Great. I think we'll get started. Folks on the webcast, everyone in the audience as well, I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your afternoon. I'm Kevin McVeigh. I cover SS&C for UBS, and we're thrilled to have Bill Stone, who's kind of chairman-founder of SS&C, and it'll be great to spend the next 40 minutes or so with Bill. We try to keep these as iterative as possible, so I'm going to start out with a little bit of Q&A. If anyone in the audience has questions, there'll be a mic runner, or you can use the barcode, and it'll come in through the iPad. If anyone on the webcast has any questions, I'll check my email intermittently. It's kevin.mcveigh, M-C-V-E-I-G-H, at ubs.com, and again, we're thrilled to have Bill.
And Bill, I think I start every fireside we do just starting back in 1986 and kind of the way you founded the business. And there's been certain step function changes over time. What I want to do maybe start at the beginning, what drove the vision, and then maybe fast forward to 2018 with the DST acquisition, Intralinks, and Eze, and I'm going to go somewhere with that. But I think just the foundation you've led has led to a lot of success for a long period of time, and you're starting to see incremental success in the most recent quarter, which we'll get into. But I think the foundation you created is just a really critical place to start, and it's always been, I think, helpful, particularly given the multiple parts of the business.
So yeah, so I started SS&C in March of 1986, and as Kevin has heard this any number of times, so I appreciate you asking.
No, it never gets old because it's a terrific story.
So at the end of 1986, we had $86,000 in revenue, and I had four people, of which I was one. And at the end of 1987, we had 17. At the end of 1988, we had 38. At the end of 1989, we had 26. So I hired every one of those 38 people, and I fired 12 of them. But if I didn't fire 12 of them, I'd have had to let all 38 of them go. So 38 went to 26, 26 went to 43, 43 went to 62, 62 went to 48. So you know it's ups and downs in this game. And I raised some equity capital in 1990 from Conning & Company and from General American Life Insurance in St. Louis, who I had audited right out of college when I worked for Peat Marwick in my time, but KPMG now.
Leonard Rubenstein was the chief investment officer, but when I audited him, he was an assistant treasurer, and I was a 22-year-old, and we were kind of friends. Holding on to relationships over time is pretty valuable, and I found it to be quite valuable. In 1994, we raised some equity capital from General Atlantic. Bill Ford, who's pretty well known as the head of General Atlantic, we were his first investment when he went to General Atlantic out of Morgan Stanley. We've been friends ever since, and that's 1994. We went public in 1996, and then we went private in 2005 with Carlyle. When we went public in 1996, we did $26 million. When we went private with Carlyle in 2005, we were doing like $160 million. We went public again in 2010. We were doing $329 million.
When we bought Advent in 2015, we did $1 billion. And then, as Kevin said, in 2018, we deployed $1.5 billion on Intralinks, $1.45 billion on ES, and then $5.4 billion on DST. So we put $8.35 billion to work. And if you looked at them today, DST combined probably does $2.3 billion in revenue, $1 billion, a little over $1 billion in EBITDA. I think Intralinks does $275 million in EBITDA, and ES probably does $170-$180 million in EBITDA. So you get $1.1 billion and $275 million is $1.375 billion, and say $175 million is, what, about $1.55 billion or something like that. So we get $1.55 billion that we paid $8.3 billion for. So what's that? A little over six, six and a half times. You're going to come close to doing that in 2024.
We've always done that, and now we have 140 offices in 40 countries. We have 200 products and services. We just finished out Q4, our biggest quarter in our history. We ended up 2024 with about $5.8 billion in revenue and $2.3 billion in EBITDA and $1.3 billion or so, a little better, in cash flow. I'm one of nine kids from Evansville, Indiana, and I know you're all jealous that you have probably never been to Evansville. It really is quite the tourist spot. It's right on the Ohio River. I've never seen a tourist there, really, but maybe. I had $20,000 when I started this thing. It's worked out pretty well even when I catch complaints from some shareholders and others. We kind of keep our nose to the grindstone and grind it out every quarter, every year.
We're lucky that we have a lot of tremendous people and a lot of opportunity. We have 22,000 clients. That's a lot. We get probably 70% of our revenue from the US. Then we probably get 20%, a little less than 20%, from Europe. We're pretty good in Australia, pretty good in Canada. Then we have a nice business, but not very big in the Far East, maybe 5%-7%. But still, 7% of $6 billion is $420 million. So it's not like the minor ones that everybody asks me about, the gnats that keep coming around us. But we tend to swat them.
