Brilliant. I think we'll kick off. That's the right, firstie. Lovely to see you all here. Thank you so much for coming, and welcome to NBPE's Capital Markets Day 2025. Most sure, and, and most in the room, but for those who don't—I'm Luke. I'm part of the NBPE team based here in London. Before I hand over to William Maltby, the Chair of NBPE, to kick things off for the day, just a little bit of housekeeping. I apologize. We aren't, we aren't looking—well, there won't be hopefully any fire alarms, but if there are, we'll go out that way, and please just follow one of the team. The way we're gonna run this session is the agenda will flow naturally. We do have a point at the end for Q&A, so please, if you do have specific questions, please do leave them for the session at the end. You can either email me for those of you online or in the room. Please pop your hand up. We will have roving mics for that part of the session. That is it from me. I will be between—we have one of our colleagues joining from the U.S., and he will be up here online for his session. Without further ado, William, I will hand over to you, sir. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We have a full agenda here today. I just wanted to talk you through a couple of slides, particularly in relation to the updated capital allocation framework that we announced this morning and the background to it. Oh, sorry. Hold on. I think I need to go on another one. Oh, am I—am I going the right way, Luke? Yep. Here we go. There we go. That's the slide I was looking for. This—here we—here we're showing is—and I think the important bullet is the, the second one on the—on the left-hand side—that we've received $165 million of cash proceeds year-to-date. And that's a very significant uplift from last year, particularly just from the, you know, it's 50% higher than from the direct co-investments last year. With a maturing portfolio and a number of exit-ready companies, we're increasingly optimistic about the outlook for distributions for 2026. Turning to the context, the NAV and the sh—um, the total return performance. We had a great performance, double-digit compound growth over 5 and 10 years, but we very much recognize that, over the recent period, life has been quite a lot more lean. Whilst we, you know, this—and we're certainly not alone in this—it certainly reflects the private equity industry, below running at, lower than norms. Of course, there's been a bit of a double whammy because you've got the discounts across the whole listed investment company sector and those in the listed private equity sector in particular have widened. You've got the, um—that has impacted shareholder returns. What I want to reassure you is that the board and the manager are totally committed to taking steps to try and narrow the discount. As we've said in the interims and are repeated again today, we want to drive performance and to deliver long-term shareholder value. The actions that we announced today really are sort of part of that journey of delivering long-term shareholder value, and they underscore the board's proactive management approach to maximizing returns for shareholders. They also reflect our view on the strength of the portfolio and the improving outlook. I think we're also excited, as I turn to the next slide, to have the opportunity to commit $100 million to, over the next three-six months, new investments because we know that new investments will really drive returns, and that, particularly long, long-term returns. NBPE has operated over the last few years where we had quite a cautious view on the exit environment. We've operated towards the bottom end of our leverage investment range, and we now, with the confidence that we have in the exit pipeline, we now feel confident to move that investment ratio up towards 105%-110%, and take it there with the exit pipeline coming forward. The second part of the use of our capital allocation policy is—driving shareholder value—is returning money to shareholders. There are really two main legs to that part. The first is the dividend, and we have reaffirmed our commitment to the existing dividend policy of basically distributing 3% of NAV a year. We have been very consistent over this for a long period, and we have paid out more than $400 million in dividends since 2013. The second part is our buyback program. We announced today that—we announced back in February that we had allocated $120 million to our buyback program over three years. After a relatively slow start to the year, we started to pick up the pace of the buybacks, and I am sure most of you will have noticed that. This morning we announced that we will accelerate that pace even further should the discounts remain wide, and that we will basically bring forward the use of that $120 million. That really reflects our confidence in the portfolio, its prospects, and also the improving outlook for realizations. You will hear a lot more from the Neuberger team about that later. We also continue to believe that the wide discount that the shares have been trading at does not reflect the value of the portfolio. Obviously, there is the accretion element at the current discount, and the accretion effect is to NAV per share. Finally, just before I hand over, I would like to say that our model, our co-investment model, gives us great flexibility to pace both buybacks and new investments. It is one of the strengths of our model. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Peter for the next section of today's presentations. Thanks, William. Hello, everyone, and thank you very much for coming. Today we'll be providing you with a deep dive on the markets, and NBPE's portfolio. Here we go. We're excited to share with you our views on prospects for the future, particularly regarding realizations. Before the presentations from my colleagues, I thought I'd take a minute to recap our strategy and business model. For those of you who, like me, have been around long enough to remember, NBPE started life as a fund of funds listed on Euronext in 2007. While we've evolved over the years, we've always been focused on creating shareholder value, both from our investment portfolio and driving demand for our shares. We've done this while managing risk by focusing on maintaining a conservative capital structure. As a result, we're proud to have been a leader in innovation. For example, we are the first Euronext-listed vehicle to move to the London market in 2009 and onto the premium listing in 2018. We're the first vehicle to focus on direct co-investments, and we're also the first listed private equity company to have an investment-grade credit rating. Today, we're the only pure-play co-investment vehicle listed on the LSE. This provides our shareholders with access to a $1.3 billion portfolio of investments directly in the private companies alongside top-tier private equity managers in their core areas of expertise. This strategy has delivered strong long-term investment returns, a 16.1% gross IRR and a 2.1x multiple of cost over the last five years on our private equity investments. Now, our business model of making these investments directly is relatively unique for London Investment Trusts. Most of our peers, both fund of funds and direct models, make their investments by making commitments to funds, either their own funds or funds managed by third parties. They do that, and then they pursue an overcommitment model by committing more than the size of their vehicle, to reach and maintain a full investment level. We believe that our approach, of investing directly, provides multiple advantages while reducing risk. It allows us to make each decision, investment by investment, based solely on what's in the best interest of NBPE's portfolio and our shareholders. It means that we're capable of responding real-time to market conditions and not having our capital deployment being driven by fund commitments that were made many years before. This materially lowers the risk of our capital structure. We don't have large overcommitments and/or off-balance sheet leverage. We are also very fee-efficient, providing manager diversification with only a single layer of fees that are materially lower than the fees of many others in our industry. Now, we have a full lineup for this afternoon, but I'd like to outline some of the key points that we're gonna go through with you today. First of all, NBPE has a high-quality portfolio with strong underlying investment performance, strong underlying operating performance in our portfolio companies. Also, importantly, the exit market is improving, and we have a number of exit-ready companies in our portfolio. We have a strong capital position and balance sheet, which gives us the flexibility to deploy capital, both in new investments and share buybacks, as William mentioned. The strength of Neuberger Berman's platform as a strategic partner to top-tier private equity managers is a unique strength. We have a strong pipeline of new investment opportunities, particularly midlife transactions. These are investments into companies that are midway through their value creation plans, and you'll hear more about that activity this afternoon. Thanks again for coming, and we look forward to speaking to you later in the day. Now I'll hand over to Pascal. There you are. Thank you, Peter, and thanks, everyone, for being here today. Pascal Casavecchia, for those who do not know me, Managing Director in our London office, spend most of my time on investment activities, including co-investments and some degree of primary fund coverage. Over the long term, private equity has delivered, has performed, has arguably outperformed public markets equivalents. That performance or outperformance has delivered growth to the asset class. You have seen increasingly, you know, these charts show you 2020- 2025 and then the outlook towards 2032. Pretty much all sorts of investors have increased their allocations, gradually but steadily, to private markets. One of the phenomenons that we talked about recently is more the individuals or the high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals increasing and projected to continue to increase at very healthy CAGRs. Their allocations going forward will be, granted starting from, relatively small figures. We'll talk about performance. And whilst we recognize that 2021 was an exceptional year in private markets, in private equity, particularly driven by a multitude of factors from economic strength to expanding multiples to, in fact, lots of exit activity, which typically creates pops in valuations and hence annualized performances. The following three or four years arguably have been more muted in activity. Mathematically, what you will see by looking at each of these years, and Paul will go into the portfolio for NBPE, which will show you that, you know, what I'm about to say is applicable to NBPE as well, is you have two counter effects. One has been good private equity portfolios have continued to perform operationally, right? You'll see good levels of, you know, revenue growth, earnings growth, very, very healthy levels indeed, somewhat offset, if not completely offset, by compressing multiples in valuation environment. Those two things have, to some extent, offset each other. Again, stepping back for one second and looking at the health of the underlying portfolios, you will see very, very attractive metrics in terms of fundamental performance underneath. We continue to believe that the asset class will perform in the long run. That's what it's designed for structurally. We think some of the main reasons, and we'll go through those, are, you know, strong governance models as well as optimal alignments across all actors in the industry. It's fundamentally a skill-based asset class where you will see increasing dispersion of performance across actors, so where investment selection is absolutely key to success. Diving into this year, what did we expect? I like the dramatic effect of the slide 'cause not to, you know, but you'll see the thingy. What did we expect? We expected essentially a low probability of a hard landing from a macro environment standpoint, generally supportive regulatory environment, robust debt markets, very robust as a matter of fact, and even, you know, with accommodative policy from central banks and usually generally positive global sentiment, macroeconomic worldwide. April, Liberation Day. That has created lots of uncertainty. Some of that uncertainty you will see has, to some extent, dissipated, but uncertainty is the enemy of activity. Private equity activity, especially in the U.S., I would argue, has somewhat slowed in the second quarter of this year. In the second half of this year, what we've seen is, you know, to some extent, private equity-backed companies have, in general, economies have performed, have demonstrated resilience to the uncertainty and the various aspects that we were worried about. Federal Reserve as well as other central banks have started easing. Debt markets have remained very stable. Our credit team, our credit colleagues will argue that this is kind of the tightest spread environment they have seen historically, if not one of those. And renewed optimism, cautious optimism on the health of the underlying economy. Why do we think PE is well-positioned, though? I've talked about governance, right? You