All right, well, thanks, everybody. We're gonna, we're gonna get started with our next session. It's my pleasure to welcome Martin Small, CFO of BlackRock. Before becoming CFO earlier this year, Martin had been head of BlackRock's U.S. Wealth Advisory business, and prior to that, he also led U.S. and Canada iShares. So quite obviously extensive experience with the firm. As many of you know, BlackRock, with $9 trillion in assets under management, is the largest and most diversified global asset manager that we cover, with best-in-class organic growth, supported by a leading position in ETFs, growing footprint in private markets and multi-asset, markets as well. With many, interesting dynamics in the marketplace, we're definitely looking forward to getting your perspective, given BlackRock's, breadth and depth across, different markets and regions.
Thank you for being here.
Thanks, Alex. Great to be here. Hope everybody is doing well. Every time I see you, I feel better about myself.
Well, there's no need to even have this conversation.
That's good.
There we go.
Well done.
Well, look, thank you again for being here. I know it's your first one with us, but BlackRock's clearly not new news to the conference, so looking forward to establishing a tradition here with you as well, for years to come.
Perfect.
So look, let's start with a question on asset allocation. It's definitely top of mind for folks, given the time of the year. And if you were to summarize, I guess 2023, you know, not a huge surprise, a lot of money went into cash. Volatility in interest rates, volatility in markets just put a lot of folks, you know, over $1 trillion into money market funds, I think, or so, in 2023 alone. As we're starting to see some stability in the outlook for rates and maybe the economy generally, how are folks thinking about 2024, and we're actually gonna get to see some of that cash moving off the sidelines?
Absolutely. I have had just the best two weeks in the last two weeks. I've been out on the road seeing clients, consultants, institutional investors-
Great.
... financial advisors, wealth management platforms. Just yesterday, I was in Atlanta with 600+ of our retail sales force for their annual sales conference, getting geared up for next year. They do 150,000 portfolio consulting engagements a year, and getting the debrief on how clients are thinking about repositioning portfolios with that crew, I'll tell you, is some of the best on-the-ground intelligence you have about what's really happening in markets. And it's been a character-building and awe-inspiring time-
Right.
... for investors, right? These last two years have been absolutely incredible. Just the sheer monetary policy shock has upended 10 years of asset allocation practices and obviously created this incredible move and repositioning of portfolios into cash and money market funds at the expense of risk assets. But it's really profound. I mean, in 2022, U.S. money market flows were like negative.
Yep.
Right? It was actually, like, minus $20 billion, and this year we've had $700 billion-plus in the U.S., over $1 trillion globally.
Yep.
This is wholesale repositioning of how clients have been building portfolios. But what I'll tell you, in all these conversations that we have with clients and all the data I look at, at BlackRock, about how clients are building portfolios, I always pay attention to two things, one of which is what's happening with the stock of those portfolios and what's happening with the flow.
Mm-hmm.
And by stock, I mean, where are clients making wholesale asset allocation changes? And the flows, where are they putting that marginal dollar?
Mm-hmm.
And I see big shifts, starting on both. The second thing that I listen for is: Is BlackRock really well-positioned? Because we wanna be a structural grower, right? We wanna be a structural grower in how we're serving those portfolios with excellence. Is BlackRock really well-positioned when it comes to those wholesale changes to the stock, as well as the moves that clients are making with the flow? And I come away from those conversations, with a lot of energy about why BlackRock is a structural grower in those markets. And I'll tell you, you start to see it. We've been laying the groundwork on a lot of the calls at earnings about what do we have to see in markets to see things re-risk, right?
Yep.
We talked about a Fed pause. We talked about having to see more certainty in the term structure, in the shape of the curve. We started talking about seeing inflation data cool a little bit. All those things have been happening, and you've seen a decidedly more positive tone, and sentiment in markets, that I'm very optimistic will, will carry into 2024. We see it in some of the flows data for Q4. Through the end of November, we've had about $54 billion of inflows into iShares ETFs, pretty much evenly split, between core equities and bonds. And we've seen some good firming up, in precision ETFs that are positive to the tune of about $8 billion also-
Mm.
