Okay, welcome everybody, to the TD Cowen Inaugural Financial Services and FinTech Summit. My name is Bill Katz. I head up the Asset Manager, Retail Broker, and Exchanges Coverage Universe. For those of you that are able to do so, we'd appreciate a five-star vote in II as we go through this season. I am thrilled to be hosting the management team from AllianceBernstein today. AB is one of our favorite names in the traditional space. With us today is Onur Erzan, who heads up the Global Client Group and Private Wealth. Onur is an Executive Officer at AllianceBernstein and a member of the Equitable Holdings Management Committee. He also heads up the global client group, as I mentioned, heads up the Bernstein Private Wealth business. So quite a few things that Erzan, Onur oversees.
He really is responsible for client service, sales, marketing, product strategy, management development worldwide. The private client group has roughly $125 billion in assets, at least as of the end of April. Onur, welcome to the conference, and thank you so much for participating today.
Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.
Okay, I thought maybe for today's conversation, we have about 30 minutes together, that we do a couple big picture questions and then maybe dive into several of the different distribution channels that you oversee and, and are leading the strategy on. So maybe from a big picture perspective, I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the, in particular, the institutional and the retail distribution model has evolved over the last many years under your guidance. I think there's north of 200 people, maybe close to almost 300 people now across those channels. And then as you look ahead for the next several years, how do you see further evolution of, of the business?
Yeah, sure. Thank you, Bill. I would summarize it under three headings, I guess. One is specialization, second is usage of data and technology, and then third is, basically bringing the product innovation and vehicle flexibility. On the specialization, obviously following the, the client needs, we have been deepening our expertise on, two, main dimensions. One is, getting much more client segment driven, like our recent, creation of the insurance vertical with our new hire, Geoff Cornell, who's gonna lead it, former CIO of, Corebridge, Deputy CIO of AIG. Again, going on that client, spectrum, DC specialists focusing on the defined contribution side, and then specialization in terms of coverage between RAAs, independents, and the larger broker dealers. And the second aspect of the specialization is obviously bringing the, the, the investment strategy or product specialization through, product specialists like private alts or vehicle specialists like ETF.
So we have definitely been leveraging our broader partnerships with our clients, and using our generalist salesforce to be the quarterback for lack of a better descriptor, but then surrounding them with a large number of specialists to bring the best of AB. So that's, I think, one big team. Number two is technology. We believe more and more asset owners and intermediary partners want to do more with less managers. That means you need to obviously bring the best quality solutions, but also you need to be very effective in the way you partner with those clients to be able to deliver the outcomes that are consistent with their objectives. So we invested quite a considerable amount of money, time and energy to create the right client data environments, and the whole technology surrounding that with the CRM technology.
For instance, in our U.S. retail platform, we created a data lake and some surrounding analytics, which we call the Oculus. And through that project, we integrate 40 different internal and external data sources to create a 360 view of the financial advisor and the client based on transaction history, behavioral attributes, demographic attributes, buying behavior, et cetera. And then the third piece of the puzzle is the product innovation and vehicles. We launched our ETF business within the last two years. We have been one of the most successful early, obviously in terms of the new entrant statistics. And in addition to ETFs, we have been very progressive in the way we leverage SMAs, particularly in the tax management with our mini SMA franchise, and then also in retirement through CITs and the ancillary retirement income kind of solutions.
So we've been very systematic in the way we talk about and think about vehicles. Then finally, obviously the alternatives is a great aspect of that. Through internal funds, through BDCs, we are growing on that journey in terms of deepening our private credit franchise across channels.
All right, thank you. So that leads me to the next question. Over the past several years, Alliance has been able to be among the few of the traditional managers, and maybe traditional is a misnomer for you at this point in time, but nonetheless, to generate positive organic growth. Why have you been so successful and be able to buck the trend? And how do you sort of see that looking ahead?
