Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bank of America's 33rd Annual Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North America Head of Diversified Financials at B of A. And it's my pleasure to introduce Michael Chae. Michael is the Chief Financial Officer of Blackstone and also Vice Chairman. He joined Blackstone in 1997 and had several senior roles at the firm, including Head of International Private Equity, Head of Private Equity for Asia Pacific. He was also a senior partner in the U.S. private equity business. Michael's also a member of the Management Committee and sits on several investment committees across the firm's business. Michael, thank you for joining us.
Great to be here, Craig. Thanks. Nice to see everyone.
Quick intro on Blackstone. Blackstone's AUM is now $1.1 trillion. It makes it the largest alts business in the world. It also has the largest individual investor business, which it started much earlier and has dedicated significantly more resources than its peers. The firm has also grown AUM by about 13 x since its 2007 IPO. Blackstone is a highly diverse business with leading and scaled businesses across real estate, private equity, credit, and hedge funds. It also has strategic partnerships with four life insurance companies and doesn't have exposure to any of their liabilities. Michael, let's start with the macro. You have a very large portfolio across different industries, different geographies. It's always helpful to provide us insights in terms of what you're seeing, including around growth. What is the state of the macro environment today, and where do you think we're heading in 2025?
Sure. So I think overall, we have a quite positive outlook. We think the economy is on a very sound footing. As you referenced, we always like to start by looking within our own portfolio, where we have something like 250 stakes, significant equity stakes in companies. We own 13,000 individual real estate assets. We have a borrower portfolio in the thousands. And what we see, if you look at, say, the fourth quarter, where we survey our CEOs and obviously track our portfolio company metrics, was a revenue growth rate in our U.S. portfolio of nearly 7%, with very strong margins. We've seen margin increases in aggregate across that portfolio for nine consecutive quarters. It's really been a pretty remarkable display of sort of the underlying productivity in these companies and frankly exceeded my expectations a couple of years ago when input costs appeared to be rising.
In our credit portfolio, fundamentals are very healthy across thousands of borrowers in our non-investment grade portfolio, pretty minimal default rates that have been stable for a while now, and we do the survey of our portfolio company CEOs every quarter with a bunch of different questions, and a grand total of 0% of them forecast recession for this year, so that's a pretty positive picture. In terms of inflation, I know Chairman Powell speaking right now, we see it as under control. We see it as effectively at target. We always focus on shelter costs. They're 36% of the CPI metric that the government uses. But the way they do it, it inherently lags probably by about a year, and even the Fed acknowledges that it's coming down in the real world and that their measure lags.
If you look at CPI in January, less shelter, ex-shelter, it was about 1.9%. 1.9%, you must care a lot about inflation. It was 1.9% ex-shelter. Now, the government's shelter component was over 4%. If you look at in our own portfolio and then at external sources and sort of market rents, real-time kind of market rent shelter cost data, it's running more around 1%. So when you combine those two, it's at or even arguably below target. Now, the Fed has room to ease in our view, but is going to be patient. And we can all speculate why our own view would be. You have strong economy. You have relatively strong and stable employment picture. And from their point of view, perhaps they want to have optionality, optionality around seeing some of these policy measures play out in the first half of this year.
And also optionality to basically leave in their back pocket the ability to be accommodative should there be some kind of shock or economic downturn. So again, we think they're actually letting monetary conditions run pretty restrictively, but that they think it's okay given the sort of relatively benign picture in the economy overall. They have room to ease. We think they're on a path to use it over time, but they can be patient. That's sort of the U.S. picture. Outside the U.S., as everyone here knows, a pretty different picture. In Europe, U.K., Germany, Europe overall, and China, more challenging sort of growth headwinds. There, I think you'll see central banks being more accommodative. And I think that, among other things, will lead to a continued strong dollar. And then in contrast, markets like India and Japan, which we're quite focused on, I think are quite positive picture.
And I think for us, they're promising places to invest. Now, I think asset values in sort of some of these more challenged areas, Europe, China, they're arguably reflecting some of those headwinds and perhaps what are becoming more interesting places to invest. So overall, it's a complex picture, but one that I think presents pretty interesting opportunities. And in September, I said at a conference early in September after kind of a volatile August that we were seeing signs that were consistent with a soft landing. That wasn't a total consensus view then. Now, I'm not going to say it's more consistent with a no landing, which I think has a lot of different meanings to different people. But I think the idea of sort of above-trend growth, inflation under control, I think that's sort of the picture we're in at this point.