Now, it's been, and to your point, Bill, there's been some debate, never about the cash flow, for sure. And I know that's always been a focus for you. Maybe talk about, because one of the things we've focused on, and I want to get into it in a little bit, but we've really tried to really stress to the market how we think there's a fundamental shift in the organic growth in the business. But you laid the foundation for that multiple years ago when you put that incremental capital to work, and you levered up the balance sheet, and the cash flow afforded you the opportunity to delever and then really start to return that capital vis-à-vis buyback dividend.
So maybe talk about some of that dynamics, because I think the free cash flow affords you to invest organically, inorganically, and really set the foundation for the next layer of growth. So maybe talk about the cash flow, and then I want to use kind of the alts business as a proxy for what we think you're doing in healthcare and how you've been able to kind of build that out. I know there's a lot there, but I think it's an important point to the story.
Well, I'm an old accountant, right? So I always thought making money was the idea of this. People interviewed me before. So what was your idea when you started this? What was driving you? I wanted to get rich and unabashedly. And I didn't know exactly how I was going to do it, but I'd be out there selling my heart out to try to get clients and then make sure that we were going to make money. The only way you can do that is you got to please your clients, right? And they become your references, and you get some more clients. And so we've always been a pretty profitable place. We always focused on, and we won't do, we're not doing revenue for revenue's sake, right? We're not, what would you do, do a whole bunch of revenue and make no earnings? No, thank you.
We've been focused on cash flow ever since we started. I think the whole idea about giving money back to the shareholders and then recognizing that you've got lots of constituents, like sometimes the equity shareholders, why are you paying down any debt? That's just because I might want to do a big acquisition, and I want those debt holders to like me, right? Because then they will invest in you, right? So you do that. I was out on a roadshow, and I think I was at TCW out in wherever they were in California, I think at the time. They said, we have a bunch of funds that won't invest in you unless you pay a dividend. Okay, we'll pay $0.10. We started paying a dividend, and now we pay $1.
And so it's listening and then reacting and then making sure that you keep coming back. I still know the guy that told me that at TCW, and I still know Leonard Rubenstein, and I still know the guys at Carlyle, whether it's Bill Conway or David Rubenstein. David Rubenstein was just our keynote speaker at our conference, our Deliver conference. He was outstanding. So it's keeping those relationships going, focusing, becoming an expert. I always talk about mortgage-backed securities was really what became one of our strengths. And there's something called Emerging Issues Task Force of the. I'm sure you guys are excited about this, but the Financial Accounting Standards Board. But they had something called 99-20, and that was accounting for derivative mortgage-backed securities, and whether you're going to do it on a retrospective or a prospective basis using CPR or PSA.
And so I could sell when I was selling, and I've done thousands of demos. So I was pretty good at it, right? And most people wouldn't come at me because I knew enough to say, most of you here wouldn't have retrospective and prospective accounting on a mortgage-backed security derivatives. None of that I'll pass. But some of them that really know what they're talking about, they would come at me, and I'm in sales, right? So you can't get too far over your skis before you better understand that, oh, I'm on thin ice here, right? And there's some smart people in finance. We had Mark Rowan in our offices a few months ago, and that's one smart fellow now. He says private markets are going to be just like public markets, and that's going to really change, make a lot of change in how we invest.
And hey, is he right? I don't know. Even if he's wrong, he's still really smart, right? But I don't know if he's right. It's kind of like when you pick a stock or things like that. It doesn't always go up. Well, if it always went up, you wouldn't be here. So it's kind of those things of recognizing that there's only a limited amount of knowledge. And an awful lot of this in growing a company is about art. It's not so much about science, and it's about those people, and can you motivate them? And if all you do is beat hell out of them, they're not going to be motivated. It's like you got to compliment them. Carrots, occasional sticks, okay, but mostly you want to, my line's 10 compliments for every criticism. And listen to your bosses. Teach them.
And if you're a boss, make sure that you're complimenting your people most of the time. If you can't compliment them, then fire them. If they're not worth complimenting, then why are you fighting it? And no one ever fired somebody too soon. But that's difficult. Nobody likes to do it. I hate it, but I'll do it if I have to.
We were talking a little bit too, Bill, about one of the things we really appreciate about the story is how differentiated your go-to-market motion is relative to competition. I think sometimes the market tends to take more of a simplistic view that the software is a software and you can change it in and out. And one of the things we really always appreciated was the intellectual property you create over the course of time with your client relationships. Maybe talk to the specific example of that and just your ability to be able to deliver in really uneven circumstances and just the predictability of that. And I think it's a huge competitive mode that, quite frankly, the market doesn't fully appreciate from time to time.
