All right, great. Guess we're officially closing the doors. Terrific. Well, thank you, everyone. Welcome to the 2017 Broadridge Investor Day. I'm Eddy Thibault, Head of Investor Relations, and on behalf of our entire management team, I want to welcome you and thank you for joining us this morning. Before we begin, let me call your attention to our safe harbor statements. My favorite part of the day. During today's presentations, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding Broadridge that involve risk. A summary of these risks can be found on the second page of the slides. We encourage all of you to refer to our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K, for a complete discussion of forward-looking statements and risk factors faced by our business. We will also be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted operating income, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow.
We believe these non-GAAP measures provide investors with a more complete understanding of Broadridge's underlying operating results. An explanation of our use of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to their comparable GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of today's presentation. We have a great agenda for you this morning. Rich Daly will kick us off with his opening remarks. Tim Gokey will walk you through the exciting market opportunities we see and provide some additional insight into our business model and our growth strategy. Tim will be followed by Bob Schifellite and Charlie Marchesani, who will talk about our core governance and capital market franchises and their plans to drive sustained growth. After a quick 15-minute break, we'll be highlighting the exciting opportunity we see in wealth management and additional opportunities in digital and international.
We'll break again. For the final section of the day, Jim Young will walk you through our financial model and provide you with additional insight about our new three-year financial objectives. I hope you saw that we issued a press release earlier this morning laying out those objectives. Finally, Rich Daly will close our prepared presentations with a review of what we have heard. We're going to have ample time for questions at the end. We are asking people to hold their questions until the end of the day. We will set aside 30 minutes at the end of the day for Q&A. I think it's a very exciting agenda this morning.
The theme of our day, you'll hear it across all of our presentations, is "Ready for Next." We have a short video on that theme. You'll hear from our Chief Executive Officer, Rich Daly. Let's roll the tape.
Think about the challenges of the last 10 years. Regulatory uncertainty, shrinking margins, evolving customer demands. Now imagine the next 10. How will you harness blockchain? What comes after mobile? What comes after Basel IV? How do your customers connect to the cloud, and how will you connect with them? We see what's coming because financial services run through us, and brands reach millions of customers through us. That's $ trillions in trades, billions of shareholder communications. Yet we're right there with you day in and day out. Everything we do, every insight we provide answers one question: What's next? You're ready to move now and a year from now, ready with scalable tech, apps, and multichannel comms. Ready to reach clients at the right time and place. Ready with data that puts your business into view. Broadridge, ready for next.
Broadridge is ready for next. The market for what we do is a focused strategy that will enable us to attack our market and the product set to drive success. As importantly, we have the right leadership team, a focus on the client, built on our commitment to the service profit chain, and the proven track record to turn long-term opportunities into reality. Together, that's a formula for delivering top-quartile total shareholder return. Let's tee up each point. The financial services market is undergoing a period of rapid change. Return on equity is low. Market trends are only putting more pressure on the bottom line, and our clients are facing significant challenges from technological evolution. They know they need to do more and move faster to adapt their business if they want to grow.
That creates significant opportunity for a partner like Broadridge, who has the technology, scale, and powerful network to help them simplify their businesses and reduce costs. Broadridge is a natural choice for them in order to accelerate that change. 3 years ago, at our last Investor Day, we told you that we had a focused strategy that would deliver double-digit earnings growth by extending our strong proxy and regulatory communications business and strengthening our product offering. Today, we have grown beyond our proxy core to serve a broader governance network.
Enabling us to extend the value we drive for our clients even further. Our investments in our GTO business have enabled us to build a capital markets franchise by enabling our service offering to include managed services and by creating a global multi-asset class platform. We also said that we would continue to invest in our business. The investments we have made have strengthened our core offerings and put us in a position to pursue targeted and meaningful opportunities in wealth management, digital communications, and in extending our global business. Another key reason for our success has been our management team, which I'm proud to note is stronger than it's ever been, with the right mix of deep experience and proven talent.
We now have a clear line of sight on both existing and new growth opportunities, which is why I'm more confident today that Broadridge is better positioned to deliver network value, help its clients transform their businesses, and generate sustained growth better than at any point in our history. That's what Ready for Next means to me. What does Ready for Next mean for you as an investor? The final element of our story is a focus on shareholder value, specifically delivering top-quartile shareholder return. We're proud of what we've been able to achieve since becoming a public company and since our last Investor Day, and we intend to continue to deliver strong results. We'll also continue to invest in the business in order to ensure that we are as well or even better positioned to achieve sustained growth in fiscal year 2020 as we are today.
Before we talk about our growth opportunities, I think it's worthwhile to remember how we got here. When we became a public company 10 years ago, Broadridge had recurring revenues of $1.1 billion and adjusted EPS of $1.51. At the end of fiscal year 2017, recurring revenues and adjusted EPS have more than doubled to $2.5 billion and $3.13. This growth has translated directly into shareholder value creation. Our shares debuted at $19.70. They closed last week at more than $90. With dividends, that's an annualized total shareholder return of 18%, well ahead of the broader market. From the beginning, we were determined to invest in our business, control our own destiny, and stay ahead of market dynamics by expanding our capabilities and services and solidifying our position as a fintech market leader.
Our growth plans were delayed by the financial crisis, which began about a minute and a half after we spun. After we became a public company and the financial crisis took place, we did not lose sight of our goal. We reinvested almost $2 billion of your money to broaden our product lineup and enhance our technology offerings. We've invested in our sales and marketing capabilities. We've also brought new perspectives to our management team. When you look at the numbers on this slide, it should reinforce two things. One, Broadridge has real momentum. Two, this team knows how to execute and win. Speaking of our team, Broadridge's management team is deeper and stronger than it has ever been. Our executive committee reflects a mix of executives who have long experience with Broadridge, as well as those who have joined more recently.
I spent a significant amount of time making difficult decisions about the depth and strength of our top leaders. Those executives who have proven their ability to perform have been rewarded with increased leadership roles, including Bob Schifellite, Charlie Marchesani, Doug DeSchutter, and Tom Carey. We have invested to bring in new leaders like Tim Gokey, Chris Perry, Jim Young, who have the skills proven at world-class organizations we need to scale our business. At our last Investor Day, three years ago, we laid out a series of financial and investment objectives. I am proud to note that we were able to hit our marks on all three key financial metrics: recurring revenue growth, margin expansion, and adjusted earnings growth.
More importantly, given that the focus of today is on the next 3 years, we did so while making the investments we needed to sustain our next lane of growth. We said we would focus our investments on 3 areas. First, technology. We've invested in our technology team and platforms to the point where they're now the leading standard for financial communications and are the back-office technology utility for more than 60 clients and provide managed service capabilities to 30 of those clients. We're now working to integrate blockchain capabilities and cloud-based communications into our product offerings. Next, we said we would invest in strengthening and enhancing our products. Over the past several years, we've continued to make tuck-in acquisitions and build new products to broaden our global product portfolio. Finally, we've continued to invest in our sales and marketing capabilities.
We've increased our focus on key accounts, stepped up our marketing support, and integrated the sales team from NACC. The result of this has been 3 straight years of record closed sales, a large and growing pipeline, and even more strategic dialogues with our clients. 3 years ago, most of these investments weren't in our run rate. We didn't have a global post-trade processing platform, nor were we in the process of developing blockchain capabilities. We didn't have a broad suite of wealth management products, and we didn't have a world-class sales organization. Today, those capabilities are in place, and their cost is reflected in our run rate. We are now positioned to pursue meaningful opportunities in both our core governance and capital market franchises, as well as in wealth management, digital communications, and by expanding our global footprint.
We're proud of our track record of delivering on our objectives and in creating value. Ready for Next is about the next leg in our growth journey. A key message today is that Broadridge has a strong and growing franchise in governance and capital markets, with additional compelling opportunities in wealth management as well as in digital communications and in growing our global business. A key word in that sentence is franchise. That's an important concept because it captures what we're trying to build in each of our businesses. At Broadridge, we define franchise as having a truly differentiated value proposition and creating network value. Let me spend a moment on this point because it's really a key sustainability takeaway for today. Network value says that the value of our services increases as we add more clients to our platform and greatly exceeds that of any point-to-point solution.
What are the drivers of Broadridge's network value? One, our mutualized platform enables economic efficiencies for all parties. Two, our visibility across the ecosystem allows us to enhance all clients' compliance, risk, and other capabilities. Three, our data from the network delivers critical and real-time insights to all participating clients beyond just their firm, providing a broader and more accurate market perspective. Four, our connectivity enables a faster transition to next-gen technologies, including cloud communications and blockchain. Five, clients can take advantage of our industry-leading cybersecurity capabilities. We see additional opportunities to expand these benefits even further as we go forward. Beyond network benefits, our franchises are defined by a product suite that enables our clients to reduce the cost and complexity of their operations by accessing a powerful shared platform and strong competitive advantages based on first-mover advantages sustained by our consistent investments on their behalf.
This is all underpinned by a long-term commitment to exceptional client service aligned with the service profit chain. While our governance and capital markets franchises will drive the bulk of our growth going forward, we see additional meaningful opportunities that will drive incremental growth and strengthen our long-term outlook. The first of these is in wealth management, where Broadridge has a great opportunity to build upon the suite of services we offer to our wealth management clients across our governance, Customer Communications, and capital markets service offerings. We are also well-positioned to take advantage of the migration to digital communications to the cloud and extend our digital leadership in governance, helping our clients further drive down the cost of paper and postage and increasing the effectiveness of their transactional communications.
Finally, we have built a growing international presence across both our franchises and intend to expand our global reach even further. As CEO, I keep my own simple scorecard on how I think about Broadridge's future. To do that, I take the base business we have and look at the strength and breadth of our current products. When I look at the market positioning and growth runway of our governance and capital markets franchises, I feel great about where we are on that point. Next, I look at our existing sales pipeline and the opportunities we have to grow that pipeline further over the next several years. Market demand for what we do is growing, our pipeline is strong, and the quality of our dialogues with strategic clients is high. Finally, I look at where we are positioned to go after even more new opportunities.
This is where I'm thinking about our opportunities in wealth management, as well as in digital and international, among others. In each case, I see real opportunities based on existing capabilities, supported by investments we are already making, driving tangible pipeline contributions. It's that scorecard that has enabled me to consistently say for several years that I'm more excited than ever about Broadridge's future growth opportunities. I hope that as you hear Tim, Bob, Charlie, Chris, Doug, Michelle, Tom, and Jim, you will keep your own scorecard. I believe that as you weigh our growing market opportunity, tangible investments, exceptional commitment to the service profit chain, and this management team's proven track record of execution, you will understand why I'm so confident that we can achieve the financial objectives we are laying out today. It is truly a great time to be at Broadridge.
The next speaker this morning is our President and Chief Operating Officer, Tim Gokey, who will break down the market opportunity we see, give you more insight into how we build franchises at Broadridge, and talk more about our additional growth opportunities. On a personal note, I recruited Tim to join Broadridge in 2010 because I thought the combination of his strategic insight honed by years at McKinsey, combined with the operating experience that he gained as head of H&R Block's tax business, would bring unique value to Broadridge. Tim has more than rewarded my confidence. In his initial role as head of strategy, and later as COO, he was the key architect of the growth in our GTO segment and the creation of our capital markets franchise, among other accomplishments. I look forward to working even more closely with Tim in his expanded role now as president.
Tim, you're on.
I can see that. Thanks, Rich. Rich, thank you very much for that kind introduction, and thanks to all of you for being here this morning. I'm Tim Gokey, President and Chief Operating Officer. Rich just described our journey over the past 10 years. Seven and a half years ago, when I joined Broadridge, it was because I saw a unique opportunity to be part of taking this company to the next level. It's been a real pleasure working with Rich and the rest of the strong management team that he just described as we have worked to more than triple the market value of Broadridge. I have to tell you, it's been quite a journey.
I remember five years ago working with our most important client contact at a global top five institution. It was a long-term relationship, a 20-year relationship with that institution and with that individual. They trusted us for what we did. We were not credible to help them with their next set of challenges, whether that was simplifying their complex technology environment or bringing their global operations together. We knew that we had work to do. Since then, we've enhanced our technology architecture, we've brought in new technology assets. We significantly increased our capabilities. As I've worked this past year with that same leader and his team, it's a completely different story. They love our architecture, which is very much in line with where they're going themselves.
They've really bought into the vision. We're close to a deal to bring together seven different corporate actions platforms from around the world onto a new single global platform that will set the standard for the industry. Now, I relate this story because it's emblematic of everything that's happened across Broadridge. I could go into any number of different units and show you a story that's just like that. As we look forward to the next 10 years, it's even brighter than the past 10 years because we are a significantly more capable company. Because of that, clients are asking us to take on bigger issues than they've ever asked us to do before. I believe that we're better positioned than anyone to address those critical client needs.
As we do address those needs, we're going to create value for our clients, we're going to engage our shareholders, and we're going to create strong returns for shareholders. I think we're going to engage our associates, not our shareholders, but we'll all be engaged. What I'd like to do this morning is, I would like to share our vision for how we build on the strong positions that we have today to take Broadridge to the next level of growth and return tomorrow. Our key message today is that Broadridge has strong and growing franchises in governance and capital markets, with compelling additional opportunity in wealth management. This is important, so let me say it again. We have strong and growing franchises in governance and capital markets with compelling additional opportunities.
In each of these arenas, there are key trends that are creating critical client needs that Broadridge is best suited to address. We're addressing those key needs with our industry-leading platform capabilities and our unique network. Why do we have two strong and growing franchises with compelling additional opportunity? First, we have a unique business model. This creates unusual value for both clients and shareholders. Second, the market context is favorable. The market is large relative to our size. It will continue to grow, and we have strong positions within that market. Third, our growth platforms address important client needs. These needs are significant, and we're best positioned to address them. Fourth, next-generation technology is a key driving force for change for many of our clients. We are creating that technology, and we're making that change a reality.
Finally, we have built a culture that knows it takes engaged and knowledgeable associates to serve clients well, and that, in turn, creates real and sustainable advantage. All in all, this translates into a powerful combination for sustained growth. Let's look more closely at that business model. It simplifies complexity for our clients, which creates unusual value for all stakeholders. We are focused on financial services. This gives us the deep knowledge necessary to help our clients solve problems, to bring them perspectives they don't have themselves, and it greatly increases the likelihood of success on complex engagements. Next, our model is based on taking entire business processes and performing them for multiple clients with a common staff, technology, and operations platform. This creates unique benefits that I'll talk more about in a moment. Finally, when the model is fully mature, we create substantial network value.
That's value that goes beyond the impact of a shared technology and operations platform to address opportunities that no client can reach on their own. This is an important point, because one of the things that's different now than three years ago is that Broadridge is increasingly focused on how we can use our platforms to drive network value to our clients. The combination of these factors creates real value for the ecosystem, which can be shared between our clients and our shareholders. Now, Rich and I already talked about the power of network value. What makes us distinctive is how we get there with our multi-client managed services model. When I talk about multi-client managed services, I mean a business process that's been fully mutualized across many clients based on a common technology platform, a shared operating model, outcomes-based pricing, and joint governance, all with independent verification.
This approach gives our clients real, immediate value. Because we mutualize the technology, because we mutualize the supervisory layers within operations, and because we invest heavily in process and technology, clients typically see a 30%-40% reduction in their total cost of ownership. Think about that. This is a huge advantage for our clients, especially in today's increasingly competitive marketplace. That superior process and technology also improves quality. For example, one new tier 1 bank client saw a reduction in age breaks and exceptions of more than 50%, and you can think about how that cascades through the rest of their operation. By being part of a shared platform, our clients are also collectively more likely to get it right on key issues like compliance. If there is an issue, no one's an outlier. In an age of increased regulatory scrutiny, there's safety in conforming with others.
In addition, the cost of designing and implementing new regulatory mandates and other changes, such as MiFID II, are mutualized across all participants. Finally, clients enjoy continuous improvement due to scale and because they benefit from ideas across the network. For example, Broadridge has delivered savings of more than $15 billion in paper costs for our North American governance clients, and we saved our capital markets clients on the order of $100 million in the recent change to T+2. Let's look at the market in which Broadridge participates. The operations and technology market that Broadridge serves is more than $125 billion. Note this is ops and tech spending only, so there are other sources of spend for our front office and corporate service offerings. In the next 3 years, spending on global financial services infrastructure is expected to grow about 5% annually to more than $140 billion.
While financial services firms have historically kept much of their technology infrastructure work in-house, there's a strong trend to have a trusted outside partner like Broadridge undertake this important work. All of this is leading to faster growth for third-party spending. Within this market, Broadridge has strong positions built on deep client relationships which drive sustained growth. As more people talk about the power of creating industry utilities, the good news is that Broadridge has been doing exactly that for many years. We have proven that we can create, grow, and govern multi-tenant infrastructures across a variety of functions with high client satisfaction. For instance, in governance, we serve nearly every broker, fund, and public company in North America for board of directors elections and for regulatory communications. With BRCC, we're increasingly doing this for omni-channel customer communications, reaching more than 80% of U.S. households last year.
In capital markets, we serve 18 of 23 primary dealers for fixed income. We serve 7 of the top 10 in equities and 4 of the top 6 in Canada. Overall, we clear and settle more than $5 trillion every day. Clearly, these two businesses are franchises today. They have attractive underlying economics, they have solid growth, and they have the opportunity to move into relevant adjacencies. In wealth management, we're building the next franchise. We already serve 20 of the top 20 wealth managers. One-third of North American wealth management accounts are on our technology platform. We touch more than 25% of financial advisors with our front-office products. Let's talk about these market positions and how they translate into addressable market for the products that we have. I said earlier that total operations and technology spending for securities firms is $125 billion.
When you look at the specific products that we offer, our addressable market is about $40 billion of that based on our current product set and near-in extensions. That's up from $24 billion that we talked about at our last Investor Day three years ago. Let's look at this briefly by market segment. The opportunity in governance is up to $13 billion, and this is going to grow as the drivers behind equity and fund growth remain positive, as the need for issuer and data-driven solutions continues, and as omni-channel customer communications continue to evolve. In capital markets, the opportunity is up to $15 billion. Capital markets firms are under pressure to cut costs and to meet regulatory demands at a time when legacy systems need upgrades. That is encouraging firms to outsource more of their non-differentiated functions to companies like Broadridge.
Finally, in wealth management, the opportunity is up to $12 billion as wealth and investment management firms undergo unprecedented change and need partners to help them navigate the new technologies they require. For all practical purposes, the total market opportunity is infinite relative to Broadridge's $2.7 billion in total fee revenue. That is what Ready for Next is all about. In addition to these drivers in each market segment, there are also broader trends at work. Three years ago, I outlined three broad market trends with which we're aligned. These trends remain very much intact today. The demand for mutualized solutions remains as strong as ever. What's different is a growing demand for global solutions as firms move to simplify their complex technology environments and their complex operations. Mutualization is also increasingly driven by the desire to leverage next-generation technology.
