Okay, great. Next up, we have a presentation from Ameriprise. I'd like to welcome back the firm's Chairman and CEO, Jim Cracchiolo, as well as CFO, Walter Berman. Ameriprise continues to evolve from historically being thought of as basically an insurance company into a one-stop shop wealth management business with a pretty wide range of products across different verticals. For the most important part, at least for us, since the crisis, Ameriprise has been the single best capital return story among large cap financials, raising its dividend five times and repurchasing $3 billion of stock, or roughly 25% of its average market cap over the last two and a half years. Just to put this in perspective today, Ameriprise has fewer shares outstanding than it did prior to the issuance that was subsequently used to buy Columbia, which I think is pretty interesting.
Now with $2 billion of deployable capital, and again, I want to emphasize deployable now and not just excess capital, within capital returns will continue to be a pretty important part of Ameriprise's story. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim for some opening comments, and then we'll try to keep this as a fireside chat format as well.
Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. What I'm going to just briefly start out today is just give you a little bit of an overview of where we are as Ameriprise today so that we can start the conversation. I know Alex has a number of questions for me as well as questions that you may ask. Let me begin by first saying that I think Ameriprise today is in a terrific position in the marketplace. We are today the strongest we've ever been. We think we are a strong retail financial services company. We go to market two ways. One is as Ameriprise with our financial advisor network, really focused on a combination of managing a client's life for financial goals, particularly around retirement, their wealth management activities aligned with that. Second, as Columbia, where we're looking to continue to grow as a global asset management company, penetrating both the retail through intermediaries as well as through institutional channels.
Today, we have transformed ourselves from when we became public seven years ago. Our focus really is around continuing to build out the advice and wealth management business with the asset management business, with annuities and insurance be complementary to that, really around our client relationships and the products that they need for retirement. Today, we have come out in a marketplace that is continuing to grow. Even though we don't see that where we are in the economic environment and market environment, we know that more people are shifting to retirement than any time in our past. Over 10,000 a day of baby boomers moving to retirement.
Clearly, as they do that, they're going to need to manage their financial needs through 30 years of retirement. One of the needs that they clearly need is advice. How to do that, how to generate an income check for the future. We also know that they need to accumulate, and the American population needs to accumulate more wealth for themselves so that they can retire. We know even as we see what's playing out in Washington, Social Security, other pension schemes are not going to actually satisfy those needs. Ameriprise is well situated to handle those client needs. Over the years, we've been increasing our penetration in the mass affluent and affluent population. We are handling more assets for more clients. Our advisors continue to grow their productivity, and we continue to add more advisors to our channel.
We've invested heavily over the last number of years to build our brand in the marketplace, to put out marketing tools and capabilities to attract more clients and help our advisors become more productive, as well as the technology platforms that give them the ability to network in more products that handle more of their lifestyle needs. Today, we feel that opportunity is there and growing, and that we can take advantage of it. We are also one of the larger branded networks out there that's not owned by a large major financial institution, a major bank, or a major investment house that has other institutional businesses. We can be very focused on our value proposition and our consumer brand in the marketplace. Our clients have very deep relationships with us.
Our advisors stay with us longer, and we have helped them over the years continue to improve their productivity by high single digits to double digits, depending on the year and the economic environment. In regard to Columbia, we have now gone and completed a major merger between the RiverSource and the Columbia asset management companies. In addition to Columbia here in the U.S., we have Threadneedle, and we're looking to now start the next step of the journey, which is to globalize our activities so that we can actually penetrate more markets around the world. Today, we have a business there that generates over $0.5 billion of PTI. A business that has great product, strong performance, and the ability with the platforms and capabilities to expand our distribution, both here in the U.S. and internationally.
We're going to continue to invest in that business and continue to take more space. We do believe that we have gone through a very difficult environment in combination with a major integration, and now we're set up for, hopefully, expansion as we continue down the road. This business is still challenging based on market flows that are out there today, particularly with equities, but we have an excellent lineup. We maintain excellent performance for one, three, or five years, and we're going to continue to put some products to market that we think is going to be very important for future growth. The combination of our advice and wealth management and our asset management business, we think we can continue to generate good returns for our company. We think that we can continue to get a nice EPS growth.