... which tells you something not just about the seasonality of those flows, but investors having a more positive sentiment in terms of where they're moving from cash, and into risk assets. We've seen these periods at BlackRock before. We saw them in 2016, we saw them in 2018, and some of our best periods in terms of organic growth, in terms of organic asset growth and organic base fee growth, followed those softer periods in terms of re-risking portfolios. The last thing I'd say is just I have a lot of confidence coming out of those conversations that we have the right structural growers.
Mm-hmm.
These times where people wholesale change the way they build portfolios, that's when there's big changes. The deferred maintenance that they haven't done, that's when that, sort of entrenched large cap growth fund that they held forever-
Yeah
... gets re-put into an ETF. That's when they move their portfolio from brokerage to advisory because the tax bill, is smaller. That's when they start building the portfolio of the future that has public and private markets and is digitally enabled. So we view these times as, as big catalysts, and we wanna make sure that, we're a structural grower in them with all the capabilities we have, and, and I think that's starting to come to fruition.
Great. Well, let's unpack that a little bit more. I think the one asset class that probably gathers the most attention is fixed income. Given where yields are today, it feels like a no-brainer, right? Like, if you kind of think about the direction of the interest rate environment, the structure of the yield curve, it feels like there should be a lot more money going into fixed income. That hasn't happened for the ballpark of this year.
Mm.
... and whatever did happen, really largely gone into ETFs.
Yeah.
As you look out into 2024, is this sort of the moment where we'll-
Yeah.
... see this bigger wholesale, the way you described it, rotation? And how do you think about the relative position of BlackRock's active business versus your ETF and the index business? 'Cause-
Yeah.
... it feels like the index business is the net winner-
Mm.
... but is it a big enough winner to upset any of the challenges on the active side?
Yeah. I feel like if I had a dollar for every asset manager that had some sort of bonds are back campaign going on-
Yeah.
... I'd be on a yacht. But I'm not. Listen, I've spent my whole career hanging around fixed income portfolios, particularly in jobs before this one. Clients historically own fixed income for three reasons: they own it for safety and surety of principal, they own it for diversification of their equities, and they own it for predictable, you know, coupon income. We've had a 15-year period, generally, where bonds didn't do a great job or weren't really relevant at the bottom for safety and surety of principal. They didn't diversify equities. Who cares?
Mm-hmm.
Equities were doing great, and so everybody moved their portfolios into credit-sensitive, higher-yielding things in order to clip coupons that were higher than the ag.
Yeah.
The whole market went there. This correction of the last two years, where we knew, everybody in this room knew that interest rates eventually had to go up.
Yeah.
I'm not sure we all knew that they would go up with the velocity and ferocity with which they went up.
Right.
But everybody knew they had to go up eventually, and that we would be seeing portfolios lose a significant amount of value. And I think that was a real shock for clients. They went back into cash, as you said, and now, as we again, we start to see a rate pause, some stability in the trajectory of monetary policy, in the shape of the curve, we're starting to see signs that clients are building portfolios in a more normal fixed income way. So we're starting to see that rotation happen.
If you look at the iShares corporate credit ETF, LQD, it's actually had $10+ billion kind of come in tending to this quarter through November, tending to suggest to me a little bit that we're starting to see some of that build in a normal way. I also think that clients kind of look at where, say, the 10-year treasury is, near long-term averages, 4.25, 4.5, and saying, "This feels like a sensible time to be restoring my portfolio to a more normalized duration-
Mm-hmm.
... for purposes of restoring that, diversification of equities and safety and surety of principle." And this is also the historical pattern of our industry. When we've seen these shocks in monetary policy, we saw it right in 2013, we saw it also in 2019 a little bit with the pause. After the pause, we tend to see flows really come back. And to your question, Alex, the shape of that has historically come back pretty even between active and index-
Yeah.
