics, we think of ourselves and we act like owners. When we retained Andrew, and we were in the early days of the discussion, and we had a lot of discussions with different candidates, the conversation is, what is my mandate? Our mandate to him was simply, we want to be a first quartile business. If we can't be first quartile, then we're out. If we can build this as a first quartile business, we'll always be in a position of strength, and we'll have lots of opportunities and lots of levers to realize on that value. Today, that's the position we find ourselves in. We've had this slide come up in years past, and I'll just touch on a few points.
If you go down and we look on the left side, unlocking value, Dan talked about the platform of Arena and the levers that are now available for us to take that to the next level. This is a young management team that's clearly on the cusp of the J curve of growing. When we look at the ability for Westaim to optimize returns, I want to be clear, we consider all avenues. We consider capital market opportunities, structure opportunities, and strategic opportunities. We are well aware of our tax issues and our go-forward thoughts for that, not only on how to properly apply our operating losses, but our paid-up capital. To put it in perspective, because a question has come in, the gains in Skyward up into the mid-twenties will largely be tax-free.
When we look forward on a go-more-forward basis, you know, in years past, While we've been active on the share buyback, we weren't active in a major way, largely because there wasn't a lot of cash flow coming back up to the holding company. Nor would we ever put the company in a position of vulnerability. Clearly, with the path we went on in taking Skyward where it is today, even our ability to put it in context and share with you. In the current environment, bank environment, you would say, "Why wouldn't you go get just a term loan or a line of credit at Westaim and start buying your shares?" Today's banks don't like net asset plays. They like cash flow.
While we have many of our Canadian and U.S. banker friends, either shareholders or an LP investor in Arena, there is no discussion or debate about the value. Everyone sees the value being created, but they struggle in trying to provide a reasonable term line of credit back to Westaim for us to be active on. We continue that dialogue. Whether because Arena's conflicted, they can't do it. There's lots and lots of Arena firms that will give us money all day long, but Dan just talked about the terms that are currently they command. We're not so interested in that rate. For the most part, I wanted to emphasize with you our discussions with all the bank players have been active for the last number of years. They all recognize the value creating.
Whether it's regulatory rules or concentration rules, they see the Skyward value, they see the CUSIP. It is not a simple pathway to getting that line of credit in place as some might believe to be the case. That said, we continue on that path. This last slide I think is the most important one. Again, we go back to build, evolve, and unlock, and let's break it down into the periods. In 2014, 2015, we found both businesses and we acquired. Some cases we stabilized, we built the foundation, and from there, we built upon it. We talked about the years of 2016 to 2022. Dan talked about it. We reviewed it in some of the prior slides. Here we are ourselves today at 2023. What can we do?
Well, obviously, we've executed on Skyward. In the test the water meetings, I was participating in a few of them because the question by many of the new investors is, "What's Westaim's plan? Are you a Fairfax or are you a Third Point, if you will? Other large investors looking to control the float." That was not our mandate, we made that clear. Like JEVCO, we positioned, our narrative was that we will be disciplined and opportunistic in realizing on this investment. There is no question that with each passing quarter, we view that the value of this company will become more evident and it will only reflect in a better share price. They are in the early innings of creating a very special organization.
That said, we recognize, and we're very cognizant of the playbook on this being that providing some shares to the market will allow the share base, share ownership base to expand, create better liquidity. It will only enhance our remaining shares. More importantly, we have an immediate use for shares. Despite the activities and the inbound of opportunities we see, it would be hard-pressed to find a better opportunity risk-reward that we understand better than buying in our own shares. Therefore, being very active on an NCIB or on an SIB, of course, that's obvious. We would move on that.
When we look at the FINCOs, in the early days, as you remember, the genesis of the FINCO was we are gonna raise some capital, and we are gonna be aligned with management, and the returns that we earn on that portfolio will allow to cover the burn, the earlier burn of the GP. We've achieved that. Arena Investors, we've talked about, it's been profitable since the last number of years, and we expect that profitability to only grow. Therefore, in collaboration with Arena, we are working to figure out the best way to optimize that capital. There's no question having that strategic capital has been a very important cornerstone, not only in securing investors, in seeding new opportunities, new funds, and certainly having that representation.
It's true with all accounts, whether you're private equity. If you look at the mega firms, a big reason why a number of them go public is having the cornerstone of that permanent capital to lead by example. That said, we are very focused on accelerating the growth of the Arena development. They are on the J curve with inbound opportunities that are interesting and that we think can accelerate their curve. We, you know, I would conclude that we continue to seek opportunities with our focus on the asset management business. This is a wonderful business within the current environment we find ourselves in. The opportunities and the verticals that can come out of that in the context of what we believe has to be high immediate rates of return or otherwise, we'll keep buying our shares.
To accept as, again, I speak for 22% of the insiders, the notion that we're comfortable seeing our discount to where it is today, is unacceptable. More importantly, really, we are just entering the period, if you will, on the ability now to pull levers effectively to be able to act on that and to narrow that discrepancy. Before I open it up to questions, I, you know, it'd be remiss if I just didn't, being it's been four years, if I didn't take a minute, first of all, to, Skyward's not here, first of all, to acknowledge and thank all the employees through this period. It was a big effort for them to do what they did to get the IPO out.
To my Arena partners, their execution of building a business from a standstill to where we are today with a global platform is inspiring, and we hear it every day from those that come in, not only to see us an investor, but are approaching us for inbound opportunities. Then to my own partners, to every, you know, Rob, Glenn and Jason, all the others, and certainly the board of directors, we wanna say thank you very much. I'd like to acknowledge Stephen Cole, who has retired as a director, who was with us eight years, who brought forward a great contribution. With that, I'd like to thank everyone for coming back in person. At this point, welcome your questions. Of course, know that we're all available hereafter to address with you one-on-one, so thank you. Yes, sir.
My name is Paul Brennan from Burlington. I'm very surprised that the share prices has remained so flat for so long when you have added assets and grown the business at a very high rate. There is a flat share price for so long. It just didn't even add up to me. You have an unbelievable great thing. Where is the disconnect?
