This is Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America, and I'm pleased to introduce Jack Weingart. Jack is CFO and on the board at TPG. He joined TPG back in 2006, and prior to his appointment as CFO, he was co-managing partner of TPG Capital from 2017, as well as managing partner of the funding group from 2006. Jack is also on the private company board of Viking Holdings, and he previously served on the board of several other private companies, including J.Crew, Chinos Holdings, and Chobani. Jack, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today?
Thanks, Craig. Doing well.
So first, let me just start with a quick background on TPG. The firm was founded in 1992, went public in 2022. It is a leading global alt manager with more than $200 billion in AUM. The firm's roots are in its West Coast base and family office heritage. TPG is one of the largest alternative investors in the world, and its acquisition of Angelo Gordon, which closed late last year, significantly enhanced its diversification and filled in product gaps in credit and real estate. Jack, did I miss anything in the intro?
You got it, you got it.
All right, great. First topic, let's jump into the business model. So TPG is a newer public company. It just recently IPO'd, and the model was designed to be more FRE, or fee-related earnings, centric.
Mm-hmm.
From 2021 to 2023, you almost doubled your FRE. Can you walk us through your model?
Sure, sure. It's something we thought carefully about. I mean, we-- I joined the firm in 2006, and obviously, some of our peers started going public shortly thereafter. And we, of course, thought about whether to go public way back then and chose not to. And during the intervening 10-15 years, I think we had the benefit of kind of watching the industry evolve, watching how some of our public peers performed, watching how the, how the corporate structures evolved.
By the time we finally decided to go public in 2021, which, as you said, we affected in January of 2022, as we planned for it and decided that being a public company was finally the right answer for us after being private for 30 years, we tried to think carefully about how to do it in the most aligned way, and the best way for the most important constituents we have, which are our employees, our fund investors, and our shareholders, soon to be public shareholders back then. As we thought about the different economics and fee streams within the firm, obviously, simplistically, it breaks down into management fees and carried interest.
We wanted our employees to be primarily incentivized by carried interest, and we wanted to create for shareholders, including public shareholders and ourselves as large shareholders, an income stream that was more stable and more reliant upon management fees. We were able to do that by coming public 15 years after some of our peers did and designing our structure accordingly. The partners of the firm no longer earn an annual bonus from management fees.
In return for that, we get a larger share of the carried interest, which, of course, is good for our fund investors because we make money when they make money, and it's good for shareholders because we're able to flow more of the management fee stream through to shareholders, which, if we do our job right and grow our business, will be a stable and growing source of income. And it's worked out, it's worked out very well. Now, it's not easy, and you have to make sure the employees are all on board for that, and we spent a good two years talking about it internally before going public. And, you know, how we're gonna manage that over time for our employee base to make sure we adequately reward our, you know, our high-performing employees.
From a public shareholder standpoint, when will they see a meaningful step-up in realized performance fees from the newer fund vintages?
Well, as you know, Craig, one of the things I feel passionately about, as you mentioned, I used to co-lead the buyout business before becoming CFO, and we need to manage our funds to generate great returns for our fund investors. And what that means is making sure we buy the right companies at the right prices, but also we choose to sell companies at the right time. So what generates realized performance revenue is selling companies and generating realized gains, and we're always gonna make that decision based on the right time for the fund that owns that company. So we're never gonna be specific about forecasting expected PRE, because we're gonna make that decision at the right time.
That being said, if you think about how we have managed that and what it's meant over time, back in 2019, 2020-2021, when that-- that's what I was doing, was co-leading the buyout business as the biggest generator, historically, for us of PRE. As valuations got higher and higher, multiples got higher and higher, we did take a point of view that, for any fund that had significant built-in gains, the right thing to do for our fund investors was to crystallize those gains. So we did go through a significant wave of generating realized carry at the right time and delivered a lot of capital back to our fund LPs at large gains.