No, thank you, Bill. You are absolutely right. So, when we look at our organic growth, vis-à-vis our peers, I think on average we outperform the peer group by 500 basis points, and we had positive average organic growth of 2.6%. In terms of what led to that, I think, I'll, bucket it under a few headlines as well. I mean, one is obviously having the right product matters, right? So at the end of the day, we are an asset manager and a wealth manager, and we need to have the right solutions for our clients, investment solutions. So I think having the right mix of the different asset classes, that balance is important, and that makes it, I think, that makes us very resilient, in face of, market rotations.
That by itself is not sufficient, but we like the fact that we have that broader investment platform, and it goes back to what I mentioned as more clients want to do more with less managers. Second, I think we have been quite targeted in terms of which types of clients we want to serve and how we want to serve them. Like, for instance, in U.S. retail, which is a highly contested space, we recognize our skill set and differentiation is very much skewed towards more high net worth and ultra net worth advisors. We have been really investing in that client segment to bring the right skills to that space. Obviously, the SMA technology we created for munis to make it much more customized and scalable is part of that story.
As we talked about private credit, we saw the success of private credit in our private wealth channel, and we took that expertise and carrying it to our U.S. retail channel as an example. So we have been very purposeful in terms of which segments of the market we want to serve. And then obviously we have been quite strategic in terms of how we create that, what I call the flywheel. What I mean by that is, I think our private wealth business and our relationship with our shareholder Equitable is quite unique in terms of our access to two large pools of capital. And we believe we can use those two pools of capital to really then build the solutions and the scale to export into the broader third-party retail institutional. And that creates basically that full circle, right?
We have done that with Equitable's $20 billion commitment to private credit. We have done that with the launch of our ETFs where our private wealth business contributed to the success, and that's part of our strategy.
Okay. And just for everyone that's participating on the webcast, I should have said upfront, I apologize. Along the bottom, you can ask a question, and I am monitoring a little question bar. So feel free if I'm not asking all the right questions, if you want to sort of ask, and I will make sure to ask Onur along the way. All right, maybe we could dig in a little bit on the private wealth space. Platform is very differentiated versus many other wealth managers out there. So as you look ahead, how do you think about the opportunity to drive faster growth in the channel? I think you've looked at some of the metrics over the last several quarters. Things are percolating. It's been very, very consistent, but a little bit of an upward bias.
As we look ahead, where do you see the best opportunities to grow in wealth management?
No, thanks, Bill. Yeah, the way we think about it is, on the both client dimension as well as the geography. As you pointed out, we had consistent organic growth. Obviously, our ambition is to accelerate that organic growth in a financially disciplined way. Although we don't disclose it, we are also happy with the margin trend in that business. So we have been growing organically, consistently, but also contributing to the overall profitability of AllianceBernstein in a very meaningful way. As a reminder, private wealth channel generates roughly 13%-15% of our fee revenue. In terms of how we are growing the platform, on the client side, based on our segmentation, we are taking the platform even further up market with ultra net worth clients, global families, and family offices.
Because our product sets are global footprint on the third-party side, as well as our expertise dealing with family offices and different channels, I think gives us unique perspectives and ability to create something special. As a result, clients moving up market is part of our strategy. In terms of geographical strategy, we have 21 locations. We actually added a location in Stamford recently, as an extension of New York. So we are definitely looking at extensions. We're adding a satellite to a core office that has large presence is part of our thinking because at the end of the day, it's both a national business, but also you need to be local.
Then we continue to look at ways to build scale in geographies where we see a lot of headroom for growth in terms of growth in the local market. Like for instance, Nashville has been one of our fastest growth markets for private wealth. Obviously, we took advantage of our headquarters there, but we are replicating that kind of bottom-up local market-driven thinking in different geographies as well. And when it comes to expanding in those kind of markets, the one additional thing you will see us do is adding more experienced advisors and then maybe occasionally, if things make sense to add tuck-ins in terms of small RAAs in those geographies to accelerate the build-out of those geographies.
