Morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining Bank of America's 33rd Annual Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North America Head of Diversified Financials at Bank of America, and it's my pleasure to introduce Martin Small of BlackRock. Martin is CFO and serves as the Global Head of Corporate Strategy. He's also a member of BlackRock's Global Executive Committee. And in his role as CFO, Martin oversees accounting, controllership, financial planning and analysis, tax, Treasury, investor relations, corporate development, and corporate strategy. Is that all?
That's it for now.
Okay. Before becoming CFO, Martin was head of BlackRock's U.S. Wealth Advisory. So, Martin, thank you for joining us here in Miami.
Thanks for having me, Craig. You look terrific today, energized by all this Florida sun.
Thank you.
It's great.
I think it's more the sun from this light over here.
I think it's good. I think we're going to keep up this witty rapport and banter the whole time. It's going to be excellent.
It's a great session for you today. So, quick background on BlackRock. I think everybody here knows it, but largest asset manager in the world, largest global distribution platform, $11 trillion of assets under management. More importantly, it's a leader or first mover in most of the secular businesses, iShares and ETFs, Aladdin and technology, Preqin and alternative data, retirement solutions, and privates, where they massively upgraded the platform this year with the acquisitions of HPS and GIP. With that, let's get started. So, I have a question on the macro front here. We're now entering year three of the bull market. The yield curve has steepened. There's record money market AUM on the sidelines. What are you expecting for industry net flows in 2025?
Thanks, Craig. Good morning, everybody. Thanks a lot for having me. Appreciate the time and all the interest. I'd start by saying we're coming off of a very strong 2024. I mean, $640 billion of flows at BlackRock, you know, 280 of them in the fourth quarter alone, 7% base fee growth in the fourth quarter. We really see a lot of optimism, a lot of energy, a fair amount of re-risking in the client base. And I think post the U.S. election, client sentiment's great. I think as we've climbed into 2025, there's still optimism, there's still energy. It might be a little bit more like white knuckles on the desk in terms of tense optimism. But overall, I see good momentum.
Just in the first month, you know, it's very early, but I'd say on 2025 flows, you know, ETF flows in the industry are up by a third. You know, money fund flows are basically flat to last year. Mutual funds sort of seeing their consistent kind of outflows over the last couple of years. But overall, January activity, very commensurate with January '25 activity, very commensurate with January activity of 2024. Lots to go. But overall, I think the macro is very positive, very constructive. This isn't a normal business cycle. And so you talk about three years of a bull market. I just don't think it's a normal business cycle. I mean, we've seen inflation fall without a growth slowdown. We've seen automation, technology, the promise of generative AI, I think really transforming what we think of as possible in productivity.
I see it in my own department, which I find very exciting. But we've been able to achieve extraordinary amounts in automation and how we just recognize revenue and how we track revenue. And I think that's ultimately given us a lot of operating leverage. I know if I'm doing it in our finance department at BlackRock, every single industry is probably doing it. I don't think we have a monopoly on good ideas when it comes to revenue rec kind of automation. But I think just everything we know about productivity, about earnings growth, about gains, I think it's all up in the air in terms of the forward promise of what markets can do. And therefore, people tell me all the time, these multiples seem rich, these multiples seem cheap. It's going to be U.S. exceptionalism. International equities will eventually catch up.
Like I've heard those narratives for years and years and years. If I roll back the clock, I heard people tell me the era of supernormal returns was over. Like I've heard it over and over and over. But I still think there's an extraordinary amount of growth ahead in markets. And while it'll take a little time, I think, to kind of sort out some of the saber rattling around trade and tariffs, I think ultimately our clients see growth, they see opportunity, and they've continued investing. And I think the first, you know, the early flows of January are confirming that. A lot of months to go from here, Craig. But I think we're in a great position at BlackRock to serve them across the diversified platform and, you know, carry their kind of whole portfolio narratives into 2025.