We're sitting with a very strong capital position, as Alex said, over $2 billion of deployable capital that we will continue to look to return to shareholders, both through dividends and buybacks. We have the flexibility if appropriate acquisitions come along. We will not pay up for things. We're not going to overstretch ourselves in any fashion or use that money foolishly, and we think we've built a credible record with you as the investor to see what we've acquired and what we've been able to generate from those acquisitions. The last piece of this story, and people will question or ask about, is our insurance annuity business. The reason this business really works for us is because those products are only to our clients that we have deep long-term relationships with.
The product features, what we do, the behavior of the clients lends itself for us to generate very good returns from those products, and we try to manage the risk really appropriately so that it doesn't cause any excess exposure to the company and cause a drag. In that sense, because we built these books over decades, we think that we can continue to generate very good returns. This will be a slower growth business for us as we continue to grow and diversify our total business model. Over time, it will actually make up a smaller and smaller part of the total pie of Ameriprise. Over the last seven years, we started out where only 20% of our PTI came from the wealth management asset management business. Today, it's approximately 50%.
We think that will continue to shift to be 60% and 70% over the next number of years. Second, we have the total pie. Total pie, we generated roughly about $1 billion in PTI going through all the financial crisis. We are now at roughly $1.9 billion of PTI. Again, as you can see, we've doubled the pie, and the pie really doubled from really a shift mix to the advice and wealth in the asset management businesses. We think we can continue that along the way. With Ameriprise, you have a business that is situated well in what I think is the sweet spot of where the opportunity is. A growing middle and upper middle class, affluent, moving to retirement with the baby boom populations that are going to need advice and product and service to satisfy their retirement.
We are one of the leading providers today with one of the largest networks, and we are the leader in financial planning and advice. Second, a continuing growing world market that more assets will need to be managed over time, both here in the U.S. and around the world. The environment is changing. There is a level of consolidation occurring, and Ameriprise with Columbia Threadneedle can be a player in that market. We already have a reasonable level of scale as an independent provider that we can continue to look for opportunities for both organic and inorganic growth. We have a company that has one of the strongest financial foundations out there.
If you look at our level of capital, our liquidity, our investment portfolios in ratio to the size and scope of our firm, gives us a lot of flexibility to either return to shareholders over time as we're doing, as well as invest for our future, both organically and inorganically. The combination, I think, makes for a very good investment for you in thinking about how you look for growth in the financial services industry today and over time. That's sort of my opening remarks to you, and maybe, Alex, I can turn it over to you for your questions.
Great. Thanks for that. The first part of the discussion I want to frame around the AWM business, your wealth management business. I do agree, I think this is going to be one of the more important growth drivers for you guys over the next couple of years. If you look at the employee channel, which is where you've made, I guess, some of the larger changes over the last few years, this should be the first year where you've seen actually positive year-over-year growth sort of on a full year basis in that bucket. That said, the margin, I guess, in that business is still well below maybe barely break even relative to the overall business. You talked about it takes a few years for those FAs to get ramped up, which obviously bodes really well for the productivity and the margin as a whole.
Putting it all together, maybe help us understand how long do you think it'll take for them to get up to speed to where you think is the appropriate level of profitability even in today's environment? What does that mean for AWM's margins over the next couple of years, given how you guys are at like 12%, 11% right now?
Very good question. I think the way I would look at it, and I want to get explicitly to answer your question, but I want to put it in a little context. We see an opportunity to actually further expand our margins from a range of opportunities. Number one is that our whole system is growing. All of the current advisors that we have, 10,000, we are very much focused on increasing their productivity as well. Number one. Number two is we have made a lot of investments in the company that even though we'll continue to make investments, we have provided more capability, more product, more service, more branding support so that our advisors can actually continue to grow their client base, move up market, build their teams to be more productive. That's one aspect of where we're going to get extra margin and growth.
The second aspect is exactly what you said. As we build out our employee channel and we add more advisors and those advisors ramp up, they're going to generate a bit more productivity that covers our fixed cost in the employee channel. What we did do is when we sort of reduced the amount of time and attention of bringing in novices and training them and developing them, we did restructure and re-engineer the cost base of the employee channel, taking down significant amounts of cost. Part of what we did do is leave enough capacity there so that we can fill a lot more seats at the same fixed cost that we currently have.