Great. So I wanted to go a little deeper on the transaction side of this. So a lot of us are expecting an upward trajectory in transaction activity on both the investing and realization side. What's your outlook for deployment this year?
Yeah, I think the transaction environment, this all translates favorably without talking about sort of when in the year things will take off. I do think acceleration through the year is a watchword. The IPO markets, if you look at IPO markets, M&A markets, both corporate and sponsors on the IPO markets, the market's been basically suppressed in a historic way for the last two years, 2023 and 2024. We're at basically two years in a row, the lowest levels in terms of volume since the financial crisis. So we certainly see the IPO market coming back. Just sort of normalizing the IPO market volumes, normalizing against kind of 15-year averages would mean the market will be up in the order of like 40% this year. I think it'll start with you see some billion-plus IPOs. The pipeline's kind of doubled versus a year ago.
I think it'll start with sort of category-leading, larger scale, kind of at the higher end of mid-cap or large-cap. But I think that will, if the market's hold up, that will broaden over time as well. So I think that's a favorable picture. And then on the M&A side, and everyone's sort of waiting for Godot here, but our view is it's happening. And if you talk to LPs or what they're seeing with GPs, you talk to bankers, we look at our own planning. We see this pipeline really filling and taking off, perhaps more second quarter than first quarter in terms of announced signed deals. And these things take time. So things we decided to launch in November of last year, we're preparing investment memorandum. You've got to have the full year financials and on and on.
You then launch them, and then sort of signed deals ensue. So I think it's acceleration, putting aside sort of exactly measuring sort of the timing through the course of the year. For us, in terms of deployment, we really tried to lean in ahead of kind of market recovery, which is always the best time to lean in. Last year, we deployed $134 billion across our firm. That was up 81% year over year, and we continue to think it's a good environment to invest.
I wanted to talk about the interest rate impact. We obviously had a very large increase in the 10-year in the fourth quarter. Last year, also private credit was very strong in the fundraising front. Do you expect a rotation into the equity side of the business, private equity, infra equity, real estate equity?
It's a good question. I think right now, I'm not going to call it a sweet spot, but I think in a very encouraging way, it's sort of a positive and balanced picture in terms of demand and flows into credit as well as the equity side. And I think there's a blend of kind of cyclical and secular factors on the credit side. Despite spreads tightening, overall yields are still very attractive and compelling. And even in the sort of traditional market, if you look at the Triple Bs, the bond yields are the highest in relation to S&P earnings yields in like 20 years. And so we are seeing, among other things, very strong flows continuing into floating-rate products.
And then within credit, between traditional liquid credit and private credit, I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that private markets are sort of the destination for investors to find excess spread, whether it's investment grade or sub-investment grade. And that's a real secular thing where the structural benefits of direct origination, doing it at scale across the sort of risk-return spectrum within credit, that's really coming into its own. So I think that's very positive on the credit side, both cyclically and also from a secular standpoint. On the equity side, we are seeing, I think, a more and more positive, constructive environment. And again, I think it's a combination of cyclical recovery in some strategies and a secular trend towards allocations and others. You're seeing this more on the cyclical side.
You're seeing the easing of some of the technical factors that constrained allocations in the last couple of years around the so-called denominator effect, around sort of the DPI challenge. I think those things are easing, if not reversing, and I think particularly in areas like traditional private equity drawdown strategies, that cyclical recovery is underway. I think it'll take a bit longer in real estate, especially real estate open-end strategies, and then in areas like infrastructure, secondaries, there you're seeing, I think, a lot of LPs on average just adding to their allocations. That's a strategic thing, and so that's very positive for our business, so again, you have this coming together, I think, of the cyclical and the secular, and right now, between credit and equity, I think it's a very constructive environment.
So how does this impact your overall fundraising expectations for 2025?
In 2024, we raised $171 billion in the course of the year in a not unchallenging environment where we also had a pretty light calendar of drawdown and flagship drawdown strategies. For 2025, it's early in the year, but we really see and are feeling strong momentum. We're very, I think, constructive about where the full year could take us and it being a very productive year. If you look at sort of drawdowns, perpetuals, and then we can talk about credit on the drawdown side, as I mentioned, we have in a positive way a heavier drawdown fundraising calendar planned. So I would expect drawdown fundraising in 2025 to be sort of a multiple of what we did in 2024.
