Good morning. We appreciate all the companies and investors in the audience attending the conference. Looks like we've got on the way to another record-breaking crowd, so we appreciate your attendance and a lot of Raymond James people in the room too, so good to see you. So first, our forward-looking statement. Anyway, we'll get on to the overview. You know, for 63 years now, Raymond James has really been founded on a principle that I think it's really overlooked. We recently Tom James just stepped down off the board after 42 years as a board member.
I hate short timers that don't, you know, do their work, but, and he stepped down just because he felt it was time just to make sure the board stays refreshed and just as he made the decision 15 years ago when he had a lot of energy to run the company, he wanted to make sure succession was in place. So we may miss him in the board meetings, but he's still in the office, so, he said he's gonna do a little more time traveling, but given that we have three days a week in the office, he'll probably be in more than most employees. But he's really created the principles that we still work on today, that we put clients first and we treat our professionals, our advisors, as clients. You know, our job is to enable them to help you, our clients, and to be effective.
So we really focus on helping them to help you, to give them the tools, you know, the input, and, and frankly, just the access to us to be able to come to issues to help solve your problems. And this is really hard for most people to understand, is that Raymond James, growing up as a family firm, just had this really rich culture of people knowing each other. Everyone's on a first-name basis. It's really a friendly place. And, you know, it's nice that it's a nice place, but it's nice in that people really want to help each other. They really want to help clients and their advisors and the professionals be able to give good service. And as we grew, we wanted to make sure we didn't lose that. And we put up the premier alternative to Wall Street. It's a dated slide.
We don't use it as that anymore. But the best of both worlds, that small, family-feeling place where everyone's on a first-name basis that helps each other, that they can have access. You get through our security. You can walk up to my office, Jim Bunn's office, Paul Shoukry's, no one to stop you, Tom James's office. To have that open access, you don't feel at big firms. When you have issues, to be able to reach out, yet have the sophistication to be able to help people, whether it's through our bank, our trust department, our award-winning systems in the industry, is to have all that support you would expect at a large institution, but that feel for a small institution. And although it's nice to have a nice place to work, you also want it to be a productive place. But we don't think they're mutually exclusive.
In fact, with our lowest turnover in the industry, take advisors, less than 1% regretted attrition. Our staff, remember when COVID went up and we were saying, "Gosh, our turnover went up to 12%," most people say, "That's normal. That was doubling for us." That sense of family and, and cohesiveness really helps us perform in the marketplace. For those that don't know us, we're now up to $1.37 trillion in assets, 8,700 advisors, and we talk about 144 consecutive quarters of profitability. Only one quarter since being publicly weren't profitable. That wasn't during 2009. We made money in every quarter. Our worst years, 8.7% ROE. It was on the Black Monday quarter when Tom refused to close the retail trading desk, and we had a whopping $100,000 loss that quarter.
Now, most people would have made an accounting change to be profitable, but kind of at Raymond James, we're very conservative. But it shows the strength of the company. As the rating agencies, there are a lot of even community banks that don't have three A-level ratings as we do. And it's just a testament to the financial strength that we've had. We're now Fortune 400, S&P 500, but the firms become pretty sizable over this period of time. And one of the differences in the businesses is really the synergy. A lot of people don't quite understand the bank model. They'll say that, you know, a Private Client Group is two-thirds of the business. Why aren't you just a pure-play Private Client Group?
Because all of our businesses really support each other, whether it's in the capital markets business, the information that the capital markets give us in terms of their analysts, even help our banks choose which industry and players they think are good are good, loans and, you know, in what sectors. The private client group, the amount of client assets we've monetized through the M&A through our bankers, the bank segment, we get the sweeps from our client accounts, and we're able to give SBL loans and mortgages. This synergistic business through all of our segments is a reality. It's not just a chart. And it really shows up here. It shows up through all sorts of cycles. You can see the businesses where profits are up and the profits are down.