As we add more advisors that have more productivity and they ramp up, it usually takes on average two to three years for an advisor coming in to transfer their book to get back to their old level of productivity. As people that we've added over the last two or three years ramp up and we add more of that productivity in the channel, we will start to improve the margins in the employee channel so that we can actually generate pretty strong margins consistent with what we do across our franchisee channel. Once we do that will complement on margin activities.
I guess staying with AWM, we've heard from a number of companies this morning. It feels like advice and wealth management is what everybody wants to be nowadays because of, again, all the demographic changes you highlighted, but also little capital requirements, et cetera. Talk a little bit about the competitive dynamic in your particular market, which I guess mass affluent. Who do you guys run into most? What are compensation packages like nowadays? Do you think that we'll continue to see more, I guess, intense competition in that channel?
Well, I think there's already intense competition out there for advisors. That has always been the case. If you always looked at the recruitment between various wirehouses, and there are periods of time that heats up, packages get very lucrative for advisors. I don't think we're in a situation that's any different at this point. I think what's a little different for us and where we're finding success is that we are very focused on bringing in advisors that want to develop their business a little more around financial advice, which is a focus that we have, number one. Number two is we have a choice for how you can affiliate, either as a franchisee and have equity in practice or as an employee with the full support that people once had as part of the wirehouses and still have today.
They can continue to have what they had in that sense. What the difference is that we are solely focused on the advisor and how we go to market and how we support them against this retail client relationship that people are finding quite interesting for them. It brings them back to sort of the cultures that they grew up in at one point in time. We are actually taking more space as we focus on the leadership support that we can give them to become more productive. We are looking for advisors who are in that middle level that need to further develop, and we help them do that. That's part of how we always trained and developed our system.
We know that it's a competitive marketplace, we feel we're situated well, and that part of what we're bringing to life, everything from our culture to our value proposition, is working for a group of advisors that are looking for a change. We feel that our pipeline can continue to be there and bring in more people. In regards to the packages, we're not paying up for those people. We're giving them reasonable and appropriate packages that are competitive, but in that sense, we're not paying a lot on the front end and hoping for a pickup on the back end. We put that between front-end compensation and back end based on productivity, ramp up, and improvements that they can get a very nice transition package, but one that's also economically viable for us as a firm.
Another trend that I think we've been watching over the last couple of years is the shift, albeit somewhat slow, a shift in economics between manufacturers and distributors in the asset management and wealth management arena. With 10,000 financial advisors, clearly you have a pretty strong muscle that you could flex to get more products on your platform and potentially make it more profitable for you. Are you doing some of that already? Is that something that you think you could do in the future? How big of a benefit could that be for the firm? Maybe you could kind of help us dissect that.
One of the major transformations that we've made over the last seven years is moving from our distribution, which was always thought about as part of what the old company was as a cost center to a real profit center that stands on its own and generates the right economics for the business that we do. As we have really changed the focus, you can see the significant improvement in our profitability over the last seven years from doing that. Part of the way we do that is to look at that very much as a distribution arm that should be able to generate, based on its size and scope, very clear profit margins and reasonable revenue transfers for putting products on our shelves and ensuring that we support that product in a compliant way.
We have added a tremendous amount of additional product over the years. We will continue to do that. We constantly look for a balance of what we provide as value versus what the manufacturer puts in so that we can get the right balance of revenues transfer for our advisor network and the advisors themselves in compensation. That is definitely part of the economics of the business and one that I think we're all more informed of today.
I guess thinking a little bit of what's going on with the retail investor out there, we've seen the tremendous amount of risk aversion for the last couple of years. The backdrop of fiscal focus certainly is not helping this dynamic, but I would also, or some would argue that given that even over the last 2 years there's been half a trillion dollars of assets coming into fixed income funds. There's potentially a risk of a quality yield bubble, right? I don't know if everybody appreciates that fully or if the retail investors fully understand that. What are you doing, I guess, with your Financial Advisors to help protect the retail clients from potential risks that they might be assuming in their portfolio without knowing it?