Truly next-generation mutualization will be based on network value in addition to common operations and technology. For digitization, we see continued growth in preference for digital delivery, especially when the digital experience is better. There's also strong support by regulators for digital channels. In data analytics, insight is being increasingly embedded in many applications versus given solely to power users. The future evolution will be to drive AI and cognitive. The line between traditional data and analytics and AI solutions will be increasingly blurred. Finally, the network value concept, as I noted earlier, is an increasing area of focus for Broadridge across all of these areas. These three mega trends remain as powerful as ever. Our focus on bringing the most current developments to our clients is paying off.
In each of governance, capital markets, and wealth management, there are key trends that are creating compelling client needs that Broadridge is best suited to address. In each of these areas, Broadridge is addressing these critical needs with our industry-leading platform capabilities and unique network. Broadridge has had a franchise in investor communications for a long time. Today, we're going to show you how we will continue to grow and extend that franchise, which is as much about governance as it is about communications. Our GTO segment has performed strongly the past several years, due in significant part to the strength of our capital markets business. We believe this franchise will drive significant growth over the next five years.
Building on our positions in governance and capital markets, we've also invested significantly in our wealth management capabilities, and we expect this will grow into a third franchise, perhaps by the time of our next investor day. Finally, we see digital or omni-channel communications and international as important additional opportunities that support these core growth franchises. In each of these businesses, market trends support long-term organic growth. We're growing sales, we're expanding into natural adjacencies, and we're investing in technology to better serve our clients. All of this supports attractive growth for the long term. You will hear from our business leaders in more detail, but let me give you an overview of each arena, starting with governance. Governance is our biggest franchise, and our governance business is approximately $1.7 billion of total fee revenue. As Bob Schifellite will describe, it has attractive underlying growth with many natural adjacencies.
Today, our unique network links brokers, funds, and public companies, shareholders, and regulators. This creates significant benefits for the entire ecosystem. From this powerful network, we have built multiple strong businesses with a track record of creating new ones like market intelligence, tax reporting, securities class actions. Capital markets is our second biggest franchise, with over $500 million in fee revenue. It's been a strong year of growth for us the past five years. The largest global institutions have a strong need to simplify their complex technology environment, especially as they rapidly evolve to the cloud. Our SaaS technology solution is tailor-made to address this urgent need. We are evolving our solution to be the global multi-asset class technology platform of the future, and client response has been strong.
I've talked personally to the heads of operations or COOs at multiple of our large global clients, and they're excited by this vision. I said earlier that Broadridge has built on our positions in governance and capital markets to create a strong platform in wealth management. This has been an area of investment for us over the past five years, and we have a growing set of targeted solutions that drive fee revenues of more than $400 million. The commoditization of asset management and other important changes are deeply affecting wealth and investment managers, who we expect will encounter many of the same challenges over the next five years that our capital markets firms have seen over the past five. As Chris Perry will describe, new technology will be key to addressing these challenges, but there's no scale technology player serving the wealth management industry.
Clients need to either build it themselves, which no one wants to do, or they need to stitch together a whole array of point solutions, which is incredibly expensive. We think this creates a real opportunity for a firm like Broadridge to create a set of solutions that work well independently, but that work even better together. Our international presence supports each of our franchises, and given strong globalization of financial markets, is an independent growth driver in its own right. In the past, firms outside of North America were much less likely to leverage third parties. As Tom Carey will describe, that's changing rapidly with the integration of the European market, with significantly new regulatory mandates, and rapid growth in Asia. Digital, cloud, and other new technologies are playing a key role across each of our growth platforms.
Our clients know that they need to leverage next-generation technology to address their critical business challenges. They face obstacles in creating the right investment and, more importantly, in applying the right talent and intellectual capital, which appropriately for them is focused on their most differentiating pieces of their business. This creates a real opportunity for Broadridge to assist in the areas where we have scale and domain expertise. I'd like to say that Broadridge can be the on-ramp for our clients to leverage these powerful new technologies. For example, as Doug DeSchutter and Michelle Jackson will describe, nearly every large institution has a significant push on to digitize their client experience. Operational communications like statements and regulatory communications are on that list, but they're so far down that clients will never get to it on their own. Broadridge can help.
Similarly, every large institution is in the midst of a strong drive to move their infrastructure to the cloud. For a Tier 1 institution, that can mean refactoring thousands of applications. Being able to leverage strong and available SaaS solutions such as ours can take whole chunks of that transformation off our client's plate. At its core, AI depends on data and scale. The more data you have, the more exceptions you see, the better the opportunity to automate and add intelligence. Because Broadridge works across many clients, that gives us the scale to create AI solutions that no client can create on their own. Finally, distributed ledger technology or blockchain can create significant advantages, but it requires a network of participants. By bringing blockchain to areas like proxy and fixed income, we can be the solution for our clients as and when the technology matures.
Broadridge is actively working with our clients today to bring these new technologies live. We've recently concluded proofs of concept in both governance and capital markets with significant players like JPMorgan, Northern Trust, Santander, and Société Générale. There's a lot of hype around this technology, Broadridge is making it a reality. Finally, I'd like to talk about something that is less tangible, but which we think has been incredibly important to our success, the service profit chain. We take a very long-term view of our business, and we view every client as a 100-year client. We are fair in our commercial dealings, and we don't optimize for the near term. We deliver every day on every project, and we never let our clients down. We've completed more than 65 major onboardings in the past five years and countless smaller ones.
This is technology, I can't tell you that every one of those went exactly as planned. The difference is the tenacious way that we do whatever it takes to make it right. Client satisfaction is the one metric on which every associate in Broadridge is compensated, irrespective of our financial results. This approach makes a difference. We are consistently rated a top vendor by our clients, which in turn creates greater client loyalty and willingness to consider other new solutions from Broadridge. Supporting that excellent client delivery takes engaged associates. We are passionate about creating an environment in which every associate can thrive and build on their knowledge and skills. We measure associate engagement every year, and we act. All this creates an engaged, client-focused, get-it-done culture that benefits our clients, our associates, and our shareholders.
It's this service profit chain balance that has created the company that we are today and that we believe ensures our long-term durability. I've been in and around dozens of large-scale financial institutions in my career at McKinsey & Company and elsewhere, I truly believe that this culture is a compelling competitive advantage for Broadridge. In conclusion, I want to say how proud I am of all that we've accomplished, of our two strong and growing franchises in governance and capital markets and compelling additional opportunities in wealth management and the others. I'm proud of our platform-based business model that builds on multi-client managed services to create unique value for our clients. I'm excited about our strong positions in large markets with favorable trends that support attractive long-term growth. We are focusing on extending our governance franchise, on driving capital markets, and on building on success in wealth management.
We're leveraging next-generation technology as a catalyst to serve our clients more deeply by helping them transform faster. Our work is underpinned by a durable and highly effective culture. Collectively, this market, this position, and this approach will create more opportunity over the next 10 years than we've seen over the past 10. Broadridge has the right business model at the right time, and we have a team that's truly excited about the journey ahead. We are, in fact, ready for next. With that, I want to thank you very much again for being here this morning. Speaking of ready for next, I am going to now introduce Bob Schifellite. Bob is president of our Investor Communications business, and Bob has been a key leader since the founding of this business.
He has a really strong ability to integrate viewpoints from all different points of the spectrum, which has been critical in building that network that I just described. In addition to being able to really work well in the context of a mature business, he's unusual in that he's had real success in building new businesses at the same time. It's been a real pleasure as part of the time that I've been here to get to know and to work with Bob, and I know you're going to enjoy talking to him this morning. Thank you.
Good morning. Thank you, Tim, for those very kind words. Again, I'm Bob Schifellite, and I'm president of our $3.4 billion Investor Communication Solutions division. I will cover the governance business. My colleagues, Doug and Michelle, are going to cover the Customer Communications business. At Broadridge, I've covered several roles in my over 30 years in this business. Some joke that I've been around since we paid the first electric bill. That's not exactly true, but it's probably pretty close. Three years ago, when I had the privilege of talking to this group, I concluded by saying how confident I was that we were going to capitalize on the opportunities over the next 25 years. I'd say 25 years. I guess it's now 22 because it was three years ago. As you can see, I do love what I do at Broadridge.
I'll tell you this, I remain even more confident about our future. We have proven that we can grow this business. We've grown it over the last three years. I'm confident we can do that again. Let me elaborate on Tim's overview. One of the most important points he made is how critical our governance franchise is to the efficient functioning of capital markets. Think about this. Every time you make an investment, whether you buy 100 shares or you buy 1 million shares, you demonstrate your implicit confidence in the governance of capital markets. Broadridge provides timely and pertinent information about equities and funds to help investors keep current about their financial assets and enables them to participate in governance through voting at shareholder meetings. Let me emphasize four messages today. First, Broadridge is at the center of a unique network that powers corporate governance.
Second, our business model is sustained by strong external macro trends, including growth in our fund and equity positions. Third, we have a tradition of building new businesses by engaging in the network. Fourth, investment in technology is expanding that tradition, and it's creating sustained growth across all of our businesses. This governance process is a complex ecosystem, and it reflects the U.S. trading system. Consider this for a moment. Without Broadridge, issuers would have to connect with shareholders working through banks and broker-dealers that hold their shares in beneficial or street accounts. That's complicated enough for one issuer and one broker-dealer. In this system, myriad connections must be made. There are more than 5,000 issuers, 24,000 mutual funds that need to connect to more than 140 million retail investors and thousands of institutional firms. They must do this by working through more than 1,100 banks and broker-dealers.
We're not even counting retirement service providers who are also participants in this process. Needless to say, it's a gargantuan task. Issuers, banks, and brokers would face huge redundancy in investments if they tried to solve this without us. Investors would also have more challenges participating in corporate governance. Today, these market participants mostly deal with our governance platform for all of their global investments. Without Broadridge, they have to connect with each bank and broker-dealer separately. Simply put, the system is complex for participants to navigate effectively on their own, and there is no company other than Broadridge that has the capability or experience to do what we do. Let's add Broadridge to the center of this network. We simplify that complex process, and we save issuers significant costs.
We allow banks and brokers to avoid huge investments to serve their customers in the same way they are served today by Broadridge. The Securities and Exchange Commission appreciates the order and efficiency Broadridge has brought to this vital proxy and governance work. We actually meet with the SEC representatives regularly with our steering committee, consisting of all market participants, to discuss overall resilience of our capabilities and platform. They also frequently solicit our thinking on new technologies and its impact on investors. We definitely spend lots of time in Washington. We provide critical solution for all participants in this network. I'll talk about each of the network and how we engage with each of them. We have direct relationships with the more than 1,100 bank and broker-dealers who are responsible for facilitating regulatory communications between issuers and investors.
This powerful network enables us to extend our offerings well beyond proxy to a variety of interrelated governance communications and asset servicing solutions. For example, we offer corporate and class action solutions, first dollar prospectus services, as well as tax manage products and digital communication platforms to these broker-dealers. Corporate issuers are obligated to conduct annual meetings. Funds are required to provide regulatory disclosures, including annual and semiannual reports and fund prospectuses. Whenever one of these market participants has a regulatory obligation, it is usually Broadridge that provides the solution. Throughout governance business, we service all, that's all, 5,000-plus corporate issuers, we service all of them, and mutual funds, all of them, 24,000. We have direct relationships with more than 2,000 corporate issuers and 400 fund families representing thousands of individual funds.
We serve these direct relationships through our end-to-end suite of solutions, including document management, meeting services, shareholder report distribution, and data and analytics. Later, I'm going to provide a few examples of how new revenue is being generated through the value-added services we have introduced over the last few years. Institutional investors. We have a proprietary ProxyEdge electronic voting platform that helps institutional investors fulfill their regulatory obligation to vote in shareholder meetings, processing more than 80%, all shares voted in the U.S. and Canada. Through ProxyEdge, we have direct relationships with approximately 6,000 institutional investor firms globally. We have also integrated multiple sources of content into ProxyEdge as we continually look to improve this platform. This year, we launched a data-driven automated solution that allows investors to develop custom proxy policies.
We've also initiated a new product for global securities class actions that is getting great traction and is very valuable to institutional investors. Retail investors, about 140 million of them. They represent a much larger portion of shares for companies than is generally understood, and their participation in governance serves them and companies well. What do we do here? We've begun analyzing retail data to help funds and issuers improve shareholder engagement. We also provide data-driven insights that assist funds in growing their businesses. Let me give you an example of how we can use this data. A fund that may typically spend today $70 per shareholder on a proxy solicitor to increase retail voting could engage that shareholder at a lower cost in a more targeted fashion by using our data-driven solutions.
For corporate issuers, where activism is clearly on the rise, we can help reach retail shareholders in a cost-effective and targeted manner. Not to influence them on how to vote, it's not what we do, solicitors will continue to do that, but simply to get them to vote. These retail shareholders can make a big difference in the outcome of these meetings. The three most expensive proxy contests just happened over the past few years, Procter & Gamble, Arconic, and DuPont. Why are they expensive, or why were they expensive? In part, because issuers had to continuously reach out and seek retail shareholders to vote their millions of shares. Our data solutions can reach this important constituency at a fraction of the cost. After the DuPont proxy fight, CEO Ellen Kullman acknowledged the importance of the retail investor in winning the vote.
On the global stage, we work with more than 50,000 publicly traded companies across 100 countries to facilitate annual meetings, processing communications for 5 trillion shares, representing 7.6 million positions. We have significant opportunity outside of North America as we build this international business. We are expanding our global custodian client base in this space to include subcustodians, which will enhance the proxy services that we provide today and provide more services. Our international growth is also being helped by acquisitions. For example, our recent Spence Johnson acquisition combined Broadridge's global retail fund data and analytics with their institutional data and market intelligence, positioning us well to help asset management clients assess global growth opportunities. We just released our first FundFlash in the Japanese language and expect to deepen our presence in many other key markets.
You'll hear from my colleague, Tom Carey, about some of the international governance opportunities. You'll love this slide. If I could get any more words on it, I would have. Let me explain our strong position in the governance network and why it's so sustainable. All the green work, all the green, is the work that Broadridge does, and we believe does well. It's a process that is reviewed independently by a Big Four accounting firm, which tests various aspects of the accuracy of our processing. I won't walk through all the steps, but let me explain why Broadridge's capabilities, expertise, and experience are so critical. For example, we have a dedicated global team to track record and meeting dates for more than 50,000 publicly traded companies worldwide. That's a huge task. There's all sorts of technology to understand when they've had meetings in the past.
A big process that takes place. They ensure that we, and therefore the issuers, never miss a record or meeting date. It is critically important. We also ensure that the delivery preference of every single shareholder is captured and managed, and that each regulatory communication is distributed in accordance with their preferences. Think back to the P&G snake pit with its high-stakes proxy battle. The aftermath of the case draws a stark contrast to how the votes we processed were finalized minutes after the polls closed and have not been challenged. That's virtually all beneficial shares that accounted for 94% of Procter & Gamble's total outstanding shares. The rest of the vote? Still being debated weeks later. The accuracy of our tabulation results from our significant investments to build and maintain these capabilities. Broadridge has an ISO 27001 certification for information security and ISO 9001 for our quality management systems.
In addition, our technology and operations environment are reviewed by third-party auditors in accordance with SSAE 18 standards. We are not the only ones who think this is a world-class system. It's also better hearing others say something good than me saying it. Industry leaders, including Paul Washington, chair of the last fee review committee of a few years ago, and corporate secretary of Time Warner, said, and I quote, "The proposed fee structure is intended to continue to support a world-class process. A world-class process that facilitates communications with and voting by shareholders, and one that will be flexible enough to encourage further efficiencies and voter participation by retail stockholders." This is critically important to these companies. I had shared this with you three years ago, but I wanted to share it with you again because it points to exactly what it is that makes Broadridge's position so sustainable.
In essence, without Broadridge, this process simply would not work. Economists speak of the Amazon effect, where one retailer has driven deflation in consumer goods pricing across the board. Well, here we have the Broadridge effect. We have significantly lowered costs to the industry. As you can see here, there are stark differences between the unit economics of sending a full package versus sending a notice or digital distribution. Over the past decade, Broadridge has invested $hundreds of millions to enable this to help funds and corporate issuers save $15 billion, $15 billion, in postage, printing, and materials costs by switching to these lower-cost delivery channels. The notice in digital, there's an incremental fee that we are paid over and above the regulatory processing fee. Therefore, our earnings remain fairly consistent. How far along are we?
Well, today, we've eliminated about 70% of traditional mail, paper, and postage in beneficial accounts on the proxy side, and continue to work with issuers and funds to increase digital adoption for their registry accounts, where they have a direct relationship, their adoption there is much, much lower. As you look at the Investor Communications division, you see a balanced portfolio of businesses. Our largest business, the regulatory business, serves banks and broker-dealers as well as mutual funds, ETFs, and plan providers. This business has enjoyed a compounded annual growth rate of 7% over the past three years, primarily driven by stock record growth. Our focus is to grow internationally and continue our leadership in North America by transforming the communications business.
For example, we continue to be engaged with the fund industry to provide improved and more effective fund shareholder disclosures that lowers costs, increases shareholder engagement, and continues the path for more digital adoption. We do expect to continue to lead the way in improving disclosures and reducing costs to the industry. Our corporate issuer business has grown at a healthy 16% CAGR over the past three years. We continue to grow the registered business to 2,000 corporate issuers that I referred to earlier that track with us directly through our technology capabilities and a comprehensive solution suite. Through our recent acquisition that some of you may have heard about of Summit, which is a document management technology and solutions provider, we will continue to aggressively grow this business. We've also created a portfolio of products building on the network-driven data assets and relationships.
This includes growing our tax solution offerings for banks and broker-dealers, data and analytics services, and marketing communications. Together, these businesses have grown 16% compounded annually over the past three years as well. We expect to continue that growth by winning new clients, creating new use cases for our data, and also expanding globally. The growth of this division is a testament to what we call the service profit chain. Our client satisfaction scores are high, with 97% of clients saying they were either satisfied or very satisfied with our services, and that's translated into a 99% client retention rate. Additionally, investments in technology have earned us a place in the Institutional Investor Tech 40 for 2016 and then again a couple of months ago in 2017. Very proud of that.
The capabilities of our Broadridge Customer Communications business, which you will hear about more later from Doug and Michelle, is also going to assist in growing and transforming these businesses. When we look at the total addressable market here, it's $9 billion-$13 billion. Today, we currently have $1.7 billion of that $9 billion-$13 billion in fee revenue. We have huge upside potential. All right. I said before that we have these macro-level trends that support business, and amongst them is positions growth both in equities and in funds. I have a little quiz. We don't have any devices. The question is, go back to 2008, which was the most difficult financial crisis I think any of us in this room has experienced, even with my 30-plus years and stuff.