I wanted to dive a little deeper in fixed income. I mean, this is the original business at BlackRock from the '90s, leader in this globally in terms of AUM across vehicle, across product. We started seeing a recovery last year. You could argue it was a little bit derailed by the rise in the 10-year in the fourth quarter. What are you thinking in terms of the pace of essentially duration extensions? And what metrics are you looking at, leading indicators, macro indicators in terms of when this money in motion can really accelerate?
Yeah. So we saw $160 billion of flows in fixed income in 2024 and 6+% organic asset growth. So I think we saw strong allocations to fixed income. $100 billion of that was basically in fixed income ETFs, where we continue to see just strong, I'd say, structural trends of fixed income ETFs being replacement allocations for CDS markets, being replacement allocations for single bonds. So there's structural changes in the fixed income market that are continuing to grow BlackRock fixed income AUM. I think as far as clients re-risking, you know, we look at a whole bunch of things, Craig, like you, you know, 5s30s, 2s10s, you know, Fed funds futures, money fund flows, flows into intermediate bond. We look at all those things. And overall, I do think we're seeing clients starting to make that reallocation. I think favoring somewhat spread and carry-oriented products.
They like the front, they like the belly of the curve. We see that with one of our active ETFs that was a top asset gatherer last year, BINC, an income-oriented fixed income product. So I think you'll see a healthy amount of allocations going in this year into kind of corporates and spread products and maybe not favoring kind of traditional duration and rate product so much as a diversifier in fixed income. But I think ultimately what are the things that drive more normalized allocation and flows? It's what we've been talking about on the calls. You know, we need to see more certainty in the terminal rate. We need to see kind of near short-term rates come down. I think we need to see some kind of normalization just in the Treasury pounding the market.
I mean, I think we have $100 billion of treasury issuance this week, and so I think ultimately some more normalized issuance, I think a steeper yield curve, all those things will lead to more normalized fixed income allocations. That said, money market funds are, as I said, you know, January flows and money funds were the same in 2025 as they basically were in 2024. You know, cash is an asset class again.
You know, sticking with that last point, if there are duration extensions into bonds, if there is re-risking into alts or passive equity, it has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is probably cash, money market. Now, your business is mostly institutional. What we're talking about may be more retail in terms of these flow trends. What is the outlook for money market funds? Given your business is mostly institutional, how should that behave in an environment where maybe some money is coming out of money market funds?
I think we're a whole portfolio provider, right? You know, we've got a $920 billion cash business going to a trillion. I think when I started as CFO, it was about $700 billion. If I look back at what's happened in the cash business, most of the money managers like exited the cash business post the financial crisis. This is a business where we had fee waivers. Does anybody remember fee waivers? We had fee waivers in this market a few years ago, and I actually think kind of having cash being restored somewhat as a normalized part of asset allocation, that's good for us. We had $160 billion of fixed income flows. We had $150 billion of cash flows. One way or another, those clients are going to work with us, whether they're exploring cash and liquidity strategies or whether they're re-risking in fixed income.
We pick those allocations either way. I do think our business, as you said, historically, you know, 90+% of our business is really institutional money fund business. And we think that's been very powerful for us. And it keeps us in a different market. We overall have relationships that transcend just that cash sleeve. So we're probably doing some other parts of business, you know, with that corporate or with that institutional investor. So it's part of a bigger relationship. I overall think that basically you'll see re-risking happen, you know, into fixed income, into equities. And I think there's two major drivers. The first of which is there is FOMO happening. So if you're a global investor and you were anchored to a traditional stock and bond benchmark and you were overweight cash, you underperformed.
So I think that FOMO is driving more normalized allocations back into equities. That's, I think, some of the flows that we saw. And I think in fixed income, it will be the shape of the yield curve. But I also ultimately think you will see substitution of private credit for some of those public credit exposures that historically would have occupied kind of a high yield or other spread allocation. I think those two drivers will be very powerful going into 2025 and 2026.