You can even see that in terms of how some of the competitive dynamics have shifted over the last 12-36 months. Your retention's improved, and organic growth accelerated. Despite the market maybe debating if newer entrants were going to create more pressure on the business, which clearly didn't come to pass.
Again, as you go through the elements of how you grow and being able to get through things like COVID, the great resignation, so that you're constantly trying to create new product and new service. That's one of the things, these acquisitions we've done, 76 acquisitions. We're buying a company called FPS Trust, or we just bought it. It's not really very big, but it's a key component in like a $25 million deal we have, $25 million a year deal we have. Even though we're only going to pay whatever it is, $10 million or something for this company, it's going to generate if we win this thing, we think we will. That's something where you have to be willing to look and see what the value you can get into your set of intellectual property.
Then you got to defend your intellectual property, and that's a pain in the neck. But if you can do that and if you can get enough of the components, you always have all the pieces. Now, you might have to put it into the puzzle, and you might have to make sure that the seams are smoothed and all that, but we can do it. We almost never say no. And usually, if you're a big sophisticated organization, it's almost all the global macros, Millennium, Point72, Baupost, Citadel, a bunch of other ones, all use us. How come? Well, because they're a big sophisticated place, and they want a big sophisticated place as their partner. And they make a lot of money, and they can't go down. Millennium can do 10 million trades in a day.
And JP Morgan's a big client of ours, and they have a direct indexer. And they can go from 50,000 trades in a day and say, "Hey, we're going to do 250,000 tomorrow." Well, we appreciate the heads-up a day. But you scramble, and you do it for them. And that's how they turn in the great big clients. And they don't want to do it themselves. Because when it screws up, they have to blame themselves. And they really don't like that. So that's our opportunity. You get to do that all the way around the world. And that's like Insignia in Sydney, great big superannuation company, and we win. So we probably will sign that this quarter, and we'll start the implementation next quarter.
Hopefully, we'll get some revenue in Q2, and then we'll get more revenue in Q3, and then we'll get a whole bunch of revenue in Q4. And people will say, "Well, how did you do? How did you outperform in Q4? How did you guys beat revenue by $50 million or something?" Well, a bunch of these things went live, and that's like a gusher of revenue. And so, well, didn't you know that was going to happen? We were hoping, but we didn't want to disappoint. If it gets this, these things can get delayed a month, and there's almost nothing you can do. Betty. Betty's out on maternity. We sure as hell can't get this done with Betty in here. Then it's Bob. Bob's out on paternity. Betty and Bob, they're not even married.
They're both out on, you know, most of the kinds of things in great big institutions that happen all the time. And you ought to be able to manage that better. Thank you, a great one. If you can show me how, I'm more than willing to try. Our biggest license that we ever sold before we got big into fund services was MetLife in 1998. We sold a $4.5 million license. It was like the mother lode. But my board was just like, "Well, when are you going to close? When are you going to close?" I said, "We're doing everything we can think of. I can't pull a gun on them. If you got something for me, you think I ought to try it more than one thing." But those are the guys with the blimp and Snoopy. I'm not getting pressure. It's like trying to pressure UBS.
That's a fool's errand. We don't do that. But you have to have enough of them that when one kind of slips, the other one kind of goes.
It's a really important point, Bill. And I think if I remember from the press release, Insignia, I think is upwards of a million retirees, right? And if you think about that relative to the penetration rates, I think you have in Australia around 5% or so. So if you think about the scope of that, right? And you mentioned it earlier, but I think it's a point worth repeating. The Q4, you had multiple records, whether it was retention at 97.1%, AUA was multiple trillions of record, really strong growth year on year. It's something you've been building for a long time where, again, we keep going back to this concept of a step function change in the organic growth. Maybe talk to that a little bit because, again, it's the importance of being able to deliver.
To your point, as the clients get bigger, the engagement gets bigger, the process becomes a little bit more complex in terms of getting it over the goal line. Something you've been talking about for multiple years that we're finally starting to kind of come up on shore.
Yeah, and we have a great relationship with our clients, so we don't usually stick them up, right? So we want price increases. They don't want price increases. But everybody else is raising everybody's prices. I'll have investors come and tell me that in things like this conference and others where you don't raise our prices, why aren't you raising our prices? I said, "I can make that happen. I can probably make that happen today," right? Oh, no, no, no. I didn't mean us really. I just meant those other clients. And so Janus is a big shareholder. We see them a lot. And they're constantly telling me to raise prices. Okay, why don't we start with you? Oh, couldn't do that. So it's not a, and we need to train, and we're getting better at it.