Yet, through the last three years, Raymond James has had record revenues and record profits for three consecutive years in a zero-interest rate environment and a rapidly rising interest rate environment, an environment now that I don't know what you call it because we don't know where rates are going or the market seems to have been very robust. But for the great years that the equity capital markets and fixed income business had just previously, the last year was a year they hope, we all hope you could forget, when the capital markets pretty well shut down. So good news is we have great bankers here for you, so and they're ready. They're here, and they will work for M&A transactions or any other business you may bring to them. And it's a great team.
And through the downsizing, as most firms have, we've kept our team in place because we think we have great professionals, and when the market returns, believe they will execute. The philosophy of the business has always been reasonable growth every year and that we don't want to grow too fast because we believe you lose the culture and the systems and the processes. But you have to grow. If you grow profitably, you can invest. You can invest in people, technology, tools, products. And if you do that well, you expand the business, and that fuels growth. If you're not growing, the opposite happens. And our trajectory has been through just reasonable growth, 10 years, 10%, you know, double-digit growth over a long period of time. And if you go out, you know, previously, you'll see that consistent growth, through Raymond James.
A lot of that's organic, and some of it's inorganic. We also believe we've been right at the top of our industry in providing, you know, returns. Almost 18% ROE last year, 22% ROTCE. And that's on hefty capital. We have, we're much more conservative on the balance sheet, which Paul will cover. And with that, we've consistent earnings in almost every single cycle. Our growth is really driven by organic growth. We're able to grow with just on recruiting and retaining people. I talked about our low attrition. We expand our investments in technology. Our budget in the last 10 years has gone from $100 million to $800 million. A lot of industry awards for the technology run out. And also strategic focus on M&A where it helps our business.
So you can see back through time, we do acquisitions that we think really help us in the particular segments of the business. So Roney & Associates was an acquisition back in 1999 in Michigan that really put us in the Midwest. A lot of advisors are still here from here. Kellogg was our entry into the U.K. Morgan Keegan really gave us a big mark in the fixed income business and expanded us in the Southeast and the advisors. I'll miss some of the big ones on here. RE/MAX put us in French Canada. Mummert put us in Europe in the M&A. Alex Brown really helped us grow and focus on the ultra-high-net-worth business, which has been a big area of our recruiting in the last few years. And then Financo, Cebile, and other acquisitions really grew our M&A capability.
And lastly, Charles Stanley gave us a diversified employee and independent basis in the U.K. in putting us to the top 10. SumRidge, a technology-oriented, corporate bond trading organization that we really bought for their technology and great people, and then TriState Capital Bank, which allowed us to increase our SBL capacity and deploy some capital. So they've all been strategic, very focused in all parts of our business. And then people ask if we look ahead, what can we expect? And it's really gonna be more of the same. People say, "Well, you can't keep recruiting. You know, there aren't enough advisors in the industry." I heard that 10 years ago. I remember I asked Tom James. I said, "Tom, people are saying it's gonna slow down." He goes, "Don't worry.
If it slows down, other organizations will do something stupid, and you'll have a lot of places to recruit from." It was being ironic, but we've been very consistent on who we are and what we do. Advisors feel respected and trusted here. That growth of both organic recruiting, which has helped us significantly grow by attracting new people while retaining our people, supplemented by the inorganic parts of the business, has been really key to our stable, long-term growth and stable and right at the top of the industry ROE. So with that, I'm gonna turn this over to Paul Shoukry to go over some financials, and we'll open it up for questions.
Thanks, Paul. It's great to see everyone here in sunny Florida. Thanks for coming to our conference. I'll provide a brief overview of our financials, and our financial priorities, and then open it up for any questions that you may have. So when you think about our capital and financial priorities, I think stepping back, the first thing to note is that our top priority is to really be a source of strength and stability for our financial advisors, bankers, associates, and clients, and to be a source of strength and stability in any market environment. Sometimes that means we look too conservative when the market environment is really strong, especially in a 10- or 12-year bull market.
But as we were reminded last year in March, I think at this session, we were criticized for maybe not leveraging up our balance sheet more and taking on more duration. And we said the reason we don't do that is because we have a healthy respect for the unknown. And not that we knew rates would surge, you know, within the next 4-6 weeks, and we would have a banking crisis. But those are the type of environments that we try to prepare ourselves for, again, to be a source of strength and stability for all of our stakeholders. We have, as what I'll cover today is first, a consistent set of capital priorities.
