Okay. So we'll get started in the interest of time. Thank you, everybody. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. It is my pleasure to introduce Martin Small, CFO of BlackRock, the largest global asset manager with over $11 trillion in assets under management. BlackRock has had an incredibly busy year, to say the least, announcing three large acquisitions, nearly $30 billion within private markets, including leading infrastructure asset, GIP, which recently closed a major data provider, Preqin, and, of course, most recently, HPS, a premier credit manager in the space as well. In addition to that, the firm continues to grow organically very well. It's great to see you guys back at sort of the 5% organic base fee growth that we talked about. So plenty to cover, and we're two minutes behind, so let's just jump right into it. So great to see you. Thank you for being here.
Good to see you. Thanks, everybody. I hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday and a round of applause for Alex for running up and down the stairs a lot today. So congratulations.
Just got to get my steps in. Well, look, so let's talk about organic base fee growth. It's an important metric for you guys. It's obviously a critical metric for the market and investors as they evaluate BlackRock. From the public data, it looks like Q4 is off to kind of continued momentum, and you talked about being sort of closer to this sort of 5% organic base fee growth in the third quarter. How are you thinking about that for 2025? And that's without the recent deals, of course, we'll get to that in a minute.
Yeah. So I just celebrated my 18th anniversary at BlackRock in September, which is pretty exciting. And I would say I've had the opportunity to work with clients at the intersection of kind of capital markets, balance sheet, regulation, risk management, technology for the better part. And this is one of the most, I think, exciting and dynamic markets I've ever seen. I feel a little bit like that '80s cassette commercial for Maxell. It's like I lean back and just that's what it feels like. I think that's what it feels like when you're sitting at so many of our clients. And that's just a great market for an integrated whole portfolio provider where clients are looking for that advice. Our organic growth momentum is really, really excellent with clients. It's broad across institutional wealth and our technology business.
We've been talking all year long about how organic growth has been improving and grinding up, I think, along with improved client sentiment overall. And in the third quarter, as you mentioned, we really had one of the best quarters we've ever had in our history, over $220 billion of flows at target 5% organic growth. AUM, which for us is a real barometer of client trust, it's a barometer of business momentum. AUM finished at $11.5 trillion spot in Q3. That's up 26% year on year. And obviously, the markets have continued to improve after that, which has been good for business. iShares' first nine months of the year, $250 billion of flows, $100 billion in the third quarter. Last I checked the public flows data, another $100 billion so far this quarter. iShares seasonally tends to see about 40% of its flows in Q4.
So that really, I think, lends to a good optimistic finish to the year here for BlackRock, along with good improving market sentiment. Looking out into 2025, this is not a normal business cycle. This is not a normal business cycle. The promise of GenAI, I think, has been a major disruptor and mover in markets. Inflation has fallen without a growth slowdown. All of the traditional recession signals somehow didn't really pan out. I think there's lots of positive client sentiment post the U.S. election. And so I think even modest rate cuts are going to fuel a very healthy amount of investor risking. And that gives us a lot of confidence going into 2025 for our organic base fee growth targets.
That, coupled with having made two large moves in the private markets, closing Global Infrastructure Partners on October 1st, we should be in good shape to close the HPS transaction by mid-year 2025. That puts us in the fastest flowing rivers of infrastructure and private credit, which we think gives us positive leverage in the base fee rate. And I'd just say BlackRock has consistently been an outperformer on organic growth in these periods of immense investor risking, especially around elections and rate cuts. So if you look at some of our biggest years on organic growth where we've hit high single digits or even low double digits, they've been around these cycles of elections, 2017, 2020, 2021, rate cuts. That's been a time when BlackRock has huge upside capture. So we have a lot of optimism going into 2025.
Great. Let's dig into some of these for a few minutes. So fixed income is definitely top of mind. I mean, it's something that I feel like you guys get asked about on every earnings call. And it's been a little bit of like kind of waiting for Godot, right? Like there's a lot of cash on the sidelines. There's still a lot of cash on the sidelines. And when is it finally going to make its fixed income? It feels like it's starting to happen.