If I asked what would have happened to stock position growth, how many would say it would have decreased by 10% or greater? Any hands? Hands. 0%-10%. Who'd have thought? Even more hands. Okay, here's the answer. Positions have increased over time, and the global financial crisis of 2008 did not stop the trend. From 2007 to 2011, the decline in equity growth was only 1%. However, critically important, fund positions grew 10%. Understand the economics here. A 1% increase in fund or equity position growth provides comparable fee revenues as a 1% growth in equities for brokerage. They're comparable. We had net growth between equities and funds. Very powerful model. Before I said I'm going to give you a couple of examples. Here's one of those examples about how we're growing in the issuer business.
This slide points to an issuer where we generate about $5,000 in beneficial proxy services. However, we establish a direct and broader relationship, and they've become much more valuable. We now do transfer agency work for them. We do shareholder data services for that company. We do print of materials for that company. The last one, document management. This is a real example. We do at those rates, probably rounded, those rates for this company. Document management is something we expect to get done, that's part of our new acquisition, that's $10,000. If you look at this, $5,000 in beneficial proxy fee now is translating into $67,000 in fees from this issuer. If you extrapolate that across the 5,000 or so issuers that we have a seat at the table all the time, it becomes a very big number.
This opportunity exists across all issuers. Let me provide a couple of examples on our network and data-driven businesses, which also have grown 16% annually over the past few years. We have a product called Opportunity Hunter, which uses our unique data, predictive analytics, and location-aware services to help mutual fund wholesalers find the right fund for the right advisor at the right time. Compare the ease of that search to trying to sell funds without that data. A huge advantage that we bring through Opportunity Hunter to these entities. Our global tax reclaim data solution helps mutual funds improve yield by reclaiming withheld taxes from foreign markets. Yet we're just scratching the surface in this business. Earlier, Tim and Rich spoke about the investments we are making in cutting-edge technology, especially around blockchain.
Let me talk about the governance view as it relates to technology. We made a significant investment in blockchain platform for proxy voting. We also made a minority investment in Digital Asset Holdings and have joined the Hyperledger project, which is advancing common blockchain standards. We also have an in-house team that is developing and exploring blockchain use cases. We have already used blockchain in parallel to traditional vote processing for a global company's annual meeting. Blockchain also represents potential growth opportunities for us. For example, this new technology could help us expand our corporate action solutions. We continue to make significant investments in digital channels through the cloud to support our clients. Something, again, Doug and Michelle will discuss. In conclusion, let me reemphasize the four messages that I stated at the beginning of the presentation and why I am so confident about our future.
First, Broadridge is at the center of that unique network that powers corporate governance. Second, our business model is sustained by strong external macro trends, including the growth in fund and equity positions, as seen by the compounded annual growth over the last decade of 3% and 9% respectively for equity and fund positions. Third, we have a tradition of building new businesses by engaging the network, and as a result, we have an addressable market of $9 billion to $13 billion across all of our businesses. Fourth, investment in technology will extend that tradition into the future, sustaining growth across all businesses. These four messages add up to significant opportunity that will be realized as we pursue them with Broadridge's hallmark blend of discipline, execution, and imagination. I conclude here. I thank you. Thank you for all being here today.
Yes, I am looking forward to the next 22 years. With that, I would like to introduce Charlie Marchesani to speak about capital markets, and I think you'll love his story.
Apparently, Bob is a lot younger than I thought he was. By the way, it's much warmer up here on stage, so this actually feels good. Good morning. I'm Charlie Marchesani, and I'm responsible for our Global Technology and Operations business, which we also refer to as GTO. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today and to share our story as a leading global fintech provider for banks and broker-dealers. I have been with the company for 25 years, servicing in a variety of client-facing, operational, technology, and business leadership roles, and have been leading the GTO segment since 2007. Today, I'll provide an overview of our key position in the global capital markets landscape as a leading global technology provider.
I'll also show how we are uniquely positioned to create value for our clients and take advantage of the opportunity we see to extend that value and to drive growth. Capital markets is a half a billion dollar revenue contributor to our results, and we have strong market momentum. In fiscal 2017, revenues from capital market solutions rose 12%, with total recurring sales of $52 million. We expect to build on this momentum as we partner with clients on the strategic opportunity to simplify and transform their technology and operations. Here are the key points I'll make in my discussion today. First, the strength of our global technology platforms, which we view as industry leading, combined with our managed services operational capabilities, position us to lead in the marketplace.
Second, we are building on that strength and extending the scope of our capabilities with investments in our next-generation capital markets technology solution, Global Post Trade Management, or GPTM. Third, we are addressing a large market opportunity. Our capabilities and investment in extending our solutions will drive strong growth. Finally, our investments in our product roadmap, network value, especially in the area of fixed income and disruptive technologies, uniquely position us with clients as their on-ramp for future advancements and innovation. In summary, we are establishing Broadridge as the right fintech strategic partner for today and for tomorrow. As I'm sure no surprise to many of you, capital markets firms continue to face challenging business conditions. Their revenue's at 38% below 2009 levels, and revenue growth has been flat since 2014.
At the same time, return on equity remains below the cost of capital for most firms, especially the top 10 global banks. These business challenges are not going away. There will be continued competitive pricing pressure on trading and asset servicing activities. Talk to industry analysts. They expect the cost of regulatory compliance to continue to grow and crowd out other investment priorities. In my discussions with clients, we see the results of these challenges. They tell us that they are increasingly searching for the right partners to mutualize costs and support needed change. Against this backdrop, this challenging backdrop, the burden of legacy technology and operations complicates our clients' ability to transform. Capital markets firms need to find a path to drive simplification, scale, and cost savings. I recently met with a large firm about their need to transform their legacy technology infrastructure.
The challenge they talked to me about was that they lack the ability to invest to drive that transformation. Their current spend is focused on supporting current regulatory change and compliance costs. Now they are looking for a partner like Broadridge to mutualize the cost of transformation and future-proof them from the ongoing cost of regulatory change. I believe we are the right strategic partner to address the market need to mutualize. We have the best capabilities. We have a strong market position, and we are investing for the future. One great example of this is our GPTM solution. With GPTM, we are working with large global investment banks to replace multiple regional applications with a next-generation global solution. This solution helps them simplify and transform their global operating model while providing them with increased operational controls and cost efficiencies.
For more than 50 years, Broadridge has been a leader in providing complex technology solutions aligned with the needs of the market, and we are well-positioned to lead in the future. We support post-trade processing for 18 of the 23 U.S. primary dealers. We process equities for seven of the top 10 global investment banks. We clear and settle trades for our clients in over 80 international markets. We are the leaders in this large and growing market for Software-as-a-Service delivery, and we are extending that leadership to support the operation needs of our clients. Our managed services teams of operational experts now support the back-office operations of 30 clients, including 30% of U.S. fixed income primary dealers. Only Broadridge has a combined technology and operation solution, differentiating us against our competitors who can only do one or the other.
This unique combination, built on a foundation of best-in-class operational processes using our technology, transforms our ability to help clients gain significant cost savings and scale. Our managed services offering has developed into the leading utility for post-trade processing and has been recognized by WatersTechnology as the best outsourcing provider since 2015. Just look at today's headlines. It proves that the safety and security of client data is critical. Broadridge provides best-in-class data security and cybersecurity models aligned with industry-recognized standards. We partner with our clients, the world's largest and most critical institutions, to review, validate, and test our models and practices on a regular basis. Our investments and scale in this area are a key competitive differentiator for us. We are investing to extend our capabilities. A great example, a global institution engaged us to help transform their North American fixed income business.
They needed help in simplifying their operations and lowering costs. The client contracted for our post-trade technology, managed services, reconciliations, securities financing, and operational workflow solutions, all in a single transaction. This client is now looking to partner with us on the next phase of its mutualization journey, an EMEA post-trade processing opportunity. I'm confident in our market position and the growth outlook that we have. We have global momentum in partnering with clients and key wins beyond those represented on this page. One of the things I'm most proud of is the next-generation investments we have been making in our platform and how they align to the needs of the marketplace. Our Global Post Trade Management platform is built on the foundation of our leading North American and international post-trade processing engines.
This is a big opportunity for us and one of the key things that I want you to take away from my remarks this morning. GPTM allows clients to choose the components aligned with their processing needs, while also gaining the benefits of a wrapper of a common global data fabric and client portal. We are working with clients to configure and deliver GPTM as an integrated global solution or a phased solution by asset class or geography. The approach gives us the flexibility and agility to support institutions on a global basis or work with institutions across their key geographies. With GPTM, we have also expanded the breadth of our asset class coverage, adding foreign exchange and exchange traded derivative capabilities to our solution. GPTM positions us as a strategic partner who can deliver value rapidly while scaling up and down to meet changing client needs.
This is an illustration of how Broadridge is using our GPTM solution to transform post-trade processing globally for a top 10 global investment bank. This bank faces the growing cost of compliance with continued regulatory demands and market changes. They need to improve operational efficiencies by reducing fixed costs and eliminating the complexity of relying on multiple post-trade platforms. The firm has nine, yes, nine, proprietary and third-party systems around the world to support their fixed income and equity processing. Think about the complexity of managing nine different solutions posting to the bank's general ledger or providing an aggregated view of data across the firm's global clients. Plus, all nine needed major renovation, constant maintenance, and ongoing investments in regulatory compliance. Migrating to GPTM will give this bank a simpler global operating model. It will also provide compelling cost savings by shutting down multiple technology platforms.
This client will be able to use Broadridge as their on-ramp for future technology, transformation, and innovation. We are helping making them ready for next. As I mentioned earlier, we are investing to extend our capabilities, providing clients with a greater opportunity to simplify and mutualize costs. We've expanded our asset class coverage with investments in exchange traded derivatives and foreign exchange processing, aligning with clients' desire to buy a broader suite of solutions from a single provider. EMIR, MiFID II, CAT, SFTR, and FRTB may sound like a series of code names, but let me provide you a decoder ring. See, Bob would've given you a quiz on them. I'm just going to give you the decoder ring. They are the latest series of regulatory mandates in the U.S. and Europe, with which our clients must comply.
To date, clients have been band-aiding the compliance for their legacy infrastructures. Now we are providing them with future-proof regulatory solutions that integrate with their full technology footprint. Our acquired securities lending and collateral management capabilities are a logical extension of our post-trade capabilities. Now we can integrate with our trading and position data and help clients optimize the use of collateral, enhancing their use of capital, as well as enhancing ROE. When I talk to large global investment banks, they consistently tell me that their worst pain point for operational control and risk is corporate actions. Simply explained, they lack a global integrated solution to manage these activities. Using our global solution, we are partnering with large global investment banks to address this significant pain point. Investing in these opportunities will drive strong growth and provide value for our clients.
As both Tim and Bob talked about earlier, network value effects can bring benefits to all participants, going beyond what any firm can do individually. With our scale in capital markets, we have a unique opportunity to create network value for our clients. We are actively engaging with clients and industry partners to realize the power of network value, especially in fixed income, where we are the books and records for 18 of the 23 primary dealers. This is another of the key things that I'd like you to take away from the discussion this morning. We have two areas of focus to bring network value to our clients. The first is accelerating operational transformation of the industry. 22 years after moving to trade date plus three settlement in 1995, the industry moved to two-day settlement this past September. Yes, 22 years.
As a market leader, I believe we have a responsibility to accelerate the pace of change. We are now working with our clients to further accelerate the settlement cycle or move to real-time settlement for the clients in our network. By doing this, those clients and their buy-side trading partners can realize the benefits of reduced trading risk and capital optimization without waiting for another two decades. Second, and most exciting, we are working with clients to bring more liquidity and transparency to increasingly illiquid fixed income security trading, starting with corporate bonds. As regulatory changes in the U.S. have moved the fixed income trading market to an agency versus inventory-based trading model for sell-side firms, finding trading liquidity in the corporate bond market for the buy side has become a challenge. Given our role, we have a unique view into the trading and holdings in the corporate bond marketplace.
We are now building on the foundation of this data to help clients and the network solve this growing liquidity challenge and better serve their buy-side clients. This will bring significant value to our clients and help address a critical industry need, one which Broadridge is uniquely positioned to solve. I'm excited about the potential of these activities to create unique network benefits for our clients and a sustainable advantage for our solutions. As Tim mentioned earlier, our investments in innovative and disruptive technologies are resonating with clients. We are focused on advancing three new technologies that provide capital markets clients the opportunity to benefit from sharing the intellectual capital and investment of our network. With the adoption and capabilities of artificial intelligence and robotics accelerating, we are investing in use cases to automate repetitive operational tasks and incorporate these technology innovations directly into our technology stack.
By mutualizing these investments across our scale, we plan to be an industry leader in the use of this technology. As we invest in the next generation of our technology and expanding our solutions, we are leveraging the flexibility and agility of cloud delivery. Combined with our traditional tenets of resiliency and data security, we will be the market leader for the industry in the migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud. I close with the best. We believe that the use of distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform business functions, and we are committed to leading the industry in the application of these solutions. Recently, we partnered with Natixis, Société Générale, and one U.S. Tier 1 bank to successfully complete a bilateral repo processing test case using distributed ledger technology. The pilot proved the potential of this technology to reduce operational risk and inefficiencies for participants.
We automated the transaction flow, we eliminated time-consuming manual processes, and we provided a secure and immutable record of the trade details. We are now working to expand this test case to other participants, creating a network effect and benefit. Our investments in these disruptive technologies are a great proof point for our value proposition and my confidence in the future. Our historical record of closed sales in capital markets provides momentum, and it proves that our services are resonating in the marketplace. With a market runway of $15 billion, the addressable opportunity for the capital markets franchise is significant. Over the past three years, we have grown revenue from capital market solutions by 18%, and we are confident in the opportunity to continue this growth. Our immediately addressable market is sized at about $10 billion, and that comes from sales opportunities of our multi-asset class post-trade processing solutions.
We will continue to grow this business by expanding relationships with current clients and adding new clients, consistent with the sales success we have had over the past several years. We will address the extended market, valued at $5 billion, by expanding into near adjacencies, which include regulatory reporting, reconciliations, securities financing and collateral management, corporate actions, and managed reference data. We have enabled these market opportunities through the investments we have made to broaden our value proposition. We are excited about the potential we see for success and accelerating our growth into the future. In summary, our vision is to be the number one strategic partner to help clients simplify and transform. We will do this by investing in our solutions and innovative technology to further accelerate our leadership. We have a proven track record as a partner. We have delivered for our clients for more than 50 years.
Whether it's Global Post Trade Management or using our fixed income data to solve trading and liquidity challenge, our goal is to be the industry partner of choice for the years to come, 22 years and beyond, Bob. With our strong market position, client relationships, and investments, we will lead in the growing market for capital markets infrastructure. I'd like to thank you for your time, and it is my pleasure now to announce a short break. Thank you.
Everyone be back at 9:55 A.M. We'll get promptly started again at 9:55 A.M. 15 minutes. Thanks.
Oh, man.
We're going to get started. Thank you, everyone. We're going to get started again. Try and keep the trains running on time and get us all out of here efficiently, and so we don't take up more of your time than we've already asked for today. I'm going to turn it over quickly to Tim Gokey to introduce the second section of the day. Tim.
Great. Thank you all. In this next section, you are going to hear about the opportunity we have in wealth management to create a third franchise, as well as the additional opportunities in expanding our digital capabilities and in growing our international business. We hope you'll come away from this section as excited as we are about the incremental opportunities that we see to drive growth. In the first presentation, Chris Perry will tell you why we think wealth management is positioned to grow and why we think this has the potential to be a third franchise for Broadridge. Next, you'll hear from Doug DeSchutter and Michelle Jackson as they talk about our digital strategy. Thanks in large part to our acquisition of NACC, Broadridge is better positioned than ever to help our clients accelerate the shift to digital communications.
We have been a leader in digital for years in our governance franchise, and we are well-positioned to extend that leadership and to broaden that change. The third presentation will come from Tom Carey, who will discuss how our increasing focus on global markets will both support our two franchises and be an independent growth opportunity in its own right. I'd like to now turn it over to Chris Perry. Chris came to us three years ago with a mandate to build a world-class sales organization, and he has delivered on that in spades. Prior to that, he was with Thomson Reuters, or Thomson before it was Thomson Reuters, for 21 years, where he ran several major businesses, including a global sales organization with more than 4,000 sales and marketing professionals.
Chris also brings over three decades of experience in the wealth and investment management industry, including several years as a financial advisor. At Thomson, Chris was part of the team that built Thomson ONE into what was the market leader at that time. That whole set of different pieces of his background gives Chris a unique viewpoint into the challenges facing the wealth and investment management industry and the opportunities that those present for Broadridge. Chris.
Good morning. I'm Chris Perry, President of Global Sales, Marketing, and Client Solutions at Broadridge. Thank you, Tim, for that kind introduction. It's really been a great and pretty quick three years here at Broadridge, working with this fabulous management team. It reminds me that three years ago at this Investor Day, I was the new guy, and I had said to everyone that we had an opportunity at Broadridge to punch at a higher weight and really increase our sales. I'm very happy to say that we've succeeded in these efforts over the last three years. You'll hear more about that in Jim Young's presentation a little bit later. As for my background, I have in fact spent over three decades in the wealth and investment management industry and have extensive hands-on, in-depth experience in these sectors.
I started my career as a retail broker and moved into institutional sales and trading, where I serviced the investment management community. Ultimately, I saw how technology was a great enabler, and I made the transition to marrying information and technology to service financial firms and corporations. Today, in my current role as Broadridge's Head of Sales and Revenue, I see a huge opportunity for Broadridge to serve wealth providers and investment managers. I am excited to share how we are driving growth by taking a one Broadridge approach to provide innovative, best-in-class solutions that enable our wealth and investment management clients to be ready for next. The wealth management industry is undergoing unprecedented transformation, and we believe that this evolution creates a significant growth opportunity for Broadridge. Our wealth offerings began as a natural extension of our capital markets, post-trade, and investor communications proxy capabilities.
They have now become a substantial solution set with robust capabilities in the front, middle, and back office. Broadridge is continuing to build momentum in the wealth sector, and our strategy is focused on combining the strengths of our valuable assets to solve the wealth industry's most pressing challenges and their big aspirations. In short, we intend to become the market leader in this space by doing what we do best, helping our wealth clients grow their business, optimize performance, and transform operations. Today, my presentation will cover the following four points. First, I'll focus on Broadridge's wealth solutions and our substantial industry footprint. Second, I'll talk about how major disruptive shifts in the wealth management sector are creating a growth opportunity for Broadridge.
I will then share Broadridge's wealth strategy and how we have aligned our value proposition with industry needs by offering an integrated front-to-back ecosystem that incorporates valuable data and digital capabilities from across all of Broadridge. Finally, I'll shift gears a bit and briefly talk about the investment management sector, where the need to modernize infrastructure is creating additional growth opportunities for Broadridge's best-of-suite platform. Let's dive into our wealth solution set. In the wealth sector, we are historically best known for back-office and post-trade processing. You'll see our back-office functions on the right side of this slide, including our managed services that allow Broadridge to provide outsourced capabilities to support technology and key operational functions such as tax reporting, margin, and corporate actions.
