Right. Welcome. Good morning. First, I wanna welcome, all of you to our institutional conference. Thank you for your participation and taking time out of your busy schedules to attend the conference. We're always excited to host, investors and corporates from around the country, Canada, and the UK as well.
Thanks for your attendance. Of course, it's always good to have a home crowd when I'm presenting about Raymond James. For those, Raymond James associates, thanks for carving out the time to attend this presentation as well. I wanna start off the presentation, well, with the forward-looking statements, of course, but also going to our values, where we always start.
The values of the organization that was started by Bob James in 1962, certainly reinforced by Tom James and then Paul Reilly through their tenures, and certainly the focus that I have as CEO and that the leadership team. We spend a good portion of all of our leadership team meetings talking about the values of the organization.
This is what really makes us different in a highly competitive industry, it's so important for us to reinforce these with tangible, measurable behaviors each and every day. It starts with being client first. Every firm says that they're client first. If you go on their website, every firm says, "Hey, we are client first." I always say the proof is in the pudding.
If you look at the financial crisis, or if you look at the mini banking crisis in 2023, what put those firms under? It was nothing to do with clients. They were bets that the firm were taking on their own behalf. You know, in 2009, it was using wholesale funding to buy what they thought were double and triple A securities that were securitized, that ended up, you know, essentially becoming illiquid, and the wholesale funding ran dry.
2023, it was duration bets that they were taking on the balance sheet that a lot of these firms that went under, the leadership team said they had no idea they were taking. The CEO and CFO were doing it off, on the side, had nothing to do with clients. We didn't do either one of those things.
The reason wasn't 'cause we knew that rates were gonna go up to 550 basis points, you know, in a very short period of time. We were getting a lot of pressure from analysts and investors for years to make those type of bets, and the reason we didn't do it wasn't 'cause we were brilliant. It's because we said, "Our values start with being client first.
What do buying long-dated securities have to do with clients?" Absolutely nothing. We don't try to time the markets. We don't try to make bets for the firm's own behalf. We're in the business of serving clients and making decisions for the long term. We don't care what happens over the next quarter or two. We're making decisions for the next five to 10 years and beyond.
That's why when we announce acquisitions, we're not big on 12 month -18 month synergy or accretion targets, 'cause that gets you so short-sighted. You lose focus on what's most important, which is preserving the culture of the organization that's joining the Raymond James family and looking at the 5 year -10 year strategic benefits.
We're not worried about what happens over the next quarter or two. Integrity, particularly in the financial services business, is so important. You know, a lot of people say integrity is what you do when no one's looking. I think that's a decent test, really, in financial services and the public company perspective, integrity is what you do when everyone is encouraging you to do something that's inconsistent with your values and rooting you on. Right now, in this marketplace, you're getting rooted on if you're taking a lot of risk.
Most of the firms with the highest leverage are doing, are getting applauded because we're 16 years into a bull market. We have to stay consistent with our values, even though we would get applauded for taking on more risk in a 16-year bull market, at least up until recently, it's not consistent with the values of the organization, and that's what we mean by integrity.
Independence is critical. We want all of our advisors, bankers, associates to all feel like they really have a sense of ownership with the businesses that they run, with the functions that they support. All of our businesses work together. Private Client Group is our biggest business, but accounts for about 70% of the revenues.
The Private Client Group at Raymond James would not be what it is today without our capital markets business, without our asset manager, without the bank. All of these businesses support one another to provide a full service capability to our clients in the wealth management business and also our institutional clients.
Sometimes, again, 16 years into a bull market, we get questions, "Why don't you focus on being more of a pure play?" You know, interestingly, pure plays have higher multiples in a bull market, right? Because then their multiples typically have a much higher range or standard deviation, because when things go bad, their multiples go down even more. For us, having a diversified and complementary business where the multiple and the valuations are much more consistent over time, and our earnings profile is much more consistent over time.
Just last year, we recorded our 5th consecutive year of revenues and earnings in very different rate cycles and very different capital market cycles and very different market environments over those five-year period. We couldn't find one other financial services firm that have five consecutive years of records in that, in those different environments, starting with COVID. The reason for that is 'cause of our diverse and complementary businesses really focused on serving clients with holistic financial advice. You see it in our long-term performance as well, 152 consecutive quarters of profitability.
In fact, the only quarter that we weren't profitable since going public in 1983 was Black Monday in 1987, and the only reason we lost money that quarter was 'cause that day, when everyone else closed their trading desk, Tom James said, "This is when clients need us the most," client-focused, and so we kept the trading desk open that day, and because of the volatility of the prices that day, we lost money. Beyond that, we've been profitable every single quarter since going public.