What that meant was, in 2022, 2023, we had a younger portfolio, and our focus turned to building value in that portfolio, and you can see that as we built, kind of rebuilt our accrued but unrealized carry. We've now added $200 million to that from the acquisition of Angelo Gordon. I forgot to mention on the FRE-centric model, we also did think it was important to flow through to shareholders more than just management fees, to make sure there was alignment with shareholders, and they would also receive a flow-through of that carry. It's kind of a royalty of 20% of the carry, and you can see that in our financials where we accrue accrued but unrealized carry, it's that 20% portion that shows up in our non-GAAP financials.
That number is now $900 million, because we acquired 20% of the Angelo Gordon accrued but unrealized, so we could match our TPG model with the Angelo Gordon book of accrued but unrealized carry. So with almost $1 billion today and a more mature portfolio, because we've spent, generally speaking, a couple years building value in our private equity portfolio companies, I think, as I mentioned on the earnings call the other day, I would expect this year to be an increase over last year's pro forma PRE of about $120 million across the two businesses. And if you think about that accrued book generally being monetizable over a, you know, call it a 3-4-year period, that gives you some sense for how things will evolve through a cycle.
I think if you look at the ratio of your deployments to beginning of period AUM, you were the lowest in the peer group in 2021, and if you look at the ratio of the realizations at the beginning of period AUM, you're actually the highest.
Yeah.
So really kind of supports your decisions then.
Yeah. And we feel. Looking back on it, we feel great about the way we managed that volatility kind of our investment and monetization activity through that period of volatility. And in a market where there's been a lot of discussion about fundraising and the dynamics affecting the liquidity in the fundraising market, one of those dynamics is GPs not sending money back to their LPs. So the LP models being kind of, for liquidity, being thrown out of whack, we're not part of that.
Okay. Let's move on to the Angelo Gordon acquisition. So TPG recently acquired a large credit and real estate manager in Angelo Gordon. First, what was your objective with this acquisition?
Well, I would say there were several objectives. And we talked about this pretty openly, going back to the IPO more than two years ago, that one of our objectives in creating a public balance sheet was to enable several elements of growth. And one of them that we talked about actively was getting back into corporate credit, private credit, which we were in with Sixth Street. We had a great partnership with Sixth Street. We chose to disaffiliate. We felt a need to broaden our platform, to bring in to become an investment manager across more alternative asset classes for several reasons. And it's really driven by both the market opportunity that we see and where we think we can generate differentiated returns for LPs. And then, on the other side of the equation, what our LPs wanna see from us.
Our biggest institutional clients around the world, one of their primary objectives is to do more with fewer GPs, is to take their large capital bases, partner with fewer GPs, where they have confidence in those GPs' ability to generate attractive returns across multiple alternative asset classes and strengthen those partnerships in return for being a real partner. You know, helping us build businesses, sharing the economics of those businesses, getting appropriate fee discounts for being a large, a large LP. And if you don't... At our scale, if you don't have the ability to speak to invest across multiple asset classes, you risk losing some of those relationships, because they're picking their large partners.
We had a great foundation of trusted relationships across multiple classes of private equity and real estate, which we had grown organically, but we were missing that credit piece. So to service those large clients, that was important. The other element on the client side is channels like insurance and high net worth. In the insurance business, we have some great private equity relationships with large insurance companies, but by definition, it's a small part of what they do. And if you can't be a value-added investor in private credit, you really can't be a strategic partner to insurance companies. And high net worth, the movement toward more kind of semi-liquid structures, permanent capital structures, requires more than just private equity. So adding a high-quality credit investing platform enabled really all of that.
Jack, how financially accretive do you expect the transaction to be? And maybe remind us what color you gave us in terms of both revenue and expense synergies.