So I want to spend a minute on the EPS algo at BlackRock. There's multiple levers here to drive double-digit EPS growth across the cycle. You have your 5% base fee organic growth, which you're at now. You have beta, you have operating leverage, you have capital management. How do you think about these various contributors and what is the sensitivity to upside or even downside of the markets?
The algorithm for EPS and for shareholder value at BlackRock, as you said, Craig, is to drive market-leading organic base fee growth. We aim to deliver 5% or better organic base fee growth through a cycle. We aim to drive operating leverage and profitable growth and to have a disciplined and consistent capital management policy where we invest in the business first and ultimately preference the dividend and pay out the excess in shareholder remuneration and buybacks. BlackRock's been a great compounder, I think, in that regard. Our aim is to deliver 5% organic base fee growth through the cycle. What we've tried to do is make the business built around structural growers. Structural growers are things like ETFs. They're not just market sensitive, but there are secular shifts in terms of the way clients are doing business that give those businesses tailwinds.
They may grow faster or grow slower in certain market conditions, so when markets are really strong, they'll grow faster. When markets are weak, they tend to grow slower, but they still grow, so we think of these markets as being inexorable, as being driven by fundamental business change, so the growth of fee-based advisory and shrinking of brokerage assets has been a propellant for ETFs. The growth of cash market substitutions for physical Bitcoin has been an accelerant for IBIT and digital asset ETFs. Outsourcing and using asset manager technology has been a way to increase business-level efficiency and profitability. We don't see those changes going away. We see them as getting bigger and faster, and therefore, we've tried to build the business around these things that grow inexorably, that grow structurally: ETFs, private markets, model portfolios, Aladdin, Aladdin technology, and outsourcing.
And so we think if we keep doing those things, we can hit our 5% organic base fee growth target through the cycle. And while in strong markets, we'll grow faster, and in weak markets, we might grow a little slower, but we'll still grow. The second thing is we aim to deliver profitable growth and to deliver an industry-leading margin. And so we've maintained a premium margin. In strong markets, we've been able to expand margins an awful lot. And in weak markets, we've been able to defend margins, I think, much better than the broader industry. Part of that is constructed by what we've been talking about a lot in the last two years, which has been kind of a rubric, a set of rules for how we systematically budget the business. One is trying to keep our investments, our controllable expenses inside of organic growth potential.
And so that means if we keep our investments inside of organic growth potential, our controllable expenses, to the extent that the markets go up, all of that drops, all of that market appreciation drops into earnings. And so our highest margin item there would be the markets. And then second is to variabilize more expenses. I'd say historically at BlackRock, our ethos was to try to convert as much as possible into fixed cost and then asymptotically drive all those marginal costs to zero. I think at the size and scale of an $11.6 trillion AUM asset manager today, having some more variabilization in our cost base, I was accused of making up that word. I looked it up. It's a real word. Having some variabilization in the cost base is ultimately good and gives us some P&L flexibility and margin flexibility.
But the biggest and most important thing we do is we take the fixed cost base and drive as much scale as we can in that. That's through footprinting, that's through automation, that's through technology. And we've been very successful at doing that. On any rote measures, you know, we've grown AUM by two, three trillion and only, you know, kept headcount broadly flat. That's a really crude, I think, kind of scale indicator, but one that we pay attention to. But I think over the term, Craig, what I'd emphasize is like the BlackRock of today is not the BlackRock of the last three to five years. And I think that's the most important thing when it comes to thinking about the impact of markets on our business.
The BlackRock of today is going to have pro forma 20% of our revenue base in alternatives, private markets and technology, secular areas that have less market sensitivity, more structural growth that I think should deliver more stability in earnings, more earnings diversification through the cycle. So that'll be obviously GIP being closed in October, HPS, which we're planning for midyear, and then also Preqin coming on board probably this quarter. But if you think about kind of $3 billion of base fees in private markets and alternatives, another $1.5 billion plus of technology services revenue, it's $4.5 billion on a $20 billion rev base from 2024. You know, that's a real change in the complexion of BlackRock and kind of the leverage that we have to markets. It's not the same as the last three to five years. I think it's a big change.