... when you actually look at the flows. I'm not sure that's totally intuitive to everybody, but it's actually come back in a pretty balanced way. My own sense is just structurally, with what's happened in wealth management, the move from brokerage to advisory, the move to more clean share classes, there's still a great opportunity for active there. But I think structurally, it'll be a little bit more geared towards index and ETFs than it is towards fixed income. But remember, there's still great fixed income active solutions there, and fixed income SMA, and unconstrained bond in all kinds of categories. We have $1 trillion of active fixed income-
Yeah.
... at BlackRock. We think we're really well positioned to capture it. And to be honest, we have opportunities to serve clients that want to use active fixed income or index fixed income. Some of the most interesting portfolio conversations are allocators who are putting together things like the AGG with our active ETF BINC. That's an income solution so that they have that stability and diversification of equities, but they've got the income sleeve professionally managed. So I see big opportunities for that in terms of fixed income risks. But I still think there's a cautious element to it. We need to see rates stabilize.
Yeah.
We need to know that they're going to stop. We need to see the term structure take shape. But to me, this is in line with all the milestones that we laid that have to happen in order to really see those flows come back.
Do you get a sense that clients that are looking to remain active in fixed income are likely to do that in more sort of credit-centric products, and the more kind of beta products will go with ETF? So I'm trying to draw a parallel to equities, and maybe that's a different market, so maybe things will unfold ultimately differently.
Mm-hmm.
But is it a fair, kind of assumption to make, or do you think, you know, active business is just going to continue to be much broader than just kind of credit selection?
I think it's going to be much broader and more diversified-
Yeah.
... than that. I don't think it's going to look like equities. I mean, fixed income is different.
Yeah.
And so I think you're actually likely to see more of the mixing and matching, but it really depends. You know, I think that there are asset allocators that view their their view as being at using ETFs to take positions in tactical asset allocation. Should I be at the two-year point, at the five-year point, and they use ETFs as tools? We've seen just proliferations of model portfolios that are using basically ETFs as tactical asset allocation in term... The equity market took on a very defined kind of style box methodology-
Mm-hmm.
... whereas fixed income, I think, is, in some sense, in some ways, a little simpler.
Yeah.
It's kind of, you know, interest rate risk and, and spread risk.
Got it. All right. All right, another maybe top of the house question for you, and then we'll kind of dig into individual products.
Yeah.
But let's talk about expenses and margins for a minute. You know, we've heard from BlackRock over the years, obviously, that the firm will continue to invest through the cycle. At your Investor Day earlier this year, you've outlined sort of a framework around it. You're looking to make expenses perhaps a little bit more variable in nature and drive more operating leverage off of your fixed cost base, but at the same time, you need to invest in the business to kind of maintain-
I appreciate how much you listen. It's really exciting.
You know, those, those things you hear them, they stick. It's funny. But what does it mean ultimately for Q4 expenses as we sort of re-wrap up the year-
Mm-hmm
... and more importantly, 2024, any outlook on expense growth or margins that you could share?
Sure. So the first thing I'd say is, you know, the, the algorithm for shareholder value at BlackRock really is about driving, you know, premium organic growth, delivering operating leverage, and, consistent capital management policy, over time. And I think if I were to sit with any one of our long-term shareholders, they would tell us, over the long term, they prefer a point of organic growth, rather than a point of margin.
Right.
But all of that in the context of, you know, we've delivered a premium operating margin. We've made consistent investments in scaling our platform. We have the ability to add large volumes of assets without commensurately growing the expense base, and that has become a real advantage to us over time. In particular, we're in public markets. AUM does not necessarily equal scale, or the ability to drive operating leverage, so we think that's a real differentiator at BlackRock. We want to keep investing in our business precisely to deliver on all these structural growers, whether that's outsourcing, model portfolios, ETFs, Aladdin, technology, our private markets business. We see those as structural growth themes, so we need BlackRock to be in a market-leading position in all of them.
