Which trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol BENF. It's on a mission to democratize the global alternative asset investment market by providing traditionally underserved investors and general partners seeking exit options, anchor commitments, and value-added services for their funds with solutions that could help them unlock the value in their alternative assets. Happy to welcome its CEO, Brad Heppner. Welcome back, Brad. What's your update today?
Thank you, Anna, and I want to thank everyone for joining us today. We announced last week our fiscal third quarter results. Beneficient has earned $10.30 of basic earnings and $0.12 of fully diluted earnings per common share through our nine months ended December 31, 2024. I'd like to share a few highlights of Beneficient's continued development as an innovator and a disruptor in our liquidity and primary capital markets for alternative assets. Simply put, when you invest in Beneficient, you're investing in our business that generates revenue from both the service fees we provide to trusts that are invested in diversified portfolios of alternative assets, as well as the actual performance of some of the most exciting names in private equity. These trusts are created when Beneficient provides fiduciary products and services that deliver liquidity and primary capital for holders and managers of all types of alternative assets.
We principally target readily identifiable but underserved markets, such as an unmet demand for liquidity of over $60 billion annually for smaller investors and small institutions, and more than $100 billion annually in general partners seeking liquidity for their limited partners through restructurings and continuation vehicles in the secondary markets. Unfortunately, for these target markets, seeking liquidity through a traditional process is incredibly complex. It's expensive and it's time-consuming if liquidity can be found at all. Instead, our proprietary fintech platform called AltAccess provides a simple, expedient, and a cost-efficient online tool to complete these important transactions, all online in a matter of days to weeks if that's desired. In addition to demand for liquidity, PEI data shows that it has been taking an average of 18 months for general partners to raise new private equity funds, almost double what it took them just three years ago.
We believe we now have a solution for that need as well. While those lines have produced a profitable nine months for Ben year to date, we want to accelerate and expand our capabilities going forward, especially in emerging new digital asset markets. In November, we announced the addition of Karen Wendel to our board of directors. She currently serves as the President and CEO of tokenization, blockchain, and cybersecurity advisory firm Trust Chains. Karen has brought deep experience in digital asset markets, technology M&A, cybersecurity, corporate governance, and the emerging blockchain and DeFi space to Beneficient. In December, we announced that Ben entered into an agreement to acquire Mercantile Bank International Corporation, subject to certain closing conditions, and the hiring of Louise Jones as Managing Director of capital markets and custody operations for Ben.
Now, Louise's career on Wall Street spans four decades, including being the youngest woman to hold a seat as a member of the New York Stock Exchange. She will manage our integration of Mercantile Bank International Corporation. She'll spearhead Ben's capital market activities and oversee expansion of the company's fee-based alternative asset custody business, including the launch of a new depository receipt companion line. How do all these pieces fit together? Mercantile Bank International Corporation is an international financial entity, or an IFE. It's based in Puerto Rico, which is a leading jurisdiction, working with regulators to provide expanded authorization for IFE banks to engage in activities such as asset management, clearing services, and digital asset market solutions, among other key areas. It is licensed, government-regulated, and it may provide specific banking and other financial activities for persons, entities, and organizations around the globe that are non-residents.
We believe this acquisition will enable us to offer an expanded range of companion custody, clearing, and control account fee-based services to complement our existing businesses on a much broader scale and generate additional cash flow in our near term. For example, we want to deliver additional custody services for international investors and digital asset investors. These are services that generally have a higher fee rate structure and the potential for higher margins than traditional custody services. We also believe the proposed acquisition of an IFE has the potential to enhance and broaden our current offerings to open new international opportunities for us. For example, an IFE's authorized activities may include custody, clearing, payments related to traditional and digital asset market products and services. As approved by regulators, IFEs can also offer traditional banking services such as correspondent deposit, lending, investments, and trusts.
We anticipate the proposed acquisition, if and when completed, would position Ben to offer alternative asset custody services that include, among other potential items, a companion line of business focused on issuing depository receipts to assist holders of foreign investments gaining access to the capital markets in international jurisdictions, which may yield higher fee assessments than more traditional custody offerings for Ben. Also in late December, as part of a separate transaction, we entered into an agreement to revise the liquidation priorities of a subsidiary of the company that we refer to as BCH. The goal is to, among other things, further enhance our current and future shareholder value, especially for Ben's public common stockholders, and to drive long-term growth at Ben. We anticipate this transaction will result in creating tangible book value attributable to Ben's public common stockholders and enhance long-term growth opportunities.
Additionally, we anticipate this transaction has the potential to be a catalyst for closing future liquidity transactions, and it demonstrates our commitment to delivering shareholder value. Also, during the fiscal third quarter, we continued to strengthen our capital structure. We increased our permanent equity by $35 million through a redesignation of certain preferred equity to permanent equity. Our originations team is now focused on progressing future prospective transactions, both our liquidity opportunities and primary capital solutions for alternative asset investors and the general partners who sponsor and manage those alternative assets. We look forward to building on this initial momentum through 2025 as we continue to evaluate additional opportunities that align with our strategic objectives. Anna, I'm available for any questions that you may have from viewers.
Wonderful, Brad. Yes, we do have some questions. Vincent wants to know, how are you locating the investors looking to liquidate? Is there a marketing strategy?
There is. We do an online media strategy with multiple different partners. We have a very integrated, using Salesforce approach to reaching out to thousands of potential investors and general partners through various media parties. We then are able to track who's reading those announcements in that marketing material, who's accessing our marketing material, and we're able then to follow up with communications with them. We have five different levels we call our funnel. Funnel has five different levels where we track our conversion from one level to another level of our marketing efforts. For example, our first communications that go out through our online objectives, we see and track who opens and who engages with links within those to learn more about our products. We then track who's responsive to us when we answer questions and so forth.
Then you move to levels where they are accessing AltAccess, setting up an account, and information is flowing back and forth. Our effort here at Ben is to improve our conversion ratios from one level to another level. It is real important that everybody that we approach remains in our funnel because initially they may not open an email, they may not click on a link, they may not engage with us. We continue to go back and approach them with other marketing materials, other strategies, and so forth, and we continue to broaden that funnel to include more and more parties. That conversion ratio at each one of those levels is very telling to us how successful our strategies are, which ones work and which ones need to be modified to work better.
Perfect. Milo wants to know, what are the logistics involved for an investor?
It's pretty simple. You can access us directly online at www.trustben.com. On there, you can learn about all of our solutions and services. You can go in and get a quick quote for what we would finance your asset for. It's a quick quote, a preliminary one, if it's attractive to you, either from our quick quote system called AltQuote. It's a branded system we programmed ourselves. It offers quotes on tens of thousands of different alternative asset investment funds with thousands of different managers that manage them. If you want to then take a step further, either through AltQuote online or directly from our website, you can access AltAccess. AltAccess is our branded proprietary online system.
You can set up an account, click through a couple of items, and share information with us, and we share information with you, all protected, all within a custody account, all regulated for confidentiality and non-disclosure. From there, we can get very precise on a value that we make a proposal to you through our AltAccess system. We can close a transaction online there. Again, it's a completely regulated, I often refer to it as an assembly line from beginning to end, very easy to access.
Wonderful. Brad, thank you so much. We have some more questions for you, but we're out of time. We'll send them to you so you can answer on your own. We appreciate you coming on for this update.
Okay. Thank you very much.
All right, everyone. We'll be.