Because as you know, our historical talent model, which we feel proud about and recipe for success is, hiring fresh talent from the market, bringing them to typically private wealth industry or early in their journey, and then molding them in our private wealth model. As a result, we have a very persistent and a very productive advisor group. But admittedly, it can be much bigger. Right now, we have around 300 financial advisors, counting some of the kind of more junior ones that are earlier in their tenure. If you want to accelerate that further, obviously diversifying the talent mix with more experienced hires and it makes sense with tuck-ins makes sense. We haven't done much of that yet, but it's in our plans.
I do want to go there in just one moment because we just had a previous presenter speak to some of the building competition for, for some of those teams. But just sort of curious, given your global perch, and, and your responsibility set, how, how should we think about the global opportunity for private wealth? It seems like some of the metrics outside the United States are equally robust with very low penetration rates as well. Certainly appreciate Nashville and the hub and spoke that you, you talked about here. But is there an opportunity to take this a little bit further afield, and, and drive growth, outside the U.S.?
Yeah, we definitely get a lot of inbounds, in that space, in different markets. Right now our priority is really capturing all the synergies that we have within the United States, given we have the U.S. retail business and private wealth with the established infrastructure and the heritage. I think that probably has the highest ROI in the very near term. But we are open-minded and when we get presented opportunities globally, we look at them. The way we think about private wealth outside the United States is, as I mentioned, we definitely have a growing base of global family clients. Typically, global families have some business interest or some family extension in the U.S., and that's a high growth part of our business.
Having 25+ locations in our third-party business, internationally, and strong brand there combined with a long-standing U.S. franchise, I think makes us a pretty interesting solution for global families. We are a pure form wealth and asset management shop. As a result, we don't have all the different requirements of banks and insurance companies, which makes us probably a bit nimble at times. Then the second way to think about it is how we kind of partner with some of our large third-party retail intermediary clients. Sometimes we do knowledge sharing and capability sharing with some of those third-party intermediaries. We might not necessarily get direct access to the client, but through that knowledge exchange, we build credibility and we can do joint product development and we drive market share in our third-party partners in international.
Terrific. So maybe coming back to the notion of, of a little more, external growth and, we've had a very good track record of hiring, as you said, molding, shaping, and getting that persistent and, ongoing productivity improvement. As you think through now of sort of extending the opportunity from a sort of a quote unquote more of a de novo way into sort of incrementally through, through maybe lift outs, can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the pipeline and then, in terms of transition assistance or, or how to think about the economics of that? An early presenter just mentioned that with private equity coming in, particularly in the RAA space, deal multiples and production payouts on trailing 12-month basis is making recruiting to be somewhat more challenging, right now before thinking about all the macro stuff that's happening real time.
How should we think about just like the opportunity set here and maybe the economic impact as you expand beyond de novo?
Yeah, no, absolutely. Look, again, the good news is this is a $125 billion-$130 billion platform depending on the month, quarter, and roughly 300 advisors. So, at the end, we're not talking about, you know, billions of, tens of billions of dollars that we need to onboard to, put out, big growth numbers. So as a result, I think we have a lot of discipline in place. And the way I think about this is at a high level, on a, on a net basis, our goal is, to grow our financial advisor ranks organically and inorganically by roughly 5% a year, right? That's not a hard target because again, we want to be, disciplined both from a quality perspective as well as ability to kind of pace ourselves based on the market cycle. But 5% is a loose kind of guideline, if you will, for us internally.
It's all about the mix within that, you know, 5% incremental growth that we foresee. How much of that will be experienced hires? I think we will start small. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we are adding, you know, 5-10 experienced advisors a year in that kind of mix. So we're not talking huge numbers here. And then in terms of the transition support, and all of that, I mean, the good news is we have a very well-established platform, including third-party manager research and an independent CIO under our independent CIO, and the wealth planning group, underneath the same individual. We have, you know, 50+ specialists that just focuses on the product, the investment platform, and wealth planning.