Yeah.
So can you spend a couple of minutes on what the client sentiment is with respect to fixed income and really the forms of fixed income and where the activity is likely to unfold next year?
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things going on here. There's still enough political and economic uncertainty in the world that cash is an attractive safe haven for clients. Market expectations for rate cuts, I think, are kind of shallower and fewer, and then also the terminal rate, I think, relative to where we would have thought it was going to be a year ago, the terminal rate's higher, and then the last thing I'd say is I don't think, barring another pandemic or a real global catastrophe, I don't think we're going to see ZIRP and large-scale asset purchases and Twist anytime soon from central banks, so the totality of those factors, I think, have made money market fund balances stickier for sure. There's a tremendous amount of cash sitting in institutional cash funds, 2a-7 funds, lots of cash proxies.
I think that just cash will be a stickier part of more normalized client portfolio allocations. I'd flag two things, the first of which is for investors that track some kind of global blended benchmark, a traditional 60/40 kind of stock and bond benchmark. Those investors that are overweight cash are underperforming. That can only persist so long. I think that will fuel a healthy amount of risking into equities and into the private market. That fear of missing out, of trailing your benchmark, I think is contributing meaningfully to risking. The second thing is, while there hasn't been this floodgates of cash coming out of money market funds into fixed income, it is happening, right? At BlackRock, we're now at $3 trillion of assets in fixed income across the platform. That's been on 9% organic growth. It's on very healthy organic growth.
Bond ETFs and iShares have logged about $120 billion of organic flows through to the year here. We've seen very strong flows broadly across fixed income. So it's not the floodgates that have happened, but we definitely see more normalized allocations legging into fixed income. And I think with some modest rate cuts, I think you'll start to see investors begin to normalize those allocations. I'd expect that they'll favor kind of corporates over traditional government bonds a little bit more. I expect that we'll see a little bit more of a skew towards ETFs than traditional active. But if that's a 2/3, 1/3 , or a 50/50 on a fee rate basis, we're in a great place, I think, to capture either of those flows. And then I also think you're just going to see more private credit rather than taking all your fixed income risk in the public markets.
So those themes, again, we've tried to build around those themes where clients are going.
Great. Okay. I'm going to spend the next maybe 10 plus minutes or so on private markets. It's been, as I said, an incredibly busy year for you guys on the acquisition front. You talked about that being an important strategic area for growth as well. So let's kind of dig in here. First, let's touch on GIP. You guys closed this deal recently. Maybe give us an update on how integration is going so far. And level set for us your expectations for management fee growth in that business into 2025. What are kind of some of the key areas of growth for the next two years?
Yeah. So I think I'd start by just sort of reminding all of our friends and long-term shareholders and followers here that inorganic has always been a fundamental part of the BlackRock strategy. We've been able to build a lot of businesses organically, but inorganic has been an important lever for us to acquire new capabilities and grow. The criteria for doing anything inorganically has to come back to number one. There has to be a cultural fit. There has to be managerial bandwidth expansion. We have to acquire, I think, kind of people that are aligned to a one BlackRock culture and mission. The second is that the acquired business has to kind of enrich and extend the platform. So it's not just about new capabilities. It's about new capabilities that make the ones you have better.
I think you'll see thematically in every acquisition we've ever done, that's been the case. I was talking to Greg Weiss, who is here. We were talking about the SMA business a little bit. We acquired Aperio. It made our existing SMA platform better in the same way that the Global Infrastructure's transaction has strengthened the existing platform that we have in infrastructure. Second, the platform itself has to be credible. You've got to be a credible operator on a consolidated basis of these businesses. So being in them is an important, I think, proxy and license to acquire. We've been in all the businesses that we've acquired, whether it's private credit or infrastructure or SMAs or options or whatever we've done, technology and data in the last year. So culture, talent, enrich and extend, be a credible operator of the business.
