Good afternoon to those of you in the room, those of you that are joining us on the webcast. My name's Steven Chubak. I'm the diversified banks and brokers analyst here at Wolfe Research. Really pleased to introduce our next speaker, Paul Shoukry, CEO of Raymond James. Raymond James wealth platform has seen outsized growth over the last few years, really bolstered by a unique omnichannel offering. It's truly differentiated in that regard in the marketplace. Paul, I know we're going to cover a lot of ground here today around organic growth. We'll dig into capital markets, expenses, capital allocation, and much more. But Paul, really appreciate you taking the time today.
Great to be here, and happy Veterans Day to everybody. It's a beautiful day here in New York, but want to make sure that we acknowledge the veterans and their families, their spouses, and their kids that have made the, in some cases, ultimate sacrifice to make sure we're the best country in the world. Happy Veterans Day to all.
I would certainly echo that. Well said. Maybe just to start, Paul, you're now approaching two-year anniversary as CEO. The operating environment immediately today is probably as dynamic as it's ever been. Was hoping you could speak to where you're seeing the most compelling opportunities for growth, and how does that inform where you're allocating capital as well as investment dollars?
Well, fortunately, the best opportunity we see for growth is in our biggest business, which is our wealth management business. Represents around 70% of our revenues. We have around 9,000 financial advisors overseeing about $2 trillion of client assets across the United States, also in Canada and the U.K. And in terms of the pipeline and the recruiting momentum, it's been at record levels. It's still the interest level at Raymond James is substantial, and that's really driven by our unique combination of culture and capabilities, where we say advisors do not have to compromise on either culture or capabilities at Raymond James. The culture is we treat advisors like clients. We put in writing that they own their book of business, and if they leave on good standing, we'll help them move to their next firm across all of our affiliation options.
Almost unheard of outside of the independent channel across the industry, and really treating them like clients. I say the proof though is in the pudding. We have 97% advisor satisfaction in our latest surveys that just came out two weeks ago, which is a record all-time high. The morale of our existing advisors, even as we grow, is as high as it's ever been. The interest and then the capabilities where we invest over $1.1 billion a year, $1.1 billion a year on technology. The fastest growing component of that, from a smaller base, is AI, which we'll talk about, I'm sure. That combination, and then we have a full-service bank, trust company, product services, insurance operation, equity research, public finance capabilities, origination capabilities.
That full-service offering where advisors can come from the biggest firms in the world and say, we're not compromising on capabilities, and we're getting a huge step-up in culture that's leading to that 97% advisor satisfaction. Just to put that into context, we had a manager that joined us from one of the larger firms a few years ago. They said they would pop the champagne at 70% advisor satisfaction. We're at 97%, and we're not even popping champagne at 97%. We're still focused on the 3% and seeing what could we do to make sure that they're more satisfied. It's a really unique value proposition. That same approach works in the investment banking business as well. We've had a lot of MDs in investment banking this year, strengthening the capabilities there.
That's another area we're really excited about to really strengthen the capital markets capability, to have a full-service integrated offering within the capital markets business as well. We have a lot of headroom in our business and the momentum. I've been with the firm for 16 years. The interest we're getting from financial professionals has never been higher than since I started with the firm 16 years ago.
That's great. I mean, and we're seeing the numbers certainly. The M&A momentum has continued to be quite strong. At the same time, Paul, we are seeing some irrational behavior in terms of like the upfront packages that people are dangling in front of certain advisors, some questions around the returns or the payback calculus, if you will, on some of the recruiting. Maybe speak to your conviction levels in terms of your ability to sustain mid-single digit or better organic growth without having to compromise by overreaching in terms of payouts.
Yeah, I would say we're confident in our net new asset growth trajectory that we've been on. There maybe has been irrational behavior in the industry, but you could have said that one year ago, three years ago, five years ago, or 10 years ago. There's always been irrational deals out there in the industry. Our focus is on Raymond James staying rational and making sure that the deals that we offer generate good returns for our shareholders over the long term. We've done that. We've been very consistent with the type of deals that we offer. Again, we don't recruit advisors based on having the biggest upfront check. It has to be competitive, but we're recruiting advisors on the value proposition that I just described on capabilities and culture.
That's how we're able to generate best-in-class recruiting results and the strong growth that we've had while also remaining disciplined and generating attractive returns for shareholders with the deals that we have.