Martin, BlackRock had a huge year in M&A last year. Three big deals, HPS, GIP, Preqin. You can see that alts was a major theme in private markets. You did all these deals without diluting shareholders, accreted the base fee organic growth. My question now is, are you done with big deals for now? And what do you see as the remaining product gaps?
Right, so we are very excited. Our clients are really excited about these transactions. Just as an anecdote, we closed the GIP acquisition on October 1st and consolidated the GIP assets, and I remember sending out this note to our clients saying, "We're excited that we've closed the GIP transaction," and most of the emails I got back were, "I thought you guys were closed already. We thought this was already done," and so I thought that was a good sign just in terms of how the firms were coming together, how we were interacting with clients, and I think the really excellent momentum energy that we have in fundraising and new product development and the like, so I'd say we're really excited about these transactions. We are 100% focused on closing these acquisitions, integrating the businesses really well, and realizing the synergies of these businesses as promised.
I think for the better part of a year and a half, we said we were interested in doing inorganic transactions in private credit infrastructure and private markets data and technology. We did those acquisitions. I do find it entertaining. People said there were other acquisitions we were doing, but I kept saying the same thing on the earnings call. We're going to do acquisitions in these three areas, and we did, and so I'd say, Craig, that really rounds out our near to intermediate term priorities in terms of large-scale M&A. We feel that rounds it out. We've always done a series of minority investments or smaller acquisitions in order to kind of bolt on product capabilities. We did that last year with Kreos and venture debt. We did that in SpiderRock to increase product capabilities in SMAs and US Wealth.
I expect we'll continue to do smaller scale minority investments in M&A for product capabilities, but GIP, eFront, and HPS rounds out our near to intermediate term agenda for private markets, data, and tech. Last thing I'll say is we feel like this is a great lineup that we have to serve clients. We've got infrastructure and kind of infrastructure capabilities across equity, across infrastructure debt, across infrastructure solutions in terms of an allocation and co-invest business. We have a private credit business that pro forma will be a really strong top five player with capabilities across middle market direct lending, upper middle market direct lending, junior securities, investment grade, securitized, and the like, so we're excited about that, and then we have a private equity solutions business that's worth $30 billion in assets. That's primary, secondaries, co-invest, which we feel is a great franchise.
But one of the really important things we want to grow is in the private equity space. We're starting to think of all the alternative asset managers as clients, right? So GP sponsors are clients. We have a great track record at BlackRock of doing this with the traditional asset managers. They've become clients of Aladdin. They use iShares in their model portfolios. We do OCIO business with them. But historically, it's interesting. Nobody's organized around the alternative asset managers recognizing this change in industry structure. So you'll have a team that's chasing around portfolio companies to do middle market lending. You'll have a team that's focused on in private credit doing NAV and fund finance lines. You'll have another group of people who are focused on participating in GP-led secondaries or single asset secondaries. And then you'll have yet another team that's focused on LP secondaries.
And then finally, you'll have some primary market or primary capital fund of funds business. So what we're doing post the close of the HPS transaction is creating a GP sponsor solutions business, a GP solutions business inside BlackRock with Scott Kapnick, Scot French, and Mike Patterson from HPS who will be joining the BlackRock management team to create an integrated provider of solutions to GPs where we can handle 100% of your direct lending, 100% of your fund finance, your GP-led secondaries. We can be a primary capital provider through our fund of funds business. We think this, you know, and we can have Preqin and eFront solutions. So we really think as far as a GP solutions business, we're on the precipice of something very, very, very interesting. And so I think, Craig, for us, the reason I highlighted is infrastructure, you know, GP solutions and private credit.
We think we're in a really great position to kind of grow alternatives at BlackRock in an industry-leading way.
Martin, I want to spend a minute and go through some of the strategic merits of each of the transactions. So just start with the HPS. In the insurance channel, where you guys are very big, there is a rotation going on to privates, which HPS could help you with. And in the retail channel, there's a large adoption going on within private wealth, which this helps you address. So maybe walk through some of the real strategic benefits that when you saw this asset, you said, "I can help them grow faster.