control companies here, right? You are enabled to be nimble and flexible and move your, reallocate your strategy and efforts towards what works for a specific company in a specific macro environment. Private equity has tended to buy companies that have had less or no direct exposure to tariffs. Indirectly, everybody has some exposure to tariffs. But directly, l argely service-based, businesses that have been insulated from direct impact. You know, disruption does create activity and does create some degree of opportunity. We will talk about valuations later, but we have seen that, you know, careful investment selection with management incentivization, supporting, having the capital to support growth initiatives and allocating that capital wisely has created the ability to create operational improvements within companies. We will talk about some of those initiatives in particular. Again, this is one slide where the dramatic effect of having the thingy go up over time would show better. Substantially, what you see is, if you look at how value creation happens in private equity, and this is a very significant and substantial subset of our underwriting over the last couple of years, if you imagine creating value through a combination of revenue growth initiatives, EBITDA margin initiatives, M&A, you see that all of these things together combine to over 100% of value creation. Where is financial engineering? Where is multiple expansion? They're not there. We're not making money. We're not underwriting value creation for our investors on the basis of financial engineering. The most value creation happens at an industrial level. Once you own a company, you know what to do. You create a thesis that's designed to be implemented over a three, four, five-year timeframe and create value through these initiatives. You have to create revenue growth, you have to create margin expansion, and private equity has been increasingly tactical about M&A within portfolio companies. Adding on competitors, suppliers, horizontally, vertically to, one, create multiple arbitrage to some extent 'cause you tend to buy smaller businesses at lower valuation than bigger businesses and then incorporate them or consolidate them into a platform, but also extracting synergies both on revenue and on cost where applicable. That has been, you know, a quarter of value creation over a long period of time now. Some of what we have been observing over the last few years, well, many years, this is kind of the same point I was making before. M&A has become more of a value creation tool. Sponsors have been increasingly tactical about it. Essentially, going back to the concern that investors have had over the last number of years now since the peak of 2021, we've seen less liquidity, we've seen less monetization, less exit activity in the market. That has created multiple consequences and effects. We will give you the message, which you will see in the metrics that we think the trough has passed and we have seen numbers trending up. You see that private equity-owned portfolios have become larger in terms of number of companies. You sell less, you tend to continue to buy. More companies managed by private equity sponsors, but also the length, sorry, the ownership period has tended to increase over time. Do we think, do we have reasons to believe that exit activity is building up? Yes, we do. If you look at troughing pretty much around Q3, Q4, 2023, activity has begun again. There has been more exits in the last 18-ish months. One slide that will hopefully give you a good sense for where we are going is, if you look over a long period of time, this is 15 years, pretty much on average, private equity has tended to return about 25% of beginning year NAV. In other words, if the aggregate industry was managing $100 billion in stock, in equity, in assets, again, over a long period of time, some years more, some years less, it averages around 25% of distributions. It has actually, this figure, troughed at 12.8% in Q3 2023, and it's now perking up back up towards the average. We're now at just over 17%. Again, encouraging sign to show that activity is picking up again. What has this meant for valuation? I'd say two things. One is. Good companies have transacted, bad companies have not. Good companies have not been cheap. For those who have wanted or been able to acquire or sell businesses, they have transacted at elevated multiples. However, again, in a, you know, if you compare to 2021, again, peak of the market, slowly but surely, transaction multiples have somewhat reduced over time. On the right side, we show a comparison between public markets and private markets. I, frankly, I always look skeptically at these figures in that you don't know what's in there, right? I mean, public markets is a lot of companies, private markets is a lot of companies. It's not apples to apples. We do think that, relatively speaking, the environment is now attractive, relatively attractive from a valuation standpoint if somebody has access to a number of opportunities. What are my key takeaways for today? One is, I would say, institutional and retail investors have continued to allocate to the asset class driven by the understanding that, you know, it's long-term performance that matters. Why is that long-term performance consistently strong? Because of structural advantages that the asset class has in terms of governance and alignment. Muted in recent years. Again, we see signs of recovery, particularly in activity, in exit activity that will generate distributions as well as hopefully pop in valuations. The way private equity managers have created value has changed over time, and it's increasingly based on industrial competencies and ability to create value by enhancing revenue, margins, profits, and create tactical opportunities with M&A. Valuations remain full, but adjusting mildly over the last couple of years to be now relatively more attractive. Thank you, everybody. Of course, I am the Co-head of the Co-investment Group here at Neuberger Berman, and I've been with the firm for 23 years and have managed the Co-investment business since its inception, 20 years ago with David Stonberg, my other Co-head. If we could move to the next slide, the next slide shows our private equity platform here at Neuberger. The simplest way to think about this page is our goal, our objective, our philosophy is to be the capital solutions provider to our private equity partners. That could be investing in our, in their funds, our primary business. That could be investing in individual transactions of our private equity partnerships. That's the co-investment business. It could be providing structured equity into the portfolio companies of our sponsors. That's the capital solutions piece. We could be funding the debt of the acquisitions of our partners. That would be private debt. We could be creating liquidity for the limited partners of those funds through our secondaries group. You'll see, as it says on the right here, we are a preferred partner, not a competitor. We're here to be on the same side of the table as our private equity sponsors, providing them the capital that they need to effect the transactions that they're trying to successfully complete. Moving to the next slide, you will see we are truly a global presence, a global firm. Over 90 investment professionals work on co-investment supported by a significant staff, as you can see here. I just mentioned I've been with the firm for 23 years. The average MD in investment professionals have been with the firm for over 16. We have co-investment professionals in Delhi, Boston, New York, London, Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The portfolios we build are truly global, and they are populated by individuals resident in those geographies. Next page, please. The years that I've managed it with my partners is we pro-approach the market in one fundamental way, and that is we want to be the critical strategic capital for the portfolio companies of our private equity sponsors. We lean very heavily into those situations where our capital is critical. We don't wait for a traditional or a syndicated co-investment to come across our table. We don't wait for the phone to ring. If the phone rings with a traditional syndicated passive coinvestment, we chastise ourselves for not having figured out that that transaction was happening sooner and getting involved more sooner. We don't wanna wait for the right time and the right place for a coinvestment. We wanna create the right time and the right place. What that means for us as a business is two specific types of coinvestments. One is what we call midlife coinvestment. That is where we partner very early on with a private equity firm to provide the capital they need because they need our capital to get their deal done. They don't have the luxury or the timing or wanna take the risk of a traditional syndicated coinvestment. They need a partner early on that is going to be money good, date certain as they go through their negotiation with the board of the selling company and the seller themselves. Coinvestment is partner early and provide them with the capital they need and other support that they need to get their transactions done. We also focus heavily on what we call midlife investing, which is simply providing coinvestment equity capital into a portfolio company of a sponsor after they've owned the company for a period of time. It could be a year, it could be two years, it could be five years. Again, that capital is being brought in to affect a strategy or an outcome that the sponsor is looking for in that individual transaction. It could be, and as very often, they need additional capital to make a big acquisition of a company that they may have owned for three years. They may not have enough capital in their existing fund that the transaction sits in to effect that acquisition. They may want to bring in a subsequent fund in their fund family into an existing investment, and they need a third party like ourselves to come in, set the structure, the valuation, and the terms so that they can bring another fund in their fund family into that transaction. They may want to provide some liquidity for their limited partners while continuing to control the company and continuing to move forward with the value creation. These co-underwrite transactions meet these midlife transactions, are proactive, value-added, active investment opportunities on our part as opposed to passive across the transom opportunities. If you were to look at the, and I know you have the portfolio of NBPE, you'll see that of the last five deals, four of them were midlife transactions. One of them was a co-underwrite. Absolutely illustrative of the strategy that we're looking for here as a co-investment platform at Neuberger. If we move to the next page, you can see we've been doing this now for quite a long time, and are constantly honing our approach to co-investment, but these are really the critical aspects. I've already talked about being proactive, but we actively source our opportunities from our GPs, particularly in the midlife and the co-underwrite space. You can see we have over 920 active fund investments globally. That is where we go and we seek our co-investment opportunities. We sit on 460 limited partner advisory committees. That is n ot only tightening the relationship with our general partners, but it also keeps our ear very close to the ground. You'll see some examples of that in a minute, but it keeps our ear very close to the ground. Opportunity that may arise in that particular management. Over last year, we've, as a firm, over $18 billion in primary co-investments, secondaries, and private credit, which makes us a material participant in the private equity ecosystem. Obviously, we are working on business. We're looking at margin growth. We're looking for situations where our capital is strategic in improving the scale, the opportunity set of that portfolio company such that it brings it closer to a time of ultimate exit. You can see that our selection rate, we looked at 512 deals, so far in 2025, we've done 9% of them, and we've committed about $4 billion this year to coinvestments alone, in executing on this strategy. Again, a significant participant in the ecosystem. In some ways, our philosophy is quite simple. I mentioned pick the very best deals, but really importantly, it is with premier private equity sponsors in their core areas of expertise. We want to be with a world-class partner, investing in those areas that they are most familiar with and have the longest auditable, hopefully sustainable track record in those types of investments. Lastly, we look and we build very diversified portfolios across all of our mandates. Diversification for us means diversification by manager, by vintage year, by geography, by enterprise value. We will have small cap, mid cap, large cap, and mega cap transactions in these portfolios. Importantly, because of where we play in the ecosystem, we get these opportunities within coinvestment on a no fee, no carry basis, which, as Peter von Lehe mentioned earlier, removes a significant layer of the fee friction from these coinvestment portfolios as we build them. The benefit of that, of that fee exclusion inures directly to you, our investors, in this case in NBPE. If we move to the next page, it has