All right. I guess welcome to the conference. This is really the beginning of three exciting days here in Key Biscayne, Florida. I'm Alex Kramm, Senior Research Analyst at UBS, covering exchanges and business services. Excited to start the conference on with with a new participant, Broadridge, I think, has never been to this conference. At least you haven't been here, Tim. So why don't we just get started with Tim Gokey, Chief Executive Officer of Broadridge? So look, as I just said, you've never been to this conference personally before. So for everyone's benefit in the room here, just to get us started on an easy note, why don't you just remind everybody what Broadridge is all about and why we should be excited about the company?
Yeah. First of all, Alex, thank you very much for having us. It is our first time here, and an amusing thing, we not knowing where the conference was, we were here with our family for a week over Christmas at this hotel. So it's funny to be back, and it's great. I mean, you know, I'm really excited to be here today because there is so much change going on in financial services right now, and we think that Broadridge is uniquely positioned to help drive innovation at scale for our industry. We sit at the intersection of capital markets, wealth management, asset management, and corporate issuers.
You know, if I go back to when I joined the company in 2010, we had 3,000 associates, about $2.5 billion market cap. Today, we're at 15,000 associates, $22 billion market cap, depending on which hour you look at. All that scaling has been around driving innovation at the intersection of a couple of big trends: the democratization of investing, the acceleration of trading. And so today, we're a technology and market infrastructure provider that, you know, $4.5 billion recurring fee revenues. And just to give an example of that, we process $15 trillion of trades every day. In tokenized assets, we process $400 billion a day.
On the governance side, we process 1.5 billion shareholder positions across 150 million accounts. We serve 28 of the 29 globally significant financial institutions. So, that gives us a really unique sort of complex functional knowledge and network connectivity that really suits us well to drive change. And I just have to talk about a couple of the things that we're investing in, and then we'll do your questions. But you know, there's so much change going on in financial services right now, with a really pro-innovation regulatory agenda, with a lot of technology change. And so it's creating change across, you know, three areas that we're investing in: democratization of investing, shareholder engagement, and AI. And those are...
Acceleration of trading. I can't forget that one. You know, so if we think about just stepping into each of those for a moment. You know, we look at the democratization of trading; it's been a trend for a long time. We see three exciting things happening right now. Tokenization, we think that's gonna, you know, it's gonna develop over time, but we're really well-positioned to help our clients with that, and we think it's gonna be a nice driver of position growth over time. Shareholder engagement. You know, the way public companies and funds are beginning to engage with their shareholders and their retail shareholders very different. We're helping them with that.
And then digitization of communications, where it's already 90% on the regulatory side, but our tools are making it even more powerful. So, we really like what's happening there. Acceleration of trading, very similar in terms of the opportunity. You know, it's getting faster trading, narrower spreads, more markets, more products, really creating demand for what we do. And now, as you think about the tokenization of that, where we're a leader, we can take that to the next level. And finally, AI, you know, we have more powerful uses of data, bringing in agentic, bringing in coding tools. We think that's a real opportunity for us.
You know, it's obviously been sort of a spook to the market over the past few months, but we think we're really differentiated from the sort of typical SaaS player that is overlaying sort of workflow on top of their own data. Whereas, you know, what we're doing is core market infrastructure. We're moving money, we're moving securities, we're moving votes, we're competing in operational resilience. It's a vast network, and it's really hard for one person to replace that. And on the converse, the upside of that is the ability to really go after the white space in our market. You know, we talk about a $60 billion market that we manage, but that's the vended side. Unvended is another $160 billion.
And so being able to go after that, like with what we've done with Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, ExxonMobil just recently, to name a few. So we really like that, really like that opportunity, and of course, we're using it internally. And that's all in a financial model that is, you know, very simple, 5%-7% growth organic, 1-2 points of M&A for a 7%-9%, recurring revenue growth. With the operating leverage of being a technology company, grow earnings 10%, 8-12 is our guidance. Buy back 1 point of shares, pay a 2% dividend, deliver low teens to shareholders for a long time. So we take that financial model, the ability to reinvest, and the ability to really help our clients drive change and mutualize change.
It's an exciting place to be.
Well, I think there's a lot to unpack here.
Exactly.