Right. So I'd zoom up for a second. The thing I think we've been best at at BlackRock is capabilities acquisitions, right? We have really strong client relationships. I'd argue to you that we have all the relationships that we need across geographies, across segments, across channels. So we have a $3 trillion plus retail business between mutual funds and SMAs and iShares. We have the largest distribution teams in the United States covering U.S. wealth and retail markets. We have a real strong hold in Europe, across Northern Europe, across Southern Europe, across direct private banking and the like. What I'd say is we didn't have the best world-class capabilities, for example, in private credit. We also have $700 billion of insurance company general account assets. Again, we're the largest core fixed income manager for insurance company general accounts.
And so the HPS acquisition, I think, is all about, number one, serving markets in which we already have either large asset bases and relationships, or we have great relationships and are distributing lots of other products. And so I'd offer this, and it's not just for HPS. I think it holds for infrastructure and our whole private markets platform. One of the clearest things we can do to help our clients build better portfolios that are integrated across public and private markets is work with the asset bases they have to include allocations to private credit and to infrastructure, for example. So at BlackRock, asset bases we manage today, we manage $700 billion of insurance company general accounts. 10% of that into private credit allocations is $70 billion at five, six, seven times the fee rate. We manage $350 billion of SMAs and model portfolios for clients.
10% of that into BDCs or something like HLEND is $35 billion at multiples of the fee rate, probably four times the fee rate, five times the fee rate. We have $500 billion of OCIO mandates where we're the fiduciary for balance portfolios across the world for pensions, endowments, charities, foundations. 10% of that is $50 billion, again, at 5x the fee rate. Last, I'd flag that I think there's an opportunity over time in something like target date funds in terms of accessing the 401(k) market, a $13 trillion space where BlackRock has a $500 billion target date franchise and Life Path.
And so if I just take 50 out of target dates, if I take 50, you know, from OCIO, if I take $35 billion from managed models, I take, you know, $70 billion, you know, there's well over $200 billion of captive assets at BlackRock that ultimately will be better portfolios and it'll be win for the clients and ultimately, I think, a win in terms of delivering those capabilities. So when I think about HPS and the merits of the acquisition, it's about bringing great products, great investment capabilities, great track record, investment excellence to markets where we already have very strong client relationships or we're the fiduciary for the assets that can direct them towards those markets. So it's really insurance, wealth, OCIO, and ultimately, I think retirement.
Again, I go back to kind of GP sponsor as an underserved market in terms of holistic capabilities where you can grow in private credit, fund finance, secondaries, and, you know, primaries and co-invest. Those are all great spots for us with the HPS team.
The data point I really picked up on there was the 5x fee rate pickup. Let's talk about GIP for a minute. So infrastructure is in a sweet spot. Governments around the world are in deficits. There's a lot of need to improve infrastructure out there. There's also a very nice theme in there with data centers, artificial intelligence. So I was curious, how is GIP tracking anything new to report today?
So first, we're really excited. We have an incredible milestone at the end of January. So the GIP team in New York moved into Hudson Yards. So we were very excited to welcome new colleagues into the office. Similarly, in London, the GIP offices are in Victoria, and we've consolidated the infrastructure teams there. Fun fact, in London, GIP is in Victoria, HPS is in Victoria, Preqin is in Victoria. So we're looking forward to kind of widening our footprint there with the teams. And things have been coming together really well.
With GIP, I'd flag a couple of things, the first of which is we made an announcement last year about a dedicated vehicle targeting the intersection of kind of energy power markets and data centers in partnership with Microsoft, with Abu Dhabi's MGX and NVIDIA, and ultimately some other partners will make their way into that partnership as well. We expect to have more news on that towards the end of this quarter, possibly beginning of second quarter.