been a very attractive environment for the last 3.5 years, in terms of deploying coinvestment. A lot of it stems from, and I won't go into great detail, you're all quite familiar with it. A lot of it stems from the low distribution environment that we've seen in private equity for the last, call it, 3.5 years. You saw some green shoots around distribution activity with one of Pascal's slides, but we're still in an era where distributions are lower certainly than the historical average. It means the more need for equity financing. It means the need for more coinvestment. Many coinvestors, particularly limited partner coinvestors, that were previously in the market, say 2021 and earlier, many of them pulled out of the market. They found themselves overallocated to the asset class and decided to slow down their private equity program by stopping coinvesting. We, being very fortunate on this platform to have capital at all times, good times and bad, were able to then deploy that capital into a market that needed that capital. From an investment perspective, we said we have the opportunity to be a liquidity provider in a relatively illiquid environment. Therefore, how do we do that in a co-investment context? The answer is lean in very heavily to our co-underwrite capabilities and be that money good, date certain for that particular sponsor. Where they're not ready to subcompany, they bring in other private equity sponsors. They bring in a friendly co-invest partner who gets them the capital they need, but allows them to continue to be the sole vision and the sole driving force for the value creation of that individual business. You can see our deal flow, and I have another page on this, but our deal flow today, 12 deals a week. The beauty of having 12 deals a week, aside from my amazing team that generates these 12 deals a week, the beauty of having 12 deals a week is I never have to worry about where that next deal is coming from. I do not have to fall in love with anything. I look at, we, my team, we look at the 12 deals a week, we decide what we want to work on, and we say no to those we do not want to work on because I saw 12 deals last week. I am going to see 12 deals this week. I am going to see 12 deals next week. I do not have to fall in love with anything. It has to fit the mold. It has to fit the model or we move on as a team. In fact, my dearest resource, frankly, is dedicating two, three, four people to an individual co-underwrite or an individual midlife for two, three, four months as they help the sponsors bring that transaction, bring that transaction to ground. We continue while the exit environment appears to be improving. The distribution environment appears to be improving. We are still very much in an era where co-underwrite opportunities and midlife opportunities are heavily sought after by our sponsor partners. That is exactly the market that we are meeting and trying to meet every day. On the next slide, you will see overall global deal flow has declined. If we could advance to the next slide, please. There we go. Global buyout deal flow has declined 12% since 2021 on an annual basis. You'll see it did tick up in 2024, as Pascal mentioned in his presentation. We are making the pull down year. Transactions 2025 and impaired 2024. Feels like some of the noise is behind us and starting to improve again. Given a backdrop of a 12% global buyout deal flow decline, we saw our deal flow up 51%. That deal flow increase was very heavily in the midlife opportunities and the co-underwrite opportunities where we truly differentiate ourselves as a private equity capital provider. Many, many sophisticated co-investors are in a midlife scenario that is coming into a company after two, three years that the sponsors owned it. Many other of our competitors are uncomfortable coming into a co, into a midlife opportunity because they're uncomfortable setting valuations. They're uncomfortable doing primary diligence themselves. They're uncomfortable negotiating downside protection. They're uncomfortable negotiating extremely complex documentation. We are very comfortable doing that. I come from a controlled private equity background. My team comes from a controlled private equity background. My investment committee comes from a controlled private equity background. We know what it's like to be on that side of the table. Therefore, are comfortable with those negotiations and those structures. We have been very fortunate in our pursuit of co-underwrite and midlife in driving deal flow the way you can see on the right side of this page. We are going to segue now to a quick video from Jason Mironov, one of our GP partners at, at, oh, I'm sorry, go back, go back. What? I'm sorry, I jumped a page. This is a really important slide, so I'm glad I, I'm glad I caught it. Very importantly, and we get this question all the time, is, Dave, given the relative lack of liquidity the last 3.5 years, the private equity, the public equity markets have been closed or have been, sort of, disappeared for a while there in 2020 and 2023. We had inflation, interest rolling up. You'll have GPs, therefore, changed or reevaluated their return expectation. We looked at, as a platform, all of the co-investments that we completed going back to 2018. You can see here between 20%, the 23% is the gross, the yellow line, and the 20% is what would be the net, if we layered fees and expenses on top. The points, of course, are the same, which is, if you look at 2018, underwritten, this is the base case of our private equity sponsor in each of these transactions. They underwrote in 2018 to a 23%. 19%, 23%, 20%, 23%. You can see it ranges from a low of 22% in 2021 to a high of 24% in a number of years here. No, our private equity sponsors have not reevaluated or reduced their return expectations. That is part of the reason exit activity has been slow because buyers are being disciplined, hence looking for returns that they have had, if not discovered in their willingness to sell into the market. Therefore, some of the lack of exits we have seen over the last 3.5 years. Now we will segue to a short video by Jason Mironov, one of our partners at TA Associates, firm based in Boston, but you will hear Jason himself is in Menlo Park. My name is Jason Mironov, and I am a partner at TA Associates. By way of a brief introduction, TA is one of the oldest private equity firms in the world. Founded in 1968, we are investing out of a $16.5 billion fund, and I help lead our efforts in business and financial services. I'm based here in Menlo Park, California. I have the pleasure of speaking about Benicon and our recent partnership with the Neuberger Berman team. Benicon, founded in 1991 and headquartered in Pennsylvania, provides self-funded employee health benefit solutions for public and private sector employees across the United States. The company specializes in tailored self-funded health plans, allowing employers to manage healthcare costs while controlling plan design. It also offers consortiums and cooperatives, enabling multiple public employees to pool resources and reduce financial risk. Benicon provides comprehensive support services, including actuarial, compliance, finance, and wellness. Consulting through its subsidiary, ConnectCare 3. Benicon was a long-term prospect for TA, and I spent the better part of three years building a relationship with the founder, Sam Lombardo, culminating in a proprietary majority investment in December 2020. Over the following four years, the company made significant progress on its growth plan, outperforming our budgets and more than tripling EBITDA. In late 2023, given this success, we began exploring a new partner to help continue Benicon's growth momentum. Neuberger Berman, led by Michael Smith, stood out for their data-driven approach, efficient and thorough diligence, and management-friendly style. From the first meeting, their ability to add value through sector expertise, distribution relationships, and insights was clear. In January 2024, we closed the investment with Neuberger. The business has continued to grow and expand, with the Neuberger team providing invaluable support in analysis, recruiting, and business execution. As we continue to evaluate other investments and transactions, we are eager to deepen our collaboration with Neuberger Berman and look forward to both Benicon's future success and our long-term partnership with Mike's team. Terrific. If I'm live again, three things were absolutely music to my ears as a manager of this business in that video. The first was Jason saying that he had been shadowing and developing a relationship with that company for three years. Not some auction that happened over a two-month period. He had been doing, with his team, the relationship building for three years. Second part of that comment is they then owned it for four years. Mike Smith and our partner in our Boston office tracked the company for the four years that. TA Associates owned it and saw that the EBITDA tripled over that four-year period. Second bit of music. First bit of music to my ear, an extremely well-known asset by both the sponsor and by us. Number one. Number two, Jason said, we began to explore looking for a new partner. That is catnip to me and to my partners. That is exactly the entree that we're looking for in a conversation to do a midlife transaction with one of our partners. Sure enough, Mike perked up his ears, jumped in, immediately proposed, let's do a midlife transaction between ourselves and Neuberger. You do not have to go through this process. You do not have to bring in a competitor. You do not have to bring in a strategic, wherever else you might have gotten that capital. Do it with us. We are the only. Co-investor in that transaction. We created it in partnership with TA as a platform. I think we put about $287 million in that investment, NBPE $25 million. Again, the reason we're the sole investor in this transaction is we created it in partnership with our partner. The third piece, I've talked about being value-added. I've talked about being forward-leaning in our deal sourcing. You also heard Jason say we add a lot of value after the fact, which we do. We bring all of our GP relationships and all of our transactions, the resources of Neuberger Berman post-closing that can help them effect, realize the value creation strategy that they have, going forward. An excellent example of exactly how we try and proactively create a transaction. No, our phone did not ring saying, "Dave, we're thinking of, Dave, we just did a deal," or Mike Smith in this case, "We just did it. We just did a deal and we're syndicating a piece of it. Do you want some?" That is the complete opposite of our business model. Moving to the next case study, I'll do this quickly. This is a transaction called Infra Group. I'll spend time again on the setup here, which I think is really important to help people appreciate the way we source our opportunities. This is one of the most recent investments we've done in NBPE. I think it was in late September. The Infra Group designs, implements, and executes on complex and critical infrastructure projects across Europe, particularly focusing on updating and modernizing, you know, aged infrastructure. It could be utility infrastructure, it could be sewer, it could be electrical, utility-based, that type of thing, but helping very complex executions on infrastructure projects. It had been in, PAI is our partner here, another firm we know extremely well. It had been in their portfolio for over two years. It had performed very well. The company had grown extremely well in terms of revenues. It had doubled its revenues through a combination of organic growth as well as making 26 individual acquisitions to continue to grow the platform. PAI saw that growth and especially saw the growth opportunity of continued M&A activity. They needed additional equity capital in order to continue to execute on their M&A program. Again, here's a situation where they actually went out. They spoke to other, they spoke to other controlled private equity firms. They spoke to other strategic competitors about providing capital to help them grow. In this process, we went to them. Let me back up. There was so much interest in this company from those private equity folks and from particularly one strategic that PAI and its partners suddenly said, "Wait a minute. We actually do not want to bring in a competitor. We do not want to bring in a strategic. We want to bring in, in fact, we want to bring in one of our newer private equity funds to invest in this company. Therefore, we're going to put our money in through a new fund into this opportunity and we're going to bring Neuberger in because Neuberger will be the new money, the third party, the arm's length arbiter of structure, pricing, etc, like I talked about in executing on a midlife transaction. You can see some more, here's that revenue growth that I cited. Here is a situation where they went down a formal path with other private equity firms, with strategics, and still doubled back and said, "Wait a minute, we've got a tiger by the tail. We want to put more of our own capital in this, but we need a third party in Newburgh, someone we know and trust to come in again, set the terms, the pricing, the valuation. Just as, as a very quick summary, again, very well-established, very mature global co-investment team that is focusing on providing all the things that you see on this particular page, providing that to our sponsors. The key point being is we are not sitting waiting for the phone ring. We are in constant dialogue with our general partners, with our private equity sponsors, evaluating portfolios, keeping our ear to the ground as to what's going on in those portfolio companies, raising our hand and saying, "How can we bring the capital to bear on whatever the situation is to help you affect what you want to achieve?" That is it for my presentation. Thank you very much. Dave, and thank you all for that. That concludes the first half of the presentation. We'll take a very quick 10-minute break, if that's all right, for people to go grab another drink and maybe a brownie or something outside, and we're back to hear from Paul to do a deep dive on the NBPE portfolio. So 10 minutes and we'll reconnect. Great. I'll just wait a couple of seconds for everyone to take their seats. Great. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Paul Daggett. I'm now going to dig into the portfolio, the performance, and do many of the reviews you'd expect. My speaker's not working. Is it? Is it any better now? I think it's... Is that any better? Or I can just talk louder. It's still a bit quiet. How about now? I'm not sure if it's actually on or... No, it's still on. Okay. Is that better? I'm getting thumbs up. There we go. There we go. I can tell the difference now. Great. I'm Paul Daggett. I'm going to cover the portfolio and the performance. Thank you all for being here. Here we go. We tried to add some new analysis this year. We've got some of the same slides you'll recognize, but hopefully some of the meat in the middle is a little bit different. Hopefully that'll be interesting and useful. To start off with, the performance year-to-date has been 3% of NAV return. Obviously, that's below our target, but we think there are a number of positive factors that really are underpinning that. You see those on this page. First of all, on the far left, the operating performance of the companies remains very strong. The private companies continue to drive value within the portfolio. Realization activity is continuing, and that has been happening with very good results and attractive uplifts. Finally, we think, as you've heard, I think from every speaker so far, we do think there's momentum building in the exit markets. We have a positive outlook for exits, both from the top down in terms of the market environment, but also from the bottom up, looking at company by company through our portfolio. This slide you have seen before, it looks at the overall portfolio. It's a $1.3 billion portfolio. We have 71 direct equity investments today. The top 10 make up 40% of that portfolio, and the top 30 that you see on the left of the pie chart make up almost 80% of the portfolio. This time, a year ago, we had about 82 positions. We had exactly 82 positions in the portfolio. Now we're down to 71. Actually, when we've received the cash from two other pending exits, we'll be down to 69. That really illustrates the fact that we've been a net seller over the past year. A lot of that has been smaller, what I would call non-core positions, but some of it's been in larger, bigger exits that we'll talk about as we go through as well. We're invested alongside 46 different private equity managers in the portfolio. As Dave Morris talked about, we do stress the fact that we bring a lot of different types of diversification, including investing alongside a lot of different managers. The most deals we have with any single sponsor is three. The largest exposure to any individual sponsor is about 7% of the fund. Finally, one of the things Pascal talked about is on the bottom right of the page. Again, this number has been building, as we have spoken to you every year for the last few years. That is the fact that the portfolio has now been held on average for 5.7 years. That is really driven by two factors. One, there is a theme of private equity sponsors holding assets for longer. Secondly, we have had this three-year period or so where there has just been less liquidity in markets. The average age has come up to about 5.7 years. That compares to the slide that Pascal showed, where the average company has been exited after 5.8 years in private equity so far this year. It really shows you the portfolio is maturing. Of course, that's part of the reason that we think we're well-positioned for exits. Just continuing with diversification for pie charts from left to right, we are weighted to the U.S. We have been for the long term. About 75% of the portfolio is U.S.-focused, but a meaningful part of the existing portfolio and also the ongoing deal flow we see is in Europe. Industries are well diversified. The three biggest industries are technology, consumer, and industrials. All are about 20% of the portfolio today. Vintage year, we're 5.7 years average age. That obviously means we do have a meaningful exposure to older vintages. You see that between 2016- 2019 on this pie chart, that's about half of the portfolio in those older vintages. The final talking point on that pie chart really is, if you look at younger vintages, we do have relatively less exposure. Again, I'll come to that later in the presentation. The last chart is enterprise value. We look at the enterprise value from companies less than $1 billion, which we would call probably lower mid-market, up to some larger companies we do have in the portfolio. The average is $5 billion. Really, the point there is we are bringing mid-market exposure and the type of exposure that is difficult to get through public markets when you look at the enterprise values within the portfolio. This slide looks at the performance of the assets that are held in the portfolio. The chart, the bars are the amount of net asset value by vintage year that we made those investments. The diamonds are the multiple of invested capital that we've made on the investments. Of course, at the top, you see the companies that are the largest exposures by vintage year. Really, the point of the slide is that we have a very good portfolio. You can see it has performed well over time. Between 2015- 2023, we're holding those companies at an average multiple of 2.1x. I think we've had a three-year period where growth has been a little bit slower. The key point is these companies have grown over time. They have performed well. When we come to the operating performance, you'll see they're still performing well. The top 10 is relatively unchanged from what we talked about a year ago, but there are two new entries. Those are Mariner and FDH. Both of those are 2024 investments. We have talked really over the last year about how well those companies have performed. On average, the four new investments we made last year have grown revenue and EBITDA by 13% over the last 12 months. In the case of Mariner and FDH, that has meant their values have uplifted enough to get them into the top 10. On the far right, though, you will see the percentage of the starting value that companies have, in most cases, improved over the past year. Four companies have grown in value by more than 20%. That is Action, Ozaiq, Monroe, and FDH. There is one company that declined very slightly in value, which is a company called Branded Cities that we have talked about in the past. It is still doing well. The market in advertising was a little bit tough in the first half of the year, but we think the company is really well-positioned and very much on the right path. It did have a slight decline in value, but we're still very positive on its prospects. The largest increase in value on the page is FDH, which I mentioned very briefly. We have a video to talk about that. This was, again, echoing some of Dave Morris's words and messages. This was a mid-life investment that we made, very much a situation that we helped to create ourselves. It is in a company owned by a fund called Audax, which is a mid-market buyout fund based in Boston. They had owned this company since 2017, and it is held out of a 2016 vintage fund. They had a situation where they wanted to add on a significant company. Because it was in an older fund, it was difficult for them to draw down equity in it. It was a perfect situation for us to step in and provide a minority recap to allow them to continue to own the company and to add value to the company. I'll hand over to a video with my partner, JT, just to talk through this investment. In May 2024, Neuberger Berman made a significant minority equity investment in FDH Aero, a leading distributor of C-class parts to the aerospace and defense industry. With more than 60 years of experience, FDH specializes in components that include hardware, electrical, chemical, and consumable products for original equipment manufacturers and aftermarket customers. FDH Aero is majority owned by Audax Group. Since 2023, Neuberger Berman has made multiple investments in the company with uses of proceeds, including the completion of a creative M&A and providing partial liquidity to existing shareholders. In 2024, Neuberger Berman invested over $300 million in FDH for a minority equity stake, including $26 million of that amount from NBPE. Neuberger Berman had an opportunity to engage with Audax and the company on a bilateral basis to negotiate the investment due to our knowledge of the industry and our ability to serve as long-term partners who could continue to support the growth of the business. Our capital enabled Audax to return capital to investors in a highly successful investment without entirely giving up exposure to a known company in an attractive industry. FDH Aero operates in a large market, benefiting from multiple secular tailwinds, high barriers to entry, and a compelling value chain for scaled distributors. Furthermore, FDH has established itself as a market leader to aerospace customers with a demonstrated track record of organic growth that has been augmented by a thoughtful acquisition strategy. Since 2024, the company has continued to expand relationships with new and existing customers, acquired a complementary asset to add to its rapidly expanding hardware franchise, and disposed of a foreign subsidiary to a strategic buyer at an accretive multiple. As a result, Adjusted EBITDA has grown by approximately 30% since closing and is now nearly $160 million. As of Q2 2025, our investment was marked at 1.6x, translating to approximately $39 million of net asset value per NBPE. Continuing and talking about the operating performance of the portfolio, t wo charts here. The chart on the left looks at LTM operating metrics over time. On the far right, obviously, you see where we are today. We reported 9%. LTM revenue growth and about 10% EBITDA growth over those 12 months, which we think is a really strong place to be and really demonstrates the strength of the portfolio. One thing I think to note is that you do see, if you look back a little bit further in time, 2022 and 2023, those numbers were a little bit higher. I think it's important to note that this is both organic growth as well as M&A. When there is a large M&A event, obviously, that can really lead to a boost in those numbers. What I would say is, first of all, we think the portfolio is growing in a very healthy way on average. Secondly, I think there's probably a little bit more organic within those numbers as a percentage than in some of those prior years because there's been less large M&A events over the last 12 months. We think the portfolio is in a great place. On the right of the slide, what we're trying to demonstrate is it's really the largest companies driving value in the portfolio. You see the top 10 companies grew revenue by 14%, EBITDA by 16% over the same time period. The top 20 and the top 30 were also above that average as well. This 80% of the portfolio continues to be the driving force for the value creation in NBPE. In terms of valuations, this slide shows you that valuations over the last 3.5 years have been very steady in that sort of 15x. 15x-16x kind of range. We're at 15.4x today, and the debt has also been steady at 5.4x. If you looked back further in time, and I'll bring this out a little bit more in later slides, that multiple has actually declined. From the end of 2021, we had a multiple of over 17x. There has been a decline from 2021, but that really has steadied out. That is why we say on the slide that that appears to have played through. We think that for a portfolio with the growth profile that we have and with the sector mix that we have, both of these metrics are in a very healthy place. Moving on to realization activity, you heard at the beginning that our equity realizations are up 50% so far this year. You see that in the bottom right of the slide. The green part is equity. The blue part of the bars is mostly income investments, which obviously we do not make anymore. Those have largely exited, which is why you see that blue. Whereas this year, the exits have been driven almost completely by equity co-investment realizations, and that is up 50% on last year. Importantly, those exits, as you see in the text on the left, have also been with very good results. The average multiple that we have made on those exits is 2.7x, and there was a 17% uplift on those exits relative to three