It's got to be a value proposition for clients. GIP definitely fits the bill on all those things. We signed that transaction and announced it on January 12th. We closed it on October 1st. We consolidated $116 billion of client AUM and expect 2025 to be about $1 billion of management base fees that we're adding to the business. What I'd say is in that signed to close period, you have so much work on integration, and we've done a lot of work there, people, platform, process. Think about all the pedestrian things of an employee experience. You got to be on the same email system. You got to make people's laptops work. You got to make their key cards work at the door. All of that's done. All of that's done so we can just get to business on realizing the synergies and delivering for clients.
I think we've had really excellent evidence that that's going well. So just as we were getting to the close, we announced this large-scale partnership around GenAI power and data centers with Abu Dhabi's MGX and Microsoft and BlackRock. To me, that was the ultimate, I think, endorsement of why BlackRock is kind of an N of one in doing these deals where you can bring together a large sovereign wealth fund, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Finance, nationwide governments across borders. That's where we should be.
Yeah.
That's where we should be playing. And obviously having Bayo Ogunles i and Raj Rao and Michael McGhee and the whole very, very talented team at GIP, it just really allowed us to extend and enrich the platform that we have to be able to do deals like that and raise capital around them. So we're really excited about it.
It's going very, very well. I think it would exceed everybody's expectations, but we have a lot to do in 2025. We've got an ambitious pipeline when it comes to transactions and when it comes to fundraising. So we're pretty excited about it.
Great. Well, you guys will stay busy with a couple of things because HPS is also on the come. So let's talk a little bit about that. Great platform gives you instant scale in private credit and really diversified part of private credit, right? It's not just direct lending. It's differentiated direct lending. It's asset-backed finance. It's a number of things of where the buck's going in the market. The two kind of growth lanes that really resonated with me and I think a lot of investors is what you guys could do together in insurance and wealth, right? So you talked about $700 billion of insurance capital you already manage. So what's the addressable market within your internal client base? How much of that could you cross-sell? How long would it take? And then what are you guys planning to do on the wealth side?
Right. So just through the lens again of the paradigm I laid out, why do we do deals? How do they fit in? Culture, talent, managerial bandwidth. I know many of you did testing the waters meetings with Scott Kapnick and Mike Patterson and Scot French and the team. This is an outstanding management team. They build for scale. I think they really pioneered these markets. They have fantastic client relationships. We all speak the same language. They're founders. Larry Fink, Rob Kapito are founders. We're client-centered firms. We believe in scale. We believe in global. Those synergies are really there when it comes to the team. Enrich and extend the existing platform. So there's new capabilities that come with this transaction. As you mentioned, HPS has been very active in kind of the upper middle market in terms of direct lending.
Yeah.
But also in junior capital solutions. Our teams have historically been active more in the middle market, kind of $75 million EBITDA borrower base, so there's an enrichment. I also think that'll strengthen origination, our ability to do more transactions, meet borrowers where they are, so enriching and extending the platform. We're a credible operator as a consolidated platform. We already had a $90 billion private credit business at BlackRock, we'll now have a $220 billion pro forma private credit business at BlackRock, so we'll be very scaled in that regard. I think if you were to unpack our underwrite in this transaction, you'd see that a disproportionate amount of the revenue synergies really come from the two things that you referenced, Alex, the first of which is insurance.
Yeah.
And if you ask me, this deal is a credit insurance and future fixed income portfolios deal. That's really what it is. So when it comes to insurance, BlackRock is already the largest insurance company general account manager in the world. We manage about $700 billion of insurance company core fixed income general account assets. This is a very specialized form of asset management. This isn't, give me a benchmark and I'll beat it. Show me the total returns. This is a highly consultative practice that involves scale, customization, managing portfolios for book yield, for risk, for other than temporary impairment. You got to understand that the portfolio is being held and available for sale accounting. So you can't just sell things that have been downgraded because there's P&L impact. You've got to think about the risk-based capital charge for the asset you're adding. And so this is a unique practice.
The clients want to consolidate that activity with a scale provider that really understands not just assets, but asset liability management, the intersection of capital management, as well as being able to improve book yield and ultimately have a conversation with the CFO about how this is going to impact earnings.
Right.