We didn't need TARP money during the government shutdown, nor did we take TARP money during the recession. We've always strived to keep enough capital liquidity on our balance sheet to stand on our own two feet. As we look forward, we've just unveiled a new value proposition in our annual report.
It's called The Power of Personal. This applies to all of our businesses, the wealth management business, the capital markets business, the bank and the asset manager. We as a leadership team have a lot of conviction that the one thing people need more now than ever before in this world of AI and technology. We spend over $1 billion a year in technology. I'll talk about that more later. In the world of social media, I could tell you, I call it anti-social media 'cause my kids use social media and it's not helping them become any more social, I assure you, than I was without social media. What people need more than ever is a deeply personal relationship.
Counterintuitively, even though people need a deeply personal relationship now more than ever, and value a deeply personal relationship now more than ever, it's harder to find a firm in our industry focused on providing deeply personal relationships than it was when Bob James founded the firm in 1962. Fewer firms are focused on investing in personal relationships. It takes a long time.
How can a private equity firm focus on developing a personal relationship model when their exit is three years to five years? Deeply personal relationships, by definition, take longer than that to create, right? When the world that's focused on quick returns, quick IRRs, quick ROIs, we're focused on the long term, the de-developing those deeply personal relationships, which is becoming increasingly differentiated in our industry.
Again, that's true with our investment banking clients, our sales and trading clients, and also our wealth management clients. We really wanna be differentiated in the industry by doubling and tripling down on what we've always done, which is developing deeply personal relationships with our clients. Our value, our vision is very straightforward, is we wanna be the absolute best firm for financial professionals and their clients.
That their clients is very important. Not our clients as a firm, but really, again, going back to the value of independence, we want every financial professional to feel like they own their clients. Actually, in our wealth business, we put in writing in the Financial Advisor Bill of Rights, "You own your book of business.
If you leave on good standing, we'll help you move to your new firm." No other firm says that across all of their affiliation options. Even on the independent side of the business, those firms are making it harder for their advisors to have mobility. Again, the focus on independence is so critical, their clients and us treating financial professionals, whether it's our financial advisors, our bankers, our traders, our salespeople, like our clients.
They, even though they have that portability, they know they're treated like free agents, they wanna stay at Raymond James 'cause we have a unique value, unique culture, and a robust platform that we're investing in. Why would they wanna go anywhere else?
You look at our strategy over the next 5 years, which we presented to our board at our offsite a couple years ago, a couple weeks ago, at our annual offsite, it really remains consistent. It's to continue gaining market share in each one of our businesses. We're uniquely positioned in each one of our businesses where we have critical mass to be competitive.
Again, a billion-dollar technology investments. Some firms have a fraction of that technology investment that we're competing against, and there's just no way for them to keep up with the demands of AI and technology in our industry. Those become consolidation targets over time. Coupled with that critical mass, we're uniquely positioned, and we also have headroom to continue growing doing what we're doing. We don't have to reinvent who we are to find growth opportunities.
In each one of our businesses, we have significant room to expand just by taking market share, both throughout the U.S., the U.K., Canada, just continuing to do what we're doing and not trying to reinvent who we are or do something totally new. We're also focused on increasing collaboration. I talked about the diverse and complementary businesses, it's not about cross-selling.
I don't like that term cross-selling. It's about bringing all of the products and services that we can to clients to broaden and deepen the relationship and to enhance the relationship to serve clients and to meet them where they are. Of course, that requires investing in tools and resources across the organization, products, alternative investments, private wealth program in the wealth management space.
We just announced additional capabilities over the weekend that we closed with an acquisition of a firm called GreensLedge, which enhances our securitization capability and our advisory capability there. Those are all investments that we're making to, again, broaden and deepen the platform for clients. Enhancing the infrastructure, you know, under the hood, cybersecurity matters more than ever. It's more complicated than ever.
We spend over $80 million a year just in cybersecurity technology. $80 million. That's more than a lot of our competitors' entire technology budget. The infrastructure resiliency is so critical as well, and more complicated than ever because so many, we're dependent on so many different vendors in the value chain and technology with cloud-based services and solutions and other vendors.
The whole ecosystem has gotten more complicated in terms of making sure that the entire system's resilient. You've seen it with cell phone providers and other cybersecurity providers externally, cloud providers. When one goes out, it has a knock-on effect across a variety of industries. All this requires, most importantly, we're in a people business. We have to hire, develop, and retain the very best people. The focus on people is first and foremost in everything that we do and talk about at Raymond James, and then of course the investment in technology.
We announced the rollout, it's still in pilot of our AI solution called Ray. What Ray is a large language model, generative AI, where we've taken transcripts from service calls and created essentially an agent where people can self-serve, advisors and their teams can self-serve, ask client-related questions that actually provide more consistent, higher quality results and much quicker in terms of being able to give you client-related questions, at the tip of your finger, at your fingertips.