But we're really mindful of making sure that we're driving profitable growth, and so we've been thinking about how to do that, particularly in an environment where beta has been a little less friendly over the last two years, and rates are going to be higher for longer, which is what the Fed has told us. We think we have a couple of levers to pull there. The first is making more concentrated investments for growth. We have less of a risk tolerance for investing our money at times when the markets are a little less friendly.
Yeah.
We want to invest in things that we know are going to deliver organic growth or have the highest probability of delivering organic growth or creating the most efficiency. The second is variabilizing more of the expense base, where we can. Broad side of the barn, we have about $11 billion of total annual operating expenses at BlackRock. $4 billion or so of those are variable, truly variable, and $7 billion are more towards fixed. I think in there, there's some opportunity for us to variabilize more expenses where it can, but most importantly is to drive more fixed cost scale. We've made huge strides on that over the years, which is one of the reasons that we have a premium operating margin.
But that's our footprinting, that's our technology, that's our organizational design, such that we can grow revenue and grow revenues and assets, in a way that that continue to create operating leverage. In Q4, that's when we finalize comp, right?
Mm-hmm.
And in years where markets are a little bit softer, we would expect to run higher comp to revenue ratios in Q4. And in years where markets are more stable or accommodating, we would expect to see more operating leverage in our comp to revenue ratio. Of the $11 billion we have of total annual operating expenses, you know, people, our talent, they are fundamentally the most important thing that we invest in every year. This is a business where driving innovation, managing portfolios, generating alpha, they're absolutely paramount, and it's a trust and relationships business.
Yeah.
And so taking care of our people, and we would expect fully this year, in a year where revenues are a little bit more flattish, that we'll be investing to reward, retain, recruit, and appropriately compensate, particularly our directors and managing directors, in our organization. We'll also be looking to reallocate resources, dynamically to the highest growth areas, and the like. I won't touch too much on the guidance exactly for 2024. We traditionally do that in January, on our call. But broadly speaking, I think the themes are the same. We're going to look to be making investments and keeping sort of controllable expenses to grow more in line with our organic growth potential.
Mm-hmm.
We're going to be looking to variabilize more of the expense base levers we have on that or distribution-oriented deals that we can do. It's certain types of compensation programs, but most importantly, we're going to be looking a lot at fixed cost scale. I think this is something we've done well at BlackRock. We have deep religion about how we organize ourselves, how we use technology to grow scale, but in particular, things like large language models and automation allow us to really scale the time, energy of our people such that we can drive more productivity gains into 2024 and beyond.
I got it. All right, let's talk about organic growth. So, it's still probably the number one metric that investors care about-
Mm-hmm.
Just thinking about BlackRock's organic base growth, which not surprisingly, aligns well with the investor conversation that you guys are having as well.
Yeah.
So, you sort of explained to the market how you get to that 5% organic base growth over time, and you've sort of highlighted the building blocks.
Yeah.
Obviously, the last kind of several quarters, the last year or so, have been tougher than that. You've been running closer to maybe flattish to that. And I guess the one of the big questions that I get from investors is: Can BlackRock get to those kind of organic growth rates without a more meaningful contribution from things like active equities-
Mm.
-or parts of the, you know, multi-asset strategies that have been struggling as well? How would you answer that? Are there enough building blocks in the ecosystem to still get you to five-
Yeah.
-even if active equities is going to continue to outflow?
Yeah. So, we have hit our 5% organic growth objective over the last five years. We've hit it in seven out of the last 10 years. And most importantly, I'd highlight that in the most challenging years, in twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen and twenty twenty-two, and even in the last 12 months, we've generated positive organic base fee growth, organic revenue growth, at a time when the industry has seen, obviously, a substantial amount of decay.
Sure.