quarters prior to the exits. October was actually the strongest realization month we have had in terms of cash receipts for about three years. We received $54 million from realizations in October, and that was from two events largely. First of all, on this slide, you see an October 2025 exit. That's of a company where there hasn't been a press release by the underlying fund, so we haven't named the company. But it was a 2019 vintage investment that we sold for more than 5x our invested capital with a 16% uplift relative to three quarters prior. A really strong exit for the portfolio. The second piece was in Action. We sold down $20 million of our holding. Again, really important to stress that we still think it's a fantastic company. We very much continue to believe in it, and it will still be our largest position in the fund. We did take the chance for portfolio positioning reasons to sell down $20 million. Again, that was a very successful investment. That part that we exited was at 6x our invested capital and brings the total that we've actually returned in cash on that investment to 2.7x. We still have 5.2% of our portfolio in that company. It has been a tremendously successful investment for us and obviously one you all know very well. Now I am going to move on to the medium-term performance and dig into some of the details and some of the analysis that, as I mentioned, we have not done before, but I think it hopefully is quite insightful. Just to start off with, when you look at this slide, which is a similar slide to what Pascal showed you at the beginning, it looks in green at the private market index performance, whereas purple is NBPE. The point is, first of all, both private equity and NBPE had a fantastic year in 2021. Obviously, you know that. Over the last three years, performance has been much more muted in private markets and for NBPE's portfolio. Of course, you can see that. Comparing these numbers, NBPE has sometimes been slightly above, sometimes a little bit below the market, but generally has been in line. Really what I'm saying is, if you think back to that slide on our track record and the existing portfolio, the portfolio has done well. The underlying performance has been good, but the market as a whole has been pretty muted. What's been going on underneath that in the portfolio? The value bridge here starts with the private equity fair value on the left and moves to the private equity fair value as of 2025. Today. We're looking over 3.5 years since the end of 2021. Key points. First of all, you see the bar in the middle. It shows you that the private companies within the portfolio appreciated over that period by $167 million, which is a 13% return on those privately held companies. Now, our largest position at the end of 2021 is the number you see next to that, which declined in value by $67 million over that same time period. It's a company you all probably know, and it's a company that faced market headwinds and multiple contraction. We actually think it's on the right path today and continues to maintain a strong market position. If for now you excluded that, then that would take the rest of the private portfolio to an 18% return over that same time period. And then really. The other thing, which again, you may realize, and is important to point out, is that the public portfolio has really been a headwind in that. So $81 million of negative return on that public portfolio. From a gross level, hopefully that demonstrates that actually the private portfolio has been creating value. Linked to that point, a question we often get is, if your EBITDA has grown 10% over the last 12 months and 12% the year before and 15% the year before that, why has your NAV growth not been 10%, 12%, and 15%? Of course, the first part of that answer is there are dividends, there are management fees, there are expenses. There are also more technical factors like the weighting of an individual company within those averages changes as their valuations change. The real point is shown on this slide. From a gross level, when you disassemble the returns, if you held the multiple constant in the portfolio and factored in the EBITDA growth that we've reported over those years, you come to a $543 million gain, which is driven by that EBITDA growth. Of course, there are some things that offset that. When you look on this slide, first of all, just to the right of it, the change in net debt. I mentioned our growth is both organic and through M&A. When you do M&A, sometimes that is funded with equity, but much more often it's funded with debt. Usually that will not lead to an increase in the EV, sorry, the debt to EBITDA multiple, but it will increase the absolute debt quantum. That's what you see here, which offsets $218 million of that accretion from EBITDA growth alone. To the right of that, as I mentioned earlier, our EBITDA multiple has actually decreased over time. If you went back to the beginning of 2021, that EBITDA multiple was 17.4x. At the beginning of this period, which is June of 2022, it was 16.5x. Today that multiple is 15.4x. That contraction accounts for another $120 million, which gets you to the answer that the actual value change of private companies over that three-year period has been $205 million. Just to really illustrate the point on M&A, because it is something we've talked about a lot, a couple of case studies to talk about. These are the third and fourth largest positions within NBPE's portfolio. They're both positions which we've held for around four years. Starting on the left with Monroe. A little bit similar to FDH in that it's a distributor of what are called C parts, which are low value, high volume parts, and it distributes them to various industrial end markets in the U.S. Although they're low cost, they are very important to the manufacturing process, and it's mostly supplying these parts to OEMs. They need a distributor who's reliable, and they prefer a distributor who can give them lots of different parts when they're doing that. There is an advantage to scale in the market, but despite that, it is a very fragmented market. We went into this company in 2021. This was a co-underwrite alongside AEA Small Business Fund. We went into it knowing that this was a business that can grow organically, but it was a very fragmented market. A large part of the investment thesis was M&A. They've actually completed, since we invested in it, 27 add-on acquisitions. That has been tremendously accretive. I can demonstrate that by the fact that the company has more than doubled in size, and at the same time, it has more than doubled in value. It is held at 2.3x invested cost today. Actually, there's been a slight contraction in the multiple they're holding it at as well. The M&A here has allowed them to build scale and to also grow and cross-sell. It wouldn't be a private equity meeting without mentioning AI. They are using AI in their sales process, in terms of monitoring sales calls and using insights from that to help them cross-sell and to continue to build and grow that company. On the right-hand side is another company we've talked about in the past, Solenis. This was a company that we actually came into midlife, and M&A was a very core part of the thesis because it actually started as a merger of two businesses, a business that Platinum Equity already owned, and then they bought Solenis and combined those two when we originally came into this deal. Now, the thesis here is to really horizontally diversify and also geographically diversify and build a company of scale. What they did in 2023 was they acquired a company, which was a public company at the time, called Diversi. It had an enterprise value of $4.6 billion. When you compare that to the value that we went into with this company initially, which was $6 billion, you can see that was a truly strategic add-on. It required a little bit more equity to do that, which we participated in. They actually are ahead of their plan in terms of synergies from a cost perspective, but also very much on plan with integrating that business and, again, allowing them to cross-sell. More recently, they made another acquisition of a company called NCH. It has not yet closed, but is publicly announced. Again, that is another investment of scale, which should really help them to grow a business, which hopefully can be comparable to a company called Ecolab, which is the nearest comparable company that I think there is. It is a public market company. It trades at 21x EV to EBITDA, whereas Solenis, you can see we initially came into this at 11x Adjusted EBITDA. Once again, if they can execute, which they have been so far, continue to grow the scale, then hopefully this can be a very successful company. It has been one that has been on the right path. Moving on to uplifts, what we have done here is separate uplifts into smaller outcomes. $5 million sales of businesses and on the right, greater than $5 million sales. If you look back over three years, the average uplift on realizations has been 11%. This year, as I mentioned, it has been 17%, but it has been pretty divided, as you can see. There are on the left smaller, what I would describe as non-core positions. These are mostly just smaller investments we made a long time ago. You can see the average holding period for these investments was eight years, whereas on the right, the larger positions are relatively younger, but in particular, more what I would call core positions. The ones on the left still being successful investments, we made 1.8x our invested capital on them, but there was actually a slightly negative uplift on those exits, whereas on the right, those larger positions have been at about a 14% uplift. Once again, I think it's just sort of an interesting analysis, and it also ties back to the fact that, as I showed you, we've actually reduced the number of holdings we've had, and some of those sales have been companies which. It was time to move on to the next owner and for us to be able to recycle that capital ultimately into new investments and buybacks. Looking at how we've exited companies, a pie chart here looks at the various different types of exits, everything from sale to sponsor, sale to strategic, stock sales, and then other partial realizations includes dividends as well as recaps and then continuation. The largest part has been, as you can see in the text, sales to strategics and sales to sponsors, where we've made 2.7x our money on average in this three-year period. Stock sales have been about 21%. One other thing just to note, I think it's a trend that we haven't covered in private equity, but the small purple piece of continuation, I wouldn't be surprised if over time we do see more of that. That is a growing trend in private equity, and you've probably seen it in some other direct private equity funds. Who approach the market that way, but very much a growing trend in the market. With that, just to summarize on the medium-term performance before we move on to the longer-term performance, I think the key takeaways here really are, first of all, underlying performance in terms of operating performance of the companies continues to be strong, and hopefully I demonstrated that that has actually fed through into value creation in the equity portfolio. Now, there has been some multiple contraction over time. I would hope that has passed through the system now. Of course, quoted holdings have also been a headwind to us. In particular, AutoStore over that three-year period declined pretty significantly. Those two points tie in with that very first point I made. There's been a significant number of smaller realizations and typically more mature companies, whereas the larger realizations have really driven the performance of the fund. We also think the portfolio is very well-positioned to continue to benefit from that outlook. Long-term performance, and there's only a few slides on this, but we again wanted to really demonstrate that over the long term, returns in NBPE have been very strong. This looks at our co-investment portfolio, again by vintage year, but in this case, this includes realized and unrealized. The green is realized companies. The purple is companies we continue to own in NBPE. Again, across the top, you see an average. Over this time period, the average return on those investments has been 2.1x our invested capital. Across vintage years, the returns have been pretty good. I think the point is that the co-investment portfolio has been doing its job. Returns have been good. Returns have actually been pretty in line with the slide that Dave Morris showed, where he showed the underwriting that we're still continuing to look for in companies. I think that has been demonstrated by our historic track record. Drilling down on that into the top 30 companies, which again is about 80% of the portfolio, you see on the left that the top 30 companies that we currently hold, and this includes public positions, has made a 2.3x gross multiple of invested capital, of which at the moment $933 million is unrealized. The portfolio there is performing very well. On the right, though, we've shown the operating metrics since inception. Again, you can see that revenues are up 117% during our whole period for these investments. EBITDA are up 135%. A kind of a crude way to make the point I made earlier that that EBITDA growth is feeding