So at the time we announced the deal, we said we expected it to be high single digit accretive to FRE in 2024, not assuming any cost or rev, or revenue synergies. Obviously, we're our job is to go capture both of those, and I'd say we feel more confident in that synergy estimate now than we did back then. On the synergy side, it really is not a deal premised on cost synergies. I mean, some M&A, you know, in the markets is primarily driven by cost synergies. This is all about generating revenue growth and operating leverage. So we're of course, we announced at Analyst Day, back in November, that we had already captured $9 million of cost synergies.
We're gonna drive to an efficient operating platform, and there is some redundancy in what the two sides of our firms have done historically. We have found more cost synergies. Our general approach is to reinvest those in building for growth, because the real kind of earnings power of the combined business and the real margin enhancement opportunity is gonna come from helping both sides, helping us from scaling our businesses more quickly.
... So you briefly hit on the more of the insurance synergy component, but let's flip to the other side of the financial sector, the bank side. Alt managers are partnering up with banks. This accelerated after the March regional bank crisis last year. How does this improve your ability to partner with banks?
Well, look, banks have always been an important part of our ecosystem, as lenders to us across our buyout business, as lenders to us with capital call lines across our different fund structures, as M&A advisors to us. The broader banking system, including the regional banks, obviously, are under a lot of pressure. That didn't change, as we could see from some of the recent activity. Our ability to be a capital provider that, in some cases, helps those banks offload assets, in some cases, replaces them as lenders to those needing capital.
And the Angelo Gordon platform, one of the things we liked about it, like about it, is that, that it's a multi-strategy platform, not a monoline credit platform, and the diversity of our credit business allows us to really leg into and work with those banks and non-bank finance companies. Our structured credit business, we just acquired a book of $600 million of loans from one of the highest quality non-bank finance companies in the market. It was probably the third or fourth time they had ever sold a block of loans, but we were well-positioned to do that and generate attractive returns for our fund investors.
So, let's pivot into the growth capital business. One of your real differentiated businesses versus at least the peers that I look at, you were early, you have a strong brand. How do you think about the TAM and the growth trajectory for growth capital?
You know, as for the growth equity, it's a funny topic because if you think back to our IPO, we were preparing for the IPO in 2021, when the markets were kind of up and to the right. And as we conducted testing the waters meetings and met with you and your counterparts, one of the pieces of feedback we got in 2021 was, "Boy, this is great. You guys have got a great growth equity business." And then, shortly after we went public, we're in the doldrums of 2022, and the market volatility of 2022, and some of the feedback we heard was, "Boy, this is terrible.
You guys are too exposed to growth equity." And I think that kind of captures, in some ways, the sentiment around growth equity, and the way some people think about growth equity is more momentum-oriented, where, you know, a lot of players flooded into late-stage growth equity, kind of pre-IPO arbitrage, if you will. That's not what we do in growth equity. What we do in growth equity is much more similar to our buyout orientation. It's selective, more concentrated, more active, very focused on kind of thematically, so identifying growth sectors in various industries, not just technology, tech, healthcare, business services, and focused on driving both profitability and growth. So virtually 100% of our most recent growth fund is either already profitable or funded to profitability. And we're a much more active investor.
We have either full control or significant influence in most of what we do in growth equity. So we want to identify strong, growing companies in the industries in which we invest and help those companies grow more quickly under our ownership than they were doing on their own. You know, in the phase I referred to, where we were selling a lot of our software companies, for example, in 2019, 2020, 2021, the percentage of our growth equity invested in the sectors that got most overvalued came down. Now, we're seeing more opportunity as some of the kind of new entrants to that area are pulling back, more opportunity at more rational valuations. So as we enter this next phase, we just launched our next growth fund, you know, we see less competition, more rational valuations, and, you know, increasing opportunity.
So, we saw some of your peers launch smaller growth strategies pre-2022, and then demand kind of slowed up in the next couple of years. But I, I'm just wondering, what have you seen on the competition front? How has competition maybe intensified and then maybe even became maybe less competitive in the last two years?