Our objective is not to be, the fastest grower in any quarter, in any one year, but to deliver durable, less volatile, organic, revenue growth, through a cycle. We re-underwrite this target all the time, and keep coming up with 5% or better, in terms of where we think we are. Importantly, what I'd say is, the reason that we have conviction in the 5% target is because BlackRock is a structural growth firm.
Mm.
Like, our fortunes and our outcomes are not tied to the market. Most definitely, economic cycles will impact the velocity or the pace of change or the revenue growth in any one of these periods, but we don't feel like our fortunes, in terms of being able to hit 5% through a cycle, are tied to short-term market conditions. It's because we have these structural, durable growers. I know that model portfolios, powered by ETFs, are going to be much, much bigger in five years than they are today. I know the ETF market is going to be much bigger than it is today. I know private markets are going to be bigger than they are today. I know that clients are going to need more technology, not less technology.
I know that clients are going to need to tap into scale in a unique way that they haven't historically. I know that they're going to do business with fewer providers, not more providers. So those long-term, durable, inexorable, fundamental trends are the ones that we build our 5% organic revenue growth assumption on. So what I'd say a little bit is when we talk to clients about, you know, picking active managers or thinking how to build portfolios, I always talk to them a little bit about, like, upside and downside capture, right?
Mm-hmm.
And to me, when we talk about things like active equities, or we talk about liquid alts, places that have been big base fee growers in the industry, and in particular, BlackRock in the last several years, they have some degree of pro-cyclicality to them. We know that.
Yep.
You all know that. But to me, if you were to look at where has BlackRock been in terms of upside capture, like, our upside capture is really high on-
Mm.
... organic base fee growth in those years, where markets are really coming on strong. And actually, our ability to still drive positive organic revenue growth in markets that are weaker, or tepid, or even monumentally down, like in 2022, is also really strong on a relative basis. So, when I think about kind of our organic revenue growth target through the cycle, I also think about it just in terms of the upside/downside capture. Like, we have captured way more on the upside-
Yeah.
... than we have, and we've controlled, obviously, the downside really well. So, I think, again, it's 5% based on the structural growers we have, and I like having some of this pro-cyclicality in our revenue base. It's actually been an outsized contributor in really good years, and we hold a lot of that revenue, even if it might put a little volatility-
Yeah.
... on the top when markets come down. I, I like having that. I like that optionality, in terms of our growth path.
Yeah. Well, and we've seen that in 2020, 2021-
That's right.
... you know, with, like, nearly, you know, high single-digit organic growth, I guess, from, from, from some of these products. Okay. All right, so let's talk about ETFs. Clearly, it's the, you know, it's been the crown jewel. Many people would argue it's still probably one of the more valuable, more interesting parts of the business, one of the fastest-growing parts of the business, for sure. You've sort of maintained your leadership in fixed income ETFs, outside the U.S. You've also been doing great in Europe with that, with that footprint.
Mm.
As you look forward, what's the vision for ETF growth?
Yeah.
... from here, and especially when it comes to newer things, whether it's crypto or active ETFs? I've seen a couple filings from you guys on that front.
Mm.
Should we expect more sort of innovation in the iShares suite over the next couple of years as well?
Absolutely. There's no question, this is a durable growth market. The exchange-traded funds market will be much bigger. We have forecasts of the ETF market being a $25 trillion market by 2030, with $19 trillion of equities, $6 trillion of fixed income ETFs, and we're in a market-leading position. We have 1,400+ ETFs. We have the broadest lineup by any metric, whether that's by style, whether that's by asset class, and our footprint is global, in particular, with two very scaled product lines in the United States and in EMEA. What's interesting to me in the last year has been that the ETF market is showing a lot of resilience even against some softer flows.
Like, gross sales and mutual funds, if you look at the Broadridge data, the ICI data, the EPFR data, gross sales and mutual funds are off $1 trillion this year relative to the last five years.
Mm.
ETF flows are going to be... You know, ETF flows are about $800 billion globally. They're down 1% kind of year-on-year.