through into value creation is to compare 135% EBITDA growth to about a 2.3x multiple. The math essentially works on that. We are seeing that operating performance feed through into the portfolio. To give you a little bit more granularity, and this is probably looked at better when you are back in the office on a screen, but this looks at that top 30. On the Y axis is revenue growth. On the X axis is EBITDA growth. This is all of the companies in the top 30. Obviously, what you see is a lot of companies that have grown very significantly during our whole period. A couple of things to note that in the bottom left, three of the companies are three of our new investments from 2024. Clearly, they've grown less, not because they're not doing really well. They just haven't had as long to compound as some of the other companies. Secondly, there are a couple of companies that haven't grown in the very bottom left. One of those, just to point out, is a company which really was a value investment thesis. The price reflected the growth prospects. We've already taken out more than our invested capital in that investment. It was actually a very successful investment, despite what that chart might imply to you. Overall, I think, again, the growth is pretty clear to see across the portfolio and the quality of the companies that we own in NBPE. With that, I'll shift to the capital position. A very important point, and I've mentioned a number of times that we've done relatively less investments in recent years. This really, I think, gives you the background to that. First of all, start off with this slide, which is actually a Jefferies analysis that we've used here. Obviously, we've anonymized the other funds. The real point here is to focus on NBPE. What it shows is the available liquidity, which for NBPE is just over $300 million today, versus unadjusted commitments to the funds underlying. Within NBPE, that value is negligible and actually very, very old commitments. Essentially, we're operating with almost zero commitments going forward. We invest on a deal-by-deal basis. That is the model. That allows us to start investing when we want to invest and to pause investing when we think we need to. Obviously, that leads to the line in green, which shows, again, the flexibility that we've built in the balance sheet. How we've gotten here is shown on this page. This looks at distributions in green on the chart over the last six years and contributions to new investments in purple. Over the last six years, we've realized $700 million more than we've invested into companies. Over the last three years, we've realized $450 million more than we've invested into new companies. I think, again, that shows you how we have thought about delevering the fund. I'll look at the balance sheet in a second. I think important to point out that we've actually returned to shareholders $270 million in dividends and buybacks over that time period as well. That's how we've been able to do it, by the healthy realizations that we have seen over that time period. Looking at the balance sheet, and this slide looks at the debt level, which maybe confusingly is a positive here. The numbers in purple are the ZDPs that we used to have. The green is the credit facility draw. You can see that if you go back in time and looking at the yellow line, we were 120% invested or so in 2019 and 2020. That was mostly because we had $160 million of zeros. We took the decision to simplify the capital structure to delever over time. You can see the yellow line sloping down to the point today where we're at 103% invested. We repaid the 2022 ZDPs, which was about $68 million. We repaid the 2024 ZDPs, which was $85 million. That means just from that alone, that was $150 million that we used to delever that could have been invested, had we not done that, into 2022, 2023, and 2024. We felt it was the right thing to do to operate on a relatively less levered basis and to give ourselves the flexibility for the type of markets that we've seen over the last three years. That has put us in a really strong position today. This looks at our balance sheet today. The credit facility is drawn by $90 million, but that is offset by the purple, which is cash and liquid investments. Essentially, the credit facility is undrawn today, and we have $312 million of available capital. That allows us to pursue the buybacks that William announced earlier, and of course, to reinvest in the portfolio. Because of the balance sheet and because of the confidence we have in realizations, we think that's the right thing to do. Really, to summarize that point, you can see that we think we had a more cautious investment approach over the last few years and really prioritized balance sheet strength. There was also lower realization activity. Of course, that meant there is more limited exposure to recent vintage years. That is why we think it's so important to begin to invest again in the deal flow that Dave Morris described earlier. We think that having invested less over the last three years is one of the factors that has caused our performance to lag somewhat. We are very confident that by reinvesting and of course continuing the buybacks, we can reinvigorate that growth. The deal flow has been very strong. The platform is extremely strong. The statistics at the bottom of the slide are really what David Stonberg covered earlier today. Exits, we are not going to make a forward-looking statement or a prediction. If you look over time, our exit level has typically been around 20%. The slide that Pascal showed you had about a 25% average. That would imply a four-year holding period. I think private equity has probably moved to more like a five-year holding period on average, which would imply 20% would be the average that would come out of a portfolio. Really hard for us to say where it's been, but it has been at a depressed level for the last three years at about 13% a year. Not just from an optimistic view of the markets, but from looking at our portfolio, company by company, by talking to deal teams, by talking to sponsors, we have pretty good confidence that the activity level on exits, all else being equal and presuming there's no other exogenous events, should pick up in 2026. That is what this slide is really designed to demonstrate. Really to reiterate Dave Morris again, we think that deal flow is really strong on our platform. We have the opportunity to invest in new deals. This slide breaks it out in a little bit more detail and shows the level of midlife transactions that we've looked at this year with 80 year-to-date and 175 co-underwrites year-to-date. We're very confident that the deal flow is there, that it's attractive, and that we'll be able to participate in it in the coming months. Just to close out the section, I have one more video, which is from one of my colleagues who's going to cover a company called Mariner, which actually, prior to Infra Group, is the most recent investment that we completed in the fund and is off to a great start. I'll hand over to Nikhil to give you that quick update on video. In November 2024, Neuberger Berman made a significant minority growth investment in Mariner Wealth Advisors. Mariner is a leading registered investment advisor and financial services firm offering comprehensive wealth management services to over 30,000 clients nationwide. Mariner provides mass affluent and high-net-worth individuals, as well as institutional clients, with a holistic set of wealth advisory solutions spanning financial planning, investment management, tax, trust, and estate planning. Neuberger Berman invested alongside Leonard Green & Partners, who first invested in the company in 2021, and management led by founder and CEO Marty Bicknell. Following a narrow banker-led process, we were selected by both Marty and Leonard Green as the preferred partner, reflecting the strength of our relationships and experience as wealth management investors. In total, Neuberger Berman invested over $700 million in Mariner, including $30 million of that from NBPE. Approximately $200 million of our investment will be in the form of primary capital to fund future M&A. Leonard Green retained its full existing position and did not sell in the transaction, creating strong alignment with our partners. Neuberger Berman also received board representation, and LGP continues to serve on the board with us. Our investment in Mariner stems from a multi-year thematic interest in the sector, having tracked several prior RIAs. RIAs, which is short for Registered Investment Advisors, compete in a massive $10 trillion industry that is benefiting from secular tailwinds as RIAs continue to gain wallet share from traditional wealth management channels. This is in part due to shifting advisor and client preferences for independent, fee-only models. RIAs also have very attractive business characteristics, including recurring revenue, sticky customer relationships, and strong margins. Mariner is a best-in-class, fully integrated RIA platform that has built significant scale. Mariner leverages its brand perception and industry-leading advisory recruitment and retention to drive consistently strong organic growth. Marty is a visionary founder and CEO, and our investment underscores our confidence in Marty's leadership. We are excited to partner with him and the rest of the Mariner team, who have an excellent track record of growth. Since closing our investment, Mariner has scaled assets under management and advisement from $245 billion to over $600 billion, driven by a combination of organic growth and M&A, including the acquisition of Cardinal Investment Advisors, which added approximately $290 billion of assets under advisement to Mariner's institutional practice. We are very pleased with the performance of Mariner in 2025 to date. Driven by record organic growth and the completion and integration of 13 add-on acquisitions, Mariner has grown revenue and EBITDA by over 20%, respectively. Proforma Adjusted EBITDA is now over $300 million, up from roughly $230 million when we originally invested in the deal. As of Q2 2025, our investment was marked at 1.2x cost, translating to approximately $35 million of net asset value. All right, so that concludes my section, and I'll hand over to Peter, who's going to summarize and give a conclusion. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Paul. Good to see everyone again. Returning capital to shareholders has been a core focus of NBPE for over 10 years, and we've returned over $426 million in that time. Now, dividends have been the primary mechanism for this, allowing all of our shareholders to benefit. Now, you've heard today about the quality of our portfolio and our outlook for exits. As a result, we fundamentally believe the current share price undervalues our portfolio and its prospects. Now, as the discount has widened, we have increased our allocation to share buybacks, and more recently, we've accelerated this activity. As William touched on earlier, with a wide discount, you should expect to see us maintain the increased pace of buybacks. As we wrap up, I just want to revisit a couple of points. We believe our strategy combines the best of the direct investment approach, high conviction investments made company by company, and the best of the fund-to-funds model, which is manager diversification. Our direct investment approach gives us the ability to adapt capital deployment to market conditions and provides us with the strong balance sheet that we have today. However, we recognize that accelerating NAV growth will be the key driver to shareholder returns and narrowing the discount. We also understand that NBPE's recent performance is below our long-term track record. While we're not alone in this, with returns across the private equity industry well below historic norms, as Pascal showed, we are very focused on driving performance. As William mentioned earlier, the update to our capital allocation framework is intended to enhance performance and deliver long-term shareholder value, and we'll continue to explore additional ways to accomplish these goals. One other thing I just want to bring up and mention here. You've heard from us earlier today about the growth of evergreen structures in Europe and the U.S., and that's a topic that we get asked about frequently. Really, the question is, what does that mean for the listed investment trust sector in London? Now, it's important to understand that in markets like the U.S. and Europe, the reason why these evergreen funds have been developed is because the regulatory frameworks in those jurisdictions do not allow for the creation of listed private equity. The U.K., on the other hand, has had access to listed private equity vehicles for more than 40 years, and London is the largest, deepest, and most professional market in the world for listed private equity. In my view, having been around this sector for a long time, I think it would be a real shame from a public policy perspective if there was not more done to support this sector, where the U.K. really is a global leader. Now, that being said, managers and boards of listed private equity vehicles, including NBPE, need to address the challenges of discounts, and we need to continue to evolve and innovate to drive demand for our shares. We do believe, though, that the listed investment company structure