This is early stages. We're eventually we're gonna expand this to all of our businesses to ask questions about not just the client-related business, but also ask associate-related questions. These are the type of investments we're making. We're doing both internally developed AI solutions, but also looking to partner with vendors that provide specialty AI solutions.
I know there's, couple weeks ago, a lot of concern around these AI solutions coming out in the industry and what does that mean for Raymond James and wealth managers. I would tell you that the wealth management industry needs these AI-driven solutions to help advisors better serve their clients, to help advisors get both more scale in their business to serve more clients and more assets, at the same time provide more bespoke and customized advice and more holistic advice than they have ever provided before. These AI solutions actually help the wealth management business evolve in providing more sophisticated, holistic advice, while at the same time doing it for a larger number of clients. That is required in the wealth management industry.
McKinsey came out with a report a year ago that said, without these technology solutions, there's gonna be a massive shortage of financial advisors in the industry if you look at the demographics of existing advisors versus new advisors getting into the business, coupled with rising demand for human financial advice.
To solve that shortage, we need the AI solutions, which is why we're investing over $1 billion in technology and looking at all of these solutions going forward. We're really excited about the opportunities that AI will have for the industry, not just in wealth management, but across all of our businesses going forward. Now I'll hand it over to our CFO, Butch Oorlog, who will kind of give you a financial review, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Butch?
Thanks. Thanks, Paul. Anchored by those values that Paul just described, pleased to be able to provide the update that we had our in our most recent fiscal year, we were able to achieve our fifth consecutive year of record levels of net revenues and record levels of pre-tax profit, both on a GAAP and a non-GAAP basis. That consistent performance is really anchored in those values that we've talked about. I'm gonna take a moment and talk about three, highlight three aspects of our characteristics, anchoring that performance. The first is our track record of increasing operating leverage.
We've been able to increase operating leverage consistently and we're gonna talk about how we're focused and how we think about doing that. We're gonna talk about our strong balance sheet, the characteristics of our strong balance sheet.
We're gonna talk about our consistent capital priorities that are focused on growth. Specifically, the way we think about generating operating leverage, we strive to grow revenues at a higher rate than we increase expenses. You know, simply put, and we do that across our diverse and complementary businesses. As you can see on this slide, we have been able to do that over the last five years with a compound annual growth rate of 12% growth in revenues.
In terms of our expenses, you know, our expenses are variable. A very significant portion of our expenses are variable and therefore flex with the revenues. Over that provides us a lot of flexibility to be able to adjust in different market environments. As you see on this slide, we've been able to achieve a 21% increase in pre-tax income over that same five-year period that we had the 12% increase in growth.
A solid performance in our ability to generate positive operating leverage. As we look forward, we mentioned the $1 billion of technology investment that we're gonna spend, that we budgeted, have spent, and continue to spend. We believe that we're gonna continue to gain efficiencies through those investments that enable both our top-line growth as well as give us efficiencies and economies of scale.
Scale does matter in this business, and we believe that we have further opportunities to continue to leverage our scale as we continue to grow. In terms of financial strength, for our most recent December 31st, 2025 reporting period, our total capital ratio is in excess of 24%. That is more than two times the regulatory minimum level to be considered well-capitalized. In terms of dollar value, that represents $2.4 billion of excess Tier 1 capital, which we have available to us to deploy in our growth in our business.
It takes both capital and liquidity to put that into action. In terms of liquidity, we have $2.1 billion of excess liquidity at December 31st. That's excess over our $1.2 billion target level of liquidity. We have capital and liquidity on hand and ready to invest in terms of as opportunities and invest in our growth strategies going forward. We also have a relatively low level of debt on our balance sheet, coupled with investment-grade credit ratings from each of the three credit rating agencies. We're well-positioned to access the debt markets to the extent that becomes opportunistic to fuel our growth.
In terms of our capital deployment priorities, our first strategic priority in deploying capital is in terms of fueling our organic growth. Organic growth for us in the terms of our PCG business can take the form of TA loans to financial advisors to grow our advisor practice.
In our capital markets business, it can take the form of bringing on additional teams and talent to expand our service capabilities to our institutional clients, as well as in our banks, it can take the form of funding loan growth as opportunities arise, which in the most recent fiscal year, our loan balance has increased 12% as evidence of our deployment of our balance sheet organically to support our bank loan growth. Our second pillar of capital priorities is our acquisitions. In terms of acquisitions, our criteria is long-standing. The first criteria is it has to be a cultural fit.