Paul, we track advisor movement quite closely. One of the things that we've seen is that there was a large M&A deal, LPL Commonwealth, where you guys emerged as a destination of choice for a lot of those advisors. Was hoping you can give some perspective as to absent any additional large M&A events, how much that contributed to the organic growth strength and your conviction levels that you can still sustain that mid-single digits plus, even absent some of the disruptions that we've seen in the industry, which frankly, your history has shown that you're typically the destination of choice in those instances.
Yeah, I think the focus on any one particular transaction is a little bit overblown, and history proves that out. Our success in recruiting isn't a 12-month or 18-month phenomenon. It's a 10- 15 year trend, and beyond that, really. We've been long-term successful recruiters, and if you look at our pipelines over the last year and our traction that we're having right now, it's across all of our affiliation options, and the interest level is coming from a wide variety of firms. This notion that there's concentration risk or we need some sort of catalyst to drive our recruiting results simply isn't true and hasn't been proven by history. We just stay consistent and continue to attract advisors from a wide variety of firms across our affiliation options.
Did want to pivot to a discussion just around growth and capital deployment. I know you made some commentary on the last earnings call regarding M&A, where your interest levels are. If we think about the Private Client Group specifically, are there any gaps, whether it's regional, whether it's product level, that you might look to fill out organically, or inorganically, sorry?
If we get to the same market share just on the West Coast of the United States as we have on average in the rest of the country, we can double the size of our business almost. But I also don't want to, with that message, suggest that we're near our market saturation. Even our backyard, an hour away from our home office in Sarasota, Florida, we have a great presence there, but just in the same building, there's a firm that has 4x or 5x the number of financial advisors that we have. We have a lot of room to continue gaining share, even in our backyard, in the home state of Florida, but across the country. But certainly, some of the markets here in the tri-state area, we're well below our average market share in the rest of the country, as well as out west.
We're expanding there, we're putting our great leaders there, and that's really where we're focused on expanding our business.
Maybe just looking at your capital ratios today, just given the excess that you're running with, you've been consistent with the buyback at about $400 million per quarter. This quarter, you turned it off as you were evaluating a deal, but now it looks like you're going to get back to that $400 million status quo or steady state. Given the expectation for earnings to continue to ramp, why not have the buyback grow commensurate with some of that earnings growth expectation? Maybe just speak to your philosophy around how you're managing the buyback, balance sheet organic growth, while maybe leaving some cushion for some inorganic opportunities as well.
Yeah, so our capital prioritization framework is first and foremost investing in organic growth across our businesses, and that largely through recruiting, investing in the platform, and growing the balance sheet to support client activity. Secondly is growing through acquisitions in the capital prioritization framework. We spend a lot of time pursuing opportunities on the acquisition front, but they have to be good cultural fits first and foremost. We're in a people business. No matter how attractive the business is, if it's not a good cultural fit, the chances of it working out are very slim. Everything else almost is irrelevant if it's not a good cultural fit and the people don't have similar values in terms of how to run the business and putting clients first, making decisions for the long term.
Then it has to be a good strategic fit, where you're not just buying assets to get bigger, but you are making the firm that's joining the Raymond James family better, and they're making Raymond James better, to give us capabilities that we otherwise wouldn't have, helping us leapfrog in terms of capabilities. Because the challenge is, if you just grow assets for the sake of growing larger, then your net new asset targets and everything else become harder to achieve if you didn't also generate some type of new capability from it. Capabilities are really important. We don't want to just grow to get larger through an acquisition. Then it has to make financial sense, obviously, for the sellers and our shareholders as well. So we have a pretty high bar when it comes to acquisitions, but that's our second priority in the capital prioritization framework.
Then an ongoing dividend of 20%-30% of earnings that we continue to grow over time with earnings. Fourth is buybacks, and we've been doing buybacks because our capital, as you point out, is higher than our very conservative management target. So we've been doing buybacks at an elevated rate to keep the capital ratios from really growing further as we pursue acquisitions and other growth opportunities. But of course, if we can't find acquisitions that meet those criteria and our capital continues to build, then we'll certainly look at deploying the levers, including buybacks, at a higher level to keep the capital ratios closer to our target.
That's great. Paul, as I mentioned at the onset, you guys are really unique in that you have this omnichannel offering. If I think about the success that you've had in terms of attracting a lot of independent broker-dealer advisors, you've certainly had a lot of success attracting a lot of wirehouse advisors to your W-2 model. On the RIA side, you guys have seen, and I would argue, underappreciated growth within that channel in particular, and there's also a bit of disruption that's taking place with Altruist and Vanguard recently merging. Some of the other RIAs are de-emphasizing smaller teams. Just curious, how you see that opportunity within the pure RIA space? How is the company positioned?