It's a very important focus that we do have today. We try to educate both our Financial Advisors as well as the client to understand a bit of what that bubble is. People are continuing to seek safety, what they consider a safety, yes, they've moved more money into fixed income. What we are doing, and what we have always done with our Financial Advisors, is to make sure that they have appropriate asset allocation. The only difference I would say today is this, we did not have our clients and Financial Advisors get whipsawed in and out of the market based on the cycle we went through. What happened is people held up putting a lot more money to work immediately, cash balances build. Today, cash balances are very high.
What we are seeing is that not a lot more money is going quickly into equities, but it is a little more flavored on a mixed basis to fixed income. As our Financial Advisors continue to rebalance of where the growth is in the assets, they'll start to rebalance, and they are doing on a quarterly basis, a bit more back into equities. What I would say is, different today than what might've been in a normalized period, the mix of fixed income is a greater percentage than it was in the past. We're hoping that as people get a little more looking out a little longer term, as they see some of the challenges that are in the environment, and it's particularly around not necessarily just market, but around incomes.
It'll be around the idea that they understand that the job market will maintain itself, that there won't be such a great deal of volatility, so that as soon as they put money to work, they're locked in in a downturn. Once that occurs, I do believe you'll see a shift back. It's not that the money disappeared at equities, it's just that the asset allocation has shifted a bit more to the fixed income, and we're hoping that that will return over time as people see a little more clarity a little further out than three to six months.
Shifting gears a little bit, I want to spend a couple of minutes on the asset management business. We've all been waiting for the turnaround and flow story, it feels like, for some time. At your Analyst Day, I guess about a month ago, I thought you made a couple of interesting points, and the most surprising to me was that you're not very well represented in some of the major distribution networks today. That to me seems like a pretty big opportunity given the fact that performance is actually quite good. Maybe spend a minute talking about from a tactical perspective, what are you guys doing today on getting a product placed on the Morgan Stanley and the Merrill of the world, and getting the product, I guess, into some of the allocation programs?
What we've done is Columbia, over the years as part of Bank of America, they started to build out their distribution beyond their own proprietary channels. Some of the first things they did is, of course, as you would know, focus in on building relationships through the intermediary channels. Now, when we combined RiverSource and Columbia, we started to change a number of the wholesalers, a number of different territories, a number of different relationships, that disrupted us for a while. That's being reestablished now, and as we go into next year, we'll be on our third year since that change, and that's when the time you start to really get a bit more traction in those relationships. That's one positive, but we see that occurring already.
The second part of those intermediary relationships in retail is what we say is the work through the gatekeepers. Those people in these houses that manage the various portfolio, and the portfolio allocations, and the modeled portfolios. In the past, Columbia in their activities there would focus mainly on a few products in a few of those relationships. What we need to do is expand the resource there, and that's what we're doing today, that goes after more of those various platforms and those gatekeepers to get more of our product considered. In the past, a lot of that product was either MassMutual product or things like the Variable Products portfolios that had a cachet as part of Columbia. You're correct in saying we have now a whole host of both equity and fixed income that has excellent long-term performance.
What we need to do is spend a bit more time, a bit more resources, having those conversations with those platforms, those gatekeepers, being in that channel, because we do believe that if we were able to get a reasonable share there, that would significantly increase our flow picture. We do have the product that would make a lot of sense in those model portfolios as we compare ourselves to many of the competitors that are out there. That's a very important focus on the retail side for us.
You can open up for questions or keep going. I guess staying with asset management for a second, the institutional product is something that I think maybe investors haven't paid as much attention to because there's been so much focus on Columbia and the retail channel. Talk a little bit to us about the pipelines you're seeing in the institutional channel, any strategies in particular that you find folks are more interested in today?
One of the things that again occurs anytime you go through a transition like this is you get put on hold from many of the consultants because they want to know what changes afterward. Who's running the money? What's your performance? Is there any change in what that structure is that would have impacted? Performance or track records. One of the things I can positively report to you is that we've come out of that in a very good way. We have more product today rated by the various consultants. We are now having a wide group of those products being discussed out there as new mandates come up.