That practice, I'd say, is relatively unique. The opportunity that we've had at BlackRock is to help these clients take portions of their portfolio and substitute out what I'd say is traditional fixed income for private credit where they get, let's say, 50 to 250 basis points of yield pickup in high-grade assets relative to what they could find in the public market. 50 to 250 basis points of pickup on these portfolios is. That's a great CFO conversation.
Yeah, right.
So that's the mission. We managed $700 billion of assets there. I think is entirely plausible based on the client conversations we have inside of a near-term, near to intermediate term timeframe to convert 10% of those assets from core fixed income into private credit, which would be high-grade corporate and asset-backed lending. If you were to think about kind of the fee rates associated and what that means for BlackRock, if today kind of core fixed income insurance account GA is, let's say, a 10 basis point business, private credit's probably in the high-grade space of 30 to 50 basis point business. So there is anywhere from a three to five times pickup.
Yeah.
On the fee rate for us here. So we think that's an immense opportunity. I also think it's really attractive for all of the professionals at HPS because we're not going out to fundraise. All those assets are already managed at BlackRock in long-standing, deep trust-based relationships. So it's go, originate great transactions.
Yeah.
Structure them really well. If you're an investor, that's what you really like doing. I think that was a big draw for the team in coming to BlackRock. The same thing is true, I think, on the wealth side. For BlackRock, we have unbelievable relationships in U.S. and European wealth markets with private banks, with national wealth, full-service broker-dealers, independent broker-dealers. iShares has really helped build the RIA movement and the RIA community. We're the largest wholesaling team in the marketplace. We have great relationships. We're the biggest provider of model portfolios. We have $300 billion of managed account assets across model portfolios and SMAs. All of those are destinations for private markets portfolios, for private markets exposures.
We made an announcement about a model portfolio partnership with Partners Group that is about delivering integrated managed accounts for alts into advisor portfolios. HPS has had a tremendous amount of success with HLEND. It's non-traded BDC, largely in certain private banks. We'd love to bring that to the RIA market. We'd love to bring that to our strongholds and some of our very long-standing distribution relationships. We believe there's an opportunity to bring those to places where we also have strong relationships in Europe, in private banks, as well as in the emerging categories in the U.K., and on the continent of the long-term asset and long-term investment funds, LTIF, LTAF, which go into retirement plans. So private credit, I totally agree with our brethren at Apollo to talk about private credit and retirement portfolios.
I just believe it's going to happen way faster in Europe, like it's happening now in Europe, and we have a great, great set of relationships to do that. HPS will help turbocharge that.
How do you think their ability to originate into that, right? Because when I hear about hundreds of billions of dollars and taking a sliver of that, that's a lot of assets that could kind of come their way. Do they have enough capacity to originate the paper that actually is required to meet the requirements kind of of the client base you're going after?
Yeah. I think if anything, what Scott Kapnick and the team have done is to consistently widen the funnel on what they do. So if they started in junior capital and specialty direct lending, they were able to move the business out to core senior lending. They've moved the business out to high grade. They've moved the business out to real estate. They've made some, I think, really key initiatives around leasing platforms outside of the United States that I think will help with origination. And they have more ideas in store that I think will be even faster to market in a combined BlackRock-HPS.
I gotcha. Great. All right. Let's hit on the third leg of the stool here with Preqin. It's a slightly different transaction. It's obviously not an asset management transaction. It's a data deal that has a first-order impact on a lot in your technology business. But I do want to talk about implications this could have for BlackRock's asset management capabilities with respect to potential indexation and product creation that could come out down the road from that. What could that look like?
So I'd start by saying, look at these transactions in their totality as this is about expanding capabilities across investments and data and workflow in the private markets. And I think about some of our largest sovereign wealth fund clients. If I go back a decade, maybe they had 25% or 30% of their portfolios in private markets. One of them in Singapore publishes an annual review every year. They have 52% of their portfolio today in quote-unquote unlisted, i.e., private markets. And so there's just a staggering seismic sea change in the way clients are building portfolios. And that means you have to be able to deliver them whole portfolio advice. You have to be able to deliver them great products and services and solutions on the investment side.