And we have a handful plus of very well-performing, I think, what will be, I think, much-demanded products in our private equity secondary strategy, in our Asia private equity strategy, in our life sciences fund, in our GP stakes fund, in tactical opportunities. So I think that bodes very well. In perpetuals, on the institutional side, we have this infrastructure business. It's reached $55 billion of AUM at the end of 2024, up over 30% year- over- year. We've introduced a European sleeve around that. So there's a lot of good momentum there. And then on the individual investor side on perpetuals, and I think we'll talk more about this, there's a lot of momentum. And we have now these four critical sort of pillar strategies. In January, we raised $3.7 billion, which was our highest fundraise in over two and a half years.
So that, I think, bodes quite well. And then in credit insurance, that business's AUM was up 20% last year. And we continue to see that on a really positive trajectory.
You're right, I do want to hit on the individual investor business. Blackstone is number one in this business globally. There's a very large gap to sort of number two. Your model has been to launch these large, I'll call them category killers from BREIT, BCRED, BXPE. So my question is, what's next? And then also, if I look at sort of distribution around the world, to me, you look very strong. Are there any gaps that are remaining?
I think overall, if you sort of step back, it's a really exciting time where the innovation engine in our private wealth strategy is really, really firing, really, I would say, taking off, and as you know, we started building this area within the firm and private wealth about 15 years ago. As we always try to do, we took a very long-term view around building this, and again, I would say we reached the point where the innovation flywheel after all that time is really, really accelerating, so eight years ago, we launched our first sort of core large-scale customized product in BREIT. Today, we're at $260 billion of private wealth at AUM across the firms. It's nearly a quarter of the firm with multiple category-leading products.
In the last year, we've gone, sitting in this room maybe 14, 15 months ago, we've gone from sort of two core strategies to now what we call the core four. In the original two, in non-traded REIT, non-traded BDC, BREIT, and BCRED, we've delivered over six, seven, eight years net returns inception to date of around 10%. On BREIT, that's like 65% higher than the public REIT index over the same time period. For BCRED, we're delivering a yield today of over 10%. And I think in the non-traded BDC area, you're going to see in the direct lending area, you're going to see more and more performance dispersion over time. So those were two really important foundational products. Obviously, a year ago in January of last year, we introduced BXPE. So we've been at it now exactly a year.
We're really, really pleased with the performance, most importantly, the investment performance and also the fundraising and the growth in NAV, so we're really, I think, the work that took and I think how that translated into performance in the first year was very gratifying. These private equity retail products are not easy to do, and I think we're uniquely positioned because of the breadth of our platform, our experience in structuring and so forth to do it well, and then our fourth core product, we call it BX Infra, launched on January 1st. It was the largest sort of first-time fundraise for an infrastructure retail product by like a multiple of 4x or 5 x.
What was cool to us is, in terms of, I would say, kind of a proof point around the private wealth strategy for us, out of that first inflow, which was over $1 billion, over 90% of the financial advisors who transacted had been in another Blackstone retail product. Over half had been in all of them. That, I think, gives you a sense of the power of the brand, the sort of the network effect and so forth. Then again, in terms of the pipeline, we've talked about this, but we have a multi-asset credit product with a ticker execution, actually, that's in filing, and we expect it to launch in the coming months. We think multi-asset credit overall is a really, really important product both for individual investors and institutions in the private credit world.
And again, because of the breadth of our strategies, including real estate credit, infrastructure credit, investment grade, sub-investment grade, we feel very, very well positioned around that. And so that's just a sense, again, of this innovation flywheel. There's more in the lab, and there's more to come, and we're really pleased about it. That's the product side. The distribution side, sorry for this long answer, Craig. You call them gaps. We can also call them white space and opportunity, both positive. And I think when you step back, much of the action to date, naturally so, has been think about geography and channels around wirehouses in the U.S. And on channels and on geography, as you referenced, it's really early innings around the opportunity.
So on the channel side, whether it's RIAs, IBDs, very large family offices, maybe insurance-linked products, very exciting opportunities, obviously, generally kind of more accredited investors and smaller investors versus QPs. And then on the geography side, I'd just say nearly every sort of major developed country and market, there's opportunity, whether it's in Japan, very important market for us, Canada, Pan Europe, Australia, and on and on and on. So it's $260 billion, but we've never been, I think, more excited about the global opportunity across channels and really, really importantly around sort of the product innovation flywheel.