Well, think about competition. First, you think about the supply side or the need for capital. The need for capital among later-stage private companies is massive. For us, the challenge is picking the right companies in the right sectors. On the competition side, I think the later stage, the kind of momentum investing I referred to before, there was a tremendous amount of capital formed. There were GPs investing funds in one year that were meant to invest in three years, and then doubling the next fund size, focused on that late-stage pre-IPO growth segment. A lot of that capital has, you know, famously pulled back. So I think the competition from those less sensitive to valuation than we are has come down, you know, significantly.
So let's move on to impact investing. So TPG was also early with impact. It's become a big theme. Which client segments globally are most attracted to this newer vertical today? And do you see the client reach and demand broadening or changing?
Yeah, so the impact is a really important business for us, where we think we have built a real leadership position. And it's a big part of our go-forward growth strategy, as we talked about on our earnings call the other day. I think it's important to just kind of level set on the background of our impact business. We began building what we call our Rise platform back in 2016 or so. And obviously, before that, we felt like we were making some investments in companies that were also making an impact through our growth and buyout businesses. But we felt like forming a dedicated capital base under a new brand called Rise was an important thing to do.
The premise of it was, you know, before that, a lot of the impact capital being raised was concessionary. It was knowingly being invested with an expectation of delivering below-market returns. Our view was we could invest in companies making an impact, generate an impact multiple on that money, as we, as we call it, and also generate market returns. And to unlock the amount of capital we need to solve some of these impact problems, like climate, you can't do it if you're not generating market returns for your clients. So we, we set about, on, on the journey of trying to prove that we could generate market returns and impact. That began almost 10 years ago. And if you look at our performance in the first Rise fund and the second Rise fund, we think we're on the way to, to proving that.
During that journey, it became clear that within the broader impact platform, the biggest need for capital was around climate solutions, is around climate solutions. That's when we branched into building a dedicated climate platform called Rise Climate, TRC. We raised our first Rise Climate Fund a couple years ago and raised $7 billion. We're now 75% invested in reserves in that platform, and that's where—Think of that as private equity climate investing. You know, carving out businesses from bigger companies, investing capital in them to grow the platforms, generating private equity returns and impact. During that journey, over the past few years of investing in that fund, it's become clear to us there's also a massive need at the asset level, more infrastructure financing, which is lower risk return, more asset oriented.
You've seen several of our peers raise infrastructure funds focused on that climate transition opportunity. We feel like we've built a platform, an ecosystem, with our Rise Climate private equity fund. We're already seeing a lot of those opportunities. We just need to raise a dedicated fund focused on more asset-level investing that will live alongside our private equity fund. So as we're out raising the next Rise Climate private equity fund, we've announced that we're also begun to hire a team to build an infrastructure business organically. All of that will, I think, speaks to your question, that we do see significant client demand.
I would say when we raised the first climate, the first Rise fund, almost 10 years ago, it was much more, it was a much smaller portion of our LP base who had capital they wanted to allocate toward impact investing. Since then, the demand from LPs for that strategy has broadened significantly, and as we're out beginning to raise these next private equity and infrastructure funds, I would tell you we're seeing a much, an acceleration in that kind of broadening of LP demand.
That's mainly what TPG is doing. What are you seeing from the competition in the impact vertical?
You know, the biggest pools of capital that have been raised have been around the infrastructure piece, with several of our peers, you know, the names of which you know. We feel like we've got a pretty interesting competitive advantage given how long we've been at this.
Okay. Let's move on to operating efficiency. How do you balance spending versus operating leverage? I know you have targets out there for our free margins, but investors are very focused on this, maybe, but probably even more so than fundraising.
So more so than fundraising?
I think they're both the two big ones.