But I think that was a real proof point out of the gate that bringing in a world-class team at GIP in and around data centers and digital infrastructure led by Will Brilliant over at GIP, plus I think the relationships that BlackRock brings at the intersection of kind of the sovereign space, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Finance created something that ultimately I don't think could have been won by another firm. So we're looking forward to delivering there in terms of impact and on the investment side and fundraising through 2025. GIP and infrastructure strategies should have some really good milestones this year, which we'll have more to share about at the end of the first quarter.
But many of the kind of flagship programs and strategies have been in fundraising for some period of time, and we should start seeing those results pull through here in the first half of the year. And overall, I think we'll have a lot to report kind of on infrastructure results. And more importantly, Craig, I'd say kind of the outlook for two, three, five-year fundraising and impact when we get to our investor day in June of this year.
So the last deal I wanted to talk about was eFront. And, you know, when I first heard the eFront announcement, I was thinking alts, data. Venn diagram looks pretty attractive. But I think one thing I was missing is what you could really do that for that they're not doing today. So creating indexes around private markets funds, private equity, real estate, potentially, you know, having someone else create a futures contract around that, using market makers to make markets around that, and eventually dropping that into a BlackRock iShares ETF, which has never been done before. Maybe you could walk us through the potential to do something pretty cool like that.
So I think Preqin's an excellent example of when we talk about kind of structural growers, right? Private markets data is a structural grower. This is a TAM that's going to be bigger in 2030 than it is today. I think on most forecasts, this will be an $18 billion TAM, you know, growing at, you know, 10%-12%. So being in a big TAM where there are large, you know, large use cases for investors. When I think about the playbook that the indexing firms have run on public markets, I think it's pretty inspiring, right? We didn't know how to organize investing in international developed markets until we had indexes and kind of modular breakouts of those indexes. Ultimately, those indexes and security classifications fueled risk models, and those risk models were able to kind of become the way that investors allocated capital to those markets.
No such ecosystem exists yet in private markets, but that's our aspiration is to build on the Preqin data, 190,000 funds, you know, 60,000 managers, 30 plus thousand LPs. It is really the gold copy when it comes to private markets data, and so our goal, I think in the near to intermediate term, Craig, is to really, you know, continue to grow that business in terms of data and analytics. I think it's to expand it and to effectively run the playbook that the indexers have run on public markets by increasing the standardization of the indexes as well as the associated ecosystem of risk models and analytics to grow that kind of subscription part of the business, but really, I think the reason we had a lot of conviction about this in the longer term is about creating investable indexes.
Investable indexes mean that you need to standardize index inclusion methodology. It ultimately means that you need to standardize the pricing methodology through which the exposures come through. I'm a deep believer that that can happen. If you can create an index where you have a standardized time series of prices and rules, ultimately people can make markets of that. Now, I've been in a lot of forums where people say, "Martin, that's totally ridiculous. That's insane. Like, how could you possibly own every underlying and middle market healthcare private equity, right?" I just want to flag for people that most things in financial markets are not physically settled, right? Like most things in financial, like the S&P E-mini is not settled in stocks. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index Futures Contract is not settled in houses. The Citigroup Economic Surprise Index is not settled in surprises, right?
There's lots of financial markets. The interest rate markets is not settled in interest rates. Like most markets that are around indexes are actually settled in cash. If you have a time series of prices, if you have a standardized inclusion methodology, you can make investable indexes because you can make futures contracts. If you can make futures contracts, you can ultimately make exchange-traded funds, right? If you think about the first digital assets, exchange-traded funds, they were on futures contracts. They weren't on, you know, cash or quote unquote physically settled. I like saying physically settled Bitcoin. They weren't on physicals. I do think there are structures, Craig, over the longer term where there can be kind of more physical replication of the private markets. But it's not a must-have. It's a nice to have.
So I think this business of creating indexes around the private markets, you know, cohorts of vintages of exposures, is a really great unique opportunity for us and the ability to take that Preqin gold copy data, improve it, and ultimately have iShares be the mechanism to distribute it out to the markets.