Well, I think you've just asked the question that everyone is thinking about, that we talk about. Look, you know, small caps, first of all, have not been a great place to be, and I think there's some in the audience that could probably speak to it better than I can. You know, holding company structures have had issues in the past, but, you know, they ebb and flow. You know, sometimes people like to... A lot of times they like to box you, what are you like? When we look at a comparative, you know, I think of ourselves and sometimes probably more in the U.S. sense when I'm answering this question, like a White Mountains. White Mountains is an NYSE-listed company, 30 years. It's focused on finance insurance.
Through the years they started, they made investments, and the stock didn't do much despite the intrinsic value as they were creating. As they started to harvest, they moved on the activity, and they started buying their shares, and then they repeated that process. If you go back and you look at their share price, which IPO'd in the mid-teens and today is 1,200, it went like this. You know, up to now, we haven't had an ability to act on it. I think certainly the inside ownership, which has been continuous, and I think you'll see it continue, certainly reflects the confidence that you just spoke of. We don't have a big following. We have one analyst, and thank you, Jeff, for coming. He is here.
you know, for all purposes, we're a U.S. company listed in Canada. Today our ownership is about 45% foreign, with mid-30s being U.S. owners. All those on their own probably create some friction, but, we do have levers now available to us to narrow that deficit.
What about a Nasdaq listing? Is that a possibility? How much of the business is focused on the U.S.?
Well, we have really very little in Canada.
Very little in Canada?
We don't have anything in Canada to speak of. Skyward is a U.S. business, and as Dan talked about, Arena's U.S.-based with platforms across the globe. For all purposes, outside of some investors, both at Arena, Skyward and Westaim, there's no business activity per se in Canada.
What % is in the U.S. then?
Well, in Skyward's case, it's largely U.S. In Arena's case, Dan, what would you describe your dispersion, about 70-30, 65-35?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've got obviously a major commitment to India and New Zealand. Can you give me a % on those?
As we talked about, we have a commitment in India with regard to our human resources. Those folks are not, you know, conducting Indian-specific business. They're supporting what we're doing globally in a very cost-efficient way for our undercarriage, for the infrastructure of the firm. With regard to New Zealand, it so happens that that's been an area for our, what we call our excess capacity funds, which is one example of things that we're doing where there's just way more to do than dollars that we have to do it with while maintaining the diversity that we like in our multi-strategy efforts, and we'll size up in an area like that. There's nothing. Two very different circumstances, but ultimately, you know, as Cam said, we're U.S.-based. At least two-thirds plus of our investments are in the U.S.
I think that will continue to evolve, globally, over time. You know, if the response to the question was in service of your, of your query regarding the Nasdaq, if we were to list anywhere other than Canada, I can't imagine it would be any place other than the U.S.
You have Europe, too?
Oh, absolutely. Again, a minority piece of our business is there.
Craig?
Yeah, I had a question for Dan and Rob. You guys speak to, you know, avoiding hammers looking for nails as you've structured the investment function. I'm curious, in terms of LP conversations today, to what extent are they overcommitted on strategies that were hammers looking for nails relative to the multi-strat offer? You guys were sort of building it before it became important, and now it seems to be growing in importance. I'm just wondering if LPs are there with you to an increasing degree or are they still looking for sort of sleeve allocations relative to the multi-strat approach?
It's both types, but I would say that.
You're right in saying that historically, and up till kinda the recent period, it's been the minority of folks who would just say, "Hey, I really am interested in, you know, kind of a special situations type of investment strategy and opportunistic type of fixed income allocation," without kind of having a view or a narrowness to that to say, "And I wanna allocate it to X," versus, you know, I wanna give a manager the ability to sort of figure that out. I think, you know, as these things go, there's, you know, kind of investors that lead, and there's managers that lead, and kinda the two that come together kind of create these evolutions, in how people, you know, think and collectively act with their allocations and their investment strategies.
I think you can just see it across even the, you know, the very large mega asset managers. You know, name a firm that's not already announced or about to announce or thinking about or previewing, you know, their opportunistic fixed income, their kinda go anywhere, their take advantage of the opportunity, you know, type of fund. I don't know that investors yet, because of, you know, just the nature and the incentives of how these things are marked and so forth, are yet, you know, kind of, regretting not having done that before. Certainly as they look forward and are making allocations, increasingly it's really flipped, the other way.
That's why, you know, as the ratio we have never had or my team has never had, as many inbounds, kinda coming in to people saying, "Hey, I'd like to learn more about Arena.
Maybe then just you could speak to what the upper bound is on the multi-strat raise for this year, because $1 billion is insignificant relative to the size of the asset class. Some single, you know, strat or sleeve funds are 20 times that and are finding commit. I'm wondering is it one-five you think you could raise or one-two? What would be a great outcome?
Well, I think, you know, we wanna put, and Dan can speak to this well, but we wanna put quality first, not quantity. You know, kinda the way we think about it is, you know, let's be conservative in that, let's recognize that this is a capacity-constrained strategy ultimately, at least for our multi-strategy. Although, again, the ability to flex into other things and have a much larger platform.
you know, when we are, and with the caveat that these are not projections or guidance, when we're kind of setting a, you know, a fund size or kind of a how much money we're gonna bring in, we're doing that always looking at, you know, what is the opportunity immediately ahead of us, and how can we size that in a way that we can put the money to work relatively quickly as well. For us, it's less about saying, "Okay, let's, you know, sort of put a larger size on that." We'll just raise successive funds kind of as we go into it.
It's more that the sizing reflects kind of if you took a snapshot today and the money all showed up today, what would, you know, where would we be able to put it to work in, you know, kind of a four to six month type of period. Then, by the way, if there's more opportunity, we'll do more. If there's more of a pipeline, we'll bring in more. That also only relates to, again, the closed-end offering. You know, our funds, because they're all also importantly asset liability matched on the out, you know, we're taking in money across different vehicles. This has the opportunity, 2.5 billion in our multi-strategy to grow.
Also, you know, we are not, you know, we're not looking to build a plain vanilla, undifferentiated, take in as much money as possible, be bloated, you know, platform. I don't know. Dan, if you add to that.