However, if there is one thing I want you to take from this presentation, just one, it's that our capabilities go well beyond the back office. We help our clients with the full spectrum of their mission-critical activities. Over the past few years, we have greatly expanded our footprint via internal investment and acquisitions. To be clear, our powerful wealth solution set also includes front and middle-office tools. On the left side, we have listed our front-office solutions that help advisors acquire and engage customers, including portals, investor education, and retirement planning tools for investors. Our robust set of digital tools helps advisors grow their book of business via state-of-the-art marketing, sales, and prospecting functionality, their lifeblood. In the middle office, our solutions perform critical tasks such as client onboarding, performance reporting, advisor education, and compensation management.
Our data aggregation capabilities enable wealth managers to fulfill fiduciary and regulatory obligations by providing insight into client assets held with other institutions, held away assets. Where are we in terms of wealth sector revenue, industry footprint, and operational scale? Broadridge has established a substantial wealth footprint by building on our leading positions in capital markets governance and customer communications. Our revenue is over $400 million, and over the past two years, our wealth offerings have averaged a growth rate of 10% a year, double digits. Our North American clients include the largest players in key wealth management segments. We provide services to all of the top 20 wealth providers in North America, and our wealth business serves everyone from national warehouses to regionals, fund companies, banks, trust companies, and even record keepers.
To illustrate the strength of our footprint, we have some numbers that spotlight the operational scale that we bring to the sector across the front, middle, and back office. In the front office, more than 25% of U.S. advisors use our solutions to enhance their sales, prospecting, web portals, and investor engagement efforts. In the middle office, more than 228,000 agents and advisors use our data aggregation service as a way to obtain a more comprehensive view of investor holdings. In the back office, our trade processing systems service more than 50 million retail accounts. Finally, our client base custodies over $7 trillion in assets daily on our platforms. A number which clearly illustrates our massive, unmatched scale that we currently have in the wealth sector. Given our substantial market presence, what will drive our future growth in the wealth sector? Both wealth and investment management are undergoing major transformations.
I'd like to highlight how our capabilities help these firms facilitate business evolution. First, demographic shifts are creating new problems and opportunities for wealth managers. Today, advisors have to cater to the silent generation and baby boomers, while also trying to attract the younger millennial tech-savvy group who want a mobile, 24 by seven self-service experience. Our tools help wealth managers address the demands of both investor groups, providing a digital advisory experience that encompasses mobile and self-service functionality. Second, disruptive market forces are driving the evolution of advisors' role and the firm's traditional business model. Major changes include the move from traditional commission-based trading to a fee-based advisory model and heightened competition from robo-advisors. In this case, we are helping wealth managers augment their advisors' capabilities via technology and innovative solutions that amplify advisor effectiveness in marketing communications and account management.
Third, regulatory compliance expense is chipping away at profit margins at both wealth and investment management firms. To counter this pressure, we're implementing next-generation technologies, operational solutions that retool their operations and optimize business intelligence to improve asset gathering. Finally, investment preferences favoring low-cost and passive products have altered the economics of investment management. Assets under management in passive investments are forecast to grow by 50% between 2015 and 2020. Investment managers need to cut costs and enhance product offerings to remain competitive. We're helping firms simplify their technology infrastructure and consolidate multiple legacy systems onto a modern platform that can also centralize their data. Our platform enhances operational agility and fully supports the growing use of alternative investments. Together, these trends provide Broadridge with an addressable market of more than $10 billion in spending across the wealth and investment management sectors.
What is our strategy to capture our share of this revenue opportunity? Well, let's take a look. Our strategy for the wealth sector has three components. First, driving the growth of differentiated point solutions that address specific challenges within the wealth ecosystem. Second, implementing our One Wealth platform, an end-to-end front-to-back office solution that integrates the wealth management activities into a seamless experience for the investor, the advisor, and the enterprise. All three are critical. Third, enriching the value of our solutions by investing in technologies that are taking advantage of data and analytics, and of course, using artificial intelligence. Let's take a closer look at each of these. In the past, our efforts were focused on selling products on a standalone basis, like a front-office tool to help an advisor with prospecting or a middle-office tool like performance analytics, but very standalone, isolated.
We're bundling tools together and integrating key capabilities to create new solutions to enrich our value proposition and add value for the advisor. This approach has enabled us to increase our penetration of existing clients and has also helped us expand into new clients, and in fact, also adjacent market segments. As a former financial advisor, one of my biggest challenges was having to use a patchwork of multiple non-integrated vendor solutions to support my client base, the spreadsheets, the databases, all of those things. That is why I'm truly excited to tell you about our One Wealth platform, as it integrates mission-critical functionality across the front, middle, and back office, and incorporates both proprietary customer data and third-party data and tools to form a seamless advisor experience.
In designing this platform, our guiding principle was to ensure that our One Wealth platform had the investor and the advisor at the heart of everything. What can our platform do? Well, it helps advisors grow and retain their business, starting with solutions that enable better targeting of potential new clients, as well as retention tools to serve them. One Wealth enhances the client experience with enriched digital communication, educational content, as well as trading and account servicing capabilities. Finally, our One Wealth platform also makes the enterprise more efficient, serving key processes such as clearance and settlement, and incorporates data management tools that improve the client relationship while helping to maximize advisor revenue and productivity. Everyone's happy. We believe our One Wealth front-to-back platform is the best in the business. As you'll see, this is a view that is shared by some others in the industry.
To illustrate that point, on this page, we have included a quote from a recent 2017 Celent report. It's not us. Celent's talking. Celent reviewed the top front-to-back wealth technology platforms in North America and determined that ours was the best. The report called out an integrated solution and highlighted our use of innovative technology to empower both the advisor and the investor. What are some of the ways that we're using innovation to better serve our wealth clients? We're turbocharging the value of our solutions through ongoing investment in digitization, data, AI. Here are a few examples. First, in terms of digitization, we're using cloud technology to facilitate collaboration between advisors and their clients. Our cloud-based solution enables communications in the digital channel preferred by the customer, whether that's email, social media, or web portals.
You'll hear more about this next from my colleagues, Doug and Michelle, during their digital strategy session. Second, we're utilizing our data aggregation capabilities to provide the firms with a golden copy of client information. Having complete information about a client's wealth gives the firm the ability to provide 360-degree advice and improves performance reporting and compliance. Finally, as for artificial intelligence, we are launching a compelling cognitive marketing solution that helps advisors grow their book of business by targeting the right clients. I'd like to talk briefly about how we are driving our growth in the adjacent investment management sector. Despite the onslaught of regulation, the squeeze on top-line revenue, and the shifting economics of investment management business model, which has changed so substantially in active to passive, this is still a growth market.
A recent PwC report projects that assets under management will grow to $111 trillion by 2020, from $79 trillion just a couple of years ago in 2015. The increase in passive and alternative investments is forecast to increase by $17 trillion in these two segments alone. In response, firms are developing new products and seeking to expand geographically. The key obstacle for most firms is modernizing their legacy systems, a challenge that Broadridge is well-positioned to address with our platform approach and our proven success at neutralizing costs across the industry. Our powerful best-of-suite global platform supports investment managers' imperative to lower costs and enhance business agility. As a result, across our product line, we have successfully established a substantial client footprint, including 17 of the 20 largest investment managers in North America and more than 300 firms globally.
Our success is being recognized in the market as well in investment management. We've won six awards over the past 12 months for our investment management capabilities and functionality from prestigious organizations like HFM, Inside Data, and Waters. Again, the industry is talking. Our strategy is to grow even more by harnessing the potential of our best-of-suite platform and by continuing to expand our services. We are focused on increasing our penetration of our existing clients, and we're also targeting other segments, including pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth managers. In closing, I think all of you can now appreciate how Broadridge will benefit from this expanded focus on wealth and investment management. To summarize this presentation in four simple points, we've established strong solution sets in the wealth and investment management sectors by building on our leading positions in governance communications and capital markets.
Second, Broadridge is well-positioned to grow as a result of transformative changes in the wealth and investment management sectors that we're paying attention to. Third, our One Wealth strategy and investments in innovation are positioning us for even stronger growth in the wealth sector. Fourth, Broadridge is uniquely placed to help the investment management industry simplify its technology infrastructure. Earlier today, Tim described our two franchises in governance and capital markets. After hearing my presentation, I hope that you believe, as I do, that we have the makings of a great future franchise in wealth and investment management. Thank you. I'd like to introduce Michelle Jackson and Doug DeSchutter to speak to you about our amazing digital communications capabilities. Thank you.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Are we good? Okay. Good morning again. My name is Doug DeSchutter, and you need to adjust the mics or are we good? Okay. Okay, good? Okay. Good morning for the third time.
It's a really good morning up here, apparently.
It's a very good morning.
Really good.
It's a very good presentation. It was worth the wait. Okay. Again, my name's Doug DeSchutter. I am responsible for Broadridge's overall digital strategy, and I'm also President of Broadridge Customer Communications. I've been with Broadridge for over 15 years. Prior to my current role, I led our U.S. regulatory businesses for several years and was Chief Strategy Officer for Broadridge at the time that we became a public company.
Hello, good morning. I'm Michelle Jackson. I'm Managing Director of our Broadridge Digital Solutions. I actually came to Broadridge 10 years ago with a background both in financial services and digital agencies. Prior to this role at Broadridge, I led our mutual funds proxy business, several of our core bank broker-dealer businesses, and launched several of our issuer data products and markets.
Michelle and I will explain our digital strategy and provide an overview of our digital platform, which is a foundational component of our governance franchise and helps drive our overall digital strategy and digital growth.
We'll also introduce you to something which is truly unique to Broadridge and very much along the lines of Ready for Next, our 21st century digital communications hub that connects brands with consumers in a digital omni-channel world and will accelerate digital transformation for brands and consumers alike.
Okay. Here are five key points that I'd like you to take away from today. First, consumers are digital, but brands are very much struggling with converting their customers from print to digital and getting them to sign up for digital delivery. Second, Broadridge has a strong heritage and track record of digital transformation. Third, we're investing to accelerate the print-to-digital transition for our clients. Fourth, Broadridge's customer communication platform creates a valuable network effect for the benefit of consumers and brands, and we'll spend quite a bit of time talking about that. Finally, the NACC acquisition generates attractive expansion opportunities and paves the way for future digital growth.
Before we get into each of these five points in more detail, I'd like to share with you a little bit of context, since not only am I responsible for our digital strategy, but I was also our executive sponsor for the NACC acquisition. I had been running our U.S. proxy and prospectus business. Before that, also ran our Customer Communications business several years ago. It became very clear at that time that digital was the future. There were a lot of questions about what digital would look like in the future, how it would happen, when it would happen, what it would look like, what the format would look like. We stepped back as an executive team, and we just took the position that, look, digital's going to happen, and it's going to be the future, and we're not going to be passive about it.
In fact, we just did the opposite. We said, we're actually going to accelerate digital adoption, even if it means cannibalizing our existing print businesses. I stepped aside from, at the time, what was running a billion-dollar a year annual revenue business. I stepped aside from that solely to focus on this challenge and this problem around digital transformation, and I'm focused on that now along with BRCC 24/7/365. Now, along the way, Michelle and our teams worked on how do we actually digitize the mail stream? How do we get consumers to turn off paper and go digital, go electronic? We started working with some of the leading technology companies in the world, many of whom you're going to see when we talk about the network and the partners that we work with are part of our ecosystem today.
We're working with these leading technology companies because we had the content, they had the eyeballs, we're both working towards a strategy of digitizing communications. As we did that, a few things became very clear. It became very clear that digital adoption is ultimately going to be driven by consumer behavior. It's not necessarily what a brand or a company's trying to do. It's what the consumer wants to do. If you're going to get a consumer to drive digital, it's going to be led by consumer behavior. It also became clear that the frequency of transactions that a consumer undertakes or makes with a particular service, the greater the likelihood, the greater propensity that they will actually undertake the effort to sign up for that service. Think about online banking, aggregation of content, and the value there for the consumer.
What that told us is that the amount of content that we have is important. Then finally, if you take a consumer perspective, there's an entire source of financial services content outside of wealth management that Broadridge simply didn't have before we did NACC. The consumer tech companies that we're working with, many of whom, again, are channel partners in our network today, told us that we were much more interesting to them with a broader content source, and in particular the type of content source that you could acquire via something like NACC. Also that we were much more likely to succeed in our digital strategy with that broadened content source.
That's a really important point. The expanded breadth of financial services-related content and relationships that we gained by way of the NACC acquisition has been a really important factor in our ability to develop a digital ecosystem with partners like Amazon, Evernote, and others that are key in our B2C solutions, as well as other business alliances and partnerships that support our digital B2B innovation. I'll talk some more about this later on.
Okay. Let's start with the first point. Going back to those five points we had before, let's go to the first point, that's that brands are still very much struggling with the print-to-digital transition. What you're going to see here, depending on where we look, the majority of consumers right now are digital, right? 98% of adults making over $75,000 are internet users. Then if you look at the stats, 70% of consumers still prefer to get a paper bill or statement in the mail at their home.
Interestingly, it's been 20 years since eDelivery's been around. Think about that. For 20 years, all of us here in the room, as consumers, have been getting pleas and incentives asking us to shut off paper, to sign up for eDelivery from banks, brokers, cable companies, virtually every provider that's sending content to your house. Collectively, digital adoption is still relatively low at 30%.
What this tells us is that when it comes to bills and statements, right now the digital experience holistically has not been better than the physical experience because seven out of 10 consumers are still saying, "Send me the paper at home." From a brand perspective, this is a huge problem. Okay. There's a lot of money that gets spent on paper and postage, we are taking a very aggressive stance and position and a leadership position in terms of how to build a network to be able to change that. It's an enormous problem that brands are looking to solve.
It's a little bit bleaker story when you look at the challenge brands have in creating meaningful, engaging digital relationships with consumers. Outside of retail banking, retail banking has strong consumer engagement over websites and mobile, consumers tend not to actually visit the websites of the brands they use. The high-level story here is this. One, it simply isn't convenient or worthwhile for consumers to visit dozens of websites and keep track of all those constantly changing passwords. Two, the higher the frequency of transactions a consumer makes with a particular service, the more they're willing to undertake the effort to sign up. Again, this is evident in the case of retail banking, where consolidation of bill pay and the frequency of transactions has created a high digital engagement rate.
The second point we talked about is that Broadridge has a strong track record of digital transformation. You think about us with a very strong governance franchise, which Bob had talked about before. We are using digital as an ability to help, again, solve this problem and gains for the governance franchise. It's worth noting around our history of innovation here. Keep going. You see some of the solutions that we've done for the industry, we've helped the industry successfully digitize around processing of the regulatory communications. We talked about some of these statistics before. We've effectively digitized 64% of all these communications already, either through digital capabilities and solutions or through using data and algorithms and suppression technologies.
That's a pretty big number that's resulted in the save that we've talked about to date, which is over $15 billion save for the industry at large over the course of the last decade. We want to continue to grow beyond the 64%, right? We still got a lot of consumers and investors still getting paper at home. To get beyond the 64%, we have to continue to add value in the digital experience. When we talk about some of the things we're investing in, that's exactly what we're looking to do.
That digital transformation has actually been a win-win for both our clients and Broadridge alike. This is a really important point. Brands have a significant savings on postage and print costs. When we look at this from a Broadridge perspective, distribution revenues go away. Fee revenue could be plus or minus, and profit generally has the potential to be larger given the value that's created with that shift to digital.
Sometimes we provide print for a client, but we don't yet do the digital. From that perspective, eDelivery can be a headwind. A lot of times we provide both print and digital, and we're aligned there. A lot of times we're not doing print at all, but we're just doing digital, and then we have a tailwind from digital adoption trends. Look, one of the ways that we're going to look to add value to the customer communications business is to continue to penetrate from a digital perspective and benefit from the tailwind of digital adoption. Okay, we continue to invest in order to accelerate the digital transformation, and we're doing that along three key themes. The first is that we need to make the digital experience better.
Right. Have any of you ever looked at marketing emails you receive and noticed just how rich they are in terms of content and data? They're actually pretty impressive. They're personalized, they're contextual, they're data-rich, so the sender can actually track interactions. A lot of brands spend a lot of resources and dollars to get those communications just right. By contrast, think of that experience as what is typically a text-based email that you get telling you that your statement is ready, and that you need to go somewhere to pick it up. That's a huge experience gap for consumers. What we're doing is bringing the leading digital capabilities that are so often seen on the marketing side of the house, but typically are not available to the operations teams that are sending out bills and statements and other regulatory communications.
This is an example of what we mean by having an enhanced experience.
In addition to enhanced experience, we also need to make digital more convenient for the consumer. One way that we can do that is rather than force the consumer to go to one of the dozen or so websites, as we talked about it, and remember all those usernames and passwords, we can directly deliver that bill or statement into a digital destination that consumer already uses. We're going to talk about that again. We can directly deliver that bill or statement into a digital destination that consumer already uses. It can be their bank's online banking site. It could be a personal cloud archive, like a consumer's Google Drive account or Evernote account. I'm actually going to show you something around that.
When we do this, again, we're not just delivering a notification with a link to say, "The content's available, go somewhere and get it." We're actually delivering the underlying bill or statement.
Now, these two broad capabilities around enhanced experience and enhanced reach are both new. We are in market now with enhanced experience. That platform has several clients already live. Our enhanced reach solutions, like delivering mail directly into a consumer's cloud account, those are being piloted now.
Let's talk about the third item up here. The cumulative sum of these multiple investments allows us to create a network and a resulting network effect. That's for the benefit of both consumers and brands alike. It's going to take time to build out, but it's very powerful and it's very unique to Broadridge. This is the network. We're going to talk about the network and the network effect. This is a very important chart, so I'm going to slow down here a little bit and make sure we just take the time to really go through this and explain this. What I talked about earlier is that consumers are digital, but they're not signing up for redelivery in mass, and they're not willing to take the effort to go to 20-plus different websites and manage all these usernames and passwords.
We're looking to be a leader here and create a network to solve that problem. On the bottom, you see we provide communication services today, either in print or digital format, to virtually every major consumer vertical that sends a bill or a statement to a mailbox. In fact, you can see that we aggregate and distribute communications on behalf of over 5,000 brands as we do that. As we do that, we're distributing content. Our reach is over 80% of all households across both the U.S. and Canada. Again, think about the breadth of that content. It's over 5,000 brands. It represents every major vertical, and it's over 80% of all U.S. consumers, U.S. and Canadian consumers. On the top half, you see we're also connected to major consumer channel destinations, again, like online banks or consumer cloud drives, like Google Drive or Evernote.