Yeah, so we actually had some size thresholds for smaller teams before the other firms announced theirs. We've always been focused on pursuing higher quality teams in the RIA space, and we've always had kind of, not always, but for several years now, under our new leader, Greg Bruce, we put kind of floors in that we didn't want to pursue really small RIAs. That's, I think, who some of these other firms, these startups are pursuing, is the really tiny RIAs. What really has driven growth in the RIA space for us is just the consolidation across the industry, which has resulted for a lot of RIAs in a reduction in service levels at those big firms. You go from being a name to a number, and if certain asset sizes, you get deprioritized in terms of how service interacts with you at that firm.
Where we at Raymond James can really offer a higher level of service to those RIAs that are a good fit for Raymond James. Not all RIAs are good fits for Raymond James, but where they are a good fit, we can provide a better service level, and we've seen a lot of traction from a large number of RIAs in that channel that are interested in Raymond James.
I did want to pivot to the discussion around the AI strategy. I know that's really been a point of emphasis for the firm, and you've been investing heavily in your capabilities. You rolled out proprietary AI assistant, Raimond. I believe that was back in June. How do the AI capabilities stack up? It might be helpful, Paul, if you can contextualize, since we know Claude for financial advisors exists, but how does your tech stack compare to what's already available, and what are some of the KPIs that you're tracking internally to evaluate the return on dollars deployed in AI?
Yeah. I mean, that's a great question in terms of the return on investment on AI, because it's becoming so integrated with our business, both in the front office. I mean, in the front office, your return is actually just remaining competitive as a firm.
If you do not keep up with the technology and the AI requirements in the front of the house, then you are going to lose your competitiveness with financial advisors. For example, we launched, and we are still in early innings of launching what we call Meeting Manager. Meeting Manager helps an advisor, through AI, basically manage from soup to nuts the entire client management process, from setting up the meeting, to preparing for the meeting, to recording the meeting, creating summaries of the meeting, putting that into your CRM, putting into your supervisory system, coming up with next steps based on the discussion in the meeting, all the way back to preparing for the next meeting. All that is being done with the help of AI agents in every component of that process.
We have emails from advisors, some sent to me just this week, saying it is saving them dozens of hours a week based on this AI technology, and they are spending a lot less time on administration of their note-taking and documentation, which is allowing them to spend a lot more time with their prospects and clients. How do you measure the ROI on that? Very difficult. But certainly, if you do not have that, you are going to become antiquated in two or three years, or maybe even one year. You have to have— That is why scale is so important in our business, because these investments are not cheap. We have a $1.1 billion technology investment, and frankly, we have to deprioritize a lot of things from year to year, even at $1.1 billion, almost fully dedicated to the Private Client Group space.
I cannot imagine being a smaller firm trying to manage a $200 million technology budget or $300 million technology budget, especially in this world of AI and cyber technology. We spend over $100 million a year just on cyber technology to protect client data, and we would be naive to say that that is perfect, right? Because we are all still vulnerable and at risk. That is how we think about it from a front office perspective, and that is where a lot of our AI focus is going, is how can we save the advisor time on administrative tasks so they can spend more time with their client developing relationship? We call it the power of personal. Raymond James, we kind of came out with this tagline about a year ago.
We, at the leadership level, have a high conviction, and this is based on talking to advisors and their clients, that what people want and need now more than ever in this world of AI, social media, which with my two daughters I call antisocial media, because when they have it, they are the least social they will be all week. With antisocial media, with AI, with all these headlines, what people really need in their lives and what society really needs more than ever is a deeply personal relationship. Counterintuitively, while that is as high a value as it is ever been in society and high a need as it is ever been in society, what is harder to find now in society across all companies is a company that is willing to invest and offer a deeply personal relationship.
Many firms in our industry even think about AI as a way to disintermediate the advisor and go directly to the client and essentially cut out that deeply personal relationship. We're thinking, no, we want to use AI to actually further strengthen that deeply personal relationship by saving the advisor's time on the administrative task to really give them and empower them to spend more time on developing that relationship. That's how we think about AI in the front office. Again, difficult to measure the ROI short term on that. Then, of course, in the back office and the middle office, we're saying, how can it give us more scale and efficiencies in various activities? Whether it's supervision, where we had humans reviewing presentations before they were getting sent out. Now we can do that through AI agents.