Yeah, I would say, again, a repeated, you know, a refrain here is a level of self-control and staying aligned with our investors. You know, there are a lot of people who went from $800- $1.5 billion to $6 billion who torch people. You know, we have no need to do that. Frankly, people don't like, we don't, unlike maybe those more fortunate, we don't get compensated on uninvested committed, right? There are people who have an incentive to kind of put a big headline number up, which may put their money in their pocket in the short term, but ultimately may endure to their detriment.
In our case, we do see investors say, even though they prefer a drawdown structure, to Parag's point, they do wanna see it invested relatively soon. If we keep doing our job, we should be able to just kind of keep doing that and doing that and doing that. I'd say also, you are right about the addressable market. If someone, you know, came to us with a view that added a zero, I have great conviction around how that could be accomplished and over what timeframe. I'd say I like how we're looking at things organically, but, you know, and I see that constant progress. At the same time, it's a big world out there.
I think a lot of people who are asset heavy and capability light are trying to figure out inorganic ways to kind of help themselves. For us, if and when we see an opportunity to kind of pull forward our business plan, you know, we're not gonna be shy about it given the marketplace and the addressable market.
Sounds like you're taking the Benchmark used venture world. You're going the route of Benchmark versus Andreessen.
Something like that. I think. You know, look, I, in my head, I think when I think of great firms like Baupost or Elliott or my old firm, Davidson Kempner or Farallon, there's a lot of reasons why they could be $300 billion right now. You know, I don't think they've ever had to apologize for a decision they made, you know? Yeah. You know, long- term, we've committed to our investors that we would be an investing business and not a marketing business.
Thanks. Mm-hmm.
Dan, can you talk to your, to your relative performance in the asset class? My impression is that 21 was maybe a better year and that there were more performance fees you earned than possibly 22.
Mm-hmm.
That maybe that accounts for not being quite as aggressive on the AUM growth that you're forecasting for the coming year.
No. No. I think if you look at what 22, as I alluded to in terms of the types of investments we did near the top of the bubble, they were intrinsically better return per unit of risk, but didn't have as smooth a return distribution to them. Obviously that creates some confusion because if people say, "Well, you're aren't you the loan guy? Isn't it supposed to be a point a month no matter what?" Well, you know, when you liquidate airplane engines, they don't go exactly per month or whatever those things might be. In that case, we had a couple of things that, you know, as an example, we have a wonderful energy business where we've never taken a commodity view, and we foreclosed on six different enterprises. We've made nearly $100 million doing it.
Once you then own it, you become the residual owner of the bounce in commodity, right? We have negative basis, and it's wonderful, and we're liquidating every day, lifting and selling every day, but it creates some more bounce. If bounce is as a result of the manner by which you're ultimately collecting your winnings, I don't mind that, right? As I say, if I'm not playing with the house's money, I don't mind how much it bounces. The pace by which we seek to add money has really been about what we see out there and what we can do responsibly. If anything, I think it's nuanced.
On the, on the one side of the barbell, in terms of taking advantage of the kind of implosion that we're seeing, we've been pretty patient about watching these things unfold, right? Real estate was obvious two years ago, but you can't make the market get there. Now two months ago, it became there. I think you are seeing across even in the areas I've outlined where there is an implosion ongoing right as we speak, it's not like everybody in those areas is willing to capitulate immediately and hand us over a 22% return with no risk. There are, you know, myriad stories of five stages of grief happening around the world in that regard.
Our backlog has been increasing investment-wise, but our number of completed over the last, you know, three or four months per month has been relatively lower and is a relatively low ratio of what we see in the backlog over time. On the left side of the barbell, as I mentioned, you know, we saw what was happening on the corporate side. one year plus ago, we started creating a new asset-based lender. It's operating now, right? Two years ago, we started, having seen what was coming in corporate cash flow, started planning the cash flow lending business. We're currently raising an excess capacity for commercial bridge lending. You know, we're pretty facile. We're moving with markets, you know, but it doesn't happen, you know, in a split second.
We have to be thoughtful about matching our investment pace to our capital. Overall, I'm always gonna be concerned about either having capital or having investments, and I'm marginally more concerned and growing on capital because I see what we can do, and I see what's out there. You know, we don't mind having what we call a Darwinian funnel, right? Where our bar just gets higher and higher and higher. That's fine. It really is not about that. It's about, you know, matching those two. As the charts show, it is, particularly at our scale, it's still lumpy, right? You're raising... You know, you're spending something, and then you're raising another big chunk.
Over a longer period of time, you see that graph going where it needs to go, but we're still early enough that you're going to see lumps in it. 15 years ago, having $1 billion meant something. You know, we're still emerging as, according to our investors, 400 investments in nine years into it. The bar just keeps rising for what is going to be referred to by large scale allocators as institutionally accepted. Jeff.
Thanks. Maybe a couple of questions on Arena, Dan. Obviously fundraising underway, which is great. For most of the last year, you've had a fairly consistent balance of deployed capital and about $800 million or $900 million of committed, but not deployed. It's been fairly flat.
Maybe just speak to the dynamics there and thinking around the cadence of deploying that from here. Right. You know, at the same time as you're bringing in some fresh capital.
Again, keep in mind, you know, sometimes your success is your, you know, fights against you, right? If you look at ASOP I, our drawdown first fund to drawdown third fund, one is we're decreasing AUM as we harvest that and give it back, right? Even though, you know, as we gain in NAV, we are increasing in fees as we go. You know, we do have to give it back. That's what we said we would do. Furthermore, a lot of folks who are in those drawdowns say, "We love the ASOP III.
How much of our ASOP I are you giving back so we can recycle it back into ASOP III? You're always gonna be kind of churning, you know, as you move upward. We continue to, if you look quarter by quarter on our exited, we continue to exit transactions and realize them. again, the gross number as a result of what I talked about has been the case where you're at this screaming peak and you're not gonna kind of give ground on return premium risk.
The net number is further exacerbated by this harvesting of older things that we need to do to show that, you know, the vintages, ultimately, you're looking at like structured finance, you're looking at static pools are ultimately your what should be your grade, your report card. We're gonna continue to press and exit things. If you take the diametric opposite of that, of what's happening in the asset management world, there are folks who should be crystallizing what in all likelihood are actually losses, but just crystallizing generally, but are effectively incentivized to keep things out there that they shouldn't, and ultimately not bring the money back to the investors and not be in a position to then deploy more from the capital that they just gave back.