This year, we'll get maybe upwards to 300 basis points in price increases, 3%. Well, that's a long way to six, right? And before, we didn't get hardly any. And people say, "Well, I'm already paying you $5 million." Yeah, and I've kept that same team on there for you for three years, right? We paid them more. We gave them big bonuses. And now, time to pay the grim reaper a little bit here. But you have to say it in the right way. They have to feel like they're getting value, and you have to deliver. That's the name of our conference. Our conference is called Deliver. And it's to keep people's focus on what we do for a living and teaching our people that, hey, these are the people that pay us, right? And so we had one of the guys from Citadel.
It wasn't their CEO, but it was one of their people. And they said, "I've never seen a conference that goes without a hitch. There's just no hitches." I said, "My youngest daughter runs this, and she's like the German high command." But it makes a difference when someone's paying attention. And it's constant. It's every day. And that's just, and like we handle all the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions in Ottawa. We handle the FCA in London. We handle the Japanese equity markets. We handle Australian short sales. It's around the world, and they make changes. And taxes, they make changes. And then we're really big providers of performance measurement and performance attribution. And so that's very much of an expertise. And the portfolio managers are like that last basis point. You'd think it was gold.
So I always tell our people, "Round up." So they never feel like we rounded down on them. And so it seems funny, but it's kind of true. And so it's recognizing that that's the nature of what you're dealing with. And if you want to keep growing, you got to keep executing. And you got to keep coming out, refreshing your technology, bringing out more and more capabilities, and being very sensitive to what our clients are saying. What's the voice of the customer? And at the same time, recognizing that sometimes you got to tell them, "No, we're not doing that. I don't care. We're not doing that." And look, we want to make money, but we're not. One guy sometime 20 years ago dropped one of our competitors. Hey, one of the guys I know that works there gave me their plan. And he walked in.
I said, "Get that off of my desk. And if you ever do something like this, I'm going to fire you on the spot." I don't want their plans. All it would probably do is confuse me anyway, but I don't care what they do. I care what we do. It's like yesterday. I don't think that Patrick Mahomes was caring what the Eagles were doing. He was caring that his guys weren't blocking, and he's getting clobbered, right, or Sunday, whatever that was. It's the same kind of thing. You got to have a whole team. People got to know what they're supposed to do. You have to be clear. And then it is nice to have the kind of cash flow we have because it gives you a lot of flexibility. It allows you to take risks on.
I bought into machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing, and AI, and we didn't waffle. We spent $1.7 billion and bought Blue Prism. Has it been perfect? Of course not. It hasn't been perfect, but we have 1,400 people that are in this every day, and it gets better. As it gets better, they had no margin when we bought them. Now they're a little over 30% margins, and that's another thing that we do pretty well is we make money. They had Blue Prism TV. We don't. We're not going to compete against Netflix, although we think we're quite creative. We're probably not going to do that.
Helpful. I may open it up to the audience and check my email. Any questions from the audience? Let me see.
Silence.
That's fine. Bill, I wanted to also maybe frame some of the numbers. At Investor Day, we talked about 4%-8% organic growth, which was in the fall. You've seen real nice incremental improvement over the course of the year. I think 2023 was 3.9%. 2024 was 6.1%, and the highlight was obviously 7% in Q4. And 2025 is centered around 5% or so. But again, you didn't wave the wand, and Q4 came in at 7% overnight. Multiple parts of the business are contributing to that. Maybe talk to some of the growth, the step-functioning gids, even Intralinks, and a less than optimal M&A environment has really been scaling.
You mentioned Blue Prism, but talk to Blue Prism a little bit because I feel like so many parts of the market are thematic, but you're indexed to GenAI through Blue Prism, not only on the revenue, but also the expense side. And then you've got the private optionality with some of the AUA you have. So maybe talk to that a little bit because there's a lot of different themes that resonate within SS&C. And again, the thing we keep going back to is it's not theory. You're seeing it in the numbers, and in all likelihood, that continues.