We're in a lot of those conversations, as soon as we do get there, and we get familiar, in a sense, with the people who are looking to put those mandates out there, we are starting to win our fair share. That pipeline looks good. We got more product going through that pipeline today, both in fixed income as well as in equities. I do believe that this could be a large growing opportunity. Now, what we need to do, and the same thing with Threadneedle. Threadneedle has continued to win some good mandates out there. They've expanded beyond the U.K. market, and they're winning some nice business in places like the Middle East. We do believe that is a very good opportunity for us. We do believe that we can actually even have more international growth for Columbia.
Part of what I've just made is an organizational change. There'll be one global CEO, which will be Ted Truscott of both the Columbia and Threadneedle business. We will look to align our resources, both for distribution as well as the new products that we want to put to market so that we can actually penetrate a greater amount of space. One of the great areas of opportunity for us is we do believe we can put together with some good focus around global product that can take a bit more space of where some people have moved to today. Institutional, we would like over time to represent about 50% of our business from where we are today. We think if we can move that up, that would also help us generate both good flows as well as good margins.
We're not going to be changing the investment philosophy of the base Threadneedle. It's really on expansion.
Yep.
I guess shifting gears a little bit, talking about probably one of your favorite topics is capital deployment and your plans, I guess, for the next couple of years. You guys have been steadily returning over 100% of earnings for the last couple of years. You've now come out and said, "Hey, we've kind of had, there's $2 plus billion of excess capital." Now that you've quantified that and actually said, "Okay, it's actually $2 billion of deployable capital." Which again feels like you should be returning, I guess, at least as much over the next few years as you've done in the last couple of years. Help us understand, I guess, the pace of that excess deployment in 2013 and 2014.
Well, let me start and Walter can complement my comments. What I would say is that we feel very comfortable saying to you that we would be looking to deploy a consistent level of that capital. Again, we will gear it based on circumstances. As an example, we already said to you, we're looking to return 90% to 100% of our current earnings. We feel we're very able to continue to do that based upon the cash flow. Based on the shift in mix of our business or our businesses aren't requiring that we need more of that earnings for capital build. In fact, we continue to free up a bit more capital.
As we exited the bank, even though that may have a little bit of a hit to us in some of the earnings, it frees us up about $400 million of additional capital that we're also looking to return to you, the shareholder, next year. That's on top of the 100% earnings. As we continue to look to the future, we do believe as we generate it, unless we use some of that capital for incremental, what I would call acquisitions beyond the organic. Again, we have a very clear criteria of what we look for there. We're not going to freely spend the money because we have it. We will look to probably, if we don't find things good and appropriate, even look over time to put that increased level of return to you over the next number of years.
The mix you might ask as the second question between buyback and dividends is, we continue to increase our dividends. We'll look to continue to do that. Of course, we always ask our shareholders what's better for you based on the circumstances. We'll have to look at the tax picture and other things. Having said that, we would like dividends to be a reasonable part of our return to you and have the dividend picture continue to look to grow. That's sort of our philosophy to begin with. The long answer to your quick question was yes. Walter.
The only thing I'll add to that is certainly when we evaluate the $2 billion deployable capital, it is looked over multiple scenarios and over multiple years as we look through different product and elements to really give us that capability to look on that time horizon. Obviously, if things dramatically change, we indicated that certainly within reasonable stress situations, the $400 million to $600 million we talked about at the FAD would certainly be able to deal with the change. That's why it is deployable from that standpoint. We feel confident in that.
Question.
Going back to capital deployment, also taking, I guess, from a little bit of a different angle. You laid out consistently your ROE targets, feels like if you deploy all the excess capital we have, you'll be well north of the sort of 18% that you kind of historically set as the upper bound. Is that the right way to think about the business that even in today's environment where things are not really firing on all cylinders from the revenue perspective, the real normalized ROE here is really closer to 20%?
Yeah. I think very clearly we brought ourselves to a stage that even in a tough environment, which we are. I mean, interest rates are all-time low. We're not earning a lot from our spread business or even our cash business in the advice and wealth management business. Clearly, we set the 15%-18% target just based on the current environment and the idea that we will deploy over time. We do feel very comfortable with that. Now, if we accelerated that deployment, yes, it would raise it above it. As we think we will get above the 18%, even by maintaining a reasonable capital cushion that would guard our flanks in case of any economic scenario in the future, as well as having some flexibility that we would use cash for potential acquisitions.