is the ideal way for investors to access the asset class, and it is true democratization of private equity, which really is the Holy Grail that markets around the world are looking to accomplish. In summary, we have a high-quality investment portfolio with strong underlying operating performance. The exit markets are improving, and we have a number of exit-ready companies in our portfolio. We have a strong capital position and balance sheet, which gives us the flexibility to deploy capital into new investments as well as share buybacks. We have the strength of Neuberger Berman's platform as a strategic partner to top-tier private equity managers. Finally, we have a strong investment pipeline, particularly in midlife transactions, which we are excited for NBPE to access to drive future growth. Thank you so much for spending the day with us today. Now I'll hand it back to Luke, and we'll answer some questions. Brilliant. Thank you, Peter. What we'll look to do is give you two minutes. We're going to bring some chairs on stage and invite Peter, William, and Paul back to the stage, and we'll open the floor to questions. Two seconds. Thank you, sir. Great. Just a message to those online, please do put your questions in the Q&A section or you can write them down. I'm very happy to open the floor to questions. If people do have questions, please let me know. Yes, Edit. Thanks for the presentation. I think, Pete, you just sort of mentioned an acceleration in NAV growth will be the key driver for NBPE returns. And just sort of on that basis and perhaps playing devil's advocate, could you provide a kind of rationale for having a minimum 3% dividend on that basis, particularly if you increase the share buyback program, you can sort of increase investors' participation in future NAV growth? Sorry, I didn't quite understand the question. What's the specific question? Just the rationale for having a minimum sort of 3% of NAV dividend when sort of NAV growth is the key component of returns here. Yeah. So basically, the question is, why have the dividend? Is that the question? Yeah. Looks as though it's been thrown my way, which is fair enough. Poor decision. Yeah. The dividend policy has been there for a long time, and I think your question is a very fair one. We have always taken the view that we return money to shareholders in two ways, both the dividend and the buyback and through the buyback. I think what was really underlying your question is more of a mathematical point, actually, than whether we have a dividend policy, which is if NAV is only growing at 3%, are we sensible to return all of that to shareholders? I think if I can answer it, I think we would be very disappointed if NAV did not grow by a lot more than 3%, but I am not making a forecast. Agreed. Agreed. Yes. Absolutely. I have got a couple. Just firstly, so you talk about committing $100 million to new investments. I mean, how many companies do you think that will buy you? Okay. I'll repeat it. You're talking about the $100 million of new investment. I mean, how many investments do you think that will buy you? Are you focusing on any particular industries? The second one, the 17% gains, quite a good number. Was that particularly skewed to any investments, and was it influenced by any listings or IPOs? I'll maybe take the investment one and Paul, you can make the other one. In terms of the new investment activity, typically when we're making a new investment, our ask size on a deal, obviously, will be based on the risk profile of a particular transaction, but would be sort of $30 million or so. Give or take, it could be a bit higher, a little lower. We have a pro-rata allocation policy, right, across our platform. If it was something where the total amount of capital available on a transaction was such that NBPE, as well as other vehicles, got their full ask, it would be sort of in the $30 million-ish, but it could be a smaller position if it was something where there was less available, and so therefore it was shared across vehicles. That is the baseline. It could also be smaller just from a risk-return profile perspective and portfolio management perspective. From an uplift perspective, I do not have the exact numbers in my head on a deal-by-deal basis, but there is nothing that I recall that skewed the numbers particularly. I think it is more down to the larger positions had tended to be a little bit more successful. I think that was sort of shown on that slide. It was not that there was one outlier that drove it. A good example is the undisclosed exit was very much in line with that average. Again, it's a really hard thing to know what uplifts are going to be. Historically, that 17% number, I think, is. I would say across quite a few deals. Just a good guide historically. People oftentimes focus a lot about the uplift. The real question for us is, what's the total return that we generate over the lifecycle of the deal? Right? That's really the most important, if you will, of are we generating a very strong return for the life of the vehicle or for the life of the investment in the vehicle? The question coming online is just in terms of with uplifts, obviously, clearly, we saw the three-year uplift about 32% and obviously 17% today. Naturally, you mentioned that uplift is generally going to be a bit lower moving forward. How can, in terms of growth or NAV growth, do you think how can you achieve the same return? With uplifts being a bit lower? Is it to your point, Peter, you mentioned about? I mean, I'm happy to start. I mean, first of all, we don't know what uplifts are going to be going forward. So we're not making any predictions that they're going to be higher or lower. It's always very hard to know. I would say that in general, over a long period, uplifts across the industry have declined somewhat. And that's, I think, because valuations have become a lot more scientific and a lot more exact. There still is an illiquidity discount that's typically built into a private equity valuation. It's hard to predict what that will be. I think it comes back to what Peter said. It's not that we look to generate returns by a big pop at the end. It's that we're looking for a long-term hold in a good company that is going to grow organically and through M&A, and that's going to feed through in the way that I demonstrated on that slide, hopefully. I think that's the bigger point. I think it's also important to note that just because a portfolio is older, it doesn't necessarily have a shelf life. A company doesn't have a life of five years, and then it doesn't have hope beyond that. The idea is that we're investing in companies that are going to be around for the long term and can grow for the long term. I do not look at our prospects for growth as we have to get uplifts on these companies. It is that we have to have these companies continue to grow, and we have to make good new investments, which I think can really help to hopefully reinvigorate that growth. Exactly. That is very important. Exactly. It is the performance of the existing portfolio, as shown through the operating performance of those businesses, as well as the quality of the new investments that we make and the ability to then generate returns from those new investments. As you heard a bit about today from Dave Morris and from Paul, we are very excited about the market opportunity and the transactions we are seeing, not just seeing, but doing across the Neuberger platform. We are particularly excited about having. NBPE have the capital available to then participate in those transactions that we're otherwise doing. Connor. Obviously, shown the top 10, both value growth and EBITDA growth is over 15% in the last, say, 12 months. If you then look at, say, the weighted averages, that kind of implies kind of low to mid-single digit for the assets outside the top 10. Can you give a bit of a flavor of what's going on there? First of all, I'd say you can see the top 30, right? The top 30 is still above that average for the rest of the portfolio. I think maybe it isn't the question, but it's more the other 20% of the portfolio as opposed to the other 60%, which would be the case if you were just looking at the top 10. Look, there's another 40 companies. Generally, a lot of smaller positions, which means I think there's a little bit more of a dispersion of what's going on. Generally, mostly still growing. Clearly, when you look at those averages and to your point, not growing as quickly as the top 10. Important to note that that's how valuations work in private equity. They're dynamic. Your biggest positions should be your best-performing companies. That's exactly what's going on there. The bigger companies, the companies that are growing faster, have become a bigger part of the value, and that has shrunk the things which are not growing as quickly. Mark. Thanks. A couple on the capital allocation, if I may. You mentioned multiple times about wide in relation to the buyback. Could you just give the board's thinking as to what wide actually means? Secondly, in terms of whether the new investment will be 50, 100, or 150, what has changed to make you actually want to invest now compared to, say, six months ago or six months time? Thank you. What I can do, though, is in reverse order. I think what's changed is the visibility on the exit pipeline. I think Paul and both Peter have mentioned that NBPE have conducted a bottoms-up review of the exit prospects within the whole portfolio. It's not just a sort of finger in the air. I think life's getting better out there. This is really sort of substantive work done company by company. It's that confidence that's fed through that enables us to say, "Right, let's push it up towards. The top end of the investment range. Which, by the way, even there, I don't think that's phenomenally high. You look at that slide compared to where so many of our peers are. I think it's still something that makes the rest of the board here feel pretty comfortable. Your first question about what is a wide discount? It's something we don't really want to be drawn on an absolute number for very obvious reasons. It could easily be used against us. I think you sort of know a wide number when you see it. Numbers getting creeping up towards 30% are clearly deeply unpalatable. Personally, I've never understood why most private equity companies' discounts are talked about at all, particularly when you hear that the valuations, when they're proven in the realization markets, come through normally at a premium. I don't really understand the concept, but I do understand why. Boards have to do what they can to try and sort of protect the discounts blowing out to really unacceptable levels. Maybe just one more comment just about the capital allocation, William, if I may, just in terms of the $120 million, obviously, of buybacks and the acceleration of the pace of acceleration of the buyback. Will the board look to kind of do more once that facility has run out, or what's the thinking around the acceleration and then moving forward? Okay. Let me answer, Luke. I'll answer that question. The first bit is, will the board do more if that $120 million is used? First, let's hope we don't actually have to use the $120 million because we're doing it because the discount's wide, which obviously none of us here in this room want. We'll do it if we have to. The whole idea of a capital allocation policy is it's a dynamic process. If that's used up, yeah, sure, we'll look at it again. I would think there's a very high likelihood in those circumstances that we would want to increase it. Increase it or renew a whole facility. I'd rather get to that point and make that decision at that point and hope we don't have to take it now. I think the bigger picture point, right, is one that we have the flexibility, given both the capital resources that Paul articulated, as well as the bottoms-up work we've done about realization activity, that we think that puts us in a really strong position to have the flexibility for both. Making of new investment activity and having capital available for buybacks in the event that that's something that's warranted as well. Having that ability to really be flexible in terms of how the capital gets deployed, but really importantly, having the resources to be able to make that choice is a position that we're very pleased to be in. Hi. Yeah, just one on the sort of not guide that might be a guide that looks like maybe realizations get back up towards a five-year hold period and the 20% there. Sort of 1/3 of deal flow is mid-life co-invest. Yet then you're guiding to a sort of industry average five-year hold period. I'm just trying to understand why it is that those mid-life deals do not have a shorter life. A couple of different reasons for that. Sometimes the mid-life co-investment is one where the manager, it's mid-life for them, but that does not mean it's necessarily mid-life for the vehicle they hold it in, right? It could be something where they're partway through the hold period of the fund that they're in, and they're not selling it to a new fund that they manage themselves, but they're just going and saying, let's say they're in year three and they're going to hold it for six years, right? Then we'll hold it for three, right? Then they'll sell. It could also be a situation where they're actually selling it from their