It's, it's just the dynamics of the asset management capital raising world that that's the case. To Parag's point, I think, definitely up to two years ago, it was, you know, I want my European mezzanine shipping guy on every other Thursday fund. People are realizing that, as you know, as someone who covers financial institutions, the one way you get murdered in this stuff, you know, in Canada, going back to myriad recent specialty finance enterprises or even get back to Confederation Life or other historic blow-ups, is by being a hammer that only sees nails and putting your investors up a tree. I think as you see some of the large brands, as an example, Brookfield's Oaktree changing their fund from distressed to I forgot what they call it, opportunistic, right?
You see a fabulous firm called Sixth Street doing what they call their TAO, which is a go-anywhere structure. That is becoming more, that light bulb is going off more and more about, you know, how this should be and how it's risk-reducing, not risk-permitting to let people go where the money is.
I guess in the context of looking forward, clearly the funnel is getting bigger and the opportunities expand. You're gonna bring in incremental capital here. We think about it on the outside as Westaim shareholders in terms of the recurring fees going higher.
Sure.
The performance fees coming through. I guess, the thought process about from here is you're clearly teed up to drive the aggregate to be sizably larger.
Yeah. Again, you go back to our business units, right? They all have senior people. There's no need for incremental MDs, so to speak, right? It's all added, as we say, adding leaves to the branches, not adding any branches to the tree. In a very, you know, very general sense, a world where we are CAD 10 billion probably means we have 300 people in Bengaluru, right? The marginal contribution margin of that move is going to be significant.
Maybe one more follow-up, because you do mention you've largely built out that infrastructure today.
Mm-hmm.
You've got what you need in place to grow and achieve those sorts of ambitions that you've laid out. I mean, Cam, you spoke to Westaim potentially playing a role in accelerating the growth of Arena from here. Help me square those two things. Is there an adjacent line of business, acquisition or something you think that could be very complementary to Arena that perhaps Westaim could play a role in? How should we think about what kinds of opportunities we're sort of speaking about here?
Well, we're, you know, I'm utterly and completely aligned with Ian, Cam, and Rob. You know, we wanna optimize the value of what we've tried to build. That can come in any given type of form. The FinCo has been vital to help us seed different opportunities. Skyward has helped us seed different opportunities. Those things could be incremental, or they could involve, you know, a whole different myriad version of things that are happening out there. Obviously, the kind of M&A and strategic partnership marketplace in our world is active as it has ever been. Cam and I have been, have continued to say that if there are opportunities to pull our business plan forward, we want to address those.
Never before have we been in a position where the platform is where it is and the opportunity set is where it is.
Maybe speaking of getting CAD 10 billion of AUM and 300 people in India, how much capital could you deploy with the existing MD base, I guess?
Certainly CAD 10 billion. Yeah, or more.
As we think about doing that and perhaps seeing some operating leverage, is there any reason why you shouldn't look like other alternative managers which sort of see 40%+ FRE margins? Does the structure of the business with excess capacity funds and perhaps smaller average deployment size mean there's a reason you wouldn't get there?
What I would say is there are, if you really model it out, there are two levels of what Cam would refer to as torque. One is just the absolute growth and the fact that both through a combination of the multi-strategy with the excess capacities, and the excess capacities and stable incomes themselves are actually more higher margin marginally even at lower fees, because of the homogeneity of what's going on there. That's an opportunity. Then the second part is that we have inevitably in these situations, when you're earlier in your life cycle, you know, you might not get the same fee structures that other people who've been around since the 1980s do, right? Ultimately, if you're delivering the same alpha, you're going to converge toward where they are.
I think, you know, the notion of when you look at our founders class levels and other things that we've done for our special partners, you know, nobody in our business delivering what we do in the way that we do charges that. Nobody.
I just might have another question. I don't know if it's more Arena or Westaim. It's probably both. Given everybody's crystal ball sucks, you guys are ultimately gonna become really large owners of Westaim through the mechanism, the incentive mechanism that, you know, was created many years back. When we talk about seeking new opportunities, to what extent is it, you know, Westaim is SPV for Arena originated opportunities? Or is it Westaim originating their own opportunities and, you know, separate and distinct from things that Arena would see? Do you have a view or preference?
I just wanna maximize value. Anything of a strategic nature that arises, I'm immediately talking to, you know, Ian, Cam, and Rob about that we see. I mean, you can see when you look at the convergence of insurance with asset management, and I would say, frankly more life and fixed annuity than P&C with asset management, there's a lot of new structures and new options and possibilities out there. We have an origination machine in an addressable market that is enormous. You know, we're turning over every rock, I can assure you.
Yeah. I mean, that's a two-part question. You know, the first thing is, you know, one of the byproducts of our share price is for the years, we get a lot of inbound, unsolicited approaches. You know, for the most part, they don't really, they don't really accelerate the business plan. The idea of sitting on someone's shelf and being harbored there for six or seven years, and they're not really driving anything, does nothing for us. We have growing profitable businesses. You're well aware of the M&A activity in this space. We are of the view that the platform Arena building is very unique. Through that, we've talked about some of the splinter or the new silos that can be created.
That said too, our, you know, from a Westaim perspective, you know, when you look through the passage of time, I think the relationships we have built within the insurance world, whether it was through JEVCO, now Skyward Specialty, is being recognized. We are a source that people will call for opportunities. When we see what we've done with Arena, we get those calls too on opportunities. We make calls. You know, now we are at the cycle we're able to consider and respond. Where before, we were very much focused on, you know, we were acquiring, we were building, and now we're into phase three. That rotation is coming through again.
The difference that we would highlight, though, is, given our share prices, we have a very high, hurdle here, being it has to be something for us to act on that out of the gate is competitive for us versus buying our own stock or it's gotta be pretty much accretive right out of the gate, or it has to have such dynamics that it would be obvious why to act on. You know, I think through our history over the, really, if you go back to 2010, it's demonstrated that.
I'm just thinking, insider ownership's 20+. It'll go to 40+. You guys are gonna buy back shares. You're not really solving the liquidity problem. You're kinda creating a new one.