Mm.
So continuing to show a lot of resilience. Again, they're structural growers. We have a market-leading position in a structural growth market. But what I would sort of look at as the hallmark of the two things going forward, they're gonna propel outsized growth for BlackRock. There's a general bucket that's about innovation and growth, and then there's Europe.
Yeah.
That's my second bucket. And in the first bucket, I look at things like active ETFs. As you said, Alex, we've launched, you know, 18 active ETFs this year across option-based strategies. They've been some of the fastest ETFs to get to $1 billion in the history of the industry. We've launched active ETFs on the back of some of our highest-profile portfolio managers, like Rick Rieder.
Yep.
Our income series, BINC. We've done the same in large cap equities. We've done BuyW rite strategies in fixed income that have been really interesting and unique. So I think we have a lot of runway to continue to innovate. And what's interesting is clients—you know, clients expect, at this point, everything to be ETF'd.
Mm.
They expect to be able to use the ETF wrapper to access any style, any asset class around the world, so we think we have a lot of room to grow on innovation. The second is Europe. It's really staggering. ETF flows, as I mentioned globally, are pretty much flat year to date, but the U.S. is off about 20%, and Europe is up 70% year-over-year. And I want you to think about this: A huge ETF market has been built in the United States on the back of a national exchange system, an NBBO market-
Yeah
... you know, a set of established market makers, exchange—I mean, real exchange trading. Europe has built a $2 trillion ETF market with no national best bid, best offer system, a relatively fragmented capital markets ecosystem. But the direction of travel is actually to replicate more capital-modern capital market structure. So just think, they built a $2 trillion market, without all of those benefits of a single market system.
Mm.
I really think the growth opportunities in Europe are incredible for the ETF market. The growth of DPM platforms and fee-based advisory, all the same trends we saw in the United States, model portfolios are taking root in the European market. And for us, that's a market where we've been running at 45%-50% market share this year. And it's one where the competitive landscape is different in terms of the direct-to-consumer players not really being present-
Right
... in those marketplaces. So I think it's a great strategic advantage for us, and that's the path to me as to how we've propelled outsized growth. You mentioned crypto. We have a filing, so-
Yeah
... I can say we have a filing, and that's-
Got it
... about as much as I'm allowed to say.
Right. Right. Fair enough. All right, let's talk about private markets for a second. That's another one of the kind of key strategic pillars of your growth. And I think at the Investor Day, you laid out a target to double your private markets revenues in five years. Areas like global energy transition and retail holds are two really important subcomponents to that. So maybe we can talk a little bit about both. Obviously, there was a nice announcement out of the UAE. I think it was last week. You guys are in the mix of getting some of that capital allocation. So talk to us about what you do to build bigger footprint in private markets, particularly across those two markets.
Yeah. So as I mentioned, Alex, you know, everything we aim to do strategically is rooted in, one, wanting to be a structural grower, and two, wanting to be incredibly relevant in serving whole portfolios. I think it's absolutely remarkable. I mean, I've been working at BlackRock since I was a baby. And in all those times, it's hard to believe how much clients have grown their private markets portfolios. We would see the leading sovereign investors in the world maybe have 5%-10% allocations in private markets. Many of them are now at 50%-
Mm-hmm.
... footprints in private markets. And we have been driving our business to meet all those clients, I think where they are, and importantly, where they're going. So our acquisition of eFront in that space was to have Aladdin be a whole portfolio system that covered public markets and private markets in an integrated view. We've done a substantial amount of inorganic activity over the last decade to build out private markets capabilities across private credit, private equity solutions, infrastructure equity, real estate, and the like, and we have $160 billion of illiquid AUM spread across those asset classes. That, as we mentioned in Investor Day, we're looking to double the revenues in that business over the next five years. And I think all the secular trends are there.