But also they're looking for more workflow, more data, more ways to understand and improve their asset allocation, their performance measurement, the quality of the dialogues that they have with GPs and sponsors as well as liquid asset management providers. Looking at the totality of an integrated ecosystem in the same way we used to look at it in public markets, you got to look at it across private markets and then across the whole portfolio. That's at the center of all these moves. Also at the center of these moves is pro forma for HPS and GIP. There'll be $2.5, $3 billion of management base fees at BlackRock in private markets. There'll be another $1.5 billion of technology revenues from the Aladdin business at BlackRock. That's $4.5 billion rough justice of revenues at BlackRock.
That's over 20% of the revenue base that's now sitting in long-dated, less market-sensitive products and services.
Yeah.
That's where our clients are going. It's also where I think what we need to deliver to shareholders, and in that context, Preqin is a really strategic asset and a really strategic move to expand the capabilities of Aladdin in whole portfolio. We acquired eFront in 2019 that was workflow across technology, and Preqin is really, to me, was the sort of last leg of the stool there to have great data that can inform great insights and workflow. Our plan on Preqin is really threefold. The first thing is continue to really sell and distribute what is the gold copy, gold standard data. When I look at all the work that comes out of so many of you write about, the citations to Preqin are numerous.
We thank you for your business and we look forward to improving the quality of what we do for you.
Just don't change the price.
We'll talk. The second is I really admire what the index providers have done, right? Like in the public market space, I really admire what they've done. They've built these incredible ecosystems where you can't talk about emerging markets or developed markets without that index, right? It's the way that you define the market. It's become the language of markets. And then it's been tied to a risk model through which you actually measure your risk and volatility and make asset allocations. And so this ecosystem of kind of integrated data, indexes, and models, that's happened in the public markets. I think the index providers have done an A-plus job of creating that fully integrated ecosystem. No one's done that on the private side yet.
We want to do that in the near term, which is take what I think is the gold copy data, gold standard data in Preqin, marry it with risk models, and create that similar recursive feedback loop that is being able to measure, analyze, and benchmark markets through that data set. And if we can do that, then I think we're on to investable indices, right? And I think that's not happening in a 24-month period or anything like that. But what you really need in investable indices is you need rules-based inclusion, right? What funds, what size, like what are the criteria for inclusion in the index? And you need standard time series of prices, which is something we look forward to working on kind of with the GP community.
But if you can create standardized inclusion methodologies and a normalized time series of prices, then you can create futures contracts, right? Like you can create futures contracts around that. People ask me all the time, well, if you can't settle these things physically, then how could you ever have indexes around them? And I ask them whether anybody's ever physically settled the Case-Shiller futures home price contract. Like we don't settle that in houses. We don't settle most financial transactions in the derivatives space are cash settled. The S&P E-mini is mostly cash settled. It's not settled in stocks. And if you can create futures contracts, you can ultimately create exchange-traded products. I think there are pathways to having physical settlement, but it's not a condition precedent for being able to do investable Indexes. And so I'm very bullish about that.
What I'd say is it has nothing to do with whether it cannibalizes like that. I have zero concerns about that whatsoever. We've consistently found, and people ask these questions all the time, will SMAs cannibalize ETFs? Will futures cannibalize the stock market? Like people ask these things. What happens is that anytime you can improve liquidity, price transparency, tradability, hedgeability.
Yeah.
Actually all the markets get bigger and better. So that's our aspiration. I ultimately think that the Preqin data can be the foundation for creating a vibrant ecosystem around the private markets that would improve the ability of more investors to participate. So we're excited about that. All of the GPs that I've talked to are very excited about it. They like the idea of Preqin being in the hands of a long-term, very stable company that can invest in it and improve it.
I think the GPs have come to realize also Preqin isn't just some place you report data. It's actually a network between LPs and GPs, right? It allows the LPs to make better decisions about how they fund and where they put their capital. It allows the GPs to spend their time better, smarter, faster, more efficiently when going to see clients and fundraising. So it's actually a network. So our ability to improve that network will be good for everybody.