Well, we talked a little bit, right? We're getting some price increases, which gives you a floor. And then we bring out new products and services. Like we talked a little bit about having trust capabilities in Black Diamond. Black Diamond's got, I don't know, 3,500 or so registered investment advisors. And a lot of times, a registered investment advisor, the old-timers like me become pretty important to them because we made the money, and now they're managing it for us. But I'm going to start putting it on my kids' trusts or my grandkids' trusts. And if they can't do trust accounting, they lose their best customers, right? So we bring out TrustSuite that integrates Black Diamond with Intertrust, and it's been very, very, very popular. So you get those kinds of capabilities.
I think the ability to constantly pivot so that we have some very well-known assets like Black Diamond. We have $900 billion in private assets that we do investment accounting and reporting on. We have the only platform that does transfer agency and fund administration for retail bulk. All of these big hedge funds and private equity funds are trying to get alternatives into like 401(k)s and IRAs and 403(b)s and 457 plans and all this other stuff. We're one of the only ones that can give them full suite. That's another big advantage. It's always having enough capability to be able to deliver. When we won Ares in 2013, they wanted to open an office in Singapore like yesterday.
We have a pretty good office in Singapore, so we helped them get live in Singapore in like two weeks, which it would have taken them six months if they didn't have a provider like us. BlueCrest was a huge hedge fund, $40 billion, I think, in London. Now it's a family office. They wanted to start trading the Canadian dollar, and they told us on a Wednesday they wanted to start on the following Monday, but they didn't have any assets in Toronto or Montreal or Ottawa or any of the other Canadian cities, but we did. So we housed them and set them up with the trading, and we told them, "This isn't going to be elegant, but we'll make it work," and we did, and I told them when they were starting, I thought this was a loony thing to do.
They looked at me kind of like what all of you are. But they called the Canadian dollar the loon, the loonie, right? So I told them it was loony to start trading the loon when they didn't have any assets in the country. But they didn't think it was funny either.
Maybe switching gears too to talk to Blue Prism. I think it's about 5% of the revenue. It's scaling. But you've also had a real meaningful benefit in terms of internal efficiencies, right, in terms of deploying it across SS&C internally. And I think what we've been impressed with is that's afforded you the opportunity not only from those efficiencies, but also to add to your sales and marketing budget pretty meaningfully. So maybe talk to that a little bit. And again, you've been able to continue to grow the margin despite continued investment, which, again, we think fuels growth longer term. And it's just you're at a really nice part in the cycle where it feels like there's just a lot of incremental things kind of coming in that are going to help the growth going forward.
I think that's right. I mean, Blue Prism, we've deployed like 2,350. We call them digital workers. Other people call them bots, but 2,350. We think it's saved us like 3,200-3,250 in FTEs. That's a lot of money. We've also taken sales and marketing. Five years ago, it was $211 million. In 2024, it was $584 million. We listened. Everybody wants more organic revenue growth. We started jacking up our sales and marketing budget and also our R&D budget, which R&D doubled over that time frame too. The ability to maintain those margins while you're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in your sales and marketing machine and your product development machine is a testament to the efficiencies that Blue Prism is affording us. We also are now trying to have them pre-configured.
We just did a bunch of bots for Riyad Bank in Saudi Arabia. When we pre-configure them, then the bot's not $13,000. It's $50,000. Now we think the pre-configured is a good way to get better pricing. You got to do some work, but it's way better pricing. And you configured it for them, so there's less heartburn, right? We don't make, not that we don't make any mistakes, but we don't make nearly as many as somebody that's just getting into deploying digital workers in their workplace.
Maybe switching gears a little bit, talk to capital allocation because I think since 2018 on the M&A front, you've probably been a little bit, well, not inactive because Blue Prism is about $1.6 billion, Battea more recently. But it seems like there's been more focus on deleveraging, obviously this year, much more meaningful buyback. But maybe talk to just the thoughts around capital allocation. And I would use a base of about $1.3 billion-$1.4 billion of free cash flow. How do you think about that relative to M&A versus buyback dividend?
Yeah. I mean, if we can find good assets to buy at some semblance of a reasonable price, then that's probably our number one goal. At the same time, when we know that this asset's going to go at 25 times EBITDA, we don't spend a whole lot of time working on that. But that's first. Second is we buy back our stock. So in the fourth quarter, we spent $365 million buying back our stock. And we paid $150 million in paying down debt. So what's that? It's about 65, 35, maybe. Maybe a little better, 70, 30. But that's what we're going to do. We're probably going to spend 70% of our cash flow on buying back our stock and 30% of our cash flow on paying down our debt. And we're having some assets that we'll sell.