Well, yeah. I mean.
That's a great one.
You know, that's right. I mean, depends which side of the argument you wanna be on, right? Listen, there's no better answer than creating really good businesses that people covet and that people admire. If that's also then being reflected by the insiders, well, then, that's a good issue. You know, you can solve liquidity or you can find stock. You just sometimes have to pay above the ask. You know, I do get calls for people looking for shares. They can't see any. I go, "If you believe in the IRR, if you believe in the intrinsic value, then going up a little on the ask really shouldn't matter, but that's over you." That really is that gentleman's question, you know? Maybe people get fixated on a price that doesn't move, but we're pretty comfortable.
We're very comfortable on the value that's being created and on the path ahead.
Well, have them call us 'cause we have a few million shares for sale at CAD 7. Andy?
I'm not so concerned about liquidity at all.
Yeah.
Because of the gap between your intrinsic value and the market price. I mean, you do some of the parts, and some of the parts is kind of basic, right? That's the lower end of what I would say intrinsic value is, and you're now north of 5 CAD. Let's call that a 67% opportunity on the SIV. I appreciate you were using the adjective obvious as an opportunity.
Mm.
I also agree with your assessment of an operating line, certainly within Canada and our, let's call it more of the conservative-
To be clear, we've even gone to our friends in the U.S. who know us well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really encourage management to explore other areas because markets, you know, financial markets have become so sophisticated that there is someone out there that, you know, once they really understand the situation, would be inclined to lend you some money. Worst case is you wait until the end of the lockout, which I believe is July.
July 12th.
Yeah, July 12th, then you have access to funds then. I really encourage you to stay on that.
Thank you.
Cause that's a big gap. If you actually ascribe some value to what you guys have done here and say, "Oh, look, you know, this is gonna keep on going," the value is well above $5. $7.
Duly noted. Yep. Thank you.
Yes.
Yes, sir.
I know I'm a shareholder. Yes, I'd like to talk about some. Okay, you mentioned buying back shares, and then you're mentioning adding to the value of the shares and how you can get people interested in the stock that you claim is worth, $35 or whatever it is. Today, I believe it's around $270. I'm just guessing. Instead of buying those shares back-
If you want to show confidence in the stock and get more people attracted to it, why not give a dividend instead to the shareholders? I believe that would have more outlook on the stock than just buying back shares, which basically doesn't attract any new investors. Dividends do attract investors.
Thank you for the question. You know, you look at. We're asset heavy. We're in the early years of generating the operating leverage out of Arena that will flow to the holding company. You know, with all due respect, buying shares is way more attractive than putting out a stipend little dividend. You know, we've thought of it, we've considered. I want to assure you and anyone, all participating today, I'm pretty comfortable we've considered every scenario we've had. We welcome the feedback we get from shareholders to think of new ideas. That has certainly been one of them. Buying back the stock, in our view, is way more attractive than issuing a little dividend.
Also I'd like to correct something you mentioned. You said people aren't really interested in small cap stocks. Well, I'll tell you this much. I own a few small cap junior oils that pay good dividend. Believe me, people are interested in those stocks. Some of them are paying as much as 10% dividend right now.
Yeah.
Being a small cap does not mean that people aren't interested in it. I'd just like to also point that out to you.
Thank you.
Another thing I'd like to say is, all things being equal right now, but let's say we go into a real recession. What would happen to a lot of your Arena or is it, I believe Arena that has so much tied up in real estate? What would happen then?
Dan, you want to address?
Sure. Well, as I, as I mentioned, you know, real estate is all not created equally, right. Both in terms of the asset types, as well as the place in the capital structure. You know, one, as an example, we have little or no office exposure, right? Much, much more importantly, we don't buy equity or mezzanine in real estate. As an example, we had a loan, two loans to a group that had a kind of smaller scale outdoor mall that was NOI producing. Great counterparties, made all sense in the world. One loan was due in November, one was due in February of 23. As we got into the fourth quarter, the guy said, "Well, I don't really like where interest rates are going. I'm a little concerned.
Why don't you just extend the loan for 6 months, and I'll pay you 25 basis points?" We said, "No, we have the maturities coming up. We have 30% subordination, i.e. your money underneath us, and we're gonna have to monetize the asset if you're not able to repay us." Lo and behold, he dug deep and paid us down 25% of our money, which meant that effectively we were advancing yet again, 65%-70% against an asset that now was valued at a seven or eight cap instead of a five or six cap.
If you've done your work and had tight structure with short duration, when there are problems in an asset with other people's money below you, and whether those problems are macro-oriented or idiosyncratic, that's when you get to make more money. If you look historically, when you look at all of our defaults, what our recovery rate is, it's 120%, right? Which means that when we have defaults, we make more. I don't see anything in our portfolio that suggests to me that whether it's recession-oriented or idiosyncratic, that we're not gonna be a beneficiary of those problems. Without being loan-to-own oriented or gratuitous in any way, but simply making sure people stick to what they told us they would do.
Like I said, we're not in any kind of recession right now.
I think it's coming.
No, I'm saying if we really go into a recession, real recession-
Mm-hmm.
not the kind that we're in right now, where you still got high employment. Everything is basically rosy right now. I'm talking about real recession. What would that really do to all this?
There's no investment we own that I have made where I don't presume that the U.S. is going into the 1970s. I challenge you to outbear me.
How about 1929?
Well, it's actually, it's good that you mention that. I think I've had people say, "Well, what if, similarly, what if 1973 comes?" Right? Okay. Well, if the entire equity market is valued at three times cash flow, then I'm a buyer of the equity market, right? Ultimately, I follow where the cash flows are. If the cash is coming back to me, I don't care. I like the things that we have. To be clear, when you get to a 1929, ultimately what you got to was a period between 1929 and 1933. These things don't go down, you know, in one shot.
When you have an entire portfolio that has a sub-two-year duration with super tight covenants monitored monthly, you're gonna get bites at the apple as it drops. People are gonna actually either pay us more, pay us back, or we're gonna take assets and we're gonna liquidate into that. Ultimately, we're following the cash flows. We don't have a thing where, as an example, if you're familiar with the mortgage business, you know that there are a thing called non-qualifying mortgages. I had people on our team say, "Well, we should lend against, at a high rate against these non-QM mortgages. They're very high return things." I said, "Well, okay, so if I foreclose on those, now I own a bunch of non-QM mortgages with a 10-year duration.