Great. Well, speaking of indices, I don't want to get out of this conversation without talking about iShares. I know we spent a lot of time talking about private markets, but iShares is still your fastest growing business. It's done phenomenally well over the years. You spoke to both bond ETFs as well as non-U.S. being big drivers. We kind of hit on that already a little bit. So maybe just double-click on what your thoughts are on both of these into 2025. And I do also want to touch on active ETFs. It's been a really powerful growth theme for traditional asset management space, probably one of the better trends in the space we've seen in many years. So what are your thoughts around that? How big is BlackRock going to be in that part of the market?
So I had the privilege of running the iShares business for about five years, and that was about the most fun I think I've ever had in my career. This is the most, I think, dynamic part, in my opinion, one of the most dynamic parts of the asset management industry. Because there are a few parts of the asset management industry where kind of institutional investors, wealth managers, model portfolio builders, liquidity providers, like how many times can you bring together like an RIA with some dude from Jane Street for a meeting? Like that never happens unless it pertains to ETFs. And it's one of these unique, I think, products where it has positive network effects. Like the more people that use ETFs, like the better that they get. I was just looking at some of this data.
The ETF industry just crossed $15 trillion this quarter, which is a new high, and if you only roll the clock back two months ago, it was at $14.2 or $14.4, and yeah, there's a healthy amount of beta in there, but there's a huge amount of organic growth. There's $1.6 trillion of flows this year in the industry. The way to think about the ETF industry, in my view, is the ETF industry is like a lubricating agent of business model transformation for lots and lots of different types of people who build portfolios, right? It is the lubricating agent for wealth managers endeavoring to move from brokerage to fee-based, right? It's the lubricating agent, I think, for kind of derivatives-intensive, collateral management-heavy people moving from derivative ops to derivative substitution.
So I could trade futures on the Russell 2000 or I could buy an ETF, right? I could collateralize those futures or I could just buy an equity. Or I might do both. It's completely transformed the options ecology. If I think about the options ecosystem around an EEM and IWM, and only a few years ago, options around HYG. Like it was so hard to build options around high yield. But now you can think about trading basis between CDX and HYG and options. That ecology, all these things have changed the markets. It's made the market. There's even futures contracts right next to them. So the ETF industry is growing because it's a lubricating agent for business model transformation. And I think that's going to continue. The two, I think, real growth areas. One, Europe.
Think about the United States has built an ETF industry with a single securities regulator, a national best bid, best offer system. Europe has built a $2 trillion industry without any of that stuff. I mean, that's fairly remarkable. We're closing in on $1 trillion of AUM in Europe and European iShares with 40% or 50% flow market share very, very consistently in a system that is, I think, where we have some unique competitive advantages that persist. Fixed income ETFs, by all market measures, are expected to go from $2 trillion to $6 trillion and do a triple by 2030. Again, for all the same reasons, right? Substituting buying individual bonds for buying package portfolios, and I'd note all this growth in fixed income ETFs; it's all organic.
Right.
Because rate have shot up, right? So bond prices have generally gone down for positively convex bonds, right? Bond prices have generally gone down. So all of this growth is organic, which just tells you the size at which clients, institutional, and wealth are moving. And I think for us, this is just a consistent grower, a real consistent grower in the US and Europe. So far this year, I think we're well at $350 billion of flows into December, on track for a record year. I think the closest provider near us is $40 billion behind, and the number three player is $250 billion behind. This is a market where you've got to have scale. We have over 1,500 ETFs. That's six times more than any other provider. The game we're playing is really different than any other providers. We're in every market. We're in every segment.
have every exposure, including active ETFs, where we now have over 80 active ETFs, $45 billion of assets in the space. We have two of the best-selling active ETFs now with DYNF, which is our factor rotation ETF run by our Quant Equity Group, about $11 billion of assets flows into that product this year. And then BINC, our flexible fixed income fund run by Rick Rieder, has had real strong sales. But that active ETF kind of toolkit, it's transformed what model portfolio builders are doing. Model portfolio builders who said, I don't want to trade my model so much, but I'd like a little bit more flexibility and active management in my income sleeve, now you put in something like BINC.