Of course, these consumer destinations are already used by hundreds of millions of consumers. In fact, statistically, what this means is that many of you in the room are, of course, already using these consumer destinations today. You see brands on the bottom, you see channels on top, and consumers connected to those channels. Importantly, in the middle, what you see is Broadridge. We're this connection point and this network hub in the middle, which makes this happen. We are effectively becoming a communications hub and allowing brands to reach consumers through destinations that those consumers are already using.
What Doug just described is the network. Let me explain what the network effect is. The network effect is a way that we can help brands create digital relationships with consumers at a much faster rate than they can on their own. For consumers, we can greatly simplify how they connect to brands, how they do business with and receive content in the digital channels of their choice. Here's how we do it. We offer consumers options on how and where they would like to receive their content. When they sign up for delivery of content in any channel in our network, again, this could be a Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox account, we ask them if they'd like to be notified when content from their other service providers in our network is available.
When the consumer says yes, we can then utilize matching algorithms to find matches with those other brands in the network. Once the match is found, the consumer receives an alert, much like what you get, for example, on LinkedIn, which says, "Would you like to connect to this brand and start receiving this content in your account?" All the consumer needs to do at this point is opt in. Remember earlier when we mentioned, we talked about the frequency of transactions can create a higher digital engagement rate? By aggregating content for the consumer at the digital destination of their choice, we're leveraging that fact to drive up adoption. To do this takes a very broad content network, like the one that Broadridge has, to make this all happen.
While a picture might be worth a thousand words, Doug and I actually thought a story here might be a little bit better. Here's a quick story to illustrate the network effect in action. Sarah sees a promotion from her utility company, EDCON, that says she can get her bills delivered directly to the digital channel of her choosing. Sarah signs up to have her bills and statements delivered to Evernote, where she stores a lot of her important household information today. Things like her retirement statement, tax, healthcare information, bills, and the like. Sarah receives a notification that her latest bill is available in her Evernote account. When reviewing her bills, Sarah's presented with a new type of communication that hits on key pieces of information she actually cares about: personalized, dynamic, and includes rich content from her utility that's engaging and relevant.
She's also able to pay and easily connect back to the utility company's website with a single click. When signing up, Sarah asked to be notified of additional companies she can connect with within her Evernote account. She now receives a notification that her brokerage account information and her cell phone bill are also available for delivery into her Evernote account. With just a few clicks now, Sarah's able to connect to all of her additional providers and access all of her communications from within her Evernote account. She can easily pay her bills, engage with her providers in one place. All this makes it really easy for Sarah to file, manage, share communications, pay bills, and engage with all the important content from her household in a single location of her choosing.
Great. The network effect is a big deal, and like we said, it's going to take time to develop, and it also required assembling a lot of different puzzle pieces to make it a reality because it requires an incredible amount of scale to enable the network effect and the matching that we talked about. The acquisition of NACC was a very important piece of that overall puzzle. This page should look familiar. We showed you a version of this pretty similar when we announced the NACC acquisition about 18 months ago. We said at the time of the announcement that the transaction had compelling financial benefits, and I'm happy to say that we will achieve our $20 million annual synergy target, and then some, hence the green check.
We also indicated that there were attractive midterm expansion opportunities. I'm pleased to say that in our first year, we achieved over 200% of our sales goals. A green check here ultimately, though, will mean that we've made further progress as a consolidation point for large in-house platforms. Finally, we also hinted at larger, longer-term opportunities, especially around digital. As you can tell from today's discussion, we're very well positioned to be a 21st century communications hub around digital.
By adding NACC, we have multi-vertical reach and vast consumer footprint. As we mentioned, 80% of all households in the U.S. and Canada. At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Wasn't NACC primarily a print business?" The answer is yes. The great irony here is that every communication starts with digital before we ever put ink to paper.
Let's recap here and leave you with some key milestones to track. Again, big picture of what we're doing. In the same spirit of what's made Broadridge such an indispensable part of the financial services industry, in the communication space, we're looking to use our breadth and our scale and our network to again evolve our capabilities and create efficiencies for the market. When we succeed here, we're going to create significant value and benefit for our clients and solve for them what is a very big problem. Now, again, it's not going to happen overnight. To gauge our progress along the way, here's some key milestones. First, meaningful outsourcing wins in financial services for our Customer Communications business.
The combination of NACC's scale and efficiency and technology, when we put that together and coupled it with Broadridge's digital platform, created an unrivaled capability and platform in the customer communication space. As mentioned on the last slide, we've already seen proof points around this. Again, early stages, but in the first year, we more than doubled our initial sales goals and expectations. Second, our mix of outsourcing wins over time with a digital component should steadily increase. Even when we have the initial opportunity with a client, and it's only a print opportunity or print application, by creating a relationship and onboarding that client into our omni-channel platform, we'll ultimately have a good chance of extending our relationship and services with them into digital over time. Third, we're going to continue to launch new digital solutions.
Today, we talked about our enhanced experience tool set, solution set, and the enhanced reach capabilities being brought to market to support brand and consumer communications. We have a strong product roadmap to support them. We're also looking to bring in new future B2C applications as well as B2B capabilities to the market. Finally, there's a little bit of foreshadowing to what Michelle's going to talk about. Partnership announcements to further extend the reach of our digital platform are also a very good milestone to track. From our perspective, they not only strengthen our solution offerings, but they validate the value of the assets and the puzzle pieces that we've brought together to enable our overall digital strategy.
Actually, on that note, many of you saw yesterday the announcement we made on the expansion of our collaboration with Amazon Web Services on our B2B data management and archival solutions. We are actually collaborating, working together to build the next generation of managed services for data management and archival. Given the already significant market share that Broadridge has in traditional archival, these innovations, these collaborations with AWS will actually enable our clients, specifically our financial services companies, to move beyond what is today in traditional archival, primarily a storage of static documents to meet regulatory obligations and to facilitate presentment. These new solutions will store documents, data, and other objects in a repository where organizations can actually leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, structured and unstructured querying to turn archives into actionable information.
This particular collaboration combines our unparalleled data management expertise and leadership in financial services with AWS's leading infrastructure capabilities to be able to deliver a very highly customizable managed service on a global scale. What you see here is the tie-in to our digital strategy, because we clearly already had a strong presence in providing managed services solutions for financial services. The expanded breadth of our financial services relationships with the extension of the NACC acquisition means that we have expanded opportunity sets. That makes us more attractive and interesting to Amazon and continues to drive more opportunities for business alliances and partnerships to drive our product solutions.
This wraps our presentation. We appreciate your time and the opportunity.
Thank you as well. I am pleased now to welcome my colleague, Thomas Carey, to the stage.
Thanks, Steph. Waiting for the transition. Not coming. There we go. Hello, and good morning, all. I am Tom Carey, the President of our international business, and I am delighted to be able to talk to you today about our journey to date and how we are going to accelerate our growth by helping our clients transform their businesses. Like Charlie and Bob, I am celebrating 25 years at Broadridge. I know. I do not look young enough or old enough. Through my career, I have been really fortunate to experience the breadth of what our company has to offer, and it has been great to be part of the evolution of this thriving business. I have worked in all aspects of our business, across technology, operations, sales, and M&A, and I have shaped the strategies and growth of our business internationally.
Right now, I am focused on the next wave of performance for our business and how we grow that own franchise internationally and creating long-term value for our clients and Broadridge. This morning, I am going to talk about EMEA and APAC, where we have a rapidly growing presence, and I am going to share details of our recent successes. I will reveal how market drivers are providing strong tailwinds for our future growth. Our clients face pressures to reduce costs and globalize operations. At the same time, these firms cannot afford a loan to transform their legacy technologies. This has opened up a $5 billion opportunity internationally providing technology and services, and we will deliver growth through multi-year opportunities with our largest clients.
Using the use case that Charlie discussed earlier, we will also bring our broad capabilities to our regional clients, and we will continue to create incremental value through market-relevant solutions adjacent to our core offerings. Achieving this growth has required a strong foundation. Let us look at what we have built so far. We began our international business in 1995 through a post-trade acquisition in Europe. This allowed us to differentiate our offering and provide our U.S. clients with international services. When we added proxy in 1998, it was for the same reason. Our international business has now evolved from that very U.S.-centric model to a sizable global business with customers around the world. Through focus and hard work, we are growing international by addressing client needs within EMEA and APAC. The slide behind me highlights major achievements in this growth period.
In 2013, we closed one of our largest mutualization transactions to date after this client conducted extensive research to identify Broadridge as the right long-term partner. Since 2013, we have generated significant new sales, grown our client base, and expanded our portfolio solutions and our capabilities. I'm going to share some numbers and key drivers behind our recent growth. With industry return on equity depressed, capital markets firms have turned to us to help reduce costs and streamline operations. This has been our strongest growth area. We've also seen encouraging growth in our investment management and governance business lines. Through a balance of sales growth and tuck-in acquisitions, we have doubled our revenues in size since 2012. We've achieved a 14% CAGR on revenue, predominantly through organic sales-driven opportunities. In my role, I have a personal mandate to double those revenues again.
How have we generated this growth? We've expanded existing relationships. We found partners who promote and distribute our capabilities. We've executed upon our commitments. Probably critically, we've delivered solutions with excellent value propositions. Our sales over this four years have been really quite strong. We've created approximately $50 million in new recurring value, while also driving new event revenues as our client relationships have deepened. By increasing our sales velocity and client adoption, we are generating renewed interest from other firms, and they're closely monitoring what their peers are achieving with Broadridge today. None of this would've been possible without the excellent team we've built by promoting our best associates and acquiring great talent. I'm truly grateful to them for their hard work and dedication to date. I'd like to share some positive dynamics even of our market opportunities.
There are four drivers supporting our growth: regulatory and compliance, globalization, cost reduction, and acceleration of outsourcing. Let's talk about each of those. Regulatory pressure may have been receding in the U.S., but that's not the case globally. Our 2015 research, combined with institutions at Institutional Investor, highlighted that over 67% of analysts in Europe and Asia thought that regulatory pressure would continue through to 2020. This is driving our clients' investment choices. One example is MiFID II. I'm sure many of you have seen the huge challenges in our industry this is creating. This regulation demands that firms separate the cost of investment research and trading while also increasing the transparency of their trade reporting. This single regulation will cost our industry $3 billion. On the face of it, MiFID II is a regional issue, isn't it?
It's not, because it has global impact due to the interconnectedness of our markets and the complex nature of our clients' businesses. Such changes prompt firms to seek our help in solving the challenges, such as accurate trade reporting and research unbundling. Likewise, Brexit, where I come from, unfortunately, is bringing new challenges for our clients and therefore opportunities for us. We're helping firms redesign their trade flows to protect the continuity of their businesses moving forward. Our second driver is globalization. Investment managers and corporations must achieve greater transparency and control across their regional entities. In capital markets, firms are already moving from solving a silo basis or regional basis to solving globally. This brings with it the benefits of consistency and control and increases cost savings, which leads me nicely to our third driver, cost reduction.
This is even more acute at capital markets firms in EMEA and APAC, where ROE and profits have failed to recover as they have with their U.S. peers. McKinsey research from 2016, European banks delivered an ROE of 5%. That is roughly half that of their U.S. compatriots. These challenges are not limited to the sell side alone. Investment managers face fee pressures and compression as the popularity of passive products increases. From Morgan Stanley Oliver Wyman Research, asset management margins contracted by 6% in 2016 alone. In financial services, clients have continued cost pressures, but they've largely exhausted the internal savings profiles they can achieve. They're struggling to address legacy technologies that require renovation. Why is that? They require renovation because of market demands to change regulation or to allow for the next wave of business transformation.
By moving to our mutualized services, they're able to reduce costs, operate more efficiently, and better leverage their data. The fourth and perhaps the most critical driver here is the accelerated adoption of outsourcing. Historically, international clients have been more resistant to outsourcing than their U.S. peers. However, today's tough environment demands that clients alter their viewpoints. Our 2017 research highlights that 64% of C-suite executives believe that outsourcing their non-differentiating functions makes more sense than maintaining those same functions in-house. Powered by these market drivers, we have significant growth opportunities. Our solutions fit within an estimated $5 billion marketplace. More than half of that is out in capital markets, where we're expanding most rapidly. Historically, most of that $5 billion was out of reach. Why was that? That's because most of that was conducted in-house within the banks.
Today, as clients seek active, talented partners like Broadridge, that dynamic is changing. In capital markets, globalization, continued ROE pressure, and the evolving regulatory environment are challenges to our clients. Whereas in investment management, a sharper focus on performance net of fees is fundamentally changing that industry. In 2016, ETFs saw a 16% net inflow, whereas conversely, hedge funds saw a 4% outflow. Of note in governance, regulators continue to promote shareholder engagement with the goal of improving board oversight. Key issues, executive pay, director appointments, and conflicts of interest. We are at the forefront of tackling such issues. We're going to maximize our international opportunities through a set of defined executable plans. To get ready for next, we will expand our market position in EMEA and APAC to become the preferred global provider.
We will actively showcase our most important strategic solutions and invest in our sales talent and account management leadership. In fact, we brought Bob Santangelo, one of our strongest and most experienced sales leaders, to international to lead our future growth. Working with our segments, we'll aggressively integrate our products and services to create higher-value offerings. Our segment roadmaps reflect this work. We're aligning with them to address international needs and demands, and this is directly supporting the growth of our two franchises. For large and existing clients, we are creating multi-year opportunities to help them consolidate technology, globalize operations, increase transparency, and manage risk. For regional clients, where we see significant runway opportunity, we are introducing our broad portfolio to them and building long-term relationships. For new and existing clients, we'll continue to expand our market reach through new solutions.
These will be delivered by our franchises and then customized and configured to meet international market needs. By implementing our plans, we will maximize our strengths and make the most of existing momentum. Before I close, I'd like to provide two tangible examples of our successes, one by client and one by geography. With a long-standing relationship with this client, a Tier 1 U.K.-headquartered investment bank, we've been providing proxy governance and post-trade services only to their U.S. business historically. However, since 2014, we've expanded this relationship to provide technology services globally using solutions from our traditional product set, as well as new product launches and acquisitions. Through multiple engagements, the client's confidence and trust in our ability to solve their challenges has grown, and we're now introducing new solutions to meet their needs.
From 2014, we have generated over $17 million in new annual recurring value internationally with this client. That's a really significant shift in our mix, because that now means that over 50% of the new sales value from this account came internationally. We'll continue to expand this global relationship through our new solution offerings and further regional penetration, meaning we have runway. That's our model in the years ahead. We'll seek to deepen relationships and identify mutually beneficial business cases. The approach of this client and the other Tier 1 that Charlie talked about are blueprints for our future global growth. The last example I'll give is how we're winning directly in key markets, where our clients face high operating costs, increasing regulatory pressure, and a need to transform. Let's look at Japan.
We've been incorporated there since 1998, and we know it takes time to build a brand, but probably more importantly, the trust of the market and market participants. We've shown that patience, and now we're reaping the benefits for both our franchises. In the last two years, we've closed approximately $10 million in new sales in Japan, winning against the historical market choice. We've also transitioned this business from a deployed on-site model to a much higher-value software-as-a-service business. In capital markets in Japan, we're differentiated because we solve both domestically and globally. We help these clients standardize across their regions and business lines. In governance, we have a strong joint venture with the Tokyo Stock Exchange for domestic electronic proxy, and our adoption since 2012 has accelerated. Why is that? Because clients have seen the benefit of a digital service and the take-up by their peers.
With our recent sales wins and our growing reputation, we have healthy expectations for Japan and also other large domestic markets. In conclusion, I am extremely bullish about our international opportunities. We are well-positioned to support our segments delivering Ready for Next through our international growth. We have large addressable market space and tailwinds from key market dynamics. EMEA and APAC clients are embracing mutualization as they face regulatory pressures and the need to globalize, standardize, and invest in technology. We have invested in integration of products, in personnel, and in acquisitions. We'll provide our clients with a greater understanding of who we are and how we can help them solve their challenges of today and tomorrow. We will win new clients in major markets and deepen our relationships with existing clients.
They will see us as an integrated partner with a broad portfolio of global solutions, a partner they can trust to help them with their greatest challenges. I am confident that we will become the preferred global provider. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Tom. We're going to take a very quick break this time to keep us as much on schedule as we can. A five-minute break only. When we come back, we're going to watch a short video and then hear from Jim Young. Five minutes, please.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's get started again. Just take our seats for a quick second. As we sit down, I think it would be terrific, we have prepared a short video about some of our efforts in our communities on engagement with not just as Broadridge associates, but the communities in which we operate. A short video here. Thank you.
Five to seven, eight years, direct school. 12 years, 11 years school. Camp. bridge course prepare next mainstream gap age education gap fill up bridge fill up mainstream.
The moment we announced this project, we had our associates volunteer for this camp. We had associates' parents volunteer for the camp. We have associates who go and celebrate their birthdays or children's birthdays at the school. We have associates who take these kids out for various outings as part of their team. We invite the MVF kids as part of all our celebrations, okay? They're now an integral part of the Broadridge family.
First studies. Broadridge. interest. Broadridge. jobs. higher studies, entrance. aim encourage. support. days teach. language problem. support encourage encouragement. The fact is that we all grow up listening to a lot of remarkable speeches. We all grow up reading a lot of remarkable stories and getting inspired by them. The question that often comes to mind is, do you need to be inspired by someone else? Can you be the inspiration for yourself and the others? For all of us over here, what we are trying to do within Broadridge is that we are trying to infect every single child or every single person associated with the Bridge Camp with the "I can" bug. You don't have to go outside. You are the inspiration yourself. You can inspire the others, and you can be the change.
In three years, I will complete my CA course. Today, I have support from Broadridge and MV Foundation. I don't have words to express about Broadridge and MV Foundation because their goodness is like an ocean.
When we see the kids, they come in, they're there in the camp for a month or two, they are transformed, okay? They suddenly see purpose. Okay? Once they have hope, they overcome their individual issues, and they reach sky's the limit for them.
Thank you, Broadridge. Thank you, Broadridge.
It's more than just corporate social responsibility. As this video said, this is a school that's based in Hyderabad, India, that also is the location of our largest office globally. We've got 2,000 associates. When you go there, you're just struck by the energy that we have. There's an incredible talent base. A lot of our innovation comes out of Hyderabad. Our Hyderabad operations have been recognized locally by the State of Telangana, which is about 35 million people, as the best employer in the whole state. This is where there are a lot of big multinationals, big brand names. It's a real honor. It really feeds into the culture that's there.
As VLK, our leader in India, said in that video, it really is part of the associates' lives there. They go and celebrate birthdays, family celebrations. As we all go and visit, it is part of what you do. Often for me, it's the first thing I do, the first day when you get there is visit. It's a very special part of who Broadridge is and part of the Broadridge family. For those of you who I don't know, I'm Jim Young. I'm our Chief Financial Officer. I joined three and a half years ago from Visa, where I spent eight years managing various global finance organizations, and I also led the North America Finance organization.