So let's start with the regulatory side, which is, you know, obviously, still the core of the business, the regulatory communications side. So one of the things you're talking about, the long-term outlook, is position growth in that mid- to high-single-digits. I don't think you just mentioned it, but, you know, maybe just talk about that for a second. What gives you confidence in what, and, you know, both the long-term outlook there, and that that can actually continue?
Yeah. You know, I think so, a core part of our business, regulatory communications, and so position growth is the main driver of our economics there. And it's not... If you look at the sort of contribution to the growth of our whole company, it's, you know, this is a part of it, it's not the whole thing, but it's an important part. And we always talk about position growth in the high single digits, and that has been basically, it's been where it's been for literally the past few decades. And the reason it's been that way is there's just constant innovation in financial services. So if you go back 15 years ago, with the advent of ETFs, if you go back 10 years ago, it's the real growth of managed accounts, and that's still going.
If you look five years ago, it was, it was free trading. If you look right now, we're seeing, you know, significant growth in direct indexing. And if we look ahead, you think about the potential impact of tokenization. So that continued innovation is what, gives us confidence. If we look right now in the very near term, you know, we're, we, you know, have a good ability to test forward over the next few months, and, and we're seeing a continuation of that same, that same thing.
So nothing on the near term. I guess we jumped ahead a little bit, but like, anything on the near term, given some of the volatility? It seems like retail is resilient. Seems like, you're still pretty comfortable with what you're seeing out there.
Yeah, it's interesting when you see market volatility and market pullbacks and stuff, in terms of how that affects our business. We tend to be a very lagging indicator, and it tends. You know, if there is an impact, it tends to happen way after the fact, if there's an impact. It is, you know, right now, what we're seeing is, retail investors are sort of buying in on the dips. So, you know, we always talk about this testing, but what we do is we pull the positions, you know, today, that we're gonna be communicating with, you know, six weeks from now. And, you know, that doesn't change that much. So we have really good visibility into the season right now.
Okay. And then, you know, outside of the macro drivers, you mentioned already in your, in the first answer, the quiet revolution, I think, you call it, on the investor communication side.
Yeah.
So I did ask about this on the earnings call, and you made a comment that, you know, there's a variety of new initiatives, but that overall, I think you mentioned, could maybe add 1 point to your growth over time. I think you mentioned maybe even $200 million was the number. So maybe just flesh it out a little bit. Any particular chunky solutions we should be thinking about? 'Cause it always sounds great when it's like, "Oh, it's 1%, it's a few hundred million," but obviously, I assume the team is looking in more detail than that.
Yeah. You know, what we're going after is some things that have been sort of issues and topics for the past several years, and we're bringing technology to solve those. And sort of different client segments have different issues. So for the large part of asset managers, they are very concerned. Well, that, you know, there is a concern that they have too much voting power, and so they're trying to distribute that to their underlying shareholders with pass-through voting. And that's been a big growth area. We've gone from 100 funds to 400 funds, 600 funds this year, $4 trillion under management. It's not huge economically, but it really positions us well.
The real thing there is gonna be, how do we make it. We're still not there yet. How do we make the interface easy enough that there's really good uptake amongst investors? But a lot of, you know, innovative ideas on that. The second chunk is that asset managers are—they just don't like having only the choice of ISS and Glass Lewis around how to do their voting. And so we've been approached by a number of those. We're driving using AI, you know, clean data, giving them a policy engine, allowing them to do their own vote. That could be a really nice, chunky growth area for us.
And, you know, we're doing that with three significant clients this year, three Tier One clients, and, you know, we see a lot more of that next year. And then the third area is standing instructions for public companies. We're doing that with ExxonMobil. We'll do sort of a beta this year with about six companies, allowing investors to set a default, because retail investors tend to want to vote with management. If they don't like management, they sell the company. And so they really like that. This could also be a really chunky business. It's pretty new, but it could be pretty chunky. So collectively, you know, just ISS and Glass Lewis, that's a multi-hundred million dollar market by itself.
The short-standing instructions, you know, hard to say how big that could be, but it could also be substantial. So, you know, if we think about building a business, you know, more than $100 million over the next few years, that's where I get the point. And it's not on the whole company, it's on the governance business.