Yeah. Well, one of the things, as CFO, one of the things I like about the FRE-centric model is when you step back, it's a relatively simple business to model, you know, we have fundraising that flows through to management fees. We're not gonna try to predict performance earnings. Those will come in when they come in. So we gotta, we've gotta be thoughtful about how we think we can scale our management fee and transaction fee, our FRR, and then what expense base we have against that. However, we did articulate when we went public a goal to expanding our FRE margin into the mid-forties before the Angelo Gordon acquisition. I think looking back on it, over the two-year journey that we've been, you know, spending time on together, I think we're pretty successful at that.
Now that we're Angelo Gordon, we've blended the combined margin down to the high 30s, and we've said that we're gonna get above 40. We believe the FRE margin will be above 40 this year. Longer term, we expect to scale back into the mid-40s, and beyond that, as we keep generating operating leverage. Could we get significantly higher than 40 this year if we chose to? Sure. You just limit spending on your people, you try to clamp down on OpEx more than we intend to do. We don't think that's the right long-term way to build franchise value. We have to invest in the teams that are deploying capital for our LPs. We have to invest in the operating platforms to support the growth that we intend to drive over the coming, you know, 3- to 5-year period.
So that's why my guidance for this year has been what it's been, which is to exceed 40%, not to overpromise on that. As we build new businesses, like, the climate infrastructure business, you know, we just announced that we hired someone to lead that business, who's got great experience. And hiring people like that, as you form new business, one of the things we think we've been very good at historically is driving not just inorganic growth, like Angelo Gordon, but organic growth. By looking at opportunities that are adjacent to what we're already doing, we see market opportunities, we form a new capital base to go after those opportunities, whether it was. That was the origin of our growth business a long time ago, as our capital business grew.
It was the origin of our impact business, it was the origin of even our real estate business, and our tech adjacencies business. As we do that, we have to titrate the expectation to generate new revenue from that business with investing in the team that's gonna expand our capability to invest in that business. And that's hard to do to avoid the J-curve. What you don't wanna do as a public company, thinking about your earnings, is go out and hire a big team that's gonna take two years to go raise capital and support that team in the meantime. So we try to have enough visibility on our ability to raise the capital to support the hiring of the team, and that's one of the keys to driving this organic growth in a profitable way.
TPG, I think, was the first public company to highlight some of the emerging fundraising challenges. I think it was the March 2022 call with denominator effect and the crowdedness.
My first earnings call.
Yeah. Yeah, I remember this one pretty clearly, but I was curious-
I never thought the word indigestion would be that interesting.
How has it improved to date? And listen, you've exceeded what everyone thought on fundraising, too, since that point.
Yeah.
But how has the backdrop, in terms of really denominator effect, because markets are up a lot, and the crowdedness, 'cause those big fundraisers, whether they were successful or unsuccessful from your peers, they're done now?
Yeah. I wouldn't say they're done. The market's always crowded with new funds being raised. But if you think about the dynamics that drove that indigestion that we saw back then, first of all, it existed in different parts of the market very differently, right? The most impacted LPs in the market were the most mature LPs, who had been in private equity the longest, who had the most mature books, think large U.S. state pension funds, for example. In contrast to other parts of the market that were growing more quickly, so they weren't yet at targets, and they were still allocating a lot of capital to get to those targets. Those are largely international pockets of capital, Asia, Middle East being the two biggest.
The ones that were most impacted were driven by, as you said, the denominator effect, where the valuations in private markets come down more slowly than public markets in a year like 2022. So the denominator of assets in a given LP's book comes down, a given percentage target for private, for private equity, 12%, becomes a smaller number, and all of a sudden, when you are adequately allocated coming into the year, you're overallocated, so you've got to slow down on your new commitments. The other factor is just cash flows.
You know, if you're a large LP, you plan cash flows with long-dated fund models that say, "If I commit $100 to TPG, I expect them to deploy that over a 3-year time period, 3- or 4-year time period, and my legacy assets should probably start monetizing, and net-net, here's the cash flow balance." And what happened in 2022 was a significant slowdown in monetization activity across the industry. Less so for us because we had done what I mentioned before. But that threw those kind of fund liquidity models out of whack. Now, as to those two dynamics, the denominator effect has definitely begun to normalize.