You now have a good sense of our two franchises and the opportunities in front of us to grow those franchises and build new businesses from our powerful foundation of critical infrastructure, industry expertise, and data. I'm going to take you through our financial performance, our business model, our capital priorities, and of course, our financial objectives for the next three years. I'll begin by looking back to the financial objectives we set at our last Investor Day in December 2014. I'm pleased to note that we achieved each of the major objectives. We're presenting two views of our performance, with and without the acquisition of NACC. We thought it made sense to look at our results this way because the acquisition had such a large impact on our three-year growth numbers, both recurring and total revenue.
All the numbers here, except for margin, are on a three-year compound annual growth rate basis from fiscal 2014 to fiscal 2015. We will start with recurring fee revenue. We set a target of 7%-10% growth. We delivered 14% growth with NACC and 7% without. Underlying both of these growth rates was organic growth of 5%, which was consistent with our plans and reflective of our steady sales growth. Total revenue growth. We set an objective of 5%-7%. We achieved 17%. Again, excluding the impact of NACC, we delivered 6% growth. Let us move to margin. We targeted 130-220 basis points of margin expansion. Here, the acquisition of lower margin NACC business set us back nominally. We were off target a bit. Excluding NACC, our adjusted operating income margin rose 160 basis points or in the middle of the adjusted range we set.
Rounding out our three-year performance was our 11% adjusted earnings growth, which was at the high end of our target range, and 12% adjusted EPS growth. We accomplished this performance while taking up our leverage to two to one, consistent with the target leverage we announced at our last Investor Day in December 2014. Our growth track record is clear and compelling. The next question is: What gives us the confidence to target double-digit earnings growth and sign up for another set of three-year objectives? To answer that, let us start with our business model. Our two franchises, along with the other businesses targeting large market opportunities, have created a durable business model, which has demonstrated predictable and consistent growth. The pillars of our business model, which have underpinned our strong total shareholder return track record, are as follows. First, sustainable growth.
Long-term contracts, many of which are subscription-like, anchor our large recurring revenue base. With our historical 98% client revenue retention rate, our model relies on adding new business in the form of multi-year contracts, which we have consistently done at greater levels. This has produced solid organic recurring revenue growth in the mid-single digits, complemented by tuck-in acquisitions, bringing total recurring growth to the high single digits and greater. Second, margin expansion. Our business continues to gain operating leverage through scale businesses, favorable product mix, and a relentless focus on finding efficiencies. These factors have helped to drive, on average, 50 basis points of margin expansion per year. We see a continued path for similar levels of margin expansion. Third, strong free cash flow. Our business is relatively capital light, which allows us to convert 100%+ of our adjusted net earnings into free cash flow.
Fourth, balanced shareholder-friendly capital allocation. We are committed to returning capital to our investors. It begins with our 45% dividend payout ratio, as measured as percentage of adjusted net earnings. Next, we look to invest in our business through internal investments and tuck-in acquisitions aligned with our strategy. Where we have excess capital, we believe strongly in returning that capital to our shareholders through share repurchase. Now I will step back and review our revenue components. To remind you of how our revenue works, let us look at the $4.1 billion in revenue we generated in fiscal 2017. The biggest piece here is our recurring fee revenue, representing 59% of our total revenues last year. This is the piece that grew 14% on a compound annual growth rate basis and 5% on an organic basis.
The bulk of that revenue here is anchored in long-term contracts for services across governance, capital markets, wealth, and other businesses. On a revenue-weighted basis, our recurring revenue contracts are approximately six years in duration, which give us strong visibility. I'll return to this topic in a few minutes. Further, we had a 98% client revenue retention rate through 2017, which evidences Broadridge's deep commitment to client service. As we noted recently, we expect the inclusion of the NACC business, and now BRCC, will push this retention number down to 97% for fiscal year 2018 as we run off known losses from clients. It is our recurring revenue base, which is our financial engine. The smallest revenue component is our event-driven revenue. Just 5% of our total revenue is but very profitable. We earn event fees from mutual fund proxies, contests, and other activities.
We consider these events non-recurring, but it's important to understand the nature of these services in our service delivery. As part of our governance and regulatory communications business, we maintain an on-demand infrastructure to support proxy voting. As Bob discussed earlier, this is a core part of our value proposition to broker-dealers, issuers, investors, and regulators. While this is integral to our offerings, it is a choppy revenue source, and it is difficult to forecast with any precision in any given year. That said, there are some longer-term dynamics and some metrics to keep in mind. First, mutual fund proxy accounts for a little over 20% of event fees, and mutual funds go out for proxy every seven or so years. This implies that approximately 15% of positions are being processed for a vote every year.
While positions continue to grow nicely, the actual number of positions in a year varies widely and depends on the size of the funds that go out in a given year. There's another area that has grown in significance, and that is corporate issuer contests. Naturally, there's a correlation here with some notable contest activity of late, P&G. It does appear activism is a longer-term trend that cannot be discounted. Finally, distribution revenues. They account for about 38% of our revenues and carry low margins, less than 10% on a gross margin basis. Postage and certain pass-through revenue items are the key components that move with mailed pieces. As more paper converts to electronic, delivery growth in this revenue stream will slow and eventually decrease, resulting in higher margins. Distribution revenue is only found in the Investor Communication Solutions segment. Let's take a look at those segments.
ICS is the larger of the two segments at $3.4 billion in revenue and $1.6 billion in recurring revenues. The biggest part of that business is the governance business that Bob described earlier. Next is the Customer Communications business Doug and Michelle discussed in their overview of our digital strategy. It also includes approximately $150 million of wealth management products that Chris talked about. The combination of healthy position growth for both stock record and mutual fund interims, strong sales and communications, and good uptake on analytics and tax products drove 6% organic growth in fiscal year 2017. GTO is our second segment. The biggest part of this business is approximately the $500 million capital markets franchise that Charlie discussed, with the balance coming from wealth management solutions, again, reviewed by Chris.
GTO's 6% organic growth in fiscal year 2017 was largely driven by the notable sales success, like GPTM and more equity and fixed income wins. The GTO side of wealth has also been a positive factor, along with new asset classes and capabilities such as foreign exchange and securities lending. Closed sales and client retention are the lifeblood of our business. The sales team under Chris Perry's leadership has grown sales at a 14% annual clip over the last three years. This performance reflects a number of factors, including investments in sales, better go-to-market execution, our stronger brand, and a healthy pipeline of new products and services. As a reminder, our sales represent new annual recurring revenue fee additions and are a good indicator of future performance. Net new business, which is our sales plus our historical 98% revenue retention, accounts for almost 75% of our organic growth.
Given our implementation timelines, revenue recognition lags sales meaningfully. Our sales to revenue recognition is typically about 12 to 24 months. This lag does, however, give us good revenue visibility out four-plus quarters. Conversion management is a critical competency. We take this very seriously. We carefully track close dates, implementation milestones, projected start dates, future revenue generation deal by deal. Internally, we use a metric called new recurring revenue backlog, which represents an estimate of new first-year revenues from sales expected to come online. We are sharing this metric with you here on this slide. You can think of it as revenue from sales that we've yet to recognize. As we close new sales, our revenue backlog increases. As sales convert to revenue, our backlog decreases by the amount of first year's revenues recognized.
As shown here, we had a total new recurring revenue backlog at the end of last year of $250 million, which equates to about 10% of last year's recurring fee revenue. Of this amount, $170 million or about 7% of last year's recurring revenue has not gone live in any form. This gives us a healthy foundation for mid-range planning. The $80 million balance represents partial-year revenue, where some portion of that full annual contract value has already begun to be recognized. Let's move to the next pillar of our business model. Broadridge has a good track record of expanding margins. From fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2017, we expanded adjusted operating income margins 53 basis points per year on average, excluding the NACC acquisition. We achieve this margin expansion while investing for the future. Here we've laid out the contributors to margin movement.
First off, we have natural scale in our franchise businesses, where processing an incremental proxy position in our governance business or an incremental equity trade in our capital markets business flows through at very high incremental margins. In addition, Broadridge has the institutional discipline to find efficiencies each year through new technology, smart resourcing, and reducing layers in the organization. More structural drivers of margin include faster growth in our newer recurring revenue-only products, which often have higher contribution margins. Looking forward, as Doug and Michelle explained, we are investing with the expectation that we can convert more physical distribution to digital. As this occurs over many years, this should give us a margin lift. On the flip side, Broadridge has been a serial tuck-in acquirer, and while many of these businesses are SaaS-based with higher contribution margins, they're relatively immature businesses that have yet to reach scale.
These growth businesses can be unbalanced, dilutive to margins. Also, as Rich noted, since becoming a public company, we have been committed to reinvesting in our business. Funding organic investments like building from scratch a tax business for wealth clients or standing up blockchain offerings for proxy or repo dilutes margin. That's just the way it is. Make no mistake, we will continue to invest in the business for future growth. While margin is an important consideration, we are not solving for margin expansion in all instances, but we are always solving for sustainable growth. Net-net, we expect to maintain a pace of about 50 basis points of margin expansion on average per year over the next three years. Next, every CFO's favorite topic, cash flow. Broadridge's business model has demonstrated low capital intensity with capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue of 2%-3%.
This low capital intensity has yielded a high conversion ratio, where we convert greater than 100% of adjusted net earnings to free cash flow. Cash has ticked up in recent years as we've undertaken some exceptional projects, including integrating NACC and investing capital to achieve those synergies, building out more capacity in Bangalore, India, our second-largest location after Hyderabad, investing in new data center, and new product development. Even with these long-lived assets, we have delivered steady and predictable free cash flow. Our strong free cash flow has enabled Broadridge to fund ongoing organic investments in tuck-in acquisitions while funding our dividend and returning excess cash to shareholders. Balanced capital allocation. This is an important component of our approach to solving for a top-quartile shareholder return. Our first priority is our dividend, and our target 45% payout ratio underscores our belief in the power of a strong dividend.
After the dividend, we pursue disciplined M&A, where our playbook has been to identify tuck-in acquisitions with compelling returns which support our strategies. We also have been a consistent buyer of our stock, returning approximately $600 million to shareholders. This equates to about reducing our beginning share base by almost 10% over the last three years. This repurchase activity has been an efficient vehicle for returning excess cash to shareholders. Finally, in balancing our priorities, we remain committed to an investment-grade credit rating. We think this is appropriate given the role we play in capital markets and the importance of maintaining the confidence of our clients and other constituents. Our target leverage ratio is 2 times adjusted debt to EBITDA, which equates to 1.7 times gross debt to EBITDA. We are currently at our target leverage.
Our $1 billion revolving credit facility gives us ample capital and flexibility to fund our business. As I noted earlier, we see targeted tuck-in acquisitions as an important investment vehicle. Over the past three years, we have made 12 acquisitions, deploying about $800 million. As you can see on the slide, the average deal size at less than $70 million squares falling in the tuck-in range. Most importantly, this investment aligns with growth areas that support our existing franchises or lay the foundation for future growth. These acquisitions also serve to infuse top talent in innovation that fuels our broader business. About half the M&A spend was the acquisition of NACC. That, as Doug addressed, was really an investment in digital, with some compelling returns from 2 relatively low-risk levers, 1 synergy achievement, and 2, winning large in-house print deals.
On the former, as Doug highlighted, we are nearing achievement of actioning all $20 million in annualized synergies with plans for more. On the latter, we have a healthy pipeline and are confident we can meet these deal objectives. In addition, we made great strides in extending our capital markets franchise through acquisition by adding additional asset classes and capabilities such as foreign exchange trading, securities lending, and collateral management. We've also added wealth capabilities around advisor compensation systems and cloud-based marketing solutions. A theme you'll see running through all of our acquisitions is data and analytics, which really underpins many of our next-generation offerings and builds on the exceptional data assets we already have. Our business plan calls for more of the same on the M&A front.
Going forward, we will maintain our disciplined underwriting. Strategic fit with the themes and opportunities discussed today will be paramount in our decision-making. We also continue to set a high bar for getting to yes on opportunities. This high bar includes deals accretive to growth in earnings within 12-24 months. We also calibrate performance against deal-specific IRRs and return on invested capital relative to the corporate average. As always, we will challenge ourselves to satisfactorily answer a fundamental question: Why are we a better owner of a business? You'd be surprised at how effective this question can be in evaluating opportunities. Of course, critical to our strategy and M&A plans is our capacity to invest. As we look forward over the next 3 years, Broadridge has ample capital to achieve our goals.
Based on our financial objectives, we expect to generate $1.4 billion of free cash flow. Assuming we maintain our current leverage target as we expect to, we would expect to have the capacity to borrow another $500 million. After accounting for roughly $600 million of expected dividends, we expect to have approximately $1.4 billion to deploy against M&A to support our growth strategy and share repurchase. Let's turn to our financial objectives. I hope many of you have seen the press release that we issued this morning laying out our latest set of 3-year objectives. Let me give you some additional insight on the drivers behind these numbers, starting with recurring fee revenues. Our recurring revenue fee growth objective on a compound annual growth rate basis is 7%-9% for fiscal year 2017-fiscal year 2020.
As a reminder, we achieved 14% growth in the period from FY 2014-FY 2017 and believe that we have the plans and the talent to have equal or better organic performance. Let's take each of these drivers individually so we have a sense of how we plan the next 3 years. Remember, ours is a sales and retention model. Our largest driver is net new business, which again is revenue from sales, less losses or cancellations. Given our historical track record of 98% client revenue retention and planned 97% given the runoff from BRCC, this is about our ability to convert our current backlog into revenue, hitting sales of around $200 million a year and onboarding those new sales efficiently.
As you can see in the bar chart, we've been averaging about 4% on this metric and have a very healthy revenue backlog on the back of record sales in each of the last three years. The $250 million revenue backlog gives us a great head start on our plan. All this gets us to a target of 5%-6% growth for net new business. Next is internal growth. Internal growth is largely attributable to position growth and trade volume growth. To provide some additional context, stock record and mutual fund positions have grown reliably over time, recently in the mid-single digits, as Bob showed you earlier. Trade volume growth is less predictable and not something we depend on in our planning. We also capture any concessions at renewal here. These elements averaged two points of growth over the last three years.
With an assumption of similar macro trends and market dynamics and some reductions in BRCC volumes, we assume zero to one point of internal growth over the next three years. The combination of 5%-6% net new business and zero to 1% internal growth adds up to 5%-7% organic growth for fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2020. At the midpoint, this would be an acceleration from the past three years on a bigger base of revenue. We do expect acquisitions to also contribute to our growth over the next three years. Given the inherent uncertainty in M&A, this line item can vary widely based on strategy and opportunities. NACC was an unusual transaction in that it was a lot of recurring revenue for a relatively low purchase price. Accordingly, acquisitions contributed a lot in the past three years.
Going forward, we assume about two points of growth from these acquisitions. On the earnings side, we assume these acquisitions contribute very modestly as they ramp to being accretive in this three-year window. All in, 5%-7% organic growth plus two points from new acquisitions gets us to 7%-9% recurring revenue growth. Our total growth objective incorporates our outlook for event-driven and distribution revenues. For event fees, we assume flattish event-driven fees over the period of around $200 million or so per year, in line with our recent average. Picking up on my earlier comments, I said 15% of mutual fund proxy positions come up for proxy on average each year. Given the concentration in two large complexes, Vanguard and BlackRock, the percentage of positions in a given period can vary.
For instance, BlackRock went out for proxy in fiscal 2017, and Vanguard will have completed its proxy in fiscal 2018. Because of this and noteworthy contest activity, including P&G, fiscal 2018 is shaping up to be a very strong year and above historical averages. As a result, we anticipate lower mutual fund proxy in fiscal years 2019 and 2020, barring exceptional events such as mutual fund mergers and acquisitions or more contest activity. We expect low-margin distribution revenue will grow much more slowly than recurring revenues. The relative weighting of each of these components brings our total target revenue growth to 5%-7%.
This revenue performance, coupled with 50 basis points of margin expansion, a fairly constant core tax rate, and a modest reduction in share count, get us to adjusted EPS growth of 9%-13% and supports approximately 10%-11% annual dividend growth, given our target 45% payout ratio. Additionally, we've not included any benefit from lower U.S. taxes as a result of a new tax bill. It does appear that given the House and Senate bills, Broadridge would be a beneficiary of new tax legislation given our heavy U.S. income mix, recognizing there are other offsetting provisions. If and when there is a final bill, we'll update you on the implications for our current year guidance and these objectives. Let me conclude with a quick summary of where we stand. Broadridge has a strong business model based on recurring revenue and strong cash flow generation.
As we look ahead, Broadridge is better positioned than ever to drive sustained growth. Over the next three years, we think we'll achieve continued 5%-7% organic recurring revenue growth, driving 7%-9% total recurring revenue growth. That in turn will lift margins and drive 9%-13% adjusted EPS growth. Coupled with a strong and rising dividend and continued shareholder-friendly balanced capital allocation, we think this is a formula for continued top quartile total shareholder return. I'll now turn the day back to Rich for his closing remarks.
Thanks, Jim. Well, we're almost there. Let me provide a few closing thoughts about what you've heard today. There's an old saying, and certainly a New York saying, that I think applies to our situation. You have to be in it to win it. Well, our message for you is that Broadridge is most definitely in it, and we really, really like our odds to win it by continuing to drive network value to our clients and delivering top quartile shareholder return to our investors. What does that mean for you as an investor? First, you should expect continued strong performance from our two core franchise businesses. The performance of our governance and capital markets franchises will be the biggest driver of our overall growth over the next three years and beyond.
As Tim noted, both franchises have been built on the back of a unique business model on building multi-client managed services platforms that link our clients to us and to each other. That linkage not only allows us to drive network value to our clients, it also reduces the cost and complexity of their operations. That's a powerful value proposition with clear relevance in today's markets. In governance, Broadridge has built a powerful franchise that lies at the center of a unique network of 1,100 banks and brokers, more than 140 million investors, thousands of mutual funds, and 50,000-plus global corporate issuers, and of course, multiple regulators as well. By providing a critical link that enables the governance process of equities and mutual funds, Broadridge will continue to benefit from the long-term increasing popularity of these investment vehicles.
In addition, as Bob Schifellite pointed out, our ability to build solution sets to issuers, mutual funds, brokers, and banks will provide continued incremental opportunities. We expect these efforts to continue to generate steady growth through 2020 and beyond. Our capital markets franchise will also be a strong growth driver for Broadridge. As Charlie Marchesani told you, our clients' challenges are creating strong demand for solutions which mutualize the cost of investment while providing a broad breadth of capabilities, cost savings, and inclusion in a strong network of global clients, including 18 of the 23 fixed income primary dealers, as well as seven of the top 10 global investment banks. We're building on the strength of that network. We continue to extend our industry-leading global technology platforms by adding additional asset class coverage, building compliance capabilities, and adding managed services.