Still human in the loop, but much quicker turnaround time on reviewing a presentation before you send it out. Actually, AI comes up with really great recommendations. If they're concerned about a particular statement in a presentation, we create an agent that could come out and recommend a substitute for it. The advisor's saying, this is great. The turnaround time has been cut dramatically, and the recommendations. They're not just saying, you can't use the statements. Coming up with recommendations that we think are really good and saving me time. That improves the client experience while enhancing efficiency too. Then, the Raimond, for example, that's just people being able to self-serve on a large language model versus having to go out and call a desk, for example, or call a human to get support on things.
The satisfaction level with Raimond's over 98%, which is actually higher than the phone call in terms of satisfaction level. We're still in early innings in training the large language model on the wide breadth of capabilities that we offer. AI is going to be an absolute game-changer, and already is a game-changer in our business. But near term, it's going to be hard to measure the ROI because near term, you're investing in the tokens. You're investing in training the agents. You're investing in all of these things. Actually, on the onset, just like any other long-term investment, you see an elevated investment spend before you get the benefits that justify that spend. But it's almost irrelevant whether it generates a good ROI or not. In some cases, you just have to do it to be relevant and to attract advisors to your platform.
It's table stakes at this point, but it sounds like the investment's going to look more like a J-curve, where you have to invest and you have to front-load some of that investment, but obviously it's going to pay rewards or pay dividends longer term.
Which is exactly the same explanation you can give to any technology investment in our history of our business, right? Very rarely are you going to get an instant ROI. You are investing in the technology infrastructure to remain competitive over time and to generate efficiencies and increase productivity over time.
If we look at some of this investment that is being made over a multi-year horizon, is the expectation on your end when you go through budgeting processes and the like, that we are going to see an acceleration in revenue growth because the advisors are more productive? And that should also translate, at least on the back office side, maybe margin improvement? Or is the expectation that you are going to continue to reinvest in the platform, in the capabilities, so maybe the margin expansion does not come through, but the revenue growth should come in better?
We see it almost real time on the recruiting process, where we bring in advisors and they look at our technology stack and our AI capabilities, and they are saying, gosh, the firm that I am with is still basically on DOS prompt. And so, it really is. That goes back to your question around recruiting economics. What people forget, recruiting economics is not binary. People say, is recruiting attractive and profitable right now or not profitable right now for the industry? I said, well, that is almost like asking the airline industry, is selling an airline ticket profitable right now or not? It is like, well, it depends on which airline ticket you are selling, which airline, what their cost structure is, how they are managing the business. It is not a binary thing. I think we are trying to oversimplify recruiting economics.
I think you have to look at a few different key factors in whether or not recruiting is attractive or not. Listen, again, proof is in the pudding. You look at our return on tangible common equity north of 20% this year on, as you point out, higher than needed capital. So, we are generating very good returns on a strategy of growing the business. Again, we had record recruiting results last year, $535 million, which was up 31% from last year's record, which was up 30% from the prior year's record.
So, when you look at the growth and growing the business, it is not the deals that is driving the growth. It is just the growth in recruiting success that is driving the cost growth and the investment growth in recruiting. It is not the percentage of the deal. It is the absolute dollar of what we are recruiting, which has been phenomenal.
When you look at the recruiting economics across the industry, you have to look at, one, do you have a value proposition? When you bring advisors in to a home office visit and they look at your technology on a screen like this, are they impressed? Or do they think, gosh, this firm is way behind. I'm going to have to get paid a higher dollar amount to make this decision to compromise on this technology, or compromise on not having a bank, or compromise on not having a trust company, or compromise on not having an equity origination capability. You have to have a value proposition in order not to cut the highest check.
Some of the firms that are complaining about having to cut the highest check, I would say, do you have a value proposition that's otherwise attractive to financial advisors and their clients? The second thing is you have to have scale. To offer a good value proposition, you have to have the size to make the investments necessary to be attractive, like our technology investment of $1.1 billion. If you only have a $200 million technology budget, it's very hard to create a technology stack where you bring in outside advisors that are kicking the tires to wow them. It's just not a big enough investment in your technology. You have to have scale in the business.
Again, when a company says recruiting's not attractive now, ask the question, do they have scale to make the investments in that value proposition so they don't have to write the biggest check? Then finally, you have to have a long-term time horizon. Recruiting, just like any other growth investment, is not going to have a one-quarter payoff. It's going to be a longer-term payoff for the company. If the management team has a focus on generating the highest margins in a year, then they're not going to want to recruit. They're going to want to slow down recruiting, actually. There's a lot of margin expansion opportunity if we stop growing. Helps us for the next year, but it wouldn't help us 10 years from now.