Or I'd like to be able to kind of move around from value, quality, size, momentum, whatever it is, and I want some model to do that. You can do that in the ticker that goes in the model. To me, we're just at the edge of all the innovation that will happen. And of course, I can't leave without saying the Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, crossed $50 billion on $35 billion of organic flows. And this is something I wasn't sure we'd ever see. I wasn't sure we'd ever see it, but I've never seen anything like it in my career for something to go from $0 to $50 billion in basically six months.
Yeah. All right. We got about two minutes left, and I'm going to bore you with a CFO-related question because we spent a lot of time on strategic things.
I am the CFO.
There you go. So.
Let's talk on opposites.
There you go. Let's talk a little bit about the margins. It's an important topic. I know you guys talked about the financial rubric for BlackRock.
I love it when you say it.
Yeah.
Rubric.
You guys were financially aware.
We were margin-aware.
Margin-aware.
That was the guy behind it.
As you think about the forward, I don't know if you're ready to talk about 2025 and kind of how you think about the expense base, but assuming normal market conditions, how do you think the trajectory for BlackRock will look over the next couple of years? But if you do want to talk about 2025, you're welcome to.
I'll do it. I'm here for you. I'm a river to the people.
Just remember Preqin, pricing increase, none.
So listen, the algorithm for shareholder value at BlackRock is delivering differentiated organic growth, operating leverage and market expansion, and a consistent capital management policy. And I think we've really delivered on the consistent and differentiated organic growth. And in operating leverage, what that really means is being able to sort of generate profitable growth, right? And to give people, I think, some understanding the way we're trying to manage the business is to say with this financial rubric, right? These are basically simple formulaic budgeting rules about how we're going to run the company with the goal of creating operating leverage and profitable growth, right? And so the three basic rules of the rubric are first to align our investment spending, to align our controllable expense.
What I mean is controllable comp, salary, and benefits, as well as fixed G&A to align controllable expenses with organic revenue growth potential. The second is to kind of variabilize more expenses. If we have $12 billion of operating expenses at BlackRock, about $4 billion are variable and volume-related distribution and servicing expenses, all the things that kind of float with AUM.
Yeah.
Variabilizing some portion of the expense base, I think we really learned in 2022, like that's a good thing. It gives us a little bit of P&L resilience. I think our ethos had always been like, let's drive everything to the lowest cost possible and then try to keep hacking it down and drive as much scale. At the size of this company, we need a little bit of ballast.
Yeah.
T hat comes from variabilizing some expenses. We've managed to variabilize more expenses. We've done that partially in distribution arrangements. We've done that partially in comp expense, but that's an important part of our toolkit. But listen, the biggest part of our expense base, the biggest part of expense base is people. It's the amazing talent that we have and the investments that we make in growing people. Everyone at BlackRock makes fun of me because when people say people are our greatest assets, people say that all the time. They're like, people are our greatest assets. The problem is they don't show up as assets on the balance sheet. They show up on the expense line, right? And we don't depreciate people. So I actually think it's not a great way of talking about people either because we don't own them, right? We have to keep investing in them. We have to keep growing in them.
If there was some way to show that value in financial statements, that'd be great. But we don't own them, so we have to keep investing. It's the most important dollar that we spend. We tend to run our highest comp expense in the fourth quarter, just so you know. So we tend to have a higher comp to revenue ratio in the fourth quarter. We think about that on an annualized basis. But when you think about these three things, that last part together, the biggest part of the expense base and investment base being people, we have to drive fixed cost scale. So the rubric is keep controllable expenses aligned with organic growth, variabilize expenses where we can, and drive fixed cost scale.
What that means is in positive and constructive markets, when beta keeps going up and FX is favorable, that we're going to drop more op income basically into the results and generate more leverage. That's better for the bonus pool and investing in our people. It's better for the shareholders. We found that managing the company on this rubric is a great way for us to kind of invest for profitable growth by using kind of our organic revenue growth as the kind of the sizing toggle.
Yeah. Great. Okay. Well, Martin, thank you very much. We're out of time.
Thanks so much. Appreciate the time.