With public markets coming up, and you can see across the industry, private equity asset appreciation lagged public markets in the fourth quarter, because public markets moved up so quickly, and most of us don't value assets on a spot basis like that. We think as long-term investors. So that, those targets have definitely come more back closer to being in line. The cash flow issue still exists, and I think there's still a lot of pressure on GPs in the market to generate liquidity for their LPs, particularly in older books that have low what's called DPIs, distributions per invested capital. There's a lot of pressure on GPs to drive more DPI for their LPs. And I think as that occurs, which is starting to happen, you'll start to see that second dynamic normalize, too.
Now, that being said, as you said, in the tougher fundraising environment, we do feel like we performed quite well, given our private equity concentrated business back through that period, where every one of our funds is gonna exceed the prior fund in size, and that was really by rotating to the markets that had more liquidity. If you look at our buyout business. I think back in TPG 6, we probably raised 50-60% of our capital from U.S. LPs. Since then, we've built a much bigger fundraising team and a bigger footprint internationally. In TPG 9 and Healthcare Partners 2, we'll probably raise less than 40%, 30%-40% from the U.S., and the remainder from international partners.
So let's dive a little deeper in fundraising into the private wealth channel.
Mm-hmm.
Right now, about 2% of U.S. investable assets for ultra high net worth and high net worth individuals are invested in privates. That compares to the institutional channel, around 25%, and model portfolios are now putting them at 30%-40%. So we have a lot of visibility to that upward trajectory. So I'm curious, 'cause some of your peers have big semi-liquid products,
Mm-hmm.
What is your strategy and perspective on this vertical?
So we agree with your premise, that there's a lot of growth still to come from high net worth allocations to alternative assets. Historically, prior to the Angelo Gordon acquisition, we primarily had a series of long-term, locked-up private equity funds. Now, with the objective of building our brand in these channels, we had begun, 10 years ago, allocating a slice of every fund, even if we could quickly raise it from institutional investors, to important high net worth channel partners like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and others, and to build our brand in that channel.
The fact is, the segment of any high net worth clientele who want to invest in a 10-year lockup vehicle with K-1s, where we draw their capital down over a 4-year period like we do for institutions, is only the highest net worth part of the segment. The mass affluent, if you will, who will drive the biggest growth in that, in that asset allocation that you referred to, is increasingly interested in finding as you referred to it, semi-liquid structures, where they can invest day one in a fully funded vehicle. They can allocate more to it. They can redeem capital if, as long as the gates don't apply. But to manage those semi-liquid structures, you have to have the ability to manage liquidity sleeves. Having a credit business helps with that a lot.
So now that we've got the full capabilities that we have, we have. First of all, Angelo Gordon already has a series of permanent capital, semi-liquid structures. We're gonna add to that. So, alongside building out a bigger high net worth distribution team, we are actively working on new product development in the areas that we're talking about.
All right, we're coming up on a couple minutes here, so I wanted to just look at the audience and see if there's any questions. If you have a question, please raise your hand. There's one over here. Whoa! And Taylor, you can wait till the mic comes.
So my question kind of revolves around the asset-based lending kind of portion of the business. We've seen, you know, a lot of your peers really dive deep into this space, given all the debanking that's going on. Can you speak a little bit more about your opportunity there? 'Cause it seems like the credit solutions business is scaling very nicely. You have some good stuff on the essential housing and then also on your ABC fund.
Sure. For those who didn't hear it, the question was around structured credit, asset-based lending. Taking a step back, one of the things that we really liked about choosing Angelo Gordon as our credit partner is the fact that they have built a multi-asset class, multi-strategy business within credit, including the area that you're asking about. But we've got high-performing businesses with fully built-out support infrastructure in credit solutions, in structured credit, in direct lending, and in CLOs. In structured credit, which is really more asset-based lending, I agree with the premise of your question. There is a significant increase in the opportunity set there.