Perfect. And then maybe to touch on the other side of that, I mean, you just mentioned the proxy advisors, and there's been a lot of scrutiny, even from the administration. So just given that you're a little bit ancillary to that business, and I think sometimes investors don't really understand where you are relative to those guys, what is the risk that you get caught up in this whole regulatory focus as well?
Yeah. Great question. Thank you. Thank you for asking, because I think, you know, you hear the word proxy, and it's like, well, no. You know, what was that? So, you know, we just don't see any appetite at the SEC for a review of sort of the underlying voting technology, or the pricing around proxy. Obviously, everyone wants it to, you know, to be less expensive. You know, that's their job, but there's just no momentum around that, if you look at the public agenda of the SEC. What is on the SEC's agenda, and it's really clear, you know, Chair Atkins has said it multiple times, it's, you know, tokenization and digital assets, and we've talked a little bit about that.
We are really helping there, and, you know, we think we can make a big difference in bringing governance to that. You know, we always talked about making IPOs and public companies great again, and that's where you hear some of the proxy stuff inside that, but it's much more around making it harder for people to put forward proposals. Our economics are not geared on the number of proposals. It's about simplifying some of the disclosures, the length of the proxies. Some of the things that are inside there, again, doesn't touch our economics. Even if they move to semiannual reporting, which I don't think is gonna happen, but that doesn't touch our economics. So those are all things that sort of sound like they're in the space, but they're really oriented at something else.
In fact, we're really helping with that, with what we're doing with ISS and Glass Lewis, and sort of creating an alternative to that, which people really like. And then the last piece of this agenda is making private assets more available to people. We're not as geared on the private asset space, but we are helping wealth managers with that. And as private assets move from just high-net-worth investors to broader investors, it does raise the question, which I'm not claiming is an opportunity yet, but it raises the question of should there be more disclosure, and could that be a future opportunity? So, you know, when we look at how the agenda's lined up, we see it much more as opportunity than a threat.
Yeah. We, we definitely think there will be more disclosure needed as you broaden access to private, private markets. Switching over to the GTO side for a minute, and maybe just starting with capital markets. I'll keep this broad, but a lot going on in that business all the time, so maybe just anything that you're excited about in the, in the near and long term here?
Yeah, I think. So near term, we announced the acquisition on Friday of CQG. CQG does execution management, especially in futures and options. We don't really play in the execution management space today, and we're building in futures and options. We have one core client, we're building up from that, so it really strengthens in both dimensions there. That was about a $170 million purchase, and we think that will not necessarily this year, because it's gonna close later in the year, but you think about its addition to the capital markets business is about 5 points of growth. So, that's, you know, that's a nice, exciting thing.
If I think medium term, you know, we always talk about the simplification that we bring to, to platforms. It's both on the front office side, where many clients, you'll go and you look, and they have 30 different, you know, front office trading platforms, and bringing that together on a single multi-asset class platform is a, a great simplification opportunity for them. Similarly, in the back office, where their infrastructure has been built up asset class by asset class, region by region, and simplifying that onto a global multi-asset class platform, that continues to be something, you know, that has a lot of room to run. And then if we think about longer term, you know, we really like what we're doing in the tokenized trading space.
Again, leading with Digital Ledger Repo, the $400 billion a day that I've talked about, but, you know, we have a nice roadmap on that, if we look forward around bringing it real time, moving to new asset classes. And so, you know, we always talk about simplification and innovation in terms of our capital market strategy, and you can just really see how that plays out.
Okay. Staying on GTO, but moving to the wealth side, which is the other part of that business. Generally an area that... And it's not just because I represent this firm, but clearly an area that we're excited about. But look, what are you doing in that area? Are you gonna be able to participate to the, to- by the-- in the growth in wealth? And, yeah, anything again, that gets you excited, near or medium term.
Yeah. You know, we are, you know, in wealth, we're focused on, you know, making the advisors more productive, making the end investor experience better, and on digitizing all the operations. And, as you know, we have, you know, invested pretty heavily, in a platform that is, componentized. It's. You know, so sort of the more you have, the better it works, but you can take any of the components. It allows people to modernize really sort of on their own, on their own pace. We have, we announced multiple, sales of that last year, so we have nice organic growth in this business. And when you think about the component side, we have-- Of those, we have, 48 components are installed live at clients.