I'll go over what we call the capital prioritization framework, talk about the track record of sort of consistent financial performance and operating leverage that we've had as an organization over time, and then kind of cover our balance sheet and the strong balance sheet position that we have. So the capital prioritization framework, as Paul pointed out, first and foremost, we believe that we can generate the best risk-adjusted returns for shareholders through organic growth. And that really starts in all of our businesses with retaining the people that we have. So we are laser-focused on retention and making sure that the bankers, the advisors, and all the associates that we have at the firm are pleased and feel like they can achieve their objectives at Raymond James. And on that strong base of retention, we can grow through recruiting.
That's really the primary organic growth lever in all of our businesses. You know, Jim Bunn has been very focused on, you know, upgrading all of the professionals across GEIB since taking over. That's really how we continue to grow the businesses through retention and recruiting. I'll talk about the balance sheet growth, which is a part of the organic growth story as well. We have plenty of capital and funding, and we have Raymond James Bank now and also TriState Capital Bank. The challenge has been recently just tepid loan demand in the categories that we focus on. So I'll get into the capital in a second. We have about $18 billion of cash with third-party banks that we could redeploy, a good portion of that to our own banks.
We're one of the few, going back to what I said earlier, being a source of strength and stability. We're one of the few banks that has that type of cushion, in our business. Most of the brokerages that own banks have already used all the funding that they have to fund their own bank over the past few years. We always maintained a healthy and conservative cushion, to give us that funding flexibility. So with the $18 billion of funding, with third-party banks, and the strong capital position, we're in a good position to grow the bank when loan demand returns. With the rising rate environment, lack of M&A activity, it's not a surprise, as you see across the banking industry, loan growth has been really tepid. The second growth objective is acquisitions.
As Paul said, it has to be a good cultural, strategic fit and then at a price that makes sense for shareholders. Paul did a good job going through all the acquisitions that we've done, over the past several years. Suraj Tripathy is with us today. We hired him as our new head of corporate development about eight months ago, and he's doing a good job helping us build connectivity with all of the influencers, the strategic, influencers, as well as the financial sponsors in the space. We've had a lot of discussions, and, you know, we, we think over time, there'll be a, another lever that we'll continue to deploy capital into, to generate good growth for our shareholders.
Very consistent common stock dividend policy, 20%-30% of earnings, and, and something that we hope not to have to cut in a downturn, going back to my comments earlier. And then finally, is buybacks. And, and that's intentionally last on the list in terms of priorities. But with that being said, if we can't use the capital in a reasonable amount of time with the other three priorities, buybacks is something that we certainly, consider and have done, more recently, to at least offset the issuance associated with, TriState Capital acquisition. And we'll continue to look at that lever, if we can't use the capital for the other three, priorities. This is just a history of the buybacks, and dividends. As you can see, last year, we did a lot of buybacks to start to offset that TriState, issuance that I described earlier.
We committed to do $250 million of buyback this, this quarter, and we're on track to achieve that objective. We'll keep the analyst community in the street updated as we progress with these various capital priorities and what the buyback plan will be. Track record of generating operating leverage over time, that's important to us. As you saw in Paul's slides, revenue growth of 10% over the last 10 years and earnings growth that's higher than that. That's important to us. We always strive to grow earnings more rapidly than revenues over a long period of time. That's the benefit of scale, in our business and also being mindful of the investments we make and the expenses that we deploy in our business.
So we're very focused on, again, investing heavily in growth and investing heavily in providing service, and good quality products and solutions to our clients. But we're also focused on the controllable expenses, where we can be. Strong balance sheet, over two times the regulatory requirement to be well capitalized. Not on this chart is our Tier One Leverage Ratio. We finished at 12.1% Tier One Leverage Ratio at the end of last quarter. The regulatory requirement is 5%, to be well capitalized. And our target on a run rate basis is 10%, so twice the requirement. Again, we have a very conservative run rate target. But at 12.1%, we have excess, and that's why we are looking at deploying the capital with those, initiatives we talked about earlier. $2.1 billion of corporate cash. Our target's $1.2 billion. So again, plenty of corporate cash.