We have some buildings in Kansas City in case any of you would need one. We have several. And we'll probably sell those if we can. And so I think we have any number of assets that we'll probably unload off our balance sheet this year and use that to buy back stock and pay down debt. So we're pretty bullish on our business and confident in our ability to meet the guidance and hopefully surprise you positively. But it's still a day-to-day fight-it-out business. And that's what we do.
It's been interesting because, again, the M&A environment hasn't been terrific. Intralinks has really been delivering. So that feels like something that, to the extent I think you've always mentioned kind of animal spirits and how important that is to the business as opposed to regulation. So maybe talk to that dynamic a little bit too. And again, trying to be more centered on the guides, but just animal spirits relative to regulation and what the change in administration can potentially mean, realizing there's a lot of cross currents there.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people in our clients, when the regulators come out with new regulations, our clients want us to help them. And so we can help you, but it's not free. And they go, "You're making money on our regulation." I'm not regulating you. And if you don't want to use us, then don't use us. But I'm not going to do all this work for nothing. And why don't you go see a PricewaterhouseCoopers? I'll do it for nothing. I'm sure my old firm, KPMG, would be glad to do it for something. So we do make some money off of regulation, but we make way more money when a number of you start your own funds. And then we're there to help you. We can help you raise some capital. We can do your NAVs. We can file your tax returns.
We can set up all that stuff. And in general, we're known as a really good partner that your investors are going to appreciate that you're doing business with first-class companies. And so we spend a lot of time on that. And that animal spirits, like Izzy spun out Bobby Jain. And Jain Global is a nice big client of ours. And Henry Ellenbogen left T. Rowe Price. And he's now Durable Capital. And he's managing $20 billion. And so that's really good for us. And those kinds of things. Izzy's son spun out of Millennium. And that's another one that we want. And then our biggest client's St. James’s Place in London. And Mark FitzPatrick, their new CEO, just took a big tour of the U.S. where he went to New York, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, I think, San Francisco and LA and Chicago.
He says, "Everywhere I went, they asked me what technology I used." I said, "SS&C." He goes, "Like checking a box." I could tell he was comfortable that, "Wow, I didn't know this is what was going to happen." I said, "Oh, no. Mark will get 22,000 clients. You're the biggest, but you're in a pretty good company. The other one, top five are JP Morgan, Capital Holdings, Humana. And I don't even know who the other one was. Maybe Citi or Goldman or Morgan Stanley. We don't want them." So we do that for everybody. We listen. You learn a lot more when you're listening. We try to teach our people all the time that. We like ideas. We like to partner with our clients on ideas and stuff that they want to do.
That's worked out pretty well as well.
One thing we didn't even get to, we have another minute, but it was maybe the healthcare business. Because again, it clearly inflected in Q4. Some of that was some of the software sales. But I think there's a lot more underneath that as well. So maybe we could close it out a couple of minutes on healthcare. Or I think the other thing that we probably don't spend enough time on is the importance of the culture you've built and the people, right? Because at the end of the day, it's a service business that's enabled by the software. But your ability to kind of continue to maintain the culture despite the growth has been pretty impressive too.
Healthcare is, I think, what we did in fund administration in 2002 when we decided to get into fund administration. Everybody told me, it's like, "What are you doing? That's dominated by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and UBS and Credit Suisse and Northern Trust and Bank of New York and Citi. You don't have a chance." Maybe. I don't think it's banking. I think it's accounting. I think it's accounting and reporting. And so I'm not loaning you any money. I'm not picking any stocks. I'm not taking you public. I'm just doing accounting and reporting. And that kind of proved out because we didn't have any money in 2002. And now we have three and a half trillion. And we went from 11th to 7th to 5th to 3rd, 2nd to 1st.
And all those names I named, Citi got out, Goldman Sachs got out, Credit Suisse got out. A whole bunch of other ones got out of the business. And healthcare. We're not getting into healthcare. We're not doctors or nurses or we're not pharmacists. We process claims like accountants. So we do accounting and reporting. And we're just getting started. And we're not a big insurance company. We're not a big financial institution. We like to think we're nimble. We make decisions. Sometimes they blow up in our face. I don't like it when that happens. But I don't shoot people because it happened. It happens several times in a row. We might shoot them. But in general, we know we're going to make some mistakes. And we're not stopping. Because technology doesn't stop. Your customers' needs don't stop.
When they quit innovating, somebody's going to run right on by them. Then they're going to look and say, "How'd that happen?" I think that's our big opportunity, is we're a founder-led, pretty big company. I'm impatient. I try to be nice, but I'm impatient. I'm competitive. So I don't like to lose. I think that gives us some competitive advantage.