As a result, that capability by itself is at scale to be able to support any transition from a product and, and tax and other, transition analytics perspective. Actually, that's our strength. Then from an operational perspective, we have a very robust internal, technology and operations team. We do our own custody and clearing. So we have much deeper expertise in middle and back office than many of the outsource platforms. Then we have the ability to add third-party custody, leveraging that expertise. All in all, the degree of operational complexity or transition complexity is relatively low.
And I would argue as a large established platform with an integrated asset management model, your ability to create synergies is much greater than a financial sponsor or a pure roll-up play because you have many more synergies in place, whether it's on the middle and back office expense side, whether through succession, or real estate in your existing footprints, or some of the technology and operational platforms, given our vendor relationships, et cetera. So, overall, that, that's what I would highlight. And then finally, I mean, it's one of those things where, it's easy to make generalizations, but even in the RAA space, we have seen a lot of different models. And actually, some of the RAAs have pretty large portion of proprietary strategies. So being an integrated asset and wealth manager, we could be quite interesting to RAAs with their own proprietary asset management capabilities.
Equally, those might not always be that attractive to others. So we will be extremely picky in terms of who we choose. And there's no commitment or there's no hard target we have in terms of doing a small tuck-in acquisition or more. So at the end, we retain flexibility around that.
I probably could spend the rest of the time just zoning in on the private wealth side, but I do want to try and pick your brain a little bit on some of the other areas that you're responsible for. Maybe we could migrate over to retail for a moment. You've showed some very provocative slides around market share that you've been gaining both in the United States and outside of the U.S. I was wondering if you could unpack the keys to the success both in the U.S. and maybe you covered a little bit before in your opening comments, but the keys in the U.S. and particularly abroad where I think AB has a very differentiated opportunity set.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, starting with Asia, obviously, we have a long-standing history in Asia, in terms of our percentage of assets and revenue. I think we have a much greater Asia presence than our directly comparable peer sets. It's also pretty diversified. It's not a single market. We have a strong high-yield franchise in Taiwan. We have a taxable fixed income income franchise in Hong Kong and Singapore, large equity following in Japan. Obviously, a lot of upside to bring further private credit type of strategies to those markets as semi-liquid vehicles gain more traction. So obviously having a well-established brand, which is rated number five, top five by Broadridge and local distribution in all the key markets is an advantage. So that, that's one that helps us.
Number two, coming back to the U.S., we really invested a ton thinking through how we can differentiate in a crowded marketplace. And our SMA technology, particularly with the tax-exempt fixed income is very differentiated. It's not only how we construct the portfolios and liquidity and the portfolio construction, but also the client servicing with the client reporting, our ability to show that tax and liquidity alpha to advisors is well received. And definitely has a lot of potential to be expanded both with new distribution partners that we are seeing as well as adjacencies with the taxable fixed income, which now has much more demand given now we have more income in fixed income, which we didn't have for a decade. So that's another important aspect of our kind of strategy.
So not only think about the investment exposure, but also think about delivering the right advisor and client experience through technology and client service infrastructure. So that's, I think, resonating well. And having private wealth, having that common backbone increasingly, is helpful to us, right? The reason why I have all the three businesses is to create those synergies rather than reinventing the wheel, in channels. Because in U.S. retail and private wealth, ultimately the end client is the same U.S. retail, high net worth, ultra net worth investor. Majority of the capabilities we can build in one place and then leverage elsewhere. So that's, I think, the second part of the strategy here, I would say.
Okay, let's, let's shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the institutional business. And, and maybe this is a too refined of a question, but I think management at a recent Equitable Investor Day laid out a goal to get your private markets platform up to about $90 billion-$100 billion. I think you're seeing right now a little bit north of $60 billion. So what's the path from here to achieve that goal? And then underneath that, where do you see the biggest opportunities?