We have another 40-some that are currently in implementation. We just won a number of industry awards. So we like the momentum, we like the story here, and you know, it's a long-term story in helping firms with their modernization roadmap.
Good. All right. I wanna kind of take it back to the bigger picture a little bit, and maybe get even a little bit more into the numbers. But, sales activity is a, is an important metric that, that we all track. Second quarter, I think, was, nice boost year over year, but I think year to date, you're still lagging a little bit if I look at last year and, and the guidance for the year. So just talk about maybe the pipeline, what you're seeing, and what gives you confidence that, we're gonna, we're gonna reach that number this year.
Yeah. So first of all, just, for those that aren't as familiar, when we think about sales for us, you know, it's sort of, it's sort of a bookings measure. It's sort of stuff goes into a bucket, and then, we implement out of that bucket. So if you look at sort of near-term revenue, it's much more about the pace of implementation out of the bucket. So we talk about the backlog that we have at the end of each year. Last year was $430 million at the end, and that's where we're getting our, our near-term revenue. So sales can go up and down, it doesn't really affect our near-term growth. Obviously, it affects our long-term growth.
And then, we tend to be pre-seasonal in our sales and do a lot more in the second half than in the first half. But as you rightly point out, we're a little bit behind where we were last year at this time. So, we've done about $89 million in the first half. You know, and as I said on the call last week, we have, you know, a lot of wood to chop. So what makes us optimistic about that? You know, a couple of things. When you look at the new originations, which is an important measure that we look at, our new originations in the first half this year were up 20% over last year. The other thing we look at is pipeline multiplier.
So if we look at all the things in our pipeline that have a date where it's expected to close sort of in this fiscal year. Now, by the way, if you added up all the stuff that's expected to close this fiscal year, we'd blow past our sales numbers. But you know, institutions always—there's always, like, a little complication, and things get delayed a little bit. And it, you know, so there's always a percentage that that happens. But if you look at the multiplier of the ratio of that, you know, compared to where it was last year, you know, it's much healthier. So those are a couple of things that give us optimism.
You know, the other thing I really like is where we're originating, where we're in conversations is these areas where we're investing, you know, whether that is digital communications, the platform, the tokenization topic, the shareholder engagement topic. And so we have really healthy client conversations around, around all of this. So, those are the opportunities. We are seeing, you know, some good momentum in the second quarter. I don't go so much by quarterly results as much as just sort of looking at the whole year, but that's where we, we come out on the $290-$330.
Okay. You just mentioned tokenization again. I think it's come up a couple of times already, so maybe we'll need to dig a little bit deeper if. Look, I think it's gonna be a big topic at this conference for sure. So yeah, can you talk a little bit more about the opportunities, but then also about about the risks that, again, I think been a focus for investors here over the last few days, weeks, or maybe even months already. So yeah, and then specifically on the opportunity side, you know, you have the repo product out there. I think it's on a private chain now or ledger now. I think you're gonna move that public.
Can you just talk about when that's gonna happen, what that could mean, and then, of course, other initiatives around that and potentially other asset classes?
Yeah, uh-
It's a big question, I know it's a lot. It's a lot going on, but-
There's a lot going on. Who knows if, you know, what the market's concerned about is tokenization or if it's software or what it is, 'cause it's really, you know, it-
Mm-hmm.
This is where you get the big bucks for figuring that out. But, you know, let's start with where people have some concern, which is on the governance side, and, you know, is there some way that this could disintermediate Broadridge? And I just want to be really clear here, which is, we think that this is absolutely an opportunity, not a risk for us. And, I'll say that again, we think this is absolutely an opportunity. And why is that? You know, if you think about, first of all, tokenized securities, what the SEC, they've consistently talked about the fact that a tokenized security is still a security.
So all of the different requirements that, you know, traditional securities have to have, you know, we expect tokenized securities to have, including everything around governance. And then you really look at, well, where will these be purchased? And, you know, we believe overwhelmingly they're gonna be purchased with traditional wealth managers or the digital exchanges like the Coinbase and Krakens of the world. And all of these are our clients. And those intermediaries are going to have all of the same asset servicing obligations that they have today, and that includes proxy and class actions and corporate actions and tax and all the complexity around that that they need to address. And, you know, and they're our clients.