What do I do then?" Right? We're not just looking at the duration of what we have, we're looking at the duration of the underlying and whether we can get on top of it and liquidate it very rapidly. Can anybody inure themselves ultimately to the worst of the worst of the worst, and whether it's 1929 or the initiation of a World War? No. Can we be the last one to go down in that instance? I think we can, if we do our job right. I like what we own and how we're positioned.
Okay. Thank you all for answers.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Hey, Cam. In the interest of those folks that are online, there were some questions that were asked in advance of the meeting, why don't I ask one of those questions now. Question is, any idea when Arena will pay back the $24 million loan to Westaim and initiate the buying of shares? It was the first question. Second question is this an interest-free loan? I'll answer the second question. The answer is no. It's a 7.25% coupon, I believe, loan. With respect to the first question, maybe Dan or even Tim Newville, who is the CFO of Arena, is online. He was traveling, he's online today. That's the guy on the screen. Dan, you or Tim wanna address that?
Sure. Well, Tim is the architect of the financials that you're gonna see in the next couple of quarters that outline these kind of three lines that we're pursuing. You know, obviously, I don't think there's, as an arithmetic matter, anybody who benefits more from the repayment of the loan than me personally. I couldn't be possibly more focused on it. The reality is, as Cam mentioned, is that, you know, we have to have clarity about what's happening underneath the hood, right? The very same things that Tim's working on that we're gonna be showing you in the next quarter and the subsequent quarters are what we need for that purpose. We are in talks with folks who are awaiting those, that clear outline of those three streams.
I think in all likelihood, the most likely case is we will do a credit line with people that we're talking to that partially repays it, and then ultimately, through a combination of either distributions or the increase of that line, we'll kind of get it toward extinguishment. We couldn't be more laser-focused on it, and I think it's eminently doable. Again, you can't, you can't be grateful for the opportunity that banks act as they do on the investment side and then curse them for not doing what they need to do on the borrowing side. Tim, you wanna give me. Maybe you can give some color in terms of the financials and what we're gonna be disclosing and how we're gonna do it over the next couple of quarters.
Yep. Thank you. I think Dan is exactly right with kind of how we're projecting our cash flow when it comes to the AIGH business. I mean, if you look in the last two years, the cash flow turning positive and really building an FRE and available cash for distribution, is growing. We also have a lot of unlocked value within our drawdown funds, which are coming into a harvest period. As you see on the financials that get distributed, you know, you see the unrealized incentive available in ASOP I coming into harvest, the growth in ASOP II with those cash flows coming, along with a possible refi. I mean, you see cash coming through the business available for that pay down.
I think those factors are good, and we're gonna continue to refine, you know, the financial metrics we can provide around the balance sheet and the cash flows, so that it's very clear, you know, where we're projecting that.
Thanks, Tim. Other questions?
Hi. Thanks. I've got two here. First question is for Dan and Cam and Rob, too. As part of the initial 2015 agreement between Westaim and Arena, there is the waterfall model where Arena Investors must buy shares in Westaim after a certain AUM and margins thresholds are hit. You know, Dan, you're a value investor, obviously, you like the discount to NAV here, as Cam has outlined here. Is there any contemplation between Arena and Westaim to change that structure whereby that allows Dan and his team and Parag to purchase Westaim shares early, earlier before you hit the margin target?
Why don't I give it the first shot?
Sure.
You know, now in hindsight, a lot of what we created in that agreement, as you noted correctly, it's a double trigger. When we introduced that, it was acknowledged and celebrated being a lot of folks, particularly within our industry, thought we got it right. Now with the passage of time and in hindsight, I think we got a lot of it right. The alignment remains true. The question will come up with every now and then, if we're buying the stock, does that put Dan in a conflict or Parag and others who are actively buying? There's never been a conversation about that. There's... You know, even going back and tweaking it from that perspective, we wouldn't do it.
Where you could see a tweak is you can see a tweak being as we go through the strategic processes, we start pulling levers. We've talked about some of the activity, whether it's inbound, M&A, accelerator, all those could generate a reason to rethink. We're okay with that because in the end of the day, we want to create a structure. First of all, it has to be economically fair. Otherwise, you won't retain talent. Whatever shape that takes in, it will be reflective of some form of what's existing today. By the by, I'm not suggesting there's anything afoot, but it's a topic we've thought about because when you do get these inbounds, that'll be something that someone will look at.
If they're bringing in or we do a transaction where it's so additive for all the stakeholders, then you just have to rethink the pie. What's fair? How are all the proper constituents being properly valued for their capital they're putting up and for the returns that the professionals are generating? Dan, do you wanna add to that?
Look, I think that, you know, we have a decent amount of ownership amongst our employees. The agreement doesn't preclude us from buying shares. I'm also kind of loaded to the gills in our funds, right? I'm as hawked as I can be and aligned as I can be. We are, you know, completely cognizant of the discount. As Cam said, you know, we're gonna be pulling every lever and there's a lot of leeway ultimately for us to adjust if and when something, you know, transformative arises that allows us to pull that business plan forward.
I mean, the only reason why I say that is because I'm sure you're attracted to, you know, the discount as well-being.
Mm-hmm.
You'd like to buy that discount and discount of cash flow, I guess. I just, you know, wanted to raise that to see if there's any consideration. Another unrelated topic on the Arena, and this is somewhat related to Skyward. Cam, you don't have to respond if you don't have to, if you don't want to. Sorry, Skyward mentioned that they might be looking to reduce their allocation to Arena. Like, they don't wanna be as concentrated to you now that they're a separately publicly traded company. Have you had any discussions on how much that could be in magnitude and also the timing of the, you know, maybe not renewing or maybe actively withdrawing some of the capital from your existing funds and maybe which sleeve of the funds are they in? Thank you.