Sure. I think we are on the right track. We grew our private credit AUM that you mentioned by 9% year-over-year. So definitely moving in that trajectory towards some $90 billion-$100 billion. In terms of the building blocks of that, at least, we have another $10 billion from Equitable's original $20 billion commitment. And, we have already, made progress with the first $10 billion, with specialty finance, and new lending, recently out of our, middle market lending platform, but we yet have another $10 billion to go. So that's one of the building blocks. As I mentioned, we created a very strong insurance vertical that cuts across public and privates, and it covers both the, portfolio management, sales, client service, as well as middle and back office.
So through that strong insurance capability, we believe we can leverage the multiplier effect in terms of what we seed with Equitable and then scale with other insurance companies. So that's, I think, the second part of the thinking. Then the third is obviously democratization of Alt and what we can do in private credit. We already have a very large private credit presence in our own private wealth channel. We know how to do it very well. Now we are taking that expertise with the wider origination platforms we own, including the 2022 CarVal acquisition. So we launched our first internal fund. We are going with our private wealth channel first, but then we have RIAs, a large IBD and a few large wirehouses in our kind of targets.
And then similarly, we are, we have created a public BDC that we will first launch overseas and then create a sister product in the US. So that will happen in the remainder of the year as well. So these semi-liquid vehicles to go deeper into third-party global retail is definitely going to be part of that strategy. Last but not the least, obviously there are the traditional allocators to alternatives, the large pension plans, large sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations. Obviously, we have a large global distribution for those client segments as well. And we have done quite deep mandates in, for instance, green energy. We see the prospects in other areas as well. So that's the fourth part of the client segment strategy. I mean, I really believe we have many paths to get to that 90-100.
Our flywheel with the Equitable and private wealth, I think, enhances our probability of success relative to others who might be following a similar strategy, but without those differentiated capabilities.
Great. We are coming up to the time. So I just want to ask maybe one last one, switch gears a little bit further and maybe we'll end on insurance. There's a lot of ways to go after the insurance market. There's sort of the balance sheet heavy, balance sheet light model. You obviously have a great relationship with Equitable and third party. How are you thinking about, sort of the evolution of your insurance footprint from here and the importance of origination capabilities? Is that something that you need to own or what you offer? And how should we be thinking about that as we look ahead?
Yeah, sure. I mean, we already manage around $170 billion for insurance clients globally. That includes Equitable and that's across general account and separate accounts. So this is a relatively established business for us with a lot of upsides. In terms of the number of clients, it's also a client base that we can definitely deepen share of wallet with. We already have 50+ GA general account clients. So just bringing new solutions to existing relationships by itself is a pretty big game changer. In terms of origination platforms, balance sheet light, balance sheet heavy, I think it depends on the asset class. In majority of the cases, we don't necessarily need to acquire new origination platforms because our existing credit origination businesses already leverage those platforms.
We have creative structures where those platforms might be embedded in the vehicles or they might have exclusive third party relationships with those platforms. In terms of balance sheet, look, we've seen sidecars and other deals in the markets. We definitely have the ability to deploy capital to participate in those kind of structures. Again, between Equitable, our shareholder, and ourselves, we're going to be very selective and disciplined on that. But ultimately we have the firepower to do it for the right structures with the right investment management mandates.
Okay, well, look, I think we're out of time. I have a zillion more questions, Onur. I'd love to run by you, but I think unfortunately we're out of time today to keep everybody on schedule. We're going to wrap it up there. So just on behalf of TD Cowen, I just want to thank you so much for helping us kick off our financial services practice, our first conference. It's great to have you participate. So I want to say thank you to you and the IR team for participating today.
Bill, I appreciate the opportunity and thanks for the great questions. I very much enjoyed the conversations. Thank you.
Thank you, Onur.
Bye-bye.