So after the election in November, we've had a big pickup in inbound on the retirement channel and the potential for privates to sort of break in. So what do we need to see from the regulatory front? And what is Blackstone's perspective on this topic?
We hadn't noticed there was a focus on this now. When you step back, there's a lot of different ways to describe this current situation. One way to look at it is you have within the retirement market, you've got two $12 trillion markets in defined benefit and defined contribution sitting alongside each other, and on the DB side, as folks know, there you have some of the most developed, sophisticated, evolved alternatives programs that have led to superior performance and net returns for those portfolios over decades now, and on the DC side, you have minimal to none in terms of the presence of alternatives. On the DB side, you typically have for plans and larger plans like teams of 40 people, sophisticated allocators of capital, portfolio managers, and so forth, working on behalf of plan participants.
On the DC side, what you've had is obviously plan sponsors who've been, I think, way too focused on fees and not net returns and worried about litigation risk. And so that does not seem right to us. We can't predict sort of timing on this. We think ultimately this should happen. And it should happen because it would be a good thing for retirees. And so we are big believers in the democratization of alternatives and that all people should participate in this. And we think it can be done responsibly with strong fiduciaries looking on behalf of DC participants. Now, if and when that day comes, we think we'll be really distinctively positioned in it in terms of brand, reputation, a track record generally, but specifically in products for individual investors. And importantly, I talked at length just now about our different products.
This sort of stable of large-scale, perpetual structured, open-ended products for individual investors, those are the right structures and products for this channel, frankly, as opposed to, say, the drawdown structures. And so we think all of that will position us well if and when this opens up, which, again, I think we would hope it would given the benefits to investors.
So I wanted to move into the insurance channel. You've created a business model that's very different than some of your large peers. You have zero liabilities. It's capital light. It's very diverse for IM agreements with third-party life cos. I think 23 SMAs as of the end of the fourth quarter, so you keep growing that number. How does your model position you for growth globally? And how really, what are your real competitive advantages versus the captive models that some of the other alt managers employ today?
So stepping back and to remind folks, we're the largest third-party manager of alternatives for insurance clients. We have $220 billion, as of the end of the year 2024, $229 billion of insurance AUM, up basically 20% year- over- year. And what I'd say is it's the right model for us. It's true to who we are. Capital light minimizes risk, maximizes market opportunity. We use, in our view, the power of our brand and our reputation and our massive $453 billion credit platform and all the origination capabilities that come alongside that to address the whole market. We think that multi-client model leads to better growth. As you mentioned, four large strategic partnerships, 23 SMAs and counting. We don't compete with those clients at selling annuities and life insurance.
We're there simply as a third-party asset manager to deliver excess spread to make them as competitive as possible in growing their own businesses. So it's a very simple proposition. And I think if you were to draw this up on a blank sheet of paper, hey, can you create a nearly $500 billion credit business and a $230 billion insurance platform and growing with 27 of the most important insurance companies in the world and so forth without using balance sheet, without taking on those liabilities? You might opt for that path ex ante. So seven years ago, I think maybe the jury was out as to whether we could really scale using that platform. And I'd like to think the jury is increasingly in on that.
The Resolution deal, Resolution one of our four strategic partners, I think it really showcased the power of our model, sort of proof of concept. We announced a $10.6 billion deal for Nippon Life, Japan's largest life insurance company, important partner to us to buy Resolution that'll close later this year. We took a step back, and it was only a little after a year of ownership that we announced that deal. We originally took about a 6% stake for the firm in connection with a long-term asset management partnership, and other LPs of ours also invested, and this transaction would monetize a very attractive gain for the firm and for our LPs and will continue to be their asset manager. Importantly, Nippon Life is this extraordinary partner, the leader in a very important global market for insurance. They're also our partner in Corebridge.
And we see really significant potential over time where in phase two of this, under their ownership, with us continuing to be their asset manager for the closed block acquisition market, this platform driven by Nippon Life is going to be very, very competitive at a time when that market, I think, the pipeline for deals in that market is as strong as we've seen in a while. So all in all, our platform for insurance was built to support a much larger business. And so we're excited and it's early days.