Great. I have a question on iShares, but I just want to let you know if any of you in the audience have a question, we can go to you after me. But iShares inside of BGI was arguably the most successful asset manager acquisition of all time. You did it in the depths of the financial crisis. You got it for a good multiple. I don't know if it's grown.
It's set now. Yeah.
Back then, it was a little controversial, which is crazy if you think about it. But I don't know if it's grown 20 times or 15 times. Maybe you know that number, but you know, massive growth. So what's new at iShares today? And I have to ask this second part. We had some news from a competitor last week. They slashed some pricing, although most of it wasn't in their flagship ETFs. It was actually in a lot of their active products. But what does that mean for your ETF business?
Sure. So listen, iShares is a relative, you know, iShares is an absolutely unique property, I think, in asset management. It's the only true global player. There's $4 trillion of assets, and iShares is present in every market segment and ETFs. We have over 1,500 exchange-traded funds. I believe that's four to six times more than any other issuer in the industry. We cover core equity. We cover precision exposures. We cover factors. We cover sustainable. If you want currency hedged min vol small cap, you can find it at iShares. There's an iShare for that. iShares, I think, has two, I'd say, kind of really great crown jewels, which would be fixed income ETFs. We have nearly $1 trillion of fixed income ETFs across our iShares range. And then the European iShares business, which I don't think gets enough recognition, is over $900 billion, going to $1 trillion.
The European ETF industry stands at about $2.5 trillion. And if you think about it, right, U.S. ETFs grew up in an environment with one Securities and Exchange Commission, you know, with one securities regulator, one national exchange, a national best bid, best offer system. Like that does not exist in Europe. And until recently, most ETF trading in Europe was largely over the counter and by appointment. So if you think about the fact that this industry has gone to $2.25 trillion with iShares at nearly $1 trillion, iShares in Europe is bigger than, I think, issuers two, three, four, five put together. Just fixed income iShares in Europe is one of the top three issuers in the marketplace. So we have, I think, a very unique property there to serve investors.
And when you think about all the things that happen in U.S. wealth and the move from brokerage to fee-based, those things are happening in Europe too, in the move to model portfolios and discretionary private markets portfolios. Those things are great catalysts for iShares. We had a record year in iShares in 2024, $390 billion plus of flows, number one asset gatherer, number one revenue grower. No other issuer was close. They were $40 billion away in terms of global asset gathering. So iShares, I think, is a really unique property. I'd say most interesting to me is that it's still a huge agent of innovation inside our walls and for clients. So we have 85, for example, active ETFs. We had over $40 billion of asset gathering in active ETFs. IBIT in digital and crypto is a $56 billion ETF.
It's unlike anything I've ever seen in my career, and I've been in asset management for 25 years. I've never seen something go from zero to $50 billion in six months. And I think the conditions, again, it's hard to say what will happen, but the conditions, I think, are coming the way of that market, not going away from that market. So I think we're very favorably positioned. The growth of iShares is, again, I think a structural story, which is that ETFs are replacing or serving as replacements for traditional mutual funds. They're serving as lower cost replacements for futures and swaps in index markets. There's huge options ecosystems developing. So it wasn't that many years ago when there wasn't an options contract in high yield. Like there was no options contract in high yield. There's a big options market around HYG, the high yield ETF.
And if you think about kind of the way I think kind of active managers even are acting, are managing portfolios, they're using ETFs, especially in multi-asset funds, as ways of getting precise slices of markets that might be high yield, that might be CMBS, that might be even CLOs nowadays through the exchange-traded markets. So a listed equity delivering markets to that. I still think there's a lot of room for growth. So fixed income ETFs are expected to go from about $2.5 trillion to $6 trillion of assets by 2030. Again, we have a real market leading position there. What I'd say just on the question is we run a global business at BlackRock. There's pricing questions and pricing strategy things to be determined every single day. But what I tell you is that pricing is like a hyper, hyper local thing.