I'll speak to that in a limited way. I mean, I would make the observation that when you look at most insurance companies, they all have an alternative exposure now, and it's growing. In Arena's case, the exposure, it was 20 points. It is a large weighting. We would say that as a private company in the last number of years in a low-rate environment, it was incredibly additive. In fact, the most additive manager out of all the consortium they used, it was the most consistent both on an absolute and a relative basis. That said, the structure of an alt investments, not necessarily Arena Alt, it goes through from accounting perspective, it goes through what they call their NII line, their income line.
In a world now where you can make 4% or 5% on risk-free smooth line effect, you can see the analyst dialogue. They really reward that. They wanna see that smooth line. From a perspective where you're creating a little more volatility in the NII, that makes it harder for them. You should expect that weighting will go down for the obvious reasons that you can get a smoother effect. It's not a reflection on the rates return those strategies achieved. It's just a byproduct of a higher rate environment.
I'd add to that you're already seeing the weighting go down implicitly because of the growth of the business. You know, that investment portfolio two years ago was $765 million. It was $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion now. With the growth in premium that they're experiencing, that's only gonna generate even more float. As a result of just by organic growth of the business, the weighting is going to drop.
As they redeem or not renew as they come to maturity, like and I'm assuming that you guys have investors that want to come into these funds but cannot due to capacity issues. Like, do you guys have standby investors that are willing to take that amount?
Just to be clear, we have no dollars under management that can be redeemed for cash. There is no notion of, you know, knock on the door, here's my cash. All of our pools are asset liability matched, and so there's no need to ever kind of swap anybody or do anything of that sort. I think over time, as Cam mentioned, insurance analysts love, you know, this stream. We happen to actually deliver not just premium alternative stream, but premium commercial mortgages and premium investment grade ABS. I think there's a whole variety of things that they do with us that match their goals in terms of not only the return they wanna get, but the multiple they wanna get on it.
There's no question, over the years, other insurance companies have seen. It's not only the return, but particularly if you take 2022, you know, your investment grade portfolio, while you've got your coupon, the value of the portfolio got crushed with the rates going higher. In Arena case, in 22, they delivered about a 6%, 7% return for Skyward. Being able. That's a book value item too. Not only is it going through, but it's adding to book value, which obviously helped on the IPO. You know, I talked about test the waters. That was clearly one of the questions because, you know, the analyst community, they don't know us. They don't know Arena to a large extent at that point, the insurance folks.
I think they wanted to understand, is this effectively a reference to the Third Point where that, quote, "hedge manager" is taking over the float. That was never the objective. Ours was Arena should stand on its own. The returns justify the allocation. They started small as they did with every insurance company, and now through time, Parag, correct me, we're 18, 20-plus or... Each one continues to increase that allocation. It's a good fit, but, you know, certainly the NII accounting treatment, everyone thinks about that with all alternative investments, just not credit.
Maybe just last one from me. Dan, on the operating leverage, I mean, the system is built to CAD 10 billion. You can probably take that in, you know, 5 years from now without adding a body or many bodies.
Any senior bodies.
Any senior bodies.
Mm-hmm.
How do you think about the incremental margin? Right now your margins are, you know, wherever they are, and you have to pay your senior people, you know, pretty well. These are all talented folks.
Mm-hmm.
As you grow to, you know, from 3.3%- 5%- 7% -1 0%, how do you envision the margin profile to grow during that time frame? Thank you.
Well, I think we're gonna have as you'll see in subsequent quarters, we're gonna have more of an ability to kind of provide that, the ability to model that and play around with that. We're super laser focused on that, as you can imagine. I would point out that when you think about retention, We are not a fund where someone's a PM on a desk and, you know, as the PM goes, the returns or the opportunity or the strategy goes anywhere. I like to use the analogy that Bill Belichick does about quote unquote "next man up," right? We have in these business units, in any given business unit, challenge them to create franchises that are in their heads, in our heads, billion-dollar franchises among the eight.
In each case, through a combination of existing assets that are paying existing joint venture relationships or discount relationships, the interconnection to our Quaestor Advisors and Quaestor Strategic, the front office analytics support that we have in Bengaluru. You know, you have a lot of support infrastructure, and I view our senior folks on the front office side as really talented, like Formula One drivers, right? We have all the machinery, all the staffing, the entire car, everything. Doesn't mean we don't want a great driver. You know, it's not like a 1995 multi-strategy hedge fund where your CV guy walks out the door and there's no business. It's just very different. We're building in tangible value.
What kind of firms are using the Quaestor from a third-party perspective?
On the Quaestor Capital Markets side, it tends to be more independent companies, looking for either to auction a company or to access new, you know, I would say small middle market kind of finance. In Quaestor Consulting Group, it is smaller mid-scale private equity firms with portfolio companies that are at issue. As well, I think smaller scale conventional private debt firms is, right? When you think about in either of those cases, if you have 25 portfolio companies, you know, even today, at least maybe 20 are fine,two are okay-ish, but three are really, you know, going through existential issues, you can't really create a Quaestor, you know, to handle, you know, three businesses that you might have over a couple of years. There's a diseconomy of scale and scope opportunity there.
Certainly, you can go to world, you know, powerful, capable global firms like Alvarez & Marsal or J. Alex. or those kind of folks. The reality is they're going after the next, you know, the next, the next class of Enrons and Adelphias and WorldComs that are coming our way and not really focused on something with $12 million of EBITDA that's under, you know, that's underwater. The addressable market for that business is just enormous. And for really talented, capable people who are able to kinda lock into those situations, that's, you know, really manna from heaven for those customers. It's a real opportunity leveraging IP we already have.
Craig?
Just thinking back to your comments about investment-led and obviously your demonstration of that, not just in the fund sizes, but the magnet times and some of the care you're taking and building up the machine, how does that align with being public? I don't know if there's an investment-led firm in public in the investment management industry.
Well-
Are there any concerns or anxieties that present there to you?
Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't necessarily know that we have to categorize ourself as investment-led and in the investment management industry. I would much rather think in terms of Berkshire, Markel, Berkeley, Prem, John Malone, and other really careful allocators of ROIC, whether they happen to be, you know, managers of funds or not. Plenty of those folks, if you look at those kind of historical superstar allocators of capital, were not investment management firms, but were brilliant investors. If you look at what Henry Singleton did after the late sixties boom ended and we went into the seventies and the book value per share he created in that kind of environment, you know, being public can be quite accretive over time.