We're also investing to drive additional network benefits to our fixed income clients to improve trading outcomes and boost their capital efficiency. Our capital markets franchise is well positioned to continue to be a growth engine of Broadridge. The strength of our governance franchise and the emergence of our capital markets franchise are a big part of why we think Broadridge remains well positioned to deliver on our growth objectives. We didn't end there because we are well positioned to go after several additional tangible and compelling opportunities. These new opportunities are results of investments we've made with your capital in recent years.
What's so exciting about these opportunities is that they are real and compelling, meaning they reflect capabilities Broadridge already has in place, and they are based on tangible dialogues we're having with some of our largest and most strategic clients. The first of these opportunities is in wealth management. We already have in place a series of robust capabilities serving the back, middle, and front offices with wealth managers. The wealth industry is being challenged by demographic shifts, regulatory pressures, and the impact of technology on the role of advisors. Those challenges, which echo those faced by our capital markets clients over the last few years, are creating growth opportunities for Broadridge. First, they should accelerate demand for our individual solutions across their business.
Second, perhaps more critically, there is a growing demand for a platform that will increasingly integrate many of these solutions, thereby allowing our clients to reduce costs and simplify their operations. Next, we're already a leader in helping our governance clients increase the adoption of digital communications. As you heard, the NACC acquisition further strengthens our ability to be a key enabler of a broader set of digital channels, especially with emerging cloud channels. The ability to offer both an enhanced experience and an enhanced reach, coupled with our low-cost physical capabilities, positions us well to gain incremental share by driving down our clients' costs of reaching their customers.
It also sets up a longer-term potential opportunity to be a digital hub, linking tens of millions of households and thousands of brands, just as today, we connect tens of millions of investors with thousands of mutual funds and corporate issuers. The final emerging opportunity we shared with you was around the growth of our international operations. While Broadridge has long had an international presence, we're increasingly focused on how we can pursue opportunities with large global players like Barclays, Nomura, and JPMorgan, and target even more regional players. The last key element of the Broadridge story is shareholder value. This management team is very focused on creating top-quartile total shareholder returns, and we have the opportunities to do it. We have a great financial model. Our focus on recurring revenues gives us the visibility we need to make longer-term investment decisions.
Broadridge's low level of capital intensity means we throw off significant cash flow to invest and return to our shareholders. Our focus on providing medium-term objectives gives us the flexibility we need to balance our investment with delivering real bottom-line results. Looking forward, we're targeting 7%-9% recurring fee revenue growth, underpinned by strong continued organic growth of 5%-7%. That will drive margin expansion and double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Those results, coupled with a strong and rising dividend and a balanced capital allocation, should continue to generate top-quartile shareholder return for our investors. Let me conclude by reminding you why I'm more optimistic than ever. Three years ago, we stood in front of you and said we need to invest to grow our proxy and governance products. We have made those investments. Today, our governance franchise is stronger than ever and well-positioned for continued growth.
We said we needed to invest in technology to help strengthen our GTO product offering. Today, Broadridge has a strong and growing capital markets franchise with a clear mandate from the market to continue to reduce our clients' costs and operational efficiencies and drive real network value for them. There is no question in my mind Broadridge is a stronger company today than we were just three years ago. Moreover, due in large part to other investments we made in digital, blockchain, our people, our brand, we are also well positioned to pursue those additional opportunities I just discussed. More than ever, Broadridge is in control of our own growth destiny. When we get back together in 2020 Investor Day, we will expect to be providing you with an update on how our execution against these opportunities has put us in an even stronger position than we are today.
That, at the end of the day, is what we are trying to accomplish. Not only positioning Broadridge to achieve our objectives for the next three years, but really positioning our company for sustained growth well beyond 2020. Broadridge is ready for next, and we are in it to win it. Thank you. I'd like to ask my colleagues to join me on stage, and we're going to go right into the Q&A. Dave, you got your hand right up there.
Just a quick point of order. We do have two folks with mics, Lena and James. As you are called upon, please wait for the mic so everyone on the webcast can hear your question.
I got it. A mic.
Okay. I want you to hand it around.
Okay.
We'll do it.
What?
I'm going to take this one on this side.
Got it.
Perfect. We've got to get Dave going here.
Yeah.
Thank you, David Togut with Evercore ISI. Rich, with Broadridge now processing equities for seven of the top 10 global investment banks, the other three are sort of going it alone with Project Scalpel. How will BofA, Goldman, and Morgan compete with JP once they're fully on your platform and you take their total cost of ownership down by 30%-40%?
Well, there's an awful lot going on. I'm actually going to ask Tim, who's been, as I mentioned earlier, a key part of the architecture with Charlie in terms of our capital markets franchise. There's I wouldn't put Scalpel as a foregone conclusion at this point yet. Tim?
Yeah. It's a great question. First of all, to Rich's point, the Scalpel opportunity, I think as people have looked at trying to create something that is different than what we're creating, as they've gotten into that, they've seen that is very challenging. They have very great difficulty in coming to agreement on what they would do. They don't have a technology platform that would really work across multiple institutions, and as they look at the opportunity to transition or the cost of transitioning people onto that, it's pretty forbidding. We do think that an industry utility is the right answer, obviously, and we're continuing to build that brick by brick. We think that continues to be an opportunity. It's particularly building the things around it.
While we It's nice to say we have seven and 10, and that's exciting, but there's a lot of pieces that we don't have, and it's building those additional pieces within the seven to 10, and it's taking that over to overseas where we see the continued growth for us.
Are the other three a matter of when, not if?
That is something that we ask ourselves every day, we continue to have good discussions with all of those institutions. For two of those institutions, they have multi-asset class platforms today. To date, our platform hasn't had that same capability. Even while we believe we're more modern and better, I think as we build out that multi-asset class piece that we talked about, that'll be an even more interesting conversation in the future.
Rich, you founded Broadridge in 1989, you've clearly built an excellent team. Seems like your succession strategy is pretty clear at this point. What is your own personal timeline in terms of running Broadridge?
Well, I can say with absolute certainty that I doubt I'll be standing here 22 years from now with Bob Schifellite. Let me make that very clear. All right?
I'm disappointed by that.
Oh. I hope to be standing somewhere 23 years from now, obviously. Beyond that, let me repeat some of the things we've said. First of all, I really do appreciate you acknowledging the effort that has been put into, and in my comments, I specifically talked about the very difficult decisions we've made to evolve to the leadership team that we have. All right? Really from almost the time of the spin, and it was really just a year or so afterwards, we have an outstanding board with significant responsibilities in other major public companies outside of Broadridge. Our chairman is the lead director at Merck, for example, HP Enterprise, et cetera. Succession wasn't a random thought because succession, as we know, is one of the board's two key responsibilities. Okay? It's to pick the CEO and to own succession.
As a member of the board, I've worked with the board very diligently with outside resources, et cetera. The board ultimately makes this decision. When we announced that Tim would be president, all right? I said that, and it was this past August, I said that I look forward to working with Tim for years to come. All right? You shouldn't expect anything to go on forever, and we have a real strong policy view that change is actually good at times. All right? We believe it's true in terms of fresh ideas, new ideas. We also believe very, very strongly that done right, okay, and even though I had the privilege of founding the business, the entity takes precedence over any individual.
We're very, very focused, and that was one of the keys of today, which was to expose the management team and the deep activities. I can say with absolute confidence, okay, that Broadridge, from a management point of view, is positioned to go forward extraordinarily well, all right, when the board and I decide it's time for me to move on. Okay? I'll also say that Broadridge will not become dependent on any single individual at any point in time. All right? I think that's what you saw demonstrated here tonight. I think I have a reasonable shot at going down as being a pretty good CEO. I think one of the key things of being rated that way is getting succession right.
For a long period of time, we have been very, very focused on ensuring that it's not about an individual, it is about the entity, and that every activity is covered. I will tell you that today's activities, okay, were led by Tim Gokey. All right? As difficult as it was, I kept out. All right? Because we want everything to happen before it actually happens. All right? No different than when we said we invest in the business three years ago for the opportunities we have today, we're building the management team to run the business in their future roles today. I'm not leaving tomorrow, but I won't be here 22 years from now. All right? Maybe in any way, but certainly not standing here.
I'm highly confident, and you should be highly confident based on what you saw here today, that this business is well-positioned to run. Let me be clear on one other thing. Beyond my family, there's nothing more important. All right? This is my third child. Regardless of what role I'm in, this team and this board will have access to me with relatively the same ease they have today. All right? It's not like I'm really ever going to go away from loving Broadridge. Okay? My confidence in our ability to go forward without me, based on today's and other activities that have taken place without my involvement, GPTM and lots of other really cool things, is extraordinarily high.
Thank you.
Hi, Chris Donat with Sandler O'Neill. Rich, wanted to ask, and I'll direct it to you, but maybe others will want to answer, too. Seems very bullish about the prospects for the next three years, and I think the plan is pretty clear. I'm just wondering what you see as the potential risks to it, and that is, if you take your view historically and having gone through the financial crisis, your revenues didn't really take any hit during the financial crisis, but you even lived through some consolidation of brokers. I'm just wondering, as you think about the most challenging risks out there, is it either bank or broker consolidation or asset manager consolidation, action with the SEC, or maybe the end of new regulations? Are those the sorts of things you worry about? What does make your cardiologist worry?
I'll give you two quick views. First of all, look, truth be told, if someone had asked me, I would have passed on the financial crisis because our revenues did get hit, and they were getting hit on that incremental revenue, which has extraordinarily high margin. All right? If you take volume or revenue out or even when we retain the clients. All right? In the Lehman going to Barclays. All right? That doesn't mean we had the same revenue when Lehman and Barclays were together. Bear going to JP. That didn't mean we had the same revenue, and we had the work to put them together, but less revenue at the end of the transaction. That certainly wasn't what I would call a fun period of time.
When I look at where we are today, even when Jim, Tim, and I, and others were discussing this Investor Day. All right. The reason that I'm so bullish, all right, is because there are going to be world events that we can't control. All right. I'm not including world events. All right. But if I look at the events directly related to our business and events are controllable, there has never been a period of time where we've had more opportunity currently funded, opportunities in our run rate. All right. That's the key. Digital is in our run rate. Blockchain is in our run rate. They're generating very little revenue right now. Now, they're generating meaningful difference in conversations with clients. Right.
When we're talking to a client, whether it be about normal communications, okay, or a client about what we might be doing in the processing world. The fact that we've already committed with investment, real investment, to get them to the next level of efficiency, whether it be driving their ability to communicate to their customers in the cloud or having the efficiency of leveraging our investment in blockchain, this is a meaningful difference in terms of if all things are equal, go with the technology leader. 10 years ago, at the Pierre Hotel on the roadshow, I said we would invest in this business if good times or bad. I didn't know, again, a minute and a half after we spun, the financial crisis would happen. As you know, we invested even then.
Now I believe, and Jim says as well, we don't give you tracking of the investments anymore as I did earlier on, because we're fully investing in the opportunities when we're there because we've created the richness in our financial structure to be able to deliver on the short-term results and invest in the longer term. The confidence about being better positioned has, we know the market has needs. We know we've funded the investments to go after those needs. We know we have the right sales organization to deliver on those needs. We know we have the right business leaders to execute against those leads. We know we're in real conversations with real clients. All right.
We have enough of this going on that there's multiple ways for us to deliver on this top quartile performance and multiple ways for us to deliver on our growing sales capabilities. The other thing that really important to me, this is a long-term play. We could have had much stronger earnings in the short term, but we wouldn't be able to be here with the confidence we have in the long term. We don't think that's good for shareholders. All right. Till my last day, I'm going to be thinking three to five years out. Okay. I'm convinced because I've worked with this team so long, they're going to think three to five years out. All right. The confidence in Broadridge, particularly for a long-term investor, should be tied to, even if for one reason or another there's a market blip out there, okay.
There's a really dry year in event-driven. Candidly, for a long-term investor, it's not going to matter. Okay? If you're chasing quarter to quarter, I guess it's going to matter. We're not going to chase quarter to quarter. We're going to create sustainable growth and value over a long period of time by being indispensable in the markets we serve. That's what this team, and I'm so proud of, presented today. Only one last thing, they presented it. Everyone's presentation was their presentation. All right? I enjoyed hearing some of the things first time today. These are the leaders.
Just second task, going in on acquisitions. DST 's NACC was a very large acquisition for you. As you think about your plan for the next three years and the $1.4 billion of cash you have for M&A and dividends, would you expect to do another $400 million acquisition, or was DST just an unusual opportunity and you don't expect one to come up again?
Why don't I let Tim address that? As president and chief operating officer, he's working very closely with the businesses to align strategic opportunities.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rich. First of all, we do see M&A as an evergreen source of growth in fintech. There are always things changing. There are always teams rolling out of a bank or an investment firm, creating something, getting it to a certain size, then they want to sell that product to JPMorgan, and it's very difficult for them to do that, but we can. We've created a lot of value with that over time. I would note that of the things that we talked about today, proxy was an acquisition, fixed income was an acquisition, and international was an acquisition, all for very small dollar amounts. Buying these early-stage things and growing them organically is very powerful. You should expect to see that as the core of our continued strategy.
NACC was a unique opportunity. We certainly look for those kinds of opportunities all the time. I think you are all looking at market valuations today as we are and wondering how people can deliver the kinds of 20% IRRs that we do if they're to pay market prices for something large right now. I think it would be pretty challenging. We're very disciplined. We will be disciplined, it's going to be a continued part of our growth strategy.
Put it in context, though. In 1989, after my backer died, I shrewdly sold the business for $6 million. Somehow we got a 20% IRR or a little better out of that proxy business over the years. Next question. Pete.
This is Pete Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Thanks for breaking out the additional information on wealth management. I was aware of a number of the point solutions, but can you talk a little bit about the history of how that grouping is coming together, maybe the top 3 products that make up wealth management today, then what holes are there to really fulfill that vision of One Wealth platform?
Before I turn it over to Chris, you need to go back, though, to D.A. Davidson, Pete, and let them know it's time to convert to the future wealth management leader, just for the record. Chris.
Trying to go through the continuum, if I can, from history to present, and then to answer on the gaps, if you will, or the challenges that go forward. We've acquired some assets in marketing and communications and digital capabilities to bring advisors in. We acquired, seven years ago, capabilities around aggregation of data, which is critically important today more than ever before because of regulatory compliance and the necessity for advisors to be accountable for all of the assets that exist. Those are a couple of examples. When you go to our back office, we have had an ability to view client holdings, books and records, what's called book management, for a number of years that goes all the way back to the BPS platform and SIS platform.
All of those make for a set of core capabilities that existed and were often provided for in their own light as these point solution. Well, I would call them products from their inception. We've been moving them towards a solution by widening out what they sell from a client or advisor standpoint. Now what we've been doing is working on how to integrate them together because the cost of implementing into a client's environment are actually much, much more than the cost of the actual products. If you can get good integration, you increase the productivity of your advisor, and that's a big deal to anybody who's running an advisor footprint. Our activities now are about the integration of what we have and also ensuring that we have a platform with APIs that allow for others to join onto that platform.
Nobody can do everything in wealth. We will be the market leader as we bring these capabilities together and we make available a platform for third parties. Sometimes there are people in a garage building things as disruptive technology right now, but they have no cybersecurity capabilities. They're not ISO certified. While you have an advisor community that's excited by it, they're scared to death to implement it into their technology environment. Somebody like us with a proven framework, with a data fabric that incorporates all of the holdings, can create that setup for them. That's what we'll be working on. We are in the marketplace on what I'll call some Big Bang theories, meaning front, middle, and back is in one holistic, efficient play for an organization. There are other situations where it's one-off capabilities that will be land and expand and grow.
Everybody on the street has very dated architecture in their back office. That gives you a little perspective.
Just as in terms of future M&A and adding potentially 200 basis points to annual growth, I assume some of that will come in wealth. Would the company be willing to exceed their 2.0, 2.1 to one debt to EBITDA target for the right deal? Where would you potentially be willing to take leverage to?
I'm going to let Jim explain how if the right deal's there, how we're going to do it.
That's how dialogues go internally. Obviously, our target leverage is our target leverage. That doesn't mean that every day of the year we need to be at 2.0 times. I think it's our understanding that we would float up for a quarter or two if we had to or had clear plans to bring it back down. As Rich said, in all seriousness, we're going to look at good opportunities, and if that means that we go up for a little bit, but have clear plans, great. That's a discipline we don't want to lose. It's not something we view as willy-nilly, but, clearly, we're focused on strategy and the right opportunities to drive our business.
One other thing, though, I think it's worth mentioning here. For forever, people have been saying, "Well, what about buying this and what about buying that?" What I hope today convinced you of is this is not a financial engineering play. We're creating real value, and we're creating sustainable value going forward. Buying an old product or buying an old product set and trying to revive it, is not what we're looking to do here. We talked about how we look out, and we ask that question, why are we a better owner? Private equity is the right owner for a lot of things that somebody's looking to revive and clean up and then push back out there again.
We're looking to follow the strategy of what we're hearing from our clients, to drive neutralization for them, to create network value, to attack the out-of-pocket cost of paper and postage, more importantly, engage clients in a better dialogue, through a digital dialogue or through a technology dialogue, and enable them to run their businesses better. There just aren't a lot of large things. What you heard Tim say is there's always somebody being spun out, though, and these are very talented people. You really should expect tuck-ins to be the more norm. We'd love to find larger tuck-ins. Because it's about the same work to do a smaller tuck-in as it is a larger one. For 10 years, people have been saying, "Well, would you consider this, or would you consider that?" I know there's a couple of bankers in the room.
I consistently frustrate them and say, "Why would I want that problem?" You should be thinking that what you saw here today is what you should thinking is going to better align our tuck-in strategy or acquisition strategy going forward.
Hey, guys. Darrin Peller from Barclays. Just a couple of first questions on the financial model for Jim. When considering the outlook you guys gave, I guess first of all, fiscal year 2018 is still calling for a couple of percent or 2%-3% of growth, and yet your overall CAGR has a pretty steep ramp in the second part of that, just to meet the 5%-7% reported. Maybe you can give a little more color on that. I know you mentioned something around the timing of your backlog, right? More color there. Then secondly, if you can give us a little more granularity in terms of the growth projections for the segments ICS, GTO, maybe versus what they just did the last three years.
It seems to me like GTO has actually accelerated, and it looks to sustainably be accelerating versus what it would have done or did in the early part of last cycle, let's call it. Whereas the ICS, we're waiting to see how things go with the BRCC, and can you give us some highlights?
Sure.
Thanks.
Darrin, the first question, I'll get to your total revenue question, but on the recurring revenue growth, we've got 4%-6% this year as our target. Good chunk of that's organic. Call it 4%-5% of that's organic. We'd have acceleration from 5-7. Your question of total revenue, if we're at 2%-3% this year, looking to grow 5%-7%, what happens? There's a big chunk of distribution revenue in there, which frankly, in the case that we're talking about, is no margin, and that's BRCC volumes that came down one specific client, some of the runoff depresses us this year, then we start to come back up with all the sales activity. Interesting from, I guess, the total revenue growth, not so interesting from a profitability standpoint.