It's very local down to the product, the segment, the client base. And so when you talk about a lot of the, when you mentioned the sort of pricing announcement last week, we can say their name from Vanguard, from Vanguard, like over half of that was in index mutual funds. Like we have, like index mutual funds have nothing to do with BlackRock. So over $200 million of the announced $350 million was in index mutual funds. That's really, I'd say, kind of more aimed at other retail brokerage competitors, perhaps than it is at BlackRock. So I think about kind of firms like Fidelity that have zero fee index mutual funds. The cuts were in retail cash funds, as we talked about earlier, and you were kind enough to point out, Craig, like 90% of our business is institutional.
We don't have a captive direct consumer money fund business.
Many of the cuts that were in active management strategies were categories where actually Vanguard was already the lowest, like active munis, lower by like double digit or, you know, double digit basis points than industry averages or in things like Windsor and PRIMECAP, which are active equities. I'm not confident that pricing has really been the agent of growth or shrinkage in those categories. For us, I largely think this isn't a material impact to BlackRock. We've had a very consistent ETF pricing kind of framework that we've communicated to the market. Number one, we will make price investments where there are high growth categories and investors are very, very price sensitive where price elasticities are very high. That's generally in core ETFs, Core iShares.
iShares Core ETFs about, you know, $1.5 trillion, call that about a third of the ETF AUM, about 15% of the base fees. That's largely where the price action has been. But I'll tell you in my career, and I used to run this business, there was a lot of hot and heavy price action in the 2015 through 2018 period. And core ETF pricing at that time, Craig, was in double digits. Today, it's like a three to seven basis points market. There's not a lot of people making decisions on five versus four or six versus five. You know, imagine that you had a large cap growth ETF with lots and lots of unrealized gains in it. You're not going to sell it and trigger all that tax just to take one basis point off the expense ratio.
As I said, I think a lot of the dynamics here are hyper local. For us, you know, we don't see them as material or changing our strategy whatsoever. We've told the market consistently going back, I think, 10 years that as an outer bound we would expect to invest something on the order of 1.5%-2.5% of global ETF revenue into pricing investments as an outer bound. In the last two years, we've invested substantially less than that. I don't expect that any of what we've seen in the marketplace in the last week would change that.
All right. With that, we are almost out of time, but I just want to see if there's one question from the audience anywhere. We have one here in the front row. It's okay. Thomas, you can ask a question.
Thanks. So I've heard obviously a ton of talk about deregulation and potentially monitoring financial services, but mostly we're hearing bad in capital markets operations. Is there anything you see in asset management traditionally? In this time period, where do you see it potentially as something helpful or even a risk?
Yeah. So I would say I'm pretty encouraged and just know the people involved, you know, Mark Uyeda as the interim commissioner at the SEC and Paul Atkins, who we've known for a long time. I'm on the ICI board. We spent some time talking to both Mark and to Paul. And I think all the indications are the commission's going to kind of get back to the investment management agenda and focus on things that the industry has I think been really looking at for a long time. So ETF share classes, there's a lot of optimism and a lot of very favorable feedback coming out of IM about that. I think there's a lot of positive leverage for the industry in that.
Looking at kind of the regime for closed-end funds, for interval funds, I think kind of focusing on liquidity rules, all these things I think will be good for delivering more value to investors. A commission more involved in asset management products with a bigger IM agenda, we view that as very favorable for the industry and our clients. And then I think there are some perhaps slightly more opaque things at the moment. But I read a Financial Times article a couple of weeks ago that there are a lot of alternative asset managers focused on trying to create some sort of safe harbor for allocations of private markets in DC. You know, as a $500 billion target funds provider, we think that would be a great opportunity for us at BlackRock and for the industry broadly. Lots of work to do there.
But I think in the near term, you know, and in the more intermediate term, a kind of more pro funds, let's take action in and around the investment management industry agenda that's good for us. And then I think there are some real channels that could open up that historically have been more closed, like 401(k).
With that, we are out of time. But Martin, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, want to thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.