The combination of that is, what I would say is that we can get to a nice high teens return in a normalized way, keeping a nice conservative or reasonable posture that gives us opportunities. If we would accelerate that, you're correct that the mix of businesses, the return on those businesses are giving us the ability to get to that higher end over the near future.
Okay. I guess, question.
You talked a little bit about how maybe some investors are starting to rebalance back into equities. We definitely have seen that rotation yet. Are you seeing that from one of the biggest, you know, defensive or passive? Are you concerned about that, when the rotation back into equities comes, a lot of flows will come onto the passive side?
We haven't. There is a bit of a shift to passive, but we have not seen that aggressive move in our business to passive. There are certain people that build some of their portfolios based upon using a bit more passive in the mix. Our advisors over the years have been so well-versed in looking at various active understanding, the various schemes for them, and using that in their own portfolio creation, that they are still going. Yes, there may be the idea that they shift a little more or in certain categories of alternative, in thinking about some of the things in certain countries or various things that they want to complement. It's not necessarily that they're building real passive portfolios around all ETFs. Will there always be some shift over time?
The answer is yes, and I think we're seeing that, but we don't see it as a radical move for us.
Okay. I guess the last one for me. You guys expressed a number of times, somewhat of a frustration with the multiple and the fact that the market doesn't necessarily fully reflect the, call it, the sum of the parts value. Again, not a huge fan of sum of the parts argument for financials most of the time. I guess the question is, if you do everything you're saying you're going to do, and the business is, to your point, 60%-70% as a management and wealth management, and you still trade at 8-9 times earnings, and I know you guys put out some slides and did your own math around that. Help us understand, I guess, your willingness to make it more of an aggressive move to really unlock some shareholder value.
From a, I guess, technical perspective, what kind of earnings implication or capital implication you will have, because clearly the insurance business and annuity business is somewhat intertwined with the advice business.
Let me answer.
I don't know if one minute is enough for that.
Yeah. Let me answer the first part of the question, Walter, and then answer the second part. Let me clearly say to you this. We try to present to you how we think of the business, why we can generate excellent returns, why we actually have very competitive positionings, including on margins against the industry. In the end, I think people over time will realize what that is, as you continue to see that this is one of the few companies that you're going to be able to see a high ROE coming out of. You're going to see a consistent study of the free cash flow, the ability for us to return to you in areas that we can grow in. I think it's just a matter of time. We've just tried to identify that for people who may not understand the business as fully.
We always know that there might be a little bit of that overhang out there from what people expect that are in people's books in the insurance annuities. In our case, we don't have that concern. These are our clients built over many years. We've shown you what we can handle through a real economic severe downturn. We show you what we even keep on a contingent side. We don't have that. If we actually thought of that, we would take more aggressive action to either close down those books, move more to outside third parties, put more of that product, and move that, shift that volume. We don't see it. We see we can generate very good returns from that, and we do. We also have the ability as we ramp up and continue to develop our direct P&C business. Yeah, that's a business that we like.
It's excellent. We think we can get some diversity of earnings, and we can scale it up to create more shareholder value. That has an opportunity for us if we thought about that for the future. I don't think we're at that point. I really do believe people will realize it once they compare. One of the things we did by even freeing up the bank is the idea that we're not going to be under these significant greater capital requirements that even others who have banking institutions, that even thought of their wealth management will. I would just say, I think we're in a good position. I think over time it will be recognized. Having said that, we're not opposed to look at things that would accelerate that if we needed to.
As long as we can generate good growth, good returns with a shifting mix, I think you're going to see a complement. I would just ask you, we put one slide together to look at our EPS growth, our volatility, and to look at that against each segment, asset management, broker-dealers, insurance and annuities, and consolidated. I think you'll find on both sides we've come out ahead. As long as we can do that, I'm not sure. You can always think about where you would like to invest, but I think this is one of the unique retail financial firms that has one of the largest financial networks, and is really set up to help people in retirement.
Great.
The only thing we got, I'll just say from the standpoint, it does add shareholder value to this, and you really have to look at what we've been saying, and I think we've proven the point on the underlying fundamentals of the asset quality, the hedging, and the product features and development that we have there that really does generate the sort of returns that should create shareholder value.