old fund to their new fund. Even though it's new for us, they've been in it, let's say, for three years or five years, but then they're actually selling it out of their old fund, buying it from their new fund. They're starting from zero, if you will, for their new fund. Did that make sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I would just add is that from NBPE's perspective, we've been doing mid-life deals for a long time, but NBPE has not been participating in most of those deals for the last three years, with the exception of those four deals we did in 2024. As we've seen that deal flow increasing. Relatively less of the existing portfolio is currently in mid-lives relative to the deal flow that you saw today, which is another reason that would explain it slightly. With respect to global M&A and sort of all the stakeholders you speak to, all the deal flow you see, would you say that sort of now all ingredients are in place to have sort of really solid volumes? I mean, we've already had quite good sort of year-on-year increases in global M&A despite sort of policy volatility. And now we'll see interest rates come down further, probably. Are there any sort of key ingredients that you're still looking towards to be a catalyst for further deal flow, or are we sort of already there? Look, there's always things that can make it better. There's always things that can make it worse, as you know. I'd say. I do not want to be the repeat of what people were saying in Q1 of this year and Q1 of last year, saying everything's great and it's going to be a great next 12 months for M&A globally, right? Because people said that twice and it has not necessarily been the case. That having been said, what could make it better? Obviously, if you had lower interest rates, if you had, frankly, most importantly, policy stability, if you had a world that was less volatile, right? That having been said, as I say them out loud, let's say that very few people are going to go, are going to short global volatility, both market and political, right? Importantly, though, about what we're thinking about just from our micro portfolio, what's interesting is, look, we live in the world, is it the broader world, right? Our portfolio is not immune from all of those sorts of activities. If we have some major global events, that is going to be a dampener on the realization events that we will see. Our view, though, about what we talked about in terms of exits is not reliant on an incredibly bullish view of global M&A, right? It is reliant on it being just not bad, right? That is actually, to William's point, what makes us feel better about the prospects there. If it ends up being really good, that is wonderful, and we will all be happy about that. We do not think we are reliant on that for it to be a solid exit environment for us. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. There has obviously been a lot of talk in the press about private credit. Perhaps unjustifiably. I just wondered what NB's views were on that. Second of all, I was just interested to dig a little bit more into the part disposal of Action, given that organic growth is fantastic, looks to be pretty good for the next few years. It did not seem as if it was that big a part of the portfolio. I just wondered whether you could say why you would not be prepared to maybe have run that position for it to become bigger. Sure. On the first point about private credit, it is interesting because all the talk that there has been about private credit has mostly been about two names that are not owned by private credit, right? It is funny because the names everyone talks about have actually, my understanding is they are actually broadly syndicated loans, not actually things, securities held by private credit funds, right? That is one point. You did hear from my colleagues earlier that. Spreads are fairly tight. That is something that's good for the equity side, right? There. I guess from a private credit perspective, it's broadly available, which is a good thing for the biotech industry. There. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else you want to add to that, Paul? On private credit, no. I mean, I agree with what you said. I think they weren't sponsor-backed deals, and they weren't really pure private credit. As a growing part of the market, I think it's very much part of the ecosystem today and something that they obviously still have to compete with other forms of debt. I mean, we view it from our own point of view. We have a private debt fund, of course, which has a very low historic default rate. It is really about the underwriting and the individual case by case. I think it is a key part of the market for private equity today, for sure. With regard to Action, great company, great long-term prospects. Purely just a portfolio management decision of us running diversified portfolios, right? As you know, we have had realization events from that position over time. It is still the largest position in the portfolio. Even with us having taken some cash off the table multiple times, it is still the largest position. Portfolio diversification is the only view for it. We are very much a believer in that. It was not an easy decision, by the way. Hotly debated, much discussed. This is true within NBPE, but also across the various other places that we hold it on our platform. It's very much a company we still believe in, but we just felt portfolio management-wise, it was wise to do that. Assuming it continues to run, where would you be happy for it to? Yeah. No particular comments on that one. Thanks. Though I hear there are some very good research analysts that cover the public stocks. Thanks. Just coming back on the exits point. I mean, if we have a fair wind, and that's a big if, am I right to assume that potentially on a one-year view, we could be looking at what, maybe 25%-35% of the portfolio could be exited? The question is, it could be. Of course, the answer is, of course, yes. It could be somewhere between 0 and 100, right? It could be. Once again, though, I think the good news is that he honest answer is there's a pretty wide fan of outcomes, right? Because if you have larger positions, it either gets sold or it doesn't, and it either gets sold or it doesn't. One or two companies going one way or the other could be a pretty material difference in terms of what could happen, right? And there's a number of situations, to get more granular, where we think an exit might happen in a certain time frame, but it could easily slip a little bit or it could close in the following year. Making those kind of predictions is really hard. I agree with what Peter said. The other thing too that you're saying is you are seeing a broader, in some markets, you are seeing a longer time period between when you sign a deal and when you close a deal. Even when you sign a deal, there might be a situation where an exit's going to happen, but it takes longer for you to get the cash as well. Okay. We'll see. Yeah. Alex. Just, I guess, you talked a lot about today, some of the dynamics of the last few years, and it's been a tricky period. What would you say have been the biggest lessons for the trust over the last three or four years? Has it been overcommitting in 2021, paying too high a multiple? What would you perhaps say? Yeah, importantly, we didn't overcommit. In fact, we're probably the only group that, we're one of the only groups that doesn't have a massive amount of overcommitment, right? If anything, our lack of overcommitment. Our conservatism of running our balance sheet and our risk management, actually, you could argue, was one of the reasons why we did not. It is a key factor why we did not invest as much because we were investing investment by investment, right? We had the ability to pull back. If we had had a massive, if we had made multi-hundred million dollar commitments to underlying funds, right, and that were huge percentages of our balance sheet, whether it was prudent or not, we would have had to fund those capital calls, and therefore we would have put a lot of money to work, right. In the last two or three years, right? Most investments done in the last two or three years have been pretty good. In hindsight, actually, the fact that we were actually running our balance sheet conservatively. Actually had a negative effect on the performance, right? Because our investment level came down and we were deploying less in these last couple of years, right? If we had perfect knowledge of what was going to happen, right, and things were going to be reasonably benign as opposed to much worse, right, then we would have, if we go back in time, we would have done more, yes. On the other hand, though, we're proud of the conservatism with which we run the balance sheet, and we think that's actually served our investors well over the years. In times of market stress, whether it was COVID, whether it was the way back to the financial crisis, other times, we've always had one of, if not the safest capital structures of any listed private equity vehicle. Actually, that is something that, say, we are proud of and something that we think is an important aspect of NBPE relative to others. There are a couple of things I would clarify. One, multiple contraction does not mean we necessarily overpaid for everything. That includes any run-up in multiple that occurred, particularly in 2020 and 2021, where obviously markets were fairly hot in private equity. Not to say that any of the deals we invested in 2020 or 2021, we might not have paid a market multiple that was somewhat higher at that time in certain sectors. It is not generally that we overpaid for deals and they have come down. It is that they ran up and then came down while we owned them. The second point is just, obviously, publics have been that big headwind. Everybody here may know this, but obviously, that's not a part of the portfolio that we can necessarily control the timing of exits. We had a particularly successful 2021 because we had a couple of big IPOs, including AutoStore. Obviously, those traded down in the subsequent years. Again, that was not a decision that we made or did not make. It is just that is controlled by the underlying sponsors. I suppose the positive thing is, you are probably still in September now, that actually for the first time, the quotas have been, they were positive in that period of time. I think from our perspective, to Paul's point, I think that is a learning for us. At the same time, it is something that we hope will not be as big a headwind moving forward. Also, it is a far smaller portion of the portfolio. 2021 was at 20%. Today, it's 6%. As markets are stabilizing, that's being sold down as well by the GPs themselves. It will be less impactful for the portfolio more broadly. Can I just follow up on that quickly on the missed component? Is there anything you could— Is there anything that you could change in future in terms of the documentation or negotiations in terms of the control you have for something once it has IPOed, like reducing the lockup for the NBPE allocation? It's a good question. Also, just on your previous question in terms of lessons learned, two aspects to that. One is if an IPO is the likely exit for an investment, that is something we very much factor in, and that's a risk factor on a deal, right? Because we recognize the fact that an IPO is not an exit. It's a valuation event and potentially the beginning of a process for an exit, but not an exit itself. You need to make sure you're factoring through, okay, once that company goes public, how long will it be until you can actually realize that and making sure you're factoring that into your investment decision process? From an underwriting perspective, that's one aspect of it. To your next point, typically, a co-investor is in a vehicle controlled by the GP and therefore it's completely in the hands of the GP. To your point, one of our lessons learned there, and it's also something that we've had greater success doing in the midlife transactions where it's more of a bespoke transaction where we're going and negotiating directly with the GPs, is doing exactly what you say, which is actually having there be more. Ability for us to get the shares, see if we can get the shares after a certain period of time, and exactly to your point. And have something where it's not completely at the GP's discretion. We can't get that every time, but that's also something we factor in in our underwriting process and as a risk factor in the transaction and make that as part of the decision of whether or not we want to make an investment. Brilliant. It is two minutes to 4:00, so I think we'll call it there. I just want to say thank you so much for coming. Really appreciate both the questions and also your attendance. What we'll look to do is we'll be sending these slides actually online on the company website already. We'll be circulating them as well directly to your emails. If there are any kind of further questions, please, you know where I am, so please do reach out. Obviously, Paul, Peter, and William as well, and the rest of the board, very happy to kind of stay and have a chat if there are any kind of further questions you want to ask one-to-one. Again, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to see you, and hopefully catch up soon. Thank you. Thank you.