So, people talk about, well, what about, you know, issuers having direct access to those clients? You know, in the end, intermediaries are not gonna give up the names of their clients to funds and public companies. They're just not gonna do it. And investors want, you know, the choice around that privacy. So we don't think issuers are gonna have that, you know, direct access. Now, if I go and buy my shares directly from Exxon or directly from Apple or directly from Microsoft, or, you know, pick your, pick your public company, then they'd have direct access. But that's a hugely clunky model. When you think about, you know, at scale, is that what's really gonna happen? No, it's gonna go through intermediaries.
So, we think conversely, what's gonna happen is, it will go to intermediaries, it will bring in, new investors, new products, new sources of demand, the digital exchanges will grow, and that will all be a nice contributor to position growth, in the future, and a nice tailwind for Broadridge.
Excellent.
Oh, DLR and,
Please
... the capital market side. Yes. So that's the governance side. Then we go to sort of the platform side of things, where we have been a leader. You know, if you went to Davos 10 years ago, you know, every street sign and every billboard and everything would have been all about blockchain, and then it sort of went away and got quiet. But we never stopped investing in that. And so, you know, we started with repo because 60% of fixed income in North America is on our technology platform, and we're looking for: Where is the use case where we can help our clients make money, we can make some money, not go broke? And so we started with repo, with internal, you know, intra-institution repo.
UBS is a user of that. And it enables clients to save money right now without, you know, a big, complex network. That had grown to about $100 billion a day up to sort of, you know, this time last year. And since then, with the market awareness, with Treasury clearing coming up, which is a great new use case for sponsored repo, and the new administration that's grown from $100 billion - $400 billion a day, a bunch of new clients signing up. It continues to grow, and so that's a nice use case. As you say, right now, we started with that on a private version of Canton, which is one of the very financial services oriented, institutional trading-oriented networks that is out there.
That we will bring to the public version of Canton. You know, they're doing some work on it. They have a statement of work with DTCC to really make it sort of fully ready for prime time. So that'll happen later on this calendar year. That'll create a lot more interoperability for bilateral repo. In the meantime, we're bringing it real time. And you think about the way repo works today, it's overnight. It's sort of a treasury function. Think about the future, where it can be real-time, atomic settlement. It can be right on the trading desk, self-financing trades as you go. And really, the volume, you know, differential there could be really nice and really create something that would really help the whole daylight overdraft situation that exists today.
So we really like that. But this is a multi-asset class platform. We already announced in Q2 that we helped Société Générale issue its first natively digital bond, corporate bond, and we can do that with others. We're also talking to institutions about tokenizing deposits. So we see, you know, a really nice roadmap of going real time, much more interoperability, other asset classes. And we think the experience of doing it at scale, which we've been doing versus experiments, is, you know, gives us a really nice edge in this.
Good. Staying on new technologies, and I think you again mentioned it at the beginning already, AI, which again, will be a huge topic at this conference across, I think, the whole, all of the subsectors. But look, I think starting with what you're doing, maybe give us a refresher of where you're doing it, using it internally, maybe for cost purposes, but also obviously where can it help grow the business? And then again, just looking at the last couple of weeks again, in parts of my coverage in financials broadly, clearly investors are focused on the disruption from AI again, software, data, workflows. I mean, some people think everything is changing, obviously. So, you know, how are you positioned against that potential disruption that a lot of people are trying to price in right now?
Yeah, you know, obviously we think it's more of an opportunity than a disruption. Probably every company that comes up here today is going to say that.
Of course.
But let me just talk a little bit about, you know, what I think differentiates us from sort of some of the traditional SaaS players, where what they're essentially doing is, you know, giving you access to your own data, giving you a nice user interface, giving you some workflow on top of that, you know, to manage your sales force, to, you know, do your HR, picture what you're doing. As I said before, I think we're very differentiated from that because we're really core market infrastructure, connecting all the institutions and the trading venues and the depositories, moving money, moving securities, moving votes in something that requires that many firms to interact with each other with strong regulatory requirements.
And where making an error can... You know, would be many, many times our fees, one error. So, that really makes it, makes it very different. I mean, look, we've, we've looked at our own... All the software that we purchase ourselves, and there, you know, we can look at applications, we say: Yep, we could, you know, internalize that. And we look at like, okay, our Oracle Financials. You know, we're not gonna internalize that, right? And it's the same, it's the same, same kind of thing, same kind of thing. So, so we just don't see... You know, the vast majority of what we do is have this broad network quality that's just very different.