The third thing I would ask when a company says recruiting's not attractive is, does that leader have a 10-year time horizon? Or do they have a one-year time horizon or two-year time horizon? That's why recruiting's attractive for us. We have a value proposition, we have scale in our business to make the investments necessary to be competitive in our space, and we have a long-term time horizon. When we back test our recruiting returns over the last couple of years, we have a long-term return target of 15% across market cycles. With pretty conservative assumptions in our recruiting model on a weighted average basis, we're hitting those returns, in a lot of cases, exceeding those returns. On average, each team is different. Some cases, you're below that return, some cases, you're above it.
But we are able to generate our return hurdle based on those criteria.
It is really interesting, Paul, because clearly the firm has benefited from having a longer time horizon when you are evaluating a lot of these different opportunities, and maybe other firms are going to be a little bit more shortsighted in that regard. When we think about some of the risks that people have called out as it relates to AI, whether it is the expectation for pricing compression, pressure on cash balances, and the inability to monetize idle cash, those are things that we hear quite often. Structurally weaker demand for advice is another. It might be helpful if you can provide some context as to how you think about those risks, how you are comfortable handicapping some of those risks, given some of the bets you make.
Maybe that is not the right term, but when you structure a deal, it does have a longer duration when you are trying to partner with some of these advisors.
Oh, it is a great question. We think about that often. I think the first thing is we are well-positioned. We are a full-service firm, right? We are not a firm that is just offering a very siloed product offering of financial planning. When we talk to our advisors, asset allocation, financial planning, over time, even without AI, that has become more tech-enabled, if you will, right? What advisors are doing is they are really deeply understanding what their clients' needs are, what their priorities are, what their lifestyle is, what their kids' college goals are, what their estate planning goals are, what their long-term care goals are. These are really deeply personal, and going back to the power of personal. And you have to have a full-service capability, which we offer at Raymond James.
The trust services, for example, that is something that creating a donor-advised fund in-house with Raymond James so you can hit your charitable objectives. There are so many things that are encapsulated with a deeply personal financial relationship with a human financial advisor. Will AI change a lot of aspects of that relationship? Absolutely, just as technology has. Will advisors have to do more and be broader and deeper in their service to clients based on technology? Absolutely. Tash Elwyn, who runs a Private Client Group business, he said he remembers when he started right out of college at Raymond James as a cold caller, his value add was giving a stock quote. Tash didn't start in the business that long ago. He's like, can you imagine now if I tried to cold call?
First of all, where would I get a phone book from? If I said, hey, Steve, I got the current price for NVIDIA right now. Are you interested? The world has changed, and technology will continue to change. What will not change is the value of the deeply personal relationship in that financial relationship. I speak on a lot of the value I ascribe to my financial advisor at Raymond James is if, God forbid, I die on the way home back to my house this evening, my financial advisor knows my wife very well, knows my kids very well, knows exactly where everything is in my financial situation.
My wife would not have to spend her time trying to figure out the financial situation as she's taking care of the kids, taking care of the family, taking care of all the other things that she's going to take care of. The one thing that would not work out very well for my wife is if I say, hey, here's a link to an AI agent. If, God forbid, something happens to me, click on this link, and this AI agent will walk you through every step of what you need to do with our financial picture. Is that going to be replaced with an AI agent? Not for me, absolutely not.
Those are the type of, again, going back to the power of personal, that will not change, but all the other aspects will be further strengthened with AI over time.
Oh, hearing you describe it in that manner, especially when we think about the structural demand for advice, that certainly feels real. There definitely needs to be a human interpersonal element that is likely to perpetuate. The question that we get quite often is more around the pricing aspect, and how do we think the pricing evolves over time, not just in terms of the ability to monetize cash, but even what advisors can charge for the services being rendered, and what gives you confidence that that should prove more durable over time?
Yeah, there's so much concern around cash sweep, and what if that goes away? Just like any other industry, if an entire revenue line item goes away across the entire industry, then the industry will rebalance, right? That's another great thing about our business model is we have a lot of levers in our business. First and foremost, we want to make sure that however we price things is fair to the clients, and it's got to be balanced between the advisor and the firm as well. So we have three stakeholders, at least, to consider when we're looking at pricing decisions. But we have a lot of different levers. We have account pricing, we have cash pricing, we have payouts to advisors. We have a whole host of levers across the industry.