As you look at the segments, I think really the way to think about it is when we think about that organic part, that 5-7, we really are thinking that both of the segments contribute somewhat similarly. You're right to highlight the great growth that GTO's had and has an ability to kind of pull up the average, but ICS, as we look at it, has very similar type of growth prospects when we look at a range of scenarios that could come out. Even if we broke it out for you wouldn't see widely diverging growth rates. Both have really solid track records, consistent with what we've seen the last few years and similar plans going forward. Both contributing, I'd say, very equally with very similar growth rates going forward.
That's helpful. Thanks. Just a quick follow-up on CapEx. We talked earlier about all the capital return discipline you guys have had, which has been great, but I just want to hear a little more in terms of what you expect, again, as a percentage of revenue and CapEx and if you were to rank order where that money's going to be going into your business, so we, as investors, should know what to expect in terms of your priorities.
Yeah.
That'd be helpful.
Yeah, we've ticked up a little bit from 2.4% to 2.7% in this year. I think we're calling for a similar year in 2018, probably in that 2.7%-2.8% range. That said, we have some pretty exceptional activity going on in terms of once every 10-year, even longer, facilities investments. Those are pretty unusual. As we modeled out that next three years, we're certainly thinking about it as sort of hitting a peak to some degree on a ratio basis, obviously, as we grow, we add more capital. I don't see this as something that's accelerating in a big way. We have some pretty exceptional events. That said, we've got some pretty good investment opportunities that are going on right now. To answer your final question about where we prioritize, clearly some of the facilities type investments should kind of decrease a bit.
Clearly some of the big NACC investments hopefully will crest this year. That starts to come down. We see some things that are going to replace it. Product development, we are doing more, as you heard today, with all the product development. We do capitalize some of our internal development for some of these newer products. That's adding a little bit of capital. That's clearly stuff I really like because that's going to have big revenue generation next to it. Clearly, technologies that are going to make us more efficient and the like will always be a high percentage of our capital. Again, I think it's always hard to say capital you've got perfect visibility on because it's naturally lumpy. That said, when we look over the last couple of years, there are a couple things that just don't feel like they're recurring type investment.
Last quick one is just on pricing. Where are we on that discussion in the world in terms of ICS proxies? Anything new? Latest updates on potential changes on the horizon? Thanks again, guys.
I'm going to have Bob address this. Bob was the leader of the last pricing activities. My view was I shared with the board that when the committee came out with their final recommendation, I noted that if my obituary went that well, my family would really be proud. I'm going to ask Bob to kick that off.
I may say things that you folks think are crazy, starting with the 22 years. Sometimes these fee reviews, which could happen tomorrow, could happen 10 years from now, we don't know. These fee reviews, just like what happened three years ago, and I shared with you some of the comments, is a great opportunity for us to further educate the industry, the regulators because when they do in fact come in to better understand, the first thing they typically say, I know I said this a lot, is how complex this process is, and it's so much more complex than it may appear from an outsider. It may happen. We engage when it happens. Our track record has been very, very strong. I think we get new opportunities to demonstrate the value.
There's so many things that they're looking for us to do differently, like better disclosures, efficient disclosures, and we'll have a pretty good role in doing some of that as well. We shall see. Once it happens, I'm sure we'll keep you posted on that.
A little more color. It's a natural question an investor should and will continue to ask. A lot of things in this business are pretty complex to understand. To go out there and read the report of the SEC and read the report of the issuer committee, the people paying the bills that they submitted to the SEC really isn't that tough to do. All right? You're going to hear from them their confidence and using words like, "We need to continue to support Broadridge because we need them to continue to invest in the technology because the process doesn't work." The cost now on the registered side that the issuers directly control is far greater than it is on the street side per shareholder. Okay? Even though the average share position is ridiculously smaller. That's one point.
The next point is what Bob raised earlier about P&G. All right. Let's make this real easy. We represented 92% of the outstanding shares. All right. Within a minute of the polls closing, they had a final, never to be changed, independently verified vote. For the 6% of the registered shares, we're almost at two months, and they're still at the table discussing whether John Doe's signature is John Doe's signature, whether this card's a valid card, whether that's not. Put the entire process in that part and there would be no corporate governance in capital markets. We're here because we invested over $1 billion to make corporate governance transparent and a reality. We will continue, through Bob's leadership, be able to leverage that position to generate additional value as we go forward.
One of my favorite pictures in the world was this chart showing, this is lots of corporations, going from $5,000 in beneficial fees, the original business, to $67,000 in wallet share by them signing on for these additional services. Just like in capital markets, we're making it more compelling for people to do that. It's a great time to be Broadridge.
Right. Lewis Hall from Barclays Bank. Darrin and I didn't actually script that we'd go one after the other, that's fine. Question's probably more for Tom on the international side. Just curious as to what impacts on your existing products and services across Europe that Brexit may have, and what the impact, if any, on your strategy and growth aspirations in the region might be. Thank you.
I was actually noting an accent thing going on here, that you're directing right at Tom.
Hello? No, it's on, yeah.
Yeah, this one. No, we're okay.
Try that one.
Maybe so.
Okay. Generally speaking, we see Brexit as probably an opportunity because we like disruption. The reality is that with Brexit in Europe, there'll be more movement of transactions around. I know your bank pretty well as to what we're doing there with them. There'll be new entities created, there'll be new business created, and there'll be more flow. We're not highly dependent on the U.K. banks in reality. When you look at where we are, we are U.K. headquartered, in quotes, we're international, but actually, the distribution of my clients globally is actually pretty distributed. U.S. clients, Canadian clients, a lot of Japanese banks. We're expecting more flow is the reality situation. We suspect that our U.K. clients will be more cautious about long-term contracts, so we may see a small reduction in the contract sizes. That's for U.K. banks only.
For European banks, we actually see more business. Charlie, beyond Brexit, why don't you comment, though, on your client dialogues around just the difficulty, whether it be staffing, budgeting, and executing on what seems to be a never-ending regulatory plethora of activities that they have to comply with? Let me grab that from Tom. Thank you.
You know, I just wanted to add one thing to what Tom said about Brexit. We have a large U.S.-based client which is going to expand internationally. Originally, they were going to locate to London. They're now going to find another location. That is actually creating more demand for our service in terms of, as Tom said, how to set up the entities and how to set up the trading models because of the expertise we bring relative to that. I do think underneath this Brexit cloud will be opportunity for us in Tom terms of and thinks of disruption.
I think the bottom line is, as I sit with clients and talk to clients, and I think any one of us who are doing that, you find that just the continued pace of the regulatory piece is just driving from their ability to invest is having a significant impact on it. I use the example of sitting with one global bank. They don't have the ability to invest to transform. They have a 1980-ish legacy infrastructure that doesn't scale in the way they expect it to do. The problem is funding the transformation is difficult for them. Even though the U.S. might have lessened regulatory demand, although you make the argument with the Consolidated Audit Trail, that that's going to be a pretty significant one-time as well as ongoing expense.
The European demand and outside Europe demands on the regulatory piece for a global investment bank are only increasing. Hence the code-sharing that I gave you earlier. I think just what's happening with the combination of a legacy infrastructure that needs to transform, regulatory demands increasing, all the spend is going to that. There's a path that people need to find to figure out how to simplify and to mutualize and drive the cost savings.
Are we good?
Yes.
Since you still have such a large amount of distribution revenue, I was wondering if you could talk to the longer-term opportunity beyond 3 years in thinking about that being a tailwind of profit growth, since you've talked a lot about transitioning that lowers revenue but increases profits. Is that an ongoing tailwind that's meaningful for a very long time, or how should we size that?
What I'm going to do is ask Doug first to comment on the strategy behind what we're looking to drive here in terms of having that tailwind be a reality by being in that hub position. Then what I'd like to do is then ask Michelle to talk about some specific client dialogues that she's in, okay? Virtually every day, with how they're looking at this challenge, and why having an entity like Broadridge doing what we do for ProxyEdge do the same thing for this, versus us making the $50 million investment already versus everybody having to make their own $50 million investment.
Yeah, well, it's a great point. It's the right observation around how do we turn distribution revenue into an opportunity by helping our clients migrate and make that transition from print to digital. That's exactly what we're doing. If you're a mutual fund today, mutual funds have traditionally very low eDelivery adoption rates when they think about getting clients to go back to the website and sign up for eDelivery of quarterly statements and things like that. They could be sitting at 5%. That wouldn't be untypical at all. They're struggling with the cost of this. From their perspective, they have very little ability to invest in the capabilities and technology to drive that over.
When you think about big picture what we're trying to do, we're leading to create this overall network and this network effect so that all the different institutions we do business with
Can benefit by being part of this network, that's going to help these clients, I'm using a mutual fund here as an example, to convert from print over to digital and electronic. Think about the role we're playing and the value that we're providing. We're taking what is a very low to no margin distribution revenue, we're investing heavily to help that client convert from print to digital, where they don't have the ability to do it on their own. We've created and we've led with this network and this infrastructure to do it on their behalf. There's real value there, we're going to be able to monetize that value. As we talked about, I think Michelle had a slide that talked about this.
There are many instances where we're going to make more money on an overall profit basis, converting from print to digital. The revenue may not be the same, right? Because you've got a lot of postage costs here. When you think about the value we're providing, I'd say on hold, we're going to see a lot of instances, maybe many more instances, where we're going to make more money converting from the physical to the digital. That's ultimately the value of a lot of the network capabilities that we're building in helping our clients make that migration.
I am in front of clients pretty much literally every day. I would say the two things we see most, relief and excitement. To Doug's point, we talked about this a little bit in our presentation, the expense, whether you are a broker, a mutual fund, a credit card company, a utility, anybody sending out a bill or a statement, the expense in that distribution, that communication, weighs heavily upon you. There's not a client conversation we have where we're trying to help them solve for that. Everything we do from our patenting and our print processes, everything we do in digital is aligned to help them meet those goals. We bring this network that they can't achieve on their own to help them do that faster. That's all really compelling.
I would say to bookend that, if we slide all the way from sort of core wealth and banking financial services and look at some of the most successful digital adopters in telco and credit card, you see real genuine enthusiasm and excitement for being able to make those sort of required communications something that can become engaging to consumers. I think it is particularly powerful that we're in market being able to address both of those opportunities. We sort of look at both the upside and sort of protect our downside in those digital conversations.
Sorry, just one more thing to add on. We're talking about taking that postage and distribution revenue and converting it to digital. The odds are we talked about 80% of consumers and households in the U.S. and Canada are getting distributions from Broadridge. The likelihood is you're getting many distributions coming from Broadridge. How do we accelerate this, okay? What Michelle showed on some of the slides in there, which were up on the screen, they weren't in the handout. If you were to sign up for the service first because you saw it was promoted by your utility company, okay, you see the availability of the content from the fund, your broker, your credit card, your bank, your telco. That mutual fund is benefiting because that same consumer who's in Broadridge's ecosystem is getting multiple forms of content.
We've helped the mutual fund gain digital delivery in a digital client relationship with that consumer because that consumer was somebody else on the Broadridge network, and that's a network matching. We've got a lot of data analysis and algorithms to enable to do that, something we spend a lot of time and investment on, frankly, we've patented. The data matching from a consumer perspective across multiple sources of content is one of the ways that we're going to help accelerate that physical adoption to digital adoption. It's not only the power of the network across all the brands that we have, but the fact that you all, as consumers, are getting content from multiple providers right now on the Broadridge network.
Yeah. Before I ask Bob to comment specifically on mutual funds, I'm going to make a comment here, and this goes to the core of who we are. All right? Leaders lead, all right? The answer is going to be technology. Okay? I don't care what question is here today or what question is here three years today, five years today, from 10 years today, the answer is going to be technology. All right?
I remember being on the roadshow 10 years ago, notice and access had just been announced, and people were saying, "Well, that could be really bad for the new Broadridge." I was with a very large investor, a potential large investor, and he said, "Look, you guys are going to be out of business." I said, "What do you mean we're going to be out of business?" He said, "You're going to be out of business because this stuff's all going to go away." I said, "Well, okay. How are you going to vote?" "Well, I don't know. They'll come up with an answer, but you're not going to do it." It was like, "What are you talking about?" This is getting more complicated, not less complicated. My original business plan talked about putting stuff in an envelope, okay, and getting it back.
That was the original business plan, and you could've written it on a postcard. The business plan today has 10 million lines of code. That was not in my original business plan. All right? The technology is going to continue to get more complex, which makes our role more meaningful. The ability to somebody to get to where we are is just more difficult naturally by the complexity that we have. All right? Technology has enabled us, at the benefit of our clients and the benefit of our shareholders, to take huge cost out. The post office has lost, and the paper and print companies have lost. All right? Even when we do more physically, we're doing it to convert it to digital. We have no desire to stay in any of the physical activities, but it's a great feeder to get more digital.
I'm going to ask Bob specifically to talk about with mutual funds, okay, where with technology, the opportunities we have for them
Sure. Certainly, funds are under a lot of cost pressure right now. One of the things that's being looked at, as you probably know, is some sort of notice for funds, which we have come up with a solution that we expect the Investor Advisory Committee of the SEC to recommend our solution on a going-forward basis. It's not a guarantee, but that's what their recommendation is, which does what I probably articulated before, which is more streamlined disclosure, lower cost, better disclosure, what the SEC is clearly looking for. There's also been a consortium that has been formed that we are participating in by the mutual fund industries, being led by Putnam, and we call it the Reimagine Email.
By virtue of this, what we have discovered is the communications on the registered side, just like when we did notice and access, and Rich referred to this, on the equity side some years ago, it created huge opportunity for us on the registered side because they had difficulty trying to implement it with the providers that they had at the time. Today, we think some sort of evolution of what will be communicated in the fund space gives us another significant opportunity to get more done with the registered side of the business, because what we hear from them directly now is how much of a struggle it is for them to get e-adoption, digital adoption, and we created this Reimagine Email with them.
A test was done by Putnam just a month or two ago, we're already seeing huge increase in uptick from their customers who've been asked a whole host of times to convert to digital by them directly. Now that we are getting involved, creating some new, different, more interactive ways for them to look at this information and deal with this information, we're getting some really good traction. I think the opportunities that are in front of us, by Rich's point, applying more technology, being more creative about disclosure, is going to take hold once again in this space. The answer will continue to be technology. Any other questions, comments?
Hi. Is this on? Okay.
You are.
Maybe a question here for Bob on the note of technology. Could you maybe upgrade us, give us an update on the developments on blockchain technology, specifically on the proxy side. We've seen Nasdaq entering smaller markets. Just wanted to see where you guys are, what does that do to your business model? Maybe timing? Also, if you can have any applications on the GTO side, on the processing.
Sure. Where we started, it was last proxy season where we did utilize blockchain for Santander Bank annual meeting. We had several large global custodians participate in that process. We did a parallel to our current process, which worked out extraordinarily well. Next, we're now looking to do some more of that, again, in the international markets this year, as well as bringing it to the U.S. market so that we'll have more of a proof of concept, which we learn how to utilize this technology and the benefits. Then of great interest, when I talk about potential new opportunities, there are other companies that are looking to us, even in the transfer agency space, where we provide transfer agency services for issuers directly. We have companies talking to us about implementing blockchain in that environment as well.
There's a whole host of, I'll say, proof points that are taking place. We're obviously going to look to aggressively expand on that in the very near term. Again, when we look at it, we think, Rich said it, leaders lead. We need to lead in that space. We need to become increasingly more educated and look at the benefits that could bring, and looking for the new opportunities that we believe a blockchain environment could bring to some of the newer environments that we are looking to engage in.
Say, I'm just going to build on what Bob was saying to give a little bit of additional context that may be helpful for folks that are not as familiar with the business. What Nasdaq announced in Estonia and then in South Africa is a front-to-back global proxy to front-and-back proxy voting solution based on blockchain. Those are both local market solutions doing voting in market. Our global proxy business is a cross-border market. About half the shares globally are held cross-market and are voted cross-market. We don't participate in local market solutions as of now in those markets. There's no direct impact of those just because of the nature of the business. What both those examples do point out is the power of network for blockchain solutions. Because the institutional arrangements are quite different across different countries.
In those countries, the exchange is also the CSD. Basically, the exchange and DTCC in this country would be the same, and it's a registered approach, so there's no beneficial ownership. That person is right in the middle of that whole thing, and it's a pretty straightforward exercise to bring everyone together. As we translate that to this market and think about who would be in a position to have that network to bring that kind of solution to the U.S. if that were to occur, we don't see any natural actor besides ourselves, which is why we're making the very significant investments in this that we have, and that we've talked about. That's, I think, just some context that makes that helpful.
Yeah. I'm going to conclude with, given the importance of Bob's business, my original baby, the Broadridge overall, we're going to have the answer before the market's ready to implement it, meaning we'll be in both globally and in North America, we'll have the answer in calendar 2018 done. Okay? That when the world is ready to implement it, okay, we'll be in a position to align with that. All right? What Tim pointed out is, the difference between doing something locally on a TA basis versus doing it internationally on a street ownership type basis is a night and day difference. All right? You should fully expect us to then be pushing for this solution to be taken advantage of by the people who want it. What do I mean by that? The key to blockchain is everybody has to be on the chain.
All right? Now, there are very few things that everyone's at the same place. Proxy for us happens to be pretty darn close to that. If IBM wanted to get their voting updates via blockchain, as an example, and ABC small company didn't, we could give IBM instantaneous updates through the chain and leave ABC where they are right now. Being the hub puts us in that unique position. The takeaway from this, though, is, of course, everything we said today. We're looking out at our businesses and not saying, "Gee, it feels great today. I hope it's great tomorrow." We're looking at our businesses and saying, "It feels great today.
What do we need to make sure, given the evolution of technology, okay, that we're still going to be the leader tomorrow? The investments that you've heard across the board here, globally, GPTM, digital, blockchain, proxy, back office. All right? Wealth. It just continues on. All right? That ties to, and I know look, taglines are taglines, but I hope for the people in this room today, I hope you really do leave here with a high level of confidence that Broadridge truly is ready for next. We're looking for what that next play is going to be out there, that next level of technology, and we're not waiting for someone else to do it. We're actually putting far more pressure on the in-house players and our competitors by being the one to do it. It really is a cool time to be at Broadridge.
Any other questions? I think that's a good place to end. We really thank you for your participation. There's only one guarantee I can give you, okay? We will do everything we can to deliver what we presented today. You saw this team, you saw what this team delivered, and you saw what this team delivered under far more difficult circumstances. This commitment is real, that every individual here, and the rest of our executive committee members who are in this room. Thanks for your participation, and we look forward to 2020 and talking about how great it is again. Take care.