So, post the election, there's prospects out there for kind of broad deregulation or at least less restrictive regulation on financial services. I'm curious on what this could mean between some of the competitive forces between the alt manager industry and sort of the banks. If the banks compete more aggressively, are there any areas that you think are potentially at risk? Or are there some areas where you think are very highly defensible, potentially never going back to the banks?
Yeah. Well, I think in this topic, people are focused probably rightly so on credit and private credit. I think if you step back, it's a really big and growing pie. The private credit market's like $2 trillion out of the global market of $90 trillion. So there's plenty of room there for growth for participants. The focus of, I think, perceived competition is usually around LBO financing, which is actually a relatively small piece of the ecosystem. But importantly, around many other strategies, private investment grade, asset-backed infrastructure debt, real estate credit, there's really, I think, really competitive dynamics with banks is not really a factor. So there's a really long runway as the market grows. And if you step back, it's really to us, it's all about what's happening here. It's all about moving assets to the right homes in long-duration vehicles.
And that's a structural phenomenon that really transcends bank capital dynamics. We're providing. It's about bringing borrowers directly to the source of origination of high-quality private credit at excess spreads at scale. And ultimately, we have different models. It's sort of about the moving versus storage model. They're inherently about sort of the moving model, and we're focused on the storage model for long-duration, high-quality private credit. And because of that sort of ultimate difference in models, it's not a zero-sum game. I think for us, there's more potential for cooperation than competition. And in that context, and you've seen us announce a number of origination partnerships with significant banks around the world in different asset classes, including within asset-backed finance. And I think you'll see those continue. And all in all, we're a really, I think, important partner to banks and vice versa.
We think we'll continue to be a preferred partner in doing all the things there are to do in this space. Overall, I think we're very comfortable with that picture.
Michael, you guys have built a very big digital infra business. I think you got about $80 billion invested today.
Data centers. Yeah.
Data centers. Pipeline's even bigger so my question is, we had some news a couple of weeks ago with the DeepSeek-R1 launch. I was surprised how quickly some of the markets moved on that. I wanted your perspective on this. Did that change anything? Is this still a really attractive segment?
The answer is definitely yes. By the way, just to clarify, on $80 billion, that's not our actual capital invested or the value of our equity in data centers. That's the sort of asset value of the whole platform, including sort of signed leases. So just to clarify on that. But look, if you start with the big picture, and the picture's really quite big, as I think this room knows, in terms of the growth in data, the demand for data, the amount of data created, consumed, stored over the last 15 years has grown like 100x. We expect that same kind of geometric growth to continue, obviously. It's really the megatrend of megatrends. And we've been major investors in the ecosystem, whether it's in data centers, other areas of digital infrastructure, cloud service providers, and then sort of the power and electrification related trends.
We think we're really well positioned to continue pursuing that. In terms of the recent developments, and we have had a couple of weeks to digest it, our perspective is that the continued declining cost of compute is going to lead to more usage and faster adoption. That will drive and continue to drive overall demand for data centers. I think you've seen with the passage of a week or two, almost every hyperscaler now has commented and sort of reinforced that view and in some ways upped their CapEx planning even further in some cases. That's consistent also with all the private industry conversations we've had. I think that ecosystem for now and for this foreseeable future is full steam ahead. Now, will there be some shifting within data center footprints?
Will the training component, which actually is a relatively small portion of data center footprints today, will that be sort of more efficiently deployed? But will that then lead to even greater demand for inference, compute, compute related to inference? Will that lead to faster adoption to even greater demands from the enterprise portion of these data centers, continued robust growth from the cloud portion? So in aggregate, I think we remain very positive. And then I'd say in terms of our positioning in that, with all the scale and incumbency advantages that you referenced, those are really powerful positives. And so what we have are this portfolio of large, very long-term, 15 to 20-year leases at attractive unit economics with counterparties that are some of those important, valuable companies in the world, built not on spec, but based on that pre-leasing activity.
So that's sort of the starting point and the foundation. And then I think to the degree that there's more uncertainty longer term around sort of the slope of the curve, we think that, and does that drive speculative capital at the margin out of this? Again, I think that's a, that inures to the benefit of incumbents at real scale, I guess.