It's kind of oversimplifying things to say, gosh, one revenue stream's going to go away, and the industry and the companies are going to have to absorb 100% of that, without any changes at all. We have, as a diversified company, a lot of different levers. We evaluate when we look across what competitors are doing to ensure that what we're doing is competitive. There's a lot of factors, and of course, we'll respond. If all the other competitors do something, we'll have to respond to that. But again, making sure that whatever we do is best for clients first and foremost.
Paul, do you have a view as to whether the industry is likely to move towards something along the lines of a platform fee in lieu of cash monetization? It sounds like you're not going to be a first mover here. It's more, we'll see how the industry adapts, and then you'll respond in kind. But want to get your thoughts just on how you see this unfolding.
I don't know. It's hard to know. Certainly, if that's what clients would prefer, that type of pricing mechanism, and that's what advisors would prefer, and that's the way the industry moves, then we would be open to it. But I can't handicap it one way or the other right now.
Fair enough. We're also in a pretty dynamic environment from an interest rate standpoint. We get quite a few questions just around what that means in terms of cash allocations, whether we are going to see potentially another wave of sorting with some incremental hikes, and secondarily, how it's going to impact loan demand. I was hoping holistically, Paul, if you can just speak to what you're seeing on the platform, what your expectations are, given everyone's collectively bracing for multiple rate hikes, at least over the coming quarters.
Right. Well, you've been covering us and our industry for a long time, so you know that I was one of the ones that were saying cash sorting is going to be more intense going forward when rates first started increasing than most others in the industry.
To your credit, you absolutely did.
Where I am now is, I think rates have been high enough for long enough where most of the cash has been sorted and invested in the alternatives, the investment alternatives that make the most sense. I do not see a whole lot of incremental sorting with some incremental rate hikes. I think people are pretty well sorted with their cash right now. It is not like we are coming off of a 10-year cycle of near zero rates and now we are entering a cycle of rate increases. I think we are pretty well optimized when we look at our client base and the cash allocation across the industry. Frankly, the silver lining with higher rates is that it actually becomes at a higher cost, but you can be more effective with cash rate programs in terms of raising new cash.
Right.
This type of rate that we are at now is challenging because in some regards for the banking industry overall, it is high enough where people are pretty well sorted, but it is not high enough to attract new cash balances with cash rate programs. So higher rates could actually be good in that regard.
You guys have also seen some really good momentum on the lending side. I think it has grown mid-single digits plus pretty consistently, even with higher rates. Maybe just speak to the sensitivity that you expect on the SBL side as well as with your commercial clients if we get some additional rate hikes here.
Yeah, I would say that what history would show us is that borrowing gets impacted short term when there is big changes in rates, either down or up. When rates change dramatically on the downside, borrowing ticks up, and when rates increase dramatically on the upside, borrowing ticks down. But those are sort of temporary phenomenons, and then people get used to the new level of rates. They are earning more on their cash too in a higher rate environment, and so the opportunity cost actually gets better in that regard, and people start borrowing again. It is just as rates are on the move is where we see lending volumes get impacted.
Once rates get to their new level, people start borrowing again based on their needs, and it becomes much more of a question around the macroeconomic environment and the stock prices for SBLs than it does become a question around where rates are, absolute level of rates are.
That's great. Paul, I know we only have a minute here, but was hoping to get your perspective just longer term as we think about this brave new AI world. What does success look like for you as the leader at Raymond James, and what are you hoping to achieve over the next five years?
My first KPI is, are advisors at Raymond James, are financial professionals at Raymond James happy with Raymond James? They're our client base. That's what drives growth in the firm. So, the advisor satisfaction of 97% is critical. If you drive that 97% advisor satisfaction and we're still retaining and attracting new advisors to Raymond James and retaining our existing advisors, and you have a value proposition that's creating that 97% advisor satisfaction, then we'll continue to generate great results and generate good returns for shareholders. We just wrapped up our fiscal year. It was our sixth consecutive year of record revenues and earnings, and pretty different market environments over those six years. It's not common to see financial services firms in the last six years that generated record revenues and earnings.
More uncommon is it was our 155th consecutive quarter of profitability, which we haven't found any other financial services firm. Even through the financial crisis, we were profitable every quarter. We didn't need or take government support. We were able to support the business on our own two feet with our own capital and liquidity. That's the kind of long-term horizon that we have. If we continue to be successful in that high satisfaction level with advisors and financial professionals, our associates, and we continue to focus on the long term serving clients, we'll continue to generate that long-term financial success, which will generate great returns for our shareholders as well.
Well, knock on wood, the streak continues. Paul, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Next up, we have our private RIAs panel.