Conversely, we do see real opportunity when we look at the ways we've already been able to generate new revenue by doing new things for clients. So what are some examples? We have a data and analytics business that serves the asset management industry. That has always been... It's a really beautiful business. We have great data around, you know, who is buying what and what channels, both retail and institutional, globally. It's always been descriptive. With AI, we've been able to make it predictive, to say what's going to happen. And that has been, you know, I won't say it's flying off the shelves, but we sold almost 20 clients, you know, in the 18 months since we introduced it. What we're doing, and we've announced with Wells Fargo and others around proxy voting.
That is a natively AI custom policy engine. Again, it's applying AI to do something, you know, really nice, really nice growth trajectory there. You know, if you next time you get... Pardon me. Next time you get an annual, an email with an annual, semi-annual report from a fund, take a look at it. There's gonna be a picture of the report, on there that you can just, just click on. I know that sounds a bit trivial, but, you know, until six months ago, it was a link. It was very disengaging because no one ever clicks through to a link. Now you can see the document, you know, right there. Investor engagement is up 10x.
Well, keeping track of all those documents and sources and making sure you have the right one is. We're using AI to do that. So, you know, with AI, we were able to do that. It's not a pure direct revenue, but it's a great, great client enhancement. So those are just some examples where already we're driving revenue or better client experience with AI. Looking at the cost side, you know, believe there was this announcement by Goldman on Friday about using AI on their. It wasn't on their technologies, on their operations to make the operations more efficient. You know, we're already doing that. We're way more levered towards technology, but we do have a business. We serve about 40 clients doing their back-office operations.
We have about 1,000 people doing that. It's about a $100 million business. We've improved productivity there 20% in the last year. We have a clear roadmap on the next 20%. We're sharing that with clients, and we think that's actually. You know, the very biggest firms can do that themselves. A lot of mid-sized firms would really love to mutualize the ability to invest in using the AI to do that. So we think that's actually gonna be a nice, nice growth opportunity for us there. So, obviously, deploying agentic inside Broadridge will be. You know, we're deploying the new coding tools inside Broadridge. That is allowing us to be more cost-effective to drive margins while still reinvesting in all the growth opportunities I talked about.
Makes sense. Well, since you just finished that topic on cost and expense opportunities, I know your CFO isn't here today, but maybe you can talk a little bit more broader around how you view investing and margin expansion in the business. From my perspective, I look at the peers, if it's the right peer group, and some of those have significantly higher margins. So I know some of these businesses are different, but maybe just talk about where maybe margins could go over time or why they are where they are, given your business profile.
Yeah. Thank you. Great question. So, you know, if you look at Broadridge, and you look at it, it's this 20% operating income margin, and you compare that to other fintech, and you say, like, "What's going on?" And so, let me just unpack that a little bit. First of all, we have a significant chunk of passthrough revenue, and I wish we could report that sort of separately. And I always encourage people that are following us to sort of do the analysis, so you exclude all the distribution. When you do that, our margin's about 30%. That's still ten points lower than a lot of our competitors, but it just helps you put it-
Yep
... a little more in the ballpark. And then, we have a pretty different growth strategy than a lot of our competitors. We have a lot of competitors that have a sort of, you know, lock people in and, you know, grow revenue with price, and then do M&A. And we are much more of an organic growth company, where we're investing in solutions. We have, you know, our organic growth, if you look at price as a contribution to growth, is almost—it's like flat. It's really much more around reinvesting to do the next thing for clients. We view every client as a 99-year client, and all of our growth comes from having very satisfied clients.
If you look at our Net Promoter Scores on our core solutions, over 60, so really satisfied clients that wanna do the next thing with us. We think that that's a superior long-term growth model for investors. Now, there is lots of room to grow margins, and we've been growing them over the past many years at approximately 50 basis points a year. There are some adjustments in there. You know, when postage costs go up, it's a direct pass-through, and it depreciates what is reported as our operating margin. Similarly, when interest rates move, it changes above the line, but it's compensated below the line on our variable rate debt. So we'd give you what those adjustments are, so you sort of have to think about that as well.