So, Michael, let's stick with AI technology. You have many roles at Blackstone, but one of them is you oversee technology. So, I wanted to see if you could talk about how the firm thinks about implementing new technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, maybe Web3, maybe you can talk about what you're working on.
Yeah. Well, it's all about data. And I think in an AI world in general, it's all a function of the value of your data. And so for us, our focus right now is about sort of synthesizing, integrating the sort of trove of data we have. And if you step back, we think that these trends will only reinforce the advantages for investors in private market and the ones with the largest scale relative to public market investors with all due respect. In public markets, you're obviously definitionally sort of confined to the four corners of publicly available data, which I think will be increasingly commoditized over time on the private market side. For us, as the largest player in the industry with troves of data across multiple asset classes and strategies with four decades or so of longitudinal data, we think that's a tremendous asset.
And it's really early days in marshaling that for the benefit of the business. On sort of AI specifically, I think about it at multiple levels of how we're trying to attack it strategically for our investment business and for value creation for our portfolio companies. That's sort of the first level. Again, it's about leveraging this data and mobilizing it to enhance our insights in investing, our data analysis, and doing due diligence on companies. And then portfolio value creation strategies, both trying to focus on businesses that are potentially most vulnerable to disruption and where businesses that can go most on offense. The second level is our own operations and processes internally. Obviously, the kind of true north there is trying to deliver more and more productivity. That'll be done through a combination of internally and externally developed solutions.
Our focus on the internal side has been around creating in a secure way a summarization and search tools, Blackstone customized tools that we can again use securely to enhance our own internal processes in the valuation area through a combination of our own internal stuff and also some partnerships with some emerging outside companies. We think that's an opportunity as well and just generally in private market sort of solutions and around operations, it's an industry that's sort of outgrown somewhat, I think, underdeveloped legacy systems around how these businesses run, so I actually think in a digital world and AI world, there's an opportunity to kind of leapfrog those legacy systems and really be a positive in terms of being an accelerant to supporting these businesses, and then third is investment strategy around all the themes related to AI, which we've hit on in part.
I wanted to ask a question on the firm's culture. It's something that's very hard to quantify, but I think it is maybe a little bit of a special sauce at Blackstone. You've had a strong leader in the institution for a very long time. I think Tony James joined around 2005.
2002.
2002. Jon Gray.
I was on my honeymoon. I wasn't on email for two weeks. I opened it up and I see I have a new boss. I said, "Do I need a new boss?" Turned out I did. Made me better. Yeah.
Also, Jon Gray kind of came up in the firm with you. Now you're seeing some of his style there. What is special about Blackstone's culture? I mean, what I can see is you attract a lot of great talent and you don't really lose people.
Yeah, I think, and I do evangelize about this and hopefully not repetitive, but I mean, I think there are a number of elements to it. I'd just sort of like recap a few of them. One is from the beginning, Steve and Pete Peterson took and continue to take a really long-term view to building the firm and to building something enduring and something that could be institutionalized. And with the goal and the ambition of not just building a great investment business, but one of the best businesses in the world. That's how high our leaders and founders aimed. This sounds generic, but I think we bring it to life, this focus on excellence in everything we do.
Everything we do with actually sort of a client and stakeholder focus, again, with a long-term view and applying that approach, that rigor and that relentlessness to big things and also little things, making holiday videos and even smaller things. Obviously, big things around the strategy of our business and investment returns. Third, I'd say sort of the 15 years ago, 20 years ago, same question when we were much smaller. We didn't seem small then. Was like, "What do we do?" I said, "Well, we try to run a relatively large firm like a small firm." And that continues to be the case.
So that takes, as you actually get bigger, more and more work, more and more processes and structures and so forth around communication, connectivity, how you communicate to nearly 5,000 employees and 28 offices globally and so forth, how you build a culture that perpetuates all that. That's a really important thing. Then to end, this is a talent business. Capital is a commodity. So what I'd say is that we really are in a stronger position today to attract and retain talent than we were when we were a smaller firm. I think we're at a point where as much as we've appeared to have scaled, I actually think the power of the brand, both with our clients and also with our prospective and actual employees in terms of trying to attract them, has scaled even faster than that.
And the key for us is continuing to sort of tie together the power of that brand and the culture of the firm. And done the right way, we're actually even better positioned today to perpetuate it and to attract great people than we were when we were a smaller firm.
Right. And with that, we are exactly out of time. So Michael, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, thank you very much.