I think it's another tool in the toolkit of anyone who's really thoughtful about optimizing ROIC over time.
Yes, sir.
You've talked about increased disclosure at Arena going forward. Maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more on the increased disclosure and maybe the objectives of that and what investors can expect...
Sure.
over the next couple quarters.
Well, when we started, there were some Canadian specialty finance enterprises who are no longer with us that were not big disclosures of what they owned. We wanted to go over the top on a line-by-line basis on the left side of the balance sheet so that we allow the owners of our company to understand what we were investing in, and we continue to do that. When it comes to now the right side of the balance sheet and those three streams we were talking about, you know, we want to make it as clear as possible, what those three lines are and how we're getting to them. We want to. Obviously, I've been in all of your shoes, and I am in all of your shoes all the time, right.
If I were, and I happen to be an owner of this enterprise, and I was trying to model this enterprise out, I know what that needs to look like, and I wanna give people as clear a path toward doing that modeling as humanly possible. You know, this arose probably in 2017, 2018, where I knew I wanted to do this. It's easier said than done. And we implemented an entire NetSuite project. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Basically, to do what we wanna do, you need to be able to bucket every expense you have, right? Every expense you have should fall into one of a series of buckets that are collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, as either direct expenses or then allocated indirect expenses.
We needed to implement NetSuite in order to actually capture each of those, every single check that went out of that accounts payable and put it into those buckets. We implemented that enterprise software system, which Tim did, and we created a strategy capability. We have a head of strategy in FP&A who has a strategy guy and a kind of FP&A modeling guy reporting to him that have only been focused on doing this. We are at the precipice of being able to report in the way that I would like to. That, in turn, will dovetail with a rolling three-year forward model, the first year of which is effectively the budget that we're working with that then connects into what we're then showing to you all.
I would love it to be already there. It's almost there, and we're gonna deliver.
I think from a public market perspective and what you guys see, you know, right now for. You know, we've evolved our disclosure of Arena Investors over time. I think, you know, what you should expect is that right now we've got FRE and incentive fees, and that makes up the EBITDA of the business. I would expect that, you know, the AIS business that Dan has been referring to, has really been a nascent business where we've had, you know, sort of build, startup, build-up expenses. It's just now reaching a point where it's gonna start to earn material revenue. It makes sense for us to now break that out of the FRE.
It's sitting in FRE right now, so there's been a bit of a drag on FRE from some of the startup costs of these very high-margin businesses. We're gonna be breaking that out to show this is the way we view it internally, as three separate operating lines. I think you should expect to see that over the next couple of quarters, and it'll really help, you know, sort of refine exactly what FRE is for our business. On the balance sheet side, our disclosure on the balance sheet has not been, you know, that great historically, but also hasn't been a focus. In a startup asset manager, the balance sheet usually isn't a focus.
As Tim alluded to earlier, you know, if you look at our assets and our liabilities in that business, they've grown quite a bit. And you guys see one line item for each. One of the reasons is we've got a lot of accrued carry in there that is gonna turn into cash flow over time, and I think it's important that our investors see a balance sheet, you know, that's more in keeping with being able to understand that. As the business matures, you know, you're gonna get into things like distributable cash and other things like that, where we're gonna start to disclose, you know, more in keeping with what a larger asset manager would disclose. You know, we're gonna take baby steps first and run later.
I guess maybe a follow-up question, unrelated, but maybe back to what Parag had said about some of the headwinds of trying to raise capital in this environment. People already have allocations to alternatives, or they believe they already have a good slice of either private credit, maybe they have real estate investments where they think this, they don't wanna add to their current exposure. How do you anticipate to sort of separate yourself from others in this space that have this label and that will potentially end up looking like pretenders in an environment where they were taking not great risks?
How are you hoping to separate yourself from them trying to raise capital in this environment where right now they all may look the same, but how are you hoping to differentiate and put a spotlight on what you do differently?
I would say there's kind of a convex shape to things, right? On the one end, you had 2018 and 2019, where everyone said they already knew how to do it. No need for us, right? We're gonna do our direct lending and our other hammers that only see nails. On the other end, you know, if we do have an absolute catastrophic 1929 mixed with a global war and people are under their desks, they're not gonna be responsive to when Parag calls. In that middle part, where I think we are, I think that I think it is net net very positive for us, and I think that I know who's competing and what they're doing in the market.
There have never been more than 2 dozen firms in what we would describe as our ecosystem, the majority of which are continent-focused, meaning only U.S., only Europe, or only Asia-Pacific, and the great minority of which are global. Of those that are global, there are virtually none that are not already, you know, several tens of billions
I don't find people saying, you know, we have this already virtually ever. I don't know if you wanna add to that, Parag?
Yeah, no, it starts with by being different. I think it's apparent, in the first conversations with folks, we describe what Arena is and what we do and how we approach it. I don't know, 9 times out of 10 or more, people say, "Wow, that's really different." You look at the returns that are uncorrelated to what they've got. Obviously, some of that's obfuscated because everything's been going one way, and it'll only be clear. But it is. It's accretive to a portfolio, whether it's their someone's first investment in private markets or their twentieth.
I think we're seeing that, and we're just seeing that, you know, that is a process that in general does take time. The average institutional sales cycle is, you know, 18 months plus. You know, we're, you know, very transparent. We lay it all out there, and people can dig into everything and talk to anyone and look at the underlying investments and investment memos and track record and all of that. You know, we find the people who do that work only gain that much more confidence relative to the just, you know, 50,000-foot view that this is something that I don't talk to people who do what you do.
We only see that, you know, getting more to our benefit than, and moving, you know, more, into asset growth.
It's 11:45 A.M., and I know that some of you folks have a hard 12:00 P.M. If there's one last question, glad to take it. Otherwise, I suggest we conclude, and for the last 15 minutes, for those that have to depart at 12:00 P.M., we're all around to take your individual questions, and if you have the ability to stay past 12:00 P.M., we're here too. If there's one last question, great to take it. Otherwise, I wanna say thank you to everyone for participating or joining us online. Anytime anyone has a question, a thought, an idea, please reach out, email, send us a letter, we will respond. Thank you.