But the place where I really think BlackRock is an N of one, like, as a sample set of one, is we're one of the few firms. Sorry, we're the only firm. That's what it means to be a sample set of one. We're the only one.
Yeah.
My statistics just got com-
Yeah.
... terrible, right? We're an N of one, right? We're the only firm that really has, I think, relationships with finance ministries, ministries of the interior, long-dated sovereign wealth investors, and bringing this sort of public and private entities together to do outsized, incredible, ambitious, infrastructure projects. And I think it's a place where we can really log differentiated growth. And the announcement that you just referenced out of the UAE with the-
Mm-hmm.
... Alterra, kind of energy transitions and climate finance partnership funds, you know, there's a $2 billion allocation, to BlackRock private markets, in these areas where we have differentiated capabilities. But importantly, I think our ability to originate transactions that are really different, that come from this, incredible position of, of service and trust, working with public and private institutions together-
Mm-hmm.
... I, I think it's a real differentiator in who we are, what we do, and how we can grow, and you've seen it with Akaysha Energy. We did it in New Zealand in building a climate finance partnership there. Our Decarbonization Partners joint venture has raised $1 billion for a first-time fund, which is pretty incredible. So this is a place where we see great momentum, and I really think there's outsized potential for growth for BlackRock.
Great. All right, let's shift gears entirely. Let's talk about tech services. It's again, an important area of growth for you guys. In the last year, you've been doing kind of back to the low double-digit growth.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's the guidance for 2023, you know, up of a, you know, I guess, higher than that in 2022. As you look forward, what is the expectation for that business? And again, similar to the way we talked about private markets, what are the key kind of pillars that you expect to support that growth?
Yeah. So, we have a $1.5 billion tech services business, you know, a revenue business at BlackRock. There aren't a lot of technology businesses that get to $1 billion of revenue, period. And so for us, this has been a key grower, a key part of the technology that powers BlackRock, but also powers, you know, many of our clients. And the trends for having integrated portfolio management, risk analytics, data insights, whole portfolio views, we see those, again, as structural growth trends, sort of durable, inexorable, fundamental ways that clients want to run their businesses, moving from sort of a patchwork of spaghetti legacy systems.
Yeah.
... into one integrated system with gold copy data. And also one that, as we talked about in Investor Days, has these platform, network, you know, positive network effects. The more people that you're using Aladdin, the better the quality of the data. The more people that are using the functionality, the better the functionality gets. And so we see, more and more, clients gravitating towards Aladdin. It's interesting, 2022 was actually, a record net sales year, for Aladdin, but we had some headwinds creep into the business that really came from the markets. A lot of the positions on Aladdin are fixed income.
Mm-hmm.
So, when you have a, obviously, a double-digit decline, you know, in the AUM, for example, we're gonna see some of that weigh on the revenues. And then we had some FX also for the non-U.S. dollar positions, that were on Aladdin. We continue to have a, a lot of conviction in our low to mid-teens ACV growth for the Aladdin business, over the next several years. And again, I think the growth engines are gonna come from kind of these whole portfolio views, of combining eFront and Aladdin capabilities. It'll come from a lot of the work that we've done in integrating Aladdin into the provider ecosystem, that we really think has great benefits, sort of win, win, win for the providers, custodians, clients, and BlackRock, in that triangle.
Then we've done a lot to open Aladdin with APIs, so that clients are getting more functionality out of it. We're forming more strategic partnerships that we can also monetize in growing the Aladdin base. But we still have a lot of conviction in our low- to mid-teens ACV growth for through Aladdin. And if anything, these markets where people feel the profound effects of what it means to have great risk analytics versus not-
Yeah.
... when all of a sudden, you have double-digit market declines, people remember they really need great systems and need great operations, great straight-through investment processing to run their businesses better, faster, cheaper, more nimbly, and tapping into scale. So we're seeing some of the best opportunities that we've had, and, currently, you know, we reaffirm our ability to grow at that, you know, mid- to low-teens, ... ACV.