But I think that we have lots of room as we scale the company to continue to invest, to continue to grow margins, and to deliver great returns for shareholders. And just as a reminder, you know, we really think about growing earnings, not necessarily about managing the margin. And so, you know, what we're managing the company to is that 10% sort of mid-case earnings growth.
Good. And then maybe finally, as I look at the time here, let's finish on capital allocation. You are an active acquirer, and thanks for the additional disclosures just now about the deal from last week. But look, you still have a lot of capacity, so maybe help us think about what else you can do, what your appetite is, any holes in the offering where you're spending a lot of time. So, yeah, what's the... In a year that a lot of people are looking for more M&A across sectors, where is Broadridge gonna fit in?
Yeah, I think, you know, the thing we always talk about balanced capital allocation. You'll hear it's balanced capital allocation, balanced capital allocation, balanced capital allocation, which is a little bit boring, but I think it's, that's superior for investors. And so, that's being investment-grade. It is making the internal investments that make sense, paying a good dividend, and then with the extra of that, doing M&A when it makes sense, tuck-in M&A, and buying back shares. And over the past 10 years, if you look at that, those last two buckets, it's been about 50/50 between those. We have a lot of cash flow right now, so we have, you know, a lot of capacity to do both M&A and to buy back shares.
But the tuck-in M&A has been a very, very successful strategy for us. We track every transaction going back the past 15 years, and we're delivering unlevered IRRs of between 18% and 20%. Once you put a little bit of leverage on that, if you're a PE firm, you know, that'd be a great track record, so we really like that. You know, we really look for areas where, you know, we're the right owner, where the synergies with us make us the right person to win. We look at 100 opportunities a year. About half the things we've done have had a proprietary dimension to them. The CQG transaction we just did, totally proprietary transaction.
So, we look for those areas where we have an edge because, you know, it does matter that you buy it cost-effectively to do well at this. And, so, so we like that. You know, we've done a couple of small tuck-ins this year. You know, looking out at where there are opportunities, there are a number of opportunities that are out there. You know, we'll see how it plays out. Obviously, with the environment going where it is, it's really interesting how, you know, what will happen to valuations for things that are, you know, in the M&A market. But, you know, in the end, it's gonna come back to balanced capital allocation. And if we, if we do do something, it's because we're the right owner.
But we're very happy to buy back our shares, and obviously, they are, you know, incrementally a lot more attractive now than they were six months ago. So, you know, if we're a buyer, you know, we'll be happy with that too.
Excellent. All right, we do have 3 more minutes. If we have a mic in the room, I believe we do, if there's any live questions, this will be the time. I know this is the first meeting of the day. Everybody's still just waking up. I think you can also use the app, but we'll do that, some other time. Maybe just from my perspective we talked about the sales pipeline earlier and, the comfort level with it. Maybe you can just, Any more detail you can impact there? Because, again, you sometimes talk about the sales more, more holistically, but there are different businesses. So maybe, maybe just talk a little bit more about where are you actually seeing the most demand.
Well, I think, you know, coming back to the really strategic sort of kinds of conversations we're having. Having good conversations with people about their communications infrastructure, where as things are going more digital, they have physical infrastructure, and what are they gonna do with it? And how can we help them rationalize that, take it over, rationalize it, and move it digital? And so there's a good set of conversations, you know, on that theme. This standing instructions for public companies. You know, after Exxon announced that they did, we literally have 100 companies, you know, coming to us saying, "You know, can we get in? Can we get in on this?" So lots of great conversations there. Lots of great conversations with asset managers around the custom policy engine.
So, and then, you know, always ongoing conversations around our back office platform. So I think, you know, if we just look at the areas where we're investing, that's where we're seeing the conversations. It does sort of spread across our portfolio, so it's hard to sort of say, "Oh, you know, Alex, is like, this area is the one that's gonna do it." But I like that. You know, the other thing I like about that is it's very, you know, when you have a portfolio approach, you end up with sort of more balanced results. And I think that's what we're gonna see.
Okay. No, that's, that's very fair. Last chance for the room. Otherwise, I'm gonna call it. All right, why don't you help me thank Tim for being here today. Thank you very much. It was great.
Thank you.