This is just the cash at the parent, really, included in this number. I talked about the funding position. We have a diversified set of funding sources. Now, this time last year, we didn't have an Enhanced Savings Program. Now we have $15 billion of balances. We rolled that out in March, and we're already close to $15 billion of balances in that program. So diversifying our funding and providing solutions to our advisors and their clients that help strengthen that relationship and attract more assets from the outside. And then Paul talked about the credit ratings. You can see our relative capital position, compared to the peers. We're on the very conservative end of the spectrum. And importantly, there's a lot of chatter in the last year about, you know, held-to-maturity securities and unrealized losses and those type of things. We don't use the held-to-maturity classification in our business.
We never really have. And again, that's just going back to the conservative principles where we thought it always made sense to have the true economic impact of, you know, rate changes reflected in our balance sheet. And so, that's not the case for many of our peers, as you all know. With that, I'll open it up to questions. Thanks again for attending our conference. Any questions? You just say the questions. We'll make sure to repeat it for the webcast, so.
Back from a few years ago, I think most people who were not going commissioned were going down to zero or stock basis. As you look forward, what do you see the future of fees and your liabilities?
Yeah. It's been an interesting trend for the advisors that with all the compression we get on costs and the back office and fees we get from mutual funds, and those have all had compression. But really, our advisor average fee hasn't had any compression, almost zero. And that just shows the clients are still willing to pay for the services that their advisors give them. And it's held up very, very strongly. So, the challenge on this, secondary fees that we get, we have to be more efficient in the back office. So, you know, we have to be able to reduce our costs, which scale helps. And certainly, technology has played a major role in, everyone talks about AI. It's so overused, I mean.
But starting years ago with machine learning and AI, I mean, the millions of e-mails and advisory alerts and false positives that get sorted from our systems, you know, have helped advisors get more time, have allowed us to keep, you know, compliance and regulatory growth in check and getting some leverage in systems. So every piece of evidence we have is we look at intergenerational changes, as we tracked over the last decade. They said these next generations wouldn't use advice. But certainly, once they hit an age where they have kids, funding education, retirement, the percentage that are still using advice or still seeking or wanting advice has been, you know, like the last generation. So we see the advice model lasting. So whatever fees that come and go in the industry, and some people get payment for order flow, we don't use it, right?
Trading fees went away. And we have to find other ways of getting services or charging fairly where clients get a good deal, the advisors get treated well, and the firm makes money. And that's a fluid thing. But the advisory revenue has held up very, very solidly. So that's been the bright light on if you look at fee compression, it hasn't happened there. Yes? Yeah. So, you know, I guess it goes back to Jesse James, you know, why do you rob banks? That's because where the money is. And cybercriminals have figured out the same thing. So the one area that I've never even questioned the investment request is in cyber. So first, we have a very robust cyber center. We'd love people to visit the office to see it because you'll be amazed at the technology. We can see every incoming threat in real time.
We've gone to 24/7 coverage around the world, moving from Vancouver to St. Pete to London to make sure we have 24/7 coverage over the network. Not only the great people we've hired, but also the amount of technology that goes around the system to stop people from getting in and if anyone ever gets in, not be able to get information out. We use outside parties that are constantly trying to break into our system. If you look at, I believe, from what I've been told, both from outside sources, they say we're a top decile firm. So that should mean you shouldn't worry about it. Of course, you worry about it with nation-states, the amount of cyber pressure. But you can't guarantee anything.
But from our outside reviews, our regulatory reviews, and everything else, I'm very confident that we're doing everything we can, and we keep tightening up our cyber. New threats come in, including AI being used, finding people trying to break in because they have leaked social media, get credentials, and try to use it to get access. So we've gone to Face IDs where you have to Zoom and show your ID on top of your words and your passwords, not just two-factor authentication. You're just constantly trying to stay ahead of the bad actors who are sophisticated and very good. So far, we've been okay. We've had our attacks that, you know, we've thwarted just like everybody else has in the industry. And so you feel good, but you never can be at rest. You always say, "What can we do better?