As regional banks have more and more challenges, non-bank finance companies need more capital to grow, the borrowers need, you know, new sources of lending. We've historically done that through our Mortgage Value Partners, credit, like, hedge fund. We just raised our first dedicated closed-end fund, asset-based credit, ABC 1, probably a year and a half, two years ago. That was fully deployed in 18 months. So we see significant need for capital. We see, now that we've built the platform, which is not easy to build with all the servicing requirements involved, we've got a significant opportunity to scale that business. It also feeds into the insurance opportunity, because a lot of the structured credit, enhanced yield, investment-grade strips that insurance companies need on their balance sheet, come out of that business.
Great. Any other questions in the audience? We have another one. We have another two here.
Hi, I just had a question about AUM versus your competitors. Does it put you in a stronger position to be a little smaller than maybe the KKR's and Blackstones of the world, or does it actually hinder the ability to grow going forward? Are you happy in that AUM position, and how do you grow? Are they in organic opportunities, or is it mostly gonna come from organic growth from here?
So it's funny, we when we went public, we talked about, I think one of the things on our roadshow slides was we felt like we were in the sweet spot from a size perspective. What we meant by that is we're obviously a 30-year-old firm with a pretty good brand, great track record of generating return for our LPs, but still with the, with the, with the platform to grow, but lots of room to grow. Since then, we went public, we had about $108 billion of AUM at the time. We now have $220 billion. Some of that growth came from Angelo Gordon, some of it came from just organically growing our firm. But, I do think that, the fact that we have this the same sweet spot analogy, I think, applies today, because we still...
If anything, it applies in a broader way, if you will, because we've got that sweet spot that now cuts across not just private equity, but also credit, a growing real estate. But if you think about where we are in real estate on a combined basis, we have $36 billion of assets under management in real estate. That's still relatively small compared to the broader real estate opportunity. In credit, we have $60 billion from Angelo Gordon. That's still relatively modestly sized compared to the larger players in the credit market. So we feel like we've got the track record, the LP relationships, the platform to grow, with lots of headroom to grow.
Jackie?
Thank you. Just a slightly different version of that question. As you think about the verticals that you're in, do you think that there are any other areas that you need to fill in, or do you have what you need from a product suite now to address all the markets that you've discussed?
Yeah, that's a good question. We've thought carefully about that and how to grow. And if you think about the pillars in alternatives, private equity, check; real estate, check, now with a bigger check with Angelo Gordon; credit, as I've mentioned, check, with the opportunity to scale each of those platforms. Infrastructure is the one that we, until now, are not present in. And the most interesting part of infrastructure to us is the climate transition element of infrastructure investing. And that's one we thought about, do we grow organically or inorganically? In credit, we felt like the imperative to get to scale quickly was... If you take a step back in credit, we were in credit with our partnership with Sixth Street, starting in 2009, and we, together with Sixth Street, built a great business in private credit organically.
So we could have taken the approach of, of doing that all over again. It felt to us like the private credit market had matured enough, the importance of critical mass had increased, that we had to get there more quickly than we could organically, hence the decision to pursue the Angelo Gordon acquisition. In infrastructure, because of the brand we've built and the market presence we have on the private equity side through Rise Climate, we feel like we've got a natural ability, being in that ecosystem already, seeing the companies and the assets already, to build a team and raise capital and grow that business organically. The other business that we're—several new businesses that we're building organically, one would be real estate credit, with our TREC Fund, building on our real estate private equity platform.
Another would be the secondaries market, which is obviously a big market in the private equity, a big market that's been growing rapidly, and we're building into that organically as well.
With that, we are out of time. Jack, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, thank you very much for coming.
Thank you. Thanks for hosting.