Great, that makes sense. All right, last question for me. I want to pivot to M&A, not surprisingly, given Larry made a number of statements about-
Yeah.
having, you know, to do a potentially transformational-
Mm-hmm.
-deal. And I want to unpack that with you a little bit because BlackRock has clearly done a number of transformational deal in the past.
Mm-hmm.
iShares, MLIM, but the company is much bigger now. So the concept of transformational might mean slightly different things today than it did a decade ago.
Sure.
So, when you guys talk about a transformational deal, what do you mean?
Yeah. So, I think when I started at BlackRock, there were about 1,000 people, you know, $350 billion of assets or something like that, and I thought the firm was huge.
Right.
And so, I've really had, I think, kind of the perspective of sitting through time and watching the firm grow. We've grown organically, I think, in a way that is very compelling. Our ability, as I said, to kind of invest in the platform, technology, people, capabilities. We've grown well organically. I think we've spent our investment dollar as well in growing the firm, but we've been a good acquirer.
Yeah.
We've been a good acquirer, and I think it's been a really key part of our story, whether it's, you know, State Street Research and Management in 2005-
Sure.
... Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in 2006, Quellos in 2007, obviously, BGI in 2009. During the BGI acquisition, I worked on this very small acquisition that was called Helix. A company we bought for a single-digit $ million. So there was a big deal going on-
Yeah.
... I worked on a small deal, at the time.
But then you got to run it, so-
Right, but I got to run it.
Yeah.
And also, actually, that acquisition birthed our innovation hub in Gurgaon, India. So, there were transformational impacts from a small dollar acquisition that really reshaped a lot of the workforce that we have at BlackRock. These acquisitions have been really key to building a best-of-breed firm. And our view is we need to keep doing them. We need to grow organically, but we also need to grow inorganically. And our philosophy for growing organically... inorganically, is it's all about growth, right? We're doing acquisitions to get new capabilities or to de-risk the capabilities that we're building. We're doing acquisitions because we want to serve clients in a way that we can't, or maybe get to markets that would take us too long to get to without an acquisition, so for example, regional plays.
Most importantly, we've never done acquisitions with an idea of we're trying to consolidate or cut costs.
Mm-hmm.
The reason for that is, I said earlier, AUM does not equal scale in public markets. And so simply putting two firms together and ripping out costs doesn't actually have a growth vector in our minds, in that, what's in it for clients? It's not clear what's in it for clients. Whereas when we've done acquisitions like Aperio in after-tax direct indexing-
Sure.
... or eFront, we know what's in it for clients. It allows clients to grow faster. So as we think about transformational for us, I think really means two things. And the first of them is transformational in capabilities, in our abilities to serve the whole portfolio, and in our ability to deliver something to clients that we weren't able to deliver before or deliver it in a more scaled way. The second thing is transformational in terms of financial impact, meaning earnings acceleration, earnings growth, or earnings diversification. When we can get an acquisition to do both, we think it's really great.
Mm-hmm.
But for us, we think about the acquisitions across those two dimensions: transformational in terms of capabilities, and long-term growth, and transformational in terms of earnings acceleration, diversification, and the like. So if we can find things that are out on the top right, in terms of earnings growth and transformative capabilities, you know, that's the sweet spot for us. We see those opportunities in private markets, where we think we are growing really well organically, have an ambition to double the revenues on the assets that we have today. But we think that inorganically in infrastructure, private credit, and potentially some other parts of private markets are attractive. Technology, expanding the total addressable market in which our Aladdin business operates, we think would be attractive, but also regional plays.
We did a joint venture in India recently, which is a way of expanding into new markets as well. So, we're really looking at all those options, and if anything, I think we've been a good acquirer. It's an important part of our story. And, you know, obviously, Larry is energized by it, as is the whole team.
Yeah. Well, we're looking forward to see what that might or may not end up being, so appreciate you being here.
Terrific. Thank you.
Thanks, Marty.