Secondly, a target has to improve, has to be improve, both us and that target. The way we think about it is one plus one needs to equal more than two, and the way that that happens is that target has to make us better, and we have to make them better. Our third element in our strategic acquisition deployment is in terms of value. If and only if, and when and only when, a target checks those first two boxes, then we're gonna evaluate the economics and make sure that we can make that investment consistent with the long-term goals in returns for our shareholders.
Our next level of capital deployment priority is in terms of common stock dividends. We have a target dividend payout ratio of 20%-30%. We operate within that target, and as an example, in the most recent quarter, we increased our common stock dividend 8%, which was consistent with our growth and earnings. Finally, the last pillar is share repurchases. We're committed to repurchase shares to offset compensation-related dilution, and then to be opportunistic with share repurchases in order to keep Tier 1 capital from growing in excess of those levels that I cited earlier.
On this slide, you just see our demonstration of how we have performed by putting the acquisition strategy to work over the past since 1999. Couple takeaways on this slide, including the fact that we've been able to leverage the people from many of the acquisitions that are reflected on this slide at, in terms of talent development, and it evidences that cultural fit that we hold ourselves accountable to, that results in us being able to bring those leaders on and have those leaders make us better and remain with us going forward.
This slide depicts the last pillar of the capital deployment, and you can see that over the past 5 years, we've deployed nearly $4.7 billion in aggregate in returns of capital to our shareholders between dividends and share repurchases. Based on our pillars of values, we've been able to achieve those results over the long run. With that, we'll open it up for questions.
Thanks, Butch. Any questions from the group? One in the back there. I'm not sure if we have a microphone, or I'll just repeat it for you.
Do you have any, do you have anything to add to those sort of bigger concerns that people might have over private credit, and how might any fallout in private credit world impact Raymond James?
Yeah. The question around private credit, and some of the rumors. I would say, so far, the issues that we've seen in private credit were actually much less credit-related and much more isolated to fraud events in particular companies or that sort of thing. I know there's some concerns in certain industries that private credit lends to, and I would say, you know, thus far, those concerns are haven't materialized into real credit issues as far as we could see them, you know, in the private credit space. At Raymond James, we've always been very conservative around offering those type of products. We do offer them on a limited basis to firms that we do operational and financial due diligence on.
We've always been more cautious around offering whether it's private credit or, more broadly speaking, alternatives. Because especially where we are in the cycle, you know, the world is, does go up and down. The economy and the markets go up and down, we wanna make sure that we're balanced in offering the various type of products that Private Client Group advisors and clients want access to.
We've always been conservative about that. We're monitoring private credit very carefully. I think the biggest risk for private credit near term is much less of a credit risk and much more of a funding dynamic in terms of redemptions or ability to raise more funding. Again, we haven't seen any statistics on that yet.
Certainly if the headlines keep coming out around potential cracks and concerns around private credit, you know, that could in itself create concerns and risk and funding issues for the space. That's something that we'll monitor very closely going forward. Any other questions? Distinguish between collaboration and cross-sell. The question was distinguish between collaboration and cross-selling.
One very explicit difference is cross-selling usually comes with requirements where we tell advisors or branch managers or regional managers or leadership in the businesses that in order to get a certain level of compensation, you have to sell a certain number of products or refer a certain number of products. We've seen that certainly cause a lot of explicit, tangible issues in the industry and a lot of intangible issues in the industry. We have zero cross-selling requirements.
There's not one financial advisor that will tell you that they're, out of our 9,000 or so advisors, that will tell you that they have a cross-selling requirement to hit a deferred comp program goal. We're very unique. That sounds like common sense. That's actually pretty unique in the wealth management space. Same with regional management, same with the leadership team.
While I encourage Jim Bunn sitting there, he's the president of our capital markets group, while he's very motivated and encouraged about using all the resources in the firm to provide the very best service and product and advice to the institutional clients, his compensation is not impacted at all by a certain number of products being sold from the other divisions. That's not a part of the formula.
In fact, we make it almost more difficult for our asset management products, as an example, to be sold internally to our own wealth management clients, because we take that separation very seriously. We wanna make sure that we're focused on quality versus cross-selling.
When I say all these things, we take it for granted at Raymond James, and it sounds like common sense, but it's very unique in the industry for all of those facts that I just described to be true. That's really the difference between cross-selling and collaboration. Collaboration is about, hey, what can we do to broaden and deepen the relationship with clients that adds value to clients, and not what's the quota that we need to hit to get to our financial goals for a firm? It's a very different construct and mindset.
Maybe time for one more, if there's another question out there. All right. Well, if not, again, I wanna end where I started, which is by thanking all of you for your participation and time at this conference. Always great to see everybody. Enjoy the rest of the week.